49 replies to this topic

[Kevin]

I started this topic in the belief that most members here are relatively new in the world of internet marketing. I am anyway.

Now, like you I'm sure, I'm trying to promote my site and from what I read on the net one of the best ways of doing this is by obtaining links from other sites. Goto Ezine Articles http://ezinearticles...s&submit=Search, or any of the other article banks and do a search for link exchange and read what they have to say. Or Google link exchange and see what they have to say. From my reading it says that link exchange is one of the best ways of promoting a site.

I want to promote my site and I want you to place my link on your site. Now I know there is no such thing as a free lunch so in return I am prepared to put your link on my site.

You place the following code on your site:

<a href="http://www.abcwritersnetwork.co.uk">ABC Writers Network</a> - An invaluable resource for all creative writers

It will show up as ABC Writers Network - An invaluable resource for all creative writers
and I'll place a similar code on in my contacts page.

You've nothing to loose, I've nothing to loose. We all have something to gain. Remember if you want to be sucessful in this business you have to work at it; that's why I'm flogging this link exchange bit

What do you think Glen?

Kevin

[glen]

hey sounds like a good idea kevin...it is just perhaps a bit early in the development of this site for many people to respond.

i think i will (temporarily) remove the password protection from this sub-forum to encourage more people to have a look

[Kevin]

I'm still learning. I adopted this code from a site offering to exchange links. I think it is pretty good. All you have to do is reword the contact info.

<a href="http://www.abcwritersnetwork.co.uk" title="ABC Writers Network" target="_blank">ABC Writers Network</a> - an indispensable resource for creative writers, providing: - details on current writing contests, an online information suite, and articles of interest to authors.

Anyone interested in an exchange.

Kevin

[despot]

Persistence doesn't. Luck does (although persistence can often be a great part of it).

Anyways, I haven't been here for a month or so. Today I come back and what do I see: few new posts, yet, nothing that important. I could read in 5 minutes what I missed in a month.
Damn, IMO this site really needs something to get visits. Although one says that just being keen on your ideas is enough, that's not the case here.
Haven't you thought about advertising or some techniques like that?

Often good things have to be shown to people by force. Otherwise they ignore it.

Yet, this is not only about this forum. It's about traffic generally, too...
(Unfortunately :-), I have not been quite successful in this so far either.)

[glen]

hi despot, i will be honest about that, i did put a lot of energy initially into promoting the site but decided that a website such as this is not worth too much energy. in dollar terms, this has always my worst performing site by far (per number of visitor impressions)! That is one think I learned,,,,Webmasters, ...and particularly affiliate marketing types ....DO NOT click on ads.

Don't get me wrong, I am not abandoning the site. I have been particularly busy the last 6 months doing a course but that is over now thankfully. As soon as the holidays are over (in 2 weeks) I can start to liven up the board and add more useful content.

From now on, I think the majority of posts I will be making on this site will be to do with the actual mechanics of building websites.

Let's all be honest, we all know enough about adsense now. I used to religiously visit sites like the Digital Point Forums but I stopped by there yesterday and I read through the last month's worth of posts....there was nothing there worth reading! Hundreds of posts but they had NO CONTENT!

I stopped by at the Jensense blog.....nothing worth reading there either! Plenty of new articles with no useful info!

To really do well with affiliate marketing, one has to build websites! I had a real wake up call while reading a post in another forum. It said something like this...."if you guys spent half the time you spent reading about affiliate marketing actually building websites then you would all be doing OK!"

I think this advice was about the best advice I have ever received so far from any affiliate marketing site! Keep building!

There is only so much you can say about adsense I believe.

Cheers, Glen

[Kevin]

Great Post Glen

From my perspective I probally could write a book about adsense now - I've read all the theory, visited all of the Forums and viewed quite a number of sites.

Now as for the actual building of websites; that's another matter. That's what I want to get my teeth into and it would be great to have a forum where you could ask questions and not feel silly.

Not feeling silly is I think one of the advantages of this site. There is no Rich Jerk about the place, there is no Joel Comm about the place there is no big name about the place, just ordionary guys like you and me trying to make some money using adsense. And, for me anyway, I feel comfortable asking questions here.

The bottom line is; if you don't have sites you'll not make money. How do you build those sites? Do you use php or html. I struggle with html and don't have a clue about php, although I see that Glen uses it for this site.

Can people recommend good template sites? Have you a template you want to sell or exchange? I see great possibilities.

Go for the change of direction Glen.

