Introduction to Cost Per Click

For Google AdSense advertising, effective keyword analysis is backbone of your endeavors. Without good key analysis research skills, you are just shooting in the proverbial dark.

We have already discussed in some depth how to determine the supply and demand for a keyword/keyword phrase using the 'R/S' (results/searches) ratio. The 'R/S' ratio is nothing more that an indicator of how easy it is to dominate a keyword/keyword phrase. The lower the number, the easier it will be to penetrate that market. If you need some more detail on this, read some of my earlier posts.

We also have discussed in an earlier post, that even though a keyword/keyword may have a low 'R/S' ratio, it may be because there is a low demand for that keyword/keyword phrase. Therefore, you have to establish a floor, a minimum volume of monthly traffic - say 5,000 to 10,000.

Okay, now we are ready to embark on the next topic: Selecting the 'Right' Keywords.

Let's give a little Google Adwords/AdSense background here - as best I understand it.

Google Adwords - when you open a browser and go to www.google.com and search a keyword, such as 'train', on the left, with a white background, you will see the 'normal' Google search engine, spidered, results. On the left, at the very top, in a shaded section and on the right you will see Google Adwords selections.

Advertisers bid on keywords, like 'train', and they tell Google that they are willing to pay a certain amount to get ranked at a certain position on the page. The more they are willing to bid for the keyword, the higher the position their ad will be on Google.

The cost per click for 'train' for the #1 spot on Google is $1.24. That means that the advertiser, every time they get a click, pays Google $1.24.

Simple enough.

On the other side is Google AdSense:

Google AdSense is a vehicle where Google and a website owner partner up and display Google Adwords ads on a web page. So, let's say you have Google AdSense set up on your website page. A visitor comes to your site page, and clicks on a Google AdSense ad link - what happens? Well, assuming that the visitor clicked on the top link (links that are ranked higher on the page are worth more), the advertiser is charged $1.24 by Google (the bid amount for that keyword). Then Google splits a portion of that $1.24 with you, the site owner. The exact amount is product of calculations that Google does. But the idea is, the more expensive the keyword to the Google Adwords advertiser, the more you get paid. Do you see the connection?

So what does this mean for you, an AdSense participant? You want to optimize your site pages on keywords that have a high amount of traffic (searches), a low amount of competition (results) and that have a high Cost Per Click (CPC). If you get all three of these, you have a winner.

Signing up for Google Adwords
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16768. Reference Document.

Basically, you are going to create an account for the purpose of research for AdSense. When Google Adwords prompts you to enter in ad information, don't be concerned about the ad running - it won't run until you actually fund the account.

http://google.com/adsense

Sign up now "Click to Begin" button

Starter Edition radio link and continue button
1. location and language - choose you location and language
2. write your ad:
What site will your ad link to? http://www.bogussite.com
What will your ad say?

This is a great product
This is line # 1
This is line # 2

3. Choose keywords: bogus

4. Choose your currency: Choose your currency

5. Set you budget: $30/month

Click the "Continue" button

Setup Account

Email: -- your real email address

Password: - a real password

Click on "Continue" Button

You will receive an email confirmation from Google Adwords. Click on the link in the email.

Okay, now go to this link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

For our example:

Enter one keyword or phrase per line: trains
Choose data to display: "Cost and ad position estimates"
How much would you be willing to pay per click (Max CPC): 10.00

Click on "Get More Keywords" button.

What you will see is a list of keywords and each associated cost per click.

Now you know how much an advertiser is paying for a keyword. Why settle for a keyword worth $.05 per click when you get one for $5.00 per click. Do you see what I mean?

You want to build your pages around this higher CPC keywords.

Okay, that's enough for today on that.


Assignment

Sign up for your Google Adwords account

Perform searches on your favorite keywords/keyword phrases and try to identify those that have the lowest R/S ratio, with a good amount of traffic and with a high CPC

Activities for http://Kitten-Pictures.com since my last post:

Was solicited by 3 or 4 websites for link exchanges via link metro (www.linkmetro.com) - and I accepted.

