As many of you know, I launched Carbon Fiber Gear back in December of 2007.  For over a year it stood fairly stagnant, not really getting much attention or updates from me, and then I started to take it pretty seriously.  So how has it grown in that amount of time?

It’s not the biggest site in the world, but it has been growing pretty rapidly lately, and I haven’t had one month where the amount of search engine traffic hasn’t grown.  The site has been ranked on Google’s first page for the term “carbon fiber” which has definitely helped things move along.

With the site I’ve tried to have at minimum 2 new posts per week on the editorial schedule.  That way my readers know to expect new content.  This has surely helped drive traffic, and gain more SE visibibility.  Take a look at this chart which shows the amount of traffic from search engines on a monthly basis since the site started:

Lately, I’ve been seeing a good 15-20% growth per month.  When the numbers are starting to get this high (20,000 uniques/month), it’s really starting to make a huge difference on the bottom line.

To help capitalize on this newfounded traffic, I’ve recently redesigned the site to better promote older content (since the content mostly is not time sensitive), as well as promote other sections of the site (like our store).  In turn I’ve found that our pageviews per visitor has gone up, and our bounce rate has come down.  Huge wins!

My main point of this post is that while I’m nowhere near the amount of traffic I’d like to ultimately bring to the site, they are decent numbers…but look at how much time it took to get there.  Don’t give up if you don’t see results over night.  It takes time to build up a site and really generate a loyal userbase, if you keep pumping out good content, things will happen.

Carbon Fiber Gear originally started out as an experiment for myself in affiliate marketing. The idea was to highlight carbon fiber parts and products, some that utilized affiliate links, and others that did not. Through the time that I’ve had the site launched, I’ve taken it into a few different directions.

Originally it was just a blog, powered by Wordpress, using a free template. I then later launched an eBay store on the blog utilizing the phpBay script. Afterwards I created a custom design, and converted the phpBans script into BANS. Now I’ve hired my first contributing writer, and the site is really starting to progress into its own real brand.

In the past I hadn’t really taken advertising too seriously on the site. I had run some AdSense, and it brought a few dollars here and there. I wanted to start selling some real advertising, so I had to setup a plan.

At first I created a 300×250 spot on the top left sidebar, and wanted to offer it up for $150/month. The spot was to be exclusive, so one advertiser would fill it, and would run on 100% of the impressions for the month. A couple of days ago, I decided to change that 300×250 spot to 2-4 125×125 spots that will cost $25/month each.

This will allow me to sell a variety of spots and not count on just one advertiser. I also will only be accepting month to month contracts as opposed to multi-month contracts at a discounted rate because the site is growing fairly quickly…and $25/month is more like an introductory price to get advertisers in the door.

Once I had everything setup, I wrote up an advertising page with information advertisers would need. All of the advertising is served using Google Ad Manager for tracking and trafficking purposes. Google Ad Manager is fairly complex, but once you understand the system it’s very nice. Shoemoney has praised it as well.

While I don’t expect advertisers to come knocking on the door, I suspect if I actually go out and try to sell the spots I wouldn’t have too much of a problem considering the low cost, amount of traffic, and very targeted carbon fiber niche. I’m still not very driven to work on the advertising at this point in time, but the opportunity is now out there. I suspect this will be a big part of Carbon Fiber Gear in the future, and I will continue to create new opportunities as the demand progresses.

I made two changes to my blog, and I was surprised to notice that my CPC rates are now 5-10x what they were. What did I do? First I added AdSense section targeting, and second, I removed advertising from the page.

AdSense section targeting allows you to specifically exactly where Google should be scanning your page to deliver targeted ads. The entire reason AdSense is so effective is because the advertisements are meant to be targeted to the reader and the context that they have an interest about in the first place. The more targeted, the higher the click-through-rates, and more than likely more money to be made. Rather than just putting the standard AdSense code on your page, you can wrap you the content you want to either target or filter out using section targeting. If you want Google to target a specific area (for example the main content of your post), simply wrap it around this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you want to filter out specific sections of your page, you can wrap those in this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Write your content here

<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

The second thing I did was simply remove two of the three AdSense spots that I had on the site. I had a 468×60 on the top of the posts, a 160×600 on the sidebar, and a 468×60 on the bottom of the posts. I only kept the 468×60 on the top for now, and I noticed that the ads are much better, and my CPC rates have been averaging over $1 a click. Previously, I’d be lucky to get 25 cents. Taking other AdSense ads off of the page can make a huge difference in CPC rates because Google can only fulfill so many spots, and each one is worth less. This reason is why some people will limit Google advertising to limited spots and use other types of ads in other spots in order to maximize revenue. Of course, you should be doing some testing to see what works best for you.

There are some very interesting rumors going around in the ad serving technology market today. DoubleClick, which is the ad server for huge sites such as Yahoo! and AOL, may be bought out by Microsoft…or even Google.

The company was purchased by a private-equity firm for $1.2 billion, but it looks like they are interesting in selling the company, or even creating an IPO for an estimated $2.0 billion. Microsoft is said to be one of the top choices for picking up DoubleClick. What would this mean for competing publishers such as Yahoo! and AOL?

The most interesting part of the news is that there are rumors of Google developing its own ad server that would compete with the likes of DoubleClick’s system. The ad server system would be nothing like AdWords, but it would allow publishers to traffic any kind of ads, regardless of it being from Google or not. The questions to ask is:

• Will it cost money?
• If it’s free, how will Google monetize on it?
  • My guess is that publishers would be required to run at least a certain percentage of Google ad inventory
• Who will the customers be?
  • Is it mean for any site that needs an ad server? Or will it be for corporate companies such as AOL and Yahoo!? Or will it meet both markets?

