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Monetization

Would You Pay to Read Someone’s Tweets?

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Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? For some time now, enterprising individuals have been trying to find the holy grail of Twitter monetization. Some have been blatantly spamming advertisements through @replies. Some have indirectly monetized their Twitter accounts by using it as a viral marketing tool. Still, others have created Twitter clients that are funded by advertisements.

Will you dare to venture into Twitter monetization by limiting your audience to paying subscribers? This is what TwitPub aims to do. It’s supposed to be a

marketplace made for Twitter so users can buy and sell premium tweets.

Is this a viable business model? It could be, if you are in the business of dispensing important, expensive advice.

While TwitPub’s activity may not be all that impressive, their service may have potential within the political and financial realms (as people would pay to access gossip and financial advice, especially in this economy).

I come from a school of thought that says the moment you set a price to your content, you would have already devalued it. For one, you are limiting your audience severely. Secondly, you won’t have as much interactivity and viral marketing potential if your content is closed. Of course, this may not necessarily be true in all cases, but unless you’re really famous and powerful, I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in paying to read your tweets. And if you’re already famous and powerful, you probably don’t need anyone paying a few bucks to read your tweets or to send you direct messages.

Would you pay to read someone’s tweets? And would you pay to get your direct message sent into someone’s inbox?

Passion versus Pay versus Profile: Blogging deal or no deal?

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You’ve a finite amount of time to write, you have to pay the bills, but perhaps you don’t love the subject as much as you used to. How do you know when it’s the right time to leave a project?

This post is primarily targeted at bloggers who have one or more regular, paid writing positions with a blog network/company and may be considering their current position.

It might also be useful for those bloggers running their own blogs (over which they have complete editorial and publishing control).

Passion | Pay | Profile

Blogging for a liveable wage isn’t easy — at least if you’re keen to do it ethically and above board.

Getting a paid writing gig with a large company can get you money and exposure much more quickly than you’d likely attain it (if at all) by publishing your own blog.

You’ll likely have access to on-tap resources to help you improve as a writer. At very least, you’ll probably be working for an editor who will critique your work, give you post ideas, and generally encourage you onwards.

Assuming you applied for the position because you had a decent amount of knowledge and passion for the subject, it’s the near perfect experience.

Isn’t it?

The longer you blog for high profile sites, the more you’ll be noticed. The more you’re noticed, the more opportunities present themselves. You also have the potential to earn more, either because your payment per post increases (often with a new position) or your posts become more popular and you get a proportional share of revenue.

The trouble begins when your passion goes, the amount of work you’re required to do is worth more than you’re being paid, or you don’t believe the work improves your own profile – only that of the company you’re working for.

It’s worth reassessing the work you’re doing on a regular basis. Think of it as a self-appraisal — when you work for yourself, no-one else is going to appraise everything you do.

Consider:

Passion

  • What are your main passions?
  • Do you want to blog about all of your passions?
  • Are you blogging about something you have little interest/enthusiasm for?
  • Are some passionate blogging subjects worth keeping for yourself rather than giving to someone else? (in other words, should you be running your own blog instead of relinquishing control and writing for a company?)

Pay

  • Are you still being paid enough for the work you’re doing?
  • Would you be able to make more money working for someone else or for yourself, or changing project priorities to give more room to new money-earners?
  • Is the work you’re currently doing taking so much time or energy that you have no resources left to do things your heart tells you to?
  • Are you sacrificing long term gain (sidelined projects) for short term gain? (fixed pay working)

Profile

  • Is your blogging gig still giving you, as a person / brand, the exposure you desire?
  • Do your efforts seem to be rewarding the company’s profile at the expense of yours?
  • Would your personal brand be improved by moving on?

Contracts and Bridges

If you have a written contract in place then you need to consider that before taking any action that may breach the terms it lays out.

You may have a notice period which must be worked out before you can leave. If you want to change the level of work you do for someone else, it may have to be negotiated and a new contract drawn up.

If you have a verbal agreement then you may have no legal/contractual obligations, but think very carefully about burning your bridges with any one company. You never know when they may be a useful contact or source of work in the future.

Final thoughts

These are just a few points to think about, whatever situation you’re currently in.

It may be that you don’t think there’s anything wrong, and if you’re enjoying what you’re doing and getting what you want, digging around may not be helpful (if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it).

