Blind Ape Seo

So the old simian reads a certain small business blog quite regularly.

The guy is quite openly describing his experiences regarding his drop-shipping site and other ventures and has recently begun a series of posts explaining changes and improvements he is making to his shop in order to improve sales.

Some of the commenters pipe up and want to hear about SEO.

- cue cheap eastern kung fu movie music -

The blind ape enters the scene.

Writing the guy an email asking if he would like a guest post by yours truly about various SEO improvements that could be done.

He denies the offer politely.

OK. No bad feelings here, just a short WTF?

He denies a complete SEO Analysis, directions for improvement AND content for his blog at no cost other than a backlink in the article?

Can anyone explain this? Because this sight impaired old ape sure can’t.

And share this document wherever you can

Scientology OT levels

We are Legion.

The old simian is not in any way affiliated with them, but this is of concern for affiliate marketers in general. People reporting on the issue are being hit with Cease and Desist letters by clickbooth.

Well, it sure seems like clickbooth is stepping on quite a few toes.

Here we have some coverage of the whole drama:

http://skewism.com/companies-that-cant-take-bad-press-part-one-clickboothcom/

http://www.blogosis.com/2008/03/18/looks-like-i-might-be-in-trouble/

http://www.blogosis.com/2008/03/09/wickedfirecom-is-getting-sued/

http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/?p=240 

::emp::

First part in a series…

Here is a paper about how waiters can increase their tips from Cornell university.
My wife has actually tried several (when she was still waiting tables) and they all work like a charm.

More on how to translate those into the internet business in the next installments.

I was not kidding with the crazy ideas thing.
::emp::

Well..

As announced on WF already, the Lord and I are going to collaborate on some podcasts over at domainingtips.com.

Not bad for an old atheist, eh?

At 1 click without any impressions… Man… I wonder how this will scale

Inspired by this post on Eli’s excellent blog:
http://www.bluehatseo.com/how-to-dupe-content-and-get-away-with-it/

The question that has to be asked here really is:
How does Google (and other engines) know that your content is duplicate content?

Obviously, this can not be a 1 to 1 matching, as any change (be it ever so small) would mark your text as original.

I presume (and Elis success with his techinque seems to confirm this) that the dupe chekers work along the lines of the duplicate finders used in academia, for example.

So how do those checks work?
Basically, a duplicate finder works in 3 steps:

1. Take x snippets from your text (normally those are chunks in varying lengths from 3-7 words)
2. Hit Google and other engines
3. Reanalyze sites / documents that return x positive matches.

Q: So, what to do about this?
A: Take more text from several sources and add to Eli’s techique.
Basically, what you want to do is this (in this example we take teeth whitening:

• Take text from 2-3 sources on teeth whitening
  You might not want to take the most poular sites for this. Hit some article directories and maybe even some forgotten archive.org sites.
• Mix the texts thoroughly.
  Take one sentence from here, another one from over there… leave a paragraph out.
  Add Eli’s techique.
  Change some words using Markov or manually.

Done.

::emp::

In the field of computer science, I often try to help newbies or people without programming experience.
Even a lot of affiliate marketing can be done without “real” programming experience.

Yes, you will fare better once you get your head around a programming language or two, but one can do a lot with the clever use of available tools.

 One such tool is iMacros, which allows you to automate any task done in a browser.

Go read a good article about iMacros over at Earner$blog.

Get iMacros here.

(To be true, using tools like this is often just programming in disguise, and I do hope it will raise some interest and ease the transition for some people.)

So… this is a project that has been simmering for a long time now and still has not come to fruition. Partly because I do not have time for this, partly because the problem space seems to be very confusing. In the spirit of the lazy web, I am offering my description of the problem space in the hopes someone wants to code this beast and share.

Goal
An application (web based or desktop) that allows for easy to use affiliate statistics.

Description of problem space
Affiliate commisions are very varied in their form and habitus. The application needas to keep track of both realized (payments received) and unrealized profits (payments pending)

Payouts
Payouts vary in time, payment methods and qualification for payment. 

