Transcript continued from the Episode 031 Show notes
Dallas Meetup Update:
Before we get to the crazy stuff in my Google Reader, let’s talk about the crazy stuff in my inbox. I’m trying to put together this Dallas Meetup and right now I’m thinking maybe the first week in September on a weeknight evening. Maybe 8:00 PM Dallas time we get together at a local pub or something like that in north Dallas. If you’ve got some feedback about that or there is something that you’d like to see, let me know. I’ve gotten five or six people that live here in the Dallas area that are interested so far and that’s great.
Here’s the funny thing. I’m looking at my email and in comes this email from a guy who is a listener but didn’t realize that I was in Allen and it turns out that the guy lives down the street. He’s a blogger and he’s been listening to the show, he literally lives within walking distance of my house. How crazy is that?
Shout out to Dr. John. His name isn’t really Dr. John, but I don’t want to reveal his secret identity and where he lives, because he lives close to me and you guys know where I live. It’s really cool. The guy has a website and he listens to the show. I think that’s awesome. Hopefully he’ll be joining us at the meetup.
Google Censorship:
Let’s talk a little bit about what’s in my Google Reader. Actually, this is in my Google Reader and I didn’t even realize it because I heard about this on NPR. This is something that bugs me a little bit. Before we get into this, I’m not alarmist, I’m not a guy who gets all riled up over really unimportant but philosophically strong issues. I don’t just make mountains out of molehills all the time.
I was driving down the road listening to National Public Radio, which I really like. I’m actually kind of a conservative guy but I really like NPR, particularly their drive-time shows here in Dallas. All Things Considered, and those type of shows. I think NPR does a pretty decent job of giving a balanced account of the news, at least on those programs.
So I’m listening to NPR and they start talking about Google – I was really surprised. What they talked about was that Google, I guess this Monday, decided they were going to release an update to the search algorithms and they were going to start reducing the rankings of sites in their index that had a certain number of legitimate copyright violation complaints against them.
If you’ve got a site, let’s say your site is particularly for pirated video and you’re providing the latest Hollywood movies for download, Google can somehow detect or they get a report regarding valid copyright complaints, if you’re one of those sites instead of returning you at the top of the search engines which you might belong by virtue of the ranking that you have inside of Google, they’re going to reduce your ranking. They’re going to modify their algorithm based on this fact.
This got me to thinking. That sounds pretty good on the face of it. After all, pirates are scummy people. I’m a content creator myself, I don’t want people stealing my stuff. I certainly if I made a $100,000,000 movie would not want people stealing my movie. I totally get that. I’m not advocating piracy, but I am a little concerned about the idea of Google taking it upon themselves to enforce selectively laws, standards, or ideas that they think are important.
There’s this idea that I believe that with great power comes great responsibility. Google has a lot of power. With that comes social responsibility that Google has to be a good corporate citizen and to do things that are fair, right, and true. Certainly it sounds like suppressing piracy is a good thing, after all piracy is illegal. But, it’s not clear to me that the information that they’re using to determine what sites have pirated content has been vetted by a court of law, it’s not clear to me what the due process situation is with this.
In fact, the DMCA is a really sort of evil thing if you’re a webmaster. If somebody files a DMCA claim against you your site can be taken down by your domain host without any due process. I’ve been involved in some of these things, they’re really ugly.
It’s not clear to me that there’s due process of law in this process. It’s also not clear to me that Google is going to stop deciding what information it’s okay for you to see in their index based on this information. What if they also decide that other things that aren’t quite up to their standards should be suppressed as well? What about pornography sites?
I think that’s a really good question. Right now they have the adult filter that you can opt into, but what if they just decide that their corporate values didn’t align with the things that pornography is all about? I could totally understand that and they probably don’t align. I’m sure that Google doesn’t allow pornography in their workplace. Why wouldn’t they suppress pornography inside of Google?
As a matter of fact, why not suppress some information about some really extreme religions that maybe are known to be linked to violence? Where does this end and when is it that Google gets to stop and decide that enough is enough? It’s kind of a Fahrenheit 451 sort of thing where Google turns out to be this big corporation that decides what the market gets to see. This is exactly the thing that Google complains about when they tried to deploy their search engine to China, because the Chinese government in a lot of cases wants to suppress the kind of search results that Google can return.
