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If You Want To Make Money Online, Don’t Blog

July 9, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Making money through blogging is not a new concept. However, a recent set of blog posts and articles I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks taken together could make one think that if you want to make a living through the web that blogging is the best way to go.

First I ran across the Wired article about Mike Arrington and his success with TechCrunch, then it was Ken Savage and his Diabetes blog that makes $40k/year, and yesterday John Chow announced his blog income for June to the tune of over $12,000 in one month. Of course there are also some longtime bloggers like Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net who actually specialize in helping people blog better and make more money doing it, while also talking about his own success of “six figure blogging”.

All of those are some impressive stories and I’m happy for all of them. They are not doing anything wrong by promoting their abilities in knowledge in helping people earn more money from blogging. Their stories are true, and they show that it is possible to make good money from blogging.

However, if you’re starting today, blogging is NOT the choice I’d recommend for people to make a living online. First, let’s look at why it’s such a popular choice right now.

Why is blogging popular for trying to make money?

1. Articles and blog posts like those mentioned above make blogs the “top of mind” choice because they are the hot topic as one of the newer and hipper publishing models for making money.

2. Blogs are receiving a lot of press and notoriety for their role in breaking news and changing the media landscape. This leads to the natural inclination for many people to want to join in on the “revolution”.

3. Social networks and other types of social media are getting people used to the concept of personal publishing and blogging before they jump in and do it, so blogging might be the most familiar publishing model to them.

4. Setting up a blog is easier than setting up an in-depth content site, affiliate site, ecommerce site, web application, or other venture on the web. It has a very low technology barrier to entry.

5. Blogging is more of an ego boost than other publishing types because they often are known as individuals instead of a company. Those who want attention are more likely to blog than to start an ecommerce site.

All these things make blogging a very popular choice right now, which is one of the reasons why breaking your blog out of the clutter to actually make significant income from it is so difficult today.

Why else is blogging not a great choice?

1. The low barrier of technology involved means almost anyone with a little skill can start a blog, and anyone with a little technical skill can make a unique blog. This is why there are millions of blogs today and almost every imaginable topic is currently being covered.

2. Since the vast majority of blogs are the same in format and technology, in order to succeed you need to be an amazing writer, a prolific creator of content, well-connected, a first-mover in a topic, be able to break news, or just get lucky. Some combination of those traits is required to get your blog traffic and links, and even then it’s no guarantee you’ll be able to monetize your blog well. Because….

3. Even popular blogs don’t necessarily generate a huge amount of ad inventory. In comparison to topical community sites, web applications, and social networks, blogs just don’t create a lot of ad impressions. It’s party due to the format of most blogs having a front page with all the recent content all on one page, and partly because even popular blogs with loud voices get a small amount of traffic compared to sites that hit the mainstream world.

4. Yes, there are other ways of making money from a blog besides advertising. There are donations (requires a big audience willing to give), ecommerce/affiliate (if you’re going to do this, is a blog the best way?), and blogging can lead to other opportunities like consulting or getting a job offer.

5. Even the most successful blogs pale in comparison in revenue and profit generated compared to top content sites, affiliate sites, ecommerce sites, and web applications. The top few revenue producing blogs I’ve heard of are in the 100-200k per month in revenue. That’s impressive, but not when you consider there’s thousands of no name affiliates, content site producers, and small ecommerce site operators doing the same amount of revenue and much better.

What should you do then?

If I’ve convinced you that blogging alone isn’t the way to make a living online, then you’re probably asking what you should do. The bad news is that the following suggestions all take more work than just signing up at WordPress.com and talking about your favorite topic all day. The good news is that the opportunities today online are still very big, but you have to go a little above and beyond the average blogger to make it work.

1. Pick a topic you’re passionate about. It’s much easier to put in time and effort about a topic that you really are interested in. Preferably, this area of interest also has advertisers, products or services to sell or refer, and content that can be created around it.

2. Evaluate what the best opportunity in that area is between creating a content/community site, becoming an affiliate in that space, or starting an ecommerce site. There are lots of great articles and sites around the web that teach you how to build sites of these types.

