Google AdSense Revenues: Mostly About Increasing Traffic

Image via CrunchBase

Most tips are to do with how you get a ton of traffic. If you can not get a ton of traffic then all other tips fail. 10,000 visitors per day or more and you could live off of Google AdSense. But before that? It better be a hobby.

SuperFastBusiness.com Interviews Matthew Paulson about Generating Substantial Revenues through Google AdSense

80% of his revenue comes from just three quality sites; as long as good quality traffic can be generated from a few sites that are performing well, and if the ads on these sites are optimized, then it would be a much better idea to add content and cultivate quality in those web properties rather than focus on acquiring more sites .... driving traffic means getting consumer attention from Google Video, Bing Video, email newsletters, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, news sites, finance, sites, and others. "There are tangential search engines like YouTube, Google images and Google news, and there are just plenty of opportunities there; the pool of people that are competing for those rankings is just so much smaller and it’s just a lot easier to get those placements that you want in some of those other search engines." .... posting ads should ideally be a separate concern from posting quality content

How To Make Six Figures Per Year With Adsense

I’ve been doing pretty well with AdSense for the last couple of years. 2012 I made a total of 104,454 dollars and this month I’ll be on track to do about 20,000 dollars just based on the kind of cycle or the seasonality of the type of content sites that I do. ..... 2007 and 2008 I had some personal finance websites that I, you know, had a few thousand hits a day and I was making maybe a thousand dollars a month ...... you can use the Adwords keyword tool to figure out the kind of topics or keywords that people or advertisers are spending a lot of money on so then you can write content about those things ..... if you’re writing about, say, finance or health or things that advertisers think there’s money in. ..... I have four or five writers that I hire stuff out to consistently and I’ve been working with them for years and you know I have pretty good arrangements. I couldn’t bring myself to writing content of sites anymore. I just, I don’t want to be the worker. I want to be the guy, you know, commanding the ship, so I’ve got people writing for me and that’s been working out pretty well. ...... they make the mistake of only focusing on kind of the main Google search results. ...... I have sites that get just a whole bunch of traffic from Google video and Bing video. I’ve got sites that get traffic from an email newsletter I have. I get sites that get traffic from Twitter and Facebook a little bit. I have sites that get traffic from, you know, kind of the Google news and Bing news ....... tangential search engines like YouTube and Google images and Google news ...... take advantage of those alternative traffic sources .... One thing that I’m not very good at is, you know, traditional search engine optimization. I don’t do any satellite sites or anything like that. I have just gotten pretty lucky in getting people to link back and I don’t try to gain the system too much ...... it is kind of a numbers game in just getting a lot of content out there ..... I have a site that gets about 300,000 page views a month and in that, I publish several dozen new articles a week and that’s one of my newest websites. And then I have three writers that write on that site. .......... SuperFastBusiness.com, it gets around about 40,000 page views a month ....... the best content I can get. .... I was Audible.com’s one of their top Affiliates. I was getting 7 grand a month in affiliate checks from them alone. I was sending hundreds of free trials to them, you know, every month. Then, and the strategy I was using is I created basically a press release for every single audiobook they had on their website and I sent it out kind of through to my different websites. And then when the Google Panda update came, they decided those articles were very similar in stealing quality content so whatever hit the algorithm and you know that revenue dried up overnight. So I lost about 7 grand a month in revenue just overnight when that first Panda 1.0 hit ....... Most of my sites are about a hundred bucks to do a sponsored post on, but there’s still good money in there. I consistently make 4 to 5 grand a month just doing those. ...... maintain a list of advertisers and just email them every month saying “Hey, if you want to do a sponsored post, here is my list of sites. Get in touch if you’re interested” ...... I have a list of 3 or 400 advertisers now and I do pretty well with that. ..... So I’ll do three AdSense ads and three ads to Tribal Fusion and, you know, between those two I can easily make 20-25 bucks for every thousand page views

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Slow Investing, Remote Investing

Remote is not so remote. You can get real time, deep coverage, in text, photo and video formats, from any corner of the world. There is real time cheap to free communication.

The so called First World collapsed a few years back because it did not invest its surplus trillions into Third World infrastructure that give guaranteed 10% annualized returns.

Instead those surplus trillions were used to torpedo the basic financial infrastructure in the First World. Shady real estate investments that collapsed like a house of cards.

Real estate is thought of as a safe investment. The house is still there no matter what happens. That is the thinking. What if the house is there but it lost 80% of its value? Is the house still there? If you think it is still there, I call it gold standard thinking. Getting rid of the gold standard was a good thing. Not all people, including some people in Congress, agree.

Bypassing Wall Street

How can Wall Street do the damage it has done and still not be taken over by a whole new generation of finance startups? It is like if Blogger were to refuse to let you migrate all your content to Wordpress. In a more of a market economy you should be able to move your money from one bank to the next in a flash.

A globalized world does not quite jive with the nation state moat. And damage happens.

There is global infrastructure, and there is global microfinance.

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Adding Disqus To My Blog Was The Easiest Thing

Image via CrunchBase

Wow. Point and click.

