trienthusiast

the tool seems nice and I think I heard of it before. Is it only 6 months old? I am surprised you don't make more than 1k/month.

I think it's a nifty tool but you need to find a better way to describe what it is and what it does.

> I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free

logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3 RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.

The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.

It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.

in which direction ?

and how is it going?

Because I have an exclusive agreement with that agency. It's obvious now after reading some of these answers that i need to review my agreement with them

It's an agency. They have actual sales people who have relationships with the companies and sell them ad campaigns on individual sites (in a certain niche).

the idea of internal tagging to start having a better idea of impressions is good.

I'll have our developer work on it.

The problem here is that the company we work with has access to the big names in the industry. Having their ad campaigns on our sites actually adds credibility to the sites themselves.

But I might start looking into cutting my middleman and going to the advertisers directly.

not NSFW at all! Actually our advertisers are as Top100 as they come!

Adsense was not really performing that well when we made the switch, but even after the switch to the new provider - we haven't experienced the highs we were hoping for.

But yes, the company who manages our inventory is quite respected in the industry we are in - simply horrible with their reporting for our figures.

And yes, no breakdown of figures. I guess this is the wake up call i needed to either start receiving reporting, or sever our relationship.

thanks

Hey - thanks for the answer.

We do receive approximately 1M pageviews a month - with usually 2-3 ads per page.

The company who does the selling now has a sales funnel that we cannot match. Close relationships to big companies to whom they sell very relevant campaigns.

This said, we make approximately $2/3,000 per month with advertising.

I believe it's really small. They say it's because half of the pageviews are on mobile so many of their ads don't show.

Even this considered, I am growing tired of having that revenue amount as my only benchmark. I have been asking for detailed reporting for months and have not received any...

Regarding the choice - why no DFP? It seems to be the easiest one.

nice book idea! If I had any time on top of job, side project and family i'd buy it!

question. I see you use Gumroad. Reasons not to go with Clickbank? No need for affiliates?

I will be counter-intuitive here and ask you this.

Is the domain worth 20k for you? If it is, and you think in the long run it will add 20k to your bottom line, then buy it.

If for any reason the startup won't succeed (knock on wood), if that is an appetizing enough .com, it will still be worth its asking price.

I recently read the examine.com guys bought it for 42k. I thought that was a very big risk for a starting blog. But in fairness, i think a domain name like examine.com could be re-sold for a very similar amount in short time.

If you think the .com is not worth 20k for you, or if you don't have 20k - then go for a prefix/suffix.

Buy cheap brand PPC campaigns on Googlee for your brand (I assume the parked domain isn't doing it) so that when people Google the name, they get to you. And eventually if you have constant Ads on top, and your site has a content as opposed to a parked domain,it will rank better in google too.

Hi, www.runningshoesguru.com here, 500k visits/month.

My suggestion is to go for the blue ocean. Either blog in a sphere that is not crowded, or be significantly different than any existing player.

Easier said than done maybe, but have a goal in mind and strive to be the absolute best. I dont agree with the "just write".

Yes, that's really where i am: there's nothing (apparently) like that and I would have to build it myself in maybe something like zoho creator... but it would definitely take (me) a while. Especially if I want to add notes between testers, email notifications and the like.

I wouldn't be too bothered by time tracking etc, but I would like at any given status to know where a product is, what's on each testers pipeline and so on.

hi thanks for your answer.

I think this would have the same issue i have with Asana/Basecamp... project management but I don't really have project, I have items to move across owners

the problem I have with Asana, the tool below etc that they are all focused on projects.

I would like something based on "objects".

Ie the products are objects that can be moved across owners (ie from a brand to a tester, from the tester to the site) and the "owners" be objects with properties (contact info, addresses etc...).

Trello does something similar, but the "Cards" are not interlinked... it's a good Excel Sheet, but not a database (no relationships between tables).

Does it make sense? Do you think I have to have it developed specifically for me? There must be something similar out there...

It should be enough to place those links as "nofollow"

I use shutterstock.com - with their cheaper plan it works out at 2$ per picture up to 1000px wide which is usually great for blog posts. I like their search too.

I tried everything from contests to better sharing positions on my website. what worked best is actually buying Facebook ads. with some optimization you. can get fans for around 0.25$ each. 250$\month will give you thousand fans. I found that at around 10,000 real, targeted fans you can give a strong kick start to your articles. but you need to treat your fan page as a different entity to your website. if you use it just as a RSS feed people will unsubscribe.

I would say 3k/month has been the average for this year. I had peaks of 5k+ but it's a somehow seasonal business.

It really picked up this year, but in order to grow you have to put in time that I don't have. I have always wished this grew enough to replace my daily job, but not quite.

1/2X half revenue sounds like robbery, especially when you 1/2 for taxes too. I am sure it could be way more profitable, but I just don't have the time to invest - unfortunately.

thank you. I have looked for similar sized sites to mine, they seem to be listed for 200 days+.

Thank you, that was useful. There's a lot of set-up costs that I rather spend in inventory but I guess the best course of action is doing everything right from the start.

That would cause abuse

yes when i said firefox i meant thunderbird.

but really, any decent email app for mobile phone would do.

The second !

Imagine firefox, but as a website. I log on to firefox.com (imaginary) and get access to all my inboxes

Timecrimes

Hi. http://www.consoleshop.nl/ is a dutch online console store. Good design but nothing amazing. But if you just click on another tab (ie http://www.homecinemacenter.nl/) you switch to a totally different store but you barely realize it. Shopping cart is in common.

thanks for your reply. that's what it says: Typebased 2.3.1 Framework 2.7.22

I use a Woo theme and was hacked last week, even though my host told me it was he timthumb vulnerability.

I never receive notice to upgrade the theme in the dashboard (and the option is activated).

what do i do now ?

1) change theme, immediately. If i can be unpolite, this must be one of the worst colour combination I have seen in a website.

2) the homepage is kind of useless. You have some text and there seeems not to be anything else around it. The real content is the blog and the link to the yahoo group. You don't need that. Make a homepage that has a) your text on the top b) the blog underneath it.

3) put some "about me" that is a quick (300-500) characters with your picture, maybe your kids and explain your story and what you do. I have been on the website a while and still i have no idea what is the issue at hand.

4) the 3) will actually link to the "donate" button. Explain that your experience and the community can help other people. your donate button is orange over brown (!!) and the text black over brown. It seems you are trying to hide it on purpose. hint: go white background and never go back.

5) your adsense banners... with those numbers you'll never see money. use that space to make a compelling story for people to donate. tell them how much. 2$ 5$ 10$