Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

I installed the free trial of the AsRep adsense reporting script a couple of years ago, within 2 hours I’d upgraded to the full software. What AsRep does is allow you to track your Adsense variables in real time and with a lot more detail. Want to know what search phrases are generating clicks? Or how about what referring domain works best with what colour combination? AsRep basically provides you with all the information that Adsense should and in real time. Installation couldn’t be easier, the actual script takes 5 minutes to setup for anybody with any experience of installing things like WordPress. To actually track your Adsense all you have to do is copy the tracking code to your pages with Adsense on, it’s also worth spending a couple of minutes putting in descriptions for your custom channels. AsRep even has the ability to cut out dodgy clicks by limiting click-troughs from the same IP. The only thing that I think is missing is the ability to report on how much money you are making, because AsRep is not tied into Google’s system it can’t show your earnings, then again that’s not really the point of the program (if you’re looking for an easy to use Adsense Earnings popup check out Adsense Alert). What AsRep can do is help you pinpoint what is and isn’t working, what keywords are the most clickable plus much more.

ps The BIG downside of AsRep is that their affiliate program isn’t active, DOH!!!!

So is everyone starting to miss their Adsense channel data yet? I suspect Google are having a few problems as they start to implement server side ad adjustments and perhaps something has gone screwy. Anyway it’s not a problem for me, just in the same way I can easily find out what colour combinations work best, what search terms drive clicks and even what ads get the most clicks. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for ages but have been waiting for a good affiliate deal to be put in place.

Anyway, I’ve had enough waiting so I’ll be talking about it tomorrow, if you use Adsense it will be well worth tuning in.

I haven’t been able to find a lot of information online about using IIS to host a SEO friendly website so I thought why not fill people in with my mistakes.

The very first website I created for myself was hosted on an IIS server, for 2 main reasons. Firstly I came from a commercial background of writing core web based business systems, Microsoft technology ruled the roost and ASP.net, SQL Server and IIS was something I did day in and day out. Secondly IIS was the web serving service that comes with Windows operating systems, this gave me an easy way of developing on a test environment. I should probably point out that I was far more concerned with writing something clever with my first website, the concepts of SEO, actually having visitors and making money were not something that even entered my head. Nowadays my initial thought when creating a website is “how much money can I make doing this”. When you start thinking like that then IIS has some obvious disadvantages.

SEO And IIS

When it comes to maxing out your SEO here are a few of the problems you’ll discover when using IIS:-

• Case sensitivity – Linux based servers are case sensitive, IIS is not. Whilst at first this may seem like it’s easier to develop (doesn’t matter how you type your links) the effect on passed link value is bad. Google and the other search engines will all treat Index.html, index.html and inDex.html as different documents, with Linux the wrong one will return a 404 error but IIS will just let it go. What you end up with is link love split between 2,3,4,5 variations of your document.
• URL Rewrites – So many of the content management systems out there (think WordPress, Joomla) rely heavily on URL re-writing to create search friendly URLs. It is well known that too many parameters turn away search engines, unfortunately IIS do not support the .htaccess behaviour that makes fixing this problem a cinch. Instead you’ll have to rely on complicated 404 replacement fudges, or more likely just live with your non SEO friendly URLs.
• Hosting – I can only base this on my own experience but I’ve found that many hosts try to cram more websites onto a IIS server than a Linux based server. As demand requires they usually host less IIS machines and so IP duplication can become an issue if you try to link between your own websites. For example if you open 5 accounts with a host the chances are you would end up with 5 different IP’s because your accounts would be on different servers. If you did the same with IIS hosting, because of a lack of hosting servers you’d more likely than not find all your accounts on one machine and one IP.

IIS and Making Money Online

If you primary concern is making money from your websites then IIS is not the way to go. Given the chance to start over I’d go for Apache and Linux all the way, these are just a couple of the reasons:-

• Cost of Hosting – Making the money is easier if you keep your costs down, Windows hosting costs more than Linux hosting.
• Better Access To Free CMS – Almost every free CMS, Forum Program has been written with Apache, MySQL and Linux in mind.
• Easier SEO – See Above.
• Cheaper Programmers – If you do need to hire in help the rates for PHP developers tend to be cheaper than those for Microsoft fan boys.
• Faster Page Loads – Ooooh controversial. Given the same page to render on the same hardware I’d put my money on a Linux /Apache system beating the pants of a Windows/IIS server any day.

