TechMix

Since that date I’ve been averaging

2012-05-31T10:19:00.001-07:00

Until then_ deuces

Now I know everyone goes ape shit over Twitter being the greatest thing since slice bread and has great appeal as a social marketing tool, but in all honesty Facebook holds far more weight. From the perspective of a website owner Facebook has much more social value.

About eight months ago I decided to set up a fan page for my hip hop blog (HipHopMusicDotCom.com), I didn’t do much with it until I noticed I was getting fans most of which were most likely referred by my friends who I initially invited when I first launched the page.

It wasn’t until September 24th that I really started to see the benefits of using Facebook fan pages. Since that date I’ve been averaging 1,000 new fans per month and averaging 1,000 + visitors per day which has increased my overall traffic by 14 percent. At this rate I’ll be averaging 2,000,000 page views per month by December.

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So Here’s How You Get It Done

First thing to do obviously is to set up a fan page for your website, now I’ve created multiple fan pages for the same site in addition to building pages to promote specific products but that’s not what we are trying to accomplish in this guide. That’s more advanced and I have a separate guide for that coming up. In this guide I’m going to get you up and running with one site first. So after you set up your fan page, give it a name which would most likely be the same as your website. Before you start driving traffic to it or invite anyone fill up your fan page with some content first. You would think something like that would be a no brainier but seeing as I’ve been invited to so many fan pages that didn’t have any content, I take it that this must be a common mistake.

First thing you need to do is to add a logo as the fan pages profile pic, add some external links, post some articles in the notes section, and make a few status updates. It’s also great if you add videos, if you don’t have videos of your own just go to YouTube and find some videos related to your site’s content and post them. This is good since the videos play right within Facebook, the fans love this. So now that you’ve got a active Fan page it’s time to start promoting your fan page.

The first step is to create a fan box for your website, there a few different customization options you can choose for your website. You’ll find that this simple step will be one of the biggest factors regarding your fan page getting new fans on a daily basis from the already existing traffic on your website. You might be asking what’s the point of having visitors that already frequent your website everyday as a fan? Well it’s simple it’s no different from having them on a email list (the money is in the follow up). The only difference is that following up is more instantaneous, think of your Facebook fan page as a “social follow up marketing platform”. 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day, those are unbelievable numbers. This is where web users hang out and this is where the traffic is so even though your readers come to your site every day why not have them come to your site ten times a day. With every post you make on your fan page it shows up on all your fan’s news feed therefore keeping your brand in front of your target audience.

Another thing you should do in regards to your website is to add a Facebook share button or “Like” button. They are a bunch of services out there that do this including Facebook.

That’s all you need to do as far as your sites concerned, now lets move on to Facebook, by now you should have invited a few friends and gained a couple fans from your website depending on your site’s traffic. If you don’t already have existing traffic on your website don’t worry, the next couple of steps will help you get traffic without already having any traffic on your site. The next thing I did with my fan page is to create a simple competition, it wasn’t so much a competition as it was a call to action with a deadline.

And It goes a little something like this.

“Thanks to all the Facebook fans for joining our fan page, we just started this and we want to do it real big, and we need your help, our goal is 1,000 members in 1 month”

That one little status update has lead to new fans who have never heard of my site before. Needless to say I broke that record, I actually ended up getting 1,300 fans the first month.

Write Creative Content

Some really easy ways to create reactive content that will evoke responses from your fans is to ask questions.

Eg: “When was the greatest era for Hip Hop Music, the 80s, 90s, or now?”

This lead to an overwhelming amount of responses, this is still one of the most discussed status updates to this date. Another way to create compelling content is to create lists.

Eg: “The top 5 greatest lyricists of all time?”

I do lists all the time because there easy to come up with and the fans never get tired of them. The trick to creating lists on Fan pages is to not give them choices but let them come up with the list themselves, this way more people will respond and it will keep the discussion going longer. The aim here is to keep the discussion going, why? Propagation. You see with every response a user gives on your Fan page shows up in their activity feed and on their profile so their friends will all see this as well. So the more feedback your fan page receives leads to more propagation through out Facebook which leads to more fans which leads to more visitors to your site.

