Site loses 44% of Chitika earnings due to auditing!
Not to harp on this (though of course I am), but one of my readers reported a whopping 44% drop in Chitika eMiniMalls earnings after the January audit. This is the biggest drop I've seen so far, others who've mailed me have mentioned a 10-20% drop in earnings. The site owner was very disappointed, to say the least.
More reason for Chitika to speed up the auditing process, as I mentioned a couple of days ago.
I'd be curious also to hear from others about their eMiniMalls earnings in general. I theorized a while ago that post-Christmas earnings would be lower than the pre-Christmas earnings, independent of any auditing issues. I don't really have enough data myself to form a definitive answer to this, as currently I'm only running Chitika ads on the Invisible Fence Guide. I'm working on a couple of more product-oriented sites, so I should have more data in a few months, but that won't help me with the post-Christmas analysis. (If you don't have a product-oriented site, AdSense is by far the better choice for your ad program.) If you have some concrete data either way, I'd like to hear from you… post a comment or send me mail.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
AdSenseAccelerator review (Part 2)
Let's continue with our review of AdSenseAccelerator. I teased you with a few screenshots in Part 1 of the review, but not let's actually see the product in action.
As I mentioned before, the Keyword Research and Top AdSense Bids tabs are the most interesting parts of this tool. Let's start with the former.
The Keyword Research tab is where you start your search for good-quality keywords. You start by entering a “theme” keyword for the category and then pressing the “Get Keywords” button. Let's try it with the theme “adsense” and see what we get:
Wow! The “adwords” keyword look pretty impressive! But click on the Refined tab and you'll see even more keywords:
Hey, these ones look even better! But how good are they, really? What you want to do now is get bids and traffic estimates for the various keywords. To do this you put the keywords that interest you into the keyword basket. The quickest way to do this is via the “Select All” button. Let's add all the keywords we found on the Refined tab to the basket. We then move to the Step 3 part of the window and press the “Get Bids & Estimates” button and end up with this:
You can click on any of the column headers to sort by that column. Click on “Top Bid” and you'll see that the phrase “adsense blog” comes up on top at $27.50, followed by “adsense revenue” at $20.18. Apparently, my blog isn't raking in the big bucks it should be! But of course, there are some key factors to remember:
- The prices shown are the AdWords bid prices for those phrases. Your payment will be a percentage of whatever the the advertiser pays, so it won't be as high as what you see.
- There could be a steep drop in between the first (topmost) bid for a keyword and the second bid. This matters to you because the winning advertiser will pay at most just over the second bid's price.
That's why the other columns in the keyword list are important. One judges the relative quality of the keyword — the more dollar signs, the better. These keywords are all low-quality keywords, as we'll see when we explore them in detail with the Top AdSense Bids tab tomorrow. Then you see relative search activity and the total number of pages containing those terms. You want keywords that are searched enough but that don't have a whole lot of competition. Lots of factors to consider.
Tomorrow we get to the best part of this program, the bid analysis.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
Joel Comm's AdSense Detective released
Joel Comm, the well-known guy who wrote Google AdSense Secrets, has just released an AdSense statistics collector and analyzer called AdSense Detective. I need a few more days of data to give you the full rundown on this product, but it collects similar data to what you can get using Google Analytics, only it's much more approachable — I find Analytics to be a bit overwhelming for beginning and intermediate webmasters, plus it's not immediately obvious how to use Analytics to do ad tracking.
Joel recently released a free standalone ad tracking program called AdSense Buddy, but this new one is much more complete. The AdSense Detective solution is hosted, which means all you do is put a bit of JavaScript in your pages and it does all the tracking for you.
Watch this space for more about AdSense Detective, but first I'm going to continue with my review of AdSense Accelerator.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
Google testing payments for items sold via Google Base
The most recent entry in the Google Base Blog mentions that Google is experimenting with letting Google Account users pay for items posted on Google Base via credit card. Shades of PayPal and eBay.
Makes me wonder if someday they'll build a system that automatically creates AdWords ads from Google Base entries to get more people to find things for sale in Google Base and get a cut of the action that way.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
Chitika posts audited revenue for January
A quick note: the audited eMiniMalls revenue for January 2006 has been posted, with payments soon to follow. My audited revenue is about 25% less than the unaudited revenue. You can check your figures quite easily by opening two browser windows and logging in twice to your Chitika account and using the “Filter by Dates” dropdown in each report window to show last month's earnings.
