Kontera vs Infolinks vs Vibrant Media

I decided to give these networks a shot on some of the sites. They complement adsense very well.

So far Vibrant and Infolinks seem to give highest income at around 35% adsense income level. Kontera is far back with only 15% compared to adsense.

If you want to easilly rise the income on your sites I recommend experimenting with these sites.

More tricks fo the trade: Adsense, YPN, buying websites

Yesterday I had a first $10 adsense day. Not bad, took me few months though. Of course I already had $100 days with affiliate sales but this is first time with adsense.

One of my sites really took off with Adsense earnings. Thing I noticed: The amount of visits have not changed, the price for the ads did. I am using adlink and in the beginning it was miserable. 1 or 2 cents a click. But then google figured out what people like to click and what pays well. And they started rotating better links. Now click is 11 cents. that's ten times more. Therefore my $10.

I've heard that Yahoo's YPN pays even more then Adsense. I do not know whether this was true, and YPN is still in beta and for US citizens only. The rumor made sense since the minimum bid on Yahoo network was 10 cents in contrast to Google's 1 cent. But recently Yahoo switched to 1 cent model too. Worth a try if you are from US.

I bought another website! Yee. It's called ZoomWallpapers.com. I always wanted to have a wallpapers site. You can find some pretty cool backgrounds there like Star Wars wallpapers, interesting space backgrounds, perhaps pick a transformers wallpaper, find a background for your website or maybe interested in Vanessa Hudgens pictures? It's all there in one place, that's the beauty of wallpaper sites. The previous owner was earning about $3-$5 per day. Since I took it over it fell down to only $0.10 per day. Why?

I got rid of ads that were literally all around the place. I moved them away because I want the site first to be a usable resource. And this will take some time.

You need to have faith in what you do. Netvestor over and out.

Starting a PPC campaign with Adwords and YSM

I have decided to expand my marketing by introducing PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Since I earned a solid amount of money last month I wish to reinvest some of it while learning the new tricks of the trade.

What is PPC and how does PPC work

Basically, PPC works like this. You make an advertisement. This advertisement appears on places you choose, like search engines and websites. You of course have total control of what keywords you want to promote through that advertisement. Then you decide how much you want to pay for one click on your add. This is called the bid. Depending on your bid and other people's bids for the same keyword your ad will be displayed in a better (or worse) position.

Let's say you decide to pay 10 cents for one click. That means it will cost $10 to have 100 visitors to your site. If by conversion methods you can earn more then $10 then you have a profitable campaign and vice versa. When you get it profitable you can reinvest all the money you earn to have more ads for more people until you hit an equilibrium between cost of advertising and money earned. Of course you can improve conversion or find better sources of income for visitors and the game starts over.

Setting up a PPC campaigns with Google and Yahoo

I decided to use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising networks. These are the two strongest networks from two strongest search engines in the world today.

If you haven't signed up with those yet, I suggest you search the net for coupons first. Both networks have them so try searching for "adwords coupons" and "yahoo search marketing coupons". You will generally find Google Coupons of about $50 worth and Yahoo coupons of hefty $100. This is "free money" and you should use it.

Setting up an account with these two providers will still cost you a little money from your credit card. $10 to start an account with Adwords and $30 for Yahoo. But if you take all the coupons you will end up with $190 of ads money to spend for the cost of $40. $190 could relate to around 2,000 very targeted visitors.

That is and isn't a lot. Depending on your niche, you will have to earn more then $200 from 2,000 visitors. Good thing is that's 2,000 very interested people in your product but it all comes down to niche and conversion from there.

How to start a first PPC campaign

After setting accounts with Adwords and YSM, you are ready to create your first advertisements. This will be a purpose of another article, but let me just give you a hot tip. Google has excellent advertising support team and you can basically take it from there. Ask them directly (you will find a link in your Adwords screen) to help you create an advertising campaign that will suit your needs and usually within a week you will get an useful answer and a ready campaign from one of their experts. It pays for Google to spend money helping you, because ultimately you will be spending more money helping them.

