The online advertising world uses all sorts of jargon to describe different bits
of the process. If you’re confused by a term, you should be able to find your
answer here.
3-Way Matching — A method of blending ads into a Web page by matching
the ad’s background color, font color and font size with the surround page
content.
AdSense Code — The instructions to display ads on a Web page are
contained within a piece of HTML code that is copied from Google’s AdSense
site. The code must be pasted onto each page on which you wish to display
an ad.
Ad Rank — The order in which the ads appear in an ad unit is determined by
Google. The ads at the top of the list should give you the most money based
on cost-per-click and clickthrough rate.
Ad Unit — A group of ads displayed together as a set. You can display up to
three ad units on one page, in addition to a search box and referral buttons.
Alternate Ads — Pre-determined ads that are served in place of public
service ads when Google is unable to find contextual ads.
Channel — A method of tracking results across pages, sites, domains or any
criteria set by a publisher.
Click — A click by a user on an ad. In stats reports, the clicks column may
include invalid clicks but not clicks on public service ads.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR) — The number of clicks an ad receives divided by
the number of impressions the ad receives. The higher your CTR, the better.
Contextual Advertising — Ads that are related to the content of the Web
page on which they appear (as opposed to traditional banner ads that are
served regardless of the content of the page).
Cost-Per-Click (CPC) — The amount an advertiser pays for each click
his/her ad receives. AdSense uses a range of different types of Cost-Per-
Click:
Maximum Cost-Per-Click — The maximum amount an advertiser is
prepared to pay for each click.
Actual Cost-Per-Click — The amount an advertiser is charged for each
click. The rate will vary according to the Smart Pricing rate of your site and
the bidding price of competitors. Google always tries to charge advertisers
the lowest rate possible.
Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (CPM) — The amount an advertiser
pays each time his/her ad is displayed. Like CPC, AdSense refers to different
types of CPM:
Maximum Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions — The maximum amount an
advertiser is charged for an impression.
Actual Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions — The amount an advertiser is
charged for each impression. In general, this will be one cent more than the
price required to keep the ad in its position on the page.
Effective Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (eCPM)— The cost of 1,000
ad impressions. Used by publishers to compare income rates across channels
(and advertising programs). To calculate your eCPM, simply divide earnings
by impressions (so $200 earned from 50,000 impressions would yield an
eCPM of $4.00).
Filters — Used by publishers to block specific ads or groups of ads.
Google AdWords — Google’s advertising program. Advertisers submit their
ads to Google, specifying their maximum CPC and total advertising budget.
The ads are distributed across AdSense publishers.
Impression — A single display of an ad somewhere on Google’s ad network.
Page Impression — A single display of an ad on a publisher’s Web page.
Pay-Per-Click — Often used interchangeable with Cost-Per-Click. Refers to a
method of online advertising in which advertisers pay only when action is
taken by the user and not only when an ad is served (CPM).
Placement Targeting — A strategy used by advertisers to choose the sites,
locations and Channels they would like their ads to run on.
Public Service Ads (PSA) — Ads for non-profit organization that are served
on Web pages when Google is unable to find relevant ads or cannot read the
content on a Web page. Publishers are not paid for displaying public service
ads.
Publisher — A member of AdSense whose sites display the AdSense code
and Google’s ads.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — A process of raising a site’s
rankings in the various search engines. This usually involves creating links
from other sites, targeting keywords and building traffic.
Section Targeting — Lines of code used to focus Google’s robots on
specific, keyword-rich areas of a Web page.
Smart Pricing — A system used by Google to determine the value of the
traffic sent by your site to advertisers and to price your ads accordingly.
Sites that deliver high conversion rates to advertisers earn more than sites
with low conversion rates.
Senin, 13 Juni 2011
Turn Your Passion Into Content — Choosing Your Site Topic
The most obvious way to create content is to write it yourself.
Pick a subject you like and pour your heart out. If you know everything there
is to know about video games, you could set up a site filled with reviews,
news and walkthroughs, and write all the articles. Your AdSense units will
give you ads related to gaming and as long as they’re positioned properly
and look right they should give you more than enough revenue to fund your
video gaming habit and then some. You can do the same thing for any topic
you wanted. (note: it's tough to generate income in the gaming niche)
This is one of the important differences between a content farm like Demand
Media and a small publishing company running a single blog or a small
number of sites.