Sync Your Facebook Fan Page with Twitter

This is a really cool feature Facebook recently added to fan pages that gives you the ability to automatically update your Twitter account via Facebook.

Promote Your Fan Pages In Groups

A great way to get more fans is to promote your Fan page on Facebook groups related your topic. The cool thing about groups is that the group is more democratic than a fan page. When you post something in a group it’s visible to all the group members. This is not the same when you post on other peoples fan pages because your posts don’t show up in the main feed of the fan pages so no one really sees it, don’t waste your time on posting on other fan pages.

Get More Fans with Prize Giveaways.

Another way that is guaranteed to increase your fan count is by giving away prizes. With my particular audience here are some prize competition campaigns I’ve done

“Two tickets to the Jay-Z concert on 9/11 Free to whoever invites the most fans by the end of the day.”

“The new Jay-Z album is a instant classic, we are are giving away a free copy to anyone who refers the most fans today.”

These work every time , that second one lead to 100 fans in a day. I have a Facebook App set up to track who refers the most members.

Update: The App I was using is no longer available, but there is a new App that’s even better. It’s actually a full blown service called WildFireApp.com which allows you to run promotions on Facebook, Twitter and for your Newletter, this service is hot so be sure to check it out, it’s not free unfortunately but it’s very effective and much better than what I was using before..

Facebook Ads

I didn’t use this for my Hip Hop site but I’m currently implementing it into other fan pages that don’t have existing traffic….If your looking for instant gratification, instead of waiting months to get fans. Facebook ads are very cheap and you can get a great deal for very little. You can turn a $300 campaign into 5,000 fans and you could then double that with the tips you’ve learned in this guide and you’d never have to run another campaign again. When you create a fan page ad just don’t make it look like an ad. Here’s a rule of thumb to go with, the description you gave to your fan page and the image you used when you created it should be the same for your ad campaign which Facebook can automatically do for you.

Study Your Stats

Once you have a couple hundred or thousand fans, start checking your stats more frequently to see what’s creating the most feedback and interactions as well as demographics and more. This will give you insight on what type of content you should be creating for your fan page. I must admit I’m quite impressed with Facebook fan page stats interface no other social network provides this at least not for free.

And that pretty much sums up Facebook fan page marketing, I have a few other posts coming up about marketing on Facebook, this is just the beginning.

Thank you for reading, Chozen…

Money from your WordPress

2012-05-31T10:02:00.000-07:00

Until then_ deuces

One of the most overlooked ways to make money from your WordPress site is by selling advertising space directly on your website. It’s not because most people are unaware that they can do that but because in most cases it’s not a simple task. Many people use Google Ad Manager but it’s a very tedious process or they use a online service like BuySellAds which takes a big chuck 25% out of your earnings or use a solution like OpenX that requires allot of maintenance and updates. When it comes to WordPress in most cases it’s best to use plugins instead of outside services to solve your problems.

Introducing OIO Publisher

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This is by far one of the most important WordPress plugins I’ve ever purchased, before this plugin selling advertising became a second job alongside running and update my websites. In 2010 this plugin brought in over $20,000 in additional income, now only 3 months into 2011 It’s already brought in 40% of what it made last year.

It’s a self serving plugin that literally automates all aspects of selling advertising on your WordPress site, from taking the orders, displaying the ads, to providing the stats. It’s very easy to install and setup and only cost $47.

Lets be clear though just because you get the plugin doesn’t mean you’ll starting raking in stacks of paper, you still need to put in the ground work. So lets cover the steps you need to take in order to effectively sell direct advertising space.

Selling Your Advertising Space, Effectively!

Pitch Page: You need a proper pitch page or sales page to present to your advertising prospects, it’s the sales page that advertisers will go to when they are interested in advertising on your website. Take a look as Mixtapes.tv and iHipHopMusic.com advertising pages. The way those pages are setup have proven to be the most effective for my business, I provide allot of statistical information to help them get a general idea of the amount of traffic they’ll receive and from what type of audience. You can gather this type of information by using services like Quantcast and Google Analytics, I use both of them because each one has a different purpose.

