vWorker.com – During development, I was stuck on writing a regular expression to extract a domain name from a block of text. After some futile searching, I posted the project on vWorker (formerly Rent a Coder) to have a regexp guru solve my problem. Within a few hours, I had over 20 developers bidding on the project.  One of the developers knocked out the project in no time, and I avoided coding frustration and focused on moving the project forward. It costs me $15, and it was worth every penny.

MailChimp – I wanted to set up an email list so that I could send out a weekly email of all of the best listings in the marketplace. I looked at a number of different email providers, and MailChimp seemed like a decent solution. It has exceeded my expectation.  Setting up the mailing list, customizing the email, and integrating the sign up form with my site was far easier than I expected.

After coding up the very initial version, I was not happy with the speed and responsiveness of the site. The two tools below cut down the load size of my page and helped to speed up the site.

Smush.it – The template that I used for the site had some sizable images, and I had no idea how to optimize them in GIMP.  Some quick googling revealed that Smush.it was the answer to my problem. The service lets you upload image files and it returns to you a zip file of all of your image files optimized, without degrading image quality. I was skeptical at first, but the results were fantastic. My total image size was reduced by 70%. This is by far my favorite Yahoo! product.

Amazon CloudFront – My webhost had a very easy to use integration with Amazon’s CloudFront, their CDN service. After uploading  images and CSS files to CloudFront, Amazon places them on its servers around the world and then pulls the images from the servers closest to the visitors to your site.  Images loaded noticeably faster after setting this up.

In the .CM initial landrush domain bidding, I bid on five domain names. My criteria for bidding was

1.)    The .com version of the domain name had at least one million unique visitors per month from the US, based on Comscore data.

2.)    I had in mind a clear way to monetize the traffic (e.g. relevant affiliate offers based on the user profile of the .com domain name).

3.)    I estimated that the site would have a significant volume of type-in traffic. This was based on intuition.

I ended up winning two of the five names, and I was very excited to test traffic to the two domain names. After a few months of testing, I can report that the two .cm domains received almost no traffic. I did not expect a flood of traffic, but the volume was significantly below my expectations. Going forward, I would only purchase a .cm domain name in order to protect the brand of one of my existing sites.  Let me know if you had different results from the purchase of .CM domain names.

As soon as they implemented the feature, they were sending tens of thousands of email messages per day.  Some of the big email providers did not take kindly to their email practices (which were completely legitimate) and they were blocked from both Yahoo! and Hotmail within a week.

To help them in this situation, I was in charge of researching email deliverability consultants to help with the problem.  Although there are some standard technologies that can be implemented to help improve deliverability (Domain Keys, SPF, etc.) the whole process seems like black magic. Naturally, there are lots of consultants out there pitching their deliverability voodoo. I was amazed when I spoke with one of the leading companies in the space and they were looking for a retainer of $10,000 to $15,000 per month.  I am sure that they are good at what they do, but this seemed exorbitant to me.  After researching many options, I recommended that the company work with a consulting company on a three month engagement for a very reasonable $750 per month. The company has big name clients and a great deliverability track record. I will report back in a few months to let you know if they were able to improve the company’s deliverability. 

You can check out the ads in question here.  The landing page at Sedo is located here.

So why is SiteViper worth using?

• SiteViper aggregates for sale listings from around the web so that you don’t have to spend time wading through forums. Listings are refreshed every 15 minutes, so you will not miss anything.
• You can subscribe via RSS.
• You can search and set up RSS or email alerts for new listings matching your criteria. This feature is invaluable when you are looking for a site or domain that matches a specific niche.
• Listings are grouped into categories so you can view just sites or just domains for sale.

I plan on making a series of improvements to the site over the next few weeks. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Some of my doubts about Facebook’s ability to monetize their platform were fueled by recent reports of abysmal performance for bulletin advertising (0.04% click through rate). Facebook users are relatively sophisticated, and they just don’t click on conventional advertisements, or even the Facebook specific bulletins. So how will Facebook generate revenue to justify the lofty valuations being tossed around by the media?

According to the rate card on Valleywag, Facebook offers sponsors heavily branded placement on brand-specific groups (e.g. The Dave Matthews Band Group). They pitch the service as a way for brands to connect with Facebook members and inject some viral potential into their marketing.  The list price for the branded groups is $150,000 for three months. Currently, Facebook has 150 of these groups. If this numbers stays constant, they will be looking at $90 million in annual revenue.

If you add in some premium banner placement, the fixed banner ad deal they are getting from Microsoft, bulletins, and poll revenue, and then we are talking about some very promising numbers. I will be watching closely to see if Facebook can continue to grow their advertising base in proportion to their user growth.

