If you are new to Search engine marketing , you’ll be forgiven for not knowing where to start. You have a website, you have your  own domain, its been out there for a while, but no one is finding you in the search engines, you’ve read a bit about SEO and links but its all a bit overwhelming.

There is a lot you can do to make or break a new domain, people will try and sell you all manner of services, Link building, Link baiting, SEO restructuring, Usability services, Re-design services, Keyword monitoring  services… the list is pretty long so I’ll say no more on it for now, other than you might not need any of them, at least not straight off the bat, consider employing an seo consultant before commiting any cold hard cash. A good consultant will be able to advise you on the best strategies. Recommend good people, that kind of thing. For less than the price of a weekend in Brighton you could be well on your way to getting your site up and running to where it needs to be.

If you’ve just had a new site built then IMHO you should have at least been told about some of the fundamentals of how your site was going to be constructed.

If your development company hasn’t factored SEO into your design then, well, I don’t want to depress you or anything but you’ve probably wasted a shed load of cash, needlessly, but that’s a post for a another day.

Getting good backlinks without spending fortunes

So assuming the best, assuming that your site has all the ingredients to do well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) then the next stage in the process would be to get those all important keyworded links for your target sales terms.

How can you get these? Well, you could always buy them, but that could well backfire on you. You could employ some blackhatter to go and spam a zillion blogs for you, but that’ll just create negative karma and come back and bite you on the arse, or you could do something relatively simple and generate things the natural way yourself. How? Simple,  install a blog.

Install a blog on your domain

Installing a blog is a breeze. Wordpress is a great piece of kit. All it requires is some file space, an ability to edit .htaccess files (check with your host) and a database, usually mysql. There are at least a 1001 templates out there and plenty of good designers who’ll be happy to help you convert your blog to fit in with your existing website or even build you a new one.

Blogs are fantastic tools of communication. Who is the best person to talk about your goods and services? The answer should be you, or the head of your sales and marketing team, but then wait up a minute. What about the rest of your organisation? What about your distribution and purchasing teams, what about your direct sales teams, what about your customer services staff? Aren’t they all expert in what they do? Isn’t there someone within each of these spheres who can add a postive contribution or two?

Why blogging matters to your online promotion mix

Why am I even banging on about this?

Well, its Sunday, its sunny, I’m in a ’state the obvious’ mindframe, I want to get the message out there that this Internet marketing stuff really can be very simple, its not so complicated you just have to do the right things and work at it a little.

Who promotes you in the offline world? What do you do, how do you do it?

Do you write press releases and hope they get picked up by mainstream media or local news agencies? Do you give your customers great service and after sales back up? Do you have direct lines of communication with past customers? Are you building those all important relationships?

Blogging  enables conversations

Bloggers are social creatures, they like to talk about each other and make reference to some of the things that others are saying - search engines too, those leviathans like Google for example are also interested in what bloggers have to say. They like the way in which bloggers link and discuss things. It gives them lots of diverse reference points to object and sites on the web that people like or have found useful, subsequently using this data to inform its SERPs and rank the websites within them, sites just like yours.

By blogging, you’ll link to others and cite good ideas and examples yourself. Others will link back to you, your domains authority will increase, your relevancy for your target terms will increase. Your customers will find you for an increasing number of keyword terms in the SERPs, they will feel reassured that your company is actively discussing and sharing what it is they do, you will be able to communicate your passion, your ethics, your ethos, launch new products and innovations in a heartbeat, create buzz and excitement in your marketplaces. 

Why wouldn’t you want to have a blog?

If you run a company and don’t have a blog, then either you aren’t really that serious about your company or you just don’t have a clue, or you just don’t want more sales, or you just…look, I can’t be convinced of any reason why you shouldn’t have a blog.

Just do yourself a huge favour and go and get one today.

June 3rd, 2007 | Category: blogging, building a readership, business, business blogging, seo consulting | Comments (7)

This is great, its a write a song for SEO contest!

Original huh? You can win a $1000-00 too.

If I was gonna enter I’d give it this, played real real slow with heavy emphasis on the riffs.

Aint no rankings when SERPs gone
There’s no traffic when she’s away
Aint no money when they’re gone
And they’re always gone too long
Anytime the bot goes away..

