Jack's Advice

Horse Classifieds

2008-06-07T20:04:00.001-07:00

Recently created a new website. The url is http://www.horsetrailerclassifieds.net/

What is Adsense?

2008-05-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

What is Adsense?

Google AdSense is a service that places ads in the form of banners and textlinks on blogs and websites, therby generating advertising revenue from each page. This service provides relevant text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content. Furthermore, the user chooses where the ads are located on the page, and the number of ads they are comfortable with. Adsense has an additional feature, that is a Google search box to your site, in which the user is paid for each time a visitor uses the function.

How adsense works.

Adsense generates profit in two ways: through page impressions, and the number of clicks on the ads. Page impressions work by every time a visitor loads the web page with the the advertisement, the host receives a profit. As such, page impressions are similar to television and print ads because the customer only has to see the advertisement, not purchase the product. And, the if the visitor clicks the add then the host receives an additional amount (more than what they would receive for impressions). However, the number of clicks an advertisement receives is always significantly less than the impressions it receives.

How much can I make using Adsense?

This inevitebly is the follow-up question. It depends on a number of things, such as how much traffic your website or blog recieves, how many clicks the advertisments generates. Based on where the ads are strategically placed, the number of clicks may increase. As a rough estimate, if your site attracts 10,000 vistors per month you can expect around $200-500 per month (but may vary highly depending on site's content).

Make money by digging. Ethics aside, does it really work?

2008-04-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Digg.com is a popular social bookmarketing site in which its users submit news stories and blogs, which are promoted on its front page, or filed under various headings such as world and business news. Its users ‘digg’ or rank the stories they like, which effectively promotes the stories, thereby bringing traffic to their website. In comes usersubmitter.com, a site launched in ’06 which offers a service that pays users .50 cents to digg articles. But how exactly is usersubmitter able to pay its users… “if you run a website which has articles on it, to drive traffic to the site you pay User/Submitter a base amount of $20 and $1 per each digg. Digg.com flashes your post on its front page only if the post has been dug at least 51 times within 24 hours. A post on the front page of the digg.com can drive 10,000 to 15,000 users to the site which roughly translates to $400-$500 Adsense dollars. So by paying $20 base + $1 for each digg getting a huge amount of traffic which eventually means hard cash is not a bad deal at all.”

Does it really work?

Hmm…half a dollar per digg, and several hours at the computer, that could be a lot of money! By this time, any persuasive arguments in ethics class went out the window of my mind, I’m going to be rich!! So driven by greed, I made a username on usersubmitter.com and was ready to get to work. But, then reality soon made an appearance and stuck its nosy head it my door (it always seems to). The program didn’t work as effectively as I thought, maybe that’s an understatement… it didn’t really work at all. For the first few days, while I was online, I’d check whether there were any stories for me to digg. However I’d keep getting the same, old annoying message: “At this time, there are no stories to digg…” Now, a week later I have resigned myself to the fact easy money doesn’t really exists (actually I’ve come to this conclusion several times, but it never seems to sink in.) In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been ethical to make money in this way, because essentially its exploiting diggs.com’s service. But sometimes I feel ethics are only beneficial when they are convenient to me, that is they if they don’t get in the way of my motivations. Am I alone? (much of the affiliate marketing I see online (ebooks) tells me no!)

References: http://tnerd.com/2006/10/03/diggcom-how-to-make-money-from-diggcom/ (quoted material)

What are Long Tail Key Words?

2008-04-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

Long Tail Keywords Explained.

The phrase long tail keywords refers to a strategy of targeting less competitive niches by stringing together several words, as opposed to only single worded keywords. If you are reviewing a diet pill product, rather than using simply "diet pills" as your keyword, string together several other words to create a long tail keyword, such as "diet pills that work."

For small businesses and affiliate bloggers, using long tail keywords is a great strategy, arguably the only successful strategy, for attracting traffic. For reference sake, consider an similar marketing strategy in the physical, non-internet world. In real world advertising, if you wanted to promote a new horse club, then you'd most likely put your signs in locations where people are interested in horses. Even though there are many more people in say NY City, your horse sign would probably get buried amongst the other advertisements, and wouldn't catch the eye of horse enthusiasts. In contrast, if you hung your signs at local barns, with a small but specific traffic area of horse-likers, you are much more likely of getting a response back. In contrast to long tail keywords, short keywords are useful for broad scale advertising, but really only have success for large businesses or bloggers who already attract heavy traffic.

However, you also don't want to use keywords that are too long, thereby targeting a market that is virtually nil. Hence, you want to find a balance with your keywords, which are neither too popular, nor too unpopular. Fortunately you don't have to rely on chance because there are several websites that help you test your keywords. For this, I usually use seotools. The procedure is pretty simple, and self-explanatory. Enter a string of words related to your target market into the search engine, and a list of results will be produced that rates your phrase and many other similar twists. Now, focus on the "Overall daily est" and, if you are a small business or blog, locate keywords that generate anywhere between 100-200 hits daily.

