David Pitlyuk

I made two changes to my blog, and I was surprised to notice that my CPC rates are now 5-10x what they were. What did I do? First I added AdSense section targeting, and second, I removed advertising from the page.

AdSense section targeting allows you to specifically exactly where Google should be scanning your page to deliver targeted ads. The entire reason AdSense is so effective is because the advertisements are meant to be targeted to the reader and the context that they have an interest about in the first place. The more targeted, the higher the click-through-rates, and more than likely more money to be made. Rather than just putting the standard AdSense code on your page, you can wrap you the content you want to either target or filter out using section targeting. If you want Google to target a specific area (for example the main content of your post), simply wrap it around this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you want to filter out specific sections of your page, you can wrap those in this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

The second thing I did was simply remove two of the three AdSense spots that I had on the site. I had a 468×60 on the top of the posts, a 160×600 on the sidebar, and a 468×60 on the bottom of the posts. I only kept the 468×60 on the top for now, and I noticed that the ads are much better, and my CPC rates have been averaging over $1 a click. Previously, I’d be lucky to get 25 cents. Taking other AdSense ads off of the page can make a huge difference in CPC rates because Google can only fulfill so many spots, and each one is worth less. This reason is why some people will limit Google advertising to limited spots and use other types of ads in other spots in order to maximize revenue. Of course, you should be doing some testing to see what works best for you.

In order to make money blogging, it’s important to diversify your revenue streams. Many bloggers make the mistake of putting 100% of their faith into just Google AdSense. I recently added Kontera in-text links for a new revenue source, and you can do the same. Just signing up and putting their default code isn’t enough to maximize your earnings though.

Kontera provides a few different things you can do to customize your advertising to help juice every penny into your revenue. This is what your default ad tag will look like:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var dc_UnitID = 14;
var dc_PublisherID = XXXXX;
var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue’;
var dc_adprod=’ADL’;
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://kona.kontera.com/javascript/lib/KonaLibInline.js”></script>

This just makes your links the default blue, which most sites with a real design shouldn’t have. On top of this, it can also make things like your sidebar and your headlines links. This is no good, and we need to do something about it.

Change The Kontera Link Color

To change the link color simply change this line:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue‘;

You can switch blue to any hex color code. For example this would make the links black:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘#000000‘;

Most people will normally make the color of the Kontera links the same color as their regular links. The main difference is that Kontera links are double underlined, but it’s still a little iffy in terms of users being tricked into clicking a link. I personally decided to make the links green when my links are blue.

Target A Specific Area

You can target a specific area of your page, for example if you just want a specific paragraph to get linked. Simply add a class=”KonaBody” to a section of your code, and everything in it can get linked by Kontera. For example:

<div class=”KonaBody”>This text can possible get linked by Kontera!</div>

Restrict Areas From Getting Linked

If you don’t want an area to get linked simply add a class=”KonaFilter” to a section of your code. For example if you don’t want the sidebar linked you can do something like:

<div id=”sidebar” class=”KonaFilter”>This code will note get linked by Kontera</div>

Easiest Thing To Do In Wordpress

All I did in Wordpress was add a class=”KonaBody” to the div=”content” section. This will cover all of the content you write, but filter out the side bar, footer, and header.

Introduction

I officially launched this blog on March 9th, which gave it 22 days to show some results for the month. Overall it did fairly well for the amount of time I have to spend on it. This blog is not my very top priority as I have other businesses that I run, which do require a lot of my time. I’ll take you through the various parts of the blog to show how they did. You can learn from some of the things that I did, and compare to see how the results actually looked. We’ll start off with traffic:

Traffic

March generated 6,323 unique visitors, 10,1272 pageviews, averaging 1.61 pageviews per visitor.

One of the most important statistics you can look at is your new visitor vs. returning visitor report. This will show you if you are able to retain your readers or not. The only thing you need to make sure to account for is spikes in traffic on days where something may have been linked on a bunch of other sites. More than likely most of that traffic is new, and will bring down the monthly average. A good thing to do is look at a few days where your traffic is pretty stable. Your returning visitor rate should be more accurate in terms of average traffic flow.

