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You bet!
I'm going to grind out 100 articles targeting long tails over this month. Should help increase search traffic while I keep pushing for leaks
CC9 - Donna
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You bet!
I'm going to grind out 100 articles targeting long tails over this month. Should help increase search traffic while I keep pushing for leaks
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Do you have 200$ you can spend ?
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What did you have in mind?
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Don't take this as an insult.
If you've been writing for months and your traffic still amounts to self submitted in a few places and got no traction maybe you need to consider finding some new writers.
I'd go out on some job boards and find some writers. Give them 20$ each and get a good sample article, on a genuinely interesting social / special interest topic, stick it online and watch how your sites visitors interact with said articles.
Take the remaining 100$ and spend it to get a few monster articles on topics you've seen do well in your niche before from who ever you judge to be the best of the bunch.
On sites like odesk or craigslist if you stick to native english speakers only, pay a few cents a word and ignore people that claim experience with writing bland seo articles you can get some surprisingly decent stuff.
If you've been writing for months and your traffic still amounts to self submitted in a few places and got no traction maybe you need to consider finding some new writers.
I'd go out on some job boards and find some writers. Give them 20$ each and get a good sample article, on a genuinely interesting social / special interest topic, stick it online and watch how your sites visitors interact with said articles.
Take the remaining 100$ and spend it to get a few monster articles on topics you've seen do well in your niche before from who ever you judge to be the best of the bunch.
On sites like odesk or craigslist if you stick to native english speakers only, pay a few cents a word and ignore people that claim experience with writing bland seo articles you can get some surprisingly decent stuff.
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I've only recently started (this month) producing articles that actually get shares etc. The few articles i wrote when I started my site aren't too great at all
but that being said wish I had $200 lol
Next goal is 1500, and tomorrow I'm going to do just that
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Curious what are some good CPA networks? I've had 6 clicks from adsense today and I've only made $1
How accurate is this? http://mthink.com/top-cpa-networks-2014/
How accurate is this? http://mthink.com/top-cpa-networks-2014/
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There are a multitude of reasons, but remember long ago when you asked me to take a look at your site and I replied that it was a dime a dozen - that everyone and their mother has a fitness blog? It's a classic supply versus demand scenario - first you need to read My Market Research thread.
AND then my Monetization Generating Revenue thread.
Problem #1 - Niche / Keywords Ranking For (since it is Adwords). Adsense is ran off of Adwords's Content Network. So the people that bid on Adwords's content network are where your revenue comes from. If you are in a super broad niche you will get lower clicks. Look at the ADs being served up, are they relevant? This is an example of your top position's AD:
How much do you think that advertiser is paying? It's bottom of the barrel stuff, so you'll be lucky to get $0.05 per click. That advertiser is probably on a CPM model if I were to guess through Google, which will again affect your revenue. But also, that ad shows me either Google does not fully understand your website, or the high CPC keywords are not appearing in your site since you didn't do keyword research and write about the high CPC stuff within your content. If you want higher CPC you need to target keywords with high CPC. Right now when I see an AD like the above, I know you are literally at the bottom of the barrel.
Problem #2 - Supply Versus Demand. Going back to my original comment about everyone and their mother having a fitness blog - when there is too much supply (thousands of other blogs/websites fighting for the same eyeballs), CPC pricing drops. Imagine if there are 100 advertisers targeting your niche, but 100,000 websites with Adsense on them. Google is going to stretch out the 100 advertiser's dollars to cover all those websites since they're all super broad, so CPC prices drop - it's great for the advertiser but shitty for the publisher (you, since you publish content - and display ads).
That's why it's critical to do not only market research before you get into a niche, but more importantly to do keyword research with a tool like SERPWoo's Keyword Finder, or Google's Keyword Planner and see what high CPC to target - what keywords people are more willing to bid on - so you can write about them.
Now imagine the same 100 advertisers but only 12 websites targeting that niche - let's say New York Life Insurance. You have the following scenario:
One. The supply super low - meaning advertisers will have to bid higher to even get seen, making the publisher more money.
Two. The product/service the advertiser has a higher ROI, life insurance policy might, for example, pay $4,000 for the life of the policy to the life insurance agent if they sell one, so they can bid $50 for CPC and if they get a 5% conversion rate in traffic converting into a sale (cause the quality of the traffic is ready to buy), they'll be spending $1000 to make one sale that is worth $4000 which might be excellent business sense for them, so they don't care how much they spend. So the CPC is going to go even HIGHER in bids.
