Nemeton

2009-02-11T14:01:00.003Z

Hit by the Dreaded Google Penalty

Just when I thought it couldn't happen, my main site Celtnet has been hit by the dreaded 'Google Penalty'.

If you don't know about it this is when your site's search results begin falling down and down the results until they're all below entry 200 or less. It's taken me over 3 years to build the site and at the beginning of last year 2008 I started to make a breakthrough, adding links and content every day. This success impelled me to build the Celtnet Recipes region of the site to over 6500 recipes; each unique and hand crafted by me.

The success snowballed so, but January 2009 I was getting over 15000 hits daily and I was making a decent income from AdSense. This is Google's own advertising program. Then, last Friday (February 6th) my traffic suddenly dried up. Over the next two days I dropped down to only 4000 hits per day, basically just those people who have bookmarked my site and income dropped by over 2/3.

OK, Google only does this when people have violated their terms of service and it's probably an automatic flag set in their system somewhere. This, though would be easier to swallow if I had changed my code and the way the site works in some way... But I haven't.

So I can't, personally, explain this drop in SERPs (serge engine page rankings) position. And that's the thing... OK, if I've violated Google's TOS then this some kind of penalty is fair. But I'm just one guy trying to put good content and new content on the web... I'm not an SEO expert and I don't have a team of people behind me.

The only way to get page rankings back is to use google's 'reinclusion submission' form. But this form assumes you know what went wrong and that you've fixed it and then you confess to them what you did and why and then you say you will never do it again. But I haven't got a clue!!!

And this is where it really gets unfair. Google hit you with a penalty over-night and don't tell you why. So if you've unintentionally done something wrong you have no clue as to why they penalized you and what you did wrong because they did not tell you! So I now have to try and figure out what I might have done wrong so that I can fix it then tell them 'I'm sorry' and 'I won't do it again'.

My income dropped dramatically during these days and is continually dropping. Now, I could blame myself and say it's my fault... except that my income from the website isn't going to me.... I'm actually using it to fund the education of Liberian refugee children in Dakar, Senegal (see One Million People Campaign Pages to see why. So this drop in SERPs for my site isn't hitting me, it's hitting others.

I work damn hard on my website, over 50 hours per week (and I have a regular job). I try and do my best, I make certain my content is novel and good...

But if I can't figure out what went wrong, and with no help from Google, in the next few weeks then I'm going to give up.

Google say they want good content on the web, but this really isn't helping. There are plenty of spammy sites out there and mine isn't one. I have unique content not crap! So why has my site vanished and now sites with far less content than mine are the only one users see.

If Google is really true in what they say about good user experiences then this is not the way to go. I'm fed up and rather than dealing with any of this nonesense again I'm going to give up and get a second job to help those Liberian kids. I've just lost them over $800 a month and to them and their future and there must be better ways of earning the money than this.

If Google are just going to pull the rug from under your feet without telling you why and giving you a chance to fix it (after all, it's only fair to be warned if your income is about to be wiped out) then why should the little guys doing individual things and actually adding to the web experience bother?

It's not the penalty that gets me... If I did something wrong then a penalty is warranted. It's just that there was no warning, no information is forthcoming and no grace period was given to fix things.

Google's motto is 'don't be evil'... But how is this not evil in any way? I've been royally screwed by Google. But, unfortunately, in the end I'm not the one who is going to suffer. I might actually get the time I spend on the website I've created from nothing all by myself back.

My website was a labour of love and this is just the way to completely kill my spirit.

2008-10-20T16:08:00.001Z

Browsing Habits and the Days of the Week

Have you been examining your visitor stats lately? Do you take note of what happens on various days of the week and how the day can affect click-throughs and conversions?

Well, if you haven't been taking note of these factors affecting your website and your income, then shame on you! Because, the days of the week and what you have on offer can have a huge effect on the income you make. Indeed, these fluctuations in the behavours of people visiting my Celtnet website was one of the main reasons I began to develop my site into an authority site.

I began my site with the Celtnet Celtic pages, all based on my hobby and interests, the ancient Celtic gods and the ancient texts of Wales. I added adsense to this, but more in hope than any real expectation. There was some income and that's when I began the Celtnet Information region of the site. This was much more an attempt at making some real money... and, yes, during the middle of the week I did actually make some money, but over Friday and the weekend that steady flow became only a trickle.

Obviously, what I was offering only seemed to be needed during the middle of the week. To try and plug the obvious gap I added a Celtnet Recipes Collection and a Medicine Section and the addition of these two new parts to the website did even out the earnings across the week. Finally, I was getting a monthly cheque from Google.

Then I made a huge mistake... I began trying to grow my entire website across the board. I was adding new content in as many different places as possible but there was no focus. I now know that it would have been far better to focus on a single area of the site, growing both the content and the in-bound links. It took me a year to make this realization and that's cost the site a lot of income.

A year ago I decided to concentrate on the Celtnet Recipes region of the site. During the past 10 months I've grown the content from 1100 recipes to almost 6000 (each hand edited) my traffic has increased 6-fold and my income almost 10-fold. This has been due to building lots of content, getting deep links into the site and re-designing my pages so they're both more visitor friendly and better at converting. And now, in contrast to when I started, the weekend is my most productive time of the week.

I get more hits and more click-throughs on the weekend, by quite a large margin, and this is probably due to the visitors being just a little less 'internet savvy' and less ad-blind overall.

And whilst I'm still growing the recipes site I've added a growing Articles Submission site, where anyone can submit their articles (a key aspect of link building) as well as an eBooks sales section and a ClickBank Marketplace where anyone can search ClickBank products or even create free ClickBank-based ads for their own sites. Each separate income generation strategies.

If you would like to learn how the site was turned around from the doldrums to a success then check-out the How to Maximiey your Web Traffic eBook and course. And if you would like to know what drives me to making the most from the site then please check out the One Million People Charity Campaign as it's this to which the proceeds from the website are given.

Yes, you can make your website into a success, but it will require effort on your part, and there are no shortcuts. You HAVE to grow your content and grow your links.

2008-10-11T14:48:00.000Z

Does Page Rank Really Matter?

At the end of September the webmaster forums were all-a-twitter in that Google seemed to be performing a page rank update. The first in many, many, months. Webmasters were desperately scanning the various datacentres to see if their page ranks had changed or not and reports were flying thick and fast. But it seems that no proper update of page rank was forthcoming. So, does it actually matter?

In a way page rank is critical, but in another it's totally irrelevant. Google uses page rank as an algorithmic measure of how important a website is (ie its rank in comparison to other similar websites, based on the number of links coming into a site and the 'authority' of those sites (ie their page rank).

As a result sites began to scan page rank and there grew a market around selling links from sites with high page rank. A site with high page rank could command a fair amount of money for selling links. Which distorted the natural, organic, growth of links to websites. Obviously this created an artificial skewing of results and Google didn't like this. So they began clamping down on the selling of links.

Now it seems that they are obfuscating page rank. The rank shown in Google's toolbar, or even on Google's datacentres may not actually represent the true page rank or ranking of a site. Indeed, I run the Celtnet and Celtnet Recipes sites. Both these currently have a PR of 0 yet I've managed to grow my traffic five fold in the past six months and my income almost ten fold. If the observed page rank was the true arbiter of a site's quality and position in the search engines then this could not happen.

Which does lead to a bit of a problem. Because higher page rank gives a site more 'juice' in terms of website ranking and getting links is the only way to improve your position in the search engines many webmasters have decided to only exchange links with high PR sites (typically 3 and above). But if page ranks are no longer accurate, how do webmasters with good sites but low PR (artificially low, it seems) exchange links?

We're in the position of having another artificial stewing of how websites are percieved and the placing of a huge barrier in front of new entrants into the field.

2008-10-06T16:48:00.000Z

The Importance of Links

Unfortunately, the Internet is not a meritocracy. You may have the world's best content on your blog or website, but if nobody reads that content then it's effectively less than useless to you as the site's publisher.

I'm not saying that great content isn't important. In fact it's a vital component for any serious presence on the internet, because you want the experience of anyone visiting your website to be a good one. So you need to give them confidence in your site and the only way to do that is to provide them with great, individualistic and above all useful content. So you need to build your site and add great content each and every day.

