Just about a week ago Google Adsense issued a new set of Terms Of Service which all users had to agree to. How many actually read all the small print?

Well one of the key points is they’re requiring all Adsense publishers to have an adequate Privacy Policy on the sites they use Adsense.

From Adsense TOS

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management…. more here…..

My View

Now call me old fashioned but what happened a year ago? The MFA witch-hunt started, with everyone panicking about being banned and a fair few actually were banned. Maybe this will be happening again….

WordPress Plugin Privacy Policy

For those of you who are unsure how to write a basic privacy policy and for those with many WordPress blogs or sites Eric Giguere has published a plugin for WordPress to make your task easier. Simply download to your desktop, unzip, upload via ftp to your server and activate in your wp-admin area.

Visit Privacy Policy WordPress Plugin by Eric Giguere.

This can be seen in use on this blog and it sure made my task easier!

Over the christmas period I’d became slack with my online activities, with my main line of work taking priority. Affiliate marketing and promoting my handful of basic sites was only really a hobby that I’d got into by accident and was only costing me pennies, but with a lay off of over a month or so and affiliate cheques still coming in I thought it was time for a change.

I have now decided to concentrate more on online activities and only take on word of mouth aerial work I choose to do. This will hopefully leave me more time to write and research content for my new sites, and also try and get them ranking well and earning a full time wage.

So now I’m trying to be a little more serious am I moving in the right direction?

Well I believe so. Here are some of my awstats for 2 sites. I will keep the earnings stats to myself until the end of a full year for any particular site, that way I can Analise things better before making any claims.

Discount Codes Site-

December: 591 unique visitors and 1643 page views.

February: 2994 unique visitors and 12,684 page views.

This is a nice increase for me, people are spending longer on the site and the site is returning some nice long tail searches aswell as top 20 for some broader terms. I’m also hoping to add at least 50% to those UV figures again this month.

Digital TV Site-

December: 4856 unique visitors and 20,280 page views.

February: 6984 unique visitors and 35,997 page views.

This is also a nice increase but revenues have dropped mainly because I haven’t updated the site with fresh content and this is something I need to get round to as the site now ranks 10 in Google UK for “Digital TV” and 17 in Google Com.

New sites.

As part of my push with making a full time go of “my new hobby” I have purchased a handful of new domain names. These are less than a month old at the time of writing this and are really still awaiting me populating them with content! Both of these are in my cms of choice - WordPress.

New Site 1

Christmas Ideas - In WordPress will primarily be aimed at propping up or supporting my Discount Codes site together with becoming a broad christmas site. I will hopefully link out to other relevant sites and it will contain everything christmassy including recipes and gift ideas. I haven’t started anything with it yet apart from upload a really nice (I think) theme from Design Disease.

New Site 2

Isle Of Wight Info - In WordPress is hopefully going to be a nice little site aimed at visitors to the Isle Of Wight, England. I have just started to add content to the site but is nowhere near finished. I am researching further as I write and this should be quite an easy topic to write about as I lived there for 11 years and still have ties and visit regularly. The theme is a premium theme called Revolution Magazine by Brian Gardner and I’m really becoming a fan of his work. More about why Revolution Themes in my next post.

So there we have it. I have my hands tied for a while now. I’ve committed a bit of money towards promoting my sites now, but no more than my previous set of affiliate cheques received. Time to try and grow.

There are some seriously high earners out there, including earnings photos to make the average “webeneur” cringe.

Get over to Uber Affiliate - Affiliate Marketing Blog - for details of the newly launched site s.eriously.com

Just a quick note to re-iterate submission guidelines to the Blog Directory.

• Please do not submit to Root. Select the category closest to your blog. When I see something submitted to Root I just delete it!
• Keep it clean. No Adult Sites please.
• Your blog/site doesn’t necessarily need to be blog. If it’s clearly hosted on a blog platform and got content then it’ll be approved.
• Splogs - Single page shared hosting blogs designed to get your sites indexed? Post regularly to them and then submit here. If it’s regularly used it might be approved.

That’s about it and it’s actually larger commercial organizations who are Spamming. I’ve no real problem with spam because some of us dabble in spamdexing occasionally.

Happy submitting to the Blog Sites Directory.

1st up is a very new forum run by the Digerati Marketing guys from the UK. It should hopefully take off and will be covering all arts of SEO, SEM, monetizing; from the clearly white hat techniques to more shady ideas. The Digerati Marketing Forum.

Also worth a visit and growing in size month-on-month is the UK SEO Forum-TIP, which not only focuses on SEO and marketing, it is also a friendly place with lots of banter going on….. and they’re a helpful lot aswell. And the Webnaunts Teddy Bear, soon to be the latest must have!

Lastly is my first attempt at a directory and also my first play with Joomla. It’s very rough at the moment and as writing this is only just over 2 days old, being crawled and one page in Google - although in flux. I’ll run through what I’ve done with link building and trying to get it indexed sometime soon, which will maybe help someone out there? Aerial Installation Directory UK.

