Project – Webtolerant (Webmaster Blog)

I strongly believe 2010 will be the year that really sparks corporate branding online. Thanks to the loads of both free and cheap resources made available, no longer will the web-a-sphere be home to only large companies. A host of small businesses and individuals will flood the market to not only extend and globalize their brand but also cut down costs at the same time.

Combined with the fact that I get tons of questions regarding webmastering and web design, I have created a new website devoted specifically for this cause, Webtolerant.

Webtolerant is geared at informing individuals how to properly build, grow, and maintain their website, whether it is for a business or personal endeavor. The site will cover topics including but not limited to Wordpress usage, basic web coding, social networks, and website management.

Let us know if there is any specific you want covered.

Project Debut – Stock Brokerage Reviews

Over the past month, I have been working on a couple different projects.. 3 main ones to be precise. I’ll be sharing all of them over the next couple of weeks; however, the first one I can talk about today.

In the whole online marketing/make money online field, you can never stop learning and adapting. Because so much of it deals with how people use the internet, understanding social tendencies is a great concept to grab a hold of.

There is definitely no shortage of business models to make money online. Of the top of my head, you can sell an information product, create a membership site, run a blog, or create a review site. My latest project, Stock Brokerage Reviews (SBR), fits under the review site category.

Case Study: How To Attract People To Your Site

Because there are so many different niches, markets, and demographics, there is no an exact science to find out what will attract people to come to your site; however, you can always try to list out some of your more popular pages and figure out what made these sites pop.

In this following list, we will be looking at some of the more popular articles throughout ASANT Media’s portfolio of sites, and try to figure out what exactly made these pages popular… (no specific order)

Stumbling Across the Optimal Ad Spot

Over the last couple of weeks I started to notice an interesting stat when it came to my Adsense placements. The slot that seemed to bring in the most money was the 468×60 campaign located in between the actual post and comments section.

I first noticed the change once I altered the look of the theme on my stock market site. The 468×60 ad now seamlessly blends into the theme, but instead of just putting it at the bottom the location is even more specific.

I placed it right under the post, and then have it followed by the article meta information and related articles. Because of this placement, I think many people often think it is either part of the site and/or they see something interesting and click on it. The clean look also gets the ad to stand out.

This placement is also working well with other types of ads that I have tried, but they need to be very targeted ads. That is why I think the Adsense campaign works so well there. Creating custom post templates will help with targeting your ads.

You can see a picture of the placement:

Add Ads Now or Later?

A question I get a lot and that is even debated around the interent is when to add ads to your site. Obviously everybody has their own opinion, but let me tell you why those with the opinion to add ads later is worthless.

There are numerous arguments for both sides, but the one I like to use is that people can’t complain about something they have never experienced.

There are many stories of successful ventures, companies, or whatever that eventually needed to throw up ads. Customers obviously complained about this because now they had to deal with all these advertisements.

If readers experience your site with ads from the beginning, then they know what to expect and won’t be surprised. Again, you can’t complain if you never experienced it another way.

Proponents in favor of adding ads later in your site’s life say that you should focus on customer experience and building your content and readership before jumping into the world of advertisements.

I see a couple problems with this:

• You are throwing away money. For every visitors with no ads is wasted money. Time is money; visitors is money.
• My previous argument – can’t complain about something never experienced. How will your current visitors feel about the new “ad” experience?

Now I do need to ad a disclaimer to this. Less is more. Do not bombard your visitors with ads, and make sure they are quality ads. Avoid pop-ups and other intrusive campaigns. Less is more.