NetBusinessBlogWork from Home, Business Opportunities, Websites for Sale - Run an Online Business

There is yet another update to Google’s Adsense TOS. The last update cleared up the foggy topic of placing images next to ads to encourage click throughs; however, the new update completely reverses a previous stance Google once had on ad placement:

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

This is an obvious attack on YPN - users now can’th ave YPN and Adsense on the same site (even if in an ad rotater) if they’re laid out in the same color scheme. The last line which allows direct ad sales (as long as they don’t resemble Google ads) may also be an attack on AdBrite seeing as how their text link ads are extremely similar to Adsense. There may, however, be enough of a difference between the two to make publishing both on the same site alright.

It looks like Google is finally taking measures to improve the quality of their ad network. If you ask me though, they should be focusing a lot more on snuffing out arbitrage sites which have a much more hurtful result than publishers using ad blocks that kind of look like Adsense. We’ll we continue to see a steady increase in Adsense TOS updates? I hope so.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

One extremely important aspect of SEO is creating sitemaps for your website. Unfortunately this is often overlooked by many webmasters because they either underestimate their importance or simply don’t have the necessary understanding of how to make a sitemap.

A sitemap is basically a detailed floor plan of your website laid out in XML (extensible markup language) in a manner that spiders can easily access. What is XML? You don’t really need to know, but if the curiousity is eating you alive, here’s a handy dandy Wikipedia link on XML.  The purpose of a sitemap is to give search engines a guide to the most important content on your website.  This in turn helps them index your pages faster and more frequently which means more search engine traffic coming to your pages.

Sitemaps usually look something like this:

Yea, I know, it looks like jibberish to me too.  But that doesn’t matter because there are a ton of generators out there that will create this code for you, and all you have to do is know what to do with it.  One generator, for example, is XML-Sitemaps.com.  It couldn’t possibly be any easier.  You simply follow the steps and the generator gives you a perfect sitemap represented in XML as well as HTML.

So now we have a sitemap generated for our site.  Here’s a snippet of one I made for Red Steel:

With sitemap in hand, it’s time to submit it to the search engines.  Simply go to Google Sitemaps and add a URL to your site (you should have done this anyway as part of your early SEO).  Once you’ve done this, click on “Add a Sitemap” which should be next to the URL you’ve just added.  You then put in the link to your sitemap which you should have uploaded to your server and click submit.  It’s that simple.

And that’s how you add a simple sitemap to search engines.  If anybody has any questions or notices anything that I’ve left out, feel free to leave a comment.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Popularity: 4% [?]

This blog is very new but is already generating a huge amount of very targeted traffic. This blog has been featured on the frontpage of Digg more than once due to its high quality content. Net Business Blog was launched on January 7, 2007. You can see January’s traffic stats at the bottom of this page.

Advertising is available monthly or in two week time periods. There are various ad positions.

Single Post Text Links
$15/post

I’ve decided to experiment with single post text links. These links will be permanent and placed at the bottom of the sponsored post like so:

Sponsored by: Your Link

You can see a live example of a single post text link by visiting this post.

Single post text links will appear by default in the next significant update after payment has been received. The buyer can, however, choose to place his or her text link in the next post of a particular category if he chooses. This may be desired to reach a more targeted audience. These links will appear on the blog as well as in the blog’s feed.

Top Banner Ad (SOLD OUT until 2/26/07)
$100/mo

The premium ad spot is the top banner ad which rests directly to the right of the logo. This is a no rotation ad block and is the best position on the page. Banner ads must meet the following requirements:

• 460×60 Size
• No excessive flashing or blinking

Text Link Ads (SOLD OUT until 2/26/2007)
$25/mo

Text link ads will appear on the right sidebar in the category labeled “Sponsored Links”. A maximum of 15 links will be displayed at a time; however, I reserve the right to add more.

Footer Ad (Adbrite)

In addition to direct ads I also offer users to advertise at the bottom of this blog via Adbrite. You can view NBB’s Adbrite page here.

If you’re interested in purchasing either a banner position, text link, or a single post text link, please use the contact page to get a hold of me. You can preorder any ad position.

January traffic:

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

I get asked a lot of questions like “What’s the best software for x.” Recently I’ve had a few people email me about my favorite FTP software. For the few of you who may not know, FTP (file transfer protocol) is how you access your web server in order to manage files. You can read more about FTP at Wikipedia.

