Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Hats off to Dr Andy… it’s not sexy but it’s true… straight from Dr Andy Williams’ latest newsletter…

“I was talking with a friend this week who works long hours, and wants to change his job. He was asking me about affiliate marketing.

The problem is that he doesn’t have savings, and so needs to be earning from day one (which isn’t going to happen in this business), or start part time while he keeps his existing job.”

I added the bold emphasis.

There are just too many “false guru” marketers who tell you how easy it is to make money INSTANTLY. Well, if you can find an opportunity to make money immediately, you’d better start shoveling cash into the bank because as soon as someone else sniffs out that opportunity and the competition grows, you’ll have to start sharing that opportunity with others. And as soon as someone writes an ebook about the opportunity, you’ll be flooded with competitors.

That’s capitalism and market forces at work.

It’s not too smart to keep going for the “easy money”, only to discover that you have to keep hunting new “easy money” every few weeks or months when the initial “easy money” gets flooded with competition.

Building a solid, profitable business takes time. Let’s see how many “false guru” marketers admit that.

I was just reading this blog post… “Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished?” where Donna asks why her blog, which I presume had its PageRank decreased because it ran ads or paid blog posts without using nofollow, is still being “punished”. She says,

“I dumped text link ads. I nofollowed paid links. I javascripted links that might be mistaken for paid links. I canceled my sponsored review accounts. I switched to a different method of monetization (Scratchback) that serves Google-friendly, nofollowed links. (And btw, Google, that put a huge dent in my revenue, just so you know). Finally, after I cleaned up everything that might possibly make you hate me, I filed a reconsideration request about 5 weeks ago.

And I did all that for…what? Did you give me my PR back? No, you did not. Did you even communicate with me to tell me that you still think I’m naughty for some unknown reason? No, you did not. You simply did nothing.”

Matt Cutts commented on her post and said,

“I’m guessing your disclaimer might have been an issue; you still say “This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation… The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog…””

Whoops!

Matt goes on to say that “I chatted by email with the person who looked at your reconsideration request when you submitted it. They pointed out e.g. *link* where you’re still flowing PageRank in a paid post (you mention in the post that it’s a sponsored post).”

Whoops!

And then, “Before I go back to the person doing the reconsideration request, I also noticed this one: *link*”

Whoops!

Donna made the suggested changes and then, “UPDATE: little green pixels have returned”.

Yay for happy endings.

OK, so my test of Kontera Ads showed rather quickly that their earnings were poor in comparison to Google Adsense but I stuck with it because I wanted to run a long test to be statistically sure that my results were accurate. We also had Vered from Kontera comment at the blog post and say that they had tweaked my account settings to optimize the earnings. After that, I felt it was only fair to give the ads an extended run to see if the earnings improved.

They didn’t.

The harsh reality is that the Kontera eCPM (earnings per thousand page impressions) was under four bucks. I’ve now qualified for their minimum payout ($100) so I’ll be removing the Kontera ads and testing my own brand-new method of advertising. I expect it to massively improve site earnings…

(note: I ran Kontera ads at the same time as Adsense during my test. The Adsense earnings fell by about the same amount the Kontera ads earned. I don’t know what Kontera ads alone would have earned.)

If you register domains and slap up websites with a quick sales letter, freebie giveaway or a bunch of articles for adsense… you’ll want to keep reading…

Go to your server admin area (usually Cpanel) and click on “List Accounts“, then look at the table containing all your domain names and find the column “Disk Used“.

If you’re like me, you’ll be in for a nasty surprise. Some of my websites which just had a few webpages were using up hundreds of megabytes of disk space.

How can that be?

It’s simple. All the pesky spam arriving at the email box was just sitting on the server, using up disk space.

Right now I’m deleting almost 60,000 spams… from just one account. They’re taking up almost 200Mb of space!

I cleaned two accounts yesterday, and have more to do. I guess I’ll free up over a gigabyte of space by doing this spring clean.

