A lot of publishers have been discussing alternatives such as YPN, pubCenter, Kontera and Intellitxt. Others have been discussing looking more seriously at in-house ad sales.

At InterSites we get a lot of advertising enquiries and are big fans of tailoring solutions to individual advertisers, however this can be very time-consuming. One solution could be a roll-it-yourself adsense type system, that is relatively customer service free. Whilst looking at possible solutions recently I came across inClick. I looked at it some time ago, and when I revisited it last week was very impressed with developments to the software and the large range of features.

One of the most interesting options is that you can get a free license up to $500 in advertising credits to check the system out. Then you can either pay a small activation fee and 5-15% of revenue you make through the system, or indeed pay a one-off cost and keep all revenue you make.

A complete list of features is available here. We may well be taking a look at rolling it out across the Inter Sites later this year, so will report back in detail if/when we do.

It may be a good solution for those looking to move away from Adsense but don’t want to have to manually setup each advertiser.

As always I’m interested to here anyone that’s used the system, so please get in contact via comments or the contact page if you have anything to add.

One of the things that always causing me a bit of work when going abroad for any length of time is making sure I have all the applications and data I need on my travel laptop whilst I’m away.

What I though I’d do was make a list of all the software and applications I use on an average day whilst working, as I’m sure there are many more than I’m aware of. So here goes:

• Windows XP
• AVG antivirus
• Ad-Aware
• Outlook 2007
• Yahoo Messenger
• MSN Messenger
• The Tube (a proxy server so I can keep up to date with BBC iPlayer programs whilst I’m away)
• BBC iPlayer Desktop
• Firefox 3 (which is my main browser and the one I’m using to type this post)
• Internet Explorer (i’ve acquired multiple Google accounts so I use an additional browser to keep me logged into Webmaster Tools and Analytics during the day)
• Excel 2007
• FileZilla
• SecureCRT
• Dreamweaver CS3
• VLC media player (great open source media player that plays pretty much anything out of the box)
• Notepad
• Windows calculator
• Winrar

Can’t think of anymore off hand, but excluding the OS and background antivirus/adware software and other small utilities that launch into the background at startup, there were 15 programs that I purposefully opened and used today. I think that is probably about average for me, how does your usage compare?

Do You Need Site Search?

The first thing you should ask yourself, is “Do I really need site search?”. If you have a small site, perhaps 50 pages or so, or indeed a site comprised of pages with little textual content you probably don’t have need for site search. There is nothing worse than searching a small site with an internal search engine only to have no results returned for even common terms and phrases. One the other hand if you have several thousand pages or more, a well-implemented site search facility should probably work well.

Requirements and Features

If you’ve decided you want or need site search on your web site, the next step is to put down a list of requirements and features. These will vary depending on the size and scale of your site, as well as what you hope to get out of the functionality. Some of the requirements we have for site search on the individual Inter Sites are:

• Scalable (needs to perform quickly even with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages)
• Customisable layout (needs to fit in with site look and feel)
• Scripting language (php or cgi based)
• Able to replicate across new sites easily
• Ability to index and search multiple sites from one location (our network search)
• Cost effective
• Different match types (broad, exact, phrase, negative etc)
• Category based search (ability to search parts of site as well as whole site)
• Low overheads (in terms of upgrades, processing power, bandwidth requirements etc)
• Ability to implement a revenue stream (paid XML feed integration, selling sponsored listings etc)

Inter Sites Site and Network Search

After testing many different solutions, including the indexed_search solution native to Typo3, we software we ended up choosing was Zoom Search. It offers some excellent functionality, is very scalable (for example our network search currently indexes over 14 million words on 150 thousand pages across the network and returns the most complex queries in well under a second). It also allows us to embed results within a tailored search page to fit in with the look and feel of the site it’s implemented on, and embed paid results in a sponsored box above the internal search results.

Hopefully this has answered some initial site search questions. As always if you have questions please feel free to leave a comment or contact me via the contact page. I will add another post outlining the exact implementation we use at a later date.

InterSites New Home Page

I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally relaunched the first stage of our InterSites.co.uk site. For those of you that don’t know InterSites.co.uk is the hub site of the network. It no longer will contain any topic specific content, but will instead be a shop window for every site in the network.

