Monetize Your Site

There is a strong indication from the performance of my site, Web PickUps, that the position on the page of the ad block does have a significant effect on the number of clicks you will see. This is a confirmation of information that I have found on the web. What works for others seems to be working for me with this site.

Web PickUps is a viral email archive site. It has been amazing to me to see how many of these emails are searched for by subject. Since I started using the WordPress blogging software and the email subject line as a post title I have seen increasing traffic to the site. When I set up WordPress I followed the general thinking that I had gleaned from my research on the best ad location for this type of site. This site I have always expected to produce little in the way of ad revenue. That has been the case since I put up the site. Now the click rate has improved enough that my overall click rate including junk pages is nearly double my historic rate. And this is from a site where the visitors are not even shopping, they are looking for humor.

I have two other sites that get steady daily traffic. I will be moving the ad blocks on at least one of those sites  soon to see if the change makes a difference there. If the test proves successful I will move the position on the other site.

The ad block and position that are working on this site is a large rectangle located between the post title and post content on post pages. There is one other recommendation that I should implement here. I have a second ad block on the post pages in the right column. The recommendation is to only have one ad block and perhaps a link unit on a page. The theory is that the more ad blocks the lower the mean price of the ads presented will be. Google serves the higher priced ads first and then fills in with decending value ads. The more ad units on the page the more opportunities for a visitor to click on a lower value ad.

At first I thought that there was a direct correlation between visitors that arrived by search and click rate. It appears that the ad positioning is the defining factor. Those arriving by search for a subject line are sent to a post page rather than the front page of the blog. The front page has only the right column ad block. I should redo the ads using channel identifiers to determine which ad position is actually doing the job.

Of course, without traffic there are no clicks. My main objective must be to build traffic, but my recent experience shows that optimizing the monetization scheme can significantly improve the results.

Internet Marketer Brian Johnson has just announced in an email to his list that several of his many sites have been hit by a Google Slap. The sites, mostly on one dedicated server, have been De-Indexed.

Brian gives his analysis of the situation and some hints to avoid the same problem in a YouTube video (see below). Brian has several highly acclaimed IM products on the market. As an ethical business man, Brian wanted the people on his list to know exactly what the situation was. Many of these sites are used as examples in his products. I suspect an element of damage control also entered the picture.

The fact that Brian sent the notification shows that he cares about the people who have purchased his products. He is to be applauded for this action. He mentions that he has been through this before and that it is one of the dangers of Internet Marketing. He does make some suggestions of ways to minimize the danger.

Here is Brian’s YouTube Video on this situation:

The world is not always a kind place, but all you can do is follow the rules and do the best that you can.

I have had two recent experiences that point out the value of WordPress in getting things indexed in Google.

I put up a research blog on sub-domain space. While I have owned the domain name for a couple of years, the sub-domain was created specifically for the WordPress installation. From the time that the sub-domain space was created until I was posting to the blog was no more than a couple of hours.

The idea with the blog is to go to Google trends and pick a current hot topic and produce a post. One of the very first posts that I made was indexed and I saw traffic from an international Google site, that turned out to be from Poland, in less than 24 hours. I was checking the traffic log to see if there was bot activity on the space when I saw the referrer link to the Google search. I thought that it was amazing and told a couple of people about the experience, as well as making a blog post on another blog.

I have just been snooping in the traffic logs again. This one comes from a different blog that I have had in operation for a few months. I was checking around Ezine Articles site today. I noticed an article using the same keyword that had brought traffic to the new blog. The article was a good fit for my other blog, on topic and all. I published the article. I logged in to the blog at 9:46 AM to post the article. At 12:25 Google returned search results with my post in the number 4 position and the Ezine original article in the number 6 position. Less than two hours and my reprint of the article was ranked higher than the original.

Looking at the results it is apparent that the reason the reprinted article returned higher than the original was because I had the exact search term as one of the tags for the article. The title and every word in the article was the same, but having the tag that matched the search term made the difference. Never underestimate the value of the tags that you apply to your posts. Think of good keywords that relate to the article or post. Us several long tail tags for the post. Add the tags to your thinking for on page SEO.

I have a couple of new observations on the Deep Link Engine.

There have been several updates along the way. The latest update seems to operate a bit faster than earlier versions. I noticed this after the last update, but have not written it up on this blog. It is only an incremental speed up that I perceive subjectively so I did not think that it was worth a whole post.

The observation that inspires this post is something that I have noticed without taking note of what was going on in the past. I was just looking at the referrer search results and the revelation came to me. What I have seen in the search description box is some seemingly unrelated text. These were things that I did not recall having in the post but were showing up in the search results.

This evening I was looking through the referrer results on one of the blogs on which I am using the Deep Link Engine. The search term included words that I did not recall from the post. Then the light bulb lite. Part of the Keyword phrase was in one of the links that the Deep Link Engine had appended to the post, and the rest was in the post title. Google is indexing those links as part of the post. I had seen this before but not made the connection.

