Private Link Sales Review
By Max | July 15, 2007
I mentioned last week that I had submitted a couple of my sites to Private Link Sales. Since PLS is a new link marketplace, I really wasn’t expecting much, but it didn’t cost anything, so I figured it was worth a try. Over the weekend, someone sent me a $20 paypal for my first link sale through them for a nice surprise. I have only sold one link on TLA for this same site before. The best part is I got to keep the full $20 instead of giving half to TLA. In my opinion, TLA prices are a little high, and maybe thats why they don’t get enough volume to sell my links. I am going to keep my eye on PLS. I have spoken to the developer and he seems very excited about its potential. Certainly the commission is nice.
I told him about your comments that he should keep the site URLs hidden from google, and I think he will take this into account for one of the next updates.
Topics: Ad Network Review | 14 Comments »
Counter Strike Website Earnings Update
By Max | July 13, 2007
I have finally been approved for all the ad networks and placed all their ads on my site. When I purchased the Counter Strike website a couple weeks ago, it was earning an average of $24/day in June all from Adsense.
Yesterday I earned $78.48 from the website. I admit, that I think the daily average earnings will be lower than this, since I had the best day with Adsense yesterday. Here’s the breakdown:
Adsense: $56.49
TribalFusion: $19.00
Kontera: $2.99
I am pretty disappointed in the Kontera earnings. I may even drop that network. An extra $90/mon might not be worth the annoyance of those ads. I think I’ll be able to boost the TribalFusion earnings somewhat by adding more impressions. Adsense was a lot higher than normal.
While $78 in one day is likely to be higher than the average, it still represents an incredible boost over the previous average of $24. I think I’ll be able to achieve $60/day on average with this site. That works out to $1800/mon. Based on that monthly earn, I think I’ll be able to sell the site for over $20,000, a 100%+ ROI!! I paid $10,000 for the site.
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment | 8 Comments »
Tribal Fusion - Counter Strike Update
By Max | July 11, 2007
OK, I guess its true what they say, a phone call is worth a thousand emails. (Actually I just made that up.) I called my account manager at Tribal Fusion and she got me set up right away with their ads on the Counter Strike site. Things are really rolling now. I have been accepted to all the major ad networks that I plan to use. The only thing remaining to do is perhaps some optimization. I might play around with some CPA networks, and see if anything converts, but with my current setup I expect to average $60/day or more. That will easily boost my valuation to the point where it will be fairly profitable to sell.
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment | 3 Comments »
Adding Kontera - Counter Strike Update
By Max | July 11, 2007
Last night I placed the Kontera codes on the Counter Strike site. For my other site, Kontera has been running at about 30-50% of adsense. It hasn’t greatly impacted adsense earnings however, and thats the nice thing. It does make me wonder though, how many clicks on Kontera are legitimate advertisement interest versus misclicks. If Kontera’s performance on my Counter Strike site is 30% of my Adsense, I’ll be pretty happy. A lot of people knock Kontera for being annoying. I actually don’t think its that annoying once you are used to not hovering over the double line links. Also the people who say that the ads bother them, don’t click on ads anyway. Now thats annoying!
Tribal Fusion still hasn’t gotten back to me, so I’ll probably have to call them.
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment | 8 Comments »
Less Is More With Adsense
By Max | July 10, 2007
Adsense has been really kind to me since I made those ad size changes. The highest earning day I had before the changes was $27. That was a Saturday. Gaming related traffic seems to peak on a Saturday. Last Saturday I pulled down $47 through adsense. I have been doing some reading, and apparently its not just the higher CTR that is helping boost earnings. With Adsense, less is more!
When I made my ad changes, not only did I replace the 468 small banner with a 336×280 large block, I also removed one adsense sidebar unit and replaced it with an AuctionAds block. Apparently people have noticed fewer Adsense ads yield a higher return. The reason this can occur, is because you will only be showing the highest bidders in the Adsense CPC program. If your user clicks on one of four adsense links, it will earn more than if he clicks on one of twelve links, since the extra eight spot will be taken up by lower bidding advertisers. I need to do some more experimenting with this. I may need to remove some more adsense units from my sites.
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment, Article | 5 Comments »
Private Link Sales
By Max | July 8, 2007
I just entered a couple of my sites on this link sales listing. I don’t know if I’ll make any money off this. There appears to be a lot of people listing sales, but I don’t know how many buyers are browsing the listings. At the very least it appears I will get a free link back to my site.
