Posted by Ruddy on Mar 29, 2009 in
Marketing Actually I don’t want to make a new post today but I just read two very interesting articles from TechCruch where Professor Eric Clemons and his white beard stated something negative about online advertising world: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/
and
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/28/steel-cage-debate-on-the-future-of-online-advertising-danny-sullivan-vs-eric-clemons/
Inside the 2nd article, someone named Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand made his own statement to fight Eric Clemons’ article regarding the failing of online advertising world. Both articles are quite interesting and you may also want to check the comments. Even Matt Cutts was active there.
Well, as always, I only share what I want to share. These articles are interesting to me so I share it with you guys 
oh and if you ask my opinion, actually I simply don’t care about where it’s heading. Since the first time I got involved in online advertising world, I never let someone else’s prediction or opinion affected me. I just researched my own competition, my own traffic, my own visitors’ behavior, and do what I have to do. If internet advertising world keeps declining, then we just have to adapt. As simple as that. Probably the only thing that’ll piss me off a bit is I have to study more and more 
No, just kidding. I always love to study new things and new languages.
But well, if I have to sound my opinion, I guess I would disagree with the old guy (Clemmons). I mean, the current diminishing return of online ads is simply because of global crisis. It affects almost everything (although I don’t see its effect for my businesses). So well, I don’t think it’s such a big deal where the online ad revenue is heading. After all, the whole internet business revenue keeps improving and this is what important the most.
Oh btw, this is my vacation schedule:
* July 09 – Hong Kong (for a week)
* December 09 – London (for a week, to watch Arsenal live from Emirates Stadium)
* June-July 2010 – South Africa (probably for 2 weeks, don’t know yet .I want to watch World Cup live)
So If you want to meet me in these countries, let me know ok?
Tags: advertising, online, vacation
Posted by Ruddy on Mar 14, 2009 in
Marketing On internet, it’s very possible for a man who had nothing like me then suddenly make enormous income within 1-2 years. I have met various people on the internet, whether they are from my country or from international world. That’s how things work. When you work hard, when you plan smart, when you are creative enough, you’ll get success. However, most of these people would think they are really “special” so they create their own money-making e-books.
The reason why some internet marketers create their own e-books is because they know most amateurs on the net are so stupid and this kind of people sometimes would do anything to learn internet marketing stuffs (I’m glad I never bought any e-books). Basically, people sell money-making e-books to make money for their own, not for the amateurs, because they know it’s quite easy to fool people.
If you tell me people sell their e-book because they want to help others, sorry but it’s just a “mask”. Face the reality. When you want to help others, then help. Selling an e-book and calling yourself a guru is not a wise decision. I’m not blind, I know there are several good e-books and paid lessons on the net. Although I never bought them myself, but usually my friends who bought these rare items would show their membership login details to me so I can check it myself. But if you ask me, I would never create something like this and sell it for money. I keep my knowledge for myself and when I want to share, I’ll just share it.
Tags: e-books, gurus, internet marketers
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 28, 2009 in
Marketing Actually I wouldn’t create this post if I never got lots of questions regarding how to look at your real SERPs and ad positions. People sometimes misunderstood where were their websites on Google. This is a very common mistake and I still don’t get it how come they never understand even after I keep reminding them again and again.
So let’s just get to the point. If you type “google.com” directly into your browser, no matter what, you’ll get redirected to Google of your country, not Google.com US. Even if you click the link “google.com in English“, you still won’t see the same results as if you really go to Google.com US. To prove this, try using a proxy service and find US proxies there. Go type “google.com” and search the same keyword. Viola, you’ll see different ads and most of the times different natural listing as well (although not significant).
I usually love to use anonymizer. The complete URL is anonymizer.nntime.com and it still works until I write this. You can also check different proxies from there to get the most accurate ad positions and natural listing from each country on Google. This is crucial for me because when I target US market (for example), I have to know who are my real competitors there. The same thing goes with SEO. If you want to know where’s your site position for Americans, then use US proxy.
Strangely, lots of people out there still do not understand how it works. Sometimes they asked me “hey my site is on the top of Google but why my traffic is much less than I expected?”, well my answer has been always the same, “If you target people from outside of your country, always use proxy before you go to Google”.
