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Typepad blogger checking in!* I'm writing a Japan  travel guide at https://www.konnichiwhoa.com. As I write this I'm hitting scale for the first time (thanks to a link from Yahoo Sports). I never thought I'd say this, but thanks, Yahoo! Anyway. I've been researching optimizing Adsense for the last day or so. I'm currently doing $0.08 RPM in a niche where CPM is a little over $2.00. I've taken a couple baby steps, like blacklisting some low payers and turning off totally irrelevant ad categories. Has anyone successfully tweaked Adsense to go from zero to actual revenue? I've seen some success stories on Hacker News but not much in the way of how to pull it off. *By the by, I'll put in a good word for Typepad. I use them because I get the service for free, which means unlimited hosting and unlimited traffic, but they also do a bang-up job on SEO. Without any backlinks or throwaway blogs, I'm #4 for "things to do in Shibuya" and climbing in other categories. So far it's worth sacrificing the extra 10% of control I'd get with WP.
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Jan 21, 2012 04:16
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Sorry for the big long obtuse post before. What I wanted to ask was: Anyone have a good resource for optimizing Adsense?
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Jan 24, 2012 00:46
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Davos posted:So lately I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog just for the fun of it and for something to do, specifically my planned subject to blog about is videogame stories. Articles just doing things like talking about the qualities of story telling integrating with gameplay, analyzing various well received and not-so-received games in this aspect, etc. Do you guys think I should try and monetize this, or is this something that would just be better at least starting off with a free blog on Blogger or something? Don't start a video games blog for money. The competition is way too stiff. If you want to do it out of love for games, then by all means go for it. But it'll monetize very poorly.
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Feb 21, 2012 02:50
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Anyone interested in taking up writing about learning music? I'm listed in the OP for my blog but now I'm on the other side and looking for affiliates. A conversion will pay you $75-150 in a niche that gets 300,000 searches and $1.10 CPC. PM me!
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Mar 24, 2013 07:50
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So I got an unsolicited pitch from a content placement person.quote:Hi, I see two possibilities here: 1. They're hoping to sucker me into handing over the keys to the kingdom so they can turn an aged domain into a viagra shop. 2. They're looking to create backlinks for their own affiliate products. Assuming it's possibility 2, this could actually be in my interest. My site is sinking without fresh content, and I don't mind giving free placements for affiliate links in exchange for traffic (I have a very steady ad CTR), Facebook likes (which I'm already generating with a dead site), and the potential to step up to email marketing or ebook sales. Anyone had experiences with such a shop? On a scale of 1 to disreputable, what am I looking at?
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Apr 2, 2013 12:01
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mcsuede posted:*Google has updated their standards on guest vs sponsored posts, if you're getting paid for a post Google requires a disclosure that the post is sponsored and "prefers" that any outgoing links are no-followed. This doesn't apply to guest posts, as guest posts are unpaid. The FCC's new disclosure rules may also apply here. Awesome edit (and awesome post in the first place). Thank you!
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Apr 5, 2013 15:18
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the mattness posted:a) Getting in more raw traffic numbers a, b, c and d are all related and can be thought of as an upward spiral of traffic. a and d are basically the same thing: more inflow of people via natural means, which predominantly means search. Steady traffic from Reddit is awesome but also requires fresh content generation, whereas inflow from search can be related to 'evergreen' content, where you write something good once and it continues to draw people in over time. (For example, my Japan blog is evergreen for phrases like "things to do in roppongi" or "free wifi in japan".) b and c are also related, and you can think of these as 'conversions.' Someone comes to your site and is then convinced to follow you on Twitter or FB. You can probably increase this number if you directly attach something free (like an ebook) to the follow. That wall is easier to construct on Facebook than Twitter (it's in FB's Page manager / developer documentation). You might also consider email, which generally does a better job of creating purchases than FB or Twitter does. Use Mailchimp or a comparable provider. If you create followers through b and c, then you'll get more traffic to new posts 'for free,' so one post may yield 100 hits instead of 10-40. That makes you more appealing to Google so you'll rise in SEO ranking, and a and d will start to perform better. Basically, it's all one big positive feedback loop if you can close the loop properly. Consider reading patio11's blog and read like your 'product' is the site itself.
