If you are a website publisher making money solely on Adsense, conversion rates don’t mean much. If you are selling your own product or are an affiliate, they do.

Conversion simply means turning traffic into customers. Conversions matter to everyone. If an advertiser can convert traffic better they will pay more for advertising.

The past few weeks I’ve been working on promoting an e-book I wrote. I’ve been running an Adwords campaign, getting search engine traffic, and promoting it through one of my pages. Two weeks ago the conversion rate was about 1:87. Last week, nothing. I didn’t change anything. Traffic was about the same.

Finally I decided to do some investigating. It turned out that Paypal had changed its payment landing page. The way the page was laid out would be confusing to someone without a Paypal account. Confusion kills conversion.

The good news is that it appears as of today Paypal has rolled back to the old page. Good for them. In the meantime I switched over to Clickbank.

If you run an entertainment or video game site please contact me. The e-book pays a little over $20 per sale. I can pre-sale pages and any other promotional materials all while minimizing any loss to you from Adsense or other advertising revenue.

Webblogs.com, not to be confused with Weblogs Inc. has been purchased by Verisign for an alleged $2 million. When a blogger makes a new post, servers are “pinged” to let people know that there has been an update. Webblogs.com is the largest ping server on the internet.

I suspect that the value in Webblogs.com is in data mining.

King.com sold on Sedo for $150,000 several days ago — once again demonstrating the value of short, one-word domains. There is discussion that this domain name may have been stolen in the past. I don’t have any further details about this right now.

Google screwed up my recent Adsense check. They put the payee information as an LLC I’m a co-owner of — which is used for out Adword’s account.

I can’t use it because none of thse websites are owned by the LLC. I sent Google an e-mail, they said oops, sorry, we cancelled the check and will pay you on the next payment cycle.

I ran into this problem several day ago but decided not to report it on this blog. It turns out this wasn’t an isolated incident.

As reported on Jensense, this is the e-mail publishers are getting today:

Hello,

Due to an issue with our payment system, your most recent AdSense payment was mailed to an incorrect address. Our system pulled the payee name and address information from your Google AdWords account, rather than your AdSense account, when printing and mailing your check.

If you are unable to receive your payment at the address listed in your AdWords account, or if the payee name is incorrect,please respond to this email so that we may cancel this check. Your earnings will be credited back into your account and included in your next payment cycle. Once this process is complete, you will see a ‘Payment Canceled’ line appear on your Payment History page.

If you are able to receive your payment at the alternate address, or if you have already contacted us about this issue, no action is required on your part.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

This is very, very, bad PR for Adsense — and great news for Yahoo’s Publisher Network. This means a lot of publishers are going to seriously consider alternatives to Adsense. At the very least, they will split up their ad inventory simply to diversify their risk away from big mistakes like this one.

Fortunately, I have emergency funds & don’t get 100% of my income from Adsense (I am a full-time website publisher.) For many independent website publishers I have a feeling that the rent is going to be late this month.

AOL has agreed to purchase Weblogs Inc. for $25 million.

This is a company I have been following closely ever since I learned that they cleared close to $1 million a year from Adsense. The way the company works is they hire bloggers who can can then post on multiple blogs accross the network.

The company was founded sometime around 2003. The details I’ve gathered show they pay their bloggers roughly $1 million a year, make $1 million from Adsense, and make another $1 million from selling their own ad space. Some of their most notable blogs are autoblog, engadget, and luxist. They run a total of 80 blogs.

One of the advantages the Weblogs Inc. has by running a huge network of sites — rather than each one seperately of each other — is that launching a new blog is easy. Every blog is linked to on each and every page of every blog. This is a technique that lands some search engine optimizer’s websites in hot water but it appears to only have had a positive effect for Weblogs.

Paidcontent broke this story yesterday evening.

This is a great payday for two guys who started their own blog network a couple years ago. Its also proof that paying for content is worth it — even if it cuts into your immediate profit margins.

Internet users on Time Warner, MSN Dialup, NetZero, Juno, and other ISPs may find that they can’t access certain websites hosted through Cogent. From what I am hearing, this has been going on since 5:50AM EST this morning.

Without getting into all of the technical details this is the result of a dispute between Tier 1 ISPs Cogent and Level 3 which involved a peering agreement. The way Cogent has been operating allowed them to sell bandwidth very cheaply — and Level 3 didn’t like it.

I’m on Time Warner Cable. All day I haven’t been able to access several major sites including the Drudge Report or Weather Underground. However, I have noticed no drop in revenue from my own sites. In fact, today looks like its going to one of my best days yet.