3. Learn how to outsource. Don’t try and learn how to be a designer, programmer, marketer, and all that on your own. Unless you’re really talented, it’s more likely that there are others who can do the work better than you and for cheaper than your own time is worth. Sites like elance.com, scriptlance.com, and specific forums in these areas are great resources to find people who are willing to do this work for you for a fee. Sure, it takes a little startup money, but not that much. If you’re serious about making money online, you’ll have to be willing to spend a few thousand dollars to get it going right. In the history of starting businesses, this is probably the cheapest opportunity ever.

4. At least master the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. Both of these techniques are the top ways to get people to your site. Every website is dead in the water without good search engine optimization and/or the ability to drive traffic profitably through pay per click marketing. Simply by mastering PPC alone you can be an affiliate and find ways to buy traffic cheaply and send it to a simple affiliate landing page where you make more money than you spent.

5. Learn, learn, learn. The great thing about the web is that new technologies and techniques of doing business online are coming out daily. What worked two years ago doesn’t necessarily work today. If you focus on learning the new opportunities as they present themselves, it won’t matter much that you didn’t get started years ago.

Good luck.

Filed Under: Publishing

Live Q&A With Four Hour Workweek Author Tim Ferriss

May 21, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

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Tim FerrissOn Thursday May 24th at 11:00 AM PDT, Direct Media Exchange will host our first Publisher Seminar Series. Our first speaker is Timothy Ferris, author of the 4-Hour Workweek, an Amazon.com best seller. Future speakers include successful web publisher Steve Jenkins of Cheatcodes.com and Right Media CEO Mike Walrath.

Pre-registration is required for each seminar, and space is limited to 100 participants. To register, visit here.

The seminar will be a 1 hour Q&A with questions coming from the participants.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Direct Media Exchange, Publishing

Making Money With Online Advertising in The Long Tail

March 19, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

There’s been some talk about how difficult it is to make money with online advertising. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed started it by discussing ways to build an online media business to $50 million in revenue, the New York Times picked up on it, and then Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 added a thought-provoking post that concludes by saying that advertising just doesn’t scale for the long tail.

I think first we need to figure out what we’re talking about here. As a venture capitalist, Jeremy is really only interested in companies that are going to be getting near that $50m in revenue number. That’s really few and far between on the web, and there are hordes of successful web companies and entrepreneurs out there making great livings with advertising as their primary revenue stream that aren’t sniffing $50m in revenue. So is Jeremy right?

As he adds in a follow up post, it’s estimated that 92% of online ad revenues run through the big four of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. That’s a sobering number, however we can’t forget that a large chunk of all that money is actually filtering down to web publishers through Google’s Adsense program, Yahoo’s Publisher Network, and AOL’s Advertising.com. So, it is a bit hard in this day and age to ramp up a site that has enough traffic, a valuable audience, and a sales force that can sell enough direct advertising to hit $50m in revenue. But when exactly has that been easy in any publishing medium? I’d argue it’s far easier on the web than in magazines, newspapers, television, or radio.

As to Scott’s point about advertising not scaling out to the long tail, that’s again a mixed answer. For the very far out end of the tail, those sites aren’t going to make much. Take this blog for instance, it’s pretty far down the tail and it doesn’t make much from advertising, but with such low traffic levels should it be making me a bunch of money? I think somewhere along the way there is this notion that if you blog or publish a site that advertising riches follow. That just really isn’t true.

However, if we look at the middle of the tail, I can tell you from lots of personal and work experience that there are A LOT of companies and entrepreneurs making great livings off of advertising. Some are sites that work primarily with ad networks and use tools like RMX Direct. Some are bloggers who use a number of different ad services to equal a nice monthly income. And some run a number of forum sites that can equal $600k from one ad network alone.

The examples are really too many to name, but the common thread for the publishers down the tail that make it work are the following:

  • Focused on monetizing their site
  • Not afraid to monetize their site
  • Decent to good traffic levels
  • A niche focused audience
  • Hard work

It’s not that tricky, it boils down to being smart, learning from others, and just working hard.

Filed Under: Advertising, Publishing

Five Reasons Audio Podcasting Isn’t Going Anywhere

March 19, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments
graph500.jpg

Look at the graph above. It’s a selection of some of the top podcasting sites, and over the last year according to Alexa there is essentially no growth for any of these sites. Podcasting is flat.