Kevin

[despot]

Well, that was obvious (though noone has said it before, imo). I am glad you did confirm that. ;)

But I can add even more: it's not only about making websites. It's more about promoting them. You can just hire a freelancer for a few hundred dolars (not more) and he'll do the site - but that does not mean it's going to succeed.
And if you have traffic, no matter how bad the site is, it has much more chances to earn revenue.

And traffic, that's what I would concentrate on. Most likely there won't be any decent traffic without investitions. On the other hand: idea matters a lot too.
Also, even if you invest, you have to know where to...
And don't forget luck..

It seems like I know what to do but I can't do it. That's tricky... And confusing.

Anyways, telling things that are well known is a bit meaningless, but I just do... :)


Good luck with your projects, glen, Kevin and whoever reads the forum :-)

[glen]

sorry for the slow response guys, i have been in new zealand on holidays! its a great place. i have some family over there. we mostly go fishing and take in the nice scenery. i will post a photo of myself so you know who is running this site!!! this is me and my biggest trout ever in a river! (yes i am pretty keen on fishing as you might guess!)

kevin - i think it is my new years resolution to learn SOME php. This forum is totally written in PHP with a MySQL database that stores all the topics. It is a program I have purchased...if I had greater PHP knowledge I could really do some nice tinkering and also setup other sites from scratch. Having database driven websites can offer a lot of advantages! in the mean time I am still playing with WebMerge to build static sites.

Despot, I agree that traffic and site promotion are very important topics that won't be overlooked. One thing I have found so far with web promotion is that, it takes a LOT of time. I will be interested to discover speedier methods to advertise my sites.

Cheers, Glen

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[Kevin]

Site promotion is important but I'm of the opinion that having the sites out there in the first place is more important. Let me explain

I started off with this adsense thing when I cobbled together a site for my local writers group, now I use the word cobbled deliberatly because in the first place I didn't know what I was doing. I had access to Dreamweaver and a few spare days. But I learned a lot.

Now I've tried to promote that site and I'm in the process of redesigning and when the new version is up and running I will do some more promotion, but that is because it is more of a hobby site.

On the other hand if I sit down with Article Miner I can trash out two, possibly three sites per week and even if they only get me fifty cents a day each that is one-fifty per day, say ten dollars a week and $3,500 in the year. Now if I am going to do that ever two or three weeks then I can't afford either the time OR the money to site promote.

With adsense we are in the information provision business and the more information we put out there then the more likely we are to receive a benefit.

I have my writers site, I will work on it, build it up and hopefully make a few dollars from it. But have you really time or the money to promote more than three sites at any one time

As a buy the way I managed to get hold of a php template the other day and I have a site built using it. To be honest I don't like it, mainly due to the fact that I don't understand php. Equally important though is the difficulty I see in creating folders for php sites. I couldn't figure out how to link them together. But I'll start a thread about this latter

Kevin

[glen]

as i mentioned in the pm to you today, a good PHP program to experiment is phpBB which is free and has a large support base

http://www.phpbb.com

[despot]

Well, about phpBB, I used it in one of my sites (which was quite successfull, had even to 500 visits a day without advertising it). It was a fan-site and the idea was to mod the phpBB to implent something like a little RPG in it (it was not my idea, and was text-based anyway).
Damn, how great staff I had gathered there. However, the site is dead now, I didn't earn a single cent of it as I did not know what adsense is, and I even lost the domain so that not even parts of the traffic (although there wouldn't be any now) could have been regathered to another site.

Yet, now I created a little site (everybody knows why but the google TOS forbids me from saying that) which I have been updating every now and then with articles. I have been running it since August 2005, but the site is in a simple subdirectory under a subdomain. I have implented an RSS feed, a Google sitemap, registered the sitemap with Google, requested some directories (although I did not check back), et cetera. The site is PHP & MySQL based, runs under a nice little engine made by me (it is quite easy and simple).
Now, in ~5 months, I have got about 30$ in my adsense account balance.
That's it. Noway to go like this.

Still, the site would not even get that much. The interesting thing is that although it is accessed by search engines (at least Google), it ranks very low. TOO low for somebody to see. But not with one keyword (well, it is codecs related). The keyword brings me about 100 unique visits a day (well, it had started about a few months ago, then had stopped as I lost some posissions, then has started again). I didn't check now for quite a bit of time if it is still on, but it seems it is.
The clickrate is very low, but it would be better than nothing.


