A Comparison Between 3 Innovative Banner Ad Platforms
by Kevin on May 7, 2010
There are hundreds of different advertising networks available for bloggers. Many revolve around different types of revenue models, whether it is through affiliate marketing (the blogger places the ads on the site), using an impression-based model, or through a CPC-based model. No matter what type of site you have, theere is a network that can help you make money.
Before I get started in the comparison, there are a few things you need to understand about advertising on your site.
- Advertising isn’t free to place on your site. Sure, you may simply be placing code on your site, but you are paying a fee to Google, for instance, as part of your earnings, in return for them serving the ads. Companies like BuySellAds also take a cut of your earnings, but this will save you money as you won’t have to setup or purchase an advertising system for your site.
- Not all ad networks are created equally. Some specialize in serving particular types of ads, say text or image-based ads, and others are based solely around social networking sites like Twitter.
- Learn the benefits and drawbacks of the various sites before you begin. There may be specific requirements to the network which you need to understand.
Comparison Between the Advertising Networks
You’ve likely heard of some of these networks before, but what do they offer? In this post, I’ll be comparing some of the similarities and their features. While some go beyond banner ad sales, their focus is on this type of advertising, the kind many bloggers currently use to make money through their websites.
BuySellAds has been around since early 2008, and they are currently hosting ads on more than 900 successful sites. The service has been adding lots of features in the past few months, and they will be branching out even further, with ads in desktop applications.
A number of innovative features are integrated into their platform, including real-time stats, full transparency of stats, as well as asynchronous ad code.
Types of Ads: Primarily banner/image, along with text and description ads.
Percentage Cut: 25% – you keep 75% of your earnings.
Cash Out: Paypal – $20, Bank Check – $50, Wire Transfer – $500
AdBrite gives users control over the ads that are shown on their sites, so you can choose whether you want to see the maximum number of ads or only select ads from quality brands. Advertisers can also find your site(s) through a Site Directory, which displays the sites by impressions and uniques. However, getting direct sales through the site typically revolves around the higher traffic sites.
Types of Ads: Banner ads, text ads, full-page ads, inline ads, as well as image ads. Ads are sold primarily based on clicks, but some are based on impressions.
Percentage Cut: Unknown
Cash Out: By default, it has been set at $100, but can be reduced to just $5, so it is lower than many other services.
AdTaily makes the process of selling ads on your site easy. It has been available in beta mode in several countries since last year, but now is available to more users. Simply sign up, copy the code provided, and then embed it into your site where you want the ads to be displayed. It functions like a widget, so visitors are the focus of your advertising campaigns, rather than mass marketers.
Types of Ads: Primarily 125×125 banner ads, although more sizes may be coming.
Percentage Cut: None
Cash Out: Through PayPal
Conclusion
Each of these platforms offer unique benefits to selling advertising through your site, especially if you don’t want to set up your own advertising system on your own. Check them out and leave your thoughts on blog monetization below.
How to Deal with Huge Traffic Spikes
by Kevin on May 6, 2010
If you have a blog – large or small, run on WordPress or Blogger – you realize that huge traffic spikes will come at some point during your time as a blogger. The more of them you receive, the faster your blog will grow, but you need a great approach to managing them in order to really see their benefits.
When a post on your blog becomes “popular,” lots of people will click through various social networking services, including Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and several others. The “Digg Effect,” as it was once called, still exists today, but there are better ways of getting around the problem and more ways to reap benefits of having increased traffic for a period of time.
Shanghai Rollercoaster by Jakob Montrasio
A Little Background on Traffic Spikes
Traffic spikes can happen at any time of the day, even when you are least suspecting it. Even if you have an older post that is valuable, it may receive thousands of visitors over a brief period of time, years after you originally published it. These spikes are great enough that they can bring down the most popular sites, powered by expensive servers, especially if you don’t have your site configured properly.
Let’s say you have an article with lots of images. Web pages can easily be over ten megabytes, and when you have thousands of visitors per hour hitting these pages, your server will experience a lot of strain. This is even more true if you have your site hosted on a “shared” server, with hundreds, if not thousands of other sites. The spike will mean the server is delivering gigabytes of bandwidth per hour.
