Niche Designer

I was excited when YPN was released because competition is always beneficial for any market. I also thought it would give niche marketers an alternative to Adsense. However, I am feeling utterly disappointed and frustrated with YPN. I started putting YPN on a few sites about a month ago. At first I got RON (”Run of Network”) ads, which was expected for the first 48 hours. A week later a few of my pages were serving quasi-semi-relavent ads… half of the time. Though the majority of my pages were still serving RON ads. I was annoyed, but kept YPN for a while longer just in hope. (more…)

High Google ranking is usually the holy grail of SEO. After my google nightmare I gave up on google. Instead I turned my attention to MSN. Why? Because my efforts pay off with MSN. Soon after creating a site or page, it gets ranked in MSN. If I put a little extra effort, I can easily make it into the first page of MSN. Additionally, I always had a feeling MSN traffic clicked more ads than google ads. I can nearly count my clicks by counting my MSN search strings. But I don’t have an adsense tracker installed, so there was no way for me to know for sure if MSN converted better than other search engines. Now, the Web analytics firm WebSideStory has confirmed my suspicions. Their experiment returned the following conversion data:

AOL traffic 6.17%
MSN traffic 6.03%
Yahoo traffic 4.07%
Google traffic 3.83%

A nearly double conversion rate is huge. Why the difference? Their conclusions included “With portals rich in content and services, AOL, MSN and Yahoo may tend to appeal toward a more buyer friendly demographic. Google, meanwhile, may appeal to more browsers – those with less of an intent to buy.” Personally, I have long regarded the MSN/AOL users as less technically oriented than Google users. It is possible more technical users are blind to ads. I think more than anything this proves that you shouldn’t put all your egg’s into one basket just because that basket is the biggest.

Recently I stumbled upon Steve Pavlina’s website and began reading a few of his articles. I am amazed that he writes such quality and quantity. He has so many insightful articles that I don’t think I’ll ever read them all, yet each article is truly quality content. He’s also running this Million Dollar Experiment on his site right now. Anyone can participate in the experiment, and all you have to do is intend to gain $1M and daily reinforce that intention. The full intention is as follows.

In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all, I intend $1,000,000 to come into my life and into the lives of everyone who holds this intention.

It’s not a chant that magically brings you money. Instead, you are allowing yourself to believe it will happen, thus you are more likely to take steps daily to make it happen. I have noticed that it helps me remain positive and become more aggressive about my goal. Plus the first day I began with the intention I saw a 600% increase in my revenue, so maybe that was a good “sign” that it works.