Managing A Community
By Max | August 12, 2007
I have recently been spending way too much time bending to the whims of the communities which are built up around one or two of my sites. Due to the subject matter of the sites I run (two video games, one ipod), a lot of the traffic is from young males. These types of users I have found are very immature and are just developing their egos. Actually most of my users are great. They contribute and generally leave me alone while enjoying the site. Unfortunately, it only takes one or two tough cases to really become a time sink.
I generally like to be available for the users. When they see me putting time into a site, it encourages them to contribute as well. However, as you would expect for many of them, this is their primary hobby. What may not seem intrusive at all from their point of view, when added up from multiple users across multiple sites, becomes a considerable amount of hand holding.
I don’t really know the best solution to this problem. On one forum, which doesn’t produce much revenue I am trying to distance myself from the daily running of the site. I have delegated admin tasks to a former moderator. It has already caused some controversy after he banned a couple regular users. Since the forum doesn’t produce much revenue, it doesn’t matter too much, but I also don’t want to jeopardize future growth.
I would appreciate any advice on overcoming this problem.
Also it should be noted that I even with these time commitments, I am still not working full time on these websites. Just know that when you do finally purchase a site for yourself, you can expect that the income is not totally passive.
Topics: Article | 5 Comments »
Tribal Fusion Lowers My Rate
By Max | August 7, 2007
I got an email from my account rep today from Tribal Fusion. Apparently they are going to start splitting out campaigns for forums and campaigns that won’t include forums. Unfortunately, one of my larger sites will be impacted by this since most of the page impressions come from the forum there. I am not sure yet how much this will impact my earnings, but they will almost certainly be lower.
Advertisers don’t always appreciate forums because the ratio of page views to unique visitors is so high. If you are running a banner campaign, you would prefer to reach 100 different people rather than the same person 100 different times.
Hopefully this won’t impact my earnings too much. 
Topics: Ad Network Review | 2 Comments »
Stay Away From Shady Sales Listings
By Max | August 5, 2007
I was just browsing Sitepoint today to see if there was anything interesting when I saw this post. The seller has made just about every mistake possible when listing his site for sale. On the surface the site seems decent enough and under ordinary circumstances would warrant a bid, but the seller seems super shady. Here’s a list of the red flags that jump off the screen at me.
1. He says in the post that he is not the actual owner of the site.
So he’s selling a site that he doesn’t own. That’s interesting. If the real owner owes him money, why don’t they sell the site and then just give him the money instead of this odd arrangement? If they owe him for hosting, it can’t be that much can it? If the site is making $500/mon in Adsense he could just change the pub number and get paid back pretty quickly I would guess.
2. Traffic stats don’t match adsense claims.
10,000 unique visitors a month don’t generate $500 in Adsense. Every single one of them would have to click an ad in that case.
3. The seller’s typing is awful.
Smart, honest people don’t make so many typing errors. Scammers do. This guy types like an “3L14e” hacker. Theres a lot of misspelled words, odd punctuation and poor phrasing.
4. He wants to be paid upfront with paypal or WU.
Nothing screams “SCAM” like someone selling a site way too cheap and wanting to be paid upfront. I have bought sites with paypal before, but in both cases, I sent a down payment and then transferred the site. After the transfer I sent the remainder of the money. I prefer escrow.com.
5. The seller displays an unwillingness to provide more screenshots.
Think about this from a legitimate seller’s perspective. You want to receive the highest bid that you can get for your site. Why wouldn’t you present all the information to make a buyer comfortable with making a bid? The more buyers you attract, the more bids you’ll get along with higher prices.
The adage “If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is.” are words I live by. Always take the time to do your homework and avoid getting scammed. This auction listing is so bad its almost comical, but there are more clever scammers out there so be careful. If anyone has any website buy/sell scam stories, I would like to hear them.
Topics: Puchase Pitfalls | 4 Comments »
Upgrading Wordpress
By Max | August 4, 2007
Today I managed to upgrade wordpress without too much trouble. I guess my setup is ideal for upgrading, because all I had to do was ftp the files over and the process was basically done. I wonder what problems other people run into? At least now I shouldn’t have to worry as much about those pesky hackers.
Topics: News | 7 Comments »
The Case For Private Ad Sales
By Max | August 3, 2007
From my earnings last month, I saw that July CPM rates were not very good at Tribal Fusion. I think part of that has to do with a natural summer slow down in advertising spending. Much higher rates can be achieved with private ad sales. For one thing if you bypass the network, you’ll receive the full amount from the advertiser. Also by selling the ads yourself, you’ll likely find advertisers more suited to your niche who’ll pay more than the ad network rates because your traffic will convert better for them.
