SEO tips = better search engine ranking

What kind of Adsense CPM do you need to make buying traffic worthwhile?

The cheapest plan for buying traffic on Quality Traffic Supply.com is $30 for 5,000 visitors and they say that websites using Adsense buy its targeted traffic.

A little math shows us that with this package you're paying $6 per 1,000 visitors. A $6 eCPM with Adsense is cerainly possible, and some of my websites do better. The question becomes how good the traffic is. They claim that the quality is excellent and that all visitors follow contextual links to reach your site (no pop-ups or anything like that). Would this traffic interact with Adsense the same way normal traffic does?

A bigger plan means cheaper traffic: 50,000 Visitors = $200. That means $4 per 1,000 visitors. I have lots of sites that could make these numbers work, even if the traffic doesn't show as high an eCPM as I'm used to with my regular traffic and Adsense.

Should I give it a try? Has anyone else done this?

Easy adult traffic - blog about porn videos

Adult topics get more traffic to your site - the adult sites in my directory get more traffic than the rest of my directory, but this is an SEO blog, I can just start an XXX movie review section. However sometimes porno related news hits the mainstream, like this story about a neighbor who mistook some loud pron for an actual rape attack.

Now I might not be able to monetize the adult traffic that will accidentally find its way here thanks to my blog entry about the porn video, but the sites in my directory will have better luck.

website marketing on myspace.com

There's an interesting thread over at DP regarding marketing on myspace.

It seems that some people found it to be too much work, too little reward while other people see it as a good source of traffic. The key seems to be reach, with tactics for getting "friends" ranging from bots to pictures of barely dressed women in the profile.

One of the complaints that got me curious was that myspace users are young (which reminds me of my 17 year old cousin telling me about myspace). Young people might be interested in my upcoming site on dating culture...

So the question is do I invest my own time? Probably not. If I can, I'd rather invest a little money, and get an expereinced myspace person to use myspace to promote my site. I'd consider asking my cousin, but with no marketing experience she might end up getting herself banned. Then I'd feel bad.

Introduction to online marketing for a new employee

I'm working with someone who is very bright and new to online marketing to promote my new site on dating culture (which launches next week). This is the introduction to online marketing I sent her:

The idea with online marketing is to get people to visit your web site. Online stores have to make sure to get visitors are interested in their product(s) but we don't have that problem (or at least it's not a big problem). We're promoting a free site that contains articles about dating culture.

There are four main ways to get visitors to a web site:

1. advertising - this includes banner advertising and the more popular pay per click advertising. Free sites don't usually advertise much.

2. links - we want websites to link to our site, especially websites with visitors interested in dating culture.

3. search engines - Being #1 in the search engines is every webmasters dream. When your site ranks first for an important keyword, you get a lot of traffic for your site.

4. Word of mouth can be good too, especially if you can get articles about your site in newspapers and other publications.

We'll be focusing on 2 and 4. Doing well with #2 will naturally lead to #3, good search engine rankings. I can pay for link-building, so if you get webmasters to link from their site to mine, I'll pay (we'll talk more about the value of links later).

Now we can't start until the site is presentable (I probably need one more week to get things together) but in the meantime, you might consider which websites attract visitors that might be interested in reading about dating culture in English.

Do you have any questions so far?

Weird web host

I've been hiring people to do my link building for me and so i wanted to give someone FTP access to my "directory" folder on one of my sites hosted with globat.com.

I couldn't figure out how to get this done wih their control panel so I emailed support. I was surprised to learn that you can not create an FTP account and give it access to he one folder:

Since www.sportsthunder.com/directory is included in your main files, any of your ftp user cannot access it without you giving them your username/password. The only work around for this is for them to upload files on their subaccount. Then you would have to download these files in order to add it on the "directory" folder.

Traffic up, Google down

For over two years, the top referrer for ESL go has been Google. No longer. This month both Yahoo and MSN are sending me more traffic than Google. Normally this would be a bad sign because losing Google traffic usually means less traffic over all.

Not this month. Traffic has never been higher with about 1400 uniques on an average day. The big difference seems to be my ranking for the keyword ESL. Google has dropped me to number 50. I had been in the 20-30 range for a while. Yahoo has me at #7. MSN has me at #7 also.

As an expert on ESL, I'm confident saying that Yahoo gives people in my profession the best results, MSN is second, and Google is not doing so well with this keyword.

Still recovering

Still recovering from the unithosting.net vanishing act. It has been hard since I've been on vacation and since the sites I lost were my low priority ones - the ones I just kind of stuck there while I spent time working on more profitable sites.

Regarding those sites, my travel blog has not seen any pof the old Yahoo traffic return. I suppose I'm ready to abandon the Digital Point link coop. My ESL site is doing very well. It's #6 for ESL in Yahoo but down to 46 in Google as their search results continue to get worse...

Unithosting.net disaster

I had a cheap reseller account with unithosting.net that I used to put my low traffic, low income web sites. I had about 8 sites with them, most database driven. Now the sites are gone. Unithosting.net support is gone. Stupidly I didn't create backup databases. Needless to say I suggest you avoid unithosting.net at all costs.

