Google Rich Snippets

Google Rich Snippets are here, and they enable you to place a small image or icon with your search results. It seems they are starting with review and social/people type sites, and sites with many pages (like the BBC).

A good thread leading you to more information is here.

7:07 am by iinky in Lovely Things

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End of Domain Names?

It seems that Google is killing the address bar with Chrome, and the end point may be the end of domain names.

With the address bar disappearing further into the background, Web apps will again take on an increased relevance, as users navigate by clicking on Web app icons, rather than typing in URLs – much as they are used to navigating OSX or Windows. In many ways, URLs are a holdover from a past time. Just as we don’t type command line strings into a DOS window on a Windows machine very much if ever anymore, Google wants our Web experience to consist of point and click, not mistaken backslashes and misspelled domain names.

I’m not sure who should be more worried – those holding millions of dollars in domain name investments, or those that have named their projects something unmemorable (Qyixr is available) just to get the dot com.

6:21 am by iinky in Lovely Things

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How Much Traffic Do You Need to Make a Living Off Your Website?

Whilst it is important to realize the quality of your traffic is important (recurring, targeted, motivated visitors, ‘starving crowds‘), and the types of revenue sources also plays a part (private advertising, pay per click, or affiliate sales), many internet investors would appreciate a rough guide to how much traffic is required to make a small income off of a website (or websites).

To answer this, I trusted the wisdom of crowds, and surveyed a number of answers to this question. Wherever possible, we will use $100 a day as a low, achievable target (multiply this figure to get to your daily income requirements), and measure visits in unique visitors per day.

“One site gets approx. 2000 visits per day and makes about $30-$40 per day. Another site gets approx. 500 visits per day and makes about $60-$100 per day. So, you can make more money with less traffic depending on the niche. I’d love to at least double my traffic to each of my sites this year. If I double my traffic, I will double my income. It’s pretty much as simple as that.” HappyWife

“One site gets over 2000 page views per day and makes me a lot of money – all CPA offers. Another gets 400 page views a day and makes quite a bit, whilst another in a different niche gets the same amount of traffic and makes next to nothing (not a buying niche).” Barb Thornback

“One person is enough. It depends on what you are selling and how well it converts.” jazbo

“According to many bloggers and me, a minimum of 500 visitors a day (That is roughly 15,000 visitors a month) is required to make fairly average income from a website every month. However, this is also depends on the quality of web traffic. And the type of income you are going for. If the web traffic is not buyer traffic then your website will not make good Income.” MyTimeMatters

“If your website makes 20,000 visitors (a day?), you can make $500 per day.” (4,000 to make $100)  subesh06

“DogForums.com gets 1800 daily unique visitors. I can almost guarantee that this site doesn’t make any more than 5-10k a month ($160 – $330 a day).” Which would give us a figure of 1100 a day to make $100. phpnetpro

“On my site I need 10,000 views (not unique) per day to make $70 a day. I have an advertising agreement for $4 CPM and another one for $3.25 CPM. Those ads are both on the same pages, that means for one page view I’m getting $7.25 CPM or $7.25 for each 1,000 views.” Ron Douglas

“CPM Advertisers want to reach a large audience, and they don’t deal much with sites which have less than 100k page views per month. Typical CPM rates (the amount an advertiser will pay you per thousand page views) might be around $5 or less, depending on the size of your site, your topic and your visitor’s demographics.” So, to earn $100 a day, you’d need about 20,000 impressions per day.

But, other income streams earn more. In my experience with affiliate marketing (such as talking readers into purchasing an ebook or other purchase), I’ve had results as good as $500 per 1000 visitors for a well-targeted product to a very specific audience.” Or 200 uniques per day to make $100. ThinkTraffic.net

“From my own personal experience one hundred unique visitors a day is plenty to start making money, albeit a small amount. Five hundred visitors a day can generate around $250 a week with proper advertising and visitor management. And by visitor management I mean blog design, advertising choice and placement, reader engagement, that sort of thing. One thousand visitors a day buys you a ticket to the $500 a week club, again with proper advertising and visitor management. It’s simply a case of picking the right affiliate programs and keeping your traffic engaged and on target. Sure, you’re never going to do anywhere near that figure with Google ads, but 1000 genuine unique visitors a day is plenty to make upwards of $25,000 per year, per blog. And from there, the sky’s the limit.

If you want a rough equation take the amount of unique visitors you have per day, and divide it by two to get a weekly income estimate. This will work for blogs that have good content, a targeted audience and good advertisement choice and placement.” ie. 1,400 a day for $100 Upstart Blogger

I’m getting $2-$4 per day from 80 visitors.” (2,000 to 4,000 a day)  mnemtsas

The last quote is a good reminder. Just to check out your current income, and divide by current page views. That way, you can come up with a figure that is relevant to you. For your worst performing program, you might need 20,000 visitors a day to get $100.

However – remember that doubling your ads, adding on different or changing your selling strategy a little can easily double your profits, bringing your required traffic a long way down. You can easily make multiples (up to 30 times) of what you’d made with advertising, just by selling your own products and services.

We can see that getting 500 to 2,000 uniques a day (or around 1,000 uniques a day), is a good  ballpark figure. Which is close to Upstart Blogger’s idea that 1,400 would bring you $100. If you are getting less than $100 a day with 2,000 uniques a day, it is time to think about optimizing this traffic.

On a personal note, at the time of writing I have a gaggle of small sites with about 2,400 uniques a day, one that gives me 1,300, another 2,400 (combined about 6,100). These are dwarfed by one that can give me anything up to 10,000 a day. For 10,000 a day, properly optimized, I should be aiming for about $5,000 a week.

8:48 am by iinky in Making Money Online

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More Google Changes to Algorithms

After the large, recent changes to Google’s algorithms that were widely reported, we might be in for some future, smaller ones, that hit domainers (people who buy and sell domains) pretty hard.

The rumored changes would reduce the importance of having an exact keyword match in your domain (eg. DigitalPhotography.com), and focus instead on the content more, when compiling results.

Mark Jackson, of Vizion, says to respond to the changes

Successful search engine optimization is not just about building for what’s worked in the past, or what might work today, but focusing instead on ‘if I were Google’ and building towards that. While a keyword rich domain may still be counted — it does show a degree of ‘focus’ on that topic/keyword, obviously — how much should it count, really?

Would you, as a searcher, want to find a 10 page website ranking highly for some research that you’re conducting? To me, the intent of your search is to find a website of substance, authority, popularity and a quality user-experience. Focus on these things for long-term success.

Jackson said.

There are many other factors at play, such as the size of your site (big brands have been doing well – too well? – lately).

And don’t expect this to go too far, as many company’s branded domains include keywords without intention. Having a keyword in your domain can also help people remember your site, and to help them find relevant information as they scan down the first page of Google’s results.

Read the full article here.

2:11 am by iinky in SEO

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Top Bloggers’ Earnings

Ok, so this is a list of gross, not net, earnings – and many of these bloggers earn more with their associated sites – but zac johnston has posted a list of the top bloggers and their incomes. Here they are, in month and yearly form, as well as posts and numbers of writers where available.

Interestingly, Kottke has only one ad space (as well as a job listing, Amazon income, and RSS feed sponsoring) and still makes over $60,000 a year. One reason – a single mention in a Kottke article can bring in over 25,000 visitors in a week.

3:36 am by iinky in Making Money Online

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