Itinerant Lifestyle

My best month by far, earning £56.92 in total. The majority of this revenue came from my email niche site, which generated £46.36. About half of the earnings from the email site, £26.65 to be exact, came from a 728×90 ad placed underneath the navigation bar on every page of the site.

The DIY niche site earned £9.65, which is a fall from peak times of around £20 per month, but this has a fall in ranking in Google to #3 for my keyword, and a resulting drop in traffic from around 600 page views per week in June to only 150 per week in October. I plan to increase the quality of the site content and start a new linkbuilding campaign to get back to #1 in ranking for my keyword, and also to try to start ranking better for some other related keywords.

To copy a segment from Pat Flynn – Things I learned this month.

Evaluate keyword CPC carefully. A hundred clicks with an average cost-per-click (CPC) of £0.05 will pay £5.00. Five clicks with an average CPC of £1.00 pays the same amount. Which is the easier to achieve?

Linkbuilding is not as easy as it is made out to be. It takes a lot of time to write an article, spin it, post it to article directories, social bookmark and then mass article submit it. Plus it takes a lot of organisation to keep track of this if you are doing it with a few sites. Make a spreadsheet and record everything you do. Not only will it serve as a to-do list, it may also help figure out what is (or isn’t) working in the whole process.

If you have a website and you use adsense, its a good idea to carry out some simple tests to see which style/colour/size/position of advert will give you the best Click Through Rate (CTR). Its a pretty simple process, and could see your earnings improve dramatically.

Split testing (or A/B testing) is the name given to a test where one variable is altered in a range of samples, and results monitored to see which sample is the most successful. I have recently carried out tests on ad sizes, font colours and font sizes, and as a result I’ve seen large increases in CTR from my adsense adverts. Google terms and conditions prevent me from saying exact numbers but it is around a 3% increase in CTR, which over time will add up.

I aim to show you how to both implement the test and set up reports within adsense in order to monitor the results. First, lets start with the implementation. I use WordPress in all my sites, so needed a plugin that could rotate ads of my choosing. After much searching I found an excellent plugin called Ad Injection, which allows me to place the ads where I want them with a number of options such as only show ads on posts of a certain length or age and the ability to choose which pages and posts will have ads. The best thing about this plugin for me is the ability to choose up to 10 different styles of ads and rotate them randomly. This meant I could start my split test.

When split testing, the first thing you should figure out is why you want to test. What is the purpose and what do you hope to achieve by testing? My aim with the split test process was to determine which font, which font colour combination and which font size would give the best CTR for my site.

Once I had installed the plugin, it was time to choose the ad location. For this, I went with Google’s suggestion for ad placement – I assume they have done a major amount of testing to determine the best placement area, and I don’t have sophisticated software to determine eye tracking movements, so I decided to stick with Google’s recommendations initially. This doesn’t necessarily mean I will always stick with them, but I had to start somewhere. This isn’t an exact science, therefore some assumptions have to be made.

I have my sites set up with sidebars on the right (as per the layout on the right of the diagram above), so I started testing the ad unit which is in the main body of the the article right underneath the main navigation bar.

Now I had determined the why, the where and the how.

In order to test different adverts, I first had to create a series of ads, each differing in only one aspect. Although the Ad Injection plugin allows for up to 10 different ad styles to be rotated, I decided to stick with 5.

For my first test, I wanted to know the best colour scheme for my adsense ads. I used the Google standard colour scheme, a blue title bar, black text and green link as per the image below.

I tried 5 colour scheme variations, including making the blue bar match the link colour of my website, making the link bar light grey, and making all three lines of text black. For each variation I created a new advert in adsense, and I named it in the format of

Niche-Ad position & size-Test-No.

This is important as when it comes to finding the results you need to know quickly which advert is which.

For example the series of my 5 ads were named:

• TEETH-TOP300x250-TEST-1
• TEETH-TOP300x250-TEST-2
• TEETH-TOP300x250-TEST-3
• TEETH-TOP300x250-TEST-4
• TEETH-TOP300x250-TEST-5

So at first glance I can tell the site the ad is used on, the position and size and the purpose.

