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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Working with Google and doing our best to give it the kinds of information it wants is probably the best way to perform well in Google’s search results. While I (at times) applaud Google for their work, I often feel as though so much more could be done to help people work better with it. They’re not very specific but at the same time they provide a lot of information to help newbies create crawlable content.

It’s clear to me that there are 2 sides to Google: The search side and what I call the “show” side. The search side is self explanatory. That’s the part of the site where millions of people go to every day and look for webpages and information that they want to find. Be it for research or entertainment, Google’s search side of things is a well-oiled machine that is super easy to use and relatively easy to find the information that you’re looking for. Technicalities aside (this is a topic for another post), Google gives its search users what they want in a simple, quick, and relevant fashion. The “show” side, on the other hand, is not as simple to define but I claim that this side includes the Google Adwords ads, and every page that is displayed with a search result, including the search snippets and word highlighting.

As a publisher, it is obvious that whenever I make a web page I want it to appear above everybody else’s result. Regardless of whether the page is unique or has 10,000,000 competitors, I want searchers to find my page because I either think it’s relevant and will make their lives better or I stand to make money from it. Sometimes it is a combination of both. This page can be found through regular search or through ad placement via Adwords. This is where Google’s Catch-22 comes in. How doe Google qualify a page such that it ranks it above or below other pages? How does Google use its algorithm to place certain Adwords ads above or below other similarly priced ads? How does Google determine what to charge and Adwords advertiser?

The rest of this post will focus on the organic search results. The Adwords questions will have to wait for another post.

Although the answers to these questions are not clear nor are they stated anywhere officially, I have come up with a set of criteria that I believe help the user to figure out how to maneuver so that their results receive better treatment from Google. I do not claim that these are 100% original nor do I expect these to be 100% accurate; these are my speculations and opinions and I reserve the right to be wrong.

As you can see I believe that Google places the most emphasis on incoming links, followed by keyword density and lastly by readability. There are other factors too such as age of site and freshness of content, but I don’t believe they are weight too heavily so I allocated 5% for all of those items.

Incoming Links

I believe that incoming links account for 50% of your website’s SERP. Case and point: I have a website that has not been worked on very recently, but right after I bought the domain I spent a few weeks adding it to as many directories as I could. The directories were all semi-relevant to the domain name and I managed to add roughly 75 incoming links to the site in about a month. Even though I am able to see all but a few of those links when searching for them (using the “link:domain name” command while performing a search query on the Google site), the site still shows up in the top 100 for a keyword with medium competition. The content for the site is readable, but its keyword density is scattered and not focused. I believe that if I spent a few days boning up the content, that site would perform much better than it is currently. Hence my belief that incoming links account for 50% of your SERP score.

Keyword Density

Coming in at number 2, I think that there is a fine balance between too many and not enough keywords on a website to rank well for a page. I want to venture a guess that a page may not be stuffed with more than 4% and no less than 1% in order for the keyword density to be in the “safe” zone. If you have too many keywords, your site could be thought of as spam. If you don’t have enough keywords sprinkled throughout your text, your site may not show up at all in the results. There’s a fine balance and I believe that it is more science than art or luck.

Readability

Google wants people to be able to use the site, not robots. For this reason, they have created a set of murky guidelines that “help” webmasters to know how they should be designing and developing their websites. Within these guidelines, Google recommends:

“Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.”

This means that the crawler looks for text and text only. If you have too many flashy things going on with the site, Google may not be able to “understand” your page and in turn, it won’t be ranked correctly.

Other

This last category is pretty open-ended. There are several things that belong here such as content freshness, how relevant your domain name is to your content, age of the domain and relevancy of links, meta tags, and others. Since this area is not clear, I won’t go too far into this topic but will say that Google does care about those factors. I may not be giving enough importance to these, or I may be giving too much importance to these. Regardless, those are tidbits that I have picked up from reading the webmaster guidelines and have not seen them play too much of a role in the SERP of my sites.

Conclusion

So, in an effort to please the searchers and work with the publishers, Google is on a never ending quest to beat spammers, while the spammers are on a never ending quest to beat Google. This catch-22 will, I believe, in the long run hurt the “litte guy” like me. I’m not necessarily trying to make a ton of money from organic search results on Google with this page. I’m not promoting “enhancement” products nor am I trying to sell you anything. However, my site will remain lower on the list than someone with more links than me or someone that has a higher keyword density than me. I’ll continue to build links and do my best to write for content and not search engines, but I just can’t help myself at being frustrated at Google for not spelling out how it is that they work. Better SERP is everyone’s goal, but I think if Google provided more clear guidelines, not only would they have less SPAM but they would also have a better way at filtering it.

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I have been building websites for a long time now, but within the last year I have been building sites with the hopes of making money online. I have tried several ventures in the past; coupon sites, tech reviews, eBay sites, affiliate sites, and blogs. Out of those sites, the most important aspect has been making them visible to other users through search engines (read: Google).

Why do Search Engines Matter?

The goal of any website is to have visitors, and to that end, there are basically 2 ways to get traffic. The first way would be to pay for traffic. This includes advertising on search engines, other websites, or through offline campaigns such as newspaper ads, television ads, or other means such as fliers or handouts. Alternatively, you could try to get free traffic. Free traffic happens when people either know your website’s address, are recommended by someone and follow the link, or find your site through search engines.

The cons of paid advertising are straightforward. Firstly and most obviously, it costs money. Many new sites and blogs don’t have a budget to advertise nor do they feel the need to advertise their site. Secondly, advertising is not always sticky. What I mean is that once your advertising budget runs out, people will not necessarily remember your site nor will they remember how to get there. You’ll get a spike in traffic while your campaign is running but as soon as it stops, your traffic will drop down to zero.

The pros of free traffic are more interesting. Firstly, it’s free. Nothing is required from you and people find you based on their needs and searches. Secondly, the hits you get are contextual and your visitors are more likely to take action (subscribe to an RSS feed, click through an affiliate link, etc…) because they found you based on results from a search they willingly performed. So here’s the question: how do you get free traffic?

The holy grail of free traffic lies with placing well in search results. Your search engine ranking position (SERP) is crucial to gaining free traffic and if you place in the first page of a search engine for a given search, you will be seeing a significant amount of traffic. Within these results, the higher you rank the more hits you will receive. In order to place well in search engines, you must first get indexed. This step is crucial and trivial, but you can do a lot to help your chances.

Use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a set of utilities provided free of charge from Google. Within GWT, you are able to submit your site to Google along with a sitemap for your site.

After finding Google Webmaster Tools, your next step should be to add your site. This is simple, just type your URL in the dashboard and click on “Add Site”.

After you have added your site, you will need to verify it. For this step, you’ll need to figure out how you want to verify the site. You can do that either by uploading a file to your server or by adding a meta tag to your index page. Either way you choose, you need to verify your page.

As the last step, you need to add a sitemap to your site profile. The first thing you need to do is create the sitemap. If you don’t know how to do this, you can either install the Wordpress plugin or you can go to the free XML sitemap generator and create a sitemap you can upload to your site.

After you have added your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and your site has been verified, chances are that your site will be added to Google’s index. For me, this normally takes only a few days but some people claim to be able to do it in hours. I call “BS” on those people and think they’re full of it.

This is how your dashboard should look like once things are all done:

By this time you should be indexed in Google and ready to receive hits to your site. Your placement will vary depending on keywords on your site and competition for those keywords but this is the basic framework for getting added to Google and placing on search engines. After this you need to work on your site in order to place well. But that’s another post.

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I think that it is good practice to sometimes look back at your work and see where you can improve. Be reviewing and revising, you can often find various opportunities to significantly improve your work, which will in turn make you better at whatever it is that you do.

It is in the spirit of reviewing and revising that I came up with the idea for this post. I hope that you can find some insight to help you make your blog better. The better your blog is, the higher the likelyhood that you’ll be successful.  The focus of this post is on domain names.
Domain Names

Back in October of last year, I did a series on this blog called “Internet Marketing 101″. The second part of the series was all about domain names. Domain names are very important for your business and if you don’t yet have one, I recommend that you go to GoDaddy.com right now and purchase one. Domain mames, in short, are important for 3 reasons:

1. Professional. If you plan on making money from your website or blog, you should definitely plan on buying a domain name. When you buy a domain name, it lets your visitors know that you’re serious about blogging. It shows other bloggers that you mean business and it also adds credibility to your site. Often times when I surf the web for content and ideas, I’ll find something meaningful on other people’s blogs. However, I hardly ever pay too much attention to those blogs hosted on sites like Blogspot or other freebies. These sites are nice for communicating with your friends, but in all honestly, they’re not good for business.
2. Personal. When you buy a domain name, you have a lot of room to be creative. You can express your interests and even brand your blog by its domain. Take this blog, for example. This site is about learning to make money online, so my domain name is “LearnHow2Earn.com”. I think that this address is professional and personal. In addition to adding credibility and creativity to my site, it makes it easier for others to remember (which is my point #3).
3. Memorable. Probably one of the most important reasons to buy a domain name is so that others can remember where and how to find you. With a site name that resides on another domain, there are too many dots and slashes to remember, and most people won’t. When you have your own professional, personal domain name, people will remember you more easily.

So, sit down with some paper and a pencil for about 20 minutes and think about as many domain names as you can.  Write them all down, and go do something else for 10 minutes.  Come back to your list and start eliminating those you don’t think are very good anymore.  Take another quick breather and repeat until you have 10 domain names left.  At this point, rank your choices 1-10 and head on over to GoDaddy.com to see which ones are available.  Start with your #1 choice and work your way down the list.  If you’re unfortunate enough to have none of your top 10 choices still available, rinse and repeat.  Try some variations, like using dashes or periods in the domain name.  Good luck and get down to business!

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Quality versus Quantity

We have done several things since starting out on our original campaign.  At first, we had some really big, over arching keywords that were cosing us substantially more than other targeted keywords.  We decided to stop “bleeding” from those keywords and as a result saw our clicks go down dramatically.  Our hope was to exchange quantity for quality of clicks.  So far, we have not seen any conversions but with Azoogle’s 4 day delay, I’m not sure if we have a complete picture yet.

Our hope is that, although we are sending only very few hits to our program every day, most of those hits would convert.  It makes sense in theory, but it may not work like that in real life.  To better illustrate our goal, look at this simple graph:

Our aim is to increase quality if we are able to increase quantity.  We don’t necessarily want 10,000 clicks per day if those clicks aren’t contextual or relevant or lead to any conversions.  What we want to do is hit people when they’re ready to buy, and because of this strategy, the quantity of our clicks is very low.

So Now What?

Our attitude of quality clicks hasn’t really paid off at all yet.  I agree with the strategy but also agree with the law of large numbers.  I would rather see a more action than less, so we’ve decided to try out another campaign.  This new campaign is supposed to convert better, but it is also a campaign whose payout is significantly lower.  Paying less than $1.50 per action, we hope to be able to find cheap keywords that give us a lot of traffic in return.

We started this campaign today with the bare bones bidding price of 10 cents per keyword.  We estimate that at the end of the day, between 30-50 people will have clicked on our ads and seen the intended page for them to take action.  If 20% of those 50 people take action (that’s  10 people), we would have made roughly $15 while spending only $5.  That’s a 3:1 ratio of income to expense.  Even if only 10% of clickers convert, we still see a profit, albeit a much smaller one.  However, profit is profit, right?

So, with a new campaign active as of this morning, we will monitor clicks and trends for the next 4 days as  Azoogle receivs the data back from the programs.  Our expectations, I feel, are quite humble and I hope to report good news in the next few days!

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One of the biggest hurdles that we are dealing with right now is delayed reporting from Azoogle. Our campaign manager says that it takes about 4 days for programs to report their earning to Azoogle. 4 days in Internet time is an eternity! I wonder why it takes so long with Azoogle? It seems to me that Commission Junction does a much better job at reporting things nearly real time. If not real time, then at least it seems like they report daily on my activities and commissions.

The thing about having to wait 4 days to see a report is that we don’t really know what is working and what isn’t until we get data to interpret. When we are forced to wait for 4 days, if something isn’t working then it means that we’re losing money and don’t even know it. This is a huge problem and I wish there was a way for the affiliate program to provide more up-to-date information for their publishers…especially newbies like us. Veterans don’t necessarily benefit from same-day reporting as much as those starting out do because they already have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. I believe that we would have a much better chance of success with quicker access to our conversion data.

Learning how to deal with this delay has been somewhat nerve wracking…and somewhat discouraging. Since we’re doing such low volume targeted advertising to get the most for our bucks, we see the click counter updated rather quickly but the money meter always stays still, or so it seems. I know that in the grand scheme of things “traffic is the new gold” and the more traffic we send to the affiliate programs the more money we stand to make. I think about adding a few more targeted keywords and see what kind of difference that makes…in 4 days.

I will keep you posted as we struggle through these challenges. I believe that tomorrow we will start seeing results from our last batch of changes. Regardless of tomorrow’s outcome, I hope that a solution is presented soon to address these reporting delays. After all, if we make money it means that Azoogle or other affiliate programs are making money.

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