First, let me clarify that those sites and many others are a mix of both audio and video podcasting, so I think they all have a future, but I think audio podcasting is not going to go anywhere and that the businesses around podcasting should be looking at video as their future.

Why do I think audio podcasting is flat and doesn’t have any future?

1. It’s hard to scan quickly.
How do I quickly scan a podcast to see if it’s worth listening to like I can skim an article?

2. It’s hard to link to a specific point in a podcast.
Technology can change this, and maybe it will soon, but if I want to directly link to a specific section of a podcast, I can’t do it.

3. Downloading and managing the files sucks.
I like RSS feeds, it’s a great way to consume content. But when I subscribe to a podcasting feed it sucks that my Ipod gets jammed up with files that I never end up hearing. Why don’t I hear them? See point #1 above.

4. Amateur podcasting is hard to take.
Sure, there is lots of amateur blogging and video that is enjoyable, but it’s easier to manage and consume. I don’t want to dedicate 20 minutes of listening time to a podcast to determine it’s as bad as I thought it was.

5. Audio advertising isn’t moving quickly.
I’m in the advertising business and work at developing and following new technology and initiatives, and everyone is talking about video, building out video solutions, and pushing video. There is very little talk and buzz about audio advertising solutions and sales of it. Even Google’s attempts after their acquisition of dMarc haven’t been successful.

As Mark Cuban pointed out back in 2005 by comparing podcasting to streaming radio, the big business model just isn’t there. There will be those who can make some cash and make it a labor of love, but it’s not a big business. As an example, one of the best audio sites, and as this blog post mentions one of the only ones to have any success in generating any growth, Odeo, is on the sales block because the company that created it is moving on to other things. If the site growing the most is up for sale, how are the other ones doing? Yikes.

Not to mention Google Trends seems to show podcasting queries declining.

Video podcasting on the other hand, which I’d just call video blogging (vlogging) or just creating themed videos like Ask a Ninja, ZeFrank, and Rocketboom, does have a bright future. Why is this? Video is more interesting. We like to see people why we hear them. It’s why people watch TV and movies now while sitting at home instead of listening to the radio. Video can be scanned easier. Video ads pay well and everyone is moving in that direction.

I hope the podcasting companies out there with flat traffic over the last year are working on video fast and furious.

Filed Under: Advertising, Publishing, Web 2.0

Creating a Top Notch Content Website

March 14, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

There’s so much focus in the blog and infoproduct world on creating “quick and easy” moneymaking websites. While it is possible to make quick websites that make money (although it’s much harder than people claim), I’d love to see more instruction like this from Andrew Johnson about steps to take to create a top notch content website.

As he states up front, it takes work, perhaps a lot of work, but the rewards can be much greater. And I think people who set out to create a great quality website will have a much greater chance for success than those who are trying to aim to make a quick buck.

I speak from experience on this one in that I have created a couple of large and successful content websites, and it did take a ton of work. However, if you’re passionate about the subject, that work is fun. It wasn’t a necessarily a lot of tricky knowledge that I had, it was that I worked hard to create good content for years, grew a forum, did tons of online and offline marketing, and made it a real business and focus.

On the other hand, I’ve also created “quick” websites, and the success rate was much lower.

It’s only part 1 of a 6 part series, so it’ll be fun to see what Andrew brings out next for advice. His advice so far is right on the money.

Filed Under: Publishing

Facebook Advertising and Optimization

March 7, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

Valleywag and others are reporting that data and anecdotes are leaking out reporting that Facebook is a terribly performing advertising buy.

Without more detail, it’s tough to really draw too many conclusions here. It’s not surprising that a social network filled with generally poor college kids doesn’t generate a lot of clicks and conversions, so I think it’d be more interesting to know some other aspects.

What are the advertisers in question pitching?

What type of creatives are the advertisers using?

What type of optimization are the advertisers using?

What type of optimization is Facebook using on their own inventory?

We know Facebook has a deal with Microsoft to represent their inventory, but I’m not aware of what technology Facebook is using to get the best yield possible out of their inventory. The Valleywag piece mentions that Myspace has been performing over twice as well as Facebook with a somewhat similar audience. What’s the difference?

Myspace could potentially be managing their advertising better, doing better user targeting, better optimization, using better yield management, and finding easy ways to work with more buyers for their inventory.

