This Blog Goes A Bit Green

I’ve been wondering for a while if this affiliate and search marketing blog of mine was going to be assigned a page rank. Overnight it has acquired a whopping 3/10. Now I only wondered because it used to be hosted on blogspot.com but when blogger announced the availability of custom domains I took advantage. The existing page rank disappeared (was PR2 I think) and as I say only reappeared last night, some 3 months later.

So at least I know it’s now working okay. I’m not a pagerank addict by the way. I note the score sometimes on mine and other sites but I’m not as hung-up about it as I used to be. Our personal finance site was PR 7 at one point (when I did fret over the score) after acquiring some back links (admittedly not all on topic!) and now it’s only PR 3. Obtaining quality inbound links to your quality page content is the key to good ranking of course.

Search Marketing pagerank

Plans For The New Financial Year

I’ve previously mentioned that our trading year is at the end of March (well, 5th April to be precise to tie-in with the tax year-end) and I indicated that I’d be publishing some thoughts on what we want to achieve this financial year. I’m a little late with this post (I’ve been busy) but a corking post (read it twice at least) from Andy Hagans has kind of nudged me to get on with it.

Last financial year was the first for me as a full-time affiliate. It went well overall and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Both turnover and profit are up on previous years and both are at highest levels to date (and in a year when a particular search engine hasn’t been that kind to us). Improved turnover and profit was anticipated of course because I’ve dedicated more time to the business because I’m no longer also in full-time employment. It was also a necessity – when I resigned my position last year I gave up the salary, benefits, car, etc, etc. Not that money is everything to me anymore – certainly not to the exclusion of everything else. With the benefit of 12 months hindsight I can see that the rat race really does, absolutely stink. I want a quality lifestyle for myself and my family not just more money to enable us to buy more stuff. Of course, I don’t want to be living on or below the breadline – obviously I want us to be comfortable. But I want the right balance and this industry should enable me to achieve it. Time only runs out, you can’t buy more. Amen!

The term affiliate is one that really doesn’t reflect what I believe we’re trying to achieve – we’re more search marketers or online media publishers. Sure, revenue comes from affiliated sales, but contextual advertising revenue also contributes significantly and I can also go down the not yet explored much avenue of consultancy services. I’ll definitely be considering a re-branding tweak though because we’re not just an affiliate outfit.

As each month passes I want to be building a sustainable, robust business where there is a fairly even distribution of revenue channels. To achieve this I think we need a good portfolio of websites and PPC income streams with the aim of increasing the portfolio over the coming year. I have already invested in new domain names and hosting packages for several new ideas. I will monetise these new websites with a mix of contextual advertising and affiliate links. I’m also intending to derive sales revenue from advertising/sponsorship deals on a couple of these new sites.

As is the case with many search marketers, our current portfolio of sites addresses some very mainstream and often competitive areas like personal finance, wine, online gambling, dvd rentals, etc. We’ll still be focusing on some of these markets in the year ahead but we’ve got other sites in our current portfolio that either need revamping, replacing or just shelved and forgotten about. Being an affiliate of an online sunglasses store for instance is not something that I’ve personally had much success with!

Some of my new ideas might take time to become established as quality sites in the particular niche markets that they will address. But if a couple of them are moderately successful I’ll be quite happy. I’m looking to build loyal audiences with some of my new ideas – some free typed-in traffic would be great and reliance upon search engines wouldn’t then be such an issue. This would also improve cash flow – something we’ve had to actively manage more this last year as our successful PPC campaigns have resulted in up-front costs with delayed commission payments. Generally, given that we’ll have new sites at various stages of development, we’ll still have more diversification within the portfolio. Having steady, dare I say it, predictable revenue streams is what can really keep you ticking along quite nicely.

I think there is some scope at a local level to offer search marketing consultancy services to small businesses. Whilst I’m no expert compared to others ($1000/hr now!) I know more than some and my keep-it-simple, common sense approach worked reasonably well back in my software house world. The issue I have is that offering my time as a service doesn’t scale. Sure, I could charge a decent hourly rate but it’s still a one-to-one relationship. Building a successful website can give payback at a many-to-one level in terms of revenue-to-effort because it can scale. I think we’ll look at doing a small amount of consulting with local businesses in order to have another revenue stream.