Your goal when having a traffic spike is to keep your site up as long as possible. You want these visitors, even though they may not be as “high quality,” as you’ll still be able to convert some of these visitors into readers or customers.
A Few Tips on What to Take from Traffic Spikes
As I already stated, traffic spikes can be valuable. Realize that you won’t get return rates as high as those found when people land on your site from search engines, but not as low as if you were severing non-relevant advertising on sites outside of your niche.
- First of all, plan for the future. If you have a site focused on content such as photos and videos, you’ll want to invest in a good hosting plan. Sure, shared hosting services offer great value, but having dedicated hosting can pay for itself fi your receive a lot of traffic.
- Have a good site layout. First impressions matter, so take the time to design your site, customize it from a pre-designed layout, or have a professional website designer code you a design.
- Use plugins to their full potential. There are lots of great plugins out there that will help you convert more of your casual visitors into readers, so have them configured to work properly when the spike comes.
- Monetize and optimize your site. Don’t clutter your site with Google AdSense ads, as it’ll give your site a trashy look. Draw in quality advertisers before your site gets huge spikes. Your advertisers will see more benefits from these spikes if you get them before major spikes.
- Integrate analytics and stat tracking beforehand. You’ll be able to see the effects of these traffic spikes and help better optimize your site for the future. Check out these 10 alternatives to Google Analytics if you are looking for alternatives.
Keep a few of these in mind as we look at some of the basic methods of dealing with traffic spikes. You can adapt them to suit the needs of your website, depending on what type of site you run and what kind of server you have your site hosted on.
Converting Users
There are a number of plugins available to help you convert more users into readers. They should be installed before any traffic spike, so you won’t be struggling with the high bandwidth usage.
Converting your users into readers is key – you’ll see more benefits in the long-term than if you simply work on increasing income from these spikes.
- Referrer Detector – This plugin will display a welcome message and a link to encourage your visitors to subscribe to your site. For example, for people visiting your site from Google, your message may read as “Hello Googler! If you find this post any useful, please support by digging or subscribing to the RSS feed for more interesting posts to come in the future.”
- Toolbars (Gigya) – Plugins like the Gigya toolbar can help your readers share the post, and they can be sometimes be non-obtrusive and help your readers share your content if they like it.
- Subscribe to Comments – The Subscribe to Comments plugin can help your new readers stay up-to-date on a post with a lot of discussion stemming from it.
- AWeber Integration – This plugin, or similar ones, can help you increase readership through a newsletter-type method and you’ll be able to grow your “list” of people who are subscribed to you.
Traffic Management and Optimization
Now that you’ve incorporated a number of tools into your blog, it is time to manage your traffic to ensure your site remains up for as long as possible. Again, you want to set these up before you even begin to experience the traffic spikes, and make sure they are configured properly.
Use a Performance Plugin such as the W3 Total Cache Plugin, which includes a number of options for setting up an optimized and cached site. When fully configured, you can see up to a 10x performance improvement. In addition, you can save money by reducing your bandwidth. A number of tools have also been included for using CDN (content delivery network). By total number of downloads, the WP Super Cache Plugin is feature-rich, but contains less features (thus it is easier to install and use).
These caching plugins will also help you manage traffic when your site isn’t experiencing huge spikes, so it is best that you install them as you are setting up your site.
Contact Your Hosting Provider as they will be able to help you in the event your site goes down. They may be able to quickly isolate the problem, although you may very likely be persuaded to upgrade your hosting plan or move to a different provider if this problem persists for more than a few hours.
Reduce the Size of Images on your site. For example, use image sprits – see this article for more information – which will help minimize the number of requests to your server. Another general rule is to use JPG and PNG (or GIF) images appropriately. Generally, PNG images are better for text images, while JPG are great for most photographs without text due to the compression formats.
Use a CDN to help off-load the images and files on your site. Many of the most popular sites in the world use this technique, as it reduces costs and speeds up the load time of sites. Use the W3 Total Cache Plugin to integrate them into your site.
Optimize Your Theme, as many themes come un-optimized. If you aren’t taking advantage of particular features, it may be time to remove them to speed up the load time of your site. Generally, templates (without images) should be less than a 100KB in size.
