Urban Giraffe’s Redirection Plugin Saves My Bacon
As you can see, the transformation from blojsom to WordPress is well under way. I’ve even got the basic color scheme redone. I’ll be tweaking this for the next few weeks, of course.
One thing that’s been really helpful during this transformation is the Urban Giraffe Redirection plugin. After I imported my old content into WordPress I was able to use Redirection to redirect the old feed URL to the standard WordPress /feed/ path without having to play tricks with my .htaccess file. Very cool plugin, very easy to use, very recommended.
If you’re reading this blog through an RSS reader, note that for some reason a full feed isn’t being sent out, even though I have that option enabled. I’ll investigate and fix this, but probably not for a few days until I get other things fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime.
Technorati Tags: AdSense, Google, WordPress, Urban Giraffe, redirection
Eric Giguere’s AdSense Blog Is Two Years Old!
The Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense blog is officially two years old today. It also marks a big change — I’ve moved the blog over to WordPress! I know many of you have been waiting impatiently for me to fix the server problems I was having, and this is my solution. Bear with me for a few days, though, as things need to be rejigged to work with the new system. All the permalinks have changed, for example, so I need to get some redirections in pronto. And there are many broken images and links to fix. But the bulk of the content is there, and as you can see from the archive list it’s pretty extensive!
Keep coming back… in a week or two things should be back to normal. And yes, the old color scheme is coming back, I just have to find an appropriate WordPress theme to modify.
AdSensePHP: Easy AdSense Code Generation
It's funny how doing one thing leads you down a certain path. When I started my website to blog series one of the things I needed to do was find an AdSense-friendly WordPress template for the site I was transforming into a blog. Only I didn't really like the ones I saw, so I had to take a non-AdSense template and transform it. Which led me to rework some PHP scripts I had for generating AdSense code. Which led directly to this post.
Today I'm announcing the availability of a new script I call AdSensePHP. AdSensePHP lets you easily insert valid AdSense code into your pages without having to cut-and-paste the code from the AdSense console. The Lite version of the script is completely free and is now available for download. The Pro version of the script is initially only going to be available to purchasers of my book Uncommon AdSense.
If you're a PHP user, feel free to download AdSensePHP (no registration is required) and take it for a spin. There are fairly extensive comments in the source code, though I hope to have some more formal documentation available soon.
Also, to encourage linking to the site, if you have a ClickBank ID then you can simply add “?cb=yourid” to the link to any page and this will store your ClickBank ID in a cookie that lasts for 60 days. All links to the Uncommon AdSense site will be generated as a ClickBank hoplink, which means that if anyone buys Uncommon AdSense site because of your referral to the AdSensePHP site, you'll be credited as the affiliate. For example, I'd link to the site like so:
http://www.adsensephp.com?cb=egiguere
Just replace “egiguere” with your own hoplink. And you can link directly to any page on the site using this system.
Give AdSensePHP a try and let me know what you think. The Introducing AdSensePHP post on the AdSensePHP.com site has more details.
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.
Clicking Ads by Accident is OK
It happens at one time or another to all AdSense publishers. You move a window around and click another underneath it to bring it to the top and … ooops, you clicked an AdSense ad! Oh oh. In the past I advocated reporting these accidental clicks to the AdSense support team, but apparently too many people are doing it now and Google has officially decreed that accidental AdSense clicks are OK and don't need to be reported.
What this means is that Google feels confident enough in their click fraud detection algorithms to accurately distinguish occasional publisher-generated blips from concerted efforts at defrauding advertisers and/or Google. Note that you should still report suspicious activity to Google, such as pages that suddenly earn you a lot without a significant increase in traffic. Being proactive with Google about these things, and being able to supply information like server logs, ultimately benefits your relationship with the big G. Let's not forget that you're pretty much at their mercy when it comes to anything about AdSense — the terms and conditions allow them a lot of leeway in dealing with publishers who they think are being negligent and/or purposely deceitful. (Really, it goes beyond that. If Google says “Jump!” the only thing you can ask is “How high?”. Such is the nature of the one-sided relationship we publishers have with Google.)
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.
AdSense Section Targeting Is Not For Keyword Stuffing
So someone was complaining about the ad targeting on some of their pages. Although this isn't directly related to that problem, when I took a look at their pages I noticed this fragment at the bottom of each page:
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> <font size="1" color="#EFEFEF">gluten, gluten free, wheat gluten, gluten intolerance, gluten celiac, wheat allergy, celiac disease, gluten free diet, gluton, symptoms of celiac, celiac symptoms, celiac testing, celiac nutrition</font> <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
This, my friends, is what is commonly known as keyword stuffing, and it's a bad thing to do. Google in particular frowns upon it.
If you're having trouble with the ad targeting on your pages, do not stuff keywords into an ad section as shown above. Remember that ad sections are hints to Google about what's important about your page and what's not. Any ad sections that are blatantly obvious attempts to sway the ad targeting will be ignored.
What you should do is use section targeting to emphasize the important parts of your content. But even more importantly, you should use natural search engine optimization techniques to make sure that AdSense knows what the page is about. This means using appropriate keywords in as many of these as possible: domain name, page URL, page title, headings, body text, anchor text of outgoing links, anchor text of incoming links. And making sure that the AdSense crawler can read the page in the first place — if you block it, it'll have to guess about the content based on the URL, the other pages in the folder or on the site, and the incoming links. Do this — and do it correctly from the beginning — and you'll see relevant ads. See the section targeting chapter in Uncommon AdSense for more.
