Link Building Methodologies

March 30th, 2007 by Chris

New article published today, Link Building Methodologies. This is quite an opus on many different methods of building incoming links. In total it is around 5000 words and over 10 pages printed.

This is yet another big SEO article, I’ve written a few recently. I have a few more to write and then I plan to create a new SEO Guide on this site. It will really just be a subsection of my “How to Build a Successful Website” guide but it will have it’s own intro page. The reason is simply that most of the recommendations this site gets are for SEO information, but there isn’t a good landing page for those people, this will be a landing page. In total the SEO portion of my guide should end up around 50 pages printed, and all for free of course.

Then of course once the SEO section of my success guide is done I’ll be able to progress further in my rewriting it and hopefully get in done in a couple months.

As always, diggs, links, or other mentions are appreciated.

Two mistakes made by wannabe website publishers

March 25th, 2007 by Chris

So many people who want to be profitable website publishers often make the same two mistakes when they first start out.

The first major mistake is not trying to think up an original site idea. So many just clone existing sites they know to be popular, Sites that either copy MySpace or provide add-on services to MySpace subscribers for instance. The ability to think originally is what separates successful website publishers from the rest of the pack.

You can see a direct representation of this phenomenon by watching Website For Sale listings at popular webmaster forums. You will notice a distinct similarity between most of the listings because they were all made by people who were not thinking originally and have now decided to try to make some of their money back by selling because they’ve realized you need more than just a copied idea to make a website successful. One of the additional problems exacerbating this issue I think is that most wannabe website publishers come from the same background and have the same interests and unfortunately are too young or too inexperienced in life to have developed interests beyond what is the norm for their demographic.

There are original ideas out there though, you just have to think of them.

The second major mistake new website publishers make is failing to wait before trying to cash in. Admittedly when you’re new you might need the money, but usually the longer you can wait to worry about money & monetization the easier it will be to build traffic. How often do we see people seeking monetization advice on a website with 1000 uniques a month or less? There is no reason to worry about income with so little traffic. At that point in your site’s development you should be focusing on expansion of content and promotion, not monetization. Focusing too much on money too early can hamper your promotional efforts (some places will not like to overtly commercialized sites) as well it occupies your time which would be better spent on increasing traffic.

If you have a unique website you are almost guaranteed to be successful if you give it enough time and don’t hinder your own progress by focusing on the wrong thing. The only times when success wouldn’t be guaranteed for a unique website is if your niche is too small to ever provide the traffic you need even if everyone in your niche visited your website (such as knitting advice for blind eskimos).

If you can make a site and work on it in your spare time for a year or two, focusing more on content and features and promotion rather than monetization, then it will eventually pay off, but you have to start with a unique idea or niche.

To provide examples, I wish to mention three sites, one owned by myself, two owned by forum members.

My site is Universal Wedding Registry. I started this site quite a few years ago but never finished building it, I finally paid to have it finished (redone really) recently and have now just barely started to promote it. How it works is it provides an easy to use interface for people to create a wedding registry compiled of items from any merchant or store, as opposed to single store registries found most everywhere else. Through affiliate datafeeds and other affiliate programs I can sometimes earn a commission on sales through the site in a way that is completely unobtrusive to users (paid links are not treated any differently than unpaid links and the users add & control both types). So I do have a system in place for monetization, but it was intrinsic to the programming of the site to include it and I don’t actively push it on visitors. I’m also not concerned that it doesn’t make me much yet. Finally, it has a built in viral promotion system because every user is going to have to tell every guest at their wedding or reception about it.

Another site is One Billion Bulbs. This site provides a free and easy way to track energy savings by using compact fluorescent bulbs instead of standard incandescent ones. The site taps into some social media mojo by allowing people to form groups, and it appeals to our competitive spirits by ranking these groups, as well as ranking states & countries. The site isn’t monetized yet but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine it ending up being exclusively sponsored by a home store chain like Home Depot, or a light bulb company like Sylvania, perhaps in the form of a printable coupon or manufacturer’s rebate. In the end this site could make the owner a tidy sum with what amounts to unobtrusive advertising that visitors will actually really like (assuming it is a coupon or rebate).

