Website Publisher Blog | Website Promotion, Generating Revenue, Website Management - Part 17 » Website Publisher Blog » Website Promotion, Generating Revenue, Website Management

To Publish New or to Update?

July 1st, 2006 by Chris

When you have an article based site you are more or less left with two options when it comes to covering certain topics. Do you write a new article, or do you update an old article?

I run into this often on this site. As the publishing industry changes I often find a need to update or tweak my articles, and I do update them rather than publishing whole new ones.

On one hand publishing a new article might make the site seem more active, or might draw in new visitors. However I like the idea of making sure all the articles on the site are as relevant as they can be, so that they’re always useful. If a visitor comes to your site from a search engine and reads an article that is out of date and irrelevant their opinion of your site as a whole might drop.

Plus, as far as search engines go, older URLs will rank better than new URLs so by keeping the old articles with established links up to date I should enhance or keep high rankings with them. Of course on the other hand by publishing new articles you’ll increase your total article count and thus the number of pages with which someone could discover your site in a search engine.

One thing I plan to do this summer (its like 4th or 5th on my current to-do list) is rewrite most of the articles on this site, especially those associated with my guide. So I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, I’m pretty sure that I will just be updating old articles though as much as possible, that seems like the best way.

Posted in: Website Management by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Now Using Feedburner for Blog RSS

June 30th, 2006 by Chris

I’m now using Feedburner to handle the RSS for this blog. In case you did not know Feedburner is a free service that provides some statistic tracking for your RSS feeds, they also have some features that make it easier to get your feed out there.

In anycase, I would appreciate it if all current RSS users upgraded their feed URL to use the one on the right, this will allow you to be tracked so I can get accurate subscribe counts in the future.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Women in Website Publishing

June 27th, 2006 by Chris

It is not that women are less capable than men when it comes to technical things like computers, but rather I think they’re less interested in such things. In anycase, Morgan Webb, aside (I gotta put something for the guys in this post), there are very few women in the computers, programming, video game, etc industries. I also include website publishing in among these “nerdy” industries. Publishing isn’t quite as nerdy because in the end it is more business & writing, but since most publishers jump to this arena from that of web development it makes sense that most of them are male.

This I think creates a golden opportunity for women to enjoy easier success like we all had years ago. The reason is of course that the best websites are run by those who are passionate about their topic, and men and women of course tend to have different interests. Not only are women’s interest sites in demand by advertisers, but also there are fewer of them, and fewer of them done well, than there are of typical man sites like sports or video games, or dare I say porn?

Not that those above mentioned industries aren’t interesting to women too, but they are much less represented than man flavored sites. You could certainly have a sports, video game, or porn site geared towards women, and you would probably be successful with it. The point is that by focusing on women you will likely have a shorter or easier road to success.

Another benefit is that in many developing nations, such as India, women may still be socially limited in what they can do. This is to your advantage because its very common for people in such countries to rip off your sites or your ideas for sites and I’m guessing most of them are men who won’t be as likely to try it with a feminine site.

For all the girls out there reading this, get to work. You’ve probably been involved in technology for a while and maybe, since you interact with men so often in this industry, your feminine side has been tucked away in a closet. Well break it out, think of a topic that is interesting to women and that you are passionate about, you might just stumble into a profitable website idea.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 1 Comment »

The 1000 Word Page

June 26th, 2006 by Chris

Of all the million dollar homepage clones out there this one I think has the most merit. Its another stupid idea of course, but a stupid idea with lots of media attention equals lots of traffic.

Lee over at forum trends posts that he knows of someone already getting 1000 visitors a day through their sponsored word. If thats true then I have got to imagine that it is worth it.

I just bought three links and looking through the word list I might buy more. I figured I’d stop at 3 for a day or two though and hedge that the ones I want will not be sold out by then. This way I can judge for myself the traffic potential.

One potential downside is that you may not get any incoming link value from these links since they’re unfortunately passed through a redirect. Its hard to say though.

One of the sites I advertised consistently gets an eCPM on Google of over $50, so I figure that it is reasonable to make back my investment even if the site only has popularity for a few months.

Another thing I did was immediately check to see if the1000wordpage.com was available (since the website left the “the” out of their domain). Unfortunately some lucky guy in Paris beat me to it.

I’ve been wanting to reinvest more into my business, this was a good opportunity. The worst case scenario is I end up with a tax writeoff, Uncle Sam will get a little less this year.

One more bit of advice. The word order is randomly regenerated frequently, so don’t buy the first word with expectations of more traffic.