Additionally, Myspace makes a lot of their ads very hard to miss, while the majority (if not all) of Facebook’s ads are below the fold. This difference alone is going to affect performance.

It’d be great to know the details of the setups to truly compare, but at this point it sounds like Facebook may need to try and do some things to keep some of their ad buyers around.

Filed Under: Advertising, Publishing

Speaking at SXSW in Austin on March 10th

February 25, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

SXSWOn March 10th in Austin I’ll be on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel at SXSW.

The panel will be moderated by publisher Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net, and will have me representing Right Media and the ad exchange market, Cody Simms of the Yahoo Publisher Network representing the contextual network market, Larry Allen of Tacoda covering behavioral targeting and ad networks, and Justin Ward from Feedburner covering RSS advertising.

Hopefully it will be educational and worthwhile, I know I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been to SXSW, so I’m anxious to check out many of the other sessions and speakers as well.

Filed Under: Ad Networks, Advertising, Conferences, Publishing, Random, Right Media, Yahoo

Web Revenue Blog Rankings

February 19, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

revenueblogrankings.gifWe’ve got Technorati, Alexa, and other various traffic or ranking services that help us quantify and rank blogs and give us something to talk about. Unfortunately, these servcies all rank with different criteria such as the number of links from other blogs, traffic based on a toolbar install, traffic estimates based on a panel, or something else entirely. Additionally, it’s not always that useful in context of your actual industry. What’s more useful to know, that my blog is #53,294 in Alexa or that it’s the 9th ranked blog in it’s niche?

Because of this, I’ve decided to compile a list of blogs that I call the “Web Revenue Blogs”, look up their rankings in various services, compile them, and then rank them accordingly. I
classify a blog as a “Web Revenue Blog” if the primary focus of the blog is helping people make money through a blog or website.

What is a “Web Revenue Blog”?
Blogs that focus on affiliate marketing, display advertising, contextual advertising, and actually helping people generate revenue in these ways by running their own site. This blog is a good example, as well as others in the list.

I’ve intentionally left out company blogs in this area like the YPN Blog, Inside Adsense, and others. I’ve also left out blogs that really just only cover news, or blogs that are really heavy on search engine news and optimization tips. The blogs in these rankings spend a lot of their time talking about making money from a website or blog.

Why make these rankings?
As I mentioned above, I don’t think any one service shows the whole picture. I was also interested to see how my blog stacked up agains the competition, and wanted to motivate myself. Additionally, I think this will help people find some good blogs that they can learn from, and it’s good to study these bloggers as the top ones are doing many things right.

How are the rankings calculated?
These rankings are a way to just calculate which blogs are the most popular and have the most influence in this industry. Therefore, I decided to try and find a way to combine link quantity, link authority, and actual site traffic. I took data from numerous sources, and then gave each blog a score for their ranking in that category. So if a blog was #1 in Alexa rank, they received a score of “1″ for that category. Then I averaged the scores across each data source to get an average score, and ranked the blogs in that order. I think it’d also be valuable to combine RSS subscribers into the rankings, but not all of the bloggers in the rankings publish their Feedburner subscriber count.

Is this perfect? No, and I’d be happy to hear comments on other data I should include or ways to change the formula.

The following is the data sources and why they were included:

Technorati Ranking – Provides the number of links from blogs to other blogs, and is the most commonly referred to blog ranking system. It relies on quantity of links from other blogs combined with the number of blogs doing the actual linking.

Alexa – Measures the number of visitors to a site based on Alexa toolbar installations on people’s computers. The data tends to favor the type of blogs we’re ranking, but can be easily skewed and is more accurate for the most popular sites out there.

Compete – Uses the number of unique visitors to a site based on USA visitors only. This data is also based on a panel like Comscore. Unfortunately this data is for the the USA audience only. It also only attempts to rank the top one million sites, and a few of the blogs in these rankings had no data in Compete.

Quantcast – A newer entry to the data sites, Quantcast measures site traffic by analyzing data provided by ISPs and various partners. They also allow website owners to put their code on your site so they can more accurately report your data. They also provide some other cool data about your site if you do this, and it can be very handy if you need to provide demographics to advertisers. A few blogs in these rankings also had no Quantcast data, so I’d recommend they ad the Quantcast code to make sure they get ranked.