Once again, I wish that Chitika would improve its auditing procedures. While it's not unknown for Google to make adjustments to an AdSense account after the fact, auditing in most cases happens in near-real-time and so you don't end up with unrealistic expectations as to your payments. Chitika could be running its audits more frequently. Even weekly would be better than monthly.
I'd like to hear from other Chitika publishers as to how much their earnings are affected by the auditing procedure. We could come up with an average percentage by which to mentally reduce future earnings.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
Extracting Amazon product information
Rather than finish Uncommon AdSense, I've been procrastinating and playing with Amazon product data. If you're not aware of it, Amazon exposes most of its product information for free vis its E-Commerce Service (ECS). With ECS, geeks like myself can plumb Amazon for tasty bits of data, which I plan on using to create additional pages for some sites.
If you're interested in using Amazon data for similar purposes, I've made a simple tool available on my personal site that lets you extract the data for any product that Amazon sells. The Amazon Product Viewer is free for anyone to use, but please read the limitations section on the page. I do have a command-line version that I'll be making available shortly, too, see the page for details.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who normally has a longer bio but is writing this on his BlackBerry and so has to keep it short.
AdSenseAccelerator review (Part 1)
As promised, I'm doing a review of a new product called AdSenseAccelerator, which looks to be a winner. I'll spread the review out over two or three posts. Please note that I don't get any kickback for this — there's no affiliate link involved — but they did let me in on the free beta. I don't know yet how much they're going to be selling it for, or the exact release date, but I'll let you know as soon as I do.
AdSenseAccelerator is a new product from the CashKeywords.com people, a provider of keyword lists. In fact, they've suspended their lists for now in favor of this new product, as you'll soon see why.
When you start AdSenseAccelerator you're presented with the following screen, the Most Expensive Keywords tab:
(Click on any of the images to see them full-screen.)
This screen lets you explore keyword values for the “most expensive categories” of keywords. Interesting stuff, but not that different from other keyword lists. The real meat's in the other tabs, the Keyword Research and Top AdSense Bids tabs.
Here's what the Keyword Research Tab looks like:
And here's the Top AdSense Bids tab:
They don't look too exciting yet because I haven't entered in any keywords. I'll get to that in the next part, but if you can't wait then visit the AdSenseAccelerator site and view their short screen capture video showing the program in action.
P.S.: Don't forget to signup for my contextual advertising newsletter to get your chance at winning a signed copy of my book. The next draw is on March 1.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
AdSense payments are in process
Don't forget February is a shorter month, which means you'll get your AdSense payment a few days earlier than normal. I see the payment's now in process. I'm hoping that the Chitika payment process is also starting. These will be the second last earnings you'll see before taxes are due on last year's earnings, so maybe you should sock them away somewhere!
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
Making money from MSN
Although I've neglected it of late, the Invisible Fence Guide has had a sudden flurry of AdSense activity lately. (Don't worry, I will shortly finish the belated AdSense case study that features the Guide — anyone interested in having a PDF version of the case study?) Wondering why, I did some investigation. The Guide still ranks in the top 10 or 20 (for “invisible fence” — it's still #1 for “invisible fence guide”) in Google, depending on which data center you're using, so nothing changed there. It is, however, now ranked #3 on MSN for the search term invisible fence. A quick look through my logs shows an increase in traffic from there. Of course, it could just be that it's a seasonal thing — as spring approaches in North America, more people are thinking about installing wireless electric fences to contain their dogs. Still, it's a good starting point for our discussion about making money from MSN and Yahoo via AdSense.
Do MSN users click more ads?
Although getting a high ranking in Google always seems to be the #1 priority for webmasters, a number of AdSense publishers have commented on the fact that it may be better to get a #1 ranking in MSN if contextual advertising is your income source. Why? Because it appears that MSN users click AdSense ads more often than Google users do!
