Gadooney.com

The Pareto principle doesn’t have a lot to do on the surface with affiliate marketing, but there is a pretty close parallel, as far as the majority of your income usually arising from a relatively small number of your sites.

Don’t get locked into thinking that all of your money will come from one big, great idea, and that your success or failing rides on this project, or that project. Yes, indeed, most of your income will come from a handful of sites, but it’s impossible to ever have a handful if you don’t try a lot of different things.

One reason I recommend throwing a lot of affiliate sites onto the wall and seeing what sticks is that even with lots of research you can’t always predict what sites will be profitable, and to what degree. Some projects just never really go anywhere, despite your efforts, while other forgotten ones suddenly wake up and start ranking well for search terms that actually turn out to be quite lucrative.

So trying lots of stuff is good, as is being flexible with the sites, once they’re rolling.

Many affiliates make the mistake of trying to steer their sites too directly, stubbornly sticking to their pre-conceived notion of what the site should be. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “By gum, this is going to be a site targeting sports and nothing but sports” but if the traffic that’s coming in is all sex-related and searches on female athletes, well, maybe you need to refine your pitch a bit and stop running banners for StubHub or other ticket-buying sites.

One of my more successful affiliate endeavors started out as a site that was geared towards people looking for insurance in assorted cities, with pages created to target specific searches such as “Austin life insurance”. So I built some pages for all sorts of insurance products, tied them to specific cities such as Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio, and completely forgot about the site.

A few months later I noticed I was getting a ton of traffic to some pages, and it was all from people searching on things like “Austin Mazda” or “Dallas Kia”. I went back and poked around on the site and discovered that for the car insurance pages I’d actually created a few test pages to see if I could get any traffic from people looking for car quotes, too, and those pages were at the very top of their respective search results. I went back, rejiggered the ads on the site to feature the free online car quotes that you can get by email, from the comfort of your home (which paid me $1-$3 per lead). I ditched the original idea and ran with what was working, building pages for cities across the US that were geared towards encouraging people to get free online car quotes first before visiting dealerships, and ended up making a ton of money.

Could I have kept trying to crack the competitive insurance niche? Sure, but it’s a lot easier to swim downstream, and my ultimate goal is to make money, not prove that I can out-think the competition and make anything that I set my mind to work. If you’re a generalist and try many different things, you’re going to fail. A lot. So what? Keep working hard, stay smart, and the ones that you knock out of the park will more than make up for all the misses.

One cool thing about pushing content out into the Internet tubes is that it’s actually a fluid, dynamic world. It pushes back. You can either be stubborn and let it slap you in the face or slide down seductively to your crotch and slip a dollar in your g-string.

One Web hosting question that crops up a lot is what exactly is “shared hosting” or “dedicated hosting”, and which is best for affiliate marketing.

Shared hosting is by far the most common and is what most people are familiar with, as far as what you see offered at sites like HostGator, AN Hosting, and GoDaddy. These packages are very affordable (often less than $10/month) and come with lots of bells and whistles, as far as letting you put unlimited domains on your site, create unlimited mySQL databases, and provide lots of storage and bandwidth.

The reason they’re called “shared” hosting packages (and the reason that they’re so affordable) is that your websites are stored on a server with many other customers, most of which are exactly in the same boat you are. They may have one site, a handful of sites, or even 20+ sites in their accounts, but they’re not high-traffic sites, getting a ginormous amount of traffic. This lets hosting providers put a ton of these sites on a single server without any huge downside, as the cumulative traffic and load on the server is kept to a reasonable amount, due to the nature of the sites.

While most of us don’t by nature like to share, there’s usually no downside, as far as your sites being up and open for business. Occasionally a site on a shared server will suddenly get a huge spike of unexpected traffic and this will cause all of the sites on that server (including those owned by complete strangers like you) to bog down or become inaccessible, but it’s a pretty rare occurence and most hosts provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee and will refund you for any time your site was down or inaccessible.