Google Pagerank – Yes, I know Pagerank is just a number and doesn’t mean anything, but I think everyone can also agree that a site with a pagerank of 7/10 has a higher link authority than a site that has a 4/10. What that means for search results is irrelevant for these rankings, it’s more of a way to try and get some link authority into our data.

Yahoo Links – Google’s “link:” command doesn’t provide a full set of data, and we’re using Pagerank already, so I used Yahoo! Search to get a more full set of links to a site. Why do this when we have Technorati? Well, Technorati is only tracking blog links, while Yahoo is getting links from any type of site.

Now that’s past us, let’s get on to the rankings. I’m sure there are a ton of blogs not listed here that should be. I compiled this list as they are blogs I read or that I knew were some of the most popular. If you know of a blog that should be included, add it in the comments and I’ll compile the data.

Web Revenue Blog Rankings

Blog T-rati Alexa Compete Quantcast P-Rank Yahoo Score
Problogger 1 2 2 1 1 1 1.33
ShoeMoney 2 1 8 8 2 2 3.83
JohnChow 3 3 6 5 4 4 4.17
AffiliateTip 5 6 7 6 2 7 5.50
Jensense 4 5 11 10 2 3 5.83
5 Star Affiliate 7 4 3 15 3 6 6.33
JoelComm 15 8 4 4 2 5 6.33
TamingTheBeast 12 9 1 2 3 16 7.17
ConversionRater 6 14 10 7 3 9 8.17
MEMWGA 15 12 5 3 3 15 8.83
AOJon 8 10 11 12 3 10 9.00
TylerCruz 9 11 11 13 3 8 9.17
WebsitePublisher 13 7 9 9 3 14 9.17
CostPerNews 11 13 11 11 3 12 10.17
WebPublishingBlog 10 15 11 14 3 11 10.67
LeeDodd 14 16 11 15 5 13 12.33

You can see the raw data with the actual rankings from each service here.

Interesting Notes
Darren Rowse and ProBlogger was far and away the winner as the site with the best rankingt in 4 of the 6 categories, and was second in the other two. The only blog with a Google Page Rank of 7/10, one of the two Technorati Top 100 members (Shoemoney being the other), and his 437,368 Yahoo links was way ahead of the #2 which was ShoeMoney with 53,173.

A few of the sites benefit from having content beyond a normal blog which probably helps in a few of the different rankings. Those sites are Shawn Collins Affiliate Tip, TamingTheBeast.net, 5 Star Affiliate, WebsitePublisher.net, and Make Easy Money With Google Adsense.

Even though LeeDodd.com comes up at the bottom of the rankings, I expect it to be a fast mover up the list. He already has a presence in the community with EarnersForum and the Elite Retreat events, and his blog is very new but is moving up in Alexa fast.

Various sites didn’t show up in one of the ratings services, so you’ll see them tied with their score in the categories above. For JoelComm.com and Make Money With Adsense they could easily claim their blogs in Technorati to get listed their rankings, and for the blogs not in Quantcast they could add the Quantcast code to their page to get ranked.

When will the next rankings be released?
I think I’ll update these rankings as much as it makes sense. I expect new blogs to join the rankings, but I won’t publish new rankings unless there is decent movement within the rankings. There isn’t much of a point to do it each month if there is very little change. I’ll check again in a month to see if it make sense to update the rankings.

Feedback is welcome on how to improve these rankings and what blogs should be included that aren’t here now.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blogging, Publishing

Top 11 Publisher Ad Tools That Help You Make More Money

February 13, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

I always enjoy posts from bloggers where they mention the top tools or resources they use to master whatever it is they are an expert in. Along those lines, I thought it’d be a good dea to pass along the list of the top ad tools I use and know of to help web publishers and bloggers make more money.

The basic assumption for these tools to be useful to you is that you run a blog or website that uses advertising to make money whether that advertising is sold directly by you, through an ad network, or you use a contextual solution like Google Adsense or YPN. Some of them are very direct in how they help make more money, and some of them are helpful tools that provide information to help you make more money from your advertising. For the most part they are free tools with a couple of exceptions.

crazyegg logoCrazyEgg
Self-described as a visualization tool to improve, test, and track your site, CrazyEgg is best used for publishers to generate “heatmaps” of where people are clicking on their site. This data can be used to make better decisions on where to place ads to get more clicks and response from users. CrazyEgg allows you to set up tests so you can effectively test the difference between two different ad sizes in the same spot, two different color palettes, or totally changing an ad’s location.

