Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category
Content first style SEO
Posted on: July 27, 2010
- In: Site News | Tips
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DiveIntoThePool.com doesn’t rank as well as I would like in the SERPs for keyword phrases like “free online dating” so I’m always thinking of what I can do to try and make my site appealing not only to my users but also to the robot crawlers from Google, Yahoo and Bing. I thought about the organization of information on my homepage. I love the main smiling image and basic search form on our website but how did search engines see it? I used the Web Developer plugin for Firefox to disable CSS and start browsing my site. I’m only sad I didn’t check this out sooner.
Homepage with no SEO
Sub-page with no SEO
Horrible! How are search engines going to know what the content of my site is about, it doesn’t even register I have a dating site till half way down the page on the homepage! The sub-page doesn’t fair much better, search engines don’t use OCR tech when crawling to my knowledge, that page doesn’t ever say the title in text form!
So I used some CSS wizardry, a little positioning and I managed to reverse the order of the sign in and search content and the text content that describes my service on the page. For IE6 and IE7 there was a little JavaScript involved but the end result is excellent and much more friendly to the robots.
Homepage with new SEO
The sub-page was an easy fix though, set the image as a background-image for the header and text-indent the H1 text inside for the desired result.
Sub-page with new SEO
- In: Promoting | Tips
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I was inspired by a thread The Business of Software – Making a million bucks/year in revenue from a Hacker News submission to figure out just what it would take to make a million bucks a year from my free online dating site. The original thread lists out what revenue per hour or month you would need at what prices to make a million dollars a year. I’m not accounting for taxes or overhead here I am just interested in the gross income.
The numbers are not exact as nothing actually divides up nice and evenly into dollars and cents. To make a million dollars a year you need to make $2739.73 per day. I’m going to calculate out for AdSense revenue only here from my current numbers. No traffic details, CTR or CPC will be posted.
So from April 2010 lets say that my gross revenue per AdSense impression, this is per banner slot not per page view, was $0.0027457700650759. At this stage all those fractions of a cent mean a lot to me so bare with the over-sized number. This means that for my free advertising based site to make a million dollars in a year I would need to get no less than 997,801 AdSense impressions per day. Not to mention I would have to also miraculously keep my revenue per impression no less than $0.0027457700650759 for an entire year.
I happen to only have one banner per page, lets say I keep with that for this theoretical success year that means I’ll need 977,801 page views per day. So to make a million bucks a year from free:
- 40,742 ad impressions per hour
- 977,801 ad impressions per day
- 356,897,365 ad impressions per year
Wow, growth never scales like you want and the graphs never grow forever so it would actually take much more than that per year to make a million bucks.
Now I don’t get much organic traffic much (yet!) so to see those kinds of page views per day it would cost about $14,834.49 per day on AdWords to drive that traffic or around $5,414,590.51 per year. This does not take into account the vast increase of return users per day if I had $14k a day lying around to drop on ads. I’d have to spend a lot more time making ads if that were the case. So those numbers were just for fun I guess.
Anyway, when your product is free you have to get an enormous amount of traffic, more than I’ve seen yet but it’s only a matter of time and focus!
Maxing out your AdWords budget
Posted on: May 9, 2010
- In: Tips
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The advertising space changes very often with differences coming from reasons of season, economy or a host of other possibilities I haven’t begun to consider. I wasn’t maxing out my daily AdWords budget for DiveIntoThePool.com and I started looking through the campaign options looking for different settings that might get me more clicks to add up to my budget on the CPC I was willing to pay. Increasing my CPC was the first option I found which wasn’t a good idea at all. I’d end up paying more money per new user and not actually get any more users per day from my ad budget. These are some changes that I’ve made over these past few weeks that have shown great success in lowering my cost-per-conversion rate and using more of my ad budget per day without spending more per click.
Anyway, you’ve got a modest daily budget and what you feel is a good CPC that you’d like to pay but you aren’t spending all of your daily budget. I’ve got a few tips that can get you more clicks per day and some things to consider tweaking after making these changes.
If your running only text ads you’ll want to start by making some image ads, aside from commanding a larger visual space on the page, you’ll also have less ads bumping up against you. Image ads do a better job of increasing brand awareness and even if they don’t get clicked their impressions are still valuable to a point. Make sure you’ve enabled your ads to be displayed on the Content Network.
Make more Ad Groups! If your new like myself you most likely have a good set of keywords all in a single Ad Group. Do some brainstorming to think of niche searches and keywords that users might look for to find your site or product. If you target a national audience for instance, start making Ad Groups for each state and make sure to include at least one text ad per Ad Group that has the state keyword in the text. If your doing a more localized product think about using zip codes in your Ad Group or neighborhoods in your target city. Make sure each AdGroup Ad you create features your target area keywords in the text or image and make sure each keyword phase you use also features those keywords.
Let’s say you’ve added 50 new ads and you’re ready to let them start working for you, you need to go to your Campaign Management settings page and change Ad rotation to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly” so that your new ads get a fair chance. You might not want to keep it this way permanently but check back on your ad performance after a couple weeks and see if you want to change this back after seeing the performance of your ads vary.
