New Orleans Internet Marketing » Internet Marketing

Free Website Help for Haitian Business

Chris H. — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:14:45 +0000

If you or someone you know has a business in Haiti; I will offer my time and resources to help with their website. I can help with simple design work and website updates. I can host your site for free on my new server. Contact chartwell (at) inlayout.net.

Affiliates Go “Cha Ching” with Bing

Chris H. — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:37:15 +0000

I was just browsing through some of Bing’s search results for “dedicated server” because I have a site in that niche these days, and I came upon something pretty interesting:

If you notice, the last search result for LiquidWeb’s homepage is indexed with an affiliate tag! I wonder how much commission “sdawkins” is getting off of Bing for this? How many search phrases is it showing up for? Must be nice!

If you look at the backlinks for the URL, it’s nothing but link directories and such. Lucky guy. Bing needs to work on their canonical URL issues here. It wouldn’t hurt for LiquidWeb to have a good SEO on staff either. I can almost guarantee you won’t see this in Google.

My Internet Marketing To-Do List

inlayout — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:31:11 +0000

A long time ago, I remembered that I forget a lot, so I started making lists.

I realized that I had plenty of great ideas to market my business, but if I forgot them, it could be like losing the winning lottery ticket. How dumb would that be?

The thing that’s really sad about it is the fact that probably 99% of my best internet marketing ideas come to me at a time when I’m completely unable to act on them, and the ones that I can act on right away, usually wind up costing me a lot of money because I don’t let them hibernate on a list for a short while!

How could such a simple, intuitive task escape me for so long?

So I started making internet marketing to-do lists, and to-date, I have 3 running to-do lists (general, blogging topics [this wasn't one btw], and press release topics). I keep them on my PDA phone, so that wherever I am, there they are. Now, I never forget my good ideas, and I actually get most of them done. I can’t begin to tell you how much this has increased how productive I am. I rarely sit at the computer board, trying to think of something to do when I feel like working. Nowadays I just check my to-do list.

The other good thing about the internet marketing to-do list, is that it makes things easier to prioritize. Instead of starting and stopping different tasks I know I should be working on, I just look at the list, and it’s usually pretty obvious what I should be working on.

Review of MySpace’s MyAds Beta

inlayout — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:31:41 +0000

In the past, if you tried to contact MySpace about advertising, you’d be lucky to get a response. Then if you did, you probably wouldn’t be considered unless you spent $10k / month or more. Well that’s all changed with MySpace’s introduction of “MyAds Beta.” I recently tried out MyAds by running some banners to promote my forums, and here are the results.

The Positive:

The interface is very easy to use. Just about anyone should be able to easily upload a banner ad and choose the demographic they wish to target. It’s straightforward and intuitive.
If you’re serious about marketing your website, you probably already have banners made, but MyAds Beta has a really neat tool called “build an ad” that will let you choose an appropriate background image for your banner and write the text that you want it to say. Just like the rest of the interface, it’s simple to use, and even the most novice internet marketers should be able to start up ad campaigns using this.
Great targeting options. MyAds let’s you choose who will see your ads based on:
Gender Age Education Relationship Parental Status And Geotargeting options like: US, Region, State, City, and Zip Code
Interest targeting is the biggie here. One of the unique things about social media marketing is the fact that these social media sites have so much data about people’s hobbies and interests. This is where these ads excel at reaching niche markets. MyAds allows you to choose who to show ads to based on many different levels of interests like: health, automobiles, fashion, movies, music, poker, etc.

Invalid Click Filtering, The Negative

The test campaign I ran went great except for one glaring downside: invalid clicks. Google is probably one of the best companies at filtering invalid clicks, and that’s why Google Analytics is such a great tool for measuring traffic. Because of this, I track all of my advertising closely in Google analytics by tagging the URL’s for each ad of each campaign I run. The problem I encountered was that MyAds was showing about 60% more traffic (clicks) than what I was seeing in Google Analytics. The real traffic I got from MyAds was good – I had good pageview numbers per visitor, and good percentages of user registrations on the forums. In fact, if I wasn’t paying for so many invalid clicks, the traffic was as good as some well targeted Adwords campaigns I’ve run. But due to the invalid clicks, the cpc I really paid was almost double what I had bid. I emailed MyAds about the issue and got a canned response that basically defended their ad filtering software. I’ve run similar ads in other places including Facebook, and never seen this big of a discrepancy, so I know they have a problem. Hopefully they will get it fixed soon. When they do, MyAds will be a great platform for social media marketing.

Why You Should Automate Your Marketing Efforts with Aweber’s Email Autoresponders

inlayout — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:37:52 +0000

I’ve long known about email marketing and Aweber’s Autoresponders, but until recently, I didn’t have any ideas on how I could integrate one into any of my own personal websites to make them more profitable for me.

Email newsletters are great for reminding customers and potential customers about your products and services. If the newsletters give something away – like high quality free information, discounts on products, or news about something the consumer cares about, they will generally stay subscribed. And when they keep getting that reminder from you, they’re a lot more likely to turn to you when it comes time for them to make another purchase. They also do great at generating conversions from potential customers who were reluctant to buy when they first found your website.

The bottom line is this: we all need to make the most of our advertising dollars, and email marketing is another way of delivering our content and bringing people back to the website. So whether it’s pay-per-click marketing that sends your traffic or television ads, if you have an email marketing campaign in place you will be more likely to convert the traffic you get from those sources.

The beauty of an email autoresponder is that it’s a set-it-and-forget-it solution to email marketing. The difference between this and a traditional email newsletter is that the more traditional email newsletter requires someone to manage it by coming up with new content on a regular basis and sending the newsletter out.

With an “autoresponder” like the one Aweber has created, the management of the list is automated, so that all of your content can be added at once and sent out through a set interval that you control through the backend. Another great advantage is that through Aweber, you still have the ability to send out a “Broadcast” message to all of your subscribers at once. So if your e-commerce store is trying to “clear out” some old inventory, you can send out the clearance sale newsletter with ease.

One important lesson I’ve learned in generating profit through internet marketing is that creating automated sources of income is key to long term financial success. When I used to make all of my money designing websites for people, I really enjoyed the work, and the money was great, but there was a limiting factor involved that I could never escape from in that line of business: you can only design so many websites, and as soon as the work runs out, the money runs out.

