Joe emails:
I think you have more important website issues. A day or two ago, you dumped a bunch of text-links–undifferentiated, unseparated text-links–into prime real-estate to the left, above the fold, as they say. The whole thing looks like a blob of spam that most people will recoil from and mentally block out. It appears that your thought-process went something like this: me have high-paying offers, me dump links on site, me make money.
But it doesn’t work that way–you can’t get what you want by proceeding so literally. You have to generalize from the lessons learned from Neil Strauss–put yourself in your readers’ heads and ask: what would make me (i.e. them) see the ad and click on it and maybe act on it? Just as you can’t go up to a girl and just recite a list of pickup lines in a monotone off a sheet of paper, you can’t do that with links/ads/offers. You have to get their attention and develop their interest, which is what all those "squeeze pages" do for all the products being sold online (i.e. those long, garish "Dear Friend" letters).
Let’s take a look at just one of the links you put up:
"Let SBI! make you a high-earning affiliate earning champion."
Your readers don’t know what SBI! is…and they probably don’t know what affiliate programs are. Assuming they actually read through the list of text-links, why would they click this one? And…what’s ironic is: you might actually have people who would benefit from getting SBI! — I’ve actually looked into SBI! in the past–if you want to build a website quickly and cheaply that has most/all the stuff you need for a site, well, it might be a way to go. All sorts of people are using it, from the author’s own teenage daughter to a Yiddish professor and so on. But no one will ever know that from your presentation. So, you’re never going to make any sales, so no commission for you.
A few ideas, some of which are bandaids: if you must have text-links like that, you could separate them, perhaps by putting them into a bullet-pointed HTML unordered-list, using the <ul> tag (and <li> for each individual list element, i.e. each link) or maybe putting a HTML horizontal-rule (i.e. <hr>) in between them. Or even just putting line-breaks (i.e. <br>) in between them.
Putting space between the actual ads might make them look better too, a little breathing room.
And you might want to have fewer ads to make the ones you have stand out.
And: why have text links in such a good spot up there? Why not use one of the real ads, maybe even that skyscraper (which is now at the bottom)? Or, maybe the ink ad–everyone needs ink/toner, after all, so perhaps that would be an easy sell?
3.) I signed up for the report from Jonathan Leger, so I expect you’ll get at least one quarter. Evidence-based results are a very good thing and that’s what he appears to have–I learned a bunch. Read it if you haven’t (it was just released yesterday)…though I can sum it up in a word: links. Page-rank, duplicate-content, a site’s focus or lack thereof and various other things that people "know" about apparently do not have the effects that people think they do. What governs ranking in Google is good linkage and he talks about it.
(As you may know, he’s got a thing about links–he’s looking to promote a service called 3waylinks.net but then again, he wouldn’t be doing that if he didn’t think it works).
Again, recommended–thanks for linking to it…
…but, again, look at what you did with it–you copied his text verbatim as your blog entry instead of telling people what it’s about or why *they* should look into it–yes, you told them why it’s good for *you*, but not why it’d be interesting to *them*.
Not that your audience is going to be super-interested necessarily, but if you *sold it* better, perhaps people would be more interested. I’m not sure whether telling people you get a quarter is so great, since it could be seen as you looking to scrounge up pocket-change…though, maybe not.
4.) I wonder, given that your whole thing is transparency, whether it would make sense to talk about the stuff you are doing to monetize the blog as you’re doing it, what you hope to get out of it, whether it’s succeeded or not, etc. Perhaps with a soupçon of your wit and sensibility to make it a little different from others and to make it fit in with the rest of what you write about, instead of it seeming to just be dropped in, undigested.
And, who knows, people might find it interesting to understand how the web works and how people make money on it and how they themselves might make some money on it….which would get them more likely to sign up for things and maybe even buy stuff related to making money online–you’d have pre-sold them by blogging about it.
Perhaps something in the titles of posts on the subject, so people not interested can skip them and people interested will look at it–"Crass Commercialism" or something. Perhaps doing it one day a week, at the end of each, perhaps, so you can look back on your results and forward to what you’ll be trying the next week and perhaps some sort of monthly summing up. Perhaps putting this stuff on another blog that you’d link to would be helpful, since then you could target the ads to products in this area and also you could talk about how you really didn’t and perhaps still don’t want to be doing this, you’d rather be doing journalism, but you have to make a living and so you’re looking into this stuff and here’s what you’ve found out and here are the results of trying the stuff out, etc.
Perhaps you could have some fun comparing your monthly results with John Chow, since he posts his monthly results, as do some others, i.e. a self-deprecating comparison or whatever.
5.) In any case, have some respect for your readership and for your blogs–don’t just dump undigested ads and offers on people–make something compelling of it all.
