I’m not saying all the lists are bad? In fact a good number of them are genuine and are created by high earning Adsense webmasters looking to maximize on their profits and to get something back from their time-consuming valuable keywords research efforts. Nothing wrong with that, in fact it makes perfect business sense. Except that you don’t really need those lists, there is a better proven way to increase your Adsense earnings.

The Adsense Secret Is All About Finding A Niche

The most important Adsense secret you will discover is that to make money and be successful, all you need to do is to stick to the basic rules for success in online marketing. The basics are that you need to find a niche that is not so competitive and one which you can contribute something special to based on your past experience, knowledge and skills. Everything else will then fall into place after this. Virtually every subject and topic you can think of will have relevant and valuable keywords.

This is in sharp contrast to the approach being encouraged by list-sellers. Which is to start by finding high-paying valuable keywords and then creating sites or blogs based on them. To start with Google do not like the idea because one of their rules is that you should not create a site or blog for the sole purpose of making money from Adsense. Of course it is easy to get round this one by quickly creating some products around your site and you really don’t need to care whether they sell or not, but who are you fooling?

The World Wide Web is increasingly busy and increasingly competitive and what this means is that niches are becoming increasingly vital and critical to online success.

You Will Earn More From Adsense With Multiple Sites/Blogs

Once you’ve found your niche, you can create a number of different sites narrowing your niche even further in different directions. I’ve used this strategy very successfully and I find that I am constantly coming up with new ideas for new sites without leaving my area of expertise. Of course I create relevant links between my different sites so as to maximize on the traffic that I receive. The important word here is “relevant”. There is nothing that puts off folks more than clicking on a link only to find that it is barely relevant to the information they are seeking. You’re wasting their time and they will not appreciate it. Better not to link at all in the first place.

What some high-earning Adsense folks have done is to create numerous blogs (some up to 50 and even more.) This strategy makes sense because the more pages you have with Adsense ads on them, the higher the chances of somebody clicking on some of the ads and therefore the higher your potential income. What I can’t imagine is how they manage to keep all the different blogs fed with quality content. I once tried this strategy with just one or two sites and it was very exhausting getting content for sites outside my area of expertise. There are increasing reports of incidents of pirated online content and I guess you now understand part of the reason why.

When you stick to one subject, keeping all your blogs fed with content becomes a breeze. You simply take one idea and modify it or slant it differently for the different sites. Even more important, it is easy to use the same valuable Adsense keywords for all the sites as you discover them.

A Free Tool To Help You Find Valuable Adsense Keywords

Here is a valuable tool that I use myself to constantly research valuable Adsense keywords. While you do not need those valuable Adsense keywords lists, you need to constantly research valuable Adsense keywords for yourself. Top Adsense earners spend a vast majority of their time doing this. You need to do the same if you want to be earn a serious income from the Adsense program.

Christopher Kyalo makes a good living writing online for various clients. Read the rest of this article at his blog http://webcontentprovider.blogspot.com

1. Ping weblogs.com and other search engines. When you ping a blog, you are telling the search engine that you have updated your blog content and that your listing should be refreshed. Weblogs.com is a blog update notification service that many individuals and services use to track blog changes. Pinging your blogs to the search engines is the fastest way to get the search engine robots to visit your blog. Also, many people browse these sites to find something new.

2. Submit your blog address to blog search sites and directories. You can submit your blog’s url to websites such as Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex and Popdex. For a complete list of websites where you can submit your url, go to http://www.guidetorss.com

3. If you have some cash you can promote your blog using pay per click search engines such as Yahoo Search and Google Adwords.

4. Set your blog to display RSS feeds and submit your blog’s RSS feed to the major RSS feed directories online. A good place to start is http://www.guidetorss.com which provides a list of the top RSS directories.

5. Put your blog URL in your email signature. If you’re a regular at any online discussion forum, you can also add your url to your signature line at the bottom of each message you post.

