eBook & Internet Publishing News
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Practically every web site owners wants more traffic, but it can be tough to get it. It’s extra tough, if your site is in a very competitive niche, because not everybody can make the top 10 organic search engine results, and advertising in Google AdWords and pay-per-click search engines can cost a fortune. So what can you do?

Clever use of an autoresponder like AWeber could be the answer. Here’s a new must-read case study about how one web site owner increased her traffic by 300%.

ClickBank have recently revamped their web site… and I have to say it’s a big improvement on the old version. Unfortunately the changes to ClickBank’s site meant that the old version of CBRocket, our script for displaying ClickBank products on your web site, stopped working. We’ve just released a new version, 2.00, that resolves this problem.

Previous customers with the previous 1.02 version, can download the new version by going to the admin screen in their copy of CBRocket and following the instructions. If you’re a customer but have the 1.00 version, or don’t the script installed on your server at the moment, then email us at webmaster@ebookcompiler.com, including giving us your name and receipt number in the email, and we’ll email you back ASAP with the ZIP of 2.00 version attached.

The latest few days have been pretty hectic, so I must apologize for getting slightly behind with email. If you have sent us email, we will reply - but feel free to send it again if you do have concerns. I intend to finish catching up with the remaining email by the close of business tomorrow, Thursday October 5th. Thanks again for your patience.

According to news reports the sex.com domain name recently sold for $14m.

Of course, only a tiny proportion of domain name sales generate anything like those kind of profits - but the fact that domain names can be registered for a few $ per year, and potentially sold for tens/hundreds/or-more times that - can make domain name speculation an appealing market for the Internet entrepreneur. Head-on over to, for example, Afternic and you can an idea of the kinds of domains that trade routinely.

Want to break into the domain trading? Go take a look at How To Sell Domain Names.

We’ve just released version 2.50 of our free eBook, "117 Ways To Increase Web Site Traffic".

This is a big improvement over previous versions, correcting and expanding quite a few points (not to mention some typos), more resources, and well, generally all round just better.

If you want to download a copy, go go here for information.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know:

• You can distribute copies of this eBook (subject to the terms in the License) if you want. It could make a nice gift for customers or visitors to your web site. Perhaps a free bonus to give away with your product. Use your imagination…
• Before you give it copies, you can download the Rebrander (also free), which allows you to customize the eBook. You can insert your own link to your own web site - on every page in the eBook - and also all the links to our company’s products can be coded with your affiliate id. Thus, if one of your readers, clicks on these links and buys a product from our company, you can earn a commission.

Conventional "wisdom" is that using a hyphenated domain name such as www.web-site-name.com as opposed to www.websitename.com helps with search engine ranking. I’ve read this "wisdom" in books, in online courses, and repeated numerous times on messages boards. However, I did some experiments and have begun to question whether this conventional "wisdom" is in fact wisdom at all.

Let’s start with the first argument for the conventional "wisdom": Hyphenated domain names allow search engines to recognize each of the separate keywords in your domain name.

Well, from a logical and programming point of view, this argument has never made much sense to me… Search engines are able to spider billions of pages, index them, categorize them, ban spamdex pages, sort the pages by theme, and all sorts of other neat tricks - so I do find it hard to believe that a simple dictionary scan of a domain name for keywords, regardless of whether it contains hyphens or not, is going to be beyond the search engine’s capabilities. Furthermore, I would think being able to properly handle non-hyphenated domain names would be a priority for the search engine’s programmers, given how many important sites don’t use hyphens in their domain names.

In fact, if you go to Google and do a search for merchant account, under each listing is the domain name, and Google, seems to be able to recognize keywords in the domain name (by bolding them) regardless of whether they are separated by hyphens or not.

At the time of writing the top 4 at Google for this search are:

1. www.merchantexpress.com/
2. www.usa-merchantaccount.com/
3. www.monstermerchantaccount.com/
4. www.merchantaccountforum.com

Notice how Google had no trouble in recognizing the keywords, in numbers 1, 3 and 4? According to conventional "wisdom" that’s supposed to be impossible.

But anyway, even if you consider that all hot air, we can do some more search experiments and see whether hyphenated names tend to predominate the in the results.

For my experiments, I’ve tried to pick super-competitive keywords - you know the ones - the ones that advertisers happily bid an arm and a leg for Overture (now part of Yahoo!) - and for which there are bound to be companies fighting for top positions using just about every conceivable SEO technique. If conventional "wisdom" about hyphens is correct, we ought to see a lot of hyphenated domains in the results for these super-competitive keywords.

Here’s the results of my tests on Google (the rankings are based on results I saw on 20 September 2005 - and I only looked at the top 30).

• credit card - no hyphenated domains in the top 30
• debt consolidation - hyphenated domains at positions 9, 11, 16, 27 - only 4 out of 30 results
• internet marketing - hyphenated domains at positions 7^*, 19^*, 24^* - only 0 or 3 of the results.
• merchant account - hyphenated domains at positions 2, 6, 12, 19, 20, 25^*, 30 - only 6 or 7 out of 30 results.
• web hosting - no hyphenated results in the top 30 results.

In case you’re wondering why I’ve asterixed some of the items, that’s because they are hyphenated, but the domain names (www.the-dma.org, www.cyber-robotics.com, 1-hit.com - for Internet marketing ; echo-inc.com - for merchant account) don’t have ANY of the keywords in it all! I would not count that as support for the conventional "wisdom" that having your keywords in a hyphenated domain name somehow helps.

So what have we got?

Only 10 cases out of 150 (6.7%) where hyphenated domains containing the keywords were in the top 30. Even if you were to count hyphenated domains not containing keywords (just because they’re hyphenated - as if hyphens by themselves are some kind of magic), and I don’t think you should, it’s still only 14 out 150 (9.3%).

