Building Websites

Sometime during the night my new book “25 Ways To Improve Your Website” went live on Amazon. Taking the steps I have outlined in the book you can vastly improve your website in about 2 or 3 hours. What I recommend is read a few chapters and make the changes to your website. In a few sittings you can help get your website up to speed and compete with others in your niche.

The book is currently priced at only $2.99 and if you are part of the new Kindle Unlimited program the book is free.

As you probably know getting book reviews is crucial when you are launching a new book and I would appreciate it if you are planning on getting the book.

You can grab a copy Here.

I am finally putting the final touches on my next book titled “25 Ways To Improve Your Website”. I have been editing this book for what seems like forever and it is finally time to let it go out and help people.

The book is based on the session I did at Affiliate Summit a few years ago. The more I work on it the more I realized that this book needs to be in the hands of users so they can help fix their websites. The book is based on WordPress websites but the information applies to almost any website or blog.

It will probably go live tomorrow or the next day. I still have to do some quick formatting to make it work across all the ebook platforms. The print book will go live a few days after that. In the book I share a few secrets and some common sense tips that some people seem to forget when making a website.

If you are on my email newsletter list you will be getting an email on how to get the book for free once it goes live. If you are not on my email list what are you waiting for?

Want to help me spread the word about the upcoming book? Click Here To Send A Tweet About It.

Last year I had the honor to speak at Affiliate Summit West. My presentation on 25 ways to improve your website was very well received. Affiliate Summit has just made the videos live on YouTube so I thought I would share it so more people can improve their website. Under the video is the slide deck from the session. You can use that as a guide. Sure some things have changed in a year but the information is still relevant.

The only information that has really changed is the Google purchase of the Picnik photo re-size tool which is now part of Google+.

Reviews of my Session at Affiliate Summit

• Clickscoop
• Marketingelf
• Fat Cow Business

Click here to see a more detailed writeup of my 25 ways to improve your website

Nothing like a Tweet from Matt Cutts on a Friday afternoon on a Holiday weekend to ruin some peoples weekend.

@dannysullivan your call, of course, but the internal team here has taking to referring to the upcoming release as Penguin 2.0.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013

Actually Matt and Danny Sullivan are having a fun conversation about what the updates name is going to be. I see it as a non issue. If you are relying for traffic from the search engines you are doing it wrong. I am looking forward to seeing my search rankings go up as the clear out some more crap.

I actually love it when they do updates as it gives you an idea of what they want usually. I also enjoy seeing all the blog post that pop up blaming Google for a loss of business. Your business should be able to with stand a Google update. It is out of your control where they rank you (If that even matters anymore).

This weekend the webmaster forums and blogs will all be doing their best posting about Henny Penny SEO the other “The sky is falling” things and what they think Google is doing. They should be focusing on making their sites better.

Today we had all new Internet lines run into our office. For the last 3 weeks or so we have been having intermittent connection to the Internet. We had the cable company come after checking our lines and change the modem. All was starting to work right and then we had some issues again.

Today's repairman made no exceptions when it came to making sure we were done correctly when he left. From the time he arrived he let me explain the problem and he came to the conclusion that we run 100% new wires all the way up to the pole outside the house. I took the time to help him and he appreciated it. He went on to tell me what the previous repairman did and the shortcuts he took.

He went on to explain to me that his bosses will be driving by in a few days to make sure that he did the job correctly and he wanted to be sure they could just look from their car and know he did a good job. He was proud of the job he did and he knew it. He also knew that I appreciated the work he was doing. He didn't want to bother cleaning up the guys mess that was before him. He changed everything so that he knew it would work and he also didn't want to come back and fix it again. He is also sleeping well tonight knowing that my Internet is working. It is the same way with building websites!

Build Your Website Right

I am constantly asked about changing websites once they are built. For some crazy reason I get asked by affiliates if they should go back and change their websites every time there is a Google algorithm change. If there is something I hate it is going back and making changes to existing pages. I frankly see no reason to change pages to try to keep up with Google or any search engine for that matter.

I have one person (Yes you Sharon) that always ask me if she should go back and change page whenever I tell her something that is wrong with one of the new pages she shows me. It is usually something so minor that it isn't really that smart to waste enough time going back to change all the pages on your site. It is actually not a good idea to have all the pages optimized on your site the same way anyway. One change of the algorithm and all of your site becomes dead. No one wants that!

I would rather spend time developing new pages and moving on then looking back. I suggest that you do the same.

When you start making websites over and over you always seem to make the new website with lessons taken from the other websites you have built before. It makes total sense but sometimes you have to consider the niche of the new website before applying all the things you think need to be on your new site.

For example you may make sites that have a pop up to capture email addresses. That is fine I have used them and although I hate them as a user in some niches they work great. My latest site it wasn't working as planned so I sat back and wondered why. I emptied my cookies and loaded my site as if I was a first time visitor. When the pop up came up after 30 seconds I found it really annoying since I was in  the middle of reading an article when it popped. I then went on my phone and did the same thing and when the pop up loaded it blocked out my whole screen and I couldn't even exit out of it. Total fail on my end.