The first time I installed Disqus it was still easy, but there were steps involved. You had to grab the code and go paste it in just the right place in your blog's template code. Not hard to do but I can imagine it being intimidating to those who don't know any code at all.

This time it was so so easy, as easy as clicking on a link at the Google search results page.

Wow. I am impressed.

disqus.com/admin/blogger

I promptly added it to all three of my blogs: Netizen, Barackface, and Democracy For Nepal.

Let the commenting begin!

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The Blogosphere Blooms

Image via WikipediaFacebook is like the McDonald's chain. The blogosphere is like the endless number of Chinese restaurants. Collectively the blogosphere is bigger. And that's the way it should be. I am an avid blogger. I am a glad, avid blogger.

Nielsen Wire: Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers

.... consumer interest in blogs keeps growing ..... over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006. ...... 6.7 million people publish blogs on blogging websites, and another 12 million write blogs using their social networks. ...... 7 out of 10 bloggers have gone to college .... Women make up the majority of bloggers ..... Bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on consumer-generated video sites like YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in Message Boards/Forums within the last month ...... Three out of the top 10 social networking sites in the U.S. – Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr – are for consumer-generated blogs. Blogger is the largest of these sites with more than 46 million unique U.S. visitors during October 2011, making it second only to Facebook in the social networking category, and Tumblr was the fastest-growing social networking or blog site on the top 10, more than doubling its audience since last year from home and work computers to 14 million unique visitors. Overall, these three blogging websites combined for 80 million unique visitors, reaching more than 1 in 4 active online users in the U.S. during October 2011. ..... 92 percent of Pinterest’s audience also visited Mass Merchandiser sites during the same month.

Google Plus Has Buzz

Image via CrunchBaseObviously Google Plus is no Google Wave or Google Buzz. This thing has legs.

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Tumblr: Ease Of Use?

Image via CrunchBaseTumblr has been in the news for having surpassed Wordpress. Tumblr surpassed both Blogger and Wordpress in page hits months back. Looks like it has now surpassed Wordpress on some other metric that shall remain unnamed by me.

What is it? There is the itch to explain. The pundits are pouring in.

I have a feeling analyzing might not work. Unless you use Tumblr, you will not get it. I myself was late to the party, but now I show up every day, most every day. Tumblr completes me.



And Tumblr still is not my primary blogging platform. I am still stuck on Blogger. I do long form blogging. I pontificate. And Blogger allows me to play with a little bit of code. On Tumblr, I mostly reblog, I almost totally reblog. And yet Tumblr completes me like Blogger does not.

Curation, Content Creation

Image by brjkt via FlickrI said at this blog several years ago that content and search will never go stale. We will come up with new forms of content creation. We will find ever new ways to do search. If you think about it, Facebook is search. Twitter is search. Facebook is content creation and curation. Twitter is content creation and curation.

But looks like we are about to embark on a new era of startups that focus primarily on curation. And that is a good thing.

Tweet Embed Option Needed

Image via WikipediaNo, Biz, Twitter Has Real Issues

I think Twitter needs to give me the same embed option that YouTube does. Very often I feel the need to embed a tweet at my blog. And I ended up taking a screen shot, using the Paint software to resize it and all. It is tedious. It is a few different steps. I think it is like five steps. Takes a lot of time I don't have.

Linking to a tweet is not the same thing. Just like linking to a video is not the same thing. And taking a screen shot makes the tweet go dead. The links freeze. There is no retweet button.

A tweet is like an atom. It is a basic building block of the web. And we should have the option to take the atom wherever.

Anthony De Rosa

I did two great events earlier in the evening, but the best part was walking from the first to the second with Anthony De Rosa, known as soupsoup on Tumblr.

Tumblr Explore

Image by Julia Roy via FlickrThe new Explore feature on Tumblr has been a major time suck. A few days back I started following the tags animals, landscape and tech. Major time suck. So much so I started to ignore the 100 or so people I have been following on Tumblr.

David Noel created a list of techies and VCs a long time ago, and I think I ended up following pretty much everyone on the list. That is what got me started on Tumblr in the first place.

Like David Noel?

Today I started following the tag food, Amy Cao of FoodSpotting is the Top Editor. It's amazing what pictures of food can do to you. No, not make you hungry, that is not what I had in mind. It is the aesthetics of the appreciation.

Wordpress For Mobile App Creation

Image via Wikipedia

ReadWriteWeb: Like WordPress for Mobile App Creation: Cabana is a Service to Watch: Is it possible for a visual drag-and-drop mobile app creation tool to deliver a sophisticated product? ..... Drag and drop addition of features like a camera, check-ins on services like Gowalla or Foursquare, integration of the Instagram photo API and many more things are possible. ..... There is a clear demand for this kind of light app publishing technology

This is the future people. Until the mobile web attains the same levels as the big screen web, we will need apps. And just like every offline business needs its own specific website, the mobile phone app has become the equivalent of the website on the big screen web. And the only way to meet that demand would be through services like this that promise to take the wizardry out of mobile app creation. Anyone who can drag and drop should be able to build an app.