This is where the true currency of the internet comes in — links. Unless you have links coming into your website then your site will not be found and your content will not be indexed. How you do this may well vary, but here are some of my favorite strategies (and I've used these to increase my website's traffic 10-fold in the past 6 months!

Submitting articles to article directories. This is an all-time favorite and still works really well. In essence you write an article on a topic related to your site and you then submit that article to one of the web's main article directories. Personally, I tend to use the following:

EzineArticles.com — not the fastest, but it's been around for a long time and has lots of kudos

GoArticles — submitted articles are instantly live you can enter affiliate links.

Celtnet Articles — not one of the biggest, but articles are quality reviewed and they are published quickly.

Article Dashboard — turn-around time can be long but this is good for getting your articles picked-up by eZines and published elsewhere.

These are only a few and you can view many more on-line. These are the ones I tend to use myself and they've been good to me in terms both of getting my articles published and picked-up by others. Just remember that each article accepted gives you at least 2 links (typically 3) back to your website and if your content is picked-up by others you get even more links.

Link exchanges — whether you do this through a third party or go for link exchanges personally it can still be a good way of getting links back to your site. Many say this methodology is devalued these days, but remember that it's not just search traffic you want... any means of getting quality links to your site is useful and if you exchange links with a related site you will get referral traffic from that site.

Blog posting — posting to blogs such as this one can be a very useful way of getting more links to your site. Basically you can write a post on a given topic and then include links back to your site that are relevant to your topic.

Free Web Page sites — Sites such as squdoo and hubpages allow you to create individual web pages. You can use these sites to write on a topic and include links back to your own website that are relevant to that topic.

Submit your site to Directories — this is probably not as important as it used to be, but some directories such as DMOZ have a high traffic ranking and can be beneficial.

Blog Comments — Commenting on onthers' blogs or on on-line forums can be an excellent way of disseminating your website's URL. You will increase your traffic both by the virtue that there are more links pointing to your site and by people coming across your URL 'by accident'.

These are just some of the ideas of the ways that you can help get more links to your site. And the truth is that I tend to spend at least 2 hours a day on getting links. In the end though the processes above can be considered as 'priming the pump'. You need enough links into your site for your site and its contents to get on the search engines' radar. But, eventually, if you have good content, then you will start to develop good links back to your site as other webmasters and bloggers mention your site and give you links back to it.

These are just some ideas about how you can improve the links to your site. You can read more about this in the article: How to Improve your Google Ranking.

If you are truly serious about improving your search engine rankings and your traffic then you really need to check out: The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic. And whilst you're there, why not sign-up for the free six-part eCourse.

2008-09-04T16:49:00.003Z

The Earnestness of Absence

I know that it's been a long while since I updated this blog... and that's never a good thing. My excuse is that I've been madly working on my website. The site has expanded in so many ways that I needed to give it a complete overhaul. So, not only does the Nemeton Home Page have a completely new look and feel and should make it much easier to navigate and find the various sections of the site.

The Celtnet Recipes recipe section of the site has also had a major overhaul and now has almost 5000 recipes from all corners of the glove in the database. No mean feat as all the recipes are edited and annotated by me before being published. There's no copying and pasting of standard recipes going on here. As you can imagine, all this means that I've been extremely busy, hence the silence on this blog for a while.

Given that I've also updated the ClickBank Marketplace and given the ClickBank Ads Generators pages an overhaul (and, yes, they're still free for anyone to publish and create their own ClickBank-based ads on these pages) you can see that I've been busy.

Of course, all this effort is in aid of the One Million People Campaign that I and my website support, so all the effort is worthwhile! And now I'm onto the Celtnet Celtic section of the site. That bit of the website that actually kicked everything off so many years ago now.

What this comes down to is SEO. Websites change and adapt and the whole look and feel of websites also changes and adapts. To make certain your website is taken seriously you need to keep the site looking young and fresh and that means keeping up with the latest trends. Some of this is easy as I've used CSS from the start. But there's still a fair amount of re-engineering involved as I was learning CSS as I was going on. I now have a nice design developed for the recipes section of the site and I want to roll that out everywhere. It uses pure CSS to ensure that the central most important information part of the page appears first in the HTML so that the indexing spiders see this first.

But, as is often the case, all this frenetic activity has meant that I dropped the ball on several important SEO factors. The first of these is not doing enough link checking. I've ended up with hundreds of broken links for one reason or another and we all know that the search engines hate broken links and will penalize your site for it. I've been busy cleaning-up these broken links over the past few days and already my rankings and traffic are both climbing.

The other thing I ignored was a proper, systematic, approach to getting more in-bound links. Now, I'd been working hard on writing articles as ways of getting in-bound links and this was working quite well for me. Between January and April I tripled the traffic to my site (and did the same for my income). Which was great, but I kind of left things to stabilize at that level and that wasn't good.

Now, optimizing my ad placements helped raise revenue and that I did as part of my overall re-design (and it worked!). Then I had to go away and leave everything for almost three weeks and visitors fell. All the hard work in writing articles was only really working as long as I kept writing articles. I needed better ways to get links. So began a campaign of proper link building and link exchanges. I began writing articles for Wikipedia again as well as leaving recipes and comments on blogs. I also began using digg and other sites to promote my various web pages.

This led to an extra 400 in-bound links in the first week and my traffic and income began to climb again. Basically it means that the old stalwarts of the internet biz aren't dead at all. And if you want to make a profit then you need to keep working on your link-building. Write articles, exchange links, leave comments, join forums. Basically use any means you can to get links to your site 'out there'. And make certain that you get plenty of deep links into your site as well.

If you want more tips like this, then why not have a look at the How to Maximize your Web Traffic page where you can sign-up to a free six-part e-course on driving more traffic to your site. Just think what you could do if you could triple your website's traffic in three months (or even less!)

And, if you have a recipe-related site why not sign-up for a link exchange with the Celtnet Recipes Links reciprocal links page?

2008-04-10T16:11:00.002Z

Free ClickBank Ads for All

ClickBank is a great resource for finding products to promote and profit from. But it's really designed for putting afiliates (those who will promote the products) in touch with products that they can promote. As a result it's intended for those who aggressively market products singly. But ClickBank is also a great source of income, with typical affiliate payments per product sold ranging from $20 to $100! What if you want to tap into this bounty without having to go through each product and write sales scripts for them.

For anyone with the time and patience, ClickBank produce an XML feed every evening (called the ClickBank products feed) and this contains information about all the products in the marketplace. You could download this feed, parse it into a database and then produce a ads based on the result.

One problem with this is that ClickBank's descriptions are indended, in general, to show how good a product is for an affiliate to promote. They are not promotional tools in and of themelves. For any product you producted to be effective you would have to update the title and the descriptions to be better at selling the product.

This is a lot of work, especially when you would need to create Ads or RSS feeds on top of the database. Now that's a lot of programming work.

Fortunately, several sites have already done the hard work for you. The best of these provide AdSense-lik contextual ads (for example see Celtnet's AdSense-like ClickBank Ads). Such ads look exactly like ClickBank's ads and you can typically change the style, chose which section of ClickBank to promote and chose the style so that it fits in with your site's overall context.

One problem of such ads is that they cannot be displayed alongside Google's AdSense ads because this conravenes Google's TOS (Terms of Service). [For more information on this issue see: Lami Reviews' Information on ClickBank Ads].

The only way you can mix AdSense ads with ClickBank ads at the moment is to integrate an RSS feed of ClickBank products, such that available at: ClickBank RSS Ads into your website. As RSS feeds count as news aggregation (no matter what's displayed) this falls within Google's TOS so this is OK and well within the rules. It's even quite easy to do this as all you need to do is to add the RSS feed to one of the many RSS to JavaScript converters on the web and then copy the JavaScript code into your own website (just do a web search for 'RSS to Javascript' and you'll get a whole range of results back).

One very recent innovation is the use of Images in AdSense-like ads, but based around ClickBank code. Curently these are only provided by the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace (in their ClickBank Image-based ads product where the ads are free for anyone to use and deploy) but it probably won't be long before other vendors also begin to produce similar ad formats. After all the use of images in Ads seems to be the way that Google, themselves are going.

