Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category

Quote by What Is The Right Internet Marketing Online Affiliate Program « Internet Marketing

Written by Brandon on March 25, 2008 – 3:40 am -

There are several different reasons why people today are becoming affiliate marketers instead of actually setting up their own online business. Some do it simply because they find this is a much easier and simpler way for them to earn an online income without all the hassles associated with running your own business. Whilst others feel that, their marketing skills will be put too much better use and this will in turn hopefully help them to achieve their desired goals.

What Is The Right Internet Marketing Online Affiliate Program « Internet Marketing

Posted in Analysis | No Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Optimizing for Google Image Search

Written by Brandon on January 4, 2008 – 5:15 am -

Here is something I noticed a year ago that completely blew me away: blogs that have lots of images get half or more of their search traffic from their images. This means if your images are not indexing on your image rich site, then you may be potentially missing an opportunity to double your search traffic. But, getting your images indexed by Google is a complete mystery even to the most seasoned webmasters as the forum chatter suggests. So, in the next few paragraphs I will help you figure out if your images are indexing on Google, and if they are not indexing then how you might get them indexed on Google, so you too can be well on your way to doubling your search traffic.

google image search costume

The geekiest Halloween costume ever: A Google Image Search (photo by Jacob Lodwick)

First, be aware that Google has a separate image crawler that crawls your site for images. You cannot include an image site map on your site telling Google when and where to find new images like you can for the written content. The image crawler just comes buy whenever it can which is not very often. Images are much more data intensive than text, so Google really takes its time getting around to your site. Also, if your site is slow, then the Google image crawler will skip over your site completely and not come back for a long, long time.

But before we get in too deep, let’s see if your images are indexing. It’s as simple as going to images.google.com and typing in “site:http://yoursite.com” ( replace yoursite.com with your blog’s own URL) . If no images come up then you’ve got a problem.

There are a few things you will need to do to make sure your images are indexing.

  • First, you should make sure that there is no meta tag in the head of your web page that tells the web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the tag.
  • Next, you should make sure that there is no line in your robots.txt file telling web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the line that excludes images. For more about robots.txt check out the links I’ve included.
  • Then, you will need to make sure each image has a very descriptive title attribute in the <img> tag. The title want to be very descriptive in 10 words or less.

If you have done all of this, and you’ve waited a few weeks for Google’s extremely slow crawler, then you have a much more difficult problem to troubleshoot. But, there is still hope! Chances are that your site is too slow for Google to efficiently crawl. I know it may seem OK to you, but to Google it is just too slow. What you are going to have to do next is speed up the delivery of the site to Google. I’ve found that the simplest and most effective technique is to cache the web pages. Caching pages is essentially a technique where your blog software creates a temporary copy of a web page that does not change too much so that the blog does not have to go back and forth to the database. Caching can dramatically speed up your site, and if your use a Wordpress blog, a there is a great caching plugin called WP-Cache that is a must for your site. After I installed the caching plugin for Wordpress on one of my own sites I very soon got major traffic from Google Images. I also tried turning it off and on for a few days at a time and found that there was a definite correlation with caching and the Google image crawler indexing my site.

If none of this works, then it may be time to start from scratch on another blog software that will guarantee image indexing. I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.

Finally, I want to point out an interesting way using Google Image Search to find out where you stand in blog domination. I run an interior design blog which is somewhat popular but no where close to the most popular design blogs such as mocoloco.com. I decided to see how I stood up to the big guys by doing a simple test to see how many images of chairs each of us had indexed. So I put in “site:designcrack.com/v2 chairs” and “site:mocoloco.com chairs” . What I had found is that I had a total of 120 different chair images which I thought was a very respectable amount of chair posts for little old me. But, mocoloco.com had a total of nearly 13,000 chair images to choose from. This immediately said to me that I will not be playing with the big blogs unless I make a full time commitment to my blogging craft. A couple of posts per day simply cannot compare.

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Posted in Analysis, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO | 2 Comments »

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 »

The Big Picture: 10 Questions for Creating Your Wealth Online

Written by Brandon on December 10, 2007 – 1:47 am -

Creating your wealth

photo by Ray (Rayphua)

Creating your wealth online is a difficult journey that should not be attempted alone. My goal with YourWealth.org is to supply that help you need to stay focused and excited, give you fresh ideas, and let you know of the latest trends in online business models. But first, I think it’s important that I start with the big picture and work into the details of creating wealth online as time progresses.

