Archive for December, 2007

Blog Titles and Meta Data: What Benefit’s Do You Get from Optimization?

Written by Brandon on December 30, 2007 – 5:48 pm -

Back when I started my very first blog in 2004, I was not terribly happy with the amount of traffic I was getting from Google. I had set up my sitemap and done all of the things that I thought I should do. Then one day, I realized that I had never created meta data in the head of my blog template. After I changed this data to properly describe my site, I got double the amount of traffic from Google the very next day. Recently though, I’ve wondered how much optimizing meta data really matters on a site that is already popular. The answer I’ve come up with is it does not matter one bit. But before I tell you why it doesn’t matter, let’s get back to basics.

library card: An Early Form of Metadata

The Library Card: An Early Form of Metadata 

If you don’t know what meta data is, then read this awesome article on searchenginewatch.com to get an understanding. In its simplest form, meta data is just data that quickly describes what is on a particular web page. This meta data can describe a number of things on your site, but for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on three tags found within the head of every web page: <meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> , <meta name=”description” content=”some description here” />, and <title>The title of the page</title>.

What each tag does is pretty self explanitory. Good Search Engine Optimization practice tell us that:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> = You would write about 20 keywords that best describes your web page.

<meta name=”description” content=”some description here” /> = You would write a small paragraph describing your site’s content using multiple keywords distinct to your site.

<title>The title of the page</title> = You would write a short title that might be the blog name and a less than one sentence description.

If you have small amounts of traffic, and you have not done what I’ve subscribed above, then you will double your traffic pretty quickly once you’ve done this.

Optimizing blog titles and meta data in Wordpress, for instance, becomes more tricky. You should consider getting one of the SEO plugins for wordpress that I list at the end of the article or visiting the Wordpress.org web page on SEO. Also, check out this link on Meta Tags in Wordpress. Remember that in a wordpress blog you have 4 types of pages that you have to optimize: the homepage, the archive, the single post, and the page. Rather than going on about this, let’s just say the end goal: Every page in your site should have different meta data tailored to that page. Most sites that have been lazy about meta data use the same meta data throughout the site and only change the titles. This is not what you want. You want to use Wordpress’ flexible Template Tags to build just the right data. (If you want more specifics, you’ll have to hire me).

If you remember at the beginning of the article, though, I said meta data does not matter one bit for very popular sites. Then why did I spend so much time on this subject? We’ll most sites aren’t really popular, so I think you’ll benefit from considering meta data on your site. But, how do I know that meta data isn’t all that important for popular sites? From an experiment I conducted in my blog sector. I write a design blog, so I took ten of the most popular design blogs as defined by Alexa, and I viewed their source to see what their meta data looked like. I thought I would find some meta data oracle that would show me the way to instant popularity, but I found the exact opposite. And, here is what I found:

  • None of the five blogs had any consistency with keywords or descriptions between them. They were all completely different even though the subject matter was quite similar.
  • A couple of the blogs did not have meta data at all. There was nothing to speak of to describe their data, and yet they remain amazingly popular.
  • Most of the blogs had no consistency between the home page meta data and the single post meta data.
  • One site even did not have meta data related to their subject and it seemed that it was a placeholder that was meant to be changed.

What should all this mean to you? There are other much more major areas where you should spend your time increasing traffic for your site. At the very least, you should definitely go to all the major search engines to see what your page results look like. If they quickly describe the results well, then you’re done. If they don’t describe what the page is about then go back to the boards immediately because either your title or your meta data needs work. Now, for a list of SEO Plugins:

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Posted in Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO, wordpress | 1 Comment »

Affiliate Marketing Arbitrage: Your Early Experiment

Written by Brandon on December 28, 2007 – 4:05 pm -

Recently, I’ve decided to experiment with affiliate marketing arbitrage. This is a whole new arena of generating revenue online for me, so I really have no idea how successful I will be, but I thought I’d point out this technique to readers who might not be familiar with affiliate marketing arbitrage and maybe have $100 bucks to experiment with. So, what is affiliate marketing arbitrage? In its simplest form, affiliate marketing arbitrage involves two simple steps:

  • First, joining an affiliate marketing program such as Commission Junction and applying to companies to market their products. In return, every product you sell gives you a commission.
  • Second, joining an advertising program like Google Adwords, and creating ads that point to the products that you are marketing. Then make really good ad copy and choose really strategic keywords to point people to your product.

