by Comm, Joel
Figure 3.10 AdsDaq lets you decide how much you want to earn from your ad space.
Begin with a relatively high amount, say $5 per Mille, to see if anyone bites, then gradually drop the amounts until you start receiving ads. As the site grows, continue increasing the amounts so that you’re always receiving the most you can from traffic flow alone.
As you’re playing with AdsDaq, you might also notice that the company offers an AdSense-style contextual system. That’s something you might want to play with, but don’t expect it to perform better than AdSense—or even YPN or Microsoft. The inventory will be much smaller, which means that the targeting will be blunter—and your click-throughs will be lower. On AdsDaq, the CPM ads are the main draw.
MORNING FALLS
Because AdsDaq has no entry requirements, it can be a very useful place to begin. You’ll be able to start monetizing those hard-to-promote spots on your Web pages (e.g., the areas at the top and bottom of the screen), and you’ll be able to practice checking your CPC stats as well as your traffic-based CPM figures.
As your site grows from a few visits a day to several thousand a day, you might want to think about moving up a level. The reason that CPM networks place restrictions on the size of the publishers they accept is that they want to bring in the highest-paying advertisers. Big companies don’t want to have to deal with lots of small sites. They’d rather pay a little more and have their ads seen by the large numbers of people visiting the bigger sites.
As your site grows, generating more money for you and for the ad network, so too does your importance to the network grow. The more money your site is generating for everyone, the more power you have, and the better the service you can demand from the network. While AdsDaq is said to have pretty good customer service, that’s not true for all ad networks, especially those with thousands of small publishers. When you’re just a name on a list, your request to block an ad category or tighten up the targeting can be pretty easy to ignore. As you move up through the ad networks, though, you should find that the number of other publishers on the network falls and the quality of customer service rises.
Morning Falls (www.morningfalls.com/network) is a step up from AdsDaq. It does have a minimum page view demand, but at just 10,000 unique visitors a month or 200,000 impressions, those demands aren’t impossible for even a one-person Internet business to achieve (Figure 3.11).
The implementation is simple, and if you’ve already been using AdsDaq, it should be reasonably familiar. You can think of the site as a second gear you can use once your site has moved away from the curb and is starting to pick up momentum. Even if the CPM ads that Morning Falls gives you don’t actually deliver more income than AdsDaq (though the higher-quality inventory means that they should), at least you can gain a little satisfaction from knowing that you qualify.
VIDEOEGG
Once things are really moving, you can think about applying to become part of VideoEgg’s (www.videoegg.com) network. VideoEgg isn’t strictly a CPM ad network; it calls itself a cost-per-engagement (CPE) network. It’s not entirely clear what that means, but it seems to suggest that the amount you’ll receive from running the company’s ads on your site will depend on what the users do, not just on the numbers who reach your site, making it more like a CPA system. The least they have to do is to mouse over the little video ad box the network supplies. That turns the box into a much larger overlay, which runs a neat video ad (Figure 3.12).
Figure 3.11 Morning Falls takes you just a step higher.
The ads themselves are beautifully done and generally come from large companies like Lexus, BMW, McDonald’s, and AT&T, so you will be showing quality on your site. In return, VideoEgg demands at least 1,000 active users every day. Active users likely means users who have actually watched the ad, not just passed through a page with an ad on it. You might well need a daily rate of perhaps 50,000 unique visitors to deliver that kind of return.
Clearly, VideoEgg isn’t going to be something you’ll be putting on your blog as soon as you launch. It might be something you never put on your blog, either because you’re happy to stay smaller or because you prefer to stick with other kinds of ads. But it does show how far you can go with CPM income. You can start with a small network earning a few extra bucks by placing banners at the top of your page and later find yourself generating really loud KaChings with top-of-the-range video ads served by some of the world’s biggest companies.
Figure 3.12 VideoEgg has some of the coolest ads on the Web. But you have to be big to crack them.
LINKADAGE
An advertiser that pays to put its name on your web site is looking for just one thing: traffic. That advertiser knows that you have the kind of users it is trying to attract, so it’s going to pay you to send them in its direction. But there’s a second benefit to having a link on a web site, and that advantage isn’t the advertiser’s, but yours.
Links improve search engine rankings. Advertising doesn’t.
Despite the billions spent every year on Internet advertising, the most effective way to bring traffic to a web site isn’t ad units, CPM banners, or even affiliate links. It’s the kind of links that you put on your site as part of your content because you like what another site has done. Google built its search engine on those recommendations, and those links determine, in part, where a site appears in search engine results.
