SEO-friendly Links for Charity

This post crosses across two of my Bologs and functions of my website. Firstly I'm seeking donations to help my One Million People campaign where I'm trying to get 1 Million People all over the internet to donate 50-cents apiece to help educate the children of Liberian refugees stranded in Senegal, West Africa after the 1999-2003 civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

But the One Million People campaign is also a chance for you to get some much needed SEO publicity for your website. As a 'thank you' for anyone who donates $1 or even 50-cents at my One Million People campaign page I'm giving you the chance to upload your image, a profile of yourself and your website/blog URL to my database. The links immediately go live on the One Million People campaign home page and you get a direct SEO-friendly link to the website you defined from that page. You also get a link to your personal profile page and your URL link is also made live there, too. For just 50-cents you can get two SEO-friendly links from a high traffic page to your own website. In addition, you get the kudos of being associated with this campaign.

So, go to the One Million People capmaign page today and become one of the canpaign's sponsors. You can also help by submitting articles to Celtnet Articles directory. Again this gets you links back to your website, but the more articles we have the more money we can make from AdSense and other ads to provide to the campaign we're running. It's only a 2-minute sign-up process to join and you can write articles on just about anything. If your subject isn't there then just use the contact form linked from the Celtnet Articles directory to drop us a line and we'll add that category for you. Submit enough articles of good enough quality and you will becme a 'Celtnet Articles' expert author. You may even become an article moderator with the rights to submit articles directly into the database.

The campaign here is also being supported from the Africa Aid Blog and news of our efforts are spreading. Why not become part of the Celtnet community today and help those who have suffered so much make a better life for their children.

Pay-per-Play ads and Other Announcements

An update on the Pay-per-Play advertising system. The Pay Per Play Ads System is currently in active testing and will be in testing for the next three weeks or os. However, this is the only time where the system will allow you to get your own first and second-tier affiliates for the system. So I urge you to visit Pay Per Play Marketing now and sign-up for the system. Then begin promoting the system to start creating your down-line.

During this testing period you may get ads on your site if you get more than 10 page impressions a day. Otherwise ads will not be delivered until the system goes live. This gives you a couple of weeks to grab the ad code and to start propagating the code through your web pages. By the beginning of March you can begin to see how your ads are performing. So, sign-up with the Pay-per-Play system at their Sign-up Page today.

Today I've also released the latest version of my Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace a human-edited version of the ClickBank products system which is fully searchable and comes with free ClickBank Ads generation systems so that you can market ClickBank products on your web pages.

I've also released the latest version of the Celtnet eZine today which focusses on ways you can increase the revenue from your website or blog. A theme that's echoed in my recent article on Expanding your Advertising Revenue Streams.

Which reminds me to inform all my readers that the Celtnet Articles site is now live. Here you can easily register and submit your own articles on any subject. You get 3 links in your resource box and you can submit articles on just about any subject. All approved articles are published at the end of the day and ads are submitted to the major news aggregators via RSS feeds so you're guaranteed of maximal exposure for your ads.

Pay-Per-Play Advertising For Your Site

A new buzz is slowly bubbling through the Internet Marketing community. It's all about a new advertising phenomenon, Pay-per-Play Advertising (PPP) that could take the internet by storm.

Every now and then something completely new comes along in terms of internet advertising. I've just found out about a new form of internet advertising that I believe will catch-on very quickly. At this present moment in time you also have the ability to join for free and earn money for playing sounds on your website, just a small piece of code is required.

Pay-Per-Play (PPP) advertising is the name of this revolution. PPP works on a bid management system similar to Google AdWords and will compensate publishers just like Google AdSense but with one critical difference... Publishers (website owners) earn revenue on 100% of their traffic... no clicks necessary!

You can find out more about PPP marketing at: Pay Per Play Marketing here.

PPP is a way for advertisers to serve 5-second audio ads to a website's visitors. But because websites serve a whole range of interests, topic and niches PPP offers advertisers a way to reach their target audience (and that audience can be very targeted and is the only form of media whose impressions and ad placements are verified by an independent 3rd party.