How to double AdSense income in one day

Having become an adsense publisher I have instantly encountered a need for better conversion. Far too many sites write about ad placement and blending that are supposed to give you better conversion rates. OK I admit there is something to it, but not one of these tips is 100% sure simply because web sites are different. You need to test it and testing takes time and I am sometimes impatient. So I did what I do in these cases - discover a better and repeatable way on my own.

Here are two simple tricks that will almost double your conversion and will work all the time.

Understanding how does Adsense work

When you put adsense code on your site, it analyzes the content of the page, mainly the title and neighboring content and decides upon relevant keywords. I already written how to manually set relevant keywords. Then based on advertiser bids for given keyword ads are displayed, usually highest bidders first and so on. This is a win-win system when it works, because you get the most money from the clicks and the advertiser is sure to get the traffic they payed for.

But often, in order to get more traffic or just out of pure lack of knowledge, the advertisers bid for keywords that are remotely relevant to their website. That means it will be remotely relevant to your visitors too. I had the luck to discover this early because I run a site that is about Nintendo Wii. The console is in large demand and is out of stock almost everywhere. That's why most of the Wii advertisers withdrew their bids or lowered them - they could not convert the traffic simply because the console is out of stock. This in turn caused that when I included adsense, I was getting ads for xbox, playstation 3 and other products my visitors did not want to see.

Now someone will argue that's still great because I was getting the highest paying ads. But here is the crucial thing. It is revenue that matters not ad cost per click. Would you rather take 1 click on $1 paying ad or 20 clicks on $0.10 paying ad?

How to turn things to your advantage

I decided it is far more important for visitors to receive relevant ads then cost per click of single ad. I monitored the ads appearing on my site and wrote down all that were not relevant to the content of my site.

Then I went to my adsense account and under Adsense Setup there is a menu called Competitive Ad Filter.This very option allows you to enter all sites you do not want ads to be displayed from. Wait a couple of hours for changes to take effect and there you go, only relevant ads displayed. This means happier customers, more clicks and more income to you.

There is also another trick. You can specifically tell adsense which sections of your site you do not want to be considered for generating keywords for your ads. Simply put these two html tags around irrelevant text.

< !-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

This text would be ignored for determining adsense keywords because it contains irrelevant information and I do not want it

< !-- google_ad_section_end -->

(when pasting remove the space between '<' and '!' characters on the beginning)

Using these simple techniques I have literally seen increase of income by 100%.

Remember, when in doubt always try to give your visitors what they want, not what you want. You can never go wrong with that.

One last note, when you are monitoring what ads not to display, do not click on the ad to get website url. You can get banned for clicking on your own ads. Usually the site is the same as the url written or you can try other ways to find out the target site.

Running adsense through an iframe widget

This is a little known adsense technique used to accomplish two things. First is to run adsense with precise keywords that you select, and second is to run adsense where otherwise it would not be possible, like for example on Weebly.

As you know problem with weebly is that it does not support direct Javascript inserts. Adsense code needs to be pasted in the same format you get it. But weebly reformats it when you paste it and thus makes it unusable.

However weebly supports widgets and there is an adsense widget that allows you to configure your ads.Pretty much the same way you would normally. Enter your adsense publisher id and channel id (to track performance), decide on the size of the widget (give it a little room for ads to display) and choose your keywords. When you are done just paste the widget code into weebly's custom html component and there you have it, adsense running on weebly or any other similar development platform. You can see ads running on Wii Finder.

Running Adsense through a widget has one crucial advantage mentioned before. You get to choose exactly what keywords you want Adsense to run on! As long as you have keywords that target your page's content you should be all right with adsense TOS. I have written to adsense support about it to make sure, and truth be told they did not give me a straight answer. It was in the lines of "Thanks for trying to make sure you are withing adsense tos. Please take a look at help and google groups for an answer.". I posted the questions in adsense group but nobody answered. The widget author says it's legal, Google didn't say it wasn't so I guess it is 75% sure.