I’m a little concerned about this. This is a little political topic and it’s a little bit unusual for this show, but there it was in my Google Reader so I thought I’d share that with you today. I’d love to hear your feedback on this. Like I said, I’m not really going off on Google. I understand stomping out pirates is a really good idea. I just don’t understand where this stops.
Reader Question – Adsense Alternatives:
Back to internet marketing. I got some feedback and I have to apologize. It turns out I don’t really know how to use Google Voicemail very well. I was playing around with a couple of different Google Voicemail accounts and I got some things messed around. I’ve had a couple of Google Voicemails, several that got – let’s say lost in my voicemail inbox. I apologize for that.
Once a month or so, depending on the frequency of the questions that I get, I’d like to incorporate some feedback into the show and this first feedback from David in Raleigh, North Carolina. Let’s see what David has to say…
Hey Mark. It’s Dave from Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m not ready to give up my site yet, I’m still filling it up with content and it’s not ready for primetime.
My question is about Adsense. I know you were booted out of the Adsense world, as am I for reasons unbeknownst to me. I’m wondering what you have done since then, if you’ve experimented with any other revenue sources, and what you might think would be the best alternative to Adsense, if there is one.
Love the show and I hope you had a good time in Mexico. Talk to you later.
I totally had an awesome time in Mexico, as you heard at the beginning of the show. Maybe we can talk more about Mexico another time.
A couple of things about Adsense. There were a couple of questions in there. One question was what did I do about Adsense? What I don’t do is I don’t use Adsense anymore. In cases where I had Adsense that was converting I actually converted that to something else and we’ll talk about that in a minute.
Then I had many handfuls of sites that were making a few dollars a day that I never had any time to work on and, quite frankly, they were crappy. They just weren’t good sites. I made a conscious decision that I’m not going to be a guy who has a farm of crappy sites anymore. I know how to do that, I know how to make money doing it.
This is something that a lot of internet marketers go through. I know Michelle MacPhearson has gone through this, she and I have talked about it a little bit. Nicole Dean and I have talked about this at length. That’s just not what I want to do. I want to make the internet a better place.
So all of those sites that didn’t pass that test, I shut them down. That caused most of my Adsense sites to go away, which was fine because they weren’t generating any revenue and they really weren’t worth anything. It was just junk.
There are some sites that you can make a real good legitimate income. For example, Pat Flynn’s Security Guard Training site. It really scared me half to death the other day when Pat announced he had gotten some kind of warning message from Google. That’s what happened to me first, I got the warning message which I responded to, I handled it and did exactly what they said, and then they shut me down anyway. If they shut Pat down you’re talking about thousands of dollars a month, so it can be a real serious issue.
Let me say a couple of things about replacing Google Adsense. Many internet marketers who are experts about monetizing traffic will tell you that there are always better ways to monetize your traffic than Adsense. I like Adsense because it’s easy, it’s self updating, you don’t have to worry about it, it’s not a lot of work. Campaigns come and go, but Google handles all of that and you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. That’s really cool, so there’s ease of use there.
From a dollar standpoint, I think most people will tell you that you can do a lot better than Adsense because if people are paying for those clicks that you’re selling, Google is taking a really big cut and in most cases you can go direct to whoever is paying for those clicks and do better. You can get better looking ads, you can do more to optimize the page because you’re not beholden to Google’s terms and conditions.
So that’s the first thing I would say. I would say in each case, almost page by page, try and understand where the traffic is coming from and try to imagine what it is that those readers are looking for and put that ad there. Go to an affiliate program like Commission Junction and find something that’s an exact match to what you think your traffic is looking for and do that page by page.
I think that’s the best thing that you can do. That’s also time consuming and your business model may not allow you the time to do that, or advertisers for some reason may not be readily available for you to do that. But, I think that’s the best answer. I think that’s what Lynn Terry would tell you too, because she’s all about market to message match. I think you can do a lot more to match what it is that your searchers are looking for than Google can do with a machine. I really believe that.