Demand Media doesn’t just look at the keyword value of the articles it
commissions. It also looks at the gap between the number of searches a
subject generates and the number of Web pages that search engines offer in
response. The fewer the pages offering rival content, the lower the
competition and the greater the chances of landing on the first couple of
pages of search results.
That kind of keywording targeting will be an important part of any for-profit
website but the people who write Demand Media’s content care little about
the subject. They might be writing about cleaning radiators one week and
brass rubbing the next. It will then be up to Demand Media to put those
articles where people can see them.
It shows. It shows in the quality of the articles and in the usefulness of the
content.
When you’re creating a site of your own, it’s going to take time before it
generates reasonable income. It’s going to take work to produce the content.
And it’s going to be easier see through the time it takes for your site to build
momentum by writing content you really enjoy producing.
That will also make it easier to produce good content. You’ll already know the
subject — whether it’s fast cars, scrapbooking, or sailing — so you won’t lose
time doing extra research.
You’ll be able to build a closer connection with readers and partner sites
when you’re on the same wavelength and share a genuine interest in the
topic.
You’ll stand a better chance of creating the kind of site that’s able to pull in
traffic naturally and build a permanent audience.
Most importantly, when you choose to write about a topic that you’re
passionate about, you’ll enjoy yourself.
That’s vital. You can make money with an AdSense-supported website. But
you can also make money walking dogs, painting walls and flipping burgers.
If you’re going to go into business for yourself then you may as well choose
to do something that makes you excited. That tends to happen most when
you’re talking online about something you’d want to talk about with your
friends. It’s when work feels least like work.
As you create a website then — whether it’s a blog or a traditional site —
your first challenge, the one you have to overcome before signing up for
AdSense, before formatting your units or even picking a template, is to
choose the subject of the site you want to create.
The good news when you ask yourself what you should be writing about, is
that your first answer is usually the right one.
It could be sport or religion, hiking or bookbinding or anything else. The first
thing you think of is likely to be the activity that’s on your mind the most and
the one that interests you the most.
That means it’s also likely to be the one that you’ll enjoy writing about the
most.
But don’t stop with the topic you first thought of. Most people have more
than one interest, and those different interests will have different values and
represent multiple revenue streams.
You could create one content site based on your professional knowledge. You
could create another site based on your weekend activity, a third that draws
on your particular family situation and a fourth on your campaigning.
That could give you a list of possible content topics that looks something like
this:
1. Aesthetic dentistry.
2. Mountain biking.
3. Mixed vegan/omnivore families.
4. Finding homes for homeless dogs.
All of those topics would be interesting to you, and you could happily create
content writing about all of them. You could produce a blog that explains
dentistry techniques, discusses dental care and offers advice on finding a
good dentist. There’s a good chance that you’d pick up some valuable ads for
toothpastes and tooth whiteners, and once your audience builds you might
be able to add some affiliate relationships to local dentists.
Choose a niche within aesthetic dentistry, such as a site that focuses on
children or a particular dental problem, and you’ll be able to stand out from
other sites and secure a slice of traffic looking for information about teeth.
If you preferred to write about mountain biking, you could put up a post filled
with accounts of your latest trips, include pictures and trail tips or discuss
equipment. Again, give the site a niche by localizing it or focusing on one
particular kind of cycling and you’ll find it easier to pick up traffic and retain a
loyal audience.Search on Google for “mountain biking,” for example, and you’ll have to
wade through over 9 million results. Michael Green, publisher of
www.bikeblognyc.com, ensures that his blog stands out by focusing on
“urban bike culture in nyc and beyond.” The blog has no shortage of ads and
Michael is even adding a store, a simple way of increasing revenues.
Whichever of those four subjects you chose to wrote about, you’d be
enjoying yourself, writing with passion and starting with a pile of knowledge
already gathered that you can draw on for your posts.