The next step is to enable SpamAssassin for each account (it’s under Mail Manager), set the score to a nice low number (I’m using 2 instead of the default 5) and click the link that says “To simply have the server DELETE and NOT deliver emails that are tagged as spam by SpamAssassin, click here now.”

Boom. Bye, bye spammers. Hello tons of extra server space.

According to this page, a storm hit Mid-Missouri a few week ago. Sadly that storm damaged the property of Jan Tallent, a fellow Internet marketer and someone who has been a valued affiliate of mine for many, many years.

To make matters worse, Jan didn’t have valid homeowner’s insurance and so the costs of repairing the storm damage fall to her.

According to Jan, “Monday night, January 7, 2008, we got hit with enough hail, high winds and hours of pouring rain that my poor, old, decrepit house lost part of the ENTIRE roof and the bad parts I was hoping to be able to afford to fix in the spring are much worse.”

To help raise funds to pay for the repairs, Jan and her friend Sharon are having a firesale.

I haven’t reviewed the products being offered in the firesale, but most are Private Label Rights products which you can resell and keep all the profits, in addition to hopefully learning a thing or two from them yourself!

Check out the details here. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that there’s a huge amount of value being offered, and the funds will go to helping Jan get back on her feet after the storm damage.

Join the club.

It’s for sale? The price is going up? It’s not for sale? Scribd stopped allowing outbound links because of the volume of Internet marketers flooding their system? SMARTS was to blame for that flood? Now SMARTS is for sale again, but only for 24 hours? And they’re rolling back the price to the initial launch price, so you “save 600 bucks”?

OK, you got me. I’m confused.

BTW, I’m not posting an affiliate link because I haven’t reviewed the product. I hardly ever promote something “blind”. The few times I did, I got burned. So “never promoting blind” is a new rule of mine.

BTW, what happened with Scribd is a great example of why building your business using only other web properties is not a great idea. They can pull the rug from under you whenever they feel like it. For example, see the Google Slap when the Adwords program stopped sending traffic to people’s landing pages. Boom. There goes your business.

I always liked that little “number of pages indexed” at the bottom of the Google homepage… back in the days when they were competing with Inktomi (now Yahoo) and Altavista (now, err, part of Overture, which is part of Yahoo) to have the largest index. I guess now the competition includes Microsoft. Back then, it didn’t!

I was wondering how big Google’s index is now. I found a page saying that the specific search query, *-”a yielded 17,960,000,000. The page is dated December 2006.

So I tried the same search query today and got 11,900,000,000 results.

Does that mean Google has kicked out six billion pages from its index? That’s almost exactly a third!

(Using the *.* search used to return 25 billion documents, but that search no longer works, so it can’t be used in a comparison.)

A shrinking index would account for the recent decreases in PageRank that people have been seeing… if the index has shrunk by 1/3rd, then there’s less PageRank to go around.

Google still claim to have an index, “more than three times larger than that of any other search engine“. Can that still be true if their index is shrinking?

I’ve just finished polishing my new site… PRCashRank. Check it out.

If you’ve ever wanted to know how much your website was worth, but knew that a domain name valuation was pretty much pointless, you should enjoy the free website valuation service at PRCashRank.

Instead of relying on spurious domain name valuations, or the number of pages indexed by Google, it actually calculates the value of your site based on the PageRank of your individual pages.

I think it’s quite nifty. What do you think?

Why didn’t I think of this… using little ASCII-pictures in Google Adwords…

A German car rental company used little ASCII-art pictures of cars as their Adword Ads.

Apparently it got a 47% more clickthroughs. LOL. Genius.

(how it got past Google’s automated filters, I’m not sure)

Ok, this is slightly old news, but I just found out about it.

If your pages in the Google index didn’t have much PageRank juice, they were shunted to the Supplemental Results Index. Being in the supplemental index wasn’t a penalty, as such, it just meant that Google didn’t consider your page to be important enough for their main index. A lot of people who were worried about the “duplicate content filter” were concerned that the supplemental index was a Google “dumping ground” for their pages… even though a “duplicate content filter” doesn’t exist.

