For those of you that have been long time readers of my blog you may remember a post I wrote about the YouTube partner program after it first launched. I sent in my application so long ago I almost forgot I had applied.

Now after nearly three months I’ve finally heard back from YouTube about my application being denied. With the size of Google/You Tube I don’t think I can weazel my way into this publisher program like I’ve done in the past so many times. However, I thought I might slip into the program by barely meeting the requirements. But I really don’t have time to maintain a steady stream of halo videos that the program requires.

I plan to apply again using the profile I set up for one of my forums that receives user submitted game videos on a regular basis, but for now I believe the profile is still too small (see it here). However, I still believe video is a great way to help bring in new visitors to your website though as most of the people on YouTube will have never been to your website before anyway.

Seeing the email from the YouTube partner program reminds me of the Adsense Video Beta. I’m also really interested to see how people are doing with that program, as I am going to need way more video views to make it into that program.

Has anyone here made it into the YouTube partner program or as an Adsense Video Beta participant? If so, how have the programs performed?

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When it comes to monetizing websites, you should never rely on just one source of income. The logic behind this is obvious and if you haven’t heard of this concept by now, you really should start looking at using multiple different publisher programs to earn more money from your websites - (Check out my recommendations here if you’re looking for a few ideas). If your main revenue source starts to decline and you aren’t using other revenue streams it can be disastoruous so if you aren’t doing this now take the first step and start to use more than one publisher program on your websites.

While utilizing multiple different publisher programs on your websites is important, I’d like to take it one step further. You should also always be consantly experimenting with various publisher programs that offer the same type of advertising solution. In this case, I’ll be offering up some numbers on two different in text advertising programs. After running Kontera’s Content Link on one of my forums for several months I decided to try another in text advertising option - Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt. After negotiaiting my way into Vibrant Media’s program, I finally got the ad code installed on my forum a little over one month ago. But before I get to the numbers from Vibrant Media, I’d like to show you how Kontera performed on Dec 10th to Jan 10th:

Not that great huh? For 17k impressions it made just over $5. However, it’s important to note that 7 days into the above time frame I set the ads to only display to guests because I felt they are too intrusive for members. Either way, you can see why I wanted to try out a different in text advertising option to see if there was anything else that could do better than $5 in a month time period even though it was only on 17k in impressions. Here are the results from Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt program:

(Thanks for the misspelling of my company name by the way)

Wow this one did even worse! I logged into my account after running the ads for three weeks and saw that there were 0 clicks! Are you kidding me? I actually emailed my account rep over at Vibrant Media to see if there was a problem with the ad code and he assured me that there wasn’t. He ended up changing the link colors from the blue that matched the color of the links on the site back to the standard green but this didn’t do much to change the outcome. I wasn’t generating a ton of impressions, but it’s funny that for displaying close to 60,000 impressions the ads were only clicked 3 times!

Now that I’ve finished running IntelliTxt for a month, I may try out AdBrite next. I’d really like to find an in text advertising option that performs better than Kontera or I may just remove in text advertising completely because it already only accounts for a very small portion of the chunk of the pie. What I’ll probably end up doing is keeping the if conditionals to only display the in text ads to guests anyway though. It’s also important to note that while Kontera’s Content Link made more money than Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt on my forum it may be the opposite for you depending on your website’s niche, demographics etc. I can’t stress this enough, if you want to increase your online income than you must experiment with a wide variety of publisher programs!

Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss out on the next update to this ongoing case study of in text advertising when I display the results from AdBrite.

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I mentioned in an earlier post that I was selling one of my smaller forums AdobeChat.com and I’m happy to say that it sold for earlier this week for $600. I don’t think the sale price is too bad considering it wasn’t really an active community. The site was making about $30 a month though, so the sale pretty much ended up being for a little over 12 months of earnings (because I’m also transferring the vBulletin license over to him). While I was looking to get a little more for the site I’m still pleased with the result. I haven’t finished the transfer yet but it should be done by the end of the week.

