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Archive for July 2005

Let’s Exchange Links! 

Thursday, 28th July 2005

Hi guys, as you can see I’ve got my links section up and running! Please feel free to add your link to my blog. Here’s the catch, you will only be able to add your link if you link to my blog. It has to be reciprocal. The add your link form will not allow you to submit your link if it cannot detect a link to "http://www.vincentrich.com" on the page your specifiy.

Google Sitemaps XML Generators 

Thursday, 28th July 2005

This is a re-post of this Google Sitemaps topic because it somehow got lost when I was migrating from Blogger.com to my own WordPress bloggin script.

When I first heard of Google Sitemaps, I didn’t want to get involved with it because the only software I could find to generate the sitemap costs $97. Lucky for all of us, there is a long list of free resources to create our Google Sitemaps today.

From what I understand from Google Sitemaps, you will need to create an XML file of all the pages on your web site you
wish to index in Google, upload it to your web site folder and finally submit that XML file URL to Google Sitemaps.

For Google’s official explanation on this, please visit:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html

There are 3 types of Google Sitemap generators…

Online Generators:

Desktop Generators:

Script Generators:

If you ask me I would prefer to use the desktop ones. I find the installation of the scripts too much of a hassle and the online generator from auditmypc.com created an error in my XML file. Have fun with these tools and I hope your site gets indexed as soon as possible.

I Just Bought The AdSense Mastery Videos! 

Wednesday, 27th July 2005

Actually I got the AdSense Mastery videos last week. I hope to receive my copy in my mailbox tomorrow or Friday so that I can watch it over the weekend. I just checked out their web site… They only have 3 copies left. I hope its not a marketing gimmick because they are threatening to raise the price from $297 to $497 after the 3 copies are sold out! So if you’re interested, now is a good time to get it.

Google AdWords’ New Changes 

Wednesday, 27th July 2005

I got this information in my email about some new Google AdWords changes. I don’t understand 100% of it but I hope it will make our lives easier.

QUALITY-BASED BIDDING

As you may know, we’ll be implementing a new keyword evaluation process in the coming weeks. With this change, we’ll simplify our keyword status system and introduce quality-based minimum bids, giving you more control to run on keywords you find important. To help you better understand and prepare for these changes, I’ve outlined them below.

HOW THE NEW SYSTEM WILL WORK

When these changes take place, each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid that is based on the quality (also called Quality Score) of your keyword and ad text specific to your account. If your keyword or Ad Group’s maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid, your keyword will be active and trigger ads. If your maximum CPC doesn’t meet the minimum bid, your keyword will be inactive and not trigger ads.

KEY CHANGES

Here are the new system changes:

  1. The keyword statuses normal, in trial, on hold, slowed, and disabled will be replaced with active (triggering ads) and inactive (not triggering ads). In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don’t meet our performance requirements and your ads appear rarely for your keywords.
  2. New keywords will no longer be disabled or have a minimum clickthrough rate (CTR) threshold. Instead, your keywords will trigger ads as long as they have a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC. Your Quality Score is determined by your keyword’s CTR on Google, relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors. Remember: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the bid required to trigger ads, and vice versa.
  3. You can move an inactive keyword to an active state and show ads by (1) improving its Quality Score through optimization, or (2) increasing its maximum CPC to the minimum bid recommended by the system. The minimum bid will be listed in the keyword status column, below inactive keywords.

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT BEFORE THESE CHANGES TAKE PLACE

If you’re happy with your current keyword list, there’s no need to make any changes. However, if you have any on hold keywords that you don’t want to trigger ads, we suggest you delete them from your account. This is because any keywords with a high enough Quality Score and maximum CPC could be activated and accrue ad clicks. You can use our Find and Edit Keywords tool, available in your account’s Tools page, to quickly search for and delete any keywords in your account.

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR ACCOUNT AFTER THESE CHANGES TAKE PLACE

We’ll email you after we implement these changes. You should then log in to your account and monitor your keywords’ performance under these new guidelines. Any disabled keywords at time of implementation will remain labeled as disabled in your account. After a few weeks, we’ll then begin deleting them. This short interval gives you the opportunity to review your disabled keywords and activate them. If you would like to keep record of your disabled keywords, we suggest that you run a report.

My Thoughts On This Change

I do not know how this will impact my Google AdWords expenses. It seems like Google AdWords are trying to get more money from us by assigning a minimum bid for certain keywords. If that is true, we might find it even harder to pay for $0.05 clicks again! Yikes!

Google says "If your keyword or Ad Group’s maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid, your keyword will be active and trigger ads. If your maximum CPC doesn’t meet the minimum bid, your keyword will be inactive and not trigger ads. "

This is how I see it… They are raising the prices of "valuable" keywords and they will only display our ads if we meet that minimum price Google has decided with its new system.

The good thing about this change is that there will be no more on hold, in trial, slowed keyword and slowed accounts. That makes is simpler for us. I never really understood these terms anyway.

I hope Google doesn’t turn into something like Yahoo Search Marketing…. Let’s wait and see what happens..

The New Vincent Rich Blog Is Here! 

Wednesday, 27th July 2005

Yes! I have successfully exported my Blogger blog to my own WordPress blogging script. WordPress offers me so much more than Blogger.

