Nemeton

2009-02-11T14:01:00.003Z

Hit by the Dreaded Google Penalty

Just when I thought it couldn't happen, my main site Celtnet has been hit by the dreaded 'Google Penalty'.

If you don't know about it this is when your site's search results begin falling down and down the results until they're all below entry 200 or less. It's taken me over 3 years to build the site and at the beginning of last year 2008 I started to make a breakthrough, adding links and content every day. This success impelled me to build the Celtnet Recipes region of the site to over 6500 recipes; each unique and hand crafted by me.

The success snowballed so, but January 2009 I was getting over 15000 hits daily and I was making a decent income from AdSense. This is Google's own advertising program. Then, last Friday (February 6th) my traffic suddenly dried up. Over the next two days I dropped down to only 4000 hits per day, basically just those people who have bookmarked my site and income dropped by over 2/3.

OK, Google only does this when people have violated their terms of service and it's probably an automatic flag set in their system somewhere. This, though would be easier to swallow if I had changed my code and the way the site works in some way... But I haven't.

So I can't, personally, explain this drop in SERPs (serge engine page rankings) position. And that's the thing... OK, if I've violated Google's TOS then this some kind of penalty is fair. But I'm just one guy trying to put good content and new content on the web... I'm not an SEO expert and I don't have a team of people behind me.

The only way to get page rankings back is to use google's 'reinclusion submission' form. But this form assumes you know what went wrong and that you've fixed it and then you confess to them what you did and why and then you say you will never do it again. But I haven't got a clue!!!

And this is where it really gets unfair. Google hit you with a penalty over-night and don't tell you why. So if you've unintentionally done something wrong you have no clue as to why they penalized you and what you did wrong because they did not tell you! So I now have to try and figure out what I might have done wrong so that I can fix it then tell them 'I'm sorry' and 'I won't do it again'.

My income dropped dramatically during these days and is continually dropping. Now, I could blame myself and say it's my fault... except that my income from the website isn't going to me.... I'm actually using it to fund the education of Liberian refugee children in Dakar, Senegal (see One Million People Campaign Pages to see why. So this drop in SERPs for my site isn't hitting me, it's hitting others.

I work damn hard on my website, over 50 hours per week (and I have a regular job). I try and do my best, I make certain my content is novel and good...

But if I can't figure out what went wrong, and with no help from Google, in the next few weeks then I'm going to give up.

Google say they want good content on the web, but this really isn't helping. There are plenty of spammy sites out there and mine isn't one. I have unique content not crap! So why has my site vanished and now sites with far less content than mine are the only one users see.

If Google is really true in what they say about good user experiences then this is not the way to go. I'm fed up and rather than dealing with any of this nonesense again I'm going to give up and get a second job to help those Liberian kids. I've just lost them over $800 a month and to them and their future and there must be better ways of earning the money than this.

If Google are just going to pull the rug from under your feet without telling you why and giving you a chance to fix it (after all, it's only fair to be warned if your income is about to be wiped out) then why should the little guys doing individual things and actually adding to the web experience bother?

It's not the penalty that gets me... If I did something wrong then a penalty is warranted. It's just that there was no warning, no information is forthcoming and no grace period was given to fix things.

Google's motto is 'don't be evil'... But how is this not evil in any way? I've been royally screwed by Google. But, unfortunately, in the end I'm not the one who is going to suffer. I might actually get the time I spend on the website I've created from nothing all by myself back.

My website was a labour of love and this is just the way to completely kill my spirit.

2008-10-20T16:08:00.001Z

Browsing Habits and the Days of the Week

Have you been examining your visitor stats lately? Do you take note of what happens on various days of the week and how the day can affect click-throughs and conversions?

Well, if you haven't been taking note of these factors affecting your website and your income, then shame on you! Because, the days of the week and what you have on offer can have a huge effect on the income you make. Indeed, these fluctuations in the behavours of people visiting my Celtnet website was one of the main reasons I began to develop my site into an authority site.

I began my site with the Celtnet Celtic pages, all based on my hobby and interests, the ancient Celtic gods and the ancient texts of Wales. I added adsense to this, but more in hope than any real expectation. There was some income and that's when I began the Celtnet Information region of the site. This was much more an attempt at making some real money... and, yes, during the middle of the week I did actually make some money, but over Friday and the weekend that steady flow became only a trickle.

Obviously, what I was offering only seemed to be needed during the middle of the week. To try and plug the obvious gap I added a Celtnet Recipes Collection and a Medicine Section and the addition of these two new parts to the website did even out the earnings across the week. Finally, I was getting a monthly cheque from Google.

Then I made a huge mistake... I began trying to grow my entire website across the board. I was adding new content in as many different places as possible but there was no focus. I now know that it would have been far better to focus on a single area of the site, growing both the content and the in-bound links. It took me a year to make this realization and that's cost the site a lot of income.

A year ago I decided to concentrate on the Celtnet Recipes region of the site. During the past 10 months I've grown the content from 1100 recipes to almost 6000 (each hand edited) my traffic has increased 6-fold and my income almost 10-fold. This has been due to building lots of content, getting deep links into the site and re-designing my pages so they're both more visitor friendly and better at converting. And now, in contrast to when I started, the weekend is my most productive time of the week.

I get more hits and more click-throughs on the weekend, by quite a large margin, and this is probably due to the visitors being just a little less 'internet savvy' and less ad-blind overall.

And whilst I'm still growing the recipes site I've added a growing Articles Submission site, where anyone can submit their articles (a key aspect of link building) as well as an eBooks sales section and a ClickBank Marketplace where anyone can search ClickBank products or even create free ClickBank-based ads for their own sites. Each separate income generation strategies.

If you would like to learn how the site was turned around from the doldrums to a success then check-out the How to Maximiey your Web Traffic eBook and course. And if you would like to know what drives me to making the most from the site then please check out the One Million People Charity Campaign as it's this to which the proceeds from the website are given.

Yes, you can make your website into a success, but it will require effort on your part, and there are no shortcuts. You HAVE to grow your content and grow your links.

2008-10-11T14:48:00.000Z

Does Page Rank Really Matter?

At the end of September the webmaster forums were all-a-twitter in that Google seemed to be performing a page rank update. The first in many, many, months. Webmasters were desperately scanning the various datacentres to see if their page ranks had changed or not and reports were flying thick and fast. But it seems that no proper update of page rank was forthcoming. So, does it actually matter?

In a way page rank is critical, but in another it's totally irrelevant. Google uses page rank as an algorithmic measure of how important a website is (ie its rank in comparison to other similar websites, based on the number of links coming into a site and the 'authority' of those sites (ie their page rank).

As a result sites began to scan page rank and there grew a market around selling links from sites with high page rank. A site with high page rank could command a fair amount of money for selling links. Which distorted the natural, organic, growth of links to websites. Obviously this created an artificial skewing of results and Google didn't like this. So they began clamping down on the selling of links.

Now it seems that they are obfuscating page rank. The rank shown in Google's toolbar, or even on Google's datacentres may not actually represent the true page rank or ranking of a site. Indeed, I run the Celtnet and Celtnet Recipes sites. Both these currently have a PR of 0 yet I've managed to grow my traffic five fold in the past six months and my income almost ten fold. If the observed page rank was the true arbiter of a site's quality and position in the search engines then this could not happen.

Which does lead to a bit of a problem. Because higher page rank gives a site more 'juice' in terms of website ranking and getting links is the only way to improve your position in the search engines many webmasters have decided to only exchange links with high PR sites (typically 3 and above). But if page ranks are no longer accurate, how do webmasters with good sites but low PR (artificially low, it seems) exchange links?

We're in the position of having another artificial stewing of how websites are percieved and the placing of a huge barrier in front of new entrants into the field.

2008-10-06T16:48:00.000Z

The Importance of Links

Unfortunately, the Internet is not a meritocracy. You may have the world's best content on your blog or website, but if nobody reads that content then it's effectively less than useless to you as the site's publisher.

I'm not saying that great content isn't important. In fact it's a vital component for any serious presence on the internet, because you want the experience of anyone visiting your website to be a good one. So you need to give them confidence in your site and the only way to do that is to provide them with great, individualistic and above all useful content. So you need to build your site and add great content each and every day.

This is where the true currency of the internet comes in — links. Unless you have links coming into your website then your site will not be found and your content will not be indexed. How you do this may well vary, but here are some of my favorite strategies (and I've used these to increase my website's traffic 10-fold in the past 6 months!

Submitting articles to article directories. This is an all-time favorite and still works really well. In essence you write an article on a topic related to your site and you then submit that article to one of the web's main article directories. Personally, I tend to use the following:

EzineArticles.com — not the fastest, but it's been around for a long time and has lots of kudos

GoArticles — submitted articles are instantly live you can enter affiliate links.

Celtnet Articles — not one of the biggest, but articles are quality reviewed and they are published quickly.

Article Dashboard — turn-around time can be long but this is good for getting your articles picked-up by eZines and published elsewhere.

These are only a few and you can view many more on-line. These are the ones I tend to use myself and they've been good to me in terms both of getting my articles published and picked-up by others. Just remember that each article accepted gives you at least 2 links (typically 3) back to your website and if your content is picked-up by others you get even more links.

Link exchanges — whether you do this through a third party or go for link exchanges personally it can still be a good way of getting links back to your site. Many say this methodology is devalued these days, but remember that it's not just search traffic you want... any means of getting quality links to your site is useful and if you exchange links with a related site you will get referral traffic from that site.

Blog posting — posting to blogs such as this one can be a very useful way of getting more links to your site. Basically you can write a post on a given topic and then include links back to your site that are relevant to your topic.

Free Web Page sites — Sites such as squdoo and hubpages allow you to create individual web pages. You can use these sites to write on a topic and include links back to your own website that are relevant to that topic.

Submit your site to Directories — this is probably not as important as it used to be, but some directories such as DMOZ have a high traffic ranking and can be beneficial.

Blog Comments — Commenting on onthers' blogs or on on-line forums can be an excellent way of disseminating your website's URL. You will increase your traffic both by the virtue that there are more links pointing to your site and by people coming across your URL 'by accident'.

These are just some of the ideas of the ways that you can help get more links to your site. And the truth is that I tend to spend at least 2 hours a day on getting links. In the end though the processes above can be considered as 'priming the pump'. You need enough links into your site for your site and its contents to get on the search engines' radar. But, eventually, if you have good content, then you will start to develop good links back to your site as other webmasters and bloggers mention your site and give you links back to it.

These are just some ideas about how you can improve the links to your site. You can read more about this in the article: How to Improve your Google Ranking.

If you are truly serious about improving your search engine rankings and your traffic then you really need to check out: The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic. And whilst you're there, why not sign-up for the free six-part eCourse.

2008-09-04T16:49:00.003Z

The Earnestness of Absence

I know that it's been a long while since I updated this blog... and that's never a good thing. My excuse is that I've been madly working on my website. The site has expanded in so many ways that I needed to give it a complete overhaul. So, not only does the Nemeton Home Page have a completely new look and feel and should make it much easier to navigate and find the various sections of the site.

The Celtnet Recipes recipe section of the site has also had a major overhaul and now has almost 5000 recipes from all corners of the glove in the database. No mean feat as all the recipes are edited and annotated by me before being published. There's no copying and pasting of standard recipes going on here. As you can imagine, all this means that I've been extremely busy, hence the silence on this blog for a while.

Given that I've also updated the ClickBank Marketplace and given the ClickBank Ads Generators pages an overhaul (and, yes, they're still free for anyone to publish and create their own ClickBank-based ads on these pages) you can see that I've been busy.

Of course, all this effort is in aid of the One Million People Campaign that I and my website support, so all the effort is worthwhile! And now I'm onto the Celtnet Celtic section of the site. That bit of the website that actually kicked everything off so many years ago now.

What this comes down to is SEO. Websites change and adapt and the whole look and feel of websites also changes and adapts. To make certain your website is taken seriously you need to keep the site looking young and fresh and that means keeping up with the latest trends. Some of this is easy as I've used CSS from the start. But there's still a fair amount of re-engineering involved as I was learning CSS as I was going on. I now have a nice design developed for the recipes section of the site and I want to roll that out everywhere. It uses pure CSS to ensure that the central most important information part of the page appears first in the HTML so that the indexing spiders see this first.

But, as is often the case, all this frenetic activity has meant that I dropped the ball on several important SEO factors. The first of these is not doing enough link checking. I've ended up with hundreds of broken links for one reason or another and we all know that the search engines hate broken links and will penalize your site for it. I've been busy cleaning-up these broken links over the past few days and already my rankings and traffic are both climbing.

The other thing I ignored was a proper, systematic, approach to getting more in-bound links. Now, I'd been working hard on writing articles as ways of getting in-bound links and this was working quite well for me. Between January and April I tripled the traffic to my site (and did the same for my income). Which was great, but I kind of left things to stabilize at that level and that wasn't good.

Now, optimizing my ad placements helped raise revenue and that I did as part of my overall re-design (and it worked!). Then I had to go away and leave everything for almost three weeks and visitors fell. All the hard work in writing articles was only really working as long as I kept writing articles. I needed better ways to get links. So began a campaign of proper link building and link exchanges. I began writing articles for Wikipedia again as well as leaving recipes and comments on blogs. I also began using digg and other sites to promote my various web pages.

This led to an extra 400 in-bound links in the first week and my traffic and income began to climb again. Basically it means that the old stalwarts of the internet biz aren't dead at all. And if you want to make a profit then you need to keep working on your link-building. Write articles, exchange links, leave comments, join forums. Basically use any means you can to get links to your site 'out there'. And make certain that you get plenty of deep links into your site as well.

If you want more tips like this, then why not have a look at the How to Maximize your Web Traffic page where you can sign-up to a free six-part e-course on driving more traffic to your site. Just think what you could do if you could triple your website's traffic in three months (or even less!)

And, if you have a recipe-related site why not sign-up for a link exchange with the Celtnet Recipes Links reciprocal links page?

2008-04-10T16:11:00.002Z

Free ClickBank Ads for All

ClickBank is a great resource for finding products to promote and profit from. But it's really designed for putting afiliates (those who will promote the products) in touch with products that they can promote. As a result it's intended for those who aggressively market products singly. But ClickBank is also a great source of income, with typical affiliate payments per product sold ranging from $20 to $100! What if you want to tap into this bounty without having to go through each product and write sales scripts for them.

For anyone with the time and patience, ClickBank produce an XML feed every evening (called the ClickBank products feed) and this contains information about all the products in the marketplace. You could download this feed, parse it into a database and then produce a ads based on the result.

One problem with this is that ClickBank's descriptions are indended, in general, to show how good a product is for an affiliate to promote. They are not promotional tools in and of themelves. For any product you producted to be effective you would have to update the title and the descriptions to be better at selling the product.

This is a lot of work, especially when you would need to create Ads or RSS feeds on top of the database. Now that's a lot of programming work.

Fortunately, several sites have already done the hard work for you. The best of these provide AdSense-lik contextual ads (for example see Celtnet's AdSense-like ClickBank Ads). Such ads look exactly like ClickBank's ads and you can typically change the style, chose which section of ClickBank to promote and chose the style so that it fits in with your site's overall context.

One problem of such ads is that they cannot be displayed alongside Google's AdSense ads because this conravenes Google's TOS (Terms of Service). [For more information on this issue see: Lami Reviews' Information on ClickBank Ads].

The only way you can mix AdSense ads with ClickBank ads at the moment is to integrate an RSS feed of ClickBank products, such that available at: ClickBank RSS Ads into your website. As RSS feeds count as news aggregation (no matter what's displayed) this falls within Google's TOS so this is OK and well within the rules. It's even quite easy to do this as all you need to do is to add the RSS feed to one of the many RSS to JavaScript converters on the web and then copy the JavaScript code into your own website (just do a web search for 'RSS to Javascript' and you'll get a whole range of results back).

One very recent innovation is the use of Images in AdSense-like ads, but based around ClickBank code. Curently these are only provided by the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace (in their ClickBank Image-based ads product where the ads are free for anyone to use and deploy) but it probably won't be long before other vendors also begin to produce similar ad formats. After all the use of images in Ads seems to be the way that Google, themselves are going.

Why are such ads worth considering? Well, generally the barrier to putting these ads on your site is very low. Also, if you have enough traffic and enough ad clicks hey can be very lucrative. However, these ads are what's termed PPA (pay per action — you only get paid when someone buys something, whereas Google ads are PPC (pay per click). But ads based on ClickBank products give you all the usual affiliate earnings potential of promoting ClickBank products by standard meansh. This is basically $20 to $100 per purchase made through these ads. Not something to be sniffed at.

For more information, see the review at How to Use ClickBank to Monetize your Site.

So, should you be considering these ads for your site, blog or web page? I will leave that qustion up to you. Try them out, do your due diligence and find out what works best for your site.

2008-03-07T09:53:00.002Z

Why You Should NEVER 'ContactThem'

Or why the 'ContactThem' emails are a tempting scam...

If, like me, you have an internet presence then you've probably seen one of a rash of eMails going round that read something like this:

Subject: I’ve visited your website http://www.celtnet.org.uk

Hi,

We’ve seen your website at http://www.celtnet.org.uk and we love it!

We see that your traffic rank is 349,775

and your link popularity is 356.

Also, you have been online since 4/15/2004.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.

If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: http://www.contactthem.ws/hit.php?s=10&p=2&w=103047

Sincerely,

Tony Gagliardi

The ContactThem Network

I've been receiving two or three (at least) of these messages each and every day. Each one refers to a different page or sub-section of my site and and they all come from different senders (but each one is in the "The ContactThem Network") and they all have different referral links. It was becoming a nuisance, and the offers also looked too tempting to be real.

I'm always on the look out for new web scams and the latest of these all go up on my Internet Scams Pages. I simply just had to look into this...

When you click on one of the referral links you're taken to a very snazzy website and an audio track starts and begins to read the content of the web page to you. It all looks very professional and it's done very well as a squeeze page. You're very tempted to click on the affiliate link or to join the program. After all who couldn't resist a passive income of “up to $4,800/month” just to display some links and banners on your website or blog. After all, it just sounds like an offer for text link or banner advertising. What's actually happening is that they're trying to recruit you into a multi-tier affiliate program.

When I began to dig further it didn't take me long to find out that the person behind ContactThem network is Stephan Ducharme, the man behind the famous (or should I say, infamous), 'Free Google Ads'. Yes, this is Stephan Ducharme, “The FreeAdGuru”.

What Ducharme is trying to do here is to get you to buy the ContactThem software product which extracts user and website details from a number of databases and allows you to use this personalized information to send out a mass mailing. Indeed, if you've ever recieved an email like the one described above then you're a 'victim' of Ducharmes ContactThem software product. One of the product's affiliates extracted YOUR details out of a database and spammed you with their ContactThem affiliate link…

You're being spammed here and the offer is only for you to join the band of spammers. I believe the product costs $50 per month (or thereabouts) and only by recruiting more into the spam brigade can you begin to make any money. It's a hybrid between affiliate marketing and MLM in that you need to recruit more people into the system to make money. Only with the twist that you're using the product not to sell anything or offer a service but to spam others.

I have to give it to Stephan Ducharme in that he writes excellent copy and is a dab hand at getting a viral campaign up and running in record time. He's obviously raking it in from this launch... But he's also notorious for atrocious customer service, not honouring refunds and massivlely under-delivering on his product promises.

This is a scam and a home for spammers, If you get any email like this just hit the delete button or add it to your spam filters...

2008-02-24T21:29:00.002Z

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.

2008-02-12T21:21:00.000Z

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.

2008-02-12T13:17:00.000Z

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.

2008-02-06T23:56:00.000Z

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?!

2008-02-01T14:59:00.000Z

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.

2008-01-24T20:45:00.000Z

Celtnet ClickBank Ads Expanded

I know that this blog has been quiet for a while now. Partly that's because I've been working had on the ClickBank part of my site. And now it's an awesome hand-crafted site with search tools, hand-annotated product descriptions, product images, search tools (which you can use on your own sites) as well as ad generation tools so you can get contextual AdSense-like Ads based on ClickBank products. The newest tool being an ad generator that embeds images along with the contextual ads. This is a real killer ad system that dramatically increases click-throughs and is available nowhere else... I now have over 1400 ad units actively being used and 250 RSS feeds in use, and that's only after 10 weeks of the system being live! Why not grab your copy of these ads today...

I've also been away visiting my wife in Senegal and presenting the Liberian community in Dakar with the money I've made from various parts of my Celtnet site as part of my Help Stefan Charity Campaign. Enough money having been gained to give two of the Liberian refugee children an education for 2008. But for this year I'm setting myself a much more challenging target: and that is to make a minimum of $10 000 for the first half of 2008 (and even more in the second half).

As a result of this I've been significantly beefing-up my ClickBank Marketplace. The site is updated every weekend now with the very latest ClickBank marketplace feed. As a result, the products and rankings in the system are guaranteed of being up-to-date. Even better, all products are instantly associated with an image of the product website and within a few days the products gain a human-edited product description. As a result the default product description from ClickBank, which is invariably affiliate-centric (saying how good the product is for Affiliates to promote). The new descriptions are all intended to describe the product and to sell it. As a result the ClickBank Marketplace search functionality is much better than ClickBank's own, especially if you're looking for a product to promote. This is why I've made the search code that drives the Celtnet ClickBank Search System available to anyone, so you can put it on your own site. You populate with your own ClickBank nickname so any sales made are credited to you.

But the real 'big thing' here are the AdSense-like contextual ads that you can create on this site. The ClickBank AdSense-like ads page allows you to generate AdSense-like contextual ads for ClickBank products. Just like adsense you can define the size and appearance of the ads. You can also define the section of ClickBank products you want your ads from, as well as defining your own keywords to return and products you need. Once you've defined your ads, a simple click of a button will produce the ad for you. You get to see an example of the ad you've created as well as getting a single line of code that you just copy and paste into your own website (exactly the same way that Google's AdSense works).

