About 9 months ago, I received an email invitation to join the Yahoo Search Marketing Southeast Asia affiliate program. I was skeptical and reluctant because promoting products which I did not used personally was not what I like to do. But, I heard from my friends that Yahoo search marketing can convert pretty well for certain type of products e.g. beauty and weight-loss. Anyway, I am happy that I eventually enrolled into the program.

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I have been writing about upcoming PC and IT Shows in Singapore since early this year at the MyBlogSG.com blog. These IT shows related posts are attracting some traffic to the blog. It will be interesting to know what are the characteristics of the keywords which giving the most traffic!

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$30 Canadian dollars and that is how much my blog is worth! This paltry offer made me sad and angry for 2 seconds. Then I realized that this blog may not worth even 2 cents if no one wanted it! Now, I am happy that someone actually wanted to pay $30 for this 190-page blog with many 1st page ranking in Google and attracted thousands of page views every month.

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Does website hosted with GooglePages get indexed quicker and also ranked higher? I don’t think so. I have a couple of GooglePages websies:

http://mywebculture.googlepages.com

and

http://shihengcheong.googlepages.com

and they never got indexed and ranked. Maybe they will get indexed now that I put the links here. Anyway, if you think Google give preferential treatment to pages hosted in their websites then other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN might just blacklist these pages or keep them in the sandbox longer!

Ultimately, I believe you still have to following recommended webmasters’ guidelines and proper SEO practices to get your web pages do well in the SERP.

As for the above 2 websites, they are sub-domains of GooglePages.com and no matter high well ranked the GooglePages.com is, it has nothing to do with the sub-domains unless there is linking between these pages withing these websites.

I modified the template and made it more SEO friendly. There is the description tag in every post also the tag title is one of a kind – optimized but not too aggressively. I link Singapore Blog by a Singapore Blogger to a couple my other blogs using fancy colorful chicklets.

I also made a new post on STOMP website and how SPH (Singapore Press Holding) was using woman and girls in bikini to drive traffic. You can see colorful photos of half naked girls in nearly every other pages of the national newspaper.

At_A_Glance

• Modified blogspot template
• Added links to a couple of my other blogs using chicklet
• Made a new post on STOMP and bikini girls ad in the Straits Times

Many have asked me how do I measure the success of a website. You will probably agree that it depends. It depends what you want to achieve with the website in the first place.

Ok, ok… Make Money Right? Most of us build websites to make money. And if that is the case, it’ll be easy to measure success. You would set a target as to how much you want to make with a website right at the beginning. No? Most of us do not have the slightest idea how to build a money making website so I understand why we did not set a monetary target in the first place. Otherwise, it would be a lame reply… “As much as possible!”.

If you make more money than you initially invested, you’ll be in profit. Typically, a DIY website would cost you less than $100 to set up and maintain for a year or even two. So if you make $100 in the first year, you break even. If you make $100 every month from the 6th month onward you are doing really well. So build 20 such websites and you could probably tell your boss you don’t really need that job!

But do you know…

• How to make $100 per month with a website?
• What do you sell to make money?
• How much traffic do you need to make that monthly cheque?

It is true that your website revenue depends on the number and quality of visitors to your website regardless of what you sell – hard goods, e-products, subscription or advertising space (e.g. Google Adsense).

One of the easiest ways to monetize your traffic is to put up Google Ads by registering to be an Adsense publisher. Content website is probably where Google wants the ads to appear so you will need unique and useful content. You will need to optimize each of your web page for search engine so that you will get free traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN and etc.

So you can see that the success of a website is a function of visitor traffic. Now, let’s determine how much traffic you’ll need to make a $100 cheque every month. We shall take the example of an Adsense publisher. Since you are a new publisher, let’s target less competitive keywords which you can still get ranked in the top 3 pages with proper SEO techniques. Each click will probably earn you $0.10 or less. You will need at least 1000 clicks to earn a $100 cheque. That will work to 33 clicks every day. If 5 out of 100 visitors click at one ad, you will need more than 650 visitors to your website every day. And that’s a lot of traffic for a new website for a newbie publisher!

If your website is not already generating 500 unique visitors a day then you’ll have to

1. Add more content to target more keywords.
2. Promote your website by submitting articles and press release.
3. Solicit backlinks by submitting to directories and other related websites.
4. Rewriting your content to make it search engine friendly and interesting to your readers.

Finally, one more tip for you to find out if your content is liked by your visitors. Go check you server log and see how many people bookmarked your website – people usually bookmark a website when they find it interesting and useful. You should have at least 30% of your visitors bookmarked your website.
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Google is number 1 and more and more people are using Google – the search engine of choice for nearly half the Internet search population. According to a report on Yahoo! (please see below report), Google’s market share increased by about 6 percentage point while Yahoo and MSN dropped. At the rate Google is growing, 50% is within reach by the end of this year. Google should be taking advantage Microsoft delay in launching of Windows Vista to gain more market and strengthen it’s grip in the search market.

