Category Archives: The Site

MailBag: What about MY success ?

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MailTechnically this isn’t a “Mailbag” question because the question was posted in a comment and not sent to me via email or my Contact Page, but it brings up a good point so I thought I would share the question and answer here for everyone to read. After-all, I can’t really go around preaching about how to be successful without mentioning my own success at least once in a while, right?

Longtime readers of my blog may remember that in the past I would post quarterly or yearly updates on earnings and traffic, but for various reasons I have done that less and less. Fortunately none of those reasons were because I (or my websites) were no longer successful – am I still proof that a little-guy that does not know much about building websites, SEO, or marketing CAN BE SUCCESSFUL ON THE INTERNET!

Anyway – here is the post/question by CPVR from VirtualPetList.Com:

… Are you going to do more things to your blog this year? It would be nice to hear about your earnings from last year to this year – and how well you’re doing with Adsense and kontera.
I used to remember checking out your blog and finding it motivating to see more success.
Or, also, have you thought about talking about Grownupgeek’s latest success? Like, how is it doing traffic wise?

Am I going to do more things to my blog this year? Probably not. The new (current) look should last me for another year or two before I get bored with it, and still no plans to add any advertising to the blog. That should make my blog one of the very few “make money on the internet” type blogs that does not have any advertising on it. (I hope you guys appreciate that – tell a friend!)

Over at my main website, GrownUpGeek.Com, Adsense, Kontera, and now IDG TechNetwork all did very well in 2010. Kontera had some ups & downs (aka, very bad months), and Adsense had some record-high months. I started using IDG TechNetwork in mid 2010 and it turned out to be the real surprise of the year. Although IDG TechNetwork earnings were slightly lower than Kontera earnings each month in 2010, beginning in 2011, IDG Tech has overtaken Kontera, and is now earning more than double what Kontera earns each month. Overall earnings for 2010 were right at $60k – that is more than double 2009 which was a record bad year for earnings..

Adsense was the highest earner in 2010 with approx 70% of all earnings. Kontera brought in approx. 15%, and IDG Technetwork brought in about 5%. Various affiliate sales (Comission Junction, Plimus, Chitika referrals, direct ad sales, ect) rounded out the balance with an approximate combined 10% of earnings.

Traffic in 2010 was slightly lower than 2009 – but just barely. 2010 brought GrownUpGeek.Com just under 5.5Million page views, while 2009 had a whopping 6Million page views. So far in 2011 traffic is 10% higher than at this point in 2009, so it looks like 2011 could be another record year.

Here is to a successful 2011 for all of us! (even if it is a bit late)..

Our Human Billboard Gets More Press

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You may remember a while back we had our second human-billboard tattoo for GrownUpGeek.com created on the back of our good friend Billy Gibby.  Not long after that AOLNews posted a story about our Tattoo advertisement which brought in a short-lived gush of traffic which was fun and all, but today minyanville.com has made a post which explains that not only is our friend once named Billy Gibby still looking for corporate sponsored tattoos, he has also changed his name to Hostgator Dotcom!

From minyanville.com:

For a nominal fee, he [Billy Gibby] will permanently plaster a company’s logo on his skin. Gibby’s website featured the going rates for tattoo placement. (A six-inch by one-inch forehead logo goes for a mere $20,000.) Among the companies he currently advertises: Golden Palace, Liberty Tax Service, and Grown Up Geek.
Though the sponsorship seems extremely crass, he uses the money to fund his boxing career and the rather noble effort of promoting organ donation.
But tattoos apparently weren’t paying the bills — or enough of them, at least — because Gibby is no longer Gibby anymore. His new name is Hostgator Dotcom.

..Traffic is already picking up.  Thanks Billy.. i mean, Hostgator Dotcom!

Measuring The Success Of Your Community or Website

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The other day I had a discussion with one of my webmaster friends about how “successful” his, mine and other websites or communities are.  This led into another argument discussion about how “successful” or “popular” is, or should be defined.  It was funny how strongly we disagreed on what should be one of the most fundamental and common ideas amongst all webmasters.

His argument is that you measure a community’s success by:

  • total number of members
  • total earnings

My argument is that one should measure the success of a community (or, website) by:

  • daily posts/member involvement
  • daily traffic
  • total earnings

We both agree that earnings is an important metric, but in my opinion, total number of members is meaningless – and of course, then I had to draw a picture as to why the member count is totally irrelevant and usually meaningless… Which I will now share with you.

If you run a Drupal community (probably the same with other systems, but i dunno), and you look at your membership data very closely, you will no doubt realize that a very, VERY high percentage of your so-called members are nothing more than spam-bots.  They may not actually leave any spam, but they are nothing more than a waste of your bits.   Don’t believe me?  Use the TROLL module and check the IP’s that they use – are they all from India, Korea, or Linux servers?   If you don’t require email validation, do they even have valid email addresses?  If you do use email validation, how many of them have actually validated their account?  How many of these accounts have ever made a post, or even been back to the site?

