Posted on

Picking A Forum Host

Regular readers know I recently started up The Advisory Panel, a forum to allow Internet Marketers and others looking to make money online a place to network.

This was my first forum launch, and I wanted to share one of the technical bits I’ve discovered that came as a surprise.

Discount web hosts will generally provide you with some number of MySQL databases for your monthly fee. For example, at Site5, you get unlimited MySQL databases. A forum takes up only one database, so I figured I’d host the forum on my Site5 account.

Before I go on, let me say that I run about half a dozen WordPress web sites off my one Site5 $5 a month hosting account. And I’m not even close to hitting the bandwidth and disk space limits on the account. For anyone running multiple blogs, I’d highly recommend Site5.

The server I’m on there has been having some odd MySQL problems now and then, and that’s led me to further investigate some of the database statistics on the account. It turns out that there’s a maximum number of connections any one application (e.g. forum or WordPress blog) can have on the database at one time. For WordPress blogs with caching, this isn’t a big deal…most people are not actually doing anything to need the database at any one time. They go to your site and spend most of their time reading, and only a little time going from post to post. Many don’t even click past the front page where your most recent posts are shown.

But for a forum, there’s quite a bit more clicking around to see different threads. As the number of members online at any one time grows, the limiting factor is the number of database connections the forum can make at one time. Go above that number, and your forum shows MySQL errors instead of content.

At Site5 that maximum is 15. Since most people at a forum still spend a lot of time reading, I’d say that 15 connections could support 100 members online at once. The Advisory Panel hasn’t hit that number yet, so this isn’t an issue, but if you’re planning on building a forum into a large membership, you’d do well to pick a web host that has a higher figure.

Other discount web hosts give you 20, or 30, maximum connections. Better, but still not great. In my research for a place to move The Advisory Panel as it grows, I’ve found only one web host that doesn’t arbitrarily limit the maximum number of connections. Hosting Matters allows a forum to use as many connections as the machine will allow, subject to the fact that these are shared hosting accounts. If your forum starts to use too many connections and adversely affects the other sites on the server, then you’d be expected to upgrade to a dedicated server.

Keep in mind that I haven’t actually used Hosting Matters, so can’t comment on quality of service, uptime, etc. But just from the perspective of supporting a high traffic forum, it seems like a good place to try.

And if you’re planning on running a forum at a different web host, find out what their maximum number of SQL connections is before starting the forum.

Posted on

Marketing Outside The Lines

What’s holding you back in your online career?

If you’re like me, when you first started out, you knew next to nothing about marketing online. And before you say, “I don’t want to know anything about online marketing, I just want to make money online”, marketing is how you promote a product, promote a blog, promote yourself, etc.

So what I did when I first started out was I joined systems. These systems had a vested interest in me becoming a good marketer, so they provided training. The training told about using email signatures, traffic exchanges, etc. Over time, I realized the basic mistake I’d made.

A system doesn’t need for every member to become a great marketer, they just need a whole lot of members to become mediocre marketers. So that’s all the training you get. Sure, they’d give you better training if they could, but most of the people who create the systems are only mediocre marketers, too.

The absolute best lesson I learned about marketing online is to break away from what everyone else does. Market outside the lines, try something that you’ve thought of, not something that you’ve read about. Break rules and see what happens. It’s through this process that you learn how to do business online effectively.

In short, be yourself, and don’t try to be who everyone else is.

Posted on

How To Do What You Hate

I don’t know about you, but there are certain things I just hate to do.

Offline, dishes are one of those things. I’ve found that the most effective way to do dishes is to do them as they get dirty. But, I’m also a great procrastinator, so when I just have one dish I’ve dirtied, it’s far easier to put it in the sink than wash it. So I do. The same with the next dish, and the next, and so on. Pretty soon, I’ve procrastinated to the point where the pile of dishes is this insurmountable obstacle that I can’t possibly do anything about.

Online, updating plugins to new versions is one of the things I hate to do. Upgrades are important for security reasons, but you never know when an upgrade will cause some problem with other plugins. It’s hard for me to mess with something that works, even though it might be more secure after I finishing messing with it.

