For example, this story is the first that I’m submitting.  You can see my Buzz button in the upper left.  In fact, I think I hear it calling, “Click me…click me”.

For those of you who don’t know about Yahoo Buzz: It’s a special section of Yahoo! that allows users to vote on news topics.  It’s very similar to other social news sites like Digg and Reddit in that the users have the control on what appears on the main pages.  In Yahoo’s own words, Buzz is: “The Web’s most remarkable stories, determined by people like you. Stories are ranked based on your votes, emails, and searches.”

The “Buzz Effect”

What is also similar to Digg is the possibility of enormous increases in website traffic over a very short time. Digg is famous for the “Digg Effect” where small website owners get their servers overloaded and have their sites go offline from the sudden surge in website traffic.

So the question is: Can you handle getting “buzzed”?  I for one would like to find out.  Would you like to help? I certainly would not mind if you clicked the Buzz button above and “Buzzed me up!”.

Yahoo Is A Traffic Powerhouse

Yahoo Buzz will be a way for webmasters to tap into Yahoo’s millions of users for free.  In fact, Yahoo has this to say: “The best content may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage, potentially driving millions of clicks to your site.” I’m sure you like the sound of that!  How would you like to have your website featured on Yahoo’s home page?  Could you imagine how much traffic that would bring? The best part is that right now there is very little competition for your stories.  As webmasters find out how powerful this tactic is for getting traffic I’m sure that will change.

Submitting A Story Is Easy

Submitting a story to buzz is very simple.  One way is to just put a Yahoo Buzz button on your site.  It will look like the button you see above on this story.  I suggest using the advanced features that they explain further down the page at: http://buzz.yahoo.com/buttons  You can also directly submit your stories here: http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit/

If my readers would like, I might get one of my developers to build a Wordpress plugin that can automate putting Yahoo Buzz buttons on your blog.  Just sign up at http://www.BillMcIntosh.com using the sign up box on the top right and then comment on this story to let me know if you’re interested.  If I get enough response I’ll build the plugin and give it to you free.

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Mobile post sent by billmcintosh using Utterz.  Replies.

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Well, here is video I created to answer that question: Social Bookmarking + Social Networking = Instant Traffic.  You can also read this blog post about a really interesting social bookmarking & social networking traffic experiment.

In this experiment you’ll see some innovative ways to leverage many of the new “Web 2.0″ sites to gain some really fast traffic and search engine rankings. It is also a great way to launch a new website and has both short term and long term benefits for SEO and getting visitors to your website.

There are 3 key parts to this strategy:

1. Social Networking

Social networking sites are sites like MySpace or FaceBook where you can go make friends and socialize. However, these sites are also powerful marketing tools! Where else in history could you have instantly found and connected up with a worldwide group of people interested in just about any topic? This exactly what social networking offers you: To directly seek out and communicate with people who are interested in what you have to offer.

2. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is replacing some of the traditional functions of search engines. Instead of having to guess the perfect keywords and weed through the results, you can just see what sites other people liked and have visited. It’s a lot like word of mouth in the offline world.  The really important benefit here is that you can pick up loads of backlinks to your website - if you know how to use them correctly.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media sites are some of my favorites.

These are sites where you can create your own content and share it with others. You can create blogs, journals, photo galleries, videos and more. My favorite are the video sites.

Video marketing is a vital part of the strategy.  The problem is that so few people really know what it takes to make video marketing work correctly. You can post an amazing video, but if you don’t market your video correctly, nobody will ever see it!

This is what I hope to remedy with my social networking traffic experiment.

One other really surprising benefit from properly done video marketing: Did you know that your videos can very often outrank your website? Did you know that your videos can get top 10 rankings in all 3 of the major search engines? It’s actually pretty easy. How could THAT help your business?

Anyway, go check out the links I mentioned above and have fun watching the experiment!

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While out of town with my family I talked to a friend of mine and he told me about all the activity surrounding the video.  I had asked some friends and employees to go check out the video before I left and some of them had bookmarked it. This apparently started an avalanche.  It’s gotten an amazing number of video plays, more than 10 YouTube honors so far, made the top of its category, lot’s of people started talking about it online and then people began linking to it.

Although still on vacation (I’m in my hotel room at the Grand Canyon in AZ right now), I decided to fire up my laptop and check out what was happening. There seemed to be two different groups of comments.  The first group of people liked the video, and went to my site and signed up for my newsletter. Many of them have sent me nice comments and acknowledgements. I’ve received a ton of traffic, sign-ups and people sending me questions in the last 48 hours (I’ll eventually get to answer them all).

The second group of people are shocked by the amount of money my AdSense 1099 tax form shows and are skeptical.  And without all the background data I had planned to put in the upcoming blog post I guess it makes sense.  $3.5 million is a lot of money.

However, that document is 100% authentic and unaltered.  I really did make $3.5 million last year in revenue from AdSense.

