Savvy Affiliate

Day 36 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

If you started your website a couple of weeks ago, by now you probably have a fair amount of content going.  That content has value, and you have to be careful to protect it.   I have had sites crash before and hosts who lost all my data.  Luckily that occurred before I hosted a blog, and I had a static copy on my personal computer.  Those websites had an inherent backup, but your blog does not.  So you need to be extra careful with it.

Wordpress Plugin

The first line of defense that you should use for backups is, of course, a wordpress plugin.   Wordpress Database Backup is a great automated tool for backing up your site.  Set it up to automatically e-mail you your backups every day or every week, I don’t recommend less frequently, and you are well on your way to being secure.  But don’t e-mail your backup to your website email.   I.e. Backup@SavvyAffiliate.com would be bad for me.  If your site crashes your email might too.   Use a third party, like Yahoo, which now has unlimited storage.

Subscribe to Your Own Page

Need more protection?    Subscribe to your own feed in Google Reader or bloglines.   If you ever lose a recent post, you can just look it up there and resurrect it.

 This is a good idea in any even, as it is always good to check what your readers are actually seeing

Download locally

As a tertiary backup, take the time to download a local copy to your machine every now and then.   It may seem like overkill, but taking the time to make several different backups of your site, and storing them in separate places, is a good investment of time.   There is nothing like losing months or years or work to make you kick yourself for not taking a more proactive role in protecting your data.

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Day 35 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

In the several months that I have been blogging, I have found that most of my hits, and the vast majority of my trackbacks have been the result of only a few posts.  3 posts in particular, out of approximately 275, are responsible for 30% of my traffic and 70% of my backlinks.  I got a large number of links with Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use, part of Problogger’s group writing project, randomly scored a minor stumble hit (for me) with I Stumble Over My Mistakes Again, and have been getting a lot of backlinks (you can debate their value) with ViraLink

What’s Your Point?

My point is that, for bloggers, the vast majority of the traffic to your site can be driven by relatively few posts.  Given the nature of social networking, 1 Great Post is much much better than 10 Good posts.  Although the 10 Good posts are effective at keeping subscribers reading, and getting visitors to return, if you want a spike in new visitors you need a great post.

How Can I Write A Great Post?

Here are some tips on how you can change your post from Good to Great

1) Don’t Rush - A good post you can do on the fly.  Great posts take time.   Figure on writing a great post in 2 sittings minimum, 3 more likely.   You need one sitting to get your initial idea down.  You need another to edit your post and weed out the junk sentences and any ideas which don’t cut to the point, and finally you need a third to tidy everything up and make sure it is perfect.    Compare your posts to when you were doing a report in school.  Sure you did work at the last minute, and every one said “I work better under pressure”, but the reports that actually turned out the best were the ones where they were started in plenty of time, and given a thorough proofreading and revision.

You can’t write a great post if you are just trying to get out content.   In order to even have the time to write a great post, you need to be ahead on your content generation requirements.  If all you are trying to do is get out today’s blog post, you won’t take the time necessary to take it from good to great.   If you have an idea you think has greatness potential don’t work on it as part of the daily grind.  Set it aside and give it extra attention.

2) Don’t Copy - A great idea isn’t great if someone else has done it.   It can still be “Good”, you can still put a new spin on it, and impart new information, but if you really want to create the kind of buzz which can drive a lot of traffic, you need to be original.

Being original is difficult, which is why it is so rewarding.  If you really want to be original, look elsewhere for inspiration.  Look at resources other people aren’t using.  Don’t go to Problogger looking for new ideas, because if you see them everyone else has, check out your library.   You might be surprised at how few people take the time to look up information that isn’t on the internet.  But when you think about it, before the 1990’s there was virtually no information on the internet.  By looking for ideas in printed works you have decades of information at your hands that most of your audience may never have seen.

One example, go to your library and check out a couple of books on entrepreneurship or running a small business.  Any ideas in there you haven’t seen before?  Then chances are your readers haven’t either.  You just found yourself a fresh and relatively original post idea.