The third site is Plastic Economy. This site provides an easy and free way for users to track credit card debt and helps users make decisions on which cards to pay down first. Since launch this site has generated substantial traffic in a short period of time thanks to some media mentions. Everyone should know how much money they owe, and they should know what their interest rate is, but some people (perhaps the same people with so little financial sense that they end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt) have a hard time dealing with and understanding these numbers and figures unless it is laid out for them in a very easy to understand way. So the site isn’t for everyone, but those it is for seem to like it. This site was also not monetized when first launch and only recently added ads (I’m assuming because traffic has reached high levels now). It isn’t hard to imagine how much ads so nicely targeted can make.

So, what is similar about those three sites? Well, they’re all set-it-and-forget-it type sites where they do not require constant updating or other maintenance, so they’re completely passive income streams. They’re all service-type content sites that rely on clever programming to make life easier rather than textual content to draw in visitors. They also are all fairly unique, and for the most part unmonetized (or at least, not at first).

So if you’re trying to get into website publishing, try to emulate these sites (and no, I don’t mean register SuperWeddingRegistry.com, OneTrillionBulbs.com, and NylonEconomy.com) by thinking up a unique service idea that could be accomplished by a website. Or, take a standard website model such as an article/forum/blog site and apply it to an underserved unique niche. The point being, the more unique your website, the higher likelihood that you will be successful. Then, once you have your site made, don’t stress out about monetizing it right away, wait until you have significant traffic.

For more tips on when is the right time to monetize, ask in our forums.

Do not fear popunders.

March 22nd, 2007 by Chris

There is anecdotal evidence that popunders are bad for business. It is said, by many, that they turn away users in droves and that you’re losing out on both traffic and links by using them.

Well, that just isn’t true.

For most of March I turned popunders off on my literature site. Normally there would be around 3 per session, now, 0. Do you know what happened to my traffic? Nothing. Daily traffic was stable, and March looks to do right around the same as January & February.

Of course I cannot test if I’d gain more links over time by not using popunders. For one thing it’d be impossible because I could never have a control group, and if that weren’t enough there is no way I’d go without the revenue I gain from popunders for such a long time.

So for those on fence, I still recommend to use popunders on most content sites, 1 per session isn’t very annoying, those that really hate them probably block them anyways, and they can provide a good amount of revenue. For those who do see them, it apparently will not prevent them from using your site.

Of course I get the infrequent email from some individual upset about the ads on my site and swearing they’ll never use it again, but the statistics do not lie. I was receiving around 70 thousand uniques a day with or without popunders. There wasn’t even a small decrease.

Google going CPA

March 20th, 2007 by Chris

As per this blog post Google is officially adding a CPA component to Adsense/Adwords.

They of course don’t mention the word “CPA” or “affiliate program” at all, characterizing it instead as an expansion of their Google Pack referrals, but we all know what it is.

This could be good, or it could be bad. On one hand a new way to make money is good, on the other hand CPA programs often vastly favor the advertiser.

Cookie Misconceptions

March 10th, 2007 by Chris

I was just doing some browsing on my brother’s computer, he uses McAfee and I got to looking into their SiteAdvisor feature, what a load of crap that was.

Apparently McAfee relies on the most ignorant of Internet users to review the security of various sites. One that was particularly distasteful was their reviews of Tribal Fusion.

People are absolutely spazzing out about finding Tribal Fusion tracking cookies on their PC. They say that if you get these tracking cookies on your PC you will get spam, viruses, trojans, and unwanted messages in your inbox.

The crazy thing is of course that Tribal Fusion is one of the more reputable ad networks and they do not allow things like drive-by-downloads.

If I were Tribal Fusion I would sue McAfee for libel, as well as any other socalled spyware removal company that improperly paints cookies in a bad light by grouping them with spyware or viruses.

The thing is the real crooks are companies like McAfee and Norton that blow security risks way out of proportion so that they can sell more of their products. They improperly label perfectly safe, and vital to Internet functionality, things such as cookies as security risks. In my book this makes them no better than snake oil salesmen who invent diseases to sell more of their bogus cures.

However we have the power to fight back. Nearly every family has a “computer person” who everyone in the family comes to for computer help. I’m willing to bet that the readers of this blog are the “computer person” for their family. This means that while the webmaster community is small, we wield great influence over other computer users.

