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.  

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.

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.  

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.  

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?  

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)