The value of that knowledge though will vary, which is why keyword values
will play a role. In general, you can expect that your professional knowledge
— whether that’s dentistry, plumbing or the laws concerning mergers andacquisitions — will produce higher value ads. After all, you depend on that
knowledge now to make a living. But it’s worth checking keyword values and
competition, and you might decide you’d rather work on a blog about your
hobby than spend more time working on a professional field that you’re keen
to leave.
Once you’ve made your list of possible topics then, use Google’s AdWords
Keywords Tool to check the values of keywords associated with those
subjects and identify niches within the subjects that you could focus on.
Then choose the topic you want to be spending your time on, because that
time and the effort you’re going to be putting into your blog do count.
Pick the wrong topic, choose a subject that you find dull or about which you
have little to contribute, and there’s a good chance that you’ll run out of
steam long before you’ve managed to build up an audience, let alone an
income.
But what if writing isn’t your thing? What if you’re attracted to the idea of
creating a publishing business, building an audience and turning it into cash,
but don’t want to write the content yourself?
You’ve still got options.
Buying Content and Hiring Writers
If you want to be a publisher rather than a content creator, then you can
always pay someone to do the writing for you. That’s Demand Media’s
approach and it clearly works for them. You can find freelancers on sites like
Elance.com and Guru.com, or you can turn to a specialist content creation
company like ConstantConversions.com to ask them to assign a writer to
write articles and blog posts for you.
Social media can be a good place to look too. SendBlaster, a company that
produces distribution software for email marketers, was able to pick up a
number of expert bloggers after it put out a call on Twitter for contributors to
its new blog.
The advantage of hiring writers is that you can be sure you’re getting good
content with little effort. On the other hand, you have to make that money
back.
That’s going to be the tricky bit. Rates can vary tremendously, and there’s no
shortage of offers on Elance for writers willing to accept $5 for 300-word
articles.There is a shortage though of writers with English as their first language
willing to accept them, and the number of good writers who are willing to
work at that rate is just about zero.
When it comes to bottom-end rates, Demand Media’s $15 for 300 words is
big enough to set the standard. At the higher ends — the amounts you’d
have to pay for content good enough to combine with your marketing to
build a loyal audience — you can expect pay 7-10 cents a word for posts of
500-1,000 words.
When you’re adding at least one post a week — the minimum you need to
keep an audience coming back regularly — that can get pretty expensive.
And when your audience is small, as it will be at the beginning, you can
quickly find that you’re burning through savings much faster than the ad
money is coming in.
The option taken by many publishers is to start cheap. They buy a bulk-load
of five-dollar posts and use them to bring in the ads, win a place on the
search engines and start to attract traffic and clicks.
I think that’s a mistake. Become known for producing poor content and you’ll
struggle to rebrand your site in the eyes of your niche audience. When you’re
ready to move up to higher quality content, you’ll probably need a complete
redesign, with all that entails for placement testing and ad formatting.
And making that move won’t be easy. Smart Pricing will already have pushed
the values of your clicks down, making it even harder to turn a profit on
those cheap posts. It’s a slow way to get a site off the ground.
A better option is to choose a niche that you can write about yourself, even if
you don’t want to do it the long term. Get into the habit of writing at least
once a week and use your own posts to give your blog a solid foundation.If you’re not confident of your writing ability or your spelling, make sure you
use a spellchecker to clear out the typos, and you can even think about
passing your articles to a copyeditor for review before publication. For
between $5 and $10 a post, you’ll be able to say what you want to say about
a topic that interests you and still make it read professionally even if you’re
not a professional writer.
Once the blog is up and running, has an audience that trusts it, and ad
revenues that are starting to look comfortable, then you can begin looking
for paid contributors.You might even find that because your blog already has a name, looking for
those writers will become much easier.
In fact, when you have a big audience for your website, you might even
discover that people want to contribute their articles for nothing.
Gathering Volunteer Writers to Contribute Content for
Free
I started in publishing with a print magazine. The Fort Worth Software
Review never made much in the way of ad revenue and as for its
subscribers, I couldn’t even persuade my mom to order a copy. But it did
persuade software companies to send me a steady stream of free games to
review.