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.
Review: Instant Article Wizard 2.0
In case you're wondering why I've been so quiet these last few days, it's because I've been working on a set of PHP scripts for AdSense code generation as well as some AdSense-ready blog and website templates. I'm thinking of packaging it all up as a low-cost report to be sold via the $7 Secrets system. However, I wouldn't mind getting some feedback on what I'm doing, so if you have ideas for the kind of thing you'd like to see in such a package, please drop me a note.
Anyhow, speaking of Jonathan Leger (the creator of $7 Secrets), he has a new product out, so let me take a break from my product development and review it for you.
Instant Article Wizard: Cut-and-Paste Article Creation
Instant Article Wizard 2.0 (IAW) is touted as an easy way to research and create expert-sounding articles without having to know anything about the topic you're writing about. It sounds fancy, but it's really all about cut-and-paste article creation. Let's see how the software works and then we can talk about its merits.
IAW is a nicely-coded Windows application. It's built around the concept of a project, which is essentially a list of keywords that you want to use to gather seed material for your article. Let's say I wanted to write an article about a topic I know absolutely nothing about, like motocross biking. I'd start IAW and enter “motocross” as my primary keyword and press the Research button:
You can specify multiple keywords in a project, but let's stick with one for now. IAW goes and grabs web pages that contain the keyword and extracts the raw sentences from those pages. It also generates a list of “subtopics” that it thinks are related to the topic and categorizes the sentences into the various subtopics.
The basic idea is to take the sentences that IAW finds for you and select the ones that would work well in an article. Let's select a few sentences to create our introduction:
Here's what our article looks like so far:
Introduction
Motocross (often shortened to MX or MotoX) is a form of motorcycle sport or all-terrain vehicle racing held on enclosed off-road circuits. Motocross racing is one of the most visually appealing forms of motorsports, with riders performing seemingly death-defying leaps, turns visibly at the edge of traction (as indicated by a sliding, spinning rear tire “roosting” dirt at all behind it), and the effort of riders clearly visible as they move their bodies around their motorcycles to balance the bikes for maximum speed.
Now let's go and add a section on the history of motocross. Unfortunately, the first list of subtopics doesn't include a “history” section, so what we need to do is enter a new keyword to the list of keywords and pull in more articles for our research. So I add “history of motocross” and grab more articles, which gives me a new “history” subtopic as well as other subtopics. There were some sentences in the “introduction” subtopic that were about the history of motocross, however, so I drag and drop them over to the “history” subtopic instead and end up with this short section:
History
Motocross is derived from the French, and traces its origins to British Scrambling competitions. Motocross was first known as a British off-road event called Scrambles, which were themselves an evolution of Trials events popular in northern Britain.
By now you have a pretty good idea of how this all works. Once you add sentences to a subtopic, you can move them around and you can split them into discrete paragraphs.
The end result is something that in theory could be a finished article but in reality is the basis for writing your own article. You simply take the entire text of the article you “generated” and paste it into Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice) and then rewrite the article in your own words. Presto, you've got a new article ready to use as content for your site/blog or for submission to article directories.
It Still Takes Time
Let's be clear on one thing. Instant Article Wizard is sold as a research tool for article writing, not an article writing tool per se. The distinction is important. For one thing, creating new articles simply by cutting-and-pasting sentences lifted verbatim from elsewhere is clearly copyright infringement. More pragmatically, they'd also trip duplicate content filters in the search engines. But cut-and-paste articles don't read very well generally anyhow, so after you've done your research be prepared to spend some time rewriting the article into your own words.
I think this tool is useful to some. If you're a skilled writer yourself I don't think it will be much of an improvement over searching for and printing out the top pages about a given topic, reading those pages, and then sitting down and writing an article based on what you've learned. But I realize not everyone can do this, which is why IAW appeals to some people, and the time spent reading and gathering sentences into the basis of an article may indeed be a much quicker process for those people. If you really want to skip the article writing process entirely, however, you should get someone else to write the articles for you.
I have no complaints about Instant Article Wizard. It works well and does what it claims to do. If you need some extra help getting your articles started, it's worth a look.
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.
Google Disapproves of AdSense Arbitrage Business Model
I usually don't parrot what other postings are talking about, but all AdSense publishers should read Jennifer Slegg's posting about how Google is turning off the AdSense arbitrage taps. Apparently they've decided that the AdSense arbitrage business model isn't a good one and have been notifying publishers who are actively using the model — particularly those running “Made for AdSense” (MFA) sites — to let them know that their accounts are going to be disabled on June 1 if they continue to use the model.
A lot of people, especially AdWords advertisers, are saying “it's about time” that Google did something about the MFA sites and the arbitrage model in particular. Although I've dabbled in arbitrage myself — mostly as research for this blog — it's not something I do on a normal basis. I wonder if I'll receive a letter from Google or not about my past behavior…
In any case, if you are using arbitrage you should stop immediately sending AdWords traffic to your sites. It's unclear to me whether traffic from non-AdWords ad programs counts or not.
