Leaving The Day Job

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It’s well known that Google Adwords has recently barred all ads for anything that might realistically be related to gambling - this includes tips, “play for free” games, newsletters etc.

I’ve discovered today that they also ban ads for platinum credit cards because “platinum” is apparently a registered trademark of American Express. No, I didn’t believe that either but I’ve checked and it is.

Now, there’s two things that piss me off here.

1) Platinum is used by pretty much every bank in the UK to refer to their premium credit card. It is a well known term in everyday use. I would say that this has diluted the term to the point at which it is no longer trademarkable. Obviously I don’t have the money to take Amex on in the courts but why should Google be Amex’s policeman? If they want to cease and desist me for using their trademark let that be Amex’s decision not Google’s

2) If you’re going to have a policy at least enforce it consistently. Search on Google any time you like for “platinum card” or “free bets” or “poker online” and you can be pretty much certain that infringing ads will be shown and more often than not it’s a large company that’s doing the advertising.

I know it’s Google’s system and I know they can accept or refuse whichever adverts they like but I’m getting pretty fed up of them imposing their own morality on me.

It looks like last week’s SEO has reaped its rewards! One of my sites is now showing at number five on Google UK for the three word phrase I’ve been targetting. I’m hoping that this will substantially increase the number of pageviews I’m getting without having to deepen my Adwords budget. The site in question is generating enough revenue at the moment to cover the advertising costs but it’s not exactly setting the world on fire so getting more free traffic will definitely do me good.

On a related note I’m experimenting with using SEO only to promote a very niche offshoot of one of my affiliate enterprises. I’m not going into details for obvious reasons but I’m trying a single landing page targetted at a specific three word phrase. The inspiration behind this is Stu Foster’s Niche Marketing Blog where he advocates “build[ing] websites that serve small segments of larger markets” - what is popularly known as “the long tail”.

Everything is set up and the site has been submitted to the search engines. Let’s see if my recent luck with Google continues and whether I end up owing Stu a pint for pointing me in this direction!

Most of the promotion I’ve done so far has been through PPC advertising on Yahoo, MSN and, mostly, on Google. I’ve decided for various reasons that I need to be working on my organic search position to. This is something which is known in the trade as SEO. It is something which is known to me as really, really boring.

Keywords, meta tags, backlinks, reciprocal links, directories, sitemaps : all of these are things that have to be dealt with but which are about as much fun as picking up dog doo (and if you think that’s fun it’s probably time to get yourself a nice white jacket with arms that tie up at the back).

So basically, this post is a call for comments. Got any tips on making SEO easier, more productive or just less boring? Send ‘em this way.

A little light relief for the weekend

Harold is a Robot #3 - How to Earn a Six Figure Income From Blogging in Two Easy Steps

They’re at it again!

Spent twenty minutes on the phone this evening to Microsoft trying to figure out why they keep rejecting my ads. There had been a minor problem at my end which I sorted as soon as they told me about it (and they only told me after I’d asked three times) but when I resubmitted the keywords they got rejected again. Turns out that once an ad’s been blacklisted you can fiddle all you like with the keywords but they won’t ever get accepted unless you also make a small change to the ad copy and resubmit that too. Doesn’t matter what you change, just add a space and then remove it and it’s enough to flick some switch inside AdCenter’s head that says “ok let’s review this again”

Finally get that ad group running and they blacklist another entire campaign. The incredibly helpful auto email says “Reasons for rejected keywords: This ad did not meet Editorial Guidelines. To find out why, in the column to the right, click Reasons for ad and keyword rejection under Related information.”

So of course I click the appropriate link and I get taken to a generic help page which tells me bugger all about why my ads have been disapproved. Utterly infuriating. I’m seriously wondering now whether I can be bothered with AdCenter. After all, who the hell uses MSN Live Passport .Net Search or whatever they’re calling it this week?

Regular readers of this blog (are there any?) will know that I have a bit of a problem with Microsoft AdCenter. Basically I think it’s a poor ripoff of Google Adwords but I’m trying to broadcast my ads as widely as possible so I have to work with it.

Today they have excelled themselves by rejecting three of my keywords because they are not relevant to the landing page. Well, these three keywords are the subject of the site. They are in the domain name. They are in the title tags. They are in the page copy. How can they not be relevant?!

I set myself a target a few weeks ago of achieving a four figure a month turnover within three months. Half way through the first month and I’m half way to reaching that goal already. All was going well. Too well.

