Cost per Impression Advertising, Expanding my reach, Email Lists – From 3/12/17 & 3/22/17 (Disappointment from fall in niche website views)

From 3/12/17

Cost per Impression Advertising, Expanding my reach, Email Lists

Now that I have the 2^nd site built out a little I have been focused on cost per impression advertising, not the site itself but ensuring the site has CPM advertising on it to begin generating small amounts of income and learning the areas of the site that CPM advertising works and works well versus not working well at all. It’s been rather exhausting attempting to identify ad networks to join and choosing models for income CPC, CPM, CPA, CPL, CPV etc…. Those are pay per click, cost per 1000 impressions, pay per acquisition and pay per lead respectively. There seem to be at least three tiers of advertising networks. The big networks with high rates of CPMs are reserved for high traffic sites, which makes sense. Then there’s the mid-tier range for sites that have some traffic and site quality requirements but pay lower rates (that’s where I’m operating) and then the lower tier which is open to anyone (also where I’m operating) and pays the lowest rates. In reviewing the various networks it became clear to me that there were only a couple really good reviews and then those really didn’t provide the detail you need regarding eCPM or RPM (estimated earnings). And aside from pay is the quality of ads and how they look on your site. So for me, Chitika had very low CPM rates compared to Adsense but Chitika is a CPC (actually CPA) ad network mainly and Chitika’s ads look good on the site. So primarily based on the look on the site I’ve elected to show them. Yllix and Revenuehits are similar networks that are more CPC, CPA and excel at ads that drive the user to take some action (pop-ads). However, Yllix ads looked better to me and were not nearly as intrusive as Revenuehits. But the review doesn’t mention Yllix. So it was situations like that that made the investigation difficult. In the end for CPM, Adsense seems to still be the best. But the diversity in ad types is good in case I ever run afoul of Adsense. Oh, and if you are mixing advertising networks on your site please be mindful of Adsense’s rules on ad display. Any redirects from your site to an ad are a no-no with Adsense, so pop-ads are not a good idea. Sliders and layers are okay at least as I read the rules. Anyway, the two review sites that helped the most in my decision-making were:

• monetizepros.com
• bloggerwphacks.com

*Note since this post I have created an ad network table for ‘beginner’ niche website owners who want to get a foot in the door at displaying ads and earning modest revenue on their niche websites. 

Email lists, oh boy I’d been procrastinating on this one. If you are going to be committed to providing a service in this space you have to understand your audience’s needs. Which means you have to request email information. It’s pretty much that simple. This search was a little easier as there weren’t too many review sites and the email management service provider seemed to be pretty obvious. I went with Mail Chimp, which is currently free based on the size of my subscriber list. Review sites I used for this selection were:

•  theworkathomewoman.com
• wpbeginner.com

My next few tasks are finally signing up for a project management program to keep track of my ‘things to do next’ items, promoting my site on other platforms, forays into alternate forms of content development and working SEO from the back-linking angle.  

 3/22/17

Disappointment from falloff in views

I almost started this post as ‘what they don’t tell you about falloffs in views’. So as I noted in the last post I’ve spent a considerable amount of time reviewing cost per impression adneworks that would work well with my site based on the traffic patterns that had been coming in over the past month. I sort of thought I had launched up to a new level. And then precipitously my views have fallen off a cliff. There were a couple concurrent events, very near to each other that may have had an influence or maybe not. One is I turned on Mail Chimp, added a pop-up box for developing my email list. Likewise, the beginning of March is NCAA tournament month. I can’t figure if the pop-up irritated folks who had been coming to the site regularly or the Tournament has proved to be a distraction in general. A third which I discovered last night is that my theme may have been behind on updates such that it no longer ran efficiently. Whatever the case the drop off was sudden and alarming. So I’ve removed the opt-in box in favor of putting it on a specific page (Contact Us) on the site for now. I updated my theme to the current version and one thing I didn’t mention is a review of the number of ads I have on the page as I did increase those to the maximum allowable limit by Google and Chitika. I also may have just not been putting up enough fresh / compelling content, so I’ve gotten back to work on the remaining pages I initially intend to put on the site. I’m not sure what lesson to share with others beyond mind your p’s and q’s and maybe being very attuned to your site statistics can clue you in on possible mistakes you’ve made or degradation in site performance that are impeding viewership. As I said at the start it was incredibly disappointing so much so that I kind of backed away. So I guess another word of advice is to make sure you don’t base your work output on day to day views. If you feel the work adds value then avoid getting wrapped up in emotion and steadfastly move the ball down the field.