Review: EzineArticles Domination
Well, since someone mentioned they liked my reviews… A few weeks I bought resale rights to a report by the Rhodes Brothers called How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks. I had some good feedback from my readers on it and the little bonus I threw in with the report. So I’ve kept my eye out for other things from the Rhodes Brothers that might interest my readership. (And me!) Here’s my take on their EzineArticles Domination reports along with the special bonus I’ve created especially for my readers… (that’s one of the little projects that’s kept me quiet over the last few days…)
Crush, Kill, and Destroy: EzineArticles Domination
EzineArticles.com is a site I’ve mentioned before, the last time in Articles 101: Writing Articles For Traffic And Profit. Article marketing is a great tool for directing targeted traffic to your sites. Almost everyone who does article marketing publishes an article or two on EzineArticles (though there are exceptions — the top author that site has published over 11,000 articles!).
One of the reasons that EzineArticles is such a popular venue is that Google seems to really like the site and many of its articles rank in the top 10 results (the sweet spot) for relevant search terms, sometimes even beating out the Wikipedia entries for the same terms. The article $1 Million in Google AdSense Earnings ranks #7 for “adsense earnings“, for example, while 7 Powerful Ways To Make Money From AdSense Using Only Free Tools ranks #3 for “making money with AdSense“. Not every article ranks well like this, but enough articles do to make EzineArticles a favorite site for writers and marketers. But what if you could almost guarantee a top 10 ranking for your article?
That’s the premise of the Rhodes Brothers’ Crush, Kill, and Destroy: EzineArticles Domination report, along with its sequel EzineArticles Domination Part II: Author Bio Box Domination. Together, the reports describe techniques you can use to dominate (take over) high-ranking articles with your own material. I can’t say much more without giving away everything, but the techniques aren’t complicated and can be done by anyone with some time on their hands and the willingness to write some articles. These are not long reports: the first one is 14 pages long, the second is only 10 pages. They’re very focused and detailed, and the writing is very clear. If you’re an EzineArticles contributor or thinking of doing some article marketing, I recommend you read the first report at least.
EzineDominator
I’ve started using the “EzineArticles Domination” techniques, and in fact that article I mentioned over the weeked — How To Make Money With Google AdSense applies the techniques from both reports, although not perfectly. What I didn’t like about the domination technique is that finding articles to dominate is very labor-intensive. I sped the process up somewhat by using Keyword Elite, but even then there was a lot of manual work involved.
Since I’m a better programmer than a marketer, I decided to write myself a little tool to find the articles that matched the “EzineArticles Domination” criteria. My first cut was a console-based application, which is fine for me but not for many people. With the encouragement of the Rhodes Brothers (who I contacted after building the first version of the tool), I built a simple user interface for the tool, now called EzineDominator. Here’s what it looks like:
This tool makes finding the right articles almost trivial. All I do now is fire up Keyword Elite, generate myself a large list of keywords, export those keywords to a text file, and run it through my tool. An HTML report (not shown here) is generated automatically with links to the articles that meet the domination criteria. I then load the report into my browser and look through the results, easily clicking over to EzineArticles to see the matching articles to decide which one to start with. It saves me a lot of grunt work!
If this tool interests you, you can purchase EzineDominator for only $10. The tool is written in Java and so runs on pretty much any computer — Windows, Macintosh, Linux. All you have to do is install Java (it’s free). Complete instructions for installing and using the tool are included.
Given how useful this tool’s been to me, I’m looking to automate some of the other mundane and time-intensive things I’ve done. Maybe a tool to find the right pages to which to apply the AdWords180 technique would be useful to others? Or maybe some simple keyword manipulation tools for those who don’t want to fork out the money for Keyword Elite? I’m open to suggestions — especially from the Mac crowd, who probably feel left out because everyone seems to be writing Windows-only tools these days. Drop me a note or leave a comment if you have some ideas or requirements.
Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.
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.
Are You Wasting Time Blogging?
One of the things I’ve been wondering about lately is if I’m spending too much of my time writing posts for this blog. Even a quick glance through the archives will probably convince you that significant effort is required on my part to keep posting quality material on such a frequent basis. While I love writing for this blog, it’s also been distracting me from other, more paying ventures. (Remember, this blog started primarily as a marketing vehicle for my first AdSense book, now long past its prime in terms of sales. And I’m not sure it’s done much to spur sales of Uncommon AdSense, either.) And since I’m not 20, I can’t stay up all night doing a dozen different things at the same time anymore!
So I’m at a bit of a crossroads here: I think I have to cut back on my frequency of postings, because I don’t want to cut back on the quality. Instead of daily posts (and sometimes more) I’m thinking of switching to once- or twice-a-week posts. Instead of posting multi-part series, for example, I’d simply write one (long) post on a given topic. Maybe I’d even skip a week or two once in a while.
As always, I’d love to hear your feedback on this topic. I’ve heard stories of some blogs losing readership once they switched to less-frequent posting, so this could be very detrimental to this blog’s health. Maybe that doesn’t matter. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.
Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.
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 Make Money With AdSense
I often get asked how to make money with Google AdSense, so I wrote a short article about it. The four keys are traffic, niche, content and optimization, but many people spend too much effort on the latter and not enough on the other three. Read the article for more details.
Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.
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.
5 Ways To Reward Your Commenters
The best blogs are the ones where the reader interacts with the blogger. This is done directly via comments left on the blog itself and indirectly via trackbacks from other blogs. While the SEO guy inside of me thinks that getting lots of trackbacks (links! more links! more!) is the ideal situation, the blogger beside him thinks that the comments are much more important.
So how do you encourage readers to leave comments on your blog? One way is to write about controversial topics, things that inflame or excite people. Another is to build up such a large subscriber base that the sheer number of readers you have ensures that you get lots of comments. These and other strategies are all well-documented elsewhere. (As a side note, you should do whatever it takes to make commenting easy, but that’s a separate topic that I’ll discuss later.)
But there’s one strategy to encourage comments that is underused: rewarding your commenters for commenting. Without further ado, then, here are five ways to reward your commenters for making your blog better.
1. Praise and Public Recognition
The best way to let commenters know you appreciate them is to tell them! This can be done in various ways:
- Sending them an email.
- Leaving comments in reply to their comments.
- Writing a post about your top commenter(s).
- Using plugins like Top Commenters or Show Top Commentators.
I definitely do the first and second alternatives, but I don’t do enough of the others. To that end, let me mention that Chuck Brown (whose site, unfortunately, is down at the moment!) is definitely the most insightful commenter on this blog of mine and brings real value to all of our discussions.
2. Adding Commenters To Your Blogroll
In some ways this is just an extension of the first way to reward commenters, and is extremely simple to do, but I’ve separated it out because I think that putting someone in your blogroll is a big step that shouldn’t be taken lightly. After all, the links on your blogroll end up on most of your pages. It’s kind of like moving from casual dating to “going steady”.
3. Disabling “nofollow”
A while back, WordPress switched to marking links in comments and trackbacks using the “nofollow” attribute. This was done in an attempt to reduce comment spam by deflating the value of the links left by bogus commenters. Unfortunately, it also means that legitimate commenters get penalized, since a “nofollow” link is implicitly treated by the search engines as a vote against the page being linked to.
If you like your commenters and want to help them out, why not disable the default “nofollow” behavior? You can do this quite simply using the DoFollow plugin.
