I get a lot of emails from affiliate networks and ad agencies via Blogging Tips, who want me to tell readers about the launch of their new site or announce a major update to their product or service. If the news is related to blogging then I usually cover the story as I like to tell readers about the latest blogging news.

These ad companies and agencies are really sneaky though. More than a dozen of them have signed me onto their company newsletter or press release list without my consent so I have to then go and unsubscribe. I did not even write a post about some of them, I simply emailed them saying that I didn’t think their news was relevant to blogging so I wouldn’t be covering it on the site. Clearly this was a mistake.

I absolutely despise spam. Affiliate companies have no right to sign me up to a newsletter without my consent. It really pisses me off, particularly after I did them a favour by writing about their news story.

But what can you do? I could remove the post I wrote about the site but I’d be shooting myself in the foot as I’d be removing another page for the search engines to spider. I’m not childish or scummy enough to put their email on a spam list either so all I can do is tell them to stick it next time they ask me to tell readers about their ‘important news‘.

You reap what you sow!!

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Although I’m always looking for new ways to make money, I’m always prepared to move on if I don’t have time to develop it to the point where it makes me money. Even if that means I don’t break even i.e. sometimes you need to cut your losses and move on.

Recently I talked about two such sites in my recent post about mini sites, namely AlcoholView and Finding Love. I created these sites to see if you could make any money using free articles but I never really put the effort into them. Though I do now think that there is little or no money to be made in using free articles from directories.

I listed Alcoholview for sale on Digital Point and got $35 for it. Not a lot of money but the domain was due to expire so my choice to either let the domain expire, renew it at a cost of $8 or sell it on. When you think about it like that it becomes clear it was the right decision. The buyer also asked if I had any other sites and then proceeded to buy Finding Love as well, for $35. Again, $70 isn’t a lot of money but I was never going to spend time developing them and zipping the sites and sending the details for both sites took less than 20 minutes.

Another site I’m thinking of selling is RetroWheels, a car forum I picked up a while ago for only $130 including a leased vbulletin license. The seller was a little shy about some facts though, namely the site having a theme which can be bought for $30. I had been looking at loads of vbulletin themes around that time and never came across it so I never thought that it was a common theme. Still, I do still like the design.

I’m not sure if I could flip it for a profit of $100+ at the moment. I’m probably better waiting til it gets a little more traffic or waiting til it gets a PageRank so that I can sell some text links on it and sell it for 10-12 times monthly profit….though if it was making that I’d be tempted to keep it!

A bad habit of mine

The purchase of RetroWheels is a good example of a bad habit I have from time to time. When I’m interested in buying a site priced $1,000 or over I spend a lot of time thinking about whether it’s worthwhile. Traffic, branding and monthly income are all important but so is the time you need to spend developing the site.

For some reason, when I see a well priced site under $250 I don’t think about this. If I decide the site is undervalued and believe that I can either develop it and make money or flip it quickly, then I’ll buy it. However, I forget to think about the time I need to spend developing the site. This is not something I do all the time though I have bought several websites over the years because I knew they were undervalued. I’ve nearly always broke even and in most cases I’ve made a small profit but I do sometimes regret the purchase.

Cut your losses and move on

Whether you create a website from scratch yourself or whether you pick one up in a forum, the bottom line is if you don’t have time to develop the site you should cut your losses and move on.

Sites which don’t need updating and make $100+ a year are worth keeping but it’s probably best to trim your portfolio and concentrate on the sites you do want to develop.

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I’ve been trying to be more active on Digg and StumbleUpon in the last few days. There are a number of factors which determine which articles get the most votes yet it’s clear that those with a lot of social friends easily get votes to their submissions.

Take Digg for example. A few people voted for one of my posts last week so I added them as friends. A few accepted and in the last day or so I’ve had a few shouts (quick messages) from them to vote for their posts (which I did). At the moment I have 7 friends but I’m going to get more as more friends means more voting power. This is why regulars with hundreds of friends can get diggs so easily.

Imagine you had 1000 ‘friends’ on Digg and you shouted for a digg. Even if only 100 or so friends gave your post a digg you would still get a huge traffic boost. Not to mention the extra diggs you would get from normal digg users who just liked your post. It’s clear that one of the biggest factors in social promotion is to make lots of friends and to actively digg their posts.

Digg, StumbleUpon and other social sites have been cracking down on those who exchange votes but I think they turn a blind eye to a lot of it i.e. they know they would lose a lot of members if they really cracked down on it.

Until they do crack down it heavily I’m going to be Mr Friendly on Digg!

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A few days ago I talked about making money with mini sites. Whilst I am still looking to make money using this method, my priority at the moment is still to monetize and promote Blogging Tips and if I have more time, I want to start getting Electric Bandits off the ground.

One of the most effective ways to promote a blog is through social media. Although I’ve read lots and lots of articles on the subject, I still consider myself a novice in social media promotion as I have found it difficult to become active within these sites. To be perfectly honest, I find it time consuming and I don’t like requesting votes for my articles. Most of the bloggers I know buzz me for diggs and stumbles frequently so clearly this is one important aspect of getting traffic from social sites.

A few months ago I decided to give the social media site Sphinn a try. I checked Sphinn most days as it’s a good place to find news and tried to be active too but after a while I got frustrated with it. I saw some really poor posts getting loads and loads of votes because the site was from someone who is very active in the community and saw some great posts only get a few sphinns (I honestly believe some people spend 5-10 hours a week on the site!). And there were a few blogs where every single post was submitted and it got lots of votes, regardless of the quality.

Perhaps this comes across a little as sour grapes. I did find this frustrating however I understand that this is how 80% of social media promotion works. It’s a ‘Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ environment.