Also on my latest site I had an Adsense ad after the post. I have this practically on all my sits as it seems to work great because after the user reads the page they need to do something and having four blue links to click on seems to be a good thing. On this site the Adsense wasn't getting many clicks at all per 10,000 views. I think it got 2 clicks and made me 10 cents, not exactly going as planned. I knew I needed something in that spot and I knew I needed it quickly as I am sure Google looks at your overall conversion. They say they don't but I would bet they do.

I decided that since the site was new I needed to build out the newsletter list. I logged into Aweber and created a 300 x 250 looking newsletter sign up box and placed it after my post. First day I got 15 subscribers within the first hour. Since then I have been getting a new subscriber almost every hour. For a new site this is pretty good. I will probably change a few of my other non performing sites to this method. If I didn't think outside the box this never would of happened. Of course I still have to figure out out to monetize the site better.

Right now the site is using Amazon for its only affiliate program links and since there is no Adsense on the site the users are visiting Amazon more. My conversion rate went up by 1% since the switch. I wasn't really thinking that Amazon sales would be benefited from removing the Adsense but it has.

When you are making new sites try not to rely on what is working on your other sites. It may not be what is best for your site, or your users in the long run.

I was just looking through my stats and this question came up in my server logs. My first thought was if you spent the time to think about it and type that long-assed question in my search box then you probably already know the answer.

YES it will. Buying traffic on Fiverr may be a good short term strategy but Google will eventually see what you are doing and your site will be penalized and found at the bottom of the search results. While Fiverr is a good place for some things I wouldn't be caught dead buying traffic or buying backlinks or link wheels or anything like that.

I use Fiverr to get logos, and maybe get some videos made. You would have to be crazy to use a site like Fiverr to have anything done off page for a website that you care about. Think about it for a second. Say you buy 50 backlinks, all of them are on garbage sites and 50 other sites have the same backlinks as you. Sometimes they are the only backlinks a site has. How easy is it for Google to go in and see these backlinks and realize that they were bought links. It is simple!

Odds are I would be able to see that you bought links or even worse link wheels from Fiverr and I don't have the expansive knowledge that Google has in its arsenal. Unless you don't care about the site you are building and only want a 3 week boost for your site then you can buy traffic from places like Fiverr. I have nothing against them but using it to get traffic to your site is not sensible.

For the last few weeks I have received nothing but mail from my local politicians running for some office. Simple in party run off to see who would get to run in November.

One guy sent me a piece of mail once a week, the other was 1 to 2 pieces every day.

One guy sent me mail with what he was going to do when elected. The other sent me mail with pictures of his family.

One guy sent me mail letting me know what he has done since he is the incumbent. The other sent me mail that looked like it was sent from his relatives in Ireland I guess trying to appeal to my Irish background.

This has been a non stop thing for over a month. One guy sent me about 5 pieces of mail. The other sent me at least 30. I voted for the guy that sent me 5 pieces of mail. The other candidate wasted so much money in mail I would never elect him to any political office.

Add in that fact and the fact that he was annoying to me every time I went to the mailbox to get my mail. The guy that sent the least amount of mail won the election. I wonder how many others felt like me.

The incumbent guy has been doing a great job and he only sent out mail saying what he has done and what he was going to to. That is all I needed to know.

Lets Translate This Online

Do you send emails like crazy? Are you the annoying guy? Do you send relevant information or do you send irrelevant information just to send an email?

Don't be that guy, although I am sending out 30 newsletters for 30 days.

Today's post idea comes from John Mihelakis of Apps HQ

“Hey Vinny, post suggestion: Its about personal websites. It seems that ultimately everyone is branding themselves in the end. Most affiliates have their income sites & also their personal blog sites. Just curious on how you see things.”

Thanks for the suggestion on the post John. It is something that I have been seeing more and more of lately myself. The answer is really simple. Most affiliates want a site they will be able to sell someday. If you make your site a personal one odds are it won't be worth money to someone in the long run.

Most affiliates that I know use their personal blogs to blog about issues they are seeing or for more personal stuff that doesn't really belong on a money making site. The money making branded site should only be about the topic at hand. I am sure you won't be posting political stuff on the Apps-HQ site anytime soon. A personally blog would be a much better spot for it.

A lot of affiliates I know are building brand sites. This is for two reasons:

• Brands are getting better rankings in Google. There is no in and or buts about it. Most big affiliates are seeing this also happening and adjusting their business for it.
• It is easier to sell a brand site. They will also get more money for it.

I could never sell vinnyohare.com for anything close to what I would want for it. I could build a brand-able site with similar focus and sell it 5 years from now for a lot of money if I wanted to.

I am always amazed at how many people build websites without the end user in mind. They don't think about who the person is that visits the site or what they do when they get there. I speak to so many affiliate marketers that have 20 products on each page and they wonder why they don't sell anything. Their theory is usually that if the person doesn't see what they are looking for they will eventually see something they like and will click on to the merchants page and find what they are looking for and buy it. I call this HOPE marketing and it usually doesn't work well.

