Website Publisher Blog | Website Promotion, Generating Revenue, Website Management - Part 9 » Website Publisher Blog » Website Promotion, Generating Revenue, Website Management

SEO Guide PDF Available

July 17th, 2007 by Chris

Just a quick headsup that my SEO Guide is now available in pdf form. It is only available to registered forum members though, so you will need to register to download it. Registration is free of course.

Enjoy.

Posted in: General by: Chris | 3 Comments »

The Digg Effect Revisited

June 30th, 2007 by Chris

More fun in traffic analysis…..

A few months ago one of my sites made it to the front pages of Digg & del.icio.us and since so many people optimize, work, and dream to achieve the same, I did a writeup about how much traffic it provided. Visit the link to read that.

Well I just got back from a vacation and apparently while I was on vacation my survival site also made it to the front pages of both sites, and so I thought it’d be fun to do another report about the traffic.

Unlike the last report though, I do have some specific time information to put things into perspective. Google analytics (atleast that I can find) doesn’t do minute or hourly reports very well, so I’m using my secondary program to get this info.

Digg

I got to the Digg homepage at around 11:56 PM Mountain Time on 6/22, the last recorded hit from the homepage was 10:08 PM Mountain Time on 6/23. However, that hit is an orphan and I think was probably from a cached page since there is no more hits near it. Really, by my logs I lost the homepage listing at 6:22 AM Mountain Time on 6/23. So really I was only up for around 6.5 hours and in the middle of the night.

Here is the story of my rise and fall:

On 6/22, all times MST.
Submitted at 12:06 (near as I can tell, Digg’s crawlers visited me then).
12:23 AM, hits from upcoming page 4 (2 uniques from here).
10:54 AM, hits from upcoming page 3 (9 uniques from here).
12:08 PM, hits from upcoming page 2 (37 uniques from here).
4:55 PM, hits from upcoming root (61 uniques from here).
11:56 PM, touchdown! (6,291 uniques from the homepage)

My fall went as follows:

On 6/23, all times MST.
6:23 AM, moved to page 2 (3,008 uniques from here).
1:20 PM, moved to page 3 (728 uniques from here).
4:05 PM, moved to page 4 (346 uniques from here).
6:34 PM, moved to page 5 (480 uniques from here).
11:26 PM, moved to page 6 (236 uniques from here).

Additionally I received 1,884 uniques from the post page itself, these were scattered over the whole length of time, but did seem to be more concentrated on the way up than the way down.

In total the trip to the top of Digg garnered 16,157 uniques. Additionally KevinRose.com (the blog of Digg’s cofounder) chipped in 362 uniques (last time this happened I didn’t have a mention on Kevin’s site as well).

Normally this site only gets around 2k uniques per day, so this was a substantial increase, last time for my larger site it was a drop in the bucket.

I find it interesting too how so little traffic is gained on the way up the ladder as opposed to the way down the ladder.

del.icio.us

Rise & Fall on 6/23

2:59 AM, traffic from /popular/
11:01 AM, traffic from homepage (255 uniques).
7:21 PM, off homepage, back to /popular/

In total I received 640 unique visitors from del.icio.us, 340 from /popular/, 255 from their homepage, and the rest from varying other pages.

So, in comparison, I was on del.icio.us’s homepage for 8 hours and received 255 uniques, during the middle of the day on Saturday. I was on Digg’s homepage in the middle of the night Friday night/Saturday morning for 6.5 hours and received 6,200 uniques.

Again though, I cannot be sure where I was placed. I could have made it to #1 on Digg for all I know, whereas just the bottom of the first page of del.icio.us.

Page Views Per Visitor
This is rather sorry….

Digg: 1.81
del.icio.us: 3.10
wikipedia: 6.60
surviveoutdoors.com: 7.64
google: 6.27
yahoo: 8.31
msn: 8.13

Normally this site gets most often mentioned in such sites because of it’s quiz (for instance the quiz has gotten Farked before which results in a huge traffic spike). The quiz is 21 questions and generally creates 25 pages views for each visitor that takes it. This also helps increase my ppv for the generic traffic sources listed above.

The page that got Digg’d had all the applicable information on 1 page, it was deep within the site, so it makes sense that most only viewed 1 page.

Do they click on Ads?

Again, revisiting the topics I broached in my first blog post on this subject, do the visitors from Digg click on Adsense ads or not? Well, for the two main days of the traffic my CTR was 1.01%, exactly 1 week earlier it was 1.73%. So they’re definitely less likely to click by this information. But I do run Tribal Fusion CPM ads on this site as well, so clicks aren’t always needed.