Affiliate Marketing

The typical affiliate marketing process

The way that this arbitrage system works is that you make more money on the affiliate commission than what you paid for the click-throughs on your ads. So, a dream example would be that you are selling some software with a 10% commission and the software cost $500, so your commission would be $50. That means if you are able to only spend $25 on all of the ads for this product then you have made a $25 profit. If you market this product well, you may be able to make dozens of sales each day which could lead to greater wealth.

But how easy is this system to implement, really? From my initial experiments, I’ve found that you are going to have to educate yourself as much as possible, be cautious, but don’t be afraid to have several hundred dollars to experiment with as “funny money”. That is, expect to lose a bunch of money testing systems.

I’m coming at this from a complete novice perspective, so please take my advice at your own risk. Now, on to my own personal arbitrage techniques that I hope will create huge profits for you. There are several factors you must think about in this technique:

  • First, what are the products that you are trying to sell? Choosing products is an art in itself. The first question should be, of course, does the company’s affiliate program even allow ad buying like this? If not, then don’t even attempt to game the system because this will hurt your reputation. Next, is the product something that people want or need? I tend to choose products that people really need like professional software or services rather than goods. The reason being if they need the product they are more likely to buy the product. Then, how much does the product cost and what is the percentage of commission? You should consider that any items that cost less than $500, say, might really not be worth your time unless you can sell a ton of these things. Then, look for commissions in the 10% range as an ideal. You may settle for 5%, though, on well selling products. My rule of thumb is you should always strive to make $50 on a commission if possible. Finally, does the product have a strong, recognizable, and trusted brand? If you know people have heard of the product then I think you are legitimizing your ad right from the start.
  • Second, what keywords do you bid on? Here’s my key to this: each ad should be based on a VERY specific keyword set based on the specific product and the word “buy”. For example, your selling Photoshop CS3 so your keywords would be: buy Photoshop | buy Photoshop CS3 | buy Photoshop Creative Suite 3 | buy professional photo editing software . These are all the keywords I would use. Notice that I left out just “Photoshop”. This would be way too broad of a keyword to get accurate clickthroughs. You should try using the word buy for a number of reasons. Buy is an action so when typed into the Google search bar by a searcher means they are ready to buy Photoshop, not looking for Photoshop tutorials or anything else. They only need to find someone selling it. Also, when you put “buy” in your keyword phrase the cost of bidding on the keyword will be dramatically less.
  • Third, you should turn off all ads for content in Adwords. In other words, you only want your ads shown when people are actively searching the phrase “buy Photoshop” which, I think, insures that the searcher is actively seeking to buy Photoshop. This will dramatically decrease the number of ad impressions that you will get each day. You may get as little as a dozen impressions, but a great deal of these few impressions will be clicked on and give the user exactly the information they were looking for.
  • Fourth, you should write simple ad copy. My main concern is that the title might simply restate the exact term that the person just Googled. So, The title might read “Buy Adobe Photoshop”. Reiterating exactly what the user was looking for is often the key to instance success. Adwords also allows you to write several ads and Google chooses the one that performs the best for you. I highly suggest using this function.
  • Fifth, you should pay to be high in the search rankings. Somewhere in the first three ads is perfect but number two is the sweet spot for me. I try to get ad slot # 2 whenever I can just as my personal preference. The thought here is it may take a dollar per click to get this rank but one out of twenty five times someone will buy Photoshop because the ad is so perfectly targeted towards buyers. Another useful tip is you can choose the times to show ads on Google. I generally think that serious software buyers (if that’s the product you’re marketing) are doing their buying early in the day on a weekday, at lunchtime, or at the end of the day on a weekday. I turn off all other times so my ad won’t show at night or on weekends.
  • The final point is that this arbitrage technique will drive very few highly focused people to your site. That means that the profit margin may be high but the overall number of times you will get a commission will be low. This is why you will want to ramp up once you’ve perfected your sales formula. Once you’ve got this technique down and you’re slowly racking up profits add dozens more if not hundreds more products to your experiment. I highly suggest doing this incrementally over a long period of time with close daily scrutiny of your losses and gains. The key to doing tons of products is diversification of what sells will stabilize your income. The downside is you may be paying out to Google thousands of dollars between checks from the affiliate marketing people.

