Fast & Easy Media Kit (Monetizing Your Website)
I was talking to one of our account managers who has been consulting with a client looking to sell ads on their website. I got to thinking that the concept of putting together a fast and easy media kit for this purpose would be a good topic for a blog post, so here goes…
I know that there are a lot of schools of thought out there as to what goes into a media kit but I think that in most cases you can keep things really simple and it will serve you well. Of course if you are going after a really big fish, like Nike or Apple, you are going to need a lot more fluff. In my opinion, there are three key components that the average advertiser is going to want to know, these are:
What is Your Website About?
What is your website about? You should probably put together a few paragraphs describing what your website is about. What information do you provide? Who visits your website?
What Kind of Traffic Do You Have?
Who visits your website? How much traffic do you receive? What are your top keywords, search terms, etc.? What are some of your top referrers? What geographic areas do you do well in? All of this information should be very easy to access from your Google Analytics reports.
What Are You Selling?
You should graphically demonstrate what you are selling. How big are the ads (in pixels, shape, etc) and where are they going to be displayed on your site. You should also cover whether the ads are going to be displayed in rotation with other ads so that the advertiser has a clear understanding. You will want to include what the costs for the ads are, and what the terms are for each. You will also want to include a fee for any ads that you have to design in-house, this is important, don’t spend all afternoon designing a banner ad for free! If you have requirements for the ads in terms of size, you should also specify those here. You obviously don’t want to open yourself up to large animated files that could affect your websites performance.
Don’t Forget to Add The Snazzy Cover Page
You will want the overall look and feel of your media kit to resemble your website and corporate branding, definitely nothing in black and white, add some color. I prefer PDF as the format for media kits online, and I think that they should be made available on your website so that potential advertisers can easily find them.
Hope this helps, if you have questions or suggestions, comment me below…
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Again, if you are going after a really big fish, you are going to need to include a lot more information. I have put together media kits that ranged from 4 pages to 30 pages in the past.
Some Thoughts Regarding the FTC Disclosure Rules
I have been out of pocket the past few weeks and haven’t had a chance until today to go over the FTC Rules for Disclosure as they apply to Bloggers. I know that this caused a serious uproar inside the blogger community, ShoeMoney (Jeremy Schoemaker) even called an emergency town hall meeting on TinyChat to discuss these new regulations. You can get ShoeMoney’s scoop here…
I have had a chance to read over the information initially released as well as the supplemental PDF explaining the rules today and for the most part I think most of us are not going to be affected by any of this. The obvious focus of the rule is to go after the fake news and endorsement sites that are out there. Personally, I think it’s going to be really tough to enforce.
There are some points that I want to bring up regarding the new rules that I think you should consider. The first being that if you receive compensation of any kind for promoting someone else’s product on your blog you had better do a full disclosure to let your readers now that. For instance, I recently reviewed a product for another company and received compensation for it. While the compensation wasn’t monetary (it was an Amazon Kindle) I still received compensation for my post. Fortunately for me, this rarely ever comes up. In the instance that I referred to earlier, I honestly was going to do a review of this product anyway and the fact that they sent me a free gift, while it was nice, it still didn’t sway my review one way or the other. Had the product sucked, I would have let you know, I promise…
In Forbes magazine, the FTC said that they were also going after employees of companies who blog as well:
The FTC also plans to crack down on company employees posing as citizen bloggers, a practice known as “astroturf marketing” because of its fake grassroots style.
As far as I can tell, neither of these documents addressed affiliate marketing, monetization, or paid links. I might be wrong, if I skipped over something, someone please be sure to let me know!! Oh, and by the way, if you are caught in violation of these rules, the penalty is $10k.
If you blog, do yourself a favor and spend an hour tonight going over these regulations if you haven’t already. Also, ShoeMoney brought up some good questions that I wanted to share w/ you as well:
I am curious where we stop? Lemme give you a few scenarios:
1) I do a paid $5000 paid post from Google about AdSense
2) I do a paid post from Google where I get paid $100 per new user I get to sign up for AdSense.Those 2 posts could be written completely different. Maybe disclosing the exact amounts paid is where we are headed?
Again for instance if a certain Google employee making 100k/yr is blogging about his company on his personal blog thats one thing. But if that same Google employee has stock worth hundreds of millions of dollars then perhaps that should be disclosed since he can single handily move the stock price up or down, do you think he is every going to blog negatively about his company. Where is this going? How in the world are they going to enforce this? I am guessing we will not see 1 case come from this.
More Affiliate Marketing Tips…
A while back I posted My Approach to Monetization after I had been doing a lot of experimentation on various projects and for the most part it was well received, after I had posted this I ran across ProBlogger’s 10 tips for using affiliate programs, and I was amazed that I had a few of the same ideas. Now, keep in mind that I don’t consider myself to be an “expert” on anything because personally I hate that title, I have however been in this industry a long time but I continue to learn something new on a daily basis. I am leery of those that proclaim to know it all when it comes to the web because the web is such a dynamic animal, and it changes everyday…
I find myself consulting with more and more bloggers these days that are hoping to one day build up a following that will allow them to one day quit their day job. In most cases, Affiliate Marketing somehow plays into their dream somewhere, and far be it for me to to be the bearer of bad news, but in a lot of cases it’s harder to build sustainable income from blogging than it looks, but not impossible.
