How To Start A Tech Site
Now before you get all excited, let me tell you that most tech sites don't
make that much if any money at all. Some don't even cover their monthly hosting expenses.
Dispite what it might seem like, this is not easy work. It's fun, but not easy. It takes
lots of hours and lots of hard work to build and keep a site going.
Nearly all tech sites make money by selling advertising. A few spin-off E
businesses. An example of an E business spin-off would be Overclockers.com who sells
heatsinks as well as do reviews. Another is HardOCP,
who does reviews and sells a mouse pad call the Ratpadz. However,
banner advertising will be where most tech sites make their money.
Until you can get over 10,000 impressions per month, you'll be limited to
CPA or cost per action banners. These are banners that pay you if a reader clicks on it
and visit the advertiser. You can make about 10 to 25 cents per click. Because CPA banners
are not targetted, the average click rate is less than 1%. That means out of 10,000
impressions, only about 100 people will click on the banner, making you $10 to $25 per
month. There are many CPA banner companies you can use to supply your site with this type
of banners. Some of the better known ones are Eads, Valueclick
and Safe-Audit. There are others
out there but these three should get you going till you're ready to go with CPM banners.
Once your site does more than 10,000 impressions per month you can run
what is known as CPM banners. CPM stands for Cost Per 1000. Unlike a CPA banner, CPM
banner don't pay based on clicks. Instead they pay based on the number of times the banner
is shown. In other words, if the banner is shown 1000 times you will get paid whether or
not the visitor clicks on the banner. Depending on the size of your site you can make
anywhere from $1 to over $30 per 1000 impressions.
There are not as many companies doing CPM banners. They all have higher
traffic requirements than CPA banner companies. Burst Media is where most new tech sites start out because they will
take you if your site does just 10,000 impressions per month.
Beyond Burst, there is Flycast,
who will take you if you do 250,000 impression per month. DoubleClick and AdForce requires your site to run over
1 million impressions per month before they consider you and 24/7 Media requires 2 million. All the
CPM banner companies work on a revenue split, giving you 50 to 70% of the banner money.
The rule of thumb is the bigger your site, the higher CPM you can make.
Burst pays the least, 24/7 Media pays the most. 24/7 Media also has the highest traffic
requirements. You should check out each company carefully. Besides traffic, some have
other requirements for you to meet. For example, 24/7 Media requires that you only run
24/7 Media banners and no one else.
Another thing to look out for is the Paid Ad Vs. Default Ad ratio.
Ideally, every banner served to your site should be paid banners. However, this is never
the case. When a banner company runs out of paid banners they sub in a default banner that
doesn't pay anything or pays when someone does an action, like signing up for a internet
Visa or something. Default ads can run as high as 50% or more during low advertising
periods.
To reduce the defaults you can sign up with two or three banner companies
and rotate them. Both Burst and Flycast let you set which banner to use when a default
banners shows up. You can set it up so if flycast is going to show a default banner, it
goes to Burst to get it, which hopefully will show a paid banner. If Burst is a going to
be a default, you can send it to another banner company and so on.
Nex page: Joining a Network
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