Best CPM Rate for Your Blogs Page View

Unless you are the top 100 websites in the USA and you have a group of dedicated sales people trying to sell you ad slots, probability is that you are not really that happy with your CPM rate that you are generating through your advertising network. Unlike you guys I also have tried out a bunch of online marketing companies. I have tried them individually, as well as mixing with each other. After trying them out for a while with different variation I will suggest the following advertising networks for anyone who is trying to generate a HIGH CPM rate for his/her website/blog.

Google Adsense:
Google Adsense, by far the best payout for ECPM. Google adsense program is easy to get approved and they pay on time and so far they paid every time.  I have seen up to $5/ECPM with Google. But again, on average it’s safe to say that about $3/ECPM is what I was making on average. Since Google was pretty continuous with its revenue, I was happy but not satisfied. So, the only things that I could do is the raise the number if impression by increasing the number of ad slots. This also has a limitation since Google will allow only 3 ad slots in a given page. So, I moved forward by trying the following.

Kontera:
Thanks to DP I found out about contextual ads and I started to look around. Based on the user reviews I went with Kontera, which so far has treated me, nice. I am generating a decent amount of revenue through them every month. But as far as the $/CPM goes, Kontera has been consistent with around $1/CPM using 2 links/post. It’s really easy to get approved with Kontera and you can get paid via paypal as well.

Chitika:
Since the banner was ads were not much a revenue generating sources, I decided to try out Chitika by replacing one of the slots for banner. Looking at the result I was about to kill myself just because I didn’t go with chitika a long time ago. Chitika has been and still is a nice compliment to Google Adsense ads for all of my blogs so far. I have a variance of $/CPM with Chitka but I would say, at the least you will get $1.50/CPM. And if you find a good placement for Chitika ads resulting a good click through rate then it will go up even more.

Keep in mind that from the very beginning I tested different revenue generating sources, which will comply with Google Adsense. In other words, I always looked and tested ONLY those sources, which can be used in addition to Google Adsense. Now you tell me, would you be happy with at least $5/CPM  for your page views from your blog. I know I would.

White Hat Link Cloaking

If you want to generalize, Link Cloaking or Link Masking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. Usually this technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. And that’s why Black Hat Link Cloaking is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. Just incase you wanted to know the difference between them, read through my “SEO Ethics: White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO” post.  Having said that, cloaking links in any Internet Marketing activity is important, especially if you promote lots of products. But its needs to White Hat cloaking. Today i will talk about 6 reasons to cloak you affiliate links as a blogger and in future how to do it.

Spam Complaints:
When a visitor clicks on an un-cloaked affiliate link, the affiliate’s link details will be displayed in the address bar. This serves to alert the visitor that they are not at the official website they believed they were being directed to.  And if a subscriber files a spam complaint with their ISP, the ISP could get the website shut down. So, to mitigate this issue, it is recommended for websites owners to use a link cloaking system to convert all direct affiliates link into a link with the domain name.
Example: Instead of link http://abcd.dot.com/aff3453 , you can have www.your-domain-name.com/product link.

Link Hijacking:
In the competitive internet marketing world it happens all the time and may or may not happen to you yet but probability is that it will happen. There are a lot of black hat way for the link hijackers who will simply substitute your affiliate ID with their own in the link, – stealing the commission at point of purchase. 

Conversion Rate:
Usually the merchants landing page or sales pages contain extra bonuses and newsletter subscriptions which may deviate customers away from buying and allows the merchant website to overwrite the affiliate’s link at the last minute. If you use an affiliate link cloaking service then you will be able to send you r subscribers to the specific product page resulting a high conversion rate.

Building Trust:
Often, a product that you are promoting at your website is withdrawn. And if you have used a direct affiliate link for that product then you will be sending all of your subscribers to something which doesn’t exist, losing your credibility. However, if you use a link cloaking system or service, then all you have to do is change that link for your destination page and you will be sending your subscribers to an alternate page.

Branding:
As you will be moving forward with your website, keep in mind that you also will be branding your website. By cloaking you affiliate links you will expedite your website’s brand building process. Once simplest way to perform this task is to format your link where your domain name stand out .
Example: http://www.Your-Website.com/Reviews/Product

Performance Tracking:
“We pay for our ignorance”, which is why as an internet marketer you need to be tracking you affiliate links click reports. You need to know how your keywords are working or you so that you can optimize them and make them more profitable. A decent link cloaking system will provide you with click tracking records. You can track your links click through rate, followed by conversion rate and you can also perform a lots of tests to optimize your profit.

