Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I watched the movie Titanic with Leo and Kate on Friday night. It’s a good movie and afterwards I was interested to learn more about the tragedy so I Googled up some answers. As I progressed through page after page something started to bother me. I had trouble finding the real content because there was Google AdSense in all the most prominent places on EVERY site I visited. It wasn’t until I hit the “clean” Wikipedia entry on the Titanic that I finally got some valuable information.

Google has to be commended for providing one of the best ways to monetize a website. It’s so good because even the most average Webmaster can easily cut and paste some code to start earning some cash from their web property. Even sites that have a clear purpose and real content still apply some AdSense here and there for the “extra cash” that can be earned. Afterall you would rather someone clicked AdSense ads on your site when they exit so you get your 20 cents.

The problem is that when a webmaster gets a taste for the money suddenly their eyes start to sparkle and you hear that “cha-ching” noise. The possibility dawns - I can make real money on the Internet - and suddenly the motivation behind building the website goes from one of indulging in a hobby to making money. More and more AdSense blocks appear on sites and it becomes harder to find the real content.

Theoretically of course you would think that the AdSense ads themselves should have the content I’m looking for. For me personally I long ago caught “AdSense blindness” unless it’s a very specific Google search. Any AdSense on websites I ignore, just the way I ignored banners in their heyday. Plus most AdSense ads are for products or services relating to my keyword -rarely does an AdSense ad actually provide the best free content about a topic, afterall, the AdWords buyer is usually there to make sales.

Now we are faced with a situation where AdSense is proliferating at an outstanding rate and thousands of webmasters build sites specifically to earn money. Many of these site owners realize that content is still important, so they work hard to locate original content for their sites, but it’s still contrived content - just enough to get some reasonable Google rankings so the traffic starts to trickle in and the AdSense clicks increase. It’s not content created from a genuine interest in the subject. Compare this to a webmaster who hasn’t discovered AdSense yet and builds a site to provide the best content. Money doesn’t come into the motivation equation at all in this case.

But does that matter? Does the quality of our Internet increase or decrease if everyone who publishes a website does it, at least partially, to make money?

If we go back to the days before AdSense people were trying to make money. They did it much the same as they do now - with affiliate programs and CPM banner campaigns - AdSense just added another, very effective monetization method. Perhaps my argument is moot - money will always be part of the motivation.

AdSense made it all too easy. When your average hobbyist can actually see that $5 a day come in there is an immediate impact on their motivation. The taste of the money is so much more tangible because the results are quick and easy. It’s because banner ads and affiliate marketing are generally harder for novices to have significant success with that they don’t spark the same far-reaching penetration that AdSense does.

Maybe Google AdSense will begin to perform poorly for advertisers and “blindness” may become a problem like it did for banners. However I don’t think the impact will ever be significant. The average net user does not see text as advertising and I don’t see that characteristic changing. This means finding the real answer to our questions may become harder and harder as more site owners drown their content with AdSense to make money. I find that quite ironic considering Google came about as a better alternative to finding answers to questions.

Yaro Starak

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I’ve recently become impressed with the potential for making money from a website by selling text link ads. During May I generated over $250 USD from selling text links on my blogs just from the brokerage service provided by Text-Link-Ads.com. It’s not a huge amount of money but it’s cash I didn’t have before. If you are aiming to become a full time blogger then any extra sources of income helps, so you may want to try selling text links yourself.

John Webster from AdBrite Guide contacted me about his new website aimed at helping publishers and advertisers maximize their return from another text link broker, AdBrite.com. AdBrite offers a similar service to Text-Link-Ads.com, brokering deals between website publishers and advertisers. As a blog publisher this means you can leave the selling of your advertising inventory to companies like AdBrite while you just work on making the best blog you can. All you have to do is add your site to their system, place some code on your site, then watch the money roll in (theoritically at least!).

Of course factors such as how much traffic you have, what industry your site is in, your site’s PageRank (What is PageRank?) and where you place the add code will determine how much you make, but as I said, anything is better than nothing, so it’s worth a try.

John kindly offered a list of tips for me to publish to help you get the most out of AdBrite as a publisher and an advertiser. I’m posting the tips for AdBrite publishers (those wanting to make money from text links) here. The AdBrite advertiser tips (those wanting to generate traffic from buying links) are posted on my other blog, Small Business Branding.

Tips To Maximize Your AdBrite Income

1. Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.
2. Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.
3. Spend some time tagging your site and giving proper demographic information.
4. In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.
5. AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as opposed to just MANY backfill placements.
6. Hard code all placements because of the concreteness of “your ad here”. Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn’t perform as well.
7. Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.
8. Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.
9. Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.

