Archive for September, 2008
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Jay Gaulard writes for a wide selection of websites on various topics. He is a veteran of the internet and has come to be respected in his many areas of expertise. This article was written on behalf of WebLeeg, a popular free classifieds website.
How to Use Free Online Classified Ads to Sell Just About Anything
Every day, more of our interactions seem to move online. In most cases, this allows us to communicate quicker and more effectively than other types of communication. Online classified ads have become a hugely popular way to get in touch with other people.
Whether you’re selling, buying, trading or just informing, using a free online classified ad is convenient and easy. In most cases it takes only a few minutes to get your ad written and posted. Since it’s free, you can post multiple ads without worrying about the word count driving up your price.
Online classifieds will put you in contact with someone in the same town or people on the other side of the planet. If you’re looking for a used lawnmower to pick up tomorrow or a one-of-a-kind piece of art several states away, free online classified ads get you in touch with the right person.
Most online classified sites have many categories, making it easy to post your ad in just the right place. Having many categories also means that you can find what you’re looking for easily and without having to dig through a lot of irrelevant ads.
Free online classifieds aren’t just for buying and selling between two private parties. They’re also an incredibly useful way to market a business online.
If you own a business or belong to online affiliate programs, free online classifieds are a great way to promote your product without spending a penny. You can advertise pretty much any product or service to people in your local area or anywhere else in the world. You can target one market specifically or make your message available to everyone.
In addition to being free, online classifieds are useful for diversifying your customer base and reaching a new audience. If you have primarily marketed through other methods like television or radio advertisements, you have a very limited potential audience. Online classified ads could potentially reach every single person with Internet access. The best estimates say that’s over 1.4 billion people worldwide.
Although the chances of all 1.4 billion people with Internet access viewing your ad are slim, the potential exposure is staggering. Imagine reaching hundreds of thousands of people with your ad without paying for it.
Even people who aren’t selling anything find that free online classifieds are a wonderful way to reach people. Just about anything can be publicized with free online classifieds. Things like upcoming events, volunteer groups and job ads frequently have their own categories on classified ads websites.
In an age where we conduct a large portion of our personal and business communication online, advertising has to take new forms to adapt. Online classified ads have grown from small local message boards to vast international networks. No matter what you want to get the word out about, using free online classifieds can help you do it even if you have no advertising budget at all.
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Posted in Advertising, Classifieds, Internet | No Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
If so, read on.
A few months ago, we launched our WebLeeg Free Classifieds Affiliate Program with Shareasale.com. It has been going quite well, with new affiliates joining the program every day.
Our program is free to join, it’s easy to sign-up and requires no technical knowledge. All you have to do is lead interested web surfers to our site and we’ll do the rest. Once they become a confirmed member, you earn .10 cents (for each new member). It’s an easy sale, because our website is popular in our industry and anyone who visits quickly finds out why. We have a great product running on a great system.
We recently had some new website banners created by a top notch design firm. They are all available to you once you join our program as an affiliate. Below is just a small sample:
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Posted in Advertising, Classifieds, Websites | No Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
This is a follow up post to my “Sudden Drop In Google Ranking” post.
This morning, I checked the ranking of the website in question. To my surprise, the site had again ranked number 4 in the Google Search Engine Results. This was most definitely good news. In fact, all key phrases now ranked on page one of the Google SERPs.
I can only hope this persists. So, what did we do? Here is a short list:
- Noticed the website had dropped in Google ranking.
- Took a unique phrase from the website homepage and searched Google using quotes, “like this.”
- Found a direct copy of the website and discovered it had been “Proxy Hijacked.”
- Found IP address of website that Proxy Hijacked our website and blocked it using the .htaccess file.
- Submitted a “Reconsideration Request” to Google.
After about a week and a half, our website had regained its ranking in Google.
I read a long article about Proxy Hijacking and it mentioned that Google had fixed the problem. If this was the case with my friend’s website, this certainly isn’t true. While I can not be totally sure Proxy Hijacking caused this case of Google ranking loss, the facts seem to lead down this path.
What is my advice to you? Check either Google or Copyscape once a month to see if someone has taken text or Proxy Hijacked your website.
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Posted in Internet, SEO, Websites | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
We have no shortage of ideas when it comes to making money on the internet. If you would ever like to discuss them, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. We will surely reply…simply because we love this stuff.
Now, I am generally going to talk about business ideas we wouldn’t get into for one reason or another, but rest assured, we have seen these type of ventures make money with very little start up cost. The reason I am only going to talk about ideas we won’t do is because we need to have some sort of competitive edge in the industry. We do a lot of profitable things “behind the scenes” to keep those prying eyes away. I guess you could call this the free stuff.