Having said that, there are lots of alternatives to Adsense. Ross Walker over at RossWalker.co.uk has an article that’s been around for a long time. He talks about the top 10 alternatives to Adsense. There are many more than 10 and Ross’ article is getting a little bit old, but it’s still a really good place to start.
If you Google for “Adsense alternatives,” you’ll get tons of options. There are things like AdBrite and Bidvertise and Chikita, all of which I’ve used. Kontera is another one that’s really popular. Ross also lists some that I haven’t used before. He lists Clicksor, ExitJunction, and DynamicOxygen – I haven’t used those, but there are many alternatives to Google Adsense.
That was a really good question. My advice; don’t use those kind of dynamic ad services unless you really need to. If you really need to, there are some alternatives that you can test. By all means, that’s probably the last point, whatever you do (even if it’s Adsense) be sure and test. A lot of times small changes can make a big difference in your earnings. I think that’s pretty much what I know about replacing Google Adsense.
Reader Question – Micro Niche Finder:
Let’s get to another piece of feedback here from Frank. Let’s see what Frank has to say…
There’s an awful lot of information on the internet of how to make money and it gets me real confused. I try doing things and I get lost because there’s so much info.
I got the Micro Niche Finder, but then I started thinking, “What am I going to use it for?” I’m not perfect, I’m just calling you and maybe there’s something. I know I saw you use it in action one time before, but just thinking I guess.
That’s a really good question. This is a guy who is just trying to get started. I love speaking to these kind of people because it is overwhelming. I remember back in 2007 when I was trying to figure all of this out. You don’t even know what all of the words mean. You hear people using these words about internet marketing and you don’t even know what the heck they’re talking about and it just seems very overwhelming.
My recommendation for people who are just trying to get started and to make their first dollar online, as I’ve said before, is to do that with affiliate marketing, as the caller mentioned. So you’re on the right track with affiliate marketing, that’s the first thing that I would say.
Really, to do affiliate marketing from a big picture standpoint it’s really very straightforward. What I recommend that you do is pick a topic that you’re interested in and that you have some interest in, if you’re passionate about it that’s even better. The reason that I tell people to do that is because this stuff can get tedious and boring and difficult and discouraging, there’s a learning curve. If you’re doing all of that around a topic that you care about you’ll stay interested a lot more easily than you will if you work on something that you’re just in it for the money. Take my advice on that, try to work on things that you’re actually interested in.
You want to create a website that talks about that topic and adds value to the reader. That’s really critical. Value creation should be at the core of any business, whether it’s a brick and mortar business or an internet business. You’ve got to create value. Build website that creates value. Teach people about the thing that you’re interested in, teach people about products that are related to this topic that you’re interested in. Recommend, link to, or mention those products from that website and drive whatever traffic you have to get sales of related products on that website.
That’s really all affiliate marketing is. Create some value that attracts traffic and covert that traffic into sales for someone else’s product. That’s really the most straightforward thing.
Towards the end of the call, the caller asks about Micro Niche Finder, he doesn’t know exactly what to use that for. I think that’s a really good question as well. You’ve got this cool tool, I really like Micro Niche Finder, it’s the keyword research tool that I started out with years ago. It’s a really neat tool because it can tell you what people are typing into Google.
So you decide you’re interested in underwater basket weaving and you put “underwater basket weaving” into Micro Niche Finder or Market Samurai or (my current favorite) Keyword Canine and you find out that they’re not typing “underwater basket weaving” into Google, they’re typing “weaving baskets under water,” for example. So you optimize your website pages and content for the keyword phrase “weaving baskets under water” instead because that’s what your visitors are going to be typing into Google.
The other thing you can do with Micro Niche Finder is determine whether or not it’s possible to win that keyword in a reasonable amount of time. By looking at the competition you can tell that you’re either going to be able to easily win it or you’re not going to be able to win it, for example because CNN or some other authority site already has all of the links tied up for that topic. That’s what Micro Niche Finder is for in the context of affiliate marketing.