That’s where the true beauty of having an automated newsletter comes in – once the initial work is done, it’s more of a set-it-and-forget-it marketing tool that will generate income for you down the road. For more info, visit Aweber.com.

Websites for Therapists: TherapySites.com

inlayout — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:38:14 +0000

I’ve been seeing some ads around for therapysites.com for a little while now, and I thought it seemed like a great idea for therapists who want to have their own website built. They provide a lot of tools that make website creation easy, using their customizable themes and their pre-built content management system.

For a FREE Month, use coupon code “promoFMC”!

If you read my post entitled “How Much Should My Website Cost?” you already know that decent web design can start in the $2k range, and go up over time with different cost factors. The thing I like about TherapySites.com, is that while more expensive than just plain website hosting, you save all of the money that’s usually spent on the initial design process. Plus you get their content management system so you can easily make your own changes to the site.

The other thing I like is that the company seems focused on the business of therapists, which means they will likely be equipped to deal with common problems that therapists face when it comes to web design; usually companies like this improve over time also.

I haven’t tried their sites out yet, and I haven’t heard any feedback on them from my advertisers, but they offer a money-back guarantee, and a free month if you mention that you were referred by The FMC Directory (my other website), so it may be worthwhile to try if you’re in the market for a new site.

How to Make PayPerPost an SEO Rocketship

inlayout — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:09:54 +0000

Paid blogging services can make it obvious that your buying links if you’re new to using them, or they can make it look like your site is generating buzz and natural links in the blogosphere. The second of which, is the desired outcome when optimizing your site for Google. While many paid blogging services don’t give much control to the media buyer, PayPerPost has many options that can make your posts look more natural to the search engines. Here are some tips for using PayperPost.

Use the PageRank Option
PPP has been pushing their “RealRank” and coming up with lots of excuses to make it seem like RealRank is great. The fact is, that the “RealRank” system is flooded with penalized PR0 blogs that Google knows are selling links. What do you think has a better chance of increasing your rankings, a blog known for selling links or one with decent PageRank that’s still under Google’s radar?

The good news is, that the bloggers are getting smarter about advertising the fact that they do paid posting. The ones who keep their PageRank aren’t linking back to PayPerPost or hosting their banners on their blogs.

Buy a Mixture of Different PageRank Posts
To make your campaigns look more natural to Google, don’t purchase all of your posts on blogs of the same PageRank. Try to mix things up as much as possible by using different campaigns targeting different PR blogs. If buying a lot of posts, spread them out over time also.

Require at Least 200 Words
Google values content, and a post with 200 words of relevant content looks more valuable and less like an ad than a 50 word post with a link to your website. You may have to pay more in order to get the posting opps taken this way, but it pays off in the long run.

Stay Away from Per-Post Disclosure
“This is a sponsored post,” is a dead giveaway to Google and visitors. You can avoid bloggers who disclose on a per-post basis by adding this line to your opportunity description:

**Bloggers, please do not take this opportunity if you disclose on a per-post basis.**

Generally, that works pretty well. Give the blogger a bad rating if they ignore it and disclose your paid post on that individual post.

Categories and Regions
It should go without saying that you should choose the most appropriate category for the blogs you want posts from. If you have trouble getting your opps taken though, you may want to try another campaign using a different category if it’s appropriate.

Another helpful tip is to block out blogs from the free blogging services. While it looks more natural to have a little bit of both, if you allow the free services you will get a majority of blog posts hosted by those services. You can usually get all of your opps taken with blogs hosted on unique domain names if you offer the right amount of money. I usually block out all of the free blogging services. I also add these to the “other” exclusion box: i.ph, bravejournal.com, blogrox.com.

For regions, if you’re promoting an American website, exclude all of the other regions. Most of PPP’s bloggers are from the US, so it’s easy to get your opps taken from US bloggers.

Links (most important!)
Don’t be lazy. Create different anchor text for every single link. While this can be very time consuming, it makes your posts look much more natural. Try to think of ways to write your anchor text so that bloggers can easily fit the wording into the post. Use articles, prepositions, and pronouns around your keywords to make it look more natural, and don’t link them all to the same page on your website. Match up keyword anchor text with content on your pages.

Example:
Keyword You’re Targeting: Blue Widgets
Anchor Text to Use: blue widgets, these blue widgets, some widgets that are blue, I found these widgets, website with blue widgets, check out these blue widgets, page about blue widgets, etc.

Remember the goal is to make the posts look natural, like the blogger likes your page and is recommending it.

Other Important Tips
Don’t use PPP as the sole form of link building for your website. Combine it with many other forms of link building to give your site a more “natural” looking link profile. Spread your posting opportunities over time to make it look like there is regular, ongoing buzz about your site in the blogosphere. PayPerPost can be an extremely effective SEO tool if used with these considerations.

The Downside
The downside to using PPP for SEO is that neither their system, nor the bloggers who write for them are perfect. Sometimes opps get taken by bloggers who don’t meet your PageRank requirements. I flag every one of these and complain about it; hopefully PPP will get the picture and fix this glitch one day. I’ve also had bloggers from regions that are excluded take opps they weren’t supposed to. As far as the bloggers go, sometimes you may get a few who are just bad writers, and there is nothing you can do about that. You also can’t control what the bloggers write, so there is the danger that some careless bloggers will post some misinformation just to get paid for a post. You can use their rating system to avoid poor writers, but that’s not perfect either.

How Much Should My Website Cost?

inlayout — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:39:32 +0000

A common question I get is, “Chris, we got a quote from this company for our new website and they want to charge us $XXXXX – is that too much?” “Well, what are they going to do?” I counter. “I don’t know, design our website!”

Simple “Brochure” Type Websites
The fact is, $2,000 can be too much or too little, and so can $20,000. It depends on what the purpose of the website is and what type of functionality you want it to have. The simplest websites to build are like “brochures” or “business cards” on the web. These have static content, meaning that if you want to change anything you need to have web design experience or have your designer make the changes. These types of sites generally go for $1k – $5k, depending on the experience and quality of the designer, and depending on if it will have flash, and how many pages it will have.