Tags: adwords, google, SEO
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 16, 2009 in
Marketing Different from SEO, you can’t never make your adwords or facebook ads campaign automatic if you work without employees. You always need to observe your campaign, see if something goes wrong, and edit your campaigns’ cost per click. You always need to do these stuffs if you want to maximize your profit from adwords and facebook ad campaigns. I’m talking about advertising campaign for e-commerce/affiliate websites, not brand exposure here.
The reason is simple, because sometimes (no matter how superb you are in adwords) Google slap your campaign. Well, I don’t know but from my experience, it looks like Google slapped affiliate sites quite often compared to normal e-commerce websites. So it looks like we can’t just leave the campaigns running by themselves if we are affiliates. If you ever read somewhere on the net about how to make huge sum of money from adwords by working 30 minutes or less every day, it’s almost a lie. They lied so they can make money by providing “dreams”
Did I say “almost”? Yes. Almost. Actually it’s possible but you need to know the trick. You can’t do it if you are on your own but if you LET someone else to work on your adwords campaign, you don’t have to monitor it anymore. It’s up to you if you don’t trust someone else to manage your adwords and facebook ad campaigns, but for me it works. You just need to do some extensive experiments.
Now how to find these people? Through elance and guru.com. Go find some adwords/internet marketing specialists who have at least 2 positive feedbacks and 0 negative feedback. Contact them and tell them you are interested to communicate with them. Usually I ask for their messenger ID and I chat with them. You have to interview them and let them prove they are really worth it. Unfortunately, you can’t “judge” them if you never had any experience in adwords…
You must understand how the adwords and facebook ad algorithms work. You have to know how to make your campaign profitable and then COMPARE it with these adwords specialists’ method. You ask them in details how they think they can make your websites profitable. If needed, you can even tell them one of your successful affiliate/e-commerce sites, then ask them how they can make it get even more success in adwords/facebook ads.
From most of the specialists, I’ve found 3 real pro specialists. I did some experiments with them. I tested their service and see how they managed my ads, how they tested their ad copies, how they reduced/increased CPC, etc. 2 of them did their work very well and made me more money although I have to pay their service for certain amount of fee. I must say if you have at least $10K per month for adwords and facebook ad campaigns, try them. Although they are not cheap but in the end you’ll make more money and what better is, they can make your campaigns automatic. However, usually these specialists’ work was kinda slow at the start.
Tags: advertising, adwords, e-commerce, facebook ad
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 10, 2009 in
Marketing People said link exchange is already dead but you need to think twice before you say so. If you are such a noob who only know how to do reciprocal link exchange or resource page link exchange, I can make sure you won’t be at the top of competitive keyword’s natural listing. Everybody knows reciprocal link exchange, I guess. How about resource page link exchange? It’s something that most people offer. For example, someone at DigitalPoint sends you a PM, it looks like this:
Hello dear, I can give you link from my biz opp website:
http://www.domain1.com/resources.php
http://www.domain2.com/links.html
http://www.domain3.com/resource-links.html
Please reply and tell me about your websites’ PR and where you can place my links.
Ever got this kind of private message or email? This is stupid but people are still doing it. So what we need to do then? The answer is easy. Find in-content links, as always.
If you have one website, let’s say a business opportunities website, then you have to create one dummy site/blog so you can give backlink from this dummy site to your link partner. Personally I’d suggest you to create two dummy sites so we can do more tricks. Of course before you can give backlink to your link partners, first you need to build incoming links for these dummy sites. It’s going to be an intensive task to do but it’s worth it in the end.
You can find link partners everywhere, start by doing manual job (emailing the SEO people) and also by contacting forum members. Although most of people on the forum are totally rubbish (they don’t have quality sites) but sometimes you can find superb link partners. The ratio maybe is less than 5%, it’s like you send 100 PMs and you only get 5 good link partners. But as I said before, it’s still worth it.
Of course you can also start a new thread inside relevant subforum (for example in Digitalpoint, create a new thread inside link exchange subforum). You’ll receive many PMs although maybe not all of them have good and quality websites. Remember one thing, you have to look professional. Don’t send any email/PM like the above example but tell them how to do in-content link exchange. Tell them you are looking for a real deal, a link with anchor text inside their article pages.
