AdWords180 Revisited
Not too long ago I reviewed AdWords180, an ebook about AdWords that I found to be different than all the other books. Although the introductory pricing is no longer in effect — it's a $97 book now — I thought I'd share with you my experiences with the book so far.
The fundamental premise of AdWords180 is that you can Google's content network as a source of cheap advertising to sell whatever you want. The book was very different from the other books I'd reviewed up to that point, since those books all relied on search advertising and the promotion of affiliate products.
I got a chance to put the techniques in AdWords180 to practice this week. I must admit my initial results were disappointing. I had several ads running, but they weren't showing. If they don't show, you don't get any clicks. No clicks, no sales. So it's important to get the ads shown. When you're dealing with the content network (AdSense sites), however, there's a significant delay in the stats reporting, so you don't really figure these things out right away. (This is why it's a good idea to set your initial daily budget fairly low so you don't accidentally waste a lot of money as you get the feel of things.)
Anyhow, my problem was that I chose to promote products in the “Internet marketing” niche, which was a bad thing to do. These are products like Day Job Killer that I've reviewed here before. But it's a hypercompetitive niche and I shouldn't have been surprised that the AdWords180 techniques weren't able to do much for me there.
So what I did was switch out of the IM niche to a completely different niche, one that had nothing to do with the Internet or marketing. This experiment was much more successful: on an initial ad spend of about $2 I made back $40 in ClickBank commissions. That's a pretty good rate of return, although only time will tell if I can sustain it. But this is the most promising system I've used so far and I'm definitely going to try some more campaigns with non-IM products.
As it happens, my review of AdWords180 sold a few copies of the book for the author, enough that he's approached me out of the blue to offer my readers a special discounted price for the book. If you want the details, drop me an email, as it's only for my readers. (I'll send a note out to my mailing lists about it later, so if you're on one of my lists then just wait for the email.) There's also an AdWords180 forum that you can peruse to get feedback from others who've bought the book — most of the forum is open to the public.
Don't be fooled, though, you still have to do work to make money with the AdWords180 technique. And you'll find a tool like Keyword Elite very handy for helping with some of the drudgery. But it does seem to work. I'll know more in a couple of weeks.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Luring Traffic With Comic Strips
Getting traffic is always an issue with any site, but especially small sites in obscure niches. You need a way to grab some attention. A lot of people lately have getting traffic by posting videos. Others post salacious images. And of course there's the obligatory linkbaiting headlines. There is no “one way” to get traffic, what works for you may not work for someone else and vice-versa. You have to try different things.
Humor is a great way to get some traffic. Yesterday I discovered a neat site called ToonDoo that lets you create your own comic strip for publication on your site or blog using simple drag-and-drop tools. There's nothing to download, the comic editor just runs in your browser (it's Flash-based) and registration for the service is free.
Anyhow, I had an idea for a one-off comic strip a while back, but not having any real artistic ability I never got around to doing anything about it. But it gave me a great excuse to try ToonDoo. Here's the result of my experiment, posted on my BlackBerry programming blog:
(OK, it's a geeky thing, but what did you expect?)
ToonDoo was very easy to use, although they could use some better help — look at the lame title I was stuck with because I didn't really know what I was doing at first. You get to choose between 1-, 2- and 3-panel comic strips and they provide you with galleries of predefined characters and objects (like those faceless people) as well as text balloons and other typical comic strip paraphernalia. You can also import your own pictures, which is how I got that RIM logo up on the meeting room wall.
When you're done with the comic, ToonDoo will generate an image tag that you can easily insert into your site or blog. The comic is actually hosted on their site and visitors can leave comments and vote for their favorite ones.
Anyhow, the point of this posting is not to prove that I'm some kind of comic genius, which should now be obvious that I'm not, but to get you thinking about another way to attract some eyeballs to your site and get people talking about it. Because that, my friends, is how you're going to make money with AdSense or whatever other monetization scheme you're using. No traffic, no money — simple as that. Since we can't all resort to displaying nude pictures of ourselves (look, you want to attract viewers, not send them running away!) then coming up with a funny comic strip, image or video is one way for your site to get some attention.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
SEO Siloing and AdSense
One thing I don't think I've ever talked about explicitly is the concept of siloing. Siloing is something many sites do to organize their pages. The article Theming Through Siloing describes the concept in detail, but basically it means:
- Grouping similarly-themed pages together under a single “landing” or “index” page to create a “silo”
- Link directly between pages in the same silo
- Across silos, link only to the other silo's landing/index page
A natural silo structure often arises when you group content by folder/directory or by subdomain. (About.com, despite its ugliness and use of popups, is perhaps the best example of siloing via subdomains.) Actually, many of these are “semi-silos”, because they'll link directly to pages in other silos, breaking the “link only to the landing page” rule. Silos can be nested, of course, to divide a broad theme into a set of subareas.
The primary purpose of siloing is to improve a site's search engine rankings. For any given theme, the silo's landing page targets a primary keyword for the niche, while the individual pages within the silo target narrower (often long tail) keywords and phrases.
A Siloing Example
Take my No Debt Is Good site. Originally developed as an example of a single-page AdSense site, it would be a perfect site for me to develop using the silo model. (The site currently has more than one page on it already, so it's not a single-page site anymore. That honor now belongs to the site's opposite, Debt Is Great. It's funny, I've had people — banking types — mail me about the debt-free living site to tell me my views were all wrong, but no one's mailed me about the debt accumulation site to tell me that. Hmm.) Here's what I'd do:
- The overall theme of the site is “being debt-free” or “debt-free living”.
- Using a tool like Keyword Elite, come up with a set of silos related to “debt free”. (You don't have to use KE, of course, use any keyword tool you want. Even playing around with Google Suggest will give you some ideas.)
