The effects

Here is some hard stats from a site that gets around 200 searches a day from google. This is a graph of the past threemonths and the traffic Google specifically has been sending the site. Keep in mind I haven’t been promoting / updating the site like I should have.

This site went from a PageRank of 7 to a PageRank of 4 — something that would normally seem devistating to a site’s search engine referrals. You can see that this PageRank decrease has had zero effect on my search engine referrers.

Text Links won’t be penalized

Google may not like Text Links, but there’s no denying that Google wants to create the most relevant search results possible. By penalizing sites that have Text Links on them, Google would suppress good sites with quality content on them. This is why I am not afraid that Google might penalize people who display text link ads.

So think a couple of times next time someone tells you PageRank means everything — it may not be as bad as you think.

Why I suddenly feel jipped

My first reaction was: finally! I can use Twitterific on Leopard again! YES!

My second reaction was: crap! I wish I could use the old Twitterific — without the ads. But I can’t, because it doesn’t work on Leopard.

Creating mandatory updates that require a purchase is a huge no-no in the software land. Even if your product was free before. You notice that the 2.0 branch isn’t supported anymore — it just dissapeared. This is pretty insulting to me, as it’s holding bug fixes hostage.

But it’s still free! There’s just ads!

That’s not free. If someone says it’s free, I ask them to answer these two questions to themselves:

1. Does IconFactory make money from the product?
2. Does the product require more of your mental time?

Mind share is a valuable currency — it’ just a different format than dollars and cents. Ad-supported is ad-supported — it is most definitely not free.

Supporting Developers

Many people point out that we need to support developers. I whole heartedly agree. However, there seems to be something missing in this argument: IconFactory went from a relatively niche company to a company known to nearly every twitter-going Mac user and then some. Because of that, I can guarantee the traffic to their site has increased, the number of backlinks have increased, and their sales have increased (they sell many products). The overall value of their company has increased as a result of this application.

By simply creating a program, they were able to purchase the best kind of advertising: the kind people willingly go out and download and install on their computers. To me, this is ample payment. In the same vein people distribute free Wordpress themes in order to gain popularity to their own sites — this application was an advertising tool.

To me, IconFactory has been amply supported. I would be willing to bet any costs of developer time have been offset by extra sales. (keep in mind this is a loaded statement with no supporting facts).

This move was about looking for more routes of monetization, not developer support.

It’s just not that complicated of an application

I’m sorry: but it’s true. It’s a GUI for a web services backend. Sure, they’ve got conditional formatting, OS integration and all that jazz — but let’s try and compare it to the complexity of other application like Firefox, YourSQL, Quicksilver, TextMate, Transmit, Parallels, etc. Twitterific is but a pea compared to these giants. The development time required for an application like Twitterific is insignificant compared to other comparably-priced OS X applications.

Conclusion

I’m pretty sure a lot of people that read this will adamantly disagree with me. That’s fine: I’m comfortable being a loner with an opinion. But in the meantime, I’m using Jonathan Snook’s excellent Snitter to get my Twitter fix.

But it got me thinking: the internet business isn’t a steady flow. It’s one of the reasons I’m so overly cautious in jumping off the full-time bandwagon and going full-time self-hacker status. I’m not angry, because of course — I’m not losing any money (my internet-earnings are really just a bonus for me). Here’s to hoping next month goes better!

Oh — and I’m working on a few more posts as we speak so we don’t go for such a ridiculous dry spell again!

In my mind, the actual designing and building of sites is only clockwork now. Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love it — but it’s something that I know I can do. It’s the continued maintenance of the sites that I often times fail at. So I’ve begun a new practice, which is to create content for a month or two of the site’s life. It forces me to delve into the project and really research what it’s about. I find out quickly whether I’m truly interested in the subject, or if I was just excited about the idea of creating yet another site

So do yourself a favor — next time you are about t jump into a project headfirst, start amassing content. See if you’re really interested in the subject before you just have another domain added to your credit card bill.

Someone needs to find me a job where I get paid to do whatever the hell I want.

That’d be great.

I make money on the internet. I make money off of online advertising. if anyone should be afraid of Adblock, it’s me. And yet I’m not.

