Money
CSS for better revenue
Author: Joe Maddalone
Revised
It's been about a year since I was really active in affiliate sales through Amazon, having lost faith in the same-o-same-o conversion rates. I think somewhere along the lines I forgot that I need to be more responsible for the traffic driven to them in the first place.
A few, recent, CSS tweaks, a little repositioning and viola! a 1.05% increase in Amazon Affiliate Sales. Right where it counts too, high-end electronics. Nothing better than seeings a single sale bring in 50.00+.
Rebirth
On a hunch, I also redesigned and repurposed a long dead domain of mine, cheatfu.com. On hour of tweaks and a bit of original/lazy CMS construction and we're at $1.00 Adsense revenue. I've said it before, a buck a day adds up. Besides, it was literally doing nothing, zilch.
Moral of the story
Don't lose faith in yourself, your design or ingenuity
GDI+ and ISBNs for fun and profit
Author: Joe Maddalone
Jason and Al, over at SelfMadeMinds.com, claim that www.tattoofonts.net pulls in about $5-$10/day, so I launched TattooFonts.org
I am somewhat committed to launching three new sites a week for a while, at least one of which will not be an article site
Also expanded on the ISBNbox site concept by adding in a small access databse and keeping track of recent searches. I was thinking about having the system automatically create static HTML pages of each unique result and then use sitemaps to show continual growth and constant updates, but using dynamically rewritten URLs will most-likely be a better and easier way to get the same results
ISBNbox now ranks fairly well for:
in Yahoo! Starting to see some Google results, which is impressive for a single page website. I think by adding the additional pages based on recent searches I should see a big boost in the coming weeks.
Finding Niches for Adsense Revenue
Author: Joe Maddalone
I recently needed to get some additional revenue going in order to cover some unexpected expenses this month. An easy way for me to do this is to launch more sites built around Affiliate Sales and Adsense/YPN revenue.
Finding a Profitable Niche
There is a lot of advice out there stating, write about what you love and the revenue will follow. I don't dispute this thinking at all, but there is another school of thought stating "Find out what's profitable first." This is what I'd like to share with you here.
No reason to reinvent the wheel, you can seek out profitable niches all day and trim your efforts back to whatever bears fruit or you can simply go out and see what's making money. an easy way to do this is to find people selling their MFA sites. Sitepoint, DigitalPoint, and eBay are great resources for this. These people want to sell their sites and so they need to show the value of these sites by presenting potential buyers with revenue information. How much does the site make and from where. Find the ones that make a decent profit off of Adsense, eliminate any angles they may have that you wont and you have your niche ready to go.
Example:
I just bought and am setting up breastreading.com, it will be a site about breasts, from cancer to lifts to self exams and so on.
Because the guy who owns breastfit.com is selling his site and showing the value of the site on Sitepoint After some research I can see the other sites he owns and from there I can begin to develop a new network of sites using similar content and better SEO/Marketing and expect to earn at least what he is currently earning if not more.
Simple stuff, huh?
Well there's my logic for the day, glad to pass it on. Stick with me, kids, I'll take you places.
Always hunting
Author: Joe Maddalone
It's always a defeatist move for me to try and pass on knowledge that certain giant companies dont want me to spout on about, between all my SEO and entrpreneurial habits something kind of amazing has happened. I launched 3 websites in about as many days and they all already indexed and recieving traffic from certain big search engines and each making about a buck a day
A buck a day aint much
But to put it into perspective these are not like the rest of the sites I have developed over the last year, which honestly do make a lot more money from Adsense and YPN, but require a lot of maintenence. These are essentially static sites that will never be updated.
Granted that may mean the cashflow from them may be short-lived, but the reality is this; If I launch a site a day that makes .50/day for a year... well in 365 days thats
365 x 0.50 = 182.50
365 x 182.50 = $66,612.50/yr
Now take out the expense of domains
365 x 9.20 = $3358.00/yr
The sites in question are
And without giving away too much on this, I will tell you this, I am using my own ASP.NET URL reqriting code to test the impact of changing all my aspx extensions to shtml extensions on some of my sites.
Whatever it is it seems to be working out really, really well.
Also be on the look out for www.isbnbox.com and www.upcbox.com which will follow similar structures and open up the doors to more lucrative affiliate sales
Another thing I have been looking at is to compete with the likes of FreeAfterRebate.info, the site is basically just a collection of feeds, but you go look up "Free After Rebate" in Google and you can see it's clearly getting lots of love from them. Kevin Savitz owns it and I have ben watching his Savitz Publishing very closely for a while now. I think it's an overlooked and undertargeted business model. Not spam or splogs, but just doing it one better than the guy at the top of the list.
upcbox and isbnbox will be directly target the traffic upcdatabase.com is getting from Google now
What are you getting at Joe?
I guess the point is, that it's not all just problogger and wordpress templates and constant blogging.... there are a lot more ways to make money out there for us web geeks than people let on. And as all those old dinosaur spam sites and domain horders begin falling off, we can basically do the same thing with a new CSS, SEO, Web 2.0 twist... think about it
New Affiliate Opportunity
Author: Joe Maddalone
I am in the processing of developing a standalone storefront for the largest eBay retailer on the planet.
The inventory consists of primaryily Books, CD's, Videos and DVD's, but is ever expanding.
The storefront shuold be complete in the next month with an inventory of over 4 million items.
The next step on this project is to establishan affiliate program, which wont really get into motion until June.
I have been an Amazon affiliate for years and since I am the one building this thing my goal is to be able to take existing AWS/ECS code and easily port it over to a web service which I will be developing for this project.