Three. Talked about this a bit in last part, but it's important to know the type of advertiser and how much they make when selling their product/service. If your advertiser is selling a $30 product, they can't exactly bid $50 per click like the insurance guy, cause 1 click would need 150% ROI, which is unrealistic, they can bid $1-5, even $5 is probably high since they might not have up-sells, cross sells, or any other monetization avenues in place. Now look at that banana from your top advertiser... what nonsense is he selling? Clearly is going to be a bottom of the barrel product/service since it's not even narrowly targeted, so they're not going to be bidding high dollar amounts for your traffic, or any traffic.
Four. No advertisers want to advertise, YET, on your site. Meaning they don't know whether your traffic will convert into a sale, they haven't tested it. If you have great content and put the people into a buying mood, an advertiser might come along and recognize it and then go through Google's Adwords network and specifically bid on YOUR website. If they are the only ones bidding cause your brand is unknown you'll get a bit less CPC, but higher then that broad CPC you are getting now. But if the traffic is good, they'll keep bidding, then another advertiser might notice XYZ competitor is always bidding on your site, then they'll test the water with your site and that will start the bidding war for placement on your site. (You will eventually want to put your own display network up and fall back to Adsense)
What's key to everything is the quality of your traffic - either it's determined by Google and their crawlers by keywords or by demand for your supply cause people from your site are converting like crazy for your advertisers. But if you're putting up pages about Jen Selter's booty (in your signature), that's not really a page or target audience that's going to convert at any level for them - cause they want to make money from selling to your visitors.
--
Lastly, If you are getting $0.15 per click, in order to make let's say a $1 Million Dollars you will need 6,666,6666 clicks. Now using your CTR (click thru rate metrics in the above screenshot - which by the way maybe against Adsense's TOS for showing publicly), of 0.80% CTR - you will need 833,333,333 total visitors to your site. Do you see the reason why you need to do research before jumping into a niche? One you need to now work on improving your CTR - moving the advertisement around on the page's layout, which will help you reduce the amount of total visitors needed to get to your $1MM goal, but also need to get higher CPC which will also reduce the amount of total visitors needed to get to the same goal. You have to do both at the same time. You will soon realize that Adsense is not suppose to be the first option for making money online....
Adsense is suppose to be the very LAST LAST LAST option to make money on a website. You will realize soon that affiliate marketing from amazon offers better ROI then Adsense, they should be a higher priority. Eventually you will then realize that direct affiliate offers for product (which you will have to test) MAY pay more then amazon; later on depending on the quality of traffic, you may want to sell CPM or CPC directly to advertisers and mega brands for exposure, but you will need your own display network like using doubleclick.net for that, and media kits, advertisement sales team, etc. (now you are becoming a real business - to generate more money. There are still more ways to generate money, selling your own products (t-shirts, books, exclusive videos or straight up merchandize), getting sponsorships from brands, and more.
You're in the fog now, where the CC9 members are that can generate traffic, but now have to figure out how to monetize that traffic, and it's a different beast then generating traffic. But if you did it right the first time around you would have setup the monetization channels before hand, but it's not too late. I know there are people on this forum that MAY love to advertise on your site and may bid on it through Google's Adwords Network or test out your site directly. You can even go through a advertisement broker that manages these relationships for you. But remember, no advertiser is going to continue placing ADs on your site, if that traffic is not converting into profitable sales for you. If it's generating some sales, they will lower their CPC so it can become profitable. Most advertiser are lazy and won't bother trying to optimize, they'll test it for a week or so, if the traffic sucks they'll move on.
How do you get non-sucky traffic? Narrow topics, and more niched traffic leaks from non-broad sources - meaning hitting front page of Reddit is not necessarily going to bring you in quality traffic, but placing dozens of posts throughout fitness forums in a traffic leak web attack might bring you in trickles of traffic which are higher quality visitors - Welcome to the dojo...
Excerpt: MFA sites: Well besides all the previously mentioned benefits, if your MFA site takes off, you'll probably start looking into getting better earnings per visitor and you'll realize Adsense doesn't cut it. You'll think of putting up your own advertising display solution and allow people to buy spots on your site. Guess what, since you've done your market research, you've got 80% of your media kit done, since that's what advertisers are going to want to know when thinking about whether you're target audience falls in line with their target audience. Imagine coming in with a bad ass stats, makes you look more professional right? Meaning, your going to be able to demand and get a higher price point for your website asset.