(Note that for trackbacks there’s a similar plugin called DoFollow Trackbacks that does the same thing for trackbacks — one way to encourage more links back to your pages.)
Do not do this, however, unless and until you have a good comment spam solution installed on your blog! I recommend Akismet, even if you have to use the pro version — it’s well worth it!
Be sure to publicize your “nofollow” disabling so that readers know it’s worth the effort to make a comment or two. For the record, I use the DoFollow plugin and have removed “nofollow” from the comments and trackbacks on this blog.
4. Revenue Sharing
Now this is perhaps a bit too radical for some people, but it could certainly encourage more comments. If you’ve monetized your blog, why not let your most valuable/insightful commenters share in that revenue stream? Technically, this is not hard to do. You just need a list of the commenters and their various affiliate IDs and AdSense publisher IDs, which you would insert at appropriate times into your ad code. For example, you could devote 10% of your revenues to your top commenters and split that 10% between them by their frequency of commenting. The hard part is maintaining the list of top commenters: while you could do it automatically based on comment frequency, it’s probably best to manually create the list of commenters based on what they actually contribute to the discussions. As anyone who’s been in a classroom situation knows, those who open their mouths the most often don’t have anything substantial to say.
5. Promoting Commenters to Contributors
The final way to reward a commenter is to “promote” them to a contributor/editor status. You can do this informally by asking them to write some guest posts, or you can do it formally by actually changing their user level within the blogging system. (This is very easy to do with WordPress.) The latter shows great trust, of course, and isn’t something you should do lightly.
What Do You Want To See?
Those are my top 5 ways to reward commenters. So here’s a chance for you to expand on my list. What have I missed and what’s your preferred way to be rewarded? Don’t be shy!
Rewards can also go the other way: be sure to read my previous post How To Support Your Favorite Bloggers for ideas on how you can reward your favorite bloggers for all their hard work.
Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.
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.
SendUsToUS: Because the US doesn’t have enough Internet marketers!
A few days ago I reposted my essay on why marketers sell resale rights. It was good timing, because shortly after the SendUsTo.US “firesale” started, which lets you buy 100 resale rights products (some have basic resale rights, some have master resale rights) for only $47 until July 31. (And if you buy, you’re also offered the chance to buy over 100 private label rights products for an additional fee.) Again, this just shows how much money there is to be made just selling things to other Internet marketers — it’s the whole if-there’s-a-gold-rush-then-sell-them-shovels mentality.
Still, these kinds of sales are an easy way to pick up products that interest you, whether or not you plan to resell them. Even if you’re only interested in 10% of them, that means you get them for less than $5 each.
What I like about this promotion besides the clever domain name (send us to “dot” US) is the whole “immigration” angle of sending three Malaysian Internet marketers to the United States… although it’s not really an immigration thing, they’re just going to attend a conference! The premise is somewhat novel, at least.
If resale rights products interest you, then you should study this promotion as well, as it shows one way to make money with resale rights — by packaging the products together into a bundle and selling the bundle cheaply.
Anyhow, I’ll be back shortly with the next part in the mobile-ready series.
Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.
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 Create A Mobile-Ready Site (Part 1)
As you’ve probably heard by now, Google is testing a version of AdSense for mobile users. Up until now, AdSense publishers haven’t really had to worry about mobile users. But with all the recent fuss about the Apple iPhone, more people are realizing that they can (slowly, at least for now) browse the Web from their mobile phone. When Google releases its mobile AdSense solution, will you be ready to take advantage of the growing segment of mobile Internet users? Probably not! That’s why I’m writing this series of articles. Today we start by looking at the reality of mobile browsing and why you’re going to have to change your site if you want to make things easier for your mobile users.
The Evolution of the Mobile Web
As a longtime employee of the leading vendor of mobile middleware and the author of numerous books and articles about mobile application development, I’ve had a front-row seat from which to view the evolution of the mobile Web. And, let me tell you, it’s taken a long time to get to where we are today.
It’s important to distinguish between mobility and the mobile Web. Mobility refers to the running of applications on devices that are inherently mobile. Such devices tend to be small (typically using a handheld form factor) and very constrained with respect to processing and data storage capabilities when compared to a typical desktop computer.
Many people consider “mobility” and “wireless” to be synonymous, but mobility actually goes beyond wireless communication. The original Palm devices, for example, had no wireless capabilities and yet could still exchange data with external applications by connecting them (typically through a “cradle” or a USB connection) to a computer or a network. Writing applications that work in the disconnected environment of devices like these can be particularly challenging, especially when the applications need to interface with corporate databases — this is where serious development tools (think mobile database and data synchronization) become essential.
The mobile Web refers to the subset of the World Wide Web that can be used from mobile devices. Like the normal Web, it’s accessed through an on-device web browser. Early versions of the mobile Web focused on non-HTML technologies like WAP for interacting with the user, but these have fallen out of favor as network speeds and device capabilities have improved. Today, in theory, any site on the Web can be accessed through a mobile device. The reality is far different, however, because few of those sites are actually mobile-ready. In fact, the trend to use network- and CPU-intensive technologies like AJAX (where the web browser is continuously talking to a web server in the background in order to update onscreen data) is shrinking the effective size of the mobile Web.
How Sites Fail The Mobility Test
Let’s look at what makes the mobile Web different. There are three primary problems to overcome.
Problem #1: Small Screen Size
If you’ve ever tried to browse the Web on a handheld mobile device, your first thought was probably that the screen was incredibly small compared to your desktop or laptop. Desktop monitors have been getting wider and wider in recent years, but handheld devices can only go so wide before they stop qualifying as “handheld”.
The horizontal bias of the tethered Web leads to sites that render poorly on small screens. Consider the CNN site. Here’s what it looks like in Firefox on my desktop (I’ve shrunk the image to 400 pixels):
Here’s the same page on my BlackBerry:
As you can see, site navigation dominates the latter: I have to scroll down quite a bit to see any stories. To keep content “above the fold” on a mobile device you have to move the content to the top left of the page and put all the navigational and ancillary stuff (like the ads!) elsewhere. Here, for example, is a properly-formatted CNN home page shown on a different mobile device:
This CNN home page has been specially designed for use with the free AvantGo mobile web browser, so content is the priority. For most devices this is the kind of reworking you need to do to your pages in order for them to be mobile-ready. The only exception are devices like the Apple iPhone that use a “pan and scan” browser that displays the web page as if it were being shown on a larger screen and lets you move around and zoom in and out of the parts that interest you. For most devices, though, pushing content to the top left is a necessity.
And don’t even get me started about data input problems…
Problem #2: Unsupported Technologies
Although there are still some die-hards out there that turn off the JavaScript support in their browsers, much of the Web becomes unusable — or at least harder to use — if there’s no JavaScript. And I’m not just saying this because I’m an AdSense publisher and AdSense ads only show if JavaScript is enabled. Many sites don’t function well without JavaScript. Even logging in to certain sites requires JavaScript support these days.
And then there are all the sites built on AJAX technologies. AJAX in this case refers to “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, which is a fancy way to say “run some JavaScript whenever the user does something on the page and update the page with data from the web server based on what the user did”. If your mobile browser doesn’t support JavaScript, or doesn’t support it fully, none of that fancy AJAX functionality is going to work, is it?