Amazon Affiliate sales are a secondary income for me, so I figure I want to structure this to be competetive with AWS, both in payscale and ease of use.
To start we are talking about dropping the tiered pay rate and going with a flat percentage for all sales.
If you have any gripes about Amazon.. (I know I do... reporting, anyone?), let me know what I should concern myself with to structure this thing properly.
And if you think you might be interested in being part of our beta later this year drop me an email at [ joe AT insert-title.com ] with a subject of "MMD AFFILIATION"
Websites as Cousins to Realty
Author: Joe Maddalone
I attended the Real Estate Wealth Expo last weekend in Chicago.
Getting to hear people like Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Robbins, George Foreman and Donald Trump speak was really fun and, at times, quite eye-opening.
I tend to look at the business of internet entrepreneurial as a close cousin to certain real estate concepts. Cash flow is universal, rental situations are close to paid advertising space, land development is similar to the development of a successful website, etc., etc.
In the midst of all this realty talk there was a seminar by a guy named Sean Roach.
A little about Mr. Roach. He apparently has made a fortune in the e-book and eBay markets. He says he buys and sells real estate on eBay and either writes or has written eBooks which he then sells through those single page sites... you know the kind. Here is an example of one of his sites that he showed during his presentation. He stated that it cost him $400.00 (ish) to have the book written and it has apparently paid for itself at least 30-40 times over thus far. not bad.
He also had some great tips about public domain property and the potential for income utilizing that arena... which I have found quite exciting, myself.
In the long run, as most of these seminars go, he was selling his Get Rich on the Internet package... I think it was somewhere in the vicinity or $1000 - $2000 for the package. Needless to say, I did not buy the package that day. Maybe some day in the future though... who knows.
Overall, having sat through the seminar I took a number of notes and left with a head full of new ideas which I plan to begin implementing over the next few months. I noticed throughout the seminar that while he mentioned Blogs as a vehicle for revenue he really focused on a lot of ideas that I personally have never tried... but seem to have been around for quite some time. At some point I looked around and realized just how many people there are that don't know anything about this stuff. I would assume that most people in the room have at least basic computer skills and I know that some were even in the industry of web development or consulting. In contrast to the talk of over saturation in niche blogging and how many blogs pop up everyday I realized that we have yet to see the real beginning of the splogs. Yes splogs. Blogs filled with spam. It's going to get insane soon, mark my words.
As for me, one thing I have begun to do is diversify. Adsense used to be really good to me, as was Amazon before them. Now Yahoo is doing wonderfully, but prior to realizing I have all my eggs in one basket (again!) I have begun to implement a number of other revenue-generating ideas.
Chitika Mini Malls is my latest venture, but only a cosmetic one. The interactive ads get clicked on pretty decently, but the payout is only okay.
I have been working on solid ways of identifying profitable niches and developing fast, original content for very little money. I am reading up on and beginning to study the world of eBay a bit... ad i will keep you posted.
As a side note - I only really got into this whole affiliate / reseller / blog stuff in the last 6 months and have gone from 0 to around $2000.00/month. So while I believe in the whole find a niche you are passionate about and spend the time on good content I also believe there are some shortcuts to be taken.
Yahoo Publisher Down Again
Author: Joe Maddalone
I love YPN, don't get me wrong, but there is nothing more frustrating than the ups and downs we are seeing with this beta.
Current Issues
I think for the most part the only consistent issue is late reporting. You never see a daily report until the day after all amounts are calculated. you can =see an estimated daily balance which is nice, but those of us who constantly check our Adsense / YPN stats hate that there's no details behind it.
The daily balance brings us to our next major peeve. Today is the 3rd day that we have seen "No Activity".. all day. Yersterday it was frozen wioth "As of 5:15PM" until about 4AM.... The idea,for those of you dont know, is that they deliver new results every 15 minutes, which is very nice because unlike Adsense you can see exactly when that last total was calculated.
All in all High payouts over low CTR are goiong to win me over any day of the week, however, as I stated tbefore this beta is absolutley not for the faint of heart.
What is Adsense eCPM?
Author: Joe Maddalone
eCPM stands for "Effective Cost per 1000 impressions"
Impressions are calculated by the amount of times an ad unit is displayed your site.
Do not confuse Ad Impressions with Page Impressions. google offers you the ability to review both.
Page impressions are exactly that, the impression of a page regardless of the number of ad units on that page.
Google's new CPM pricing model for some advertisers has a definite effect on these values and may very well become a key component in the Advertisers filtering capabilities in the near future. Now that Google has CPM pricing the exact value and usage of this data may change but essentially you can use the Google Adsense reporting tools to realize the following:
The basic formula for eCPM is as follows:
Earnings / Impressions = Effective Cost per 1000 impressions
This can be incredibly useful data when looked at either as a whole or more importantly as a custom channel or URL channel report. To further breakdown and maximize the potential for this data as a decision making component in any AdSense campaign I suggest utilizing it in conjunction with the now 200 channels you are allowed with Googles Adsense control panel.
The advantage of knowing the eCPM may not be immediately apparent for a site, it offers a unique insight for a site developing content and traffic over a long period of time. Both Adwords publishers and Adsense advertisers this allows anyone to see the effectiveness of a sites content or ad layout and placement over the duration of a long-term project.
The bottom-line is that the real value of eCPM is best suited for those not looking to get rich quick with adsense, but those more concerned about the long term effects of placement and layout experimentation alongside solid content.