Eventually, I had more games than I could play so I looked for other keen
gamers who wanted free software in return for writing down what they
thought.
I kept that concept when the Internet took off. I put the newsletter online,
called it WorldVillage.com, and expanded into every topic about which people
wanted to contribute.
Today, that site still gives me some valuable revenues — and I still don’t pay
the thousands of contributors who post their articles every month. Instead of
games, they receive 50 percent of the AdSense revenues their articles
generate.
But you don’t even have to share advertising revenues with contributors to
benefit from free, original content. Once your site is doing well, contributors
will want to have their articles on your site because of the search engine
optimization benefits those appearances will generate.
Instead of you paying them, you agree to add a bio that includes a link to
their website. The higher the ranking of your own site, the more the link will
raise their site — and the more direct traffic the link will generate. It pays
more for the contributor to write the odd free post that includes a link than
pocket a few bucks for the writing effort.
This kind of free contribution has become something of a standard practice
on the Internet and once your blog becomes well-known, you should find
that people are actually writing to you to offer guest posts.
Convert a few of those guests into regular contributors and you’ll be able to
cut back massively on the cost of production.
You can encourage people to write in by adding a tab or a link on your site
soliciting guest posts. Even a line that says something like this can do the
trick:
“We want YOU! We want your thoughts, articles and comments. Send
your submissions to editor@yoursite.com and as long as they meet our
criteria, we’ll post them here.”
You can then create a whole new set of pages for your users’ submissions
and put AdSense on each one of them.
While accepting guests posts can be a valuable way to generate free content,
the best contributors will only offer posts in return for a link once your site
has a good amount of traffic.
But there are other ways to find similar kinds of free articles.
Breathing New Life into Old Content
Blogs have to be written all the time, but if you’ve ever written anything in
the past, don’t just let it gather dust on your shelf — or on your hard drive.
You can’t make any money if no one reads it but you can make money even
from old works once you put advertising on it.
Pick a subject you like and pour your heart out. If you know everything there
is to know about video games, you could set up a site filled with reviews,
news and walkthroughs, and write all the articles. Your AdSense units will
give you ads related to gaming and as long as they’re positioned properly
and look right they should give you more than enough revenue to fund your
video gaming habit and then some. You can do the same thing for any topic
you wanted. (note: it's tough to generate income in the gaming niche)
This is one of the important differences between a content farm like Demand
Media and a small publishing company running a single blog or a small
number of sites.
Demand Media doesn’t just look at the keyword value of the articles it
commissions. It also looks at the gap between the number of searches a
subject generates and the number of Web pages that search engines offer in
response. The fewer the pages offering rival content, the lower the
competition and the greater the chances of landing on the first couple of
pages of search results.
That kind of keywording targeting will be an important part of any for-profit
website but the people who write Demand Media’s content care little about
the subject. They might be writing about cleaning radiators one week and
brass rubbing the next. It will then be up to Demand Media to put those
articles where people can see them.
It shows. It shows in the quality of the articles and in the usefulness of the
content.
When you’re creating a site of your own, it’s going to take time before it
generates reasonable income. It’s going to take work to produce the content.
And it’s going to be easier see through the time it takes for your site to build
momentum by writing content you really enjoy producing.
That will also make it easier to produce good content. You’ll already know the
subject — whether it’s fast cars, scrapbooking, or sailing — so you won’t lose
time doing extra research.
You’ll be able to build a closer connection with readers and partner sites
when you’re on the same wavelength and share a genuine interest in the
topic.
You’ll stand a better chance of creating the kind of site that’s able to pull in
traffic naturally and build a permanent audience.
Most importantly, when you choose to write about a topic that you’re
passionate about, you’ll enjoy yourself.
That’s vital. You can make money with an AdSense-supported website. But
you can also make money walking dogs, painting walls and flipping burgers.
If you’re going to go into business for yourself then you may as well choose
to do something that makes you excited. That tends to happen most when
you’re talking online about something you’d want to talk about with your
friends. It’s when work feels least like work.
As you create a website then — whether it’s a blog or a traditional site —
your first challenge, the one you have to overcome before signing up for
AdSense, before formatting your units or even picking a template, is to
choose the subject of the site you want to create.