BrowserMob is a unique tool that I recently discovered that uses real browser users for website load testing, providing better AJAX support, and clearer reporting of the load of your website. You’ll also be able to monitor the uptime of your site through their service. Pricing ranges from free to nearly $2,000 per month, but if your income depends on your site’s uptime, then tools like this can help.
Conclusion
Have a good plan for when your site experiences huge traffic spikes. Remember, take advantage of every visitor you receive, as you should value each of them equally. Invest in quality plugins and hosting providers and you shouldn’t deal with much downtime – keep uptime above 99.9% to ensure your visitors are able to access your site most of the time. Even with a percentage at this level, you’ll still experience about seven hours of downtime per year, or about one minute per day.
Has your site ever experienced the “Digg Effect,” and how did/do you deal with the problem?
You’re a Medicore Blogger
by Kevin on May 5, 2010
You’ve started a blog in hopes of becoming a successful a-list blogger who can make a full-time income writing one or two posts each day. This is a dream many of us have, but few of us will ever come close to achieving this.
One of the main problems everyone faces when starting a new blog is that we all begin as mediocre. No one is perfect at something they’ve never done before, and this is also true for all bloggers. Starting a blog is like overcoming a tough obstacle in itself.
It’ll take time before you are able to churn out quality content on a regular basis, and your readers understand this. Even the most popular blogs you see today were started with much smaller ambitions, only reaching the mainstream level when you have broken a number of news stories.
Getting over the fears that you will never be a great blogger is the hurdle you need to overcome before you will truly realize some of your potential.
There have been hundreds of success stories by bloggers who have achieved the mainstream status, but perhaps this isn’t the position you want to be in three years from now. Perhaps you simply want to have a larger base of readers – we all want this, don’t we? Well, here are a few tips you can use to help break yourself away from the “mediocre” status as a blogger.
Raise the Bar
Even the bloggers who have set out to create a revolution have now resorted to the same promotion methods. You can change this through your blog.
The first step to raising the bar is to place your community and your readers first. Always involve your community in upcoming projects, providing them what they need to know to stay involved.
One thing many readers want to see is an evolution of you and your brand. Sometimes the littlest changes make the difference, such as re-arranging the design of your site or adding new social elements, such as Facebook and other social networking links. These changes can positively help enforce your brand.
Believe in Yourself
People don’t venture into new markets or don’t pursue making their hobbies into full-time income streams because they have low confidence in themselves. Although you may be great at a hobby or skill, you don’t feel you have the savvy business sense to actually profit.
Today, it is more easy than ever to create your own business and promote it through the Internet. There isn’t anything stopping you except the drive and motivation, which you should already have if you are passionate about your hobby.
Believing in yourself has some drawbacks, however. Even though you might feel great about what you are doing, your readers may not, and this fact may come crashing down on you. Don’t let the negativity get to you, or you will never be able to meet your goals.
Change Your Habits
How to do you evolve from a mediocre blogger into a blogger that is trusted, valued, as well as respected in the community? Well, you begin by changing the habits that have prevented you from reaching this plateau in the first place.
While I’ve covered some of these tips in the past, I’ll run-down some of them again to help you grow as a blogger.
- Don’t follow trends. Set your own trends. Evolve faster than other bloggers and point yourself in the right direction before someone else tells you where the market is going.
- Have a plan. Plan your plan. Set goals for yourself, in terms of how much traffic, readers, and income you want to see at certain periods in the future – six months, a year from now, and so on.
- Don’t forget your morals. Some bloggers feel that traffic and income should erase all their morals. Don’t resort to spamming the people who have helped you reach your goals or they’ll quickly drop their support.
- Stick to one topic or niche. Branching out can happen, but not initially. You won’t find the time to maintain multiple sites until you have built one site up to a decent level.
- Always provide value. If you are simply rehashing what others have heen saying for years, you aren’t making an impact, and your readers won’t find any value in what you are delivering.
Your Thoughts
What other ways could a new blogger set himself or herself apart from the millions of other blogs while still being able to represent a brand? Please leave your comments in the area below.