You can find more AdBrite publishers tips and AdBrite advertisers tips at AdBriteGuide.com

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I’m going to be brutally honest with you - I don’t like Google AdSense. I admire what Google has created with the AdWords/AdSense program. I admire those bloggers and website owners that make thousands of dollars from AdSense. I intend to one day draw extensive income from AdSense as I build a website portfolio, but for Entrepreneur’s Journey AdSense is not what I want.

I just finished reading an article, How AdSense Lowers Site-Self-Esteem, which reminded me again that AdSense should not always be the monetization drawcard that you rely upon. I’ve believed this all along since my very first money making website did not use AdSense but still made 100% of its income from advertising. I attracted advertisers myself by pitching to businesses that would clearly be interested in my audience (if you want to know more read this article - How to Make Money from Your Website Using Advertising). There was no middle man, I didn’t have to wonder how much money Google was generous enough to pay me per click and the advertisements were always clearly targeted at my audience and approved by me.

I fostered long term relationships with some of my sponsors, which was a comfortable thought compared to the whims of the Googlebot deciding how much traffic you get and consequently how much money you earn. My traffic back then was not reliant upon Google, it was mostly based on word of mouth and a loyal return audience. As long as my website was up I enjoyed a stable following, a stable income and no dependency on Google or any single major source. I would argue that it was a more stable business model than relying on AdSense and search traffic. Of course it’s not easy to get a site to that position but once you are there you can enjoy the fruits of your labour. I believe Entrepreneur’s Journey should follow this formula.

This blog is new and operates in an industry that has some fairly stiff competition. Right now I don’t get much search traffic, I expect that it will improve overtime and probably continue to improve as long as I keep doing what I am doing, but I never plan on search traffic being my bread and butter. It’s more the icing on the cake. My successes so far and I expect in the future will come from one thing - producing content that helps people and is consequently spread through word of mouth and linking. My audience will most likely always be repeat visitors coming back through RSS or bookmarking. This is not a bad thing. Yes search traffic is always valuable and no doubt some search visitors are converted to repeat visitors, but I’m fairly confident I understand how my audience will be built and it won’t be on the shoulders of Google.

Back to AdSense. As the above mentioned article on website self-esteem notes, most bloggers are writers first and advertisement seekers second. Yes the new breed of probloggers do seek specifically to earn an income from their blogging efforts but I feel most of us out there blogging are doing it for other reasons. Money can act as a powerful motivator and I wouldn’t be writing this article if AdSense on this blog brought in $100 a day, but it doesn’t nor do I expect it ever will, and it definitely won’t without me crossing the boundary from “just a few ad blocks” into the “adblocks wherever I can find space” philosophy.

AdSense is a great service but it appeals because it’s easy. It’s simple to insert into a website. It makes money based on clicks and does the job of finding relevant advertisers for us. I’ve put it on my website to test it and my conclusion is that I don’t want it and I don’t need it. I don’t like the type of ads it displays, I don’t like that it’s proliferating all over the Internet and becoming the banner ad of web 2.0. Yes it’s great technology but I already hear the whispers…oh, those things, yeah, I ignore them because I know they are ads just like the old banners…

Worst of all I don’t like the way it’s making bloggers think. By bloggers I include myself too. AdSense makes me greedy. AdSense makes me trick myself into thinking that making money online is easy. It’s never easy. Online business only rewards hard work, research, clever thinking and people that take action not once, or twice, but every day.

Right now I like that my blog can give without necessary expecting anything in return. I like that I’m in a position with my finances and my personal congruency to be comfortable investing so much time into a project that currently has a financial return of about $1 an hour.

I’m no saint though. I’m in this for the money. I’m motivated by the money. I blog and write and put up affiliate programs because I want to achieve complete financial freedom. I want to be rich too.

As a daily exercise I remind myself to be patient. I work hard to produce content and focus on producing words that will bring more and more people to this site. I know that it’s all about eyeballs - the more people I help the more I help myself. The larger my hit count the greater my potential to earn from my website, even if I’m not exactly sure the methodology for converting eyeballs into coins…not yet anyway, that’s why I test. For the time being I’m close enough to being content with my progress that I can say no to AdSense.

I’ll leave with one last comment - if anyone would like to advertise on this blog, email me, I’m open to discuss anything.

Yaro Starak
Blogging For Fun And Profit

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I’ve mentioned AdBrite and Text-Link-Ads as options to make money from your website or to buy advertising to bring in traffic and raise your PageRank. A third option targeted specifically at the blogosphere is BlogAds.

