Monetize Your Site

I have posted an article on html semantics and SEO on the main site. I just wanted to announce it here so that it will hit the RSS feed. The anchor text links directly to the article. Thanks!

While is was in the Selling on Your WebSite mode I wrote one more new article today. I discuss the importance of maintaining your focus if you choose to become an Internet Marketer. You can go to the site through the link in the footer to read the articles.

I redid the css to style the headings in the content area as I wished. I don’t understand why it was not working as I had it set up, but it was not. I added separate rules for the selectors and now things are behaving as they were intended. I must need to learn something more about the css for multiple selectors in a rule. When things did not work properly I did go and check on the proper format and I thought that I had that right, but it did not work as planned.

I have been doing some studying on our project, to make some money from the web. There was a caution from an Internet marketing pro that hit home. That caution is to not be  so worried about the cosmetics of your sites that you do not promote the sites. He told of a site that had the potential to be a very good site, but they spent so much time developing the site that they went broke before the site could get off the ground.

You must have traffic to make money. There is good traffic and not so good traffic. The good traffic is well targeted to what you offer. People turn to the search engines when they are looking for a product or service. Therefore it is important to come up on the first page of search results for a term or terms that people who are looking for what you have to offer may use in their search. Social networking can drive traffic numbers to your site, but that traffic may just be out of curiosity and they may not be in the market to buy anything at all when they visit your site.

A site needs to be put together with its traffic potential in mind. Keyword research will go a long way to that end. In order to have good, targeted traffic, your site must rank well in the search engines. You need to produce a site that can rank high in the search engines. Among other things you need to look at the competition for a niche that you are thinking of using. If there are several strong sites in the niche  you will have trouble getting on the first page of the search results. There may be hundreds or thousands of sites catering to a niche, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should not choose that niche. If there are a lot of weak sites in the competition you may still be able to rank well for the niche.

I have been following some tips from a major Internet marketer. In today’s ‘lesson’ he talked about buying a website and boosting the average daily income from an average of about $10 to around $30 in the first month of ownership. He talks about the importance of keywords and targeted traffic. Using the right keywords is very important, and providing backlinks using those keywords is the ‘key’ to search engine traffic. Search engine traffic is some of the best traffic that you can have to a site. That traffic is looking for the information that you are providing on the site and it is free.

There may be a bit more to this story, though. As a proven Internet marketer this gentleman may have access to some CPM ads to which the hopeful marketer does not have access. I do not know that this is the case. Having a good stream of targeted traffic is definitely the way to making a steady income from the Internet. Getting this traffic for free by understanding and using keywords is the way to have a high return on investment.

Another good point of this lesson is that you are considering buying an existing site you must look at the source of the existing traffic to that site. A seller may be able to get high traffic counts to a site, particularly in the short term, by paid advertising or social bookmarking. The social bookmarking traffic is likely to be very poorly targeted and the paid ad campaign may be designed to pull a lot of traffic by using keywords that are not well supported by the site.

I have done some further research on Smart Pricing for Adsense. It turns out that this is not a new thing, as it was instituted by Google in 2004, about 5 years ago now. The reasoning for instituting the program is so that Google advertisers will get better value for their advertising dollar making the Google program more attractive to advertisers. The premise is that the advertiser will pay less for lower quality clicks. The downside, as far as publishers are concerned, is that this is done on an account wide basis. If most of your sites provide high quality clicks but one site starts providing low quality clicks the publisher is in danger of falling under smart pricing and the high quality clicks will also be priced at the low quality rate.

It appears that the alarm sirens may be a bit louder than necessary. The Smart Pricing position is reviewed on a weekly basis. Since the Adsense program can produce substantial income for the publisher the best advice that I can give is to just watch your payment per click and if you see a substantial drop to analyze the situation. Dropping ads from one site may get you back to the regular pricing tier and keep your income in line with your general traffic.

From my research and my own experience it does not appear that a low click through rate is a solid indicator of the site that is the problem. It appears that the quality of traffic is the key, quality being defined as the attach rate rather than the click through rate. By this I mean how many of the clicks from the site result in the hoped for action on the part of the visitor, ie: a sale or a sign-up. The thinking is that search engine traffic that results in a click may have a higher attach rate than traffic from social bookmarking sites or from returning regular visitors. The hint that Google uses is that clicks from a photography tips site may not carry the same value as clicks from a camera review site, for instance. This would be because the visitors to the tips site might click on an ad for general information purposes but not really be in the market to buy, while the visitors to the review site are probably looking for information to help them with a buying decision so they are more likely to make a purchase.

If you provide quality content that targets your visitors you may never run afoul of  Smart Pricing. If you pay attention to what is going on with your Adsense account you will probably be able to identify the problem and take corrective actions. If you do notice or suspect that you have fallen under Smart Pricing you will need to look for a change in traffic or content to identify the problem and take the appropriate corrective action. Dropping a profitable income stream like Google Adsense because of one under performing site is not the best choice in the matter.

In my travels around the web last evening I ran across a piece of Adsense Intelligence about Adsense Smart Pricing (link to article). The blogger explains that accounts with poor click through rates get bumped down to a second tier pricing structure that Google maintains called Smart Pricing. He states that revenue per click can be about 10% of the real value of the click if your account falls under smart pricing.

I did a quick check and found that my best sites do not measure up to the minimum. I will be looking into this situation a bit more. I have adsense ads on all of my pages. If the situation is as suggested in the article I will need to pull most of those ads and research where the few clicks that I do get come from. I can think of many pages where the likelihood of getting a click is very small. Luckily I do the ads with an include file on my sites, so if I decide to drop the ads completely I can just substitute a blank file. I will be looking for a replacement for some of the sites, as I want to maintain the possibility of a small income to defray expenses even on those sites. The sites where I can identify that I get clicks from some pages but not others will be a bit more hectic, but with a find and replace function in my text editor I will be able to make adjustments where needed.

If/when I make further discoveries about this information I will let you know, but for now, the best recommendation that I can give is to put adsense ads only on well targeted pages on sites where people may be open to buying something. This probably excludes several of my sites.