Another day

Not much to report today. I wrote another article for the new site today at work. These articles are much shorter than the ones for the home theater site. Probably 1/3 of the length. It should not take long to get a lot of content for the site. I will also be using articles I find at article submission directories on the site to beef up the content. I think that 25 articles by me and 5-10 from directories would be a good start. I know I said that 25 was a mistake but we will see if that's still true now that I'm going to have a template finished before writing them. I will *finally* use Wordtracker this weekend and determine the keywords for all of the sites that I will be working on in the near future.

The template is actually coming along finally. I guess it just took me complaining about it to start the ball rolling. It's very plan. After working on the graphics for the home theater site, this one is extremely plain. Maybe it will look better once the header is finished.

6,4,6...And Google Redeems Itself

That's right 6, 4, and 6. Those were my positions today in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. My Adsense definitely noticed too. Since I changed the ads back to the way I had them, there was an explosion in clicks. In fact, this was the biggest grossing day for the site. Last night I reached 35 visitors, 4 more than my previous record. Good times ahead...hopefully. Now if I could just get some sales.

I also wrote another article for the care/storage page. I'm running into difficulty with the template. I can't seem to get my act together on it. I don't know what the deal is. I may need to take a break from the heavy lifting and just get links for a few days. Who knows? I need to get myself together if I'm going to have 8 sites by Dec 31. There's not nearly as much time left as you would think. We are going into the 7th month of the year, so that's not even a month for each site. Watch as the sands of time slip through my fingers. If anyone has any words of advice on this, let me know. Oh, tomorrow I'm going to contact some lenders from a list my real estate agent gave me. There were some duplexes that seem like they would more than cover my expenses if I could just get financing for them. I'll let you know.

Lost in the woods people, I'm lost in the woods.

Google Disappoints...Maybe

I was excited to see what would happen as far as Adsense goes now that I'm getting Google traffic. Know what happened? Nothing. Right now, my site is even with my all time record for traffic and there has been no Adsense revenue today. One thing that may have contribute to this is my changing of the ad format. I've changed back to the way I had it to see if that will improve things tomorrow. Hopefully it will. I can see why people covet the 1st page of Google so much. It really brings the traffic, more so than MSN or Yahoo with the very same keywords.

Today was a bust as far as work goes, too. I don't think I've had a more unproductive day. Even days where I did nothing on the site, I was more productive than this. I just kind of came home from work and sat here. Shame. I need to start making my list of things to do again while I'm at work. Anyway, that's the status report for the day.

Surprises Upon My Return

I'm back from San Antonio. I had a chance to hear my little brother play saxophone for the first time in 5 years. He's good, I had no idea that he had improved as much as he had. I missed out on a lot of the stuff like that with him because of school and work. That is one of the main incentives for becoming financially free; so that I won't have to miss those things with my kids one day.

Well, I get back home and check my stats. I see a bunch of visitors from Google. No big deal, the visitors from Adwords appear the same way as those with a regular search. I take a closer look and notice that the term the person searched for isn't something from my Adwords campaign. It's "home theatre accessories". I click on the link. To my surprise I'm #4 in Google! Despite my personal feelings about how Google does things, I'm pretty happy. Then I see another person came from Google. Their search: "home theater accessories". My position: #6. Now the question is whether this is a quasi-permanent thing (nothing seems to be permanent in search engines, only quasi) or is it going to pull what Yahoo did in my first 2 weeks and put my on the first page only to drop me back down to #354 (only a slight exaggeration). Only time will tell.

I'm curious about the amount of traffic I get from Google on a week day. I had 20 visitors today and it's a Sunday. Usually Sunday is a single digit day for me. I'll keep you posted, as always.

Better Late Than Never

I decided to take a nap today after work and didn't get back up until 10. I guess I needed it. I added a new section to the site dealing with DVD and CD care and storage as well as one of the two articles I wrote for it. The first of these is an article on 5 ways to prolong the life of your DVDs and CDs.

Link exchanging has been going well. I've had one where the link page was a PR4 with only 15 links on it, most of those from the navigation menu. Being the untrusting person I am, I need to go back and look at the page source to make sure that there aren't any tricks going on. I don't know why people try to withhold PR from the people they link to. It's not like they are taking PR away from their page by linking to another site. I don't know but it pisses me off.

