Tag Archives: Earnings

Make Money by Giving Your Stuff Away for Free

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Those of you that follow this blog know that in the past, premium membership sales were a huge earner for us.  Between 2007 and 2008 premium membership sales alone amounted to over $90,000.  Several months alone premium membership sales generated upwards of $10k.

But in order to successfully generate long-term (lasting) income with premium content sales you must have content that a customer/member is willing to pay for.  Generally this means content that cannot be found anywhere else and is of real value.  If you can’t provide that high-quality content, you’re basically ripping people off, and/or reduced to tricking them into purchasing your ‘premium’ content which is not good for business and opens a whole other can-of-worms to deal with (refunds, complaints, etc).  For a long time GrownUpGeek.com had that certain type of content that could not be found anywhere else, namely tweaks and loopholes that allowed Myspace users to view the content of other Myspace member’s pages that were marked as ‘private’ or un-readable.  But as far back as 2007 I began to realize that because one day Myspace would no-doubt make this no longer possible, I would need to come up with a better long-term earnings strategy.  I could not continue taking people’s money in good-faith knowing that I did not (or soon would not) have anything of value to give in return.  Also, seeing the amount of ‘copy cat’ sites popping up faster than SwineFlu cases as well as the amount of “stolen” information copied and pasted from our site to other sites made it even more clear that this just was not going to work in the long-term.

At the end of 2008 after seeing premium content sales steadily drop, after constant problems with PayPal and GoogleCheckout, after growing tired of customers that were unable to read the agreement they were agreeing-to when purchasing a premium membership or just outright lying for refunds, after getting sick of other websites copying & pasting our premium content, or worse making sad (and sometimes humorously lame) attempts at copying/ripping-off the entire site (if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then we must be doing good!), and seeing the amount of new good, premium content steadily drop, I came to the conclusion that for long-term success we had to focus on FREE advertiser supported content.  After realizing these truths, we stopped accepting premium memberships, stopped focusing on our ‘premium’ forum content and started focusing on building content in our free/open forum areas.  Sadly, shorty after all these ‘executive decisions’ of mine the economy tanked, along with advertiser ePC/eCPM (and overall earnings), but traffic has continued in an upward trend and finally in the last few months eCPM (earnings) are creeping back up to pre-economy-bust levels.

IMHO, free, advertiser supported content is where the future is.  Actually, it’s where the past is.  Most websites (the vast, vast majority) generate income from advertisers, some generate income by selling products or services, and only a tiny fraction of websites actually generate income by ‘selling’ content.   Television learned this decades ago – you CAN make money by giving away your content if it’s tastefully sprinkled with advertising.  Sure, there will always be HBO and Showtime, but unless you can sustain a high volume of high-quality content like HBO and Showtime, ‘free’ is the way to go.   So for the last year we have gotten back to our roots and generate income the old-fashioned way:  placing a limited amount of advertising on pages viewed by anonymous visitors (once someone becomes a free member, virtually no ads are displayed).

Concentrating on building good content or providing a good, free service (aka Facebook, Twitter, etc), not going overboard with the popups or ads (you’ll just piss-off people), giving visitors a reason to come back, and building traffic will generate steady income. Taking money from someone without giving true value in return cannot result in long-term success.

How To Make Money Without Even Trying

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I got a surprise in the mail today. Lumped in with the bills and other junkmail there was an envelope from Chitika.com. Since I’ve only really used Chitika for testing/comparing in-text ads against Kontera, and not for over a year, I assumed it was just some sort of promotional materials.  Boy was I wrong. Upon opening the mystery envelope I was greeted with a check for several hundred dollars. Good thing I didn’t just toss it!

I quickly logged-in to my Chitika account and ran an earnings report, and it turns out all this effort-free cash was generated from referral links on old posts here in the blog. Those posts took probably 30 minutes of my time and effort at most to write, and now they are generating $3 – $5 PER DAY.  It seems it took a while for the publishers that signed up via my referral links to start generating income, but now that they are, it’s paying off for ME.. They make money, I make money – it’s a win-win.

This is a great reminder that that you don’t actually need to use a particular ad-network for it to generate an income for you. If the product is good (many publishers prefer Chitika over Kontera or use their standard ads), post some referral links, and earn money without even trying.

DISCLAIMER: This post contains referral links.. Duh!

Using Six Sigma & Statistics To Increase Adsense Revenue

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Actually since most publishers, myself included, use more than just Adsense, a better title for this post would probably be “Using Six Sigma & Statistics To Increase PPC Revenue” – but putting Adsense in the title is more catchy’er so I’m going with it.

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to be doing more analysis and testing of my different PPC networks to try and find ways to optimize earnings. The method(s) I’m using to look at my data are DMAIC and Six Sigma strategies. These processes are new to me and I’m hardly even a green-belt myself – but I have a “Black Belt” mentoring me as I go through this process to guide me (and basically tell me what to do). The simple version of all these processes basically boil down to really looking at everything (stats) that impacts your desired result (earnings), then analyzing the data, making changes/experimenting, looking at the data again to validate your changes worked (or didnt), and applying the changes.

