Landing Page Optimization, by Tim Ash
Landing pages are pages designed specifically to make people land on your site – mostly from search results pages. But getting them there – creating a page with good SEO 
that makes your page and your site visible to the search engines is only half the job. Once they arrive, the page must also be good enough and interesting enough to make them want to stay a little, and perhaps even visit other pages on your site.
Tim Ash’s book teaches you some basic skills to achieve this. As a matter of fact, it is one of the better guides around that gives a step-by-step, comprehensive guide that imparets to you the skills necessary to improve your bottom line. And, for most of us, that’s something that matters a little, isn’t it?
So this neat guide teaches you to identify mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value, to define visitor classes and key conversion tasks, how to gain an understanding on customer decision-making, and other related tasks. It tells you about some common pitfalls – ones that I certainly have been unaware of – and how to awoid them. The book also includes a companion website and a detailed review of the Google Website Optimizer tool.
That’s a lot of crucially important information in a little package for people concerned about making visitors come, turnings visitors into customers, and improving the bottom line!
.Search Engine Optimization All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies, by Bruce Clay and Susan Esparza
If you want your Web site to show up quickly when people search, Search Engine Optimization All–in–One For Dummies has the whole story on how to build a site
The book has chapters covering how search engines work, keyword strategy, competitive positioning, SEO Web design, content creation, linking, optimizing the foundations, analyzing results, international SEO, and search marketing. It even gives you some ok information about geeky things like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, so that you can improve you ability to match metatags and keywords to page content.
- How search engines work and which ones offer the best exposure
- How to develop a keyword strategy and be competitive
- Designing an SEO–friendly site
- How to line up relevant links for better search showing
- How to get more from your server and CMS
- How to measure your success
- How to globalize your success
- Using SEO to build your brand
A good alternative to this book, equally good, is Search Engine Optimization For Dummies
, amazon US
, amazon CA
, and Suchmaschinen-Optimierung für Dummies (Fur Dummies)
.Learn blogging from Huffington Post and Problogger
There
Learning to blog, and getting to be a good blogger, is pretty hard. Many try and very few make it. Thus, learning from the bloggers that have made it makes sense. Even though they may not give you all their secrets, and even though they may not be able to impart to you the golden style and the mode of thinking that sets them apart, learning from them may still be a good way to improve.
The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging is, as it turns out, both informative, fun, and useful. It gives you tools to help you build your blog, strategies to create your community, tips on finding your voice, and lots entertaining anecdotes from HuffPost bloggers that will make you wonder what took you so long to blog in the first place.
The most interesting chapters to me were chapter 2 through 5. Chapter 2 described some of the the basics of getting started.
Chapter 3 discusses how to your blog noticed. The tips are very practical and one I think actually work. It also gives tips on monetizing your blog in a realistic fashion.
Chapter 4 is about finding your voice. It advises you consider both what you will feel most passionate about and what you think your potential reader would want out of your blog.
Chapter 5 takes the notion of getting your blog noticed one step further, and talks about how you can foster a community through your blog.
I found the books intereesting and useful, and recommend it to others as well.
Darren Rowse 
and Chris Garrett’s Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income is another book from successful and profitable probloggers, and here they reveal at least some of their secrets. It is a well written book – in the clear, no-nonsense, straight to the point style that we have come to associate with Problogger.
This book gives a lot of useful tips and techniques for building a successful blog. The chapters deal with topics like Blogging for Money, Niche Blogging, Setting Up Your Blog, Blog Writing, Blog Income and Earning Strategies, Buying and Selling Blogs, Blog Networks, Blog Promotion and Marketing, Secrets of Successful Blogs, Creating Something Worthwhile.
Reading this book gave me a lot of knowledge in blogging and a lot of food for thought.
It is perhaps the most comprehensive and realistic book I have seen on blogging. It covers almost everything, but as the authors are skilled and know the business from every angle, there is advice for all regardless of current skill level.
I found many, many tips that hopefully will help me focus my efforts and produce a better blog. There is so much to learn and so much one can do to improve, and Rowse and Garrett give valueable assistance that makes it easier to avoid costly and time consuming mistakes. A great book!
Links to amazon: The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging
Affiliates scammed at Commission Junction?
For me the whole story with Commission Juction started a long time ago. I have written about it in this blog previously, without mentioning the name of Commission Junction, is a post entitled Monetizing your blog – make the smart choices.
One of the ad agencies I had an affiliate deal with, I can reveal now, was Commission Junction. It, in turn was (is?) affiliated with eBay, and gave me ads from a number of great companies that I was happy to promote, like for instance eBay and Adobe.