For this blog, apart from the domain name, I haven’t done any keyword research and it will stay that way. With this blog what will happen, will happen!

With other small sites though, I do conduct a little research. It’s pointless targeting search terms that no-one is ever going to search for isn’t it? Especially if your goal is earning an income, whether it is small and part-time or a full time income.

The Usual Keyword Tools

Now most people are aware of the usual places to research their keywords. Most notably are Wordtracker and Overture. With Wordtracker seeming to target solely American searches and Overture rumoured to have not been updated in 8 months. This shouldn’t be a problem to most people as it still gives them a pretty good insight as to what is being searched, but some want more. So you bump up your research with Google Adwords suggestions tools, Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz. If you were to analyze all the results you would have current and recent ideas of what people are likely to search for and be able to craft your wording accordingly. You’d do pretty damn well from it and stay a few steps ahead of the average site!

But what if you could find exactly what key searches have been driving traffic to your competitors sites in the last fortnight?

Ask them? In honesty I doubt many would want to tell you! Search for your self and it would take an eternity!

The next step in keyword research

In steps SEOdigger, a free to use search query site that parses over 60million search results to a depth of 20 results in Google. Simply enter the site URL you are querying and SEOdigger does the rest. You will find where a site ranked on a set date for a certain keyphrase, it even gives you the Overture and Wordtracker scores for the keyphrase. It’s like getting into your hardest competitors Google Webmaster Search Queries and having a good snoop about!

You don’t need to register with SEOdigger but it is worthwhile in doing so. Non registered users can only search for one site page at a time but registered users can search the complete domain in one go, and complete upto 10 searches an hour. I registered with them 3 months ago and I’ve found it very helpful in completing the bigger picture in my keyword analysis.

Visit SEOdigger and try for yourself.

As an after thought, wouldn’t it be nice to find out what people searched for before coming to the search terms that resulted in a visit to your site?

I’ll let you know in my next post

I’ve been spending too much time on mini projects recently, around my full time business, and reading too much of the wealth of great posts and articles that get submitted to the social networks. In reality I’ve got to manage my online time better and set asides certain periods for reading and finding new sites, and times for doing constructive things.

In essence I really should have taken notice what I said before:

Daily Blog Tips gives advice on how to keep your blog flowing nicely and is probably the post I should take notice of due to the frequency of my posts. No real excuses are there?

“Duh!”

That’s enough from me for a minute so; Time For Round Two!

This looks as a good opportunity for publishers, as their ads look very clickable as they don’t look to what we are used to think of as an advertisement.

I’d have to agree completely with Nick as the ads do look great and the ads are very easy and quick to setup.
They are also offering $25 credited to your account on joining, low minimum payment amounts and higher than usual CPM earnings.

My only (minor) gripe is that so far WidgetBucks seems to geared towards the US market. I would like to see an option for a different currency in the future as my two main sites are geared towards UK markets. Maybe this will become an option as more advertisers join their affiliate programme.

Saying that I’ve just signed up and it does look like a good setup which I can still use somewhere; and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for UK currency options in the future.

Read other great articles on monetization and Nick’s full post about WidgetBucks
at PaymentBlogger.

Less a week ago Tim’s personal blog TimNash.me.uk experienced a few minor hiccups courtesy of Google. So being unphased by the minor problem the “power that be” posed to him, taking away his identity, Tim has unleashed the fresh and new TimNash.co.uk blog.

The new blog brings you Tim’s findings and opinions with a twist of humour covering topics close to his heart: search engine optimisation and social media.

Many UK and international bloggers, and SEO enthusiast’s alike may already know Tim for his witty and “say it like it is” post’s on blogs and SEO forums, and the useful information and analysis he graces us with . Those of you who don’t know of Tim visit his new SEO Blog and read his not for the faint hearted set of personal goals. I can see Tim’s blog is soon going to be a “must read” for many.

One of my ideas for this blog was to put up a weekend list of articles/posts I’ve found interesting over the week. A lot of other people do this and this is nothing new, basically I like linking to relevant and useful content, and sharing it with others.

• Blog Links and Money: SEOCog is run by Melanie, a great contributor of my favourite SEO forum. This is a nice article about buying and selling links.
• Creating Mini Sites Content: Is part of a 5 part series about Mini Sites courtesy of Ash, a domainer who knows what works.
• The Fundamentals of SEO: Comes from “SEO Theory” (not a blog I recall reading before) and covers the basic steps and checklist for all your SEO campaigns.
• Building your SEO Empire: White, Grey, and Blue Hat techniques to incorporate into your SEO strategies for building your very own empire. Warning; this is a comprehensive read, put the kettle on first!
• Preparing for Blogging Emergencies: from Daily Blog Tips gives advice on how to keep your blog flowing nicely and is probably the post I should take notice of due to the frequency of my posts. No real excuses are there?

I hope that gives some of you something new to read and food-for-thought.