Google Page Rank Dropped

Google has dropped my Bosnia site’s page rank to 0. Zip! Understand zero! Because I have a couple of sold text links on my site. Geez! Am I supposed to spend countless hours researching for information, writing and editing my posts for nothing? Eh when I am rich, I will provide information for free.

Someone has to stop Google. Microsoft and Yahoo better catch up fast in the search engine competition, otherwise Google will monopolize the Internet just like Microsoft used to monopolize the computer industry way back.

Read Daren’s post about Google’s latest crusade on page rank.

How about a Revenue Stream from Ebay Auctions through AuctionAds?

I saw AuctionAds on Shoemoney’s blog for awhile and kept wondering if I could implement this new revenue stream on my web sites.

Surprise, surprise! About a week or so later, I received an email from Text Link Ads, another monetize source for websites, announcing AuctionAds venture and invited me to join. Without hesitating for even a split second, I jumped immediately at the opportunity.

A joint venture between TLA’s parent company, MediaWhiz and ShoeMoney Media, AuctionAds allows webmasters to monetize their websites from eBay auctions. When visitors click on the ad, they are redirected to the auctions on eBay. Publishers make money each time a user clicks on AuctionAds and then signs up for a new account on eBay, place winning bids or just perform an action.

Example – See an example of AuctionAds in action on PragueBuzz.com. This particular page promotes Bohemian crystals, rare works of art from the Czech Republic. At the bottom of the page, I include AuctionAds code showing Bohemian Crystal auctions from eBay. The ads have been displaying the right products most of the time. However, once in a while, you will see totally irrelevant ads, e.g. computer or electronic gadgets. This is one big issue with Contextual Ads in general though, not only AuctionAds. It is difficult to get the right ads all the time.

You probably know Google Adsense, don’t you? They are contextual link ads which match (or try to match) the website’s content. Similarly,AuctionAds are contextual image ads showing eBay auctions based on keywords associated with the code. The difference between Google Adsense and AuctionAds is that the former is pay-per-click advertising where you get paid from users’ clicking on the ads while the latter is an affiliate program which pays only when users make a purchase or perform some action after clicking.

Implement AuctionAds
1. Image ads – You choose a keyword, for example “Bohemian Crystal”, which best describes either the content of a particular page or the entire site or simply anything you want. Then you generate the code for the ads. Ads are available in many formats: leaderboard, skyscraper, banner, half banner, various sized rectangles and more.
2. Link ads – You target a page on eBay, supply the page’s URL and then generate the code.

I really appreciate the fact that pages from AuctionAds load very fast, which I can not say the say the same for many other affiliate-networks. Getting highly-targeted ads for my sites can be done very easily and quickly.

If you are small webmasters with niche site, you should check out AuctionAds. They most likely accept your sites as they do not reject based on the sites’ traffic. Click here to join.

Note and Review: John Reese Interview with Jim Edward, “Traffic Master”

About John Reese: An online marketing guru, the traffic master, who can generate mass traffic to web sites in a short period of time using thousands of marketing methods he tried, tested and proved successful over the courses of ten years. He claimed to be an abundant thinker who wants everybody to get rich and enrich others in the process.

Early success and lesson

• Tried various of things and by the time he was 23 years old, he was hundreds of thoudsand dollars in debt and hospitalized for overworking.
• In 1996, he set up a free auction photos hosting for eBay users.
• Increased traffic to 10 millions of users per month within 90 days.
• Then made lots of money from advertising.
• This site became one of the top 100 sites in the world, got more traffic than Disney, CNN and coporation which spent tons of money on TV’s commercials. (To understand why TV’s commerical advertising might not work or not work affectively, read my note on Seth Godin’s Google Talk, the part about interrupt marketing. )

By giving away freebies or creating a product that people like, they will spread the products for free without even intentionally spreading it.

Viral Marketing

• Setup an affiliate program.
• Develop a useful product or service (1) for people to use and they will spread the news.
• Create good content (2) and people will talk about your website and link to you.
• Give them money and incentive (3) to spread your products and services.

The biggest incentive for having a lot of traffic

• Money is definitely a benefit, but not a biggest one.
• He doesn’t succeed all the time, but overtime reaps more success than failure because has more experience and always improves on a methods already working.

