I’ve touched on microsites before, but lets go a bit more into the concept. The idea is essentially this, build seperate, small websites that are good for several reasons:

• Being Separate from your mainsite has its advantages. You can be more specific, where you couldnt build a 5 page detailed look at one product easily on your oscommerce you can on a seperate site. Also by being seperate you can highly target your seo more blatently without worrying about jeperdising your main branding. Similarly you can express other thoughts on a topic, for keyword placement and to attract different end users only to lead them to your main site.
• A setup microsite can act as a bridge drawing people to your main site.
• A setup microsite can feed PR to your main site (hosted with a seperate company)
• Quick to set up
• Done correctly it can provide free advertising, free customers to your site, free PR boost for your site and even create a revenue.

Effectively you decide on your main site, 2 sites or small network of sites - your flagship big push project/s and then build a network of smaller, supportive ‘pusher’ microsites to aid the growth of your main site. They are designed to be left alone with little to none maintenance post development (which should only be a day or so) and self sufficient, paying their own way.

Here’s a few steps I would advise you read before proceeding with developing a good microsite network as a base to a main site.

Steps:

1. Get a different host - Hosting accounts are key to making use of microsites. It is probably not nescessary to have a different host for each site - maybe 2 microsites per hosting account in different niches. This is because each different hosting account will have different IP (shared hosting might have a load on one ip.) Different IP’s will help defuse your spread to the search engines. (it will help but I am sure google is not stupid to this!)
2. Get a good keyword relative domain - “candle-wax.com” would fit a candle wax subsite.
3. Go Niche - Choose an absolute niche - go niche and then niche of that niche. The better the niche the more chance your microsite has - if you sell a range of candles, make a microsite about candle wax types.
4. Build around a main site - using the previous example if you ran an online candle shop you could build microsites on: candle wax, bees wax, candle products, candle gallery, homemade candles, original candles, world candle records.
5. Time Manage microsite production - Limit your time on each project - I tend to allow a day every few weeks to building a microsite. Its not always constrained to a day, and doesnt always take a day - but don’t waste years making it stunning, stick to the basics - good original content, good link structure and clean code.
6. 1-15 pages - its only a microsite, start it as a microsite, plan how many pages you are going to have and fill them with good original content.
7. Links - Stealth links work - make it a ‘fake’ online shop that when the person clicks ‘add to cart’ it sends them to your main site, its also a great chance to get some real contextual links to your main site. Use words that are what the pages they are linking too.
8. Monetize - I will explain further down but done well will actually make money as well as helping your main site.

So if you manage the above you should be able to create 1 microsite in a day, 1 effective, targetted, long tail niche micro site in around 8 hours. Then what? Well then you push it - as you would any other site - but provided you have chosen your niche well and seo’d your pages this shouldnt be too hard. Strategic linking of your microsites together can help although you want google to think them as different as possible so use different sources for linkage, dont typically link them all together and try and differentiate them all from each other. Also do not use your main site to help them - this is not benificial. Use the microsites to boost your main site not the other way round!!

Monetizing your microsites should more than cover the costs associated with setting them up, therefor allowing you a free place to advertise, draw customers and further dominate your niche.

First things first stick some pay per click or similar on there - although typically you are trying to get people to your main site - so not over the top otherwise you might loose customers for only a few pennies. Using Matched.co.uk you should be able to make a minimum of £15 per month, unless your site is badly designed and poorly linked too (and you don’t have 5 good pages on it). You give them 5 urls that you will stick links on and they will approve/not approve you and give you a bit of code. Having this ad on your site will then get you £3 a month. Not much but 5 of them and you get £180 a year - that should more than cover hosting and registration fees . You are limited to 5 sites with each account on matched though (each with 5 pages = £75 a month)

Kindly use this link if you are going to use Matched so we can all benefit

Further monetization with amazon affiliates, Commision junction or ebay auctions is all good progress but as the site is so niche you are not likely to get huge returns on the effort. Personally I keep it reasonably simple but I have got a few micro sites running all of the aforementioned.