Why are such ads worth considering? Well, generally the barrier to putting these ads on your site is very low. Also, if you have enough traffic and enough ad clicks hey can be very lucrative. However, these ads are what's termed PPA (pay per action — you only get paid when someone buys something, whereas Google ads are PPC (pay per click). But ads based on ClickBank products give you all the usual affiliate earnings potential of promoting ClickBank products by standard meansh. This is basically $20 to $100 per purchase made through these ads. Not something to be sniffed at.

For more information, see the review at How to Use ClickBank to Monetize your Site.

So, should you be considering these ads for your site, blog or web page? I will leave that qustion up to you. Try them out, do your due diligence and find out what works best for your site.

2008-03-07T09:53:00.002Z

Why You Should NEVER 'ContactThem'

Or why the 'ContactThem' emails are a tempting scam...

If, like me, you have an internet presence then you've probably seen one of a rash of eMails going round that read something like this:

Subject: I’ve visited your website http://www.celtnet.org.uk

Hi,

We’ve seen your website at http://www.celtnet.org.uk and we love it!

We see that your traffic rank is 349,775

and your link popularity is 356.

Also, you have been online since 4/15/2004.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.

If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: http://www.contactthem.ws/hit.php?s=10&p=2&w=103047

Sincerely,

Tony Gagliardi

The ContactThem Network

I've been receiving two or three (at least) of these messages each and every day. Each one refers to a different page or sub-section of my site and and they all come from different senders (but each one is in the "The ContactThem Network") and they all have different referral links. It was becoming a nuisance, and the offers also looked too tempting to be real.

I'm always on the look out for new web scams and the latest of these all go up on my Internet Scams Pages. I simply just had to look into this...

When you click on one of the referral links you're taken to a very snazzy website and an audio track starts and begins to read the content of the web page to you. It all looks very professional and it's done very well as a squeeze page. You're very tempted to click on the affiliate link or to join the program. After all who couldn't resist a passive income of “up to $4,800/month” just to display some links and banners on your website or blog. After all, it just sounds like an offer for text link or banner advertising. What's actually happening is that they're trying to recruit you into a multi-tier affiliate program.

When I began to dig further it didn't take me long to find out that the person behind ContactThem network is Stephan Ducharme, the man behind the famous (or should I say, infamous), 'Free Google Ads'. Yes, this is Stephan Ducharme, “The FreeAdGuru”.

What Ducharme is trying to do here is to get you to buy the ContactThem software product which extracts user and website details from a number of databases and allows you to use this personalized information to send out a mass mailing. Indeed, if you've ever recieved an email like the one described above then you're a 'victim' of Ducharmes ContactThem software product. One of the product's affiliates extracted YOUR details out of a database and spammed you with their ContactThem affiliate link…

You're being spammed here and the offer is only for you to join the band of spammers. I believe the product costs $50 per month (or thereabouts) and only by recruiting more into the spam brigade can you begin to make any money. It's a hybrid between affiliate marketing and MLM in that you need to recruit more people into the system to make money. Only with the twist that you're using the product not to sell anything or offer a service but to spam others.

I have to give it to Stephan Ducharme in that he writes excellent copy and is a dab hand at getting a viral campaign up and running in record time. He's obviously raking it in from this launch... But he's also notorious for atrocious customer service, not honouring refunds and massivlely under-delivering on his product promises.

This is a scam and a home for spammers, If you get any email like this just hit the delete button or add it to your spam filters...

2008-02-24T21:29:00.002Z

SEO-friendly Links for Charity

This post crosses across two of my Bologs and functions of my website. Firstly I'm seeking donations to help my One Million People campaign where I'm trying to get 1 Million People all over the internet to donate 50-cents apiece to help educate the children of Liberian refugees stranded in Senegal, West Africa after the 1999-2003 civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

But the One Million People campaign is also a chance for you to get some much needed SEO publicity for your website. As a 'thank you' for anyone who donates $1 or even 50-cents at my One Million People campaign page I'm giving you the chance to upload your image, a profile of yourself and your website/blog URL to my database. The links immediately go live on the One Million People campaign home page and you get a direct SEO-friendly link to the website you defined from that page. You also get a link to your personal profile page and your URL link is also made live there, too. For just 50-cents you can get two SEO-friendly links from a high traffic page to your own website. In addition, you get the kudos of being associated with this campaign.

So, go to the One Million People capmaign page today and become one of the canpaign's sponsors. You can also help by submitting articles to Celtnet Articles directory. Again this gets you links back to your website, but the more articles we have the more money we can make from AdSense and other ads to provide to the campaign we're running. It's only a 2-minute sign-up process to join and you can write articles on just about anything. If your subject isn't there then just use the contact form linked from the Celtnet Articles directory to drop us a line and we'll add that category for you. Submit enough articles of good enough quality and you will becme a 'Celtnet Articles' expert author. You may even become an article moderator with the rights to submit articles directly into the database.

The campaign here is also being supported from the Africa Aid Blog and news of our efforts are spreading. Why not become part of the Celtnet community today and help those who have suffered so much make a better life for their children.

2008-02-12T21:21:00.000Z

Pay-per-Play ads and Other Announcements

An update on the Pay-per-Play advertising system. The Pay Per Play Ads System is currently in active testing and will be in testing for the next three weeks or os. However, this is the only time where the system will allow you to get your own first and second-tier affiliates for the system. So I urge you to visit Pay Per Play Marketing now and sign-up for the system. Then begin promoting the system to start creating your down-line.

During this testing period you may get ads on your site if you get more than 10 page impressions a day. Otherwise ads will not be delivered until the system goes live. This gives you a couple of weeks to grab the ad code and to start propagating the code through your web pages. By the beginning of March you can begin to see how your ads are performing. So, sign-up with the Pay-per-Play system at their Sign-up Page today.

Today I've also released the latest version of my Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace a human-edited version of the ClickBank products system which is fully searchable and comes with free ClickBank Ads generation systems so that you can market ClickBank products on your web pages.

I've also released the latest version of the Celtnet eZine today which focusses on ways you can increase the revenue from your website or blog. A theme that's echoed in my recent article on Expanding your Advertising Revenue Streams.

Which reminds me to inform all my readers that the Celtnet Articles site is now live. Here you can easily register and submit your own articles on any subject. You get 3 links in your resource box and you can submit articles on just about any subject. All approved articles are published at the end of the day and ads are submitted to the major news aggregators via RSS feeds so you're guaranteed of maximal exposure for your ads.

2008-02-12T13:17:00.000Z

Pay-Per-Play Advertising For Your Site

A new buzz is slowly bubbling through the Internet Marketing community. It's all about a new advertising phenomenon, Pay-per-Play Advertising (PPP) that could take the internet by storm.

Every now and then something completely new comes along in terms of internet advertising. I've just found out about a new form of internet advertising that I believe will catch-on very quickly. At this present moment in time you also have the ability to join for free and earn money for playing sounds on your website, just a small piece of code is required.

Pay-Per-Play (PPP) advertising is the name of this revolution. PPP works on a bid management system similar to Google AdWords and will compensate publishers just like Google AdSense but with one critical difference... Publishers (website owners) earn revenue on 100% of their traffic... no clicks necessary!

You can find out more about PPP marketing at: Pay Per Play Marketing here.

PPP is a way for advertisers to serve 5-second audio ads to a website's visitors. But because websites serve a whole range of interests, topic and niches PPP offers advertisers a way to reach their target audience (and that audience can be very targeted and is the only form of media whose impressions and ad placements are verified by an independent 3rd party.

The ads themselves are very professional (many are made by the biggest players in the industry) and you don't have to serve them on your website. Rather, you just sign-up to the system and grab a short piece of javascript that you embed into each of your websites and you're done. Now, we all know that audio on websites can be very annoying, but the ads served here are only five seconds long and they run (and finish) as soon as your web page has loaded. As a result they're not too distracting and are easily ignored by your site's visitors.

The system currently has 66 000 advertisers (and growing) and because there's nothing to click and the ad plays as soon as the web page is loaded you get paid each time an ad is played! The compensation plan is also quite generous.