Now why would this be? There are several possible explanations, and I'll leave it up to you to judge which are the closest to the truth:
- MSN users don't realize they're clicking ads. This is an argument made for a lot of online advertising, actually, but the point here is that MSN users as a class may be unaware that AdSense ads are, well, ads. Until recently, for example, Dell was using a branded MSN page as the default home page for its computers. So MSN probably got a lot of traffic from casual users that way. And of course from the default Windows installations, too.
- Google users develop ad-blindness. More Google users, on the other hand, know what the ads look like and develop “contextual advertising blindness”.
- MSN users develop ad-blindness. Oddly enough, if an MSN user develops “contextual advertising blindness”, that might in fact make them more likely to click an AdSense ad. Why? Because they look different than MSN ads.
- Google users tend to click the ads on the Google search results pages. Because the same ad service (AdWords) feeds the same ads to Google's own search pages and (via AdSense) to third-party sites, chances are good that when a Google user is searching for something they may see a particular ad on the Google search results page itself before they see it on a site they visit from that page. In other words, they click the ads on the search pages before they click the ads on the content pages.
And of course, don't forget the simple fact that if you can get a higher ranking in MSN then higher earnings may occur simply because you're getting more traffic to your site — your CTR may not improve, but your earnings certainly may.
Note that you could make similar arguments for targeting Yahoo! users.
Should you ignore Google?
So you might wonder if this means you should ignore Google in your quest for higher AdSense earnings. Of course not! Getting a high ranking in Google is always beneficial. More targeted traffic is always good, no matter where the source. You might, however, want to try the opposite-ad-program theory to see if you get better earnings, though: for Google referrals, show YPN ads, for MSN and Yahoo referrals, show AdSense ads. (I have not tried this theory myself because YPN still isn't available to non-Americans. But it's probably worth a shot for a week or two.)
What it does mean, though, is that you shouldn't focus exclusively on Google. Don't ignore the other search engines and try to get good rankings for your site in Yahoo! and MSN, and maybe some of the smaller ones as well. Some of these rankings should happen naturally due to good SEO practices. MSN seems to put more weight on the in-page SEO techniques (keywords in title, headings, text, image alternate text) and on the actual number of links than the other two do. (Be careful not to go overboard and get penalized in Google.)
Work your way higher on all the search engines and I can almost guarantee your earnings will increase significantly. It's all about traffic.
Coming shortly: A review of a neat product called AdSenseAccelerator.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.
How to move a blog, part 5 (series)
Time to finish this series. In Part 1 I talked about backing up the current blog, in Part 2 I talked about configuring the new one, in Part 3 I discussed redirecting the old blog to the new blog, and in Part 4 I described strategies for redirection hosted blogs. Now let's talk about fixing up incoming links to your blog.
Losing your links
The worst thing about moving a blog is that you can easily lose all your incoming links if you're not careful about it. That's why the HTTP redirection described in Part 3 is important: if you can permanently redirect each posting at the old address to its new address then that will go a long way to fixing your incoming link problems, because both the browsers and the search engines will adjust their internal bookmarks accordingly. It'll probably take a while for the new links to replace the old ones in the search engines, but it should happen over time.
If you can't do a 301 redirect then your task is harder, you have to be more proactive about finding and getting those inbound links changed. Even if you are redirecting, it's probably a good idea to do some of this. The first place you should start are the blog aggregation and search services.
Bloglines
After I moved this blog from MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com to memwg.com, I wanted to update the Bloglines subscriptions to the new address. All I did was shoot an email off to the Bloglines support people, telling them what the old feed address was and what the new one was, and within a couple of days they had fixed up the subscriptions. Very simple.
Technorati
Technorati, on the other hand, is always problematic for me. I'm doing a 301 redirect, so all I had to do with Technorati was re-claim the blog at the new address and embed the JavaScript code they give you on the main blog page in place of the old code. Then Technorati told me their crawlers would pick up the change and figure things out. Well, it hasn't happened yet. I still have both versions listed in my Technorati account. No response to my email about merging the two, either. All in all, pretty much par for the course in Technorati. I hope that eventually it will sort itself out.
Other services and sites
Make sure you update your ping notification services (like Ping-o-matic or Pingoat) appropriately — if you have them bookmarked, update your bookmarks.