Quantcast is very good at measuring your audience by demographics such as ethnicity, income level, education, age group and much more.

Google Analytics provides many in depth statistics about your daily website visitors, search traffic, location etc. It’s a very popular service used and recognized by millions of website owners and advertisers around the world.

They best thing about both of them is that they’re free and better than most of the paid services out there.

Press Kitt: Often referred to as a media kit in business environments, is a pre-packaged set of promotional materials of a person, company, or organization distributed to members of the media for promotional use. In our case it would be a media Kit and it would be distributed to product and service providers, this kit would include all the best things about your website how many visitors your website receive, screenshot of your website pages, what search terms you rank for, honorable mentions, success stories from past advertisers etc. Basically it’s an extended version of what your Pitch Page would be, both of which are proven to increase direct ad sales. A Media Kit though is more professional when approaching bigger companies and even agencies for advertising.

Multiple Options: Offer your advertisers multiple advertising options, such as different payment options, time periods such as daily, weekly, monthly etc. Give them incentives for being loyal customers such as a free week of advertising. Make your advertising offer as flexible and feature filled as possible.

Knowing What To Charge Advertisers

This is where things get a little tricky, the reason why direct advertisers even exist and are looking for you is because they are looking for more affordable alternatives to advertising on Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. And the reason why your looking for advertisers is because you want to make more money than what your making from advertising programs like Google Adsense.

So now the trick is to provide a medium where you make more money but the advertiser spends less money.

How much should you sell your ad space for? The method I use is to at least double the eCPM rate you’re getting from Google AdSense. If a spot is making you $2.50 per 1000 CPM (Cost per thousand visitors), then sell it for a minimum of $5.00 per CPM. It would be stupid to sell it for anything less than double because that is what Google is selling it for (assuming Google takes 50%). The whole point of selling advertising directly is to cut out the middle man and make more money.

When you use this method you now have the option making your pricing flexible. So lets say the advertiser is looking for a cheaper alternative to Google, he’s paying them $5.00 per CPM to advertise on your site or sites similar to yours and 50% of that (assuming that’s what Google pays you) goes to you which would be $2.50. What you would do now is seek out this advertiser and offer him a rate of $4.00 per CPM, he’s already advertising on your website so best believe he’ll take the deal. So now you gave him a better offer and instead of making $2.50 per CPM your now banking $4.00 per CPM directly, that’s a win/win situation at it’s best.

You already know who your advertisers are, you can see them on your Google Adsense ads.

Calculating Your Rates

Take whatever Ad Network your making the most money with, take the average CPM rate that they pay you and double it. Then you take the total number of page views you get a month and divide it by 1000, whatever number you get from that you would then multiply by that doubled CPM rate you first calculated. Look at the example below.

Google Adsense is the highest paying AD Network for my site iHipHopMusic.com, so the math is as follows.

Google Adsense CPM = $0.63 (Google has changed it’s term from CPM to RPM which stands for Revenue Per Thousand visitors but it’s still the same thing)

My average monthly page views = 2,000,000

The math:

Google Adsense CPM = $0.63 x 2 = $1.26 (This will be your website CPM)

Now to calculate how much you would make.

Your average monthly page views = 2,000,000 / 1000 = 2000 x $1.26 (My website CPM) = $2,520

So selling advertising directly would result in you making $2,520 while Google would only pay you $1,260

How would this work with the OIO publisher plugin?

You can’t sell according to CPM rates with OIO Publisher, you can only sell ad units (eg 300×250, 728×90 etc) for specific time period such as 7 days, 30 days etc. So what you would do is to use the same system but narrow it down to specific ad units.

So lets say we have a ad unit at the top of our website which a 728×90 ad size. Google Adsense has statistics for specific ad units so you can take a look to find out the amount of page views, CPM, clicks and more that a ad unit gets.

So lets say that ad unit gets 700,000 page views per month, you would divide that ad unit by 1,000. Example below.

