Oops
Posted on | July 21, 2010 | No Comments
Totally blew away my wordpress installation.
Effective Affiliate Marketing
Posted on | July 2, 2010 | No Comments
After a blistering start to June, I thought that I was well on my way to another 25% monthly revenue gain. However, it seems that about halfway through the month, the clicks slow down dramatically. I wonder if people spend their paychecks dining out early in the month? Anyways, the result was a June revenue number with 0 growth (actually a 5% decrease.) As we sit here on the first day of July, it once again appears that the clicks are starting to appear again.
Nonetheless, I spent some time working on the sites last month, trying some ghetto-SEO to improve ranking for Atlanta and Seattle, also while launching Washington DC. So far, my ghetto-SEO has not seemed to have had any effect, but I think I will have to be a little bit more patient.
The biggest news is that after having gone bowling with David Kadavy and a very, very, brief discussion affiliate marketing, I decided that it was worth another shot. I need to generate more revenue, and at this point, I’m definitely not generating more eyeballs. My fear is that at some point, the number of people who don’t know about Groupon or Living Social will trend towards zero, and they will stop clicking on the Adsense ads. So, we need to develop different revenue streams.
Ineffective Affiliate Marketing
The first time around, I simply went and got some square advertisements for the affiliates that I thought might be related to the site. I just slapped those ads on the page and through dumb luck, got 1 click through sale on the first day. But after that, nothing, and I felt that having so many square advertisements on the page was going to seriously detract from the user’s experience, as well as dilute Adsense revenue. Dilution would come in the form of users clicking on affiliate ads instead of Adsense ads, which return no monetary value unless the user continues on to purchase something. So instead of making a dollar on Adsense for the click, I would get $0. And if the conversion rate on affiliate click throughs is maybe 1%, that’s about $100 lost Adsense revenue for a gain in $2 affiliate marketing revenue. A theoretical $98 loss.
Effective Affiliate Marketing
After reintroducing affiliate marketing back onto the site in a specific way, I have now made 3 additional affiliate marketing sales in less than 1 month. That’s enough evidence to me to prove that it is not a fluke. So let’s take a closer look.
If the failed experiment the first time around was too generic (random ads strewn throughout the site), I wanted to try being as specific as possible. I looked up every restaurant listed on the site in Commission Junction to see if it had a Restaurant.com gift certificate. If it did, I added a restaurant specific link to the restaurant’s page, as shown in the example below.
This I believed, would catch the website visitor at the time they were most likely to be interested in dining at the restaurant, which in turn would mean they would be interested in saving a little bit more money. Catching them at this moment, I believe is the best place for me to not only get a click-through, but a sale on the affiliate site.
The problem with this approach is that it was very labor intensive on my part. I know that CJ has an API, but I have not delved into it deep enough to see if I could automate this whole process. It would be much nicer if I could automate looking a restaurant up on CJ and then adding the link to the site. At this point, injecting the link is also very specific, and I don’t trust a VA to do it accurately. It would also take just as much time to verify their accuracy. So until I have a better method, I will just have to suck it up.
So, while I spent at least several hours looking up all the restaurants across all the different cities, only a handful of restaurants actually offer the restaurant.com gift certificate. It also appears as if Restaurant.com is not nearly as popular in the other cities I have prix fixe sites in, but the company is also based here in Chicago. The next time I launch a city, I will probably have to spend a little bit more time doing research on this aspect as well.
Affiliate Marketing Can Work for You!
I’m now a 100% believer that affiliate marketing can work for you, if you implement in correctly. By injecting the links to your affiliate sites at the right time, you can indeed make some money off sales referrals!
I’m very anxious for Groupon’s Beta Affiliate program to start, and I hope that it can also help increase revenue for the site. Affiliate conversion rate also becomes very interesting, and I hope to be able to get into some A/B testing to see if I can increase the click-through and sale conversion rate by changing the wording or colors of the affiliate link.
