Most webmasters I know believe that in order to make more money with their sites, they need more traffic. Of course this is true but you can always optimize your inventory in order to make more with what you have, and give better value to your advertisers. In today’s article I will try to focus on some of them and give some general tips on subject.

Know your audience

Let’s start with the basics. Knowing your audience is really important for your web site. By knowing your audience you can offer products that may convert better, or make advertisers (in case you sell your inventory) love you Of course if you are monetizing your site with a contextual program like adsense, then you probably wont need this but you need to know some things regarding the traffic of the site. I will explain that later.

Improving CTR (click through rate)

It’s all about clicks right? So we need to make the visitor click on the ads. Let’s give some tips on that.

Don’t fill your site with ads

First thing you need to know is that there is no rule like “the more ads you have, the more will be the possibilities to click on them”. In fact if you fill a site with ads is like begging and 99% of your visitors will never come back. In my opinion you should not have more than 2 ad units and one link unit, or a few small banners in your sidebar.
This way your site looks more professional and your visitors will be able to know that your site is cool before they click on an ad (after all we need return visitors, right?)

See what people see first in your site

That’s a very important thing. You need to find a few non techies and ask them to tell you what they see first in your site. This is the place where you need some advertisements. Past researches teach us that a user decides about a site in the first two seconds. So if they don’t like our site we need them to click on an ad in that time.

Ad placements

One of the major problems today is ad blind users. I mean people who know very well how ads look, so they wont even see the message in an advertisement at all. To prevent this you need to use a smart ad placement. To understand this better we need to know how a user see our site.

Experienced users understand very quickly what is the template of the site, and where is the content. So they will try to focus in the content from the beginning of their visit to your site. A good thing to do in that part is to put an advertisement in the top of your content or even better use a box mixed with the content. If this is an adsense style advertisement then using the site colors is better as our intention for this ad is to “trick” the user that it is content.

Now if the user find the way to read the content he/she needs to take a decision. Stay on your site - which is good anyway - or leave it? For the second option we can use a big box advertisement after the content. This advertisement should be something that user will pay attention to, so I would suggest to use blue colour for the links of this advertisement.

If your site has a sidebar in the left, it is good to have a 160×600 banner there. This is mostly because most of the people check the left side first. So this way if the user don’t like the site from the start of the session he/she can leave and give us some money

Colours for contextual advertisements

The colours you will use with your advertisements is a very big factor regarding contextual ads (adsense, YPN, etc.) Of course the exact colours you will use is connected with the colours of your site, so I can’t say much to this. But something I know and I advice you to test, is that the blue colour in links in most cases has better CTR.

Another important thing to consider, is that if your site has many return visitors, you might want to serve different coloured ads per pageview. This is because your loyal visitors know where your advertisements exist in your site, and they don’t look at all there. But with colours changing on every pageview you may get them to see your ads.

Are your ads really contextual?

Sometimes the adsense bot doesn’t understand what your content is about, and that’s mostly a SEO problem. For instance if you have a blog and everywhere you can see the word “blog” adsense will display blog related ads even in your post about your vacation! In order to prevent this you can use section targeting. This will help the google bot figure out what to get from your page, and serve more targeted ads to your web site.

Do you know what the results are?

No matter what kind of advertisements you serve (CPM, CPC, own inventory, etc.) you need to know some basic stats for the advertisements you serve in your site. This can be done with channels in adsense or zones in openAds or even conversion goals in Google Analytics. The important thing is to note the changes you are making and then see what the results are for each individual advertisement. With a little trial and error you will be able to find out what really works with your site. To be sure that your experiments give you right results each experiment should be live for at least 2000 impressions, but if your site has some serious traffic then 10.000 impressions is even better.

Some final thoughts

Most webmasters own sites because they want to make money, but in the process they forget that the users actually look for information Be cool with the ads on your site, and always pay more attention on how to make a better site for the people who are using it. This way you may bring in less money in the next few weeks but I am sure it can make you a living in a year or two

Hope you enjoyed this article. Later we will publish more articles regarding ad optimisation, so keep in touch

Why is Aaron Wall one of the top SEO’s?

Aaron Wall SEO Book, is one of the highest ranking SEO sites but why, on the face of it his site is nothing special a glorified blog it’s not even hugely optimised for the term SEO so why is it there?

