It’s a Revolution …

Sorry for the quiet time here lately. I am working my butt off on several projects and the blog had to suffer as a result. Last week I spent ~$400.00 on the developer pack for the WordPress Revolution Themes (not an affiliate link). I had looked at one specific theme first for a new site, but considering the price for one template (multi-use License) just made it clear to me to spend the extra money and go for the entire package.

I just finished my second site using the new templates and I am in love with these templates. Easy to modify, good documented, and astonishing looking in my opinion. I am not a gifted web designer and so this really helps to make a good impression with my websites. Here you can see the result where I just modified the colors a little bit, but when with an otherwise unmodified design.

Pregnancy Announcement

This is a website that I had build many years ago with just static pages. I am selling physical products (postcards) from this website and kept things simple. Lately traffic has been slowly decreasing a little bit and so I decided it is time for a re-design. Now it is running Wordpress and I can easily add content on the fly and trigger the search engines to come back with the build in blog ping feature of Wordpress. I am planning on doing 2-3 blog posts per month for the beginning. I still have to finish up some of the remaining 301 redirects to the new pages and make some minor adjustments here and there (sitemap, meta tags, etc.), but overall I think this is a great step into the right direction. I need to figure out if I can add some social networking pieces to the mix as well.  I also ordered one new postcard design which should arrive next week or so.

The new blog design also allows for better implementation of presenting additional affiliate offers. I will experiment with that a little bit to see what works and what doesn’t. Now that this is also a blog I can easily write product reviews and use those to drive more traffic to the site.

Anyway – let me know what you think the site is missing or what I can do better. I would be interested in that feedback and learn from it and share the results here.

By the way – I am using a product called “Mysimpleads” (Not an affiliate link) for the ad link and banner rotation. I think it is so much easier to use than OpenAds/OpenX/phpAdsNew. It takes only moments to setup a campaign and zones – including geo-targeting. I have been using it since it was in beta and it is fast and reliable + the developer is a really helpful guy.

Searchme.com apologizes

After writing about Searchme.com on my blog I received an apology from them. See the apology here:

Hello,

Please accept our apologies for the problems your outlined in your feedback email. We also saw your blog post, and we’re terribly sorry for the trouble.

We want to let you and your readers know that when provided with the domains in question, we always take immediate action to prevent further traffic from our crawler. Additionally, we are working hard to prevent similar problems in future.

Again, we offer sincere apologies.

Kind Regards,

Michelle

Thanks for replying back to my email and my blog post, Michelle. I will accept your apology. I don’t know if it makes sense to provide domain names to you, as I think there is a huge flaw in your crawl technology that your developers should be able to identify easily. Anyway – here is a screenshot of the searchme bot dominates my website statistics on one of my websites. So far I have identified 3 websites of mine that were hit hard. I also went back to last month and reviewed my websites in questions and saw the same behavior (just a noth “friendlier” than this month). Not funny. I wonder how many other websites are being hit hard like this?

 

 

Searchme.com – The Worst Search Engine EVER …

How come that good search engines can crawl my sites in a decent manner, while some search engines are just wild hogs that use ANY available byte of remaining bandwidth and take down an entire site? The guys at SEARCHME.com did a wonderful job in wasting GB of GB in bandwidth trying to do WHAT on my servers? Are they retarded or what? Searchme does not identify itself properly as a bot (at least not in the logs I have reviewed) and has not manners in how to properly crawl a website. Googlebot used 500 megs to crawl my site, while searchme used almost 12 GB of bandwidth. If they would send me hundreds of visitors a day I would not mind, but there is nothing showing up at all. How stupid are these guys at searchme.com with their searchbot?

Searchme.com is one of the worst search engines ever and I just blocked an entire class C subnet on the firewall level. Freakin’ idiots ……. I should invoice them my loss of revenue.

If you want to block them, too – use this IP Range: 208.111.154.1 – 208.111.154.254

Update (5-21-2008): I was contacted twice by Searchme.com. The first email was a response to me having submitted a message through their contact form. The second response via email to apologize. Read the full update here.

Starting a new Affiliate Website

I am in the process of starting a new affiliate website. I stumbled over this niche while doing PPC and found one competitor who owns an entire network of websites in that niche. This guy has done a phenomenal job in regards to SEO and he dominates the ad rankings on Google.com with Google Adwords. For me this is a clear indicator that he must be working very profitable in this niche. An initial PPC test showed me that I have to put in extra efforts to get even a small share of this traffic. So, I might leave PPC traffic out for a little bit, but promote my website via SEO first. That gives me time to test and to improve the site + workout a killer landing page that I can use for PPC traffic. I am also using my in-house keyword tracking solution. This little script provides me with keywords people have searched for and clicked through to my website. This will be helpful in building PPC keyword lists as well.

