AdMoolah News and Views

Here is a list of the blogs that I consider essential reading for any web publisher. I tried to be selective and keep it to a reasonable size.

AdSense/PPC

JenSense – Making Sense of Contextual Advertising – Jennifer always has the latest scoop on AdSense and other ad programs.
Inside AdSense – Google official AdSense blog.
inside AdWords – Google official AdWords blog.
Yahoo! Publisher Network – Yahoo’s official YPN blog.
Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense – Eric Giguere always offers good advice on AdSense and other publisher related issues.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Book.com – Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook (aff. link) offers great SEO tidbits.
Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Graywolf always has an interesting tae on the SEO world.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – Solid SEO advice.
SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO BlogShedding light on the darker side of SEO.

Search

John Battelle’s Searchblog – Author of “The Search” has excellent insights into the world of search.
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – This Google employee always has good advice for publishers who are looking to keep clear of being labeled a spammer by Google.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ – Danny Sullivan’s SEW is an authoritative site,
Search Engines News – Great source for search engine marketing news

General Publishing

Shoemoney – Skills to pay the bills – Jeremy is a very successful publisher and has some great insights and speaks his mind.
Copyblogger – Great tips on who to write to attract traffic and sell.
AdMoolah News and Views – Of course I have to add my own blog!

Blogging

ProBlogger Blog Tips – The resource for anyone who has a blog.
Sifry’s Alerts – David Sifry runs Technorati and has a good grasp one what’s going on in the blogging world.

JenSense has the scoop on a new feature on AdSense for Search that allows you to open the search results on your own page instead of a page at Google.

This will be great for publishers who weren’t using AdSense for search because they didn’t want to send traffic off their own sites.

Google has a help page with the implementation details.

The ProductWiki Blog has an interesting post on comparing their revenue from AdSense versus their revenue from shopping.com affiliate ads. They found that the shopping.com affiliate program was 4.6 times more effective than AdSense was.

The lesson I take from this is that you should never settle for just on advertising source. See what else is out there and try it out. There are many different ad and affiliate programs, one of them could be making you a lot more money!

Found via Seth Godin’s Blog

If you have two sites in a similar niche, should you put links between them?

This is a difficult question. With the popularity of webmasters doing link exchanges to try to boost their ranking in search engines, Google has decided to devalue reciprocal links. So linking two of your own sites together may not help you get better ranking from Google. It is often better to stay with one-way linking from one of sites to another. To get the maximum boost in Google, it is usually better to have links from one of your higher ranking sites to a lower one.

On the other hand, having links between two related sites can help you get traffic directly. People see the link on one site, click it, and discover your other site.

So we have a little dilemma. We can link our sites together with reciprocal links and risk not getting ranked as well as we could in Google, or we can stick with one way links and lose some potential traffic from one site to another. What do we do?

The solution I have come up with is make one of the links a link that will not been seen by search engine spiders. If I have two sites that are related I will still link the higher ranked page to the lower ranked page using a regular link, but I will use a JavaScript link from the lower ranked page to the higher ranked page. If you want to be extra cautious, this link can also be redirected through a page that has a “nofollow” robot meta tag.

Of course, this same strategy will work if you have 3, 4 or even more sites that you want to interlink.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on this linking strategy.

Coincidentally, Eric Giguere also wrote a post about interlinking sites yesterday, but he has a different strategy.

AOL recently released a document on the Internet containing query data for about 20 million searches from 658,000 different users.

This has been seen as a huge mistake on AOL part and raises some serious privacy concerns. The AOL user IDs in the data had been replaced by random numbers, but there was still quite a bit of private data in the search queries such as Social Security Numbers and credit card numbers. See Elliot Back’s post about the privacy issues.

The reason this is of interest to publishers is that it is a very extensive source of information about keywords and search behavior. Mining the data can reveal which keyword phrases are popular and what alternate phrases people use when one phrase does not show the desired results. This data is much more detailed than anything obtained from sources such as Wordtracker or Overature keyword listings.

I expect to see people’s analysis of this data popping up soon.

See this Digital Point thread for more discussion.

Update: Here are some websites which you can use to access the data:
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/ – Users can query by user id, keyword, date or clicked website
http://fuaol.com/ – A list of the top 5000 keywords
http://simplifiedsec.com/KeywordDigger.html – Search by keyword

Update 2: http://dontdelete.com/ This looks like a good, quick interface to the data.

The equation for calculating how much revenue is generated with a CPC program is:

pageviews * CTR (click-through-rate) * RPC (revenue per click)

So far, this blog has focused on CPC and RPC. Lately I have become more interested in the pageviews part of this equation – basically increasing traffic. This is were the real growth opportunity is. CTR and RPC will always be limited, but traffic is almost limitless. Even giants like Yahoo and Google worry about increasing page views.

So, from here on in you’ll start seeing posts about things like marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), link building and buying advertising. I hope you enjoy exploring these topics with me.

I will still be posting about the advertising related topics I always have, so if you like that part of the blog, please do stick around.

One things that has bothered me about YPN is that they are very slow to report the previous day’s earnings in performance reports. I often want to check my balance for the day before I turn in, which is often just after midnight Pacific Time, and it never has the figures for yesterday’s revenue at that point. Today I realized that there is an easy way to calculate the previous day’s earnings.

First, note the “pending balance”, which is equal to the previous month’s earnings plus the earnings accumulated so far this month. Then run a performance report with a date range that include the previous month up to the current day. Subtract the “Report Totals” figure from the “pending balance” and you end up with yesterday’s revenue.

For example, today is August 3rd just after midnight Pacific Time. Let’s say my pending balance shows $500.00 (not the real figure). I run a report with a date range of July 1st to August 2nd. The report does not show August 2nd’s revenue and the total shows $450.00. I now subtract $450.00 from $500.00 and I know that I have earned $50.00 for August 2nd.

Now I can go to bed satisfied that I know how much I earned from YPN the day before.