Content Management Systems (CMS)
The next upgrade is a site with some form of “content management.” CMS allows the site administrator or anyone else with permission, to login to the site and make changes to content and pages using a simple text editor. Website owners like CMS because it makes them less dependent on their web design company for changes. Changes to content can be made quickly and easily by the site owner or admin.

Types of Content Management Systems can vary considerably. Popular “out of the box” CMS systems these days are Drupal, Joomla, and believe it or not, Wordpress. While the simple brochure site mentioned above can usually get CMS for a small additional charge ($1k-$2k), large corporate sites with CMS can get very expensive, in the “10’s of thousands” price range.

Ecommerce Websites
What about shopping carts? Depending on the amount of customization needed, shopping carts carry a heavier price tag as well. The simple solution, if you just have a few products for sale that won’t change, is to get a Paypal account, and use their built in system for the shopping cart. this can be done with just a few simple website edits, and is the easiest way to sell items online (a reasonable web designer might add in a few Paypal buttons for free with the initial design, or for about an hour’s labor if done after the fact).

Most ecommerce sites will have products with options, that change regularly, or limited inventory, or large numbers of products, all of which lend themselves to being better handled by some form of shopping cart script. Don’t let a web designer try to rebuild the wheel for you. There’s usually no need to program a shopping cart form the ground up, and most web designers don’t have that ability by themselves anyway. There are plenty of shopping cart scripts available that can be installed on a site and modified to match your site’s look and feel. Some popular examples are OS Commerce, Zen Cart, Cube Cart, and others. Modifications are what will drive up the price here. Out of the box, these things are simple to install, but modifications to the code and templates can eat up a lot of time. Expect your custom website / shopping cart combination to run anywhere from $5k – $20k, and make sure the designer or company has experience doing the type of ecommerce site you’re looking for. To save money here, go with a ready made template instead of custom design. For all types of website templates, check out Template Monster, TemplateWorld, and Open Source Templates.

Social Media Websites
Want to start a community? There are a lot of ways to do it these days. Social media is taking the web by storm, and a good place to get your foot in the door is by creating something for a small niche. Probably one of the oldest, popular forms of social media is the online forum. Again, like shopping cart scripts, there are scripts out there for forums as well. These are ready made forums that are relatively simple to install and manage. The three most common that I know of are PHPBB, VBulletin, and Invision Power Board. Similar to customization of shopping cart scripts, customization of bulletin board scripts can run up the price as well. Expect installation and customization of new forums to run anywhere from a few thousand dollars up, depending on how far the customization is taken and how many non-standard features are added. For forums as well, you can keep the price down by using a ready-made template from one of the sources mentioned above.

Believe it or not, there are scripts available for creating websites similar to MySpace, Digg, and Youtube as well. Just do your research on them before you decide on one. I always check out their support forums (if they have them), to see what kind of trouble people are having with the scripts, and to see how quickly their support staff responds. If you hire a company to create a site like this for you, be sure to check their references and past experience. You don’t want to be someone’s “test run” on creating a social media site.

What About Hosting?
Your web designer might offer hosting or some type of maintenance plan, or even some form of marketing at a monthly rate for your website. Make sure that you know exactly what you’re getting for the price you agree to pay. For the simple brochure websites, shared hosting is usually adequate, costing anywhere from $5 – $20 / month. But shared hosting may not be adequate when you move up to an ecommerce or social media site that will have many users interacting with it at the same time. For these types of sites you might need a “Virtual” or “Dedicated Server;” my favorite of which so far, has been LiquidWeb.

The amount of traffic you receive will be proportional to the effectiveness of the marketing you do. Don’t expect a flood of visitors just because you have a great website. It can take a lot of time and money to get decent traffic to your website, and there are a lot of different ways of going about marketing it, but that’s for another post.

So What’s the Total Price?
It depends. Good designers with a lot of experience will charge more. Look at their portfolio and check references. You usually get what you pay for, but it’s also easy to get ripped off if you don’t do due diligence. The advantage to going with the more experienced designer or company, is that they usually know what they are getting into before they give you a contract, and they can easily deal with problems that come up along the way. A less experienced designer is more likely to give you a lowball price, then either not meet your expectations, or have to ask for more money to get the site where you want it. That’s not always the case though.

The price goes up as you add features. So it’s important to consider the purpose of your website, its profitability, and what you can fit in your budget. Things like design quality, flash, ecommerce capability, and interactivity can really drive up the price, but they can also make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your site.

Foreman & Pike Consulting is Now “Reciprocal Consulting”

Chris H. — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:28:39 +0000

Many people are aware that I work for an internet marketing firm called Foreman & Pike Consulting (used to be www.ForemanPike.com). We have now changed our name to Reciprocal Consulting (www.ReciprocalConsulting.com). I am happy to say that we will continue to be able to provide the same top-notch service that we are well known for in the industry. Here is the letter from John Pike on the change:

As the internet advertising market changes each day, so must we.

Foreman & Pike Consulting has always been on the cutting edge of growth, development and performance; and this will not change. We will continue to offer Internet advertising solutions, successful conversions, increased sales and most importantly, a return on your investment — all on a pay for performance basis. However, we benefit from your success as much as you do because after all, without you we would be without purpose.

It is for this reason that Foreman & Pike has changed their name to Reciprocal Consulting.

We believe that Reciprocal better describes who we are, what we do and what we offer, as our relationship with our clients is mutually beneficial. We want to stress, as we always have, that we are Partners with our clients. We take on your vision, make your goals our goals and our success is measured only by your success. This is the difference between an Internet Marketing firm and Reciprocal Consulting.

Nothing has changed and nothing will except for our name, which we feel better represents us and our relationship with you, our clients.

Sincerely,

John E. Pike, Owner & President

Reciprocal Consulting

A Great New Orleans Photographer

Chris H. — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:04:45 +0000

If you’re involved in the internet marketing profession, there is eventually going to come a time when you will need a picture of yourself for a bio or “about us” page. Especially if you’re a blogger – a good picture helps readers to connect and get a feel for who you are; Problogger has a good post on the benefits of using your picture on your blog.

My time had come. I needed a picture for our firm’s website. I’ve been getting along with some crappy old pictures that I cropped from random photos for too long. So being the internet marketing hacker I am, I hit Google up for some “New Orleans Photographers,” and that’s how I was lucky enough to find George Long.

