Programming Interviews Exposed: New Edition Released

Indulge me for a moment with a post that has nothing to do with AdSense, contextual advertising, or Internet marketing in general. Today is the official release date for a book I co-authored, Programming Interviews Exposed. It's a great addition for every programmer's bookshelf.

Last year I was approached by the publisher of my first three books (see books by Eric Giguere) to revise Programming Interviews Exposed (PIE), which was originally published in 2000, since the two original authors were too busy to do it themselves.

I must admit that I was hesitant to do this at first. PIE was an “instant classic” in the fast-changing world of programming books, an incredibly useful resource for programmers looking for a way to get an edge on landing their next job.

You see, the job interview process for a software development position is very different in many respects. You can't really judge a programmer from their resume, or even from casual conversation, although both do give you some clues as to what they're like. What's important is the way a potential candidate thinks and codes. That's why most organizations who are serious about their programmers require candidates to take one or more (it's not unusual to do 5 to 7 of these in a single day for the same job) “technical” interviews. These are one-on-one interviews conducted by the candidate's peers — other techies already working for the company. The interviewer asks the candidate a series of questions to gauge the candidate's technical proficiency — does he or she really know all the stuff they've listed on their resume? — and how the candidate thinks.

Technical interviews are grueling processes. Typically, the candidate is presented with a simple-sounding problem like counting the number of bits that are “on” in a 32-bit value. But there are constraints on those problems that make them non-trivial. And some of the questions are incredibly challenging. The point of it all is to see how candidates approach problem solving — a fundamental skill for any programmer — and how creative (”out of the box”) they are. And, just as importantly, how well they'd fit in with the company's culture.

My first experience with the technical interview process was when I interviewed for Microsoft back in the fall of 1989. They're not fun. You don't have a lot of time to answer the question and the pressure you feel is very intense. A book like Programming Interviews Exposed would have helped me immensely in preparing for those interviews.

The reason PIE's been so successful is because it takes a comprehensive, let's-talk-through-the-problem approach to finding solutions to the types of problems a programmer would encounter during a technical interview. It's not the questions themselves that matter, but how you answer them. PIE takes each problem and walks the reader through the process used to eventually come at the correct answer. A lot of time is spent discussing why certain answers are better than others and looking at various alternatives. A lot of time is spent just talking about the problem and breaking it down into smaller pieces. A software developer who reads this book in its entirety and takes the time to completely understand each problem and the approach that was taken to find its solution is going to be extremely well prepared for the technical interview process.

OK, enough with the sales pitch. Visit www.piexposed.com for more information on the book, including a list of what's new in the second edition, and join the mailing list for free interviewing tips. You can buy the book from Amazon and from other fine booksellers.

If you're not a programmer, you probably know one or two people who are. Do me a favor and tell them about my new book — that's the best thing you can do for me besides buying a copy! (Thanks!)

Sponsored Link: Be sure to check out Viral Profit Machine for a viral list building system that encourages affiliates to send traffic your way.

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.

April 30, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Dear Eric: Personalizing Your WordPress Blog (or website)

One of the things I liked about Dreams Not For Sale was its recommendation to personalize a user's interaction with your blog or site. What this means is that whenever you capture a visitor's name — usually by getting them to signup for your mailing list — you should use that name to address the user as much as possible. The book even includes free access to the author's $97 personalization course (”The Power of Personalization”) as a bonus — he really believes in the concept.

So I decided to try it with one of my newer WordPress blogs, the one hosting my free Why Keyword Elite? course. As you can see, the home page for the site is a standard “squeeze page” that collects the user's name and email address. Once that's done, they're sent to a thank you page that addresses them by name. Here's how you can do the same thing. Note that you can do this with a blog or a website, all you need is the ability to add some PHP code to your pages.

From Squeeze Page to Session

The trick is to use sessions to store the personalization data. Any decent autoresponder — I use AWeber exclusively and highly recommend it — has the ability to redirect the user to a “thank you” page after they sign up for your mailing list. This is where the personalization happens.

Instead of sending the new subscriber directly to my thank you page, I send them to a short PHP page that then redirects them to the correct page. When I create my squeeze page, I set the “forward variables” option so that the autoresponder signup process forwards all the user information entered into the squeeze page — typically “name” and “email” — to the post-signup destination page, i.e. my PHP page. Here's what my PHP script (personalize.php) looks like:

<?php
  session_start();
  if( isset( $_GET["name"] ) ){
      $_SESSION["personalized_name"] = $_GET["name"];
      $_SESSION["personalized_email"] = $_GET["email"];
  }
  header( "Location: http://www.whykeywordelite.com/how-to-buy-keyword-elite/" );
  ?>

As you can see, it's a very simple script. It first calls session_start() to create a session, or find an existing session. (PHP will set a cookie on the user's machine to identify the session. All of this is automatic.) It then pulls the “name” and “email” values sent by the autoresponder signup and stuffs them into session variables called “personalized_name” and “personalized_email” before redirecting the user to the real thank you page.