AND then my Monetization Generating Revenue thread.
Excerpt: Types of Monetization
Advertisement (Websites Which Employ This Tactic For Revenue: Lead Generation, Informative) - CPC, or Cost Per Click. This is the Adsense model. A visitor visits your website, digests the content, then clicks on an advertisement. If the advertisement is related to the content they just read, you may want to test a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or Affiliate Marketing) offer since those can generate you more income.
Advertisement (Websites Which Employ This Tactic For Revenue: Lead Generation, Informative) - CPC, or Cost Per Click. This is the Adsense model. A visitor visits your website, digests the content, then clicks on an advertisement. If the advertisement is related to the content they just read, you may want to test a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or Affiliate Marketing) offer since those can generate you more income.
Problem #1 - Niche / Keywords Ranking For (since it is Adwords). Adsense is ran off of Adwords's Content Network. So the people that bid on Adwords's content network are where your revenue comes from. If you are in a super broad niche you will get lower clicks. Look at the ADs being served up, are they relevant? This is an example of your top position's AD:
How much do you think that advertiser is paying? It's bottom of the barrel stuff, so you'll be lucky to get $0.05 per click. That advertiser is probably on a CPM model if I were to guess through Google, which will again affect your revenue. But also, that ad shows me either Google does not fully understand your website, or the high CPC keywords are not appearing in your site since you didn't do keyword research and write about the high CPC stuff within your content. If you want higher CPC you need to target keywords with high CPC. Right now when I see an AD like the above, I know you are literally at the bottom of the barrel.
Problem #2 - Supply Versus Demand. Going back to my original comment about everyone and their mother having a fitness blog - when there is too much supply (thousands of other blogs/websites fighting for the same eyeballs), CPC pricing drops. Imagine if there are 100 advertisers targeting your niche, but 100,000 websites with Adsense on them. Google is going to stretch out the 100 advertiser's dollars to cover all those websites since they're all super broad, so CPC prices drop - it's great for the advertiser but shitty for the publisher (you, since you publish content - and display ads).
That's why it's critical to do not only market research before you get into a niche, but more importantly to do keyword research with a tool like SERPWoo's Keyword Finder, or Google's Keyword Planner and see what high CPC to target - what keywords people are more willing to bid on - so you can write about them.
Now imagine the same 100 advertisers but only 12 websites targeting that niche - let's say New York Life Insurance. You have the following scenario:
One. The supply super low - meaning advertisers will have to bid higher to even get seen, making the publisher more money.
Two. The product/service the advertiser has a higher ROI, life insurance policy might, for example, pay $4,000 for the life of the policy to the life insurance agent if they sell one, so they can bid $50 for CPC and if they get a 5% conversion rate in traffic converting into a sale (cause the quality of the traffic is ready to buy), they'll be spending $1000 to make one sale that is worth $4000 which might be excellent business sense for them, so they don't care how much they spend. So the CPC is going to go even HIGHER in bids.
Three. Talked about this a bit in last part, but it's important to know the type of advertiser and how much they make when selling their product/service. If your advertiser is selling a $30 product, they can't exactly bid $50 per click like the insurance guy, cause 1 click would need 150% ROI, which is unrealistic, they can bid $1-5, even $5 is probably high since they might not have up-sells, cross sells, or any other monetization avenues in place. Now look at that banana from your top advertiser... what nonsense is he selling? Clearly is going to be a bottom of the barrel product/service since it's not even narrowly targeted, so they're not going to be bidding high dollar amounts for your traffic, or any traffic.
Four. No advertisers want to advertise, YET, on your site. Meaning they don't know whether your traffic will convert into a sale, they haven't tested it. If you have great content and put the people into a buying mood, an advertiser might come along and recognize it and then go through Google's Adwords network and specifically bid on YOUR website. If they are the only ones bidding cause your brand is unknown you'll get a bit less CPC, but higher then that broad CPC you are getting now. But if the traffic is good, they'll keep bidding, then another advertiser might notice XYZ competitor is always bidding on your site, then they'll test the water with your site and that will start the bidding war for placement on your site. (You will eventually want to put your own display network up and fall back to Adsense)
What's key to everything is the quality of your traffic - either it's determined by Google and their crawlers by keywords or by demand for your supply cause people from your site are converting like crazy for your advertisers. But if you're putting up pages about Jen Selter's booty (in your signature), that's not really a page or target audience that's going to convert at any level for them - cause they want to make money from selling to your visitors.