As a web publisher you really are a small business owner. You are in a great industry — your websites make you money day and night, whether or not you do anything to them.

Think of your websites as businesses. Always ask yourself, how can I make more money?

Today I recieved two books from Amazon through UPS. One is How To Salvage Millions From Your Small Business, the other is Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got. These two books have nothing to do with website publishing. These books have everything to do with making more money from your business.

I’ve just started reading How To Salvage Millions. In the first chapter they talk about the importance of metrics! One of the writers, Ron Sturgeon was the owner of a very successful auto recycling business which he sold to Ford.

As a website owner I know just how important metrics are. As an internet marketer I know how critical metrics are (I’ve sold a few products through Adwords.)

I wrote an article for Website Publisher (not my site) about how to optimize Adsense. I’ve helped a lot of people double their Adsense clickthrough rates. I did this by tracking, very closely, what combinations of ad placements and colors make the most money — thats metrics.

To you and me metrics is a daily occurance. You log into Adsense and check your earnings. If you are like me you have seperate channels so you know how much each site is earning and how different ad placements are doing. Other busienss owners don’t have that luxury — they have to measure and calculate these things by hand. They can’t do them daily. A smart few do them weekly. Most do it monthly if at all.

Listen to what your metrics tell you. I guarantee you, you’ll make more money.

As an interesting sidenote this guy Ron Sturgeon is featured on Millionaire Blueprints’ website. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a link that takes you to a photo set of his house and car collection (you can also see pictures of his cars at RDS Investments.) I bought this book on a completely seperate recommendation — not even realising who this guy was until I got it today.

His house is huge; I can’t even count the number of cars he has. Look at those pictures and then tell me you aren’t interested in this guys business secrets.

(Ron

InternetRetailer.com has published a very interesting case study of Bodybuilding.com. Why should you read it? Because for 2005 they will have estimated sales of $48 million this year (this is a site that the owner purchased for $20,000 several years ago.)

Why are they successful? I think I have a few ideas.

- 10,000 articles written by 400 writers
- A big forum
- Profitable products that customers come back and buy again
- A great site which means a very effective and powerful word-of-mouth campaign conducted entirely by their users

I am well aware that sites such as eBaumsworld have been making good money for years now by hosting interactive content and silly videos. It might be time for you to start thinking about using video to attract traffic to your website (I am.)

There is a good article on Yahoo news about the growth of video content online.

“There seems to be no way to quench people’s thirst for online video programming,” says Chris Chambers, WWE senior vice president.

A few weeks ago, the first hour of WWE’s Friday Night SmackDown series on UPN was pre-empted by Hurricane Katrina coverage, so WWE put the show on its website. The show averages 5 million viewers weekly, and WWE thought it might attract 250,000 viewers online. Instead, there were 500,000.

“That was with no promotion, without people knowing that the show was there,” Chambers says.

I don’t believe that video will ever dominate the internet — but the internet may well dominate TV as we know it today.

There are stories about how those in the radio industry predicted that TV was just a fad — and how others saw TV as the death of radio; neither prediction was right. I believe the internet is the ultimate for of media. It combines books, radio, live TV, pre-recorded video, and user interactivity all together into one big package.

As a website owner don’t be afraid to take advantage of video technology to bring viewers to your site!

Big companies have been on an internet spending spree this year and there is no end in sight.

To me the aquisition by News Corp of IGN for $650 million was expected — the purchase of Skype by eBay for $4.1 billion was not. Why would an online auction site want to own a VoIP company? Buying Paypal made sense because most of eBay’s users use Paypal for their purchases — but why Skype?

David Kirkpatrick over at Fortune has an idea why these big purchases are happening:

We are seeing the first signs of the emergence of a small group of e-commerce service companies of a new type—essentially they’re integrated online commerce conglomerates. They aim not only to replace shopping malls, but also TV networks, telecommunications, and the banking system, among other services. And they want to do so globally.

The companies he identifies are “Google, eBay, MSN, Amazon, Yahoo, and AOL” He thinks a few other companies may join this list such as News Corp, or Chinese companies Baidu or Alibaba (Yahoo actually purchased partial ownership in Alibaba this year for over $1 billion.)

As a website publisher its worth paying attention to what is happening here.

For example, Google owns Adsense. Yahoo has launched a program to compete with Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network (still in beta) and MSN probably will too. This means more competition — Google is going to have to work harder and give publishers a bigger cut of the pie to keep them on board.

On the flip side, we have a company like eBay which dominates the online auction market. They have been increasing their fees rather than cutting them — because they have no competition.

I hope these companies are able to compete against each other for years to come — it means more money for us publishers.