Posted new photo

Search Engine Rankings for Keyword Phrase "Kitten Pictures" on http:Kitten-Pictures.com since my last post:

www.alltheweb.com - 0
www.altavista.com - 0
www.google.co.uk - 0
www.google.com - 0
www.google.de - 0
www.msn.com - 41 (unchanged from last time)
www.yahoo.com - 0


Search Engine Rankings for Keyword Phrase "Kitten Pictures" on http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com (this site redirects to http://Kitten-Pictures.com)

www.alltheweb.com - 0
www.altavista.com - 0
www.google.co.uk - 0
www.google.com - 0
www.google.de - 0
www.msn.com - 3 (The same as yesterday)
www.yahoo.com - 0


Questions? Comments?

I welcome them. You can either post the question in the comments section at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at Stan -@- StanBeck.com. Please feel free to tell others about this blog and/or my Kitten Pictures site.


Until next time…

Make it a great day!

Page Optimization Analysis

Today, we are going to analyze our competition's sites (actually, just the #1 site in Google's rankings or this will be a really long post), looking for potential weaknesses that we can exploit…
There are three major factors search engines use to evaluate your site:

1) Page Optimization - how well you page is 'search engine friendly'
2) Links from other sites
3) Site Content

Let's focus on Page Optimization analysis for the #1 ranked site in Google for the keyword phrase "amtrak train schedule". This happens to be ole' Amtrak themselves (www.amtrak.com).

So, let's get everything set up. Open a web browser (I am using Internet Explorer) and go to www.google.com. Search for "amtrak train schedule'. Click on the highest ranked site, which at the time of this writing is www.amtrack.com.

We need to look at the html code that comprises this site. In Internet Explorer (I.E.), it is <view> and then <source> (from the drop down list). A notepad window will pop-up with Amtrak's main page's html code. If you've never looked at html before, this is going to look a little strange - but I'm going to help you.

These are the elements that we are going to look for:

1) Title Tag
2) H1 Tag
3) Bold/Underline/Italics Tags
4) Image Alt Tags
5) Keyword/Keyword Phrases within the first 25 words
6) Keyword/Keyword Phrases within the last 25 words

Okay, now what is our keyword phrase?

"amtrak train schedule"

In notepad, search for the following items listed below.

Title Tag (<title>amtrak train schedule</title>)
Search for "<title>"
Here is www.amtrak.com's Title Tag -> <title>Amtrak</title>

Notice that only the word 'Amtrak' exists in the title tag. This is an area of weakness that we can exploit.

H1 Tag (<h1>amtrak train schedule</h1>)
Search for "<h1>"
There is no <H1></H1> tag .

Bold Tag (<b>amtrak train schedule</b>)
Search for "<b>"

<B><a HREF="javascript:if(location.href.indexOf('espanol.amtrak.com/amtrak/enes')!=-1){idx=location.href.indexOf('mp_act_url');if(idx!=-1){pidx=location.href.indexOf('&',idx);uidx=location.href.indexOf('=',idx)+1;url=unescape(location.href.substring(uidx,pidx));pms=location.href.substring(pidx+1);location.href=url+'?'+pms;}else{location.href=location.href.substring(location.href.indexOf(';')+1);}}else{location.href=location.protocol+'//espanol.amtrak.com/amtrak/enes/?24;'+location.href;}" CLASS="NavBarWhite">En Espa&ntilde;ol</a></B>

<B><a HREF="http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/HomePage" CLASS="NavBarWhite">Home</a></B>

<B><a HREF="http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/Help" CLASS="NavBarWhite">Help</a></B>

<B><a HREF="http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/ContactUs" CLASS="NavBarWhite">Contact Us</a></B>

<B><span CLASS="NavBarWhite"><a HREF="http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/Search/AdvancedSearch" CLASS="NavBarWhite">Search</a></span></B>

<b>Departs:</b>

<b>Departure Date:</b>

And so on - you get the idea

There are no bold tags

Italics Tag (<i>amtrak train schedule</i>)
Search for "<i>"
There are none - the would look like <i>text</i>

Underline Tag (<u>amtrak train schedule</u>)
Search for "<u>"
There are none - the would look like <u>text</u>

Alt Image Tags (Look for the text "alt=")

These are the pseudo pop-up labels that are displayed in browsers or browser configurations that block images from displaying.

Search for "alt="

Here is what I found:

ALT="Amtrak"
alt="spacer-blue"
alt="spacer-blue"
ALT="spacer"
ALT="Nav Angle"
ALT="Reservations"
ALT="spacer"
ALT="Schedules"

And so on - you get the idea.