From Session to Personalization

Now that the user's name and email address are stored in the session, a simple bit of PHP coding is all we need to personalize our content for the user.

First we modify the header.php file for the theme we're using to define useful functions:

<?php
    function isPersonalized(){
        return isset( $_SESSION["personalized_name"] );
    }

    function getPersonalizedName(){
        return $_SESSION["personalized_name"];
    }

    function getPersonalizedEmail(){
        return $_SESSION["personalized_email"];
    }
?>

Next, we install the PHPExec WordPress plugin. This lets us insert PHP commands in our postings. (If you're not using WordPress you don't need to do this, of course.)

This lets us refer to the user by name with a minimum of fuss:

<phpcode>
<?php if( isPersonalized() ){ ?>
    <p><?php echo getPersonalizedName(); ?>, I'd like
    to thank you for subscribing!</p>
<?php } ?>
</phpcode>

Of course, this would be nicer if it was all wrapped up in a plugin. Maybe I'll do that.

In any case, when Tammy subscribes to my course, she sees a thank you page that starts with “Tammy, I'd like to thank you for subscribing!”. And, if I want, I can continue using her name throughout the site, treating her like a unique individual instead of some faceless browser. Neat and easy enough to do!

Sponsored Link: Be sure to check out Viral Profit Machine for a viral list building system that encourages affiliates to send traffic your way.

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.

April 27, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Viral Profit Machine

A few days ago I told you about the free Silent Profit Machine special report, which I thought was quite clever. (If you haven't downloaded it yet, go get it now — my offer of more than 25 free pre-built AdSense sites still applies to those who download the report via my link.) Well, the author of that report teamed up with Jonathan Leger (of $7 Secrets fame) to create a product called Viral Profit Machine based on the Silent Profit Machine list building technique. If you're looking for an easy way to build a mailing list, you should definitely take a look at this script. You'll need a freebie report or product to use as a giveaway, of course, in order to get people to actually enter their name and email address into your squeeze page. But the script takes care of all the affiliate tracking, a key part of the Viral Profit Machine technique. (If you want to know what it is exactly, read the Silent Profit Machine report first, it'll give you a better understanding of how everything works.)

I'm thinking of using VMP to promote Uncommon AdSense. It dovetails recently with my thinking that I haven't been doing enough to help my affiliates promote my book. (BTW, that's exactly what another product — Ewen Chia's Autopilot Traffic Machine, now called “Traffic, Signups and Sales” — is all about, making your affiliates happy so that they send you lots of traffic. Well, Viral Profit Machine is one system that does just that.)

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

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.

April 26, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Web Revenue Blogs Update

Pat McCarthy of ConversionRater.com has updated his ranking of web revenue blogs and I'm happy to say that Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense is still in the top 10. I pointed out that the Technorati data he was using for my blog was wrong, though — he used a ranking of 1,000,000 when it's really about 34,000 (and even that's suspect because of how Technorati dislikes this blog). Maybe I'll go up a notch or two once he updates the results :-)

It'll be interesting to see what happens to my rankings after I switch to WordPress.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense. It's only $47, too!

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.

April 25, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Review: AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo

I get the occasional email from my newsletter subscriber asking me my opinion on a certain AdSense-related product, in this case an ebook called AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo. I'm usually able to answer, but not always, because I don't have the time (or the money!) to review every AdSense infoproduct that comes out. But if one of my readers is interested, it might be something worth checking out. Hence this review.

AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo

AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo is written by George Katsoudas. Like the sales page for my own book, the main AAVoodoo page doesn't have a fancy ebook cover on it. Most of the page is the usual over-the-top sales copy, but scroll down to the bottom and you'll see a section labeled “Special Reports” which links to several pages of content such as “How to Write Google AdWords Ads” and “How to Improve Your AdSense Quality Score”. This is a nice change — some actual content to read! What the sales page doesn't say is that those are actual extracts from the AAVoodoo book itself, so they give you a good idea of how the book's written and the level of detail covered. The book weighs in at 71 pages, by the way, although there are a fair number of screenshots at the front of the book that beef up the page count.

You are excused for thinking that AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo is about AdSense arbitrage, because that's what the title implies. It isn't, not really, unlike the AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging ebook (see my review) which is precisely about that topic. But AAVoodoo only touches the surface of the arbitrage concept in comparison.

The basic technique promoted by AAVoodoo is to combine the arbitrage concept — buy PPC (typically AdWords) traffic at low cost and send it to a page with higher-paying AdSense ads — with the affiliate marketing concept. In other words, send your traffic to a landing page that has three things on it:

The book comes with four different page layout templates that you can use as starting points for your own landing pages.

So the basic idea behind AAVoodoo is that you give visitors three chances to (directly or indirectly) make you money: either by clicking an ad, visiting the affiliate product's sales page (which he recommends you open in a new window in order to keep the visitor on your page) or by signing up for an autoresponder series you've created.