Let’s face it, Google is bigger than Yahoo and MSN combined – that is to say even if Bill Gates were to buy over Yahoo search, MSN can only be number 2. So it’s time to consider seriously just optimizing for Google instead of wasting time on the rest of the search engines for they may never catch up!

Google Shores Up Search
Tuesday March 28, 1:57 pm ET
By Alyce Lomax

Despite rivals’ best efforts, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG – News) has increased its share of the search market, widening its lead in the space. It’s clear that Google has made itself the brand in search…

According to ComScore data for February, Google increased its market share to 42.3%, from 36.3% on a year-over-year basis. High-profile rivals Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO – News) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT – News) both dipped. Yahoo!’s search share fell to 27.6% from 31.1%, while MSN’s share dropped to 13.5% from 16.3%. In an interesting aside, IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s (Nasdaq: IACI – News) Ask.com increased to 6% from 5.3%. (Ask.com recently dropped long-time gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves and has embarked on a TV ad campaign entreating folks to give its search tools a whirl.)

As for Microsoft, I have no comment — well, other than the fact that I’ve made it clear in the past that I’m a bear, so why beat a dead horse. Although I have colleagues who think highly of Microsoft’s efforts to step up its search features, its rep for being an innovator — or even for being particularly on time with its products — isn’t too hot. Needless to say, the Vista delay hasn’t helped in that department.

Found an article on Google Sandbox Effect very interesting and useful. The author first explained what’s Google Sandbox and verified its existence – there are still many webmasters not willing to believe that their websites can be “locked up” for 3 months or more. To the knowing webmasters, the Google Sandbox has been a bane to their effort in SEO and gaining better search engines visibility.

Well, help is here. The article described 10 methods to help you avoid the sandbox effect though some of the method may be considered as blackhat tactics**.

1. Buy out old domains – typically a year is good age to ensure a domain is sandbox free
2. Buy recently expired domains – expired domains can avoid a fresh sandbox cycle
3. Collect the low hanging fruit – large quantities of low traffic terms can be just as rewarding
4. Buy your way in – consider doing PPC campaign for your targeted terms
5. Use subdomain from developed site – host your new site on a subdomain of an already established domain
6. Acquire “trusted” links – acquire high quality authoritative backlinks e.g. DMOZ.org
7. Explore non-Google traffic sources – learn to survive without being at the whim of GG
8. Drag your competitors down to your level**
9. Hijack your competitors rankings**
10. Perhaps you aren’t sandboxed after all – it is possible that you aren’t sandboxed but simply suffering the effect of a very ineffective web page design in terms of SEO

Read the full article here.

Since we are still on the topic of writing search engine optimized articles for better SE visibility, I would recommend that you take a look at a series of articles on Singapore shopping. Several weeks ago, if you checked my previous post, I discussed about Singapore targeted traffic. Just to recap, I mentioned that I observed an increase in the number of visitors from Singapore – thanks to sg.yahoo.com and msn.com – over the past 12 months to my Singapore related websites.

Now back to the articles, I commissioned a freelance writer based in Singapore to write 20 shopping related articles. I selected the keywords using Overture keyword tools, so these are not particularly great niche keywords but highly competitive keywords. I just want to see how will these pages performed.

I must admit I am quite impressed by the articles. The writer is familiar with the shopping locations in Singapore and gives good tips to those who like to have a shopping spree in Singapore. So go take a look while they’re still fresh.

Google updated the PR rating for all websites last week. Some of my websites PR have improved, most remain the same. My web hosting and search marketing website http://www.mywebculture.com is now rated PR4 – many of the internal pages are PR 3 and some even PR4. I believe the constant adding of new pages to the website has helped in the improvement of the PR rating. Hey, do you have an article on web promotion or search marketing? Submit to my Web Marketing articles archive and possibly get a PR3 link from my website.

So, if you want your website to be recognised by Google, make sure you constantly add good quality content. Otherwise, Google will mothball your website! especially if you do not already command good traffic.

You can install the Google Toolbar to display the PR rating of your website or go to this page:

http://www.prchecker.info

Now, let’s talked about the 4 websites put up by our Internet Marketing in Action Workshop participants back in August. Both the blog sites and the mini sites have PR1 showing that Google has visited your web pages and approved of the content. However, except for Tigercrab’s HYIP blog, the other 2 websites are dormant – no new content and very little traffic. Alas! How to make money with your website if no people come visiting…

Now that Google has ranked your web page, it is time to put in some effort and add more content to attract traffic and links from other people websites. Do not let your time and effort spent at the workshop go to waste. Let me know how I can help.

To see the above blogs and websites, please go to

Internet-Marketing-in-Action-Workshop.html

Before I go, do you know Jolly’s blog, http://internetmarketinginaction.blogspot.com had been promoted to PR2. He’s definitely doing the right thing.