Happy birthday to me

[Setec]

Thanks WF for the happy birthday email. You're the most thoughtful PHP script I know!

I've been having a really good day with arbitrage (7Search/Searchfeed -> YPN). I just decided to get into it a week ago, and I really dinked around along the way reading a lot and learning keyword research techniques, etc.

Yesterday (first day my sites were actually up) I made around $4.50 on a spend of around $2.50 with only 6 clicks and a 6% page CTR. I don't have the CTR numbers yet for today, but my traffic really kicked in, and my daily balance is at $42.21 on a spend of around $15.00 (but the profit reporting is hours behind the spend reporting, so I'm around 3:1 ROI). That's mostly from two of the five pages I put up a couple days ago. I added five more today with a different layout and I'm hoping traffic for them kicks in tomorrow.

I'm not completely automated, but I do have total separation of content from layout using XSLT, so it's no work really to add more sites. The keyword research is the time-consuming part. Time to go for volume now!

So it's a happy birthday. I've never seen a daily total that high in two and a half years busting my ass on the white-hattiest content site you could ever imagine. I take a week to sideline my principles and go for the $$$ and I'm beating my records already...

 

[mistwist]

Happy B-day to you... and me too!

 

[Setec]

Wow, I just got to look at my CTR for yesterday, and it's terrible, like 0-5% on most pages. And I'm still turning a 3:1 profit. I can't wait to see when I get the CTR up!

 

[Reefer420]

wtf? Man I need some new niches then - even the clicks I get on my insurance are like 10 cents...and I have a 40% avg CTR!

how many adsense ads are you running on your pages? Maybe my i-geek like page just has too many people clicking on the bottom ads instead of the top-paying ones..

 

[Setec]

I'm using YPN. I rely on AdSense on monetize a white hat site I've put an incredible amount of work into, and I don't want to put my account even a little bit at risk with anything slightly sketchy like arbitrage.

I'm staying away from insurance/financial/legal niches and focusing on various expensive products nobody would think of.

I'm experimenting with two templates, one with three ads units and one with one. So far two of my ten niches account for almost all the traffic and revenue, and both are the three-ad variety. I haven't got any serious traffic yet to the one-ad pages but the very limited results from those so far aren't promising.

 

[pocketrockets]

I'm using YPN. I rely on AdSense on monetize a white hat site I've put an incredible amount of work into, and I don't want to put my account even a little bit at risk with anything slightly sketchy like arbitrage.

I'm staying away from insurance/financial/legal niches and focusing on various expensive products nobody would think of.

I'm experimenting with two templates, one with three ads units and one with one. So far two of my ten niches account for almost all the traffic and revenue, and both are the three-ad variety. I haven't got any serious traffic yet to the one-ad pages but the very limited results from those so far aren't promising.

Are you choosing the category to target with YPN or are you letting it decide?

 

[Setec]

I'm letting it decide.

It seems from my limited experience that YPN sucks at targeting across entire sites, but does just fine targeting page-by-page IF the page has text relevant to the products you want to see ads for.

Here's what I mean: I have a white hat site about a sport, let's say it's squirrel-throwing. And say I have a sub-page about the nuts you use to lure the squirrels in so you can chuck them at cars. Google would show nice targeted ads about squirrel-throwing on both pages because it figures out that's what my site is about. Yahoo would see "nuts" on that page and show ads for insane asylums and Christian rock CDs.

Yahoo seems to have a lot more trouble associating with a site's topic but it's just fine at taking queues from the keywords on each page. So I've had no trouble getting targeted ads on my arbitrage pages. Maybe somebody with more experience can give you a better picture of the two networks, but this is my impression.

P.S. Don't throw squirrels at cars.

 

[Reefer420]

how much traffic are you getting to these uber-niche sites? I have a few in 7search w/ 1k+ keywords for really high paying niches...but if I can get one or two peeps in a day I'm lucky. Granted I have a high CTR on them, but who cares if I'm only getting a couple of people.

Then again I guess those two clicks will make up for 10 clicks on my stupid Pokemon site (which I took off today!) even though it has a 90% CTR since it pays around 5 cents per click...

 

[pocketrockets]

Yahoo seems to have a lot more trouble associating with a site's topic but it's just fine at taking queues from the keywords on each page. So I've had no trouble getting targeted ads on my arbitrage pages. Maybe somebody with more experience can give you a better picture of the two networks, but this is my impression.

P.S. Don't throw squirrels at cars.

Yeah, I've been using YPN for almost a year now so I know all about the targeting issues. Part of the problem is just the sheer lack of advertisers with YPN vs the Google network. This lack of supply adds to the non-relevant results sometimes. That is why I was curious about whether you were choosing the category or not.

I use adsense on a few arbitrage sites but I'm considering using YPN because they pay so much better for certain topics. Although I'm a bit worried about risking my account status with YPN since they are constantly monitoring your sites and will ban you for poor conversions.