The Webmaster Place

The importance of multiple revenue streams:

There are several reasons why for most people it is important to have not one but several or many different revenue streams. In other words, you may have a day job, but you also have a work-at-home-business that you do on the side. Or you may have a business, but it pays to have multiple revenue streams in the business, not just one core one.

Online this is easy: Don’t just have one web site, have 5, or 10 or 100. Each one should also have multiple revenue streams, making money not just from ad revenues, but also from email lists, product sales, etc.

Reasons:

1) The 80/20 rule: It takes a certain amount of effort to be successful in one revenue stream. After you know how to do that it might be very hard to get to the next level because at each level of success new skills are needed. Maybe one doesn’t have those skills or the personality to implement those skills. So it can be much easier to put the first stream on autopilot and create a second stream in a similar way. Put the second stream on autopilot and move on to the third, etc. You get 80% of the success for only 20% of the effort each time.

2) Diversify for safety: If one revenue stream dies or gets cut in half you still have the other(s) to fall back on. Often I find that if one stream gets hit others might improve at the same time which evens things out.

3) Diversify for success: It could be that a second revenue stream totally outperforms the first one. Multiple streams give multiple chances to find something that works better; then you can focus on building the one stream that works the best.

My own experience with this is as follows:

I started out about 10 years ago designing web sites as a freelancer. On the side I worked to build up traffic to 3 information web sites that my wife and I had built with the hopes of making some money from them. Eventually one of the sites started making a bit of money so I had 2 revenue streams: my freelancing and that site.

After a lot of work and time the web site was doing better but my freelancing still brought in most of my income. On the other hand, the web site was bringing in the money without much time spent on it. The web site got to a plateau so I took the advice of the late Cory Rudl who said to build a site, automate it and move on to the next site. I now had 2 assistants and we started building more sites, one at a time.

When the dot.com bubble burst my freelancing revenues went way down as did the revenues from our sites. But we got better and better at building the sites and soon we were making much more from the sites than from our clients. We kept building and now we have over 50, running almost entirely on autopilot. As a bonus, I learned quite a lot from our own sites that has helped me help my clients.

Sometimes the sites earn more and sometimes less. But almost all are all making at least some money, and when one goes down another is likely to go up.

We got to the point where were were making about 80% of our revenues from our own web sites and other projects and the rest from our clients. The clients were 80% of our headaches for only 20% of our revenues. So I started to let them atrophy — we serviced them, but we didn’t look for new clients and if we lost an existing client we could live with that.

You might guess what happened next: our own sites started to tank due to increased competition and tougher search engine criteria. So what did we do? We kept the sites and we keep adding to them but now we are getting more into the client business again. We have a number of clients, each of which is basically a revenue stream.

Thus we have many revenue streams. If something works we focus on that. If our focus stops working so well or goes away we just shift our attention to something else that is working. And we keep trying to build and expand so that hopefully we will soon get to the next level, whatever that is.

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I admit it: I am a cheapskate. I don’t like spending money. Not mine, not my business’, not my clients’.

In some ways this is my biggest strength. For example, I have build a small company with miniscule overhead costs (besides salaries) by having a “virtual office” where everyone works from home at their own expense.

On the flip side, in some ways this is my biggest weakness. For example, I have built a small company which requires a huge amount of management because we have a “virtual office” where everyone works from a different location.

So how do you know when it makes sense to dig into your pocket and shell out some money? I am not an expert but I have one way of knowing which is for sure correct: I spend money if I think it will make me more money.

If you have read my earlier posts here, here and here you will see that I stress the importance of getting one’s investment back. Preferably very fast and many times over.

A risk-reducer is if you can get your money back or only pay after you have given the product or service a try. I asked for refunds 2 or 3 times. I spent a bundle (sometimes over $1000) on products with money-back guarantees. If I honestly didn’t think the product was worth the money, or at least wasn’t what I was looking for, I requested my money back and it was promptly refunded. In my experience if you deal with a well-known firm they will be professional and will not give you any problems about refunds lest they tarnish their reputation.