3) Don’t Doubt - One problem I have had is that when I have an epiphany and get a really good idea, I immediately assume that other people must have thought of the same thing.  I hurry up to try and get my idea out first, only to later realize I would be better served by taking my time.  If you have a great idea, don’t doubt yourself.  Chances are if it is a good original idea no one has done before, then no one will do it in the time it takes you do to it right.   Take your time to get all your ducks in a row when you have a great idea, they don’t come all that often, so you can’t afford to mess them up with self doubt.

Want some more info on writing great posts?  Daily Writing Tips is a new site by the makers of Daily Blog Tips, and has tons of great information.

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Day 34 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

What content you have on your site will determine for Google what keywords to associate with your page.  What keywords get associated with your page determines what Ads will get displayed, and how much they are worth.

To make a lot of money using AdSense, you need to be tagged with some profitable keywords.  Often their can be very little difference between keywords worth several dollars a click, and keywords worth several cents a click, so how do you separate the profitable keywords from the junk?

Use AdWords to Find Profitable AdSense

Google likes to help out its advertisers, much more so than the sites displaying the Ads.  Since AdSense and AdWords are two sides of the same coin, you can use AdWords to determine how profitable your AdSense keywords will be.

It only costs $5 to set up an AdWords account, and after that you can keep it forever.  This is a great investment which will pay off in the long run (actually even the short run).  So don’t hesitate to sign up.

Once you have signed up, what do you do?

Log in to AdWords and go to tools

After you are in Tools, click on the first link on the left, named “Keyword Tool”

Finally you need to enter some information about the kind of ads you are looking for.   Enter a keyword you would like to search on, click “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” as what you are looking for and finally put $100 as your max bid.  If you use a max bid that is too low, you could be missing out on the most profitable keywords, so don’t be afraid to go high.  But don’t worry, you aren’t actually bidding on keywords, so it won’t cost you anything.  Sort by “Estimated Average CPC” to see which keywords are profitable

This gives you a great idea of which are the most profitable keywords.  Although this is not what Google will actually pay you, (Expect about 25% of the amount you see) it does give a good idea of what keywords are profitable.   If I was targeting this page for specific keywords, I would want it to hit for “AdSense Help” or “AdSense FAQ” or “AdSense Info” to get the most profitable Ads possible.

Want to also see how much each keyword is being searched on so you can combine your SEO and your Advertising?   Keep the same sorting, but change “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” to “Keyword Popularity”

In this case, “AdSense Help” scores well for both high CPC and high Search volume.  It looks like a great keyword to target.

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Day 33 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

AdSense is a great way for new bloggers to make money.  In fact many new bloggers get most of their income during their first several months solely from AdSense.   As their site grows they tend to diversify and get approximately 30% of their income from AdSense, and the rest from other sources, but Google AdSense is still a great tool for making money online.

Other Resources

I have covered AdSense before with posts like

• 5 Quick AdSense Tips
• How Much You Can Make With Each AdSense Visitor
• Getting High Paying AdSense Ads

So this post will cover some slightly different topics that you will want to know in order to make the most money you can with AdSense

Putting Ads in the Upper Right Corner

The Ad location which I have found to work the best with my posts so far is in the upper right corner of the content.  It is a spot which your reader is sure to see, which makes it more likely that they will click.  But the nice part is, the upper right corner of your content is fairly unobtrusive to the reader.  If they don’t want to click on your ads they will just read around.  Hopefully the AdSense won’t disturb them too much.

How to do it?

The key CSS tag for putting AdSense Ads in the upper right corner of your blog is Float.   By using the float tag, you can place your Ads in your content, and the content will morph around the ads. An example of the float tag I put in my CSS is

float: right;

 Couple that with a margin tag to ad some space around the ad, setting it slightly apart draws more attention to it, and you get

.AdSense_Ads {
   float: right;
   margin: 40px 0 10px 10px;
}

Nothing to it.

I like to put the floating ads in my Wordpress php for the single page.   I place my AdSense block with the <Div class = “AdSense_Ads”> call out right before the <?php the_content>  Tag in my single page php.  I think putting all those ads on the main page is a little much, and prefer a different advertising strategy for my main blog page.

To see more about the float CSS tag, here is a tutorial

 I am still working  on how to best tab the Ad down, i.e. if I wanted to float it in the middle right of the content, instead of the upper right, without spacing everything over using margins, so if you know please drop a comment.