6. Install a blogroll. A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. Services such as Technorati spider your links to tell who’s linking to you and who you’re linking to. If you show up on someone’s Technorati link list for their site they’re likely to visit your site to see what you said, increasing your exposure. Blog owners can also visit your site to check it out if you show up on their referral logs.

7. Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs that you regularly visit. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least.

8. If you plan to have anything printed up, put your blog’s web address on it. You can print your blog URL on business cards, stickers, leaflets, etc.

9. Take advantage of blog software features that help to promote your Blog. For example, if you’re using Blogger, you can do this by turning on: “Email This Post”, “Post Pages” “Site feed” and the Blogger Navbar. These features will help attract new visitors to your blog.

10. Exchange Links with other Bloggers or blog owners. This is another effective strategy for generating targeted traffic to your blog for free. It involves contacting other blog owners for a possible link exchange partnership. All you have to do is locate blogs that are related to yours and contact the webmaster to swap links.

11. Write articles or free reports for other webmasters to publish and put your blog url in the byline. The ‘byline’ is the short paragraph that goes at the bottom of each article and describes who the author is and what they do. If you write good content, your articles will be published by other webmasters and many readers who like your article will go on to visit your blog. You can submit articles for free at: http://www.going-platinum.co.uk/

Copyright � 2005. Chileshe Mwape writes for Debt Consolidation Loans UK: http://www.best-debt-consolidation-loan.co.uk/ and http://www.secured-homeowner-loan.co.uk/. Visit these sites to consolidate debts and apply for a loan online. This article may be reprinted as long as all the above links are active and clickable.

The five guidelines included in this series should become watchwords for ezine emailers as they incur the risk and responsibility of sending newsletters or any other repetitive type of email.

Part 1 of 5: Treat Email as a True Risk and Cost Center
Part 2 of 5: Avoid Collateral Damage
Part 3 of 5: Plan to Use Every Legitimate Tool and Tactic Available (M2M)
Part 4 of 5: Build strong relationships (H2H)
Part 5 of 5: Continuously evaluate messages, lists, and recipient populations

Part 1 of 5

Treat Email as a True Risk and Cost Center
not as just an Internet infrastructure tagalong

Because it was “free”, easy, and universally accessable online, email became the breeding ground for a vast number of experiments in communication and commerce. Ezines, newsletters, CRM programs and many other online publications are the product of some of those experiments. More pathological forms of information transfer also evolved in the same space, such as Spam and viruses. Today the Internet is trying to develop an immune system to fight those pathogens. Unfortunately, non-pathogen marketers and online communicators of all types have become the victims of this primitive new immune system’s stumbling efforts.

Many online publishers moved to email back when the costs were essentially limited to a computer, some bandwidth, and a lot of work. Well, email has changed since then in many ways, almost beyond recognition. As this guideline points out, the cost of email risk avoidance and email delivery assurance have now become significant, even when they are not direct out-of-pocket expenses.

Senders need to catalog and understand the risks they face, and the costs to overcome these risks, as they adapt to the new hostile email environment.

New Potential Legal Risks From Email Programs:

Despite the prevailing opinion amoung newletter and ezine publishers that the recently enacted email legislation is directed only toward “Spammers”, there is good reason to take these regulations rather seriously.

Even if we assume that you only send permission-based email (that all of your recipients subscribed to your ezine), so by definition you are not a “Spammer”, there are many other aspects of the email process that have now become regulated. Examples include email transmission practices, list records, operational control over complaints and unsubscribe requests, claims of false or misleading Subject Lines, and several other issues. Mistakes in these areas, even with clearly permission-based mail, can have legal implications. And in fact, precisely what constitutes “permission” is still being worked out in some cases.

Online publishers should also be concerned about the motives and circumstances of some actions under the new laws. Targets may be chosen more for their ease of accessibility than for any serious infractions. It is much easier to find and go after a target you can see (such as an stable ezine) than it is to hunt down an elusive Spammer.

Finally, there is a common assumption that the email laws of other countries are similar to those in the US, however in many important respects this is not true. The differences in these laws compels (at the least) strict controls be maintained for any lists that are not fully geographically targeted.