Answer: Affiliate marketing
Aaron runs an affiliate program yep that’s his book we are promoting on the right, this scheme provides thousands of back links all from highly targeted relevant sites. For him it’s a win win situation his book gets promoted and he gets back links, lots of back links.

If you provide a service or product you to could be harnessing the power of an affiliate network.

Before you start
Now before you go getting all excited there are some cons to this win win situation and the con is the win your affiliates.

You soon realise that their good affiliates and then the spam junkies managing your affiliates can become a nightmare its one of the reasons people look to affiliate management companies to act as middlemen.

The second problem is the affiliate cut, you see they may be driving sales to you but they are also taking a cut from that sale if you have only a tiny profit margin on your goods you will see that shrink even further.

Doing it alone or Affiliate marketing company
Still with us, great now comes the big question do you run the affiliate scheme yourself or ask an affiliate management company to do it for you.

A Management Company takes care of finding, advertising and running your affiliates for either a percentage of the sales (cutting profit margins even more) a variable fee or both.

Doing it yourself means you need to find, manage and run your affiliates, organise payments etc

Ultimately this is going to come down to the way you want to handle your expansion, either way is going to cost at least a little, though the DIY is probably cheaper in the long run, you will not have the ability to fall back on the experience of your affiliate management company when it goes wrong. For this post I’m going to presume you went the DIY route (we will do a round up of some of the best affiliate management companies in a later post)

Self managing affiliates

You will need software to manage and track your affiliates, their sales etc
Both myself and Aaron use iDevAffiliate software its very reasonably priced with the basic version being just $99

However unless you are reasonable coder you will want to get the SEO friendly links module which is another $99.99. Personally I use the Gold version, which includes all the addon modules. There are plenty of others out there but iDevAffiliate does a pretty good job at a good price and I would recommend it.

Setting it up is a breeze and you will be managing your affiliates in no time, remember to use the SEO addon to create nice 301 redirects for your affiliates this way your affiliates will not only be bringing in traffic but also helping with your rankings.

A good affiliate scheme will provide banners and various link etc to assist its affiliates the more you can provide them the better, I offer banners, button’s, targeted anchor text links, and even example landing pages with additional graphics for their use be creative.

Recruiting Affiliates should be the easy part a good way to start is the “closed membership” advertise on forums etc for a 100 or so affiliates places like DP, Webdigity and Wickedfire are packed full of people eager to be your affiliate sadly for you they are probably not the ones you are after. However a mixture of forum activity and contacting well known and respected affiliate marketers might well pay off, after a few months expand the group a hundred at a time. I find this works really well particularly if you provide a waiting email list.

Paying your affiliates is the next problem the quickest and easiest way is through PayPal, make sure you have a PayPal business account that is verified, other options could include Google checkout or good old fashion cheques (though these come with their own added issues).

Final thought

This was a brief intro to the world of affiliate marketing from the other side and its suitable for everyone from a drop ship merchant, Directory owner even an SEO consultant!
One very final thought Aarons’ book is actually very good so maybe the reason he is considered one of the best isn’t just down to affiliates but you will have to read his book to find out!

Lies, damn lies and Google

I think now is appropriate time to wade in on the are paid links spam debate the big boys have been fighting it out to the point that blows were very nearly struck, to be honest both side have well thought out and constructive arguments. I won’t go to heavily into the debate but will include some great web links where you can get a good idea of what is going on. Instead I was to draw you to 2 issues I feel need to be raised that seemed to have been forgotten.

Google is a company

Google is not a state, country or a charity Google is a money making company being listed in Google is not your right and you have no legal control over making them list your site. Therefore we can debate till we are blue in the face but the Google Search engine is controlled by a company that ultimately has to make money to survive, one of its main revenue streams sits on the right hand side of your screen every time you do a Google search. Google bosses must have by now realised the problem, if people can pay SEO companies to buy good links and optimise sites to get to the number 1 spot in the search engines then it will provide a far better return on investment then short term Adword campaigns it is therefore in their interest to see this becoming harder and more expensive to do.
Google has a problem it cannot alienate customers or competitors to much and therefore has made or rather left concessions in its policies.

