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So a few months back I signed up for Kontera publisher account. Installation went smoothly and I've been making a few bucks everyday. But then over the next few weeks I've started getting a few complaints from my users, their complaint was that the site looked too spammy. And I agree.
This is the invisible line of running a website putting advertising on it. Its' the line that has never been clearly defined and it moves everyday, how much advertising is too much. So one of my first actions was to take down Kontera, it was just a few bucks a day so it wouldn't affect my master plan too much... yet the weeks after, I kept seeing the message don't put all your eggs in one basket... and I've preached it in the past as well.
The Solution
Pretty simple actually, I've took some time to analyize the Kontera and how it works, and came up with the conclusion that it works really for new users... as soon as people hover or click the links they realize that they just clicked on an ad, which is not bad but for returning users this just becomes one big eye sore on the website with having these double underlined links all over the content they're trying to read.
Cookies, yes you gotta love cookies :) The basic idea behind this is you serve the Kontera ads only for the first time someone visits your site, they might click on a link or not, but after that pageview they never see them again. I'll probably tweak this to serve those links maybe every nTh page view for users that are on the site for the first time.
Effects?
What happened to the earnings you may ask? Well they haven't droped much, which in turn proves what I've stated before that mostly first time users are clicking on those ads, anyway it's a great way to ad another avenue to making money online. Give it a try.
If you haven't signed up for Kontera do it today, you don't want to get stuck when google might ban your site from adsense.
I find myself often asking this question... when will I quit my fulltime job and work for myself... And by working for myself I don't mean find projects to work on for other people (at least not entirely). The problem is we spend the most amount of our time working for someone else. It's a vicious cycle that I hope when broken will reap major benefits.
I've been working for seven years right out of school and only for the past year I've really started looking at how to make money online, by using your own projects.
People are always out on the lookout for how to make money…from my experience you need to start in your daily life. I’ve never been an advocate of buying expensive lunches or that cup of coffee for $5. Brilliant business plan BTW. I’m also not cheap, I spend money when I feel I’m getting a good value on something or celebrating a particular occasion, I think it’s smart living.
One of the biggest achievements I’ve accomplished to date was buying my first condo. I was 24 and after losing quite a bit of money on the stock market I finally decided to put my money into good use and buy my first home. The first step was getting an agent, they make sure you get out there and actually start looking J. I found a great condo that was on the market for 1 day.. a penthouse suite with an amazing unobstructed view of the lake. It’s small but the price was right. I purchased the condo for 189,000, that was over three years ago.
The condo market here in Toronto has been red hot, which is great but I wasn’t looking at flipping, I’m in it for the long run. See there is a few ways to look at a mortgage payment and I look at it this way… I used to spend $700 on rent plus utilities, when I got my new place it was going to cost me $1400 with maintenance. The way I see it is, I’m paying myself about $300 a month that’s the principal amount. So my cost goes down to $1100. Now I also got a bunch of great amenities and the luxury of living in a penthouse suite, not bad. So there is a little bit of a difference but not much, easily I adjusted to the new hike in my living expenses. See the brilliant thing about this is, just a few months ago I got an estimate on the value of my property and it’s valued at around 250,000. That’s about a 33% jump in my equity in just over 3 years, divide that into 3 years invested and each year I’ve made a potential additional income of $20,000. Now that’s what I call a sweet deal.
Anyway I’ve moved out of my place about a year and a half ago to move in with my girlfriend and we purchased a new place just a few months ago. It’s on Yonge St. right in the middle of downtown with an amazing view facing east on the 33rd floor. My other place I rented out and it’s currently covering itself… meanwhile my equity keeps going out.
Want to know another big tip? Here it is… compared to New York and Vancouver, Toronto’s housing prices are currently considered BARGAIN prices!!!! Toronto is exploding, there is 100,000 new people moving into Toronto each year, and it’s the biggest city in Canada. The potential for prices to keep going has never been stronger.
I’m hoping that we’ll be able to buy a new place once every 3-4 years and keep going. I like to think at it this way… every time you buy a new place it’s like you’re getting a new partime job. Think about it… you invest 20-30k to buy a new place… rent it out and within two years you get all of your investment back and your equity goes up. You keep doing this over and over and as long as you plan thing properly there is no reason that by the time you’re hitting 40, you don’t own 4-5 properties. It’s that simple, again when trying to make money look at where you’re spending it first.
I'm not sure how many of you listen to Coast To Coast AM but I try to catch as much of the show as I can. I was more of a fan back when Art Bell was the fulltime host. Anyway browsing some of the guest sites on the coasttocoastam.com site I noticed that a 99% of the people on that show had no clue on how to build a site. All the designs were from the 90s with no SEO or any other proper formatting behind them, the only thing they had was domain age. So I started thinking... I could do a lot better then that.
This is when aboutmyplanet.com was launched. It was originally supposed to be a website that talks about alternative energy, UFOs and other weird stuff. I got three other friends interested who also listened to the show, however after the initial interest they never ended up contributing much to the website. Again the word DEDICATION just jumps out at me.
So anyway, having a good background in design and development I chose wordpress and designed my first theme. Got the website launched just a couple of weeks later. Now what... I'm not a writer... so not knowing much about SEO, marketing or anything to do with SEM I stared looking at cool articles and copied and pasted them into my own site... (remember this was over a year ago when I had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE to what I was doing). So here I am with a few cool articles and a neat site, and no visitors.
Luckily for me, social sites were just really starting to take off and doing really well... and you didn't hear much about gaming systems or using using social sites to do SEM (Search Engine Marketing)... so being a big fan of digg I started posting my cool articles on digg... and viola I managed to get to the front of digg a few times... each time I would get 20,000-30,000 visitors... not bad I was on top of the world. That's until people started to really abuse the systems and they cranked the screws on anyone submitting the own articles... so that lasted about 3 months.
In the next post I'll try and put up some graphs of those days and illustrate how digg traffic can affect your site and how "borrowing" articles fits into launching your own website.
Over the past year I've been very intrigued by the top 1% of the people online who can actually make a living from some type of a business online. I say 1% because they're very hard to find and when you do find them not all of them are keen on sharing much about their success. There are a few like John Chow - Making Money Online who go into great detail on how they make their money. It's not easy but for a dedicated person it's a dream waiting to come true.
I'm going to start putting more effort into my personal blog here and try to reveal as much as I can about different techniques and theories that are available for making money online. I've been trying to break into the market over the past year and I think I'm on the right track. Every so often you hear of someone like Shoemoney who got booted to stardom very quickly and it's great to see but very rare. I hope that with a lot of hard work I'll be able to get to a level where I can be my own boss and dedicate most of my time to my online projects.
As some of you know a year ago I've built a site called Questionville.com. Mainly based on the Digg idea but taken to the next level. The idea behind the side was to provide users with a site to ask questions and let users rate the best answers which would bubble to the top. It was a hit right from the start. But I wasn't prepared for it. I didn't know the first thing about marketing... I had a great product on my hands but no idea how to market it. Over the past year the site has slowed right down and a bunch of competitors have come out and "borrowed" some of my ideas. More on that in a future post.
Anyway so I'll be getting into some details about how I started some of my blogs and what has worked for me in the past. And hopefully everyone will enjoy my perspective of making money online.
