Monday, Frank Schilling coined the term Ballmerfreude -- taking pleasure from Steve Ballmer's misfortune. I shared that post from within Google Reader, so it shows up on my sidebar now. Well, an unintended side-effect of that is that I'm now the only site that ranks for that term right now in both Google and MSN, while Frank is the only one who ranks for it in Ask. (Strangely, Yahoo still doesn't have any ... Keep reading »
Many women regularly go out dressed scantily and then wonder why they don't get the respect they deserve. Dave Chappelle answers that question with another: "If you're not a whore, why are you wearing a whore's uniform?" I can't tell you how many sites I see wearing a whore's uniform -- selling themselves out for a quick AdSense click, not realizing that they're sacrificing greater long-term benefit. Take a good, honest look at your site ... Keep reading »
I came across a thread on DigitalPoint this morning about the accuracy of Google Analytics and found it interesting that one of the posters assumed that Analytics must be far less accurate than AWStats since AWStats reported many more visitors. Surely Analytics was undercounting, right? I know that feeling. I'm always anxious to believe the good stats. However, AWStats' counting of every request to your site -- even bots -- means that their stats are ... Keep reading »
Great post by Aaron today on How to Create & Unlock $100 of Value Per Word.
If you rely largely on advertising for your revenue -- whether direct, affiliate or contextual -- you're making money by encouraging your visitors to buy or do something elsewhere. There's an important concept there that we often never think about: If the advertiser is willing to pay you $0.10 per visitor that you send them, then that visitor must be worth noticeably more than $0.10 to them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be willing to pay you that, right? (In other ... Keep reading »
Very often, it can be hard to figure out what products or companies to advertise on your site. Some sites have obvious tie-ins (a site about cars, for example) but others are much more difficult. If that's your situation, or if you could just use some fresh ideas, check out sites like yours who are successful and see how they're generating revenue. Who advertises there? Where are the advertisements on the page? Use some of the same ... Keep reading »
I wrote last week that you can learn a lot by looking at the public stats of those who are already successful. Well, an article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle reveals that A-List blog TechCrunch makes $240,000 a month with about 1.25 million unique visitors. That's $0.19 per visitor. You have to dig deeper into those stats to get the real story, though. The 1.25 million visitors comes from comScore, who in ... Keep reading »
Of course, that's not because I have budged from my PageRank of 4, but because ProBlogger.net, CopyBlogger, John Chow, and Blog Herald have all been chopped to a PR 4 -- apparently for selling links. Again, I'm not taking a stand on it one way or another, but if this doesn't convince you to stop selling text links, you must be earning a ton.
Man, too often in the past few months I've seen cases where someone sold a website or domain name for far less than I, or someone I knew, would have paid. Had the owner only done even a little checking around, they could have netted themselves several hundred thousand more dollars in some cases. Never, ever, ever take the first offer without checking around. It is bad form to ask for an offer and then turn around and shop ... Keep reading »
Recently I was looking for the site of someone I met at Elite Retreat last year and ended up typing www.cpaaffiliates.com to get to his site, CPA Affiliates, instead of the correct address, www.cpa-affiliates.com. What I got was the old Server Not Found error. I realized that I had forgotten the dash in the domain name, but it got me wondering who owned the better, non-dash name. I knew ... Keep reading »