If you have a website, or if you use the internet to search, you have been effected by Google's Panda.

What is Google Panda?

The Panda updates are an attempt by Google to create a better user experience. The idea is that sites which give bad user experiences have certain things in common. Finding these commonalities, and reducing them to a mathematical equation which somehow downgrades these sites automatically is the idea.

Panda results

Depending on who you talk to, it either works great, or will destroy the fabric of the universe. In truth, the results are a mixed bag, but I can see how it could help in the long run after many iterations. Like antivirus program, it will have to be constantly changing to keep up with the people who seek ways to get around it. I am not here to praise Panda, or to attack it, I just wanted to make some observations.

Panda for business and branding

When Panda 2.5 was released into the wild, I noticed immediately. I have a site that dropped a couple of spots in the serps on all the major keywords for the niche. It frightened me a little at first. Then I took a look at which sites had been placed ahead of mine for those terms, and they are all businesses that sell the types of products I am offering help on.  It would seem that this release was aimed at helping brands and businesses, and that information sites may have taken a little hit as these business sites moved up.

How business and information sites interact

My site is about practical matters like maintenance and repair, and shows individuals how to get the best deals on what they really need, and how to care for the product to keep it in tip top condition.

As an example, let's say it is "auto repair and maintenance". So now the car sale sites are ranking ahead of the car maintenance site. Fair enough. I may not like it, but I can understand it.

Pre Panda 2.5 the site ranked in the first and second slot for the search terms. Post Panda, it ranks third to sixth. There was a breif drop in traffic, and a commensurate drop in earnings, and then both returned to normal levels although the serp's remained the same. This leads me to beleive that people searching for a phrase like "Corvette" are about as likely to be looking for information on the care and feeding of the vehicle as they are to be looking for a place to buy one. They seem to be looking down the row until they find something that matches the query as they understand it. I am getting the same traffic for the search as before because the user seems to know what he, or she is looking for.

I might be selling advertisement or leads to the very dealers who passed me in the ranks. If that is the case, it is a little more difficult to convince them to continue to purchase space unless they look carefully at the stats and see that my site is still sending them the same amount of traffic. What seems to be happening is that the searcher types the phrase, looks at the serp's, looks down the page to the result he needs, reads about his chosen subject, and then decides to look into buying.

If the serps were segmented by intention, the user could go directly to the result they intended to find. Like "Corvette tail light" is just as likely to be a request for tail light repair information, like; Can I do it myself? and "How do I do it?" as it is for buying a tail light lense, and if the first is the case, the second would naturally follow after the user determined that they could in fact do the job. In other words, purchase follows information.

The same is true for other areas, for instance, "painting my home", is probably more likely to be a search for information than for paint stores. In this case the serps reflect this knowledge, but it is not true accross the board.

From where I stand, it looks as though users are searching for information more frequently than products, and that the product searches come after, and may even result from the information gleaned.

So, my question to Google would be: Why not offer them the information first?

WordPress Websites Advice

It is a sad commentary on the human situation, but as we get better at any anything, we forget where we started. Some of us think: “I am going to remember how difficult this was, where the pitfalls are, and use that information to help the next guy.” Unfortunately, we rarely do. In fact, after we reach a certain stage, we may even think: “I found it, there is no reason that they can’t do the same.” It’s just the way things work in the world.

If this thinking was carried through to it’s logical conclusion, no one would ever receive any education, and we would probably still be working on that “wheel thingy”! The fact is, that the societies which have flourished have been the ones who took special care to record knowledge, and pass it down to the next generation. We should also do this for others, whether out of compassion, or concern for the continuation of our community.

It is with that in mind that I submit this information for your use.

I have taken care to try to remember everything, but I know that there will be some steps left out, some changes made in the interim, and other factors that will undoubtedly prove me wrong from time to time. In such cases, please bare with me.

This is done with the “newbie” in mind, so it may seem overly simplified to those of you who have been using WordPress for a while.

WordPress websites an introduction

WordPress is a great blog publishing tool, but will it hold up as a content management system?
Well, you could ask CNN, or Ford Motor Company, or one of the hundreds of thousands of other website owners who power their websites with the WordPress platform. In fact, more than 14% of the top 1 million websites today use WordPress. Yes, WordPress is a great content management system!

WordPress can be used for blogs, or by carefully using categories or pages, it can be made into a more traditional website, with it’s own blog already on board. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of “plugins” which can extend WordPress usefulness, and thousands of themes/templates, many of them free and modifiable with a tiny bit of effort.

