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what I do

Earning from Advertising Online

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My new goal is to earn a living wage from this site. I’ve got a long way to go, but at least the trend is upward.

I’ve been using Google AdSense since May, 2004, to place "context-sensitive" ads on my pages. I earn money whenever a site visitor clicks on one of these ads.

The results to date have not been impressive: most months I didn’t even earn the minimum $100 required for Google to actually pay me (the earnings accumulate: you get paid the month after your total goes over $100). So I’ve been studying up, with the help of blogs like John Chow’s, applying what I’ve learned to my site, and observing the results.

Logically enough, revenues from Google AdSense seem to be linearly related to:

  • the number of ads available to be seen on the site (= number of pages x number of ads per page),
  • the number of people who actually see them, and, of course,
  • the percentage of those who actually click on an ad (yes, there are ads that pay per view, see below).

Furthermore, earnings are non-linearly related to:

  • where on the page ads are placed
  • how people arrived at your site in the first place
  • what they were looking for that got them there – in other words, what’s on the pages.

I will deal with each of these aspects in turn, in several articles, before discussing my results.

Number & Placement of Ads on a Page

Google AdSense

According to Google’s rules, on any single page you can have a maximum of:

  • three ad units (ahem – I had forgotten this rule til recently, and was flouting it on some pages where I had manually placed ads in the middle of the page – I hope I have all those cleaned out now)
  • one link unit
  • two search boxes
  • one product referral button

Right now, on most pages on this site, you’ll see Google ad units in the left and right columns and at the bottom, and a link unit in upper right corner. The search box is at the very bottom of the page – that’s been there for a long time, and was always intended to be useful rather than to earn money (which is a good thing, because it earns almost nothing). The product referral button (lower right corner on most pages) earns if someone clicks through and downloads what Google is offering. I don’t mind recommending Firefox because I’ve been using it myself for years, as do a disproportionate (to its market share) percentage of my visitors (I placed those buttons only recently – no earnings so far).

For a long time, being squeamish about bombarding people with obtrusive advertising, I had a fixed ad unit only at the bottom of the page. I doubt many people saw those ads. My web statistics show that over 80% of the people who land on my site leave within 30 seconds. Google probably registers a page "impression" for that bottom ad unit for every page viewed, because the ad was loaded on the page and, from Google’s point of view, available to be seen. However, a lot of my visitors are clearly just glancing at the top of a page and leaving again, so they never actually see those bottom ads.

Lesson: For an ad to be guaranteed to be seen, it must be "above the fold" – in the top area of the screen that is seen immediately without scrolling down.

Google’s own AdSense blog offered a case study about a site that quadrupled its revenues by placing ads in certain spots. So I added the ad unit in the left column below the section menu – the Google folks said that left columns perform better than right columns. In the case of my site, they perform very well, perhaps because the left column starts with navigation (links to other pages in the same section). Any eye scanning down the navigation list would tend continue on down to at least the first Google ad. (I would love to know if it is in fact the top ads that get clicked on, rather than those further down in the ad unit, but Google doesn’t give me this kind of detail.)

The ad unit on the right is more recent, a result of screen real estate being freed up by something else that I’ll get to in a minute.

According to John Chow, the most lucrative type of ad on his site is the "large rectangle," and it appears that he’s not the only site owner to think so. My suspicion is that its placement is more important than its format: on his and many other blogs it’s right in your face, interrupting and confusing the reading material so that sometimes I’m not even sure what’s blog and what’s advertising. I am not as much of a design purist as I used to be, but I draw the line at that (for now). For the time being, I will keep the center column of each page ad-free. (So, if ads really bother you, keep your eyes to the middle of the road.)

I have some very long pages, leaving a lot of room in the left and right columns. Google won’t let me show more than three of their ads, but I’m allowed to also show other ads, as long as these are not context-sensitive (which would put them in competition with Google).

Amazon

In the left column below the Google ad unit, you’ll see an "Omakase" ad unit from Amazon. "Omakase" is a Japanese restaurant term meaning "as you like it." Each unit is generated on-the-fly by Amazon, taking its cue partly from page content, but more from Amazon links elsewhere on the site (including my own Amazon store). If you (the visitor) are already an Amazon customer, the links shown are also based on your own history with Amazon – guessing from the ads I see myself, this may even be the heaviest factor in Amazon’s decisions about what to display (though they are likely also playing with the mix to see what works best). You and I would never see the same Amazon links, even if we visited the same page at the same time.