I'll be in San Antonio for the next couple days so there won't be any updates unless I do some work while I'm there.

All is Right in the World...

Spurs win! They barely pulled it off but they did it. That was too much drama, if I had time available I would take tomorrow off from work.

Anyway, I was able to write another article for the new site at work today. It took me all of ten minutes. I like this new site=) I may be able to get 25 articles finished faster than with the home theater site. I'm starting to think that the problem was more with the fact that my template wasn't ready when I wrote the home theater articles rather than 25 being too much. Without that template to make the pages, I could not see the finished product and it felt like I wasn't making any progress. Template comes first this time. Then I will focus on the articles. That doesn't mean I won't write one or two while I'm bored at work though.

With the help of Jonleehacker, I've made a huge discovery that has made an impact on my template. My new site will look more professional than the first one because of it. This discovery also led me to some new tricks using CSS. My next CSS file will probably be the only thing that changes as I make new sites. Once I create this template, I will be able to change ONLY the CSS file to completely revamp it for a different topic. HUGE. Time and time again, Jon has helped me out so I'd like to say thank you to him.

First Article of the New Site

I was able to write 3 articles at work today and one was the first for the next site that I'm working on. This site will be easier than the home theater site in that there is little to no research required. The article took all of ten minutes and it's about the same length as the average home theater article. That's good stuff in my book.

I'm also making progress on the template for the new site. All I really have to do at this point is write the CSS, determine the SSI, and make the header. The header is already giving me grief. This template will actually be used for the next 3 sites because the structures will be the same and the colors these topics are associated with are all the same. More good stuff.

I'm moving up in MSN, #15 this afternoon. I'm still non-existent in Yahoo and it's hurting my traffic/revenue. Alas.

...Of New Articles and Stupid Basketball Players

Stupid Spurs. Watching them, you wouldn't know that they were losing the entire game. There was no desperation or drive to win. They deserved to lose tonight. They better win Thursday, and that cute waitress that was there last Thursday needs to be there too. The only way the Spurs can redeem themselves is if they win and I get her number. Anyway, back to business.

I wrote an article at work today on noise canceling headphones. The principles behind how they work are pretty interesting. Other than that, no new news. Adsense is still in the pits. Just more reason for me to diversify and have more sites. The next two sites will be based off the same template I'm working on. The only thing to change will be the colors. Efficiency is the name of the game.

It Begins Again

I was fairly productive today. I made 3 outlines for the home theater site. I will probably write them tomorrow during slow times at work. I won't post them all at the same time, rather I'll space them out in order to appease the SE spiders.

The Yahoo slaughter continues. I didn't realize how much my Adsense revenue depended on Yahoo visitors, or at least search engine visitors, until they were gone. I really need to get back to the top of the rankings and get the rest of my pages ranking well, too. I'm starting to wonder if this new Yahoo update is going to punish me for "overoptimization". While the home page is written naturally, I'm sure the keyword density for "home theater accessories" is a bit excessive=) We will see.

I started work on the new site today. Not conceptual work but real, tangible work. The template for the site should not take nearly as long as with the first site. I'm wiser and more experienced now, plus this one won't have the graphics of the first. Very clean and professional is what this one will be about. I am also using the Adsense Heat Map in order to make sure that the places that are best for ads are available for that purpose. I also have a few other things that I will do right off the bat that I would have like to have done with the home theater site, i.e. server side includes. Build a great foundation and your creation will stand the test of time. Just ask the Egyptians.

Link Exchange Success

I have started to get replies to my link exchange requests. Finally I am getting somewhere with this linking thing. I think the combination of a better link page and a different approach to my requests is helping a lot. Rather than wasting time putting up someone's link and asking them up put up mine, I just ask if they would be interested in exchanging links. I also tell them that I will put their link up first. In essence, it's the same process as before but it's more efficient this way. Now, I don't have to mess with including links unless they are interested. Simple variation but far better in my opinion.

Aside from the link exchanges, I accomplished nothing this weekend. Too much was going on. The link exchanges are important though. I really want to have a decent PR by the time the next update takes place. I had planned to do some Wordtracker this weekend but it will have to wait.