The strategy that I’ve found to get through those tasks I hate, whether it’s dishes or updating plugins, is to start with the easiest single item, and just do it. I don’t think about the huge pile of dishes, or the large number of plugins, I just do the easiest one. My sneaky way of talking myself into this is to tell myself that I’ll just do the one and then quit. I’ll have made my gesture, then I can do something fun.

But when that one item is done, I talk myself into another. And another, and another. And pretty soon, the pile’s almost gone, and I feel pretty good about having done it all.

So the next time you have something to do that you hate, lie to yourself that you’ll do just part of it, and then reward yourself with something fun. It works!

Posted on

February’s Neglected Niche Site Update

Back in the January update for my neglected niche site, I reported around $35 in Adsense earnings.

February’s income was around $30, down because of a total lack of time to do anything to the site. But then, that’s why I call it my “neglected” niche site. I also had about $100 in affiliate commissions from sales, which was a new trend. As far as Adsense earnings, though, I think the plateau has been hit, unless I work more on the site to boost its search engine rankings. And it doesn’t really seem worth my time to do so, for a probable extra $10 a month in Adsense income.

I’ve been wanting to do another niche site lately, even though I’m still working on adding content to a quality niche site over at SBI!. Yes, I like to start projects! I’m resisting, though, because I just don’t have the time to do a new niche site justice.

Instead, what I’m going to do is live vicariously through volunteers over at The Advisory Panel. I’ll host and manage a niche blog/site, and volunteers will generate content. They’ll all share in the proceeds from the blog, and along the way we’ll document the entire process at the forum.

If you’re interested in volunteering, join The Advisory Panel and let us know.

P.S. Speaking of niche blogs, the prize for the March contest at The Advisory Panel is going to be a complete niche blog, setup and ready for content. As a bonus, it’ll even have a header custom designed by Lori over at A Cowboy’s Wife.

Posted on

Leap Year

Today is pretty much the only day you can say doesn’t happen every year. Which is appropriate, because it isn’t every year I launch a forum, either.

February has been the month for The Advisory Panel launch for me. I’ve focused most of my time and effort on it. As a way of saying “Thanks!” to the early joiners who’ve been participating, I’ll be sending the ones who posted at least 15 messages during the month $5 via Paypal.

I plan on holding regular contests at the forum. The contest for March will reward the person who is most active in the forum during the month. I’ve installed a plugin to the forum that tracks all sorts of activities and rewards them with credits. The person with the most growth in credits during March wins the contest.

The prize is yet to be decided. One idea was to give away a complete niche blog on a subject of the winner’s choice. I’d do the keyword research to figure out how the blog should be targeted, I’d host it on my hosting account, pay for the domain name, setup WordPress, install plugins, etc. The winner would just need to log in and create content.

I’ll finalize the prize fairly soon, so check at the forum for details.

Posted on

How Much Can You Afford To Pay Per Click?

The first advertising exercise finished over at The Advisory Panel, and as a result I discovered that some of the PPC basics I took for granted weren’t very clear to everyone. So I figured it was time for a post about them.

When you’re paying per click for your advertising, you have to make sure that you can show a profit after paying for the clicks. So there are some calculations you can do up front to give you a good idea how much you can pay per click. Let’s look first at a statistic that most merchants give you.

EPC is the average earnings per hundred clicks. This is the dollar amount you can expect to make when you send one hundred people to the merchant’s page. This is usually reported by the merchant as an average across all the traffic they’re sent. You may also get it reported for your specifically after you have enough traffic being sent.

Keep in mind that since the merchant’s EPC is an average over all their traffic, you might be able to do better than that if you’re sending well-targeted traffic to them. You might also do worse, if the traffic you send isn’t very targeted.

So, let’s say that we know the EPC for a particular product is $54.07 (this is the actual EPC for a particular product you can market through Commission Junction). So what do this number tell us? Well, nothing exactly, but we can use it to come to some first guesses about what we can afford to pay per click.

If we think we’ll make $54.07 per hundred visitors, that means our income per visitor is $0.54. Remember that each visitor is a click we had to pay for, so we have to pay less than $0.54 to make any profit.

