As I mentioned in a previous post about AdSense blending, I mentioned that I have been doing some testing on one of my sites. Over the past few weeks, I ran four different versions of AdSense blending color schemes on my cliff notes site. I tested the color scheme that I have always run on the site (labeled Baseline in the table on the right) and three different color variations.

My goal was to increase the click through rate on the ads. The results are listed in the table on the right. The bottom color scheme increased the click through rates on my ads by 31%. While I expected some improvement, I did not anticipate getting this much lift from just altering the color scheme. I am particularly surprised by the difference between the fourth ad and the third ad. The gray text appeared to have a huge impact on click through rates. The gray text really helps to give the ads a different feel and blend them into the content of the site.

I still have a lot more experimenting to do, and I will continue to post my results on the site. As always, I would love to hear your AdSense optimization tips.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about AdSense optimization. In reading through the forums over at SitePoint today, I came across this useful post asking for example of good blending of AdSense ads into content. There are some very nice examples in the post which may help to generate some ideas. I especially like this one. The site uses complimentary images very well, and does a great job of blending ads with the content.
I have been running some AdSense blending tests one of my sites, and I will publish the results here soon as a case study.

After having one of my sites banned from AdSense, I decided to test a number of alternate advertising programs. AdBrite (aff link) was the first program that I tried. AdBrite sign up is quick and painless. As soon as you are accepted to the program and place the code on your site, you can start displaying run on network ads. You can also enter tags to your site, which will help advertisers find your site. The run of network ads were acceptable, but not great. Ads relating to MySpace and educational sites performed best on my site.

I ran AdBrite ads for about a week, and my click through rate was close to ten times lower than my AdSense click through rate for the exact same space. Revenue per click was half of what I was earning with AdSense. Needless to say, I will continue my search for AdSense alternatives.

Despite my lack of success with AdBrite, I think that it could work very well for some larger sites. If advertisers are frequently asking for space on your site, AdBrite could be a hassle free way to manage your inventory. I would be very interested to hear about any AdBrite success stories out there.

A few weeks ago, I emailed Adsense support to ask about an idea I had for displaying an Adsense search box on my site.  In response to my inquiry, I received an email from an Adsense rep informing me that my free term paper website did not comply with the Adsense program policy. After exchange a number of emails with customer support reps, they informed me that they had “exercise editorial discretion” and determined that my site was not a good fit for Adsense.

The situation is mind boggling to me. I have been running Adsense on the site since April of 2003 without any problems. I was one of the beta testers for Adsense because I was working with the company Google acquired to get the foundation technology for Adsense.

Banning my site is also confusing because on the AdWords side of the house, Google allows term paper related advertisers. A Google search for term papers shows at least 50 AdWords advertisers. When I pointed this out to the AdSense customer support rep, I was told that AdWords is a separate program and that it has a separate policy.

Despite my efforts to point out the inconsistencies in my banning, I could not get the ban reversed.  In the next few weeks, I will be trying out a number of replacement programs, and I will post my reviews of the programs here. I plan on testing YPN, Adbrite, Clicksor, Text Link Ads, and others.

I would be very interested in hearing from anyone with similar experiences or good ideas for Adsense alternatives.

I have had some decent success with a handful of advertising and affiliate programs. Here are five programs from which I have made at least a $1,000.

Websponsors – One of the first affiliate networks that I had some good luck with. For a while, I was making a ton of money off their free poetry offer that paid out at $1.00 per lead. Lately, I have had some success with their free student pack offer that pays out $.60/lead.

AdSense – I have done well with AdSense since its inception. I would like to do some more testing to optimize AdSense on my sites, and I will chronicle the results of the testing on this blog.

Adteractive – Adteractive is another good affiliate network. I have had some success running their FastWeb scholarship and JackPot offers on a few sites that I helped with finding good affiliate offers.

EmarketMakers – Their free stuff and contest offers have produced for me. They have a large selection of offers.

CommissionJunction – I have not run any CJ programs in a long time, but I made some nice money on offers for internet accelerator software and romance books a while ago.

While compiling this list, the one thing that stuck out at me was that I have had a variety of different types of advertising programs earn me good money. The key was just taking the time to ferret out the good programs and offers that fit well with my audience.

