|
I've been following keyword research tools for a while now and the one that keeps standing out to me is Market Samurai. However, I read recently that many keyword research tools lost their potency when Google removed the ability to track users by keyword data in 2013. Most of the posts promoting things such as Market Samurai are from pre-2013. Does anyone use such tools anymore and do they still work well? What tools do you use and why?
|
#
?
Oct 28, 2014 16:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 23:19 |
|
|
Bought a new domain, re-launched my old blog, grabbed all of my old articles off of wayback machine, posted a new article, then immediately sold ad space. Niche is a HUGE deal. I've got a bunch of other sites that fell to the wayside, not because they weren't "decent", but I just didn't give a poo poo about the topic. Here's some tips for selling adspace: Network using twitter/fb/whatever, get in touch with someone who is just starting a company, pitch your number of fb likes/twitter followers/whatever, get money.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 01:16
|
|
|
Glad to have you back. Enjoyed reading your posts from earlier in the thread. So you're relaunching your old blog under a new domain? Mind sharing a URL?
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 01:45
|
|
|
Does anybody have any recommendations for how to track an ad waterfall? Has anybody here dabbled in CPM arb?
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 16:57
|
|
|
When you sign up as an Amazon Affiliate does it matter how many unique visitors your site gets every month? I.e. If you have less than 500, are they less likely to approve you? I'm in the process of putting together content to set up a blog but I don't want to sign up to Amazon too soon if it's going to jeopardise chances of them accepting me.
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 20:22
|
|
|
They will auth anyone who isnt doing illegal or really scummy poo poo. They will shut you down if you dont get a sale in 90 days. They take a closer look at things when you start pushing volumne.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 20:28
|
|
|
Ah, thanks! The 90 days thing is definitely worth keeping in mind. I'll get everything set up and operating before I sign up then. Especially given this exclusion: quote:Qualifying Purchases exclude, and we will not pay advertising fees on any of, the following:
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 20:38
|
|
|
I'm not sure that's entirely true. I have a Black Friday blog that only gets sales in November/December and then stays dormant the rest of the year and I've had Amazon on there for 4 years with no issue. They might also cut you some slack if they see you do some minimum volume a year. If you aren't even getting any clicks in the last 90 days then maybe I'd be worried. Speaking of which does anyone else here have a blog tailored to Black Friday/Christmas stuff? Any tips for this year?
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 20:46
|
|
|
Sorry I should be clearer, first 90 days no sale is an auto shut down. If you actually push through sales for some of the year I imagine they cut you slack never run anything quite as seasonal as a black friday type blog. Also remeber amazon run on a person basis not a blog basis so if you own 3 blogs all of their stats get combined.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2014 21:07
|
|
|
I signed up for amazon a LONG time ago and made like $20 off of it in the first week, and then haven't sold anything else. They keep sending me emails about my payouts and performance though.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2014 06:57
|
|
|
I make a few bucks a month off Amazon, but it's way less consistent than Adsense. I've been meaning to write a couple articles more explicitly targeted towards Amazon products and see how those do.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 01:51
|
|
|
So tumblr blogs seem to very good for SEO. From what I understand all links are dofollow and every time someone "likes" your post you get another dofollow link on that person's page. I think it depends what your niche is, but having one or two tumblr blogs seems like an easy way to build some backlinks.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 02:09
|
|
|
As far as Amazon goes I haven't had problems getting approved with various blogs but I did run into a problem when I started making sales off of one that I was using a woo commerce store for - they disapproved that site once I started actually making sales because it lacked original content (lesson learned). From what I can tell it seems that they pay closer attention to blogs once they start earning rather then when you first apply. I've yet to not get accepted immediately even with blogs that were just starting out.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 04:27
|
|
|
I've been wondering about Tumblr, but have no idea how to integrate it with my normal wordpress site - just seems like its duplicating content unneccessarily.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 09:25
|
|
Ron Don Volante posted:I make a few bucks a month off Amazon, but it's way less consistent than Adsense. I've been meaning to write a couple articles more explicitly targeted towards Amazon products and see how those do. How do you make money off AdSense? It just feels.. dirty. I've seen some stuff on eye-tracking and user focus behaviour and what I've taken away from it is that people are really good at subconsciously filtering out ads, especially those block AdSense ads and especially in the places people normally put them. So unless you're willing to seriously warp the presentation and quality of your content, and trick people into reading/clicking ads as if they were part of the content, it's largely just an eyesore. Unless you have millions of pageviews per month and you pay the bills on bulk alone, but then you're degrading your website experience for countless people who will never bring you a single cent... At least with Amazon affiliates the money you earn is directly related to things that people want to buy, and the more spammy you are with it, the less likely you are to make any money, which is almost the opposite of AdSense stuff.. I don't know, I don't have any experience in this.