Posted in: Website Management, Website Promotion by: Chris | 5 Comments »

Adsense CPA Opens for All

June 29th, 2007 by Chris

Just a quick heads up to everyone that Adsense’s CPA system is now open for all publishers. Check it out.

This could end up being both good and bad for Adsense publisher revenue. On one hand it is another way to make money, on the other hand it could end up having the same problems of many CPA programs, namely a merchant who has poor conversions which end up earning us less. That is the main different in my eyes between say CPC & CPA. With CPC the publisher get paid no matter how poorly the merchant’s website converts. With CPA the publisher only gets paid if the merchant’s website converts. So with CPA you’re really dependent on the merchant knowing what they’re doing (and they don’t always).

Posted in: Ad Networks, Affiliate Programs, Generating Revenue by: Chris | No Comments »

New SEO Guide

June 27th, 2007 by Chris

I’ve been slowly going through my successful website guide and rewriting all the articles to update them to 2007. They were first written in 2002 mostly and so many were outdated.

I have just completed the rewrite of the SEO section and have decided to break that out into a separate guide all it’s own. So I’m proud to announce my new SEO Guide.

The reasons are many, but basically I know through monitoring my traffic that most of the recommendations from others to this site are in regards to it being a place to learn SEO. I thought it would be prudent to create an ideal landing page for these people, moreso than the existing SEO category, something that really gave them a course-like introduction to search engine optimization. A guide is the perfect format.

Some of the content in the guide is just rewrites of old articles, but other articles are newly written in the past few months. In total the guide is around 60 pages if it were printed out. This should make it pretty much the longest free SEO guide on the Internet.

Links, recommendations, and Diggs are all appreciated. If you Digg it though please Digg the guide itself, rather than this blog post.

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns feel free to post a comment here, in the forums, or send me an email through this site’s contact form. I’m specifically seeking feedback for ways to make the guide more useful.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 7 Comments »

The Human Factor: SEO for People

June 14th, 2007 by Chris

There is a pervasive myth or misconception in the SEO world that has to do with how your site is constructed. Many believe that your site needs to be strict xhtml with a table-less CSS markup or the search engine is going to vomit when it tries to crawl your site. They correctly recognize that a compatible, quick loading, standard following markup tends to be good for the end user and so they figure a search engines wants, nay needs, to see that.

This is not true in the slightest, a search engine will happily gobble down 1995 spawned HTML markup generated by Frontpage if it is surrounding good content.

Instead, what people have stumbled onto here, is the Human Factor. The Human Factor, summed up simple, is this: If people like your site, you will rank better.

How is this possible? Well there is this little implant put in your brain at birth and…. Well actually, its possible because of a beautiful system called PageRank developed by Lawrence Page & Sergey Brin, the guys who founded Google. PageRank, at it’s core, is a recommendation system, if a site is recommended, it gets a little bonus. But I’m not here to talk about PageRank, follow the above link to read more on it. I’m here to talk about the Human Factor.

It is important when building, optimizing, and hoping to profit from a website that you remember the human factor. You can do something to make your site better, and doing so can in the end help your search engine rankings, increase your traffic, and make you more money, and it isn’t going to be because of any direct connection with any of those things, but rather because you made your site better, more enjoyable, and yes people like it.

So many SEO myths end up spawned of the Human Factor, but they’re all easily enough explained away. More futile are the arguments that take place regarding it. Everyone will agree that you should do things like use clean code and follow accessibility guidelines, but what they argue about is the reason why. Some people just insist it’s a direct relationship, they haven’t heard about the Human Factor yet.

Well, should we really blame them though? Things can be confusing out here. For instance, some things that make your site better for people also make your site better for search engines. I’m talking about accessibility. What are search engines but big, relatively dumb, blind, text readers. They can’t see your final rendered page, all your pretty images, and aren’t always smart enough to use context clues. So the same things you add to your pages to make them more accessible to the disabled will help you with search engine rankings… both directly in this case and indirectly through the Human Factor.

The bottom line, and the purpose of this post, is to explain a simple truth. Often, the best piece of SEO advice I can give someone is to make a better site, publish better content, add better features, or otherwise make people like your site more. If you build a site that is useful, informative, and entertaining people will use it, they will recommend it, and you will get better search engine rankings.

Make a poorly constructed site with generic content, a shoddy design, cross-browser compatibility problems, and you’re just making your link building efforts that much harder.