Monetization

My purpose of this blog is not to subsidize any sort of income really, but anything extra is always nice. At this time, I’m more worried about generating traffic then actually making money. With traffic comes money, so worry about the first before worrying about the latter. During March I was running just Google AdSense. I did a few things to better optimize the ads, and still plan on doing some more obvious things in the near future. March brought in $5.28 on 15,360 impressions for just a $0.34 eCPM. There is much room for improvement on this, so it will be interesting to watch and see as this hopefully grows.

I have also added Kontera in-text links for April, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that does at the end of the month.

RSS Subscribers

My RSS subscriber count is averaging close to 50 by the end of the month. That’s not bad considering it was 0 less than a month ago. A huge help was the site of the month article John Chow had written about. Since many of his readers have similar interests, they seemed to show a liking over here as well. My goal for April is to have my RSS subscribers averaging over 100 by the end of the month.

The one trend that is noticeable, and will continue to be noticeable, is the drop in subscribers on Saturday and Sunday’s. I purposely try not to post content on these days, so there will obviously be a drop in traffic and subscriptions.

Search Engine Goodness

I was seeing search engine results very early on in this blog, so it’s interesting to see what people are searching for to get here. This can also drastically help with the direction that you can write your content to maximize the amount of traffic that comes in. Search engine traffic is very valuable because it’s targeted traffic. Readers searched for something specifically, and the hope is that they came to your site looking for just that. I had 176 visits from organic search engines (Google, MSN, search, and AOL). The top 10 keywords that were searched to get to my blog in March are as follows:

1. 2008 infiniti g37 coupe
2. 2008 g37 coupe
3. www.nevblog.com
4. david pitlyuk
5. 2008 infiniti g37
6. infiniti g37
7. powercast ipo
8. mercedes mansions
9. heli expo
10. www.davidpitlyuk.com

We can obviously see here that the keyword which brought the most traffic was in regards to my post about the new 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe. I wrote this post early on when the car was just released and before many other sites had written about it. This gave me an advantage in the Google SERP, and put me on the top of results for some time before some of the bigger sites were able to get their content in. Just doing a preliminary look at April stats, I can see that not as much traffic is coming in from the same article, but I’m seeing a ton of traffic coming from my post on the next multi-BILLION dollar idea. In that post I talked about a company called Powercast, and how I would love to invest in them. While many other articles have been written about Powercast, not many have written about investing in it. This gave me a powerful advantage in search results, as it is a company which many people are seeing the potential for making some money on. In fact the top 5 keyword referrals in April so far all have to do with investing in Powercast. Just some food for thought.

Popular Pages/Content

It’s important to look at the most popular pages, as it can give you a few clues to make your blog better. It can tell you what articles people are most interested in reading and what articles are getting the most linkbacks. This way when you sit down and think about what you should write about, you should have a general direction to lead you in. This can also help you create a niche for your site if you do not already have one. Here’s a list of the top 10 most popular pages on this site for March:

1. Lamborghini As A Piece Of Art
2. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter
3. An Ugly Lamborghini?
4. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
5. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
6. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia
7. How I Got Over 2,000 Visitors In The First Week With $0
8. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
9. Who Is David Pitlyuk?
10. Cars (Category)

The top 3 posts were fairly popular on a few of the automotive forums that I am a part of, and therefore generated a good amount of traffic. Take a look at the top referrals analysis below to get more of an idea where my traffic came from.

I had 38 posts in the Month of March averaging 1.7 posts per day. According to my article on the number of optimal posts per day, I’m right in line! Keep in mind that I try not to post content on the weekends as I believe that’s time to try and do some relaxing.

Top Referrals

1. StumbleUpon
2. My350Z
3. Autoblog
4. G35Drive
5. JohnChow
6. Maxima.org
7. NissanClub
8. ViperClub
9. Digg
10. Google Reader

StumbleUpon brought 1,067 visitors that averaged 1.91 pages per visit. The majority of the traffic came from two articles that were “stumbled”. I didn’t learn about StumbleUpon until this month, but it’s a great concept…look for a post specifically about this in the near future. My350Z, G35Drive, Maxima.org, NissanClub, and ViperClub are all forum communities that I’m a part of. You can read more about generating traffic from forums in my post How I got over 2,000 visitors in the first week with $0.