I then cut and paste the 5 separate ad codes into the plugin and waited for the results to come in. So that’s the implementation phase.

In order to be able to see and assess results quickly I used a great feature built into adsense, whereby you can save reports for viewing later. I set up a report to view the performance of the 5 ads over the previous 30 days.

To set up this report click on the Performance Reports tab, then choose Ad Units from the menu on the left. Then click on “edit selections”. There is an option to choose specific adverts. Add the ones you wish to be included and click on update report.

Your custom report will now be displayed, and you have option to save it. I named my report “TEETH-TEST-TOP300x250″ so I could find it easily later.

So now I had set up the test and the report. All that was left to do was wait for the results. I decided that in order to get the best results I would let it run until each individual ad unit had a minimum of 1000 ‘ad requests’. By choosing a larger number I was trying to minimise the impact of unusual events or click activity on the site.

There is no definite amount of time or number of ad requests to let the test run for, but bear in mind the more ad requests you let a test run for, the truer your results will be. I would suggest that 200-300 is the bare minimum number of ad requests to run a test for to get a true reflection of the anticipated long run CTR.

After approximately 1000 requests of each ad, I saw a variance of about 2.5% between the ads with the highest and lowest CTR.

After testing the font colours, it was time to test the font sizes. I used the ad colours that proved to be most successful for my site (which incidentally were: 1. link text – same colour as links on the site,  2. description – black, 3. URL – light grey), and made three ads of different font sizes; small, medium and large.

I again ran the test for a minimum 1000 requests, and set up another custom report in adsense for quick viewing. In the end, the medium font size gave the best CTR on my site.

The final variable I tested was the font itself. This again has three options; Times, Verdana and Arial. After the 1000 requests of each ad, Arial came out on top.

So after carrying out the three tests, I found the ad unit that gives me the best CTR is Arial, with a medium font size and a colour scheme that is blended into my site. This process has led to an increase in CTR of over 3% for this particular ad unit location.

Isn’t it time you tested for the ad unit design that will perform best on your site?

I think its better to start at the beginning. Before I build a webpage, write articles and start building back-links, I first have to decide what the site is going to be about. In other words, I have to decide my target niche. At the moment I have eight sites, each focusing on a different topic. In no particular order these niches include gambling on tennis, how to train abdominal muscles, home maintenance, the wonders of the world and a type of medical calculator.

I started most of these sites because I thought there was good potential to monetize using Adsense, but that’s not the case for every site. For example, my ‘gambling on tennis’ site, isn’t really in a great niche for Adsense. In actual fact I built this website after reading 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris (affiliate link). I had been developing a “contrarian tennis trading system” on Betfair, and was starting to have reasonable success. The system itself works pretty well and I’m confident that someone with a bit of time and good concentration would be able to make a lot of money by following it. The actual trading itself didn’t work out too well for me, and I’ll explain why.

Trading on tennis means sitting down, watching a tennis match and placing bets, or “trades”, after certain events take place during matches. It takes a lot of concentration as individual points move very quickly, and it only takes a matter of seconds to swing entire matches in favour of one player or another. This isn’t so much of a problem if you can trade matches in your own time, however due to the scheduling of matches, a lot of tennis is played during the day, when most of us are at work. In developing and testing the system I found myself spending far too much time streaming tennis matches over the internet during my working hours, opening and closing trading positions at my desk.

Unfortunately my problems arose on those occasions when the boss happened to walk by during an important moment in the match. I’d be forced to switch my screen to Microsoft Excel, thereby missing a trade and ending up out of pocket! I eventually decided to stop trading altogether as I wasn’t able to concentrate.

This didn’t mean I gave up on the tennis trading system altogether. As I said before I read 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and decided that my ”contrarian tennis trading system” would make a good muse. I believed my best opportunity to profit from the tennis trading system would be to write an sell an ebook which would explain all of the steps to follow when trading, and – more importantly – how to select which matches to trade.