Win a top spot in those search results for your most important keywords, and you’ll get massive amounts of targeted traffic for free.
For publishers, being linked to from other web sites is a vital part of marketing. It’s also one of the toughest forms of marketing, so the links have value. Publishers rarely hand out links like these on request; they demand something in return—as you should. That might be something as simple as a return link, but as we’ve seen, it can also be an interview or even a free article. There are plenty of article banks on the Internet stuffed with free (and generally low-quality) content that publishers can put on their own sites provided they include footer information that usually includes an author bio and a link to the author’s own web site. It’s an easy and cheap way to spread links around the Web.
There has always been another way to get your link on another web site. You can pay the publisher. If the link isn’t being delivered through an ad unit but through an informal deal between publishers and advertisers, there’s a good chance that not only will the advertisers get traffic, but they’ll also pick up some improved search engine rankings.
When you’re looking to make money by selling these kinds of links on your site, there are a number of principles to bear in mind.
The first is that the higher your own search engine ranking, the more valuable the link will be. When a high-ranking site links to a lower-ranking site, that lower-ranking site picks up a massive boost. Sites with a page rank of 6 or 7 will always be able to charge more than those with page ranks of 2 or 3. (There are a whole bunch of tools available on the Web that will instantly tell you your page rank, but the most trustworthy is Google’s own toolbar. You can download it for free from www.google.com/toolbar/ff/index.html.)
Like much of Internet business building, the bigger your site grows, the easier it becomes to make money—and the more money you’re going to earn.
That sounds obvious, but it’s an important point that’s often missed. Too many people start Internet businesses expecting to be picking up five-figure checks from Google within a few months of joining AdSense. That doesn’t usually happen. It takes time to build content, collect links, improve your page rank, build an audience and create partnerships with advertisers. Link selling might well become a useful part of your revenue stream, but it’s unlikely to bring in large sums of money until you have the reputation, the traffic, and the Google love to charge giant amounts.
Selling those links isn’t completely straightforward, either. Receiving payments for placing a link on a web site isn’t completely black hat, nor is it entirely white hat. The link
is going to have two benefits: On the one hand, it’s going to help your users reach your advertiser’s web site. That’s legitimate. Every link does that, and Google, after all, has become a multi-billion-dollar company by helping companies do this. Selling links directly simply cuts out the intermediary and lets you pocket the entire fee.
But the link is also supposed to help advertisers improve their own search engine rankings, and that means deceiving Google, at least a little. Google will raise the advertiser’s ranking because it believes that you’ve supplied the link after seeing something on the site you like. You approve of the site, you think it’s something your users should know about, so you’ve told them the site is worth visiting. That tells Google the site is important, so the company tells its searchers that the site is worth visiting, too.
If Google knew that the other site had paid you for that recommendation, it wouldn’t count it. Google does have a way of discounting some of the links that sites receive. A link can be categorized as “dofollow,” and Google will count it, or “nofollow,” and Google won’t. Links placed on Twitter, for example, are generally “nofollow.”
I could tell you that it’s unlikely that Google is going to suddenly declare all of your outgoing links “nofollow” and take away an asset that you can charge for. And I could suggest that when you’re dealing with another site directly, you really should only be accepting links from sites you know and trust.
But in practice that’s not the way things work.
If another publisher asks you directly for a link, then you should either supply it for free—as part of your content or, more usually, a link exchange—or you can offer to sell that publisher advertising. If you’re looking to sell space for text links to sites you’re not familiar with, then there are number of services that act as brokerage houses. Even eBay has been known to list text link space, although the results have usually been pretty poor: Advertisers have paid and received nothing in return.
LinkAdage (www.linkadage.com) is at least reputable and reliable. You can set your own rate for a link, or you can create an auction, ensuring that you receive the best price possible. Typical prices range from $70 to $275 a month for a site with a high page rank. LinkAdage will take a 50 percent fee, however.
COMMISSION JUNCTION
Text link ads used to be very helpful. These days they’ve largely been overtaken by contextual ad systems like AdSense or Chitika. When you’re just starting out, those companies will serve up relevant ads very easily. And when you’re established enough to have the sort of page rank that makes selling links worthwhile, you’ll want to think carefully about doing so. You’ll be linking to the most important sites, anyway, so any link you receive is likely to be a relatively minor site. You might find that it’s just not worth the fee.
That doesn’t mean you should never do it. You’ll just want to weigh the benefits of an additional couple of hundred bucks against the costs of placing links to a site that your users might find disappointing.
