Blogging Experience

Is Direct Ad Sponsorship Really Worth It?

Posted by Melvin 17 October, 2008 (9) Comment

When the Google Adsense era came to oblivion (wtF!) or when most people realize that using AdSense isn’t really as lucrative as 123, they forget it and turned their head to what is known as Direct Ad Sales or Sponsorship. Well you might have read a ton of post about direct ad sales and I [...]

When the Google Adsense era came to oblivion (wtF!) or when most people realize that using AdSense isn’t really as lucrative as 123, they forget it and turned their head to what is known as Direct Ad Sales or Sponsorship. Well you might have read a ton of post about direct ad sales and I can’t argue that this could possibly be the highest form of income earner for a blog. What I can say here is that it isn’t really as easy as what it seems especially for newbies or for people on the more unorthodox niche and I know most people can testify for it.

So positive things with direct ad sales is of course, you’re cutting the middleman, then its more great for blogs, it also makes a lot of income possible. The problem with it now is that, even though you’re on an Alexa of 100,000 and below it still cannot assure you that you can get out $100 on ad sales on a month. I know some people who are really on a situation like that. Another problem is that, because the value of almost everything is close to being a junk, advertisers are not lenient anymore to advertise for a month. They test for the first 5 days, if they want the results, they’ll continue if not they’ll take their ad again!

One more problem is when the blogger or publisher gets desperate because no one is advertising for their blog, they’ll do a firesale! They sell their ads for so cheap, which is not good because you’re making your income source to underachieve. In which if you put up a WidgetBucks Ad or maybe shoppingads you can likely get some more. Again, Im not degrading the value of Direct sales, its just that sometimes what work for others doesn’t mean will work for you.

What other alternatives for unsponsored sidebar? You can let CPM banners take that or you can run some affiliate products there or you can just remove the sidebar and optimize it contextually! The thing here is that you always want to get the highest income possible. If you’re on a lust niche, then Im pretty sure you’ll get no private ad deals, but when you run AdSense then there are some ads that can generate you income. I guess thats it for today and let me know you’re strong voice.

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Categories : Blogging Experience, Monetization Tactics Tags : ,

You Always Have To Rotate

Posted by Melvin 8 October, 2008 (14) Comment

I am surprised on how many people not even considering rotations when they are advertising or just talking about internet marketing in general. Rotation is just basically rotating of ads and other stuffs. Why do you need to rotate? It’s simply as because by rotating you are optimizing your campaigns or whatever you are doing. [...]

I am surprised on how many people not even considering rotations when they are advertising or just talking about internet marketing in general. Rotation is just basically rotating of ads and other stuffs. Why do you need to rotate? It’s simply as because by rotating you are optimizing your campaigns or whatever you are doing. Just one simple great example is when you’re placing out affiliate links on your blog. When I was starting out before, the 468X60 banner at the top is not a paid placement, it was just a clickbooth affiliate link. And well, what I did is that I put out about 3 different 468X60 copies of clickbooth banner and rotated them and observed who do well the most. I ended up finding out that the clickbooth banner you’re seeing now is what works best.

I think its important to do this. I mean when an advertiser calls me up for advertising I am more likely expecting them to give me about different ad copies. This is important, I mean if you’re out to buy an adspot promoting something you should almost always have different types of banners so that you can make the most of them. That’s why I don’t really like OIO because although it rotates ads, it doesn’t give out the advertisers an option to put up different ad copies.

Even in Pay Per Click and affiliate marketing, rotating is also very essential. In Adwords I always have ad variations on products that I am promoting and Google optimizes it themselves to show more what gets more clicks. People normally get tired of what they see and rotating it makes it look fresher for them. So how do you rotate?

Well there are different methods but I can say you can use a simple php roll call. You can download the ad rotator plugin by Taragana. The steps are enumerated their on his site and its really very easy. You can also use openX but this can be confusing to newbies but the features are really powerful. As you can see there’s really no excuse not to rotate. I can boldly say rotating can make anything that you’re doing online better

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Categories : Affiliate Marketing, Blogging Experience, Internet Marketing Tags : ,

September 2008 Income From My Whole Life

Posted by Melvin 5 October, 2008 (26) Comment

Sorry for the crappy title. The month of September is a busy month for me! I have to go full time in school and Pay Per Click campaigns! Anyway September is a nice month and I just thought I will do a roundup like what most people pretty much do. This is the first [...]

Sorry for the crappy title. :-) The month of September is a busy month for me! I have to go full time in school and Pay Per Click campaigns! Anyway September is a nice month and I just thought I will do a roundup like what most people pretty much do. This is the first time I will do this one ;-)

Rankings and Blah Blah…

  • Alexa down to 136,000
  • PR dropped to 0 for no reasons at all
  • Technorati in 50,000 now!
  • 12,000 Pageviews from last month
  • Top 130 in 45n5
  • Improved Google SERPS
  • What else

I have improved slightly overall even though I haven’t done much promotions. I have also not been posting anything related to making money and most post from this month don’t have the quality that most blogs offer. Still my readers are still visiting and have seen increase return visitors traffic. The number of comments per post is still great and I just think the best way to say is thank you for my readers! :-)

So for the income of the blog this month

  • $25 from Paid Post
  • $55 for direct sponsorship

Believe it or not this is the highest paid advertisement I got in this blog. From June to August, it was just like $10 - $20 and last month was probably the best month. I also got a long term bookings and some really took advantage of my cheap rates (my advertise page is still not updated)!

