Can a Million Dollars be Earned from a Website?

Over the last month several online revenue streams have been evaluated as the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under has progressed. Whenever you are attempting to achieve something like the task that has been set, as things progress it is important to evaluate what has been working, what hasn't and change course accordingly.

The revenue streams that have been focused on to date are primarily..

• Sports Betting
• Google AdSense
• Donations
• Trademe (NZ's Version of Ebay)

The traffic building methods we have tried include

• Blog Explosion type sites
• Swapping Links with other Blogs
• Technorati Tags
• Article Writing
• Commenting on other Blogs

Revenue Stream Analysis

Sports Betting - This did not get off to a great start, and I think that you need to be extremely careful if this type of revenue avenue is to be explored, do not spend to much time or money on it would be my advice to date. However maybe more careful research is required on my part.

Google AdSense - I continue to be impressed with the AdSense model, it has been a reliable source of income for this blog, and although a very minor amount of money is involved it has the potential to exponentially increase along with Blog traffic. I highly recommend Google AdSense as a revenue earning tool. If you want to sign up for AdSense, you can do via the image link to the right. (This link will send you to Google AdSense and list this site as the referrer. When you earn your first 100 $ I will also receive a payment)

Donations - To date I have earned nothing from the donations requested on this site. However that does not mean that they are not worthwhile, it would only take 1 decent donation and that could far outweigh Google Money.

Trademe - Unfortunately have not really had anything worthwhile to sell to date, this is definitely worth more focus going forwards, because it is a great way to make money.

Building Traffic

Blog Explosions - Although I was initially quite keen on the idea behind these, I have changed my mind somewhat. For one thing from what I can gather Google AdSense appears to frown upon them, and also most of the visitors that you would gain from such a program are often not really interested in the content of your site. Still probably worth listing your site with them however, a link is a link. I would however rather get my traffic the old fashioned way, through blood, sweat and tears!

Swapping Links - A number of the visitors to this site come from other sites that have linked to this one, another nice feature of linking to others is that it helps your Techorati Ranking. So remember if you are looking to boost your Technorati Ranking, and don't mind helping me out at the same time, please place a link on your site and let me know via a comment on this blog. I will then place a reciprocal link on this site. Thanks to all the great sites that have linked to me in the past, which has also helped me expand the content of this site by linking to them.

Technorati Tags - I cant really say that I get a lot of traffic from Technorati, however it is important to tag your blog appropriately as this makes it a lot easier for people to find it! Hopefully as the site matures more traffic will be fed from the Technorati Portal.

Article Writing - Writing is what this blog is all about really, I look forward to submitting some of the articles to places like ezinearticles in the future. At this stage I have not submitted any from this particular blog, however have received hits from my other blog via articles so realize that it can be a nice solution in the hunt for long term traffic generation ideas.

Commenting - I have found that commenting on other blogs is a good way to get a return visit and often a return comment as well! Most bloggers are interested in the people that comment and read their blogs, so this method of traffic generation is a great one!

Be sure to check back regularly for updates on our Project, it is turning out to be a very interesting journey!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Technorati Tags - What are they and how do they work?

Firstly lets get Technoratis defininition of what exactly a tag is!

Reference: http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html

Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize
their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense.

You can tag a post with anything you like, you can even make up a tag! To view blog posts,that have the tag of "million dollar experiment" you can just go to this link http://technorati.com/tag/million%20dollar%20experiment and see them all.

You can view the most popular tags at http://technorati.com/tag/pop I see today the most popular tag is microsoft, followed by Iraq? Two subjects that seem to be forever talked about.

Great thats what a tag is, now how can we use this to make our posts popular and should we bother?

Well the good news for Blogger Beta users like myself is that by adding labels to our Posts, Technorati will automatically pick them up and tag them.

It is certainly worth the small amount of effort because it makes your site easier to find in the blogosphere.

The only downside to this whole process is that because effectively anyone can tag a post as anything, and it does not always mean that the tag is relevant to the content of the post. However readers will quickly get sick of sites that do not appropriately tag their content.

There is also the possibility of confusion, where one person may feel that a tag is relevant and another may not, however it is hard to make everybody happy all of the time.

Now I have to try and figure out what to tag this post with.....

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!