In some ways this goes against the grain. Most marketers will tell you not to mix these three elements together and focus on one thing only, ideally building your mailing list. Does the AAVoodoo method work? I can't answer that as of yet.

Let's get back to the arbitrage topic. Although AAVoodoo isn't exclusively or even mainly about AdSense arbitrage, it does discuss it. It starts with niche selection (there's a list of suggested niches if you don't have any ideas) and keyword research. AAVoodoo recommends Wordtracker as its keyword tool of choice and has a number of screenshots showing you how to build a keyword list. He then briefly goes over the same tasks with the Google and Overture online keyword tools. One thing he mentions that's true from my experience is that none of these tools have exactly overlapping sets of keywords, so it's good to use as many of them as possible to generate your list. I'm surprised he didn't include instructions on how to do the keyword generation with Keyword Elite, because there's nothing in what he's doing that can't be done with KE. (Aside: sign up for my free Keyword Elite mini-course.) He also mentions some free online tools that you can use to manipulate the keyword lists you come up with and shows how to use Microsoft Excel to do some basic list operations.

The whole point of this exercise is to find low-volume but also low-cost terms that you can bid on for pay-per-click (PPC) traffic using Google AdWords.

That's the list of keywords for traffic generation. Next you have to create a list of keywords for content, i.e. to attract higher-paying AdSense ads. You do that using the AdWords keyword tool, letting it suggest synonyms for you and then playing around with cost estimates to find ads whose first three ad positions are relatively high-paying. You can only do rough estimates, of course, because the keyword tool gives you search network costs, not content network costs (which is where the AdSense earnings come from), and you don't get all that money anyhow. What the book's actually talking about here is the “bid gap analysis” I've mentioned before. The process can be sped up significantly (and more accurately) by using AdSenseAccelerator,
by the way.

After you've built your lists, time to build the landing pages. As I mentioned before, the book provides you with some templates and gives advice as to how to structure the page and write the content. It also talks about writing the autoresponder messages for the email part of the technique. Nothing radical here, just a lot of work.

There's some good advice about trying to make your content pages “sticky” so that the visitor stays there and you have more opportunities to make money as well as look more legitimate in Google's eyes. One way to do this is by adding relevant YouTube videos to the pages, and the book shows you how to do this. (You really don't need instructions, though, it's ridiculously easy.)

Then comes the iffy part of the book, getting the PPC traffic to your site. It has the standard advice about writing keywords-targeted ad groups and including the keywords in the ad itself. It then tells you to create a fake subdomain for your landing page site based on those keywords and to use that fake subdomain as the display URL for your ad. You'll get slapped by the AdWords editors, but apparently if you plead your case they'll let it through. I dunno, seems dubious to me…

This is followed by advice on how to create landing pages that automatically adjust themselves to reflect the ad group that triggered the click, which basically means sprinkling in a bit of PHP code into your pages. The concept's fine, but the implementation's a bit off because most webhosts run with the “register globals” feature of PHP turned off, so the code he shows won't actually work unless you add this snippet at the top of the file:

<?php $ag=$_GET['ag']; ?>

An easy fix, but one that will most undoubtedly trip some people up.

There's a section about using site targeting as a traffic generation source, which is the technique described in much more detail by the AdWords180 book (see my review.)

The remainder of the book is a set of short sections about building a business, stopping information overload, and overcoming procrastination.

Overall, this is an OK book. The title is somewhat misleading and there is a questionable tactic or two mentioned, but if you're willing to put in the work (aye, there's the rub) then the general technique the author presents is quite workable. You'll need other books if you want to delve more deeply into certain aspects that the book covers fairly superficially, but that's not unusual in the world of infoproducts.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense. It's only $47, too!

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.

April 24, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Bum Marketing

bum marketing explainedAn Internet marketing fad known as bum marketing is hot right now and I thought I'd make a post explaining what it is and how AdSense publishers can make use of it to increase their earnings.

What Is Bum Marketing

The baby bottom you see to the left is a little joke on my part. (It was hard to find a work-safe image to accompany this posting, though!) “Bum” marketing is not about “bums” in the human-bottom-end sense but about “bums” in the “hobo” sense.

Bum marketing refers to the technique of writing large numbers of short articles that target low competition search engine phrases for a niche market. You can get more information by signing up for the Bum Marketing Method course or by reading First Money Secrets or Article Domination. Here's the basic technique:

  1. Create a list of long tail keyword phrases related to your niche. This technique focuses on phrases, not individual keywords. Each phrase must have very little competition, say no more than 1,000 to 10,000 results when searched for in Google using phrase search (the search term in quotes). The cutoff point depends on which article submission site you're using… the more trusted the site, the higher the cutoff. You can also stand more competition if the phrase has a high monthly search volume. Find 30 to 50 such keywords/phrases.
  2. Write a short (300-400 word) article for each keyword. The article must be written using basic SEO techniques and include the keyword in the title and in the body of the text several times. You will also include a resource/bio box at the bottom of the article that links back to your site(s) using targeted anchor text.
  3. Submit each article once to one of the prime article directories, sites like EzineArticles, SearchWarp and GoArticles.
  4. Move on to another niche.