I had the niche, I just needed to choose a name for the system. When targeting a niche for Adsense, I have found the simplest and best method of choosing my keywords is by using the Keyword Tool from Google Adwords. This tool is designed for advertisers who wish to place their ads on Google, so it stands to reason that if advertisers choose their keywords using this tool, the people who are building sites specifically as a means of generating revenue from those adverts should also use it to select their niche. I will write a post on this as part two on the subject of how I select my niches, but for now I’ll explain how I chose a name for the tennis betting system.

So I ran a search on Adwords to make sure that people were interested in betting on tennis. To search, type a few  terms related to your niche idea into the words or phrase box, select the country and language you are targeting and check ‘exact’ match type to ensure accurate results.

As you can see from the screenshot of the results below, there are a good number of people who search for either tennis trading or some related term, which shows two things, that a) the niche is very specialsed and b) there are potential clients

After my search I decided wanted to use the phrase “tennis trading” in the URL as that was really what I would be marketing the product as, and it had a number of direct and indirect searches on Google. I registered my domain name (profitracquettennistrading.com) and added it to my hosting package. At the moment the site, the ebook and the membership format are all under construction and should launch for the start of the new tennis season.

A long winded story, but I chose the muse as it was something I was interested in, and after I ran a few checks with Google, I felt there was a market for the product. I will keep you updated with the success (or failure!) of this site in the future.

This is the first post on the new Itinerant Lifestyle. I wanted to take it in a different direction, so what better way than to start again.

Something I have been attempting for a while is to use my websites to make a supplemental income online. There are quite a few different business models regarding monetizing websites, which have been explained countless times on other blogs, so I wont go into those here, I will just say that my efforts so far have mainly centred around Google Adsense.

Current Situation

In total I have eight niche sites, but only two of them have any real traffic and income. I am using Adsense to monetize the sites, my earnings from which are shown below. From the graph you can see the earnings are generally below £1 per day, with the occasional day in excess of £2. As of the end September I’d earned £131.61 in 2011, which equates to an average £14.62 per month, or just under £0.50 per day. Nothing to write home about, but it pays my hosting bill at least.

This income is generated from mainly one site (which from now on I will refer to as DIY), but I am developing the second site (refer to as Email) and it is doing very well, by far eclipsing the earnings of my main site (so far) in October. The other sites either have decent content and no visitors, or visitors but no decent content.

I’m not allowed to talk about click-through-rate or cost-per-click specifics, but I have been doing some testing on second site, which is the main reason that the earnings are improving. I will talk about this in a future post as it is something that is fairly simple to do, but will take some explaining.

I have also messed around a little with Clickbank, Amazon Affiliates and other advertising, but this has been on the other smaller sites, and so far without success!

The Future

My hope is to develop the Email niche site and hopefully increase earnings up to around £50 per month. At the same time I want to develop the other sites by adding some great content and improving their search engine ranking to get some traffic, which should in turn lead to more earnings.

For the time being I plan to stick with Adsense as my main method of monetization, as I think I have a good idea of how to position ads and improve click-though-rates. In time I’d like to investigate other revenue streams such as creating and selling my own products.

Aims for this Blog

I would like to emulate Pat from Smart Passive Income who is not only making a ton of money from the internet, but also writes a great blog. The thing I like about Pat is his honesty regarding the how, where and why he is so successful. With every post/video/podcast, readers/viewers/listeners are given a personal insight into the thought processes that have led to his success.

I am a firm believer that one of the main reasons why Smart Passive Income is so successful is Pat’s writing style. The blog is very engaging and is written in such a way that readers get the impression that they have known Pat for years, even though they’ve probably never even met him.

I would like to keep a record of my progress and (hopefully) increased income. By doing this I can focus my attention and recall how and why I did things, but also I hope readers will gain from my thoughts and actions on how to start earning some additional income from the internet. I don’t ever expect to be as popular as Pat, but a few readers would be welcome!

Anyway I’ll expand more on this as the days and weeks pass. Thanks for reading this far!