So my advice in a nutshell: When reviewing a product or service, look for something that is not a major expense (if possible), is LIKELY to make you your money back fast and many times over, and preferably has a money-back guarantee or a delayed payment option that you can rely on.

If you have all that, spending the money should be a no-brainer.

I plan to write about 2 recent examples of this in my next posting.

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If you have been around the web for a while you certainly know there are different ways to make money from your site. If you are not selling a product of your own you can still sell your advertising space or push other people’s products via affiliate programs.

Of course if you haven’t been in a cave for the last few years you know about Google AdSense. The program is amazing and created a revolution in online advertising.

And if you need help in making it work Contact us and we will show you how. If you want we will even do it for FREE, but there is a catch, one which you will probably like. It is worth finding out more.

But that is not what I want to tell you about.

What I do want to tell you about is another services that we are using in addition to AdSense, Chitika eMiniMalls.

These are product ads in the normal banner shapes that can be used in place of or in addition to Google ads. They are certainly more attractive than Google ads and less… ubiquitous. On the flip side they are for products only which can be limiting depending on the topic of your web site.

You can sign up for the program here.

I admit that we are still learning how to make the program work right, but in the meantime it is earning us a bit of extra money on top of our AdSense revenues. If you want to learn more try reading
Joel Comm’s Chitika eMiniMalls Secrets.

Joel is the author of Google AdSense Secrets, an ebook that has literally helped us to increase our AdSense revenues by thousands of dollars.

If you haven’t tried Chitika eMinimalls you probably should. If you have and can give me some pointers please leave them in the comments section. I know this program can be a winner and I plan to figure out how to make it work.

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A short history lesson on how Google AdSense revolutionized the web:

With Google AdSense, for the first time high-paying ads were available to everyone, presuming you were clever enough to use the program properly.

In a nutshell, Google AdSense ads produced CPMs (cost, or in this case revenue, for 1000 exposures) of $50, $100 or even more. [Yes, such CPMs are possible. If you don’t believe it, keep reading.]

Now even at the height of the dot.com advertising insanity the top ad rates were normally “only” in the $50 CPM range, and this was only for the top web properties. Still the $50 CPMs were a rip-off. When the advertisers actually started paying attention to how little bang they were getting for their buck they backed out. CPMs then plummetted causing plenty of publishers to go out of business. The dot.com crash was on!

But then Google AdSense came onto the scene. Now even the little guy could get advertising CPMs at the pre-crash rate or higher. Like, pinch me, I must be dreaming! It was too good to be true.

Not only that but since AdSense program figured out what ads to show all by itself there was no work involved. Just put the JavaScript on your page and that’s it. No investigating which affiliate programs or search terms (for PPC advertising) pay the best, no need to periodically remove dead advertisers.

But how did they do it? If the pre-crash CPMs were a rip-off as I said, how does AdSense give similar or even higher CPMs?

The answer is that the guys at Google once again took an existing concept and with one clever twist created a much better product, just like they did when they changed search engines forever by adding PageRank (i.e. offsite factors) to their algorithm in addition to the on-site factors that all the other search engines were using. In the AdSense case they went away from giving fixed results based on specific search terms chose by the publishers and instead culled their entire network of advertisers for the most clickable and high-paying relevent ads. Brilliant! As usual.

It took quite a while but finally other services began following suit. Will a new dot.com boom follow? Maybe. Maybe not — people are still burned from the last disaster. But in the meantime a lot of “little guys” are making big bucks. Where there is money, eventually the big guys will follow.

So build your content sites, rake in the money and position yourself to be in the game when it gets red-hot again.

And if you don’t know how to make such big money from your AdSense programs you can get someone to show you how. One option is to research the subject. I recommend reading Google AdSense Secrets. When I read the first version over a year ago I was already making VERY good money from AdSense but I still learned quite a lot from this book. Within a month or two I had already made my money back and continued to make my money back roughly every month. Now I make much more. Plus I found a whole new approach to making money from AdSense that I didn’t have before that.