Hopefully by now, you will have a decent idea about the importance about cloaking while blogging about other stuff. So get you cloaking script and start enjoying the benefits.

How to Customize WordPress 404 Error Page For Maximum Benifit

In an ideal picture perfect scenario there would be no run time error for your website. Whatever page your visitors want to get access will be right there even though you have redesigned/updated your website thousand times.  Of course, in reality errors are inevitable. Things go wrong always, links will break, posts will be moved and never will be redirected etc. A 404 page gets displayed when a user request to access a web page that doesn’t exist. And when they do, unless you change it, they’re going to get a default 404 page. 

Assuming that you have been already blogging, you already know that it’s much easier to engage an existing reader than it is to go out and find a new reader. And that’s why creating a custom 404 page for your site is so important. And if you have redesigned or reworked you website then chances are that you will have some 404 error page.  If you just google it you will find five gazillion ways to customize your word press 404 error page. I will not reinvent the wheel, rather I will through in some Engineering thoughts into it and will show you how to develop a systematic approach to create a custom word press 404 error page. 
Step 1: Design Layout

The first step is creating the custom error page is to layout a conceptual custom 404 error page design keeping reader usability, SEO and reader retention in mind.

• Usability should the first and most important functionality that you need to integrate into your custom 404 error page design. The goal is to format the navigation such a way that it will provide a smooth transition from an error page (a negative thing for yours website since you don’t have what the reader wants) to some other pages that you would like you readers to go.
• Second functionality is SEO. Assuming you know the importance of anchor text with back links for your website, you can implement breadcrumb method to optimize your website content for both the readers and search engine bots inside your custom 404 error page. From your 404 error page use anchor text to link to the major categories that you want your visitors to go and then followed by some of your other most visited blog posts (I would do at least 10). Keep in mind that if you use a software to generate the top 10 posts then you will not generate any backlinks. So, if I would be you then I would do it myself so that you can generate 10 great backlinks for my blog and/or site.
• Monetizing should be another functionality while you will design your custom word press 404 error page. Depending on your blogs topic if you want then you can also replace your most visited blogs with something that will make you monkey. You can also replace the top 3/4 posts links with some other posts links where your have some kind of affiliate link embedded into it. Why not making some extra $$ while you can without bothering others. Take a look at Darren’s bio page from where he refers reader and make money. You can always create that bio page into your customs 404 error page for your word press blog and generate cash flow.
• Personality matters. Be yourself by bringing your own personality into the page. Replace the typical ” page cannot be found” with something that you would feel when you cant find something. Feel free to add a picture or some crazy comment that will make you stand out.

Step 2: Conceptual Design:

Being an Engineer, I have developed a habit of visualizing everything’s before I go into execution. So, I have sketch the following two different types of customs 404 error page that should give an understanding what I have explained above.

Example 1:

How to Customize WordPress 404 Error Page For Maximum Benifit

Example 2:

How to Customize WordPress 404 Error Page For Maximum Benifit

Step 3: Execution:
Now, you should get a pen and paper on your hand and design your own layout. Once done update your blog and thats it.

Also, if you have customized your 404 error page already then why not sharing that here. Till next time, TA TA.

SEO for Bing BUT Why : Bing's Search Market Share Analysis

As you all know that Yahoo and Microsoft has just a recent contract where Yahoo will be using Bing’s search algorithm for replacing yahoo’s own search algorithm. Looking at the past behavior of the search marking industry, Yahoo and Microsoft joined together to get on Google, who by far is the biggest player in the search industry. Having said all of that, what’s in for you as a webmaster? Earlier i have explained how to SEO for Bing and today i will back up its importance for every one of us who blogs.

Bing.com History Pre 2009:

Let’s take a look at how Bing was introduced and then we will look into its total market share.  

SEO for Bing : Bing market share

Bing.com History During 2009:

Now lets take a look at the market share in 2009 .

Bing market share 2009

Clearly you can tell that Bing.com will be another major source for webmasters to tap into with that wopping >28% search market share. Going through the Bing Forum seems like Bing will be much more predictable than both Yahoo and Live.com, which is a good news for all the webmasters.  Any other thoughts??

