I've seen people use tinyurl for this.

This is a very inspiring thread. I work full time but I have plenty of free time after work and was trying to find something to keep me occupied without spending too much money and possibly learning or earning my own money. I have honestly been reading up on this type of stuff to see what I could come up with. My brother is also very interested in doing something like this but we have no idea what step one is. I guess its just a little trial and error. We will come up with something.


Thanks for the inspiration Max, when I do stumble upon something I will be sure to keep the thread rolling with what I've learned.

Can anyone give me some advice on optimizing my ad placement/size/type, etc?

I have a site posting sports jobs (www.sportsjobcenter.com) and have a number of ads on the site, but I want to try to optimize them as much as possible and I don't know much about it. Currently, it's all ad sense and I don't have the traffic to move it to something like tribal fusion yet that requires I believe 5K unique hits per day.

The larger and more annoying the better.

You just have to experiment. Try different colors out and see if anything generates different responses.

I know that different sites would possibly have different answers, but in general...

An image only Adsense ad would do better than one that rotates between text and images?

And a 160x600 would do better than a 300x250 and a 120x90?

And breaking up the content by putting them in the middle of an article/posting would be more in your face an annoying and therefore more effective?

I have found that in general the large square is higher revenue than the 160x600 skyscraper. That is probably because it is typically positioned in the center of the page rather than the side bar.

Also I don't think you should restrict to image only or text only. You want google to display the highest revenue ads in that position whether its text or image. There may be cases where restricting could help though.

Breaking up the text is a good idea. You'll also want one near the top of the page.

It is best to blend the adds. Text will preform better than image in most cases. Make it look like a side bar blend it in with the menus. The point is not to fool website viewers, but the mind is set to ignore adds, but we are trained to look in the sidebars and headers for menus. You need to blend it in with the other content as well. Do no make it stand out in red or anything like that.

Kinda like the google ads on the left of one of my sites, here:

http://www.counterstrikesource.net/

should I be wary of an auction where the seller is offering free hosting for two years? if I win the auction should I decline his offer?

Hosting is dirt cheap. He probably has a reseller account which means his cost for the 2 years will be about $2. He's just putting it in there as a value add.

If you plan on hosting multiple sites, spring for the $7-10/month and get a hostgator account.

Lots of potential for that site. I think I would want to have some "ins" in the industry or at least some trucking knowledge for this one.

Some things I would definitely change -
On the FAQ the number 1 question is how to cancel. The #1 questions should be how to subscribe.

They mentioned they hired an "seo company". This company is doing more harm than good. That homepage footer garbage is total SPAM and probably penalizing them.

Typically sites have higher Google PageRank than SEOMoz Domain Moz Rank (DmR) or Domain Moz Trust (DmT). I would guess this is some sort of penalty Google has applied - or they will jump to PR3 next toolbar update.

The site header image links back to vessage.com but www.vessage.com has the most links and diverse link profile. They need to choose 1 and 301 redirect the other to the 1 they choose.

Obviously A LOT of customization could be done with all of that data - tags or categories such as "Truck Loads in Milwaukee WI", etc...historical data counts - "We've listed 850 truck jobs starting in Milwaukee WI so far" which is an incentive for someone to subscribe. Their search is pretty good but I'm not so sure how user friendly it is to the average truck driver.

But yeah definitely an interesting site.

Great thread, good link for generating money for your site

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to...-with-website/

if anyone interested

I'm looking for some help with pay per click advertising using Google Adwords. I've got a site that has daily fantasy baseball contests. My two main target markets are fantasy baseball players (particularly those who already play daily contests) and sports bettors. I've tried running ads targeting both groups. When targeting fantasy baseball players, I've got no real problems - my ads display, sometimes get clicks, and sometimes result in a sign-up. Unfortunately, I can't get the darned ads targeting sports bettors to show up. I'm pretty sure my bids are high enough, but my quality scores are 2 or 3 for each of my keywords. The wording of my ads pretty closely matches the keywords, so I'm thinking it may be that may landing page (which is the login/registration screen for the site) doesn't match the keywords for sports betting as well as it does for fantasy sports. Is it possible that that would cause such low quality scores, or are there any other possibilities?

have u purchased any new ones since your back from vacation?

I wanted to show the site my friend and I have been working on for the last 2 months. It's a dropship model website selling english saddles, and a plan to add horse blankets in next week. We did keyword research into these 2 niches and found keywords with enough searches and small enough competition to be able to rank at top Google page 1 using only organic SEO tactics. I'm currently doing PPC for one brand name cuz the CPC is $.05 and zero competition. That brand only gets about 500 searches/month.
We're currently working on the organic SEO work, including link building, article writing, social bookmarking, directory submission etc.
The margins are ridiculous on these products and if we can get this thing selling 3-4 saddles/month + horse blankets I'll be super happy. Our total costs to this point are <$300, and hosting on the shopify platform is $60/month.

http://www.horseswest.com

If you really want to make money from PPC you need to make multiple landing pages on your site. These are pages that match A) The searchers intent and B) What you said in the ad. Those will give you a better quality score and you'll get higher conversion rates. Basically you want to carry through the message of your PPC ad onto your landing page. If your ad says 15 day free trial, your landing page headline should say something about the 15 day free trial.

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/ They have 2 free webinars a month and tons of optimization examples on their site.

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer And to run your tests, google website optimizer is probably the best free tool out there.

The more focused you get the higher your profits will be. So instead of 1 login page (which I'm sure converts like poop) you should probably have 20-30 different pages tailored to your ad groups. Ideally you'd have 1 adgroup with 1 keyword phrase and 1 matching landing page but that quickly becomes a scalability issue.

At work we're up to about 400 landing pages but we use some software that automatically A/B tests pages and makes creating pages pretty fast (but it's like $4,000 a month for the software).

Does anyone know the site www.websitebroker.com ? It has got a lot of websites for sale. Anyone knows if it's legit?

I think you're exactly right. Conversion rates aren't great. From my own blogs, something like 5% of clicks result in a sign-up. But from some other sources, it's far below 1%. I'm sure by creating tailored landing pages, I'd get better rates, and also would solve the problem of getting Adwords to show my ads. The problem is, my site is just a 'skin' (similar to poker sites' skins) and I don't have full control over the 'landing page'. It's unlikely that I can get multiple versions of it, and any changes I need would take time to get implemented. Would it make sense to create a true 'landing page' that people reach prior to the site, containing detailed tailored information?

yeh does anyone know if that site is legit? it has a lot of listings.

most of the listings seem fishy. either it's 5k for a 15k/month site, or on the ridic expensive end 350k for a 4k/mo, 62/1k, etc. now i'm a total noob so perhaps these are legit worthy turnkey opportunities, but meh.

the few that do seem to fall within 10-15 months profit all got started this month. good or bad? no proven sustainability vs. hasn't reached peak yet - which way should i look at that?

I dont know anything about that particular site, but here's another that seems to have good reputation.

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/

bump..very nice and informative thread

For sure an inspiring thread. I'm an experienced web developer that is looking to build a network of sites. Ideally I'm looking to partner with someone who has SEO/promotion skills and enjoys that side of the business. If you are interested, please feel free to PM me about any possible partner project.

great thread max very interesting, have you been able to buy any other sites recently?

How important is it that the domainname is targeting your most important keywords?