Update on projects and more lessons

It's been pretty exciting the past few days. My projects took off and I have been very busy learning about Conversion. I admit this is the topic I know least about so I'll be passing up useful tips for you as I try them out.

Learning Affiliate Marketing

For starters I have signed in to a few affiliate marketing forums hoping to get as much information as I can. I believe "old man's" advice is the best you can get. I still can not recommend any in particular since I've been a member only for few days but you can find a list of them in Top 100 Webmaster Forums.

My main focus has been the Wii Finder. As you can see I changed the site layout and included two affiliate marketing programs - Ebay and Amazon. I offer the visitors the opportunity to buy Wii on either of these two sites which guaranteed have Wii in stock - such is the need for the console that you can't find one anywhere else! Since Weebly does not support javascript per se I only used classical links as you can see.

But here is a little tip I learned about in the meantime. You can use iframes and Weebly's custom html element to display portion of another site that is running javascript. Basically that means that you can even have Adsense running on Weebly! But I have to investigate this further first.

Easy Wii finder and Wii in Stock currently earn 100% of my daily website income which is around $45 at this moment. You will be able to monitor this information on the blog's sidebar from today.

Dark side of the force is calling Luke

One of the things I successfully fought was the temptation to offer "Free Wii consoles" . This is an affiliate program that pays $1.50 just for a visitor to sign up with their email address in hope to win a Wii.

Having in mind that my site has more then 1300 unique visitors daily, you can imagine what kind of money could be made out of it. While I do not know if you can really win a Wii or not, it looks a bit shady to me. Why would anyone sane pay $1.50 for one email address? Well certainly the reason is to promote and try to sell all kind of products and I am afraid of those ugly ones. You know the sort.

So I decided against it and actually it was easy. Just follow "would I do it myself?" rule.

Economical principles behind three different methods of conversion

Conversion is somewhat a hard word, but it describes process of "converting" your website's visitors into profit. If 1000 visitors comes to your site and 100 of them make you money, you have converted 10% of your visitors into money (or you have conversion rate of 10%). So with that cleared up you need to know what methods of conversion you can apply.

There are three basic ways of visitor conversion:

1. Sell your own product
2. Sell someone's product
3. Sell information about someone's product

Sell your own product

This is the best method of conversion. Reason for this is that your commission is 100%. You earn what you sell. While the best, it is also used by least number of people. Why is that?

People tend to think that they have nothing valuable to sell. They think of products in a too material way. But services are also a product and many have a unique skill or knowledge that can be monetized. You can also buy something at lower price and sell it at higher. Be creative.

Here are some examples for selling an own product

• Sell domain names - find an attractive domain name and grab it before someone else does. Build a domain name portfolio
• Write an ebook - If you have writing skills you can turn one of your passions into an ebook and sell it for value
• Design themes and templates - Nowadays custom themes and templates are very popular. Create an original theme and sell it in webmaster forums
• Create software and games - If you have programming skills you can write small useful applications and promote them. Fun addicting games can monetize very well too
• Offer translation services - If you speak fluently several languages you can offer translation services
• Sell anything you can make - This can be stickers, t-shirts, carved sculptures, earrings.
  

Sell someones' product

This is also called affiliating. Basically you sign up with one of the affiliate marketing programs, pick up links and banners and put them on your site. Whenever someone buys something through your link, you get a commission. Affiliate marketing commissions are in range of 3%-8% but we can say that is is around 10% for sake of comparison. That means that affiliate marketing is 10 times worse solution then selling your own product where you receive 100% commission. Most popular affiliate programs are CJ, Clickbank, Shareasale, Amazon, Ebay...


