Archive for September, 2006

Every few days I see a new thread posted on the various webmaster forums I frequent asking how important meta tags are to search engines. Here is a quote from Matt Cutt’s interview with John Battelle’s Searchblog.

We’ve seen the whole tagging idea in Web 1.0 when they were called meta tags, and some people abused them so badly with deceptive words that to this day, most search engine give little or no scoring weight to keywords in meta tags. You can read the rest of the article at John Battelle’s Searchblog

One of the sites I have been anxiously waiting for Google to index finally made it in this weekend. It is pretty nice to finally show up. So how am I gonna celebrate? I am gonna rip it down and start over. Isn’t that the norm?

I have noticed something else during the indexing progress. I have some of my sites on their own IP and some of them are on shared hosting from bluehost.com. I have been really pleased with Bluehost and think it is a great value, but I have noticed it takes longer for Google to find new websites. The other sites have shown up very quickly compared to the ones of a bargain hosting company.

I would change my name to Dr. Evil and take over the world. Then I would buy the internet and sell it back to it’s glorious creator Al Gore. Is there a sarcasm button around here?

I have all of these really good ideas, but I am trying to do all of this myself. So I get started on one project, and before I finish I think of another project. I am not a coder or a designer so it takes me longer to accomplish some tasks than it should. An example would be a game website I am working on, Warhammer Online Game Site. I downloaded and installed Joomla for that project. I made the header, customized a template I got on the net, started learning about Joomla which I had never seen before, started trying to become a Joomla security expert, and a billion other things. That is one example, but my portfolio of domains is pretty close to 30 (after 60 days).

That is my bitch and moan for the day, but I also gotta say I am very pleased with what I grossed the first month of my making money online adventures. I am definitely reassured there is plenty of money to made online. I now just have to work on getting my costs down. Oh, and find a coder and designer.

One of my affiliate landing pages has a content landing page for an online service that allows you to watch cameras inside a realty TV show house. I was sending traffic to the site when suddenly the traffic went through the roof.  My conversions picked up and I couldn’t figure out why because my PPC were at the same level they had been.  Then I check Google Analytics and saw a ton of content referrals.  I searched for the keywords but gave up looking for my page after going 20 pages deep in Google. I still have no real idea how all the traffic found the page, but I am certainly happy about it. It has been an experience I want to duplicate and compare to the small niche market.  You can definitely make money with traffic and next we try to make money with small niche highly targeted traffic.

That is what I am starting look for now. I keep reading on all of the forums I visit about finding a high paying niche market and cashing in.  I am now working on figuring out how you find that high paying niche market.  I have some ideas, but I would love a quick bullet point list how to do it.  LOL Wouldn’t we all.

This Search Arbitrage is and interesting monster to tackle.  I had gotten to point where I felt I wasn’t doing much right since I was spending a lot for clicks and not getting any sales or leads.  I went across the board and started lowering my bids at Yahoo, Adbrite and MSN.  This was around the time Azoogle announced the changes to ringtone promotion.  Then as fast as it they stopped, my conversions started going up.  They have been somewhat consistent since then.  I am pretty jazzed up about my online marketing at the moment.  Actually, I don’t want to jinx it so forget everything I just said.

My Azoogle ads have slowed back down now, but my Commission Junction ads are the ones really doing well.  I found a small niche that has been converting pretty well.  I will lose half that niche in a week or two so I am hard at work trying to replace it.

Azzogle affiliates got a pretty good explanation from from Azoogle about the recent Ringtone changes.  I had a feeling they were under the gun when they made the quick changes.  The changes didn’t effect any of my arbitrage anyway because I am using negative keywords for free anyway. People who search for free don’t buy things.  Granted you could try and trick people into getting ringtones thinking they were free, but that isn’t how I am running my bussiness.