Link Exchange Galore

I've made a bunch of link exchange requests and submissions to directories in the past 2 days. 16 in all. From what I hear, the next PageRank update takes place next month so I want to get as many links as possible before that takes place. While the page rank won't do much for my immediate rankings with Google, it will make my site more appealing to people I am trying to link with. I've done a couple things in order to boost the inbound links for my link page. I am really interested in what kind of PR the site gets since its still in its infancy. I really doubt it will be above a 2 but it would be nice=)

I noticed that my traffic from Yahoo has stopped. Right now, I'm ranked #123 for my home page. I know it's a temporary thing but I don't know if I will get back to my spot as #3 for home theater accessories. I can only wait and see. MSN has me listed at #38 for the same search phrase.

Short Post

I was able to write an article yesterday before the Spurs fiasco. This one is on HDMI-to-DVI cables.

At work I was able to do more brainstorming on the third and fourth sites. It seems like they should be very doable and won't require much research for the articles. I also registered a domain name for the second site today. This weekend will be a busy one.

Stupid Spurs...

I'm not even going to post tonight......Spurs forgot how to play basketball.

The Day of the Directory

I came home stressed like you wouldn't believe. Stressed to the point that I couldn't do any real work on the site so I submitted to a bunch of directories. Mindless but definitely necessary.

My Adwords account is getting clicks now. The CTR is bouncing between just above and just below 1.5%. It turns out the small groups that I added as an afterthought are the ones that are holding the campaign on their shoulders. All of the ads getting clicks are above the .5% limit but these others are in the 60s and above. It's crazy. This weekend I need to make a goto.php page to track more accurately who is going to what merchant. As it stands, CJ only tells you that someone went to a merchant but if you have multiple merchants you don't know which got the clicks. Tracking is essential and this is something that I've been putting off for too long.

The next site has been fleshed out to the point that I could write articles for it. I haven't started thinking of designs for it yet but I will soon. This weekend is going to be busy but I may have a host and domain as soon as the following Saturday. More sites = more income......

JonnyQ Special: What Jon has Learned Thus Far

I was at the Rich Dad site and decided to make a post I had planned to do here. So this here it is.


Alright, initially this was going to be a private message for Michelle but Jscott is right. We need to help each other. These are the big things I've learned so far.

Title, Meta Description, H1, & H2 tags are key - Write each article targeting a single keyword phrase and have it in each of the tags mentioned. Keyword density is important but not to the degree most people think so write naturally without all of the bold, italics, and crazy font sizes. I don't know about you but that stuff pisses me off.

Update often and get your RSS feed up - It was mentioned that you need to update every day but I update maybe twice a week, 3 times tops and all of the major SE spiders crawl my site frequently. Google every other day and the rest once a day. The RSS feed will help get your articles indexed in Yahoo faster in the very least and will help bring repeat traffic.

Submit to directories but only to direct linking ones - On the page where your link will show up go to View > Page Source and look at the links. Make sure they are clean links and don't have a bunch of gobbldy gook around them. SE spiders won't follow Java and that is often what all of that stuff is.

Get links from related sites - All of the major search engines factor in incoming links when determining your rank. Google does more so than the others. Make sure the links are from quality link pages and not just a laundry list of every site created since 1996.

Have a clean site map - The site map should be nothing more than the links to all of the pages on your site. There should be a link to it on every page of the site as well. The site map makes it easier for spiders to move around and find everything.

If you are starting in PPC, leave Overture alone - The learning curve for PPC is too steep not to have the control that Adsense gives you over your campaign. Learn to use the " " and [ ]. Just putting in a keyword without puncutation is a recipe for disaster. Ask and I can tell you what I've learned in the area of PPC in the last week. It's a lot.

Track EVERYTHING - Track the spiders, track your links, track the visitors. Watch their movements. Stalk them. Time them. See how long they stay on the pages. The time they spend is an indication of the page's effectiveness. If they leave after a few seconds, there may be issues to address. Track your Adsense on EVERY page. Use the channels to gather data and determine which ad style is most effective on your site. I have spreadsheets I use and I will make them available to anyone I've talked to more than twice for free. If I haven't talked to you before, all it will cost you is a link to my blog=)

SSI & CSS - Server Side Includes and Cascading Style Sheets (external ones) will shave hours off site maintenance and testing. I have links to great sources on both that I will post later.

