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JFairfax posted:That's really impressive, pretty good for something that is low maintenance. Yes, that screenshot was Adsense only. I did much better in Amazon last year due to some great TV deals I posted, but not as much this year. Had a real good CPA offer last year as well that was cancelled a few weeks prior.
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Dec 27, 2012 07:26
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MasterControl posted:A 7% click rate is outstanding. Are you running ads in posts with your styles matching? Obviously everything is set up to match the site layout. This site is heavily optimized for Adsense clicks, nearly everything "above the fold" is an ad, content requires scrolling down. This is a site that the average visitor will hit once per year so I don't have to worry about building an audience, it's setup to maximize revenue. It didn't hurt that the main google ad I kept seeing on my site matched the keyword I was going for exactly. CTR was >10% for the first few days.
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Dec 29, 2012 08:38
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Sperg Victorious posted:I think at least one of the WP plugins for amazon associates has geo-location. PiP and most of the major Wordpress plugins for Amazon support geolocation and specific stores.
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Dec 29, 2012 18:52
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MasterControl posted:What are you using for your site? Wordpress or did you build it yourself? I'm just using wordpress on a hostgator account for all my blogs. Most of my sites are using the Heatmap theme which is pretty utilitarian and has a good CTR. Also I'm still working for a living, that earnings is from a single site that's meant to make money on Black Friday only. It earns less than $5 the rest of the year 
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Jan 2, 2013 23:00
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Zero Gravitas posted:So... no help? I just took a look at the plugin on my site and there's not really much explaination on how it works the locaization. I think it will just use the same affiliate ID and then send the visitor to the correct Amazon site. You could also try looking at Amazon Link plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/amazon-link/
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Jan 6, 2013 22:28
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Google owns the map data so they would have control over specific locations or names. You can use something like openstreetmaps if you need more control.
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Jan 24, 2013 09:10
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Try lists in something other than 10, like 9 or 12. They tend to get better click troughs. I hear 7 is the best number in fact. Just take a look at Cracked.com, they specialize in "Top #" lists and nearly none of them are Top 10.
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Feb 4, 2013 04:58
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MasterControl posted:any reason why that is? I'm guessing a list less than 10 might seem more clickable? Absolutely, 10 just sounds boring. 9 most overweight superheroes or the 33 worst shoes ever made sounds way more interesting. You see it all the time on any website that does heavy seo.
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Feb 4, 2013 22:41
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Take a look at your headlines too. The headlines with the best clickthrough are ones that ask a question or omit a key detail from the story. Lets say that Facebook tomorrow announced they're going to make their own phone. A typical headline would be something like "Facebook announces new phone as a push into the mobile sphere" or something like that. The best types of headlines are "Is Facebook's new phone the last gap for mobile air?" or something like "Facebook's newest announcement bets the company on one key area." BusinessInsider.com does this better than anyone I've seen. I can't stand their articles littering up my flipboard feed but I can't help but clicking, their headline writers are really good. Time.com and Cracked are good in this space too.
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Feb 6, 2013 18:18
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Honey Badger posted:Is there a decent market for less popular hobbies / interests out there? I've always tossed around the idea of starting up some kind of blog that deals with literature, both modern and classic (i.e. reviews, discussing themes, obscure references, introductory literary theory, etc.) because it's a personal passion, but given that a full 20% of Americans read a grand total of 0 books per year, and most people not many more than that, I'm not sure if it's an idea that has any traction. Niche markets are where the money is. It's way too hard to compete with a broader audience.
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Feb 7, 2013 18:02
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Send out a weekly digest of your sites content and include a CPA/sponsored link in the newsletter. Selling newsletter ad space can be very lucrative.
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Feb 9, 2013 06:07
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I've done it before going from longname.org to name.com. It's fairly easy, you just setup your new site and use a 301 redirect to send all vistors of the old domain to your new one. Then, log into your Google Webmaster tools account and notify Google of the changes to keep all your rankings and placement the same. Google has a nice page and video on the process: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
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Feb 17, 2013 01:53
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therealjon_ posted:Is it best to do a fresh Wordpress install or just update the old site with the new info? You should be able just to update the domain in the wordpress admin interface and wordpress will handle the rest. As long as you don't have any hard-coded links to the old domain you should be fine. Step-by-step: http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/1898/How+can+I+change+the+domain+name+for+my+WordPress+blog%3F#gs BulimicGoat posted:I haven't seen anyone mention themes in a while. What is everyone finding success with? I use Heatmap Theme on most of my blogs but it's a pay theme. It's extremely modular and dead simple to setup and use. I've also used various themes from http://newwpthemes.com and http://www.arrastheme.com for other blogs too. FCKGW fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Feb 17, 2013 |
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Feb 17, 2013 17:41
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mcsuede posted:Be careful, automation is an easy way to get panda slapped. I'm ok with some automation if you're using it for seeding your sites content. Generate some spun content for a week or two, then start making real content. Hide the junk on your second page so lost visitors won't see it but google still will. This worked well for a couple of my blogs but it was mostly pre-panda. Do be careful with automated content. I had a very popular ipad blog that I let run with automated content a little too long. I was still writing good content but there was too much crap. The site eventually got banned from the google rankings and I have yet to remake it. That site was hovering around $50/day revenue for two months and climbing.
