Project Wonderful Not Reporting Right?
By skolor | June 30, 2008
Sorry about not posting on Friday. I was super busy. I decided to try something, something super cool that I did with Project Wonderful, and, if it worked, will be posted about in around 2 weeks. Then again, if it didn’t work, I’ll be disappointed, and post it anyway. Anyway, I did a whole lot of research into Project Wonderful, and found some cool stuff, which I’ll be posting in the near future.
I found something rather disturbing though. At first, I thought it must be a reporting error with Google Analytics. Certainly it must be a problem with their Java Script loading wrong on my site, there’s no way that Project Wonderful would be off by this much. However, I can’t come to any other conclusion except that they’re not telling the entire story when it comes to clicks. I tried it again, with a number of different statistics software and here are the results I found:
Topics: General posting | 2 Comments »
Penny Blogs- Part 2
By skolor | June 26, 2008
Wow. The past 2 days I’ve done a lot of research into the Penny Blogging phenomenon. There’s a lot of complaints about it, which gave me a great source of information to draw some conclusions. Unfortunately, they’re not good news, at least for the most part.
The few sources that look at the problem identify this: Penny Blogs, in fact, almost all of the Project Wonderful users, are operating in a rather bad economy. See, the economy, at least for Penny blogs, is a input-only, single good economy with a general sales tax. To make things worse, the supply is so immensely above the demand that it kill salmost all the competition.
Don’t know what that means? Well, its rather simple.
Topics: Theory | 2 Comments »
Theory 2 - Penny Blogging
By skolor | June 23, 2008
Theory - Penny Blogging can be both good and bad, depending on what you want out of it
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned TheOtherMMO, another blog that I run. Originally, when I launched it, it was intended to be “flipped.” With a group of 3 other people, we all started MMO blogs, and the goal was to sell them within 2 months. That died when, two weeks in, I had some personal problems that made me stopped posting. So for almost a month, I didn’t make a single post. In my absence of posting, it became what I like to refer to as a Penny Blog.
So what exactly is a Penny Blog? Its something which is, in my experience, unique to Project Wonderful. Under most forms of advertising, if you get a very small number of hits, in particular under 20 or so a day, you tend to get very erratic payments. With Adsense, or a similar system, you may get a click once a week, which will make you $0.50 or so. On the other hand, with Project Wonderful, what was an erratic, seemingly random clicking of ads, can be turned into a consistent flow of money.
Topics: Theory | No Comments »
Delay in posting
By skolor | June 16, 2008
Kind of funny, right after I make a point about the necessity of keeping to a schedule, I have to announce that I won’t be.
I’ve been writing all my posts, by hand, weeks in advance for a little while now. I’ve got about 2 weeks worth of posts for this site taken care of, and the same for 6 other blogs (only 3 of which actually exists). The only problem is that I don’t know where it is. I’ve lost it, so until I can find it, I’ll be doing short, fairly meaningless posts.
Sorry all.
Topics: General posting | 2 Comments »
Keeping a schedule
By skolor | June 11, 2008
I talked on Monday about the importance of keeping a schedule. Now, there is one caveat to that that I ignored- if you aren’t getting much in the way of traffic, it doesn’t really matter if you keep a schedule or not, you won’t be getting much traffic. However, it is best to ignore that factor, and go forward as if that didn’t matter, since the eventual goal will be to be making money, making it important to have the schedule in place already.
I really don’t have much more to say on the topic, except to explain my schedule. As is fairly obvious, I’m working on a MWF schedule. It seems, in my opinion the best for a blog, other than updating every single day. It gives you mid-week spikes, which, according to Monday’s theory, are important. You almost always see a drop off in traffic on weekends, because people aren’t at work browsing the internet. Thus, you’ve got to capitalize on your weekday traffic, and, unless you’ve got those spikes, I theorize that you’ll be getting less in bids.
I’ll be doing a little more than just MWF posting, each day will have a specific topic. Monday will be the Theory day. It will introduce the theory of the week, which, hopefully, will have something to do with Wednesday and Friday’s posts. Wednesday will, in the future, be a interview day. I’m hoping on getting quite a few people willing to do interviews for the site, talking about how they use Project Wonderful, so that everyone can learn from them. Finally, Fridays, like I said before, will be case studies.
Now, I’m off to go set up my Experiments since I now have ad approval.
Topics: General posting | No Comments »
Theory 1 - Scheduled Posting
By skolor | June 9, 2008
Theory - Regular, scheduled posting means everyone wins.
This theory builds on the research done at Blogject Wonderful, the Officials Project Wonderful blog. They don’t update very often at all, but this was an article which caught my eye a while ago, and eventually lead to the creation of this site. If you’d like to read their original article, read scooping up advertising deals.
Their research is rather basic. They took what appears to be a be either a webcomic or blog which updates Monday-Friday, and they noticed that it keeps a fairly standard rate on M-F, that rarely dropped below its standard rate. Their article focused on an advertisers point of view, using long term, low priced bids means that every once in a while you win the spot, when the other advertisers miss a day for some reason.
There’s an extension of this information that they didn’t seem to consider. In fact, the main tenets of this theory they seem to have taken for granted, and not investigated at all. This assumption is fairly simple: there are two different types of bids, which are generally placed by different types of people, who are aiming for different types of advertising campaigns. If you’ve used Project Wonderful as a publisher, you will have noticed them, and their basic trends.
Topics: Theory | No Comments »
My one complaint
By skolor | June 6, 2008
I’ve loved Project Wonderful. Its been my favorite of all the advertising methods I’ve used by far. However, I HATE one of their newer policies. Sometime between early April (when I launched www.theothermmo.com) and Late May (when this site was slated to launch), the admins at Project Wonderful made an unannounced change- you now have to have each individual site approved.
I’ll say that again to make sure you caught it - You now have to have each individual site approved.
I haven’t read a single thing about that, I doubt many people have run into this problem. Like I said before, I was one of the very early users of Project Wonderful. Its been a little over a year and a half now that I’ve been with them. In all that time, I’ve probably used Project Wonderful on a dozen different sites, and its been fairly successful on almost all of them. I’ve never had to do this before, having to have a new site approved. I HATE this, having to put off putting up ads because they want to check my new site.
Topics: Case Study | 2 Comments »