I've become a lot more introspective as of late. I feel more interested in writing stuff that expresses my inner-thoughts than the "newsy" stuff I tend to blog about. As a result much of my popular blogs have been untouched for the past couple of weeks.

I wish I had the creativity that many others have in keeping their blogs funny and entertaining.

Perhaps what's happening is that I'm hitting an age (in my early 40s) where I keep asking myself there's got to be more to life than just sitting in front of a computer, posting article.

People say I'm pretty lucky to be my own boss, work out of my house, and be able to carry my business in a laptop. But I'm a guy who can't handle monotony. I need to tackle new things all the time. I like tackling new ideas.

I recently launched a new blog, "Motorcycle Philosophy" where I can do more of this "introspective" writing. No ads. But I do have links to some of my other blogs, to help give it some boost.

Maybe that's what I ought to do; build a bunch of these little blogs, each on a different topic, where I can spew out my analysis once a week, and give some more Page Rank to my bigger sites.  

Labels: Blogging Profession, Page Rank

I think the best way to earn the most money from advertisements on your website, is to use a mixture of CPC and CPM based campaigns.

Specifically, I like to run AdSense for my CPC stuff, and a banner network for my CPM stuff. For banner networks, I'll look for a small network so that my site has a greater chance of getting targeted ads. There's lots of them on the Adify system. Otherwise, I'll default to using ValueClick.

The idea behind the CPC/CPM combo is that a smaller percentage of your visitors are willing to click on an ad. But the larger percentage is not, yet you can still monetize them through the CPM.

Also, as your audience increases, you'll discover that the click through rate decreases. This is because your audience has become more diverse. CPM ads are great way to resolve audience diversification.

Problems with the CPC/CPM Combo

You may find that the click through rate on your CPC ads will drop as a result of competition with your CPM ads. This is to be expected. However, the goal is to make up that difference, and exceed that difference, with CPM ads.

Therefore, you don't want your visitors clicking on CPM ads. It's imperative to keep monitoring your CPM ad statistics to see if any banners are attracting a large number of clicks. Turn off any specific CPM banner that's attracting clicks. Since CPM ads don't pay you for clicks, you're losing money.

That's part of the irony of CPM ads. Since advertisers are paying for impressions, they tend to design ads that attract a lot of clicks, like interactive ads, or ads that look like a Windows error message.

Final Results

The bottom line is that you want the combination of CPC and CPM ads to be higher than if you just ran CPC ads.  

Labels: Monetization

In a previous article, I mentioned that "good blog templates are hard to find".

I referred to my Junk Food Blog, and my need to update the look of the blog. I wanted to bring in a more professional look, but found it difficult to do so while retaining the blog's header logo.

The header logo had a jovial look and feel, which was perfect for JFB, being it had an entertainment value: a look at the some of the newest junk food on the market. But I needed a design that would allow me to incorporate a leaderboard ad. I couldn't do it with the design of JFB, because the ad would sit on top of the header-logo, causing the logo disappear, and the ad to blend in with the logo's background.

So today I bit the bullet, and just eliminated the header-logo. I have a blog design that looks more fluid and streamlined, and portrays the leaderboard clearly with no obstructed view.

I had the wife look at it, and tell if she liked the new design or the old design. She thought the new design definitely had a more professional look, though a more "business" look as well. I don't want a business look, just a professional look. But, she said she really liked "piggy" logo at the top.

We'll try it out and see if I can continue building an audience on that blog.  


Top image: old design, note the leaderboard ad doesn't integrate well with the header logo. But the header logo has a jovial look, and has become nearly synonymous with the blog.

Bottom image: new design, the leaderboard ad integrates much better with the header, but I had to confiscate the old header logo to make it work.

Labels: Blog Templates

I was staring at an e-mail that I was just about ready to send out. And I swear, one of the commas in the article started to crawl up from the word "Julian".

I had to look more carefully, to make sure it wasn't gnat, or an ant. But no, it was a comma.

Well, then it stopped moving, and it was back in its original place.

I think I've been sitting in front of my monitor for too long today.

I need to get more sleep.  

Labels: Computer-Hallucinations

This evening, we held our third "Menifee Internet Professionals" meeting. This is a group I set up on Meetup.com, where folks living in my community, who earn a living on the Internet, get together for a social gathering. Read more about it here.

Only two people showed up, myself, and the gal hosting the meeting. I was really disappointed that no one else bothered to show. I'm not sure if that's a reflection on me, or if people are not taking this group seriously. I suspect it's the latter.

