|
Whether it’s the economic slowdown or inherent problems with the PPC parking business model, if you're like me you've seen your PPC income steadily decline over the past 12-18 months. This article isn't meant to be an analysis of the pros and cons of the parking model, but instead an objective analysis of alternative means of type-in domain monetization.
Parked.com remains my preferred parking provider - from customer service, to their tracking, reporting, landers and ability to add custom content, Parked meets the vast majority of my needs. For traffic that Parked.com cannot monetize, I make use of their ability to route secondary traffic to alternate providers. Since Parked lost the Ask feed, this feature has become invaluable to me. Their secondary feeds just don't cut it - but unfortunately there still aren't great alternatives out there. I'm sure any of you who own great Indian traffic domains can feel my pain.
So what have I been doing to stem the receding tide of PPC earnings? First of all, I've stopped looking at my parking account as an end, but rather as a means to an end. Think of it as an incubator if you will. When you acquire a new domain, toss it in the parking account and let it warm up - if it shows signs of life its time to get moving. I started out by building out my highest traffic names - unfortunately in the vast majority of cases, I saw a drop in my earnings. It also takes a lot of time and ongoing effort to keep the sites up to date. There are options out there for automated mini-sites, but personally I have an aversion to syndicating content - you're just never going to get the SEO results you want if you're using duplicate content.
My favorite way of monetizing type-in domains at the moment is through CPA offers. This method isn't for all types of traffic, but if you have the right domains you can see great results.
There are a ton of CPA networks out there - you may already have accounts with some of the big players such as CJ.com, Shareasale.com, Linkshare.com, etc. I've always had decent results with CJ.com, Shareasale.com really caters to smaller offers, so they have probably the broadest coverage of small niches - but not necessarily the highest payouts. Linkshare.com I would avoid. I'm currently running a few profitable offers through them, but their reporting is maddening. Reporting routinely goes down for days and even weeks, leads and sales disappear and support is non existent. Ok, enough of the Linkshare rant.
My preferred CPA network is Neverblue.com. You'll have to have a website to get on with them, and once you apply they'll conduct a phone interview in order to approve you. But, these are all signs of a quality network. Every affiliate gets phone, email and AIM access to a dedicated account manager. Best of all, unllike the other networks where after being accepted you still have to apply and wait to be approved for each individual offer, approval to Neverblue gives you instant access to nearly all offers they run so you can get started right away. Neverblue also has the best payouts and a large number of offers that pay on leads and email submits which are easier to convert than sales. Tracking and reporting is also tops in the affiliate space.
Ok, so here's how I used a Neverblue offer to increase my earnings per visitor to one of my type-in domains by over 7x from $.52/per unique visitor to $4.00/per unique visitor.
Click picture for full size image
With a CTR over 100% it seems crazy to move this domain - my RPC was $.43, or $.52 per visitor and I earned $28.92 in an 11 day period.
Now here are my Neverblue.com stats for the following 11 day period:
Click picture for full size image My visitors were down 27% in this period, but my revenue increased 453%, earning $4.00 per visitor and $160 in 11 days.
The only thing I had to do was find an offer that matched what I already knew my visitors were looking for. You can use Parked.com's traffic analysis to tell you what links they are clicking and what advertisers are advertising. In a lot of cases, you'll find CPA arbitragers advertising on your domains - all we're doing here is cutting out the middlemen - the parking companies, the feed provider, the affiliate marketers. Once you find your offer, its as simple as enabling URL forwarding at your registrar and forwarding the traffic to your affiliate link.
It really couldn't be simpler to monetize your domains via CPA and recapture the money that the other players in the online advertising space are siphoning off of your traffic.
|
