My next project, a viral page

This week I started a new project: a viral page (in spanish).

What is a “viral page”? Hard to describe, but in my mind, it’s a page that depends on social/viral traffic (as opposed to SEO).

So it will be full of “trigger-happy” stories, hoping that people will share them on Facebook/Twitter.

The idea is to monetize them initially with Adsense, and then move on to other offers (affiliate offers, CPA…).

For content, I have hired two part-time writers from Upwork. Aside from their monthly salary, these are the initial expenses

Hosting: using my current Bluehost VPS server, if/when traffic starts growing I will consider moving to a more powerful server

Domain: $9 in Godaddy

Theme: $59 in Themeforest (Bimber Theme)

Logo: $5 in Fiverr

I will be using Facebook to promote the posts that I add to the site.

I’ll keep you posted monthly on income-expenses, and lessons learnt.

There are 2 sides to have in mind

  • Traffic
  • Conversions

For traffic, the only initial source will be Facebook ads.

For conversions, I will need to check the best offers. Adsense is probably a good way to get started, but there might be other sources of revenue. I’ll also keep you all posted on this.

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Some of the Highest AdSense Earners websites worldwide

In case you are looking for some inspiration, here are some of the top revenue generating websites in the world.

I’m not writing this so you can copy everything they are doing: as always, look for inspiration but develop your unique approach.

However, nothing stops you from checking their ad placements, colors, keywords… You can be sure that those sites have spent time and money optimizing, so you can get an idea or two (obviously they also have millions of daily pageviews, which is harder to get).

Here are the sites (in no particular order, since earnings can vary over time):

Mashable.com

Mashable is a blog focused on media, entertainment and technology.

Estimated Adsense earnings: $650.000 per month.

Digital Point Forum

Digital Point is a forum focused on SEO marketing (and in my humble opinion not very good looking). It was founded by Shawn D Hogan at the age of 19.

Estimated Adsense earnings: $550.000 per month

Plenty of Fish

This dating website combines Google Adsense with paid ads.

Estimated Adsense earnings: $350.000 per month

Digg

If you have been around the Internet for the past years, you have probably heard of digg. It is what it’s called an “aggregation website”, where people can share specific urls and people will comment (that’s the base idea, but it has grown to be much more).

Estimated Adsense earnings: $250.000 per month

EHow

EHow is a website about how to do things. Literally. It has how to guides for almost anything, with some nice Adsense ads along the way.

Estimated Adsense earnings: $240.000 per month

Techcrunch

Techchrunch is one of the most popular technology blogs in the world.

Estimated Adsense earnings: $240.000 per month

Perez Hilton

Even when there are some websites that make more money monthly than Perez Hilton, I had to mention it. It really puzzles me that a website about celebrity gossip can make that much money. Really?

Estimated Adsense earnings: $150.000 per month

So what do these websites have in common?

I can see some common patterns here:

  • Tons of traffic (yes, you need traffic if you want to make big bucks)
  • Lots of content
  • Niche (or niches) with a lot of potential visitors (apparently there are many people interested in celebrity gossip)
  • Focus on the user/visitor (meaning, the sites are created to help the visitors)

 

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Where to find writers for your site?

 

When it comes to adding content to your site, you have basically 4 options (well, actually 5, you could also copy/steal content, but that is probably going to take you nowhere):

  • Write your own content
  • Hire a writer
  • Use a content creation service
  • Have guest blogging

Let’s have a look at the options

1. Write your own content

If you are on a budget, this is the way to go. Start writing the content yourself and at the same time learn the process along the way.

Pros

  • If you are a reasonably good writer, you will have high quality content
  • No need to manage anyone
  • Save money

Cons

  • You are constrained by time (and this is a biggie)

2. Hire a writer

If you have some money to spend, you can also hire someone to write content for you.

Ideally, you want to find a native speaker, but those are usually more expensive, so if you are on a budget you can try to find someone with good language skills.

