Google Adsense and Adbrite

You won’t make money on your site without traffic. That seems obvious, but what’s not always so obvious is where to get the traffic. One way is to advertise.

When you are looking to send traffic to your site, you can choose from:

Google Adwords
These can be rather expensive, depending on your keyword. But, they really drive you traffic.

AdBrite
I really like this because you can choose which site you want to advertise on, and if they are an adbrite subscriber (I am, and most are) you can advertise on their site. By doing this you can really target who comes to your site and you can get your advertising for cheaper.

Here’s what I mean; with Google you pay by the cost of the keyword and you get put on whatever site their computer thinks will work best with your keyword. It’s definitely easier for you, but is it better? And, depending on your keywork, Adwords can be pretty expensive. Remember, Adsense makes good money for publishers and it does drive some serious traffic. If you have the money this is a great option.

But, some of us are on a limited advertising budget. We can spend the time looking for appropriate sites and deciding on our own advertising strategy. If this is the case for you, Adbrite may be your answer. You don’t pay by keywords, but by the site.

So, if I want to advertise to businesses in general, Adwords will charge me a fee (based on the keywords I choose) per click on google’s adsense. In contrast, if I want to advertise on a certain site, Adbrite will charge me a fee (based on the price the publisher charges, usually depending on the traffic the site gets) per click on your ad.

So, while both systems are similar, they serve different purposes.

**Correction: Google and Adbrite both offer site targeted ads. Not sure if Adbrite offers keywords.

Why Murdoch Really Bought MySpace?

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog ? Why Murdoch Really Bought MySpace?: “In addition to live concerts, MySpace is an ideal platform to release music videos (which the major record labels are desperately trying to monetize), as well as other short-form reality programming (think Fox’s “American Idol”) that’s likely to attract the 22 million youngsters in the MySpace community… an audience that happens to also watch MTV.”

What do you think about this? Can you really see MySpace eventually becoming a true rival of MTV? I mean, seeing the success of FOX and FOXNews, my bets are on Murdoch.

It definitely makes alot of sense to me. Of course, I equate the marketing genius of Murdoch with Gates so I’m not surprised. I was waiting to see why he bought MySpace, and this really could be it. Interesting.

Soon in Japan, it’ll be raining ads – Yahoo! News

Seems like marketers are always looking to cash in on the next big thing. Some people are saying it’s bloggers. Of course, I’ve been saying it for a while now.

It’s sure as heck not this:

Soon in Japan, it’ll be raining ads – Yahoo! News: “After being bombarded by commercials on the way to work and watching promotions pop up on the Internet, the Japanese consumer could soon be hit by advertisements where they least expect it: on their hands.”

Seems like a bad idea, don’t you think? Your ad will get lost in a stream of other ‘raindrop’ ads.

Web marketing is the same way. How many times have you seen an ad on a site that has NOTHING to do with the content on that site? It’s just not smart. I would never publicize my gaming blog on the same site that my diet site is on. Target your marketing towards the people that are your target audience. Use different sources of revenue too. On the diet site, I use my amazon affiliate links to show my readers books they might be interested in. I also have google ads that are content related. On the gamingandtech site most of my users detest ads, so I have pared down to only offering non-obtrusive google ads. I may decide to put some affiliate text links on there soon, but I am testing to see if they will drive away users. My popularity is growing well there, and I don’t want to send people away.

And, as important as reaching your target market, you must target towards your purchasers, not just your readers. These are not always the same. For my gamingandtech blog, I try to stay on tech more than on gaming. Gaming keywords pay really poorly, but have high-clickthrough (my experience) whereas a keyword related to computer hardware pays well, but has a low-click through. Watch your stats and tailor accordingly. In other words, the tech people seem to buy more than the gaming users, hence the higher paying keywords for the tech stuff. And, if you think about it, it does seem to make sense, since most of my gamers are young and poor and the tech people are usually IT analysts that have excess gadget money to spend. I keep my keywords in tech high so that those are the ads that appear.