Whatever happens, the next few months will definitely be interesting in the ad serving world.

I found an excellent tool provided by Feedburner if your feed is run through them. It’s called FeedFlare, and if you don’t already have it activated, get on it! FeedFlare is the feature on the bottom of each RSS feed post that shows you important links such as “E-mail this * Add A Comment * Digg This, etc”.

I’ve seen it on other blogs before, but I just started to look for how to add myself tonight. Login to your Feedburner admin and click on the optimize tab. On the left you’ll see the FeedFlare option on the menu. Once you click that you’ll see all of the options for the different “FeedFlares” you can have. I added the 4 above for now, as you don’t want to have too much that it overbears the reader. If you don’t see something you want, you can browse the catalog for more, or even develop your own using their API.

Something that takes just a few seconds to add can drastically improve your blog, increase interactivity with your readers, and bring in new traffic.

SmashingMagazine is the king of websites for building compilation lists of some of the coolest stuff on the web. Their newest guide is a list of Google AdSense facts, FAQs, and tools. For somebody like me that hasn’t had much experience with AdSense, I’m trying to take in as much as possible in order to make it as effective as possible for myself. On top of that, I use AdWords for two of my businesses, so it’s always good to see how things work from the other side of the fence.

They have compiled twenty quotes that will help you do things like place your ads on your site so that the click-through rates are higher.

??Format is important for multiple ad units, display your ad units where repeat users will notice them, place a leaderboard immediately after the last post.?

There are some other great links for other resources. For example I found a new tool that I installed for Firefox which displays your AdSense statistics in the status bar:

There is some great stuff on the site, and will provide hours of good information.

I am technically out of Google’s sandbox as I am seeing backlinks for my domain name in Google. This is great news because it means that Google now “trusts” my site, so I should start seeing more and more traffic from them over time. You can check your own domain by simply going to this URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=www.yourdomain.com. I’ll be doing some analytics on the amount of search engine traffic over time in order to see how it grows, so that should be interesting. In the meantime, people have searched these keywords in Google and got to this blog…keep in mind this blog was just launched 12 days ago:

• www.nevblog.com: 8 Visits
• david pitlyuk: 2 Visits
• 2007 yellow dodge viper: 2 Visits
• ted leonsis: 2 Visits
• nevblog.com: 1 Visits
• wii stock: 1 Visits
• rebuilding helicopters: 1 Visits
• media temple (mt): 1 Visits
• new ugly lamborghini: 1 Visits
• lamborghini alar: 1 Visits
• double din touchscreen for car pc: 1 Visits
• nintendo wii hard to find march 2007: 1 Visits
• viper paint code: 1 Visits
• in dash pc din: 1 Visits
• 2007 dodge viper silver: 1 Visits
• virginia’s biggest houses: 1 Visits
• interspire problem: 1 Visits
• heli expo 2007: 1 Visits
• gummi bear chandelier: 1 Visits
• mansion expensive houses images: 1 Visits
• wordpress ajax rating: 1 Visits
• heli-expo rss: 1 Visits
• lamborghini alar: 1 Visits
• first day of my blog visitors: 1 Visits
• still hard to find wii march 2007: 1 Visits
• picture mansion modern gorgeous: 1 Visits

I will provide more analysis at the beginning of next month, but it’s exciting to see the progression take place so quickly.

Today, Google announced a new advertising format called Pay-per-action. I’ve always referred to this as CPA or cost-per-action.

What Is It?

This is going to be a major deal in online advertising from both the publisher and the advertiser perspective. Google advertising has always worked on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis where the advertiser would pay when a user clicks on their ad. With this new model, the advertiser will only pay when the user does a certain action, like filling out a form or buying something. In this new model, it does not matter how impressions or clicks are generated from the ad, as no payment is due until the action is completed. Some of the actions would be:

• Leads
• Signups
• Site interactions/pageviews
• Sales (always the same value)
• Sales (% of sale with many different sale values)

I have signed up to be a beta tester with my automotive site, ActiveTuning, as we currently use AdWords for part of our advertising budget. I haven’t decided how I’ll use it, but as of now I’m thinking that I will be looking for sales as well as leads/site interactions. I’ll use the leads for a scenario where a user will get as far as adding a product to their shopping cart, but may not necessarily go through the entire checkout process. It will definitely be a new world in terms of tweaking and playing around with different formats to see what works the best. Hopefully I am accepted as a beta tester.

Conversions would be tracked by using Google’s conversion tracking.

Making It Work

PPA works, and if optimized correctly can make much more money. An advertiser is willing to pay more for an action rather than a click because they can pre-formulate the ROI (return on investment). For example if I have a product that costs $100 and my cost is $60. I know I have up to $40 to play with before I start losing money on the product sale. Rather than pay $1/click where maybe the ratio of clicks-to-sale end up being $20 and 20 publishers essentially made $1…I’d be more willing to pay $10 to one publisher to generate that same one sale.

The problem is actually making it work. What I mean by that is making an ad that is just asking to be clicked so that as a publisher you can actually provide leads to advertisers that convert. The best way to do this is not by your regular banner ads, but by highly targeted in-content ads. For example if I write a review on a digital camera, a link in the review directly to a vendors product page that sells the camera will more than likely have a high sales conversion rate.

This is where Google’s new ad format called “text-link ads” comes in:

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to

Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we’ve found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

This new format will really help out in terms of making PPA successful for the advertiser, publisher, and ad network (Google in this case). It will be interested what other ad products come out of all of this.

Thanks to Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, as his post made me aware of Google’s announcement.