My first paypal payment from Vizu
January 30, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
A great way to add another revenue source to your website is by adding a paid poll from vizu to it. You configure the settings by yourself, add some keywords and categories to it and select the amount that you want to earn per 1000 impressions.
Vizu then tries to find advertisers that fit your description and adds automatic polls to your website. I had great success with a setting of $2 per 1000 impressions (vizus share is 50% of that number). I just wanted to let everyone know that they actually pay in time and can be recommended. They seem to have troubles finding enough advertisers for my website this month, only 1/3 of impressions have been served.
Adsense Smart Pricing
January 29, 2007 by martin
Filed under adsense, make money
You might have heard that Google introduced a feature called smart pricing to Adsense some time ago. Smart Pricing is supposed to punish websites that have a bad ctr by reducing the amount of money a click on the ads earns the webmaster. The most disturbing feature of smart pricing however is the fact that not only the ad units on that website are affected but all the sites in the account of the owner of the adsense id.
This means that if you have adsense on a big forum with a low ctr and bad feedback from advertisers your whole account might experience the effect of smart pricing. Everton from connected internet is trying an experiment and reduce poor performing ad units on his network of sites and monitor the results over the course of months. It will be interesting to see if there have been indeed changes to the better because of this.
Youtube to introduce ad revenue sharing
January 28, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
Video blogs will soon be able to add another revenue source to their websites by uploading their videos to youtube and earning a share of the money that youtube generates from it. It remains to be seen how this revenue sharing will be implemented but I suppose it will be similar to Google Adsense using keywords and geo targets to calculate revenue for the video.
Ads will most likely be delivered right before the original video starts which will surely drive at least some users away from youtube to other sites that do not show advertisement before the videos. It is hard to predict how much revenue a successful video would be able to generate, guess it will be most likely a per impression payment instead.
Wordpress more tag and full feeds
If you use the more tag in your articles in Wordpress to cut off the article you might have noticed that the feeds get cut off at the same position even though you selected to provide full feeds of your articles. There is no obvious way to change this behavior and it took some time until I found the solution to this problem.
You will have to edit the file post-template.php in wp-includes. Open the file and search for the following string
if ( preg_match('/ (.+?)?
Don’t panic when earnings drop
January 26, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
It can happen to everyone anytime. Your revenue drops from one day to the other with no plausible explanation whatsoever. This has happened to one of my own sites just a few weeks ago. I had record earnings with adsense in December that plummeted by nearly 25% in the beginning of January. I did not change the layout or ad placement or anything else on the site at that time.
I would have went right into panic mode if this would have happened about a year ago but not this time. I do know that my adsense earnings, and all other earnings as well, change in a certain range every day. Drops are as normal as peaks and should be seen as a usual behavior. There could be many reasons for dropping revenues, some of the most popular include end of fiscal period, holidays, appearance of made for adsense sites and drop in search engine rankings.
Find new niches
A great way to create competitive successful websites is to find a new niche instead of niches with lots of competition. It is actually very easy to find new niches and I’m going to show you how this is done. Every day new products are announced on the internet - games, hardware, phones, gadgets aso. The advantage of new products is that there can’t be a niche for the product before it was announced. There can be only broader niches that also cover the product that has been announced.
We are going to exploit those products and create websites or blogs about them. Let us take a look at games for example. Many websites like ign or gamespot report about games that are in production right now. The developer probably registered the .com domain name for the game but everything else should be up for grasps if the announcement was released recently. Try and capture the .net domain for the game, .org could be fine as well but I would stick with .net if possible.
Upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 now
Only seven days after the release of Wordpress 2.0.7 Wordpress 2.1 has been released. It contains some major changes, security fixes and performance improvements and should be installed immediately if you are running a Wordpress blog. It is always sad to see when a Wordpress blog gets defaced because the site owner did not update to the latest version immediately after it was released.
You can download the latest version of Wordpress from the official website. Upgrading to 2.1 is very easy. It is recommended to backup all the files and the database and disable all plugins before you upload the new files and run the upgrade.php file.
How I made $1500 in four months with a website
January 22, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
I promised to write about a real example that would show how to buy, optimize and sell a website in a short period of time. I do check the sitepoint marketplace once a day to see if someone offers a great website that I could buy and optimize. Sites are sold auction style on sitepoint, the owner decides the starting price, the bin, buy it now price, and the amount of days the auction will be running.
I spotted one site that was currently offered for $400 with a buy it now price of $1200. It made about $1 a day and had some nice extras such as a yahoo directory entry, a wikipedia link, great google keywords, more than 80% of users came from search engines and a pagerank of 4. Visitor flow had been stable for eight months and it did not look like this would change anytime soon.
Buying, Optimizing and Selling Websites
January 21, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
I would like to write about another method of making money online without putting effort into creating a great website. The following method can be nicely explained with a real life example. Instead of building a new house you buy a used one with lots of potential that looks just a little bit shabby or one were the owner of the house has to sell it under market value. You then pay some craftsmen to make the house nice and shiny and sell it afterwards for a nice profit.
The same can be done with websites if you know the basics. It is not easy to spot a website with potential if you are a beginner. You have lots of other webmasters who are visiting certain forums (digitalpoint, namepros, sitepoint) every day to find websites and buy them before another one does.
Introduction to Ad Blending
January 19, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
Ad Blending tries to conquer the effect of ad blindness. Even inexperienced users are able to spot certain type of ads on a page and tend to avoid them afterwards. Especially banner sized ads or those that stick out of the other site content may be ignored by ad blindness.
Ad Blending tries to overcome ad blindness by not sticking out like normal ads. The ad layout would be changed to reflect the formats of the rest of the website. The ad would look like normal site content by using the same formatting rules (colors, sizes, fonts) as the website.