As a website owner you get 25% of the amount bid by the publisher for their ad (this is much more than Google). You can also earn by referring other website owners, online marketing firms, fortune 500 companies, etc. to run PPP ads on their website(s). You will earn a healthy 5% of the total amount that our advertisers spend running ads on your referrals website(s). You also earn 5% of the amount that the advertiser spends on PPP ads played on the website(s) that your direct referrals bring on board. As a result there are 3 levels of commission. Each potentially bringing you a very healthy income each and every week! But the quicker you get on this bandwaggon, the better it is for you.

Or, if you're already sold on this exciting development, why not go directly to the Sign-up Page.

2008-02-06T23:56:00.000Z

Improved ClickBank Contextual Ads for your Site

Anyone following this blog and other postings I've been making both here and on my website will know that I've been working for about 3 months on creating ClickBank based ads that are free for everyone to use. Well, following a few comments about my ads and some snide remarks I've been busy completely re-designing them.

If this is news to you, then let me explain. ClickBank is the web's largest collection of electronic products ready for immediate download. Each product is backed by ClickBank's 56-day money-back guarantee. If you sign-up to ClickBank and become an affiliate you will make between $20 and $100 on every product sold through your affiliate ID. Unfortunately, however, ClickBank is designed for putting authors (those who write the products) in contact with affiliates (those who market the products). As a result ClickBank products are geared towards gaining affiliates rather than selling products.

This was the problem I had, so I decided to do something about it. ClickBank makes a data feed available of all their products. I grab this every weekend and load it into a database. I then create images for each product website and then change the affiliate-based product titles and descriptions to descriptions that will sell the product. All this being done by hand. The result is the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace where you can view and search for any product in the ClickBank marketplace based on my new descriptions.

Once this was done I realized that I had a very powerful tool on my hands. A little work and I could offer websites ads, just like Google AdSense ads but based on ClickBank products. This let to my creation of the ClickBank Ads generation page. Here you can get contextual ads, just like Google's, RSS feeds, image-based ads and ClickBank based search scripts all free for everyone to use. The big thing here were the Clickbank contextual ads. The code worked well, but the ads were a little amateurish when they first came out. I was busy refining the selection options so you could display he ads exactly how you wanted and with any option of ClickBank search products you wanted. But the ads themselves were a bit flaky.

That was my downfall initially. So, I've spent the past two days completely writing the Ad code. They are now much more professional and you can get them to look almost exactly like AdSense ad units if you wish. To prove this I've put up a demonstration web page at Celtnet Breads Page. Just have a look at the ads on the page. No, they're not Google AdSense ads, they're CentnetCBAds based on ClickBank products. On the lower left you'll also see how I've made ad units out of an RSS fee of ClickBank products (the code to do this will be available soon, but you can create your own ClickBank products RSS feed for free now.

As you can see the ad units I'm providing are now very professional in appearance and you get a huge range of sizes and possible appearance so you can either blend them completely to your website or you can make them totally stand out. What's more you get all these ad units for free. All you need to do is to sign-up to get a free ClickBank affiliate ID at ClickBank. Then you just go to my ClickBank Ads generation page and start creating the ads for your site.

What do I get out of it? You may ask. Well, you get the ads completely free. But for the work I've put into creating these ads I randomly assign my own ClickBank id to 8% of the ads shown on your site. If someone buys something from one of these ads I get the money. But the other 92% of all IDs go to you! Any money I make goes to my 'Help Stefan' charity campaign rather than to me so it helps the children of Liberian refugees in Senegal get an education. As a result you can monetize your website with ClickBank ads completely free whilst also knowing that you're aiding a worthwhile cause.

In my hands, on high-traffic web pages I make twice as much on those pages from ClickBank sales as I do from the whole of the rest of my site with AdSense. Now that can't be bad. So, why not check out my ClickBank Ads today and grab yourself a piece of the action?!

2008-02-01T14:59:00.000Z

Recent Events and Lessons for Webmasters

Two recent events in the news: Microsoft's offer for Yahoo! and the 'Anonymous' group's Google Bomb attack on the scentologists provide both salutary and informative lessons for all webmasters.

Microsoft's recent attempt to take over Yahoo! shows both the vulnerability of web-based companies (Yahoo!'s shares have slid dramatically in recent weeks) whilst also showing how important the internet space is. Yahoo! is one of the most recognized of web brands and Yahoo! dominates many areas of the web sphere. Yahoo's search (though trailing behind Google) is still the second most widely employed on the web. This makes Yahoo! a good fit for Microsoft and also means that Microsoft is after an even larger slice of internet revenue.

These are all hopeful signs for all of us with an internet presence. Both as there's a chance of a company developing that will give Google a run for it's money. Also it indicates that spending on internet advertising will continue to grow and that Microsoft wants a bigger slice of this pie. This projected growth of the internet as a marketplace also has significant implications on how businesses (and most especially small websites) do business on the internet. In a more crowded internet it's the large 'authority' sites who will ultimately triumph over their smaller brethren. This is something I've been saying for many years. Small 'niche' sites may not be dead yet, but their period of usefulness is drawing to a close and it's something that I point out in my eBook Maximize your Website Traffic, which has now been newly updated for 2008.

The other newsworthy event of the past week was the attack perpetrated by the 'anonymous' group on the Scientologists. You can read my analysis of this attack at Simple Techniques Still Work - The Case of a Google Bomb. Wikipedia defines a Google Bomb as:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

This is interesting as Google claimed, during 2007 that they had put in place measures that would prevent this kind of attack. This still didn’t prevent the Anonymous group from getting the Church of Scientology ranked third in Google for the term ‘dangerous cult’. Now, I certainly don’t condone this kind of attack. However, the strategies employed (some of them at least) point towards very good learning lessons for internet marketers.

Now, according to Google sites shouldn’t be ranked for a search term if those terms are not actually on the website being pointed at. The interesting thing here is that the term ‘dangerous’ was on the Scientology website, but the term ‘cult’ was not. Thus Scientology should not be ranked for the search term ‘dangerous cult’ — but it was!

The term ‘cult’ was only found in the links pointing towards the website which means that anchor text is still very important in getting a web page ranked for a certain term. The more in-bound links you have with that term in it pointing to your website or web page the more likely you are of being ranked for that search term!

This is interesting as a careful analysis of this 'Google bomb' attack reveals several methods webmasters can use to improve the ranking of their site and to get their sites listed for keywords and terms that are not part of the site's text.

In brief, what the the strategies employed by the ‘Anonymous’ group shows us is that:

in-bound links are still the most important factor for rankings

Page content matters for ranking

Anchor text still matters for keyword targeting

Keywords matter and keyword density is important

Link authority matters. The more links from high PR sites ir ‘topical’ sites, the better

Generating ‘buzz’ from social media sites and press releases matters

Timeliness matters. The more link density you can create in a short time, the better

The domain name itself is important. If you own the domain name to a search term you are going to rank well, regardless of content

This is all very interesting and gives the lie to Google's statements of last year (though I'm certain that Google's developers are already busy plugging the apparent gaps in their algorithms).

Yet, the techniques described above do work (at least for the present) and I've just added a new section to my Maximize your Website Traffic ebook to show how this Google bomb attack relates to the wealth of techniques described in the ebook.

I'm sure there will be more fallout from the two events described above over the following weeks. For the moment, however, it's just interesting to sit back and consider the implications.

2008-01-24T20:45:00.000Z

Celtnet ClickBank Ads Expanded

I know that this blog has been quiet for a while now. Partly that's because I've been working had on the ClickBank part of my site. And now it's an awesome hand-crafted site with search tools, hand-annotated product descriptions, product images, search tools (which you can use on your own sites) as well as ad generation tools so you can get contextual AdSense-like Ads based on ClickBank products. The newest tool being an ad generator that embeds images along with the contextual ads. This is a real killer ad system that dramatically increases click-throughs and is available nowhere else... I now have over 1400 ad units actively being used and 250 RSS feeds in use, and that's only after 10 weeks of the system being live! Why not grab your copy of these ads today...

I've also been away visiting my wife in Senegal and presenting the Liberian community in Dakar with the money I've made from various parts of my Celtnet site as part of my Help Stefan Charity Campaign. Enough money having been gained to give two of the Liberian refugee children an education for 2008. But for this year I'm setting myself a much more challenging target: and that is to make a minimum of $10 000 for the first half of 2008 (and even more in the second half).