- Ideally, you want to pick the keywords with the highest volume as your silo keywords, which is why a keyword tool like KE is useful for cutting through the drudgery. The initial set of silos I was able to come up with using KE's Project #1 (to get the list of related keywords) followed by Project #2 (to get the search volumes) are:
- credit cards
- debt consolidation
- debt reduction
- debt solutions
- debt free
- debt counseling
Another way to generate this kind of list is to look at the top 2 or 3 sites on Google for “debt free” and use the AdWords keyword tool to get a list of site-related keywords based on those URLs, grouped by theme. The list of silos I get back from this method include:
- debt consolidation
- credit card
- debt reduction
- money makeover
- debt management
- debt help
The lists are very similar. You could probably have come up with most of these ideas on your own, too, but it's always good to check things with a keyword tool to make sure you're covering all the heavy hitters.
- Create a folder for each silo. The name of the folder is based on the silo keyword, of course, which will have important implications on our AdSense ads.
- Create 5 or 6 pages of content for each silo. Each page should directly relate to the silo's primary keyword. Again, you can find a tool like KE or the AdWords keyword tool to find relevant keywords.
- Within each silo, create an index page that links to each of the silo's pages. Each page of content should also link to other pages within the silo. Standard SEO techniques are to be used here, such as varying the anchor text of the links, using proper page titles, headings, etc. Link out to other silos where appropriate, but only to the silo's index page, never to any of the content pages in the other silo.
- Finally, create the top-level index page that links to the index pages of the different silos.
Again, there's nothing radical in any of this, and as I mentioned before many sites naturally organize themselves along similar lines.
AdSense and Siloing
SEO siloing is about search engine rankings. So how does it relate to AdSense? Well, the AdSense patent — you get my detailed analysis of it free by purchasing Uncommon AdSense — describes how the AdSense targeting system selects the ads for a particular page of content. The criteria include the following:
- the URL of the page
- the content of other pages within the same folder/site as the page
- the anchor text of links from the page to other pages
- the anchor text of links to the page from other pages
- the page title
The siloing technique ensures that each page of content focuses all of these factors onto a very specific subtopic of the site's overall theme. Which means that the ads displayed on those pages will themselves be tightly focused on the same subtopic. Better relevance means more clickthroughs, which in turn means more money.
So the next time you start a new content site, or if you want to fix up an old site, use the siloing technique to get both great ad relevancy and great search engine rankings.
If you're a WordPress user, be sure to watch Michael Gray's Make WordPress Search Engine Friendly video, where he shows how placing posts in just one category is an easy way to achieve a siloing effect. You should also refer to my AdSense and SEO for WordPress article and my AdSense and robots.txt series for further tips on creating an optimized WordPress blog.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
The Pet Fence Guide is Back in Google's Top 10
As I mentioned before, Google has been moving to a more-or-less continuous update cycle. This means that changes in page rankings can occur quite quickly. Point in case is my Invisible Fence Guide Pet Fence Guide, which I mentioned almost two weeks ago was in need of resurrection, because it had slipped enough in the ranking for “invisible fence” to seriously impact its traffic levels. At the time I wrote the post, it was on the second page of the results, around the 15th position or so. So I decided to start the process of getting it back on the first results page. I did this by “reintroducing” the Googlebot to those pages right here in this blog, by linking directly to each page in the guide (it only has a dozen or so pages) with appropriate anchor text.
That was only the first step, of course, and I didn't think it'd be enough to make a big impression, but apparently it did. Today the Guide is ranking at #3 for “invisible fence”. Just because of that posting.
If anything, this should be more proof that a respected and high-ranking feeder blog is a tool you definitely need in your arsenal. I'm still going to proceed with my other changes, though. Can't hurt, that's for sure.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Instant Traffic and AdSense Earnings
I've been seeing more marketers push Patrick Hillenbrand's AdSense Decoded video series lately. (Actually, he's usually referred to as “Dr. Patrick Hillenbrand”, although I'm not sure what relevance his degree has to making money with AdSense. I guess it's supposed to make you trust him more. OK. I have a master's degree in computer science, so please call me “Master” from now on.) The videos look similar in nature to Michael Cheney's AdSense Videos. I haven't seen either so I can't compare the two, but I suspect that if you're the type of person that likes learning from videos rather than reading books, I'm sure that either series of videos is fine. Presumably, though, AdSense Decoded is more up-to-date.
The point of this posting, however, is not to review either set of videos, but to talk about some claims I see more and more often on the promos for these types of products.
Instant Traffic = Pay-Per-Click (AdWords)
When you see a product claiming that “no organic search engine traffic” is required or that you can “get loads of traffic 15 minutes from now”, you can bet that they're talking about one thing exactly: pay-per-click traffic, likely via Google's own AdWords program. Because it's true, if you have a credit card, a list of keywords, and a set of pages already prepared, you can sign up for AdWords and start getting hits on those pages in about 15 minutes.
Now, I don't see the sales page for AdSense Decoded say anything about using AdWords. But the author does put his “AdWords Qualified Individual” logo on the page. And later on he goes on to vaguely discuss his “AdSense brokerage” (not “arbitrage”, he points out) method. And notice how he says this:
I turned on the “Light Switch” on my AdSense Account on 11 May 2006, and BANG ! As Predicted I Made Massive AdSense Profits Overnight
I'm sure if we looked at his AdWords account for that day we'd see that's when he turned on the AdWords floodgate. Which brings us to the other part of this.
AdSense Earnings vs. AdSense Profits
Most AdSense books/videos like to show you “proof” of their AdSense earnings. Nice screen grabs from their AdSense account. OK, ignoring the fact that it's incredibly easy to fake that information, let's look at the wording they use. They never talk about “profits”, only “earnings” from AdSense. “Do this and your earnings will increase dramatically”, they'll tell you. The “this” part is what we've just discussed, use PPC programs like AdWords to drive traffic to your sites.
What they're leaving out, of course, is the cost of getting that traffic. Let's assume they are making $10,000 a month in AdSense earnings. But maybe they're spending $9,000 a month on “traffic acquisition costs” (that's how Google describes paid traffic in its own earnings reports). So really they're only making $1,000 a month in profit. Which is fine, don't get me wrong, a lot of people would be happy to make an extra $1,000 a month. But there's a big difference in making $1,000 a month in profits vs. making $10,000 a month in profits.