One nice thing about shared plans is that they’re completely managed for you by the hosting provider, as far as security and support, and you have to know very little to get up and running.

As mentioned, shared hosting plans start off really cheap but can scale up to reasonably expensive plans, if you have lots of sites and get a decent amount of traffic. Some people like the fact that they’re completely managed by someone else, so some customers stay on shared hosting plans, even when they have tons of sites and tons of traffic, and simply upgrade to plans that provide more storage and bandwidth (which still share a server with other sites but typically with fewer other customer accounts).

Dedicated hosting is a bit different. They’re similar in nature, as far as paying a hosting provider for space on a server, but in this case you have the entire server dedicated to your sites and don’t share space with any other customers. This guarantees better performance for popular, high-traffic sites, and it also usually means you have greater control over your sites, as you often have more direct access to the server management.

It depends on the host and what licenses they have, but with dedicated packages you typically get access to WHM and cPanel interfaces, that let you handle many routine tasks associated with your server. With shared plans you often have to request a new domain or new mySQL database to be offered, creating a ticket for it, and waiting on support to take care of it; all those steps can be done yourself in seconds on a typical dedicated hosting account.

You’ll also often get the added perk of being able to act as a reseller through your dedicated hosting account, which simply means that you can add customers beneath you, who pay you for hosting their sites on your server, just as if they’d signed up for a normal shared hosting account.

Dedicated hosting packages can be managed or unmanaged, as far as whether you get a lot of support and security help or whether you’re essentially on your own, as far as ensuring that the lastest versions of scripts and programs are up-to-date and secure on your server. Because of all the nice perks and bonuses, dedicated plans are a good bit more expensive, starting at around $100/month for the cheapest unmanaged plans and around $200/month for managed dedicated server packages.

As far as what’s best for affiliate marketing, if you’re just starting out, you should always go with shared hosting. Always. We all start out with grand plans but it’ll likely take you years until you grow your sites and traffic to the point that a dedicated plan makes sense. While switching plans or hosts can be annoying, it’s not rocket science, so there’s no reason to start out with a bigger package than you need for the foreseeable future, as you can always expand or switch later when the need arises.

 

One fun thing about this project so far is that I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments from people, which is not only cool and and of itself, but it makes me feel a bit more useful in general, as far as addressing particular questions and concerns. I’m going to spend a day or two knocking out a lot of the questions that have cropped up, as most are practical, nuts-and-bolts, and things I sometimes take for granted and forget to slow down and cover in at least some detail.

One common bit of feedback that’s cropped up a lot is something along the lines of “I’m not an affiliate at the moment and have no immediate plans to be, but I’m digging the site, keep up the good work.” My initial knee-jerk response is, hey, thanks, and then I start thinking and worrying that people might simply see “affiliate marketing” and think Amway and immediately close the browser.

This also dovetails, in slant fashion, with some feedback I’ve gotten from experienced affiliates about the wisdom in launching a site where the primary purpose is to educate people as to how to make money via affiliate marketing, since that necessarily involves creating more competition for anyone in the affiliate arena.

The common thread (in my head at least), is that I really don’t feel like I’m trying to teach people to be successful affiliate marketers here so much as I’m trying to teach people how to write good content for the Web. Which. really, can be distilled even further to trying to teach people to write good content, or, even more simply, to write good.

Lots of guides to affiiate marketing are heavy on the technical side of things, as far as breaking down what elements are most heavily incorporated into search engine algorithms and helping you isolate and manpulate them to your advantage. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it works and has value, but it throws you into an endless loop of chasing whatever the current trend is in SEO, as far as what the search engine algorithms currently value, which is always subject to change in a week or two. If you play that game, you end up endlessly tweaking and fiddling with sites, changing link structures, using different elements in your pages, rejiggerng keywor density, and on and on and on.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I tend to stay away from that stuff, to a large extent. While it has value, most of us are working with a finite amount of time, and I pretty strongly feel that you’re time is much better spent by sticking to the much simpler game plan of writing something every day, sticking to topics you know and enjoy, and creating focused, well-written pages.

