If you have niche sites that are not getting much traffic it can be tempting to try to boost the traffic by stumbling, digging or adding your post or site to social network sites. However if you are monetising with Google adsense be careful. Google pays you for traffic that not only clicks on the adds but that converts. Not all the people who click on ads are going to buy of course but Google knows what proportion to expect to convert if the traffic is targeted.
That means that traffic coming to your site needs to be already looking to purchase something. You get this kind of traffic from the search engines. If someone is looking for an answer to their problems they will use a search engine to find it - they won’t use stumbleupon or blogcatalog! Stumblers and diggers are surfing, hopping from one site to the next. If they do happen to click on an ad they are very unlikely to buy anything. At least this kind of traffic is not too likely to actually click an ad. A lot of social traffic can lead to Adsense smart pricing
Quote from Googles Adsense Blog (my bolding)
The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR. (ROI return on investment - CTR click through rate)
So Google wants targeted traffic. That means traffic from search engines that comes to your site with a purpose in mind. It is also important to have relevant content on your site to trigger relevant ads. This is easier with a niche site and you can tweak the ads appearing by making sure the relevant keywords are in your post titles and content. Use one post per page unless all your posts target the same keywords especially on the home page. Mixed posts targeting different keywords will only confuse the Google bot and lead to irrelevant ads which won’t do you any good.
How do you know if you’ve been smart priced?
All the sites in your account are affected not just the offending site and the cost per click (CPC) will go down to cents. If you see a sharp drop in CPC you could be smart priced. The good news is that if you remove ads from the problem site your CPC should return to normal in about a week or so as soon as Googlebot has reindexed your site. It may be difficult to find the offending site especially if you have more than one that is causing the problem. The CTR is an indication that the traffic is not targeted for the ads but itself is not a problem - you could have a low CTR but high conversion so use it as an indication not a proof that you may be smart priced.
Griz has lots more information at How to Get Traffic to your Website or Blog
It is vitally important if you want to rank well on Google that you know how to get backlinks to your site, posts and pages. Not just any backlinks but relevant backlinks. A backlink from a completely unrelated page won’t do you much good but a backlink from a highly relevant page, even if that page has a low page rank (PR), will help you rise in the SERPS. There are, of course, lots of ways to get backlinks but I’d like to describe two ways I use.
Article Marketing
To get relevant backlinks write an article and include a link to your site with your keywords as the anchor text in the resource box. I’ve been using article marketing with great success. I was using isnare but they have become so slow that I recently signed up with Article Marketer and am pleased with the service. All my articles have been distributed in, at the most, 2 working days and they also check the article for any errors in formatting for things that editors may not like.
ConnectContent
ConnectContent is run by RT Cunningham who has a blog at Untwisted Vortex. This is a great service! It costs just $12 a month. The idea is to form a network of people who can exchange relevant links in posts and pages. You can only get as many links as you give (weighted for PR). It works best if you have a wide range of different types of sites as you can’t be guranteed that there will be someone with a site relevant to yours and you may not get links for all your sites. If you just have one or two sites it won’t work very well and you should probably wait until you have more sites but if you want to know how to get back links check it out!.
As I can no longer use eBay to make money I have been concentrating on using adsense. I’ve put adsense on the eBay sites and I’m making between $900 and $1000 a month from these. However I did not optimize these ads so the CPC (cost per click) I am getting on some of the sites is very low. The reason for this post is to introduce a new site by Griz Make Money with Adsense which has so much useful information that you really don’t need to go anywhere else to learn how to make money online. Griz is an advocate of using free platforms such as Blogger and in making the blogs ugly so that people take one look, think this can’t be very good, and back out, often enough by clicking on the ads to make some money.
Have a look at his site, you will learn a lot as Griz, not only knows what he is talking about but has the knack of writing in a very clear way. Make sure you read the comments, especially Griz’s answers as there is so much information in these.
I have learned so much from this site and his other site How to Make Money Online for Beginners that I want to share this with you all.
I’ve been meaning to post some info on keyword sniping for some time so my apologies for taking a while to do this.
There are a lot of things you need to know about other aspects of internet marketing in addition to the keyword sniping (KS) technique and I can’t address everything in one post so I’ll concentrate on the techniques I use and skip over some of the other stuff.
Choose Your Niche
Choose your niche - this is vital to the success of KS. Then choose at least 2 good keywords. For keyword research I use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you intend to make money from Google Adsense then click on the show/hide columns and choose Show Estimated Avg. CPC You will need to pick keywords with a reasonable high CPC. If you are new to IM choose keywords that have more than 5,000 searches a month and less than 30,000 competing sites.
Set Up Your Site
The whole point of keyword sniping is that your whole site is optimised for 1 or 2 keywords. The keywords should to be in the domain name, and must be in the title, the description and in the content on the home page. You will need to add at least 10 pages of good content to the site all about your keywords. If you’re using WordPress you can remove the dates from the posts to make them all look like pages rather than posts. On each of the pages make a link with your keyword as the anchor back to the homepage. Pages should be at least 300 words long.
Some Points about the Site Structure
- You need the title tag on every page. If you are using WordPress you can use the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin it do this.
- A link in the footer to point to your homepage using the keywords as anchor text.
- On the home page keywords should be included about seven times. This will be okay if you have a least 1000 words of text so you could set your home page to have four posts appearing all with your keywords in them.
Back Links to Your Site
Most importantly you need to get links to your site using your keywords. Vary the anchor text, don’t have all of the anchor text exactly the same. Use your keywords that mix them up a bit with different words.
You need to get links that are on relevant pages. The best way to do this is to submit articles you have written yourself. I’ve been using Article Marketer to submit articles recently. Although it is a paid service I’m finding that it is much faster than ISnare which I was using and they also look at your article and check that they are formatted correctly for the article directories. Most articles have been approved and submitted within 1 working day. ISnare lately has been taking more than 2 weeks. For some of the sites I have made I only needed 2 articles distributed to a range of article directories to rank high in SERPS. Of course it depends on the competition so you will need to add more if you don’t get the ranking.
How Long Does it Take?
It won’t hapopen overnight so don’t despair! It took a minimum of two months to begin to rank well and some sites took much longer. Submit another article if you don’t see results within about 2 months.
On Dec 14th I received an email part of which is below:
“During a recent review, we found that your account is related to a previously banned account. Your account has been terminated and 100% of your pending commissions will be reversed.”
I have never has another account with EBPN and certainly have not been banned for any reason. I had over $2000 in that account that I earned honestly and with a lot of hard work. My earnings had really started to increase and I had high quality traffic for every period.
For those who don’t know eBay gives you a quality score based on ‘who knows what parameters’ and has dumped affiliates in the past for sending too low quality traffic.
I am not the only one who has received this email and all say that they do not have any other accounts. Today looking at eBay’s forum I see another round of bannings for the same spurious reason. I find it very suspicious that people are being dumped just before pay day. See the thread “your account is related to a previously banned account”
In the email it said “If you believe you have been linked to a banned account in error, please reply to eBayPartnerNetwork-Quality@ebay.com with your account information and a detailed description of how you are driving traffic to the eBay site. ”
Despite 4 emails to this address giving them the details they asked for I have had NO reply. Not even a form letter to say they have received them. This is how they treat honest, hard working affiliates that have been sending them, traffic for over a year?
I can no longer recommend either using BANS or being an affiliate of eBay as there is just too much likelihood of perfectly honest, hardworking affiliates being dumped and losing hard earned money through no fault of theirs.
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