Pay Per View, Pay Per Click, Pay Per Action And Now Pay Per Play!

Yes, I just came to know today about a new advertising system called PPP (Pay Per Play). It is similar to Pay Per View (CPM ads) in the sense that there is no need for the visitor to take any action as in case of Pay Per Click and Pay Per Action ads. The key difference is, these PPP ads are audio ads that are about 5 seconds long and played to the visitor. The visitors won’t go out of your page by clicking the ad since there is no ad to click, just voice! Further, these ads are context aware! That is, the ads that are played are relevant based on the content on the page. However, it seems to be valid to run these ads along with Google AdSense ads since there is no text displayed for these ads, but just voice. Go ahead and try them.

Where To Get Valid Inbound Links, Some For Free?

Each year Google keeps changing it’s algorithms based on how the web is evolving. At the crux of it, it’s all about getting valid inbound links. Too few links, no chance of surviving in the business for long unless it’s possible to build a loyal community too soon and too quick. So, even legitimate web masters, in their desire to grow business as soon as possible, try to resort to all sorts of tricks that help get these inbound links. Once in a few months, Google discovers a pattern or comes up with a reasonably accurate algorithm, that can weed out some of the invalid inbound links.

So, as time passes, how do you go about building your inbound links? Which directories offering inbound links are still valid per Google (and may go invalid in the future, but who cares, it would be invalid for competitors as well)? Which websites are allowing inbound links knowingly or unknowingly by not setting the rel attribute of a link with nofollow? Do you have to pay a lot of money to the SEO companies to get this information? Is it not readily and publicly available? Well, that’s what this post is all about.

The answer is, not only is it publicly available, it is free. Better yet, you can get this info right from the horse’s mouth, I mean from Google! Say you found that one of your competitor has a better pagerank and you don’t find that website any better than what you have. Then all you have to do is, go to Google and search for

link:domainname.com

where you replace the domainname.com with the website you want to research on.
Note that for the purpose of Google’s pagerank, domainname.com and www.domainname.com are treated as two different unless the web master explicitly indicates they both are one and the same. So, you need to research on both

link:domainname.com and also link:www.domainname.com and one of them will have more results.

Once you get this results, start going from top to bottom and identifying all the websites that are linking the domainname.com. You will notice various different means of getting inbound links. Typically

1. Forums: where people have their signature point to their website. In the past, no one knew that one day there would be a rel=nofollow option and even now, many forums don’t actively enforce this. So, you will be able to identify forums that are allowing you to promote your website by getting an inbound link.

2. Web 2.0 sites: Sites that allow the community to publish content. Some of these sites may be charging a nominal fee. It may be worth paying that nominal fee to get the content published because, paying for a in-link at one of those text link networks could cost much more and on a monthly basis!

3. Blogs: you will be surprised that there are people blogging about topic of your area and they are always interested in knowing something new, better, innovative or however little way it can differentiate itself from the rest and these bloggers want to be the first to review (mostly for free) and present it to their visitors.

4. Link Directories: For all the concern on whether link directories are still useful or otherwise, you will still notice several directories showing up when you do the link: search. So, instead of wasting money on directories that don’t show up for inbound link search, go with ones that show up. There is no guarantee that a couple of months down the line they would continue to be in the good books of Google. But, hae, what the heck? They won’t be for your competitors as well! At the end of the day, SEO is not about pleasing Google, but being a notch above your competitor.

So, remember that the very company that created all these inbound link rules, which is Google, can be used to figure out which websites are the potential candidates to build your in-links. Good luck!

www.assoc-amazon.com is slow or timing out

Last two days the www.assoc-amazon.com website has been very slow. If you are wondering what this website is and why I am writing about it, read on.

There are many Amazon affiliates that are putting a lot of effort in promoting Amazon’s product and the more effort the more they are rewarded assuming that effort translates into referring more customers who place orders on Amazon.

Amazon has many affiliate widgets and some of them are served off of www.assoc-amazon.com . For some technical reasons, because of the way these widgets are made available by Amazon, it’s not possible to load the widgets after the main page is loaded. As a result, if the above amazon affiliate web server is slow or down, the pages which include these widgets will become very slow giving the visitors of the affiliate websites a bad perception about the visiting site (and not amazon.com itself). Further, since many people want to optimize their revenue opportunity, they place the affiliate scripts prominently at the top half of the website (above the fold) and as a result, the content below the widget script won’t get loaded for a while.