And I spent a large number of hours finding the right ads, placing them on my pages, monitoring progress, and so on. And, according to the stats, a lot of people clicked the ads.
But guess what? I made no money at all! According to the same stats, not one of the people clicking the ads became leads for the advertisers. Nor did any of them buy anything. Not one single soul!
So in the blog post I cited above, I wrote:
So far, I haven’t made a nickel on those affiliate deals. Many of them, I think, are scams. At least a large number of them are structured in ways that favor the advertiser and possibly the agency, but definitely not me. So somebody else is getting the value I create.
It now turns out that mostly likely I was scammed! There is now a class action suit against Commission Junction pending, and a proposed settlement:
The proposed settlement will resolve claims that Defendants failed to adequately monitor Commission Junction’s Network for the use by third parties of software that does not
comply with Commission Junction’s (“CJ”) Publisher Code of Conduct and that is intended to steal or divert commissions from publishers on CJ’s network (“Non-compliant Software”), failed to adequately monitor or prevent third parties from engaging in the theft or “hijacking” of commissions from Advertisers and Publishers on CJ’s Network, and failed to make sufficient disclosures regarding the existence of Non-compliant Software and commission theft, resulting in losses to both advertisers and publishers on the CJ Network.
The suit, and proposed settlement includes ValueClick, Inc., Commission Junction, Inc. and Be Free. Neither of these parties, of course, admit any guilt or wrong doing. But they have agreed to pay publishers and advertisers even so!?!
So yeah, monetizing blogs and websites IS difficult, and there are scams! So look out friends, be careful, watch your stats and trust your instincts!
PS: Link to info about the settlement
Do big corporations hack blogs to shut them up?
I have had a couple of strange experiences lately. I’ve written a few things that are more than a little critical of a couple of huge corporations. Since then, I have twice had my blog infected with malware or badware, so that Google have blocked people from going directly to my blog from Google search results.
I am not critical of Google. I think that they did the right thing, given the presence of malware on my blog.
But the thing is, I run several blogs. This is the only one that has had malware. And now this blog has had it twice. And this is the only blog where I’ve criticised huge corporations. I can’t prove anything, I have no idea who did it, it is just strange. But I am cynical. And I am don’t really believe in coincidences. Not all that much.
I run a WordPress installation. So, the first time Google told me I had malware, I was running WordPress 2.3.2. I looked through all my posts. Then I looked through my PHP-files. I found a JavaScript that looked strange in a theme file. So I did a clean upgrade to 2.3.3 and changed theme.
A few days later, the malware was back. This time I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and changed theme again. The theme is clean, the installation is clean, Aximet is there, only clean widgets and plugins. Just as the first time. I hope WordPress 2.5 makes this install more secure. This has cost me lots of time and work. I hate it.
Who knows. I am suspicious. I may be too suspicious. Have anybody else experienced anything similar?
Web Site Benchmarking from Google: Enhanced Google Analytics
Google Analytics is about to get a new facelift from Google, according to Web Analytics World.
Yesterday I had a chance to talk with Google Analytics’ Senior Product Manager, Brett Crosby regarding some of the new features being rolled out into Beta for Google Analytics. The one that I found most intriguing was their new benchmarking functionality which will allow users to compare your site’s metrics versus other sites. With opt-in permission from site owners, Google will be aggregating website data into different verticals allowing users to compare their data with companies in any other vertical.
Here is the blog about it from Google:
Benchmarking now available plus additional opt-in settings
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
We’re happy to announce the launch of two related new Google Analytics features: a beta version of industry benchmarking and a data-sharing settings page. Both are designed to give our customers more choice and better control over their data. We are also launching an integration with Audio Ads today, which we’ll discuss in more detail in tomorrow’s post. All of these features will begin appearing in customer accounts today, though benchmarking reports may take up to a couple weeks to show data.
Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.
You can also compare your site against an industry vertical different than your own. For example, you might see that your industry’s traffic dips at certain times of the year while another industry’s traffic increases. Based on that information, you may wish to explore cross promotional opportunities to drive traffic back and forth.
For more information, take a look at the benchmarking FAQs in the Google Analytics help center.Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so we’re also introducing a new data-sharing settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. To be clear, we are not sharing individual data with competitors; we bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data. Once you opt in, it may take a couple weeks for the reports to populate.
You can also elect to share your data with other Google services. This setting will allow us to provide you with additional advanced new features. For example, many of you have asked us to integrate Conversion Optimizer (which is currently only available to AdWords Conversion Tracking users) into Google Analytics. By opting to share your data with Google, you’ll be able to take advantage of these related new features as they become available. For more information, take a look at the data-sharing options FAQs in the help center.
