What constitutes a paid link?

There seems to be a lot of talk lately about Google penalizing sites for paid text links. One of the higher profile cases is a site called The Stanford Daily who’s page rank dropped from a 9 to a 7 over a short amount of time. On a scale of 1-10, dropping 20% would be bad at any point, but I think we’ll all agree that Google’s page rank system has an increasingly difficult slope to climb when you are talking about reaching the 7, 8, 9 and 10 ranks. Losing 2 spots at that point is a HUGE blow.

Last month we found out that Google slapped a bunch of paid link directories causing them to lose their high ranking in the search results. Following up this month, Google is punishing sites for buying links. This sparked a conversation at my office which lead to the question, what constitutes a paid link?

There were a bunch of scenarios tossed around in our discussion. Some of them where no-brainers, but there is a lot of middle ground here. In those instances, is it up to Google to be judge and jury on what is or isn’t a paid link? Of course it is.

So here’s some instances that got thrown around. The question for each is, who should be getting penalized?

Paid Posts
With sites like ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com offering bloggers cash for writing an article about a product or site, both of which require full disclosure for the fact that they are paid reviews, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to find and penalize these posts.

Text-Link-Ads
This is another great service that links up bloggers with advertisers. With a dead-simple Word Press plugin available to bloggers, it’s easier than ever to earn some cash from your inventory (i.e. blog posts). Advertisers can search for sites offering topics of their choosing, then pick a word or phrase from a post on your site and pay to have it link directly to their site.

Powered By / Sponsored by links
With the staggering number of sites using WordPress to power their blog, there are thousands of designers cranking out new themes that are made available free of charge. When you download and install the theme they usually request that you leave the crediting link in the footer. Could this not be construed as a paid link? They provided their service in exchange for the link to their site. You’ll find an increasing number of these credits link to both the designer and a sponsor. Search the forums at digitalpoint.com to find dozens of offers for sponsored link spots.

Pay Per Click Ads
I’m not talking about Adsense here. I’m thinking more about programs like Revenue Pilot. Sites that let you do more creative things with their ads than just plopping a rectangle in the middle of a post or sidebar. Sure, the links to not point directly to the buyer’s site, but could an argument be made for penalizing the site who’s monetizing some space by having a collection of links he’ll be paid for each time they get clicked?

Affiliate Network Ads
Again, in most cases, these aren’t linking directly to the advertiser’s site, but the blogger has an incentive for keeping the link on his site. Sites like cj.com offer a bounty to their publishers on behalf of their advertisers for all traffic that perform a certain action on the advertiser’s site. This has to be considered a paid link then, right?

The way I see it, given recent events, if you are getting any sort of benefit from a link, direct or implied, then it has to be considered a paid link and everybody in a 10 mile radius is likely to be penalized.

Leave a comment and let me know who you think is being penalized or should be being penalized for their actions in the scenarios above.

[Dear you fine folks over at Google. I am not receiving any benefit from the outbound links in this post. Cheers, geeeek]

How to profit buying Pay-Per-Click advertising

About 6 months ago I decided I wanted to run an ad on Google Adsense promoting an offer I thought had serious potential. I had no idea what I was doing. I rushed over to Google Adwords and signed up for an account. I created a campaign, added in a couple hundred key words, wrote my ad and sat back waiting for the money to roll in. After a week went by and I had spent a couple hundred dollars on traffic and had made only 1 sale, I had to stop the campaign. I was losing 90 dollars per hundred spent. What was I doing wrong? As it turns out, just about everything.

In order to profit using pay-per-click, it’s important to do your homework first. Here are some steps you can take BEFORE you pay for your first click.

Step 1, research the product

Step 2, Find out how the offer converts

Step 3, See how many ad views you can expect

Step 4, figure out where your ads are likely to display

Once you have the above information, you can now do some simple math to decide if this is a product you are willing to advertise.
A = Cost Per Click
B = # of clicks to make a sale
C = Affiliate Payout
D = Cost Per Lead

A * B = D
C - D = Your profit

When first starting out, I suggest you error on the cautious side when it comes to figuring out how many clicks it will take to make a sale.

Now that you’ve done your homework, it’s time to put it in to action. If you haven’t done so already, Sign up for a Google Adsense account.

When creating your campaigns, there are several factors to keep in mind. Here’s a list:

Some additional tips to keep in mind:

You may notice that all my information relates to how to run PPC ads on Google, but not on Yahoo or MSN. Since Google supplies it’s search results to many other online search sites, by advertising in Google, you are also advertising across many other networks. When you are just starting out I suggest you stick to Google. If, over time you have come up with a successful ad campaign that has had time to age gracefully, you may want to consider creating the same ad in the Yahoo or MSN networks. This is an if, and only an if, you are already seeing a steady profit from the same ad over an extended amount of time.