But why should you use these ads? Well, the product information is written by hand and it seeks to sell the product. The code you get links directly to the database I've created so each time the ClickBank product feed is updated your products are automatically updated as well. The script is also completely dynamic so that on each page refresh you get a completely new set of ad, again just like AdSense. Unlike AdSense, however, you only get paid when someone buys a product through you link (you define your ClickBank nickname when you create your ads sets.

The newest 'killer app' in my suite of tools is a system for creating ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images... Here you define your ad block size and the colour scheme, but instead of getting plain text ads you also get an embedded image of the product website. It's been shown that images draw the eyes and that images also increase click-thorughs several fold. So these really could be the killer ad system for your website. Like all my other tools, it's completely free to employ and deploy and the script is dynamic so he ads change and rotate on each refresh.

To learn more about these ad systems, please go to my ClickBank Ads Generator page. There you will also learn about how you can generate ClickBank RSS feed ads so that you can mix ClickBank ads with AdSense ads or use ClickBank ads in blogs and other aggregators.

Whilst I've been away, I've been running some experiments in terms of replacing regular AdSense ads with my own ClickBank ads and mixing AdSense ads with ClickBank product RSS feeds. The results of these experiments (so far anyway) are detailed in my January 23rd eZine and it makes for very interesting reading.

But what's in it for me? I hear the cynical asking. Well, in fact, there's not that much in this for me at all. Your ClickBank 'nickname' (basically your ClickBank affiliate ID, which you can get here, free) is entered into my products so any sales made are credited to your account, rather than mine. However, what I do is that I randomly assign 8% (and not 15% or 20% like all my competitors) of all products delivered with my ClickBank ID. Any sales made with this ID are credited to my account and any proceeds go directly to fund the 'Help Stefan Charity Campaign' described above. So, not only are you getting some of the best ClickBank ad tools currently around you're also helping to support a worthwhile charity. And whilst that support continues to come in it gives me an incentive to keep updating and improving the tools that I provide for you.

Together we can become richer, so why not have a look at my tools today to see how they can improve your bottom line. Unlike other marketers and other systems you don't have to sign-up to anything to use my tools, I don't care how big or small your website is an you can use as many different ad unit sizes as you like on your pages. I believe that tools like the ones I'm providing should be made available as widely as possible and should be provided to everyone, regardless of who they are and where their site is. But, if you do find the tools useful a link back to http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php would be appreciated!

To your continued marketing success...

2007-10-31T19:25:00.000Z

The Big ClickBank Secret

If you visit this week's release of my Celtnet WebInfo eZine then you'll see that it's dedicated to a single product that I've produced. If you're a web marketer or even if you just run a website or a Blog then this is probably the most important annuncement that you'll hear this year (maybe even next year).

ClickBank is a source of literally thousands of electronic products for sale. All are available for instant download and are backed by ClickBank's 8-week money-back guarantee. As most products sell for $30 and affiliate payments average at 55% this could be a lucrative source of income for anyone with a website. However, the barrier to anyone actually being able to make an income from ClickBank is absolutely huge. Clickbank itself operates as a means of putting vendors and potential affiliates together in one place. As such the information provided by ClickBank is affiliate-centric rather than sales centric. This is a real problem as you simply can't take ClickBank's data feed and produce useful product information from it. The only way to do this is to place all ClickBank's information in a database and then to supplement this with product information either produced by screen scrapes or by actually visiting every vendor site and writing the descriptions by hand.

In my ClickBank Marketplace this is precisely what I did. The products there have images crafted by hand and descriptions crafted by hand. This is a long and hard job, but once the information is in the database it's simply a matter of updating. Now I had what was probably the best ClickBank search system on the web. Which was great, for me. But what if I could provide that functionality for everyone?

This led me to produce my Free ClickBank Search Code page which allows anyone with a ClickBank nickname (which you can get free free by following this link to deploy the search form on their website or blog. Anyone making a search is re-directed to my marketplace site, but all links and products shown get your ClickBank nickname in them. This means that you get the affiliate commission for any sale made.

This was good and it was a step towards achieving what I wanted. But it wasn't everything I wanted to achieve. Possibly the best marketing system out there at the moment is Google's AdSense network which provides contextual ads to a website. What if I could deliver something similar for Clickbank? After all AdSense pays tens of cents and ClickBank could potentially pay tens of dollars. A fair amount of work led to the ClickBank Contextual Ad Creator page Basically it's a form where you enter your ClickBank nickname then you select an ad size and style, pick a ClickBank category for your ads (or use your own keywords) then chose the colour for your ads. Once this is done all that you need to do is to click a button and you get to see the ad you've created as well as getting the code you need to plug into your website for the ad to be displayed. All this is done automatically for you and as you provide your ClickBank nickname any sales made from the products displayed are, once again, credited to your ClickBank account. Even better as ClickBank products retain for an average of $30 any you typically get 60% of this as Affiliate Commissions this can be a lot more lucrative than Google's AdSense. The ads are created dynaically so a new set of ads will be displayed on each page refresh and they are automatically updated as my ClickBank database is updated. I'd just created an ad-generation system that anyone with a website could deploy and take the income from. The barrier to anyone making an income from the internet has just been very dramatically lowered.

This was wonderful, but what if you had free hosting or were on a Blog that did not allow such ads to be displayed, or if you didn't want to queer the pitch with Google by displaying any other contextual ad system on your web pages. Well, there was a solution: ClickBank RSS feed generator. Like the ClickBank Contextual Ad Creator what you get is a form that allows you to input your ClickBank nickname and to chose a category or sub-category of ClickBank for your feed (you can also use your own keywords). Pressing the button generates the feed and you get your personal feed URL at the bottom of the page. This is unique to the feed you just created and it allows the feed to be generated on the fly (you can create multiple feeds on different topics). Just copy the URL and paste it into your favorite aggregator in the back-end of your website or Blog. This allows you to add ClickBank ads to places where you normally couldn't so just about anyone can monetize their entire on-line presence with ClickBank.

Between these products you have the complete solution to monetizing your website with ClickBank and as you can chose the topic of your ads (you can even use your own keywords) you can customize the ads to your site and even generate multiple ads and multiple RSS feeds to suit different areas of your website. Basically this is the complete ClickBank ads system and it's all completely free to you.

Now, here's where I should tell you what's in this for me. Obviously I make all the sales from anyone coming to my website directly. But I also make 8% of all sales referred by anyone else. This is becuase I have code that automatically and randomly assigns 8% of all products shown to my ClickBank nickname. This still means that you make 92% of all sales. Remember that all the work to provide this system has been done by me and the work is done by my code and on my website. I'm only asking this small percentage (all other systems, which you have to pay to join ask for 15% or even 20%) because the money goes to supporting my 'Help Stefan Campaign' charity. I've been forced to do this as the response to this campaign has been so poor. Maybe by offering free incomes to all webmasters I can kick-start the campaign.

Remember, all you have to do is to visit my website, grab the code and deploy it on your own website. You can get further information from my ClickBank Ads page. Then visit the pages above to get the appropriate code and systems for you. The rest is entirely up to you and I hope that you will use my code for your own internet success.

2007-10-25T21:13:00.000Z

Need information on Monetizing your site? Search for the product for you now:

ClickBank Search System Released

If you've noticed the search box at the top of this page then you may have realized that I've added something significant to this blog. Indeed, this is why my announcement of the latest October 23rd release of the Celtnet eZine is a little late. Indeed, that release of the eZine is entirely dedicated to a major piece of work that I've been involved in.

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a major piece of software. This is a complete ClickBank marketplace and search system which attempts to be the 'Best in Class'. The wraps are due to come off the system now and I'm ready to release to the public. The system itself can be found at CeltNet ClickBank Marketplace. This offers all the products in ClickBank for sale with meaningful descriptions and images. I've also implemented full text searching for each product.

More than that I've made the search code publically available. You can grab the code below or your can get the code from its home at Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace Search code. You can inplement this code on your own Blog or search site. It allows you to embed your ClickBank Nickname in the search pages so that any sale you create on my website are credited to your ClickBank account. This allows you to use my hard work in producing my website to monetize your website or blog with ClickBank!

You can learn more about what I've done and how you can use my code to leverage my work to monetize your site or blog with ClickBank either on my CeltNet eZine Marketplace or in the Monetizing your Site with ClickBank article in my Celtnet Reviews Site.

Basically I've made ClickBank user friendly with a lot of hand-crafting for the genral use and you can use the code below to implement search boxes for this system in your own websites. Simply change the YourClickBankName in the code to your actual ClickBank nickname and you're ready to earn commissions (the whole affiliate pay-out in fact) by implementing the search code on your website and sending visitors to it.

Once you have your ClickBank nickname you can now simply put one of the search boxes below (I have three options for you) on your website and any sales made from your searches will be credited to your ClickBank account (the one you just set up with your nickname, above). All your need to do is to change the YourClickBankName in the code below with your own ClickBank nickname and then paste the code in your own web pages. After that you're ready to start earning money!

The various search box options are as follows:

1. Simple Search Box

The code for this simple search is (The code works on all webistes, including Blogs and XHTML-encoded pages):

<br /><br /><form name="search" action="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/search.php" method=GET><br /><br /><span style="font-size:10px">Powered by <a href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php?cbid=YourClickBankName">celtnet.org.uk</a><br /><br /></span><br /><br /><br/><br /><br /><input size=45 maxlength=40 name="keywords" value=''><br /><br /><input type="hidden" name="uid" value="YourClickBankName"><br /><br /><input type=hidden name="r" value="downloads"><br /><br /><input type=submit value=Search><br /><br /></form><br /><br /></div><br /><br />

Remember to change the YourClickBankName in the code with your ClickBank nickname before using this code!

2. Search Box with Search Options

The code for this more complete search is (The code works on all webistes, including Blogs and XHTML-encoded pages):

<br /><br /><div align=center><br /><br /><form name="search" action="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/search.php" method=GET><br /><br /><span style="font-size:10px">Powered by <a href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php?cbid=YourClickBankName">celtnet.org.uk</a><br /><br /></span><br /><br /><br/><br /><br /><input size=45 maxlength=40 name="keywords" value=''><br /><br /><input type="hidden" name="uid" value="YourClickBankName"><br /><br /><br><br /><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="1" checked>all words<br /><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="2">any word    <br /><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="3">exact match   <br /><br /><input type=hidden name="r" value="downloads"><br /><br /><input type=submit value=Search><br /><br /></form><br /><br /></div><br /><br />

Remember to change the YourClickBankName in the code with your ClickBank nickname before using this code!

3. Search Box with Search Selection Dropdown

The code for this fully-functional search form is (The code works on all webistes, including Blogs and XHTML-encoded pages):

<br /><br /><div align=center><br/><br /><form name="search" action="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/search.php" method=GET><br/><br /><span style="font-size:10px">Powered by <a href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php?cbid=YourClickBankName">celtnet.org.uk</a><br/><br /></span><br/><br /><br/><br/><br /><select name="cat"><br/><br /><option value=0>All Categories</option><br/><br /><option  value=1>Business to Business</option><br/><br /><option  value=2>Health & Fitness</option><br/><br /><option  value=3>Home & Family</option><br/><br /><option  value=4>Computing & Internet</option><br/><br /><option  value=5>Money & Employment</option><br/><br /><option  value=6>Marketing & Ads</option><br/><br /><option  value=7>Fun & Entertainment</option><br/><br /><option  value=8>Sports & Recreation</option><br/><br /><option  value=9>Society & Culture</option><br/><br /></select><br/><br /><input size=45 maxlength=40 name="keywords" value=''><br/><br /><input type="hidden" name="uid" value="YourClickBankName"><br/><br /><br/><br/><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="1" checked>all words    <br/><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="2">any word    <br/><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="3">exact match    <br/><br /><input type=hidden name="r" value="downloads"><br/><br /><input type=submit value=Search><br/><br /></form><br/><br /></div><br /><br />

Remember to change the YourClickBankName in the code with your ClickBank nickname before using this code!

Notes:

As you can see this code is entirely safe, indeed I've given you the whole code for the search page. Once an user types a search term into one of these boxes and clicks on the 'submit' button they are taken to the celtnet.org.uk ClickBank search pages and your ClickBank nickname is populated in every search term that's found. Unlike other sites we also make sure that your ClickBank ID is transferred to the information page about a given product so that you have a second chance to gain a commission.

I've done all the hard work for you. All you need to do is to copy the code above, implement on your own website or blog and you're ready to earn income from ClickBank instantly. Remember that gaining 'multiple streams of income' is a key to internet marketing. Add the free ClickBank search code to your site and start earning ClickBank commissions now.

2007-10-17T18:38:00.000Z

Keeping your Site Fresh

The addition of a new section, the Celtnet Affiliate Information section to the Celtnet has allowed, for the first time in ages, me to think about the site's design and how it works. I've been working on the site for several years now and the site's basically grown organically as I've added more content and more sections. Each one has had a slightly different design and a slightly different look and feel, mostly due to how my skills have grown over the years. This does mean, however, that much of the site is completely inconsistent.

Some pages are very simple, others are incredibly complex and I'm definitely not driving either traffic of clicks to large areas of the site. Basically I had lots of site real-estate that was woefully under-used. In addition I was building large databases of potentially useful content, but those databases were, at best, driving only a single page or region of my site. It was time for a complete re-think. OK, so I couldn't re-vamp the entire site over night and there was lots and lots to do.

But, if I was clever then I could kill two birds with one stone. I could continue adding the good content I needed whilst, at the same time, working on a new site design and layout. I wanted the pages to be more visually appealing, to have more places for ads at the side-bearigs and to have far more opportunity for adding dynamic content.

I came across a very nice CSS-based pattern for this a couple of weeks ago and this has now been re-coded to suit my needs and released as the basis for the Celtnet Affiliate Information. One of the worst pages in my whole site was the Celtnet Recipes home page. As this was the official portal to one of the largest and most popular areas on the entire site this was basically criminal!

As you can see, the page has now been entirely re-done (compare with the West African Recipes page for a feel of how it looked (actually it wasn't even as good as this). Now I have nice navigation tabs at the top, a navigation menu on the left and content that refreshes itself in the main windows. I can even add extra adverts to the side-bearings without drastically affecting the content. I think it's much better and this version of the web page will soon be rolled-out across the entire site.

What I also like is that the general 'look and feel' can remain consistent across the entire site but substituting a single logo (which belongs to a global site-wide family of logos) can instantly tell the visitor where on the site they are. The various regions of the site can be better linked internally, maintaining more of a discreet feel so that someone interested in mobile phones, say, can just navigate within the mobile phone region of the site. Someone visiting the recipes section only needs to look at the recipes section of the site etc yet all these distinct site regions can be tied back to the site's overall home page and master index.

This way I can keep Celtnet's Celtic region, the Recipes region and the Information region (with its medicine, information, programming, internet marketing and mobile phone sub-regions) separate but entirely linked. For the first time it will be possible to integrate the site possibly and to drive better advertising across the entire site.

This is a major change, but it shows that you should really design your site before comitting to the coding first! But I'm a programmer and an information provider rather than a designer. Ah well...

I'm also hoping that the resultant better integration within the site will increase my exposure to the search engines and my exposure to my site's visitors. I'll keep any results (both positive and negative) in this blog.

You can learn more about these changes and how they relate to SEO, web design, and keeping your visitors interested in your site on my eZine Celtnet WebInfo eZine

2007-10-17T16:18:00.000Z

Celtnet eZine Out Now

Today I want to highlight various strategies in Internet Marketing. Firstly, I'm anouncing the latest version of my Celtnet WebInfo eZine. This issue deals with an important aspect of internet marketing, how to keep visitors on your site and how to get them to return again and agai. A brief introduction to the issue follows:

Celtnet WebInfo eZine #106
Whatever else you may be doing with your website, one of the most important things you must do is to keep your content fresh. Adding new content or changing yor content keeps the indexing spiders coming back to index your site — which is good for you. But you also need to keep your content fresh for visitors. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use somethign like an image rotator so that you have a different picture to view each time a visitor comes to your site (I tend to use rotating images and changing text, especially for article-driven areas of this site).

CONTENTS:

1. Window on the Web
2. Feature Article — The importance of Refreshing Content
3. Comment — Content is Still King
4. Business Tip — Fresh content means returning visitors

This eZine comes with several changes and updates to the site. The first of these is the release of my Celtnet eBooks Sales Site which offers eBooks for sale and also allows you to advertise your own eBooks, for free (more on this in the previous October 09 Celtnet WebInfo eZine). The second is the Celtnet Affiliate Information site which offers advice for those seeking affiliate programs, as well as a directory of availiable affiliate programs; with the intention that this will be the largest searchable and browsable repository of these campaigns on the internet.

The Celtnet WebInfo (CI) eZine is now tied into the Celtnet Affiliate Information website and the two will be working in concert. Any ads shown on the CI eZine will also be shown on the website and the CI eZine will offer affiliate tips and the latest information on affiliate programs. To celebrate this anyone signing-up to the eZine this month will get 5 free internet marketing eBooks (normally retailing at over $300!). You can sign-up using the below:

Please note that you are signin-up for the eZine and any related marketing information posts. I do not send out spam and I never, ever, sell eMail addresses to others. Your eMail address will be stored, encrypted, in our database only and will not be visible or availiable to anyone else.

2007-10-07T20:46:00.000Z

eBooks, an Essential Marketer's Resource

Whatever you may think of them, eBooks have emerged as an essential resource for internet marketers of all stamps. First of all, an eBook is an electronic product that you can package or sell. Based on the subject of the eBook you may even be able to sell it for a considerable product. An eBook is also a way of disseminating information. You can embed links in eBooks and these links could be to affiliate sites or products that you're marketing. You can also add links to your own website to promote your list-bulding efforts or areas of your site that you need to drive traffic to.

As you can see, an eBook can be an invaluable marketing tool as well as potentially being a primary product for you. But if you have created an eBook you still have the problem of get people to see and market your eBook. One way is to publish the information on Blogs like this one. You can write press releases about your product. You can write articles about your product or you can give a copy of your product to review sites such as my Celtnet Reviews site.

You can also promote your eBook through some eBok sales and publishing sites. An example of these is the Celtnet eBooks site which not-only publishes eBooks and software products for sale at knock-down prices but also allows authors to upload information about their own eBooks (and all for free). If you're interested in this service then go to Celtent eBooks Publicity. Simply sign-up and you will recieve a confirmation eMail taking you to a web page where you can upload your eBook's information. Subject to review this will be uploaded to the main database and will become part of the Celtnet eBooks site with a link back to your product page.

This gives you free advertising in a large eBooks site. An invaluable resource for your eBook marketing. All that's required is a single link back to Celtnet eBooks on one of your sites. The site also offers profit share and marketing opportunities so that you can allow Celtnet eBooks to sell the product you have for you (you will be sent any income at the end of every month by PayPal).

If you have a free eBook for marketing purposes then Celtnet eBooks or any similar site may also be a good place to submit it as the site also has free or low cost eBooks (some 2c or less) that users can easily access and download. This is a great starting point to begin the dissemination of your eBook and thus any marketing material in the eBook. It's amazing how quickly such products can begin their transmission across the internet from a single site like this.

If you want to keep as much of the profit as possible then you could think about setting-up your own eBooks sales sites. The code driving the Celtnet eBooks site is available as are packages of eBook products so that you could have your own site on the web in a matter of hours. This way you can promote your own eBook products as well as gaining residual income from selling other items through your site.

Indeed, the Celtnet eBooks is one of the cheapest sources of electronic products with resell rights on the internet and it's a great place to stock-up on electronic products that you can sell through your own site. There are even special packages of 40, 80 and 120 products that you can buy and instantly download.

With the latest code for the Celtnet eBooks you can even use PHP code snippets to provide sales butons to your eBook products on any of your web pages. This way you get tracking of those products you've sold and you get secure download pages that expire within a set amount of time so that your download pages are always safe.

I've spent a lot of time and effort on these pages to produce a quality site and it's now time that others saw the value of what I've generated.

2007-09-12T08:26:00.000Z

Extending the Site

The Celtnet site has been maturing of late as I've been adding new products and services. In the end, the problem is always one of adding content; of getting sufficient people to visit the website in enough numbers that you can make a decent income from the proceeds. One great way of getting more content is to put-up various forums. As a result I now have the following forums available for participation:

Celtnet Celtic Forums
Celtnet Recipes Discussion Forum
Celtnet Information Forum

Why not join the communities today?

I have also been adding a review section to the site at Celtnet Reviews Site. Here you can both read reviews of eBooks, internet products, websites, print books and a whole host of topics. You can also join and sign-up free at Join Celtnet Reviews. After you sign-up then you can post your own reviews. There is also a special section for site advertisement-style reviews.

Remember that reviews are now the internet's advertising phenomenon. They provide good content, which Google loves to index. They are also a sales pitch and you get yur URLs linked from text that remains live on the internet for a very long time. So, if you're interested in publicising your website, why not join the Celtnet Reviews Site today.

Also remember that my One Dollar SEO links system is still available. For $1 you can add your site to an SEO-friendly catalogue of links that guarantees your site's URL will be indexed. Just remember that all proceeds from any sign-ups goes to the Help Stefan campaign.

If you are interested in information about internet marketing, with hints, tips and a personal voice then the Celtnet Information eZine is for you. Internet marketing is a hard slog and you need all the advantages you can get. My aim is to bring you the tools and strategies you need to make the most of your internet business. The tools are available, so why not use them?

2007-09-08T17:05:00.000Z

Trying to Make Money

As I've had little enough response to my Help Stefan Campaign I'm having to consider alternate means of getting more money.

The condition of her father in Liberia has deteriorated considerably and next week Stefan is talking of taking the bus from Dakar to Guinea, from there she will change to Freetown in Sierra Leone and from there she has to work-out a way of getting to Liberia. If only I could afford the airfare, then things would be so much easier.