And to gain a big picture of your wealth strategy, you should answer several difficult questions that will affect your life before choosing a direction for building online wealth. Here are what I consider to be the top ten most important big picture questions:

  • What are you really interested in? This can be a very difficult question, but I suggest that you focus on an interest that you have and look for an extremely novel approach to whatever you like. Let’s say you like bicycles, for instance. After a bit of quick research, I discovered that there are very few resources on bicycle maintenance and repair and no online resources that give you step by step instructions on repair. If you love bicycles, then this may be an approach to take. And if you are unsure what a novel angle might be on your topic, then brainstorm with friends and family or write a comment to me and I’ll help you out.
  • What is your tolerance for risk? This is possibly the most important question simply because a lot of people start an online business thinking that they can start with very little or no capital when, in fact, sometimes a lot of capital is needed and you may want to quit your job, thus cutting your money supply. My suggestion to you is know your risk tolerance way ahead of time. If you hate risk, have to support a family, or just like a challenge, you may start a modest how-to business, affiliate business, or niche blog that only takes some of your free time. If you are unafraid of risk, then you may feel compelled to spend every bit of time and money on an e-commerce business or online application. I warn you, if your start down a risky road you do not want to turn back or cut your risks because your product will likely suffer or die. In the future, I hope to teach you how to start with low risk and steadily increase your risk as you reinvest your income into the business.
  • Would you like to supplement your income or create all of your wealth online? This question is tied to the risk question. If you want to make what I call “hobby money”, then it will cost very little and take little free time, but you won’t see any real financial returns for years. If you want big returns then you will need complete focus and commitment.

Creating your wealth
photograph by Daveybot

  • What is your personality like? Are you a people person or are you a quiet worker who does not socialize. Determining your personality early on is extremely important because there are certain personalities that make a business successful and if you don’t fit in that mold then you will need to hire someone who does. It’s a hard fact to face that you can’t always do everything, but it’s true.
  • How long can you wait to create your wealth? Do you want to create wealth slowly or quickly? If you can wait then the risk is lower and the topics you can choose are broad. If you want to get rich quick you need an extremely novel idea and the funds to build and promote it. Quick wealth is a pipe dream, but it is attainable.
  • How good are your computer skills? Your computer skills do not necessarily need to be good, but you do need to understand what the latest technologies are and how to use them to create your wealth online. Try to assess your skills from one to ten. One being you know nothing about computers ten means you can program in PHP and Javascript efficiently. 5 means you know what these things are, and you know how programs work, but you don’t necessarily know how to use PHP. If you are a five, then you are good to go. If you are lower than a five, then I suggest reading blogs such as DoshDosh and Problogger.net to become familiar with the layman’s technical jargon. You will need this skill to some extent even if someone else is creating the infrastructure for you.
  • How good are your writing skills? Writing skills are key to success when developing an online wealth vehicle. I will certainly talk about this more in multiple posts, but a quick introduction to skills you will need is the ability to write clearly and concisely, the ability to back up your thesis with simple to understand examples, and the ability to influence with either your humor, strength of tone, or wealth of knowledge. If you don’t have this strength, consider hiring people who do.

Creating your wealth
photo by Idle Type

  • Will your family and friends help you to create your wealth? This is important to know quickly for a number of reasons. If you are depending on your circle of associates to help you out then test them quickly on their devotion to the project. I have wrongly discovered that some of my previous attempts at wealth building would be made easier by employing my friends and family to help me out. The truth is they are not as passionate as you are about your topic. Go out and seek a community of like-minded zealots and recruit them all.
  • Who do you look up to? This is not a question I think most people ask themselves, but an important one. Why is it important? Because this will give you a tangible model to follow or look up to. For instance, I work in architecture and I look up to my boss. He’s successful and charismatic, and he is a great designer. Now that I’ve identified my boss as someone I look up to, I can ask him questions about his success and observe how he has become successful. Having this tangible model allows you to see what works for you and what doesn’t.
  • Where do you want to be in ten years? This is a loaded question. You probably want to be successfu, but when you ask this question you can sort of plan where you want to be and then work backwards. Working backwards from the future is a great way to be able to map out the plan, year by year, that will help you achieve your success in incremental, real, tangible steps.

These are a few basic and extremely broad questions, but you will need to answer these questions to start a broad plan to create your wealth. From here, you can start to hone in on the specifics which I hope to address, piece by piece, on this blog over the next few years.

Posted in Analysis, Creating Wealth, Fundamentals | No Comments »