Common Mistakes – Chapter 1

March 6th, 2006 by Mook

As most of you know, I am new to this whole blogging thing here at WP, but after some deliberating, I think I will start to address different aspects of generating revenue and web promotion topics in specific chapters. We’ll dub this chapter “Common Mistakes”, and we’ll address and focus on things that you probably shouldn’t do when you launch a new site. Most of the topics will be quite general, so it can help everyone. As always, if you have any topic you’d like me to cover on a blog, email me and I’ll get right on it. So, with all of that said, on with the show!

One of the most common mistakes new site owners make (seasoned webmasters and newbies) is putting too much advertising on a brand new site. See, whenever we make new sites, as a website owner, our first goal is to make back whatever cash we’ve spent on the design, development, hosting, marketing, etc.. It’s time my friends, to break out of that mold. If you are making a website for profit, what’s the first thing you need to focus on? Generating revenue is probably the most common answer.. Wrong! Traffic. In order to make money, you need traffic. You can have the world’s greatest amount of content, the greatest design ever, the most fluid scripts running, but without the traffic, all you have is an empty chunk taking up space on a server.

Whenever I have my designers make sites, I always tell them — “Be sure to build the layout so that if I need to add ad spaces, I’ll be able to without ruining the original layout design”. Rather than building it with the spots in there first, my goal is to build up user loyalty on the site, and then slowly add my ad spots. This goes for all of you YPN and Adsense users too who think that text ads aren’t that noticable either. They are, even to stupid surfers.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t put any ads on your site, because even I go crazy with them sometimes. But I am saying that when you build a site, don’t go crazy with ads everywhere. You shouldn’t be in a rush to make money. Treat your website like you would an infant. I know it’s a strange reference, but it works. When you think of your website as the baby, and the traffic as the food, you wouldn’t feed your baby crappy food just because the label says it will make the kid grow quickly right? So why would you do something like posting a cajillion ads on your sites? All it does is annoy the end user.

So with that said, all of you internet revenue cowboys out there should probably hold off on putting pop-unders, and flashy banner ads on every empty spot on your new site. Your best bet is to take a step back, look at your site, and try and build up traffic first. This way, when it’s built up to a substantial level, then you can start to annoy people with your ads and really bank off the site. This method also works really well if you want to do private ad sales on a CPM or monthly level, because you’ll have a lot more return users this way.

Posted in: Generating Revenue, Website Development, Website Management by: Mook | 6 Comments »

Another Major Acquisition

March 6th, 2006 by Chris

I read this article this morning about NBC Universal buying iVillage. This is yet another in a recent string of major Internet acquisitions. I also like how the article recaps some of the other big ones lately.

What I find really neat about this is that the sale of course includes Gardenweb.com as it is part of iVillage now. For you non-gardeners, Gardenweb.com is one of the Internet’s largest forums, having been started in 1995. It has expanded from gardening information to home & life information. It is always popping up in garden related search results. In any case this site, which using a custom forum software that hasn’t change in forever, was started by a guy, just a guy, way back in 1995. He sold it to iVillage in 1994, I’m not sure for how much, and now it is sold to NBC Universal for over half a billion dollars. So 10 years after a guy starts a forum, a guy just like you or me, it is owned by NBC. Who will own your forum 10 years from now?

The MySpace story is interesting too, that site was only started in 2003 and boom, 2/3 years later it is sold for over half a billion.

The fact is, major media companies are waking up to the Internet. Look at NBC, how many failed online ventures did it have? Anyone remember NBCi? Now instead of going about things the wrong way and failing, they’re buying our successful creations.

Of course blogs have gotten big billing lately, what with the sale of Weblogs to AOL & About.com to the New York Times. However I think that forums are more valuable than blogs and they will be parts of major acquisitions in years to come. These major media companies are drooling over online communities, and a forum is the quintessential online community. This is also why the iVillage buyout interests me, because it is mostly a forum company, or rather the strong foundation of the company is its popular forums.