In these tips points, I’ve quickly shown you how to create your own affiliate marketing arbitrage system. Then I went over six techniques I use to get the gears rolling on the arbitrage system. I’ll put links to great resources below, but if you have the time and money, then I urge you to experiment as well. And, as always, your comments are very welcome and encouraged.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Analysis, Arbitrage, Experimental Techniques, Google Adwords | 7 Comments »

Building Blog Revenue: Adsense Ad Relevance and Ad Placement

Written by Brandon on December 25, 2007 – 11:55 pm -

There are two major topics have been haunting people since the beginning of Google Adsense: Adsense Ad Relevance and Adsense Ad Placement. These two factors will have the largest affect on your ability to produce revenue on your blog using this program. In this article, I will cover the fundamentals of making your ads relevant and the placement of your ads. Then, I will cover several quirks that are must needed knowledge when weaving through the Adsense riches minefield.

Have you ever made a blog post on bicycles, say, only to have the Adsense ads next to the bicycle post show up with ads for juicers? I have, and it stinks. No one is going to click on an ad for a juicer next to a post on bicycles. If you’ve had similar occurrences, then ask yourself these 5 basic questions:

  • How long ago did you write the post? If you wrote a post recently and the ads are showing up not relevant, it may still take some time for Adsense to crawl your site to get the correct content. According to Google, the Adsense Crawler (which is different than the Google Crawler) may take up to a week to crawl your content. If your post has been up less than one week then be patient before your freak. For more on the Adsense Crawler, check out this link.
  • Is your web page behind a restricted login page? There are ways to get around this with the latest version of Adsense, but this may be a problem that is not easy to fix. My only suggestion is to not have Adsense on pages that are not publicly accessible.
  • How much text-based content is in your post? For example, I use excerpts of posts on category pages, but I also show ads between the excerpts. How long should I make these excerpts? I’ve now tried several experiments, and I’ve found that if the title (between your title tags in the head of your web page) is relevant to the ads you want, then a 50 word excerpt from the article with at least a couple of keywords is adequate to get good ads. Anything less than a 50 word excerpt is pushing it.
  • Does your page have adult content? This won’t get through for ads even if you just use swear words a lot.
  • Is the Adsense code placed within an iFrame on your site? If so, then this could be a potential problem getting relevant ads for the adjacent content.

Let’s say you’ve gotten this far, you’ve reviewed all these questions, tweaked your website accordingly, and you still are not getting relevant content for your blog posts. Then there is one secret weapon that you will want to use which are the Google section targeting tags. These tags let you target particular sections of content on a web page while ignoring other content. The tags are:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

An example of its use might be:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
A paragraph about dogs
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
A paragraph about shoes
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

This bit of code will give you ads on dogs but not on shoes. It’s just that simple. I recommend trying this out in your post templates of your blog, however, I warn you that it may again need a couple of weeks for the Adsense crawler to find the code. So, you won’t receive any instant gratification on this. By the way, you will still need a decent bit of text for Adsense to analyze. One word with these tags around it will not get the results you want.

Now, on to Ad Placement. Let’s start with Google official words on great ad placement, and then I’ll give you my personal experience. Google has created a handy diagram for the best ad placement which is linked here.

Blog ad placement

I highly suggest putting ads in the same manner shown above. You could write volumes about what to do to optimize Adsense ad placement, but here are five simple steps that you should follow:

  • Show ads just like the diagram above on your blog.
  • Assign each ad its own “channel”. A channel allows you to differentiate between one ad placement and another. put a different channel for your home page, single post pages, and archive pages, sidebar, and header.
  • Watch the performance of these ads for two weeks
  • Chose the top three performers in terms of click through rates
  • Get rid of all the other ads because the top three performers will probably do much better than the rest by many factors of magnitude. And, underperforming ads just make a cluttered and unreadable page.