(It did not occur to me til just now to wonder whether Google considers this competitive… Feels to me like a gray area. I guess someone will yell at me if they don’t like it.)

These links have been on my site for a few months and have indeed increased my Amazon revenues: from zero to $10 in three months. I don’t know who’s making money as an Amazon "associate," but it sure ain’t me. But any money is better than no money, and I like the look of the Amazon ads.

BlogHer

On the right side of most of my pages, you’ll see the result of my recent membership in BlogHer, a network of women bloggers. Adding that right column space to a site that wasn’t originally designed for it has been a bitch and a half, and the job isn’t done yet. Although I’m using DreamWeaver templates, which automate some of the changes, I’m having to touch up every page by hand, to create a center column that doesn’t run into the advertising on the right and therefore become unreadable and ugly.

But this has had two useful side effects:

  1. There’s a lot more room for ads in that right column, so I was able to put in another vertical Google ad unit.
  2. I’ve constrained my text to a column 600 pixels wide, instread of sprawling across whatever width of screen was available. This is much more comfortable to read on large monitors – when a line of text gets too long, the eye can easily get lost while reading across it.

It’s too early yet to tell how much revenue BlogHer will be worth, but it may prove useful to drum up new readers: as my site now features links to others in the BlogHer network, my site is featured on some of theirs; I get a little bit of traffic from this. And I’m finding the people at BlogHer nice to work with. Although (story of my life) I don’t fit the normal blogging mold, they have gone out of their way to work with me, and even pro-actively suggested useful changes. It’s a far more personal relationship than I could ever have with Google or Amazon, and, with me, relationships count.

Other Ad Networks

There are other ad networks out there. I tried Adify, which offers to sell advertising space, but, as far as I can tell, I never even got a sniff of a customer from them. (Google also offers a "buy advertising on this site" option – you can see it in every ad unit, but I don’t think anyone has bitten yet.)

Apparently you don’t start to make real money until you can attract the big boys, as John Chow has done. And, to do that, you have to have large numbers of visitors. Yes, I’m working on that – as I will discuss in a near-future article!

read Part 2, on increasing the number of pages on your site

links to John Chow

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Communicating with Your Customers

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Someone anonymous claiming to be an Apple employee launched a blog (now vanished) to discuss his/her thoughts on Apple’s communications with its customers. This was big news in the blogosphere, because Apple is notoriously secretive and uncommunicative.

The only Apple product I own is an iPod (I had a Mac SE 15 years ago, my first and last Macintosh), but I have read the few entries on this new blog, and the accompanying reader comments.

Many of the commenters decry the blogger’s anonymity, saying that it proves that the blog is a fake perpetrated by Apple itself as a publicity stunt. Some blogs have recently come to light claiming to be produced by individuals who “just happen” to love a company or its products so much that they would dedicate time to blogging about it, but these blogs turned out to be funded by the companies in question (e.g., Wal-Mart). Such subterfuge cannot long remain hidden in the teeming online world: when thousands of minds attack a puzzle such as “who’s really behind this blog?”, it gets solved very quickly.

The Apple blogger him/herself points out, reasonably enough, that to be identified by the company could cause her to lose her job (most of the commenters seem to assume the “Masked Blogger” is a man, while I, for no particular reason, think she’s a woman).

The Masked Blogger’s avowed purpose is to start a conversation about what Apple could be doing to communicate better with its customers. She’s asking the right questions, and some of the answers are useful. It therefore doesn’t matter whether the blog is genuine, because Apple is reading it. Whether they read it to see how their PR experiment works out, or to try to identify their rogue employee, the conversation about conversation is taking place – and Apple, volente o nolente*, is listening.

Whether they will learn anything is another question. It surprises me that this conversation is still needed. All the “new wisdom” floating around the blogosphere about how companies should communicate with their customers (the current vogue, of course, is that they should use blogs) follows principles that I invented for myself over ten years ago, starting in CompuServe forums (yes, I am a geek antique).

