I have started writing a few articles about how I am going about rebuilding my google income to the point it was previously at. I am doing this so I can get my thoughts in order and see where I can make further improvements and identify where I have gone wrong. Below is the first article I have written on this (you can see them at mytipper.com) Building a Web & Google Empire Pt 1 – Where I came from and where I am coming from I got into web design and development a number of years ago, when PHP was still young. I had been a moderator on many a site for a long time and ran a number of sites in the dark days of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Many of us who ran sites back then struck one or two minor deals but never really made much money. This left us feeling jaded and that there was no more money to be made after the days of the “dot bombâ€. Especially since many of us got in just at the start of the crash and had no idea that there was that much money to be made. Personally I struggled with meager earnings of one or two cents a day. Which was hardly worth the banner space they took up. Back then we made sites simply in the hope they would become popular and to inflate our own egos leaving us with a sense of achievement or success that many of us late Gen x’ers and Gen Y’ers so desperately craved. I like to think of it as the post grunge movement. We didn’t have a right to whine and moan, we didn’t have anything to be particularly annoyed at or upset about, yet we craved success and we craved achievement and recognition. We still do, though many of us are a little older and apparently a little wiser. So for many of us we started out trying to pioneer the way after the crash and tried to make a buck, essentially living the dream of making money for nothing. After a while we realized this simply was not going to happen it just wasn’t plausible, only the major sites like MSN and CNET made money and those ideas were all dried up. Then out of the barren wasteland rose Google adsense, it offered so much and it seemed so appealing to all of us, advertisers, publishers and visitors alike. It returned ads relevant to the content of the sites we were running, viewing or targeting. Our users wanted to click on them because the everything was relevant to what was being shown. These first months of Google adsense were the heady days where every click netted us $5 or more and even the most barren site with a handful of visitors could suddenly pay for themselves if not become profitable. There were no tricks to be weaved on the ads, no hoodwinking our visitors into clicking the ads, they were there, they were different and the information displayed was appealing. Slowly the revolution raised up and every site it seemed wanted a piece of the Google Adsense pie. Everywhere you turned, everywhere you clicked suddenly where there were loud glarish images touting dating sites, books and a million other things that no one really wanted and no one wanted to click on, there was now blended textual adverts telling us about things that we were reading about on the page. I wanted to click and I did. However this boom was to be the temporary downfall of the publishers. Like any boom the bubble eventually bursts, with thousands upon thousands of publishers, there were thousands upon thousands of “cheats†looking to cheat the system and make a quick buck. The advertiser price inflated, advertisers started backing out and profits started to drop. It was about this time that I personally lost interest in what was starting to become a regular income. I went from easily making over $100 a month to struggling to get to the mark and eventually dropping to less than $1 a day. The smart and the savvy users saw their opportunity. Whilst users such as myself started losing interest and just leaving things be, they started inventing and finding ways to make their ads more appealing inventing ways to increase their click through rates, and inventing ways to make more money. Simple techniques were discovered and implemented and earnings for some have gone through the roof and look like staying that way. Everyone is starting to catch on now and everyone is starting to get a better slice of pie. All parties seem to be happy and this could see the end of the upper and middle class switch to reference “nineteen eighty fourâ€. Only time will tell on that one. When I started out with Google adsense I had a small site based around plugins for the e107 CMS (You are most likely on that site now – http://www.mytipper.com) I had a niche audience and times were good. I eventually expanded adding a sports website and for a while my earnings went through the roof, then suddenly they dropped. In recent months I have been watching the trends closely and reading all the text I can on Adsense and have started to increase my CTR and earnings. In pt 2 of this article series I will discuss the changes I made and had to make and how they increased my CTR and earnings. I will discuss my plans and how I am slowly trying to build my web empire, the techniques I am employing and some information about the sites I am using for this. In pt 3 we will re-visit the site and we will see how the changes effected my over all results. We welcome your feedback and ideas, Please post your tips and let us know some of your ideas.
