Website Optimization Techniques

One of the most lucrative websites to build is the Membership site. This is because the income should grow exponentially and the resale value of the site will be greater than a static website.

Investors value your website on it’s revenue history and potential. So the ideal situation is where the revenue is ramping up. The best way to get this ramping effect of the imcome is to have a membership site. So each time somebody subscribes as a member they add to the monthly income stream.

For example, you have a $20 per month subscription site and just 1 person joins per month. Here is the revenue you can look forward to over the first 6 months:

Month 1: $20
Month 2: $40
Month 3: $60
Month 4: $80
Month 5: $100
Month 6: $120

That’s with just 1 member joining per month!

As the site grows, it should attract a greater influx of new members leading to exponential growth.

However, the big stumbling block I find is the question of what kind of membership site should you go for. This irritated me so much as I read blog posts and forums saying how lucrative the membership sites are.

I tried before to create a dating site, but it was a flop because only guys pay to join dating sites! So if you create a dating site, I suggest targeting the gay male market LOL.

This is what I am doing now: I am going for the specialist Real Estate niche. Sure there are lots of existing websites out there but the world is a big place and I hope I can carve out my niche.

My thinking is that when people are anxious to sell a $500,000 property, they will not have a big issue with paying say $50 a month to advertise it on a site that is highly focussed on their locality with a nicely presented Ad for their property with a photo gallery etc.

I think it’s worth the effort to build a Real Estate site and see how it goes. If I make a mistake with the locality, I can always start again with a head start with all the code and templates in another untapped region of the world.

What do you think? Is this a good idea?

There is a universal avatar service called Gravatars that you can register with so that sites that are Gravatar enabled will show your Avatar when your email is recognised.

They support transparent GIFs so I would make such a gif so it will work on forums that shade the background area.

I’m not sure what the standard size is, I think it’s 48 pixels square.

Anyway, it’s quick and easy to put into place if you have a square image or icon available for your Avatar. Go to: www.gravatar.com

You can test your avatar and get a do-follow link in the process here

The link between your posts/comments and your Gravitar is your email address that you registered with the Gravitar service.

Enjoy

Optimizing MLM

Here is the secret to making money from MLM:

These are my current stats from a UK-based MLM program that I have been involved with for a few years now. For now, let’s throw your sponsors or trainers into a river and analyse what I do and return to them later for further training if you feel so inclined.

The image is a print out of my current genealogy. At the top is my business name. The main purpose of this is to get this name displayed at the top of my affiliate landing page so it is familiar to my visitors that are referred from my pre-sales page at: Win The Money I have other pages to refer visitors but this can give you an idea.

Next you will notice the “L1″ tags on the images. This means each line is a team member on level 1. These are the people that generate the money. In my case it is $2 or $4 per week per participent.

It’s a lottery syndicate program where the UK/EU denotes which one they signed up for. Ideally they signed up for both.

If I was to build deep, I only get about 20% of the money so unless my green-colored “affiliates” recruit some people and ask for assistance, it doesn’t make sense to build deep as most MLM participants are scammed into doing.

One of the secrets is that YOU are the golden gem that finally recruited people into the program and you will be darned lucky to find another person like you, so don’t bother. Just build your level 1!

You can add up how much I am making per week by adding up the UK + EU entries @ $2 each.

Not bad residual income

Of course, I am paying for the product too, but it is profit and I have been making this profit for freakin’ ages. So you MLMer’s out there take note and focus on making profits!

This is a quick post about how to link bait sites with your images.

I take lots of photographs and publish some to the web. Sure, enough, with time they get hot-linked from MySpace and forums. The people that hotlink NEVER credit you for the photo, so don’t expect a text link back to your site. So all you get is the image link.

The benefit is that you get a back link which helps your image ranking in Google Images, the downside is that your bandwidth is consumed each time the image is displayed on the other sites.

So how can we optimize this to our advantage?

Use a keyword for the image name.
This is most important I think since the hot-linker may be too dumb to put relevant text next to the image or use an ALT tag.
For example: keyword-phrase.jpg

Minimise the file size of the image and make the image dimensions ideal for inclusion in forum posts. So we minimise our bandwidth hit and steer them towards using a medium-sized image rather than a large version.

Add your domain name to the image.
This should get a few curious people typing in your URL to their browser to look for more pictures like the one they are viewing.

To be really sneaky, you could maybe use a PHP script and .htaccess to add this text to the image only when it is hot linked. And add a small watermark to the large image to put them off linking to that one. If I do this myself at some stage I will publish the code on this blog but it is a bit OTT for my liking right now.

Help the image get found.
This is what I do. I have a separate blog where I post on random topics which is ideal for posting keyword optimised posts to bring attention to the image.

The URL of the post, the title and opening paragraph all have the keywords in them. And these keywords are like the keywords for the photo. I also add a relevant “tag” to the post.

When I publish the post, it is pinged to technorati etc. where scrapers and others are monitoring this tag and come on over to my post to scrape and hot-link etc. Plus the image should get a good chance of being picked up in image searches.