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Feb 22, 2013 03:52
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Omits-Bagels posted:Well, I decided to change my theme on my travel advice site. I haven't gotten all the kinks out yet and I need to change a few things but I am pretty happy with the change overall. I'm finally going to write some more content as I haven't touched the site in a long time. Let me know what you all think or if there is anything I should change. I would switch your comment system over to Disqus if possible, I've seen it increase responses on comments on some of my sites because you readers and respond with disqus/facebook/google/twitter logins. It will import all existing comments for you as well. Your mobile theme looks good too.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:54
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Speaking of mailing lists, does anyone have any suggestions for pay-as-you-go list providers? I have a blog that has just under Mailchimp's 2000 susbscriber limit for free accounts. The only issue is that this is a blog for Black Friday only, meaning I send probably 4-5 emails for one week out of the year. Moving to a monthly paid plan seems pointless and Mailchimp's Pay-as-you-go plan seems a bit much at $60 per send at that level.
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Mar 25, 2013 18:09
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Omits-Bagels posted:Yeah, I've been getting hit hard with this for the past week or so. I installed a wordpress plugin that limits log-in attempts. I just set it to two attempts and then it bans the IP address for one week. Hopefully that stops them. It will not, it's massively distributed so you have hundreds of thousands of IPs trying to log in. It appears to just be using "admin" or "sitename" accounts, so if you change the admin account and move the login page from the default that will stop the automated attacks. Better WP Security can do both of those things for you.
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Apr 13, 2013 21:01
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I've bought articles on textbroker too you can try there. Edit: they're 30% too it seems. FCKGW fucked around with this message at 15:31 on May 3, 2013 |
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May 3, 2013 15:29
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Stealthgerbil posted:I am thinking of making a blog about cheese since I do eat a lot of good cheese and it would be nice to keep track of it in a format that other people can view. Plus I want to make my own cheese and make posts about it and I think it would be a cool and fun idea for a blog. Does this sound like a decent idea for a blog? With just a quick glance it looks like there's a few cheese blogs out there already but many haven't been updated in a while. I say give it a shot.
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May 15, 2013 20:00
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Doghouse posted:Two questions, one of which I may have asked here before, so forgive me: In addition to photopin, I also like http://foter.com and http://sxc.hu for stock photos. Free themes can be good and bad, it's just a crap shoot. I do like the free themes on http://www.newwpthemes.com for some sites but it's always something that you'll need to find one that fits your site's content and style.
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Jul 16, 2013 19:37
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warheadr posted:Also I know everyone is asking about themes, but the recommendations seem to skew toward AdSense-related, ie. Heatmap. Do themes like that work well for Amazon Affiliate-related niche sites as well? I see Thesis recommended a lot, not sure I want to shell out that much right away but if even for my purposes it really is miles ahead of other paid themes maybe I'll just go ahead and do it... I use Heatmaptheme's "Authority Review Blog" theme with the Amazon Product-in-post plugin, seems to work well. If you can find a decent theme you like with a good Amazon plugin, that'll get you about 80% of the way there.
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Jul 19, 2013 19:04
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Amazon provides linking codes and it's own URL shortener service for doing exactly as you describe. I'm not sure what you find shady about it. There are tons of blogs who's sole income comes from reviewing products from Amazon and adding affiliate links.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:13
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That site is frighteningly out of date. The site code appears to have been created over a decade ago and you're running forum software that hasn't been updated in 4 years and is probably full of thousands of security holes. It's just not a very good looking site. I bet if you were to update your forums software, convert the site to a wordpress/drupal CMS and throw in plenty of images and more visually appealing content you'd be accepted. EDIT: Archive.org is saying the site has changed 10 times in the last 5 years and the text on the forum page has notes from 2006 and 2007. I'm not sure how often the site content is updated but it looks abandoned to me. FCKGW fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jul 26, 2013 |
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Jul 26, 2013 18:47
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I used to use YARPP but my host kept disabling my site when it got popular because the plugin kept doing multiple database requests on each page load. This was a few years ago though so it may have been fixed. I ended up going with a 3rd party site like nRelate or Taboola so I can monetize related posts as well.