If you don’t already know, in-text advertising are those links that display an ad when you hover over them with your mouse. I’m not a huge fan of this type of advertising, but I’d like to see how they perform on my blog. You will notice that my real links are blue, and sponsored links are green with a double underline.

Kontera used to only accept publishers that generated at least 500,000 pageviews a month. This blog is new, and not doing anywhere near that, but Kontera decided to let smaller sites into their network. Their main concern is accepting sites with quality content, which mine passed their test.

John Chow has Kontera implemented on his site and generated over $300 in 12 days. Keep in mind his blog generated 313,000 pageviews in the same month. I’ll recap how it does on here for the April review in early May. Stay tuned.

If you have been running Kontera, or even IntelliTXT, how has it worked out?

There hasn’t been an idea out there for a while that I’ve gotten truly excited about. That has all changed with the introduction of a new business started by an entrepreneur named Shearer. The company name? Powercast. If you haven’t heard of them yet, trust me, you will.

What Is It?

Wireless technology has really developed over the last 10 years, its made our lives easier and cleaner…but there has always been one wire left over, the power plug. That’s where a new patented, FCC-approved technology comes in that was invented by Powercast. The technology is wireless power. By utilizing a receiver plugged into the wall, and a receiver chip on the unit, it can act as if it is plugged in up to 3 feet away. The receiver converts radio waves in to DC electricity.

So imagine having your PDA/Cell phone in your pocket, and as soon as you sit down or get in the car it’s automatically charging. Imagine LED lighting in your house with no wires. Imagine medical devices such as pacemakers, that never have to be replaced. I think you can see where I’m going here, the technology is limitless in applications.

Limitations

I’ve already mentioned the 3-foot limitation, but there is also a power limitation. At this time, the technology can only power smaller devices up such as phones, PDAs, LED lights, etc. Something like a TV, computer monitor, or laptop cannot be utilize this technology…yet. The amount of power consumption by devices is getting better by the year. As power consumption goes down, the possibility of wireless power for that device goes up. Lets say I’m Dell. I’m going to do everything in my power to create a laptop that will only need enough power that it can work through wireless power, because I know my laptop will have the edge over other companies, which means it will sell. This thought process will drive many companies to work harder and faster to use less energy for their devices. This is a good thing!

When & How Much?

It sounds like something out of the future, but we’re going to start seeing products released this year, yes, 2007. Powercast has already signed over 100 nondisclosure agreements with companies to develop products. One of the first products will be an LED stick from Phillips. We should expect to see many more products in 2008, such as computer peripherals.

It gets better. The technology is cheap to manufacturer! The actual chip in the product (the whole bread and butter) only costs about $5 to make. I’m sure products will bring a premium because the technology is so new, but we shouldn’t expect to see something like a $1,000 cellphone that can do this…expect your normal prices.

How Do I Plan On Monetizing?

I will be closely watching this company, and I hope that they get an IPO. I just dabble in the stock market, but I only invest in companies which I personally believe in. Powercast has the opportunity to easily be one of the richest companies in the world, it will be very exciting to watch their growth.

SmashingMagazine is the king of websites for building compilation lists of some of the coolest stuff on the web. Their newest guide is a list of Google AdSense facts, FAQs, and tools. For somebody like me that hasn’t had much experience with AdSense, I’m trying to take in as much as possible in order to make it as effective as possible for myself. On top of that, I use AdWords for two of my businesses, so it’s always good to see how things work from the other side of the fence.

They have compiled twenty quotes that will help you do things like place your ads on your site so that the click-through rates are higher.

“Format is important for multiple ad units, display your ad units where repeat users will notice them, place a leaderboard immediately after the last post.”

There are some other great links for other resources. For example I found a new tool that I installed for Firefox which displays your AdSense statistics in the status bar:

There is some great stuff on the site, and will provide hours of good information.

Today, Google announced a new advertising format called Pay-per-action. I’ve always referred to this as CPA or cost-per-action.

What Is It?

