Search Engine Traffic

eBay’s US affiliate program seems to have some program tracking sales/leads since April 7th, 2007. Here is what eBay had to say about it:

The eBay US team has been working to solve the tracking issue that
began on Saturday April 7th. A fix was implemented over the weekend and
early data is pointing to an overall improvement. Additional data is
required to confirm that the fix is complete.

We don’t know how extensive the problem was and how much commission the eBay affiliates have lost. But we can imagine that if you are a big eBay affiliate, your income is probably going to suffer a little bit of uncertainty. This sort problem further taught us a lesson that it is really important to not put all your eggs in one basket, no matter what.

Moreover, we wonder whether AuctionAds.com is affected by this problem as well.

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People have been debating whether traffic from social networking sites have any staying power for quite sometime. Here is an interesting observation.

VentureBeat.com’s ventureboard has a for-sale posting for WhoIsonMypage.com, which is “a social network add-on service that allows users to track page visits and share content across all of the major social networks including MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5 and Xanga. WhosOnMyPage.com launched in late March of 2006 and has signed up over 1.3 millions users to date.” This was really a good idea and the site eventually attracted 1.3 million users. But if you take a look at the following snapshot from compete.com, you will see that the unique visitors to the site has been on a downhill slope since last April.

On the other hand, traffic at Bebo and Friendster has a different story. Bebo has seen its traffic increase gradually in the same period but Friendster’s decline is much slower.

I don’t know how much money WhoIsonMypage is asking for. But with traffic tapering off, it may not be able to attract a lot of buyers. This kind of brings up another question: when is it a good time for web2.0 site to exit?

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Whether you are launching a brand new website or adding new sections to your old website, you will need to do some competitive analysis before jumping in with two feet. The good news is that it is pretty easy to perform some simple competitive intelligence study these days with all the tools available on the internet. We will give you a simple framework to go about doing this. (Hint: we are not talking about pretexting here, that’s too expensive )
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When it comes to email marketing on the web, you have many choices. Two of the most popular hosted services for internet marketers include aweber.com and getresponse.com. They both offer good service at an affordable price (at around $20 per month). But if you are just starting out and prefer to run your own email marketing software, here is a free script for you to use. It is called Phplist from phplist.com.

It is fairly easy to install and configure. You could be ready to run your first email campaign within an hour. Here is a quick lowdown on how to install the free email marketing software.
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Apparently some ringtone affiliates managed to spam all three major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN and the situation is really bad. (The following cloaked page ranked no. 4 in Google. )

I accidentally noticed this when I was reading Jeremy’s (a.k.a Shoemoney) post about his ringtone experiments. For example, if you do a search for “verizon ringtones“, 9 of the top 10 links are affiliate links on the first page of Google. And a good portion of these affiliate links are ‘hosted’ on EDU domain, presumably giving them more weight on Page Ranking. While these guys achieved an amazing thing by ‘beating’ Google on the SEO game, the implication for this kind of stuff is pretty profound. Basically this is bad for everyone except the spammers. It is not about who gets to make money and who does not. It is much worse for the internet marketing industry. If people start losing confidence in the major search engines, you can bet that the whole search advertising business and everything else is going to falter. What do you think?

Smart Google engineers, it’s time to fight back!

Update: Google has a page for you to report Spams here http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. But a manual process is always at a disadvantage in this game.

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If you are serious about blogging and you haven’t visited Mitchell Harper’s blog Increase Your Website Traffic, you are missing out on some very informative blogging tips.

His latest post How To Speed Blog When You’re Too Busy To Blog Normally offers 5 simple techniques you can use to not only avoid gaps in blog posting, but also to help you engage your blog reader. I am sure I can use one of his five tips one of those days.

From the dates on his blog it is apparent that Mitchell has just started blogging lately, but he already has some very good posts and demonstrated a lot of creativity in driving traffic to his blog. Some great example include ‘donating to charity on behalf of anyone who would comment on his blog, paying for ReviewMe blog reviews by John Chow and ShoeMoney.