Then again, if there’s even a niggle that you’re selling yourself short, skimping on projects you really care about because you’re bogged down by a regular contract, or running yourself ragged without the passion to energise you, then it really is time to sit down and consider what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

The three elements — passion, pay, profile — need to be weighed together, and any decisions you make will be based on your current situation and how much of a risk-taker you are.

Doing a regular check-up like this will help to ensure that you’re giving your best and being fairly rewarded, while still enjoying blogging. After all, that’s the main reason you started, right?

Blogging revenue: are you seeing recovery?

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Many online publishers have seen a downturn in revenue over the past couple of quarters, with some niches more badly hit than others.

Advertisers are either scarcer, or they’re not paying as much for advertising space.

Yet I’m noticing that some “set and forget” advertising models (such as Google AdSense and Chitika’s Premium ads) are showing some positive growth.

Growth isn’t explosive, but it does appear to be happening. Though the current economic climate is still challenging, the new financial year may well be encouraging advertisers to spend budget and seek sponsorship deals.

Do you generate revenue from your blog, and if so have you noticed any signs of recovery? I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

Need Your Help Monetizing A Site

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Performancing.com has been around for at least five years now. In that time span, many bloggers from all walks of life have shared their tips, tricks, and techniques. Based on what I’ve seen while writing for Performancing, many of you are either monetizing websites or are wanting to do so. I find myself in a good position to become one of those who are monetizing websites as I am currently working on my own project. However, I have never monetized a site before let alone dealt with advertisers. So with that in mind, I’ll explain what I plan on doing with my project and then I’d like you to chime in and help me decide how to monetize this site.

About The Project:

The name of my project as well as the domain name is WPTavern also known as WordPress Tavern. The site will focus on all things WordPress as well as related projects under the Automattic umbrella. I’ll also have a forum attached to the site. I have three goals for this project. The first is to foster a community. The second is to turn the site into a success and the third is to turn the site into my full time job which revolves around my passion.

Monetization Strategy:

If there is one thing I have learned by browsing the archives of Performancing, it’s that you should always have multiple revenue streams. With my new project, I’ll have a couple of different avenues for which to pursue advertising.

WPTavern The Site – With regards to advertising on the site, I will have an area on the sidebar for 4-6 125X125 advertising spots. I’m not sure if I will use any Google based advertising because it is annoying and easily blockable by Ad Removal scripts. When I start out, I’m thinking of filling the squares with affiliate links until those spots are sold.

What should I use or do to manage these advertising spots? It’s been suggested to me that I use something OIO Publisher to manage my ads. I can also use PerfAds but I’m just not sure what I should be doing.

Podcast – I already operate a WordPress centric podcast which produces one episode each week. As it stands, the show doesn’t have any advertising attached to it and on average receives 800-1,200 downloads per week. My plan is to increase the amount of episodes I produce in order to increase these numbers and provide better coverage of the software.

The Talkshoe Cash program is gone and they do not provide an in-house means of monetizing show hosts. I’ve been thinking about joining a podcasting network in order to gain advertising. I’ve also been thinking about joining BluBrry. Talkshoe doesn’t really give detailed statistics for the show so I’m not sure how difficult it will be to base advertising rates on those stats. How should I go about selling/managing advertising on the podcast?

Video/Screencasts – Creating text/audio based content is not enough for WPTavern to rise above the noise. I’ll need to produce videos and more specifically, screencasts. I’d love to be able to have those screencasts sponsored either by me mentioning their product in the video or creating an intro or outro featuring their product. I don’t have the software right now but I plan on producing these videos with Camtasia Studio 5.

Any thoughts on this monetization technique would be very helpful.

WPTavern Forum – With the forum, I’m not sure if I will have a 468X60 advertising banner in the header section of the forum or not. I’m also thinking about adding a section above the fold to display 125X125 banner ads. Last but not least, if I am going to use Google Adsense, I’d like to use it on the forum by either having a bot publish a post in every thread which is Google Adsense or some other fashion. I’m also toying around with the idea to have a specialized section of the forum where premium theme or plugin authors can purchase an advertising post in the forum. However, that method of forum monetization I feel would be difficult to police.

If you have any thoughts or ideas on how to monetize a forum, I’m all ears.

