Google Books is preparing to sell access to books. Wow! Better get ready, info product authors.

How this will work is that Google will enable people who find your book via search to instantly purchase access to it. So, begin preparing your ebooks on how to drive organic searches of your ebooks right away. It is an obvious, enormous wave of potential surging toward all of us.

Google will be acting as the broker, enforcing DRM, and extending the reach of ebooks. As usual for the Google crew, this will completely change the game. I think this is being completely overlooked by most infoproduct developers. Yes, Google appears to be targeting print-book publishers, but there is no reason at all that this won’t work for us too.

Gentlemen, start your planning!

Technorati Tags: google, ebooks, google book search

After more hours of work than I care to share, I’ve posted Top Gambling Blogs. This is my first pure content-for-adsense play. I have another 3 similar blog sites queued up to receive a similar treatment.

The idea is that every month, I will list and track the changes in ranking for the top 25 gambling and poker blogs. I get this information through a multi-step method, which I have (mostly) scripted nicely in Python.:

1. Get the URLs for blogs listed in the first ten pages of results for "gambling blog" and &quot:poker blog" on Google, Yahoo, and Alexa.
2. Strip all obvious garbage results
3. Pull Alexa ranks for all of them
4. Pull Technorati inbound links and inbound blogs for all of them.
5. Sort them properly.
6. Test each link, throwing out spam blogs and non-blogs, until I’ve pruned the list to the top 25.
7. Write short descriptions for each blog.
8. (next month) Track ranking changes from last week.

It took a while, but I really like how it turned out. I think it is valuable, not spam, and might actually get linked well.

Technorati Tags: adsense, poker blog, gambling blog, casino, ranking

CBprosense is a fascinating idea. Instead of using Google to display ads based on the keywords on your site, you use their system to display links to ClickBank products.

Since CB products generally earn $15-30 per purchase, this could very well be hugely more profitable than AdSense for me. I’m going to give it a try on my most heavily-hit site, Invisible Castle. That site gets 300-500 uniques a day, yet makes very little from Google.

I’ll be sure to report back here how well it converts for me, assuming their TOS let me.

The system has several modes once you have signed up a site. The one I’ll try uses direct keywords. It can also spider your site looking for keywords. They say that it is compatible with Googles’ Terms of Service, but for now, I’m going to run it alone.

Technorati Tags: ClickBank, ebooks, adsense, adsense competition

I’ve been tracking my Adsense profits every day for weeks now, at the suggestion of several people on the forums. I’m not sure if this is what they were hoping I’d notice, but the single biggest thing I’ve observed is that the niche of each site strongly influences profitability.

Let me emphasize that point again. Strongly! First, click through. One blog has a CTR averaging literally 25 times the CTR of a web app site I run. The EPM is likewise 20 times higher on that blog. So, the web app which gets thousands of hits a day earns less than a tenth of what the blog which only gets a couple hundred hits at best.

I guess I know which one I should be spending time boosting!

Technorati Tags: adsense, earnings analysis

Most writers want more readership for their sites, yet throw their hands up in despair over the “Google Sandbox”, and assume that no one will find them for a few months. That’s just not true if you put a little effort into your site promotion efforts. Here I present 5 tips which will only cost you a few moments of time, once, but which will pay off over the long term.

#1 Add your site to Opinmind

Opinmind is a unique service that searches sites for opinions, rendering an “opinmind” scale for any topic. For example:


It does this by searching the content of sites, looking for opinions about the topic. You can get your site included in its searches, and linked on detail pane of their opinion search results by manually adding your site to their search engine.

Submit your site from the form at the bottom of any search results page.

#2 Add your site to IceRocket

IceRocket is a dedicated blog search engine. It has a number of interesting features, such as keyword term comparison graphs, where you can see how up to three terms have changed in popularity over time. Adding your blog to their searches will net you readers who are looking for blogs, which is a more valuable class of reader to many of us than the general reader referred from Google.

Submit your site on their Add Your Blog page.

#3 Add your site to TailRank

TailRank is an interesting site I first learned about on TechCrunch. They attempt to be a “newspaper of the blogosphere”, by aggregating hot conversations into groups, and highlighting blogs talking about or initiating hot topics. Most interestingly, they get their blogs to include from members’ subscription lists. You can get yours listed by importing an OPML feed list.

First, make an OPML feed list. The easiest way to do this is to make sure your sites are in your preferred RSS reader. I like Bloglines. Then, export the list as OPML. Most readers will do this for you.

Once you have the list, create an account at TailRank, and then import your feeds to TailRank.

#4 Submit your site to BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another dedicated blog search engine. It has a different focus than the others listed in this article, seemingly more interested in the “top sites” and “top searches”. Getting your site added to its search engine is a snap, though finding where to do it is less easy.

I found their blog submit page here.

#5 Add your sitemap to Google

Google will be able to crawl your site more efficiently if you give them a sitemap. This is especially easy to do if you are using WordPress, which has the excellent Google Sitemap plugin. If you aren’t using Wordpress, you can use Google’s own sitemap generator.

Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google and confirm that you own the site you are attempting to add. This will pay off in better-targeted searching at Google, as well as visibility into your crawl stats, errors and your pagerank. Nice payoff for a small amount of hoop-jumping!

Manage your sites and their sitemaps using the Google sitemap page.

Technorati Tags: SEO, icerocket, opinmind, blogpulse, google, tailrank, sitemap, site promotion

Everyone tells you the key to profits lies in finding a good niche. But with all the competition on the net, how do you analyze a potential niche to see whether it is worth your time? One good guide I’ve found is at Jamdo Blog Marketing.

He suggests the following steps:

1. Use the keyword search tool at overture (go to: resource center, keyword selector tool) to see how popular your main search term is. A good bet is 20,000 searches.
2. Go to Google, type in the search term, and go to the first ten sites. On each one, get the Page Rank using the Google Toolbar. Ideally, you don’t want any competition over PR5.
3. For each of these sites, also go to Yahoo, and type in “link:the.site.url”. This will show the backlink count. You don’t want more than 100 or so.
4. Lastly, go research your keywords on WordTracker (that link will pay Jamdo’s blog for his helpful article).

For a more in-depth discussion, read the original article

Technorati Tags: Niche marketing, affiliate marketing, keywords

Everyone says to focus on a niche, at least at first. But how do you find a niche that isn’t suffocated by well-established companies with legions of affiliates?

You look for niches which are just going by default to the top sites. At least that’s the strategy recommended in this article. The author points out that many sites don’t even really try for good search ranking for some niche products. But no one else is either, so the big guys win by default.

How to use this information

You can take advantage of that, and drive those non-targeted searchers to the site of your choosing. First, identify likely niche.

In my own keyword research I have found many keyword phrases that tens of thousands of Internet users are searching for every month by considering the following question…

Did the top ten websites purposely optimize their pages for this keyword phrase or did they get there simply because no one else is actively COMPETING for search engine placement?

Then, apply these tests from the article:

1. Is the keyword phrase in the title of the listing?
2. Is the keyword phrase used in the Domain Name of the listing?
3. Is the keyword phrase used anywhere in the URL at all?
4. How many backward links are pointing at the URL?
5. Are the backward links pointing at the page mostly internal links or do the come from other quality websites?
6. Is the URL a top level domain or some obscure page buried deep within a larger website.?

Technorati Tags: keywords, adwords, seo, niches