Savvy Affiliate

Geometric Growth can be a great boon for established sites.  What it means is that if you put in enough work to increase your traffic on an established site vs. a newer site, the same amount of work will yield much larger gains for the established site.  This was outlined in part 1 of this series. However, it also bodes well for newer sites.  Geometric growth for newer sites means that they can quickly break out of profit slumps and start making money.  But can we accept Geometric Growth as possible for any website?

I believe Geometric Growth is possible for websites, especially for their profits, especially in the first year.

Why is this?  Well in the first year of a webpage’s existence, it has a lot of things going for it that allow it to grow quickly.

1) Quickly expand article base- If you have a webpage which is new, you can quickly put out a lot of content.  In fact, if you have started your website within the past couple of months, there is a good chance that you only have a couple dozen pages on it.  A person could double the number of pages in a couple of days if they put their mind to it

2) Quickly expand their backlinks- The same thing goes for backlinks as it does for articles.  A site which only has a few backlinks will have an easier time doubling the number of links coming in than a more established site.  Additionally, as you double your article base, the number of backlinks will naturally expand.

3) Grow in Click Through Rate - As you get more established as a website you will gain experience on where and how to place your ads to optimize their click through rate.  This experience will naturally increase as you have more posts to play with.   Here is a good page on how to optimize your Adsense

4) Get Higher Paying Ads - Part of Google’s ad selection criteria is simply keyword density.  However there is a lot of anecdotal evidence which suggests that more established sites, i.e. ones with more content, get higher paying ads, Even when controlled for webmaster experience!!!   The only thing that this suggests is that Google uses PR and site size as one of their selection criteria for their ads.  Thus if you have a more established site, you can get more profitable ads.

What does this all mean?  Putting these in an equation

Webpage Profit Growth = Article Growth * Backlink Growth * Click Through Growth * Pay Rate Growth

But since the last three factors are all related to Article Growth we can model them as a variable * Article Growth so

Webpage Profit Growth = Article Growth * (X * Article Growth ) * (Y * Article Growth) * (Z * Article Growth)

Webpage Profit Growth = Variable * Article Growth^4

Clearly the profit growth for a webpage is geometric in its beginning  stages.  The rate of geometric growth will vary from page to page, but if a webmaster sticks with their page they will see large growth after the first year.

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How much money do you make from your site?  $2 a day?  $1 a day?  Less?

Although it is a sad fact that new sites aren’t profitable, it is good news that through the magic of geometric growth, they can quickly become profitable.

Don’t worry too much if you have a new webpage which makes less than $1 a day.  Some of the most profitable webpages out there made less than $1 a day two years ago.  Here is an example.  Say that you have a new webpage.  It is not uncommon for new sites which get a lot of work done on them to grow 30% month over month.

If you have a site that makes $1 a day, and you grow it 30% every month, that means that

After 1 month - $1.30 a day

After 2 months - $1.69 a day

After 4 months - $2.85 a day

After 6 months - $4.82 a day - $144 a month

After 12 months - $23.30 a day

After 2 years - $542 a day

What is this showing?   Well I can’t promise that your site will grow at a 30% rate month over month.  That is an impressive growth rate to keep up.  However, this does show that once you have established your site, geometric growth begins to work in your favor.

Once you have established your site, putting in some extra work, say increasing your traffic by 10% will net you a much larger gain in profit than a 10% gain in traffic will for a smaller site.  So the key here is to start a site, and stick with it.  Too many people start a site and give up after six months or a year or so, just when the site is beginning to be worth their time.

But is geometric growth a reasonable assumption for a beginning webpage?  We’ll examine that in the next article. 

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Get Searched? Make Cash

In a previous post, I wrote about how social networking sites, especially Digg don’t drive profitable traffic.  From a standpoint of trying to immediately monetize your webpage, social networking sites are more or less worthless.  They do have some redeeming qualities, and are good for driving up your traffic and your profit long term though.

So if social networking sites drive bad traffic, who drives good traffic?  Google.  Search engine traffic is some of the most profitable around.  In fact, many webmasters who operate the most profitable sites report that they get 80% or more of their visitors from search engines.  Less than 20% of their visitors come from direct referrals.

So why is it that searchers make more profitable visitors than other users?  