This all seems great at first, but you have to think about how much time it will take to find and then service an advertiser. With Tribal Fusion I just take their code and put it on the site. At that point the work is done which is great. If you sell the ad space yourself, you are going to have to spend a lot of time just to find an advertiser. Then on top of that you will need to negotiate a price, get them to pay you, and then place the ads on your site.
Say someone wants to pay you $100 for an ad placement that normally makes you $50 with Tribal Fusion or some other network. If you spend 3 hours of your time with all the details, then you have essentially just created a job for yourself making $17/hr. That isn’t too bad for just running a website, but my goal in owning sites is to minimize my time requirement as much as possible. Running a business will never be completely passive income, but the closer to that goal you get, the more time you’ll have to spend on a beach in Hawaii.
Unless you can land a very big spender, the time it takes to do all of this is probably not worth the extra increase in income if you value your time at all. The ideal advertiser will continue to purchase your inventory for several months. The first month with a new advertiser will be the most time consuming. After that its all gravy. For smaller sites I would recommend that they just sit and wait for advertisers to come to them. That eliminates the time spent finding advertisers.
This month I really want to find some more direct advertisers. I believe I will really be able to boost my earnings beyond what Tribal Fusion can pay. I am however going to be watching how much time I spend with this endeavor to be sure that the time is well spent.
Topics: Earnings Optimization | 5 Comments »
Website Income - July 2007
By Max | August 2, 2007
Sorry about the lack of posts lately guys. I have been overwhelmed at my day job with work. I am actually traveling up here in Portland. It’s hard to post regularly when you are out of town.
Anyway I wanted to update you on the July earnings. I am pleased once again. This time Counterstrike really boosted things up for me.
Google Adsense: $2748.65 - I had one person download Google Earth and that paid me $2!
TribalFusion: $1355.27
Kontera: $451.11
ValueClick: $76.57
AuctionAds: $86.09
Direct Ad Sales: $20.00
The Grand Total this month is $4737.69. That’s over $1000 more than I made last month. I actually made less than last month because the newly added CounterStrike site accounted for more than the difference between last month and this month. The likely reason for the slight drop in earnings from the older sites is slower traffic in the summer.
On one positive not, my mixed drinks site is starting to get some google traffic which has really helped. I have literally not touched this site since about December. Traffic has been up and down during the last few months, but it has always made a little money, and I am impressed with how little work has been required in maintaining it. All my other sites require at least a little attention.
Topics: Monthly Income | 11 Comments »
Some Of These Webmasters Are Getting Creative
By Max | July 26, 2007
I was browsing Sitepoint today and saw this auction going. I thought it was a pretty funny site idea. Check it out.
Topics: News | 1 Comment »
Make Sure You Upgrade Your Wordpress
By Max | July 23, 2007
Yesterday, my personal blog got hacked. I think there is some kind of Wordpress exploit for this version. Tonight I plan to upgrade to the latest version which hopefully will keep me out of trouble. Also I really need to start backing up my sites more regularly. You can’t afford to have a harddrive go out on a server and lose a website in this business.
Anyone have any ideas for an easy automatic way to perform backups?
Topics: News | 9 Comments »
Some Interest In Counter Strike
By Max | July 19, 2007
I received a message from someone yesterday who was interested in purchasing the Counter Strike site. They were interested in the site from the previous sale that I won. He asked me about some of the earnings stats. I told him I was looking for offers somewhere around $20,000+. I don’t think he’ll go for it at that price since my increased earnings don’t have much of a history yet. I am not going to sell at this point for anything less than $20,000. I think I could get at least close to that if I put it up for sale on Sitepoint, so there is no reason to sell myself short now. What do you guys think?
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment | 9 Comments »
Escrow.com Review - Avoid Getting Scammed
By Max | July 17, 2007
Escrow.com appears to be the service to use when transacting a website. Looking at many of the auctions on Sitepoint, you can just tell some of them are scammers. You will definitely want some protection as a buyer since you will have little recourse if you use another method to purchase.
In case you don’t already know, an escrow service is just a trusted third party which holds funds provided by the buyer to give the seller confidence that he will be paid during the transaction. If you have ever bought a house, then you have used an escrow service. You wouldn’t want to just hand a seller several thousand dollars without being absolutely certain that the goods being sold will be yours.
Escrow.com works in a similar fashion. The seller sends you a transaction email, and then as the buyer, you will fund the escrow account with a bank transfer. Escrow.com then holds the funds and tells the seller to begin the transaction. Once the seller has transferred the goods to the buyer (in this case a website), the funds will be released and the transaction completed.
This is the best way I know for buyers and sellers to avoid being scammed during a transaction. The fees are high, but not any worse than paypal. If you are sending thousands of dollars to strangers over the internet, you will want to take every precaution against getting scammed.
Topics: Article | 2 Comments »
