Personal Website Era Is Coming Close to Its End

You may have heard sayings similar to the title many times in the past. Nevertheless, indepenpent website owners are still making obsersable money all the way along. This is not the case any more, I'm afraid. Webmasters find it more and more difficult to make a penny from the internet. Why? Because more and more developments in the internet world indidate that, personal website era is coming close to its end, and this time, it's real.

Today's internet enters its consolidating phase. It's dominated by a few giants playing in such fields as social network service, search engine, e-commerce, online collaboration and on. Maybe independent webmasters are still addicted in the good days five to ten years ago, when everyone could start a website to publish some infomation, provide simple service, or sell something, and makes an attractive income from advertisements alone. Now, forget about it. Users are captured by Facebook, Twitter and so on. Web service becomes an indispensable part of enterprise IT system. E-shops represented by Amazon, Ebay, Bestbuy could offer nearly everything you want to buy. Personal website is just like a ugly duck, which provides nothing unique or special.

Today's internet is led by users. It's not a world of post 70 and post 80 anymore. It's a world of post 90 and post 00, whose interests are largely different than their 70 and 80 counterparts. They are social animals. They are more attracted by new things which are characterised by uncertainly. They like to show themselves in front of the others. To capture them as users, you need to approach to them,  sincerely hear what they say, provide what they really want and satisfy their self-realization need. This is a completely new kind of marketing. You need a lot of money, you need experises specialized in different functions, you need a mind-set that deeply understand what's going on in both real and virtual world. Basically, you need an entrepreneurial team and have angels or VCs on the back. Personal website? No way!

So, what opportunity is left for independent website owners? Frankly speaking, I don't know. What I know for sure is that, you have to either form an entrepreneurial team, or partner with big giants. If you could think of an idea that you can work alone during after-work hours, I suggest you think twice before you start to implement it.

Why Bother Article Spinning?

The other day, one user sent an email to me, asking, "did 2submitarticle.com provide article spinning service?". To be frank, I was a bit lost when hearing "article spinning", since it was the first time that I heard of this phrase. However, as soon as I looked it up in wikipedia, I gave to that user a firm answer, "No! 2submitarticle.com doesn't, and will never provide article spinning service".

So, what's article spinning? As is said in wikipedia,

"Article spinning is a search engine optimization technique by which blog or website owners attempt to manipulate their rank on Google and other search engines. It works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles, and replacing elements to avoid being penalized in the Search Engine Results pages (SERP) for using duplicate content. The original articles are often plagiarized from other websites and can often also be copyright infringements if the original article was used without the copyright owner's permission."

Wikipedia evaluates article spinning mainly from legal perspective. I totally agree with wikipedia. Article spinning has nothing to do with originality or innovation. It can only be related to "manipulate", "duplicate", "plagiarize", "copyright infringement" and other dirty words. Besides, I have other reasons why I am strongly against usage of article spinning service.

First of all, today's search engine values solely on quality instead of quanlity. The second generation, as known as keyword-based, search engine, has come to its late life. The mass amount of all kinds of data, including text, images, videos, audios and so on, has exhausted its computing capacility so that, the quality of search engine results is already significantly impacted, let alone adding into its index database additional amount of low quality, highly duplicate contents. The value of highly similar, or duplicate content will become even more trivial when the next generation, as known as topology-based(or smart), search engine rolls out.

In addition, rewriting article isn't as time-saving as one thinks. Different people have different writing styles, which brings about different article structure, order, and degree of formality. In order to maintain a sound readability of the rewritten article, one has to read through the article, rephrase numerous words and sentences, switch orders of sentences and paragraphs if necessary, and so on. Only changing words is certainly not enough. I had some experience of English-Chinese translation in the past. That experience was not very good, as you have so many things to consider in order to make the translation natural enough. I bet rewriting article is not an easy task, too. Remember, here I'm not talking about those individuals who just use some free article spinning tools to generate gabages to throw here and there. Rather, I'm talking about those who would like to spend some efforts to spin other people's work manually. Although it takes a significant amount of your energy, I still don't recommend that kind of behavior with reasons as stated above.

Then, if you really want to spin, I suggest you just follow others' topic, no more no less. Everyone can have a say about a hot topic from their own unique perspective. No matter how good or bad your article is written compared to others, it's right your ideas that the search engine and others value. That's the beauty of the internet - Everyone can contribute, without regard of his/her age, gender, literacy and other discriminatism.

Think Website Investment in Terms of ROI

Millions of individuals start up their own websites, dreaming of getting some extra income besides their full time job. Usually, that extra income won’t be much, maybe $10 a month. Compared to what they can earn from their daily job, that $10 isn’t worth mentioning at all.  Thus, they feel ashamed to describe their online business in front of others, and always tend to ask questions like “how can I earn $100 a month from my website”. Well, let’s try to think of website investment from another perspective.

Business people always assess business investment in term of Return on Investment (ROI), which means, how much you can get given a certain level of investment.  Put in another way, you can’t tell a business is good or not by only looking at the absolute dollar return, but have to relate the dollar return to your investment. For example, project A needs an investment of $5000 and will bring a return of $10000. Project B needs an investment of $10000 and will bring a return of $15000. As you can see, project B will bring a larger return. However, project A is actually better since its ROI is 2 (10000/5000) whereas project B is only 1.5 (15000/10000).

The same logic can be applied to website building. Let’s assume that you are getting $10 dollars per month from your website, which is $120 dollars per year. You might think $120 a year isn’t worth your efforts from the very beginning. However, you can only arrive at a safe argument by taking your investment into account, too. Then, how much do you have to invest to a website every year in order to earn $10 per month? From my own experience, only $47.6 (domain and hosting fee) will do. The organic search engine marketing will be enough to accomplish otherwise costly marketing task. So, the ROI should be around 2.5 (120/47.6), which is quite attractive.

Generally speaking, you can’t expect a huge return without incurring a matching degree of investment. Don’t blindly envy those webmasters who claim to earn $1000 a day from their websites. It’s not because they have mastered mysterious technique for online business, but often because they have spent a lot on their online business, in terms of the following ways:

• Work full time on their online business
• Have engaged in online business for a long time
• Operate tons of websites.
• Spend a lot on traffic, marketing and advertising
• Others…

Hence, if you think $10 dollars per month doesn’t meet your requirement, don’t blame yourself as a poor player in online industry, but rather, try to think in the other way round: Is it because I didn’t invest enough? If you want to earn more, you can spend more time, update your website more often, build more quality websites or spend some money on marketing and advertising. If you can invest more in terms of both time and money because you are fully occupied by your full time job, it’s OK, since an ROI of 2.5 is already an enviable result by many offline small practices.

5 Tips to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR

We are always struggling to get a steady stream of traffic for our websites. However, when we finally achieve that goal, we may find that our nightmare continues, simply because a great amount of traffic doesn't necessarily follow that the traffic will translate into a high level of google adsense income. The CTR of our ads matters a lot, too. Here I'll list 5 small tips for you with regard to how your CTR will be improved.

• Set the color of hyperlink to be blue. Experience tells me that an ad link with blue color has on average the best performance. Maybe that's why Google , and Bing as well, adopts the blue color, too. If the blue color will greatly impact your overall color scheme, you can also consider red color, whose performance is also good.
• Avoid or limit the use of image ads. The CTR of image ads is really low. I guess the reason should be that the advertising is made so obvious that visitors are simply scared away.
• Cater to traffic generated by search engine. The reason that visitors use search engine is that they want to find something. After they find out what they want in a website, the next action is most likely to be closing the website completely. So you need to get the visitors to click your ads at the same time they retrieve information from your website. Otherwise, the chance is gone and you never know when they will come back, maybe never. Hence, you need to find a way to make your ads not only quite noticeable but also can arouse the visitors' interest. For example, use a large leaderboard, place the ads in between the title and the body, and so on. If the traffic from the search engine is taken good care of, I can assure you that the CTR is quite promising.
• Use borderless ad unit. This is quite self-explanatory. The borderless ad unit, coupled with the same background color to that of the webpage itself, can blur the distinctions between ads and site content, which creates the visitors' inclination to click your ads.
• Make good use of channels. Although it is quite effective, the channel is the most overlooked Google adsense tool by webmasters. In fact, through proper setting, you can easily identify which ads unit has better performance. In addition, you could judge whether changes in ad settings are effective or not. After several rounds of adjustments, you could arrive at the optimal ad placement and settings.

Needlessly to say, one can hardly exhaust the numerous ways to improve Google adsense performance. I hope the 5 tips elaborated above could cast some light for clever persons as you all to think of more applicable tips to make Google adsense more attractive to the whole webmaster world.