So get a quality design, a professional logo, brag about your content, and maybe give your visitors the power to control content. They’ll like you for it, and in the end, Google will too.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization by: Chris | 3 Comments »

Various Google Updates

June 13th, 2007 by Chris

The Googleplex has been buzzing with lots of little busy bees so far this week.

Adwords advertisers now can see performance data for individual sites in the content network (Adsense) and then exclude the bad ones and or do site targetted ads on the good ones. This should, hopefully, benefit quality Adsense advertisers (most of you who read my blog I’m sure) and hurt the ones who just publish garbage/scrapers etc. This was in beta before, but now it should be for everyone.

Google has updated their webmaster central interface, including adding a new paid link reporting tool. Additionally reinclusion requests are now called “reconsideration requests.” Why the change? Beats me.

Finally, Google Analytics has made a series of updates including turning all the lines in your referrer report into clickable links, something that always annoyed me in the past. However, they still truncate off the query string of your referring URLs, so if your referrer is a dynamic page that uses a query string you still can’t figure out what that query string is.

Posted in: Ad Networks, General, Search Engine Optimization, Website Management by: Chris | 1 Comment »

Trustmarks, and why I think HackerSafe is a waste of money

May 17th, 2007 by Chris

A trustmark is a badge placed on your site that gives consumers a feeling of security so that they will buy from you. It doesn’t mean actual security, just the perception of security. You can get a trustmark from your SSL provider, which means they verified your phone number and you paid for it, hardly a bastion of security. This mark is usually included for free though along with your SSL certificate.

You can get a trustmark from your payment gateway sometimes. Authorize.net started making them available. They are free with your Authorize.net account, and while they look and sound all “security-like” in reality all they do is verify you have an account at Authorize.net.

You can make up trustmarks. I did one for my newest ecommerce site, its just a little lock icon reminding the people the connection is secure.

There are lots of other vanity trustmarks you can buy. You can pay Truste to review your privacy policy, you can pay the BBB for a membership, you can pay Dun & Bradstreet for a membership, you can pay numerous chamber of commerce like organizations for memberships.

You can also buy a trustmark from a so-called “security auditing company” like ScanAlert (makers of HackerSafe). When you send a request for information to ScanAlert you will start getting phone calls and emails, regularly, from very enthusiastic people who really want you to sign up and pay them the $80 or $150 a month or whatever it is. They make a compelling argument; they have numerous statistics showing how a trustmark can increase conversions, they will tell you how much money they will make you, they will tell you that you’ll get PageRank from their search engine friendly directory and that will help you in the search engines (until Google bans them for selling links anyways), and oh, they’ll scan your server from the outside for basic security things like not having a firewall setup. Sure sure, they scan for thousands of vulnerabilities, most of which are going to be killed by your firewall. It’s like an anti-virus company bragging about how many threats they’ve protected you against, not that there really are 100,000 active Windows XP viruses in the world…

Anyways, I get the distinct impression the company is 90% salesmen and 10% tech guys, which makes me not want to do business with them.

So, to sum up, the first main benefit is increased conversions. This can be had with any trustmark, HackerSafe isn’t better in my opinion than any other. The second main benefit is a link from their search engine friendly directory, but small merchants are buried deep and it isn’t likely to pass PageRank for much longer I think. The third main benefit is superficial (in my opinion) security scanning, which most people just don’t need.

A new company has a different, and I think better, approach.

BuySafe more or less acts like an insurance provider for online merchants. They offer purchasers the option of buying a bond for their purchase that will pay them if something goes awry with the transaction. This is free to merchant providers, as they make their money selling the insurance. They have a variety of ways to implement their system, from a widget post checkout that offers customers the ability to buy the insurance, or a module that integrates inline with your checkout process if you use one of a number of popular hosted solutions or shopping cart scripts (including most of the ones mentioned throughout this site).

Mostly I dislike HackerSafe because the numerous times on the phone with them I recognized attempts at high pressure sales tactics, and their salesmen were just plain wrong about some security, technical, and marketing things that I’m well versed in. I got the distinct impression that they cared far more about selling to me, than security or anything else, so I couldn’t even use them out of principle. In the end though thats fine, there are numerous free alternatives

Posted in: Ecommerce by: Chris | 3 Comments »

One Product Ecommerce Update

May 16th, 2007 by Chris

This is an update to my previous post on the topic.