This is going to upset of a lot of people who are making a lot of money from arbitrage. For the rest of us, though, things will just continue as usual.
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.
Review: Brad Callen's Free Directory Submitter
Today I'm reviewing a free product of interest to all AdSense publishers, Brad Callen's Directory Submitter. Download it now while you read this review. (Only runs on Windows, though.)
Background
Brad Callen is an Internet marketer best known for his SEO Elite and Keyword Elite products, both staples for serious online marketers. You've heard me wax about Keyword Elite before in particular, including my free course on how to make money with Keyword Elite. Both SEO Elite and Keyword Elite are fairly pricey products, but they're good quality products and Brad gives great support to his customers. I recommend both.
Directory Submitter Standard Edition
One proven way to get traffic to your sites is to get them listed in authoritative directories. Directories are just websites that list and categorize other websites. That's how Yahoo! got its start — it was a big web directory to begin with. There are two benefits to being listed in directories:
- you get found by humans browsing for sites on specific topics; and
- you get extra search engine juice from the directory links.
The problem is that getting listed in directories is a tedious process. First, you have to find the directories in question. Second, you have to create an account for the directory. Third, you have to submit the details about your site. And you have to track it all. That's why products like Directory Submitter get written, to do away with some (but not all) of the drudgery.
Directory Submitter comes in two editions: Standard and Gold. The Standard edition is completely free and lets you submit sites to 350 different directories. The Gold edition costs $47 (which is cheap compared to Brad's other products) and lets you submit to over 1700 directories. All directories currently listed in either edition are free directories that do not require reciprocal links, which is a big plus. And the directory list is current and maintained by Brad Callen's staff.
Although I've upgraded to the Gold edition, this review is going to use screenshots from the Basic edition.
How Directory Submitter Works
Directory Submitter is very easy to use. Downloading and installing it only takes a few minutes, but you have to supply a valid email address as part of the process. (Again, this software only works with Microsoft Windows — Vista support is included, BTW.)
When you start the software, you're prompted to create a project. Each project represents a different site that you want to submit to the directories. There are three pages of information to fill out for each project. The first is basic information about the submitter (you):
Next, you provide information about the website, including different title variations (used to create the links in the directories), descriptions, and keywords:
That's all the setup you need to do. Spend some time thinking up good titles, descriptions and keywords, though. The titles you use will become the anchor text of the links back to your site, and of course the description should be something that will appeal to the humans reading the listings and make them want to visit your site.
Once your project is setup, it's time to submit your site. This is a semi-automated process. You start by clicking on one of the directories in the list, which brings you to the site submission page for the directory:
As you can see, most of the fields are filled out automatically for you based on the information in your project profile. You still have to manually choose a good category for your site and most of the directories require you to prove your humanity by filling in a “captcha” field. Still, most of the work is already done and when you fill out the other parts of the form you just hit the submit button and you're done with that site. You then move on to the next suitable directory in the list. Directory Submitter tracks when you last submitted a project to a given site, which makes it easy to know what got submitted where.
That's all there is to the product. Like I said, it's not a completely automated solution, but it's a timesaver. Submitting to 350 (or 1700!) directories will still take some time, so you'll want to do things in small clusters, maybe 10 to 20 submissions a day.
Make Money Selling Submission Services
I sometimes get asked what's the quickest way to get make money online. AdSense is not quick. Even selling affiliate products isn't quick money, though it's quicker than AdSense. The quickest way to get money is to provide a service for others and be paid for it via PayPal. So here's an easy money-making opportunity for those of you with time on your hands: setup a directory submission service using Directory Submitter. Offer to submit someone's site information for $10 or $20. You can post offers like this in various forums. All they do is supply the information about their site. You then do the work of visiting all the sites and submitting that information — work that's made a lot simpler with this software. You don't even have to use the Gold edition, you could get started with the Standard edition and then upgrade later when you've made a bit of cash and perhaps even offer a premium service to customers.
Just an idea…
Conclusion
I like this software. It's free, it works, it's simple, it looks good. Definitely recommended: download Directory Submitter now.
Sponsored Link: AdWords180 is a great book about cheap AdWords advertising. I can even get you a $30 discount — just send me mail for the details.
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.
Go Wide With Your AdSense
One of the things I find myself doing now when setting up a new site or blog is favoring wider layouts than I did even a year ago, and it's something I think all AdSense publishers should consider now. The old web design books tell you not to go past about 550 pixels in size (for the content), but this ain't 2004 anymore. Here are some reasons:
- 1. Screen resolutions are higher.
- Well, it's true. Older computers might still be running at 800 by 600, but higher resolutions are now the defacto norm. Especially when you consider how many people are buying widescreen monitors. Even laptops these days are going wide. Simply put, there's more horizontal real estate to use. Which means the wide AdSense ad and link unit formats can work well. And thin layouts look, well, dated.
- 2. Keeps more above the fold.
- Look, you want visitors to click the ads, though of course you can't say that to anyone. (We'll keep it our little secret.) The wider layouts — when used properly — keep more content above the fold. And more ads above the fold. The less the visitor has the scroll, the better.
- 3. Better ad embedding.