728×90 ad unit = 700,000 page views per month

700,000 page views / 1000 = 700

Lets say Google Adsense pays on average for the 728×90 ad unit $0.32 per CPM, you would double that which would be $0.64.

700 x $0.64 = $448 (Whatever number you get just round it off to the nearest 10 so in our case that would be $450)

So that would be $450 per month for the 728 x 90 ad unit, while Google would have only paid you $224 and no they wouldn’t round it off to the nearest ten.

It’s very simple but it gets even better, you see you can sell that ad unit more than once at the same time. They’re called ad slots, on all my websites the rule I go by is that every ad unit has 3 ad slots which are rotated every time my site loads, don’t worry OIO Publisher will handle all this for you. So now your ad unit can make 3 times as much money so instead of $450 per month you can make $1,350, you can sell more or less than 3 ad slots if you like it’s up to you to decide that. My Hip Hop site gets over 2,000,000 page views per month so I figured 3 ad slots per ad unit would be the best option for me to make the most money, while the advertisers get the most exposure for their money. Just make sure it’s beneficial to both parties or it won’t work.

To make things even sweeter, you can offer a exclusive ad slot, this means one advertiser can buy out all the available ad slots in a ad unit. If you don’t mange to sell out all your ad units frequently, this could be a good option for you. On of my less popular ad units I don’t sell out all the ad slots so what I do is offer a exclusive ad slot with a 15% discount. You might think your loosing money but remember these are ad slots you weren’t going to sell anyway.

So for the same $450 per ad slots we used above, we would also have a exclusive ad slot for $1,215 (which is $450 x 3 ad slots – 10%). I recommend giving a discount of 10% or better, they will be much more inclined to purchase if they know their getting a deal.

Now remember this still just one ad unit, on average a website usually has 3 to 4 ad units so you can easily double, triple and quadruple your earnings. It’s impossible to do this working with 3r party ad networks.

That pretty much sums up how to sell advertising on your WordPress site or any site for that matter. Even if your site isn’t powered by WordPress you can simply create a second website via WordPress and use it as your own personal ad network. I did it, so can you.

Go get OIO Publisher

In the next post related to this I’m going to cover how and where to find advertisers for your website.

Until then, deuces!

So Whats The Cause Of These Changes?

2012-05-31T09:48:00.000-07:00

So Whats The Cause Of These Changes

Now anyone who has a website that receives consistent traffic over a long period of time and uses Google AdSense to monetize their traffic have noticed a few things. In the beginning the earnings are really good for a couple months, they have higher payouts depending on the time of year, and the click through rates are much higher in the beginning. Over time all of these things change and in many cases depending on the topic of your website the changes in the earnings are so drastic that it does not make sense to even continue to use Google AdSense as a primary income stream. As a matter fact you might want to consider removing AdSense all together in order to find new ways to make money with your blog or website.

So Whats The Cause Of These Changes?

Ad Inventory: The most obvious reason for the drop in earnings is that the ad inventory for AdSense has gone down, when the economy took a turn for the worst so did the Ad rates and not just for AdSense but for all Ad Networks across the board. Advertisers have much smaller budgets to work with thus Google AdSense has to lower there rates, now of course there are some exceptions to the rule such has the health industry and few other markets that still have healthy ad payouts but they are few and far between. I can tell you from personal experience working in the music industry that music and entertainment related websites and blogs are not making much from AdSense, last year my hip hop blog was making a full time income and this year even with more traffic the site isn’t even making half what it made last year. In fact AdSense has become a third tier income stream for that site.

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Ad Formats and Placements: Believe it or not this plays a major part in how well Google AdSense performs on your website, depending on your site design and what ad formats you use, it will directly affect how much money you will make. The best way to figure out which site design, ad formats and positions will perform the best. I suggest you setup three different variations of your website (Designs), run each different design with different ad formats and ad positions. Run each variation for at least a week depending on your traffic, if you have a high traffic website you can make it less than a week. This is split testing in it’s simplest form. To know exactly what your visitors are interacting with on your website I suggest you check out CrazyEgg, it’s a really sick analytic tool that gives you a visual view of your website with a heat map overlay that shows exactly where your visitors and their mouses went and where they didn’t go.

