Earn More - Thinking Outside The Box

Making Money Online:

• Traffic – You must be able to drive traffic the more the better
• CTR – You must strive to always improve your click through rate
• Conversion – You must work to improve your conversion (even programs like adsense are mentioning conversion now – study up on smart pricing and you will understand you must convert for yourself or your advertisers)

The three biggies, get any one of those elements wrong and a websites earning will simply tank. The first listed is the most important. Traffic, you can have a high click through rate (ctr) and an amazing conversion rate but with little traffic none of those other points really seam to matter. I often visit Joel Comms adsense forum site and see so many people asking about improving the CTR on a new site just launched days ago. While it makes sense to work out the site template and ad integration early my gut tells me that most of these people are spending far too much time “playing” and not spending enough time “working”. I define working as anything you do to drive traffic to a site such as add new content, get inbound links, ect ….

Creating content is probably one of the best ways you can drive traffic to a site, I post probably 3 to 8 blog posts to my various blogs a day. Steady growth of unique content, a sure fire way to get a steady steam of visitors from the search engines. Over the course of my marketing career I have also heard many experts stress just how important it is to have a “list” and it really makes so much sense. Having someone subscribe to a newsletter allows you to get your message across to that person at regular intervals. While I understood the importance of building list I always had a hard time “mailing” to my list until recently.

Aweber has changed that with a neat blogging tool that many are calling rss to email, I have recently set up this simple system on two sites (this site and another sports related blog). I thought I would take the time to share with you how I am planning on leveraging this new technology to boost my earnings online.

Awebers system is such as easy way for bloggers to continue to drive visitors to their sites, each time a blogger posts to their blog the aweber system picks up a snippet from the new article and formats in a newsletter with a link to the entire post (article). Aweber offers various newsletter templates and you can select how many posts to include in your newsletter (I call mine blog updates) before the newsletter is sent out (I send after three posts are made to my blogs).

When I first set this up on my sporting site I was not sure how I would “monetise” it, after some thinking this is what I came up with. The format of the newsletter allows for two various “sections” one section is the main content where the article snippets and article links are located. Another section they define as the “About” section where I am sure many site owners will put a two sentence blurb about the newsletter or their site.

What I did instead was to create a “adsense mini site” on my domain in order to boost my adsense revenue. I created a mini site because I wanted to provide very few links to other article in my mini site (they are located only in the footer of each page) I knew if I did this my CTR would rise simply because as my readers read my (relevant) articles the adsense links would be the online links visible until they got to the end or bottom of the page.

I created a mini-site that with about 12 articles that I know will get higher bid amounts based on commercial goods, traveling, ect … (of course they are still on topic with my main theme of the site). Then I went back to the Aweber template for my sporting site and replaced the “About” section with a section of links that I labeled:

Sports History & Merchandise

I wanted to let my visitors know exactly what this section was about, I don’t want to fool them into clicking over only to find T-Shirt and Poster articles about my sporting event. So I added the word “merchandise” and “history” then I added one link to every page of my mini site. Over the summer now every third post will trigger an email that gets sent to my subscriber list with my “adsense mini site” links included!

This little project of mine took me about 4 hours total to complete, now that the work is done all I need to do is update my blog on a regular basis (easy) and I have added an additional revenue stream. I just created this list about three weeks ago and already have about 80 subscribed. Aweber also has great tools that help with creating or signing up people to your list (like the pop on this site – it is shown every 5 days to a visitor).

xx