Google Plans to Include Website Speed In Its Ranking Algorithm

According to a recent blog post of Google engineers, Google was considering taking website speed into account when determining a website's ranking in its search engine. In this post, I'd like to go through this news together with you and see what it means to us webmasters.

Google's logic is, the higher the website's loading speed, the happier the visitor will be. Generally speaking, if the website takes a long time to load, the visitor would stay for a much shorter timer on that website. What's more, a faster website will not only enhance user experience but reduce the website's operational cost as well. Google has long been renowned for viewing user experience as its top priority. Including website speed in its search engine ranking algorithm will certainly provide a productive addition to its value proposition.

There is one question that we webmasters concern most - Does the inclusion of website speed will change a website's ranking greatly? The answer is, not really! As mentioned by the Google engineers in that post, too, the weight assigned to website speed is far less than that of the relatedness of the website to the search keyword. Therefore, the current ranking results, if not for other reason, won't change much. According to an estimate, only less than 10% of the ranking results might be affected by the change made in the ranking algorithm. In one word, we webmasters don't need to get panic at all.

To better cope with the change, we should understand how Google measures a certain website's loading speed. The method is quite straightforward. It can either check its famous crawler's responsiveness or check the tracking result retrieved through the Google toolbar.

Arriving here, we've got a better idea about why Google might consider the inclusion of website speed, what the change's impact is, and how Google checks the website speed. Although we can't know exactly the impact until after the change takes effect, it's always a good idea that we choose a faster web host instead of focusing on how much the host costs alone.

Second Thought On Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is always cited as one of the most effective ways to promote a website. For a long time, I didn't believe that. In my previous view, the chance of the comment being accepted is quite low. The fact that webmasters have the tendency to post their comments with the sole purpose of promotion rather than providing valuable insight make the acceptance rate even lower. So, personally I wouldn't want to spend my already precious time to do blog commenting.

My bias with regard to blog commenting is completely gone after I tried it once a couple of days ago. I downloaded a free software which could search and list all the blogs that allow one to post a do-follow link together with his or her comments. To be honest, I didn't take it quite serious as I didn't believe it could have any visible impact on my link popularity. So I just randomly picked a few blog posts and posted my comments to promote 2 Submit Article, and deleted the software after that. However, the result was completely out of my expectation. I checked my website's link popularity at the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. It's quite astonishing to find that one comment I posted on a blog alone brought over 30 backlinks for my website, which constitutes a majority percentage of my total backlinks! Although the quality of those backlinks may not be quite high, the big number itself counts. Imagine you try to exchange links with other webmasters. According to my experience, out of 100 link requests, only around 10 of them will get responded, and unlike the multiplying effect of blog commenting, these 10 reponse will only be considered as 10 backlinks by Google. Therefore, blog commenting really worth a close examination.

After a thorough analysis of the blog which gave me such a large bulk of backlinks, I've summarized the following tips with regard to blog commenting to share with you so that we all can maximize the benefits from blog commenting.:

• The blog should allow commentators to post website URL along with the comment itself
• The website URL should be has do-follow attribute, or should NOT have the
  

  'rel="nofollow"' attribute

• Pick the blog that has "Recent Comments" section on the side bar. So, a recent comment will appear in every list or content page of the blog. This is what exactly contributes to the backlink multiplying effect.
• The comment is better to be closely related to the content of the blog post, so that the chance of being accepted by blog owners is higher.

As mentioned earlier, one big concern here is the quality of the backlinks. Since the backlink multiplying effect is largely determined by the "Recent Comments" section, you need to ensure that your comment will appear in this section. As the number of "Recent Comments" is limited, usually less than five, the less popular the blog is, and thus the less frequency of new comments, the more likely that your comment will appear in the "Recent Comments" section. However, it's the backlink from more popular blogs that has a much higher quality. Apparently, this is a dilemma for us webmasters, which returns to an old topic in the field of link building - webmasters need to balance between quantity and quality of backlinks.

The Real Worth of Sitemap

Among many other techniques and tools, Sitemap is said to be a very effective tool for Google ranking. As its name tells us, Sitemap represents a map of a website's page and link structure. Generally speaking, it's a way to tell Google about pages on a website that Google might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on a website, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Sounds Cool, Uh? Yeah, I agree. However, does it mean that Sitemap is so important that one can't afford to go without it? Not really. Let's say how Google says about the function of Sitemaps:

"
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

    * Your site has dynamic content.
    * Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
    * Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
    * Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. For example, we won't crawl or index image URLs contained in your Sitemap. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide additional information about your site, such as the date it was last updated, and how often you expect the page to change.
"
The basic meaning of the above paragraphs is that, Sitemap, as an effective webmaster tool, will certainly add value to your website in terms of help Google crawl your website in a better way. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that your rank in Google will be different with and without Sitemap. The only difference may be that your website, especially the new ones, will be indexed by Google a lot faster with Sitemap submitted to Google.

Arriving here, I bet you have a clearer understanding of the role Sitemap plays in your website promotion process. No doubt Sitemap can have a positive impact on your website. I'm just saying that you don't need to overemphasize its role, let alone pay a good amount of money to purchase Sitemap generating service from somewhere. Even if you still deem Sitemap critical to your business, I guess it's better you get it from Google Webmaster Center for free.

Is Bing Included in Your Promotion Plan

Since its inception, Microsoft's Bing has been getting increasing attention in the search engine market. According to latest stats, Bing's market share has been up for the third straight month and occupies 9.70% share of searches in February 2009. Most of the rises are stolen from the market leader Google, who, on the contrary, has suffered from two consecutive months of slight drops in share of searches. However, Google's market is still far higher than its competitors, at 70.95% in February 2009.

The question is, whether webmasters should include Bing in their website promotion plan? Well, given its increasing weight in search engine market, one definitely can't afford to overlook Bing completely. The good news is, taking Bing into consideration when promoting your website won't take you any further efforts. Let's examine Bing's search engine optimization (SEO) guide first.

According to Bing's official guide regarding to search engine optimization, one should perform the following basic things in order to get a good position in Bing:

• Develop great, original content (including well-implemented  keywords) directed toward your intended audience
• Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
• Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links

As you can see, the guideline above is quite similar to that of Google. This is also the case in reality, which means, a website ranking high in Google normally ranks high in Bing, too. There is only one point that I'd like to point out: New sites generally doesn't rank well in Bing, whereas new sites will have a reasonable rank in Google not long after its launch. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that there are no fundamental differences between Google and Bing with regard to ranking criteria. I guess it's just because Bing doesn't have a update frequency as high as that of Google.

So, from my point of view, Bing should indeed be included in our promotional plan, given its rising influence in the search engine market. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to spend dedicated efforts to learn Bing-specific SEO techniques. As long as both search engines are keyword and syntax based, the underlying fundamentals won't be much different. Only after a truly next generation search engine, which is more intelligent and semantic based, comes out can things become different.

Implication of Twitter's exposure to Google Search

As you may probably know, Google has announced its plan to integrate twitter updates into its search results, with the belief that Google search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data. Today, I'm not going to talk about the private information security issue, which is always the first thing to come to one's mind when talking about that integration. Rather, I'd like to discuss with you about the implication of twitter's exposure to Google search to us webmasters.

Needless to say, twitter will become more important with regard to website promotion. Previously, updates about your business can be only seen by your twitter followers,the number of which is quite limited. After integration within Google search, things become different. Your profile updates will appear in the search results every time someone searches relative keyword through the search box. Just imagine how traditionally you get your website appeared in the search result pages. You probably need to exchange links with others, post replies in forums, post comments in blogs and so on. With twitter profile exposed to Google search, you simply add another effortless channel to direct your Google-targeted promotion efforts.

However, Abusing social network service's promotional capability has always been a tendency among webmasters. I believe that tendency will become more so after Twitter profile gets exposed to Google search. Word of advice, Google and Twitter are not fools, if not more clever than anyone else. If one abuses twitter's promotional capability, he or she will run the risk of getting punished in some way, for example, categorized as spam by either Twitter or Google.

Anyway, Twitter's exposure to Google search is certainly a good news for us webmasters. We just need to be firmly disciplined in order not to abuse its promotional capability. After all, the principle mission of Twitter is to connect people, nothing else.

Google Adwords Tells Us How to Fill In Resource Box

Nowadays many webmasters submit their articles to numerous article directories in return for up to three affiliate text links to their business or websites. Normally article directories will allow the authors to put their affiliate links, together with a short block of descriptive text, in a so called "Resource Box" (Also Known As "Author Bio"). A critical question that must be answered well is, how can authors achieve the highest CTR through those affiliate links placed in the resource box?

Merely listing dull hyperlinks certainly won't work, because few would click the links if they don't know where the links will direct them at first glance. Therefore, the descriptive text accompanied with the hyperlinks become quite important for CTR. The question is how to write them effectively. Don't worry. We can learn from Google Adwords with regard to how to fill in the resource box in an effective way. Let's first take a look at how Google Adwords tell its members how to write effective ad text.