Posted in: Website Promotion by: Chris | 2 Comments »

Small Publishers Staying Strong

June 26th, 2006 by Chris

Andrew Johnson posted on his blog that he thinks small publishers will be out of business in 2 years. I don’t think so, not even remotely. The small publisher has an inherent value that no large publisher can match. No or little overhead. To be out of business you’d have to be losing money on the business. Bandwidth & hostings costs are only going to decrease, so the main expense with running a content site will only decrease. All you need to do is make a profit, and a profit is easy to make.

Yes, more publishers are entering this field all the time. Yes this has created much more competition. However the Internet is also getting used more and more all the time, so the audience is also growing.

The publishers of today also have the advantage of being here first. The more years a site has been online the harder it is to challenge that site because that site will have accumulated links, bookmarks, regular visitors, etc.

Just look at the plight of the new comers trying to get listed in Google, they are having an extremely difficult time even getting listed whereas 5 year old sites easily enjoy top rankings.

Will Durant said: A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. This concept is applicable for websites as well. For instance many people have written that Google will never fall from the top of the search engine pile even if a competitor makes a better search engine. So long as Google does not fall in relevancy people will keep using it. Of course it also applies to smaller websites. A large popular content site will not fall unless the management first makes unpopular changes.

The epitome of this concept of course is a forum. A large popular forum is like a juggernaut that will never stop unless the industry it covers suddenly vanishes and the forum doesn’t have time to adapt, or if the management makes poor decisions that alienate the users.

I do see the potential that publishers new to the industry will be discouraged and might give up, that would be their fault though. Certainly all the wannabe professional bloggers out there might find its harder to make a living doing it than they thought. However I do not think an established publisher has much to worry about from the future.

Of course, planning for longevity is important, which is why I wrote an article about it.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Making the tables to CSS switch.

June 25th, 2006 by Shawn

I’ve always thought, as have and still do many others, that regular HTML with tables easily handled any website that I needed to build. I always thought that the 100% CSS crowd was an uppity club, a club that people simply wanted to join because it was the “in” thing to do. My arguments against completely using CSS was a) why fix what isn’t broken, b) CSS is much more restrictive than tables and most importantly c) from a business perspective, there is no financial advantage between choosing CSS or tables.

Well, after hiring a CSS designer and witnessing the birth and completion of an entire website in CSS, I can say that I was completely wrong. I am now a full supporter of 100% CSS layouts. And here’s the reasoning for it:

1. My bottom line. While most CSS designers are more expensive to hire than old fashioned table designers, I save money in the long run with the bandwidth I use. Short term pain (paying more for a designer), long term gain (saving more money every month on bandwidth).

2. My parents. My parents still live in the house I grew up in — which is in the middle of the woods. They’re unable to subscribe to a fast internet connection, so they’re still browsing around the web at ISDN speeds. When they call me and ask to see the new sites I recently built, I’d like to show them sites that load instantly. CSS drastically reduces the load-time on all connections.

3. Clean, easy to update code. Seperating code and content really does save a lot of time when updating a site — more time than you can ever imagine until you actually experience it.

Those are the three (3) main reasons for me personally — others have their own. Because of these reasons, as well as those not mentioned, are why my designers and my company only design 100% CSS sites from now on.

Posted in: Website Development by: Shawn | 6 Comments »

The Saga of Wayne Yeager & Trafficology

June 25th, 2006 by Chris

Way back in 2001 one man named Wayne Yeager took the Internet marketing world by storm. He started this newsletter called Trafficology.com based on the premise of bribing webmasters for their best traffic generating ideas. He would pay $1350 a month, including $1000 as a top prize, for the best ideas sent to him each month. The newsletter was free and he made no profit.

The service was absolutely great, there were some really nice ideas in his newsletters. Most of the ideas are common knowledge now, but for the time they were cutting edge. We couldn’t fathom where the money was coming from though or why.

Then it happened. In the fall of that year he announced he was taking his best ideas and putting them in a paid newsletter. This one would be limited to only 400 subscribers and cost $20 a month.

Cha-Ching

The new Super Trafficology newsletter sold out quickly enough and Wayne was now sitting on guaranteed monthly cash flow of $8000. I also seem to recall him selling subscriptions at an annual rate so he may have brought in more than that. But that is just my memory I cannot find any old data to support it.

At this point the free trafficology newsletter waned in popularity. I personally did not make the subscriber list for the super trafficology one but comments I heard that the ideas, while good, weren’t as great as they were supposed to be. In any case Wayne, being a very smart man, eventually cashed out selling the business to the current operators, Nitro Marketing. I have no idea how much he sold it for but with his cash flow and brand recognition it probably was a lot.

