RORY HANSEN

In Google’s recently released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF ALERT!), they describe the best practices to follow to ensure that Google can properly crawl and index your site data.

Shaun at Hobo has created a list of tips on what to AVOID doing, by summarizing many of the suggestions from the Starter Guide. Here are some interesting ones I saw:

Avoid:

• having deep nesting of subdirectories like /dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
  page.html
• creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them
• allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your
  webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent
  pages are requested)
• having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations

There are a total of 30 tips listed on Shaun’s post. Read them all here.

We’re now half-way through November, and it looks like my earnings this month are going to come in way below what I was expecting.

At the beginning of the month, I had blogged about how the niche site which is responsible for 75% of my earnings has had it’s SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) completely disappear for about a week. They did come back, but all of a sudden, have disappeared again. Google, you’re breaking my heart!

It’s been quite disheartening, but to keep myself distracted, I’ve been working to update content, implement nofollow’s on my blogs, and research PPC more. I’d really like to start an effective PPC campaign using the Facebook ad platform, but just haven’t had the time to do the appropriate research.

It’s times like this that PPC Bully would come in handy, as it would be doing the research for me! (LOL). But, before I start using an automated tool to create successful ads, I’d like to do it by hand, to really digest how to do it successfully. To me, that’s what attracts me to this whole Make Money Online concept– understanding how all of these various tools and methods work and seeing if I can take my learnings and execute a successful campaign.

On Halloween, I wrote that my SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were totally off-the-wall, with keywords that I was once ranked #2 and #3 and #4 for showing no ranking at all. My niche website had essentially disappeared from Google’s radar for these high-traffic keywords, resulting in a > 75% drop in traffic. Forums like SitePoint and DigitalPoint and WebmasterWorld were filling with posts of weary webmasters, concerned about their keyword positions changing for the worse.

Thankfully, SERP’s seem to be returning to where they were pre-Halloween, as in the last 24 hours I’ve started to regain my keyword positions. (At least for some keywords.) I expect the Google Dance to go on for another 24 hours or so, after which time things should be back to normal.

I’ll be doing a more complete write-up of this after work today, but from the reading I’ve been doing, it seems to have been a Google error, where they accidentally reverted to old indexing data.

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics are just a few months away, and there will be tonnes of people flooding Vancouver looking for places to stay. The hotels will fill up, and people will be looking for private properties to rent for the 2-week Games. They’ll be scouring rental websites looking for listings that match their needs. But, before these renters start looking, Vancouver home owners will have to get their listing online for these perspective renters to find. And that’s the opportunity.

Your money making opportunity:

Rent2010.net, the #1 Google result for “Vancouver 2010 rentals”, lists Vancouver 2010 Olympic rental properties for Vancouver, Whistler, and the surrounding areas. For $25, homeowners can purchase a full-page listing on the website, complete with pictures and a customized description of the properly. This gives the homeowners access to the thousands of people that will be flocking such rental sites looking for a place to stay.

Rent2010.net offers an affiliate program that pays out $10 for each “sale”, where a sale is when a homeowner purchases a full-page listing on Rent2010.net for $25. This equals a 40% payout, which is pretty decent.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Rent2010.net Affiliate Program, check out the information on their Affiliates page.

How to advertise this opportunity:

Google AdWords may be a good advertising vehicle, so long as you target as local as possible to the Vancouver-area. But, you might have better luck through your own personal network, on Facebook, MSN, or your own email contact list.

Another strong place to advertise this opportunity is on Craigslist, specifically the Vancouver Craigslist site. Of course, you’ll have to be careful about how you script your ads, or you’ll be flagged for spam.

Good luck!

Have you seen PPC Bully? As a relative new guy to PPC advertising, to me it seems like an incredible tool for uncovering profitable niches and the EXACT ads that people are using to profit in those niches. Just input your keywords and wait a few days and PPC Bully will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

The guys behind PPC Bully have come up with this term called Profitability-Indicator. The idea is that if an ad is showing for a long period of time at a high ranking, then one can assume that the ad is profitable (because no one would keep an ad up so long, unless it was profitable).