You want to communicate with your customers online? It’s not rocket science.

The basic principles are:

  1. Be honest. This doesn’t mean that you need to spill your guts and tell every company secret, but everything you do say must be absolutely true. And, when you know there’s a problem that affects customers, say so, especially if asked point-blank. Don’t imagine that you can pretend ignorance, or hide behind spin and subterfuge – you can’t.
  2. Be real. Not every problem is going to get fixed quickly and not every customer is going to be happy. If you explain what steps are being taken and how soon you (reasonably) expect them to take effect, customers are surprisingly forgiving. Most will love you just for showing that you’re listening and trying to help. Sometimes you can’t fix a problem; not everything customers say they want is even possible. When I worked for Adaptec/Roxio, I frequently used the line: “Fast, cheap, or perfect – pick two.” Most customers understand that businesses cannot supply everything for nothing. If you can give a reasonable explanation for why you can’t do what they’re demanding, or can’t do it as fast as they would like, they get it. And they appreciate being spoken to like capable adults. Weasel-speak only shows contempt for your listener; no one likes that.
  3. Be yourself. Perhaps because I started out “talking” to people personally in forums (and never wrote marketing copy for a living), it always came naturally to write in my own voice. I was surprised at how well people responded to this, telling me: “we, as customers, like the feeling that we are dealing with a real person, not a machine producing corporate ‘happytalk’.” NB: This did not mean that they wanted to hear about my vacations or what I ate for lunch or my views on politics, nor did it mean that I could tell someone he was an idiot even when I thought so – I represented the company and, when you do that, you ALWAYS have to be polite. And careful: sarcasm usually backfires online, and even mild irony gets over-interpreted.
  4. Be strong. It’s a hard job, representing a company online. You’re highly visible: when the shit hits the fan, you’re the first to get spattered. Because people are accustomed to being treated badly by every other company, their default assumption is that you, too, are out to screw them, that your niceness is just a ploy, it’s all a PR stunt, etc.NB: OF COURSE it’s a PR stunt – everything that you do in the name of your company where a customer can “see” you is marketing and PR (whether you – or your company – realize it). Every employee in any company who ever has contact with a customer has a chance to make or break the company’s reputation – maybe just with that one customer, maybe with many who will hear by word of mouth about that customer’s experience. What is that if not PR?

    Be prepared for suspicion and abuse. Just keep smiling, and nice them to death. Trolls get bored quickly, and they are a small minority, no matter how loud. The silent majority will respect your patience, good manners, and tolerance. In fact, if you hold out long enough, they will start leaping to defend you!

  5. Believe. Being nice under duress does take a psychic toll, so you’d better be doing it for a company, product, or cause that you believe in. And it’s fine to defend your belief passionately: people respond to passion, even if they don’t necessarily agree with you on its target.

Okay, I’ve told you everything you need to know. Now get out there and talk to your customers!

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More Tips on Getting Better Customer Service

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If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that customer service is one of my pet peeves – and praises, when somebody actually gets it right.

For my upcoming US trip, I need a cellphone. Actually, three, for the three of us going to Las Vegas for CES, so we can keep track of each other during the show. Though we all have tri-band phones that will work in the US, roaming charges from Italy are ridiculous.

I was astonished to find that there seems to be no way to simply buy a SIM card for whatever service and pop it into the phone I already have, as I did in India. Every US carrier wants me to buy an entirely new phone. This is annoying, since I am used to my own phone and have all my numbers on it. But there appears to be no way around it. US consumers sure put up with a lot of rubbish from their cellphone providers.

I consulted with my group of online experts, who concurred in recommending TracFone, and one even sent me a special free minutes offer. So I went straight to the TracFone site and ordered three cheap cellphones. Or tried to.

As I had been expecting – because it happens so often on US sites – it wouldn’t take my foreign-billed credit card. I could buy the phones from Amazon with any credit card, but that would cost a bit more, as would buying them in a shop.

Stubborn creature that I am, I decided to write to TracFone’s customer service about this. What do I have to lose?