See the Email PhD “Compliance” section to research the email regulatory environment further.

New Service Access Risks From Email Programs:

Impact on Your Personal Communications
Some online publishers assume that higher risk email programs, such as newsletters or promotional campaigns, are somehow naturally distinct or compartmentalized away from other types of personal email channels. Unless specifically designed as such, this is usually not true. It has come as an unpleasant surprise to many that blocking caused by, for example, an email marketing campaign can also cause the blocking of your email to friends and family. Blocking caused by a simple auto-response program at a minor Web site can disrupt your ability to communicate with anyone at a particular ISP.

One basic response to this type of risk is to segment and isolate different types of sending streams so that a shut down in one area does not push your entire e-communications system offline.

Recipient ISP Disruption
It is usually easy to determine when communications are cut with a major ISP, potentially denying access to a large number of customers or subscribers. But blocking at any one of hundreds or thousands of smaller corporate and local networks can be robbing you of revenue, customer satisfaction, and name recognition without your even knowing it. Testing for these blocks can be a difficult and involved process.

Direct blocking is not the only way in which email communication is disrupted at recipient ISPs. Having messages land in the Junk-bin rather than the In-box effectively eliminates that message for many recipients who automatically delete those messages without looking at them.

Every recipient ISP has the right to interfere with communications it judges to be inappropriate for its network. Unfortunately, a small number of Spam complaints, an appearance on a Blacklist, or just the perception of that system’s administrator may cause breakdowns that can be very difficult to detect and resolve.

Unless you are an email wizard yourself, one of the most effective ways to begin to track down your delivery profile is through a delivery testing company. See the Email PhD “Data and Tracking” section for more information on this type of resource. Unfortunately, this type of service also represents a new cost for online publishers.

Hosting ISP Disruption
Even more directly, publishers are sometimes surprised to find that their own ISPs or NSPs can, and will, kick them off the service based upon email sending history.

It is amazing to realize that despite the sales cost and effort of acquiring new customers, and the service and support cost of retaining satisfied customers, most ISPs have placed the decision as to whether you can keep your service into the hands of a small group of “abuse” administrators. By declaring a violation of the contractual Acceptable Use Policies or similar provisions, these administrators have suspended many email and Internet accounts. Sometimes this can occur without notice, and often without recourse. Even very low levels or ratios of complaints can force you to scramble for new sources of Internet service.

See the Email PhD “Sending Signature Management” section for more information on avoiding basic disruptions within your email service chain.

Customer Affinity Risks From Email Programs:

Changing Consumer Perceptions
It is not unusual for a recipient to sign up for an email list on one day, and to report that email as Spam the next. The reasons why this happens are numerous, but unless a companies’ email program is well managed and controlled there is a risk that a few recipients can do a lot of harm.

“Everyone knows” that Spam is a potentially dangerous pervasive evil online, and that any email they don’t immediately recognize or want to receive at that moment is Spam (as incorrect as that definition is). The news media, recipient ISPs, and companies selling anti-Spam products are also training recipients that they need to actively suspect every email they get.

Online publishers have to adapt rapidly to provide assurance and reminders to recipients that they actively requested to receive that email, and to embed relevant and high interest content in all of their sends.

Negative Brand Impacts
Beyond the risk of turning off individual recipients with ineffective email programs is the broader risk of reputation loss within the general online community. Highly compliant, carefully managed email programs are their own reward when it comes to avoiding uncomplimentary PR outbreaks or having your name posted on the anti-Spam activist boards.

See the Email PhD “Content Controls” section to further research customer perception management issues.

Increasing Costs Within the New Email Environment
By all accounts commercial email can no longer be treated as if it were free. Whether for increasing internal control time and costs, or external service costs, you need to allocate the resources necessary to operate a sustainable and effective email program.

Increasing need for technical and strategic expertise
More than ever before, email has become a domain requiring a broad mix of different types of expertise. Because this knowledge can be highly specialized, or require access to proprietary data, this expertise often needs to be acquired from outside the sending organization.