One of the things that really gets under my skin are the motivational materials that are out there teaching everyone how to quit their day job and start blogging for fun and profits, you’ve seen them. Most of the time these guys are just doing their best to get you to buy their books. Of course there are some real success stories out there, just Google ShoeMoney or ProBlogger and see what they have been able to do.
There are some things that these guys, the real experts, have in common and you have to figure them out on your own if you are going to be successful. Both have their own individual styles of course, but there are key ingredients that I think a successful blogger has to have. One positive thing is that both of these guys are willing to give back what they have learned over the years, here’s another example:
Darren’s first 10 tips, followed by 6 more that he added today…
1. Consider your Audience
It almost goes without saying – but it’s worth putting yourself in your readers shoes and consider what they might be looking for as they surf by your blog. Are they shopping for specific products? Might they be looking for related products or accessories? What would trigger them to purchase? Start with your reader in mind rather than the product. If you take this approach you could end up doing your reader a favor as well as making a few dollars on the side.
2. Genuine Recommendations and personal endorsements always work best
There are literally hundreds of thousands of products and services for you to choose from to recommend to your blog’s readers but making money from them is not as simple as randomly adding links to them from your blog. Your blog’s readers come back to your blog day after day because something about you resonates with them – they have at least some level of trust and respect for you and perhaps the quickest way to destroy this is to recommend that they buy something that you don’t fully believe will benefit them.
The best results I’ve had from affiliate programs are where I give an open and honest appraisal of the product – including both it’s strengths and weaknesses. The most successful affiliate program I’m involved with here at ProBlogger is Joel Comm’s e-book which I reviewed here. If you read the review you’ll see that I not only tell readers who I believe the book is for but I also mention those it is NOT for. In a sense I critique it. On a surface level one might think that this wasn’t a wise move and that I should have given a glowing review – however the sales that I’ve had through the program have proven otherwise. People want to know what they are buying first and even if they know a product has limitations they will buy it if it meets their particular need.
3. Link to Quality Products
We all like to make sure we’re buying the best products money can buy – your readers are no different to this and are more likely to make a purchase if you’ve found them the best product for them. Choose products and companies with good reputations and quality sales pages. There is nothing worse than giving a glowing review of a product only to send your reader to a page that looks cheap and nasty.
4. Contextual Deep Links work Best
When I started using the Amazon Associate Program I naively thought that all I had to do was put an Amazon banner ad (that linked to Amazon’s front page) at the top of my blog. I thought that my readers would see it and surf over to Amazon and buy up big – thereby making me a rich man. Nothing could have been further from reality – I was deluding myself.
I always says to bloggers that I’m consulting with that they should learn something from contextual advertising when it comes to affiliate programs. The secret of contextual ads like Adsense is that a reader is reading a post on a particular topic on your blog and when they see an advertisement for that same product they are more likely to click it than if they saw an ad for something else. The same is true for affiliate programs. A banner to a general page on every page on your site won’t be anywhere near as effective as multiple links throughout your blog that advertiser products that are relevant for readers reading particular parts of your blog.
So if you’re writing a blog about MP3 players and have a review for a particular product – the most effectively affiliate program that you could link to from within the content of that page would be one that links directly to a page selling that specific model of MP3 player. This is how I use the Amazon program today. It is more work than contextual advertising because you’re not just putting one piece of code into a template but rather need to place individual links on many pages – but I find that it’s been worth the effort.
5. Consider positioning of links
One of the things I go on and on about with Adsense optimization is the positioning of ads. I tell bloggers to position their ads in the hotspots on pages (like the top of a left hand side bar – or inside content – or at the end of posts above comments etc). The same principles are true for affiliate advertising.
6. Traffic levels are Important
While it’s not the only factor – traffic levels are obviously key when it comes to making money from almost any online activity. The more people that see your well placed, relevant and well designed affiliate links the more likely it is that one of them will make a purchase. So don’t just work on your links – work on building a readership. Not only this, consider how you might direct traffic on your blog toward pages where they are more likely to see your affiliate links.
7. Diversify without Clutter
Don’t put all your affiliate efforts into one basket. There are plenty of products out there to link to so there is no need to just work on one. At the same time you shouldn’t clutter your blog up with too many affiliate program links. If you do so you run the risk of diluting the effectiveness of your links and could disillusion your readership.
8. Be Transparent
Don’t try to fool your readers into clicking links that could make you money. While it may not always feasible to label all affiliate links I think some attempt should be made to let people know what type of link they are clicking on. I also think consistency is important with this so readers of your blog know what to expect. For example here at ProBlogger usually put a note beside or under affiliate links to simply let readers know that that is what they are. On my Digital Camera Blog I don’t do this because of the large number of such links make it clear by the text around the link that clicking on it will take them to some sort of shop or information where a purchase is possible (ie a link my say ‘buy the XXX product’ or ‘get the latest product on XXX’.