- Common wisdom says that the 338 by 280 large rectangle format works best (I've found it varies — test things yourself and see what works for you) when embedded right at the beginning of the content, right under the main heading, either floated to the left (my preference) or to the right. Here's the thing, though. If you've limited yourself to 550 pixels of width then that leaves only 212 pixels for the text immediately to the left or right of the ad unit. Add in whitespace and maybe a sidebar or two and you've got
- 4. More whitespace!
- So many layouts I come across make little or no use of whitespace. Whitespace is like silence in music — but rather than let me blither on about it, why not just read this great article instead?
Hmm, one more reason and I could have made this into another Top 5 list like my Top 5 Reasons to Marry a Geek. But no, I'm stopping at 4.
Don't be afraid to go wide with your layouts, and be sure to include lots of whitespace. I'm certainly not the only one thinking this way. Look at how many 3-column WordPress themes are showing up these days. Disney had it wrong: it's a wide world, after all.
Sponsored Link: AdWords180 is a great book about cheap AdWords advertising. I can even get you a $30 discount — just send me mail for the details.
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 Lazy Git: Text Link Ads and AdSense
This post is adapted from a message I sent out to my mailing list. Might as well share it with all my readers.
Not too long ago, one of you asked me if I had some more
information about text link ads. As it happens, I really didn't
have much to say at the time, but I can talk more intelligently
about it now. It's timely for me because I had an unsolicited
request to display a text ad on one of my sites last week. So here
are my thoughts about text link ads, how they relate to AdSense,
and whether or not it's something you should be doing.
What Are Text Link Ads?
Let's first make sure we're all on the same page. When I say “text
link ads”, I'm referring to text links that someone PAYS you to put
on your sites. In other words, advertisers go around looking for
sites in their niche and buy links on those sites in order to direct
traffic to their own sites and/or to raise the search engine
rankings of their sites. While there is a company called Text Link
Ads out there, when I use the term “text link ads” I'm referring
to the generic concept of paid/sponsored links, not to the specific
company.
How Do Text Link Ads Work?
It's fairly simple. You and the advertiser (often mediated through
a third party like Text Link Ads) sign an advertising contract where
you agree to link to the advertiser's site for a fixed fee, usually
a monthly payment. The advertiser gets to choose the link and where
the link is placed, paying more for the top spots on well-trafficked
sites.
You can see how much sites are worth to advertisers using the
free Text Link Ads free calculator. Start by going to the Text Link Ads home page and select “Free Tools” from the “Make Money” tab. Click on the
“Text Link Ads Calculator” and you'll end up on a page that has
a simple form to fill out as well as something that looks very
much like an AdSense heat map. First fill out specifics about your
site on the left side. Then click the various areas of the heat
map on the right to see how much you could be making per month
by selling ad spots for text link ads.
For example, the TLA calculator tells me I could be making about
$70/month selling one ad spot on my AdSense blog. And I could make
more by selling more spots. Hmm.
So say I can get $100/month on average for selling links on a site.
If I had 5 sites like that, it would be $500/month in extra income
for very little work. Not a bad model.
Google Doesn't Like Text Ads
But there's a catch. The search engines, and Google in particular,
don't like paid links. Because it mucks up their algorithms. You
should read this post from Google guy Matt Cutts for some details.
Now, various people in the search marketing community think that
this is bull, that people have been selling links in one form or
another for a long time now and so what's all the fuss? They even
argue that Google does it themselves with AdWords, AdSense, etc.
(Mind you, their programs don't affect search engine rankings.)
I'm not going to get into the debate, mostly I just want to make
you aware of it.
Here's the problem, though. Much of a site's value to
advertisers is based on various third-party measures of how well
the site is trusted and how much traffic it gets. Google's PageRank
and the site's Alexa numbers are particularly important. So if
Google comes up with algorithm changes that force sites with paid
links to lose PageRank, and the value of those links is based (in
part) on PageRank values (all things being equal, advertisers will
pay more for links on a PR6 site vs. links on a PR5 site) then the
money you make from selling text links will decrease and maybe even
disappear. No, I can't predict the future, but it's something to
keep in mind.
The Lazy Git
After my interest in text link ads was piqued, I went looking for
some useful resources on the topic. The only one I've found so far
is an ebook called The Lazy Git Marketing Method (LGMM).
I had seen this promoted by other Internet marketers, but had not
bothered with it before because the sales page turned me off. When
I see pages with fancy sports cars and dollar bills flying around,
it just kind of says “scam” to me and off I got to other sites…
(A “lazy git”, by the way, is a British expression. A “git” is slang
for a stupid or unpleasant person. A “lazy git” is… well, you can
figure it out.)
What you don't see when you read the sales page for LGMM is any
mention of text link ads. That's what it's all about, though:
creating high-PageRank sites (PR4 or higher) and then monetizing
them via text link ads. It's pretty passive income once you've got
the sites set up.
Text Links Ads and AdSense
Of course, AdSense publishers know all about passive income. Once
you create a few AdSense sites, it's usually just a matter of
tweaking them once in a while (with new content, usually) and
basically letting Google do all the hard work for you. So displaying
text link ads on a site is really a close cousin to displaying
AdSense ads. It's almost a natural step for an AdSense publisher to
take.
Well, if it weren't for the search engines grumbling about paid
links. There is some risk to putting text link ads on a site that
is getting a lot of traffic from organic search queries. You might
want to think twice about doing that.
So I wouldn't go slapping text link ads on all your AdSense sites.
