Banking On The Brand

It’s surprising how many people revisit a site by typing in the name of the site in search engines. And not just once or twice, but revisit many times. Some just type the name without the .com and some type even the entire domain like www.wordpress.com and visit. Why can’t they type that on the location bar? Beats me.

Anyway, so I used the name of one of my websites and did a search on Google. My website shows up first. No surprise. But what surprised was there were some web pages created with that combination of keywords and offering something that has nothing to do with my website.

That’s how it occurred to me that when a new website is started and if it’s reasonably successful, then one can build additional pages with the combination of keywords in that domain and hope to get some extra traffic. What makes this technique work well is

a) A domain name is a unique name (yeah, there is .com, .org, .net etc). So, if someone recently got that domain, chances are no one used that word(s) much.
b) Search engines display only one or two pages from a given domain on the results page. So, even if the top one or two goes to the original website, subsequent results will be from other websites. So, that increases the probability of your own website.

Now, while I found this interesting technique, I can’t comment on the effectiveness. Remember that tricking someone to click on a website is not going to be useful if what you offer and what the user is looking for are different.

PageRank & Quid Pro Quo

No, I am not talking here about exchanging links.

What if your receiving a job is dependent on you providing a link to the company’s website?

I was doing some research about a company to figure out where it was getting the inbound links. You should be knowing this can be easily done using the “link:” syntax on Google. What I found was that some of the links were coming from blogs and those blogs were of people from India. The company that I was investigating is a US company. Why will a blog that talked about some Indian movie contain a link to this company’s website? That’s why I visited the blog and looked around a bit. And finally I realized that the blog belongs to a guy who is an employee of this company in it’s India center!

Now, my post title might be over hyped a bit. For all you know, the guy might be just unknowingly passing on the pagerank to his employer’s website. But these days PageRank seems to lose it’s value completely. Those who know what it is have stopped passing it to others. Those who don’t know, passing it unnecessarily. And not knowing what to do, Google keeps changing the algorithms every few months, potentially introducing regressions or providing guidance which again is only followed excessively by people who know about it, and blissfully ignored by the rest.

In this context, let me give a specific example. Killerstartups.com reviews about 15 sites a day. Given the explosion of the web, with potentially thousands of websites sprouting up each day, a handful of carefully reviewed and picked websites by Killerstartups maintainers should definitely deserve a bit of “vote”? But killerstartups.com only thinks that these websites are worth mentioning as killer startups but doesn’t think that they are worth passing the pagerank! Irony. Isn’t it?

Click Fraud or Competitor Fraud?

If you do PPC advertising, one of the things that you worry about is click fraud. Click fraud typically happens when your ad is displayed on a 3rd party website and the publisher is clicking on the links to make money. There were stories about how some publishers either directly or indirectly got clicks by paying to people sitting at home just for clicking those ads on their pages. Large companies denied the extent of the click fraud and offered very little information. So, yes, if you are a advertiser spending large amounts on advertising, you certainly be worried. However, you also have the choice of turning off the network advertising so that your ads are only displayed on the search results pages. This reduces click fraud because, no one other than the search engine companies can make money by clicking them. Though I would like to just through in a conspiracy theory that every shareholder of one of those big search engine companies can click on a single ad each day and boost the revenue and hence the stock price!

Anyway, now there is an article about competitor fraud. Read this Click fraud? Don’t be a victim blog post. This probably existed in the past as well, but when the economy gets tougher, may be there is more crime online or on the streets. The interesting thing is that this is a real issue. Though the statcounter blog indicates that by monitoring where the clicks came from it’s possible to recognize the competitor and report. But what happens if there is a 3rd party offering such click and exhaust competitor budget type of service? I mean, we all know that the corporate espionage is for real, isn’t it?

AdSense Alternative

AdSense is popular with people trying to make money online because it pays well. It pays well because the ads are contextual. There are several reasons why you may not be accepted into an AdSense program or your account might have been suspended. So, you might be looking for AdSense alternatives. Also, Google has apparently changed one of it’s terms and conditions on what other ads can be displayed along with AdSense. In the past, it wasn’t allowed to mix other contextual ads. But apparently now that’s allowed as long as there is no confusion. So, this is yet another reason why you want to look for an AdSense alternative that’s contextual.

I have been made aware of Oxado, a contextual ad company. Here are some reasons for considering this company

1. It’s European. If you have a good amount of non-US traffic, especially if it’s European bound, then this can increase the revenue
2. It’s European. Yeah, I know I am repeating. But this is because of the currency rates. Yeah, the dollar is picking up, but hae, it’s no where near the levels when EURO was first introduced.

One interesting thing you would note with Oxado, unlike other ad networks is that they give hourly break up of the statistics! And better, it’s real-time even for publishers. So, check out Oxado and get yourself a online salary raise!

Is Making Money Online For Me?