9. Combine with other Revenue Streams
Affiliate programs and advertising programs are not mutually exclusive things. I’ve come across a few people recently who have said they don’t want to do affiliate linking because it will take the focus off their Adsense ads. While there is potential for one to take the focus off the other – there is also real potential for both to work hand in hand as different readers will respond to different approaches. You should consider the impact that your affiliate links have on other revenue streams – but don’t let one stop the other.
10. Track results
Most affiliate programs have at least some type of tracking or statistics package which will allow you to watch which links are effective. Some of these packages are better than others but most will at least allow you to see what is selling and what isn’t. Watching your results can help you plan future affiliate efforts. Keep track of what positions for links work well, which products sell, what wording around links works well etc and use the information that you collect as you work plan future affiliate strategies.
Well, today I was reading 6 more tips that Darren had posted on his blog, and here they are:
11. Build Your Network Before You Need It
Perhaps the biggest thing that I’ve learned about affiliate marketing is that it works best the bigger and stronger your network is. I mentioned in my first list that ‘traffic levels are important’ – this is true, but connected to it is your ‘network’.
Whether it be loyal blog readers and subscribers, your email list, your Twitter connections, your Facebook friends or some other social network – the better your network the better you’ll do at driving affiliate sales.
It’s not just about size – the size of your network is only part of what I’m talking about here. Also important is the depth of relationship that you have with your network/readers and the amount of trust that they have in you. If you have consistently helped people and been useful to them over a long time they’re probably more likely to respond to your recommendations.
Relevancy/Focus counts – The other key part of your network is how relevant it is and how focused it is upon the topic that you’re doing promotions on. For example – I see some people on Twitter running competitions to build their follower numbers in a way that just brings in any follower that they can. The problem with this is that they end up with a large but unfocused network. I personally would rather have a smaller network who all shared the one interest than a large one who just signed up to get a prize.
Lastly, a network takes time to build – if you think you’ll be doing some affiliate marketing at some point in the future – start building your network now, before you need it. This gives you time to build the depth of relationships, trust and focus of your network before you begin promoting affiliate products.
12. Try different Mediums
I’ve alluded to this above already but one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last few years is promotions work differently on different mediums.
For example: some affiliate promotions seem to convert best in a blog post, others work best when you send an email to a list you’ve been building while others seem to take off on Twitter or other social media sites.
The key is to try different approaches, to have build up your network before you need it (see above) and to track the results for each promotion so you can check what is and isn’t converting.
13. Multiple Promotions of the same Product
I spoke about this at Blog World Expo last year in a session but don’t think I’ve written about it here at ProBlogger. Here’s what I’ve found:
If you write a single blog post promoting an affiliate product you’ll have a certain percentage of readers buy the product (the % varies a lot). If you are able to follow that up with a different type of post a few days later it can reinforce the promotion.
Here’s how I’ve done it on my photography blog:
- Blog Post 1 – a post announcing a new product, giving some benefits, sharing who the product is relevant for etc.
- Blog Post 2 – a post a few days later that is an interview with the person behind the product – exploring why they made it, expanding upon what it includes, who it’s for and giving the product context. I’d try to also include some tips or suggestions for readers who don’t buy the product in such an interview so it is a useful post for everyone.
- Email List – later in the week email out the subscriber list linking to the previous posts and reinforcing the promotion.
- Tweets/Followups – I would also include a few Tweets about the promotion through the week and would consider a 3rd blog post a week later – perhaps some reader reviews of the product.
The key is to not spam your network but to find interesting and useful ways to draw attention to the product multiple times over a week or two so as to reinforce it and give those who take a little longer to make a decision the opportunity to get the product.
14. Bonuses Work
There are many techniques that internet marketers use to increase sales of their products. I find some a little ‘cheap’ and ‘nasty’ but many do work. Two that I’ve found less offensive and/or manipulative are where you add value to the affiliate promotion by either adding a bonus of your own to the offer and/or getting the person behind the product to offer a bonus or discount just for your readers. I’ve done this a number of times on my blogs and have found that conversions are significantly higher.
15. It takes Time
A theme that regular readers of ProBlogger will recognize is that making money from blogs (through any method) takes time. While an affiliate program does have the potential to make you a lot of money very quickly – it almost always comes after a lot of work and once you’ve spent a lot of time and effort building out your network.
The early days of building your network may see very little (if any) results. I personally earned very little from affiliate marketing in my first year or two of blogging but as I mentioned above in the last year or two it’s really begun to exponentially increase – partly as a result of getting smarter with my promotions but partly just as my network grew in size and quality.
16. Timing is Important
One of the things I’ve learned over the last week of launching my own product is just how much difference there can be in the rate of sales at different times of the day and week. It would vary depending upon the location of most of a blog’s readers but for me sales have been significantly up during business hours in the USA and on weekdays. No real surprises there.