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Aug 6, 2013 17:29
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You're probably taking about Google Operating System. They're pretty popular and break a lot of stories. Search Engine Land is another one that's been around for more than a decade now and 9to5Google is getting popular as well. You'll have some competition to deal with. I've seen people who want to write about Google just use "G" as a descriptive term (e.g. GBlog) so try looking at domains using that. You still might run afoul of Google since they own trademark on some G properties but that's where I would start at least.
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Aug 14, 2013 16:04
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Digg is semi-curated. Editors monitor social traffic and find what's interesting or well-written, particularly with a quirky story that can have a very enticing title written for it.quote:What is the Digg Score? That particular article seems perfect for the site.
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Aug 26, 2013 20:09
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It's getting to the holiday season, I'm starting to get steady increases to traffic on my Black Friday website so I spent a couple hours yesterday cleaning up my site and getting some new hosting to handle the incoming traffic. Here's last year's stats: This is was for the month of November. CPC wasn't as great as last year but it was still a good result. This was for a Black Friday niche for a specific store. There's tons of money still to be made so if you have an idea for a blog for the holidays get a jump on it soon rather than later. My question: I have a Mailchimp mailing list which is quickly approaching it's free 2k subscriber limit. I think I'd rather just let user subscribe to my posts by email instead of sending out a newsletter. Any suggestions on good plugins to do something? Wordpress offers the Jetpack plugin that does it but it's pretty limited.
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Nov 3, 2013 17:45
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mcsuede posted:There's no good AND free alternative. Either use the Jetpack plugin or start paying MailChimp or another vendor. Oh, I have no problem paying for a plugin or service, I've spent over $100 on plugins for the site this month already. My issue was with mailchimp's payment structure requiring a monthly fee for a service I use 2 weeks out of the year. Either case, I found a setup that works for me that I might was well share with anyone who's looking to build a bigger list. First you'll need an SMTP mail sender service to send out your emails. There's a bunch out there but the most cost-effective services I've for smallish lists are Mandrill by Mailchimp and Dyn Email. http://mandrill.com http://dyn.com/email/ Mandrill is free up to the first 12k emails sent per month and Dyn has a $3 monthly fee for 10k emails sent. Mandrill places an initial limit of 250 emails/hr for new accounts, Dyn has no limit but asks you a few questions to verify you aren't a spammer when you setup your account. One main issue I'm having with Dyn is that my newsletters are ending up in spam boxes but this seems unusual and I'm talking to Dyn about it. As far as Wordpress plugins go, you have a few options. Subscribe2 - http://wordpress.org/plugins/subscribe2/ MailPoet - http://www.mailpoet.com Sendpress - https://sendpress.com Mailpoet and Sendpress are very good programs but are fairly limited in their basic versions so expect to pay for the Pro version. They aren't terribly expensive at around $100 or so, and if you've got a good sized newsletter you're gonna need it. Most features are available in the free version to sub-2k lists. I ended up using Subscribe2. The plugin is free, it supports SMTP hosts and does daily, weekly, and per-post emails. You can also curate your subscriber list, do double opt-in and has a few form functions. No limit on subscriber count but they do have a pro version that offers some more functionality that you probably wouldn't need to a basic blog, mainly advanced click tracking and stats that your SMTP provider may already have.
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Nov 8, 2013 17:35
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Sancho posted:Name.com works fine for me. I'm pretty low maintenance but it's real easy to update the name servers & set billing to autorenew. They only email you when your card gets declined really. I use name.com with my 20+ domains and I love them. Highly recommended.
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Nov 12, 2013 04:18
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If anyone is still doing this I've started up the #blogging IRC channel on Synirc. Hope to keep it going at least through the holidays where there's some good money to be made.invision posted:New Tactic: Paying Twitter Whores to tweet my link to an affiliate thing that gives out a high CPA. $5 spent on 5 tweets, $15 in profit. They just killed that campaign so try to find something else.
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Nov 14, 2013 17:17
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Black Friday niche blog was a big success.  I also made a few hundred from SkimLinks as well, I'm really digging their system. Any link to one of their retail partners is monetized, no special links or coding is required. I had to watch the site constantly and upgrade my VPS 4 times, ultimately going to a 12 core 32gb system to handle the spikes and load. I think I'm going to put some of this money into having someone build me a new site for next year and maybe moving off wordpress. I just wish this lasted more than 2 weeks out of the year.