Huge traffic gives you the ability to improve whatever you’re doing at a much faster rate.

3 top myths about generating traffic

• Guaranteed hundreds of users per day for $X by loading your sites on popup (1). -> Most people enable popup blockers on their browsers by now. (Popup is a type of Interrupt Marketing which doesn’t work anymore. People hate junk; their time is valuable, and they don’t like to be interrupted. See this post for clarification.)
• Offers to submit your site to hundreds of search engines and web directories for a fee (2). -> Most people don’t know about the majority of these search engines and directories. You should pay attention to those big players like Google, Yahoo or Msn. (I manually submitted my first website close to a hundred of search engine and directory, but I don’t think this matters. From the second website, I care only about Google, Yahoo, MSN and a few more.)
• Guaranteed #1 search engine ranking for certain keywords (3). -> Nobody searches for these keywords. For example, I get the #1 Google ranking for the combination of my native first and last name (it’s unique). But who cares about my name.
• Nobody knows the best keywords otherwise he/she will dominate the search engine for those particular keywords.
• Getting the #1 ranking is not a sure thing as it will be gone the moment the ranking algorithm changes.
• Ranking is not consistent. You can rank high in Yahoo but low in Google.

Like lottery, the chance to win increases if you have more lottery tickets compared to one. So you should set up a bunch of websites with good content, get them to rank high and link to the main site. (Also I think by having many sites, you can try and test many different SEO and marketing techniques on these sites.)

What is the common mistake?

• You forgot to track your progress and focus only on developing the products and driving traffic.
• Whenever you start developing a product, the fastest way to get traffic is by buying some keywords with Adwords.

If you can’t get the people who look for your products to go to your site, then you can’t get the people who’s not looking.

Free traffic

• You don’t need to be technical to do all the work.
• Instead you should hire people to do the work, enabling yout to test things faster.
• Invest some money, ~200-300 dollars to see if this business works, else move on to something else.
• There’s no such thing as Free Traffic.
• If the traffic is free, you probably have spent a lot of time for it -> sweat equity.
• You can spend all this time doing the work and get little on ROI. Not worth it.
• (I have to agree with this one. I spent so much time dealing with technical issues and felt very frustrated that I can use the time and energy to create content. In a few months once I get a steady source of income, I will invest on hiring some temps. )

If you’re not willing to spend some money to build traffic, business is not for you.

Favorite way to generate traffic

• Create good products, services or content. Give people value. Help them to be rich. Help them to make money. Be an abundant thinker.
• Have people to market your products or services through affiliate programs.
• Have them link to you.
• Have them mention you in their emails, mailing list or newsletters.

Leverage website traffic from other sites’ owners. Internet is a snowball effect. People will send traffic to you.

Think and change fast

• The internet changes quickly.
• You might lose your traffic sources fast.
• You need more than one online business model.
• You can make money through affiliates (1).
• You can also make money through selling your own products (2).
• But you make more money by doing both .

If you should fail. Fail fast.

Develop products or drive traffic?: Affiliate Marketing

• You don’t have to invent the wheel by creating a new product.
• Go with existing products, join affiliate programs.
• If you don’t have too much time, then you should make money through affiliate marketing.
• Take ideas that work and make it better.
• Combine them with your own.

If you can’t make money by sending traffic to existing site with existing traffic, then you can’t make money on new products in that market.

How long to get traffic and money?

• Get rich quick scheme will not work.
• Concentrate on make the first dollar, on the first sale to gain momentum.

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Technorati Tags: Bohemian Biz, Ebay, Google Adsense, Internet Marketing, Online $$$ Experiments, John Reese

Go Daddy’s $5.99/year domain names

Register a new .COM domain name for only $5.99 at www.GoDaddy.com . Offfer ends December 31st, 2006.

I’ve bought three domain names from Go Daddy for $6.20, $8.95, $8.95 respectively. Plan on buying at least one more domain name for future web sites. I’m considering whether I should take advantage of this promotion and buy a name now. I can park the domain somewhere for later use and maybe try to experiment domain parking. I read that you can get money with this domain parking stuff although I have no idea how.

I have 3 more days to decide. Will update after 12/31.