But it’s not just JavaScript. Flash is a problem, too. Consumer-oriented sites use a lot of Flash-based interaction. That stuff just won’t work on most mobile browsers today. Audios and videos may not play, either. In some ways, the mobile Web is where the tethered Web was 7 or 8 years ago, and that really affects how sites built to today’s standards work (or don’t) on mobile web browsers.
Problem #3: Slow and Unreliable Networks
What’s been one of the common complaints about the iPhone? That the web browsing is too slow. If you’ve ever tried to browse the Web on your own mobile device, you’ll know that blazingly fast download speeds isn’t something you can expect.
Wireless network speeds are all over the map, but they’re all slower than what you expect on a tethered device. The iPhone suffers because it’s on an EDGE network, which isn’t particularly fast (although it’s better than the GPRS we were stuck with a few years back). There are faster solutions out there, it all depends what carrier you’re on and what model of device you have. And how many other people in your area are also browsing the Web from their own devices — remember that you’re sharing wireless bandwidth with everyone else in the same cell area.
Another problem with mobile devices is that they can wander in and out of network coverage. There’s nothing more frustrating that trying to download a page and losing it halfway through the download because of some kind of network problem. These issues don’t crop up nearly as much as they used to, but it’ll still happen from time to time and it’s another reason to keep the pages on your site as small and content-rich as possible.
What’s Next
That’s the end of this first part. In the second part we’ll start looking at the things you can do to your site or blog to make it mobile-ready. A few simple things can make a big difference in your site’s usability.
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon 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.
Does Showing Fewer AdSense Ads Lead to Higher Earnings?
Ah, where would I be without commenters to spur my grey matter into action? One of my readers left this question in response to my recent post on How Low-Paying Ads Can Dominate Higher-Paying Ads:
I don’t think it enhances the look of a page or the readers’ experience by having the max number of ads, but from my experience it has increased revenue. However, now with the very low earnings per click I’m getting, I’m wondering if it would be better to carry fewer ads.
Let’s stay away from the aesthetics and talk only about the earnings. So what’s the right strategy: more ads or fewer ads? As it happens, I deal with this topic in some detail in Chapter 14 of Uncommon AdSense. Here are some excerpts from that chapter.
Chapter 14: Display the Right Number of Ads
[The following is excerpted from Uncommon AdSense, Volume 1 and is copryight ©2007 by Eric Giguere. All rights reserved. Please do no republish this anywhere without my express written permission.]
When AdSense first appeared, publishers could only place a single ad unit on a page. (Yes, I’ve been using AdSense for that long!) That restriction was later relaxed to allow up to three ad units per page. (See Chapter 22: Know the Program Policies.) As you can imagine, many publishers immediately added two more ad units to their pages. Assuming each ad unit was showing four ads (the maximum allowed), that meant that up to 12 ads were being shown on a given page. But is that the right thing to do? Does each ad unit you add make you more money?
The Highest-Paying Ads Go First
AdSense displays the highest-paying ads first. Which is great for you, but what does “first” mean? There are two scenarios to consider:
- Within the ad unit. In horizontal ad units, the leftmost ad is the highest-paying ad – ads are ordered in decreasing value from left to right. In vertical ad units, it’s the topmost ad – the ordering is from top to bottom.
- Within the page. The highest-paying ads are displayed in the first ad unit seen by the browser. The ads shown in the second ad unit (as seen by the browser) pay less than the first unit’s ads, and similarly for the third ad unit (again, as seen by the browser) compared to the second ad unit.
Most publishers understand the ordering of ads within an ad unit, but you may not realize that the ordering of the individual ad units also influences your earnings. The ad unit the browser sees first is not necessarily the first ad unit visible on the page. It depends entirely on the HTML that defines the page. If the ad you think is first isn’t actually first from AdSense’s viewpoint then you may not be maximizing your earnings.
[An extensive discussion about page layout has been omitted.]
You may not care. If your pages are in a competitive topic area with plenty of ads to fill each ad unit (so you don’t have to worry about public service ads or alternate ads appearing in the prime clicking area) and if the bid gap (see Chapter 38: Mind the Bid Gap) is narrow then the ad unit order probably doesn’t matter. Of course, you’d be wise to test this assumption with the AdSense Preview Tool (see Chapter 17: Use the AdSense Preview Tool) to confirm that the ad inventory is as extensive as you think, especially when the page is viewed from other countries. See Chapter 18: Properly Handle Missing Ads for related information.
What Are The Alternatives?
But what if you do care? What are the alternatives?
- The obvious solution is to change the physical order of the ad units so that the highest-performing unit (which may or may not be the one shown in the AdSense heat map – the heat map is a general guideline) appears first in the HTML.
- If changing the physical ad unit order isn’t possible, another solution is to change the entire layout of the page in order to place the highest-performing ad unit in a position of prominence.
- Instead of changing the page layout, consider moving the ads themselves to different parts of the layout.
- Reducing the number of ads you show on the page is the simplest alternative. You can do this by removing ad units or by changing the ad formats you’re using.
[Note: The book describes each of the above in much greater detail.]
There’s no magic formula for determining which ads units to remove or reformat. Ideally, you’ll be guided by the tracking information you’ve collected for each ad unit (see Chapter 19: Track Ad Performance) and start by adjusting the least-performing ad units.
Test, Test, Test
There is no “one layout to rule them all” in the world of AdSense. What works on someone else’s site may not work on yours. What you have to do is test and make your changes in increments, seeing what happens.
[End of excerpt]
More Or Fewer Ads?
So the answer to my reader’s question is “maybe”, which I know sounds like a cop-out. But there are too many variables that influence what kind of earnings you get that it’s hard to come up with a blanket answer for everyone. Let’s say, for example, that in the particular layout you’re using it’s the second ad unit that’s getting most of the clicks. Then the right way to increase your earnings would be to drop the first ad unit entirely and leave the second (now first) ad unit where it is — this should increase your average per-click earnings. But that strategy wouldn’t work if the first ad unit was getting most of the clicks.
Now is a good time to re-read my post The One Answer To All Your AdSense Questions. You’ll have to look at your earnings, track where they’re coming from, and make decisions accordingly.
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
The Meta-Market: Why Marketers Sell Resale Rights
This essay on why marketers sell resale rights first appeared on GeekAffiliate and is being reprinted here to give it a wider audience.
Any intro marketing textbook teaches the importance of defining and targeting specific market segments. Understanding your market is key to selling into that market. But do you understand your meta-market?
The meta-market
For online businesses there are two meta-markets: consumers and resellers.
Consumers are the traditional meta-market, the end, er, consumers of a product or service. To sell to them you must sell them on the features and benefits of the product. Show them how it fulfills a need or a want. All the usual marketing stuff.
Resellers are the other meta-market. Resellers take products and sell them to consumers. Or, more likely, other resellers.
So which meta-market appeals to you?
An example
Say you wrote an e-book on dog training. It’s a good book, and you’ve got some promotional material written. So which meta-market do you target?
The consumer meta-market is actually very hard to sell to. These are the same people that most marketers — online AND offline — are chasing. Lots of competition. Lots of money to reach them. Of course, if you have a high-traffic site about dog training or you’ve built a large mailing list of dog lovers, your job will be much simpler. This is why building a reputation and a following is important if you want to be successful at consumer selling.
Or you could go after the reseller meta-market.
Resellers are always on the lookout for products to sell, either to consumers or (more on this shortly) to other resellers. If there’s something unique and appealing about your product, if there’s a money-making angle you can exploit, the reseller meta-market can be extremely profitable.
