What Do You Want To See?

10 Responses to “What Do You Want To See?”

1. Kathleen Gresham on October 5th, 2007 5:15 pm

   I’ve been experimenting with other kinds of advertising to supplement Adsense, because I have only a few sites and not a lot of traffic. One week two people bought affiliate products from links on my site, and I made more money than I’ve ever seen from Adsense (total).

   People seem to be talking a lot about low yields from Adsense today. Some are replacing it entirely with other kinds of ads.

   However, my feeling is that I need some Adsense ads to quickly get indexed by Google.

   What are your thoughts on supplementing Adsense with other kinds of ads (context, FavAds, and what-not)? Do you think the alternatives trash up the page too much? Or do you think diversification is simply prudent?

   Mmmmmm. Maybe that’s more questions than you wanted.

2. Cam Turner on October 6th, 2007 7:10 am

   Hi Eric,

   Here comes the pure, Canadian, hold-nothing-back truth as I see it. You might end up deleting this comment.

   I subscribed to your blog and newsletter after reading your MEMWG book cover to cover. The ease of writing, the conversational tone and excellent information made me want to know more, and the blog provided that.

   In the beginning the blog was great and informative too, but for long time now it’s been — here comes the part most others would delete — nearly pure internet marketing sleaze.

   I’m sure you’re making more money now than ever because of the info products, sponsored links, reviews and whatnot, but the real information you sometimes post is lost in the noise.

   I wasn’t even aware that you had started a piece on mobile websites… but I’d like to see it completed.

   I’m not even sure how you caught my attention with this post. I usually skim them (at most) to see if you’re giving something new away (ie. straight to the bottom).

   When you started GeekAffiliate I subscribed right away, because the first posts were great information. But there hasn’t been anything new there since January.. nearly 9 months.

   I couldn’t bring myself to force upon my readers the kinds of things you were advocating, though the odd bit of SEO advice was nice.

   I monetize my tiny blog (http://www.ireadscifi.com) with unobtrusive Amazon.com associate links and I’ve helped monetize my hobby club with Amazon.ca (http://www.kwas.ca/library.htm) the same way. It’s not much ($100/mo or so), but it’s more than I’ve ever seen with AdSense, TLA or any of their ilk, and it’s tripled the annual KWAS library budget in less than 2 months.

   Looks like Kathleen is in the same boat as me, except I use white-hat SEO techniques to get indexed by Google instead of AdSense.

   If the rest of the readers are like myself and Kathleen, maybe you should start up GeekAffiliate again and keep the information:sales ratio as high as possible (10:1?).

   I hope this helps in some way.

3. Eric Giguere on October 6th, 2007 7:58 am

   Good questions, Kathleen. I’ve discussed these before, but I can certainly do so again… thanks for the ideas.

4. Eric Giguere on October 6th, 2007 8:11 am

   Cam:

   I don’t delete posts if I feel they add value. Thanks for making a very long and well-thought-out post.

   I must, however, disagree with your assertion that this blog is “nearly pure internet marketing sleaze”. I’m not sure why you’d characterize it as such. Look at the posts currently showing on home page. I’m not sure how any of them would qualify as “sleazy”. Would you mind pointing out which ones are?

   I actually make very little from ClickBank and other affiliate programs. 85% of my online income comes from AdSense. It’s a bit worrisome, in some ways, because my online income isn’t as diversified as it should be. Hence the interest in affiliate marketing.

   It’s interesting that you don’t like the “Sponsored Link” section at the bottom of each post. Those aren’t paid-for links, those are just links to things I think are interesting or whatever. I call them “sponsored” links to distinguish them from the main content. They and the bio immediately after it serve another purpose, which is to recompense me from the scrapers who republish my material without my permission. Most of them are too stupid to remove the links, which means at least I get a link back to my site at a minimum.

   I announced not too long ago that I was shutting down GeekAffiliate. Because it was taking too much of my time. Many of the posts I make, whether here or an GeekAffiliate, take a good hour to create. It didn’t look to me that GeekAffiliate was on its way to anything substantial based on the server logs I looked at and the subscription count, so I decided to focus on MEMWG. Maybe that was the wrong decision. Perhaps I could be convinced otherwise…

   It sounds like I should stop giving things away at the bottom of the post and mix in the giveways into the main text

   Feel free to respond!

5. Cam Turner on October 6th, 2007 10:28 am

   I completely agree about the amount of effort it takes to create a post. On my blog it’s at least an hour.. usually 2. I do appreciate the effort you put in.

   As for marketing sleaze, I’m afraid I can’t characterize a single post as sleazy, but somehow this blog turned me off. I don’t anticipate the next post and often don’t read much of anything coming from MEMWG. This wasn’t always the case. Along the way something happened that turned me off.

   That said, I’m still subscribed to both the blog and the newsletter so it must provide me some value.

6. Eric Giguere on October 6th, 2007 11:26 am

   It’s too bad you don’t have any specific criticisms for me. Those of you reading this, any comments along the line of “Eric, I like…” or “Eric, I dislike…” would be appreciated.

   Anyhow, I’m asking for feedback for a reason, to make this a better experience. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!

7. Cam Turner on October 7th, 2007 9:09 pm

   HI Eric,

   Sorry I couldn’t be more specific, I’ll try here. For the record, I was trying to leave the feedback as a means to help you improve. I do/did love your writing style.

   I’m going to give this blog another shot. Either I’ll change my mind or I’ll come up with specific examples that come across as sleazy.

   Also, for now I’m going to unsubscribe from the newsletter since that might be my problem. If I had to guess the content “for your newsletter subscribers only,” is what turned me off. Sure it’s a proven IM technique to sell products, but so is SPAM if you send enough of it. This might be were my “sleaze” impression came from.

   That and the fact that I missed the post about shutting down geek affiliate.. The lack of content there was also a thorn for me, but now I understand your motivations for halting that project.

   Good luck.

8. Jack on October 9th, 2007 11:50 am

   Eric

   I like your blog and read it (via Bloglines) daily or as often as you post.

   I don’t mind the reviews and pitches for other products. First, you have to get paid for your work. Subscription models are nice, but most folks will jetison that paypal payment once money gets tight. But Adsense and affiliate sales do make money. (Check out John Chow’s revenue breakdown for his blog and affiliate sales make the majority. AdSense, when he had it, only accounted for no more than 8-10% of his revenue.)

   In the purists world, content is king and readers are happy to occasionally buy a book or use the tired old, tip jar.

   In the real world, affiliate sales, review me entries, and other monetization streams are the only way good content providers stay in business.

   In the “What I want to see column”, I vote for more ways to generate organic traffic. I also want more ideas on how to catch new trends, build fast sites and generate revenue.

   Thanks for the blog, the content and the forum to discuss.

9. Eric Giguere on October 9th, 2007 6:02 pm

   Thanks, Jack! Some good comments there. I like your ideas for what you want to see, that’s exactly the kind of feedback I wanted!

   As for monetization of blogs… I think that AdSense is often not the best choice for a blog. Certainly not for blogs that are (like this one) targeted at Internet marketers… I’m going to announce some new advertising options shortly

10. Paul on October 15th, 2007 10:00 pm

    You may already be working on this, but I am looking at moving to video for my home repair site. I have never done anything with video so the hardware and software needed to work efficiently would be of interest.

    Thanks