2 versions of WordPress, both are free, both are easy to use.

WordPress.com

If you want to simply express yourself with the least amount of effort and preparation, then WordPress.com just might be for you. To use it, all you have to do is go to http://wordpress.com, answer a few questions, fill in a little information, and post to your hearts content. It is so simple and easy that I don’t suspect any advice is needed. A big advantage of this system is that it requires no hosting or domain name purchase,the drawback is the fact that it requires no hosting or domain name.

Since this blog is hosted courtesy of WordPress, you have a little less control over some areas that may or may not be important to you. The major one is that you can not place ads on the site. If you do not want to sell ad space, then this is the one for you.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org offers a little more flexibility, but there are a few more obstacles to overcome. You will need your own hosting, and you will need your own domain name, but you will have more control in the long-run. Basic hosting can be had for around $150.00 a year, more or less. A domain name can be purchased for around $12.00 per year, and most hosting companies offer the domain registration at no extra charge with the hosting. With a little careful shopping, and a few minutes looking for discount coupons, you can probably get domain and hosting for $10.00 a month, that is, $120.00 per year or less.

Because WordPress.com requires almost no expertise beyond understanding the simple, self explanatory interface, we will be concentrating on WordPress.org.

WordPress website hosting

When using WordPress to build your site you will need hosting. Hosting is the place where your website resides. Technically it is the server that allows your website to be displayed across the internet.

Most hosting packages are pretty cheap compared to what you pay for everything else in life, especially when you see it as a tool to earn income. Basic hosting suitable for running the WordPress platform can be found for under $10.00 per month and this usually comes with a domain. There are a number of good web hosts, and we have our favorites. I have been very happy with Lunarpages, IX Webhosting, and Hostgator. The packages includes a panel that allows you to choose from a variety of different free products, and one of the most important is a “one click” installer. This one click installer will allow you to instal WordPress on your domain and hosting. They go under such names as Fantastico and Softaculous.

When signing up for hosting you will pay less for signing on to longer periods of time. A word of notice here: If you sign on for a year or more, the monthly charges for that period will probably be withdrawn from your account at one time.

If you haven't read Making Money Online | Affiliates you should probably read it now, it will make this page a little more understandable.

When life hands you lemons...

The story so far:

I sent affiliate sites a lot of clicks, and they resulted in little to no money, discovered that some programs cheat their affiliates, and have the solid proof that this is true based on the fact that people who bought the product through my link called and emailed me for service to the product!

I tried something a little different.

After suffering much at the hands of many affiliate programs, and discovering  that I was being cheated, I started wondering what I could do with all that traffic I had been sending them, traffic from people who wanted to buy this type of product. I remembered a client who had bought some ad space from me. Having no other place to send these potential customers, I sent them to my loyal advertiser and waited about a week before contacting him. I then contacted the company and asked if they had noticed any extra traffic. They had. I asked them to track it through their sales cycle and see what happened, with the promise that if it worked for them, they could buy the traffic at a rate yet to be determined. If it didn't, no problem, I would just send the traffic elsewhere. They agreed. After a couple of weeks they told me that sales had skyrocketed!

We weighed the options for pricing, including a flat rate per month, (a little to0 soft, not favorable to either party) commission based on sales, (a little too hard to track accurately) and finally settled on a per click rate that made both parties happy (just right).

We based the price on the number of clicks it takes to produce a sale, the price of the product, and a standard commission rate. The net effect was, that I was selling leads by demonstrating the effectiveness of the program before attempting to sell it.

It is my most lucrative ongoing contract to date, and all came about as a result of being cheated.

Now that's lemonade!

For more of the tricks I learned along the way, keep checking back. I am not sure how much I want to reveal, but I might share a little more on the subject.

What is an affiliate program?

Becoming an affiliate means that you send visitors from your website to another persons website, and if they buy something, you get paid.

Affiliate program types

Some companies run their own affiliate programs, and others farm them out to places like Commission Junction, or the Google affiliate program. Amazon has an affiliate program that works pretty well, and has been responsible for a few small checks over the years.

Problems with affiliate programs

One of the problems with affiliate programs is that to make any real money from them, you will probably need a lot of traffic in sectors in which it is notoriously difficult to get traffic. Of course, you can buy traffic from Google or Facebook, but this can be a tricky business and could result in the loss of a Google Adwords or Facebook ad account if not done carefully. Google frowns on sites built solely for selling affiliate products, and has shut down thousands of accounts because of what they see as misuse.

