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Monthly Archives: July 2009

From Adsense to Affiliate Links

Typically webmasters start out with Adsense as their revenue stream. While it’s easiest and definitely quick to use, Adsense is not always the best performer if you’re looking to earn money online from your websites. With Adsense you’ll always run into a couple problems.

1. You can’t presell. With an affiliate link, you can talk about the product so your visitor knows what to expect when they get to the advertisers page. You can give them the price and details, and if they still click, they’re likely to buy since they already know everything. If that isn’t the product they’re looking for, they’ll continue browsing your site. You’ll make a sale, or keep a visitor. With Adsense you don’t get the chance to do either.

2. You’ll earn less. While I can’t say that every single one of my sites that has affiliate links makes more with those affiliate links, a majority do.

3. All your eggs in one basket. If all of your income is coming from one source and something happens to that source, your revenue drops to $0.

4. Unknown revenue share. This has always been the biggest issue with me. Google doesn’t tell you how much you’re going to earn. In fact, they tell you how much they will give you per click, after you send them the clicks. It’s totally backwards but until they have a reason to give you that info, they never will.

Moving away from Adsense is tough, and I wouldn’t suggest dumping it all together. Start slow, remove the ads from one page and replace it with affiliate links. Test it for a month and see what the revenue is like when compared to Adsense.

By |July 27th, 2009|Make Money Online|2 Comments
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How To Find Long Tail Keywords

Finding Long Tail Keywords

The “Long Tail” keywords are phrases that contain up to 5 key words and are highly specific. Since they are so specific, the search volume is very low.

Long tail example:
“Large Sony Plasma 1080p Detroit” – This key phrase is a very specific search phrase. Someone that searches for that knows exactly what they want. They want to buy a large Sony plasma TV in Detroit that has 1080p resolution. If you Google that key phrase you’ll see there are less than 10,000 results, and none of the results are any good.

A regular key phrase would be “Sony Plasma 1080p”. Not only do you have a lot more competition with that key phrase, but you don’t know very much about this visitor. You don’t know if they want a 32″ or a 50″, do they want to spend $500 or $3,000? Do they plan to buy online, or are they doing research and plan to buy locally? Do they really want a Sony, or are they looking for specs. Do they already have a Sony and need a new remote?

When you target the long tail, you will get a much higher conversion ratio because you already know what your visitors are looking for because they’ve been specific with their search. Since you know what they want, you can give it to them above the fold, quickly and easily.

The best way to find long tail keywords and key phrases is through your own data. This is your search engine referrer logs. If you’re site is new, you probably don’t have logs showing what people searched for just yet, but you will. Once this data starts rolling in, start making pages based on what people want.

Until you have that data another good way to find long tail keywords is through a keyword suggestion tool. Google has one, but Keyword Discovery is my favorite. The numbers in the search totals are not very accurate, but it gives you a good idea of what is being searched for.

Using “Sony plasma” as an example we get the following long tail key phrases:

sony multisystem plasma tv
sony plasma dvd connections
comparison chart for sony, toshiba, and panasonic plasma tvs
repair of sony plasma tvs
biggest sony plasma tv
sony plasma dvd digital receiver connection diagram
prices on sony plasma hd tv
sony 37 wega plasma tv specs
sony 950 plasma wall mount
sony bravia hdtv 46 plasma
how to get my sony plasma off standby

As you can see, after a 30 second search, you now can create 11 pages of content that is highly targeted. Some of those searches aren’t going to convert to sales (diagram, specs, off standby), but others could convert very well (wall mount, dvd connections, repair). Even if your page isn’t designed to convert, it could still make you money.

Imagine someone in a forum asks “how to get my sony plasma off standby”. Someone answers by linking to your site. When someone else comes along looking for issues with Sony TV’s, they’ll find your site. Then they might find your comparison chart, or your 1080p vs 720p guide. Since they’re looking for more information, you keep giving them information and your site makes a sale, and gets a link. Win-win for you and the person you helped.

Do you know of other ways to find long tail keywords?

By |July 18th, 2009|SEO/SEM|8 Comments
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Add Line Breaks in WordPress Posts

WordPress has a weird “feature” of stripping extra line breaks out of posts. Often times you will want more than just a single space between paragraphs or pictures. If you try to use standard html code like the following, it won’t work.

<br /> – doesn’t work

<p>&nbsp;</p> – doesn’t work

The only method that I have found of adding extra line breaks in your WordPress posts is to use the following code.

<p align=”left”>&nbsp;</p>

Copy and paste that as many times as you want.

 

 

 

 

See?

Another one that seems to work just as good is: <p style=”text-align: left; font-size:1px”>.</p>

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See?

By |July 14th, 2009|General|5 Comments
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