Last year was not a bad one for me, but it had its ups and downs.  Like any business, webtrepreneurs have to be able to adapt to curve balls thrown their way.

2009 started off with a bang.  My eBay affiliate business was netting around $300 a month in January, $400 in February, and was set to earn $500 in March.  eBay, however, decided to cut off my account in March for no good reason.  After months of dispute, they never paid me in March and my affiliate account has been deactivated.  I have no idea why my account was flagged as all my sites stuck to their terms of service and all sites were original and clean.  Such is life, right?  I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot and this is just another blow to their reputation, in my opinion.

So, with that stream of income cut off, what’s one to do?  Well, it’s a good thing I had other moneys coming in from other sources.  I netted about $1000 last year from referrals and the few bucks I made from eBay.  Though I didn’t set any goals for 2009 and 2010 is already shaping up to be a very busy year, I’ll do my best to keep blogging and I hope to make 50% more this year than last.  Let’s see how things go and I’ll keep you posted!

The question for the ages. How does one place well for certain keywords on Google? I get asked that more often than I would have thought. I’m not Matt Cutts nor am I an SEO expert, but I have done OK for a few of my sites in the recent past. There is no one magic trick to placing well in the engines and Google surely won’t give away any tips or tricks. However, they do give you a set of very vague guidelines to help you get an understanding of how to build your websites.

Firstly, keyword search results, or your search engine ranking position (SERP) determine how well you place when a user searches for a given keyword that is relevant to your site/page. Google advises you to make your page for the humans that are reading it, and if it’s relevant to humans then Google’s Googlebot will read it and index it. In addition to content, Google recommends that you have other links going to your site and that you also create a sitemap. You should also make it accessible and avoid keyword pollution, page cloaking, and other malicious things.

From the paragraph above, you can see that there are at least 4 recommendations. From these recommendations, honest developers and spammers alike will be indexed by Google. Google then aims to remove the spam and keep the ham. The honest content creator and the Evil Marketing Spammers (the Ems, as I like to call them) both have the same set of guidelines, but somehow, it seems like the Ems are getting ahead of the game. While the honest content creators strive to provide good content, the Ems will work their evil magic to beat Google’s rules and algorithms in order to rise above other more qualified and relevant websites.

Learn From the Ems

Then question then becomes simple. As content developers and non-spammers, what can we do in order to make our websites better than that of the Ems? How can Google find favor in our sites, given that we don’t have all the time, money, or other resources that the Ems have?

Lucky for us, Google has given us some starting points and the Ems have given us plenty of knowledge and insight into doing well for ourselves.

1. Human Readable Pages: Google recommends that your page should be human readable. Well, aren’t all pages readable to humans? I would say “sort of, yes”. However, what Google really means is this: “Make your content so that our bot can read it”. In other words, don’t create one huge .jpg with text on it. Googlebot will think it’s only an image. Don’t make your site in Flash if you’re not using any text that can be parsed. If possible, use only valid HTML code. That’s kind of what they’re saying. Googblebot is impressive, but it is not able to interpret things other than text so it goes through your source code and looks at what’s inside. It then makes sense of your content and indexes and ranks it accordingly.
   It also seems like Google cares about how much content you have. If there are two sites of similar quality, content, and ranking, I think that the one with more content will be ranked above the one with a lesser rank.
2. Incoming Links: In the Google Webmaster tools, there’s a way for you to check incoming links to your site. I’m not sure how the big G finds and categorizes the incoming links, nor do I know what they count as a valid incoming link, but that does seem to play a big role into placing well in the search results. We can learn from the Ems here and use some strategies if we really want our content to be found. We (as individuals) can create accounts on sites like Squidoo, Blogger, and Wordpress. We can then create content on each of these sites that link to our site. This is kind of an odd strategy because you are then creating SPAM to promote your quality site. I’m not too fond of this approach but I have used it in the past with a small degree of success. Likewise, you can create accounts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon and hope that your users will like your content. These two strategies combined can help your site to place higher in search engines.
3. Accessibility: Lastly, Google says your site should be accessible. This does not mean making it only so users can GET to your sites, but it means making the content “accessible” to people with disabilities. You do this simply by adding “alt” tags to your images and by adding titles to links. Make sure to validate your site using the W3 HTML validator.

Getting indexed by Google is the easy part. People will find you and people will get to your site eventually. If you employ the above strategies and work on building solid content, people will find your sites more frequently and you’ll start getting more and more hits organically. Keep your eyes peeled and examine the sites made by Ems. They’re good and you can learn a lot from them!

Have you ever noticed that a lot of bloggers seem to be doing a lot of brainless things on their website? I mean, I’ve surfed a lot and seen many different sites, but only a few of them stand out and hit me as blogs that try to do something different. I’d say that a vast majority of the blogs I read are cookie cutter blogs; they have some generic blog template serving up some affiliate ads on the right. They’re clogged with widgets, gadgets, and 3rd party bells and whistles that detract from the content of the blog.

The first thing I wanted to do when I started blogging was to develop my own Wordpress blog template. I knew nothing about doing this kind of thing before November and today I would like to think that given a bit more artistic talent, I could start a Wordpress theme design company. I can take any template and break it up into a Wordpress theme. Not only does a self-made Wordpress template help you to stand out from the crowd but it also adds a nice level of individuality to your blog. I also get the satisfaction of knowing the my blog template is unique and nobody else has this template. I’m not bragging about my template…I know I am no artistic genius, but I like what I see and am satisfied with my work. When people come to this blog, I hope they recognize that this is not a run of the mill, flight by night kind of blog.

Another thing that instantly turns me off to a blog while browsing the Internet is the use of 3rd party plugins. I currently use 3 of them on my site; one of which I think will be gone soon. Some websites that I see, however, take what seems like 5 minutes to load. When all I want to do is read a certain article, I often end up closing the blog before it even loads because these gadgets take so long to load. There are blogs that probably only get 10 hits per day and they load up all kinds of widgets in the hopes of making money online. For those blogs out there, hear me: get the traffic first, then add the monetizing widgets. You can’t make money if people close your blog before it even loads.

As a rule of thumb, I think of my users before setting out a new design for the blog or before adding anything to the site. Is your blog ready for new things? Do you want people to remember your blog as a good one? Then don’t do what everyone else is doing! Think outside of the box and do something different. Don’t bog down your blog with useless widgets. Make your user’s experience memorable. Want your own Wordpress template? Stay tuned to this site and learn! In the coming posts I will show you, step by step, how to create your own Wordpress template from scratch.

So Davey Z and I found out today that we were unintentionally violating the terms of service to one of our big search engine marketing campaign programs. This campaign apparently didn’t like us using our domain name to promote them. That’s why our link stopped working roughly a week ago. During this time, I had been working with my affiliate manager to figure out what the problem was but we didn’t figure it out until today.

Up until today I was really happy with my affiliate manager at Azoogle, but the fact that it took him 3 days to tell me why the link stopped working is really unacceptable. I know, I know, I’m still a small fish. I brought in less than $1000 last month so why should he care about my problems, right? Regardless of size, I think he should have been more responsive.

So, lesson learned. Read and understand the terms of service fully before spending money on a campaign. I don’t think we’ll lose any money other than the money we paid for clicks for a few days, but other than that we’ll be in good shape.

What did we get out of this lesson?

1. Pay attention to the fine print. The campaign’s terms and conditions clearly told us not to use a domain name that contained their name. We ignored that and did it anyway. Our mistake. I don’t think it was worthy of an immediate ban but I guess that’s just how they work. No sweat. We won’t lose any sleep over this. There are plenty of other campaigns out there….it’s their loss, ultimately.
2. Check your campaign links every day. We could have saved a few click dollars if we had checked up on our links every day. It tooks us 4 days to realize that our link wasn’t working, and therefore we lost out on PPC dollars. This money, ironically, was our first attempt at scaling this campaign so we were bummed when we found out our link was dead. We didn’t lose all of it, so we’ll find another campaign for sure.
3. Stay on your feet. What happens when you get tossed a curveball? Do you let them throw you a strike or do you swing for the fences? Stay on your feet, keep your eyes open for new campaigns, and have a backup plan in case of emergency. Davey Z and I have talked things over and we’ll meet tonight to hammer out our new plan just in time for the weekend.
4. Learn to move on. Don’t let little setbacks like this keep you down. Sure, we were only running 2 campaigns. This one was our “big” one…it generated most of our income last month. Oh well. Big whoop. We’ll find something else and kick our strategies up a notch.

I learned a few lessons this past week about affiliate marketing. I hope you can learn from my mistakes so that you don’t face the same problems that I did. Remember to stay on your feet, pay attention to your campaigns, and most importantly, don’t ever give up!

I woke up this morning feeling somehow weirded out and invigorated all at once. I had the weirdest dream that transcended time and space, and yet it felt strangely real somehow. I dreamed that I had Jeremy over for a Coke.

Let me first say that I really enjoy reading Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog. His business sense, opinions, and radio show are very helpful and his online personality appears to be transparent; that is, what you see online seems to be what you get in real life. He seems to be genuine in his communications and although he doesn’t explicitly reveal much of “how” he does things, he does provide helpful tips to those wanting to better their craft.

One thing that I find kind of scary is that somehow, my thoughts of online exploits have started creeping into my dream life. I don’t normally remember too many of my dreams, but this one was so vivid! It started out with me meeting Jeremy at some conference somewhere. I was my same age, but he was a lot older than me. We hit it off and were talking about his latest ventures and how I could help him to do even better. As an aside, I have been working on a project that I think could help him to squeeze more money from his blog, but that’s a different story for a different time. So, the conference was coming to an end and I feel like I still had too many questions to ask him…so I got the guts to invite him and his wife and kid to come to my house sometime. He graciously accepted my invite and they showed up a few minutes later. This is a dream, remember.

Upon arrival, I was immediately embarrassed by my tiny home. Normally, I don’t feel that my place is too small, but in this dream it really was quite inadequate. Maybe it was a representation of my level of knowledge versus Jeremy’s, or perhaps it was me feeling quite small compared to him. After all, he is a very successful webtrepreneur and I am still a newbie. He’s made millions online and I’ve made only hundreds. He has over 15,000 RSS readers and I don’t yet have 100. So, my house seemed tiny. I didn’t even have his drink of choice, which according to my dream was a Coke. I offered him a Diet Pepsi Max instead.

So after a long time of inspecting my tiny house, Jeremy sits down and lets me ask him some questions. At this point, his face was old and reminded me of a guy I used to work with. Thick white hair, ballcap, wrinkles, and yellow teeth. However, whenever he spoke, his face went back to being that of what I see on his blog. His voice and words of advice were energetic and lifted my spirits. By the time we were done talking, my house was bigger and more comfortable. And he was suddenly drinking an ice cold Coke.

We talked mostly about SEM. He gave me some tips and told me to “go big or go home”, which is a motto that I have grasped since starting my online exploits. This dream, surreal as it may have been, helped me to wake up today with several new ideas and strategies to try in the month of March. As you’ll see in my next few posts, February has broken my earnings record and my SEM campaigns with Davey Z have done well. We still have a lot to learn but thanks to Shoemoney, I feel like I’ve gained some insight overnight.