I haven’t given up on social media though. I just don’t think Sphinn was for me plus the traffic which I did get from the site was low. Digg and Stumble on the other hand, bring me a lot of traffic.

A good example of the traffic Digg can bring

I don’t use Digg often but I am becoming more and more aware of the traffic it can bring. I do use StumbleUpon and give the thumbs up to many pages but I’m not actively making friends or voting for their blog posts. Clearly I should be trying to be more active on both sites.

Last month I had a reminder about the traffic Digg can bring. Whereas StumbleUpon traffic seems to be more stable, Digg traffic usually comes in large bursts. This happened last month on BloggingTips on 22nd October.

Here’s a screenprint of the traffic burst from Webzlier and analytics.

Webalizer : I’ve removed most of the months data and just showed the days before and after the digg traffic burst.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics Traffic Sources from October 22nd 2008

The traffic from Digg was from the post It’s a bad time to buy a blog but it’s a great time to sell!. This post was written on September 12, 2008 but more than a month later someone found the post and submitted it to digg and it racked up 360 diggs (which I assume got it on the home page or close to it).

The whole thing has given me a much needed rude awakening. I need to use this promotion medium more and start taking advantage of these social sites. Whilst I am still going to continue writing the same kind of posts for the blog, I am more aware of what posts do well on Digg and StumbleUpon so I will write more ‘digg’ like posts from time to time.

I’ll talk more about my experiences with these sites in the next few weeks and hopefully show you some examples, as I think it’s more helpful to learn from what works and what doesn’t. In the meantime, if you have any practical tips for promoting a site through Digg or StumbleUpon I’d love to hear them

Thanks,
Kevin

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I logged into my Google Adsense account today and out of curiosity, checked how much money it had made me since I started using it. I was really shocked. Apparently from June 23, 2003 to November 3 2008 I’ve made $289.99. I’ve never used adsense on any of my main sites but I still thought that I had made over $1,000.

Breaking Down My Stats and Puitting Things Into Perspective

For me, the most important stats on the adsense report page is the Page CTR (Click Thru Rate) and the Effective CPM. Google explains the Effective CPM as :

From a publisher’s perspective, the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the eCPM would equal $180/45, or $4.00. However, please keep in mind that eCPM is a reporting feature that does not represent the actual amount paid to a publisher.

Most channels seem to have a CTR of 0.5% and an ECPM of around $1 however AlcoholView and Finding Love were much higher. AlcoholView had a CTR of 1.10% and en ECPM of $5.35 whereas Finding Love had a CTR of 0.80% and an ECPM of $2.19. Both of these stats are considerable higher than all other channels.

Both AlcoholView and Finding Love are mini sites I created to test the waters with their related niche. I was also curious to see if you could make money with a site using free articles.

I probably spent less than an house creating AlcoholView and less than 2 hours creating Finding Love (as I added some other affiliate links). All I did was upload WordPress, activate a free design and then add a few free articles from an article directory. Other than that I haven’t did anything with them. My original plan was to go back and spend more time on them later if they were converting well but I never made the time.

The domain name AlcoholView expires soon so I decided to list it for sale on a few forums but I’ve not had any offers as yet. I’m tempted to renew the domain again and add some more articles as the ECPM is really high. But then again, this is time that could be spent working on another site. Even though the site has made a few dollars here and there I think that to increase page impressions and Search Engine traffic I really need to spend some time writing original articles but I’m not sure how much time I would have to spend on the site to get it to a dollar a day through adsense, and I’m not really willing to waste more time on it either.

Which is why I’m going to cut my losses, sell these sites and move on. Although they didn’t make money, I’m glad I built those sites as it convinced me that free articles are generally speaking, not a great way to add content to a site.

Selling Text Links : A better alternative to Adsense for Mini Sites?

Adsense is not usually a big earner which is why it’s sometime called ‘Webmaster Welfare‘. Which is why it would be better to just get some inbound links to my mini sites and once it has a PR of at least 3, I can sell text links on it. I know that Google frowns upon this but if the site got a PR penalty I wouldn’t be that bothered.

I created a few other content based mini sites using original articles recently and I think thats the strategy I’m going to apply to them. The sites in question are Htaccess Basics and Taekwondo Patterns. I spent the best part of a working day on each site doing research for the articles and writing the posts. The articles are original and informatitive so they should be able to get inbound links natrually though I will probably add links to them on some other sites I own.

As I wrote in my article Using WordPress To Create Mini Sites last month, the idea is to spent a little time building the site and then move on. I know I can build sites of this quality within a day so if these sites prove to be profitable I am going to start developing more (though I am going to wait to see how these two perform before I commit time to it).

So to summarise, this is how I plan on making money through mini sites :

• I’ll create a mini site using wordpress using a free design.
• I will spent about a day writing original content to the site and making sure the site is actually useful to people.
• I will try and get some inbound links and get a PageRank within a few months.
• Once it has some PR, I will then sell text links using Text Link Ads, LinkWorth or LinkXL.
• I will then repeat the process.

Some things to note :

• If the site gets a little traffic, I may add adsense or promote a related product through the site. I might also spend some more time adding content to the site so that traffic increases.
• I won’t worry too much about getting a PageRank penalty. The whole point of this process is to get the site to a point where it is making money and move on.

I actually have 3 or 4 old sites which I am doing this on just now. They are sites which had good traffic at one point but have not been updated in years. However, since they still retain a PageRank I am able to make a few hundred dollars a month by selling text links on them.

I’m sure some of you will be interested in developing a mini site of your own so if you have any questions, stories or tips, please share them by leaving a comment

Also, I encourage you to subscribe to Self Made Minds, as they have written some great posts regarding mini sites and continue to make good money through them.

Thanks,
Kevin

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