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 10:59
|
|
|
I personally dislike adsense on business principle so try to avoid anything that relies on them. Think about it, your best visitors are the ones that will click stuff and are monetizable. People like us are generally pretty worthless. Yet when you get a clicker, you send your most valuable visitors away from your site for pennies. Unless your in a niche with hugh cpcs I would figure out a better way to make money off them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 11:50
|
|
|
Anyone know how to fix this? Using Wordpress, BLoggit theme, Vanilla forums set up for commenting. Everything works but the space allotted for the comments box is just a little too small.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 17:48
|
|
|
I pretty much just use one 300x250 adsense ad in the top right sidebar. I rarely put anything into the content of my articles (although I do it a few times). I don't feel like it cheapens my site any. Plus, I doubt I'm losing too many visitors and making an extra $100-$300/month aint shabby.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 19:40
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:How do you make money off AdSense? It just feels.. dirty. I've seen some stuff on eye-tracking and user focus behaviour and what I've taken away from it is that people are really good at subconsciously filtering out ads, especially those block AdSense ads and especially in the places people normally put them. So unless you're willing to seriously warp the presentation and quality of your content, and trick people into reading/clicking ads as if they were part of the content, it's largely just an eyesore. I just assumed that everybody here was using AdSense. I only have experience with Amazon affiliaties and AdSense, but I love AdSense as it's a fairly consistent $3-5/day for me. It's also easy to find high CPC keywords to write articles on, with the keyword research tool.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2014 23:42
|
|
|
I've been trying to reduce my bounce rates lately but I just took a look at Quick Sprout's information on average bounce rates - http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/decrease-website-bounce-rate-infographic Apparently blogs have an average of 70-98% bounce rates. Should I not be worrying about mine being at about 65% then? When I look into my analytics I'm happy with the growth in traffic and referrals but I was assuming the next logical step would be to try and reduce the bounce rate, which in my eyes seems pretty bad. Since I'm up to 30% organic traffic and would like to increase that should I just keep focusing on content/SEO/ranking for keywords? I've been under the assumption that google places a lot of emphasis on bounce rates when it comes to ranking sites, but maybe it doesn't matter as much as I thought. Royal Jeans fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Nov 3, 2014 |
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2014 05:44
|
|
|
Avg. session duration is what you should pay attention to
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2014 09:07
|
|
|
KetTarma posted:Anyone know how to fix this? Grab firebug or I think its even built into browsers now. Try ctrl-shift-I and highlight the comment box. Should give you an indication on what to edit. Sometimes it can be a little trickier.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2014 17:37
|
|
|
laxbro posted:Glad to have you back. Enjoyed reading your posts from earlier in the thread. So you're relaunching your old blog under a new domain? Mind sharing a URL? http://grabthenozzle.com/ Just finished scraping what was left of my site from wayback and uploading it. Kept the FB and Twitter and managed to get the names of those changed over also. Wooh.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 11:50
|
|
|
If anyone is using Skimlinks they bumped their Amazon affiliate payout to 8.5% for the next couple of months. That's higher than the entry rate of ~4% from Amazon directly.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 16:18
|
|
|
I'm just getting started in this and I was wondering if it's a smart idea to have the homepage for the website be nothing but an introduction and header that leads to other pages of the website (to the blog page, the contact page, etc), as opposed to the usual layout I see of the homepage being a stream of most recent posts/a collection of most popular posts. Thoughts?