Again, look at the numbers on the AdSense Decoded sales page. When you go from less than 100 impressions per day to over 20,000 impressions per day and you have a decent clickthrough rate (over 50% is what they're claiming) then you're absolutely going to see large AdSense earnings. But again, how much did it cost you to get those 20,000 impressions? It's a tricky game to play, as anyone who's tried their hand at AdSense arbitrage will tell you. And don't forget that you'll have to carry those advertising costs for a couple of months before you see the first earnings payment from Google. Are you prepared to spend that kind of money?
It's alright to be skeptical when you read some of these claims. It doesn't mean that the techniques these products are teaching are bad, but they may require a significant investment in time and money for them to pay off, something that they certainly don't emphasize.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense Blog Back on Technorati
Well, complaining in public on a mailing list about Technorati's inability to index my blog seems to have gotten me somewhere. Someone from Technorati apparently subscribes to that list and left me a message saying the problem's been fixed, although implying it was really my fault in the first place. Hey, that's OK, if it was my fault then fine, let me know what the problem is and I'll fix it. But when you leave repeated messages with Technorati that get unanswered, it's kind of hard to figure out what exactly's wrong, is it?
Hopefully the indexing will continue and allow surfers who are looking on Technorati for AdSense-related material to find me much more easily. Meanwhile, the blog's had a precipitous drop in ranking because of the adjustment. That's OK, it should start to go up again slowly over time, just like it was doing a year ago. If you're a Technorati user, I've made it easy for you to mark the blog as one of your favorites, just use the link at the bottom of this post or in the sidebar. Of course, links back to this blog from anywhere are always appreciated!
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Have You Dropped Your Blog's Calendar Yet?
I've started a small redesign of Make Easy Money With Google And AdSense (this blog). A couple of weeks ago I redirected memwg.com directly to memwg.com/blog/adsense — yup, the home page is completely gone. Let's face it, this blog is the only active part of the site and has taken on a life of its own. The book it originally accompanied is almost two years old now, which is ancient history for anything tech-related (although, to be honest, most of the content is still relevant — it's still a good introduction to quality website creation and content monetization). Looking through my logs I can see quite clearly that the two most popular areas are this blog and (surprisingly) my Google Suggest Explorer (I see the weirdest queries there). So dropping the home page was a no-brainer and eventually will consolidate my PageRank and hopefully push the main blog page back up to PR 6 level.
Then today I dropped the calendar from the sidebar. Did anyone use it? Doubtful. I never use calendars on other people's blogs. There are better and easier ways to search blog content. As far as I'm concerned, the calendar is a waste of space.
Some other changes are coming to the sidebar and the header area. I'm also going to put in some proper archives, although I'm not yet sure exactly how I'll organize them.
The colors won't change, though. Yeah, it's a bright blog. So what? It matches the cover of my first AdSense book. (What, you thought it was a random choice?) Besides, you should see my house — no white walls anywhere, just the ceiling and the trim.
Have you dropped your calendar yet?
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
MyBlogLog Community for MEMWG
I'm going to give MyBlogLog a try. If you're a user, there's now a community for this blog:
Feel free to join the community. If you're a LinkedIn user, you can also see my public profile here:
Drop me an email if you want to connect.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense and robots.txt (Part 4)
Time to finish this series. Refer to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 if you're just joining us.
Testing Your robots.txt File
Until you're pretty sure about what you're doing (and even then) you should always test your robots.txt file before deploying it to your web server. This ensures that you don't accidentally block a crawler from pages you want crawled. This actually happened to me not long ago when I accidentally blocked the Mediabot from my Google Suggest Explorer. Oops.
There are many robots.txt validators available, but the one you want to use is Google's. Why? Because it supports Google's robots.txt extensions, so you'll know for sure if the Mediabot (or the AdWords crawler) will be allowed on the right pages or not.
Google's validator is found in the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), a free set of tools for webmasters and blog owners. If you've created a Google Sitemap, you'll already be familiar with GWT — see Google Sitemaps 101 for more information. GWT is free, all you need is a Google account.
To use the validator, you'll need to add the site you want validated to the list of sites registered with GWT. You don't even have to verify your ownership of the site to use the validator, so just go ahead and enter the URL of your site in the “Add Site” box at the top of the page. Once the site's been added, click on the “Manage http://……” link to get to a page that looks like this:
Click on the “robots.txt analysis” link to bring up the validator:
The page above is the GWT entry for my debt-free living site. As you can see, it shows you when the robots.txt file for that site was last read. This particular site doesn't have a robots.txt file. If it did, the contents of the file would be shown in the text box.
It doesn't matter whether or not a robots.txt file was found, you can just take the contents of your updated robots.txt file and paste them into that text box. You then scroll down to the next box and enter a list of URLs you'd like checked:
You scroll down again and select which Google crawlers you want to check the file against:
And then you press the Check button. The URLs you listed are checked against the rules listed in the first text box.
You'll have to use another validator if you want to check non-Google crawlers, but for AdSense publishers this validator is often all they need to use.
So this ends our look at the robots.txt file. Now I need to apply what I just described to the pet fence guide and get the Googlebot to look at just one copy of the content while letting the Mediabot through to all the pages on the site.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense and SEO for WordPress
If you're a WordPress user, Jim Westergren's article on configuring WordPress for maximal search engine optimization (SEO) is a must-read:
The only thing I disagree with Jim about is the addition of a Google Sitemap to your site. It's actually very easy to do with the Google Sitemap Generator plugin and it will even produce a human-readable version of the sitemap just like the one shown here (assuming your web browser knows how to transform XML files into HTML, which modern browsers do).
After you've read his posting, be sure to read these relevant postings I made about using AdSense with WordPress:
- How to Get Relevant AdSense Ads (Especially for Bloggers)
- The AdSense-Ready WordPress Blog series:
- Google Sitemaps 101
Actually, I noticed that I never finished the WordPress series, there was supposed to be a fifth part! I'll do that shortly.
Anyhow, give yourself a half hour and read all those postings and you'll have a pretty good grasp of what it takes to make WordPress both SEO-friendly and AdSense-friendly.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense and the Long Tail of Advertising
After reading the latest ProBlogger guest posting where an advertising exec tells
bloggers to avoid AdSense (which makes me question the whole “guest post” concept), I just had to post a rebuttal. Because AdSense is more important than you might think.