Why Google AdSense Isn’t the Best Way to Make Money Online
by Kevin on May 4, 2010
For many years, webmasters and blog owners have felt that AdSense was the best way for new website owners to make money online. After all these years, more and more people are moving away from Google’s premiere advertising platform to make much more money using their own methods.
Why should you move away from AdSense, too?
Not Enough Reward
Placing a bunch of HTML code on your site isn’t very rewarding, especially if you are doing it simply to make money. Sure, you might see a few dollars in additional income each month, but in the long-term, people will move onto one of your competitors who serve higher quality advertising.
There are simply better ways to make this money, whether it is through private advertising or through affiliate marketing.
Hundreds of Advertising Networks
Some people stop their search for a good advertising network with Google AdSense. Even though it may be one of the largest and most popular, you may see more rewards from networks with a much smaller base. In addition, you may also see more relevant advertising through these networks.
BidVertiser and AdBrite are two networks that have a decent base of users and will serve relevant advertising on your blog(s).
When to Use Google AdSense/Similar Advertising Models?
The only time you should commit to Google AdSense/similar contextual advertising networks is when you are no longer updating a site, but still have the traffic levels to make money through the site. Another case when you should use these networks if for sites with a high level of low-quality traffic. For example, if you run a site that gets traffic in the millions like Digg, you’ll want all the ad clicks you can get. However, it would also be valuable to look into long-term partnerships.
There are times when Google AdSense works and there are times when it doesn’t. It all depends on what type of site you run and how you want to portray your brand to your customers and visitors.
What are your thoughts on Google AdSense and similar networks?
10 Elegant Premium Themes Released Recently
by Kevin on May 3, 2010
A number of great WordPress themes have been released recently, ideal for transforming your site into a more complete website, ranging form a simple website to a full-fledged e-commerce site. While there may be many free themes available, few of them are of high quality to draw in new customers, and even fewer of them offer a complete theme panel and support to go with their affordable prices.
1. MyProduct | $19.95
This theme is great for promoting your products and services online. The design is smooth and contains a corporate feel. A page-based structure makes the theme powerful and versatile at the same time. Five color schemes are included with the theme package.
2. Diarise | $70.00
Diarise is a new theme from WooThemes, offering you the ability to organize your company/organization’s events in an elegant and clean manner. Easily add events straight to your calendar application and link your events to booking forms. INcluded are eight alternative color styles, custom widgets, built-in SEO options, and a powerful theme framework.
3. L’Image | $47.00
This theme is great for professional photography sites or galleries. It is compatible with the latest version of WordPress, contains a four-level drop-down menu system, all the source files you need, and automatic thumbnail creation.
4. The Beeb 3 | $39.00
Six custom widgets, built-in thumbnail support, full source files, and all the other common WordPress features have been integrated into this theme. While the look is more cluttered than some other themes, news sites will enjoy the wide array of areas to place advertisements.
5. Vidley | $50.00
The Vidley Theme has been designed to be flexible and ready for all the videos you want to post on your website. A number of customizable options have been included in the back-end Options Panel, making it easy to manage your theme.
6. FolioFlip | $30.00
The FolioFlip Theme contains a lot of options, making it the ideal theme for a portfolio blog and those who want to showcase images on their blog. A number of pre-designed templates have been included, but you should check them out, along with all the other features.
7. Unique | $30.00
Unique is a powerful theme for creating a complete website. Two levels of color customization, plus a number of typography styles are included. You also have the option of setting an article as a homepage article, promo, or footer link.
8. Metric | $79.95
The Metric Theme has been designed for everyone from a novice WordPress user or business owner to the advanced developer who makes a living customizing WordPress sites. A number of features have been included to help you use and customize the theme.
9. Novocane | $30.00
Novocane is an advanced theme, with an eye-catching grid magazine layout, fifteen header background options, fourteen Cufon fonts, and nine footer background options included. Seven PSD files, Google Analytics support, and plenty of options make the theme easy to use and customize.
10. Meedo | $35.00
Meedo is a corporate/business theme designed with options to enhance the experience of your users who visit your site. Five smooth sliders, up to thirty sliders, and three color schemes have been included within the template.
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