AdMoolah News and Views

I’m testing out a new widget called BlugRush from Income.com’s John Reese. You should be able to see the widget in the right sidebar.

The idea behind the widget is that it displays headlines from other BlogRush users on you website, and your blog’s headlines get displayed on other people widgets. So it is basically a way of gaining some extra traffic to you blog. For every visitor that sees the widget on your blog, you earn credits, and those credits are used to display the latest headline from your blog on other sites.

They also have a referral system in place where you can get a percentage of the credits for every person that signs up under you. The referral system goes down ten levels, so people who get into this early may get quite a few visitors from this. I guess it’s too early to tell how many visitors, I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

A new website ReviewBack launched today. It provides a service where people can review each others blog. The sign up is free and there are no fees involved in getting or giving reviews.

This service is sort of like ReviewMe or PayPerPost, except that instead of paying cash for a review, you pay by providing your own review back to the site that reviewed you. So far, I don’t see any signs of how they are going to monetize this service, but I assume that it will be advertising based revenue.

This seems like a great way for smaller blogs to get some link love and attention from other bloggers. I have signed up, along with about 60 other blogs. Right now there hasn’t been any “review action”, so I’m not even sure how the whole process works. If you want to find out how this thing work, sign up and request a review from me! I have to warn you that I will be very very picky about who I accept a review exchange from.

(I hope you don’t mind me plugging my new site again, but I am sure this announcement will appeal to a lot of you.)

I have enabled a new feature on SEOyak.com. Whenever you submit a story, you can create a text ad that will be displayed permanently on the story page. SEOyak.com participants know the value of a text link, so it should be a great incentive for users to start to submit stories. Here are details of the ad program.

So sign up now, or if you are already signed up, go submit a story.

One of my favorite sessions at PubCon was Viral and WOMM Marketing Management. All the speakers were good, but I found Lawrence Coburn’s talk about web widgets particularly interesting. A widget is a small piece of code that can be placed onto a website that will provide some kind of functionality to the users of a site. Some example of popular widgets is the embedded YouTube player that you see on countless blogs, or StatCounter. For some more examples of widgets see Steve Rubel’s blog post.

One reason web widgets are good for publishers is because they are a great way to build links. The HTML for the widget almost always includes a link back to the site of the widget creator. This can be a very powerful source of links. Statcounter.com, for example, has over 50 million backlinks, according to Yahoo. This is because whenever someone uses a counter widget from StatCounter.com, they get a backlink. StatCounter.com is the number one result for “web tracker”, “hit counter” and “web stats” on Google.

One great piece of advice that Lawrence gave during his talk was rotating the text of the link back to your site. Having identical text in your links doesn’t look very natural to search engines, so rotating the text that is displayed can help with rankings. It also allows you to target different keyword phrases. Another good idea is to provide links to different pages of your site, not just the home page. Again this is something that looks more natural to the search engines.

Web Widget Resources

Lawrence has a blog about widgets called Sexy Widgets.

One interesting service is, MuseStorm, which provides tools for building widgets. However, as far as I can tell, a widget built with MuseStorm do not contain links back to your site. Update: It appears that publishers can have links back to their own sites using MuseStorm.

In webmaster forums people often caution others not to build links too quickly. The search engines do not like unnatural linking patterns and quickly adding links to a site can be a sign of an unnatural pattern. If you go out one day and buy 100,000 links from every page two large websites, that is probably pretty unnatural and the search engines wouldn’t really like it very much. But is building links quickly always a bad thing?

There are ways to build links quickly without being penalized for them. A good example of the is the launch ofReviewMe. ReviewMe has built up a lot of links since their launch less than a month ago. Yahoo now shows 19,502 links to ReviewMe.com. To show that ReviewMe is not in the Google sandbox, I did a search for ‘paid reviews’ on Google, and ReviewMe comes up as the fifth site in the SERPS. So it seems like they manages to build links quickly and properly. How did they manage to do this?

They managed to get very natural looking links by eating their own dog food and paying lots and lots of bloggers to write posts about them. This resulted in links from within the content of pages from a large variety of sites. The strategy seems to work. This is similar to what happens when stories go to the front page of Digg. Many people see the link and link to it from their own blogs and websites.

So, if you are getting links naturally, don’t worry about getting too many too quickly. Google realizes that links do spread quickly on the Internet.

There are two sites that launched yesterday that seem to be getting some good results. Both are getting impressive statistics with different viral marketing approaches.

The first is ConquerYouNiche.com (affiliate link), which I mentioned yesterday. This forum allows user to display their own ads. When you post or read the forum you get credits which are exchanged for displaying ads. You also earn ad displays from people you refer. It seems like this idea has really taken off because they already have over 8000 registered users! This was a smart viral marketing plan by the forum owner. This type of incentive would be difficult to reproduce outside of the Internet Marketing world, however, because most people wouldn’t care about being able to display their own ads.

