Monetizing A Blog

English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here's a good one.

How I monetized a blog in 30 days: what worked, and what didn't

The Pinterest Gods

I help my mom run a cooking blog called The Yummy Life. She writes all the content, and I make sure the site actually works. We've been at it for almost two years, and until recently there wasn't much reason to worry about monetizing it because there was never enough traffic for it to matter. Then one day the Pinterest gods decided that we deserved better and in a frantic storm of pinning, our traffic shot up to about 25,000 visitors per day...... Before the spike we were getting ~4k visitors per day. The peak of the spike brought ~67k. It then fell to about 20-25k and it's stayed there ever since. There hasn't been any downward trend in the past three weeks, and almost all of the traffic is still coming from Pinterest.

Tips

#1 - Remove as much crap as possible from the sidebar (Good, Bad)
#2 - Use affiliate links to customize the ads for each post .... create her own ads for each post. Each ad links to a product on Amazon through an affiliate link. .... the Amazon affiliate links are generating almost twice as much revenue per visitor as the AdSense ads (~$5 RPM from Amazon, ~$2.50 RPM from AdSense).
#3 - Have the ads scroll with the page
.... steps #1 and #3 combined to increase our AdSense CTR (click-through-rate) by a factor of 33 (.03% to 1%).

Bad Ideas

Google AdSense text ads
Amazon pre-made banner ads
Amazon aStore .... This month we've had 3,288 orders placed through our on-page ads. We've had exactly zero placed through the aStore.
$0.99 eBook
Publishing networks

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Top Posts Of 2012

This is a must see list: Managing Startups: Best Posts of 2012.

I Like To Read, I Like To Take Pictures

Nexus 4: My First Smartphone
Nexus 4 Is Way Too Cool

I have been playing with my Nexus 4 for days now. It is such a joy.

I have downloaded and organized a whole bunch of apps. I have discovered that I really like to read. Some of my favorite apps help me read. I also seem to like to take pictures. I have discovered. These are not revelations to me. More like confirmations. But confirmations I am happy about.

I really like to read. Pocket is a good one. It beats Flipboard in my book. I like the idea of saving in Pocket on my laptop to read later on the phone. My private homepage on my laptop already has an excellent curation of read destinations.

Amazon Kindle is awesome and easily my favorite app on my seven inch tablet. I am glad to have the Wikipedia app on the phone. Wikipedia is an awesome aspect of the Internet.

I have tried and loved several game apps. I played for hours, one of them overnight, it seemed like. But I did not find myself going back to them the following day. Chess I have gone back to. That is a good classic game in which to want to climb levels.

Path pictures are good, as Instagram pictures. The smartphone is such a poor camera that it has to make up for through filters and effects.

It is a treat to be able to download apps for your phone while sitting in front of a laptop.

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Kurzweil Has Found A Home

Singularity: I Am Not Convinced

Singularity is not a concept I have bought into. But anyone who proposes it is a bold thinker. And in attempts at singularity many great things will happen. I want those great things.

Google’s New Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus. ..... Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information. ...... “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, “Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.” ..... Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.” .... Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend. ....... Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”

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Nexus 4 Is Way Too Cool

The Nexus 4 Is A Beautiful Thing
Nexus 4: My First Smartphone

An iPhone Lover’s Confession: I Switched To the Nexus 4. Completely.

Over the past few years I’ve invested a lot into Apple’s products and services.

If you come by my house, you’d find four of the latest Apple TVs, two iMacs, the latest MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, more than five AirPort Express stations and Apple’s Time Capsule. You could touch every single iPhone, from the first up to the iPhone 5, iPads ranging from first generation to fourth and we recently added two iPad minis.

My iTunes Library comprises well over 8,000 songs – all purchased via the iTunes Store. No matter whom you would ask, everybody will confirm that I’m what some folks call an Apple fanboy.

The reach of Apple’s products goes beyond my personal life.

As the co-founder of Germany’s largest mobile development shop, I’m dealing with apps – predominantly iOS powered – in my daily professional life.

Driven primarily by the business I run, I tried to give Android a chance more than once.

In various self-experiments, I tried to leave my iPhone at home for the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One, the Samsung Galaxy S II and S III – and always switched straight back to the iPhone. None of those Android devices have worked for me – yet.
And then I got the Nexus 4.

Putting it into a single line: The latest version of Android outshines the latest version of iOS in almost every single aspect.

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Android Has Moved On

Image via CrunchBase

Android came before the iOS, although the iOS, upon launch, was better than the Android experience. But all that is past tense. Android is securely in the lead now. And the number of apps on the Android platform is a key indicator that is the case.

Google Play will hit a million apps in June (probably sooner than the iOS app store)

Google Play now has 800,000 apps and is growing faster than the iOS app store...... Google Play was growing revenues twice as fast as Apple’s app store. And with the fact that while it took eight months for Google Play to go from 200,000 to 400,000 apps, it took only slightly longer to get from 400,000 to its current 800,000 — meaning that Google is almost maintaining its rate of growth despite the massive increase in absolute numbers.

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