Dear Ask the Geek,

I’m beginning to get a decent amount of hits on my blog (5000 pages/3000 unique per month…not millions, I know, but they’re increasing steadily), along with lots of requests to advertise. I need to determine the best way to monetize both the blog, and/or all my sites. I use text-link-ads at the moment, but I need some advice on where to go from here.

Sincerely,

I Work Hard for the Money

Dear I Work Hard for the Money,

Monetization is a formula that’s very specific for every site, and one that needs to be constantly evaluated based on your website’s goals and content, and perhaps your business needs at large. I think talking about the three following things will help answer your question:

• Website conversions
• Paid links & Transparency
• Advertising rates and payment types

Website Conversions

Understanding your website’s main objective (and in particular, if there is a monetary correlation) is called a conversion:

Conversion is the process of successfully achieving the primary objective of a specific page or website.[1]

Focusing on defining what the conversion for your website is will make things much clearer for you regarding advertising – what kind of advertisers you’d like to host, pursue, and what type of visitors you’ll want on your site to fulfill your website’s goals. Also, it will help you further define your audience (existing or ideal) and therefore understand what type of advertising will not be intrusive or a nuisance but rather a service to them!  i.e., you have a site about Venice, but you get an offer to host an ad for part replacements – does it make sense? Does your audience want that?

Of course, conversions don’t have to be strictly monetary – perhaps you’re hoping to turn visits into writing opportunities, photos sold, or email inquiries received. Perhaps after defining your website’s conversion, you’ll find that you should actually think about BUYING advertising instead of hosting ads on your site for others, or make it available in a subscription format, etc.

Here are some questions that you should answer to help define what your website conversions might be:

• How do you measure the success of your site currently?
• Beyond the number of visitors and traffic in general, how are you planning to track the effectiveness of your site? What factors will be considered when examining who comes to your site and how they’re getting there? Are some sources/referrers higher-valued than others? Why?
• Are there particular key pages on your website you want your audience to see/visit or are there particular paths the user should complete that could be considered conversions? (i.e., request information/quote, buy product, stumble, etc)
• Is there a correlation between more traffic and an increase in “sales/conversions” in other ways? (more tours, more photos sold, more products bought, etc.) How are you measuring this?
• Should you be focusing on better-serving your existing audience instead of looking for more traffic? How are you measuring the experience of visitors to your website?
• How much money are you expecting to make? Do you have an actual target / fiscal need that must be met and is driving your website’s purpose?

Write the answers to these questions down along with your other brainstorming, or perhaps create a light business plan, and then you can use this to base all your other decisions regarding partnerships, revenue goals and advertising.

Tip: If you end up instead buying advertising, understanding your website conversion is essential to measure if your investment is giving a good return on investment (ROI).

Paid Links & Transparency

Google doesn’t like paid text links, or more specifically: Google doesn’t like links that are not labeled as advertising (“selling links”) because it compromises the integrity of how they calculate PageRank and therefore the influence a certain site has. I’m not sure exactly how you have configured your advertising/paid links (or what you’re getting in terms of revenue) but you might want to read this article about paid links by Google. With that being said, many have decided not to care what Google thinks and use them anyway.

I can give you some advice regarding monetizing, but I think monetizing your website is like finding the perfect pair of jeans: every site is going to have the perfect fit and mix of advertising that’s different from everyone else.

I think the best type of advertising to sell is that which respects the trust relationship you have between you and your audience. In my case, I believe graphic advertising, in designated advertising areas of one’s site and clearly labelled are best. They may affect the aesthetics of your site but the transparency is very clear to your audience.

Since your sites are quite focused, and you have the opportunity to find local/niche businesses that might want to be featured, you can probably take a pro-active approach and contact them with your rates, whether it be graphic advertising or text links. You may try to attract a quality advertiser with discounted rates if it adds then to your site’s own reputation to have them advertising there or helps you get other advertising contracts based on the reputation of your current advertiser.

Types of Ads and Payment

If you’re determined to have ads on your site, whether you’re selling them directly to the business or opting into an ad network (like Google) you’ll need to understand how your payments are calculated.

