Backlinks, PageRank, and Blogger

Posted by stuart as online marketing, pagerank, make money online, blog, google adsense, adsense

Lot’s of interesting chat going on in Tom’s little corner of the world at Nothing-Ventured.org about one page sites at the moment.

One thing that specifically caught my eye was a comment by Empress about using single page sites to throw some page rank loving back to a main site.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, as I run all my sites from a single reseller hosting account, any links between my sites will be of little or no value in terms of pagerank, because they’re all on the same IP.

Now I could go off and get a whole pile of $5 a month hosting accounts and spread my sites around that way - but let’s look at the cost of doing this. (Keeping in mind that most new sites I put up are on sub-domains of existing sites, therefore cost me nothing. I couldn’t do this if I moved all my sites on to different hosting accounts)

Let’s say I run 10 small sites and blogs, I need ten hosting accounts, at $5/month = $50/month = $600/year
10 domain names at, say, $9/year = $90/year.

So now we’re at an annual cost of $690 for hosting and domains. That’s $57.50 per month, before I start to turn any kind of profit. Ouch!

Now I have another idea - let me say firstly, that I’m in no way any kind of expert on off-page SEO, or how the Blogger network works, but I have to assume that Blogger spreads its hosting around a whole pile of datacenters around the planet.

The question is, how does Blogger determine which blogs are served from which servers? I’m guessing that they use some sort of geo-IP targeting, hosting the blogs on the nearest server to the location from which it was created.

If this were the case, it may be possible to create a whole stack of Blogger accounts, each one of them created through a different proxy in a different location around the world. Put a couple of articles relating to your subject on each one (the content wouldn’t need to be that good, just re-hashed PLR articles maybe?), linking back to a main site.

This would create a catalogue of backlinks from relevant pages with different IP’s. Admittedly, the pages sending the link loving back to your main site would not have high PR, but I wonder whether the “every little bit helps” theory might apply here?

There’s a miriad of reasons why this might not work, and it’s debateable whether the time spent doing this would be better spent building quality content or “real” backlinks, but it’s something to think about.

Adsense bazillionaire wannabe - a day in the life.

Posted by stuart as online marketing, pagerank, make money online, blog, google adsense, adsense

4am - Wake up to screaming nine month old baby, stagger to kitchen to make up bottle. Lurch back to lounge-room, turn on PC monitor to check stats before getting baby up. “Not bad - 3 clicks from 84 impressions for a total of $1.64, and it’s only about 10am in the US”

4:15am - Baby’s fed and back in bed, I’ll just go out on the back porch for a cigarette, then check the “top channels” to see where the clicks came from, then head back to bed. Interesting, one of the clicks came on a new page I only set up yesterday - http://therenalunit.com/how_much_dialysis.php
4:30am - Better go have a look at the latest visitors section in site stats for therenalunit.com, and see how that visitor found their way to that page. Hmmm, seems they found their way there from my another page on therenalunit.com, linked through from a blog post I made. How did they get to the blog post? Oh, ok - gotta love Technorati
5am - Better have a look at the technorati page, just to see what other people are writing about dialysis and kidney disease. Eyes float to the bottom of the screen. “Hells bells, Firefox Adsense extension is telling me I now have 7 clicks from 105 ad impressions for a grand total of $2.71. We’re on track to beat our $3.31 daily record!” Clicks seem to be coming from www.ausshopping.net - an Australian site about mobile phones, which originally started as an online drop-shipping store, but I couldn’t make any decent money from it, so I wrote some content, dropped some adsense ads on it, and forgot about it. The joke is, it outperforms all my other site with double my average CTR, and outrageous eCPMs of up to 10 times my other sites.

5:25am - better go check the alexa rankings of my sites; no major changes to report there. Check pagerank of a couple of sites while we’re there - nope, no update at the moment

5:45am - Wandering off to see what people are saying about Adsense over at Technorati, I’ll especially look out for blog posts by Eric at memwg.com and Tom at Nothing Ventured Nothing Gained.

6:15am - Not a whole lot of note at Technorati, I wonder why people bother posting to blogs with one line references to other people’s blog posts. Hardly seems worth the effort, really. The other thing that interests me is people who take free articles from sites like GoArticles.com, and copy and paste them into their blog. Why would you bother?
6:35am - Happen to notice little orangey-brown Outlook icon in the Windows toolbar is flashing - new email. Check it out, 13 new emails warning me to moderate comments on this blog. Log in to Wordpress - 13 freaking comments from the same phentermine peddler that seems to have been targeting this blog with his comment-spam for the last couple of weeks. I reckon I’ve deleted at least 200 spam comments from this prick. Problem is, every comment seems to be coming from a different IP, so I can’t even block him that way.

6:50 - fist stirring coming from the bedroom of my three year old son. Bloody hell, The day starts for the rest of the family soon. My wife will be getting up, she’s going to ask me what time I got up, I’ll tell her 4am, and she’ll ask me what I’ve been doing for the last three hours. Problem is, I don’t really have an answer.

I’ve been up for nearly three hours, and haven’t even done any real work on any of my sites. Oh well, I guess there’s always tomorrow.

Welcome to Adsense, please check your self respect at the door.

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online, google adsense, google, adsense

Imagine you received this letter:

=====================================

“Dear sir,

Welcome to Microsoft, congratulations on being accepted as a valuable business partner of the Microsoft Corporation.

