I’ve been building AdSense sites for years now, but have never done much from the other side, in other words participating in the AdWords programme as an advertiser. But I’ve been getting into this over the last few days to promote a product on a client site.

As pretty much of a noob at this side of things, it appears to me to all hinge on the so-called Quality Score, which is basically a measure of the relevance of your landing page to the keyword you’re targeting. The higher your score for the keyword, the less you’re liable to pay for a good ad placement and subsequent click than an equivalent ad with a lower score. This is obviously desirable as your advertising budget then stretches further and you end up achieving a higher return on investment.

Quality Score

The obvious question, then, is how to increase your quality score. Seems it’s doing the same kind of stuff that makes you successful in organic search: choosing good keywords, paying attention to on-page and off-page optimisation, and even targetting your ads very specifically at the keyword you’re bidding for.

For example, say the target keyword is Bible stories for children, you should:

• use the keyword in the page, if possible in the title, meta description, heading tags, page body, alt tags, etc
• get some links pointing to the page with the keyword as anchor text, and
• use the keyword within the AdWords ad itself

I’m sure there are other finer points / black arts to be considered, but these appear to be the most obvious factors for now. Feel free to comment below if you think I’ve overlooked anything.

Related posts:

1. AdWords competition update
2. Competition: win a £30 AdWords voucher
3. Bing traffic converts well

Niche websites are now relatively easy to create and run without possessing advanced technical skills, thanks to modern web publishing platforms like WordPress. Combine this publishing ability with a little keyword research, basic SEO skills and an appropriate advertising or affiliate program and you have all the essential elements to create a largely passive income stream. Unsurprisingly there is a growing number of individuals cashing in on this opportunity.

As a result there is a growing marketplace for those wishing to trade these niche sites, fueled by those who specialise in creating them specifically with a view to sell them on for a quick profit (a practice known as “flipping”). Conventional wisdom seems to suggest a nominal value of around twelve times average monthly earnings – in other words a year’s income – for these sites. Judging by the number of those involved in this market, it must be profitable enough. But personally I would never sell one of my niche sites for so little.

I look at it this way: how much money would I need to earn and stash away in the bank or some other form of investment in order to generate a certain amount (for argument’s sake let’s use a figure of $100 per month)? At a rate of ten percent per year I’d need $12,000 in capital. Of course in the current climate I’d be unlikely to achieve a ten percent return without taking on a lot of risk – perhaps it’d be more realistic to expect a three or four percent return, in which case I’d need between $30,000 and $40,000 to generate that $100 per month.

On the other hand, using the “twelve times earnings” rule of thumb I mentioned earlier I could only reasonably expect to sell my $100-a-month site for around $1,200 – which I certainly could not invest to achieve a similar return. So the site is worth far more to me earning a steady $100 per month, year after year than the single-year value of its earnings up front.

Of course circumstances may force one to sell an asset for the sake of ready cash, but given the choice, my advice is always to hang onto these “virtual capital” assets for as long as possible.

No related posts.

Many internet marketers set themselves a goal of earning enough via their online pursuits to either scale back their day jobs or give them up altogether. But as you become more reliant on your online income it becomes increasingly important to understand the risks to your business systems so you can minimise them whilst at the same time putting plans in place to help you recover if an income-disrupting event should occur.

There are a number of potential online and offline points of failure which could compromise your ability to conduct your online business. Since internet marketing is technology heavy, in this article we’ll focus on a few of the technical challenges you may encounter and discuss things you can do now to minimise their impact on your earnings.

Web hosting problems

Problems with your web host can be devastating because often the first you’ll know about it is when you see the dreaded “Account Suspended” page coming up where your site used to be. This can happen for a number of reasons, but typically it’s because you have exceeded your resource allocation in some way. The obvious solution to this is to maintain two (or more) separate hosting accounts, preferably with different service providers. In the event of a dispute with one you can switch your site over to the other until the problems are resolved. Incidentally, this is why it’s a good idea to use a domain registrar that’s independent of your web host.