It’s not that I don’t like IIS, in fact I love it but I’m a very strong believer in the right tool for the right job. Writing big business n-tier intranet, extranet or internet systems then I’d always favour .net, IIS and SQL Server. For making money from small to medium sized websites then Apache, PHP, MySql and Linux it is.

What a day, Google have stirred up all sorts of crap by dropping the page rank of many top name bloggers. The widely accepted view for why this has happened is 2 fold.

1. They are punishing sites that sell links
2. They are dropping sites that are part of networks that artificially boost page rank

There are many Blogs that conform to the first, if you sell links on your Blog and make it public knowledge then you have either been hit or will be. For the second point most people highlight ProBlogger who has seen a drop from PR6 to 4 even though he claims he’s not selling anything (although I seriously doubt that his advertisers links are no followed)! Then again what is the point of having established high trust websites if you can’t use them for your own benefit? My own personal opinion is that this is Googles latest attempt at totally devaluing the selling page rank business. Of course brokers like Text Link Ads have the most to loose by this…that’s why I have a sneaky feeling that they knew it was coming!

You see not so long ago I received an e-mail from TLA that suggests a change in the way they do business, it strongly suggests that they are looking to sell site visitors rather that page rank. As Google attempt to remove the industry that has built up around page rank perhaps the biggest benefactor of that business has announced a switch to a CPC model. You will soon be paying for each visitor sent via a TLA link thus taking the emphasis away from page rank to that of visits, switching to cost per click instead of a fixed monthly price can be the only way of achieving this. It looks like you’ll no longer be using TLA to improve your search position but instead you’ll be buying visitors and this is something that will not incur the wrath of Google. Of course with this switch they’ll be going from being the biggest fish in the link brokerage pond to just another PPC seller in a big ocean but with the team they have I don’t think they’ll struggle too much.

So how stressed do you think you are? Being self employed and doing little more than “playing” on the internet (according to my friends anyway)I thought my stress levels would be really low. Then again, there is the worry of fresh content for my own sites, erratic earnings, balancing my work for other people and probably 100 other things going on that I like to put to the back of my mind and forget about.

I’ve found a free 2 minute test to reveal how stressed you are, I managed to score 70%, not bad but I’m sure I can work on that extra 30% for a perfect score. A meeting I’ve got tomorrow should add another 10 on anyway

Free Stress Test

Why not give it a go and find out how stressed you are, you might just be surprised.

Not how important sounding, but how important in terms of SEO and getting that natural search traffic! I’ve read huge amounts of material about how to pick a domain name, the importance of branding vs. the significance the search engines put on the keywords in your domain. Personally I’ve nearly always based mine on search phrases (with a name like themakemoneyonline.net go figure) and it’s never failed me yet. My advice to clients is similar as well, what I’ve found when working with the “average” web user is that they use search to find what they are looking for (even if they know the domain), very few normal users type a URL in directly. This makes it entirely possible to brand the actual look of your pages with your company name (for people searching for your company) but to put it all under a search optimised domain name. One thing worth doing here is also buying your company name for e-mail hosting, the last thing you want is customers emailing you at sales@mybiglongsearchfriendlydomain.com

Now above I said I nearly always use keywords in my domain names, however 12 months ago I started a domain to try out the branded approach. I can’t reveal the niche because it’s one of my 2 main money earners but I do already have a few successful websites in the same area so I had a rough idea of what to expect in terms of traffic and money. My experiment with this officially ended in July, my attempt at a short catchy domain was as far as I’m concerned a disaster. Search traffic compared to my other domains was barely 5%, the money I made was slightly better but still only around 10% of the earnings I would see with the other websites. This was all with equal page rank and an equal amount of effort put in, it was a newer domain but that was the only difference.

Around the beginning of September I finally decided a change was in order so I created a new search optimised domain and moved the EXACT same content under my new domain. I was very careful to remove any traces of the old domain from Google via the webmaster tools. Anybody want to have a guess at what if any difference this has made, remembering that this is a brand new domain name with no PR and no trust? Well in the 4 or so weeks it has been indexed it has made as much money as the previous domain did in 6 months. 4 weeks for 6 months earnings. Search traffic is roughly 30% of my other domains and increasing every week.

So what has all this taught me? I’ve learnt that either I’m rubbish at branding or very few websites are successful brands, of all the websites you’ve visited in the last year how many can you remember the URL off? On the other hand anybody with the right amount of keyword research can create a domain name that will help attract natural search traffic. Given those odds I think I’ll stick with my keyword approach for now.

