Website Publisher Blog | Website Promotion, Generating Revenue, Website Management - Part 18 » Website Publisher Blog » Website Promotion, Generating Revenue, Website Management

Another One Bites the Dust

June 16th, 2006 by Chris

You can add my name to the list of people who have been kicked out of YPN for not doing their own geotargetting. As a whole this policy has made Yahoo and YPN look amateurish in front of pretty much the entire webmaster community. They are unwilling to simply filter out international traffic or show international traffic PSA ads and instead expect their publishers to do so or risk being kicked out as I have been.

We’re not talking about some Mom & Pop ad network, we’re talking about Yahoo, you’d think they could get their act together on this one. But instead they are generating oodles of bad press and bad public opinion in the webmaster community and they’re missing out on the revenue they could be gaining from the US traffic of the publishers they have kicked out.

Now personally, the traffic I was sending was about 80/20 US/International, and I knew that they could kick me out for it, but after many months (I got in early), they didn’t and I figured I was safe. Oh well, more traffic for Google.

Jun 16 2006 11:23 PT

Hello Chris,

Thank you for your participation in the Yahoo! Publisher Network Beta program. As part of our efforts to ensure high-quality traffic for advertisers on the Yahoo! Publisher Network, we continuously monitor publisher attributes such as:

1. Sources of their traffic, including its geographical distribution.

2. Suspicious click activity.

3. Advertiser conversion rates.

4. Overall quality of leads generated on your site.

Unfortunately, due to poor traffic quality, we have terminated your Yahoo! Publisher Network account ID 7928413270. In accordance with Sections 6(a) and 6(b) of the Yahoo! Publisher Network terms and conditions, we will not include clicks from non-U.S. users or otherwise invalid clicks in your payment. We have refunded amounts generated from the non-U.S. users and otherwise invalid clicks to our advertisers and will pay any remaining amount owed to you in accord with the Terms and Conditions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Sincerely,

David Andrews
Relevance Analyst
Yahoo! Search Marketing
74 N. Pasadena Avenue, 3rd Floor
Pasadena, CA 91103 USA

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 10 Comments »

What we can learn from The Million Dollar Homepage

June 15th, 2006 by Chris

I realize now that The Million Dollar Homepage (milliondollarhomepage.com) is old news. I originally thought of this quite awhile ago when I was blogging for SitePoint though and it was on my schedule of things to write about when I stopped writing for SitePoint, then I forgot about it until today when I was talking about it with my accountant.

The obvious lesson we can take from TMDHP is that the press and press releases are powerful marketing tools. Media mentions can easily snowball and generate insane amounts of publicity. Of course the chances of such a thing happening are slim, but if they do happen you’re going to be sitting pretty.

However, the lesson I want to talk about is a less obvious one: the power of 100% margins.

What if you could sell something that costs you nothing to make or distribute, and indeed is mostly automated? Your profit margins would be 100% (or nearly so after any applicable credit card processing and hosting fees) and your business would be very scalable able to handle large volume. You could sell this item for as little as $1 and with enough volume still make a huge amount of money.

Alex Tew decided to sell pixels for $1 each. It seemed farfetched but it worked. People wanted his pixels and were willing to spend $1 to get them. So, what could you sell that costs you nothing to produce? Well, there you’re on your own.

There are some obvious choices, such as selling upgrades to forum members (a larger avatar for $1, a special user title for $1, etc). However you aren’t going to sell millions of these things. A good ebook can fit this model, you only have to produce it once and then there is no incremental cost for each sale, but again you won’t sell millions.

Keep thinking about it though, if you can create value in something that people are willing to pay for but costs you nothing, then you’ve hit upon a gold mine.

Posted in: Generating Revenue by: Chris | 1 Comment »

CJ backsteps a little on mandating JS links

June 8th, 2006 by Chris

Commission Junction’s recent announcement that they would be mandating the use of javascript, as opposed to straight HTML, links caused a significant uproar among publishers and they seemed to have backed off the issue a little.

On June 23, 2006, JavaScript links will become Commission Junction’s default link type in the CJ Marketplace. However, we will continue to offer Legacy links through the beginning of 2007. The Legacy links will be available for all your advertiser relationships, including those joined to before and after June 23, 2006. At this time we have not scheduled a date for which the Legacy links will no longer be available or supported. We will notify you at least six months in advance of making this change and will not require the change during the 2006 holiday season.

This is a much better situation I think and gives publishers ample time to learn to use the new links while still being able to use the old links.

Posted in: Affiliate Programs by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Popunder Rates Falling

June 5th, 2006 by Chris

Over the past 6 months I’ve noticed a steady decline in popunder rates at both Fastclick (now ValueClick Media) and Casale.

There was a time when Fastclick was my primary popunder provider with the most campaigns and the best rates. Then Casale passed them. Now ValueClick (VC), has passed Casale again, but both are much lower than they used to be, under $3 eCPM.

What is causing this?