Costs of outside service providers
It is frequently the case that an external Email Service Provider can better handle certain types of email sending. And there are obvious advantages to off-loading infrastructure risks and to increasing the embedded expertise (such as in ISP relations) by using ESPs. The trouble is that they cost money. The range of pricing among ESPs is extreme, as are the levels and types of services offered. Check out potential service providers carefully, and comparison shop - it is well worth the trouble.

Additional costs for administration and controls
Compliance elements and rising recipient expectations require more time and better records, and the need to track and respond to all complaints from numerous sources has added new manpower requirements. Of course, the costs of defensive records and permission audit trails are also growing. While these costs pale beside potential costs of non-compliance or customer erosion, in many cases they represent new and unfamiliar budget items.

Costs from distributed bandwidth and sending system architecture
The need to segment and distribute outbound email streams can increase both bandwidth and technical administration costs. The need to capture and retain more extensive records, or to access sending, delivery, response, unsubscribe, and complaint information in a timely fashion may require additional investment in computing hardware. Updated sending and tracking software purchases may also be needed.

Performance Benefits That Offset Costs
Simply put, you may have to absorb many of these costs to maintain effective, deliverable, and sustainable email programs. It is very likely that without this investment the efficiency of your email program will continue to slide, at the same time that the risks of uncontrolled programs are increasing.

Conclusions:
Over all, email sending programs have moved significantly away from the simple question of what “can” be done to a much heavier emphasis on what “should” be done, based upon increasing legal and recipient perception risks. The cost of sustaining effective programs is growing. Fortunately, so is the differential advantage of maintaining a working email communications channel.

Copyright © by Email Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

Tim Starzl is the chief editor of Email Ph.D., an informational Web site dedicated to improving email delivery for all permission-based senders. With several years experience in email sending system design, high volume sending, and high precision tracking systems Mr. Starzl provides practical working advice for a difficult and rapidly changing environment.

1. Write articles or free reports for other webmasters to publish and put your website address in the by-line. If you write good content, your articles will be published and many readers who like your article will go on to visit your website.

2. Arrange a Joint Venture partnership with List owners and Webmasters.

3. Add your ad or website address to your email signature. This way, every time you send an email, you’ll be promoting your website.

4. Exchange Links with Other Webmasters. This is another effective strategy for generating targeted traffic to your website for free. It involves contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange partnership.

5. Add a blog to your site and Ping weblogs.com and other search engines. Pinging your blogs to the search engines is the fastest way to get the search engine robots to visit your blog and attract new visitors to your web site.

6. Submit your blog address to blog search sites and directories. You can submit your blog’s URL to websites such as Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex and Popdex. For a complete list of websites where you can submit your URL, go to http://www.guidetorss.com

7. Create RSS feeds for your site and submit the feed URLs to the major RSS feed directories online. A good place to start is http://www.guidetorss.com/ which provides a list of the top RSS directories.

8. Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs that you regularly visit. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog or website which begs a visit at the very least.

9. If you plan to have anything printed up, put your web address on it. You can print your URL on business cards, stickers, leaflets, etc.

10. Add your web address to your forum profile signature. Every time you post or respond to questions your ad will be displayed. If you post good content in forums, people who read your threads will also check out your website.

© Copyright 2005 Chileshe Mwape. Submit articles for free at http://www.going-platinum.co.uk/ All articles are published instantly. You can submit reports, news, press releases, stories, product reviews, opinions, editorials about your website and services and much more.

(This article may be republished as long as the above link is active and clickable and this author box (byline) is not edited.)

An example is Glenn Canady, the author of “Gorilla Marketing” who employed only one of these strategies, and it made him over $1 million dollars.

The fact is, search engines can get you an enormous amount of traffic, and it’s traffic to your sites that’s free. However, in order to ethically and effectively market in the search engines, you need to use strategies that actually work.

