extreme webmaster evernerve

In the first part of this article, I explained how to build great educational content that will bring you traffic. I will show you now how I earned (and am still earning) money from it.

It all started with AdSense

It is AdSense that made me try to become self-sufficient in the Web business. I have built my website with about 15 lessons/tutorials to start with. I chose a clean, readable design because of the public which needed an easy access to the educational content. I signed up with Google’s AdSense and waited for their response. In about 2-3 days they approved my website. The password was mailed to me (standard procedure) and I was able to begin slapping contextual ads onto my website.

A reckless beginning

I thought “This is going to be easy” and so I began slapping AdSense in the middle of each page (and each page was very long, due to the many sections and steps in each tutorial and the fact that a single page hosted a single tutorial). As I was to see later, this was pretty much useless. I did follow some advice from the AdSense gurus: I used onlytext ads (no images) and the most popular format - the big 336 x 280 ad.
I managed to earn $70 in the first month after launching my website with AdSense ads. This was a good sign, because at the time, Google made it obligatory for you to earn at least $100 in the first three months after signing up with AdSense to be able to stay within the program. Earn any less, and you get kicked out. I had about 18,000 visitors that month. Around 80% of them were unique, and that ratio stayed to this day, although the number of visitors skyrocketed since that time.

Traffic began pouring in (read the first part of this article to see how to pull that off). I made a successful website just like that. Just kidding: a lot of hard work went into its creation! As I discovered more and more hub websites that link to tutorials, I got more and more visitors. During the second month after launching my website, I earned $180. This was an important milestone for me, because I saw that I could earn well beyond the minimum set by Google, and all in a single month. This time, I had 26,000 monthly visitors. That was an increase in traffic of more than 50% compared to the first month.

I continued churning out tons of quality new content each week (a really good tutorial with screenshots takes a lot to create). More and more unique visitors poured in each day. Nearly all of my money came from the big 336 x 280 big rectangle ad. My160 x 600 skyscraper ad sucked bigtime.

The month after that: 40,000 visitors and $220.

This trend continued for the following 6 months: my traffic increased at a steady rate, but the income wasn’t increasing as I wished. It was hovering around $400 per month.

Do follow the advice of experts!

I was frustrated. What the fuck did I do wrong, I asked myself?! Then I remembered how I read that you must always experiment with ad placement and different ad formats to see what works best. I am kind of lazy regarding experimentation and tracking: I love to work for hours on end and make quality content, but following statistics and looking for any changes was irritating. But I had to do it, whether I liked it or not.

I finally resolved to heed the advice of AdSense experts. I did a thing that made my website look a little bit spammy, but I didn’t give a shit since it proved beneficial to me soon. I moved the 336 x 280 rectangles right at the top of each tutorial, beneath the main heading. I slapped AdSense link units right on top of my left sidebar menu. I blended in everything, seamlessly: no borders at all, and the ad link colors were exactly the same as those in my content.

The results showed up almost instantly! I implemented the change at the end of a month, and the income went from previous month’s $380 to $590!!! That’s an increase of more than 50% in just a week! I was amazed. The next month, I earned $1,000. I was so happy. I just can’t describe how joyful I was. My work finally paid off. Just because of ad placement! Imagine that! Yes, it is true nonetheless - these are the peculiarities of the Web. Here is a nice graph that shows how my income increased during the year after my website was launched:

Can you see the sudden jump in revenues? That was because of a single tweak!

What’s even better, I learned some important lessons:

• Always heed the advice of experts in the field you’re working. They know what works and what doesn’t. It isn’t by chance that there are well-known and respected experts in every field of human endeavour. This are the individuals that mastered their trade through trial and error, years of work and direct experience. If someone already knows how to do a certain thing, just copy them. Do as they do! I am a stubborn kind of guy and I learn a lot via my own mistakes. If you’re reading this, don’t be stubborn like me, but start the right way immediately.
• Hard work alone doesn’t bring the results. Results come by working hard the right way. You can bust your ass working and still move forward at a very slow pace if you don’t do it right. Sure, there will always be setbacks and errors, but that’s part of the learning and working process. You can decrease these temporary setbacks by following the experts’ advice, asking for a second opinion on blogs, forums, etc.

The day I got bitch-slapped by Google

As time went on, my public grew to 120,000 monthly visitors. Not bad for a one-man show website with around 140 static pages, huh? The income was steady. It wasn’t increasing any more, it stayed around $1,000. But the refreshing fact was the realization that I didn’t have to produce content as often as before, and the traffic still kept pouring in, while the income stabilized around one thousand dollars. The importance of this for me was that I was able to move on to other projects and expand my Web empire. Everything was going smooth, until one sunny day in Paris! No kidding

Imagine this: you are in Paris on a holiday with your beautiful wife (yep, I’m married). The weather is sunny, the City of Lights is as beautiful and romantic as ever, you are visiting museums, walking along the Seine, exploring the city and shopping by day and hanging out in cafés and getting sloshed in brasseries by night. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, it was a well-earned and long awaited vacation for both of us. And it was a blast.