This had put the post at #5 on the first page of results. It is an unexpected benefit of using the Deep Link Engine. I don’t know that this plus outweighs some of the minuses from the DLE, but it is one of the first positive things that I have been able to say about the plug-in. I do see the small bump in traffic from the curious blogmasters when I make a post, and there are a few, mostly no-follow, links that appear on blogs that either have a benevolent blogger or the setting allows all comments and trackbacks.

The other side of the coin, as I have previously mentioned, is that the server address will end up on the Akismet black list. In confirmation of that I had linked from one of my blogs to another earlier today. I was telling the story of a page that has been hit with a Google slap on my Hobby Webmaster Blog. When I checked in on the linked blog I found my own trackback in the spam comments folder. Now that I have linked it here I will have to sort out this trackback from the spam comment folder on that site.

So, in this case, a post showed up high on a search result page because of a link that was placed with the post by the Deep Link Engine. This is really an accidental side effect of the DLE, but I had a visitor because of it.

I had mentioned that I suspected that using the Deep Link Engine had landed my server IP address on the Akismet blacklist. I recently made a post on one blog and, since the topic was such that it fit with another of my blogs, I made the same post on a second blog. The second blog found my identical post and identified it as the most relevant. The Deep Link Engine sent a ping to my other blog. I found it in my spam queue the next time that I looked. This confirms the information from my server logs that indicated the pings from the Deep Link Engine were going into spam queues. A few people are either curious or conscientious about checking their spam queues, but I am sure that most of these trackbacks are flushed either manually or through inaction.

In this post:  http://raygen.info/blog/2010/03/24/deep-link-engine-the-new-wordpress-trackbackpingback-spam/ on the RayGen.info site the blogger says that the product of the Deep Link Engine is ping/trackback spam and recommends that people not use this product. With my experience with the DLE I agree with all of his points.

I only used the DLE engine on this blog briefly and then discontinued using it as I saw how it worked. I have not installed it on my real blogs that are at all important to me. I have used it on what are basically hoped to be WordPress sales pages. I will probably discontinue use even on those sites. Initially there was a bump in traffic with each post. Lately the traffic boost has been insignificant.

I have also seen complaints about the time involved with completely removing the DLE and its tracks from a blog. I may gain experience in this in the not too distant future. If so I will report on my experience for the benefit of my readers.

Have you discontinued use of the DLE? Did you remove all traces of the links that it produced? Tell us in a comment!

For any visitors who may not be familiar with Micro Niche Finder this is one of the well recognized keyword tools that is available on the market. It has come highly recommended in the past, and with the rebuild of the tool it has made a giant leap forward in utility. People have liked it in the past for its ability to automate keyword research to a great extent. This update continues with the great functionality and has produced a much more mature program.

Keywords are your keys to success in Internet Marketing. The most targeted consumers are the ones that arrive at your site through the search engines. The search engines use keywords to determine the relevancy of your site to the search being performed. Keywords are also used in Pay Per Click advertising to get your product or service in front of your target customer. Ideally you would find a keyword phrase with a high search count and low competition. Micro Niche Finder provides you with all of this information as well as alternate keywords with the associated information.

For a full featured keyword tool check out Micro Niche Finder today!

I have been using the new version of Micro Niche Finder since the day that it was released. I started with Micro Niche Finder six or seven months ago along about about version 4.2 I think. I just checked my USB key that MNF provides and it has says MNF3 so I may be confused, but I think that this is the first major update qualifying for a number increase that I have been through.

This update is truly a major update. There has been a complete rebuild of the code base. The GUI has been redesigned for the new version. There is now a tabbed window for the main screen that extends the capability of the program a great deal. The program loads and exits much faster than the older version. It also seems to be significantly more stable than the version with which I started.

I saw several features added through updates with MNF 4.x that extended the utility of the program. The program returns several key indicators to enable better, more thorough, keyword research. It queries multiple databases to return the information, and it does it on autopilot. You could do much of what the software does manually, but it would require several individual searches to obtain the data and then more thought and time to interpret the data.

Not only does MNF return data on the number of local searches and the exact phrase count for the various keyword phrases, but it also gives you algorithmic estimates on the strength of competition for the words.  In addition it can provide information on the backlinks associated with the keyword phrase and the estimated online commercial intent for the words. The ability to check domain name availability in the .com, .net, and .org top level domain space was added later in the 4.x line and is also a feature in the 5.x series. It will also search ClickBank, Amazon, and ebay to help you to find affiliate products to promote. The software will also search for related articles that can provide you with more information and give you some ideas about marketing your products.

Micro Niche Finder is a tool that can help you to produce results in your Internet Marketing efforts. Keyword research is where it all must begin. Many very successful Internet Marketers use Micro Niche Finder as their keyword tool. If you are interested in IM you should check out Micro Niche Finder today!

iSnare is one of the major article directories on the web. They offer a service to deliver articles to your WordPress blog installation. You add a file to the blog directory and articles begin to show up as drafts in your posts list.