Kadavy’s Passive Revenue Mental Hack
Posted on | June 20, 2010 | No Comments
While bowling the other day with David Kadavy, he mentioned a mental hack he uses when analyzing his passive income:
Multiply passive income by 10.
While passive income is fun, for beginners and those just starting out, sometimes it’s hard to overlook the fact that you’re talking about dollars per day. But, using Kadavy’s Passive Revenue Mental Hack may help motivate you to work on increasing your passive revenue stream.
Effects of the Facebook Like Button
Posted on | June 15, 2010 | No Comments
Back in March, I reached almost 20-25% of my monthly revenue goal of $150. In April, I launched two new cities to try to increase traffic in addition to trying out affiliate marketing. In May, I installed the Facebook like button to grow traffic through more social/viral mechanisms. I also made the webpages Mobile Safari friendly. Here are my personal findings.
In April, even though two new cities were launched, the traffic gained was next to nothing. So much for my theory that I could hijack premium organic page rank quickly in other cities. I will have to pick up some kind of SEO Primer and see if I can finagle my way up the rankings since 95% of my traffic is still search driven. Additionally, the affiliate marketing, while producing a very quick $2 result the first week, failed to produce any other revenue since. The final result for April was zero revenue growth.
In May, I decided to be less aggressive with advertising, removing affiliate marketing. I also installed the Facebook Like button on the restaurant pages, and used iWebKit to create Mobile Safari friendly pages for the iPhone. While the Facebook like button increased Facebook traffic, the overall impact was negligible. Of the 1000+ unique vistors a month, only 20 were coming from Facebook. Additionally, while a small percentage of visitors are browsing from their iPhone, the advertisement revenue has been nil. AdMob seems to have difficulty serving up ads, with a fill rate of about 60%, with 0 click throughs. But, I will say that making the website iPhone friendly was a whole lot of fun.
But, I am very pleased to say that the revenue in May increased by 50%, which brings me about one-third of the way to my $150 per month goal. While June seems to also be on pace to bring another 25% increase in revenue, I am cautious of the trend. The reason being that the single reason for revenue increasing is the increase in click-through price. Overall clicks were down 20%. While there currently is still a marketing bonanza driven by Groupon, Living Social, and other online discount sites, I don’t know that I know that it will be sustainable. I need to focus on driving more traffic.
Spring Cleaning
Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments
It’s surprising and mind-opening to me that getting rid of stuff can often provide more satisfaction than accumulating more stuff. With less things laying around, everything seems to be in it’s rightful place. Even small organized spaces seem plenty big, and the need to get more space, to house more stuff, subsides… at least temporarily.
Now, how to go about not accumulating stuff must be a special discipline all on its own.
Facebook’s Social Plugins – Using the Like Button
Posted on | April 24, 2010 | No Comments
Facebook announced their next step in taking over the internet and invading all of our lives with their new Open Graph protocol. From a personal perspective, I groaned at having more “digg” or “like” buttons cluttering up websites, and having my personal information being shared across more websites for the purpose of targeting me with advertising. I’m not entirely sure how Open Graph is different than the failed Beacon project, but it surely smells the same to me.
From a commercial perspective, I think Open Graph is very interesting. Maybe it is a way for companies and brands to more effectively spread awareness of their products and services using very valuable social capital. But if everyone is doing it, does it make it more or less effective? I guess we will find out in 6-12 months.
However, not wanting to be left behind by all this hoopla, I decided to try to install the Like Button to the Prix Fixe sites. And let me tell you, it’s really freaking easy. For the Prix Fixe sites, I decided to have the button labelled “Recommend” instead of “Like”. I don’t have a real reason besides I thought it seemed nicer.
Figure 1: Example of Like Button
In less than an hour, I had modified my platform to include the Like Button on all the restaurant pages. Ideally, I would have wanted to create a Like Button for each individual restaurant special. However, I’m pretty sure the use of the Like Button is for liking an individual web page. If I wanted to put a Like Button on each special, I would have had to create an individual page for each special, something I didn’t want to do.
Why use the Like Button?