In-content link exchange actually is similar to paid blog post (I’ve given you the example - SEO case Study I), but the difference is you have to give backlink to their websites from your dummy sites. Sometimes I even give backlinks from my real sites and in return I get backlinks to my dummy sites. But of course you can’t just link to everyone, you have to know what you are doing.
Personally, I don’t really care about PageRank. Usually I did link exchange after I checked my partner’s incoming links. Usually I checked how many backlinks they have for their sites and I also checked how many outbound links do they have in a page where they will give me backlink. If they have no outbound link at all in the page where they will give me a backlink, I will definitely take the offer.
This is also a grey hat SEO technique but it works until today. You can build your own network by creating 9-10 websites if you want and link each other but I’m too lazy for that. When I was still actively build links through the above link exchange technique, I felt I’ve spent too much time for that. So since the last few months, I even never trade anymore links with new partners. But believe me, if you do this technique and the paid links campaign I told you earlier, you’ll be on the top of Google (unless Google changes its algorithm).
Tags: internet, Marketing, SEO
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 8, 2009 in
Marketing I’m gonna talk about SEO today. Search Engine Optimization is one of the main reasons why I can earn money from my affiliate websites. Of course I won’t rely on SEO for my upcoming websites (including Hymoo) LOL. But I just wanna share what you might don’t know about Google and SEO.
OK here it is.Go to Google.com and type a competitive phrase there “diet pills”. I’ve been observing about this website: consumerpricewatch.net (sorry but no FREE backlink to this kind of website from me…). At “diet pills” and related keywords, you can always find consumerpricewatch.net at the top of the natural listing. Maybe he’s not always at the first position but at least he’s always at the top three.
Am I impressed by the content of this website? No. Personally I believe he’s working directly for the diet pill he recommended. The last time I checked his website, he was recommending Orovo and it was a direct link (not affiliate link). So it must be something. I don’t believe if Orovo or other crap diet pills really work. After all, every supplement in this world is overrated. They are produced to fool you.
So if consumerpricewatch.net is not a good and honest diet pill review site, how the hell can he stays on the top? Simple. Paid links! You can check his backlinks using backlink analyzer tools like Yahoo Site Explorer or whatever you want. I’ve come into conclusion that he has SO MANY backlinks from irrelevant blogs. He contacted the blog owners through paid link service providers (or directly, I don’t know) then he told those bloggers to create a post about “diet pills”. Of course inside the posts, these bloggers gave backlinks to him with his targeted anchor texts like “diet pills”, etc.
Usually people told us to focus on article marketing, directory submission, blog commenting, 3 ways link exchange, etc. But only several of them believe paid links are still having big impact for search engine optimization. Well, I don’t know what will happen in the future since I don’t work for Google but I know consumerpricewatch.net IS JUST one example that proves how effective paid links are.
Of course if you are not stupid enough, you won’t buy blogroll links or links inside resource pages. Try to buy in-content links inside unique articles and vary the anchor texts. Obviously they’ll help. Even from unrelated blogs and websites, they are still helpful as long as the posts related to your anchor texts.
To make everything clear here: I’m NOT the owner of that website. Consumerpricewatch.net is owned by someone else and I’ve been observing his SERPs because it’s quite interesting. He relies on paid links but he has been staying on the top of Google natural listing for competitive keywords since a long time ago. This is not kind of black hat SEO because I’ve seen websites with this kind of campaign always stay at the top of their targeted keywords.
If you ask me how I did it myself, I usually bought links for my affiliate websites through Digitalpoint. I also ever used some services like TLA or buyblogreviews but most of the websites listed there are totally crap. Digitalpoint forum, however, is a little bit different. You can find lots of link sellers and negotiate with them about the price.
Well, I don’t focus on my affiliate websites anymore. So to be honest, the last time I bought a link for my website is around 1-2 months ago. But I’m telling you, this is one of the golden keys to the top. I’ve experienced it myself and you can also analyze the competitive keywords on Google. Some websites “buy” their way to the top and they know what to buy and what to avoid. Do not buy blogroll links and links from directories. Buy in-content posts instead.
By the way, it is very easy to detect in-content paid links. If the anchor text looks like targeting keyword, it’s 90% paid link. And if the post is very irrelevant to the blog niche, it must be paid link as well.