"amtrak train schedule" appears in none of the Image ALT tags.

Keyword/Keyword Phrases within the first 25 words
Search for "amtrak train schedule".
The keyword is not found.


Keyword/Keyword Phrases within the last 25 words
Search for "amtrak train schedule".
The keyword is not found.


Summary
From a page optimization standpoint, this page is very weak for "amtrak train schedule".

Assignment
Perform the same analysis that we've just done on sites ranked 2 through 10 on Google.


Activities for http://Kitten-Pictures.com since my last post:

Solicited about 30 more link exchanges.

I changed my main text font on my site to Arial 8pt so that I more closely matches the Google adsense font and size

Posted new photos each day

Wrote another article called "Cat Dander Allergy - The Mystery Solved" - I didn't submit this one to the article submission sites. I'm going for the keyword 'Cat Dander Allergy" - it has a Google adword cost per click at about $.87


Search Engine Rankings for Keyword Phrase "Kitten Pictures" on http:Kitten-Pictures.com since my last post:

www.alltheweb.com - 0
www.altavista.com - 0
www.google.co.uk - 0
www.google.com - 0
www.google.de - 0
www.msn.com - 41 (was 0 previously)
www.yahoo.com - 0


Search Engine Rankings for Keyword Phrase "Kitten Pictures" on http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com (this site redirects to http://Kitten-Pictures.com)

www.alltheweb.com - 0
www.altavista.com - 0
www.google.co.uk - 0 (I've fallen from 751 to zero)
www.google.com - 0
www.google.de - 0
www.msn.com - 3 (I was #1 yesterday and floated back down to #3 this morning)
www.yahoo.com - 0


Questions? Comments?

I welcome them. You can either post the question in the comments section at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at Stan -@- StanBeck.com. Please feel free to tell others about this blog or my Kitten Pictures site.


Until next time…

Make it a great day!

R/S Weighting Further Explored

Yesterday, we looked at a formula to determine the relative weighting of how possible it is to dominate a keyword/keyword phrase. I call it the R/S formula and it is as follows:

Results / Searches = RS Weighting

I was going to talk today about estimating clicks in Adsense, but it has been requested that we slow down a tad and take more time to develop the Results / Searches topic. So that's what we'll do.

I took the liberty to put into an Excel spreadsheet the keywords/keyword phrases and their respective searches, results and "r/s". Remember, this was generated for the keyword 'train'.

And I sorted them by "R/S" ascending.

Now, remember, the lower the "R/S", the better.

Let's walk down the list…
























What catches my attention? "amtrak train schedule". This keyword has an "R/S" of 77 with monthly searches near 10,000. If you compare that to say, "train photo", which has an "R/S" of 46,121. This is very low, especially for the traffic level.

Hmmm, my curiosity is definitely piqued. We need to look at the competition a little bit. Let's do a query in google.com and search on 'amtrak train schedule'.

Here is a list of the top 10 in order:

1. www.amtrak.com/
2. www.dot.ca.gov/hq/rail/depots/stops/emy.htm
3. www.dot.ca.gov/hq/rail/amcalroutes/rtes.htm
4. www.roomsatpar.com/global/train_schedule.html
5. www.trainweb.org/amtrak/
6. www.amtrakcascades.com/
7. www.primetravels.com/rail.shtml
8. www.amtrakhiawatha.com/
9. www.acerail.com/schedules/bus-schedule.htm
10. www.concordtrailways.com/maine_bus_schedule.htm

The next step is that we need to analyze the competition's sites to see whether or not there is a vulnerability that we can exploit. We will deal with that next time…

Assignment
For the keywords you had chosen, perform the same type of analysis that we did above.