I actually requested quotes from quite a few of these gurus, but George was in line with the rest of their prices, and he could see me the fastest. I showed up at 9am this morning, and was amazed by his professionalism and attention to detail. Within an hour we had the perfect picture for Foreman & Pike’s “About Us” page, as well as a few casual shots I got him to do for my blog.

George’s studio is adorned with amazing pictures from his 30 years of photographing New Orleans and Mardi Gras. He’s even got a spectacular book of post-Katrina photos that’s about to be published soon. I highly recommend his work, and I plan on using his services in the future.

Buying Advertising & The Truth About Website Statistics

Chris H. — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:27:43 +0000

Being the webmaster of a site with over 400 direct advertisers (who are therapists), I often get asked about stats, and currently I don’t have anything set up to deliver stats to my directory’s advertisers. The population I advertise for are therapists who, for the most part, are relatively new to internet marketing. Since I also manage a few individual marketing campaigns for therapists, I have a good idea about the kind of traffic that converts into referrals for them, and the kind of traffic that doesn’t. I even get to see how good my site’s competitors do at sending conversions to therapists. It’s a really unique vantage point, and here’s what I’ve come to learn from it.

The truth about what people are selling you in terms of advertising, is that the bottom line is the price you pay for each conversion. In the case of the therapists who advertise on my website, a “conversion” is a referral for counseling services. With that being said, statistics on visitors and pageviews that people send their advertisers can potentially be meaningless due to the fact that conversions are highly dependent on how targeted the traffic is.

Targeting Traffic

Let’s start with the concept of targeting, “How Targeted is the Traffic?” The truth about traffic, is that you can literally buy traffic for a website through a number of sources, but different traffic will convert into a referral at different rates. A case in point was an experiment I did one time when I bought cheap advertising through a lesser known pay-per-click service. I got a lot of “traffic” from the service, people where clicking on my relevant ads and visiting my website, and the cost was less than what you would pay for clicks through Google or Yahoo! Sounds good right?

It wasn’t good at all. The reason being, that the traffic had nearly a 100% “bounce rate;” in other words, those people hit the homepage of my website and left from there. They weren’t at all interested in what my site had to offer. Would you want to advertise with a site that got that kind of traffic? There are a lot of ways that companies can fail to deliver conversions to their advertisers and poor targeting is one. Another common mistake is by not managing pay-per-click campaigns properly.

Case in point: See the attached screenshot for a Google search I did for “massage therapists in New York.”

The circled ad on the right is for a relationship therapist who hasn’t added the negative keyword “massage” to his pay-per-click campaign (which would keep him from showing up for this search). Mistakes such as these are common, and can cost advertisers a lot of money because consumers don’t always realize that the ad isn’t for them until after they click on it.

My purpose in bringing up targeting is to demonstrate that 100 visitors, doesn’t always equal “100 visitors.” I wish I could stop there, but there’s more. Another reason “100 visitors” doesn’t always equal “100 visitors” is that there are different ways of defining a visitor to a website, and the same goes for PageViews! Unfortunately, most stats packages define these concepts in different ways that can result in significant differences amongst the stats they report.

Differences Among Stats Packages

Some of the most common methods website owners use these days to look at their stats are log file analyzers that take raw information from the web server’s logs and translate it into useful tables and charts (like AW Stats and Webalizer), and tracking tools like Google Analytics which use javascript to track your site’s visitors. While all have their advantages and disadvantages, the numbers from each can be very different. Since Google Analytics uses a javascript, only visitors with web browsers that handle javascript will be tracked, so those numbers can be more conservative. On the opposite end of the spectrum, log file analyzers like Webalizer and AW stats, will frequently count bots that are spidering your site for different reasons as “unique visitors,” which can make those statistics grossly exagerated. There are a lot of other stats packages out there, but these free ones are commonly used and sufficient for most websites. The important thing to be aware of though, is that the manner in which a stats package defines a visitor or pageview can vary significantly amongst them.

These differences also hold true for ad serving software. One of the most common tools people use to send stats to their advertisers is an auto-generated report that comes from the software they use to serve ads on their website. A lot of online ad sales are done on a “CPM” or “cost per mil” basis, with a “mil” being 1000 ad impressions. In order to estimate the kind of value you will get from such advertising, one needs to know how that advertiser defines an “impression.” Some ad serving software will show a new impression to a visitor who has been on the same web page for an extended period of time. Typically, this happens when the banner cycles through to another advertiser then back to your banner, but not always. Is that something you want getting counted twice? Do you have a choice? Probably not. What about if the visitor refreshes the web page?

Confused yet? Me too. That’s why I take what people tell me about their website’s stats with a grain of salt when I buy advertising. It’s a trial and error process for me that I have learned to evaluate effectively over time.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is, you need to “level the playing field” by evaluating your own stats. You can easily compare different advertising by looking at the referral stats for your own website. Many therapists I talk to have websites and don’t realize that they already have a stats package installed – that their designer or web host just needs to provide them access to it. Once there, you should be able to look under a “Referring Sites” category to see where your websites visitors are coming from. Compare the amount you spend with how many visitors you get from each advertiser.

Track your conversions as well. For therapists in particular, if you have a “contact form” on your website, you can track conversions by entering a “Goal” (the URL of your “Thank You for Contacting Me” page) into Google Analytics. With this information you should be able to easily see which sites are sending traffic to you that results in a referral. Conversion tracking is an absolute necessity for any serious marketing campaign; it can mean the difference between “making thousands” or “spending thousands.”

But what about phone calls? How can I track those?

First of all, if you have a website for your services, it is important to have your phone number in a prominent place (near the top, and BIG). The easier it is for people to contact you, the more likely your website will be to convert visitors into referrals. Keep a spreadsheet handy to record new referrals you get, and politely ask, “Do you mind me asking how you found out about my services?” If they say “your website,” also ask if they found your site through a search engine or another website. Sometimes people will be able to recall, and the information can be very useful in determining if your advertising dollars are being well spent. This information can also be gathered through new patient intake forms.