I've tried putting-up pages for eBooks including:

Celtent Guide to Spices and Spice recipes

Pictorial Guide to Building and Upgrading your PC

'Memories of Myth and Man' Poetry eBook

Each of which goes to helping the Help Stefan Campaign. I also have the One Dollar SEO links where webmasters can purchase non-reciprocal links for $1 which are guaranteed to be valid and remain live for the life of the website and which will never exceed 100 links in length so that all links on a given page will be indexed. Again, take-up is extremely slow with only a few links having been taken-up thus far.

So, this weekend, in desperation I'm trying every trick I can to make some money for this campaign. The latest approach is to try the 'Hubpages' site both to generate additional income and to drive more traffic to my main Celtnet site

Hay Fever Information

Celtnet Site Description

Information about Acne

Improve your Google Rankings with In-bound Links

Introduction to How Mobile Phones Work

In desperation I've even resorted to buying an internet course: Profit Lance which is reviewed in the site given here. Reviews are good and the course definitely looks comprehensive so I'm going ahead with it at the moment I'll report back at a later date so say whether it's worthwhile or not.

Amongst the various on-going projects I've also resurrected my Celtnet Information eZine and have begun posting to this weekly rather than fortnightly. I'll see if this starts to bring-in any more sign-ups.

Well, that's today's view from the trenches. I now need to go back to doing some serious marketing.

2007-09-01T07:22:00.000Z

If you have been reading or visiting my Help Stefan page then you will know what this campaign is all about. But if you haven't visited that page yet then the aims of the campaign are as follows:

1. To allow Stefan's father to have a life-saving operation so that the surviving members of her family can be re-united
2. To allow Stefan to visit her father in Freetown, Sierra Leone and to make the journey there as safe for her as it can be.
3. To allow me to travel to Senegal to look after Stefan's son, Zogo whilst his mother is away.
4. To give Stefan the orthodontic work she needs to repair her upper jaw.
5. To give Stefan a wedding to remember in December so that we can live together in the UK as a family; thus ensuring the new future I promised her.
6. To set-up a fund so that the remaining Liberian refugees in Dakar can have an English-language school for their children to repace the UN school that has just closed.

I am hoping that the fund, once started can continue to help other Liberiand and Sierra Leonian refugees in Dakar. But I have an immediate need to aid one single person to turn her life around. Please help me make 2007 the year of recovery for her.

I am not even asking for charity here in that you will get something for all your donations. If you are a webmaster then a $1 donation will get your site listed on my One Dollar Links pages. A $10 donation gets you a permanent link on the campaign's Home Page. Even if you're not a webmaster, a $1 donation gets your name on the web page as a 'Friend of Stefan'. A $5 donation gets you a copy of my Poetry eBook, even better a $10 donation gets you a copy of my Guide to Cooking with Spices recipe eBook.

A small donation on your part will help completely transform the life of a woman and child who have suffered so much. Remember, if you want to help please link to This Page or publish the letter below in your blog, ezine or website:

Today's Total: $187
A letter from the Webmaster: I would like to introduce to you Stefan and her son Zogo.

They are true survivors who escaped the civil wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone in the early 200s to make their way on foot through Guinea (where both developed malaria) to Senegal, The Gambia and now Dakar, Senegal. There they are refugees and have no legal status. As such they cannot earn any money and are eking-out a hand to mouth existence. Though that's not how they would put it. However, Stefan believed her entire family to have been massacred. But now, with my aid she has discovered her father to be alive but in very bad health with a heart condition. He needs $10 000 for hospital bills and for the operation that may save his life. Stefan herself has recently been very ill with malaria and has been hospitalized herself at a cost of $3000.

I love this woman very much, but with her hospitalization I have now spent my last penny so I'm turning to the internet in the hope of gaining donations to help Stefan's father Alfred. I am also looking for the airfare to send Stefan to her father's side. I would also be like to take several months off work so that I can travel to Senegal to look after the boy, Zogo. The total cost of all this will come to more than $20 000, so I'm imploring for your help.

The home page for the campaign is at http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/help-stefan.php where you can make your donation securely via PayPal.

If you are interested in recipes then, if you donate $10 you will get a copy of my eBook 'Guide to Spices' at http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/spice-book.php.

A $5 donation gets you a copy of my poetry eBook 'Memories of Myth and Man'.

If you are a webmaster then your $1 donation will get you a permanent link to your site on http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/one-dollar-links.php

Please help me to re-build the life of a woman who has lost so much.

Thank you for your aid.

Yours

Dyfed Lloyd Evans

PS you can help this campaign by copying the email letter above and sending it to all your friends. Thank you for your help.

2007-08-28T04:49:00.000Z

$1 SEO Links Description Updated

As part of my continuing campaign to Help Stefan and to make some money to help her with her Malaria and for her to be able to visit her father in Sierra Leone one last time before he dies I have added some more information on how you can help and get your website links featured for one dollar I've added some more information. Remember, the Help Stefan despite being new is already ranking well in Google (just do a search for "help stefan" to see what I mean).

If you want your website featured on this high-traffic page then a $10 donation gets you a permanent link on this page. However, this page also links to a series of pages where, for a $1 donation you get your website permanently linked. For ra $5 donation you will get a link on this page with a colour description and bold/different font so that your website stands out. Here is an example of a $1 links page.

Remember that what you're getting here are non-reciprocal links. Direct links to your website (or even an internal page of your website that's guaranteed to improve your indexing). All it will cost you is $1, just $1. Go on, help change someone's life and do your own website a favour at one and the same time. After all, for one dollar, what have you got to lose? I've spent much more than that on useless 'get rich quick' schemes.

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Join the Gold Affiliate program:
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2007-08-25T01:28:00.000Z

Latest News

Since my last posting I've received some bad news from Africa in that Stefan is now very ill with malaria which has led to liver complicatons. If you want to learn more about what's going on, then go to Stefan's diary page on my website. Here you'll get the latest updates on how Stefan is doing and how you can help her.

Yes, I've been updating the pages of the help Stefan campaign region of the website. And all money generation efforts for the site are now going into this. If you're a webmaster then, please, go to this site and for a $1 donation to the campaign you will get a permanent link to your website on one of the one dollar links pages. Please note that these are permanent pages and you will be linked directly from them. It only costs you $1 and you will help make someone's life so much better.

I've also just completed my first major eBook. You can find details about it on the Secrets of Cooking with Spices page. A $10 donation gets you this eBook completely free; as well as giving you a permanent link to your site on the campaign's home page and all subsequent pages. Go on, you know you want to! Where else can you get a links page that helps someone else and makes their life better. The SEO opportunities here are cheap at half the price.

I'm also sellig the eBook through ClickBank at eBook Sales this sales page. And, of course there will be sales via eBay. I'm going to push this as much as possible, mostly because the money isn't going to me. So if you read this and want a recipe book, or want some cheap advertising for your own website, then please go to the help Stefan campaign home page. Everything I do in terms of attempting to generate additional web income is now going towards this campaign.

Which explains postings like this and disseminating the web page and details as widely as possible. I'll report here and on the web page as to how the campaign is going and how quickly I can get it off the ground. The reality is that this is pretty much an emergency now due to Stefan's condition and the more help I can get the better.

2007-08-21T14:18:00.000Z

Latest eZine Published

The latest version of the Celtnet Information eZine has been published and this time it's all about eBay and getting more visitors to your site.

I'm still working hard on the campaign to help Stefan and Zogo:

Help Stefan Campaign

If you can spare $1 then help support this site and change someone's life forever? Learn how and why on the Help Stefan campaign page.

Remember, if you take part in this campaign by clicking here a $1 donation gives you a permanent link to your site on the $1 links pages. $5 gives you a colour and bold link to your site. $10 gets you a permanent link to your site on the campaign's home page (you can even get your name down as a sponsor) and you get a copy of my eBook, 'Cooking with Spices'.

What have you got to lose? So why not get some more exposure, do yourself a favour and help to turn someone's life around at one and the same tome. Even if you don't want to donate or to add your site to the links pages, why not help this campaign by linking to this page: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/help-stefan.php . A little effort on your part will change another person's life forever.

And, in case you're wondering, yet this post is on-topic for this blog. It just happens that the opportunity this time is on my own website. All it'll cost you is $1 to get your website some exposure and what's that compared to the amount of time you'd spend on your own site? Please help your own site by making this campaign work.

Thank you

Dyfed

2007-08-20T00:11:00.000Z

A Plea for Help and a New $1 Link Site

Yes, I'm launching a brand new link site: Help Stefan Campaign Page. Yes, it's a charity page, but rather than just asking for money (and, yes I am asking for your help) you get a chance to get a permanent link to your site for just $1. Or you can have a permanent link on the main page above for just $10. The money will go towards helping a young refugee from Sierra Leone and her son get a new life and find surviving members of ther family.

You will learn about her on that page and how you can help. And, yes I have a vested interest as I want her to become my wife. Believe me, everything you read about here there is absolutely true. Please help me rebuild her life and re-unite her with her father for perhaps the last time. You will be doing good and you will get some very cheap advertising for your own website into the bargain.

Once more, the flyer for the page is as below:

Help Stefan Campaign

If you can spare $1 then help support this site and change someone's life forever? Learn how and why on the Help Stefan campaign page.

If you can, please link to this page on your own website. After all the more links there are to it the higher its PR and the better will be the exposure you get on the page. I'm going for a big campaign for this, after all the window of opportunity is small to help re-unite Stefan with her father who is gravely ill.

Help me, help her and help yourself into the bargain.

2007-08-17T19:24:00.000Z

A further cautionary tale.

Once more, I've been letting things slip on my website, but now I'm back taking care of things (hey, I got married and my wife is still awaiting a visa for the UK so I do have some excuse!). But to get back to the matter at hand...

If you've been reading any of my posts then you know that I'm reporting on my attempts to convert the >celtnet into a money-making venture. I've been posting odd bits and pieces here since I began and I've used this as a forum to show what I've been doing in terms of what works and what doesn't.

My website is basically divided into three parts: Celtnet which deals with Celtic deities and Celtic literature; Celtnet Information which is an information portal to information on technology and medicine and finally: Celtnet Recipes which is the recipe-associated part of my site.

As you might imagine, these parts of the website actually contain a fair amount of information, some of which is completely unique to the site. OK, so I've been posting regular articles to ezinearticles.com and that's resulted in numerous publications of those articles and quite a few back-links. It's been showing results by improving my Google rank and getting more visitors to the site. I've even posted answers to Yhoo! Answers and those have brought-in more links. But the trick I really missed was Wikipedia.

After all, if you look at just about any query in Google, what's there in the top 10? You guessed it, Wikipedia. It has an amazing google rank of 8 and if you really want your site to get good ranking and positioning then if you can get back-links off Wikipedia that's pretty amazing. If you've perused the recipe section of my site then you will see that I have a passion for African cooking. The fact that my wife's West African, and my liking for hot chillies probably helps in this respect! Anyway, on my recent trips to Senegal I've been visiting the markets and collecting samples of native herbs and spices. This has given me access to recipes and information on spices that are not on Wikipedia (and are hardly anywhere else on the web either). As a result I have articles and images of these spices and I write articles on them for Wikipedia. That way I can give back-links to my own pages as the original source (which it is) and I can also give links to recipes where those spices are used (again on my web page). This gives me two very good back-links for the price of one article. Ever since I started this I've seen my income from AdSense almost double. And with some judicious ad placement I'm getting conversions of up to 2.6% which isn't at all bad!

There's also another repository, Cunnan, a repository of Mediaeval recipes and I've started posting articles there as well. After all I have a huge range of Medieval recipes on my site. Why not use this resource as well?

The thing is, use the talents you have. I'm a writer, poet, cook and scientist and I can use all those skills to bolster my website. The aim in the end is to get visitors and to get as many of those visitors to generate income as possible. A few simple steps, if you have an information-rich website with novel content, at least, could net you big gains in terms of visitors.

I've also been trialling Kontera for additional adverts on my site. I'll check back with you as to how this preforms. Then there's Yahoo! Answers which I've been using to answer recipe-related questons and plugging varous URLs from my site in the process.

All these are more and new ways of getting my site noticed and of gaining visitors to the site.

2007-08-04T23:05:00.000Z

The Importance of Thinking Ahead

I know that I haven't published for quite a while now (almost three months!) but that's partly because of personal evnets taking precedence. Yes, I do have a personal live!

In additoin I've also been working (or should I say re-working) the recipe region of my website. Previously I had static HTML pages and a small MySQL database allowing rather crude querying of those recipe pages. After about 200 entries or so, and where I had hand-crafted links between the pages simple updating became a massive chore. But I perservered, after all I'd written all those pages and the burden of changing the system seemed less than the burden of updating everything.

Eventually, of course, it became plain that to continue this way was untenable. I had to change the system to a database-based system that could be queried using php which could then be used to update the pages and create the content automaticaly. The database design took five minutes, though it tool a bit longer to re-encode my existing pages in a format that both the database and the php could use. Still after a few weeks the re-encoding was done and I could change my HTML pages to use the new system. It took a while to re-encde everything and to point the existing HTML pates to the new php-based ones. As far as the user was concerned nothing had really changed. The pages looked like they had before. But now, I could update the entire system by simply adding a new entry to the database and it was automatically propagated through the entire system.

Rather than being a chore it was now possible to update and add new content simply. Over a month I was able to more than double the total number of entries in the database, and the total number of recipes on my site. Having simple access via MySQL to all the data also allowed me to create new doorway pages to the data, such as my modern recipes listing page or the African recipes listing page or the main course listing page.

It was a great change and should have been done ages ago. It also led me to a way of accessing a MySQL database and using PHP to create a nulti-column table from the values returned. Which I will wirte-up for my code section of the website soon and I'll publish the URL and brief details here.

But to get back to the matter at hand, the salutory lesson of all this hard work is that if I'd spent a couple of days on design at the beginning of the recipe site's inception it would have saved me many months' worth of hard slog and repeating what I'd done before. Now I had a single unified database that allowed full text querying and which also allowed for easy updating and for many different, automated, entrypoints into the data. Learn the lesson that I had to learn the hard way. A few day's design at the beginning will save you many months of re-design and re-factoring when the system becomes too top-heavy to be sustained any further.

2007-05-11T20:36:00.000Z

Medicine is an Important Business Consideratoin

It may be a rather controversial statement, but humans are paranoid about their health. How else, could healthcare be such a massive business worldwide? Because of this many internet entrepreneurs miss this massive financial resource. Partly this is because many internet authors are wary of a 'scientific' subject in case they demonstrate their ignorance. There is also the issue of giving appropriate and accurate information in what could, for the reader, be a matter of life and death.

In this respect I may have an advantage over other internet marketers in that I am a card-carrying PhD in clinical medicine. So I am willing to go into areas such as Cancer Information that others might not go into. After all I have researched Breast Cander and I know what I'm talking about .

Yet, the area of medicine is huge and something like information on hemorrhoids can be researched simply on the internet and an article can be produced. Yet hemorrhoid treatment is a lucrative market and the AdSense ads you will attract to such a page can be very lucrative indeed. The same is even more true for medical areas such as hay fever (or allergic rhinitis to use the medical term).

Indeed, if you can think of a conditoin, no matter how trivial, then there will be a preparation somewhere to treat it. And if there is a medication then there is a company willing to pay for adversising which makes it worthwhile your effort to research the condition and to write a page about it.

Basically medical research is a massive and undeveloped area of internet marketing where, at the momet, your sole competitor for the number one spot in the search engines' listings is Wikipedia and if you're willing to integrate information from several sources you can even beat this behemoth of information to the top listing position.

2007-05-09T20:35:00.000Z

Are Articles the Way Forward?

I've often presented the adage here that 'content is king' and as a person involved in an information-based site then I basically have to believe in that adage. If I didn't then I wouldn't continue what I was doing aht there would really be no point in my website Celtnet. It is my premise that it's possible to generate an income from the Internet using only information products. Basically it's the 'silver hat' version of 'white hat' marketing. Though to enable this one needs to be active pretty much every day to write and gain novel content. Here, novel content is the most improtant as it needs to be indexed by the search engines without incurring a penalty for being 'duplicate content'.

Then there's the need to advertise you site, to write articles that will get your site noticed and intexed. This is where article sites such as ezinearticles.com come into the equation. Here you can write articles on a myriad of topics and include your own links within the signature strip of the article. As these articles are published both on the site itself and are often used by others to pad their sites your URLs can gain a broad dispersal. This is both good for your own stragtegy of getting your site indexed but can be problematic if you use those selfsame articles on your site as you may well incurr duplicate content penalties in the search engines. As a result, by all means use the article sites to publish your articles and get your links known but do not publish those selfsame articles on your own website without significant modification.

If writing articles for your own website you should advertise them on the articles sites but to know which ones to focus your attention on look at the list of Top-paying Google Adsense keywords as these will give you the best return on your investment in the sort term. This is why, to go along with my restructuring of the Celtnet Information site I've now added a new section on Telecos (Telecommunications Companies) that focusses for the moment on AT&T and BT. AT&T accounts for a large slice of the best paying keywords so a history of both AT&T in general and Cingular in particular should lead to quite lurcrative AdSense advert palcements in the US.

But adding content is little good unless that content is indexed by the search engines, which is where article submissions to article sites can help. As always, it's a caso of write the content, sell the content.

2007-05-06T13:36:00.000Z

Pile 'em High, Sell 'em Cheap

In the non-virtual bricks-and-mortar world of marketing the strategy of "Pile 'em High, Sell 'em Cheap' is arguably one of the most succesful in the retailing arena (after all it's what makes WalMart America's #2 company). But, almost without exception, internet marketers use the 'Premium Product' model to market their products. They treat them as if they were premium commodities and charge high prices expecting low-volume sales. So an eBook can retail for anything between $39 and $300; a software system will retail for anything between $97 and $997.

However this strategy goes against the way that most people think of 'value for money' where, at a psychological level, most buyers think that anything below $10 is cheap (hence the profusion of $9.99 offers on the high street). Anything below $30 is considered 'reasonable' as long as there's a reason to buy it, but anything over $30 is 'expensive'. This is why internet marketers selling their products as 'high ticket price items' need the employ the hard sell technique to shift their products. Even then they only sell afew items every month and this is why their products have to be so expensive.

If a technique works in the real bricks-and-mortar world where overheads are much higher then the same technique can definitely be applied to the virtual world of internet marketing. At least, on a conceptual level I was certain of that. It was only when I began the research for my article on models of internet sales businesses that I saw how scarce this sales model was in the virtual world. Then I came across the $7 Secrets eBook by Jonathan Leger. The eBook costs just $7 and it comes with php software that allows you to easily start marketing your own $7 products and the whole package is more than worth it for the software alone. So, I urge you to have a look at the $7 Secrets page now. Remember, just buing this for the software that comes in the package will more than make up for the $7 cost.

There is also the 7 dollar offers sites that sells other peoples' information products for $7 a pop. On this site affiliates make 75% of all sales with 25% going to site manager. There are almost no overheads for the hosting site as the products themselves are hosted by the original author.

What you see in the site described above is the WalMart marketing process in action. The model being: gain as many products as possible, sell them all cheaply as you can and take just a small margin yourself. You affiliates do the hard work of promoting your site and the money you make is pure profit with little or no intervention on your part.

2007-05-03T17:29:00.000Z

Keepint the Momentum going

Today's post is all about perhaps the most difficult aspect of making money from the internet: keeping the momentum going. It's the usual story — you've been busy adding content and generating a flurry of content. You've added AdSense advertisements to your various pages and you're getting a trickle income. Buoyed by this you've started adding more content and affiliate pages to your site. You may even have minisites on your domain that target visitors to a given topic or keyword set. Maybe you've started an AdWords campaign to drive more traffic to your various pages.

Then the rot begins to set in. Though you're adding more pages you're not getting a significant increase in AdSense income and the rich pickings from your affiliate pages just aren't coming in. So you get disheartened and your momentum drops off. You begn to watch the various statistics in Google or your Affiliate partners' web pages rather than generating more content for your site. And, day by day, as little or nothing happens the disillusionment sets in.

Just remember that internet marketing isn't an overnight solution to your financial worries. There's no 'get rich quick' strategy out there that works. Rather, you have to work at it and you need to use all the tools at your disposal to improve your income. Read my Maximize your Web Traffic eBook to optimize your site and gain more incoming links and more visitors (this is precisely the same system I've researched and employed to increase traffic to this website three-fold in the past two months and I'm seeing traffic gains month-on-month).

I also strongly urge you to visit the Adwords Secrets page as the information here will jump-start any AdWords campaign you may be considering. Everything and anything you can do to drive traffic to your site is money in your pocket.

For this reason I aim on adding at least one page to my website every day (the real aim is five) and I aim to bring these web pages to the attention of the indexing engines by publishing this Blog at least every other day and by writing a publishable article to an article site at least every other day as well.

Personally I use ezinearticles.com for this purpose but I admit that I need to join other article sites so that I can submit at least one article a day.

In addition to this I also need to add at least one Affiliate-based page to my site every day. Today's being the Celtic Rings Information Page. It should also be noted that this page, with its reliance on images also uses novel CSS (cascating style sheet) code rather than HTML tables for the image layout. This code will be published as a page at Celtnet CSS Image Placement and this code will also form the basis of a new article on this technology. After all images and links are the basis of just about any successful affiliate campaign.

As a semi-professional photographer who used to make money from his photography I also intend to use this technology along with a shopping cart to make various images I have available through the web. Thus giving me an additional income based on stock photography.

Today's lesson is: whatever may be happening to you in terms of your internet marketing career don't get disheartened. The more you diversify and the more you keep on plugging along: both in terms of adding new content to your site, making sure you take advantage of all the free advertising resources available to you and adding new methods of generating income to your site.

2007-05-02T21:27:00.000Z

Niche Markets are your Fortune

All the big interent marketers will tell you not to turn your hobby into your main website as this means you're far too focussed on the content rather than the money you can make from the website. To a great extent they are true: in that if you're writing aboout a hobby or interest of yours you will tend to get into the minutiae of what you're writing about and before you turn around you will have written a six-hundred page site and six months have somehow flown past.