Ideal link bait images are sexy girls and funny pictures. You can probably edit pictures of animals to make them funny. Privacy laws may be an issue where you are showing people’s faces so you may want to photograph their fat butt instead

So I hope this gives you some ideas. This seems to be the easiest way to generate link bait to me, although it’s not ideal from a page rank building perspective, it is one way to get curious traffic from people seeking more “information” on a topic.

Also, when your images have been hot linked plenty of times and the forum posts have aged, you can 301 redirect the location of the images to your other sites and maybe change the images to include Ad text and reduce the resolution further to conserve bandwidth.

Here is an example of how I implemented this technique for the keyword Sexy Teacher - just let your creative juices flow and don’t simply copy my example! Try crazy dog or sexy granny etc.

Some ideas to take this further are to have a pop-up window when your image is clicked with cut and paste code for forums etc. This will help you get the kind of link you are after. You can use small text for your back-link so that they are likely to keep it.

Then, maybe create a gallery of your link bait photos.

This is likely to become a series of posts since I am using various ways to structure my websites. Let’s start with what I consider to be the optimum structure for a website.

The best way to convert a visitor to a sale is to have a highly targeted visitor land on your page that links to the merchant offer. The link may be a big shiny button saying “click here to get started” for example. This is known as a “call to action” and is the “most wanted response”. Think of your page as like a funnel leading all the visitors to click on this button.

If they are distracted, they may not click it and leave. Distractions include:

• Having to scroll the page
• Things to click on in the sidebar
• Music loops
• Banner Ads such as smilies
• Bad looking page design

The rest of the page should be pre-selling the offer with a strong headline detailing the major benefit such as “zero risk rapid weight loss system”. Then a description of the offer in more detail. Your personal testimonial of using the product. Bullet points about the various benefits. Credibility factors such as the medic who endorses the product. Limited time urgency statement followed by price slashing deals if they act now etc. And finally the button.

Well, you get the idea. This is your pre-sales page to get people salivating to buy the end product.

So this page needs to look great and the SEO and keywords etc have least importance on this page. We will work on SEO on the other pages of the site. Our domain name should ideally have a couple of keywords in it and the title tag should have all of our major keywords in it.

For example, our product is PPC Wonder Pill so we register a domain such as ppcwonderpillmagic.com and for our title text we will use “PPC Wonder Pill Magic”. So we got our main keywords butted up to the left of our domain name and title tag.

Now, in our inner pages we will link to the home page with the anchor text of “PPC Wonder Pill”. This will make the links highly relevant.

Before we build our inner pages, we will research the keywords to make a list of say 10 highly relevant keywords that we will create article pages around. Here we don’t care so much for the graphics, we want text.

For example, if a keyword is “Reviews of PPC Wonder Pills” we create a page with a url containing these keywords separated by dashes and we use this keyword in our title tag and in the first paragraph of our text, in the middle of the text and at the end of the text.

The text will be an original content article that we write on this topic containing about 10 paragraphs of text. And we link to the home page within the article using the keyword anchor text of the home page.

Rinse and repeat this for 9/10/11 article pages for the various keywords.

Finally, add a privacy policy page and about us page containing contact details.

So this sets you up with a perfect PPC landing page that should get a nice quality score and attract organic search engine traffic once it has got some inbound links from external sites. And the inner pages will funnel the highly targeted organic traffic (people- LOL) to the conversion page.

Many people are now using BANS (eBay affiliate sites) or MMA (made for Adsense) sites to make money online but they are forgetting to add substantial unique content to their sites. It’s very important to build a website with the primary objective of satisfying the visitor and supplement your information with monetization.

This not only gives the visitor a better experience when visiting your site, it is good for search engine ranking. This in turn leads to a higher quality score that may improve payouts with Ads that you host on your website.

So this is one thing to keep in mind to improve the income from a niche site. But the main idea I wanted to present is to sell products off your site. This is something that I am about to try. I have purchased some low cost items in my local area that are related to culture and fashion that are hard to buy in other countries. So I am setting up a site that describes the culture and will have keyword optimised pages that advertise the relevant products.

Specifically, I have bought some hand crafted items that look great but were cheap to buy. But when I present them online along with supplemental pages about the culture plus photos etc. I can give them a high perceived value. Also, I will only have 1 of each item for sale.

I found these items by looking around second hand stores and gift shops. I could sell them on eBay, but I want to try selling them for premium prices to relatively affluent customers.

The price mark up will be huge in percentage terms, but people in my target market will not be able to obtain the items easily so I think they will be happy to pay to get the exclusive items in their possession.

The conversion to sales may be low, but does it matter? If I create an optimized page it is done and I then move onto the next item and page. Eventually, a buyer should land on the page. I could always gradually reduce the prices with time.

In summary, there will be a website featuring articles about the culture behind craft/collectible products and keyword optimized sales pages for the products. The idea is to re-sell products internationally for at least double the purchase price.

What are your thoughts on this idea for maximizing niche site income? Of course, you can still include Adsense and a BANS store too.

For my DOT com hosting I generally use Hostgator.com having purchased the basic reseller plan. This allows me to host 100’s of small sites. It’s a really flexible plan where I can create my own hosting packages so I don’t waste resources such as bandwidth allocation on small sites that are expected to get low traffic.

