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You may have noticed a lot of affiliate software and programs flowing through the blog over the last 2 days. There is a reason behind this madness, I am not just trying to make you go broke by wanting to buy all these great promotions.

I have been conducting my own crude test to see how fast my blogs are getting indexed by Google. As well as trying out a new link cloaker / tracker, which I will talk about in another post.

So you want the non-professional results of my indexing experiment do you? Well I will give you the down and dirty, as I am still working on it, and I kinda skewed the results. First on the front end. This site currently sees what I would consider ZERO traffic, it isn’t actually zero but nothing to speak of. Less than 50 visitors per day. I am working on that too. This site also currently has very few backlinks, i can count them on one hand. I said the test was skewed because I am in the middle of redoing the site, and I changed the structure from a subdomain to all on the top level domain in the middle of the test. (OOPS)

Well here’s the dirty results. 3 of my posts were direct copy ezine articles from the affiliates tools section of the given affiliate. These were indexed within 24 hours! The others were indexed within 48 hours. No too bad. But I am no SEO expert so they do not rank well for their keywords. But gotta crawl before I can run.

The catch. This site is setup in Googles Webmaster tool, with a sitemap submitted and generated by the WordPress plugin “Google XML Sitemaps” This plug-in not only rebuilds your sitemap on an update, but it will also ping Google, Yahoo, and MSN to tell them you updated.

So you tell me, how fast do your pages get indexed?

There are tons of free tools available for affiliate online research. There are a few I am currently using.  Below I will tell you what I am using and how I am using it. If you have more tools, and know better ways to use the tools I am using please post it up in a comment.

1. Google Analytics
   • This tracking service is very handy.  You place the code snippet in your site, and it will report back, traffic, what page visitors land on, what page visitors exit from, how much time they spend on your site, and where they navigate to within your site.   It will also show what geographic location visitors come from, how they found you, either which search engine, or where the direct link came from, and what browser they are using and a lot more.
2. Google AdSense
   • If you have made it this far you should already know what Google AdSense is.  This is a program to advertise on your website without hassle.  You just paste a few lines of code into your site and sit back and watch the money come in (well sort of).  Google uses a PPC program (Pay per click).  Every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your site you earn a commission, a few cents to maybe  50 cents.  The ads are automatically tailored around ketywords found on your site.  The impressions, clicks, CTR and eCPM are tracked for you, and you can setup custom channels so you can determine which ad placements, or ads from different sites are making money.
3. Google Adwords
   • I am new to Google Adwords.  And advertising costs money.  So what I want to stress here is the tools sections in adwords.  There are a few things I use.
   • The keyword tool.  This free tool can analyze your site and suggest keywords, or you can type in key words.  It will the display how much search traffic these keywords generate, and the competition for these keywords.  I use the competitive information to determine if I will be able to display a good assortment of high paying ads on my site (PPC ads from AdSense).
   • Insight or Search – This is another handy research tool.  You input keywords, and it shows you where the searches are coming from and the volume over time.
4. Google Webmaster
   • This is basically a portal for submitting your site for the Google bat to crawl.  Alot of people think this is an inefficient way to get ranked, but I still determine is necessary.  There are tools to help find bad internal and external links, and  any meta data issues.  This tool will also analyze or generate a robots.txt file.
5. XML-Sitemaps.com
   • This handy tool is great for creating an XML sitemap for you. It supports up to 500 pages, which is enough for most, (definitely enough for me), and offers outputs for download in XML, compressed or uncompressed, html, text, and more. Just run the script and then upload to google. Whammo, you have a sitemap for your site.

Update:  part 2 is here.

Last I posted I was driving traffic to my newly set up cooking games site.  That was almost a week ago, and a lot has happened since then.

I turned off my Google Adsense ad today after my budget ran out.  Below is the continuation of the results.

Day 4:  Adwords sent   71 clicks (still a $5.00 / day budget) to http://www.games.cheesymeat.com Of those page hits I got one (1) AdSense click for a daily total of $0.82.  I received 4 referrals to Big Fish Games, but no sales.  So another losing day.

Day 5:  I reduced my budget to $2.00 per day and lowered my bids on all of my keywords.  My budget went down by more than half, but I still got 40 clicks to my site with a better CTR.  My Adsense received 1 click for $0.20 (WOOHOO!!)  Big fish got 2 more referrals.

Day 6:  I added a second ad variant to see if I could improve the already good CTR.  I also bumped the budget back to $5.00 after tweaking my keywords a bit.  results?  A total of 80 clicks, split pretty evenly between the 2 ads.  From Adsense, 5 clicks, $1.33.  1 more big fish referral.

Day 7:  Same campaign as above, 2 ads got 42 clicks each, total of 82.  AdSense totaled up at 9 clicks and $3.97.  My best day yet, but still not enough to recuperate what I am paying for advertising.

Day 8:  I drastically altered my campaign, I hacked out any keywords that weren’t performing and once again adjusted my bids.  I lowered my budget back to $2.00.  only 18 clicks today but a very nice CTR (my best yet).  AdSense got 1 click $.24 (ouch!)

Day 9: Final day of experiment.  Budget back to $5.00 (although I only let it run up to about $4.00) 37 clicks, At Adsense, 3 clicks for $1.55.

Sum it up:  This has been an extremely educational experiment.  Definitely not immediately profitable for me, but has potential for paying customers later at Big Fish.  Total cost of AdWords campaign was $42.67.  Remember I was given this from Signing up with StartLogic.  So I really made $11.21 from AdSense, but if I had paid for the advertising I LOST. Not really what we are after here.  On a side note according to Google analytics, my site saw over 500 unique visitors in these 9 days, with a bounce rate of 39%.  I am pleased with these numbers if nothing else.

See you soon with my next experiment, which is already in the works………

I keep asking myself this same thing.  Now what do I do?  I have been in this game for all of 2 weeks so far, and can’t learn and read fast enough.  Well below I will document the continuation of my quest..

So I want to be an affilliate marketer.  Last time I told you I purchased some php scripts for content generation, set up a host at StartLogic.com, and was ready to get started. My next step was to start pointing my domain names in the right direction.  I own 45 domains in total.  A couple are dedicated to my other business startup, and some are just for personal / family use.  While I was at GoDaddy.com I went ahead and bought a few more names.  I have a pretty specific niche of names, and wanted to open my self up to a few more areas of the internet.  I mentioned in an earlier blog I am a repeat customer if service is good.  GoDaddy‘s names might cost a bit more than the cheapest places on the web, but the management utilities and other features are top notch.  I went ahead and pointed the name servers of the sites I wanted to utilize to StartLogic.

Now I have my domains, my hosting and some php scripts.  I began playing with the DomainZaar script package, initially I was impressed and happy with the default layout.  This package comes with Ad Sense ready to go, but seemed to be missing something.  I began tweaking the layout to suit my needs.  I added another ad, expanded a search box, added Google Ads for search, and just generally moved things around.  I prefer the way it looks now, but the real question is is the ad placement good?  I have no idea, that is on my list of things to research.

Next time – I need more ads…….