Sell information about someone's product

This is also called advertising. What you do is put advertisements on your site that take your visitors to another site, for various purposes. The most popular advertising program is Google's Adsense. Earnings through advertisements vary but are in the range of 1% commission for what you could be getting if you were selling target advertised product. This means advertisements are 10 times worser then affiliate marketing and 100 times worser then selling your own product, commission vise. Getting there?

So what's best for me?

Most beginners start with advertisements because that's easiest to setup. But if a click through an advertisement yields $1, similar affiliate marketing link could yield $10 while if you were directly selling the target product you can cash in $100. These are only rough numbers but show where the smart money is.

If you are beginner you can start with ads. If you already have ads you should consider upgrading to affiliate links. If you are already in affiliate marketing you should consider selling your products or services directly.

Another hint. It is equally difficult to sell a sticker and a diamond ring. On average every 200 users that come to your site looking for sticker or diamond ring will buy one. But your earnings on a diamond ring will be 1,000 times bigger then for the sticker. Think about that too.

Wake up call: Stop reading ebooks, time for action!

I have a question to ask you at this point in our little journey. Do you consider yourself a serios Website Investor? Have you read all about research, development and marketing? If not go ahead and finish reading those first.

If you did, have you actually put to practice tips given there? Have you researched your keywords? Did you build a site? What was it like promoting it?

Reason I ask you all this is simple. This blog can be read as a one big e-book on Website investing. Like all e-books out there, you will find it useful, you will accept many of ideas and you will learn something new. But it is worthless until you actually do something about it! I want to urge you to stop reading e-books for a while and start doing some live action!

The best way to learn something is by practicing it. If you do not spend equal time in practice as you spend reading theory, you will be simply overwhelmed with information and you won't be able to act creatively. Your creativity will be put to hold, sealed in a corner of your brain. You have all this information at your disposal, yet are unable to find a simple way to start. This can be very frustrating if not prevented on time.

So start today and start small... Research your keywords. If you did, build a site using proper SEO techniques. Apply some of the tips and tricks I told you about. If you did then it is perhaps time to do something about marketing.

Have a great netvesting weekend!

Earning money with zero investments using Website Investing methods

How to make money with zero investment? It is an old question. Thanks to Internet, making money opportunities are in abundance.

I want to share my experience in how to earn money on Internet using only free tools and services through a process called Website investing. I will show you methods and techniques that I learned. And we will learn together in this netvesting adventure.

The whole Website investing process can be split simply into fours separate steps:

1. Research
2. Development
3. Marketing
4. Conversion

Research is a part where you search for a 'niche' for your new Website. Niche is a term, made of one or several keywords, describing your target market. Like for example "shoe making". Your want to find a niche for which you have little or no competition on the Internet, while there exists a general interest for it (people search for it in the google). Finding a good niche is extremely important.

Development is a part where you develop your website around your niche. We need a development platform and content. Good content is very important because you want users to read about something useful which will help you get better rankings with search engines like Google and Yahoo. You will develop content using free website creator services, such for example is blogpsot.com the home of this site. I have not paid a cent to have this site, I do not pay any bills and I do not have to worry about server problems. I only have to write. Everything else is taken care of. There are a lot of other sites like this all about you will learn in website development related posts.

Marketing is a phase where you let the world know about your content. Purpose of this step is to generate traffic (visitors) to your site. The more usable and original content you have the less you will have to worry about marketing. Still you have to make an initial move. Social networking is very popular tool for letting others know about your content. There are other tools like forums, directories, word of mouth etc. The crucial thing is to have content worth talking about or recommending. Key to remember is if you wouldn't recommend your new site to your friends , then don't expect others will.

Conversion is where all the visitors "convert" to earnings. It is all called monetization. It is somewhat a rough word, but it describes process from a monetization perspective. In practice about 200 visitors are needed to make one sale. Interestingly it does not matter what you are selling. If you are selling a sticker for $2 or a diamond ring for $2000, it will still need about 200 visitors to sell it. Chance is people that look for stickers will have around $2 to spare and people looking for diamonds will have $2000. That's an interesting fact that needs to be remembered.