We know that more businesses advertise online every day and that online ad spending increases every year, so you’d think that rates should be going up. Perhaps ad spending is moving away from popups and more into search marketing. I don’t think that is necessarily the cause either though, because traditionally the types of companies that advertise in popups are not the types who can get a good return with PPC marketing.

Could it be user behavior? Are more users becoming wise to popups and either blocking them or ignoring them? Maybe, except I’m not talking total revenue, but eCPM, and the people who do not know how to block popups are also the most likely I think to be confused by them and so click on them.

If I had to guess I’d say that at the present time advertising inventory is increasing faster than advertising demand. The fact is website publishing is getting noticed, and people are realizing that they can make money doing this, this is especially true in the developing world where they do not need to earn very much to be successful.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Commission Junction Mandates Javascript Links

May 31st, 2006 by Chris

CJ.com recently announced a new policy whereby affiliates will have to start using javascript links practically exclusively when promoting merchants in their network. For certain special types if integration, such as for email or datafeeds, the links will stay the same, but for all others they will need to be javascript.

In my opinion this is a very bad thing.

Anything that takes away from the flexibility a publisher has is going to hinder that publisher’s ability to make sales.

I love javascript links, I love having non-standard sized graphical/text/mixed creatives that automatically update without me having to do any work. Amazon has used such creatives for years, many Linkshare merchants use them. CJ has some merchants that use them but very few.

Whether or not javascript links are good though isn’t the point, the point is that only having javascript links is a bad thing.

One of the things I most love about affiliate programs is that you can promote them with as little screen real estate as you want. If you want to monetize a single word on the screen you can turn that word into an affiliate link. With javascript based links, whose anchor text & display properties could change at the whim of an advertiser, you can’t do this.

This will also cause problems for price comparison or other similar systems that need a standard URL to feed into their system. They will not be able to do it anymore.

CJ’s stated motive, to combat ad blocking, is a good motive, but this is not the right method to do it. No ad blocker in the world could block out an HTML link if sent through a same-site redirect first, but any rudimentary ad blocker could be made to identify CJ’s javascript and stop it from loading, it is going to be so much easier for loser companies like Norton to block all CJ ads.

There has been a lot of uproar over this, many claiming affiliates are going to switch. I doubt it, affiliates go where the programs are. In reality I think sales are going to decline and the merchants will switch, then the affiliates will follow the merchants.

Posted in: Affiliate Programs by: Chris | 4 Comments »

Rolling the Dice

May 27th, 2006 by Chris

I was asked recently why, if I do this for a living, has my forum signature (where I list most of my sites) not gotten longer by any measure in recent time.

The reason is that there are different methods of going about being a website publisher. You can build many small sites, you can build a few or just one big site, and everything in between. Currently I’m focusing more on big sites.

I started off with one site of course, then branched out, and in that my major growth period I made many sites. Then I tried different things. 18-24 months ago for instance my major project was building a datafeed site system that’d allow me to easily publish sites from any datafeed. This was a success and made me some good money but eventually datafeed sites got heavily hammered in search engines and so it doesn’t earn me much anymore.

12 months ago my major project was expanding the content on my largest site. Over the course of the summer I practically doubled the content. This didn’t increase my number of sites, but it did drastically increase the amount of content I had. The main reason I did this of course is that the marketplace is starting to get crowded and it is getting harder to launch new sites and so I thought, and still feel, that my energy is best used in improving existing sites.

A compounding factor in all of this is the fact that I’ve never been one to publish duplicate content. It is so easy to duplicate a content site you already own to further saturate the marketplace, but this has been something I’ve never done, so when I run out of topics to publish sites on I simply can’t go any further. Sure, there are limitless topics out there but I do like to publish on topics that interest me and my interests are not limitless.

Which brings me to today. The rate at which I launch new content sites has dwindled, but the sites I do launch are better done than before because I am investing more money into my business and obtaining development I could not do my self.

Really though, my focus now has shifted from making profitable sites, to making crazily profitable sites. See, I’m rolling the dice and trying to score big. I already make more than enough money to live on comfortably, and my income has maintained steady growth. So rather than trying to keep launching small sites that only incrementally increase my income I’m thinking more about larger sites with income potential measured in 7 figures. The success rate for such sites isn’t going to be as large, but I can afford to gamble a little bit since I no longer have to worry about where next month’s mortgage payment is coming from. So right now I have 2 large projects in the works, and one smaller one (by comparison) all of which I think have potential for very high-end success.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Search Engines Borrowing Page Titles from Directories

May 22nd, 2006 by Chris

I’ve heard this complaint dozens of times. Someone has a pretty nice search engine ranking except instead of using the webmaster’s carefully selected title tag as the title for the listing the search engine pulls one from a directory that was done by an editor who might not be the most gifted copywriter. Now sure, for directory based searches this is alright, but I’m talking about a normal search engine just borrowing some directory data.

Google for instance will borrow from DMOZ, Yahoo from Yahoo (duh), and MSN used to borrow from LookSmart/Zeal back when they used them, now they’ll borrow from DMOZ.

Well MSN just launched a new meta tag that allows webmasters to opt out of such a service.