To increase revenue from the Prix Fixe sites, it’s going to be very difficult for me to drive more revenue per visitor, and thus the only way to reach my revenue goals are to increase traffic. I’m certainly not about to pay for more traffic at this point, so I need to increase the amount of visitors I get for free. Here’s where I’m hoping Facebook comes in. When you click on the Like Button, the activity will show up in your Facebook stream, bringing you free exposure. Wether or not that exposure is worth anything, I do not know. I also hypothesize that visitors that are coming in from Facebook might also be link-jumping/click-happy, and just might click on some of the ads. I marked my traffic numbers in Google Analytics, and will compare the number of visitors a month from now. Not only am I hoping to grow the number of visitors to my established Chicago site, I’m hoping the Like Button will accelerate growth to Atlanta and Seattle.
Developer Notes for the Facebook Like Button
For the most part, using the Facebook Javascript SDK, you can get up and running with Social Plugins in a very, very, short period of time. I did get stuck on a couple of points:
Why doesn’t my Like Button allow Comments?
For each of the cities, I created a new Facebook Application in the Developer App. I then configured each city with it’s own Application ID through my Prix Fixe platform. On Chicago Prix Fixe, when I installed the Like Button, it also came with a free comment feature (as seen in the above figure.) But when I installed it on Atlanta and Seattle, those Like Buttons did not have a comment feature.
It turns out, that to have the comment feature, you need to enable Facebook Connect in the Developer App. Once you enable Facebook Connect, you get the comment box for free!
Why does my Like Button show different values for the same web page?
Web experts probably don’t have this issue, but since I’m more of a hack, I had this issue. For my website URLs, I set up my domains so that www.chicagoprixfixe.com and chicagoprixfixe.com show the same content (with or without the www prefix). But technically, they are two different webpages because they have different URLs. The problem is that http://www.chicagoprixfixe.com/r/triple_crown and http://chicagoprixfixe.com/r/triple_crown are technically two different pages. Therefore, Facebook thinks they are two different things and the Like Buttons are not linked. If someone visited the first URL and liked it, someone visiting the second URL would not see that the first person liked it.
Techy stuff coming: to fix that, I simply wrote some Apache ModRewrite rules into an .htaccess file. This now redirects all visits from chicagoprixfixe.com to www.chicagoprixfixe.com, and that will solve that problem. Hopefully, I did it the right way and it won’t mess up my SEO rankings.
In Conclusion
As a hater, it certainly bothers me to see Facebook invading the internet. As a developer/entrepreneur, I’m drawn to how I can get maximum return for minimum effort. Installing the Facebook Like Button definitely did not require much effort. How much value it will return, is up in the air. And I hope to have some concrete measurements from this experiment in a month or two.
iPad review from a former skeptic
Posted on | April 18, 2010 | No Comments
I was definitely an iPad skeptic in my previous blogpost. I just couldn’t justify buying an iPad for my own use. But as it would happen, a few days after the iPad was released, I was provided an iPad for “work purposes”. Now that I have had it for almost three weeks, here are my impressions.
The iPad is sexy, but a little awkward
The iPad itself is definitely a sexy piece of design and engineering. You just want to hold it and play with it. As most of the other iPad reviews have stated, it is surprisingly heavy to hold. I also quickly learned that using the iPad while laying on my back is not comfortable, and not easy. Its weight makes it uncomfortable to hold above you like you might try to read a book. Additionally, because it is an interactive device, you need to use your fingers to type or touch the screen. The weight of the iPad makes it so that you would probably use two hands to hold it above you, and when I tried to maneuver my hands down to the keyboard to type, I nearly dropped it.
The iPad is not made for typing
I initially tried typing this blog post with the iPad in my lap. But I just couldn’t get over how much slower it was to type on it. It felt laborious to try to type anything at length. Given that I type over 100 words per minute on a keyboard, I would say that I was down to about 30 words per minute on the iPad. One saving grace is that the iPad autocorrection helps speed a little bit. However, the lack of arrow keys make mistakes very costly in terms of time. If you make a mistake, you have to use your finger to move the cursor with that magnifying glass tool, which takes much longer than hitting an arrow key a couple of times.
