BinaryDay

I had recently written about most viewed video on youtube. Related research shows that there is a massive demand for free bollywood movies onine. There are many websites that allow users to download free bollywood movies. There is also no dearth of websites to watch online bollywood movies. I have been trying to figure out a feasible business model for starting a website where users can watch free movies. I am not able to find much content related to the legal aspects of the topic. If any of you happen to have any experience in the topic, then please drop me a mail.

Also do you know if working on a seo project for a website which may be illegal is legal or not. My previous posts about romantic hindi songs and romantic hindi movie may get me a project from a site about bollywood hindi movies. I am not sure if it is legal though. What should I do?

Having a good product is necessary for a company to be successful. However will only a great product make a company successful? What happens if noone has ever heard of its products? So if you have a great product. People already know about the product and they are queueing up infront of stores to buy your products. Do you need to do anything else? Yes. Collect money from them. Without this last step, you will have a great charity, not a business.

It is so much easier to agree on the obvious when you are talking about something you are not involved. Now take the logic from the above paragraph and apply to what you are doing i.e blogging. The content that you are producing is the product. You need good content. But ONLY good content will take you nowhere. People need to know about your content. Think SEO/SMM. Finally you need to be able to collect money from them, which takes us to monetization.

Summary: To make a living blogging, you need to

1. Create great content
2. Promote the content so that people know about it.
3. Finally monetize the traffic so that eyeballs are converted into bank balance.

I shall be writing a number of post related to how to convert great content into bank balance in the next few posts. I hope you have already signed up for my feed already.

To understand the concept, read my earlier post about blogger’s dilemma

Optimizing adsense positions has really worked wonders for binaryday, pushing the eCPM to more than 10$. Primarily, I used optimization tips provided by Google. Here are some of the important adsense optimization tips that have worked for me. However do not just read these tips. Loginto your adsense account and start making the changes. All these changes can be effected in less than 15 minutes and you shall be surprised by the result.

The first adunit shows the ads with the highest revenue per click ads. Make sure that it is the ad unit with the highest Clcik-Through-Rate as well. Use of CSS can make it difficult to know what is the first ad unit. Visit the page from your browser and do a view source. Scroll down the html code. The first block of adsense that you see is your first ad unit. Use custom channels to check that it is the one with the highest CTR.

Size matters. Google’s data says wider ad units outperform the narrow ones. What do you use?

Do you still use wordpress built in search box on your blog. Stop throwing away serious money and start usings an adsense for search box.

Site targetted ads increase the competition for your advertisement place and there by increase your earnings. Modify the default message to convert more advertisers into site-targetted advertisers for your site.

The corner of the ad uniit makes a difference. Increase your earnings by using rounded corners for your ad units.

Go Borderless
Place your adsense unit below the header of your posts and directly below the border. Removing the border between content and adsense unit can result in an increase in CTR of as much as 300%. Binaryday uses this trick to the letter

Match your ads to the content
In May 2005 google published the secret to dogbreedinfo doubling its income to more than $650 a day. The simple tip that doubled the earning was use unobtrusive advertisements. It is not like for nothing that all adsense Guru suggest this as the first tip.

Way back in January 2006, Google published this simple but effective optimization tip for blogs. To get the best results from adsense, you should choose the right ad format for your blog and then place it at a place, where people will see it. Also make sure to use section targetting to get ads targetted to the specific post.

How to make money online is one of the few topics that will never go out of fashion. Top bloggers are making millions of dollars. More than enough has been written about the topic of how to make money online, some good ones and mostly lot of crap. I will not try to reinvent the wheel, rather I shall be sumarizing some of the best articles on the topic.

Many beginners think of blogging as the only way to make money online. However that is not the case with 50% people using other methods to make money. You can make money by Website Design,Selling ebooks,Software Development etc. Pick a method that is compatible with your skill sets

In this post, I have concentrated heavily on how to make money from blogging, simply because this research was done by me for myself, to start making money from binaryday. To summarize all the articles that I have read about how to make money online from your blog, I can say that the most popular methods are 1. adsense 2. other advertisement networks and 3. affiliate marketing

Getting the best out of adsense: Adsense continues to be the most popular method for monetizing blogs. However the golden word with adsense is optimization. It is possible to increase the income from the same blog by 6 folds through proper optimization. To get better income from adsense, always use bigger formats, choose the color scheme that blends with your blog and place the advertisements blocks in locations that are more prominent.

To be continued as my research gets completed.

I am sure you are aware of bloggers in the USA who make more than a million dollar from adsense. Well noone from India has got that sort of success. However many people like you and me are making a really good earning by using adsense on their blogs.

Some of these bloggers post their earnings report online. I know few of them personally. So I just thought that I will create a list of people who have managed to earn more than 200$ per month from their blog.

Any post about indian bloggers can not be complete without talking about Amit agarwal of Digital Inspiration. Amit earns in 6 figure USD i.e more than 50 lakh rupees a year from blogging alone.

Next in line is Madhur Kapoor of whoismadhur.com. This october he made more than 500$ from his blog. Unlike Amit, Madhur blogs along with a regular job. Hence that number looks quite impressive to me. You can see Madhur’s earnings report as a proof.

Nihar from Niharsworld also made more than 500$. See Nihar’s earnings report. Techbangalore also seems to be making 500$ a month. Virgintech made 200$. It is not a earnings report like earlier proofs. You will have to read the entire post to locate the line where he mentions about making 200$ a month from the blog. I personally know a couple of bloggers at least who earn more than 400$ a month.

What is the point of this post?

Quite simple. Blogging and adsense presents a unique oppurtunity to India. In a world where a software engineer in good companies makes 400$ a month, people are making that much by spending 1-2 hours a day on blogging. I am surprised that many more people are not starting to write blogs. I hope that this blog post will increase the awareness about blogging as a highly profitable hobby.

If anyone wants to start blogging and needs some help, feel free to contact me. I shall help you with all the knowledge that I have accumulated over a period of time.

I am not sure if Techies in India have realized the oppurtunity that the iphone store presents to us. I think this is one ares that is begging to be dominated by us. Surprisingly I have not seen much enthusiasm about the same in the Indian blogosphere.

Think about it. The apps store has sold apps worth more than 30 million $ in 1 month alone. Even after taking apple’s cut from this the developers have made 21 million $ or 80 crore rupees in 1 month!!!! source

Why do I say this domain is begging to be dominated by us? Because of the long tail phenomenon. The top 10 apps accounted for only 9 million or just 30% of the total.

It means that there are lot of apps that made small amount of money. What is one strength that is required to win a fragmented market like this?? It is the ability to be the low cost producer. Which country has that capacity in abundance?? That is the logic for my conclusion that the iphone apps market shall be completely dominated by Indian techies.

Only if we wake up to the oppurtunity fast enough. The window of oppurtunity remains open till the apps market gets its dominant player.

Getting paid for reading advertisements was one of the favorite ideas with the VCs in the web1.0 era. Seems like those ideas are coming back into fashion. However this time in the mobile advertisement sphere.

After mGinger, now we have paisa4sms that promises to pay you 20 paisa for each sms that you recieve. More importantly they claim to pay you 5 Rupees for each person that joins your network.

So if you have a good network of friends or if you have a popular blog then you can easily monetize the same with paisa4sms.

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog ) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.

If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.

Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.

Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.

Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.