Search Analytics

Or you can call it Search Keyword Analytics. Competitor Keyword Analysis. But before we go into details, here are a few things that you can already do.

1. Using your own website log, you can find out the top keywords through which your visitors are landing at your website
2. For any of those keywords, by searching on the top search engines, you can find out who the competitors are

However, if you want to find out what other keywords are used to land at those competitors, how would you do that?

Well, that’s where the Search Analytics from Compete comes into picture! For any website, they give the top keywords using which visitors land on that website.

If you are wondering how they do it, they have access to the traffic either through the network logs or their browser plugin. While this kind of information is as accurate as Alexa’s traffic rank or the Quantcast rank, it is still a little useful tool that lets you explore what keywords a website is optimized for.

SEO or SEB?

I have noticed people advising about writing a fresh content frequently as the way to do search engine optimization. I have been involved in maintaining a few websites for a while now and been tracking the patterns of my visitors and where they come from and noticed that this advice of writing fresh content frequently is not really so much to do with SEO but to do with SEB.

SEB?

Yes, Search Engine Behavior! Let me explain.

Search engines, especially so with Google, seem to give weightage to the freshness of the content. That is, all things being equal, if page x is newer than page y, then page x has a better chance of being above page y in search results. As a result, by writing fresh content, you are only adopting yourself to this SEB rather and not really doing SEO. This is because, the same page x will eventually go to the very bottom of the pile because just like you, there are thousands or may be millions more (depending on your topic) that are doing the same thing, writing fresh content regularly. A lot of that content obviously is rebottled content. I see people putting projects on freelance marketplace websites to write articles for very cheap price.

So, while writing fresh content and getting a few visits in the next month or so is a reasonable strategy, it is not a sustainable model. So, next time someone is going to charge you money for SEO, make sure that they are not doing this just by providing a few fresh pages you can publish on your page (and who knows, some of them might be selling the same content again and again with a few changes to it and that is not effective for you in the long run either) and get you traffic for a few days. If you have success in acquiring traffic at the same levels for more than 3 months from the time you start engaging with an SEO, only then you might consider your money worth spent.

Online Advertising & Sales Tax

If you sell something repeatedly as opposed to selling your old ipod as a one-off on ebay, then you are required to collect sales tax. In some states, I believe the home rent you pay also has a sales tax. So, my question is, if someone displays ads on their websites, like AdSense or others, in a way, they are renting out their online property for others. So, are the buyers of ads required to pay a sales tax? Are you required to collect the sales tax and pay it to the govt? This gets a bit more complicated when there are middlemen like Google for AdSense or AdBrite or other companies that actually collect the CPC or CPM and give you a commission. For physical goods, the tax is typically based on the ship-to address and I think there is also the bill-to address involved. However, with online advertising, as there is no physical goods involved, there is no ship-to address. Unless, one wants to consider the ip address of the user who visited the website and figure out the address using the ip-geo mapping. This probably makes a little sense for CPC ads as there is an explicit action by the end user of clicking the ad. But what about the interstitials and banner ads where the ads are forced upon the user irrespective of whether or not the user is interested or watching the ads. What if the user has installed ad blockers and so even though the network assumes an impression, the ad is not really being viewed by the end user. Or should the tax be decided based on the website location? But then, most people live in one state and their hosting solution in another state. Which one would be used for the tax?

With online advertising increasing every year, I am sure there would be sales tax discussions about it in the future. Based on the online research I did, I don’t seem to find any information. So, just putting down my thoughts. However, I hope that this won’t happen because, as is the CPC rates are decreasing each year and small players are making only a few dollars a month. If some of that is going to be eaten up by a sales tax, then that would make it difficult for many bloggers and small websites.

eBay Partner Network

What Amazon has done almost a decade ago with it’s associates program, eBay has just started! The writing is perhaps on the wall, after eBay’s PayPal got threatened by Google’s Checkout, eBay has reduced it’s ad spending with Google and in addition, perhaps realized that running an in-house affiliate program, like what Amazon has been doing so long, is the right move.

Personal experience had been that I am able to do a lot better with Amazon associate program than those affiliate programs that are offered through middlemen like Commission Junction (CJ) and others. So, now that eBay has it’s own affiliate program, perhaps it’s time to start looking more seriously into it.