Cynthia, who hosted the meeting, is a Realtor who recently launched a new business called "Menifee4Rent", where she helps people find rental homes and apartments. She said many landlords and property management firms are willing to pay her finders fees. So during our meeting, we talked about how she uses the website to build up her clientele. She went on to tell me that most Realtors still don't have their own websites.

I was rather surprised to hear that. I thought that most, if not all, Realtors have them. It seemed like the real estate market is really sold on using the Internet as a marketing tool. But no, she said. There's even a lot of Realtors who do have websites, but don't know how to use them, or have barely put anything on them.

I guess that's kinda good news to me, because just last week I relaunched my real estate blog by providing tips to Realtors on how to improve their online marketing strategies.

For that matter, it's amazing to know how many local businesses in my community don't have websites. Most of these mom & pop shops don't have a web presence. They may be thinking that business has been pretty good just from people seeing their store from the street. But how much more business might they get if they had an interactive website? It's a question of how much business are you losing by not having a website?

Domino's Pizza is already well known for having created a pizza ordering system that you can access from their website. I understand that the mom & pop pizza shop can't afford anything that sophisticated, but it's not that difficult to have a website that displays their phone number.

Most Realtors seem to believe that their potential Internet audience is too small to convert into business. It's like they've made this a foregone conclusion. Even though Realtors use the Internet for their own personal use, they don't seem to understand what it might do for their business. Has any Realtor actually measured their potential Internet audience? I find it amusing that they've made a conclusion without even trying it.

The world only has a small percentage of people willing to try something new. The larger percentage is simply content to follow the mainstream.  

Labels: Meetup Group, Real Estate Blogging

There seems to be a lot of talk lately that the Internet advertising industry is experiencing a bubble that's about to burst.

The sentiment is that online advertisers are spending an awful lot of money buying ads through Google and Yahoo, and are about to make a shift. The idea is that Google is the 800 lbs gorilla in this market, and as Google goes, so goes everybody else with it.

That's a chilling thought for a guy like me, who relies on AdSense income.

I have to agree, that these are very precarious times for businesses who've put a lot of eggs into the contextual advertising basket. There seems to be a paradigm shift taking place, one that Google has just recently recognized.

It's social networking.

In order to understand the online advertising industry, you have to look at where people are congregating. Today, sites like MySpace and Facebook is where the all the people are gravitating to. It makes sense that this is where online advertisers are going to spend their money.

We also still live in a world where we access the Internet through a 17" monitor (or 19" like me), and a PC and a keyboard. This is going to change also, as technology makes devices that can access and present the Internet with as much ease and clarity as you do now.

Leading this change to alternate forms of access will be the social networking sites. Kids will demand that they access MySpace and Facebook through their mobile phones and PDAs, or other dedicated devices.

Don't count out MySpace and Facebook as just entertainment sites for kids. While they are indeed dominated by teens and twenty-somethings, the fact is that social networking is how they perceive the Internet. As they mature into their 30s and 40s, they'll continue with that paradigm.

The question is how are you preparing to change with the trends?  

Labels: Paradigms, Social Networking

I created a new blog template for this blog, which you're seeing now. I implemented this template to several other of my blogs too, using different color schemes.

This template has two particular advantages...

1. It has a more professional appearance than my previous designs


2. It accomodates three standard ad sizes (728x90, 160x600, and 300x250)

Labels: Blog Templates

Yesterday I said I redesigned my real estate blog.

Today, I refocused it.

That is, I'm going to stop blogging about real estate news, and focus on writing about Internet marketing and publishing, as it relates to real estate.

The reason is because I've failed in building up an audience for my real estate blog. There so much saturation in real estate websites, and real estate news. And since I'm not a real estate expert, it's pretty much impossible for me to gain any traction.

So, I'm focusing on content that no other real estate website has, my expertise in Internet marketing and publishing.

Real estate professionals are increasingly undertanding the marketing power of the Internet, and are seeking out help on designing their sites, writing their blogs, and marketing their properties. Since that's my forte, I figured why not try my hand at it.

It gives me the opportunity to still earn money from the lucrative real estate advertising business.  

Labels: Real Estate Blogging

I redesigned my real estate blog.

After looking at the old design, I realized it looked cheesy, old. A real estate blog ought to look professional, clean, just as if it was designed by big-money designers.