The lesson translates to promoting products – unless the product has a real focus upon the type of people surfing the web on the weekends or late at night you’ll want to time your promotions to those times of the weeks that your audience is online. Similarly – avoid public holidays – this last week even though we launched the workbook 3 days after Memorial Day in the US I suspect we lost a few sales as some people took the week off.
Disclaimer: I don’t usually reference affiliate marketing experts unless in my opinion they are truly experts, Darren Rowse fits into that category as an expert in my opinion…
A Few Key Ingredients for a Successful Project
A short time ago my my partners and I launched a startup project of our own and within 4 months time we had picked up national exposure to the point that we were negotiating 4 potential sponsorships and had requests from at least a half dozen or so other parties interested in being a part of our project. A couple other things that are worthy of mention is that during that 4 month timeframe we had accumulated over 1,000 followers on Twitter and had approximately 20,000 Facebook Fans.
For the sake of this post I will not mention the project itself because these principles apply to pretty much any project, instead I will discuss some key ingredients that went into growing that project in such a short period of time.
Consider the Focus of your Project…
Fortunately for us we had a very popular topic and were able to draw from a very loyal fan base. Whatever your project is, be sure to have modest expectations when trying to measure your success. It stands to reason that a website that caters to fans of Football is going to draw more attention than a website catering to the bread making community. Also keep in mind where your audience is located, if you are launching a website that reports news and events for a small region of the United States, you obviously can’t expect to see the same amount of traffic or have the same kind of impact that a similar website has that markets to a national audience. I am not saying that you should change your focus of your project either, I know many successful websites that only cater to a niche or regional audience.
Tips for Development
If at all possible, I recommend using one of the popular open-sourced frameworks that are out there. A couple of things that I would look at when trying to decide on a framework or CMS would be the size of it’s support community and how well you like the management process, because I promise you that you will spend more time managing the website than you think.
My preference for most projects is Wordpress, many websites today are built upon Wordpress and there are a couple of reasons for this, one is because it has probably the largest community of developers and users than any other CMS on the planet and secondly because it’s extremely flexible, I haven’t ran into many situations where I couldn’t build in some kind of functionality into my wordpress projects that a client was asking for, it’s extremely versatile. A couple of other solutions that are out there that are also probably worth looking into are Drupal, Joomla, and ModX. If you go with one of these as your foundation I don’t think you will have any problems scaling your project as it grows down the road.
When working with a developer on the front end, be sure to lay out your vision for the project as clearly as possible, this is extremely valuable because it helps the developer know what your needs might be 6 months to a year down the road and he can often times allow for this more acutely during the development process.
Design is Huge!!
If you do not have an eye for design, or maybe you think you do and others have told you that you don’t, do yourself a favor and hire a graphic designer to assist you with the logo, layout, and any other graphic elements of the site. Making a first impression is extremely important while trying to build a community. The website needs to have very slick graphics, attractive layout, etc. I have seen it time and time again, a website can be thrown together without any of the basic elements of design and have the best content in the world and it will flop, of course there are a few sites like craigslist.com that will continue to defy the laws the nature but it’s always a good idea to look good!
Every aspect of the project also needs to mesh well and be consistent with other portions of the project. We wrestled with this on our project because in addition to our wordpress application we also had a simple machines forum running with approximately 400 members on it that were active daily. We eventually came up with a theme design for our forum that meshed well with our layout for the wordpress site but it took some time to get these exactly right, or at least in my eyes and I am somewhat particular when it comes to design.
Never stop tweaking the site, if you see areas of the site that could possibly perform better or be more visible to your users, be sure to tweak them on the fly, your visitors will appreciate that you have their ease of use in mind each time they recognize these edits.
Cast a Huge Social Net…
Social Media is the buzzword these days, it actually has been for a couple of years now inside the industry. By social media I am referring to where people hangout online. For instance I have friends who still hit myspace just about everyday, but the vast majority of my old classmates are all on Facebook, a lot of my friends from within the tech community all interact on Twitter. These are all examples of social media.
Being able to identify who your audience is is very important, but what is equally important is how you plan to connect to them inside these social networks. There are tools out there that will allow you to build a following, or you can hire my partners and I and we will be happy to consult with you and point you in the right directions. The first process for doing any of this is to figure out where to invest your energy first, for us we had a startling revelation on the front end of the project, we thought that our younger fan base would be on Twitter and were shocked when our page went viral and picked up almost 20,000 fans in a weekend.
Let’s say your project has to do with college football and you want to connect to College Football fans on Twitter, there are about a half a dozen or so proven ways to connect to other fans. Some of these methods only require a little bit of work on the front end but I have found that the quality approach isn’t as easy as others would have you to believe. There are some issues to consider with each of the social networks such as follow limits on Twitter and Groups versus Pages inside of Facebook. Again, this is where a company like Pleth would come in and help you identify the best approach for your social campaign. It’s not a shot in the dark like you would expect, we actually have some methods in place that have proven to be effective.