10 years from now will any of your sites be big enough to be bought out on this scale? Think about it.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Introduction: Mook

March 4th, 2006 by Mook

Hey everyone out there. This is my first time publishing a blog.

For the longest time I’ve wanted to get into blogging, but never really had the drive or time for it. Thanks to Chris (Aspen on SP) we worked something out to join together and further help webmasters out. I have a lot of respect for Chris as a webmaster and a fellow SEO.

Since this is my first post, I really don’t know what to add to it, so bare with me until I get some solid topics down. Most of you will recognize me from the Site Point forums as the creator of a thread labeled “Screenshot: My CJ Stats:”. I’m the guy who pulled in over $100k in one month (well when I took the screenshot it was in the $80k’s) from CJ (commission junction) alone. I’d like to point out that I don’t only rely on CJ, and the reason I posted stats from them is because they pay the highest as far as financial lead advertisers go, and they are also by far the toughest ad network to make bank on.

For the longest time CJ and I didn’t really work well together. In fact, it all started to really come together when I stopped thinking like an affiliate, and started thinking like a consumer. I took a step back and thought to myself “alright, if I were refinancing my mortgage, what type of site would make me want to fill out all of my most personal information to attract lenders?” — It took me a while to come up with a good layout, but thanks to my design team at the time, we were able to draft up a non-intrusive typical layout. The typical layout I’m referring to is a splash page, with some content here and there, and then banner or text ads saying “Click Here”. Sorry guys, that may have worked years ago, but it certainly doesn’t fly these days.

I’ve been stressing for a pretty long time to webmasters like yourself that the affiliate marketing game has changed and evolved into a real business. See, there are so many ways to make money online these days that it needs to be treated as a business, and not as a hobby. Sure, you can make money from your hobby, but people need to change their approach and their layouts to really attract sales, clicks, or leads. You need to be really clever about it, and not in a sneaky way either. Just put some effort into it, and don’t try to churn out a million pages a day either. Sure, taking the easy way out and buying some script that does it for you will always attract the really lazy guys, but if you truly want to make a lot of money, you need to approach it from the CONSUMER’S POINT OF VIEW. Put yourself into their position. Remember that when you’re making a page or a site, and it looks good to you, you’re probably grading it from a webmaster’s point of view, which won’t work as well. Get your friends to tell you what they like and don’t like. Do they trust the page enough to send out their information or buy or click the advertisements? Ask them what would make it more appealing? This is market research, and I’ll cover this topic some other time, as it’s really it’s own animal.

In closing, I hope to really help and inspire webmasters involved in the affiliate and site promotion theaters (kinda like a war theater, because we are at war, just without bombs). As most of you know, I don’t have an ebook (even though people have told me to write one), I don’t share any of my large sites, I keep most of my things private and don’t expect any new business or money in return. All I ask is that you give credit back to me if you decide to use any of my posts on boards or blogs, and that when you are successful yourself you continue to share your knowledge and expertise with fellow webmasters for free. It’s my way of giving back to the community that helped me so much over the years and ultimately helped me get to this position.

Posted in: Generating Revenue by: Mook | 11 Comments »

Desire Targeting

March 4th, 2006 by Chris

I thought I’d try my hand at creating a new phrase, like “link baiting” and so I thought I’d expand on a topic I have covered previously here. Basically the process of targeting your advertisements not based on your content but based on the desires of your visitors.

Targeting advertising & affiliate programs to your content can make you some money, after all if someone is on a site about gardening they probably are a gardener and they might just need gardening equipment. However for truly great conversions, and eCPMs (effective CPMs) measured in the $100s you need to target your ads to your visitor’s desires or needs. If the product or program you are promoting helps your visitor accomplish the immediate goal that drove them to visit your site in the first place, well then you’re going to get a lot of conversions.

So the trick is to know your audience, and know them well. This isn’t going to be applicable to all sites of course. Sometimes the only reason people visit a site is to read content. However you’d be surprised what you can figure out.

I like to use my literature site as an example. It is a literature archive, people go there to read and search through books. Now initially I put in a lot of “Buy this book from Amazon” kind of links, and many are still up. They perform okay, selling a handful of books a day.