Primed to spend, easy to reach
There are two problems with the consumer meta-market:
- Consumers are hard to reach; and
- Consumers are not easily convinced to spend their money online
The reseller meta-market, on the other hand, is almost the opposite:
- Resellers are actively searching for new products to promote; and
- Resellers are eager buyers of online products
Even though the reseller meta-market is much smaller than the consumer meta-market, it’s a much easier sell. I touched on this before when I talked about turnkey AdSense site economics, but it goes way beyond AdSense.
So what’s your meta-market?
Understanding which meta-market you’re actually targeting is one of the keys to succeeding as an online entrepreneur. The strategies you use to go after consumers are different than the strategies you use to go after resellers. There’s a lot of overlap, of course — you must convince resellers that what you’re offering is of interest to consumers, or at least other resellers — but you focus on different things.
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.
Review: SiteStealer
Time for a little break from AdSense to review another Internet marketing product. I’ve gotten some questions about the SiteStealer ebook that’s being promoted right now. At first I thought this was a book about how to frame product sites in order to get affiliate sales without using affiliate links (I show you how to do this in my report How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links, BTW), but that of course was just clever marketing by its creators. They’ve taken the “gangster” approach and have used a lot of innuendo to make it think that you’ll be doing something not-quite-kosher. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the “Rich Jerk” approach, although it’s nowhere near as insulting as the latter.
Banned From ClickBank?
If you believe what the other marketers are saying, this book’s been banned from being sold on ClickBank and on other places. That could well be true. Some of the order stuff I saw made reference to ClickBank, and they offer the same 8-week guarantee that all ClickBank products get, but when you order you actually pay through Paydotcom, which is the refuge of last resort for online marketers. (OK, that’s just my opinion.) If it was banned, though, it’s not because the content is controversial, it’s because ClickBank THINKS the content is controversial — they don’t actually read the ebooks that are sold there, they just look at the sales pages and whatever description the vendors provide. So they probably looked at the SiteStealer sales page (even the name by itself would give them problems) and decided to give it a pass. Maybe. Who knows?
What’s Included With SiteStealer
But who cares how it’s sold, it’s what’s in the package that’s important. SiteStealer is a 75-page ebook delivered in PDF format. (No popups in it, thankfully…) It comes with a number of bonuses (of course), including:
- A set of 229 headlines to use/adapt for your own sales pages.
- Headline Creator Pro, a Windows application that when run asks you four simple questions about the product you want to promote and then generates a whole pile of headlines based on your answers. (It’s kind of fun to use, actually, and you can build some really outrageous headlines with it!)
- The $7 Secrets report and the scripts that go along with it.
- Various on videos on creating your own resale rights product, how Peel Away Ads was promoted, etc.
Stealing Techniques From Others
By now you probably have a good idea about what SiteStealer’s about: selling products online by “stealing” (legally) ideas and techniques from successful Internet marketers. There are 5 “levels” of “theft” that they describe:
- Grabbing and rewriting winning headlines.
- Swiping entire sales pages.
- Swiping the entire business model.
- Purchasing resale rights to a product.
- Creating your own products to let others “steal” from you.
So really, SiteStealer compiles and explains various successful strategies used by online marketers, with an emphasis on the resale rights angle (remember GuruSlayer or Dominating ClickBank?).
Who Needs SiteStealer?
This product will appeal mostly to marketers who:
- don’t have a firm grasp of what resale rights are and how to use them effectively, or
- who want specific checklists and step-by-step breakdowns of how to create and market products, or
- who want “behind the scenes” looks at successful product launches.
I must admit that the latter part was what interested me the most, as of course I have my own products to promote and I’m the first to admit that I’ve done a terrible job promoting them. The “Peel Away Ads Deconstructed” video was particularly interesting, since I’m one of the people who actually bought resale rights to Peel Away Ads (PAA) and have been helping them build their empire! The deal with PAA is that although you purchase resale rights, you actually direct the buyers to the product site for order fulfillment after they’ve purchased the product from you. There they get exposed to an upsell and therefore you have an additional opportunity to make money from the customer. Meanwhile, the product creator builds his or her mailing list of customers and is able to keep those customers updated with the latest version of the product. So a win-win situation. (Note that the reseller can still build his or her own mailing list of customers as well.)
The video about building a resale rights product was also quite interesting: it’s still work, but it’s certainly a lot less work than creating your own product. (I know what that’s like!)
You also get a bunch of other bonuses, including process maps and checklists for various Internet marketing techniques and access to more case studies.
All in all, not a bad deal if you’re in the market for this kind of stuff. It’s not really anything new, but the real-world experiences described here and the processes used make it much more usable and worthwhile than things like Day Job Killer, at least in my mind.
How Low-Paying AdSense Ads Can Dominate Higher-Paying Ads
A couple of days ago I suggested that it might (with the emphasis on might) be time to clear out the competitive ad filter as Google gets more successful at removing made for AdSense (MFA) sites from its search index. However, there have always been AdSense publishers who’ve been adamant that they absolutely MUST use the competitive ad filter to filter out the low-paying sites that are hurting their overall earnings. In fact, there’s a thread over on Digital Point discussing this in some detail. Google tells us publishers not to do that because it undermines the ad auction and may prevent you from maximizing your earnings.
It’s evident to me, however, that Google isn’t as forthcoming as they should be about the auction process. I don’t work for Google, nor do I have any special inside knowledge, but I do believe that low-paying ads can dominate higher-paying ads and lead to lower earnings for individual AdSense publishers. I’ve thought this for a long time, although I think this is the first time I’m discussing it in public, and I’m curious to hear what others have to say about it.
The Party Line
First, let’s review what Google has said about its ad selection algorithm. Remember, most of the details of the algorithm are discussed in the AdSense patent (a free detailed review of which you get when you buy Uncommon AdSense) but that really deals with the targeting of the ads, i.e. how to determine what a page is about in order to select the right keyword-based ads. What we’re interested in is how the ads are ordered after the non-relevant ads have been excluded.
In theory, the highest-paying ads get selected first so that the first ad in the first ad unit pays the most, followed by the second highest-paying ad, etc. etc. The AdSense team tells us this:
Our auction system automatically selects the best performing ads for each page to help you earn the most possible money. This is especially true with our new expanded text ads. By filtering ads you think are low paying, you could actually be cutting out the most optimized ads and decreasing your revenue potential. Each ad that is filtered is one less bid in the auction, lowering the price for the winning ad on your site. You benefit most when there is a larger pool of advertisers competing for a place on your site.
There’s the party line: don’t put ads in your filter, you’ll keep potentially high-paying ads out of the auction!
But then they continue with this:
Additionally, when we calculate the auction, we take ad clickthrough rates (CTR) into account - an ad with a $0.25 cost-per-click (CPC) with a 5% CTR is more valuable than an ad with a $1.00 CPC but a 0.1% CTR.
And this, my readers, is the crux of the problem.
The AdWords Ad Rank
Remember, AdSense is just an outlet for AdWords ads, so it’s necessary to understand how AdWords works to really understand how AdSense works. Luckily, there’s a good explanation of AdWords ad ranking on Google’s site.