Qualification for payment A threshold is imposed upon which payments will be made. Threshold vary from $10 to $100. A problem more of the smaller publishers, profits below the threshold also need to be tracked.

Payment method Paypal, wire transfer, check 

Time Net 30, 60, 90.

Investments and costs

These also vary in size and shape, from one-time investments to recurring payments.

Recurring payments
Hosting, domains, etc.. Interstitial and one-time payments PPC,new hardware, programming assignments… Amongst all those, time can also vary.

Hosting and domains can be paid for (or demanded) monthly, bi-monthly, yearly, 2 year contract…

So far for now.. if you want to add to this or offer a solution that goes further than the simian’s Affiliate tracking Excel sheet, please comment. ::emp::

Description
Also known as “Project D” for the 47 day challenge, this is a small site about moleskines.

It is as good an example of a niche site as it gets.
The topic is the “moleskines” brand of notebooks, it is handcoded, took about 2 hours including content and is monetized via amazon.

One of the main reasons this works is the domain name.
All traffic is pure organic search results. I’ve done no more than link to it on some of my sites.
It brings in about 2 bucks a month and some more in Christmas season.
Last year it made about 50$ profit after subtracting hosting costs.

For those interested in ROI, it rings in at 400%.

Proven it’s worth, I want to give this little site some love and multiply its adspace.

Multiply your adspace times X using lightbox
Clicking on one of the dormant links in the wickedfire header will prompt a box to pop up, adding a dark layer on the site and shopwing a picture. Many people mistake this for a flash animation at first, but it is a small JavaScript called Lightbox.
The interesting part of lightbox is the description you can enter for the image. Turns out, you can enter HTML code to format your description.
This gives us the opportunity to enter the HTML needed for advertising.

Caution!
Javascript won’t work. So you’re out of luck with adsense, but any static HTML is fine.

For those interested in Javascript, flash, etc.. for something like lightbox, check out thickbox.

So what will I be doing?
Basically, collect a few nice moleskine pictures to display in my lightboxes. Add amazon to every lightbox. For 10 pictures, I can display 10 more ads.

Other Benefits
Lightbox has several benefits that should work well for advertising:

• It darkens the rest of the site, making the user focus on the image (and adspace)
• It does not interfere with the layout
• The user stays on the page while looking at the pretty picture
• The user is looking at something he’s interested in, you can display your ad right beside it

Setting it up
Download lightbox http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
Read the Tutorials. (Really easy, it is just one page)
The script weighs in at about 5K, making it a lightweight addition to your site.

So I set this up for my product page here:
Collected an image of a lined moleskine, added a button “view details” which prompts the lightbox.
Set up the amazon link in the lightbox, using the small colorcoded moleskine icon.

How to enter the HTML code?
Well, saying “any html will work” is not quite right. You need to strip and/or escape some characters from your code to prevent it from breaking the Javascript surrounding it.

These are the less than sign < and quotation marks “

Just replace them with < and single quotes, respectively.
You could also just leave out the quotation marks, but I find readability is better using single quotes.

So your amazon code looking like this:

<a href=http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0009WOZBE? ie=UTF8&tag=XXXYZ-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B0009WOZBE>Drei Amen für den Satan</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=XXXYZ-21&l=as2&o=3&a=B0009WOZBE” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;”>

Becomes this:
<a href=”images/image-1.jpg” rel=”lightbox” title=”<a href=’http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0009WOZBE? ie=UTF8&tag=XXXYZ-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B0009WOZBE’>Drei Amen für den Satan</a><img src=’http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=XXXYZ-21&l=as2&o=3&a=B0009WOZBE width=’1′ height=’1′ border=’0′ style=’border:none !important; margin:0px !important;’>“><img src=”images/thumb-1.jpg” width=”100″ height=”40″/>
</a>

Rinse and repeat.

Voila, you’ve got adspace times images now.

::emp::

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