The trials and tribulations of making money on the internet.

Monthly archive February, 2008
General Information

Where Should I Place My Ads?

by Tom on Feb 8, 2008 • No Comments

If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, I’m here to try to answer that for you with a little help from Google. Google has done a great job of doing this work for you, they have a nice “heat map” of what areas of a webpage perform the best with advertisements. But keep in mind different things will work for different sites. Personally I have found that on a blog where a lot of people comment I have good luck placing a 250×250 ad right below the article on the article landing page (not the homepage). So the ad is placed between the end of the article and the comment box. This works well if you get a lot of comments as people will finish the article and be right there to click on your ad. Just make sure those ads pertain to what the site is about or people won’t even look twice.

I have also read that the upper left hand section of a page is what is looked at most. This is usually where a company or website’s logo is found, but if that is the most looked at part of the site I say put an ad up there or at least put an ad underneath your logo. Nothing too big and obtrusive though, it will just push people away.

Take a look at the “heat map” that Google provides.

google heat map

This shows that the best placement for ads is directly above the content on the webpage, in the middle. The darker the orange box the better the placement for ads. So as you can see ads that are placed above the “fold” (what the user sees before having to scroll down) usually perform a lot better than ads placed towards the bottom of the page. And the obvious emphasis is on the left had side of the page, so this is where you should focus your highest paying ads to if you’re using an affiliate program and if you’re using adsense, just put the code over there somewhere.

As I mentioned above this may not be the best placement for ALL sites, so make sure you experiment with where your ads are placed on a page and find out what works best for you. Most of the publisher programs like adsense, have the ability to track specific ad units that you place on your page, so make sure you utilize those to determine exactly which ads are getting you the most clicks so you don’t change something that was doing well.

General Information

Buying Domains

by Tom on Feb 8, 2008 • 1 Comment


Go Daddy $1.99 Domains 468x60

I’ve bought quite a few domains over the years, a lot of which just sit and do nothing. I may have had a good idea at one point and bought a domain in anticipation of creating a new site, only to forget all about it or realize that the idea might not have been so great. So this little write-up is more of a guide on how to get a good domain name, where to buy them and other domain questions.

So you have an idea for a site geared towards making money. The topic of the site isn’t necessarily “Making Money” but your main purpose for creating the site is to make money through displaying ads somehow. Now one of the best ways to get people to your site right from the start is to buy a domain that someone already owns or that a site is already created on. And by this I mean you find a site that someone may be selling on one of the many web marketing forums out there, that the person just has no use for anymore, or didn’t do what they wanted with. It’s going to cost you more than it would if you registered the domain yourself, but if the domain has been around longer it helps with SEO (search engine optimization). Google and other search engines sometimes look down on sites that are strictly looking to make money and have just started up. Now this isn’t always the case though, if you have legitimate content on your site and people like reading it then you should be ok with SEO from the start, that’s not saying you are going to be #1 in google from day 1, that takes work and another write-up. So click below to check out some tips for buying domain names.

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General Information

A Little Taste For Next To Nothing

by Tom on Feb 8, 2008 • No Comments

For my first post on the Internet Gangsters I wanted to tell the story of how I got my first taste of internet riches/pennies. It started with the epic failure of my “I’ll sell your crap on ebay for you” venture. I thought I had a decent domain, my cousin had his own hosting servers and was able to host it for free so right out of the bag I was only $8 in the hole for the domain, not bad at all. So time to setup the website and honestly I don’t even know why I needed a website, but I thought I’d get customers over the internet. So to start I put up a splash screen saying “Coming Soon, We’ll Sell Your Stuff on eBay!” accompanied by a horrible logo (it was meant to be temporary). Well the internet brought me no clients, but then again the site sat with a “Coming Soon…” banner for the entire time. I did sell a few things for family friends after telling a few people that I was going to try to do this, but that turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it was worth. So that ventured died out quickly, but the site itself did not.

I still had this great domain just sitting around doing nothing so I started to think about other ways I could make money and that’s when I discovered adsense. Google adsense is a great way to monetize your sites as it views your site context and bases the ads it shows on what you are writing about. That way the ads are relevant to what is being posted on your site and therefore more appealing to viewers. Nobody wants to come to a site about Dogs and be shown ads about the latest perscription pills, they want to be shown ads about Dogs and things related to dogs. So I signed up for adsense, but didn’t really know what to do with it, so I started reading. And looking back at what I did, I do not recommend doing it, yes it can work, but I don’t think google likes it and it’s hard to keep people coming back after they know what you’re doing. So what I found from my searching was a way to make a page that was basically all articles that were taken from free article sites on the web and just reposted on my site. The trick to making the adsense ads work was making the links to these free articles, look like adsense ads. Now it sounded like a good idea at the beginning, but at the time a lot of people were doing the same thing and with the same articles that I got (since I was lazy and just copied another site). So search engine traffic barely existed since all my content was the same as a million other sites out there and by spamming (the only way I could get visits) those people weren’t coming back. I did make a few bucks though, which gave me the itch to do something more with this.

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General Information

Hello There

by Michael on Feb 8, 2008 • No Comments

Hello, and welcome to Internet Gangsters. Here you will find all sorts of information on all things related to making money on the internets. Tom and myself have decided to share our experiences with domain sales, internet marketing, SEO, PPC and whatever else has the potential to generate revenue online. A bit of background first. A few years ago both of us graduated from an unnamed art college in Chicago with degrees in interactivity on the web. What the fuck is that you may be saying to yourself right now? Well that is also how we feel about it. Nothing against the school, well maybe a little, but we left school no better then we started off, a pair of computer-savvy kids who didn’t want to go to a big state school and study accounting, like everyone else we know. They can all manage all the money we make. Works well for everyone. Anyways, this “interactive multimedia” major was supposed to be some revolutionary hybrid program that combined creativity with web technologies. It did not. Nothing against our professors, because most of them were pretty good at what they did, it was just a jenky program that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be when it grew up. So we graduated, worked for the man for a few years and here we are, trying to supplement our day jobs with the few cents that Google tosses our way for an ad click, so start clickin’. That is just a breif overview of who/what we are. Tell everyone you know, set us to your homepage, link to us, digg us, stumble us and most of all come here as often as possible for a healthy dose of sarcasm mixed with money making.

Michael

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