For the PPC traffic I will build out the site a little more first to build a good foundation for quality score. I will then do research on keywords and design a plan of attack. Link building will be outsourced initially so that I can concentrate on the other pieces. The payout per lead for this product is above $20.00 and there are several products from different merchants available so that I have redundancy and can experiment with the different products. I emailed my affiliate manager at a certain network hoping to get some insight on which product converts best.

I am honest, I am following the leader a little bit – not by copying his website or content, but I use his websites as a guide to build out my own. He must have done a lot of testing in my opinion. I am not making a blunt copy because that recipe might give me short-term success, but in the long run it will not be the best way to do it. A copycat will never be number one and will always be a step behind. A copycat might get a call from the merchant or affiliate manager to stop copying other people’s work. It’s not my goal to be running behind or to do the work twice. I think this niche is large enough for a couple more players and therefore I want to position myself as such.

I don’t know how fast this will turn a profit. Outsourcing SEO work is expensive and I will be down several hundreds of $$$ first. I also expect to lose quite some dough on PPC marketing first. No risk, no fun, eh?!

Blogging Contests and Building Brand Awareness

Not too long ago a crazy blogging contest rocked the Internet World with prizes way over $14K. One of my websites donated a prize and I think it was a great way to increase brand awareness. I have been contacted several times now by other websites to sponsor additional contests, but most of the offers I declined because they were just copycats and I did not see a chance for repeat success.

One inquiry by John of dnxpert.com however looked different and so I decided to offer a cash prize to take part in this blogging contest. The website John is running this contest from is topic/industry related to my website I am using for the sponsorship and so I hope this is another great way to build brand awareness and to get some visitors of John’s website to check out my own website. John’s contest is just shy a few bucks from reaching $9,000.00 in prizes (at least at the time of this writing) and I think that you should check it out and participate because some of the prizes are a great way to get your online business efforts jumpstarted.

Building a brand should be your ultimate goal to separate yourself from the Internet crowd. The advantages are that more people will refer to your website as an authoritive source of information. This will result in extremely targeted inbound links and extremely targeted visitor/content combination – which in return can result in higher sales. Not every website is deemed to become a brand name. If your content is shitty, forget it and go back to enjoy short-term success eventually. You can mix really good content with affiliate marketing and success can be yours, but make sure your content and the website presentation are superior.

Suicide PPC or How to find new PPC Keywords that make you come back from the Dead

This will gonna cost you some money, but if you do it right you also gain the key to PPC success. Earlier this year I was sick of the lack of keyword tracking I had in place for one of my websites. I could see the top performing keywords, but I could not see which pages were ranking for those keywords. I wanted to get that information to be able to put customized ads onto those pages for better conversions. I managed to write some PHP code that dumped all necessary keywords into a MySQL database. It is not a pretty solution, but I am able to massage the data so that I can see the referring keyword (the exact search term/phrase), which search engine or website the visitor came from and (most important) what exact page the visitor entered my site on.

I let this go for a while to collect data and then started working on this MySQL export of over 500,000 keywords and phrases. On purpose I am collecting duplicates so that I can see which terms are most popular. Then I increased filtering and was able to get a lot of usable data that allowed me to put extremely targeted ads in place on those specific “landing” pages (normal pages on my website). That has been working out good I want to say.

Now I am taking this script and going to use it on my PPC websites as well. BUT, here is the kicker that will allow you to really benefit from this. Once the script is installed and operational, I will set some money aside and do a “Suicide”-PPC campaign. I will pick some of the most important and most popular keywords. An example would be ringtones, insurance, loan, mortgage, …. you get the idea. I will use phrase match or maybe exact match and of course plenty of negative keywords, then I will bid high enough to be on page one. Making sure I have a decent quality score and then let the campaign go and deplete the funds allocated. I want traffic.

Now when your campaign has stopped my goal is to analyze the data I collected. The importance now is not the landing page, but the actual keyword/phrase that was used. Why? Since my script will collect the entire search term I am able to see what people are really search for. That will give me a great insight into how people search in that specific niche. I will be able to collect ideas and trends and then use that data to build my “production” campaign based on those findings. The advantage is easy – I will have exclusive data that nobody else has or is shared with hundreds or thousands of subscribers that buy keyword lists from Spyfu, Wordtracker, or Keywordspy.

It should not be too difficult for you to get a similar script set up. If you do a Google search for retrieving search terms from http headers you will be on the right way. I am not able to share my code at this point for competitive reasons. I’d give you a link where I found lots of information to start my script, but the webmaster did let the domain name expire …..! Anyway – initially you will spend $100 or $200 on gathering the data, which – depending on your situation – is almost suicide, but then you will come back from dead like a (PPC)-Zombie with killer keywords in your pocket and can beat the heck out of your opponents.

By the way – I highly recommend using SpeedPPC for building PPC campaigns. This tool has saved me hours or days of work setting up PPC campaigns.

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