MailBag: What about MY success ?

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Rand Wilson

Technically 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)..

Earn Money The Easy Way!

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Rand Wilson

Our newest Advertising Network, IDG Tech has three easy ways to generate income:

CPM Ads: As I posted a few weeks ago, IDG Tech’s CPM ads have been doing fantastic, and still are – my two test units are still earning over 10x better than Adsense units ever earned in the same locations. I again recommend at least trying the IDG Tech CPM units if your website qualifies.
If you are part of IDG Tech Network, they also offer referral payments for sign-ups to their IDG Tech Panel which pays members to take surveys related to the IDG Tech Advertisers. If you are already an IDG Tech Network member (publisher), ask your account manager about how you can sign up or contact me and I will forward the name and email address of the program manager.
As part of #2, anyone can generate money and/or rewards by completing the IDG Tech Panel surveys. Normally I would not recommend online-surveys to make money, but knowing that many of my readers are looking for any way to generate a few dollars – and after signing-up myself, doing a few surveys, making a few dollars, and seeing how easy it is, I’ve realized that someone with a few minutes on their hands every day could actually make more than just gas or beer-money each week. If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for your (free) account and start making some extra cash: Click Here To Join IDGTech Panel

Measuring The Success Of Your Community or Website

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Rand Wilson

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?

More Traffic Does Not Always = More Earnings

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Rand Wilson

From almost day-1 of my webmastering career I have been lead to believe that more traffic = more earnings. It was beaten into my head over and over in every eBook I read, every forum I browsed through, every “expert” blog I read, and by every other webmaster I’ve ever spoke with. For the most part of the last 5 or so years this has been true and I never questioned this law of nature – all was right with the world.

But recently I started to notice a slide in daily traffic. I was getting a bit panicky and waiting for the corresponding drop in earnings – but, it never happened. Traffic was falling, earnings were steady or even increasing. Have the experts been wrong all this time? Is it the beginning of the end of days? Could this be due to global-warming? Is this another sign that Dec 21, 2012 is not really just bullshit!?
I put my Mythbusters hat on, and decided to examine my earnings history with regards to traffic for the last few years and see if I could bust this myth. I also put on my six-sigma shoes (which are really, really old and dusty and hardly even fit now) and invested a good 5 or 6 minutes hastily throwing together a graph of my traffic overlayed on my earnings.

(click the graph to view full size)

The graph shows traffic, in blue and earnings in green – from February 1, 2009 through September 10, 2010. Earnings are a combination of one PPC network (Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network (may it rest in peace), or Microsoft Pubcenter) and one inline-text provider, either Kontera, InfoLinks or Chitika.

As you can see on the left side of the graph through most of 2009, the old saying was true: More traffic equals more money – although the earnings were low, the spikes and valleys match up for both earnings and traffic.

But, beginning around the end of 2009 things started to change. Traffic increased a bit, but earnings increased more – I attribute this to the recession turning around. But a few months after that it got even stranger, with several totally unexplainable spikes in earnings with little or no corresponding increases in traffic and even some spikes in traffic with only slight increases in earnings.

On the far-right of the graph, in the last few months, you can see a steady downward decrease in traffic, and yet consistently high earnings, and even a few moderately high earning peaks – ALL WITH LESS TRAFFIC.. Has the PPC world gone mad!?

After a little more research I figured out the cause for what seems like a total breakdown of the elementary laws of making money online, and the explanation is actually pretty simple. For quite some time, the website has been receiving high amounts of traffic on a few pages/subjects that just do not earn well – actually, they earn every little now days. Most of these are around the subject of Myspace (does anyone really use Myspace or generate any earnings from it anymore? Myspace is SOO 2006!) So when traffic to these pages began to drop, either due to loss of my Google rankings on the subject, or more likely, the fact that nobody really uses Myspace anymore, it didnt affect earnings at all – and earnings from the rest of the site in fact continue to rise. The same thing in reverse happens when we get a sudden surge in traffic on a subject/pages that advertisers just don’t care about. This explains that large blue traffic peak near the middle of the graph. For several days GrownUpGeek.com was ranking #1 for several searches regarding the wildly popular (flash in the pan) game “MyBrute”. It brought in butt-loads of traffic (and, I choose that word “butt load” appropriately based on the traffic), but the earnings weren’t there due to either mistargeted ads or very low paying targeted ads.

So boys and girls, the old myth “More traffic always equals more earnings” is BUSTED!

Do not try this at home – I am a professional

Holiday Advertiser Gifts

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Rand Wilson

Ahh the holidays..

Yesterday the FedEx man threw a box at the door and to my delight it was the annual holiday gift from Kontera.

Just like every year I eagerly shredded the box and was greeted this time with a nice, porcelain coco-mug, complete with a package of Dutch Hot Cocoa.

But skrew that! This year, the best gift from Kontera is how it’s been earning.

Kontera is still performing better in the last month or so that it has all year, and still out-earning Adsense on most days – heck, it’s just like the good-old days before the recession. That peak on December 11 on the graph below was the highest earning day in nearly two years!

If you aren’t using Kontera then it sucks for you because you’re already missing out. But it’s not too late to get started. Go over to Kontera.com and open up and account and give it a try. If you’ve used Kontera in the past and weren’t happy with the performance, NOW is the time to test it on your site again. If you already use Adsense on your site to generate income, Kontera is a great way to add more revenue without using any of the valuable space on your pages.

This post contains affiliate links. If you hate affiliate links you can go directly to www.kontera.com

Learn Success The Easy Way

Do it right the first time, stoopit!

Tag Archives: Earnings

Earn Money The Easy Way!

Measuring The Success Of Your Community or Website

More Traffic Does Not Always = More Earnings

Holiday Advertiser Gifts