That's it! It's not rocket science. The whole point is to send traffic to your site(s) through your article's resource boxes by saturating the long tail search results of a related niche.

Bum marketing is not new. It's essentially equal to the “workhorse” method presented in Affiliate “Project X”, but the “push” in bum marketing (sorry) is on market saturation with short articles. You need to write and submit articles as quickly as you can.

Now, if you're not a born writer you're probably thinking this isn't for you. And indeed, this is what trips most people up. But the two books I mentioned above and other article writing books like Turn Words Into Traffic all have helpful hints on how to write articles quickly and easily. (Trust me, being a born writer doesn't necessarily benefit you, because you're apt to spend a lot more time writing a single article than you should in order to truly benefit from this technique.)

Bum Marketing and AdSense

The focus of most bum marketing books is on promoting affiliate products such as those found on ClickBank. This actually complicates matters somewhat, however, because many of the big article directories (EzineArticles in particular) don't let you use affiliate links in either the text of the article or even the resource box. So either you submit the articles to sites that allow affiliate links or else you resort to doing indirect selling via landing pages on sites you own. (Even landing pages are coming under scrutiny by some of the sites, though.)

Of course, AdSense publishers don't generally have to worry about these things, so in some ways bum marketing is much simpler for AdSense publishers to implement. All you do is point people to your sites, ideally specific pages deep in the site. Combine bum marketing with SEO siloing and you've got a way to both send traffic to your site and increase your site's rankings.

The downside to bum marketing? Time and effort, as usual. Writing articles, submitting articles, keyword research, etc. — these all take time and effort. And it takes away from the time and effort you're putting into maintaining your own sites.

You can actually combine your usual AdSense publishing activities with bum marketing to get the benefits of both without twice the work. Instead of just writing a short article for each keyword, write two articles: a short one for article submission and a long one to place on your site/blog. Have the short one reference the long article.

Alright, stop reading and get writing!

Sponsored Link: Get the free Silent Profit Machine report on list-building and get 25 pre-built AdSense sites as a bonus!

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.

April 23, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 4 Comments 

How to Get Over 25 Free AdSense Sites

Do you want some free AdSense sites? Sign up for the free Silent Profit Machine report and I'll give you over 25 of them. I'm not a huge fan of deploying pre-built sites, but they can be useful for topic and layout ideas.

Just sign up using my link. And you'll find Silent Profit Machine interesting enough, with a new twist on the list-building paradigm that I wish I had thought of!

Sponsored Link: Get the free Silent Profit Machine report on list-building and get 25 pre-built AdSense sites as a bonus!

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.

April 21, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Google is the IRS of the Web

Quick, what are these people talking about?

No, they're not talking about taxes, although it's a perfectly good assumption for this time of year. These people are actually talking about Google.

There is fear among search marketing experts that Google is fast becoming the IRS of the web. Or, perhaps more precisely, the (self-appointed) auditor and enforcer of search marketing.

The analogy's not perfect, but it's not that far of a stretch. Let me quote the following paragraph from the page describing the IRS criminal investigation arm:

Compliance with the tax laws in the United States relies heavily on self-assessments of what tax is owed. This is called voluntary compliance. When individuals and corporations make deliberate decisions to not comply with the law, they face the possibility of a civil audit or criminal investigation which could result in prosecution and possible jail time. Publicity of these convictions provides a deterrent effect that enhances voluntary compliance.

Let's change a few words:

Compliance with Google's search marketing rules relies heavily on self-assessments within the larger web community. This is called voluntary compliance. When sites make deliberate decisions to not comply with the rules, they face the possibility of investigation that could result in penalties. Publicity of these penalizations provides a deterrent effect that enhances voluntary compliance.

Actually, the next paragraph on that page can also be reworded:

Google's web spam agents [i.e., Matt Cutts] fill a unique roll in the search marketing enforcement community. Today's sophisticated schemes to defraud search engine users demand the analytical ability of web spam investigators to wade through complex computer records. Web spam agents are trained to recover evidence and use specialized forensic technology to recover web spam data that may be cloaked or hidden by other electronic means.

OK, I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek here, but the parallels are there. As Google continues to grow, so will these kinds of concerns.

Google's stated mission is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. But that's the kind of mission statement you's expect from a non-profit or governmental organization, not a public for-profit company. I think Google's mission is really to organize the world's information and monetize it, which puts it in direct competition with the likes of Thomson and Reed Elsevier. Google has two primary advantages over these other companies, however, because it doesn't have to produce or manage the content it monetizes and because it controls the distribution network. Google is perhaps the ultimate vertically-integrated information company. It's no wonder that some people are raising red flags.