Best of luck to you.

A marketing challenge of my own

Sorry Ed, my interest in the 30 day challenge has left me. I tried. I swear. I tried. So, as of today, I believe I am officially out of the running for “winning” the 30 day challenge. However, I was able to get one of my content pages ranked in Google and since I didn’t use tumblr, my page is still up there in the rankings. I’m ranked about 120th, so I’m not exactly beating the visitors off with a stick, but, I think with some cultivating and linking, I can move up that ladder.

I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything from the 30DC. I learned quite a lot. I found a bunch of great tools, met some great people and found some killer new blogs to read.

So, after talking with Jason and Jake about this, I have decided to run a bit of a marketing challenge of my own. But, I’m going to do it slightly different. Rather than drag out the content for 2 weeks before showing you at all how to make money from the challenge, instead, I’m going to give you all the rules and ways to make money right up front! Novel concept, I know.

My challenge is not timed. My challenge has no prizes (except your own personal satisfaction). My challenge does not require you to spend zero money (though, you may not have to.) My challenge is… this:

Create your own niche site and generate your first affiliate sale through the use of article marketing.

“How do you do that?” you ask. Follow these steps:
1. Find your niche market
2. Find/purchase a domain name that fits your niche.
3. Set up hosting for the site.
4. Find an affiliate product to sell on your site (try cj.com or clickbank.com for products)
5. Install a CMS like WordPress or Drupal
6. Create initial content for the site (4 or 5 articles to get you started) - be sure to include links to your affiliate products in your articles, or banners in your site’s template.
7. Create articles to publish to article sites such as ezinearticles.com (be sure you create UNIQUE/QUALITY articles for each article site.)
8. Generate traffic to your site through the use of social bookmarking services (check out socialposter.com)

The idea is simple, get yourself in to the habit of creating worthwhile content that generates interest and therefore generates traffic and/or sales.

Here are the Rules:
1. Use your own domain name
This way, when you drive traffic to the site, no matter what, they are seeing your content. And, if your niche has other things to offer, you aren’t stuck with all your traffic going to a ridiculously narrow targeted page.

2. The domain must be new (or at least not already be in use)
The idea is for everybody to start on the same level playing field. If you have a domain name that already has 200 inbound links, that’s great… just don’t use it for this challenge.

3. You can not pay for traffic
Again, it’s fine to spend money on a new domain name and hosting if needed, but for the sake of this challenge, let’s leave the media buys and PPC campaigns for other sites.

Leave a comment or contact me and let me know if you are interested in taking part. You can start as soon as you like.

Knock ‘em dead!

An important lesson about saving content

When creating content that you are going to post on a free service (like tumblr.com, googlepages.com, wordpress.com, etc…), you may want to store a copy of that content on your computer.

Today tumblr.com went through and shut down several hundred new accounts belonging to the people from the 30 day challenge. I am certain that some percentage of those people wrote their content directly in the edit box on tumblr. Had they instead written their content in a text editor (yay, Ultra Edit) and saved it, they would be able to easily add that content to some other page rather than having to re-write the entire article.

When you don’t have control over the environment where you are placing your content, take that in to consideration ahead of time to save yourself some real grief later on.

30 Day Challenge effect backlash

A few of the blogs that I read have been pointing out the fact that the methods described in the 30 Day Challenge are just not going to work long term. I have to disagree to an extent. Let me explain:

The idea behind the 30 Day Challenge was to be able to make $10.00 without spending a dime. This means you can’t buy new domain names, hosting for a site, nothing. Everything you do has to be done on free services. So, when Ed Dale tells everybody to go sign up for Stumble Upon, all of a sudden, Stumble Upon is going to receive a few thousand new signups in one day. They are going to take notice. Same thing with tumblr.com. All of a sudden, in one day they started getting a VERY large amount of new signups, each with some marketing phrase used as it’s subdomain. They are going to feel the effects of the 30 day challenge and they are going to take action. And, since everybody created all their new pages in a 24-36 hour period, it going to be pretty simple to find and eliminate those accounts.

Had there not been several thousand, but instead a few dozen new accounts created on tumblr.com, it’s most likely that these would have slid under the radar and the purpose for creating these pages would have been realized. The purpose being only to TEST OUT A NICHE MARKET. The end-game here is not to use tumblr.com or any other free hosting service as your long term solution for keeping your content, but merely a way to test and see if it’s worth going to the trouble (and expense) of creating a new site with consistent content using your own domain name and your own hosting, etc, etc.

Give me your thoughts.

