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This issue will be published on or before November 2,
2007.
Table of Contents for this issue.....
-
Authors
Comments
-
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments
-
The
Best Domain Name
-
Defensive Domain Names
-
New
Internet Tools
-
Google
Adsense
-
Google
Images
Author's Comments
Where did October go? It seems like yesterday we published
the last issue and here we are starting November.
I
love the fall in South Texas. It has finally cooled down and the
weather has been beautiful. This is the time for football and
hunting.
It
is also the time to start thinking about how to benefit from the
forthcoming Christmas season if you are selling online.
By
the time you get the next issue of Boomer eZine, we will all have
enjoyed Thanksgiving (in the US). Linda and I wish all our readers
the very best during November. No matter where you live, remember
to give thanks for your blessings.
Q &
A, Suggestions and Comments
If you have anything for this
section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article,
please use this suggestion
form to give us your suggestions or your input.
With your help, we can improve the Boomer eZine.
This link will open a new page.
Close the page to return to Boomer eZine.
The
Best Domain
Name
This
is giving away one of my secrets, but I consider that my job is to
help you, the readers of Boomer eZine, so here goes.
A
very common search on the Net is “best ______”.
You fill in the blank. I
have started using this domain name concept to build websites that
combine pay per click traffic with organic traffic (non-paid traffic
from the search engines).
I
also buy the domain names if they look good and hold them for the future
since I cannot build too many websites at a time.
You can register a domain name for under $10.00 per year so why
not hold a name that looks good. It
might be a good investment for you.
You can build the website or you might be able to sell the name
for a profit.
The
site I am building now is www.the-best-gps.com
which mainly focuses on selling the Garmin Nuvi 350 automotive GPS unit
through Amazon.
I
started this site as a landing site for pay per click advertising from
Microsoft AdCenter, but the natural traffic is building.
It is only coming from MSN and Live Search since I have not
focused on search engine optimization for Yahoo and Google.
I
always include a script from www.statcounter.com
and Google Analytics on every web page I build so I can see how viewers
track through the sites and what keywords are attracting customers.
Note
that both Google Analytics and Statcounter are free.
See the previous article on Statcounter in Volume
1, Issue 40. The article is
titled "Another Internet Tool". This
article includes a video about Statcounter.
Here
is a look at the keyword report from Statcounter for the-best-gps.com.
Other
keywords not shown in the picture:
which
garmin gps is the best
which
is the best gps?
who
is the best gps
which
is the best nuvi?
best
rated auto gps
These
are not numbers that are going to blow anyone away, but the important
thing to remember – the searches on a variation of “best” or
“the best” come from a viewer who is focused on finding information
and is probably going to buy a GPS.
And the traffic is FREE.
This
free traffic is coming primarily from MSN and Live Search.
The-best-gps.com
is number one on MSN and Live Search (they come from the same Microsoft
search engine) for the keyword “the best gps”. It is third on these
same two searches for the keyword “best gps”.
I
am selling GPS’s on Amazon and doing OK.
I have a respectable click through rate (CTR) on the pay per
click advertising, but I see now that I need more free traffic to the
site to average down the cost for each GPS that I sell.
I
did not originally make this site a Site Build It (SBI) site, since
I originally planned for it to be comprised of a couple of landing
pages. As I added to the
site and it grew, the organic traffic started to grow.
Mind you, I was not working on search engine optimization (SEO),
but I will take good luck whenever it comes along.
Now that I see the potential for free traffic, I am moving this
site to SBI so it will assist me with the search engine optimization
(SEO). This will drive the
average selling cost for each GPS down with the free traffic.
Right
now, SBI has a Halloween
/ Days of the Dead sale on for an extra SBI site for an additional
$100 so I can buy two sites for $399.
Based on the concept of “the best” or “best”, I am buying
two sites. I will use one to
build out the-best-gps.com. The
other site will be to build my next “best” project www.the-best-HDTV.com.
This domain name is parked on SBI right now and if you click it,
you will land on a sales page for SBI.
I plan to start this site as soon as I migrate the GPS site to
SBI.
If you are interested in this sale, check it out at Halloween
/ Days of the Dead sale.