I'm no apologist for Google. I'm just one guy who's to write about one aspect of Google's content monetization, AdSense, in an effort to help others make money using the Internet. (I'd write about Yahoo's Publisher Network, too, except that as a Canadian I can't join the program, which is only open to US residents, and so I have no experiences with it to share.) I turned down a job offer from Google last year not because I was morally against anything they are doing, but because Google's lawyers were concerned about my writing activities and Make Easy Money with Google in particular raised red flags in their eyes. (You can be sure that Uncommon AdSense would not have seen the light of day if I had accepted the offer. Even my little link cloaking how-to report wouldn't be welcome, would it?)

Let me finish by quoting Marshall McLuhan's book Understanding Media:

The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium.

When Google effectively controls the medium of the World Wide Web, will it be a positive or a negative influence on human society? Is the world of Neuromancer becoming a reality?

You tell me.

Sponsored Link: Get the free Silent Profit Machine report on list-building and get 25 pre-built AdSense sites as a bonus!

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.

April 20, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSenseAccelerator Adds International Support

I meant to post this yesterday, but those server troubles prevented it…

The AdSenseAccelerator site is accepting new members and supports a number of new features — international users take note.

As regular readers know, AdSenseAccelerator is a tool that gives you detailed data about AdWords keyword bids, in particular information about the bid gaps between the different bidders in the AdWords system, which is a great way of discovering if a keyword with a high maximum bid is actually as profitable as it may seem. You can read my detailed review of AdSenseAccelerator in three parts: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Here's what the AdSenseAccelerator folks tell us about the new features:

Last week we uploaded support for international langages,
countries and currencies into AdSenseAccelerator's engine.
For months now, many customers have requested such
features and to be quite frank, it puts us even further ahead
of our competitors' tools.

Not only can our customers get the largest and most up-to-
date top paying AdSense keyword lists (and domain names)
for the US market, they can now increase their profits by
targeting the UK, German, French, Italian and many other
markets, too.

AdSenseAccelerator is not cheap. It's sold on a monthly subscription basis. But it's a good tool for serious keyword research, and their support is great. Between it and Keyword Elite you'll have all you need to research profitable keywords.

Sponsored Link: Get the free Silent Profit Machine report on list-building and get 25 pre-built AdSense sites as a bonus!

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.

April 19, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Affiliate Commandments and Instant Money Vault

Well, I've stabilized this server enough for now to keep posting to it while I prepare to either upgrade the blogging software or switch to another platform entirely. Let me tell you, moving two years worth of postings to another platform is a daunting task, but I think the long-term benefits will outweight the short-term ones. As long as I can maintain the same permalinks for my postings I should be OK, though.

In the meantime, it's been a busy couple of days in the Internet Marketing world. A couple of products have been released: The Affiliate Commandments and Instant Money Vault. Here are my brief summaries.

The Affiliate Commandments lays out a set of “affiliate rules” that the creator of AdWords Miracle, Affiliate “Project X” and Day Job Killer has determined from his experiments with affiliate marketing. It's only 16 pages long, but then again it's less than $10. The advice is good but not earth-shattering, neatly summarizing the major themes from his three books.

Despite what you might think, even those with no or little experience in affiliate marketing will find this product useful because of the bonus 53-page report it includes. Titled “The Complete Beginner's Guide to Affiliate Marketing”, it's a nice intro to affiliate marketing basics from someone who definitely knows his stuff. If you've been wondering about promoting products as an affiliate, consider buying The
Affiliate Commandments for this bonus report alone. For $10 it's good value. Oh, and I have a bonus for you: buy the product through my affiliate link (clear your “clickbank.net” cookies first) and I'll send you a free copy of my handy-dandy ClickBank tracking script.

Instant Money Vault is a different kind of beast. The basic purchase price gives you a 111-page ebook on the various ways of making money online. The coverage is somewhat superficial, though, because a 100-page book can't really cover the myriad ways of online money making in any real detail. So I wouldn't buy this product for the book.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for a cheap way to grab a bunch of resale rights products, purchase Instant Money Vault and upgrade to the “VIP” level. You will then get over 70 (!) products with resale rights (some even have private label rights) as well as 10 (non-resale) ebooks that go into more detail on the different income streams described by the main IMV book. The resale right products include:

(AdSense publishers, take note of the first two items.) It took a long time to download everything, even with a high-speed connection. I haven't had time to look through it all, but many of the products are things I've seen before. Buying them all individually would cost a lot more than what Instant Money Vault costs. And you pre-built sales pages (mini-sites) for all the resale rights products.

Remember my recent review of Dreams Not For Sale? Its fundamental premise was that you should build a mailing list and sell resale rights products to the list in order to keep all the profits to yourself. A package like this one would be one way to get a set of products to sell to a list.

Ah well, back to moving the 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.