The genius of AdSense is that it's able to monetize content that advertisers and advertising networks would otherwise ignore. It's the ultimate application of the Long Tail phenomemon to online advertising. By implementing a completely automated system for selecting and displaying contextually-related advertisements, Google is able to make money by displaying ads on small, low-traffic sites that are otherwise too uneconomical for advertisers to reach.
Does this mean AdSense is the perfect advertising program for every site? Absolutely not. If you have decent traffic in an in-demand niche, you can probably find a way to make more money from advertisers looking to target those kinds of sites. If you go looking for it.
But if you want a hassle-free way to monetize the traffic that's reading your content, AdSense is hard to beat. Not everyone understands how to use AdSense to its fullest, of course, which is why I wrote my book, but that doesn't stop them from making money.
The existence of AdSense also makes other advertising networks work harder to improve themselves, which is also a good thing.
AdSense isn't for every site, and I've never said otherwise. But for many sites, it's the only option that makes any sense. And sometimes, it's just the only option.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
RedirTrack: New Open Source Affiliate Referral Tracking Project
Given the interest in a ClickBank tracking script, I thought I'd announce something a little different, a new open source affiliate referral tracking project I call “RedirTrack”. And I'd like your input on it before I start coding.
P.S.: If this posting causes your eyes to glaze over, don't worry, the next posting will be about AdSense, not this icky click-tracking stuff. Just needed to get the ball rolling.
RedirTrack Requirements
Let's start by talking about what we want to see from this software. Here are the initial requirements based on what I'd like to see RedirTrack do:
- Written in PHP for maximum portability across web servers
- Uses a MySQL database for data storage
- Simple installation
- Requires Apache web server with rewrite capabilities (mod_rewrite) enabled (99% of hosting services offer this)
- Generates unique tracking IDs for use with ClickBank and possibly other affiliate programs
- Stores useful information about each referral
- Creates “nice-looking” affiliate links
For example, say I want to promote the Keyword Elite product, which is sold on ClickBank, from an AdWords ad. This is the kind of destination URL I'd like to use in my ads in group “KE1″ of my campaign:
http://www.mysite.com/go/keywordelite?group=KE1&kw={keyword}
When my ad is clicked, AdWords will automatically insert the keyword that triggered the ad into the URL, so if a user was searching for “keyword tool” the actual URL would be:
http://www.mysite.com/go/keywordelite?group=KE1&kw=keyword%20tool
What I want to come out the other end is an HTTP redirection request (see my book Link Cloaking For The Mystified on how redirections work) that looks like this:
http://egiguere.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=9JT5
The TID parameter (the ClickBank tracking ID) is unique for each click. The RedirTrack script stores useful information about the originating click, including for example the values of the “group” and “kw” query parameters but also things like when the click occurred, the referral URL, and what address it came from. Anytime a ClickBank sale occurs, I can take the TID parameter reported to me by ClickBank and pull out the associated information. This will quickly tell me which keywords are making me money. Of course, I'm not limited to using RedirTrack with AdWords, I can use it to track clicks in my HTML pages, and so on.
The script could be enhanced to handle redirecting users to specific landing pages, not just ClickBank hoplinks. We could even have it do different things when a crawler (the AdWords crawler comes to mind!) visits.
RedirTrack Implementation
So I haven't done a single line of coding yet, but this is how I envision it working:
- The script itself is very simple, because we want it to be fast.
- We'll use an auto-increment integer primary key in the main table that stores the click tracking data. That primary key will be transformed into a ClickBank tracking ID using a base 36 conversion routine.
- The “nice URLs” will be handled using RewriteRule directives in the .htaccess file for our “go” (or whatever you want to call it) directory. Again, this keeps the script simple. (I'm thinking the qsappend option to RewriteRule does most of the hard lifting.)
Off the top of my head, I think the .htaccess file for the “go” directory would look something like this:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule keywordelite redirtrack.php?vendorid=bryxen4 [qsappend,last]
But don't quote me on that, haven't tried it yet.
Alright, there's the plan. I'm making it open source because I don't want to deal with the hassle of creating a commercial product. Plus I think this is pretty simple stuff, anyhow. Any comments or suggestions before we start coding?
Sponsored Link: Learn how to get AdWords clicks for less than one cent using the simple technique
described in AdWords180.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
PHP Code For Creating ClickBank Tracking IDs
My last posting about using a central script to generate unique ClickBank tracking IDs has elicited a number of comments and emails from readers looking for more information about how to do it without shelling out $997 (actually, $1497 if you don't want to use his hosting system) to the Rich Jerk. So I did some digging around and found something that'll really help you get started on this.
It's Base 36!
Remember how I said that a tracking ID consists of numeric digits and uppercase characters, giving you 36 possible choices (0 to 9 plus A to Z) for each character in the ID? If you remember your math, you'll recognize that this is a “base 36″ system where the numbers go 0, 1, 2, … 8, 9, A, B, C, …, X, Y, Z, 10, 11, 12, … 18, 19, 1A, 1B, …, 1Y, 1Z, 20, etc. You may have seen numbers like this before, because geeks often talk in “base 16″ or “hexadecimal”, which is like base 36 except that only the 6 letters from A to F are used.
So to generate a ClickBank tracking ID all you need is to keep an integer value around, add 1 to it whenever you need a new tracking ID, and then convert that number to base 36. You can even go the other way by converting a tracking ID from base 36 to base 10 (our standard decimal system for counting by 10) to get back the original integer value — very handy for storing something in a database! (Hint for the database geeks: use an auto-increment integer primary key.)
