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.

No related posts.

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

6 Responses to “Common Mistakes – Chapter 1”

  1. paul  Says:
    March 6th, 2006 at 5:52 pm

    I remind myself the best money making system for the site may not have been invented yet. Things change all the time. If you have traffic, even if it doesn’t earn much, you are positioned to take advantage of any good program that comes along.

  2. Brad  Says:
    March 7th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    I think you’re spot on, Mook! I’d even go further: if you’re dependent, or semi-dependent, on SEO for traffic I’d place NO ADVERTISEMENTS on a new site until a specific number of inbound links have been acquired! Webmasters are much more likely to link to ad-free sites than sites swamped with contextual and affiliate ads! I use this strategy day-in, day-out and it works well! Consider a brand new forum I’ve just created:

    http://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/

    No ads – either contextual or affiliate – will be placed on this site for at least 6 – 8 weeks. Hopefully, during that period I will attract dozens of inbound links, which is absolutely essential to successful SEO, and built-up a significant number of dedicated visitors.

  3. Bleys  Says:
    March 7th, 2006 at 6:46 pm

    As a consumer I pretty ignore sites with excessive advertisements (and especially those with popups) no matter how good the content. There are a couple of exceptions–but not many.

    That said, I think it depends on the site. On my GFXContests.com site we didn’t have any ads for the first month. Then someone offered to pay for a spot on the top of the site. It’s very unobtrusive, and the ad is related to the content of the forum. So I think it’s fine. But no way we’ll put adsense or intellitxt or anything like that on there until we grow a good bit more.

    Then again, on http://www.prserps.com, I put an Adsense block on the main page (but none of the results pages) from launch. It is tastefully places, not deceptive, and certainly doesn’t detract from the user experience (in my opinion), so again I see no problem with it.

    I generally agree with you, Jon, but I think it does depend on the site and how you place the ads. A single adsense block on launch isn’t going to make or break a site. ;)

  4. Michael Gersitz  Says:
    March 9th, 2006 at 11:15 am

    I generally have enough of my own sites already to generate enough inbound links and I can generally get 60k page views (which is Chris’s Rule I think) so I just build ads into the site and play with them later.

  5. Ken Barbalace  Says:
    March 22nd, 2006 at 8:19 am

    Great blog entry Mook. Even as an old hand at this stuff I found it informative. It is hard to not search for the gold immediatly upon starting a mine, and it is helpful to be reminded that we need to dig the mine shaft before we can start digging for the gold.

  6. inflatable  Says:
    May 2nd, 2012 at 2:25 am

    Advertising is not advertising or to determine the core values ​​of …inflatable

Leave a Response








(Email field must be filled in)

Top of page...