I’ve been hearing a lot about you, and you have been my inspiration to blog. Like what you said in this article, content is really very important and I hope I could eventually help other people through the content I give. Thanks again.

Sincerely,
Anna

Just wondering why don’t you make use of the blank space of the right side of your page for Google Adsense campaign?

Or perhaps you think by running this campaign, it will drive away your traffic to other sites?

How do you make money from marketing your blog, from the banner ads?

I’m having difficulty finding your site (entrepreneurs-journey.com) on the MDH site for obvious reasons.

Any clue what I should be looking out for?

Very True, Marketing gimmiks like MDH are timely bubbles which I am sure won’t last for long. Idea is to find repeated readers who find your content interesting.

Fair comment about the budget. Bad phrasing on my part but I would be surprised if many people here have less of a budget than me. See the following article for an explanation of why I say that:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1560905,00.html

As you say, the generic nature of the ‘product’ is a key factor in any possible success with this approach. With long tail possibilities stretching to years and decades and the publishing world in a state of flux, artists need to look to the future and learn from the entrepreneurs of the world.

Thanks for the comments and interesting blog.

Fad-piggybacking. I like it.

Thank you for the lengthy comment. It sounds like your MDH experiment went well. I think perhaps saying that you have no budget is not quite accurate – you did have enough of a budget to purchase a significantly sized MDH ad, which is probably beyond a lot of the readers of this blog.

What you are pitching is reasonably generic, a book, so the untargeted market is not quite as “bad” for you. As you said the exposure is valuable to place that subconscious image and phrase (by the way, nice title – Tom Corven is strangely compelling) in the minds of a mass audience.

I think you have started a really interesting experiment into alternative means to promote a book and utilise the web for exposure.

Fad-piggybacking could be a specialist marketing technique!

I am trying to pioneer a new way of breaking into mass-market publishing. As an unpublished writer, I’m a small voice in a big stadium. The publishing business is on the edge of a disruptive change akin to that experienced in the music industry (once a paper-like reader does for books what mp3 players did for music – 5 years?) and this is why I’m doing things my way. With no budget to play with, I have to get creative. Hence the MDHP ad.

In a few weeks time, I’ll be touring the UK, paying particular attention to University and College campuses. Tom Corven is free as an mp3 recording and a high proportion of students own these. They are also more likely to ‘get’ what I’m on about with one sentence.

My hope was that the large banner would stand out and bring lots of traffic but as many people correctly spell out here, this traffic is mostly untargeted. I did not have great expectations for direct ‘sales’ from this ad. I count a sale as someone listening to the fist two chapters of my (free) novel. The real idea was to get the book jacket into the back of many people’s minds and of course the name, Tom Corven, so that if they see it elsewhere, it’ll tickle their subconscious.

So, where has it got me so far?

My stats are down (happens a lot lately – frustrating!) but estimate that I have had around 30,000 direct click-throughs so far and that half a million people have seen the name on the MDHP. I make the latter guesstimate with lots of wild speculations. The MDHP gets between 50K and 150K visits per day. In any month, this equates 1.5M and 4.5M visits. I think over the period of six weeks so far, 500K unique sets of eyes looking at the ad is a reasonable guess.

A couple of weeks ago, Alex Tew was featured in a double page article in the Times. The journalist contacted and subsequently quoted me in the article. In a separate area, a large copy of the page highlighted the Tom Corven ad and lifted text from my site to explain where it was linked to. With a distribution of approx 3M and a readership of perhaps 6M, my guess is that this brought in another 500K reads.

I’m extremely happy with the results so far but it’s definitely a long-term investment and one which will only work with a large enough ad. (Big secret – I also placed a small 20×30 horrible question mark near the centre – shudder).

This thing will bloom and die quite quickly but in the meantime, the potential for small people to build brands is substantial and over time the ad will seem quite inexpensive.

The following is an email I received yesterday (name excluded for privacy reasons):

———————————————

Paul

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Will be keeping my eye out for the Dreamwords trilogy. I only found your book due to an article in The Times regarding Milliondollarhomepage. I am glad I found it, and I have recommended your story on to others.

Thanks again

———————————————–

None of this of course rubs against your own conclusions but I hope it shines a light from another angle; one that you and your readers will hopefully find interesting.

Paul

You have a high quality site which is way above the fray of most “make money” business sites. This giant puzzle of MDH just looks like a giant Spam site to me. I agree with your posts that content is king and I have found many “gems” on your site.

Keep up the great work!

John

I have recently been brainstorming positioning strategies and keywords to use for my work and products. I don’t want to be just another “online marketer”, there are already a lot of very good (and bad) examples of that – I’m trying to find the right niche that fits me, my style and my content that is small enough that I can get attention and clients (stand out in a crowd of crap) and large enough that I can make a living from it.

Remember, the biggest risk is not taking one. And in saying that, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Write that down.

The first day the ad was up (late September) I got about 400 clicks from it…. since then its slowed down a bit – but I have had over 1000 clicks from it so far in October. Right now its probably averaging a little less than 100 clicks per day.

My strategy is to hope that enough visitors from that site will click on my adsense – or buy pixels on my own site – so I can recoup my investment. Perhaps by the end of the year it will have paid for itself; perhaps not. Additionally, by raising awareness of my site, it has picked up a few more links around the net, which ought to be good for my search engine ranking in the long run.

Would I do it again? No. But it has been a fun experiment….

Prices are anywhere from $0.01 – $40.00 per click. If you flip it around and get into an advertisers shoes they are only willing to pay based on how much value you provide. If a $5 click brings in 100 visitors in a month for $500 and you can convert 5 of those visitors into paying clients AND a client is worth $100 to you in profits, do you keep advertising?

Continuing the smarter marketing theme – if you are intending on purchasing traffic PPC is definitely a lot smarter way to do things. Better off getting 100 targeted visitors rather than 1000 randoms.

What’s the going rate for charging a client for each person you send to their website? (If I had a banner but only charged for each time someone clicks on the banner)

Chris

What alt text would you suggest? I have so much trouble *not* sounding like a get rich scheme working in the Internet business education arena.

You probably heard of the Million Dollar Homepage  – set you by a guy trying to pay for college.  The idea is simple – he has 1,000,000 pixels in an image to sell and you buy a small block (minimum purchase 10 x 10 pixels = …

I think if you had to buy clicks from AdWords then ~10 clicks a day, every day for 5 years would be a very good deal for $100 dollars. Also it’s the conversion rate of the visitors that really determines the value of the advertising. In my experience, search engine traffic is the best for clicking on Adsense, and the type of traffic that comes in 1000s from a big name referral is not that great for clicking ads, but may be good for subscribing to feeds or newsletters.

So, to me, success or failure of an ad campaign depends on more on conversion than just volume of traffic.

Yes, once any and all of us get some money we can binge with, then we can experiment with the unknown and see what works – with hope(s) to make it big!

Chris

People should market to prospects and repeat visitors/customers, not passer-bys. Yes, it’s nice to help someone out, but it should not be a realistic source of targeted users.

I assume the MDW is tracking the clicks on each client and their ad size (# pixels). All this would be a great dataset from which to study – lots a fascinating hypotheses to explore.

Thanks for running the experiment! Chris