Yesterday's Activities for http://Kitten-Pictures.com

• I didn't solicit any new link exchanges
• Posted to my favorite google group
• Placed a free Ad in AdlandPro Classifiedso Put up a new post on http://Kitten-Pictures.com
• Began to work on a new feline-related article (content is king!)
• Submitted to search engines using Web Position 3

Today's Activity Plan for http://Kitten-Pictures.com

• Put up a new post on http://Kitten-Pictures.com (done)
• Post in my favority google group about cats (done)
• Submit more link exchange requests (have already done 8 today so far)
• Put up a new post on http://Kitten-Pictures.com (done)
• Work on my feline-related article

Search Engine Rankings for http://Kitten-Pictures.com

www.alltheweb.com - 0
www.altavista.com - 0
www.google.co.uk - 0
www.google.com - 0
www.google.de - 0
www.msn.com - 0
www.yahoo.com - 0

Search Engine Rankings for http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com (this site redirects to http://Kitten-Pictures.com)

www.alltheweb.com - 0
www.altavista.com - 0
www.google.co.uk - 751
www.google.com - 0
www.google.de - 0
www.msn.com - 3
www.yahoo.com - 0


Questions? Comments?

I welcome them. You can either post the question in the comments section at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at Stan -@- StanBeck.com. Please feel free to tell others about this blog or my Kitten Pictures site.

Until next time…

Make it a great day!

Today has been a busy day of promoting and learning – more about that a little later in the post…

The Next Step

If you recall from yesterday’s post, I recommended that you:

o Make and inventory of your skills and hobbies
o Download Good Keywords and get familiar with the demand for keywords which represent your skills/interests.

Let’s move on to the next step.

With Good Keywords, we looked at the keyword ‘train’ and saw that over the last month, there were over 147K searches.

Now, let’s talk a little economics for a second. Do you remember the laws of supply and demand? Let’s, in our mind, think of the number of searches returned by Good Keywords as a representation of demand. Does that make sense?

Now what about the supply? Well, here is the cheap way (not necessarily the easiest) to get this information. (I generally recommend that you do things the hard way the first time, so when a tool comes along to automate the process, you have a greater appreciation for it.) An easy way to get the supply numbers is from a search engine, like Google.com.

Open Google.com and type the word ‘train’ in the search box and press the “Google Search” button.



















Notice the words just above where you typed ‘train’. They say “Results 1 – 10 of about 448,000,000 for train”. That 448 Million represents the number of pages that searching on ‘train’ returns. That number is your supply.

So what we are going to do now is divide the Results by the Searches or the ‘Supply’ by the ‘Demand’.

What are our Results (Supply)? – 480,000,000

What are our Searches (Demand)? – 147,000 (approximately)

480,000,000 / 147,000 = 3,265.31


Now, let’s play a ‘what if’ game for a second.

What if these were the numbers?

Results (Supply) – 240,000,000

Searches (Demand) – 147,000


Our demand stayed the same, but our supply has been cut in half. What does that mean? Well, if the demand is the same and the supply is cut in half, that means there is less competition, right? Right!

Let’s put this in our equation:

240,000,000 / 147,000 = 1632.65.

Did you notice what happened to our resulting number? It was cut in half.

So, we can say that the lower the resulting number, the less the competition, right? Do you understand?

If you are not following this, then reread this section.

So, what you are going to do next is figure out which keyword combinations have the lowest resulting number of our Results/Supply formula.

Look down the list of your keywords/keyword phrases in the Good Keywords tool and for each phrase that is appealing to you, do this calculation. In addition, you should set a minimum traffic goal – say 10K searches per month. If you get too low below 10K searches, you run the risk of there not being enough demand for your topics. However, 10K is completely arbitrary – that’s just the number that I use.

In the next posting, I’m going to show you how you can run some estimates to give you an idea of the money making potential of a keyword/keyword phrase using Adsense.


Assignment

Run your keywords through the R/S equation and determine which keywords/keyword phrases you should focus your time on.


A summary of yesterday’s activity:
o Yesterday, I solicited about 40 more link exchanges in Link Metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/). I’ve got about 100 exchange offers outstanding that I’m waiting to hear on. I had 8 successful link exchanges yesterday. Most of all of my exchanges are with Pet related sites.

o I posted to my favorite groups.google.com forum.

o I uploaded a new Kitten Picture – you can see it at http://kitten-pictures.com/.

o I setup and article page and added an article to it: http://kitten-pictures.com/articles -- the article that I wrote is “An Introduction to Pet Photography”.

o Added to the top of my site a note that let’s people know that I am interested in exchanging links with them.