Given that, I’m not sure how people are using the iPad while traveling for “work”. I just don’t see myself packing a bluetooth keyboard just so that I can type while constrained to my iPad. If the Macbook Air just had 4GB of RAM, it would be the perfect machine. I am looking forward to using the iPad for entertainment purposes on my next inter-continental flight. I just know that I’m not planning on typing any emails while I’m gone.
For productivity, look elsewhere
After getting over some initial excitement, I really had nothing to do on my iPad. I wanted to play with it, but I had no real reason to. And that’s where the apps come in. There are already some great apps (games) for the iPad, but the only thing that comes close to a productivity app that I thought I might actually use is Adobe’s Idea app, which is free. But I still find myself using a pen and paper instead of getting out the iPad.
I would love to try out some other apps, specifically some of the Omni apps like OmniGraffle and OmniGraphSketcher, but they have very high price tags. Developers are definitely charging more for iPad apps, and I don’t have cash to burn. Of the best free apps, the ones that open up content are the best (Kindle, ABC, Netflix), but I didn’t find much value in the rest.
iPhone apps masquerading as iPad apps
iPhone apps look terrible on the iPad. It’s like when you have Hi-Def TV and then try to go back to watching Standard Def. It’s terrible. iPhone apps, in their native 1x mode, look small and useless. Stretched out to fill the screen makes them worse. What now annoys me is how many apps say they are “iPad compatible” apps. I excitedly download them, only to delete them upon finding out they are just iPhone apps that can run on the iPad.
The high resolution on the iPad spoils you. Well designed iPad apps take full advantage of the screen real-estate, and provide a highly satisfying experience. Little bitty iPhone apps just don’t stand a chance on the iPad.
iPad vs Kindle
I had a Kindle for 29 days. I returned it on the 30th day. Partially because I couldn’t justifying the $259 e-reader, and partially because I was hoping that Apple would announce the iPad. To compare and contrast the two devices, the Kindle is nice and light. The iPad is kind of heavy. The Kindle has an awesome 7 day battery life. The iPad has an awesome-in-its-own-way 12 hour battery life. The Kindle can read books, and is bad at reading PDFs. The iPad can read PDFs beautifully (if you can get a PDF onto the device), while doing everything the Kindle can and more. The iPad can even pretend to be a Kindle with the iPad Kindle App. Wow. And I actually think the iPad Kindle app functions way better than the Kindle does. Forget the iPhone Kindle App, the iPad Kindle App is awesome. Plus, the added side benefit was that with Kindle for Mac and Kindle for iPad, the Kindle books I previous bought are now accessible again.
So, even though there are blog posts on why the Kindle is better than the iPad, I’m not sure I could convince myself to buy a dedicated e-reader that isn’t drastically cheaper than the iPad, unless the content was also drastically cheaper. I don’t know the last time I tried to read something in direct sunlight, so the argument of the beautiful e-ink on the Kindle is moot.
The iPad is for having Fun
The biggest surprise to me was how fun it was to play games on the iPad. The device is large, bright, and beautiful, with a resolution that can support some pretty serious gaming. Sure you’re not going to play a Modern Warfare 2 equivalent on the iPad, but for those of us that aren’t quite so serious gamers, the iPad is a terrific casual gaming device. I would be worried if I were a PSP or a Nintendo DS.
Plants vs. Zombies HD and Diner Dash: Grilling Green definitely made me very unproductive for the last 2 weeks. GodFinger, I don’t understand as a game. Well, I understand that it is a social game with micro-payments, but I hope that all future games do not become social games monetized by micro-payments and require viral marketing. But that’s probably what’s going to happen.
iPad enabled websites
With big names like youtube and vimeo already having converted their websites to play video in mobile safari on the iPad, the Netflix and ABC app (hello Hulu? are you there?), video content is largely available for the iPad. Even some webapps are Mobile Safari-enabled. I swear that Gmail looks better on my iPad than it does on my computer. Also the hidden beauty is that a lot of websites will already be iPad friendly because of the 1024×768 screen on the iPad.
iPad Accessories
Something about the iPad screams that it needs accessories. I don’t put protective cases on anything I own. But I feel the need to own a protective case for the iPad. The iPad also seems like it needs a stand. I was trying to use my iPad to play a vimeo video while I was working, and I just had to ghetto-rig a pile of stuff to make my iPad stand up. So far, I have not seen any nice protective cases or stands. There’s a nice case prototype on Quirky that shows a lot of promise, but its a few months out from shipping.