Affiliate (Bum) Marketing Guide in 10 Steps

2008-04-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

In the online world, Affiliate Marketing is one of the new frontiers for generating money from home. As with any method of producing wealth, it actually does take some amount of effort and work. If you are looking for a phony get-rich-scheme-in-thirty-minutes, look some place else. This column intends to explain how a person can successfully make money through affiliate marketing. For this purpose, I have compiled a list of 10 steps based off people who have struck success. Study, put the time in, follow this procedure and the money will follow in due time.

What is Affiliate Marketing?: In short, you write reviews about products and topics that are marketable, and then send them to websites that publish product reviews. If your articles are well written, and you advertise well, then they should gain popularity and search engines will soon pick them up. Every time someone who is referred from your article purchases the product, you the author of the review gets a large cut of the money made from the sale (normally 50-75%). After writing an article or so a day, after about 4-6 months time a steady flow of income should begin to appear. Nearly all of the resources you will need to get started are provided and explained below.

Step 1: Brainstorm a niche (a specific market area). The logic is simple, if you write about something you know and find interesting, the writing process will flow easier. So ask yourself what you are interested in? For example, if you are interested in video games then you may want to write reviews about products dealing with them. However your niche still has to be marketable, so if your interested in tape cassettes-sorry about your luck, you'll have to find something more sell-able. Some helpful examples are products associated with household items, sports, culture, computer advice etc. If your having trouble, go to the next step where you can search for ideas via the link provided.

Step 2: Find a few products you may want to promote. You can do this by searching in the "shop marketplace" tab at clickbank. These are the products you will be writing a review about later. Again, find products that are both marketable and are interesting to you.

Step 3: Read several articles at ezinearticles. Chances have it, several people have already published articles on the product you will be writing on. Type in the name of the product in the search box at ezinearticles and read what they have to say. Then ask yourself, how can I improve upon what is already written? Further research your product to find more information using search engines such as google or even wikipedia.

Step 4: Start a blog. This is where your reviews will initially be published. The best suggestion for starters is to open one for free at blogger.com. It is now run by google, and has a very easy format that practically anyone can understand. If your website begins to flourish, you can get your own unique .com for under 10 dollars a year. For this, I suggest godaddy. Don't forget, your page title and content should reflect your niche.

Step 5: Open an account at paydotcom. Earlier, I had you research products at this site. Now that you have thought through what you want to write about, its time to open an account (it's free). An alternative option is clickbank.com. If you don't have one already, you'll need to a paypal account in order to receive money (also free).

Step 6: Write a quality article. To rehash an old adage: quality first, quantity second. Simply put, if you write junk then no one is going to spend time reading it. After finishing the article ask yourself, would I want to read this? Again, for help look to see what others are writing about on the same product and improve upon what they are saying, maybe even combine info from multiple sources into something more comprehensive. Don't forget, link the product you are selling to the article to your paydotcom account! More info. about this can be found their website once you set up an account. Additionally, writing many articles is also crucial to your business, the more articles you have out there then the more chances people will come by your work. Thus, writing 1-3 articles a day at 30-40 minutes each would be ideal start for a beginner. Just don't sacrifice quantity for the sake of quality. Here is a good example of successful article (you may want to use this as a template at first.)

Step 7: Keyword research. When you enter a word or phrase into a search engine, that is called a keyword. How they function is that the author of an article list several keywords when he submits it to publishing sites. The keywords that are entered in the search engine match the ones attached to the article, and bring such articles into view. Hence finding the best keywords is crucial for generating traffic to your article, and thus making money. When deciding your keywords, you'll have three main considerations in mind. First and most obviously, the keyword must be relevant to the product you are reviewing (if you are writing about a fishing product, it should be related to fishing etc.) Second, if you choose keywords that are too popular then your article is going to get buried and no one will ever find it (thus the word 'fishing' by itself is too general.) Third, your keyword choices shouldn't be too specific in which no reasonable person would type it in a search engine (for example, "green and pink fishing rod with poka-dots") So, what is recommended is using keywords that are neither too popular or too unpopular. More specifically, this is anywhere between 100-200 hits daily. For finding our how many hits a particular keyword attracts use seotools

Step 8: Publish your article! For this, you want to submit your article to several article publishing sites. Some sites that I recommend are: hubpages, squidoo, ezinearticles. Again, the more places you submit your article the more chance you have of it being read. (You also may want to bookmark your website at socialposter. This is another way of generating more traffic to your reviews via your website.)

Step 9: Research which articles you wrote are most successful. One way of doing this typing the name of your article in quotes on the google search engine (for example, "Affiliate Marketing Guide in 10 Steps"). Partway down the page look for something similar to: "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,360." The last digit (in this case 1,360) is the number of times your article has been citied on the web. The purpose of this is to see which articles are most successful, which in turn gives you a clearer idea what kind of products you may want to write more about in the future.

Step 10: Don't stop reading. Reading this article is just the beginning. Now you will need to familiarize yourself with the terms and ideas relevant to the online marketing field, and the only way to do that is to read as many articles as you can.

If you found this helpful, take a look at my website for more information. I am currently researching other methods of making money online and compiling them into free easy-readable 10 step guides. In the near future, you'll also find articles on topics such as how to write a quality article, and an in depth guide into keyword research etc.