The rubber hits the road in the 30 day challenge

During the first two weeks of the Thirty Day Challenge, we spent a lot of time reading and learning and researching, but not a lot of time “doing”. The wait is over. On day 16, we were shown a new tool that we will use to build our pages where we will drive our traffic. That new tool is called tumblr.com. My team and I are all pretty sure that squidoo.com was going to be the place where we were going to host our content, but since google.com slapped them around recently, squidoo.com wasn’t going to work.

So far, messing around with tumblr.com, I have to say I like it’s ease and simple approach. Creating a blog-type site can be done in a matter of a few minutes. It handles all the heavy lifting and you can focus on just adding content. Bingo! What’s not to love? They also have several site templates you can choose from, and you can also create custom ones yourself. For the sake of the 30DC, we’re going to use a standard one.

So, I’ve picked my umbrella phrase, I have done my research and I have written my article. Time to set up a tumblr.com account. Since you need to have a unique email address for each tumblr.com account, I went over to google.com and created an email account. I then went back with my new account in hand and tried to set up an account at tumblr.com, but, amazingly enough, somebody else has already chosen my same phrase. Unreal! Jason was kind enough to point out that since I had created the Google account, I could just use Google Pages to create my content. Brilliant! 10 minutes later, I had created my page, formatted the text, added a photo and a link and I was all done.

So, check it out, here is my first content page for the Thirty Day Challenge. I’d be thrilled to hear your feedback. Also, while you are at the page, feel free to Stumble Upon, add it to your del.icio.us account, Twitter it or use any other Web 2.0 social networking tool to give it some link love. You know I appreciate it!

Next stop, top 10 on Google!

Internet marketing with no internet access

This afternoon when I arrived home from work, I was all ready to sit down to a nice long evening working on a couple sites and getting caught up an some market research. Unfortunately, my internet connection was not going along with that plan. I had no connection. None. After a call to the cable company, I now have an appointment for a service tech to come find out what’s going on.

For the past few weeks our Internet connection has been dropping for 20 minutes at a time every hour or two. This has made it difficult to get any sort of flow going over the past couple weeks as I spend half my available work time being upset by the lack of a connection. So, tonight when it happened again, it made me think about what I could do in my down time with no Internet connection.

Here is a list of 5 things you can do to be productive when Internet access is unavailable:

1. Unplug!
OK, that may sound like the exact opposite of being productive, but you will be quite surprised with how re-energized you will be when you sit back down to get to work after a few hours away from the PC. Plus, getting out and hanging out at a park, a mall or just about anywhere else can produce new ideas for your projects.

2. Plan your next 5 blog posts
While you may not be able to use the Internet to research the topics, you can still plan out the topics and map out a basic layout of your next few posts. This way, when the connection comes back, you’ll know already what you want to research.

3. Write stub posts
Most of my posts have links to articles, tools or sites. But the bulk of the content comes from inside. So it should be no problem to write out a few posts that will only need to be touched up with a few links that can be found once your connection fires back up.

4. Backup your work machine
WHAT?? Make a backup? Who does this? Honestly, I wish I would more often. I recently lost (read: accidentally deleted) a chunk of data that I had been working. Losing 5 or 6 hours worth of work is a bummer that can usually be avoided by having a backup. I’m guilty of not backing up my system on any sort of regular basis. Are you, too? Taking care of your work system is usually the last thing on your mind. It’s always just there ready to work when you are. Take some time to make sure that you don’t lose any valuable data.

5. Brainstorm
Head on down to the local book store and pick up a couple trade magazines. Getting caught up on the current happenings is great, but dig a little deeper. Most trade magazines have a “market place” section with smaller advertisements. This is a great place to come up with ideas for new topics to research for your blog or article writing projects.

As a bonus item, one other thing you should do is make sure your wireless network is secure. I’m only able to make this post because one of my neighbors is kind foolish enough to leave their wireless network open and unsecure. For my wireless network, I lock it down by mac address. Each piece of wireless equipment has a unique ID called a mac address. Your wireless network router has the ability to shut out all traffic except for traffic that comes from equipment that you have added to your list of approved equipment. By not doing this you are leaving your network open to all sorts of trouble.

30 day challenge 10 days in…

The 30 Day Challenge is moving along nicely now. After spending much of the first week wondering where in the world all this stuff was going, I can finally say that I see a light at the end of the tunnel. On day 10 we were given a bit more information on how to conduct our research and then we were given the weekend to catch up on everything we’ve learned so far, and we are supposed to narrow our key word searches down to two candidates that we want to move forward with. I currently have about 5 terms that I think have potential, so tonight I’ll try to narrow them down, or, I may just be an overachiever and run with all 5.