More traditional—and more useful—are cost-per-action (CPA) ads. While CPC ads pay solely for a click, and CPM ads pay only tiny amounts every time the page is loaded, CPA ads pay when the user does something the advertiser considers valuable, such as completing a form and becoming a lead or making a purchase.
If that sounds like affiliate advertising, then the idea is exactly the same. I’m going to talk in detail about earning affiliate income later in this book, but there is one vital difference between affiliate advertising and CPA advertising with the help of an agency.
Sign up with a CPA ad agency and you’ll have no idea which ads you’ll be serving. While it’s true that you’ll always have some measure of control—you should be able to block companies you don’t want, and you might be able to pick categories of products you prefer to advertise-the real benefit of using an agency is that you don’t have to do any of that stuff. Once you’ve signed up, you’re making your site available for advertisers to choose you.
Figure 3.13 Commission Junction is among the heavy hitters of CPA advertising.
The fees vary tremendously, but because CPA ads are popular with some very big companies that tend to pick large sites for their distribution, if you can deliver the traffic—and the action—they can give you a pretty nice KaChing.
Lots of different agencies can send CPA ads your way, but one of the most reliable is Commission Junction (www.cj.com) (Figure 3.13). The company now forms part of Value Click, which bought it for $58 million in 2003. (I always said online advertising pays.)
Commission Junction has some nicely detailed stats and some very big names in its advertising networks. You could find that your site is advertising Dell, Yahoo!, Expedia, or HP Those are the kinds of companies that make your site look good—and win clicks from curious users.
That’s a big advantage.
For top-earning publishers—those making more than $10,000 a month from their Commission Junction ads—the company offers a special service with a dedicated account manager. For advertisers, Commission Junction offers different levels of participation (including appearing in search results), which makes it a good place to start, as well as to build a large-scale campaign.
It should be clear that once you’ve created your content, there are lots of different kinds of ads that you can place around it. Contextualized CPC ad networks like AdSense, YPN, and Microsoft’s Content Match, will “read” your pages, serve ads that match the subject, and pay you fees that range from a few cents to tens of dollars for each click the ads receive. Other CPC networks, like Kontera and Chitika, offer additional ways to do the same thing, blending their ads neatly into your page and increasing the chances that you’ll win those clicks.
CPM ads, like those supplied by AdsDaq will pay for your traffic regardless of what your users do, while CPA networks will give you larger amounts, provided your users actually do something. You can even sell text links directly, either by yourself or through a network like LinkAdage.
If that sounds complicated, understand that in practice it’s very simple. Start by placing AdSense on your site. Add Kontera, and if you think it will suit your content, Chitika, too, using AdSense as the alternate. Take the time to optimize and track your AdSense results, and while you’re doing that, also build up your traffic so that when you place CPM ads, you’re making decent money.
Over time, you’ll find yourself discovering which ad formats deliver the most clicks. You’ll come to see which topics deliver the most value. And you’ll start to build up the kind of traffic that makes banner ads worthwhile.
Again, this won’t happen overnight. While you should be able to see some income right away, it might take several months before that income is enough to repay you for the time and effort you’re putting in. But if you’re persistent and determined, if you’re prepared to learn, experiment, and adapt, you’ll get there. Your web site will be generating up to a dozen different types of KaChing from content alone.
But content delivered for free on a web site and supported by ads isn’t the only way to make money with the knowledge you possess. In Chapter 4 I explain how to earn the full value of your expertise ... by selling information products.
4
Information Products—Seeing Your Knowledge
All of the methods that I’ve described so far have been based on the idea that the knowledge you possess has value. Whether you’ve picked up that knowledge from years of practicing your profession or learned it by indulging in your passion, if other people want to know what you know, you have an opportunity to make money.
Everyone has knowledge like that. Everyone can now build a web site to display that knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 3, there are now plenty of different ways to surround that knowledge with advertisements, giving you a steady stream of revenue. You don’t even have to go out and track down the advertisers yourself. Google and other services will serve them up automatically, matching their inventory to your topic.
As long as y
ou’re adding content, bringing in readers, and tweaking those ads until they’re working at full power, you’ll be hearing KaChing.
An ad-supported content site gives your knowledge away for free. You can make a lot of money with it, but that money doesn’t come from the value of your knowledge. It comes from the value your readers have for your advertisers. If your users like to buy lots of things from your advertisers, you’ll make lots of money. If they prefer to read and click away without touching an ad—and some traffic sources have lots of users like that—then you’ll struggle.
In the meantime, you’ll have given away something valuable of your own for little reward.