Monitoring which Ads Work Best

I found out that Ads in the upper right corner of my blog work best by careful monitoring of my AdSense.  (And by watching to see where Problogger and John Chow place their Ads)  By placing all my ads in a different AdSense channel, I was able to determine what was working, and stop using the things which didn’t work.

The AdSense channels are your friend.  Make sure you make use of the AdSense channels.  Try using a different channel for use Ad format or Ad location.  It might be smart to use a different channel for each content category.  This will let you know what type of Ad pays the best, and where the Ads with the best click through rates are located.  Optimizing your AdSense will ensure that you make the most money possible off of your site.

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Day 32 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One essential part of running a successful blog is building strong relationships with other bloggers.  These relationships will be crucial to building traffic to your site, helping you get in on product launches and learn of things before the crowd, and for working together to create more value than any one blogger could do by themselves.

Building relationships isn’t necessarily easy

Unlike networking at a job or at school, most of the people you meet blogging you only know online.  It makes it harder to build a solid relationship with other bloggers when all you know of them is their name (or pseudonym) and what they write.  It is easier to network with people face to face.  The simple fact that blogging is virtual makes it more difficult.

But networking while blogging is just as important as at a job

In some jobs networking can be very important to your long term success.  A manager, salesman, politician, actor, can gain success as much by who they know as what they have done in their own right.  That isn’t to say that a person can’t break into any of those fields, but having connections does make it easier.

Blogging is no different.  Having friends with popular websites, or making friends with people who run popular websites, is one shortcut to success in your blog.  Speaking strictly in terms of traffic and search rankings, it is better to have one link from a really successful site (say PR 6-7) than a dozen links from relatively unknown sites (PR 3)

Blog networking can be similar to work networking

Although I would rather have a link from a highly trafficked site than a rarely visited one, you also need to think long term.  Just as at a workplace you try to meet everyone, and avoid offending anyone, because you never know who is going where, you never know what small Blog today will become tomorrow’s superstar.

It is not at all unusual for a blog to go from zero to huge in 18 months or less.  The lesson to be learned here is that it can oftentimes be more beneficial to focus your networking on less popular sites.  When the blossom, the rising tide will help lift all their outgoing links in value.  Additionally, it can often be much easier to get ahold of the proprietor of a smaller site.  And they will be more open to building a relationship.  Although someone like Problogger is very good at responding to e-mail, he must get dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails every day.  People would like him to check out their site, people want a link, people are trying to build a relationship.  However someone like me gets very few blog related e-mails a day.  An e-mail to me asking for a site review, or offering a link exchange, or simply requesting that I check out your site and add it to my blogroll is much more likely to get attention than a similar one would to a John Chow.

Some Tips for Networking

1) Mind your manners - Being civil and courteous are just as important while blogging as in the real world.  If another blogger does you a favor, and links to you, or posts a guest blog, or gives you a review, make sure you take the time to thank them.  Although it isn’t always necessary to give them a return link (you can if you want to) a simple note saying you appreciated their effort is always appreciated

2) When pinging try to deep link - Deep links on your site are very important for ranking well in search engines and driving traffic.  Just as importantly, to you, deeplinking a blog is how you can get another bloggers attention.  I am currently getting 6 or 7 links a day to my blog, mostly due to Viralink.  But most of those links go to my Blog not a deep post.  As a result they don’t leave a trackback, and I don’t give them as much attention!    I always lookup my trackbacks, but most links to my main site I just assume to be a viralink and don’t necessarily follow.  I imagine other bloggers have similar experiences.  Do both them and you a favor and deeplink

3) Make use of new tools - Things like Mybloglog and Top commentator Plugin are great for finding out who is checking out your site.  Use these tools to find who frequents your site, these are your best bets in terms of networking.  It takes a lot less work to change someone from a visitor to acquaintance to friend, than to start with someone who doesn’t come to your site and has no idea who you are.

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Day 31 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

This is day 31 of the 100 Days to Building A Great Website.  This has been going on for a month, so I thought I would look back at some of the changes I have implemented and give some results.