I mean if I wanted to read some real estate news, I'd want to read a site that looked authoritative and business-like, not something amateurish.

Anyways, take a look at it...
http://www.realestatehow.com

It's basically the same format that I'm using on this blog you're reading. The difference is that I've made use of more gradients, and placed the leaderboard ad inside the header graphic.

So what do you think? Does it look great? Or is it just "good", or is still painfully amateurish?  

Labels: Blog Designs

A blogger's challenge is to keep publishing original content to his/her readers. You want quality content. Compelling content.

So how do you get it other than squeezing out more ideas from your brain?

Well, look for ways for people to give it to you.

That's what I decided to do with one of my blogs, "Orange County Memories" (OCThen.com).

OCThen publishes the memories of people who lived and worked in Orange County, CA. Before "The OC" was a trendy place, it was rural living for most people. And this was only as recently as 40 years ago.

Since I'm someone who spent 23 years living in Orange County, I had a lot of memories myself. I started by focusing on a particular memory, such as my visit to the old "Japanese Village and Deer Park" in Buena Park. At that point, visitors trickling into the new blog read the article, and posted their comments about the same park as well.

I continued doing this, writing a new post for each memory.

I also posted a "Submit A Memory" article, and linked it from the navigation bar. In this article, I asked readers to post a comment, to this article, on anything they remembered about living or working in Orange County.

It worked. I fielded tons of comments. I then republished each comment as a new blog post. In effect, I had created a perpetual content generator. All I had to do was copy each comment into a new blog post of its own. No more brain-squeezing. It was as easy as copy and paste.

Each time I republish a comment as a new blog post, I delete it from the "Submit A Memory" article to avoid content duplication, preventing search engine penalties.

Here's an example of a comment that was posted to the "Submit a Memory" article, which I then reposted as a new blog post, and then subsequently removed from the "Submit a Memory" article...

http://www.octhen.com/2007/10/tustin-in-1950s.htm

And the best part about this, is that each comment is ORIGINAL content, and FREE content. I'm not violating any copyright laws. As long as I keep posting these comments as new blog posts, I can keep building an audience.  

Labels: Content Ideas

It appears that Google has revised the PR value that displays in its toolbar. This is because all of my PR5 sites are now displaying as PR4.

My PR6 sites are now showing as PR5.

Google has been doing this for quite some time. They have to. Everyday, thousands of more websites make their way online. Hundreds of thousands new links are added. Considering the fact that the toolbar categorizes each site into one of eleven rankings (0-10), they have to recalibrate the rankings.

This doesn't mean our websites have lost ranking. Rather, it means that a PR5 rank now has the influence of what a PR6 had.

The ranking on the toolbar is not the same as the "true" ranking. Google assigns a very large number, several digits in length, as your real rank value. What appears in the toolbar is simply an abbreviation of that number.

So, your ranking hasn't really changed.  

Labels: Page Rank

The New York Times seems to be stirring up the pot on the issue of accurate website statistics.

You can read the whole thing here...
http://www.nytimes.com/....FYjFK7n0HeOL0o4osG95w&oref=slogin

I do have to dispute one of their paragraphs...

But the Internet has given publishers a new form of ammunition: raw server data with precise numbers of site visits and page views. This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by ratings companies based on panel samplings.

Labels: Google Analytics, QuantCast, Statcounter, Website Statistics

Website publishers often use the many keyword tools out there to determine what keywords and keyphrases are most often searched for. The reason for knowing what's most often searched for, is so that they can use the most popular words for titles and filenames. It's an SEO practice.

But there are alternate viewpoints on what exactly is a popular keyword or keyphrase.

Many people look at how often a particular keyword/phrase has been searched. Other people instead look at how many variations of keyword/phrase exists. Keywrod Variation, versus Keyword Volume.

For this article, I used Google's keyword tool, and wanted to know if I should use "Menifee Homes" versus "Menifee Real Estate" for my new blog.

According to Google, here are the results (volume)...

menifee real estate (average)
menifee ca real estate (low)

menifee homes (average)
homes in menifee (low)
menifee ca homes (low)
menifee homes for sale (low)
homes for sale in menifee (low)
homes for rent in menifee (low)
homes for sale in menifee ca (low)
homes in menifee ca (low)
homes in menifee california (low)
new homes in menifee (low)
new homes in menifee ca (low)
new homes menifee (low)
new homes menifee ca (low)

Both "menifee real estate" and "menifee homes" have similar volumes (average). However, "menifee real estate" has a higher advertiser competition, meaning greater AdSense earnings potential.