Converting to Base 36 with PHP
Converting to base 36 is not something you find in most code libraries, but I figured that a quick search for a PHP routine to convert an integer to a hexadecimal (base 16) value would be a starting point for my base 36 conversion routine. Then I came across this little gem, written almost four years ago:
A Binary-Octal-Decimal-Hexadecimal-Base36 converter
That's right, someone's already written a base 36 converter for us! You can actually try it out online. Enter a number like 845623 in the Decimal (input) field and press the DEC to B36 button near the bottom of the page to convert it to its base 36 representation, I4HJ. Press the B36 to DEC button to go the opposite way, from base 16 to decimal. If you're looking for a simple way to manually generate some ClickBank tracking IDs, this is a nice little tool to do it.
The source code for the converter is available and is distributed under an open source license, so if you plan on creating a script for sale, you should come up with your own version of the converter. But for personal use this is a great place to start.
Note that you don't have to use a database to store the data your script collects, but given how easily PHP interfaces with MySQL it's probably the wisest choice. But if you don't get a lot of traffic through your affiliate script then you could get by storing things in files, too.
Sponsored Link: Learn how to get AdWords clicks for less than one cent using the simple technique
described in AdWords180.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
How To Do Your Own X-Ray Domination Using ClickBank Tracking IDs
Today the Rich Jerk is releasing his X-Ray Domination product today. If you're on a few mailing lists, it's hard not to know this, because almost all the Internet marketers with substantial lists are trying to outdo each other with “extra value” bonuses offered to anyone who purchases X-Ray Domination (XRD). It's understandable, because XRD has a list price of $997, which means each person an affiliate signs up is going to make that affiliate several hundred dollars in commission.
What follows is a discussion of what XRD is really about and how you (possibly with help from a geek friend) can do the same thing with a bit of programming. Although I've not seen or used XRD myself, I've gleaned enough information about it to be pretty sure about what I'm discussing here.
X-Ray Domination Is All About Tracking
The Rich Jerk is known for his controversial tactics, and he's used them to the hilt in promoting this one. I'm not sure what most people think they're buying when they buy X-Ray Domination, but it's probably not what they think it is. The truth is that at its heart, XRD is all about affiliate tracking.
Any good marketer — online or offline — knows how useful it is to have concrete data about which advertising campaigns are working — and, more importantly, why they're working. But that data is hard to get. Many marketing tactics in the offline world have no measurable stats. In most cases, you can't definitively say that “this promotion sold N copies” of our product.
Online promotions, though, are often measurable. When someone clicks an ad, you can capture information about that click — which ad was clicked on, the referring page, the IP address of the computer, etc. — and you can use cookies and session IDs to track a user's progress from ad click to conversion. (A “conversion” could be a sale, an email address, a phone number — something that directly or indirectly makes you money.)
Tracking things on your own systems is easy to do. Tracking things across systems that don't belong to you is harder. That's the situation affiliates find themselves in, because once they refer a potential customer to the vendor's site, they lose the ability to track what happens to the customer unless the vendor gives them a way to do the tracking. If they don't know which keywords on their pay-per-click campaigns (or other traffic sources) are actually converting, affiliates are at a disadvantage. They'll be spending money that would be better spent elsewhere.
ClickBank Hoplinks
Most infoproducts are sold through ClickBank. Up until recently there was no way to track affiliate sales via ClickBank because of its hoplink system. A hoplink is a special URL that combines the ClickBank IDs of the affiliate and the vendor to create a referral link. Here's an example of a hoplink:
http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net
This hoplink combines my ClickBank affiliate ID (”egiguere”) with the ClickBank vendor ID (”uavol1″) for Uncommon AdSense. If you click on http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net then you get redirected to the UncommonAdSense.com site, but only after first going through ClickBank's systems. ClickBank sets a cookie that stores the ID of the referring affiliate. If you click the order button on the vendor's site, ClickBank uses that cookie to track which affiliate made the sale. But that doesn't tell the affiliate how the sale was made. All they'll know is that they made a sale, somehow.
ClickBank Tracking IDs
Recently, however, ClickBank added an option that lets affiliates track the sales they make. They did this through the addition of a tracking ID (TID for short) to the standard ClickBank hoplink. All you do is append a query parameter “TID” to the standard hoplink:
http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=MEMWG
The tracking ID can be any combination of numbers and uppercase letters (lowercase letters get converted to uppercase) up to 8 characters long. The TID is stored in the cookie with the affiliate ID and passed through to the ClickBank order form. It then shows up in the affiliate's ClickBank reports. If you click http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=MEMWG and buy Uncommon AdSense, I'll see a sale in my affiliate report marked with the TID “MEMWG”. Consistent use of tracking IDs allows a ClickBank affiliate to see precisely where conversions are coming from.
The X-Ray Domination Method
Now we get to the meat of the X-Ray Domination method. Although the details here are specific to ClickBank, you could apply the same ideas to any affiliate system that supports tracking of affiliate referrals.
Let's look again at the format of a ClickBank tracking ID. For each character in the TID there are 36 possible values (the numbers 0 to 9 and the English letters A to Z). This means that there are 36^8 = 2,821,109,907,456 possible 8-character tracking IDs. That's a huge number, and it's not even the total number of tracking IDs possible, because in fact you'd need to add 36^8 + 36^7 + 36^6 + …. + 36 to count all possible 1- to 8-character tracking IDs. Let's just stick with 8-character IDs, though.
So here's what you do to apply the X-Ray Domination method to ClickBank affiliate referrals:
- Instead of using a ClickBank hoplink, all your referrals should be to a site you own. Your AdWords ads, for example, would all use your site as the destination URL. The destination URL would include at a minimum this information: the ClickBank vendor ID and the keyword that triggered the ad.
- On that site you have a PHP script that interfaces with a MySQL database. Each referral gets directed to this script.
- Each time the script is accessed, it stores information in the database: which IP address the click came from, the ClickBank vendor ID, the ad keyword, etc.
- The script then generates a new, unique ClickBank tracking ID for the referral. The simplest system is to start with 00000000, 00000001, 00000002, …, 00000009, 0000000A, 0000000B, …, 0000000Y, 0000000Z, 00000010, 00000011, …., etc. But you could use other schemes, such as using the first character to distinguish the traffic source (AdWords, article, blog, etc.). Whatever works for you.
- The script redirects the browser to the vendor's site using a hoplink and the unique tracking ID. For example, http://egiguere.uavol1.hop.clickbank.net/?TID=0000002M.
