Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

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If you were lured to this post by the title, you shouldn’t feel bad. I didn’t really write this title to trick you, though I did write it to make a point. I’m actually going to show you how to do it by the end of the article, too, so I don’t think it’s fair to accuse me of trickery.

I’m going to assume you don’t already have a web site, and you’re starting from scratch. Six figure retirement means our goal is simply to get to $100,000 in AdSense income per year. This shouldn’t be hard. Just this morning, I stumbled on this article with the unambitious little title, Becoming the Next Advertising Millionaire.

This is going to be so easy. The “next” advertising millionaire. Wow, there must be thousands of them!

I’m Just Like You

I like to think that I’m too intelligent to fall for the siren song of Internet riches, but I’m not. I want to be an Internet advertising rock star just as much as the next guy.

As a result, lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with AdSense and other ad networks. This is how I happened to stumble on the “Becoming the Next Advertising Millionaire” article. I found it during a search for “interstitial ads”. I visited one of my main blogs today, and found that suddenly there was another web site there, and it was making Firefox crash. As it turns out, an interstitial ad is an ad where a whole new web site comes up instead of yours, with a link or two that says “Sponsored by <Your Website Name>”. An ad network I was trying out, AdBrite, leaves these “full page ads” on by default, though you can turn it off. When I searched for “AdBrite” and the company that was there in place of my site, I learned about “interstitial ads”.

Now you know about them, too. Wow, you’re going to be so filthy rich.

Back to Our Six Figure Goal

In my case I didn’t start on the road to AdSense wealth from scratch. I have about 3,400 pages of web content under my belt, so I get to play around.

One site of mine has 610 pages of blog, and about another 400 pages or so on top of that. We’re going to use the blog number of 610 pages since that’s where I’m running AdSense. Over the past ten days AdSense reports 2,461 page impressions, and I’m making $2.38 per 1,000 impressions. My average for all my sites is $2.80 per 1,000 impressions, so we’ll use that for now.

Having 2,461 impressions in 10 days means I’m serving up 246.1 impressions per day. There are 610 pages on the blog overall, so that means that each page gets displayed 610 / 246.1 times per day. Dividing, each page gets displayed 2.48 times per day.

We’re going to be rich in no time. Stay with me.

We get $2.80 per 1,000 page views. A page of content gets displayed 2.48 times per day. Our goal is to reach $100,000 per year.

OK, $100,000 per year divided by the $2.80 we get per thousand page views means we need to have 35,714 x 1,000 page views per year to make $100,000. That works out to 35,714,000 page views per year.

In order to make this work, let’s assume you can write four pages per day, five days per week, on average, and you’re going to start when you’re twenty-one years old. Fifty-two weeks in a year times twenty posts per week is 1,040 pages per year. Each page gets viewed 2.48 times per day, so that means you can generate 2,579.2 page views in a year. Our goal to get to $100,000 in yearly AdSense income is 35,714,000 page views, so let’s see how old we’ll be when we retire. 35,714,000 divided by 2,579.2 is 13,847, so starting out when you’re twenty-one, you’ll be in a position to earn your six figure AdSense retirement when you’re only 13,868 years old.

If I were you I’d start typing.

AdSense and I have a checkered past. I had an account several years ago, but never made much from it. Last week I decided that really ought to take another look at ad networks like AdSense, since I believe that Pro Blogger / Online Publisher is a legitimate career path for an Internet writer (albeit one with a long start-up curve and a crowded field).

So last week I put up some AdSense on a popular real estate blog I own, and again the results were not all that spectacular — a couple of bucks per day. But things got interesting soon.

Ask any kid with a chemistry set. Nothing interesting happens until you mix two things together.

Enter Associated Content

You wouldn’t think that Associated Content would have much to do with AdSense on the face of it. AdSense lets you generate ad revenue from your web site, and Associated Content is a place where you can sell writing online if you don’t mind not getting paid much.

What tipped me off to the idea that those to things are actually not all that different was a single unifying statistic, CPM. That’s an ad term that you probably know, which means “Cost per Thousand (Impressions)”. Of course as a publisher I’m not interested in cost so much as revenue. Some people call this RPM (Revenue Per Thousand). Google uses the weird expression eCPM, or “Effective Cost Per Thousand”, but effective or not, we’re talking about revenue here.

When I signed up for Associated Content, I knew the rates would probably be lower than they would be for direct writing sales. I tried them out because I thought it would be an easy way to make a quick writing sale or two, and I wanted to see what they offered.

I don’t have a report on the rates yet, because the first article I tried was submitted for up front payment review, which can take up to two weeks. I can tell you that others have reported numbers that don’t impress me much, such as $7.00 per article. Based on that, I doubt I’ll be writing up a storm for them, but we’ll see how it goes.

What really got me interested, however, was when I saw their performance payments, which is based on what they call (wait for it…) PPM, or “Payment Per Thousand”.