As usually with outsourcing, you’ll have to test 10 people to get 1 or 2 who are good (and sometimes you can’t even find a good writer out of 10).

These are some recommendations from my own experience:

  • Send people a test job. Ask them to write a couple of articles with different styles/lengths
  • Ask for samples (those can be faked though)
  • They way they communicate can give you feedback

Pros

  • Very escalable

Cons

  • It will take you some time until you find a good writer
  • Money investment
  • Sometimes people disapper without a trace, so you need to start over again

Here are some places where you can find writers

Upwork

Freelancer.com

3. Use a content creation service

Instead of hiring a single person, some pages have a buffer of writers that you can use.

It’s  not as personal as having a dedicated person, but on the other hand if you have just one writer and he/she gets ill, or goes missing, your progress gets halted, whereas if you use a service like this you always have someone ready for the job.

Pros

  • Plenty of people ready to work

Cons

  • Usually more expensive than having a full (or part) time writer
  • Less personal communication
  • You can get a mixed quality depending on the particular writer

Some of these companies are:

Textbroker

Hirewriter.com

4. Guest blogging

In case you never head the term, guest blogging is when somebody will write a unique article for your site, and instead of money, they will request a backlink to their site. It’s a way for them to get some extra traffic (and backlinks).

This can be a great strategy since you are basically getting content for free, but you will need a established blog before you can ask people to write for you for free.

Pros

  • Free

Cons

  • You need to have a certain amount of traffic before you can request a guest blogger to write on your site

There are 2 ways you can find guest bloggers

a. People will approach you and ask to write a guest post

b. You proactively find someone for it

When looking for someone, you can browse their personal sites or use a service like blogger link up or MyBlogGuest

 

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How to create a Forum with WordPress and monetize it with Google Adsense

If you are building a community site and think that it might benefit from having a forum, this could be a great thing, and the main reason is that you don’t need to create any content, other users will do it for you!

The only thing you need is to keep them engaged, posting regularly and you got yourself a winner!

Now the only negative side is that CTR in forums is usually low, but this can be some extra income.

Here are the steps you need to do:

 

Install WordPress

Skip this if you already have a WP site.

Install and configure the bbPress Plugin

This is the best Forum software for WP

Use a theme with bbPress support

I recommend you go to Themeforest, and search for a theme which works fine with bbPress

Create the forum list

You can also create subforums and categories if needed.

Install this free plugin to add Adsense units

It’s called bbPress Advert Units, and it lets you choose where you want to add your ads inside the forum.

Add your Adsense ad units and decide where to show them

These are the options you have:

  • Between posts
  • In the body of the first post
  • At the top and bottom of topic pages
  • On individual forum pages
  • On the top level forum page

That’s it! As long as you have a reasonable amount of users who post in the forum, you should get more and more content (meaning more and more visits), and your revenue should go up

 

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What is Adsense Smart Pricing and how to avoid it?

Back in april 2004, Google introduced what they call “Smart Pricing”.

Before that, advertisers had to pay their bid price for each click, regardless of whether they made money (ie, a sale) from that click, which means some of them were receiving tons of clicks, but not so many sales.

So, in order to avoid people fleeing from Adsense and moving into other platforms (Yahoo back then [Bing Ads these days], now Facebook, etc), they did the following: for pages that were giving advertisers few sales, they lowered the price of each click, which means that advertisers pay different prices depending on where the click comes from.

Before Smart Pricing came in, the only thing us (publishers) had to focus on is sending as many clicks as possible, but after that, we need to take into account the quality of those clicks if we want to get paid more, simply put.