That's definitely what happened to me. I was so focussed on adding good, useful, content to my website that I completely ignored the monetization aspects. I wasn't even concentrating on the SEO techniques that would actually drive traffic to my site. The truth is that I had a good site with solid content but everything else in the internet marketer's arsenal was missing. What I did next was undoubtedly arse-about-face but I slapped some quick AdSense banners up (pretty much randomly) then I began on the SEO. I learnt a lot about SEO from this and put those techniques into practice to drive-up my monthly visitors by more than seven-fold in three months (and the numbers are still increasing month-on-month).

Next I bagan playing with the placement of AdSense banners, which led to the writing of my internet advertising effectiveness page which gives you many tips and tricks on ad placement. The basic message is put a banner ad on your pages and add an ad on your right-hand sidebar. These are by far the most effective places for ads. If you have relatively long pages you can embed your third AdSense ad in the middle of the text (another effective strategy).

The other thing not to forget is to add AdSense ads on each and every page within your site. I forgot to do this and lost 40% of the possible clicks in my site. What I hadn't done so far was to add any affiliate marketing content. After all, much of the received wisdom about affiliate marketing is that you need a big but profitable niche to work in.

You need a niche because you need to dominate the area of Affiliate Marketing that you're working in. There's no point in making a 'me to' affiliate site as this is going to be dominated by the big players and you undoubtedly won't be able to compete with them. So you have to chose a niche but it needs to be a 'profitable niche'. But the question is, what's a profitable niche? My site was focussed on Celtic gods, Celtic texts and ancient cookery — could I do anything with those areas?

When I started doing my research it emerged that there were many Celtic-associated affiliate opportunities out there. These ranged from Amazon books (which is why I set up my Celtic Art Sourcebooks page all about sourcebooks and mothods for generating Celtic art) through Celtic clothing (hence my Celtic Sheepskin Company affiliate page) to jewellery and even gourmet meats.

Basically there was a huge range of affiliate products that I could use to monetize my site. What was better most of these fitted with the main content of my site. After all, if people were doing Celtic-assoicated searches on my website they'd be interested in Celtic-related products. And the point of the pages I was creating was to make real content that would be indexed by the search engines as well as ofering people opinions on the products. I was pre-selling here rather than selling. A good example is the Celtic rings page I'm working on now. This is based on the history and meanings of the Celtic designs and the rings are there to show good examples of what I'm talking about so people can buy them. The focus is on information and the products are only incidental. The same goes for my Amazon-assoicated Celtic Art Sourcebooks page. I'm telling people here the sourcebooks I use to create the artworks on my main Celtnet Celtic Information site and how I use them what I'm not doing is actively trying to sell the book.

It has to be said that for certain web pages I do go for the hard sell. An example is the AdWords Secrets page. Yet the focus of the page is how the product helped me and how it could have helped me even more had I bought it earlier.

The message of this posting is that you can make your niche profitable and your passion about your niche can be an advantage as long as you don't lose sight of your goals. Yes, you can monetize your hobby. But make sure that you keep your eye on the ball and write relevant content even when you're trying to sell something. If you have an information-based site use information to sell and promote the products by stealth. After all what you're trying to do is to get your visitor interested in the products. It's up to the site you're sending them to to do the actual selling. If they can't sell their own product then there's no point in having an affiliate partnership with them.

2007-05-01T16:50:00.000Z

Don't Ignore AdWords

If you've been tracking (or even glancing) at this blog over the past couple of weeks you'll know that I've been playing around with AdWords campaigns. Some of the initial results are in and I've also been going through Google's own documentation on the subject. You can find a precis of what I've discovered and what Google themselves say on the maximizing adwords use and Selecting AdSense Keywords in the new Internet Marketing Information section of my site.

Basically I've now spent three months playing around with AdWords and I've made a whole bunch of mistakes and found ways to improve campaigns and cut down on my costs. All this information is given in the following pages: maximizing adwords use and Selecting AdWords Keywords. There's no hype and no bullshit involved it's all gold.

Still, I have made one major mistake and it's one I really should tell you about. And it's this:

Yes, I know, I'm advertising someone else's product and it you've been following this Blog then that's something I never, ever, do. So why am I letting you know about this product? Well, the truth is that 90% of all the products out there in the internet marketing field are complete and utter rubbish. They're selling vapourware to punters who can only recoup their money by promoting that useless product to sell it to others.

Perry Marshall's 5 Days to Success wiht Google Adwords course and eBook really is pure gold. And, yes, I did shell out the $97 for the product myself and to be truthful I was completely stunned. OK, so I'd managed to work out some of the strategies based on my own experiments and the documents that Google provide on their AdWords website (which are rather impenetrable but very useful if you work through them). But this isn't to say that I knew even 30% of all the things that I needed to know.

Perry Marshall's product may not make you rich. However, it will make your AdWords campaigns more efficient and targetted. If you're seriously going to use AdSense for your campaigns then you are going to need his eBook. All I can tell you is that within a day of reading the eBook I'd re-jigged a number of my AdWords campaigns and just that saved me the cost of his product so it's already paid for itself — and that's without the additional traffic that's already coming into my site. And I think that this is the best accolade I can give the product and why I am willing to endorse it both here and on my website — it works!

This is where my mistake comes in. If I'd bought Perry Marshall's product three months ago then I wouldn't have had to struggle to find out things that he already tells you and my AdWords campaigns would have been flying from the get-go. I would also have saved myself about five times the cost of his course in eliminating pointless clicks. Of course I know this now and I'm kicking myself for not not having purchased the product earlier. So, learn from my mistake, click on the links above and save yourselves a lot of stress and headache.

OK, so that's the rant about my own stupidity over. Please just learn from my mistake!

I have a few other goodies in the pipeline to do with Google AdWords. One of these is an automated web page that will take several hundred keywords and automatically add the phrase match double quotes and the exact match square brackets around them (if you don't know what these are then read my Selecting AdWords Keywords page to learn what they are and why you absolutely have to use them). There is also my existing Create Misspelled Keywords page. And if you want to know why mispelled keywords are important for your AdWords campaign, read my AdWords Tools and Resources page.

2007-04-29T15:45:00.000Z

Don't Ignore your Website when Adding New Content

As you'll know from my most recent posts I've been working both on adding more content to my site and on re-jigging existing pages to improve ad layout and click-throughs for my AdSense ads. All of this, as I've said before, is based on having real content to pull visitors to this site and using AdSense to monetize the site itself.

I've been involved in a flurry of activity to add as much content as possible. Which means both adding original content written by myself, as in my Mobile Phone Information minisite and using others' articles to wrap around affiliate content, as in my Mobile Phone Ringtones page or my Recipe-based Amazon Book Search page.

All this, of course, is excellent and it follows exactly the behaviour in the Multiple Sources on Income programme. To this extent I've been adding some serious affiliate programmes to my portfolio, such as the Credit Card affiliate site.

But there's one thing I forgot to do and that was to keep an eye on the remainder of my website. After all, much of the other things I have to offer on my site is pretty niche: based on Celtic Deities and Celtic Texts. Basically I'd been ignoring this bit of my site (which, in terms of number of pages at least, is a significant portion of the site).

Here's the shock I had yesterday: From the Google AdSense stats I know that about 3000 people a day visit my AdSense monetized pages. Effectively 90000 people every month. But the thing is, when I looked at my overall weblogs I was getting 230000 visits every month. 140000 of my visitors weren't even seeing an ad!

Effectively I was squandering over half my website. This has led to some frenetic activity over yesterday and today to include AdSense ads on pages such as Celtic Gods Search page and on individual results pages such as the Mad Merlin information page. Basically, any page that didn't already have ads on them gained a header ad and a right sidebar ad.

It'll take me a few more hours today to cascade these changes through the site, but tomorrow I'm going to make a difference: which it should.

One other thing I noticed is now much my inbound traffic has increased over the past few months. The curve is nicely exponential at the moment and it's all because I practiced what I preached in actually using the techniques that you will find in my eBook on Maximizing your Web Traffic. Get the eBook and replicate exactly what I did today! And remember, unlike almost all other internet marketers and entrepreneurs I'm telling you what I've done and allowing you a peek into my web stratagems and processes right here on this blog!

The eBook mentioned above is yet another string to my marketing bow in that it's a real product being sold for a purpose. More than that it's not hype in the least, as the techniques are working for me right now! This is just the start of the eBooks for me as I will soon have a product based around spices using some of the information in my Spice Guide page along with recipes for each spice from my extensive collection. I'm also working on a book about male health, focussing primarily on the penis. But those are all projects in the pipeline (but it's important to keep goals focussed in this business!)

2007-04-27T14:31:00.000Z

Article Sites as a Gateway to Amazon or eBay

It's been said many times, but it remains true nonetheless. The only real way to make any decent money on the internet is to have Multiple Streams of Income. As I have mentioned before, my main Celtnet Site is the generation of content and the gaining of Google AdSense revenue based on the strength of that content. This is the main focus of my site; but that doesn't mean that I won't use other means to gain income from the sites.

As a result, I've been beefing-up my best AdSense pages with more content and adding potential additional sources of revenue by linking the information to Amazon pages. This relies on the IP to Country Conversion software that I've written and documented which allows the pages served to point to the appropriate Amazon site for the visitor. To make the landing pages more intresting (and appealing) for the indexing engines I've wrapped the Amazon results pages in abstracts of articles directly related to the subject matter both of the minisite/section I'm attracting the visitors to and of the precise Amazon search I'm using on that page.

Examples of this are: Amazon Mobile Phone Search where I'm using mobile-phone-based articles to add content to a search site based on Amazon's Electronics sections for mobile phones. Another example is Amazon Recipe Book Search which uses over a hundred recipe-based articles to add content to a search site based on an Amazon book search for recipe-based books.

As an alternative to this methodology I've also created a Mobile Phone Ringtones based page which adds ringtone-based article to an affiliate search page for mobile phone ringtones. Again this should make the page more attractive to the search engines. However, I'm not adverse to other means of gaining visitors to such pages and I will generate and AdWords campaign based on this page.

From what I've done so far, it should be obvious to you that as long as you can find articles for your subject of interest and you can generate either a search engine or results based on Amazon, eBay or some affiliate content then you can fairly easily create a content-based site that draws visitors to the products that you're attempting to sell. In the end, this is nothing but an extension of my original eBay Misspelling Search tool which uses eBay-based articles to make this page more attractive to search engines. Though, again, I will soon be generating an AdWords campaign to draw more visitors to this page.

So, as well as my bread-and-butter of search engine based AdSense income I'm now adding content-based search and affiliate pages as well as new AdWords campaigns to draw more visitors to my potentially more lucrative pages. The economics make sense and it definitely should work but I am definitely a novice when it comes to these kinds of camaigns and nd it will probably take me a few tries to get things right. As always, I'll be keeping you up-to-date of progress via this Blog.

In terms of trying to get the 'multiple streams of income' I've also just bought Nick Marks' 'Multiple Streams of Income to see if this is a product worth going with. After all, the concept properly gells-in with what I'm trying to achieve for this website of mine.

2007-04-24T17:33:00.000Z

CletNet Info eZine Alive again

Now that I'm properly back on the internet marketing kick again, it's time to resurrect the CeltNet Info (CI) eZine which I started just over a year ago and then allowed to lapse as I first became ill and then got married. So, it's more than eight months since my last eZine publication date and the CI eZine is active again with the following posting: April 24 2007. The aim being to return to a posting every other Tuesday from now until I clear my debts.

The truth is that I've been at this game for a while now and it's taken me a long while to get to grips with the simple rules of making money on the internet. The simple truth is that to make money you need content. That content needs to be indexed by the search engines and the indexed pages need to be delivered to potential customers. Even if you're generating an information-based site this is still true. You need to do your homework and that involves investigating good-paying keywords and integrating those keywords into your text. Even if you're more into programs such as Google's AdWords or Yahoo/Overture's Sponsored Search maintaining that list of well-paying keywords is important as these are the keywords you don't want to bid on if you wish to make any money from your campaign.

With this in mind I've been adding a few more pages to my Mobile Phone Information minisite and this is to add information on the very lucrative Mobile Phone Ringtone niche. I've also dismantled an old phone today so the next page to be added to this minisite will show the dismantling process so that the various components of the phone can be labelled and analyzed. Admittedly, this page will be image-rich, but it's still good, novel, content for the website.

I'm also going to try a trick from my Auctions site by adding Amazon and ClickBank pages, articles and products and making these more attractive by using article abstracts as sidebars and content. This will take a little development based on the templates and site examples I already have but it will both flesh-out the site and add more potentially lucrative content.

2007-04-23T13:56:00.000Z

Continuing on the Optimization Track

Since my last post about the new Mobile Phone Information section of my site and the way I'd used it as a model to alter the google adsense ad placements on my site I've been having a re-think of other sections of my site.

The latest to receive the adsense makeover is the how to build a PC from scratch section of my site. I've altered the page to give better usage of adsense ads, falling back on the classicc header ad, right sidebar ad and one ad within the text. But, as the page also deals with computers and computer components I've also added a fresh ad for Google's new Google Pack of free PC software (see ad on left). After all, if you're trying to upgrade or build your PC with components a nice suite of freee applications should appeal to you, right?

I certainly hope so as Google's lead payments for this can be up to $2. Which isn't bad at all!

Apart from this I've been adding more content to my recipe-based site and my mobile phone pages. I've even caught-up with the various submissions added to my Celtnet Links Page. Of the 440 submissions during the past three months all bar five were for either adult or pharmaceutical sites. Why do these people bother, I wonder? Now I'll have to write some software to week out these guys. But that should only take me a couple of hourse. Ah, the trials and tribulations of an internet marketer!

Well, that's all for today, folks. I now have to get back to actually doing things to the website to make money :-)

To your continued success!

2007-04-20T13:29:00.000Z

A New Site Section

Admittedly it's been a few weeks since my last post to this site. Mostly as I've been away visiting my wife in Senegal, West Africa. As ever, though, I have not been entirely idle during this time. It's long been an ambition of mine to expand my list of minisites to add new revenue streams. This comes from AdSense analyses I've been doing on which regions of my site have been pulling-in the most revenue. This analysis clearly indicated that my Guide to Credit Cards was by far the most efficient region of my site in terms of overall revenue. As a result of this information I did some research on business and marketing areas that would provide revenue but which, in general, were not that well served in terms of information content.

After a few weeks' research I eventually came up with the whole area of mobile phone technology as an excellent topic for creating a new information-based minisite. Further research revealed a fair amount of information on mobile phones, none of which was properly integrated. So I printed the papers out and took them with me on my trip. The long flights allowed me time to read this material and re-arrange it for my purposes so that when I came back home I could begin writing and constructing my new minisite. The result of this was the Mobile Phone Information minisite. An adsense targeted site that still relies on proper, real, content to pull-in visitors.

It's interesting, but the creation of this latest minisite also allowed me to re-examine and alter the placement of AdSense advertisements on my various minisites. They were all updated last night and the strategy seems to have worked in that already today I have generated three times as much revenue as I did at this same point in time yesterday. Which just goes to prove that the task of adding new content to a website and of modifying and managing the placement of ads is never-ending. If you take a break from these tasks then you will lose out on overall income.

In truth, I suppose, I am more than a little obsessed with my website and whatever I do I don't completely rest from working on and thinking about the site. A good case in point is my trip to West Africa. Even whilst I was going round the markets with my wife I couldn't help but think about the recipe and spice section of my recipe-based sites and I ended-up buying small quantities of herbs and spices that are either unique to or which can be bought chealpy in West Africa. As a result, as well as my original Guide to Spices I have now added a new Guide to Herbs to my site. Again, whilst adding this page (which is continually being updated) I also had an opportunity to play around with and modify the advertisements on this and related pages. Which, again, I hope will bring me further increased revenue.

2007-03-28T19:04:00.000Z

Expanding the Cancer Information Site

As I wrote in my previous post, I am in the process of expanding one region of my site that is currently underperforming and which should actually have considerable potential. It's also a content-based AdSense site and it's based on a topic that I know quite a lot about as I used to conduct research into brest cancer. The thing to do now is to move the site from a niche adsense site based solely on prostate cancer and mesothelioma to a broad-based cancer site. Giving information on what cancer is and accurate information on specific cancer types.

As a result I've added a new section on generic cancer information and a section on breast cancer. There is real content here, all created from my personal knowlege. But there is also borrowed material, based on grabbing RSS feeds from other sites, which bulks-up the content of the site. An example being the cancer news page.

What I'm trying to do here is to go back to the principle that 'content is king'. I'm creating real, useful, content based on my parctical knowlege of cancer biology, cancer detection and cancer treatment. This is an information site that just happens to have Google AdSense ads embedded within that real content. What I'm doing here is moving away from all that push-push-push marketing and affiliate sites by showing that AdSense can be used with sites that contain real content to actually turn a profit for those sites.

I know I'm being heretical here, but what I'm saying is that real, proper sites with useful content and information, if packaged correctly can make the webmaster a real income. It's just a question of generating sufficient content of sufficient interest to the reader that they want to visit your site. But that content needs to be about something that will pull-in visitors who are both interested in the topic you are presenting and who will actually click on the ads being presented. After all it's making money using those ads that's the name of the game here.

But if you can do it with pure white-hat techniques, and provide useful information into the bargain then you are on the side of the angels.

2007-03-19T17:53:00.000Z

Using AdSense Channels

As I've already mentioned in my previous blog posts, I'm currently in the process of both analyzing, optimizing and improving the AdSense performance on my website, Celtnet, and this time it's the opportunity for AdSense channels to come under scrutiny.

Whenever you create a new AdSense Ad in Google you have the chance of assigning that ad to a new or existing channel. Where a channel can be either a single page, a directory or a grouping of similar-themed pages within your websites. I tend to base my channels on directories which, in turn, are built around pages of the same theme. This means that various regions and topics within the site can be analyzed in detail to find which are the best performing and which give me the best return on investment in terms of the time taken to write the page.

In terms of overall traffic coming to the site then my recipes section brings-in by-far the largest number of visitors and it's also the section that gives me my largest AdSense income. However, the click-throughs and the earnings per page are, as you might expect, quite low. Still, for a hobby part of the site this section is actually performing much better than I ever thought it would.

After this comes what is definitely the best-performing section of the site my Credit Card Information minisite. This has fewer visitors than just about any other part of the site, yet it manages to be my second-best earner partly because of the high adsense returns and because of the section's high click-through rate (at over 12.75% it's pretty impressive). Next comes my General Information section which, itself, has a pretty impressive click-through rate of 2.3%. Finally comes my Cancer Information region which has few visitors but a very healthy click-through rate of 20%.

Currently my worst-performing section is the eBay misspelling and ClickBank Marketplace section. I'm not sruprised at this because, as I detailed in my previous eMail, it's because I took my eye off the ball for that particular section of the site. Now that the problems encountered whilst moving the website to a new host have been fixed and/or eliminated and I'm busy re-popularizing and advertising this region of the site It's my aim to increase the traffic to these pages at least 60-fold.

However, I should mention that I'm using the eBay Misspelling Search Page to build my own little eBay empire based on buying mispelled items at a bargain price and selling them on at their real value. The whole point here is to gain as many possible different streams of income as possible.

Of couse, the work involved in performing the analysis and optimization can also be monetized, simply by using this to write an ebook on the subject which can be sold on. Precisely what I did for my eBook on How to Maximize your Web Trafffic which details the SEO techniques that I used for my own website.

2007-03-18T10:00:00.000Z

Breaking the Cardinal Rule

With everything that's been happening in my life recently I didn't have much time to check my website since I moved to a new hosting package. Of course, now that I'm back on the web marketing route I find that I had broken one of the cardinal rules of web marketing 'make sure that everything on your website is working'. A quick review of my eBay and Clickbank search pages revealed that because of internal Perl permissions my eBay Misspelled Listings Search Tool wasn't giving the correct misspelling suggestions. Of course, this was easy to fix. But I had lost many months' worth of traffic, income and good will. All things that will take time and effort to put right again.

Even worse, in some respects, I had completely missed one entire database in the transition so that none of my ClickBank Search pages were working at all. Not the marketplace search itself, nor the associated ClickBank article search section. The only part of my website working was the Amazon products feed search page. But this would not really attract any visitors to the site without the other pages working, as these would be the draws to traffic.

It took me half a day to fix all the problems. But I had lost almost four months' worth of both traffic and revenue. Of course, the site now works perfectly and integrates seamlessly with Amazon. Indeed, it works better than many of the other eBay misspelling tools out there. Which was my intent all along.

Now that other events in my life, such as marriage, getting my wife and her son a visa, are almost done I'm back to using my eBay Misspelled Listings Search Tool for the purpose that I originally designed it for. That is, for finding items that are misspelled on eBay and which no-one is bidding on. These can then be purchased cheaply and re-sold for a profit!

If you want to learn more about this, then why not look at my article on the subject: http://EzineArticles.com/?Using-Misspellings-to-buy-items-Cheaply-on-eBay&id=172957 which can be found at ezinearticles.com.

And, yes, I really do make money using this technique. I've also used it to cheaply source components for building a PC as well as buying SLR camera lenses and accessories. If you want to save moeny, just as I have done, why not give the tool a go? It works for all the major English-based eBay sites and using my Internationalization System it will even detect which country/region you are from so that you automatically get your own native eBay page offered to you.

Wishing you success in your internet marketing campaigns. And, don't forget, never take your eye off the ball!

Dyfed Lloyd Evans

2007-03-14T15:01:00.000Z

It's Wednesday and I've just finished the day job so it's now over to my internet work and today it's the turn of that old chestnut, AdSense once more. Now, if you don't know what AdSense is, then you really shouldn't be in the internet game. But suffice it to say that it's Google's advertising system where Google delivers adverts to your site on a pay-per-click (ppc) basis. I've been writing several adsense-targeted pages and today I've generated my first master landing page to help these get indexed (this page can be found at Make Money with Adsense.