Ask any online publisher — Firefox users click less ads. The sweet spot of online visitors are Internet Explorer users who came from a Yahoo/MSN search. They’re the ones clicking the ads. And quite frankly, they’re too stupid to install Adblock. They’re the ones we make money off. So what’s the use if we start blocking ads from people who already mentally block them out? It’s kind of like passing a law to remove all meat from Vegetarian stores.

Adblock is good for the online ecosystem. There was a time on the internet when banner ads could fetch $5-$10 CPM no problem. Those days have long passed, and CPMs can be as low as $0.05 now-a-days. That decrease is a direct result of the ineffectiveness of banner advertising. It’s ineffective because people mentally block them out. If we allow people to install Adblock — we start narrowing our targeting down. We start targeting the people who buy things. And CPMs go up.

If online advertising is one thing: it’s trackable. We can track where visitors came from, how they got to our site, what they did on our site, and finally what products they bought. This obsessive amount of analytical power generates an extraordinary ROI-driven marketplace in which specific advertising can be exactly correlated with revenue. As effectiveness of advertising rises or falls so does the price of said advertising.

Google is not going out of business. The online advertising business is stronger than ever — and it’s shown no signs of slowing down, let alone dying because a few people installed Adblock. I say bring it on.

Link Worth Formula

Before we get started, it would be a good idea to cover exactly how TLA calculates the worth of your link. Note that this is a different number from what you will earn. I don’t know the exact formula, but I do know the variables in the formula:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Number of ad spots available
• Site Wide / One Page

There are some other rumored factors, and factors that don’t actually end up changing your worth that much:

• Technorati Rank
• Number of pages link will appear on
• Demand (how often is there an empty spot?)

So, at the end of the day, to have the highest link worth, you need a site with high PageRank, high Alexa Rank and a site-wide link, and few ad spots available.

Submit Late

Don’t be so quick to submit your site to TLA. While it can be extremely tempting — if you are at a PR3 or PR4, I would most certainly not recommend submitting your site to TLA. The reason for this is how links are sold in TLA.

Let’s say if you submit now, your link worth will be $20/mo. If an advertiser buys a spot for a year and a half, the total cost will be $20/mo for the entire 18 months. This means, that if in 6 months your links are worth $150/mo, you will still only be earning $10/mo (50% of $20). If you had waited 6 months to submit, you would have made $65 ($150/2 = $75 - $10 = $65) more in that 6th month. This would have made up for the entire 6 months previous of making $10/mo.

This may be a little confusing to grasp at first — but think it through, and you’ll see why it’s actually worth it to wait it out and submit later on in a site’s life.

Hold back on those ad spots

It can be real tempting to jack up the number of available spots when signing up for TLA. Most people think — if I can sell one link at $20/mo — why not sell 10 links for $200/mo! Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Adding more links devalues each individual link. That means that if you have 10 spots — your link worth may be 50% of what it is for 4 spots. The advantage to having less ad spots is how much easier it is to fill them. Instead of having to sell 10 spots — you only have to sell 4. Additionally, I’ve found that advertisers like it when there’s less links on the page (gives their links more worth).

My recommendation is 4 spots. It may hurt at first — but once you start making some decent cash, it’s going to be worth it.

Add a link to your package

This is one of the most successful tweaks I’ve done to sell more links. Let’s be honest: TLA’s search sucks. If you want to find a specific site, you can’t. So help out your advertisers and add a quick sentence below your links that says something like: Support sitename by purchasing a link today.

Matt Brett does a good job of this. Small and simple — but highly effective.

Leverage your network

The highest factor in link worth from my experience has been PageRank. So leverage your network and link your sites together. Once you start sharing the PageRank around — you’ll be able to multiply your earnings across sites. I did this for a while (until I sold off a few sites), and it was a huge success. One of my sites that I hadn’t updated in over a year was still bringing in $75/mo for me. Not bad off 500 uniques a month! This was all possible because I network my sites together.

Anything else?

Do you have some other tips to share for increasing your TLA earnings? Please share them! I’d love to hear how you guys are leveraging this great system.

A few weeks ago, Apple released a much needed update to their iWork and iLife suites. The most important update to iWork for me was the addition of a spreadsheet-like program called Numbers. I spent a few nights porting my revenue and expenses over to Numbers and all I can say is: wow.