In conclusion
It’s interesting to see what kinds of companies have quickly adopted the iPad as a platform. Gilt has a nice app that I find much more pleasant to use than their normal website. As one of my friends said, “When you use the iPad, like it or not, you feel like you are holding the future.” I can only imagine that the next iPhone OS 4 will make it even more awesome. Maybe there will be some nice integration with the next iPhone to make it “awesomer” (hoping for internet tethering and maybe some kind of photo/video integration).
My sister loves it, and is waiting for the 3G version to buy. My girlfriend loves it, and can’t put it down, but when I asked her if she would contemplate buying one, she said no. She’s not a gadget person, or into spending lots of money on toys. And at the base of it, right now, that’s what I think the iPad is. A giant toy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just be aware that when you buy one, you are not going to suddenly become instantly more productive than you were before. In fact, you probably will waste more time than ever before.
How to Effectively Work with Virtual Assistants
Posted on | April 5, 2010 | 1 Comment
To try to grow the pie from Adsense revenue, I recently tried working with some Virtual Assistants to do some research for the Prix Fixe sites. It was an experiment in both outsourcing, and spending money on an idea instead of doing it myself. While time is money, Startups and Ideas tend to have more time than they do money. But, if I could spend a little bit of money to accelerate growth, it would be more than worth it.
As inspired by Tim Ferris’s The 4 Hour Work Week, I looked into outsourcing work through Virtual Assistants (VA). After re-reading the chapters about Outsourcing your life, I jumped in and started looking for a VA. After looking at a few sites mentioned in the book, I decided to go with Elance, a site that I am comfortable and familiar with.
Preparing for an Outsourcing Project
The first step to working with any kind of outsourcing is being able to very effectively communicate what you need done. It sounds obvious, but we know from research there is often a large gap in communication from managers down to their team. This gap comes from managers having more information than their team, and when communicating a plan, or vision, the manager tends to fail to impart some important background information. Managers don’t do this on purpose, they simply forget that they have more information than their team does. Hence, when a team member works on the tasks presented to them, they may not understand the rationale behind the task, and when confronted with an obstacle, are not able to reason out what an acceptable, alternative solution should be.
So while you know exactly what you want, and why you are having this task done, your VA has no context. Your responsibility is to create a shared vision of the desired end result with your VA.
For my task, I wanted to try to make the task as straightforward as possible. So I wrote a short, 1 page brief about the project, and how I wanted the VAs to perform the research, including: what sites to visit, what terms to use when searching, and a data-entry spreadsheet template that represented my final desired deliverable.
After posting my project on Elance, I received about 15 proposals. What surprised me was not the fact that the hourly rate was relatively cheap, it was the fact that some of the cheap hourly rates also came from men and women in the United States. The proposals came back ranging from a low of $3 an hour in India, to $9 an hour for one proposal that was submitted by a flight attendant in the US. Instead of giving the entire project to one person, I decided I would give out smaller projects to several of the applicants. Mostly, because I wanted to see if there was a quality vs price correlation, but this would also increase my chances of finding a VA I could work with for the longer term.
I divided the work by metropolitan area and sent the VAs on their way. As recommended by The 4 Hour Work Week, I started each VA out as follows:
- I emailed each VA the 1 page brief for their task, and the spreadsheet template, and I asked them if they had any questions about the task.
- Once I felt they understood the task, I asked them to perform 1 hour of work and return the results to me. This way, I could check to see if there were any problems before they spent the remainder of their time.