Now, you cannot rely totally on merchant’s EPC figures. Those include a wide variety of traffic, and no doubt include some traffic sent by marketing superstars. But as a rough guess for planning out a PPC campaign, you can use EPC to come up with an initial keyword bid.

Given the numbers above, we could look at various targeted keywords and decide if they could be profitable, based on whether we could get our ad at position 3 or 4 for under $0.54. Ideally we’d be far enough under that we make a decent profit.

This is most definitely not the entire story! You also have to track your own results, and adjust based on what you’re actually earning once you start getting enough traffic. Traffic must be well targeted, or you’ll be wasting money.

But it gives you a rough idea of how to evaluate keywords to see if you might be able to earn from them.

Posted on

Internet Marketing Success — My First Hub Page

Okay, I finally got around to creating my first Hub over at Hub Pages.

For anyone who missed my first post on it, Hub Pages, Giving Squidoo A Run For Their Money?, Hub Pages is a Squidoo like site that allows you to easily create single web pages focused on a topic. Unlike Squidoo, which uses arcane profit sharing calculations, Hub Pages just uses your Adsense, Amazon, and Ebay ids when displaying a certain percentage of the ads. So you know exactly how many impressions and clicks you’re getting.

My first hub is called How To Achieve Internet Marketing Success. It was intended as an expanded version of my post, How To Succeed In Internet Marketing, but ended up getting way too long.

So what I finally did was make the hub more of a motivation and intro for what will eventually be a large number of more detailed hubs on various Internet Marketing topics (as if I need more places to create content!) Assuming, of course, that it looks like Hub Pages is a good place to continue to create content.

Oh, and I know that it would have been a nice idea to create a hub that was on the same topic as one of my Squidoo lenses, to compare the results from both, but I couldn’t quite make myself write a hub on a topic that I’d already covered. So that experiment will have to wait until I’m feeling in the mood to repeat myself.

I’ll report back in coming months on the earnings from this hub.

Posted on

The Psychology of Monetization

Recent comments on posts here have got me thinking about the psychology of monetization.

There are good reasons to monetize a site from the very start, and good reasons to delay monetization. Some of the reasons are appropriate for one niche and not another, so I wanted to go through some of the factors that I’d look at in deciding to monetize or not.

Perceptions of Sites with Ads

I tend to see sites that have a lot of ads but little content as spammy looking. When I write a site that is spammy, then I don’t have any trouble putting ads on it from the start. When I write a site that I want to be viewed as more of a quality site, then I like to delay ads until I have enough content that I think a few ads are warranted.

Value of Early Traffic

In the early days of a site, the amount of traffic coming in is low. Assuming a 20% click through rate on ads, if you’re getting 5 people a day to the site initially, that means you might get 1 click a day. If you’ve chosen your keywords well and written your content well, you might get $1 for that click (although often it’ll be less).

Early traffic just doesn’t add that much to the bottom line, so for quality sites I like to focus early on building the best site possible, and worry about monetization later.

What Are The Keywords Worth?

While site level keywords might be picked because they can get $1 or $2 per click, the chances are good that most pages on your site will monetize at a lower level if you’re using something like Adsense. If you use a site side widget to put ads on every single page in the site, then you might only get $0.20 per click on some pages.

Is it worth $0.20 for a visitor to leave your site by clicking an ad?

My preference is to monetize only on pages whose keywords are worth enough to make it profitable for the visitor to leave the site. I might lose them anyway, but the chance is also there that they’ll look around the site more if not every page has ads on it.

Focus on Monetization

When I start to monetize a site, I tend to focus on tweaking various monetization options in order to get the most out of the clicks I’m getting. And I usually slow down on content creation, because that isn’t my focus.

So for my personal nature, monetization a quality site early would work against me.

Plans for the Site

What are my plans for the site? Is it primarily a MFA (made for Adsense) type of site, where the goal is to get the ad click from search engine traffic? Or is it more of a quality site, where the goal is to build repeat traffic by offering valuable content?

Or something in between?