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 18:24
|
|
|
Mad Rancher posted:I'm just getting started in this and I was wondering if it's a smart idea to have the homepage for the website be nothing but an introduction and header that leads to other pages of the website (to the blog page, the contact page, etc), as opposed to the usual layout I see of the homepage being a stream of most recent posts/a collection of most popular posts. Thoughts? No, landing pages are bad. You want the least amount of effort to get to your content, otherwise people are gonna be like "screw this" and bounce before you have the chance to engage them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 18:38
|
|
|
invision posted:No, landing pages are bad. You want the least amount of effort to get to your content, otherwise people are gonna be like "screw this" and bounce before you have the chance to engage them. Yep, at every "thing" where "something" has to happen you lose X% of people. Now, "thing", "Something" and X% could be a million different things but if that thing isn't content, monetization or something else that creates someone value you really should question why its there.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 18:45
|
|
|
Okay, good to know. Thanks!
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 19:55
|
|
|
Cast_No_Shadow posted:Yep, at every "thing" where "something" has to happen you lose X% of people. I'm not even sure about the whole "read more" click to get to the full post on my new page. Haven't had enough traffic to test yet. The bad thing is that my sidebar (so, ads) aren't visible unless you're looking at a full post. Guess I could re-write it so the front page displays the sidebar too.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 20:24
|
|
|
Thats an interesting thought about ads actually. Does anyone have any knowledge about when people click? Do people hit a site and insta ad click or is it after consumption on content? Id think, based just off my gut, for most sites your front page isnt that killer for ads? Most would be repeat visitors googlers would surely be landing on a targeted post?
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 20:40
|
|
|
Cast_No_Shadow posted:Thats an interesting thought about ads actually. Does anyone have any knowledge about when people click? Do people hit a site and insta ad click or is it after consumption on content? There's been all kinds of studies and theres so much anecdotal evidence out there about ad placement it's unreal. My thing is, if ads are how I make money, why would I give you the opportunity to *not* be exposed to them? That's like running a store and making people ask you for a product before you go get it out of the back and show it to them. There's a reason endcaps in retail spaces are a huge deal. Can't click it if you can't see it. This really becomes an issue when you have a deal with specific advertisers and they don't see a whole lot of traffic coming from your site - why would they renew the deal when you're not benefiting them? You make money from maximizing good numbers and minimizing bad ones, the same as in any business. To not give yourself every chance possible to do that is shooting yourself in the foot in my opinion. That doesn't mean go overboard either, because that has the opposite effect of what you want. You're right though, most (all?) of my traffic is social media driven where people are going to be seeing a single post. Here's the other thing about ads - I can almost guarantee you that you either ignore ads or click so rarely that it doesn't even register. I'm that way, so I also have this issue where I assume that people aren't going to click them, so I don't put a lot of faith in it. The problem is, the majority of people on the internet aren't as "savvy" (as much as I hate that word), and there's a reason why pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitial, and all other kinds of ads exist - because they work. If they didn't, no one would be spending the money on them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2014 20:51
|
|
|
Well it's taken a few months but I reckon I got my first sale through Amazon Assoc. I say reckon because suddenly I had to fill out some tax forms suddenly 'So we can pay you'. Although they might have just realized they didn't have the proper details from me yet and just decided to ask.. If true though and someone bought the Nissan Cube dress up parts I posted then I'm up for...er..about $6. SCORE!  Now to plug a few more body kits..EDIT: No, they just wanted my tax details. Oh well.. Camo Guitar fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Nov 6, 2014 |
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2014 01:23
|
|
|
Anddddddddd ad deal #2 is done. I talk about it a lot but if you're not on social media connecting to business owners/marketing people and running ads on your site you're screwing yourself really hard. Adsense/whatever is barely worth it unless you have insane amounts of traffic, or you're into blackhat warrior forum sales funneling woo techniques.