Assuming you have more than one site, you can also significantly hedge your bets by hosting them separately. Then even if something bad happens to one account you can continue to fly on your remaining engine while the first one gets fixed!

Search engine ban

Almost as bad as having your site suspended is having it de-indexed by the search engines. Or perhaps it’s worse because it’s a lot harder to rectify. You can probably avoid it happening by using strictly white hat SEO techniques to promote your site, and can certainly mitigate its effects by running more than one website. Beyond that you could look at driving traffic using social networking or building a subscriber list, so you are not completely at the mercy of the search engines.

Falling out of favour with a monetisation partner

In a similar vein, you should do all you can to stay strictly within the terms of your contract with whatever monetisation partners you have – the internet is littered with sad tales of those who’ve been kicked out of Google’s AdSense program for failing to comply with their conditions. By now I hope it’s becoming obvious to you that you should also monetise your sites in several different ways rather than rely on a single partner.

Site hacked

In case you haven’t heard, there are plenty of unscrupulous individuals and syndicates roaming the net. Whether out of mischief or malice they often hijack others’ sites for their own ends. Whilst you may not be able to stop a truly sophisticated hacker who targets your site, you can deter most other opportunistic attacks by maintaining strong security around login details and staying up to date with new releases of your website platform. As the saying goes: when being chased by a lion, it’s not necessary to out-run the lion, just the other people running from it!

Computer failure / loss of communications

Don’t forget that your computer and internet connection are also vital links in your business’s technical chain. Do you have a secondary machine in case your regular one gives up the ghost? Do you have backups of your mission-critical data? How will you manage your site if you lose your internet connection? My answer to these questions is the same as all the others: have a backup plan that you can activate at short notice to minimise downtime.

As you can see, most of these risks can be addressed by building redundancy and diversity into your business. There’s nothing new there – financial experts have been doing it for years. But perhaps it’s time we in the online marketing game grow up a bit and learn some of these lessons from others’ experiences rather than our own – it’s much less painful that way.

Related posts:

1. How to stay safe online
2. Internet Marketing: is it for you?
3. The truth about article marketing

Apologies if you tried to access this site in the last few days only to be told it’s suspended – I was informed by my web host that it was consuming excessive resources. This came as quite a surprise to me as it’s not a particularly high traffic site, nor have I been aware of any problems with it in the past.

Culprit plugins

In any case, I take my host’s word for it that it was causing undue load on the server, so I set about lightening it up a bit. I very much doubt anything in the WordPress core would be causing the problem, so the first thing I did was scan through my list of plugins. That, along with a bit of research on Google, suggested a couple of possible culprits: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, Global Translator, and Broken Link Checker. Although some have reported problems with YARPP in the past, later versions have been significantly rewritten to address these problems, so I’m inclined to think it’s not the cause here.

On the other hand, I’ve personally noticed fairly intensive processing associated with the other two mentioned above, so I immediately deactivated them. In addition, I deleted almost 30 megabytes of cached page translations since these will no longer be used, and added some redirects to my .htaccess file to redirect search traffic and any bookmarks of the translated pages back to the original English versions:


RedirectMatch 301 /pt/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /zh-CN/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /nl/(.*)$ http://www.hippowebsolutions.com/$1

etc.

I’m no expert on rewriting URLs, but I think that’ll do the trick. So, apologies if you’ve come to this site hoping to be able to read it in your own language, but I’ll only be publishing in English from now on.

WP Super Cache plugin

Finally, I did what everyone else does in these circumstances – I installed a caching plugin. This reduces a site’s server load by creating static html versions of pages as they are requested, which are then served the next time anyone hits the page. This means none of the php scripts or database calls are executed the second time around, so the server has to do a lot less work per pageview. It also has the benefit that cached pages are served quicker, and thus provides a better user experience.