I love to experiment, so I would try different ad sizes and colors, but if you’re not the experimenting type, then here are the top three performing placements, by far, for my blogs:

  1. 468×60 ad size on a single post below the post title and post information. Single posts are the most googled posts, not the home page. When people land on the home page they are just browsing. When people land on a single post, they are looking for something in particular. By the way, don’t use a big fat square in a post. It looks cheap and stupid, and I think it will hurt your overall brand even if you get better short term clickthrough. I get between 2% and 4% clickthrough. If I have 10,000 viewers each day that means potentially 400 ads clicked at $.25 per ad, say. That’s $100 for not having to do too terribly much but have good ad placement.
  2. Search on the sidebar. Here’s the deal, I have very few people use my search bar, but the ones that do often click on an ad when they get search results. I’ve received upwards of 30%-40% clickthrough rate on my search, but it only accounts for a small percentage of the overall traffic to the site. If you can get your search to somehow be fun and attractive to users of the site, then you may be in store for some massive revenue potential. Google has created a clunky, ugly search form which you can completely modify to your needs. I suggest really thinking about how you make this search stand out and be attractive for people to use. You may even consider having a separate page devoted to search that people use on a daily basis.
  3. 5 keyword link unit in the sidebar near the top of the page. I don’t know why, but this link has amazing clickthrough rates for me. Maybe it’s because the ad looks like part of the categories links, I don’t know. But, the rates are in the 30% range. I really can’t believe that nearly one third of the people that visit would click on this. The only explanation I have is that this unit is located on one of my low traffic sites and when the traffic boosts less people will click. In other words, this may be the luck of the draw.

Finding these three placements has lead to my overall clickthrough rate to go up by a factor of five on most of my sites. These are the best ad placements for my Adsense ads, but this leaves a lot of free real estate. Do NOT clutter this real estate up with Adsense ads. In stead, I suggest finding a “premium” ad provider that will give you big, flashy ads that look better and pay better. If your traffic is over 1000 people per day then you should be able to find a better ad provider than Adsense. Or, you could get the advertisers yourself. This is by far the most lucrative yet most difficult route.

As a recap, I’ve covered two major factors for creating strong revenue in your adsense regime. There are literally dozens of techniques for making these ads work for your, but these factors are the baseline when using ads. In the future I’ll cover other adsense revenue generating angles including arbitrage, widgets, Adsense sharing among others. If this was helpful, drop me a note in the form of a comment. I’d love to hear your opinion.

Posted in Adsense, Analysis, Building Blog Revenue | 2 Comments »

Blog Interviews: A Surprisingly Traditional Way to Build Massive Blog Traffic

Written by Brandon on December 22, 2007 – 10:36 pm -

Probably one of the biggest boosts that you can create for your blog is by conducting interviews with people in your field. You are probably thinking, “That’s so traditional, how could this such a successful method to build traffic?” In the next few paragraphs I hope to prove to you that interviews may potentially be the best way to build traffic. (Just as a quick example, interviews I’ve done in the past have usually grown my audience by a bump of fifty sustained visitors to the blog which adds up over the course of twenty interviews.) And after I’ve convinced you of its benefits I hope to give you a road map of how to conduct and leverage your interview into a continuous moneymaker. But now, for why this method is so powerful:

Blog Interviews- A Powerful Blog Traffic Building Tool

photo by laffy4k

People want to read about real world case studies because it inspires them.

I know when I hear an interview with an entrepreneur in my field that has made a successful and established business of what he or she created I am listening intently. This information is gold not only because the interview can give me new tips and ideas, but also because I learn what the interview subject went through emotionally to get where he or she got.

Your interviewee will enjoy the PR boost that they get from your interview, and in turn, let all of their friends, customers and potential customers know about.

In basic terms, doing interviews is also about trading audiences. You give the interviewee your audience, and the interview subject gives you her audience when she sends out an email to all of her contacts telling her audience to listen to or read the interview. It’s really a beautiful marriage.

