The Web Week

Web traffic varies wildly, yet increasing numbers tend to smoothe out.
Naturally traffic varies on topic.
Very roughly I would still say that traffic looks something like this, around Wednesday as a mid-week mean:

Monday - 125
Tuesday - 115
Wednesday - 100
Thursday - 95
Friday - 115
Saturday - 80
Sunday - 75

Digg Directory

Digg.com should start a directory where users can use the present system to vote sites up and down in the directory.
Could fast become one of the prime places on the net.

Organic Is Not Enough

To all you "cheapskate" ;) webmasters out there who are only relying on free organic traffic.
I can see why, but mind you - If you are only doing organic you are not utilizing the full potential of your niche. Someone will eventuelly come along and buy their way into your spot. If you want to protect and develop your turf you better pull out that credit card, head over to AdWords and start buying traffic.

AdWords Copywriting

A little copywriting tips I have carved out:

Cood copywriting is about beeing in a specific mindset. This mindset can be extrememely hard to get into and can be extremely valuable. Mindset combined with intensive split testing is the key to success.

- Try beeing a bit vague, highly specific (as allways) but vauge at the same time. Sounds contradictory, but watch this:

5 Step Solution
Instant Easy Fix
Fully Customizable
Www.Site.Com

The above ad could work for many different things. It claims to be highly specific, but it is vague about what it is specific about. This arises curiosity, people think "this *could* be excactly what I am looking for".

A few AdWords - AdSense tips

- Have a second look at any old campaigns you may have. Your old stats may allow you to do things that a new campaign cant. Especially pricing stats can be valuable as initial keyword prices are going up.
- Rethink old campaigns, can they be relaunched with a different business model? Can you put ads on the landing page and monetize the traffic differently?
- Content network ad campaigns will usually grow over time. Set it up with a price per click you can live with and see the number of clicks grow by 2-5% per week.
- Be creative in monetizing traffic. There are ALWAYS more ways that you have utilized.
- Be careful to create good initial statistics. The first few clicks can set your entire campaign settings in AdWords. Launch campaigns when you know the click through rate will be high. Make sure the click through rate is high.
- Google works on Pacific Time. Your first clicks of the day, Pacific Time are virgin. They can set you up for the rest of the day.
- Tech savy users click few ads. Less sophisticated users will click more ads. Google users click few ads, Yahoo users a bit more, Live.com a bit more again etc. European users click more than American users. Young click less than old users etc. Targeting non-sophisticated audiences can work.
- Click fraud kicks in once you start bidding about 5 cent or more per click. Under that there is less fraud as the fraudsters make less per click.
- Traffic, clicks CPC and IPC (Income Per Click) will vary significantly. You should expect a variation of more than 50% on both AdSense and AdWords so when they are seen in total your variation can be 100% or more.
- Diversify Diversify Diversify
Many sites
Many sources of income
Many business models
Many traffic sources
At least two independent hosting providers
Domains separate from hosting provider
Domains with at least two different providers
Backup
Off site backup
Contingency plans for everything
Etc. Be paranoid.
- Buy traffic, if you only rely on organic traffic you are not using your full potential.

Market inbound links as if they where YOUR pages

A simple trick not many marketers use is to also do internet marketing for whatever pages are linking to your page.
Submit them to directories, link to them from blogs etc. They will indirectly give you traffic AND their Google ranking will go up giving you more traffic etc.

AdWords – AdSense Best Practises II

More experiences from AdWords and AdSense for good measure:

AdWords
- It is about having an ad that fits into the mindset of the searchers.
- If you need to set up a new domain and website just to fit into the mindset of the searchers.
If people are searching for "49ers coffee mug", your "healthycoffie.com" domain name might just not cut it. You might need a different domain name like "custommugs.com" or "sporsmugs.com" just to get the click at all.
- Small improvements in click through rates can result in huge price drops.
- Test test test - you can not tell what works or not unless you test it.
- Lists are a given, people love lists.

AdSense
- Beware of smart pricing, keep to good quality.
- Smart pricing can easily lead to a race to bottom prices.
- Keep a log of the changes you make, otherwise you will not be able to know what works.

Internet Marketing Best Practises

I am doing a lot of tweaking on Google AdWords.
I spend USD 50 000 – 100 000+ per year on AdWords.
Some things I have found - sharing it under the "what goes around, comes around" principle:

- Anything "free" will always give a high click through rate.
- "FREE" is better than "Free", and much better than "free". Use capital letters when allowed.
- First letter in domain name shown should be capitalized, www.Runbox.com not www.runbox.com.
- You might even try capitalizing the first "W" and the "C" like this Www.Runbox.Com.
- In display URL I have not yet decided on having a slash "/" after the URL or not. Need more data.
- Try many ad variations, make new and delete non performing.
- Be sure to delete the ads that are not working so well to improve the average click through rate.
- Putting the price in the ad will send much fewer, but much more high quality clicks. But, the campaign will be less efficient, this is a paradox with AdWords. They will somehow fix that I ams sure, but for now a paradox you will have to work with.
- Use the actual key word people search for in the ad header. Repeating it works fine.
- As allowed get a call to action in like "click", "easy", "yes" etc.
- Old deleted campaigns are gold, revitalize them with new content. Google cares about old stats.
- Do not pay more than 15-20 cents per click. It is usually not worth it.
Cap your clicks at USD 0.15 and improve them, you will see the price gradually drop after a few days. The better you make them the lower priced they get - it's amazing.
- Make many campaigns and improve them individually.
- Separate USD/UK/Australia from "Rest of the world". As a rule of thumb a click from the first group is worth twice as much as a click from the second (many exceptions naturally).
- Be careful changing ads with good stats, you might loose the stats history.
- Use negative keywords, make a list of them. Always negative "-sex", "-porn" etc. Build your list ofer time and use it every time. I have a list of about 500 negative keywords for my campaigns, you will have to decide on "-free" etc.

Suggestions for Google - you do read my blog I assume:
- Have a box on every campaign "Add my negative list".
Suggest some negative words in this list and have me add to a global list.
- Allow suspended ads to be resubmitted as they are.
- Allow to pause some ad copy instead of having deleting it.
- Speed up the reporting to almost real time.
- Do not assign the Google.co.uk team to European accounts automatically. The Europe team is not a good as the US team, this is a bad practice done by many US companies.
- Show us more about what is going on. Why do prices change?
- Show total number of searches on key words, so we can see the potential volume.
- You write some best practises like this one, so we don’t have to. There is way to much guessing and witch science going on with AdWords.

Article Markteting tips and best practises

A good way of getting free viral exposure is article marketing.

When you submit an article keep in mind:
- Some republish sites will not create live links of your article but just publish it in plain text. Therefore make sure you have in your tagline your domain name or website written out in it's full url like this http://www.runbox.com, many publishing systems will make that a live link automatically and then you have your link afterall.

- Make sure you write in the article, preferably at the end. "This article is free to republish in its entirity." Many article websites will remove the source.

- Make sure you have the original article on your website for reference and to claim it in case of a dispute.

- Think about the headline. This is how most people will find your article. This is where you can draw traffic to it. What are people searching for? Can you match that precisely, to the letter?