Recent Updates RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • webaholic 10:57 am on April 28, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Google Algo Changes – Is it time for a change? 

    Sad PenguinIt’s been a while since I’ve done a post so I’ve saved up this long post so I apologise now if I rant on but I needed to get it off my big fat hairy chest!

    Google has certainly gone and thrown a big f**k off spanner in the works. Affiliates and Webmasters who are use to these regular updates but the recent change AKA penguin update, has really screwed up many online web businesses by knocking them off the rankings and in some instances showing results that are either not relevant or don’t have hardly any content.

    I tweeted yesterday saying ‘There seems to be a theme for Google’s major algo updates. Black & White animals Panda/Penguin. Will it be Killer Whale,Zebra or Skunk next?’ This I believe is because Google see this in Black and white or Black and White Hat as a common SEO term.

    Webmasters in the early days of Google use to stuff keywords on the page to manipulate their search engine rankings and it worked. If only I started back then I would have done the same thing. After all if that is what others are doing to get ahead in the game why not. Although as a long term strategy cheating the system will get you in the end. But what if you are playing by the rules and still get knocked back. I think this is the reason so many people in the industry are more sceptical and I’ve even heard many people saying they want to get out of the game, what is the point! I can certainly understand their thoughts as I’ve had some of my websites lose a lot of traffic and income.

    For those that do Affiliate Marketing full time, I do feel for them and hope they manage to recover any lost income. It’s a risky business and its even made me rethink about a change of direction.

    Can I see people moving to other search engines to find what they are looking for? Maybe, this all depends if the crap results that Google are showing continues or if they can roll back the latest algo updates or fix what is broken and show visitors proper results.

    Other Ways to Make Money online without Google

    What other options are available online to make a living?

    Content writing services – I can’t write content for toffee. I can ramble in my own words but I wouldn’t be able to write about topics I have no skills in. It would take me too long to do this. This doesn’t have to mean that I couldn’t offer a content writing service and nor could you. There are freelance sites where you would be able to start, but this relies on you finding and relying on a decent content writer. Then you simply manage the relationship and bring the work in. Is this for me? Not sure to be honest, but I certainly won’t rule this out

    SEO services – I have a keen interest in SEO, I’ve done all SEO for my sites and have some very good success. Some might say well you’ve lost rankings why would I want to use you. To be honest, many SEO companies will at some point rank a site and also seen an algo update affect their clients rankings. I believe I know the ins and outs of SEO and what affects it, how to structure websites for onsite seo as well as how to do link building effectively for Offsite SEO. On my major site, I have noticed a bit of movement with the latest update but to be honest it went up for a few days and back to 2nd spot so I feel that where I’ve put most of the effort in and done this all ‘White Hat’ it has stood its ground. So I feel very confident to take this on.

    Blog – Blog owners will get traffic from search engines but they don’t just rely on this as they will have followers and regular readers. This would require you to build up something that you had a real interest for or experience in and can write regular. You earn money from advertisers but will take time while you build up the traffic. This is not for me, although you could if you have some money to invest initially outsource the content to specialist content writers in a chosen niche and do quite well I’m sure. After all Content is King!

    Social Media – This requires you to have lots of followers or be famous if you want to make money off social media from Twitter sponsors for example, but there are also other ways you can make money from this. Doing fiverr gigs to help give people extra facebook fans/twitter followers or social bookmarks. I don’t feel this is for me and don’t think this will work as a good money earner in the long run.

    PPC Management - Most of these types of jobs are used by bigger clients who will unlikely go to Joe Bloggs PPC Management company and say can you manage my PPC campaigns. I have done this for a friend briefly in the past but I don’t have much interest in it.

    Directory Site – People want to advertise a link on directory sites all the time, but there are thousands out there. Either yours needs to be targeted to their niche and not only the site has page rank but also each page where there link will go will needs some authority too. This doesn’t necessarily rely on traffic from my experience. I’ve got links on directory sites because it was relevant and had a good page authority. It helps mix up your link profile and I don’t think this element will change. It may become more difficult if Page Rank disappears at some point.