This is good news, especially for larger sites and relatively standard sites where benchmarking is meaningful and usesul. However, at this point too few details are available to make it possibly to really know in any detail how useful this will be. But it is sufficiently interesting for me, at least, to eagerly await momre news and information from Google.
A Warning About Windows Live Writer
I have previously written a very positive posting about using Windows Live Writer as desktop editor for WordPress.
I have installed and used Live Writer on my WordPress installation. It works beautifully, but has created huge problems for me. As it turns out, the program for some reason uses ISO code representation of extended characters instead of “standard” HTML (I have the Norwegian version of the program, and I am not certain whether this is a problem in other versions – but it probably is in non-English versions).
That is, « is represented as & #171; (ISO Latin-1, with a blank space inserted after & to prevent from not displaying) instead of & laquo; (HTML). And so on, for all the extended characters.
So why is this a huge problem: Because in WordPress, plugins like “Sensitive Tag Clouds” and the like assume standard HTML. And WordPress 2.3.x tags seem to be generated on this assumption as well. So my WordPress installation generates tags that include these odd ISO-code numbers into my Google sitemap. But when that page comes up in a search, and the users wants to open my page, the page can not be found, and generates a 404-error.
So I am losing a traffic due to this program. I have gone through the documentation for Windows Live Writer, and as far as I can see, this is not at all documented. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to configure this. Also, you can only see the representation when you switch from normal to HTML view in Live Writer.
The only solution I have so far found is to write the text directly into the HTML-view instead of using the ordinary views. Then the characters will be correctly represented in WordPress.
So for me this has meant: (a) I have stopped using Live Writer, and (b) I have had to go back and correct all the post I had written using it before I detected the problem.
Be warned! This is not a good program to use with WordPress installations!
– Peter
Monetizing your blog – make the smart choices
Advertising is generally the most important source of income on blogs (and web sites). However, monetizing your blog is not quite as easy as many may think. There are a number of pitfalls, and a large number of companies and agencies out there that want to serve you deals that look promising, but in reality will make you very little money.
I have learned some lessons about this. I have made some costly mistakes that I am willing to share so that others can avoid repeating them. There are a bunch of people out there writing blogs about how much money they make, how fast they’re making money, and how easy it is to make money. A number of them make big money on that. Some of the advice is good, some is not. Very few of them say very little about the mistakes they have made. Neither do they say muc about the posible pitfalls you may encounter when you seek to monetize your blog. And, for sure, it’s not nearly as easy as most of those people say.
Making money by blogging really is not only about getting visitors and driving traffic; it’s also about avoiding pitfalls and making money for yourself instead of for others. Your blog may well create a lot of value, without you getting anything near a fair share of it.
So here are some stories about pitfalls. This is straight talk, and valuable and expensive lessons. Some of my readers, I am sure, have similar or other stories. Sharing them will, I am sure, be to our joint benefit.
I have associate deals with several companies. The ones I am very pleased with, are Google and Amazon. However, being eager to make bucks, I also entered into deals with some online advertising agencies (I will not, for now, name them). They offered deals of a different nature than Google and even Amazon – all sorts of so called “incentive-based” payment structures, often with extremely high pay-offs if my visitors did A, B or C, but nothing if they didn’t do just that.
So far, I haven’t made a nickel on those affiliate deals. Many of them, I think, are scams. At least a large number of them are structured in ways that favor the advertiser and possibly the agency, but definitely not me. So somebody else is getting the value I create. Let me explain in more detail by giving an example.
One deal I have is with a credit card company. I show their ads, banners, and the like. Now, since I run a book site, I figured at least some of my visitors would be interested in an extra credit card. And the deal looked very sweet – I would receive about USD 100 if a visitor filled out an application for a credit card. So far, I have showed the ad about 30,000 times. Not one visitor – according to the agency – have applied for the card. OK, so maybe my visitors aren’t interested in credit cards, you say? Well, I’ve tried a number of other products as well. Same story. So what is happening? Now, it could be that the cookie they use to identify applicants as coming from my site isn’t working. But there is more to it than that.
One thing I notice is that the advertiser(s) I get from one of my online advertising agencies don’t run any campaigns (like “Free of charge first 2 years” or “0 percent APR for one year” or the like). And the ads aren’t extremely attractive. Some of the other companies also advertise offers that really are not very competitive.