It’s easy to setup, it just requires signing up for an account and placing some code in your page footer. You then create a test and start tracking clicks. The free version allows you to track up to 5,000 visits and track 4 different pages at once. There are paid plans if you want to do more in-depth tests.

RMX Direct LogoRMX Direct
If you’re working with ad networks, you should be working with RMX Direct. RMX Direct is a free ad network manager that helps you sell your inventory easily and for maximum revenue. It allows you to work with networks directly that are part of the Right Media Exchange, as well as auction your own ad networks like Google Adsense, YPN, Valueclick, Tribal Fusion, or anyone else.

Auctioning your inventory is the best way to maximize your revenue, and RMX Direct has other cool features that make managing ad networks a much better process. Check out a previous post about using it manage contextual ad networks.

feedburner logoFeedburner
If you run a blog or a website with RSS, you need to be running your RSS feed(s) through Feedburner. There are numerous benefits alone in the streamlining, analyzing, and optimizing of RSS feeds by using Feedburner, but if you have enough subscribers it’s an ad revenue stream as well. If I wasn’t consolidating and tracking my RSS subscribers through my Feedburner feed, I probably would have never bothered advertising within my feed. Feedburner makes it extremely easy to advertise in your feed once you hit 500 subscribers, so I’m now just making additional revenue without additional work. Bravo.

AdsBlackList
If you’re using Google Adsense, you should be using AdsBlackList. It’s a site that compiles user submissions of sites that are “Made For Adsense” sites and low cost per click advertisers. When you sign up for an account, it has you enter your site and some keywords about it. It then returns a list of “Made for Adsense” and low cost per click advertisers you can then ban from showing ads on your site. Besides probably helping increase the quality of ads, you’re also hurting the distribution of a lot of junk in Google’s system. I have not run specific tests on if the overall revenue per click goes up after banning their suggested lists, but other publishers have reported good results.

Google Analytics LogoGoogle Analytics
Yes, it has performance issues. Yes, there is a lag time before you get your data. Yes, it’s Google. However, Google Analytics is still the most complete free web analytics tool out there. For this article, the benefit of Google Analytics as it relates to ad revenue is that you need to analyze your traffic and find out what type of content is interesting to them, what keywords are they using to find you, what referring sites are there, and what geography your users from.

Armed with that data you can now make decisions. Can you identify an underserved area of your site that users are interested in? Interested users means more page views which equals more money! Do you have a lot of visitors from a foreign country? Perhaps it’d be good to sign up with an ad network based in that country and geotarget it to those users with a tool like RMX Direct? You can’t make smart decisions without data, and Google Analytics provides it for free.

amigo-logo-lowres.pngAmigo
For those of you who are still signing up users for email newsletters, Amigo operates much like an ad network except it’s a tool for email advertising. Sign up with Amigo and they’ll match ads and stick ads into your email newsletters earning you additional revenue. If you don’t have an email newsletter, maybe it’s time to start one?

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
I know this tool is meant for Adwords advertisers, but it can be a great way for publishers to find out what search phrases are paying a lot per click if they’re using Adsense or YPN. Click on the “Site-related Keywords” tab, and enter in the URL of a site in the topic you’d like to research. Check the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” box, then select “Cost and Ad Position Estimates”, and enter something large like $50.00. You’ll get a result that shows keywords along with an estimate of the CPC they require to get to the estimated ad position.

This is a rough way to find out what topics and terms are generating high revenue per click to focus your content. You can also get estimates of search volume and search volume trends if you’re curious as to how the keywords in the topic stack up there.

Yahoo/Overture Keyword Tool
The famous Yahoo/Overture tool returns keywords that contain the keyword you enter, along with the number of searches on Yahoo Search from the previous month. Many question the accuracy of this data as some strange terms sometimes have really high search counts, but regardless it can be a good estimate of search volume and provides a way to brainstorm additional topics to cover to get more traffic and ad revenue. It also provides a good counterbalance if you’re using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If a keyword looks interesting to you in both tools, chances are it’s an interesting keyword in reality.

quantcast dataQuantcast
A newer and very cool data/ranking service is out called Quantcast. Quantcast “quantifies” publisher sites and provides an Alexa-like traffic estimate and ranking, but takes it a step further and provides demographic estimates of your audience such as age, gender, household income, ethnicity, and education.

