Someone asked me today at a client whether they could allow their sales and marketing people to watch the web stats in real time as they sent out their latest email broadcast.

So what we set up was a nice big plasma screen in the meeting room, a buffet lunch and Get Clicky on the plasma live.

GetClicky for those who don’t know it is a fantastic and very accessible web analytics service that allows you to put the power of analytics in the hands of the people who use it.

One great feature in Get Clicky is the ‘Spy’ feature. This allows you to see in real time as people hit the site.

As Clicky is so friendly to view and tries to resolve the IP of the visitor to the company who owns it we could often clearly see a known customer or prospect coming into the site from the email and watch them as they browsed the site.

One sales guy even stopped eating the buffet to run and get a pad to take notes of a prospect browsing slowly through products he didn’t even know they used.

Its a geeky way to have lunch but I think it paid for itself and my time easily.

If you haven’t tried it yet why not go grab a free 30 day trial of GetClicky now?

If you haven’t tried it yet why not go grab a free 30 day trial of GetClicky now?

A few times recently I have mentioned that I am preparing to sell my ‘Adsense Flat’ to friends and people always seem surprisingly interested in what my ‘Adsense Flat’ actually is.

A few years ago it was possible to create a decent amount of money from Google Adsense adverts simply by automating the creation of websites and because it was automated you could work out ways to scale the whole thing.

How it all worked

Register lots of .info domain names

Regfly at the time had their ‘Super Fridays’ where you could buy domains in bulk via their API for just $0.99 a piece – we used to get between 2-500 each time

Shove them all on one or two VPS hosting accounts

They were in fact all served by a single index.php file on the box, we dynamically determined the requested domain and then served the cached content into a set theme

Create a system that goes and gets content from somewhere

It doesn’t matter how we got this content but it was pretty poor spider food at best if I am honest

Get it indexed

All sites in a batch were cross linked and just 1-3 inbound links from elsewhere would be enough to get the sites crawled and the majority indexed

Place Adsense on the sites

The clicks were tracked and any site that we sent enough traffic to got contacted for a direct relationship

Await the site being de-indexed

I used to track ‘burn rate’ as a KPI of how long the domain remained indexed for (My KPI was the time between full crawl and 75% de-index)

Then repeat this again and again using the keywords that worked well

Heres a post from 2007 showing some stats from one batch

Why it stopped working as well

Well Google decided that the lack of value in the sites they were allowing us to make was in fact more harmful than profitable so they embarked on a tirade of banning people for spurious reasons (I eventually reached account number 7 and Google still owe me £8.5k that they will never pay)

How much did people make and what did they use it for?

Here is where I am different, many people made good money. Here is a screenshot of one of my Adsense accounts from the time (NB its actually a scan of a printout I made and kept on my office wall for a while – That account is banned now like so many others….)

As you can see thats $9,000 in 30 days

Most people spent the money on better computers, cars, gadgets and in one memorable case a year long holiday across the globe

I however invested some of mine in a flat in the nearby coastal town of Cleveleys

Here is the listing from www.houseprices.co.uk showing what we paid for the flat (There is no mortgage on that property)

And here is a screenshot of where it is – handy for a paddle in some brown freezing water

Its a one bedroom flat and has a retired lady called Veronica sitting in it as our tennant.

The plan was always to use the capital from the sale of that flat to eventually clear our main house mortgage.

Veronica has taken up an offer now to move into one of the many many houses owned by my mother and father in law so we will be selling it slightly earlier than intended but that all depends on what interest we get in it when it goes on sale.

Here is the place she is moving to – they dont look much these places but its ideal for a retired lady, easy for the shops and always in demand

So thats really the story of my Adsense flat, I do miss the easy money where the script was the money maker.

I have moved to outsourced teams and affiliate nowadays, whilst that doesn’t mean that I need to work much harder it does mean you have to manage much more.

2010 I will be making more time to get back to generating cash away from the client work.

Just read this post about how to spot people with fake follower counts on twitter.

Interesting article but as usual the boy scout brigade arent thinking it through.

Its not as easy as they make out, to illustrate that let me show you three graphs from twittercounter then ask you to guess which is faked…

I know these stats because I am in control of all three accounts here (and many more hehe)

OK now 1 of those is real… but its not necessarily the one you think…

Its a tried and tested rule that Adult traffic is hard to convert. Its true, thats not the issue but many people will try and tell you they are getting earnings from stats that you know cant be true.

So to debunk some of the BS you hear from these people I thought I would run through some real stats for you.

First off a disclaimer:

1. I don’t do Adult as a rule but I have some traffic that seems appropriate so thats where I sell it to.

2. This is traffic that is harder even than normal to convert but the main points still apply.

Here is the expected stats for the Adult site I am sending to (I have blurred the actual sites)

Now you may be shouting at the monitor (Why by the way, I cant hear you) that I should be using the top site as it has the best conversion rate. I feel that the site I am sending to will beat that for the traffic I am sending.

