Making Money
Why a Drop in Adsense Revenue?
I recently made some adjustments to the layout over at PCMech. Nothing I thought was very drastic. I was simply re-organizing some elements and fixing some long-time problems (like creeping CSS layers in IE). Well, after I went live with the new layout, I began keeping a close eye on the various revenue sources. One of the things that caught my eye big time was a drastic reduction in clicks generated by Google Adsense. The CTR (click-through radio) went down by almost 0.5%, which is quite a bit. And since it is clicks which generate revenue, that obviously affects my bottom line.
I had a few theories on why this might be the case and I started looking at the situation. My theories are:
- The ad is placed right next to the tabbed content loader, so perhaps users are more interested in that than the ads.
- When I changed the design, I also changed the URL structure to the articles. I made sure that all the pre-existing URLs to articles still work (don’t want to break any pre-existing links), but I made all the articles use the titles to generate the URL, much like Wordpress does. I did this because using keywords in the URL is much better for SEO than an article ID number. Problem is, all those new URLs are new to Google, too, and the ads may not be as well targeted as they were, thus generating less click traffic.
You can view our new review on the Ion DEC-180 Digital Media Center to see what I am talking about.
Right now, I am leaning toward the second item above as the likely explanation. In order to help just a bit, I went ahead and adjusted the colors of the ads so that the links match the link color in the site’s articles. That is always a good idea. And, to test my theory, I set up a URL channel in Adsense so that I can track revenue based on the URL being used to call up the ad. I have URL channels now set up for the old article URL format, and another for the new article URL format. I can then see which is generating the higher click-through. My guess is that the new URLs just have not been spidered yet by Google. Once they have, I bet the revenue will increase. We shall see, and I will let you know.
Traffic Secrets Course
One of the things I am working on this year, as I have mentioned, is kicking business and revenue into high gear. One of the things I am doing to get this done is to broaden my horizons and learn from others. Now, I’ve already learned alot from others, but one thing I have never done is purchased a course to learn anything about the internet. The other day, however, I did. I picked up The Traffic Secrets course, by John Reese. The thing originally sold for almost $1000, something I doubt I would ever pay. But, now he’s clearing it out for $377. Still steep, but hey it doesn’t take much to pay that much off.
I’ll offer a review of the product once I’ve had a chance to evaluate it. I have a few informational products on PCMech, but I’ve never offered anything that costs that much. And, I have to admit, I was just a bit leery of the product. Not because I doubt it’s quality, but because I’ve seen so many of these one-page ad copy sites trying to sell somebody’s “system” for striking gold. And in most cases, the only one striking gold is the seller of the course. In this case, I got a great testimonial from the guys over at Internet Business Mastery who said they paid full price for this course and found it to be more than worth it. So, hey, like I said, I can fork over the $377 and make that back pretty quickly even if nothing changed with my business. So, what the hell.
Leveraging Your Site
I saw a blog post by Andrew over at Web Publishing Blog which talks about leveraging what you have. I find it amazing how Andrew ends up echoing what I’m doing in my own business over on his blog. This week, leveraging what I have has been big on my mind. And, the end result is that I am getting more done this week than I have in some time.
The situation here has been that, if you extend my revenue stats out for the past year, the graph is pretty flat-lined. If you look back 4 months, it’s a very noticeable downtrend. There is usually a spike in revenue around the holidays so that fact that I’m not generating what I was during that time is not surprising. However, my constant goal here is to always be increasing, even if slightly. So, a year-long flat-line trend is not that great. I’m not bitching. I am earning an easy 6 figures yearly working online full-time.
The thing is that I have a very big asset known as PC Mechanic. The site has 10,000+ people daily looking at it. Eyeballs is the name of the game in this business. I have those. But, am I really taking full advantage of the site? I mean, if I had a store on the street with 10,000 people strolling through every single day…one word. DAMN! But, am I making the kind of money from PCMech that I would expect from a 10,000+ customer store? No.
The big missing ingredient has been marketing. Its about getting the word out. Delivering what people want. Staying on the edge. New products. And, in summary, leveraging what I have. For example, just today I launched a new ad format on PCMech and am currently testing it on the homepage to get more subscribers to the weekly newsletter. The signup stats have SUCKED and now that I’m paying attention to it properly, I realized that. So, instead of using popups, I am using a Catfish-style ad I found from Sitepoint. I am expecting a much increased subscription rate from the same traffic. Leverage.
On a related note, we also just today launched our first DVD over at PCMech for building your own PC. New products. Always good.
Is Your Site STOPPING Customers From Buying?
Shortly before my wedding, when I was still working, I attended a web conference put on by Marketing Experiments. They put on these conferences every few weeks and they are always pretty insightful. The subject of that particular conference was how technology can affect your online conversions. In other words, is your website getting in its own way of you making money? Interesting concept. Well, I took some notes as I went and I thought I would share them with you today.