My guest post went live on JohnCow.com where I wrote about why you should make sure you spend enough time to milk your cash cows before focusing your attention on new ventures. I believe that it’s really important to strike a balance between the time you spend managing your current portfolio of websites and the time you spend on launching new websites. I think it’s a good read (although I may be a little bias), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Lastly, on an unrelated note to what I usually write about I finally sold off a portion of my personal NES collection. I sold my rare Top Loader NES which was the second version of the Nintendo Entertainment System that was only produced for about one year until the Super Nintendo came out. The Top Loader was produced with a different type of metal connection so that you wouldn’t have to blow on your games to get them to work (Yah we all had to do it and it worked differently on everyone’s NES). For those of you that haven’t read my about me page, I got my start making money off of buying bulk lots of NES games and reselling them individually on eBay years ago. In the process I gradually kept specific games for my own collection and I finally decided to start getting rid of them. I feel like this is an end of an era, but alas I have a Wii now and will just download the ones I really want there.

Do you share your site sales experiences with your readers? Do you think I would have had better luck at SitePoint or do you think the site wasn’t worth enough to post it for sale there?

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I stumbed accross this website several months ago:

Explorer Destroyer (As of the time of this posting it’s currently down though)

The basic premise of the site is to get people to use Firefox while at the same time make you some money. Sounds good right? There are three different levels that you can use on your site only two of which can help you make money off of users downloading Firefox with the Google search bar:

Level 1: Gentle Encouragement Rating: $$
Visitors using IE see a message encouraging them to download Firefox (with a download link) running across the top of the page.
Level 1 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)

Level 2: Semi-serious Rating: $$$$
Visitors using IE get a friendly splash page encouraging them to download Firefox. There’s a download link, and a link to continue on to your site.
Level 2 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)
Update: Xavier sent us this modified version of level 2 that will only show the splash page occasionally. Download it here and see a live demo here.

Level 3: Dead serious
Level 3 will not allow people using IE past a splash page. This level is very useful for sites that are not IE6 compatible. And there’s never been a more important moment to switch people to Firefox. Can you handle it? (At least try it for a day to see how good it feels.) Unfortunately, level 3 is a little too intense for the Adsense policies, so for this level you’ll have to use a regular, non-Adsense link to download Firefox.
Level 3 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)

Several months ago I decided to use Level 1 on one of my small sites:

Free Video Game Fonts.

If you’re using internet explorer you’ll see Level 1 and if you’re using FireFox you won’t. In any case, here are the results:

As you can see the Firefox referral has performed terribly. For displaying the ad close to 17,000 times and only resulting in a one dollar profit is pathetic. I think that perhaps one main reason why the referrals have preformed terribly is because of how long FireFox has been around. Lots of people have the program and many of those in the video games niche have it as well. I can estimate that of the 17,000 impressions I’m sure there is significant chunk that visited the site with internet explorer even though they have firefox on their computers.

I’ll be removing the explorer destroyer code from my websites soon so if you want to see it in action just check out GamingFonts.com. It is pretty laughable that this preformed so poorly, but then again perhaps it’s also humorous that I left the code on the site for that long. Either way, it’s always imporant to experiment with new ideas because you never know which ones will pay off.

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In an effort to focus more on the big picture, I’ve decided to sell off one of my smaller forums on Digital Point. I will use the proceeds from the sale towards a few other projects I have going on now that I will discuss later.

Click here to view the listing

Here are some key points about the listing for those who are interested:

AdobeChat.com is a PR2 forum with 419 threads, 1,432 posts and about 800 members.

The domain has been registered at GoDaddy from Nov 05 and will expire in Nov 08 and will be pushed to your account for free.

I will send backups of the site to the new owner and they will be tasked with setting it up on their own server. (I suck at doing this so I won’t be able to provide much help.)

The hosting requirements are not steep at all. I previously hosted it on a shared account from Site5 along with several other forums.

