Earn money while you shop - November 5th, 2007

I’m sure when you go shopping in Tesco, Sainsbury’s or even Asda you get asked at the till if you’d like some cashback? Sadly, as we all know, this isn’t some free offer where they give you cash out the goodness of their hearts in exchange for you actually shopping in their stores. It comes out of your bank account.

If you didn’t know that, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a bank account. Please stop reading now.

If you did know that, what you might not realise is the term ‘cashback’ when related to a website DOES in fact offer you cash out of the goodness of the hearts of the website owners, in exchange for using them to shop.

Surely that’s nonsense you might be thinking. Well no, in fact it’s not. If you’ve ever seen advertisements promising such unlikely offers such as ‘earn money while you shop’ or ‘get paid to buy your groceries’ there’s a good chance they are in fact real.

How does this work? How can I get some of this free cash?

A cashback website is basically a shopping portal website that is affiliated with numerous online retailers, usually high street brand names such as the aforementioned Tesco, Sainsbury’s and yes, even Asda. The owners of the website earn affiliate commissions whenever someone (you) purchases something via their link, but unlike regular affiliate schemes the cashback website offers to share the affiliate commissions with the buyer (yup, you again).

So basically you get the Affiliate commissions on offer through an affiliate scheme just by using the cashback site when you shop.

The cashback site then earns its money either by taking a subscription from its users (sadly this time it’s also you, sorry) on an annual basis, or by deducting a percentage of the affiliate commission. If you happen to spend a lot of money online then paying a £5 subscription every year is small change. You’ll earn more than that just by purchasing an iPod for example.

So, if you’re looking to do your Christmas shopping online this year it might be worth your while looking for a decent cashback site first, you could save yourself a few hundred pounds in affiliate commission.

What the emergence of cashback sites means for the affiliate marketing industry is another matter though, one that has stirred up quite a debate about the direction of the industry as a whole; but that’s for another blog.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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Adsense Earnings Revealed - October 22nd, 2007

Over the past few months I’ve been talking about how you can earn revenue from your content driven websites with Adsense, but have never actually given you hard figures. Today seems the perfect opportunity to do just that as with some website tweaks I made last week (which I will come onto later) have resulted in radically increased earnings.

The below figures show the same week in October throughout the five years I have been running Google Adsense on a series of content driven websites. You will notice a steady and constant rise for the first four years until the last year, where the increase becomes a little steeper.

The first year in 2003 saw very low earnings from Adsense, where acheiving over $1 in a day was a cause for celebration.

2004 saw the earnings rise by 300%. Still nothing to pop the champaign corks over but this constituted decent progress, especially as the traffic levels had only risen by 100%.

2005 saw the traffic level off and the earnings rise only slightly. At this stage it was reasonable to assume that Adsense had a limited earning potential and I had reached it.

2006 and the traffic had risen only slightly from the previous year, but the earnings had gone up by 300%. This was done by onsite optimisation which I have described in detail in previous blogs about affiliate marketing.

Finally 2007 and a 50% increase in traffic was dwarfed by a 500% increase in revenue from the previous year.

So how did I do that? What amends could have possibly caused such a spike in revenue from a network of websites? There were in fact two simple changes made to two websites in particular.

Firstly, an ASP based website that received on average 2,000 visitors per day was converted to Wordpress and hosted on an Apache server with search engine friendly URLs. This resulted in much faster page loads, better organic listings and consequently more ad views and clicks; a simple solution perhaps, but a very effective one. This in truth wasn’t responsible for the huge jump you can see in the figures; the real reason for the spike was an even simpler change made to the second website…

One of my higher trafficked websites, and by higher I’m referring to several thousand visitors per day, had been constructed using a dynamic SQL database. However, because of the level of traffic the strain on the server accessing the database for every visitor was immense, which caused a noticeable delay on the loading of the homepage, thus the adverts were delivered slowly. By taking a snapshot of the dynamic homepage and making it into a static HTML page, the website was delivered far quicker, which meant faster page loading times, more page view, more ad views and of course far more clicks and earnings.

Having a dynamic site is great and saves a lot of time with updates, but unless it’s absolutely necessary you should question whether you need your main page to be dynamic and whether in fact a static page will radically increase your revenue.

Yes this means that the front page doesn’t get updated instantly whenever new information is added, which means a little extra effort on my part – but as you can see the rewards far outweigh the increased workload.

A similar solution was used when I worked on the website for a major high street retailer. The traffic outweighed the server’s ability to cope thus the dynamic home page was served as static for a few days until the new server could be configured.

It’s not a kop out solution, it’s not a workaround. It’s a sensible way of drastically increasing your revenue in a very short space of time. The figures presented support this.

Want to increase your Adsense revenue? Make your website’s homepage static.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

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