I had assumed that these days, my secret tactic was pretty obvious to eBayers and that it would be losing its effectiveness. My experiences over the past couple of weeks don’t support this assumption and it worked even when bidding against well established, long term/high feedback eBayers.

Ok, so this is how it works. Let’s say you are bidding on an item which is worth about £50. The bidding is at £30 with a few minutes to go. Several bidders are interested and it looks like the item is going to go for what it is worth.

When bidding on eBay, I always leave my bid until the closing seconds of the auction – some call this sniping but in fairness it’s just common sense, why show your hand any earlier than you need to? It is fair to assume that one or more of the other bidders will have put in proxy bids (so although the bidding might be at £30, they may have said they will pay up to £50 and their bids will automatically be increased as other bidders bid the price up) and it is the way people use proxy bidding which will give you an advantage in many cases.

So if the item is worth around £50 and there is a bit of interest in it, then you can probably assume that at least one bidder will have put in a proxy bid of £50. If you also bid £50 but they put their proxy in first, then they will win. So you need to bid higher than their proxy bid. For some reason most people on eBay seem to still be stuck in mindset of using round numbers when bidding. In other words, (from my experience at least), when placing bids they nearly always use a figure such as £50, £55, £60 and so on. This means that if you make the assumption that the highest proxy bid is £50, you only need to bid £50.01 to win the item and if you put the bid in during the closing seconds of the auction, your competition has little time to react and re-bid.

This might sound ridiculously simple but I have won five out of five auctions in the past few days using this method. The cheapest auction I won at £10.01 (the next highest bidder had put a proxy bid of £10) and the dearest auction I won at £260.01 (next highest bidder was £260). I was discussing this with a friend and he revealed that he had just won a car using the same technique! He bid £1601 and the next highest bid was £1600!

As I say, a very simple technique but one which is very effective and can win you auctions for just a penny!

Like many of you I’m sure, I have been considering how Panda has and will continue to affect my sites and it is clear that the way we all look at SEO in the future has changed dramatically.

Before Panda it was enough to have pages of good quality, unique content and a few inbound links to your site in order to rank well in Google.  Now, as the search engine becomes smarter, it is clear that this method of SEO is not going to be enough.  Instead, Google are fine-tuning their methods of assessing the whole user experience on our websites.  In other words, if the user isn’t having a good experience then why should your site be ranked highly in Google’s results?

So how are Google able to assess user experience?  Well although the algorithms etc that Google will be using are, no doubt, massively complex, the basics of how they can assess user experience is actually quite simple.  Google has access to an absolute ton of data gained from both the way searches are conducted to Google Analytics (which so many sites use now as the standard visitor tracking software).  Let’s look at just a couple of aspects of this data…

Firstly, page views.  If Google can tell how many pages a visitor is looking at on your website, it helps them to understand how interesting your site was to that visitor.  Same goes for the time they spend on your site in total.  In an ideal world you want visitors looking at lots of pages and spending hours on your site.  Of course, in the real world this isn’t going to happen but if you look at your stats and see that people are, on average, looking at one page per visit and spending seconds on your site then you may have problems with Panda.

Secondly your bounce rate.  Bounce rate is expressed as a percentage and it is, quite simply, the number of people who visit your site and leave after viewing just the page they arrived at.  This could mean that they click an external link on your site or that they arrive from Google and just click ‘back’.  If the latter, Google are going to assume that your site wasn’t helpful in terms of their original search and guess what?  Yup, down the rankings you may go!

Now whilst the Panda algorithms will definitely help Google to clear up its index of poor quality ‘made for Adsense’ sites etc it may also affect many legitimate webmasters who offer high quality content for free.  For example, I have a number of sites which offer lots of content for free and which earn a modest income from advertising.  This blog is a prime example – there is nothing for sale on this site and the only income it receives is from advertising.  Pre-Panda, I didn’t have too much of a problem if someone visited the site and clicked on a Google Adsense advert, after all, they would have just earned me some money.  Now though, my focus needs to be slightly different.  I need to be thinking about trying to keep a visitor on the site as long as possible before they click an advertising link and that is a much harder thing to do…

The reason it is hard is because you have to find the right balance.  If your content is ‘too good’ the visitor will be inclined to stay on the site and any advertising will blend into the background and be ignored.  If you make the advertising stand out more than your content then you are risking a high bounce rate and low page views/time on site.