- “Submit” is NOT a good marketing word, so having buttons on your site that simply say “Submit” can be highly ineffective.
- What they did to test this was to do a traditional A/B split test on an e-commerce site. One site was your typical database-enabled site and the other site was completely static. The two sites looked the same, however the second site simply collected the order information and the staff manually ran the orders in order to see how the site responded. What they found was that about 22% of customers could not buy due to some technology-related issue with the site. It was not a matter of programming bugs. Instead, it was problems with the built-in technical and business features that were part of the website. Therefore, the traditionally assumed business rules built into the technology were acting as friction to the buying process.
- The most common problems were (1) invalid credit card where the customer was not clearly presented a solution for getting around it, (2) Potential customer had previously registered for a free newsletter on the same site but could not remember their username and/or password, (3) Potential customer had taken a free trial already and was thus ineligible for the offer without any clear next step for them.
- One potential solution to lost orders is to simply call the customer and see if you can rescue the order through personal contact.
The top 7 solutions to making your site not drop your customers under it’s own weight are:
- Place an order every now and then in your own store as if you were your own customer. Take note of any and all confusions.
- Call your own customer service line (or have a “secret shopper” do it).
- Make use of your “forgot your password” feature. Is it easy to use?
- Post an 800 number to your store. This can be a rescue line when your customers run into problems with your store.
- Monitor your conversion funnel and find where people are dropping out.
- Monitor the credit card errors from your credit processor. Does your site clearly outline the next steps for customers whose cards are denied?
- Temporarily remove form validation and credit card address verification. Does your conversion improve?
This overall motto here is that we can build in all kinds of great features into an ecommerce store, but sometimes it is those built-in features that can present barriers to your customers. And face it, most customers are not loyal enough to spend much of their time trying to get around any barrier. So, test your site and make any barriers provide clear solutions. Have people test your site (other than you) and you will find where your bottlenecks are.
Wordpress Plug-ins for Earning Money
Every blogger likes to make money doing what they do. There are some good sites dedicated to this art, including ShoeMoney, ProBlogger and CopyBlogger. For Wordpress users, Lorelle has a good list of plug-ins to help you monetize your blog.
BTW, got a kick out of Jeremy’s post about Jenna Jameson. Looks like this lady is turning into Michael Jackson.
AdBrite InVideo Is Launching
I got a notification in my inbox this afternoon that AdBrite is launching their InVideo product. AdBrite is, of course, the ad marketplace founded by Philip Kaplan, famous for F-ckedCompany.com fame. A few weeks ago, I posted here about this new service which got mysteriously leaked to the blog community and no doubt generated some nice buzz for AdBrite. I signed up for their invite and I guess now they are opening it up. So, what do I think after giving it a try?
Not bad. Not bad at all. The player is clean and functional and the code looks to be easy to integrate. There are a few kickers, though, in my view:
- The ad coverage doesn’t yet seem to be that good because I got no ads to show up in my test. Perhaps its a little too dependent on my keywords I enter in the video title and description?
- The player is a little cumbersome to use in dynamic environments such as PCMechTV, where I use Wordpress and the podPress plug-in to show our videos and podcasts. In order to use a video on AdBrite, you have to go enter the details of that video in your AdBrite account, then the code uses an ID number to reference the video. This is not very friendly in dynamic environments where it would be much eaiser to use PHP code (or some other language) to dynamically insert a path to an FLV file directly. So, really, the way this is now, this service is only good if you are manually copy/pasting code into a text field to insert your movies. Many of us use dynamic environments.
Other than that, this looks to be really nice. If they could simply provide a plug-and-play SWF player that I could dynamically point to different FLVs, that would be perfect. Not sure how feasible that is, though.
On a related note, I just did a quick test of ValueClick’s In-Stream video ads. Not very good. They use a huge mess of javascript code to embed a video. Loading the video is slow because its pulling all that javascript content. At times you think it is failing to load at all, then it magically appears after a few seconds. In addition, the size dimensions seem to be totally ignored because it seemed to pick its own dimensions for my videos, totally cutting off the outer edges. I know this service is very new for ValueClick so we need to give them time to get it right, but the current version just isn’t very good.
Mozilla Being Hypocritical?
I saw on another blog that Mozilla has placed the Adblock Plus add-on onto their list of recommended add-ons. At the same time, Mozilla is said to have brought in $72 million in revenue in 2005, most of it from Google Search ads. Is this hypocritical? I would say so. For those of us in this business, including Mozilla, ad revenue is very, very important in our ability to bring content to the internet. For Mozilla to play a proactive roll in helping people block ads only helps to cut a major source of revenue.
