How to Make Money on Your Website and Mobile App

What is the Best Way to Make eMoney?

If a company has a decision between website or mobile app, what is the best way to earn money? What is the best strategy?

Website
Depending on the business it seems that advertising or a paid subscription is the best way to go. It seems that using Google Adsense you can earn up to $1500 a day or $10,000 a month. Webrevenue.org is a great website for learning more about this topic.

Build Traffic
To make money you have to first build traffic. Webrevenue states that the following factors help.

1. social site
2. connect to other sites
3. study the"repeat visitors" to the site
4. study stats using sites like Quantcast

Webrevenue has an interesting formula:

(Regular Monthly Visitors + (Regular Monthly Visitors * Rate of Growth)) = Next Month’s Visitors.

The author seems to say that a site will do well depending on how much effort you put in to the content.

Business Models
A list of ecommerce business models can be found on DigitalEnterprise.

• Brokerage
• Advertising
• Infomediary
• Merchant
• Manufacturer (Direct)
• Affiliate
• Community
• Subscription
• Utility

Wired also features a great article on business models with a breakdown of how many business use each type of model. The majority, 34% uses advertising.

Mobile Apps
Mobitech states:
""In mature markets, the mobile Web, along with associated Web adaptation tools, will be a leading technology for B2C mobile applications through 2012, and should be part of every organization's B2C technology portfolio." (Gartner, 2010)"

Given the disadvantages listed for the iPhone, the startup cost, and the 30/70 split of revenue, developing a mobile app does not seem worth the cost unless you have money to burn. That is the impression I get from Mobitech.

On the flip side TechCrunch states that top iPhone apps can make $400-5000 a day. There is also less competition in the free apps area.

Selling Aggregate Data
Selling anonymous aggregate data is one way to make money. CloudAve discusses the controversy over Mint.com selling aggregate financial data. Besides the Mint.com discussion I was not able to find much information about selling aggregate data, which would imply it is hard to do or not as common.

How to Create a Template in Dreamweaver Video

I just made my first You Tube video. Next time I will try Camstudios.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bggHd7RICzI

Week 3 GOMC Team Formation & What Search Is

Marketing Sharpshooters Team Formation
This week we formed our teams for the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Our team name is Marketing Sharpshooters. We completed the following tasks:

• Selected the business.
• Got agreement from the business that it was ok to use their website.
• Sent an email confirming the team.
• Created a Google AdWords account.
  

The part that confused me was the statement that any campaigns created should be paused. Since we had not started any campaigns I assume they did not need to be paused. The help menu on Google AdWord explained how to pause a campaign.

We registered our team and entered our customer ID into the GOMC page. Now we wait for the $200 in AdWords.

Search
We discussed how searches are made in class this week. After you create a business website it is important to list in a directory. This helps the search to find what industry you are in. DMOZ is an open directory and the first place to index your page.

How Search Reads Your Site: Lynx, Browser for the Blind
One item that was of interest was the Lynx browser for the blind. Lynx only reads text and simulates which a search engine will see when it looks at your site. Since search engines look for words this is very helpful. I found it more user friendly to use a Lynx viewer. at the bottom of the HTML code I inserted a delorie.gif image so that the viewer could read my site. It was really neat to see the results. I have known one blind person in my life and wanted to volunteer at RFB&D.

Number of Links
The most interesting thing about search is that after 200-500 links to external pages the search engine optimization (SEO) will not pay attention to. Choosing which sites you anchor to is important.

Strategy of Choosing Words

When bidding on words the price of the word is not the only consideration, but also the quality

Ad rank = CPC bid x quality score

an expensive word does not mean your ad will be placed for sure, it also relies on how clickable your ad is. Adwords is like a word auction. You can place your bet but you want to make sure you have got a high quality website to sell.

Some Google Ads have images, which I imagine could boost the quality score.