Below are three different ways to effectively, and ethically, raise your rankings in the search engines. I’ve included seven different resources that you can use that will help you implement these strategies, and do it quickly and easily so that you can begin to see an increase in your traffic almost immediately.

1. Optimize your site.

To make sure that you are properly targeting your market, you need to make sure that you are marketing using the right keywords. This means optimizing your site to make sure that the keywords you have on your site are the keywords that your site is actually optimized for.

There are two tools that you can use to help you with search engine optimization:

a. Search Engine Optimization Fast Start Ebook -

http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-book.php - will teach you simple and effective techniques for optimmizing your site. This ebook is now in its 4th edition, is completely up to date, and is one of the best ebooks I’ve seen on search engine optimization.

b. Web CEO - http://www.smallbusinesshowto.com/search-engine-optimization-software.html - This is a complete search engine optimization suite that offers 10 different tools to help you optimize your site for the search engines. It offers the most comprehensive, and step by step, set of instructions I’ve ever seen with any software package. According to the instructions, you can get started in one hour. The free version of this software will work for most, and it also includes a $97 search engine optimization course as part of the package.

2. Develop a linking strategy.

One factor that influences how well you are ranked in the search engines is linking. The more inbound links that you have pointing to your site, the higher you will be ranked in the search engines.

For each link that you have pointing back to you, that’s another opportunity for your potential customer to find you. With credibility being such a big problem on the internet, to have someone recommend you increases your chance of making the sale.

To help you develop an effective strategy, I recommend that you read “Linking Matters” - http://www.linkingmatters.com/. This ebook shows you how to develop an effective linking strategy for your site, and do it very quickly.

3. Develop a content strategy.

The truth is, “Content is King”. Most people online are looking for information. The more information that you provide for your customers, and the more valuable it is, the more likely you will make the sale.

Below are three different ways to develop content for your site.

The first and most effective strategy are articles.

Articles actually work for you in several ways.

a. Brands you as an expert so that customers come to you.

b. Provides valuable content to your potential customers.

c. Builds a relationship between you and your potential customers.

d. Creates a viral marketing strategy for your site.

e. Builds a linking strategy for you every time a webmaster publishes one of your articles.

No other strategy that I have employed has brought me more business than this one.

To find sites that accept articles, go here: http://www.jogena.com. This is one of the sites that I use because it’s one of the oldest, and most reputable sites online for finding information on ezines. Unfortunately, there’s no search, but everything is done by category, and the information is comprehensive, so you will locate rather quickly what you are looking for.

However, if the thought of writing your own content gives you nightmares, there’s a way around this.

You can use public domain information. Public domain information is information that is free to use because it’s in the public arena, or the copyright has expired.

To help you easily locate this information, I recommend that you download the public domain toolbar. You can get it at the Public Domain Forum - http://www.publicdomainforum.com/forum. You have to register for an account to get the toolbar, but both the forum account and the toolbar are free. The toolbar is a very comprehensive resource of public domain sources.

The third content strategy you need to consider is blogging.

What a blog does is allows you to create search engine friendly content on your topic of interest. Combine this with an RSS feed, which the search engines love, and you have a winning strategy.

Not only will it help you build content for the search engines, but it can also help you raise your traffic and sales.

Here is a comprehensive ecourse that you can take that will drastically reduce your learning curve, as well as provide you with the resources you need to implement this strategy.

http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com/blogging-course.htm

Finally, to keep abreast of what’s happening with search engines, you need to subscribe to Search Engine Watch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com. This site offers tons of resources, news, and a newsletter on search engine optimization.

Apply one, or all, of these search engine resources to your search engine strategy, and you can expect a major increase in your traffic and sales to your site.

Jinger Jarrett is a writer and internet marketer living in Alpharetta, GA. You can get all of her best free internet marketing resources, including freeware to help you market on the forums when you visit her site at http://www.askjinger.com

Upsells

Upsells are additional sales made at the initial purchase. McDonald’s does it when they ask to super size your order. When you sell an ebook for $30, you can add an upsell to the order form. The upsell offers an expanded version of the ebook with an extra bonus for $10 dollars more. This increases your initial transaction size. Done properly, at least 20% to 50% of your customers will buy the higher priced item.

