Today’s quote of the day (ok – so its quote of the week, month or year as I don’t do quotes of the day) comes from David V. Lorenzo:
‘Most successful entrepreneurs are great re-arrangers. They take something that has been useful somewhere else and rig it so that it is groundbreaking and disruptive to a completely different industry.’ found via Dane
This is what I see a lot of very talented bloggers doing at the moment. They are taking previously done ideas and putting a new spin on them.
Another trend that I’m seeing among bloggers that relates to this is the trend of bringing two different niches together into one blog.
- Shoeblogs does this by blogging about ‘Shoes and Celebrities’.
- Cooking Gadgets does this by blogging about ‘Gadgets and Cooking’.
These are just two of numerous that I’ve seen of late that do this. In fact I’ve stumbled upon about 5 others in the past 48 hours that are attempting to do it also.
I love both of those blogs, precisely because they have defined a niche and stick with it.
I think this is one of the hardest parts of blogging. Finding a topic that is either old or stale and bringing it back to life is a true skill.
I have a question Darren, you talk about the amount of money you are making and making sure you and the advise you give is ethical. I wounder how many click throughs you get from people who just want to support you and not really intersted in buying anything from the advertiser? Do you feel simply telling your readers not to do this is enough? I am not attacking anything I just am currious if somehow that was not worked into your plan for problogger.net
Chris
I doubt that people who read Darren’s other blogs know much about “supporting’ by clicking on his adsense links.
And the people here who do understand about Adsense links don’t click them. I think if you look back through the archives you will find a post where Darren said that he only made $5.00 a day (or it could have even been a month) from this blog.
You will also see that Darren’s not much of a t-shirt salesman either because he’s commented on how few Pro Blogger t-shirts he’s sold.
Stuart:
You might be correct however I have looked at the volume he does on the other blogs and he would have to have a very high click thorugh rate and I find that hard to believe.
OK Stuart none of us can talk about the exact rates, but let’s take a look at a hypothetical blog and clickthroughs.
Average hits per day: 10,000
Average click through: 3%
Average click value: $0.50
Daily earning: $150
Annual earning: $54,750
OK, now consider Darren has many blogs, many ad revenue systems, sponsorships, etc. How is it so difficult to see that the maths works, on very conservative figures?
Sorry Stuart, it’s Chris that was questioning the figures.
Chris
Why do you find a high ctr hard to believe?
Personally I haven’t looked at Darren’s other blogs but some of my partner’s and my niche blogs have an incredible CTR so why do you feel that Darren can’t achieve the same on his blogs?
Chris
I get a CTR of 15% to 25% on some of my blogs. So his numbers are very beleiveable. Its all about testing testing testing.
Chris,
its an interesting question. I actually find that the CTR here at this blog is the lowest of all my blogs so I highly doubt anyone here does that.
From what I can tell on my other blogs no one does either.
In terms of my CTR – I can’t reveal figures.
Andy’s stats are good – click value might be a bit generous though.
Maybe. I was thinking of a hypothetical tech blog where figures are often higher. :)
So funny that the comments went completely off track on this post. Thanks for the first comment, flygirl, hope you continue to enjoy cooking gadgets. It struck me when I started it that I should have thought of it months ago! It came from a trend I saw on one of my other blogs… Hey, I write about gadgets a lot… and, wait, most of them are about cooking. So, there you go :)
InertRamblings.com, which I registered in July of 2003, has stated just that since its inception. “Everything worth saying has already been said…” has been the headline sitting at the top of the page for the past 2+ years. ;)
I was only making an observation but lets look at some numbers
avg per day
71
6
72
21
47
60
195
11
175
752
16
13
49
24
18
121
379
23
40
10
57
648
124
40
122
36
10090
4430
2683 problogger
total 20,333
609990 a month or about $.025 per unique visitor
at 3% click through that is 18,300 people
6% 36,600
9% 54,900 (what I get) he would get just under $.30 per click through for $15,000 a month. If problogger is not making $150 a month his money is coming from 2 or 3 sites. Problogger is over 10% of his total traffic. Many of the other sites have not had posts in quite some time. I am not questioning this, I am making an observation that focus is very important!
Nice to see someone is digging around and trying to find some evidence before they make accusations Chris. I do appreciate that.
As per usual with these discussions – I have my hands tied behind my back by what I can and can’t share with the agreement Adsense publishers have with Google.
I can confirm that my site meter stats show I has 1,434,000 page views in August (the month of the $15,000. I can also confirm that my site visitor count is a little down this month in terms of visitors on some sites – although only slightly.
I can also confirm that in August there was one day when I was slashdotted which brought in an extra $XXX which might slightly alter the figures.
I can also confirm that my CTR is at a reasonable level on my bigger blogs and that I have a few blogs that have quite high click values.
It is very difficult to make judgements on other people’s sites without knowing the full picture. For example I know of one blogger who is blogging on the same topic as one of my sites who does double the traffic but no matter what he tries he can’t get his CTR anywhere near mine. I also know of others who get considerably higher Click values than I do on similar topics.
All I can really do is appeal to you to have a little faith in what I’m saying. I guess over time most people come to see what I’m claiming is true by what I say and how my blogs perform. I don’t spend much time trying to defend myself in this anymore because I know even when I’ve gone to lengths to try to prove it that some people just never believe me. While I don’t like to be accused of lying (I know you’re not doing that here) I am coming to terms with the fact that I can’t ultimately prove it unless you’re willing to drop by my house sometime for me to show you some earnings statements from Adsense.
The other thing that you need to remember Chris is that Adsense have some very high level fraud controls in place.
If, as you seem to suggest, there is something untoward going on Adsense would have chopped Darren off at the knees long ago.
Unfortunately Darren is correct – it’s very hard for him to post any form of proof to support his income stats – in other forms of marketing I’ve seen people do it and immediately been accused of photoshopping the image.
The fact is that everyone’s experience here with adsense or affiliate marketing is always going to be different. For example my partner can make bucket loads of money through affiliate marketing with very low traffic numbers – but I can’t make a sale of the same product on triple her traffic.
What does that prove – that she’s cheating or I’m hopeless?
It doesn’t prove anything but that everyone’s experience is different.
Darren’s traffic happens to like what he offers and the way it is presented – your traffic may not like the way you’re doing it.
As someone said before – test test and test some more.
This may not be new news; for many years many have defined genius as seeing connections where others previously did not.
Well I guess you guys missed my point however I did read adsence rules etc. and I see were there are controls for such things as people just hitting links. I never ment to suggest there was any fraud or that anyone had to defend themselves I was just trying to get some information.