Here are the traffic stats:

2007 and 2008

Adsense stats:

Past 11 months

(I tried YPN in Jan / Feb 07 and it didn’t convert well).

The site currently makes around $30 a month via Adsense and footer links at the bottom of the site. The footer links pay out $15 a month (I’ll get the winner set up with the place I am paid out for these). It could easily earn more if you put more time into promoting the site.

The site also comes with an owned vBulletin license worth $160. If you want to upgrade to the latest version of vB it would cost $30 to renew the license.

The domain is great quality and perfect for discussion about Adobe programs.

Bidding starts at $500 which works out to about a years worth of earnings plus the cost of the vBulletin owned license but does not factor in the future potential of the site or the value of the domain.

Auction runs for 5 more days. Each bid near the end of the auction date will push the auction back one hour so that everyone has a chance to get their bids in. I’ll give a last call for bids and then it will end.

Overall, I think it’s best for me to part ways with the site because I already don’t have enough time as it is to promote it and make it an active community. The first day after I listed the auction I didn’t get any bites until one person offered me $200 for just the domain. I think it’s worth more than that as a package deal and let the potential buyer know that. He didn’t really budge.

Then after that first private message I received three more one right after each other. The first was a $450 offer for the entire site which I responded to the potential buyer that I thought it was worth a little more than that. The second PM wanted to see more traffic stats and the third offer was $600 for the site. Again, I believe the site is worth a little more than that and let the potential buyer know. I sent these messages out late yesterday and haven’t heard back from anyone yet, but I honestly do think that the site is worth more than the highest offer I’ve received so far.

I’ve sold sites before, but this will be one of my larger sales as I am notorious for simply building sites up and never selling them. However, I believe that reducing some of the smaller earning sites in my portfolio that take up my time will allow me to spend more time on building up the big earners.

I’ll let you know what the site sells for in a few days

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Let me preface this post by saying that if you don’t already know by now I’m a huge gamer. I love playing video games and most of the websites I run are focused on the video games genre. So naturally I was looking to start another website about XBLA games (Xbox Live Arcade) and this lead me to purchase XboxLiveArcade.org on Dec 30th 2006. I held onto the domain for a few months while I waited to launch the forum.

At the time, the .com and .net were already taken by someone that just used it as a parked page. On a whim, a couple weeks after I purchased the .org I thought I’d just look to see if the .com was available because I remembered that when I first checked it was set to expire soon. I knew not to get my hopes up as most people renew their domains at the end of the year cycle automatically or at least near to it. However, to my delight, after entering my search I was staring at a GoDaddy screen that stated XboxLiveArcade.com was available! I couldn’t believe it dropped and no one picked it up.

For those of you that don’t own an Xbox 360 or follow video games that much – Xbox Live Arcade is the platform that small less expensive games are released on. You can download trials for every game to test them out or purchase them right from your Xbox dashboard for varying prices. So because of the fact that Microsoft never bothered to buy the domain and it was held by a domain parker for so long I couldn’t believe that I was able to get it for the cost of a new domain fee.

I launched the forum a few months later and I immediately linked to XboxLiveArcade.com from my other game sites using the anchor text “Xbox Live Arcade.” I’ve also shared links with other websites and the site currently sits at the number 5 slot on the front page of Google. Now I do need to make some alterations so that the description reads something like “Xbox Live Arcade Game Reviews, News and Forums,” but I haven’t gotten around to doing this. Anyway, because of the fact that the domain name is XboxLiveArcade.com and I’ve used “Xbox Live Arcade” as the anchor text it was really for the site to make it onto the front page of Google. Obviously the greatest thing about being on the front page for a highly relevant search term is the targeted traffic it’s been sending me. Check out this screenshot from Google Analytics:

This is less than half of the traffic the site receives from search engines too

Now the only thing I have to worry about is Microsoft’s lawyers coming after me for it someday…

Are you on the front page of Google for your key search terms? If so, how long did it take you to get there?