Social media is another possibility for affiliate traffic, but you need to be careful not to spam the sites, and this is also difficult and can lead to problems with social media sites if they perceive what you promote, and how you promote it as spam.

There is also the problem of affiliate thievery, both from hackers who use programs to intercept your sales and make them their own, and unscrupulous companies who do not want to pay their publishers what is due them.

My personal experience with affiliate programs

I ran across this problem recently with a leading supplier of hard goods, work supplies, and other items related to brick and mortar businesses. One commission check, followed by other sales that mysteriously dissolved into cyberspace, with no record of the tracking numbers in their database.

Another program, run "in house" by a major dealer of big ticket items produced similar results. I had been sending them a lot of traffic, from links that provided a clear indication of where my visitors would be going, and what they would find when they got there. Not a single sale resulted, according to their accounting. By this time, I had put in place a series of safeguards in the form of tracking software, and some less technological methods.

After receiving phone calls and emails from people who had bought products through my links related to service issues, and having tracked thousands of visitors through the links, I determined that they were in fact dishonest. I confronted them with questions on the issue in a polite manner, and to my surprise, within a month, they closed their affiliate program!

Needless to say, I was not happy!

Do you remember that old saw about when life hands you lemons? Sometimes it works! What happened as a result of some affiliate vendors dishonest business tactics resulted in my highest earnings!
To read more about this see: Making Money Online | Selling Leads

When I first built a website, it was for the purpose of supporting my "Brick and Mortar" service business. It worked pretty well for that as a sort of online brochure.

As time went on, I was getting so many emails and phone calls on the subject, that I decided to build another site solely for the purpose of answering those questions and others that might pop up. Much to my amazement, it actually got quite a bit of traffic, and pretty good ranking for the keywords related to the topic!

An online acquaintance suggested that I try the Google publishers product known as "Adsense". Adsense is the publisher side of the Google ad platform. To put it simply, website owners can put a snippet of java script on their websites that will show ads related to the content on the page. Advertisers pay a "per click" price to Google, and when the ads are clicked on a site, the site owner shares in the revenue.

Adsense revenue slowly grew, and sites on other practical topics were built, and the income grew more.

There is money to be made online, but if you do it honestly, it will take time and a lot of work. Beware of those "Make 6 Figures Overnight" scams. They don't work. Avoid the tactics known as "Black Hat", they can get you banned from the major search engines.

If you are interested in pursuing a career as a webmaster, find a topic that interests you, get a hosting package and a domain name, and write lots of good articles, and you might just make some money at it.

If you want to try your hand at blogging, and using Adsense for free, Google has another tool known as Blogger where you can create a blog, ad Adsense, and get paid for the clicks that come your way.
See:Google Blogger
and Google Adsense

It seems that no matter what problem comes up in modern politics, no matter what the issue, Thomas Jefferson seems to have had the answer at the founding of our republic.

Jefferson wanted to stick to coinage as our cash currency. Hamilton wanted to print paper money. In the end, both got their way, but eventually, due to the very reasons Jefferson stressed, the paper became the dominant form of currency.

Jefferson wanted real money, the actual value of which would be the amount of real precious metal in the coin, a constant, and consistent value. He said: "Paper is poverty...it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."

Turns out that he was right, and that the monetary system set out by Hamilton and the banks, is the most likely source of the current financial crisis.

Note: I am using the terms "Greens" and "Conservatives" in the American sense of the words, not  in the British sense as political parties, although some similarities exist.

What I am going to say about the environmental debate will not make anyone happy, but I have found that angering everyone is usually the best indicator of the rightness of a position.

The truth is, that the debate has been going on, on a political and emotional level. This rarely works to bring about the truth. The fact is, that both extremes are wrong!

The hardcore "conservatives", who seem to think they are being conservative, are least likely to be truly conservative because they are not seeking to preserve the very resources that drive capitalism. They tend to shy away from replacing older forms of energy production with newer ones, even though the newer forms would make us less dependent on unstable foreign oil, something everyone claims to want, but forget in this debate. This line of thought might be a point that true environmentalists should pursue.