Writing a series

On Day 11 I wrote about Writing a Great Series of Posts.  This 100 part series of posts has been very beneficial to my site.  These articles are the single most viewed posts on my site, and writing the series is one of the things which motivates me to generate content more or less every day.   Since I started this series, my daily views are up 50% and my RSS subscribers are up 100%

 Targeting Keywords

On Day 25 I wrote about finding sought after keywords.   The article made me apply the advice to myself and change the title of the series I am writing.   It was originally titled “100 Days To Webpage Excellence”  but is newly titled “100 Days To Building A Great Website”   Why?  Because more people search for “Building A Website” or “Great Website” than they do for “Webpage Excellence”    If I consider this a 3 month exercise in SEO, I decided I needed to be smart about the keywords I was targeting.

Additionally I have had a month to find out how people are Googling me.   The most hits I have gotten are from

• good wordpress plugins
• “who is googling you”
• savvy affiliate
• AdSense per visitor
• “best time to post”

This gives me an idea of which keywords to target.   I might as well target some keywords which I am already getting hits for, and aim to climb to the top of those rankings.  Since I already rank for “Savvy Affiliate” and “Who is googling you” doesn’t seem very beneficial, it seems like it might be smart to tackle keywords such as

• Good, Great, Best, Top etc. Wordpress plugins
• AdSense profit per visitor or How much AdSense Profit
• Best Time To Post or When To Post

So expect in the future to see some posts along those lines, and to see my SEO warping towards those ends.

You can do the same thing for your blog.     The easiest keywords to rank for are the keywords you are already getting hits from.  Find some keywords you show up on the 2nd, 3rd, or even higher page for and target those.  Once you move up into page one, or even place #1 you can widen your scope.

Good Post Titles

On Day 22 I wrote about The Importance of Great Post Titles.  Although I’m still experimenting with what works best, I have found that since I have written my post titles with an eye towards attracting Google visitors, my search results have gone up.   It is just common sense that to attract people, you have to write something enticing.  It may be common sense, but I sometimes have trouble doing it, and I know other bloggers do as well.

So have you implemented any particular new strategies that you have benefited from recently?  Any good tips that you have read, here or anywhere else, that has helped your site?

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Day 30 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Cloaking your affiliate ads can help drive up your clickthroughs. 

One thing that you will have to decide when you start advertising on your site is how obvious do you want to make your ads.  Clearly if you are using AdSense, you will be forced to show the “Ads By Google”   If you are putting a bunch of sponsored links in your nav bar, you should probably mention that they are sponsored.  But there are other gray areas where you might want to keep your affiliate ties a little more hidden.

People are less likely to follow a link if they know it is an affiliate program

It is sad but true.  As soon as a visitor sees that the webmaster is making money off of him, he is less likely to follow any links, or buy any items.  It is not that the visitors dislikes the webmaster, but putting up affiliate ads means that there is an extra level to the relationship.  It the blogger advertising because they love the product?  Or love the money?

While many ads you should be explicit about your relationship, there are some times when it is not wrong to hide it a little more.  For instance if you are recommending a book on Amazon.com you may also include an affiliate link.  You genuinely like the book, so why not take advantage of the content that you wrote and try to monetize it some?   Is it wrong to hide your affiliate status in this case?  I would argue that it isn’t.

So how do you cloak affiliate ads?

The single biggest way that people get turned off on affiliate ads is when they mouse over and see a big long string of alphanumerics in the link.  Clearly that is being tracked to someone.  Once they see that string, the chances of clicking the link drop in half. So the trick is to not let the string alphanumeric string appear in the window.  People can still see the real destination by right clicking properties, but they are less likely to do that.

To make a desired url appear in the window use the html “onmouseover” and “onmouseout” in the <a> tag.   If I was linking into startlogic, I might use the two lines you see below

onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.startlogic.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”

How that would look in the whole ad is something like

<a href=”http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2453369-10394256″ target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.startlogic.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>IxWebHosting </a> 2 free domain registrations & only $3.95/month

The link still directs to the same place, but now it is less obvious that it is an affiliate link.  It is much more inviting for clicks, and will likely result in more income.

Don’t misuse the cloaking

Please don’t be a spammer with this.  Don’t tell people you are directing them to EBay and then really send them to some mal-ware site.  As with anything there is potential for abuse, but if you use it correctly there is nothing wrong with it.

