At the request of a friend I met today with a small group of young, aspiring webpreneurs. These are exactly the kind of people I hope to be connecting with here on the Leap blog, so I was excited about getting a more personal interaction and some instant feedback.

The meeting was very productive, the people were great and I learned a little about how the things I was talking about (the same things I write about here) were being received. Not all of it as I expected or intended, so that will help me do better here going forward.

Here are 2 things I took from it that I wanted to share right away here.

Where’s The Beef?

The big question all of them had for me was did I think now was a bad time to start a web business of any kind?

That’s a fair question and I had anticipated it might come up. Attempting a very poor Senator Ted Stevens impression, I coldly yelled “NO!” to the room. They laughed, but I’m not sure they really knew why.

Here is my reasoning as I explained it to them. Right now lots of small operations are going down. Heck, lots of big companies are dropping to. It’s a terrible time to be an established business with operational costs that were budgeted long before this current down turn hit.

It’s a fact of business that the bigger and more established you become, the more intricate and detailed everything gets, the more you have to operate on a projected budget and the harder it becomes to react to real time conditions.

So when things get tight they have to trim costs in areas other than where they really want to. So people lose jobs, service and support levels decrease, the company image takes hits… it just snowballs. And ultimately, some go completely under.

And while all of that is sad, remember that we’re talking about real people losing their jobs, but the flip side to that is these companies which go under leave a void in their marketplaces, and for the nimble startup who isn’t working on projections from numbers of last year yet that’s an opportunity to launch from.

This applies to companies and startups of all sizes, even the lone-ranger home based startup.

Right now, I assure you, there are a lot of people who have been struggling to make a go at Internet Marketing–maybe you’re one of them–and they are debating with themselves over giving up or plowing forward.

Some will quit. It’s sad to see someone give up their dreams but completely understandable. There are bills to pay, hungry mouths to feed. A steady paycheck from anywhere becomes very attractive when everything seems to be going against you.

But some will stay with it. Those who do will find new elbow room in their niches as others leave. Suddenly they go from being Guppies to Sharks in the same tank.

My point is that if you can afford to do it, then I believe this is a opportunistic time to start up.

It isn’t an easy time. Just because someone else left a void in the marketplace doesn’t mean customers who weren’t spending money with them will buy your products, they may still not spend money for a while and you’ll have to be ready for that.

But, with less crowded waters it is an opportunity for the noobie to really learn how to swim them. To become intimate with your market and get to know your customer’s needs and expectations, so you’ll be fully prepared for the inevitable economic upswing when it comes and they start spending again.

AdSense is great for site publishers! Except for most of the time when it’s the wrong choice…

I talked with the group today a little bit about adsense. And after a few minutes I realized that I was giving them the wrong impression (in my opinion) that adsense is always a reliable and safe revenue stream.

In-fact, I think it is when used on the right kind of web site. But I also think it’s a waste and counter-productive for a majority of web sites.

Here’s what I really think about it in-case I’ve given the wrong impression here on the blog in the past.

If you run a web site where visitors might be looking for a service oriented solution to some problem, then adsense is a fantastic way to monetize your pages.

Put yourself into the mind of the common visitor to your site. What problems are they going to be facing and seeking solutions for? Are the solutions to those problems typically process or product based?

If the answer is process based then you have a good site for running adsense on. Especially if the process is usually performed by some type of professional.

However, if the solution is typically product based, meaning any sort of tool or even a learning aid that would help your visitor eventually perform the process for themselves with no professional help required, then you would be foolish to put adsense on your pages and earn pennies for clicks where you could have earned dollars by putting an affiliate ad for the product in that same place.

I know adsense is easy to setup and start seeing fast money with, but it’s small potatoes compared to what you could earn with the same page real estate through an affiliate product.

So, when appropriate I love adsense, but most of the time I just don’t think it’s appropriate.

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Technorati Tags: AdSense, internet marketing

I see that line often on blogs and forums I frequent, “I can’t make any money with my blog (or site)…”

More often than not it seems to me they actually are making some money, but its pennies per day with some form of contextual advertising and they aren’t satisfied with pennies per day. Who can blame them?

There’s a lot of reasons why contextual ads may not be doing well on a given site. Everything from the display style and layout that can effect your click rates–to the actual content and keywords of the site that may be causing lower paying ads to be displayed–and a million other things that are too advanced or intricate to try to define and explain here.

In my experience, most sites can make a decent return from contextual advertising, especially with Google’s or Yahoo’s, but there are a few genres that don’t seem to have the advertiser volume to supply site owners with enough high paying opportunities to make what they want or expect from their ad blocks.

So, what to do if AdSense, YPN!, AdBrite, AdEngage, BidVertiser, etc. advertising isn’t performing on your site or blog and you think you’ve tried everything to improve the click rates and keyword targeting on it already?

Well, something I’m a huge fan of is running your own text based advertising blocks on pages. In-fact, I even do this sometimes on sites where normal contextual advertising is performing good for me and I’ll tell you why: because I can use these spots to advertise affiliate products that pay much higher commissions than any pay-per-click model will generate for me…provided I’m able to match the displayed ads to the content effectively.

