Article Surfing Archive

There's a headline that gets anyone's attention.

There is actually a post on webmasterworld.net from a forum user who calls himself markus007 that makes that claim. I think the few initial suggestions he makes bear repeating:

1. Get a database of IP's so you know where your traffic is coming from. Then create channels for each country. Its not uncommon to see US traffic with a CPM of $5.00 and a CDN traffic at 20 cents and vice versa. If you have access to the hints option, give different hints based on IP. ie if your page is about 401k plans, that won't get you anything outside of the USA.

2. You have to create sites that will bring in repeat traffic. If you think you will get rich off SEO think again. If you create a Free jobs site you could net 30 million + a year if you got big. Club listings site, free religious personals etc would all be big money makers. Look for established markets and offer a service for free and support it with adsense.

3. Have your users create content and lots of it. User reviews of night clubs, Resorts, golf courses etc. Build your site around your users and make them part of your site, don't build your site for consumption.

4. Do not enter markets with a lot of competition monitized via adsense. Try and undercut paid content markets by offering a free service, or better yet create your own market.

5. Keep your site dead simple, it has to load fast and have no more then 2 ads and 1 or 2 pictures other then your logo. Do not confuse your user, give them what they want and give it to them fast.

6. Troll around various forums and if people are not talking about your market, there is a good chance you will make money.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the thread (it spans 25 pages):

Traffic is step #1, conversion is step #2, then for #3 we have to play with psychology

I like this one because it follows the process I have been preaching for years:
impression -> conversion -> action

So, in summary, users can find in his sites free services that are usually paid elsewhere, and they get them in a simple and fast way, and targeted to their locations, with lots of user feedback.

This seems to confirm the often quoted #1 Google's advice:

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Well said.

Markus again:

I found that you should just ignor monetization issues. I focus most of my time on trying to increase my dailly visitor count. [Emphasis added] If i don't increase my users/pageviews by 10% a month there is something wrong. If you focus all your time on trying to make money, your site tends to not grow.

With trends in advertising currently, it is best you build for the long term anyways. Google is coming out with rich media ads which would increase my CPM to $4+ and other ad platforms are working at tracking the users intentions. Ie if you searched for a new car on google a week ago, a random site may display car ads when you visit it. I think in 5 to 10 years, the internet will monitize at the same level as offline. Now is the time to get ahold of as much traffic as you can.

The beauty about what i've done is that my site constantly grows 10% a month, and I build long term value and actually help millions of people and my time spent working on the site stays at about a hour a day.

Read the thread. It's long but interesting: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/12751.htm