For other links, take the manual approach. Send mail to the owner of the blog/site and tell them you've changed your address and if they'd be willing to change some or their links. Few people are going to go through all their old postings and update their links, but ideally they'll change your site listing in their blogroll.
I hope this mini-series has been a help to some of you. Let me know if you need more details on what I've described.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
How to move a blog, part 4 (series)
In Part 1 I talked about backing up the current blog, in Part 2 I talked about configuring the new one, and in Part I discussed redirecting the old blog to the new blog. But redirection only works if you control the system that the original blog was running on. What if you don't?
The Blogger curse
I see it happen all the time. Someone creates a blog on Blogger and hosts it for free on Blogger's blogspot.com domain. Then the blog gets popular and the blogger wants more control over things and suddenly moving off of Blogger becomes both a priority and a problem. The problem isn't the postings, it's redirecting the traffic from the blogspot.com address to the blog's new address.
This is why, of course, I always advocate getting your own domain name and a hosting service to actually host the blog. This doesn't mean you can't use Blogger — the blog on the home page of CluelessAbout is a Blogger-managed blog, for example. But the very fact that the blog pages are on a host you control means you can do things like the redirection trick I discussed in Part 3, things you can't do if blogspot.com (or a subdomain from another blogging service) hosts your blog for you.
So what can you do? Let's look at the different approaches.
Rebuild your audience
The simplest option is to just bite the bullet and remove your old blog (after moving all the postings to the new blog, of course) from the blogging service. Actually, “remove” is too strong a word. Delete all the existing postings, yes, but then post a new entry saying that the blog's moved. Anyone who finds or reads your old blog will hopefully update their bookmarks accordingly.
Painful, but simple.
Link to each new post
This one takes more work. If you can't redirect the old blog to the new blog, edit each entry in the old blog and insert a paragraph at the beginning that says something like “This blog entry has moved to title of posting“, where title of posting is a link to the new posting. Make sure the anchor text of the link is the full title of the posting, don't just say “This blog entry has moved here“. Always keep good SEO techniques in mind whenever you're linking, even if you're just moving things around!
If you're up to it, trim the old posting to just the bare minimum. Give people a reason to jump over to the new blog.
While you're at it, turn off comments and trackbacks for the old postings.
This is a lot more work than the first option, but there's a better chance of directing readers to the new blog.
Redirect via JavaScript
If your blogging platform allows it, you can insert a small snippet of JavaScript in each posting to redirect the user to the right spot. This is similar to what I discussed last time, but it's not as good a solution because it depends on JavaScript and search engines won't be able to follow the redirection like they can when it's done at the HTTP level via a 301 redirect. So you definitely want to combine this approach with the second approach of including a link to the new posting at the beginning of the old posting.
This is even more work, but it gets you close to what you can do with an HTTP redirect.
Next, we'll be looking at what you can do to get your new blog listed in Technorati, Bloglines, and similar services.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
How Traffic Equalizer Works: An example from my AdSense newsletter
I'm getting ready to release another issue of my AdSense newsletter. Below is an article I published in the last issue to show what you get when you subscribe. The easiest way to subscribe is to sign up for my free mini-book, the two words that can make you rich, my no-nonsense guide to making money with the Internet. Besides the book, you'll get a subscription to my newsletter and a few other bonuses. In any case, enjoy the article… I had exactly one complaint from a reader that I was too soft on the people who use this kind of product, but the point of this article isn't really to judge the usefulness of the technique, only to describe it. Note that as search engines work to integrate “trusted sites” more tightly into their results, these products will become less and less useful over the long term, though they may continue to work as short-term revenue generators.
How Traffic Equalizer Works
If you've been using AdSense for a while, chances are you've heard
of a product called Traffic Equalizer.
As you know, AdSense publishers live and die by the amount of
traffic they get to their sites. You can't make a lot of money
without getting a substantial amount of traffic. This is why
products like Traffic Equalizer (TE for short) exist. They're
in a class of software called “traffic generators”. So how do
these products work?
The process is fairly simple. You register a domain and host
it using a basic web hosting package of some kind. Then you run TE.
