A Million In One Year

Ah yes, the glorious M-word… 

Well, speaking of M-words, I’m back from the Mojave Desert where I was doing sound for the fantastic Joshua Tree Music Festival.  What a wild, magical adventure that was.   A strange, fabulous, romantic tale almost impossible to tell.   Oh, and it was 114 in the shade on Sunday - a May record for JT.

I’ve created a fair amount of content for my sites - and even though there is still much work to do, I feel it’s time to get started deploying various systems of monetization.   I can’t wait!

There are some advertising systems which will not accept sites until they have steady traffic (such as tribalfusion.com - for whom you must have over 2,000 uniques per day) - however until my traffic reaches those numbers there are still many other options available.

Once these monetization systems are set up and in place, the third stage will be to start driving traffic to the sites.   I’ll do this through various methods such as link-building, viral video and PDF, and all sorts of other techniques - and I’ll post full details on this when it’s time.

After that, it’s all a matter of testing and improving: Adding fresh content, continuing to ramp up the traffic, and then testing and comparing the performance of innumerable aspects of a site in order to optimize to the highest degree possible.   I anticipate that this work will end up being the most time-consuming of all, and will expand to fill the time available.   It’s really going to be an “inner battle” to stick to my focus and make sure I keep going through the tedium of endless link-building and site optimization: But it is here, I believe, that the battle will be won or lost.   If I am going to win my bet, make no mistake, this is going to be a Mission and a Half.

Of course in my case, having created several web sites, part of my testing process will be to see which sites perform best and put the most energy into those.

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In general, when working on a web site, I divide my efforts into three areas. (My actual complete system is a little more complex and I’m saving that for my forthcoming e-book - but the three-point system is a good summary for now) : - 

CONTENT > MONETIZATION > TRAFFIC

The content aspect obviously includes the theme, all the on-site information, and all the “free stuff” that attracts people to the site and gets them to stick around.

Traffic includes a whole host of techniques I will be using to get visitors.

As for monetization - those of you who have read the introductory post will know that I was already banned (mysteriously) from Google Adsense. However, the good news is that there are an enormous host of alternate possibilities for ad networks and other methods of making money that are alternatives to Adsense.      After much preliminary investigation I have drawn up a short list; and from these I will select the monetization methods I will be exploring:

1) AzoogleAds - I read that someone is using this to make $1000 per day from a ringtone site - so I’ll be using this on www.outerspaceringtones.com for sure.

2) Kontera - Jim Karter is making over $9000 per month from Kontera on a network of over 200 sites.  Kontera uses a system of adding special “double-underline” links to your text content which generate pop-up ads.

3) Bidvertiser - this is an alternative to Adsense and works in a very similar way.  I’ve already signed up.  Some Bidvertiser clicks pay really well (sometimes higher than Adsense) but their content matching appears to be nowhere near as accurate in targeting as that of Adsense - so the clickthrough rate is a lot lower. This may be partly due to not having as many advertisers as Adsense, or maybe due to lack of accuracy in content matching algorithms; I rather think it is the former.

4) Clickbank - both for selling my own eBook when it is finished, and for hosting affiliate links to other digitally downloadable products.

5) Hostgator Affiliate Scheme (Note - this is my affiliate link; if you sign up for Hostgator web hosting through this link, I get a commission. Hostgator are great and I use them for all my web sites; never had a problem - finally a good one after serious nightmares in the past with other hosts!).
Hostgator pays $50 per person who signs up for hosting through your affiliate link and remains a customer (I think they must remain a customer for longer than 30 days but I am not sure of this figure).   There are also bonuses if you get a high number of signups.   I’ve already signed up and am driving traffic from www.PXR8.com but haven’t seen any conversions yet…

6) NeverBlue Ads - I don’t know much about this yet but Jim Karter recommends it and if it’s good enough for him it’s good enough for me…

7) Widgetbucks  - another Adsense alternative, this one seems to have been the subject of a little controversy.   They apparently featured an “Anti-Adsense” advertising campaign; which I never saw - but one thing that’s certain is that their own site does not appear in the top 10 on Google for the term widgetbucks.   (I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions!!)   Anyway, reviews state that widgetbucks is simple to set up and use - why not give it a whirl?

My own mp3s - I am either going to get these distributed online through CDBaby, Tunecore, or System Recordings.   System is a prestigious New York based electronic dance music record label I have worked with before - they are very cool and really great to do business with, and I just received an email from the a couple of days ago saying that they were interested in digital distribution of my catalogue.  This essentially means they would handle getting my music up on the download sites such as iTunes and many others, and manage the process in return for a percentage.   There may well be additional licensing opportunities too. Other services such as CDBaby offer very good percentages, but it’s unlikely that they will do much in the way of promotion.   I haven’t had a chance to chat with System yet but I will be doing this very soon.

9) CPA Empire -  said to be one of the best CPA (cost-per-action) networks

10) Chitika   I am reading good things about this ad network.    Someone said Chitika apparently pays 5x better than Kontera.  Others have said that their service has greatly improved recently.    I know nothing about what it was like before - however the vibe seems positive - I am going to give it a whirl.

Others to investigate:

Incentaclick another CPA network - currently has an Alexa rank of 1665 and climbing

Hydra Network

Casalemedia

Burstmedia

Text Link Ads It’s interesting to note - Jim Karter states that this network is making him less money all the time. The alexa ranking bears this out; it’s falling steadily.

 Adbrite - apparently works well on high traffic sites so maybe best to wait a while on this one.

Pepperjam

Copeac - another affiliate network; seems to be highly regarded.

Amazon affiliate scheme - I am going to investigate this.  If there’s a way to include links to relevant books from my pages, it might be a good way to go.

Linkshare - one of the bigger ad networks, this one currently has an Alexa rank of 837.

TNX a new site recommended by Jim Karter

AdToll

I may also investigate specific affiliate campaigns for products which correlate directly to individual web sites.

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You think there’s enough here to keep me busy? It’s going to be a fair bit of work to set up all the accounts and to keep track of all this information.   I’ll need to set up an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the relevant info.   Additionally, there will be a fair amount of study involved in getting the best from these systems.   I may not end up deploying them all - it’s rather a lot.

Also, it’s to be expected that some monetization methods will work better on some sites than on others.   The only real way to be sure is to test - and this means running one system for a few weeks, then running another and picking the winner.  Although this work is critical I don’t want to get too bogged down in it.   One thing about this internet marketing business that I have learned, is that there is an infinite amount you could possibly be doing at any given time: you need to choose carefully what to focus on and make sure that you are spending your time in the most constructive way possible!   So I will do a certain amount of testing and tweaking of ad systems in order to pick the winners; but I would rather be spending my time when possible on developing content and driving traffic.   It’s all important, and it all helps.

The good thing about this work is that once a site is performing, you can move on to another site for a while and continue to benefit from the work you did on the first site.    The most critical work is to get the sites up, the content and the monetization in place.  Then the fun can begin…

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