What we’re interested in is the Ad Rank for keyword ads on the content network section of that explanation:
Ad Rank = content bid X Quality Score. The Quality Score related to Ad Rank on the content network is determined by: the ad’s past performance on the site in question, as well as on similar sites; your landing page quality; other relevance factors
The Quality Score (QS) is the issue, not the bid price. Remember, this is written from the advertiser’s point of view, not the publisher’s viewpoint. Advertisers who properly optimize their ads — and it’s work to do that, trust me — can pay significantly less that other advertisers and still outrank them if their QS is high enough.
High CTR, Sure, But Maybe Not For You
The clickthrough rate (CTR) is one of the major components of the Quality Score. All other things being equal, an ad that gets clicked on more often will have a higher QS and cost less. The wording above suggests that each ad’s performance is evaluated on a per-site basis as well as a per-group basis. And probably on an entire-network basis as well. We don’t know how all these different values factor into the QS.
What if a given ad performs very well on many sites, but not on your own? In other words, it has a high average CTR, and hence a high QS, but your site happens to be one of the outliers? Overall, yes, the ad performs well and makes Google money and so Google rewards the advertiser with lower costs and higher rankings. But that’s to their benefit, not yours. Google doesn’t care if the advertiser only pays a few cents per click. If the advertiser’s ad is getting clicked on thousands of times across the content network, that’s still a lot of money for Google. But each individual publisher is just getting a small piece of that action.
Then There’s The Ad Inventory…
And let’s not forget the ad inventory. There are tens (hundreds?) of millions of pages with AdSense ads on them being displayed any given second. Luckily, there’s a huge inventory of AdWords ads available to display in those slots. Or is there?
Some important points about AdWords:
- Advertisers bid separately for the search and content networks. Many advertisers shun the latter altogether. This leaves fewer ads and lower prices for AdSense publishers.
- Each advertiser defines a daily budget for their ad spending. When that budget is exceeded, their ads stop running for the rest of the day.
- They can also limit the ads to run by geography and/or language and by time of day. Again, this trims down the pool of ads.
So there are fewer ads than you might think. Worse still, to prevent advertisers from blowing their ad spend too early, the default setting is to “optimize” the ads by spreading out their display. Advertisers can override this and force the ads to show as quickly as possible. But most don’t.
What does this all mean? There will be fewer higher-paying ads and they’ll be left out of the ad rotation more often than the lower-paying ads. This means that at any given time it’s possible (and likely) that some AdSense publishers won’t have any high-paying ads in their auction, and so they’re left with low-paying ads to display.
Maybe I’m wrong about all of this, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.
Note: I still like AdSense and I still think it’s a great way to monetize content. But it doesn’t work for everyone, and while collectively AdSense publishers do well it’s definitely true that individual publishers can suffer relative to others.
Sponsored Link: Have a dog who’s doing some unwanted gardening? Maybe an Invisible Fence pet containment system is what you need!
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 Triple Your Subscribers In One Easy Step
Do you want more subscribers? Do what I just did and have FeedBurner serve your RSS feeds and watch your subscriber count shoot up dramatically!
Measuring Blog Readership
Accurate readership metrics for a blog aren’t always easy to get. Prior to my switch, for example, the only thing I knew for sure was that I had a large chunk of subscribers (over 200) reading this blog via Bloglines. Yesterday when I switched to FeedBurner and placed their “FeedCount” graphic on the site, the FeedCount was at 277, which seemed to confirm what Bloglines was telling me, although in my gut I was pretty sure it was higher.
Today, however, the subscriber count has more than tripled to 944. Here are the FeedBurner stats:
As you can see, the largest block of subscribers (348 of them) read this blog via Google Reader or iGoogle. There are also many other small aggregators being used as well as individual readers, of course. Add in those who read this blog via email (not shown in the FeedBurner stats because I maintain that list using AWeber’s blog broadcast feature) and the regular subscriber count is well over 1000.
Switching To FeedBurner
Switching to FeedBurner is trivial if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog: just download and install the FeedSmith plugin. The plugin intercepts calls to your WordPress feed (usually found at /feed/ on your site) and examines the user agent header to determine who’s trying to read the feed: anyone but FeedBurner itself gets seamlessly redirected to the FeedBurner feed instead. (The redirect is done using a temporary redirect to ensure that subscribers always come back to your original WordPress feed. Thus if you disable the plugin, subscribers will automatically revert to using the original feed.)
Futures
Of course, none of this will help increase the AdSense income for this blog (which is paltry, as I’ve admitted before). But by switching to FeedBurner I’ll be able to capitalize on any feed monetization schemes that Google (who now own FeedBurner) comes up with.
Did I really triple my subscribers overnight? No, not really. What I did was expose my actual subscriber base overnight, just by switching to FeedBurner. But it gives me more clout with advertisers if that ever becomes important. For some real tips on increasing your subscriber count, see copyblogger’s 10 ways to get more subscribers.
Coming soon: an ethical bribe just for my subscribers… 
Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.
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.
Subscribe to the Best AdSense Blog by Mail or by RSS
You may not have noticed it, but yesterday I started using FeedBurner to serve my RSS feed. I’ve done this to make it easier to subscribe to this blog and also to better track those subscriptions. The changeover should be seamless to my current subscribers.
Did you know that you can get any new posts I make by mail or by RSS? I know there are still a lot of people out there who prefer to use their inbox to read things instead of using a newsreader, so the choice is yours.
If you don’t want to miss a single action-packed post, please subscribe today!
Sponsored Link: Have a dog who’s doing some unwanted gardening? Maybe an Invisible Fence pet containment system is what you need!
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.
Time To Clear Out Your Competitive Ad Filter?
Google has always allowed AdSense publishers to ban specific advertisers from displaying their ads on a publisher’s sites. This is done using the competitive ad filter in the AdSense console. The competitive ad filter lets you list up to 200 domain names (or partial URLs) that are to be blocked; any ad whose destination URL matches one of those values is blocked. See the Google help pages for more information.
Many publishers use the competitive filter for an alternate reason: as a way to block out made for AdSense (MFA) sites, either for pragmatic reasons (they don’t pay enough) or to simply deny those sites some extra money. Google has always insisted that this kind of blocking is wrong because their auction algorithm ensures that only the best-paying ads show up on an AdSense site. But anectodal evidence and sites like AdsBlackList have gone against that advice.
However, now that Google has disapproved of the AdSense arbitrage business model and has taken various steps lately to improve AdSense site quality and remove MFAs from the indexes, it may be time for everyone to clear out their competitive ad filters and see what happens. It’s easy to do, and you can save the existing list in a file somewhere for safekeeping. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who does this to know if your earnings go up or down after doing so (give it a few days, though).
Sponsored Link: Have a dog who’s doing some unwanted gardening? Maybe an Invisible Fence pet containment system is what you need!
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 Power of the Negative Review
This essay on negative reviews first appeared on GeekAffiliate and is being republished here (with a bit of editing) to give it a wider audience.
Internet marketing — and affiliate selling in particular — involves a lot of fear. Not in the sales pitch — although there is certainly a lot of “buy this now or you’ll regret it!” messaging — but in the attitudes of the seller vis-a-vis the potential customer.
And let’s be clear: these are customers we’re talking about, not “visitors” or “readers”. Don’t sugar-coat it: if they’re giving you money, directly or not, they are your customers.
Almost everyone engaged in affiliate selling exudes boundless enthusiasm and a “it-can-do-it-all” attitude in an attempt to convince a potential customer to push the Buy! button and hand over their money.