The indexing and optimization techniques I'm using for this can all be found in my e-book The Sectret to Maximizing your Web Traffic. Though I'm also using and testing completely new techniques that utilize new techniques based on AdWords to turn a profit on the pages I'm creating. The aim is to pick niches where the ppc income generated is greater that the money spent on driving traffic to these pages. As this experiment progresses I'm writing an e-book to document both my successes (and, almost importantly, any failures) and this will be published within a couple of months. So, watch this space for an announcement!

My focus now is on content and number of pages so I'll sign-off this blog by saying that using the approach above I've already doubled my adsense income this month compared to last month and that my aim is to double that income once more during the next two weeks. As always, I will keep you informed of my progress via this blog.

Today I am taking as day1 of my 'eliminate my debts' drive and this blog will report my progress, successes and failures. I have now begun on my path towards 'multiple streams of income' and the money, finally, is starting to trickle in.

2007-03-11T13:51:00.000Z

Well, I know i've been away from this blog for a while now. And that's mainly because I was married last month to a wonderful lady from Senegal, West Africa. Of course, having gone through the expense of the wedding and with the expense of visa applications for my wife and her young son I now find miself strapped for cash. So I'm in the process of increasing my internet based activities. I will be commoditizing some of my applications and systems, such as the eBay misspelling and ClickBank search and Website Internationalization pages so that they can be purchased or leased by others.

I've also been intensively working on improving my rankings and site visits. This has led to a three-fold increase in both monthly traffic to my CeltNet site and a three-fold increase in my Google AdSense income each month. If you want to know how I did this, then you can get a copy of my very reasonably priced ebook on the Secret of Maximizing your Web Traffic and this will tell you everything I did so that you can repeat the formula yourselves. And believe me, it does work as I've seen the results for real on my own website.

I've also been investigating new means of getting AdSense revenue using targeted pages such as the one here: Find a New Credit Card using Google's AdWords program to drive referral traffic to the page. The results of this investigation are already being fed ino my latest ebook which should be ready for unveiling by next weekend.

I'm also moving to ClickBank as well as PayDotCom to provide my sales service for the various products.

The landing pages for these products are also in the process of being updated so that I can make after-sales offers and bump-up my email lists. After all, pre-selling and the sales of other peoples' products are a big part of success in internet marketing and I'm becoming much more professional in my attitude these days and the results of these efforts will be reported in these blogs.

I'm also beginning a new program of looking at other internet marketers' products; both to see in I an gain any tips and to see whether they are of any use to the novice internet entrepreneur. The first of these products being Ewen Cha's Autopilot Profits program which promises to 'Print 24/7 Profits For You...Automatically!' In the next week or so I will come back with a report on this product and whether it's worth investing in or not.

2006-10-24T15:03:00.000Z

A new hoster and a new (re)Start

I'm currently in the process of moving my celtnet.org.uk domain to a new hosting company (and so far it's going pretty smoothly). I'm also adding the celtnet.net domain to my hosting plan as well. As always, though most of the process is going pretty smoothly there are a few little niggles. Mostly just things that are done differently. I already have over 90% of the website up and running and should be up to 98% by tomorrow.

Of course, there's a chance here to tidy things up nad to add even more functionality so that the final 2% of the implementation may take a little while. Of course, one of the things I need to do is to link the blog generation software to the website which is what this particular post is all about! It's information and a test all rolled into one.

2006-08-22T13:19:00.000Z

Cracking the AdSense Puzzle

If you're into SEO, web optimization or making an income from the web then you will either have employed or are thinking about adding AdSense to your website. But what about all those people out there making $1000s from AdSense every day? How do they do it?

I'll admit that I use AdSense extensively on my site, though it's really more a sideline than a main income source, though it the money from AdSense campaigns does bring in more than enought to pay for my domain names, hosting plans and my DSL access. But I only have a handful of sites and they're all content-focussed. Indeed, I'm operating completely the wrong kind of model to make and real money from AdSense.

In reality, if you want to make serious money from AdSense then you'll need something like 1000 sites with just enough content to get them indexed and the maximum number of AdSense ads on each page with those ads blended into the text as far as possible. You will need to target these pages with the best keywords you can find and you then need to buy a whole bunch of under-performing keywords in AdWords to drive some traffic to the sites (about 10 per page as a minimum) and you need to keep writing pages with new ISPs as the ones you have already are likely to be banned from Google quite quickly. As a result, to make $10 000 per month (which is possible) you will need to spend at least $6000 per month.

You're also entirely dependent on a single stream of money and as Google is tightening its rules for the kinds of sites (as described in my previous post on Google's slap in the face for small sites). The limiting of the number of AdSense ads you can have on a page to 3 is also limiting this business model somewhat. The problem is that most of these sites are either entirely spam or contain useless information and are polluting the search indexes. Google is right to try and eliminate them.

Another AdSense model is to set-up so-called AdSense microsites that are sites targeted to a specific niche or keywords set. These types of sites do have real content, although they are tiny in size. But there's still the problem that you're entirely dependent on Google's AdSense program for all your income. If Google chages its rules or indexing algorithm again your entire income may vanish in a puff of smoke.

The secret to maintaining your on-line income (and it's not really a secret) is multiple streams of income. Increase the number of revenue streams that you have. This way if one source of income dries-up (as it's likely to in the current search engine environment) you still have other sources of income to rely on. Diversify and, as I point out in a previous post on the importance of products provide something that visitors to your site will want.

2006-08-16T17:13:00.000Z

How do you know which sites to link to?

From the very beginning Google's 'page rank' has been derived from the number of links coming into a given site. With Google's recent updates to it's algorithms this has become a matter of greater urgency for webmasters as the only way to be regularly crawled and indexed by Google is to have sufficient incoming links to your site. But these should not just be directed to your home page. You should also have links coming in to deeper sections and pages of your site — as many of these as you can in fact.

It's all well and good to say this but which sites should you seek to gain link exchanges from. Obviously you should avoid automated link exchange systems as these could get you penalized as belonging to a 'bad neighbourhood'. Apart from these the knee-jerk reaction is to say: go for websites with high PR (page rank) ie sites with PR of 4 or more. There are many sites out there that will tell you the page rank of a site or page. There are some link exchange sites that won't even accept links unless the page you're putting your link on has a PR of 4 or better.

The problem here is that the PR as calculated by Google is notoriously unreliable. It's only updated every three months and generally tends to underestimate the true PR of a site/page. Indeed, a quick check of some of my pages showed that Google was indicating about 10 incoming links and a PR of 3. In fact I have over 80 incoming links and the PR should have been at least 4!

If you can't trust PR then how do you make a decision about which pages and sites to try to link to and which to avoid? Below are some guidelines that you may want to think about when considering link partners:

1. The target website represents someone you'd want to be associated with. It may sound obvious, but think about the site you're attempting to link to. If they don't represent someone that you'd like to be associated with then don't go for a link exchange with them.

2. Make sure your target link is relevant. Again this is an issue that I've addressed before. Google is now checking incoming links to your site and if they're not deemed 'relevant' then you may be penalized.

3. Ensure that the website performs well on Google. As PR is not a reliable measure of a website's 'worth' you still need some measure of whether it's a good thing to link to a particular web page/site. One of the best ways to do this is to come up with a few relevent search terms then check how your target website performs in these searches. If the page consistently performs well in these searches then it's definitely worth linking to.

4. Your links on the target site should be accessible to search engines. In recent months a number of link sites have been using rather underhanded practices to hoard page rank. They've been garnering links to a page in their site but using the 'nofollow' tag they prevent the outgoing links from being spidered. Such links will not help your pages' rankings at all.

5. Try to get your links embeded in the body of the target website's copy This is a tip to maximize any traffic you're getting from your links. The truth is that if your link is part of the text then it will be clicked more often than it if was on a side-bar or at the very bottom of the page.

6. Ensure the target website allows you to use your own text The text that accompanies your website's description is a critical part of your marketing and branding. As a result you should only really link to websites that allow your to define your own description of your website.

7. The page on which the link sits shouldn't be too far away from the home page The general rule of thumb here is that search engines in general won't index very much that's more than three layers deeper than the home page. Essentially the first link to your website shouldn't be more than three clicks away from the site's home page (this is how the BBC organizes their site). If, say your link is three clicks away from the home page but a further click takes you to a detail page about your site then this is OK.

8. The target link links to specific content Many linking systems only want to link to your home page. However, you want the search engines to index as much of your site as possible. As a result you will want to have a number of link exchanges that are deep links into your website. This is most easily achieved by writing articles in which you embed your URL. However, if your website is divided into fairly obvious sectons (and your top-level directories link to your content) then you may be able to exchange such URLs with more focussed websites. A good example of this would be the brewing section of my website http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/brewing/ which I've had considerable success exchanging links for.

Of course, almost no link exchanges will meet with all these criteria; just use your judgement about the ones that are most important for your needs. I wish you luck in you link exchanges.

2006-08-15T16:02:00.000Z

Google's Slap in the Face for Small Marketers

Unless you've been hibernating in a corner somewhere, then you can't have failed to hear the furore that recent changes to some of Google's rules have created. The advertising community are beginning to call this the 'Google Slap' as it appears that Google have effectively delivered a 'slap in the face' to a large number of their advertising customers.

Just in case you've been hibernating (or, more likely you've been on vacation somewhere) here's a recap on Google's new rules:

What they've done is to come up with Quality Score that Google defines as: 'A value placed on an individual domain that reflects the quality of the content contained within it.'. Which is nice and vague. But it boils down to the fact that if Google decides that your site doesn't contain sufficient 'useful' content then your site will be penalized within the search engine.

Take, as an example, a very common scenario: an internet marketer is running an AdWords campaign that targets a single page which contains little more than a tiny amount of text and an opt-in form then this site will undoubtedly be penalized under Google's new rules. Indeed all sites that are little more than just one page sales letters, squeeze pages, pure AdSense sites or affiliate sites will be hit by this rule. Which basically covers everything that traditional affiliate and product marketers use to sell their wares.

At the moment it looks as if this penalty will both reduce the ranking of your site whilst increasing the per-clik cost of and AdSense advertisement targeting your pages.

Even worse is that these penalties, as described in Google's statement are levied at the domain level. This could potentially mean that you could have some wonderful pages with literally loads of useful contnet on them, but if Google has decided that the remainder of your website is complete crapola then your entire domain will be affected!

It also seems that Google is also checking varous other things such as:
— the age of your domain (how long your site has been on-line)
— the number of pages from your site that Google has indexed
— whether or not your have a page on your site stating your privacy policy
— whether you have a 'contact' or 'about me' page on your site.

Undoubtedly Google is doing this to try and combat 'spam sites' ie sites that spring up overnight and contain nothing but auto-generated pages full of links, and/or appear to be built simply to display Google Adsense advertisements without really providing quality content. However, as seems the norm for 'King Google' at the moment (see my Has Google lost the plot 1 and Has Google lost the plot 2 articles for more) they've created an essentially arbitary set of rules that will nds up penalizing new businesses who have brand new domain names and who simply haven't had enough time to fill their site up with content as well as the 'spammers' (but this, again, seems to be part of Google's current strategy).

Given that this represents the new reality, what do you need to do to overcome this latest google hurdle?

There are a few work arounds for the 'Google Slap' (though as with any workaround your mileage may vary and they're not guranteed to offer complete protection. Especially as we effectvely have a rapidly-moving target here. However, there are things that you can do to improve your overall quality score.

Once you've looked through the list it will come as no surprise that many of the points detailed here are fairly standard SEO procedures and are detailed more thoroughly in my eBook The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic.

1. Install a Blog on your Domain

A blog is an excellent way of providing content for your domain. If you don't have one then set it up now and start posting to it. It's also important that your blog is hosted on your domain and that you link to it from your main sitemap.

If your site is new then you should know that adding a blog to it will darmatically increase your site's standing (and the number of pages indexed from it) in Google's eyes.

If you have affiliate landing pages that are basically isolated from the remainder of your domain (to keep visitors there) than at least link your blog to these pages and these pages to your blog as this will improve the amount of content visible from them.

1. Get More Incoming Links

There's no getting away from this one: the more In-Bound Links (IBLs) you have then the higher the ranking of your site and the better your ranking in Google's eyes.

But be careful. Don't get involved with link 'farms' but do submit your links to link sites. You can also write articles and press releases (but make sure to add your site's links to them).

Also find sites with similar content/user profiles to yours and ask them if they're willing to exchange links with you (most will be happy to).

3. Make sure you add a 'Privacy Policy' & 'Contact Us'

This one is a direct response to Google's new rules: The 'contact us' page is easy enough. Just create a page with your name, e-mail contact and if appropriate your telephone number, business name and contact address.

Now create a 'Privacy Policy' page. This is a little trickier to produce. You could simply do a search for 'privacy policy', look at the kinds of variations avaialble and then code a variant up for your own use.

Alternativey you could add a 'P3P' which is a new web standard that allows websites to declare privacy policies regarding things like the use of cookies and the storage of e-mail addresses. For a more detailed exposition of this have a look at wikipedia's entry on P3P.

4. Build a Site Map

This is pretty-much a no-brainer. Search engines love site maps and if you use an automated sitemap generator (such as google's sitemaps genrator you even get a breakdown of any problems in your site. Just make sure that your sitemap also lists your contact and privacy policy pages.

5. Add Links to any Affiliate Landing Pages

This is the biggest departure from marketing norms. Previously you would not have considered adding a link to anywhere from your affiliate landing pages. But, in this brave new world of Google rules you must at the very least make certain that your landing pages link to your privacy policy and contact pages. It is also probably a good idea to link your landing pages to your blog (and vice versa) as this will provide real contnet to associate with your pages.

6. Add More Content!

Again this is a no-brainer. Google's touchstones for a site's worth are definitely becoming the overall content of a site and the number of in-bound links it has. As a result you should add as much content as you can to a domain.

You could do this with eZine-type articles but if you do so at least make certain that you add your own commentary around the article otherwise you may receive the dreated 'duplicate content' penalty. Even a three or four-hundred word review on an affiliate product can be enough to provide you with 'real' content.

Truthfully, however, the writing has been on the wall for some time as regards 'thin' affiliate-focussed websites with little or no true content and it's one of the reasons that I decided to build my own website on the large-scale model, adding content first and then focussing on marketing and income strategies. It undoubtedly lead to a lowering of my opt-in conversions (as visitors could move elewhere in my site) but it may just turn-out to be a good long-term strategy.

2006-08-14T20:38:00.000Z

Still Riding the Google Merrygoround

An update to my various previous posts on this issue. After taking a bit of a well-earned rest around my birthday I came back to see that Google was claiming 5000 pages in my site indexed (after a bit of digging it turned out to be more like 1300 pages but that was still wonderful!). OK, so a lot of pages were pretty rubbish and not very useful, still there were lots of 'good' pages in that list and I was really excited.

By Saturday the total was down to 181 and by today it was 148 pages indexed. So, what the hell happened to increase my number of indexed pages ten-fold and then to decrease again to just about what it's always been. I know that I've put a fair amount of effort into getting in-bound links (but Google isn't showing any of these). I can find them via MSN and Yahoo! searches.

So, what the hell is going on? Is Google broken beyond the hope of recovery (as seems likely for all fairly new websites). And will deep pages full of content such as my guide to edible wild foods which is three levels down within the site ever be indexed?

I'm at the point of complete and utter frustration with the whole web indexing system, especially as I add new good content that's being totally ignored by the indexing engines. What is the point?

2006-08-13T17:51:00.000Z

The Re-direction Problem

With the search engines clamping-down on 302-type redirects (temporary redirects) as these are used in the unsavoury practice of web page hijacking (where a php or other script is used to driect search 'bots to the originating page but all other requests are directed to another page). As a result the originating page is indexed but almost all seearches are directed somewhere else.

The search engines have taken action against these underhanded tactics by effectively banning all 302 redirection requests. This has led many webmasters to fall foul of the new wat that the search engines look at the world and have either suffered dramatic drops in the number of pages indexed or have been banned entirely from Google. Salutory lesson number 1 is this: if you have more than one domain name pointing at your website then plaese, plase make certain that they are all re-directed to your main site using 301 (permanent) redirects.

So why, you might ask, am I prattling-on about 301 and 302 redirects... Well, I'm trying to gather as many domain names with 'celtnet' in them as possible and I've just bought 'www.celtnet.net' via my ISP. I was trying to sort-out a redirect from this to my main site www.celtnet.org.uk. Of course, after securing the domain I need to link it to my old domain so that the 'www.celtnet.net' domain name points at my existing pages. However, on searching my ISPs information pages they seem only to offer either 302 redirects or the inclusion of the old domain's pages within a window in the new domain.

The second solution really doesn't help me and the first solution could get me banned from Google! Not very helpful at all! I've just contacted my ISP to see what this is all about but for the moment I have a new domain name that I can't connect to my existing website because it's the wrong type of redirect.

The moral of this story, if you're buying alternate domain names from your ISP or your hosting provider make sure that they offer you the correct kind of redirect otherwise you may end-up with a domain name that you can't connect to anything.

2006-08-12T19:11:00.000Z

A Red-letter Day for the Recipe Site

As well as the more standard means of making income on my webiste (Amazon marketing, eBay Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, eBook selling) I also maintain more information-focussed areas on my website. Some of these are purely altruistic in nature (such as the Celtic regions of the celtnet.org.uk part of the site. Other regions, such as the poetry corner include Google ads, but are really there as a showcase for both ancient and modern poetry.

Then I havea growing recipe secion to the site which is intended to inform (in that it has recipes from the ancient (ie stone, bronze and iron ages), roman, medieval and Elizabethan periods, as well as specifically Welsh recipes. Allied to these are various ancient recipes for beers and meads without which no ancient meal is complete.

Over the years I've collected many thousands of recipes and I'm slowly adding these to the website in a miscellaneous modern recipe section. With the addition of this recipe repository I've now just passed the four hundred recipe mark, with an expected fifty additional recipes to be added to the site tomorrow. Partly this is a desire to get the information and all the recipes I've gathered 'out there'. But the recipes are also a good source of AdSense income.

To this end I've attempted to add value to the recipe site by adding a recipe search facility that allows every recipe in the collection to be searched by name, food section period as well as by free text search. A cut-down version of this recipe search is also provided on each page in the recipe secton. Though the recipes are all provided with metric measurements I do also provide conversion pages for volumes, mass/weight and tempreature that allow conversions between a range of units, both modern and ancient. Partly this is alturism in helping the website's visitors, though the pages also draw-in AdSense customers.

As with everything, the more content one has the better, and the more likely it is that someone will visit a page and click on a relevant link. I've also begun to add relevant Amazon links to my recipe-associated pages, such as the page on the history of the spice trade and the guide to spices which is slowly being linked out to varous recipes incorporating the spices described in the main text. This is increasing linkage within my site and within regions of the recipe secton (if you want to learn why this is important, have a look at my Maximize your Web Traffic eBook.

Oddly enough, the recipe site itself grew out of my main Celtic site and included recipes important to the various histories of Celtic Britain. Though once produced the section soon assumed a life of its own. It's even been an excellent marketing ploy and sectons of the site are being syndicated by other sites. As cookery is a growth area I'll soon be adding reviews of cookware and links to supplies or cookware and cooking products. As far as I'm concerned this is an area of the website that can only grow in value.

2006-08-09T13:00:00.000Z

The Importance of email Systems

In my previous blogs on generating my first product and the importance of having a product I've gone through the journey of creating an internet-based product before creating and then making that product available.

Today the journey approaches its conclusion as I discuss marketing the product, in particular eMail marketing with autoresponders. After looking at the market and what was available I finally decided to go with followingup.com who seem to have a fair monthly price, allow you to define up to a hundred outgoing messages for every campaign you have. As a result they can more than cater for my current needs and have significant room for future expansion.

But why the sudden rush to get an autoresponder up and running you may ask... Well, one of the best ways to get someone interested in a product is to entice them with a give-away. I've already done this with the eBook The Secrets to Maximizing your Web Traffic itself by bundling other products along with it. For an information product, however, the easiest thing to tive away is information. So I've created a five-day course to send out to anyone who signs-up for it that supplies tasters of the eBook, some real, useful, information and plenty of reminders that my eBook still exists. This way I grow my eMail list and provide interested visitors with plenty of chances to sign up for my product. A win-win situation.

Just think of what an autoresponder could do for your business and keep plugging away at your marketing efforts.

2006-08-08T21:24:00.000Z

My first Product!

As I mentioned in my previous post (below) I've come to the conclusion that the only way to really make money on the internet is to have a product. As a result I've been converting various pages on my website and adding some things that I've found out on the way into an eBook. This took quite a few days to complete, with graphics, pagination issues, indexing and creating cover art, but by last Tuesday I had my eBook: 'The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic' was written.

Of course, that wasn't the end of things. I needed a sales page (which can be found here). Then I needed a way of actually physically selling the eBook. I created a protected directory for the downloads, an isolated web page to facilitate downloads. That way almost all my infrastructure was complete. But I still needed a way of actually physically selling my product.

ClickBank was a no-brainer just because of the sheer number of people using it. But it is expensive and fairly inflexible in terms of the features offered. In searching for an alternative means of handling affiliates as well as payments I came across paydotcom.com which seemed to offer an excellent service. As a result I set-up paydotcom as my main processing and affiliate-handling service. Which literallly took three minutes. After adding the payment links to my web pages and my affiliate handling links I was done.

Half an hour ago I ftp'd all my pages to the website and I was up and running. In a bout of creativity I'd even created a whole load of affiliate marketing material, including banners, eZine advertising copy, classified advertising copy and an e-mail newsletter. Things were looking good!

