The Difference Between AdSense and AdWords

Posted on December 7th, 2007 in Website Tools, Traffic, Marketing by Dan

I know that to a lot of you this is going to be something that you fully understand, but I’m noticing that a lot of people at first don’t understand the difference between Google AdSense and Google AdWords. Let’s take a minute and go over the differences so you can better understand it if you need to.

Here is a summary of the difference from Google’s website:

For Advertisers: Google AdWords

  • Advertise to people searching on Google and our advertising network
  • Reach people actively looking for information about your products and services online
  • Easily control costs - pay only when people click on your ad

For Site Owners: Google AdSense

  • Maximize your site’s revenue potential with contextually targeted ads
  • Customize ads to complement the look and feel of your site
  • Track the success of different formats and locations with online reports

So basically, AdWords is an advertising program to create more exposure for your site. AdSense is a monetization technique that you can use to help your site generate some extra money. In the end they both should help with an income, but you don’t have to pay anything to place AdSense ads on your site.

I hope that clarifies this for those of you that weren’t sure about the difference. If not, please let me know!

More on Yahoo! Site Explorer

Posted on June 8th, 2007 in Website Tools, Traffic by Dan

I had a really good question from a reader about how to check what phrase the competition is using on the sites that show up in the search results with the Yahoo! Site Explorer trick. The problem is that you won’t usually be able to just look at the page and tell exactly where the link is. So what you have to do is actually look at the code of the site to find the link.

To see the code of any website you just need to view the source. You can either do a right click in some empty space on the site and choose “View Source” from the menu, or go to the top of your browser menu and click on the View option and choose Source from there. That will open up a window that shows you the code of the site you are currently looking at.

In order to find the link to the site we’re checking, you just hit Ctrl + F (find command) and search for the domain name of the site. That will find it inside the code. From that part of the code you should be able to see what is going on in that part of the site and that will help you find it on the actual website. This may take a little getting used to because you have to be able to understand some of the basics of HTML. But once you look at this a few times you’ll start to notice little landmarks that will tell you where it is.

Here are a few examples of what you’ll see. Let’s say the site you are looking for is www.whatever.com. So we go to a page listed in the Yahoo! Site Explorer that says they have a link to www.whatever.com. I open that site, then view the source and search for the domain name in the source. If the link is using anchor text, you’ll see something like this: <a href=”http://www.whatever.com”>Cool Site!</a>. So then you would look for the text “Cool Site!” on the page, and that’s the link to whatever.com. Again, this may take a little getting used to, but that’s how you can find the link on the page by looking at the code.

I wouldn’t really spend a lot of time doing this. The main purpose of this trick is to get an idea of what phrases your competition is linking to and also who they are linking to. That way you can start to look for ways of getting links on the same sites.

Combining Affiliate Marketing with Dropshipping

Posted on May 25th, 2007 in Website Help, Traffic by Dan

Is it a good idea to mix dropshipping and affiliate marketing on the same site? For some reason this is a question that I’ve been getting quite a bit lately from people that I work with. The answer really is “it depends”. Of course that’s not the best answer, but let me explain.

You have to decide on what the main focus of your site is. Are you focused on selling the physical products on your site (dropship etc.) or are you more of an information site that is planning on making money from affiliate? In some ways you could say that these two ideas are strategically opposed to each other.

Let me explain.

With dropshipping/retailing, you want people to stick around on the website and actually buy something. That’s how you make money is when people actually buy from you. With affiliate marketing, you make money when people leave your site. Whether you get paid on a per-click basis (adSense for example) or on an action basis (affiliate commissions from sales), you don’t make money when people stay on your website. So, with one idea you want people to stay, with the other you want people to leave. Are you seeing the difference here?

If you have a dropshipping website and you are also placing affiliate ads all over your site, then you have a mixed focus. You also need to look at how much you make on a sale. Let’s say for example you make $10 on a sale but you also have some adSense ads with which you average $0.50 a click (this varies per industry and ad). What you have just done is sold a lead for $0.50. But if that lead had actually purchased something or taken another action you would have made $10. In my opinion that isn’t a very good trade-off if you have a good conversion rate. Now do that same example with a $20 margin. You can see that the more you make per sale, the more important each lead is to you. Don’t sell your leads cheap!

So to make it short, I don’t normally recommend mixing affiliate ads on a dropshipping/retailing website. You could possibly get away with it if you were offering some type of complimentary service through an affiliate link, just make sure you still keep the main focus the main focus.

It’s All About the Traffic!

Posted on May 18th, 2007 in Traffic, Offsite SEO by Dan

Making sales or any type of income from a website is really all about the traffic. If you’re going to make a sustainable cash flow from any site we have to be able to get that site in front of as many people as possible. Just like in real estate they say “location, location, location”, for a website you could replace that with “traffic!”

It’s really just a numbers game. Here’s an example: Let’s say you make $20 average per sale, but you notice over time that you only convert about 3% of your visitors. Let’s also say that your goal for your site is to make $1000 a week. First of all, you need to make 50 sales a week to make that profit. And at a 3% conversion, you’ll have to get your site in front of 1,667+ people each week for that to happen. That’s the numbers game.

So how do we get the traffic? Well, there are a variety of methods that you’ll want to consider and I’m hoping that the information on this blog - over time of course ;-) - will help you to achieve that. But here are some of the basic things that you’ll want to consider:

Natural Search Engine Traffic
In other words doing the SEO work to get your site picked up by the search engines and ranked well. It takes a lot of work and will take some time to happen, but if you do things right you’ll see some really good traffic results from being ranked well on the search engines. Most people find the sites their looking for from search engines, so this one is very important.

Pay-Per-Click
If you do a search on most search engines they have two different types of results: the ‘Sponsored Links’ and the regular links. Sponsored links are the people that are paying for the traffic that they get. This is usually done on a per click basis. So whenever you click on one of those sponsored links you just charged that company whatever they’re bidding for that location. There are effective ways of doing this and it is another way that you could get traffic to your site.

Classified Ads and Shopping Sites
Classified sites include sites like CraigsList.org where you can list a free classified for your products to get some extra exposure. Another great way to get some extra exposure would be to list your products on some of the big shopping sites out there like Amazon, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Google Base, etc. People already trust these sites and by listing your products on them you can bank off their credibility to sell your own product.

Email Campaigns and Newsletters
One of the best ways to do email campaigns is to only email to people that have already requested information from your site. Yes, you can go out there and purchase names from other opt-in lists but its best to market to people that you already know are interested in your product and your site. Start a newsletter for the site and over time you’ll start to build up a good following that you can send mailings to from time to time. Make sure you stick to a consistent schedule for this so people know what to expect from you. Also, its nice when you can throw your newsletter subscribers little bonuses like 5% off an order just for being a member of the newsletter, etc.

There are some other ways of generating traffic out there, but these are the basics that you should be considering first. I know that I didn’t go into a lot of details here. Each week I’ll be giving more and more tips to help you out with different aspects of these, also tips for when you’re building your site, etc. If you have any specific questions on any of these feel free to let me know!