Try one or two sites, maybe. Or create some new sites specifically
for this experiment.
Back to the Lazy Git
If making money with text link ads interests you in a serious way,
then the Lazy Git Marketing Method is worth a look. It's not a big
ebook — it's very short, in fact — and it's not for short term
gains — the author tell you that up front. It will require
some work on your part to get the sites going and to get them
ranking well — kind of like AdSense. But that's what I like about
it, it's a complementary process to what you (as an AdSense
publisher) are already doing.
I actually learned something from this book. Not about text ads,
but about finding good domains, both new and expired, especially
about the tools you use to make that fairly easy. The parts of the
book about setting up sites and blogs is pretty basic and I don't
think you'll learn anything new there. Besides the domain stuff,
the most interesting parts of the book are the strategies you use
to get your sites to rank more highly and therefore make money from
selling links on them. Again, some duplication there with things
you already know, but there are some different twists.
Are Text Link Ads For You?
That's a good question. “Probably” is the answer if you're an
AdSense publisher. It's another income stream to consider for your
sites. I say go ahead and try it out with one site and see how well
it works for you. Again, it's a complementary strategy in many ways.
If you're more into affiliate marketing, though, then text link ads
probably aren't for you, not if you're looking to direct traffic
to vendor sites to make money as an affiliate — if you're not
putting AdSense ads on your affiliate sites, don't go putting text
link ads on those sites either.
Sponsored Link: The author of the famous Google Cash book has a free report available for download called Google Cash Strikes Back. He's trying to sell you on his system to automate the Google Cash method, but it's instructive in and of itself in showing you how much work is required to make money by promoting affiliate products with AdWords. AdSense is a lot easier in many ways, IMO.
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.
From Website to Blog (Part 3)
Time to continue the series about transforming a website into a blog. In Part 1 we discussed the reasons for and against changing a website into a blog and in Part 2 we discussed the initial steps for moving from a site to a blog, which included backing up the existing site and preparing a sitemap. Now let's look at how we keep the old site alive while we dick around configure the new blog and what blogging platform we should be using for the blog.
Two Ways To Keep The Old Site Alive
By doing a backup of your site and creating a sitemap, you've ensured that you can quickly restore things if you royally screw things up. It may take you a while to get the new blog configured properly, though, so you want to keep the old site alive and around while that happens. There are two approaches I recommend.
Approach 1: The Temporary Site
This approach requires you to spend a bit of money, but it's the cleanest way. Acquire a second domain, host it somewhere, and put a duplicate of your original site on the new domain. Ideally you can do this just by copying up the files from your backup copy of the site. If you use relative references in your internal links — in other words, the links to the pages/images on your site don't include the domain name — then the site should just work. If you use absolute links, however, things may break on the new site once you take the content off the old site. And of course, the traffic's all going to the old site anyhow.
The way you fix both of these problems is by redirecting traffic from the old site to the new site. The easiest way to do this is with a .htaccess file on the old server:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://newserver/$1 [R=302,L]
The key to this rule, though, is to use a 302 redirect instead of the usual 301 redirect. The “302″ code is the “moved temporarily” code, while “301″ is the “moved permanently” code. At some point we're going to want people to go back to the old site, so we make sure the redirections are temporary.
Approach 2: Co-existence
The other approach is to have the website and the blog coexist on the same server. This may be easier than you think. Remember last time how I mentioned that the files on the site probably end in “.html”, “.htm” or “.php” and that the equivalent blog pages wouldn't have those extensions? You will ultimately want to redirect the former to the latter, but only as a last step. In the meantime you can just let the old files site around and get accessed while you get the blog up and running around it.
The only trick with this is the home page, because normally the blog's going to take over the home page, and if people come to your home page they'll get into the blog and perhaps be all confused.
Rather than get all technical, I recommend a simple approach. Use WordPress 2.1's static home page feature and quickly whip up a very simple home page that consists of nothing but links to the non-blog parts of the site. I'll show you how to do that next time.
Which Blogging Software?
Well, you can guess by now. I recommend you use WordPress 2.1 as your blogging platform. You'll find the static home page feature and the various plugins and themes that are available to be invaluable in transforming your site into a blog.
But I'm out of time today, so we'll discuss the blog setup next time…
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.
Personal Notes
Yes, it's been quiet here, but two things I want to point out:
- My personal blog is finally up and running. Very bare bones at the moment, nothing too exciting yet.
- AvantGo for BlackBerry, the project I've been working on for the past year, finally went out the door. Whew.
I'll be back tomorrow with some AdSense postings.
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.
Review: Moving Sale Madness
A few days ago I bought a $37 product called Moving Sale Madness, which apparently is only on sale at that price for the rest of the day. Ooops, I guess I should get a review out! So here goes…
Moving Sale Madness: An Inexpensive Internet Marketing Course
Harris Fellman's Moving Sale Madness has the usual hyped-up selling page. It's OK to be skeptical about the claims you see on that kind of page, I always am. What I'm most interested in is the product you get for your money, not the promises. So that's what I'm going to focus on.
This product sells, until midnight tonight only, for only $37. And for $37 I think it's actually pretty good value. You get 8 components covering 4 Internet marketing topic areas, each of which consists of an audio interview with an area expert and a bunch of ebook/software products, most of which are sold with some form of private label or master resale rights.
