Unexpected Website Ad Revenue

So here’s the story.  After I had my “ah ha!” moment and discovered niche marketing, I spent several months researching and playing around with different site models. I was already familiar with the direct sales website ad revenue from my community site and  I had my sites based on the Niche Profit ClassroomNiche Profit Classroom is a training program that provides step-by-step instructions on creating niche web sites that generate an income through info product sales. The course covers market research, keyword research, web site creation, content creation, product creation, and site promotion. The program is available on a monthly subscription basis. The strengths of the program include the detail video instructions, proprietary tools, support forums along with ongoing webinars, and the ready made website “niche packs.” method, but I also experimented with ClickbankA payment processor for digital goods and services. The company is one of the most established services of its kind and provides a single point of contact for payment, refunds, and affiliate management, payment, and tracking. review sites, XfactorA style of AdsenseAdsense is Google's advertising profit sharing program for internet publishers. When advertisers place ads through Google's Adwords program, they have to option to have their ads distributed through the content network as well. If this option is selected, the ads will then be displayed on web sites that have content related to the advertiser's targeted keywords. When a Google text link ad is clicked that is displayed on the partnering publisher's web site, the publisher receives a percentage of the ad revenue that the advertiser is charged by Google. website popularized by a marketer known by the screen name "Xfactor" on many internet marketing forums. The sites are targeted towards micro-niche topics and are designed to make money from clickthroughs on prominent blocks of Adsense. The method was originally explained in detail on a thread in the Warrior Forum and then expanded and later updated in the Adsense Masters eCourse. style Adsense sites, and Amazon.

One of the places I researched was the Warrior ForumA message board dedicated to internet marketing, publishing, and all topics related to making money online. and I came across a number of posts by people talking about how they bought a  domain, built a niche site around it and then sold it on FlippaAn online marketplace for web site and domain sales.com.

I was thinking, “I make awesome sites, that would be great for me!”

Part of NPC’s program is that they give you the two niche packs a month, but they also give you a “hot list” of niches that have good potential that you could develop (this may have been part of the Pro level . . . I don’t remember.)

So I just looked back through my Hot Market Reports, picked one that looked interesting, bought a domain and started building a site.

Before I finish the story, let me give you a frame of reference.

Flippa.com is an online marketplace that works kind of like Ebay, but is just for web sites.  Some of the web sites are aged and are already generating revenue.  Some are brand spanking new that the seller built just to sell.

My plan was to do the latter.  I just do not understand at all the concept of selling an income generating site, especially when that income is passive.

From what I read, about six months earlier the new turnkey site package sales were hopping.  When I decided to try it, it had tanked . . . more on this later.  At the time, the average site sold for 10x its monthly revenue if it had verifiable income.  Although, I did see a few that were sold for three times it’s monthly income . . . . yes, that’s monthly, not yearly.  That is just crazy to me.

The sellers of the majority of the turnkey sites just had a developer’s license for a theme like WooThemes or Thesis for WordPressA blogging platform that is available in a hosted and standalone version. The standalone (or self-hosted) version is highly customizable and is very popular for both blogs as well as standard web sites., changed some of the colors in the CSS file, uploaded a custom header image and slapped up some PLR articles.  That whole process would take a few hours.

That is not what I did . . . OH NO.  I can’t do anything so easy.

I made a completely custom theme.  Since I usually add some custom features in all my sites, I wanted to add this same functionality to this WordPress theme I was creating so that whoever the eventual buyer was could modify it easily.  So I created custom theme options, the works.

Then I wrote completely unique articles for the site AND created an awesome Twitter background for the site AND had it all tied in together so the RSS feed would automatically promote the posts.

As I was working on it, I was thinking, “this is way too much work” because I was only expecting it to sell for a few hundred dollars.

I was also thinking someone would jump right on it.

Oh was I wrong.

The highest bid I got was $85! Seriously.  For a custom theme, a good domain name, a custom twitter account, all unique content, and a site that was already integrated with social media.  You would be paying that much for the articles alone, and that is if you went with a cheap web writer.

Since it didn’t meet the reserve, I let it run on a 30 day listing after the initial auction expired to see if I got any other takers.  I did get an offer of $25.  Oh yes, sure . . . I’ll take that.  Let me PAY YOU to take my site and lose money after paying the listing fee, selling fee, and domain name registration.

I already had enough sites that were up and that I needed to work on promoting and I really wasn’t ready for another one, but during that 30 day extended listing, I started getting some Adsense clickthroughs.  So I decided that maybe I should keep it and work on it since it was already making a little bit of money without any promotion at all.

So I let the listing expire and put the site on my promotion schedule.

Let me just say that this site is in the dog niche . . . because you know . . . you can’t call yourself an internet marketer if you don’t have at least one site about dogs or dog training.  (If you’re just learning about niche marketing, dog training is one of the “Big Four” of niche marketing along with weight loss, dating, and making money online.)