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Apr 27, 2013 12:23
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MasterControl posted:Facebook advertising is what I have gotten into but I'm cheap so it's $1 a day. I've been getting page likes at .09 a like at that price. Previously I was paying a bit more a day and my cost per like was 30-50 cents a like. no clue why it works out that way. Also target the topics. Don't go general. If your a World of warcraft raider then find as close to a subject as you can. It optimizes conversions. my traffic has really picked up from Facebook since I did advertising and $1 a day is nothing really. Ooooo, I'd love to learn more about this. What lowers the cost per like? Better targeting? Just setting the budget at $1 a day and off you go?
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Apr 29, 2013 05:37
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Beaumont posted:As of 3 months ago, I've started a copywriting job at a food website (imagine if Domino's Pizza had a blog) and one of my main responsibilities is to update their blog. I don't have any real experience blogging - I've got a reasonable grasp on SEO, but that's it. It's time to get my poo poo together. Well, it certainly sounds like the wind is at your back. I imagine you'd look good to superiors if you were able to raise overall pageviews or improve a business outcome, which means: -More newsletter subscribers: in blog posts, encourage users to sign up and demonstrate the benefits of doing so. If subscribers go up, pageviews per post will go up too. -More posts on highly-searched cuisine types: make a list of different cuisines, using Google Keyword Tool to create a large list of high-traffic search keywords for you to blog about. Ideally you'd like more search traffic than email, because email has to be written every week but one popular article pulls in traffic forever. -Related to that, do an SEO audit with the help of Yoast. Even if you're doing a good job on a per-post level, there are sitewide changes that can be made to improve performance. -More of a certain business outcome (example: if you were Domino's Pizza, clickthroughs to order online)
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May 8, 2013 21:38
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FAN OF NICKELBACK posted:I have a question that I'm too dumb to figure out. You're not dumb. Direct also means that GA can't determine the referrer for any number of technical reasons. There may be a referral shield (black hat sites tend to do this often) or SSL may be involved. For any browser that turns on https in Google by default (most notably Mobile Safari), you'll also see traffic as Direct or just from Google with no keyword data. This is a big deal in the analytics world and there are a number of ways to estimate - but never really know - the true sources of your traffic. Consider paying for an SEO tool or running some small test Adwords campaigns to get a feel for the volume from individual keywords.
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Nov 19, 2013 01:56
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Krono99 posted:How else could I approach this from 'outside the box' to generate some unique visitors and traffic to my blog posts (specific car ads)? I never thought I'd say this sentence, but I agree with Kenny Rogers. How are a handful of $5 posts per car supposed to be unprofitable for car sales? I applaud the initiative to always try new methods and be questioning - I'm sure the sales managers love that - but closing comes from finding what works and exploiting the hell out of it. Unlike most people on the Internet, you already know what works.
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Nov 26, 2013 01:20
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On a separate note, my first blog is getting consistent hits with little effort but CPC has fallen all the way down to $0.12. As of two years ago (the last time I actively updated the blog) it was around $0.60, so the trend is definitely downward. I haven't tweaked any ad settings in literally years. The last thing I did was add a blacklist of lesser ad providers. Is there anything else I should be doing? e: typo snagger fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 05:40
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Reposting: How do I get my ads off of Google's lovely AdChoices network and on to something better? I blocked a bunch of domains several years ago, but haven't done anything sense. My CPC has fallen from $0.88 to about $0.40 in the last year and a half. Pageviews have also fallen, but that's because I was too lazy to update with new content.
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Jan 9, 2014 01:20
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snagger posted:How do I get my ads off of Google's lovely AdChoices network and on to something better? I blocked a bunch of domains several years ago, but haven't done anything sense. My CPC has fallen from $0.88 to about $0.40 in the last year and a half. Update on my ad situation. Lesson: update your ad code! I was running ad code that was easily several years old. I swapped out the code on all my ad units and I saw a very healthy spike in my CTR and CPC since users were shown interest-based targeted ads. This may turn konnichiwhoa.com into something worth spending time on.
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Jan 10, 2014 04:33
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KetTarma posted:
Have you checked your site on a mobile device? Likely candidates would be breaking your responsive design, bad HTML, or including media that wouldn't display on a mobile device.
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Jan 19, 2014 20:42
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My Google MultiScreen rating just went from 5 stars to 1 star. I have no idea why.
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laxbro posted:I recently bought an expired domain with a healthy amount of backlinks and want to know if ripping content off reddit is a viable method for building initial blog content. For example, will google penalize me for having duplicate content from reddit? I plan to ask the authors for permission and offer a permalink to their sites but was wondering if there were any reasons not to do this. Most of the big blogs just watch Reddit, Hacker News and social media feeds for their stories nowadays. They seem to be getting along just fine with it. Just link to the original source (not the news aggregator) and you have an easy stream of posts. No need to ask authors' permission.