The second one is ReviewMe, which I also wrote about yesterday. They are using a more brute-force approach by paying bloggers to write about them. It seems to be working too, a Technorati search for ReviewMe shows about 140 blogs mentioning them in the last 24 hours. These are links that will be in the middle of highly targeted content. Their Search Engine Ranking should be going through the roof pretty soon.

These numbers are great for a 24 hour period. Viral marketing is great way to get a lot of people to your site quickly if you do it right.

I am on a bunch of Internet Marketing email lists, and about 99% of the emails I get are crap. But I ran across something fairly interesting today. There is a new forum called the Conquer Your Niche Marketing Forum (that’s an affiliate link).

I found this one interesting because they offer you incentives to post by offering ad space on the web site. Unlike AdSense revenue sharing sites, this one lets you put up you own text links. I like this idea, because the revenue from your own ads could be much better than putting AdSense ads on a forum. It will also bring in a variety of ads from all the participants, instead of repeating the same AdSense ads everyone has seen 100s of times.

And, like all internet marketing ideas, they have an affiliate program where you earn more ad space for referring members.

I’m not sure if the forum itself will be any good, it just launched and there aren’t a lot of real posts yet. But, it does seem like a neat way of getting some ads in front of people so I’ll keep my eye on it for a little while.

Linkbaiting is a hot topic in the SEO world these days. As old-school link building techniques such as directories, link-exchanges and buying links become less effective, SEOs are trying to get (Gasp!) natural links. Linkbaiting is just a tactic to try to build content that will attract natural links. This fits in nicely with social media sites, such as Digg and del.icio.us that have been all the rage lately. Getting linked from these social media sites is likely to result in many bloggers writing entries about it. Done right, there is a viral spread of the link around the web, resulting in hundreds or even thousands of natural links.

It sounds fairly simple, but it’s not. If it was simple everyone would do it, right? Some of the critical aspects to getting linked to include getting the right idea, having good headlines, and getting it in front of the social media sites and bloggers in the best light possible.

The best piece of linkbait I came up with for AdMoolah was the AdSense Revenue Sharing page I started in January. According to Yahoo, that page has close to 100 links to it, including some high quality ones from places like SearchEngineJournal and ProBlogger. I don’t think linkbaiting wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but I knew it would attract a lot of attention. I didn’t promote it very well and didn’t position it well at social media sites. If I did, who knows how many more links I could have gotten.

SEOs are starting to provide link baiting services. They will help you come up with the idea for link bait, develop it, and make sure it gets the right exposure. These services are not cheap though, they start at $5,000 for the basics, and go up from there. Here is a list of linkbaiting services:

• Andy Hagans
• SEOMoz
• Stuntdubl
• Text Link Ads

At these prices, I’m not sure how much business they are getting. It would be interesting to get get the feedback of someone who had used these services. Maybe somebody with deep pockets (like ShoeMoney) could test out all 4 services?

Search Engine Roundtable today had a post about some free coupons for CPC advertising.

Get $50 in your account when you sign up for a new advertiser at MSN’s adCenter and Google’s AdWords.

PDF file of $50 Coupon for adCenter. Note that these are good for US residents only.
Form to receive a $50 coupon for AdWords. I’m not sure what restrictions this coupon has.

If you’ve never tried advertising before, this is a good chance to do so. If you manage to get $0.05 clicks, you can get 2000 targeted visitors for $10.00. Not a bad deal.

Note that both adCenter and AdWords have $5.00 USD activation fees that need to be paid.

I recently bought and read Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and I am very glad I did.

I’m not usually one to go out and buy e-books, but I had been reading Aaron’s blog for quite some time and found that he always has good sensible advice. The book is very similar. It isn’t full of hype and get rich quick schemes, and there are no affiliate links in the book. What it does have is solid information for the full length of its 256 pages. I came up with a lot of ideas while I was reading it and had to keep a notebook on hand so I could scribble down notes as I went.

The book covers a variety of topics that web publishers need to know: writing for search engines, link building, pay-per-click, overviews of the major search engines and more. Each topic has the in-depth coverage it deserves. The content is very current and covers the latest on every SEO technique.

The one small problem I did find with the book is that it did not always flow smoothly. Since the book is an ongoing work in progress (and you get free lifetime updates when you buy the book) it has become a little disjointed in places. It wasn’t disruptive enough to make understanding the book difficult, it just seemed a little clunky at times.

Overall, the book is great, and I highly recommend you buy it now so you can start increasing your traffic right away.