Showing posts with label Revenue Sharing Programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Revenue Sharing Programs. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

When to Stop Giving Away Your article in BlogSpot

Blogspot, previously known as "Blogger", is so convenient to use that nearly every creature in the internet world has opened an account for it. This post is mainly related to those friends who use blogspot to publish ads alongside their posts in order to gain additional income.

From the day that bloggers publish their first post, they are thinking how to best monetize their blogs. Google Adsense is again the most popular advertising program being used. Recently, Amazon formed partnership with Google, so that bloggers could display Amazon affiliate ads alongside their posts as easy as they do with Google Adsense. As you know, you need tons of traffic to produce enough ad clicks and thus generate observable ad revenue. This is almost impossible without continuous content creation and promotion efforts that usually may last more than one year. However, if you really hope to make money from blogging, this is the necessary hard work and patience that you need to invest.

Many blogger don't realize that. They believe the day they create unique content is the same day they ought to earn money. With this belief in mind, they soon think of a beautiful idea: Why should my article only reside in my blog? As long as it's my original work, I can park them in as many places as possible, either through article submission or through social bookmarking. If I do this, I'll receive at least two benefits:
  • Free back links to my blog and individual post
  • Some article directories offer ad revenue sharing program from which I can earn additional income from my articles.
Their basic idea is true. However, as I emphasized repeatedly in my previous posts, never go too far with regard to any of your ideas. Almost all originally correct things will turn wrong if one overdoes them. The same is true for your article marketing. My general points are as follows:
  • Promotion effect follows the rule of diminishing return. You certainly can get free backlinks from article submission or social bookmarking. However, the more articles you submit or bookmark to the same website, the less marginal promotion effect the article will bring to you. At some point, it won't compensate your article marketing effort any more, and that's when you ought to stop giving away your article.
  • Not all article submission or social bookmarking sites are worth your efforts. They are thousands of article directories and social bookmarking websites out there. We usually believe, the more the better. So we tend to submit or bookmark our articles to as many places as possible. An important fact we neglect is that most of those article directories and social bookmarking sites don't generate any traffic at all. The only result your article brings is free content to their website, with negligible benefit to you. Clearly, it's better that you stop giving away your content to those dummy websites and spend your saved efforts on producing more creative content and targeting your promotion efforts to those few best article directories and social bookmarking websites.
  • Most ad revenue sharing programs do not sound as good as they claimed at all. You could refer to my detail analysis given in my last posts: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" and Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates. Same as above, you are merely contributing free content without any significant promotion effect, let alone additional income from shared ad revenue.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates

In my last post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing", we discussed how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs. The conclusion is only choose those few which have already got a large traffic base. The problem is how we can arrive at such an attractive list?

Of course, you can always try search on Google with keyword "Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites" and you'll get tons of relevant information. Then you can choose among them according to your own inspection and other people's experience. However, our time is usually limited. Thus, we can't afford to participate as many revenue sharing programs as we want. In my opinion, it's enough that we join in one or two best revenue sharing programs. The reasons are as follows:
  • The purpose of joining revenue sharing programs is not to make a fortune. It's just to provide an additional income. If you do things right, the piece of income will be visible, but far from large. It's your own full-time work or entrepreneurship that you need to devote a major part of your energy to.
  • We can't expect ourselves to be experts in every field. Those best revenue sharing sites operate in many different fields, including blogging, forums, reviews, article directories, social media and so on. It's highly impossible that you can maintain the quality and quantity of your content in more than two fields. For example, you may be good at writing high quality article, but may not be so good at producing videos. If that's the case, why not focus on the field you are best at.
  • Copy right issue. If you participate in more revenue sharing programs than you can afford, a potential result is that you may start to copy others' content to maintain a regular upgrading frequency of your account page in each revenue sharing programs. In the short term you may increase your adsense income to some degree. In the long term you may end up with your account blocked. You're not safe even if you publish your own content in different revenue sharing programs, which is quite common in article marketing field, because some sites require exclusive ownership of your content.
Since we only need to select one or two best adsense revenue programs, the work turns out to be quite easy - We only need to select among those AUTHENTIC adsense revenue sharing programs instead of using some programming hacks to implement the revenue sharing function. By authentic, we mean those who have established formal official partnership with Google Adsense. Examples include Docstoc, Hubpages, Flixya, RateItAll, to name just a few. Even BlogSpot belongs to such an official partner of Google Adsense. It's just that Google is so generous that it distributes 100% of adsense revenues to its bloggers.