Google still showed pages from the supplemental index in the search results… if they couldn’t find enough results from the main index. So if someone searched for “italian pink bamboo shoots” and yours was the only page matching that search query, your page would be shown as the only result… even if it was a page in the supplemental index.

So, the supplemental index was nothing to get worked up about… apart from the fact that Google was effectively letting you know that your pages in the supplemental index needed either more original content or more inbound links if you wanted those pages to get into the main index.

All well and good. Until Google removed the “supplemental index” notice when returning results from the supplemental index.

Google said, “Google’s technology has improved over time, and now we’re able to crawl and index sites with greater frequency. With our entire web index fresher and more up to date, the “Supplemental Results” label outlived its usefulness.

For webmasters who have used the supplemental result label as a diagnostic aid, Google encourages the use of our Webmaster Tools and also our Analytics service. These free services can provide you with insight into those pages that users and Google may find less relevant.”

Anyone else think that smells fishy? We all know that Google crawls higher PageRank pages more often. So they must crawl lower PageRank pages less often. But according to them, they now crawl everything so frequently that there’s no need for a supplemental results index. Hmmm. What about all the oodles of duplicate content? Won’t those pages still be in a supplemental results index? I would expect so… all except the most “relevant” page… but now you just won’t know.

Also, saying that “These free services can provide you with insight into those pages that users and Google may find less relevant.” is a bit nonsensical. Just install the Google toolbar and the PageRank indicator will tell you how “relevant” the page is to Google… and hence also to its “users” because Google determines what the “users” see by primarily ordering the results according to PageRank.

Well, webmasters kicked up a fuss. You can read their replies here. What do you think?

Update: There’s more recent info from Google here. Apparently, everything Google indexes is now in one big, ahem, index. Cue lots of slapping themselves on the back, and lots of headscratching and “so what’s” from everyone else.

… if it was ever really alive.

You know the main problem of advertising online? People hate ads.

Way back in Internet history there were banners… especially run-of site banners, which advertisers bought per thousand impressions. I think advertisers were paying up to $30 CPM for run-of-site banners. I remember selling some to Entrepreneur Magazine… although I don’t remember how much I charged them.

After a while, banners were “tuned out” by site visitors, clickthrough rates nose-dived and the cost per thousand impressions fell through the floor.

What did advertisers do?

They started to pay Goto.com (now part of Yahoo) per click… and the Pay Per Click industry was born. Google took this form of advertising to new heights with their Adwords/Adsense system… and very clever it is too.

But the fact remains that people don’t like advertising. Take a simple example… what do you do when you’re watching a movie and the ads are shown? You head to the kitchen for a snack or drink, right?

Advertisers got wise to that trick, so they decided to “sponsor” a movie and have a little mini-ad before and after the movie segments. I guess you’re more likely to see it because you haven’t yet left for the kitchen, or have just got back from it to see the next movie segment. Also, the message isn’t, “buy our stuff”, it’s more, “we’re good guys sponsoring the movie you’re enjoying”. So it’s more of a soft-sell.

Take that message online and it doesn’t really work. How can you make an interstitial page into a “soft sell”? Apart from closely targetting it to the page the visitor last saw, and the page they’ll see next, there isn’t much you can do. It’s still an ad.

So are Adwords/Adsense ads being “tuned out” like banners were?

Are website visitors rebelling against advertising in general?

According to the Telegraph, the huge “Web 2.0″ properties are struggling to turn huge numbers of site users into cash. Apparently, “Mark Zuckerberg apologised to Facebook users for the “bad job” his company made of implementing Beacon, a controversial new advertising system that exploits the power of ‘word of mouth’ marketing.”

Oh dear.

The problem, for Facebook, is that they have huge numbers of competitors… and those competitors will be quite happy to undercut whatever revenues Facebook generates… and Web 2.0 users will be quite happy to go to whatever Web 2.0 website that offers the least advertising.

So we’re left with a dilemma which has existed since the Internet was born… if people are free to decided which websites they want to visit, and there’s intense competition for website visitors, can website owners afford to put advertising on their websites? On the other hand, can they afford NOT to?