Archive for the ‘Experimental Techniques’ Category
The Greatest Traffic Secret Google Loves, and how to exploit it.
Written by Brandon on April 15, 2008 – 2:35 pm -I read a little blip of an article whose title I loved: " The Greatest Traffic Secret Google Loves". The answer: Original content. This is true. It’s the best kept secret, in a way. But maybe more secret is how to exploit this without dying of hand cramps as you’e typing away. Here’s a few experiments you may try to generate original content.
- Try using a bot to create the original content. I personally think this is a stupid idea. The way this might work is set up an adlib formula that you plug in a few words to. Sounds cheesy, but it may just be effective. I would suggest keeping these articles low on the blog page.
- Spend a few hours outlining 50 articles and then take a week off to write these articles. Wow! This is drastic. It may just kick start your SEO, though.
- Outsource the articles. You may want to get a quote from a copywriter in India.
- Write little original bits and add several quotes to fill the article up. This is a great technique because it gives props to other bloggers’ handy tips.
- Once established, get guest contributors from smaller blogs to help you out.
If you already know this then it isn’t a secret. If you never heard of this then maybe it can be called a secret. Good chance you heard of this but unless you are doing this, then using this is the secret you have not discovered. What is the secret? You’re looking at it right now. Has it dawned on you? Ok, fancy trick here, I dropped down a line to heighten your suspense. What did you think I was going to say? Some convoluted method that requires you to buy my $97 e-book? A way to make Pepsi put your URL on bottle caps?
The Greatest Traffic Secret Google Loves | Adventures in Internet Marketing
How to be the king of your domain (and others) and make a killing - National
Written by Brandon on March 31, 2008 – 3:56 am -Anyone interested in trying their hand might find inspiration from Australian domain entrepreneur, Michael Gilmour. I have to admit, I’ve bought a few domains in my time and I’ve tried similar techniques of parking advertising on the sites, and it there is a real art and science to domain parking that is beyond my comprehension. STill, according to this article:
The practice of buying up unused names, known as "domain parking", is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion worldwide — and Australia is seen as a growing market for those with an eye for a dollar.
How to be the king of your domain (and others) and make a killing - National
Posted in Arbitrage, Creating Wealth, Experimental Techniques | No Comments »Invesp Consulting’s Landing Page Optimization Service Is The Perfect Additon To Your Adwords Campaign
Written by Brandon on February 6, 2008 – 6:13 am -I’ve been experimenting with Google Adwords for some time now, and as many of us know it’s easy to have Google Adwords bring people to your site. Of course, once these people are at your site it can be much more difficult to convert these people from faintly interested into paying customer. If you are going to pay for tons of eyeballs for your site then you are going to want to wow them when they arrive. There are a number of techniques which you can employ to have these people stay at your site and even buy such as: well placed newsletter sign ups, enticing copy, or free offers.
However, if you have a bit of a budget and not a lot of time to optimize your landing page, then you are much better off hiring a company such as Invesp Consulting who specialize in optimizing your landing pages. What’s so beautiful about having the experts do landing page optimization is they’ve already done all the experimentation for you to find landing page techniques that work. Of course, if you’re like a mad scientist and want to spend hundreds of hours tweaking your landing pages, go for it. But consider that those tweaks might bring you to exactly what Invesp could deliver all along.
Posted in Creating Wealth, Experimental Techniques, Google Adwords | No Comments »Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins
Written by Brandon on January 28, 2008 – 5:45 am -I know you’ve heard this story before: “Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins”, but a few recently created plugins for Wordpress have really opened the floodgate for creating rapid, wealth generating blogging businesses. But before I get into the nuts and bolts of the business model, I would first like to introduce you to a website currently using this business model: Trendhunter.com.
The Trendhunter Business Model
Trendhunter.com is essentially a multi-user blog where thousands of users have contributed articles to the site. According to my recent check at Alexa.com, Trendhunter is the 9th most popular design website on the internet The main focus of revenue for the site comes simply from the sheer volume of contributions which number in the dozens each day that are posted to the front page, and the ability of the contributors to promote their posts. How does owner, Jeremy Gutsche, get so many contributors?
- He shares ad revenue with his users.
- He encourages bloggers to promote their own content by contributing to Trendhunter.com
- He edits each post that makes it to the front page which, unlike Digg.com, means only the most interesting trends make it. This helps maintain strong content quality that is on topic.
- He promotes and encourages contributors to promote the site using web 2.0 tools such as blog widgets and old-school viral tools like emailing friends.
I believe that sharing the ad revenue is the strongest incentive for making such a popular blog because Mr. Gutsche makes it so easy to make extra money. How does he make it so easy? By making the ad sharing easy. All you have to do to make money is have a Google Adsense Account. When you sign up for Trendhunter.com, you are prompted to enter your AdSense code. Now, every article that you write that appears on Trendhunter.com will show your adsense ads, and any ads that are clicked on generates revenue for you. For most articles, only a dollar or two revenue is generated, but it is possible to generate up to $50 for articles that are viral and extremely popular. And, of course, the more popular the site and the more articles you write means the more money you make. All of this along with the collective power of all the other people on the site wanting to make money means explosive expansion once the site has built some popularity.