This idea is basically creating templates for successful web applications. If you are into launching websites, you probably are aware of the issues you can have when it comes time to make your new website look presentable. You know as well as I do, many of the web’s best applications come with a “bare bones” template and it’s up to the template designers to pretty these sites up.
Just to give you an example, I was looking for a premium Wordpress template a few days ago. I came across a few websites that had some good ones, but the designs fell off a cliff when I got to the second page of Google results. Actually, now that I think about it, there are only two design firms I am aware of that I would actually get my credit card out for.
So, knowing that there are about a zillion popular web applications out there and knowing that there is a demand for premium templates, don’t you think if would be a good idea to make some money while the opportunity is staring you in the face?
Ok, so how do you do it when you have absolutely no design experience? That’s easy. The internet is full of awesome design firms based in Russia and India. Get in touch with them, lay out your plans, have them complete the projects, but be sure to get the license to resell the end product. Then, start up your own blog with all your designs and get ready to sell. Open up a store front that sells digital media and do a little SEO. By the time you are done, you’re in business.
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Posted in Business | No Comments »
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
This is just a quick note to let you know you can now sign up (right upper corner of website) to receive our posts by email.
Tired of coming by our blog to read our blog posts every day? Well, if so, just put your email address in the “Sign Up” box and hit “Subscribe.” Then, simply confirm your email address in the email you receive. After that, you can count on receiving an email once a day, as long as we write a post.
We are using this service by Feedburner on some of our other blogs with reliable success. So, if you are interested, go for it.
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Sunday, September 21st, 2008
I have often wondered if there is some grand resource out there for those of us who are interested in internet traffic trends by industry. It would also be helpful if this data were returned to me chronologically. Daily would be ideal.
If you run your own websites as part, or all, of your business, internet traffic trends are of great concern to you. Some days, your websites seem to be over performing. This is great and it’s very easy to get used to. The entrepreneurial spirit in you goes into hyper-drive. Well, what goes up, must come down. The only problem is, on the internet, there are way too many variables that dictate website success to ignore any “downturn” in website performance. If there was just a way to gauge whether it’s the industry as a whole that has taken a downturn or if it’s just your one website.
Personally, I have seen rather predictable ups and downs in traffic. I remember back over the Summer, during the holidays. On July fourth, web traffic was anemic, only to have an upswing shortly thereafter. I suppose you could just let your website be and hope for the best, but any business owner worth his/her salt isn’t going to sit idly by and watch outside forces play such a strong role.
I think the type of information I am talking about is available over at ComScore, but I believe you must pay for that. I suppose I could trot over to Alexa and type in one of my competitor’s URLs to see how their traffic has fared during the past few weeks, but Alexa’s website traffic stats are notoriously unreliable. They are built upon the Alexa toolbar, which is geared much more towards some groups of internet users, rather than others. Let’s just say that computer geeks gravitate towards the Alexa toolbar, but soccer moms don’t. Tech website traffic is going to look a heck of a lot higher than pottery websites. There may some value in the site across industries though, since those Alexa toolbar people would visit various types of similar websites.
I will continue to look for an answer to this little issue I am having, but in the meantime, if you know of any industry based traffic trend sources, please post a comment.
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Posted in Internet, Websites | No Comments »
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
As I wrote in a prvious post, duplicate content on your own website can come in the form of “www.mysite.com/” vs. “www.mysite.com/index.html.” The search engines see this same page as two different ones, but with identical content. As I also mentioned, most search engines are smart enough to figure out that these two pages are the same one, but still, they do share Pagerank.
What to do? That’s easy too. Just open up your .htaccess again and type in the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
You can do this with other pages that have the same problem as well.
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Posted in SEO, Websites | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Ok, this is a pretty simple thing to do and it has some important benefits.
Have you ever visited a website or a web page only to find that annoying “Not Found” error message? If so, what did you do? You probably got ticked off, hit the back button and visited another website. Can you imagine someone coming across a “Not Found” error page on your website? Well, if you don’t have a custom 404 “File Not Found” page set up on your website, that might just be happening.
Here is what you need to do to fix this problem and keep your visitors on your website.
The first thing is to create a web page with some sort of message on it. Something like, “Whoops, looks like the page you are looking for isn’t here. Please click this link to visit our home page or our search page…” You get the idea. You can save the page as “404.php” or something similar and upload it to the root of your web server.