Hopefully the combination of the above will resolve the problem to my host’s satisfaction and you’ll be able to read more of my incredible content next time you visit; otherwise I guess I’ve been talking rubbish, but you won’t be able to read it anyway!

Related posts:

1. WordPress Translation plugin
2. Easiest way to manage broken links
3. How secure is your site?

Article marketing is a great way to promote your sites: for every article you submit to an article directory, you typically get to place two or three links back to your own site(s), using anchor text of your choice. This results in link juice and referral traffic from the directory, and also any third party sites who pick up the article and republish it. However, many internet marketers are confused about the issue of duplicate content and what it means in practical terms for their submissions.

Basically, search engines are not too keen on returning listings with multiple copies of the same content, and not surprisingly, since this does not provide web searchers with a good user experience. So they tend to try and identify one copy of an article as the original, or preferred version, and devalue the rest in the listings. That doesn’t necessarily mean the other copies will not be listed at all, but just that they will appear lower down the rankings.

A common question that gets asked by article marketers is: is it OK to submit that same article to more than one directory? Personally I don’t see a problem with it – even if the versions that are identified as duplicates are suppressed in the search engine listings, there’s still a chance of getting referral traffic from the directories themselves, as well as any third-party reprints, and as long as they are not de-indexed completely by the search engines, you should still get the additional SEO benefits too.

Also, don’t forget that a large part of the article marketing strategy relies on your content being picked up and republished by website and ezine owners – so you’re going to have duplicate content “issues” anyway. And even if the worst happens and only one copy ends up in the search engine index, you haven’t lost anything. So there’s really no point in holding back – get your articles published as widely as possible to maximise the benefits that you may get from them!

Related posts:

1. The truth about article marketing
2. All backlinks are created equal…not!
3. Internet Marketing: is it for you?

Article marketing is a well established and effective method for promoting a website because it’s an easy way of garnering traffic and backlinks. Here’s how it works:

1. You write an original article on a topic you know something about
2. You submit it to one or more article directories
3. In return for your quality content, the directory allows you to place one or more links back to a site or sites of your choice
4. By submitting your article, you make it available for reprint by website and ezine owners seeking fresh content
5. Each time your article is republished, so are your links, resulting in a multiplication of backlinks over time – and we all know that this results in more traffic for your site, both via direct clicks on your links and via increased search engine rankings.

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work!

In reality when people republish your article they often either remove your links entirely or make them nofollow, thus negating most of their value to you. Or at least that’s my experience, but I suspect I’m not alone in this. When this happens, your first thought might be to complain to the article directory and expect them to do something about it, but you will not get anywhere with this – the article directories’ terms of service almost always state that it’s your responsibility to follow up any violations of your copyright.

So what can you do? Well, you could simply stop submitting content to article directories, but this is cutting off your nose to spite your face. And remember, there’s nothing to stop other site owners from illegally using your content even if you only publish on your own site, so whilst this approach may limit your exposure it doesn’t solve the problem.

Alternatively you could be vigilant and make it your business to follow up every infringement, first demanding that the relevent site takes the content down, and if that doesn’t work, by filing a complaint with their hosting service. Before embarking on this approach, make sure you understand the cost to your business in time and lost productivity, and also the emotional and psychological cost to yourself.

Or you could do what I do and simply accept that the practice will continue, but not let that detract from the benefits that article marketing will bring regardless. This doesn’t condone the wrongful use of your content, it’s simply an acknowledgement that we don’t live in a perfect world but we carry on anyway.

Related posts:

1. Duplicate content in article marketing
2. Internet Marketing: is it for you?
3. All backlinks are created equal…not!

We’re always told (I’ve said it myself) that when optimising your site for search engines that Google is king and you may as well forget the rest. Now it’s certainly true that Google commands the lion’s share of the search market, but in my opinion it’s also a lot harder to rank well in Google. It’s kind of like choosing a super-competitive keyword versus a long-tail one: you know it’s better to own the competitive keyword, but it’s a lot easier to achieve a good ranking with the long-tail one.