If you dig around on my website you can see me using Micro Niche Finder in action to build a site about BMW car parts for eBay. That’s a type of affiliate marketing you can do, you can drive traffic to eBay and I’ve done several sites like that over the years. You can go back and look at the video. I don’t have that site anymore because I just did it for the demo, but the video is still valid.
Reader Question – Traffic Post-Panda
I think we can find time here for one more piece of feedback. This is from Ryan Johnston…
I’ve been a podcast listener since your first podcast. As a side note, I was a former resident of Dallas, Texas for 25 years.
My question for you, and I’d like to try to dive into this deeper, affiliate marketing has a lot of moving parts to it, building sites and promoting products. But, the big question is how to get traffic to your site. Backlinking and using tools like Article Marketing Robot, SubmitYourArticles.com, and Build My Rank, some of these have lost favor with Google with the Panda algorithm update.
You want to stay ahead of the Google curve. What is the best legitimate way to backlink your site to get traffic? You build a site, you put it up there, and how is going to get onto the Google index for you to get traffic?
That’s a great question, I appreciate that. I’m going to break that up into two questions. One question I hear in there is Post-Panda what techniques are still valid? He listed a couple of kinds of things, including blog networks like Build My Rank.
Let me make two points about that. The first thing is the main thing that I’m seeing from Panda is that you really need to vary your anchor text, that’s very important. I’m also seeing that after Panda if you do vary your anchor text most of the old stuff still works, with one exception that we’ll discuss in a minute.
If you’ve got indexed links and they’re coming into your website from all over the place, from article marketing, all the standard things, even some blog networks in some specific cases, that’s fine – unless the anchor text is all too similar. That’s a problem. You need to make sure that you don’t use the same anchor text on your links. There’s lots of data and there have been lots of studies on the internet that show that.
The second thing I’ll say is that specifically with regard to blog networks, blog networks are fine as long as the blogs in the network are still indexed. What’s happened is Google has started to do a much better job of sniffing out blog networks and deindexing the blogs in the network. I haven’t seen any credible evidence that they’re penalizing sites that are linked to by the blog network.
But, I do see an indication that in order for links to count in your link profile those links have to be indexed by Google. So if the whole blog in the blog network gets deindexed, any links you have coming from that blog go away and lose all their power to help your site rank. So you’ll see your site dip as if it were penalized, but I believe what’s really happening is the links that you thought you had coming into your site are actually going away.
That’s my answer there. All the old stuff still works; article marketing still seems to work just fine. But, it’s very important that you build a diversity of links. If you’re selling suede shoes you can’t just have “suede shoes” as your anchor text. You’ve got to have “blue suede shoes,” “red suede shoes,” “groovy suede shoes,” and “colorful suede shoes,” “wet suede shoes,” and “hey look at this,” “click here for this,” and something that looks a lot more natural to Google.
That’s one clear indication that an SEO has been involved in the optimizing of backlinks is when the backlinks anchor text doesn’t follow natural language. When people actually naturally link to a site they tend to say something like, “You can find great suede shoes by clicking here.” That’s the sort of editorial link that Google is looking for. One way they can sniff out whether or not there are some of those is to make sure that all the anchor text doesn’t exactly match the keyword.
One other thing about keywords that I’m seeing and we’ve covered this in a couple of shows, but I’ll just remind you. I still see that exact match domain names help. I think that’s a little goofy because most authoritative sites rank for multiple keywords, so I can’t see any real sensible reason that an exact match four word keyword domain should get any extra authority, but it apparently does and I still see that.
I fully expect that Google will correct that some time in the future, so I do not recommend that you quit your day job if most of your rankings depend on the fact that you’ve got exact match domain names. That EMD factors, as we call it, will someday go away, at least that’s my theory.
That’s three calls and that gets us to the end of our time today. Thank you so much for calling in, I really appreciate it. I hope that more of you guys will call in. I really enjoy doing that and I’d love to be able to do that once a month or so.
The phone number again is 214-444-8655. I’d love to hear from you and work through some of your questions, get some of your feedback for on the show. Call in and tell me what you think about this Google censorship thing, I’d love to hear that.
Until next week, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic one.
