One of the popular blogs out there that I really enjoy a lot is CyberNet. They always have fresh content, good reviews and reminds me of a younger and more influential Lockergnome.com. The minds behind the project - Ryan and Ashley are brilliant at what they do and have had a lot of success along the way. Then it came to me, who better to ask for advice about taking your blog to the next level than them? E-mails were sent, virtual handshakes were made and a conversation was had…
When did you know it was time to really put your all into CyberNet and try to do your best at making some money with it? Was it your goal from day one or was it something that you decided to do later on down the road?
Ryan: Our goal from day one wasn’t to make money; CyberNet was originally started as a hobby. Our goal was to do our best and put our all into it, and to write great content and tutorials that you wouldn’t find on many other sites out there. I guess you could say we were focused on quality and not quantity. We were actually surprised at the time it took to maintain a site with quality articles and we realized if we wanted to continue to provide the content, we had to find a way to make money with it. It wasn’t until about a year ago that Ashley and I both started working on CyberNet full-time.
Out of all of the money making methods out there today, which has been the most and least successful for you thus far?
Ryan: We’d have to say that Google AdSense has definitely been the most successful for us so far. Part of this is due to the fact that we have a large international audience, and Google serves ads internationally. Google has also done the best with displaying ads relevant to the content that we write. Also worth mentioning is Tribal Fusion because they’ve been really good for us as well. Since they charge on a per impression basis, we have been able to make money without needing people to click on the ads. By serving up these types of ads, our regular readers who aren’t likely to click on the ads are able to contribute to our success, just by visiting the site.
The least successful money making method for us has been Chitika. It’s something we tried in the beginning and what we found is that their ads were for products and our audience isn’t really the type to turn to an advertisement to make a purchase. We received a very little return using Chitika, and so we stopped using them.
You deliver a wide variety of content on just about anything and everything technology related. Ever find yourself getting burnt out on tech?
Ryan: We never get burnt out on tech in general. What we do get burnt out on though is simply writing. This is why we’ve made it a point to distance ourselves from the site most weekends so that come Monday morning, we are fresh and excited to get back into it.
Another way we avoid getting burnt out on technology is by writing about a variety of topics. We’ve seen gadget sites write 5-10 articles per day on a sole topic like the iPhone. Our brains would go crazy if we wrote about a single topic that many times in a single day! A variety of topics keeps things exciting.
Let’s say you find that one of your posts has really started to take off in popularity today. It’s getting mentioned all over the place and you see an increase in traffic. What is your usual course of action?
Ryan: Well, first we pull out the helium tank and blow up some balloons. Then we bust out a cake, open up a bottle of champagne and do the happy dance!
Joking aside, on a server side, we don’t really have anything to worry about when there’s an increase in traffic. We’re confident that our host can handle any surges in traffic that we may have.
From a content perspective, we try to keep up with the comments on the article and get involved in conversations that may get started so that the audience can see that being active in our community is one of our top priorities.
For anybody out there wanting to take their web site to that “next level” as far as professionalism and reach what advice would you give to them?
Ryan: We thought of a few things for this one, so we’ll just outline them in bullets.
- Success takes a lot of time and an extreme amount of patience
- You’ll get a lot of criticism along the road, people questioning your intelligence and your credibility
- More often than not, you’ll have negative people telling you what you should be doing instead of positive people telling you what you’re doing right
- Do your best to form a community and participate in it. Our community is our most valuable asset on the site right now. A lot of great readers, commenters, and members of the forum have made us what we are today
- Take time to acknowledge just how far you’ve come and the progress you’ve made
- Set goals of what you’d like to achieve and refer to them on occasion to help keep you on the right track
I want to thank Ryan for his time, and please all of you (even you there, sitting in the bathroom with your notebook PC) go visit CyberNetNews.com. Also be sure to check out our archive of other past interviews with some of the brightest minds on the Web.
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