Work it Everyday!
Just having an impressive following on the social networks is one thing but maximizing that following is another story. There are a couple schools of thought regarding Twitter especially, some companies follow back their followers regardless, and some do not. It is my belief that the quality approach is to become involved, sure it’s nice to set back and post links to Twitter and Facebook knowing that a few of your followers are actually going to click through based on the law of percentage, but what would happen if you actually engaged in conversations with your followers? My experience has been that the more you engage your followers the more likely they are to be loyal visitors to your project, and also the more likely they are to invite and share your content with their friends.
I would routinely budget 2 hours a day toward social media management and could have possibly devoted more time if I had it available. I would engage other users on their comments and they would do likewise. I would also occasionally post links back to competing projects just to show that “it wasn’t all about my project” and was more or less about the common interest we had with our followers.
Make it Easy for Visitors to Get Involved…
Probably one of the smartest things you can do on the front end of your project would be to incorporate some user authentication tools like OpenID or my favorite one so far, Facebook Connect. By doing this you allow even the first time visitor to your website the ability to post a comment on your content with just a few clicks of their mouse. Without these authentication tools they visitors are forced to register on your site alone and for the most part they have to really like what you are doing to devote the minute or two it takes to do that. Be sure to promote the fact that you use Facebook Connect on your site, I have found that it does encourage your visitors to comment more.
Give the Community Part Ownership
With our project we quickly identified about 10 or so bloggers that were posting blogs up on various services on the web such as Blogger and Wordpress.com. We put out some requests asking for Guest Bloggers to offer their perspective on issues. Within 4 months we had approximately 10-12 bloggers posting anywhere from once to three times a week. That’s content that we didn’t have to write but what’s most valuable about this is that they can offer a perspective totally separate from your own which helps your project become more diverse in it’s offerings. For instance, we had a blogger who provided posts with an editorial type of flair to them while we had another blogger who could honestly have you rolling in the floor before finishing the first paragraph of their posts. We also had a writer who would only post about a paragraph or so each week but it was possibly the most informative weekly columns about our core topic I had read anywhere else on the web. Keeping your content diverse gives visitors to your website the impression that you are actually a lot larger than you really are, and this never hurts anything.
There is another positive about getting your Community involved with your project, they take on a sense of ownership and will help promote the community in ways that you might not be able to. For example, we had a forum on our project that was extremely popular, we posted a note asking for moderators and within a week or so we had appointed one volunteer as global moderator for the project and another dozen or so managing specific portions of the forum. I can’t count the times that I would run across these same peoples facebook profiles and tweets where they had links posted back to the message board.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Granted this is something that always comes up on the front end of each project with our clients because for the most part there hasn’t been a grand awakening to the general public yet that being ranked high in Google isn’t a necessity anymore, there are other ways to receive traffic thanks to the social landscape. Now, am I saying that you shouldn’t do whatever is in your power to get to the top of Google? No, that’s not what I am saying at all, rather I am saying that we shouldn’t fixate on where we are at in Google like we did a few years ago when search engines were the ONLY way visitors found our content.
Fortunately for us we had a very good SEO campaign going, we actually showed up on the first page of Google for at least 3 or 4 key search terms and probably a lot more than that but I didn’t spend a lot of time researching out our rankings because it wasn’t a top priority.
Keep Track of Your Analytics, Do Comparisons
One of the most useful tools for me with our project was a free tool provided by Google called Google Analytics. These analytic tools gave me all of the information I needed, for example, what was the most popular types of posts we had on the site, I noticed a quick trend that our visitors all seemed to favor nostalgic and historical posts moreso than posts that covered current events, so I quickly started allocating more posts to that category and our numbers continued to climb exponentially each week.
One other thing that helped me out a lot was knowing where our visitors came from each week. We saw a large number of returning visitors which was comforting to know that we had a good product that hooked our visitors in. With Google Analytics you can also track referrers. This tells you who sent your visitors to your site, the primary ones for us were Twitter, Facebook, and then Google. Exactly in that order. The fact that our visitors were three times more likely to come from Twitter than they were the front page of Google helped motivate me to work our Twitter account following even harder, and trust me being in this industry for as long as I have, it was an eye opening experience to see this firsthand. I can’t emphasize enough how important social media plays with todays landscape.
Wait Until the Time is Right to Monetize!
When you first launch your project, don’t expect to throw adsense on your site and start making money overnight, I don’t think that there are many out there these days that actually have that expectation anymore anyway, but I always try to let our clients know on the front end that they need to budget on not making any money for a while that way they don’t have any false expectations going in.
Yes, we did make some money on Adsense through pay per clicks, were we making more than other websites that catered to the same community? Yes. We stumbled upon a few ways to inject adsense into content that we sent out to our follower in a way that wasn’t obtrusive or detracted from the quality of our content. It took us a little while to get this process down, but once we eventually figured it out we did make some money.
