How to earn the most with your blog or website?

September 1, 2008
Filed under SEO

Where to begin the website optimization for revenue?

The first is SEO, Search-Engine Optimization. I know, you’ve heard this a million times already, but this is the truth. What you need in the first place is visitors, a lot of visitors. My experience is that most of the visitors come from search engines. So, if your website is highly optimized, you should get visitors. If you have content.
So, the second thing you need is content. Search engines adore text. The more text, the better. They will crawl your website sooner or later and will list your website in the results. If your content is more relevant than your competitor’s to the search term the user searched for, the search engines will list you on a higher position, so the user will visit your website, not the competitor’s. General rule is that the search engine users click the first three results, they don’t search further if those three are relevant to what they are searching for. Try to publish as much as possible because you will not catch the bandvagon with the first post. Most likely you will post dozens of articles before you will notice that users visit your site or blog, just don’t give up. Post, post, post, about anything which strikes your mind. Somebody will be interested, that’s sure.
The third thing, place your ads in good places. I’ve read somewhere that all you need to do is to place your ads in a good, highly visible place. This is only half true.

Adsense published a heat-map about where an ad should be placed (on the left). This heat map doesn’t guarantee high revenue, but it will definitely help in earning more. And it does work, apparently.

And I think that was all. Now let’s see what ads brings you more revenue.

Adsense: AdSense is strange. I think, better said many think that the common users formed a so-called ad-blindness which practically means that the users ignore these type of ads. I think this is quite true. I have one single AdSense ad-block on this site and it is ignored. Even though this website has quite a lot visitors (of course this is relative) the ads are ignored by almost all of the users. So, while AdSense has the potential to make your pocket fat, the users doesn’t help you at all. The more visitors you have, the more clicks you will receive. The only problem is, the more visitors you have, the more you have to pay for hosting. So it seams AdSense is a dead idea.
The payment with AdSense is extremely convenient as they can send the earnings both as checks and via Western Union.
AdBrite: It’s the same as AdSense, but they have two other product which can possibly bring some good revenue for high-traffic sites: Inline ads and Full-Page ads. OK, my opinion is that these are very annoying. The inline ads basically are like hyperlinks. AdBrite crawls your content and when finds some keywords, it transforms them in links, which on hover pops up a, well, pop-up something which content is an ad related to the keyword. Full page ads on the other hand are even more annoying: If a user navigates your site, after 2,3,4,5 or six page loads it puts a superframe on your content and shows only ads on your whole site. Wow, i bet every visitor dreams about this.
The payment is issued two months after you reached the minimum payout amount and issued only by check. Which are hard to clear in Europe. I saw people who waited one month to have their check cleared and when cleared, 5 euros where instantly blocked by the bank as commission.
Pay-per-Post: This is for bloggers and it seams to be working quite well. Their slogan is “Get Paid to Blog About the Things You Love!“. Basically you get payed for posts on blogs. Very convenient thing is that they send the payments via PayPal, less convenient is that they review each post twice.
Affiliate links: these are the big-boy’s toy’s and can bring you some checks which will make you very happy. If they are used correctly. I saw people who got checks in amount of a few thousand dollars per month, which is extremely good income in any part of the world.
So how to use affiliate links correctly? Basically, you have to include somehow in your posts in a way to be relevant. For example, the above link to the PayPerPost website was an affiliate link. You also should “nofollow” these links, stopping crawlers to follow these links. This is only my experience, never heard is a good thing or bad, i just think it’s better.
Where to get affiliate links? I’d recommend you to choose Affiliate Networks with high reputation, which are on the market for a long time. These are Google Affiliate Network (Doubleclick), Commission Junction (CJ) and maybe Linkshare. These are all trustworthy affiliate networks, they can track your affiliate links with high precision and won’t fool you.