EzSEO Newsletter # 106
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EzSEO Newsletter # 106
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Identity Theft - have you received a request from me?
2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part XVIII
3. Interesting observations
4. Guido’s latest f-ree course
5. Other Stuff
Hi again.
It’s been a few weeks since my last newsletter. First of all, Sunday fell on Christmas day, then New Year’s day. I had intended to write a newsletter last week, but had a bad flu bug. I am still getting over that bug now, but feel so much better. I actually lost 4 kilos in the first two days of the flu (through not eating, and sweating constantly) and 6 kilos altogether since the bug started. Maybe I could breathe into little bottles and sell them on eBay as the latest and greatest weight loss program ;o) (only side effect is feeling like c**p).
We finally got snow here on Teide, and each night seems to bring a little more. Only problem is that I have been so ill, we have not been up to play in it yet. Maybe this week.
OK, onto the newsletter.
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1. Identity Theft - have you received a request from me?
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This week I have received two emails from people asking me if I had reviewed their products yet, as it was a couple of weeks since they sent it to me. Nothing unusual about that you might think. However, one of these emails forwarded an email “written by me” to them, telling them how great my site was, and how much traffic I could send them if only I could get a fr.ee copy of their software to review. After all, the software was guaranteed a 10/10 rating on my site.
This person has sent out these “review copy” requests from a GMail account, something like andywilliams.seo@gmail.com.
Sucks eh?
Although this is identity theft on a small scale, it could have potentially harmful effects for my business.
Is someone pretending to be you?
For any software or eBook authors out there who have received requests like this from any marketer, always send that marketer an email to his/her confirmed email address asking for confirmation. I never send out requests like this using a GMail account. In fact, I never send out requests asking for a review copy. I always buy the products I want to review (unless I am sent them by the author). That way, I can review them honestly, without having to promote something I would not use.
My advice to all, in your business, get use to only using a business email address from your own domain, and not a fr-ee email address like GMail or Yahoo. Looks more professional, and helps build your credibility.
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2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part XVIII
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If you have been following this course so far, you will have:
a) identified your niche and checked for profitability
b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.
c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.
d) selected several phrases to use as main page keywords.
e) selected suitable phrases to be used for article pages.
f) learnt how to theme pages. You should use this information to begin collecting themed keywords for your planned pages.
g) seen how main pages differ from article pages, and understood how these differences dictate how the pages are created.
h) seen how selling differs from pre-selling, and learnt one way to sketch out a blueprint of your pre-selling content.
i) looked at a top selling sales page, and dissected out the various pre-selling techniques highlighted by the “pre-selling blueprint questions”.
j) looked at two models for building main sales pages.
k) looked at how to write articles, and learnt a simple “Value Test” you can use to decide if your article is good enough.
l) Found a suitable web host, domain name and web editor.
m) Looked at links, and understand that some links will server you better than others.
n) Seen how Page Rank can be passed onto other pages, and also that the Google toolbar is not accurate.
o) Seen that links in to a page are a vote for that page, and that the link text used on incoming links, gives your page some reputation for that term. The more incoming links with that term, the higher the reputation.
p) Seen how tracking your visitors can give you a lot of useful information, and chosen a stats script for your own site (if your host does not provide one).
q) Seen how to create a useful links page that can act as a resource for your visitors, and looked at one way to automate this page.
If you missed any of these newsletters, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/
This mini course begins in issue #89 and continues to the latest post in the blog.
WOW, number 18 of the series already. There is plenty more to come as well.
Today I want to look at two of your options for making an inc0me from your website. After all, that’s why your building the site, isn’t it?
These two methods are affiliate programs and Google Adsense. They are the most common, and financially rewarding ways of earning income from your site, yet there are pitfalls.
A lot of marketers use affiliate programs and Adsense on all their sites. However, my own observations in the last year have shown that sites with both make very little income from affiliate programs. Adsense is such an easy way to make money from your traffic that most webmasters don’t appear to care about the lost affiliate revenue.
