Tag: SEO

Categories
Adsense HubPages

Warning From Adsense!

I think a few people at HubPages recently have had warning emails from Adsense – in censorshippart the email goes something like this:

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying
Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For
instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as
h**p://cdn.hubpages.com/hub/XXGoogleXAdsenseX.
Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of your website.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to
make prominent use of “Google Brand Features” on sites displaying Google
ads. This includes any sites that attempt to create a false association
with Google or use Google trademarks in the URL.

So apparently you can’t use Adsense or Google in urls – note this was just in the end part of the url as well not actually the domain name. Not on a site which uses Adsense anyways. I’m not the only one to have been affected on HubPages and the Hub support team suggested I unpublish or change the url’s on any hub which contained “google” or “adsense”.

So I did – about a month ago – and now they are all gone from the cache  now they – are back right here on this site – which does not, never has, and will never run Adsense! Unfortunately I have lost the comments – which as usual on hubpages were useful – anyway here is the text!

Adsense Placement on HubPages

This never made me a lot of Adsense – but it ranked pretty well because it had so organic links – oh well. Useful information if you want to know why you have a single digit click thru rate on your hubs.

SEO Google Explains How to Do It

I went through the latest Google Webmaster guidelines and applied the “official” “suggestions” to hubpages.

How to Earn $1000 a Month with Adsense

Obviously sarcasm doens’t work with Adsense employees! This was actually the hub they named as in breach of their TOS! I must admit though I made a few dollars because yes  I was triggering plenty of get rich quick Adsense ads and the odd idiot did indeed click on them!

Photo Credit

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business

Passive Income and Online Friends and Competition

There is a great debate about how much those of us who build online passive income sites as to how much you reveal of your niches. There is every opinion out there – some people don’t care who finds their sites – others go to great lengths to conceal their niches.

1070365_friends_foreverIts at tricky balance in my opinion and part of the answer lies in people’s underlying personalities and some in their business model. Its an issue that anyone doing passive income blogging has to deal with at some point though.

I resisted the idea of having multiple online personas for a long time. Eventually though I realised that I wanted to start a couple of new personas on hubpages for the hubchallenge – having a few more profile pages which I could link to my sites seeemed like a good idea. Then of course if I build backlinks to those hubs from other sites such as article directories then I need the same persona to link there, and so it goes as they say.

Here’s some points that people do confuse themselves with – who are you hiding from Google or your competitors. If you are running Adsense you are not hiding from Google because the sites are linked with your pub-id – you might as well run Analytics as  well and use a gmail address.

If you are monetizing with Affiliate sales or otherwise yes you can “hide” from Google – though if determined they will still track you down unless other people own your sites, as a domain registrar they have access to this information even if you have privacy enabled.

What do you do – do you think hiding your niches is important – do you make a cursory effort to do this – or do you think its really important and you go to some effort and expense to do so?

Categories
Back Links HubPages

Hubpage Challenge 100 Hubs in 30 Days

OK so not a day after I write about diversifying to other Web 2.0 article sites and review  InfoBarrel the great Hubpage challenge blows up all over the Internet. If you have been asleep under a rock and not paying attention it went like the: Court decided to have a new money making experiment: 100 hubs in 30 days. Well Hubpage’s marketing guy Ryan Hupfer noticed this (btw if you are wondering how this sort of thing happens – I have 2 words for you “google alerts” a great way to know what people are saying about you!). Long story short we now have The Great Hub Challenge:

100 hubs in 30 days

Continue reading “Hubpage Challenge 100 Hubs in 30 Days”
Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Passive Income

Passive Income for March Update

Well what a difference a month makes! Sure its turning cooler here in Australia and we may have seen the end of the Perth swimming season but its all looking rosy from where I’m sitting!

Big Wave, SW Australia
Big Wave, SW Australia

I have been a whole lot more focused in March though the Site Build It fracas was a little distracting. Trust me the amount of traffic would have taken this blog down if it had been on shared hosting – hostgator reseller rocks is all I can say!