The particular subset of the dog niche keywords I was targeting wasn’t as competitive as some, but they weren’t exactly easy either.

Also, when I first started working on promoting the site, it was right in the middle of  the CaffeineGoogle implemented a new search index over the course of the first several months of 2010, completing the rollout in June. According to the Google blog, it is designed to yield "fresher" search results and allow for faster indexing of new pages. rollout and the search results were bouncing all over the place and it was a little difficult to see what was going on.

After the SERPAcronym for "search engine results page."’s settled after the Caffeine and May DayA update in the Google ranking algorithm that occurred at the beginning of May 2010 that had an impact on ranking for long tail keywords. updates, the page 1 results made sense to me and I knew what my plan of attack needed to be.  But that page 1 was tough. There are a lot of sites competing for the phrase (12 million,) but what is even more to the point is that every single page (not domain . . . page) ranking on page 1 was optimized and had a PRAn acronym for "pagerankPagerank is Google's metric for the amount of authority, or importance, a particular web page has.." Pagerank is Google's metric for the amount of authority, or importance, a particular web page has. between 4 to 6.

Right now my site is at #4 for it’s main keyword.  It’s been holding steady for a couple of months when I run ranking reports with Market Samurai, but I think there is some movement going on.

When you view your site report in Google Webmaster, it shows the top keywords for your site and your average ranking for each.  If you click on the keyword to expand the display, it will show you the number of impressions your site had at each position and the clickthrough ratio for each.  My site had 20 impressions at #2, so it must have been in that spot for a few minutes.

So I know if I keep pushing, I can break the top three.

My Surprise Money

Now to the point of the post in the first place.  When I designed the site to resell, I had put in one of those advertising blocks that displays four 125 x125 ads in the right column.  Initially I had just put in some Commission Junction affiliate offers as an example.

So far this site has earned money with Adsense, although the EPCAn acronym for "earnings per click" used in reference to online advertising. and clickthrough rate aren’t the greatest.  It’s also earned money with Amazon.  I do have a Clickbank product promotion on there, but while I am getting a good number of clickthroughs, the conversions are dismal (I’m thinking I might need to create my own product that is more targeted to my particular keyword set.)

But back to the 125 ad blocks.

On my community website and other sites that are more targeted towards direct ad sales, I use OpenXA standalone, self hosted ad serving platform. to serve ad campaigns and use my business billing platform.  Actually, I set up all my sites to serve the ads through OpenX.  I even have a spot in the theme option panel where I can just enter the zone and campaign ID’s without having to touch the code.

OpenX is a great ad serving program.  My main gripe is that it doesn’t allow for advertisers to place self serve ads.  This has been on the “coming soon” feature list for the program for YEARS.

One day as I was just searching around the web, I found a service called ShinyAdsA web service that offers an automated advertising management platform designed to connect web publishers and advertisers., which is designed to help site publishers connect earn more website ads revenue without having to do ad sales themselves.  You add the code to your site and advertisers can purchase advertising and upload their own banner.

If they don’t have their own creative, ShinyAds has an ad builder where they can create their own by just filling in some blanks.  Publishers can also create base ad templates for advertisers.  How cool is that?

The other thing that I think is SO awesome, at least for me with my existing set-up, is that it completely integrates with OpenX.  I didn’t have to change anything at all.  Since I already had OpenX zones for those ad spots, I just had to give ShinyAds permission to access those specific ad zones.  So those spots display remnant ads (affiliate offers) until an advertiser buys the spot.

You can set your zones by either a set price per month or week, or by CPMAn acronym for "cost per thousand" used in reference to online advertising. This is the rate is charged for every thousand impressions of an ad. as well as the minimum spend.  You can also specify whether the ads will be held for review or if they will be auto approved.

They credit your account 48 hours after the campaign ends.  Payment is made to publishers through Paypal and they only charge 15 percent of the net ad revenue (the gross less the Paypal transaction fee.)

My First ShinyAds Advertiser

So today I got my first advertiser signup through ShinyAds!  Whoo Hoo!

Yes, it was a small amount.  But the cool thing is that this website ads revenue was completely passive.  I didn’t have to mess with anything at all.  I didn’t have any back and forth emails, no phone calls, no invoicing, no messing around trying to get the creative . . . Nothing!

I just opened my inbox to an email that said, “Hey, you made some money today!”

And that is exactly my goal with these little niche sites.

So take that all you cheap Flippa buyers!

Ugly sites that are a dime a dozen may be fine for Adsense where a visitor will click on anything to get away from the ugliness.

They may be fine for info product sites where your main strategy is the newsletter popup to build the list.

But when it comes to direct ad sales, Design makes a difference!

Tags: ad sales, Flippa, niche marketing, shiny ads