Conclusion:

As you can see, I definitely have opportunities for multiple revenue streams with this website. However, my specialty is writing and producing content, not managing the advertising. Should I outsource the advertising or grunt it and do everything on my own? An alternative would be to partner with someone who has experience in advertising management and let them handle it while I foster the community as well as produce the content.

Last but not least, how should I go about the advertising as I’m just starting out with the site? I’ll have a good launch but I’m unclear as to how I should handle advertising from the get go. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

WPTavern is an up and coming project. I’ll be keeping everyone updated on my progress, milestones achieved, and techniques I use which turn out to be successful.

Monetizing Isn’t Getting Any Easier

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Darren Rowse of Problogger has published the results of his two month long poll asking his readers how much income they make by blogging. You can view his post to check out the results but here is something that stuck out to me:

So to this point we can say 70% of those who make money from their blogs make less than $500 a month and 30% make $500 or more.

I know Darren has a huge audience of bloggers and most of them are looking to make money online but it seems pretty bad that only 70% of those who voted are making less than $500.00 per month. Just that statistic alone makes me realize why Make Money Online blogs are so popular.

While the results of Darren’s poll are not entirely accurate, it’s interesting to note the discrepancy between the amount of people who made $20,000 or more in the month of October. I’m willing to bet some people voted $20,000 just because it felt good but I’m still curious as to who those elite bloggers are. Darren claims he knows a few people who make that amount, I personally don’t. If you do, tell me in the comments.

Back in May of 2008, James Mowery asked Performancing readers how much money they averaged per month from Blogging? 26% said less than $100 while only 8% said more than $2,500.00. An interesting point in this poll was that 18% of those who voted claimed they would make money eventually.

What I think all of this means is that, it is a real pain to make a decent amount of income by blogging. There seems to be a select few who have been able to turn blogging into a full-time job and have developed a major following by people who are looking to do the same thing. In 2009, I have finally bit the bullet and will be operating my own web property centered around WordPress. I’ll have my chance to try out different revenue generating opportunities and of course, whatever I learn through this process I’ll be sharing the information on Performancing. But again, it has to be said that Darren has turned this blogging stuff into a six-figure salary job and he has documented how he reached that point by means of Problogger and by writing a book. It would seem that even if you are given the ingredients to success, it’s not as simple as just mixing them together. Some of the ingredients to success come from you.

While times are becoming increasingly tough with regards to monetization, my hope is that with the reboot of the Performancing website along with the forum, we can help each other succeed by sharing tips, tricks and techniques. Thats what I’d like to see and with that, I wish everyone a safe and happy New Year!

Monetization Makeover: Tom Keating’s VoIP Blog

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Welcome to the second edition of Monetization Makeover. In this series, I review the monetization of different blogs, in terms of both strategy and ad placement, and make suggestions for improving profits.

Today’s lucky blog: Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog. Optimized correctly, a blog like this can make bank.

In Monetization Makeover Part 1 I critiqued PSPFanboy’s ad implementation, copiously citing the Adsense heat map as justification for my recommendations. If you haven’t seen the Adsense heat map, I suggest you take a good look (and even if you have, I’d suggest reviewing it early and often). And now, to this week’s blog.

Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog

Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog is a very well read site in its area. The niche he’s in is one that pays very well with contextual advertising, since CPC bid prices for VoIP-related keywords are very high (trust me, I know). With this in mind, let’s analyze a “permalink” page. As a long-established blog with gobs of content, Tom Keating’s blog receives tons of traffic from search engines like Google. The traffic from search engines mostly flows to these permalink pages (blog software packages like WordPress and Movable Type handle these permalinks very well for search engine ranking purposes).

Transparent Visitors Pay Your Bills

Now, a bit of an aside on search engine visitors: they tend to be transparent, meaning they find your site in a search engine, click over to your site, either find what they’re looking for, or not– but either way, they usually exit by clicking on an outbound link on your site, or by clicking the back button on their browser.

This is a very important point in terms of its implications for monetization. Visitors from search engines are not going to subscribe to your XML feed at the rate visitors from links do. They’re going to come over for 40 seconds or so and leave, so you need to make the most of them in that quick timeframe.