As Google Adwords explains, writing ads is an art. To create compelling ad text, one can apply the following tips:

• Text should be clear and well-written. It should highlight the differentiating characteristics of an advertiser’s product or service.
• Include keywords in the ad title. Since the keyword entered is what people are looking for, ads with keywords in the title stand out.
• Include a call to action. Calls to action are generally action verbs, such as buy, order, and purchase. While find and search may be accurate, these words imply that the user is still in awareness/interest mode.
• Capitalize the words in the display URL. For example, instead of using
  www.warmpuppies.com, use WarmPuppies.com.
• Choose a destination URL that points the visitor to a landing page relevant to the keyword entered. Users who don’t find what is promised immediately are more likely to leave the advertiser’s site.

From my point of view, the tips mentioned above can be perfectly applied to article marketing field with regard to how to write an effective author bio, with just slight adjustments listed below:

• the descriptive text for author box should be clear and well-written. It should highlight the differentiating characteristics of the author's business or website.
• Include your targeted keywords in the descriptive text. Since the keyword entered is what people are looking for, author box with keywords in the descriptive text stands out.
• Include a call to action. Calls to action are generally action verbs, such as buy, order, and purchase, which contribute a lot to increasing visitors' awareness and interest.
• Capitalize the words in the display URL. For example, instead of using
  www.warmpuppies.com, use WarmPuppies.com.
• Choose a destination URL that points the visitor to a landing page relevant to the keyword in the descriptive text. Users who don’t find what is promised immediately are more likely to leave the author’s site. The landing page doesn't need to be always the index page.

Such perfect match as the one between Google Adwords and Resource Box is not uncommon at all in E-Business world. If we can become more conscious about matches of these kinds, I believe our march in E-business world will become a much more effective process.

Open Your Arm for New Site

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article - New Site Deserve More Attention From Webmasters, whose basic idea is to ask webmasters not do overlook the potential value of those new directories and content websites. Today, I'd like to reverse the topic to some extent - Directories should learn to open their arms to accept new sites.

It's not uncommon that directories claim that they don't accept new sites with PR 0. Enforcing this constraint, they hope to maximize the overall quality and credibility of their directory. Personally I wouldn't agree with this claim. On the contrary, I strongly believe that accepting new sites with high quality into their directories does benefit them greatly.

First of all, I don't see any correlation between member sites' PR and directory's own success. The purpose of directory is acting as a parking farm for different categories of website. Unlike content websites for which content quality and uniqueness are top concern, the critical success factors for directories are, but not limited to, the number of websites they contain and diversity of the websites. Rejecting new sites whose PR is still zero, the directory might end up containing only those mature sites which have been already included in numerous other directories. Besides, directories usually offer free one-way text link to other websites, which means giving a free vote to others with regard to PR. So, no matter what the PR of other websites is, the directory's ranking and popularity won't be impacted. The benefit of new site for directories is more obvious when directories ask for reciprocal links from their member websites, since those new websites are much more willing to link to the directories.

Besides, any new site will become old quite soon. Google search engine ranking update, major or minor, is more and more frequent nowadays. It's quite easy for a website to get a bigger than zero PR after doing the basic promotion homework, such as automatic submission to mainstream search engines, posting in forums, social bookmarking and so on. Although the waiting period from old to new is quite short, directories cannot afford to wait until those new sites become old before accepting them. The risks are, the webmasters of those original new websites may no longer be interested in directory submission, given the decreasing importance of directory submission for website promotion. Besides, based on my experience, the enthusiasm of webmasters are much higher at the early days of promotion and it will decrease quite quickly thereafter. If directories fail to seize the opportunity of accepting those new websites at the very beginning, it's highly likely that the opportunity will be gone forever.

According to what was said above, I strongly believe that it's to directories' own interest to accept new websites, especially those with high quality and great potential. Dmoz.org is the best ever example of directory practice. As you know, it pose rigid standard with regard to submitted websites. However, if you look at its submission form, its quite straightforward. No matter the website you submit is new or old, it won't take you much time to get your website across. I suggest other directories learn from Dmoz.org. The best practice is to redesign their submission form to make it open to any website, and leave the screening process to human's hand. That way, it will get exposed to a greater websites pools and at the same time maintain a high level of quality.

Keep Away From Automatic Article Submitter

Nowadays, there are numerous automatic article submitter out there. Although most of them are not free to use, many authors are enticed by their claimed efficiency in article marketing. For me, I always keep a certain distance away from those automatic tools. (The only exception is search engine submission, for which the automatic tools are almost the norm). The major reasons are as follows.

First, not every aspect of the article marketing process should be automated. You can save your time by auto-filling your article content and other related information. However, besides efficiency, you have to take care of the quality of your article as well, which usually can't be well performed by those so called auto submitters. They just take your article as it is and submit it to every article directory, good or bad, in a rude manner just like dumping garbage. Simply put, it's you, the author, that should take the final responsibility to maintain your article quality.

Second, I believe not every article directory welcomes automated submissions. Whenever an article directory grows in polularity with time, it sooner or later will care about the quality and uniqueness of the article submitted by its members. At that time, those articles contributed by automatic article submitter will be easily caught.

Last but not least, with an automatic article submitter, one has the tendency to over submit their articles to as many article directories as possible. This is generally not a good practice in that the uniqueness of their articles doesn't exist any more.

Arriving here, you may want ask, if automatic article submitter is not suggested, what alternatives can I use to increase my article marketing efficiency and at the same time I don't lose the ability to take care of the article quality?

Well, 2 Submit Article may be your right choice. It's a free Massive Manual Article Submitter that endeavors to significantly reduce article submission and social bookmarking efforts of those who want to do article marketing more efficiently in terms of both time and money. In principle, 2 Submit Article is a manual submitter. You have great flexibility with regard to your article quality and which article submission or social bookmarking site to submit or bookmark to. On the one hand, you save your article submission and social bookmarking time to a great extent. On the other hand, you get away from those so called automatic submitters which are usually so hated by article submission sites. Dear authors, why not give it a shot?

New Site Deserve More Attention From Webmasters

Directory submission and link exchange are still among the most effective promotion methods to drive link popularity. When choosing which directory to submit and which site to swap links, we webmasters always focus on those established site that already get a certain ranking position in Google. With regard to those new sites, no matter how large their potential is, we always neglect them completely.

For a long time, I'm following the rule mentioned above. Now, I'd like to give it a second thought. Here by "give it a second thought", I don't mean to discard the rule. On the contrary, I strongly suggest we continue to strive to get our sites accepted by those established sites, because if those established directories, such as the most famous one, dmoz.org, accepts your sites, or a high PR site which operates in the same market niche with you is willing to exchange links with you, the promotion return to you will be huge. The key point that I want to make here is, at the same time that you strive to get your sites accepted by established websites, you'd better try to take advantage of new directories or websites as well. The reasons are as follows:

• Every site has its early days. Dmoz.org can give you a ranking boost in Google once you get accepted by them. But such promotion benefit couldn't be possible without Dmoz.org's continuous development. The same is true for those small directories or individual websites. If you can identify those news directories which have huge potential to be a second dmoz.org or those new sites which have all the qualities to become a second digg, the long-term promotion benefit is quite promising if you spend appropriate promotion efforts to them.
• Submission to new directories or link exchange with new sites can secure you a better position in those new sites. I wonder if you have the following experience. Your site finally gets accepted by a famous directory after several month's waiting. However, when you try to locate your link in that directory, it's over 10 clicks away from the home page. Wouldn't you feel such experience frustrating? If you submit your site to new directory, it's highly possible that your site appear on the first page under a certain category. The same is true for link exchange with new site. Some new sites are even willing to exchange homepage links with you, rather than parking your links in so called "sponsored links" page.
• Submission to new directories or link exchange with new sites has a higher possibility to get accepted. I'm also a webmaster, so I can understand how happy webmasters are when their links get accepted and how frustrated when their links get rejected. Link building is such a long lasting project that many webmasters give up half way. We webmasters really need acceptance joyfulness secured by submission to new directories or link exchange with new sites to keep us upbeat all the way to the final success for our link building project.

In brief, I strongly believe those new sites, especially those with huge potential to get good search engine ranking position and administered by a responsible and diligent webmaster, are quite worthwhile for promotion. When we are focusing on those established sites, why not divert some energy to them as well? 

Site Review: 2SubmitArticle.com

2 Submit Article (http://www.2submitarticle.com/) is a free manual massive article submitter. It's there to significantly reduce the author's article submission and social bookmarking time.