So whilst you might be able to improve your key SEO data, it may be at the risk of losing advertising revenue.  Who knows how things will actually pan out but with more Panda updates planned over the coming months, one thing is for sure, it won’t be too long before you see the impacts of Panda on your websites.

Hot on the heels of Panda comes Panda 2.2 launched last week. Google is getting smarter at kicking poor quality websites out of their index and the days when you could throw up a bunch of domains with poorly written/researched articles and expect a boatload of visitors for free are long gone.  Even well designed sites with ‘unique’ content are being affected and it is only going to get tougher as Google fine-tunes their new systems.

Of course, Panda should be great news for Google’s users and should ultimately mean that their search results are more accurate and provide searchers with a better all round experience but if Google decide that your site is not what people should be looking for, how will it affect your business?

The video below from SEOMOZ will help to explain the changes and things you might want to be doing from an SEO point of view – the rules have changed forever!  If you own a website business, you really need to watch it…

Buying an established business means I can pick up a site which has an existing customer base and income stream without doing the hard work of building the site and doing the initial marketing (which is quite often the hardest bit).

What I have discovered is that even finding a suitable website business to buy is an absolute nightmare! Although there are plenty of sites up for sale, you’ve really got to sort though the rubbish to find a gem. Not only that but there seem to be a lot of people out there who are quite prepared to try and mislead buyers if they think they can get away with it.

Fortunately I have a wealth of online experience built up over 13+ years so I am probably better placed than many people to pick up on the areas where sellers may have been less than honest. Let me give you some examples of the type of thing I have seen in just the last week…

Supplying misleading traffic figures seems to be a popular thing to do, especially with new websites. I have seen sites for sale which have only been running for a month or two which are claiming traffic of 20,000 unique visitors per month! Unless you are incredibly lucky, this just doesn’t happen. Dig a little deeper and chances are that the seller has paid for a ‘traffic package’ which will provide a stream of junk traffic to make their stats look good. I found one site which was clearly targeted at a US audience and despite only being online for six weeks, was claiming 30,000 unique visitors per month! A quick look at the Google Analytics file associated with the site confirmed that yes, Google was counting in the region of 1000 visitors per day. However, dig a little deeper and you would see that ALL of this traffic originated in China! Not good for an American site and a huge warning sign that this traffic is not what it first seems.

Take a second site I found. Basically a niche site which was selling a particular type of kitchen product. There were about 90 different types of this product available for purchase and the site claimed that all products were dropshipped direct from the main UK distributor. The products were quite expensive which meant a handful of high value orders each month. Over the past year there were around 70 orders in total. Nothing strange in that you might think. However, I noticed that as well as over 80 testimonials from customers, every single item on the site had at least 1 product review from a customer and some had up to 5! There were over 250 product reviews apparently from just 70 orders. This is completely impossible – it’s a fact that most people won’t bother with a testimonial or a review, even Amazon doesn’t have reviews for every product! Again, I dug a little deeper and found that ALL of the reviews were written in the past two months and the icing on the cake for me was that one of the reviews actually read as follows:

“I got paid a measly 5cents for rating this product and writing this review”

Priceless – you couldn’t make it up (well actually you could and they did!).

This particular case actually got worse. I figured that whilst the reviews etc might all be fake, they did seem to be making sales from the site (of course the fact that the seller had lied about the reviews could mean they had lied about sales too). There was enough information in the sale listing for me to determine who the dropshipping wholesaler was and I therefore contacted them directly to obtain some wholesale prices. I wasn’t about to hand over a lump of money to the scamming seller but I might throw up a quick website of my own instead ? Guess what? The dropshipper advised me that they had recently decided to cease offering a dropshipping service! And there ladies and gentlemen we almost certainly have the reason that the website is up for sale!