These figures mean that they are getting 1 signup per 756 clicks

Imagine if you had to reach that level on all your affiliate stuff, we would all be begging for scraps on the street by now!

Now I also have the problem of not being able to send the traffic straight there as I have to pre-qualify the visitor slightly.

The visitor to my site has to arrive, click any link (they all go the same place) and then when on the Adult site sign up for me to get paid.

This is how the maths work out for me here: -

I get a 37% click through on my site
I need 756 of THOSE PEOPLE WHO CLICK THROUGH to make a sale

So I get 1 sale for every 2041 visitors to my site!

If I get say $30 for each signup (I do a bit better than that as I get a percentage of recurring bills too)

If I was a BS merchant I could pretend that I was earning $4500 a day from the traffic I have but in reality I am getting far less.

I am not complaining here and this site has enough traffic to make it well worth my while keeping it around but I do like to inject a little reality into things every so often.

Remember the rule, work out your numbers based on the full path of the visitor. Dont just multiply your raw traffic by some industry average and think your the big man.

Many thanks to everyone who commented with suggestions on what I should write about this year, heres some of those suggestions and my responses / commitments for the coming months: -

Dave said:
Off the top of my head, you could show us an old example of one of your TV show sites. Just something a US newb like me could learn from.
Always, always, always: relevant traffic generation. I don’t care if its whitehat, gray, black, or blue.

I would love to run through an example – let me see what I can put together.

Chris said:
That is pretty much the stuff that anybody wants i guess. but that just shows that there are not so many good articles about it.
here it comes:
a step by step description of what you would do to start a simple project.
something like,
- where do you get your keywords and how do you choose them
- do use any tools if so which ones?
- …
i would really appreciate something like that.

I think a starter post on how I decide what to go after and how I choose things would be good too

Jason said:
I’ll take advantage of this since I got your email and normally I don’t bother with emails, but I thought I would give it a shot.

1. Adsense Targeting. I know people hate Adsense for the most part and tell you to get away from it, but I mostly build grayish white sites and can do them fast. However, I have problems with adsense getting me the right ads, even with a site/page fully optimized for a set of terms.

2. Keyword selection. I’m looking for some good tips. I pull my keywords from about 17 different sources with my own PHP script, but I am looking for the good keyword examples, like keywords with “buy, store, discount, coupons, etc.. ” What are the best “trigger” words to go with your keywords

3. Sites or ideas that: make money quickly ( fast burn ) vs. sites that make money long term and examples. This should be a weekly series. It would be awesome to follow someone each week was they do a “fast money site” and a “long term money site” and explain the differences of each.

4. Traffic. Whats the best places in general to get traffic ( drop links )? Please don’t be like everyone else and say ‘relevant authority sites’, what about a list of “here are some generally easy but good places to quickly drop a link” and why they are good ( indexing or traffic or link juice ).

Whoa thats a lot to go at there Jason… but some really great ideas thanks.
Adsense targetting – think I have covered that before but I will happily go over it again with some examples of it in action.
Keyword selection – tough one but I will do my best to work out what works for me and share that. Trigger words is more of an Aff thing in my opinion and targetted niche is more of an Adsense thing.
Fast v Slow – Yeah would be nice to put some numbers against these I think – whats fast and why, how fast is a fast burn. When building slow whats the timescale to start seeing some results? etc etc
Traffic generation – I hope to do some examples of traditional traffic v new social methods.

Chris said:

Hey,
I’d be more interested in hearing about the administrative side of your campaigns/link building.
What procedures do you have in place for tracking and logging all your link related data etc.

I have a bit of a stats habit I am afraid and I use simple data extracts and Excel to crunch the numbers. I would however love to do some posts about link aquisition and specifics on thinsg like link volume and pace as I know that I differ there compared to most people doing this type of thing

Garrett said:

I’m interested in hearing more about tips/tricks for automating tasks. For example, favorite scripts or tools that make your daily webmaster life easier (ie. link building/checking, competitor research, keyword development, etc.).

Maybe ill try to put together some simple scripts that could be used for that and also share some simple tips on where to get the data and how. Id also like to do some tutorials on scraping from a basic perspective (Watch for the Esrun taking the piss comment below – he knows how crappy my code is!)

Dink said:

When are you gonna do another Matt Cutts link juice cartoon?

Yeah I should do a few more link baits cartoons, maybe someone like Calcanis next time ?

Remember if you have any specific requests – get in touch

Thanks to you all again, some great ideas for me to go at there – look forward to writing the posts now!

Paul