The other big player that should have invested in own affiliate program but has not done so far is WalMart. If they want to remain competitive in the online space, they got to do it.

CPC To CPA/Affiliate To Optimize Returns

If you are a publisher using a cpc ad network on your website, and over time you figure out which ads are fetching you money, then you can get a general sense of what kind of products/services are of interest to your visitors. If your website is very specific, then chances are that you already know this. If not, then the top ads that are generating the revenue gives a good sense of what works better.

Once you have this idea, you can start doing research on the related websites and figure out if they also have affiliate programs. If they do, then you can sign-up for it and start promoting them on your website along side your advertisements. Then, if your user goes to that website through your affiliate link and end up taking the action, you end up getting paid a lot more than what an ad click would give you.

If you reach a stage that you have managed to identify the right set of affiliate programs, then you can completely ignore advertising altogether, but that probably is not as easy. So, a mix of both would probably a good idea atleast during the first few months when you experiment this. Also, not all companies have affiliate programs.

There are no products available for display here

Wondering what the title is all about? Amazon has done it again! Many of the aStores are showing this message for a reasonable time now and there is no information absolutely whatsoever from Amazon yet! Less than two months back I wrote about how amazon widgets were slow but there was no communication or a prompt action from amazon.

Promoting WebSite Through Blog Comments

The question is, if it’s appropriate to promote a website through commenting on the blogs. I have a blog that gets about 4k to 5k visits a month and I have half that many comments per month. So, I am not really a big fan of spam. Further, comments within blogs are invariably scanned and all the links are augmented with rel=’nofollow’ attribute so that the search engines don’t give weightage to them. If so, does it still make sense to provide the links on the blogs as comments?

Well, the answer depends on what you are doing. If you are just going to any blog and just cutting and pasting boilerplate text, then that’s definitely a spam. But if you are carefully picking the blogs such that the blog post is very relevant to what your website is about and even more so if you can participate into the blog post’s main discussion point or the existing comments, then it is not as much a spam. Ofcourse, you are still doing this with the intent of promoting your own website, but you are also trying to provide value to the visitors of that blog. Thing is, for ages, every business small or big engages in one form or the other of marketing and promoting products to any consumer whether or not that person likes it or not. Bottomline is, everyone wants to promote their websites, products and services. The key is how much you pay attention to the relevancy factor that determines the degree of spamming. Spamming is fundamentally not a boolean value.

The Goal

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement is a great book that explains why keeping your production line busy 24/7 isn’t always the best thing. It is a book that inspired many people and one of the must reads no matter which industry you are in.

You may be wondering why I am talking about this book in a site that’s mostly dedicated to online advertising and affiliate programs. Well, recently it dawned upon me, why not take some of the concepts of The Goal and apply it to online advertising as well. Let me explain.

I use a particular website statistics counter site to track the visits to my multiple websites. Those of you who earn some money through your online ventures like advertising and affiliate programs know how curious you are to keep monitoring your website statistics periodically to see how the day is progressing. Well, atleast I do. So, I spend quite a bit of time on the website. And this website uses Google AdSense. But within my 50+ visits of the websites per day, 7 days a week, I hardly remember clicking an ad ever. Yet, Google AdSense keeps bombarding me with lots and lots of ads. Now is that ringing a bell to my first sentence on The Goal? I mean, perhaps, churning ads all the time to the users is probably not the most optimal strategy of displaying ads.

When Google missed the 4th quarter results, their management mentioned how they were disappointed in experiments it had run on some of the approximately 20 social networks it works with, which include MySpace and its own Orkut. Sure, most people visiting MySpace are interested in things other than looking at ads. So, when you are throttling the ad network at 100% capacity, thinking it to be the conventional wisdom, perhaps, that’s where people need to revisit the strategy.

As we evolve as netizens, it’s important to not only solicit to us what we may like based on the context, but also to stop doing it based on our preference. Switching from text ads to banner ads is only going to increase the frustration and thanks to Firefox’s ability to block images from any host, it makes it less annoying.

Who Follows NOFOLLOW?