It doesn’t stop there either, and shows interesting things like “Siteographics” which shows what entertainment the audience likes, what retail stores they shop at, and what magazines they check out. It also shows what keywords they used and what other sites are similar in audience. Here is the Quantcast data for YouTube.com.

Why is this cool? Well, once you start selling advertising on your site directly to advertisers, they are often interested in demographic data. The beauty of Quantcast is that they’ll get the data for you and you can point advertisers to this objective third party that has the data. If your site is big enough, they probably already have you listed. If not, you “Quantify” your site by placing a bit of code in the footer of your site template and it will start grabbing the data.

SurveyMonkey
If you don’t trust Quantcast or want your own specific data, you can use SurveyMonkey to create surveys you can show to your audience via popup windows or direct link. It’s a free service, and is pretty easy to use to setup surveys and distribute them.

Just like the benefits of Quantcast, this is great data to provide to advertisers about your audience, and SurveyMonkey results make a great addition to your online media kit or page that pitches advertising on your site.

Webmaster Forums
While not specifically a tool, I felt it necessary to point out some of the top discussion forums where there are web publishers talking about advertising and how to make more money. In no particular order here are ones that I’ve found value in on a consistent basis:

Conclusion
If you have additional tools to suggest, please list them below in the comments. If they make sense, I’ll add them to the list.

Filed Under: Ad Networks, Advertising, Blogging, Direct Media Exchange, Google, Publishing, Random, Right Media, Web 2.0, Web Analytics, Yahoo

10 Ways to Use an Ad Server to Dominate With Contextual Ad Networks

February 7, 2007 by Pat McCarthy View Comments

YPN LogoOver the last few years contextual ad networks such as the Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Adsense have become powerhouses in the publisher advertising world. Even though ad servers were around long before these networks, many publishers and bloggers don’t bother using ad servers when working with them.

google_sm.gifPart of the reason is they make it pretty easy to just slap their ad code on your site and get going, however that’s EXACTLY what they want you to do because then they own all access to that inventory. It can really help you dominate with contextual ad networks if you use an ad server in the ways listed below. Note: RMX Direct is the example ad server being used because it’s free, does all these things, and is the ad server I’m most familiar with at the moment. However, many of these concepts will work with other ad serving options.

1. Set Frequency Caps
Frequency capping is when you specify that you want to only allow a certain advertiser or ad network to receive a set number of impressions over a time period per user. For example, you could specify that you only want to show 10 Adsense impressions per hour per user. The rest of the impressions they’d get could be YPN, or other ad networks you may be working with. Why do this? The main reason is that if you just always show Adsense, the same ads are often shown throughout your site. If a user hasn’t clicked on any after a certain number of impressions, it may help to show YPN ads that have different ads, or YPN ads with a different visual look, or maybe even show CPM display ads.

coloredad.gif2. Manage Multiple Color Palettes
With the recent Adsense policy changes requiring competing networks to have ads that have a different visual “look”, an ad server can make it easier to manage multiple color palettes. As mentioned above you can use frequency capping to run different visual looks, but you can also easily manage the delivery of those visual looks by creating multiple campaigns/placements in an ad server that can easily be turned on or off, and have the details adjusted.

3. Combat Smart Pricing
I’m not entirely sure if YPN has “Smart Pricing”, but with AdSense if you are serving ads across multiple websites and one of the websites has clicks not converting as well as others, that website will drag down your revenue per click as a whole. See more information on “Smart Pricing” here or here. Many publishers who realize this and deactivate Adsense from their poorly performing sites see an increase in click payouts due to smart pricing. With RMX Direct, if you suspect that one of your websites may be hurting your overall revenue per click due to Smart Pricing, you can stop serving AdSense ads to that site with the click of a button. There is no need to take down ad code off the site since it’s controlled through the ad server. Then you can also turn it back on with the click of a button, switch it to YPN ads, or do something else with it. It’s much easier and quicker than jockeying code around all over the place.