As a result of this I've been significantly beefing-up my ClickBank Marketplace. The site is updated every weekend now with the very latest ClickBank marketplace feed. As a result, the products and rankings in the system are guaranteed of being up-to-date. Even better, all products are instantly associated with an image of the product website and within a few days the products gain a human-edited product description. As a result the default product description from ClickBank, which is invariably affiliate-centric (saying how good the product is for Affiliates to promote). The new descriptions are all intended to describe the product and to sell it. As a result the ClickBank Marketplace search functionality is much better than ClickBank's own, especially if you're looking for a product to promote. This is why I've made the search code that drives the Celtnet ClickBank Search System available to anyone, so you can put it on your own site. You populate with your own ClickBank nickname so any sales made are credited to you.

But the real 'big thing' here are the AdSense-like contextual ads that you can create on this site. The ClickBank AdSense-like ads page allows you to generate AdSense-like contextual ads for ClickBank products. Just like adsense you can define the size and appearance of the ads. You can also define the section of ClickBank products you want your ads from, as well as defining your own keywords to return and products you need. Once you've defined your ads, a simple click of a button will produce the ad for you. You get to see an example of the ad you've created as well as getting a single line of code that you just copy and paste into your own website (exactly the same way that Google's AdSense works).

But why should you use these ads? Well, the product information is written by hand and it seeks to sell the product. The code you get links directly to the database I've created so each time the ClickBank product feed is updated your products are automatically updated as well. The script is also completely dynamic so that on each page refresh you get a completely new set of ad, again just like AdSense. Unlike AdSense, however, you only get paid when someone buys a product through you link (you define your ClickBank nickname when you create your ads sets.

The newest 'killer app' in my suite of tools is a system for creating ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images... Here you define your ad block size and the colour scheme, but instead of getting plain text ads you also get an embedded image of the product website. It's been shown that images draw the eyes and that images also increase click-thorughs several fold. So these really could be the killer ad system for your website. Like all my other tools, it's completely free to employ and deploy and the script is dynamic so he ads change and rotate on each refresh.

To learn more about these ad systems, please go to my ClickBank Ads Generator page. There you will also learn about how you can generate ClickBank RSS feed ads so that you can mix ClickBank ads with AdSense ads or use ClickBank ads in blogs and other aggregators.

Whilst I've been away, I've been running some experiments in terms of replacing regular AdSense ads with my own ClickBank ads and mixing AdSense ads with ClickBank product RSS feeds. The results of these experiments (so far anyway) are detailed in my January 23rd eZine and it makes for very interesting reading.

But what's in it for me? I hear the cynical asking. Well, in fact, there's not that much in this for me at all. Your ClickBank 'nickname' (basically your ClickBank affiliate ID, which you can get here, free) is entered into my products so any sales made are credited to your account, rather than mine. However, what I do is that I randomly assign 8% (and not 15% or 20% like all my competitors) of all products delivered with my ClickBank ID. Any sales made with this ID are credited to my account and any proceeds go directly to fund the 'Help Stefan Charity Campaign' described above. So, not only are you getting some of the best ClickBank ad tools currently around you're also helping to support a worthwhile charity. And whilst that support continues to come in it gives me an incentive to keep updating and improving the tools that I provide for you.

Together we can become richer, so why not have a look at my tools today to see how they can improve your bottom line. Unlike other marketers and other systems you don't have to sign-up to anything to use my tools, I don't care how big or small your website is an you can use as many different ad unit sizes as you like on your pages. I believe that tools like the ones I'm providing should be made available as widely as possible and should be provided to everyone, regardless of who they are and where their site is. But, if you do find the tools useful a link back to http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php would be appreciated!

To your continued marketing success...

2007-10-31T19:25:00.000Z

The Big ClickBank Secret

If you visit this week's release of my Celtnet WebInfo eZine then you'll see that it's dedicated to a single product that I've produced. If you're a web marketer or even if you just run a website or a Blog then this is probably the most important annuncement that you'll hear this year (maybe even next year).

ClickBank is a source of literally thousands of electronic products for sale. All are available for instant download and are backed by ClickBank's 8-week money-back guarantee. As most products sell for $30 and affiliate payments average at 55% this could be a lucrative source of income for anyone with a website. However, the barrier to anyone actually being able to make an income from ClickBank is absolutely huge. Clickbank itself operates as a means of putting vendors and potential affiliates together in one place. As such the information provided by ClickBank is affiliate-centric rather than sales centric. This is a real problem as you simply can't take ClickBank's data feed and produce useful product information from it. The only way to do this is to place all ClickBank's information in a database and then to supplement this with product information either produced by screen scrapes or by actually visiting every vendor site and writing the descriptions by hand.

In my ClickBank Marketplace this is precisely what I did. The products there have images crafted by hand and descriptions crafted by hand. This is a long and hard job, but once the information is in the database it's simply a matter of updating. Now I had what was probably the best ClickBank search system on the web. Which was great, for me. But what if I could provide that functionality for everyone?

This led me to produce my Free ClickBank Search Code page which allows anyone with a ClickBank nickname (which you can get free free by following this link to deploy the search form on their website or blog. Anyone making a search is re-directed to my marketplace site, but all links and products shown get your ClickBank nickname in them. This means that you get the affiliate commission for any sale made.

This was good and it was a step towards achieving what I wanted. But it wasn't everything I wanted to achieve. Possibly the best marketing system out there at the moment is Google's AdSense network which provides contextual ads to a website. What if I could deliver something similar for Clickbank? After all AdSense pays tens of cents and ClickBank could potentially pay tens of dollars. A fair amount of work led to the ClickBank Contextual Ad Creator page Basically it's a form where you enter your ClickBank nickname then you select an ad size and style, pick a ClickBank category for your ads (or use your own keywords) then chose the colour for your ads. Once this is done all that you need to do is to click a button and you get to see the ad you've created as well as getting the code you need to plug into your website for the ad to be displayed. All this is done automatically for you and as you provide your ClickBank nickname any sales made from the products displayed are, once again, credited to your ClickBank account. Even better as ClickBank products retain for an average of $30 any you typically get 60% of this as Affiliate Commissions this can be a lot more lucrative than Google's AdSense. The ads are created dynaically so a new set of ads will be displayed on each page refresh and they are automatically updated as my ClickBank database is updated. I'd just created an ad-generation system that anyone with a website could deploy and take the income from. The barrier to anyone making an income from the internet has just been very dramatically lowered.

This was wonderful, but what if you had free hosting or were on a Blog that did not allow such ads to be displayed, or if you didn't want to queer the pitch with Google by displaying any other contextual ad system on your web pages. Well, there was a solution: ClickBank RSS feed generator. Like the ClickBank Contextual Ad Creator what you get is a form that allows you to input your ClickBank nickname and to chose a category or sub-category of ClickBank for your feed (you can also use your own keywords). Pressing the button generates the feed and you get your personal feed URL at the bottom of the page. This is unique to the feed you just created and it allows the feed to be generated on the fly (you can create multiple feeds on different topics). Just copy the URL and paste it into your favorite aggregator in the back-end of your website or Blog. This allows you to add ClickBank ads to places where you normally couldn't so just about anyone can monetize their entire on-line presence with ClickBank.

Between these products you have the complete solution to monetizing your website with ClickBank and as you can chose the topic of your ads (you can even use your own keywords) you can customize the ads to your site and even generate multiple ads and multiple RSS feeds to suit different areas of your website. Basically this is the complete ClickBank ads system and it's all completely free to you.

Now, here's where I should tell you what's in this for me. Obviously I make all the sales from anyone coming to my website directly. But I also make 8% of all sales referred by anyone else. This is becuase I have code that automatically and randomly assigns 8% of all products shown to my ClickBank nickname. This still means that you make 92% of all sales. Remember that all the work to provide this system has been done by me and the work is done by my code and on my website. I'm only asking this small percentage (all other systems, which you have to pay to join ask for 15% or even 20%) because the money goes to supporting my 'Help Stefan Campaign' charity. I've been forced to do this as the response to this campaign has been so poor. Maybe by offering free incomes to all webmasters I can kick-start the campaign.

Remember, all you have to do is to visit my website, grab the code and deploy it on your own website. You can get further information from my ClickBank Ads page. Then visit the pages above to get the appropriate code and systems for you. The rest is entirely up to you and I hope that you will use my code for your own internet success.