The PPC Bully team even published their algorithm. From their FAQ:

Ad “Birthday Flowers” was seen 12 days out of 18. The Ad was last seen 2 days ago.

• Number of Days Seen: 12 days
• Percentage Seen: 12/18 = 66.6%
• Number of Days since Last Seen: 2 days
• P-Index = (12 * 66.6%) / 2 = 4

Profitable Ad is an ad whose PI is at least 7.

Similar to Aweber, the only reason I’m hesitant to sign-up for PPC Bully is because of the monthly cost. At $49 US per month, it would be the most I’ve ever paid for a web-based service subscription.

Here’s the Pros vs. Cons thinking that’s currently running through my head.

Cons: It’s $49 US (so, about $60 CDN) and I don’t even know if it works. What if I sign up and don’t like the tool? Or, worse, what if I don’t even have the TIME to use it?

Pros: But it’ll save TIME. I’ll have just to make the time to use the tool. And, as everyone knows, time is money. Using my current salary as a benchmark, it works out to LESS THAN TWO HOURS OF WORK per month to cover the cost of PPC Bully. From the looks of the demo video, PPC Bully would save a lot more time than just 2 hours per month. And with a 60-day money-back guarantee, even if I don’t like the tool, I can get my investment back.

You know, even just going through the exercise of typing out those Pros and Cons makes it clear that at the very least I should try the service. If nothing else, I’ll gain some new insight into some of the cutting-edge tools that other affiliate marketers are using to rake in the dough.

Embedded below is the PPC Bully demo from their website. Take a watch and let me know what you think.

Amazon Associates, AdSense, ClickBank, and Text-Link-Ads were responsible for my October earnings. Below is the breakdown:

Earnings
AdSense: $166.53
Clickbank: $437.58
Text-Link-Ads: $89.56
Sedo, Amazon Associates: ~$2
Paid Reviews: $22.54
Total earnings: $718.21

Costs
No AdWords costs this month.
Signed up for Findology, but have yet to start any campaigns.
Total costs: $0.00

October Earnings: $718.21

September Earnings: $335.79
This represents a 214% improvement month-over-month.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $718.21 profit, which is 48% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 8 more months to make up the remaining 52%.

Concerns going forward
As I had mentioned in a previous post, my main contributing site has seen it’s traffic dive in recent days. By dive, I mean traffic has reduced by about 75% (natural, search engine traffic). This concerns me because unless things pick up again, November earnings could potentially be 75% lower than October earnings.

On Friday, I earned more than $125 through my small network of sites and couldn’t help but tell everyone around me! I was ecstatic! It was the first time that I’d earned more than $100 in one day.

It’s amazing how small, incremental earnings improvements can do wonders for personal motivation. I’m not making a 6-figure income from affiliate marketing or blogging, but I feel like I’m headed in the right direction. In September, I was averaging about $10 per day, which added up to $330 that month. And, with one week to go in October, I know I’ll be surpassing that by QUITE A BIT, but I’m trying to avoid calculating anything til after the 31st. I’m looking to be surprised!

I’ve had some good days in the past, but none as good as this. Some readers might recall my Firefox experiment for Google Referrals. During my most successful days, I had Google Referrals earnings of over $175/day. But this is a bit deceiving, because I was also PAYING for Google AdWords. In all, I saw profits of about $1000/month during the experiment, which would average to about $30/day.

Perhaps this was just a lucky day for me. And I doubt I’ll even hit the $1000 mark for the month of October. Regardless, I’m so pleased with where I am this month and am even more motivated to hit my Mortgage Goal.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my affiliate marketing goal of making enough money online per month to cover my mortgage. Effectively, this is around $1500/month.

I figured that I was bringing in around $300 per month already, as it’s been pretty steady for the last year. Up until September 2008, I’d been coasting, doing less than an hour per month of work to support that $300/month income stream, as I had no motivation to invest anything more.

As a baseline measurement to understand where I am with respect to meeting my goal, I need to know my September 2008 results. Well, I just took a couple minutes to tabulate them, and here they are:

Mortgage Goal: $1500 / month

September Results:
AdSense For Content: $254.25
Text-Link-Ads: $81.54
Total: $335.79

(No earnings from Amazon Affiliates, and neglible earnings from Chitika and other programs during September.)

