Written on April 11th, 2005 at 11:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Cats, Dogs and Adsense
Ted Rheingold has a good summary of the recent Adsense Publisher’s Forum (I’m still waiting for my invitation - with airline tickets - to the next one). Ted has a couple of sites (Dogster and Catster) that use Adsense. He writes that between the two sites they serve 6 million ads per month and that they earn around $850 per month (total). He gives his CTR (which I won’t publish here because I believe it to be against Google’s guidelines - even with the recent relaxation of the rules which now allow publishers to share total earnings but not other factors like CTR).
I’m a little surprised by his numbers - by my calculations his ads must not be paying too much per click to be earning that much with that many impressions and that sort of CTR.
Maybe there isn’t much money in Cats and Dogs but looking at my own stats I would expect 6,000,000 ad impressions to do significantly more than $850 in a month - in fact if I could get that kind of traffic in my direction I’d be bringing in as much as the team at Weblogs Inc with their $1000 per day!
I’m not quite sure where the issue is though - maybe its just really low ad value. None the less the information about the Adsense Publishers Forum is interesting.
Written on April 11th, 2005 at 09:04 pm by Darren Rowse
The $100 a Day in 12 Weeks Challenge
Just stumbled upon WebSiteNights - a blog dedicated to a 12 week challenge to make $100 per day via Adsense and Affiliate programs. So far the bloggers that have joined the challenge are:
- BJ’s Challenge
- Cy’s Challenge
- Cal’s Challenge
- Rob’s Challenge
- Teli’s Challenge
- Jenn’s Challenge
- Star’s Challenge
- Kevin’s Challenge
- Arina’s Challenge
- Nadav’s Challenge
- Wendy’s Challenge
- Russell’s Challenge
It is an interesting concept that I wish I’d known about a bit earlier even though i’ve already reached the $100 per day level myself as it sounds like fun to be involved with a group of people working on a similar project. Anyway check out what these bloggers are doing as I’m sure they have some interesting ideas.
Written on April 11th, 2005 at 06:04 pm by Darren Rowse
The Complexity of Advertising on a Blog
Are you a media buyer or seller that wants some work? This might be a good post for you to read to the bottom of.
One of my biggest frustrations as a single practitioner blogger is that I have to get my head around multiple areas of expertise. I’m a writer, an editor, designer (I do outsource a lot of this), PR person, marketer, tech person (I outsource some of this) media seller, search engine optimizer and strategist - all wrapped into one.
I’m becoming more confident in most of these roles but am aware that I have a lot to learn in most of them - particularly in the area of selling advertising space on my blogs.
I now have a blog that is attracting semi-regular requests from large companies, ad agencies and media buying groups about advertising with me. This is both an exciting prospect (the money involved in these transactions is great) but also incredibly frustrating and stressful. You see I have little experience in selling advertising on this scale.
The most recent of these requests was for a two month campaign, the figure I could quote up to was five figures, with a large multinational company. I was dealing with a media buying company who were very encouraging. However the negotiations broke down simply because of my inability to get my head around the complexity of what was require to make the campaign happen - to put it most simply it was out of my league.
It was complex on some of these levels:
- firstly it was a technical nightmare to think through (targeting IP addresses, ad formats, scripts running within scripts, servers talking to servers etc)
- secondly pitching for the campaign was terribly complicated (the media plan I had to submit had 28 elements for each ad including screen shots of proposed ad positions, a powerpoint presentation etc - to do it properly would have taken me two or three days)
- thirdly it was complicated by the fact that the site of the proposed campaign was a blog and not a traditional website (the media buyer really struggled to understand so much about how blogs are set up)
- fourthly it was complicated by the fact that I don’t really understand what is a reasonable figure to charge a multinational company for such services and still remain competitive
- fifthly it was complicated by the fact that I live in a different time zone from the people I was dealing with and every email interaction we had seemed to take 12 to 24 hours depending on the time of day
After days of trying to get it right (and putting a lot of my daily updating of blogs on hold to do so) and becoming more and more stressed in the process I’ve unfortunately just had to email my withdrawal from the race to win the campaign.
This frustrates me but also motivates me to be in a better position next time such an opportunity arises.
Tomorrow I’m meeting with my business coach to help formulate a business plan for my blogging business which to this point has simply evolved without much long term strategy. One of the elements I need to incorporate into this plan is a strategy for these larger advertising campaigns.
At this point I am leaning towards outsourcing some of this process and would be interested to talk to anyone who has experience in the buying and selling of advertising on websites. They would have a good understanding of blogging and be willing to work on a project by project basis (freelancing) for a negotiated percentage of any advertising that they sold and managed. I’d be open to them doing some proActive selling as well as responding to the requests that I get).
If this is you or if you know of someone who fits the bill please contact me so we can chat about how it might work out well for us both.
Written on April 11th, 2005 at 02:04 pm by Darren Rowse
News network to pay ‘citizen journalists’
John just pointed me to an interesting article on how GetLocalNews.com is moving towards a revenue sharing model with its thousands of volunteer writers.