The first thing we had to “Define” was my “Big-Y” – this is the variable that I want to improve. In my case the “Y” is earnings. We drilled down through our “X‘s”, the variables that affect my Y, and we focused on PPC, and ultimately Clicks/CTR. There is an entire process involved in drilling-down through the X values to determine what to focus on – but even though I already knew that CTR would be my critical-X, my Black-Belt mentor made me jump through the hoops anyway – this kind discomfort is apparently one of the keys to Six Sigma.

I won’t go much more into the DMAIC and Six Sigma processes (they are incredibly complicated and boring) but I do want to share a few things that we discovered while beginning to do some statistical analysis.
The first thing we discovered is that with Adsense, more clicks = more money. This is something that we think we all know, but we proved this “statistically” and have demonstrated it with the following graph (note that actual values are not displayed to remain TOS compliant):

The next thing we discovered is that with Kontera, more clicks does NOT = more money! This was quite a surprise, and seems a bit ass-backwards, but the numbers prove it:

Obviously this does not mean that I should stop using Kontera – heck, Kontera earns more than Adsense on many days. But what it does tell me is that if I want to focus and spend time and energy on experimenting/improving CTR, that time would be better spent on improving Adsense CTR, because based on the data (see the Adsense chart), more clicks virtually always means higher earnings with Adsense. But, with Kontera, more clicks does not guarantee more earnings. So this reinforces that I should be focusing on how I can improve Adsense CTR to achieve maximum earnings.

We also partially busted the myth that Kontera clicks will reduce your Adsense CTR. As you can see in the chart below (actual values omitted to remain TOS compliant) there is NO correlation between Kontera clicks and Adsense clicks:

One of the tests that we will be doing over the next few months will be to compare CTR of Adsense & Kontera individually to either prove or bust the “Kontera reduces Adsense CTR” myth.

I will be continuing this process of collecting data, crunching numbers, making stupid graphs and figuring out what it all means over the next few months. As usual, as I learn or make interesting discoveries I will share them here.

Kontera Holds It’s Own Against The Big-3

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Most publishers, myself included have been feeling the impact of the economy on their earnings recently. Based on what I’ve been reading in the webmaster forums and my own experience PPC earnings are generally down all over with no immediate sign of a rebound – a rebound will happen, but in the meantime it can be painful – especially if you have large server/bandwidth bills that need to be paid each month.

To try and improve or optimize earnings I’ve started to take a close look at my stats to see if I can find ways to maximize and squeeze out as much as possible. I’ll be making more posts about that in the next few weeks but I wanted to quickly share something that jumped-out at me and actually surprised me a bit.

For the last 90 days or so I’ve been doing some testing to gauge the performance of Adsense, Microsoft pubCenter and Yahoo Publisher network to see how they compare to each-another.  During all of these tests, I’ve always left good old Kontera running – Since I’ve really been focusing on how the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) compare against each other, I never really took a close look at comparing Kontera to them – I guess I’ve always taken Kontera for granted as just “a good supplemental” income source.

Since I’ve been gathering data for more in-depth analysis later, I threw together a quick graph of how Kontera has been doing against the big-3 PPC networks so I could visually gauge it’s performance (below). The blue line is EITHER Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network or Microsoft’s pubCenter (they were rotated randomly day-by-day) and the red line is Kontera. I have intentionally omitted the dates, which advertiser was used on any given day, and the scale (amount) of earnings so as not to violate any NDA’s or TOS’s

Kontera vs Other PPC Networks

Kontera vs Other PPC Networks

When I looked at the numbers this way (visually), a couple of patterns surprised me a bit.  One, Kontera actually performs very well on ‘bad’ days, and two, on many days that text PPC earnings are down, Kontera earnings are often higher – and basically, Kontera is performing pretty darn good lately!

Like I stated above, I will be doing a lot more analysis over the next few weeks and I’ll be posting most of my findings to pass-along anything I learn.

My Advertising Network Roundup

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About two or three times per year I rotate through all of my advertising networks to see how they are performing.  I think it’s a good idea to test all your ad-networks every once in a while to make sure you aren’t missing out on any potential earnings – a network that performed poorly six-months ago might do much better today (not usually, but you never know).

These are my results, listed worst to best, for the year – with the last test finishing up just a day or so ago.  Note that due to the various TOS’s, I do not include any actual CTR, ePC, eCPM or earnings data:

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BidVertiser: very low CTR and even lower earnings.  A waste of my valuable page real-estate.

Adbrite: I put the most time and effort into testing Adbrite because I have read of many other publishers that were getting good results.  But for me, it just did not work out.  I tested both text-only and banner units and after ~100,000 impressions, earned only a few dollars.  It seems that most publishers generating good earnings with Adbrite are using their “full page” ads which to me seem to be the #1 way to piss-off/drive away potential visitors.  Adbrite also has “in text” ad-units, but I did not test them.