Why
will I move a site from a web host (Hostexcellence.com) that charges
$6.97 per month to host six websites to one that charges $299 per year
for one site (Site Build It)? Simple
math! The more free
traffic that comes to the site and buys a GPS, the lower the cost per
sale.
Sale
price less cost of sale =
profit. Also, I do not want
to tackle search engine optimization with Google without SBI to help me.
It does so much of the SEO work automatically.
The
other part of the equation is that Google controls a large volume of the
Internet search traffic. If
I use SBI SEO to get my keywords ranked high on Google, the free traffic
to the site will explode, and I will sell a lot more GPS’s from free
traffic.
As
a closing note, many people have already picked domains named “bestdomainname”,
but they may not have picked “best-domainname” or
“thebestdomainname” or “the-best-domainname”.
I have found that putting “the” in front of the name still
gets about the same search engine treatment as the keyword without it.
If
you have a passion that would make a good website or if you identify a
hot market that you feel you could exploit, jump in there and purchase
that domain name, “the best whatever”.
Before
you jump in, look at the variations of the “best” domain name you
are considering. See if
a “best” domain is built or is just parked.
If it is built, see if you think you can do a better job.
If you use SBI to help you, my bet is you can beat the
competition.
Don
’t
sit here think about it! Do it!
Defensive
Domain Names
I have mentioned defensive domain
names before in the Boomer eZine, but in looking back, I never wrote an
article about the concept.
A defensive domain name is a
name very similar to your main domain name.
You need to protect it so someone does not take advantage of your
hard work to promote your domain by purchasing a domain name so close to
your name that people can confuse the two names and your traffic will
end up on the other domain.
I was reminded of this when I was
evaluating the “best” names for “best HDTV”.
bestHDTV.com and best-HDTV.com are taken.
I purchased the-best-HDTV.com some time ago, but I did not check
on thebestHDTV.com. When I
checked on the names while writing the previous article, I found it was
available and bought it to protect the-best-HDTV.com, which is the name
I will use for the main website.
Sure, it costs about $10 per
year to own each domain name, but I recommend that you control the
domain names that are similar to your main domain name.
New Internet Tools
These may not be new, but they are
newly mentioned in Boomer eZine. Credit
where credit is due. I
learned about these from an article on Site Pro News http://www.sitepronews.com.
I get the Site Pro News email newsletter and it always contains
some great information.
XML
Sitemap Generator http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
The XML Sitemap Generator trawls through all levels of your site
to generate an XML sitemap. It also gives you a running count of pages,
provides a text-based URL líst and a HTML sitemap you can import
straight into your site. The online version of the generator is free for
sites of less than 500 pages, but there's also a low-cost script-based
version for large sites that can be set up to automatically index your
site, upload an updated XML file to your server and ping Google and
Yahoo when done.
Price: Free for sites of 500 pages or less
Google
Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics
Google Analytics is free web-based site metrics / analytics
software hosted by Google. After you include tracking code on all
selected pages of your site, Google collects data regarding visitor
activity and then you are able to log into an Analytics interface and
view site activity and produce reports.
Price: $0
I
plan to write an extensive article about Google Analytics in the next
Boomer eZine.
Aweber
Aweber is a multiple auto responder and mailing líst management
service rolled into one. Members can send an unlimited number of
campaigns, follow up messages, and newsletters to an unlimited number of
approved opt-ín lists. For newsletter purposes, a wide range of
templates are provided, as are free training guides and videos to help
you create campaigns.
Price: From USD 19.95 per month
Aweber is the autoresponder that we use to
handle the mailing list for Boomer eZine. I
consider it to be outstanding.
Google
AdSense - A few pennies at a time.
Back
in Volume 1, Issue 49 of Boomer eZine (http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I49_031607.htm),
I thought I had found a better ad system than Adsense.
This ad system inserted ads that pointed to Clickbank rather than
using Adsense. The reward
per click was a commission from Clickbank which is usually in the range
of 50% of the sale price.
I
switched the advertising in Boomer eZine over to this and waited for the
money to come rolling in ---- and I was still waiting when I decided to
switch back to Adsense on the October 2007 issue.
The
choice was a few sales from the Clickbank system versus many clicks on
Adsense ads at pennies per click.
Let’s
discuss the Adsense program on Retirement Jobs Online (RJO) as an
example. Site Build It (the
RJO web host) encourages you to not try to monetize your site too
quickly. After I built the
site, I placed a few recommendations to various products on the site,
but I did not put any Adsense ads on RJO.
