http://www.articletrader.com/ Articles at ArticleTrader en-us http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/the-future-of-pixel-advertising.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/the-future-of-pixel-advertising.html Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0600
Alex – like any good salesman - started by pestering friends and family and urging them to buy some pixels from him. As he started getting orders, he made the very wise decision of alerting the media of his idea. The media liked the idea of the entrepreneurial student trying to make money on the internet for his studies, by coming up with an idea that simple. Alex played the media very well indeed and appeared in print, radio, TV and on the internet. As the story picked up two months into the project, Alex hired a media consultant to help him handle the frenzy. It took only 5 months until the 1,000,000 pixels were sold and the million dollars were reached.

Quickly a lot of copycats copied Alex' idea and many more have followed. It is estimated that there are now more than 5,000 sites selling pixels in a way similar to the Million Dollar Homepage or with slight variations. Only a very tiny fraction of these are have made any money. So why is that?

The original page owes its success primarily to the publicity it got in the media. As any new copycat website has no or very little news value, why would anyone pick up on the story? As there are now thousands of similar sites, how could any one site generate enough traffic for advertisers to be interested in buying advertising space?

There are slight variations over the basic business idea of pixel advertising. Some pixel websites now offer free pixels and premium pixels with better location than the free ones. Some websites offer pixels on a picture of the moon or a map of a certain country or region. Other websites offer intricate ways of trading pixels or pixels at $0.01 or less.

Alex Tew himself has developed a new site with a variation over the original theme. On the blog on the Million Dollar homepage the launch of his new online business idea has been promoted for quite some time. The new site Pixelotto - which was launched in December 2006 – allows advertisers to buy pixels for $2. For each pixel sold, $1 goes to a prize fund, $0.10 goes to a charity fund and the rest goes to Alex Tew and maintaining the site. What's new about the site is that the accumulated prize fund will go to one of the site's registered users. Anyone can register and to take part in the draw, a user needs to click on at least 10 different ads on the site in a given day. The idea of this obviously is that the advertisers are guaranteed traffic from the site (although low quality, not targeted traffic) and that users have an incentive to return to the site daily. The draw for the prize is held after all one million pixels are sold or after a year of the site being live, which ever comes first. The winner can also decide which charity is to receive the money generated for charity.

So how is Alex doing on with his new site? The answer has to be that he has done surprisingly well. As of March 2007, a total of about 150000 pixels have been sold. This means that $150000 has gone to the prize fund, $15000 to the charity fund and that the remaining $135000 dollars have covered setup and development costs and marketing, leaving Alex with a healthy profit. A check on Alexa.com however reveals that visitor numbers have plummeted since the site's launch and it appears that no pixels on the new site have been sold for the last few weeks. It seems fairly likely that no new revenue will be generated, due to the low amount of traffic on the site. A check on Alexa for the traffic of the advertisers reveals a very small, or no increase in traffic, for those sites.

What is missing on the new site is that it lacks the novelty of the original, that Alex is no longer a poor student with an ingenious way of funding his studies and of course that thousands of other sites do something similar already. There's no personal touch, no blog and thus no interesting story that the media would follow.

It is anyone's guess what the future of pixel advertising will be. The author of this article was certainly surprised at the how well Alex' new site did immediately after its launch. With thousands of sites out there doing something similar, it is however unlikely that significant revenue can be generated with pixel advertising.

Luckily, to make money online, there are plenty other more profitable roads to follow.


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Andrew Nielsen is the author of The Online Business Builder.
Article source: The Future Of Pixel Advertising


Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/blogging/making-money-on-blogs.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/blogging/making-money-on-blogs.html Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0600
Ads
By placing ads on a blog it is possible to generate revenue from visitors who click on the ads. The most common source for ads is Google's AdSense. By signing up to Google AdSense and placing a small piece of code on your blog, Google will display their ads on your blog. Advertisers who signed up for Googles AdWords program pay Google for each click on ads and Google shares this revenue with blog owners displaying the ads. Google does not disclose how the revenue is shared – they encourage you to sign up and try it out so you can see how much you generate and then decide if it is for you or not. Google places ads on webpages so they match the content on the page. A blog about traveling would therefore attract ads for airplane tickets, hotels etc. Since Google shares their revenue with you and since you want to generate a lot of revenue, you need to produce content for which ads pay well. There are tools available for determining for which keywords there is the most competition among advertisers – content for such keywords will be content that generates the highest revenue. The revenue generated per click can be anywhere from a few cents to several dollars, depending on the advertiser competition. Normally, relatively few visitors to a website or blog will click on ads. There are ways to optimize a blog or website for achieving higher click through rates. You will be able to find varied (and sometimes contradictory) advice on what is the best strategy. Follow the links below, to sign up for Google's AdSense and for tools for finding the keywords for which there is a lot of advertiser competition.

Affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are a type of partnership, where are seller of a product shares the revenue generated from a sale with the "affiliate" who sent the customer to the seller's website. The percentage of revenue given to the affiliate can be from a few percent to as much as 75 percent. Affiliate programs are often supported by the company handling the online payment, who then takes care of paying the commission to the affiliate the minute the customer makes payment. An owner of a blog can become an affiliate of one or more sellers and send visitors to the sellers' websites, thereby generating revenue for the owner of the blog. Affiliate links (i.e., links from the affiliate to the sellers' websites) are easier to disguise as normal links, than ads provided by Google. The affiliate can create the links, so the customer may not even notice that the affiliate is affiliated with the sellers' websites. For this reason, a higher click through rate can be achieved this way than through ads. You can expect that only a few percent of visitors following your links end up making a purchase. So also for this option, a large amount of traffic is needed to generate good revenue. Follow the links below to learn more about affiliate programs and how to find products to promote.

Getting traffic
No matter which option for revenue you choose, the key to generating serious money is to get serious amounts of visitors for the blog. This means that your blog needs to be interesting for the reader and not just look like something made for you to make money. For this reason, you need to keep the amount of ads and affiliate links to a minimum. You need to produce content which appeals to readers and to add new posts regularly to keep visitors coming back. Topics like politics, religion, gaming, gossip, arts, sports - to name just a few – seem to be popular topics. You need to select a topic which you yourself find interesting as this will make it easier for you to write articles that others will find engaging too. Blogs with a good amount of graphics seem to attract more visitors than blogs with a small amount of graphics. Besides having a blog which is interesting and make visitors return, you can get visitors using advertising, link building and other techniques used also for "normal" websites.

In this article we have explored some of the ways you can make money from blogs.

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Andrew Nielsen is the author of The Online Business Builder – a popular eBook about making money online.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/seo/the-problem-with-google.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/seo/the-problem-with-google.html Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0600
The idea behind assigning of such a rank is that a page is considered to vote for another page by linking to it. This generally makes good sense as I - and other website administrators - are likely to link to a page which has information that I find good and useful. The problem with it is that I - as a website administrator - will do my best to get as many good inbound links to my site as I can in order to develop my online business. As few other websites link to my website by themselves - despite my wonderful product - I engage in link building and search engine optimization. By this, I mean that I try to get inbound in a number of ways. I post messages on forums about earning money on the Internet, get listed in dodgy directories and write articles which are posted on numerous websites. I am not the only website administrator who works this way. And unfortunately, not everyone produces content of as high quality as myself. On the website where you're reading this article, by far the most information was produced simply to let website administrators get inbound links from content with the keywords they target. This is also why you find the term "making money online" throughout this article. The quality of an article needs to just be good enough to be accepted on the site and the author has achieved what he or she wants.

So there we have it. Because of the way search engines assign rank, the Internet is filled with information of dubious quality. You may even think of all this information - including this very article (which - strictly speaking - isn't about making money on the Internet) - as a kind of spam. As long as the search engines continue to assign rank the way they do now, the internet will be filled with more and more of such junk. I know for sure, that I'll continue to write articles - however remotely related to making money online - just to get inbound links.

So is there are better way?
Well, we're still waiting for the next generation of search engines to come along. This is likely to be based on a different philosophy which is already used elsewhere: rating and voting. On a website like youtube, users rate the content they view, and the number of votes and average vote can be seen by other users. This is exactly the type of information that would be useful for you, the purchaser of ping pong balls. You'll want the website with the highest rank - assigned by other customers - to ensure that you get the best quality of ping pong balls at the best price. This surely would be much more useful to you, than the websites who managed to get the most inbound links to their websites.
Until such a search engine is developed (making the creators a lot of money on the Internet) I will have to rely on articles like the one you are reading now. Having the best product in my category is currently not what it takes to make money online.


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Andrew Nielsen is the author of The Online Business Builder - a popular, bestselling eBook about making money online.


Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]>