You might think that a site like this would never sell, that there wouldn’t be anyone out there daft enough to buy it. You’d be wrong – the site sold at auction for almost £12,000 and I bet the poor buyer has no idea about any of my findings above.

I have come across numerous sites like this during the past week, it really is quite worrying as to someone who doesn’t understand how traffic/sales figures and so on can be faked, it would be easy to get ripped off.

If you are looking at buying an existing online business, just be careful out there – it’s a minefield!

I can’t believe it is nearly a year since I last updated this blog! Where does the time go? I was only reminded because an old subscriber of mine dropped me an email to see if I was still working online! The answer to this question is yes, most definitely however these days the majority of my online businesses have absolutely nothing to do with Internet marketing or showing other people how to earn a living online hence the fact that this site has become a little neglected.

However I was prompted to add this quick post following the above email and also because of a promotional card I received through the post from those lovely people over at Google. The card was promoting Google Adsense (which I have been using since it was first launched) and was customized around one of my sites to inform me that I wasn’t using the maximum number of Adsense advertising blocks on some pages. This was true, I wasn’t! To be honest, the site in question is one which I haven’t done a thing with for years and just sits there kicking in a bit of Adsense revenue every month but it prompted me to take another look at it.

I like to think I know a bit about Adsense and over the years, it has earned me some serious dosh so I wasn’t overly convinced that adding another Adsense block would make a lot of difference. However, the card from Google also suggested that I set the site up to accept both text and image advertising blocks (something which I do as a matter of course these days). Because the site had had Adsense added so long ago, the option to display images and text wasn’t one which I had opted for thus only text ads were being displayed. There are a number of advantages of displaying both, not least the fact that it gives a bit more variety. Also people do tend to filter out Google text advertising these days as they become more used to it. I have also found that image ads can often pay a higher clickthrough rate but that may just be on the keywords I am targeting so you may have different results.

Anyway, long story short, I spent half an hour adding and updating the Adsense code on three of my ‘old’ websites two days ago and so far the results are staggering. The sites were previously achieving good clickthrough rates of just over 4% but after my amendments this rate has increased to over 17% for the past two days! Now two days is clearly not a very long period of time and it will be interesting to see how this rate adjusts over the next month or so but as an initial result, this is excellent.

I have Google to thank for dropping me the promotional card (of course they will be earning more as a result of my changes too) and if you have Adsense blocks on a website which you haven’t looked at for ages, I urge you to take five minutes to review them today and make sure you are using Adsense to its full potential otherwise you may well be leaving money on the table just as I was.

One of the most common online business mistakes I see (and have seen over the past 10 or so years) is when individuals put all their eggs into one basket and concentrate on just one online business and one online income stream.  For me this has never been an ideal option and quite frankly, in my opinion, it is risky beyond belief!

The Internet changes at an alarming rate and what works today may not work tomorrow.  Believe me, I have owned websites which were earning £3000 a month on Friday but due to a Google update were down to £300 a month by the following Monday!   At the time, if that had been my only website and my only source of income, I would have been seriously worried.  As it was, the site was only one of several which I owned at the time and although it was incredibly irritating/frustrating/annoying, it wasn’t the end of the World and I wasn’t going to lose my house over it.

I have said it before and I will say it again, it is far better to have multiple streams of income.  I would always prefer to have ten websites each earning £300 a month rather than one website earning £3000 a month.  The main problem seems to be that if you have a site which is doing really well, you end up spending most of your time working on that one site to ensure you get the absolute maximum benefit out of it.  That’s fine to a certain extent – I have periods where I concentrate on one business for months at a time BUT I always keep an eye on my other businesses and tweak them as necessary.

