Old Content

11.4 Old Content

Blogs have to be written all the time, but if you’ve ever written anything in the past, don’t just let it gather dust on your shelf. Give your old work a new lease of life by throwing it onto the Web!

For example, “Low Fat Linux” by Bob Rankin was written years ago. You may be able to find it on Amazon.com, but it’s not likely that many people are buying it because you can read the entire book for free at www.lowfatlinux.com.

Bob’s content has done its job of selling copies. Now it’s doing a second job, selling clicks to ads.

What have you got lying around that could be earning you money?

Fig. 11.1 Bob Rankin makes money from old notes. Note the position of his ads. They’re prominent but could he get more clicks by putting them on the right? He could also have added an AdLink unit above the list of links on the left.

You might have an ebook of your own that isn’t selling very well. Instead of attempting to sell your ebook for $19.95, why not turn it into web pages and make it available for free for all to enjoy? Paste your AdSense code on the pages and you may make more from the ads than from sales of your ebook. Repurposing old content is a fantastic way to draw water from your own well.

I did this with a book that I’d written about online dating. The home page contains a list of chapter headings with a skyscraper ad on the left and a Google search box beneath it. There’s also a banner on the top, which I expect people largely to ignore. That ad does however make the ad unit look less commercial and the text ads match the list of chapter headings (although I used red for the links to match the color scheme of the page).

Fig. 11.2 BestDates.info — Making money by using old contentto bring people together.

Note that this is a professional-looking website. That’s important. The fact that you’re using old content is no excuse for using an old design. You still have to make the page look good and pick up high-quality traffic if you want to get the clicks and the revenues.

On the internal pages, I’ve pushed the ads a little harder. Above the fold, there’s no real content except for ads. To stop people from scrolling away immediately though, I’ve used a nice big picture. I know that users will stop to look at that image. They’ll then look at the ads and only after they’ve done that will they scroll down to read the page.

I’ve also put a long list of links on the left under the skyscraper to help the ads blend in and placed a third unit at the bottom of the page next to the free download.

Fig. 11.3 Ads and an image above the fold at BestDates.info

And the best thing about this strategy is that I’ve got so many pages of content to use. Each page is a separate chance to capture more clicks. I could even spin off the content on those pages and market them as individual articles or websites.