BlogAds operates much like the other two services except they target only blogs and not general websites. This is a nice niche and as you can imagine makes for a powerful advertising method. Blogs in general have more sway with their audience because of the personal, human-to-human relationship bloggers enjoy with their readership. Generally if a blogger recommends a product or service, his or her audience will take the recommendation as word-of-mouth rather than perceive it as advertising, especially if the blogger has a reputation for honesty, integrity and experience in his or her chosen field. Placing an ad on a blog won’t quite have the same effect but it may enjoy more credibility than placing the same ad on a commercial website.

From the bloggers point of view BlogAds offers another method to monetise their audience. BlogAds won’t take just any blogs on board, there is a screening process and they will take a 30% cut of each advertising sale. BlogAds state that the average blogger makes $50 per month and the lucky few make as much as $5000 per month. The system offers a simple submission form hosted by BlogAds so you don’t have to do much once you are approved to join the network. You copy the “Your Ad Here” code onto your blog and any interested advertiser can click through and purchase an add. Delivery and payment are automatic and you can manually approve all advertiser applications. BlogAds also allows you to write your own sales copy that is displayed to potential advertisers which is a nice touch, allowing you to personalise the selling process and carefully pitch what your blog is about.

If you are interested in trying this method on your blog you can view the submission details.

While not appearing nearly as professionally branded as AdBrite or Text-Link-Ads, BlogAds does have it’s appeal. It looks like a simple blog itself and feels more like a human being is running the show rather than a corporate entity, a no doubt important selling point to attract bloggers that value community over commercialism.

BlogAds stresses the community nature of it’s network to potential advertisers and warns them that a standard advertisement like you would run on a site like MSNBC.com may not perform as well on blogs. Blog advertising rewards creative and savvy advertisers that can connect and empathise with the community they are trying to reach.

No doubt as more and more blogs are added to the BlogAds network it will become very appealing to advertisers to leverage this advertising method. I expect many bloggers will look to systems like this to form the bulk of their revenue strategy and hopefully over time it will reward popular blogs with enough funding that they can rely on it for a living. For the time being it offers small-time bloggers perhaps enough money to supplement hosting costs, but you certainly should not be thinking about quitting that day job just yet!

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I like this idea - SavvySoloCAST - by Michael Pollock who runs smallbusinessbranding. The SavvySoloCAST will collect audio cast (podcasts) interviews of entrepreneurs.

SavvySoloCAST: Tune in each week as I speak with successful, savvy solopreneurs and recognized experts who know what it takes to build a thriving business. Learn from their success. Be inspired by their stories. And most of all, use what you hear to become more savvy and successful in your own business.

This idea is similar to an idea I wrote about in my previous post, a What do you do with your life? Blog that collects audio interviews with a range of people talking about their lives, what motivates them, how they reached a decision on what they are meant to do in life (if they managed to figure it out!). I suggested that this idea was best left as a not-for-profit operation. Why? Because I don’t think it would be easy to make money from it, which I believe is an inherent problem with a lot of web business ideas.

Michael notes this problem too in this post about his SavvySoloCAST project:

You may remember my goal is to turn this project into a revenue generating entity, and frankly, I’m not sure how I’m doing that yet. The problem with “podcasts” is most of them are free, and so people come to believe all of them should be free. And if they’re not free, well then they’re just lame. Could go the advertising route as many blogs have done but that seems boring to me. More later as it picture gets clearer.

I’ve had numerous conversations with web entrepreneurs about this topic and many of them agree that the revenue models for web business are often poorly thought out and depend too heavily on advertising for success. Back in the DotComBoom it was accepted that you didn’t have to worry too much about your revenue model, it was all about investment capital and IPO’s. Of course this eventually led to a crash and nowadays web business, like normal business, has to show sound revenue models and profit forecasts. They need a sustainable way to make money - who would have thought that!

The Internet has largely been driven by free information. Users expect services and information to be provided for free and are very reluctant to spend. Previously entrepreneurs used the logic that they could capture the market benefiting from network effects and then worry about making money either from advertising or by charging for services.

Unfortunately many web businesses quickly realised that advertising revenue sometimes wasn’t enough to even cover costs let alone make a significant profit, and as soon as they started charging for their services their audience quickly ran off to the nearest copy-cat free service provider out there.

So what is a web entrepreneur to do? You have a brilliant idea that will likely find an audience but how can you make money from it?

Read the rest of this entry >>

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