Blogging is an activity that I started in April last year and it’s been great. Not too many people currently read my blogs, though I don’t market them much at all really, truth be told. But by blogging I’ve learnt an awful lot by reading other posts and stumbling upon new sites. It’s been really useful and I whole-heartedly recommend that it’s an activity that anyone with online business (or non commercial) aspirations should undertake.

So, lets see what happens between now and April, 2008. And hopefully beyond.

Your Email Is In The Post

I’ve been a subscriber of the free springwise online newsletter for a few months now and I always enjoy reading about the new business ideas that people have (if you like Dragons Den and the like, you’ll probably enjoy the newsletter). This weeks edition contained one post that I initially thought was a bit daft, but then I read more and have begun to change my mind.

Sites such as postful and the Australian l-mail offer services whereby you can email them and by giving them the physical postal address, they’ll turn your email into a letter and post it in an envelope to the specified address (read more). postful is USA only for now I think, whereas l-mail is already international.

At first I though what’s the point of that? But after being intrigued enough to read on I can see some advantages of the services. l-mail offers an international service so people in Australia for example might find it cheaper to email in the first instance in Australia and have l-mail print and post the letter over here in the UK. But who would want an actual letter? Well grandparents spring to mind. Anyone you know who would enjoy receiving a letter from you (like my two young children). Anyone without a PC. An intrepid backpacker on a gap year could email their I’m still alive but I need more money Dad, quick! request from an internet cafe in the back-of-beyond and the pc-less parents would receive the unwelcome begging letter.

Some businesses insist on hard-copy invoices, purchase orders, time-sheets, etc. so that’s a potential market (ok pc-to-fax is another option too). As these email-to-mail services allow you to incorporate both text and image any number of documents could be sent. l-mail also offer text to speech and braille too – a worthy niche. There must be quite a few niche areas to exploit in this area. The pricing varies and can be a little cheaper if you permit l-mail to include their little logo. Of course, for such services to become profitable they need the critical mass of regular users.

I suspect that this could be food for thought for one reader of this blog who was kind of on the same wave-length as these services with an idea of his own. l-mail are looking for partners I see.

Is title= Spammy Or Not?

You’ll be aware that you can use title=”something” as part of your html for a url link. Hover over this link to google to see what I mean. This one hasn’t got a title when you hover over.

Used sensibly I think that link titles can look quite smart. Question is, are they considered spammy or not? Should you never use them, or only sometimes, or all the time if you do use them? Do they improve your sites usability?

Even Vanessa Fox is inconsistent in her use of them in her google blog posts. For example, in this post she’s used them all the time, but in this post it’s 50-50.

Anyone have an opinion?

html spam

Got a flickr Account …Finally

I’ve got a little idea on the go for a new site, more of a kind of personal hobby/interest site with a bit of adsense & affiliate links thrown in for good measure perhaps. As I’m going to be taking photos of my home town of Hoylake, I want to use flickr to host the photos (and link back to my new site via the user profile). Not that I’m an ace photographer by-the-way – I’m a total point and shoot kind of person.

Well, up until this morning I’d been in “pending” in flickr for over 3 weeks. This meant that my photos didn’t show in any flickr search. Apparently, all accounts are manually reviewed before they can go “live”. Fair enough if that’s how it works. But waiting this long – it’s a general problem I gather – can only put people off can’t it? To be honest, I didn’t envisage anything but an instant sign-up and go setup. It’s not like it’s a start-up site… it’s been around long enough and it’s owned by yahoo for heavens sake. I think the owners need to put their hands in their (very) deep pockets and allocate the required resources to sort the issues out.

Anyway, I’m now apparently safe so I can get cracking.

upthejunction Social Networking

Dave Naylor. Bigmouth

I subscribe to both the Dave Naylor and Andrew Girdwood blog feeds.

