Well, I have started the game of buying and selling websites. I just purchased King of Arcades - kingofarcades.com last week. It is a flash gaming website with over 2,400 flash games. It is receiving decent traffic from a variety of sources, both organic search traffic, social bookmarking traffic and man other sources. It has a lot of work to be done on it. My goals are to buy and sell sites for profit, of course that is the idea,..right? This is the first stepping stone in what I plan to do. The King of Arcades has a Page Rank (PR) of 2, so I will be doing link exchanges to build up my PR, to one day be able to sell links on my site like I do with MyDentify, my business directory
AmericanEskimoZone is really starting to pick up traffic and it is not even complete yet. I really hope people do not get disappointed seeing a few broken links. I plan on completing this project within the next 2 months. Serious content needs to be added for me to be satisfied. It is starting to show a great potential for what it can be. I just need some time to work on it. There will be some serious content additions fairly soon, as referral keywords are inspiring me to create content based on what users are searching for.
I have been running a New Years promotion on MyDentify.com now for about a week and it has been a huge success so far. There have been over 1,000 user submitted links, and users have requested 5 new categories to place add their link to. Currently the promotion is, free links into the directory, which is normally $5.99. Featured links remain the same price at $22.99. But evey free link entered, counts as 1 ticket to win 5 featured links. I made a few changes to the website, removing the bottom ad unit, larger font sizes on paginated pages, just some minor appearance things that have been bugging me for a while.
I have wanted to buy a proxy for a long time now, but its a very large server hog, so I might stay away from that for a while. My web budget is starting to expand with revenue from MyDentify and my other revenue streams so who knows what the future will bring. As long as I stay focused, it should be nothing short of my goals.
If you could run a website of your own and have an income stream to cover your domain and hosting fees would that make your day? How about if that same income stream increased over time along with your sites growth and you started making $100.00 a week from it. As the more traffic you brought to your website, the more your income increased to even $100.00 a day. Got your attention yet? Im not trying to sell you anything, or get you to try my product, because I don’t have one. Im just giving some insight into how Im using the internet to monetize my websites.
Having a variety of income streams is best because if something were to go wrong with your only stream and you rely on it to survive then you will have a problem. But thats a different topic entirely. You can read my “Dont Put All Your Eggs in One Basket” post to learn more. I use a variety of things to send income my way, I try to be as creative as possible and have it require the least amount of effort. With my main stream,..its basically effortless. Well effortless as in once I have it ready to go in my website. I use Google AdSense as one of my main sources of income. Google AdSense is one of the most popular services out there where you can embed a few lines of code to display ads related to the content of your page. If somebody clicks on that advertisement, you get paid because you referred somebody to their website.
But I like my color palette, will the ads look weird?
AdSense ads are very customizable, you can even see one to the right of this page. Im using a 160×600 skyscraper. It could also be customized to be other sizes and colors. But all I did was embed one snippet of JavaScript and it does the rest automatically. But is it really that simple? In essence yes, but to have it optimized for best performance then it takes a little more work. But you get the idea. Google will pay a publisher monthly if they can earn $100.00 or more. If you dont make it in that one month, they will send it once you do. To be honest its a really cool system they have going.
But how much will this earn me?
There are many factors that Google takes into consideration when determining the click value, most factors are for Google’s eyes only. But some are proven to be true like placing your ads in the “hot spots” of a web page, or above the fold, etc. One other major factor is the keyword that is being targeted to show the relevant ads. For instance content on home mortgages will be worth more of a click value than a website on Pokemon Cards, because the market for competition is much higher and business are competing for clicks. On average people can get paid anywhere from $0.2c to over $1.00! Now thats cool. I have a little formula I created which is common sense but very simple. More traffic = more clicks = more money. The more traffic you get, the more chances you have for someone to click on those banners. Thus generating more income for your website. Now like I said before, once you insert the code all you do is sit back and watch the money come it.
Is AdSense really worth it?
I would definitely say yes. It has proven to me to be a successful source of income both short term and long term. You can monitor your click through rates, impressions and so on. The feeling of knowing you are successfully running a website and profiting off it is a feeling of success and it can only get better if you stick with it. Thats why once you get into AdSense you develop both long term and short term goals to constantly raise the bar to be as successful as possible.
Are there other ways to make money?
Of course there is. You can do link submission, banner advertising on a per customer basis, referral programs and many other various forms of website monetization. I like to use a variety, not only because its safer, but I can get exposed to new services out there that I could benefit from.
The beauty of the internet is mind boggling. There are so many ways to get a piece of the pie, most take a lot of work, and some, not so much. The best way to stay safe when monetizing your website is to use more than one source of income. Here is an example, I will use AdSense because its one of the most popular services out there. - There are some real die hard AdSense users out there, these users don’t have a job, their job is AdSense. They spend their time using AdSense to make cash, and some serious cash at that. Im talking hundreds or thousands of dollars a week and yes, even a day. They are so successful at it that they make more in a week than someone else would working for another company officially employed. But then it hits, AdSense starts to hit a slump, or they get banned for what ever reason. Their only source of income is now gone, and possibly for good. That will mean starting from step 1 all over again. All their hard work is no longer valid and they are at a financial loss. That is not a good situation and thats why by not “putting all your eggs in one basket” is a great thing.
Exploring Your Options:
If you find other sources of income like Yahoo Publisher Ads, ClickBank, Chikita, Kontera, Text Link Ads just to name a few, then they can prevent 100% loss. I am a loyal member of DigitalPoint, more specifically the AdSense section. Day after day after day I hear of people getting banned, or deleted or not being able to use AdSense anymore and all of their income is gone. Explore new ways of supporting your website, try new things. There are some really cool services out there.
A lot of this might sound simple, or common sense, but setting goals is one of the most important things you can do in any variety of things. When it comes to Web Traffic, AdSense, anything really, I always start off with a goal. Once you reach that goal, raise the bar and push just as hard, if not harder. Don’t forget to celebrate once its achieved. By doing so you create more motivation to keep going and succeed In further projects or progressions on your same target. I started doing this with my website traffic. For the first year, I had a target of 25,000 page views. It was very hard at first, but i achieved it. I then raised the bar to 50,000 for the next year. I totally surpassed that and got up to 100,000. I thought to myself, hey I can really push my self on this one, so I set a goal of 1,000,000 page views for year three. Since January 07 to present I am right around the 1,850,000 pageview mark. This is all thanks to setting strong goals and sticking with them. Here is a simple way to break down goals.
This will be one of my little tid-bits of search engine optimization for the day. Use keywords in your titles. By doing so you increase the keyword density and tell search engines that this is important. Although, there are over 1,000 factors that can play into Googles algorithms, this is one small, but important thing you can do. You will also increase your chances of getting better site traffic and ad relevance if using AdSense or other keyword specific ad targeting systems.
Hi im Tim and I love opportunities to try new experiments and take new adventures online. Professionally I am a Digital Media Producer out of Boston, MA and design, develop and produce interactive media.