Building A Website for Affiliate Advertising
I've been reading a bit about various ways to make money with advertising. I'm looking into various affiliate programs, trying to decide how to focus my next website/blogging project. My first experiment with Google Adsense is on an informational site running on the WordPress platform called marinecorpsrecruit.com. It's doing fairly well, making around $15-$20/month, but it took a lot of blog posts just to get it to that point and since its my first blog with ads, I'm not sure how well that will last in the longer term. The answer to how often I have to update it to maintain a steady (or better, growing) amount of traffic is yet to be known.
I'm looking for my next idea. I was considering trying my hand at an affiliate program, but there's so much out there and I'm not finding a ton of useful information about which programs are actually good, how people are making money with them, how to promote certain products, etc. I don't mind putting in some time making a website, but I don't want something that's going to take several weeks and then only pay a few cents a week. It should be worth it I hope!
I checked out Commission Junction, which looks OK, but I can't get approved to use their advertisers links until I have a website to put them on. I don't want to spend time building out a site, only to not get approved by the advertisers; it's too much risk. For my Marine recruit site, I applied for a hotel ad and was automatically denied...not sure why.
How To Use Adsense Selection Targeting
Just thought I'd share a little thing I just learned about: Google Adsense selection targeting. Adsense ads are placed on your site based on matching adsense keywords with keywords found on your pages. Sometimes, you may be writing a few paragraphs that are relevant to the overall purpose of your site, but when you look at the keywords out of context, they aren't usually ones that your target audience would be interested in and would therefore not click. So you want to try to make sure that the ads that are shown on your site are relevant to your audience.
For example, for this blog, it's safe to say that most of my readers would be interested in web design. Since I write about that a lot, Google will often display ads that have web design-related keywords and the content is often very relevant to anyone who might be visiting my page. BUT, maybe I was writing a tutorial on how I developed a website for a car insurance company and as part of that post, I wrote a paragraph describing that company. Google would pick up those keywords like "car insurance", and suddenly that post would have ads trying to entice people to get a free insurance quote, which is not very relevant to my audience and will probably mean that I get less ad clicks.
A way to help make the ads that are showing up on your site relevant to your visitors, you can insert code in your page to target a selection that you do not want Google to consider for adsense keywords.
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Here is the content that I do not want Google to use for adsense keyword targeting.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
It's super simple and can help you deliver relevant content to your visitors.
SEO Outline
So I've been working at my "new" job for several months now and have learned quite a bit. Shamefully, I've neglected to record the things I"m interested in and learning on a regular basis. I will make a Thanksgiving reconciliation to try a bit harder to record and share what's up in my web world.
First off, I've been working at a web design firm that specializes in SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is interesting because in some ways, it's really really basic. It means making sure your website is structured in a way that search bots can easily navigate and index your site, making sure that you use various HTML tags to "optimize" your content and checking out your competition to come up with a few strategies for improving your page rank.
That's a really basic explanation and for a long time, that's really all I thought that SEO meant. In reality, success in SEO is a much more strategic affair that involves some rather complex strategies, which is both the most challenging and rewarding and exciting part of SEO. There's a certain morale boost that comes in the form of boosting your site or a client's site a few positions or even a few pages higher in search engine rankings. It's not just a scorecard competition; a single boost in page rank can equal hundreds of additional page hits (and thus sales or ad conversions) a month. It's fun and important basically.
The basics of SEO:
Learn how to research keywords & phrases
- You need to identify your competition and figure out why they are ranking high in search engines
- You need to understand how people are searching for the services your site/business provides
- You need to consider your goals in relations to your strategy. Do you plan on making money through ad clicks or by getting people to fill out an affiliate quote form? Or purchase products from your store? A high visitor rate is great, but pay off only really occurs when you are pulling in targeted visitors who are looking for the service you're offering.
Build your site in a way that search bots can easily navigate and index it
- Make sure you use correct HTML structure and properly nest your content
- Create meta information that targets your keywords and phrases
- Don't forget to use alt and title tags for things like images and links
- Don't overuse your top keywords. Change them up. Your most important ones should be in your domain name, title tag and h1 tags (but not worded exactly the same). Use long-tail keywords for additional headings tags.