Not only will sticking to those simple concepts help you make money in the affiliate world, but they’ll also help you get traffic to any Web site that post content to, whether it’s a personal blog, a fan site for your favorite band, or a site for a business you own. Pulling back even further, training yourself to write content that is concise, focused, and consistent can be valuable at your day job as well, especially in a day and age when many people sadly can’t even string together more than one or two coherent sentences.

While the goal of this site isn’t going to change (it’s still going to be focused on helping you cash in on some of that juicy money floating around in the world of affiliate marketing), it’s important to note that the main method I’ll be using is to illustrate the value of good writing, first and foremost, which can be extended far past the narrow world of affiliate marketing and can be valuable in all sorts of ways.

Sorry about the lack of posts the last few days and general wonkiness of site accessibility. I’ve been making the switch over to the land of dedicated servers and wrestling with moving over databases and in general getting my head around some of the control panel stuff on the backend. ‘Tis nice to have pretty much complete control over everything but with great power comes lots of wading through less-than-user-friendly interfaces, installation guides, and support documents. Things seem to be back up and fairly stable now *crosses fingers* so hopefully we’re ready to roll.

I’d earmarked this weekend for finally motivating and tearing down the sizable-yet-rotting-and-falling-down shed in the backyard that we inherited with the house, but it appears Mother Nature had other plans, as it’s raining like a mofo, the temperature is dropping, and we actually might get a little sleet/freezing rain on Monday and Tuesday.

It’s always funny watching people in central Texas collectively lose their minds when there’s even a hint of winter weather, as we’ve already got newscasts blaring about the Killer Winter Storm barreling down on us, people are ravaging bottled water supplies at stores, and some state agencies (like the University of Texas, where my wife works) are already planning to be closed on Tuesday, and to open at 10 AM on Wednesday.

It’s Saturday, people, and its like 60 degrees outside. You’re already planning to be closed 3-4 days from now, based on that dude on television that tells you how hot or cold it might be in the future? Yeah, I know, Killer Winter Storm moving in, but the worst you’re projecting is that it’ll drop to 30 degrees or so late Monday night. I realize I’m a bit jaded due to living in Colorado for four years, but geez.

The last few weeks have been busy but good, as far as things on the affiliate front. I should probably broaden that a bit to the “business front”, as I’m taking the first fledgling steps to expand past the pure affiiliate marketing model I’ve been doing the last 5-6 years via my business. The potential rental property I was looking at fell through, but I did get a revolving line of credit established for my business, which opens up a lot of possibilities.

The plan is to still look for a rental property in the $30,000-$40,000 range (which is actually feasible where we live, if you aren’t scared off by owning rental properties in lower-income areas of town), use the revolving line of credit to pay cash and buy it, rent it for a year or two, then rehab and sell, aggressively paying down the line of credit with any net rental income plus what I make on the affiliate side of things. Which actually has been a good motivator on the affiliate side, as far as ramping things up to where I could reasonably expect to do all of the above and own the property, free and clear, in a year or two.

But it’s also made me get more focused in general, as far as building my business and being open to possibilites outside of affiliate marketing. That’s always going to be my bread and butter, but there are also pretty close relatives to it that I can pursue, as well as completely unrelated things (like real estate) that it can provide the funds to pursue and invest in.

As far as the weekly recap, things have been clipping along nicely. Here are the traffic stats for Gadooney.com, since I installed SlimsStats near the end of December:

Week 51: 308 unique users
Week 52: 225 unique users
Week 1:  365 unique users

In the broader Web picture, that’s tiny traffic, but for a brand new site with hardly anything indexed in search engines, that ain’t too bad. You really shouldn’t pay any attention to traffic at all for the first few months, as it’ll likely only disappoint you, but I’m throwing it out there just so you get a sense of scale. Webmasters tend to be very clouse-mouthed about traffic numbers, and for good reason, but that doesn’t help you one bit when you’re getting your feet wet, so screw that noise.