I made  some new friends during the whole thing and I’d like to give a shout out to Lorecee at Work From Home On-Line Guide who really gave some thoughtful  comments from an ex-customer’s point of view.

Some people thought that I did the whole Site Build It Review to make passive income from their affiliate system. I didn’t. I initially did it to build my subscribers and hopefully get noticed my some people looking for information about how to start an online business. I have put an affiliate offer on the post now – a legit piece of software which will hand-hold you through the site building process, is a one time cost, offers a 30-day money back guarantee and allows you to build as many sites as you want.

I build sites using self-hosted wordpress, blogger and MyStarterBlog but some people want prettier with less effort and are prepared to spend the money  – that’s fine to.

In between approving Site Build It comments though I did manage to get some sites up and running.

  1. I’m thinking about doing some SEO consulting when/if we return to New Zealand.  I bought two new and one pre-owned domain for that niche and got site up on all of them. All are indexed.
  2. I set up 2 blogger blog niche sites. One is waiting for content from cyberquest – who were offering 500 word articles for $1 and got absolutely flooded with requests  – so the content is about a month delayed.
  3. Found a great uncompetitive niche and bought 6  info domains (99c each at the moment) to geo-target the term across 3 markets and 2 variations. One site up and indexed and backlinks built.
  4. Found another 2 pre-owned domains which I bought did the keyword research for and ordered content  from Cyberhub– so they are sitting waiting to.
  5. Bought yet another 2 pre-owned domains and didn’t have them transferred by the end of the month so I had done the research for those to!

So I’m pleased with the progress for the month – more keyword research than sites developed but it will keep rolling now I think!

This month I have a week off over Easter to snorkle with the whale sharks so I have to work extra hard to make up for it!

BTW remember that if you are running Adsense you need to update your privacy policy by 8 April Grizz over at make money for beginners has provided an updated version

Photo Credit

Categories
Back Links

Entrecard Will Kill Your Search Traffic

OK I have been doing some Web2.0 stuff over the last few weeks and have looking for  sources of backlinks which will a) work for the search engines i.e. give me a do-follow backlink and b) might even get you some focused traffic. Getting my sites to the point their earn me passive income is all about increasing my backlinks

Entrecard Sucks!
Entrecard Sucks!

I don’t know if you count Entrecard as 2.0 as really its just a fancy banner exchange which as been around forever (ie like 10 years – a LONG time on the Internet).

I never took much notice of Entrecard but people over at the Today forums were singing its praises so I signed up (free) and installed it on my Travel Over 30s blog.   And I dropped my entrecards – almost always on relevant blogs in the travel and expat sector. You can drop a maximum of 300 cards a day – with a little distraction – ie. actually reading some of the blogs this can take several hours – most of the blogs have every widge under the sun and take FOREVER to load.

And sure enough the traffic came – maybe 50% of people I dropped on dropped back within the next day or so – to be honest this was better than I had thought. I got a bit of traffic from them.

Then I stopped  dropping – and my after a day or so my Entrecard traffic went down to a handful a day. Which again was to be expected. This was not passive income – if I didn’t drop no one was going to drop back or even visit.

So Entrecard wasn’t building me an ongoing audience – it was just getting me a reciprocal “drop and run” response. So if I didn’t drop I didn’t get traffic.

Which in its self is not so bad – but it got worse, a lot worse. My Google search engine traffic disappeared. I was getting a steady flow of queries from Google to a number of different posts – I had had this traffic for around a month.

After a week or so of serious Entrecard activity -my search engine traffic had gone. Why?

Well I don’t know for sure- as you never do with search engines, but I am almost certain it is because my Entrecard traffic was low quality – it was hit and run – they came found the Entrecard widget – dropped and left.

Google rates pages for a number of reasons – but a lot of very short term visitors who click in and out – seems to get you marked down. And I think this is what has happened to my blog.

Meanwhile my other Today blog, which I never had Entrecard on has gone from strength to strength on search traffic.

So not only will your Entrecard traffic not convert to sales, Adsense clicks or even readers – it will also have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.

Entrecard is off my blog as soon as my current backlog of adveritsers are through.