It goes and generates hundreds, even thousands, of pages for you
to place on that site. Those pages are all targeted to specific
keyword phrases. You place AdSense ads on those pages and get
them listed in search engines. Then you sit back and watch the
dough roll in.
Alright, it sure sounds simple. So how, exactly, does it work?
The basic idea behind TE and similar products is what I call the
search engine blitzkrieg. You generate a whole pile of simple
pages with content scraped from other sites — oftentimes nothing
but links from the search engines themselves. You make sure that
the pages are generated with good SEO techniques and that each
page targets a specific keyword or keyphrase. (That's why scraping
links from search engine results pages works so well.) You then
get them indexed into the search engines. A significant percentage
of your pages will end up ranking highly (ideally in the first
ten results) in the search engine results for their keyphrases.
Because they rank highly, those pages end up getting traffic
from people searching for those keywords. You make money if any
of those people clicks the ads on the pages.
This is strictly a numbers game, of course. The generated pages
will only rank highly for a certain number of less-competitive
keyphrases, so you need to generate and index a lot of pages
to capture enough traffic to make it worthwhile. But the traffic
you do capture is highly targeted — obviously, they were searching
for something very specific — so the chances are better that
they'll click a well-targeted ad if they end up on one of the
generated pages, which is why an automated system like AdSense
is perfectly suited for this kind of use.
Now, the search engine group within a company like Google doesn't
like these kinds of sites because they're not useful content sites.
These pages only exist to drive traffic to the ads. The advertisers
may not care, actually, if they're being sent well-targeted traffic
that is likely to result in a sale, but that may not sway the
search engine purists. So what happens is that a lot of these
sites end up getting dropped from the search engine indexes because
they're not seen as being useful. In fact, any pages that follow
the same general pattern will get dropped at some point — this is
why users of TE change the default templates that come with TE
in order to avoid (at least temporarily) being caught by the search
engines. (Well, users of TE _should_ make those changes, but I'm
not sure how many do.)
Do TE users care about getting dropped from an index? Not in most
cases, because the dedicated TE user will create multiple sites
with different templates using different domain names hosted by
different hosting companies… so losing one group of pages won't
mean losing the complete income stream.
Of course, TE users are also in competition with each other. If
two TE users are targeting the same niche, which site will get
higher rankings? Probably the site that uses more advanced SEO
techniques to tweak the generated pages even further.
If you're wondering what a TE page looks like, here's an example:
http://www.no-more-spyware.com/resources/eliminate-spyware.html
[In the original newsletter article I also included a
link to a second page, but it's stopped working since then,
probably because someone reported them either to Google or
to their hosting service…]
All I did was a bit of surfing in Google to find these pages, I'm
not associated with them in any way.
AdSense publishers should note that the AdSense program policies
specifically forbid you from placing AdSense ads on pages that
have no content. These kinds of pages probably qualify, though
Google doesn't actually define anywhere what a “content page” is
or is not. If they catch you, they'll probably stop serving ads
to that domain… maybe… they seem inconsistent about it, because
after all they ARE making money from these kinds of pages. (Note
that this is separate from being dropped from the Google index,
which is a different problem.)
So should you use TE to get traffic? I can't really answer that
for you, but I can certainly tell you NOT to place TE-generated
pages on a content-oriented site, otherwise you risk the
entire site getting dropped from search engine indexes. So if
you want to use TE, make sure you put the pages on a separate
domain with a separate IP address.
If you're a good programmer, you could probably come up with
your own page generation software that does what TE does, which
would be easier to customize to escape undue attention.
The ideal solution would be to autogenerate pages with original
content, but that's not possible. Perhaps a semi-generated
system would be better.
Or you could just build sites with good content and go for natural,
long-term traffic growth.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
How to move a blog, part 3 (series)
Well, the AdSense ads are back on this blog, which is now originating from the memwg.com domain instead of the MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com domain. I moved the blog over last night and so far things seem to be working well enough, so I re-enabled the display of AdSense ads since Google's not blocking this domain. Which brings us back to my mini-series on moving a blog. As you recall, in Part 1 I talked about backing up the current blog and in Part 2 I talked about configuring the new one. What you do next is import the old postings into the new blog and then redirect the old blog to the new one. But that's easier said than done in some configurations…
Importing old postings
Once you've configured the new blog to your liking, you should import the old postings. Better to do this before announcing the “new” blog to the world. How you do it depends on the software you're using, but it should be a fairly simple process because others would have done it before and a bit of searching the Internet will find you detailed instructions for your particular blogging software.