I think Facebook would benefit from delving into the CPA world a little bit more. Myspace must be making a killing with their relatively new ringtones section. They are probably earning at least $10/signup for the ringtone promotion with Jamster. With some creative promotion, Facebook could be the uber super affiliate. For example, Facebook knows when students are graduating, and they know that many students will be moving when they graduate. By presenting targeted offers related to moving to a new location (moving services, insurance, internet service,etc.), Facebook could make a killing. Very few services have as detailed demographic and behavioral data that could be leveraged for innovative monetization.

Facebook ratecard at Valleywag.

Tags: facebook, monetize, ratecard

If you keep the box checked, a text message with a “coupon code” will be sent to your phone, and you will be asked to enter your “coupon code” on the next page. If you enter the code, you will be charged $9.99/month to be a member of Bid4Prizes. Bid4Prizes is a cell phone based auction system owned by the same company that operates the popualr mobilesidewalk ringtone affiliate program.

Photobucket is making at least $7.50 per user who enters a coupon code. They are probably making even more based on the significant volume they are driving to the offer. Considering the relatively young demographic of Photobucket’s users, I am sure that they are generating a ton of signups, and there are probably some surprised parents out there looking at cell phone charges from Bid4Prizes. According to the May Photobucket newseltter, they are registering 85,000 new users per day. If the offer converts at 1% of new users, they are generating over $2.2 million dollars in revenue per year from the offer.

This monetization strategy is very aggressive, and it will be interesting to see how long Photobucket maintains the practice.

The .cm landing pages receive roughly 8 million uniqe visitors per month. In my initial post, I mentioned that whoever was behind the .cm domain redirect was leaving money on the table by not customizing the landing pages based on the domain entered. According to the article, all of the domains point to the same landing page in order to provide some defense against accusations of typo-squatting. By Mr. Ham’s logic, the service is not typo-squatting, but simply a redirection where all domains are treated equally. The article is a great peak into the world of domaining, and I highly recommend checking it out.

In the comments of my last post, someone mentioned Rightway Gate, a company that claims to be able to register .cm domain names.  I gave them a call last week.  They claimed that if you could provide proof of a trademark or other intellectual property, they would work with the Carmeron domain registry to get you the domain. I am not sure if the service is legitimate, but it is something to explore if you are desperate.

The first thing that sparked my interest was how on earth they could maintain such a rapid rate of new user acquisition.  During their signup process, they slyly ask users to import their address book to invite friends to the site. The friend invitations are some of the slickest that I have seen.  You can see some screenshots and a full writeup of the process here. I have read that they send out the invite multiple times. Apparently, this strategy has been very effective for them.

On the monetization side, they have done a good job of developing multiple revenue streams. They make money from:

• Email Marketing Opt-In at Registration (via postmasterdirect)
• Banners
• Search Agreement with Ask Jeeves. The techcrunch article says that most of their revenue is derived from the search agreement.
• Intellitxt. On all of their profile pages, certain keywords are highlighted and if a user hovers over them, they will be presented with ads from intellitext.
• Ringtones. They have some text links to ringtone CPA offers. With the size of their teen audience, they should make a killing on ringtones.
• Sale of Downloadable Games. They offer paid downloads of full versions of games such as bejeweled. Game downloads are probably not a huge revenue stream for them, but I like the diversification.
• They insert “targeted text ads” into the emails and site messages user s send. They are using a Adknowledge to provide the ads. I am curious how well the ads are actually targeted.

With their level of traffic, Tagged has a huge revenue opportunity. To further improve their monetization, I would pursue:

• Developing in the sponsorship/direct promotion area (think myspace). On their employment page, they are hiring some ad executives which should help with this.
• Promoting targeted CPA offers. Ringtones are a good start, but they could expand to education and other targeted offers.
• Market Research. Market researches would pay up ($4-$8/survey) for access to their userbase.

With such explosive growth, Tagged will be a good company to keep an eye on for the next few months.  In my next post, I will cover an aggressive monetizaton tactic of a site with a similar demographic.

Tags: tagged, case, study, cpa, monetize, monetization, advertising

I have seen a drastic improvement by redirecting the traffic to the blinko affiliate program on azoogle. The previous owner was using Sedo to monetize the domain. This earned him approximately $0.13 per visitor. The affiliate program redirect has earned my over $0.40 per visitor over the first month and a half. This equates to $430 CPM. The traffic volume is not huge, but it is a nice additional revenue stream. I will keep my eyes open to apply this technique to more domain names.