    Develop an App – Many people have made decent iphone apps and made a lot of money from these. All it needs is a decent idea and some marketing. If you can’t develop this yourself then outsource the coding to someone else. I have wanted to do this but just need that idea. I’m sure like anything getting it popular is not an easy task.

    Setup an Ecommerce Shop – Still rely on Google quite a lot for this, either you’ll want to rank organically, use PPC or a mixture of both. However you will be building up a brand instead of an Affiliate type site. In some instances you may be able to use Ebay/Amazon for your source of shoppers/leads

    Domaining – Buy and Sell domains. This is a great form of investment and requires skills in finding the right domains that are in demand at good prices that you can sell on for more money. There are so many domainers doing this that it can be difficult to compete. I like to dabble in domain names but have not yet found it to be a successful route, partly because I’ve not had the money to invest and partly because some of my domain names are not that valuable to most people.

    There are many other ways to make money online such as selling photos/art buying and selling at auctions sites. Some are ok for extra pocket money but I’d be looking for ways to make a business that is going to help give that freedom and opportunities for my family to explore the world without the worries that comes with being on the bread line!

    What are you going to do, please share your views below?

     
  • webaholic 12:27 pm on February 17, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Oh! What’s Occurring 

    Just a quick update as I don’t get the time to blog as much as always got other more important tasks to do, but I don’t want to let this blog just drift away if I can help it.

    Between now and my last update. I have been investing in domains some more and then developing them into websites. I’m finding that my whole thought process of this Affiliate business has changed since I started out in Affiliate Marketing 3 years ago. I now look at this more as a business and when buying domains or websites I have to see potential as an investment. A bit like on dragons den, you need to evaluate if the domain or site is worth investing in and estimate if you will see a good return for that investment. Sounds simple right! Thanks to Frank Paul for making this clear in my head

    I now also outsource some of the tasks to get the job done quicker or sometimes better. I ain’t no content writer so that is something I’ve been outsourcing. I can highly recommend both Kirstin and Ben for their content services.

    I still build my own sites but to be honest I think I may even start outsourcing this too. For the sake of say £500, if the domain is worth investing into, then a decent looking trust worthy site is a must. Although I can design sites ok, it does take time to get it how I like them.

    As I invest more into decent domains, I need to clear some of the not so good ones so I’m going to try and sell off some to bring in a few extra pounds so that I can keep on reinvesting.

    One site in particular I’ve invested into is in the Finance niche, some of my followers on my Twitter account will know this already. At the moment I’m down on my investment because I had to invest a lot of money into it, but hopefully this will recover the initial investment and then will be 100% profit from then on. It is already earning which I’m chuffed about as it was a new site, took about 3-4 months to get it properly ranking and hopefully it will stay there as I continue to link build.

    I’m on the hunt for more domains or websites to invest into. I want to spread my risks by having multiples investments in different areas.

    Some of my smaller niches are still doing ok and earning a nice passive income.

    I have also just looked at an old website I built as an article directory a while back. I left it to automatically post as it was too time consuming approving posts but because of this the quality of the content is not great and the site got penalised and de-indexed because of all the duplicate content. This is to be expected. It has 71,000+ posts, and 77,954 spam comments protected by the Akismet plugin. When it was ranking it was earning about 2-3 quid a day from adsense and was on autopilot so was a nice little earner for doing jack to it. I quickly took google ads off there as didn’t want to be penalised.

    This domain had a PR5 at one stage and had and still has thousands of backlinks to it. I plan to redo the site and hopefully it will get back into big G’s index and re establish the page rank on the next update. Then I can sell advertising links or banners to make sure of a site that isn’t doing anything.

     
  • webaholic 10:05 am on September 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Month of September – Progress Report 

    What has Gary from Webaholic been up to this month you may ask?

