make money internet
Search Engine Optimization
In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic. Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEO and win a top spot for a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.
Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt. Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages. Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a robots.txt file: User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.] Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to exclude.] In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”). Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings. Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.
Titles And URLs
I mentioned earlier that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant. But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings. A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”.
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. That’s why on my website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like www.familyfirst.com/miss_abigails_time_warp.html rather than strings of number which confuse the robots. One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.
Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth. It is always worth aiming to put your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down. One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. This isn’t an exchange; you post your links on their site, they don’t post their links on yours. Make sure you browse forums regularly, add comments and include your URL in your signature. You’re likely to get the best results on good forums related to your topic but don’t be fussy. Even unrelated forums can help to improve your search engine ranking. Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings.
Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the SEO forums themselves for some good tips. www.searchengineforums.com is one good place to browse and http://forums.seochat.com is another. You should also check out my own forum www.AdSenseChat.com. Although this is mostly about AdSense optimization, not surprisingly, SEO issues are discussed often, especially as they relate to AdSense. It’s a great source to dig up new ideas. And if you’re going to putting your links all over the forums, why not do the same thing for blogs? You can think of blogs as places to read someone’s writings if you like, but don’t forget they also let you add your own feedback. That means that as an AdSense publisher, you should also be thinking of them as free places to post your links. Again, any blog is good but top blogs on your topic are probably the best.
Don’t forget to check out the SEO blogs too. www.seobook.com is a good one, www.bradfallon.com is another and of course there’s my own blog at www.joelcomm.com. You’re welcome to leave your links there!
It’s not just blogs and forum that that let you leave your details though. There are plenty of sites that welcome free content and would be happy to display your link if it means that they get an article in return. Start by looking at other sites on your topic and then try www.ezinearticles.com. You don’t even need to write anything original when you do this. If you write a new entry to your blog, submit it to an article site at the same time as you upload it to your blog. Who knows where your links will end up? The easiest way to put your links across the Web though is to do a link exchange. If you’ve got friends who have websites, start there. That’s very easy.
While linking from friends’ sites is straightforward and cost-free, www.linkmetro.com makes the whole link exchange process very formal. There’s a giant range of different sites that you can exchange links with so you can keep your links relevant and your ranking good and high.
You can also buy links on sites like www.Adzaar.com, www.AdBrite.com, and www.LinkAdage.com. Again, these allow you to choose sites on which you can place your own links but charge a fee for the process.
On my own site www.buyjoeldessert.com, for example, I give page links to people who satisfy my sweet tooth with a donation to my cause. (I’m still hungry by the way, so feel free to sign up, improve your rankings and make my dentist happy!)
I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their visitors a tangible way to say “thank you” for their online efforts. Smart site owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:
www.buyleoalatte.com
www.buybarbaracoffee.com
You can actually acquire the “Buy Me A Drink” script that all these sites run on. Click here!
And finally, one resource that I highly recommend is WebRing (www.webring.com). This is such an easy way to gather links on relevant sites that I can’t believe it’s not the talk of the net. The idea is to link together sites on similar topics so that users can quickly find topics that they’re interested in. Nice for them. But it’s nicer for you when a bunch of links from similar sites rocket your SEO ranking. That’s exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for when they rank sites.
Create Gateways
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter. But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages, there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads. So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just people who wanted to know about “cats.”
Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo! right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it. The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later. (Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing your pages to climb the rankings.) That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can concentrate on content. There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example, lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and MSN are important, in that order.
SEO Tools
There are a number of tools that I recommend to help with search engine optimization. The first is the Google Toolbar, which will let you keep track of your page ranking. You can download it for free at http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html.
The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html
SEO Elite
SEO Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful competitors. You can discover the optimum number of times to repeat keywords, where you should put them, whether or not to use h1 and h2 tags and even your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount more.
In short, you can find out exactly how your competitors have got to the top of the search engines, learn what they did — and do the exact same thing to swipe their spot.
You can learn more about SEO Elite and pick up your copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html Reciprocal Manager
Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of managing your links. As you continue to optimize your site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links on other sites and being asked to host links from other site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professional-looking, neatly organized links directory that’s good for both your link partners and your visitors. The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other sites to link to based on search word or phrase.
Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com.
Stomping The Search Engines
Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it comes to SEO optimization. His wedding favors site grossed over $1,000,000 within a short time of launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime placement in Google and the other search engines.
I’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO optimization and I can tell you, he knows his stuff! I thought I knew a bunch about SEO, but after spending a couple of hours with Brad, I feel like a novice.
You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with AdSense. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Brad Fallon's 10 audio CD series, Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad's teaching on how to duplicate his success for your web site(s). I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.
To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.
A Word About Cloaking
One issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is “cloaking”: presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you present to users. There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example, the bot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular. You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to win you much traffic. One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one of the tools available online so that when the Google bot comes, it only reads the content. Of course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about... well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to anyone who was searching for anything.
And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether. Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s TOS and could get you banned. So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your content. Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try). And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
21.8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense than I do about search engine optimization. We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine optimization though, I recommend Mark Widawer at www.trafficandconversion.com. Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should definitely check out his site and see what he has to say. You won’t regret it.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Getting Traffic To Your Web Site
Getting Traffic To Your Web Site
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this ebook is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’ll give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the information you need. In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine optimization.
Advertising
Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too. For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit. Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign. One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising. It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
Reciprocal Linking
Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic! Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement. The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link. If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedies that you can use. The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree. It certainly won’t hurt to ask. Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a similar position on your own site can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users. If you have a site about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?
Send A Friend
There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.
Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google
allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.
RSS Feeds
One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlines are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help your feeds to stand out. It’s rarely a good idea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day. The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts. One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level. The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader. But readers will often unsubscribe if they can’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off giving them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.