What is editorial control

Why is it ok to buy links from Yahoo directory but not my site? Because according to Google, Yahoo directory shows editorial control, they filter out inappropriate sites that don’t fit a criteria and therefore are not motivated by money. Lets look at that again…
Yahoo directory is:

• A human edited directory
• Who takes only paid submissions
• Pays its editors

Now I’m sure the Yahoo editors do a great job but what makes them have any less or more editorial control then myself. Lets take this blog for example, their is no way I’m going to allow a Viagra company advertise here or any company except those relevant to the site. I have full editorial control and are perfectly capable of saying no I also know what I think is the sort of sites our readers would be interested in. In our community friends slot at the minute is Wordtracker they are a great company and yes the link is an affiliate one but that doesn’t make them any less of a great company. If Google wants to delist a site they have every right to do so but to delist it because of paid links is like they are saying the site owner was incapable of making editorial control, now I’m not a lawyer but thats got to be close to slander?

I am not a terrorist

In the UK we have anti movie copying ads on all DVD’s they go something like this….

DVD Piracy is wrong, its a crime, by making, selling or buying a pirated DVD you are helping terrorism

That was a bit of a leap, I copy a DVD for a friend I’m helping terrorism? Google uses the same techniques as that ad it has managed to blur the lines between what it doesn’t want you to do and the Law. Interestingly I hear a lot of people referring to Blackhat techniques as illegal and while many probably are being a black hat SEO doesn’t mean you break the law merely that you break Google webmaster guidelines.

Is it safe to buy links

2 things have become obvious through out this, one Google can’t detect paid links easily and with many Webmasters wising up to simple things like using the word sponsors it will become harder, hence they are trying to get people to rat out such links, two Google is a huge PR machine and ultimately it plans to eliminate paid links not algorithmically but through propaganda. Ultimately my advice remains the same, never buy for PR always buy for targeted traffic in your subject area with good anchor text alternatively look for button ads like the one to the right of this post, great links carry weight almost impossible to detect as paid for these might not be as useful as anchored text links but they have the potential to get your brand to 1000s of visitors.

Light reading

• SEOMoz - Matt Cutt on paid links
• WPW Video with Rand and Graywolf over paid links
• Graywolf presentation at SES
• SEOMoz coverage of Paid links session at SES
• Two quick ones from Andy Beard Slippery slope for Google | Paid Links vital for relevancy
• Last but not least Mr Cutts own words on how to report a paid link

One last thing

We still looking for community friends if your site, company or product would be of interest to our readers let us know we would love to welcome new friends to the site, though Pharmaceutical companies need not apply

Are you a directory owner and are you ready for the day that Google stops telling users PR from the toolbar. Most directories make their money based on the PR value while we in the SEO world scoff at the childish mentality for directory owners it’s a 1 way ticket to profit, higher PR means you can charge more for your links. Other then people submitting links most directories receive little to none genuine traffic this makes having a high PR even more vital as its one of the few matrices that is known to many webmasters out there.

So when you see comments like this from Googlers

Given that many of you aren’t so fond of PR info in the toolbar, I’d love to know what feature you would like to see. Mandatory criteria:
- Would have to provide actionable info for webmasters
- Would need to be useful and interesting for the ~99.9% of users who aren’t webmasters

Source - SEO Round table

Its time to be thinking about how you and your directories will cope in the no PR era.

The options

The way I see it their are 3 options when it comes to looking at the future, do nothing, sell or evolve. The first I don’t really see as an option the other 2 are worth considering.

Selling your site

Now would be the perfect time to sell your site, except of course the next PR update is due soon could this be the last? If you sell now you might not get the same price you would have got if the sites PR has risen, but leave it till after the PR update and you will be competing with an array of sites that have just had a good push and the owners want to offload.
Site selling fluctuates just like any other market knowing when to sell can make the difference between a fair price and a good price.

A quick look at sitepoint and Digital Point forums today showed that a PR 4 Directory would go for around $800 a PR 5 in excess of $2000 while a PR 3 would barely make it past the $150 mark.

Therefore we can see that the difference between a PR 4 and PR 5 is quite significant (but so is the work)

A good rule of thumb is to look at the sites monthly revenue and multiply by 12-16 to get an estimate but not all sites reach their estimates.