In the last year I have begun experimenting with Adsense focused, and affiliate focused web sites, where I use one or other of the techniques, but not both.
I modified a website that was getting 200+ visitors a day to only include Adsense, then only include affiliate links, and then use a combination of both. I ran each alternative for one month and kept a tally of income earned. I don’t want to give exact figures here, but I can tell you the relative amounts earned by each combination:
Adsense Only - made $Z
Adsense + affiliate links - $Z x 1.2
Affiliate links only - $Z * 4
Obviously these results are not statistically significant, and cannot be applied to all websites, but it does imply to me that Adsense can hurt your sites affiliate commission earning potential.
My point in sharing this information with you is not to tell you to abandon Adsense. It is this:
Test and track, and experiment with your own sites.
Experiment with where you put Adsense.
After further experiments, I can offer two simple guidelines:
1. Don’t put Adsense on a web page that reviews a product. By its nature, these pages will attract visitors who are interested in buying the product, so point them to the merchants that sell the product via your affiliate links.
2. If you have a general content page (an informative article on a topic), add Adsense to that page. These pages are less likely to attract buying customers, so Adsense is a way that you can make some m0ney from them before they leave.
3. If a review page is not converting visitors into paying customers via your affiliate links, work on your pre-sell, and test again. Only put Adsense on these pages as a last resort, and even then, only after you try a different merchant(s).
As with anything in business, diversify your efforts. Work on two types of site:
1. Large content sites that are primarily targeting Adsense income.
2. Smaller sites that are concentrating on affiliate income.
The techniques I use for building these two types of sites are different only in what I do with the articles I write.
For an affiliate site, write articles on your chosen niche, but don’t automatically put them onto your site. Consider how best to use the article. Is it pre-seeling a product, or is it general information on an area of your niche?
Articles that can pre-sell a product should go on your site. Articles that are more informative but not really related to selling a product will better serve you by submitting it.
e.g. Suppose I have a shoe site selling shoes. This is a lucrative affiliate niche, so I don’t want to waste my visitors by getting them to click on Adsense if I can sell them some shoes.
If I write an article on “Walking boots”, I would post it on my site with links to affiliate merchants selling walking boots.
If I write an article on “Why stilettos are bad for your posture”, I would submit it to article sites. This article is not directly related to selling products on my site, but would make great reading on article sites/other shoe sites, and benefit me in the backlinks it generates to my selling pages.
Think about whether an article can best serve you on your site, or submitted.
Large content sites set up for Adsense are a different kettle of fish. For these, most of your articles will be published on your own site. Of course you want to submit articles too, for backlinks, but the majority of content should be put on your site with prominent Adsense ads.
These two types of sites will diversify your business. You will see them perform in very different ways in terms of where the income comes from, and my own experiences suggest that affiliate sites can way out-perform Adsense sites if done properly.
As with any of this, you need to track and test your own sites, but don’t get into the trap of putting up Adsense everywhere. It will hurt your affiliate earning potential.
Next week, I want to talk about owning your own products for selling on your site. This is not as difficult as you might imagine, even if you are not a programmer or writer.
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3. Interesting observations
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Back in some earlier issues of this newsletter (84 and 87) I did some experiments with Article Announcer. The initial results were staggering, and I wrote about them in those issues. You can go back and re-read those if you want, and check up on how the pages are currently doing.
Anyway, instead of just forgetting the results and moving on from that experiment, I have been following it with interest.
In issue #87 of my newsletters I told you how I had moved from #11 on Google, to # 9 on Google for a term with over 15 million competing pages) after submitting one article using Article Announcer using “internet marketing newsletter” as the link text in my resource box.
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Well, what happened since then?
Firstly my web page dropped out of the top 30 for that term.
However, here is where it gets interesting. In the months since then (that newsletter was published in July 2005) I have done nothing to that page, nor have I tried to improve its rankings with more articles, or the rankings of any of my other pages. The site has been left as is, except for a few additional reviews that I post periodically. I just left the site as it was.
