Seeking Revenue » tips & advice

Tracking and Analyzing your revenue

Ken — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:17:21 +0000

If you are earning income online, do you track your revenue and income? How do you do it?

If you have multiple sites and have use a number of revenue sources, do you know exactly which sites are doing well and what programs are contributing to your revenue?

I was trying to answer those same questions as well and did a Site Revenue Performance spreadsheet.

It is published and shared on Google Spreadsheets (I’m starting to discover the usfulness of online office applications). Just go to the spreadsheet, click on “Edit this page” to edit it and save it to your account. (You need a Google account.)

Let me know if you find it useful and how it can be improved.

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StumbleUpon – source of good traffic

Ken — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:23:00 +0000

Many had pointed to tried and tested method of using Digg and del.icio.us as source of traffic.

In this article I’m introducing another source – StumbleUpon, as a good source of traffic.

For the past few months I notice StumbleUpon appearing as referrer on one of my site. I didn’t take notice because the figure wasn’t significant.

A few days ago though, I submitted Free Biz Ware to StumbleUpon and was duly blown away by the result.

Take a look at these traffic charts.

From an average of 20-40 visitors, I suddenly received close to 2000 visitors within the day.

If you look at the source you can see that most of the traffic originated from StumbleUpon.

I am sure many internet marketers are already aware of this effect and quietly using it. Hopefully as more people become aware of the StumbleUpon effect, the quality of stumble will not be degraded.

Try it but use with responsibility of a good netizen.

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Sign up for Text Link Ads and get paid

Ken — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 05:38:00 +0000

Text Link Ads (my review) is a popular source of revenue that had received good review in forum such as Earners Forum.

The concept is simple, the service broker site owners who what to get one directional links with publisher willing to host their links. So if you own a website, you are a good candidate to sign up for Text Link Ads.

Now I will even pay you to sign up. Here’s why and how.

Text Link Ads has a referral program that pays $25 if any referred visitor results in a sale or gets accepted into their publisher program.

Click on this banner and sign up now and if I get paid, I will share the referrer fee 50-50 with you.

Interested? Find out how.

Follow the banner above or this link to sign up.
Send me your name that your sign up with.
If your name appears in my referral payment list, I will pay you via PayPal when TLA pays me.
Done.

Can you trust me?

Well, that’s the only catch, you will have to trust me. If you don’t, simply don’t sign up. Simple.

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Making sense of Adsense click through rate

Ken — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:15:31 +0000

I have neglected this blog for a while because I could come up with solid content to fill it. Doing analytics is inherently time consuming, my plan is to post at least 1 to 2 analysis a month. The analysis will be based on what I am doing online and my own blogs.

In this article I want to look at Adsense click through rate (CTR) and how you can use this insight to change your ad layout and improve conversion.

Take a look at this report for August todate. The channels, all belonging to the same site, had been masked (We don’t really need that for this discussion anyway).

Some Basics

Before we move on, let’s take a look at some basic. A good source of information is the AdSense Help Center.

In order to obtain the CTR data, we first have to create Channels for each of the ad position.

You might also want to get familiar with some of the terms: Clickthrough rate, Click, Page Impression.

Making Sense of the data

Here, the clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most important figure to look at.

Due to the ads different position and impression on different pages, absolute figure like click and impression does not give a complete picture.

CTR on the other hand tells us how effective is the position, ad format and style.

To compare, take a look at this data from July. Not all the channel corresponds as I had created more channels in August.

The page impression are almost equivalent. We are not at the end of the month yet, so in fact this month’s traffic has slightly increased.

The CTR though has some good news (and so does the number of clicks).

For one channel the rate has increased substantially from 6.46% to 11.52%. This I attribute a creative format change that I had done.

Not shown here is the page Effective CPM, this has also been increased by filtering Low Paying Ads.

The Next Step

In the next month, I am going to remove the low CTR channels and reposition them. Then I’m going to monitor and result.

I hope this helps you as much this exercise had help me. Please share your thoughts and any comment you have.

