2005-11-26T08:47:00.000-08:00

Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days

Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days is a series of articles by Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide, which aims at "translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand". I decided to see if her attempt to make a profit from internet marketing in 30 days could inspire me with some new website content strategies. I had some catch up to do, so I read through the days doing as much as I could do quickly.

Day 1 - She considers selling on eBay. I've done this, and dislike all the packing & post office activities. Her second thought was AdSense - which IS a purely online option, and one I highly recommend. But the one she decides to run with is CafePress. This gave me an idea, and I joined the affiliate program with the description: "I have a dictionary of famous quotes on my site that I will use to generate text for your products." I couldn't call my store famous quotes, the name was already taken, so I called it cute quotes instead. Joining and setting up the store was easy, and it was sitting there waiting to make money for me in a few minutes. Of course I need to market it to actually make any money, and Jennifer has many tips to do that. For now I read on, planning to come back to Jennifer's "slogan creation" ideas and AdWords marketing ideas.

Day 2 - Some good ideas on using the forums and viral marketing. CafePress looking like a good idea. Made a note to come back and read this again. Cute(ish) quotes keep impinging on my mind at unlikely moments. But I have great doubts about being able to write slogans that will sell. Must read: Small Business Ideas forum.

Day 3 - Good discussion of copyright - Jeniffer had an obvious copyright phrase knocked out by CafePress. So I guess I'll chance the grey cases and let CafePress do the weeding. I may use famous quotes and give them a cute twist: "To be or not to be ... cute", "I wanna be cute to you." "Happy birthday to me". "I'll still be cute tomorrow". Hmmm... needs some work. Please send me some suggestions, cute reader. Froogle will not accept a feed from CafePress. Jennifer had uploaded .jpg files when you needed to upload high dpi .png. RTFM Jennifer (mental note to myself to do the same!)

Day 4 - Jennifer put eXTReMe Tracking on the site to get stats. Didn't say how, can't see how, will get back to this. She gets 200 unique visitors from AdWords ads, 6 from organic Google.

Day 5 - Jennifer tries pulling an RSS using free Feedburner. She set up a Feedburner link (which allows readers to add her feed to any RSS reader), and BuzzBoost — Feedburner's way to convert her feed into HTML to format her blog content to pull it into her store.
From CafePress control panel she added a section but left it "empty." so content came from the "description" field in the store manager. The description field takes javascript and HTML so the code from Feedburner went there. This all looked tricky, so I left it for later.

Day 6 - Jennifer had problems adding AdSense though the template panel. I found it a breeze. But she found how to optimize a Blogger site, a must read. Anyway, enough catch-up for now.

AdSense Referral Links

2005-11-05T05:38:00.000-08:00

If you haven't added AdSense to your web site you are missing out on a great little money earner. The AdSense program is continually adding new features - the latest is a batch of referral links, where you can make $100 by referring someone to the AdSense program. You get the $100 when the person you referred makes $100 from AdSense advertising.

This is very clever of Google, for several reasons. The referral program probably costs Google nothing up front. The marketing rumour mill suggests that for every dollar you make with AdSense, Google probably makes about the same. So getting that referral costs Google nothing up front, you get $100 for making that referral, and the person you referred is happy. No one loses, everyone gains. Don't they? Discuss.

I cannot show you a Google referral button in this post. I tried clicking "Edit HTML" and pasting a button in, but on publishing was confronted with the error report: "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not allowed...".

Like all Google ads, the referrel link is powered by javascript.

You can see a working referral button in the left margin of the following page:

http://www.321books.co.uk/famous-quotes.htm

It's the one with the green tick on a white background. I don't like this button. It's very plain. Surely it could have some more text and less white space? A Google logo? Maybe fireworks today? Discuss.

Website Content Strategies

AdSense Referral Links