My compost tumbler site is now profitable. My total development costs were $1000 almost on the nose, and my marketing costs were around $800. With a profit of $40-$60 per sale depending on specific product model I needed 36 sales to pass my original investment, and I’ve hit that mark in just under 2 months of operation. I’ve actually made a little more, as I had some larger orders with profit margins of ~$100.

So, I’m averaging around $1k per month in profit at this point. There are different ways to look at that. Compared to other sites I own, $1k a month is rather poor, on the other hand many new website publishers have problems reaching that point. My workload for this site is relatively low, it takes me 30 seconds to 1 minute of actual work to process each order, and that’s all I really have to do. So profit for time invested is certainly a very nice ratio.

My original marketing budget included 3 free products to send to prominent bloggers for review, only one blogger has so far written a review, although the others tell me they’re working on it, and one says she plans a large 2 part series. Some traffic is being provided by these individuals. Additionally I blogged about the tumbler on my own garden blog and that provided some sales, especially at first.

For search engine listings I have very few. I have good rankings, 8th, on MSN for my main keywords and good rankings for minor ones as well. Google I am only ranked on some obscure terms, and not very well, overall the site seems to be experience what many would call the “sandbox” but that’s okay, its not like I mean to pay my mortgage with this money, and eventually I know it’ll break out, sites always do, and then it should rank highly. My only Yahoo referrals are from their directory so far, I’ve added Yahoo sitemap submission to my todo list.

Most of my traffic then is coming from direct referrals from the aforementioned blogs, and PPC marketing. My PPC marketing efforts are achieving a very nice ROI, MSN especially (MSN traffic converts better than Google traffic, AOL traffic does pretty good too). I got $200 in free credits when signing up with MSN thanks to one of those various coupons they’re always mailing out, and so far I’ve put that to good use.

Overall the most impressive thing with the site has been the conversion rate. After discounting traffic I’ve been getting from the blog you’re reading (untargeted traffic) the site is only getting around 30 uniques a day now, for the first month it was even lower, and lately it has been averaging 1 sale a day. Or, to say it another way, my unique eCPM is above $1000. I can only imagine what’ll happen when the site grows most established and gets more traffic.

One thing I did not count on was a price increase. The manufacturer increased their prices due to an increase in shipping costs, but overall that hasn’t dented my sales. So that’s good, I was worried for a time.

So, the site is a success, I’m even thinking about making a few similar sites because I’ve identified a couple other garden products I feel I could efficiently sell. I just have to figure out if they’re drop shipped or not.

Between this post and the previous one I’ve outlined every step I took when making this site. I’ve kept no tips or tricks back, no secrets, truth be told there aren’t any. It’s all rather simple. In the end you just need to identify a product that you can market, and that fits my ecommerce selling criteria. Gardening is my biggest hobby, and I have a couple existing gardening sites, so I chose a gardening product. A product you would choose would be different, but the overall process should be the same.

Posted in: Ecommerce, Website Promotion by: Chris | 5 Comments »

Going Subscription

May 13th, 2007 by Chris

I tell you what, I don’t like the outlook for Internet advertising.

Ad companies are making lots of money, Internet advertising is growing, and companies like it because it works.

But for publishers, all I see is revenue decreasing on the same or more traffic, especially from ad blockers. I now notice a significant gap between ads shown and impressions delivered and that gap is getting larger and larger, approaching 40 or 50%, thats crazy.

Things like preroll video ads are poised to take off, but if you aren’t running a site with video that won’t help you. What would be really useful is if ad networks stopped focusing on popunders and instead worked to sell and perfect the interstitial, as that unit is more insulated from ad blockers than any other type.

Granted, there are many unscrupulous people out there who use banner ads or popups as a vehicle to spread spyware, so there is a security reason to block some ads, but these ad blocking providers go too far with blocking all ads, even benign ones, much like the way that they have lied to the public about cookies.

Ecommerce is great because you cannot adblock it, much more reliable form of revenue. Also, you need far less traffic to make good money with an ecommerce site than with a content site. So I’m glad I’ve diversified my income stream and have my ecommerce sites. Additionally my foray into manufacturing should pay off very nicely as well, eventually eclipsing my revenue from all other sources. Finally, I have 2 sites in development that use affiliate marketing in an incentivized way that makes users want to make sure they give you commission, so no worries about ad blocking there.

However, that still leaves my content sites I already have, and as far as I can see the best option will be to make them subscription sites.

So this Summer I plan to add subscription features to my literature site. The base level will just to be turn the ads off, and at this time I’ll probably add anti-ad blocker code to point people to this subscription if they do block my ads. I plan to have this one be $5 per month.