The ads themselves are very professional (many are made by the biggest players in the industry) and you don't have to serve them on your website. Rather, you just sign-up to the system and grab a short piece of javascript that you embed into each of your websites and you're done. Now, we all know that audio on websites can be very annoying, but the ads served here are only five seconds long and they run (and finish) as soon as your web page has loaded. As a result they're not too distracting and are easily ignored by your site's visitors.

The system currently has 66 000 advertisers (and growing) and because there's nothing to click and the ad plays as soon as the web page is loaded you get paid each time an ad is played! The compensation plan is also quite generous.

As a website owner you get 25% of the amount bid by the publisher for their ad (this is much more than Google). You can also earn by referring other website owners, online marketing firms, fortune 500 companies, etc. to run PPP ads on their website(s). You will earn a healthy 5% of the total amount that our advertisers spend running ads on your referrals website(s). You also earn 5% of the amount that the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) that your direct referrals bring on board. As a result there are 3 levels of commission. Each potentially bringing you a very healthy income each and every week! But the quicker you get on this bandwaggon, the better it is for you.

Or, if you're already sold on this exciting development, why not go directly to the Sign-up Page.

Improved ClickBank Contextual Ads for your Site

Anyone following this blog and other postings I've been making both here and on my website will know that I've been working for about 3 months on creating ClickBank based ads that are free for everyone to use. Well, following a few comments about my ads and some snide remarks I've been busy completely re-designing them.

If this is news to you, then let me explain. ClickBank is the web's largest collection of electronic products ready for immediate download. Each product is backed by ClickBank's 56-day money-back guarantee. If you sign-up to ClickBank and become an affiliate you will make between $20 and $100 on every product sold through your affiliate ID. Unfortunately, however, ClickBank is designed for putting authors (those who write the products) in contact with affiliates (those who market the products). As a result ClickBank products are geared towards gaining affiliates rather than selling products.

This was the problem I had, so I decided to do something about it. ClickBank makes a data feed available of all their products. I grab this every weekend and load it into a database. I then create images for each product website and then change the affiliate-based product titles and descriptions to descriptions that will sell the product. All this being done by hand. The result is the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace where you can view and search for any product in the ClickBank marketplace based on my new descriptions.

Once this was done I realized that I had a very powerful tool on my hands. A little work and I could offer websites ads, just like Google AdSense ads but based on ClickBank products. This let to my creation of the ClickBank Ads generation page. Here you can get contextual ads, just like Google's, RSS feeds, image-based ads and ClickBank based search scripts all free for everyone to use. The big thing here were the Clickbank contextual ads. The code worked well, but the ads were a little amateurish when they first came out. I was busy refining the selection options so you could display he ads exactly how you wanted and with any option of ClickBank search products you wanted. But the ads themselves were a bit flaky.

That was my downfall initially. So, I've spent the past two days completely writing the Ad code. They are now much more professional and you can get them to look almost exactly like AdSense ad units if you wish. To prove this I've put up a demonstration web page at Celtnet Breads Page. Just have a look at the ads on the page. No, they're not Google AdSense ads, they're CentnetCBAds based on ClickBank products. On the lower left you'll also see how I've made ad units out of an RSS fee of ClickBank products (the code to do this will be available soon, but you can create your own ClickBank products RSS feed for free now.

As you can see the ad units I'm providing are now very professional in appearance and you get a huge range of sizes and possible appearance so you can either blend them completely to your website or you can make them totally stand out. What's more you get all these ad units for free. All you need to do is to sign-up to get a free ClickBank affiliate ID at ClickBank. Then you just go to my ClickBank Ads generation page and start creating the ads for your site.

What do I get out of it? You may ask. Well, you get the ads completely free. But for the work I've put into creating these ads I randomly assign my own ClickBank id to 8% of the ads shown on your site. If someone buys something from one of these ads I get the money. But the other 92% of all IDs go to you! Any money I make goes to my 'Help Stefan' charity campaign rather than to me so it helps the children of Liberian refugees in Senegal get an education. As a result you can monetize your website with ClickBank ads completely free whilst also knowing that you're aiding a worthwhile cause.