When importing, though, be sure to disable the pinging of services like Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic. Again, you don't want anyone visiting your blog before it's ready.
Redirecting the old blog
This is perhaps the most important step. It can be really easy or really hard depending on the blogging platform you were using.
Ideally, anyone who accesses one of your existing blog postings at the old address — you know, those postings with all the inbound links — should get automatically redirected to the equivalent posting at the new address. For example, if you followed this link now:
http://www.MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com/blog/adsense/How-to-move-a-blog-part-1-series.html
you'd actually be sent seamlessly to this page:
http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/How-to-move-a-blog-part-1-series.html
Not just you, but the search engines, too — anyone following the old links gets sent to the new blog. This is done through the magic of HTTP redirection.
HTTP Redirection
HTTP is the protocol (the communication standard) that a browser uses to get pages from a web server. When a web server responds to a browser's request, one of the things it does is send back a status code, which is basically a number describing the status of the request. Normally, the status code “200″ is sent back along with the contents of the page that was requested and the browser simply displays the page. But other status codes are possible. The one you're probably most familiar with is the “404″ code, the “Page Not Found” response that occurs when ask for a page that doesn't exist.
As it happens, the people who defined HTTP realized early on that web pages might move from one location to another. So there are redirection status codes that let the browser know a page has moved. For all practical purposes, there are only two status codes that matter: “301″ for permanent redirections and “302″ for temporary redirections. (Permanent means “this page has definitely moved to this new location, update your internal bookmarks accordingly and never call me again” while temporary means “this page has temporarily moved, so go to the new location but don't update your internal bookmarks and check with me first next time you want the page”.) The new location of the page is sent along with the status code so that the browser knows where to fetch it from.
The ideal situation, then, is to configure your old blog to send a 301 status code for every request, redirecting the browser to the equivalent page on the new blog. This isn't too hard to do if you actually have access to the web server that runs the old blog. If you're using the Apache web server, for example, you can add entries to the .htaccess file in the root of your blog directory to redirect incoming requests to the new site.
To see how this works in reality, visit Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer page. On this page you can enter any URL and see exactly what the browser would see. Enter in the address of my old blog:
http://www.MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com/blog/adsense/
Then press the “Submit” button. You'll see a lot of output, but it's not too hard to follow. First comes the request to the web server:
GET /blog/adsense/ HTTP/1.1 Host: www.makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1 Connection: close
Notice how the URL of the web page we want got split into two parts, the host part (”www.makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com”) and the path part (”/blog/adsense”). Next comes the response back from the web server:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:30:05 GMT Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Location: http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/ Content-Length: 0 Connection: close Content-Type:·text/plain(CR)(LF)
As you can see, the response was a 301 redirection, with the new location being specified as “http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/”. The HTTP viewer then follows the redirection request just as a real browser would, and eventually you'll see the raw content of the blog page returned to you. It's a handy little tool for figuring out these kinds of things.
But what if you don't have access to the web server to force it to redirect requests for your blog postings? This is not an uncommon case — if you're hosting your blog on blogspot.com, for example, this is exactly your situation. Well, we'll leave that for tomorrow's posting.
P.S.: I also have an HTTP viewer tool available, but it's the opposite of Rex Swain's tool. My tool shows you what the web server sees when it gets a request from a browser, not what the web server returns. Interesting in its own right, though.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
How to move a blog, part 2 (series)
Let's continue our discussion about moving blogs. In Part 1, we discussed making backups of postings. I should have mentioned, though, that you can often export postings from a blog suitable for import into different blogging software. How you do it depends on the software. The software I use, blojsom (more about it below) has a plugin to import postings from a syndicated feed. See what your software supports. Whatever you do, make sure your postings are backed up somewhere. (I once had to go fishing my postings out of Google's cache due to a system crash between backups, and that wasn't fun.)