2007-10-25T21:13:00.000Z

Need information on Monetizing your site? Search for the product for you now:

ClickBank Search System Released

If you've noticed the search box at the top of this page then you may have realized that I've added something significant to this blog. Indeed, this is why my announcement of the latest October 23rd release of the Celtnet eZine is a little late. Indeed, that release of the eZine is entirely dedicated to a major piece of work that I've been involved in.

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a major piece of software. This is a complete ClickBank marketplace and search system which attempts to be the 'Best in Class'. The wraps are due to come off the system now and I'm ready to release to the public. The system itself can be found at CeltNet ClickBank Marketplace. This offers all the products in ClickBank for sale with meaningful descriptions and images. I've also implemented full text searching for each product.

More than that I've made the search code publically available. You can grab the code below or your can get the code from its home at Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace Search code. You can inplement this code on your own Blog or search site. It allows you to embed your ClickBank Nickname in the search pages so that any sale you create on my website are credited to your ClickBank account. This allows you to use my hard work in producing my website to monetize your website or blog with ClickBank!

You can learn more about what I've done and how you can use my code to leverage my work to monetize your site or blog with ClickBank either on my CeltNet eZine Marketplace or in the Monetizing your Site with ClickBank article in my Celtnet Reviews Site.

Basically I've made ClickBank user friendly with a lot of hand-crafting for the genral use and you can use the code below to implement search boxes for this system in your own websites. Simply change the YourClickBankName in the code to your actual ClickBank nickname and you're ready to earn commissions (the whole affiliate pay-out in fact) by implementing the search code on your website and sending visitors to it.

Once you have your ClickBank nickname you can now simply put one of the search boxes below (I have three options for you) on your website and any sales made from your searches will be credited to your ClickBank account (the one you just set up with your nickname, above). All your need to do is to change the YourClickBankName in the code below with your own ClickBank nickname and then paste the code in your own web pages. After that you're ready to start earning money!

The various search box options are as follows:

1. Simple Search Box

The code for this simple search is (The code works on all webistes, including Blogs and XHTML-encoded pages):

<br /><br /><form name="search" action="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/search.php" method=GET><br /><br /><span style="font-size:10px">Powered by <a href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php?cbid=YourClickBankName">celtnet.org.uk</a><br /><br /></span><br /><br /><br/><br /><br /><input size=45 maxlength=40 name="keywords" value=''><br /><br /><input type="hidden" name="uid" value="YourClickBankName"><br /><br /><input type=hidden name="r" value="downloads"><br /><br /><input type=submit value=Search><br /><br /></form><br /><br /></div><br /><br />

Remember to change the YourClickBankName in the code with your ClickBank nickname before using this code!

2. Search Box with Search Options

The code for this more complete search is (The code works on all webistes, including Blogs and XHTML-encoded pages):

<br /><br /><div align=center><br /><br /><form name="search" action="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/search.php" method=GET><br /><br /><span style="font-size:10px">Powered by <a href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php?cbid=YourClickBankName">celtnet.org.uk</a><br /><br /></span><br /><br /><br/><br /><br /><input size=45 maxlength=40 name="keywords" value=''><br /><br /><input type="hidden" name="uid" value="YourClickBankName"><br /><br /><br><br /><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="1" checked>all words<br /><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="2">any word    <br /><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="3">exact match   <br /><br /><input type=hidden name="r" value="downloads"><br /><br /><input type=submit value=Search><br /><br /></form><br /><br /></div><br /><br />

Remember to change the YourClickBankName in the code with your ClickBank nickname before using this code!

3. Search Box with Search Selection Dropdown

The code for this fully-functional search form is (The code works on all webistes, including Blogs and XHTML-encoded pages):

<br /><br /><div align=center><br/><br /><form name="search" action="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/search.php" method=GET><br/><br /><span style="font-size:10px">Powered by <a href="http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/marketplace.php?cbid=YourClickBankName">celtnet.org.uk</a><br/><br /></span><br/><br /><br/><br/><br /><select name="cat"><br/><br /><option value=0>All Categories</option><br/><br /><option  value=1>Business to Business</option><br/><br /><option  value=2>Health & Fitness</option><br/><br /><option  value=3>Home & Family</option><br/><br /><option  value=4>Computing & Internet</option><br/><br /><option  value=5>Money & Employment</option><br/><br /><option  value=6>Marketing & Ads</option><br/><br /><option  value=7>Fun & Entertainment</option><br/><br /><option  value=8>Sports & Recreation</option><br/><br /><option  value=9>Society & Culture</option><br/><br /></select><br/><br /><input size=45 maxlength=40 name="keywords" value=''><br/><br /><input type="hidden" name="uid" value="YourClickBankName"><br/><br /><br/><br/><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="1" checked>all words    <br/><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="2">any word    <br/><br /><input type="radio" name="t" value="3">exact match    <br/><br /><input type=hidden name="r" value="downloads"><br/><br /><input type=submit value=Search><br/><br /></form><br/><br /></div><br /><br />

Remember to change the YourClickBankName in the code with your ClickBank nickname before using this code!

Notes:

As you can see this code is entirely safe, indeed I've given you the whole code for the search page. Once an user types a search term into one of these boxes and clicks on the 'submit' button they are taken to the celtnet.org.uk ClickBank search pages and your ClickBank nickname is populated in every search term that's found. Unlike other sites we also make sure that your ClickBank ID is transferred to the information page about a given product so that you have a second chance to gain a commission.

I've done all the hard work for you. All you need to do is to copy the code above, implement on your own website or blog and you're ready to earn income from ClickBank instantly. Remember that gaining 'multiple streams of income' is a key to internet marketing. Add the free ClickBank search code to your site and start earning ClickBank commissions now.

2007-10-17T18:38:00.000Z

Keeping your Site Fresh

The addition of a new section, the Celtnet Affiliate Information section to the Celtnet has allowed, for the first time in ages, me to think about the site's design and how it works. I've been working on the site for several years now and the site's basically grown organically as I've added more content and more sections. Each one has had a slightly different design and a slightly different look and feel, mostly due to how my skills have grown over the years. This does mean, however, that much of the site is completely inconsistent.

Some pages are very simple, others are incredibly complex and I'm definitely not driving either traffic of clicks to large areas of the site. Basically I had lots of site real-estate that was woefully under-used. In addition I was building large databases of potentially useful content, but those databases were, at best, driving only a single page or region of my site. It was time for a complete re-think. OK, so I couldn't re-vamp the entire site over night and there was lots and lots to do.

But, if I was clever then I could kill two birds with one stone. I could continue adding the good content I needed whilst, at the same time, working on a new site design and layout. I wanted the pages to be more visually appealing, to have more places for ads at the side-bearigs and to have far more opportunity for adding dynamic content.

I came across a very nice CSS-based pattern for this a couple of weeks ago and this has now been re-coded to suit my needs and released as the basis for the Celtnet Affiliate Information. One of the worst pages in my whole site was the Celtnet Recipes home page. As this was the official portal to one of the largest and most popular areas on the entire site this was basically criminal!

As you can see, the page has now been entirely re-done (compare with the West African Recipes page for a feel of how it looked (actually it wasn't even as good as this). Now I have nice navigation tabs at the top, a navigation menu on the left and content that refreshes itself in the main windows. I can even add extra adverts to the side-bearings without drastically affecting the content. I think it's much better and this version of the web page will soon be rolled-out across the entire site.

What I also like is that the general 'look and feel' can remain consistent across the entire site but substituting a single logo (which belongs to a global site-wide family of logos) can instantly tell the visitor where on the site they are. The various regions of the site can be better linked internally, maintaining more of a discreet feel so that someone interested in mobile phones, say, can just navigate within the mobile phone region of the site. Someone visiting the recipes section only needs to look at the recipes section of the site etc yet all these distinct site regions can be tied back to the site's overall home page and master index.

This way I can keep Celtnet's Celtic region, the Recipes region and the Information region (with its medicine, information, programming, internet marketing and mobile phone sub-regions) separate but entirely linked. For the first time it will be possible to integrate the site possibly and to drive better advertising across the entire site.

This is a major change, but it shows that you should really design your site before comitting to the coding first! But I'm a programmer and an information provider rather than a designer. Ah well...