In my post about a framework to make more money from your site, I wrote about Revenue Generation Methods as a key driver in site revenue. While I was checking del.icio.us today, I noticed a great blog post titled Beyond AdSense: A Business Model Checklist. It features a rather extensive list of revenue generation methods. Hopefully, some of these may strike some great ideas on how you can make more money from your blog or website. I especially like the concept of using a site to promote professional services. Someday, I could see using MonetizeTraffic to promote consulting services.

I am also a big fan of the idea to “Sell Intelligence.” For one company that I used to work for, I developed partnerships with two market research companies where we helped to field a panel for custom research reports. This alternate revenue stream was a great complement to our existing advertising and affiliate programs. As this blog grows, I will write in more detail about some of these revenue generation methods, and I look forward to hearing from visitors about creative methods they are using to drive revenue.

So you want to make more money from your blog or website?  This can sometimes feel like a complicated problem without a clear place to start. One of the things that has stayed with me since college was that the best way to attack a seemingly daunting problem is to establish a framework for the problem. While this may seem overly simple to some, I find that it has helped me to make improvements to my sites.

For increasing revenue from my site, I like to frame the problem as:

Revenue = Traffic * Monetization
Traffic = f(Search Engine Optimization, Quality Content, Viral Nature of Site)
Monetization = f(Revenue Generation Methods, Ads Per Page, Ad Effectiveness)

Let’s walk through the framework.

The first equation shows that Revenue can be thought of as the traffic to your site times the rate that you monetize visitors to your site. If your blog receives 100,000 page views and you monetize the site at $3.00 per thousand visitors, then your blog’s revenue will be $300/month.  If you want to increase revenue to your site, there are essentially two variables that you can adjust.  You can increase traffic or you can increase the rate that you monetize your site.  When working on enhancements to my sites, I like to focus my efforts around one of these two variables.

So how do you improve either the traffic or monetization of your site? As noted in the framework above, I consider traffic and monetization to each be composed of driven by 3 key drivers

Key Traffic Drivers
1.) Search Engine Optimization. A well-optimized site can make a huge difference in search engine traffic. This is an area of interest to me, but not something that I am particularly good at.
2.) Quality Content. Sites with quality content should receive more traffic over time. The impact of quality traffic can be further amplified by the third key driver.
3.) Viral Nature of Site. Some sites just have a great viral quality about them which greatly amplifies their traffic. Of course MySpace and YouTube are great example of this. I can’t tell you how many times I have referred my friends over to videos on YouTube.

Key Monetization Drivers
1.)    Streams of Revenue. Well monetized blogs or websites often have multiple streams of revenue. For example, on some of my sites I have sponsors, use AdSense, and some affiliate links.
2.)    Ad Density. I think of ad density as the number of ads on a site. A delicate balance is usually required here. Too few ads will leave money on the table, and too many ads will drive away users.
3.)    Ad Effectiveness. You can have tons of the AdSense and affiliate links on your site, but they have to be relevant to the site to generate clicks and/or desired affiliate actions. Contextual advertising has made this much easier than it used to be, but I think many sites have opportunities to increase the effectiveness of the ads which they run.

Throughout the life of this blog, I plan to touch upon many of these key drivers, with special emphasis on the monetization side. This is my first pass at the framework, if you think I left out any key factors, feel free to leave me some feedback.

MonetizeTraffic is a new blog devoted to the strategies and ideas to make more money from your website/blog. The site will feature reviews of advertising and affiliate programs, techniques to optimize revenue generation, and case studies. The site will rely heavily upon my experiences running a number of web properties.

About Paul
My name is Paul and I run MonetizeTraffic along with a number of web properties. You can see some of them listed in the Projects box on the right side bar. I have been involved in making money on the web since I launched my first website in 1996. In addition to running my sites, I was one of the first employees of Kiwibox.com, a website for teen girls. At Kiwibox, I worked on business development, and I learned a lot about helping to run a large site. Over the years, I have also provided online strategy consulting services for a Congressional campaign and CollegeProwler, a college guidebook company. I still have a lot to learn about making money online, and I hope to share my learning experiences via MonetizeTraffic.

Contact Paul