Another new host for a new site

So I bought a new web site and I need a new host for it. I found a cheap host that is offering a 50.00 gift certificate to Amazon.com when you sign up for a one year plan at 5.00/month and a 19.95 set up fee. It's a fairly generous package too: Free 50% more Space & Bandwidth on all Hosting Plans.

I don't see an uptime guarantee, but with this site, it doesn't really matter if it's up 363 or 364 days a year. Of course I expect it up almost all the time and a quick google search doesn't turn up any complaints.

I should not that the gift certificate offer ends in just over ten hours... And it's not that easy but I'll give it a try since they take PayPal. Hopefully they don't screw me out of my gift certificate. Since it comes to about 80.00 for one year, by the time they give an affiliate commission and buy my gift certificate they might be losing money...

Going with a new host (Lunarpages.com)

Not too long ago I bought an Australian music site. I figured it made sense to leave the site with an Austrlian web host. That is until I got a notice that I'm close to the 100 MB space I get and the next plan up will be 15.00 US (rough estimate depending on the excahnge rate from AUD to USD). For a site coming up on 100 MB, that's pretty steep.

So I'm switching to Lunarpages because they will transfer my site, promise 99.9% uptime, have an active community and live chat help (there was someone there when I just checked), and offer 3000 MB space plus 40 GB transfer for under 8.00/month.

Get links and traffic from Ebay

I sometimes auction advertising space on Ebay. When I do, I always link to a few of my sites - Ebay is busy, and this is a good way to get exposure. For the next 7 days this one will be up: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7501988091

The people buying links on Ebay are probably trying to promote their sites so if you have an SEO blog or a directory (and I have both plus an advertising blog) an auction is more than looking for a customer - place links to your site and it's getting more traffic.

Registerfly.com = why my site went down

Obviously it's no good when your site goes down. We try to avoid this by getting a reliable host. So it's pretty infuriating when your site goes down because your domain expired. You might be thinking that I must be a chump to let my domain expire, but it's not my fault. I use registerfly (will be transferring my names soon), put renewals for expiring domains in my shopping cart, click checkout, pay through pay pal (they always decline my perfectly good credit cards), and figure I'm done.

Apparently not. Although there's no indication, the domains are not renewed yet. You now have a bunch of money uselessly sitting in your account and you have to renew the names again. Here's a transcript from a conversation I just had:

Client Care Representative: Hello, Welcome to Registerfly LIVE CHAT, This is Client Support Representative Andrew, How may I Help you?
jamestrotta: I renewed several domains through paypal, but they now show up as expired and the paypal funds are just sitting in my account
Client Care Representative: Now try to renew again the funds in your account will be used for that
jamestrotta: I don't see the renew option
Client Care Representative: On the top of the page you will see the tab Domain Names
Client Care Representative: Under that Renew domain option is there
jamestrotta: They only show up as expired when I try to change DNS. Under the actual domain name profile it said active. I see what you're talking about
Client Care Representative: The domains are not renewed yet
Client Care Representative: You have just added funds in your account
Client Care Representative: Now you will have to use the funds to renew it
jamestrotta: I realize that now. I need to know why they weren't renewed when I put them in my cart and went through the paypal process.
jamestrotta: I even put a note on the paypal transaction which domains were being paid for
Client Care Representative: generate a ticket our second level support will renew the domains for you
jamestrotta: I would like to know why they weren't renewed wen I had the renewals in my cart and checked out through pay pal. I need to know that registerfly is reliable
Client Care Representative: When you do the transaction with paypal money is added to your account
Client Care Representative: then you have to use the money to renew the domains by doing the transaction again
jamestrotta: Why have the shopping cart in the first place? Normally when you put something in the shopping cart and pay for it you're finished.
jamestrotta: Why wasn't I warned that I ahd to do it again?
Client Care Representative: When you use credit card transaction will be done instantly but with paypal you will have to process it again
jamestrotta: And why wasn't I warned about that. On other sites you don't have to do the transaction again when using pay pal
Client Care Representative: Sorry but at our site when you use paypal you will have to do the transaction again

Sponsored by Consumer Product Reviews

Traffic for who?

This site claims it can generate thousand of hits for me. I see how it will generate traffic for itself, but I can't imagine CTR high enough to generate real traffic for me. But I'll give it a try and let you knwo how it turns out. Or you can just try it yourself:
Update: These guys cheated! I've learned that they gave themselves credit for referring me when credit should have gone to another site (the one that really referred me).

Alexa ranking and real traffic

I installed the Alexa toolbar a couple of months ago and since that time have seen my sites' traffic ranks increase dramatically. For example, my ESL blog has gone from 1.8 million or so to 166,000 or so. Traffic has increased slightly, from maybe 90 uniques/day to 110 uniques daily. In short, when someone offering you advertising space or trying to persuade you to enter a reciprocal linking partnership, ignore their boasts about Alexa rankings.