Dave Naylor has just posted about links from the bigmouthmedia homepage being, in his opinion, spammy because they are hidden. Andrew Girdwood is (I believe), head of search at bigmouthmedia and a strong advocate of using no-follow, avoiding spammy techniques and paid links.

It’ll be interesting to see how Andrew replies to Daves’ post.

Search Marketing Dave Naylor bigmouthmedia

A Right Riveting Read #5

I know absolutely nothing about it, but I’m becoming more interested in the domain name industry. Not the dubious tactic of registering trademark domains but the art of discovering generic domain names that have (or could have) value. I haven’t discovered any yet and just about all the ones that I’ve thought of have already gone!

Whilst searching I stumbled upon a blog that is my fifth A Right Riveting Read. Frank Schilling posts some really interesting thoughts on the domain industry and certainly seems to know a thing or two about the generic domain name market. Frank has only been blogging since Feb and he’s been posting regularly and linking to a few useful sites along the way. I suggest that you subscribe to his feed if you’re at all interested in buying and selling domain names.

Domain Names Frank Schilling

twitter: Can I Be Arsed?

After going through my things to look at/do list this morning I joined twitter – the web version rather than the mobile offering. I pimped my blog again with a twitter badge too. The idea being that you post a message in (or to, via IM) twitter describing what you’re doing at that moment in time. Your twitter friends and your blog readers can see what you’ve been doing.

Thing is, as todays history indicates, you’ve really got to be bothered to post to twitter to make it work. And, as todays history indicates, I just can’t be arsed. I posted this morning for a bit, then had lunch and then went off to tend to plot 69, came home, spent some time with my daughters, did more work, etc.

But posting updates to twitter never crossed my mind. I may persevere. I suspect I won’t.

Microsoft Expression Web

It was sods law that my beta version of Microsoft Expression Web software expired over the bank holiday weekend, just when I was using it heavily. Evidently mistakenly, I thought that because I downloaded it last year it wouldn’t expire. I had to revert back to frontpage and I ordered an upgrade package for about £85 from amazon. It’s just arrived – the free, super-saver delivery is just as quick as paid-for delivery half the time.

I guess dreamweaver would be the choice of most active web publishers but as I started off with frontpage a few years ago the progression to expression web seemed quick and logical. I quite like the product even if it refuses to correctly render in design mode a template that I use frequently. It suits my needs for the time-being – maybe I’ll move to dreamweaver in the future.

websites Design Tools

Ads For My Own Domains

I’ve read a few articles over the last month or so suggesting that it can be good practice to serve ads for your own domain and company names to enhance your brand. Jennifer Slegg has a recent post about branding with adwords and it was that post that prompted me to try it out on a couple of my own sites. Jennifers new blog is well worth adding to your feed reader by-the-way.

To start with I’m just using our upthejunction and cardtart sites. I’m not currently using the content network – in fact I probably won’t at all, it’s not like we’re trying to be a high street brand. An immediate problem has arisen with cardtart though – the minimum bid for cardtart related phrases is way over the top and I’m just not prepared to pay. Even though we rank #1 for cardtart adwords feels there’s currently a relevancy/quality issue. Hey ho. The site has just this weekend gone live with a long, long overdue revamp (not finished yet either) so I’ll give the bots time to sniff around and see if the minimum bids drop to something more sensible.

I’d spotted a while back that Martin Lewis, the journalist that publishes this site (click my link, not his ad – we might be competing for a phrase but I don’t encourage that kind of ad clicking) has been bidding on card tart phrases for a while. I used to see a few debt consolidation outfits bid too but they’ve long gone – presumably the ad costs outweighed the income.

We rank #1 for upthejunction (yeah, that incredibly popular search!) but I can see that we’ve already had a couple of ad clicks. Quality is fine in this instance and click fees are just a couple of pence.

I’ll monitor what happens for a bit and I’ll then look to roll this exercise out on the other ad networks and also for some of our other sites.

Search Marketing Branding

Next Page »