The recession has started taking its toll. Online earnings are down. What should I do?
This is the question which is doing rounds in the mails and forums these days.
Are my earnings also down? What am I doing to take care of it?
Yes. My earnings are also down by around 25%. Previously, this was being compensated by the appreciating dollar against my currency (rupee). But now even the dollars has started depreciated again. So, the downturn has (sort of) started hurting me. What am I doing to resist it. Similarly what are the step you can take in these difficult times?
Here are the few steps I am taking. You can also try some of them. I am sure these can help you keep your earnings running.
Convert some of your liquid cash into earnings. Means, go out and buy some good websites. This is the right time. The earnings on the sites are on the lower side, so the valuations will be better. It will add to your top-line and will be a very good investment in a long term.
Reduce the percentage of the earnings you spend on yourself and increase the percentage you put back into your website. That means increase the marketing budget and hire more people/freelancer to increase the content on your site. That way you can compensate the decreasing eCPM by increasing the traffic.
This is the time to ask favors (and return them as well) from all your online friends in terms of links and mentions.
Go out and try to find your own advertisers and advertising deals. I am trying this and today only I finalized on a big deal. It looks difficult, but is not that difficult. If required, you can even try to do a monthly+CPA sort of mixed deal with your advertiser. It is sort of a win-win situation. But there is a problem in this one. This sort of deals are easier for bigger sites but more difficult for smaller ones.
Shell out some more advertising space on your website for some new advertising network. Every bit helps. Also make sure that this addition of new network is not reducing your earnings from other networks.
Are you taking some other steps to increase your earnings, then please share them in comments.
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These days there are too many webmasters forums online. But none of them is trying to be a great one. The biggies like WMW, DP, V7N are becoming more and more useless day by day. Some are not being moderated well while others are being left by people for other reasons.
WMW has those bizarre rules which I really hate. DP is becoming useless as the Shawn is no more there and all those crazy group of moderators are not doing any good. Too many newbies and scammers at DP are making it useless. V7n on the other hand is now no more being visited by members and looks abandoned.
There are many others as well, but none of them is trying to be a serious and good one.
“This is the perfect time for a new webmaster community to engage with a hungry market.” - says Will Spencer, one of the well known name in the online industry who has launched his new webmaster forum http://www.netbuilders.org.
In his words:
Our strategy is to focus on our community. This means not only more transparent and open moderation, but also more open and transparent forum management in general. We have threads to announce and discuss major decisions regarding the forum. We listen to our community members because we are all community members – we all live here.
This strategy also means providing enhanced services to our community members, such as free content and templates. A webmaster community is made up of people who want to succeed. People visit webmaster forums because they believe the forums can help them to succeed. The current crop of webmaster forums on the Internet has failed to meet that expectation.
That strategy also means that we don’t have rules to prevent people from mentioning their own sites. This is a forum for webmasters – we are all marketers. Entrepreneurs are excited about their current projects. Our community members should be free to talk about the things which excite them.
I know Will Spencer from long. I also know that he manages some very good and big websites. He has extensive experience in this field. I am sure he will be able to manage http://www.netbuilders.org quite well.
Currently the forums is quite new. As of now it has only 86 members (including me). If Will can bring in some good big names (members) into the forum and can make them active, I am sure it can make big. People like me are actually looking for a new place to hang around.
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Adsense for domains, which was only available for only few big players like sedo and domainsponsors etc. previously is not made available to smaller publishers as well.
So what is “Adsense for Domains”?
This is a domain parking service similar to sedo.com where Google will show the ads. This service was previously available to only bigger players and we were required to park own domains with them. So the revenue from the domains was being shared with Google as well as the domain parking service provider. But now Google making it available directly to the smaller publishers, you need not pay anything to those domain parking service providers. That means more money (hopefully) to us domain owners. So now you have one more way to make money online.
Matt Cutts, in an interview, gave some very good search engines tips which not many people know about. Have a look and see whether you know all (or even half) of them.
Who don’t know Matt Cutts, he works for the Google “search quality” group and specializes in search engine optimization issues. He is actually the face of Google for webmasters. And most of the webmasters follow what he says in his blog.