Bill Withers Aint no sunshine

The point is though - its an original idea that people like and are playing with. By coming up with original ideas, posts, points of view you’ll get readers, grow your traffic and have a blog where people engage and interact. Isn’t that a primary aim for all?

Get to it, lazy mo fo’s

May 26th, 2007 | Category: seo | Comments (4)

Link to your friends effectively

Some times we tend to take everything we’ve learnt for granted, we assume that everyone must surely know that already. It’s one of the reasons why we tend to use jargon - we just assume that because we know, then it follows that others probably know as well.

So with that little intro out of the way, herein follows a little statement of the obvious that might not be obvious to all.

If you have a friend who happens to be an SEO in Cornwall or know an SEO in Orange county who has written a good article about obtaining .edu links then link to them in the way I just did!

If you link to them with the words this, here, or click then you are really not doing them as much of a favour as you could be. You wan’t to help your friends right? You wan’t to help improve the relevance of their pages too huh?

So, if they write an article that talks about their launching a new link building service, then use those terms just as I did and link directly to the page too.

If you already know that they are ranking well for a particular term, then mix things up a little for them too. Think of variants of the words they’d like to found for and vary those. People looking for solid business blogging tips might not always enter those terms in a search engine, some might enter make money from your blog, or monetise your blog. By knowing who your write about and taking a little more time, you could be helping them and adding value to what you do, both for them and the people who will subsequently find them in a search engine somewhere.

For those who don’t know - search engines use a thing called anchor text to help them determine relevance. The words that are contained in the link add weight to the page by adding contextual weight. An assumption is made that if a person points to a page with descriptive words, then it follows that the page is likely to be a good match for those terms. If enough people, or enough sites with sufficient levels of authority link to that page for those terms, then the relevance of this page amongst others, is boosted resulting in a greater likelihood of that particular page being returned for the search engine query.

May 26th, 2007 | Category: linking, links, seo, seo basics | Comments (17)

Search engine ranking algorithms are a mysterious thing. Very few people on earth have access to their exact blueprint, for those of us who think we have cracked it, it all seems relatively simple. Put enough of the right things in place in the right combination and presto you are in, right, simple huh? In reality of course, hardly.

Work at the coalface dictates that the safes combination gets harder to crack as more people try to open it for their target terms. It just doesn’t do anymore to think of ones documents in simple structure word count and number terms. As the document numbers increase, some keywords can take on an almost esoteric level of attainment. The access parameters are ratcheted up to a point of ‘hey if you want to score here, you gotta be doing real good‘. So, whats a man to do then?

Techno crackhead SEO’s on observation acid

SEO minded people who think about this sort of stuff might well share some of my musings, specifically in terms of thinking like a search engine algorithm. The theory being of course that any successful understanding of anything makes it a whole lot easier to apply what we have learned and therefore, apply in attacking it - hardly rocket science there.

Too many people I think, tend to approach SEO from a rigid bits and bytes approach. They forget that at their very core, search algos are built by ordinary thinking human beings, subject to similar influences as us all. They are people who visit the same kinds of conferences, interact with the same kinds of people via forums and blogs and pubs and restaurants. The only difference between them and us, and lets not make no mistake about it, it is very much them and us is that they hold the keys and are in a state of continual defence and counter offence.

Observation observation observation

If you look at most sites that perform well consistently today, then amongst the more competitive of SERPs, there are a number of observable constants.

It seems almost obvious to say, but I’ll say it nonetheless that most good sites with good competitive rankings are relatively well balanced and have the right combinations of the required signals to rank.

Really Rob? No shit sherlock, well yeah but it doesn’t hurt to say them out loud now does it.

Content content content

On the content side its pretty safe to say that a site has to have the right level of keywords, spread about in the right kind of way. In the overwhelming majority of cases pages that rank for keywords have them on the page.

Trust me baby and I’m popular too

On the trust side a site needs the right level of authority in its field, with the right kinds of people linking in, in the right kinds of way.

On the social side its not a bad thing to to hope that the site is discussed often enough in the right web social circles.

Do people hang at your party?

