Technology Reports

When you start out building a website you want it to be found. Yes, whenever I build a site I dedicate some time to promotion and marketing, building links and getting the word out.

Now, I have some well established sites (over 2 years old) and have hardly touched them once thye build and initial marketing has been done. A look at the stats and at the major search engines show that the initial promotion and linking I did really paid off. Just by doing nothing more than getting a few hundred good incoming links to my sites and waiting for a couple of years they now feature quite high in the SERPS.

SEO is not a short term thing you can do - it is a medium to long term approach. You should concentrate on building your site, building quality incoming links to several pages on your site and then forget about it (so to speak). Just continue to build your site content, add backlinks to new pages and wait.

If you have done the basics then in time your work will pay off and your site will feature well in the SERPS.

That being said, it is always a good idea to continue to add a few links or blog posts about your sites on a semi-regular basis to ensure that it remains high in the SERPS. There is always someone trying to push their site higher than yours. You need not give up on a new project after a couple of months because your site is not on the front page in the big “G”, keep at it and give it time - you will do better than your competitors who give up after a short time.

Well, My experiment in Proxy servers came to an end a couple of months ago.

For a while I was running a small number (about 20) proxy’s and my host told me to get rid of them -due to abuse.. As I had a lot of other sites on the server I had no choice but to remove them. I held onto a couple of them and continued to earn a small amount from them, but finally they too were the subject of abuse.

The abuse was in the form of someone logging into an email account from the proxy and sending spam. Guess what IP address appeared in the email headers as the originator - yes, the IP of my server.

So, the only choice I had was to shut down the last proxy I had, which was a shame as the actions of a single person denied the use for the hundreds of legitimate users.

What did I learn about this experience? Well, a lot. I learnt that no matter what, there is always someone who will try and take advantage of any given situation. Providing an online service might earn you a bit of $, but the eventual abuse will make it hardly worthwhile. Running a proxy made me a reasonable amount of money, but only for a short time. I would have been better off devoting my time to a project that would have earnt me a lesser amount, but been capable of earning forever!

Yesterday, I created a brand new website and as part of my day 1 promotion I wrote a small blog post of around 150 words.

So what I hear you say…

Now, the blog post had in it 4 links - the main page plus 3 deep links.

Yep, you are still saying so what…..

Now this blog post was made to a small blog network of 12 blogs.

.. And you are still saying so what….

Ok, I’ll get to the point.

Today, when I went to the Big “G” I did a simple search for “site:mysite.com” and I found that in less than 24 hours that Google had visited my new site and indexed the 4 Pages that had links to them.

So, in terms of getting your new websites indexed quickly, set up a blog and get it indexed. Make semi-regular posts to it. Use it as a tool to get your new sites indexed quickly.

If you don’t have your own blog network then by all means contact me and for a small fee I will post about your new site as well.

The important things to note here are that I used not only 1 link to my new site but included 3 deep links as well. It is not just important to get your home page indexed but your whole site indexed.

Today, I came across something that is new (to me) to maximise the revenue from all of your current websites.

Now, as a webmaster anything that can get you more returns from what you already have has to be a good thing now doesn’t it!

I can honestly say I have not heard of this method before now - and that is Audio Advertising on your website. It makes you money every time someone loads a page on your site! You simply sign up, insert a bit of JS code into your page and whenever the page is loaded a short 5 second audio advert is played. The Adverts are Contextually related to your web pages and can run concurrently with all other contextual ads -as there is nothing for the site visitor to do except listen.

One of the good things is the payout will be weekly whenever you exceed the minimum payout amount, and it is via paypal or cheque.

If I have not convinced you yet to take a look at this as an opportunity to increase your revenue, then you can read more here

The program is currently in Beta and if you get in before the 1st Feb 2008 then you will be invited to join the affiliate program for free and earn even more.

Holiday times always see a huge drop in traffic to your proxy websites. It is a fact of life. The biggest users of web proxies are of course students at school or college who want to get to sites such as myspace, facebook and even gmail.

Now, during holiday times you need to think of other ways of promoting your proxy and this is the time to think about SEO. Yes, with a little bit of time and effort (just like with any other website) you can gain valuable links and potentially traffic by thinking a little differently.

Firstly, everyone knows that content is king and all proxy webmasters know that most proxies have almost no content. Time to solve this one - set yourself a challenge and write 5-10 content pages and put them on your proxy website. Target each of these articles around a keyword of site that your proxy users.

Now your site actually has some content - get a few links pointing to each content page. Write a short blog post on your own myspace or facebook will help.

You have probably already done to death the whole submissions to topsites with mixed results - so think differently. What do you do with your other sites? do you not submit them to directories? Well, take the time and do the same with your proxy. Find some niche directories such as the proxyfindr proxy directory or even submit to general directories.

Directory submissions can be made much easier with the Website Submitter - it is a semi-automatic directory submission software package that has over 2000 directories in the database and provides reports to monitor your efforts.

So, when the “normal” traffic starts to drop off on your proxy, start treating it as a regular content website and build your brand so that the Search engines can provide you additional traffic all year round.

Now the whole idea of building content sites, putting up ads as I havew learnt is quite hard work. To get anywhere you need to devote a lot of time to build your content then build your traffic. It certainly works out OK in the end and the rewards do follow your efforts.

There are other ways - and I have been looking into affiliate marketing as an alternate (or another) income stream. The difference here is that a small investment can have a much better return for about the same effort as a content site.

I have been looking into various offers and I am making a little bit of a start. Of course, I am starting by trying offers where there is no or minimal outlay. One of the first offers looks like it has a huge potential - Sign up as a pre-launch partner and earn a % of the income once the Site launches. No outlay, no risk, and the chance to earn. While it is essentially a profit-sharing model where all pre-launch partners can earn a % of the profits, there is more to it than that. So, if you want to get in right now for a chance of earning some profits then simply sign up to receive the newsletter and you are on your way!

To sign up simply go to www.michaelbadger.com and complete the signup form.

The best part about this offer is that there is nothing to buy and no selling involved - simply sign up for part of the profits.

Stay tuned for more offers.

UPDATE: Well if you didn’t sign up it is now too late! the offer has closed.