How I Got Rich

Final Warning: Your Google AdWords account has multiple violations

I got an email from lpq-support@google.com the other day giving me a final warning for violating the AdWords policies. Despite it being my first warning I was quite alarmed. Although most of my traffic comes from SEO a fair amount of my sales for big ticket items come via AdWords ads so if I stopped the ads I’d probably lose out on a fair chunk of my earnings.

Only a few of my sites were listed as offending Google but they looked like most of my others sites which I am promoting through AdWords.

The email told me not to delete or pause the ads to those sites but to change the sites to meet their guidelines and then resubmit them for their approval.

I deleted the ads to the offending sites anyways and sent them an email which they have just replied to letting me know about my sites.

They told me that my sites were bridge pages and I need to make them more useful to the end user.

The sites are technically bridge pages as they link through to the merchants but they all have at least 200 words of original content about the products they are promoting.

If they are considered bridge pages then all affiliate sites are bridge pages in my eyes.

Short of removing the affiliate links on these sites I don’t see what else I can do to please Google.

I’m going to try and cut down on the number of sites I promote with AdWords and aim to reduce my reliance on it in preparation for the day when my account gets cancelled.

The worrying thing is if these sites offend Google AdWords what’s to say they won’t soon offend Google regular, organic search and get the boot from there too?

I never really worried about the dominance of Google but perhaps now it is time to start!

Outsourcing link building with ODesk – Update II

Just a quick update on my experiences of outsourcing the creation of forum profile back links through ODesk.

One of the first sites I did this for has now moved to number one in Google for the keyword I used for the anchor text in the profiles. The site was previously in the bottom half of page one and first moved to number four or so and then moved up to the top spot.

If I try and see if the links purchased for the site are indexed I cannot see any sign of them so who knows if it was anything to do with these links? Its a bit of a coincidence though.

Although saying that the other sites I have aquired links for in the same manner have yet to show much change in the SERPs but again none of their links are showing up anywhere as being indexed.

I started off using two contractors from ODesk to build my links so I could see which one was the best and then stick with them but they both do the work to the same standard so I have been using them both.  They are both incredibly slow though and even though I put in my ad that I required a turn around of 48 hours for a batch of 120 links they take at least five days. 

Due to them both being so slow and me having lots of sites in need of links I have taken on two more people who applied to my advert but again they are very slow.  Add this to the long time it takes to get the links indexed and you are looking at a long process that could take months to really show and benefits or otherwise.

But paying for the creation of these links is cheap and takes me no time or effort so I am continuing with it for now until I find a better way to get links for my sites.

Can anyone recommend a faster link builder than my guys and has anyone else tried this approach to getting links?

Advanced Web Ranking Review

Advanced Web Ranking is a tool that shows you, in great detail if you wish; where abouts your websites are in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords of your choice showing you your website ranking in the search engines of your choice.

I’ve been looking for a tool like this for ages and although I have come across a few in my time none of them have really done what they say on the tin or come anywhere near the functionality of Advanced Web Ranking.

As I have lots of niche sites all targeting different keywords, prior to Advanced Web Ranking I had a spreadsheet I would update at random intervals with a list of my top websites and where they were ranked in Google for their main keyword. But as time went on I stopped updating the sheet as I kind of knew in my head where my sites were for their main keyword. Also because I had to manually hunt down my sites in the SERPs this was a task I often overlooked in favour of other less boring jobs.

But now, with Advanced Web Ranking, I can enter one or more keywords, enter the url of a website, choose a search engine (including which country) and let this app do the hard work for me.

You can specify how many pages deep to check the results for your site. By default it is set to 50 but I set it to 200 to see if it could find some of my long lost sites and see where they were in Google. The more pages to check the longer the searches take though so be warned!

Once the report has run you are presented with a list of the keywords you specified and where your site is found in the search engine results page (SERPs) and which page of your site i.e. the home page or a particular page.

From there you can right-click on a keyword and go to that page of the SERPs to see your site and where it is in the search engine ranking and what the competition is.

You can save your project and come back to it later, adding more keyword or more sites to check against as your site expands which is very handy.