From the visitor perspective, we know that search engines can deduce a hell of a lot from the actions of people who are either logged in or have a toolbar installed. Toolbar data being a great way of obtaining that vital user behaviour data useful for indicating the right positive or neagitive feedback signals.

If you can objectively measure how people behave ‘on site’ then overtime, with sufficient data, some excellent assumptions can be made.

If questions like, ‘Once on a site how long do visitors stick around‘ can be answered or ‘Are they off in a heartbeat flicking back to the SERP for a better result‘ then asking the questions of ‘Is this a common phenomena‘ and ‘How many different people in different parts of the planet engage in such behaviour patterns‘ really do help to make assumptions and say that these would be the kinds of signals that should be folded in and added to a sites overall ability to rank.

We don’t like SEO’s we don’t want or need their sphere of influence

For the Search engines, an SEO’s ability to influence the latter aspects mentioned is next to zero. As a result, this information should outweigh many of the other established or accepted signals that many assume to be weightier.

For me, this should be the holy grail of a search engineers work, creating an algo that is next to unmanipulable, at least by the direct actions of search engine marketers.

Other contributions of course are things like ‘user personalisation’, often talked about as the next big SEO challenge, with algos tailored towards surf history, age and user behaviour; almost dictating that the day of the universal SERP are on their way out.

SEO on its deathbed?

Absolutely not! Good SEO’s who appreciate the ever shifting sands already have an excellent take on all of the factors required to rank. Even with the private data mining capabilities mentioned, the search engines still require good, well structured sites made and promoted by people with a good understanding for what creates and sustains buzz and interest in this Internet world - that demand isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Conclusion

Its no surprise that the big search players all make a big play on the benefits of membership to their little cookie clubs and whatnot, and maybe a day will come even, where they are arrogant enough to make you play their game or go off and find something else to search with, who knows.
They can hardly be blamed mind, cos after all, it all helps in the quest for the perfect algo right?

May 21st, 2007 | Category: personalisation, search, search engines, search marketing, seo | Comments (2)

Communiques of impending doom 

According to Jensense Google are going to be disabling adsense accounts that are being used for MFA type sites.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts

That’s big news, especially if you are one of these people who have gotten kind of comfortable earning what seemed to be a relatively easy buck.

Arbitrage in a nutshell

For those of you who don’t know what it is and how it all worked, the short explanation is that you’d build a site designed to get clicks from users on your adsense ads and earn a buck.

How you obtained the traffic varied. Some people used PPC (pay per click) programs to buy clicks at the lowest possible rate and filtered them through to a site with ads that attracted a higher payback. So if you paid $.05 for a click and got $.06 upwards back then you’d make a profit.

Google being the largest PPC player on the block means that exclusion from their program leaves a smaller pie to play with.

So what who cares, did anyone die?

Is there anything inherently wrong with this practice? Well, Google seem to think so, else why would they take this action. yet, it has to be said that people do similar things in different ways and different markets. Its called Capitalism.

It remains to be seen whether similar programs will take similar actions. They all make vsrious public pronouncements about how they like to protect their advertisers and add value to them and all that old hype, yet the reality is that in the case of Google for example they’ve happily just let the pennies roll on in for some years now without any real meaningful steps to curtail the process.

One can only speculate as to what actually drove this decision. A call to arms to clean up the SERPs perhaps? A cry from advertisers sick of low quality traffic. A general why should an external marketer be allowed to profit from our system using two sides of the same coin even. Who knows.

The bottom line is that the game has changed yet again.

Dealing with it and taking remedial steps

If you are a thin affiliate for example with product feeds and general low quality ‘find it everywhere else’ kind of content with adsense thrown in for good measure, then perhaps you too could find yourself on the receiving end of one of these unwelcoming letters.

Of course it could just be a public purge designed to bolster waning perceptions of ad quality and policing. Advertiser confidence is key to the success of any program. Advertisers using the adsense network don’t want to have low quality shitty visitors to their sites from people who had no alternative other than to click an advert, the view being that this type o traffic simply doesn’t convert. If advertiser confidence in the adsense network is improved then it follows that more will participate. More participants equals more revenue of course.