- Include an .htaccess file that will instruct bots on what files/folders should be indexed or ignored. Try to avoid having duplicate content indexed...like blog archives. Most search engines will recognize duplicate content and consider it as spam or as irrelevant.
- Keep the most important information early on in your code.
- Online advertising is a whole conversation in and of itself. It can be incredibly beneficial if done right, but it can also be a gigantic waste of money if done wrong. Generally speaking, you want to use ads if your site offers a service that you know people are looking for and usually its a competitive field. Sometimes a client sells a product that is highly highly competitive, like auto insurance for example. They can optimize their site to death, but it still will have a hard time ranking high because there are so many other sites out there doing the same or similar thing that have been around a long time. To make money, they often have to advertise to pull targeted customers into their site.
Promote your site
That's the general outline of what I've been learning about SEO at Zeus. I know I should probalby write more useful specific posts and I intend to do so. But for today, you can my outline. Enoy.
Faster Google Search | SEO Longtail Keywords
Wow! Google's new search is so fast! I wonder how this is going to affect SEO strategies. We discovered this new feature while I was at work today and one of the first things we noticed was that people may be less likely to type in longtail keyword searches. At the stroke of a single key, Google is suggesting new keywords directly below the search box and offering up search results in real-time. Are people going to bother typing in their words or will they see a bunch of promising leads before they even get to the keywords?
This may have a rather disproportionate affect on smaller and newer websites, because premium domain names are already taken, so the majority of people building sites are chasing after various longtail keywords now. Time will tell.
Onward towards Gzip! How a little compression can save the day.
There come a few times in a budding web designer's life when they discover something very useful and incredibly helpful and they wonder, "Why on earth did nobody tell me about this before!?" And, being the collaborative souls that they are, they think, "I will share the news with all of the others so that they too will reap the benefits of this new knowledge!"
It is then that the cold truth rises to the surface. The fact is, this news is completely geeky and the topic is completely, assuredly boring to just about everyone except our inspired little geek.
Well, lucky for me I have a blog for this sort of thing. It may not interest my loved ones and does not merit an "I made a new post!" announcement on my various social networking sites, but I know that I have an audience out there. Somewhere out in the vast hinterland of the Internet, a lone shivering geek must also be asking, "Is there another way to make my web site faster!?!?!?"
And like me, they shun the easy non-standards solutions of image maps. Like me, they have read and re-read countless articles on how to optimize photos for the web. And like me, they felt there just must be something else out there. Something warm and fuzzy, like a tiny piece of code.
Today on my journeys, I learned a few new things on topics whose keywords involve GZip, htaccess, Live HTTP Headers, and YSlow. Don't go away! Now's where it gets exciting!
Just about every web developer uses Firefox add-ons, especially the Web Developer Toolbar. There are two others that are particularly useful when trying to increase the loading speed of a site and for some silly reason, I never used them until today: Yslow analyzes a site's performance based on Yahoo's rules for web performance and Live HTTP Headers displays the live communications between your browser and a site's server.
I used YSlow to analyze one of my sites. I got an "A" in everything except GZip compression. Huh? I did some reading and discovered that I might need to configure my server to output GZip compression. To check this, I scanned the dialog between my browser and the server using Live HTTP Headers. I saw that my browser sent this request: "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate."
This is the browser telling the server, "FYI, I accept compressed files if you have any."
The server ignored that request, meaning that it was not set-up to Gzip my content. Bah!
I have a shared-hosting plan and never realized that I have access to certain server set-up options. Web hosts who put dozens of clients' sites on one server would be insane to allow everyone access to the server's config file. I thought I'd just have to send them a message if I needed something on the server changed. It turns out that individual accounts may have access to certain set-up options by using an .htaccess file (hypertext access).
First, locate the file. I signed into CPanel, went to the file manager, clicked on a little check box to allow me to view hidden files, and then went into my home directory. There it was, ".htaccess". I clicked on it to edit it and added code from BetterExplained to configure the server to allow compression output.
# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>
I saved the file.
I then reloaded my site and behold! The load time was four times faster! My work here is done.
For great reading, check out these articles:
- BetterExplained: "How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression"
- Yahoo! Developer Network: "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site"