In summary, 2 Submit Article has at least the following unique strengths:

• Save your article submission time greatly. 2 Submit Article tries to include as many famous article submission and social bookmarking websites as possible, so that you don't need to open each site one by one and thus can spend more time writing high quality article. Moreover, with the drap-and-drop feature, you need to input your article information only once.

• Make memorizing tons of URLs unnessary. 2 Submit Article has already included those famous article submission and social bookmarking websites in its database. The only thing you need to do is select those article submission or social bookmarking websites you'd like to submit or bookmark your article

• Easy navigation between different sites. Since 2 Submit Article is an integrated platform, you can easily navigate both forward and backward to check your article submission or bookmarking status, which is impossible if you open each site and submit or bookmark your article from scratch each time

• Free to use, no pop-up or pop-under ads. 2 Submit Article is free to use forever. That doesn't mean 2SubmitArticle team won't spend any efforts upgrading and maintaining 2SubmitArticle.com. On the contrary, the whole 2SubmitArticle team devote themselves in launching new features and making 2 Submit Article better and better. In addition, there won't be any pop-up or pop-under ads to disturb your submission. That means, on the one hand, 2SubmitArticle.com its own won't place any pop-up or pop-under ads. On the other hand, if they find any article submission or social bookmarking site contains pop-up or pop-down ads, they'll remove it from our database.

What's more, 2 Submit Article just set up a shortcut to submit or bookmark your article. Simply drag the button 2 Submit Article has placed at the front of their front page to your Firefox bookmarks toolbar. After that, whenever you want to submit or bookmark an article on some webpage, select a block of text as article summary and then click that button. Your basic article information will be auto-filled in the article submission and social bookmarking form, which will save your article marketing effort even further.

With so many unique strengths elaborated above, 2 Submit Article is relatively simple to use. Basically, you need to take just a few steps as follows:

• Select between Article Submission or Social Bookmarking
• Select websites you'd like to submit or bookmark your article
• Fill in the blanks with related information of your article
• Click "Submit" button
• Submit or bookmark your article through drag-and-drop process

Arriving here, do you still think you need to spend all of your time going to article submission or social bookmarking sites to submit or bookmark your article? Probably not! 2 Submit Article could be the ideal solution you need. Why not start your article submission or social bookmarking now?

(Before I stop, I also want to mention their review feature just launched. You could post your insightful review to any of the article submission and social bookmarking site that you have expertise at. To show their deep appreciation, 2 Submit Article offer you a FREE One-Way text back link for every valuable review you share.You can't miss it!)

What Matters When Choosing Affiliate Programs?

Currently, there are numerous affiliate programs out there. Common types of them include CPC, CPM, CPS, CPA and other creative derivatives. On the one hand, such a massive existence of affiliate programs creates great convenience for webmasters to monetize their websites. On the other hand, it makes some webmasters quite confused in face of so many affiliate programs and other webmasters eagerly to choose those affiliate programs that they assume will bring a largest return within a shortest timeframe.

Then, how about the actual performance of those affiliate programs with a presumably largest return in a shortest timeframe? Not quite satisfactory I have to say. The majority of webmasters actually haven't received any payment from their chosen affiliate programs at all. In order for us to achieve a better performance in affiliate advertising, I think it's quite crucial we discuss what matters when we choose affiliate programs. In my opinion, there are at least the following critical factors that we have to keep in mind before we publish affiliate ads in our websites. Although some of them may sound quite basic to you, I insist to list them out since it's right the basics that many of us forget with regard to affiliate programs choosing.

1. The traffic of the affiliate program's official website. By "traffic", I mean not only the amount of traffic, but also the source of traffic and the quality of traffic. I believe you all know the importance of traffic amount quite well. But for the source of traffic and quality of traffic, we usually forget to commit our due diligence. If the majority traffic of the affiliate program comes from only one source, we may have enough reason to question the stability of its traffic. If most traffic of the affiliate program comes from traffic exchange programs, the traffic has barely any value and the affiliate program's reputation is in serious doubt.
2. The reputation of the affiliate program. Some affiliate programs have a relatively long history and accumulated a fairly large traffic base. However, a large part of their history is notorious. You may find my users complain about various issues, for example, payment delay, service unavailable, ads untargeted and so on. It this is the case, you'd better not participate in it at the very beginning, no matter how large the commission rate is.
3. Ad unit design of the affiliate program. Some affiliate programs have very poor design in their ads. Even a beginner in web design may not feel comfortable when trying to appreciate their ads layout. Remember, if we don't feel good for the ad unit, the visitors of our websites won't, either. Thus, poor ad unit design may severely impact the Click-Through-Rate (CTR). It's important that we don't comprise on this just because of their attractive commission rate or other strengths such as short payment schedule. 
4. The diversity of ad units is also very important. In this regard, Google Adsense is the most outstanding example. It has provided webmasters nearly all choices of ad units that one could think of, so that webmasters have a great flexibility to seamlessly incorporate Google Adsense into their websites. In fact, it's quite common that webmasters use Google Adsense to better their websites' outlook.
5. Anti-cheating technique of the affiliate program. If the anti-cheating is not done quite well for an affiliate program, some "intelligent" guys could take advantage of any possible backdoors the affiliate programs to generate fake ad clicks without being caught. So those cheaters will receive payment although they didn't generate any income for the affiliate company's clients - those advertisers who let the affiliate company publish their ads for them. In the affiliate marketing field, the interests of advertisers, affiliate programs, and individual website publishers are closely tied together. If the interest of the advertisers is damaged, all stakeholders in the value chain, including you, will suffer in the end.
6. Chemistry between the affiliate program and your website. By "chemistry", I mean whether the ads fit your overall content and style of your website. For example, if the website talks about article writing, you may not want to publish ads about commercial electronics. If your websites requires the user to fill in a long registration form, you certainly don't want to pop-up ads to disturb your users.
7. Commission rate of the affiliate program. Don't get me wrong when I mentioned "commission rate". Here I mean you should think twice before lured away by extremely high commission rate. Where does your affiliate income come from? Although it's the affiliate program that pays you, it's the advertisers that offer any amount of advertising budget, out of which the affiliate program distributes a share to you. You know, no rational advertiser is willing to pay one penny more than the advertising price determined by the market. If an affiliate program offers an extremely high commission rate, chances are, either it's another case of business fraudulence, or the affiliate program is giving away money like an angel.

Of course, there are many other important factors impacting your decision with regard to which affiliate program to choose that I fail to cover here. However, it's always more important to know how than to know what. As long as you know that you need to think more carefully than before when choosing a suitable affiliate program for your website, the probability of your success in affiliate marketing is much higher.

Is Link Exchange or Directory Submission Dead?

Nowadays, there are a lot of so called Social Network Service (SNS) providers out there. Among them the most famous ones are Facebook and Twitter and other social media websites. All of them are characterized by being highly interactive and user-friendly.

This is good news for webmasters who are eagerly to get unique visitors to their websites. Previously, besides on-page optimization, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they accomplish this goal mainly by traditional link building methods including search engine submission, link exchange and directory submission. Now they have realized the effectiveness of those SNS websites in getting their websites exposed to a large group of potential visitors within a relatively short timeframe. Therefore, a lot of their promotion efforts are diverted to those SNS websites.

I don't want to say they are wrong. On the contrary, I'm always so amazed by webmasters' rapid and correct adaptation to any emerging technique in the field of internet marketing. Take Facebook as an example. Facebook takes the 2nd position in Alexa's Top 500 sites list, immediately after Google but before Yahoo. Some analysts even predict that in 2011 the traffic of Facebook will surpass Google. I'll be the stupidest webmaster in the world if I don't follow the trend to target adequate promotion efforts to Facebook like SNS sites.

However, spending adequate promotion efforts to SNS sites does not necessarily follow that we webmasters should neglect entirely the importance and effectiveness of link exchange and directory submission.(Here I didn't mention search engine submission, because with tons of free submission tool available here and there, search engine submission work is just a matter of mouse click and thus webmasters are still willing to do so.)

Google is still the number one. Generally speaking, you can expect that the major traffic of your website still comes from Google. Therefore, link exchange and directory submission still contribute to your promotion targeted at Google buzz, such as Page Rank (PR). Some people claim that Google has updated its PR algorithm so that the back links got from link exchange or directory submission are given less votes to your PR than before. I don't see that. Even if what they said is true, it's most likely because that Google has taken more factors into consideration when calculating each website's PR, so that the average vote resulted from each factor, such as back link, turns out to be less. Anyway, based on the current mainstream search engine technique represented by Google, it's unlikely that they can achieve a relatively fair search engine ranking result without giving serious consideration to back links. This fact won't change until a truly intelligent next generation search engine comes out.