So, as a result, I show the ads, but my visitors don’t respond to the ads by performing the actions that would give me my rewards based on performance incentives.
However, ads have three (main) functions – make people visit stores or web sites, sell goods, and build brands. So my advertisers get a lot a brand building, as well as a few visits, but pay nothing because they don’t sell goods at the same time. My feeling, increasingly, is that many of the deals I have made have been created (set up) this way intentionally. And, what is possibly worse, is that the agencies I am using may well be making a certain amount per ad shown or per click through – without me getting any share of it. Or, they may be owned by companies that have a joint interest in cheap online ads. I don’t know much about this, but I speculate that this may be how it sometimes works out.
Now, you also have to remember that in addition to the three main functions of ads, they have a fourth function: Advertisements affect the attractiveness of your site, positively or negatively. Google’s work with improving the relevance of their ads, will also help you make your site more attractive. Unattractive and/or irrelevant ads, on the other hand, may well reduce your blog or site’s attractiveness.
My sense of what is right as far as payment structures for online advertising is concerned, is that any deal with an advertiser should involve a per view payment – that’s really a payment for branding of the company and/or its product. There exist lots of evidence that Internet ads have strong branding effects, and branding is certainly paid for in other media like TV, newspapers, and radio. It should not be any different on the Internet. Such deals are hard to get, especially for sites with few visitors, but bigger sites and blogs have them.
In addition, there should be a click through as well as a purchase based incentive.
Deals that don’t have all these components are basically biased in favor of the advertiser or the agency, and should in principle be avoided. But, in reality, deals that are “fair” in this, very strict sense, and have all three payment components are hard to get, and only the biggest and most visited sites usually get them. So, in the real world both you and I will have to compromise a bit.
So, what would my advise be, based on this? First, of course – start with content that gives value to your readers. Assuming that is true for your blog, here are some rules about making more money for yourself and less for others on ads on your blog or site:
Maximizing income on your blog – rules about ads:
1. Look for deals where the incentives for you are transparent.
2. If possible, try to get paid per view.
3. If you can’t get per view ads, get ads that pay per click (a la Google).
4. Only run ads that are highly relevant for you site – ads that by themselves add to the attraction of your site for your visitors.
5. Remove ads that don’t make you money quickly (show the ad x thousand times, if nothing happens, then out they go).
6. Don’t run ads that you wouldn’t respond to yourself – e.g. without bargains, special offers, campaigns, and the like that give extra value.
7. Never, never enter into deals with agencies offering very complicated reward structures.
8. Look at what other bloggers say about the various agencies – only go with those that come highly recommended and that other bloggers actually make money on.
9. Report scams – agencies that don’t pay as they should, cookies that aren’t working properly, and the like – online ASAP so that others can avoid them.
So for me at, learning to monetize smartly has taken some time as well as lost me some money!
Some questions to my visitors: Have you experienced similar things? Do you have similar or other stories to report? Was this useful advice? Let’s share experiences – blogging is not a zero-sum game, we can all benefit from doing it smarter!
– Peter –
Search Engine Optimization Starts with the Titles
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most important factors in driving traffic to you site. However, mastering SEO to perfection is difficult. But some simple things you can easily do will take you a long, long way towards being noticed, simply because they are the most fundamental and important steps in Search Engine Optimization.
First, set up you blog so that your postings are stored by title. Many blog systems store your pages by date or number or some such system. Most blogging software let you change this default (I have done this in my WordPress blogs – it took 2 minutes). Find out how it’s done with your software, and do it.
Second, work with your titles. Make certain the main tags for your posting appear already in the title. The title is the single most important tool you can use use to increase visibility. This is especially true if you also make certain the post is saved using the title name. The reason is simple: Now your title, and hopefully your tags, if you follow this advice, is also part of the URL for your posting!
While working with the title, you must balance three considerations. First, the tags for the article should be there. Second, the title must be sexy so that people want to read the article. But also, thirdly, the title must reflect the content of the post fairly well, otherwise your readers will grow vary of your titles and not want to return.
So finding great titles involves a huge balancing act. I am not always sure I do this well myself, but I am extremely conscious of the importance of titles and work to balance them, and I may well return and change the title a number of times after I have written a post in order to improve it. And I spend a large amount of time to ponder over alternative titles, even sometimes write down several alternatives on a piece of paper and look at and tweak them multiple times over several days.
I will write more about SEO ln later postings, because of its importance, but if you start by doing the two things I have pointed out well, I can guarantee that you are already one step ahead of most bloggers when it comes to being noticed and driving traffic.
– Peter
Blogging is great fun! But why?