Here is my attempt to answer some of the questions and comments surrounding the video:

I’m not promoting some get rich quick scheme.  In fact, I don’t even have anything for sale on my site.  I’ve had the domain name billmcintosh.com for a while and I decided recently to start a site where I’ll give away free coaching, tips, advice, wordpress plugins and scripts.  Does that mean I’ll never sell an internet marketing product ever?  I can’t promise that, but I definitely don’t have plans to release any kind of get rich quick scheme through this site anytime in the future.

I have so many websites I can’t even count them. they’re spread across 15+ dedicated servers plus more virtual private servers and shared hosting accounts. I buy some sites, I build some, but my staff creates most of them. My AdSense income came from a variety of places: Organic SEO, membership sites where I displayed AdSense to members while they are visiting the paid content section, sites that I drive traffic to with PPC, and on pages where I send people who I feel will not convert into customers for my own products, but might be a good match for someone else’s.

During 2007 I drove a TON of traffic.  Some days I had 150,000 visitors on just one of my sites.

And although you can see that I’ve made a lot of money using AdSense, I do not recommend someone relying upon 100% AdSense earnings for a business.  AdSense is volatile and Google is not an easy company to partner with.  I know of several horror stories where someone started making a nice income from AdSense, then overnight…SLAP! Google pulls the rug out from under them and bans their account for a silly reason.  And just like that they have no business.  So AdSense is a good start, but definitely not the only way you should earn income.I’m not claiming I made $3.5 million bucks in pure profit from AdSense. Nor is AdSense my only income source.  I have more than 20 full-time employees and probably 20 more outside contractors working for my various companies.  That along with marketing and promotion eats up a chunk of my revenue.When I get home (or maybe earlier if I have time while away) I’ll make another video and post giving you guys more details.  I’ll also provide some more proof for the skeptics out there. So if you feel you can learn something from me, go check out my video and sign up to my site.  If not, that’s fine too.  Either way I wish you luck with your adventures in the world of Internet marketing.

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Although this is a very cool change for Aweber, I don’t usually use Feedburner. This is because the rss feed it generates has all the links to posts as redirects. So if you show the Feedburner RSS button, any spiders that usually crawl and scrape the posts will send the link juice to the Feedburner redirect and not my site. Plus, displaying a Feedburner image showing “0 readers” for any length of time isn’t very encouraging.

On a new site every inbound link counts and getting them from a variety of sources as deep links directly to the post helps a lot. RSS feeds being syndicated with inbound links pointing directly to post pages is also extremely helpful.

When a site already is established and has a ton of inbound links and trust I’m sure these harmful effects are minor.

So before I could get excited about integrating aweber with FeedBurner, I needed to figure out how to solve this problem.

My solution was to show everyone a Feedburner image which takes them to my rss feed at “/rss”, but when they click the link, my javascript fires and switches the link to the actual FeedBurner feed. You can see this on one of my newer sites:

This results in users going to Feedburner, but robots, with their inability to follow javascript, follow the original “/rss” path. Since we want to get our content and posts crawled and indexed by other sites linking back to us instead of FeedBurner, this is perfect.

The other benefit, and the point of this post, is that now we can use FeedBurner right off the bat, and it will count all our aweber subscriptions along with our RSS readers. That is why the image above shows 75k readers (Heck, only a handful of blogs have that many RSS readers!)

I am currently rolling this functionality into a plugin that will additionally give you an aweber subscription box, along with help in getting the two services linked properly. I am pretty excited about it and hope to have it released in the next week or so. If you want be notified of updates and instructional help videos that go along with this plugin be sure to subscribe to my site using the subscription box on the top right of BillMcintosh.com.

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Today Google announced the introduction of their new AdManager service. It’s described as an ad serving tool for publishers of small and medium sized websites. With it you can serve ads from AdSense and other networks along with serving in house advertising as well.

Google describes Admanager this way:

“It can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure directly-sold and network-based inventory. Google Ad Manager offers a wealth of features, including an intuitive user interface, automated yield optimization, and proven Google speed and reliability. Best of all, Google Ad Manager is free. Ad Manager currently addresses the ad management and serving needs of publishers with smaller sales teams and effectively complements the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which is focused on publishers with large sales teams. We’re excited to add DART for Publishers to our suite of products, and we’re committed to the continued development and enhancement of DoubleClick’s offerings.”

You can read more about Ad Manager here and here.

It sounds like a great tool for webmasters on a limited budget who want to have a high quality ad-serving system on their sites. After all the horror stories about AdSense publishers getting banned and losing access to their accounts I’m personally a little gun-shy about giving Google complete control over all the advertising. What happens if they start banning AdManager accounts too? Will I lose all my reports and data?

What do you think? Would you try this on your sites? Leave me a comment and let me know your take on Google’s newest toy.