NVU - Forget Dreamweaver and FrontPage. This is free and works just as well as either one of them.

Read Forums, not Ebooks - You can learn almost everything for free by frequenting forums and asking questions. Perfect example. I bought Stomp the Search Engines about 2 weeks ago. All fired up about kicking Google's posterior, I popped in the first CD. Then the next, and then the next. While it's a great program for newbies, I had already learned just about everything that was discussed from forums. The only new thing was the concept of press releases and guess what? Jscott just mentioned that for FREE in this very thread. Invest in your education and read forums, save the money and invest it in your business.

Internal links count, too - SEs index and rank pages, not sites. As such, a link from anywhere is an inbound link. Make sure you use the page's key phrase in the link anchor text. The ...>BLAH part. Also do as I say and not as I do and don't name your home page "home". Use the site's name and make sure that it contains the site's main keyphrase.

Adsense - Chances are Adsense will be the major money maker for your site, at least initially. Study the "heat map" and design the site around it. I'm sure someone here has a link to it. Follow the rules and don't get banned. That would be a huge chunk of money that would be lost from you.

This is wisdom garnered from 42-105 hr/wk of work and research for the past 4 months. Use it wisely.

New Article

I was able to write an article at work today. I think I'll start doing it more often. This article is on speaker wire. Other than that, nothing new. I did get a few clicks today but again, they aren't staying long enough. I'm not sure how to approach this. When I advertised for my article, I had few clicks but they read and clicked through to the merchant. Now that I'm advertising the product, I get more clicks but fewer click through to the merchant. If I'm going to have my cake, I want to eat it too dammit! I also found another link exchange site that you may be interested in. Link Metro. I sent out one link exchange request. We will see how it goes.

One of my next sites is starting to get fleshed out. While at work, I was able to come up with 25 different categories/articles that could be on it. This site will also use RSS to bring in fresh content on a regular basis as well as articles people have submitted to directories. While the home theater site is about the love, the next sites are about the business. Whether I write the articles or not means nothing to me on these next ones as long as they bring in the cash.

This weekend, I'll subscribe to Wordtracker and do some real keyword research for everything; my current site, the next two, and my ads. More sites means more income. More income means more money in the business coffers that can go to software that saves time, more domains and hosting, and finally writers. University of Texas is here in town and there's a multitude of college students that would write articles for a $5-10 a page. More sites is the key. One day they will bring in enough money to start buying real estate.... I'll leave that discussion to another time. Night.

BJ Tagged Me!

I've been hit with the book tag by BJ, it seems to be going around. Here goes:

1. How many books do I own?
I really couldn't say, I'm a late bloomer as far as reading is concerned. My parents pushed hard for me to read more so of course I resisted with all of my might. I have a couple hundred comic books but as far as novels go it's probably in the double digits. I read more "how to", business, and military history books anyway.

2. Last book I bought?
Last book I bought was of Jean-Rene's suggestion, HTML: Your Visual Blueprint for Designing Effective Web Pages.

3. Last book I read?
See previous.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me?
1. Rich Dad, Poor Dad - It was confirmation that many of the concepts I had in my head were not only viable but had been used successfully by one R. Kiyosaki.
2. Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde - It was the book that started the Era of Reading that I was in while working at the bookstore.
3. Shogun - 1100 pages is quite intimidating to someone who had avoided reading for so long but it turned out to be one of my favorites.
4. We Were Soldiers Once, And Young - Probably one of the best books written on Vietnam. Being from a military family, books about those who sacrifice their lives in defense of their country really resonate with me.
5. E-Myth: Revisited - A book on business that anyone taking the plunge should read.

Ha! Now its my turn! Jean-Rene and Jonleehacker, you're tagged! Everyone else has been tagged already.

