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Originally Posted by sjpeer  I was fortunate to earn $100 in my first month through multiple posts being referred to by lifehacker.com. I've been able to maintain about that level, although October wasn't a great month for me. Overall since mid August (2 1/2 months) I've made just over $200.
My biggest question now is how to opptimize my site for adsense, search engine optimization (SEO), and other advertising.
I would love to hear from Steve (or anyone) more detail on the following:
1. What the percentage break downs are from different revenue sources (I know he's shared some rough figures).
2. The break-down of where his traffic comes from (Delicious/Social Bookmarking vs. Organic search vs. Returning readers vs. posts from other blogs).
3. What 80/20 activities will optimize Search Engine results the most.
4. How did revenue sources change on Steve's site over time as the blog grew.
I'm at over 10,000 hits a month and have been wondering if I should try to do some direct sponsorship deals or look into affiliate programs rather than relying solely on adsense.
I would love to hear any advice on these questions. |
You should definitely opt to use other streams of income apart from Adsense. The reason for this is Adsense can be "insecure", and if you put all your eggs in one basket, then all your income could vanish overnight. Very often, people would get their Adsense account terminated mysteriously for no reason, and as everyone knows, it's almost very difficult to get one's account reinstated, unless you have strong evidence and supporting data to show the big G that you are at no fault.
There are many other ways to make money apart from Adsense. For instance you can create your own e-product (i.e: softwares, ebooks), and promote the website through organic traffic and of course the so called PPC.
You can also use what's called the "Google Cash" model to make money. It's becoming increasingly harder to profit this way, but it's still very possible to make handsome income (i.e: 4 to even 5 figures per day) if you know what you're doing.
Don't know how to create softwares? Then you could get one developed at outsourcing sites such as rentacoder.com, elance.com. Don't know or like writing? You can buy PLR articles and turn them into an ebook and sell it through, say, Clickbank. You can also preload these articles into an autoresponder sequence, and have these sent to your list as, say an online course spreaded over a course of 7 days, 14 days, etc, and promote your affiliate link this way......
Build your list: create a squeeze page, diligently post in marketing forums, create contests, use PPC......
Another income stream idea would be to create a membership site. It's a smart way to make money, I think, and if you do it right you can make handsome income. Pick a niche you like, do some market research on it, and just proceed with creating a high value membership site, which hopefully you can sustain for a long period of time.
Answering your question regarding what 80/20 activities will optimize Search Engine results the most, IMHO it would be to get a lot of backlinks and reciprocal links from related sites. Of course you should still do onpage optimisation (pay attention to the tags and obviously internal linking structures of your site), but I think it's the offpage that counts more. Nonetheless the combination of the two certainly forms a powerful combination.
However, don't get stuck solely in SEO-ing your website, because that's not the only way the search engines, especially Google, decide how to rank websites. You should know that Google implements a technology called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), which basically means that its robot decides the relevancy of a website not only by the frequency of the appearance of certain keywords, but also of those that are semantically related; hence, that's how you should design the contents fo your websites. Overall, write for your visitors and not for the robots. Readers satisfaction very often is followed by handsome ranking.
Well I could go a lot more but let's stop for now and I hope the above has provided some useful insights
.