So try it out - microsites as a base for a larger web project! - If you require further consultation regarding seo powered by creative microsites then let me know

That is the question. Recently as you may have read I have been dabbling with affiliate marketing. From my fortnight of play and testing I have made under $100/£50 (at the current exchange rate :0 @ uk>usa.) Now that’s not a lot of money, but then I haven’t exactly spent lots of time on it (maybe 5-10 hours.) The thing is if you think about it, stand back and objectively look at both sides of the affiliate ideology, there is a fine division between affiliates and sellers.The sellers allowing affiliates to be middle men can’t really loose out as they invest little time setting it up and essentially get the affiliates time spent for free. They do however swap this for commissions and lack of control of the ways in which their products are being sold online (this is also how it works in real life affiliate situations.)

The Affiliates want to make their share, they work hard (or not) and get a small cut - and mark my words it is pretty small. A lot of small cuts do make a large cut, but is it really that possible to become very rich as an affiliate?

In every market, business or field there will always be success and failure, the highly successful and the complete belly floppers. Now the successful in affiliate marketing (notably the big ‘make money online blogs’) do make for quite large payouts, with some bloggers apparently making 25k+ a month from affiliate work. I am sure there are the odd few making even more than that too, but think of how many affiliate marketeers there are making just a bit?

There are aspects of affiliate marketeering that I do like. The hours - suit you, the product - you can pretty much choose - from rc cars to radiators, the tools - payperclick, microsites, forums, redirects, shorturls for affiliates. Its a fun game, mixing in cool opportunities like ebay commissions, widgetised selling blocks etc. easily up-scaleable too.

I suppose acting as an affiliate is the modern day equivalent of door to door salesmen. You get a companies ware’s and try and sell as much as possible promoting it across the world in order to get your cut.

I will probably continue to dabble in affiliate marketing, promoting products I believe in, but as a path to billions I can’t see it being as simply universally expandable as investing or selling your own services and products (and using affiliates rather than being one). I almost would say that you should do 80% of the sales work in house, allowing you to maintain a lot of the control and a fair amount of the revenue. Affiliate marketing from a business point of view should also be thought out before rushing in, as for high high end products with certain aspirations and values - you shouldn’t let just anybody go around selling your products for risk of contamination of brand.

• 5 Things to know before starting up an eVenture
• Successful Business Strategy
• Hyperlocal - selling to your next door neighbour’s online

It seems the pagerank update is completed - I have seen an increase in all of my sites and a fair few others:

criTix (this wonderful business blog) - 0 (I never used it) to 3 (pretty good)

Several of my affiliate sites went up - 0 to 2/3

Wheels-Near-U - 0 to 3

RankRace.com - 0 to 4 (anyone want a pr 4 domain/site?)

Several web design projects I expected to remain on 1 forever went up also to 2’s and 3’s.

Seems to me that this update has been very favourable - what I thought was going to be a complete stampede of minus’s worked out ok.

• 3p adword clicks - chasing the long tail monster
• Pagex - Bolt on SEO tools
• Planning web dev centralisation - making your files, classes etc centralised for ease of use

Too many people think seo is the end all of internet business. To what extent should we agree with this idea? should we put google before our customers to get more customers? never if you ask me, but its very easy to fall into the trap of doing things because you are used to them, even if they are not effective or even useful.

SEO is great to learn because essentially its the art of providing a good easy to understand site with good unique content that is of some worth. But its far to easy to get caught in the game. Yes using amazing seo skills can get you millions of viewers but no not hugely easily. The art of seo has exploded in line with online business and now is populated by a fair few million seo practitioners, but how far should we go?

It is possible to get huge amount of traffic, from lots of different places. You can gain better positioning in the serps, get dugg a few hundred times, become facebook fantastic - but the first is the only really stable producer.

Going niche is the obvious choice for those who can - but what if you require the top spot for an insanely competitive keyword/phrase - do you go niche for a few hundred similar phrases or work on that one mass keyword - its a sum up to be made by you.