Confirmed: Bing Recommends 301 Redirection

I have been writing about Bing.com and how Bing.com is becoming another powerhouse for webmasters throughout last couple of weeks. Recently I added a SEO plugin for one of my cell phone news blog and which gave me a lot of 404 errors. To correct that I started to use 301 redirect based on the facts that google prefers a 301 redirect. Keep in mind that, Microsoft prefers a 302 redirect but I did 301 redirect anyways since google prefers 301 redirects. This question was also brought out in Bing webmaster forum and it has been verified that Bing now prefers a 301 redirect and it strongly recommends NOT to use a 302 redirect. So, for all of you out there, if you are doing 301 redirect then keep it going and for those who don’t, then its time to switch your 302 redirect into 301 redirect.

How to Perform SEO with Bing for Your Blog

In my last post I have talked about how to submit sitemaps in major search engines where you have seen the name of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Bing is already a buzz word in the search engine world. It is proven to be better than the old MSN.com but again, the million dollar question is as a webmaster “what’s in your wallet? Or how can you SEO for Bing? So, I decided to point out some of things that webmasters can do to improve your site ranking with Bing. SEO with Bing will be similar to SEO with Google. Let’s take a look.

What is Bing?
Microsoft has released a new search engine far better than MSN.com which is called Bing. As Microsoft describes it “Bing is really a decision engine—a faster way to make more informed choices”.

Why Bing is Important for webmasters
I will simply let the number do the talking. It’s been only a little over a month that Bing has been released and Bing is already ranking in the top 20 websites in the world. So, I have decided to compare Bing with Google, Yahoo and Ask.com for their traffic and found the following. For my websites, Bing is already taking over Yahoo for sending visitors. So, if I you would be you then I would keep a close eye on Bing and maximize its potential.

Bing search engine ranking

Things to do for SEO with Bing
Bing emphasizes on SEO very much. In their white paper they said specifically that “All of the benefits from these enhancements are available to websites that invest in SEO.”  SEO for Bing will require the following for all the webmasters:

• Submit your sitemap to Bing
  Submitting your sitemap to Bing is also very helpful for Bing to look into your smashing content. Read through my earlier post about submitting your sitemaps to search engines to find out more. However, there’s no need to resubmit your sitemap to Bing if Live Search previously indexed your website and there have been no recent changes on your website. You can use Google sitemap plugins for you WP blog to create a XML sitemap.
• Unique titles and Meta descriptions to each page
  By adding great post titles and descriptions you will provide Bing with good, keyword-oriented information that will well represent your website thus will rank better in Bing. Read though the “How to Optimize page Title” and then “38 Ways to Electrify Your Blog Post Titles and Headlines“. Once done, use all in SEO plugins for your wordpress blog and implement your learning’s.
• Systematic page Structure
  For Bing web crawlers a systematic and well organized page structure matters. Bing crawlers want the webmasters to use a consistent data structures between pages (such as placing similar data between pages using a similar tree structure, similar class names, support standard markup technologies, such as micro formats, etc.) to add more of your webs site content into Bing’s SERPS.
• High Quality Content
  Once you have performed SEO for you blog and blog posts, you need to start looking at our blog post content. Since, Bing offers a content preview, Bing wants webmaster to perform SEO for clear and high-quality page content.

Hopefully, you can find the huge similarity between the SEO for Bing and SEO for Google. The only thing that I Bing hasn’t mention is the importance of backlink. I assume as Bing learns more they will be asking for backlinks as well. Also, if you wanted to read Bing’s White paper you can find it here. Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that.

How to submit Your Sitemap to Bing/Google/Yahoo

Sitemap is a simple ways to let search engines know about your blog’s posts. Since we tend to forget adding our site maps to search engines except Google,  I wanted to make you life a little easier by explaining how you can submit your website’s sitemap to all the major search engines. But first,

How does Sitemap work?
The only way a search engine knows about your websites content when they crawl your website. That’s why all the major search engines send out Search Engine robots to crawl the web and to discover new content. Once the content is found then search engines download html content of the page and store in their database to display as a search result. And all the search engine crawlers follow links that are given to them in terms of sitemap. And that’s why; everyone MUST submit his or her websites sitemap to all the search engines. It is almost like help those engines to discover pages with newer, fresher and better contents that you website or blog has to offer.