Quick Update

Not much to say today. I wrote an article yesterday and did the initial keyword research for my next two sites. Today I added a couple new adgroups into my campaign and one got its first click within hours. The weekend is slow for the internet, the truth about my campaign's progress will show in the next two days. I have been getting more clicks and the campaign is just about 1% in CTR but there is a problem. The people that click through aren't staying. I need to look into this and determine if its a loading issue. If the page is loading too slowly, people may abandon it before its finished. I still pay for the click but I don't get to "presell" to them. We will see.

And the Overhaul continues....

To leave the taint of the original campaign behind me, I moved all of the new "laser-focused" ads to a brand new campaign. It is doing heads and tails better than the original. I'm going to let it run for a few days to see how things go. The weekends aren't the best time to test because I have noticed a HUGE drop in traffic on both the blog and site during that time. I can say this, the new ads are getting clicks. Almost immediately after "Overhaul Part I" last night my CTR went up. Not enough to undo the damage that had already been wrought but enough to let me know that I was on the right track.

Tomorrow is back to basics day. I write articles and I do my keyword research for the new sites. No more messing around.

You're Fired! - Jonny Style

As I told BJ today, "Overhaul doesn't quite describe it aptly." I read somewhere that when taking over an ailing company, one should fire all the leaders first because they obviously just didn't cutting it. That is what I did with my Adwords account. The Adgroups that weren't a part of the highly focused strategy - FIRED! The ad copy that wasn't getting the clicks - FIRED! My original keyword list - FIRED! And the list goes on and the heads did roll. I'm finding new keywords. Thanks to Tara, I'm writing new ads. This will work eventually. I am still convinced that Adwords is viable, just not in the methods that I had been using.

I need to keep perspective on this. PPC is just a small part of the overall strategy. I need to make sure that I don't devote too much time to it at the expense of the site and creating new ones.

For a Moment I Lost My Way

While doing my keyword research, I got so caught up in the amount of potential traffic in some terms that I forgot my objective. Everything I've read on making Adwords work says to keep the target audience tight and, for lack of a better word, nichey. I lost that. Subsequently, my Adwords account was "slowed" meaning Google isn't showing my ads as often until I get my CTR up. I need to return to my laser-like focus in the keywords. I'm talking about precision weapons quality here. My ads would not be seen by thousands of people a day, but those few who would see them would be in the market for what I'm selling. That's laser focus, people. I need precision like Rocky needed speed.

Looking back, I can say that the thing that I put the least amount of time into were the actual ads people see. This seems to be a recurring theme with me. The most important thing is the one thing I focus on least. Same thing happened with the home page of my site. Now it's decent but at first it was pitiful to say the least. The problem now is convincing people to click. I could be provocative but as you know, I have a tendency to be verbose in my writing. That doesn't lend itself to being effective in the 25 characters or less limit of the ad headline. This is definitely an exercise in personal growth here=)

Big congratulations to Tara. She made her first sale today! I know how hard she works on this and I'm glad things are going well for her. Soon she will be beating people away from her sites with a stick!

Busy Day at Work, Slow Day at Home

I signed up for Value Exchange through Sitesell last night and had a response when I got home today. Problem was that the person's site had no link page that I could find. How do you exchange links with someone who has no links page? That's the question of the day. In fact, I found several at Value Exchange that had no link page. Go figure.

I got 2 more clicks on my ad today and I think one clicked through. The script I was using to tell if they were converting isn't working the way it's intended. I need to figure out how to rectify that. But so far it looks like 75% CTR to merchant. This was approximated using my clicks and comparing them to my clicks in CJ. I just need more traffic. I'm still putting in keywords. Still no end in sight as far as the list goes. The sooner I get my keywords in, the sooner I can start researching the new sites.

I posted on a forum about making better ad copy so hopefully I'll get some hints in that regard. I really think this is a gold mine waiting to be found. It's just a matter of finding the right keywords and making an effective ad.

Can I get some CLICKS?

Adwords is sweet. My click through rate sucks but I expect that for my 3rd day in. However, the good thing is that the 2 clicks that I did get today may have 100% click throughs to the merchant. I know of one for sure but I need to wait until tomorrow to verify with Google for the other. That tells me that my article may have some bite to it. Now it's just a matter of making my ads more compelling and raising the CTR.