Admittedly, if you're thinking of creating your own eBooks (after this first one I have a further five in the pipeline) there are several big hurdles. You need to convert your text to PDF, you need to create graphics and you need to put the whole thing together. Personally I'm very hands-on about this (it probably comes from having an artistic bent and having worked in the publishing trade for a while). But if you're not into doing it all yourself you could do worse than having a look at the services offered by someone like evieb

2006-08-01T22:22:00.001Z

The Importance of Product

As I mentioned in my previous post Is Product the Key to Success? I think that pretty much the only way of making serious money on the Internet is to create a real product and to market it. As a result I've been working on tow eBook products: 'The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic' and 'The Guide to Building and Upgrading your PC'.

In addition I've been working on a sales system for these products, including support and eMail. Here's where having a good autoresponder system comes into its own, allowing you to set-up an automated stream of eMails to both prospective and current customers.

Then there's the purchasing system itself (or themselves). For the current projects I've gone for both Paydotcom wihch has an excellent pricing range and good affiliate tools as well as ClickBank as one of the largest on-line merchants of electronic products.

Using both of these systems covers much of the electronic sales market. With the products and the sales systems covered and the sales letters actually written all I have left to do are some of the ancillary products: writing the eMail sales letters and follow-ups, along with information and content to aid with affiliate sales. I aim to write and/or construct these over the next few days and with any luck the sales site itself will go live early next week.

Stay tuned to this blog to find out how things go.

2006-07-30T20:59:00.000Z

Is Product the Key to Success?

After working at this whole 'internet marketing' thing for quite a while now I've finally come to the conclusion that the only real way to make money from Internet marketing is to have your own products. I'm certain that it's possible to make a good living from affiliate marketing and Google AdSense click-throughs. However, to make real money with these programs you need content and lots of it.

Admittedly, I'm going to persevere with these schemes, especially on pages such my spice guide page that includes both Google AdSense ads and Amazon links to relevant books. Then there are my auctions pages that mix AdSense advertising with eBay searches, Amazon comparisons, ClickBank searches and eBay misspelling searches. Yielding as many sources of income as possible in one place. Again, such pages can bring-in quite reasonable income.

Then I thought to myself. I'd gone through quite a lot of effort to write the pages that afforded me with the functionality on these pages. Wouldn't I gain more income if I actually marketed and sold the software itself?

In putting-up my website I'd also learnt a lot about how to create websites, get them indexed, improve their website rankings and market them. This should all be grist to producing eBooks that could again be marketed and sold. In additon there were the other things I was interested in, such as my recipes site which could also be converted into eBooks. Creating real products.

Obviously, once you have tangible products (even electronic ones) you need a way to sell them. The obvious way is to create a web-store based on PayPal as a search methodology. I've almost completed my first eBook and I've been gathering information all over the web about creating a PayPal-based store which I'll start implementing next week.

Once it's up and running I'll post back on this blog as to how it was created (and how you can create an equivalent store for your selves). Then I'll begin updating on how this new marketing strategy is going.

2006-07-26T09:58:00.000Z

Images with AdSense Ads, the Next Big Thing?

Google's AdSense program has become and almost ubiquitous source of income for webmasters both large and small. As a result may people have been playing with the format and placemet of AdSense ad units to maximize click-through rates.

The greatest amount of information about optimizing adsense unit placement and format comes from Google (hardly surprising, as they make money from these ad units themselves) and their data clearly indicate that wider units tend to out-perform taller ones with the formats: 336x280, 300x250 and 160x600 resulting in the highest overall number of click-throughs.

It has long been known that plain text ads out-perfrom image-based ads (my page on internet advertising effectivenesss explains why). Also, ads that look as if they are part of the text (same background, no border and with blue links) out-perform ads that stand out as separate blocks. It's even better if you can incorporate the ads into your text. Indeed, a recent study by Tim Carter (at AskTheBuilder.com) showed a 20% increase in revenues when he palced a large rectangle (336x280) ad unit positioned within his articles and sited in the upper left-hand corner.

If you generate pages with lots of text then using multiple ad units can help with click through rates (just note that if you have multiple ad units then the ads which lie lower down your page will have lower bid prices). But it's important that the ads with the highest click-through rates must appear first in your HTML code (you can use CSS to locate it anywhere you want on your page).

The latest trend, however, is the use of images to make ads stand out on a page (see Draw a Pig for an example. Now, you can't use things like flashing GIF arrows pointing at your ad block as this would violate the AdSense terms and conditions by enticing visitors to click. However, you can have a lerge letterboard (say 728x90) and if your site is about flowers, say, then you can legitimately place a row of flowers above the ad block as this simply fits-in with the overall theme and content of your site.

Indeed, if recent reports are to be believed then this is strategy that even Google themselves are experimenting with (see the Digital Inspiration blog). This seems only to be a beta test for Google at the moment, but a number of people have now reported seeing versions of the Google five-ad tower where the first ad in the block is an image rather than the expected text ad. I've just started using this image enhancement technique on my own websites (you can see and example here on my history of the spice trade page) where the images are all ancient means of transporting spices and thus relate directly to the content of the article itself.

Over the next few days I'll begin converting more of my high-traffic pages to similar image-based formats and I'll report back on my progress in abut three weeks. It certainly seems to be a sensible way froward and anything that improves click-through rates can only be a good thing (especially if Google are experimenting with this themselves).

2006-07-24T12:29:00.000Z

Blogging as a Resource

Your Blog is potentially a very valuable resource, are you making the most of it? If you have an active blog then you potentially have a very valuable resource that you should be making the most of. The first thing is to monetize your Blog. This could be as simple as adding some advertising banners on your blog (one across the top and one on your navigation pane). If you have some affiliateships or some of your own products your can also provide links to these on your blog.

If you also have your won website then your Blog should be integrated into this. You should have a link from your website to your blog and links from your Blog to valuable pages or resources on your website. Ideally these should be links to deep pages within your site as your Blog can help you overcome the problem of the search engines not indexing deeply enough into your website. The reason is this: If you have a Blog then all your older posts are archived, but these have the same website border as your current blogs. As a result you have a large number of copies of any links your've added to your blogs on multiple pages. This looks good to the web indexers and as a results they will index these pages (often very quickly).

The only hurdle to being indexed in this manner is that of actually getting your Blog crawled and indexed. If you're posting frequently then you can use 'ping' services such as pingomatic or pingoat to perform this task for you. Your new content will be posted to a number of Blog indexes and will be seen by the Search Engines and included in their indexes. However, as I've previously posted this may only be a transient inclusion. If you really want your Blog indexed on a premanent basis (along with all those pages the Blog points to) then you will need to treat your Blog exactly like any other web page.

What does this mean? Essentially you need to play the 'indexing' game. This means that you need to get sufficient in-bound links pointing to yor website that the serach engines can't help but index the pages and also have to maintanin them in their indexes. This means that you have to get your Blog included in as many Blog directories as possible (a good starting point for doing this is the RSSTop55 directory. This lists almost 185 blog directories and RSS feed aggregators.).

The other thing you need to do is to get your Blog published as an RSS xml feed as well (most blog generators do this for you) so that you can also add the content of your Blog to the various news aggregators out there.

This is only a brief outline of the advantages that a good Blog can bring you. For more information see my article on Blogging.

2006-07-23T14:03:00.000Z

The Importance of <meta> tags

I've been performing some tidying-up work on my website and a quick comparison of my <meta> tags with what Google reported for some of my web pages indicated that Google was using a the <META NAME="description" CONTENT=""> as well as the content tag (sometimes instead of) to add descriptions of some of my pages.

Now, I'd read somewhere the the <meta> tags were declining in terms of their usage, so I'd taken my eye off the boll as far as these components of my pages were concerned. Basically I'd missed a major trick — and now I was paying for it.

'Why is this important?' you may ask. Well, some of my pages, though they had different content had the same <meta> tags as others and Google was considering them as 'similar' and dumping the second page as a 'supplemental' result. Essentially, because of a stupid oversight I was losing pages of content from Google's main index. More importantly I was losing free advertising.

'How so?' you may well ask. For each page of your site that's indexed Google has a title of up to 66 characters and a description of up to 160 characters. This is your advertisement, your pitch to get visitors to come to various sections of your site. I know that the holy grail of SEO at the moment is to get your web page to be the first in Google's (or whatever search system you're targetting) list of results. If you're striving for this, then take a step back and consider how you're actually using the search results yourself. When you type in a search term or string and Google returns the results then you'll see about eight results of the ten that Google returns. Do you immediately go to the result on the first position and click, or do your eyes gaze over the results and if there's a title or strapline that interests you, do you then click on that one?

If you're perfectly honest with yourself (and studies of how people actually use web pages confirms this) then you're probably in the majority of those who glance at the descriptions and straplines to see something that interests them. Those who have bold headings and can write good content (within the 160-word limit of the strapline) will get the most traffic. OK, so it's important to get on the first page of results if you can, but it's far better for you to write good copy that will draw visitors in rather than trying to squeeeze the final few placings for your page.

This means that you will need to take a close look at the <title> tag of your web pages as this is what provides the title in the search engines. Beyond this you need to take a close look at anything that might be used to provide the description for your web page. This includes the <META NAME="description" CONTENT=""> tag and your first >h1> heading as well as the first sentence of your main text. If take care of all this then you should improve the chances of your web page being spotted from amongst the crowd. However, you won't really know if this effort has been worth it until your page does get indexed and you can see what text's being reported. Once you see this text then you may well want to edit it to make the information initially reported abut your web page be 'punchier' and stand out more.

Like all advertising making the most of how people perceive your page in that first search engine report is a question of editing, refining and testing. This is your first contact with a potential customer and your should make the most of it.

2006-07-20T18:40:00.000Z

Thoughts and Considerations

I must admit that I've broken my own rule of posting twice a week for the past week now. Unortunately there are only eighteen useful hours in a day and unfortunately I can't write everywhere at once.

The main reason for the quiet on this medium being that I've been rather busy on researching and writing something else. To bolster my recipes section on my site I've been researching some of the main spices used by various cultures and how these spices have been traded. As a result I now have a web page on the spice trade which details the spice trade and the influence it's had on the world from 5000 years ago to the present. Allied to this is a page giving detailing the spices themselves and what they are. These pages have taken a while to research but today they went 'live' for the first time.

What, however, I hear you ask, has this to do with this blog. Well, the reaserch is actually going to be used to create an eBook on spices, giving a history of the spice trad, a description of the plant origins for each spice and a number of recipes that show the spice off to it's best abilities.

You'll also notice that the pages are PHP scripts that also allow me to link these pages into my Amazon affiliate store so that I can recommend book dealing with the subject matter of the page. In addition, using my localization system I can poinit users to either the US or UK amazon stores, as befits their country of origin. I'm therefore providing an useful information source on the website, linked to Google AdSense and Amazon. The information from there will also provide a product that I can sell from my own website and which I can also supply to various eBook stores to sell for me.

As a result a little thought, some research and a fair amount of writing provides me with three independent sources of income. Not bad for a week's work!

2006-07-14T16:20:00.000Z

Using Blogs to get your Site Indexed

Or not...

It's often said that writing a Blog, pinging this to a number of blog sites and getting it listed in Blog indexes can help with the indexing of your site and that a frequency of about two posts every week is about right for this. On learning this I thought it would be a great way of getting more of my site indexed in the main search engines.

As a result I started increasing the post frequency on this blog and began using pingoat to ping the main blog directories when my blog had been updated. The frequency increased to twice a week and then every other day (sometimes more frequently). Once I had sufficient content I also began adding the name of this Blog to some blog directories, spreading the word about the blog's existence as wide as possible.

I also attacked the 'look and feel' of the blog, adding links to important pages and areas of my site. By June 29th the Blog had been crawled and about six pages from it entered Googles Index on July 3rd. Then, on July 4th those pages vanished from Google's index. The Blog was spidered again on July 9th and on Jul 11th all the Blog pages as well as ten additional pages from my main site that were referenced by the blog were in Google's index. Of course on July 12th I lost my site (see the story below). On Jult 13th, wen my site came back up the pages were still in Google. Then, today on July 14th all the 30+ pages relating to this Blog had vanished again!

Is this another example of Google Losing the Plot? Basically a page should either be good enough to be included in Google's index or it should not. This 'is it there, or isn't it?' is a complete madness, however you look at it. It either suggests that Google's indexing system is broken, or it indicates that they're out of space on their servers and are dumping certain indexed pages based on some kind of quality algorithm that seems to make little or no sense to me.

It's no surprise that many sites are becoming completely frustrated with Google. Especially as Google's taking their usual attitude of 'everything's fine'. Despite trying to do everything right I've almost given up on getting Google to index the vast majority of my site and I'm relying on advertising to get traffic. Which is maybe Google's whole strategy here: trying to get as many people to used their AdWords system as possible. After all, if your pages are never going to enter their index what else can you do?

Admittedly I've had a very frustrating week and despite working very hard to improve and extend my website I'm seeing very little advance for all this work, but from what I see out there on the 'net I don't think that this problem is entirely limited to me.

2006-07-12T15:48:00.000Z

Your Hosting Company can ruin your day

Today something happened to me that made me realize just how dependent I (and anyone else who makes their living on the internet) am on the whims of others. It just so happens that over the past few days my Hosting Company's been migrating their unix hosting servers over to new IP numbers. Most of thesse migrations seem to have been fairly painless. However, today at 07:00 this morning my website vanished from the internet (which was fine and totally expected).

By 09:00, though, when I entered my site's URL (www.celtnet.org.uk) int a browser to check if it was back up I was instantly re-directed to another site entirely. My heart began to beat faster as I feared the worst — had my site been hijacked? Half an hour later and my site's URL seemed to be pointing to another site entirely. Obviously something was completely amiss.

Immediately I dashed-off an email to the people at LCN (my hosting company) enquiring as to what was going on and why my site seemed to be pointing at other people. About an hour after my email was sent, at 10:30 they updated their information page to day that, unlike the previous day's IP address moves today's migration was progressing much slower and it might take 24 hours for the problems to resolve!

Soon after I received a response to my email, with an apology and a link to the updated information page (which I'd already seen). Not very helpful, admittedly — but probably fair enough. By now, in addition, a request for www.celtnet.org.uk was pointing at the name of the machine whose IP address was being moved: oldraq8.lcn.com which simply displayed a 'Server not Found' message. Well, at least my URL wasn't directing people to someone else's site any more. Of course, by now, the next consquence of all this was striking me. Fore each hour that my site remained off-line I was actively losing money!

Indeed, Wednesday is one of my stronger days and on a typical Wednesday I can expect to take-in more than the ~$220 that my hosting plan with LCN costs for an entire year. Essentially in this one day's outage (assuming that it's only going to be a day) I'll lose enough money to have otherwise paid for a year's hosting. Then there's also the general loss of credibility that the site's unavailability causes. Especially as the URL was directing people to a random website and a 'Server not Found' error.

Basically today's looking to me like being a complete disaster. It's now 14:40 — over seven hours since the site first went down and I've taken pen and paper to go and write this missive. I've also realized that though I'll be able to write this up in my Blog no-one will be able to read it as the blog's hosted on my main site — which is down.

It's now 16:20 and my URL's finally pointing at my side, though the site iself is still not available and I'm getting a 'connection timed out' message. It's an improvement, but still not as good as actually having my site available. Indeed, it's 22:30 now and still no sign of the site being back up. I'll set-up a system to ping the site so tiat if it comes back sometime tonight I'll know when. It now seems likely that this is going to impact Google's crawl tonight — a really bad thing after all the hard work I've been doing in terms of getting my site into Google's index.

Finally! It's 10:15 the following day and my site's back up. I can now upload this blog and get on with some work on the site.

Please don't read this as me getting at LCN. Whilst I've been them the've been a great Hosting Company. The tale is here to show just how dependent websites are on other people and how something very small can have a severe effect on a site-owner's bottom line.

2006-07-11T14:22:00.000Z

Has Google Lost the Plot?

Part 2

In yesterday's first part of this article you learnt a little about Google's business model and how the business analysts view the company. Today's article will look at Google from the viewpoint of website owners and internet marketers.

Google (as well as all the other search engines) are in a very peculiar position as the're delivering value on top of other peoples' content. The value being the delivery of that content to the user in a way that's useful to the user (which usually means the ranking of the results returned). To remain in top position the search engines must convince their users that they're delivering content that is 'the best of the web'.

Admittedly, Google comes for a fair amount of stick in articles such as this one; mostly this is because Google is the dominant player in the web indexing business and because of this a small change in the way that Google indexes or caches websites can make a web-based company succeed or fail. Admittedly, Google, along with all the other search engines, have a problem. The web is expanding month on month and though some of the new sites are providing good and useful content many of the others are spam sites, whose sole function is to promote other peoples' products. Others are 'scraper' sites, stealing content and presenting it as their own. Yet others are 'clone' sites. Sites that have Amazon or eBay marketing areas that are duplicates of other sites and use the same code and/or pages as them. There are also those websites that take pre-existing articles from article websites and publish these as new content.

Including multiple copies of such websites would both degrade the results of any search engine and would simply swamp any good information-rich website in a sea of junk. Over the past eight months Google have been busy tweaking their algorithms and delivering a system called Bigdaddy. What few messages that have been coming out of Google have been very 'up' about this, but the news from webmasters and a number of recent disasters indicate that Google may well have dropped the ball over these updates.

Part of the problem with all this is the difficulty in actually getting any information out of Google. All their systems are automated and there are pages where you can send questions to Google, but all you ever get back from these is a standard automated response. Google can also black-list websites because of content or practices that Google deem to be bad. But they don't tell you that this has happened. The only way to find out if you have one of these Google penalties is to use a form to tell Google that you think you've had a penalty, that you've corrected the problem and that you'll never, ever, do it again. There's an implicit assumption of guilt and that all webmasters are somehow 'bad'. The only other indication of a Google penalty is that the number of pages indexed in a site (as well as the site's overall rankings) drop dramatically.

Google also change their algorithms and indexing practices at will without making much of a general announcement about it. And it's this implicit environment of secrecy that annoys many webmasters. Especially as any updates to Google's indexing strategies may make a site fall in terms of rankings or may dramatically change the number of pages from a site that are indexed. A change in Google's algorithms may have the same effect as gaining a Google penalty, which obviously dramatically increases the stress levels for may web authors.

Despite their slogan of ''Don't be evil' Google come across as being a cold and uncaring company who have an almost religious belief in their indexing algorithm. Tweaking this algorithm is what they do and it sometimes appears to outsiders as if Google firmly believes that their algorithm can never be wrong.

I can understand why Google have done this. If they didn't then they'd be inundated by umpteen million e-mails every day. However, because of this they've painted themselves as being cold and aloof: uncaring of the needs of the very people who create the content from which they make their money.

The current upheaval started about seven months ago when Google began to roll-out their new Bigdaddy datacentres. These were, according to Matt Cutts 'the human voice of Google' were new data centre infrastructures rather than a major algorithm change in indexing. Bigdaddy is, in effect, a brand-new data center that Google uses to perform core search engine tasks like cataloging Web sites or serving up localized features. Google operates thousands of data centers across the globe.

However, as the Bigdaddy datacentres were rolled out during January and February many website designers and authors reported very dramatic reductions in the number of pages from their sites that were indexed. What seemed to have happened was that as Google rolled out some new technology to fix a few things this resulted in their breaking other things, But it wasn't until May 10th that Google's co-founder, Larry Page, addressed this issue saying the problems took the company by surprise and it was now investigating what is going on. "We have a team studying it now," he told an audience of journalists at Google's annual Press Day event. It looked as if in upgrading to Bigdaddy Google was erasing its existing data caches and replacing them completely with new indexes. During this process many web pages that were previously indexed simply disappeared from Google.

At about the same time Google CEO Eric Schmodt told the New York Times about a 'server crisis' where the machines holding their indexes were completely clogged.

Another problem was that real web pages were being replaced with 'supplemental results' often from six months or so previously. These supplemental results are pretty useless in terms of searching though they do artificially inflate the number of pages indexed from a given site.

Then on May 16th Matt Cutts offered a very long post on the timeline of Google's new indexing and Bigdaddy roll-out. This said that many of the supplemental results would be refreshed. Then came the scary stuff: If a site didn't have enough incoming links then it might be considered as having 'low confidence' and wouldn't get crawled as deeply. Even worse, depending on the number of links to your site Google may be crawling your site every day to see if there's interesting content but none of that content may be indexed (this is happening to me now). So Google is basically stealing my bandwidth without giving me anything for it.

Maybe Google doesn't want the good content of the web indexed. After all, if you're not getting any visitors for the search engines you're going to have to resort to advertising and one of the big sources of advertising out there is Google's AdWords program. The truth is that Google is no longer reflecting the internet as it is, but they're reflecting the Internet as Google thinks it should be. Moreover, other search engines are catching-up with Google and are indexing more of the web than Google are.

In their recent update it seems as if Google re only really counting the number of uni-directional (ie non-reciprocal) links coming into your site from related sites as a measure of a site's worth. However, if you do a search for your site's URL on Google and then perform a links search with the links:www.mysite.com you'll see that the links: search only returns a third of the total number of links coming into your site. So Google may well be under-estimating the number of sites linking to you and so your ranking and the number of pages indexed in your site will suffer as a result. Also if you're in a specialized niche then you may not have many inbound links, but those you do come from natural links built in your area of interest. However, as you have few incoming links most of your pages won't be indexed (as will be the case for many of the sites that link to you) so even if you have good links the non-indexing of these linking pages mean that both you and the sites linking to you aren't given the credit that you should.

The upshot of this is that a perfectly good, clean, website cannot now get all or its pages indexed if it doesn't have a sufficiently good score in terms of both in-bound and out-bound links. Too few inbound links and the site won't be fully indexed. As a result Google is effectively editorializing a site's content because Google doesn't think it's 'good enough'. In reality Google's users are being deprived of many good resources because of this. Users are only being exposed to a portion of an internet — a portion that Google defines for them. Does this really mean that Google is short of indexing space and that they can only keep going by 'pruning' the web? It's certainly looking more and more as if this is the case.