- When a sale occurs, use the TID to pull out the information associated with the sale to figure out when and where the referral came from.
That's it. Funnel all your ClickBank referrals through this system and start to collect valuable information about what's working and what's not. Use the information to increase your ad spending in key areas, write articles triggering the right keywords, etc.
Such a system is simple for an experienced PHP, JSP or ASP programmer to develop. Trust me on that. It could potentially require a lot of database space to run such a system for a long time if you have a lot of traffic, but the kind of system available in a standard hosting package will easily handle the traffic that most affiliates would generate at the start of this process.
From what I gather, X-Ray Domination gives you more than just a script that does what I've outlined above, but I have no specific details about what's included. I think, though, that if you have some programming ability — or known someone who does — you can develop your own script for a lot less than $997.
Update: The XRD site's live now, and it looks like there's more stuff than just the tracking script,
which is good. Still seems pricey to me, though. If you buy it, please do yourself a favor and use the product.
So many of these things get sold and the buyers never actually do anything with them.
Sponsored Link: Learn how to get AdWords clicks for less than one cent using the simple technique
described in AdWords180.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense and robots.txt (Part 3)
Previously, in AdSense and robots (part 2), I described how the standard web exclusion rules (the “disallow” syntax) made it easy to accidentally block the AdSense crawler (the “Mediabot”) from scanning pages that you'd normally want read, all because you were trying to keep the search engine crawlers from indexing certain pages. Luckily, the bright bulbs at Google came up with a solution: inclusion rules.
Google's Extensions To robots.txt
All of Google's crawlers support the Allow directive in addition to the standard Disallow directive. For example, the following syntax forbids access to all parts of a site except for the “/blog/” subdirectory:
User-agent: * Disallow: / Allow: /blog/
The primary use for inclusion rules, however, is to give different crawlers different levels of access. In the last posting, for example, I showed you a rule to avoid duplicate content serving for a WordPress blog:
User-agent: * Disallow: /2005/ Disallow: /2006/ Disallow: /2007/ Disallow: /link.php Disallow: /category/ Disallow: /page/ Disallow: /feed/
The problem with this rule is that it blocks all crawlers. We'd still like to see the Mediabot get access to those pages so Google can show the right ads on all pages, duplicate content or not. With the allow syntax it's quite trivial, just add a new rule targeting the Mediabot exclusively:
User-agent: * Disallow: /2005/ Disallow: /2006/ Disallow: /2007/ Disallow: /link.php Disallow: /category/ Disallow: /page/ Disallow: /feed/ User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Allow: /2005/ Allow: /2006/ Allow: /2007/ Allow: /link.php Allow: /category/ Allow: /page/
AdWords users should take note of this syntax, too, because landing pages are often very similar to each other and are often excluded from the search engines because of this. If you want, you can use the “allow” syntax to give the AdsBot-Google crawler (the AdWords crawler) permission to access the landing pages. Note, however, that by default the AdWords crawler ignores exclusion rules that apply to all crawlers, i.e. “User-agent: *” (here's the reference.) So in most cases your landing pages are safe. But it doesn't hurt to explicitly ensure that the AdWords crawler can see them.
Aside: Crawlers voluntarily choose to respect robots.txt. At times your system will be crawled by a crawler that ignores the rules you've defined, or (like the AdWords crawler) doesn't respect all of them. Some sites are aggressively crawled by scrapers and other crawlers with ignoble purposes and end up using other facilities for limiting access to their content by non-humans.
Google also supports extensions to the pattern matching used to determine which rules apply to which folders or files on a site. The matching used in a standard robots.txt file is pretty simple: any URL that begins with a given pattern is matched. This is why it's important to include the trailing “/” character at the end of folders. Google uses more sophisticated matching which is useful at times for more complicated scenarios.
Now, it sure would be nice if there was a way to test a robots.txt file, with and without these extensions, in order to ensure that the rules actually work as we expect them to work. Luckily, there's an easy way to the testing. We'll get to that next.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense and robots.txt (Part 2)
In AdSense and robots.txt (Part 1) I described the basic syntax for the robots.txt file. Today we look at how the robots.txt file can affect your AdSense income if you're not careful with how you declare the exclusion rules.
Mediabot: The AdSense Crawler
AdSense is an automated program. The very first time an AdSense ad is displayed on a page, Google quickly sends out a web crawler to read and analyze the content of the page so that it can properly tailor the ads it displays to the content of the page. The basic algorithm for how it chooses the ads is described in extensive detail in the AdSense patent application. (You can get my analysis of the patent for free by purchasing Uncommon AdSense, by the way.) The crawler is commonly known as the “Mediabot” because of the user agent string it sends, “Mediapartners-Google/2.1″.
Until the Mediabot has a chance to examine the page in question, AdSense selects ads based on other factors, such as:
- the URL of the page itself (which may contain ad-triggering keywords)
- the content of other pages (previously analyzed themselves) that link to the page in question
- the search queries that lead to the page
Again, all this information is detailed in the AdSense patent application. As long as the new page's content is in line with these other factors, the ads you'll see displayed will probably be on-topic. But the real determination of which ads best fit the page won't be made until a few seconds or a few minutes after the first ad is displayed.
And after the crawler's seen the page once, it will come back to occasionally revisit the page as long as AdSense ads are being displayed on the page. It usually comes fairly frequently, but there's no way to control the scheduling.
But note this: the Mediabot respects the rules in the robots.txt file. This has important implications.
Don't Ban the Mediabot!
A common use of exclusion rules is to prevent search engine crawlers from seeing duplicate content. It's very easy to serve up duplicate content in blogs, for example, because most blogs have extremely flexible navigation paths — besides viewing individual posts, you can view them grouped by date, by category, etc. Normally you only want to present one view of the postings to Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. For example, WordPress SEO - using robots.txt to avoid content duplication presents an exclusion rule that WordPress blog owners can use to present a single view of the blog content to the search engines. Here's a small fragment of the exclusion rule:
User-agent: * Disallow: /2005/ Disallow: /2006/ Disallow: /2007/ Disallow: /link.php Disallow: /category/ Disallow: /page/ Disallow: /feed/
Notice the use of the wildcard character in the user agent part of the rule. You're not just banning the search engine crawlers from those pages, you're also banning the Mediabot! So if you display AdSense ads on the blog, they won't be properly targeted on the pages you've blocked via the exclusion rule. If you're like a lot of WordPress users and you use permalinks that start with the date of the posting, you've just blocked crawling of those individual postings!
