A post over on GreyWolf’s blog asks how people are doing with their rankings on sites that they use article syndication sites to market. I’m rather fond of article marketing, and use Article Marketer to submit my articles.

So how am I doing?

I would say I get adequate but not spectacular results so far. This may change over time. I have a new site that I’m experimenting with pure article marketing on, and it does rank already at #5 for what I would consider to be a moderately competitive keyword. It’s about two months old, so it could just be the luck of being new and vanish utterly in a few weeks. We’ll just have to see.

I am giving that site content unique from the articles I submit for it. The idea is for the articles to encourage people to come to the site for more information. However, the articles are reasonably complete in and of themselves. I still want to give enough that site owners might possibly feel comfortable publishing the articles. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone wants more people coming to their websites. It’s the entire point of building a site, after all.

One trick that can work well for some people is to make sure their images are easily indexed and search engine friendly. There are some risks to this, but overall it can be a decent tactic.

Optimizing images is not too hard. It’s a matter of naming the image well and of inserting it correctly into your site. The name of your image should be descriptive, and use hyphens to separate the words – pretty-picture.jpg, not prettypicture.jpg or pretty_picture.jpg.

When you put the image into your site, you should include it’s height and width as well as a descriptive alt tag. This is constructed as alt=”pretty picture” within the code for the image. Some people suggest doing the same with title=”pretty picture” but others feel that could be overdoing it.

Your code should look like:

img src=”pretty-picture.jpg” height=”100″ width=”100″ alt=”pretty picture”

enclosed in the usual brackets, of course. This means that Google and other search engines now know what your picture is about. You may start getting significant traffic from the images you optimize this way. Read the rest of this entry »

I read this over on the JenSense blog. This just sounds really great for better blending when a border makes sense.

You can now select the old squared corners, slightly rounded or very rounded corners. It looks great for being able to really coordinate your AdSense with the overall appearance of your website.

I can’t help but wish they’d come up with this sooner. Yes, it’s a minor change in a lot of ways, but it’s also a flat out really great change. Now you don’t have to just blend the entire unit when you use rounded corners on your site.

Technorati Tags: adsense rounded corners

The more I look at social bookmarking, the more interesting it gets. But it’s also challenging. For example, think about driving StumbleUpon traffic to your blog.

There is an easy way to do this. You can buy traffic from StumbleUpon as low as $0.05 per visitor. You set your budget, they send the traffic.

I suppose this could be viable, although I’ve never tried it. Instead, I prefer to try to get natural StumbleUpon traffic.

This, however, is not all that easy. You can Stumble your own sites to an extent, but take it too far and they won’t let you submit links from that domain anymore. As with any other sort of social bookmarking you need to participate, make friends, Stumble other sites that might be of interest.

StumbleUpon visitors can be interesting creatures. My husband likes to use it, and I have fun watching him, as he is not involved in any sort of online marketing. He’s just Stumbling for the fun of it. Read the rest of this entry »

I do a limited amount of work with datafeeds on a few of my sites. It’s not my main focus, but I’ve had some fair results from them. But I know a lot of people worry about them resulting in the much feared duplicate content penalty. After all, an unknown number of affiliates, plus possibly the merchant’s site may be using the exact same product information and descriptions.

But you really don’t have to worry that much about duplicate content. Especially if you are willing to put in a little extra work on your datafeed websites.

One of the quickest things to do is a find and replace for some of the descriptive terms. Get out your thesaurus and find different words to use. You will want to make sure that they will still make sense on your site.

If the merchant tends to use a particular phrase or sentence over and over again you can try to think of ways to replace it. Once again, simple find and replace. I sometimes flat out delete the sentence, other times replace it, or if I’m trying really hard, I come up with a couple of variations and switch them around. Read the rest of this entry »

I see a lot of people wanting to start a home business because they want to get rich quickly. Of course, they quickly find out that it just isn’t that easy. It takes time and effort to get a solid business going. Very, very few people ever hit it lucky. Everyone else has to work and work hard.

Many of your day to day habits can also make it harder for you to get rich. If you have large debts, it’s going to be really hard for you to get rich. Everything will go to your debts. You’d do better by far to get your spending habits under control than to live a lifestyle you cannot afford.

If you don’t have goals you are depriving yourself of a vital tool. Goals help you to stay focused. But it takes an action plan to reach your goals.

And of course, if you believe in “get rich quick” you probably aren’t going to get rich quick. You have to study your business and how you will reach your goals. You have to be prepared to invest. You have to be prepared to fail. You have to be prepared to watch your business progress slowly. And you have to be prepared to succeed.

Not everyone is going to succeed in a home business. Not every failure means that you’ll never make it. But if you don’t try for success you aren’t going to succeed.

Technorati Tags: home business success, get rick quick

If you read much about what Google likes in an affiliate site, you know that they aren’t all that fond of thin affiliate sites. You know the kind… all datafeed or ads, no originality. And really you can’t blame Google or any other search engine for not liking them.

But if you have struggling thin affiliate sites you might appreciate this advice on making them appear thicker. It’s extra effort, but it can be very much so worthwhile.

The advice given is very simple, with the two main points being that you can add original content to pages with duplicate content to make the site look thicker, or you can add serious, original content pages to the website. These pages need to be capable of attracting attention on their own.

This is great advice if you use datafeeds for your websites. The problem with them has long been that many sites will have the same information. Some people can make a living off this, but it is getting harder as the search engines get smarter. Making sure that you stand out somehow is always a good idea.

I’ll also echo one of the comments: Make sure you link out to authoritative sites with regular links. You don’t have to make these prominent, but they make you look more honest. I will sometimes quote pages on goverment sites that are relevant to the product, linking to that page. It’s a site I know won’t be competing with me to make the sale, but will be an honest resource.

Technorati Tags: thin affiliate websites, thin affiliate, thick affiliate

It’s about time! I can’t believe it took them this long to realize that recurring billing is a good thing to offer when you focus on downloadable products.

This is great news for affiliates and merchants. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of new offerings taking advantage of the recurring billing feature.

It should be interesting to see what kind of rates merchants decide to offer on recurring billing, since the affiliate will continue to earn commissions. After all, with your standard purchase the merchant is earning for the purchase of a single item. If they want to sell more to the customer they can, but that has nothing to do with the affiliate.

But with recurring billing, the affiliate gets a commission for the duration, while the merchant has to keep things going. It’s going to be interesting to see how this balances out. Frankly, I think merchants would love to see a way to offer a higher initial commission and then lower during the subscription, but I don’t think that will happen. Read the rest of this entry »