Gadooney.com
A Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing
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Do Excerpted Links in Blogs Prevent Search Engines from Spidering Your Content?
(1)Short answer: no.
Longer answer: If you use an excerpted link (or any “Click for the rest of the entry” type of link to keep the post on the home page shorter and more concise), you’re not really affecting the ability of search engines to find and index the content in the post, assuming you’re using a typical blog structure.
Most blogs are set up so that a certain number of recent posts are featured on the home page, in addition to every post having a permanent home in the archive. Since the permanent home contains the full text of the post, search engines almost always find and index the content there, so you really don’t have to worry about using excerpted links, and the content they may “hide” on posts on the home page.
One consideration, though, is that your home page is typically spidered much more frequently and content there usually ranks higher in search engines, so if you’re targeting more “newsy” niches (i.e. posting blow by blow updates of the Britney saga or American Idol results), you’d probably want the full text of each post to appear on the home page. If your content is more timeless, using excerpted links is pretty much a non-issue, and one that neither helps nor hinders you.
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Nose, Meet Grindstone… Grindstone, Nose…
(0)Much craziness abounding of late, especially ramping up with possible real estate investments getting rolling, and the markets taking a dump yesterday didn’t exactly easy my stress levels any.
On the affiliate front, I’ve been keeping my head down, cranking out pages on existing sites, and launching a few trial, experimental sites that are soaking up lots of time. I’m finally getting some Google love to the first batch of new sites I’ve been detailing here (including this site), which is nice to finally see.
I’ve also been more active in monitoring other affiliate-oriented sites and blogs, something I’d let fall a bit to the wayside in the last year or so. It’s definitely hard to sort through the clutter, as there’s a massive amount of crap out there, but you definitely find more than a few nuggets of gold if you’re patient and keep an eye on stuff.
To that end, here’s some links to useful blogs/sites that deal with affiliate marketing and/or general webmaster/SEO topics:
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Weekly Recap
(1)Man, can I get a do-over for February? Or at least have the month back, as I’m not sure exactly where it went, but it’s largely gone-gone-gone, with seemingly little to show for it.
Or, you know, lots to show for it, depending. One thing I forget at times is that I’m essentially starting over with all my affiliate work, after all of my casino and poker related sites came crashing down in the wake of recent US legislation whacking that industry mightily. I fall into the trap of viewing everything through that lens, as far as rushing, pell-mell, to try to make up the money I was previously making, and viewing anything less as a failure.
Which is pretty damn dumb, especially when I spend so much time here preaching patience, acknowledging the fact that it takes much time for your efforts to bear fruit, as far as getting indexed in search engines, acquiring customers, and building traffic. Beating myself up for not instantly achieving beaucoup traffic and riches is, umm, not very realistic or helpful.
At the same time, there is a balance, as far as pushing yourself to constantly get pages and sites out there. Especially if you’re blessed/cursed with a day job and are doing the affiliate stuff on the side. The difficulty is in find a balance, and giving yourself credit for all the things you did accomplish, instead of focusing on what didn’t get done.
In that light, while I cranked out very few pages of content this week, much work was done on Pokahblog.com and Oddsnark.com, as far as getting them ready to open up to a beta test experiment of sorts. I’ve been playing around the idea of being able to offer a community, group blog on assorted topics that’s open to any author, but one that still offers them a chance to potentially make money via Adsense and affiliate programs.
As the owner/admin, I’d basically make the site go, optimize and promote it, provide a way for authors to make money, and give them an easy way to post content. Which is a fairly compelling idea in many ways, as it solves the primary problem for me (getting content onto optimized sites) and for bloggers (having multiple outlets for the content, including commercials ones designed to make them the most money possible). It’s also a potentially nice outlet for people wanting to dip their toes into the affiliate waters but who aren’t quite committed to signing up for a hosting account and setting up a website themselves.