Although Trendhunter.com has developed really strong growth and requires a very small staff which has developed a relatively low impact revenue stream, there are some areas which Trendhunter.com could improve. I want to focus exclusively on rapid content generation, though, which is essentially the heart of Trendhunter.com’s business. So, how do you add content currently to the site? You have to go through a fairly excruciating process that involves filling out a half-dozen text fields minimum and tab through 4 tabbed pages. At any given time during this process, if you accidentally click on the wrong link surrounding the entry form and you’ve lost your data.
Adding the Tumblr Method of Rapid Content Creation
Trendhunter.com’s content creation could be so much more fun and easy if there were some sort of bookmarklet that you could add to your toolbar, so whenever you’re at some website you want to write about you could push a button, write a few sentences, and boom! your post is done. Enter the Tumblr.com Bookmarklet. This bookmarklet lets you press a button, and all the images pop up on a new screen. Then, you can choose an image, write a couple of sentences, and hit “post”.
A quick comparison of the Tumblr.com content work flow versus the Trendhunter.com content work flow reveals that the same quality post can be created with the tumblr bookmarklet method in 25% of the time it takes to create a Trendhunter post. The work flow savings you get with tumblr.com are:
- automatic uploading of images and videos
- 10-20 less clicks needed per article, which saves your hands
- more incentive to write an article because it only requires one click on the tool bar
- quotes can be added by simply highlighting the desired text you want to quote.
Trendhunter.com would surely benefit from adopting this model, and the Trendhunter tool bar that already exists seems ripe for including this in their development schedule. But if you are as ambitious and motivated as Jeremy Gutsche, you may be able to beat him to the punch by creating an even more effective and simpler version of Trendhunter.com using Wordpress and a number of simple to implement plugins.
So, what are these plugins that can make Wordpress as popular and powerful as Trendhunter.com? We should start by analyzing what Wordpress is missing that Trendhunter has:
- First, Trendhunter has a stronger user customization, so Wordpress needs a plugin that allows users to add a photo of themselves, add their Adsense information, and add whatever other information you care to follow. To fill this gap, I use the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin which allows you to add any number of extra fields to your users’ profiles. More importantly, you can also recall the information in these fields using the Cimy template tag. For instance, if a user provides his Adsense account number, then I can put this account number into any post that this person writes using a small amount of PHP code. This guarantees that the writer will get all ad credit for his posts.
- Second, Trendhunter gives each contributer his own sort of miniblog within the overall site. This miniblog includes an image of the person, the contributor’s stats, as well as the person’s own URL which he can send to friends. Again, all of this can be created using the simple template tags provided by the Cimy plugin.
- Third, Trendhunter is missing a way to create posts quickly and easily. A new Wordpress plugin that recently became available that has proven incredibly powerful is the Quickpost plugin provided by twelvehorses. This plugin allows you to create posts very quickly. You can also offer this to your contributors and they can add posts equally quickly. This is the major advantage you would have over Trendhunter using Wordpress.
- Fourth, Trendhunter gives readers ways to spread posts virally to other sites. You can accomplish the same things that Trendhunter offers with a couple of useful plugins. One is the Social Bookmark plugin which allows you to bookmark an article to any number of dozens of social bookmarking sites. The other plugin of note is the WP-email which allows readers to email an article to friends.
There are some definite advantages of using these Wordpress plugins, however, there are also some hurdles that you should be very aware of:
- First, it’s not completely clear if you are following the Google Adsense terms of service agreement if you exchange out user ad accounts . This is because when you have a generic Adsense code where you substitute other authors’ Adsense account numbers this may be seen as altering the code. The Terms of Service says you are not supposed to alter this code in any way, however, I personally do not consider this violating the TOS because the end javascript code really is not altered than the intended code. I highly suggest reading about this and using this at your own risk. However, judging Trendhunter.com as a test case, using this method is acceptable as long as you do not alter the code in any way and just the account has changed.
- Second, the Quickpost Plugin has a bug where you have to sign in before the plugin works. I’ve informed the plugin writers, but you may have to hire some outside help if this plugin becomes an essential part of your business.
- Third, the Quickpost Plugin posts direcly to the site no matter what your user status is. That means contributors posts go live immediately without being approved by an editor. This, again can be quickly fixed by a competent Wordpress developer and a couple hundred dollars. You don’t necessarily have to offer the quickpost plugin to users, but it is so handy it’s hard not to offer this option. My suggestion is to only allow posts on the home page in a category no one would ever choose. This might deter getting unwanted posts on the home page.
- Finally, the Cimy Extra Fields plugin can be very powerful yet tricky to set up with Adsense. You will want to consider writing a very well thought out conditional statement in PHP that assures that you have received a valid Adsense code. This is not for the amateur to attempt.
Overall, if you’re willing to try to learn from Trendhunter’s great strengths and shortcomings you may find yourself with dozens of contributors and ten times the traffic. If you need any help fleshing this out or need further instruction on implementing this feel free to leave a comment or email me at bbaunach@yahoo.com.
Tags: content, plugins, trendhnter, web2.0, wordpressPosted in Adsense, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Experimental Techniques, Starting a Business | 1 Comment »
No Follow Free- Good or Bad?
Written by Brandon on January 4, 2008 – 4:40 am -After noticing that I have yet to receive one visitor from Google since I’ve enacted my no-follow free policy, I’ve decided to turn off this function for a few days to see if I can regain some search traffic. Has anyone experienced a similar occurrence? If so, then please let me know.
Tags: , no followPosted in Experimental Techniques | 1 Comment »