I am probably going to wait until next week so I can have some weekly content on mytipper.com though am thinking of starting a blog. In anycase I will post a post here when pt 2 comes out. The dig article: http://digg.com/design/Building_a_Web_Google_Empire
Danny, a very well-written piece! I now have a better understanding of what you guys went through during that period (I started only last year). Am eagerly awaiting your next post!
Hey, Danny, I just visited mytipper.com. You need to watch that 468 adlinks unit at the top that is scrolling across the screen. I'm pretty sure that counts as "drawing undue attention" to your Adsense ads, and is against Adsense's TOS. I would either confirm that Adsense is okay with this, or change it. You don't want to get booted out of Adsense while you're trying to build back up your Adsense empire, do you?
I noticed that too, I doubt that's allowed. At some point, the 'Ads by google' sign is not visible as well.
Thanks for that. It is suppossed to be a banner rotar, and the next ad is suppossed to slide in but there have been a few issues with it. i will remove it now.
part 2 is currently being written. It is a long one. currently at 3 pages and about 2500 words. It differs a little from my first intentins but that is just my writing style, I hope to post it in the next 2or 3 hours, if it is too long I will split it into 2 articles.
Somehow squeezed out part 2 at http://mytipper.com/content/content/content.php?content.12 I will post it here in a few days I dont want to spam the forums with these articles
part 2 is way to long but still there is some good stuff in there, some of it very useful and some of it not so much but in general it should help some. Should I post the whole of part 2 in a new thread here?
Overview In part one of this article I mentioned some information about my history and the history of the online advertising / web development scene. We established that after the “dot bombâ€, many of us struggled to break even, Google arrived on the scene and initially we all saw an increase in revenues and times were good until inevitably the bottom started to fall out of the market. Many of our profits dropped and a lot of us base users lost interest, we stayed with the programs but no longer put any effort into increasing our earnings via Google. We also discovered that some saw further potential in the market and were smart enough to take it to the next level and to earn a living from their sites. In this article we will explain a little more what happened to the market and why. We will also discuss my two key sites and the changes that have been implemented in order to increase my CTR and earnings. So lets get to it. The market, its bottom and what exactly happened To maximise our earnings and understandings we first need to understand what happened. In other words to understand the future you must first understand the past. The boom and crash that occurred was inevitable from day one. Google Adsense burst onto the scene, they were making money, the publishers were making money and then finally us at the bottom end, the publishers were making money. That’s great. The problem with this is that as a society we see someone making money off of a great idea, and without strong patents, people will inevitably see this and say “Hey if they are making money from it, I can make some money tooâ€, essentially publishers were split into four fairly distinct groups. 1 – Your standard law abiding publishers 2 – Your Savvy, clever publisher who discovered the “secrets†to Google Adsense 3 – Your publisher looking to cheat the system and make a quick buck 4 – The publisher who decided to become an advert service provider Each of these groups had an effect on the earnings of each of the other publishers in their own way. The first group simply plotted along happy for any money they made, be it cents or dollars, they were there keeping the markets steady and advertisers contentedly supplied them with adverts. The second group pushed up their own earnings giving Google more and more reason to keep the program alive, Google learned from this group about techniques that worked and other publishers learnt some of these techniques too. These publishers are the ones that keep the entire program alive, they give hope to the average user when they come across each other, they net the advertisers results and they increase the Google stock value and their bottom line. The third group are the ones you find everywhere, they latch onto a good thing, and are not content with doing the right thing, instead they want more and they don’t want to put the work in to achieve the “moreâ€, they figured out ways to cheat the system, they either accidentally or purposely violated the Google TOS, and inevitably Google had to act, enforcing further restrictions and clamping down on all users over all. They inflated advertising costs through their actions and as a result pushed the bottom out of the market, advertisers stopped wanting to pay the costs and people were pulling out of the program. Because of the clamping down some genuinely honest people have been banned. Because of the clamping down I believe all users should be warned, if