    I have been very busy this month with both building and ranking new websites as well as selling off and also purchasing new domains.

    If you are at all interested then here is a little breakdown of my progress this month. I certainly think people shopping online after the summer holidays has helped increase the traffic and commissions. I wander if others have also had a good month.

    I’ve seen a massive increase in traffic and earnings from my websites. On Affiliate Window, the main Affiliate Network I use:

    - Clicks increased by 968 this month
    - Transactions have tripled
    - Income has more than doubled so well happy with that

    I’ve also sold off Maldives.org.uk as well as a couple of other smaller domains. Good luck to the new owners

    I aquired dining-chairs.co.uk domain and have put up a website with a load of products, now time to try and build up the link profile to push it to the first page of Google. I did have an offers on the domain and several people enquire about it but the offer wasn’t as much as I thought the domain was worth. For your information this was mid £xxx. So I’ve decided to develop it to try and acheive a higher figure as the buyers will be more interested when its on the first page and actually getting traffic. I suspect that when it gets to first page it will make a couple of hundred a month from affiliate commissions that I’ll be looking for more like mid £xxxx otherwise there would not be much point me selling, especially as I’ll have to invest a bit of money to get it to climb from outsourcing content and other promotional methods.

    I also entered the Acorn Domains competition started by Frank Paul. My entry was networkdefender.co.uk which was a bit of a gamble. It was a quick hand registration to try and benefit from the recent .com sale which sold for $20,000. I contacted several end users and the .com owner but no interest so far. So I’ll just hang on to it for a bit longer.

    I also brought the domain bestecigarette.org.uk because there was a load of interest in e-cigarette domains recently. I put up a site and got it to the 1st page. Not sure if its there now but I did get a bit of interest but no offers. This was again a domain I was trying to flip quickly for a small profit.

    I caught the domain name solicitorpersonalinjury.co.uk and also hand registered a few more domains that had dropped.

    I also did a quick blog post on Frugal Daddy for a deal aggregator service in the UK. Got paid £40 for what took me 10 minutes to do.

    Making money online is fun and rewarding when you put the time and effort it.

    Next month I need to cut down on those niche domain purchases unless I believe they can sell. I will focus on reinvesting into the bigger more profitable websites.

     
  • webaholic 3:19 pm on September 19, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Find the latest Airport Parking Discount Codes online 

    Booking airport parking online can save you as much as 60-70% of the price you could end up paying if you just turn up and pay. But you can save even more by using an Airport Parking Discount Code.

    The following page on Voucher Daddy displays all the latest Airport Parking Discount Codes from the leading UK suppliers of Airport Parking and Airport Hotels services in the UK. This saves you both time and money when shopping for airport car parking. Here is the link:

    http://www.voucherdaddy.co.uk/airport-parking-discount-codes/

    The Voucher Codes can be used to take a discount off when you get to the car park providers checkout. All these suppliers offer secure parking, on site and off site and are all very competitive. So it really helps to look for the provider with the best discount available.

     
  • webaholic 12:45 pm on September 16, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Smoking Kills – Nuff Said 

    Smoking KillsSmoking is not just a habit for some, the addiction is life long for some. I’m not a smoker myself and have only ever smoked the odd fag when I was a young lad. I just couldn’t understand why so many people smoked in the world because of the taste, the smell and also the drain on the wallet.

    Well help is at hand with an Electronic Cigarette. A battery operated device that when you inhale you give a puff of nicotine but without the crappy substances of a normal cigarette. Recently there has been news reports from the BBC and the Guardian about the UK Government trying to encourage smokers to switch to this smokeless device.

    There are several UK online retailers which offer E-cigs as they are also known. You basically buy a starter kit which comes with the Electronic Cigarette and some liquid cartridges, like refills which give you a certain amount of puffs. Finding the Best E Cigarette can be difficult, so like everything else you need to do some research.