The reason I mention this is I’ve noticed something surprising happening with one of my sites. It’s a niche site, optimised for a handful of related keywords (and when optimising I had Google in mind), and monetised with AdSense. It’s not getting a lot of traffic yet as it’s still quite new and ranked quite low for my target keywords (at the moment the best-ranked is on page 8 in Google), so what Google is sending me is long-tail traffic. The surprising thing is that I’m on page 1 in Bing for most of my keywords, and while the volume of traffic Bing is sending is still only about 25% of what Google is sending, here’s the thing: it’s targetted traffic matching my keywords!

The result is that I’m getting an AdSense CTR of about four times higher on the Bing traffic than the Google traffic and the 25% (targetted) Bing traffic has made me twice as much as the (semi-targetted) Google traffic!

Of course, all this was unintentional. I didn’t set out to rank well in Bing; it just happened as a side-effect of optimising with Google in mind. Just goes to show that after all is said and done the search engines aren’t really that different! But perhaps Bing finds my particular blend of SEO especially tasty? I don’t really know at this stage, but you can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye on my stats!

Would you care to share your own experiences of Bing optimisation? Feel free to leave a comment below…

Related posts:

1. How to identify website keywords
2. Success with AdWords
3. Where’s the StumbleUpon buzz on your site?

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of unsolicited bulk email (a.k.a spam) offering me SEO services:

We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.

Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.

Do these people not realise the irony of their statement that they use only “the most ethical white hat” techniques, yet they have no qualms about spamming their offer all over the net? Seriously, if this is how they go about their business, I would not touch them with a barge pole, and neither should you.

Here’s a question: if they’re such hot-shot SEO experts, how come they don’t put their skills to good use to get their own site to the top of the SERPs? The quality of the traffic would be ever-so-much higher! (I’m sure you realise that was a rhetorical question! The simple answer is because they can’t!)

The contempt I have for this crew is matched only by that which I have for anyone who makes use of their “services”! Basically, you’d have to be crazy!

Related posts:

1. Success with AdWords

I’ve written quite a lot about how useful blog commenting is for building links to your own site, and establishing a presence in your niche. But there’s a downside to this too, particularly if you support the dofollow movement. Recently I’ve noticed a big upsurge in the number of spammy comments I’ve been getting. Because I moderate comments they don’t make it onto the site, but even deleting them wastes my time.

Types of junk comments

These junk comments tend to fall into one of three categories:

1. true spam – actually this is the least part of the problem because Akismet does such a good job filtering it out. Still, the odd one does slip through.
2. auto-generated nonsense – keyword-laden, computer-generated garbage. No matter how many times you read these, they still don’t make sense. People promote these tools as the answer to your link-building needs – well, I beg to differ! For example:
   

   An Alexa site widget on a web site can improve the site’s traffic ranking and enthusiastically shared their success stories to others through their blogs… Alexa toolbar users worldwide and from other “diverse traffic data sources”…

   In some cases I guess these nonsensical comments are actually left by real people who can’t express themselves very well – either way they’re getting deleted though. If I can’t understand what it says, my readers won’t be able to either.

3. generic human-generated nonsense – these often take the form of insincere flattery, for example:
   

   I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.

   Wow, thanks! Unfortunately when you keep receiving variations on this, or even the exact same comment over and over, you start to wonder about the sincerity being expressed here!

Don’t over-optimise

I guess the take-home message here is: don’t try to over-optimise your commenting strategy. Sure, you may be able to leave hundreds of comments using these methods, but how many of them actually stick? Far better, in my opinion, to leave a few hand-crafted, thoughtful comments that actually stick and enhance your reputation.