Categories
Back Links

Self-promotional backlinks – which don’t annoy

Photo Credit: PoppyKay
Photo Credit: PoppyKay

For important new developments at todaydotcom check out my update : is today a scam?

The importance of backlinks we have discussed before. Many sites allow you to link to your own sites – two that I use are hubpages and today.com which are sites which pay you to blog. Today particularly require that to earn their payment per post the content must be original and not self-promotional. This appears to confuse people – and yet although many of my posts promote other sites I have none have them been flagged.

1-Feb-09 Update – today has now tightened up and will not pay the per post fee if you have a link to any site you own or to any article on hubpages , AC and similar sites.  You still get the traffic payment.

What’s the secret – write an original article, related to the same topic – add a link somewhere – not an obvious one – just a link with the text that you are are trying to rank for in Google. There’s a link in this paragraph which is relevant to the broad topic of making money blogging but this post would get approved if I had a blog on the theme of making money online at today.com

Approaches to avoid :

  • quoting content – even if you wrote it and can do so legitamtely – and saying something like “read more here” or “for more information click here”;
  • disguising links by hiding them in a full-stop (period) or linking in a misleading manner i.e. using a misleading anchored text – this is against Adsense’s TOS anyway;

You must provide original and complete information for the reader without them needing to leave the site that they are on.  I generally write about topics I know well on these  blogs I find know well.  Every post on my two today.com blogs has been approved and here are some of examples of promotional posts which are acceptable:

Christmas in Australia

Underground in Coober Pedy

Child Star in Australia

Note too that not every post does have promotional backlinks – the overall pattern matters too. Sometimes I don’t link out at all – sometimes I link to authority sites such as commercial businesses

Basically every post stands alone if you have an interest you can read it from start to finish without needing to click. The link is vaguely related to the content matter though – which makes it a valuable backlink to have in Google’s eyes  – the links to my sites in this post are less valuable because this blog isn’t really about travelling or Australia!

What’s a Backlink?

Now just to take a step back –  I’ve been asked more than once in forums and elsewhere “whats a backlink”.  The answer is simple people, its just a link to another place – a piece of underlined text (usually) – which when you click or hover your mouse over it shows another web-page.

3 Simple Steps to Create A Backlink

An example is easiest:

  1. type in the worlds “Baby Boomer Gear”,
  2. highlight the words and then click the chain (link) in WordPress (or most other on and off line writing packages these days including hubpages)
  3. it asks me for the url – if I then copy or type in http://www.cafepress.com/babyboomerbuzz
  4. the end result will looks like Baby Boomer Gear and Maren has an anchored backlink for her Baby Boomer store!

Thanks for the question Maren – the only dumb questions are the unasked ones you know!

Categories
Online Business

2009: The Year I Make it?

balls_prioritesWell this is my New Year’s post – we had a great holiday and no  I didn’t run out of things to do or find any stunningly cheap internet – so no work got done.  Time to take stock:  the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year.

Biggest challenges of the year:

  • “getting” the marketers mindset.  Understanding that I am in the business of selling things – but reconcilling that with not wanting to rip someone off. BTW I just noticed someone bought a Asus eeePC from one of netbook review hubs – that made me smile – because I love that little notebook!
  • focus – I keep on getting distracted and I need to balance where I want to get to and new ideas which keep on coming from left field!

Biggest Wins of the Year:

  • managing to make some affiliate sales and being able to sleep at night. I have decided that   I will only promote on this blog what I use myself and find useful and explain why  I use it and why. This does seem to convince the occasional person to buy from me – I thank you 🙂
  • finally being able to rank a site based on the keywords I wanted to rank for – it doesn’t sound like much – but trust me it was the “proof of concept” I really needed  – sometimes you just have to do it yourself to understand that it will work for you – dumb but human I think.

So 2009: what is happening going forward.  I am torn, and have been for 6 months, between being an internet marketer, a freelance writer, and more recently a blogger. Unfortunately I am instinctively more comfortable in the social role of blogging or the contractor/employee role of writer  – but where  I need to be is an internet marketer.