In the title of this post, we also mentioned one word "Pirate". Which revenue sharing programs belong to pirates? Generally, they possess the following features:
  • Utilize self-developed code i.s.o Google Adsense API to implement adsense revenue sharing function. Need more information about Google Adsense API? click here
  • Traffic is quite low compared to Google Adsense revenue sharing program's requirement: 100,000 daily page views.
  • Link popularity is quite low
  • Have a relatively short history
  • In eager need of content
  • Others...
Given the features mentioned above, you can imagine how much you can earn from their programs and how long it will take you before you reach Google Adsense's payment threshold. Then, you may wonder, how can I discriminate authentic adsense revenue sharing programs from pirates? Here I summarize several tips for your reference:
  • Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can be seen from your Google Adsense account center in the path My Account - Account Access
  • Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs have 100,000 or more daily page views.
  • Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs never require you to register Paypal or other credit accounts to receive your share of your adsense income
  • Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can usually act as your referrer to register a Google Adsense account if you haven't got one already
  • Check with Google Adsense support.
From my own experience, I can tell you, if you make a right decision with regard to which authentic adsense sharing program to join and pay adequate efforts to operate your account subsequently, the return you'll secure will be quite satisfactory. I hope this post, together with my previous post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" will help you make a better decision when you want to join some adsense revenue sharing programs to bring some additional income.

Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing"

Google Adsense revenue sharing is a rather trendy concept nowadays. Lots of websites majoring in different niches, including blogging, forums, social media, video sharing, article directory and so on, all claim that they provide a share of adsense revenue to their users who are contributing contents. Some of them even claim that they distribute 100% of their adsense revenue out, which is quite attractive at first glance.

However, as a content contributor, one might concern the following question most: how much in absolute dollar amount can I earn within a certain period of time, let's say, a month, which is the pay schedule of google adsense program. To answer this question properly, we should first understand what factors drive the absolute dollar income you'll earn from a certain adsense revenue sharing program.

For the sake of easy elaboration, I'll use the following formula to approximate the absolute income you'll earn from adsense revenue sharing program:

I = N * C * R * P, in which, I represents the absolute income you'll earn. N represents the number of visitors that view the content you contributed. C represents the Click-Through-Rate(CTR) of the ads placed by the websites for you. R represents the Pay-Per-Click(PPC) rate related to your article. P represents the percentage that the website is willing to distribute out to its content contributors.

Based on the aforementioned formula, you can easily see that your adsense revenue is determined by both yourself and the website. For example, you can improve the quality of your article, so that the number of viewers for your article will be higher. Or you can optimize your keyword selection and density, so that the PPC of the ads alongside your article will be higher. However, the major determinant of your adsense revenue still comes from the website, since the number of your content's impressions is by far more determined by the popularity and traffic of the website itself. The quality and optimization level of your content play a role to some extent, but far from critical. With regard to the adsense revenue sharing percentage, which a lot of websites manipulates to exaggerate their adsense revenue sharing programs' attractiveness,  its impact on how much one could earn is really minimal.

Arriving here, you probably know how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs - Only participate the few ones who already have a large traffic base. Otherwise, you are making contribution to others' wallet without gaining a reasonable return for your content. 

Therefore, the problem here is where you can find such a list of truly attractive adsense revenue sharing programs? I'll deal with this issue in my next post. Please stay tuned if you are interested.