So those are in beta testing now, as I just opened them up a few days ago. Still some kinks to work out but I’ll be curious to see how the experiment turns out. The key, methinks, is going to be whether or not the sites can achieve a certain critical mass, as far as building up enough traffic that authors can see a tangible return for their work. I think it’d be a pretty compelling pitch if someone could jump in, post a lot, and make $50-$100 month from their content, but it’s going to take a lot of traffic to make that a possibility, and a lot of patience from early beta testers.
As far as my personal stuff, I continued to pick away at assorted sites. Still not getting much love from search engines but that’s par for the course at this stage. I’ve got a few new schemings up my sleeve, which I’ll likely detail here soon. Plan for the rest of the month is to bang out some content in assorted places, but, as always, who knows if that’ll end up being the case.
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Finding Profitable Affiliate Niches
(1)We’re going to loop back today to a tool I’ve mentioned before, the Google Adwords Estimator tool, but we’re going to use it in a slightly different way than before.
Previously I’d recommended using it to prioritize the content that you create for your site, starting with the terms that had the highest CPC estimate, as those would in theory pay you the most as an affiliate for Adsense clicks on those terms on your site. Since time is at a premium, that’s a good way to work smarter and maximize the bang for your content-creation efforts.
The Adwords Estimator tool, though, can do some other neat stuff, too. If you’re taking the generalist, shotgun affiliate approach (i.e. trying lots of smaller niche sites and seeing what sticks), you sometimes encounter a bit of an odd conundrum. You’re ready and willing to bang out a site but you don’t have anything planned, as far as areas you’d like to target.
While that sounds dumb, it’s not uncommon, especially if you build lots of mini-sites that are 10 pages or less. You can usually brainstorm and come up with a decent niche after some cogitating, but a quick shortcut is to use the Google Adwords Estimator tool to do the brainstorming for you.
To get started, pull up the tool here. Click on the big tab titled “Site-Related Keywords”. which is right next to “Keyword Variations” which is the default tab that’s selected when you land on the page.
Next you’ll be prompted to enter a URL. Enter http://en.wikipedia.org into the URL field. Then be sure to check the box beneath it, which says “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”
In the dropdown menu below that, select “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” and then below that, enter “100″ into the “Max CPC” field. When all that is done, click the “Get Keywords” button.
You’ll get a big honking list of keywords and CPC estimates, so click on the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column to sort them with the highest at the top.
So what just happened? We basically just used a dynamic, constantly changing source of data (Wikipedia) to do the brainstorming work for us, as far as finding potentially profitable niches to build an affiliate site around.
If you scan down the results, some results should leap out at you, with surprisingly high estimated CPCs. Because the home page of Wikipedia is dynamic, with random content pushed to it throughout the day, your results will be different, but when I did it the following jumped out at me:
martial arts billing: $11.07
martial arts software: $10.91
What you’re looking for isn’t necessarily the highest CPC estimate, but more a sweet spot, as far as a term that pays well (I consider anything over $5.00 as paying well), is reasonably obscure with little competition (I just ignore generic ones like “Bally fitness” even if it pays very well, as it’s too competitive), and has a decent amount of search volume (if only 2 searches are done on the term per month, it does you little good to build a site for it, even if the CPC estimate is high).
The Estimator tool has options in the pulldown menu to view the same terms for search volume trends and other data, so you can get a broad idea there as far as how often the terms are searched for. For much closer to exact data, many affiliates use WordTracker, although it’s pretty pricey so you might hold off on that until you’re making the big bucks.
Determining overall competition for terms simply takes some experience, but plugging the term into Google and running a search is the basic way to go about it. See how many total results there are and check out the top listings to get a gauge of much competition there is, how high the PageRank of the sites with the top results are, how well-optimized the pages in the top spots are, etc.
Using the “martial arts billing” and “martial arts software” above, poking around shows that those are actually fairly competitive terms, as far as existing pages targeting them, so building a site around them isn’t a slam-dunk proposition. So you shouldn’t necessarily expect to mine gold each time you run through the process above. it’s not some magic formula for riches, just a nice way to mine for potentially profitable niches that you might never have thought of otherwise.
