Before you let the post title mislead you into thinking that Google trained an army of pandas to take over the internet, let me clarify. The panda (or farmer) update has been named after some Google engineer who wrote this update to bring down the article farms who were providing Adsense loaded articles of low quality. Being kinda slow to do write-ups on Google Algorithm changes, as usual, I must explain how happy I am with this update.

How often have you googled something important and were eventually led to an article fully loaded with ads? And after finding a way to read through the ads, you discover that the article was not helpful at all. Google has finally brought these websites down for good. I’m not particularly talking about made for adsense websites, but I’m talking more along the lines of Ezine Articles or WiseGeek.

I’ll start by explaining my frustration with wisegeek.com. Wise geek is an informational website that contains over 50,000 articles. Apart from the  traditional “how to” articles, this website targets “What is..” articles. So if you were ever searching for something like “What is a credit card?”, this website would come first.

Since the website was old, had hundreds and thousands of indexed pages, and a lot of editorial backlinks, this website had a lot of authority in the eyes of Google. The authority was so much, that the website would dominate a spot in the google top 3 rankings for almost any keyword it would target in it`s articles.

The typical article is a near 500 word, half helpful article. Along with the articles are huge Adsense blocks carefully embedded to fool the visitor for normal links. I’m a webmaster who plays with ads all the time, and I found that to be irritating. I can only imagine what the rest of the people would’ve thought about it.

Well, long story short, Google punished WiseGeek.com and other websites of the sort who were either loaded with ads or had low quality articles on them. This update was much needed and finally Google SERPs have gotten rid of big websites that added little value and were getting a lot of traffic for no reason. Webpronews published a whole list of the the winners and losers in the panda update.

To my knowledge there isn’t really any small website that has been affected by this update in terms of more search traffic or less search traffic. At least, the search traffic at my websites has remained constant and I’m glad google took this initiative to punish the big ones. To be honest, these website had it coming.

Let me know if you know of any smaller websites that have been affected by this update and why. If you’re not sure whether your website has been affected or not, then just compare your search traffic of march with February. If you see a different trend than the previous month then there is a chance that your website has been affected as well.

Filed Under: Blogging, Internet, The Net - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Like other Delicious (bookmarking site) users, I also received an email on the 27th of April mentioning its acquisition by Youtube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Yes, these were the two geniuses, along with Jawed Karim, who founded the most popular video sharing website in the world. Following the acquisition of Youtube by Google in 2006, I haven’t really heard of anything from these guys.

What is undoubtedly true of these pioneers is that they certainly know how to build a community. Youtube isn’t even a proper social network, it is just a platform where you can ‘Broadcast yourself’. But these two men have built it into this internet giant that it is today. Youtube, at one time, had the most interactive community on the internet.

Yahoo! made a statement last year about its intention of discontinuation of delicious from its social media ‘arsenal’. With the deal being closed after 5 months, it seems that either they had a tough time finding a buyer or they really were concerned on handing it over to a company that could “make more sense of the service”.

Whichever the case, according to speculations and rumors, the deal was closed around the $5 million mark. Educated guesses were that Yahoo! acquired Delicious in 2005 for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million. Now, it would be unfair to make judgements on the Yahoo! product management based on rumors about the purchasing and selling price, so I would leave that part to a side for now.

Although Yahoo! claimed that Delicious would make more sense with someone else, one might think that why Yahoo! failed to make sense of it. The fact that it bought Delicious for a double digit million dollar figure and sold it, most probably, at a loss is a more-than-clear indicator of its failure to achieve its acquisition goals. Obviously, it wasn’t making much money either.

Delicious might’ve been a much bigger and more useful tool had it grown to the masses properly. It had (and still has) the one feature Google lacks: Direct user input. Delicious maintained a user community where people shared and bookmarked links on the internet that they found interesting. With that edge, many anticipated Delicious to become the next big thing after Yahoo! acquired it. Too bad things didn’t work out the way they were meant too.