you see a site cheating let the webmaster know he is going against TOS, if he fails to comply within a reasonable time then take action by informing Google. However you should not let it slide completely, if you cheat, you may make a short term gain but it should be everyone’s goal to make a long term income from their sites, so warn them, wait for compliance (a week or two is reasonable), then report them and we will all be the better for it. The fourth group saw a good thing, decided it would be a better thing if they were an advertising service rather than a publisher, they decided that either they could make more money that way or that they could provide something Google Adsense could not, or just do it better than Google could. The way these guys affected the market was to draw other advertisers away from Google, this helped to balance the price increase that the third group had created. They added competition and diversity to the market, prices steadied a bit and all were a bit happier. It didn’t resolve the problem but it did dampen the fire a little, however many of these were too late in coming and advertisers had already been stung, $5 clicks are now a rarity and largely a thing of the past. Where we are now The splitting into these four groups has now led as to basically where we are now. At this point we still have our four groups and these are essentially the four groups that will remain till the end of time, or the end of Google Adsense, whichever comes first. Essentially if you fall into the first group and have decent traffic then you should be able to make some money, at least enough to make your site an even investment and grab a few extra dollars on the side. There are no real secrets to making lots of money with Google Adsense, all the information you need is out there, but you need to work hard and make the effort to utilize the information, even if you follow all the steps it doesn’t automatically guarantee you of major profits. The best tips I can give you Before I state my tips it is worthwhile you knowing that I am currently in the first group and trying my hardest to push myself into the higher end of that group or into group two. In part that is why I am writing this article. These tips are specific to your adverts. I will explain these later when I details my sites and their new placement. - If you have a forum site you need to be ultra clever about your placement, forums do not convert very well. As a start you should have an advert after the first post and at the bottom of the last post - Do not try to cheat the program, if it is firmly in the grey area, forget about it, it isn’t worth losing your account to make another $10 - Put your ads in the content with your content wrapping around it - Make your text and links look identical to your Google adverts, I believe Google use Arial 12 for their title and Arial 10 for the text. You should match this on your site so that your adverts blend more and look like normal links - Blend, blend, blend. If you background is white, make the google border and background white and if your links are red, make your adsense titles red - Put at least one advert in the upper fold of your website. - If you ad is outside or away for content (like in your header) do not blend it, make it standout. This will draw attention to is and stop people from becoming “ad blind†- Put a Link unit across the top under your header where links usually are. If your links are here, then try putting them on the side. - Do not over do it. Put enough ads that will be effective but don’t crowd the page - Build your site around content and integrate Google into it. Too many people have built their sites around adsense and it shows, normal “surfers†are savvy to this and will ignore your ads. In this market you have to be doing something different. I am trying to stick to these rules and am starting to have carrying levels of success. The main idea is to blend ads to content or to make them standout, you should have a good mix of both across your site. You should also makes some changes to this as you go as well, make a few changes every few weeks and it will keep drawing attention to the ads. You may want to for instance make some of your ads standout with bright garish colors on one of your busiest traffic days. It will draw people to them, then a day or two later, blend your adverts back in. By doing so you will have people actually looking for your adverts rather than looking away from them. They may not click on them when they are bright but they will remember they were there and aren’t when they check back. My sites and how they were When I first started my sites, I had little idea of advertising and didn’t really care about making much money from it. I started a site because of two reasons. 