Ultimately the more competitive the business probably the more time need be devoted to seo and sem techniques. If your in a fairly non competitive market you may only have to provide a good website to your seo dude or company and leave it with them for a few weeks to set up good seo practice, keyword alliteration and then your done. But if your after “cars” it will take a whole lot more to make it up there.

Day in day out you will probably need to provide 5-10+ brand new pages of keyword rich, new, original, appropriate content. Backed up by well designed pages, a long standing domain, customers that chatter endlessly about you elsewhere online and a monsoon of backlinks that could carry donkey.com to the top.

Personally I try to go for a balance - some weeks I will push things more than others, on low budget weeks I might do nothing but create good content or further work on making the current pages more appropriate. To compete with the “cars” serp big boys it probably would take a budget of 60k a year - mainly to pay 3 people to do the work!!!

But in the end does seo mean £££? It takes a lot more than just good seo to get the money in. Remember to make a good site with functional ways to convert clicks to customers and customers to £££. Sometimes its better if we don’t all just follow google around looking for our dish of customers and we just go and get them ourselves!!!!

Clicks are effective viewers, completely targeted and ready to be entertained. You pay google, yahoo or one of the other world dominating company’s to dice up their success and give you a billionth of a billionth of the result.

It almost annoys me that I use google adwords, although with competition as strong as it is you need to use all the tools available to you. Anyway I was not part of the now legendary 1p a click generation - I was online then I was probably just doing something less useful - like command and conquer or writing qbasic. But I am online now, trading and making money. So to get these bums in seats, get people there and looking, snag them into using my sites I use a range of tools - one being pay per click. Pay per click is not by any means my favourite type of advertising. Its effectively well over priced in comparison to the other alternatives, should you know where to look. But for new projects I usually allow a certain amount of play money and some of that gets thrown down the google hole.

But to get the most out of your pay per click, that is spend 6p on a good viewer as a pose to 30p is not actually that hard. First I would recommend diversifying. If your target audience is not essentially british (mine usually are but if yours are not) then you have a vast amount of choice in pay per click sellers.

I would recommend trying a variety of different ppc operators to see which works most effectively for your target audience and keywords. Definitely start with Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing (£60 free coupon if you click this link :D) and Looksmart.

For me Looksmart provides very cheap traffic, although I am not to sure at this point how relevant it is in comparison with more british targeting equivalents. Yahoo IMO is quite expensive but only relatively.

Google Adwords - if your not paying attention will be very expensive - prepare to pay 80p per click in a mass market for open keywords and still only hit 2nd place. However I suggest the following to get much cheaper adwords clicks (works with all ppc):

Long tail your keywords - that’s it - simple you say - well yes actually. By longtailing my keywords I am now paying 2p-8p for 2nd/3rd/4th position, more specific relevant clicks. This works in most markets, but requires some time and a regular adjustment. Essentially you want to create 3 or 4 word lines in adsense - e.g. instead of “used cars” you want to get “2nd hand cars in uk” - Depending on your localisation (or Hyper localisation) you can then intersect your locations to provide you with a huge list of 3/4/5 word keyphrases. These longer keyphrases will be used less often but as a result will be a lot cheaper. Spend the time to set yourself up with huge long tail lists of phrases relative to your target.

Here’s how I recommend going about getting cheaper adwords clicks:

• Get a database or list of your products/locations/keywords/descriptives. I say get a database because its a lot quicker if you do so.
• Create a php (or whatever language) script to write you keyword lists. Aim to have each line use at least 3 words. Phrases like “used cars west london” rather than “used cars”, other good examples would be “second hand cars west london”, “cars for sale west london” etc.
• If you have a good list of locations you may end up with a very long list of variated keywords. This is only good, just don’t create 20mb files - that’s too many.
• Stick them into google and run them in line with your current broader ads e.g. run “used cars *AREA*” as one campaign in google and another campaign with just the keywords “used cars”. The used cars one will likely get as many hits as you could want, but at a much higher cost. The more long winded list will achieve modest numbers but for a 2nd position it will cost you pennys.
• Do this with all your static keywords, ones that don’t change with time.
• Monitor them - Some will work well others will be no shows, but eventually almost every one will probably be typed in, depending on how long tail your going! Adjust the bid prices in as much detail as possible. If you have lists of thousands build this into the php script to output the bid value on the line *bid*.
• Sticking at double the minimum bid of 3p or 4p will usually get you top 3 position in my experience (with long tail adwords.)

