John Jonas Blog

Over the last couple years keyword research has become difficult as the quality of tools have degraded. Overture’s keyword research tool became totally unreliable about 18 months ago. Wordtracker just doesn’t have the data to provide accurate results. Sometimes in fact, wordtracker’s data comes from such a small data set that it doesn’t provide any data for keywords that get large search volumes.

So, I’ve come up with new ways of doing keyword research.

One way I do it is with KeywordTopia. I built it so that I could get results from all the places that would give keyword results.

Another way I do it is with the free google keyword tool, in conjunction with google trends.

Here’s a video about how I do keyword research across multiple niches:

Next Tuesday I’ll be releasing UnderCoverProfits, which is going to change the way a whole bunch of people do affiliate marketing.

See…in the past, when promoting other people’s products, what most people have done is pick a program to promote, and then go test it on Adwords to see if they can make it profitable. It takes time to pick the right program, and it takes time and money to test.

UnderCoverProfits reverses the process. Instead of spending money to test, it uses other people’s testing to figure out for you what affiliate programs will be profitable, so that you can start your campaigns knowing that they’re going to be profitable from the beginning.

It’s the exact opposite of the big hype right now about keyword level conversion tracking. With keyword conversion tracking, you test keywords on your own dime. With UnderCoverProfits, you test keywords and affiliate programs on other people’s dime.

If you’re looking to promote your own product on Adwords, as a competitive intelligence tool, I don’t know anything that will give you better information about your competitors than UnderCoverProfits. It will show you what keywords they’re bidding on, and which of those keywords are profitable for them.

So far our beta testing has been amazing. About 85% of the beta testers are now making money as affiliates on Adwords where they previously weren’t.

[tags]UnderCoverProfits, Under Cover Profits, Undercover Profits, affiliate marketing, affiliates[/tags]

This is ridiculous.

Hostmonster has lowered their hosting price from $9.95/month to $3.95/month and increased their limits on the product.

You can’t increase the ability to host unlimited domains, but they increased the bandwidth you get (who cares), and also the storage space (WooHoo!).

This hosting is soooooo much better than anything else I’ve seen its ridiculous.

And, what’s even better, is when you call them, you get a human…fast.

I’m posting this mostly so I can remember it:

http://www.istockphotos.com

Stock photos between $1-$5 depending on size.

That’s a great way to make a website look better.

This is interesting. It tells 2 stories:

1. The power of user generated content
2. Search engines certainly aren’t telling the whole story.

1. Users are blogging on WritingUp.com. They write hundreds of blog entries each day. They also write thousands of comments each day.

Two weeks ago a site:writingup.com search revealed that google had 510,000 pages from the domain writingup.com in their index.
Today, the same search reveals 729,000 pages.

The community is growing.

2. It has always been said that search engines won’t want to index very many pages of a site that has low pagerank or that has very few links to it.

Well, with 729,000 pages indexed, google says that writingup.com has 2 incoming links.
It also has a pagerank of 3!

THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!

Google isn’t telling the truth here.

Want more proof?

Try a link:writingup.com search on msn:

12,158 incoming links

Or what about a linkdomain:writingup.com search on yahoo?

20,400 incoming links.

Something is wrong here.

Or, what about a site:writingup.com search on yahoo?

They only have 13,100 pages in their index. Huh?

Or, msn

8227? What? What are you guys thinking?

Why can google find over 700,000 pages on writingup.com, and msn can only find just over 8000? I mean, all the url’s on the site are clean. They don’t have index.php?somevar=somethingelse. Everything is linked to. There aren’t duplicate posts on the site (yet).

So, my point is, search engines aren’t telling the whole truth.

Also, if you’re still using what the search engines tell you as a metric of how successful your SEO campaign is going, you’re fooling yourself (or, they’re fooling you, just like they’d like to do).

After having been with wordpress through 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, wordpress 2.0 is finally out.

