The ultimate College Packing List - What to bring to college?

Often times students end up partying the summer before college away, and not spending all that much time thinking about what they need to do to prepare before heading to the college they have been accepted at. The last minute college packing list is often filled with holes where major things to bring are left out or forgotten. Students often turn to google for some help by searching "What To Bring To College". There are tons of things you will need to bring, and tons of things you wont, check out whattobringtocollege.com for the ultimate college packing list.

Maximizing adsense revenue

Just a few things I have noticed on sites monetizing with adsense.

Having low and unstable traffic can greatly affect your pay per click income. A lot of times sites will see less than 5 cents per click because of this.

My advice : Don't put up adsense until you have decent traffic (500-1000 uniques per day minimum) and in the long run you should make a lot more.

New google ISP

http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html

Lessons: Funneling visitors to different revenue streams

A concept I recently tried on one of my newer sites really increased revenue and made much more efficient use of each visitor in monetizing the site.

For example a site with information about bad breath cures, the initial pages of the site would strictly filtering visitors out based on which products or services they might be interested in purchasing. Likely categories would be visitors looking for a doctor or some sort of prescription treatment, visitors looking for a specific treatment product, and visitors just looking for information.

As they are filtered down into more specific categories the visitor is given only a few options of what to click; the option to go back one page, back to the homepage, or to the buy page. By reducing outbound links to only those that will take the user to another page on your site or to a buy page, you greatly increase the chance of getting a visitors click to a buy page, which ultimately leads to a greater chance of a visitor buying.

Keep in mind, this isn't the right technique for all sites, this technique gets your visitor to a buy page asap. Some sites make revenue by keeping visitors on their sites for an extended period of time. You need to decide whether it is best for your site to filter and ship off the visitors or keep them around for a while.

MySpace attacking Friend Adder Bot websites

Over the past couple days many of the recently popularized MySpace Bot web pages have been taken down. I am pretty positive myspace is taking legal action. The bots themselves seem to still work but the homepage's for the bots are all 404 not found.

Some of the sites down include BadderAdder, AdderRobot, AddNewFriends.com, and BotTower.com

UPDATE: As I was writing this I saw the MySpace cease and desist news blurb.
http://domainsmagazine.com/Domains_12/Domain_1590.shtml

All those huge revenue generating MySpace resource sites will soon be down, this will potentially give some of the domains that don't contain "myspace" a good chance at replacing them.

Observations : What to look for in affiliate programs

After having successfully launched a handful of profitable review style affiliate sale websites, I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to affiliate programs. There are six major factors I take into account when choosing an affiliate partner.

Commission Rate
What percentage of each sale you generate do you earn? This varies greatly from program to program but generally anything around 10% is about right. Look at the average price of products being sold and see what you would make per sale, then decide if the amount of traffic you are sending is worth what you are making, or could you monetize it better with adsense or other forms of income?

Cookie Length
Some affiliate programs only give credit for sales made if your visitor instantly buys something upon reaching the buy page. Others set a cookie for the visitor to make sure that if they return within a certain number of days and make a purchase that the affiliate still gets their commission. This is very important, as a large portion of purchases are made after the visitor returns to the merchant's multiple times during the decision making process, 30-day cookies are ideal and should really help maximize your sales.

Link Options
Does the affiliate allow you to directly link to product pages? Some affiliates do not have the appropriate scripting done to allow you to link to any specific page on the site. Does the affiliate allow you to ad link descriptors in your outbound links to help track individual link conversions?

Statistics
Does the affiliate system allow you to track individual link and campaign success? This can help you focus on what products to promote, how to format links, where to place links, and more.

Ad Creative
Do they provide good banners and text links? Do they have multiple sizes to help accommodate several different site layout styles? Good banners do help get hight CTR and can make or break your campaign, if the banner doesn't sell the visitor on clicking, then you won't be able to sell them on buying the product.

Payment Policies
Read into the fine print of payments, how you are paid, when you are paid, payment thresholds and tax information.

Lesson : Small Degrees of Seperation (coke theory)

A large part of successfully creating profitable websites and networks is approaching their development and growth with an effective strategy. Shoemoney wrote an article about The Coke Theory, basically the theory is that building new sites in the same niche as a successful existing site allows you to use each site to promote one another and create a network of profitable sites.

Imagine all your outbound links are to your own sites, if someone doesn't buy something (or click a paying link) on the initial site and moves to another site in the network, there is another possibility to convert that visit into revenue.

Using this strategy also will help you to ramp-up development times for new sites, you have targeted traffic, secured ad space, and a large number of link partners at your fingertips for each new site.