I monetize MFA type sites from the very start, because that’s their entire reason for being, to get visitors to click on ads or affiliate links.

Quality sites I delay monetization on, for the reasons talked about above, until traffic is at a decent enough level to warrant it.

No Right Answers

Those are some of the things I think about when deciding when to monetize. I’ve started a topic over at The Advisory Panel to discuss this topic, so if you’re a member come on over and jump in! And if you’re not a member, it’s free to join.

So when do you monetize, and why?

Posted on

Smoking Hot List Review

Rick Katz of the Big Dog Heavy Hitters report has created another free report, called Smoking Hot List.

The Smoking Hot List report talks about the importance of capturing your visitor’s contact information, rather than simply directing them to a program’s affiliate page. Who buys into a program on their first visit? You’ll have questions you want answered, you may go to some other review sites, etc. If you just send traffic to a program’s sign up page, then you’ve lost any opportunity to be the person who answers their questions and helps them succeed. The commission will go to whoever does those things.

So the report recommends capturing their information into an autoresponder list, and following up with them via email. Don’t even say what program you’re promoting on the sign up page, just say what it can do for them. That way you have a lot more time to follow up with them and figure out what is keeping them from succeeding.

There’s a lot more in the report, and true to form, you have to opt in to a list to get the report.

On the back end, Rick offers the use of the Smoking Host List report to build your own list. You join Rick’s co-op club, and get access to not only the Smoking Hot List report, but can also participate in the co-op itself (if you remember my review of the co-op, it’s the only program I’ve seen online that actually lives up to what it says it’ll do, namely put you into profit quickly). And for everyone who joins the co-op through your Smoking Hot List page, you get a direct commission.

So you’re building a list and getting paid to do it.

This program is ideal if you don’t have a website and want to build a list, or have had trouble building lists before. Rick’s co-op club has worked out very well, so I don’t doubt that the Smoking Hot List pages will work out well, too.

Click here for the full Smoking Hot List report.

Posted on

Site Build It! Day 10

If you’ve been following along with my SBI! series, you’ll recall I was last on day 7. How’d I get to day 10 already?

Day 10 is monetization, and is triggered by you reaching 30 pages of content on your site. When that happens, the monetization module unlocks, and gives you access to some very cool analysis tools.

Keep in mind that you don’t automatically monetize at this point, but 30 pages of content is a good milestone. You also want to be getting some traffic, at least 20 to 30 unique visitors a day. If you aren’t getting the traffic, then the time you’ll spend monetizing could be far better spent creating more content.

The SBI! monetization tools pull data from Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, along with data culled from your website’s referrer logs (those tell SBI! what keywords people are actually finding your site with). All that data is then run through some analysis and provided to you in three ways.

The Content Building module shows you the relative keyworth of all of your site’s keywords. Keyworth is a number that SBI! came up with that is a one-number summary of the keyword demand, supply, Adwords and Search Marketing prices, traffic, etc. Sort by the keyworth column, and you have the keywords you want to target at the top of the list.

The Content Building module helps you to focus your content creation on the pages that will give you the most monetization benefit. You’ll still create pages for all the keywords eventually, but you might as well do it for the most valuable keywords first.

The Ad Selling module shows you a list of all your pages, along with how many visitors you’ve gotten to each page, and the Adwords and Search Marketing estimates for how much the keywords for those pages are worth. Since this is a page oriented module, if you don’t have a page for a keyword it won’t show up here.

This module shows you what the most valuable pages are to place either Adwords or Search Marketing ads on. And it’ll tell you which is better for each page.

The PPC Buying module provides you with all sorts of statistics that are useful if you plan on driving traffic to individual pages on your site with PPC campaigns. You have to be able to effectively monetize before this makes sense, so I haven’t gotten into this module. But it looks to provide the same high quality analysis as the others.

Once again I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the tools that SBI! provides. The monetization analysis tools provide the data needed to make rational decisions about how and when to monetize to the greatest benefit. Most people creating niche sites do this haphazardly, but SBI! gives you what you need to do it systematically.

Click here for a quick tour of what SBI! provides.