Online Marketing Opportunity

Knol is a new social content type site from Google, similar in some ways to HubPages and Squidoo. It is named Knol after a unit of knowledge.

You can write a Knol, which is basically an information article, on almost any subject. You can also add links in the text pointing to external websites, including your own. This means that when people read the Knol they may visit your site to find out more on the subject.

It looks like these links, as with most other social content sites, are not going to do much to boost search engine rankings. However, the Knol itself can rank well in Google which can mean lots of referral traffic for a high search keyword phrase.

After some spot checking of a few Knols it seems that (surprisingly) Google likes Knols! Around 25% of the main keyword phrases from the Knols we checked had a top 10 ranking for that phrase on Google.

It is too early to say for sure but this could be THE social content site to use if you want to get high rankings on Google (and who doesn’t). Why not try sharing your own knowledge by writing a Knol based on the topic of your blog or website. You could be rewarded with a healthy stream of referral traffic.

List Building

The idea with this online marketing method is that you build up a list of emails from people interested in a certain topic. Once you have the email list you send out regular newsletters, product reviews, tips or other useful information. In these emails you endorse a product and use your affiliate link, every time someone on your list buys from one of your emails you make a commission on the sale.

This is one of the most consistently successful online marketing methods. I put off trying this method for ages as it seemed to complicated to set up. Once you get started though it is not too difficult, you just need to use the best strategy and the correct tools.

Building Your List

The best way to build a list is to offer something of value to people in exchange for their email addresses. Giving away a free guide or piece of software relevant to the topic of your site is probably the best option but a newsletter can work too. If you include this offer above the fold on your website or blog with a clear call to action you will see the best results.

You can use pay-per-click adverts or other forms of advertising to send visitors to your sign up page. This can speed up the process significantly but be careful, you should not spend too much here until you start to make sales and generate income.

Marketing To Your List

The only viable way to manage and market to your list is by using an auto responder. This software will automatically send out emails to those who sign up to your list. You can program them to send out multiple emails, perhaps once a week, with different information and product recommendations.

There are some free auto responders available but I use Aweber and would strongly recommend that you do the same. Your list is potentially very valuable, you do not want to lose out on sales. The cost of the service is relatively low, currently $19 per month for the first 500 subscribers. This includes access to many other marketing tools as well as the very reliable auto responder.

Treat Your List With Care

It is important to treat the people on your list with care, they can easily unsubscribe. If you send out well-written emails with useful content, your subscribers may start looking forward to receiving them. These people could stay on your list for years and buy numerous products thorough your affiliate links.

If you send out weak emails with little or no value you will lose subscribers and miss out on sales. It is just that simple. A good option is to sign up to your own email list, this way you will read each mail as your subscribers do. If you read any emails that you think are too sales focussed or uninteresting you should either re-write them or delete them from your auto responder series.

There is no strict rule as to how often you can email your list, really it depends on how good your emails are. If you have some great information you could send them out every day, but no more than twice a week is probably safer, at least to begin with.

At the beginning of your auto responder series you may want to send out a few mails with no products or affiliate links, just top information. This is a good way of building up trust with your subscribers.

Online Marketing Methods

The aim of this section is to highlight the online marketing methods that can actually work and the best way to use each one in order to make a profit.

Contextual Advertising (AdSense)

Contextual advertising is a way of showing adverts online which relate to the context of the page they display on. The idea behind this is that if someone is reading a page about used cars they are much more likely to click on a car advert than on one about say, health insurance. With contextual advertising you get paid per click, so the more relevant the adverts are to the content the higher the click through rate (CTR) and more money goes in your pocket.

The largest contextual advertising network is Google’s AdSense program and you have probably clicked on many AdSense ads without even realising. You can submit your site to Google and if it is accepted they will give you the necessary code to add to your pages to start earning money. Google will accept most sites that have useful and original content.

With AdSense there are many different advert sizes and formats which you can customise to your liking but the best feature is the accuracy. If you have a well optimised page the adverts displayed are usually very close to the theme of the page.

In fact, this is a useful way to test the on-page optimisation of a page. Place AdSense adverts on the page, give it a few hours to settle in and check the adverts displayed. If they are relevant to the content on the page, you know you have a reasonably well optimised page for ranking in the search engines. If the adverts do not match, you need to work on the theme of the page, visit my On-Page Optimisation page for tips on how to optimise a page.

In order to maximise the CTR of the adverts, it is usually best to make the colour scheme blend in with the rest of your site. Also, the best location for AdSense ads is in the main body of the page above the fold. You can still put them in footers or side columns but the CTR will be significantly lower.

As you get paid per click, if you have little or no traffic coming to your site you will not make any real money. The amount you get paid depends on the topic of the advert. Some higher end topics like insurance will pay you over $1 per click, the average seems to be between $0.30 and $0.50 per click but some low end keywords like tattooing will pay just one or to cents per click. CTR’s also vary depending on the format and position of the adverts on a page, 3 – 4 % is probably a good target here if your adverts are placed in with the content.