[pullquote]I would always prefer to have ten websites each earning £300 a month rather than one website earning £3000 a month…[/pullquote]

If you are just starting out (or even if you have a couple of online income streams in place), my advice is to get a business to the point where it is earning a certain amount of profit each month (I have always considered £300 a month to be about right).  Then when you have achieved this target, start working on your next website/business and do the same.  Continue to maintain and grow the first one at the same time but ideally have more than one project on the go at once.  One of the other advantages of this way of working is that it will help to prevent you from getting bored with one specific site.  Believe me, whilst you may think that your new website is the greatest thing since sliced bread when you first start working on it, after a few weeks of looking at the same site everyday it can soon start to get stale!

Of course, some business ideas will work far better than others and some won’t work at all but the beauty of the Internet is that it costs so little to run a simple online business that even if a site only makes a few pounds a month profit, it can be worth keeping it going.  For example, I have a number of websites which I set up years ago and which I haven’t updated (or even looked at!) for about four years but every single month these sites each generate between £20 and £50 a month in profit in return for me doing absolutely nothing!  Why would I turn them off?  Ok, they are never going to be big money earners but even £20 a month is worth having if you don’t have to do anything for it.

Over time it is likely that you will find that you have one or two websites which contribute the bulk of your monthly income and that’s fine but just make sure you have a handful of others which also bring in some cash just in case one day your big sites no longer work…

As well as my websites and other online business interests, I still have an eBay business which ticks over in the background and which, in a worse case scenario could pay my monthly bills (I personally don’t like selling on eBay at all, far too much effort but if it was a choice between this and getting a job, eBay wins every time!)

Todays lesson?  Multiple income streams are key – don’t put all your Internet eggs into one virtual basket

In case you hadn’t noticed, the World Cup has started!  Now, I personally have very little absolutely no interest in football whatsoever BUT despite this, the World Cup could affect the profitability of my businesses over the next few weeks…

Football, in the UK at least, is one thing that will drag people from their computers to in front of the television and if people are not in front of their computers, they are not spending money with me (or you).  Therefore, if you are planning any kind of promotion or launch over the World Cup period you would do well to ensure that it doesn’t coincide with one of the major matches.  Even if you don’t run an online business, it is possible that the World Cup could affect you.  Do you sell on eBay?  Do you buy on eBay?  If so, avoid posting auctions which will end during a match and if you are buying, lookout for auctions which DO end during a match as there is every possibility that you could grab yourself a bargain.

And don’t think this is just a bit of theory on my part, I learnt the hard way some years ago that football does indeed affect eBay bids!  I had one of my favourite cars of all time up for auction, a 1961 Land Rover and I was extremely surprised when the vehicle went for about £500 below its value.  It was only when the buyer picked it up and mentioned in passing that he had nearly missed the end of the auction because ‘…it was right in the middle of the England game…’ that I realised what had happened!  It also explained the steady flow of emails from people asking if I had sold the Land Rover as they had been watching the match and therefore missed the end of the auction! 

As I said before, I have absolutely no interest in football but now I do at least take a bit of notice if it is going to affect my pocket!  You will find a full World Cup fixture list at this link.

As iPhone sales (and now iPad sales) continue to grow, the demand for new iPhone apps is growing at a similar rate.  Although I have been busy with my web businesses over the past few months (mainly on account of the fact that I have had nearly three years ‘off’!), I have had one eye on the iPhone apps market as I think there is considerable opportunity to make some serious money over the next few years.

Now I am no app expert but I have been reading a fair bit about the marketplace over the last few weeks and have followed a couple of individuals as they have developed and released iPhone apps onto iTunes.  There are two main ways of ‘selling’ an iPhone app, either for free or for a fixed price.  My initial thoughts were that the paid apps would be the best way of earning however this does not necessarily seem to be the case.  With a free app it is possible to include adverts (a bit like Google Adsense) which earn you money whenever someone clicks on one.  This means that you could potentially earn something every time a user opens the app whereas with a paid app, you only earn on day one.  Equally, even if someone downloads a free app and doesn’t click on an app for months, there is still the chance that one day they will so your earning potential is kind of unlimited.  When you factor into the equation the fact that free apps get download in far larger numbers than paid ones, I have to say that going down the free route looks like the better option.

