AdMoolah News and Views

Google has announced a new Custom Search Engine.

Similar products have been available from other companies for some time. There is Rollyo, Eurekster’s Swicki and Yahoo Search Builder. They all basically offer a customizable search engine by allowing you to enter a series of URLs that will be searched. This allows for the building of verticalsearch engines. For example, if you wanted to build a custom search engine for remote control cars, you can enter the URLs of all you favorite remote control car sites, and the search will select pages just from those URLs.

Google’s offering has a pretty good combination of features, compared to the others, including:

• Unlimited URLs. You can enter in as many URLs to include in the search results as you like.
• The ability to monetize the searches. You can provide your AdSense publisher ID and the search will be just like AdSense for Search.
• It allows you to specify if you want to only search in those URLs, or gives those URLs preference over all the others.

For some more opinions on Google’s Custom Search Engine, see Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Aaron Wall and JenSense.

There have been a lot of new advertising networks popping up in the last month or so. With many people complaining that AdSense isn’t doing as well for them as it used to, I think many publishers are ready to look for alternatives. Here is a quick overview of five networks that have been announced recently.

Performancing Partners Ad Network
This is a advertising network for blogs. Advertisers can buy ad spots on you blog on a monthly basis. Performancing has an “Auto Pricing” feature which determines the price of an ad based on your blogs statistics. These prices can be overridden by the blog owner. You can choose to place anywhere from 1 to 6 ads on your blog. When there are no ads to display, an ad for Performancing is shown. The good thing about about these Performancing ads is you get a 5% referral program for anyone who signs up through them. I have signed up for this program and am testing it on my blog right now (you can see ad on the the right sidebar). It takes 48 hours for the auto pricing to kick in, so I’m not sure what to expect yet.

Performancing pays 70% of the revenue to the blog owner. They also have a 5% lifetime referral bonus for any publishers or advertisers who sign up through your ad.

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Text Link Ads’ Feedvertising
Feedvertising allows you to insert text ads into your blog entries. The interesting thing about this is that it allows you to insert your own ads for free, or if you like to sign up for their advertising marketplace so advertisers can pay for ads. I have not yet used the Feedvertsing program, but I am considering trying it out. I like the fact the ads are unobtrusive and are clearly labeled as ads.

Feedvertising is free to use for your own ads. Publishers get 50% of revenue generated from the sales in the advertising marketplace. They also have a referral program which pays $25.00 for any referred visitor that results in a sale or gets accepted into the publisher program.

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Texsy
Texsy is an ad program that inserts ads into the text of web pages. Texsy underlines product names on your web sites and underlines them. When users hover over the underlined words, an ad pop up. The ads that are shown are from Amazon, Ebay and Shopping.com. Publishers must sign up for these affiliate programs for them to show up on web pages.

Texsy inserts its own ads into the publisher sites 20% of the time.

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AdQuick
This is a new advertising program that I don’t know much about. The web site does not provide much information, there is no Terms and Conditions page yet, the FAQ page is empty and they provide little information about how the program works. I’ve sent a message to them asking for more information. I’ll make a new post if I find anything significant.
Update: They now have a FAQ posted on the site, see: http://www.adquick.co.uk/faq.php. Still no T&C though, so I’m not signing up for now.

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ReviewMe
Review me is a new advertising program from Andy Hagans. Bloggers are paid to write reviews about an advertisers program. The review will have full disclosure that reviewer has been paid, and the review do not need to be positive. ReviewMe is not yet open to the public, but should be shortly.

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I’d love to hear comments from anyone who has experience with these networks.

The PubCon Las Vegas 2006 conference is shaping up to be a great one. This is the first major web publishing conference I am attending so I am really looking forward to it.

The list of names of people I recognize that are giving keynotes and sessions is huge: John Battelle, Guy Kawasaki, Jennifer Slegg, Barry Schwartz, Rand Fishkin, Andy Hagans, Brett Tabke, Vanessa Fox, Aaron Wall, Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Greg Boser, and Danny Sullivan.

The price is great too; $489 USD for a 4 day conference is very reasonable. I’m used to going to software development conferences that are $500 a day or more.

The other thing I love about this conference is that it is in Las Vegas, baby! I’m already booked at the MGM Grand, which is just a quick monorail ride from the Convention Center. If your still looking for a good price on a hotel, try checking out Las Vegas Hotel Deals and Specials.

If you are going to be there, be sure to look for me, I’ll be the guy with the Mohawk (if I don’t have to go on a business trip between now and the conference). Email me at tlainevool [at] admoolah [dot] com if you want to arrange a time to meet and chat or have a drink.

I originally posted my AdSense Revenue Sharing List back in February. Since then I have added at least a few more sites to the list every month. It has now grown to 50 sites. As usual, if you know of other, feel free to email me at tlainevool [at] admoolah.com

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.

When you decide to create a new website what is the first question you ask yourself? Is it: How am I going to make money from this site? If it is, you may be asking the wrong question.

In a recent TechCrunch article, Venture Capitalist Paul Graham said:

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don’t do that, it won’t matter how clever your business model is.

Of course you have to have a business model eventually. But experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.

Many people in the web publishing industry do this the opposite way. The webmaster forums are full of people asking What niche should create a site in? or What are the highest paying keywords? The question they should be asking is: What website should I build that people would want to visit?. The time to figure out how to monetize a site is after the visitors are there. This is one thing that makes AdSense so great. You can put it on a site, not worry about it, and it will generate money. Once you have more traffic you can start experimenting with different affiliate programs, or finding advertisers directly. AdSense is a good default business model until you can figure out the real business model.

Seth Godin has a recent blog entry about people who started doing something out of interest, and ended up being very successful and making a lot of money. The people who started Apple, Yahoo, Digg, and BoingBoing didn’t have a large paycheck in mid when they started up.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that pioneers are almost never in it for the money. The smart ones figure out how to take a remarkable innovation and turn it into a living (or a bigger than big payout) but not the other way around.

So the first question you should ask yourself when creating a new website should be What do people want in a website?

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.