There is another option. There are gurus out there who can help you to do better. I myself have been able to improve my revenues to 6-10 times what they were before for some ads. Would that kind of increase be interesting to you? I thought so.

If you don’t want to pay for someone to help you, we can help you for free in exchange for a share of the increased revenues. Believe me, paying once is by far the best deal for you but I realize that for many small businesses it is hard to justify new expenses. If that applies to you then the revenue share approach is a zero-risk solution. Why not give it a try? Contact us to find out more.

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Ok, true I said that I would be sticking to the business side of webmastering, but I also said there that I could help you debug a table and here is how:

Ok, wait a minute. This is so stupid and easy that it may seem ridiculous that I am posting it but don’t jump on me. One of my colleagues just came to me a few days ago for help with a table and this was how I helped him:

Just set the table to BORDER=1 . If there are multiple imbedded tables set each one to BORDER=1 or try doing them one at a time, if necessary gradually getting to the point where they all have borders. If you are having trouble figuring out which elements belong to which table you can set some to BORDER=4 or whatever to clarify which table is which.

Ok, I said it was stupid and easy. It really does help though because it lets you see what the table is really doing which can lead you straight to the problem(s).

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I hope you read my last message about why this blog focusses more on the business and money side of webmastering than the technical side. It involves some very deep thoughts based on many years of experience.

So where is the money to be found on the Web?

Everywhere.

We are quite fortunate to live in a time where the start-up costs in time and money for starting a business are approaching zero. Once upon a time if you wanted the simplest business you had to have a store and stuff to sell and you had to put the time in yourself. The power of the Internet removes almost all of that. A virtual store that sells someone else’s stuff and runs itself costs almost nothing to create and no time to maintain.

For anyone who doesn’t yet know how to make money on the ‘Net, look around. There are probably millions of people out there making tons of money in hundreds of different ways, most of them pretty simple.

Having trouble “getting started”? Ok, here is the way to start your very own internet business, presuming you have the basics like a brain, an Internet connection:

1) Buy a domain name
2) Get a host
3) Put up a few pages about a subject you like.
4) Put some Google ads on the page.
5) Surf around to get some links to your site.

Time spent: maybe 8 hours to have a site that will generate at least SOME revenue for you, forever.

Ok, ok, so it won’t be much money, maybe less than the hosting fees. Fine. So once you have taken the leap, refine it a bit until you make money:

6) Repeat steps 3-5 until you are making a profit.
7) Start over from the beginning and build another site. Repeat.

There you have it. A no-brainer way to make money online. Just about anyone can do it. Anyone who isn’t is really missing out for no reason.

Of course there are many slightly more sophisticated ways to make a lot more money online. Still it is almost unbelieveably how easy it is to make big money these days. For 15 ideas that show just how easy it is, try getting the Desperate for Money ebook. It really is an eye-opener.

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Ok, I have a confession to make.

Once upon a time I would have been considered a real geek. I had a degree in Computer Engineering from a prestigious university and a great resume as a programmer and network administrator. That was when the Web was just getting started.

But — I also had an interest in people, and I saw the potential of using the power of the Internet to reach many more people with much less effort. So when the Internet first started gathering steam I jumped in, even before there was a World Wide Web.

There was also a second “but” — I got tired of always racing after the latest programming languages and tools. Sure I had worked with about 15 different languages and had a background in hardware, networking and system administration as well. But there was always new stuff coming along and if one didn’t know it, well, one was behind and one’s skills were less in demand.

There was a third “but” as well — I have a bit of graphical talent and enjoy drawing, layout and other graphical fields even though I am far from being a graphic artist.