But something almost spoiled that idyllic stay in Paris. I say almost, because I am a positive kind of guy and I never let shit ruin my day or take away my joy. I always smile and plod on, no matter what! So, on a magnificent summer day in Paris, I decided to check my e-mail. Although I mostly kept myself away from the Web, computers and technology (this is a wise thing to do while you’re on holidays), out of curiosity I went to see if someone sent me a message. And it did. That someone turned out to be Google’s AdSense team. But it wasn’t to congratulate me on my earnings or anything like that.

The AdSense policy enforcement gang informed me that all the ads displayed on my website were blocked because I violated their AdSense policies. They told me to make the necessary changes in 3 business days (!) otherwise I wouldn’t be able to display AdSense ads on my website any more. Also, they informed me of the possibility of completely erasing my AdSense account if any further violations were to be found.

What was my sin? My ads were too much blended in. They were very effective. Why was I shocked to see this? Well, because once you start earning shitloads of cash from AdSense, you receive a call from Google and you have your own assistant/consultant appointed to you - a person who will give you advice on how to increase your ads’ click-through rate (CTR) by making changes to your ads visual appearance. In other words, how to blend them in. And as a bonus, because you are bringing Google much cash, you get additional AdSense ad formats so that you can increase your website’s CTR even more!

Is this hypocrisy or what? Google isn’t the Web police, they are the Web mafia. Their “do no evil” motto is a nice PR stunt, that’s all. In reality, they act like a mafia bully. They rather follow the “do as I say, don’t do as I do” policy.

Well, I won’t rant about that anymore, I will just say that there are many, many websites out there that still violate the AdSense policies. And yet, the AdSense ads are there for all to see. The question is: How come I got singled out as a scapegoat, especially in the educational/tutorial websites universe?

I think that happened because my website became popular. And I think that someone got irritated because she or he clicked on an ad and just had it. And possibly mailed the AdSense mobsters, who took action. Remember this: Once you become popular, you are bound to have enemies. Human beings are known to be jealous, envious and whatnot.

Back to my Paris holidays, I had to make the necessary changes in 3 business days! I made them in a blink of an eye. I had to, because the AdSense policy violations nonwithstanding, where the ads once were, there now appeared a completely blank space. And that looked lame.

What was really nasty, is the fact that although I made the necessary changes the same day I received that email, the AdSense support gang took 4 days to answer me. More mafia arrogance. The ads were gone for a couple of weeks, maybe even three weeks or so. Earnings dropped significantly.

After I made the changes to my website to comply with the shadowy, murky AdSense policies, I was permitted to slap the ads again. But because of the removal of many AdSense units, I lost a big piece of my revenues. From $1,000 I went down to $600 per month. The link ad unit alone brought me $100 each month! And I had to remove it, because it looked like a part of my sidebar menu.

November 14th

On November 14, 2007, Google changed its AdSense ads clickable areas. Before, the whole area of an ad was clickable. Now, only the link is. The AdSense revenue from my educational website went down from $600 to $200-$300 because of that. That’s because there were fewer accidental clicks now, I suppose.

Luckily, I had already developed other websites and pulled in other revenue streams. I learned my lesson early on. So should you: never ever rely on a single company as the source of your revenue. Rely on it only if it’s your company, ok?

Many diverse sources of revenue are the key

Once your website becomes popular, the players in your niche will start to notice it. And you will be contacted for advertising and reselling their products. And that is cool!

Selling affiliate products

What is really good, is that you don’t have to do almost anything to earn money from these other sources of income. All I did with affiliates is put their banner on my website. I have earned a little bit more than $400 from a single affiliate in 4 months. I can say that I effectively replaced the loss caused by the removal of the AdSense’s link unit.

Pay attention now. I almost quadrupled the sales of an affiliate product by making some simple but wise choices.

• I made a specific tutorial about a certain aspect of the desktop application that my website is centered around.
• I chose an affiliate product that enhances that aspect of the application.
• I made an eye-catching, custom banner for this product (with the proper affiliate link of course).
• I put the banner on every page of the said tutorial.

I have targeted a specific product which is well-suited for the kind of visitors my website gets. It was a winner! And it even wasn’t a sales page! If I did that, I suppose that I could earn even more. But I simply don’t have the time for that now. I am focused on a myriad of other projects, websites and some looming partnerships.

I also noticed that other websites in my educational niche started copying my banner and some even made a pre-sales page. Heheeeee now that is what I call recognition.

Displaying targeted referral ads

I also began to use the Google’s referral ads. These can work well, because you can choose ones that suit your audience. I have once got $60 via a single click! It was a referral for some school that held courses on various things that were similar to what’s on my educational website. Pretty cool, huh?

I places these ads at the bottom of my tutorials, because in that way, you give your visitors more choice. They can click the ad to leave your website, instead of having to type in some other URL manually or clicking a bookmark. If the ad’s well targeted, there is a good chance that they will click it, because they are probably surfing the Web for similar stuff.