Desensitization
The problem, of course, is that potential customers then become desensitized to the whole sales process and view everything with a certain degree of skepticism. (As well they should.) With everyone babbling on exuberantly about how wonderful the product is and how it’s the cure for your problem and how it’s so easy and how only a few are being let in on the secret… well, really, is there any doubt that the conversion ratios — how many people see the message versus how many actually buy the product — are so low?
This is why, in a crowded arena of me-too sales pages, the negative review has a disproportionate amount of power. Not to dissuade potential customers from buying — the sales pages already do a good job of that — but to convert them into actual customers. Let me explain.
Idealism Is Inauthentic
Nothing is truly perfect in real life. Ideals are pursued, but never reached. If asked to describe your spouse’s faults, you can probably rhyme off a half-dozen without thinking. But so what? You know what those faults are and you’ve accepted them. They’re part of the price you pay to have that person in your life. The faults are outweighed by the positive attributes that drew you to him or her in the first place. (Don’t forget it’s mutual: your spouse has to put up with your faults, too.)
This is why the fear of saying anything negative about something you want to sell is counter-productive. It doesn’t seem authentic, to push a concept that Seth Godin espouses.
Negatives Are Relative
But negatives are not absolute. What you think is wrong with me (and there are many!) my wife may consider attractive. Just because you think a book can’t teach you something doesn’t mean that it’s not useful to someone else.
Books are a perfect case in point. Look up any Amazon book that’s a bestseller — say in the top ten — in its category. Read the most recent customer reviews for that book. Which reviews were the most useful to you? The exuberant utterances of the personal (or paid) friends of the author or the ones that say “I didn’t like this book because…“.
Look at my first AdSense book: Make Easy Money with Google, which just celebrated its second anniversary, has now been reviewed by no less than 45 customers on Amazon.com. While I’m happy to report that it’s maintained a steady 4-star rating, there are several quite negative reviews. Here’s a sampling of them:
- Perhaps this book would be useful for a person totally inexperienced in just about everything, including tying their shoes.
- … this book is aimed squarely at the absolute beginner, who have no idea how to build sites, and who want in on the money race.
- Overall, valuable if you’re a novice that wants to get into internet publishing monetized by Adsense but worthless for pretty much anyone else.
Ouch! I can’t say those reviews thrill me, but they’re honest. They’re authentic. I’m sure they’ve put people off from buying the book. But I bet those people were never in my target audience. However, a novice looking for a good introductory text on AdSense would look at those comments and say Hey, this sounds right for me! and he or she will buy the book because of them.
To such a person, those negatives are actually positives, because they don’t want a jargon-filled book that they can’t understand.
Expose Those Warts!
I wrote a review of a software product called Desktop AdSense Cash Machine. It wasn’t a perfect piece of software by any means, but it did an adequate job. I acquired resale rights to it and decided to sell it to anyone who wanted to buy it, but given its limitations I priced it low at only $10, not $37 or even $67 like some others do. Because I thought $10 was a fair price for what it actually did.
Now, I didn’t sell a ton of the product or anything, but I got some great feedback about my review. People thanked me for the detailed review (with screenshots) and for giving my honest opinion about it. It was like a breath of fresh air for them.
All I did was expose AdSense Cash Machine’s warts: here’s the product, it does this, it doesn’t do that, it’s worth this much, take it or leave it. (Note that I don’t sell it anymore, as the product stopped working due to changes to the various article directories it pulled things from and I haven’t had the time to go looking for an update.)
You Still Get Well-Targeted AdSense Ads
If you’re an AdSense publisher, as opposed to an affiliate marketer, rest assured that the AdSense ad targeting will still work exceptionally well with negative reviews. Why? Because those reviews are still chock full of related keywords and phrases.
An Opportunity For The Geek
If you’re a geek, take heart, because geeks excel at negative reviews. They’re happy to deconstruct products and ideas and to tell you exactly why they won’t work and how to fix them. Where the marketing type wants to build, the geek wants to destroy. Well, maybe destroy is too strong a work. Deconstruct would be a better way to phrase it. And that’s where your skills (you, the geek reading this) come into play.
Does the thought of writing a sales page make you sick? Then don’t! Write an authentic review instead. Don’t just parrot the sales copy. Don’t shy away from exposing the warts. Describe what the product does and what it doesn’t do. Who will benefit from it, who won’t. How to use it, how to abuse it.
Don’t underestimate the power of the negative review!
Sponsored Link: Have a dog who’s doing some unwanted gardening? Maybe an Invisible Fence pet containment system is what you need!
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.
Popups in PDFs? Say It Ain’t So!
One of the things I like about the PDF format is that it does what it says it does without any surprises. Unfortunately, it looks like that’s going to change. PDF Page Pro is in pre-launch mode and will probably be heavily promoted by various marketers. That in of itself isn’t a bad thing, but PDF Page Pro is software that adds popup windows to PDFs, which is definitely going to be annoying.
The popup windows are done using JavaScript. The sales page makes it sound like this is some great discovery on their part, but Adobe Acrobat’s JavaScript is well-documented, it’s just that no marketer’s really taken advantage of it before. This software even lets you automatically open up a web page after a popup (either an entry popup or an exit popup) is dismissed.
What’s really annoying, though, is that turning off these popups is non-trivial. Oh, the sales page makes it sound easy enough:
You see, with this software, although your pop-up URL always shows up for the first time, if your prospect doesn’t want to see it again… Then in their acrobat browser, they can just go to Document –> Security settings and stop the pop-up coming up again and again!
But I doubt the non-techies will figure that out. They’ll need to invest in a PDF cracker to remove the embedded JavaScript.
I really hope we don’t see a lot of popup PDFs popping up because of this product….
Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.
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 3 Kinds Of Successful AdSense Sites
One of the questions I often get asked is What kind of AdSense site should I create?. Well, a year or two ago it didn’t really matter what kind of site you created, not if you were in the game for short-term gain. But things are different now. Google is (finally!) cracking down on AdSense publishers who create valueless sites, both indirectly (by dropping them from the search engine result pages) and directly (by banning their accounts). Gone are the days when you could just crank out sites and see huge rewards.
No, instead, AdSense publishers need to concentrate on providing real value to their readership. That real value will draw visitors. Those visitors will click the ads and make you money.
How do you provide real value if you’re just one person with limited time and resources? By working hard on one or two sites. But what kind of sites? Conventional wisdom says that you need to create “authority” sites, but that’s not the right approach at all.
Here’s my list of the 3 kinds of AdSense sites that work best for small publishers. Start with one of these.
1. The Experience Site
The first kind of AdSense site that anyone can build, and in many ways the easiest to build, is the experience site. This is a site that describes your personal experiences with something. It doesn’t claim to be authoritative, nor even comprehensive. It’s you talking (hopefully intelligently) about what you’ve done.
There are so many possibilities for building good experience sites. If you’re an avid photographer, for example, you can build sites around your experiences with certain cameras, specific photo techniques, shooting problems you’ve had (and solved), locations you’ve captured, etc. etc. Almost any hobby is rife for material here, especially if you’ve been doing it for some time and have a lot of “war stories” to discuss.
Many experience sites are built around a blog, although it doesn’t have to be that way. My own Invisible Fence pet containment system experiences are documented in a very simple and conventional website, with a multi-stage construction was described as an AdSense case study. Were I to redo the site today, I might do it as a blog, although then I’d feel obligated to update it on a regular basis.