Here's a complete list of what you get:
- Affiliate Marketing Starter Kit:
- Five-part audio interview with Tellman Knudson (includes transcript)
- Affiliate Success Roadmap
- Affiliate Marketers Toolkit
- Master Affiliate Marketer
- 23 Internet Marketing B.S. Dogmas Dispelled
- PPC Profits
- Copywriting Starter Kit:
- Four-part audio on copywriting (includes transcript)
- Step by Step Copywriting
- Killer Sales Letters
- Pricing Strategies - The Numbers Don't Lie
- Newbie's Guide to Online Fortune
- Innovate and Create<
- 12 Week Intensive Copywriting Info Kit
- List Building Starter Kit:
- Six-part audio on list building (includes transcript)
- Email Marketing in 2006
- Leverage on Email Marketing
- Real World JV
- Resellers Sales Kit
- Viral Marketing Starter Kit:
- Four-part audio on viral marketing (includes transcript)
- Basics of Blogging eCourse
- Create Your Own EBook
- Article Cash
- Viral Marketing Tutorial
- A to Z RSS
- Website Personalizer
- PDF Profit Lock
- Instant Affiliate Marketing Mastery:
- Six-part audio interview (includes transcript)
- Resale Rights Profits
- 15 Days to Resale Rights Success
- Leveraging on Resale Rights
- Article Site Directory
- Keyword Swiper
- 4 article packages with private label rights
- A whole pile of audios (almost 60 of them) from various seminars
- Instant Copywriting Mastery:
- Four-part audio (includes transcript)
- The Guide to Internet Entrepreneurship
- The Truth About Back-End Sales
- Site Wizard Prod
- Turbo Fly-In Ads Pack
- Instant List Building Mastery:
- Five-part audio (includes transcript)
- Product Launch TimeTable
- Instant Split Commissions
- JV FireSale Automator
- How To Setup A Squeeze Page Video
- Squeeze Page Templates
- Instant Viral Marketing Mastery:
- Four-part audio (includes transcript)
- Viral Marketing Tutorial
- Instant Blog & Ping
- Private Label Articles Package
Now you see why I haven't had time to review everything included in the package. Yeesh, it would take a good week to sift through everything. If you're just starting out, I think there's enough material here to get going on almost any aspect of Internet marketing. (Note that there's nothing in here about AdSense, though, so you'll have to buy my book to complete the set! 
)
For example, I quickly read through the 15 Days to Resale Rights Success and found it to be a nicely laid-out ebook that gave you concrete steps on how to find and sell resale rights products.
Don't get me wrong: except for the audio interviews with Tellman Knudson (each interview is over 2 hours long), most of the bonuses are resale rights products created by others and their quality and usefulness will vary. This would be a hard sell (at least to me) at $97 or higher, but for $37 it's decent value — if you actually sit down and read most of the material, of course, and then act on it. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which should give you enough time to try things out and see if Internet marketing is for you or not.
Anyhow, if you want it you need to order it now before he takes it off the market. (One of those proven sales tactics, you know!)
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.
Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos
Well, it's time for one of Darren's group writing projects and I thought I'd throw in a contribution. I don't expect to win, but maybe a few extra readers will discover this blog because of it. So, without further ado, here are the Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos that publishers make:
- Clicking your own ads. This is a big no-no in the AdSense world. No matter how enticing the ad, don't click it if it's on one of your sites! If you accidentally click an ad on your site (it happens) then play it safe and shoot an email off to adsense-support@google.com to tell them about the accidental click. You'll get your hand slapped, but your account won't be terminated without warning. New AdSense publishers in particular should report accidental clicks and any suspicious behavior they see (like huge increases in earnings for no reason) in order to gain Google's trust.
- Telling your friends and family about your site(s). Bragging about your site(s) to your friends and family and you're sure to get one of them clicking ads on your site at random. If they do it enough, you'll get slapped by Google for invalid clicks, even though you're not the one at fault. Be very careful of relatives who bring their laptops to your hourse and use your wireless router for their surfing: any clicks they make will appear to be coming from YOUR computer, so if they click ads on your site(s) you can get in trouble (see #1). Yes, this happened to me
- Writing content for AdSense, not humans. The whole point of AdSense is to automatically provide a publisher with relevant, contextually-targeted ads to display alongside human-oriented content. Google uses sophisticated content analysis algorithms to determine the topic of a given page and return relevant advertisements. In most cases (there are exceptions, unfortunately, and I show you how to get around some of them in my book) you don't need to do anything special to get the right ads to show as long as you're using standard search engine optimization techniques to structure and organize your content — which you want to do anyhow to get good search engine rankings. (The SEO siloing technique works very well.) Write naturally — for humans, not computers — and let Google do its things. Don't forget, it's the humans who click the ads that make you money. If no one's reading your content because it's hard to read, you won't make any money.
- Not testing. I wrote about this before in The One Answer To All Your AdSense Questions. Every site is different and what works for my site may not work for your site. Start with the generally accepted best practices — like following the AdSense heat map — but try different things and see what works (and what doesn't) for you.
- Participating in dubious traffic schemes. Traffic is your lifeblood, of course, because without traffic there's no one to click the ads and make you money. But if you don't grow your traffic through natural, organic means, you'll lose money — the money you spent to get the traffic in the first place (which almost never converts into AdSense clicks) and the money you could have made had Google not terminated your account. (Because traffic schemes are forbidden by the AdSense program policies — you have read those, haven't you?)
