It may seem like a silly question, but I believe many have websites just for the fun of it. They could also be basic information sites, but all the same, I am curios to know how many of you want to make money from your site.
Here is the poll: Are you trying to make money with your website or blog?
Are you trying to make money with your website or blog?(trends)
So you may be asking what is a “Targeted Bounce”. I don’t think there is a known popular definition, but I certainly have one.
A targeted bounce is marketing to random visitors with the hopes they will enjoy your site.
If you market to anyone and everyone, you will have a targeted audience that will most surely bounce off of your site. Additionally, if you market your site without clearly defining it, your visitors are as good as random.
You hear it a lot, having a tag line is important. Even the blogging software I am using to write this post, WordPress, has a spot for me to enter a tag line. It asks for the blog title, and the next thing it asks for is the tag line. You got to have one, and not just because it’s cool. You have to have one because it defines what you do. Best Web Image – Web Usability and Design, “Web usability and Design” is my tag line. By reading my tag line you should quickly understand that my site is about usability and design, and not the best web images.
Check out EduBook. It’s an article marketing site. Notice the screenshot I took of it. No tag line, and in fact, you might think it’s about horse training if you read the first post title. It’s not. Their specialty is really not even apparent at first glance. Here is what they do:
The only way you can really tell that their site is about article marketing would be to visit those categories. The category is then obviously filled with articles and titles that you would expect. A few of them pretty good as well. So this is the killer for me. You spend a whole bunch of time writing quality articles, but your site fails you because you have not clearly defined it. Visitors show up, they think “What is this site?’, find no visual clues, and bounce.
Take the time to define your site. Add a tag line, offer a brief introduction paragraph, give your visitors a clear reason to be their. You may bounce the ones not interested in your niche, but that is OK, they are not interested in your niche. Grab the ones that are interested, and don’t let go. Don’t target a bounce.
When I do my Basic Usability and Design Analysis, there are two particular items I check for. Does the site stay on topic, and if it has advertisements, do the advertisements interfere with the visitors use of the site.
Here is a good example of staying on topic. The site File-O-Scope does two things really well on this site. They skipped trying to make money from advertisements, and they kept the site on topic. They want to sell LAN file search software and not ad clicks. Ads are distractions, and if you use enough of them, they could start working against you.
Imagine the File-O-Scope site with just a couple of Google text ads running. Now imagine it gets 1,000 visitors a day. If ten a day click on those ads, generating say, $0.20 a click, they could make a whopping $2 a day. Over a month that is $60. That $60 also just cost 300 visitors from buying their product. If their marketing guys have been doing a good job, and sending them a quality target audience they should be getting at least 1% of their visitors to make a purchase. 1% of 300 is 3 sales. Their product is $39.95, and that times those three new sales is $119.85. No ads, double their money.
You could argue that you could make more than $0.20 a click, but I could also argue that I did not count the cost to get those visitors to the site. I could also argue that because the site has less distractions without the ads, the sales increased for the group of visitors that did not buy or did not click on an ad. More people were likely to buy. If total sales increased by just 0.5% from overall traffic, that could be five more sales. Revenue from ads on a site like this just don’t add up enough to make sense.
When I see excessive ads on a site, it’s an automatic signature to me that site owner is either desparate, making some serious money, or does not really see the purpose of their own site. Usually it not the case of the first two, but a signature of slop. The sites main idea has been lost, or was never fully developed to begin with. These sites are typically full of distractions, or what I like to think of as “good ideas that don’t belong”, and ads, ads, ads. Why isn’t my site making enough money they think, or I just haven’t sold enough ads. Sorry, that’s not the problem. The problem is their distraction.
Good ideas can also be just as damaging. I have a good idea, I will add another widget to my site. Yikes, don’t do it! Here is a little hint on how to focus your site, and get visitors loving it. The Hint: “One of the greatest inventions for the computer is the delete button.” Don’t go deleting the site though, just the distractions!
As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of putting ads on this site. The traffic required to make those ads worth it would have to be a lot, and though I would like to tell you this site is getting 10,000+ visitors a day, it is not. Most sites do have ads though, and there placement can make all the difference in the world.