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Nov 30, 2013 17:11
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Omits-Bagels posted:Nice! I was wondering when you would post. How exactly does SkimLinks work? It looks interesting. It's actually super easy. If you're running Wordpress you just install the plugin and insert your Skimlinks ID. Any link you put on your site, if it's in the Skimlinks network, will be converted on-the-fly to an affiliate link. So for example if you post a straight link to a TV on Best Buy, when a user clicks on the link they get routed through the Skimlinks network and you get the referral. It's pretty seamless. Skimlinks has a pretty large merchant network and many referral payouts are actually higher than what you'd get if you signed up yourself because they're a larger network and can drive more traffic and get a better payout. For example an Amazon link through Skimlinks pays 6.5% referral whereas you'd get only 4% by yourself until you hit a certain order threshold. They also have Skimwords which adds inline links to content and product showcase which shows relevant items based on keyword content. Skimlinks isn't the only system like this out there, but it's what Pinterest uses/used to monetize their site so I thought they were pretty legit. I'm not trying to pump them up too much but if you have a blog focused on reviews or promoting products it's the easiest way to monetize those links, especially if you want to expand beyond Amazon. Most of my Skimlinks revenue came from a Best Buy HDTV roundup I did and I just linked to the products like normal. If you wanna know more or sign up they have a referral network so PM me and I can share some stats. FCKGW fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 21:08
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Skimlinks takes a couple days to tally affiliate sales so the total doubled since I last posted.
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Dec 3, 2013 22:46
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Omits-Bagels posted:I wonder if I can turn off Skimlinks for just Amazon. I do pretty well with Amazon already so I'd be worse off if they took a 25% cut. But for other sights it would be nice. Yes, you can. In fact, it's off by default, you have to tell it to rewrite Amazon URLs if you want.  You also have to remember that they take a cut of the referral fee, but they can also get a higher fee than and individual affiliate might be able to negotiate. So a 25% cut of the referral fee may still be more than whatever lowest fee you can get from Amazon. If you start making enough sales to be in the 6.5%+ range then you're probably better going direct.
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Dec 4, 2013 20:47
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Kenny Rogers posted:Thoughts on alternatives for those of use whose legislators hosed us out of getting funbux from Amazon Links? The prevously mentioned Skimlinks will work. You may have to deal with slightly lower payouts depending on how much traffic you were sending before.
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Dec 4, 2013 22:05
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One thing that popped into my head today was how important making your site mobile ready is. The majority of my traffic late Thursday was mobile and I figured mobile as a afterthought last year. This year I tweaked my template to be responsive and made sure I was serving the correct ads on mobile device (Adsense now has responsive ads). I figured this helped rise my revenue since last year's mobile rev was nonexistent. If you have a blog look into making your theme responsive, or at the very least install plugin to make your site mobile ready. Jetpack has a pretty good mobile theme in their plugin settings and you can still plug in mobile ads as well.
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Dec 10, 2013 00:27
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Zero Gravitas posted:One of many... quirks (for want of a better word which encompasses "bloody annoying idiotic things") with the new theme is that it doesnt update "dynamically generated" pages (like the contributors page, or categories) until you make a new post. Its a bit annoying, but hey ho, otherwise it looks pretty loving sweet and thats what I'm going for. One thing I've learned is that if you're writing articles, try and include some links back to any previous articles you wrote. Something like "Hot on the news of last month's announcement that we found water on mars, new evidence is pointing to the fact that we found a '94 Ford Explorer on mars!". This will help somewhat with some automatic scrapers and agreggators because they sometimes leave those links in. Also don't be afraid to email whatever sites are reposting your content and ask for a source link. You are well within your right to request attribution or demand the content be taken down. As far as popups, I've used ITRO popup in the past for my newsletter and been happy with it. FCKGW fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 17:35
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Amazon affiliate cookies are good for 24 hours. If someone clicks your affiliate link in the morning and then comes back to the site later that night and buys something unrelated you still get credit.
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Jan 27, 2014 16:53
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Mine is usually 250x250 ad, search (if not elsewhere), top blog posts widget, top comments widget or twitter feed, then some other junk depending on how long i expect the blog posts to be The ad at top is usually the best performing ad on the site.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:35
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Also realize that 75% of goons probably run Adblock so you can forget about any adsense earnings.
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Mar 2, 2014 00:10
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