The next step in the move is to get the new blogging platform configured the way you want it. (Note that we're not just talking about upgrading your current blogging software to a new version… we're talking about moving your blog from one domain to another.) If you're moving from a hosted environment like Blogger, there will be a lot of setup to do that you haven't had to do before. It's much better to do this before you go “live” with the blog. One of the first things you should do is turn off the blogging software's pinging support. You'll be creating dummy entries as you try different things in your configuration, and you don't want services like Technorati to come sniffing around until you're ready for them. Remember, no one's going to discover your blog by accident until you start publicizing it. So this is your chance to test things out without worrying about messing things up.
About blojsom
I've had some interesting comments about the blogging software I use, which is blojsom. Someone wondered why I was using “this weird platform”. It's not so weird, trust me. Apple actually uses it as the basis for one of their server products. It's open source, just like WordPress. But it's written in Java, not PHP, which is why I like it. I've just been slow to upgrade it and fix it up… that's my fault, not the platform's. But I just silently upgraded it to the latest version this morning as the first step in my blog move.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
A niche keyword list for pharmaceuticals: Top-Paying Google AdSense and AdWords Keywords for Pharmaceuticals
I've had some good feedback on my recent mini-series on keyword lists. Those are the lists you use to find a potentially profitable (with the emphasis on potentially) niche for your content. One of the readers who contacted me, Frederick Zimmerman, has gone further and applied the niche approach to the keyword list itself, which I thought was interesting enough to mention here. What he's done is quite clever. He created a list of pharmaceutical product names from the US Food and Drug Administration's official guide, the “Orange Book”. After some cleanup, he submitted it to AdWords to get cost and traffic estimates. And now he's selling it as an e-book on Amazon:
Top-Paying Google AdSense and AdWords Keywords for Pharmaceuticals
Not many publishers go the Amazon route, most prefer to use a service like ClickBank that offers affiliate programs and the like. Zimmerman thinks the Amazon route is more reputable, and I can see some validity in that view.
What's even cleverer is that he's also included the keyword information in spreadsheet format embedded within the book itself — just click on the link and it loads into Excel, ready for manipulation.
Disclaimer: Zimmerman sent me the list, unsolicited, for my opinion. If you're looking to write pharmaceutical-targeted content, it seems like a reasonable source of information on what's hot and what's not among advertisers. All the usual caveats about taking keyword lists too seriously apply, of course. (If you've got a keyword list you want me to review, go ahead and sent it to me, I'm compiling a list of them for reference.)
I would be curious to know if any readers would like to see me release Uncommon AdSense via Amazon in addition to or instead of using ClickBank. I already have an ISBN For it, so it probably wouldn't be that hard to get it done.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
How to move a blog, part 1 (series)
As promised, I'm starting the process of updating my blogging software to improve its reliability. I'll also install some caching options to make the pages come up more quickly. Lots of fun, geeky stuff… I hope! While I'm at it, though, I'm also going to move this blog from the MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com domain to the memwg.com domain so that Google will start serving AdSense ads to it again. Might as well do all the painful stuff at once. So I thought I'd start a little series talking about the steps required to move a blog from one domain to another, as it's something you may have to do yourself at one point. Note: this blog may go down at various points as I move it…. if it does, just check back later, it shouldn't be down for too long at any one point.
The first thing to do is decide whether or not your really want to move the blog. There are various reasons for moving a blog, but the main one is to move a blog from someone else's domain (like a Blogger-based blog on the blogspot.com domain) to your own domain. Ideally, you would have done this at the beginning, obviating the need for a move, but many first-time bloggers don't realize that there are benefits to hosting the blog on your own domain. (This doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't use Blogger. Look at my CluelessAbout site — its home page is actually a Blogger blog.) In any case, you're in my position, having to move the blog from one domain to another.
After you've decided to move the blog, there are some preparatory steps to take. The first thing is to make sure you have a backup of your current blog's postings somewhere. This is always good to have no matter what, but if you need to repost the content of those postings to the new blog then it's good to have them sitting around somewhere you can easily access. The easiest way to get those postings is from your RSS feed. If you can, switch you blogging software to place all the postings in the feed and then download the feed and store it somewhere safe. If you can't get all the postings that way, try looking through search engine caches for old feeds, sometimes you can find them. But you'll probably have to suck down the entire blog as a set of HTML pages. You can download software to do this for you.