Again, don’t write a blog to make money, but you can blog smartly using your know-how to add to your revenues. And, to build traffic, advertise smartly. Don’t place your diet site in a Home Depot forum.

AOL ready to reinvent itself

See the story on CNET News.com: “Not all that long ago, America Online looked unbeatable.”

An interesting read. To summarize, AOL, which once was undoubtedly the king of the hill, is now the email people are embarrassed to admit they use. And, with even the reluctant netizen switching to broadband, AOL has decided to reinvent itself and change its profit model to one centered on advertising.

Now, the reason this is interesting to us, is in the big picture:

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Though the majority of their revenue comes from subscribers, and although they have prepared to ride the wave of fortune as long as they could, they thought ahead and began years ago building AOL as a portal as well.

and it’s interesting in the small picture:

Soon blogs and other ‘new’ things on the net, will inevitable become old-hat one day. Prepare for that. You have to realize that what works now, won’t work next year.

Let’s say you are a VOIP blogger. Your market may be composed of techies right now, but next year your grandma may be reading your blog looking for the latest VOIP technology on your site.

Watch your market. Keep an eye on where your visitors live, what site they’re coming from, even what browser they’re using. Give them the content THEY want.

Getting real about wikimania

Great WIKI article. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it explained better.

Getting real about wikimania | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

This fellow, Joe Kraus was a founder of Excite, one of the early and HOT search engines, back when Yahoo was king. He know runs JotSpot and talks about how we can make money from WIKIs.

I have a suggestion for getting your links out there. Go to eHow and post a wiki on something you are an expert on. You will build your ‘street cred’ and it gives you a free, targeted advertising spot. Remember, though wikis are written by the user, they are also edited by other users and a blatant ad will be deleted by the next user who sees it. Be smart. Be subtle.

When I wrote a wiki a few months ago for RSS feeds and aggregators, I used my flagship blog, http://athomemama.blogspot.com (gaming and technology) as the example in the directions for downloading feeds.

Find a wiki site in your field by using the google search bar above or go to eHow. You know stuff others don’t. Share the wealth.

Adding content without writing

Some of you know I love to write. I doubt I will ever resort to content management to add content to by sites. However, I posted the below article as an example of a FREE article I found at an article directory site online. Just do a google search on ‘article directory’ and you’ll find plenty of them.

Also, you can post jobs on several sites and name your prices for original, exclusive stuff. You can let them know how much you are willing to pay, whether or not the gig will be ongoing, and if the work should be ghost-written for you or acknowledged. One site, Freelance Work Exchange offers writers real jobs (not network marketing) in their field for a monthly fee of, I think, around $30. There may be a trial period. I can’t remember.

If you use the service, let me know so we can rate it.

More SEO Helps

I just signed up for Google’s Adwords on another blog of mine, and I found out some prices per click for my keywords. So, I guess that is probably the best way to know how much your keywords are going to pay, per click. Of course, your adsense isn’t going to tell you details like this. So I recommend getting an Adwords account, if for no other reason than to choose your keywords and see their approximate price.

Dave Davies has a great article on Search Engine Optimization, 10 Steps to Higher Search Engine Positioning. In fact, we could learn alot from Dave’s site. He has dozens of articles on SEO. He even explains the recent drop in page ranks. His site is a bookmarker…

I’m still reading the Joel Comm ebook. Liking it so far. Will give a full review soon.

“AdSense Secrets”

Recently I’ve been turned onto Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets. I first read about him after I clicked on a google ad and then when I read ProBlogger.com’s report of making around $15K this month on adsense, and noticed he credited Joel with alot of his know-how, I bit the bullet and bought the e-book. I just dropped $97 to buy a copy and already I am seeing the value. I’ll post more info later, but if you can’t wait, I stuck a link up above my pic where you can go directly to his page and read more.

Oh yeah, and I bought a domain name. This is, of course, supposed to be step one, but I couldn’t come up with one the domain name squatters hadn’t already purchased. So, I know own www.thesleepyblogger.com and www.sleepyblogger.com

Will stick my sites up there sometime this weekend.