Mortgage Goal Remaining: $1164.21 / month
Percent of Mortgage Goal Met: 22%

My history with AWStats 

For years now, I’ve used AWStats to help understand my site traffic; how many people are visiting, what pages are getting visited, and what search terms they’re using to find my site. If you’ve never used AWStats before, it’s a pretty typical web log analysis tool that parses your server logs every night, and produces a series of reports that detail the various things I mentioned above.

But therein lies it’s two downfalls:

1. AWStats generates its statistics by looking at your server logs. Because it parses server logs, it cannot provide metrics on anything that isn’t stored in the logs. This includes tracking links that your visitors clicked on, tracking user browser resolutions and bandwidth, and an assortment of other client-side facts.
2. AWStats refreshes it’s stats every night. When tweaking ad campaigns and landing pages, writing blog posts, and adding new links to my sites, I want to be able to know exactly what’s going on in real-time. And, waiting til the next day just isn’t good enough; it simply causes me to make too many guesses and assumptions.

(Okay, I know you can change how often AWStats runs, but my web host has it scheduled to run once a day, at night.)

3-day trial with MyBlogLog

I recently signed up for MyBlogLog a few days ago and one of the services that I started to make use of immediately was it’s Statistics service. Pop in a little bit of javascript on your website and it’ll start tracking in real-time site visitors, what pages they viewed, how often pages were viewed, and what links your visitors clicked on (including Google AdSense links!). Although they only provide a 3-day trial on the service, I found myself practically refreshing the stats page every few hours to see what was new. I found that I really enjoyed having all this knowledge at my finger tips.

Now, on to Google Analytics

Well, that 3-day trial is ending today, and I can’t imagine just going back to AWStats, so I’m giving Google Analytics a shot. I’d known of it’s existance for a long time, even when it was still called Urchin, but had never bothered looking into it. So far, I’m pleased with what I see, especially with a feature called Site Overlay. It’s truly amazing. When you click on the Site Overlay link in Google Analytics, it opens up a new browser window and points the browser to your website. Then, on a translucent overlay of your website, it shows you exactly what links are being clicked and how often. It might even provide more info, but I’m still investigating all of the options and functions that this tool has.

Open questions:

• What analysis tool are you using on your website?
• What does it do well, and what does it do poorly?

We all know the 1st-tier PPC networks are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. You might also classify Amazon in there, too. Of these top-tier pay-per-click advertising networks, I’ve used Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter for various search marketing campaigns in the past. (I’ve never tried Amazon’s service, so cannot comment to how slick it is, or how well the traffic converts.)

There are many reasons why these networks are considered 1st-tier, the number one reason being that their respective search engines have the largest market share. But it’s more than that. Each of the 1st-tier services also have great keyword research tools, have slick interfaces for creating ads, and have really nice reporting systems.

The only real drawback? They can be a little pricey.

But what about the 2nd-tier? Have you used any of them?

Here’s a list I’ve gathered so far:

• SuperPages.com
• GoClick.com
• Search123.com
• ABCSearch
• Findology
• SearchFeed.com
• MIVA
• Enhance Interactive
• 7Search
• FindIt-Quick.com
• BrainFox.com
• Kanoodle

(Oh, and I’m sure I missed a tonne more. :-)

Personally, I’ve used 7Search before and, although the PPC cost was rather cheap (I was bidding on keywords with click-thru costs of between $0.01 and $0.03 each), the number of clicks I also got were few and far between as well. It probably took 8 months to use up the $25 initial deposit I made.

I’m trying with another 2nd-tier PPC network now, Findology. Mostly, I’m doing this because I found a promo code for an extra $50 credit on an initial deposit of $25.

(Actually, it appears that these promo codes are all over the place, because people can create them on the fly and use them as advertising bait. Hmm…. Smart actually. Someone just made a few bucks off me when I signed up using their promo code!)

Questions:

• Has anyone out there in the blogosphere used Findology before?
• What’s your opinion of the service?
• Any tips?

Feel free to leave some comments detailing your experiences. I’d really like to know how the other 2nd-tier networks compare.