--
Lastly, If you are getting $0.15 per click, in order to make let's say a $1 Million Dollars you will need 6,666,6666 clicks. Now using your CTR (click thru rate metrics in the above screenshot - which by the way maybe against Adsense's TOS for showing publicly), of 0.80% CTR - you will need 833,333,333 total visitors to your site. Do you see the reason why you need to do research before jumping into a niche? One you need to now work on improving your CTR - moving the advertisement around on the page's layout, which will help you reduce the amount of total visitors needed to get to your $1MM goal, but also need to get higher CPC which will also reduce the amount of total visitors needed to get to the same goal. You have to do both at the same time. You will soon realize that Adsense is not suppose to be the first option for making money online....
Adsense is suppose to be the very LAST LAST LAST option to make money on a website. You will realize soon that affiliate marketing from amazon offers better ROI then Adsense, they should be a higher priority. Eventually you will then realize that direct affiliate offers for product (which you will have to test) MAY pay more then amazon; later on depending on the quality of traffic, you may want to sell CPM or CPC directly to advertisers and mega brands for exposure, but you will need your own display network like using doubleclick.net for that, and media kits, advertisement sales team, etc. (now you are becoming a real business - to generate more money. There are still more ways to generate money, selling your own products (t-shirts, books, exclusive videos or straight up merchandize), getting sponsorships from brands, and more.
You're in the fog now, where the CC9 members are that can generate traffic, but now have to figure out how to monetize that traffic, and it's a different beast then generating traffic. But if you did it right the first time around you would have setup the monetization channels before hand, but it's not too late. I know there are people on this forum that MAY love to advertise on your site and may bid on it through Google's Adwords Network or test out your site directly. You can even go through a advertisement broker that manages these relationships for you. But remember, no advertiser is going to continue placing ADs on your site, if that traffic is not converting into profitable sales for you. If it's generating some sales, they will lower their CPC so it can become profitable. Most advertiser are lazy and won't bother trying to optimize, they'll test it for a week or so, if the traffic sucks they'll move on.
How do you get non-sucky traffic? Narrow topics, and more niched traffic leaks from non-broad sources - meaning hitting front page of Reddit is not necessarily going to bring you in quality traffic, but placing dozens of posts throughout fitness forums in a traffic leak web attack might bring you in trickles of traffic which are higher quality visitors - Welcome to the dojo...
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Then you're misunderstanding the lesson because you're in an evergreen niche with tons and tons of money exchanging hands. You're getting all worried because your RPM is low but it's still a small sample size and you're still in the building phase. It takes time to rank, even for long tails, and your organic traffic is going to have much clearer intent and probably get you more clicks than your "leaked" traffic. Maybe you think this is easier than it actually is and that you should be banking by now? It's not, and you shouldn't.
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Yeah you're right im just depressed adsense didnt work as well as I thought it would
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It hasn't even "not worked" yet, it just hasn't worked well with the traffic you've been getting and it's still a small sample size. Not all traffic is going to 'convert' the same, whether a conversion is a CPA offer, an adsense click, a newsletter signup, etc.
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Sounds like im jumping to conclusions. my thought process was more views = more adsense money so when I saw $0.6 i was pissed
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My current plan of action is using market samurai to find the 1-20 daily searches with buyers intent and try to rank for that. I will add in some affiliate links.
Keep pushing with the leaks. and see what happens in the next week
Keep pushing with the leaks. and see what happens in the next week
emp
BuSo Pro
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You have a lousy CTR .. maybe work on ad placement first.
After that.. Listen to CC ... after all, people never listen when I tell them that adsense sucks.
Fuck it, even just putting a protein or creatine powder from amazon into the sidebar would have earned more.
::emp::
After that.. Listen to CC ... after all, people never listen when I tell them that adsense sucks.
Fuck it, even just putting a protein or creatine powder from amazon into the sidebar would have earned more.
::emp::
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Heh, well there's no sense debating it but it's worth noting that there are plenty of people out there who do a lot better with adsense than any alternatives. I assume we're all speaking from first hand experience, and with so many variables everyone's mileage is going to vary. Your best bet is to test and see what does the best with your traffic.
emp
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OK.. I was on mobile yesterday, so I will take a few minutes to flesh out a better response.
First off, I do not agree with @CCarter's asessment of "this niche is played out" - a lot of content in a niche normally means it is a BIG niche and profitable.
