Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

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

[ Add Your Comment | 25 Comments ]

I’ve had full text RSS feeds on my blogs from day one. I’ve justified why and I stand by that justification still. Recently there has been a lot of discussion circulating around the blogosphere about people stealing content from RSS feeds. Since feed are so easy to use it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a way to automatically replicate blogs by using RSS.

For a while now I’ve watched my Technorati referral statistics and it’s becoming more and more common to find blogs replicating some of my articles or even replicating all of my articles. They don’t ask for permission and use the content either by copying and pasting or by using an RSS feed scraper which automatically republishes content from RSS feeds of other blogs.

Initially I was bit surprised and angered, especially when I came across a site which blatantly republished all of my articles creating a near-duplicate of my recent content. I’ve shot off a few emails to such sites asking for them to remove my content but somehow I don’t think an email will be enough to get my desired response.

How This Hurts

My biggest concern, and I’ve already noticed this once, is that my search engine rankings will be affected. While I’m confident that it won’t be me that gets the duplicate content penalty since I have so many authority links coming in to my site (it should be the rip-off artists that get the penalty, but you can never be sure), I have noticed at least one instance where a clone of my site has ranked just below my own page in the search engine results page for a particular high-value keyword.

But Does It Really Hurt?

A few weeks ago I woke up to the usual list of emails telling me about each new person who has subscribed to my blog promotion tips newsletter. I check each of these emails to see which sites people are joining up from. This particular morning one of the referrers was from a site that was not mine. The blog clone had recruited a newsletter subscriber for me!

Of course it depends exactly how other people are ripping off your content, but in this case when the culprit is using an automatic RSS publishing tool it republishes my content EXACTLY how it appears, which means it includes all my affiliate links, links back to my site and links to my newsletter. This duplicate site may be stealing my content, but it’s also helping to make sales for me, sign-up newsletter subscribers and bring new visitors back to my site. It’s hard to complain about that.

Overall of course I don’t like people using my content without asking for permission first, but at least it’s not all bad.

Yaro Starak
Blog Content Thief Victim

[ Add Your Comment | 19 Comments ]

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Failure

I’ve cancelled my Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) pay-per-click (PPC) account. It’s a terrible product and I’m not afraid to tell you why.

One problem, the first big problem most people notice especially if they have been using Google’s AdWords system, is how terrible YSM’s system is to use. The interface is awful and after using Google’s system it’s almost physically painful to navigate around YSM. You would think after all this time and so much negative feedback that they would work to update and clean their many-years-old system. It’s not like they can’t get access to Google’s system and see what Google does so much better.

YSM has a monthly minimum spend of $25. That means if you can’t generate enough clicks you will get charged a minimum fee of $25. To combat this you have to struggle with the system to enter in new campaigns in hope of attracting enough clicks to get your moneys worth. Then the quality of the clicks starts to drop because you chase less relevant keywords and your conversion rate suffers.

Of course why this is a real problem is because Yahoo’s network just doesn’t get the traffic that Google does. You can’t get the clicks because Yahoo’s network can’t deliver the impressions.

That’s a fantastic combination for customer dissatisfaction.

To top it all off YSM forces you to pay a $100 joining fee which I have just found out is not refundable. They probably do this so they at least make *some* money from you before leaving dissatisfied.

Okay, I’m being a bit harsh, but I’m frustrated and I’d like Yahoo! to do something about it. The blogosphere is powerful and I suspect there is a good chance my comments may get back to someone who matters at Yahoo!.

Why Google Owns The Pay-Per-Click Industry

I suspect Yahoo! is well aware of the shortcomings of their PPC system, I’m definitely not the first to complain about it. The underlying problem is that Google owns the lion share of the search traffic and is leaping far ahead of every competitor with their ever expanding publisher’s network (Google AdSense). Consequently Google can deliver more impressions and clicks and combined with a far superior system, which is regularly updated and simple enough to be used by small business owners, and you have a recipe for market domination.

Of course Google depends on their PPC system for 90% of their billions of dollars of revenue so as you can imagine, their interest is certainly in retaining a leadership position in the PPC marketplace while MSN and Yahoo! don’t depend on PPC to keep their businesses going (thank goodness for them!).

As you may have heard, MSN and Ask.com have also recently launched pay-per-click systems. Ask.com survived previous years because it made use of Google’s system to generate revenue while it was getting back on it’s feet. Now that it has some momentum it’s decided to try an internal PPC system. Of course MSN could never consider making use of Google’s system so they have been busy playing catch up to launch their own PPC technology, but like Yahoo!, I suspect their system will suffer from low traffic levels since their network just doesn’t have the reach that Google’s does.

And that’s the problem.

Google wins because of the long tail. Google makes such a tremendous amount of money because millions of businesses all around the world operating in millions of markets all use AdWords to promote their wares. The other search engines just can’t service as big a long tail as Google can and can’t offer the results where it matters - targeted traffic - like Google can. Their reach is shorter so their tail is shorter too.