I can understand this too. On sites I run, Ive opted out of the adsense network from the off, simply because of all the low quality non converting crap I used to receive.

Don’t get me wrong, the adsense network can be great from a brand building and getting your url out there perspective, and it really does depend too on what kind of market sector you operate in. The big arber sharks of this world tend to target the highest paying keywords as these offer the biggest payback for them, perhaps an additional problem has been that as more people have gotten in on the act, this net has increasingly expanded downwards with arbers being forced into going for the smaller paying terms as the larger ones margins were squeezed.

On days like this, I’m glad I’m not an arber

May 20th, 2007 | Category: adsense, advertising, arbitrage, mfa | Comments (5)

SEO advice good or bad 

We all know that if we want to get lots of visitors and expect to get them from search engines then unless we apply a little SEO knowledge, we’ll never get past page 25 for our target keywords.

But is there a quick way to get off the ground? Especially if we don’t know where to start and can’t be fussed with what seems to be a torturous process of trying to work out who to employ or what to apply and in what way.

There’s a lot of stuff out there on SEO. Lots of it, page after page after page of opinion, speculation and hogwash.

When SEO is discussed for example what do they mean when they say

You need a few meta tags here and there?

Your title tags need to be looked at and changed?

Your copy needs to be rewritten?

Do they mean that you need to restructure everything and throw in lots of bold tags, links, H tags, blockquotes, off site links, nofollow links, url rewrites, increase keyword densities?

What do they mean when they begin to talk in terms of your pagerank or alexa score or external link building campaigns that-will-use-a-combination-of -social-and-historical-methods and yeah… wtf exactly does that mean even.!

 Most would be forgiven for taking the conclusion of, this SEO stuff is  a little confusing to say the least!

Just hire a professional SEO

I’d advise anyone who is serious about their website and clueless on SEO to go and hire an individual or firm who know what they are doing. Ask them for references, don’t buy any BS about monthly submission fees or ‘get you on 1st page of google in a week’ promises as you may as well just send it to my beer benevolent fund and let me drink it for you, I can promise you the same you know

I’m a tightwad, I’m smart I can do it myself thanks, just gimmee a tip!

Ok, so you wish to persist on your own and want to have a little play around yourself . Ok, without further ad0 here are 3 little tips that you wouldn’t go too far wrong applying..

1. Create something that is good - Kick arse with your content, do it better than everyone else.Have an idea or product that is good!If your website is crap, then improve it, add value now, before it goes down the tubes.

   Add a blog, use social mediums to drive it forward, ask yourself lots of questions and be honest with your answers. Would you want to buy your product from your website? Is your site the best at what it does? If the answer is no, then it’ll pay to think that the search engines might think the same too. If thats the case, then you could be stuffed pretty quickly. Can you afford to be so?

   The web is powered by links and in lots of ways, the words contained within those links. You need to get people to link to you in all manner of themed ways, to different areas of your site from as many different sites as possible. This is the juice that will power you up the ranks. If you don’t have it, then it will be very difficult to rank without it.

   Link juice will be very difficult to obtain if what you are selling or saying is nothing but a lot of old rubbish or same old same old. It takes hours of effort to manufacture artificial link popularity. Your time could be better utilised on improving your product. By creating something that is useful or buzz creating, you will get people talking about you and what you do.

   Use your blog to communicate with your visitors. Discuss your latest innovations or deals. Feedback to people who are enquiring of what you do. Show them a human side to your organisation/business/personality. Give them what they need.

   Ping the various social connecters out there - get active in your sphere, create excitement in your marketplace, stimulate your visitors, give them a reason to return. Give them the tools to talk about you in earnest.

2. Use established site structuring techniques and good effective copyYou’d be amazed at the number of pages that fail at the very first hurdle of production.Go and read up about basic good page structureUse the title tag effectively.

   If your site has pages that say “Company name: about us section” or “Company name: our product section” then you really need to think about that and ask yourself what the value in that is. The short answer is there is very little.

   Everypage of a website should be different. Everypage should have a unique title tag that suitably heads up that page. If a page is about a Sony Vaio Ar21 then those words should come first within the tag.