Today’s activity plan:
o Solicit more link exchanges in Link Metro (already started)

o Write this posting (almost complete)

o List more articles off of the article page (done – a total of nine so far)

o Start working on another pet-related article

o Make a post into my favorite groups.google.com forum (done)

o Upload a new Kitten Picture (done) (www.Kitten-Picture.com)

Here are my search engine standings for “Kitten Pictures” as of this morning:

http://kitten-pictures.com/:
Google: not found
Yahoo: not found
MSN: not found

http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com/ (this site redirects to http:Kitten-Pictures.com):
Google: not found
Yahoo: not found
MSN: 3

Still not seeing much movement in the search engines. Everything that I’ve read seems to suggest that I’m doing all of the write things – advertising my site on forums, publishing original content articles, actively seeking link exchange partners. I believe it’s just a matter of time, especially for Google, which is tougher to get ranked on.

I may also want to start thinking about publishing some content along with my pictures – just to give the search engines something to grasp onto. I’m going to looking into that.


Tomorrow’s Plan:
o Pursue Link Exchanges

o Post to my favorite Google Groups

o Work on my original-content pet-related article

o Work on this sites next post

o Do a lot of reading on various forums.


Questions? Comments?
I welcome them. You can either post the question in the comments section at the bottom of this posting, or you can email me at Stan -@- StanBeck.com. Please feel free to tell others about this blog or my Kitten Pictures site.


Until next time…
Make it a great day!

Still #2 at MSN & Internet Marketing Tutorial

Good morning all. I'm experimenting with the setup of my posts, so please bear with me as I try to figure out the best structure. There is a lot here, so make sure you take time to read through it.

Getting Started

I want to talk a little bit about getting started in this big world of Internet Marketing -- with your own website or blog. If you weren't interested in that, you probably wouldn't be visiting this site.

Most successful sites are those that start with clear objectives in mind. Written is best. Get it down on paper!

Are you trying to make money or are you feeding a hobby?
How do you plan to get visitors to your site? Are you planning on paying for advertising, or are you going to try to get your site ranked by search engines organically?
Who is your target audience?
Do they have money to spend?
Are you selling a product, service or advertising (or any combination of the three)?

You must commit to focusing your site on a niche -- a small narrow band of interests.

My site is about Kitten Pictures -- pretty narrow, right?
It's not about 'Pictures';
It's not about 'Animal Pictures';
It's not about 'Cat Pictures';
It's about 'Kitten Pictures'.

Pictures -> Animal Pictures -> Cat Pictures -> Kitten Pictures

Do you see the progression from very broad to narrow?

So, how do we find this niche? Great question.

Let's start with your hobbies and skills.

What do you like?
What are you good at?
Even more important, what would other people say that you are good at?

** Be careful not to downplay the value of your skills, believe me, there is an audience of people who can benefit from what you know.

Let's say you have a love for trains. You have loved anything about trains since you were a kid.

Let's see if we can find a niche that we can exploit.

For this next exercise, I'm going to use a free tool called "Good Keywords" http://goodkeywords.com/. Free is good, right?

Now, let's open Good Keywords and do a search on the word 'trains'. I'm going to use the Overture US as my source for data. Make sure you download this tool and try it along with me -- this is great practice.





























Notice that the word 'train' garners approximately 147K clicks per month in overture. That's a lot of traffic. However, the word 'trains' is much too broad of a niche, especially when you are starting out. We need to find something a little smaller and more targeted.

Notice that 'Thomas the Train' is also very popular with 54K searches per month. Lionel trains gets about 11K searches per month. That's probably a little more like it.

Just because a keyword or keyword is phrase is popular and gets a lot of traffic, that's only one part of the equation. We need to know how much competition there is for that keyword or keyword phrase.

My next posting will show you how I figure out how to assess the competition for a keyword/keyword phrase.


Assignment
Make an inventory of your skills and hobbies.
Download Good Keywords and get familiar with the demand for the keywords which represent your skills/interests.


A summary of yesterday's activity:

For my site http://kitten-pictures.com/, I posted on the front page that I wanted to do link exchanges. I also looked around a bit for some link exchange software that was free to use. I reviewed some, but haven't come to a decision. I like the link metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/) directory, but their advanced membership which maintains a lot of the mundane link tasks is more than I want to pay per month -- at this time anyway.

I spent most of yesterday pursuing link exchanges on link metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/). I really like this directory because it's not hard to sell -- these people are already predisposed to the idea of link exchanges and so that's one less hurdle to have to jump. There are other link exchanges out there that I noticed when looking on Google, but I've not had time to pursue yet.