Ads, in terms of payment, can be broken down into two general categories – CPM (cost per thousand page impressions) and CPC (cost-per-click). Google AdSense, for example, pays per click. Usually CPM are offered in conjunction with several ad networks (like BlogHer, Federated Media, etc.) who sell a level of exposure to advertisers across their network of blogs, but CPM can also be inferred if you’re offering an ad space for a specific period of time, like a month.

The CPM formula can be calculated by dividing the cost by the number of thousands of page views. For example, if your blog gets 10,000 page views a month, and you’re selling an ad space for $30/month, the CPM is therefore: 30.00/(10,000/1,000) = $3.00/CPM. Alternatively, you may negotiate a CPM that is good for X number of impressions and the advertisement is removed by you after meeting this quota.

Google includes a CPM rate in their calculation, but it’s actually a post-facto calculation that is made based on the ads clicked and however much they negotiated per-click with that ad owner. They call it Effective CPM, which is why you can see different CPMs for the different advertising spaces you have on your page. It depends on how many clicks they have received.

A third type of advertisement type is called an affiliate link / ad / offer, which means that you don’t receive anything from the ad owner unless the user purchases something on the ad owner’s website, and you’ll receive a percentage of this sale. These affiliate links can be internal to your site’s content (much like text links) or an offer/link to an affiliate store in your sidebar.

Sara Rosso (aka WHT’s In-House Geek)

Resources

• Advertising 101 for Bloggers and Developing a Strategic Business Plan from Design*Sponge (excellent!!)
• Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up from Smashing Magazine
• 10 Things to Consider when Choosing an Ad Network from Food Blog Alliance
• What is Affiliate Marketing? from ProBlogger
• The Google Page Rank Pendulum Swings…. Again from ProBlogger
• How to Monetize Your Site with Video from Mashable
• Effective CPM from Google

Dear Ask The Geek,

OK, so I made my site and then found out (too late) that I can’t add shipping profiles to it for different countries. So I need a ‘proper’ website with something like oscommerce or x cart, but I really can’t do it myself.

I was thinking about paying a web designer $2200 to design and set up a site for me but it is a huge amount of money to spend which I don’t really have and I would rather spend less, but I don’t know where to turn to. I do know that I am not capable of doing this myself. Just trying to design my labels in Photoshop makes me scream in frustration!

I want a good looking site that makes people want to go back, nothing fancy like Flash, but a clean professional site. What do you think? Do you have any reliable contacts with e-commerce and web design experience? Is $2200 too much?

Sorry for all the questions!

Ready and Rearing to Go

Dear Ready and Rearing to Go,

For your e-commerce site, that’s a good price, and that’s a bad price….depending on what the specs (specifications) are – what is the designer offering for that price? And, more importantly, what do you WANT? I strongly suggest you sit down and make a list of all the features and functionalities you’d like your site to have. You can get a good idea by looking at similar e-commerce sites though there’s a more formal process called benchmarking that I’ll explain in another post.

Not knowing what you want will cost you a lot of money, either in paying for features you don’t need, or having to insert something later because it wasn’t planned for initially or included in the first quote.

Make a list of all those features and functions of the site, and then prioritize them – label some “must have” and some “nice to have” – having this list you can start evaluating not only his offer but you need to figure out if there are any holes in the offer or if there’s something you can remove to save money.

If you get an answer “well, that will cost you more” at least you know it’s because YOU have decided that functionality is critical. And, hopefully knowing what you want will help you see if there are some free alternatives or compromises you can make.

Here’s some things to consider for the website’s front-end (visible to your clients), but this list is not exhaustive – I suggest you brainstorm a list of anything you can think of:

• Customer Assistance – is it live, through a contact form, or using an email address? How many different forms of contact will you offer your customers?
• Types and Methods of Payment – is the payment happening through your e-commerce site, or is it resting on an external payment site (like PayPal)?
• Shopping Cart and Login – Can your users buy more than one of your products at a time, hence the shopping cart? Do you want users to be able to save their shopping carts via login, without a login, send an order in pieces to two different addresses?
• Tools – are there any special tools your site will need? Will they have to be specially developed (from 0) or customized (from existing paid or free tools) for your site? Tools like calculators, calendars, profiles?
• Flash and Video – do you want or need an animated introduction to your products, or video? (**note: this is where the price starts to skyrocket)
• Stock Images – Do you need imagery/graphics for your site? Since you are selling your own product, you probably won’t need to buy any stock images for your website, but it can be an additional cost.