I'm also hoping that the resultant better integration within the site will increase my exposure to the search engines and my exposure to my site's visitors. I'll keep any results (both positive and negative) in this blog.

You can learn more about these changes and how they relate to SEO, web design, and keeping your visitors interested in your site on my eZine Celtnet WebInfo eZine

2007-10-17T16:18:00.000Z

Celtnet eZine Out Now

Today I want to highlight various strategies in Internet Marketing. Firstly, I'm anouncing the latest version of my Celtnet WebInfo eZine. This issue deals with an important aspect of internet marketing, how to keep visitors on your site and how to get them to return again and agai. A brief introduction to the issue follows:

Celtnet WebInfo eZine #106
Whatever else you may be doing with your website, one of the most important things you must do is to keep your content fresh. Adding new content or changing yor content keeps the indexing spiders coming back to index your site — which is good for you. But you also need to keep your content fresh for visitors. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use somethign like an image rotator so that you have a different picture to view each time a visitor comes to your site (I tend to use rotating images and changing text, especially for article-driven areas of this site).

CONTENTS:

1. Window on the Web
2. Feature Article — The importance of Refreshing Content
3. Comment — Content is Still King
4. Business Tip — Fresh content means returning visitors

This eZine comes with several changes and updates to the site. The first of these is the release of my Celtnet eBooks Sales Site which offers eBooks for sale and also allows you to advertise your own eBooks, for free (more on this in the previous October 09 Celtnet WebInfo eZine). The second is the Celtnet Affiliate Information site which offers advice for those seeking affiliate programs, as well as a directory of availiable affiliate programs; with the intention that this will be the largest searchable and browsable repository of these campaigns on the internet.

The Celtnet WebInfo (CI) eZine is now tied into the Celtnet Affiliate Information website and the two will be working in concert. Any ads shown on the CI eZine will also be shown on the website and the CI eZine will offer affiliate tips and the latest information on affiliate programs. To celebrate this anyone signing-up to the eZine this month will get 5 free internet marketing eBooks (normally retailing at over $300!). You can sign-up using the below:

Please note that you are signin-up for the eZine and any related marketing information posts. I do not send out spam and I never, ever, sell eMail addresses to others. Your eMail address will be stored, encrypted, in our database only and will not be visible or availiable to anyone else.

2007-10-07T20:46:00.000Z

eBooks, an Essential Marketer's Resource

Whatever you may think of them, eBooks have emerged as an essential resource for internet marketers of all stamps. First of all, an eBook is an electronic product that you can package or sell. Based on the subject of the eBook you may even be able to sell it for a considerable product. An eBook is also a way of disseminating information. You can embed links in eBooks and these links could be to affiliate sites or products that you're marketing. You can also add links to your own website to promote your list-bulding efforts or areas of your site that you need to drive traffic to.

As you can see, an eBook can be an invaluable marketing tool as well as potentially being a primary product for you. But if you have created an eBook you still have the problem of get people to see and market your eBook. One way is to publish the information on Blogs like this one. You can write press releases about your product. You can write articles about your product or you can give a copy of your product to review sites such as my Celtnet Reviews site.

You can also promote your eBook through some eBok sales and publishing sites. An example of these is the Celtnet eBooks site which not-only publishes eBooks and software products for sale at knock-down prices but also allows authors to upload information about their own eBooks (and all for free). If you're interested in this service then go to Celtent eBooks Publicity. Simply sign-up and you will recieve a confirmation eMail taking you to a web page where you can upload your eBook's information. Subject to review this will be uploaded to the main database and will become part of the Celtnet eBooks site with a link back to your product page.

This gives you free advertising in a large eBooks site. An invaluable resource for your eBook marketing. All that's required is a single link back to Celtnet eBooks on one of your sites. The site also offers profit share and marketing opportunities so that you can allow Celtnet eBooks to sell the product you have for you (you will be sent any income at the end of every month by PayPal).

If you have a free eBook for marketing purposes then Celtnet eBooks or any similar site may also be a good place to submit it as the site also has free or low cost eBooks (some 2c or less) that users can easily access and download. This is a great starting point to begin the dissemination of your eBook and thus any marketing material in the eBook. It's amazing how quickly such products can begin their transmission across the internet from a single site like this.

If you want to keep as much of the profit as possible then you could think about setting-up your own eBooks sales sites. The code driving the Celtnet eBooks site is available as are packages of eBook products so that you could have your own site on the web in a matter of hours. This way you can promote your own eBook products as well as gaining residual income from selling other items through your site.

Indeed, the Celtnet eBooks is one of the cheapest sources of electronic products with resell rights on the internet and it's a great place to stock-up on electronic products that you can sell through your own site. There are even special packages of 40, 80 and 120 products that you can buy and instantly download.

With the latest code for the Celtnet eBooks you can even use PHP code snippets to provide sales butons to your eBook products on any of your web pages. This way you get tracking of those products you've sold and you get secure download pages that expire within a set amount of time so that your download pages are always safe.

I've spent a lot of time and effort on these pages to produce a quality site and it's now time that others saw the value of what I've generated.

2007-09-12T08:26:00.000Z

Extending the Site

The Celtnet site has been maturing of late as I've been adding new products and services. In the end, the problem is always one of adding content; of getting sufficient people to visit the website in enough numbers that you can make a decent income from the proceeds. One great way of getting more content is to put-up various forums. As a result I now have the following forums available for participation:

Celtnet Celtic Forums
Celtnet Recipes Discussion Forum
Celtnet Information Forum

Why not join the communities today?

I have also been adding a review section to the site at Celtnet Reviews Site. Here you can both read reviews of eBooks, internet products, websites, print books and a whole host of topics. You can also join and sign-up free at Join Celtnet Reviews. After you sign-up then you can post your own reviews. There is also a special section for site advertisement-style reviews.

Remember that reviews are now the internet's advertising phenomenon. They provide good content, which Google loves to index. They are also a sales pitch and you get yur URLs linked from text that remains live on the internet for a very long time. So, if you're interested in publicising your website, why not join the Celtnet Reviews Site today.

Also remember that my One Dollar SEO links system is still available. For $1 you can add your site to an SEO-friendly catalogue of links that guarantees your site's URL will be indexed. Just remember that all proceeds from any sign-ups goes to the Help Stefan campaign.

If you are interested in information about internet marketing, with hints, tips and a personal voice then the Celtnet Information eZine is for you. Internet marketing is a hard slog and you need all the advantages you can get. My aim is to bring you the tools and strategies you need to make the most of your internet business. The tools are available, so why not use them?

2007-09-08T17:05:00.000Z

Trying to Make Money

As I've had little enough response to my Help Stefan Campaign I'm having to consider alternate means of getting more money.

The condition of her father in Liberia has deteriorated considerably and next week Stefan is talking of taking the bus from Dakar to Guinea, from there she will change to Freetown in Sierra Leone and from there she has to work-out a way of getting to Liberia. If only I could afford the airfare, then things would be so much easier.

I've tried putting-up pages for eBooks including:

Celtent Guide to Spices and Spice recipes

Pictorial Guide to Building and Upgrading your PC

'Memories of Myth and Man' Poetry eBook

Each of which goes to helping the Help Stefan Campaign. I also have the One Dollar SEO links where webmasters can purchase non-reciprocal links for $1 which are guaranteed to be valid and remain live for the life of the website and which will never exceed 100 links in length so that all links on a given page will be indexed. Again, take-up is extremely slow with only a few links having been taken-up thus far.

So, this weekend, in desperation I'm trying every trick I can to make some money for this campaign. The latest approach is to try the 'Hubpages' site both to generate additional income and to drive more traffic to my main Celtnet site

Hay Fever Information

Celtnet Site Description

Information about Acne

Improve your Google Rankings with In-bound Links

Introduction to How Mobile Phones Work

In desperation I've even resorted to buying an internet course: Profit Lance which is reviewed in the site given here. Reviews are good and the course definitely looks comprehensive so I'm going ahead with it at the moment I'll report back at a later date so say whether it's worthwhile or not.

Amongst the various on-going projects I've also resurrected my Celtnet Information eZine and have begun posting to this weekly rather than fortnightly. I'll see if this starts to bring-in any more sign-ups.