Now, if you’ve read any of my posts before, you know how my mind works, and you already have figured out the conclusion: these transparent visitors are ripe for monetization. If they’re going to click off, I might as well get them to click off on an ad that pays me for each click. Further, you should note that the CTR on ads from transparent visitors tend to be higher than that of repeat visitors, as repeat visitors have seen your design before and often become “banner blind” to your ad placements.

To sum it up, I think a very good strategy is to maximize the CTR of your ads from transparent visitors without going too far and annoying your regular visitors.

Back to the example at hand. Tom has obviously tried to maximize the monetization of his site (there sure are a lot of ads on the page!)

I’m seeing 6 ads, actually count em. Great monetization, right? Not necessarily.

This is one example where less is more. The ad units that can make him the most money (namely, Adsense) are not featured prominently, nor are they optimized. Further, the page is cluttered with ads that probably pay a lot less than Adsense (Chitika, and, I’m guessing, the graphical units). Using those units has the effect of lowering the CTR (and eCPM) of the Adsense units, while probably not making up that lost revenue. And at the end of the day, it’s all about eCPM of the entire page.

Sometimes Less Is More

With that in mind, I’d probably do something like this:

  • Make the skyscraper part of a left column – Skyscrapers nearly always perform significantly better on the left.
  • Change the sky to 160 width (it was 120 before) – 160 sky’s perform a lot better than 120 sky’s. The human eye can read the wider text much more easily (and thus click more often).
  • Blend the skyscraper – The default Adsense color pattern (white background, blue border) performs terribly. Blending = good.
  • Put the graphical skyscraper below the Adsense skyscraper – This one comes with a caveat as I’m not sure what kind of deal, CPC or CPM they get from these. But chances are, they pay a lot less than Adsense for a topic like VoIP. So feature the Adsense.
  • Drop Chitika – For a theme like VoIP, Adsense is going to wildly outperform a program like Chitika (again, I know from experience).
  • *Not pictured* Change Adsense title text to a more clickable color – To get that ridiculously high CTR on Adsense units, all you have to do sometimes is use red, orange or a shade of blue as the title text. Experiment a bit, as this will vary from blog to blog, but it can make a pretty big difference. (I didn’t picture this one however since I thought it might detract from the design–everything is a tradeoff.)

That wraps up the second edition of Monetization Makeover. Remember, when in doubt, just ask yourself What Would Andy Hagans Do?

I welcome your thoughts.

Monetization Through Twitter

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Many people still believe that using Twitter is a waste of time. Perhaps those notions will change now that a company has come along offering to pay you for using their service to shrink URLs. Introducing Adjix. Adjix is a brand new company that is both an ad network and a service which pays people who shrink their URLs through their site. Adjix calls people who shrink their urls, linkers. Adjix places ads at the top of each page where a URL has been shortened without altering the original content. This is yet another opportunity for those of you who would like to advertise to the twitter audience as you can launch ad campaigns through the service.

Account Creation:

Creating an account on Adjix is simple. All you need is an email address and a password. You’ll also need to provide your first and last names. Once that is done, your account is created immediately. Once your account is created, you’ll gain access to edit your profile, the ability to shrink links and also to view your link statistics. As for shortening a URL, the practice is simple.

While shrinking your URL, there is one more option you can configure to go along side the link and that is, selecting the category of advertisements to display. This provides you the option to make the ad more relevant to the link. More on this later. Once you shorten your URL, there are two different ones from which you can share. There is the short url which looks like this: http://adjix.com/s8 and then there is the Ultra Short URL which looks like this: http://ad.vu/s8

Using Your Domain Name With Adjix:
Adjix does provide a way for you use your own domain name in conjunction with the links provided by Ajix. You can either configure your DNS settings to point to partner.adjix.com to allow home grown links or you can fake it by adding anything you want before the adjix.com URL. For example, http://blabla.ad.vu/s8. Considering this aspect of monetization may catch on, many Twitter users who don’t want to see advertising may bypass clicking on links which contain ad.vu or adjix text within them. So, using the complicated DNS route may be the way to go to really increase your success rate. If you are interested in going down this route, be sure to read the DNS instructions that Adjix provides.

All About Monetization:

Earning money for using the service:
Linkers earn $0.10/1000 unique link views (10 cents CPM per unique link impressions) and $0.20 for each valid, unique, click-through. In other words, Linkers receive $0.0001/link impression and $0.20/ad click-through.