Sure, I may not see the $3 or $4 dollars per day that I might have with AdSense or a similar PPC program, but if the ads I display are content-relevant and formatted well I often see great conversion rates that earn much more on a monthly basis than that $3 to $4 dollars per day would amount to.

And sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, so I’ll switch back to a traditional PPC ad network on those site(s) or pages. The point is I’m always tweaking and tinkering to see what’s going to work best where for me.

Which brings me back to a site or blog that just isn’t earning any revenue to speak of with the traditional ad networks. If you can write a little HTML, CSS (and JavaScript or better yet, PHP would be a great addition since they’ll allow you to serve up dynamic ads across your various site pages based on the individual page keywords for well targeted ads) then you can try to create your own text based advertising blocks, following the basic designs that are known to work and offered by every ad network already.

Just select plenty of affiliates with products that are related to your site/blog’s overall theme, and try to match the best ones for display on each page as best you can.

You might just be surprised at the results.

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Technorati Tags: blog, make money, web site

Unless you’re creating a specific product for sale, or providing a specific service on a per-client basis, the odds are that you’re hoping to generate revenue from your web site as a content producer.

This is a solid way to generate income, and for people who can create a steady flow of original, informative and engaging content it can be a highly rewarding venture.

But how do you make money from producing and publishing content? There are actually numerous ways to monetize your content web site, from displaying contextual advertisements–such as Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads–to individual text link and affiliate products sales such as from those Amazon ads you see on every other web site.

Now, there are some who argue that it’s wrong to place advertising on your informational web site or blog, and dishonest to promote affiliate products there as well.

I respect their opinions of purity, but I have to disagree with them whole-heartedly. If I spend hours of my time researching a topic, and then formulating my research, knowledge and experience into a concise, informational posting or article; and then publish it absolutely free for all to access and read on my web site that I’ve paid out of pocket to own [the domain for], build [the actual site] and host online, isn’t it fair for me to place non-intrusive advertising on my pages that may generate a small financial return for my efforts? I believe it is.

I do agree that some advertising is over-the-top, such as heavy flash files and pop-ups/pop-unders, and I would never use those on my personal site. But, relevant, on-topic contextual ads and text links don’t interfere with the published content or degrade the visitor’s experience in any way. And, they can often provide visitors with exposure to resources of value that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about. As I see it, these types of revenue streams are a benefit to the advertiser, as well as for the content publisher and their readers.

I also think they’re about as honest an earned income as there is online. To earn a consistent income from these advertisements requires getting and maintaining lots of traffic. To get and sustain lots of traffic, the content publisher has to constantly produce high-quality content that’s of value to their visitors. In other words, your earnings are directly related to your efforts. The harder you work, the better your content will be. The better your content is, the more traffic you’ll generate. The more traffic you get, the more money you will earn. But slack off, or publish garbage and the bottom will fall out in no time.

I also feel the same is true of affiliate product endorsing too. No sincere content producer who strives to provide valuable information to their readers is going to diminish his or her site and reputation by endorsing garbage. But if he or she believes the product is a quality resource, then it seems fair to be compensated with a small commission for any sales that result from informing readers of it.

Using O`Bannon’s Leap as an example, I have endorsed a couple of products with affiliate links in postings, and in every instance it was something that I would recommend to my own Mother without hesitation–knowing it was a value for the price. I understand that even (maybe especially) online, we become known by the company we keep, and if I were to endorse crap products just for the affiliate commissions that would quickly turn around to bite me as readers began to associate my site with crap. No serious content producer is going to risk that for a couple dimes off of a few sales.

But I don’t see anything wrong with earning those small commissions when referring interested readers to quality products, and letting them decide for themselves if it’s worth the cost to buy or not. Again, I think it’s win-win for everyone. The readers who want the value and use of the products get them, the product supplier gets another sale and customer, and the content producer is rewarded for bringing the buyer and seller together.

So, now that I’ve gone on about what various ways there are to generate income from your content site–and there are others too, I’ve stuck to the most popular methods to keep this from becoming novel length–you may be curious as to which method(s) I suggest using?

The short answer is all of them. As the title of this post implies, I think it’s best to diversify yourself with as many streams of revenue as possible.

Not to squeeze advertising into every pixel of your pages, that’s not my intentions at all. But because no single source of income is ever guaranteed to last. If you use Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network to deliver contextual ads, there’s always a risk of having your account terminated, even for false allegations made to Google or Yahoo! about you I have heard. If that is your only stream of income, the well would be dry overnight.

The same goes for text link advertising. You never know if someone will want to have their links shown to your traffic from month to month. You could have a dozen advertisers this month, and zero next.

And while I’ve never had a problem with any suppliers of affiliate products I’ve promoted, I’d like to believe that’s partly because I am picky about who and what I’ll recommend, but the fact is you never know if a given company or supplier is going to suddenly go out of business.

So, I suggest wisely building as many different sources of revenue as you can, while always being careful not to overwhelm your readers and visitors with any of them. It’s a delicate balance, but not that difficult to find and maintain if you approach each decision on what to use and where to locate it on your pages with caution.

Ultimately, I’d rather have 10 different sources each paying me $300 per month than 1 source paying me $3,000 per month, that way if anything goes wrong along the way I’m only out a portion of my earnings rather than all of them. Get lots of eggs, and keep them in lots of baskets and you’ll never be without.

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