Consider The Typical Small Business Owner

I’m a pretty good example of a reasonably average Google AdWords user. I don’t spend much but I keep at it month after month in my little niches. I use AdWords and get customers. Google understands the end user is millions of average joes like me and works to meet my needs.

PPC needs to satisfy the long tail of users, the average small business joes, who only have so many hours per day to devote to PPC campaigns. Since I follow an 80/20 rule I’ll spend my time where I can get the best results with the least effort. That is Google AdWords.

I don’t want to have multiple options for PPC. I want one system with maximum reach. I want to manage one set of campaigns in one well constructed interface with my ads going across every network to as many targeted searches and content as can be delivered (or that I can pay for).

The Big Boys Playing Together?

Ever since Ask.com (back then, Ask Jeeves) worked with Google in an effective relationship I’ve thought about all the search engines working together. Google will likely remain dominant in the PPC marketplace as long as the market is viable since it depends on it so much. Google has the best technology and provides the best service. Instead of cluttering the market with inferior competitors, who create more systems for small business owners to struggle with in order to market their businesses, why can’t everyone use Google’s system and share the revenue?

Why can’t we just tick a box in AdWords if we want our campaigns to run across Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com? The customer gets the best experience and therefore more customers come on board and the size of the market increases. With a larger market the revenues increase for all participants. A utopian solution where everyone benefits or am I dreaming or misinformed?

I couldn’t begin to speculate whether working together would be more lucrative for the search engines instead of each having their own PPC system. Certainly based on Ask.com’s decision to create their own PPC system you would think it is more profitable than working with Google since they must have done the numbers.

In this case, unfortunately, I think this is a situation where the customer loses because the big boys have to compete. In most circumstances competition benefits the consumer but I think in the PPC war, as the current market sits, it would be better if there was only one system to service the entire industry so the little guys like me can keep it simple.

Yaro Starak
Average Joe

[ Add Your Comment | 19 Comments ]

Download the MP3 [ 33 Minutes - 7.5 MB]

Dave Jackson has a great voice for podcasting and he should since he’s the dean of the School of Podcasting, a membership service to help budding podcasters get their shows up and running. Dave and I had a fun chat about running an online membership service including discussion of various software packages, we delved into his history and looked at the future for his online project. If you like podcasting, plan to launch your own membership service online or just enjoy a fun interview then download this podcast.

Show Notes

• We started with a brief intro to Dave, his School of Podcasting and how he got into podcasting.
• Dave offered some advice on running an online membership service business (including discussion of AMember).
• Next up we looked at how to attract an audience for a podcast.
• I asked Dave about his previous online ventures, including firsttimevisitor.com.
• And we wrapped things up with a look at the pricing of his membership service and the scripts and software he uses to manage School of Podcasting.

[ Add Your Comment | 3 Comments ]

I just finished listening to my most recent audio CD from Perry Marshall as part of my membership to his Renaissance Club (Membership is $29.95 a month and you get a bunch of great stuff thrown in when you sign up plus a monthly hardcopy marketing newsletter and audio CDs in the mail - see here for details).

The audio featured an interview with Stephen Arnold, a “Technology Analyst”. This guy is like a treasure trove of news about Internet companies. I don’t know how he keeps up with it all but he sure sounded off some interesting and very current commentary about the big boys - Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

He discussed internal situations at all three companies and looked at how Google has a competitive advantage because it’s technology infrastructure is so cheap to create. Yet its technology could potentially be an Achilles heel if something ever goes wrong with it and the Google engineers can’t figure out what’s causing the problem because of how distributed their network is (a clustered infrastructure).

Perry and Stephen covered click fraud, what Google is planning for the future, why Google replicating Microsoft Office is not really “that important” because there are much bigger things at stake based on where Google is heading. They looked at advertising models on the web, how Google’s structure is full of geeks while at the other big web firms the geeks are the minority and the suits are the majority, and a whole host of other technology topics. It was a pretty cool listen for an technology geek like myself.

Google Own Economy

What really grabbed my attention was Stephen’s discussion of the potential future situation where Google operates a successful payments system (Google Wallet - Google’s answer to Paypal), Google Base (an online global marketplace - Google’s answer to Craiglist) and Google AdWords, and how all these systems could integrate together.

He painted a fictional scenario where a seller has an item that has little value in the USA but can garner a $100 price tag from a person in Sweden through Google Base. Upon making the sale Google asks the seller what they want to do with the cash - deposit it into their bank account, transfer the funds to AdWords credit or divide it into multiple purposes.

Google essentially becomes the one stop shop of online commerce even more so than it is now. It controls the financial services (flow of funds) and the marketplace (buyers, sellers, advertisers, publishers). No company in history has ever had that much control. Stephen stated that Google isn’t there yet but if it does happen the situation means one company will be very powerful but, hopefully, everyone wins and the whole process becomes quite seamless. Does power corrupt - we will have to wait and see!

I’m a huge fan of pondering the future of technology so I thoroughly enjoyed this CD. Did any of you other Renaissance Members have a listen to it? (I know there are a few who have joined up via this blog - at least 20).

[ Add Your Comment | 11 Comments ]