Why are experience sites useful? Because the problems you’ve faced and solved may be problems that others are themselves facing. Or maybe what you did is completely novel in some way. Not all experience sites are useful or well-done, and not all of them add to the value of the Web. But if you work at it, your site will definitely have value.
2. The Clarification Site
The second kind of AdSense site is the clarification site. The purpose of a clarification site is to better explain a topic. Because while there’s a lot of information out on the Web, much of it is poorly presented and/or poorly explained.
Here’s an example. A few years back, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), based here in Waterloo, created itself a website, as most organizations do. The home page at the time was very obscure about what CIGI did. Here’s what it said:
The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is a global research centre charged with studying, advising and educating scholars, practitioners and governments. Its area of concern is the character and desired reforms of the multilateral system, particularly within the areas of economic and financial governance.
Say what? (You can visit the Internet archive to see the page in its full glory.)
I don’t mean to pick on CIGI, and in fact today their website is much clearer as to the mission of the organization and much more navigable.
The point is that a crappy yet authoritative site is still a crappy site. If you can build a site that clarifies matters, again that’s real value. The best way to do this is to build a site for a different audience than the authoritative site, since presumably the authoritative site is speaking to what it thinks is its primary audience. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other people out there who’d be interested in your Reader’s Digest version of the same material.
3. The Compilation Site
The final kind of successful AdSense site is the compilation site. This is a topic I’ve discussed before, see Are Article Directories Ethical? for example. Let me quote myself:
That’s the big problem with the AdSense article directories I see. They’re just random collections of unedited material thrown together in hopes of grabbing a search engine’s attention. There’s no thought put into their organization. There’s nothing special or unique about them. Even adding things like reviews, additional commentaries, definitions, etc. to the articles that were gotten somewhere else would be useful. Something to distinguish that kind of site from everything else.
One of the problem with the Web is how to organize and find the information you need. The information’s usually available, but it may not be easy to find it. A compilation site attempts to organize that information by summarizing the important points and then linking to all the relevant websites for more detailed information. The information on the site itself is not what’s most valuable, it’s the organization of that information and the links to the (presumably more) authoritative sites that is useful.
The best compilation sites have lots of links to other sites. They’re not afraid of external linking, and they’re all the more useful because of it. It may seem counterproductive because each link out is one more chance of losing the visitor (and hence any potential ad clicks) but it’s the links that make the site valuable to the visitor in the first place and that draw in the traffic.
What About Authority Sites?
A lot of people want to create authority sites because they think that it’s the way to really make money. Because the search engines love authority sites.
There are several problems with this viewpoint. For one thing, search engines don’t disclose what an “authority site” is. Oh, people have noticed that Wikipedia gets a lot of mileage in Google where it probably shouldn’t. And until the “Squidoo slap” occurred recently, pages on Squidoo were ranking extremely well.
But the most obvious problem with the authority site model is that few people are authorities on any given topic. I could probably argue that I’m an authority on Java ME programming, since I’ve published two books and numerous articles about the topic over the past 7 or 8 years. This blog itself showcases my AdSense expertise, so my word here would have some weight as well. But I don’t think I can be considered an authority on anything else, certainly not on a global or national level. (You can certainly be an authority within a smaller community, though — but is that authority monetizable?)
A couple of years back, the term “mesothelioma” was a hot topic for AdSense publishers once it was “discovered” that law firms were paying big bucks for mesothelioma-related advertisements. So a bunch of publishers immediately went and created sites and pages around the term. But where do you think they get their information from? The other — already existing — mesothelioma sites, including the ones put out by bona fide cancer organizations like the National Cancer Institute. These new sites were clearly opportunistic. They weren’t experience, clarification or compilation sites — sites that could provide real value beyond what was already available. (Aside: I must admit that I briefly went down that path myself with my Vioxx Lawsuit Questions site, but it became clear as I was doing it that it wasn’t really something I could develop into anything meaningful, so I abandoned it quite quickly. I think the only real contribution I was able to make in relation to the Vioxx recall was with my humor piece, and I pretty much left it at that.)
If you have the knowledge, experience and wherewithal to create an authority site, then by all means do so. But it’s not easy. You’ll have more success creating one of the kinds of sites mentioned above.
Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.
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.
FrugalIM: Resources for the Frugal Internet Marketer
Just a short post to introduce Frugal IM, my new mailing list for the frugal Internet marketer. One of the things I’ve been doing over the past year (and surely regular readers have noticed) is purchasing infoproducts and reviewing them here. This has been partly out of interest, but also partly for research. I’d love to be able to sell 4000 copies of an ebook just like Blogging To The Bank has done over the past couple of weeks. (Hey, I’m happy to sell 4000 copies of one of my printed books, so of course I’d be ecstatic to sell a similar number of more profitable ebooks.) So I’ve been buying these things and seeing what it is they do that makes them so successful (or not). I may post some thoughts about this whole process at a later date, but I’m sure I could sell a lot more copies of Uncommon AdSense (well, it’s probably not new enough now — I’d have to come up with a new product) by cranking up the hype level and engaging big-name JV partners. I’m not sure I want to do that, but again that’s for another discussion…
Anyhow, because of all of this research I’ve actually gotten my hands on a number of products with resale rights. Instead of letting them gather dust on my hard drive, I thought I’d offer them to my readers. Most can only be sold, not given away, nor can they be placed on membership sites. Which means I can only sell them via a website or a mailing list…. hence the Frugal IM mailing list. Join the list and I’ll send you a free ebook on article marketing (I do have a few I can give away) and then you’ll get no-hype emails on a regular basis offering you one or more infoproducts at cheap prices. See the site for more details and the signup form. If you have any questions, just use the contact form to drop me a note, or see the frequently-asked questions list.
Coming next, we’ll return to our normal programming. I’m going to talk more about my Invisible Fence Guide and attempt to answer the question What kind of sites do successful AdSense publishers create?. Hint: it isn’t about authority.
Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.
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.
3-Way Links
Jonathan Leger (who was last mentioned in my Instant Article Wizard 2.0 review) has just released a new service called 3 Way Links, touting it as the latest way to get boatloads of search engine traffic. I was offered the opportunity to join the beta, but I didn’t have the time or energy to do it, plus I needed to think about the implications of this technique, which is what we’re going to do right now.
What is 3 Way Links?
3 Way Links is a link-building service sold by monthly subscription. To join, you must meet the following criteria (taken verbatim from the 3 Way Links site):
- Only sites on their own domain are accepted (no subdomains).
- No free-hosting sites.
- Sites must be professional in quality and appearance.
- Only family-friendly sites are accepted (no adult, gambling, warez, hate, etc.)
- No sites related to link networks or similar linking systems are accepted (not because of conflict of interest, but to ensure network security).
- No ‘under construction’ sites — they must be ready-to-go when submitted.
- Sites must have at least 2 pages indexed in Google.
- Sites must support PHP.
Most AdSense sites meet these criteria, the big exception would be blogs hosted on other domains (like blogspot.com). The sites will be manually reviewed before they’re allowed into the 3 Way Links network.