What I didn’t realize is that most of my visitors aren’t there by choice. They’re students and are working on an assignment for school. They don’t want to read Shakespeare in their spare time. So I put up ads for essay and homework help websites, and they do very well. My essay links get clicked on around 1000 times a day. I don’t offer any essays on my site, so it’s not really related to my content, but it certainly helps my visitors reach their immediate goal (which is finishing their homework).

You can also build a site specifically around an affiliate program, so that the affiliate program matches the typical desire of a person visiting. This is the concept behind most review sites. More on this though can be found in my Affiliate Gold article.

Posted in: Affiliate Programs by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Attracting advertisers with little traffic.

March 2nd, 2006 by Shawn

Here goes, my first blog post. Leave your comments.

With most new sites I build my objective is to make money off of private advertisers, with CPC and affiliate programs supplementing my revenue — not being the primary source of my income. Getting checks each month from private advertisers is much more stable than fluctuating CPC revenue. With CPC and affiliate programs, the amount of income you can generate is strictly limited by the amount of traffic you receive. On the other hand, you can attract and keep private advertisers regardless of the amount of people visiting your website and generate much more money than CPC.

Most webmasters assume that private advertisers are solely concerned with traffic — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Online advertisers, regardless of size, are also looking to be associated with other professional, trustworthy, good looking websites that can display their sales pitch. Obviously, the rates that you can charge to an advertiser are limited by the industry you’re involved with and your advertising rates, but you could still easily make a few hundred bucks a month per advertiser in a relatively tame, but vibrant market.  That’s nothing for good-sized advertising budgets.

Little traffic will give little ROI.

Assuming your advertising rates aren’t outrageous, most advertisers will stay onboard advertising on your site while receiving a negative ROI. If your website possesses all of the characteristics listed above, advertisers will come to the conclusion that your traffic is going to grow steadily over time. You should confirm these beliefs on a regular basis and make it known that you are looking for a long-term advertising relationship by calling and checking up with your private advertisers.

Keep your advertisers informed with changes and additions to the site, the direction the site is moving in, and let them know that you’re easily available to answer with any questions or concerns. You’ll gain their confidence.

And their business.

Posted in: Generating Revenue by: Shawn | 7 Comments »

Welcome

March 2nd, 2006 by Chris

Meet the new blog, same as the old blog.

I plan to treat this blog roughly the same as the blog I had on SitePoint. Actually no, thats not true, this blog will be better. Well for one I can link to more of the articles I’ve written when I want to expand on a point. I never thought it was right to link to this site from SitePoint, so I never really did that. I think I’ll probably give myself more flexibility as well.

Additionally Shawn Weeks has asked if he could contribute to this blog and I thought that was a good idea, so you’ll have two authors. For those of you who don’t know Shawn, he took some advice on a forum 2 years ago and turned himself into a website publisher instead of a web developer. I think his story is a good one for those of you who are currently working for clients and would rather work for yourself.

I would also like to thank all the people who have given me support with my leaving SitePoint. I still don’t know the reasons for my abrupt departure, but I figure that if I don’t know them by now, I’ll never know them. In that case I’m simply not going to worry about it. I understand many people are upset (I know I am) and I understand many people are considering resigning and or leaving SitePoint, or at the very least visiting my site here more often. What can I say? I’d like to heartily encourage that behavior. This site isn’t even comparable to SitePoint in terms of popularity, but I’ve always considered it to be high quality, and I think you’ll in general find the community to be a little more mature, and also a little different demographic. By and large the people here are website or business owners, entrepreneurs.

Obviously, if you were a reader of my SitePoint blog , I would hope you transition to reading this blog.

As for the Kit SitePoint had been planning. They more or less wanted something like my guide on this site, only more in depth and up to date. So rather than work on my own book or something, I think I shall simply go through and update/expand this guide.

The first article I’ve updated is my Search Engine Friendly URLs article. This was actually pretty much the first article I ever wrote, and so it was high time for an update.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 22 Comments »

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