Multi-Dollar Advertising Deal
This week the owner of a company that sells iPod battery replacements contacted me about my web pages. He wanted to take over the pages from me so that he could use them to promote his company or place banners on my site. I said I still wanted to control my site, but he could advertise there. Rather than place additional ads, I agreed to replace the current Google ads with ads for his company. I like AdSense ads because they are text and never too garish. His ads are more like regular banners but I said I didn't want any animation, garish colors, or pop-ups. He also wanted to have me place the banners at the top of each page, which I didn't want to do. And he asked that I change some of the content on the page. I didn't do that, but I did make a few changes on my own that should help him out without hurting any other companies I link to.
To figure out an ad rate, I took the monthly average each page had been generating with Google for the last 2 years and added 50% (since he is getting an exclusive deal and with Google he would have to bid against other advertisers), then rounded to the nearest dollar. He has agreed to pay me by the month, so I hope he sees enough in sales and click-throughs to continue indefinitely.
iPod Battery Pack $20 (for 2 ads)
3G iPod Battery Replacements $4
Tests of My Band-Aids Battery Pack $3
iPod Emergency Charger Review and Tests $2
Right before I started writing this entry, I told the guy the pages were posted. By the time I finished, he had sent money to my PayPal account. Pretty good! But alas, it wasn't entirely free money. Because he was really paying PayPal by credit card, rather than just transferring money to me from his own PayPal account, I got hit with a 4.9% charge plus a 30-cent fee. He agreed to keep paying for two years, but I will have to upgrade my PayPal account to receive more than 5 credit card payments per year.
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Comments (5)
Friday the guy wrote to me alarmed that I had moved the website. I urged him to be patient and reminded him I had told him I was planning to do this. He pointed out that my pagerank for the new pages was now zero because there are no links to them. He said he was really paying to be linked by my highly-ranked pages more than he was for advertising. I used an option on Google toolbar to see what my pageranks were. Even though I am getting traffic from search engines, sure enough my pagerank is zero. He said he would give it a month or two and see if my rank goes up.
Posted by UT | February 3, 2008 10:13 AM
Remember... "the guy" is your customer. The customer is king. (In this relationship he is not just a taxpayer.)
I'm not sure I understand the concern, though. Wouldn't all links and searches that would go to your old page get redirected to the new page, still driving ad impressions?
However, if traffic is down 50%, perhaps you should offer a 50% discount until traffic has returned.
Posted by Jeb | February 3, 2008 10:29 AM
Traffic is down about a third. But he isn't interested in traffic. Instead he is interested in having a link on a page that other pages link to (and thus has a high rank). This in turn, will give his site a high rank. My old battery page had a rank of 4 (out of a maximum of 10 which Google's home page has; CNN's home is 9; Wikipedia pages are around 7; iLounge is a 6). So 4 was pretty good (I found a couple of sites with ranks of 4 that linked to my page). Other pages he bought ads for had rankings of 3, 3, and 2. Mac5 has a rank of 1. His site has a rank of 5. Google doesn't like people manipulating pagerank and I don't want my pages manipulated. But it could take a while before I get anyone linking to the new site.
Posted by UT | February 3, 2008 12:46 PM
I see. So he is trying to manipulate Google by buying links on well-ranked pages.
Posted by Jeb | February 3, 2008 3:49 PM
Well, due to continuing slow traffic (down by half), including no referrals from Google for the last 4 days, and no hope of gaining any Pagerank any time soon, I told the guy he could back out. He offered to pay my Speedfactory bill in addition to the monthly fee if I would move everything back to the old site, but I feel like I need to get rid of Speedfactory eventually regardless. I told him I would be in touch once my Pagerank went back up. In the meantime I put AdSense ads back (which I suspect might lure Google back).
Posted by UT | February 11, 2008 9:32 PM