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Day 29 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

There are several important parts of making money online.  You have to get people to your site.  You have to display ads that interest them.  Finally, you have to get people to click on your ads.

There are many sites which will help you optimize your ads, especially AdSense ads.  Here are a few links for AdSense optimization - I have written about it several times, and a quick Google search turns up several links on Optimizing AdSense.

However, while it is important to optimize your advertising to make the most of out the traffic you are getting, you also need to consider how valuable that traffic is in the first place.   What many sites do not get into is the connection between the traffic you are driving to your site, and the click through rate that will be on your ads.

Not all traffic is created equal

In general, the more web savvy your traffic is, the less likely they will be to click on your ads.  You will need to keep that in mind when you are targeting your traffic.  If you write posts and have a site which is dedicated to blogging, and whose primary traffic is other webmasters, chances are you won’t get too many clickthroughs.

In fact, all other things being equal, if I had to choose between ranking well in these keywords

• Make Money Blogging
• Make Money Online
• Make Money From Home
• Make Easy Money

The one that I would want to rank well in the least is “Make Money Blogging.”   After all, who is searching for that?  Other bloggers.    What I would most like to rank well in is “Make Money From Home”  People searching for that probably don’t know too well exactly what they are looking for, and are more likely to click on a well written advertisement.

Additionally, FireFox blocks ads

In general terms, you can probably guess how well your advertising will do from who visits your site.   If most of the people visiting are using AOL’s integrated browser, I would like my chances for high click through rates.  If most of the people visiting are using FireFox, the chances of an individual ad doing well are not very good.

I do love FireFox.  I use it myself all the time, and it has some wonderful extensions.  However the FireFox extension which blocks Advertisements can really do a number on your click through rates.   Now if only there was a way I could use it, but make sure no one else did

This may be more helpful in choosing your niche

Advice on who clicks on ads may be more helpful when choosing your niche then when you are working on an existing site.   Choosing a great niche can mean all the difference between a profitable site and one that never makes any money.  But it is still something to consider while running your site.  If you find that you tend to write posts targeted at a web-savvy audience, try and rethink.  In general I think Savvy Affiliate readers are pretty web-savvy.   While it does make this blog fun to write, and interesting to interact with the readers, I’m not expecting exceptional click through rates.   That could be a reason why John Chow is now targeting key words like “Make Money From Home”, and not just “Make Money Online”

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Day 28 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Sometimes after you take a break from blogging it can be hard to get back in the groove of writing posts and working on your website.  Often blogging can become a habit, but if you break that habit other activities can often overwhelm your blogging.   Here are some tips on getting back in the groove.

1) Limit the number of posts you’ll need to write

If you know that you’ll be taking a break from blogging, and you’ve had some bad experiences with being motivated after taking a vacation, try and make it easy on yourself.  Before you take your break, while you are still motivated, take the time to create a backup repository of a couple posts.  Save them as drafts that you can pull out when you need to.

What you can do is use your drafts to limit the amount of work you have to do when you come back from vacation.  You can write posts every other day and use your drafts every other day.  Or you can write posts the days that you are motivated and save your drafts for when other things pop up.

 By the time you run out of your stored up drafts, you will hopefully feel up to blogging again.  By limiting your workload right when you get back, you will keep yourself from being overwhelmed, and make sure that your readers still get posts.

2) Reward yourself when you work

Although when you are blogging you need to try and eliminate all your bad habits, like checking your stats over and over again, you need to prioritize which habits are the worst.  If you get back and don’t feel motivated about your blog, try rewarding yourself by letting discipline slip.  It is more important that you keep your interest up in your blog then you make 100% effective use of your time.

Working on your blog can be just that sometimes, work.  But checking stats is fun.  So if you are having trouble, reward yourself by giving yourself some extra time to check your stats, or to read your feeds.  You can always break those habits later once you have renewed your interest in working on your blog

3) Catch up on your comments

While you were gone, chance are comments and correspondence built up in your site.  Hopefully, if you were using good comment spam blockers, then most of these comments are real.  So take the time to catch up on the comments and e-mails that have built up.  Interacting with your readers is a great way to renew your interest in your site.  If you have built up a good community over time, or even if you have a few close blogging friends, then their enthusiasm will help spill over into your own enthusiasm

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