In my hands, on high-traffic web pages I make twice as much on those pages from ClickBank sales as I do from the whole of the rest of my site with AdSense. Now that can't be bad. So, why not check out my ClickBank Ads today and grab yourself a piece of the action?!

Recent Events and Lessons for Webmasters

Two recent events in the news: Microsoft's offer for Yahoo! and the 'Anonymous' group's Google Bomb attack on the scentologists provide both salutary and informative lessons for all webmasters.

Microsoft's recent attempt to take over Yahoo! shows both the vulnerability of web-based companies (Yahoo!'s shares have slid dramatically in recent weeks) whilst also showing how important the internet space is. Yahoo! is one of the most recognized of web brands and Yahoo! dominates many areas of the web sphere. Yahoo's search (though trailing behind Google) is still the second most widely employed on the web. This makes Yahoo! a good fit for Microsoft and also means that Microsoft is after an even larger slice of internet revenue.

These are all hopeful signs for all of us with an internet presence. Both as there's a chance of a company developing that will give Google a run for it's money. Also it indicates that spending on internet advertising will continue to grow and that Microsoft wants a bigger slice of this pie. This projected growth of the internet as a marketplace also has significant implications on how businesses (and most especially small websites) do business on the internet. In a more crowded internet it's the large 'authority' sites who will ultimately triumph over their smaller brethren. This is something I've been saying for many years. Small 'niche' sites may not be dead yet, but their period of usefulness is drawing to a close and it's something that I point out in my eBook Maximize your Website Traffic, which has now been newly updated for 2008.

The other newsworthy event of the past week was the attack perpetrated by the 'anonymous' group on the Scientologists. You can read my analysis of this attack at Simple Techniques Still Work - The Case of a Google Bomb. Wikipedia defines a Google Bomb as:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

This is interesting as Google claimed, during 2007 that they had put in place measures that would prevent this kind of attack. This still didn’t prevent the Anonymous group from getting the Church of Scientology ranked third in Google for the term ‘dangerous cult’. Now, I certainly don’t condone this kind of attack. However, the strategies employed (some of them at least) point towards very good learning lessons for internet marketers.

Now, according to Google sites shouldn’t be ranked for a search term if those terms are not actually on the website being pointed at. The interesting thing here is that the term ‘dangerous’ was on the Scientology website, but the term ‘cult’ was not. Thus Scientology should not be ranked for the search term ‘dangerous cult’ — but it was!

The term ‘cult’ was only found in the links pointing towards the website which means that anchor text is still very important in getting a web page ranked for a certain term. The more in-bound links you have with that term in it pointing to your website or web page the more likely you are of being ranked for that search term!

This is interesting as a careful analysis of this 'Google bomb' attack reveals several methods webmasters can use to improve the ranking of their site and to get their sites listed for keywords and terms that are not part of the site's text.

In brief, what the the strategies employed by the ‘Anonymous’ group shows us is that:

• in-bound links are still the most important factor for rankings


• Page content matters for ranking


• Anchor text still matters for keyword targeting


• Keywords matter and keyword density is important


• Link authority matters. The more links from high PR sites ir ‘topical’ sites, the better


• Generating ‘buzz’ from social media sites and press releases matters


• Timeliness matters. The more link density you can create in a short time, the better


• The domain name itself is important. If you own the domain name to a search term you are going to rank well, regardless of content

This is all very interesting and gives the lie to Google's statements of last year (though I'm certain that Google's developers are already busy plugging the apparent gaps in their algorithms).

Yet, the techniques described above do work (at least for the present) and I've just added a new section to my Maximize your Website Traffic ebook to show how this Google bomb attack relates to the wealth of techniques described in the ebook.

I'm sure there will be more fallout from the two events described above over the following weeks. For the moment, however, it's just interesting to sit back and consider the implications.