A lot of you probably know that you can use your default browser as a FTP program, but doing it this way is extremely slow and painful. FTP programs make the whole process a lot easier. So which FTP program do I use? I use SmartFTP.

SmartFTP is a great program with a ton of features. It can be downloaded for free at their website (trial version). You can also purchase the full version at their website, although I’ve been using the free version for about 5 years and have yet to have a problem. The only thing you have to put up with when using the free version is having a little window popup when you launch it asking you to purchase the full version.

The GUI in SmartFTP is very easy to pickup and can be used by even the newest user. Over the years they’ve added a ton of features that make managing your web files a lot easier. For example, when uploading files you can now upload entire folders rather than selecting all of the files you want to be uploaded. This makes installing CMS software a breeze when you don’t have shell access.

Overall SmartFTP is one of the best (if not the best) free FTP programs available. I suggest everyone look it over. Just for the record, this wasn’t a paid post, and I’m not getting commission for recommending this program. I just think it’s a great piece of software that deserves to be mentioned.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Popularity: 13% [?]

I saw this video a little while back and thought I’d share it with you guys. Some parts of it are a little empty, but overall it’s a pretty funny example of your typical internet marketer.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]

A debate that has been burning since the beginning of SEO (not to mention in the comments of Building a Niche Minisite (Part 2)) is whether or not a webmaster should use dashes (-) or underscores (_) when separating keywords in their URLs. For the past couple of years it has been generally accepted by most SEO experts that using dashes was the best thing to do. Pretty much the only basis (that I’ve seen argued in multiple articles) is the fact that Matt Cutts (Google employee) argued in favor of dashes in a blog post in August 2005. For those of you who don’t know, Matt Cutts is pretty much an internet celebrity, at least among the SEO and general web development communities. That being said, most people simply quote Matt’s posts and accept it as truth. I, however, always do my own research. What have I decided? I don’t think it really matters which one you use.

The basis of Matt’s argument is that Google doesn’t recognize the underscore as a word separator:

So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2?.

Basically what Matt is saying here is that Google doesn’t recognize “word1_word2″ as two separate keywords, but rather one keyword made up of two words joined by an underscore. Therefore searching for “word1″ or “word2″ in Google will not display the page with “word1_word2″ in the URL. Lets use an example to better illustrate.

We’re going to run an experiment for “hardware reviews” which gets about 2657 searches monthly and also are a couple main keywords in other highish volume searches. When we search for hardware reviews in Google, the first page contains a bunch of links to hardware review site homepages (which means it just directly links to the domain rather than linking to a subpage). However, there is one result on the first page of results with a subpage - and that subpage contains underscores:

Okay, so for starters the first thing we notice is that this URL is from DMOZ which is weighted heavily in Google. It’s no surprise that a DMOZ entry would rank high for any term; however, if Matt’s post were correct in the fact that Google doesn’t recognize underscores as word separators, then how is it that Google has highlighted “Reviews” in bold while keeping “Technical_Evaluations_and_Product_” in normal weight. The fact that “Reviews” is in bold means that Google recognizes “Reviews” as its own word and relevant to my search for “hardware reviews”. I think it’s also safe to determine from this search that Google recognizes forward slashes as word separators.

So Matt’s post from 2005 is wrong. Was it right in 2005? I don’t know, I didn’t research it then. But it’s wrong now, and that’s all that matters. Google does recognize underscores as keyword separators. But that’s not all there is to this debate! Another question still standing is whether or not dashes perform better than underscores as far as SERPs are concerned.

This is an extremely difficult question to answer seeing as how SEO depends on a ton of factors, and despite what a lot of people say, the URL is relatively low on the list. Aside from dashes and underscores, a lot of people also use forward slashes, +’s, and I’ve even seem some first page results using %20 as separators. I found some interesting results in the last place I was looking: in a search for the phrase “dashes vs underscores”:

Of course the first result was a link to Matt’s blog post. What’s interesting is the second and third results. They’re both using underscores in their filenames. How funny is that? Lets look at these results even further:

The first article at 12pointdesign is a static article. Not too much information to gather here other than the author makes a very solid argument in favor of underscores. The third result which is at SimonCox.com is a blog post with absolutey no trackbacks or comments. Needless to say, I doubt this post was extremely popular and probably didn’t get too much linkbacks if any. I’m not saying this is a bad post or a bad site, I’m just pointing out the fact that the reason this post is ranking high isn’t because of massive backlinking.