I’ll be testing it out and will report back to you on how it’s working for me.

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Last week Google accidentally let slip that they will be penalizing AdWords advertisers for slow loading times of landing pages. You can view the Google’s FAQ on this topic here.

(For those not intimately familiar with AdWords, if you are bidding $.05 for the keyword phrase “best keyword ever”, you may have to increase your bid anywhere from $.20 to as much as $10.00 if Google thinks your landing page is too slow.)

Wow. This brings up a bunch of questions. What is “slow”? How will I know if I am penalized? How do I fix it? How much will this cost me!?

What is “slow”?

Since “slow” is a relative term, you may think your page loads great. Google says in their Help Center:

…we evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region.

How will I know if I am penalized?

Look at how your keyword is graded on the Keyword Analysis page. If it says, “This page loads slowly”, you are affected.

How do I fix it?

Put simply, if you are a web developer, just follow the directions they list: use few redirects, reduce page size, stop using interstitials, and minimizing iframes. If you aren’t, you will need to get someone to help you.

And even once you do fix it, it will take awhile for Google to take away the penalty:

The AdWords system re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis. If you make significant improvements to your landing page’s load time, you should see an improved Quality Score and lower minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids. Note that your Quality Score may update incrementally over a number of weeks after you improve your load time.

How much will this cost me?

No one knows yet the extent of “slow” that Google is penalizing. But irregardless, if you are not actively managing your AdWords campaign and watching for penalties, this could cost you A LOT of money. Like any of the other penalties Google lists in their 100 page document, if you don’t know what they are, you can’t be possibly be able to ensure they don’t happen to you.

My takeaway from this: AdWords Is For Professionals

Adwords is going from “too darn complicated” to “tax law complicated”. With so much money being spent, it is not a system for an AdWords newbie to dabble in. Unless you have a wildly successful campaign that can make you money even with all the mistakes you WILL make, it will more than likely cost you A LOT of money.

If you start an AdWords account with the desire to “learn as you go”, you are shooting yourself in the foot. You will cause penalties to your account that can take years to correct. Sometimes, the problems will never go away.

And with this penalty, you could be over-paying Google, not know it, and not even realize it was because of your site speed (or dozens of other factors most new webmasters wouldn’t have a clue about).

Trying to figure out AdWords as you go is like trying to represent yourself in court. Sure, you may get lucky, but do you want to bank on that?

photo credit: biscuitsmlp

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For those of you who don’t know: Google periodically cleans house in their AdWords program. They single out websites and assign them a poor “quality score”. These sites hit by this bad score have their minimum bid prices skyrocket to $5 or $10 per click. This effectively bans you from AdWords since most webmasters cannot afford to pay $10 for every click Google sends their way.

These rounds of quality score updates have affectionately been called the “Google Slap” by those in the Internet Marketing community. Not even the big spenders in AdWords are immune from the Google Slap. I’ve personally had campaigns that spent six figures every month with Google get slapped and go from $150,000+ in monthly spending to nothing. So they don’t seem to mind offending big advertisers.

Over the past day or so there’s a whole new round of Google Slaps hitting many sites. This is round 4 of the Google Slap. Webmasters, marketers and business owners everywhere woke up this morning finding their bids jacked up from pennies to $10. The people who relied upon AdWords as their biggest source of traffic are essentially out of business overnight.

I’ve heard rumors that in some cases Google Slapped so many sites this time that some major keywords actually have no advertisers running at all. I’ve seen several of the markets I’m advertising in get thinned out where there were dozens of advertisers last week and now there are less than 10.

I completely understand Google’s desire to have quality listings in the AdWords program, but the problem I have is that Google sure seems inconsistent and arbitrary in the way they apply the quality score. I’ve seen horrible sites survive the Slap and keep running fine while at the same time quality sites get hit hard. I even have a campaign I manage that ranks in the top 4 organic search results for all its major keywords. It’s a 10 year old site and is an authority in its market. However, Google has slapped it and refuses to adjust its poor quality score. So they’ll send free traffic from their organic search results, but will not let me pay them to be in AdWords.

Another problem with the Google Slap is, in some cases, once you’re slapped you can’t fix it. You might as well throw away your domain name and start all over.

That’s why I always advise that anyone who wants to use Google AdWords to study up on it completely before doing anything. I don’t mean a casual study either. You must understand all aspects of using Google AdWords; Including their Landing Page & Site Quality Guidelines, the Google Webmaster Guidelines and how to make your site generate sales effectively. Otherwise you’re likely throwing money out the window while risking being slapped permanently.

Now to top things off, Google accidentally uploaded the future version of their terms of use. This was a mistake and they quickly pulled it down, but not before some clever webmasters had a look at what’s coming in the future. Google is apparently going to keep track of how well the server your website is on runs. If it runs to slow for Google’s liking, they’ll slap you!

I’ll cover more on this one within the next day or two.

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