My page has steadily improved in rankings.
Today my page is #5 in Google (at lest here in Spain) for that term.
So why has this happened?
Well, I have my suspicions. You see, I don’t work on links to my ezSEO website. That is why the PR has remained fairly constant for years, hovering between a PR 4 and PR 5.
When I submitted the article using article announcer, backlinks jumped to several hundred new links in a matter of days. Google will more than likely have spotted this with one of their filters, and penalised my page. However, the penalty was not permanent, and would decay over time if nothing else suspicous happened. Over the next few months the penalty was lifted, and the links that remained to my page became a benefit to my rankings.
If my suspicions are correct, then Article Announcer is a very useful tool for better rankings, BUT, it must be used sensibly. Quick rises in backlinks will get you a penalty. If you submit every day, or every week, for one particular page, that penalty will never expire, so your page might be constantly penalised and never rank well.
However, another observation here is that the rest of the pages on my site were not penalised. My rankings were rock solid, and my traffic overall was constant. This suggests that the penalty was page-specific.
Taking this further, I would suggest that using a tool like Article Announcer is best done by linking to internal pages of your site, and not just your homepage. If your site has 100 pages, submit an article where the resource box links to one of those pages, then switch to another page on your next submission, and so on, until you have an article submitted for each of the 100 pages. Then start again.
This information is backed up by an article in the latest of Planet Ocean’s excellent monthly newsletter.
In the article they highlight rapid link growth after periods of link building inactivity as a trigger for a penalty.
Article Announcer remains one of my favourite tools of 2005, but if you do own it, do track your own experiences, and be careful not to over-use this tool.
I do have a feeling that in 2006, article directory listings will have less (if any) effect on your rankings as the search engines filter out these sites from their PR and ranking calculations (all abused systems eventually get penalised).
Does this mean Article submissions are not worth your efforts in 2006? No. In fact, if you are submitting quality information, article submissions remains one of the best ways of getting backlinks to your site, simply because good articles will be picked up and reprinted on other sites that are not filtered out by the search engines. Article submissions remain one of the strategies I will continue to use into 2006, and it should be in your arsenal of SEO weapons too.
However, one word of warning. If you are submitting poor articles, you are wasting your time. When the search engines stop giving you credit for your backlinks from these article sites, what are you left with? No decent site will have republished your article, so you wont be left with any valuable backlinks. If you are submitting articles, submit quality, or you are wasting your time.
While Article Announcer is not an essential tool (you can submit by hand with the same results), I love it because I can reduce hours of work, into a matter of minutes. And when I have to do this every week, the time savings over the year are immense.
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4. Guido’s latest f-ree course
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My good friend Guido Stiehle, that hard working Dentist & Internet Marketer from Germany has done it again. This guy is definitely one of the good guys, and always provides information based on his experiences.
Guido has put together some great video tutorials that he is giving away (OK, you have to pay a small fee for postage and packing of the CD). This time his course is aimed at beginners wanting to learn more about various bread and butter techniques all webmasters should know about:
HTML & Website Design, Blogging and RSS Feed Syndication
What more can I say. If you are just starting out and want to get ahead quickly, take up Guido’s offer and get his CD video tutorials.
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5. Other Stuff
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Firstly some great f.re.e software. I have always been a big fan of mind maps to help me plan projects. Unfortunately the software for creating these useful organisational tools is often expensi-ve, so I usually do them by hand on paper. However, there is a software program that wont c0st you anything, and rivals the market leaders in terms of functionality:
Secondly I have been getting a lot of emails asking when January’s Niche Blueprints will be released. Well, because of illness this month I wont be releasing any. There are still quite a few of the December Blueprints available, with special pricing introduced for those that buy both. Niche Blueprints are one of the easiest ways to get started in affiliate marketing, since the niche is researched, and you are provided with detailed keyword lists that I have put together personally using Wordtracker, plus an in-depth manual that shows you how to go about building your site, recommended affiliate programs etc.
You can get the niche blueprints over at:
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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