The internet is one of the best ways to advertise for many different professions, products, and services. For therapists in particular, the demographics of internet users are perfect for getting quality referrals. Your money can go a lot further on the web than through traditional means such as yellow page or print advertising. With that being said, this form of advertising is relatively new compared to traditional means, so many are not familiar with the concepts involved. Hopefully my explanations will help.

Amazing $50 Ebay Affiliate Sites Deal of the Century

Chris H. — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:43:29 +0000

I met a guy named Chris on Digital Point the other day, and he did some work for me. He did a really good job, so I asked him if he did anything else. He then tells me about these Ebay affiliate sites that he’s selling to people for dirt cheap. He sends me a bunch of examples, and I was blown away.

The sites are setup using Wordpress with an ebay affiliate feed for whatever type of item category you choose. He sets a cron job to update the feed, and walla! You’ve got an ebay affiliate site, SEO friendly and ready to go in a few hours.

So I had to try this out myself. I bought RolexWatchAuctions.com, and I bought AppleComputerAuctions.com for a friend of mine as a Christmas present. Here are some other sites he’s done:
http://1dollardvd.net
http://rockbandsource.com
http://guccigallery.com
http://mycoachstore.com

I got a few links for RolexWatchAuctions.com, and it’s already on the first page of Google for “rolex watch auctions,” I haven’t even had the site 2 weeks yet.

Here’s what you will need:

Choose a topic that you think will be profitable for an ebay affiliate website.
Create an affiliate account at Commission Junction so you can join the ebay affiliate program.
Buy the domain name.
Choose a Wordpress Theme (I customized the graphics at the top for mine, Chris didn’t do that).
Setup hosting somewhere or add the domain on to an account you have that allows multiple websites.
Send me $50 through Paypal (Click Here), and I will get you in touch with Chris so he can start your site. Make sure you put your email address in the Paypal message if it’s different from your Paypal email.

This offer expires on Jan. 10th, 2008.

Google Analytics and Your Privacy Policy

Chris H. — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:40:10 +0000

Today I did a little work on a privacy policy I have been writing for a website. Privacy policies are something I have ignored in the past, but they are becoming increasingly important as more people on the web these days actually read them, and they can give more “trust” to your site from certain parties.

I started it off with the information gathered from Google Analytics that I use for various purposes. Google Analytics is a really great analytical tool, and it is an effective way to run pretty reports that clearly show visitor trends, effectiveness of marketing, search queries, etc. I’ve had a few clients ask some pretty tough questions in the past, and on occassion, I’ve had to dig deep into Analytics to find the answer. Did you know that Analytics tracks visitor stats down to browser type, OS, geographical location, Java version, network location, screen resolution, and more?

While writing the Analytics section of the privacy policy, I double checked a few things in my Analytics account to make sure I got the most important items, and below is the list I came up with. Comments and suggestions are welcome; this is the very first section of the first draft.

Types of information collected on ———-.com

Information Collected From All Visitors
- Visitors to this website who have javascript enabled are tracked using Google Analytics. Google Analytics collects the following types of information from users:
  - Type of user agent (web browser) used, software manufacture and version number.
  - Type of operating system
  - Screen colors (color processing ability of the users screen)
  - Javascript support
  - Flash version
  - Screen resolution
  - Network location and IP address
    - Can include country, city, state, region, county, or any other geographic data.
    - Hostname
    - Bandwidth (internet connection speed)
  - Time of visit
  - Pages visited
  - Time spent on each page of the website
  - Referring site statistics
    - The website (URI) the user came through in order to arrive at this website (example: clicking on a hyperlink from Yahoo.com that took the user to this website)
    - Search engine query used (example: typing in a phrase into a search engine like Google, and clicking on a link from that search engine)
- This data is primarily used to optimize our website for our visitors, however we will use this data for marketing purposes. An example of how this data could be used for marketing purposes would be to tell potential advertisers how many visitors we get to the website, where our visitors come from, and how they arrive at our website.
- This data DOES NOT include any personalized identification information such as:
  - Names
  - Phone Numbers
  - Email Addresses
  - Mailing Addresses
  - Social Security Numbers
  - Bank Account Numbers
  - Credit Card Information
Information Collected from All Users Who Register on This Website…

Need Suggestions for Hosting Companies!

Chris H. — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:53:01 +0000

I currently have many of my websites hosted on Media Temple’s Gridserver. If you click on the link, don’t get sucked into their slick marketing and hyped up “Grid Hosting” talk. Today my sites on those servers have been dead slow to respond all day long. About 15 websites. Since moving them to the gridservers they have also been plagued with database errors, even after upgrading to “dedicated” memory for my db’s (Grid Containers). I’m now spending a around $80 / month for two accounts, and I don’t feel safe keeping my sites there much longer. I lose money every time something like this happens, and it never fails, that it happens at the worst possible time (like the day you spent a bunch of time and money doing extra marketing to get people to your website).

My problems actually started with a company called Aplus.net, where I had hosted many static html sites over the years. Aplus.net had the worst outsourced tech support you could imagine. Not that I need tech support very often, but their control panel had bugs, so it was painfully necessary to call them sometimes. When I started bulding more database driven sites, I noticed 500 errors on Aplus.net hosted sites. When I called, I was told that their servers “do not allow more than two simultaneous PHP processes at a time,” whatever that means…. I was running a simple serendipity blog that they had available in their control panel.

This is when it really got bad.
My spearfishing forums were on Aplus.net’s shared hosting, and I knew it was an accident waiting to happen. I had already set up the hosting account on Media Temple and begun moving my smaller websites there. The forums weren’t getting any traffic though, and the site would be hard to move so I saved it for last. That’s when the biggest spearfishing forum site on the web went down. The owner shut it down, purged a bunch of moderators, and basically pissed off a bunch of users. So where’d they come? My site, and you can probably guess what happened next. My site was crippled by the traffic. The aplus.net servers couldn’t handle it after the first few hundred visitors. I had to shut down the site and spend the next 24 hours moving it to Media Temple.

During the interim, some of the guys local to the spearfishing community on the big site, set up their own barebones vbulletin forums, on a decent server, and all of the traffic went there. It stayed there too of course.

Do you see why hosting is important? Suppose the same thing had happened to me today? No one’s going to stay on a site that takes 5 minutes to serve a web page.