The above is the basic functionality of the Advanced Web Ranking software application but there are loads more features packed into this great tool. You can also choose two or more websites to check at once to see how your competitors rank for the same keywords. You can also view the tops sites for particular keywords. You can schedule the reports to run over night or at set times so they are ready for you when you need them. They also allow you to track the position of your sites in the SERPs over time which is a great feature as often you can miss exactly when your site moved up or down the rankings and if you don’t know when it happened it can be hard to work out why it happened it which is what you really want to know.

Who is this tool for?
Advanced Web Ranking probably isn’t necessary for the person with just one or two sites that are only targeting one or two keywords as you can probably keep track of a setup that small with a simple spreadsheet or text file. But once you start to expand and either acquire more sites or try and get your existing sites ranking for additional keywords a tool like Advanced Web Ranking really comes into its own and allows you to keep an eye over what Google and its search engine friends are doing with your site which for most of us is the main way we get our traffic and thus revenue.

My copy of Advanced Web Ranking also came with Advanced Link Manager which allows you to view the link to your and other peoples’ websites which is turning into another invaluable tool to have when it comes to researching the competition and keeping track of the links going in and out of your sites – especially when it comes to managing and monitoring reciprocal links which the Advanced Link Manager can do. There is also a Keyword Research Tool which I’m sure will come in handy for people looking for a new niche or researching other keywords they could target on their sites.

So would I recommend Advanced Web Ranking? I’ve not been using it for long but it’s already proved its usefulness to me and my sites and I’m sure you will find it of benefit, especially if you have no system in place to monitor your sites in the SERPS.

If you want to know more you can download a free 30 day trial for Advanced Web Ranking from here.

This screen shot below shows a report for this blog and how it ranked for three keywords: ‘how I got rich’, ‘affiliate marketing blog’ & ‘affiliate marketing’ (click on it to view a clearer version):

Appalling Click Through Rates

Today I’ve been looking through my stats for the previous month to try and indentify which sites are making money and which are losing me money.

It was quite depressing reading.

Lots of my sites are ranked quite well for their keywords but either get very little traffic or if they do get the hits hardly make any sales.

You put in the work to setup a site, get it ranking ok, keep the products up to date and add content but still the visitors do not come or when they do they don’t buy anything.

I think my sites do add something to the user experience: they gather together all the products of one type from lots of different merchants and lay them out clearly in one place, sorted by price, so the user can see them all in one place and what is in their price range.

This is a rather negative post from me and I know I am one of the lucky ones who has managed to make a few quid from this game so shouldn’t complain but the more you try to analyse things to see how you can improve what you have the more I seem to realise how random things seem to be in what makes a good niche or site and what doesn’t.

But I will keep going. For now my main focus is getting my Christmas site up to scratch and also trying to get all my existing small niche sites ranking well for their main keyword.

Then I will start thinking about the bigger picture and how I can move things forward in 2011.

Christmas is Just Around the Corner

I know its more than three months away but now is the time to start your Christmas sites if you have not done so already.

Last December I had my best month at the time earning about 850 quid which was about double what I earnt the previous month.

I only started the site in November (I think) so imagine how much you could earn if you started now.

What do people buy (more of) int he run up to Christmas?

• New TVs
• Extra chairs and tables for when family come over
• New plates and cutlery
• Toys/presents
• Recipe books
• Hampers
• Booze

I’m sure there are loads more ideas out there but that should get you started.

Good luck and merry Christmas!

More Google Keyword Tool Data

A while ago I tried to do some ‘tests’ to see how accurate the Google Keyword tool is and also how much traffic you get for being number one or two in Google.
Read about it here: http://howigotrich.net/tag/google-keyword-tool/

I tried it again recently with a site I have that has been number three in Google for its main keyword for many months but only gets about 3-6 unique hits a day.

After running a Google AdWords PPC campaign for that keyword I found out that the keyword got 273 impressions in one day (I’ve only run the campaign for one day so will see how it goes).

That means that for being number three in Google my site gets around 2% of the searches for that keyword clicking through to my site. This is not a lot!

According to the Google KeyWord Tool this keyword gets 1,900 exact match searches per month which works out at 64 per day. This is over four times less than what the AdWords research tells us.

So what have we learnt? The Google Keyword Tool is still inaccurate but we already knew that but this reinforces the idea and I would urge anyone doing keyword research to use AdWords rather than the Google Keyword Tool before choosing a niche.

