For anyone who placed a card on bla.st, Tim has just left a comment on my previous post about bla.st:
- If you are unhappy with how your short term bla.st card performed, contact me I’ll be happy to re-list your card as a long-term card, to the same total value, for free.
So there you have it! Anyone who wishes to have their advert relisted should contact Tim.
I think it was someone on a fourm (I can’t remember which) that was asking about metal business cards the other day, and someone responded by posting a link to this site which sells all manner of different business cards on different materials. Now, to be honest this are not very practical and are rediculously expensive (nearly £2.50 per card ), but I’m a sucker for this kind of thing and I just think that having brushed steel business cards would be awesome!
What better way to stand out from the crowd?!
If you ask most people, especially newcomers to internet marketing, which contextual ad service they use on their website, it’s fair to assume that most people will say Google Adsense. In reality, it is probably the easiest way to make money from a website - nothing is required of the site visitor other than a click, from which you can make anything from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars.
There are other services out there, such as Yahoo (USA only), Adbrite and DClickAds which offer contextual advertising services but there’s no question that Google dominates the market. And therein lies the problem. It is too easy to become dependant on Google for revenue, which can be disaterous if your account gets suspended (- something that seems to be happening a lot) with little or no chance of a reversal. Live by the Google, Die by the Google. I personally don’t rely on the money that is currently in my adsense account and try to mix my revenue sources as much as possible, in fact most of the income from my sites comes from affiliate links.
Although Google does dominate the market at present, that isn’t to say you can’t make money from networks such as Adbrite and DClickAds, and the best way to find out what works best is by experimenting. For example, David runs Yahoo on one of his websites and he tried out the Adbrite interstitial ad service one day, only to discover that his daily revenue shot up. Basically, there are tons of networks out there: Text Link Ads, Adbrite, DClickAds, Advolcano and many more which can all potentially provide an additional revenue source, so you don’t need to rely on Adsense for income. John Chow has a great list of advertising networks which can be found here.
Honda have today launched their new site, myearthdream.com. They have designed a new livery for their 2007 F1 car, which is essentially a picture of the earth, in order to raise awareness of enviromental issues. The car has no other coporate logos on it other than the insignia required for F1 cars. The idea behind the website itself is to encourage people to make a pledge to change an aspect of their lifestyle in order to help the environment and in return have their name inscribed both onto the ‘digital car’ that appears on the website and the real F1 car!
Well…this is certainly an interesting idea and, as so many things these days, seems to be inspired by the original MDHP. I expect there’ll be a lot of press coverage about this and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of response this generates. It is interesting that they are promoting ‘awareness for environmental issues’ on an F1 racing car - not exactly the greenest of machines!!
MSN Traffic
After checking on MSN yesterday I noticed that my MTB site had got to the number one spot for the sites main keywords. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really produced that much of an increase in traffic to my site, but to be honest that’s to be expected with MSN. Still, it’s a good sign that the site is progressing and traffic overall is still going up slowly but surely. I’ve also been mucking about with my adsense placements to try and find the best CTR, which is still pretty shitty at the moment - it made me something like 11 cents yesterday. But I’m still determined to grow this site completely without any paid traffic!
Bla.st
Just a quick follow up from my post about bla.st; Chris has now reported that the $10 he spent to stay on the top spot of bla.st for two days resulted in 2284 views but only 27 clicks - a CTR of just 0.9%. It speaks for itself really…
I was just reading John Chow’s review of Bla.st, and immediately the MDHP came to mind. The basic idea behind Bla.st is that people can place a ‘card’ on the site and the more you pay determines it’s location - obviously the highest paying ad is on the first page and free ads are last. Anyway, everyone seems to be getting all excited about it but I really don’t understand what the user benefit is at the end of the day. And to be honest, it seems like the majority of the buzz around it is coming from webmasters and bloggers who see it as another way to promote their website or blog - but the question is, to who exactly?
Obviously, it may be worth placing a card on the site considering you can do it for free and at the end of the day it is a link (plus with the amount of people talking about it, Bla.st may end up with a decent PR), but that could be the only benefit and I’m convinced that the majority of people visiting the site ARE the people who are placing the ads. So once all the fuss has gone, what good will it be?
Having said that, good luck to the peeps behind it and I hope they prove me wrong.
Around this time last month, I set up a new mountain biking site and I’d hoped that by now I’d have made some money from it. I’ll admit now, I’ve been really bad about sticking to the targets that I set myself, plus the fact that at one point I didn’t have internet access for almost a week and I sort of got sidetracked by updating my student site.
So from now on I’ve decided if that I’m going to write my goals and targets on this blog so I’ll be more inclined to stick to them. Here are the stats for the first month of from my MTB site:
Visitors: 383
Pageviews: 1779
Earnings: $2.08
Hmmm. Not great is it. Anyway, instead of making lots of excuses I’m just gonna write down my targets for this site for the next month:
- Get at least 10 new inbound links (I know earlier on I said one a day but that just seems impossible!)
- Add a new article to the site every day (I’ve not added any content for about a week and a half)
- Spend an hour a day posting on MTB forums
- Earn at least $50 from the site by this time next month
So there you have it. I know that $50 isn’t that much but bear in mind I’m trying to get all my traffic organically (no paid advertising). Hopefully this time next month my stats will be a bit more impressive!!
I came across Blogarate the other day, which is a cool widget that lets readers give your blog posts a star rating out of 5. It isn’t just a rating system though, it also sends blog posts back to the Blogarate website, along with the post star rating, and displays it Digg style.
Obivously, it’s advantage over sites like Digg is that you’re actually giving a post or article a rating, which could be good or bad, as opposed to just voting for decent posts, which is much more useful for the author.
Although this is a pretty good widget, I think it’s more suited to business or news type blogs than personal blogs. I reckon it would be especially good for content or article sites/blogs that are using wordpress as a cms, as it’s a good way to get feedback on your content from your users and probably get some extra traffic from the Blogarate site too.
It’s good to see that the Yahoo/Overture search tool is now working again. For a while I was using the Wordtracker service but it now seems that it isn’t all that accurate (in my experience) after all. I was testing out about half a dozen keywords which I know for fact get at least a couple of thousand searches a month and it was showing less than 10 searches a day for most of them. This could just be a few isolated inaccuracies but I’m glad the Yahoo tool seems to be back (touch wood!) and I think I’ll be sticking with it for the time being.
I was reading a post over on the A4U Forum today about when the best time to launch a new site is. Perhaps the immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘when it’s ready’ but I don’t think it’s that simple.
Obviously, you want the search engines to index your site as quickly as possible but you also don’t want people visiting and being put off by incomplete content before it’s ready. Plus you don’t want to upload a site with a load of dead end links.
This is why I always try an adopt a ’stages stratergy’ when I’m uploading new sites. What I mean by this is that I’ll always split parts of the site up so that they can be published independantly of other sections, as this way you can get some inbound links and keep adding more content gradually.