Really, the biggest blunder is not reading and understanding the AdSense terms and conditions, which includes the program policies. If you do that, you'll be ahead of 80% of the AdSense publishers out there.
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.
From Website to Blog (Part 2)
In From Website to Blog, Part 1 we looked at the reasons for and against transforming a website into a blog. Only you can weigh the options and decide if such a transformation is right for you. But let's assume we want to proceed. How do we get started?
Back It Up!
This should be obvious, but it always bears repeating. The first thing you should do is backup your current site. This shouldn't be a problem for most of us, as we tend to work with an offline version of the site that gets copied up to the web host whenever changes are made. But it's not uncommon for little things here and there to slip by the staging process and make it directly onto the site. I've done this before with copies of files that I've offered for download, etc. Don't rely on the local copy of your site. The best thing to do is to fire up your FTP program (if you want a free one, try FileZilla, I use it all the time and it works great) and do a recursive copy of the entire content of your current website. Usually this involves nothing more than dragging a folder over from the “remote” side of the FTP window to the “local” side and waiting a few minutes for the entire source tree to copy itself down to your hard disk. (Really, you should be doing this on a regular basis no matter what.)
Build a Sitemap
Now that you have a copy of the site stashed away for safekeeping, it's time to build a sitemap for your old site.
The term “sitemap” can refer to many different things, but all we're looking for is a complete list of the pages on your site. Let's take my debt-free living site as an example. Its sitemap is:
- www.nodebtisgood.com
- www.nodebtisgood.com/debt-snowball-tips.html
- www.nodebtisgood.com/about.html
- www.nodebtisgood.com/privacy-policy.html
- www.nodebtisgood.com/sitemap.html
It's very important to have a complete sitemap of your site. You don't want to lose any incoming links to those pages, no matter how trivial they are. And chances are good that the page structure of your new blog will not exactly the page structure of your existing site.
Take the file extensions, for example. On a website most pages end with “.html”, “.htm”, or “.php”. Even if you keep everything else about the URL the same, those extensions are probably going to be dropped. The www.nodebtisgood.com/debt-snowball-tips.html is going to become www.nodebtisgood.com/debt-snowball-tips/ when I move it over to WordPress. Not only have I lost the “.html” extension, but technically the URL also ends with a slash (”/”) where before it didn't.
In most cases, then, you're going to have to redirect pages from their old locations to their new locations and use the right kind of redirection (a 301 redirection) to ensure that you don't lose visitors and that the search engines understand that your content has moved to a new set of addresses.
The only way to do this is to start with a complete list of the existing URLs. Build it anyway you like. If you already have a Google Sitemaps file, for example, that's probably all you need. But even a simple text file listing each unique URL will do.
Next we'll talk about keeping the old site alive while the new site is being developed.
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.
Inside AdSense Isn't Always Right
A recent post on the Inside AdSense blog about encouraging clicks shows you that even the AdSense team at Google has trouble keeping up with changes to the AdSense program policies. To quote the post:
In addition, publishers are not permitted to label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.”
That's what the old program policies used to say. The new ones aren't as explicit:
May not place misleading labels above Google ad units - for instance, ads may be labeled “Sponsored Links” but not “Favorite Sites”
This is vaguer and a bit more flexible. I reported on this loosening of the labeling rules a couple of months ago and Google's confirmation of the change. It's a bit odd that the Inside AdSense team isn't aware of these changes, but I guess it's the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing… Of course, if you have any questions at all about what you're doing, the best thing to do is ask AdSense support about it and get the official “go” or “no go” from them.
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.
From Website to Blog (Part 1)
Over a month ago in my article on SEO siloing and AdSense I mentioned how my debt-free living website could be redeveloped as a blog using the principles of SEO siloing for dead-on ad targeting. I've decided to go ahead with the transformation and to use it as a case study on how to transform a website into a blog. One of my readers has recently done this with one of his own sites and has told me it's led to increased traffic. So let's do it. But first let's talk about why we're going to do it.
Why Transform A Website Into a Blog?
So what possible reason would we have to transform a non-blog website into a blog-based website? After all, a blog is just another kind of website. What special advantages does the blogging model confer? Here are some reasons for making such a transformation:
- Easy content management. Blogging systems are a specialized type of “content management system” (CMS) because they make it easy to create and update content. Many non-blog sites are managed by hand, which gets to be a pain when you have to update things like sitemaps (both the human-readable and Google-readable kinds), “what's new” pages, menus, etc. A good CMS removes barriers to updating content, which is a good thing.
- Better indexed content. There are directories and search engines who only deal with blogs and avoid non-blog sites. If you transform your site into a blog, you can get indexed/listed by these kinds of tools, i.e. Google Blogsearch.
- Easy content syndication. Even though RSS and other content syndication formats predate blogs, many people associate them specifically with blogs. But you can create feeds for pretty much anything. Your non-blog site can have a “what's new” feed that gets updated whenever you add content to the site. But if you have a blog, you get such automatically updated feeds with no effort.
- Built-in interactivity. Readers can leave comments and trackbacks. You can even let (trusted) users contribute their own content.
