Revenue That’s Right Under Your Nose…
Posted by Stephen on
March 1, 2006
It appears that I have developed the “eye”. As I get closer to my “Retirement” day, I become more keen of all my opportunities on Futurelooks. While off for the last couple days, I started to notice ways to monetize the traffic even further and take note of opportunities that I could capitalize on. One such opportunity was the text link programs we employ that underline relevant keywords and send users to related advertisers.
At first, we were doing a dynamic revenue share system with them (we actually use two companies: Kontera and Vibrant Media) where we would receive 50% of each referral link revenue. So I went back to both companies, and played some hardball. Through it, I was able to negotiate a much higher, flat rate. You see, with a flat rate, there are no fluctuations in the CPM price, so for every 1000 impressions, I would get the same price regardless of what the actual revenue was. I did calculations of the last 2 months, and it looks like I just left about $1000 on the table.
By being able to look at my site in the big picture view, I was able to realize revenue opportunities that were underperforming. As my “Day Job Retirement Day” comes closer, I’m less and less worried about what lies ahead.
Don’t forget my cut!
You can come to the retirement party! LOL!
I like the layout of FutureLooks, very similar to Laptop LIfestyle and John Chow’s sites. Is that one running Joomla as well?
Thanks for the comments John!
Futurelooks is using a custom CMS system called NEPHP. I would recommend that you stay away from that as we’ve had some significant issues with reliability and performance and have had to have work done to the server and backend to support it properly. Going forward, Joomla will likely be the backend of choice.
Though similar looking, each site is tweaked to perfection to yield the highest click through and CPM rates. Otherwise, Laptop Lifestyle would have been much easier to create as I could just cookie cutter Futurelooks. After monitoring it during roll out, it was clear, it would not be that easy.
Thanks for the quick reply Stephen. I have test driven and supported many CMS’s and couldn’t quite put my finger on which one you were running on that site. I am a PHP developer and my curiosity got the best of me. I too am having a hard time finding a CMS better than Joomla.
Best of luck with your sites!! I wish I could realize retirement as early as you