The thing is, since Google is so opaque most of the times, we don’t know for sure what affects Smart Pricing, so the only thing we can do is try to get quality traffic. However, these premises seem to be correct:

  • Smart Pricing is calculated across the whole Adsense account,  so if you have some high quality sites mixed with low quality, your ad prices might go down overall.
  • Smart Pricing is evaluated on a weekly basis, which is good, since that means that if you fix what needs to be fixed, your earnings can go back up quickly.
  • Smart Pricing is tracked with a 30 day cookie, so sales for an advertiser can come within 30 days (the visitors don’t need to purchase straight away).

So what can you do if your earnings are getting lower (with a similar amount of clicks)? I can recommend 2 things:

  • Try to see if one or more of your sites (or pages) might be causing this. If so, temporarily remove ads and see if after one week your revenue goes up. If this does not help, check with other pages, until you find the culprit, then remove ads from that page altogether.
  • If you are driving paid traffic to your sites, stop that for a week and watch again your revenue.

Here are some tips on how to prevent Smart Pricing

  • The main thing is, try to keep advertisers happy. If they make money, you make money (and Google on the side), everybody is happy.
  • Make sure to have high quality content on your site (which is likely to attract “better” visitors)
  • Try to get most of your traffic from high quality sources (search engines being the best)
  • Keep your content relevant

So that’s it! Since Google does not give away too much information, we can just guess, and do trial and error.

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7 Online Marketing Blogs I follow (and 3 podcasts)

Blogs

Niche Pursuits (by Spencer Haws)

I have been following Spencer for years. When I got started with Online Marketing, I was focused on building niche sites; tons of information about that in here. Spencer is the creator of Long Tail Pro and Long Tail University.

Smart Passive Income (by Pat Flynn)

Full of great information, and a great source of inspiration for me.

John Chow

A bit filled with ads for my taste, but there are some great posts.

Online Rule (by Veit Schenk)

Ok, this one won’t win the Oscar for the best design, but Veit delivers great information (with a sense of humor, something to be thankful for these days)

Charles Ngo

This one is more oriented towards CPA, but there are tips about optimization, landing pages or affiliate marketing in general that are useful for everybody.

John Carlton

A copywriting legend, he has a blog full of useful, interesting and fun content.

Bonus: Seth Godin

This is not an online marketing blog per se, but Seth offers great advice that can be applied to any online business.

Podcasts

There are not many podcasts focused on Internet Marketing, but here are some that I listen regularly:

Smart Pasive Income

Again, not only the blog has good content; the podcast is great.

Marketing in your Car

From the creator of Clickfunnels; 257 episodes so far

Digital Kickstart

Not too many episodes (yet), but great interviews

 

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Niche site vs Authority Site

When it comes to building a site, you can take 2 main routes:

  • Niche Site
  • Authority Site

Let’s look into them:

Niche Site

This is usually a smaller site, targeting a small number of keywords.

There is no clear definition, but I’d say it’s a site that has from 2 to 15 different pages with content, which is not updated often, and does not engage with its audience.

The idea is that once you find one (or 2-5 at the most) keywords that you can easily rank for, you can build a site around them, add some more related content, and rank for your main keyword or keywords.

It is built around a single topic or keyword, and usually the owner will do all the backlinking.

Takes some work to create in the beginning, but after that it mainly becomes set and forget.

Usually monetized with Adsense or Affiliate links.

Authority Site

This is a bigger site, with lots of content, updated regularly, and with high quality articles.

It focuses on a main topic, but has different pages built around related keywords.

The goal is to have people linking to the site, so it gets trust and better rankings over time.

It aims to have an engaged community, and can have multiple monetization systems, and takes a lot of work.

 

So you have 2 main choices: you can build a portfolio of small niche sites that earn a nice sum combined, or you can build 1 or 2 authority sites.

Which option is better?

That’s for you to decide!

Obviously an authority site has a much higher income potential, but it takes more work and in the end you are putting all your eggs in one basket.

The good thing is that there is much room to scale once it becomes successful.

On the other hand, building small niche sites takes less time and effort, however its earnings potential is much limited, since you can just rank for a limited set of keywords.