So you have to be careful in how you define your exclusion rules. The wildcard character should be used with caution. If you can, create specific rules to block specific crawlers instead. The problem with this approach, of course, is that there are simply too many crawlers to list, so you'll need to limit yourself to the big ones like Google (”Googlebot”), Yahoo! (”Slurp”) and Microsoft (”msnbot”) and forget about the rest.
At this point you're probably thinking that it's too bad the robots.txt file can't let you specify inclusion rules in addition to exclusion rules. Google thought so, too, and so they came up with an extension to the robots.txt syntax that lets you do precisely that.
But more on that and how it affects the AdSense crawler in part 3.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense and robots.txt (Part 1)
My last posting was about my attempts at improving the rankings of the Guide to Electronic Fence and Pet Containment, previously known as the Invisible Fence Guide. One of the things I need to do is to get the search engines to only crawl one copy of the content, since I have the same content repeated in different locations on the site. This is done using a special file called a “robots.txt” file, but if you're careful you'll end up blocking other crawlers — like the AdSense crawler — that need to access all those pages, regardless of whether they're duplicate content or not. Here's how to do that.
Why robots.txt?
In the early days of the Web, search engines would be quite indiscriminate about what they'd index from a site. Often pages that were actually meant to be private — known just to a small group of people — would make their way into a search engine's results. For this and other reasons, a Web robots exclusion standard was developed to allow website owners to tell well-behaved robots what they couldn't index. (You can find detailed information about the standard at the robotstxt.org page.)
The basic idea is quite simple. At the root of a site — the top-level folder — the webmaster places a simple text file (not an HTML file, just a file created with a text editor like Windows Notepad) called “robots.txt” that gives a set of rules for determining which parts of the site are to be ignored by crawlers.
So if I wanted to exclude robots from certain parts of www.memwg.com, I'd create a robots.txt file (case is important, don't capitalize any part of the name!) at www.memwg.com/robots.txt. The first time a crawler came to the site, the first thing they'd do is fetch the robots.txt file using the URL http://www.memwg.com/robots.txt. If there was no such file, the crawler would assume that the whole site can be indexed, otherwise it would apply the rules it finds in the robots.txt file to the list of pages it generates for the site and only index the ones that make it through those rules. In other words, the robots.txt file is a filter that filters out URLs that shouldn't be indexed.
I should point out at this point that there is another way to exclude crawlers from indexing the contents of a web page, by using a <meta> tag at the top of the HTML file. For example:
<html> <head> <title>A page about nothing</title> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"</meta> </head> <body> <p>Nothing to see, move on folks, move on.</p> </body> </html>
See the HTML Author's Guide to the Robots META Tag for all the details. The problem with this approach, however, is it only protects HTML files, and it also requires modification of each file to be protected. The robots.txt file is a better and simpler approach to the problem.
The Classic robots.txt File
The classic robots.txt file — the one defined by the Web robots exclusion standard mentioned above — is very simple to create. The file consists of one or more exclusion rules.
An exclusion rule has two parts to it. The first part is the User-agent line that is used to identify which crawler the rule applies to. The second part is a sequence of one or more Disallow lines that identify the parts of the site that the crawler is to ignore. Here's a simple example:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
This example tells all crawlers (”*” is a wildcard character that matches anything) to ignore all files in the “/” folder (the root folder). In other words, the rule above prevents all crawlers from crawling the entire site.
That's a bit of an extreme example. A more likely rule looks like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /links.html
This protects a number of directories and a single file from crawling.
User Agents
Some you might wondering what a “user agent” is. I've already written a detailed description of user agents in my article Masquerading Your Browser, which I suggest you read, but to put it simply a user agent is simply a string (a sequence of characters) that the web browser sends to the web server whenever it requests a file from the web server. The web server can use this string to identify what kind of browser is making a request and return different versions of a page. For example, in How to Detect Internet Explorer I show one way the user agent string can be used to detect that Microsoft Internet Explorer is asking for a page.
Crawlers fetch files from a web server the same way that browsers do. Well-behaved crawlers use the user agent string to identify themselves to the webserver. Google's search engine crawler, also known as the “Googlebot”, uses a string that looks like this:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
So if you want to exclude the Googlebot from a specific folder, you'd add a rule like this to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /notforgoogletosee/
This rule blocks any crawler whose user agent contains the phrase “Googlebot” from accessing the “/notforgoogletosee/” folder on the website.
Geeks collect and disseminate information about user agents. For example, you can get a list of user agents from UserAgentString.com. The AdSense crawler, for example, identifies itself as:
Mediapartners-Google/2.1
Remember that, it's important. We'll see why next time.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Comparing Google and Overture Search Volume
Today I ran across this post that shows search volumes in Google's keyword tool, obviously a test that Google is running. It's a been a long-standing request from Internet marketers and AdSense publishers that Google release actual search volume information, which up to now they haven't. Looks like they're about to.
Anyhow, I thought it'd be interesting to run a few of those numbers against the Overture keyword suggestion tool and see how the numbers compared. For fun, I also looked at what Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker have to say. I only did this for three keyword phrases, as I have better things to do with my time:
| Keyphrase | Overture | Wordtracker | Keyword Discovery | |
| secretary desk(s) | 66000 | 8069 | 14370 | 21059 |
| antique secretary desk(s) | 2830 | 829 | 210 | 4736 |
| roll top desk(s) | 44000 | 11290 | 19170 | 23401 |
So what can we conclude from this small, unrepresentative sample? Well, it looks like the common wisdom that the Google search volume is a multiple of the Overture search volume is correct: the Google numbers are from 3 to 8 times higher than the Overture numbers. But the numbers from Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery seem to have a lot more variance. Of course, some of these services separate the singular from the plural forms, and the estimates are for different time periods, so treat the data with a (large) grain of salt. It will be interesting to run more detailed stats when Google actually releases the search volume information to everyone.