You can also put any URL you’d like into the tool to analyze for keywords, so play around with it, trying things like http://news.google.com and http://buzz.yahoo.com. You can also focus on inner pages in Wikipedia like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_arts if you find a promising looking term and want to delve deeper.
Another nice feature is to run your own affiliate sites through it, as it will pull up your own targeted keywords and related keywords and give you estimated CPCs for them, hopefully confirming that you’re on the right track and targeting profitable niches, as well as potentially new fodder for pages to create.
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Site Review: My Crafty Corner
(1)Peter has been playing along at home and recently requested a review of the site he and his wife are working on, My Crafty Corner.
Hopefully he doesn’t mind it being done in a public fashion such as this, but I think that format is especially helpful, as it provides links and eyeballs to the site being discussed as well as possible tips and fodder for people working on their own site. If anyone else lurking out there would like a similar review, holler at me and it shall be so.
From the highest of aerial views, the site is a great start, especially starting from scratch and with no previous knowledge of working with WordPress, affiliate sites, HTML, etc. You picked a great topic, as it’s one that you and your wife obviously know a lot about, but also one that has lots of Adsense advertisers. So not only is it easy to create lots of juicy content, but there’s an audience and market for a lot of the keywords you’re working with, due to the theme and nature of the site.
You’re also doing a great job of incorporating images into your content. Not only do they illustrate the projects involved, but they also do a great job of personalizing the site, as they’re largely pictures of your family, so it’s much easier for users to connect and empathize with your content.
It’s kind of a subtle effect but it’s much easier to build trust and authority with your audience if they feel like they know you on a more personal level than the average surfer/webmaster relationship.
Some general areas you might monkey with, in no particular order:
1) I wonder if tackling the broad “crafts” market is the best choice, or if you’d get more traction if you optimized the site for a smaller, more focused slice of the crafts pie.
2) Since it’s largely about scrapbooking (and the ads currently displaying via Adsense are almost all scrapbooking related), I’d be tempted to run with that, possibly titling the site “My Scrapbooking Corner” or “My Crafty Corner: Adventures in Scrapbooking and More.”
That doesn’t mean you can’t touch on other non-scrapbooking crafts content, it would just mean that the site title (which gets a lot of emphasis when search engines rank pages) would focus on scrapbooking.
3) I struggle with this constantly myself, but you might consider breaking up the content in the posts a bit with paragraph breaks after every 2-3 lines. It’s much easier to read Web content when there are liberal breaks used, and it gives the illusion that your content is longer and meatier.
4) I’d definitely change the background color of the existing Adsense ads that you’re running, so that they blend into the color of the theme. With the white background that they currently use they pretty much scream “Ignore Me, I Am an Advertisement!”.
5) It’s kind of a painful reality of the affiliate world, but you’ll get the best traction from Adsense if you blend the ads tightly with your content, and put them in places where they’re highly visible. Here’s an example of a layout that’s worked well for me on assorted sites, as far as integrating Adsense ads.
I’ll admit, that’s a little intrusive. But it works, as far as getting clicks and making money in Adsense. The 468×15 link unit ads above the post title look more like navigational links than ads, so they get lots of clicks. The 200×200 Adsense unit in the text is pretty intrusive, but again, people tend to click on links like that more often if they’re actually embedded in the text. Then the final Adsense ad unit at the bottom hits up anyone that’s made it that far with one last sales pitch.
Whether you go that far or not is ultimately up to you. Some people don’t like to dirty their sites up that much with ads, and that’s totally understandable. In general, though, the more tightly you integrate the ads into the content, the more money you’ll make.
6) You might check CommissionJunction (CJ) to see if they have existing affiliate programs for some of the products mentioned in posts. I think Joann’s has a program through CJ, and there might be other arts/crafts retailers. If you can link to actual products via their affiliate program, you’ll get a lot of potential bang for your buck, and won’t have to rely solely on Adsense to potentially make money.