The top referring domain for the week was IamFacingForeclosure.com, followed by my poker blog and Digg. One practical thing to note about Digg is that you only get truly crazy traffic from there if you landon the main page, which is what people talk about when you see stories about getting Digged and having your site crash, due to immense traffic. If you’re not on the main page, your Digg traffic is usually more of a trickle, so don’t freak out if you ever see Digg in your referral stats and think your site is about to be overwhelmed with traffic and about to crash.

As far as income, it was a decent week but nothing spectacular. I’m going to move towards reporting that stuff on a monthly basis, as it’s too time consuming to do it weekly, and I’m also going to expand it to include all of my Web-based schemings and not just Gadooney.com. I’m finding myself working more on other sites of late, so just reporting on things here isn’t really indicative of what I’m doing, and where I’m making money. I still think it’s valuable to be transparent about all of that stuff, as it motivates me and shows you what is actually possible and what to expect, I just want to shift it to monthly to save me some hassle and to expand it, to show the value in working on assorted things and projects.

As far as what the hell I did this week, I’m still working more to revamp some older, largely dormant sites than on getting new content out there. None are really ready for public consumption but they’re getting there, and should start kicking in a bit of money to the bottom line. I’ve got a couple of new sites ready to roll out, too, but I’m waiting to get my hosting sorted out, as far as switching over to a dedicated server package, before putting up any new sites that I’d immediately have to move over, etc.

Ask me a question. I dare you.

Things have been pretty hectic of late, with no signs of it easing anytime soon. I’m working on some pretty cool new stuff, though, which is close to being unleashed upon the world. I know, coy and annoying, but them’s the breaks sometimes.

In somewhat related news, I’m just about to make the leap and get a dedicated server package at HostGator. I’d been happy with my current host but of late my sites have been pretty sluggish, and their “solutions” are anything but that, as far as shifting things from server to server, blaming the slowness on the compiling of stats each day but refusing to simply turn off the stats compiling, etc. It’s probably time for me bid adieu to shared hosting anyway, and the managed dedicated server packages at HostGator have some pretty nice bells and whistles attached, including the ability to re-sell Web hosting and eCommerce packages pre-installed, and other potentially useful stuff.

So look forward to some posts in the near future about the trials and tribulations of switching Web hosts. It’s actually usually not that bad, and hopefully not something you’ll ever need to know about, but potentially useful to file away in that rainy day category.

One thing many affiliates don’t consider when they’re first starting out is how to properly structure their site, as well as how to use internal links to maximum effect. You’re focused (rightfully so) on getting lots of good, juicy content out there, and not so much on secondary concerns like varying your anchor text links, creating sitemaps, and interlinking your content.

One of the reasons that I’m a big fan of using WordPress for affiliate sites is that it automatically addresses many of the link structure issues mentioned above. The category structure of most themes ensures that all of your content is both logically arranged, interlinked, and accessible to search engine spiders. Varying your anchor links and link titles is a snap and simply a click of an icon away. A click or two on the permalinks options can instantly ensure that all of your URLs have juicy, targeted keywords in them, as long as you’re using good titles.

Let’s unpack some of the link structure factors mentioned above and get down to the nitty and/or gritty details, as far as what you can do to ensure your site has good link structure throughout:

View Your Site Through Spider Eyes: Good link structure ensures that search engine spiders find and index every single page on your site. When a spider hits your site, it basically worms it way through it, following link after link after link. If your pages are interlinked well, with multiple avenues to get to destination pages, the spider will find every page, since there are many pathways through your site. If you have poor link structure, with only one possible route to some pages, much of your content may be missed and not indexed.

How do you help search engine spiders find all of your content? It’s actually pretty easy. Give them more than one way to navigate to each page. Using this site as an example, spiders can find pages via the Categories links, the Archives links, and the Latest Posts links. I also try to link from post to post as well in the text itself, which is another avenue.

