ReadWrite Web has published their list of predictions for 2008. They actually did pretty good on their predictions for this year so it may make sense for anyone publishing blogs and website to pay attention. While not all their predictions came true, Google did not release a Google Operating system, but they where correct with how much RSS has grown and there have been quite a few new rich web based applications released this year. While Google did not create and release their own operating system, they did continue their move into the Rich Application arena with improvements to Gmail, and their office type apps with Google Docs.

One thing that is predicted to happen is that Google will start to feel more pressure from other companies in the area of Search. I personally would like to see this happen as Google is becoming to much of a monopoly. Hopefully Live will be able to take some ground in search and force Google to stop beating up on the little guy as they have done lately. Microsoft has deep pockets and I fully expect them to start pushing pressure on Google in several areas. As Vista reaches more of any adoption in businesses this year, I’m sure this will help Microsoft take back some ground from Google in several areas. Microsoft has built quite a few features into the platform that while it does not force users to choose the live products, it is a lot easier to utilize the MS products than it is with products from third party companies.

We should also start to see an increase in the number of advertisers offering contextual advertising programs. This will be really good for the small publishers as it will provide more avenues to earn revenue for your sites. Adsense is still a good choice for a lot of sites, I still use it on other of my sites, but it is not earning the same amount as it as a year ago with increased traffic. Perhaps more competition in this area will force Google to start paying a little better to its publishers. Regardless any competition in this area will help both Advertisers and publishers in their contextual advertising efforts.

It will be very interesting to see how many of their predictions come true.

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If you are a regular visitor to this blog then you may have noticed, the new Bidvertiser ads sprinkled around. I started running these about a week ago just to try it out. I did not really expect a lot since I used to run Google Adsense on this blog and it never did very well at all.

My overall CTR for Google Adsense is fairly decent, but on this site it never performed. Even when I did get clicks the payout was only a penny or two. Needless to say I did not expect much out of Bidvertiser on this site. well its only been running a week or two and my CTR is still not great, but I have noticed when I get links they are worth a lot more. So much more that I may dump Adsense on one or two other of my sites which are focused towards ad clickers and see how it performs there. I need to ensure there are ads focused towards my niches on those sites, but if the revenue per click sticks to the same percentage I’ve seen on this site and they have relevant ads, then I could triple my PPC based revenue across my virtual real-estate. If you have sites that perform decent with Adsense, but not to the level you expect them too, then Bidvertiser may be worth checking out.

The program has similar amenities as Google Adsense, although they are fairly new and they don’t have as many advertisers as the Jolly Green Google Giant, but it is still fairly new and seems to have some potential. In addition to the higher paying ads, they also have a referral program like Google has, but their referral program works a little better in my opinion, read its not as hard to earn the minimum payout so it stands to reason that even sites with little to no traffic may be able to earn money and thus earn you commissions for sites you refer. I’ve been with Google for a little over three years and I have referred quite a few publishers to their system, but I have yet to be paid by Google for any of my referrals. This is because with the hundred dollar payout at Google, a lot of Adsense publishers never earn their first check. With bidvertiser the minimum amount for payment is $10 dollars so this should allow more people to actually get something for their efforts.

Technorati tags: making money, adsense, google, revenue, bidvertiser

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For those of you who have been subscribers to this blog for quite a while you will no that I write a good bit about Internet Marketing. The main reason I started writing about this subject is because at the time I started this blog I was spending a lot of time on the Warrior Forum. There are some posts in that forum that offer some great ideas for marketing on the Internet, but  there are also a lot of people on the forum who are just trying to rip people off.

You can go there just about any day and find a post talking about some Internet Marketing Guru and how they made millions of dollars on their last eBook. Most of these Gurus are selling some ebook or software that promises to make you millions if you will just follow the directions and take action. I’ll admit I’ve purchased a few of these products, but I did not make millions. I guess I’m just no smart enough or I did not follow the directions properly. Or it may have been that my morals would not allow me to take advantage of someone else, which is what a lot of these books teach. I’m not saying they all do, but there are some practices which I would deem as unethical. I’m not saying they all are pushing crap, but it does happen a lot more than you would think.

Of course I’ve always wondered a couple of things. If these Gurus are so great at building web communities and they have been building these since the web was an infant, then you would think you could find their name associated with one of the huge online ventures that have made millions or been sold for millions or billions. But outside of John Reese, you can’t really find any of these names associated with any really big popular sites. At least I have not been able to find any association. If I’m incorrect, will someone please correct me.

Now while I don’t doubt that there are probably thousands of websites these people own and operate, I don’t know of any really big popular sites. This tells me that most of these people own small sites that bring in a few visitors per day and they make their money in the form of a few pennies each day multiplied by the thousands of sites. In fact the few sites I have found show this to be the norm. Now while this may be a valid business model for some it seems like a lot of work when you could just build one large authority site, promote it like crazy and come out better in the long run. Of course this  is not the main promoted business model promoted. The main idea of most Internet Marketers seems to be build a site with 10 or so rewashed PLR articles, promote it to a few directories to fool the Search engines into indexing it, spam your link through out the web to get a few people visiting the site and then do this 5 to 10 times every day. So you build small site after site registering a domain name for each one. Or you take a domain name, utilize some sort of site generating software or RSS feed and have the software create the site for you. You slap some adsense or Affiliate programs on these sites and hope for a few clicks and maybe a purchase. You can build thousands of these and earn some money from them. These seems really expensive to me. If you register a domain name with Godaddy you can spend $9 dollars per top level domain per year. Now you can get an unlimited domain hosting account fairly cheap, but the domain name registrations are going to cut into your profits.

Now once you have these sites built, you throw together an eBooks and build a sales page promoting the book. Put your book on Clickbank and wait for the sales to come in. Sometimes if the copy is good enough on the sales page, then the sales will come in. Of course then you talk others into promoting your eBook as affiliates then you can sell more. Now you don’t really care if anyone actually learns how to make money, you really don’t want them to become self sufficient. for everyone who actually learns how to make enough money to become self sufficient, the Guru loses a potential customer.

The one main rule of any selling business is to make the customer come back and buy again and again. The trick to be successful is to make the product quality just good enough to impose a level of satisfaction with the customer, but of the quality that the customer never needs to buy another copy or version in the case of eBooks.

All this may be acceptable for some but for me, I’m not sure if my ethics allow me to be associated with this type of business.

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