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May 4, 2014 18:43
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laxbro posted:I don't think google shows their keywords in analytics anymore. No idea where the random keywords come from, could be from other search engines. In any case you can see keyword search volume in google webmaster tools. Keyword data is trending toward zero as more browsers adopt secure search and Google does less and less about it. As a proxy indicator, check your Landing Page rankings and extrapolate out to each page's focus keyword.
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Jul 10, 2014 03:58
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Omits-Bagels posted:So I'm thinking that I can spend about $100-$200 each month promoting/improving my site (FB ads, stumbleupon, Reddit, hire a writer, etc.). I'm trying to figure out how to get the most bang for the buck. Any suggestions? I'd intuitively guess it depends on your blog's vertical but can probably be solved with straightforward math. Go calculate your actual ad rates, the traffic boost by each channel, and your site's RPM, and you'll see which one gets you the best results per dollar spent.
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Jul 28, 2014 19:50
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laxbro posted:Is it permanent? Could I just submit it as a text submission with the link in there to get around it? I wasn't necessarily spamming my site, I just never post on reddit so I must have triggered their spambot since 4 of my last 7 posts in 2-3 weeks were links from the same site. Just create an alt.
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Sep 13, 2014 23:18
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KetTarma posted:How do you handle guest bloggers? One of my friends said he was interested in writing from time to time and was curious about how I could pay him based on traffic he generates. You probably won't make significant money directly off of that one post in one month. In my experience working for large content providers, I made about $12 a post, so I'm using that as my benchmark. Looking at it narrowly, you could only "afford" one post a month. So, you should look at it instead in terms of an investment. That post will have ongoing value and hopefully grow your monthly baseline traffic, which would increase your revenue beyond $20 on average. What would it be worth to you to raise the average to $25? To $50? What would it take to get there? Are you willing to pay your friend what he needs to get you there? And don't forget that investments come with risk. For that amount that you're willing to pay, are you willing to "lose" it should your average remain at $20?
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Sep 30, 2014 18:04
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laxbro posted:I recently got a spike in organic traffic to a page with a bunch of random pictures I've gleaned from the web. I can't tell yet what keyword is drawing people to the page. The bounce rate is super high and the time spent on page is very low. I added the page as an after thought, and haven't added any pictures since I started the site. Any advice on how to take advantage of this new traffic? I think it will be hard to improve the bounce rate, because people searching for pictures are not going to want to read my stories. Are there any plugins that are good for pictures, and where I can possibly integrate ads in with the pictures? http://creepylittlestories.com/pictures/ Sounds to me like you're ranking in Google Images for something; check the file names on your images and the alt tags you applied. If that's the case, I dunno what to tell you in terms of taking advantage of the traffic. Bounces count as zero time on page, so a high bounce rate will result in a low average time on page.
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Dec 19, 2014 17:22
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Royal Jeans posted:neat tip about stumbleupon Nice! When you say 'like' is that a Facebook like, or something native to StumbleUpon?
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Jan 21, 2015 16:01
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KetTarma posted:I'm starting a spinoff blog from my main one and want to use a few articles from my current blog. What's the best way to do that without taking a SEO hit? Canonical link reference? 301 redirect? Just deleting the main blog's copy? Write fresh content and link between the blogs. Whichever direction the links go will lend power that way - linking from the old to the new will give SEO juice to the new. Canonical links and 301s aren't relevant here, because canonical links are for variants on one page (think landing pages customized for different traffic sources) and 301s are for content on the same site that's been reorganized. Deleting the main copy and reposting elsewhere can't possibly end well.