From these numbers you can see that an average personal website using AdSense with under 100 visitors per day is not going to make you wealthy. You could bring in a few dollars a day though and cover your hosting costs. However, if you have a large site with lots of traffic you can make decent money, especially if it is based on one of the higher paying topics.

A few words of caution before you go and put AdSense adverts all over your website. Consider the type of website you have. If you have an e commerce site you could get paid a few cents to send a visitor away from your site when you would have made a lot more from selling one of your own products.

I worked with a client once who had an online jewellery store and he was using AdSense as a secondary income source. He didn’t realise that the adverts on his site were sending his customers away to buy jewellery from his competitors. We removed the adverts from his site and the following month his revenue increased by 12%, a lot more than his earnings from AdSense!

If you use AdSense be very careful to stick to the terms and conditions laid out by Google. Pay close attention to the number of adverts allowed per page and avoid clicking on your own adverts. This is the quickest way to get banned from using AdSense, don’t panic if it happens once or twice while you are working on your site but never click your ads intentionally. Google can ban you if they are even slightly suspicious of the activity on your account and they can also keep any funds you have built up between payment dates, so be careful.

If you do get banned there are other alternatives to AdSense. The best one I have used is Kontera’s in text advertising. The CTR’s and price per click are nearly as good as AdSense and it is fairly straight forward to add to a website.

When you are using search engine optimisation on a web site or blog it is useful to keep track of a few points to check your progress. By doing this you may be able to identify aspects which are working and those which are a waste of time. Also, it may help you to identify the cause of any problems that come up.

Track Your Indexing

Create a basic spreadsheet for each site you work on and add the following columns:

Number of pages indexed by Google
Number of pages indexed by Yahoo
Number of pages indexed by MSN
Number of backlinks reported by Yahoo

Each week use the site: command in the 3 main search engines to see how many pages are indexed and record the results on your spreadsheet. If you have a new site this should help you see the gradual indexing of your pages, if you have an existing site it will allow you to check that most of your pages are still indexed. Google will rarely index all the pages of a site.

A sudden drop in traffic is often explained by one of the search engines dropping your pages from their index. The first step to take here, depending on the search engine in question, is to submit a Google sitemap, a Yahoo URL list or submit to MSN.

When you note the number of pages indexed you should also check the number of links for your site in Yahoo Site Explorer. The best setting to use here is show inlinks ‘except from this domain’ to: ‘entire site’. You will then be able to see the effectiveness of your link building campaign over the course of time.

Track Your Traffic

It is also useful to keep a record of your monthly traffic and split it into search, referral and direct traffic sources. This will show you how your traffic grows over time and can also help you resolve problems.

If your traffic goes down one month, go back and look at what has changed since the previous month. See if the fall in traffic was from an organic, referral or direct source. You can then go further and see which search engine or which referral link was responsible for the fall and in some cases take steps to resolve the problem.

If your web stats program does not provide you with this level of detail you may want to consider Google Analytics. It is free to use, easy to install and has a good level of statistical detail.

Using The Search Query Report To Find Negative Keywords

You can use the Search Query Report in Adwords to find the actual keywords visitors searched for before clicking on your advert and entering your site. This is a really useful way of finding non-relevant keywords which are costing you money. These keywords can then be added to your negative keyword list to prevent untargeted traffic, making your Adwords campaign more efficient.

In order to run a Search Query Report select the Reports tab, ‘Create a new report’ and pick ‘Search Query Performance’ as the report type. For the settings the best to use are probably ‘account’, ’summary’ and ‘all-time’. Your campaign will need to have been running for a period of time here to get any useful results.

Once the report is complete, open it up and look through all the keywords that have been used to find your site through Adwords adverts. If your account is set up very well or if you are only using exact match keywords all the keywords may be relevant.

However, if you are using broad match and phrase match keywords there is a good chance that some of the searches used to find your site are not relevant. By this I mean a search which has no chance of a conversion because the browser is looking for a product or service that you do not sell. Go through all the results, note all the irrelevant keywords and add them to your negative keyword list.

Depending on the structure of your campaign this could result in a significant increase in efficiency and a reduction in the average cost per conversion for your account.

Is Cuil A Google Beating Search Engine?

A new search engine has just been launched called Cuil (http://www.cuil.com/), pronounced cool, named after the Gaelic word for wisdom. The reason it has been in the news is that the two main people behind the search engine are former Google employees. They were involved in making the existing Google search engine and claim that their new creation will index many more pages and provide more relevant results.

The results shown by Cuil are ordered by organisation rather than the link popularity method used by Google. Also they are displayed in 3 columns with images, giving a totally different look to their SERPs pages.

The launch of Cuil may have been over hyped, it was never really going to be better than Google straight away. Some people have been criticising the relevance of the search results already.

However, I was looking through the web stats for one of the sites I manage and there it was. Cuil was the 4th largest traffic referring search engine after the big 3 (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). That is pretty good going for a newly-launched search engine!

While it may not be the instant Google beater promised by some of the PR, it does seem to index a lot of pages. Given some time and a few improvements to the relevancy of the results, Cuil could be one of the main search engines. Watch this space.