I have FINALLY fixed the other home theater sites page (read: links). It looked so bad, I can't blame people for not wanting to link with me. That's taken care of now. If you have a site, go check out Linkmachine. It's what I used, and so far it comes with a "try for yourself" recommendation. It may not be for everyone but I see that there is potential in it. Just go see it. That's about it for now. I'm about to partake of some keyword inputting goodness and maybe some link exchanging. Until next time.

More Adgroups & #7 in MSN Search

I'm up to 15 Adgroups on my Adwords account, each one has two different ads for testing. Adwords alternates the two and gives you an idea of which one is more effective. From there you can make changes and do more testing. Writing the ads was surprisingly difficult. There's not much room to say what you have to say so you have to be a bit creative. I haven't even put a dent in my keyword list yet, most of the ones I put in today were ones I thought up off the fly. I put those in so that I wouldn't forget to later. I guess I'll have plenty to do tomorrow after work. I have to say that this Adwords thing is pretty cool so far, now I just need some clicks.

I wrote an article on subwoofer cables today. This is another one that has the HTAR Top Pick seal on it. We will see how well it converts. I also got my first visitor from MSN Search today. To my surprise, I'm ranked #7 there. I think I was just indexed last week or the week before so my homepage is doing well in two of the Big 3.

Adwords is Up

I was able to start my Adwords account today. I didn't get much accomplished because it took the guys from IPower forever (read: 7 hours) to send me the promotion code to get my $25 credit. As of right now, there are 3 adgroups so I will expand that tomorrow. I also redid my "Add Your URL" page. It now has a script that changes the link that will be used on other people's sites. This way, I can spread around the page rank rather than having it all focused on the home page and trickling down from there. That is essentially it for today. Work on the next sites will begin as soon as the Adwords campaign is on its feet.

Adwords Tomorrow?

If all goes well, then that's what will happen. My first Adwords campaign is going to target a specific product on my site. If that does well, then I will move on to some of the others. I was finally able to write a new article today on the technical terms related to headphones.

Tara has just finished another site. It's another pet site but it deals with making your pet's final arrangements. Go check it out at Pet Memorials Info.

As many of you may have heard, Cory Rudl was just killed in a car accident. Rudl was a successful Internet marketer who had a significant influence on the way people approach this business. Something sudden and tragic like this makes you put things into perspective.

Blog Spam

Please Stop/Don't spam my blog. I really do not appreciate having to remove your posts.

Realization

I came to the conclusion today that while I did hours and hours of research into my keywords for the articles on the site, it wasn't the best quality. I say this because I looked at my keyword list today and the majority of them do not have a good demand-to-supply ratio. I had noticed this before I started the site but now it's more evident as I try to write new articles. I need to go back and do it right. I need to dig deeper than I had and really find what people are searching for. While the articles I have up now are fine in terms of the d/s ratio, it's the newer ones I'm concerned about. Since it is the web page and not the website that gets ranked in the search engines, making each article stand on it's own two feet is imperative.

I need a time table. There is too much "floating" going on. I talk about "my next site" this and "my next site" that but there is no definitive start date for me to begin work on it. It looks like I have my work cut out for me this weekend. Between Edwards, getting ready for the new site, writing more content for the current one, and keyword research I should be kept fairly busy.

Adwords Progress

I'm slowly but surely making progress with Adwords. I should be able to start the campaign this weekend if my current progress continues. On a slightly frustrating note, overnight someone had discovered a bunch of the uncontested terms I've been cataloguing and has posted their ads first. They are obviously unaware that these are my terms and that they are about to meet some competition. They are especially oblivious to the fact that it is ME they are going up against and that I have a propensity for preying upon the weak. Said competitor better get their game face on real quick because I am coming.

I need to reevaluate the home theater cables section of my site. I don't think I am doing enough in that area to promote products. In fact, I think there are two categories that really need help in that regard. It'll be on the agenda for this weekend. Also on the agenda, preparation for the new sites. I got paid today and dumped $150 into my business coffers. It's not much but it's all I can spare and still eat. I like to eat. This money is for advertising, hosting new sites, new site research, etc. Eventually, I will be able to wean this business off of my wallet and it will hunt for it's own food. I can't wait.