   It sounds elementary and obvious but you’d be amazed at the amount of people out there who miss this singley important factor. Trust me <title>Sony Vaio Ar21 Laptop - Buy your Sony Vaio Ar21 Laptops here - read Sony Laptop reviews and more</title> works infinitely better than <title>Company name: Our Laptop products</title>.

   Use headings to head up your content and apply logic to what it is you are discussing.

   If a page is about the Sony Vaio AR21, then put those words in your H1 tag. Do not expect to just stick an image or a flash movie in there and expect it to do well. You have to tell both your visitors, and the search engine spiders that you would like to index your pages, what it is that your pages are about. Spiders cannot deduce meaning and context from that which they cannot see. Images and Flash movies and videos are more or less useless as they offer little means for either.

   Use words, and emphasise important words such as your product name - use related language to describe what you are selling or trying to promote. If you don’t want to take the time to look at your SERPs for examples of how this works, then go hire an SEO copywriter, ask to see examples of their work and look to see how these people are ranking.

   Use good link navigation throughout your site. Consider using breadcrumb trails throughout. Page > Subpage> Product name

   Clean your urls so they read nice. Read up on modrewrite and get rid of those session id’s and variable parameters.

3. Discuss one topic or product per page. If you are selling products on your site then you need to have individual pages for individual products. Unless you are a craigslist or an Amazon or a dealtime or an ebay perhaps, you just will not rank for a product on a page that contains 20 other items.If you want to have any chance of ranking for individual keyword items, then you must seriously consider creating a separate page for each.

   If you have 100’s or 1000’s of products then invest in a database or spreadsheet and read up on dynamic page creation. It really isn’t too difficult, and will save you hours of editing and fannying about opening up separate files to do this that and what have you. Template design is where its at.

What you expected more? Sorry, maybe some other day

May 19th, 2007 | Category: blogging, seo | Comments (13)

Quick short post. As part of this blogs monetisation experiment, Ive decided to trial Kontera. Visitors will notice that there are double underlined links which feature a little advert when a cursor is placed over an identified link.

Generally, I think they are fairly unobtrusive and most savvy users should notice a differentiation between normal links and these advert type links. An example of a typical ad can be seen below.

Im using the <div class=KonaBody> tag to ensure that its only my blog posts that are affected in this way. I don’t think its right that my commenters comments should be used in this way, so rest assured that whatever you say will not be advertisizied!

I’ll report back in 6 weeks or so and let people know how things progressed.

May 16th, 2007 | Category: kontera, monetization | Comments (10)

Continuing the conversation on your blog

This post isn’t really aimed at the hardcore experienced blogger, its more aimed at those just starting out, people like me in fact. I’m fairly knew to all this and tend to blog from a search centric POV. Whilst its generally true that its search engines that will give most bloggers their traffic, there are nonetheless a variety of other  ways you can drive traffic and build the conversation within your sphere.

Blogging is popular for many reasons. Be it a tool for self expression, a tool for self promotion or just a general communication medium, its a fantastic way to reach out and have a conversation with people with similar interests.

Most of us are aware of the fantastic tools and platforms out there that enable us to see who is referencing us and in what context.

Trackbacks the process of ‘pinging’ a blog automatically is one such way. Checking your technorati stats is another. Using other 3rd party plugins or embed code is another still; Feedburner, Google anlaytics, Webtrends, Clicktracks to name but a few.Not to forget of course, the old trusty web server log files. Oh and lets not forget the ever increasing number of social media blogging communities that have sprang up recently. MBL, BumpZee, SpicyPage and my current favorite of course, BlogCatalog.

The really great thing about these is that they enable you to put a human face to your readership, letting you see who recently visited you, seeing new faces, clicking through to their sites or pages at their community and seeing what they have to say about whatever it is they do. Ive found some great blogs this way, that I otherwise may simply have missed.

I started blogging as ‘robwatts’ in January 2007. Yep, thats not so long ago at all. If you want to read my figures and stats here they are.

I currently have a little over 110 subscribers -  a technorati authority score of 208 with a rank of 19,424 and an alexa rank of  102,721 My Google PR is 4.

In comparison to other sites these numbers are very small beer, yet to be frank, I didn’t start blogging to win any popularity contest or acquire willy waving look at how big I am type scores, yet it is nice to know that people are interested in some of the things I have to say, and that these are beginning to be reflected in the various metrics fore-shown.