On the other hand, although without question those SNS websites represented by Facebook are more effective in promotion than traditional web links or directories, they still have a long way to dominate the whole internet. Don't be over-enthusiastic in front of those fancy things in the internet. Do you still remember how people's over-enthusiasm resulted in the internet crisis around the year 2000? Do you still remember how video sharing websites burned venture capitalists' money like paper in the past few years? Stay calm my friends! We need to figure out what actual benefits the SNS websites will bring to us and take advantage of them in a thoughtful way. Apart from that, we should continue to invest out energy into traditional promotion efforts like link exchange and directory submission without being misled by exaggerated SNS buzzes.

In addition, SNS websites usually need your extra efforts before you start your actual promotion work. Put it in other words, you need to build your social network. The problem is, it takes you a huge amount of efforts to build such kind of social network. Clearly, you can't import your email or other contacts in real life into your social network directly, either because you don't want your real life friends or colleagues to know what you do in the internet or because seldom there are some people in your close life that have the same interest with you. Hence, you have to build this social network from scratch. The time it takes is at least comparable to, if not more than, that it takes you to exchanges links with other webmasters or submit your links to directories.

Arriving here, you probably got my point.SNS-targeted promotion is indeed more effective if you can manage to do it. However, however effective is SNS-targeted promotion, you can't afford to overlook the importance of link exchange or directory submission in any regard, since Google is still the internet king and since SNS is still at its fledging stage.

When to Stop Giving Away Your article in BlogSpot

Blogspot, previously known as "Blogger", is so convenient to use that nearly every creature in the internet world has opened an account for it. This post is mainly related to those friends who use blogspot to publish ads alongside their posts in order to gain additional income.

From the day that bloggers publish their first post, they are thinking how to best monetize their blogs. Google Adsense is again the most popular advertising program being used. Recently, Amazon formed partnership with Google, so that bloggers could display Amazon affiliate ads alongside their posts as easy as they do with Google Adsense. As you know, you need tons of traffic to produce enough ad clicks and thus generate observable ad revenue. This is almost impossible without continuous content creation and promotion efforts that usually may last more than one year. However, if you really hope to make money from blogging, this is the necessary hard work and patience that you need to invest.

Many blogger don't realize that. They believe the day they create unique content is the same day they ought to earn money. With this belief in mind, they soon think of a beautiful idea: Why should my article only reside in my blog? As long as it's my original work, I can park them in as many places as possible, either through article submission or through social bookmarking. If I do this, I'll receive at least two benefits:

• Free back links to my blog and individual post
• Some article directories offer ad revenue sharing program from which I can earn additional income from my articles.

Their basic idea is true. However, as I emphasized repeatedly in my previous posts, never go too far with regard to any of your ideas. Almost all originally correct things will turn wrong if one overdoes them. The same is true for your article marketing. My general points are as follows:

• Promotion effect follows the rule of diminishing return. You certainly can get free backlinks from article submission or social bookmarking. However, the more articles you submit or bookmark to the same website, the less marginal promotion effect the article will bring to you. At some point, it won't compensate your article marketing effort any more, and that's when you ought to stop giving away your article.
• Not all article submission or social bookmarking sites are worth your efforts. They are thousands of article directories and social bookmarking websites out there. We usually believe, the more the better. So we tend to submit or bookmark our articles to as many places as possible. An important fact we neglect is that most of those article directories and social bookmarking sites don't generate any traffic at all. The only result your article brings is free content to their website, with negligible benefit to you. Clearly, it's better that you stop giving away your content to those dummy websites and spend your saved efforts on producing more creative content and targeting your promotion efforts to those few best article directories and social bookmarking websites.
• Most ad revenue sharing programs do not sound as good as they claimed at all. You could refer to my detail analysis given in my last posts: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" and Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates. Same as above, you are merely contributing free content without any significant promotion effect, let alone additional income from shared ad revenue.

Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates

In my last post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing", we discussed how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs. The conclusion is only choose those few which have already got a large traffic base. The problem is how we can arrive at such an attractive list?

Of course, you can always try search on Google with keyword "Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites" and you'll get tons of relevant information. Then you can choose among them according to your own inspection and other people's experience. However, our time is usually limited. Thus, we can't afford to participate as many revenue sharing programs as we want. In my opinion, it's enough that we join in one or two best revenue sharing programs. The reasons are as follows:

• The purpose of joining revenue sharing programs is not to make a fortune. It's just to provide an additional income. If you do things right, the piece of income will be visible, but far from large. It's your own full-time work or entrepreneurship that you need to devote a major part of your energy to.
• We can't expect ourselves to be experts in every field. Those best revenue sharing sites operate in many different fields, including blogging, forums, reviews, article directories, social media and so on. It's highly impossible that you can maintain the quality and quantity of your content in more than two fields. For example, you may be good at writing high quality article, but may not be so good at producing videos. If that's the case, why not focus on the field you are best at.
• Copy right issue. If you participate in more revenue sharing programs than you can afford, a potential result is that you may start to copy others' content to maintain a regular upgrading frequency of your account page in each revenue sharing programs. In the short term you may increase your adsense income to some degree. In the long term you may end up with your account blocked. You're not safe even if you publish your own content in different revenue sharing programs, which is quite common in article marketing field, because some sites require exclusive ownership of your content.

Since we only need to select one or two best adsense revenue programs, the work turns out to be quite easy - We only need to select among those AUTHENTIC adsense revenue sharing programs instead of using some programming hacks to implement the revenue sharing function. By authentic, we mean those who have established formal official partnership with Google Adsense. Examples include Docstoc, Hubpages, Flixya, RateItAll, to name just a few. Even BlogSpot belongs to such an official partner of Google Adsense. It's just that Google is so generous that it distributes 100% of adsense revenues to its bloggers.

In the title of this post, we also mentioned one word "Pirate". Which revenue sharing programs belong to pirates? Generally, they possess the following features:

• Utilize self-developed code i.s.o Google Adsense API to implement adsense revenue sharing function. Need more information about Google Adsense API? click here
• Traffic is quite low compared to Google Adsense revenue sharing program's requirement: 100,000 daily page views.
• Link popularity is quite low
• Have a relatively short history
• In eager need of content
• Others...

Given the features mentioned above, you can imagine how much you can earn from their programs and how long it will take you before you reach Google Adsense's payment threshold. Then, you may wonder, how can I discriminate authentic adsense revenue sharing programs from pirates? Here I summarize several tips for your reference:

• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can be seen from your Google Adsense account center in the path My Account - Account Access
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs have 100,000 or more daily page views.
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs never require you to register Paypal or other credit accounts to receive your share of your adsense income
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can usually act as your referrer to register a Google Adsense account if you haven't got one already
• Check with Google Adsense support.

From my own experience, I can tell you, if you make a right decision with regard to which authentic adsense sharing program to join and pay adequate efforts to operate your account subsequently, the return you'll secure will be quite satisfactory. I hope this post, together with my previous post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" will help you make a better decision when you want to join some adsense revenue sharing programs to bring some additional income.

Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing"

Google Adsense revenue sharing is a rather trendy concept nowadays. Lots of websites majoring in different niches, including blogging, forums, social media, video sharing, article directory and so on, all claim that they provide a share of adsense revenue to their users who are contributing contents. Some of them even claim that they distribute 100% of their adsense revenue out, which is quite attractive at first glance.

However, as a content contributor, one might concern the following question most: how much in absolute dollar amount can I earn within a certain period of time, let's say, a month, which is the pay schedule of google adsense program. To answer this question properly, we should first understand what factors drive the absolute dollar income you'll earn from a certain adsense revenue sharing program.

For the sake of easy elaboration, I'll use the following formula to approximate the absolute income you'll earn from adsense revenue sharing program:

I = N * C * R * P, in which, I represents the absolute income you'll earn. N represents the number of visitors that view the content you contributed. C represents the Click-Through-Rate(CTR) of the ads placed by the websites for you. R represents the Pay-Per-Click(PPC) rate related to your article. P represents the percentage that the website is willing to distribute out to its content contributors.

Based on the aforementioned formula, you can easily see that your adsense revenue is determined by both yourself and the website. For example, you can improve the quality of your article, so that the number of viewers for your article will be higher. Or you can optimize your keyword selection and density, so that the PPC of the ads alongside your article will be higher. However, the major determinant of your adsense revenue still comes from the website, since the number of your content's impressions is by far more determined by the popularity and traffic of the website itself. The quality and optimization level of your content play a role to some extent, but far from critical. With regard to the adsense revenue sharing percentage, which a lot of websites manipulates to exaggerate their adsense revenue sharing programs' attractiveness,  its impact on how much one could earn is really minimal.

Arriving here, you probably know how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs - Only participate the few ones who already have a large traffic base. Otherwise, you are making contribution to others' wallet without gaining a reasonable return for your content. 