Cookies are vital for website functionality and for advertising. The ignorant people writing those reviews on McAfee don’t realize that these “evil” tracking cookies are mostly used to prevent them from seeing too many ads. They also don’t realize that practically every advanced personalization feature used by websites requires cookies.

So, use your role as computer person and website publisher to educate your families and the public at large on the use of cookies. Tell your family not to install software from any company that overstates security threats, educate them about the nature of cookies, and if you run a community driven website or have a newsletter, why not put in a public announcement educating your readers about cookies?

It would be nice of an organization like the IAB could actually do something useful and run a public awareness advertising campaign to fix the negative connotation associated with cookies, but we all can do our part. For most of us Internet advertising is our bread and butter, and we should make sure it isn’t so badly portrayed.

Users Hate Interstitials… Right?

March 4th, 2007 by Chris

I’m a big fan of interstitials. I see them as the ultimate answer in the ad/ad-blocker arms race.

Most of the detractors of the format say they are extremely annoying to users and that people will leave your site.

Well… I was just doing some datamining of my site statistics and I noticed a very very suprising trend.

I only run interstitials on heavy resource load pages, ie search pages. If a user searches I figure they’re pretty set on using my site and the search is the most resource intensive thing on the site so the interstitial revenue subsidizes that.

After viewing an interstitial a user continues to view, on average, 7.79 pages on my site. This is compared to an average page views per visitor of only around 4. Users who view an interstitial still end up viewing almost twice as many pages after that interstitial as the average user views in total. That is pretty strong evidence that interstitiates are not the visitor-repellent may people claim.

Interstitials still are not the perfect answer to ads. Few networks provide a separate ad code just for serving them, and those that do typically do not offer high rates as the format hasn’t seemed to catch on with advertisers, but this information certainly should be enough to convince most webmaster to atleast give them a try, even if only in one small area of your site.

Directory Submissions for Less

March 1st, 2007 by Chris

I often recommend Best of the Web as a good directory to submit to after Yahoo. They’re one of the few legitimate larger directories out there that take paid submissions and if you’re site is in a high profit niche, or is an ecommerce site, it is almost always worth the expense. Find out more about their costs here .

In addition to their main directory they also have a blog directory which is either cheap or free depending on how quickly you want it reviewed.

Whats nice though is they just emailed me a coupon for March entitling visitors to 20% off either submission. Pretty nice I think. If you were putting off this submission or hadn’t made up your mind yet if you thought it was worth the expense, maybe the coupon will make a difference.

The coupon code is 4LEAFCLOVER.

Things are not always what they seem.

February 24th, 2007 by Chris

Has anyone else noticed a propensity of tech journalists based out of San Francisco to adopt a center of the universe mentality? Local fads to them are automatically national fads or the next big thing? Two obvious cases in point, Friendster & Second Life.

Friendster was never that popular but started mostly out in the San Francisco area and got significantly disproportionate news coverage considering it’s size. In every article I’ve ever read about that site I always had a private chuckle from the traffic figures given.

Second Life is much the same. Anyone who is in this industry and watches tech news shows and reads tech magazines knows about Second Life, and has known about it for… 5 years now? According to their website they have had only 1.3 million users actually enter Second Life in the past 60 days.

I thought of all this just because I was reading this article (good read, all things considered) which talks about the build or sell mentality among Internet entrepreneurs, and again I had a private chuckle because my literature site draws more monthly uniques than Friendster…. and the Friendster people spurned a deal worth 1 billion dollars in today’s stock value.

What does all this mean? Perception is reality maybe? Or do I need to hire a PR firm?

Ecommerce Site for Sale

February 23rd, 2007 by Chris

When Eragon the movie came out I bought up some domains related to the movie and had them developed for the selling of swords in case I had trouble ranking well with my existing sword site. But I’m happily sitting at #1 for the keyphrase now so I do not need the domains or the site I had made, but I figured it’d be a good opportunity for someone to get their feet wet in ecommerce. The site was developed to my specifications and so it is poised to do well if promoted as I used the same formula for success on it that I used on my site. I’m really just trying to recoup development costs with the sale.

So, if you’re interested, check it out.

View Auction

An Experiment in One-Product Ecommerce

February 20th, 2007 by Chris

I just finished a new ecommerce site, Organic Compost Tumbler, that sells just one product. This type of ecommerce site has unique concerns not found in other ecommerce sites, but just because you are only selling one product does not mean you can’t be successful.