1 – I had written an ASP sports pooling (tipping comp) program and wanted others to be able to use it 2 – I had a few catchy t-shirts and t-shirt slogans and thought I might be able to sell a few and make a dollar. http://www.myTipper.com was born. The name has little relevancy to my site these days but at one stage I had high PR, the name is out there and it has some sentimentality for me now, so I keep it. So I had a website…..what now? Well the first thing I did was start writing an ASP site with some basic CMS functionality, it started working out alright though it didn’t really do all it could. I started working as internet manager for a record store in Sydney and at the time we started using a CMS known as PHPWebsite ©. My site was still young and from the work I had done with the record shops site, I decided a CMS was a good idea, this was my first experience with a content management system, rather than a few loosely tied together news scripts. I started out looking at PHPWebsite ©, but this didn’t really suit my needs, it was a little complex and I didn’t yet know any PHP programming. It all seemed a bit daunting. So I had a decision to make. I knew I wanted a CMS so I had to research and find one. I knew I wanted to and would likely have to learn PHP and I knew I needed to drive traffic to my site. Step 1: Research an analyse each CMS according to my criteria, my criteria was simple, something easy and intuitive. After testing out script after script I eventually stumbled on e107© The more I used it the more I fell in love with this little system. Step 2: Get some content So once it was up I didn’t know exactly what to do with it. I had a number of minor sites put together with free services like geocities and had the idea of trying to get mytipper out there, but no firm idea, I just wanted something. I started by clapping together my site with various information about my ASP code, some jokes, humor what would now be called a blog and an online store. Basically just a normal home page Step 3: Get some traffic: I was new to this and wasn’t really sure how to go about it. The one thing I knew was if I could do something useful for a community people would come into my site. I submitted to the search engines through my cpanel and thought “now what?â€. I posted on a few forums and then had an issue with my host disappearing. I had started getting a few hits and thought, I wont give up and took my first adventure into paying for webhosting. As such I thought I would put in an earnest effort to do something useful. I looked at my site and thought, I would like to email my members and let them know I am back online. Taking a look at my admin panel I realized there was no facility for this. With this realization came the sudden bolt of lightening that got me on the track to where I am now, including my job!. I thought “You know what, you should write something for it, it will be a good way to learn PHP†I jumped on to e107Coders and started reading up through FAQ’s and reading the forums, asked a few questions and downloaded a few “pluginsâ€, I then jumped over to http://www.webmonkey.com and grabbed a PHP & mySQL tutorial, drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper and wrote down most of the ASP functions that I used most commonly. Then on the other side wrote down the PHP functions that matched them. In under 3 hours I had learnt PHP, since I was self taught at ASP, this was a massive achievement for me personally. Then I got to work and wrote my first PHP script and my first plugin, I released it and started to get traffic to my site. This was just the start, I began writing more and more code for e107 mainly to improve my site and then to help others. Eventually I started on a project which today is the premier ecommerce solution for e107, originally called “myStoreâ€, it was a simple paypal driven shopping cart, now called “ZoGo-Shop†it is an entire ecommerce solution. My Other sites About a year after creating http://www.myTipper.com one of the sites I used had a massive dispute amongst its users, I saw my opportunity and created a site called http://www.silvertails.net which is now the most popular Manly Sea Eagles Rugby League supporters site out there, even as if not more popular than the official club site. http://www.offandracing.com – A horse racing site I started for my fried, I have left it a lone for a while but always nets some good clicks. I will be returning to this one soon and using it as a feature of some up coming articles. In the last year I have started up two other sites which are currently “work in progresses†these being http://www.Cubicities.com – A site all about office life, its humor its horror and its monotony, it has a blog and user submitted stories and more. (my first adventure into blogging) http://www.beeriest.com – A site all about beer, beer reviews, pub and drinking stories. The latter of these sites are still getting off the ground, and I have not focused on them at all yet. I have started adding content and will continue to add more as I develop their concept further. I will likely start a real blog and tie it to cubicities.com soon rather than having a CMS style blog on there as it is now. How I placed my adverts in the beginning When I started out ad placement was simple and effective. I place a 468 * 60 banner in the top right corner on top of the logo. In fact as this article is written, you can see this design on htto://offandracing.com. This was highly effective and I was averaging over $20 a day even with low traffic. I used this formula for mytipper and silver tails, then off and