Its funny, but when you initially start out talking about whatever it is you discuss, you realize that, by and large you have a very small audience indeed. You might well write the most fantastic of stuff, yet if you don’t have the readership or eyeballs on your content, then not many people are going to be able to see or comment upon it. can you do anything about this? Sure you can…Ive already touched on one such automated way, but for the benefit of those who may have missed it, I’ll cover it again.

Catch your Tumbleweed

If your blogposts are blowing about in the wind, wailing away crying for a little attention then maybe you just have to let people know they are there.

I guess this was one of the thoughts that swam around in the depths of my subconscious which with a prompt or 2 pushed me in the right direction.The creative process is one of those things that can just sneak up and bite you on the behind. I was thinking about some of my posts that hadn’t received comments, and half jokingly blogged on it back in April.

I challenged the blog community (or my tiny growing readership at the time)  to calculate what their ‘tumbleweed’ score was for their blog and added as an afterthought, that I might even develop a plugin to help people automagically display their scores. Some bloggers like Andy responded, and made me realise that actually, this could well be a handy little addition to the blogging productivity box. The idea was that by having a visible metric, you could see how your posts were being responded to over a given timeframe, as well as show old posts that your newly aquired readers may have missed. So was born the tumbleweed plugin for wordpress.

Its nothing incredible of course, it just uses a little SQL and some basic maths. It may not work on all WP setups either, but it should work on most.

As for people using other blogging platforms, the short response at the moment is that it just will not work on your set ups. Blogger is kinda restrictive in terms of how it enables you to interact with the back end so my hands are a little tied. If I get enough interest or requests I may well look at creating something similar for platforms like Typepad,Drupal etc.

If youv’e written stuff that you think was good and think that people might benefit from seeing/reading again and want a little prompter to help you see how you are performing in a fun light hearted way, then tumbleweed could well be the thing for you.

Meantime, whatever it is you are doing or writing about, enjoy it!

May 15th, 2007 | Category: blog tools, blogcatalog, blogging, bumpzee, mybloglog, spicypage, tumbleweed | Comments (7)

Its Friday, a time to wind down and chill, so I’m gonna respond to this little meme.

I’ve been tagged by Robin over at Fortune Watch (check out his blog for some great finance tips and pointers)

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

I’m not one for adhering to rules so in this regard I’m gonna reshape it a little and make 2 lists.

Random Personal

1. I am a big fan of Carry On films
2. I once left an aeroplane in a wheelchair (was it a small plane or a big wheelchair, you decide..)
3. I cycle between 50 and 80 miles per week
4. My son is bigger than me already and that concerns me muchly
5. I used to wonder why I was born on the same day as  the bombing of Hiroshima
6. I once watched 5 series of the Soprano’s in less than 3 weeks.
7. I learnt I needed glasses by accident, prior to this I just assumed that the world was a little murky
8. I follow the fortunes of Arsenal Football Club and love Thierry Henry

 Random Tech

1. I recently purchased an 80gb IPOD Video  from ebay and love it
2. My steps to learning  HTML began through viewing the source in web browsers, editing them and noting the effect. I subsequently decided to buy a book.
3. I have 6 computers in the house 5 of them are deficient in a way or other, yet they all work.
4. I spend in excess of 80 hours per week online
5. My favourite search engine despite its many shortcomings is Google
6. I once built a win a car website and thought the world and its wife would participate in my draw.
7. 40% of my working week is spent at home
8. In 1999 I built a  flash website that had a 3 minute pre loader. I gave up flash development shortly thereafter

   Tagging Nellioness Mama Papa Hobo Tony Mark Steph and Paula

May 11th, 2007 | Category: blogging, meme | Comments (9)

QSP (quick short post)- Hmmn seems that trackbacks have gone a little skew whiff here. I’m reluctant to do a little upgrade as the last time I did everything broke and…god what a nightmare that was.

So if you have pinged me and I haven’t responded or acknowledged what you said, its not that I’m being some rude arrogant arse, its just that I’m kinda reliant on technorati and that terribly crappy search engine’s site explorer to see whats what and where.