Therefore, the problem here is where you can find such a list of truly attractive adsense revenue sharing programs? I'll deal with this issue in my next post. Please stay tuned if you are interested.

How to Earn $100 per day?

This article is not meant for experienced website publishers or those start-up entrepreneurs who have received money from venture capital (VC). This article is meant for those who are new to the industry, working as part-time, but yet hope to earn a considerable income. A question that they often ask in webmaster forums or somewhere else is, how to earn $100 per day?

The reason that they ask the question demonstrates how difficult it is for one to earn that much through website building or blogging. Although it's true that it takes a long time before one could earn $100 per day steadily, I believe everyone could earn that much or even more if he/she has a correct thought and holds on to that thought until achieving the target.

First, you need to form a correct thought with regard to so called $100 per day. Does it mean that you have to earn $100 a day from just one website? Not really, and often it's almost impossible for an ordinary webmaster. However, it's quite possible that you earn $10 per day for each website or blog after a year or so's continuous optimization and promotion efforts. Then the answer is clear. Why not setup another website or blog after you have succeeded in earning $10 per day for your existing website or blog? Go on with this process and you'll find the goal $100 per day not far away.

Second, you need to hold on to the correct thought. Knowing what's correct thing to do is relatively easy. It's doing correctly for a long time that is difficult for most people. That's why most webmasters end up earning pennies, if not nothing at all. If you know beforehand that you can't afford the time to maintain 10 or more websites or blogs, either lower down your earning target or quit the online market completely, otherwise, it's highly possible that you spend a huge amount of efforts without any money return.

Sounds easy huh?  I want to tell you my friends, it's not easy at all. Otherwise, there shouldn't be so many webmasters still wondering how to earn money online. Only with a correct thought and strong perseverance could you have some chance to succeed.

Before you implement anything, I have another word of advice: never start your work in a haste. We always tend to start our work as soon as possible once we believe we've got the correct thing to do. What's more, setting up online business is quite easy nowadays, which is further facilitated by various CMS systems (i.e, Joomla) and the free service provided by many hosting providers (i.e,GoDaddy). Thus, we always feel it hard to resist the temptation to setup our websites one after another. Don't do so! I myself have learnt many lessons from doing like so. I can assure you that we could getting nothing from a hasty work, no matter how hard we work, despite a lot unnecessary layout of investment.

Dance with the Affiliate Market Leader

You probably all heard about "Dance with the wind". That is exactly how I came of the title of this article. By "leader", I mean those leading affiliate programs, like Google Adsense in (Cost-Per-Click) CPC programs, Amazon in CPS (Cost-Per-Sales) programs and so on.

Nowadays, many website owners complain about strict rules of Google Adsense and low referrer rate of Amazon. In their mind, Google Adsense is dead. Amazon is lead. As a result, they tend to switch to other alternatives that have relatively looser requirements or have a much higher commission rate, which they managed to find in such places as clickbank and other advertisement proxies. Nevertheless, the best news I've heard about is that some of these alternative programs have a mediocre performance, but far from outstanding. On the other hand, however those webmasters who stick to traditional giants such as Google Adsense and Amazon continue to share with us their successful stories. Personally, I strongly suggest that we dance with the leader. The major reasons are as follows.

First of all, the leading affiliate programs are far more advanced in advertising technology. We could always hear exciting news about technique innovation or new advertising tools from them. Take Google as an example, there are hardly any competitors in the advertising world that even come close to its technique. Recently, it just acquired AdMod to strengthen its influence in mobile advertising market, which brings new ad publishing choices for webmasters. It also collaborates with Amazon to allow bloggers to easily plug in Amazon ads in blogs.

Second, the leading affiliate programs know the most appropriate rate. Based on their rich experience in advertising industry, they have a good command of knowledge to charge a most appropriate price for advertisers and distribute a fair share of ad revenue to website publishers, no more no less. On the contrary, some unknown affiliate programs set a ridiculously high commission rate to attract webmasters. Word of advice, don't be fooled by their high rate. Think about where your ad revenue comes from. If you always bear in mind that any ad revenue you may have comes from advertisers, you'll be more rational when choosing which affiliate program to participate in, since the advertisers are not fools, either. Besides, the high commission rate often means that the choice of ad type is quite limited and quality of ad is rather poor.

Last but not least, the leading affiliate programs are more likely to have a very low probability of default. A significant part of assets of leading companies are composed by intangible assets, which is closely related to their reputation. If you look at Google's balance sheet it reports to shareholders every quarter, you could get a better idea of that. That's why those leading companies are always quite aware of their reputation. Therefore, it's quite unlikely that they default on affiliating commissions payable to webmasters at the expense of their public image. However, those affiliate programs sitting in the corner are different. They probably don't care about reputation whatsoever. Instead, short-term profits are most vital to them. When something unfavorable, such as cash crisis, happens, it's not a bad idea for them to disappear completely without paying out a penny.

In summary, I strongly believe those leading affiliate programs, such as Google Adsense, Amazon and so on, are more worthy of your effort, in terms of sharing the benefit of their technology advantage, securing a fair market return and protecting your ad income.

Why Your Google Adsense Earnings Drop

Not a long time ago I saw a guy opened a post in a famous webmaster forum, asking why his Google Adsense earnings were dropping gradually overtime, whereas at the same time his traffic remained almost the same and his site underwent not a single change. Well, as I mentioned in my previous post (Don't Go Too Extreme When Choosing Keyword For Google Adsense)
, Adsense earnings equal Traffic * Click-Through-Rate (CTR) * Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Given that the traffic and website are unchanged, the only factor that could have to do with his declining earnings should be PPC.

So why is his PPC declining? PPC, as the name told us, is the per-click price that the advertiser is willing to pay to Google in order to get his/her ads display in a favorable place either in Google search engine network or Google content network.(In reality, the PPC will be divided between Google and website publishers. Here for the sake of simplicity, I don’t distinguish between PPC that goes to website publisher and the one that goes to Google). Clearly, the reason that PPC is declining overtime is that the advertiser is paying less and less for Google’s Adwords. Why is that the case? Basically, I think there are three major reasons here.

First, online advertising industry is increasingly competitive. That means, advertising companies need to adopt every means in order to compete with each other. One direct result of the fierce competition between advertising companies is the lower advertising price that companies/individuals could enjoy nowadays, which in the mean time means that poor website publishers have to accept much smaller ad revenues than before.

Second, Google advertising network is evolving rather quickly. No matter the search network, or the content network, the volume of ad places is exploding at an unprecedented pace. As the demand and supply law of economics tells us, higher supply of ad places will lead to lower equilibrium price of ads, which is exactly the case for Google Adwords’ PPC.

Third, advertisers are becoming more and more adept at Google Adwords. As you know, the ad place that one’s ads will display in Google’s advertising network is not only determined by maximum CPC bid, but also by so-called quality score. Quality score is reversely related with the PPC that a company or an individual has to pay for Google Adwords program. That means, the higher the quality score, the lower one has to pay for advertising. Generally speaking, quality score could be largely increased by achieving a high CTR, writing a highly relevant ad text, optimizing the landing page and so on. Nowadays, a lot of people are so good at these techniques that they could actually lower their PPC without sacrificing the advertising effect.

In sum, it’s not surprising that website publishers earn much less from Google Adsense program compared with several years ago. With the increasing competition within the online advertising industry, the continuing thriving Google advertising network, and more and more savvied advertisers, there is not much a website publisher could do to stop the trend. However, it’s not the end of the world. Never forget the equation: Adsense earnings equal Traffic (Or number of visitors) * CTR * PPC.  So, here are my suggestions:

• Never sacrifice quality of content or service for the sake of any kind of short-term gain. It’s the very basic that determines your traffic.

• Never stop optimization and promotion work. Otherwise, your traffic or CTR can’t be high

• Always pay attention to new industry. New industry means not only less competition but also less familiar to advertisers, which might lead higher PPC.
  

Article Submission Or Bookmarking?

For those who want to promote their websites, especially those content-intensive ones, for example, blogs, article submission and bookmarking are both among the most effective means you can take. At first glance, they look roughly the same. But they do have differences. In the following analysis, I’d like to perform some basic comparison between them.

Before I start, I’d like to clarify the meanings of article submitting and bookmarking, respectively.