I set up several blogs with the iSnare service. When I first set these blogs up the service was a bit spotty and the targeting of the articles was not too good. This is not too serious with this program because it is a delivery service and not an auto-blogging package. You make the final decision on publishing the articles.

As I mentioned, at first the delivery was spotty, but then it stopped completely for several weeks. I was not sure if they were just out of articles or if they had discontinued the service. The service has now resumed and it appears that they were doing some serious tweaking to the system. One of the sites has had about 130 articles delivered in the past week. I just went through those articles and only found three that were not on some phase of my target topic. The three that I rejected were loosely associated with my topic and possibly belonged in the general category.

I have looked at the articles delivered to one other blog and the new articles are similarly well focused. I don’t think that I have seen one that I had to reject on that blog, but I have not gone through them all in the way I did with the other one.

Since the iSnare service seems to be running well at this time I am discontinuing the WP-Article Fetch service that I had set up on a few blogs. The quality of the delivered articles was poor when it worked at all. The idea is good and the price is right, but the implementation leaves something to be desired.

I had reported an incompatibility issue between DLE V 1.7.0 and the All-in-One SEO for WordPress yesterday. This is just a quick note to confirm that there was a quick follow-up update to the Deep Link Engine (V1.7.1) to apparently to fix the incompatibility issue with the All-in-One SEO for WordPress issue. I have installed the update on a couple of blogs and the errors appear to be gone. Stay tuned for further updates on the DLE update situation.

An update version 1.7.0 is being pushed out to the community. I have found this update to be incompatible with the All-in-One SEO for WordPress plug-in. The incompatibility will cause several errors in WordPress. There will be a listing at the top of the SEO for WordPress page and a warning below the post window on the posting page. The solution is to turn one or the other of the plugs off. A am disabling the DLE plug on blogs in which I have both plugs installed. I think that in the long run the SEO plug is the more important.

There are some other issues with this update. The last updates came two in quick succession. I suspect that we will see V1.7.1 or 2 very soon.

In addition, running the update changed my settings on one install and may have auto-activated the plug-in on a blog where it was installed but deactivated.

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There has just been another update for the Deep Link Engine plug-in so I checked the site to see if there was more information. The page that the link takes you to is the download page, although I have no idea why someone clicking from the UI of the plug from within WordPress would want to go to the download page (actually it is a funnel page for their auto content cash system page, so that’s why they take you there). The claims of the download page are the same as they have been:

Before we start revealing the system to you, we wanted whet your appetite by giving you our exclusive “Deep Link Engine”, a custom WordPress Plug-in that puts blogs on steroids, automatically…

• Automatically get backlinks to every post you make – Tries to get backlinks with limited success.
• Get more traffic and higher rankings by just installing it once – There was an initial surge but then as the sites became a familiar face the traffic died down.
• Increase relevance and ranking power of each page with quality outbound links – It does put the links after the post, weather they are relevant or not. I have not tried with the later versions, but there was no way to control the generated links when I tried, and considering the real purpose of the plug that has probably not changed.
• Most links you get are “do follow” – I have software that detects if links are no follow and highlights them. I have looked for the links that have sent me traffic from the few blogs that approve the trackback. I think I have seen one or two that were do follow, but the bulk of those few links that the plug-in actually garnered are no follow links.
• Automatically increase the relevant content for each post – Here again the relevancy comes into question. If you could actually sort the returned URLs and eliminate those that are obviously irrelevant this statement would be more true.
• A $67 value, yours free today – A developer can assign any value to his software that he chooses. If the plug-in had ever been sold on the open market the value would have more meaning.

My comments are in bold blue above. Here are some other thoughts and observations. I suspect that the IP address of my server is now on the Akismet spam blacklist. It would explain to some extent the drop in those checking the posts. I think that most of the trackbacks end up directly in the spam folder on sites with Akismet activated. I also suspect that many blog operators do not even check the spam queue, just letting the comments be deleted automatically.

There is also a question in my mind as to the validity of my stats particularly on Commission Junction. CJ says that they trap for bot activity. I think that the activity from the DLE does not get trapped. My CTR has been through the roof on CJ since I started using the plug-in, but the sales do not add up. Even a one or two  percent conversion rate should have resulted in many more sales than I have seen.

At first I hoped that this was just that the bloggers that I could see from my traffic logs were not my target market. I began to be suspicious when the traffic died off but the click through rate remained about the same.  I then did some research on the CJ site and ran across the information that bots could disrupt the accuracy of the stats. This is the only sensible explanation of the CTRs and impression stats that I have seen.

I recently read a traffic building article that stated there was no real way to automate the job of getting backlinks. I could not argue with that statement based on what I have seen with the Deep Link Engine. Note: I am still running it on several blogs, but I think the content that I am adding is doing more for my traffic count than the DLE.