Internet Business Daily

Google has finally fully updated their PageRank for all sites. Internetbusinessdaily.net has moved up 1 position to PR4! Juicefeed.com finally received a PageRank and surprisingly has jumped to PR4 after only being online for about 2 months.

A bunch of my mini-niche sites also got PR3, which is good. They include: Cheap Dishwasher, In Stock Wii, and DSC Cybershot.

A better PR (PageRank) will give my sites more traffic, better leverage on link exchanges, and better search results. Check out your site’s new PR, but be sure to check the difference between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com! You can goto Google’s webmaster tools to set the preferred domain to make them have the same PR.

I put this video up on YouTube about three years ago, before it became the video juggernaut it is today. The video is of me and my drunk college buddies doing some stupid stuff. They take a exercise ball and run straight at each other and whoever was standing after won, but really no one won this game. I am the one recording the video. The sound got all messed up for some reason when I uploaded it to YouTube, but I don’t want to upload another one. Check it out: (skip ahead to 1:40 if you want to see the funniest part)

In-text advertising is basically ads that are targeted to the keywords on your web page. Each ad company highlights specific words on your web site in their own way and when a user hovers over the word, an ad appears. You can see examples of this on my website.

I had been using Vibrant Media for months, and it was doing well for a while. Then one day I had no revenue for about two weeks straight. This was very discouraging. I then noticed that many sites were using a new in-text advertiser called Kontera. At first glance I didn’t think that Kontera’s ads looked as good as Vibrant’s, but they were popping up everywhere so I decided to give them a try.

Comparison
The first difference I noticed was that you can have many more highlighted words on each web page. I think I had something like 15 ads on a page with Kontera and the limit for Vibrant is 7. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. Users might think you are being too spammy with the ads, and there is a fine line between quality content and just writing for advertisements. Some other differences obviously include the color of the underlined word, and the look of the ad. Personally I think Vibrant Media’s ads look much better than Kontera’s. Both companies I must admit have excellent customer service. They both receive my highest approval for their customer service.

Vibrant Media Ad:

Kontera Ad:

Revenue
So now the most important difference, revenue! When I started using Kontera, I was only getting a couple cents per click. I was getting many more clicks than I was with Vibrant, but they just weren’t paying as much. Let’s take a random sample of days as an example. One day I had over 30 clicks with Kontera, which made me about .40 cents. Yesterday with Vibrant I had 5 clicks, which made me over $2.50.

Winner: Vibrant Media
The obvious winner for a smaller blog such as my own is Vibrant. Kontera may be able to optimize for a bigger site much better, but I was not able to get the numbers I was looking for from Kontera. I have permanently switched back to Vibrant Media.

What Is PageRank?
I was just looking through all the stories I have been digging lately and noticed that my profile page has a PageRank! What does that mean exactly you ask? Well PageRank (PR) is the ranking system Google uses to determine how “important” a web page is. Every page that Google spiders get a PR, whether it is 0/10 (most pages) or 8/10 like Digg’s homepage. The higher the PR, basically the more traffic Google sends you.

Since I’ve been a digg user for quite some time, my profile page as been assigned a PR4. Granted this isn’t great, but it’s something. I can absolutely use this to my advantage.

How Can I Use This?
Since I control every single link that appears on my profile page, I can submit my own stories and they will all appear on my page. Without going too much into how Google ranks pages by linking, having my links on my PR4 profile page looks good in the eyes of Google. All I need to do now is create links to my article pages with the keywords I want. Even if the stories don’t hit homepage, at least they are on a PR4 page.

Downside?
There are a few downsides I see. First of all, you need to leave a link up long enough so that Google can come around and spider it. This means that if you digg a bunch of other people’s stories, your links will disappear quickly. Another possible problem is that Digg assigns a no-follow tag to the links and Google won’t count them. As far as I can see, they do not do this currently.

So without being too spammy, which is pretty much an oxymoron using this method, try it out!

I have been a CJ eBay affiliate member for about 2-3 months now. Basically how this program works is you sell items for eBay and they give you 40-65% of the commission. This is only a deal you can get through Commission Junction. Then one day Tom Ferris (who told me about this program) and I both stopped receiving revenue. We quickly received an email from the CJ team saying that eBay had a huge bug that did not allow for the tracking of sales. WHOA! We were still getting impressions and clicks tracked, but not that sales (the most important thing to track).

So basically eBay has no idea how much each of their affiliate would have made, and is most likely going crazy over there trying to figure out what happened. So what will happen to all of the money we would have made? That’s a great question and one that I asked the CJ team. The quickly responded with:

EBay is planning on reviewing your prior sales record and trying to calculate a generous estimate of what you would have made while their tracking was down. We hope this answers your question. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

So here’s the problem as I see it: how are they possibly going to determine how much I would have made? I only started making money with the program a few days before the bug happened. On the other hand, for someone like Tom, he has plenty of data that shows he makes money. Supposedly they have fixed the bug as of the 22nd, but I am still not getting any revenue. I will keep everyone updated on the status of this error, but it seems like this should be a huge issue over at eBay and they should be working 24/7 to figure out what’s wrong.