Tumblr Down, Tumblr Up

Image via CrunchBase

Business Insider: TUMBLR IS BACK!: an extended outage that started yesterday.... Tumblr's twitter account says: "The recovering database cluster is online and healthy. We're incrementally opening up access to blogs while monitoring performance."

This downtime was significant because (1) it went on and on and on, it lasted a while and (2) enemies of Tumblr had publicly warned a few weeks back that they would take it down. Right now I don't know if the downtime was due to overuse, or some act of those enemies. I am about to go dig up on the story.

A Boxee Browser

Image via CrunchBaseA few days back I wrote about how I was not too excited about the idea of a social browser. It did not feel like a big shift. You can share stuff from your Chrome browser with a few add ons.

But then I was at the Boxee Box launch party last night - and they got a swell product - but then I kept thinking, what Boxee needs to be is a browser on your laptop, not a box that takes you to a big screen.

This Blog's Design Inspired By Google, Craig's List

A netizen is not some kind of a king, but an average person. I put much thought into the name of this blog. I am a citizen of the Internet, and I hope you are too.

I have used a mainstream platform - Google's Blogger - that anyone can use. I have used a domain name that does not smack of exclusivity. Blogger gives it to you for free.

I have tinkered with the blog's design a lot over the months and years to finally come up with what I have come up with. I have got rid of many elements to make the blog load fast for the readers. Speed is a fundamental element.

I like the blank, white background. When I sit down to compose a blog post that makes me feel like I am facing a blank canvass and I am about to paint something beautiful. I would not want the blog to look snazzy and inaccessible.

The colors are for the most part default. The only color I changed was for the post titles. The default was weird orange. I changed that to pitch black.

New York Times, Time magazine and this blog all use the same font: Georgia. That is no small detail.

The header is a good one. It introduces me to the world, to the reader. It makes the blog stand out, I hope. When you pick from the popular design templates, you are not offering something unique to you.

As for snazzy design, I have saved that for my BlogRoll.

I am fond of linking. You might have noticed that. But then I am also fond of sharing pictures and video clips. If you are only interested in what I have to say, usually you get to skip the other parts of the blog. They are almost organized like sections, often, the image at the top, the links at the bottom.

Redesigning My Blog

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Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging

Image via CrunchBase

I was just busy leaving tens of comments at this particular blog post by Fred Wilson, the VC also known as AVC, and it occurred to me that we treat blog comments as almost illegitimate. There is that near universal no follow command that pulls down comments left at most blogs. I appreciate the logic behind it. Spam commenters would skew the Google PageRank mechanism. Links in the comments sections should not carry the same weights as links in the body of articles and blog posts. But to say they should carry no weight

Image via CrunchBase

at all is ridiculous. By that logic, email should be banned. Those Nigerian dictators are reason enough. So far the way we have treated blog comments - with hostility - stems out of ignorance. If you don't fathom it, destroy it. 

[WordPress #336657]: Not Being Able To Leave Comments

By that logic, Twitter is out and out ridiculous. (I Get Twitter) 140 characters? Come on.

There is blogging and there is microblogging. Twitter is microblogging, and has more than earned its rightful place. It has all the buzz. Blog posts are content. Blog post comments are microcontent. Microcontent has not been given its rightful place. And I think that has been a mistake. Good to see Disqus at work to remedy that. But it is not growing fast enough for me. There are too many blog posts that I come across that I want

Image via CrunchBase

to comment on but can't because I got there before Disqus did.

I would be curious to know how Disqus deals with the no follow nonsense.

It is Google that is slow. It has yet to deal with tweets. Google and/or Facebook have still to deal with Facebook updates. Google is nowhere close to even wanting to deal with comments at the bottom of blog posts. How social is that? Not at all.

Tweets And Facebook Updates: The Mumbojumbo

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[WordPress #336657]: Not Being Able To Leave Comments

Image via Wikipedia

For several months now I have not been able to leave comments on any Wordpress blogs. That is a lot of blogs. And I am not a happy camper. Wordpress has this wonderful thing called Akismet. Akismet's boast is that it does away with spam comments. I am an avid blogger and an avid commenter, I am no spammer. Looks like I got caught in the net, which is fine. What is not fine is I have written to them repeatedly to get me off the hook and so far they have not responded. This is a shame.



JP Rangaswami's blog is a Wordpress blog. TechCrunch is a Wordpress blog. To deny me their comments sections has got to be a misdemeanor.

I like the idea that I can leave comments at these two blogs - right now I can't - and I like the idea of trackback. If I link to posts on these two blogs, I want to be able to show up in their trackback sections. Right now I don't, and that is such a waste.

I have tried writing to them, I have tried tweeting them. Now I have resorted to blogging my complaint. Get me off the hook, folks. Or are you punishing me for having my blog on Blogger and not Wordpress? That can't be the reason.

Bye Bye Geocities
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me

Image via CrunchBase

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http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/3408247089
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/3408249560