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It’s that time of the year and everyone’s making their New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the next year. I never made a concerted effort to make goals in the past, so my New Year’s Resolution is to focus on hitting the goals I set out in this post ;). In fact, I didn’t make any goals in 2007 for this blog or the other websites in my company. I came to the realization a month ago that I must set goals and check up on them otherwise I’ll just go along without a plan or a focus on where I need to be. So I’m starting this year off with my specific and measurable goals for 2008 as a part time web publisher and blogger that I will revist on a quarterly basis:

Blog Specific Goals:

a. Get the custom blog design paid for and implemented Achieved March 18th
b. Make $1000 a month from my blog (All income from my blog will be disclosed)
c. Break the four digit RSS mark by getting to 1,000+ RSS subscribers
d. Hit the front page of Digg at least once
e Break the top 10,000 Technorati mark
f. Improve and maintain my posting frequency and by the last quarter of 2008 I want to look back at Q4 and see at least 92 posts.
g. Do a quick blogging tip every Sunday for the entire year of 2008.

For the other websites and forums I run:

a. Increase my online income to $2,000 a month (Blogging goal not included.)
b. Have at least one forum hit the 1,000,000+ page views a month mark
c. Be mentioned on a major video game related website (i.e. GameSpot.com)
d. Only launch two more forums (So that I will focus my time on growing the sites I have)

I know I took a while to post my goals for 2008, but I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I can reasonably do while at the same time providing a significant challenge. I know that I can reach the goals I’ve set out for 2008 and am really excited to mark off goals and provide quarterly updates with recaps on all the goals.

If you haven’t set any goals for 2008 I urge you to try it. Make sure you write specific and measurable goals so that it’s easy to keep track of how you’re doing.

What do you think of my goals?

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I’ve been working with an account manager over at Vibrant Media, (the folks behind intellitxt ads) because I haven’t been amazed with my Kontera earnings. I believe that anytime you put more advertisements on a website it’s important to make sure that the money you make will compensate for some disgruntled members that may stop coming to the site because of the extra ads. Because in many circumstances you may be doing more harm than good if you put extra ads on a site to make a few extra bucks and end up not even making enough money to justify their use. Let’s be honest, in text advertising is fairly intrusive. Do I believe it’s so intrusive that it’s simply not worth using it on your website? Of course not. But if you’re going to run in text advertising it better payout well don’t you think?

So one of the things that I recently decided to change with my forum was to make the switch from Kontera’s content link to Vibrant Media’s intellitxt ads. At first I was denied access into their program because GV did not meet the minumum page views requirement of 500,000 monthly. The traffic for the site has been dropping off for a few months and I’ve been working on improving the things that members are complaining about. Anyway, after I got his email I immediately called him back because I don’t take no for an answer. Long time readers of my blog have probably noticed this trend by my earlier posts about being denied by Text Link Ads at first and jumping through hoops for Kontera months ago :D. So on the phone I told him about the qualities of GV, how it’s different than other websites, the time we’ve been on the net and after talking some business he agreed to offer me a trial period. I’ll report back my results after I’ve got the ad code installed for a month and compare it to what I’ve made with Kontera in the previous month. Obviously I want Vibrant Media’s intellitxt ads to do much better than Kontera’s and will provide detailed stats whether that proves to be the case or not.

I think it’s hilarious that I’m 3 for 3 when it comes to being denied entry into a publisher program at first and then following up with the person that denied me and trying to get in. I’ll let you know when I’m denied and can’t convince someone to let me in if it ever happens but so far I’m at a 100% average

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - if you’re at first denied entrance into a publisher program follow up and find out why you were denied. Sometimes it’s something obvious like not meeting a minimum page view requirement, but tell them to look at your site’s content and explain why your site is different and why not meeting the minimum shouldn’t stop them from letting you in. Just combat any objections they have and they might get burned out and let you in to get you to shut up. You can thank me later when you’re making an extra hundred bucks a month off one of your websites because of a program you were accepted into that you were at first denied.

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