Income from Affiliate Networks

The Copeac thing is doing great. You may remember me for posting the Pay Per Click Campaigns that I did with Copeac. $165 is damn impressive for me because I just kick started things off last September 20 until the last day. The $62 from PJN was actually $62 way before the 15th month, before I took all my camps down from them. Still a decent amount for me! Btw, PJN still pays new signups $10 for signing under my ass! $20 from Clickbooth is I don’t where it actually came from and the my smallest earnings that came from Comm. Junc. is great considering I even have forgotten my password with my account with them.

Basketball Betting

So Actually I and a great friend Raymille had this little bet on our teams, me w/Ateneo and him w/his LaSalle crap! Eventually LaSalle sucked that bad and was swept in the entire series.

Expenses

  • Adwords - $120
  • Food and Transpo for school - 500 PHP ($12)
  • Bills ($20)

So I really hate talking about expenses because it makes me feel I have earned nothing but lets face it everyone spends on something. The adwords cost for the entire month is just actually when I started running Copeac’s campaigns. I set up a very poor low budget campaigns. For the food and transportation, I have always been over what’s my money for school. My parents give me about $6-8 per day for my expenses and its like I was always $10 per day not because I have poor budgeting but because everything has skyrockted in terms of price.

So, that’s everything for the previous one. What should you expect from me this October? Literally none! :-) I will be trying to post some of my PPC tactics and some blogging tips that I have learned along the way as well as my ramblings and blah blah. I would also like to beg Market Leverage to accept me to their network because I think I was like rejected for about 20 million times and all I wanted is to get accepted to their program and hopefully dominate Tyler’s New Signups Affiliate Challenge! ;-)

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Categories : Blogging Experience, Ramblings Tags : ,

The Pleasure Of Being Read

Posted by Melvin 25 September, 2008 (18) Comment

Once in a while, I got a question and answer here and someone asked a question like this:
Wess Stewart: What motivates you to blog? What made you want to blog in the first place?
I just said for the pleasure of being read and for money. Well I think I would love to say more about [...]

being-read

being-read

Once in a while, I got a question and answer here and someone asked a question like this:

Wess Stewart: What motivates you to blog? What made you want to blog in the first place?

I just said for the pleasure of being read and for money. Well I think I would love to say more about that. The money, of course everyone in the blogosphere has believed they can become rich and they can put up a decent amount of money having their blog. It’s given, I mean not so many people can continue a blog that you have to pay $10 a month and get no moolah for it.

Back again to the pleasure of being read. I was looking at my stats and it says I am getting 800 page views a day and 350 uniques. About 1/4 of that probably is just because of AdWords and some PPC. So thinking of having about 150-250 readers a day reading the simple thing that you say about something, man don’t you feel happy for that? Being read from US to Australia to India, New Zealand, Philippines and etc. just seems to be a pleasurable thing for me. I even have some offline friends who says “oh dude, you’re post about this topic pretty got a great response!” And I was like “oh I thought you’re not reading my blog”.   I know a lot other blogs there have bigger number of readers but for someone like me who’s just a dork and a cool student, it’s really amazing. I also got about 100 feed subscribers and its great!

To be honest, I never think at first blogging can be this  fun. Back to my first day I just posted how I think making money online being not for everyone and I think receiving no responses to now getting 5-10 comments per post and keeping on growing. I also meet a lot of people and learned from a lot of people who commented on this blog to share something about what they think and how they disagreed and such stuffs!

I see people who are getting depressed with their blog not piling up hundred of dollars for them every month but with great readership. I know its hard not to get a lot of money but well you just always have to think that a lot of people are following you. You may not be gaining money but for sure you’re getting the traction that most people couldn’t get. And believe me, this will be more useful for you and your journey!

If you like this one you can stumble it!

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Categories : Blogging Experience, Preachings Tags : , ,

The Proper Way Of Doing Paid Posting

Posted by Melvin 20 September, 2008 (15) Comment

So I have never posted anything this month that has something to do with blogging. I just thought I would post one. Well, paid post or paid reviews is a thing that is really in right now. I mean almost everyone has given their a blog a go signal to have it. It’s just [...]

So I have never posted anything this month that has something to do with blogging. I just thought I would post one. :-) Well, paid post or paid reviews is a thing that is really in right now. I mean almost everyone has given their a blog a go signal to have it. It’s just surprsing how many people do not actually know how to do it the proper way. In forums and discussion threads, I always hear “you have to choose between the pr and the money” and some “oh, I don’t want to piss Google” and such stuffs. The thing is there is really nothing wrong with paid posting and links and blah blah. Matt Cutts has explained it well and still I thought many didn’t get it. So here are the guidelines (very few)

  1. Disclose it! - This is the first rule first and foremost. Unless you’re doing a review from those networks that are taking a cut, you should always tell your readers and Google that what you wrote is a paid review or some sort like that. I know a lot of people (including me) getting away with it with not disclosing but believe me you will hurt your blog in the long term if you do not disclose it
  2. Rel=’nofollow’ - How hard it is to put that simple stuff on your code? Well basically Google frowns on links that pass pr juice and you could get penalized. Although I do see a lot of bloggers nowadays not nofollowing links and well they do disclose though, that it is a paid post. And I think the disclosure would automatically mean something to Google as those sites pr were never dropped. Or Maybe I can tell Google they’re passing PR Juice. ;-)

So thats it. Basically those are the only things that bloggers should keep in mind when doing paid posting. People who told you that the end of paid links and postings are near are stupid. The thing you always have to remember is that Google is the largest and the best search engine and they always say they can weed out any spam. Follow what they say and you’ll be all fine!

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Categories : Blogging Experience, Preachings, SEO Tags : , ,