One of my viewers turned me onto a new platform recently to help boost site performance and increase ad revenue. It’s called Ezoic, and it looks promising. Though, I am extremely apprehensive when it comes to adding new things onto WriterSanctuary.
The last time I rolled the dice on a “guaranteed” platform, I took a massive hit and lost all of my images. And since the backup from Hostgator failed, I had to go through and repair all of the posts.
And I’m still finding content I need to fix.
Anyway, I would love to address some of the speed issues I have with this tool and make more money. I just don’t want to spend the next five years trying to repair something that broke thanks to a defunct plugin or app.
I suppose I can try it for a month and see what happens. This time, I’ll use my own backups, thank you very much.
What is Ezoic?
From what I can tell, Ezoic is a website-optimizing platform that can fix a lot of the speed issues I’ve been having lately. Since it’s a pain in the ass to find decent plugins to address CLS problems and removing unused CSS.
See, I don’t really have the time to dump into crawling through code and making adjustments. In fact, I’m not really supposed to be blogging right now as I have other work that needs done.
According to Ezoic, though, It’ll take less than five minutes to vastly improve site performance.
Monetization
A large chunk of what the blogs pull in right now is from platforms like AdSense. According to Ezoic, their system uses AI to generate placement ideas and ad units for optimum exposure.
It comes with an Ad Tester you can use to run a variety of experiments simultaneously to see what method works best. This lets you set up goals and control bid competition across several ad networks.
One thing I really like is the data analytics for the system. You can break down each author of your site and see their individual Page RPM. In other words, you can tell what writer generates the most ad revenue for your site.
I can do this now with Google Analytics, but I’d have to set up a special tag for individual authors to track. And it’s a bit more convoluted of a process than using Ezoic.
Website Speed
Website speed is a vital element for any blog to be successful. That’s because Google and visitors hold performance in high regard. Especially when it comes to mobile access.
According to Ezoic, I can solve a lot of my performance issues and streamline the process. From what I can tell, you essentially use their fast CDN to deliver content. This means you don’t have to change web hosts.
Personally, I’d rather just fix the issues on the site itself and not rely on virtual copies spread all over the planet.
However, you can choose to remove unused CSS, minify HTML, lazyload iFrames, or utilize caching. But for an extra $30 per month, you’ll get access to Sitespeed+ features such as next-gen images, critical CSS rendering, and site speed tracking.
That’s a bit expensive considering the sites are just barely pulling in more than that, especially since I added a writer to my team.
SEO Tag Tester
Another interesting part of Ezoic is the tag tester. This lets you change a variety of elements to see what works best for search engine optimization.
For instance, I can try variations of a title to see what performs best in search results. I’d like to give this a try. I use the Jetpack headline analyzer function, and Ezoic will help me figure out if the analyzer is worth using.
Essentially, I can run tests on every blog post on my site with new title tags to see which gets the highest click-through rates. I can then compare these new titles to pageviews, bounce rates, and average position in Google.
These are three aspects I track every time I update an article, actually. So, it would be nice to have those reports instantly on hand.
Video Player
The video player aspect of Ezoic is mostly for those who plan on hosting video content directly on their site. Though, I’m not sure if I’d use this part of the tool.
Mostly because I use YouTube to augment the blog posts while trying to increase viewership to the YouTube channel itself.
However, it looks as though Ezoic adds all the meta information search engines use to list videos on the results pages. This means your site-hosted video content has a better chance of being seen on Google.
I might try this out at a later date just to see if it actually works well enough. But like I said, I have a YouTube channel for a reason.
So, What Will I Test Ezoic On?
I’ve put a lot of work and effort into getting WriterSanctuary to this point. The last thing I want to do is jeopardize everything I’ve built so far.
In reality, ColoradoPlays.com has the most traffic. However, it also appears most visitors to that site enable ad-blockers, so something like Ezoic might not even be worthwhile.
Then again, according to Ezoic, the average increase after using the monetization aspect of the tool sits at around 93% in the first month. So, if ColoradoPlays made $16.11 from AdSense this last month, it would be around $31.09 during the next.
That’s barely enough to pay for the premium service should I decide to upgrade. But, it might be worthwhile depending on how many sites I can add to my account.
Adding it to WriterSanctuary.com would make the most sense. But, there’s that fear of really screwing something up. Yeah, my past experiences with Hostgator really soured me on all kinds of things.
At any rate, let’s toss it onto ColoradoPlays and see what happens. If it looks like it’ll work out, then I’ll add it to WriterSanctuary.
At the moment, the other two blogs are really not pulling in the numbers to justify the expense.
No matter what, though, it’ll give me a blog post and a video.
Content.
If It’s a Worthwhile System, I’ll Do a Review
Starting today, I’ll set up a case study on WriterSanctuary.com regarding Ezoic and using it with ColoradoPlays. This means I’ll grab some data points and then run the experiment for a month.
After all, I get a 30-day free trial if I sign up now. That’ll be perfect to see how much of an impact adding this will make. I guess that means I need to get more gaming content up during the time frame.
In a month, I’ll then get a decent blog post and video about using Ezoic and whether or not it’s a viable system to use.
To be honest, I hope it is.