Part of the problem here is that people believe the hype that they can get the benefits without putting in the work – whatever the activity. While this approach might benefit those pushing the comment-generation tools, I don’t believe it’s beneficial to the average blogger, or to the wider blogosphere.

Conclusion

You can use blog commenting to great effect for building your site’s reputation, as long as you leave useful comments that contribute to the discussion. But abuse it at your own risk! You will do far more damage to your reputation than good by posting auto-generated or repetitive generic comments, and will almost certainly be tagged as a spammer. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

For the rest of you – those that leave good comments that do add to the discussion – thank you! It’s actually refreshing to receive your useful input (and of course you have nothing to worry about!)

Related posts:

1. Strategic commenting
2. Strategic commenting, part 2

When writing articles on your website, do you consciously target certain keywords, or just write whatever comes to mind and hope for the best? Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be a daunting prospect, and it’s not hard to get so bogged down in keyword analysis that you end up not writing anything! Because of this, I suspect most bloggers don’t bother to optimise the vast majority of their posts, if any, which creates an opportunity for those who are prepared to do a bit of digging. This can yield big rewards in terms of search engine traffic.

Choosing sensible website keywords needn’t be that complicated, as long as you follow a few simple guidelines. Today I’m going to outline the process I use, which is what I’ve distilled from many different sources – so it’s nothing revolutionary, just what works for me.

Website Keyword tools

There are a number of keyword tools out there, some free, some not. My weapon of choice is generally the Adwords keyword tool, which gives me everything I need: terms that people are actually searching on, and an indication of the volume of searches and what kind of revenue potential those terms have. And you don’t even need an Adwords account to use it! I’ve also recently come across Google’s search-based keyword tool, which provides much the same sort of information, but bases its results on actual search traffic for a particular site. For this reason it’s obviously of most use for optimising an existing site that already gets some search traffic. For the remainder of this article I’ll be using the Adwords tool though.

How to identify candidate website keywords

The Adwords keyword tool can operate in two different modes:

• keyword suggestions are based on analysis of an existing page or site
• keyword suggestions are based on words or phrases entered by the user

Note: to view CPC (cost per click) data, you need to select Show Estimated Avg CPC from the Choose columns to be displayed selection box.

The following suggestions are displayed for the term “creative writing course”:

Selecting the best website keywords – step 1

First of all, sort the list by search volume by clicking on the Approx Avg Search Volume column. You might be forgiven for thinking that the terms with the highest search volume are the best ones to choose, but that’s not necessarily the case. Why? Because these are also likely to have the most competition, and thus will be much harder to rank well for. When using search engines, most people don’t get beyond the first couple of pages of results, so to get search engine traffic it’s definitely better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. In other words, it’s better to dominate the results for a fairly obscure long-tail search term rather than find yourself unable to compete for a more popular one.

Now scan down the list for multi-word terms that are related to what you want to write about (or have already written about). A good rule of thumb is to select candidates that match the following criteria:

• phrases that are 3 words or longer
• average CPC between $0.50 and $2.00 (or the equivalent in your chosen currency) – this indicates that the terms have some revenue potential, but competition is unlikely to be too stiff
• are grammatically correct (remember, you’re going to use these terms in the text of your site)

Selecting the best website keywords – step 2

Once you have a list of candidates, pull up the ordinary Google search page and enter the following, for each candidate in turn:

allintitle:"your search term"

This is a way of guaging the competition you face from optimised pages competing for the same term. A rule of thumb here:

• less than 1,000 results – should be quite easy to get a good ranking
• between 1,000 and 5,000 results – can achieve a good ranking with good optimisation and focussed link building
• more than 5,000 results – stiff competition; you may be better off focussing elsewhere

(Thanks to John Cow for these rules-of-thumb).

Go forth and optimise

Once you’ve selected your website keywords, you’re ready to put them to work on your site. But that’s a topic for another day…

Related posts:

1. Success with AdWords
2. Bing traffic converts well
3. AdWords competition update