The market research portion of the 30 DC can be a bit tedious. You do the same thing over and over and over again. I finally got the idea to stream line my searching process and I created a tool that lets you enter your terms and it will pull up the 3 relevant result pages. You then pull out the proper information from the pages and either add the term to your list to continue with, or throw it on the reject pile. I have a VERY large reject pile at this point. If you want to try out the keyword search, you can find it here.

Day 1 and 2, getting your feet wet

Day 1 of the challenge was pretty simple, really. Not much to do, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something to learn. Day 1 could be summed up with the following list, in order, of the things we are going to do.

1. Market Research
2. Get Traffic
3. Generate Conversions
4. Create Product

When you first look at this list, it sure looks like these are out of order, doesn’t it? Why would you consider getting traffic or trying to generate conversions if you don’t already have a product? It’s simple, actually - why go to the trouble of generating traffic for a product that isn’t going to produce sales?

On day 2 we got our first real chunk of homework to do. We’re supposed to create a list of niche markets that we want to work in. After creating the list, we need to narrow the list down to 7. While you don’t need to pick 7 markets that you are well versed in, at least choose markets in which you have an interest in digging deep and learning about the market you are going to be promoting.

It was suggested that we stay out of the “major league” niches like fitness, health, dog training and refi/banking.

Finding popular niche markets to promote may sound like a daunting task. But, there are actually dozens of places you can go to come up with ideas for markets based on what’s popular on the Internet right now. Here is a list of places you can use to search for hot trends:

Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, Lycos Top 50, AOL Hot Searches, ebay Pulse, Amazon New Releases, ehow.com and Google’s Most Popular.

Keep in mind, this list is nowhere near complete. I’m sure you already can think of several other sites where popular trends pop up. Keep your eyes open and a notepad handy.

Coming up tomorrow in the challenge, how to do market research on our 7 new markets.

If you haven’t already done so, go to thirtydaychallenge.com and sign up for the largest Internet marketing project around. You will NOT be disappointed!

Getting started with the 30 Day Challenge

Over the past few days I’ve introduced a few new people to the 30 Day Challenge. The problem is, they didn’t get the 2 weeks of pre-season build up that many of us got. Obviously, all the content is still available, but there is quite a lot to get caught up on in a short amount of time. So, for those of you who are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information available on ThirtyDayChallenge.com, I’ve put together a quick and dirty list of things to do to get ready for the challenge.

Tools
There are some fantastic tools available to us that are not only very powerful, but best of all, they are free. Some of these tools you may have already heard of, some will be brand new to you. So, to get started, you should download and install the following tools or plug-ins and sign up at the websites that we will be using for the challenge. I’m not going to provide an explanation of why or how each tool is used as that’s going to be covered during the challenge. I’m just going to point you to what you are going to need.

And the tools are:

- Firefox Browser (Download). Many of the tools that you will be using are plug-ins for the Firefox browser.
- SEO for Firefox (Plugin)
- Firebug (Plugin)
- Del.icio.us (Plugin) Requires an account at del.icio.us
- Fleck (Plugin)
- Scribe Fire (Plugin)
- Search Status (Plugin)
- Session Manager (Plugin)
- Stumble Upon (Plugin) Requires an account at stumbleupon.com
- Twitterbar (Plugin) Requires an account at twitter.com
- Facebook (Social Network Site - create an account)
- digg.com (Networking / bookmark site - create an account)
- youtube.com (Networking / video site - create an account)
- itunes (MP3, video player - download)
- skype (Download) [note: I don't recall if they specifically suggested Skype, but he definitely mentions that he uses it and it's a great tool used for communication]

Another tool that you will definitely want to get is an RSS reader. During one of the videos Ed Dale suggests creating an account at bloglines.com. However, I’m already a user and a big fan of netvibes.com, which is also a free tool. If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you may want to go with bloglines so that if they explain how to do something specific using that tool, you aren’t left wondering how to duplicate it in a similar tool. The choice is yours on this one.

After you get all the tools downloaded, installed, signed up and whatnot, you will want to try and find a team to join in the 30 day challenge forums. This is certainly not required, but suggested by Ed as a way to share ideas and to help keep you motivated. Next, log in to Facebook and search for the thirty day challenge group and join up. Also, you may want to search for other friends who are already facebook members and add them to your friends list. Based on what I’ve seen so far, networking is going to play a big part in the 30 day challenge.

In day 1 of the challenge, Ed suggested that over the next 3 days the training and homework will be fairly light and then we will all have the weekend to catch up. So there is no need to panic if you haven’t had a chance to watch all the videos and listen to all the podcasts. Take your time. Get caught up and get ready to learn, earn and make some new friends over the course of the 30 day challenge.

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