February 6th, 2008
This was something that I’ve been wondering about for a while, I know I make a lot of typos, the question is does typing too quickly come at a cost?
Just like many an old internet marketer I’ve got a few “aged” websites that just hang around not doing much, they tend to stay where they are in the rankings paying for themselves but little else. What they are good for though is experiments, I like experiments!
So I decided to take one of these static websites (6 pages of embarrassingly bad HTML) and go through correcting my typos that had just been forgotten about. I was hoping that using the Queens English would benefit my affiliate conversions if nothing else (isn’t it really annoying when somebody is trying to sell you something but can’t even be bothered to use the correct grammar and correct obvious typos? It gives a really bad impression from the start).
Four weeks down the line it has actually turned out to be quit a productive little exercise. A jump of 28 places in the search engines and more affiliate sales in one month than the previous six. Of course the increase in affiliate sales could be down to the increased traffic from the better search results. And the better SERPs position could be down to Google treating it as new content (there were a lot of mistakes to correct!) but overall for half an hours work I have no complaints.
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new “Make Money” idea that results in a rushed job, I’m as guilty of this as anybody. Having seen how taking your time can return better results I think from now on I’m going to give that extra time and be more considered in my approach. If nothing else running your content through MS Word’s spellchecker should help a bit!
February 5th, 2008
£97 Million (Or roughly $194 million US dollars) is quite a prize I’m sure you’ll agree? I’d go as far to say that it might even eclipse the couple of hundred Entrecard credits I gave away a little while back! EuroMillions is Europe’s lottery and this Friday that huge amount is the jackpot prize, in the drop of a few balls you could join the super rich blowing John Chow, Darren Rowse and ShoeMoney (and about 99.9 of the entire population) out of the water. To put this amount into perspective for make money bloggers that prize would get you over 430,000 reviews over at John Chow, enough to keep the ever willing Michael Kwan busy for the test of his life!
This is one serious amount of cash and although the odds are slim somebody has to win. Even if you don’t match all the numbers in this Friday’s EuroMillions draw the £97 million jackpot will go down to the next prize level. This has got to be worth a punt, for the sake of a few pound you’ve got nothing to lose.
How To Play EuroMillions Online
First of all if you’re in the UK you can go and sign up at the Official National Lottery Website. I’d recommend you do this anyway, before I started playing online I was always forgetting to buy a ticket.
If you’re outside the UK then you can still get in on the EuroMillions action by signing up at TheLotter.com, they offer a global lottery agent service allowing you to play lottery games from all over the world no matter where you live.
If you do decide to play then the best of luck to you, if you don’t then remember you have to be in it to win it!
February 5th, 2008
Well that’s what they say, so I’ve decided to have a bit of a change, out has gone the old orange template and in has come a new blue one. Besides giving me 1 or 2 more options for advertisements the new theme has a lot more ways of finding my older (and frankly more interesting) content. I guess the old theme did look a bit flat, hopefully this one will prove much easier to use.
I don’t know why but I always seem to end up reverting to blue, I’d guess about 90% of my personal websites have blue as the dominant colour, it’s possibly because I read somewhere that it is the best colour for selling. Then again there is a good chance I just imagined it. Seeing as how my blog earnings have been stuck at around $200 a month for the last 4 months now it will be nice to see if this change has any affect. As with everything I do online I’ll be sure to let you all know.
If you like the look of the new template you can get your own copy for the bargain price of $45 (that’s only £22.50 to us Brits). Just get your Paypal details ready and go over to xHTML Coding.
February 4th, 2008
UKWebmasterWorld have organised an SEO Contest to see which SEO can rank best for the phrase SEOContest2008. My friend Astrit over at www.dnseo.net has decided to enter the competition, good luck! I’ve not bothered for a couple of reasons, 1. I’m lazy 2. I don’t want anymore SEO work, I make more than enough from my own websites thank you so whilst the kudos would be nice I can live without it.
Anyway if you do Google search for the phrase SEOContest2008 (or click this link) you’ll notice that the top results are dominated by people who are using the phrase somewhere in their domain name. Whilst using it as part of the URL is a worthy substitute in my opinion you can’t beat getting your primary phrase in the domain name, it will be interesting to see who wins this SEO contest. My money would be on somebody using SEOContest2008 as either a sub-domain or as the domain name itself.