Here are the new changes:

  1. An automated links directory for exchanging links with other web sites
  2. WordPress "pages" are now stored in the "articles" section
  3. Blog posts are now grouped in categories
  4. Nice blog archives grouped by month
  5. Better blog feeds for both the blog entries and comments

I would like to go into detail on my little tweaks to WordPress to make it what it is now but that will have to wait when I have a bit more time to write some articles. In the mean time, enjoy the new enhancements and tell me if you encounter any bugs. I bet you wouldn’t feel like much has changed but believe me a lot has changed since the move from Blogger.com.

Moving To A WordPress Blogging Script 

Sunday, 24th July 2005

I am getting fed up with the limitations of Blogger. I want to be able to categorize my web site into different sections and put my articles in one category and resources, my recommended stuff into another category. As you can see the links above for articles and resources do not work at the moment!

I’m going to export my Blogger posts to a WordPress blogging script on my home PC to make sure everything is all right before making the shift for the actual blog. It’s about time I did that. I am blogging more than affiliate marketing right now. It would be great to put my posts into categories like “affiliate marketing”, “pay per click search engines”, “internet marketing”, and “google adsense”.

Then I will take some of my “raw” unedited blog posts and enhance them into polished articles and put them in my articles section, submit them to article directories for people to use on their web sites.

You know what? I will scrap the 2 section idea for “articles” and “resources” and simply make 1 section called “articles” and “resources” will be a subsection of articles. Lucky for me, WordPress allows me to create sub categories.

How To Build An AdSense Empire? 

Tuesday, 19th July 2005

I bought the ebook AdSense Empire about 1 month ago. I build “1 web site cluster” of 1 traffic equalizer site, 1 blogger blog and 1 content site. My results were terrible. No traffic and my pages were not indexed enough. I only had 1 page indexed so far.

Maybe I should use the previous blog and ping method I used for my previous example. The AdSense Empire author recommends that you automate the article posting using these blog and ping tools. My software can’t do that. Lucky for me I found a free script to do that for one of my sites. But I still can’t automate the blogger blog to post articles everyday. Maybe that is why I can’t get traffic?

Anway I am still clueless on how to make it work. I didn’t get the results I was looking for. I was hoping to get like 100 visitors per day and $2 per day income from Google AdSense. I requested for a refund for the book but there is still no reply. I hope to get it settled before I spend money on other Google AdSense guides.

I was shopping around and I have heard great things about the AdSense Mastery video course. The price is a whopping $297. I was discussing with a friend to share the cost of this videos course so that we can watch and learn it together. From what I have heard from some forum posts. You will need to spend more money on RSS, page generation and blog and ping software to make the AdSense Mastery course work for you. I think the content will be better than the AdSense Empire book because it is very very vague and I had a lot of trouble understanding what the author was trying to say in the book. I hope the AdSense Mastery videos would help speed up the learning process.

Google AdWords Landing Page Conversions - Preview 

Tuesday, 19th July 2005

Early this month I created a 1 page affiliate site to promote this affiliate program. I have been recording my conversions for the number of opt-ins to my autoresponder series and the number of sales.

This is a 1 page opt-in capture page that redirects to the merchant page after I have their name and email address.

My results are pathetic at the moment but I have learnt some things about landing pages. I still need to do some testing on what works for me and what doesn’t. For example, I now know that my photograph and signature at the bottom of the page doesn’t improve the conversion at all! Strange!

I would like to know if I position the opt-in box at the top of the page and add a “drop in box” asking for their name and email would improve the opt-in conversion. I am paying about $0.05 per click so its not that bad. This would serve me well with my future sites.

I am in the process of calculating the conversion with a spreadsheet…. More to come in a while!

Outsourcing Your Article Writing 

Tuesday, 19th July 2005

I hate to write articles and autoresponders for my web sites. But I like to write in my blog once in a while. Kevin Brown has a free report on How to Outsource Your Article Writing on freelance web sites like Elance.com, ScriptLance.com and RentACoder.com.

I’ve been looking for a guide like this for a long time. Kevin has sample letters and a certain list of things he expects from his writers. I would be so lost without this report. Kevin’s also the author of EZ Article Publisher. I haven’t used the software yet so I can’t review it. I bet it would be useful if you’re into article writing for your content sites.

I think I need to hire someone to help me fix some layout issues on this blog. I always see this huge white space at the 1st post in my Firefox browser for some reason.

Free Wikipedia High PR Incoming Links 

Wednesday, 13th July 2005

Talking about Wikipedia.. I just registered an account there and decided to browse around to see what I could do. One of the things you can do there is edit the articles! Wikipedia has almost everything you ever want there.

I searched for “Oasis” my favourite band. To my surprise I found very detailed biographies of Oasis. If you’ve been reading my blogs you will know that my venture on the internet was my Oasis community site Oasis Fanatic. 2 ideas came to my mind…

  1. Grab the biographies to use on my web site because my biographies are out of date!
  2. Add my link to the biographies hopefully to get a higher Google PR ranking. Oasis Fanatic is currently at 3 Google points.

Check out the articles with a link to my web site:

  1. Liam Gallagher biography - PR 4
  2. Zak Starkey biography - PR 4
  3. Noel Gallagher biography - PR 5
  4. Oasis biography - PR 5
  5. Andy Bell biography - PR 0
  6. Paul McGuigan biography - PR 4
  7. Alan White biography - PR 0

I could only add my links to the pages with the “edit” link at the right side of the articles. Oasis is my niche. You add links to your web sites or even your affiliate links there and see what happens! What a great tool this is!

I even added a cheeky link at the affiliate marketing article at Wikipedia with my link right at the top! If you’ve got more ideas on how to use Wikipedia, please share it with us by leaving some comments!