WebRevenue.org | Increase your Website Revenue

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to monetize a website. We’ve covered multiple ad-networks in the past, but Widgetbucks is an up-and-comer that really deserves a close look. Why?

Well, for starters Widgetbucks ad-units yield 50% to 300% more on average than most traditional ad networks. But that’s not all we liked. Read on for our in-depth review of this promising advertising network.

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Website publishers who use Google’s AdSense advertising network received an email this week with some unpopular news: The kickback for referring other publishers to the AdSense platform is being drastically reduced.

Is this email an indication of Google maturing into a less-friendly, more profit-centric company? Or is something else going on?

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AdSense often represents a small part (or no part) of the total revenues earned by a website. In a previous article we published an exhaustive list of the dozens of alternatives to Google’s ubiquitous AdSense advertising network. In this article we’ll get up-close and personal with a couple of these alternative networks. We’ll tell you what the differences are, and we’ll discuss why you may (or may not) see an increase in revenues with some alternative advertising strategies.

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Welcome young grasshopper, to the dojo of webmaster psychology. Here we will hone your skills until you are a blackbelt at acquiring links all over the web.

Everyone knows that the more connected you are, the higher your page will rank (and the more traffic you will get.) The more traffic you get, the more money you earn. So let’s start at the beginning: how does one “get connected”? How does one convince others to link to them for free?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your fellow webmasters (or “competitors”, as the case may be) voluntarily linked to your site?

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My friend Michael makes an average of $370 per day on his blog. That’s an annualized income of $133,200 from blogging. I’ll leave out his last name so that I don’t violate his Adsense ‘Terms of Service’. ( For those who don’t know, it is against Google policy to directly discuss one’s Adsense earnings for a particular site ). The other day I sat down for lunch with Michael and asked him for his story: In a little more than 18 months, he went from earning less than $1/day to quitting his day job, and building a successful site.

His advice was priceless…

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Love it or hate it, Digg.com is a massive force in driving web-traffic. The well-known “Digg Effect” has put websites permanently on the map by bringing thousands of new viewers to web-pages overnight. (The ‘effect’ has also crashed many a server with its often-overwhelming tsunami of visitors). Long gone are the days when a simple “Digg This” could land a story on the front page. Today’s masters of Digg employ social-networking strategies to leverage submissions and gain access to the ultimate prize: that short-lived spot on Digg’s front page.

Here are some proven strategies:

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One of the many pitfalls that webmasters can fall into is the lure of so-called “free content”. There are dozens of sites which list thousands of articles that can be cut and pasted freely onto your own website to ‘fill it up’. While this might sound like a good idea, it’s not.

First of all, the so-called “free content” is usually nothing more than someone else’s commercial marketing message that they’re hoping you’ll put in your site because it ultimately helps their brand, sells their products or drives traffic to their sites. But that’s a small problem, compared to the really serious problem with free content…

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Recently, there has been a proliferation of automated “website value” estimators. These sites claim to be able to compute the cash value of your website given only its URL. I like this idea of course (who doesn’t like to punch in their URL and see the results?). The problem of course, is that it doesn’t work very well. I started with the popular “Website Value Calculator” (located here) and tried entering a few different sites.

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I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve had with fellow web publishers who cite their Alexa ranking with pride. I usually make a bet with them that I can start a site with any random name, and break into the top 10,000 ranks within 1 week. Not that this is a practice I engage in — I’m merely saying this to illustrate my point: that Alexa is severely broken, and will never be an accurate source of web traffic information.

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If you’re a WordPress user, this is something you can do in the next 3 minutes that can radically improve your average pageviews per visit. Click on any article in this site, and you’ll probably see a grey box down at the bottom of the page. There are lots of “Related Posts” plugins you can use, including the original “Related Posts Plugin” and another aptly called “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” — both are excellent and extremely easy to use.

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Every first-time web publisher wonders “How much will I make with AdSense”. While the somewhat discouraging answer may be, “Beer Money” (or less, depending on your taste for beer), it’s important to keep in mind that there are those who generate astronomical amounts of advertising revenue with their sites.

How much can you make with AdSense? The short answer is “the sky’s the limit” — as can be seen by looking at the revenues of the biggest AdSense earners.

Let’s take a look at some of the highest grossing individual publishers and webmasters…

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Google Analytics and AWstats were both reporting data on the same website. The numbers should have looked the same, but they couldn’t have been more different.

Not too long ago I made the switch from AWstats to Google Analytics. I was stunned to see a vast difference in the data reported by the two statistical packages. AWstats was reporting nearly three times the number of pageviews that Analytics was reporting. What was going on?

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Most independently owned websites start out using AdSense ads. Why? For starters, no one wants to sell their own ads. It’s time consuming and likely to be fruitless given the amount of traffic most new websites start out with. AdSense is also one of the two big cpc ad-networks that everyone’s heard of (the other being Yahoo! Search), and Google is a reliable name that people trust. But after awhile you may feel like exploring the hundreds of other networks out there. …Or maybe not.

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Ad units are like water: they’ll eventually flow into every nook and cranny of your screen real estate. We’ve all witnessed the generations of efforts — some successful, some not — to find new and more prominent places to stick just one more ad. We’ve seen pop-ups, and pop-unders. We’ve seen banners, towers, skyscrapers, super-skyscrapers, thumbnails and every possible size you can imagine. We’ve even seen the cursor itself used as ad-space (remember

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How fast does web traffic grow? (And how to grow your monthly visitors quickly!)
Most bloggers, developers and webmasters will look at the stats of competing sites and say “I can do that too”. And yes, you probably can. And while much has already been written about “how” you can create compelling web content, and “how” you can grow your traffic — in this post we’ll talk a little bit about “how long” it takes to grow your web traffic, and how to accelerate your traffic growth.

For starters, there’s no simple answer to this question because there’s no simple answer to “What is content”? There are hundreds of different types of content from blogs, to online applications to social networking sites, etc. But there are some truths that are widely understood:

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