This blog can be very focused on Clickbank products and this is my personal preference when making money even with Clickbank’s known problems. However, some of my sites from my early days on the internet continue to bring in a few dollars from Google Adsense clicks.
Google Adsense Adverts are everywhere, some of the biggest and most well known sites make the majority of their income from Adsense (and I mean Millions of $$$), these sites work on huge volumes of visitors and the % of those clicking on their ads. Plentyoffish.com the free dating site made something like $300K/month back in 2006! 
Anyway, back to the point of this post, the choice between Clickbank and Adsense…
I look at it like this:
A Clickbank sale of $80 will take 80-100 hops to make giving an EPC of about $1
An Adsense click in the same niche may earn about $1
The benefit of Adsense is that you don’t have to make an allowance for refunds, the problem is you cannot encourage people to click on the adverts like you might with a Clickbank hoplink.
So, if you find a good high paying niche consider Adsense as an alternative to Clickbank. It doesn’t harm to diversify your income streams to allow for changes!
Popularity: 2% [?]
Matt Cutts confirmed via Twitter (how very 2009!) that the PR Toolbar update happened on 30th December 2008. Twitter/MattCutts
This latest update has brought mixed fortunes for my sites, some coming out of the “Sandbox” and some going in, but most significantly after a period of 7 days without a sale on Clickbank, the last three days have seen commission of over $250 on a variety of products from a variety of sites, some that have never produced before.
I really hope this update is the turning point for my most significant sites and brings some much needed consistency to my Clickbank sales.
Anyone else seen some significant change in PR or site ranking?
Don’t forget PR does not actually mean you get high ranking on searches.
Popularity: 3% [?]
There are many Internet Myths about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and in particular how to rank well in Google searches for popular keyword search terms.
A whole industry around SEO has developed from SEO Companies who work on a massive scale on behalf of large corporations, to SEO Gurus on the Web to Google Employees like Matt Cutts.
Until now Google have been fairly quiet officially about SEO and instead insisting that webmasters and webdesigners create sites for the visitors not for the Google Robots. But on the 13th November 2008 they released their Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide as a sort of “SEO for Dummies” ebook. It was originally intended as an internal guide for Google Employees, but they have just released it via the “Webmaster” section of Google. The Link above and in the sidebar will take you directly to the pdf to download.
When I first started reading it, I thought that I knew it all, but towards the end there were several (still basic) things that I had never heard of. I recommend everyone reads it as even if you think you know it all, it never hurts to get a refresher from the horses mouth.
Let me know if you learnt anything, drop me a comment.
JZ
Popularity: 1% [?]
A quick note tonight as I am still really tired after the long weekend and Weddings!
I had to make a few changes to a couple of my websites tonight as I had noticed some had been dropped by Google completely, I don’t mean just slipped a few pages, I mean not indexed.
One of them is The Forex Brotherhood which was riding high for “forex brotherhood” terms. It was a holding page and list builder during the pre-launch period and the end of August. Then I decided to redirect it with a hoplink to the Forexbrotherhood.com site, so when someone clicks on theforexbrotherhood.com it goes to the official site. I did this using a php redirect script on the index page.
This worked fine for a while and the site still ranked well for my keywords for several weeks giving me lots of hops and a few sales.
Then suddenly Google updated and the robots then found nothing, no meta tags, no content, no keywords etc etc. All of the links I have built obviously still remain, but they mean nothing if google finds nothing on the site. DOH!
I have reverted to a landing page with some keyword rich content and a list builder. Lets hope Google finds it again quickly and I can get back to where I want to be on the SERPS.
So my tip is, do not use php redirect on the index page if you want it to rank in Google, if you just want to use it as a direct link for ezine or adwords etc then fine, but I want search engine traffic too.
This might not be news to a lot of experienced marketers, but if one of you learns something then I am happy enough.
JZ
Popularity: 1% [?]
Recent Comments