Donations

Never underestimate these. Donations brought me a few hundred dollars. I just said to my visitors that if they found the knowledge that I share freely useful, that it would be nice of them to consider donating any sum of money to support my website. I think that’s fair, and lo and behold, people started donating!

I would have earned more if this had crossed my mind before. I just didn’t happen to think of it as a source of income, until a frequent visitor to my website emailed me to ask how can he donate money to me! Again, I repeat: hard work and excellent content pay off!

Currently, the money received from donations pays all the hosting bills for my educational website! Ain’t that nice? And everybody’s happy

Selling your own product

I didn’t make my own product, but if I decided to do so, I think it would sell well. That’s because I have an established audience and a good reputation in my niche, but also a lot of traffic, of course. This would be much wiser then writing a book for a publishing house. Here’s why:

• I noticed a printed book that looked very similar to my website, especially the way things are explained in the book (heheeheee).
• In a time span of about a year and a half (about 18 months I think), my educational website brought me more than $11,000 with AdSense contextual ads alone.
• A quality book in my niche costs around $50. When it gets outdated (this tends to happen amazingly fast with software books), you can find it for $30 on Amazon. But for the sake of this example, let’s say that the price is steady at $50. This means that 220 copies of that book must be sold to arrive at the sum of $11,000.
• I am sure that a good book sells a few hundred copies, if not more. Maybe a lot more. That depends on the popularity of the subject you’re writing about. But what’s important is that the author doesn’t get all the money from the sale. He or she gets only a fraction of the sum. There is the publishing house, the bookshop, the technical editors, and so on and on. And it takes months to write a good book. Surely, I have put much work in my educational website too, but all the while I got money from contextual ads, affiliate sales, referrals and donations. And that’s one website only.
• All I have to do to make an e-book is take all the existing content on my website, rearrange it, add new stuff, put it in an easily readable format and sell it. And my website is my own marketing machine: I have many visitors (more than 1.2 million a year). If only 0.5% of them bought my e-book, which I would price at anything between $60 and $80, I would make a minimum gross income of $360,000 each year.

Sounds unbelievable? Check out these two great examples:

1. Aaron Wall and his SEOBook.
2. Mark Monciardini and his Photoshop Top Secret DVDs.

They both started out as passionate users of the Web (Aaron, SEO) and a specific piece of software (Mark, Photoshop). I specifically remember Mark, because I visited his website ages ago. I remember when he just happened to have Photoshop tutorials (and some AdSense ads slapped here and there). He soon developed instructional CDs and then DVDs. And now? He sold more than 1500 copies of his course @ $179. Do the math and you get a sum of $260,000.

And that’s through his website alone. What if you had a website like mine, and I offered you 50% as an affiliate partner? Imagine that! I sell affiliate products that I’ve seen on a myriad of websites in my niche. The owner of the product makes a nice sum from all these websites, without any additional work at all!

You are surely asking yourself and me now “why don’t you make your own e-product if they are so lucrative as you say?”
Here’s the answer:

• My ADD makes my attention span shorter. I am always doing many things at once, and if I work around a single thing for too long, I tend to get stuck and the whole thing stretches too much and becomes difficult to bring to a proper end.
• I am happy with what I do now. I work in many different fields and projects. Since I live a decent life and have enough money for now, I like to keep it that way. Earning by doing what you like is something really beautiful and rewarding.

On a sideline note, don’t write for magazines unless they pay you really good. I used to write tutorials for both printed magazines and e-zines and I must tell you that they don’t pay you good money. You get crumbs, basically. I did it a couple of times just to see how it works and for prestige (the printed mag) and also to gain more traffic (the e-zine linked to my website).

Summary

You can earn good money with your educational website, because:

1. You can pull in a lot of traffic. Always. Websites appear and disappear on the Web each day. There are a few major players here and there, but they tend to become a bloated mess after a while. And people like new things, especially if there’s high quality involved.
2. You can have many sources of income. Always make sure to have as many as possible (but without making a bloated mess of your website). Use contextual advertising, sell affiliate products, sell your own ad space, collect money through donations, make use of referral ads and so on.
3. You can make your own e-product once you have enough experience and knowledge. And that’s when you are on the road to some big money.
4. If your website becomes so popular that it pulls in millions of visitors each month, you can even consider selling it, if a multi-million dollar offer comes knocking at your door. I know that I would do that.
5. Your website will become your reference point. You will be seen as an expert and a guru in your field. This means more business proposals. People will want to hire your services or even offer you a position in their company. I know this because it happened to me.

In this part of my educational websites building article, you saw that you can really earn a hefty amount of money, even with a single website!

I want to point out the fact that I am earning between $300-$400 a month with my website even now when I am updating it once in every three months!!! Imagine that! I have commited myself to my other projects and money is coming in every day. That’s the power of quality content. Google recognizes it and people bookmark and spread it. Of course, if your educational website is going to be the main source of your income, you should update it at least 3-4 times a month.

In the third and final part of this article, I will write about how to create a community around your educational website, how to manage it and take proper care of it. Make sure to come back for the last part in this series!

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