I would like to see this marketplace take off because they take a much smaller cut than Text Link Ads does. I think that she should rewrite her software to only charge the $2 listing fee when a sale is made. Right now the links listings are free, but I bet the volume of listings will dramatically decrease once the $2 fee kicks in.
Topics: Ad Network Review | 20 Comments »
Tools Of The Trade - Using DnScoop
By Max | July 6, 2007
I want to highlight this website, www.dnscoop.com. There’s no doubt there are others like it, but I have been using this one, and have found it quite useful. When you are evaluating a website to buy, you will want to make sure that what the seller is telling you is true. dnScoop offers a lot of information such as the age of the domain, alexa ranking, and link stats all in one place.
The funny thing is the value they place on the website. They have some kind of automated valuation script. Don’t believe what this tells you. Its incredibly inflated. Sometimes its fun just to see what weird numbers pop out though. I have no idea where they come up with the valuations though. They probably just input the value of google, and derive all smaller sites from that. 
Topics: News | 4 Comments »
Holiday Traffic Lull
By Max | July 5, 2007
The impact of holiday traffic is very pronounced. There must be a lot of people bored at work spending their days visiting websites instead of working. When the internet bubble was running full speed ahead back in the late 90s, a lot of people were talking about the huge productivity gains companies were seeing. Most of these gains I suspect were a result of improved technology. The introduction of the internet to business probably has a huge negative impact on productivity. I personally know several fantasy football “experts” who put in more hours with their fantasy teams than they do at work during the season.
Every one of my sites was down about 10-20% in traffic. Actually there was one exception. MyMixedDrinks.com did really well. On July 3rd, I got about three times the normal traffic, and July 4th traffic was double the average. I guess on July 3rd people need the recipes for the drinks they are going to make the next day. Then on the fourth they look up the recipes, but by 2pm are so drunk they stop they don’t care what the mixer is.
Many people also experience a lull on the weekends. My weekend traffic is quite good. Because of the types of sites I run (video games and ipods) I get a lot of teenagers and young adults who visit on the weekends. I guess school or work prevents them from putting in much time on the internet.
Topics: Article | 4 Comments »
Maximizing Adsense
By Max | July 4, 2007
So after switching from the 468 ad unit to the much larger 336×280 adsense block, I am already noticing a bid difference in adsense earnings. I already have a 75% increase in CTR. This should translate into substantially higher earnings. I haven’t even been running this larger block a full day yet and I already have more clicks than in any of the previous four days. Theres still 4 hours yet to go too! If you are not using the 336×280 block or at least one of the other large blocks you are leaving money on the table.
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment | 11 Comments »
New CounterStrike Website Is Now Transferred
By Max | July 4, 2007
Today I got the details to the new server I ordered for the Counter Strike site that I bought last week. The previous owner performed the transfer for me which is awesome. I always ask. It can’t hurt, and they will usually have a better idea at what needs to be done than you will. He even taught me a new trick. There is a program called rsync that will make an exact copy over ssh for you. Try this on your next transfer.
rsync -avz -e --delete ./ counter@YOURIP:/home/counter/public_html/
You have to be ssh logged into the source server and in the directory that you want to transfer. “counter” is the username/sitename, and YOURIP is your IP. This appears to be a much better option than ftp for large sites.
You will still have to transfer the DBs by exporting them as I mentioned before.
Enough technical mumbo jumbo for now… Lets get down to business.
The first change I made was to replace the old 468×60 adsense ad with one of those whopping 336×280 blocks. I hope this will increase the CTR and earnings. I have noticed a CPM increase by using the big block ads. The last four days I have made $27, $22, $18, and $21 from adsense. Thats not really much data to go on, but I do have some of his screen captures I can compare against as well. Hopefully in a week I should be able to tell what the performance increase is.
The next change I made because I noticed that there were 4 Adsense units on one page. I don’t believe this is allowed under the Google TOS. One was a link ad unit instead of the standard ad unit. I wonder if that matters? If any of you are intimately familiar with the TOS let me know. Anyway, just to be on the safe side I replaced the sidebar skyscraper with an AuctionAds block. This will ad some advertising diversity and I probably would have done it anyway. I have already gotten some clicks on this ad unit, so thats a good sign. Lets see if they buy anything. It will take a few days before I know. Someone mentioned in the comments below that AuctionAds performs well on gaming sites, so I have got high hopes.
Topics: Website Flipping Experiment | 10 Comments »