April 19, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The New Google Suggest Explorer

Well, this server's been going up and down like a yo-yo. Part of the reason, oddly enough, is the popularity of my keyword research tool, the Google Suggest Explorer. Originally written in Java and hosted on this site, it was one of the things I had to move before I'd be able to switch this blog over to WordPress. I've done that now, you can visit the Explorer at suggestexplorer.com. I'm hoping this will take some load off the server hosting Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

Some of the queries that I see people do with the tool (don't worry, all I see are the standard web server access logs — I have no way to track who's actually making the queries) are quite bizarre and unexpected. Here are a few sample queries from the past 24 hours:

There are also various unmentionables that are definitely not safe for work.

Well, enjoy the tool!

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.

April 18, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Server Troubles — Please Bear With Me

So it looks like I've posted enough to this blog now to cause some out of memory issues with the underlying software. The blogging platform I use is not very common and it's also file-based as opposed to database-based. So either I need to upgrade it to a newer version or else I need to switch to WordPress. Both jobs are non-trivial, but I think I'm going to do the latter.

In the meantime, if you see a message like “Tomcat server not responding” then just come back later, I'll probably have restarted it. Hopefully I can move everything over fairly painlessly to the new system.

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.

April 17, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Do It On The Server: The Right Way to Add RSS Feeds To Your Site Or Blog

Over the weekend I had a question from a reader asking me how to include an RSS feed into the content of his site. There are essentially two ways to do this: the wrong way (JavaScript) and the right way (PHP). Let me explain.

Why Use RSS Feeds?

First, though, let's talk about why you want to do this. To understand why, you have to understand what an RSS feed is. “RSS” stands for “Real Simple Syndication” and it's a way for publishers of content to provide content in a well-structured form easily manipulated by computer applications. That's what syndication is all about — making your content available for others to redistribute. The term is not new, of course, and has long been used in newspaper publishing. Most of the comic strips you see in a newspaper are syndicated, as are columns like Dear Abby and Dave Barry.

Technically, the term RSS itself refers to a specific syndication format. Another popular format is called “Atom”. In general usage, though, people tend to say “RSS” when they really many “any widely-supported content syndication format”.

All the major syndication formats are based on a text formatting standard called XML. XML documents are human-readable — mostly — but are easy for computers to process. The RSS feed for this blog starts out like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="0.92">
    <channel>
        <title>Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense</title>
        <link>http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/</link>
        <item>
            <title>Another AdWords180 Recommendation</title>
            <link>http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/Another-AdWords180-Recommendation.html</link>
        <description>This is where the content would normally be.</description>
        <pubDate>Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:25:07 -0600</pubDate>
    </item>

    etc., etc., etc.

RSS looks a lot like HTML in some ways, and that's because both HTML and XML are both “markup” languages. Unlike HTML, though, RSS feeds precisely describe the important attributes of content — when it was published, its title, its link, when it was last updated, who wrote it, an excerpt, etc. Its regularity and conciseness when compared to individual pages on a site/blog is what makes it so useful for various purposes.

RSS Feeds and AdSense

AdSense publishers in particular can find RSS feeds useful because they're a great source of keyword-targeted content.

For example, you can transform a Google Blogsearch query into an RSS feed. Here's the RSS feed for the phrase “keyword elite”, with the term in quotes:

http://www.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&q=%22keyword+elite%22&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

All you have to do to get this URL is do a Google Blogsearch for “keyword elite” and then click on the “RSS” link to the left of the results. Any software that understands RSS can take that link and use it to grab the latest blog entries about “keyword elite”. And there are lots of content sources available. Blogs are an obvious content source — most blogs publish at least a partial feed of their content — but so do article directories like EzineArticles (their complete list of article feeds is huge).

Yes, all kinds of tasty, keyword-rich content is available for the AdSense crawler to analyze and serve up super-targeted ads…. if you do it right!

Do It On The Server!

There are two popular ways to include RSS feeds on an HTML page. One way is to include a snippet of JavaScript on the page, the other is to use a PHP script running on the server. Both look mostly identical to the visitors viewing the page, but not to the crawlers!

The problem with JavaScript, you see, is that the crawlers never see the data from the RSS feed. That's because JavaScript runs in the browser, not on the web server. Crawlers aren't full-fledged browsers and they don't run the JavaScript code (at least not yet — it may happen at some point, though) they find embedded in an HTML page.

If you want the RSS data to be seen by the web crawlers, including of course the AdSense Mediabot, you have to process the RSS feeds on the server and insert the data right into the HTML page before it's sent out by the web server. This normally means doing it in a server-side scripting language like PHP. If you do it this way, both the crawlers and the human visitors will see the same data and they won't even know it came from an RSS feed after it's converted into HTML. You can see an example of this by going to my Squidoo lens about Keyword Elite and looking at the last section titled “Keyword Elite News” — that's actually an RSS feed that's been imported into the lens. But if you look at the underlying HTML you won't see anything special — the processing is all done on Squidoo's servers.

How To Add RSS Feeds To Your Pages

If you're comfortable with PHP programming, you can use the Magpie RSS and Last RSS code libraries to insert RSS content into your pages.

If you use WordPress, the feedList plugin does the job nicely.