Well, that's today's view from the trenches. I now need to go back to doing some serious marketing.

2007-09-01T07:22:00.000Z

If you have been reading or visiting my Help Stefan page then you will know what this campaign is all about. But if you haven't visited that page yet then the aims of the campaign are as follows:

1. To allow Stefan's father to have a life-saving operation so that the surviving members of her family can be re-united
2. To allow Stefan to visit her father in Freetown, Sierra Leone and to make the journey there as safe for her as it can be.
3. To allow me to travel to Senegal to look after Stefan's son, Zogo whilst his mother is away.
4. To give Stefan the orthodontic work she needs to repair her upper jaw.
5. To give Stefan a wedding to remember in December so that we can live together in the UK as a family; thus ensuring the new future I promised her.
6. To set-up a fund so that the remaining Liberian refugees in Dakar can have an English-language school for their children to repace the UN school that has just closed.

I am hoping that the fund, once started can continue to help other Liberiand and Sierra Leonian refugees in Dakar. But I have an immediate need to aid one single person to turn her life around. Please help me make 2007 the year of recovery for her.

I am not even asking for charity here in that you will get something for all your donations. If you are a webmaster then a $1 donation will get your site listed on my One Dollar Links pages. A $10 donation gets you a permanent link on the campaign's Home Page. Even if you're not a webmaster, a $1 donation gets your name on the web page as a 'Friend of Stefan'. A $5 donation gets you a copy of my Poetry eBook, even better a $10 donation gets you a copy of my Guide to Cooking with Spices recipe eBook.

A small donation on your part will help completely transform the life of a woman and child who have suffered so much. Remember, if you want to help please link to This Page or publish the letter below in your blog, ezine or website:

Today's Total: $187
A letter from the Webmaster: I would like to introduce to you Stefan and her son Zogo.

They are true survivors who escaped the civil wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone in the early 200s to make their way on foot through Guinea (where both developed malaria) to Senegal, The Gambia and now Dakar, Senegal. There they are refugees and have no legal status. As such they cannot earn any money and are eking-out a hand to mouth existence. Though that's not how they would put it. However, Stefan believed her entire family to have been massacred. But now, with my aid she has discovered her father to be alive but in very bad health with a heart condition. He needs $10 000 for hospital bills and for the operation that may save his life. Stefan herself has recently been very ill with malaria and has been hospitalized herself at a cost of $3000.

I love this woman very much, but with her hospitalization I have now spent my last penny so I'm turning to the internet in the hope of gaining donations to help Stefan's father Alfred. I am also looking for the airfare to send Stefan to her father's side. I would also be like to take several months off work so that I can travel to Senegal to look after the boy, Zogo. The total cost of all this will come to more than $20 000, so I'm imploring for your help.

The home page for the campaign is at http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/help-stefan.php where you can make your donation securely via PayPal.

If you are interested in recipes then, if you donate $10 you will get a copy of my eBook 'Guide to Spices' at http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/spice-book.php.

A $5 donation gets you a copy of my poetry eBook 'Memories of Myth and Man'.

If you are a webmaster then your $1 donation will get you a permanent link to your site on http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/one-dollar-links.php

Please help me to re-build the life of a woman who has lost so much.

Thank you for your aid.

Yours

Dyfed Lloyd Evans

PS you can help this campaign by copying the email letter above and sending it to all your friends. Thank you for your help.

2007-08-28T04:49:00.000Z

$1 SEO Links Description Updated

As part of my continuing campaign to Help Stefan and to make some money to help her with her Malaria and for her to be able to visit her father in Sierra Leone one last time before he dies I have added some more information on how you can help and get your website links featured for one dollar I've added some more information. Remember, the Help Stefan despite being new is already ranking well in Google (just do a search for "help stefan" to see what I mean).

If you want your website featured on this high-traffic page then a $10 donation gets you a permanent link on this page. However, this page also links to a series of pages where, for a $1 donation you get your website permanently linked. For ra $5 donation you will get a link on this page with a colour description and bold/different font so that your website stands out. Here is an example of a $1 links page.

Remember that what you're getting here are non-reciprocal links. Direct links to your website (or even an internal page of your website that's guaranteed to improve your indexing). All it will cost you is $1, just $1. Go on, help change someone's life and do your own website a favour at one and the same time. After all, for one dollar, what have you got to lose? I've spent much more than that on useless 'get rich quick' schemes.

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2007-08-25T01:28:00.000Z

Latest News

Since my last posting I've received some bad news from Africa in that Stefan is now very ill with malaria which has led to liver complicatons. If you want to learn more about what's going on, then go to Stefan's diary page on my website. Here you'll get the latest updates on how Stefan is doing and how you can help her.

Yes, I've been updating the pages of the help Stefan campaign region of the website. And all money generation efforts for the site are now going into this. If you're a webmaster then, please, go to this site and for a $1 donation to the campaign you will get a permanent link to your website on one of the one dollar links pages. Please note that these are permanent pages and you will be linked directly from them. It only costs you $1 and you will help make someone's life so much better.

I've also just completed my first major eBook. You can find details about it on the Secrets of Cooking with Spices page. A $10 donation gets you this eBook completely free; as well as giving you a permanent link to your site on the campaign's home page and all subsequent pages. Go on, you know you want to! Where else can you get a links page that helps someone else and makes their life better. The SEO opportunities here are cheap at half the price.

I'm also sellig the eBook through ClickBank at eBook Sales this sales page. And, of course there will be sales via eBay. I'm going to push this as much as possible, mostly because the money isn't going to me. So if you read this and want a recipe book, or want some cheap advertising for your own website, then please go to the help Stefan campaign home page. Everything I do in terms of attempting to generate additional web income is now going towards this campaign.

Which explains postings like this and disseminating the web page and details as widely as possible. I'll report here and on the web page as to how the campaign is going and how quickly I can get it off the ground. The reality is that this is pretty much an emergency now due to Stefan's condition and the more help I can get the better.

2007-08-21T14:18:00.000Z

Latest eZine Published

The latest version of the Celtnet Information eZine has been published and this time it's all about eBay and getting more visitors to your site.

I'm still working hard on the campaign to help Stefan and Zogo:

Help Stefan Campaign

If you can spare $1 then help support this site and change someone's life forever? Learn how and why on the Help Stefan campaign page.

Remember, if you take part in this campaign by clicking here a $1 donation gives you a permanent link to your site on the $1 links pages. $5 gives you a colour and bold link to your site. $10 gets you a permanent link to your site on the campaign's home page (you can even get your name down as a sponsor) and you get a copy of my eBook, 'Cooking with Spices'.

What have you got to lose? So why not get some more exposure, do yourself a favour and help to turn someone's life around at one and the same tome. Even if you don't want to donate or to add your site to the links pages, why not help this campaign by linking to this page: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/info/help-stefan.php . A little effort on your part will change another person's life forever.

And, in case you're wondering, yet this post is on-topic for this blog. It just happens that the opportunity this time is on my own website. All it'll cost you is $1 to get your website some exposure and what's that compared to the amount of time you'd spend on your own site? Please help your own site by making this campaign work.

Thank you

Dyfed

2007-08-20T00:11:00.000Z

A Plea for Help and a New $1 Link Site

Yes, I'm launching a brand new link site: Help Stefan Campaign Page. Yes, it's a charity page, but rather than just asking for money (and, yes I am asking for your help) you get a chance to get a permanent link to your site for just $1. Or you can have a permanent link on the main page above for just $10. The money will go towards helping a young refugee from Sierra Leone and her son get a new life and find surviving members of ther family.

You will learn about her on that page and how you can help. And, yes I have a vested interest as I want her to become my wife. Believe me, everything you read about here there is absolutely true. Please help me rebuild her life and re-unite her with her father for perhaps the last time. You will be doing good and you will get some very cheap advertising for your own website into the bargain.

Once more, the flyer for the page is as below:

Help Stefan Campaign

If you can spare $1 then help support this site and change someone's life forever? Learn how and why on the Help Stefan campaign page.

If you can, please link to this page on your own website. After all the more links there are to it the higher its PR and the better will be the exposure you get on the page. I'm going for a big campaign for this, after all the window of opportunity is small to help re-unite Stefan with her father who is gravely ill.

Help me, help her and help yourself into the bargain.

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