Waste of time mentioning Google as their backlink thing has been broken forever and a day… oh hang on I guess there is blogsearch

May 11th, 2007 | Category: trackback | Comments (4)

WARNING:This is a post I might earn money from and contains affiliate links!!!!

I just read a review of Bidvertiser over at Andy beards Blog. If you run a blog and are looking to monetize it then you will no doubt be aware of the confusing array of options and providers out there. Adbrite, Adsense, Chikita are a few you may have heard of all which all help you make money from your blogging endeavours. You place some ads on your blog, a visitor sees an ad that attracts their eye, they click it, you get paid - simple as that.

I’d seen Bidvertiser ads on various sites across the Internet. I hadn’t paid them too much attention cos well, you gotta draw the line somewhere! There’s monetising your blogs and then there’s turning your blog into a big fat bunch of ads all over the shop which…well, doesn’t really work and kinda lowers the standard of whatever it is you are seeking to do with your blog.I’ve decided to give them a try and see how it goes on a blog or two.

Similar to other advertising and website monetisation programs, you have the choice to be either a publisher, an advertiser or both.

Bidvertiser Advertisers

They are currently offering  $20-00 worth of free clicks for new advertiser sign ups . I don’t want to make this sound like an advert or a review of Bidvertiser, so I’ll skip any elaboration on what makes them different, or why you should choose them. From an advertiser perspective, they could be good, they could be a pile of rubbish. You’ll have to suck it and see I guess, or go research reviews on the net from people who have used them already.

The thing to bear in mind is that they are probably marginally cheaper than other networks out there in terms of CPC, so could be a good bet for any arbitragers amongst you. Buy low sell high and all that :D . The great thing though is that they do seem to ge tthe idea that by giving advertisers more placement options and allowing them to bid accordingly that there are as a result some excellent early low cost conversion opportunities available to those who research their niche.

Bidvertiser Publishers

Similar to other programs, they offer a number of options for publishers in terms of ad type configuration, payment options, and optout options. They’ll pay you by cheque or Paypal . Ive opted for paypal for now, simply because cheque cashing is a PITA.

Bidvertiser is  pretty simple to use. You sign up, you place their code on your site and they pay you a % of any clicks ads outputted recieved.  You can even join their refereal program and receive up to $50 for getting a new referal too, which isn’t bad at all. It works in a way by saying that if a new publisher earns $10 then they’ll pay you the same. When a publisher earns $50, they’ll give you an additional $40. Most low monetised blogs easily achieve that over a year, so there could well be a little incentive there too.

There are other Internet advertising programs out there, with higher referal fees and more lucrative options; however when you balance some of those out against some of the achievement criteria, then they suddenly become a little less attractive, but more on those another day perhaps

You can read Andy’s review of bidvertiser here. Or sign up directly here for advertisers and here for publishers.

Good luck with it.

May 9th, 2007 | Category: bidvertiser | Comments (12)

My friend Lyndon was talking about SMO (Social Media Optimisation) and directories the other day and pissed a couple of people off. He was damn right too.

Most directories are useless rubbish

Bog standard web directories are not worth a cold cup of ****. A directory that sells on the basis of PR is asking for its link-pop-pass on ability to be stripped away.
See, for me, the whole get links from lots of directories on different IP’s thing is so frickin 2003 its not even funny any more! Most can be knocked up in two seconds flat and then populated with a dmoz script or Y! scrape. Most if not 99.9% of them offer very little value at all othe than the ability for joe bloggs to be able to drill down and find or add a site in an area they want to. Usually they are plastered with adsense adverts in the head of the document, designed to attract the users eye and take them away from the people who have paid to list. Funny.

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May 5th, 2007 | Category: directories, promotion, seo, smo, web 2 | Comments (22)

Yahoo! annouced a new tag today, supposedly aimed at helping webmasters to section off aspects of their pages so that spiders don’t index content that is superfluous to the meat and gravy of the page. The ‘what a great way to flag seo’d pages’ factor aside, lets look at what they are saying with regard to usefulness and the webmaster.

The “robots-nocontent” tag is a useful tool for webmasters.

