Robert Scoble writes that ugly websites such as the one owned by Markus Frind makes more money in what he claims is the anti-marketing design. Actually, the design is much better than many websites I’ve come across. Maybe Robert’s standards are pretty high. Markus’ site which is an online dating site reportedly gets tens of millions of pageviews everyday. That translates to over $10,000 in AdSense revenue each day.

Okay, here’s my question. It’s not the AdSense revenue that boggles me. What’s intriguing is how in the world does he get that level of traffic? Tens of millions of pageviews everyday will get you 10 grand in AdSense per day. Assuming it’s 10 million pageviews per day, that’s $1 per 1000 pageview. $1 CPM is nothing to write home about…

But then $10,000 a day equals $300,000 a month!

Technorati Tags: AdSense

Popularity: 21% [?]

There are two major ways to get traffic to your blog:

Pay Per Click (PPC):
Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are the big 3) where you pay for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.

In either case, you’ll have to pay. It is a quick way to get listed (albeit not in the organic listings) in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing – but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Resources to check out:
Google AdWords
Yahoo Search Marketing
MSN AdCenter

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
There are a lot of companies working ‘behind the scenes’ to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase. The nice thing about SEO is that it’s free (meaning you don’t have to pay to get the traffic). The downside is that getting your site listed on the first page of search results can take a long time and lots of work!

Resources:
Search Engine Relationship chart - who’s serving who?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Blog Explosion has just added a ping service where you can ping multiple blog directories at one time. Up till now, the service I’m using is Pingomatic. Make sure you ping the popular blog directories where you have listed your blogs to let them know that you have updated your blog. You should do this everytime after you make a new post. Monitor your web stats from time to time to see if pinging is bringing more traffic to your blog. You can see by looking at the “referring URL” where the traffic to your site is originating from.

Popularity: 11% [?]

If you want to get more relevant links to your blog or website, you’ll either have to go out and look for link exchanges (usually emailing the webmaster of the site you wish to exchange links with) or have interested webmasters come to you requesting for links. You can simplify the process using Link Metro where you can sign up for free and manage all your link requests. The user interface is very easy to navigate and the website directory is neatly divided into different categories.

The main categories are:
Art and humanities
Business and industry
Computers
Health and fitness
Internet
News and media
Recreation
Society
Sports

Each category is also subdivided into smaller categories.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I was just spending some time surfing on Blog Explosion which by the way is a good way of generating traffic to your blog. If your blog is still new and you’ve got some time on your hands, it’s worth signing up for a free account at Blog Explosion. When you surf other blogs, you’ll get credits which will be applied to your account. The more credits you accumulate, the more visitors you’ll get in return. While you’re surfing, take note of the different designs and how other people are monetizing their blog.

Popularity: 9% [?]