There are numerous advantages to this, but depending on how much your spending it could be more cost effective to just use the broad term. Factor in your hourly wage in creating the files.

If you manage some low cost per clicks - Post them in the comments here - what’s the lowest cost per click you can get in google adwords?

I am not one for joining in phenomenons, I like objectively watching and trying to intervene occasionally for profit purposes. Mainly because the big net phenomenons usually mainly profit their originators and don’t do much apart from drain your time and slice your efficiency. Hence I have curbed my enthusiasm (good program) for facebook, counterstrike and msn. (I purposely never joined myspace!) but recently I fell into the Yahoo Answers Hole.

I say hole but it isn’t all bad. By answering questions well and being a good source of correct and helpful information you can help people and get a little credit (putting your url in source of 20 odd answers might provide 10-20 interested clicks and for search engines that ignore nofollow perhaps some serp climbing.) But it does help people which in cosmic karma isn’t bad, just not financially a great producer. While things are quiet though its a positive step.

It is providing yahoo with free content essentially which I don’t sponsor, but with the communication aspect it draws you in. Networking becomes notworking! There’s numerous equivalent sites out there, that really I would recommend you avoid if your of an addictive nature but want to progress in business, however objective attention towards them, as they are part of the modern business climate is essential.

Having said that if you want to add me as a friend heres my profile…lol god damn viral concepts.

…ok so the title is a little over dramatic, it is probably not the case that google is completely dropping pagerank. The word on the line is that a large number of websites are experiencing drops in their google pagerank, as if a pr update is in progress, however I am yet to hear of any pagerank increments so I am doubtful that a full update is taking place.

Personally it does make me think that perhaps google are up to something, I mean for example raising the bar? Perhaps in the coming weeks/months/days google will announce a new bar so as web people everywhere can discuss and aim for it. This would fit with the mass consensus of page rank drops without any increases, although as much as hinting a higher bar of entry it could also mark the beginning in the decline in the use of page rank.

After all pagerank is unfortunately used a lot by people buying and selling links to gauge the quality of the link for sale, so I could see google saying ‘abuse it and loose it’. It isn’t a defining factor in buying and selling links but I can see it would be one way they could combat it slightly.

In the end its unknown really how much google are willing to do to combat people selling links, scrapping page rank could just be the start…..not that that’s what’s necessarily happening - no doubt there will be a post from someone victorious as the first raised pr in no time at all.

…lets just hope its me

I have just released the first version (after testing) of my new page tools. Named Pagex, these 2 php include files will provide a quick and easy bolt on solution for page related tasks. It allows you to do the following all from 1 single administration file. Best of all its free under GNU and is absolutely easy to install!

• Control SEO - Control all meta tags, titles and monitor page rank for all your pages from one place!
• Monitor pages - load times, page rank, turn them on and off for maintenace
• Basic in built CMS - Pagex has the in built ability to feed simple repetitive data across many pages (menus, headers etc.)
• Referrers, Referrer Logging - Don’t bother with log files - watch your referrers in real time, with PR rank, search query highlighting + more.
• Free under GNU license
• Runs on Mysql/PHP

Click here to download Pagex / Click here to view more details on Pagex

The following is an excerpt from my Pagex Page: 

Pagex - is a simple, bolt on tool that you can use to monitor your pages, feed them data, turn pages off for maintenance, analyse your referrers, page load times and customise all meta data for each page from one simple menu. All this built into 2 php files and made mind bogglingly easy for everyone from the SEO expert to the beginner web developer!

I was reading a post over at problogger about knowing when your site has been ‘dug’ and thought I would point out google alerts.

I found out about google alerts from reading garythescubaguys excellent seo whitepaper, but have since used them for a fair few things. The premise is that you enter a phrase, select ‘as it happens’ (as to how often you want to be notified) and then every time the phrase is found by google it will email you details. Now obviously entering ‘car’ would result in an email every second - so when you choose phrases do so well.