racing. I never really tried excessively hard to get clicks on the sites but they came anyway. Then they simply stopped, so I stopped bothering and just had them there without much thought or worry. I use to have Google Ads inside my ecommerce app which displayed an iframe of a page on my site. This worked until Google changed their TOS and this though still legal was in the very grey area. I pulled this and noticed there was not a massive change in income so it didn’t bother me too much. So what happened In all honesty I do not know what happened, one day I was earning ok money and things were moving along steadily, the next things slowed right back. I hadn’t changed anything, most of my traffic was increasing rather than decreasing and I simply gave up. Well when I say I don’t know, I have an idea. I simply lost interest, when I lost interest I stopped marketing my sites and I stopped worrying about it. This was the blow from which I am now trying to recover. My biggest secret that I will reveal is that you have to stay focused, you have to have goals and you have to work hard to achive them. Marketing needs to be ongoing, and you have to keep content fresh and appealing to YOUR market, so make sure you identify your market. Changes, dedication and results The changes I made were first to Silvertails.net. This was my main and most popular site, so the logical spot to start eh changes was where i had an audience of considerable size to market to. Change 1: Removed the header advertising Change 2: On the forums I place and advert between the content, under the header and above the forum Change 3: Place a block “square advert to the left block Change 4: Place a 468 * 60 advert under the first post of the forum and a link unit after the last post Change 5: Place a 468 * 60 advert in the middle of the full news article Change 6: Place a leader board at the top of the front page of the site Within a week of making these changes I saw an immediate increase, I had gone from my lowest earnings averaging less than $0.50 per day up to averaging above $5 and a click through rate of just under 1% which isn’t bad for a forum based website. I noticed by checking through my Channel stats that my highest clicks now come from my forums and the front page which has surprised me. After I had completed this I started moving on to http://www.myTipper.com. However this was hacked not long after and I have just rebuilt it. When I rebuilt it this time I took into consideration where my content was going to be, where it was going to come from and where I was going to place my articles. So here is how I have gone about the re-design, re-development and marketing of the new mytipper.com 1 – Created a new layout that had ads in a prime position completely blended into the content. 2 – Created a content rich front page with relevant scrolling headlines syndicated with RSS 3 – Place adverts within free content relevant articles, a skyscraper and a 468 * 60 banner at the bottom of the articles 4 – Made the same forum changes as I did to silvertails.net 5 – Release a new version of ZoGo-Shop with the release of the new site 6 – Syndicated some new articles on e-commerce for my ZoGo-Shop customers 7 – Wrote part 1 of this article 8 – Wrote part 2 of this article Whilst steps 7 and 8 may seem mildly amusing and somewhat pointless to you, let me as you a quick question. What are two of my websites names or URL’s? I am pretty sure you would have names mytipper.com and silvertails.net. It is quite simple, whilst at the same time I am writing these articles in the hope they will help others and will help me collect my thoughts and focus on what I am doing and what needs to be done, I am also able to market to the audience. This is a prime example of what is said time and time again on sites like http://forum.digitalpoint.com the successful users tell you, you must add content, we groan and think there must be a better way, but at the end of the day there isn’t. Don’t get me wrong this article is designed to help others I just though that pointing out the above would help and inspire some of you to do the same and write an article, even if it is just a story about how you got up and running. With the first part of this article (my first ever adventure in writing an article) I have already had over five offers to write exclusive articles for other site, some for money, some for link exchanges. This is the power and the value that a simple article can bring. In summary I hope some of you decide to do the same. Visit my sites and you will get a clearer understanding of what I am talking about with the placements and data. When all is said and done, you will need to put in some time and effort to build your site and I will be there with you re-building mine and offering whatever advice I learn and have. http://www.myTipper.com was re-released on 27th of June 2006, in the next article we will revisit the site and how the changes have helped shape my income, I will also continue to provide updates on this on my site in the upcoming weeks so that you can get an idea. I also welcome any other ideas, information and tips, I will be sure to credit you on these. Until next time, happy earnings