Affiliate Marketing is another story altogether, selecting the right brands to associate with your project is not something you should take lightly, you have to be wary of who your readers are and what their interests are to accurately provide ads to them on a large scale. Another thing that I am really big on is not going overboard, for me a small 120×60 banner is just as effective as one of those long creepy sidebar ads that advertisers all recommend. Respect the value of your online real estate also and don’t jump at an opportunity just because it appeals to your niche, negotiate to get the best return percentages on leads and sales you generate, after all you are the one providing the service.
While PPC, Adsense, and Affiliate Marketing are great, there are only a few rare instances where I have seen these actually make a project profitable. To make the real money you are going to need to produce a media kit with basic information about your project, break down ad sizes and figure out what you want to charge for each of these ad spots. Once you have this media kit in hand you can then go forward and pursue bigger fish for direct advertising on your site. As I mentioned earlier we had 6 sponsorships in the works that were each commited to paying pretty good money each month for their ad placements and several more that were contacting us with interest. Once the project takes off you will hopefully spend more time pursuing this end of the business than you will in the actual day to day management of the site.
Promote, Promote, Promote
One of the things that I did a lot of was to go on podcasts that catered to our same demographic and promoted our project. I would sometimes go on two shows a week and initially we didn’t see a huge jump in traffic but over time we could definitely tell it was helping. We also granted interviews with every newspaper outlet that asked about what we were doing and made sure to brag on the community aspects of the project, we picked up several loyal community members through these efforts that just happened to read about us in the newspaper.
I also contacted several friends I had in the media industry that I thought would be a good fit for what we were doing and provided RSS (really simple syndication) of our content to them to use on their website, these arrangements were a win-win for both us and the media outlets because they were getting free content on their websites and we were getting traffic we would have normally seen.
These are just a few of the key ingredients that I feel like were important to quickly get our project off the ground. These are pretty much the same staples that we advise our clients on everyday to maximize their web presence.
HootSuite / Adsense Frustrations
My partners and I have been using Hootsuite for a couple of months now to feed our twitter feed from our Nascar website. Out of all of the Twitter tools out there, this one ranks in my top 5 just because of what it allows you to do. You can manage multiple accounts from their control panel as well as access your statistics from your related twitterfeed.
Another really cool feature about Hootsuite is that it will allow you to shrink large URL’s, kind of like tinyurl.com does, but the big difference is that Hootsuite uses a service called ow.ly that opens up the linked page w/ a small non-obtrusive frame at the top. Inside this frame you can embed your Google Adsense code into.
Honestly this doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but that little frame w/ the adsense on it has really helped us pick up some ppc revenue.
A couple of weeks ago Hootsuite stopped serving Adsense ads and our PPC revenue from nascarview.com has taken a pretty good hit as a result. I have personally sent notes to @hootsuite on Twitter and they have reponded a few times about the problem and said that they were aware of the issue and were working to resolve it.
That has been a few weeks now since I heard from them, and I haven’t seen anyone else serving up adsense w/ ow.ly links since then. I know that there are several people who have inquired on twitter about the issue as well, but none of us have really gotten a timeline from Hootsuite as to when we might can expect them to have this fixed. Hopefully soon…
My Approach to Monetization
I have a simple, possibly hard headed, approach to monetization. Granted I haven’t ran a campaign personally in several years, and I know that the game has changed a lot in that time, but I don’t think that I am too far off base w/ my thought process here… (and I would love to get some feedback from any of my readers who are enjoying some success). Here are some principles that I have been putting into play with my monetization campaign on this website:
- Only work with advertisers that are contextually relevant to your websites content. For instance, if this website is geared toward web developers that work with PHP and wordpress, then my ads should be relevant to my audience.
- Only work with advertisers that you would do business with yourself. For instance, I got burned once by 1-800-Flowers, and for that reason their ads will never show up on my website. I feel like this is important because the products that you are pushing on your website are somewhat of a reflection of yourself. I have carefully built my blogs subscribers over time and I certainly don’t want to alienate them because they have a bad experience from one of the vendors on my website.
- Carefully utilize your sites real estate. I know that I am probably out of alignment with ShoeMoney’s teachings, if you notice his website, he has his ads up to the top of the page where they are in plain view of his audience. I prefer to gradually ease my audience into the idea that I am recommending products on my blog other than my own. It is for this reason that I have set my ads to run lower in my sidebar, and that they are only visible once a user scrolls down the page.
- When building my ads I ask myself, would I click on this link? Personally I do not click on ads that much, I just don’t do it. I don’t have a reason either, it’s just not in my habit to do it. A few things that turn me off about a lot of ads are the blinking animations. I feel like if your brand is strong enough, you don’t have to do that with your advertising. If you notice, none of the ads on this website are animated, they are simply logo images for companies that are already well established and reputable brands.
- Have a good balance of adsense and affiliate links on your site. Personally I don’t have adsense running on this website right now but I will soon. Of course, they will be smaller locations on the site. The thing about adsense and pay per click type ads is that the visitor only has to click on them to make you money, but with the affiliate links, your revenue is often tied to the actual purchase of goods or services.
