Save Money with My Mashup/Coding Project (Featured on Programmable Web)

My Coding and Side Project, SaveOnAtoZ.com was recently featured on Programmable Web a few weeks back. It simply appeared on the front page. I did not have time to write a blurb on it then, but I wanted to write it down as one of my accomplishments. Programmable web features a list of API's and their corresponding web "Mashups". Mashups are defined as

a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

- Wikipedia

What is Save On A To Z? Well the goal is to save money on everything. Simply speaking, the site connects to various apis and helps you conduct product searches based on keywords. The different result sets are segmented and / or listed on the same page according to your preferences. You can bookmark and compare the items side to side. The result sets can be loaded in to the same page via ajax.

The results are drawn from Amazon, Ebay, Half, Shopzilla, Buy.com, Best Buy, Shop.com, Google Base (Formerly Froogle), Nextag, Sortprice, MSN just to name a few of the engines. You can seriously check across all these sites within a few seconds. In addition, I am always expanding the result sets.

My goal is to provide you one of the most comprehensive resources for comparing prices and saving you money. With today's economy in a downward spiral and gas prices rising, we need to be sure that we are saving as much money as possible.

I hope you find my project useful. You can visit it here. If you can bookmark it on a social site, share it with friends, or link it in your blog, i would be most grateful. Thanks for reading. Hope this saves you a lot of money!

How Much Does Google Pay - Unique Visitors, Pageloads, and the Traffic Circus

Simply put- I want help others (and myself) find the best way to monetize their website. I figure, maybe if I share some my information, I will gain some insight into my own methods and perhaps you will reciprocate if you have found a better solution. Simply speaking, for my last pay period (not that long) until today I have received

132,423 page impressions
504 clicks
0.38% conversion
net: $102.85

This equals out to approximately 20 cents a click on average. Depending on your ad positioning and your conversion rate (and the topic of your site), you can expect to do more. But with these stats, you can easily see that it takes quite a few page loads and views in order to actually convert into real money. Now let's try to take that into the context of trying to get this done in one month: 132,423 page impressions/1.3 (average page views per visitor) = 101,864 unique visitors.

Now to achieve this in 30 days => 101,864/30 days = 3400 users a day!!
Please check my calculations - and I hope they are wrong, but that is a lot of users to accomodate a day just to make $100. There must be easier ways of making money. It seems people have learned to ignore them in many cases.

Even if your average payout for each click is 40 cents, you would still need 1700 users a day. Well the first thing you can do is put multiple Google Ads on the page. I have heard that, on average, it takes a person 6 exposures to finally convince them to follow through. So put those ads on Top, side and bottom. To increase the conversion rate, try making your ad relevant in design to your site (e.g. use the same colors of your site).

In addition, as we all know, video is hot - try integrating the new Youtube Video Ad Units into your site. There are some great advantages to this unit as it is extremely interactive, dynamic, and outright fun. I have had some luck with it, but honestly - the most successful Google solution almost always come from the Google AdSense for Search which pays about the same per click but gives me a 10% conversion rate. This is the searchbox that will take you directly to Google search engine with Google ads displayed at the top. Here is an example.

I hope you will find this information useful for your own website. Perhaps you can leave me some tips for my own. Thanks for reading!

My Current Web Project : Mashup Galore on SAVEonAtoZ.com

Look through multiple search engines, price comparison Engines, and other resources we can find.
Save Money On Everything: SAVEOnAtoZ.com

I am always working on adding new resources to help you find a better price including multiple comparison sites, meta search engines... its like meta^2.

The mashup features results from Amazon, Ebay, Half, Google Base, MSN, Shopzilla, Nextag and a few more resources as well. You can compare side by side in your shopping list and bookmark them for later. I have spent a lot of time on this project just learning how to use APIs and pulling the results from different locations, so I hope my efforts are not in vain.

I hope it saves everyone an incredible amount of money!
thanks for looking and please take some time to visit SAVEonAtoZ
thanks!
Mz