Twitter Followers VS RSS Subscribers

October 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

Twitter Followers vs. RSS Subscribers

You may be aware that Twitter is the newest phenomenon in the blogoshpere. Big name bloggers have been jumping on the Twitter bandwagon for months, and many have effectively leveraged the micro-blogging service to increase readership, while at the same time using it to develop new relationships. The great thing about Twitter is that is helps you develop that two-way relationship that RSS lacks.

Having that Feedburner chicklet increase by a few hundred readers definitely feels good. The more subscribers you have, the more influence you have as a blogger. But I would assert that a new Twitter follower is far more valuable than a new RSS subscriber. Here’s why:

1. Twitter followers see your broadcasts

Although some people will tell you that using Twitter as a broadcasting service is wrong, but I disagree. Many people PREFER their friends let them know of a new blog post via Twitter. I may not always have my feed reader open, but I keep Twitterific in the corner of my monitor all day. When someone announces a new blog post on Twitter, I will very often click and read it.

2. Twitter followers can become your friends

The thing that Twitter offers that an RSS reader can’t is the ability to respond. Sure, there is always the comment section, but you’re far more likely to get a response from a blog author on Twitter than in their comments. Twitter is conversational, and thus Twitter users like to use the tool to converse.

3. Twitter friends can become your fans

Friendship means trust, and people who trust you are far more likely to become fans. Ultimately, fans are what you want.

The way a blogger gets to be influential, and thus make money, is by figuring out a way to get people to use their influence (no matter how small) to promote you. People who like you enough to do this are valuable, and Twitter is the perfect tool to cultivate these fans.

4. Twitter followers are usually testing you

I give my blog readers three options when they visit my blog.

  1. Subscribe to my RSS feed
  2. Subscribe via Email
  3. Follow me on Twitter

The reason I added that third option is because I suspected many people were coming to my blog, enjoying my content, but couldn’t justify adding another blog to their list of daily reads. For these people, I needed to give them an option that let them gradually get to know me. If they enjoyed conversing with me, or reading my tweets, then they are likely to click a “New Blog Post” broadcast when I tweet them, as well.

And since I use Woopra Analytics, I am able to watch the instant results of tweeting a new blog post to these followers. It’s amazing to see the “Live” number shoot up instantaneously.

5. Twitter followers can become RSS subscribers too

During the time since I added the third “Follow me on Twitter” option, I’ve seen my RSS subscriber numbers almost double. I certainly can’t give credit to Twitter for all of them (I worked my tail off in October to increase subscribers), I can say that I do believe Twitter helped tremendously as a part of my overall subscription and traffic increase strategy.

In the cases where Twitter followers and RSS subscribers overlap, consider yourself lucky. You’ve just made a new friend, and a new subscriber.

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How to Get Detailed AdSense Report Through Email

October 3, 2009 Leave a Comment

Now you can get your detailed Adsense reports through email. You don’t need to sign in to to your Adsense account for this, simply opt for their email system and they will keep sending you detailed report about your earnings. This new adsense feature has been brought to us by Adsense team and they talked about this on their official blog.

Let’s know how we can set up an detailed advanced report through email :

1. Login to your Google AdSense Account.
2. Navigate to Reports >> Report Manager
3. Now go to Advanced Reports and search for a date range.
4. Once the report is generated, save that Report as Report Template.
5. Now move to Report Manager page and check for your recently saved Report Template.
6. Now if you want to get the reports, change the frequency option next to it.
7. You can opt for Daily Reports, Weekly Reports or Monthly Reports.
8.Provide the e-mail address where you want to receive those reports. It’s not necessary to provide the email associated with your adsense account.
9. Choose the reporting format and click on Save.
10. You are done.

Now Google Adsense team will send you the detailed report on your account. You can notice different things related to your adsense performance and make changes accordingly.