How much does it cost to advertise on their network:
Advertisers can place ads for $0.35 per 1000 ad impressions (35 cents CPM for ad impressions) and $0.75 per valid click-through. Additionally, advertisers can review ad reports to detect click-fraud. Advertisers can create their ad campaigns for free and when they’re ready to go live they can just ad funds into their account. At any time they can turn ad campaigns on and off to test what works best.

Account Payouts:
Adjix states that at the end of the month, any Linkers with an account balance greater than $25 are mailed a check approximately 45 days later. This 45 day period gives advertisers an opportunity to review their ad campaigns for click-fraud.

Considering the earning amounts, it would take 25,000 straight unique views to earn $25.00. It would take 12,500 straight unique click-throughs to earn $25.00. Those figures make it seem to me like it would take an awful long time to receive that first paycheck, sort of like the situation with Google AdSense. However, maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones who’s Twitter list will provide a good combination of both unique views and actual click-throughs.

Link Report:

Adjix provides a detailed link report which is initiated with the first shortened URL. The report includes information such as the link creation timestamp, the shortened url, the original url, which type of ad, and total amount of hits. You can also view at a glance what your earnings are.

When going into detail for a specific link, you can view the hit timestamp, IP address of the clicker, hos name, whether it was an impression or a click through and if it was a Valid (payable) hit.

Conclusion:

Overall, this is the first time I’ve heard of a company that has provided an opportunity for users of Twitter to make money simply by shrinking their URL’s. This task has typically been accomplished by using TinyURL, or URL Snippet but if you add on the ability to make a little coin while providing the same shrinking services that Tiny URL has provided, it may be enough to get people to jump on board. I’ve taken a look at how the ads are displayed and they don’t appear to be too intrusive into the browsing experience. The ads remind me of one line Google AdSense ads which rotate. I didn’t notice the ads at first because the Ad Block Plus FireFox extension ended up blocking them from the ad.vu web address.

As for the approach that Ajix takes, I find it to be better suited than having to deal with popups or some annoying flash ads. Will you become rich by using this service? Most likely not. The only people I can see making a decent income using a service like Adjix are the Robert Scoble’s and the Leo Laporte’s but those people are already making a decent amount of income without the need to place Adjix shrunken URL’s in front of their audience.

Performancing Experiment:

Considering this is a new way to monetize through using Twitter, I’d like you to participate in an experiment. I will be using this service until the middle of September and if you’re interested, I’d for you to do the same. Come back to Performancing during this time as I’ll report on my findings after using the service for a few weeks. I’d also like for you to post on your blog your findings and send us a link to your report in the comments.

Monetize Your Archives With WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin

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Currently within the hive, there is an ongoing conversation taking place with regards to the must have WordPress plugins. Although everyone seems to have a different answer to this question, a number of Hive members are using a plugin called WhyDoWork. I decided to give it a try myself to figured out why it is, people are using it.

WhyDoWork is a WordPress plugin which ties into your Adsense account that enables you to display more ads for older articles. This plugin contains a plethora of options allowing up to ten different ad codes which can be configured to use AdSense codes, YPN, CPM banners, buttons or what have you. You can also configure when the ads show, how they show up, as well as block ads from showing up on certain pages or articles. This means you can display little to no advertising on articles that are new and after a week or more, you can start displaying ads on those posts which will be viewed by search engine traffic.

Different positions you can display advertising:

Top – Inserts the ad between the title and the content

Top Left and Top Right – Inserts the ad in the top part of the content.

Middle – Inserts the code in the middle of the post, between two paragraphs. Middle means here that it sees how many paragraphs there are in a post, then divides it by two and inserts the ad there. For example, in a 12 paragraph story, it will insert it after the 6th paragraph. You need at least 2 paragraphs in a post for the middle positions to display.

Middle Left and Middle Right – Inserts the code in the middle of the post, surrounded by text. It actually inserts it in the top part of the second half of the post, so it might seem closer to the bottom.

Bottom – Inserts the code below the content

Random – Cycles the selected code among the positions that are not occupied by other ads. In order for the random setting not to use a position assigned to a fixed ad, you will need to insert the random one to the last setting in use.

Conclusion:

It seems like many people are using this plugin on their blog as a way to monetize their archive. However, I want to know if you are using this plugin? If so, has it been successful for you in terms of increasing the amount you make from advertising?