Amazon Goes From Quarterly To Monthly Payment

Amazon has announced that starting in 2007 it will be changing its payout from a quarterly payout schedule to a monthly payout schedule. This is a huge change for Amazon after sticking to the quarterly payout schedule for so long as the world changed around them.

The payouts will be made on a 60 day term. In other words after a month ends you will receive payment 60 days later. I'm not sure why they can't go to a 30 day payout that it seems everyone else is on. I mean if you're going to revamp your terms wouldn't you go to what is standard?

One other change of note is that their physical check sending fee has increased from $8 to $15. I'm guessing this is to simply get affiliates to go with EFT (Electronics Fund Transfer) rather than requiring the issuing of so many paper checks every month.

The only question I have is "What took them so long?"

I haven't had a lot of success with Amazon myself, though I have received a few payouts from them over the years.

Other Coverage
Building My Empire
Problogger
Making Money With Google AdSense

Your Traffic Source Determines Your Revenue With PPC

Which source of traffic generates the most income when it comes to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising? Is it MSN, Yahoo!, Google search traffic or some other source?

I did an entry on this last year and the finding was that visitors from MSN clicked out the most and had the highest CTR. Unfortunately the MSN traffic is nowhere near as high as Google search traffic.

Now AdMoolah has taken this one step further and included visitors from advertising campaigns at Yahoo! and Google AdWords into the equation and has some very interesting stats.

On one of my sites I have been running Google Analytics and have some custom JavaScript installed to allow me to track which visitors click on the ads on my site. On this site I run a combination of AdSense and YPN ads. I have also been running some AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. Here is a chart showing the percentage of visitors who click on ads broken out by the major sources of traffic.

Head over there to see the results.

I found it interesting that the advertising campaigns had almost double the CTR of traffic that came in through Google or Yahoo searches.

Improving Sales Conversions On Your Website

How can you improve the number of sales of visitors to your website? Improving conversion can be the number one key between having mediocre results and really turning your online business into something that works.

But how can you increase your conversions rate?

Well, there are some great tips at this entry by Herb over at Exclusive Concepts. in the entry he addresses what he dubs "Beg for Click" and offering coupons or discounts. And not just offering them, but sticking them where people will actually see them. He has a few screenshots of "makeovers" before and after and I think they are great examples between something that night work and something that will.

Really great examples, head over there and check them out.

Huge Revenue Day Yesterday

I had a huge revenue day yesterday. It would have been a record, but fell a little short because of one day in September when I got flooded with about 10 times the traffic. Yesterday was normal traffic levels and the revenue was double a normal day for AdSense revenue.

This seems to be a sign of the Christmas season really kicking into action. The beginning of a new month usually seems to pay a little better too, but that's not always true.

I've been really busy of late, so this website hasn't been as updated as I wish it was. The plan was 1-3 posts per week, but I just can't seem to keep up with the 800 things going on and keep this up to date. Hopefully that will change.

Did you experience an unusually high revenue yesterday or was it just me?

YPN Still Returning Horrible Results

Ya know, I switched some of my sites over to YPN a few days ago to give them another try after months and months figuring that Yahoo would have had time to correct a lot of the drawbacks they have compared to AdSense.

I've found that they have virtually remained unchanged. Slow reporting that you have to wait until the next day for, low Click Thru Rates that are probably due to the bad context of the majority of their ads, it all remains as it was.

I have now removed them from most of the websites I had added them to about a week ago. It's just horrid results.
Getting paid pennies for the same traffic numbers you make dollars with on AdSense just isn't appealing.

I was trying to give them a shot because I wanted to diversify some of my AdSense revenue, but it's just not worth it to lose that much.

I'm pretty disappointed in them at this point. I think it's been nearly a year since I used them last and it looks like they've done nothing at all in that time. The few things they have done are nice, like adding Electronic Funds Transfer, but I consider them the basic necessity of any type of program like that. In this day and age a physical check should be a last alternative, not the only one.

The fact that you have to wait a whole day just to see reports after they've had a whole year to work on this shows a lack of innovation and motivation within their development department. It's almost as if they aren't taking this program seriously and are neglecting it.

I'll still leave them on a few sites that won't cost me a fortune to see if things change, but at this point I'm pretty sceptical that it will ever climb to a reasonable level of revenue.