If you're not a techie and you're not using WordPress, there's a commercial product called RSS Content Builder that will do the trick.

There are other solutions available, too, a quick search will find you many different options.

Hope you've found this helpful. Keep those questions coming!

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.

April 16, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Another AdWords180 Recommendation

Alright, I know I've plugged it before, but again I'd like to recommend that anyone interested in doing some AdWords advertising, whether it's to promote your own sites/products or someone else's products, give AdWords180 a try. Why? Because it actually works, although it takes some effort to put the system into play. But I've done better with it than with any of the other AdWords books I've reviewed.

But the best thing about this book from my vantage point is that the author is responsive. Whenever I have a question or run into a problem, I send him mail and he replies within a reasonable time (he's in the UK — I've noticed that quite a few of these AdWords authors are based in the UK, oddly enough) with detailed answers to my questions and suggestions of things to try. It's great, that's exactly the way I try to be with my own readers.

The regular price of AdWords180 is $97, but I have a link I can send you for a discounted price if you're interested. Just mail me.

Another product I can recommend for similar reasons, by the way, is Build A Niche Store. The support from the BANS people is superb and everyone I've sent their way has been happy with the quality of the product and the help they get from the product creators. It's too bad there aren't more products like these available on ClickBank!

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.

April 15, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Google's DoubleClick Purchase Means Opportunity for AdSense Publishers

Google's acquisition of DoubleClick brings one of the leading online advertising networks into the Google fold. Over the long term this is probably going to mean more opportunity for AdSense publishers, since I expect to see advertisers who use DoubleClick will be given the opportunity to advertise on Google's content network.

What does this mean to you? If you want to tap into this advertising base, you'll probably want to enable image ads (many AdSense sites run text ads only, but DoubleClick advertisers focus on image-based ads) and you'll want to gravitate towards the rectangular formats like 350 by 200 that work well with images and (especially) video. You might also want to make your site available for site targeting by offering up premium positions for advertisers to bid for.

There's still lots of time to do all of this before the floodgates open up, so get cracking now!

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.

April 14, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Review: AdSense Code Cracker

Today we take a look at AdSense Code Cracker, a relatively cheap ($27) ebook that is good value but isn't at all what you think it's about.

AdSense Code Cracker: Where's the AdSense?

Let's call a spade a spade. AdSense Code Cracker is deceptively-named. There is nothing in this book about AdSense. It's actually an AdWords primer in disguise.

Imagine my surprise when I bought the book and discovered this. Yes, I expected some coverage of AdWords, but I though it would be an AdSense arbitrage book like AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging. But it's not. It has a lot more in common with other AdWords ebooks I've reviewed here, including AdWords Miracle, Beating AdWords and Google Wealth Wizard. (If you missed my reviews, you can read them all from my AdWords book review roundup page.)

What you actually get is an 85-page book showing you how to advertise with AdWords. There's a few pages at the beginning about selling ClickBank affiliate products, but after that the book is all about AdWords. It goes through everything in quite some detail, so if you're looking for a newbie's guide to AdWords then this book is decent value compared to the others. He even explores some corners of AdWords that I really haven't played much with, such as the tools for mass movement of keywords between ad groups — an easy way to grab inactive keywords and move them into new ad groups where the ad text and landing page relevancy (you have to do that part, the tool just moves the keywords) will reactivate the keywords.

This book in particular advocates the creation of massive lists of keywords for doing long tail bidding at low keyword prices. This is contrary to the advice you'll see in the other books, which tell you to create small groups of tightly-focused keywords. I suspect the truth is that both ways will work depending on what variables you're dealing with.

For example, my own AdWords account is in such a pooched state these days that I have to work really hard to get a decent quality score for my ads — I should really start fresh with a new account. I did a quick test with a very large keyword list and most of my keywords were inactive because my minimum bids for them were $12 each! So there's no way I can bid $0.05 per keyword in order to apply this book's method. But someone starting fresh with a new AdWords account won't face those hurdles, I think. I really should try this again with a different account.

I should point out that this book is far from perfect and could use some editing. At least one of the sample ads it uses as an example has text that is too long to fit the AdWords character limits, which is a very poor thing to do in an AdWords book. (Google Wealth Wizard had that same problem.) And the section on writing compelling ad copy is very short and doesn't go into that much detail — and, frankly, that's the hardest part for most people, I think.

Oh, and the “formula” for making massive profits with AdWords is not disclosed until page 80 or so in the book, and it's nothing earth-shattering.

It's too bad the book is named the way it is. Yes, I suppose if you can send lots of traffic to your AdSense sites and pay no more than $0.05 per click you'll have high AdSense earnings — that's the whole point of arbitrage. But that's not what the book's about. It's an AdWords primer, pure and simple.

AdSense Code Cracker sells for $27.

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.

April 13, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Updated SEO Siloing WordPress Plugin

The SEO Siloing WordPress plugin I released yesterday has been updated to version 1.1. The main updates are:

Watch this space, I'm going to use this plugin to convert my debt-free living site into a siloed WordPress blog as I described in SEO Siloing and AdSense.