Becoming a webmaster was the perfect way to put all the above together. I could use my technical skills to reach lots of people, playing around with graphics stuff along the way. And I had most of the skills needed for creating web sites already. Not only did I not have to chase after old technology to be able to create sites, the skills needed online changed more slowly than the programming field as a whole. Maybe that was because it was only one small subsection of programming so I didn’t have to worry about EVERYTHING going on in the field. Regardless, I no longer felt that I was always behind the game.

As my company slowly grew my technical skills grew slowly but my business skills grew much more quickly. Having a technical foundation is awesome, but if you want to make real money you need to know business, marketing, sales, and/or management. That is where my focus of learning is now.

It is very sad but I am having second thoughts on the hi-tech field in general. I see people that are older than myself who have been programming for decades and now no one wants to hire them. What is scary is that it is happening to me too. As I approach 40 my skills are the “old” ones. I program the “old” way. If I were to get a job as a programmer I wouldn’t deserve nearly as much money as I can get running my own company.

What kind of profession is it that the more experience you have the less valuable you are? It is like being a sports star — you have retire by the time you are 40. Except that if you are geek you normally don’t get huge bucks along the way so you can’t retire at 40 even if you want to.

So this blog is not going to teach you much along the way of new technical skills. I don’t have them to teach you. Well, maybe I could help you debug a messed up table or script that is driving you crazy. For some things experience still matters. But otherwise I am going to be focussing on ways to make money. I know a bit about that by now and you need to know it too.

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YPN vs. Google AdSense: Yes, it is a clash of the titans, King Kong vs. Godzilla all over again. Who will be left standing at the end of the battle?

Hopefully the answer will be “both of them”! Or better, them AND MSN as well. A little competition is a very good thing for us webmasters.

I have been running YPN on one of my sites for about a week and so I can report on how it stacks up against Google.

The first and biggest question is “how does it perform”? Ideally I should do a proper split test of YPN vs. Google on a few hundred pages and see which wins. Split testing means switching between the ads — first one person gets one and then the next person gets the other and so on.

Since both Yahoo and Google have exclusivity clauses that say their ads can not be shown on the same page with context-based ads (i.e. ads that figure out themselves what are the important keywords on the page and then serve ads accordingly) from other services I think that split-testing would be pushing the envelope of acceptibility, at best. I am not going to go there.

But in the meantime I have put YPN ads boxes on a number of my pages. The results are great — these ads are definitely competitive with AdSense’s. That is a huge relief because I don’t have to worry that Google will one day ban me for something I didn’t know about. I mean I am still worried, but if they dump me I will just move all my business over to YPN.

I am not surprised that YPN performs well. Yahoo has no choice but to deliver like Google does or better since Google already dominates the field. If Yahoo wants in they are going to have to compete successfully as I said here.

What about everything else? Well, YPN seems pretty close to an AdSense clone in many ways. The ad units come in the same shapes with the same color-setting options, the reporting is the same, etc. They even make the same mistake as Google by creating a long digit string for each channel in the JavaScript instead of just letting us use text strings that actually make sense. Presumably this is more accurate than using words in case a digit gets dropped but I am sure that if they wanted to they could get around this like Chitika apparently does with their “minimall” ad units. (More on Chitika later in another post. Sign up here to try Chitika out. )

I mean, I am sure there is one guy at Yahoo who is the one with the Google AdSense account so the Yahoo!ligans can check out what they need to do to keep up. Eventually Google will do the same for YPN. Or more correctly, I am sure they also have an account at their competitor’s service but for Google it is more of a question of looking back and trying to stay ahead rather than keep up.

So far YPN definitely is losing in the account features department, but not by much. For example, they don’t have up-to-the-hour stats for today like AdSense does. That really hurts when I am experimenting with something new and want to see how it is going but I assume that this feature will get added eventually. They already seem to be making progress — their “Daily Balance” feature is actually starting to be updated more than once per day, which wasn’t the case a few days ago.