How many people know what is a

simplex method?
viscosity?
mitosis and meiosis?
or-add-any-complex-topic-of-your-choice

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is, not everyone who contributes to the web by writing something is interested in making money online. Not everyone is interested in getting lot of traffic. Not everyone wants to follow the latest techniques in SEO, let alone know what SEO is. Now, all these people who don’t know and/or don’t care about what search engine optimization is or how it might impact their own pagerank or someone else’s are going to just do it naturally, writing html using wysiwyg eidtors and creating links as appropriate. Infact, some of the wysiwyg editors don’t even have a field to indicate rel=’nofollow’!

As I mentioned earlier in NOFOLLOW GOOGLE, it’s Google which created the problem by giving importance to linking. So, rather than improvise on their algorithm, they resorted to a stupid heuristic rule of annotating a link with rel=’nofollow’ option to indicate that a person linking the link doesn’t want to manually help the search engine crawler to know that he/she doesn’t want the search engine to follow that link. Now, tell that your mom or grandma and see if they would like to follow such rules!

Since the links got importance, people started selling them, and companies like text-link-ads started being brokers for buying and selling. History will tell you, that any commodity, when it starts having monetary value, will start having such an outcome of trading. Google is trying to catchup by constantly tweaking their algorithms to figure out such paid links.

Trust me, paid links is just the current passing phase in Google’s long-term debacle if they don’t innovate. The web of the future is going to be a lot more complicated where web masters are not only learning the technical insights of SEO, but also the psychological aspects of users generating the content. In my Getting Free Inbound Links, I mentioned how it’s possible to get free inbound links. Essentially by carefully analyzing who is readily to link for free and without a nofollow, and following up with such people, it’s possible to keep on increasing the inbound links. So, in the end, instead of not just those who are paying money to get inlinks that would rank better, but also those who know how to research and identify sites that are linking friendly.

Unless there are better algorithms, the problem of figuring out the relavant pages based on linking to the pages is not going to be sufficient. Asking people to annotate those links is even farther from ideal.

I would like to see a software that, given a keyword(s) identifies all the relevant blogs that are generous to give links without worrying too much about their own pagerank or making money. Let’s call that GenerosityRank or it could also be SEOIgnoranceRank! So, the software would simply order the blogs and websites in the decreasing order of these ranks which then helps you boost your pagerank for free. There you go!

Dropship vs Affiliate Programs

Having seen some success as an affiliate, I have been thinking about the next step. So, I came across dropship model (which I knew before but didn’t spend much time researching it). So, the dilemma is whether to continue to invest time and effort on the affiliate program or diversify into dropship model.

There are a few dropship companies such as shopster.com which will only show their prices if you have an account (though you can have a 7day free trail account) while I found MegaGoods.com showing it’s prices openly to non-members as well. So, using the member prices given on MegaGoods.com and comparing it to the same product offerings on Amazon, I found that the margins are typically 6% and above for electronics. However, Amazon Affiliate program gives only 4% for electronics category (but gives up to 8.5% depending on performance for other categories). So, while it’s obviously a disadvantage of atleast 2% being an affiliate, here are some pros and cons of Dropship vs Affiliate programs.

Affiliate Pros compared to Dropship

• No need to deal with online transactions
• No need to have secure website to take orders
• No need to process the orders
• No need to deal with customers and take any calls for returns and other maintenance work
• No need to worry about maintaining reputation of the store/brand
• No need to worry about losing a potential customer due to lack of trust/brand recognition
• Number of product choices is much more with a program like Amazon affiliate program, than any of the dropship programs (while Amazon has millions of products and typically hundreds in each category such as GPS or even dozens for a category such as Massage Chairs, the choice available with any dropship program is typically much lesser.

Affiliate Cons compared to Dropship

• No control on pricing. Whatever the affiliate program company (Amazon for example) offers, have to convince visitors to buy at that price.
• No customer info to be able to maintain a mailing list and follow up with them with deals (adhering to the opt-in/out policy)
• No repeat customers
• Difficult to obtain statistics or they are inaccurate

Assuming that in both cases it’s important to maintain a good website, follow SEO techniques, bring traffic to the site and so on:

The lack of operational overhead for affiliate programs is probably enough reason to not worry about the extra 2+% revenue possible with a dropship model.

My current conclusion is that if you are considering either program as a side income and not too serious of making it a mainstream income, then going with affiliate programs is perhaps the best option. But if you are very serious about your own small business and be your own boss one day, then you should definitely try out one or two dropship programs.