Then, because so many students & teachers use my site (I get thousands of incoming links from online syllabi), I plan to add additional tiers of subscriptions for specific groups. A library subscription will be $20 per month and allow up to 10 computes simultaneous access. A teacher subscription will be $30 a month and allow 1 teacher account and 30 student accounts with value added features such as annotation works for the students, tasking them to complete online quizzes, a notice board blog, private messages, and a file upload homework submission function. Finally, a district level account that is $300 a month and allows 20 teacher accounts.

Now, this site gets around 1.5 million uniques per month (true monthly uniques, not just daily uniques * 30 which would be much more). So even if my conversion rate for subscriptions is 0.001%. That is 1500 subscriptions a month, which is a huge number considering in 10 months at the same rate I’d have 15,000 subcriptions (minus any cancellations of course). Realistically I think I could expect a far lower conversion rate, around 1 ten-thousandth or 0.0001%. Which is still 150 subscriptions a month.

So really, I expect that 6 months to a year after launch the subscription revenue should pass the ad revenue from the free half of the site. It should only grow after that, I could see it reaching as much as $50k per month. That type of revenue would additionally allow me to hire more people, full time in house even, to add content and features to the site, which should entice more subscriptions, etc.

If you run any big content sites like I do, you might think about doing something similar. It might cost me $1-$3k to have the coding done for this system, but I’m sure that’ll be earned back really quickly, and everything beyond that is profit.

Posted in: Generating Revenue by: Chris | 4 Comments »

About Adsense Pricing

May 12th, 2007 by Chris

I get really annoyed with Adsense sometimes. Starting in April they started passing out seemingly automated optimization reports that more or less told me, and many other publishers, that we’d earn more if we didn’t block so many domains with the competitive ad filter.

Well myself, and others, block many PPC arbitrage type bad sites with a poor user experience because we’ve notice an earnings increase by doing so. There is also a theory that Google is looking at how often people click the ads and then immediately hit the back button as a way to gauge the quality of our traffic. This seems unfair when it is the shoddy ad that is causing it but anyways…

After getting those rather annoying optimization reports I sent an email to an Adsense rep I’ve worked with in the past, his answers were enlightening somewhat.

Thanks for your in-depth email.

The situation you’ve described is not an easy one to diagnose. The truth
of the matter is that blocking MFA-type URLs from your site can result in
either a rise or decline in revenue (depending on what those ads were
doing for you earnings-wise prior to blocking them).

What I can tell you regarding some of your ending questions is that our
system takes into consideration factors such as what keywords and concepts
triggered the ads, and also which ads that are shown. For example, a click
on an ad for digital cameras on a page about photography can be worth less
than if the same ad shows on a page where digital cameras are compared.
Please note that the system is dynamic and can change with time. The goal
is to ultimately offer even more relevant ads with a better customer
experience.

I hope this clarifies matters. I’m sorry to hear of your declines, and
hope to see your revenue returning to levels with which you’re satisfied
in the coming weeks.

Feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions.

I then got this further followup:

Thanks for following up. To clarify, the targeting mechanism takes into
account a number of factors including the price of the ad, as well as the
ad’s relevance to your page, and the likelihood of the ad being clicked by
your visitors.

There is no blanket policy, but in general, if one of the types of ads to
which you’re referring is predicted to have success (both in terms of
revenue and click-through) on your site, the algorithm will opt to show

I never knew it before, and I’ve never seen anyone else mention it certainly, that ad pricing can change based on relevance. One would think though that Google wouldn’t be penalizing you for shortcomings in their content analysis and targeting algorithms. What is more likely I think is that they, obviously catering to advertisers, make judgement based on the ad’s relevance to your page and then apply a modifier to ads that aren’t 100% matches. If, with that modifier, the ad still pays more than the less than 100% matches it’ll be shown, but you won’t earn as much off it as if your site was perfectly targeted to it.

What concerns me though is how Google Hints affects this since using hints you can get ads that differ from your content. Additionally I feel that Google is putting maybe a little too much stock in pure content matching, which isn’t the same as serving ads your visitors are most interested in. Your visitor’s desires do not always match with your content.

For what its worth, I’ve also tried stopping all the blocking I’ve done and my income did not increase at all.

Anyways, count me as yet another webmaster frustrated with the seeming endless gradual decline in Adsense earnings.

Posted in: Ad Networks by: Chris | 4 Comments »