Most ebook authors use ClickBank, PayDotCom or Commission Junction to market their products and often hand over upwards of 50% commission to the affiliate who made the sale and of course a small cut to the website they use to market it.

I have to admit that I am one such author. Through another website (that I keep completely separate from this one and has no thematic link ) I have been marketing an ebook. But I have another admission…after about 150 hits on my “pitch page” I have not made a single sale.

I have plenty of affiliates on board and a decent amount of inbound links. The pitch page is decent enough…as cheesy and tacky as these things tend to be…but no one is buying.

I think my next plan is to halve the price. If that doesn’t work I am going to remove the ebook from sale, publish it for free online and scoop in the adsense and amazon revenue.

I’ll keep you posted.

Just an afterthought. On the Clickbank marketplace you can see some limited stats for the products Clickbank offers. You can’t see sales volume but you can see that sales have been made…so someone is buying them! I just suspect that not a lot of people are making big bucks. Then I guess why would you pay $50 to a naff looking website when $20 buys you a book in a real shop by an expert?

So time to turn to off-site SEO. Well, that’s not quite true, the above mentioned post had several tips for on-site SEO that are worth reading, but I will leave that for another day.

Twitter, microblogging platform, either the coolest thing on the planet or an annoying toy for self-publicists. Well, as a blogger and a webmaster you probably fall into the self-publicist category! But what, if any, is Twitter’s value in SEO?

WordPress has some handy plugins (I am using Wordtwit, which does exactly what I want, but there are others) which allow WordPress to access your Twitter account whenever you create a new post and tweet a link and (very) brief teaser to the world. This is create, as because of the viral nature of Twitter you could get a great deal of traffic to your site.

My strategy was like this:

• Create a special Twitter account for each site.
• Install and Activate Wordtwit (2 mins).
• Create a post or two.
• Search on Twitter for keywords related to that post or the them of the site in general.
• “Follow” (i.e. subscribe) to people tweeting on similar interests.
• Often, with no prompting, they also choose to follow me.

I get new readers who are potentially interested in my site. I have not done any spamming or hard selling and anyone can stop following me at any time. Assuming that you’re not breaking any big stories you are probably not going to see huge visitor spikes, but visitors will come and they will be interested in your content. Hopefully they will retweet some of what they have seen and all their followers will get to see it too.

And that is the singular most valuable thing about Twitter for SEO, the people who use it don’t just like to see new information, they like to share it!

I know what you’re thinking…link building is good for SEO. But is it? Obviously in the early days of SEO link building and keyword stuffing were the order of the day, but Google (and Bing, Yahoo etc.) are much wiser and they know a fairly won link when they see one.

At the beginning of a project, it might well  be worth adding links to directories just to get yourself on Google’s radar, but ultimately those links count for next to nothing in terms of SERPs position and traffic flow.

Of course links from relevant sites still count, and are very important. But the best kind are one way links and those are hard to get. Google knows all about webrings and pingbacks and doesn’t give artificial one-way links much credit. It especially hates anchor text that looks like it has been provided by the benefiting site.

One of the worst things you can do is send mountains of spam to webmasters. The kind of email that says

“Dear…, I am so excited about the content of your site that I wanted to share a link. Please link to my site about Dog Shampoo…”

That kind of thing gets you know where, most webmasters, like me, delete them in bulk from our inboxes and more than likely mark them as spam.

So all you can really do is use the safe, honest methods which are pretty boring with no pyrotechnics.

• Create good content often
• Visit other people’s blogs and participate in debates
• Leave them relevant feedback
• Only link to one of your own pages if it’s genuinely relevant
• Use forums and post relevant links if allowed
• Write articles to syndicate
• Invite your readers to comment (interesting debates invite links)
• Be patient
• Use Twitter

In a nutshell, spend the time you would have spent creating spam emails for webmasters on producing content. If you are assiduous about your blogging and you have something to say that’s worth hearing, the reader’s will come!

I still think that if you have the kind of site where images are important (photo blogs, fashion sites etc.) then you would be mad not to at least experiment with image ads. Even if they are not for you, the results probably won’t be catastrophic. For example my average CTR was down by less than half a percent. A significant figure but I am glad I took the risk and find out once and for all, because now I know I can concentrate on other areas.

Just to be clear, what I found from using image ads:

• My CTR was down
• I had more very low paying clicks (bellow 10 cents)
• My overall revenue was down
• I didn’t think the image ads did my site any favours style-wise

So for me now it’s all about getting CTR back up and attracting high paying ads!

As all good bloggers know, if you want a decent click through rate (CTR) on your ads, the first port of call is the adsense heat map. As you can see, the best place to put ads is likely to be somewhere within the post.

Lots of people unnecessarily fear editing the WordPress code. In fact it is very easy.

All you need to do is go to Themes > Editor. In the right hand side bar you will see a list of files. The two you need are single.php and index.php.

Index.php controls the homepage of your blog, single.php controls individual posts.

In Index.php find the line of code that says

<div id=”container”>

Just slip your full adsense code directly underneath. That will give you an ad right above the title of the first post on your homepage, central to your readers viewpoint.

Now for the individual posts. How about having an ad indented next to the text, under the title (as in this blog)? Easy!

