August 1, 2008
Experiment with Obtrusive Ad Complete
Here are the results from the big, obnoxious ad posted in the upper-right hand corner of the site. During the month of July there were around 50,000 page impression and the rate paid was around $2.60 per 1,000 impression. You can do the math. That won’t buy a lot of beer in the west, but here it’ll buy over 300 bottles, which I will begin to pick up and review in due course.
I would need at least 50,000 impressions a day if I wanted to make an extremely modest living off the blog. People who dream about getting rich by blogging haven’t run the numbers.
So long to Investing in Dubai, the Red Room, and that hideous PowerPoint template one. Three cheers for an ad-less maoxian.com!
Cat: | Time: 7:18 am (utc+8)
August 1st, 2008 at 8:17 am
Incorrect, I’m making $30k+/month now off my blog and I’ve only got 15,000-20,000 daily impressions…but it didn’t happen overnight, you gotta change stuff around til you see what your audience wants and what works best
August 1st, 2008 at 8:50 am
Tim: If you’d be so kind as to break down that revenue… is the $30K simply from ads? Maybe write a post about it?
August 1st, 2008 at 10:22 am
Will write a post, but no, ads are like $5k, gotta have premium, book, dvd to make it really worthwhile
August 1st, 2008 at 10:52 am
Tim: Thanks. It sounds like your ad rate is way higher than $2.60 per thousand impressions if you’re able to make $5K with your amount of traffic. Looking forward to reading your post with the detailed revenue breakdown.
August 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Chairman, every beer that your ad money buys you worth a bilion daily impressions! TIM won’t afford any of those beers..
August 1st, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Hey CM,
I am impressed: you can make living (even if it would be modest) with US$130 per day! Before taxes I guess. ;-)
Cheers,
Markus
August 1st, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Markus: Yes, but I’d need 10x current traffic and that would only happen if I started to post nude pics of my young girlfriends. :)
August 1st, 2008 at 7:57 pm
If you want to get some more revenue on your site, you will want to test other options than CPM. You could give adsense a shot, or you could go with CPA (cost per action) ad options. This is very lucrative in the trading/investing area. Signups to brokerages payout 50-100 per action, which to get your current revenue you would need about .006% conversion rate. If you can find ads that convert 1% (which they do) you can get five figures a month easily.
You could also sell direct links to other websites for a monthly fee, either graphic or text.
August 1st, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Steven: Thanks for the tips, never heard of the brokerage CPA links. Not sure how you get the five figures a month figure, I’d have to read about how someone who uses it does.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:01 pm
So now you just store those pics somewhere without posting them? ;-)
I reckon if you started a dummy watch list posted daily, say 15min after the open, you’d have quite a few subscribers. Won’t take much time either, although due to the timezone it might conflict with those nude photo op sessions :-)
August 1st, 2008 at 9:08 pm
eyal: Yes, I have a backlog. :) I think everyone knows what the unusual suspects are every morning; I couldn’t add much value there.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
this is how my blog made $45k last month
August 8th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Tim,
I found it interesting that your DVD sales were superior to your book. The lazy citizen would rather use technology than read.
August 8th, 2008 at 6:26 am
well, the dvd is priced at 20 times the book.
and the dvd completely sucks. at least the book is entertaining.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:39 am
LOL, the DVD is teaching people more than the book ever could…got dozens of stories now of people stopping their losses and becoming profitable…if thats sucking, i’ll take it any day of the week
August 8th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Tim: So the DVD is $300 (cleverly priced at $297 lol) which means nearly 100 were sold in a month — that’s pretty good. Does John Chow have a DVD? :)
September 10th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
what happened to the monthly picks that you were charging for? still running those? if not, when did you stop? must have missed that.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
@Babak: I threw in the towel in disgust at the end of August after six months of frustration. The cumulative results for the ideas was right around breakeven, and I learned that there is definitely no more difficult time frame to trade than attempting to hold several days to weeks. I will always and ever be a daytrader.