Well the fact of it is that the average person using a search engine is less tech savvy than the average user reaching your site from other means.  The average person who clicks on your page from Google is likely to be using internet explorer, which is one of the best internet browsers you want your visitors using.    People who reach your website through a means such as Digg are likely to be using a browser such as Firefox, which allows users to download a plugin which will block ads.  Clearly if they are blocking your ads, they aren’t likely to click on them.

Additionally, think of the people who get your content through a service such as Bloglines.  These readers don’t see any of your ads at all.  The only way to monetize those users at all are to put links in your posts to other posts of yours, and hope they click through.  Needless to say, that click through rate will be low.

The bottom line - If you want to get the most profitable visitors to your site you have to rank highly in the search engines.  SEO is critical to a webmaster who wants to maximize their profits.  Social networking sites can be a godsend for driving long term traffic to your page, through backlinks and blog syndication readers; however they are unlikely to be a good source of immediate money for your webpage.

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Digg - Good For Your Site…… At Least Not Bad For Your Site

In my previous post I wrote about how Digg can be bad for your page.  In there I wrote that Digg users can overwhelm a website’s bandwidth, putting it down for the rest of the month.  To make matters worse Digg users are very tech savvy, and unlikely to click on your ads.  Unlikely to net you any money.

However - there are some good points about Digg that I left unstated.  Digg does have some redeeming qualities, which is why many people, including myself use it.

The tech savvy nature of Digg is actually one of its redeeming qualities.  Although I don’t expect many people using Digg to click on my ads, I do expect a lot of the Diggers to have blogs and websites.   That is my target audience.  If I write an interesting article, they are likely to bookmark my page and come back to it later.  If I write a really good article, they are likely to post a backlink to it on their own page, driving traffic to me which will result in a higher clickthrough rate.

Additionally, because Digg users are so tech savvy, they are the kind of people I want commenting on my site.  If I post a question about how to do something, or I post a question asking what people think of a recent format change, Digg users are likely to respond.  More than that, they are likely to respond in an intelligent matter which is useful to my immediate problem.

The bottom line is I don’t Digg pages expecting to get an immediate spike and traffic and money.  In fact I don’t want to have a page go to Digg’s front page and put my site down for a month.  However, Digg is a great way to slowly build up my page’s backlinks and build up its traffic.

For now I’ll keep using Digg.

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Digg - Bad For Your Site…… At Least Not Good For Your Site

A lot of webmasters put a lot of time and effort into being listed on some of the social networking sites such as Digg.  They think that these sites will be the magic bullet for their page.  If they get listed on Digg, they will get a lot of traffic for their site.  And lots of traffic means lots of money right?  If they get Digged, and get thousands of hits, then of course they will get lots of cash right?

Wrong.  Digg users are some of the most Tech savvy users on the internet.  They are linking through Digg in order to do one thing.  Read the page, and then bounce back to Digg.  They are not there to click on ads.   Additionally, many Digg users use the Firefox browser, which has a very popular and efficient plugin which stops ads from being displayed. Many webmasters who get Digged report seeing their click through rates plummet for that period of time while they are high on the Digg site.

In fact, Digg can even be bad for a site which is not prepared for it.  If you have a webpage which has not taken any measures to handle Digg, an influx of Diggers can quickly eat up your bandwidth for an entire month.  This leaves you with no options other than to leave your page down for the rest of the month, or to shell out additional cash out of pocket in order to increase your bandwidth.  

There are things you can do to make your site stand up to a social networking influx though.  Wordpress users can download the plugins Wp-Cache and Digg Defender, which will help a site stand up to all but the most ferocious spikes in traffic.

So that means Digg must only be bad for a site right?  Why does anybody bother Digging their page?

Well that’s not exactly true, see part 2 of this post to see why Digg is Good for your site

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Getting New Readers 

One way of getting new readers that many bloggers don’t consider is by syndicating your content offline.  Many bloggers don’t allow other people to use their content period.  And this has valid reasons.  The most important reason for this is that Google and the other search engine will dock them for duplicate content.  Duplicate content penalties can be huge.  If you have too much duplicate content, Google or Yahoo can delist your entire site.  That outweighs the benefit you get from a couple of links by letting other people use your content.

However, offline content is different.  If you have a webpage which might appeal to people offline and you are approached by someone who would like to use your content, then you should consider it.  A good example of such a page is a computer site.  There are tons of people who get computer magazines and industry news magazines.  These are also people who are likely to go to your site if they are exposed to it.  An example of a site which has no offline potential is this site.  Savvy Affiliate is primarily devoted to helping other bloggers and webmasters make money.  How likely is it that the that target audience would be reading the same kind of content in an offline publication?