I posted a really great picture on the http://kitten-pictures.com/ site -- you all should check it out (small plug :>) ).

I received notice from more article submission sites that my article "An Introduction To Pet Photography" was accepted. I got a couple declines, but mainly due to the content matching the theme of the submission site. The big score is getting into http://ezinearticles.com/ -- they are fairly selective compared to most.


Today's activity is going to be spent doing:

Advertising this blog on several of the Google groups with theme of 'work from home', or 'internet marketing' -- done already!

Post on my favorite Cat Health Google group -- done already!

Writing this post -- almost done :>)

Continue to work on my link exchanges on Link Metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/).

Set up my Article page on http://kitten-pictures.com/ -- ran out of time yesterday.


Make it a great day!

Link Exchanges are happening...

Well, this morning finds http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com in #2 on MSN -- that's good, I'm pretty happy with #2 at the moment while I'm still learning the ropes :). http://Kitten-Pictures.com is still not indexed yet. I still don't quite understand how having one site redirect to another plays out in the search engines. If anyone knows, please let me know.

The Link Metro (www.linkmetro.com) site is working well. I'm getting more and more successful link exchanges each day. I'm keeping all of my cat links on the front page and I created a separate link page (http://kitten-pictures.com/links) for my non-cat links. Remember, the link metro service has a free and a paid subscription option -- I'm going free for right now to keep my expenses low.

Today, I'm going to set up an articles page so I can start listing Cat/Kitten related articles -- content, content, content.

In addition, I'm going to put on the front page of http://Kitten-Pictures.com some sort of message asking folks to link to my site. Someone told me (I think that I read it somewhere) that all you have to do is ask, right?!? We'll see what the response is on that.

That's it for now -- enjoy the rest of your day!

Bouncing Around Again - #3 on MSN today.

I checked MSN this morning and http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com is now #3. -- Bouncing around again!

My article "An Introduction to Pet Photography" has been published in a couple places -- great! The idea is that when google/yahoo etc. re-spider these sites, they will see my article and then will trace it back to my site http://kitten-pictures.com. That will in turn lead to them spidering my site. I will keep you posted on this progress. I'm not sure how often the search engine spiders crawl already-indexed sites.

In addition, I signed up for a free service called Link Metro (www.linkmetro.com) -- a free link exchange service. It's a pretty nice service in that their link partners are broken down by category, so it was easy to find which sites where complimentary to my http://Kitten-Pictures.com site. I sent about 20-30 link exchange requests yesterday morning and I've already picked up 2 accepts. Both sites have a page rank of 3, which is pretty good; certainly better than http://Kitten-Pictures at this point.

If you look at my http://Kitten-Pictures.com front page, you will see lots of links there. Each link represents a link request that I've sent out to various sites. I've telephoned all that I could find phone numbers for and for the rest, I sent an email. The sites that I've not heard from, I'm going to resend my request in about 3-4 weeks. If I don't hear from them again in 3-4 weeks, then I'm going to remove the link.

Now, let me show you a nifty trick on how to easily tell which ones are linking back to me, automatically. I'm going to use the tool SEO Elite:

I launch SEO Elite, I go to option #4...




Option 4 is where I can check who is linking back to my site.

Now I press the "ok" button:



The light green symbolizes those on my site that are linking back to me. The ones that are light red (pink) are not. Pretty cool, heh?

Enjoy the rest of your day!

#2 in MSN again!

I guess it must be common to bounce around a little bit in your search engine ranking -- I really don't know that for sure -- just my observation. My site http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com which redirects to http://kitten-pictures.com has moved from #4 to #2 overnight. Here's what I did for http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com -- NOTHING! However, I did a couple things for http://kitten-pictures.com.

1. I moved my title tag right up next to the head text tag.


2. Second, I added "Kitten Pictures" close to the very bottom of the page.


3. Third, I wrote an article called "An Introduction to Pet Photography" and submitted it manually to: http://goarticles.com, http://ezinearticles.com, http://articlecity.com


4. After those submissions, I decided that that was a huge amount of laborious work, so I purchased some software called Instant Article Submitter to assist. I attempted to submit to about 200+ article sites and about half succeeded. The other half didn't succeed because I need to establish actual accounts on those -- and that's what I'm doing this morning.