Another interesting feature is that you can let external sites use a database on your Hostgator account. This means that you can utilize free hosting that maybe has PHP but no database.

But why would you be bothered about that Mr Multivar? Good question…

The answer is that I wanted to set up a UK site hosted in the UK so that the IP address is GEO-located in the UK. I believe that this will help with search engine rankings for UK specific searches.

DOT CO DOT UK domains are cheap and I buy them through Heart Internet. Today I purchased a domain for around $12 for 2 years, plus I took advantage of their free hosting offer. So I have a hosted website for just $0.50 per month. So can I make a profit with it? Plus, what will it be worth in 2 years time? I think I may do OK

To get a better chance of finding an available domain name you may want to consider .eu but that does cost more but it also makes sense to use this TLD where you are considering having multi-lingual versions of your pages e.g. in German, French, Spanish and Italian.

The features of the control panel are like their paid hosting plans apart from the lack of a database. AW stats, email and all the usual good stuff is there. One major limitation is the monthly bandwidth of just 100MB so you need to avoid lots of large images and forget video streaming

The domain has separate DNS management so it’s easy to change the nameservers to point at Hostgator if need be.

Now I am waiting for the Domain name to resolve to the hosting which always takes ages for UK domains for some reason.

Update: it took about 10 hours, now it seems to be up at:

Win Money Online - winthemoney.co.uk

So there you go, some tips on setting up very cheap hosting for your domains.

After some initial success with BANS (check the side bar Ad to grab your copy) I decided to develop some more sites but to speed up the process, I re-used a pre-aged domain.

Starting from scratch can take a lot of time to get your site accepted as something other than a spam site, so I deleted the content from one of my existing sites that makes no money and decided to build that site out into a niche eBay store with the categories in sub-directories and the home page powered by a blog.

The blog will be the power house behind organic traffic to the product pages. I have 5 niche product areas for the site and a list of keywords to cover in the blog posts.

Now I have installed the scripts and done some basic configuration, I need to create a template for the site. This template will have to seamlessly integrate Wordpress with BANs and Adsense. Once this task is complete, I will become a blogging demon for the keywords and look for ways to get links to the site.

As this project progresses, I will report the results here on the blog. Also, I may provide a detailed step by step plan so you can copy my technique for your own niche project ideas.

To get ideas for a profitable niche, you can drill down into the categories on eBay looking for fairly expensive items that attract plenty of bidding activity. Then research the best keywords to use to match these products as category names.

One of the essential things to do when driving traffic to a landing page and beyond (to your affiliate offer) is to track the clicks on the links. I also like to make the link appear to be still on my site and cloak the destination.

Like other marketers, I like to use “go” in the URL so the visitor is expecting to go somewhere but they can’t simply type in the URL of the offer page, they will have to click to find it out.

Today I put together a simple “splash page” which is a minimalist advert page designed to display rapidly and generate clicks to a lead capture page. I am trying this out on a traffic exchange. I had minimal success with traffic exchanges before but they are frequented by people looking to make money online. So I feel there must be a way to channel them away from the scams and towards standard, proven affiliate marketing training.

On this page, I used a vertical banner to the left of the Ad copy with the link to the affiliate training offer from clicks on the banner. I used a link of the form: mysite.com/affiliate-offer/?go=proof If people change this URL, they won’t go anywhere except back to my site.

To redirect them to the affiliate offer, I append some PHP code to the page. The page is index.php in a sub directory of my site.

Here is the redirection code:

Replace AFFILIATE_URL with your affiliate link.

This code also logs all the clicks with a time stamp and other data such as IP address and user agent. So you can tell genuine people from robots.

In your subdirectory you need to create a “log” directory and CHMOD the directory permissions to 777 (with FTP software such as FileZilla). Then you can browse the log files that are saved by the script.

How the script works:

when a visitor clicks on the link (link/?go=whatever), the page is re-loaded but the GET variable “go” now has a value, so the script is triggered.

The visitors data is captured and stored to the log file, then they are re-directed to the offer page.

This is not the only way to do this but one I like to use for simple tracking purposes not involving 3rd-party services.

After a week of split testing Adsense I have a clear winner for the Ad format that generates the most revenue on my test page.

I worked out the Earnings per Click (EPC) and the Click Through Ratio (CTR) for each Ad and compared the figures.

The Ad formats that I was comparing were the 728×90 text unit and the 350×250 text unit. The 350×250 Ad had both the highest CTR and EPC. Multiplying the improvement in CTR and EPC gave an overall improvement in potential earnings of 42%.

So this comparison was well worth doing and I will switch over to the higher performing Ad unit for this particular page.

Update: 

LOL I haven’t switched to a fixed Ad format yet since the  728×90 text unit produced more revenue a day or so ago, so I am now thinking to continue with the eCPM balancing idea for a month or so.

Something I didn’t mention before is the visitor irritation factor. The thin-wide Ad unit is more visitor friendly to my eyes so this is another reason I don’t completely want to let it go.