*PS: Wait for my next post. SEO Case Study II: Link Exchange and Networking.
Tags: internet marketing, paid links, SEO
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 5, 2009 in
Marketing Welcome to the world where work ethic is not needed anymore. No, I’m not talking bullshit. This is true. As an internet marketer, I’ve seen too many examples. Have you ever seen one site 100% copied another website and only twisted the texts to manipulate Google duplicate content issues? Well, as I said earlier, I’ve seen too many examples.
The easiest way for lowlife spammers is to find one affiliate/small e-commerce website which is on the top of their targeted keywords. For example, you want to be on the top of “diet”? Then go type “diet” on Google and click the first position there. Copy it completely, twist the texts to avoid dupe issue, and check its backlinks through Yahoo Site Explorer or whatever you want to use. Then copy his backlink techniques as well.
This is a common practice nowadays. Of course I have never done such a terrible thing but I know several people who copied my successful affiliate sites like this. I even talked with one of them and I mocked him in Windows Live Messenger. It’s fun you know to make them feel shame of what they did to your websites 
(although it won’t help. These lowlife spammers will always try to go for it).
These stupid search engine optimizers (to be honest) are people without work ethic. They only think of money. They know I make money, they know the other successful SEO sites also make money, and they thought by copying the original sites, they would be at the top of Google one day. What ridiculous is, they are also targeting the same keywords. This is why in my earlier post I was wondering when Google can eliminate these shits?
Tags: internet, Marketing, SEO, work ethic
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 4, 2009 in
Marketing Search Engine Optimization is getting ugly, don’t you think? More and more people have joined the competition and they keep spamming Google by creating new websites every month. They create new sites for their own cross-linking benefits and also to do 4 or 5 ways in-content link exchange with their partners.
They also buy paid links to increase their websites’ visibility on Google natural listings. Even their domain names obviously are targeting the keywords. Websites like weightlosspills.net (targeting “weight loss pills”) and freedatingusa.com (targeting “free dating”) are just two examples.
Google themselves keep slapping affiliate and MFA sites in adwords. Because of that reason plus the financial crisis era, now lots of people have switched their main marketing campaign from adwords to search engine optimization. I also don’t really like adwords so I understand if people prefer to do SEO than to pay $0.5 per visitor. If we can get more traffic with smaller investments, why not?
However, I want to talk about how Google never stopped these spamming people. What they (Google) want actually is simple, they want every website that comes out at the top of the natural listing is the one who provides best information. But you can see now in high-traffic keywords there are lots of affiliate, MFA, and small e-commerce websites. I mean small websites which look extremely similar to affiliate websites but they don’t sell affiliate stuffs (they sell their own stuffs).
The question is, how many months left (or years) before Google finally improve their algorithm and beat these MFA and affiliate websites? We all have seen the new Google feature, SearchWiki. If you login into your Gmail account and type something inside Google search field, you’ll see UP and X buttons everywhere. I still believe this SearchWiki feature has not yet affected Google SERPs in general (I mean, for people who do not login). But later, it might be.
Search engine optimizers have been trying so hard to be on the top of Google natural listings. They create new sites, they do 4 or 5 ways in-content link exchange with their link partners, they also buy paid links, and now they are on the top of their targeted keywords.
They even never really updated their websites’ content. They only update it once per week or even per two weeks to ping Google. To be honest, these kinds of websites are rubbish. They only want to sell their stuffs and Google gives them what they want. Sometimes it amazed me these websites have better rankings than Wikipedia in some keywords.
I know one day Google will improve their algorithm a lot and it’ll decrease this kind of spamming. But when?
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 3, 2009 in
Marketing Hi, this blog is quite new so it’s normal if I receive very few visitors. However, I think it’ll be also very normal if within one year later from now I still receive very few traffic. The reason is simple, because I won’t market this blog. I’m busy with my marketing attempts for my business websites and also for the development of Hymoo. Therefore, I won’t spend too much time in my personal blog here. I will update it when I want to talk about something but I won’t market it.
I will only show my blog’s URL on facebook, twitter, and (later) Hymoo. I think I’m not interested to market my blog. But who knows