In the past, one could just find a primary keyword, purchase an EMD (Exact Match Domain), write 3 to 5 articles and rank pretty quickly.

However, at some point, Google became much smarter and it’s giving much weight to authority sites, so niche sites are not so easy to rank anymore (unless you find some nice keywords).

 

 

 

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What you need to build a successful Adsense site

Here are the 3 parts of the equation involved:

Keyword Research

One of the most important. Two reasons:

  1. Since you are aiming to rank your site at the very top of Google, you will need a keyword (or ideally more) that you can rank more or less easily.
  2. As we saw before, different keywords have different EPC (Earnings per Click)

Traffic

This one is pretty simple. No traffic = No money

The best traffic source is SEO traffic (people who find your site via Google).

There are also some people who try to get cheap Facebook clicks to drive traffic to their site (usually with viral content), and expect to make more money with Adsense clicks than what that traffic costed. I haven’t personally tried this myself so I cannot comment on it.

So we are not only talking about quantity, but also quality.

CTR

The % of visitors who click on your ad. To improve this you can work on:

  • The site theme
  • Different ad sizes
  • Different ad placement

So that’s mostly it!

Spend some time doing proper keyword research.

Then work on getting traffic

Once you have those two (which are, in my opinion the most important), test and tweak, so you can maximize earnings.

Then rinse and repeat 🙂

 

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The Top 6 WordPress themes for Adsense

Here is a list of some of the best optimized Adsense Themes.

However, and before I start, let me clarify something: there is no doubt that having a good, optimized theme helps improving your CTR.

But bear in mind there are still many factors for having a successful adsense niche: the quality of the traffic, the niche…

Why am I saying this? Because one might thing that by having a good theme all the work is done, when in fact the theme is just one of the factors.

So here are some of the themes that I like:

CTR Theme

This one is especially designed with Adsense in mind.

Link | Demo

Divi Theme

Not just for Adsense; it’s a feature packed multipurpose theme.

Link | Demo

Admania

Multiple layouts, mobile optimized

Link | Demo

Truemag

According to their own description, “Truemag’s ad “hotspots” are strategically placed throughout this content-driven theme to attract the eye without compromising the user experience”

Link | Demo

SociallyViral

Created to get viral traffic, but it’s also optimal for Adsense

Link | Demo

AdMag

Great theme for a blog (magazine style) with responsive Ads system

Link | Demo

Clickbump

It offes multiple themes in one. Some of them are not too attractive, but they have been built with CTR in mind, so no complains about ugliness if it makes money 🙂

Link | Demo

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How to get a high EPC in Adsense

EPC or Earnings Per Click is a simple idea: how much you make (on average) every time someone clicks on one of your ads.

So that means you want to have a high EPC.

Let’s see some tricks / ideas on how to get more money:

Target the right niche / keywords

Some niches pay more than others. Why? Because there is money being spent in them!

At the end of the day, if you earn money with Adsense, that means that there are advertisers willing to pay for those clicks.

Niches like insurance, lawyers, health… tend to pay pretty well (the only problem is ranking  well, of course).

Find profitable keywords

Once you have your niche decided, use a tool to find high paying keywords and write content around those keywords.

Get quality traffic

Make sure your traffic is not junk (SEO traffic is usually good), or Google might decide that your site is not worth getting properly paid.

Try to get people to click on the top ad

Usually, the ad that appears first in your site will be the one that pays the most (per click), so you want your visitors to click on that one.

Geography matters

Clicks from different countries are not worth the same. If most of your traffic comes from countries like USA, Canada, UK, Australia… you will get a higher CPC than other countries where clicks are cheaper.

Use text and image ads

Google will usually display the top paying ad, so if you are using just one of them you might be leaving money on the table

Pro tip:

Connect your Adsense and Analytics account to get all metrics and have better information!

Ninja tip:

Test, test, test! Test everything: placement, colors… there is always something you can improve 🙂

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