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How to How to Test Adsense Ads on Your Site Safely

October 2, 2009 Leave a Comment

Many newbies feel excited about their Adsense ads and end up clicking on them. Remember that Adsense TOS clearly warns not to click on your own Adsense ads and disobeying this might lead to your account ban. Google advises to use it’s Adsense preview tool to preview your Adsense ads, but this tool shows only few pre-configured ads. Google is yet to develop this feature, this is not what a publisher looks for. You can follow an another trick to test ads on your own site by clicking on them. Yes, you can click on your own Adsense ads and Google won’t ban you for this, let’s know how!

While creating a new Ad zone, Google provides you piece of code to place on your site. When someone clicks on that link, Google tracks the IP address, geographical location along with many other things (How Google detects invalid clicks). Now, if you click on your own ads, Google will track that the publisher is clicking on it’s own ads and will ban your account without any warning or notice. In order to be safe, even if you click on your own ads, you have to make those ad units uncrackable.

Normal Adsense code looks like this :

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”;
/* 728×15, created 4/16/09 */
google_ad_slot = “xxxxxxxxxxxxxx”;
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

Now insert a single piece of code inside that code.

google_adtest = “on”;

Your final code should look like the below screenshot now :
preview-adsense-ads-300x102After updating the above code, click on your own ads to check them. By adding “Test” tag to your Adsense code, you make your Adsense code a test unit and none of the clicks will be calculated by Google, no matter if the clicks are coming from the publisher or any third party.

Google will not calculate any impression or clicks on these ads, so you should mind to remove that code as soon as you are done with your testing. Else, you might end up getting nothing as your Adsense revenue.

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Adbie Keywords Catalog 2 – Adsense Website

September 27, 2009 Leave a Comment

New unique Adsense website. AdBie Keywords Catalog script its a very profitable search engine and popular keywords catalog script with integrated Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network or any PPC box program (Adbrite, Bidversiser etc.), Amazon, Ebay and Clickbank. Average click CTR 18%. The script is optimized for search engine spiders. For ex. page with search results on “domains” is named “domains.html”, “free domains” is named “free_domains.html”, “cheap com domains” is named “cheap_com_domains.html” etc. For ex. page in keywords catalog (popular searches) “domains” is named /domains, free domains is named /free/domains/ etc. Keyword in catalog You add and remove in admin panel section. Ex. if You add keyword “Make Big Money” You see in catalog three pages: /make/, /make/big/, /make/big/money/ and make_big_money.html page. One keyword, four pages for search engine spiders. You can add millions keywords, get millions adsense pages and unlimited free traffic!.

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How to Get Indexed On Google Within 24 Hours

March 1, 2009 Leave a Comment

Some friends often ask me how to Get Indexed On Google Within 24 Hours,I find some ways by my experience, I think the ways can help you make money.

You have just created your new blog, mini-site or other fancy presence on the web. You’ve got your adsense in place, your first few articles written and you are ready to be indexed on Google so you can start building traffic and hopefully make a little money. Well, personally I don’t like to wait that long to start monetizing my website. So I devised a little plan that gets my site indexed within 24 hours, every time, and starts making me money immediately.

Here is my short to do list to make it happen:
For this example let’s say I have registered Seeor.com obviously for the niche of skin care. (Not a site or niche I use – just a random example)

The first thing to do is set up an email box called: contributors @ Seeor.com (or whatever the actual domain is)

The second thing to do is find an affiliate product that has something to do with the niche of my new site. It can be a Clickbank product or an affiliate program of any kind just as long as it is good and relevant to my niche.

Once I have found a relevant product I set my affiliate link as the signature for all emails coming from my new domain. The signature says something like: Have you seen the latest breakthrough in “Niche Name Here”?
(Note: I usually cloak the signature link with a simple redirect page)

The third thing to do is a quick search on ebay or google for some info or something about my niche with master resale rights. Most of the time I can find it on ebay for less than a dollar. (Just search your niche along with the word “resale”)

The fourth thing to do is set up the resale product or products with paypal. I set the price at $7 or under. (I like to use ejunkie to host my files for sell but it isn’t absolutely necessary)