Now lets venture down the list and take a look at the other results. Of all the results on the frontpage there is only one other one using dashes in the URL. There is one other using +’s as separators. The rest of the results don’t have the keywords in the results at all. How about the second page?

The second result on the second page is a link to a blog we’re all familiar with: ProBlogger.net:

This post at ProBlogger was written the day after Matt Cutt’s post and sparked a lot of comments from ProBlogger’s big readerbase. Yet this post resides on page 2 of Googles results for “dashes vs underscores”? Odd.

What does all this information tell me? Not much. As I said before, there is so much to consider in SEO that trying to figure out whether dashes or underscores work better is almost impossible. One thing I can guarantee, however. Whether or not at the time of Matt’s article in 2005 Google didn’t recognize underscores as word separators - that is completely untrue now. I’ve seen enough evidence that I can without a shadow of a doubt claim that Google recognizes underscores (and a ton of other characters) as valid word separators. But how do these word separators affect SERPs? I’m not totally sure. I do know that a lot of the big boys use underscores (Wikipedia, DMOZ, and Digg to name a couple) and they all manage to rank well. Often.

At the end of the day I would say putting keywords in your filenames is important. Separating them is just as important. As far as which is more effective: dashes or underscores … I’m going with it doesn’t matter. From what I’ve seen you can use either, and it will be just fine.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Dclick Ads is a relatively new internet advertising agency that deals in creating relationships between advertisers and publishers. They offer three types of methods in which publishers can sell advertising space: Standard ads (your typical banner ads, text links, etc), DirectLink Technology, and SmartCache Ad Serving (basically XML advertising).

Dclick Ads is an internet advertising and marketing service connecting advertisers (buyers of ad space), and webmasters, with one another in a fast and easy to use method. Publishers can set their own pricing per week, per month or at per click rates.

Their website didn’t really “wow” me as far as the design and professionalism. It looks almost as if it was hastily thrown together. The actual service, however, seems a bit more solid. Probably the biggest thing this network has going for it is how well it has managed to work with non-US publishers and create business for them. Browsing through their current client list it seems that most of them are foreign websites; however, they still do business with US-based sites as well. I’ve signed up for an account with Dclick Ads and will be testing them over the next couple of weeks. If anybody else has any experience with this company, I’d love to hear about it.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’m really happy that there were so many votes on our first poll, and I hope there will be that much activity on the next. Here are the results from the previous poll:

As you can see most readers thought eCommerce Sites had the most money making potential. I can’t say I disagree with this. eCommerce Sites have huge potential to be real cash cows; however, they also require a ton of work. If you’re willing to do the work then you can certainly make an eCommerce Site work. I’ll be posting another entry soon elaborating on running an eCommerce Site as well as interviewing a young entrepreneur who’s made a name for himself in the field.

Be sure to participate in the new poll (on the sidebar): Which Affiliate Program do you Prefer?

Popularity: 8% [?]

Popularity: 8% [?]

I try to stick to writing my own content for this blog, but this recent post at Problogger.net is definately worth sharing. These tips for bloggers are all pretty much common sense, but sometimes we need common sense guidelines set up for us in a step by step manner to collect our thoughts. This post is a great starting point for any new blogger or an old blogger who’s struggling to create a name and brand for himself. Here’s an excerpt (and one of my favorite points):

5. Of course its a Marathon — I just wanted to remind you.
Even if you’re a lousy writer and spend almost NO time on marketing, if you’re willing to stick through it, you’ll discover something interesting. After a while, your competitors will start dropping out. The fact is that out of the tens of thousands of blogs that are started every day, only a tiny fraction will exsit after a few weeks, and less after a few months, and even less after a year. People get discouraged. There are other priorities in their lives. Life moves on. All are perfectly legitimate. But, it should be some solace to the seriously interested among you, because by just surviving, you’ll have outlasted a significant portion of your competition.