I inquired into Rackspace dedicated hosting, and the cost will be over $500 for what I need (a little too steep). I also tried out Mosso, who is rackspace’s shared hosting sister company. They looked really promising at the $100 / mo. price. The services they offered seemed really cutting edge. But when I started moving sites there, I had trouble with their database servers lagging. They acted like it was a very rare occurrence, but how should I know? I need something reliable. I cancelled that account too.

So here I am, still frustated with hosting, looking for suggestions. If anyone has any I’m open to them. The thing is, I need to host a bunch of database driven websites, which I’ve found out – is a lot different from hosting a bunch of static html websites.

How I Doubled My Advertising Income in Under 8 hrs.

inlayout — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:08:05 +0000

I have a website with excellent organic search engine rankings for moderately competitive keywords that are well-targeted for a lot of advertisers. I run Adsense on this site, and it has always done well for me. But in the past 6 months or so, Adsense revenues have been declining somewhat, so I decided to take action.

The best performing Adsense ads are usually showing up at the top, so I did some research and found which two had the best paying affiliate programs. One paid around 30% per sale, and the other had a very good per sale payout that wasn’t dependant on the percentage.

For one program, I created a small text ad similar in appearance to the Adsense ads on my site. I placed it in an i-frame and plugged it in, right on top of adsense (pushing down adsense a notch). I also made sure that all of the links on my site for this advertiser used the affiliate code, and I blocked the ads from showing up in Adsense using their competitive URL filter.

For the other program, I felt it would be more suitable to create a landing page on my site for it. I did this, and even did some SEO work on the landing page. I linked to the landing page from a featured links area on my homepage, and from some other prominent places on the site.

The last thing I did, was to run some banners on my site. I already had a cheap banner rotation script installed that I got from SoftBiz Scripts. It’s really simple, and I recommend it for small sites. Although I normally had advertisers running banners there, at the time, I was down to one advertiser. So I added banners for the affiliate programs. I’m not a terrible artist, so I even designed my own banners; and so far they have outperformed the standard banners that the affiliate programs provide.

Here’s a screenshot of one month’s earnings on one of the programs:

Although I incorporated these changes over the course of a few months, the total time spent on them was around 8 hrs. I could have easily done it all in one day, but I wanted to test things out a little bit at a time to ensure that I didn’t waste time and money. Hopefully some of you can take advantage of this as well.

Also of note, was the fact that my Adsense earnings did not decline from removing these two advertisers. In fact, they seem to be going up again these past few months.

How Are Things in New Orleans?

Chris H. — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:10:12 +0000

I get this a lot. I talk to so many people all over the country in the line of work I do. An advertiser wrote me tonight and at the end of her email it said,

PS. If you have time, I’d be interested in hearing a post Katrina report.

From the Second Most Likely Area To Flood Out Sacramento, CA.

So tonight I took some time, and since so many people want to know, here was my response:

As far as New Orleans goes, overall I’d say the city is doing well considering what happened during Katrina. The good part is that most parts of town are “back to normal” I guess one could say. The bad part is that the poorer parts of the city are still deserted and not making much progress. The people with the least resources are the ones that were hit the hardest. There’s this “Road Home” program that the State created to give out the federal funds that were allocated to help rebuild, and over the past few months people have just STARTED to get that money – 2 yrs. later. So you can imagine, what low income person, who has already settled down in another state, is going to get that money and want to come back to rebuild? New Orleans didn’t treat them that great. Only the ones who really loved it here will come back, and even for some of those, the thought of returning and not having their community here will be too discouraging.

We have a lot of migrant workers here helping rebuild now, so there’s been a big shift in the racial / ethnic makeup of the city. After a while, abandoned houses will be torn down and new ones built. Some areas of the city have already gotten “facelifts.” So there has been some good and there will be more to come of it. For tourists, everything good about New Orleans is still here, and one probably wouldn’t notice much difference. I love the city and I guess you have to take the good with the bad anywhere you live, but for me the good here, really outweighs the bad.

The Changing Image of Google

inlayout — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:22:51 +0000

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year. Although I’m sure there were hundreds of other signs that Google’s image was changing, for me it started when Google “local results” started showing up in search above the natural search results.

Here we had our beloved “Google,” created by two Stanford students infatuated with search, beginning to venture into the realm of the “content providers” by adding local yellow-page-type listings in with their search results. Let’s see, how do we edit our listing? Has anyone ever tried it? If you have, you know that it’s next to impossible. Who knows where Google gets this data, or how they decide which businesses get the privilege of showing up on the front page.

Now we have “news” results showing up in regular search results. Was I looking for news? If I was, wouldn’t I just add “news” to the search or search “Google News?”

The problem as I see it, is that my favorite search provider is turning into “content provider.” This is further evidenced by acquisitions such as YouTube. The search engine we grew to know and love is now directly competing with more and more webmasters around the globe. This hasn’t happened without a backlash though. “Search” used to be the primary means I would use to find the content I’m interested in, but now I have many new alternatives.

Looking back at the evolution and rapid growth of social networks and media, I see a relationship between Google’s “sandboxing” of new content and the growth of popular sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon (SU). For those unfamiliar with the term, Google’s “sandbox” refers to the inability of new websites to rank well for competitive keyword phrases in Google. If I can’t find the newest, best content on Google, I’m going to go elsewhere; and Digg and SU provided a great means of delivering the newest and best content to users.

The recent tryst with eBay is a symbolic event that reminds me that Google is a competitor, more so now than ever. Google wants to be “everything to everyone.” By providing content that it’s too big to manage (local listings), and e-commerce solutions (Google Checkout), it’s no longer just our friendly search provider.

MyBlogLog – Get on the Wagon

inlayout — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 18:00:04 +0000

I haven’t talked much about MyBlogLog in the past, but I really like it. The site widget is neat because you get to see who’s been visiting your blog, and you can explore their blogs and get to know them better. So if you’re not in “the wagon” you’re missing the train.

This little experiment, I found on Chris Sandberg’s blog when I was looking at my backlinks. So I thought I’d give it a try:

***Start Copying Here:***
Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.

2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.

3) Take “My New Community Members�? and move them into the “The Original Community Members�? list.

4) Find 3 new blogs, join their MyBlogLog Community and add them to the “My New Community Members�? section. Remember to also add the “Join the Community” link next to each blog. (Example: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/ReformatThis/ )

5) Join as a member to each Community listed here by clicking on “Join the Community�?. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your community, and you should do the same!