Please note the below important terms and conditions regarding your relationship with Microsoft, and also please note that we reserve the right to change these terms and conditions at any time.

1. You may not discuss any aspect of your relationship with Microsoft with anyone.
2. Unfortunately, at this time, we cannot tell you how much we will be paying you. We won’t even give you a fixed price for a set result. Want to know what 100 clicks on a certain keyword is worth? Sorry, you’ll have to forge a contextual advertising partnership with, um…..well, ah……hell, we’re the only game in town - wohoo!
3. Unfortunately, we won’t be disclosing what percentage of what our advertiser pays will go to you, the advertising vehicle. We’ll even keep the formula for calculating that a secret. See that $0.03 click you just got on your site, You’ll have no way of knowing whether the advertiser paid $0.04, or $10.00
4. We reserve the right to terminate the relationship at any time, for reasons which we may or may not choose to disclose to you. Should we choose to terminate the relationship, you will forfeit all money earned but yet to be claimed to Microsoft Corp. “

Thankyou for choosing Microsoft as your contextual advertising partner!”

=====================================

There’d be rioting in the streets if Microsoft tried on even half of what Google’s getting away with here, not to mention that Google’s terms and conditions probably violate any one of a number of fair trading laws in any number of countries.

I read a while ago (I can’t remember where, I’ll post the link if I can find it) that for Yahoo! and MSN to topple Google, they don’t need to build a better search engine, but build a better contextual advertising system. This raises an interesting point. When Yahoo! and MSN finally get their act together and try to reel in the head-start that they’ve given the Goog’ in this area, will we see a lightening up in the T&C, and an opening up of the information supplied to publishers?

Google can ride rough-shod over its publishers at the moment, as although there’s little doubt that “thar’s gold in tham thar hills” as far as Adsense and good traffic/content goes, without competition, Google has publishers terrified that they’ll incur the ire of some bot deep in the bowells of some datacentre somewhere.

If either Yahoo or MSN can build anything approaching the ad inventory levels attained by Google, and provide some less intimidating terms and conditions for publishers, we’ll be in for some very interesting times indeed. Google may also find that they will be turning a blind eye to borderline TOS violations which are getting publishers booted at the moment, as if publishers see Google as being too inflexible and difficult to deal with, they’ll jump ship, and guess where the advertisers will want to be - where the publishers are.

Follow me on my ad(sense)venture

Posted by stuart as online marketing, pagerank, make money online, seo, google adsense, search engine optimization, adsense

I’ve been developing a few new sites recently, so I thought I’d blog the process.

Follow me as I develop my next site, from keyword research, design, adsense implementation etc.

I won’t be giving you the address of the site because:

1. It’s against the Adsense TOS to discuss statistics in relation to a URL
2. I don’t want the statistics skewed by people visiting from this blog.

I’ll link to this site from the (PR 3) home page on a site in a similar niche, and that will be the only inbound link to start with.

Firstly, a few statistics on the sites subject:

• Overture says that there were 22,882 searches on this topic on the Yahoo! network last month
• Overture says that the top bid on the main keyword related to this subject is $1.52
• Google says that the top bid on this subject is $2.46, with the highest related keyword at $13.53

The site will be designed using a template page from the Open Source Web Design site, and will start with five pages of original content

All of the content will be original, written by me, and I’ll try to add one to two pages per week.

I will run two adsense units - one 336×280 at the top, and one link unit on the right hand menu.

So jump on board, and we’ll see how we go.

Active versus passive advertising

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online, adwords, google adsense, adsense

The three month orgy of treachery and malice which is known as Big Brother renewed its acquaintance with Australian teenagers here last night.

Now this is something that would usually pass someone like me by with little need for comment, except for the fact that, for some unknown reason, Mrs. Pimpmypagerank seems to forget that she is a professional mother of two at this time of year, and revert into some sort of teeny-bopper sponge for all that is revolting in the house.

So, once the rugrats were safely tucked in to bed, the TV was switched to the appropriate channel, and I wandered off to the back of the loungeroom to write some content for a website I had been meaning to get to for ages.

Listening in to the background noise from the TV, I realised that during every ad break, the ads seemed to be for the same companies. Now this should not be surprising, as a show as popular as Big Brother is going to attract advertisers based on two criteria:

1) They can afford to advertise on a show that rates so highly (God only knows why); and
2) They think that they can take advantage of the impressionable minds watching the show.

This got me thinking about the way that these advertisers deal with the shows producers, versus the way that Adwords advertisers deal with Adsense publishers.

To draw an analogy, the Advertisers are the Adwords ad buyers, the production company (Endemol) is Google, and the TV station is the Adsense publisher.

Now there is one main difference between the TV advertising model, and the Adwords/Adsense model - the Advertisers on the TV show do not require their audience to actually do anything, and they’ll still pay. They can be considered as “pay per view” customers, rather than “pay per action” as is the case with Adsense

The advertisers are assuming that if they have to pay, (at a wild guess), $50,000 each time their ad is seen by 3 million people, they’re paying around 1.7 cents for each person viewing the ad. To equate this into Adsense terms, with a CTR of 2.5%, on 3 million page views, that’s 75,000 ad clicks, divided by the $50,000 that the advertiser has paid, is $0.66 a click. assuming a 50-50 split between Google and the Adsense site publisher, the publisher is getting $0.33 a click, over 3 million page views - an eCPM of $8.33, which is an acceptible result for an adsense publisher, especially with such a low CTR.

I wouldn’t mind a piece of that action!