Saturday the 20th of October 2007, that is a date you should put in your diary with a little note, “the day a large part of the internet died”. In a move that has to be the first of its type anywhere in the world, UK authorities took down the website tv-links.co.uk and arrested the owner. What crime had been committed here you may ask, that of linking! The tv-links.co.uk website did nothing more than provide links to content hosted elsewhere and openly linked to by hundreds of other websites from all over the world. Some of this content may have been dubious in terms of copyright but once again I’ll emphasise that they only linked to content hosted on other websites (Google owned YouTube as one example no less). The actual offence relates to “the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet”, the keyword here being facilitation. By linking to a website that contains illegal content he was apparently facilitating copyright infringement, sorry but what a complete load of bullsh*t. The people facilitating the copyright infringement are the website owners who allow the illegal content to be served from their servers, in this case one example being Google. What he was actually guilty of was finding and cataloguing content. Isn’t it funny how the UK authorities including F.A.C.T. (Federation against copyright theft) decided not to even try and have the actual CONTENT taken down, why, because they’d be taking on somebody their own size rather than some poor 26 year old lad running a hobby website.

I wonder what they possibly think they have gained by taking tv-links.co.uk out of the equation, within a month another dozen copycat sites hosted away from the UK will have popped up all just as accessible to UK consumers as TV Links ever was. The actual content is still available online and can be easily found by doing nothing more than a Google search. The only thing they have succeeded in doing is removing the liberties of UK citizens to discuss and share online. They didn’t even ask him to remove the content (probably as it wasn’t his content that was the problem) but instead decided to raid his house. It’s a joke. But is it really that serious? Well it is if you have ever embedded a YouTube clip on your blog that you don’t have expressed permission to use, or if you use MySpace/Bebo/FaceBook to share Music and Movie preferences or if you operate a website that has outbound links (that’ll be all of them then) . As we are now responsible for the content on the websites we link to does it mean that I have to spend each and every day making sure that every website I link to is not doing anything illegal? What about the sites they link to, or the sites after that, what about what they link to? It’s crap, nonsense and not just a little bit offensive. Linking is what makes the World Wide Web work, without it the greatest information resource ever invented becomes nothing more than a glorified billboard. How much worse do things have to get, I remember when the worst thing an outbound link could do was break and lower the quality of your website, now it appears as though it can see you on the wrong end of a police raid! I only hope the bloke involved sees this through ok, with any luck they’re just scaring him and don’t have a leg to stand on or at least that’s what common sense would say. Then again with the nanny state the UK has become that can see community officers stand by and watch a child drown in the name of health and safety common sense doesn’t have a place.

On a personal level I’m annoyed as well, not least because I spent a lot of money on the onlinetv.im domain which I wanted as a resource to live streaming online tv. I wanted a blog format for things I found interesting online (like ITV’s Tycoon series for example) but I’m abandoning it. As somebody who makes their entire living online it’s very important I do a risk assessment before starting anything new, with the news in the UK it’s just not worth it. On the other hand if you live outside the UK and want to do something similar then just let me know via the contact form, I’m now prepared to sell the onlinetv.im domain name.

There’s a huge contest going on at the moment, John Chow and ShowMoney are going head to head in a month long challenge to see who can increase their RSS subscribers the most. Of course this is a clever peice of marketing, if either one of them attempted this same stunt on their own then if would never be half as effective (and for us bloggers the prizes they are dishing out wouldn’t be as good either). At the moment it looks like Chow has it with some amazing jumps in the last few days, hundreds at a time. What does seem strange is that both contestants have started adopting similar approaches, to get people who already subscribe to subscribe via as many different methods as possible. But why should this matter?

The truth is it doesn’t, unless you are somebody who takes notice of the RSS count when deciding a price. You see the RSS count is one very significant way in which bloggers set their advertising rates and services like ReviewMe and pay-Per-Post decide on a fair price. What John Chow and ShowMoney are effectively doing is saying I’ve got so many thousands of RSS subscribers but the truth is that after this competition they may end up with a huge amount of duplicate subscribers, affecting the number of eyes your advert on their feed is shown before. It amazes me how so many of the factors that advertisers deem important are so easy to fix, what is to stop me auto setting up a few thousands e-mail accounts and bumping my or anybody else’s RSS count? Even better why not pay a few dollars and have it done for me in Asia. The RSS subscriber count is no more reliable than Alexa which can be cheated by something as simple as leaving an auto-refresher running.

At the end of the contest both John Chow and ShoeMoney are going to have a way of justifying increased ad prices and for that reason it has worked very well, whether I’d want to be one of those advertisers or not is a very different question.