Like I said, I just thought it'd be interesting to compare the numbers. I have no great wisdom to impart.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Resurrecting the Invisible Fence Guide
I mentioned not too long ago that the income I'd been earning from my pet fence guide AdSense case study was declining. That decline is due to its slow drift down the search engine results rankings. At one point, for example, the site ranked #2 on Google for the term “invisible fence”. Right now it's on the second results page, however. I want to move it back up, of course, so I thought I'd write some posts relating to that topic, with the Invisible Fence Guide (that's it's original name — more on that shortly) as the example.
Why Did The Rankings Change?
Search engine results are always in flux. This is true now more than ever. Google recently switched to a continuous update system rather than the interval-based updates they'd been using since the beginning. So if your income depends on natural search traffic, you have to pay attention to those rankings.
When you have a site that's lost its ranking, the first thing you want to do is a post-mortem to figure out why the ranking's been lost. That will help you determine which steps to take to fix things — if they're fixable!
So what happened to my invisible fencing guide? There are a number of issues at play here:
- The deliberate de-emphasis of the Invisible Fence trademark. As you may recall, the site drew the attention of Invisible Fence, Inc.'s lawyers who threatened to sue me for trademark violation because I was using their trademarks on a site that was advertising competitive products. Rather than fight them on this, I decided to change the site to accomodate most — but not all — of those demands. Naturally, de-emphasizing the term “invisible fence”, including removing that keyphrase from the domain, impacts the search engine rankings.
- The lack of new/updated content. The site's not been updated in a while, about the only thing I did to it recently was to put a note on the home page mentioning Taffy's early and unexpected demise.
- The use of duplicate content. Because it's a case study, the site creation was documented and split over several stages, which are all still live on the site. This, of course, means that there's duplicate content. A normal site wouldn't have these issues, at least not in this manner.
- Better SEO work by other sites. You think you're the only one worried about search engine rankings? The other sites are working on improving their rankings, too.
- Ugly session IDs mixed up in the URLs for the site. These should really be taken out.
Despite these issues, though, I think the rankings can be improved. This is especially true when you had a high-ranking site to begin with — which is why you need to use good SEO practices right from the start. It's easier to start high and fix a downward drift than to start low and work your way up.
Revisiting the Invisible Fence Guide
Let's start by revisiting the Guide to Invisible Fence, or the Guide to Electronic Fence and Pet Containment as it's now known. Remember what I wrote not too long about feeder blogs? I want to get the pages on my pet fence site noticed again. So I'll start by referring to them right here.
The guide is a very simple site, consisting of a dozen pages of content and an “about this site” page. Here are the content pages as they now sit:
- Pet Fence Guide Introduction: Explains what the site is about — to describe why we decided to purchase and install an Invisibile Fence dog containment system even though our backyard was already fenced.
- The warning signs we ignored: The clues we should have paid attention to that one or both of our dogs were trying to escape the back yard.
- A dog escapes the back yard: The incident that led to the purchase of the Invisible Fence system.
- The search for the escaped dog: This is when we made the decision to get an Invisible Fence system.
- The Invisible Fence dealer's sales call: The visit from our local Invisible Fence dealer.
- How Invisible Fence works: The basic technology behind the Invisible Fence system.
- Installation of the Invisible Fence: How an Invisible Fence system is installed.
- The Invisible Fence collar: What makes the Invisible Fence collar special.
- Training the dogs to respect the Invisible Fence boundaries: The simple training procedure that keeps the dogs away from the Invisible Fence.
- Repairing the Invisible Fence: How the Invisible Fence system was repaired when a car ran into our wooden fence and disrupted the Invisible Fence wiring.
- Using the Invisible Fence system inside the house: How you can take advantage of the Invisible Fence collar for pet containment inside the house.
- Pet Fence Guide conclusion: Generic concluding stuff.
There's also the About the Invisible Fence Guide page and of course the AdSense case study page linking all the different stages together.
So, what do I do next? What I need to do is move the pages out of the “Stage 4″ part of the site and into their “final” locations, which was always my initial intention but something I never did. Once I do that, I can work on configuring a robots.txt file to exclude the duplicate content pages from the search engines. But let's leave this for next time.
Sponsored Link: You want an interesting book?
Uncommon AdSense is
pretty damn interesting, if I say so myself.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense. Interesting name, interesting topic, interesting blog.
The #1 Rule of Blogging
Someone on a mailing list I'm on was interested in setting up a blog for her business and went looking for advice about what to do. My response to her was that there was only one thing that really mattered.
Be interesting.
Oh, sure, there are lots of technical details to explore and lots of decisions to be made about which blogging platform to use, what theme to use, whether to use partial or full feeds, whether to write long posts or short posts, etc. etc. If you want to know more about these kinds of things, read ProBlogger and Copyblogger. I can only bow to the masters.
But the #1 Rule of Blogging, the “one to rule them all”, is to be interesting:
- Be interesting to prove that you're human, not just some bot that mashes and reposts other people's content.
- Be interesting to incite readers to revisit, because usually you only get one chance to make a good impression. (It's kind of like dating.)
- Be interesting to communicate, because Lord knows it's hard for anyone to pay attention when they're bored.
- Be interesting to reach your readers on an emotional level, in a way that dry recitations of facts (”Hey, let's publish our press releases to the blog!”) and obviously overhyped sales material (”It's the best thing since sliced bread!”) can't and don't.
Perhaps the best reason to be interesting, though, is that it makes the world a more interesting place. And I'd argue that a more interesting world is a better world.
Don't create yet another boring business blog. Be interesting because you don't have a boring business blog. Ideally that means having an interesting business blog, but if you can't manage that then just don't have a blog!
Sponsored Link: You want an interesting book?
Uncommon AdSense is
pretty damn interesting, if I say so myself.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense. Interesting name, interesting topic, interesting blog.