The first stage of this is now live. Each of the 520 individual Inter Sites is listed by the following categories as well as in A-Z form. The categories are as follows:

• Arts & Entertainment
• Business & Commerce
• Careers & Jobs
• Cars & Transport
• Computers & Hardware
• Education & Learning
• Electronics
• Finance & Money
• Food & Drink
• Games & Toys
• Government & Society
• Health & Fitness
• Home & Garden
• Internet
• Lifestyle & Fashion
• Music, TV & Film
• Reference
• Relationships & Family
• Science & Nature
• Shopping & Gifts
• Sports & Hobbies
• Travel & Holidays

At the moment each site has a screenshot and snippet of information about it, such as our Gardening site which you can see here.

Advertising

In the coming months we will incorporate all the advertising options across the sites, all collected in one place. We’ll probably be offering initial advertising options such as:

1. Display advertising
2. Site sponsorship
3. Enhanced listings on our business directory sites
4. Contextual advertising through our own Adsense-like program

Some exciting things are in store and I’ll be announcing those on the blog as and when they appear. in the meantime, check out a slideshow of all 520 sites here.

Network Search

As part of the new site we also launched our network search. From InterSites.co.uk you can now search content across the entire network of sites. Initial indexing completed yesterday evening and will be updated every month as we launch new content and sites. Currently there are approximately 150,000 pages of content across the network.

As advertising has in the large part shifted away from CPM deals to CPC and CPL/CPA type campaigns so too have the metrics you should be forcussing on. Traffic is no longer order of the day, now Targetted Traffic is far more important even if the overall levels are lower.

This was reinforced for me at the beginning of this month, when I sat down and went through traffic and revenue figures for all the individual Inter Sites for March 2009. One of the smaller sites in the network had the following traffic figures for March 2009:

• Vists – 775
• Pageviews – 1813

Not very impressive by itself, but over the same period this site did the following revenue:

• Affiliate – £110.43
• Paid Search – £15.86
• Adsense – £3.88 (based on a rough £1 to $1.50 conversion)

That’s a £130.17 from 775 visits or approximately 17 pence per visitor to the site. I won’t give you the exact site, but it’s a small niche that pulls in a small amount of organic and type-in traffic.

Now obviously if that was your only site, you wouldn’t be retiring anytime soon, however consider in this case it’s just one of 520 sites in the network currently and the figures start to look more interesting.

Another thing to note is that with such few visits, you’re not chalking up large bandwidth bills, or hardware costs even when you scale up (and more on scaling up in a post soon). Lastly look at the breakdown between affiliate sales, paid search and adsense. As I’ve stated before, if you’re only relying on Adsense and looking at getting lots of traffic to make any significant money, you should look again and see if you have very specific traffic that might convert well into an affilate based sale.

A lot of people running content sites think the only revenue options are Adsense or affiliate programs. Although both can do a great job in monetising content, if you’re looking to truly round out your revenue streams you really should be looking at paid search feeds as well.

An example of a paid search feed is shown in the screen shot here. This is from one of our sites. A user has gone to the site and done a web search for the term “wine rack”. As you can see 10 results have been returned, just like if you’d done a search on Google, Yahoo or MSN.

These results are actually provided via XML from Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and are paid results backfilled where necessary with organic results.

They work much in the same way as Adsense for Search, however are much more powerful in a number of ways. Some of these are:

• Since they are delivered via XML they can be customised to fit in with the look and feel of your site exactly, as seen in this example.
• You can see up your own additional tracking on the serve URLs to track multiple variables, such as keyword/key phrase searched and clicked on, position on that click, as well as a myriad of bits of information about the user. At it’s simplest this can be done through a free tool such as Google Analytics by tagging the paid URLs as outbound links using javascript.
• As well as searches done via search boxes, you can hardcode links to particular searches on the site with many providers. If you go to www.interwine.co.uk you can see some of these “featured” links on the Top 10 box on the right. These link directly to paid results that are particularly relevant or useful for your visitors.
• You can use a feed to show “Sponsored Results” at the top of your own site search. If you go to InterWine.co.uk and do a site search, you will see a Sponsored Results box above the internal search results.
• Unlike Adsense you can choose to open results in a new window, leaving your site in the background for when they finish with the advertisers site.

I’ll take in details about some of the larger providers such as YSM in future posts as well as information about getting a feed. If you’re a large content provider and you’re only relying on Adsense and/or Adsense for Search for your revenue streams, you may well be missing out on a very valuable source of extra income.

Some of these chores might be:

• Renewing domain registrations
• Renewing hosting
• Patching server software
• Patching and upgrading any site software such as forum scripts, CMS’s etc
• Updating third party code such as invocation code for ad servers, or analytics snippets
• Updating contact details, about us pages, copyright dates etc

All this is before you even think about writing fresh content, adding new functionality or doing SEO or SEM.