- After their 1 hour of work, I reviewed the work, corrected any issues AND updated my 1 page brief so that I would reduce the chances of repeat mistakes in the future. Then I let them finish their task and remaining hours of work. Note: the projects were specifically scoped for time.
The result was that for a range of $3 an hour, to $6.50 an hour, I got completed spreadsheet from each VA that represented prix fixe deals for their assigned city. Not bad!
Price vs Quality
At first glance, there was a small price vs quality correlation for my limited sample. The main issue was that non-native speakers had a hard time reading English text and determining what was a special or deal vs what was just someone’s opinion. However, the $3/hr Overseas VA performed about as well as the $6.50/hr Overseas VA. The best result was from the $6.50/hr US based VA. However, as I will flush out below, this would turn out to be misleading.
The benefits of working with Virtual Assistants
Besides the project being fun, there were several main advantages to outsourcing these tasks to the VAs.
- Instead of me procrastinating about doing the tedious work, I could have it done for me immediately for a small fee.
- It is good management practice in learning how to effectively delegate.
- I got usable work to immediately launch new websites.
- I learned about why it ultimately wasn’t immensely useful for me to oursource the task the way I did.
Things to avoid when working with Virtual Assistants
Now, on to the important lessons on the subject.
Does it really save you time?
While the VAs were doing research for me, I was developing the content management platform for all the prix fixe sites. I built in functionality so that I could import a spreadsheet that matched the template I gave to the VAs. That way I could just upload their results into the system. However, this resulted in two problems for me.
First, it caused me some “extra” work to modify the VA output so that it technically matched my import function. Oftentimes the VAs had introduced an extra line here or there into the spreadsheet to help organize their work, but it was not something my importer could handle.
Second, once I imported the data into the system, I still had to verify that the data was what I wanted. As I mentioned before, some of the VAs were not native english speakers, and they included people’s opinions (e.g, “A great atmosphere”) as a restaurant special. So, while having the information in front of me was very useful, I still ended up double checking all the work for accuracy.
Thus, I hypothesize that for it to have been an ever better outsourcing experiment, I should have: A) Allowed the VAs to input the data directly into my content management system and avoided any intermediate formats. B) I would have had to trust that their research was factually accurate. I think that it would hard to trust that the VA deliverable would be perfect under any circumstances, but if you were able to find a VA that you worked with well, you could eventually get to the point where you would not need to double check all of their work.
I had each VA perform 5 hours of research for me. Discounting any “management overhead” for starting the project and selecting a VA, I spent about 2-3 hours importing and double checking the work. So I “gained” a net 2 hours, but I spent $15-$30 for those 2 hours. I also suspect that I could have also done the work myself in 2-3 hours anyway, thus really not having saved any time or money.
So the question you really need to ask yourself is, “Is the work that the VA doing for me, really going to save me time or money?”
Was the work being done actually valuable?
You could scope the perfect project. And you could hire the perfect VA. It could save you tons of time. But if you’re not spending time/money in the right place, what does it matter? Just like you shouldn’t be creating work for work’s sake, you shouldn’t hire a VA just to get “stuff” done. You should first work to figure out what the valuable work is. In my example, it may have been more valuable for me to have had the VA’s call all the restaurants that either I or they had researched to verify the deal/special data was correct. This would then provide a lot of valuable information to the website readers, in the form of confidence that the deals were accurate. At this point, I believe the research performed by the VAs was valuable. However, it would have been more valuable for me to have had them verify the deals instead since I wouldn’t be able to call the restaurants during their operating hours.
You can do things the right way, or you can do the right things.
The takeaway is, make sure that you are outsourcing and executing the right things. Don’t just outsource things for the sake of outsourcing. (I’m sure there’s an opportunity here to talk about not outsourcing mission critical functionals, like getting feedback from customers. But that’s outside the scope of this already long post.)
