William Charlwood

I’ve been going through one of those patches of life where there’s not enough time to do all you want to do. The internet makes matters worse – and better. I don’t know about you but I find Wikipedia is getting more and more of my attention these days and I even amend/correct/add to articles. Personally I think it’s a fantastic resource that reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation library.

Can you imagine what the world’s going to be like when the whole of Wikipedia’s information can be stored on a single USB drive?

Well you know what? It probably already can!

As of August 2007 the whole of Wikipedia was estimated at 7.5Gb so if it’s gone up 10 times since then (which is a pure guess) then you need a 75Gb USB drive. There are already 64Gb drives available from Amazon so in fact we are already in this position, especially if you allow a bit of data compression.

I wouldn’t be surprised if USB capacity tracked the size of Wikipedia’s growth for a while.

Thank goodness.

I can now access my spreadsheets after an awkward hiatus. I’ll take a look shortly in the Google Docs Blog to see if anyone sheds some light on the situation.

Monetization is the process of turning your web traffic into cash. It includes generating income from direct sales, from advertising systems like AdSense, from affiliate sales or simply by getting people on your website to telephone or fax you and place orders.

Pure internet marketers tend to focus on automated systems of monetization so that once they have set things up, the money gets generated without further effort or work. You can do this quite readily provided you have acquired the skills necessary to generate targeted web traffic.

To maximise the monetization potential of any website requires a degree of testing because changes to systems and web page copy will have an impact on your average visitor value. If you start to measure the value of your traffic and identify where you lose people during a purchase process using Google Analytics for example, you can start to optimize the monetization capability of your website.

Classic ways of boosting monetization are to introduce autoresponders to generate repeat visitors, introducing and testing new web copy, offering downsells to people who reject offers and upsells to people who accept offers and buy from you. Autoresponders also allow you to increase your backend sales which are those you make to people who have bought from you in the past.

Another way to monetize traffic is to use Cost Per Action networks. These pay you when someone clicks on an ad on your site and buys something – it’s a bit like affiliate marketing.

As I’ve mentioned before, Clickbooth seems to work well.