One of the biggest swings in perception I now have is that any change no matter how small, has some kind of time commitment. For example if you’re running a single site and need to update your robots.txt and ftp it to the server it might take 2 minutes. In the past this kind of time I never consiously thought about (after all if you’re explaining what you’ve done in a day, telling people it’s taken you 1 minute to correct a typo seems inconsequential).

Lets take that robots.txt example again. If I had to update and ftp a robots.txt file to every Inter Site across the Network at 2 minutes a site, that would take 100o minutes (just over 16 1/2 hours). That’s two whole working days for some people, even if we ignore the time taken out of the day to check mail, make a cuppa, or the toilet breaks all those cuppa’s require! In reality it’s probably more like three days.

Now when I look at a 1 minute change I see it as a whole day’s work, and a 5 minute change takes a week. Think about that next time you update your wordpress software, or change the copyright date on your blog at the beginning of the new year!

If you’re running large numbers of sites automation is your friend, and without it all progress can quickly disappear into an endless series of updates, tweaks, changes and fixes. Some of ways we minimise extra manual work is through:

• Standardising everything we can, such as: themes, plugines, script versions on each site
• Documenting previous update sequences for re-use in the future
• Running multiple sites of a single CMS codebase
• Outsourcing everything non-core
• Extensive shell scripting for common tasks, such as backups, software updates, new site installations etc

These are just a few examples and I’ll come back and talk in more depth on any of these people are interested in, in future posts. As always, leave a post if you want more info.

In this third part I’ll be addressing some of the most frequent questions about monetisation and revenue generation on the Inter Sites.

Q. Do the Inter Sites make money?

A. Yes of course! Although we try and make advertising as unobtrusive as possible (no popups, popunders, overlays etc) the Inter Sites is a commercial network and makes money via advertising.

Q. How do you make money?

A. In a number of different ways, largely via contextual advertising, search feeds, display advertising, affiliate sales and site sponsorship.

Q. Which companies do you recommend for advertising?

A. This would largely depend on what kind of site you have and it’s audience. To give you an example we currently use Google Adsense as our contextual provider, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and Search123 for our search feeds and AdJug and Adviva as backfill for display advertising. We use a variety of affiliate networks such as Affiliate Future, Affilinet and Buy.at on different sites. I’ll talk about each of these in more detail in later posts.

Q. How much money do you make a day/month/year?

A. LOL, nice try but obviously no way I’d reveal that. I have no desire to go down that road of sounding like I’m boasting.

Q. I would like to advertise my **** site on  your network.

A. We’re always happy to look at new potential advertisers depending on the site. Contact me via the contact page and I’ll see what we can do.

Q. Do you use a CMS/what CMS do you use?

A. We do indeed use a CMS to run the sites. The CMS we use is called Typo3 and is built using PHP with a database backend (we use MySQL). I’ll talk more about Typo3 in detail in a future post, but one of the big benefits is the ability to run multiple sites of a single code base.

Q. What other software do you use?

A. We use OpenX hosted as our display advertising platform. Previously we had a local install of it, and used the predecessors of it, back to phpMyAds days. We also use Links SQL by Gossamer Threads as a directory script and various other smaller scripts for specific functions. As with the CMS, I’ll talk about these in more detail in a future post.

Q. Who do you host with?

A. We are currently using Rackspace for our dedicated managed servers. We’ve been with them for just over 4 years now.

InterSites.co.uk Home Page

In these common question posts I’m going to try and answer some of the most frequent questions I get about the Inter Sites. Feel free to send any questions not covered through and I’ll try and answer them.

Q. What are  the Inter Sites / What is the Inter Sites Network?

A. The Inter Sites are a network of UK websites offering information and advice on a variety of topics. Although primarily a content network, we also seek to provide useful tools and community features, where appropriate.

Q. How many sites do you have?

A. There are currently about 520 sites in the core Inter Sites network. In addition we have just started creating a further 75 geo sites covering all the cities in the UK, so all together about 600.

Q. How long have they been around?

A. We launched the first site in 2002 (InterCoffee.co.uk) and launched the hub site (InterSites.co.uk) in summer 2003. We  have gradually added other sites since then.

Q. How many of you are there?

A. We have tried to keep the number of employees as small as possible. We currently have the 2 founders (myself and one other) working full-time as well as a full-time contractor. In addition we have several part-time contractors doing project work for us, and outsource as much non-core work as possible, such as hosting, financial etc.

Also check out Part 2 and Part 3.