Week 2 Analytics and KPIs

One area of internet marketing that I find the most interesting is analytics. Coming from a scientific background, I like to measure and look at statistics. I like to fit data to models. Learning about how website hits are counted and miscounted by under- and over-representing the data is interesting.

I started looking at websites three months ago with Alexa, an Amazon owned company, and graduated to using Quantcast, which I find much more specific. We discussed these in class this week. Tt was interesting to hear that Alexa is less accurate. I have a friend who works for SPSS, a statistics company involved in this area. SPSS was recently bought out by IBM. He works in the area of telephony. I am interested in asking my friend if he can predict an outbreak of flu.

KPIs, key performance indicators, tell you how many people you convert to customers. If I invited 100 people to view my site and 30 people visited but only 5 people joined that tells you the conversion rate.

It was interesting to hear that webmasters tend to be males of a certain age.

One new word I learned was meme. A meme is a viral idea like a story that becomes part of the culture and has an almost cult-like following. Apparently the kid who smashed the iPad is trying to reach meme status.

One of the new places I've started exploring on the internet is Quibblo. By the looks of it this could be one of the new places that young people hang out to escape the grandmas on Facebook (for me everyone new that wants to be my friend is an older relative). I created a quiz and one of the last questions was,"Do you want to attend a Taylor Swift concert?"

Some interesting articles on teenagers and social media can be found. I want to follow what teens do because I know that they'll find something interesting and hopefully it is more cool than smashing an iPad:

1. Teens and Social Media
   
2. Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults

What I learned this week is the growth rate of Twitter. I had attempted to use Twitter a while ago but did not understand it. After hearing Amber Mac's talk I understood that using Twitter takes time. I've started using Twitter again. This time with a different approach. I still wonder how they make money.

1. I don't have to read all the tweets. It is not email.
2. I will follow "famous" people and websites and blogs first.

So far I've found that as I follow people the number of people who follow me grows. What is cool is that I get to see people like Rick Bayless show the dishes he plans to serve at Frontera Grill before it happens. And maybe it isn't him that does the posting (it seems like it is) but it makes you feel more connected on a direct level and feel the "pulse" of what is happening out there. To get started I recommend Tweet Top.

Week 1 Internet and Interactive Marketing

Interesting technical topics that expanded my horizons of internet marketing this week included:

1) Flash is not supported by the iPhone or any touch device

2) PHP is used instead of HTML for dynamic websites

3) Drupal can be used to allow anyone to have access to modify your website

4) the more external links you have to your website the more probable that Google’s SEO might find your webpage.

The topic of Flash has also come up in my web development class at Harper College. Flash on a website may limit the number of people who can view your site. If the user has to download an application they might move on to where they can get the information faster.

Interested in learning more, I did a search on what might replace Flash and found “The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps.”

One shift in the technical environment is that the number of mobile device platforms has increased. Flash covers 75% of the market share for online video but has we know the iPhone does not support it. This means that approximately 10M people cannot view flash on their iPhone. Politics, audience bias and not technical issue drive the battle between Apple, Google and Adobe. Each company has their favorites. One of the potential replacements for Flash is HTML5, which seems to align well with Google. HTML5 would allow a common video format.

Functionality of HTML5 and customer reach will depend on the browser you use. As we saw in class, the market share covered by each browser is constantly changing. However, part of the problem with removing Flash is that it is embedded in the infrastructure of many websites. It is like changing from oil to biofuels. It takes time to build a new distribution system. But ultimately it will boil to what the customer wants. The answer, in reality, may not be black and white but shades of gray.

In addition to the lecture portion of the class, I learned from one of my classmates that most companies do not make their website accessible to users with disabilities. It is an unwanted added cost of development. Perhaps this is the difference between academia and the working world. If the market share of customers with disabilities were large enough, I am sure the website would be accessible. The common theme seems to be that technology and marketing must go hand in hand, determining the target customer is important, as it determines what channels you will use to reach them. Investigating customer behavior first may heavily influence the type of technology you use.