‘GetLocalNews.com, a nationwide network of 6,000 local news sites, is planning to share its advertising revenue with thousands of volunteer writers.
The idea is to reward and motivate contributors whose stories and photos generate the most traffic, which in turn fuels ad revenue, said Edgar Canon, chief executive of the San Francisco company. He hopes the quality of contributions improves, too….
Now the company will pay writers half the net ad sales their stories garner, Canon said. That figure is based on each story’s “page views,” or the number of times visitors view its Web page. Canon expects it to work out to about $2 to $5 per 1,000 page views. The company will send checks quarterly to all writers that rack up $25 or more in payments, he said.’
Read more at News network to pay ‘citizen journalists’
Written on April 11th, 2005 at 09:04 am by Darren Rowse
Download MP3 Interview with enternetusers
Andy over at Easy Bake Weblogs has just posted an audio file of the interview that he did with me last week. So if you want to hear my Aussie accent and learn a little bit more about my blogging strategy download it and let me know what you think. It goes for about 40 minutes in total.
Andy and his listeners ask questions like:
- what would you do differently if you were to start it all again
- is there too much competition for new bloggers to start niche blogs?
- what traffic volume do you need before using ads?
- which is better, individual blogging or writing for a network of blogs?
- what is the biggest mistake of beginner bloggers?
We talked heaps about Adsense.
See a full running sheet of what the interview covered here.
Hope you can understand me - my phone line wasn’t the best and I have a cold.
Written on April 11th, 2005 at 03:04 am by Darren Rowse
Blogging Fears - Death
I’d like to continue my Blogging Fears series by talking for a moment about Death.
OK - ‘death’ is probably not a topic you were expecting me to cover in at enternetusers (I hope this is not too morbid) but the past week I’ve actually been wondering what would happen to my Blogging assets if I were to die?
I know there would be international mourning among my readers and a great pilgrimage to Melbourne for my Funeral (streamed live on the net) but what about my blogs? It seems such a waste for me to have worked for all this time on my blogs and for them to stop running and stop earning an income for those that I love when I go.
Advice: Perhaps it would be a responsible thing to do to add my blogs to my will and to make arrangements for someone to look after them for my lovely wife who is rather clueless about blogging. Like any income earning asset, your blog is something to think about the future of beyond your life time (btw - if anyone wants to leave me theirs in their will - let me know!).
Have you considered adding your blog to your will? What provisions have you made (if any) for your blogs if you were to die or become incapacitated?
This is another part of my ‘Blogging Fears’ series where previous posts have been Getting Hacked and Disappearing from Search Engines.
Written on April 10th, 2005 at 03:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Welcome to the wide world of the podosphere
Podcasting and Blogging got a little attention in the Age today with an article titled Welcome to the wide world of the podosphere featuring comments from fellow Australian Bloggers and Podcasters Cameron Reilly and Duncan Riley.
Written on April 10th, 2005 at 09:04 am by Darren Rowse
What To Do When Your Blog Drops in Google’s Rankings
Search Engine Journal has a good post on What To Do When Your Established Site Drops in Rankings and gives this advice:
‘All I can say is that many have suggested the same advice in the WebmasterWorld thread. Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld, suggested to do “NOTHING”. He said, “The worst thing you could do, would be to go make a bunch of changes. Just let the algo work itself out.” A senior member said that he “made the mistake of making many changes after taking the hit, many months later no where to be found.” ‘
I totally agree with this advice out of my own experience of disappearing from Google late last year. The temptation was to make some major changes at that time but I decided to stick it out and just keep working on some of the basics including writing good content, making the coding of my site validate, building relationships with other sites in the hope that I’d get a few extra incoming links.
The result was in the next reindex by Google my traffic returned - not (in my opinion) because of my tweaks or anything I did in the mean time but just because whatever Google did to de-list me they reversed (as often happens).
So if you drop suddenly in Google’s rankings hang tight for a bit. Keep doing the basics and wait for another update. It will be a frustrating time but I’ve talked to many bloggers and webmasters who’ve been through it - so the chances are it’ll work itself out for you too.
If your ranking doesn’t come back in the next couple of Google updates it might be time to think about some bigger changes - but in the mean time have a little patience see out the storm.
Written on April 9th, 2005 at 01:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Weblogs Inc Seeks More Bloggers
Looking for a blogging job (part time)? Weblogs Inc are looking for more bloggers - particularly on the topic of Digital Cameras and Software Downloads.
Thanks to the many readers who have let me know about this knowing I blog about Digital Cameras. I’ve actually already emailed them expressing my interest but they are not interested in taking on a blogger who has a ‘competing blog’ on the same topic. This is understandable although I was interested in the possibilities of exploring what a creative partnership on a niche topic might look like.
Hopefully one of my readers out there gets the job/s - simply email Jason and the guys at Engadget with a few sample posts to show what you’re made of.
Written on April 9th, 2005 at 12:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Trash Princesses Embrace New Media
Paris Hilton is podcasting and Pamela Anderson has a blog.
This can only end in a scandal.
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