I wanted to wait until the traffic on the site started to build
to a respectable level.
About
the second week of October, I decided to start placing Adsense on the
RJO site. This is a big job
since there are 72 pages on the site and I have to edit each page to
place the ads where I want them.
I
decided to take the page popularity rank off the Site Build It traffic
reports and start adding Adsense to the most popular pages and work down
to the least popular page. At
the same time that I am adding the Adsense, I am also adding the script
to the page for Google Analytics so I am going to do this with every
page and it will take a while.
Adsense
will not make you rich unless you specialize in Adsense and have several
websites with high traffic. However,
if you are a retiree living on a fixed income (social security and
retirement savings), $100 - $200 per month from Adsense is welcome.
This is achievable from Adsense if you are getting moderate
traffic to your site.
Look
into Google Adsense. Consider
starting a blog or building a website on which to place your Adsense
ads. You will need to drive
traffic to the blog or website so do not think that all you have to do
is create the blog or site and sit back.
You will have to work at traffic generation to make Adsense pay.
But when traffic starts to hit your site and click on the Adsense
ads, you will start receiving that monthly check that helps your
finances.
Google
Images
I
admit it. I was not aware of
the power of Google Image Search until my recent experience with it on
our Retirement Jobs Online (RJO) website.
As
you probably already know, RJO is a Site Build It (SBI) site.
SBI has great a great traffic analysis section that I enjoy
reading each morning to study the traffic from the day before and the
sources of the traffic.
I
always check the number of visits, the number of unique visitors, and
the keywords they used to find the site.
I noticed last month that I was starting to get hits from the
keyword “retirement” which is not a keyword that I target.
The keyword “retirement” is super popular and I chose not to
even attempt to compete for it since the big investment companies and
other companies with deep pockets pay big bucks for it on the pay per
click sites.
I
kept watching my traffic numbers for “retirement” and they kept
climbing so I though there was something wrong with the SBI reporting
software. I sent an email to
SBI support and as usual, I received a very quick response.
Support
told me that the traffic for the keyword “retirement” was coming
from Google Image Search.
Sure
enough, when I went back to my SBI traffic reports and looked at sources
of traffic, Google Image Search appeared several times from several
different countries.
To
see what my viewers were seeing, I did a Google Image Search on
“retirement”.
Here
is the standard Google search page.
The link for Image Search is indicated by the arrow.
When
I searched, lo and behold, the picture that I use on the RJO home page
showing a street sign that says “Retirement Lane” is number 5 on the
image search results for “retirement”.
That picture is an eye catcher and it is responsible for most of
the image search traffic.
Now
the rest of the story, I purchased the picture from a photo site to use
on the home page. My
thoughts were that it conveyed a strong picture to a visitor about
“strolling down retirement lane”.
When
you put a picture on your site, always give it an “Alt Tag” (correct
name is alt attribute, but no one uses that description).
This is a text label explaining what the picture is.
It is from the Alt Tag that the search engines get the text
information to know what the picture is for entering it in the image
search engine database.
Here
is the HTML code for the picture on the home page of Retirement Jobs
Online (the HTML greater and less than signs are removed so your browser
does not think this is an HTML command and put the picture on the page
rather than the HTML code). The
highlighted text is the alt tag.
img
src="http://www.boomer-ezine.com/images/RetirementLane.jpg"
width="225" height="188" align="center" alt="Picture
of Retirement Lane Sign"
I used to think
“why bother to put an alt tag on a picture? It
is an old fashioned HTML practice for people with low speed connections
who do not download graphics.” WRONG!
It still works that way, but it also assists people with
disabilities to know what the graphic is AND it gives the search
engines the necessary text to enter the graphic into the image search
database.
When you set up a
picture or graphic, always give it an alt tag and use one of your
associated keywords in the alt tag so it can help you attract traffic
from the images searches on the search engines.
Search engine
traffic is free, and we should use every technique to attract it.
That wraps up
this issue. Until next
month, stay tuned.
John and
Linda Howe
www.boomer-ezine.com
http://www.entrepreneur-ezine.com
www.boomer-guru.com
www.boomer-entrepreneur.com
www.boomer-marketplace.com
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