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 02:34
|
|
|
invision posted:Anddddddddd ad deal #2 is done. I talk about it a lot but if you're not on social media connecting to business owners/marketing people and running ads on your site you're screwing yourself really hard. Adsense/whatever is barely worth it unless you have insane amounts of traffic, or you're into blackhat warrior forum sales funneling woo techniques. If you don't mind me asking, how much are you making from private ad deals? Is it based on traffic/clicks somehow, or is it a flat fee?
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 04:09
|
|
|
Ron Don Volante posted:If you don't mind me asking, how much are you making from private ad deals? Is it based on traffic/clicks somehow, or is it a flat fee? Flate rate for x months. And not a whole whole lot, but enough to get pretty intoxicated for about a month and half. The amount of money you make depends on how well you can pitch your site. I don't think I've ever really ever been asked about traffic stats. People usually see fb/twitter numbers/engagement and how the site looks and go for it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2014 06:37
|
|
|
Okay so I converted my website into a blog where I review books. Not exactly intending to make billions but when I finish writing my first book it'll also serve as the social media HQ thing, for blog posts etc related to writing. I also plan to do language stuff - I have a few educational tools I wrote and am still (super slowly) working on. So I'm going to do some guest blog posts on various other people's blogs for language and literature stuff and link it back to my own. The idea is to group a few interests (reading, writing, language) into the one site and provide some educational tools as well, and hopefully there'll be enough content that if people come for one thing they stay to check out the other things. I also live in Rome so I can put up photos etc in a sort of pseudo-pinterest. In a bit, once I have a bit more content (but before I do the guest-post circuit), I will sign up to be an affiliate marketer and change the amazon book links to affiliate links (although I'll be reviewing a lot of free ebooks as well). URL is https://www.marianminds.com just ignore the verb conjugator layout for now, in a little while I'll update it to mesh a bit better with the blog layout. But does anybody have any comments on the general format? Layout, presentation of information, tips for getting people to come... Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Nov 9, 2014 |
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 17:10
|
|
|
Well I don't know if it's different on desktop but I'm on my phone and your little about thing comes up first and I have to clickthru to get to a recent posts. Does your theme allow you to display your recent posts on the front page? I'd change that and move what's there now to an about page. It's great you have it but it doesn't need to be the first and only thing on your front page.
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 18:35
|
|
|
That's actually a technical limitation, the front page isn't Wordpress, I just grabbed the sidebar etc from the theme and chucked it on a new page. The reason for that is that the site is in Laravel and the I just can't imagine how long it would take for me to separate the two completely. So it's kind of a hacky workaround to make the front page look like the wordpress portion and then link to the rest normally. If you click through to a verb conjugator (which came first) you can see what the original interface looked like.
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 9, 2014 18:45
|
|
|
I really like the layout, format, and colors. It's extremely easy to read and navigate on my PC. As far as getting traffic the best sources I found were commenting on similar blogs in my niche. I also had a lot of luck with Twitter starting out as far as social media goes; if there's groups for it you could check into Triberr and join a group of like minded folks where you can share each others content. Since you're appealing to language/eduction folks you can also find some groups on Google+ & some forums pertaining to your interests. They're good places to reach out and start making connections.
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2014 01:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 23:19 |
|
|
Thanks! I accidentally spent all of today sorting out the code and styling so that I could shuffle my existing verb conjugators into the sidebar and format of the new wordpress site. I'm pretty happy with the result. The content has been squished a little bit but that's just the cost of getting it merged into the larger interface - this way whenever somebody uses the verb conjugator they can't help but see there are blog posts and other links. Good idea on finding other people's blogs to comment on, but now I have a question too. I turn comments off as a matter of course for wordpress blogs because of comment spam and possible browser exploits. Are comments useful for getting users involved? Does '0 comments' again and again tend to turn people off and make them think it's a deserted site, or is it outweighed by the potential for them to comment and go 'oh yeah that's a goodun'? I suppose I better turn them back on. I'll check out Triberr and Google+, I think my general plan is to use twitter to advise of content updates and to provide links to interesting articles, the blog is to post actual content (reviews etc) and random photos of Rome, and then spread those two links as far as I can using triberr, google+, and other people's blogs.
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 10, 2014 18:17
|
|