I really like Mozilla and drool over their browser, but this recommendation of their’s does rub me the wrong way a bit.
Increase Online Sales by Reducing Customer Anxiety – The Scientific Approach
This afternoon I attended the web seminar mentioned in the previous blog post. The seminar was put on by Marketing Experiments Journal, a very professional outfit that takes the science of online marketing to levels you would normally expect from a college course. The subject of the seminar was how to decrease customer anxiety levels and thus increase the conversion rate of a website. In other words, how do you alleviate any fears a customer might have and get them to click on the “Buy” button? Well, one of the things I am most impressed with from these guys is the degree of statistical analysis they put into these things. Most website owners simply guess at what will work on a website, usually from what THEY would want to see. The thing is that the science of raising website conversion is not a matter of guesswork, and it is certainly a matter of knowing your audience. Let’s get right to the 7 tips which formed the basis of this whole talk. And, for each, I will interject my own view and advice on the matter.
Use testimonials
More specifically, use testimonials which address specific points of customer anxiety. For example, if you know that speed of shipping is a concern, post a testimonial that talks about how fast your shipping was. If support is a concern, post a testimonial which talks about how great your after-sale support is. Really pay attention to the purpose of each testimonial rather than simply posting anything that says good things about you.
Use language and tone in your copy
Pay close attention to your audience and what their state of mind is. Use language on your website that specifically caters to your audience. For example, if your intended audience is a younger one, your typical corporate speak is probably not going to sell anything. The presenter of the seminar also alluded to the importance of matching the tone of the customer and said a future report of their journal would discuss how to make a site actually cater to the particular mood of the customer. Now that will be very interesting, if it is some kind of real-time thing.
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Google Updates Their Adsense Policies
That’s right, Google has issued their 2007 update on policies to be followed by websites using Adsense. Of course, Adsense is Google’s contextual ad service where websites can place Google ads on their site and earn revenue. The revenue you can make from Adsense is pretty good in the scheme of things, so webmasters who use it should go take a read of the new policies. Google does kick off sites that break their policies, even if they are not as picky as Yahoo, who kicks off sites for having international traffic when YPN can’t pull off geo-targeting on their own.
Here are the highlights of their new changes:
- Sites cannot place images next to ads to in any way direct a user’s attention to the ad. That means no arrows or “click here” images. Nor any trick placements to make people click on your ad thinking it is a valid part of your site navigation.
- You can no longer display Adsense on any site which is displaying competing ads from any source which looks like an Adsense ad. Now, this is pretty wide and sweeping. It basically means Google is going to hold you in violation if you are using Yahoo Publisher Network on the same site. Period. There is some confusion on this policy, though, because the way it is phrased, you could use a competing ad as long as it looks different than Google ads. I’ll have to wait to see if this gets clarified. Plus, it says specifically *site*, which means they won’t even accept you trying YPN in a totally different section of the same site. That is ridiculous.
- You can now place up to two referral links on your site in addition to the ads.
- Sites can no longer ask for anything before displaying a referral link. For example, you can’t ask for a user’s email address before referring them to the Google Pack.
- If you use Google’s custom search engines, you can only display one additional ad unit on the page along with the search results. This is because the search results already come with ads (just like when you search Google normally).
- You can’t run Adsense on any site involved with selling student essays or term papers. I think this one is a little humorous, actually. For a company who got into hot water over scanning books and making them searchable, its ironic as hell that they’re banning these types of sites from their Adsense program.
- You can’t display ads on sites that in any way break copyright law.
Uniblue Announces SpyEraser
Uniblue is today announcing the release of SpyEraser as well as a PowerSuite that groups the utility with their existing Registry Booster and SpeedUpMyPC titles. I have not yet tried the utility, but I have tried and marketed other Uniblue products in the past and have found them to be fine options. The reason I bring it up is because Uniblue is fairly well known for their affiliate program and they do put quite a bit of effort into their affiliate marketing. As the owner of PCMech, I have worked with Uniblue many times in the past and have made good money with them. And they support their affiliates more than most, providing a wealth of marketing materials, ideas, etc. So, for those of you doing affiliate marketing on the internet, I’m sure SpyEraser and the new PowerSuite are going to be available for affiliates to sell.
A word of advice, too, for you affiliate marketers – choose your programs wisely. Uniblue is a good company to work with. In the past, I have worked with Inkline Global on PCMech, advertising their PCShowBuzz software. Marketing that program brought in more complaints than any other campaign I have ever run on PCMech. And I got a lot of complaints about returns not being honored by the company. So, in the interest of my visitors, I have made a policy not to advertise for Inkline anymore. Inkline is perfectly professional dealing with directly, but I can’t get around the fact that I got so many complaints. I don’t desire to have my reputation affected by association, and as an affiliate marketer, you need to keep those considerations in mind as well.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