Simply add <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”> to your header and you will no longer have an directory title with your MSN listing. Using this tag will not affect your actual listing in the directory, just what information is used to generate your listing in the SERP.

One can hope this meta tag goes the way of rel=nofollow and ends up being adopted by all engines after being launched by just one.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 3 Comments »

How’s this for a niche?

May 5th, 2006 by Chris

Restaurant corn on the cob is always so much better than the stuff I make at home, or the stuff my mom used to make. Determined to find out why I searched on Google for “How to cook corn on the cob” and this website came up second.

This site immediately struck me as useful. It is more or less optimized for a single phrase (the phrase I searched for) and it answers the question that is my phrase in a simple and straightforward manner, with lots of pictures.

Obviously, to my trained eye this site was made for commercial reasons, not a love of corn, but it is still really useful, mostly because the owner follows the KISS attitude. There is no superfluous navigation, the text is large and easy to read, and there is a plethora of pictures. I consider simple & instructive content like this to be obvious link bait, and I’m sure that is one of the reasons this site is ranked well.

I do not agree with everything this webmaster does. If you scroll to the bottom you’ll notice links to similar sites and if you browse around his network for a while you’ll see some obvious duplicate content with the same instructions on different domains. However he does have what looks to be a simple successful little system setup.

I’m sure none of these sites gets very much traffic by themselves, but considering they were easy and cheap to make, easy and cheap to maintain, and actually are useful to the end user, I’ve no doubt they are profitable. Any of the adsense experts reading this will of course tell you that he could undoubtedly increase his revenue with better ad placement, and maybe include some additional “for further reading” type ads for cookware or cookbooks, however just because his site isn’t perfect, doesn’t mean its not good.

One thing that really gets on my nerves is the sheer number of lazy people out there who try to make a buck online by either producing nothing of value, or just copying other people. This site is an example of how easy it can be to make a successful site. How hard is it to write a page on how to cook corn and take a dozen pictures to go along with it? My point is, its not as hard as the spammers seem to think to make a useful site & make money off of it.

I also like this site because it is an example of something I posted about previously, optimizing for a question.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Burst!Media Changes Default System

May 2nd, 2006 by Chris

Burst!Media announced today that they launched a new defaults system whereby publishers can input a value for their defaults and if their defaults are valued at higher than Burst’s ads then the defaults can run before those campaigns.

Burst!Media isn’t the first major network to do this, Fastclick (now Valueclick) did this last year.

However, I do feel that Burst doing this is much more news worthy than Fastclick (Valueclick) for a variety of reasons.

For one, Burst can get some really stellar rates. In general their fill rate is low, and their RON advertisements aren’t anything to get excited about, but where Burst shines is in targetted campaigns that can still bring in numbers around $10 CPM. Publishers want those campaigns, and Burst wants publisher inventory, but many publishers have been hesistant to use Burst because of the lackluster RON campaigns. With this new system that is no longer an issue as publishers can join up with Burst, send all their traffic through Burst (thus showing Burst and Burst’s advertisers their potential inventory) while still keeping a higher paying ad network (AdSense, TribalFusion, etc) showing most of the ads.

Another reason I find this interesting is that Burst used to really push exclusivity, I myself had an exclusive agreement with them at one time. This is just another step in them opening up and realizing that most publishers do not want to limit themselves to just one network, which is the right direction for them to be moving in.

Overall this is an excellent change. I would also recommend any publisher currently using Adsense on a niche site to try to get into Burst. Just setup your defaults at whatever your Adsense eCPM was for the past month or so. Worst case scenario, you spend an hour setting up this chain and get nothing. Best case scenario Burst manages to sell some targetted campaigns for your site that exceed your Adsense income.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 1 Comment »

PageRank or Your Page’s Rank?

May 2nd, 2006 by Chris

I’m sure most of my readers already know this, but I mean honestly I cannot visit a popular webmaster forum and not see this mistake being made. So I’m going to blog about it in hopes of making a central place people can be sent to when they get this wrong.

Your PageRank, or PR, and your page’s rank, are not the same thing. They might look the same, but punctuation matters here.

PageRank, is a proper noun and named after Lawrence Page, the co-founder of Google. I sometimes wish he was named Lawrence Zarinski or something so we could have ZarinskiRank and people wouldn’t be confused.

PageRank, or PR, is a numeric score representing the total weight of all the incoming links (links pointing to one page from another) that a page has. You can read more about PageRank here or here. If someone says that they have a PR of 3, it doesn’t mean they rank 3rd, it means that on a logarithmic scale of 1-10 they have a value of 3 for PageRank.

Your page’s rank, is where it appears in a search engine’s result page, or SERP. If someone say’s their page’s rank is a 3, that means they’re the 3rd listing on a search engine for their keywords.

PageRank is a relatively straight forward mathematical formula. Your page’s rank involves hundreds of factors.

PageRank does influence your page’s rank, it is one of a plethora of factors used by search engines to calculate rankings, however it does not directly equate to rankings.

So in the future, avoid confusion and use the correct term. If you do not, god kills a fairy.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 2 Comments »