Lifetime Value of Customers

Lifetime Value refers to how much a customer is worth. Customers tend to buy more than once. Say you sell vitamins online. It costs you $50 to bring in every customer. But they buy from you for six months at $30 per month. Even if you lost $20 on the first sale you profit $160 per customer over six months. Knowing this, you can break even or lose a little money upfront to get a new customer and profit from the repeat sales.

Back End Sales

The big money is made from repeat sales to satisfied customers. Create more products and resell them. It always costs more to get a new customer. The hidden profits are in what you do with them once you’ve got them. Build your business around a group of products you keep selling to your database.

Joint Ventures

Joint Ventures are project-specific partnerships. There are many ways to set these up but here’s one idea. Find other businesses that have comparable products to what you sell. Make sure they are not in direct competition with you. Ask them if they would like to sell their product to your list. You get a 50% cut of gross profits. Everybody wins.

Create Higher Priced Products

Believe it or not, a $20 ebook can be repackaged and sold for hundreds of dollars. Take the ebook and expand on it so it’s at least 150 to 200 pages. Record the ebook and make CD’s of the recording. Add a few bonus materials and now the perceived value is no longer $20. You can easily charge $300 to $1,000 for the same information properly package. Of course, it goes without saying, that what you sell must be valuable.

By taking these strategies and modifying them to your needs you will tap the hidden profits in your Internet business. The money is there waiting for you. Using the above five strategies you should double or even triple your gross profits in the next 6 to 12 months.

John Anghelache is a copywriter and marketing strategist who develops high-ticket information products. His FREE book "How To Turn Your Expertise And Ideas Into A Business That Can Make You Rich" is available at? http://www.TurnIdeasIntoProfits.com

What is Link Renting?

Link renting is a means to ‘rent’ the popularity and traffic flow of another site - you pay a monthly fee in return for a text link pointing to your site. In doing so, you can directly and indirectly drive more targeted traffic toward your website.

Many industries such as travel, pharmacy, pornography, and gaming have search results which are hyper competitive and require heavy advertising or aggressive SEO techniques. Some niche websites may see an even greater ROI on smart link rentals since many of their competitors may not include link renting in their online marketing budgets.

Some rented links provide great value in direct targeted traffic, whereas some other links provide greater value from the effect they have on search relevancy.

Most links are rented on a monthly basis with an option to renew at the end of the month. Some link prices can be as low as a few dollars a month whereas some can cost thousands per month.

There is no singular one-size-fits-all way to directly assume the value of a link. Most effective marketing has risks associated with it, but you can minimize the risks and maximize your return by breaking the value of the link down into its elements:

1. Direct traffic from link renting
2. Viral effect of advertising
3. Effects of link rentals on search relevancy.

1. Direct Traffic from Link Renting:

Link renting can drive significant direct traffic. The first things you need to know are:

• what is the quality level of the traffic?
• how related is this audience to my product?
• how much traffic does the site receive?

What is the Quality Level of the Traffic:

Where does the bulk of their traffic come from? Someone recently asked about ePilot, the pay per click search engine, at Search Engine Watch forums. Andrew Goodman replied “The first question I would ask myself would be: ‘where does ePilot’s traffic come from?’ Answer isn’t clear? Then it would be no surprise that the so-called traffic doesn’t convert to anything.”

This same concept holds true with any site. If you do not see any quality inbound links that could indicate a problem: or they could get most of their traffic from pay-per-click ads. Whatever the case, if you are going to spend money renting links for traffic, make sure you know where their traffic comes from.