Well. I guess the reasons why people want to blog vary from person to person. Some blogs are corporate, some are of a professional services nature, some are newscasts or some clearly aimed at the big bucks.
My blogs aren’t of any of these types. Two are about books, and the third is this one. And since I want to give my own reasons, and not presume to know other people’s motivations, I’ll stick to what I consider to be the fun part of blogging.
For me blogging is first and foremost about talking to people – communicating. I read books, and have read lots of books. Some of those books have given me great experiences. So I write about that – more about old books than new ones. I try to tell people why this is a book they should read. I hope, over time, a few people read the blog and find my advice useful, and hopefully enjoy the books I recommend. So, talking to people about something I enjoy is a great part of the fun for me.
Naturally, I’d like people to talk back, so that I could discuss instead of just communicating. That would increase my fun. But actually there’s not too much of that, at least not in my case. I get some responses by email, and actually more of those than comments in the blogs. I don’t know if I am the only blogger that has this experience though, or whether it simply means that I am not good enough at involving my readers in dialogues. (Any bloggers out there with similar experiences? Any smart ideas about getting good dialogues going?)
The second most important thing for me, I think, is that blogging keeps me sharp. I read books that I am going to review differently than I do books I just read for fun. Or I go back to books I’ve read in the past and ponder over them. I read other peoples’ reviews, and form opinions both about them and on the books I am reviewing. Or, I sharpen up my knowledge about web site design, blogging, blog technologies, and the like. So, in a sense, blogging makes me sharper and more overall involved in stuff I am interested in. I may not actually spend the time writing, but will still be sharper. I like that. It’s good for my brain, and therefore, I think, good for me. And, as a consequence, I watch less TV and read less garbage. That’s good for me as well, I figure!
Also, I like to be net literate, and to learn about all the new technologies used by bloggers, and to check them out as well. There’s a lot to learn, and I really enjoy that. I read blogs, discussion forums and the like, and try to find stuff I like. Then I test it out. Often I find I don’t like or see much sense in the stuff I try out. Even so, that’s learing, and enjoyable.
Fourth, I’d like to make a fortune blogging. But to be honest, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Not anytime soon, and most likely never. But I don’t really care all that much. I will still go on blogging. And I suspect this is the situation for a large number of my fellow bloggers as well. I mean, lets face it, if I really wanted to make the big bucks blogging, I should have been writing about celebrities, hot babes, or that kind of stuff, or about the upcoming American presidential election. Anybody who can read bloggers’ income stats, can figure that one out. It’s not exactly rocket science. But I’m not going to do that. It simply doesn’t interest me that much. Not right now, at least. So I write my own stuff, reflecting my own interests and my own perverse sense of humor.
Seems to me, the number of bloggers is increasing rapidly. And most likely, less than one percent of them will make significant money blogging. Perhaps only one in ten among the ones makng real money – that is, less than 0.1 percent – will make enough dosh to make a good living by blogging. For most, money will forever be a distant hope. That almost certainly is the case for me, I have yet to cross the magical 100 dollars limit 
. So, I think it is pretty important to have other reasons for wanting to blog than just the dream of making money. I do not think it is any easier to make money blogging than it is to make money on acting, tennis, photography or other professional type activities. The struggle for survival is intense, and only the smart and adaptable will survive. And, of course, the hobbyists – and that’s me! LOL
So, gals and guys, fellow bloggers: Why do you blog? Where’s the fun in blogging? What makes blogging worthwhile for you?
Nordic bookblog- Ashes to Dust, by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
- Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End, by Leif GW Persson
- Bestsellers in Sweden, August 2010
- Scandinavian movies: Five memorable dramas
- Bloodthirsty femmes: The Women of Scandinavian Crime Fiction
- Red Wolf, by Liza Marklund
- Yours Until Death, by Gunnar Staalesen
- Jussi Adler-Olsen wins the Glass Key Award for 2010
- Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell
- Bad Intentions, by Karin Fossum – an Inspector Konrad Sejer novel
- Nekkidblogger CSS & SEO
- A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, by Deltina Hay
- Internet marketing and the old style marketers
- HTML & CSS: The Complete Reference, Fifth Edition, by Thomas A. Powell
- HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible (Fifth edition), by Steven M. Schafer
- CSS3 – fun with rotation
- Box with rounded corners and shadows – fun with CSS3
- Opera 10.5 – faster, better CSS3 support
- Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional, by Simon Collison
- CSS Web Site Design, by Eric A. Meyer
- The Ultimate CSS Reference, by Tommy Olssen and Paul O’Brien