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.

5 Replies to “Site Build It! Day 10”

  1. Really, Jay? They make you wait til you have 30 pages of content to monetize? Perhaps that is appropriate for total newbies but that would send me demanding a refund if I didn’t have full control over the timing of when I implemented what on my own site that I paid $300 for. Otherwise the tools sound great.

  2. [quote post=”502″]Really, Jay? They make you wait til you have 30 pages of content to monetize?[/quote]

    The Monetization module isn’t available until you have 30 pages, because it depends on stats from visitors actually visiting your site to make recommendations on which pages to monetize first. And before you have 30 pages, the chances are good that you don’t have enough stats to make any analysis meaningful.

    Actual monetization is you putting Adsense (or whatever) code in your pages, and you can do that at any time. If you want to monetize from day 1, you can do that, and the analysis tools will still be unlocked when you hit 30 pages.

  3. [quote comment=””][quote post=”502″]Really, Jay? They make you wait til you have 30 pages of content to monetize?[/quote]

    The Monetization module isn’t available until you have 30 pages, because it depends on stats from visitors actually visiting your site to make recommendations on which pages to monetize first. And before you have 30 pages, the chances are good that you don’t have enough stats to make any analysis meaningful.

    Actual monetization is you putting Adsense (or whatever) code in your pages, and you can do that at any time. If you want to monetize from day 1, you can do that, and the analysis tools will still be unlocked when you hit 30 pages.[/quote]

    Thanks for clearing that up for me, Jay. I, personally, think any page with content on it is suitable for adsense. I don’t see any reason to lose those early visitors. So, I always monetize from day one. As for SBI locking the stats… Well, I guess they have to have something to work with to give you a better idea of where to focus your efforts. Anyway…

    Thanks Again!

  4. [quote post=”502″]I, personally, think any page with content on it is suitable for adsense.[/quote]

    That’s one of the things I love about the SBI! monetization module. Once it has the stats to work with, it’ll tell you if you might be losing money by using Adsense ads over Yahoo ads. Or vice versa. The two services don’t pay the same, and some keywords might work better with one over the other. You can mix them on a site, as long as a single page only has one or the other.

  5. [quote post=”502″]I don’t see any reason to lose those early visitors.[/quote]

    SBI’s philosophy is that you have a limited amount of time to work on your site. Most people are doing this sort of thing part time, working it in between family responsibilities, etc.

    In the early days of a site, if you spend part of your time monetizing, you’re slowing the growth of your site because you’re not creating content. And it’s content that gets you visitors.

    Personally, I find that anytime I start monetizing a site, my perspective shifts from providing valuable content to optimizing my monetization efforts. So I like delaying monetization until I have enough content that the site can stand on its own for a bit until I come to my senses and start providing valuable content again.

    But I also create content at a snail’s pace, due to everything else going on in my life. People who can generate content quickly and can “monetize and forget” wouldn’t have the same problems.

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