7) The titles of posts could do more work for you, as far as being more descriptive of the project involved. Search engines put a lot of weight on the titles of pages and posts, so you want these to be as descriptive as possible and to hit up common search terms that people interested in scrapbooking might search on.
Overall, though, it’s a great start, especially for your first shot at it. Keep on cranking out juicy content and tweak and fiddle with a few things, as you’re definitely on the right track.
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Using the Site: Command to See if Your Content Has Been Indexed in Search Engines
(1)One thing I constantly talk about here is waiting for sites to get fully indexed in search engines, sandbox filters (which prevent your new sites and pages from displaying in search results for a certain period of time), and using good link structure and sitemaps to get all of your content indexed.
Once your sites are up and running, it’s very easy to see how many of your pages have been indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Before I show you how, though, be aware that a page being indexed and it showing up in its proper place in search results are two different beasts. Because of sandbox filters for new sites, your content may very well show up as being indexed, but it’s not yet in the mix of the actual search results, as far as ranking where it should be when the filter is lifted once your site is sufficiently aged.
Let’s start with Google. Run a normal Google search, and type in the following into the search box: site:www.gadooney.com (Type it exactly like that, with no spaces. And type it into the search box, not into the area in your browser where actual URLs appear.)
That will take you to a search results page that shows every page that Google has indexed for gadooney.com. To see your own site, simply replace gadooney.com with your own domain. The total number of pages indexed will likely be greater than actual posts or pages you’ve created, as most search engines index feeds and categories and other extraneous sections of your site as actual pages, especially if you’re using WordPress to manage your content.
To check Yahoo and MSN, repeat the above process exactly, as far as running a search in each search engine using the site:www.yoursite.com syntax.
What do you do with all that data, once you get it? Well, honestly, not too much at the beginning stages, as the value in the site: command at the initial stages is simply to check that the search engines are able to find all of your pages and index it. If they are, then you know that your link structure is working its magic and enabling search engine spiders to find your content. There’s more valuable data in the results from the site: command, but we’ll dig into that in a later post.
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Weekly Recap
(0)A bit of a pitiful weekly recap, as time is still very much at a premium of late. All family members are finally back up to speed and feeling well, though, and my daily routine is getting back to its normal groove. Even when I had time to work the last few weeks I was having a hard time focusing, so not too much to show on the productivity front.
I did manage to get out a three part post on generating traffic to your site while waiting for search engine results to kick in:
- Instant Traffic Sources Part I: Forums
- Instant Traffic Sources Part II: Outbound Links
- Instant Traffic Sources Part III: Blog Comments
I also got a good bit of work done building out Vroomchatter.com, and have been pretty pleased with the traffic and results so far. That site is a good example, too, of the vagaries of the world of search engines, as for some reason it’s getting lots of Google traffic despite the fact that it’s a brand new site that shouldn’t be indexed yet. I’ve had that happen with a few new sites, that initially get indexed and get traffic despite the fact that they’d normally get sandboxed and have to wait a few months until getting fully indexed. Typically the traffic lasts for a few weeks, then they get sandboxed, so it’ll be interesting to see if the current traffic lasts.
Plan for the next few weeks is still pretty much the same old routine, as far as continuing to build out content on all the assorted sites. Hopefully I’ll be back to a more regular posting schedule, both here and elsewhere.
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Instant Traffic Sources Part III: Blog Comments
(1)So far we’ve looked at a couple of different ways to generate traffic to your new site while waiting for search engine results to kick in, touching on using forums to generate traffic and using outbound links.
Today we’re going to examine using blog comments to drive traffic to your website. This should be a quick one, as it’s pretty obvious, but an easy way to generate some decent traffic to your site is to be a frequent commenter on blogs that are related to your subject.
In this day and age, you can’t chunk a rock anywhere without hitting 1,926 blogs devoted to the subject, so there are likely plenty of blogs about your subject matter out and about in the world. Most blog platforms allow you to include an email address and URL when commenting, which are displayed after you submit your comment, and can be clicked through by anyone perusing the blog you commented on.