Added to this Google have had other debacles of late. One of the most notable were the reports in a number of SEO fora that Google had suddenly and very mysteriously added a few billion pages to their index. This might be a cause for celebration: had Google finally relented and indexed the pages that they'd dropped or excluded from their index? Analysis of my own site indicated no for Google still only indexed 85 pages (MSN was indexing 1100+) [as an aside, since I wrote this Google have added a further 40 pages to my site's index]. Rather, all those new pages were blatant spam and contained only pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as well as scraped conttent. Even worse, many of these pages were displaying well in the search indexes. A Google representative responded via forums to the issue by calling it a "bad data push," something that met with various groans throughout the SEO community.

What seems to have happened is that a Moldovan had the enterprising idea of using the way that Google handles subdomains (in reality these are sub-components of a website but Google handles them as if they were totally independent sites). This allowed he enterprising individual to craft scripts that would generate an endless number of subdomains as soon as the googlebot dropped by his site. As Google indexed these subdomians on an essentially 'no questions asked' basis he was able to deliver single pages containing keyword-rich scraped content, keyworded links, and PPC ads for those keywords. Spambots were then sent out to put GoogleBot on the scent via referral and comment spam to tens of thousands of blogs around the world. The spambots provided the broad setup, and it didn't take much to get the dominos to fall.

As a result this individual found himself with 5+ million indexed pages on Google. Word of this spread like wildfire in the SEO communities, though the general public seems essentially ignorant of Google's latest snafu. Google responded saying that only 'millions' of pages had been indexed and that they were working on tweaking their algorithms to remove the possibility of this happening again. Though close examination strongly indicates that the domains were actually being removed manually from Google's index.

What stuck in many webmasters' craw is not the fact that Google were caught out, but the fact that this scamster managed to get millions of pages into Google whilst Google's managing to ignore many thousands of websites with perfectly good content and is not including them in its index.

Then came the story at the end of June that Google had dropped 'amazon.com' from its entire search index (and its not the only big player to go missing from Google). If Google can't do the big players, then what hope have we, the minnows in the Internet pool?

Will I be sticking with Google? The answer is that for the moment I will. Google is generating some of my best income due to the AdSense program. However, bizarrely, most of the traffic that creates my AdSense income comes from non-Google search engines!

If you want to see the entire article then you can find the full article here

2006-07-10T13:46:00.000Z

Has Google Lost the Plot?

Part 1

As a web developer and webmaster of the www.celtnet.org.uk website I have a vested interest in the way that search engines work and operate. A recent article in the Economist Newspaper indicates that the market share of the various search engines is as follows:

Google: 50%
Yahoo!: 28%
MSN: 13%
Ask: 6%

Google has more market penetration that this, however, as it tends to be used by more 'web savvy' users who are far more likely to buy products on-line. Indeed, the popularity of Google grew out of this community because Google at the time was seen as 'best in classs'. The results returned by this search engine were better than those of its rivals both in terms of the accuracy of the results delivered and the total number of sites and pages indexed. With its search algorithm and its page ranking facility Google delivered both the most and the best results. Even after its stock market floatation Google was basking in the rosy glow of how it was perceived by its user base. But does this view of Google still hold true?

Since its stockmarket debut Google (in common with many other large companies cf Microsoft) has been adding new and often quite different products to 'supplement' its core search engine business. Some have criticized this as an example of a large company straying from its core business. However, Brin and Page, Google's founders, have calculated that Google's engineers should spend apout 70% of their time on core products, 20% on relevant but tangential products and 10% of their time on the wildly fun things that might (but probably won't) lead to a product.

As a result a large number of tiny teams within Google have been working on all kinds of different products. However, many webmasters see this as Google not caring about their core business any more. In fact this is a view that many in the investment sphere now share and Google's share price has been rather volatile of late. Indeed, the view is held that at floatation Google was a fairly simple story: in effect they were a marketing company deploying online ads on top of the most popular search engine on the internet. Now, however, Google looks rather like a mess and comparisons are being made with Microsoft during the mid 1990s where they had a single core strength (Windows OS) and were churning-out a string of rather poor me-to applications.

For example Google Video has been trumped by YouTube and Google News lags far behind Yahoo! News. Google's instant messaging offering lags far behind AOL's Yahoo!'s and MSN's offerings. Even Google's slogan of 'Don't be evil' is looking faintly ridiculous as they use their status as a 500lb gorilla to stifle the growth of web-based developers and entrepreneurs.

Over the past few years Google has almost certainly offered the best search engine experience on the internet. This is significantly due to Google's search and indexing algorithm. The problem now is that Google actively regard themselves as the best and this has coloured their attitudes at all levels and represents one of the reason that they don't seem to have a clear strategy for the future and are currently dabbling aimlessly at a variety of non-core projects. This over-confidence has also led Google to have what might be viewed as an almost-religious faith in their mathematical algorithms which means that there is almost no human intervention as to what gets indexed and why. For Google the important thing to know about a website is how many incoming links are pointing to it and a website's overall rank (its Page Rank) is directly linked to the number of incoming links. This is great for old websites on popular topic, but if you're a new website in a specialist niche your indexing and rankings will suffer as a result.

This is why Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) is employing a different track. They also use incoming links to rank web pages but they also cluster sites and pages by theme. Thus rank isn't absolute as it's measured with respect to a site's or a page's comparison to its peers ߞ an approach that often returns better results than Google's. A cursory comparison certainly suggests that Ask's general web search is at least as good as Google's and it's searches for maps and images are currently superior. As a result Ask is gaining a small but dedicated following.

The potentially really big player in this arena, however, is Microsoft who are weighing-in with their MSN search engine. This is not as good for searching as Google, but has indexed more of the web (for example Google has indexed 86 pages from my site but MSN has 1100!). As Microsoft tweaks MSN's search abilities this product may well offer a very strong challenge to Google. After all, Microsoft has a tradition of entering a marketplace rather late with a fairly mediocre 'me too' product that gradually improves until it prevails. Moreover, MSN will be including an on-screen search box in its next operating system Vista that will be pre-configured to search MSN as a default.

The search engine wars are definitely not over and in tomorrow's article I'll be looking at Google's relationship (or rather lack of it) with their main content providers, the webmasters. Return here tomorrow for the second part of this article.

2006-07-09T18:03:00.000Z

The Importance of Website Search

The paradigm of the search engine is the glue by which the modern internet works. If you need to find any information about a website then you will go to a search engine (probably Google, judging by the search statistics) and you will enter your search terms and find a list of sites that you might be interested in. This is the kind of functionality that visitors expect to find whether they are performing a general web search or whether they are looking for something specific on an individual website.

If you're serious about your website then you will need to provide some kind of search functionality for your site. This both provides your visitors with a sense of professionalism about your site. It also gives them a way to find things that are present on your site but which may not be immediately obvious. You are also providing your visitors with a means of navigating your site that's completely and entirely familiar to them. After all it's how the web works in general.

Google provides this kind of search functionality which you can use on your site via their Adsense program. This is free to join and you can use the Google Adsense button on the left-hand panel of this Blog to join. However, there is one major disadvantage to using Google as your site's search mechanism. Though the system is free (and you don't have to store potentially large indexes on your site) it does rely on Google having indexed your entire site. If you're a new site or you have very few back-links to your site then it's becoming increasingly difficult to enter google's indexes and very few of your pages may be indexed by Google. As a result Google's search system may be of little or no use to you.

Personally I've eschewed Google's site index search system for the very reasons detailed above (though I do include Google web searching tools on my site). Instead I use the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine to power searches on my site. This is a Perl-based system that you can either install for free (or you can pay $40 for a license that gives you slightly more functionality).

This is an impressive system which you can easily download and install (as long as you can execute CGI scripts on your server). It allows you to define your search results page as you want as well as allowing you to decide which pages you want to index and which ones you want to omit. This way you can index anything you want from your site (or your can omit 90% of your site from the index if you want). Moreover, once you've installed the scripts on your site you can use a standard web browser to call the script and execute it, making running the indexing of your site very easy and flexible. The system is very quick as well, both in terms of indexing your site and in terms of the searches you can perform. Even better, you can also specify ads that you want to place on your search results.

The basic search functionality is provided by a search box of the type that you can find on my home page. However, if you want a very simple search box that you can place anywhere then all you need to do is modify the form below to use on your own site:

<form method="get" action="http://my_site_url/cgi-bin/search/search.pl" style="margin:1px;">
<input type="hidden" name="Match" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="Realm" value="All" />
<input type="text" name="Terms" value="search site" onfocus="clearform(this);" style="width:100px;" />
<br style="line-height:2px;" />
<input type="submit" value="Site Search" />
</form>

As the Perl script is usually in the cgi-bin directory simply change my_site_url to the URL of your own website. (Depending on your configuration you may have to name search.pl to search.cgi. IF you want to see how this simple site search box looks and behaves then have a look at my recipe site search function.

Adding search functionality to your site is something easy to do and you can do it with a tool that's completely free and which is under your own control. Don't neglect this important functionality as it's an essential part of making your site both look and feel professional.

2006-06-27T13:52:00.000Z

Interacting with your Visitors

Helping the User find what they want

The first thing to recognize is the nature of the web itself. It is generally information rich but content poor. Most web surfers are internet savvy. They know that they may well have to visit several websites to glean the information they're looking for. As a result they tend not to examine a particular website in detail. Rather they 'graze' a particular site looking for specific keywords so that the particular information they're looking for can be sought-out.

There's a tug-of-war happening at the moment between the needs and desires of webmasters and website owners who want surfers to stay on their website as long as possible and the needs of the surfers themselves who want quick access to a piece of information or a service so that they can move on somewhere else. If these opposing needs are skewed too far in favour of the web designer your user may become so fed-up with your site that they never visit it again. From the viewpoint of the web-designer, it may sound counter intuitive: however, actually helping the user find what they want so that they can leave quickly may actually significantly improve return traffic to your site. If you arrange each web page with easy sub-titles and an obvious key to the main sections whilst providing easily navigable sitemaps and site search systems will make them feel comfortable on your site.

The truth is that even though our societies have changed significantly we humans are basically the same as we were a thousand, two thousand, five thousand years ago. We still live in tribes composed of our families and our nearest neighbours or friends: with a circle of close relationships that's generally little more than 150 people. We have evolved to deal with other people on a personal level. We need to know other people so that we can grow to trust them. Providing easy and consistent navigation on your site helps this aspect of 'trust'. So that people believe you are trying to help them rather than trying to help yourself. Your site will, as a result, become an information resource that they will come back to again and again. This interaction with your visitor, gaining their trust and giving them reasons to come back to your site, is far more important than trying to trap them into your site on a single visit. This is why you should develop your own 'voice' on your site. Make it individual, use your own writing style so that your visitors know you and know you can be trusted. This way they will come to trust other aspects of your site, such as the advertising you're providing.

How we look at Websites and Why

By far the commonest form of advertising on the web today is the banner advert. This form of advertisement often combines animation, sophisticated graphics, and even audio to endorse product information. The effectiveness of such advertising being generally measured in terms of the 'click through rate' which is the ratio of the number of times an ad appears on a page compared to the number of times an individual clicks on the banner. The problem is that banner ads are great for the retailer but poor for the website owner. Analyses by Ipsos-ASI research shows that an internet banner is effectively equivalent to a 30-second TV advertisement in increasing overall user awareness of a brand by as much as 40%. So, 2/5 of your visitors will remember a brand from a banner advertisement after they leave your site but only 1 in every 100 will actually click on the banner. What you're really doing with banner advertising is providing the companies who display banners on your site with a lot of free advertising for very little personal gain.

Indeed, a study by Benway (Benway, J.P. (1998). Banner blindness: the irony of attention grabbing on the world wide web Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 42nd Annual Meeting, USA, 1, 463–467) demonstrated that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. If is from this study that the term Banner Blindness derives. Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study by Athenia Associates which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1/3 of the way down the page.

How humans actually Look at Web Pages

Human beings are great apes. We share a close genetic relationship with chimpanzees and gorillas and we are slightly more distant relatives of the Orang utan. Our colour perception and our front-facing eyes giving us binocular vision are all part of our primate heritage. We evolved in colourful rainforests and colour vision is part of the background to our lives. The problem is that our vision is keyed to movement. This is why static colourful banners can be ignored easily, as they fade into the background of our visual surfing experience. This may explain why animated ads generally have a 15% higher click-through rate than static ads (as examined by ZDNet, 1996) and in some cases may have as much as a 40% higher rate. This is because motion against a colourful background speaks to the primate brain of danger; something we have to investigate to make sure it's not a threat.

If the investigation of movement is something that's hard-wired into our primate ancestry then writing, by comparison, appeared very late in human history Reading and writing doesn't come naturally to us, it's a learnt skill that's an effort to maintain (compare your attitude to spelling mistakes compared with mispronunciations if you don't believe me). Reading requires a conscious effort which is why recent investigations examining where an user's eyes track on a web page show that about 92% of the time is used-up in examining textual data as show in a Poynter Institute study of 2000.

This has led to the trend for using text-based advertisements with the same colour scheme and fonts as used in the main body of the text. This way the reader of the web page actually reads the text of the advertisement (or at least scans it) in the same way that they scan the remainder of the text. This has proved very effective, and in using it on my own site I have seen an almost 8-fold increase in click-through revenue (yes, that's right 800%) since movingtot text-based ads embedded within the text of the web page itself.

Knowledge is power, and once you know how people actually view your web pages and what works/doesn't work you can begin to alter your marketing strategies to make the most of your content. If you want to know more about this subject, then read my page on Internet Advertisig Effectiveness.

2006-06-20T20:23:00.000Z

The Importance of Links

If you're serious about promoting your website then you will have realized by now that after creating your website and optimizing it for your chosen keywords or phrased the MOST important thing you can do is to improve the number of incoming links to your website. After all the internet is supposed to be a web of interconnected sites.

Indexing systems such as Google also need some way of measuring the importance of your site on the internet and one of the ways to do this is to measure the number of incoming links to your site. Of course, what your really want are a large number of high-ranking sites (with PR [page rank] of 5 or better) with incoming links only to your site, but that's not really realistic.

Your incoming links, however are important. What you want are good incoming links as these (at least in terms of Google's latest algorithms) count the most count the most both in terms of giving your site good page ranking (PR) and in terms of getting your site deeply indexed. Reports coming from Google even indicate that if you don't have sufficient incoming links then though your site may be actively spidered it will not be thoroughly indexed. Indeed, I have fallen foul of this myself and have some anecdotal evidence to support this as a reality.

In putting up my main Nemeton: Home of the Celtic Gods site (along with its sub-sites of Nemeton: Home of Ancient Recipes and Celtnet Information web information site) I concentrated on putting-up good content and where possible writing tight code that would verify well. I did join a few web-rings to get initial traffic and after a few moths, as I wrote new content Google was finding and indexing the pages with the spiders coming about once a week. By March I had an adsense income of about $80 a month (not great, but pretty good after only three months in the program). Then in April the adsense money dried up...

I was desperate to find out what had happened and eventually when I went to the Google sitemaps page I found that my indexed pages had dropped by 90% and almost 75% of these were marked as 'supplemental' from August 2005 and would realistically never be found in any normal web search. It was horrible. Initially I thought this might be a 'blip' and I waited for a month but the situation did not improve. Desperately searching for whatever might be wrong I cleaned-up the sites, thinking that they might have been penalized by Google for whatever reason.

Then, finally I came across this posting on Matt Cutts' BLOG. It looks like my problems were all down to my inbound links (basically I had none). I'd taken a very 'white hat' approach to the whole web thing and having a good website I wanted my links to grow naturally. My desire was basically to have the site pay for all my internet and web hosting costs, which basically meant getting $70 a month, which I'd achieved. But the new Google indexing rules meant that I was in a bizarre catch-22 situation. Google wouldn't index my site unless I had enough inbound links and there was no way to naturally grow in-bound links unless my site was indexed — which is complete madness!

This was pretty much when I decided to join the remainder of the web world both in attempting to make as much money as I could from the website and in using any and all means possible to get good in-bound-links [IBLs]. Partly this started as an experiment to see whether it would work or not. First I started with web directories that offered free in-bound only links. But finding these sites and signing-up to them was proving to take an enormous amount of time. As I result I signed-up to the service offered by Seoster who submit a website to multiples of 100 directories for $10 per set. I opted for 200 submissions to see what would happen. Their service was quite fast and in just over a week I had my first confirmations of inclusions. A few days after that and the number of pages indexed in Google began to climb at a rate of about 5 pages every other day. A breakthrough!

Of course, these were all decent inbound-only links. Which fits with the proposition that in-bound links score better in Google's algorithms that reciprocal links. Though reciprocal links also count in terms of Google's indexing algorithm. As a direct result I decided to update the whole linking process at my site, designing a new PHP front-end and using a MySQL back-end which would allow users to automatically submit their sites to the index for either reciprocal links or paid uni-directional links. This led to the development of the CeltNet Links System.

Of course, I can't ever let a good thing go so I also extended this page to link through to a classifieds advertising page which offers both free and paid-for classified ads. I'm now in the process of adding as many links as possible (though, as recommended by Google I'm only allowing links that fit-in with the three themes of the website: Celtic, Web Information and Recipes. In a month I'll post again to let you know how this new approach is working for me.

2006-06-14T13:57:00.000Z

improving your Website rankings and Website Income

The advent of Google's new Bigdaddy datacentres and their latest indexing software has significantly raised the bar in terms of getting new (and even some established) websites indexed. In terms of how your website is likely to be indexed what seem to count now are unique inbound links (especially inbound links from sites with good page rank). If you want full indexing of your site and want to improve your page rankings you will have to increase the number of inbound links you have (and joining link farms won't help you).

One of the ways to do this is to join on-line web directories such as such as The Open Directory Project (DMOZ). There are literally thousands of these available and many will cost you nothing to be listed and won't even expect a reciprocal link from you. These will get you the needed links and as many have good page rank they will also improve your page rankings. If you don't want to hunt-out these directories yourself then you can use a service such as: Seoster who will submit your site to a large number of directories at a cost of $10 per 100 submissions.

Another way of increasing your visibility and your indexing is to use and write for article sites such as eZines.com which allow you to submit articles where you can use deep links into your site as part of your signature at the end of the article. This not only provides you with additional links to your site but also gives you deep links, improving your overall indexing.

However, perhaps one of the most best-kept secrets of successful webmasters is the program run by morethantraffic.com. This is a truly innovative program that aims to make you $100,000 US Dollars in 4 months from your web site!; simply by driving an increased stream of traffic to your site — which is what we all want!

What makes this program stand out, however, are its terms. The company aims to make you $100 000 in just four months. So confident are they that you can make this target that they are not going to charge you their fee unless you reach this $100 000 mark. Indeed, if you don't reach the target of $100 000 in four months they will give you the remaining eight months of your one year absolutely free! Now, you can't say much fairer than that (especially for a program that actually works).

Moreover, as well as allowing you to dramatically increase the income generated from your own website they are also making a a very lucrative affiliate program available so that you can also make additional income by driving new sales to their website. Yes, that's right, they give you two streams of income instead of one...

I've joined this program with my Celtnet website and I have to admit that currently I'm well on target to earning my first $100 000. Try it out for yourself, you have literally nothing to lose.

If you want to learn more about some simple search engine optimization tricks for your website, then see the full story on my webmaster resources page.

2006-06-06T09:06:00.000Z

CSS Cascading Menus

If you're even partway interested in the web and the position of your web pages in the major search engines you will undoubtedly have noticed that big things have been happening to how and when Google indexes web pages. This is mainly as a result of their Bigdaddy datacentres and the changes to indexing software. This means that incoming links from good sites (without reciprocal outbound links) are becoming more and more important in terms of which sites Google index and how deeply they index sites. As a result, the more help you give the indexing bots the more likely they are to find the internal links on your site and to actually crawl those links.

Expanding dropdown menus are an useful way of providing navigation to your users in a pretty, intuitive and space-efficient manner. However, the standard ways of implementing these types of menus (in frames, using JavaScript) means that they will probably never be indexed by the search bots. How, then, can you provide the same functionality to your users, whilst also allowing the bots to find and cache your valuable links.

The answer is to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which is a way of defining styles used to mark-up standard HTML tags and elements in what can be very beautiful ways. In fact, you can encode your menu as a standard unordered list cascade and then use CSS markup to turn this into a cascading menu.

In essence this is done by hiding the leaf nodes of the menu and only revealing them when a mouseover event occurs. If you use the following CSS code:


div#menu ul ul ul,
div#menu ul ul li:hover ul ul
{display: none;}

div#menu ul ul li:hover ul,
div#menu ul ul ul li:hover ul
{display: block;}

it achieves precisely this for you. You can now achieve the hid-and-reveal functionality of a menu, but what you have is still only a list (albeit with some cool functionality). It will take quite a bit more CSS style to convert this into a proper cascading menu. To achieve this you will need to add the following CSS code:



#menu {
width: 105px;
background: #0000FF;
margin-left: 5px; 
position: absolute; 
top: 180px; 
left: 0px;
}


#menu ul {
list-style: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

#menu a, #menu h2 {
font: bold 9px/16px arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
display: block;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
border-color: #ccc #888 #555 #bbb;
margin: 0;
padding: 2px 3px;
}

#menu h2 {
color: #000;
background: #FFFFCC;
text-transform: uppercase;
}

#menu a {
color: #666666;
background: #efefef;
text-decoration: none;
}

#menu a:hover {
color: #a00;
background: #fff;
}

#menu li {position: relative;}

#menu ul ul ul {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 100%;
width: 100%;
}

Note that the first #menu item in the CSS code above defines where the menu box should be located on the page (in my case it's on the left-hand side of the page just below my standard page header. After this come the functions that take care of how each element in a menu apears and how they are positioned relative to one another. Apply all the code above to an unordered list within a <div id="menu"> block and you will get your cascading menu.