How you can submit sitemap to Search Engines?
It’s amazing that how sometime we forget to submit our websites into all the major search engines. There are three major search engines and fortunately all of them allow webmasters to submit any sitemap for free. The following are the three links that you can use

• Google Webmaster Tools:
  Need a gmail account.
  Link: www.google.com/webmasters/
• Yahoo Site Explorer:
  Need a Yahoo account
  Link: www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• Bing Webmaster Center:
  Need a windows account
  Link: www.bing.com/webmaster

One thing to keep in mind that there are two types of Sitemap that we can have for our websites

• XML sitemap – For Search Engines web crawlers
• HTML sitemap – For human

It is preferred that webmaster submit a XML sitemap to all major search engines for easy discovery of your pages. And the big guy Google and young boy Bing preferred a XML sitemap. Read through ” Use XML Sitemap for Better Google Indexing ” for detailed information. Having said that, I know that since Google is the biggest buy in the block, we tend to do everything for Google. But sometime, it is wise not to forget about the little guys also. Especially if you are into SEO and are trying to get a better ranking for your blog, every little things count. Any contradictory thoughts ??

Free Verses Paid WP Theme: How to Decide when to Pay for Premium WP Theme

 I left home at the age of 17 and started my life with $750, and I was broke for the next 8 years till I became an Engineer. Since I could not apply for loan and couldn’t even get financial aid for my college and I had to support myself along with my education, I was living literally hand to mouth every day. During that best time of my life, one of the habits that I have developed is “value consciousness“. Mine is a three-step process:

• Necessity
• Affordability
• Maximizing return of dollar spent

My thought process is that when I need something, I also need to be able to afford that comfortably. Once financial situation gives a green light to the necessity then I will find a way to spend the lowest amount possible to get whatever that I want to get. This philosophy also worked when I started to blog around 2006. I was holding myself for the longest from buying paid wordpress themes and bought my first paid theme in 2009, yes after 4 years.  Today I will share my thought process that helped to buy a wordpress paid theme for my blogs. I will also include some of the unforeseen benefits that I had after buying those paid wordpress themes. 

Understanding the Necessity:
Before you jump in and buy a Paid WP Theme, you need to really understand the need of your blog.  This needs is in terms of your blog’s layout. You might have a blog that needs a magazine style WP theme, or a tech style WP theme. It could be a 2 column or a 3 column. So, take your time and visualize it in your head or may be sketch on a piece of paper about the future layout of your blogs and then go and hunt the WP Paid theme that you like. This first step will make you start thinking like a web project manager.

Calculating the Rate Of Return:
Every single dollar that I spend, I ask myself about the return. In the same note, I asked myself about the return that I would be looking for once I buy a Paid WP Theme. Is it the look, or the traffic, or more ad space?? Ask yourself those questions.

Cost determination:
Find out how much money that you can afford to buy a WP theme. You don’t need to buy a developer license even though you might think that you will need it later. When you don’t have enough flow then think how much it will cost you “today”. And of course it makes sense to buy multiple domain licenses if you have multiple blogs that you are running.

Customization Flexibility of your Paid Theme
More people use any particular Wp theme, better it is. Chances are someone already thought about customizing that small piece of you blog that you wanted to customize and all you have to do is to implement in theme. If not then just ask and you will be surprised. So, whatever paid theme that you are thinking of, make sure that a lot of other folks are using that for outside of what you are looking for.

Accessibility for Help
The above point also made me to look themes that have concentrated support forums. This was one of the major buying points for me. Whenever I need something I just go the forum and post the question and log back in day or two later and someone already answered that questions. Life is easy, huh??

Past Customers
This should give you an idea of how good your paid theme will perform in real life. Look for high traffic websites that use the theme you want. And if you cant find any then probability is your is good BUT not that good. 

So, I went ahead and bought Solostream Theme for all of my blogs and went along with my life. Was it is the best decision, may be yes and may be not. And I will show you some of the results that i have experienced that I received after buying the Solostream Theme in future. So, stay tuned and dont forget to share your comments.

Determine Feasibility of Your Blogs Success

As an Engineer I deal with handful of project everyday and for all of our projects, we start working on project with the “Feasibility” study. And anyone who is planning on being a professional blogger or already is, should conduct a feasibility study. A Feasibility study is the time where we/anyone can project the success/failure rate of a work based on collected data. This feasibility study is not from holding from doing what you like rather to guide you to come up with a niche topic which is practical and will bring your some money some day.  I have tried to make the process simplified as much as possible but hey; sometimes it is just that technical. 