I use it to watch for my web address (so I have 1 alert for criTix.co.uk), for my name (so I can find out if anyone is cussing me online…lol) and company name etc. It might take a little experimenting but its definately a useful tool!

Google Alerts

Submitting your site to search engines, potential link partners and directories is a good place to start when beginning a new web project. It won’t give you a million hits, but it’ll act as one of 20 or so things you can do to help (excluding creating good good content.)

So as soon as your site is legible (make sure its good enough to be viewed - because submissions will be checked or crawled!) Get on with submitting. You should also bare in mind that as good as it is you shouldn’t spend days on submissions. It will take a long time to get up the list like that. I would recommend the following because it shouldn’t take more than 2 hours.

1. Check site completely - perhaps obvious but you should thoroughly check your site for broken links and in various browsers. An ugly site may put people off and broken links are irritating and unhelpful to your seo efforts.

2. Decide on keywords, titles and description - You will need to decide what your keywords are (150 charectors worth) as well as a short description and a long description (250 char and 400+ char respectively) and a good keyword rich title. These will be used when submitting.

3. Get Roboform - Very important to get this before even starting, the time it will save you is immense (essentially you set some default answers to forms and then at the click of a ‘fill form’ button or even automatically it will fill the form and/or submit it.) It also works with a lot of the programs I am about to suggest because its integrated with browsers.

4. Get Web CEO - Excellent Excellent bit of software - well worth the download. I am not going to go into it too much, is very intuitive, but excellent tool for anyone running a website - seo based!

5. Get IBP & Arelis - Again similar kin to Web CEO but with very good features, would highly recommend - will go into more detail below.

 6. Create a special Email address - Under the domain you want to submit, or elsewhere - create a new email address to the one you usually use (for 2 reasons:) 1. it will keep your normal email from potential spammers, as the email you use for submitting might end up online. 2. it will keep the process concise - all the emails relating to submissions will go to this other inbox and therefore processing them will be easier.

7. Set up your programs - Once you have the above programs installed, and perhaps some other directory submitters and such (submit helper is also good) learn to use the programs a bit - you will need to set defaults in all of the programs: in roboform set up default login, email, username etc. information and test it works on a form, in webceo and ibp&arelis set up your websites with descriptions, keywords, titles and your email and contact details. Remember to use your newly created email to keep it separate!

8. AutoSubmit - Open Web CEO and under ‘promote your site’ click ’submit URLs’. Select the project you created for your new site, or make a new one for it. If you havent yet then enter your details, including the email address you set up (do this under the ‘general information’ and ‘page details’ tabs in setup tab.) Then skip to auto submission tab at the top. Select all the engines from the list (click ‘list of engines’  - 120 on my list) and then click ’submission’ tab and click ’submit’ - leave this too work - it will submit your site to as many as possible and give you an audible message when its done. Also do the similar process to this in IBP & Arelis  (Search engine submitter.)

9. Manual/Semi Auto Submit - Open up Web CEO / IBP & Arelis / Submit helper and go to the ‘manual’ or ’semi-automatic’ submit areas.  The basic process is to go through a list on the left, click the website address and it will take you to the submit page - select the ones which you remember - because these will probably be the bigger directory’s/engines. If not then go through the lists, although the list might be huge! This is where your roboform helps - once you open the submit page right click and you should see ‘fill form’ on the list - like with your other browsers - this will 90% automate your submission bar the clicking. Submit helper does a similar process. This will provide you with as many directory entries as the auto submitter does - if not more - but is time consuming.

10. Check your email - A lot of the submissions - especially about 15 of the search engines Web CEO submits too including anoox etc require you to click a link in their email to complete submission, so check the new email you made and go through them clicking the links. Some of the engines require you to re-enter your email address - this will sign you up to their mailing list but will get you on the engine.

Hopefully these 10 steps will help you get a little more web presence! - although probably not necessary for more established sites it can be a good place to start if your site is brand new. After that go and write some damn good content and build some good web relations!!!