The fifth thing to do is set up an auto-responder for the email address that I created in step one. The text reads something like this:
————————————————————————-
“Thank you for your interest in becoming a contributor to Seeor.com (or whatever). We will review your submission and contact you if we feel that a working relationship can be established.
Our current contributors find the resource below very useful. As a potential contributor you may get your copy of this $89 resource for only $7.
Title of Product Goes Here (link to the reseller products I set up through paypal).
We hope to be in touch soon.
- SCB Staff ”
————————————————————————-

The Sixth thing to do is to go to craigslist.org and choose the largest city that will have an interest in your niche. Post an ad under “creative gigs” that looks something like this:
————————————————————————
Title: Can you write articles about skin care?
Seeor.com (<- make sure that is an active link. Very important!) is looking for aspiring writers with an interest in skin care and beauty. Everyone is welcome to apply. Please submit a short sample of your writing on any related subject (200-400 words) to contributors @ Seeor.com
———————————————————————–

Now here’s what happens:
1. That live link on craigslist.org will get you indexed on Google within 24 hours every time.
2. Lot’s of targeted people will click on the link to see what your site is and some always end up clicking on adsense ads.
3. Your auto-responder will fire off immediately to anyone who responds to the ad and offer them the “discounted” info as well as show your affiliate loaded signature. (again to highly targeted people)
4. If anyone actually sends you good content (most will suck) you just scored a great writer for your site. Work out a deal accordingly.

Don’t try to keep bumping the ad to the top. Leave the ad live until it naturally expires. If it made you any money, (always does), then run it again.

You were going to try to get indexed anyhow and this way is is a hell of alot more productive.

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The SEO Success Pyramid

February 3, 2009 Leave a Comment

Wooden’s philosophy on coaching (and life) is summed up in the “Pyramid of Success,” which beats the tail off all that Self-Help Guru junk you see peddled in books, on blogs, on daytime chat shows, and on late night TV. I was lucky to hear Coach Wooden speak about the Pyramid of Success while I was a student at Pepperdine University; to this day, it’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.

What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.

I would never compare myself to John Wooden, but I do like teaching others about online marketing. So, with that in mind, and inspired by the great coach, here is the….

SEO Success Pyramid

SEO Success Pyramid

What’s It All Mean?

Commitment: Every successful project I’ve ever worked on has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic and engaged. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can sabotage everything.

Planning: Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed, and so forth. Search marketing is no different. Read: Planning an SEO Campaign

Product/Service: Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. There’s no substitute for quality.

Education/Information: You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.

Patience: True, there are exceptions every now and then, but for the vast majority of companies big or small, search marketing is a process that takes time to implement correctly. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.

Design & Usability: Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a web site that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.

Keyword Research: If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.

Analytics: How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? Measure, analyze, adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

Tools: Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.

Crawlability: A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc. Here are 5 common crawlability mistakes you need to know about.

Content: This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting…

Links: Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.

Social/Local Findability: Let me explain this since I might be inventing a new term. Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, but social media can work, too. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is findability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible, and you can do this on social media sites that make local networking easier.

Reputation Management: It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.

Trust: In my first post of 2007, I said trust is the No. 1 factor, and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success.

As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find buzz/word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

January 26, 2009 Leave a Comment

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

  • Review of your site content or structure
  • Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
  • Content development
  • Management of online business development campaigns
  • Keyword research
  • SEO training
  • Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading “Sponsored Links”) as well. Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work.

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

  • Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
  • Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
  • Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
  • What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
  • What’s your experience in my industry?
  • What’s your experience in my country/city?
  • What’s your experience developing international sites?
  • What are your most important SEO techniques?
  • How long have you been in business?
  • How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

  • Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

    “Dear google.com,
    I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

    Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

  • No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
  • Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you.
  • You should never have to link to an SEO.Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
  • What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

    • One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

    Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

  • What are some other things to look out for?
    • owns shadow domains
    • puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
    • offers to sell keywords in the address bar
    • doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
    • guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
    • operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
    • gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
    • has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google
    • requests your FTP account information or root access to your server
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