PPM, CPM, RPM, eCPM — How Much Money Are We Talking Here?

What got my attention immediately about Associated Content’s PPM was that it was $1.50. My AdSense account hovers around $9.00 per day.

This got me thinking. If AdSense pays about $9.00 per thousand page views, six times as much as Associated Content, maybe Associated Content would turn out to be the victor over AdSense in the Worst-Way-To-Make-Money-Online Throw Down. Are you ready to rumble?

It also got me wondering about how many page views my web sites had, and what that would look like divided by 1,000 and then multiplied by $9.00! It turns out that I may be able to make several hundred per month off of Adsense for a month’s work or so, since I have a fair sized inventory of unperforming content.

“Inventory of unperforming content”. See, I’m talking like a publisher already!

What Kind of CPM do Real Estate Brokers Make?

As soon as I started thinking in terms of CPM, I got curious about how much money I made last year as a real estate broker from my real estate web sites. So I did some really rough-draft calculations, and came up with a figure of somewhere between $20 to $30 per 1,000. That’s not bad considering where we are in the “real estate meltdown” (also known as “the credit crunch” or “the end of carbon based life as we know it”, depending on who you ask). I could probably do $60 per 1,000 if I wanted to hop in the car more and do more sales, but of course that would be cheating.

My Publishing Epiphany

Some time yesterday I had a publishing epiphany, where everything I’d ever written online turned into a viewable page, a 1/1000th fraction of an M that could produce some revenue value for me, some “R”.

The nice thing about thinking about RPM is that it teaches us that we as publishers can increase either our RPM (look for better publishing or ad opportunities) or our M (write more, or promote it better), and either way we’ll get more R, more Revenue.

Perhaps in a future post we’ll talk about the results of my attempting to increase RPM and continue to increase it over time using an open source Ad Server, OpenX.

Early twenty-first century English speakers have an ear for ugly words.  For example, having created the most significant advance in democratizing publishing since moveable type, we made up the ugliest word we could for it: "the blog".

"The blog".  I saw that movie when I was a kid. Steve McQueen was in it. I worried about the blog getting the poor little dog.

Not content to write our online journals using an ugly word, at some point many of us have the capitalist afterthought that we want to make money with our "blogs".  Dutiful speakers of early 21st century English that we are, we’ll need an ugly word for that, too. So we say we need to monetize our blog.

To it’s credit, at least "monetize" captures the general idea that we we’re just sitting here typing, minding our own not-yet-a-business, when suddenly we needed to grab some AdSense code and paste it in here somewhere, so we could be monetized.

Show me the monety.

My Excuse for Using the "M" Word

"The machines are watching what we write." Forty years ago that sentence would have been a paranoid fantasy. Today it’s just a description of the search engines. Because the machines are watching what we write, I have to use the word "monetize", because I’m hoping that someone looking to monetize their blog will come by and read me.

I say monetize, therefore I am monetized.

I don’t have to like it.

"When Should You Monetize Your Blog?" and Other Pseudo-Questions

George Orwell was famous (partly) for telling us that sloppy language could lead us to think sloppily. We hear about monetizing our blogs, and wonder at what point we should start monetizing them?

I do think you should make money off your blogging efforts. You should have a living made partly or largely from professional writing online, just like I do. That’s what this blog is about, to explore different ways of doing that. The problem with "monetizing" as a word and a concept is that it implies that you started out doing something that wasn’t worth money, and Adsense or some other magic wand is going to transform your lonely prose into something people will throw money at.

I would encourage you to think this way instead.  The following may sound like a group of New Age affirmations that only Stuart Smalley could love, but try them on for a moment and tell me if they help:

• I have something to write that’s worth reading, or if I don’t, I can improve.
• I can sell something worth buying, and get paid for it. If I don’t know how to sell or what to sell, I can learn how to sell or find something to sell.
• The blog I’m dreaming about / starting up / working on now is a vehicle for making that happen.
• I will keep at it until I am successful.

Am I saying you shouldn’t use AdSense? Not at all — if that’s a good way for you to sell, then go for it! Advertising is certainly something you can sell and some people make big money at it. I think most people will make more money, however, if they consider a mix of "ads" for their own products and services, or private ad transactions and affiliate programs. John Chow got rid of AdSense and reported $14,450 in private ad sales revenue for February. To give AdSense its due, Darren Rowse, who’s no slouch either, recently reported that AdSense is his overall winner. Up until recently, my own business model had about three notes in it: Blog. Sell house. Blog. Hire agents to sell house. Blog.

Now I’ve added these notes:  Write. Learn. Write. Sell.

The only way to fail is to stop trying.

Thanks

In a future post, I’ll talk about how some of these ideas have played out on this blog and in my own life and work so far, and some of the stupid fears that have limited me. If others have similar examples from their own lives and work and want to share I’d love to hear about them.

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