Fringe "greens" on the other hand, tend to be more interested in forwarding a political system which they think will further their agenda than being green. If the goal of environmental groups is to protect the environment, they should seek to be more inclusive, and might find many allies among conservationists and foreign policy experts in conservative camps who are interested in such issues as preserving natural habitats, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

It is sad, but sometimes true, that green groups are sometimes hijacked by extreme socialists who use the issue of ecology to promote a political agenda, while true conservative groups suffer the same fate at the hands of robber barons. Unfortunately, the fringes of both groups have the same problem. That is, that they are both more interested in promoting a political agenda than environmental protection, or free markets.

By reducing the argument to political issues, the truth gets removed from the mix. By fanning the flames of political partisanship, we get a lot of heat, and no light

Searching for a unified concept of ecology

I have friends who are environmentalists. I have friends who are capitalists who are concerned with the economic impact of what the environmentalists are attempting to do. Unfortunately, politics also play a role in the debate.

In the beginning

According to the Judeo Christian way of thinking, nature is fallen. Genesis chapter 3 says " cursed is the ground for your sake, thorns and thistles it will bring forth". This has been seen by those who oppose Christianity as the basis for western cultures misuse of the planets resources, and is therefore used as an argument, or at least a reason for environmentalists to oppose Christian thought.

In actuality, western cultures misuse of the planet has its beginnings in the first part of the Genesis story, that is, mans fallen nature, which destroyed relationships in 4 key areas:

• Spiritual

• Psychological

• Sociological

• Ecological

The Nature of man

If mans nature is fallen in each of these areas, the resultant cause of global environmental abuse is not found in Christianity as such, but in the greed which results from that fallen nature. In other words, Christian thought is not to blame for the problem, but is the only thought form which adequately explains the dilemma, and until this is understood, substantial progress with the problem can not be made.

Controlling the effects of fallen nature

We make daily efforts to control the results of nature's being fallen. We deal with thorns and thistles, and bugs and weeds. We have to mow the lawn. We have to weed the garden. We must deal with insects and grass burs. That is the nature of nature, but that is not the problem.

Controlling the nature of man

The problem is the nature of man!  The answer to this problem is to be found in controlling the results of the greed inherent in the human family. If greed is inherent in human nature (anyone who is truly honest with themselves knows this to be true) then dealing with the greed, or working with the knowledge of the greed will offer the best basis to begin.

Learn to separate fact from fiction

First I would say, that one goal of those who are concerned with the health of our environment should learn to separate fact and fiction inside the environmental community. There is enough truth to our environmental concerns to make them important without falsifying information.

Separate emotions from reality

Second, we should be able to separate our emotional responses from reality. What I mean is this. We should not let our dislike, or distrust of a corporation stand in the way of our progress. Painting "X" brand as the devil, will lessen our ability to influence them.

Find a way to make reality work

Third, we should find a way to make the greed which exists work for our environment instead of against it. If we know that men are greedy by nature, and that we can not change their nature, then we must find ways to make that nature work for the common good. Instead of opposing the market economy, we should make that economy work for us instead of attempting to replace it with another system which will also be bound by mans greedy nature.

Adam Smith was right, society works best when each individual is seeking his own self interests. That is the way it works in a world in which greed is the dominant feature. Recognizing this is the first step in recovery.

This is true, if what we seek is real progress in the environment, but if the environmentalist goal is to replace the free market system with a socialist system, then the environment is being used as a political tool to further a different agenda. If this is the case, this should anger true environmentalists as much as the greed of the corporations!

What we can do:

With the enormous brain power present in the environmental community, it should be possible to find ways to make being green pay. This works for both the green community and the capitalists. If it becomes cheaper to recycle than to harvest dwindling resources, then recycling will become the norm. This kills two birds with one stone!

We should become a community of scientists and discoverers instead of a community of protesters. Protesting is fine, but along with the protests, we should offer viable alternatives.

First of all, it is a “WS” extension, which is now being used most often as an abbreviation for “Web Site”, but it really is the country extension for Western Samoa.

I do not live in Western Samoa.

The sight is hosted on Lunar Pages, which is my favorite host, and the “CMS”, or “Content Management System” being used is “Word Press” blogware from WordPress.org. WordPress is a great cms, and it takes very little special skill to operate, and, it is free.

The only problem with using WP as a cms is that you can’t automatically write the most search engine friendly “urls”. There are plug ins available that help with this, but, in most cases, the benefits of using blog ware, outweigh any related problems.

Update: It is now much easier to write good URL’s than it once was. The good folks at WordPress seem to improve the system every day. Hats off to you guys!