My New Community Members

Google Groupie – Join the Community

Azrin’s Info Web – Join the Community

Affiliate Marketing Wave – Join the Community

The Original Community Members

New Orleans Internet Marketing – Join the Community

Kreah Craze – Join the Community

Blographik – Join Community

Internet Business Blog – Join the Community

2Perfect – Join the Community

Santoshp.com – Join the Community

FleeingtheSocialScene.com – Join the Community

The Google Maven – Join the Community

TheAdamBox.com – Join the Community

CourtneyTuttle.Com – Join the Community

SmarWealthyRich.com – Join the Community

BloggerLounge.net – Join the Community

The Thinking Blog – Join the Community

Blogging For Bills – Join the Community

Randa Clay Design – Join the Community

PureBlogging – Join the Community

Dietriffic - Join the Community

Shawn Knight – Join the Community

Reformat This – Join the Community

Kelly Cho – Join the Community

Ms. Danielle - Join the Community

The Man of Silver – Join the Community

Nate Whitehill – Join the Community

Leo Chiang – Join the Community

Garry Conn – Join the Community

Samanathon – Join the Community

Mr. Gary Lee - Join the Community

Feats of a Chilean Dot Com Entrepreneur - Join the Community

Jon Lee – Join the Community

Everyday Weekender – Join the Community

Bryan’s Rants – Join the Community

***End Copying Here***

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda

inlayout — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 02:40:28 +0000

I “should have” started this blog 9 years ago. That’s when I got interested in designing websites. I can’t imagine how many transformations it would have gone through by now. I wonder how many links it would have going to it, or what I would have talked about back then. It sure wouldn’t be “sandboxed” by Google, like this one is.

I tell everybody I know, if you’re interested in anything, start a website on it. Let me help you with it. Just put something out there, and sooner or later, if you work on it a little bit, it will make some money for you.

It’s also neat having a blog and being able to sit down and write something that I know a ton of people will see tomorrow. But it’s also like owning property. The fact is, advertisers need relevant space to advertise. They need to reach their audience, and with all of the blogs out there, it’s hard to believe that sometimes I can’t find one on the topic I’m looking for. It does happen though.

Look at the new text ad products popping up: ReviewMe.com, V7N Contextual Links. They need bloggers.

So if you have something you like to talk about, what are you waiting around for? Put yourself out there…

Bringing StumbleUpon Traffic to Your Website

inlayout — Thu, 31 May 2007 02:59:44 +0000

http://www.stumbleupon.com

If anyone hasn’t tried StumbleUpon yet, I strongly suggest it, not only for bringing additional traffic to a site, but also because it’s really good entertainment and a great way to find the kind of stuff you’re into on the web.

SU is kind of a mixture between MySpace, Digg. and Del.icio.us. Sign up for a free account, download the toolbar (usually, I’m very against adding toolbars, but this one’s worth it), and choose your topics that interest you.

What SU is Good for from a User Perspective:
This is the fun part about StumbleUpon, after you fill out your profile and check off topics that interest you (so that SU knows something about you), when you click Stumble! on the toolbar – it takes you to a cool random website that you will probably like and / or find very useful. At first I was pretty amazed at how great it works. I now “Stumble�? late at night when I’m bored and can’t sleep. I always wind up adding a new bookmark. Don’t be too selective with the interests you choose. Go to My Preferences > Stumbling > Update your topics, and dig through the multitude of topics checking of everything that interests you. That way you’ll get a wide variety of good stuff, and you’ll be more likely to find others with similar interests.

How SU Can Benefit Your Website:
Just like Digg, the SU community shapes what content gets seen on SU. SU can literally send thousands of unique visitors to a stumbled site at anytime. I’m pretty new to SU, and I’ve stumbled my blog a few times (which isn’t even ranking in the search engines yet, it’s so new), and had 2000 SU visitors come in one day. Also, all SU content is indexed by the SE’s. When I stumbled my blog, it went to #1 in their business section for a few days. A very good link.

Say you like a site, and you “Stumble�? it (the best way is to click the “thumbs up�? button, AND write a review and tags for the site), that counts as a vote for the site, and helps categorize it. When a site you stumble gets a vote, it increases the likelihood of others getting to see the site on SU.

Only thing is, all Stumblers aren’t created equal – some votes are more important than others. To improve your “importance�? in SU, you want to have “friends�? and / or people subscribed to your pages. Here’s some easy tips to improving your importance in SU:

1. Choose your topics liberally. Check off anything you’re interested in. If you have lots of interests, it will be easy to find similar stumblers.

2. “Stumble�? sites you like. Just like you would use Digg or Delicious, but your “Stumbles�? show up on your pages. People will be more likely to add you as a friend if they like your “stumbles.�?

3. When you click on another SU member’s picture, their interests show up next to them, if you have a lot of matches, add them as a friend, there’s a good chance they will reciprocate.

4. There’s a lot of ways to find similar SU members, there’s a “Network�? link at the top, and a “friends�? link. Once you have “friends�? it will even show you “friends of friends.�? I’m sure you get the idea.

Here’s my pages – add me – http://chartwell.stumbleupon.com/

My experience with SU traffic so far, is that it is weird and unpredictable. SU now sends about 100 visitors per day to my blog, but every now and then I’ll get a wave of a few hundred or so. I have read of sites that get much more traffic than this from SU.

As with all good internet marketing, the quality of the content on your site is directly proportional to the visitor’s satisfaction, and satisfied SU visitors will send many more SU visitors. So don’t think you can spam StumbleUpon easily. You can “Stumble” whatever you want. When you “Stumble” a website or a page, all you really do is introduce it into the community. If it’s not very good, it will be ignored, just as many of my useless blog posts are – going by the SU waste side :)

The Downside to SU traffic:
SU’s not some magic bullet that will bring a ton of sales to your e-commerce site, even if Stumblers really do like it and bring in a ton of traffic. The visitors are much less likely to convert than direct SEM referrals. But it is a FREE, easy way to bring in extra traffic, and the search friendly links are good too. Did I mention it’s Free?

