Monetising My Site

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I decided to go with my idea of doing an Internet marketing blog in the end, for a number of reasons, but the main reason being that I have a passion for it, and so it should be easy for me to write endless amounts of content for it.

In fact I went for two blogs, but I’ve only set one up so far.  Site Juicer is to be my Internet marketing blog, and I’ve recently pimped it out with loads of ads – the AdSense ones being in highly clickable places (according to Google’s blog heatmap).

I’ve also setup affililate links for all the products my visitors are likely to be interested in, some of them I get paid per lead, which has particularly interested me.

Finally I have created an advertise here page with PayPal subscribe buttons, I haven’t really fairly priced the adverts, if I was to they would be worth almost nothing!! Instead I’ve put the miminum prices I would accept for the hassle, and I plan to increase traffic and page views over the coming months.

My next step will be to create an ebook to encourage email signups, this will then be followed up with a *yawn* email autoresponder series – each one recommending a product or service.

So once I’ve done my ebook (hopefully by the end of next week) I will start writing content and interlinking it. I’ve also got ProBloggers 31 days to a better blog, which I plan on giving a try…

At least it should be an interesting project to work on, I hope to learn a lot about monetizing in the process (I’ve even made £18 this week for referring people to various sites).

Once it gets enough money I plan to pay for a logo and then a design… when it earns enough that is, I figure it needs to pay for itself to justify paying out for a design…

How to transfer your blog from blogger or blogspot to WordPress

Posted by David Whitehouse

Sometime in 2008 I started a blog called Inventive Millionaire had over 120 posts on this blog and it was very similar to make money online kind of blog.  Anyway I have decided to resurrect it because I now wish to make money from blogging and in order to do so I am going to need a lot of content and a lot of blogs.

So in order to resurrect the content I had to remove a redirect from Inventive Millionaire to David Whitehouse and then I had to export the content from Blogspot and run it through a conversion process to get it ready for WordPress, then I simply imported it into WordPress.

There is a simpler way but it didn’t work for me simply go to tools imports and select blogger from there and its pretty straightforward from then on.

New USB Soundcard for Improved Voice Recognition – FAIL

Posted by David Whitehouse

well I’ve got and naturally speaking 9.5 and I produced for a USB soundcard basically it’s meant to improve the quality of the audio because instead of using inbuilt soundcard them using an external on the advantage being that you don’t hear all the worrying stuff coming from the computer so it can get a better sound quality I am also ordered Dragon naturally speaking 10 some hoping to start blogging them using this

anyway I didn’t really correct this you can see how good it is and also by just both her and normal conversational speed so wasn’t like that they’re dictating slowly I was just talking about would normally

Why it is important to buy both the .co.uk as well as the .com

Posted by David Whitehouse

Many people neglect the importance of buying their local domain name as well as the dot com.

As you can see from this example, my colleague Rory is up to no good again!  He’s just bought the unitednationsofsound.co.uk and no doubt he’ll be climbing the rankings to get the number one spot over the next few weeks.

I just hope Richard Ashcroft makes him an offer for it…

Update: Apparently they’ve been in touch with Rory and he is passing it over to them

Shockingly Bad Ads from AdSense

Posted by David Whitehouse

So I’ve been fiddling with my AdSense ads on my MW2 site – it’s getting quite a lot of page views, so I was interested to see why it was getting a low CTR, as I had placed some of my ads in highly visible areas… So I logged on to the site and checked the ads on the homepage – ok, then I clicked through to the first blog post I noticed and I saw this below (click to enlarge):

Now I don’t know about you guys, but I doubt the average Modern Warfare 2 player is going to have corporate team building on his mind right now, do you?  So I think this is my current problem, Google is serving unrelated ads…

Does anyone know how I can get AdSense to put some better ads on it?  I know you can target ads based on certain parts of text – is this is why I am being punished?!

Any suggestions welcome.

Can I Make Money from My Blog?

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently, I’ve decided that 2010 is going to be the year I get good at monetising websites, starting with my own.  So here is the big question – can I make money from my blog?

Can I make money from my blog?

Image curtesy of geek and poke

I went through the John Chow website with a fine tooth comb recently, I went through all the ads he sells and how much in total he could take home (if all his ads are bought), its something like $14,000 per months just from selling his ads direct.  I read some of his old posts about how he calculates what he charges for private ads, basically he doubles eCPM from AdSense – which makes sense to me.

So I started looking into monetising with AdSense and other ad networks, and I’ve realised I am highly inexperienced – hence the reason for wanting to learn.

My aim is to be making £1,000 ad revenue from a blog per month (not sure which one yet – perhaps you can help me on that – see questions at the end).  I’ve read a few posts and I reckon an eCPM of £5 should be possible – please let me know if I am wrong here as it largely comes down to this number!

I know from my stats that I can get at least 50 visits per month per post, and at least 4 page views per visitor, if I write my blog posts correctly.  So here is the break down:

£1,000 in earnings at £5 eCPM would mean I need 200,000 impressions per month

200,000 impressions with an average of four page views per visitor would mean I need 50,000 visitors

Each article brings in an average of 50 visits per month, so I would need a total of 1,000 articles writing.

If I write 3 articles a day for the next year I might just achieve my goal.

Your Opinions…

Ok I’d love your opinion here guys, I’ve got a number of queries:

1. What niche should I choose? I know about Modern Warfare 2 (but I’m quitting games), Internet marketing and thats about it.

2. Internet marketing is quite a competitive niche (obviously) If I were to choose Internet marketing, should I use this blog or Site Juicer?

3. Is eCPM of £5 a reasonable amount – does anyone think this isn’t achievable?

I’d love to hear your opinion here guys and gals!  ;)