Switching from Ezoic to Monumetric was like night to day!
Have you ever heard the expression “You must transition from working in your business to working on it”?
This is what everyone told me: Outsource, scale, change your role. If you want your business to grow, you must grow. All that kind of jargon is what I saw and heard everywhere I looked.
When I first started Spytunes back in 2007, a student in the college I was teaching at and consequently leaving, straight away asked me: So how are you going to make money?
On pure instinct, I said ads, without even thinking. Remember, 2007 is before Facebook, it’s even before YouTube!
As I’m a firm believer that you can’t learn guitar well without studying real songs, this had the unfortunate knock-on effect that all my YouTube videos made no money; it all went to the publisher.
So I had to find an alternative route involving eBooks and later a membership model to access my guitar courses.
This automatically forced me into the world of business. Email funnels, sales pages, create your customer avatar, and all that stuff I’m not particularly interested in.
My goal was to make great guitar lessons accessible to anyone, not plan an email funnel.
But I accepted it and kept listening to podcasts and marketing gurus so I could keep making my guitar lessons.
After realizing that I needed more songs, rather than many lessons on every song, so wider than deeper, I’ve in the last two years ended up with over 450 tunes, rather than 80.
This led me down the path of implementing ads on all these pages, hoping that this would cover the running costs of Spytunes.
Putting Monumetric ads on Spytunes
I started with AdSense, which is a concept where I only get paid if a user clicks on the ad; just seeing it pays nothing.
I implemented this just to see what it was like.
As my traffic grew thanks to the many new songs, I qualified for signing up with an ad provider called Ezoic. It was a disaster.
The customer service was appalling, and they kept putting ads in places I didn’t want. The quality of the ads was also really low; I hated it.
Some money was generated during the couple of months I had Ezoic ads, but they never even paid me, let alone answered any emails. I left a bad Google Maps review to get back at them. Now all of a sudden, they answered my emails and even begged me to come back.
They also said I couldn’t go with another agent as I was tied to them. I later discovered the company was founded by ex-soldiers which explained the hostage tactics!
By now, my traffic was even better so I contacted another agency, Monumetric.
Honestly, it was like night and day. The customer service has been exceptional since day one. The dashboard to view how the ads are going is clear and easy to follow. I can even see what ads work and which don’t.
I get paid for a user viewing the ad, not just clicking it. I even booked a Google Meet the other day; only a few hours later I spoke to Erika, face-to-face for half an hour.
I’m so happy with all this that I’m actually going to open up my beginner guitar course and just run ads instead.
No more email funnels, CTAs, or landing pages. I can finally go back and work in my business, making guitar lessons, instead of working on how to sell them.
It’s kind of like when you start a band because you want to play music but end up doing photoshoots and travelling around (tour), selling T-shirts instead. You wanted to play music but became a travelling T-shirt salesman.
I now have Monumetric working on monetizing my business so I can work in it rather than on it and I couldn’t be happier.
I highly recommend that you monetise your website with Monumetric.
Monumetric Review | Related Pages
About me | Dan Lundholm
This article on monetising your site with Monumetric was written by Dan Lundholm. Discover more about him and learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.