Well, I'm off to submit a new kitten picture to http://kitten-pictures.com and submit posts to my groups.google.com cat newsgroup.

Getting Smashed on MSN

Wow -- I need to back off here a minute. Yesterday was a tough day, getting down-graded from #1 on MSN to #2. And today, I've been moved back to #4. Arrrggghhh.

Now it's time to regroup and start cranking it up.

I was trying to figure out what might have happened. You might notice that http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com is the site that is ranked on MSN, not http://kitten-pictures.com. What I did is I started with the http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com and but quickly came to want to add articles which would give me content. So I put in a redirect on http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com to http://kitten-pictures.com. I wasn't too sure how that may play out with the search engines -- this may be part of that. In addition, I'm no longer promoting http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com, only http://kitten-pictures.com.

What am I going to do to rectify this. Well, I'm going to study my competitor's sites and try to figure out if they have a better optimized site than what I have. Also, I'm going to cranking out some articles -- in the 400-600 word range on topics related to kittens and submitting those to article sites. I've got one that I've been working on today -- and it's coming along great.

The other thing is, I've start contacting more sites for link exchanges -- not junk or generic sites, but sites that are related to my key words. I have a lot to do today -- primarily, I need to finish my article and get it posted.

More about my first foray into the world of Adsense

Based on the materials that I read by Jonathan Leger (Adsense Gold), I constructed a Blogger.com page about “Kitten Pictures” (http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com). Well, how did I come up with that? Well, I’m pretty un-original and I think originality can come after you learn and can duplicate what others who are successful have already done. I digress.

Anyway, I noticed Jonathan Leger had a page on blogger.com called http://felinephotos.blogspot.com/ and the page is about “Cat Pictures”. CAT PICTURES – it was so simple -- he wasn't writing anything at all. Not only that but he had very high Google and Yahoo rankings. I don’t remember back what the ratings were when I first checked, but here’s what they are at the time of this writing:

For the keywords ‘Cat Pictures’, for the site http://felinephotos.blogspot.com/:
http://www.alltheweb.com/ – 4
http://www.altavista.com/ – 4
http://www.google.co.uk/ - 108
http://www.google.com/ – 121
http://www.google.de/ – 57
http://www.msn.com/ – 3
http://www.yahoo.com/ – 4

I use the SEO Elite software to generate this list! It’s a great tool.

Then I opened up a tool called Adword Analyzer – this was a tool that I bought back when I was doing Google Adwords advertising. If you want to read about it, here is the link: Adwords Analyzer. I did a search on “Cat Picture” and I saw that Google had 36 thousand hits in a single month – not an insignificant amount of interest.

Then I looked up “Kitten Picture” and I saw that it had roughly 1/3 the traffic of Cat Picture (about 11K), but I would be able to use it to get my feet wet. Of course, I copied everything about Jonathan’s site (http://felinephotos.blogspot.com/). The look was identical. If you go to my site now (http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com/ / http://kitten-pictures.com/), you will see that it has since changed – I’ll talk more about that later.

I started my site, http://kitten-pictures.blogspot.com/ on around 4/28/2006 with zero rankings in the search engines and the time of this writing, I am now #1 in MSN.com. I still have no ranking in the others.

Well, that’s all for now – more later.

Now to the Present - (Google Adsense)

I’m quickly coming to the present. Recently I received an advertisement via email from Gary Baker – Gary runs a site called jempublishing.com and somewhere in time, I signed for his newsletter. Anyway, here is a copy of the ad that he sent me (only a few lines just so you can get the flavor).

Stan,

Michael Cheney, is one of the most-respected names in the field of Internet marketing.

I've actually learned quite a bit from this guy and you will too.

Chances are that you've already read one of his many, many marketing articles that are dotted throughout the web.

In this unique interview we gained insights from him on how he has managed to build up several successful Internet businesses that now earn him thousands each week.

Hey, I really grill him for you and he dishes out some very juicy nuggets of money making info.

So read on...

And so the letter goes on. I was intrigued because Gary is a credible internet marketer, so I clicked on the link he provided and that took me to Michael’s Adsense Video’s Course.

I looked over the site and some of the resources that Michael has produced and I decided to take the plunge. The video course is excellent and I have learned a lot from it so far.