To see such a menu in action have a look at this recipe page. If you want step-by-step instructions (with examples and complete code) for how to implement these CSS menus have a look at this CSS menu guide page.

Because the indexing bots view web pages as if they were pure text (they do not apply style sheets and do not look at JavaScript) when they encounter a CSS menu it simply looks to them like an unordered list of URLs and each and every link is cached and navigated. Which is precisely the kind of behaviour that we want the bots to perform.

2006-05-30T08:59:00.000Z

Creating a Medieval Font

The Web is a wonderful thing, and with xhtml and CSS it's possible to be to be very precise in terms of designing the look and feel of web pages. In many ways, the latest page specification techniques mean that page layouts for web pages are beginning to get close to those for the typeset page. However, the one place where web page design falls behind the design of the printed page is the case of fonts. All web designers are limited in what they can do by the fonts physically installed on the viewers system. This means that either a default font needs to be used for a web page or a series of similar fonts need to be specified (in the hope that the viewer has at least one of these installed).

This is all well and good as it allows the viewer to specify default fronts and font sizes in their browser (and to over-ride what the page designer has done to make the pages more viewable). However, if one is dealing with old writing systems all the desired characters in the desired fonts may not actually be available. Of course, it's possible to allow people to view images of such texts and PDF files but these don't really marry well into the design of a website and break what should approximate a 'seamless' browsing experience.

Was there a way to overcome this? One early solution of embedding fonts in web pages seems to have effectively died a death (I wanted my solution to be available on as many modern web browsers as possible). First I checked to see whether anyone had already generated what I wanted... In brief I was looking for a way to publish the text of about ten manuscripts written in Old and Middle Cymric between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries and to remain as close and as faithful to the original manuscripts as the needs of modern typography would allow. This necessitated the use of almost 300 glyphs or characters that were unique too these manuscripts, many of which did not exist in any modern font. The only way to get anywhere near the characters I wanted was to design my own font.

Thankfully photographs of the original manuscripts that I wanted to base my font upon were made freely available by both the National Library of Wales' Digital Mirror project and by the University of Oxford Digital Library project. Other manuscripts were made available as facsimile reproductions. Using these sources I could go through the images and extract the best representation I could for every single character I wanted in my font. After a bit of cleaning up I had a set of almost four hundred images representing my desired character set.

At about this time a very generous friend gave me a copy of what was then Macromedia's Fontographer and I spent a few weeks importing the images into this, getting the application to draw outlines around the characters and then cleaning-up the resultant glyphs and re-sizing them so they came to the same scale. The resultant font had all the necessary characters for the Western European languages, the extant Celtic languages as well as all the additional glyphs I needed for the proper representation of my Medieval manuscripts.

I then left this font languishing for over a year as I did other things with my time. Then, on reading an article on Unicode I picked-up the font again. The glyphs were re-organized to comply with the Unicode 4.0 standard with my additional characters being placed either in existing gaps in Unicode or within an undefined area called the 'Personal Use Area'.

With the basics of the font done I started looking at the Medieval manuscripts and began to encode a few to use my new font. The first of these being the manuscript Math Mab Mathonwy from the Mabinogi book known as the Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch (if you're interested my translation of this into English can be found here). This worked well, as long as you had my font Mabinogi Celtic Font installed on your system. In which case you'd see the text as in this image:

If you didn't have the font installed then all the standard 'Latin' characters would be displayed but the remainder of the text would be gibberish. I did think of writing at the top of each page that the font Mabinogi Celtic had to be downloaded but that wasn't a particularly elegant solution and would interrupt the 'look and feel' of the page. The question remained: what could I do. Then I came across a posting someone had made about using JavaScript to check whether a website visitor had a given font installed. The posting itself was old even when I encountered it and was essentially broken for most modern browsers.

It did give me an idea though and I bought a couple of books of JavaScript to see whether or not I could implement something myself. After quite a bit of frustration I came up with a way of using CSS layers to compare my font with what should be an existing font on the user's computer (I chose Arial for this). The code itself is given below:


<div id="dummy" style="position: absolute; visibility:hidden">Test</div>

<div id="layer1" style="position: absolute; visibility: hidden"><font face="MabinogiCeltic, Mabinogi Celtic, Arial">Test</font></div>
<div id="layer2" style="position: absolute; visibility: hidden"><font face="Arial">Test</font></div>
<div id="layer3" style="position: absolute; visibility: hidden"><font face="MabinogiCeltic">Test</font></div>


<script language="JavaScript">

if(document.getElementById&&!document.all)document.getElementById("dummy").innerHTML= document.getElementById("layer1").offsetWidth;

if (((document.getElementById) && (document.getElementById("layer1").offsetWidth == document.getElementById("layer2").offsetWidth)) ||
((document.all) && (document.all.layer1.offsetWidth == document.all.layer2.offsetWidth)) ||
((document.layers) && (document.layers.layer1.clip.width == document.layers.layer2.clip.width)))

document.write("<font size=3 color=\"red\"> Warning: This page displays the document in in its original form and employs characters used only in Medieval texts. To view these characters you will need to download and install the specially-designed font, \"Mabinogi Celtic\", which can be obtained  <a href=\"../mabfont.html\">by following this link<\/a>.<\/font><br/><br/>");
else
document.write("");

</script>

Essentially I'm creating three layers here. The first is a dummy layer, the second contains my font (but defaults to arial or the system font if not available). The third layer has araial font (but defaults to the system font if this is not available). Once the layers have been created and the text 'Test' has been rendered in them I check the size of the layers. If the two layers are the same size then my font (Mabinogi Celtic) isn't available and the following warning is printed:

Warning: This page displays the document in its original form and employs characters used only in Medieval texts. To view these characters you will need to download and install the specially-designed font, "Mabinogi Celtic", which can be obtained by following this link.

If the two layers are different sizes then different fonts have been loaded into them and no warning is displayed. Hopefully this should mean that my font, Mabinogi Celtic is available and the page simply displays the Medieval text correctly. This all seemed great, and for IE on Windows and Safari on the Mac it all looked and worked great. However, someone eventually pointed out to me that the font wasn't working for Firefox.

After a bit of digging it looked that there was a problem with glyphs in the range E1F1 to E2C9 which were simply being ignored by Firefox. In the meantime I'd added Ogham, Runic and Greek scripts to the font so that all Celtic writing systems and early texts could be handled by it and with the move of the offending glyphs to the region EFF0 onwards the font now worked with Safari.

As a result the proper full version of the Mabinogi Celtic Font is now ready for download. All the document pages have been updated to use this font and with the font download page updated and the font's insallation instructions improved the system is now ready for release. So, if you want to view my Medieval texts or you want to give your own documents a genuine Medieval feel, why not download the font and give it a go?

2006-05-26T13:35:00.000Z

Internationalizing your website

One of the problems that I faced with many of my web pages was the need to offer seamless internationalization. The ability to serve ads based on the local of the surfer. The problem became even more urgent as I added eBay misspelling searches and Amazon product additions to various pages. My default was going to be the US, but I didn't want surfers from other territories I was targeting from other territories feeling left out or alienated. Basically I wanted the page to default to the appropriate territory without the user having to click on anything.

Eventually I found the software 77 site, which makes a database of IP addresses linked to country available for free. Of course, once you have access to this database (which is delivered as a CSV file) it's possible to start doing some clever stuff. The site even provides some free example code in Perl, php and java on which you can base your own code.

Then I did some digging of my own on the web and I found that I could download and process the raw data for myself (I hate relying on someone else for a datasource if I don't have to. After about an afternoon's tinkering I had the code to download and parse the files in place. Then I started to write the code to actually use the database of IP to country name lookups I'd generated (which actually didn't take long). Then I started plugging it into my own code. So the eBay international misspelling tool so that international visitors are automatically taken to the correct eBay store.

After that I began working on a new page which demonstrates the code by showing a visitor their IP address and displays a flag for their country of origin. Moreover, and possibly more importantly the web page generated takes you step-by-step through the entire process of how to generate your IP to country name database as well as all the code to use it and do something useful with it. Everything you need, in short, to seamlessly internationalize your web pages.

If you want access to the page and all the technical detail then you can find the IP to country name mapping instruction page here. On this page you will find a description of what I did along with all the code necessary to implement this functionality on your own web pages. Remember you're basically getting for free what some companies are charging you $99 a month for. Moreover, because the code and all the instructions are provided you can modify this code to do precisely what you want it to. What could be better than that?

2006-05-25T10:02:00.000Z

Individualized Amazon Store

The Amazon affiliate program is probably one of the best out there and if you haven't joined yet I suggest you go to Amazon UK's Affiliate site or Amazon.com's affiliate site (or your local Amazon's affiliate site to sign up. This process will take a few days as amazon will check your website for content and to make sure that it doesn't contravene any of their policies. Once you have been accepted, however, you will be entered into the program and you will receive your affiliate ID.

Once you have this then you can start generating your own Amazon store (you will be paid a commission on every sale you make which will range from 4.5% to 8% (though there is a cap). The system is also organized so that after you've sold 51 items the earnings increase to 5.25% per item (and this increases is retrospective for the items already sold as well). There are also bonuses for sales through a remote cart and direct links, so that by the time you reach 101 sales you should be earning an average of about 7.5% commission.

One way to start an Amazon store is to write your own reviews and add amazon links to them, or to use amazon links if you have book references in your text (which is how I started). This is not a very efficient approach and obviously takes time to set up. So, is there any way of setting-up your own Amazon affiliate store? In fact there is. Amazon (including various of the major localized variants) produce an XML stream of their products. This can be parsed and incorporated into your own website to generate a personalized/individualized Amazon store for your own website.

A number of scripts and/or systems for incorporating an Amazon store into your own website exists. These range from the entirely free basic scripts where you have to do some programming of your own to fully automated systems. If you're into hacking your own code then the amazon products feeds site. This is a free script that you can install and modify how you wish. If you want something a little more 'polished' then I'd go for the free ASM2 script which you can install and configure for your own use (though you'd probably need to do some manipulation and configuration).

If you want/need something a little more automated then two products to be recommended are associate-o-matic's Associate-o-matic and ghostscripter.com/amazon_shop.php's Amazon Shop. Associate-o-matic costs $99 for a full license, though there is a lite version that is delivered free (though 10% of your comissions go to the authors of the script. Amazon Shop costs $110 for a full license (though if you're not interested in poking around within the source code it's $49).

All these systems will alow you to build your Amazon-based sales pages/sites and almost all the systems above will also allow you to target multiple amazon sites (usually US, UK, Canada, Germany [and generally France and Japan as well]). With these systems you can also target the amazon results you return so they fit with the contents of your site. As a result if you have a minisite or a microsite (for an explanation of this see the Celtnet minisites information page) which is directed to a given topic and which also has a potentially lucrative amazon store associated with it. Alternatively, if you have a recipe section of your site (as I do) you can deliver information about recipe books and cooking utensils or gadgets to associate with them.

How much money you make is then entirely dependent on how much traffic you drive to your website, though even 250 or so visitors each day is enough for you to make a profit of at least $40 dollars a month (and this is after paying for your domain name, web hosting and DSL connnection charges). Once you've set it up the system looks after itself, and if you can make a profit from each site you place the system on then you will soon be making a steady additional monthly income.

2006-05-24T17:40:00.000Z

Build your own PC Pages go Live

After considerable work, the section of my site on how to build and upgrade your PC is now complete. This section of the site takes you through all the main components of a modern PC (everything from the motherboard through to printers and displays). Once you've acquainted yourself with the main components of a PC the next page takes you through how to build a PC from scratch based on the components I've collected for my own PC. This page also tells you where and how I sourced the various components and shows you how you can gather the appropriate bits and pieces quite cheaply.

After purchasing your components, the guide lets you know precisely (step-by-step with all the necessary illustrations) to put everything together, starting with the motherboard, then the internal drives and finally the connections to the case itself.

2006-04-24T20:11:00.000Z

eBay, Misspellings and Google Meta Tags

Misspellings are far more common on the internet than most people think. These result from typographical errors, typing English words how they are pronounced rather than how they are spelled (something that can be compounded by regional and geographic variants). Then there are the differences between different international variations of English). Then there are confusions between homophones (words that sound the same, such as dire and dyer). Some of these errors arise because of mistyping neighbouring keys (where wealth becomes wealyh) others arise because certain sounds in English are similar (b and v for example or even r and l). Other errors occur because of character transposition (such as herd becoming hred) due to miss-typing or characters being dropped (such as search becoming serch) and characters being added (passed becoming passed).

Many of the common misspellings can be derived from the rules of language (which is where being an etymologist helps). Other instances can be derived from (for example) the differences between American and British English. Such lists are freely available (if rather hard to find). Using these it's quite possible to produce an application that derives these errors 'on the fly'. Indeed, it is this application that drives the Celtnet eBay Misspelling Tool. The code also forms the basis for the 'on the fly' calculations performed in the Celtnet MisspellingSearch tool for finding misspellings of words and short phrases. This tool can be used to create misspellings a site's keywords and it outputs a pre-formatted <META> tag to plug straight into your website.

Beyond the basic algorithm (implemented in PERL, with a PHP interface) comes the hard slog. There are a number of misspellings 'in the wild' that essentially defy the standard linguistic laws (in the main these are caused by local variants in spoken English or miss-typings due to right-hand and left-hand dominance). The only way to capture these and to create rules for generating them is to search for them. This necessitates writing a spider that searches for web pages with significant paragraphs written in English displayed (and requires that the pages crawled be 'balanced' in terms of technical pages and pages written in formal and colloquial English). Once the pages are brought back and the HTML tags have been stripped it's a question of passing the pages through a spell-checker (I'm using Aspell which has a PERL interface and handles International English variants) so that the misspellings can be identified. All misspelled words are placed in either one of two files; a file where the misspelling is obvious and a file where there are several possible interpretations for the misspelling. The first of these is amenable to automated analysis whilst the second needs manual intervention. Over many weeks this builds-up a view of the 'real' misspellings on the internet. Some of these misspellings are fed to a database whilst others are built into the Perl script that auto-generates misspellings. (The database I've constructed currently has 1356781 words with almost 2 billion misspellings and it's almost 100Mb in size).

I've now reached the 'diminishing returns' stage for these analyses as it's taking a trawl of almost 30 sites to find a new misspelling (though the other sites are providing useful data on misspelling frequency). As a result it's time to make the various misspelling systems available for others to use. There will probably be updates over the next few weeks, but these will be incremental improvements rather than major revolutions in functionality.

If you want to give these systems a whirl (and they're completely free to use) you can find them here:

Celtnet eBay Misspelling Tool to find misspelled eBay listings for eBay sites in he US, UK, Australia, India and Ireland.
Celtnet MisspellingSearch a generalized misspelling tool to aid with website meta-tag optimization

2006-04-23T15:02:00.000Z

Microsites and how to Use them

'What is a microsite?' you may well ask... If you've never come across the term before, it's about time that you learnt about them and how you can use them to make money for you.

With the Google AdSense program you can place ads on your own site and gain money from these ads (if you're not already a member then you can use the adsense link on the left-hand panel to join the program). Am microsite (sometimes called a minisite) is a site designed to drive AdSense traffic to a domain of yours. Such a site is usually eight to twenty pages in total and it's specifically written around a single highly-specific topic (for an example see this credit card information site of mine. The site is designed like any big site, with site links and contact pages and a sitemap. There's also real content on each and every page and this is something that the search engines love, proper content. The site is also optimized in that each header and each link contains text that relates to the site's keywords.

As a result of this the site is Search Engine Optimized (or SEO'd to use the current acronym). This improves the site's overall rankings in Google and overall gives you a higher ranking and therefore brings more traffic to your site and the aim of all money-making websites is to attract more traffic. Ultimately, the more people who visit your site the more money you will make...

Depending on the subject a single AdSense minisite will make you between $15 and $60 every month (though it can be more for some sites). For a single site this doesn't really sound like very much, however, as this income can be gained for each and every minisite you have then you can multiply this income stream by twenty, a hundred or even two hundred fold. This is when the monthly income starts to mount up.

I can hear you asking: 'But how can I generate 100 or more sites like this — won't it take forever?' with all the code and the images the first of these websites did take me about four evenings (24 hours) to complete. But I knew that I'd be creating many more of these, so I designed the code to be completely portable and easy to replicate for any website I wished. Indeed, the code is so portable that I'm making it available for FREE to anyone who wants to deploy their own. After that first site it takes me on average two evenings (12 hours) to make a new site live (and this includes all the research and the images!).

Admittedly this isn't my main income stream any more, but the 20-odd microsites that I currently have 'live' still make me a very nice income every month. Moreover this is a very low-maintencance way of generating income. I spot my niche, but a related domain name, create my microsite on my normal hosting plan, point the new domain name at the directory containing the site and the system goes live. To boost initial traffic and get links to the new site I'll write a few articles to be published on various article sites. These articles usually go 'live' in a week and within two weeks I generally see both traffic and income starting to emerge from the microsite.

Even if you can only spend two evenings a week generating your microsite you should have at least 40 such sites up and running within a year which should see you generating at least $400 a month by the end of the year as long as you've chosen your niches well.

One thing to remember is that you're looking for niches with little competition to maximize your traffic and your Google ranking. However, there's no point in making your site too focused otherwise you will have insufficient traffic. The adage here being first do your research. Think of your niche, then think of some keywords related to that niche. Once you have these use Google to perform a search and see how many competitors you have in the niche area. Remember to have a look at some of the top-ranking pages. After all, there may be many thousands of pages in your chosen niche but you may be able to provide better content than any of them and thus you can still come out top of the rankings. It's a question of balance and knowing a little about what you're doing and how you're going to market your site.

If you already have a domain and some server space you will lose noting by giving this a try and it might just make you a tidy extra income!

2006-03-31T21:29:00.000Z

I know that I've been silent for a few days now, but that's because I've been busy on a large-scale project, the pilot version of which goes live today. This is an 'everything you ever wanted to get out of eBay' site. Offered are searches for eBay in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India and Ireland. Searches by keyword, by category as well as by current (local) auctions are offered. The site can be configured to work with any of the locales given above. Once the local is set then the the remainder of the site will work for the country named.

I'm also working on a way of getting searches based on common misspellings and typographic errors to work on all the eBay sites above. I have a system that works 'on the fly' but need a few more days' processing to get the asssoicated database fully populated. In about a week I aim to have this system fully working. This will allow you to find all those ads that fall off the normal eBay listings, snap them up cheap and then potentially sell them on for a profit your self! And the URL? You can find the site here: The eBay search site.

Please note, everything but the misspelling search works now, so why not give it a go?

2006-03-26T17:34:00.000Z

Today I've finally hit a true milestone. There are now more than 1000 content pages on the site! This comes with the addition of almost 100 translations/redactions of Medieval recipes from the book A Form of Cury. The Medieval recipes section now includes authentic recipes and ideas for every meal (and for snacks as well!).

2006-03-23T21:31:00.000Z

Today sees the release of the fifth microsite for the Nemeton domain and this time it's a biggie. In this microsite you can learn all the secrets of how to become a succesful affiliate: at absolutely no cost to you. The information provided on this site would probably cost you $60 or mor on some sites, but I'm presenting it to you absolutely free. Not only will you learn about how to go about getting hold of affiliate content and links for your site but I also let you know (based on the latest research) which affiliate links acutally work and where to place them on your site. Click on this affiliate information link now. It'll be the best few minutes you've spent reading a website.

2006-03-22T19:42:00.000Z

As promised, and several days ahead of time! the new Celtic god database search engine goes live. With this system you can search the entire list of Gaulis, Celtiberian and Brythonic deities to find any ancinet inscriptions (or Medieval manuscript) mentioning the deity and the source of the original reference. The data here is also linked to the pages detailing all the information on that god provided on my site.

2006-03-21T15:39:00.000Z

Finally, for the day Celtnet goes global! The nemeton site now has a new home as I've purchased the domain celtnet.net from which to serve the site. This reflects the change in the site's status from a small hobby site into something that's much more (and which also takes-up an ever-increasing amount of my time). But don't worry, if you're already linking to pages at celtnet.org.uk I intend to keep that domain name going as well so your links won't break.

2006-03-21T15:26:00.000Z

Just to show that I've not been entirely ignoring other revenue sources to enhance my web activities whilst I've been working on the searchable list of celtic gods, I've also been working on a new adsense-targeted minisite all aobut credit cards: what they are, how to get one, how to use them wisely and what to do if you get in trouble with your cards. The Credit Card Information site is available here.

Along with the Weight Loss with Hoodia gordonii site and the Prostate Cancer Information Mesothelioma Cancer Information cancer sites this makes four of these minisites in all thus far, with several more in the planning pipeline.

If you are interested in making this kind of minisite yourself to capture adsense traffic then I've placed all the necessary instructions and made all the requisite code and templates available on my Minisite Generation Page in the information section of the website.

2006-03-21T15:20:00.000Z

It's been a while since I posted, but that's mainly because I've been very busy of late. I'll soon be putting-up a whole new search page where you can search the entire database of all the known inscriptions to all the Celtc gods of Britaini and Gaul. To this list I'm also adding all the Cymric (Welsh) gods and heroes known from all the ancient Welsh texts (and the search results will all link to the appropriate page describing that deity on my site. It's taken a while as I've written all the code myself but I'm in the midst of final testing now and aim to have the new system up and live early next week. Watch this blog for more announcements.

2006-02-21T20:10:00.000Z

The brewing section of the recipes part of the site is now available, including basic recipes (with full instructions) for making ales and meads. Also there are lots of recipes for making specific kinds of ales and meads and authentic Medieval and Elizabethan versions of these.

They are all linked from the brewing home page http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/brewing/brewing.html.

2006-02-16T12:58:00.000Z

The website celtnet.org.uk may have been going for almost two years now, but this is the first time I've had a chance to produce a Blog. Watch this space for information on site updates as well as thoughts and comments on all matters Celtic, cookery and brewing related...

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