Have Fun Stumbling!
http://www.stumbleupon.com

How to Make Money with Adsense

inlayout — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:41:38 +0000

My first check I got from Google Adsense in 2003! $260.40, not bad for a first time Adsense user!

That was when the light bulb went off. I had done something I enjoyed doing (building a website), and I had earned money from it that would contine to grow. Keep reading this blog, and you’ll eventually find out exactly how I did it every time. Here are some tips to make money from Adsense:

Different Markets Pay Differently
Not all markets are equal! Just as certain keywords are more competitive to show up for on the internet, keyword competitiveness is almost directly proportional to Adsense competitiveness. If there are more people competing for the ads, the ads will pay more when people click them. You may not be able to choose the sector your site is in, but if you can, consider these factors:

If the market is competitive, do I have the resources to build a site that can compete?
If the answer is “yes, I have the resources to build a content-rich site, do effective SEO, and market the site in a competitive market,” then do it, and you will reap the rewards of the high paying ads. If the market is competitive and you don’t have the resources to do SEO or other marketing, your high paying ads won’t get clicked because the site will be at the bottom of the pile.

Determining market competitiveness can be a simple process. One way is to bid on the keywords using Adwords or a similar product, another is to look at how well-optimized the sites in the search results are. While the second can only be done if you have a decent understanding of search engine optimization, bidding on keywords in Adwords will show you exactly what people are paying for the top positions. My experience has been that earnings will be just under half of what the advertisers are paying. If I had to guess, I’d say between 35 – 45%. (Google’s new “smart pricing can have a dramatic effect on this figure, but that’s a topic for another post.)

If the market your site is about is non-competitive, you may not make as much money on the clicks you get, but you’re at an advantage because you won’t need to devote as many resources to SEO and marketing in order to build a top ranked site in its niche. In this case, you can focus on creating good CONTENT which is the key to SEO and Adsense earnings. Is it a market that has growth potential? If so, it may be a great opportunity. Offer free information or services to the public. Create a site that will be a fixture for years to come by adding fresh content regularly.

Putting Adsense on Your Site
This is the easy part, you sign up for an adsense account, pick some pretty colors, get the code, and dump it somewhere you think it will look good on your site right? Almost. Do that, but be willing to experiment with some different colors and placements. It’s a careful balance.

I’m not always comfortable with the ads between posts on the homepage of this site. I don’t want users to have to “avoid” my Google ads to navigate the site. It can drive people away. These are some of the things you have to consider when doing ad placements. The good thing about my ad placements between posts, is that when someone clicks on the post, they get an unobstructed post to read. So the minor homepage inconvenience isn’t as bad.

Effectiveness for ad placement can be different on every site, but my experience has been that the left hand portion of the web page, above the fold of the browser window, will get the most clicks. I also increased my clickthrough rates by about 4% when experimenting with different ad colors. Ads designed to look like content or navigation on the page will sometimes get higher clickthrough rates. Although that can be another judgement call; it’s not going to be effective long term if the site is difficult for users to navigate.

Last, enjoy what you do. Create sites about things you like doing, are knowledgeable of, or like talking about, and you’re sure to be a hit. Pay attention to search engine optimization and try to get quality links to your site. One of the best things about making money through adsense is that you don’t have to spend time dealing with advertisers on a personal basis, and you can focus more on building your site.

Free Websites for Mental Health Professionals

inlayout — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:37:02 +0000

There’s a new service available to mental health professionals called @ Counseling.

http://atcounseling.com

@ Counseling is a place where counseling professionals can sign up and create their own web site, choosing from a variety of different templates. It all takes place through your browser window, and is a very simple and straightforward process. Best of all, it is completely free for any licensed member of the helping professions.

The service is provided by The Family & Marriage Counseling Directory, but therapists do not need to advertise in the directory to be eligible. I hope people will take advantage of it.

Welcome to New Orleans Internet Marketing

Chris H. — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 03:48:35 +0000

I’ve been designing web sites since 1998, but that’s really not important. Anyone can design a web site. But how many people really understand how traffic flows on the internet? I spend e v e r y w a k i n g moment trying to figure it out.

I’ve helped bring traffic to websites in many different ways. It started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When I started doing SEO, the results were amazing. I read a few good resources, like The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, the doctoral thesis by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I spent countless hours on WebmasterWorld and SearchEngineWatch and reading newsletters by people like Jill Whalen. In no time at all I was hitting the top of the search engine results with every keyword phrase I targeted. I was also learning Social Work at the time, and I wrote my master’s thesis on Search Engine Accessibility and Community Resources; it was a project designed to help community resource agencies design web sites with search engine optimization in mind. The research I did at this time gave me an in-depth understanding of how search engines work.

I was still designing web sites at the time, and with incredible results. My client’s sites did great in the search engines. That’s when I realized that I needed to start designing web sites of my own. I realized that no matter how much I charged for the web sites I designed for small businesses, my time and effort was just as valuable, when put towards developing sites of my own.

Needless to say, the success I had was great. The Family & Marriage Counseling Directory was my first real project I did on my own, and it’s still one of the top sites in its niche today, well enough respected that therapists fequently submit articles for publication on the site.

I’ve since moved on to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), running ad campaigns in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and their collective search partners. I’ve done a lot of experimentation with those campaigns on my own sites, which has helped me learn what works and what doesn’t.

Then came social networks. Forums had always been around, but social networks? To be honest, I had my head in the sand, hoping that they would go away at first. I was “too busy” to go on myspace.com, and wayyyy too much of a rebel to be a part of the “mainstream” by doing something like “having a myspace page.” Boy was that dumb. People are navigating the web in a completely different way now, and it’s going to continue to change. Hopefully I never put my head in the sand again. Now I actually like myspace, and I “get it.” Even though I’m 31 years old and definitely not “with it.”

Did I mention that World Spearfishing Guide (case study coming soon) is #1 on myspace.com right now when you search for “Spearfishing?” I’ve found a whole new area of internet marketing – social media search engine optimization – let’s call it “smseo” for short. :)

So this is what I do now. It started off as Independent Layout & Website Design, and it’s now New Orleans Internet Marketing (dba inlayout, LLC). The focus of my work is designing proprietary, niche, web sites that provide information and services to the public.

Thanks for stopping by,

Chris Hartwell