This is a fantastic time of year for Christmas product related sites and it’s where the work you’ve done throughout the year can really reap rewards. Over the last 2 weeks I’ve seen all income streams increase between 50 and 250%, which makes checking stats every morning a very exciting time. Each day I’m looking for and pushing new affiliate products to my existing visitors and feed subscribers and I’m checking stats for pages that are getting bit of traffic to see if there are any related products I can push there.

The Clickbank product I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has now generated just over $600 in commissions, which considering I just added an extra paragragh and affiliate link to an existing page is a pretty nice return IMO. However by my own daftness I’ve managed to lose in the region of $5,000 over the last 6 weeks or so by giving away my traffic.
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I’ve received an email from Mika of Kontera about an offer they have on for new publishers, where if you get 50,000 impressions in you your first month you’ll receive a $25 bonus.

Kontera provide those in-text adverts that normally appear as double underlined links, they are pay per click but I’ve heard some larger publishers have been able to negotiate fixed CPM deals. I have used Kontera in the past and still do on one of my sites, however I found I got a better return with a similar service offered by Chitika. I would quite like to trial Kontera again on my gadget blog however they changed their TOS a while ago to include an exclusivity clause: (more…)

My Adsense has been down the last month but with a domain leased and some new one’s to get ready for next year I am still reasonably happy with how things are at the moment. What I have managed to do seeing as things have been a bit quieter is do some general housekeeping and it pays dividends.

For someone like myself that does actual real product sales and sells a service there are a few things you can implement that can greatly increase your userbase and overall income.

Thankfully my wife has been more efficient & proficient than I at housekeeping she has agreed to help and help manage the online version too

1/ For my online product sales I get the user to add the products to their basket and this is recorded in the database, they then add their own details which are stored/saved long before they get to make payment. (more…)

I’m a fan of Chitika and I reviewed them back in July. Since then I’ve been invited to participate in their new Premium Publisher Program, they are due to do a press release about it today and asked me to write up my opinions, so here goes. I’ve checked with Ryan my rep there and I’m allowed to share ALL statistics so expect a few detailed screen shots.

The requirements to become a premium publisher aren’t too high, if you’re earning $10+ per day on a quality site you’re going to be pretty close to qualifying, though I think the current group of premium publishers (DPB, GPS Review, I4U) will be earning a lot more than that. Being a Premium Publisher you get a slightly different control panel when you first log in but that’s mainly cosmetic and just tells you about the benefits. The real changes come with how you can make more money. (more…)

Last week I got round to one of those jobs that I’ve wanted to do for a while and that’s making my affiliate links a bit more visitor friendly and readable. I’ve mentioned before how I automatically convert links to sites that I have a relationship with to their corresponding affiliate links, I’ve now taken this a stage further and have created a Word Press plug-in to make it easy to add new affiliates as I find them.

The way the plug-in works is it searches for the domain of merchants that I have an affiliate program with adjusts it accordingly, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/ would be converted on the fly to the equivalent affiliate link of :
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/se121lnwtnvACIJCEHEACBEGHEDF?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F&sid=cg-http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F/geektoys/games/7eaa/

As you can see the affiliate link is pretty darn ugly and to the (slighty) trained eye it is obviously an affiliate link which does put some people (especially tech savvy webmasters) off clicking it.
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Although I like to have a few generic uk domains I am not a serious domainer, I don’t really know what I would peg myself as if I had to, I’d struggle, I like to try different things even though a lot of the time the line between them grows increasingly blurred.

Established domainers now realise why they used to get questions regarding age, history in Google and pagerank and find themselves benefiting more by developing or semi-developing domains to add more income and end user value. Developers realise it good business to use a brandable generic or more genre specific internet address.

Spurred on by Jeremy’s post about datamining his own stats I took an hour or so out this weekend to look through stats for an old furniture website I had that ranked really well in Google.co.uk last year, I had a database of keywords & phrases that visitors had used to find the site and that it therefore ranked for – phrases that people had obviously searched for. (more…)

I’ve been using Chitika advertising units for around 18 months. Chitika are another one of those networks that like Adsense pays you per click but they also offer more visitor engaging ad units. So visitors can search and compare product prices on your site.

Currently Chitika offer 3 distinct different types of ads. These can be used multiple times on the same page (if appropriate).

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This is another of those posts about sharing experiences and experiments. A couple of months ago I reported on the revenue streams of one of my sites and how the biggest slice of pie revenue was taken by Adsense and how I wanted to increase other income sources to minimize this dependency.

One of the other revenue streams I looked at was Tribal Fusion. They are a CPM ad network meaning you get paid per impression rather than per click. I implemented them a couple of months ago and placed a 468×60 banner at the top of each page, a vertical banner on the left navigation bar and rectangle in between posts on index pages. These ad positions were previously not used for anything constructive so any income generated should just be an addition, thus reducing the Adsense percentage and increasing the income to boot.
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Sometimes you look for ways of making money and sometimes they find you.

Last month my better half gave me the good news that she was pregnant with our second child, yikes! It wasn’t long after I had heard of a test you can do online, is it a boy or a girl?

In the UK it is a sad fact that at the 20 week pregnancy scan they can no longer tell you the sex of your child as it leaves them open to being sued {sigh}. So they won’t say anymore unlike first time round when we had our son, some people prefer a surprise, I don’t, I prefer to plan ahead so when a company offers the ability to send away a blood sample and tell you to within 99% the sex of your child at 8 weeks into the pregnancy I find that appealing!

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Well seeing as this blog is about sharing and learning I am going to cover a small change that I made a few months ago as I now have sufficient stats to back up the full effect of what I did and how it has played out. Maybe not directly useful to you but perhaps the sentiment may apply to other sites.

I don’t know if any of you lot do actual sales online or whether your all predominantly bloggers or? However I tend to do a bit of everything, me being me

I’m not really into drop-shipping or selling physical goods as really there is only so far you can go without taking on staff and giving up my home office which I enjoy so for actual sales I decided to get into e-sales, orders that can be taken and completed online, you have to love the internet!

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