Turk Hit Box » Adsense

One of my moneymakers: MSNeklentisi.com

Turk Hit Box — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:05:16 +0000

Msneklentisi.com is one of the sites I have bough couple of months back. It ranks high for most keywords related to MSN on google.com.tr. Averaging about 10000 uniques/day, its highest is 22000 uniques on February 16th. First of all, because of the high visitor count, its very hard not to make money off of this website. Secondly, the visitors’ ages range from 10 to 18. A young audience cannot differentiate between advertisements and the actual content resulting in high CTRs.

Using Yahoo’s Yslow, I have made considerable amount of optimizing, including total site redesign. The page now loads much faster and should be able to rank much higher with valid css and xhtml. On-site optimization is always one of the first things on my mind after I buy a website.

Revenue

I bought the website for 4300 YTL, which is roughly 3300 USD. The website makes between $15 – $20 every day, but I have also seen days when it tmade around $40. To generate this income, there are 650 clicks on the ad units on average. Last month, it made $633, which means that I can get the money I paid in about 6 months. I believe that if a website investment reaches its break-even point in less then 8 months, it is a nice investment.

Like Komiksozler.net, I wish it was an English website, then I would be making $1633 instead of $633 every month .

Traffic

Like I have said, the website averages about 10000 uniques/day, but msneklentisi.com has a forum of 3000 members, which should guarantee the growth or at least the stability of traffic. I am also hiring people to post on the forum to attract more and more members.

Latest Investment: Komiksozler.net

Turk Hit Box — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:33:51 +0000

I love buying established sites, especially when they have high unique visitors per day! Komiksozler.net is one of them and I bought it about a week ago. Since it receives about 15,000 uniques per day and has custom written (messy) php code, it has been causing too much CPU load on the server and crashed it several times. If you have been unable to reach Turkhitbox.com, thats the reason.

Traffic

Komik Sözler means Funny Words and komiksözler.net ranks as number for both google.com & google.com.tr results and “komik sozler” keyword is responsible for the whole traffic. My target is to make the site rank for a larger keyword, “komik” in 2008. The site has about 464,000 results in google index. It is a very solid site and thats why it has become an authority site for the keyword, komik sözler which you can see below:

Since it has very messy coding and mysql structure, I decided to use Mint to tract the visitor count & popular pages. I would like to evaluate the data for about 4 weeks and exclude some of the unneeded pages using robots.txt. The reason I am doing this is that I want the content pages to get more value in the Google index. I also need to find a way to create a XML sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools.

Revenue

I bought the website for 3600 YTL, which is roughly equal to $3000. The site generates about $15 per day, so I bought the website for about 6-7 months of its revenue. Its not a bad deal if you think of it as a long term investment. I am thinking of getting private ads at the top as well to increase the revenue even more.

According to the previous owner, the site can generate more than $25 /day during holidays since more people log on to search for funny words to sms their friends. If I can make the site rank #1 or even rank in the first page of the keyword, “komik“, I can make that income stable.

The surprising side is, the $15/day income is made by about an average of 400 clicks! Thats a very high number and if it was in an English website, it would mean more than $100/day. That’s the thing with Turkish websites, they serve very low paying ads.

The previous owner also used 2 adsense content units and a single link unit. I have added another link unit and made backgrounds for the link units so that they look seamless with the other links. I believe this will will greatly improve the CTR.

Design

I think the site has a very simple web 2.0 looking design, but it suits the niche well. I am planning on changing the design of the game page (Komik Oyun – means funny games) according to the main page. I have cleaned up the design & the xhtml alot, and now it has only 2 errors in the xhtml validator. I should finish validating the website during the week.

Blog Income Progress – Summer Update

Turk Hit Box — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:48:47 +0000

I have not been able to pay a lot of attention to my blog during summer, and this really didn’t help my blog income during the months of June, July and August. Making a total of 21 posts during 4 months is not a good accomplishment, but I never wanted this blog to be a copycat of bigroller bloggers. I wanted to make posts that are unique and unseen. Well, here is how much I made with just 21 posts..

As you can see If I have kept my original pace of posting, I would have more income during the month of August. This is why the Adsense blog income has doubled in July and then went down in August. And remember I only had a single adsense unit during June and July using my adsense instead of more tag hack. Now I have added another unit on sidebar, which is actually a very low converting unit, I am hoping to increase my blog earnings in September ‘07.

I will be posting regularly during September, so subscribe to my feed, and get ready for original, never talked topics. I don’t want to be the next John Chow or Problogger; their posts no longer relate to home blogger. They make money from every aspect of their blog, and know people you will never get to know. I want to represent the people who are new and want to have the edge on competing with other blogs.

Blog income should not be taken seriously at first, thats why I waited for the blog to have some backlinks and a stable traffic. I will be submitting my blog to more quality directories and get more backlinks rather than placing more ad units or try the squeeze every cent out of my blog posts.

Adsense Gadget for Vista Sidebar

Turk Hit Box — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:23:15 +0000

As a member of the “make-money-blogging” crew, I usually login to my Google Adsense account every hour. Even though I like logging in and see my Adsense earnings increase for the day, I feel that it is somehow adding stress to my life. This is why I highly recommend you this Adsense Gadget made for Windows Vista Sidebar.

On the above screenshot, you can see how the Adsense Gadget looks on your sidebar. Like every gadget, it’s draggable and configurable. The text on the Adsense gadget is very easy to read on 1280 x 1024 resolution on a 19” LCD monitor. Adsense Gadget configuration screen requires you to enter your login details. I have checked the adsense gadget for a week for any external connection attemps except for google.com/adsense and found nothing. So I can say it is fairly safe for you the download.

You can also change the text colors and background on the gadget. Background Index number is only good for 1 and 2. 1 simple black background and 2 is a web 2.0 looking blue background image. The text colors can be put in using the Hex Color Codes, but you can only use # followed by 3 numbers. I would like to thank Shane Hird for writing a successful gadget and I hope he improves the gadget in the future.

You can download the Adsense Sidebar Gadget from Windows Live Gallery.
I have uploaded it here just in case the Live Gallery url is changed in future: download from THB

Adsense instead of -more- tag?

Turk Hit Box — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 12:11:56 +0000

Here is my first adsense placement idea for my posts. I edited one of the files in wp-includes folder to replace the tag in wordpress with an adsense bar. The reason I wanted this was not to go through process of adding adsense each time I post.

I first thought I had to change the tinyMCE files to do this so I have to check and test every one of the related files. The solution was simpler than I thought. You just need to find the post-template.php file in your wp-includes folder and change the code on line 98.

You can place any html code you want between and . After you click on the more link, you will see that the full post now contains an adsense banner in that place. Now I am looking for another place on my blog to place my next adsense for content bar. If anyone has any idea where I can get high CTR numbers, please feel free to comment. And don’t forget, since I am using the dofollow trackbacks plugin, if you talk about this hack on your blog, You will get a backlink in return!

PS: This wp-hack got me lots of new plugin ideas, but first things first right? When everyone thought there is no plugin left to write for wordpress