Yes, you may have heard that some people are making a lot of money online. Well, that’s one of the things that’s common between online and offline (or real-world or brick-and-mortar however you want to call it). Some people can make a lot of money, while others reasonable and many more barely or just enough. So, it’s not that jumping on to the online gives an edge all of a sudden. It does open up some new avenues that are not possible otherwise or suit one’s personality.

Say you are spending no more than 1hr a day and managed to make less than $200 a month. That’s $2,400 a year. But also say you have $100K in savings that you invest in stock, mutual funds and CDs. By spending the same 1yr constantly updating your knowledge on the stock market, and buying and selling the stock at the right times (which is a big if, but one thing I learned is that only if you constantly follow the market you can make better decisions even if they are wrong sometimes), you have the potential to increase your income a lot more. One key difference is, with financial investments, there is a potential to lose your base money itself, no denial. But you could lose a whole lot by not following the markets at all and just putting all that money either in just a savings/cd or putting it in a mutual fund and not tracking it’s performance.

So, unless you see a progressive and higher return on your time investment with online ventures, don’t keep wasting too much time on it. As much as the thought that you can rake in big profits while you are basking on a beach in some beautiful resort might be very tempting, it’s not as simple and easy. But most importantly, in pursuing this dream, make sure you don’t lose money in other areas. The net profit could be negative!

Google AdSense Opposites Algorithm

In life pretty much everyone either believe or not believe in something. Like God, honesty, government etc. So, when nothing is known about a person, why not just display ads of both types of beliefs?

Well, that’s what I got recently. Look at the following image of Google AdSense I captured. It has two ads, one saying that the affiliate programs rock and the other asking to avoid affiliate programs.

So, if you happened to read these ads, you are right away sold to one of them, isn’t it? .

Yahoooooo! LinkShare and Overstock worked!

Earlier in my What’s The Big Deal With Accepting Into Affiliate Programs? post I mentioned how I didn’t get accepted by Overstock.com because I used an existing unrelated site. I still went ahead and designed my new website with Overstock data feeds inspite of the initial rejection.

I managed to design it well enough that I eventually got accepted into the program by registering to it through LinkShare.

I had been a member of LinkShare for more than a year but never really made any money. That is till prior to end of last month. My first commission from Linkshare happened by selling an Overstock product through this newly designed website! Yahooooooo!

I have been successful with Amazon affiliate program netting me more than $250 a month. And wasn’t sure if I would make any money through LinkShare and also Overstock. One thing I can say is that it really depends on the effort put in by the affiliates. Don’t expect to just sign up and start making money. The reason why I didn’t make any money for about an year with LinkShare is because I didn’t bother to do much with it as I have been concentrating on Amazon program. Now that I managed to get $5.00+ from a single sale with Overstock, I plan to spend extra time on this as well.

Paid Diggs!

Only recently I have blogged about Wikipedia Paid Links. Today, there is another request on rentacoder.com (bid request 996851), which says

“I have two websites already submited on digg. I want someone to digg my website as many times as possible. Provide me your bid for digging from 50 users (You have to digg two websites from each user).

Very easy project for new coders to get 10 rating and also get similar project in very near future.”

The fact that it’s an easy project and if people are ready to pay for it, makes the whole web 2.0 type sites useless. When you hear of stories about people being recruited to click on ads and get a few cents, this could mean a new type of business model. Have people do digging, stumbling and delicious tasting to get a few bucks.

The Internearth

Except for one key difference, in many ways the Internet is like Mother Earth.

When someone buys a piece of land, if they invest money and effort and build a house, the value of the property increases. But if nothing is done to the land, while the land might appreciate, it’s potential value is not fully realized. That land may not be for construction. It could be for farming. Unless someone plows and farms, it’s not going to give much return.

Similarly, when someone buys an internet domain and just parks the domain, they are not realizing it’s full potential. If one invests money, time and effort and builds a good website, it has the potential to generate more revenue.

So, what’s the key difference? Well, the earth is physical and limited by the total available land. But the Internet being digital or virtual, however you want to think it to be, has no such limit. As many domains can exist, though only a small fraction are being converted into profitable websites with proper investment.

No (Page)Rank, No Revenue?

If a website has a lot of traffic, one could expect it to be making good revenue. If it’s a consumer oriented website, then it would make money displaying ads and selling products. So, usually there is a good co-relation between the traffic and the revenue. But what if it’s a business website? Is it possible to make good revenue without much traffic?

I recently had a discussion with a friend who has a outsourcing company and he gave me some insight into his website and his business (he actually revealed to me more info than necessary since he is seeking some advice from me on getting more website traffic) and as it turns out, his website rank has decreased recently (it wasn’t a good ranking to start with either) and his traffic has plummeted by more than a million as per the Alexa traffic ranking.

So, before I give out the numbers, here is a question that I want you to think about. A B2B company that has an alexa traffic rank of close to 2 million and which doesn’t even show up in the likes of quantcast and compete, what kind of revenue do you expect it to be making per year? Take any wild guess.

Anyway, the answer turn out to be between 4 to 5 million USD. Yes! That’s right. So, next time you look at a website, don’t judge it’s value just from these externally available numbers.