Open single.php and find the line of code

<div class=”entry-content”>

Underneath that, insert the following:

<div class=”alignright”> <script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-1234567890000″;
/* 336×280, created 00/00/0o */
google_ad_slot = “123456789″;
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//–>
</script><br />
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

Obviously, insert your own ad code above so you get paid! Also, change “alignright” to “alignleft” if you would prefer your ad to appear on the left. Click “update” and you will see a nice ad, and so will your readers.

If you would like to show ads in some posts but not others (or want different themes for different posts) see this excellent link.

On my sites I had pretty much ignored image ads for no particular reason. Recently I got a message from Google in my adsense account saying that I could raise my revenue by selecting image ads. I decided to give it a go.

On paper, image ads should be more profitable compared to text ads on a click by click basis. Image ads take up as much space as at least three text ads (depending on space) and therefore must out-bid those other ads. Or that is what you would think.

It seems that in fact the revenue from image ads appears to be lower. I am about four days into a one week trial of hosting image ads on another site and my revenue seems pitiful. Lots of clicks are worth less than 10c and some as low 1c.

I am going to complete my weeks testing and I will post the results here, but I don’t hold out much hope that the ads are going to “bed in” and start producing decent results.

Two points to add:

1. Click rate has not diminished much. Maybe a little but it’s hard to tell over such a short period of time.

2.The site in question is a health information site and therefore is arguable more suited to text ads. It is said that sites which favour images anyway, such as fashion and corporate sites, do better with image ads.

Whether or not image ads are going to work for you is hard to say. One piece of advice is to try them on only a few pages for a week and see what happens. I rather suspect that they won’t improve your revenue and might make it go down.

Blog Directories are just one way of increasing links and traffic flow to a blog. There are many thousands of them out there and probably not worth your time and effort to submit your site to hundreds of them.

I believe in organic SEO and therefore I am pathologically against paying for site listings and links. Apart from anything else, it puts you on a very dodgey position with the big search engines, that shun paid for linking services.

It got me wondering what the point of these blog directories is. Does anyone atcually use them to find blogs? My guess is not. The directories that came top of Google SERPS were generally poorly laid out and hard to use. I go the distinct impression that the only visitors are bloggers who are looking for a listing and an inbound link.

So is that all these blog directories are? Glorified link farms? Well, I guess so. It’s a shame really but then if a blog is worth its salt then it will be listed in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. so who needs a blog directory anyway?

It would probably be better if the big search engines stopped putting any store in links from directories as they are not truly earned links and show nothing of value in the blog.

NB I should just add that Technorati does look as if it has value to internet users…but it was the only one!

What do you think?

isit them

So are any adsense alternatives worth considering?

Well, in my opinion not. I have tried Oxado and didn’t get anywhere, at the time they just didn’t have enough ads in my niche.

Here is a list of alternatives but I doubt you will find them half as good as adsense.

AdBrite
Bidvertiser
Infolinks
Chitika
Clicksor
AdToll
Exit Junction
Yahoo Publisher Network
Target Point
Fastclick

There are others, but most of the decent ones are only interested in sites with thousands of page views per day, not so much the little guy.

Think of anything that should be on the list, let me know!

For those of us who like full PC functionality on the move weighing around 1kg then netbooks are the way forward and so cheap.

But which one should you buy? Netbooks tend to have roughly the same spec for roughly the same price, so other factors that are perhaps more personal come into play. I took advice from Netbook Showdown and bought their top netbook of that time (Sept 09) – the Toshiba NB200.

It is a great netbook:

It has a great keyboard

It has a fantastic battery life, even compared to newer rivals

It has built in Hard-drive protection

A good screen

But my one had one problem. It stopped working, and it wasn’t going to be covered by the warranty. The fact of the matter is, a netbook is a laptop and that means you should be able to use it on your lap. But if you do then it gets hot.

Through perfectly normal and legitimate use I managed to fry my mainboard. Now, if I try and turn my Toshiba on, all i get is a few seconds of whir from the hard-drive and a green power light, no post and no boot.

I could buy a new main board but once I’ve had it fitted it will cost the same as a new netbook, so that is what I will buy next – haven’t decided which on yet. Any ideas or recommendations please leave me a comment!

With affiliate marketing you do tend to have panic moments, when time goes by and you haven’t made any sales even though you have been sending your readers through (readers whose clicks would have made you revenue on PPC).

But fear not, my affiliate anxiety-busting tip of the day is to think about how you attract potential customers. After all, assuming your product is good it’s just a numbers game: send the customers and the sales will come.

The important question is why should customers come to your site before they go to the main sales page? What is in it for them? And the answer is added value. The point is to pre-sell and to ad value probably by answering questions or allaying fears or anxiety they might have about buying the product.

The most common questions that potential customers want to know are “Is this a scam?” and “Does it work?”. If you can answer one of those questions then you are likely to attract readers and convert sales. Of course this only works if you can give positive answers because you feel genuinely enthusiastic about the product.

In a post on another blog recently there was an article entitled Panic Away Review. This post did some clever things:

It offered to review the product and therefore answer the two important questions (is it a scam? does it work?).

It offered impartial advice to the panic attack sufferer that might be interested in buying the product.

It gave negative as well as positive opinions, which increases customer confidence: people know that nothing is perfect and that if it seems to be too good to be true it probably is.

It offered an alternative product so sales could still be made from those potential customers who read the review and decided against Panic Away.

You might read it and think the post isn’t that good, but you don’t want it to be so good people spend too much time on it. You want people to absorb the information quickly and then click through on one of the affiliate links provided.

If you have nay further tips or comments to drop me a line below!