Do You Need A Custom Domain To Get Traffic?

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Blogger vs Wordpress

Blogging is a cheap and easy way for people who don't know how to build their own website to start making money online. All you have to be able to do is write interesting articles. Two popular free blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress.

If you're just starting out and plan to make money blogging you should choose Blogger even though I think WordPress is a more powerful blogging platform.

It seems a little strange to not pick the best tool but I also believe in picking the right tool for the right job. As I'll explain, Blogger is better than WordPress if you're just starting out.

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AdSense Backup Ads Using Amazon Affiliate and Commission Junction

When AdSense does not have advertisers to fill your ad slot it displays a blank space by default which doesn't exactly maximize your revenue potential. A better solution is to display alternate ads. In this post I'll show you how to easily set up your AdSense Backup Ads to display either Commission Junction Smart Zones or Amazon Affiliate ads.

Both Amazon and Commission Junction run large, well-respected affiliate programs that can help you earn money from space that would otherwise be left blank. The process is very simple and you only need to know some basic HTML and CSS as well as have the ability to upload files to your website.

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Strangers Won't Help You Get Rich Online!

Jeff Bezos is a founder of Amazon.com who has served as it's chairman and CEO for many years. He has a net worth of $18.4 billion mostly from the Internet.

If ever there was a man that could make a killing on the internet selling eBooks it's this guy! But he's not.

Come to think of it, why aren't Sergey Brin and Larry Page releasing "The Secrets Of Making Money Through Search Engines"!?!?!?

Is Mark Zuckerberg currently working on his "How To Build Wealth Through Social Networking Empires" seminars?

No, but some random guy you've never heard of puts up some money for a late night TV spot or a cheap webpage and you're ready to hand over your credit card number. What's the worst that can happen? You're out a few bucks right? WRONG! You can lose a whole lot more.

Checkout the video Scamworld: 'Get rich quick' schemes mutate into an online monster from theverge.com.

Also take a peek to see what The Salty Droid, who was featured in the video has to say about it here.

Why I Don't Use StatCounter To Track AdSense Clicks

A lot of people have been using services like StatCounter to track AdSense clicks as well as for gathering other information about their website visitors.

StatCounter is the most popular free service that offers the ability to track AdSense, Amazon and other affiliate ad clicks but I don't mean to single them out. I think it's a bad idea in general to give access to information about your site's visitors and what AdSense, Amazon or other affiliate ads your visitors click on. It is something that could potentially reduce your earnings.

Not many things in life are free and it's hard to imagine a company is giving you access to their service and not getting anything out of it. They have servers and bandwidth to pay for as well as salaries for their staff.

StatCounter claims that they make their revenue through advertisements on their website, they do not put ads on your site and you can even have their tracker hidden so it's not visible on your website. But is StatCounter getting more out of the deal?

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Inline Contextual Text Popup Ads with Amazon and Blogger

Google has been making a lot of improvements to their free blogging platform, Blogger.com. One of these recent changes has been the integration of Blogger with the Amazon Affiliate program.

Now you can easily link your blog with your Amazon Associates tracking id. One of the benefits is you can quickly and easily add affiliate links to products on Amazon.com by using the Amazon Product Finder that is located next to your post editor.

Just type search for the product you want and click to insert a text, image or advanced link+image link which includes pricing information.

This is a lot faster than logging into Amazon's affiliate site, searching for the product, choosing the appropriate tracking id, setting the options to match your site's template then copying and pasting the code. It's even better if you usually add plain image links. In the past you had to download the image and then upload it to blogger. Not anymore!

You can also use your Amazon Associates account and blogger to include contextual inline text pop up ads in your blog posts. When your guest hovers over a link a small pop-up will appear showing the details of the product. Here's how to do it.

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Getting Better Results with Amazon Associate Program

The Amazon Associate program is one of the oldest and most popular affiliate program out there. It was the first affiliate program I joined.

I didn't have a whole lot of success with it at first and forgot about it for a while. Then I decided to try and learn more about it and find ways to improve my results.

It's also been a while since I posted on this site so I thought I'd come back and share some of what's been working for me.