There’s a flat $47/month fee to join the network, which allows you to list up to 20 sites with PageRank (PR) of 3 or less. You can add an unlimited number of PR4+ sites to the network. (Think of the network as a stereotypical bar/pub: the PR0-3 sites are the “males” and the PR4-10 sits are the “females”… you can never have too many of the latter, but too definitely have too many of the latter… but I digress…)
How 3 Way Links Works
The basic idea idea behind 3 Way Links is to use three-way reciprocal linking between related sites to increase search engine rankings. Instead of using two-way reciprocal linking, which looks like this:
A links to B and B links to A
3 Way Links uses uses one-way links between three different sites:
A links to B, B links to C, and C links to A
Here’s the little diagram Jonathan uses on his site to demonstrate this:
In graph theory, this kind of linking is known as a directed cycle.
Why is this kind of linking better? Because too many people have abused two-way reciprocal linking. Search engines are giving less credence to two-way links and would rather see one-way links between two sites, because that indicates that the site doing the linking is “voting” for the other site without any special consideration. Or so they hope!
You use 3 Way Links by placing PHP scripts on your sites. The scripts go and create links to other sites in the network. The service is well-designed: you can specify the anchor texts you’d like use for links back to your site and they ensure that your own sites never interlink. There is no link back to the 3WayLinks.net site nor any obvious “footprint” left by the linking code. (Or so they think…) Each site will have no more than 250 links pointing back to it, which apparently is enough to boost search engine rankings significantly in most cases.
3 Way Links and Google
Let me start by quoting Google’s webmaster guidelines:
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Obviously, 3 Way Links violates this guideline. Google is on the record as being against any kind of artificial link-building schemes. They don’t even like sponsored links like those offered by Text Link Ads. The other search engines haven’t been as explicit about paid links, but I think all agree on the general sentiment, that you want to distinguished sponsored results from unsponsored results. (Or at least they say they do… but that’s another kettle of fish…)
If you’re an AdSense publisher, please note the following statement in the AdSense program policies:
AdSense publishers are required to adhere to the webmaster quality guidelines
My interpretation of this rule is that it forbids AdSense publishers from participating in link-building schemes.
Use It Or Not?
While 3 Way Links claims that there’s no detectable footprint on any of its member sites, I doubt that’s actually the case. All it takes is for one site in a 3 Way Links network to be flagged as such and immediately all sites that it links to are suspect. I’m thinking it won’t take the brains at Google a lot of time to figure out a way of sniffing out these networks. They probably already sniff out directed cycles already. The question is, do they do anything about it?
If you read the testimonials on the 3 Way Links site, you’ll see that the beta participants have been very pleased with the results so far. That’s great. My question is whether these results will last, at least in Google (they probably will in MSN!). If you plan on giving it a try, be careful. Don’t start with your most important/precious sites so that you don’t lose your income stream because they got banned for participating in a link scheme.
There’s nothing wrong with directed cycles in linking, of course, and they can be very serendipitous when they happen. But artificial link-building schemes should always be considered short-term plays and you need to have some backup plans in place for when the rug gets pulled out from under you.
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.
Google Continues To Target Made For AdSense Sites
We’ve had some recent discussions here about building focused, quality sites based on what you actually know versus building “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites that don’t generally add to the usefulness of the Web. (See the comments on Project Black Mask: Initial Thoughts for an extensive discussion.) As I reported earlier, Google is going on a page quality offensive by requiring AdSense publishers to follow both its webmaster guidelines and its AdWords landing page quality guidelines.
So today there’s a further indication that Google is getting serious about ridding the Web of useless MFA sites. There’s a very interesting discussion in the Google Webmaster Help group about a site full of general articles about random topics that’s been dropped from the Google search index because of its lack of quality. (See the related posts on SEO Buzz Box, Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal for more.)
Adam Lasnik of Google’s Search Engine Quality team had some very strong words to say to the site owner:
The reductions in rankings you’ve experienced are not going to be
reversed by simple technical or structural changes. You may wish to
focus your efforts, add compelling, original, and substantive content
or tools, and *then* file a reconsideration request.
Ouch! I’m surprised they’d say things like this in public to a site owner, but I guess it shows that they’ve finally decided to get tougher about the whole MFA topic.
[Aside: One wonders why they've finally decided to do this. The cynical would say that either advertising revenues have started to decrease because of quality issues, forcing their hand, or else they've reached enough critical mass now that losing the revenue generated by MFA sites, which is not insubstantial, will be made up for by increased revenues on the non-MFA sites. Only the bean counters know for sure. I'm sure Googlers will protest otherwise, but they whey has it taken Google so long to crack down on sites that have clearly been in violation of the terms and conditions ever since AdSense was introduced? End aside]
This is good news for those of us who focus on building quality sites. It’s also a big worry for those who build MFA sites by the bucketful, since for the most part those sites live and die on search engine traffic. If they’re getting banned by Google that’s going to dry up a major part of their income stream.
What does this mean for the average AdSense publisher? After all, it’s quite normal to think about adding content with AdSense monetization firmly in mind. Does this mean that we’re all going to be banned?
No, I don’t think so, not if you approach it the right way. Note that there is no universal definition of “made for AdSense”, for one thing, and that in many ways it’s a matter of interpretation. I discussed this almost two years ago in this pair of posts, which I urge you to read (or reread):
Note that this was around the time where I was premiering my Invisible Fence guide as a simple AdSense case study about making useful sites that could be monetized via AdSense. That site’s still going strong, by the way, even though it’s slipped in the rankings in the last couple of weeks. And it’s nothing fantastic, kind of amateurish really, but it’s also something almost anyone could do because it’s based on personal experience and provides some useful information for anyone considering the purchase of a pet containment system like Invisible Fence. My advice to you has always been to concentrate on building sites that are on topics you know about, said site being a prime example. If you don’t do that, don’t be surprised when Google drops your site because it doesn’t pass muster!
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.
Post-24 Blues
This is totally off-topic, but I’m looking for some suggestions from my readers. My wife and I like action shows, and were disappointed last year when Alias went off the air (although it did get very weird in the last season). So in January I told her I’d like to give 24 a try, even though she’d always been resistant. (No, I don’t know why…) The 6th season was just about to start and so I convinced her to give it a shot. We were hooked as soon as we started watching!
It soon became clear that we were missing a lot of the backstory, however, so we started concurrently watching Season 1 of 24, the one where 
Jack Bauer must foil the assassination of presidential candidate David Palmer. We then immediately proceeded to watch the second season where Jack has to stop terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb (hmm, sounds somewhat like season 6 — I guess there’s bound to be some repetition when you’re dealing with a counter-terrorist unit). Then on to season 3 and a deadly virus that could wipe out the United States (and presumably Canada as well), season 4 where terrorists attempt to take over and meltdown nuclear power plants (I didn’t know the US had so many of them…), and finally season 5 where terrorists steal a large cache of nerve gas and much mayhem (martial law in LA!) results. I can see why the Amazon reviews for each season over overwhelmingly positive. It’s certainly been a fun ride for us! (Although I must admit that the season 6 storyline was much weaker than the two seasons that preceded it. Season 5 was especially good, we watched the last two hours of it last night, which is what prompted this post….)
But now the ride’s over and we’re wondering what to watch. So I turn to you, my readers, because there must some of you must have similar tastes in TV shows to watch. Leave me a comment with some suggestions for things to watch/rent while we wait for the seventh season of 24 to arrive early next year…
Sponsored Link: Have a dog who’s doing some unwanted gardening? Maybe an Invisible Fence pet containment system is what you need!
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.