    There are many benefits to E Cigs, such as being able to smoke in a public place, reducing the health risks of all the tar and other rubbish in Tobacco, saving you shed loads of money each year and not smelling like some tramp (sorry to all those smokers out there but you do stink).

    There was a lot of media about these so this was why I decided to look into this. Could save you some money if you haven’t already heard of them.

     
  • webaholic 11:58 am on August 25, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    How to Get a Vanity URL for your Google Plus Profile 

    gplusGoogle Plus will by default give your profile a long URL like mine was this https://plus.google.com/107951945105803318264

    To get a nice short URL instead of that long unrecognizable link, you will need to use http://gplus.to/ to create a short one.

    You will need to use you ID number from the long url so that you can link it to a short link

    To find your profile ID, go to Google Plus account and hover over your profile picture. Here you will see the long url containing your ID number.

    Copy the ID number into gplus.to link and set yourself up a nickname.

    Mine is now gplus.to/GaryYeardley

    Some requirements for you new profile link:
    Username must be between 3 and 25 characters, not contain any special characters, and only Latin characters and numbers are accepted. You can also only link 1 username to your account.

     
  • webaholic 10:10 am on August 12, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ipod   

    iPhone and iPod Touch Landscape Not Working 

    A friend of mine asked me today after recently buying a 2nd hand iPod Touch. ‘Why does my landscape mode not work’. Looking through the settings and there was no option. Surely this place would be best place for it, but oh no Apple have put this on the home screen scroll buttons.

    Below you will see 2 screen shots

    portrait orientation locked

    portrait orientation locked

    Double click on the home button and scroll to the left, where you see the music buttons. Here you will see an icon to lock the portrait mode. Currently locked has a lock icon like below.

    portrait orientation unlocked

    portrait orientation unlocked

    Simply touch the lock icon to enable the unlock the portrait orientation mode so when you want to swivel your iPod device, the display will rotate and show both portrait and landscape if needed.

    Simples!

    Note: If this doesn’t work, then try resetting the device from itunes or updating the firmware. Then if this does not work, contact the maufacturer/supplier.

     
  • webaholic 7:28 am on August 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    KeywordDomains.org.uk – New site to find org.uk domains for sale 

    Looking for .org.uk domains, then head over to KeywordDomains.org.uk

    Gary from 3ac.co.uk recently set up KeywordDomains.org.uk as a place to list all your .org.uk Domain Names for sale. If you own any of these domains and you wish to sell them, then you can advertise your domains on here for only £1. Alternatively he has given a Free option providing you give him a nice backlink from your blog or website.

    KeywordDomains.org.uk is solely for .org.uk domains for sale. It allows you to build up more interest to any org.uk domains you have for sale and he will tweet about these too.

    I have listed my org.uk domains for sale. Let me know if any take your interest.

     
  • webaholic 7:24 am on August 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    org.uk domains for sale 

    Below is a list of keyword org.uk domains I have for sale which I currently don’t have time to develop with other big projects on the go.  Some have sites on them but won’t be included with the sale unless stated below. Some may already have links and some may be ranking, but no earnings to show.

    £50 – timezone.org.uk
    £50 – eyewear.org.uk
    £50 – sdmemorycards.org.uk
    £50 – slippersocks.org.uk
    £50 – cashmerejumpers.org.uk
    £50 – beachdresses.org.uk
    £50 – yogamat.org.uk
    £50 – superkingmattress.org.uk
    £50 – superkingduvetcover.org.uk
    £50 – airportparkingbristol.org.uk
    £50 – balancetransfercreditcards.org.uk
    £50 – batmanfancydress.org.uk
    £50 – darthvadercostume.org.uk
    £50 – supermancostume.org.uk
    £50 – sailorcostume.org.uk
    £50 – cotmobiles.org.uk
    £50 – ladiesdesignerwatches.org.uk

    Premium org.uk domain

    £1200 maldives.org.uk (includes site)
    - page 2, position 12 – last checked at time of this post
    - Site Age 2000
    - PR2

    Don’t be put off by org.uk domains. If a .com or .co.uk domain is already gone, getting the org.uk domain can give you the same results. There is no difference between how a org.uk domain can rank in the search engines compared to a .co.uk. I have many org.uk domains ranking no 1 for their main keywords and they still convert really well.

