The Dollar Factory

The best keyword research tool

Keyword research is an essential component for online success whether you are into blogging or affiliate marketing with AdWords or other similar Pay Per Click services. A good selection of niche keywords with little competition can make your online campaign skyrocket and earn hundreds if not thousands of dollars for you.

But where can you find good keywords? What are the best tools available for online entrepreneurs, especially those just getting started and have only a limited budget?

Essentially, you have two options. One is to pay for a subscription in order to gain access to a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker. Your other option is to make the most of the free keyword research tools available online.

The best free keyword research tool that I have ever used is that published by Aaron Wall of SeoBook.com. Not only did Aaron write an excellent eBook on SEO but he has made available for free a large collection of tools useful to those trying to make money online. His free keyword research tool is probably the best one I have ever used. It polls data from the Wordtracker database and it shows the approximate number of daily searches on all major search engines. It also allows you to download the results on your own computer in CSV format. Now that’s convenient because later you can easily import the data into your AdWords campaign.

This free keyword research tool will help you get started making money online. Once you learn the ropes, then you can graduate to a more advanced tool such as the one offered by Wordtracker.

Posted in Pay Per Click | No Comments »

Facebook losing its charm before it starts making money

Last year, Facebook made headlines about its increasing popularity and open API that allowed 3rd party developers to access its vast user base. Amid all the excitement about the exponentially increasing traffic to the site, many tried to figure out how to monetize it and basically assign a value to the company itself. Reminding us of the dot com craziness of the late nineties, Facebook received a valuation of more than $15 billion as a result of Microsoft investing $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company.

Unfortunately, 2008 in its short life has been mostly but bad news for Facebook. Their new advertising platform known as Beacon was not welcomed by their members (actually that happened towards the end of 2007) and essentially shook people into realizing that monetizing the Facebook crowd would be much more difficult than initially thought. The many 3rd party applications developed using the publicly available API are mostly annoying and hardly useful or profitable. In fact, even the most popular applications cannot make good money on Facebook. The company itself has yet to turn a profit and according to an article posted on TechCrunch, they expect to lose $150 million in 2008.

In the meantime, new data shows that users are getting fatigued and losing interest on the website. Although registrations continue to increase (at a lower rate than before,) the users are spending less time on Facebook. It seems that everybody is getting tired spending all his time poking people. Or they just realized that they still dislike their old friends from high school and maybe that was the reason they stopped talking to them in the first place, until Facebook came along anyways.

Competition is also fierce. MySpace which is larger than Facebook since it has been around longer is about to release its own public API giving 3rd parties access to their users. In the meantime, Google recently released a new API that taps into a person’s social graph constructed using data freely available on the World Wide Web. Finally, a myriad of smaller but more specialized social networks have emerged over the last couple of years capturing those users who just want to avoid the clutter of the larger networks.

All in all, Facebook is in decline and they will have a hard time justifying their huge valuation. The company will not go away any time soon and it will continue to exist for many, many years but the days that all we hear about how cool Facebook is won’t last much longer. And the insane valuation that Microsoft placed on them based on smoke and mirrors will soon be nothing but a long lost memory. I just wonder, what new fad will replace Facebook?

Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Google’s social graph API

Google has released a new API that will allow developers to create applications that take advantage of a person’s WWW social graph. The social graph will be provided by Google who already crawls every page on the Web and extracts relationship information specified using the XFN and FOAM protocols. This could be a very useful tool for anyone who wants access to a social graph and doesn’t want to deal with companies such as Facebook and MySpace (when they release their API, that is.) The following video gives a brief introduction to Google’s social graph API.

Posted in Webmaster Tools | No Comments »

Google streetviews gone wrong

A brilliant take on where Google’s (and others’) detailed mapping of our cities may lead too. And you thought that Google’s motto was to do no evil! Big brother is watching baby. It won’t be long before Google starts offering a money making program for blackmailing unsuspecting suckers who are filmed by their army of robot mapping cars.

Posted in General | No Comments »

My first action for 2008

First of all, happy new year to all of you and I hope 2008 brings you lots of profits.

Second, I want to spend a few minutes to talk about the first thing I did on the first day of 2008. I removed Text-Link-Ads from my highest ranked and most profitable site. Why did I do this?

A couple of reasons actually. First of all, I am a bit worried that Google will remove my site or seriously drop my ranking in their index. I know some people will say that Google is using their monopoly power to scare webmasters and control the World Wide Web; honestly though, it is their index and they have every right to add or remove whichever site they please. As far as I am concerned, I want to be in their index and rank well so I don’t want to give them reason to remove me.

The second reason and I would say the most important is TLA itself. First of all, I work hard to promote my sites. So, when I sell a link why should I give 50% of my revenue to them? It is not like finding people to sell links to is hard! They are everywhere. Not only that but TLA’s prices are terrible. You would think that after Google bitch slapped so many webmasters for selling links (the Pay Per Post publishers got hit the hardest, apparently) TLA would have at least increased the prices to compensate those still in the program and willing to take the risk. But nothing like that happened. TLA makes enough money as it is taking advantage of webmasters’ hard labor and so they made no effort to address Google’s war on selling links.

Because of that, I decided that my most important site which ranks well and receives a considerable amount of traffic is not worth risking to line the pockets of the MediaWhiz (owners of TLA) people.

That was my first action for 2008.

Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »