More on BlogIndexTest - the first results are coming in

In my post on April 24th 2006 i.e. about 3 days ago, I mentioned that I was doing a test to see how long it took for my blog to be indexed by the search engines. The method was simply to introduce a new word that did not currently show up anywhere in Google MSN or Yahoo and then search for it periodically until it did show up.

So that was less than 3 days ago and I've just searched for my new word "blogindextest" on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Result: it now exists in the MSN and Yahoo indexes but not Google. (Interesting given that blogger is owned by Google)

What I'd like to test next is whether I can get new pages (or new websites) indexed fast simply by linking to them in my blog posts. I'll run this test shortly.

Blogindextest is a trademark of Commercial Reality Ltd (!)

A wasted day?

I spent what I now feel was too much time on a problem yesterday - a classic case of not being able to see the wood for the trees. I've been grappling with the best way forward for some websites I run, trying to work out whether to

1. Outsource via Elance.com
2. Do it myself using FrontPage (which I have and don't really like)
3. Do it myself using XSitePro (which I have and do like)
4. Buy Dreamweaver - which I downloaded for a 30 day trial in the morning

I want to create a site that is very easy to update, doesn't look like a template site, allows the inclusion of AdSense ads easily and can act both as an instruction site AND a sales site at a later date.

The key thing with nearly any website of any complexity is the ability to update and for that reason I wanted to keep things simple. XSitePro will let me update very rapidly whilst maintaining an automatic site map (and Google Sitemap too).

But then so will Dreamweaver I think. FrontPage won't, at least not the version I have and I notice that Microsoft say somewhere on their site that the FrontPage range is coming to an end.

So it was a balance between XSitePro which I know and am reasonably familiar with or learning Dreamweaver which whilst looking powerful undoubtedly has a learning curve that is steep and long.

When I really thought about it the problem with XSitePro is simply the lack of templates that I could edit. It took me quite a while to realise this though hence the wasted time.

But I've now found a solution I think: there's a lady in Canada who does XSitePro templates. I phoned her up for a chat and will ask her to create a nice template for me next week.

Problem solved. (But it could have been solved in about 5 minutes really).

However, the day was not entirely wasted because I picked up a new AdWords client too and wrote several pages of a new book.

Blogindextest -How long does it take to get a blog in the search engines?

I decided this morning to do a simple test with this blog: I want to know how long it is taking for a new posting such as this one to be indexed by the search engines and I suspect there is a very easy way of testing this out. So what I am going to do is make up a new word "blogindextest" and see how long I have to wait before this word is recognized by Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I've just done a Google, Yahoo and MSN search for this phrase and got no hits - as expected. So what I need to do now is do the same test regularly until I get a result.

AdWords Consultancy

Just returned from a meeting with a fellow Brit who also does AdWords consulting like I do. He's been over to an AdWords conference in Chicago and confirmed my feeling that there is no magic solution to AdWords, it just requires 6 skills sets:-

1. Understanding the mechanics of the system
2. Keyword research
3. Copywriting
4. Price setting / determining the value of a new customer
   
5. Conversion tracking
6. Understanding (and often helping to define) the target market(s) of your client
   

And of course the small matter of making sure that the site that you direct traffic to converts visitors into customers.


There are many keyword research tools on the market and I tend to use 3 or 4 at any one time but Google's own tool is getting better fast and for many simple campaigns it may be sufficient.

TalkTalk and TradeDoubler

Today I joined the TalkTalk affiliate program via TradeDoubler. What this now allows me to do is get paid whenever someone visits TalkTalk via my affiliate link and signs up for their free telephone service.

I've been a TalkTalk user myself for a while and have had no problems whilst enjoying the savings.

TradeDoubler is one of the leading providers of affiliate services in Europe and if you don't already have a TradeDoubler account you should get one because it lets you sell a very wide range of products from a wide range of businesses as an affiliate.

How to make High Paying Keywords work

I had a nice email this morning from someone who had purchased my AdSense report called "How to make High Paying Keywords work".

They described the report in embarassingly glowing terms and asked me if I had any others available.

Shame to say I don't as yet (well I have a few freebies) but I wrote back to him saying that I had about 10 in the pipeline. So newly spurred on by this feedback from a satisfied customer I will put more effort into my writing.

The news yesterday was of Google's growing profits and once again I am amazed at the cash pile: Google has about $1.25 million per employee in the bank right now.

Writing an ebook / Special Reports

I'm writing an ebook today, one that I think will have a significant impact on my income in 2006. It's interesting to do the financial analysis though of ebooks versus Special Reports: Special Reports don't take long to write and sell at a premium price whereas ebooks tend to take a while (if they are any good!)

However, with an ebook, especially a reasonably substantial one, you can usually build an army of affiliates who will help you sell it whereas Special Reports tend to be sold directly by the author to the end customer.

There are exceptions and if you are using a sophisticated affiliate marketing system you can sell as many things as you like via affiliates.

The other thing about Special Reports is that they can be used to go after a very tight niche. For instance, I wrote one just over a year ago called "How to make high paying keywords work" and it sells really well because it tackles a very specific problem related to AdSense.

Setting up a new AdWords account

Today I had to set up a simple AdWords account for a business here in the UK. Quite a simple campaign was all that was needed and I'm now waiting for my client to enter his credit card details and once that's done, we'll be off and running.

His business I suspect is ideal for AdWords because it is a tight niche so I think we'll be getting high value low cost clicks. He also has within his niche 3 different types of customer so I've created 3 separate sets of keywords and ads each addressed to one of those types.

Where it will not work out so well is once people land on his web site because it is not remotely well tuned as a lead generation engine but then few sites are.

As usual I've also come back to work after the break to see a number of emails from people who have been banned from AdSense. I can't work out if there's a pattern here or not: there seems to be a steady rise in the number of messages I get about it but then my subscriber list is getting bigger too.

Of course, many of these problems arise from people clicking on their own ads but in some cases there does seem to be some other cause.

How to make $10

Just had an email from Paypal saying someone has sent me $10.

So where did it come from?

The answer is really intriguing: I gave someone a free ebook.

This ebook is one of the nicest pieces of viral marketing I know about and I'd like to create something similar myself oneday.

If you are just a tiny bit curious, you can download the ebook here free too. You don't need to tell me (or the author) who you are, you just need to read it.

It's short. Easy to scan quickly and easy to understand. Allow 5 to 10 minutes and you'll learn some neat marketing tricks.

StopBounce review

Having implemented StopBounce on one page of one of my websites yesterday I can report that it made me some money. Not a lot but then that particular page got 5 views since yesterday evening when I edited the Stop Bounce code in.

First impressions are therefore reasonably favourable. After all, if it carries on like this, I could expect to make around $10 a year from that page which doesn't sound like much but if you roll it out across thousands of pages....

What Stopbounce does is pay you 1 cent for every person who leaves your web pages without clicking on anything. They must arrive at your web page via a search - you can't direct them straight there. StopBounce then displays relevant ads to the person when they hit their Back button. I haven't tested the relevancy or format of the ads but if they are relevant then the browsing experience for the user is probably ok.

I found implementation very straightforward - I just had to edit in some code and re-publish using my FTP program.

I do have some questions about the system: how many advertisers have they got being on of them - but the system could do really well, especially if they started to reward web publishers on the basis of the value of their traffic and not just on quantity.

Website Conversion problem

I've just finished an AdWords campaign report for a client and had a problem: there is no way that their AdWords campaign is going to work well because their website is terrible.

If you look at it, you can't work out who they are selling to. You can't even really work out what they sell. In fact they make the mistake that many sites make of assuming their sales prospects know what they do and why they should do business with them whereas in practice it is difficult to tell.

My problem is made worse by the fact that I am running this campaign as a sub-contractor and whilst I have asked several times what the main objective for their AdWords campaign is, I have never been told. It could be that they wish to sell to consumers or it could be that they are aimng at business to business sales. Their website does not make it clear.

And here's something really terrible: I ran the AdWords keyword tool over the site to see what keywords it would suggest and it came up with nothing. Reason: it couldn't work out what the site was about either.

This is because most of the site is just graphics or Flash animations and there is Zero SEO in the design. No use of H1 or H2 tags. No use of Alt tags. Even the text is in fact graphics and from a usability perspective some text graphics are links and some are not even though they are all the same colour.

A hopeless case I suspect and whilst I have reported all my thoughts to them I strongly suspect that the AdWords campaign will get the blame!

Search engine optimisation

I read a succinct comment somewhere last week that search engine optimisation, or optimization as our US and Canadian friends call it, is not really about trying to understand how the search engines work: it's about trying to find out what the website in the number 1 slot is doing and then doing those things a little better.

Sold quite a few copies of the blogging to the bank book last night which makes for a healthy start to the day and my AdSense subscriber numbers continue to climb.

I've got to deliver my children to an activity day today too so I won't be able to put in a full day's work but once back I intend to start making some changes to my internet training site which is already showing promising signs of generating a healthy AdSense income.

StopBounce or Stop Bounce

More info on that program I mentioned this morning. It's called StopBounce and it apparently pays you 1 cent everytime someone leaves your site.

It has a nice little ad too:

I'm learning more about how it works but I think in principle it intercepts people clicking on the "Back" button on their browser and displays some targeted ads. When it does this, it credits your account with 1 cent.

If you get 1,000 such transactions a day, then that must add up to, let's see now.......hmmm....ah yes, $10.00

How to make money with exit traffic

Came across an interesting program this morning that makes you money when someone leaves your site. I've applied to the program but there is a 3 day review period when they check your site over to see if they think it is suitable. If I get any more information I'll post it here.

A good day yesterday for my own and affiliate sales. The fact is that when you write to people via an emailing list it nearly always generates some sort of activity whether that be AdSense clicks or affiliate sales or 2nd tier sign-ups.

2nd tier sign-ups are often rather disappointing though because 99% of people never really do any active promotion which means you'll never make any money off them.

Affiliate Cash Vault

Just playing around a bit with my Clickbank account and decided it was time to learn about the new "My Marketplace" facility.

What it seems to be is a grouping of products that are related to other products I've sold, the theory being that if I can sell one product I can probably sell another similar one.

The top product in my current marketplace is a product called AffiliateCashVault and it looks interesting. From an affiliate marketer's perspective one of the appealing things is the high commission percentage.

How to minimize unsubscriptions

Whenever I send out a bulk email I always end up with fewer people on my email list than I started out with. This is for 3 reasons

1. Inevitably some people will decide that they've heard enough from me. Often it's simply because they are suffering from information overload and can't deal with the sheer volume of emails they are getting.
2. Some will also decide that they don't like the type of emails I send out.
3. Some will have full in-boxes with their ISPs or will no longer be using the email address they signed up with.

My autoresponder also automatically deletes email addresses from my database if it generates a bounce back on 3 consecutive occassions. This happens when someone subscribes using a false email address.

To minimize unsubscriptions I tend to test messages: I send them out initially to a test audience and monitor unsubscription rates. If they are acceptable I then release the email for distribution to my whole list.

This testing serves 2 purposes: it keeps the overall quality of my emails high (as assessed by my readers, not me) and it helps me grow my list by managing unsubcriptions rates down.

Partial list broadcasts with my autoresponder have been made a lot easier recently - you can create sub-lists according to criteria such as subscription date and once you've created a sub-list you can use it any time you like to send a test broadcast out.

AdSense Arbitrage

I've had a quick look at an arbitrage test I'm running (this is a process where you buy traffic using AdWords and send it to AdSense enabled web pages to see if you can make more money from AdSense clicks than you spend on AdWords clicks).

Active since the begining of April i.e. for 7 days, the site has broken even now because I am being very disciplined about buying traffic cheaply. So that's pleasing not least because the site I'm doing the test on can become a great deal bigger in time.

What is the site called?

I'm not going to reveal that until the test results are conclusive at which point I'll write it up as an AdSense case study.

Chocolate blogger

Just enjoying an intense chocolate hit from a Cadbury's Twirl and now sitting back with a Diet Coke ready to write an email that I'll be sending out to 17,000 plus people shortly. I've finished a report on a weighty AdWords campaign and as ever with these things, there's a sense of relief once the job is done. What matters for this particular client is conversions i.e. that people who visit his site via AdWords clicks go on to complete a enquiry form.

You can have a surprisingly large impact on conversions by choosing the wording or copy of your ads carefully and as of yesterday I started playing around with a new ad creative (as each AdWords ad is known) to see if I can ramp up the sign up rate to my newsletter.

In this case I've chosen to use words that let non-subscribers know that there is something they don't know: I alert them to the fact that 17,000 people read my AdSense newsletter and if they don't subscribe they won't know what they're missing.

This curiousity factor often works a treat especially when used with lists. For example

Find out the top 10 mistakes people make with AdSense.

It's kinda hard to ignore that because there is always that nagging doubt that just perhaps you are making one of them yourself.

Emailing my subscribers

I like to send a note to my subscribers at least once a fortnight and more often if things are going on. Today I'll be mentioning Google's new AdWords referral program which you can join if you are an AdSense publisher. I've put more information about the AdSense and Firefox referral programs here and will be adding some commentary today about AdWords.

The essentials of the AdWords program are that you get $20 commission if you introduce someone to AdWords and they spend $100 or more on AdWords advertising within 90 days. There are some restrictions though.

This morning I see that my list has grown to 17,034 which is respectable but I have some plans afoot to boost my subscriber rates and I hope to have time to implement these changes today as well.

Also need to complete a lengthy AdWords Consultancy report that I'm writing for a client.

Made it

From my autoresponder control panel just now

"Total number of subscribers: 17000"

Happened a tad earlier than I expected.

17,000 subscribers - a mini-milestone

I'm currently 3 people away from having 17,000 subscribers to my AdSense newsletter. Of course this is not a particularly "round" number but I'm always pleased to clock over another "k". So at the current rate I expect to be North of this figure later on this afternoon.

How quickly does Pagerank get updated?

I posted a blog entry on e-consultancy yesterday about Google Analytics. The main page has a Pagerank of 6 at the moment. My entry shows up on that page as a link but the entry itself has a pagerank today of 0.

I'll keep an eye on it to see if and when this changes. I would expect it to as Google crawls the site and makes a note of new content.

Google Analytics and blogging

Also got an email from Google today telling me that I could now use their Analytics system from Urchin. I've wanted to use this for a while but there was a capacity restraint which led Google to roll it out in a more controlled fashion. I signed up for an account a few months back and having just got one I've added it to this blog as well as 1stProfitPrograms.com already.

The user-interface looks really good but I need to see specifically how it will work with AdSense.

Does $500 extra make me a super affiliate?

A few weeks back I promoted a powerful keyword research and content building tool to one of my newsletters. The vendors were offering an additional incentive to encourage their affiliates to work hard: a cash prize of $1,000 to the most effective affiliate during the 7 day launch window, $500 to the next most effective and $300 to the 3rd most effective.

So I was very pleasantly surprised this morning to find that I'd won second prize.

AdWords competition

Nice idea this: one of my clients is running a competition for their staff. I run an AdWords campaign for them and have done for over a year now and we are getting new customers for a very small amount of money. Whilst I already have an extensive keyword list set up for them, allocated across a range of Ad Groups according to the target market (they essentially have one product which is bought by a variety of businesses), there must be keywords we haven't thought of that could attract new business.

So what the CEO did is ask his team to propose new keywords as part of a competition. I have just set up the winning entries (4 new keywords in total) and over the next 2 or 3 months we will see if they

• attract searches and clicks
• generate new business

The CEO has awarded the two staff members whose keywords have been chosen a cash prize and if any of these keywords generate new business, further cash prizes will be awarded.

Organising your affiliate programs

Everyone it seems suffers from information overload when they start to learn about internet marketing but if we "go niche" then one of the sub-problems we all have to deal with is managing the affiliate programs we join. Each one has its own username and password, percentage commissions rates, URLs, Terms and Conditions and reporting systems and it can be quite difficult keeping track of all the information.

One of the web design programs I use - XSitePro - makes this process a whole lot easier because it lets you set up affiliate links that you can then include in your webpages by selecting them from a list. All the contact data, commission data and affiliate URL stuff is stored in the background. You can re-visit this info any time you want and of course you need to set it up once for each program you join but after that it is a time saver.

How to track AdSense clicks free

I've just made a change to this blog and some other sites I run to track visitor behaviour a bit better. The neat thing is that I can now track clicks on AdSense ads or any other link for that matter free. Specifically I can see which ads get clicked on each page which gives me some valuable information about

• the types of products or services that are of interest to readers of this blog
• the number of blog entries that people typically read when on this site
• how long they stay on my site for (but don't worry - one thing I don't know is who you are!)

I'll be posting a page about this free tracking service shortly

AdWords Conversion Tracking Problem

Ok, found the problem. My AdWords account seemed to be telling me that no-one was signing up for my AdSense newsletter as a result of my online advertising campaigns yet I just knew this wasn't right.

Turns out that the current "Thank you" page, where people get taken to when they've signed up, does not include the AdWords tracking code. If the code was there, it would send a message back to Google that there had been a succesful sign up. Google would then allocate that sign up to a particular keyword in my campaign and show me the conversion rate. I would then go about optimising my AdWords campaign on the basis of subscriptions rather than clicks.

So I'll get this fixed first thing this afternoon.

I've also had to trouble-shoot a problem I was having with my autoresponder but that's fixed now and I've added 3 or 4 more pages to a website.

100,000 copies of a blog

There's a news item on the BBC today about a blog that built up a cult following. The author eventually turned her blog (on French cooking) into a book that has now sold 100,000 copies.

Moral of this story: never underestimate the power of blogs.

Today I received further proof that the change I made to my autoresponder last week is working: I received more commission income via Clickbank.

Today's plan is to carry on building a couple of content sites and then investigate a problem I'm having with conversion tracking data on Google. I don't seem to be getting any subscribers to my newsletter via AdWords advertising at the moment which I know to be incorrect. The initial suspect is the "thank you page" that I take people to once they have signed up. Unless Google's tracking code is in that page, my AdWords account won't show the conversion.

How to make money from typos

Everyone is in a hurry these days and so they type too fast (or don't know how to spell correctly in the first place) which means that when they do a search they make typos.

This is one of the easy ways of capturing low cost web traffic. I mean I just typed in blogger.com, or so I thought, and I ended up on a site I've never seen before.

People make spelling mistakes when they enter urls, or search terms etc. and certainly many AdWords advertisers set up typos as keywords.

I use AdWords to advertise a VOIP site I'm working on and get traffic there for 2 cents a click by using typos as my keywords.

If you want search engine traffic, try thinking of words that relate to your site that people often mistype and then place some of those typos on your webpages in headings, page titles etc. and you'll probably end up getting some free search engine traffic too.

Let's try bloger.com shall we. And also www.bloger.com and http://www.bloger.com and blgoger to see if that gets any traffic to this page.

Google's own AdWords ad for AdSense

Turn your website into a revenue generator in minutes.

This was an image ad unless they are using a special new text format with colors.