4. Track Impressions From Multiple Networks In One Spot
One thing that’s always annoying about working with multiple ad networks is having to login to multiple reporting systems to get data. With RMX Direct or another ad server, you can see your impressions for YPN and AdSense all in one place. Unfortunately, at this point most ad servers can’t show revenue data because the amount paid per click varies. As Adsense and YPN move more forward with APIs, we’ll probably see more ad servers finding ways to import that data as well.

5. Work Display Advertising Into The Mix
Users can become blind to contextual text advertisements, which can result in low click-through rates meaning poor revenue for you. Why not put some guaranteed revenue in your pocket by adding CPM display advertisements into the mix? RMX Direct takes that idea one step further beyond normal ad servers, as it has display networks built into the product to apply to and work with easily. They will compete with the prices of your contextual ad networks, making it a guarantee you’ll only earn more revenue. Competition is a beautiful thing.

But what about the “low” quality of many graphic ads? Excuse the sales pitch, but RMX Direct also has a tool called Media Guard that allows for insane control of the characteristics of ads you don’t want appearing on your site.

6. Analyze Geographic Distribution of Ads
The reporting systems of the contextual networks don’t give any geographical breakdown of where your ad impressions are coming from. Knowing this information can help you make decisions on the type of content you create, or if it makes sense to geotarget your ads. If you found out today that 70% of your ad impressions were coming from Europe, it might make sense to create more content for that audience. You can also set up channels with contextual networks and test using different color palettes in different countries to see the results. Different cultures feel different ways about various colors, it wouldn’t be surprising if users from different countries respond to ads differently.

similarpubs.gif7. Learn From Similar Publishers
This one isn’t available in most ad serving products, but one of the most powerful features of RMX Direct is our community. Sure, you can find a forum out there of AdSense or YPN publishers, but can you find a forum of people who are using both, plus a number of other ad networks at the same time? Our forum is full of publishers just like you who have been there and done that. Ask them for advice, they’ll be happy to help (as will the RMX Direct support staff).

8. Get RSS Reports of Impressions and Revenue Estimations
Building upon the idea of tracking impressions from multiple ad networks in one spot, some ad servers feature RSS reporting so you can get your stats right in your RSS reader. Again, with the contextual networks, at this point only the number of impressions shown can accurately be reported, along with an estimation of revenue if you’re using RMX Direct. But if you’re using the display networks in RMX Direct, it’s very handy to get the real revenue statistics through RSS.

Tracking Impressions

9. Work With As Many Networks As You Can Handle
If your website doesn’t have much traffic, then you don’t need to work with many ad networks. However, if you get a decent amount of traffic and take advertising seriously, you should definitely work with as many ad networks as it makes sense for your traffic levels. To start out with, you have the ability to sign up with nine ad networks from the Right Media Exchange. However, once you start adding additional ad networks in, the sky is the limit. Work with whatever contextual networks you want. If fact, you can add networks from the whole spectrum, more display networks, more contextual networks, and even more affiliate advertisers.

10. Geotarget Your Ads
Which does better in Asia, YPN or AdSense? Want to find out? With RMX Direct, you can geotarget your advertising placements. It’s useful in a number of situations. Let me give you an example: let’s say you’ve noticed a spike in clicks from Russia and you’re worried about click fraud. The solution is simple, turn off contextual ad serving to that area with a quick click and save (if the problem is severe, please notify your ad network). As mentioned above, you can also target color palettes to specific regions, or eliminate showing contextual ads to any countries beyond the USA if you want to show different types of ads to international users. The power is in your hands.

Geotarget Ads

Bonus tip: Instead of PSAs, show display ads.
With some contextual networks, you can specific what you want to do in the event a public service announcement (PSA) needs to be served. Well, don’t lose that impression and the money that comes with it, send it to an ad server like RMX Direct where you have display networks that can pay you a CPM for that impression. Simply put RMX Direct ad code into an HTML file and point the network to it. Behold, 100% fill rate for your advertising.

psa_small.gif

Conclusion
Hopefully the above tips showed that a whole new level of power is available in managing contextual networks by using an ad server. You put the control in your own hands and can use it to optimize your contextual advertising.

Filed Under: Ad Networks, Advertising, Direct Media Exchange, Google, Publishing, Random, Yahoo
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