Like many things discussed here, be judicious. Don’t spam blogs with comments for the sake of comments, as something like “Great post” is pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. You’ll get more bang for your buck if you do a little legwork and identifiy the most popular, respected blogs, as they likely have the highest traffic.
When you comment, put some thought into it, so that anyone reading it will realize that you know what you’re talking about, and that the odds are good that your own site will be interesting as well and worth checking out.
Another advantage of being a knowledgeable commenter on blogs is that your comments will often generate an incoming link to your site from the owner of the blog, especially if it’s on a related subject. It’s more professional courtesy than anything else, but it’s often easier to get someone to link to you if you simply frequently comment and contribute to their blog, rather than linking to their site and sending an email, begging for a link, etc.
Search engines are trending towards (or already to the point of) completely ignoring links in the comments themselves, so don’t get caught up in thinking that “Hey, I can generate tons of links if I just comment on blogs all day.” Spamming comments is pretty much a complete waste of time, so no need to go there.
A close cousin to using blog comments to generate traffic are services like Yahoo Answers, where you can answer assorted questions that users have posted, and (for now at least) are allowed to include clickable URLs in your answer. Your mileage definitely varies here, based on the topic and popularity of the subject matter, but it’s a decent way to generate some instant traffic, if there are questions posted that relate to your site and subject matter.
Again, like blog comments you get more mileage if you put a little time into it, as your goal is to impress any user with the fact that you know your stuff. If you just slap up one line responses and a link to your site, you’re likely to get flagged as a spammer or simply ignore by most users, thus rendering the whole exercise a pretty large waste of time.
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Weekly Recap
(0)This week was sort of a wash on the affiliate front, despite getting off to a good start last weekend. My wife came down with a bad stomach virus late last Saturday, and she ended up spending about 36 hours in the hospital, mostly getting rehydrated. When she was finally on the mend, our pet rat (we don’t have kids so the little sucker is essentially our surrogate child) developed a bad abcess, which the vet treated, but the infection spread.
Wife is fine and completely back up to speed but it’s touch and go with Sherman, unofficial holder of the title of World’s Coolest Rat. He’s a tough little guy so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that he can fight off the infection, with the help of antibiotics, and so far he’s holding up pretty well. He’s worrying me because his appetite is off, but he’s also normally a huge pig, and decereased appetite isn’t that unusual with the antiobiotics he’s on.
On top of all of that, the home inspection on the potential investment property was last week, in addition to meeting with mortgage lenders to hammer out loan details. All of which was dumped on top of my day job, which involves a 30 mile commute, which gets a bit difficult when shuttling sickos to and from the hospital and vet.
So yeah, not much progress on the affiliate front. Can’t really say it bothers me all that much, as there are definitely more important things in life than whether or not cranked out 172 pages of affiliate content last week. If anything, maybe that’s the best lesson I could babble on about here. I tend to get locked down into my routines, constantly chasing dollars and concocting new schemes, trying to balance all of that and still be a good husband and rat-dad, but reality checks are nice, as far as what’s really important.
Don’t get lost when chasing money around. Extra money is nice, especially if it’s part of a larger plan to buy you the space and time to live life to the fullest, but you likely don’t have to look very far, each and every day, to find much more valuable things that you shouldn’t be ignoring, for any amount of money.
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Instant Traffic Sources Part II: Outbound Links
(0)In Instant Traffic Sources: Part I we discussed using forums to drive traffic to your websites, while you’re waiting for your pages to get fully indexed at search engines. Remember, our goal is to not just get traffic at all cost, but to maximize our efforts in areas that not only provide us with decent traffic, but other potentially valuable things as well, such as incoming links to our sites, etc.
Today we’re going to look at how we can use outbound links to drive traffic to our new site and to generate incoming links. Incoming links not only serve to boost your Google PageRank, but they also speed the rate at which your site is indexed by the spiders of assorted search engines. And, more obviously, surfers on the sites that link to you do click through links, so incoming links also generate traffic directly.