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Jan 24, 2015 20:10
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Moniker posted:I'm making a simple wordpress site for a client. I want them to be able to input questions and answers (FAQ page) but I don't want them to have to copy/paste HTML from the source of the input. Just get Gravity Forms and have the submissions create new post drafts. Also, there's a Wordpress thread in Cavern of COBOL: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3161913
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Feb 1, 2015 22:57
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DarthJeebus posted:Okay so I do have a question that maybe the thread can help with. If I'm trying to blog about my chosen niche while promoting affiliate products, should I set up a "storefront" type of page separate from the blog, keep it all in blog format putting affiliate links and reviews in my posts, or some hybrid of the two? Can anyone suggest some good themes for this purpose? I'm inclined to suggest keeping it all in blog format. The experience will feel more native to a typical reader, plus you'll get a higher conversion rate by removing the store "step" in this process: blog post > your storefront > the real store (eg Amazon) > store's checkout funnel > purchase There are losses at every step of the way, and for many steps in this process you may only get 1 in 100 clicking on to the next step. Remove your storefront and you'll remove one of those layers where 99 out of 100 drop out. The result of this process is also the result of a multiplicative process, so not multiplying by 0.01 is good. There's something to be said for running a pure affiliate or dropship e-commerce operation, for sure, but I'm not sure combining the approaches is mathematically more effective than just one or the other.
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Feb 10, 2015 00:30
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Grooglon posted:I have a blog that I've been writing for a few years. It's about a niche area of a totally over-saturated topic (video games), and it gets about 300 visitors on average each day (about 65% of which are new). The URL is pretty poor and doesn't contain any keywords, and the focus of the site has definitely been more on writing practice than profit-making. Maybe so! I'm also in a small/unprofitable niche (Japan travel), I maintain my site poorly, and I do $2.80 RPM (per mille, not per month) on 50 visitors a day. At the same RPM you'd pull down about $25 a month.
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Mar 5, 2015 21:29
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laxbro posted:I'm jealous. I was getting a few clicks a day, but I only get .05-.30 cents per click. The keyword I rank for shows an average bid of 2.50 in keyword planner, so I'm not sure why I'm getting paid so little. I would be estatic if I was getting more than $1.00/click. In 5 years I've never gotten anything from Amazon links. I've noticed that my CPC goes up if traffic does. If it's a really high traffic month, my RPM will double. If your site is small that could be a factor. I also started disabling some ad types and forcing everyone on to behaviorally targeted ads, and that goosed my click rate a bit.
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Mar 6, 2015 00:10
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KetTarma posted:For the past 3 months, I have posted a picture with some commentary every day at a random time between noon and 7pm. When I started this, I had 501 Likes. At this point, I have exactly.. 501 Likes. A few possibilities: -Facebook wants your money to increase your reach (thereby exposing more of your audience's friends to your Page) -Your audience has people in completely different time zones -Your blog doesn't have a Like box -You're not incentivizing a Like from your website or on the Page itself (using a social locker) -Your content is insufficiently viral
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Mar 6, 2015 21:03
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dhrusis posted:Yeah, its just on the /shop page because its Woocommerce generating that page and it doesn't plan well with my generic theme.. Open it up in your browser's dev tools and examine the source code around that area. The right margin on #content looks quite suspect to me.
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Mar 10, 2015 20:36
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MussoliniB posted:Name: MussoliniB Wow, that *is* niche. Who's this for, music students? If so and if you're interested in revenue, I'm piloting an affiliate program for my online music school. Aside from that, maybe you could get some amazon affiliate dollars for linking to textbooks on the subject?
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May 17, 2015 21:14
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Camo Guitar posted:Anyone know of a preferably free pop up wordpress plugin that you can configure to say 'Hi you like this stuff, subscribe by putting your email details here etc etc' with the forms in the pop up? Congrats on the adsense payout! I used to use OptinMonster for exactly this but they just switched to a very expensive SaaS model.
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May 21, 2015 04:25
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Hyvok posted:I've had someone contact me from "Ginger media" about running an ad campaign. Is this legit or a sometype of scam? The company seems legit, can't find too much info on it though. Sounds like you got cold called by a marketing firm. If you want to spend money to have someone run ads on your behalf, there's no shortage of firms out there who would love to take your money.
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Jun 13, 2015 20:51
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Alder posted:Hmm--I run a small blog for a niche MMO/game reviews and so far 850 views which is actually higher than I predicted. Should I try SEO stuff or just keep it as a hobby? Mostly, I wanted to find more people who liked the same games I did... In how long did you get these 850 views? Was this a few hours, or a few weeks? Given the combination of "video games" and "niche," I can't imagine that's a silver bullet for commercial success. If your goal is to find people who like the same games as you, I imagine you'd be happiest if you kept doing that and worked to mold this community in a way you see fit. If it gets a large enough following and users are contributing to the content or community, then you may have other commercial possibilities (publishers placing ads, affiliate links to game stores / Amazon) come along.
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Dec 13, 2015 21:28
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