Random Thoughts

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I installed Project Wonderful a while back and thought I would let you in on what I’ve learned.

The first thing that I learned is not to have more ad spaces that you can realistically sell. I would suggest starting with just 2 ad spots. This causes a supply vs demand problem, causing the spots to get filled up fast and making the bids go higher. At first I made the mistake of adding more boxes once those filled up. I found that this kept my ads at an extremely bidding price and I had some empty spots. When I went to only 3 spots, they filled up and created a more of a bidding war. This is one case where “less is more”.

If you want your ads to fill up fast, put them above the fold. No one wants to pay money for an ad that no one will ever see.

On the Advertising side, I have found success with using Project Wonderful ads to generate traffic. I tend to search for higher volume blogs and I try it out for one day. The “wonderful” thing about Project Wonderful is that you can advertise for only 1 day and can put a cap on your expenses. This allows you to evaluate if you want to bid higher or if you didn’t feel that you received enough traffic to justify the expense of another day. For new bloggers this is especially useful because you don’t have to shell out $20 or $40 to advertise on a high traffic blog and there’s not commitment.  If you advertise on a blog for 50 cents per day and find that it doesn’t generate enough traffic, you’re only out 50 cents.

I will report back in early to mid April with my earnings from Project Wonderful and other revenue generating endeavors.

Recently I purchased a 125 x 125 ad spot on theblogentrepreneur.com as a way to generate more traffic. The cost was relatively low considering the fact that it has directed quite a few new visitors to my blog. After it has been up for one month, I will take a look at the total cost of the ad and compare it to the number of clicks received to calculate my Cost Per Click or CPC. Looking at Google Adwords, you would likely end up paying around 10 cents per click if you were to advertise your blog and not many blogger advertise with Adwords. Advertising on other blogs will hopefully prove to cost about 1/2 as much as Adwords and with the proper ad, will end up being almost all targeted traffic.

How Much Should You Pay for Advertising?

I believe that if you are purchasing an ad that will generate targeted traffic, you should pay as much as you can afford. If I had the money to spend, I would have purchased an ad on a blog that receives more traffic, but for now I’ll stick with lower cost advertising. I don’t like to spend more than $30 per month on one single ad. That’s just a personal preference given my financial situation. If I had $500 to spend I would go for it. If your site is monetized properly, you should earn that money back, especially if your CPC ends up being around 5 cents, and you have a high CTR.

From my initial results from advertising on other blogs, I would say that it’s well worth the money.  If you’re skeptical whether your ad will work, why not install Entrecard.  This may give you an indication of how much traffic you will receive if you were to purchase an ad on that site.  Actually, that’s how I found that buying an ad on TheBlogEntrepreneur.com would be beneficial to me.  One day I bought an Entrecard spot there and had  quite a few clicks, so I decided that it would be worth the money to advertise there.

If you’re wondering why my blog posting frequency has declined as of late, it’s because I’ve been busy with a few online endeavors that are taking a lot of time.  In order to alleviate the pressure of having to post here for a few days I thought about using free articles posted on article directories for my blog posts.  I stopped by a few article directories searching for appropriate articles that I could post today and after about 30 minutes, I was surprised at what I found.

I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that article directories are a great way to market your website and increase search engine ranking.  It appears that many, in an attempt to obtain better search engine rankings, decide that quality is not important.  Articles seem to have been uploaded hastily, resulting in poor quality.  Because article directories have a policy that prohibits making changes, articles must be copied “as is”.  That would mean posting the article, errors and all.  I’d prefer not to post something on my blog that appears to have been written by a 6th grader.  Among the errors that I found regularly were spelling and major grammar issues as well as problems with html formatting in links.

If you’re going to use article marketing to market your website, try to post quality, well written articles that you have been proofread a few times.

If you’ve been here before you may have noticed a few changes to the site.  I’m learning about generating traffic and monetizing my blog and have recently installed a Scratchback Topspot Widget and have also signed up with Project Wonderful.

Scratchback

This program allows you to purchase a text link on this blog for a low daily rate.  You will notice it placed on the top left sidebar above the fold so that you get as much exposure as possible.  It’s currently set at a low $1.00 and buyers use Paypal to pay for their ad.  The great thing about this widget is that it’s customizable to look like your site and you can set the starting bid.

Project Wonderful

You will noticed that I’ve placed this on the top right sidebar.  If you see a 125 x 125 ad that says “your ad here” this means that the space is available for rent for only 15 cents per day.  You will have to keep an eye on the bids as they go up you may get bumped off and need to bid more to keep your space.  If you’re installing Project Wonderful for the first time watch out that you don’t leave your minimum bid set at $0.00, unless you want to offer advertising for free.  Project Wonderful is “wonderful” if you don’t know much about design and layout.  You can customize your ad unit to include different sizes of ads and also specify a number of columns and rows.  I have installed 125 x 125 ads since they seem to be most in demand and they are quite attractive.

I will keep you updated on the performance of both Project Wonderful and Scratchback.  Stay tuned…

For the past two weeks I’ve been testing Adgridwork, a free text ad exchange to see if it might generate some traffic without cost. It seemed like a great idea, but unfortunately what I thought would bring tons of traffic my way has turned into another disappointing program. My ads had been viewed more than 500 times with only 2 click which I thought was pretty low. Even though it didn’t take up a lot of space in my sidebar, I have still removed it and will try something else. There are plenty of other similar programs out there that may provide better results.

Because my blog is a 3 column theme, I don’t think that having too many text ads look very nice in the sidebar anyway. I’m toying with the idea of getting a new wordpress theme soon, but am just trying to figure out exactly what I want. When I first setup the blog I had no idea what I wanted in a theme. I didn’t know anything about widgets or plugins so I just grabbed one that seemed to work. Now that I know a bit more, I’m realizing that I need a theme that can do a little bit more for me, as well as look a little “sexier”…If a blog can really be called “sexy”. Bill Gates uses the term so I figure I can use it as well.

I love using social networking sites and finding new sites that I can learn from.  I use StumbleUpon and Entrecard daily and have been somewhat annoyed visiting certain websites and blogs.  I’m currently living in a hotel that doesn’t have the fastest internet connection.   I’ve done speed tests and some days I’m only surfing at 1.5mbps whereas my previous home connection was around 7mbps.

I’ve been annoyed with pages that have about 100 things to load up in the sidebars. They have ads for everything under the sun whether they are relevent or not,  plus links to every directory in the world.  Is this really necessary?  Do all these links need to be on the main page?  I don’t think that they do.  Sometimes pages take so long to load that I get annoyed and I just move on to another page.  I realize that this isn’t the smallest page out there, however it doesn’t take long to load even when my internet is a little slow.

Here’s a few tips to help you make changes to your page if necessary:

1.  Try to put only relevant ads on your front page.  If your site is about tech stuff, do you really need to advertise knitting resources?

2.  If your ads are not generating revenue within a reasonable amount of time, get rid of them. They’re just taking up space.

3.   Test all your links and ads regularly:  If they don’t work on a reasonably consistent basis, remove them.

4.   Alternate ads regularly:  You may want to advertise a number of different things and test out various programs, but remember that you don’t have to do it all at the same time.  If you have 10 programs/ads that you want to try, why not try 5 of them and then after a certain period of time, try the other 5.

5.  You may have submitted your site to directories and are required to add a reciprocal link.  Unless they require you to put the link on your front page, try creating a directory or link page to display images or links so that your main page is not cluttered with links that could be placed elsewhere.