I’ve been using Kontera for the last few years as an additional revenue source on some of my sites. What Kontera provides is in-content links. I’m sure you’ve seen sites that use them or a similar service- generic words within your content will have a double underlined link. When you hover over those links a small javascript pop-up shows up in the same window with an ad, often a video ad. But after considering it for about a month, I’m dropping them from my site. Here’s why. continue reading…

You can make money online with Google Adsense by writing less content. The key is having the right amount of content. Content is still king but sometimes it’s better to be the queen. Here’s a case study in which I am making money off a site with minimal content.

I came across a coupon for $1 .com’s at Godaddy (limit one). These coupons turn up once in a while and I never hesitate to buy a site because it’s almost impossible to not make your $1 back even with minimal content. At the very least I could sell the site for 20 times that based on a solid domain name alone. I quickly created the site in WordPress and set up the theme and the 15 pages I wanted for the site. I knew based on the subject of the site that 15 would cover all possible topics and I would go into detail on subtopics on each page.

I set up each page with the headings and page title so I had a basic framework for what I would be doing with the site. I threw some general keywords around in the sidebar and footer (things like “review”, “buy”, “where to buy”, etc). Then I wrote the content for the first page. I linked to it from some of my other sites and did a few directory and search engine submissions- very minimal link building. Then a few things came up with some of my other sites and I had no time/interest to complete the site. But something interestingly unexpected started to happen.
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Most of the SEO gurus and guides out there tell you to focus on getting your site to the top spot in Google for your keywords. It’s an admirable goal and it’s certainly something to strive for but being on top of the SERPs isn’t everything. There’s more to getting clicks to your site than just being ranked highly in Google. Take a look at this chart I swiped from one my sites using Google Webmaster Tools:

I cut out the search terms on left but this is for a varied bunch of terms that all rank number one in Google. You’ll notice that despite all the terms being ranked first, the click through ratio varies greatly from 100% down to 33%. That is because of other factors in the SERPs beyond just being the first result.

Some of these things you can change. Your onsite SEO is very important, like the meta info and page titles that appear in the results (if you’re using WordPress there are good plugins like All in One SEO that will do this for you automatically). Your site name is a factor- site names relevant to the keywords will be more likely to get clicks. The number and type of ads appearing above the results is a HUGE factor that unfortunately you can’t control without buying ads yourself. Relevancy of the other results is also a big factor; if your site looks like it matches what the searcher is looking for better than the rest of the results on the page (or with a more intriguing page title), you’re going to get the click whether you’re number one or number nine.

Here’s another chart I pulled sorted by clickthrough percentage; I chose a middle of the road percentile for demonstration purposes: continue reading…

One of the more popular groups of bloggers today in terms of sheer number of blogs and readers is the “Mom Bloggers” or “Mommy Bloggers” category. I’m sure many of you have at least heard of Dooce which is probably the most well known in the genre (she gets over 3 million pageviews a month!). But there are literally tens of thousands of other smaller sites with hundreds of thousands of readers and you can use this to your advantage.

While it’s hard to generalize about such a large group, I’ve found that some of the more popular topics that Mom Bloggers write about is kids and parenting, family life, coupons and deals and contests. Again generalizing here but I’ve found Mommy Bloggers to be VERY receptive to relevant comments on their site and direct emails. Of course like any other site you can leave comments for links. But let’s delve a little deeper.
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