• It can improve our focus on the main content of your pages.
• It helps target your pages in search results by making sure the appropriate deep page in your site can surface for the right queries.
• It helps improve the abstracts for your pages in results by identifying unrelated text on the page and thus omitting it from consideration for the search result summaries.

Those bullet points are interesting. Lets have a look at them in reverse. Nope, not reverse order, but reverse logic. Lets see what can be determined by flipping the logic around.

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May 3rd, 2007 | Category: robots-nocontent, yahoo | Comments (4)

Of course, blogging isn’t dead, I’m still here i don’t plan to shuffle off and pop my clogs, unless fate decides otherwise perhaps. If I don’t come back, then lets just say that I’m privileged, lucky and happy to have lived a life full of ups and downs and highs and lows. Nothing worth having was ever easy guys, especially search engine rankings.

Robyn tagged me on the theme of the blogosphere is ending what would be your last message. I love the way in which she answered the question. Its depth, its light, its overarching clear message - give love and be loved.

The blogosphere is ending. No more blogs. Blog apocalypse. The Internet is still working, the world is fine. But you can’t write anymore. Write your last post. Make it a good one. What is the reason you blog? What is the last gem of knowledge you want to leave? What do you want to be remembered for? Who are you? What is the meaning of life? Haha…well not exactly but you get the point. Pour your heart into it.

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May 2nd, 2007 | Category: blogs, love, meme | Comments (6)

April 30th, 2007 | Category: vt | Leave a comment

If you are a tech blogger then you are likely to be a little bit geeky, you might even like to watch models develop and change and improve too, I certainly do. If you are into the whole social networking and blogging thing then you’ll probably love playing with the various tools and platforms who offer widgets and plugins and options for expanding the conversation.

A recent splash on the blog scene following in the footsteps of the now Y! acquired mybloglog is Blogcatalog.

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April 27th, 2007 | Category: blogcatalog, social networks | Comments (6)

QSP (quick short post)

New York SEO - Joe Whyte tagged me earlier on a ‘what magazine do you read’ meme. So in a spirit of yeah why notiness, I thought I’d take the time out and share.

I read a whole lot more online stuff these days, so don’t read half as much paper stuff as I once did. The last mag I read was New Media Age which is pretty good for search and tech stuff.  I occasionly read New Scientist as it has some interesting pieces that have a habit of getting me thinking about all manner of weird and wonderful things. I bought a copy of Mens Health the other week, as I had this mad idea to regain my abs, but thus far haven’t gotten too far on it. I’ll secretly read my sons copies of some  xbox360 games mag, just to check out really cool games like Command and Conquer and Gears of War, but other than that I’m no longer a real paper media dude.

Tagging Jeff Robyn DS and James

April 24th, 2007 | Category: magazines, meme | Comments (3)

I think its a good idea to keep up with what you say and where in the blogosphere, yet with so many different types of platforms and formats its pretty difficult to do at times.

Which is probably why I just got a little excited when visiting co.mments. I think co.mments is a great way of tracking your conversations. I vaguely recalling seeing this somewhere or other and thinking cool, that could be handy, so I just went along and signed up, great I thought this could be just the thing, and then my balloon went down. It would be great, if that is, I remembered to use the bookmark tools they provide.

Use these bookmarklets to quickly bookmark conversations you want to follow. One click and they’re added to your tracking list.

First, add the bookmarklet to your favorites (IE) or bookmarks (Firefox, Safari, other). When you read a post you want to follow, simply click on the co.mments favorite/bookmark. The co.mments server will then follow up and find new comments for you.

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April 22nd, 2007 | Category: comments, productivity | Comments (6)

I was over Andy’s blog this morning and read a very interesting post about Technorati favouriting.

For those of you who get the whole social media metric thing, you’ll understand that some sites and algos prefer to use signals that indicate real world popularity. Most observers would say that Technorati use favouriting as a signal in determining blog popularity. Makes sense too. Who would favourite a blog if it were crap after all?

If you’d like to favourite my blog, then you can do this here. Or you can just right click and download my opml file here and favourite everyone that I have, then add them to your faves.

If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. (down a bit left a bit..)

April 21st, 2007 | Category: technorati | Comments (6)