As a delicious user and fan, I’m super excited with this acquisition because these two social media pioneers may just add the well-needed push to delicious to take it to the next level. After all, the internet is now evolving into web 3.0. Will these people be able to establish a system to improve delicious and bring it to the top 50 internet giants or will the efforts go down the drain? Only time will tell the real answer to this, but for now you can use the comment section below to explain your thoughts on this acquisition.

Filed Under: Blogging, Internet - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

This is yet another guide to help you make money with clickbank. I saw many different guides floating around the internet and there was a good deal of variety of strategies to make money with clickbank.

Through trials and errors, I too have my own techniques and strategies for succeeding with clickbank. However, with the variations in the inernet marketing industry, I have changed my strategy from time to time.

My own strategy isn’t really unique, but it’s a nice mix of different techniques. Clickbank, for me, has been the best service to make money promoting digital products. But, before I get into detail:

What is Clickbank and how does it work?

If you’re new to this, you might be thinking what Clickbank is. But don’t worry, it’s nothing scary or too complicated. It’s just a simple platform to connect Vendors (People that make the product) and Publishers (People that promote and drive sales to the product).

When the publishers promote the vendor’s product and drive in a sale, the vendor pays a commission to the publisher as a reward. It’s pretty simple: The product is ready, the sales page is also ready and all you have to do is promote the product with your own promotion link.

Commissions usually range from 50-75%, which means that you’re making more money than the vendor makes on that particular sale. Some products have recurring fees for which you’ll be able to make a recurring commission.

You can use Clickbank’s Analytics service to check how many visitors you’re sending to the sales pages of the products and you can analyse other important data over there to find out what’s working and what’s not.

How to start off making money with Clickbank?

It’s really just a 5-step process:

1. Register at Clickbank.com
2. Login and go to the ‘Marketplace’.
3. Browse between categories to find the product that you want to promote.
4. Create your hoplink for that specific product.
5. Promote that hoplink and drive sales.

It’s all easy until Step 5. Promoting the hoplink and getting visitors is a tough task. Getting sales from those visitors is an even tougher task. Although, the vendors do a great job in creating a well converting sales page, it’s still hard to get a sale done if it’s a random visitor.

So, you need to get targeted visitors to your hoplink in order to drive interested people to the sales page that might actually end up purchasing. There are many ways to get targeted visitors.

How should I promote my hoplink?

Below is a list of ways you can promote your hoplink to drive targeted visitors to the sales page:

• Use social media: Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are one of the most effective tools for driving sales through Clickbank. The bigger your friends list at Facebook or the number of your followers at Twitter are, the better chance you have driving sales. It’s a good idea to find out the interests of people (not friends ) and then try to market the product to them. You can make use of facebook pages and the information boxes of youtube videos to promote your hoplink and receive targeted traffic.
• Use a blog: Some time ago, I wrote a guide on how you can setup your blog and make money with it. By using your existing blog (or creating a new one), you can put promotional banners of related clickbank products on your blog with your hoplink. This is also quite an effective method as it requires less work of promotion if you’re already running a blog that receives visitors. Even if it doesn’t, now you can promote your blog instead of promoting the hoplink to build a little trust on the visitor to increase your chances of making the sale.
• Promote to a mailing list: You can build a mailing list by creating a splash page to get your visitor’s email addresses and then later emailing them your promotional links to make the sale.
• Advertise on websites: You can also purchase targeted traffic through Google, Facebook and other similar websites. You’ll have to pay a set price per visitor

The promotional techniques consist of, but are not limited to, the methods listed above. You can use your creativity to drive traffic and sales through other methods. Unleash your inner sales man and promote your link all over the territory.

Now that the Clickbank guide is in front of you, it’s about time you get to work. Sign up with Clickbank now and start promoting products. The sooner you start, the more you’ll learn; and the more you learn, the sooner you’ll start making money. Best of luck!

I’ll be writing follow ups to this post to give more tips on making money with Clickbank. So subscribe to the blog to stay updated. If you’ve got you own tips or experiences with Clickbank, please share them in the comments section.

Filed Under: Earn Money Online, Make Money on the Internet - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
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