Oh, I forgot to mention this. In order to do what I am suggesting here, you need to be running an Apache web server and your web host has to allow changes to your .htaccess file. I am sure there are other ways to create a custom 404 File Not Found error page and get it up and running, but I am only talking about one way here.
Now, open up your .htaccess file and place this code into it somewhere. I like to place it right on top:
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
I am using .php extensions for this stuff just because of habit and preference. You can use .html or whatever you wish.
Well, that’s basically it. You can now save your .htaccess file and upload it to the server and go see if it worked. Try typing in some page that you know isn’t there. If it works, please read my previous post about “How To Check Your Web Page HTTP Headers & Response Codes” for some important information.
Good luck.
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Posted in Websites | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
There may be cases when you would like to see what your webpage HTTP headers look like. Why? Well, because they are kind of important. As Wikipedia states, the HTTP headers define what the returned data looks like.
Still you ask, “Why in the world do I care about that?” Ok, I’ll keep going. The main reason I look at the HTTP headers is to find out what the HTTP status code is. The reason the status code is important to me is because this is the code the search engines use for a multitude of things.
Let me give you a little example, and this related to my previous post regarding the sudden drop in Google rankings. As I was doing research into what the problem may be for this particular website, I came across an issue where someone had recently put custom “404 Not Found” error pages up on some of their websites. Everyone knows that custom “404 Not Found” error pages are cool, but what some people don’t know is that if those 404 error pages show a “200 OK” (successful HTTP requests) code, the site may be in big trouble, SEO-wise. The reason for this is because there are going to be many “404 Not Found” error pages on a dynamic website. If you have your custom “404 Not Found” error page showing a “200 OK” response code, the search engines will think that all the instances of this page are duplicate. You know as well as I do, that spells trouble.
What’s worse is if you set your homepage as your “404 Not Found” page. Your homepage is going to return a response code of “200 OK.” That’s not good, because now you have multiple instances of your homepage…all duplicate content.
It’s my opinion that the search engines are smart enough to figure this out. The page (such as your homepage) with the highest Pagerank will prevail. Still, I have some websites that I am working on that have multiple instances of the homepage and they all have Pagerank, which isn’t good, because the duplicates are taking the Pagerank from the real page. Now, again, that’s my opinion.
Here are two tips:
- How to check your HTTP headers - visit this website or just Google “Website header check”
- How to set a particular page as your “404 Not Found” error page in your .htaccess file - Just place this code in the file: “ErrorDocument 404 /404.php” without the quotes. The 404.php file is the actual error page in this case.
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Posted in SEO, Websites | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
Do you remember my article from yesterday about the sudden drop in Google search ranking for my friend’s website? Well, I just can’t stop thinking about it.
From what I have been reading, it seems as though my conclusion may be correct. At least I am hoping it is. If I ever conclude anything semi-concrete while thinking about Google, it’s a good day for me.
Ok, I found this very helpful and thorough website that pretty much described the exact problem my friend is having. It’s titled “Google Proxy Hijacking” and tells the whole story.
Here is what struck me as I think about this some more.
- My friend’s website has been live since 2004.
- The site seemed to be in the Google sandbox for the entire 4 years.
- For his most competitive keywords, he was ranking past page 20 on Google.
- About two months ago, he made some changes to the homepage copy as well as an HTML overhaul.
- About a month after that, the site ranked number 3 for his most competitive keywords.
- The site ranked on page 1 of Google for about a month.
- The site now sits at page 25 for its most competitive keywords.
Here is my theory. I think the website has been proxy hijacked for a number of years. This is what caused the poor rankings for such a long time. When the homepage text and HTML changes were made about 2 months ago, Google visited the site and found it unique. Google ranked the site well, due to this new unique content. During the month, Google noticed the proxy website was now a duplicate of my friend’s website once again and dropped the website’s ranking.
Does that make sense? From what I read on the website I linked to, it does.
Here are the similarities with what we are experiencing and what the author wrote on the other website:
- My friend’s website has never been banned.
- We did a quoted Google search for supposedly unique content on my friend’s website and a proxy website showed in the search results.
- The proxy URL looked like this: proxysite.com/cgi-bin/pxy/nph-pxy.pl/000010A/http/www.friendssite.com/
- The proxy site was an exact duplicate of my friend’s website.
Now, I am not sure if this is what caused my friends ranking to drop, but all the factors are there. The keywords we are talking about are very competitive, but the fact that his site showed so well in the search results for a month shows me that the potential is there.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
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Posted in SEO, Websites | 2 Comments »