February 4th, 2008
The Top Commentators plug-in for wordpress allows you to reward the people that comment the most on your blog with a dofollow link (by default WordPress make comment links nofollow). It’s one plug-in that appears to be on everybody’s recommended list so I thought it would be interesting to see what difference it really made. In order to test this I created 2 completely new WordPress blogs and set up a posting schedule so that they would both contain about the same amount of content. I then installed the top commentator plug-in on one and left the other one blank.
When it came to promoting the blogs I did nothing more than submit sitemaps to Google’s Webmaster Portal and installing the entrecard widget. After 5 weeks I’ve got a pretty good idea of how things have turned out and whilst it’s no real surprise it does reinforce how important this plug-in can be. On the blog without the plug-in there were a grand total of 3 comments and an average of 8 unique visitors a day. On the blog with the widget there were a grand total of 17 comments and an average of 26 visitors a day. I’ve also got to say that both of them received very little in the way of natural search traffic, almost all was from entrecard. What I did notice which was a pleasant surprise was that the comment quality was faultless, I didn’t receive one “nice post” spam style comment.
How Can This Help Me Make More Money?
So much of blogging for money is about perception. If people perceive you to be successful then they are more inclined to listen to you and join in. Of course this has the circular affect of actually making you more successful. Part of that equation for blogs are the comments, a healthy active blog will have a healthy number of visitors willing to leave comments and the top commentator plug-in obviously helps to encourage people to leave a comment. By having what is perceived to be a popular blog things like direct advertising sales start to be a real option and that is where the big bucks can be made with blogging.
February 2nd, 2008
So it looks like WidgetBucks aren’t welcoming clicks from us foreigners, it must have been a temporary glitch in the system, bugger!
Anyway, it got me onto thinking about this from a much broader angle, is it harder to make money online if you’re based outside of North America? I think it is. There are a number of reasons why I think like this but these are my top 3:-
1. Treated As 2nd Class Citizens On Ad Networks – There are a number of ad networks out there that treat us very poorly compared to Americans/Canadians. Some won’t let you sign up (regardless of where the traffic you bring them is coming from), others lower their pay outs or otherwise try to “put you off”. Even the big G is now guilty of this. I live in the UK and notice it a bit, I imagine it’s even worse if you live outside of Europe and Australia.
2. News, What News? – I have a large list of blogs that I either visit on a regular basis and/or I subscribe to their feeds. I think it’s really important to be right up with the latest developments in this game, the early adopters always seem to benefit the most from any new networks and methods of making money. The problem is that so many of the big names in make money blogging are based over the Atlantic that for most of my day there is no news (it’s just bad luck I suppose that Darren Rowse is equally as far away). Press releases and breaking news is understandably released at a time to suite North America. Of course when something does break by the time I read about it the next morning it’s too late.
3. Exchange Rates – During December and January it actually looked for a little while like things were picking up, but no. I can’t think of any of the big ad-networks that let you earn your money in anything other than US Dollars*. When the dollar weakens we all end up taking a pay cut. I can completely understand this for many of the smaller networks but I guess the one that really bugs me is Adsense. There must be as many Adsense/Adwords users outside of the US as there are in the US? When using Adwords from the UK I pay in sterling, my bids are in sterling. Seems they can do the conversion one way but not the other because in Adsense every click earns me cents and dollars. It can look like it’s going to be a good month right up to the day when Google go to payout and then the slightest shift in the exchange rates can make a big difference to what you get in the bank.
I’m not trying to blame anyone here, some things just are what they are and aren’t likely to change anytime soon. As much as the internet is global it is still dominated by North America, I only have to look at my traffic stats to see that. I guess the real question should be are you prepared to move to make more money online? Not at the moment so I’d better stop my whinging!
* I stand corrected, somebody just pointed out CJ.
February 1st, 2008
A little while back WidgetBucks started to look like it was going to become my number one income generating PPC network, then they changed the rules that meant you didn’t get paid for clicks outside of North America. It was a sad day in my house. Instead you had to make do with pay-per-impression ads that have never really lived up to the hype. My earnings with WidgetBucks since this happened have taken a nose dive and I’ve started to experiment with 2 other networks to see if I can get anything like the performance WidgetBucks were originally giving.
Is Non American Traffic Welcome Again?
I’ve just seen something unusual on one of my sports websites, instead of the usual Ringtones, Dating style ad I normally see (being a UK visitor) this morning I got the old WidgetBucks widget back. I’ve done several refreshes and asked a friends from different networks to have a look but they all report seeing the widget. Does this mean that WidgetBucks are going to start paying for clicks again or is it just a glitch in the system. I really hope it’s the first option, I’d also be interested to know what you see below?