I have not been updating my blog as much as I would like to. I have been very busy at work, including some side projects and consulting I have been doing. I am still trying to get out many SEO Tips segments because those are quick and useful to my readers. So what have I been up to you might ask?

Juicefeed - Celebrity Gossip Site
I have been still working on Juicefeed.com, trying to get that site to grow. It has been a little difficult however because of Google’s duplicate content filter. My partner and I have been trying to figure out ways around this, and the only thing we can come up with is to have our users write the content for us. The idea being that people reading the site will want to comment on the photo’s we have and that will count as original content. The only problem is that we don’t have many users, and basically no loyal users yet. So no one is commenting. Hopefully we will be able to get a loyal reader base so they will start writing for us as well.

Search Engine Optimization
Another thing I have been doing is consultation. I do some SEO work, some Adwords traffic driving, and some general Internet optimization techniques. I have been hired to help Ken Corre sell his book The Victim Donor, which is a medical fiction. This involves doing some SEO for him, and using adwords to drive targeted traffic to his site to sell his book. I just put the campaign live this morning with the keywords relating to “medical fiction.” I am going to track the conversions and everything else associated with selling something online. I also have another consultant gig coming up soon. Ken had referred me to this company who was in need of SEO and web standards optimization. I have not yet started that project, but hopefully we get the ball rolling asap.

Talkmatic
Talkmatic is another project I am working on but has slowed to a crawl. We will hopefully start growing that site out soon as well.

Internet Business Daily - Still Making Money Online
I want to start growing this blog more. I am going to dedicate more time to writing posts and hopefully I will gain some new readers. I very much enjoy sharing my knowledge and experiences with people online and reading their comments about it. Again, I am poor writer so it takes me a while to write a post but I will definitely be posting more original content in days to come. Thanks to the loyal readers right now and I welcome any new readers!

**UPDATE: Looks like Google deleted this movie from their archives…sorry everyone!

This has got to be one of the greatest geek movies of all time. It is the story of the rise of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and their relative companies. This is a much watch for any techy or computer geek, so here ya go!

Three is such a perfect number sometimes. Three strikes, three stooges, three’s company…ok well those are bad examples but I believe there is a real power in the number three in regards to SEO. Everything on your site should be in three levels. You should be able to describe anything on your site with three levels of detail. This rule is not written in stone, but it is something that I believe is true. This not only makes it easy for the Google spider to come read your site, but it also makes it very easy for your readers to navigate.

Three Levels of Navigation
You should be able to get to anywhere on your site within three clicks. Let’s say for example you have a video game website. One of my favorite navigational tools is a cookie trail, and should never go more than three levels deep. Let’s use a review of the Xbox360 game Gears of War as our example. So when a reader comes to the homepage looking for the review the first thing they should see are the different types of consoles (assuming the site covers all consoles). They click on Xbox360, which takes them to a page that contains things like reviews, previews, hardware etc. The second click will be reviews, which takes them to a page with all the games that can be reviewed for Xbox360. The third and last click should be Gears of War review. So the cookie trail should look like this:

Xbox360 >> Game Reviews >> Gears of War Review

Game reviews and Xbox360 can be interchanged but you get the point. This makes it easy for the user to navigate and for Google to read your site. Also, the site map becomes very easy to read.

Three Keywords
I also think you should have three main keywords to describe your site. This is another theory of mine and is not proven. I have chosen “make money online” “blogging for money” and “internet business daily.” With these keywords I hope to build a large combination of long-tail keywords. Long-tail is currently the best way to get traffic on a smaller site, because we can’t compete with the big dogs. So choose the 3 keyword phrases that best describe your site and eventually you will start getting combinations of long-tail keywords having to do with these keywords.

Pretty cool but has GOT to be fake…

My friend’s father has recently written a book (medical fiction), and has asked me to review it for him on my site. For as long as I have known this family for, I was more than happy to do this little favor for him. So as most of you know I am anything but a great writer, but here is my best attempt at a book review:

Both shocking and spellbinding, The Victim Donor tells the story of a family man who struggles to discover why he has become the focus of a gruesome kidnapping plot, which seems to have more of an underlying motive.

Stockbroker John Harris III is living the American dream with Cheryl, his physician wife and college sweetheart. Together they have four young children, a house in the mountains of Utah, their health, their love, money, and stability. Their lives are suddenly turned upside-down when Harris is kidnapped one morning on his way to work.

The local Utah police and the FBI make little headway on the case until, to everyone’s surprise, Harris turns up alone and comatose in a motel room several states away. He’s in perfect health except that he’s missing a kidney—the result of a rogue surgery performed by a world-class talent.

Urban legend suddenly becomes suburban reality and nightmare for the Harris family as they face some terrifying questions and realities. Why did the kidnappers choose Harris as their victim donor? And why did they allow him to survive? Harris and his family are about to learn the horrifying answers.

So if you enjoy medical fiction, The Victim Donor is absolutely for you. It is a great read with many plot twists that leaves you asking: “can this happen to me??”

You can find Ken Corre’s website at www.kencorre.com, where you can read reviews and purchase the book. I invite all of you to check it out.