- Don’t go overboard, one of the biggest things I see when people first start monetizing their websites is that they literally go overboard with the ads, and the content is somewhere hidden between three or four large blinking gif images.
Granted, I have only been running affiliate ads on this website for a short period of time but I have already seen some transactions take place as a result of using this philosophy. Could I make more revenue from this website through monetization by abandoning these principals, absolutely! I know that I could, but I don’t plan on ever pursuing it…
I would love to hear some feedback from online marketers that are involved in their own monetization campaigns and get their opinions.
More Thoughts on Monetization
You might notice that I am now running some advertisements on my blog in the sidebar. For those of you who know me, you will know that this is a stretch for me, up until this year I never attempted to monetize any of my personal projects, and honestly I haven’t built an affiliate link in 8 or 9 years when I owned theproteinstore.com.
My reasoning for not getting into these affiliate programs probably has to do with the fact that I am a bit OCD when it comes to brightly colored, distracting, blinking ads that run right in the corner of your eye. These ads still make it hard for me to focus on the actual content of the website.
Contextual relevance has also been a big thing for me, if I was going to run ads on theproteinstore.com, they had to be related to health and fitness, and I wouldn’t run anything else. Even while I was running the ads I would use them very sparingly, often times designing my own ad in photoshop to make it look a little less obtrusive and to blend in with the page content. This often times would prove to be way more trouble than it was worth, even on a good month my biggest commission checks were under a hundred dollars.
I have been watching a lot of ShoeMoney’s podcasts and following his blog very closely and he does a great job with monetization, in fact he is making a nice living from it, so is Norm Chow and a few other ones out there, but the truth of the matter is that most of the ones that are handing out advice for monetization aren’t doing that well, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that a lot of these guys are skewing their traffic metrics just to sell advertising and “get rich quick” programs.
While absorbing some of ShoeMoney’s teachings this past week I decided to start investigating a few partnership opportunities that were out there along with my business partner Greg Smart. I think we have about 3 or 4 partnerships going right now with various services that provide us with our choice of contextually relevant advertisers.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with how these programs work, you basically signup and then select from a large list of advertisers that you would like to work with. I selected mostly ones that I thought would be relevant to our Nascar fan base on NascarView but then decided to look into some advertisers that might do well on this website. Since I primarily blog about wordpress and web development I figured those would be some good areas of interest.
I am a huge fan of Brian Gardner, he is a great guy that designs some of the best, if not the best, premium templates for wordpress that are on the market. I use his themes as a starter for a vast majority of my projects inside of wordpress because they are standards friendly, easy to configure and build on top of. Brian, like a lot of the wordpress theme providers on the web today, already had an affiliate program setup so I just opted into that and was approved right away. I setup my first ad in about 8 years on my website! If you notice the studiopress link in the sidebar, that’s it…
Well, I have been using another product that basically generates standards compliant themes for wordpress, joomla, and drupal called Artisteer. I have been real impressed with Artisteer so I decided to post that link on my blog as well and do a little story about the product, etc.
Here’s where it get’s interesting. That night I totalled $49.95 in sales for the Artisteer theme generator. I couldn’t believe it, that was like 3 days worth of adsense revenue and it had only been on my website for a few hours. Okay, so at this point I am hooked, I start signing up for programs with all kinds of companies that I knew were reputable, and that I would honestly do business with myself. I was approved for most of these requests, a few didn’t approve.
If you will notice my links located in the sidebar for Sirius, The North Face, Overstock.com, Omaha Steaks, iTunes, Nautica, and Petsmart, those are my affiliate links. Basically how this works is that anytime a visitor to my website hits one of these links and goes onto that companies website and makes a purchase I get a percentage of that purchase back at the end of each month.
For instance, with the Artisteer link, the overall sale was $49.95, my take on that sale is $5.00. I know it’s not going to bring on an early retirement or anything but here’s the gist of it, I didn’t have to do anything for that $5.00, it came in on it’s own…
This frustrates me a little bit knowing that all along I have had this pretty incredible blog traffic going on and that there is no way to know how much affiliate revenue I could have been generating all along with these type of programs.
And the only excuse I have is because I am a little bit OCD and don’t like blinking ads everywhere. If you notice, none of my ads are blinking but people are still clicking on them and purchasing products from my advertisers. It’s an amazing thing to me that I have been in this industry as long as I have and am just now starting to pick up on this again after 8 or so years…
If you visit NascarView.com, you will notice that we are running sponsorships, paid ads, and direct ads on the website now, and have income streaming in from a couple of different locations now. Of course we don’t have anywhere near the amount that I think we will one day have, especially when our direct ad sales start playing a factor.
All of this to say, I am kicking myself in the butt right now. And oh yeah, be sure to support my advertisers.
