How I monetized a blog in 30 days: what worked, and what didn't
Nice post on improvements made to increase revenue per visitor. For additional helpful advice, also see related hacker news comments.
With this being about a food blog, I couldn't help but think of Kay
Thanks. I haven't made any serious attempt to try to monetise my food blog. It's more of a hobby for me and I say what I think rather than trying to curry favour with anyone. (Pun not intended.) Mind you, in these tough times, perhaps I ought to try harder. Given that I've already got some AS and aff offerings on there, I might as well fix them up so they work better.
I definitely liked their suggestion to customise ads. AS can put some pretty bizarre stuff on there sometimes. Also, what he wrote about Pinterest is amazing. Obviously it's something I'm aware of but I've not been using it for business yet. That's definitely something to look into more closely.
My Blog - latest posting: Should education be compulsory for children?
And before the latest post it was a series of book reviews about books which aim to teach people about buying and selling websites.
More Pinterest interest. Their photos are indeed yummy-looking. And the recipes - heading back there now!
Also clever that his mother makes her own ads; Amazon ads on their own have never performed well for me either.
His point about Amazon's ready-made ads rang true for me as well. For me, the basic problem with these ads is that they're too small. The text is difficult to read (you can't customise the size) and (in the case of books), the title often gets truncated. I've always been surprised that so many sites use these ads. (I'm thinking mainly of the so-called "product links" here, but my remarks also applies to some of the "widgets").
When I switched from the canned ads to my own home-made version, I saw an immediate increase in conversions.
Mike
I used to make my own Amazon ads waaaaay back before AWS (now astore?) and the product link maker / widgets.
Just because something isn't working doesn't mean that it can't work. Sometimes it is a matter of simple marketing that webmasters sometimes overlook or just don't have the experience/knowledge. For example they call their cook book "ebook" on the site and use that as link text. An ebook of what? Just call it Cook Book so more people know what it is without clicking and might want it. Also they should categorize the ebook recipes and sell separate cookbooks for each, e.g. soup recipes, dessert recipes, etc. And finally they need to include something "extra" in the ebook not available on the site like some cooking tips and tricks (not just exclusive recipes).
I'm trying to figure out how to leverage Pinterest for a couple of my sites that fit the demographic. Being a 40ish year old male I'm kind of disconnected from the Pinterest demographic though. I just recently started using it personally.
Last edited by Matteo; April 27th, 2012 at 8:23 AM.
AWS? That's Amazon Web Services. That's an API for accessing detailed information (prices, star ratings, reviews, whether in stock, etc) about their products. The idea is that you can post that info on your own site, or make use of it in any other way you might dream up.Originally Posted by Matteo
aStore, on the other hand, is a set of pages that shows specific products that you want to sell, usually with a common theme, and styled to look like it's part of your own site.
I tried running an aStore for a couple of years, but had very little success with it. Maybe I wasn't going about it right, but it didn't seem to be worth putting any more effort into it.
Mike
Sorry if I seemed to be asking what those are. I am familiar but haven't used them in years and they changed the names of everything and tweaked (and added astore). I used AWS before it was called AWS about 10-11 years ago and used a custom script to pull the data and dynamically create thousands of pages all indexed by Google (using mod re-write). Not many people were doing it because it was difficult for the average webmaster. Seems so common to everyone now. I had niche stores for about 15 niches. The most profitable were jewelry and camera equipment. People would buy diamond jewelry worth $10,000+ from that site and I would make $600-700 on one sale. Blew my mind. When they made it super easy to plug and play it got saturated with 2 months. Then Google put the hammer down on those types of aff sites so I let them just die off.
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