Managing Your Own Expectations for the VA
In the end, for about 5 hours of time, each VA produced me a total of 50 rows of data. This was far short of their original estimates of 30-50 entries per hour. Even though I was quoted 30-50 entries per hour, I originally suspected that the rate was too high. I’m not suggesting that the VAs did not work diligently for their money. In fact, I do believe they tried their best.
I also should have thought about the total “size” of the research. I don’t think that any one particular city has 150 prix fixe menus anyway. Just like you need to think about your business market size, you should think about the size of the available information on the internet too.
If the size of the information is limited, spending more hours doing research is not going to get you more data.
Conclusion
In this experiment, one of the large questions was if there was a correlation between quality and price. Given that I performed the experiment in a somewhat flawed manner (i.e, it still took me work to get the work done, and I was double checking and reformatting the work), it would have been most economical for me to go with the lowest cost provider at $3/hour. Although his work has some issues, it was pretty darn good. Now, if I were going to build a long term relationship with the VA, I would have to see which VA could learn faster. But I had certainly narrowed it down to 2 VAs that I would be comfortable in giving future work.
I hope this post will be helpful in saving you a little bit of time and money when working with VAs. If you have any stories or experiences to share, please leave them in the comments!
iPad Expectations and Possibilites
Posted on | April 2, 2010 | 1 Comment
I’m not as hyped about the iPad as some other people I know, but I think that it was summed up quite nicely by David Pogue (I think.) Even though there are many things the iPad cannot do, the iPad represents an enormous amounts of possibilities and potential. Today, I don’t know that I think it represents a paradigm shift, unless, suddenly, all apps were designed so that I would not need keyboard entry.
I should disclaim that my mobile computing needs are very little. Even though I have an iPhone, I almost never use it. And when I do, it’s pretty much just as a mobile-phone. I don’t particularly care to check my email all the time, or search the web when I’m standing around, twitter whatever I’m thinking on the train, or check in while I’m at starbucks. So while I love technology, I don’t feel the need to be connected all the time.
I think the key to the iPad is in the content, duh. I didn’t think that Apple would allow streaming Netflix, but it appears that I am wrong! Although, as soon as I looked at the app, I thought, why would I sit at home and watch a movie on an iPad when I have a much bigger TV in front of me that can already stream netflix? Now, if I could store the movie for a flight, that would be pretty awesome as reviewers have gotten 12+ hours of video playback on the iPad. That kind of battery life IS amazing. But since I’m almost always at a computer and internet when I need to be, and am purposefully not tethered when I don’t want to be, the iPad is not for me in this regard either.
Maybe it’s a game changer for the casual gamer. I know true Gamers aren’t about to trade in their PCs for an iPad to play the Halo 4000. But for the casual gamer, it could be interesting. With iPad arcade docks, and full-screen board games on the iPad, again, there’s a lot of potential here. But sadly, this is not me either.
So, as I wind down this week, I was thinking about how I would want to use an iPad. The perfect scenario for me, would be when I become a 4-hour work week guy/lounge around at cafes/collect checks for doing almost nothing type of individual, where I could use some iPad applications to check in on various businesses, check my bank account/investment balance, make some quick modifications, and then go back to living life. While I was almost quick to state that at that point, I would not need a computer anymore, I think it’s more likely that in the aforementioned leisurely scenario, my needs for computing would be greatly diminished. So, until my life is less about software development, and more about money management, for me, an iPad would just be a toy.
But there’s nothing wrong with toys!
Triple your Adsense Revenue in 1 month
Posted on | March 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
Over the last few weeks, I have been very busy with several things including work, helping friends purchase new homes, and life in general. But, with an hour here, and an hour there, I tried to launch some random content websites with no success, hire a few Virtual Assistants to do some research for me, grind out a usable version of my new content management platform, and most importantly, TRIPLE my adsense revenue.
Tripling your Adsense Revenue
One of the great mysteries of the SEO world is why ChicagoPrixFixe.com holds the TOP result for several food related searches. Additionally, it is on the first page for some other searches. Traffic to the site is holding at about 50-100 visitors per day, and ad revenue has tripled between January and February, and looks to be holding steady in March.