Mitchell’s articles on getting website traffic by using social network sites such as Digg is very interesting. In one post he documented his experiment of analyzing the most frequently used words in the headlines of Digg front page stories, I wish he’d published his code as a tool or service on his blog. I am sure people will bookmark it and come back to use it frequently.

Mitchell is also very adamant about what he is doing and what his goals are:

I truly feel that my blog can help change people’s lives and I want to share it with everyone. It’s my goal to have 10,000 unique visitors a day by my 25th birthday on July 13th and I know I can do it easily.

I am confident he will be able to achieve his goal and I wish the best of luck to him.

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Making money through AdSense arbitrage, in its simple form, is dead.

If you just read about AdSense arbitrage somewhere, and were wondering if you should jump on the bandwagon, the short answer is no, you should not waste your time and energy on AdSense arbitrage. I am going to tell you why in just a minute.
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These are the tools I use on a daily basis to do my keyword research. They are all a little different from each other but each provide great utility. Best of all, they are free!

• Google AdWords Keyword tool - use this tool to find out synonyms of your keywords and average estimated Cost per Click price. Another great feature is to use the ‘Site Related Keywords’ option to discover your competitor’s keywords.
• SEOBook’s Keyword Tools - this great tool gives you an estimated search traffic for your keywords on Google, Yahoo, MSN. Very handy tool to find out if there are sufficient volume for your keyword rich content pages.
• webconf’s website keyword suggestion tool - feed this tool with your domain name it will return a list of keywords you can try writing your content and the search volume for each of the keywords.
• Marketleap’s Keyword Position Verification tool - you can check your Search engine ranking for your chosen keywords that you spent so much time trying to do SEO …
• Keyword Rich Domain Names - this tool comes handy if you don’t yet have a domain name for your keyword rich website idea.
• A Bonus: Digital Point Keyword Tracker - if this is your first hearing about this tool, you are out of luck. It requires you to have a Google SOAP API key, which Google no longer gives out anymore.

There are also commercial tools you can buy. I heard that Keyword Elite is a decent tool but I have no experience with it.

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PortalFeeder’s blog reported a story where a guy essentially lost all 60k per month Google Adsense over night due to garbage content. Details are here North Carolina Man TAMES The ‘900 Pound Gorilla’… - Portal Feeder Marketing & SEO Blog

The spirit of the story is that: for one, you can’t take the easy shortcut, which in this case, this guy was basically using blackhat techniques to generate a lots of sites that generated $60k monthly Adsense check. Secondly, you can’t put all of your eggs in one basket especially if you work hard to develop a legit business online. For example, you have to mix Adsense, affiliate marketing, etc.

Nevertheless, the success of Adsense did and continued to feed a lot of online business directly (with Made for Adsense sites etc) and indirectly (with all those internet marketers that create tools and services that cater to the MFA crowds). Everyone is enjoying it while the party is still on and nobody is questioning the party will be over one day.

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I have been thinking lately how viral marketing can be applied to blogging and making money online in general. I also have been watching how Jonathan Leger masterfully used viral marketing in building his “$7 Dollar Secrets empire”. Here is some of my observations.

Viral marketing, by most experts’ definition is a form of marketing where people are enticed to pass the marketing message around to friends, families and colleagues.

For viral marketing to be successful, you want to achieve a high pass-along rate. A high pass-along rate in turn is dictated by the incentives/motivations the message implies on the messenger and the easy of pass-along the message. In the case of $7 Dollar Secrets, the incentives for people to pass along the script is that Jon has given the source-code of the script away and anyone who uses the script could potentially be using it to build its own viral marketing effort to make money (although the money-making part is probably not easy for new internet marketers). Secondly, by setting a low price of $7, it dramatically reduces the psychological barrier for buyers to try it. Lastly, the script and ebook can be so easily passed along and setup by anyone which allowed an entire eco-system to be built around the $7 Dollar Secrets concept. On my last check, there are a total of 342 $7 eBooks listed for sale on 7dollaroffers.com.

There is also Digg style review site for all $7 eBooks at 7dollargurus.com. The most successful viral marketing is through a network of affiliates.

By the way, Darren Rowes’s article on “34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog” listed infrequent posting as the number 2 reason why people unsubscribe blogs. I better increase the frequency at this blog.

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