How Related is the Audience:

It will be somewhat of a guesstimate as to how exactly how related the traffic will be, but generally it is fairly obvious when something is on theme or off theme. Some things you may want to consider when determining traffic quality:

• What is the mood / mind set of their traffic? Related traffic may not be traffic that converts. At the 2004 Webmaster World Las Vegas Conference a speaker mentioned that a website about prom hairstyles may not be a good place to advertise prom dresses since girls do not usually look at prom hairdos until after they have already purchased their prom dresses.
• What product should I advertise? Sometimes it makes sense to send traffic to your home page while other times it is more logical to advertise a specific product because it is hot or more related to that particular audience.

How Much Traffic Does the Site Receive:

Most honest webmasters who sell ad space understand that the traffic they receive is a large part of their ad value and should have no problems giving you that information.

Some systems such as Alexa also track traffic, but their statistics can be inaccurate due to their limited distribution.. The best way to use such systems is not for traffic estimates but for comparisons between sites. Note that Alexa has a heavy bias toward webmaster resource type sites. Additionally other companies such as Hitwise may provide more accurate traffic statistics.

From the base traffic level there is a bunch more research you can do to determine how much traffic the site may bring:

• Who currently advertises on the site? You may want to ask them about their advertising experience. Some ad networks such as AdBright show past advertisers average cost per click and ad renewal rates.
• How many ads are on the page? Each additional ad will split up some of the traffic.
• Where does your ad sit? Ads that are tucked away in the footer or in common ad space may get less exposure and drive less traffic. Ads near the content may gain additional exposure and drive more traffic.
• What ad formats can be used? Certain ad creatives may provide greater value than other ads.
• What is the ad turnover rate? Advertisers tend to stay with a site that delivers traffic. A high turnover rate may indicate other problems.
• Have advertisers made any suggestions? Ask if any of their past advertisers made any suggestions or stated that they found any particular setup as being especially helpful.
• Is the traffic seasonal? Some sites have large shifts in traffic volume due to seasonal factors.

2. Viral Effect of Advertising:

Some ads go through click tracking systems which may prevent them from being indexed by search engines. This means that the only value of those particular links would come from direct traffic. Sometimes ads lead to additional exposure though.

3. Effect of Link Rentals on Search Relevancy:

Many links have a greater indirect value than direct value.

When someone links to your site it is seen by search engines as a vote of quality. The anchor text and other page elements such as the page title and headers may also help search engines further classify the link. On image links the image alt text plays the roll of the anchor text.

On the commercial web many links are bought and sold, and thus for search engines to remain relevant they must find ways to regulate link purchasing.

Some of the things you may want to look for when buying links to help maximize your ROI and minimize your risks:

• Are the links direct links? Links that go through an ad server usually do not help build your link popularity.
• Is the page on theme? On topic links from industry hubs are given significantly more weighting in clustering or community based algorithms such as Teoma’s topic distillation and Google’s Hilltop. If the site allows off topic links then it has a greater chance of having its link popularity blocked or devalued.
• How many links are on the page? If a page sells an unlimited number of ads then the outbound link popularity is split up many ways, and that also could look a bit unnatural to search engines. If there are hundreds of internal links on a page then each additional link will be getting an exceptionally small share of link popularity.
• What anchor text can I use? If you can use descriptive anchor text then the value of the link is greater since the link text helps search engines understand what your site is about.
• What is the cost difference between site wide and individual page links? Generally site wide links may drive significantly more direct traffic, but likely they do not provide much additional weight beyond a single link from the best page on the site.
• What is the PageRank of the page? Generally many people place too much value on PageRank, but a higher PageRank does equate to greater connectivity and slightly additional value.
• Who links to the page and to the site? If the page or site is well connected within your topical community then search engines will likely consider links from it as being far more important than links from pages which are not as well connected.

Summary:

To best determine the value of a link you need to consider both its direct and indirect effects. Generally it is best to buy on topic links since they provide both direct and indirect value.

About The Author

Aaron Wall is a self taught, independant search engine marketer. He currently owns/operates http://www.search-marketing.info, and is learning more about the internet daily. Aaron’s articles have been syndicated across the web. He quietly works out of his house helping numerous website as a consultant and search engine marketer. You can reach Aaron day or night at (401)207-1945.