Want an example of a good time to let a publication sydicate your content offline?  Problogger has one Here

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The last part of the Adsense Equation is to get high paying keywords to appear on your webpage.  If you are getting a fair amount of traffic, and you are getting a reasonable percentage of people to click through your ads (at least 2%), then the best way to increase your adsense profit is to get high paying adsense keywords, and make more money for each click?

 So how do you determine which keywords will make you the most money?   Unfortunately Google doesn’t put out any kind of list on how much each keyword pays.  They don’t even put out any kind of information on how much they pay each an affiliate for each click as a percentage of how much money they make.   However, there are ways that you can back out which ads pay the most, or at least which ads pay more than others.

1) Do a Google Search - Do a Google search of the keywords that you would like to advertise on your page.  Are there people advertising for that keyword?  If so, look to see how deep the ads go.  If the ads go deeper than the third or fourth Google page, then that is a sign that a fair number of people are bidding on those keywords, and that the keywords can be worth a fair amount of money.

2) Use Google Competitors - Look up how much the ads are going for on Google’s competitors.  Although Google tends to get a premium rate for its ads.  The same ads that sell for a lot on their competitors site will sell for a lot on Google Adsense as well.   You can use this 7 Search tool to estimate the best keywords

3) Sign up for Adwords - Signing up for adsense isn’t very expensive, it only costs $5 to get started.  If you do sign up for Adwords then you can find out how much it will cost to get a top spot on adwords, and that will give you an idea of how much money you will make.  Here is a tutorial on how to find the best Adsense Keywords using Adwords

4) Look for best lists - Some sites will publish lists of what the best adsense keywords they have found are.  Here is one example of a Best Adsense Keyword List

Need more information on getting the best Adsense keyword?  Problogger has a great article about it here

Read the rest of the adsense tutorial

Part1, Part2, Part3

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Need More?

Need more reasons why it is good to write lots of content for your site, even if that means that your posts are shorter and the quality might be slightly less?  Well another good reason to go gang-busters with the content is it allows you to better statisically analyze your webpage.

Statisticians love large samples, and you should as well.  If you are writing a dozen posts a day, that gives you the opportunity to make many tweaks to your advertising and to optimize your site.  If you are putting out many pages, you can make many small changes to each page and see which one works the best.  This works especially well if you are using a monetization scheme such as Adsense.

Using Adsense channels you can hone in on the best advertising methods for your site.  By quickly putting out a lot of posts, it allows you to optimize your site for ads faster than you other wise would be able to.  Optimizing your advertising will result in a higher click through rate on your webpage, and ultimately more money in your pocket.

More on Maxing out your content  Why Write a Large Quanity of Posts, Setting Targets, Using Bloglines and Other Tools, Starting a new Blog, Writing Shorter Posts, Using Other Bloggers for Mutual Gain, Getting Stats with Your Pages

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You’re Not Superman

Although it would be nice to be able to generate endless streams of content, everybody has their downtimes.  There are days when you are sick, have writers block, or just can’t seem to get anything good down in your blog.  These are the times when it is handy to have guest bloggers.

By utilizing other bloggers, you can greatly increase the amount of content that is on your site.  Increasing the amount of content on your site will increase your search engine hits, increase your traffic, and ultimately increase your profit. 

It isn’t that hard to get other people to help you generate content.  Simply ask for their help.  If you have an established site, many people will write posts for you so that they can put on the bottom.. written by Their Name @ TheirSite.com and get a high PR backlink out of it.   This can be good for your site as well.  By utilizing other bloggers you can put different styles of writing and different points of view on your page.  Do your readers not like one of the bloggers?  They can focus on the others.   Do the search engines not pick up the best keywords from one person’s style of writing?  Hopefully the other writers are better at generating keywords.

The bottom line is that you can use other bloggers in order to generate good content for you site.  Generally you can get people to do it for you without payment if you have an established site and can reward them with backlinks.  However if there are some particular people who are especially good and write great content for your site, you might consider rewarding them somehow.

More Posts on Generating Lots of Content  Why Write a Large Quanity of Posts, Setting Targets, Using Bloglines and Other Tools, Starting a new Blog, Writing Shorter Posts, Using Other Bloggers for Mutual Gain, Getting Stats with Your Pages

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