Last few days business has been dead. Jurassic Dead. OK, slight exaggeration, there has been some money coming in but the daily average is dropping and hitting that goal looks a bit less likely.

I’m hoping that it’s just to do with the time of year. Schools are winding down for the summer and so parents and families are off on holiday instead of sitting around buying stuff online like good little consumers.

Hand on heart though I know I could be doing more. It’s proving trickier to discipline myself to sit down and do affiliate work each evening after the day job and especially at weekends. I’m kicking myself for going to the pub on Saturday night and writing off pretty much the whole of Sunday with a hangover. I’m planning to take a few days off from the day job (soon, need to give two weeks notice though, grr!) and try to throw myself into some serious affiliate work.

And I really must chase HSBC to see what they’ve done with my business bank account application too. Not a good start to our banking relationship.

UPDATE: Half an hour after posting this I checked my referrals and my below average day has turned into a nicely above average day! Mental note: must write negative blog posts more often

I’m now using Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing and there’s one thing that’s becoming very apparent. Google is huge and the others are mere also-rans. I’m running basically the same campaigns with the same keywords on all three networks and Google is several orders of magnitude ahead in both impressions and clicks.

Now, logically, this makes some sense. I don’t know a single person who uses Yahoo or MSN in preference to Google. But as an advertiser I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. If Google decides they don’t like my ads or my keywords or my bids I’m stuffed.

On a business perspective, how does Microsoft (let’s face it, Yahoo is yesterday’s news) expect to compete with Google as an ad platform if their inventory is so lacking? Microsoft’s search technology (even after all the hype of their new Live platform) is still woeful. They need to seriously lift their game if they’re to attract users and therefore advertisers to their site.

It’s been a frustrating couple of weeks. Numerous things have distracted me to the extent that the whole “leaving the day job” thing has been on hold. I won’t bore you with most of the details but one is of interest : web hosting.

Initially I was using shared hosting from a well known US host. Obviously, shared hosting is far from ideal when you’re using it to run a business but I had an account already and I figured I could always upgrade once things got up and running. Unfortunately I was wrong. My web sites have been up and down like a thing that goes up and down a lot over the past weeks and I’ve been forced to put all my ad campaigns on hold until I can find a reliable host.

So I’ve been looking into virtual and dedicated hosting. Boy is there a wide diversity of setups and prices! The best prices are to be found in the US where the hosting market is more advanced but two things worry me about hosting in the States. For one, there is the issue of latency. The bits of data have further to travel and that can impact on the user experience. Secondly, support. A lot of places say they offer 24/7/365 support but experience tells me that the overnight part is likely to be one guy on his own. This is far from ideal when their “overnight” is your “during the day”.

UK hosting prices are ridiculous. Generally they’re more than double their US counterparts and, as I’ve discovered this week, they may claim to be British but actually have their servers elsewhere in Europe. For example, 1&1 are based in Germany.

So after much searching I signed up for a VPS with Webfusion. Big mistake. They advertise that they have UK data centres. What they don’t mention is that they also have German ones and that’s where their VPS servers live. Annoying to have been misled but not a showstopper. Ping times were still good.

Second problem: Virtuozzo. For the uninitiated, a VPS is a single physical server divided by software to resemble multiple separate servers. Virtuozzo is one of the software packages that provide such services. It’s very popular not least because it allows overselling. In other words you don’t have a guaranteed share of the server resources. Again, annoying but not a showstopper.

What did turn out to be a showstopper though was Webfusion’s support. One of the things they advertise about their VPS package is that if you balls up the server you can do a clean reinstall from the control panel. So I logged on and tried a few things out always with the intention that I would do a clean reinstall after I’d kicked the tyres a bit so I could start properly. Tried to do the reinstall and the server died. Reinstall failed. Tried again. Failed again.

Emailed support. Got a response about 6 hours later asking me for the root password. Tried to log in myself and realised that my password no longer worked and I was locked out too. Several days later and Webfusion still haven’t got my server back online. I’ve told them not to bother and to cancel my account. It’s one thing to break a server on your own but another thing altogether when the ISP’s own control panel, used exactly as intended, does the job for you.

I’m now enjoying a seven day free trial with a Dutch company Budget Dedicated. They use Xen virtualisation which is far nicer than Virtuozzo as it gives you dedicated resources, near native speed and all the freedom you’d get with a real dedicated server. Ping times from the UK are fantastic and they have an IRC support channel so you can get immediate answers when you have a quick question. I think they may be getting my business.

Found these Adsense tips via Digg : http://www.14thc.com/scout/?p=135