YPN also lacks electronic payments, a competitive ad filter, AdLinks, a search option, substitute ads in case there are no matching advertisers, etc. And no option to refer others to YPN and get a commission.

On the other hand, YPN offers the option to put your earnings into your Yahoo! Search Marketing (i.e. Overture) advertising account if you have one, an option which Google has absurdly not included thus far. But now they will have to…

Where Yahoo is obviously trying to get ahead of Google is with their offering code for RSS feeds. They are also pushing integration with some of their other services, but so far for free. (Hint: pay us and we will be more likely to play along.) Google is going to have to follow suit. MSN… Well, we’ll see about them.

The bottom line: don’t dump AdSense yet… Get both services and watch them fight it out. May we all win!

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I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.

I have been trying to contact Yahoo/Overture for the better part of the last decade. Either to get my sites listed or to get into the Overture partners program. Emails, phone calls (left messages — they never answered), trying to get a friend to get me in, etc.

My experience was that trying to contact Yahoo was a little like praying — you might see the results but you are not very likely to hear the response. I think at Yahoo and Overture they would like that analogy, as they gave the impression that they felt they were higher beings than us mere webmasters. Maybe it was unintentional.

But then again, prayers were much more likely to get results than my emails and phone messages.

Which brings us to the phone call.

Earlier I mentioned that I tried to get accepted to the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN). I later wrote (after not getting a response again to my queries) at length about the need for Yahoo! to improve its support in order to be able to compete with Google AdSense. I said that support would be the big challenge to Yahoo! because it would require a change in corporate culture for them to start actually responding to webmasters.

Almost 2 months passed. I had given up on getting into Yahoo! for now because my company is not US-based and Yahoo! says that they are only working with US-based companies during the YPN Beta.

Then, right as I was starting to dream about getting my US-based clients in the door I received a voice-mail message (left at my voice-mail-to-email # in the US) from Yahoo! They wanted to know why I hadn’t completed the signup process. They left a phone number to call them at.

I couldn’t believe it. As I said above, I still can’t.

It was over the weekend when I got the voice mail so I eagerly anticipated calling them on Monday. I called, got right through, waited on hold for a neglible amount of time, and then a real human being picked up. I told him my problem and he said if I have a US tax ID for my company that would be fine. I do, so I went back to finish the signup process.

A problem — they only allow for US addresses in the signup form. What to do? Called them again. Got right through to a human, explained the problem. He asked me if I have a US address for checks to be sent to, which is all the actually care about because they are not yet set up for foreign addresses. I do, so I put it into the form, got in to my account, and started putting ads on one of my sites!

I will give you an Adsense-vs.-YPN update soon. The main thing for now is that Yahoo! really does seem to have overcome their big hurdle and they are now accessible. The next thing you know, they might actually be accountable. This is great news for Webmasters everywhere, or it will be if it continues after the Beta. Watch out Google, it is going to be a bipolar world!

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I must admit I am getting frustrated.

I have drawn up a list of new business areas I would like to pursue and it is growing much faster than I can act on it.

That’s the good news.

I pretty much missed the first Internet wave, the bubble where people made zillions of dollars using other people’s money to accomplish… maybe nothing. In those days I was slowly building a traditional consulting business and growing one web site while studying half-time and working half-time.

I think I blew it by being too boring. Yeah, I built up my client list, raised my rates, made some nice money from my site, but then it mostly came crashing down when the bubble burst. I survived, barely. Somehow.

I was more successful the next time around. My business had grown into a small company and together we cranked out a number of web sites that made decent money for a while. When Google AdSense came along we jumped on it and made good money from it.

Now that is going away because there are so many people creating so many sites out there. We are looking for the next wave to catch. For the first time I see that there really are tons of ways to make money out there. It is just a question of picking something and pursuing it until one succeeds. Yes, it will usually not work the first time or the second, but persistence pays off.

If you have been eyeing a certain product or service that others seem to be making money from, go for it! I plan to update you about some of the things I am working on in the future.

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