Trafficology was the biggest thing in Internet marketing in it’s day, and it looks like the new owners still benefit from all the praise it received at that time. Of course Trafficology.com is now much different than it used to be, but I’ve included some old copies of information below so you can get an idea of what it was like.

To this day it is still the best example in my mind of a well executed profit making maneuver. He basically paid a lot of money for value and then sold that value back to the same people he bought it from for a much higher price in the end. Then of course he cashed out at the right moment.

Here is the old stuff:

An old SitePoint interview with Wayne Yeager

Archive.org copy of Trafficology.com

An old SPF thread about Super Trafficology

Posted in: General by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Left Hand, Meet Right Hand

June 24th, 2006 by Chris

So I got this email from Yahoo yesterday:

June 23, 2006

To gauge our performance and optimize our services to better meet your needs, we are asking our publishers to participate in an important survey.

We think you may find this survey interesting, and your input will be considered carefully by Yahoo! senior management. Please note that the only goal of this survey is to collect your opinions. You can be assured that your responses will remain confidential and only analyzed in the aggregate. Upon completion of the survey, you will receive a small gift in appreciation for your time.

The survey should take about 30 minutes to complete. Please click on the link below to be automatically directed to the survey.

http://v2.decipherinc.com/survey/hap/hap06012?list=3&source=l3_RivOq

If you have any questions regarding the legitimacy of this survey, feel free to contact mtricia@yahoo-inc.com.

Thank you for your participation!

The Yahoo! Publisher Network

Apparently they didn’t get the memo that I was kicked out of their network.

Still, I took the survey, and apparently by doing so they’ll send me a check for $45, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I also of course got to leave comments about how stupid their geotargetting rules are.

I’m not sure if the link I got is unique, or if anyone can use it to access the survey, but if you can access it try taking it.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 2 Comments »

Tricking Clicks

June 23rd, 2006 by Chris

So I’m sitting with my wife at breakfast and she asked me what I was working on this morning so I told here how I am experimenting with Adsense placement and how I’m testing if there is a performance different when placing a cube to the right of the first paragraph, second paragraph, etc.

She said that she knows she really likes ads because they make us a lot of money, but her first reaction when hearing that is that she thinks its annoying to put ads there. She said that sometimes she accidentally clicks on an ad and gets annoyed. She said she never clicks on ads except by accident. I said that I rarely click on graphical ads anymore, because I don’t really need a free Ipod and most graphical ads nowadays are just for some stupid program like that, but that I do click on Adsense-type ads when they interest me.

Then I kind of made a point by saying she didn’t really accidentally click on the ad either. She wasn’t randomly clicking on the page and accidentally hit the ad. She saw the ad, read it, found it interesting, and clicked. She just didn’t realize when she clicked on it that it was an ad. If she had known it was an ad she wouldn’t have clicked on it because she has had bad experiences in the past clicking on misleading ads or ads that result in drive-by-downloads or a mountain of popups.

Now there is an issue within the publisher community on whether or not to trick a user into clicking on an ad. The problem is the word trick is grossly the wrong word to use in this situation. By blending the ads into your site you’re not tricking the user, you’re just overcoming their natural ad prejudice like what my wife has. The user still reads the ad, and still finds it interesting enough to click on it, there is nothing dishonest about that.

It really is a shame that shady individuals have ruined public trust of advertising, and I did of course explain to my wife that Google polices its advertisers for such behavior. Still, an environment has been created in which we have to make our ads look like content in order for them to be read. I don’t think this is trickery, you’re not using an ad for steak to sell tuna after all. All you’re doing really is making sure the ads get looked at and then you’re relying on the targeting to make sure they get clicked on. If the user is not interested in the ad they won’t click, and if they are interested then “tricking” them into clicking can’t be all bad can it?

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Google Testing CPA Ads

June 21st, 2006 by Chris

Search Engine Roundtable reports Google is testing CPA ads with selective publishers.

This could be good if Google is able to negotiate higher rates than what one would get by themself. Also, perhaps Google is using adwords data to figure out which programs to run since so many affiliate programs are promoted through adwords. Of course that would certainly upset all the PPC affiliate marketers out there.

Options certainly are never a bad thing, the only way this could be bad is if Google eventually moves into CPA and abandones CPC. Obviously many publishers dislike CPA because your earnings are depending on the advertiser’s ability to convert once they have traffic.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | No Comments »