The good news when you ask yourself what you should be writing about, is
that your first answer is usually the right one.
It could be sport or religion, hiking or bookbinding or anything else. The first
thing you think of is likely to be the activity that’s on your mind the most and
the one that interests you the most.
That means it’s also likely to be the one that you’ll enjoy writing about the
most.
But don’t stop with the topic you first thought of. Most people have more
than one interest, and those different interests will have different values and
represent multiple revenue streams.
You could create one content site based on your professional knowledge. You
could create another site based on your weekend activity, a third that draws
on your particular family situation and a fourth on your campaigning.
That could give you a list of possible content topics that looks something like
this:
1. Aesthetic dentistry.
2. Mountain biking.
3. Mixed vegan/omnivore families.
4. Finding homes for homeless dogs.
All of those topics would be interesting to you, and you could happily create
content writing about all of them. You could produce a blog that explains
dentistry techniques, discusses dental care and offers advice on finding a
good dentist. There’s a good chance that you’d pick up some valuable ads for
toothpastes and tooth whiteners, and once your audience builds you might
be able to add some affiliate relationships to local dentists.
Choose a niche within aesthetic dentistry, such as a site that focuses on
children or a particular dental problem, and you’ll be able to stand out from
other sites and secure a slice of traffic looking for information about teeth.
If you preferred to write about mountain biking, you could put up a post filled
with accounts of your latest trips, include pictures and trail tips or discuss
equipment. Again, give the site a niche by localizing it or focusing on one
particular kind of cycling and you’ll find it easier to pick up traffic and retain a
loyal audience.Search on Google for “mountain biking,” for example, and you’ll have to
wade through over 9 million results. Michael Green, publisher of
www.bikeblognyc.com, ensures that his blog stands out by focusing on
“urban bike culture in nyc and beyond.” The blog has no shortage of ads and
Michael is even adding a store, a simple way of increasing revenues.
Whichever of those four subjects you chose to wrote about, you’d be
enjoying yourself, writing with passion and starting with a pile of knowledge
already gathered that you can draw on for your posts.
The value of that knowledge though will vary, which is why keyword values
will play a role. In general, you can expect that your professional knowledge
— whether that’s dentistry, plumbing or the laws concerning mergers andacquisitions — will produce higher value ads. After all, you depend on that
knowledge now to make a living. But it’s worth checking keyword values and
competition, and you might decide you’d rather work on a blog about your
hobby than spend more time working on a professional field that you’re keen
to leave.
Once you’ve made your list of possible topics then, use Google’s AdWords
Keywords Tool to check the values of keywords associated with those
subjects and identify niches within the subjects that you could focus on.
Then choose the topic you want to be spending your time on, because that
time and the effort you’re going to be putting into your blog do count.
Pick the wrong topic, choose a subject that you find dull or about which you
have little to contribute, and there’s a good chance that you’ll run out of
steam long before you’ve managed to build up an audience, let alone an
income.
But what if writing isn’t your thing? What if you’re attracted to the idea of
creating a publishing business, building an audience and turning it into cash,
but don’t want to write the content yourself?
You’ve still got options.
Buying Content and Hiring Writers
If you want to be a publisher rather than a content creator, then you can
always pay someone to do the writing for you. That’s Demand Media’s
approach and it clearly works for them. You can find freelancers on sites like
Elance.com and Guru.com, or you can turn to a specialist content creation
company like ConstantConversions.com to ask them to assign a writer to
write articles and blog posts for you.
Social media can be a good place to look too. SendBlaster, a company that
produces distribution software for email marketers, was able to pick up a
number of expert bloggers after it put out a call on Twitter for contributors to
its new blog.
The advantage of hiring writers is that you can be sure you’re getting good
content with little effort. On the other hand, you have to make that money
back.
That’s going to be the tricky bit. Rates can vary tremendously, and there’s no
shortage of offers on Elance for writers willing to accept $5 for 300-word
articles.There is a shortage though of writers with English as their first language
willing to accept them, and the number of good writers who are willing to
work at that rate is just about zero.