Evolving

Still with us, then perhaps selling was not the answer then its time to evolve ultimately to stay in the market you will need to add services and value to your site.

Without PR you will need a new benchmark people will be looking to your directory less as a means to direct money earning but to traffic so what can you do?

• Set up a blog, and advertise featured sites on blog post
• Create link or link adsvertising services
• Go social and embrace web2.0
• Something else?

Setting up a blog
The idea is simple create and maintain a blog attached to your directory, instead of the usual google adsense pull featured listings from your directory. Now this only works if you maintain the blog, but a successful blog will encourage users to submit link (it also works for building up those inbound links)

Become a link broker
You have a vast quantity of links and people looking to be advertised why not get into the link brokerage game, offering to match links within the directory assisting in 3 way link building. This can be done on many levels but the simplest is to allow users to opt in to the link broker scheme and then provide them with a list and a controlled way to contact each other. Of course these schemes can get very complicated but just look at Text Link ads.

Going social the web 2.0
Have a look at mybloglog, blog catalog, digg, reddit what do you notice, they are all directories! At their heart the same ideas of directories are their sure the focus has changed but they are still offering links back to the users site. The difference is they do so under the flag of being a community they provide a sense of belonging even if you don’t want to go as far as installing pling or similar think of the ways you can bring the community feel to your site.

Something completely different
Hey its not all about my ideas their are loads of ways to turn your directory into something more, how about a CSS gallery site? what about site profiles and allowing user feedback?
Tell us what your going to do when the end of the world comes (at least for directories)

Running e-commerce sites can be a great source of revenue but have you ever been in the situation where only a couple of products are being sold at the expense of others after all you can only feature so many products on your home page.

Mini Sites

Mini or niche sites are a favoured tactic of the SEO community for years, they allow you to target specific terms without having to adjust an entire site instead you create smaller sites dedicated to one product or niche that then link back to the main page to make the sale. These sites work because they are bringing the searcher exactly what they want, no hassle or fuss.

Determining suitable products

Mini sites are all about balance finding products that people are searching for and are easy to compete in the SERPs the key therefore to our mini sites is research.

Keyword research is laborious and tiresome anyone who has done any serious niche blog development will tell you how many possible combination of subjects their are out there you would be amazed the number of extreme ironing websites there are. However we are at a significant advantage in that instead of the near infinite topics niche bloggers have we only have a finite number that of our product catalogue.

Using word tracker and Google trends

We will use a simpler version of a technique I use for finding niche sites but for the purposes we are using it for it will work perfectly. Instead of me explaining it I’m going to use a video from the Thirty Day Challenge which if you haven’t already discovered is a great little site.

Just a few points

• In the video they use a base line “male yeast infection” the reason is simply they know the approximate traffic for high ranking page for that term
• Wordtracker is US based so some keywords it will have problems with
• You can save yourself some time by using the Firefox or IE 7 search plugin for Wordtracker

So now go through all your products looking at both Wordtracker and Google trends and then for each one do a Google search jotting down the number of competing sites (as part of this you may want to also check your own sites current rank for individual products) You are looking for products with high number of searchers but small number of sites ranking for the term.

Hopefully you have been able to find 3 to 4 products so now its time to create your mini sites.

Developing mini sites

There are loads of resources out there for developing Mini sites and niche site’s some of the best are Quick Whois Mini site guide, and Net business blog Niche Case study. However before jumping in and setting up your site there are a few things to remember and watch out for.

• Domain names - The nice thing about a mini site is you can buy a nice highly targeted domain name however when thinking of domain names remember that you cannot use other companies brand names so for example even though you might be selling Heinz Backed beans you can’t use Heinz name therefore you will need to look for a name like backedbeans.com
• Make your sales direct - while we haven’t discussed your main site at all in this article you need to make sure that you can go from the mini site direct to the checkout in a single click, you don’t after all want to lose that customer
• Unique content - don’t just copy and paste your product description rewrite and expand it, also use pictures where appropriate.

Mini sites are a lot of hard work, however if you are running a large e-commerce store having 10 or 15 high ranking satellite mini sites will bring in a continuous stream of sales, allowing our to focus on the high traffic high number of retailer products on your main site front page.