And the way to earn is with big projects. The site like that is just another crap-site in the internet which would not earn any reasonable money.
The site that I told you about before, it would have been a good start. A start, however.
But it's over now. I could maybe do something like this, but I don't feel like doing it, because now I am too lazy, the things that interested me then now do not, I already had enough of experience for quite a bit of time with that site and the team that I had there has already splitted (hope to get all of them together sometime so that we could have some good time).
Laziness is probably the main reason, though. :)

About making websites that should be good to the internet, to the community, et cetera, as somebody stated, well, maybe a good resource is always good but, as for myself, it may sound rude, but I don't give a ###### about somebody's education and I don't actually believe my site could change something. The world is inreversibly tainted already. :)

And about earnings, although it's probably the main thing most people aim at when creating adsense sites and so on, there are other ways to earn money. Even other ways to earn money in the internet.
The easiest ways are quite illegal, or, at least, you cheat somebody and he looses. I don't know if a fraud is a way to go... Wouldn't want to do that.


So, in conclusion, you can skip this, as it is yet another useless post made by me... :)

[glen]

thanks for your post despot, thanks for sharing your RPG experience. I hear they are quite addictive...if your site gets 100 visitors a day that is not much really....if you got a 4% click through rate that would be 4 clicks a day...so you might make maybe 50 cents or 1 dollar. I know there maybe expections where some sites make quite a bit for a click...but in general..it seems the average is between 10 and 20 cents.

with that said, if you rank lower than other sites you might like to consider the design of your competitors and work out what they have got which makes them stand out of the crowd. it might be something small like an active chat board....do you have a codec forum? i guess people would like to chat about that stuff...particularly people into audio...but chances are that technical audience won't be good clickers...my belief is that non-technical people are the best clickers...so this is the best audience to go after!

cheers, glen

[despot]

Well, thanks for the advice.

I don't think I could or would like to extend the codec page (it's just a very simple page which has a link to download codecs). It was the first (or second) in Google by entering the name of the codec.
The page brings about 100 hits alone (there are some extra hits from other pages but not that many)...

Anyways, I should make another site to make something out of adsense as this is just too bad.
But currently I am too lazy...
And that's the end of the story so far. :)

[glen]

ok well i am sure your motivation will return one day! you probably just need a site topic that really interests you!

[despot]

Oh, hello again.

Just cheking back.

In case you would be interested, I'm under the $80 mark already, lol. Without doing anything for the website.
If I manage to get $100 in a year, well... that's not to bad.
Planning to purchase some domains and get it on from scratch again. Leaving the old site, of course.
It's just that I'm currently too lazy and out of ideas.


In fact, after having visited this forums and seen 4000+ posts, I had been thinking for a minute that this site is finally taking off. The things seemed not to be as good later, though.
Anyway, there is some progress with it.
Congrats.

[glen]

hi despot, i was hoping you would contribute a few thousand posts to get things moving! LOL

good to see you back. well done with your 80 dollars. should at least cover your hosting and domain name registration.

for your next site you might set up a site about being lazy...perhaps www.iamlazy.com is available? i know there are heaps of websites about being "bored at work" and i guess that laziness is a topic in itself

[despot]

Nah, it seems somebody has been smart enough to take iamlazy.com.

Too bad, gotta start generating new ideas.

[glen]

how about www.generatingideas.com? :-) ah i just checked and it is taken!

[despot]

Warning: I'm kinda exhausted today (doesn't feel like doing anything) so this post might not make much sense. Anyway.


Okay, just to let the world know - I'm now working on a new project. It's kind of a generic idea and I am not really sure if it would take off but I've been working like a few nighters already (well, like three hours really late each night). I'm not too much into marketing and I don't practically have any funds so I don't know if I would be able to bring decent traffic to it. I don't really know if it does have any potential. We will see, I guess...

I don't think I would be posting the link in public but maybe I'll PM it to some members of this forum (uhm... if any interested). Of course, no promises so far. :-)

Also, I think I'll maybe run the first few weeks without ads. I don't really want it to be just MFA. But if I could monetize it afterwards, that would be awesome.

This is all so strange to be posting it here. But I just felt like having to share this.
Plus, as I post this now, there is no way back. Gotta code.

[glen]

keep at it despot. i think its a good idea to build without adsense at first. one of the new forums i am setting up has no ads on it so far... (its just a general discussion forum)...i just want to build up a community and i think that if i place ads on there i will lose more than i will gain. plus i think maybe it will be easier to get rank without ads but i am not sure...it is an experiment on that point really.

also, i think it will be easier to get others to link to you if you do not have any ads on the site because you are viewed as a pure non-profit and some people respect that.