Next we'll talk about setting up the new blog on the new domain.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
Traffic Tip: Keep your site/blog running
I must apologize to regular readers of this blog. Due to some bug in the blogging software I use, the site's been going down at unpredictable intervals. You can't avoid these kinds of things, but it's been happening more often that it should, and I've been procrastinating fixing it. My software is several versions behind now. And I might as well take the opportunity to switch everything over to the memwg.com domain so I can start showing AdSense ads on this site again. Bear with me for a week or so while I get things adjusted. Getting the site relisted in Technorati without losing its current rank in the list of AdSense blogs should be a challenge.
So here's a traffic tip for you: if your site's not running, you'll lose traffic. Simple as that. Keep the site up and running 24/7, or as close as you can get it to that number. Otherwise, it's a quick way to kill your traffic.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
High-Paying Keywords, Part 5 (series)
Let’s continue our discussion about high-paying keywords. In Part 1, we discussed the kinds of high-paying keyword lists. In Part 2, we discussed how keyword lists are created. In Part 3, we discussed the problems with high-paying keyword lists. Part 4 was about keyword popularity. Today we talk about the usefulness (or non-usefulness) of keyword lists.
Why Keyword Lists Are Useful
Oddly enough, Michael Gray’s latest post, No One Wants to be Fat and Poor, doesn’t talk specifically about keyword lists but it hits the nail right on the head. The reason that keyword lists are useful is because they help you find the right money-making topics for your site/blog.
Think about it. You’re sitting at your computer. You know what search terms you type in. You know what you like. But do you know what others are searching for? Are they people just like you? Probably not. So you need help in figuring out what keywords are worth concentrating on, because not all keywords are equal. A good keyword list will show you that Topic A is worth more than Topic B but less than Topic C, at least in a general sense.
Keyword lists also suggest related search terms to you that you might have missed, which is useful for tailoring your content.
Why Keyword Lists Are NOT Useful
On the other hand, you shouldn’t concentrate too much on the actual numbers shown by these keyword lists. As I discussed previously, the values they give you aren’t necessarily indicative of what you’ll get if someone clicks an AdSense ad targeting that keyword.
What the lists are good for, then, is showing the relative values of different keywords, or at least of broad topics. They’re not a “silver bullet” by any means, but given a list of topics to choose from for building a new site, normally you’d go for the one that had the best price-competition ratio.
Nothing startling in what I just said, it should be obvious if you’ve been reading this series. But I hope it helps some of you.
P.S. It figures, afer I go gloating about the wonderful 5-star review someone posted up on Amazon about my book, someone else comes along and gives it 3-stars, complaining that the book is for novices, and that I admit that quite clearly. Not sure why they bothered reviewing the book, then…. Sigh. Someone reading this, please feel free to put up another 5-star review to counteract it! 
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He’s also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
Writing good titles is good SEO
Just a short note about a basic search engine optimization, that of writing good titles. I came across the article Article Marketing & Copywriting Secret: How to Make Your Title SELL which provides some basic tips. It's those silly keywords again, they seem to popup everywhere in the world of SEO. Really, that's what's driving the whole Redscowl Bluesingsky contest, except that most of the contestants have gone further than refining the title and are including the keywords right in the domain itself. (It's interesting, each of the top ten entries has at least “redscowl” in the domain name. Most also include “bluesingsky”, or use it in a subdomain.) So remember the basic rules, and put your keywords in:
- the page URL;
- the page title;
- the headings;
- bolded text;
- the anchor text for links from other pages on your site; and
- the anchor text for links from external sites (this is harder to do)
Choosing a good, keyword-rich title makes many of these happen almost naturally.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
LearnFrenchAtHome.com: New reader-built site
Here's a new site by a reader of the French edition of Make Easy Money with Google, the first one from that group of readers. LearnFrenchAtHome.com is a site promoting private French lessons that includes live phone calls from teachers to force you to practice. The site was up before he read the book, but he's since added AdSense ads on it as per the instructions in the book. Take a look. Some of the English on the site needs a bit of work, so you can be sure that the teachers you get are native French speakers
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.