This article is written by Ken of 59Ideas and first published on Analytic Insight. You may copy and use this article if you retain this message.

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Filter Low Paying Ads in Adsense

Ken — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 10:22:00 +0000

I had long heard of the need to filter out low paying, or worst, spam ads, but had not gotten my act together to enter them one by one into the Google Adsense’s Competitive Ad Filter.

If you’re running AdSense, you’ve probably seen ads like this: “We have 4 best products for …”, or “Best resources on net for …”.

These advertisers pay very low per click. And if you drop by their sites, they are running Adsense too. How do they do it? Well, they are using your low paying ads to drive their higher paying ads which they run.

Here is a list to get you started with the filtering.

One rule of thumb, “websites not selling any product but using PPC only to draw traffic to their sites are low paying” (via Make Money With Ads)

Before you go overboard with filtering, do some testing.

21publish.com
agematch.com
aish.com
arc99.com
ardice.com
assortedinternet.com
audioblog.com
best4sites.net
blog-software-blog.com
blogexplosion.com
blogger.com
bloggerbusiness.com
bloggercrab.com
blogging-bonanza.com
bloggingbiz.com
bloggingequalizer.com
bloggingsecrets.com
blogharbor.com
blogidentity.com
blogigo.com
blogit.com
blogizm.com
blogjet.com
blogmysite.com
blogomonster.com
blogpulse.com
blogsource.com
blogspot.com
blogster.com
blogstogo.com
blogware.com
buzzmetrics.com
canaca.comcerado.com
cheblogs.com
chrisabraham.com
cohit.comcomputerweekly.com
didakutz.com
digg.com
digitalearning.com
domaindirect.com
dreamhost.com
editme.com
effectivebrand.com
egoweblog.com
enewsblog.com
ezsgblog.com
faces.com
findnot.com
flexfinder.com
forum4bloggers.com
fotothing.com
freeenterpriseland.com
friendcircles.com
fullscalecommerce.com
futublog.com
go27.com
google.com
gowholesale.com
homocon.com
igossip.com
infoworld.com
ittoolbox.com
savenow.us
traveldiary.com

More references:

Listen to the official word at Preventing leaky filters. They have a different view on filtering.
AdBlackList

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Is there an optimal posting rate?

Ken — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:11:08 +0000

This is one question that many blogger ask, including myself. Similar questions are

Do you post daily, weekly or randomly?
How many post do you make in a day?
Is the posting time important?

I maintained a few blogs and used different posting strategies. This action was part delibrate and part accidental. Nevertheless I was able learnt something about this question over the past few months.

Let me share them with you.

Quantity is important

The more article you have the more pages search engine can refer visitor to.

So regardless of daily post, random post or multiple posts a day, getting the quantity up is important to increase search engine visitors.

Take this blog Ken and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I post regularly (almost daily) on various motorcycle relate topics. Now there are over 110 articles. The stats show that the search engines are sending visitors to different posts on different topics.

It is unlikely that I cover so many topics with a few posts but with many posts I can.

Have a posting schedule

Another strategy is to have a posting schedule. When visitors know that you post information every Monday, they will come back at the appointed time.

In Invest Insight, I post a weekly chart analysis every Monday. after a while, I notice that traffic on Monday and Tuesday is usually higher.

Defined focus can makeup for missed schedule

Analytic Insight was started about a month ago. The posting schedule is a little erractic as I struggle to keep up with writing and researching the topic.

Surprisingly, I find the the absence in posting has not impacted the traffic that much.

Is there an optimal posting rate?

There is, but it is different for each individual site. You have to find out for yourself what works for your blog.

I suspect however that frequent, larger number of post is more effective.

Reference:

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How I lost more than 150% by doing nothing

Ken — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 23:52:00 +0000

For more than 3 months the pages on whois.la were running without optimisation. I did not look at the server stats or the revenue trend. I just let it run. It was making some money and I did nothing.

Doing nothing can cost money. In this case lost Adsense revenue.

