This post was most recently updated on October 26th, 2022
Ditching the CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws) job to be your own boss and still make over a million dollars is the dream of many people, and Carla Vitt, publisher partner of MonetizeMore, achieved this goal. She started her journey in the universe of content monetization as a freelance writer and saw the opportunity to grow only with blogs. It all started with a lot of curiosity and desire to be better paid. Despite having made mistakes in the beginning, she counted on the help of PubGuru‘s tools to circumvent the loss of a site that was already earning more than R$ 200 thousand per month and scale up even more.
According to Carla, one of the main points to expand her business was the purchase of traffic, besides learning how to protect herself against possible bans. Are you curious? Get to know Carla Vitti’s story and get inspired!
In 2015 Carla started writing articles for a friend, who sold them to website owners. At first, she was just a freelancer, but after a while she was invited to work on a steady basis with this same friend and decided to quit the CLT job she had until then.
“I worked with him for about 10 months, but in that time I was a bit curious. I wanted to learn why I was doing it, to understand a little more. I looked for some copywriting jobs to do on my own and started writing for a person who worked with an ad-monetized blog” explains Carla.
This contractor wanted to order a larger volume of texts and, to convince Carla that he could pay for the articles, he shared his AdSense account with her, so she could see how much he was making. It was then that she had her first contact with an ad platform.
“He called me, asked me to share the screen. When I looked at it, there was about 400 dollars on it. So I looked normally at it from the outside, but inside I was like, ‘$400 dollars? A day? From that moment on, I just wanted to find out how he did it, to see if I could do it too. And that’s how my journey with blogging and ad monetization began,” she recalls.
Although it is a very profitable market, the main difficulty in becoming a publisher in Brazil, according to Carla, is the lack of information:
“Of course there is much more information today than there was before, it’s just that it’s nothing in a guided way. It’s nothing like ‘do this and then do that’. In the beginning, I got my first information by asking other publishers, but not everybody is willing to help. After a while I was learning from the Google Help Center itself, especially regarding Google AdSense, and I was learning by making mistakes too,” she said.
For her, other areas of marketing are already better known, such as affiliation, launching and drop-shipping, for example, but programmatic media is still unknown to most people.
“If you come to a group of people and say you’re a publisher, nobody has any idea what you do. If you say you work with blogs, they look at you with pity and think you’re hungry, that you don’t do anything. I don’t even like to explain what I do, only when it is necessary. I usually answer like this: I work with digital marketing,” she says.
She remembers, however, that today it is already possible to count on some channels to obtain information about programmatic media and, moreover, she herself is investing her time in trying to gather this information in a guided way.
“I know there are some channels today, like the MonetizeMore blog, which is one of the most helpful. I learned by testing, reading, watching the Help Center, making a lot of mistakes, and for more than a year now I have been using Monetize’s blog, because I didn’t really know about it.”
As publishers understand site metrics and how ad monetization works, it is natural to want more traffic. In that case, buying traffic is an important piece to ensure business scalability.
“Since I started, with that article client of mine, he was already working with paid traffic, so for me, it was the only viable option. After a long time, I have heard about organic traffic. I knew about the possibility of making traffic, but I only knew one of the strategies, which is called direct traffic,” she says.
She explains that with this strategy, the publisher makes an ad directly to an article on your blog using the URL. But it is essential to know all the possibilities to choose the best for each case.
“Over time, I observed the behavior of other publishers of other blogs, and I realized that there were some other possibilities. This is very important because sometimes we can overlook the capacity, for example, of e-mail marketing to be a strategy that works. And it is a strategy that works,” he alerts.
For beginning publishers who are unsure whether they should invest in traffic, Carla points out the method for those who want to accelerate growth.
“Some people use organic strategies and think that only those are the best. Maybe they are, in fact. But when you say you use organic strategy because it doesn’t involve spending money, you are actually spending something that is much more valuable than money, which is your time, right? And I’m not saying here that it doesn’t work, in any way… But it is precisely through the purchase of traffic that you will accelerate growth, you will boost your earnings, even if today you have little money to start with”, she recommends.
According to her, for those who are at the beginning of the journey and still don’t have many resources to invest, the tip is to start small:
“I am living proof that starting by investing little in buying traffic also works. In fact, I believe that for the beginning publisher, it’s even better to start small. A person can even have 100 thousand Reais to start today, but if they don’t have the necessary knowledge, it’s very likely that they will throw this money away. The question is not about having a lot, but knowing what to do and how to do it,” she advises.
Having a site banned by Google is something that happens frequently with beginning publishers, and with Carla it was no different. For having neglected some important points, she stopped earning 200 thousand reais from a site and was still left with credit card debts to pay.
“I wanted to have money as soon as possible. When I saw the blog as an opportunity to make money, I sacrificed some things that I didn’t realize I was, like, for example, posting content anyway, not doing the correct plagiarism check. I delegated some functions that need to be delegated, in fact, but I was not there supervising, you know? So I had some problems related to that, and lastly, I had a problem with invalid traffic as well, because invalid traffic today is very difficult to detect, especially for a beginner publisher.
To make her sites more secure and earn more from ads, Carla became a partner of MonetizeMore. She started using several tools available, such as Traffic Cop, a defense system against invalid traffic that was awarded by Google, capable of keeping a site secure 24 hours a day.
“Traffic Cop was the only solution that helped me solve this invalid traffic issue. Regardless of what level you are at, if you are using Google AdSense it is even better because it tends to be more sensitive and more judicious. And the fact is that sometimes we can’t detect invalid traffic, and not only the beginner publisher. So we need a technology that can identify it. And Traffic Cop does exactly that, right? It can identify and block both general and sophisticated invalid traffic. So it’s very worthwhile, I can’t be without it “, she recommends.
Another resource that Carla uses a lot are the customized reports, including Profit Attribution, which is a great help in the strategy for traffic purchase because it allows to identify the return on investment.
“On my first call with MonetizeMore I asked the staff to do the integration [of PubGuru with my site], so I could track this. It makes a lot of difference, especially for beginners, to analyze the metrics. From AdSense I confess that it’s easier for you to analyze, now inside AdManager there are a lot of reports, possibilities and combinations, and analyzing through PubGuru is much simpler,” she says.
Do you want to count on the help of specialists to earn more money and keep your site always safe, just like Carla did? Contact MonetizeMore! It will be a pleasure to help you!
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