Another great tool to help spiders (which I haven’t yet implemented here) is to publish a sitemap page, which gives yet another way for spiders to find and index every page on your site.

Get the Most Out of Your Internal Links: Internal links are the ones that you create yourself when you link to other pages on your site. These can either be in the body of the text on a page, like this link to the Google Adwords CPC tool, or broader navigational links.

The key with these is to use them, first off, as they kill two birds with one stone, as far as highlighting important pages to users and adding another layer of good site linkage. But another equally important factor is that these links are used by search engines to potentially boost your pages in search results, if you use them well.

Internal links should echo the content on the page they’re linking to and reinforce the keyword you’re trying to get search engine traffic for. In the above example, the title of the page of the first link is “Google Adwords CPC Estimateor Tool”, so I want the text of the link I’m using to reinforce that, which is why I used Google Adwords CPC tool. This is much, much better than another typical link I might have used, such as cool Google tool.

See the difference? Both read roughly the same and link to the same place but the first is very specific and reinforces the targeted keyword for that page, which is designed to get search engine traffic for terms like “Google Adwords CPC”, “Adwords CPC tools”, “Adwords estimator tool”, etc. The second works but it doesn’t add any potential boost to the page in search results, while the first one both works and can give a boost.

It’s also helpful to vary the structure of your internal links, using common variations. So if I link to that tool again, I get more bang for my buck if I use a variation like “Adwords estimator tool” instead of always using Google Adwords CPC tool. The benefit is due to the whole semantic direction that search engines are going, which I’ll ramble on more about in detail in the future.

One last thing is to not forget to title your internal links, as well. Hover your mouse over the links above and you’ll see that I also titled each link with a corresponding targeted term, reinforcing the keywords on the destination page. Vary this up as well whenever you can and don’t always use the same title. The boost here is more negligible but it’s a good habit to get into.

Categories Are Links, Too: If you’re using WordPress, don’t forget that your Categories are links, too, and should be optimized for the keywords you’re targeting. You’ll have less flexibility here due to space restraints and layouts, but just keep in mind that these should be optimized as well if possible.

If your site is about poker and you’re creating a category for pages that are poker tips, you’d always want to call that “Poker Tips” instead of simply “Tips”. Both work fine and both alert a surfer on the site that if they click on the category they will find tips about poker, but one is optimized for much more traction in search results than the other.

Don’t worry if it looks silly to have all your categories preceded with “Poker (whatever)” as in the example above. Yes, it’s a poker site, anyone on it knows that, yes it’s redundant, yes the category “Strategy” is obviously about poker strategy and not wombat hunting strategy, but always keep an eye towards the search engines in cases like that. If it looks hugely silly or will break your layout, fine, use the sensible name for categories, but if it only looks slightly odd, err on the side that will help you in search results.

Kick around in the affiliate world long enough and you’ll hear lots of talk about PageRank. It’s a pretty simple idea but has gotten largely been mangled and obsessed over past the point of recognition or common sense.

When discussing PageRank, what we’re really talking about is Google, and how Google ranks pages in its search results. PageRank is a  part of Google’s search algorithm that automatically determines how pages on similar subjects should be ranked in results. Keep in mind that there are other search engines than Google and while they may incorporate similar factors, when you talk about PageRank you’re really talking just about Google.

It’s easy for search engines to find and index content, and easy to return indexed content when users type in certain terms. Google finds many pages about “widgets” and when you search on “widgets”, bam, Google serves you up the 182,928 pages it’s indexed on the topic of widgets. That’s easy.

The hard part is for Google to determine which of those pages should be listed in the #1 search engine results pages (abbreviated as SERPs). What makes one page on widgets better than another one? How is “better” even defined? With the rise of affiliate marketing, how do you not only accurately rank all the worthwhile pages but also throw out spam pages that are designed solely to make money and are of no use to the average surfer?