Also it tells me that this niche is worth targeting and putting some more effort into as it is getting around 8000 exact searches a month instead of the 1900 reported by the GKWT. But there is also the problem of the 2% click through rate the site is getting being at number three in Google. Will this improve if I get the site to number two or number one? Only time (and some dodgy forum profile backlinks) will tell…

Outsourcing link building with ODesk – Update

Since my last posts about ordering some link building through ODesk I’ve had about 5 or 6 jobs completed. Each one has been for 120 forum profile backlinks to a different one of my sites. The jobs all went through smoothly but I have had trouble getting the new links indexed. I’ve tried pinging the list of urls to the profiles but it hasn’t seem to have done much.

I’ve tried to look for the backlinks by using http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ and the Yahoo site explorer but for some of my sites only a few of the links that have been built show up and for others none of these links show up.

This is a bit disappointing as it seems to be slowing the whole process down a lot.

But on the upside two of the sides I have had links built for have moved up the SERPS shortly after their links were build. One was in the bottom half of page one and moved to number two in Google and the other was at the bottom of page one and moved to number seven on page one in Google. It might be a coincidence but the timing is pretty bang on.

Time will tell if the other sites get the same boost.

In the meantime I have been ordering more links for my other sites and also trying to do more blog commenting to try and improve my backlinking efforts.

AdSense on Low Converting Sites

I’ve got a site that gets about 150 hits a day but hardly any of those convert to sales. That site is probably my busiest site but unfortunately the very targeted traffic (pretty much all of it comes from one main keyword) just does not lead to sales.

So I have decided to try out some AdSense on the site and see if anyone clicks on it. I’m going to leave it on the home page for a month and see how the revenue compares to last month and if it is worth it.

I’ll post the results next month.

Monthly Round-up for August 2010

Don’t think I have done one of these for a while but as I am now back from my holidays I thought I better do a quick one for August.

I was away for the first three weeks of August (as well as July) so didn’t do that much work on my sites but the main thing I have been doing is the outsourcing of the acquisition of forum profile back links (you can read how I did this on this blog). I ordered them in batches of 120 and did it for four of my sites but its been over a week now and the links are not showing up in any backlink checks I’ve done so cannot say if they have made a difference or not. I doubt these links are very high quality but they’ve got to be better than nothing.

I’m still outsourcing written content which is really helping my sites as I’m too busy/lazy to write my own content these days and this way allows me to get good, fresh content for my sites. Have a look on ODesk and see if you can find a good writer if you are interested in doing this.

I still haven’t gotten around to trying out the financial leads through the Affiliate Marketing School as I am still scared of losing lots of money on PPC but I will bite the bullet one day – maybe once some money starts coming through from AWin.

My ‘big site’ is still not ranking at all which sucks. I’ve done about 50 200 word product pages for the desired keyword and its still not on the first 60 pages of Google and judging by some of the other pages in the top 600 the competition isn’t that stiff. This is my first site which does not have the keyword in the domain and I’m now realising just how much a keyword domain helps.

I’ve also started three new keyword niche sites this month after a long time of not starting any new sites. None of them are particularly good niches as they get pretty low hits but they might bring in a few quid each month which is nothing to complain about but not really the road I want to keep going down long term (lots of little sites).

What I am thinking about at the moment is moving from getting a large slice of a small pie to getting a small slice of a big pie. At the moment my sites do quite well in the SERPS (apart from my big site) but the niches are pretty low traffic so even if I get to number 1 in Google and take a large slice of the niche pie I still don’t get much money. But now I am thinking to maybe go after a more competitive niche but aim to get in the bottom half of page 1 and just have a smaller slice of the much bigger niche pie. To do this I will still need a keyword domain but as they are all gone in the competitive niches I might start appending them with buy_____.co.uk or _______store.co.uk as I’ve seen other people doing this. I don’t really like the idea of muscling into niches in which other affiliates are already operating but people are doing this to me now so maybe its time I started doing it too. What do you think readers?

This month my profits were up about 10% on last month which I am pleased about and I will be aiming to do the same next month.

In September I will be mostly working on my Christmas site – it’s only 3 months away!