This is going to be a major deal in online advertising from both the publisher and the advertiser perspective. Google advertising has always worked on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis where the advertiser would pay when a user clicks on their ad. With this new model, the advertiser will only pay when the user does a certain action, like filling out a form or buying something. In this new model, it does not matter how impressions or clicks are generated from the ad, as no payment is due until the action is completed. Some of the actions would be:

• Leads
• Signups
• Site interactions/pageviews
• Sales (always the same value)
• Sales (% of sale with many different sale values)

I have signed up to be a beta tester with my automotive site, ActiveTuning, as we currently use AdWords for part of our advertising budget. I haven’t decided how I’ll use it, but as of now I’m thinking that I will be looking for sales as well as leads/site interactions. I’ll use the leads for a scenario where a user will get as far as adding a product to their shopping cart, but may not necessarily go through the entire checkout process. It will definitely be a new world in terms of tweaking and playing around with different formats to see what works the best. Hopefully I am accepted as a beta tester.

Conversions would be tracked by using Google’s conversion tracking.

Making It Work

PPA works, and if optimized correctly can make much more money. An advertiser is willing to pay more for an action rather than a click because they can pre-formulate the ROI (return on investment). For example if I have a product that costs $100 and my cost is $60. I know I have up to $40 to play with before I start losing money on the product sale. Rather than pay $1/click where maybe the ratio of clicks-to-sale end up being $20 and 20 publishers essentially made $1…I’d be more willing to pay $10 to one publisher to generate that same one sale.

The problem is actually making it work. What I mean by that is making an ad that is just asking to be clicked so that as a publisher you can actually provide leads to advertisers that convert. The best way to do this is not by your regular banner ads, but by highly targeted in-content ads. For example if I write a review on a digital camera, a link in the review directly to a vendors product page that sells the camera will more than likely have a high sales conversion rate.

This is where Google’s new ad format called “text-link ads” comes in:

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to

Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

This new format will really help out in terms of making PPA successful for the advertiser, publisher, and ad network (Google in this case). It will be interested what other ad products come out of all of this.

Thanks to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, as his post made me aware of Google’s announcement.

Last weekend after house hunting with a friend, we decided to stop by a new place in the area for some dinner. The place is called Pei Wei Asian Diner, and it’s owned by P.F. Changs China Bistro. If you haven’t been to P.F. Changs, it’s best described on their about page:

The P.F. Chang’s experience is a unique combination of Chinese cuisine, attentive service, wine, and tempting desserts all served in a stylish, high-energy bistro.

Pei Wei is an interesting play on a concept that is new to me. They offer some select items from the P.F. Changs menu, as well as some new stuff, but it’s not your typical restaurant. They call it the “quick-casual restaurant”, and I liked it…a lot. Upon walking in, you go to a counter and order your food and drink. Simply choose a table to sit down at, fill your cup at the beverage station, and shortly afterwards somebody brings your food. There is no waiter to talk to, nobody trying to up sell appetizers, just a nice relaxing environment where you don’t get bugged. Somebody will also clean your plates up, so there is no work required on your part. Since you do not have a waiter, it also means you don’t need to tip, so you can still have a nice dinner, and save a few bucks. Will and I both got the same thing:

This is the honey seared lemon chicken, and is my favorite dish from P.F. Changs. We walked out of there with a $16.28 check between two people. It’s no $1,300 meal, but we were happy when leaving.

I think this is an interesting concept in dining out, and I would like to see some more of the popular franchises out there like Friday’s, Applebees, Olive Garden, etc do something like this. Is this something you would prefer compared to going to an actual full-service restaurant? Keep in mind that the food is just as good.

Now that my blog has been live for over a week, I think it’s time to look back at how the traffic was. 2,245 unique visitors and 2,934 pageviews (Monday 3/12 through Sunday 3/18).

You can see a spike in traffic mid-week, this was due to some of the blog posts getting some promotion multiple days in a row. Even though there is a huge drop in traffic afterwards, I retained some visitors, and this is the most important factor. As I continue to post more content, I expect to see the daily average numbers rise.

The top five posts for that week were these:

1. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter
2. An Ugly Lamborghini?
3. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia
4. Home Page
5. Who is David Pitlyuk?

I figured the Who is David Pitlyuk? page made it into the top 5 only because people are new to this blog and want to know more about the author.