As a sidenote, if you own a website or have considered starting one, and would like to discuss the possibilities of monetizing your project, please feel free to contact my business partners and I, we would love the opportunity to work with you and share our experiences with you…
Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting
Just a heads up, the Central Arkansas Refresh Group is going to have our second meeting this next week (Tuesday, March 31) at the Starbucks located at 9401 N. Rodney Parham Rd. in Little Rock. The start time is 6:00pm and we expect the meetup to last about 2 hours but with all of the networking that went on last week it’s hard to say what time we all need to tell our families that we will be home. Also, if you haven’t already, please RSVP on the Facebook Event page so we can kind of get an idea for headcount…
Our Facebook group has grown to over 55 members now and continues to grow each week. The group is open to everyone interested, our goal is to have a diverse crowd, here’s a little bit more from our website about the group: (compliments of David Kinkade, who is also promoting the group on his blog)
The Central Arkansas Refresh Group consists of technically minded professionals who make their living on the web — bloggers, software developers, graphic artists, social networking enthusiasts, photographers, videographers, marketing and media gurus, and website owners.
Centered in Little Rock, the Central Arkansas Refresh group launched in February 2009 to serve as a hub for education, networking and the sharing of ideas among like-minded web professionals.
The group is organized around the principles of the Refresh movement:
The Refresh Manifesto
- Let’s Gather Great Minds
- Let’s Share All Of Our Knowledge
- Let’s All Grow And Learn
- Let’s Promote Local Talent
- Let’s Be More Than We Think Can Be
- Let’s Make Our Cities Better
Membership is open to all interested web professionals, programmers and new media enthusiasts. Visit our Facebook page now to get involved.
Interested in being a corporate sponsor for the Central Arkansas Refresh Group? Visit our sponsors page for more information.
ShoeMoney® Monetization Webinar
My partner Greg and I sat in on Jeremy Shoemaker’s webinar last night that was put out by Big Jason Henderson and Big Marketing and it was awesome!! After the webinar ShoeMoney did a 90 minute Q&A and it was very informative. The video from the first part of the webinar is available online at ShoeMoney’s blog here.
There are a lot of guys out there that are so called Monetization experts but ShoeMoney is the real deal in my opinion, and I have been in this industry a while and can usually spot a flake when I see one. If you own or operate a blog and have considered monetization for your blog, I recommend checking out ShoeMoney, he is one of the few “experts” out there that I recommend.
Advertising & Social Networks
I was reading an interesting article in the Financial Times today about Social Networking and it’s effect on advertising. This is exactly why I have been involved with social networking because I do see it as the next frontier for my industry.
My business partners have been dabbling with social networking as well so that we can be better positioned to help our clients achieve results in their interactive marketing campaigns. One thing not really covered in this piece is the interaction between websites and social networks. For example, we are presently assisting our clients in implementing Facebook Connect and Twitter into their websites. If you are a website owner, or involved with online marketing, please feel free to contact us to discuss your needs, we would love the opportunity to consult with you.
Here is the content of the article from the Financial Times:
Social networks threaten advertising growth
By Tim Bradshaw, Digital Media Correspondent
Published: January 15 2009 01:41 | Last updated: January 15 2009 01:41
Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media, a report has found.
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, has warned that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Social networks enable consumers to pass on information about products and services, and recommendations from friends are more influential than traditional forms of advertising.
Advertisers are already taking advantage of the trend, with the Cadbury “Gorilla” spot being viewed over 10m times on YouTube as well as being aired on television.
The Dove “Campaign for real beauty”, which advertised Unilever’s cosmetics range, was also boosted by a YouTube video showing a high-speed transformation of a model’s natural face to the made-up and touched-up final version which appeared on a billboard.
But not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world, the IPA warned. In its worst-case scenario, the resulting decline in paid-for advertising space could see £16m ($23m) of revenues lost by the industry by 2016, if agencies fail to create new products and services to cater to the social media world.
However, the report says that two-thirds of that decline could be made up by creating new forms of web content that contains branding messages, and by analyzing the data expressed on the web.
Clients’ investment in new content and rapid data analysis will increase by around 5 per cent, according to the IPA’s survey. Other sources of revenue derived for social networking include consultancy and e-commerce.
“The current downturn will accelerate these trends in agencies as everyone is looking to innovate and stand out from the crowd,” said Moray MacLennan, IPA president and chief executive of M&C Saatchi Worldwide, an agency.
“I don’t think [social media] is a replacement for paid-for media, it is just going to be a challenger for [consumers’] time and attention.”
Social networks themselves are still figuring out how to make money from advertising on their sites. Pricing for generic banner advertising on social networking is relatively low compared to other sites, because their users are logging in for communication rather than commerce.
That has prompted both networks and advertisers to look for more innovative ways to connect with consumers.
“Within this environment, one needs to acknowledge that more often than not you are interrupting private conversations,” said Mr. MacLennan.
Joe Staton, planning director at the Future Foundation, who co-wrote the report, said that marketers needed to secure “permission” to approach users on social sites.
“As people are being more considered about purchasing, they want to go out and find information themselves rather than just receiving it,” he said.
FT.com / UK / Business – Social networks threaten advertising growth