When it comes to bottom-end rates, Demand Media’s $15 for 300 words is
big enough to set the standard. At the higher ends — the amounts you’d
have to pay for content good enough to combine with your marketing to
build a loyal audience — you can expect pay 7-10 cents a word for posts of
500-1,000 words.
When you’re adding at least one post a week — the minimum you need to
keep an audience coming back regularly — that can get pretty expensive.
And when your audience is small, as it will be at the beginning, you can
quickly find that you’re burning through savings much faster than the ad
money is coming in.
The option taken by many publishers is to start cheap. They buy a bulk-load
of five-dollar posts and use them to bring in the ads, win a place on the
search engines and start to attract traffic and clicks.
I think that’s a mistake. Become known for producing poor content and you’ll
struggle to rebrand your site in the eyes of your niche audience. When you’re
ready to move up to higher quality content, you’ll probably need a complete
redesign, with all that entails for placement testing and ad formatting.
And making that move won’t be easy. Smart Pricing will already have pushed
the values of your clicks down, making it even harder to turn a profit on
those cheap posts. It’s a slow way to get a site off the ground.
A better option is to choose a niche that you can write about yourself, even if
you don’t want to do it the long term. Get into the habit of writing at least
once a week and use your own posts to give your blog a solid foundation.If you’re not confident of your writing ability or your spelling, make sure you
use a spellchecker to clear out the typos, and you can even think about
passing your articles to a copyeditor for review before publication. For
between $5 and $10 a post, you’ll be able to say what you want to say about
a topic that interests you and still make it read professionally even if you’re
not a professional writer.
Once the blog is up and running, has an audience that trusts it, and ad
revenues that are starting to look comfortable, then you can begin looking
for paid contributors.You might even find that because your blog already has a name, looking for
those writers will become much easier.
In fact, when you have a big audience for your website, you might even
discover that people want to contribute their articles for nothing.
Gathering Volunteer Writers to Contribute Content for
Free
I started in publishing with a print magazine. The Fort Worth Software
Review never made much in the way of ad revenue and as for its
subscribers, I couldn’t even persuade my mom to order a copy. But it did
persuade software companies to send me a steady stream of free games to
review.
Eventually, I had more games than I could play so I looked for other keen
gamers who wanted free software in return for writing down what they
thought.
I kept that concept when the Internet took off. I put the newsletter online,
called it WorldVillage.com, and expanded into every topic about which people
wanted to contribute.
Today, that site still gives me some valuable revenues — and I still don’t pay
the thousands of contributors who post their articles every month. Instead of
games, they receive 50 percent of the AdSense revenues their articles
generate.
But you don’t even have to share advertising revenues with contributors to
benefit from free, original content. Once your site is doing well, contributors
will want to have their articles on your site because of the search engine
optimization benefits those appearances will generate.
Instead of you paying them, you agree to add a bio that includes a link to
their website. The higher the ranking of your own site, the more the link will
raise their site — and the more direct traffic the link will generate. It pays
more for the contributor to write the odd free post that includes a link than
pocket a few bucks for the writing effort.
This kind of free contribution has become something of a standard practice
on the Internet and once your blog becomes well-known, you should find
that people are actually writing to you to offer guest posts.
Convert a few of those guests into regular contributors and you’ll be able to
cut back massively on the cost of production.
You can encourage people to write in by adding a tab or a link on your site
soliciting guest posts. Even a line that says something like this can do the
trick:
“We want YOU! We want your thoughts, articles and comments. Send
your submissions to editor@yoursite.com and as long as they meet our
criteria, we’ll post them here.”
You can then create a whole new set of pages for your users’ submissions
and put AdSense on each one of them.
While accepting guests posts can be a valuable way to generate free content,
the best contributors will only offer posts in return for a link once your site
has a good amount of traffic.
But there are other ways to find similar kinds of free articles.
Breathing New Life into Old Content
Blogs have to be written all the time, but if you’ve ever written anything in
the past, don’t just let it gather dust on your shelf — or on your hard drive.
You can’t make any money if no one reads it but you can make money even
from old works once you put advertising on it.
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