In addition, I purchased 2 other products which came recommended from Michael’s course:

Adsense Gold, by Jonathan Leger
Jonathan has put together a very well done adsense tracking system so you don’t have to guess why a campaign is succeeding or failing. Plus, he gives away thousands of free to use articles. For me, just getting started, this was a very attractive option.

SEO Elite, by Brad Callen
Brad’s software is a competitor spying tool – Using, I went from zero search engine exposure to #1 on MSN inside of two weeks time.

I use these products daily and I highly recommend them. In my next post, I will show you more about them how they have helped me.

Internet Marketing History (Part 4 - Google Adwords)

I saw some ebooks out there on ClickBank that talked about Google Adwords –- that just by running these cheap (for my I was bidding .30 per keyword, so I all depends on your perspective – the cheapest is .10 per) ads promoting clickbank products. So I took a stab at it. I looked around for products that seemed less competitive but still had a reasonable demand and I began marketing those. The one that that I did the best with was a French Language course – made a few bucks over the price of the advertisement, but nothing to get really excited about. However, I was moving in the right direction – this was PASSIVE income and it felt good. I worked for me 24x7 and that was exciting.

Internet Marketing History (Part 3)

So that’s what I did, I stopped, stepped back and thought about all of the things that I didn’t like about eBay and dealing with products. Inventory and shipping were at the top of the heap. Information products seemed to be the way that I wanted to go. It’s cheap to produce and distribute. So I created a website called www.EveryEbook.com using shopping cart software called X-Cart Gold. I purchased the resale rights of a bunch of eBooks and began selling them from eBay and www.EveryEbook.com.

On eBay, I was practically giving the books away to build up a contact list. I built up around 100 or so, which is pretty good. I also sold some off of the website, considering the only way that I was promoting it was via my About Me page on eBay. But again, I still didn’t like having to manage all of the listings on eBay – it was just too time consuming for me. I want to build something that builds me wealth without having to work to hard at it, if you know what I mean. Plus, another thing I really don’t like about eBay is the mentality of the customer base – they are largely folks looking for incredible deals – to the point were you aren’t making any money. So aside from a few items that I sell now and then, I’ve backed off of eBay.

Internet Marketing History (Part 2)

Well, after I had sold everything, I started looking around for other things to sell. I have an interest in music and so I thought I would try to sell Computer Audio equipment – the type of gear a home studio would contain. I signed up as a dealer for Edirol (a subsidiary for Roland) bought a bunch of inventory and began selling it on eBay – all over the world, in fact. It was pretty cool to be selling to Israel, Europe, Russia, etc. The problem was I was barely making any money and was spending huge amounts of time running the thing – organizing inventory, writing listings, managing listings, shipping, etc., etc., etc.

Well after a few months of this, a great thing happened to me. Roland changed their policy and decided that Edirol equipment could not be sold on auction sites anymore. Arrggghhh. Just when I was in the middle of this ‘thing’ that I created – I had just gotten a Silver Power Seller rating and everything – the bottom fell out. I had no backup/contingency plan. So what was I going to do now?

Well, I scrambled around looking for new suppliers of new inventory. INVENTORY – they all wanted minimum orders; they wanted me to keep a certain amount on hand. And they there was the learning curve of getting up to speed on some fairly sophisticated equipment – it was mind numbing. I decided that it was best to just cut it loose, sell my remaining Edirol audio gear and call it an experience.

Internet Marketing History (Part 1)

I’m going to give a brief summary of my history and when I’m caught up to the present, I will then give it to you blow by blow.

I’ve had the desire to market via the internet for several years now. Having a technical background, I understood the techie stuff, but not the marketing. For a techie, unless you are exceptional, marketing is a foreign language. I really hate to self promote – sounds kind of odd doesn’t it. I have the desire to sell something, but I don’t want to say anything to anybody about it.

One of my first forays into the online world was on eBay – a very natural place to start since the barriers to entry are low. I could just find some junk around the house and sell it, right?!? Right. And that’s what I did for a while – actually, I was selling a lot of my wife’s clothes that were out of style and that she was no longer wearing. Free Inventory for me.

My Journey Through Internet Marketing

This blog is a place where I am going to document my Internet Marketing Journey in hope that my successes and failures will somehow assist you on your journey.