But I knew pretty much what to expect from a low-level customer service rep. So I used an old trick (previously mentioned on my site – see below – and sometimes used on me in my Adaptec/Roxio days). I did a search for “Tracfone CEO” and found out his name. (I also saw, from the press releases mentioning him, that TracFone does a lot of socially-conscious stuff. That made a good impression.)

Now I had to figure out his email address. The address I had, customerservice@tracfone-ild.com, did not look like a corporate HQ adress – some sort of service center. CEO not likely to have email there. I sniffed around some more, found a press release with the email address of a company spokeswoman. Her address was formatted first initial-middle initial-lastname@tracfone.com From that, I could guess the format of the CEO’s email. So I copied my email to customer service to a couple of likely addresses for him. I was polite, and pointed out that they were missing potential business from travellers like myself, coming to the US with a need for a phone.

That was about 11:30 yesterday morning. At 1:20, I received an email from the CEO to someone named Steve, cc’d to me, instructing him to assist me in my purchase. I immediately thanked the CEO and said I was sure I would enjoy doing business with his company.

At 4:30 the same afternoon, I received the expected reply from customer service: “It was managements decision to only accept US based Credit Cards for security and business reasons.”

I’ll give them credit for swiftness of response, though a zero on punctuation (and, of course, helpfulness).

I’m now waiting to see whether Steve manages to pull this off for me. Even if he doesn’t, at least the attitude at the top is the correct one. Who knows, maybe they’ll change their credit card policy and find themselves with a whole new income stream.

later – Steve couldn’t come up with a payment method fast enough to solve the problem, so I’ll just have to buy from a store. He did tell me which were likely to have the largest selection of phones, and that the refill cards I want are also available there. That’s enough of a good-faith effort for TracFone to get my business.

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beginningwithi.com: Why the Name?

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My dad once said that, if he ever gets around to writing an autobiography (and I wish he would), he would use rivers as a theme, because many important parts of his life have been spent near major rivers (from the Mississippi to the Mekong).

I thought about this, and decided that my own autobiography should be titled: “Countries Beginning with I.” Italy and India, obviously, are a large part of my life, while Iran, Iraq, and Israel have all had major impact on the world during my lifetime (and will likely continue to do so). I have also lived (briefly) in Indonesia, so we can check that off the list. Which leaves Iceland and Ireland – hugely influential neither in the world nor in my personal life, but I hear they’re nice places to visit…

I have also spent a great deal of my life in another country beginning with I, the Internet: as of early 2007, I have been online for 25 years.

I don’t know when I’ll ever get around to writing my autobiography, but my website is that, among other things. So I have set up a new domain, beginningwithi.com. I figure that’ll be easier for people to spell than Straughan (as long as you remember that there are two Ns in the middle of beginning).

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Creative Energies: Doing User Interaction Design

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As you will have noticed, my newsletters are getting fewer and further between. Nowadays, most of my creative energies go into my work for TVBLOB. “What work is that?” you may ask. Good question. As in many startups, roles aren’t well-defined, but, basically, everything that touches our future end-user customers will somehow, someday, be my responsibility.

For the moment, my main job is designing software features, behaviors, and interfaces. This would be relatively straightforward if we were making software for the familiar Windows environment – I’ve been closely involved in the development and support of some very popular Windows software packages, and I have very clear ideas on what works and what doesn’t.

But TVBLOB’s software and services will be displayed on a television set, with a far smaller viewing area (in terms of pixels) than any modern computer monitor. Try setting your computer display to its smallest possible resolution and you’ll get the idea – except that, at least on my current computer, the smallest possible setting is 800×600 pixels, while a standard PAL (European) television set can display roughly 700×550.

Limited screen real estate is not the only design problem I’m up against. The hardware I’m designing for is not a computer with a keyboard; we expect that people will mostly use a TV-style remote control to interact with our software. And I don’t mean a huge, clunky remote with 300 buttons that are so tiny you can’t press them, let alone remember what they’re all for. Our remote will have only a few more buttons than you’d find on your average DVD player controller. So I have to use them wisely.

Not that I’m complaining. It’s a fascinating set of design challenges, and I’m having lots of fun. But the work does tend to wring all the creative juices right out of me…

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