The unique way that Google tackled the issue in the past was something called PageRank, which was basically a measure of how many sites linked to your site, and how popular those sites linking to you were. I’m simplifying here, for the sake of brevity, but that’s the basic gist of it. The measure of that popularity (a combination of total links to your site plus how popular the sites themselves were that linked to you) is called PageRank, which is displayed on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

Think of it as a popularity game. If 1,000 websites linked to you, the odds are that your content is pretty damn good. The pages on your site would then get a boost in search results over the pages on another similarly-themed site that only had 3 websites linking to it. Your PageRank would be higher than the site with similar content, so your pages would get a boost over theirs in the search results.

Extending the idea a bit, all links to your site weren’t created equal. Let’s say you have 100 links to your site, but they’re all from other sites that themselves were very popular and had a high PageRank. Your pages would tend to be listed higher than a competing site that also had 100 links to their site, but with all the links coming from less popular sites with low PageRank.

To see the PageRank of your site, download the Google toolbar and configure the options so that PageRank is displayed. Visit a site and in your toolbar you’ll see the site’s PageRank, which is displayed as a green bar that runs horizontally. Hover your mouse over the bar and it’ll show the actual PageRank number in a pop-up box, on the 0-10 scale.

That’s the basic idea of PageRank. It was a good idea and worked well, but, like all things where money can be made, savvy affiliates and SEO firms started gaming the system. An ungodly amount of hours was expending trying to manipulate PageRank, to spread PageRank more effectively thoughout sites so that all pages got a boost, to not leak PageRank to other sites, and on and on and on. For good reason, as boosting your pages in results directly relates to making more money.

PageRank still exists, and it’s still a factor in the ranking of search results, but it’s not as important as it was in the past, as Google is working to incorporate other similar factors into its algorithms, such as TrustRank and other semantic considerations.

Stepping back a bit, the real reason I mention this is to try to prevent you from disappearing down the black hole of spending too much time obsessing over or trying to manipulate PageRank. People waste a ridiculous amount of time debating the pros and cons of things like PageRank, TrustRank, amd REF=NOFOLLOW OR REL=NOFOLLOW, when all they need to do is focus on creating good content.

I know a sound like a broken record, but all you have to do to make money in the affiliate world is focus on writing good, targeted content that people search for. That’s it. Predict their questions and answer them. Pick niches where people have lots of questions and retailers or advertisers are lined up, salivating at the chance to answer their questions. Do that, over and over and over, and you’ll make a boatload of money.

If you get down to the bare bones of PageRank and TrustRank and other factors, they’re really just getting at a very basic truth. They try to identity and reward good content that people are interested in and value enough to link to. That’s it. If lots of people link to something, it’s usually good, interesting, entertaining, whatever. Cool.

That makes your life very easy, as an affiliate. All you have to do is write good stuff, and let the rest work itself out. Sure, you can write crap and compensate for it by all sorts of sneaky stuff to manipulate search results and generate traffic, but that’s not a recipe for long term success, and often more work in the end than simply creating good content.

At a certain point, sure, there’s some value in being savvy to all the latest news about the Google algorithm, and what should be tweaked over here, what could be optimized over there, etc. But in the beginning you’re always better off to simply put your blinders on and concentrate on banging out good content, without worrying about all the extraneous junk that can lead to endless fiddling and wasting of your precious time.

There are certain issues that you’ll wrestle with every day in the affiliate world, and one of those is advertising. Or, more accurately, if you’re using the correct advertising to make as much as you can from your traffic.

I don’t have much love for the word “monetize” (don’t get me started on other less than concrete buzzwords like “sticky,” “eyeballs,” and “scalability”) but it’s a nice shortcut to describe what affiliates do. You transform traffic to your sites into clicks on certain ads and links. Do it well and you’ll make much money. Do it poorly and you won’t.