Visitor Retention: Now of course visitor retention is a good thing, it means your brand is growing and your keeping your visitors interested in your content but in terms of Google AdSense it’s almost guaranteed to kill your income. The problem is that your repeat visitors have become immune to the ads, they see the same set of ads with the same ad copy every time they come to your site. Eventually ads will become invisible to them and you’ll notice shortly after that the only clicks your receiving is from brand new visitors most of which come from search engines. The problem with the new visitors clicking on your ads is that once they click that ad there gone and they may never come back, this will hurt your overall visitor retention and stunt the growth of your brand. Now of course this does not apply to you if you just built the site to specifically to make money from Adsense then building a brand is really not important.

Seasonal Traffic: If you noticed a sudden drop in your earnings and your traffic, this is probably due to time of year. In most niches it’s common for blogs and websites to have lower earnings in the summer time. If you can afford to, wait to see what your earnings are like in another time of the year and if you don’t see any changes in your earnings then it’s time to try something new. Personally with my media site Music Video Cast, the daily AdSense earnings has gone up and the same goes for my blog iHipHopMusic.com since the beginning of September.

So What Do You Do When AdSense Starts To Suck Ass?

Find Other Advertising Networks: There hundreds of Advertising networks out there that you can test out, especially if you have a high traffic website with high visitor retention. Your visitor retention is too valuable to be wasting it on AdSense, instead find some ad networks that will pay you according CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) rates, most networks out there pay anywhere from $0.50 to $3.00 per CPM. The great thing about this is that you don’t have replace AdSense but instead just diversify your income, lets be honest the chances of you getting rich from AdSense in this day and age is highly unlikely, it’s not like 5 years ago.

Partner With Vertical Ad Networks:More and more niche specific ad networks are popping up all over the place, the great thing about these networks is that they have higher payouts than the large ad networks, I’m currently working with Global Grind Network which is a Hip Hop related ad network owned by Hip Hop mogul Russell Simmons and I’m currently in talks with CraveOnline to start a running multiple campaigns from numerous major brands on Hip Hop Music Dot Com, right now the payouts are looking like there going to be anywhere from $4 to $7 per CPM (yep you read that correctly). Currently I’m averaging 48,000 page views daily on Hip Hop Music Dot Com so I’m looking forward to getting those campaigns rolling, usually if you have great website these companies find you and make you a offer, so far I received 18 offers this year already. Global Grind has been on some bull shit lately but I’m going to save the bashing for another post.

You can find many different niche specific networks at Adify.com which hosts many popular networks such as B5media (A Blogger Network), Green Ad Network, and Martha’s Circle (Martha Stuart’s Ad Network) just to name a few.

Rotate Your Ads. This is pretty self explanatory and very important but surprisingly not enough people spend time doing this, which is probably due to do all the testing and analytics involved. They are a few services out there that simplifies the whole process which include Rubicon Project, Yield Build and Pubmatic.

Affiliate Programs: While every other form of generating income and adverting has taken a dive, the affiliate marketing/performance based industry has been thriving in this horrible economy and many networks have been showing record earnings.There are hundreds of Affiliate Networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, Affiliate.com I (I love Affiliate.com) and LinkShare just to name a few. I’ll have to cover affiliate marketing in a few upcoming posts and how I’m using this method to make more money than I am with AdSense.

Sell Ads Directly: Just like affiliate programs this is a whole other subject that I will be covering in a upcoming post, from what tools to use, where to find advertisers and how to pitch your website. When this is done right it can completely replace AdSense as a income source, as I mentioned earlier in this post that AdSense is now a third tier income stream on Hip Hop Music Dot Com. I’ll cover all that in upcoming post so stay tune.

In conclusion

Don’t make AdSense be your end all be all income stream, the same way you try to find different ways to expand your website or blog is the same way you should try and find ways to monetize your content. Just pay attention to most of the big guys in the industry, there not talking about AdSense anymore. Don’t get comfortable with your current earnings a start playing defense, before you know you’ll be dependent on a declining income and you’ll end up with your head up your ass like the image above.