Not that I’ve been anxiously awaiting it or anything, because when something works for me, I’m usually happy to leave it alone. But, I really hate when I write a post and realize I want to upload a file so I have to copy the text from the post, go to the upload screen, upload my file, copy the tag, only to realize that I just lost the copy I had of the post, so I can’t paste it back in and I have to write it all over again!

This version puts uploads inline with the posting screen. Nice job.

Upgrading…

I guess growing pains are good, if you’re growing like this:

You can see the dip in traffic on Christmas, and the little dip right before the skyrocketing from 20-25,000 hits/day to 40,000 hits/day was when we were having server problems.

The problem is that www.writingup.com grew so fast that we had major server problems. The week between christmas and new years was really a struggle for us. The server went down for hours at a time, basically time after time after time.

We were getting so many hits that our little server couldn’t handle it…

Or so we thought.

It turned out that mysql just needed some tweaking. I guess mysql by default has caching disabled so we turned on caching by adding this line to the /etc/my.cnf file:

query-cache-size = 20M

As soon as mysql started caching queries it immediatly started working again.

Before we added that our server load had slowly gone from .2 up to about 30 before it would just die. Mysql was getting so many queries (hundreds per second) that it couldn’t do them all, so it would start getting slow queries (queries that took over 2 seconds) and those take up a lot of memory. The system would take up all the memory, and then start using the swap space until there wasn’t any swap left. Then it would just die.

After turning on caching to mysql it never gets overloaded. It never gets behind. I’ve seen it doing 565 queries per second, which is more than it can handle for a sustained period of time, but it handled it just fine.

We also added this:

key_buffer_size = 64M

Which helped a little, but not as much as turning on caching (I don’t really remember what this one did, but I think it allows mysql to use more memory when searching through tables that have keys in them).

Anyway, the server has been up now for over 7 days without any problems. We’re still going to get a bigger machine for it, so that it can grow more.

We hit 300 bloggers sometime last week. We have 335 right now, and our alexa rank is climbing pretty quickly.

Not bad for having only launched it less than 2 months ago. Especially considering that the site looks terrible, isn’t very clear for how to refer someone, and I haven’t really started marketing it yet.

We have some big marketing campaigns slated for the near future, which include a bigger PPC campaign, a PR campaign, an emailing campaign (I met 2 people this weekend at the Big Seminar who have mailing lists of 650,000 and 15 million business opportunity seekers, who have double opted in to their lists…and they’re very willing to send an email about it), a newspaper press campaign, and finally a campaign to get the users to promote it more than they are already doing it.

I have had quite a few users ask me how they can promote their own blog and I’m putting together a plan for them.

The best part about the growth are the emails I get from people saying they’re starting to make money. It’s amazing how much confidence making just a little extra money will give you. If you can do it online once, you can repeate it 100 or 1000 times.

Plus, the more the site grows, the more money each person is going to make because people on the site read each others blogs.

Exciting.

A few months ago I got banned from using the Overture keyword suggester tool because I had written a script that would query it automatically for me.
Being banned from the tool was somewhat of a pain in the butt…because I couldn’t just pull it up any time I wanted to check search amounts. It didn’t stop me from doing it…as I just wrote another tool that I could stick on a server somewhere (a different ip address, that’s what overture banned) and have it query overture and give me the search amounts.
However, I didn’t like being banned from it so months ago I sent them an email asking them to unban me and I promised I’d never do again what I had been doing.

They said no.

Just today I randomly checked the tool again and I HAVE BEEN UN-BANNED!!!

I don’t know why, maybe it was just the people at overture feeling the need to repent of their evil ways and have mercy on poor peons like me. Or maybe they just made me sit out a predetermined amount of time and are now letting me have a chance again.

Either way, I’m happy to be able to use it again.

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I believe Yahoo is finally going to come up with their own version of Google’s Adsense.

http://publisher.yahoo.com/

It’s about time!!!

I think this will be sooo good for publishers like me. It will force Google and other companies who serve ads to pay their publishers more to compete for ad space on publishers pages. If they don’t, publishers will just switch to the other company who is paying more. It should put the power back into the hands of the publishers.