Buying books with Amazon affiliate program
April 30, 2006
Most of the money I receive from my websites, I try and save. However, with the Amazon program, you can purchase books instead of receiving money.
I love buying books, so it feels great to be able to buy books literally for free.
I have just finished this quarter’s books and have bought the following:
The Definitive Guide to Joomla! (Definitive Guide)
Blogwild! : A Guide for Small Business Blogging
New link and a site re-design
April 28, 2006
I am happy to report that I have another advertiser who are going to pay $60 a month for a link on one of my sites. Linkworth (aff link) is working out great for me!
I have installed a new template on my Japan Hostels site. There are a couple of things which I need to fix on it yet, but I think it has a nice, clean look.
Statistics and key words
April 26, 2006
With so running so many sites these days, it is difficult to always be keeping an eye on the stats of my sites.
I was checking the stats on my Japan Hostels site and found that I was nearly getting 48 per cent from MSN and almost nearly as much from Google.
Then I checked my referring keywords and found my top keyword phrase (non search engine specific) was “Japan Hostels”.
Yep, you guessed it. I am ranking number 1 for Japan Hostels on MSN. I have no idea how I did this.
Now I just need Google to rank me the same and I might see some serious traffic coming in.
Are niche sites the way to go?
April 25, 2006
I often hear people asking are niche sites the way to go to be successful on the internet.
Personally, I don’t think that niche sites are the [i]only[/i] way to go. If you have an idea for a big general topic, I say go for it. But you have to keep asking yourself, how will my site be different or better than the existing sites out there.
The theory is that you can quickly rise to the top of Google if you focus on a niche, but of course you will only be at the top for a few key words in your niche.
If you are prepared to put in for the long haul a big general site is possible, but you need to be extremely patient.
The other alternative is to find new things which are becoming popular and start to make sites/register domains about the topic. Of course you are taking some gamble as to whether the topic will indeed bear fruit.
Also, if a popular company name or product changes name, think of all of the great domain names you can register. One example is when Mambo changed their name to Joomla.
Japanese apprentice fails to get off the ground
April 25, 2006
A Japanese version of the television program, ‘The Apprentice’ has failed to eventuate. One of the features of the US and UK version of the program sees contestants ending their run on the show with their boss, Donald Trump in the US version, yelling ‘You’re fired!’.
Especially after the trouble of high profile Livedoor president, Takafumi Horie getting arrested for shady dealings with his company Livedoor, company presidents in Japan are taking a low profile.
Employment in Japanese companies has traditionally been seen as a life long comittment. Only recently have people willing to change companies. Change is still somewhat slow in Japan.
Labour laws in Japan, are also very different to those in the US, where bosses don’t have the luxury to fire staff at will, without paying a hefty severance package to the employee.
How long will Adsense last
April 24, 2006
There is an interesting discussion going on at Webmasterworld on this topic.
One person had this to say:
Currently, online marketing only accounts for around 10% of all advertsing expenditure. Within the next 10 years, that figure will be around 50% if not more. The future is rosy. The people who are looking to make a living online now will benefit more than those who make a start in years to come.
I have been working on the internet for more than a year now, and I have been able to grow my income slowly overtime. Adsense is up and down, but I have been able to diversify into other programs.
If was to take it more seriously and run it as a business, I cannot see any reason, why I couldn’t do this full-time.
I thought that maybe I was late to get in, but I think that maybe there has been no better time to start.
Link exchange email requests
April 19, 2006
When I was starting out, like everyone else I looked for similar sites to mine and tried to get link exchanges. Nowdays, not that I don’t want links, I don’t spend much time to try and get links to my site.
I now have the opinion that if you produce good quality content, people will link to you naturally. If you send 1000s of emails out requesting a link, you might get a few links back, but will these be quality links?
The site who promises to link to you might have a page with links to sites, but they could be totally unrelated to your site.
My solution to getting good, quality links back to your site is to try and develop a good relationhip with the site owner first. Leave comments on the author’s blog, provide quality feedback and participate actively in the site’s forum if they have one.
Blog and site owners love consitent feedback on what they are doing. In a competitive blogging world, site fans are loved by webmasters. Once you have become a recognized “site fan” and ask the owner for a link to your blog, or new website, I am sure that they will help you out, with any problem or request you might have.
Mini Site Update
April 18, 2006
Someone left a comment asking how my mini-sites are doing. The short answer is: pretty average. Although, someone just yesterday bought a wine opener from my site.
I have done nothing to promote the site, it took a couple of hours to set up and I have made a couple of bucks from it. Is it worth it? Well, if you are looking for short term profits there are probably better ways to make money.
In the long term, who knows? There are so many things that could happen with the site.
One other problem, is that if you plan to make a bunch of mini-sites to profit from Adsense, there is fairly good emerging evidence that it is better to have one or a couple of big, high traffic sites with a lot of content on a fairly specific topic. For example mobile phones or a travel destinations.
Broad topic sites, untargetted users, humour sites are all going to perform bad in Adsense terms.
My other new sites are taking time to develop any traffic. Although, people are finding them. I started a site about the book and movie: Shantaram. I am currently on the first page of Google results for Shantaram Movie.
If I was able to maintain the position, I could expect some good results when the movie starring Johnny Depp is released.
So to conclude, nothing startling but I am an optimist!
Google and Microsoft go head to head
April 18, 2006
The competition between Microsoft and Google is becoming greater as they both try to cross into one another’s domains.
Google have released their own on-line calendar and just when I thought I would stop using Hotmail, I clicked on the “try new beta” in my account and found Microsoft’s new web mail offering.
It has an Outlook-like interface, with calendar and contacts. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I am sure it will be a hit. More and more corporations are running Outlook so it is going to be nice and familiar for most people.
Another high profile link
April 18, 2006
My Japan job site just got another high PR (top page of 9) link to it, from a US university.
Should see a reasonable jump in PR after the next update.