The biggest factor in one-product ecommerce I believe is item quality. To sell just one thing that one thing has to be of high quality and unique. If you sell multiple items you can get away with selling both lesser quality and higher quality items and customers will make their decision based on price or another factor. If however you’re just selling one product you’ll need to make sure that product it of the utmost quality. You also have to make sure the product is one that can sell well and provide a reasonable profit as you will have fewer sales than if you had a catalogue of 200 products or more.

So, I decided to provide a step-by-step account of what I went through to launch this site in hopes that it’ll show others the path to do the same. Now if you all go out and make sites selling the exact same thing I’ll be a sad panda, but certainly use this to inspire you to go out and find your own product.

It all started with some shopping. I am a gardener, next to Internet stuff gardening is definitely my biggest hobby. I was looking around, again, for a good compost tumbler. The problem is I could always find things wrong with practically every one I saw. Then I stumbled upon the product that I am selling and it addressed literally all the problems I had with the other competing products. I thought to myself that this was a good quality product that I could sell, especially because it fits my criteria for choosing a product for ecommerce, and just incase you forgot, here it is again:

Chris’s Ecommerce Product Selection Criteria

  • It has to be hard to find locally, or else no one will look online.
  • It shouldn’t be carried by Walmart, or any other national retail chain, or else you will not be able to compete on price.
  • It has to be durable and not prone to technical malfunction or breakage, or else you’ll deal with too many returns.
  • It should be fairly expensive, so that you can make more profit per sale.
  • It should be fairly expensive, so that people will look online for a good deal if they do find it locally.
  • It needs to have a reasonable price to shipping cost ratio. If the shipping cost of a product is too large in comparison to the product’s purchase price the customer will not feel as if he is getting a good deal.

So I did some research and found out who manufacturers the item and contact them about wholesale policies. It turns out that they dropship mostly which is great for me considering having to pay for shipping to me, and then to the customer, would hurt my margins, and the boxes are huge and I’d need to buy warehouse space for storage.

Now at this point I would need to do other things had this been my first ecommerce site. I would have to form a business if I didn’t have one already, I would have to apply for an EIN from the IRS, I would have to register with my state to accept sales tax. If I didn’t luck out with the drop shipping I would have had to open up a UPS account and setup a daily pickup. Then maybe I’d buy some shipping supplies from Uline.com.

However I’m already setup for all of that, so all I really needed to do was get a domain, get the site made, and have a merchant account setup.

The first step was deciding on the site. I thought Garden Compost Tumbler would be best, and I even went so far as to do buy the domain, but then I did some keyword research and discovered that the second most popular compost keyword is “organic compost” so I decided to name my site Organic Compost Tumbler so that I could target both “organic compost” and “compost tumbler” with my title. This is just another good example of why you should always do keyword research. So I bought four domains, both the “garden” version and the “organic” version, and of each I got a hyphenated and non-hyphenated version.

Next I contacted John Conde, known to many forumites as Stymiee, about doing the development. The reason I selected John was because he could provide the whole package as he is an authorize.net certified developer, a merchant account reseller, and partner in a development company. So the work was done for $850, which included the merchant account setup fees. Then I also ran a $100 logo contest at GFXcontests for the logo.

If you include the domain and SSL the total cost to launch the site lands pretty solidly right on $1000.

With my profit margins I will only need 20-30 sales to makeup that cost, and after that I’ll make a nice profit. I don’t expect this site’s volume to be huge, but I do expect to earn at least 4 figures monthly off of it.

Promotion wise I plan to try something different. I will ask prominent garden bloggers if they will write an honest review of my tumbler in exchange for a free one. I’ll be more than happy to pay my wholesale cost for a tumbler to get that kind of exposure, even without considering the potential search engine benefits. Of course I also have my own garden blog that I’ll write a review on. I expect that once I do the links from my own sites, get the directory submissions done, and get reviewed by at least 5 bloggers I should get to the first page in the SERPs for my keyphrases, and eventually I hope to reach #1, though I’m sure that will take longer, perhaps a year.

I will be sure to update everyone with the progress of this site. I decided to make this project very transparent and open to let everyone see exactly how I go about doing what I do.

First update here.

Top of page...