Here are a few things that I learned.
95% of my AdSense revenue comes from visitors who were driven through search. That also means that Direct Visits (people who type in the URL directly), generate only 5% of the revenue. What I think that unfortunately means is that growing regular users will probably not impact my revenue growth. That is not to say that growing a regular user base would not help in other ways, but for now, I want to focus on maximizing revenue with minimal work.
Nobody clicks on web advertisements anyway
For a long time, I did not believe that money could be made through online web advertising, pretty much ignoring the fact that a massive amount of Google’s revenue comes from Pay-Per-Click advertising. But now I’ve got money in the bank that says you can make money through online web advertising, and the psychology is as follows.
Typically, when people visit websites regularly, they already have an idea of why they are going to the site, and they know what they want to get out of the site. Thus, when visiting your favorite websites, you most likely mentally block out the advertising that is put in place. You probably also find it annoying.
However, if you think about times when you are truly searching for something on the internet, after you’ve used your favorite search engine, you probably are visiting sites that you’ve never seen before. Additionally, you may not know what content you are looking for either. When you reach the site, you scan the site’s content quickly, perhaps reading the blog post or editorial, and then continue on your way. At this moment, there is an opportunity to present advertising to you that may interest you.
If I was searching for Best Tapas Deals in Chicago, I may end up visiting a website like ChicagoPrixFixe or Yelp. But, if I didn’t find what I was looking for, I may be prone to clicking a Groupon Ad that tells me I can save 90% off of Chicago’s best. And when I do click, I’ve just generated Pay-Per-Click revenue.
So, knowing this, what can you do to try to improve upon this?
The first thing I tried, was putting the advertising on the top left of the page, instead of the top right. That means the first thing the visitor would see would be the big fat square AdSense advertisement. This alone boosted click-through rates by 100% (the remaining 100% increase, I believe, is due to increased pay-per-click fees being paid by the advertisers themselves.)
I also tried a service called Chitika. Chitika is another advertising broker, but their niche is some javascript code that adapts the advertising based on whether or not your website visitor is a direct visitor, or a visitor from a search engine. If they visit the website directly, Chitika does not display any ads. However, if they do visit from a search engine, the Chitika Ad, ugly as it is, is displayed.
I left Chitika on the site for about a week or so, just to see what would happen. And sure enough, people do click on the Chitika ads. However, I had very poor revenue results from those clicks, so I removed Chitika from ChicagoPrixFixe. But I did keep the idea, and I implemented some changes so that ChicagoPrixFixe adapted the website layout for when visitors came from Search. The result? Adsense revenue has maintained, and I haven’t made it an entirely horrible experience for any direct visitors.
The site now averages almost a dollar a day, with the lowest being $0 and the highest being $5.
Does Affiliate Marketing Really Work?
I don’t have a lot to say on this topic just yet, but I can tell you that after installing some relevant Affiliate Marketing on the website, I made $2.10 on the 2nd day. One occurrence does not make a pattern, but I’m certainly liking where this is going. I am not sure how much cannibalization will occur to the AdSense revenue, but only time will tell.
Conclusion
Of our monthly goal of $150 per month, we are now approximately 20-25% of the way there! Fantastic! However, to grow the pie, either I will have to keep increasing the revenue per visitor, or I will need more visitors. Obviously, accomplishing both would be the best, but let’s focus on one thing at a time. At this pace, if I were to reach the 500 visitor per day goal, I expect that I would definitely reach, if not surpass, my monthly monetary goal.
It’s funny how this $1 a day always seems to be the so exciting. Partially, I’m still amazed that people click on advertising and it can indeed generate money. Partially, it’s $1 closer to a dream of financial freedom. I hope that I can help share information about the journey. I have been having a hard time finding real information on the web, since most sites on this topic are behind very expensive paywalls.
Let me know if you have any questions!
How can I track Advertisement clicking?
Does anyone know how I can track the actual advertisement clicking on the site? I assume I will have to be monitoring all link clicks, and if I can get an event for the click, then I can track the click.
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