An interview creates a more intimate relationship which you may be able to leverage in the future.

Speaking of beautiful marriage, if the interview is well received and generates business for the both of you, then you will feel like you’ve both given and received something valuable which is a great way to establish a strong relationship. This relationship may in the future lead to sponsorship of the blog or other favors.

An interview is a solid piece of data that you can incorporate and repackage into several forms.

Interviews can be used to make a podcast and a blog post, but of utmost importance is it can make multiple podcasts and blog posts. Interviews can often be extended into four or five parts with each new part gaining greater and greater anticipation by the audience. Give the audience a taste with the first podcast, and keep them wanting more by telling them what they’ll miss in the next podcast. Beyond this, interviews are great material for case studies in books or ebooks.

An interview helps create a legitimate brand.

If your brand is not established, an interview with someone whose brand is established will start to legitimize your blog. For instance, if I ran a small political blog, and I somehow landed an audio interview with Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House in the U.S., then I would surely be on my way to creating a legitimate brand, and seen as someone who has access to important people. If your niche is very narrow like sock knitting, then legitimizing your brand would include interviews with famous yarn manufacturers whose brands your audience would be familiar with.

Pocast Interview

photo by Matt Forsythe

Now you know why you’d want to do an interview, what about how to perform an interview? I’ve create a list of five short points that will get you on the road to making an interview with an eye for creating maximum traffic for your site. I don’t tell you how to improve your interview skills or how to record an interview, but at the end of the article I will list a number of resources to help improve your interviewing skills and techniques.

  • First, identify your interviewee. You should speak with her at least once to evaluate her a two main criteria: authority and personality. You want to evaluate does she know what she’s talking about and can answer in an engaging manner. Now, Let’s say you’ve identified your first interview and she has agreed to the interview. What next?
  • Second, prepare a list of questions. These questions should, in my opinion, be biased towards the subject, focused on the interviewee’s area of expertise, and be framed from the perspective of your audiences interests. I would start with a list of ten questions, but if you’re familiar with the interviewee then you can develop more detailed questions as well. Definitely email these questions well in advance of your interview to give the interviewee time to prepare. As well, I suggest you ask the subject to create any of her own questions that she might find pertinent to the conversation. Make sure, as well, that the subject know who your audience is and that she should frame her answers specifically for your audience.
  • Third, conduct the interview. There are two styles of interviews I like and only two: The recorded interview and the email interview. I do not prefer the face to face interview where I take notes because of the amount of work and the accuracy which I can record. The recorded interview is the best type of interview because you can distribute this content in several media types, and it’s really the simplest method for the interviewee to participate in. All they have to do is show up and talk. The email interview, however, takes much more writing commitment on the part of the subject, but it is much less work for you. This is a great type of interview, though, if you just want a quick, short bit of information. I list a bunch of resources at the end of the post.
  • Fourth (this is crucial), urge your interview subject to email all of her contacts to be sure that they read your interview. You may even want to craft a letter for them as a go by. Also, ask the interviewee to please do a press release announcing their interview as well as publishing it on their own company newsletter. What you are aiming for is to get maximum exposure to an audience that is completely familiar with the interview subject but may have never heard of your blog or podcast.
  • Fifth, keep in contact with the interview subject. I would ask her if you could put her on your email mailing list. If you maintain the relationship then you may want even ask her to become a sponsor of the blog at some point. At this level in your relationship, the interview subject may even be a booster for your website and could be much more easily convinced to become your sponsor.

If you are able to follow these five steps, then I think you will really be able to maximize the interview to its fullest revenue potential. To recap, I’ve broadly covered why interviews are important and how to maximize interviews for your podcast or blog, the next step would be to look at some of the skills needed to create a good interview. The resources listed below should be a great start:

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Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, Podcasts, SEO | 11 Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Using Facebook

Written by Brandon on December 16, 2007 – 6:48 pm -

Facebook LogoFacebook is yet another monster social networking site. This website allows you to market your blog in a vast number of ways, so I only intend to discuss a couple of the ways that are very traditional and straight ahead. And, maybe at the end of the article I will name a few more clever marketing techniques. But before we get into the details, we should discuss building your network first.