But notice that "menifee homes" has 13 variations compared to just 2 for "menifee real estate".

To me, "menifee homes" is the better keyword/phrase to use when building a website on real estate in Menifee, CA.

If you built such a site with 25-50 pages, each of those pages would contain content that optimizes on one or more of those 13 variations. Meaning, you'll actually attract more visitors from Google searches for the fact that you're covering a wider range of keywords and phrases.

Even though "menifee real estate" has greater earnings potential than "menifee homes", the latter will still earn you more income for the fact that it can fetch a larger audience.

Although if you play your cards right, you can find a way to weave both keywords into your website.  

Labels: Keyword Variation, Keyword Volume

About a couple of weeks ago, I launched a local real estate blog for my community, naming it "Menifee Homes".

Instead of putting it on its own domain name, I opted to host it on a subdomain of my Menifee news blog, Menifee 24/7. Since they're both focused on the same community, I figured it will help boost Menifee 24/7.

Here's my thinking for launching this new blog...

Menifee is one of those towns where a lot of families are looking at relocating to. It offers homes that are much cheaper than in SoCal's metropolitan areas, offers a much lower crime rate, and has that "small town" feel where a lot of people know each other.

Also, it appears that many of the AdSense ads appearing on my Menifee 24/7 site are real estate related. Even though much of the content is not necessarily about real estate, the word "menifee" seems to be associated with lots of real estate ads.

So, I created the new "Menifee Homes" blog in an attempt to capture a more focused audience, in hopes of cashing in on those Menifee real estate ads. While I welcome residents of Menifee to read the new blog, I'm focusing on capturing search engine traffic, hoping to find potential home buyers. I figure these are the people more likely to click on the ads.

I've recruited a few real estate bloggers to generate content for me.

I found a few Realtors and brokers who are working the Menifee market, and whom have some experience with blogging. What these people are getting in return is visibility. Assuming I can capture a good sized audience of potential Menifee home buyers, these Realtors and brokers will have the opportunity to "speak" to them, and hopefully earn some business. On top of that, their photos and contact info is prominently displayed on the blog, and they get to "sign" each article they post with their website address, giving them some extra page rank for their respective websites.

I'll post updates on this new blog is doing.  

Labels: Real Estate Blogging

My motorcycle blog, Biker News Online, continues to increase in traffic ever higher.

Yesterday, it hit an all time high in 6,449 page views and 4,024 unique visitors, based on tracking from StatCounter. You can also see its traffic on Quantcast, though Quantcast seems to report fewer uniques than StatCounter.

From January of this year, traffic has increased more than 4-fold from about 750 uniques per day, to averaging 3,300 per day. All traffic on Biker News Online is free traffic, I don't buy ads, keywords, or engage in any traffic generation gimmicks.


Earnings from AdSense have also increased, though not proportionately. While traffic is up about 4-5 times, AdSense earnings is up only about 2-3 times. See my article entitled, "CPM Drops When Impressions Increase" for a discussion. Income from other sources, namely affiliate programs on LinkShare, Share-A-Sale, CommissionJunction and BikerKiss, have remained the same, however.

In the graph, notice a third metric for "Returning Visitors" in the orange color. It's averaging about 200 per day. While it's much lower than the "Unique Visitors" metric, I'm not complaining. Returning visitors don't usually click on ads. What they do, however, is promote my blog, either by giving a link on their blogrolls, mentioning my blog in their blog posts or on biker forums. They also post comments on my blog. It's those first-time visitors that tend to click the links.

So what do I account the steady rise in traffic? Well for one, constant publishing of new content. And not just publishing plenty of new content, but focusing on content that tends to create buzz. Finding subjects that bikers find compelling, either as humor, or anger, or disgust, tends to attract more backlinks.

Another way to build traffic, particularly within the biker community, is to participate on biker forums. Bikers tend to congregate on forums, and there's tens of thousands of them on the Internet. When you create an account on a forum, set up a signature file containing an hyperlinked icon or banner for your website. Any message you post on the forum will have your blog's link.

One of the challenges for me as a blogger is that I tend to burn out. If I want traffic to keep rising, I have to keep blogging. Fortunately, there's always plenty of news to blog about in the motorcycle world; that's make things easier. The fact that traffic and earnings keep rising keeps my enthusiasm going.  

Labels: Increasing Your Traffic, Traffic Patterns