“Article submitting” means submitting your entire article content to article submission sites. Popular article submission sites include EzineArticles, ArticleBase, GoArticles and so on. To submit your article, you normally need to provide the following information:

• Article title
• Author name
• Author Bio (or called Resource Box)
• Article summary
• Article Body
• Tags
  

“Bookmarking” means submit your article link’s basic information, rather than the entire content, to bookmarking sites. Famous bookmarking sites include Digg, SlashDot, Reddit, Google and so on. To bookmark your sites, you normally need to provide the following information:

• Article title
• Article Link URL
• Article summary
• Tags

So, from what was listed above about article submission and bookmarking, you could easily see that the functions and requirements of the two are indeed different. Let’s try to summarize their two major differences as follows:

• Article submission gives away your content, whereas bookmarking doesn’t. After submitting your article to some other sites, your website is no longer the only place that publishes your article. The visitors who are interested in your article may not need to visit your sites. The article submission sites may publish PPC ads, like Google Adsense, alongside your article on their sites, and the ad revenues all go to their pockets. On the other hand, bookmarking only exposes the link of your article. To visit the full content, the visitors still need to come to your sites.  That means, you are still the sole owner of your article and your website is the only place that publishes your article. (Let’s ignore content piracy issue at this moment).

• The promotion benefit that you get from article submission is the resource box offered by the article submission sites, in which you could list two to three links that you would like to promote. Normally the article submission sites do not allow you to insert any affiliate link in the body of the article. On the other hands, as you only submit the basic link info, rather the entire content, to bookmarking sites, the promotion benefit you get is directly related to the article link the bookmarking sites have bookmarked for you.
  

Arriving here, you may wonder which method you should adopt. Well, there is no definite answer, since it all depends on your own judgment and biggest concern. For example, if you’re concerning about the copyright issue or don’t want someone else to enjoy the ad revenues brought by your articles, the better alternative is bookmarking. If you want your website’s link popularity to be increased more quickly, the more suitable choice for you is article submission. Nevertheless, you could always combine article submission and bookmarking to achieve a maximized benefit.

Don't Go Too Extreme When Choosing Keyword For Google Adsense

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) of keyword for Google Adsense is a hot topic in all webmaster or advertising forums. Some guys blame their low PPC keywords for their humble return. Some guys tend to ask what are the keywords which the highest PPC and plan to build up independent websites or write blogs around them. There are still some guys trying to make money by providing an updated list of keywords sorted from high PPC to low PPC. Needless to say, no one who hopes to make money purely through Google Adsense will be so stupid to choose the keywords with the lowest PPC. However, should the webmasters follow the strategy of targeting the keywords with highest PPC in order to maximize their return?  Not really.

To facilitate your understanding, let’s go through the mechanism of making money from Google AdSense briefly. If a visitor comes to your site and clicks an ad, you and Google will share the revenue from each click, which equals to the Pay-Per-Click price set by some advertiser. Based on this logic, the determinants of your Google AdSense earnings including the followings:

• The traffic of the website. More accurately, the number of unique Visitors of your site. Let’s designate it as N.

• The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your ads. 

• The average PPC of the keywords determined by your website content.

So, the total revenue R equals N*CTR*PPC. Obviously, PPC is not the sole factor that determines your return from Google Adsense. You have to maintain a relative high standard of quality of your website and implement effective and continuing promotion strategy, so as to ensure a good deal of traffic. Meanwhile, in order to achieve a satisfactory CTR, you have to make effective use of ad places in your websites and in the meantime not overuse your website’s ad capacity so as not to scare your visitors away. Content quality and relativity are quite important for CTR, too. Thus, although centering your topic or content around keywords with high PPC is quite important, you have to achieve a satisfactory result of your website traffic and CTR as well.

However, a high PPC never means a highest PPC. If you automatically believe a highest PPC will secure a highest return from Google Adsense, normally you are wrong. Based on my own Adsense data, the keywords which bring me the most return accumulatively are those ones who have middle to upper level of PPC, but far from the highest. Because the web pages related to middle to upper level of PPC are, in a statistical sense, always have a much higher amount of traffic and a much higher CTR than those web pages with the keywords whose PPCs are among the highest,  and the traffic and CTR advantages together far outweigh the disadvantage out of a relative low PPC. Of course, this conclusion is purely based on my experience. If your experience is totally different from mine, don’t hesitate to leave your arguments here in the comment section.

Anyway, I suggest you not go too extreme when choosing keyword for your Google Adsense program. My experience tells me that targeting at the keywords with a middle to upper PPC will bring you a much larger return. Why not take a shot?

Customer Is the King

As the saying goes, customer is always the king. This is exactly the case in E-business. It's customers who buy your product or service. It's customers who click your ads. It's customers who spread you reputation throughout the whole internet. Hence, the importance of loyal customers is clear to notice. However, this pivotal fact is forgotten by many of us webmasters. They are busy setting up our websites and filling in various contents. They're addicted in all sorts of cool features online. They're deeply fond of letting various ads appearing in every corner of our sites, which might deter any potential visitors away forever.

But, seldom are there any webmasters who care about their customers. In my view, that's why only a few webmasters can succeed in finding the gold mine of internet, while the majorities are still struggling on the border of giving up. Given the importance of customers to the success of any endeavor, there are at least the following crucial questions that you have to answer.

• Who are your customers? A customer for a business is anyone willing to pay a price to acquire a good or service from a business. Some customers have many different wants and needs - some simple and some very complex. You have to tailor your business to satisfy different level of customers' demands in a pleasant way. Otherwise, they just switch to other E-businesses who provide roughly the same product or service portfolio but satisfy the customers' need in a relatively better way.

• What do they most care about? Some customers care more about price. Some pay more attention to service standard. There are still some others who care about your product or service quality or brand most. Try to understand what they care about most, so as to deploy your business in a most suitable way with regard to their expectation

• How can you reach them? Choosing the right channels to sell to customers is a crucial decision. You need to know how and where customers want to buy your products or services, and the best way of getting customers to hear about them. For some e-businesses, reaching customers is relatively straightforward, for example, go to boutique forums, join keyword targeted campaign program, among which Google Adwords is the most famous among webmasters. However, there are still some other types of e-business for which how to reach the customers is not very clear at the beginning. If this is the case, you have to be more careful to implement anything. Although it's not easy to get where your customers are, this important could never be omitted. In my opinion, in this case consulting some marketing specialist is the most efficient and effective way if you are not expert in marketing.

In brief, customer is the king. You have to make her happy before you can make anyone else happy, including yourself. Get a clear cut understanding of the aforementioned questions at least, and I believe it will largely decrease the probability that you regret later for your wrong decision at first and a huge amount of efforts that secure no return at all.

What Can and Can't CMS Do For You?

There are tons of open source CMSs downloadable in the internet, among which joomla is quite popular among webmasters. Almost all of them claim that they could help even those who know nothing about HTML build a sophisticated dynamic website within several minutes. I agree that's true. With a strong set of core functions, numerous powerful extensions, and a lot of free or bought templates available in somewhere, putting a website live overnight is not difficult at all. CMS is so fantastic that CMS experience is shared in every corner of the webmaster' world. However, before you take advantage of CMS, I think it is better that you are familiar with what can and can't CMS do for you.

First let's go through briefly what CMS can do for you. CMS, as its name tells us, it's a web content publishing and management system that allows normal content originators to create, submit, and publish their content directly within a web application/site without any development tools or knowledge of HTML. Therefore, in principle, CMS is a management tool which could facilitate the maintenance of your website greatly.

However, what I want to elaborate more about is those things that CMS can't do, since we are more like to make mistakes in this regard. Here I summarized several points for your reference.

• CMS couldn't perform design work for you. You have to prepare your template separately, and leave proper slots in the template for the CMS to layout all types of content, including text, image, and video and so on. Although free templates for any kind of CMS are available here and there, it's highly possible that you can't use them as they are and have to adapt them to your need, which cannot be accomplished without a good knowledge of basic HTML and CSS.

• CMS couldn't create content for you. No matter you use CMS or not, you are the originator of unique content and should be held responsible for the quality of content. CMS won't take over the writing job for you. On the contrary, it only help you manage the content created by you.

• CMS couldn't develop ideas for you. The same as content, you are the one who are held responsible for the creativity and marketability of your idea. If you try to delegate this important task to CMS, your failure is then inevitable.

Based on the aforementioned points with regard to what CMS can't do, we could arrive at the following conclusions:

• If you don't know anything about HTML or CSS, don't try to build any independent website, even if CMS and templates, either free or bought, are both available.
  
• If you don't have any sources to acquire unique contents, don't hope CMS will help you become a great writer
• If you don't have any mature and innovative idea in mind, don't try to become an entrepreneur just because you have acquired the skills of manipulating some kind of CMS.

What do you think? Should any thought, don't hesitate to leave your comments here.

Use customized blog templates or not?

Before I kicked off E-Business 101 at blogspot, I benchmarked several blogspot blogs on a random basis. As I noticed, none of them used the pre-installed templates. On the contrary, they chose to use those customized templates, which basically have the following features:

• have more columns 
• have more ad places
• the template style matches their blog subject better

The end goal, needless to say, is hoping to get a larger return from blogging.