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.

April 12, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 3 Comments 

SEO Siloing WordPress Plugin

This post introduces the SEO Siloing WordPress plugin, which is used to create an SEO Siloing site structure for your blog.

Prerequisites

This plugin should work with WordPress 2.0 and up, including WordPress 2.3 with its major overhaul of the category structure. It may also work with older versions, but I haven't tried it.

You would normally only use this plugin if you have defined the permalink structure for your blog to include the category name as described in Easy SEO Siloing for WordPress Users. In other words, all your postings use the form /%category%/%postname%/ for their permalinks. This isn't a requirement, though, but it's a recommendation. You can actually use the plugin on any page or post, but if you use it on a non-page you have to explicitly give it a category to display.

Installation

Like all WordPress plugins, this one's very easy to install. Download the seosiloing-1.2.zip file, extract the seosiloing.php file and place it in your blog's wp-content/plugins folder. Then open the WordPress administration console and activate the plugin.

Using the SEO Siloing Plugin

The plugin's primary purpose (so far) is to create category landing pages, which are static pages with links to all the postings in a given category. You can, however, use it to create pages with lists of posts in any category. You can even use the plugin in posts, but you'll have to explicitly specify a category name/ID.

For each category in your blog, create a static page (not a post) whose “post slug” (the name of the file) exactly matches the “category slug” of the category. By default, the category slug is the name of the category converted to all lowercase and with hyphens replacing spaces. For example, the “List Building” category's slug is “list-building”. You can view a category's slug from the Categories page under the Manage option of the admin console.

Place the following HTML comment somewhere in the body of the page:

<!-- seosiloing-category-posts -->

Save the page. When accessed, the page will create a list of posts from the matching category.

You can also force posts from a specific category to be displayed by using this syntax:

<!-- seosiloing-category-posts#name -->

Replace name with the name or the ID of the category you want displayed. For example:

<!-- seosiloing-category-posts#general -->

This syntax lets you use the plugin within posts.

If the category cannot be found, a customizable error message is displayed. A customizable message is also displayed if no posts exist in the category.

Note: The normal category pages are still available via the usual /category/name/ syntax and those pages are untouched by this plugin. The point of the plugin is to create landing pages within the same URL hierarchy as the posts themselves.

Customizing the Output

Under the Options menu in the administration console you'll see a new entry for the SEO Siloing plugin that lets you set various options, including what to sort the posts by (title is the default).

Feel free to report any bugs/enhancements to me.

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.

April 11, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 54 Comments 

Review: GuruSlayer

So I used a ClickBank trick I know to purchase a copy of GuruSlayer earlier than its actual launch date. If you're on various email lists, you've probably seen this one hyped a lot. They make it sound like a groundbreaking product, but it's not. It's about making money online by building an email list and promoting products to that list. It's actually geared more to newbies than anyone else, experienced marketers won't find much new here at all.

You can read my full review of GuruSlayer up on Squidoo. Even if you're not interested in GuruSlayer itself, you might want to take a look at what I've been doing lately with Squidoo as a traffic generation mechanism. Google like Squidoo — see how my Keyword Elite review has already made it to #20 in the search results? If you're content-focused and looking for ways to drive some traffic to your sites, create your own Squidoo lens today, it's pretty easy to do. You can share in the money the lens makes and also use it to send search engine traffic to your AdSense and affiliate pages.

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.

April 10, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

Easy SEO Siloing for WordPress Users

Not too long ago, I discussed how SEO siloing can lead to better-targeted AdSense ads. One thing I didn't mention, though, was how easy it is to use SEO siloing with WordPress. Here's my quick tip on how to do just that.

SEO Siloing and WordPress Categories

The basic idea behind SEO siloing is to link articles on similar topics together and to minimize cross-topic links between different groups of articles. The easiest way to do this is to place the articles together under the same folder/directory. As I discussed before, doing so will also improve your ad targeting as the keywords in the URL play an important part in selecting the ads to display.

One easy way to group topics together with WordPress is to categorize your posts. This is easily done from the sidebar when you create or edit a post:



You just check the category for the post, adding a new category if necessary. Note that you can assign multiple categories to a post, but it's simplest to stick to one category per post.

Adding the Category to the Permalink

You don't get any benefit from assigning a category to each post unless the permalink for the post also includes the category. Again, WordPress makes this very easy to do.

From the WordPress admin console, select Options and then Permalinks:



Now choose the Custom permalink type and specify it as /%category%/%postname%/, as shown here:



Save the updated settings.

That's it… posts now include the category name in their URLs. If you use subcategories, the subcategory will also be included. It's an easy, easy way to do SEO siloing with WordPress.

This shows you why a lot of people use WordPress as a content management system (CMS). The new static page mechanism in WordPress 2.1 makes it even easier to create a “non-blog” site based on WordPress, as I did with Why Keyword Elite?.

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.

April 9, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

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