A lot of webmasters get the feeling that they have to do this now, get it done now, now, now, or else their competitors will run off on them. In some cases that’s true, but for the most part as long as you’re consistant and provide top-quality content, you will attract readers. You can read the rest of this post here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Domaining 101 Contents:

• Introduction
• Extensions
• Researching Keywords
• Registration
• Parking

What are Keywords?

Domain keywords are what make up your second level domain and give your overall domain the most value. Keywords are paramount when evaluating a domain name and should always be selected with careful consideration and research. As a domainer, you are almost always looking at your domains based on their keywords.

It is possible that a domain may contain absolutely no relevant keywords but could still be worth a good amount of cash. For example, Google.com is a relatively worthless domain when basing the value off of the keyword alone. “Google” was definitely not a notable keyword before the site was created and marketed, yet now it is probably one of the most valuable domains in existence. This is where the whole question of branding, establishing a memorable presence for your website thus adding value to the domain, comes into play. There are some domains that people consider “innately brandable.” These are typically short, one-word domains that are easy to remember and catchy. However, as a domainer the majority of your portfolio will most likely consist of keyword-oriented domains since these have more obvious value and appeal better to search engines.

Follow the Trends

In case you’ve been under a rock your entire life, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the world revolves around trends. They’re fickle and seemingly random. I remember the first time my little brother showed me Pokemon. The Christmas after it was released, Pokemon trading cards (which were worth a dollar or two each in the beginning) were selling for $200 a pop. They got so hot that shady-looking guys in pimped out Hondas started selling them out of the trunks of their cars in the High School parking lot. Despite the widespread popularity of Pokemon, today you could buy the entire collection for a couple hundred dollars. The trend died out just as fast as it started.

Like with every industry domaining sometimes has trends where particular keywords or keyword matchings become very popular. These domain trends often follow popular culture of the “real world” and can be picked up early and monopolized.

A great example of following domain trends is Clark Siegelin’s registration of multiple 360 .com domain names (keyword360.com). Although these domains have no obvious advantage in my eyes, Clark saw an obvious brand in them and decided to corner the 360 domain market. According to an article on Sedo, Clark was able to sell cash360.com and firm360.com for thousands of dollars each.

For Mr. Siegelin the value of the brand was obvious so he registered every possible 360 related domain he could think of. Half-hearted investment wasn’t an option. Deciding to corner the 360 market was just as obvious as the value of the brand.

The article also states that Clark is still receiving offers in the thousands for his 360 domain names. Since Clark’s success there has been an increase demand of 360 domains. 360, a seemingly low-value suffix before Clark’s success, is now a very targeted one.

Other trends are easier to spot ahead of time and rely much less on luck. A popular trend domainers like to follow is watching which new pharmaceuticals are released. Concurrently keeping an eye on any medical research and jumping on new findings and treatments is a good way to get premium domains. Other popular trends, at least right now, include poker or gambling-related, travel, investment, medication, and home business domains.

By keeping an eye on trends and being ready to capitalize on them as they occur you have a great opportunity to acquire premium domains at extremely low prices to sell for an amazing profit or park for good revenue.

Keyword Effects on SEO

Before I get into all of the delicious SEO tools, let me explain the reasoning for using these typically “SEO only” tools in the realm of domaining.

Domainers should always, and I mean always, be aware of search trends when researching domain keywords. Domain keywords are an integral part of search engine optimizing; therefore, they should be picked carefully and always with SEO in mind. In addition, keyword search tools are necessary in determining the popularity of keywords. Researching search trends is a good way to assess the potential traffic of a domain as well as to get ideas of how well that domain could be monetized.

Keyword Search Tools

There are a ton of nifty tools out there that are ignored by up-and-coming domainers everyday. I’m going to go ahead and say it: there is no magic secret to domaining. Every tool you need to succeed is out there waiting to be used. All you have to do is get up off your butt and use them. The following tools are used more heavily in SEO than in domaining, but as I’ve said before, SEO is an integral part of domaining. Molding your domains around popular keywords adds a huge amount of value and should always be considered when domaining.

Overture Suggestion Tool
http://inventory.overture.com/

One of the most important factors to look at when deciding on keywords for a new domain is the search popularity for those keywords are. Overture Suggestion Tool does just that. It archives searches from actual users on a monthly basis and allows you to sift through these searches to find the most popularly searched keywords. This tool is a must in determining the popularity of potential keywords and cannot be ignored. The only setback when using this tool is that it displays search results from Yahoo only. It still shows the trends fairly well, but it should also be noted that Yahoo owns a small portion of the search engine market. However, as a domainer you should never rely on just one tool.