So where did the traffic come from, and how did I get so much for nothing? The majority of it came from just a select few forums that I am a member of, and just posting in off topic sections. Here’s a list of some of the top referrers:

1. My350Z - A message board community for Nissan 350Z’s
2. AutoBlog - A popular automotive blog, owned by Weblogs
   • AutoBlog posted an article on my Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter post, unfortunately I had issues with my hosting company that day, so I lost a good amount of traffic.
3. G35Driver - A message board community for Infiniti G35’s
4. NissanClub - A message board community for Nissan vehicles
5. Maxima.org - A message board community for Nissan Maxima’s
6. ViperClub - A message board community for Dodge Viper’s
7. Digg - A user generated news site

I am a member of many other message board communities as well, so I can still do a good amount of promoting on those, and I plan to. When doing something like this, you must make sure of a few things:

1. Do not spam the forum. I tried to post on relevant message boards that would find the topics interesting. I did not post everything that I wrote about on this site, just specific topics that I thought people on the forums would like. For example, I posted about the Dodge Viper With A Matching Helicopter in “Off Topic > Other Vehicles” forums on a car-oriented site.
2. I typically do not like to register for a forum just to make a post about something I wrote. People normally consider that spamming, and you don’t want them to have a negative opinion of your blog. I like to add to a community I am already a part of, and have been posting for a while. If you aren’t a part of any message boards, consider finding one of something that interests you, and join.
3. One way to generate more clicks is to give a teaser picture. For example I wrote about my Lamborghini Art post, but rather than just having some text, I posted one of the pictures from the article (which linked to my page of course) as well as the link and a blurb. Seeing something visual will help your click rates, which in turn generates more traffic for your blog.

Other than posting on forums, I also submitted relevant posts to relevant sites. I sent over my Viper With A Matching Helicopter post to Autoblog, and they ended up writing about it. That brought over hundreds of unique visitors. RealEstate Undressed posted about my Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia article. As long as you write good, original content, there will more than likely be other people interested in reading what you have to say. If they link back to you, it brings you traffic, new visitors, and a better ranking in the eyes of sites like Technorati and Google. My point is that had I not sent my links their way, it would have probably never been written about, and that’s a lot of benefits I would have lost out on. I also submitted select posts to user generated news sites such as Digg and Netscape. Even if the submission don’t make it onto the front page, it does generate some traffic.

Last, but not least, I sent links out to friends that I thought may be interested in the content. Word of mouth is easily the greatest form of advertising (and flattery) out there. Word of mouth is how sites like YouTube end up getting big enough to be bought up by Google for 1.65 BILLION dollars.

Just make sure you are writing good content, and you are doing it consistently. By following this simple rule, you will see traffic to your site get bigger and bigger. Have some other suggestions for generating free traffic? Feel free to post your comments below.

Blogging has become a major business, and plenty of people are doing it as their full-time job. One guy that I’ve known for many years, John Chow, made over $7,000 last month alone from his personal blog. Weblogs got bought out by AOL about 1.5 years ago for over $20 million. There is money to be made in the blogosphere world.

How does one go about making the big bucks? The best beginner guide I’ve seen so far was written by Steve Pavlina, a guy that was in jail for felony grand theft at the age of 19. Since then Steve has turned his life around, and launched his own blog. Now he makes $1,000/day, and tells you how he does it and what you should know to do it yourself. It’s a long read, but if you’re serious about making a blog to make a living for yourself, I highly recommend giving it a read.

The article is posted on a blog called “Unusual Business Ideas That Work.” This is one of the sites on my RSS reader, and can be a great inspiration for business ideas. All it takes to come up with the next billion dollar idea is the one spark, and anything can trigger that. This blog posts business ideas that are considered “out there” but have worked for people. One of the most inspirational things you can do for yourself is read other peoples success stories. Motivation is key in order to succeed.

You will notice people like John Chow, Steve Pavlina, and Darren Rowse are making money now with their blogs. You will see a common trait in the advice they all give, and that’s because what they do works. Things like making sure your blog is updated constantly, writing good original content, and experimenting with different advertisers and ad layouts are among many of the equations that make the formula work. It’s not rocket science, but it does take a lot of time, work, and consistency.