Enough of Blogger.com already

I'm moving and setting up camp over at my own hosting instead. I know one is not supposed to do that but I figured its still early in my blogging life and hosing ones own blog and using Wordpress gives A LOT more freedom to manage your site, from ads to details in the design.

Hope you'll join me at our new adress, even if its longer than GWB's criminal record - InternetEntrepreneur.InsiderWeblog.com .

Steve Pavlina - the industry benchmark?

In a recent post I wrote about Blog monetizing and speculated whether the booming days of AdSense Blogging were eventually going to slow down, like the fad of pixel advertising. There are of course some fundamental differences; blogging provide an actual content to the public, while pixel advertising was a fad, largely fuelled by the novelty of the idea.

However, in that recent post I also wrote about Steve Pavlina and his blog (stevepavlina.com), using it as an example of a successful blog site. I also did some simple math on the stats regarding traffic and income from his site. Steve was kind enough to take his time to write a long comment on my post clarifying some numbers; kudos to him! I felt this warranted a new post revising some of my calculations and conclusions about this topic.

The actual numbers for stevepavlina.com are, according to Steve, 1.8 million visitors, 5 million page views and about $9,000 in AdSense revenues per month. Using those numbers we see that AdSense earns Steve about $1.80 per 1,000 page views. If we assume high paying ads ($0.50 per click) that would give us a CTR of 0.36%. However, Steve pointed out that my assumed CTR of 0.5% “would be very weak”, so I think that his CTR are higher that this. Medium paying ads ($0.1 per click) would indicate a CTR of about 1.80%, which should be closer to the industry benchmark.

Steve also tells us that AdSense isn't even his no.1 income anymore. It actually comes in second after incomes from "joint ventures", which I assume is an euphemism for promoting various merchandise and services on his site. In total he earns $40 k per month. This must be one of the absolute top earning blog sites in the segment, considering he alone provide all the material published on the site.

As Steve points out, relative traffic stats can be viewed over at Alexa.com and indeed his traffic rank is impressive. A whopping 0.0324% of all Internet users have visited his site the last 3 months. Compare this with the official site of Dr. Phil who could only muster 0.00585%, even though the content is similarish.

Stevepavlina.com continues to set the benchmark for this particular niche of the industry, and it becomes even more interesting since his generous disclosure of the income his site generates. I am still convinced that success breed success, and even the fact that I'm writing about him will generate him some more traffic, however minuscule. His success will continue to attract curious visitors and the excellent content on the site will keep them coming back. We can all learn from Steve.

Domain names as passive income

As Travis Wright points out in a recent post domain names may become the real estate market of the future. I'm yet to venture into this field of Internet business, but it does sound intriguing so I will have a look at it the coming weeks. The ideas is the following:

1. Snatch an attractive expiring domain and resell for a higher price
2. Buy an undeveloped domain, possibly spend some time to build it up, and resell

Some domains generate such search engine traffic that you can make money just by slapping some content, some sponsored links and ads up.

Will I become a domain broker? I'll have to see about that.