Getting a viable Business Idea
This is the first phase of the process where you solidify your blogs niche idea. If you haven’t decided the topic of your blog then you should fall back on your past experience. Is this something you enjoy? Do you have unique knowledge about a topic? Do you have a special talent or skill? Sometime, it is helpful to get feedback from other that you know. You need to start to rainstorm ideas that seem to fit with your background and interests. It is very important that you blogging idea be something that you will know and enjoy. After all you will be spending an awful amount of time blogging and doing other stuff, you would better enjoy it.

Researching the Market
Market research involves finding out what web searchers want/need and determining how you can satisfy that want/need through you blog. You need to find out your competitions successes and failure in the market place. And finally, based on your research you can project your blogs success or failure probability.

Finding the Target Market
The goal in this phase is to narrow down you search even more to find your best customers. You need to target those people who are looking for the information that you will offer. In this phase of market research you will develop a profile for you customers. You will gather your information through demographics (looks into where visitors come from: US, non US etc) and psychographics (look at lifestyle, age, lifestyle etc)

Competition
Before you go into a game you need to know each and everything about your opponents that you will be playing against. In this phase you will find out the direct and indirect competitions for you targeted niche. Make a list of 5/6 major players, in this case websites in that market and find out their market share, resources, focus, strengths and weakness. Once you have gathers all the above, you can now plan you attack to win that niche market share.

Money Making Strategy
By this time you should already know about your niche topic and your competitions along with the market share. And now you need outline a money making strategy. It is very easy to copy others but if you do that then you will a follower for rest your life. Instead you need find out what your competitors use to make money and make that better by using your thoughts into that. If the #1 site in you niche google adsense then you should think about google adsense and chitika at the same time. Think outside the box.

You might have fantastic contents in your blog that you take time to write. You might have the best layout for your blog. But if you don’t have the traffic then your probability of making money or being successful will be lower dramatically. And if you wanted to know the success feasibility for you current blog and/or your next project then go ahead do the homework now than later after committing your time.  And for those who have the home work and ready to build their next blog/website you might find my “ Create Website & Blog Like a Project Manager” pretty interesting.

Free WP Theme Verses Paid WP Theme: Missing Components of Free WP Themes

I was using Free WP Theme for a long time for all of my blogs. Then I switched into paid themes and currently I am enjoying the benefits of that decision. So, I decided to share my experience with free wp themes, and how I decided to buy those paid premium themes that I have bought and finally the benefits of paid Wp themes.

Today I will share the major and typical problems that I encountered with Free WP Themes. I will try not to get into too much detailed much here rather I will just give you some high level overview and hopefully you will be able to relate to those typical problems.

Lack of customization on the theme
 I bet that you always wanted to have a unique a look in your blog. And you can do that with Free WP themes but then two things has to be true: you know how to code and you have a whole lot of time in your hand. And in that case you are not using your time effectively.

Lack of concentrated support for that theme:
 I always had an issue with this. It is always easier to ask someone about something than reading about that and learning it. It will be very rare that you will meet a group of folks who are using the same free WP theme that you are using and you can ask for help.

Lack of updates with the evergreen WP versions
 I have experienced this bunch of time. I update the WP version the free theme is not compatible to work with new WP version resulting my site the crash.

Plugin compatibility issue with Free WP themes
 This is a fun one. Imagine your site was working perfectly but as days go by it gets slower and weirder. By the time you figure it’s a plugin and your Free WP theme compatibility issue (posting questions to forums, using google and calling hosting tech support) you have already spend a good chunk of time that you can use to improve you blog. I truly hated every time that I went through this particular issue.

Time spend on customizing is too much
 After I went through all the above and at the end I had to switch to a different theme for whatever reason, I went through everything one more time. If I think about it now, it was simple a paid.

I do want to understand couple of things. It is beneficial to have free themes at the very beginning for your blog, just like having your first car and then you should work your way up. Using free themes will also allow you to look around more for the type of themes that you are looking for. And best of all its FREE. But think again when you really decided to get into blogging long term. And just in case you want to know, I have used the some magazine style free themes for the longest and then moved forward with Solostream Theme.  Any other thoughts??