Internet Marketer

I have learnt a few things over the year  and now have several sites developed and slowly starting to make me money.  There is money to be made, though at the end of the day its not content which is King, but links and search engine rankings.  That said I still try to make my sites to have some useful content in them, and so far  I have not had any issues with them being taking down as spam so  I think I am doing OK there.

Freelance Writer

Ironically I have made around 60% of my online  income by writing for other people. This was an unexpected development as I never thought of myself as a writer  but like any skill the more the do you the better  I get, and understanding something of how search engine works is definitely an advantage in this area. At the end of the day  Freelance writing is hardly passive income   – as any writer will tell you. Instead I am using it as a way to buy leverage for my main business that is sites and yes content too.

Blogger

I got involved with today.com, initially anyway, because I thought that I could get some easy backlinks to other sites and make some money on the referrals.  I was right on both counts  – but also found that I quite enjoyed the interaction and given that  I was being paid for traffic directly  I could play with some of the social networking stuff such as Entrecard.  Both blogs  I started in November are now PR3 Australia News is more a trends blog while Travel Over 30s is turning into a general travel flagship/social blog.  Basically the idea with both of them is to use them to not just get backlinks but maybe attract a few would be entrepreneurs over to this site or to my hubpages cotent.

Goals for the first 1/2 2009

  1. Get more organised and focussed on the important stuff so that I can achieve the following:
  2. Develop at least 10 more niche sites developed and promoted and ranking in the top 10 for my keywords
  3. Develop at least 1 e-book out a month  – to be also promoted via my own website which involves learning a few technical bits and a hard thing – how to write a sales letter!
  4. Maintain this blog, Passive Income on a regular basis – sorry can’t promise better than that –  I try not to post unless I have something to say – or a question to answer – so if you want more posts ask more questions 🙂
  5. Maintain my two today.com blogs – trying to blend social blog with trends to get a lot more search traffic to them – and do some entrecard dropping at least in the short-term.
  6. Uses AMA more frequently to support my money sites and other blogs.
  7. Maintain and diversify my freelance writing income – probably to replace the part-time, real-world job I have, which is looking very shaky at the moment – mineral exploration anyone?

Hell that’s rather a long list!  The bottom line is though –  I need to start making a decent income – which around here is at least A$1000/week and I am not close yet! But  I will be!

Categories
Blogging Making Money Online

Today Works Well for Trends Blogging

IMPORTANT: Read this update on blogging at today dot com – it still works well for trends though.

Well I am enjoying blogging at today.com more and more. Mainly because I am finding it pretty easy to get my posts indexed and then get search traffic to them. What I am doing is something that is called “trends blogging”. Google has an appetite and the appetite is for whatever people are searching for at the moment. To check out the top 100 queries at Google trends – trust me it usually makes for pretty depressing reading!

I’ve tried using Google trends to blog directly – but to be honest lacking real-time access to US TV is a huge disadvantage – and not caring even less about US popular “culture” is a show-stopper!

So instead I am doing my own version: which is currently around a film which is about to be released. I suspect it might be popular because the sexy photos of Nicole Kidman in Australia hub does pretty well. And the movie isn’t out yet – which is the point – the premier is tonight so I wrote about the Australia Movie premier and the post was indexed with 40 minutes – probably less I wasn’t looking. I was already getting some traffic to an earlier post on the same topic so I checked my stats and made sure I answered the questions to searches I’d had traffic from – some of which weren’t answered in the original post which kinda gave me the hint that I might be onto something. I am now sitting in position 2 and 3 for my keywords in Australia anyway – and of course its not yet today in most of the US – I LOVE the time difference game sometimes (its almost as good as the curency game at the moment for those of us whose currencies have dropped against the US$ ). Now the nice thing about today is that I get paid on traffic not directly on clicks -that’s lucky because entertainment is notoriously BAD for Adsense payouts! But I am definitly getting traffic!

Categories
Marketing Search Engines

Google Reveals SEO Secrets

Google has just released their Search Engine Optimization Guide. Yes the big G itself is finally prepared to answer the most FAQ out there ” How do I get my site to rank in Google?”