The difficulty, though, is that it’s not just a matter of getting traffic and slapping up ads. It can be that easy, in rare instances, but usually it’s not. Typically you’ll need to accumulate targeted, focused traffic that is exposed to integrated ads, links, and products that your focused traffic is inclined to be interested in.

In plain English (and much more simply), you’ll make lots of money advertising mortgage products and services if your traffic is composed of people actively looking to buy a house. Those same ads for mortages will make you jack squat if your traffic is looking for naughty pictures of Britney.

That’s the first level of thought related to ads on your affiliate sites. Once you match up your content with on-topic, related advertising, you get to the second level, which is how the ads are integrated into your site.

Backing up a bit, one common issue that lots of new affiliates wrestle with is when to include ads in their sites. Do you have ads from Day 1 or do you wait until you build some traffic to incorporate ads? Do ads annoy and scare off users that might otherwise hang around your cool, useful site? Should you wait until you get search traffic to start integrating and optimizing ads?

There’s no defnitive answer, but I leans towards including ads and tightly integrating them into the site from Day 1. You’ll have your own learning curve as far as learning how ads work, which programs to use, how to build product links, etc., and the sooner you get on the curve, the better.

There’s also a flip side to not subjecting users to ads in the early days, as you’re prone to piss some of them off later when you flip the switch and all of this obvious advertising suddenly pops up. If the ads are always there, from the first time they hit the site, they tend to simply accept ads as a fact of websites these days.

As far as integrating ads into your site, to some degree it’s a matter of personal choice and determined by the type of site you have. I’m not going to go into all the specific cases and factors, especially when what works for one site might never work for another.

In general, lean towards text ads if you can, as they almost always outperform image ads such as banners. We’ve all become slightly conditioned to subconsciously ignore banner ads on website, as they’re obviously ads, they’re generally the same size and appear in the same general locations, and we’re usually interested in reading the actual content, not the ads.

Thus the beauty of text ads, as they’re embedded in the text and hard to ignore. More importantly, they’re often mistaken for navigational links, so they tend to get clicked much more often than other ads. Yes, I know, slightly sneaky, but your goal isn’t to be nice and informative; your goal is to be nice, informative, and profitable. If you have to sacrifice one of those three elements, ditch nice and stick to informative and profitable.

The more tightly and seamlessly your ads are integrated into your site, the more money you will make. Your goal is to have an informative, content-rich site that is narrowly focused, with a layout that makes it difficult to distinguish from ads, content, and navigational links.

If you’re using Adsense, customize the color and background of your ads so that they blend into the background of your website. Consider using different Adsense formats in different locations, taking into account your navigational links, post format, and other factors.

Problogger.net is a good example, epsecially the Adsense ads just above the first post on the main page. Those look just like navigational links, and they’re topics that someone wanting to make money from blogging would be very inclined to click on. If the format was instead the larger Adsense ads, with the advertising text and URL included, they’d very obviously be ads and wouldn’t get clicked as much as they do when people mistake them for navigational links.

If you’re using third-party affiliate programs that provide you with banners, don’t just use the first one you see. Try to run ads that blend into your site and, in some cases, adjust your layout and design to the ads you want to run. In the past I’ve built entire sites around ads that I wanted to try out, with the layout and design (and content, to some extent) dictated by the ad itself.

Ads are a necessary evil in the affiliate world, so the sooner you make your peace with them, the better.

Nothing like three or four consecutive late nights with my nose to the grindstone to remind me of a simple unavoidable truth: getting older blows. Yeah yeah, I know that being the ripe old age of 32 doesn’t exactly qualify me for a discounted rate at the EconoLodge, but it’s also a far cry from the days of yore where I’d only get four or five hours of sleep a night for weeks at a time and never blink an eye. These days, not so much, with much dragging of ass accompanying even just a few nights in a row of burning the midnight oil. And it’s only going to get worse, too.

Not much going on other than extreme busyness, but assorted deadline crunches are now behind me and I’ll get back to posting regularly the next few days.