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A Hard Way To Make Easy Money

A lot of poker players use this line, "a hard way to make an easy living" and I think it also applies here. This is literally going to be very hard if you want to get started.

This isn't a program where you sit and click your way to make money. Having the best technical skills or being able to program the best interactive Web 2.0 website may help but it's meaningless unless you put in a lot of physical work. I mean a lot. This might be the hardest you've ever pushed yourself.

Not everyone can do it, but I think a lot of people should try, even if you don't plan on making money from it. The rewards can be great. The affiliate program pays out 25% which is very high, and there are 10's of thousands of new customers buying every week. The top tier affiliates average over $100,000 a year.

This is not a scam but I'm going to tell you up front this isn't going to be easy. It may turn out to be the best thing you've decided to do, even if you never make a dime. If you want to learn more, continue reading below.

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Large Ad vs Multiple Smaller Ads

Yesterday I discussed how it's not a good idea to rotate banners if you don't have a lot of traffic. Instead, you can try putting multiple ads in the space where a full ad would go. This will help you determine which advertisers work best with your site.

You don't want to go nuts including dozens of ads on your page, but you want to give the handful of ads you'd like to test an opportunity to be seen as much as possible. Since some of the spots in the grouping might do better, it's best if you can shuffle the placements within the group.

When you do this, you want to keep the larger ad size in mind and select the smaller ads so that they fit in the space of the larger ad as nicely as possible. That way if you want to switch to the larger ad, you won't have to make any major changes to your template.

You may not think you'll want to switch to the larger ad, but it's a good idea to keep it available as an option. Advertisers like the larger ad sizes (336x20, 728x90, 160x600, etc) and you may have an opportunity to display just one big ad if you get an offer. You may also find that one of the smaller ads does significantly better than the other smaller ads in the group, so you can experiment with running it at full size to see if you can improve the performance even more.

The reason the bigger ads are more sought after is that their size captures the users attention. What we're going to try to do is group together smaller ads close together so that they visually take up a similar amount of space. That will get the user's attention, and they will have an opportunity to review different ads. Within a couple thousand page views, you should have a good idea of which ads will get the highest click-through rate. After around 50k page views, you should start getting a good idea of which ads will have the best conversion rate.

This post covers some examples of common ad formats and how to break them up into groups of smaller ads. This should help you come up with other ideas for ad sizes you have on your site.

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Biggest Mistake People Make With Affiliate Banners

Using affiliate banners on your site is a great way to make money. One of the big problems is choosing the best affiliate banners to use. Related to that, is the biggest mistake affiliate marketers make. Rotating too many banners.

This all boils down to average human response to web advertising. Your site may do better or worse because there are things you can do to make your site perform better (or worse) with pay per performance advertising. So for the most part, marketing with affiliate banners is a numbers game.

You need to expose a lot of traffic to your banners and the likelihood of having someone click on a banner and then make a purchase. Let's use the numbers below as an example.

	Expected
Click Through Rate (CTR)	2%
Conversion Rate (sale/lead)	2%
Commission	$10

So, using those assumption. To get one commission of $10, you would need one sale. To get one sale, you would need 50 clicks. To get 50 clicks, you would need 2500 impressions. In this case, the expected value of 1,000 impressions is $4. Applying the law of large numbers, the more real impressions you have the closer you will get to achieve that expected value. Bots, click exchanges, traffic generators, traffic exchanges don't count.

Now, lets look at how to use that to our advantage and avoid making a common mistake with banner advertising.

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AdSense vs Affiliate Banners

Google's AdSense is a very popular way people who make money online earn revenues. It is not the only option though.

In many cases AdSense does not have the most profit potential, but it is the most profitable for many content sites. The reason for this is that AdSense is very easy to use and the targeting behind it is very sophisticated. With affiliate marketing you're going to need to do a bit of work. You can't just throw some affiliate banners on your site and expect to cash big checks.

I'm going to describe how the two work, as well as give some tips that might help you make the most out of them such as when to pick one over the other and how to use them both together. I'm leaving out Amazon as an affiliate in this one and dealing strictly with Affiliate Networks. Amazon is a slightly different beast but some of what's described here can apply.

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