Something happened a few years back where affiliates thought tools like popshops or Shareasale's make a page would make great pages. They do make great pages but you have to add content to the page and not list 20 products. The affiliates that make the most money are ones that show one or two at the most products and either write a review or an explanation of how the product will benefit the end user. When someone lands on a site that has 20 products they become confused and either click off or end up in a browsing mode and don't buy anything.

Being an affiliate manager I can see what sites make money and which ones end up being failures and abandoned when the affiliate no longer maintains a site. I can also see when the affiliate just quits and blames affiliate marketing doesn't work and is never heard from again. The affiliate may make some money building these sites but all it takes in one Google algorithm change and the affiliate site gets dropped. Since the page is nothing but a bunch of products no one is ever going to link to it so it never has a chance to rank long term.

Where Does The End User Click

If you have Google analytics installed you can get a good sense of what is going on with your site. After logging into analytics choose your website and go to Content >In Page Analytics. Your site will pop up on the right and you can see what people are clicking on. Little orange boxes will appear above the link with a number of clicks in percentage and you can get a good idea of what people are clicking on. Even better than that though is you can see what people are not clicking on and eliminate that link on your page or rearrange your site so that link is lower on the page.A focused page will always before better than one with hope.

This very good but it doesn't serve you with the best info. I would also like to know what people are hovering over. Lets just say that the ad you see for Paramount might be taking the users eyes away from your intent for the user. You would never know it. But using a service that Sugarrae uses called CrazyEgg you would be able to see that people were trying to click on the picture and couldn't because it wasn't a click-able link. Go read Sugarrae's post and come back. It will be much clearer as she explains it very well.

Most websites I see do not tell the end user where to go. They assume that the user will find what they are looking for. If you noticed I said assume and hope in the same article. Not exactly words that help build your website the best it can be.

As I was preparing for the screenshot I noticed something about my own site. 34% of the people that were reading my site were clicking on a link that took them back to the homepage even though they were already on the homepage. Now I have to figure out why.

Today's post is post number 1 out of the next 30 days I plan on posting once a day. This post was inspired by a conversation Geno Prussakov and I had at Affiliate Summit.

A few weeks ago we we talking to a prospective client about running his affiliate program. Casually during the conversation he mentioned if it is possible that his in-house affiliate program was causing him to have a Google Penguin penalty in the Google search engine. At first I was taken back by the question and then he told me that he had a custom built tracking solution for affiliates.

My next thought was if he was using his main site as the URL for all the affiliate links or not. The answer to that was a yes, an answer I didn't want to hear. It had been a while since I had managed a program that had this and it was very common if you had an affiliate program for a long time to be on a tracking solution like this. Tracking solutions were much more common than they are now since most affiliate programs use an affiliate network to do this. I knew at this point he was probably penalized and a storm was brewing just like in the sunset picture on the upper left.

There use to be an affiliate tracking platform that use to have this and was used by many companies. The name escapes me now but it is the same feature that Post Affiliate Pro has. Nothing against them but I personally wouldn't have an affiliate program running that wasn't on a network. I certainly wouldn't have my affiliate program using the same URL has my main site.

We Will Get More Backlinks Too!

Some affiliate managers back in the day thought it would be a good idea to use their own affiliate tracking and the backlinks were a benefit to the website and increase natural backlinks were good to have. Of course most affiliate managers were also in the website development department and they knew exactly what they were doing. They didn't think there would ever be a penalty for backlinks coming down the road.

The problem with this tracking and having the affiliates use the same URL as your main site lies in the backlinks that appear to be coming in as a cause of your affiliate program. Google takes a look at all these sites linking to you and sees some weird stuff. If you have not enforced your affiliate program well you have links coming from all sorts of places like blogspots and pages that haven't been updated in years.

The anchor text is probably all the same even though the links are different because of the parameter at the end of the URL. Google doesn't care, it still sees the site linking out to garbage and placed on sites that are not quality at all. If the site is based off a keyword it could be seen as a match for keyword spamming because of the company keyword name in the anchor text.

In many cases it is one link on a site that has 100's of affiliate links. It could very well look like you are buying links on websites that are made just for placing links. Either way your site is being linked to by some bad neighborhoods. Google says they don't penalize sites for people linking to you but I have seen that to be not the case at all. Read this post on Search Engine Journal about backlink profiles in Google and their use of the word “Almost”.

Let's just say you have 5000 affiliates that have links up on 5 or 10 sites like this. Some of these sites are dormant since the search engine rankings dropped and haven't been updated in years. They are all penalized because they have a lot of affiliate links themselves and probably no backlinks. All of a sudden you are on 10,000 -15,000 pages and probably with the same anchor text.

Using a well known affiliate network doesn't give you this problem as the search engines know all the URLs that the networks use. The networks use URLs like kypcocy.com or something similar. There is usually no site built on it so it is easy for the search engines to see the exactly what the links are.