Since the beginning, I have always taken a hard-stance against these useless/fake accounts.  Of course we block many servers and proxies and use other tools like Bad Behavior and TROLL to block many of these bots.  We also use the Inactive User module to send warnings to inactive users which will hopefully bring them back to the site, but then deletes the accounts if they ignore the pleas to return to the site.  Another trick we use is to add an additional required-field to the basic Drupal user-profile – this will stop many bots cold for months.  After a while (6-12 months) the bots will figure out what to type in to that field, so I just change the field-name every few months and the bots get all confused again.  You can also use a CAPTCHA in the membership signup page but I have found that most bots laugh at captchas and dont even slow down.

So if the total number of members is meaningless on it’s own, what is important to determine how “popular” or successful your website or community is?  The answer to that depends on what is most important to you:

To many webmasters/community owners (myself included) the most critical metric is how active the community is: How many posts/comments are made per day.  For a website like GrownUpGeek.com, this is difficult because it attracts people that are new to computers and to the internet, and they often are not comfortable making posts.  It is important how active the community is not only because it clearly demonstrates that the community is alive and thriving, but also because it is that activity that is generating content which will in turn (hopefully) generate traffic and/or earnings – other important metrics.

Other webmasters or community owners may use traffic (unique visitors or page views) as ‘the’ measure of success or popularity.   This is a good measure, but (to me) should not be the most important metric.  Although more traffic usually translates into more members (which we now know does not matter), more earnings (yet, not always), and hopefully more activity, traffic alone should not be considered the most important metric.

Of course, if your website generates income, then total earnings may be what is most important to you regardless of how much traffic, members, or activity you have.  This is fine, except without activity or traffic, over time your earnings will surely suffer – meaning that even if earnings are a high priority to you, activity and traffic should be more important to ensure your earnings over the long-run.

In the end, I won the argument.  Either because I’m right, or louder.

What is your most important metric for determining the success of your website or when comparing to other sites?

Kontera bug; Fix is in the works

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For about the last ten days or so there has been a bug in the Kontera ad-code causing attempts to access pages that do not exist when a visitor ‘mouses over’ a Kontera ad-unit. This bug manifests itself as a ’404 Page Not Found’ error at the website hosting the Kontera ads. Sites with heavy traffic may see hundreds or thousands of these errors per hour.

Most errors are from trying to access the following page names:
/YahooAlgo
/FreeDictionary
/Info.com
/NewYahoo
(perhaps others, depending on your niche/content/ads targeted to your site)

My sources tell me that Kontera is aware of the problem and is working on a fix which should be pushed out in the next few days.

How Much Would You Sell Your Website For?

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I’ve recently been in talks with a media company that has expressed interest in purchasing GrownUpGeek.com.  I made it clear to them up front that I was not really interested in selling, but I would listen to what they had to offer.

What is the real value of a website? The standard way to valuate a website is to take it’s average yearly earnings and multiply that by 1 year, or 3 years, or even 5 years.  This would put the estimated sale value of Grownupgeek.com somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000.  Of course, if the buyer is more interested in just the domain name because it matched a new product or service, the value to the buyer could be much more, but sadly I have no such luck.

Going into the talks I knew/assumed that the company would already have an idea of the “standard” value of GrownUpGeek.com ($200,000 – $300,000) and I was already prepared to turn down an offer of that amount.  WHY?  Because the website will generate that much money in 4 to 5 years.  If I sell the website today for say, $300,000 then subtract taxes, escrow fees, attorney’s fees, and whatever other fee’s that come up, I would actually be losing money as opposed to holding on to the site for 3-5 years.  This does not even take into account the emotional attachments to “my baby” – I have spent the majority of the last 5 years of my life tending to, feeding, & caring for the website.  It’s my hobby, it’s my LIFE!  What the heck would I do without it?  Sure, I would have a couple of hundred thousand dollars in my pocket – but I will have that anyway over the course of the next few years.

So when asked by the big media company “what kind of number did you have in mind Mr. Brown?“  I responded with something closer to 2.5 times higher than “standard” value.   (I could hear the gasp in the room)..  Some kind of bargaining technique?  NO – It’s just worth more to me than a few hundred thousand dollars that I will most likely see anyway in the next few years.  Unfortunately the media company does not assign the same emotional value to a website that I do, and as expected, they thanked me for my time.

How much is your website worth to you?  Do you assign any sentimental or emotional value to it?  Even if it’s “just a business” to you, could you walk away from it for only 3-5 years worth of your current earnings?  Am I just a sentimental fool?