I’m a huge fan of spreadsheets, and also a perfectionist when it comes to design and layout. This is the exact kind of program I absolutely love to use. It gives me the simple power I need from spreadsheets, and the beauty I get from creating documents in Illustrator or Photoshop. Have a look at my master spreadsheet I use to keep track of my revenue month-to-month:

The primary reason I think this program is so revolutionary is that it realizes that most people only use the basics in spreadsheets. 95% of the spreadsheet work I do is just adding up numbers, averaging out numbers, and creating simple graphs to visualize the data. It dumbs down the complexity that is Excel and gives everyone a simple interface to do their simple calculations.

The second reason I love this program so much is that it makes it really easy to create great looking spreadsheets. You just need to select one of the table or chart templates in the sidebar, and suddenly your tables are formatted nicely with headers, cells, and summary rows and columns. Excel only has knowledge of one of these: the cell. Having knowledge of all three makes formatting light years easier.

Still not quite excel

Don’t get me wrong: Numbers is no replacement for the raw power of Excel. Writing complicated formulas is not nearly as easy, and scripting doesn’t seem very possible (or perhaps plausible). If you need to do some hardcore analysis, you’re probably better off firing up trusty old Excel (if not for anything but familiarity). But if you’re looking for a simple spreadsheet program to create some easy to use number-crunching: Numbers is your program.

Yet, in a wonderful twist of irony Numbers can open more Excel files than Excel can. It’s been over a year since Office 2007 XML-based files (.xlsx, .docx, etc) started showing up. It is still impossible to open these files on a Mac. How ridiculous is that ? (come on Microsoft) Luckily Numbers comes to the rescue and supports importing these new files.

Find a relevant affiliate program

Most of my revenue comes from DreamHost affiliates. I’ve already talking about how to make money from DreamHost and it’s pretty simple when it comes down to it. My open source project is a Wordpress theme. Many people downloading themes need hosting. I use and support DreamHost: and I even give people a coupon.

Find a legitimate affiliate program and promote it (but don’t force it) on the download page. I’ve found the less you push affiliate programs, the better they succeed. Strange it may be: but you have to understand your visitors aren’t morons. Give them something useful, and make a quick buck at the same time.

Firefox comes to mind as the most successful venture of this idea: every search you make in the google toolbar earns money for Mozilla. I know that I love the Google search bar — so it’s a win from my side, and a win from Mozilla’s side. Mozilla earns enough to pay several full time developers, and spend money on advertising to boot.

Create a hosted / pay-for service

Another option is to create a service very much like Wordpress.com. Leverage your open-source project by offering more features or less barriers to entry for a small fee. This is a great way to fund your open-source project because it will make you want to develop the application even more — because when you enhance the project, you also enhance your revenue generator.

I think this would have been a great idea for Vanilla — if Lussomo had started up a hosted service for Vanilla, it would have been taken much better in the community. Furthermore, I believe moves like this are far more profitable than any affiliate or other traditional advertising out there. You also become in control of your revenue — which is a massive plus.

Charge for support

Along with any open-source project comes the inevitable support requests. Sometimes the number of support inquiries becomes overwhelming. So why not offer small fees for simplistic support? Maybe charge $15 for “premium” support — where your request will be answered no matter what. There are of course tiers of this idea that you can implement: and in fact I’ve got a project idea of my own trying to leverage this very idea ;)

Place a donate button on the page

A lot of people assume that people by nature won’t donate money. Why not try? Put a big prominent donation button on your download page and see how people react. You never know how it will work out. I know some developers making $XXXX per month in donations alone.

Find a sponsor

Last but not least: find a sponsor for your project. Sometimes companies are willing to pay developers to create free products if only to get their name and brand out in the open. If you’re really strapped for cash, start asking around for some corporate sponsors. You may be surprised how willing companies are to help you out.

This is by no means a huge traffic term, nor is it anything that’s going to make me tons of money. But it does come back to my point: SEO is really easy. There are exactly two steps towards ranking high in the search engines:

1. Perform ultra simplistic optimization on your pages. This means using semantic HTML and having relevant page titles.
2. Make compelling content

It’s the second one that really matters. If you want to rank high in the search engines: make something worth while. Make something that people want to read/use/interact with and you will do fine. Quit trying to scam the system, and just do good for the web. It will come back to you tenfold.