Many website owners focus on getting good PageRank for their websites. PageRank, or PR for short, is Larry Page's famous algorithm for determining the relative importance of pages. Google's ranking algorithm uses PageRank as one of its inputs (but certainly not the only input — you can rank highly in Google even with a low or non-existent PR) and so it's the topic of much discussion and debate among webmasters interested in getting their pages to rank highly in Google's search results.

The other day, though, it occurred to me that there were other, real-life applications for PageRank. But first, let's briefly revisit what PR means.

In the Google world, each page is assigned a measure of its importance based on how many other pages link to it. In general, the more inbound links to your page, the higher your PR. The page then votes on the importance of still other pages through its own links — in effect sharing its PR value among all the pages by dividing that value equally among all the links. The fewer outbound links a page has, the more its “vote” is worth to each of those pages. There are some complex mathematics that keep track of everything.

As a general rule, then, what you want to do is get as many inbound links to your pages but to minimize the number of outbound links, preferably keeping them within the pages of your own site(s) so as to spread your PR “manure” amongst your own pages and not that of external sites. Of course, if you're too stingy then you'll have trouble getting anyone to link to you, so you can't avoid those external links completely if you want to be a good Web citizen. But if you have a high-PR page then links from that page are valuable, and you want to be picky about who you link to.

So how does this apply to the real world? Well, my daughter's just signed up for the Multiple Sclerosis Read-a-thon, which means we have to hit up our friends and family to sponsor her reading. Not our favorite task, really, but it's for a good cause and it encourages her to read, so we do it.

Here's where PageRank comes into play. Say the PR represents the willingness of a family or individual (which I'll just refer to as “family”) to donate to charitable causes. A “link” from A to B means that family A donates money to family B's cause. Ignore for a moment how wealthy (or not) a family is. The more times a family is “linked to” (asked to donate), the higher the family's PR. In other words, if you keep pestering your friends and family to donate money to your kid's cause, you'll be more susceptible to being asked for donations yourself from those same friends and family, because of course they contributed to you, so why wouldn't you contribute to them?

Just like with real PageRank, a family's PR gets shared out proportionately based on how many times it donates to other families' causes. As you can imagine, then, having a high PR makes you more valuable. The trick for donation-getting success, then, is to find those families with more incoming contributions than outgoing contributions. This gives them a high PR, which they can then share with you by donating to your cause. The fewer outgoing donations they have, the more money they'll be willing to contribute to your cause.

Who said PR only applied to Web pages?

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

Though this isn't really related to AdSense at all, anyone who's ever thought of writing and selling an e-book or infoproduct (“information product”) should check out Aaron Walls's great posting How to Create, Market and Sell an Information Product Online. Loads of great advice from someone who's been there. Let me add a few comments of my own.

I've talked before about how great articles are in getting traffic to your site. Well, as Aaron states, they're also great for generating publicity for your book. The two go hand-in-hand, of course, since you'll need to create a site to promote your e-book. Create the site first, though, and then make sure to place copies of the articles you write on the site itself. Ideally, make sure that copies of the articles you submit to other sites link back to those original articles on your site. You'll also want the bio box to promote the fact that you have an e-book, so be sure to mention that you're the “author of such-and-such, an e-book about blah-blah-blah”. Those two things will get more people visiting your book's site.

So here's a question for you: do you place AdSense ads on your book's site or not? My gut reaction is to say “not”, because the primary purpose of your site is to promote your book, to lead people to the order page. This is a constant struggle for many people who run e-commerce sites selling things. It's different when you're providing information for free — in that case the AdSense ads make perfect sense. When you're selling the information, though, it's usually better to just promote your own stuff, not someone else's.

That said, realize that when people republish your articles on their sites, they're going to take them and wrap them with ads. That's how they make money. So you could do the same with the “original” copies stored on your site. I just wouldn't put the ads elsewhere on the site. Again, your goal is to move people through the buying process, which consists of these steps:

1. Need recognition
2. Information search
3. Evaluation of alternatives
4. Purchase decision
5. Postpurchase behavior

That list comes straight out of a marketing textbook, Principles of Marketing. The articles you write to promote your infoproduct address #2. But when they eventually get to your site, any ads they see may factor into #3 and cause them to look elsewhere — after all, the ads will normally be well-targeted and relevant to the consumer's current quest.

If you want to experiment with the ads, though, a better way to do it would be to setup a second site to promote the e-book. Fill it with the articles and whatever content seems relevant and put ads on those pages. Make it act as a funnel to your main sales site. See how well it makes money. Or not. Maybe repeat the process if it works well.

And, by the way, I second Aaron's recommendation of OpenOffice as a great way to build e-books. Within Writer (the word processor, it's equivalent of Microsoft Word) there's a menu item labelled “Export to PDF…” that does exactly that. It's what I used to create my little e-book the two words that can make you rich and what I'm using to write Uncommon AdSense. There is a bit of a transition in moving from Word to Writer — it's not exactly the same — but you can work though it and come up with a pretty decent looking product in the end.

One last thing: you might be thinking this e-book/infoproduct topic doesn't apply to you, but are you sure? If you've been blogging extensively for a year or two about a subject, for example, chances are you've got some great material with which you can write a book. Same with any of the articles you've written — more material for an infoproduct. Just because you've put the material out there for free doesn't mean you can't bring it all together and repackage it into a different format. You can even build audio versions of your stuff! If people are reading what you're writing, chances are a small subset of them will be willing to pay for the privilege of more/better/expanded information. Think about it…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

Reader Danny Lim in the UK is pleased to announce his new site reviewing UK junior doctor jobs. (In the UK a junior doctor is the term for a medical intern or resident.) Junior doctors look for 6-month to 2-year contracts to get trained, so DoctorsAtWork.co.uk provides them with reviews by other junior doctors about the working and learning conditions at various facilities throughout the UK.

There are no AdSense ads on the site as of yet, because as Dr. Lim puts it:

This is my very first website & very little IT background. So I have used your book & site to get an introduction & background on creating a website & getting google adsense. I have not yet involved AdSense as I want to build a few more quality pages as you said.

Danny is himself a junior doctor, so I applaud him for finding the time to create his site, which is gaining popularity among medical students in the UK.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.