Facebook | Building A Million-Dollar Digital Publishing Site (6)
Facebook | Building A Million-Dollar Digital Publishing Site
Hey all.
I'm new on here. My name's Janssen. I'm 25 and from Maine. I got my start in AM a couple years ago, got away from it and now I'm in digital publishing. (Although, I'm tempted getting back into AM after reading some of the threads on here.) On the side I do some lead-gen stuff for extra cash. I'm not a total noob in IM, but def amateur level compared to some of you guys on here.
What I'm currently doing:
I'm working on 2 digital publishing sites that are completely different in verticals, but the overall goal is the same: increase influence and audience base, get a ton of traffic and make money.
SITE 1 | Christian Site
- Faith focused site catered towards Christian millennials.
- reLaunched Feb 2015
- Currently Gets about 50k uniques and 100k imps/mo.
- We've got a core team of 4 and an author base of about 20-something.
- One FB page has about 160k page likes and another page we operate has over 2k
SITE 2 | WHL
The second site is our attempt at executing a feel-good entertainment site similar to Viral Nova, Pet Flow, Bored Panda, Little Things, Distractify, LAD Bible, etc. This is the site I want to focus on in this follow along. It was launched last month (May 2015). I realize with so many of these sites popping out of nowhere there is an even greater need to establish ourselves as a lasting brand.
Here were the stats for May.
- 36,000 uniques
- 550,000 page views
- Adsense earnings: $420.51
- Facebook Ad Spend: $586.71
- ROI: -28.33%
May 2015 Wins
After finding a winning piece of content, I setup 7 campaigns via oCPM for website clicks that contained various ad sets split testing headlines, images, demographics and interests.
The average CTR between all 7 campaigns was 23.433%. The average CPC was $0.01 - even less than that in several campaigns.
With over 500,000 impressions I was able to get the site accepted into Taboola.
Current Problems
1. The obvious is that the EPC's just not there yet.
Get this: I was able to drive those clicks at $0.01 CPC. The average page view per visitor was 14 page views. So really, it came out to $0.0007 CPC. And the site was STILL unable to make a profit.
I have no idea how these other publishing sites are doing it.
My GUESS is that they were able to get enough impressions to get accepted into higher paying networks like Tribal Fusion or Pulse Point. And those networks combined with Adsense and Taboola/Outbrain/AdBlade cranked up their RPM to justify their CPC.
Am I on the right track here?
2. Facebook Ads Process
Pretty much I setup a bunch of ads to split test a variable. I kill the ads that are significantly higher in CPC about 3-5 hours later. (Is that too soon?) At the end of each day I run reports, but seriously, I'm not really sure how to read the numbers.
I mainly look at CPC. Again, if some are significantly higher than average I kill it. If some are slightly higher than average but the relevance score is a 9 or 10 and the CTR is high then I let the ad run longer. I combine the winning variables and scale to other relevant interests.
I'm not really sure if this is the best strategy.
My intentions for this follow along:
Mentorship: Learning is critical to success. I realize I can get that from asking questions on the STM forums, but what I'd really like to do is develop relationships.
Masterminding: I'd like to join a motivated, ethical, Facebook-specific mastermind group (that will last longer than 2 weeks). I realize I'm not super experienced but I do this full-time so you can count on me to be committed and hard-working. If, after reading this entry you're interested, let me know.
Accountability: I intend to update this thread often. Hopefully my (future) success on here will contribute to the learning experience of others, and inspire even more IM'ers to work hard and not give up.
Anyways, that's all for tonight.
Cheers!
So it's almost 3am here. Can't sleep so thought I'd update this.
The past 2-3 weeks has def had its ups and downs.
The major 'down' was my Facebook account being banned which derailed me for about a week. Good news is I did some research and now have 3 more accounts secured with some spend already.
But, the 'up' side of things:
- Adsense actually paid me for last month's earnings. I didn't profit, but it was enough to cover the majority of this month's advertising expenses, which is going to be $493 exactly.
- My Adsense RPM (revenue per 1000 impressions) increased dramatically! I have no idea what happened but it just shot up, some days being nearly $4. It's averaged out to about $2.80 per 1000 impressions. But hey -- still better than the $0.20 I was initially seeing!
- Taboola is making a difference in earnings. So far adding an additional $1 RPM. My average RPM with Adsense+Taboola combined being $3.00 so far.
- I started becoming profitable. I started seeing daily 150% ROI with profits in the $xx range.
- I'm scaling now, and I'm actually going to end up with a profitable month. I'll let everyone know what the exact numbers were when the month is over.
What's Next:
- I'm still working on systemizing an optimization strategy because I'm starting to think about scaling and I want to be able to duplicate these results. In the same way that high profit AM campaigns are created, not found, my hypothesis is that these digital publishing campaigns can also be created as I diversify content.
- I'm gonna scale the heck out of this current campaign and squeeze out every last $$$$.
- I'm going to work on increasing the RPM to $4 consistently. (Anyone who could give some insight on this I will be truly grateful!)
- Profit goal for July is $1000.
In Conclusion, it hasn't been easy but I've learned a lot this past month. I don't think there are a lot of stackers in digital publishing but I hope this follow along will be helpful to those thinking of pursuing it. I've got some ideas brewing in my head that I'll also be implementing this next month.
On a side note, after absorbing a ton of information and reading some inspiring testimonies, I've decided to also dive into mobile marketing in the very near future. I'll eventually start another follow along once I get into a handful of affiliate networks and am setup. I'd love to start a fully transparent, share-all mastermind group with a few other hardworking affiliates. We would follow the mobile cookbook. I've got a budget of about $1500/mo to dedicate to this mastermind. Everyone in the group should have a similar budget. Let me know if you're interested.
That's it for now.
Peace!
Originally Posted by jjmanno
jjmano, you should try to get into MGID, they pay more around $2.00 RPM.
We can discuss on Skype? 
PM me.
Good thread, keep updating
Very interesting stuff, some questions if you don't mind:
- Are the majority of the visitors from the US?
- All traffic is coming from FB right now through paid ads? Or are you also using offsite seo tactics?
- How much free traffic do you still get from FB, I know they severely reduced the potential to go viral recently, but I still see quite a lot of non-sponsored shares in my timeline from sites like the ladbible.
Because the amount of organic traffic should increase I see a very bright future ahead for your site, keep up the good work!
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