Then one day, I read somewhere (probably the Adsense Help Center) that the number of ads on a page should be optimized.

Although not a fan of plastering a lot of ads I decided to try it on whois.la which was “under-ad“. The only Adsense banner appears in rotation on the top banner. Clearly this is sub-optimal.

The result was beyond my expectation.

What I did was simple.

First, leaderboard was added to the header and footer. Later the link unit was added.

I also found that most of the rotating banners were not performing, so I removed some of them and increase the weight of the Adsense banner.

Behold! Revenue shot up by more than 150% immediate which simply blew me away.

As of now, the site is still very much unattended and the plan is to spend more time optimising the inside pages and boost the revenue further. It is like unmined gold.

In closing, here are what I have to share from this experience

Do not be afraid to put up more ads
For Adsense you can have 3 ads unit, 1 link unit, 2 search unit and 1 referral unit for each product. (Notice how this is maximized on this site.)
Blend the ads with your site design
If you are not a fan of plastering ads all over the place, think of ways merge the ads with your design. I did the Ad Advantage scheme with this aim in mind.
Sharpen your saw
This has been mentioned before. Constantly learn and apply. Do not do nothing.

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Diversify your blog traffic

Ken — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:19:05 +0000

In a recent post the author mentioned that his traffic was badly affected when Google decided to reindex their search result.

Many had similar experience with what is now know as the Google dance. Never heard of it? More about Google dance here and here.

Here’s my definition.

Google Dance: An event that is held frequently when Google updates its search index and ranking. During the event, some people dance for joy which others jump up and down in exasperation.

Dropping out of search engine is consider the Top 10 Blog Disasters

The fact remains that Google is still a main source of traffic for many website. Because of the recent traffic surge , Google accounts for about 10% of traffic here. Typically it was about 30-40%.

What are some strategies to get more traffics from other sources and be less dependent on Google?

Nick at Performancing mentioned some Alternate Traffic and Information Sources. There are good but still confined to the social bookmarking, tagging, digg’ing “web 2.0″ish type activities.

What about increasing traffic from other sources beside search engines? Problogger has some interesting suggestions which include running paper ads!

The good old way I believe is still by writing quality content. Look at how Steve Pavlina increase traffic by 100+% by writing quality content. He claims that search account for 5% of his traffic.

What other methods works for you?

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Maximising Your Income

Ken — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:32:50 +0000

How to maximise income from your blog?

Chris Garrett at Performancing has some common sense advice. He is right that common sense is seldom common practice.

But according to his post I’m on track. At least I’m doing what another blogger more experienced had called common sense.

Let see how I am doing against his recommendation

The more you post the better at it you will become.
I can attest to this. The more I write, the easier the idea came. In fact now I often have drafts standing by. The thing that I have to improve on is a more consistent schedule that I can stick to.
Diversification might be a much better approach.
Doing this as well. I have a few blogs now covering online revenue (this blog), investing, analytics, motorcycle. I’m planning a few more.
A lot of when Chris said make sense if you already have a few blogs.

On top of that you will also need the following to drive your income

A converting, usable design
The current design is a big improvement from what I started with. More tweaks as I go along.
Lots of great, focused content
Working on it
Lots of targeted, motivated traffic
This one need more work. Not much traffic yet
A pool of high-paying advertising or other top revenue source
So far only Adsense. Text Link Ads and eNMarketing are 2 promising sources that had produced result.

How are you doing so far?

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The Art of Ad Placement

Ken — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:10:24 +0000

One thing I learnt of the Adsense Help Center is ads placement.

Ever wonder what ad position performance best? Check out this this advice and tips from the Help Center.

The picture on the left is call a “heat map” and it shows you what position on a page is hotter for ads. The brighter the orange box the stronger the performance.

There is also another heat map for forum.

Of course you are advise to use your judgement and place ads according to your page layout and audience. Some testing with the help of analytics might also help.

I am learning and testing different ad placement as well.

As we go along, I will feature some creative ad placement and also discuss my own ad placement experiment.