Purple Squirrl

SEO still focussed on text

In the video below, Google’s Search Evangelst Adam Lasnik explains that if you are going to post images and video, text is still needed to help search engines find your page. He says that using Flash as example is good for “engaging users but still focus on text as the primary mechanism for communicating”.

The objective of course is that you need to be found. Just like I’ve done here with this video, if I were to have just embed the video with a good post title the search engines would find it more difficult to find it .When you’re trying to make money online you need to be found via natural search. If you don’t use text then you haven’t really prepared your content properly from an SEO perspective.

SEO - Update on Metrics

As SEO matures it’s interesting to see that the value and sort of metrics is also changing. Stephan Spencer over at Marketing Profs writes an article about some of the metrics now being tracked for SEO.

Here are the metrics Spencer mentions -

1) Brand-to-Nonbrand Ratio
2) Unique Pages
3) Page Yield
4) Keyword Yield
5) Visitors per Keyword
6) Index-to-Crawl Ratio
7) Engine Yield

Numbers are interesting, they can certainly tell a story but only if sliced & diced the right way do they tell the accurate story.

Dating ebook experiments shows how to make money online

Lana R. (member of Gather.com) provides some great insight into an experiment she did with ebooks. She explains how she used the sale of ebooks to launch her affiliate marketing campaign. As you look around the web today this is an ongoing trend. There are a ton of free ebooks out there stuffed with affiliate deals. The author signs up with a bunch of affiliates on a certain topic then writes and ebook. In the ebook they suggest those affiliates as good destinations and the ebook customer then signs up with the affiliate - cha ching.

The experiment Lana R undertook was to use Torrent sites to advertise her ebooks and see how much she could push the envelope with SEX as the ebook topic. It turns out that even though these torrent directory sites (ie. the pirate bay) allow users to download apps illegally for the most part (or at least pushing the boundaries of what is legal) they will ban an ebook if the title is too obviously sexually explicit. So Lana R worked her experiment with a dating related ebook.

Here’s some info from her article on the affiliates she used -

Now I’ve tried a great number of adult dating sites, so here are two of my best performing STATS and results:

Disclaimer: These are my stats from various testing which I don’t track. So you should be able to get even higher conversion rates which turns to higher per signup $$$:

#1 - Iwant
7 uniques per FREE signup ($7.10 per free signup)
71 uniques per PAID signup ($50 *35/week* to $100 *279/week* per paid signup)

By far my best performing dating site, choose the Pay per Profile for starters and once you see more and more traffic, start using the Pay per Signup campaign instead.

#2 - AFinder
5 uniques per FREE signup ($0.35 per click)
55 uniques per PAID signup ($100 per paid signup)

My 2nd best performing affiliate site, only Pay Per Order is worth using.

Some of the takeaways from this experiment when creating an affiliate stuffed ebook -

1) You don’t need a website to make money online. Lana R did this without a webiste. She simply made the ebook and submitted it to torrent directories.

2) Title of the ebook has can’t be too sexually explicit or it will be banned.

3) The ebook should not be longer than 5 pages.

4) Create 2 or 3 versions of the ebooks and track success.

5) Sign up with 2 affiliates and track success. It’s best to do #3 & #4 independent of each other.

I like the idea behind this method but not crazy about the subject matter. So, I may try it on a different topic where I can provide good value.

Perfomics Details the 4 Pillars of Natural Search

The folks over at Performics have posted four articles explaining the 4 main things any website owner needs to be concerned about when optimizing their site to be found on Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine. If you are looking at moving the needle with SEO then take some time to study these articles.

The 4 Pillars of Natural Search

Pillar Number 1: Indexation
Pillar Number 2: Content Optimization
Pillar Number 3: Link-Building
Pillar Number 4: Distribution

Their posts are clearly meant as an primer since they do not delve into any of the tools required to do any of the research necessary. In the coming months I will be posting more info on what I’ve done with this blog regarding SEO and what tools I use. I’ll also post what Wordpress plugins are good to have for SEO.

Build Your Company with LinkedIn Recommendations

LinkedIn has posted on their blog some recommendtions from one of their users - Sasha Strauss, Managing Director, Innovation Protocol. He talks about how businesses can grow by employing a LinkedIn recommendation strategy. Here are the tips he shares in the post -

Get pre-qualified for new opportunities

• Represent your accomplishments by having an authentic, accurate depiction of your career
• Grow your network by uploading your contact list and reaching out to former colleagues, clients and employers
• Get recommended by connections who know and respect your work so that new opportunities have

Glam Media - pros & cons

The biggest issue when starting a website is traffic. Of course the business needs to make money but all web business models rely on web traffic. One way to get that traffic is to partner with a company like Glam Media. They have created a network where a partner site can post ads within the network at a share of revenue.

This is how they explain their deal -

” Here’s how it works. Our flagship site, Glam.com is the heart—helping drive traffic back and forth among the Glam Publisher Network, in an integrated way, and our publishers are the veins.

* Daily content feeds from sites in the Glam Publisher Network are featured on Glam.com’s homepage via headlines and direct links

* Content from corresponding publishers are highlighted across Glam Media channels on fashion, beauty, lifestyle, wellness, and others and via our network directories

* Glam Publisher banner ads embedded with rotating story and site links go out across the entire network, allowing all our publishers to enjoy the same integrated advertising exposure that Glam so adeptly provides for brand advertisers.

So one of the tactics I would like you to consider is participating in some community networks. One of the biggest and most effective is the Glam.com network.

After growing through their agreement here it is in a nutshell …

The good: In exchange for them selling ad space on your site they give you 50% and help drive awareness of your site.

1. you allocate some ad space to them and they sell ads on your site and it’s a 50% / 50% revenue share on the ads that are served on your site.

2. They then also allow you to put ads out on the network which is thousands of sites.

3. They also agree to promote your site from time to time.

4. You can put advertising from other networks like adsense so you are not limited to one advertising source.

The bad:

1. The ask you to sign on for a 2 year term.

2. They want you to put their ads above the fold

3. If in the 2 years someone wants to buy the site they have 1stt right of refusal at the same price as the other offer.

4. Because you join their ad network. They want credit for the traffic to your site.

Google’s Analytics Evangelist

Robert Scoble from Work Fast TV on Fast Company.TV interviews Avinash Kaushik, a Web Analytics expert who is Analytics Evangelist for Google. He is the author of “Web Analytics an Hour a Day”. He gives some good info on keywords selection.