The first thing you need to think about when putting ads on your site, is why? This falls into your sites plan. Are you building a website to make money from ad space, or are adding ads to supplement your income? If it’s to supplement your income, I would strongly reconsider your decision. I have many sites, most have ads running on them, but not all. Which ones make the most money? The ones without, go figure. Ads are a distraction, and if you are selling a product, why on earth would you want distract them. An even worse case scenario, is they actually click on one of your ads, and leave your site. Did you make money in that case, or lose money from a loss of sale?
If your site is there to make money from ads then you need to decide where to put them. There are all sorts of sites out there that will tell you where to put the ads, Google Adsense is one of them. It’s basically common sense though, put the ads where they eyes would naturally go. One strong bit of advice is though, don’t put the ads in a place where it can interfere with the sites navigation. This may get you a click, but you will for sure aggravate the visitor. Depending on your ad agency, if it happens enough and the bounces are high, you may not even get credit for those clicks. Loss of visitor, loss of money.
Without much effort I was easily able to find a site with some Google ads on it, Graphic.org. Graphic.org is designed to be a resource for educators showing different types of graphical methods of organization. The ads are aggressively placed within the content, but are done in a way that does not interfere with the sites navigation or function. Visible, but not interfering is the key to good ad placement. They have also been consistent in placement so it is easy for the visitor to know what is an ad, and what is content.
Some might say that they don’t want to place their ads so aggressively. I would partially aggree. The solution? If you want to make money from ads, be aggressive in placement. If you don’t want to make so much money from ads, don’t put them on your site.
Paid To Review is a very popular and successful website, which main purpose is to inform people how to make money online.
The site contains many articles informing people how that they can go about earning money using the Internet. Such ways of making money include paid surveys (where people get paid to answer surveys online), writing product reviews (where people get paid to review various products online), by using cashback websites (where people can get paid cashback every time they perform a transaction online), and from various other ways of making money online.
Most of the ways of making money online mentioned on the Paid To Review website are completely free to participate in, only requiring a little understanding of how the methods actually work – how someone actually goes about making money from that opportunity. The website contains a lot of in-depth articles, which explain the exact steps required to profit from these money making ways.
Recently the Paid To Review website has added various guides which explain how somebody can make money from setting up their own free website, or blog. This basically involves opening a free account at a blog provider website, and then adding some kind of advertisements or affiliate programs to the blog. By doing some basic free promotion of your blog, you could then start to build up traffic to the site, and earn some money every time one of your advertisements gets viewed or clicked.
So although the website used to simply provide information about making money using various websites, it now contains some more in-depth guides to earning money by setting up websites and blogs, which is a little more technical then simply answering paid surveys, writing product reviews, or even by using cashback websites. And to be honest, if someone is actually interested in making a serious amount of money on the Internet then it is imperative that they get involved in more than online surveys.
The Paid To Review website has also added quite a nice new feature recently – a money making forum. On the forum you are able to discuss issues related to making money online. Perhaps you had read a guide on the Paid To Review site but hadn’t fully understood it – you could simply post a question in the forum, and someone is bound to help you out. Adding a forum to the site has increased the interactivity of the website, finally enabling the visitors a chance to discuss the many ways to make money online. However, the forum has only been active for a few days, so activity is still pretty quiet, but due to the popularity of the Paid To Review website it shouldn’t be long before the forums are very busy.
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Parallel Design Comparison
Tuesday I mentioned that I would be doing a three part post on three different credit cards sites. This is the first of the three. All three card sites are owned by the same person. All three have been designed to give advice to the user about selecting the right card, and offer links to the credit card companies. In this three part post I want to show how testing parallel designs can be beneficial to a site owner, and how being sold on just one layout could be a huge mistake.
The sites in comparison are: http://www.nowcreditcards.co.uk/ (link no longer seems to be working 2/2010), Credit Cards Comparison, and Compare Credit Cards.
Please Comment
Knowing that these sites are designed to educate, and then get visitors to visit the credit card sites, which site do you think performs the best? Specifically, when I say perform, I mean which site do you think sends visitors on to the credit card sites the most? Feel free to comment below saying which one and why. In the third and final part of this post I will reveal the best site, and yes I have spoken to the owner. I do know what site is out performing the others.
Part two of this post will review each site, their selling points, and the steps a user would need to take to complete the desired goal.