Net-Entrepreneur.com

On Web-Design and Blogging

Web-DesignAlmost two weeks since my last post, and I’m missing the familiar buzz of publishing content. The commentators, the familiar faces in the avatars, the friendly emails.

It appears that web-design has the tendency to suck every available bit of time you have. Fueled by enthusiasm and good spirits I find myself designing and coding most of the time, being left with no time to blog.

I know, I should post regularly and be consistent with the quality, but the project I’m working on is quite serious, and has a potential to earn good money in the long run. I cannot rely on a free WordPress theme and had to start to completely overhaul a simple theme to fit our requirements. We’re doing everything in-house: the content, the graphics, the coding, and you can imagine what amount of energy and time this requires.

This is a blog about blogging and internet marketing (roll your eyes here), and obviously as a serious entrepreneur I’m going to undertake several projects once in a while. And a logical conclusion is that I’m going to have these sort of blogging breaks unless I outsource the time-consuming tasks. I am going to do this, but later on, when I will assemble a team of trustworthy freelancers and have a bit more money in my pocket.

Last three days we rented a bunch of movies and didn’t turn on anything with an Internet connection. This move allowed our heads to clear up and this post to see air.

Enjoy what you do, and see you around.

 

- Alex

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Ignorance is Bliss

Ignorant Sheep?Once you set up you blog and have a bunch of niche sites running AdSense, making money maybe, you’re happy. Right? Right? Wrong!

Apparently I’m never happy, and must think of fresh new ways to improve on everything and make every small glitch dissapear.

One of those improvement-eureka moments was yesterday, when I said to myself that it’d be great to monitor my server to find what uptime it has.

Among other tools that are available on the net, I chose Basicstate.com. Why? Because it’s free and could answer my question. It runs checkups on the server every 15 minutes, sending email alerts if the server is down and allowing for basic statistics later on, for analysis.

 

Surprise, Surprise

Boy was I surprised when I got my first alert!

What?! - I said, this is impossible! This can’t be true with the top rated hosting plan I’m paying for! $7/month, mind you. Outrageous… (not sure if you’re getting the sarcasm, but yes, it’s me being sarcastic)

You can imagine how surprised I was when I got my second alert half an hour later. After that my face was longer than a horse’s and I went to sleep with heavy thoughts.

 

Wakie Wakie

Today I received a few additional alerts to my mail. When trying to browse to my site immediately upon receiving the alert everything was Okay, except one time what I indeed couldn’t access any of my sites. I guess the outages are very brief. Basicstate doesn’t report the duration of the outage.

So I guess, as usual, this coin has two sides:

  • On one hand, it’s good to know everything that is happening on your server.
  • On the other hand, I was doing fine without it, got nervous with it, and in retrospect I never should have bothered.

I really don’t care anymore- Every hosting has outages and that’s a fact. I’m sure every single one of them is doing everything they can to improve their stability, since competition is very strong, so If a server is down for a few minutes a day, no biggie.

 

Have fun.

 

- Alex

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Sometimes I spend so much time having something done, redesigned or recoded on this blog or on one of my other sites, just to reveal that this is not something that would have worked to begin with.

I’m sure this also happens to other bloggers too. So frustrating…

 

Read the rest of this entry »

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Fireworks

Several days ago I noticed that Google is going through another of its PR update cycles. After checking mine and a few of my friends’ I discovered that this time Google has been kind with all of us.

My PR is PR3 now, and this means that I would start getting a little bit more organic traffic from Google. That can’t be bad, right?

Congratulations are also in order to Mirjam from Me Myself and I for her PR3, Mark from Mason World for his PR3, Abhinav from Inspirit for his PR4, Max from Sitehoppin for his PR4 and PR3 (for the blog).

On the other hand, people have been reporting an increase in PR on relatively new sites that have no backlinks. What’s that supposed to mean?

Anyways, Google wants - Google gets, that’s what big bad corporations are there for.

 

- Alex

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You can use Project Wonderful to know exactly how much traffic a site gets. I will explain how immediately after this:

I’ve just read a post on my old blogcatalog buddy’s blog, about how Entrecard is making good money with Project Wonderful ad spots.

Just to recap his article:

  • Entrecard is running 2 Project Wonderful ad spots on their forums page, the prices for which stand on $6.10 and $7.10 per day
  • Abhinav is also running a Project Wonderful ad spot on his blog and it costs $0.24 per day
  • He was wondering what was the traffic one would need in order to achieve $6 range prices on Project Wonderful.

 

How Many Visitors Does Entrecard Have and What is CPM

Crowd

  1. Entrecard’s got roughly 12,000 daily unique visitors. It took me less than a minute to answer his question. As promised, I will explain how to spy on a site’s traffic in a while.
  2. CPM (cost per mille) is the cost per 1,000 impressions of an ad, and it is used as a common denominator in order to compare advertising opportunities on different sites. One may have 100,000 unique visitors per month, the other may have 800,000, with CPM you will know to compare the two.

 

Why is Project Wonderful Wonderful for the Advertiser, but not for the Publisher?

  1. According to an article on ProBlogger where Daniel Scocco compares Coppybrlogger.com and JohnChow.com and explains a lot about pricing your ad spot, a CPM of $1.5 is a good average for a 125×125 ad spot.
  2. $6 it costs to advertise on Entrecard divided by 12 = $0.5 per thousand. This means that Entrecard’s CPM for that spot is about $0.5.
  3. A CPM of $0.5 is great if you are the advertiser, it is really cheap!
  4. If you are the publisher, you really could do better.
  5. Moreover, Project Wonderful charges 25%, so
  6. Entrecard could have charged more than 3 times as much as they’re getting right now, if those spots would’ve been sold directly to the advertiser.

That is why.

 

The Promised “Spy” Technique

Eyes

Project Wonderful’s says in its intro that they are all about fairness and transparency.

Indeed! That same transparency is what I use to know what traffic a site that has a Project Wonderful ad spot gets.

Go to the site you are interested to spy on. If you look below the Project Wonderful ad spot, it says “Your ad here, right now: $0.00“. This is a link, and if you click through you will get to a purchase page with a monthly graph showing the site’s Unique Visitors and Page Views. It shows the stats for the page the as is place on, but basically it would reflect the sites overall traffic, because webmasters would put it on the most visited page, to get the best prices.

So now you know. Use it wisely.

 

- Alex

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