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool takes results from the Overture Suggestion Tool as well as other tools (including results from Google and MSN) and displays it all in one central location. This is typically the first place I look when researching new keywords for domains. It’s a fantastic tool that is complex enough for the most experienced domainer yet simple enough for first-timers to pick up.

Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends

What better place to research potential keywords as they relate to SEO than Google, the number one search engine on the net? Google Trends allows you to compare keywords for their performance in Google. It displays the results in an easy-to-read graph. One aspect of Google Trends that many other tools don’t have is that Google Trends allows you to view keyword trends over the last three years. This lets you see if popularity for certain keywords are continuing to rise or if they’ve already reached their climax and are losing value.

Other Keyword Search Tools
Keyword Discovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
WordTracker - http://www.wordtracker.com/
NicheBot - http://www.nichebot.com/
Digital Point Suggestion Tool - http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Adwords Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
NicheTaxi - http://www.nichetaxi.com
Google Keywords - http://www.goodkeywords.com/
SEOChat SEO Tools - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/
Google Zeitgeist - http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
Lycos 50 - http://50.lycos.com/
Yahoo Buzz - http://buzz.yahoo.com/

Using all of these tools for every domain you purchase may seem like overkill, but I cannot stress enough how important good keyword research is in domaining. Research will save you time and time again from making bad decisions. You may see a domain up for sale that your gut tells you has good potential but after doing a little bit of research you may find that there are little to no searches for terms related to that domain.

As a general rule of thumb you want to nab domains with a good amount of searches. However competition must also be taken into consideration, which is why I considered the Adwords tool for example. If you find a term that only gets 25,000 searches per month, for example, but has little to no competition then it may be prudent to register and develop a related domain. It’s a balancing act between keyword popularity and competition.

Domain Name Generation Tools

Keyword-based Name Generation Tools

Okay so now you have a little list of keywords that you want to register a domain with. That’s all fine and dandy, but how do you use those keywords to come up with a brandable domain name? Sometimes it’s hard to sit down and brainstorm ideas for domain names centered around your keywords, so domainers often use Keyword-based Name Generation Tools.

Simply put Keyword-based Name Generation Tools take whatever keywords you want and assort them in every possible way to give you a list of possible domain names. These tools also allow you to choose from synonyms to use for your keywords.

One of my favorite Keyword-based Name Generation Tools is Domainsbot. Domainsbot allows you to sort domain suggestions based on extension, availability, and by synonyms. It’s a fantastic tool that I use quite often. I’m not going into a whole lot of detail here since it’s honestly pretty self-explanatory. The best way to get used to using a name generator is to sit down and play with it.

Other Keyword-based Name Generation Tools
Nameboy - http://www.nameboy.com/
Domainfellow - http://www.domainfellow.com/
Dotster’s Namespin - http://www.dotster.com/register/namespin/
123 Finder - http://site.123finder.com/
Raining Names - http://freeserve-v1.domainnames.com/advanced.asp
E-gineer’s Domainator - http://www.e-gineer.com/domainator/
SnapItNow - http://www.snapitnow.com/
Mozzle - http://www.mozzle.com/
Whoix - http://www.whoix.com/wizard.html
Webmaster Toolkit - http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/domain-name-generator.shtml

Random Domain Generation Tools

Random Domain Generators are tools that basically spit available domains out of nowhere. Sometimes they come up with short, nifty, brandable domains but usually they just pop out worthless words. Sometimes, keep in mind this is a very very rare sometimes, they generate a domain that you may think has a lot of value and is worth registering. For the most part though, these things are nothing more than novelty.

However, since these tools are so very popular, I’ve created a short list of random domain generators for you to enjoy.

Outer-Court Randomizer - http://blog.outer-court.com/domaingenerator/
DomainsAreFree - http://www.domainsarefree.com/random-names.html
SnapItUp - http://snapitup.net/

I’m sure there are a lot more, but I’m not going to spend much time on these since, as I said, they’re rarely that useful.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Popularity: 11% [?]