Chitika: Chitika’s new “Premium Units” performed fairly well.  These ad-units only display to search-engine traffic and target ads based on the keywords used when searching.  This type of keyword targeting results in very relevant ad-units and very good CTR.   You can configure the Chitika Premium Units to display another ad-network such as Adsense or YPn for display to non-search engine traffic – otherwise direct/non SE traffic will not be shown any ad-units.  Chitika also has an “in text” unit which when tested earlier this year performed well.  Some publishers do not like the “in text” type ads, but I don’t have an issue with them – although I only display them to anonymous vistors, not registered members.  With Chitika you also get a dedicated account manager for support which is a big plus.

Yahoo Publisher Network: YPn was a real surprise this time around (this is why I test a few times a year!).  I have done nothing but badmouth YPn over the last several months, but now I’ll eat my words and take it all back.  This time YPn gave well-targeted ads, fair CTR, and decent ePC.   YPn also has support!  When I had a question regarding the Yahoo Publisher Network TOS, my email was replied-to in less than 24 hours, and when I had a follow-up question a YPN representative called me by telephone to avoid more email confusion.  YPn also has a toll-free phone number for questions/support..  Yahoo Publisher Network gets my “comeback of the year” award!

Kontera: If I was comparing only the last 2-months of the year, Kontera would be the clear winner.  But since i’m comparing the overall performance of the entire year, Kontera comes up a strong #2.  Kontera’s in-text ad-unit performance started out slow this year generating about 50% of what Adsense generated on a daily basis.  But beginning around September/October Kontera was earning 80%-90% of what Adsense was doing, and by December, Kontera was generating approximately 200% of what Adsense was (that is more than double Adsense on most days!).  Kontera’s other strong-point is support.  With a dedicated account manager that you can contact any time by phone or email (and actually get a response) this puts them far ahead most of the other ad-networks.  Some publishers do not like the “in text” type ads, but I don’t have an issue with them – although I only display them to anonymous visitors, not registered members.  Many publishers have also complained that Kontera slows-down their page load times.  If you experience this, be sure that you have your code loading at the very bottom/last of your page right before the /BODY tag.  I have never experienced this issue, and I check/test almost daily.

Adsense:  Still king over the entire year, but if I was comparing only the last few months, it would fall to Kontera as #2.  Excellent ad-inventory and near-perfect targeting no matter what your niche/content makes Adsense hard to beat.  Combine that with (usually) good/high ePC and Adense is still #1.  The Adsense support team does well in answering support-requests (usually in 48 hours or less), but you don’t get a dedicated account manager unless you are in the “UPS club” (a really, really big, Premium publisher).

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Remember: Just because an advertising network performed good/bad for me does not mean you will get the same results.  Whenever anyone asks me, I recommend trying everything and sticking with what works (seems almost obvious, eh?)..  I also recommend trying different networks every several months as I do to make sure that you are using the best-performing network – you never know when you might be pleasantly surprised.

Affiliate Links: This post contains affiliate/referral links.

How I Made $21 For Three Minutes Of Work

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$21 is not a lot of money, but I know that it’s more than many webmasters earn in a week – and since this method made me $21 EXTRA and it is so simple I thought I would share.  If someone had the time to do this all day (krap, i wish I had time to do it all day!) it could quickly add-up.

So I’m working yesterday and listening to the radio/CNN/Fox News (flipping around for background noise) and I keep hearing about “the virus that attacked the Pentagon computers” – They talked about it all day – every 15 to 30 minutes.  So remembering an idea from Garry Conn that I had experimented with a few times already, I decided to give it another go.

I did a few Google searches on the virus that had gotten into the Pentagon computers and quickly saw that there was only about 10,000 – 20,000 results – and knowing that our site already has a lot of virus-related content I was confident that I could rank very well for some of those searches if I put my mind to it.

I quickly made a simple post about the virus, gave it a URL and Title Tag with the keywords I was targeting, made it a bit keyword heavy (but didn’t go overboard), and ‘bolded’ the keywords a few times.  After I created the page/post it quickly received a few comments posted by members (mostly off topic which i have since deleted) but because I’m displaying the Drupal “recent comments” and “New Forum Topics”  blocks on virtually every page, I immediately had site-wide links across thousands of pages pointing to the new post.  I also added in an extra Adsense block (& custom channel) on the page, and I created a URL channel so I could track earnings on this new page from my site-wide Adsense block that is displayed at the top of every page.

Within less than an hour traffic started to pour in.  I did a quick check and I was delighted to see that the page ranked #1 for “Agent.btz pentagon” and ranked #3 for just the name of the virus, “agent.btz” – but mine was the only result that displayed anything about the Pentagon.

All evening I sat glued to my stats and I could see every time one of the news channels mentioned the story because a new wave of traffic came in.  This morning the Adsense channels added up to just under $21.  My Kontera stats haven’t come in yet, but I’m sure there will also be an extra few $ there also.

If you already have an established site, and do some basic on-page SEO, this kind of popular content building should be pretty easy to accomplish – every day there are dozens of “big stories”.   The difficult part is finding the day’s “big” story and keeping your pages/content on-topic with the rest of your site – and not be spammy about the whole thing.

$21 a few times per day or per week, or even $10 several times a day/week can add-up pretty quickly..  Certainly worth a few minutes a day.