Any link on your site that points to an external site is considered an outbound link, one which, if clicked, takes the user to an entirely different website. Some outbound links are inevitable and necessary, such as Adsense links or affiliate product links. Those links are what puts money in your wallet, so you don’t need to worry about the fact that the user may click them and never return, as the whole point of your affiliate site is to encourage people to click those links.
What’s slightly more problematic are outbound links to other sites that don’t generate income for you. Let’s say you’re working on your blue widget affiliate site, and discover that there are other great sites about blue widgets out there, that readers of your site would probably find useful as well. Your first impulse is a generous one, which is to provide the best site for your users, so you’re inclined to link to those other blue widget sites.
But then you put on your shrewd, mercenary hat, and start thinking “Hmm, how does that make me money? Not only might I lose traffic due to people clicking through the links and never returning, but my link might boost the other sites in search results, hurting me even more. I’m not doing this to be nice and make friends, I’m doing it to make money. So screw linking to any other site.”
Lots of affiliates subscribe to that line of thinking, and I’m not going to try to debunk it, as the concerns are very valid. But, like many things, it all depends on the particular situation, and in some cases linking to other similar sites can not only boost traffic (and income) of your site, but it can ultimately boost your site in search engine results.
The Nascar news site I recently launched is a pretty good example of a case in which outbound links have given the site a nice boost. One of the first things I did when pondering launching the site was to poke around and see if there were similar sites out there, especially ones with an affiliate angle, as far as being optimized for Adsense, etc. While I found a goodly number of blogs and fan sites, hardly any of them were designed to make money.
So I decided, from Day 1, to include lots of outbound links, to any quality blogs or fan sites that I could find. You’ll find the list of links in the sidebar to the right of the page. I didn’t stop there, though, as I created the links and regularly clicked through myself, so that the webmasters and owners of the linked sites would check their stats and suddenly see traffic coming from some new site they’d never heard of, called Vroomchatter.
In fields where you don’t have a lot of cutthroat affiliate competition, the natural impulse for a webmaster who sees that you’ve linked to them and are sending them traffic is to return the favor, and link to you on their site. You’d be amazed at how quickly this happens, as many of us are obsessive about stats and check them constantly, and in my case I had incoming links added by sites I’d linked to in less than an hour from when I put their link up and clicked through it.
(Remember, you’ll need to click the links yourself, to simulate traffic to their site, as your new site likely has no other traffic to do the clicking.)
Have those return links produced tons of traffic and great riches for me? Not at all. But the site is already making money for me, despite the fact that it’s not indexed in search engines. Keep in mind, too, that the nature of the topic the site is devoted to (and the lack of competition in general) is what makes the outbound links work for me. If I were pushing Viagra pills or some other highly competitive product with beaucoup affiliate sites devoted to it, it’d be a complete waste of time to link to other similar sites, as the mercenary webmasters behind them would never, in a million years, give you a courtesy link back.
As with anything, moderation is also usually best. Don’t go nuts with outbound links, as a very large number of them can hurt your overall site in search results. It’s also best not to extend the idea and to contact people you’ve linked to, asking for a reciprocal link back, etc. Not only is that time consuming but are you really committed to monitoring and tracking who has linked back to you, who hasn’t, and so on? If you do decide to use judicious outbound links, just link ‘em and forget about it.
Outbound links to similarly-themed sites can also potentially give you a boost in the new world of search engines that incorporate semantic considerations, too. All that means is that search engines are getting smarter, to the point that they can potentially reward pages that are about a certain theme and obviously part of a larger network of sites devoted to the same theme, whereas they wouldn’t reward another page if it had no visible connections (i.e. hyperinks) to similarly themed sites.
In the grand scheme of things, outbound links simply aren’t going to generate huge amounts of traffic for you, but their judicious use in some cases can produce a decent amount of traffic, as well as generating incoming links and speeding up how fast and regularly your site content is spidered and indexed in search engines.