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Just last month I sold a new WP blog on SitePoint and my profit after the sale was just over $800.00. The blog that I sold I would normally get around $100-$150 but I did a couple extra things to make it much more valuable. I'll explain in detail below.
Create Some Quick Feeder Blogs
First what I did, which might change the way you look at it, is I created 2 extra blogs to add to the sale. But, truthfully, I put both of the extra blogs together in just a couple of hours. I didn't do any extras to them like I do on the main blog. They were used solely as feeder blogs to the main money blog. I dressed them up with a nice theme from WooThemes...and why not? It takes just as much time to add a premium theme as it does a free one. Actually, it's usually much quicker to configure a WooTheme using the built-in administration area, but you would only know what I mean if you ever used one.
Anyway... I added a block of AdSense to the feeder blogs although I'm thinking now it might have best to leave it out. Also, I added the RSS feed of the main blog to a widget in the sidebar of the feeder blogs. Other than that I just created some basic red, white, black and blue text banners and linked them to the main money blog. I added one to the sidebar, 1 floating to the right of each post and one below the featured post. Really, using a WooTheme can dictate the placement of the banners, I just fill in the gaps. It's very simple. Oh, and for content, I used Syndicate Kahuna (or Article Marketing Automation) to get free, unique, niche specific content. Get the max allowed articles per day until you reach 10 or 15, then change it to 1 a day and your blogs are ready to go.
Install Geo Targeting So That Your Money Blog Is Monetized For Practically Any Country
The first thing I do to maximize the monetization to as many countries as possible is add a one page eBay store to the main blog using the phpBay pro WP plugin. Almost every niche has products being sold on eBay. Typically when I build a blog using phpBay, I break things down into categories and create one "post" per category. I use posts so that when I submit my RSS feed to the RSS directories, the auctions may be included in the listings. But for the niche blogs that I intend to sell, I simply add a one page listing using one generic keyword. Sometimes I have to add some negative keywords to filter my results. For the most part, this "upgrade" takes about 10 minutes.
Geo Targeting For CPA Offer Ad Placement
Ok, this simple addition to the blog is very powerful and adds quite a bit of value.
As an example of how I used this in the past... I was promoting a certain offer on my main blog which paid $35 but was only for U.S. traffic. The same product, but on a different CPA network paid $30 but catered to both U.S. and Canadian traffic. Then I found another similar offer paying $29 which catered to U.S., Canada and the U.K.
I could have simply chose the $29 offer which allowed me to promote to all 3 countries but instead I chose all 3 offers and used a custom geo targeting script so I knew which offer to show based on the customers country.
Here's how it works in a nutshell. I added one line of code to the very top of the "header" file in my theme. This line of code triggered a script (and since it is in the header, it is triggered on ALL pages) that looked at the IP Address of the visitor, compared it to a database of IP Addresses to determine the visitors country. The script stores the 2 letter country code in a variable. Now, if I want to place an ad in the sidebar for example, I run a simple if-test to say something like... if the country is "US" show the HTML for the US ad, if it is "CA" then show the HTML for the Canadian ad...and so on. It's actually very very simple to implement. I will be giving away my custom script (with instructions) later today or tomorrow to the readers of my newsletter, but you can get everything that you need for it to create your own from the MaxMind web site, specifically this page here.
MaxMind GeoLite Country Free IP Address to Country DB
Regardless of whether you use my script or create your own, if you use the MaxMind approach, you may want to keep your IP address DB up-to-date. It gets updated monthly. Personally, I don't sweat it too much. I might update it every few months if that. There is a DB that they offer for sale, as well as a free one. The free open source database that MaxMind provides offers 99.5% accuracy which is good enough for me :) I guess it returns "US" for all AOL users, but for my purposes that's fine.
Customizing The Ad For Each Country
A cool easy thing to do for your ads is to customize them for each country. For example, you might put something like "Now available in Canada..." and/or display a small Canadian flag on the ad for Canadian users.
What To Do When You Don't Have An Offer For A Specific Country
Obviously with the example above I am only able to present my offer to 3 different countries. What do I do with the rest of the traffic to squeeze out the money making potential? I do one of two things. Sometimes I display an ad promoting the auctions. Since the auctions are on a page and generally there is just one small link in the navigation bar pointing to it, it doesn't hurt to display an ad promoting the auctions to all of the "extra" countries. eBay allows you to promote to several major countries and with the geo-trageting in place in your phpBay plugin it will automatically show auctions specific to the country of the visitor. Incidentally, the free geo-trageting upgrade to phpBay uses the same MaxMind database discussed above.
Now, if you don't want to promote the auctions for whatever reason or your niche doesn't have any products available on eBay you can just display AdSense ads to all of the extra countries.
There you have it...those 2 things, I believe, increased the value of the blog(s) to the point where I could command a much higher amount. Hope this post helps you and gives you a bit of interest in blog flipping. Best of luck.
Tags: make-money, make-money-from-home, blogger, making-money-on-the-internet, how-to-earn-money
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March 5th, 2009 at 6:17 am
awesome post and some very clever thinking as always keith, really enjoying your blog. i must have read single post on keithjameslock.com by now. Thanks for sharing your script with your readers, much appreciated and keep up the good work, alan