Offline Marketing
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that traffic online. You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of.You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.
Promoting Your Blog
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also because a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have. If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash. The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic.com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option. You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts). Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries? One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites and higher search engine rankings. You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
Public Relations And Publicity
Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture. Publicity can be free.
It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning. Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to call. Sound difficult? It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write. There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headline; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to name just three. Most importantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run. Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people‘s lives just might. Think about the effect that your piece of “news” will have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story. And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the name of your business in the press, you also get the halo that comes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You become the number one source for whatever your website offers. And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your home page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!” Sound good? The real expert on marketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut from the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man Sells Brooklyn Bridge For $19.95”. He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.
He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.com.
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this ebook is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’ll give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the information you need. In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine optimization.
Advertising
Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too. For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit. Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign. One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising. It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
Reciprocal Linking
Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic! Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement. The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link. If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedies that you can use. The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree. It certainly won’t hurt to ask. Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a similar position on your own site can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users. If you have a site about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?
Send A Friend
There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.
Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google
allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.
RSS Feeds
One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlines are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help your feeds to stand out. It’s rarely a good idea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day. The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts. One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level. The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader. But readers will often unsubscribe if they can’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off giving them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.
Offline Marketing
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that traffic online. You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of.You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.
Promoting Your Blog
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also because a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have. If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash. The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic.com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option. You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts). Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries? One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites and higher search engine rankings. You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
Public Relations And Publicity
Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture. Publicity can be free.
It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning. Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to call. Sound difficult? It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write. There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headline; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to name just three. Most importantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run. Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people‘s lives just might. Think about the effect that your piece of “news” will have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story. And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the name of your business in the press, you also get the halo that comes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You become the number one source for whatever your website offers. And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your home page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!” Sound good? The real expert on marketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut from the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man Sells Brooklyn Bridge For $19.95”. He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.
He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.com.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
how to make money internet
Searchfeed
Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services which gives them a wide global reach, useful if you’re based outside the United States.
You can integrate the ads smoothly into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time.
Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother? If, for some reason, you don’t want to use Google — or can’t use Google — and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative.
You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft
One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all start-ups. Or should that be up-starts? A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system. The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale.Copyright © 2008 Joel Comm and InfoMedia, Inc. – All Rights Reserved 176
Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want. But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information. And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html. The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006.
They’re still far behind.
There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited.
Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geo-targeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off.
What we do know though is that the ad units are going to look a lot like AdSense units.If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads.
Searchfeed
Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services which gives them a wide global reach, useful if you’re based outside the United States.
You can integrate the ads smoothly into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time.
Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother? If, for some reason, you don’t want to use Google — or can’t use Google — and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative.
You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft
One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all start-ups. Or should that be up-starts? A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system. The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale.Copyright © 2008 Joel Comm and InfoMedia, Inc. – All Rights Reserved 176
Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want. But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information. And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html. The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006.
They’re still far behind.
There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited.
Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geo-targeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off.
What we do know though is that the ad units are going to look a lot like AdSense units.If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
AdBrite
AdBrite
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads. For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers — like you — get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN.
You can learn more about AdBrite at www.adbrite.com.
Kanoodle – Bright Ads
The same criticism can be made of Kanoodle’s BrightAds service, which is similar to Google’s. It’s a search engine that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites. The contextualizing isn’t quite as accurate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer — or at least not yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to businesses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content. That’s all creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google. BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I’m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries.
Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads. For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers — like you — get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN.
You can learn more about AdBrite at www.adbrite.com.
Kanoodle – Bright Ads
The same criticism can be made of Kanoodle’s BrightAds service, which is similar to Google’s. It’s a search engine that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites. The contextualizing isn’t quite as accurate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer — or at least not yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to businesses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content. That’s all creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google. BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I’m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries.
Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Yahoo! Publisher Network
how to make quick money
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.)
They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re
using that on your site.
As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One
of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often
Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads.
These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal
with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not
contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more
frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of.
And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad
thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.
Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do
with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve
enough to attract us.
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.)
They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re
using that on your site.
As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One
of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often
Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads.
These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal
with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not
contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more
frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of.
And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad
thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.
Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do
with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve
enough to attract us.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Chitika — All Malls, More Money
how to make money on the internet
Chitika — All Malls, More Money
Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page. You will notice the difference in your revenues though. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eye-catching and attractive.
The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image. Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself. That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users.
Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together. One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too. Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too.
You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too.
If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase. If you don’t qualify though—and Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people will—you can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages. These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click.
I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.Want to get signed with Chitika? Easy! http://www.adsense-secrets.com/chitika.html All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income. Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
Chitika — All Malls, More Money
Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page. You will notice the difference in your revenues though. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eye-catching and attractive.
The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image. Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself. That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users.
Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together. One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too. Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too.
You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too.
If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase. If you don’t qualify though—and Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people will—you can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages. These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click.
I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.Want to get signed with Chitika? Easy! http://www.adsense-secrets.com/chitika.html All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income. Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
Sunday, October 10, 2010
ContextCASH — Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
how to get money fast
ContextCASH — Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH (www.contextcash.com). This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and Intellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites. Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense. And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions. Remember, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales. The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and — like any affiliate system — whether or not you’ve recommended the products.And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate income with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly so it will be difficult to recommend them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see some great rewards. And you do have some control over all these elements. Not only can you optimize your links in all sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (most come from Amazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page. In short, if you’re thinking of using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
ContextCASH — Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH (www.contextcash.com). This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and Intellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites. Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense. And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions. Remember, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales. The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and — like any affiliate system — whether or not you’ve recommended the products.And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate income with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly so it will be difficult to recommend them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see some great rewards. And you do have some control over all these elements. Not only can you optimize your links in all sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (most come from Amazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page. In short, if you’re thinking of using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
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