At the same time - lots of competition.
However, a lot of newcomers do break into such niches... not at the top 5 spots maybe, but in big niches, getting a few crumbs of the pie might be enough.
Looking at flippa, fitness sites are still being sold nicely.
myhealthfitness.org - 2800$
builtfit.com - 4500$
zentofitness.com - 7060$
thebestadjustabledumbbells.net - 8050$
etc etc
I purposefully took the not so great here - workouts.org and others are getting even more $$$.
That aside, let's look at the case in hand
CTR
You, my friend have a click ratio of a wopping 0.029%
That is horrible.
The core of the disaster
The problem here is that the problem is self-perpetuating as well.
A bad CTR means that google doesn't know what is of interest to people on your site.
Those 5 people probably clicked on very random stuff. The underlying problem here being that Google tries to cater ads to the person, not to the site anymore. So even when I peruse your site, I get ads for development tools and website hosting.
The "easy" solution
A lot of people start with adsense because "I heard people make money with it" and "it's easy."
So... we need something that serves products targeted to your website AND is easy to install.
Let's take amazon.
Going into the "widgets" area, I just selected "Recommended product links", category Sports&Outdoors and entered the keywords "bodybuilding, fitness, supplements"
And got this
Really, it could not be easier.
This banner has an average price tag of 30$ - at 4% commission by amazon, this would be 1.2$ per click, so with your 5 clicks, you could have made 6$ instead of some measly cents.
One thing about amazon is that it sets a cookie that lasts for 24 hours - so anything a user buys after coming to amazon from your link is credited to your account (unless they hit another aff link in the meantime).
Where the fun starts
Now, the real beauty in amazon is when you use it like an affiliate - THIS thing I just outlined is just the tip.
Write reviews linking to specific products, make use of their seasonal specials, etc..
And - ditch adsense.
::emp::
And I just wrote another 510 words no one is gonna pay me for...
Guess I know why MY game is weak.
::emp::
First off, I do not agree with @CCarter's asessment of "this niche is played out" - a lot of content in a niche normally means it is a BIG niche and profitable.
At the same time - lots of competition.
However, a lot of newcomers do break into such niches... not at the top 5 spots maybe, but in big niches, getting a few crumbs of the pie might be enough.
Looking at flippa, fitness sites are still being sold nicely.
myhealthfitness.org - 2800$
builtfit.com - 4500$
zentofitness.com - 7060$
thebestadjustabledumbbells.net - 8050$
etc etc
I purposefully took the not so great here - workouts.org and others are getting even more $$$.
That aside, let's look at the case in hand
CTR
You, my friend have a click ratio of a wopping 0.029%
That is horrible.
The core of the disaster
The problem here is that the problem is self-perpetuating as well.
A bad CTR means that google doesn't know what is of interest to people on your site.
Those 5 people probably clicked on very random stuff. The underlying problem here being that Google tries to cater ads to the person, not to the site anymore. So even when I peruse your site, I get ads for development tools and website hosting.
Google serves crap, users don't click at all - or click stuff that has nothing to do with your site - means google doesn't know what makes money on your site - keeps serving crap.
Rinse and repeat.
One way out of this would be to play with ad placement to get a better CTR - and that is what I would have told you a few years back. Now, with the personalisation playing havoc, etc... You can try... I'd rather forget about adsense.Rinse and repeat.
The "easy" solution
A lot of people start with adsense because "I heard people make money with it" and "it's easy."
So... we need something that serves products targeted to your website AND is easy to install.
Let's take amazon.
Going into the "widgets" area, I just selected "Recommended product links", category Sports&Outdoors and entered the keywords "bodybuilding, fitness, supplements"
And got this
Really, it could not be easier.
This banner has an average price tag of 30$ - at 4% commission by amazon, this would be 1.2$ per click, so with your 5 clicks, you could have made 6$ instead of some measly cents.
One thing about amazon is that it sets a cookie that lasts for 24 hours - so anything a user buys after coming to amazon from your link is credited to your account (unless they hit another aff link in the meantime).
Where the fun starts
Now, the real beauty in amazon is when you use it like an affiliate - THIS thing I just outlined is just the tip.
Write reviews linking to specific products, make use of their seasonal specials, etc..
And - ditch adsense.
::emp::
And I just wrote another 510 words no one is gonna pay me for...
Guess I know why MY game is weak.
::emp::
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