What about the downsides, though? Here are some potential barriers to making the transformation:
- The need to update content. The best blogs are the one that update their content on a regular schedule. It may not be daily, but it's usually predictable. If you change a site into a blog you'll feel pressured to update the content. It's one thing to update one or two sites on a regular basis, it's another to update 50 sites on a regular basis.
- More resources. You need more disk space, more memory, and a database to run a blog. Performance may be worse than a non-blog site — the simplest websites need nothing but a bit of disk space. These days, though, even the most barebone hosting account has everything you need to run a blog, so this may only be important when your traffic levels are high.
- Inflexible site structure. Blogging software will force you to structure things a certain way. Until WordPress 2.1 was released, for example, you had to jump through a few hoops to create a blog that had a static page as the home page. These may make it hard to adapt your existing site structure to what the blog expects.
Given how small my current site is, though, these barriers don't exist for me, and I think that the need to update content on a regular basis is probably good anyhow — search engines love new, original content after all, and if making something a blog forces you to update things, it's probably a benefit to you in the long run.
Next time we'll look at the preparatory steps needed to transform a site into a blog.
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.
Obsessed With PageRank?
It happens to all of us: at one point or another, we start obsessing about the PageRank of our sites. PageRank (PR) is the page (not site — PR is about individual pages) ranking algorithm that made Google famous, even though these days it's only one factor among many that Google uses to organize its search indices. In fact, Google will tell you to not worry about your PageRank and to work on creating useful sites that will naturally draw traffic by virtue of their existence. The fact is, though, that webmasters and bloggers (the two groups are different) still obsess over PR. It doesn't help, for example, that the Google Toolbar shows the PR of the page you're on. Nor does it help when tools like the Text Link Ads calculator factor PR into their calculations of how much your site is worth.
So no matter what Google says, there is a perception that PageRank is important, and on the Web perception is often reality. That's why you should spend fifteen minutes to read Danny Sullivan's post What is Google PageRank?.
PR doesn't directly affect AdSense, but it wouldn't surprise me one least to find out that PR affects smart pricing, although I doubt Google would ever admit that. Regardless, it's a great article to read.
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.
How to Support Your Favorite Bloggers
As a regular blogger, one of the things I enjoy the most is getting mail from my readers saying how much they enjoy what I write. Which brings me to this list of things you can do to support your favorite bloggers. In no particular order, they are:
- Subscribe to the blog's feed. RSS readership, though imperfect in many ways, is an important measure of a blog's popularity. Having more subscribers encourages a blogger to keep writing, and to write quality material. The blogger can also charge more for advertising, get noticed more quickly by other players in the same niche, etc.
- Write a thank you note. Like I said, it's very gratifying to get notes from readers telling you how much they enjoy the blog.
- Socialize the blog. Things like joining the blog's MyBlogLog community (here's mine), tagging blog postings with Del.icio.us, submitting pages to Digg, etc.
- Comment on postings. Some blogs get a lot of comments, some (like this one) don't. Comments are not an accurate measure of readership, but they are a measure of interactivity and they allow the blogger to have public conversations with the readers.
- Spread the word. If you know some people who are interested in the blogger's topic, tell them about the blog. Or recommend it to others in a public forum.
- Don't ignore the advertising. OK, I have to tread a fine line here because of Google's rules against promoting the clicking of ads. (Remember how I got in trouble with them because of this April Fool's posting?) Not all bloggers have ads, of course, but if they do then pay attention to them once in a while. Ad blindness is hard to undo, but obviously the blogger's looking to those ads for some income, so looking at them once in a while for something that might interest you benefits both of you.
- Buy something from the blogger. If the blogger has a book out, grab a copy (hey, here's mine). Or if they recommend something that you want to buy, use their affiliate link for the purchase. Or send them a donation/tip — some bloggers have “tip jars” just for that. Or subscribe to their newsletter if they have one.
I'm sure there are other ways you can support your favorite blogger, but I think that covers the major ones.
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.
Make $100/Month With AdSense
Short posting today, since I spent last night doing my taxes and I'm feeling grumpy today because of it. Worse yet, my grandmother's in the hospital — please keep her in your prayers.
Regular readers will know that I'm not a get-rich-quick kind of guy when it comes to AdSense, though with a blog name like “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense” I doubt most people realize that at first. I don't have a magical guide to making money online like most people are selling. The basic formula that I've always promoted and works for me is simple to explain:
- Find a topic that interests you and attracts advertisers. (Hard to make money on topics with no ads, given that AdSense is ultimately about displaying ads in your content.)
- Build a website or blog about the topic. (These days I favor going the blog route, even if you don't intend on updating it on a regular basis. WordPress and all the various plugins that are available for it make it easy to build even a “static” site as a blog.)
- Fill your site/blog with useful, original and unique content.
- Rinse and repeat.
Now that leaves out a lot of the messy details, of course. But do it two or three times and it will start to become routine: you'll develop a set of tools and best practices that make creating subsequent sites/blogs much easier.
A blog posting I came across yesterday lays it out quite well, so please take the time to read Make $100 Month In AdSense for another example of this philosophy in action. I especially like the clever eyeglasses blog he gives as an example — someone spent some time doing some good design work on that one!
You see, the “easy” part comes once a site's up and running. Getting there is the hard part.
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.