Now, Amazon probably doesn’t care so much about losing a few extra orders a day that are generated through affiliates. But, for many affiliates, this is pretty much the means of making revenue out of their websites. So, everytime there is such a hiccup in the amazon’s affiliate website, it hurts the affiliates.

What’s annoying is that the Amazon affiliate program has forums and they seldom mention about their server problems or give an ETA. So, instead of trying to bring it to their attention and be unheard, I wanted to take it the web route. To talk about it in my little blog. And discuss this not so that the guys operating the Amazon Affiliate program would read it, but because hopefully it may get to the attention of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is among the few companies that are in the forefront of defining the future technologies. I have a great respect for Amazon not due to my affiliation with Amazon as an affiliate, but as a developer who understands what they are doing with Amazon Web Services with offerings such as Amazon Simple Store, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon SimpleDB and so on.

If they want the public to build their web sites, SAAS enterprise applications using their web services, and expect that there is a 99.99% service level, how can people believe in that when their own internal affiliate offerings are not as reliable?

So, Jeff Bezos, please remember many people like me are not just a bunch of amazon affiliates trying to make a few extra bucks a month, but also care and understand the technology aspect and are in a position to recommend the technologies for other startups and potentially consider using it in our own startups. Please try to spend some extra money to revamp your 10yr old affiliate program with more modernized technologies.

Advertisers Care About Traffic, Not Google AdSense

Does that MakeSense?

Yesterday, there was news about Incredimail getting banned from Google’s AdSense. The exact reason is not available and it may unfold in the next few days. Even if Google gives them the standard answer, they can perhaps go to the court arguing that they are trying to monopolize the email (gmail) by shutting out the competitors through other means. Who knows, let’s wait and see.

But most importantly, if this can happen for a publicly trading company, it can happen to anyone. Thinking about it, perhaps Google’s success is not just its algorithms, but also the fact that they let even smaller companies and individuals to get registered into their AdSense (ofcourse, with some screening criteria that only they would know). This created a viral marketing for them. And now they are big enough, they don’t seem to worry too much about AdSense customers any longer. Some of the recent changes in the AdSense program are

1) changing the clickable area from the entire ad area to only the title and the link and not the text in between
2) reducing the referral incentive and that too only for US based (leads or publisher?).
3) now booting a publicly trading company without much explanation and I am sure they should be very well aware that this is going to be a big news talked about by everyone including me.

So, the key lesson from all this is the fact that a business model can’t solely rely on Google AdSense. It’s important to work out with other advertising network partners and better yet, with a bit of success, it’s even possible to offer own personalized advertising and reaching the advertisers directly so that the middle-man commission is avoided. Infact, patrick.net has started this in the last few months, offering an ad spot for about $700 a month of $30 a day.

My advice is don’t wait till there is yet another change in Google’s AdSense TOS or worst yet, till they decide to ban you without much information other than some canned replies. At the same time, be cautious that till you get enough traffic, no ad network is willing to look at you. There are a few like AdBrite, but the CPM rates from them are horrible if you don’t have someone directly buying your space through the network. And companies like Yahoo! don’t even care to send a reply on the decision if they chose not to accept you into their program (that’s what I remember a while back, but may be it changed).

Bottom line is, your website visitors don’t care about which ad network you are using to display the ad. They only care about the type of ad. As long as it is relevant, that’s what interests them. Similarly, advertisers also perhaps don’t really care about participating only in Google AdWords/AdSense program as long as they can get quality leads and website traffic.

Infact, here is a tip for publishers on how to get a good advertiser lead. Identify the keywords appropriate for your website. Then go to Google and search for those keywords and look at the ads displayed on the top and side. Note down the company names and please don’t click the links because, you are not going to those site to buy the product/service but to get a lead. So, just note down the company names and directly go to the websites. And figure out if there is a way to contact the company offering your ad space and why you think it is a good opportunity. Any information on your site traffic such as Alexa traffic rank and Quantcast statistics will help these advertisers to make the right decision.

Get smart before it’s too late. Many people are working towards a retirement based on advertising models. Such dreams can go wrong if there is no predictability.

$350+ from a PageRank 3 Site During Christmas

My PageRank 3 website fetched me more than $350.00 from Amazon affiliate program in December. And guess how much I made through advertising? For the entire month, using Adbrite’s full page ads, I made $1.37. I have read people talking about how their websites are making a lot of money through Google AdSense and other online advertising options. However, in my case, it’s the affiliate programs, which I initially thought are hard to make money out of, that are doing well for me. Ofcourse, don’t buy into joining any affiliate program. Amazon seem to have worked the best for me, though I haven’t really paid too much time and effort on other affiliate programs.