I have been associated with both Rodinhood.com and TheRodinhoods.com past couple of months. I have few queries regarding advertising on one of my startups( www.biharprabha.com,www.news.biharprabha.com,www.jobs.biharprabha.com). I would be glad if you could help.
Is Google Adsense very less paying compared to other ad networks? I usually get 20-30 clicks a day, but could not earn more than 2$/day.
Recently I have partnered with Ethnic Online Network,however it will take sometime to implement their ads.
I wanted to know if you have any experience in various ad agencies, and if so which of them are reliable and you would prefer?Can you suggest few such ad agencies?
Jayesh Gopalan
Hi Rodinhoods!
I too would like to hear the reply for this question.
Please Comment and give your valuable suggestions on this post.
Abey John
Earning via adsense or any form of advertising is a function of the value of the content. As long as you are able to publish content of high value or which is widely read you will attract more readers. India’s top blogger Amit Agarwal earns a six figure $ income every month – labnol.org. Visit his site and see how he does it.
Abhishek Bharadwaj
All I can dig out from the site stats of labnol.org is that about 35% of users are from USA, rest from other developed countries.Only 15 % are from India.
From my experience the average CPC(cost-per-click) of Google adsense in India is 0.2 USD, in US it sometimes goes to 12 USD. This makes a difference
If you have a large viewer base in USA or developed countries of EU, you can generate surplus easily, but for sites like us where 88 % of users are from India, and Indian advertisers are reluctant to pay, it creates a big problem to survive.
Abey John
Right Abhishek. You could try a few other things. Since this is Bihar focused you could make it the destination of choice for non-resident US/EU Biharis. Have exclusive Bihari community related news from outside India.
Hmmm. From what I can see yours is not an ad network problem. It is a traffic problem.
1. I notice is that your content is not unique. Your labourer story is a ditto word for word copy from TOI. You will not gain traction with that. What you need is unique content. Find a couple of writers who can rewrite these news stories. Also figure out how to get included in google news. That should give you a lift in traffic like nothing else. I have a pdf about that somewhere, mail me on aj-at-clickmantra.in and I’ll send it over.
2. You do not need http://www.news.biharprabha.com. Technically www. becomes a sub-sub-domain to the search engines. news.biharprabha.com is sufficient. How much of your site is getting indexed?
3. What sort of marketing activity are you doing to promote the site. Contact every Bihari org/community on the planet and invite them to send their news and information. i.e. you have to make it the #1 destination for Biharis everywhere.
4. Build a large enough audience and then you can worry about the value of the traffic and figure out if you need to migrate to higher paying ad networks. What you need is exclusive content that wont be found anywhere else.
Abhishek Bharadwaj
Thanks Abey…
1. Our idea is to collect the non-criminal, non-political, development stories from various news sources(for Bihar) and present them at a single place. And for that we quote references to the original source often.
2. Although, we have stopped doing so because it takes time to copy the reference source and paste them and it is difficult for a single person to do all this. This wont make any copyright violation when the site is small. But, we have this in our agenda for future for certain.
3. Last month, we went to No 1 position in Google result for the query ‘bihar news'(the most searched keyword after bihar.). It remained there for 24 hours. Then for couple of days we were at No. 2 at some locations. Again we are back to our own position (12-18).I am unable to understand this phenomenon,
Thanks once again for your support.
Abhishek
Abhishek Bharadwaj
If you make a query for ‘bihar news’, you shall get patna-bihar.blogspot.com/ at No-2.
This site is a blog and simply provides the links for RSS feeds using Google News.There are many others who are among the top despite lacking original content.
I have evidences(I cannot share that publicly here) that a leading news portal of our country asked me for the reference of a news article and simply copied and published it.
One another top portal of our country owned by an American giant copies all RSS feeds from my portal and publishes it.
This keeps me in dilemma, what role does original content play in this game??
Abey John
An over simplified answer is that the blogspot page has 4000 backlinks which is enabling it to rank while your news site has 218.
Original content matters a lot, when there is a sea of duplicate content, the ranking algo shifts to other signals which is why you see all the RSS syndicators rising to the top based on other signals.
Are you using the rel=cannonical meta tag on your original content? No point in using it on the content you syndicate from other places.
As an experiment why dont you try to write original content for a week and see the results. Am sure you will see a serious bump in traffic. Just take the news item and rewrite it.