The initial problem which held me back from moving into the app market was the fact that I have very little programming experience but when I think about it, I have very little HTML/PHP experience yet I have been earning from websites coded in these

languages for over 12 years.  How?  Simple, I hired someone else and guess what, surprise surprise, the app market is no different!  There are thousands of capable app programmers out there who would be happy to take on the development of your app and hand over the finished product to you so that you can deal with the marketing.  So this is my plan, I have a few ideas for different apps and over the coming weeks I will be obtaining development quotes and hopefully getting one or two up and running and (fingers crossed) bringing in a bit of revenue.

If you can write articles, this might be one of the most important things you read over the next 12 months!

Info Barrel is a revenue sharing website.  What this basically means is that the site acts as a location for people to publish articles in return for a share of any revenue which these articles may generate.  The revenue generated tends to come from Google Adsense adverts which are placed on the article page so that when a reader finds the article via a search engine or other link, the hope is that they read it and click on an ad.  Info Barrel also allows you to place a couple of affiliate links in each article and will also display Amazon adverts with your affiliate link.  There are many similar sites around for example, eHow and Squidoo, both of which are very well established sites with many many writers and articles already online.  Info Barrel is slightly different in as much as it is relatively new BUT it is growing at a considerable rate and shows every chance of succeeding in giving the big boys a run for their money.

I only heard about Info Barrel a couple of weeks ago but I can definitely see the potential for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the current top writers are already earning worthwhile money while the site is only a PR4 – as the site grows and PR increases these earnings are set to sky-rocket.  Info Barrel allows you to place your Google Adsense publisher ID into their system and they display your Google Adsense ads 75% of the time.  This means that your earnings go directly to your own Adsense account – no waiting for payouts from a third party.  In addition, the site runs monthly competitions which give you the chance to earn up to 90% of revenue!

All articles are reviewed for quality and uniqueness and article titles can only be used once.  This last point is one of the reasons why this is an excellent time to get on the Info Barrel bandwagon because the good titles (from an SEO point of view) are going fast BUT there are still plenty of opportunities if you are willing to put the work in.

How much can I earn?

Well my honest answer is that I don’t know, I am pretty new to Info Barrel myself but I am aware that some writers are earning up to $1000 a month in Adsense clicks from just a few hundred articles.  This is a superb return and in theory these earnings should continue to grow as the site increases traffic, PR and authority in the search engine rankings.  Personally I think that anyone capable of writing a few good articles would be crazy to miss an opportunity like this as whilst I might be wrong, a bit of work now could pay dividends for years to come.  My advice, get a hundred or so articles on Info Barrel and see what happens, if they start earning then add more, if not, then what have you lost?

You can sign up for Info Barrel here – it’s FREE!

In simple terms, when you put Adsense ads on your web pages, Google crawls the pages to see what the content is about and then displays adverts which are relevant to this content.  For example, if you have a page about weight loss, chances are the ads Google displays will be for weight loss products/supplements and so on.  The thing is though that Google isn’t always that good at knowing which information on your page it should take the most notice of and sometimes it gets it wrong.  In other words, Google might pick up on a couple of ‘rogue’ keywords which throws it’s normally excellent choice of adverts way off.  Section targeting allows you to tell the Google robot which content it needs to pay most attention to and it is soooo simple to use!

If you want to use section targeting, all you need to do is add the following HTML tag at the start of the content you want Google to take note of:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

and then add the following tag to the end of the content:

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you wish, you can also tell Google to ignore certain sections of your page by using  a (weight=ignore) comment in the starting tag as follows:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Google say that it can take up to 2 weeks before they take notice of these tags but my advice is start using them today.  If you use WordPress there are a number of free plugins which will automatically apply these tags to your article/post pages – just use the Plugin search in the admin panel to look for ‘section targeting’.

And don’t worry, this isn’t a sneaky blackhat trick to fool Google, used correctly it is perfectly within the terms and conditions of the Google Adsense programme – here is their official FAQ on the subject.