Since you’re already a blogger, you know how important it is to have hands-on access to your content, so with regards to the back-end of the system (the underlying servers, software and code), here are some things to consider:

• Back-end software – Is the back-end (content management system) proprietary / their creation? Or is it built on a readily-available software like WordPress, Joomla, etc.? Can you learn how to use it by finding information online?
• Making changes – How easily will you be able to intervene to make changes to the text on the site? The images? The design?
• Site Installation and Location – Where will the site reside – on their servers, or will they install this system on your server / where you buy hosting? This is important in case you decide to leave – what happens then? Is there a clause in the contract at how they will deliver the system to you, or what they will deliver?

These are some things to get you started. While I can’t tell you exactly what is good value for that price you quoted, hopefully you’re starting out with your must-haves for designing your website and you can even get a second quote to compare them.

Sara Rosso (aka WHT’s In-House Geek)

Dear Ask the Geek,

I have a quick question about the copyright info you have on the photos on your blog. I have just started my blog, and I love posting my photos. Should I be concerned about doing that? I was hoping to ask your advice and a bit of your wisdom on the matter since you have more experience blogging. If one adds the copyright sign like you do, does that protect the images? Also, on a technical note, how do you add that to your photos? I use a Apple with iPhoto, but I also use a PC.

Any advice would be so helpful!
Budding Photographer – Blogger

Dear Budding Photographer – Blogger,

On my food and travel blog Ms. Adventures in Italy you might have noticed that I have “sararosso.com” on all my photos, but that’s not to say that it’s the right thing for everyone. Let’s look at each of the issues of your question in more detail.

• The Difference between a Watermark and Copyright
• All Rights Reserved and Creative Commons
• How to Create a Watermark

The Difference between a Watermark and Copyright

First of all, let me clarify that the semi-transparent text you see on my photos is not a copyright. It’s a visible digital watermark that is an opaque text layer that I insert in my photos. Invisible digital watermarking takes the process much further and actually embeds identification information digitally into the file which cannot be seen. This is not very widely used and would be the sort of thing a professional photographer may do. It usually requires special software.

A watermark does not necessarily protect the photo’s copyright. To learn more about copyright, Read the { When I Have Time A Guide to Copyright and Creative Commons } In it, I touch on the fact that copyright is inherent with original works of art like photos. In short, you automatically “own” the copyright to your photos. It’s up to you to decide how you’d like your work to be shared/modified/re-worked by anyone that finds it.

A watermark, more than an actual legal mark is what I consider to be a social deterrent that serves two purposes:

1. deter the user from stealing the photo which is unusable for many (profitable) ends
2. help render it recognizable by the author or others in the case that it is re-used somewhere else

While it won’t stop your photos from being taken, modified or re-published, it may deter someone interested in taking the photo since they don’t have a pristine photo available for their means.

All-Rights Reserved and Creative Commons

I decided to keep my photos All Rights Reserved except for a small selection of photos on Flickr that I have released under the Creative Commons license: Attribution-Non-Commercial which means I expect to be attributed as the original author but that people can re-publish/modify/build on for non-commercial means.

Depending on your objectives, you might also decide to change your license terms on your photos. I suggest you read the When I Have Time A Guide to Copyright and Creative Commons and decide what’s best for you.

How to Create a Watermark

There are several ways to create a watermark, and several programs you can use to do it. Most are specifically photo editing software, and some are even free!

Some include plugins or actions to create a watermark, but there is a simple method to do it that will work in almost any program:

1. Open your photo file (Geek tip: always work on a copy of the file so the original remains untouched)
2. Create a new layer or text layer
3. Type in the text you’d like to appear (your name, your blog’s name or your URL)
4. Adjust the opacity or transparency of that text layer so that it is visible to the degree you prefer.

Some prefer to create a “frame” to the photo with their URL or to not use transparent text at all but rather the full text color, but it’s completely your preference.

Photo-Editing Software to Make Watermarks with:

Here are some suggestions of software to get you started. Making a watermark is something you’ll have to learn the first time you use a software program, just like any software, but once you know the steps it’s quite quick and easy, and you can set up a batch to do it on a group of photos in many software programs for your next blog post.

• Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom – I’ve been using Photoshop for more than 10 years, so I’m most comfortable using it. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a lighter version of the software for the budding photographer (like you!)
• GIMP – a free, open-source alternative to Photoshop that is rich in features.
• Picnik – online photo editing with a lot of options. Choice of Free or Pro versions.
• PicMarkr – a free, online way to add watermarks. Pro installable version available, too.
• Watermark.ws – an online and free tool to add watermarks.
• CNET 15 Online Photo Editors Compared – some free, some with paid pro versions, including some of the software I mentioned above.

Good luck, and start experimenting!

Sara Rosso (aka WHT’s In-House Geek)

Have a question for Ask The Geek? Send it to me.

Dear Geek,

I have three different websites and I’m wondering if I should consolidate them: a website built with a template wizard, a blog on a free site, and another website hosted for free. They are all three at different locations as I have tried to keep our cost down, but need to consolidate, focus and try to use one platform if possible. I am thinking to go towards WordPress, as it seems like it supports static web sites and blogs, but just hope it works with Mac.

What about merging my two sites, blog and web for the B&B on one site, like WordPress? I am worried to have my web for the Inn get lost or lose what little page rank I have.

Thanks,
Dispersed and Confused

Dear Dispersed and Confused,

It seems like a simple question, but there’s quite a few things to address:

• Using WordPress with a Mac
  
• How to Maintain PageRank
• Hosting and Managing Multiple Sites

Let’s take a look at each one.

• Using WordPress with a Mac

First of all, from a user standpoint WordPress can be administered from any operating system, because you are going to access it through a website interface, so don’t worry about using your Mac with WordPress. As long as you have a web browser, you’ll be able to access the WordPress management console correctly. WordPress can also be installed on both Linux and Windows operating systems, but you probably won’t need to worry about that – your web hosting provider will. Check the WordPress requirements and confirm that WordPress can be installed with your web hosting provider – most providers will specify this information in the FAQ or even provide 1-click installation services. If you don’t see it, don’t be afraid to send an email before buying a particular service.

I’m a WordPress fangirl, and I am using it on both blogs and static websites. So I say, come on over! You can import your free blog with WordPress quite easily. Start by checking out the WordPress forum – it’s very detailed and has articles on everything including Importing Content from various blog platforms into WordPress.

Second, I think your instincts are right to try and consolidate your business’ blog and website on the same domain. In fact, I think that free blogs should never be used for business-related websites as you want to build your brand on your own domain if possible. You’ll definitely want to read my article about buying a domain: {Read WHT article : How To Buy a Domain and What to Do with It}

• How to Maintain PageRank

PageRank is a value that Google assigns to a website and certain pages within that website. While not all of the elements of this calculation are known, it is safe to assume that regularly updating your website and the number of incoming links to your content are important to affect your site’s PageRank.

It’s probable you will lose PageRank by moving your content to a different domain. But, the PageRank you had previously attained was technically  someone else’s property/domain. Wouldn’t you rather see it attributed to www.yourdomain.com instead of blogspot.com or another free blog site?

This is perhaps the hardest part of moving a website, but I can assure you that the Internet is constantly changing and updating, so you’ll have many more chances to regain PageRank by putting good content out in the future. Starting over with PageRank is best done sooner than later.

I recommend moving your free blog to a blog hosted under your domain and then with the new launch:

1. Contact those sites still linking to your old site and (gently and politely) ask them to update their blogrolls.
2. Plan a series of content for post-launch that are compelling and link-worthy to jumpstart your Page Rank recovery.
3. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to register your website and start tracking it in Google (don’t forget to use a statistics tool like Google Analytics to track your content!)

You’ll be well on your way to getting back your PageRank.

• Hosting and Managing Multiple Sites

This is something that bears further investigation based on the web hosting providers you’re considering. Some web hosting providers will allow you to host multiple or unlimited domains for the same price. Note that I’m not referring to two different domains pointing to / associated with identical content, but two distinct and separate sites, hosted with a single provider and paying a flat (monthly) fee.

Note that some of these solutions may not be ideal for sites with large amounts of traffic, but that is something that can be evaluated (by regularly checking your statistics) periodically to see if you’d need a more robust solution.

I don’t want to suggest a particular provider, but trying doing a Google search for “hosting multiple domains” “web provider multiple domains” to get started at finding a provider.

Hope this helps you get started,

Sara Rosso (aka WHT’s In-House Geek)