Does it really work as they thought? In many famous webmaster forums, I saw a lot of guys told us that their customized templates worked out quite well and they earned quite a lot from their well designed blogs. Well, personally believe them, for two reasons. First,their decent return is there for everyone to see. Second, I have no data at hand to do any comparison. However,more scrutiny won't do you any harm. To help you make a better decision before your decide to switch to customized template, knowing the demerits of customized templates is also very important. I've summaried the following demerits that currently come to mind:

• More workload. You could no longer take advantage of the drag-and-drop feature when you want to add/delete/modify the layout or widgets. Of course, you could find a way to achieve the same layout effect, but the efforts would propably double.
• Less compatibility. That means, whenever Google put forward a trendy feature in future, adjusting your customized template is time-consuming, whereas those who use the default template could easily enjoy the feature with just one click.
• Degraded performance. You have to use some third-party image host for all the images used in your customized pic. Although you have a wide choice regarding to which host to use, the loading speed of your blog is certain to be impacted.
• A greater tendency to over-monetize your blog. With the flexibility of the customized template, many guys tend to over-monetize their blogs. When we open their blogs, we could see ads floating in almost every corner, in and out of their posts. Yes, such density of ads placement will surely get you additional clicks because of careless clicks according to probability theory. However, in the long term, it will damage your blog's reputation and deter new visitors who are so scared by your ads that swear never to return in future.

Writing this post doesn't follow that I don't suggest using the customized blog template for your blog. I just want to encourage you to think more before you decide to switching blog templates. If the benefits it will bring clearly outweigh the negative effects based on a thorough analysis of your situation, go ahead. If otherwise, keep with the default template.

Learn to Control Yourself When Doing E-business

I don't know whether human beings are born greedy. Observations and self experience make me believe this is exactly the case. Despite what goal we set at the beginning, we are always tempted to ask for more. Asking for more is reasonable only if we have met all the requirement of time, money and human resources, and laid a solid foundation already. Unfortunately, in many occasions we forget who we are and where we are completely, so our ultimate failure is inevitable. In this post I’m going to analyze several behaviors that may indicate potential troubles would come to you because of your greediness. If you find your experience more or less match the behaviors I mentioned, I strongly suggest you stop and think seriously.

• Search all kinds of promotion techniques. Such techniques might include search engine submission, directory submission, social bookmarking, SNS, forum signature, link exchange, article sharing, and etc. I don't deny the importance of any of the techniques to promotion. What I'm strongly against is trying to apply every technique you managed to find in each corner of the earth. Almost every business activity, including those in e-business, faces the law of diminishing return, which means, the return will reach the peak and then start to decline once your activity passes a threshold. So, it's quite important that you figure out two or three most pertinent promotion techniques according to the specific situation you're currently in. With the time you save from those unimportant, at least in the current phase, promotion activities, you could focus more attentively on your core business

• Maintain a huge amount of accounts, including, but not limited to, blogging, forum, bookmarking, and affiliate programs. So many accounts might be a clear sign that you are trying to monetize blogging as much as possible, that you're posting many nonsense replies in various forums to get your signature exposed, that you're trying to get your new articles linked by as many bookmarking sites as possible, and that you're trying to find those affiliate programs with the highest payout. The list of crazy activities like these will go on endlessly. If not for a solid foundation you've laid out, such as a clear ambitious goal, high-quality content, search-engine friendly, a stable visitor base and etc, I strongly doubt such activities will bring you more return before you're overwhelmed by the huge workload.

• Can't resist the temptation of "free" content in the internet. As said above, some friends would like to monetize their websites or blogs as much as possible, which demands a great amount of content output in a short timeframe. Obviously this is mission impossible for any single human being. Thus, some of them start to steal other people' or organization's content in an irresponsible way so as to fill in the blank of their website or blog empire. As I said in my earlier post: The Ultimate Determinants of Making Money Online, a roughly efficient market would give a normal market return with a reward to time, money and human resource that you invest. So, don't rely on the ill-conceived thought that those copied content will bring you a desired return, if not a punishment in the end.

In summary, I think learning to control yourself is very important in e-business, as well as any other type of business. My suggestions to all of you, including myself, are as follows:

• Apply only those promotion techniques that will bring the most identifiable return to you in any phase
• Set up accounts that are just enough to match the capacity and targeted market of your business
• Understand the importance of both quantity and quality of your business.
• Don't sacrifice your integrity and code of conduct for the sake of satisfying your greediness

When to build your own website

In the last topic we talked about the ultimate determinants of e-business. We got to know that we should never forget the basics when doing whichever type of business. From now on, I'm going to discuss each small topic with you. Today's topic is: When should we consider building our own website.

When asked why they built their own website from scratch, the answers are always among the followings:

• More flexibility w.r.t design and ad placement
  
• Many open source CMS systems such as joomla make the building of website a piece of cake
  
• With a feeling that independent website can always earn more money than free host such as blogs, wiki and other free hosting providers.
• Others

However, none of the answers listed above ensure that building our own website is a wise decision, that is, will bring us much more return than if we continue to use secondary domain name with free host. Actually, nowadays, bloggers and wordpress are quite effective cash engine for webmasters. You could customize your design. You could almost freely place your ad anywhere in your pages. You could do link building. You could play with social bookmarking. What's more, you could take advantage of some blogging technique, such as auto pinger, to greatly reduce promotion efforts required.

So what on earth determines whether we should consider building our own website? Well, it depends on the competitive advantages of independent website compared with free host service. In my view, the competitive advantages of independent website include the followings:

• Serve as news, company or some other organizations' portal.
  
• Provide service, such as search engine, web directory, blogging, forum, social network service (SNS), and other sorts of service that demands member registration
• E-commerce
• Others...

As you could see, I didn't mention exhibiting unique content as one of the competitive advantages of website. Why? In my view, if you have unique content, putting your content in a blog provided either by wordpress or blogspot is enough for you to achieve as least the same result as if you build your own website. In many cases, the return ensured by free blogs is much higher than independent websites. The reason might include:

• Independent website is more likely to have more general content, which is less friendly to advertising network. On the other hand, blogs usually have a narrow topic on which all the articles are centered.
  
• Independent website is much harder to optimize given the huge workload of an entire site, whereas with a blog you simply need to care about your articles, domain name, and some titles naming.
  
• You have do all on your own for your own website, whereas blogs usually have a lot tools or widgets for you to take advantage of.

In brief, it's very important to think twice before we decide to build an independent website at a certain moment. I made a lot of mistakes in the past because of blind website obsession. I sincerely hope, after reading this article,  you my dear friends, and I as well, could do a better job in future when we need to make a decision on when to build our own websites.

The ultimate determinant of making money online

So many times we see a lot of guys asking how to make money online. Do they really not know how to make money? I doubt that seriously.

In my opinion, what they are really curious about is how to make quick money online. That's why so many guys would like to rush into affiliate programs with high commission rate, spend so many efforts to crash SEO technique, and perform other crazy activities that they might think of. Then. do they really find quick gold in the internet world? I bet 99 percent of them fail to achieve so, despite a lot of time and wisdom being wasted. I don't want to deny the 1 percent chance that there may exist some genius on our earth.

In my view, I don't think there is any quick money in the internet. The market is roughly efficient, which means it will only give any participant a normal return based on his/her investment of time, money or knowledge. Thus, don't make affiliating or SEO become an end in itself. Otherwise, it will only give you a normal return determined by the market, which is almost 0, since these markets are almost saturated after so many years of rapid development. Of course, here I don't deny that they are still among the effective means of serving your end goal in the e-business.

In fact, E-business is the same as any other sort of business. We should never forget the basics of doing business when you're exploring opportunities in the internet. So, what are the basics of doing business? There are many famous theories addressing this problem, for example, the value-chain framework, 4C, 4P, the porter's five forces and so on. Given the purpose of this blog, here I don't want to expand on these specific topics. If you want to get more, google is the right choice for you.

Knowing the basics of doing business well, does it mean that you can enter into the market place immediately? You definitely know the answer is NO. However, in the real life, many of us always make hasty decisions that we regret later.Take myself as an example. Once I thought I found a great idea and wanted to implement it immediately. I rent hosting space, registered a domain name, and spent a whole crazy week to develop the website, only to find that I don't have enough content to fill in the website.

Thus, make sure you think carefully before you move. Do you have a clear idea about what your business is? who are your customers and how to reach them? who are your competitors? how fierce is the competition and so on. What content or service are you going to provide? how do you get your content or service? How are you going to promote your business? The list of pertinent questions will go on. Make sure you could answer all of them before you make a start.

All of us want to make money. But don't be fooled by quick money myth. Otherwise, you'll most probably earn an almost zero return despite of a huge amount of time, money or other resources. No matter how big your online business is, never forget the basics of doing business.