Month: October 2006

How much is a text link on your website worth? The guys over at text-link-ads.com have put together a nifty little tool to answer that very question. Since they’re in the business or brokering text links online, I would consider them a reasonable authority on the subject.

The text link calculator makes use of TLA’s proprietary algorithm for determining the value of a static text link on a given website. Factors in the equation include:

• The URL of the site,
• Its category,
• the number of links to be sold,
• whether the link is singular or site wide,
• and the link’s placement on the page.

As an added bonus to calculating links, TLA has included a nifty little heat map similar to the Google Heatmap published by Google.com for their publisher program.

Not surprisingly, my research shows that sites with the highest payout/cost are those concerned with gambling, finances, real estate and the other usual suspects.

I’ve recently signed up and purchased some text links with TLA and have found that their calculator was off by only a few dollars so far as the pricing was concerned. The link I purchased on talkr.com for this site cost me $50/month for placement on the top of the right hand column. For the same placement, the calculator has them pegged at $40/month, so for a free tool the calculator wasn’t off by an extreme amount.

If you haven’t signed up for text-link-ads.com yet, I highly recommend checking out their $100 instant coupon with the purchase of $125 in links. With that coupon you can sign up, do the first month as a test and only be out of pocket $25. Here’s my affiliate banner for the coupon or you can go to $100 in FREE Links.

One of the biggest problems I face as I develop more and more websites is the constant monitoring I have to do for community blogs, forums, and anything else where outsiders have the ability to add their own content. I’m constantly deleting spam, welcoming new members, scanning for business opportunities and generally keeping an eye on things. This can consume an hour or more of my day easily.

Enter my new favorite tool, FeedReader. FeedReader is a free, fast, and streamlined feed aggregator that polls my designated RSS feeds and aggregates (or collects) the results in an easily readable and sortable format that I can scan in just a few minutes. It sits quietly in my taskbar tray collecting updates and even alerts me when something new pops up.

Because almost all of the content management systems I use to power my sites generate an RSS feed, I can collect and monitor multiple sites quickly and with relative ease.

Feed aggregating is an excellent management tool if you run one or a hundred websites that need tending to, and I recommend FeedReader as the software to do it.

Screenshots

Automating tasks on your website is extremely important in the high volume game of website marketing and promotion. Here are a few tips and ideas to help you automate your site:

Use third party service providers to analyze statistics, deliver email updates, and monitor your site for downtime.

Make use of new Web 2.0 standards like XML and RSS feeds to deliver content to various parts of your site.

Promote tools and applications like forums, blog comments, and wikis to make your site interactive so you don’t have to produce 100% of the content manually

Import your web site’s RSS feeds into a feed aggregator so you can monitor what’s happening on every part of your site without a lot of clicking around.

Enlist the aid of trusted members to moderate and encourage others to interact with your website.

Submit sitemaps to search engines rather than manually submitting individual pages.

Create multiple email accounts for specific tasks (I have one called “alerts” where all of my site notifications – new users, sales, errors, etc. – are sent).

I personally own and maintain several successful websites. They are successful for many reasons: they earn a large revenue stream, have high traffic volumes, or address a specific need very well. In my time with online publishing, I’ve learned that there are many factors that contribute to success, but this last one – the ability to address a specific need in a unique or more effective way than anyone else – is often times the difference between success and a failure.

An example of addressing a specific need comes from one of my favorite websites, 1KM1KT (One Thousand Monkeys, One Thousand Typewriters), which is an online publishing house for independent role playing game developers.

1KM1KT earns its success not by being the most innovative role-playing game website, nor by being the largest. Instead, it addresses a simple need in a way that other sites had overlooked and is rewarded by a faithful following, a large search engine presence, and a reasonable income stream. 1KM1KT’s primary function is to act as an online library where independent game developers can store their games – a need other sites had failed to address to the role playing game community.

The point of this article is that innovative technology, big budget marketing campaigns and a staff of hundreds are not necessary to build a successful website. All you need to do is look around at your daily life and ask yourself, “how can I make this better?”

I heard an interesting term today that applied to the evolution of search engine technology called latent semantic analysis. The application of latent semantic analysis applies groupings of terms or variables to a concept, rather than a more traditional one-on-one relationship.

Although the technology has its flaws, it appears to be the next wave in the evolution of search engine technology. No longer will the Googles and Yahoo!s of the world be dependant on keyword density or incoming link anchor text, but rather on the concepts and information of your website and those of websites that point to yours.

Ultimately, this is just one more argument against trying to game search engines for higher rankings. Those wishing to sustain their websites over the long hall should focus on providing quality, useful material for their audience in a way that is easy to understand.

For more information on latent semantic analysis (LSA) here are some good resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Semantic_Indexing
http://lsa.colorado.edu/
http://lsa.colorado.edu/papers/dp1.LSAintro.pdf