The Black Bible of the Increasing Hits
by Micky Bou
Since some time ago (too much time in my opinion) we are flashed daily by news about the huge monsters, million dollar valued, top level predators in our life chain as Myspace, YouTube, MSN, Digg, Yahoo, and the 'G-star', Tyrannosaurus Rex in this jurassic universe, Google. Following this comparison terms, my web sites are like small mouses running around, looking always up with fear of being splashed by the enormous feet of those dinosaurs.
Oh well, they are talking about their web access reports in terms we can hardly understand. Indeed, the distance between those big bosses and all of us is growing every day. Its really like a third world country (where banana export is the most important government priority) and where rich are growing rich and poor are getting poor as time goes by...
At the beginning I was a believer too in those magic articles about the Word of the Increasing Hits, the Search Engine Friendly Design Truth, and I was traveling through confusing Holy Books (for an affordable price) like an online Templar in my Quest for the Google Bible, with no success at all.
Well, I tried it hard, and built an online book store in collaboration with one important university of my country. Time passed and we got a PageRank 5 and soon we were serving daily about one thousand pages.
DON'T LAUGH, for me this was a really serious amount, and thought I was going on the right way at last.
So, I started with AdSense, the
make money for nothing solution that rules the online world, infested by empty content pre-made web sites and... I got $30 monthly. Wow, thats really impressive, what will my family think about it? Ah... almost forgot, I spent in AdWords about $1000. Want more? here you have a real example for one of my sites:
Page Impressions:
205.263 CTR:
0,10% Clicks:
216 Conversions:
0
The numbers are talking, I really don't believe that site is so bad to get this results... or perhaps I should change my profession and start selling hotdogs, really considering it...
If you have AdWords, just take a look over the stats, you will see that the average CTR on the sites your Ad is published is about
0,10% (this can be greater in sites serving less pages). This means that you get 10 clicks every 10.000 page impressions, and this costs you about $6. Of course you can spend hours and hours trying to choose the sites with better CTR in order to get more clicks for less money, but the fact is that if you want a significant amount of new users daily on your site, AdWords is too expensive and brings you too few users, and even worst, most of them will leave your site on the very first page.
Why? Is not your content good enough? I don't think so. The main reason is that a great percentage of people clicking Ads is coaxed by suspicious marketing strategies, well posicioned and ambiguous adverts, and the main problem,
CLICK FRAUD.
For me, click fraud is not only important when someone is arrested because used a bot and tried to get $500.000 from Google's pocket. Click fraud too is when your forum members or friends make a click without real interest in the advertising subject, but more in helping your site (of course, with the best intentions).
In conclusion, I am afraid Internet Marketing is, unfortunately, like a great Casino where we will never get so much money as we spend (plus hours and hours of hard work) with the hope of getting the $1.000.000 Big Prize the day we find the Perfect Startup Holy Grail.
Good luck everybody in this Quest, you will need it indeed.
About the Author:
Micky Bou is a domain and web hosting company owner. He has been working on the Internet since 1993, and is currently the director of
YSI.NET, a firm providing low cost domain registration and web hosting services. He has worked on many web site projects and is collaborating on the task of providing
Internet Zones with original content. If you want to collaborate too, you can submit to us your article by clicking
here.
Article Source:
Internet Zones
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