Its a pretty scary document: well scary if you are in the business of scamming people out of good money by pretending that SEO is hard to do – its anything but. In fact I suspect none of what is in this guide is new. Its just been finally collected all together in one place so that people can actually find it – now that’s an idea!

The report is fairly simple to understand for anyone who has the rudiments of how a website is setup. The bottom line is excellent for anyone who wants to make money as an online writer because as usual the bottom line is that a website which is attractive and useful for readers will also attract the search engines. Get your headings right and make sure you correctly anchor your backlinks and Google will notice.

I wrote an extended review of Googles SEO Guide an how it applies to HubPages here: SEO How to Do It by Google

One item the Google SEO Guide mentions in passing is that blogging about newsworthy or unique content will get you ranked. That certainly seems to be happening to me on my Australia News blog

Categories
HubPages Online Business

HubPages is NOT a Waste of Time!

I occasionally get the comment that I shouldn’t publish all my better content on sites I don’t own or control. The comment came up again on HubPages where I was told again that I was basically wasting my time publishing there.

Well its true at one level: the actual direct income I make from Adsense/Kontera/eBay/Amazon revenue sharing pays for my hosting: but that’s about it!. No the effect of Hubpages is more subtle than that. I have readers who actually read what I post there.

That said my best ever hub in terms of views by hubpages readers is this one high-lighting some sexy pictures of Nicole Kidman. I have a theory on this. As an exclusively English language site HubPages has a quite a number of Indian authors. India still has tight censorship laws which probably block most of the X-rated sites which are prevelent across the internet. HubPages bans “adult” hubs but their interpretation is the same as Adsense’s that is the odd American view of sex which bans (female) nipples but wet transparent clothing is fine. I don’t know for sure but I know that I have had over 200 views a day for weeks at a time, and then the views drop to a tenth of that: probably because the hub is no longer featured on the front page of “hot” hubs! So I am guessing that I will get quite good PR on that hub on the next update. BTW people looking for pictures do NOT buy anything!

My other success recently on Hubpages has been a serious of hubs I have done around the “make money online” niche.

Consistently the most commented and popular pieces are the ones which either relate to Internet Marketing, HubPages and personal experience in those areas. People seem to love to read about people’s success’s or otherwise with making money on-line. My all time comment record is the HubPages for Internet Marketing 251 approved comments: that’s not counting the comments I have spammed; anything with “marketing” in the title seems to get a lot of spam!

Categories
Paid Tools Tools

AMA After 2 Weeks

Wow I am really impressed. I have been tracking the sites/pages I am promoting using Article Marketing Automation. Today I had a quick look – expecting the usual list of “not found” mean I’m not ranking in the first 1000 results and just about dropped the laptop – I am ranking wow!


Success
Originally uploaded by kevinthoule

I am promoting a hubpage I wrote a while back. The page is nearly a year old but wasn’t ranking at all well on the SERPS. I posted an article with a variety of 3 word keyword phrases on 21 September (which has now been published 53 times): almost immediately my Google traffic jumped – that could have been coincidence – I’ve seen this size jump before. But today I noticed that I was ranked for some of the 3-word KW phrases I had never promoted anywhere but via AMA – in fact sometime in the last couple of days I jumped from not in the top 1000 – to position #2 (for 2 phrases) and #6 for another!

Now hubpages may not be a fair test: I generally find I can get hubpages to rank easier than anything else I write. But I also have been pushing a niche blog of mine. Its been around about 3 months, is a .info and is bouncing around – it got to first page and then dropped out of sight to sit around the 100-300 rank mark for various long-tails, for the last 2 months. Now today its back, and boy is it back -the gain in the last couple of days is around 200-400 places so that I am now sitting position 10 and 20 for quite a number of my keyword phrases I. I submitted one article to AMA on the Sept 19 – and its been published 59 times.

People this seems to be working – I’ll let you know in another week whether the positions hold up. Those links again: AMA free version with a trial of the article submission
Or if you want to go straight for the money version – click the pretty banner on the right!