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Heroes Forum For Sale
I’ve decided to sell my Heroes Forum over at DP. The site made over $100 last month and receives more than 10,000 unique visitors/month. Current high bid is $250. The Buy It Now price is $1200. While I still love the show, I’ve lost interest in running the forum and don’t have the time to do so very well.
Squidoo Case Study #3
Sorry for the extremely late response to the case study - at least I did get it done though. The final result of the test was a rank of #3 for the category and a rank in the top 100 on Squidoo .com. Based on the test I was able to substantially increase my rankings on Squdioo. However, my final verdict is that it was not worth it, at least in my experience. I received $0 in return for the money advertised thoruhg the affiliate links I placed. In the end, however, it really depends on how you market the page, the niche, and the affiliate links placed.
Squidoo Case Study #1 Part 2
Note: This is part 2 of a series of blog entries. To read part one, click here.
Just an update on the Squidoo Case Study. To be honest I had no intend on making another post on this until the end of the month. However, I’m pleased to say I’ve already seen some results. Why these results are not monetary, it’s still rather surprising.
Here’s a screenshot I took around the time I launched the traffic campaign:
As you can see, this lens was pretty standard. It has a lens rank of around 80,000 out of 200,000. 1 unique visitor in the past seven days. All in all, pretty general.
Now here is a screenshot taken today, three days after I launched the traffic campaign:
Look at that! Lens Rank of 130 out of 200,000. If you ask me, that’s pretty darn impressive. Furthermore, this is with only 3,000 visitors, plus 10 five-star ratings. More traffic is on it’s way.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how, or if, this will affect the Squidoo revenue payout.
Squidoo Case Study #1 Part 1
Squidoo (referral id, yes) has been one of the latest crazes in the webmaster world - hailed novel by some webmasters and hated by others.
Basically, Squidoo is a website where users can create their own pages, also called Lenses. These Lenses can hold affiliate ads from Ebay, Amazon and other companies and you earn a direct percentage from each purchase. They also display Adsense throughout each page. However, this isn’t actually Adsene with your publisher ID. It’s their Adsense and they claim to distribute percentages of it to their top publishers. This is theoretically determined by star rating, traffic, and CTR.
Last month I earned a measly $1.18 from Squidoo. This threw me off because I’d earned $20 the previous month, and $10 the month before. I was expecting a double digit sum. I have yet to receive a penny from affiliate sales.
Onto the Case Study
Anyway, in this case study I’ve ordered some traffic to a specific Lens and hope to study it’s effect. I’ve ordered 60,000 unique visitors to this Squidoo Lens. Traffic will be delivered at around 2,000 uniques/day.
While yes, I did obviously blow some money away on this purchase, my goal is to make it back. I’m testing the legitimacy and practicality of earning money from Squidoo - in particular, Adsense, which should be the easiest way to make money from them.
I’ll keep you guys updated as this progresses.
Stumble Upon - Paid Advertising
I did not actually know they had this feature at Stumble Upon until I read a guest post on Shoemoney’s blog.
They have a paid advertising feature, which is, in theory, highly targeted.
For those of you unaware of what stumbleupon is, it’s a social networking site that allows users to visit and “stumble” websites that are in their database based off of their Firefox and Internet Explorer toolbars. This toolbar collects data which helps recommend sites in the future. Because of the way this is set up, the StumbleUpon administration can easily add paid spots into the seemingly random stumbles that users view.
You can view the advertising’s page here.
The first thing I would like to say about my experience with paid advertising on StumbleUpon.com is that it was all very easy, clean, and professional. My account had to be approved, but that’s to be expected by any respectable advertiser. After my account and first site was approved, I was free to add sites, campaigns, and funds to my Stumble Upon account directly from paypal. You can easily activate or deactivate campaigns you have running, track your +/- feedback percentage, set a maximum visitor/money cap, as well as view the total amount of visitors they’ve given you. Their price was relatively reasonable at $.05 per visitor - and they brought you visitors nearly instantly because their network is so large.
With this case study I did have some difficulty because of a few factors. Firstly, I was already receiving traffic from StumbleUpon prior to purchasing the additional traffic. Furthermore, my niche (writing) didn’t fall into a direct category of theirs (songwriting - too specific) and (entertainment > writing - more about books that writing). To top it up my site, a forum, probably wasn’t the best for StumbleUpon users.
The site’s that do best with StumbleUpon are typically multipmedia sites such as videos, pictures, and news stories.
I ended up adding about $25 to traffic and get a few thousand visitors - however, I did not see a jump in registrations or in revenue.
I don’t think my site was the best for StumbleUpon, that’s why this study failed, in my opinion. I will, however, continue to use StumbleUpon and experiment with different niches. And - of course - I’ll keep you informed.