If you haven’t setup some conversion tracking yet you’ll want to get that running, you can see some help from the Google page on Conversion Tracking setup. Now you’ll want to go back into your history for AdWords at least 48 hours back and click on the Networks tab, here you can see how much money your spending out and what it costs to get a conversion from any given site. I’ve had some terrible spam sites send nothing but junk traffic that I then excluded from this page to make my dollars work harder for my conversions. Also take a look at how your conversions are doing for the Google Search Partner pages, if you find that you aren’t getting the right CPA for these pages you might want to disabled being shown on those partner pages. If you don’t have page your promoting that has any type of conversions you’ll want to focus on bounce rate and other analytics that I’d go over in another post.
This post turned into quite a wall of text and anyone not serious about getting the most money from their advertising dollar will surely say tl;dr. I’ve seen great success implementing these changes over the past 2 weeks but these methods require a much higher degree of hands on administration. If you just want to set it and forget it this post won’t help you much. I hope these tips help other advertisers max out their AdWods budget!
Headlines in the Pool
Posted on: August 28, 2009
- In: Tips
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I’ve had the pleasure to review lots of profiles in recent months and I absolutely love it when the member uses the pool theme to write their headline. By far the most popular word I see is “looking” and even that’s been used by ddscs in his headline “looking to go swimming”.
I found a few other good ones too.
- splishsplash78 – “just checking the waters”
- Caprica – “Chillen by the pool with a cold drink”
- johntlg – “skinny dipping’
Can’t wait to see more creative ways members find to dive into the pool!
A Guide to Spotting Dating Spammers
Posted on: June 14, 2009
- In: Tips
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I’ve had more experience with online dating site spammers since launching than I thought I ever would. I foolishly didn’t even consider spammers as an issue when I first implemented reCaptcha on my registration page. Spammers cost me greatly when they first hit the site. They would contact every one of my members and each time a spammer would hit I would have another member that left. My heart ached that each of my members got a new message notification, I knew that their hopes were raised only to be disappointed when they checked their inbox to find it was just spam. I couldn’t get decent sleep while I considered solutions to keep this from happening. I have since come up with a much better way to handle spam on my dating site that has kept my members inboxes clean and no one is aware of them for the most part. However I am not always online to remove fresh spam profiles and I wanted to let everyone know what types of spammers I have encountered so everyone can help to protect themselves when I am not around to remove the spammers immediately.
Flower Girls
The flower girls as I’ve come to call them are typically from the country of Senegal in Africa. They will post primarily as female profiles with pictures of pretty flowers. Completely disregarding the description they post the same sentence over and over. They typically won’t select a state other than Alabama to create the profile just that much faster. The messages they send all include a variation of the 419 scam and will have plenty of God bless yous. They will give you their email address for confidential communication, do NOT email these spammers, once they have a valid address it will get passed around.
Am Pretty
The am pretty spammers. They create detailed profiles with full descriptions and a matching picture but can’t seem to use the word I correctly. I’ve read descriptions similar to “Am good looking woman and am pretty” which is a great tip off that something is not quite right. While the picture is always of the proper sex, male or female, the ethnicity, eye color and hair color will not typically match up. These spammers will go for personal contact first and foremost. The internal messaging system is your friend! It isn’t as good as your personal email client but it keeps new contacts at arms length. These spammers will say that they found you interesting and want to chat giving their email address and instant messaging information on the first message. I believe this is to open the lines of personal communication or verify a valid email address that might be scammed using other methods.
The Nigerian
Nigerian spammers, most famous for the 419 scam these spammers are much better at creating profiles than those from Senegal their profiles come from various cities and states, they have matching descriptions, profile pictures and lengthy paragraphs about themselves. These profiles are almost impossible to spot from just looking at them unless you’re doing the site administration. There are a few mistakes in each profile and the pictures typically look like the beginning of an adult video. The messages are the same grab for valid email addresses or the start of the 419 scam.
Spoofers
The IP spoofers are just a step up from the standard Nigerian spammer. They use a service or USA based internet provider to create profiles from locations inside the USA which make them even harder to spot. These profiles typically have less errors than the standard Nigerian ones but the messages are the same. Either we have tons of money to give away or three paragraphs about how great your profile is and giving out their contact information without ever mentioning something from your local area or profile. Easy to spot after a message is sent out.
Waiters
Waiters have been the latest on my dating site that I have found and by far the best. It’s a twist on the spoofer where the profile is created and looks valid to the outside. Good grammar and spelling in the post and a good profile photo and description. For all preceding spammer types they will immediately blast everyone on the site with a message for money or email contact but the waiters will wait for a few days before attempting to contact everyone. Sneaky!
Sleeper
I haven’t seen a sleeper yet but I can guess that they should exist. The profile is immaculate with every t crossed and i dotted. They won’t message anyone or try and spam to the whole site at once. The profile may sleep for weeks or days and just wait for other members to contact them before initiating the scam of collecting email addresses or starting a 419 style dialog. These are the most costly for spammers to make as they won’t get much of a return and can’t be force fed to the other members.
The Real Deal
I’ve never met the real deal and I don’t want to. There are some scammers that no automated or personally administered system can protect against. I know that disappoints me as well but the fact of the matter is there are people out there inside the USA or out that will get by all the above obvious flaws. They will work for months on you using love or persuasion for money or favors. They will prey on insecurities and loneliness and trust in the good of people. Just remember the old adage that if something is too good to be true it probably is. As in real life, whenever you approach new relationships it’s best to approach them with caution.
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