    It’s a known fact that having a keyword in the domain helps to boost your search engine rankings.

    If you are interested in any then please get in contact gary@authoritydomains.co.uk

     
  • webaholic 9:00 am on July 26, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Benefits of Google Plus 

    I’ve not been using Google Plus for long, only a week and already I can see some benefits to using this over using Facebook. Only problem is I don’t have hardly any friends using it and to be honest I haven’t invited any yet lol! So for now I’ll still be using Facebook at least until all my friends/family/acquaintances have moved over.

    There is so much news and media coverage about Google plus and even the likes of TechCrunch and other tech blogs are doing analysis on how well Google will do compared to the other big social sites, i.e. Facebook and Twitter. Most people don’t mention Myspace that much any more, whether this will still be the case in the next 6 months or so who knows. With the recent investors Justin Timberlake Group, maybe he will turn this into more of a celebrity sharing social network and be an exclusive hangout place.

    What I like about Google Plus is I don’t have to login to Facebook. I can see my any new notifications from any other Google app I’m using such as Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, and also whilst logged into Google while using any other Google app or their web search. It combines a mixture of the good stuff about both Facebook and Twitter.google plusThere is a lot of stuff that is similar and maybe even copied the ideas from the other social networks. For instance in Facebook you would Like someones status, In Google you will +1 it. Maybe someone needs to create a hand icon for a hive five! Also I still think they need to have a dislike option too.

    Google have also taken the Twitter idea to follow people, so not only will you be able to have your mates in your friends groups, you may also want to follow your idol such as Lady Gaga !?!?! Why her I don’t know. She sings well but that’s about it.

    Google Circles

    The other thing I like is that you can assign your followers to different groups, such as Friends, Family, Acquaintances. This is great if you wanted to post a picture but you didn’t want your Grandma to see your latest antics and no my Grandma isn’t on any social network, just an example. But another example is maybe you want to share some information with a group of friends and you don’t necessarily want your work colleagues to see this information.

    Google named this Circles. You can share a message to a Circle of people and only them if you wish.

    Google Hangouts

    Another benefit of Google Plus is Google Hangouts. You can have a video call with up to 10 people, where as Facebook only recently added this feature and its limited to a video call with 1 person at the moment. You can also view YouTube videos while on the call with your friends.

    Google Sparks

    Google Sparks is another cool feature, which allows you to catch up with information that you have an interest in. Simple add a keyword spark and then you can keep up to date with all things shared about that keyword. I used SEO as I have a keen interest in this. I’m not sure yet whether this information comes from the Google results or from information that is shared on the Google Plus portal only. You can already see the likes of SEOMOZ blog posts shared in Sparks.

    Google +1

    Google also have the power of their Search engine. Holding a majority share of the visitors throughout the world. 92% last count according to hitwise. You may have noticed next to each search result you can +1 a site. Clicking +1 will automatically share this site with your followers for them to comment on and vote on. This could be a viral way of Google gaining lots of people to use it.

    Google may even use some of the sharing information from Google Plus and +1 for a way they measure how search results are ranked. It wouldn’t surprise me if they have already put this into their algorithms.

    For any Internet Marketer or Business, this can just be another way to gain extra traffic in a viral way to your website/s. Don’t miss out. Anyone that needs and invite, please let me know comment below and I’ll send you one.

    Here is my Google Plus profile – https://plus.google.com/107951945105803318264 – Not much to it and hoping I get a more friendly url liks my name or something instead of all those numbers. Maybe that’s how many have already registered!

     
c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
l
go to login
h
show/hide help
esc
cancel