The simple fact is this is not rocket science to build up your network. First, you find friends you already have, then you look through all of your friends of friends to see who you know. Hopefully by this pint you may have 100 people you know. Next, you join as many groups as you can find on your topic of choice. Then, look through all of these people to find people who fit the demographic that you are seeking. I run a design website, so I’m always looking to make friends who are designers or architects.

Inviting more friends becomes very crucial. You need to write as personal invitation as you can without sounding too “marketing speak”. This is one of the toughest things to do to build traffic, quite frankly, but I think it’s worth it to create a bit richer social connection. In the invitation letter, write who you are, what your do, and why you’re contacting them. This may be enough to get them as your contact. (HINT) I like to write maybe a dozen short, well thought out invitations and keep them in a text file. Then I pull them out and customize them a bit.

Let’s say you’ve done this for a few hours each week for 4 months, and you now have a contact list of 8000 people (it’s possible, trust me). How do you get them to come to your site? You have to offer something they really want. You can’t just say, “hey, come look what I did!”. So, what do people really want? besides sex, there are three things that appeal to people:

  • Free Stuff. Run a contest with a great prize. You can show off this contest by first writing a post on your blog. This contest on your blog should require the person to give a valid name and email address with an opt out button to be included on your email newsletter. Next, post a link to your facebook account using Facebook’s awesome “share on Facebook” button that you can add to your Firefox tool bar. Make Sure you include an image of the prize or some attention getting image in your link. You really want people to notice because this image and writeup will show up in all of your contacts’ new feeds. This may manage to get a bunch of people to the site.
  • Challenge Your Audience... or, at least let them know about exciting challenges. As I’ve mentioned, I run a design site which covers architecture and product design. Young designers, including myself, can’t resist entering or at least reading about design competitions. It’s simple human competitive nature. If competitions don’t exist in your niche, then create your own competition, and offer a prize that would be really desirable. I would suggest that if you don’t have money for a prize, no problem! Just partner with a business who will give you a prize in return for some promotion on your blog. This may sound difficult, but it’s not. It’s as easy as asking. Again, use the Share on Facebook button to link to your site.
  • Appeal to People’s Vanity. I think the most highly effective form of marketing on Facebook is to start looking at your contacts and finding out which ones are doing something exciting and interesting in your niche, and then writing about those people doing things you’re interested in. The key here is to choose people that you like that also have large networks in the range of a few hundred or so. Make sure your post is extremely professional, cordial, and glowing. Send a personal note to the contact letting he know you are going to publish this, and ask him if he wouldn’t mind sending this profile out to all his contacts. Having him notify his contacts personally is key. You might also ask his contacts to leave comments on the blog about their thoughts on this person you’ve profiled.

Jon Rawlinson
by Jon Rawlinson: Appealing to people’s vanity must be lucrative.

Now, that you’ve built up your contacts, then you might want to try creating a group. I almost don’t think at this point you will even need a group, but you may want to make one just the same. The focus of the group should be completely on the site. You may even want to have several links on your site that brings people to your profile, your group, and your group discussion. You may even consider using the forums in your group as the main forum for your site. The advantage of this is gathering a larger and more focused audience is possible. The disadvantage is that you cannot add any advertising. You’re better off keeping a forum on your own site, for sure.

This has really been one way of marketing your site on Facebook, but the most powerful traffic building exercise is for the advanced Facebook marketer and goes into territories that I’m not even quite sure how to explore. That is developing your own Facebook application. For what I do which is run a design blog, an example of a potentially highly effective marketing tool would be to create a Hot or Not for design products. Based on which products people thought were hot this application might be able to help people narrow down style compatibility. For instance, people that really like stark, modern design of a certain kind could find each other. Of Course, the results of the hot or not could show up in a compelling way on your website. Although this has the possibility of driving tens if not hundreds of thousands of users to your site, you will first need to find a competent developer to make the software and come up with a specification that is fun for the users, but also exploits the virtues of your blog.

Please contact me if you want to share any thoughts on how to improve this article.

Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, SEO | 3 Comments »
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