And if we analyze it further, you’ll also notice that the hyphenated domains tend to be lower down the top 30 than their non-hyphenated competitors.

• If we look at the top 10s only, hyphenated keyworded domains, scored just 3 out 50 (6%)
• If we look at the top 5s only, hyphenated keyworded domains, scored only 1 out of 25 (4%)
• And if we look at just the top results - there are no hyphenated keyword domain names at rank 1.

So does that mean hyphenated domains are a total blow out?

Well I can’t go quite that far:

• While I could find no evidence that hyphenated domains helped (they didn’t predominate in the results), I couldn’t really find any evidence that they hindered either.
• So far, I’ve only looked at Google.
• So far, I’ve only looked at a limited number of searches. So, I can’t say whether results would be the same for different searches (unless Google is kind enough to send me an affidavit telling me what their ranking algorithm is!)
• And, finally, if you were to look at the results by whether they contain keywords or not: I think you’d find keyworded domains (whether or not hyphenated) did do pretty well. Which means, that having your keywords in your domain name, does look like it helps. And if you can’t find any good available domain name with your keywords and without hyphens, maybe a hyphenated one would do?

I’ll hopefully return to this subject in a future post, but in the meantime, don’t forget your domain name, is only 1 factor that affects your ranking. How you design your pages (on-page factors) and who links to your (off-page factors) is also important, more important, and you can use tools like SEO Elite or Web Position to help with that.

We’ve go a new free eBook: 117 Ways To Increase Web Site Traffic. In this eBook, you’ll find lots of ideas for promoting your site, and we also allow you to distribute copies (rebranded with your affiliate links) from your web site. For detailed information and download instructions, please click here.

Imagine, you’re selling your eBook or downloadable product using ClickBank. You think you can improve your sales letter (and thus convert more of your visitors into customers), but you’re not really sure whether your changes will be improvements or not. So you need to test. Now you can find all sorts of complicated software for split testing, but if your web host supports PHP, I can show you a dead easy way to do it, that doesn’t cost a penny.

1. Imagine your existing sales letter is called index.html, first rename it to index1.html
2. Next make the variants of your sales letter. called index2.html, index3.html, etc. (at least one, but as many as you want)
3. In each of these variants, include a sales link to sell a different ClickBank product. For example, index1.html sells ClickBank product 1, index2.html sells ClickBank product 2, etc.
4. In your account, you can set the thankyou pages for each of your ClickBank products to the exact same URL (after all the customer will get the same product regardless of which particular sales letter they see). You can set the price of the products to all be the same, or if you’re split testing different prices, vary the prices between the products.
5. And now the clever bit…. you create a PHP script that displays each of the different sales pages at random.

Start Notepad, and enter the following:
<?php
$npages = 2 ; // change 2 to the number of sales pages you have
$n = ( time() % $npages ) ;
include ( ‘index’ . ($n+1) . ‘.html’ ) ;
?>

Now save the file as index.php (if you are using a version of Windows prior to Windows XP, you will need to type the name in the Save As dialog as “index.php” including the quotes, or else your file will be named index.php.txt).

Now upload your index.php to your site.

If you visit your site’s main URL, you should now see one of your sales pages loaded at random. If you click Refresh in your browser, different pages, should randomly rotate in (sometimes you’ll get the same page, sometimes you’ll get a different page). But the chance of any of the page being loaded is the equal.

And the result? As you run it, you’ll be able to see which version of the sales letter performs better, because its corresponding product number will occur more often in your ClickBank stats.

What should/could you test?

• Different headlines
• Different colors
• Different sales letters
• Different prices
• Different guarantees

Vary one thing at a time, and eventually you’ll find the sales letter which converts best, and therefore makes the most money for you.

This is a pretty basic question, but one that a lot of folks don’t know the answer to… it’s quite possible to even be a very successful webmaster or even an SEO expert and not have the faintest idea what this blogging craze is all about.

In this piece I’m going to concentrate on the commercial aspects of why blogs are important - rather than the fact they allow non-technical people to publish news/information web sites (which is another important aspect of blogs)

First the basics: A blog is kind of like having your own news web site, where you can post stories using blogging software (rather than creating HTML pages manually).

Most blogs allow you to have visitors participate in discussions/comments after each story, although this can be usually turned off if you prefer. We’ve turned off comments on this blog.

So why are blogs important for promoting your site or online business?

The key things are:

1. Blogs have an RSS news feed. This allows people with newsreader software/services to pick up (”subscribe”) and other sites to pick up and potentially even republish (”syndicate”), your latest stories.
2. Blogs have a “ping” mechanism. This notifies various services that you have posted a new story and allows them to quickly (often immediately) spider it and add it to their indexes. This is in contrast to the traditional SEO marketing method where you have to wait (often weeks if not months) for a search engine spider to periodically visit your site, and hope that it spots changes and indexes them.

Compare our main company site - www.ans2000.com versus our company blog - blog.ans2000.com.

There are three important differences to note:

1. The pages at www.ans2000.com are built by hand using HTML. Whereas the pages at blog.ans2000.com are built using the blogging software. Notice the calendar, archive functions, the organization of stories into categories in the blog? All that stuff is maintained totally automatically by the blogging software whenever we post a new story. We don’t even have to do 1 second’s worth of work to get these features.
2. Notice the RSS buttons (”chicklets”) on the blog. They allow people with newsreader software/services to subscribe and be notified of updates to our blog.
3. If you click the top “XML” button on the blog, you can even see what is in the RSS feed (which is what news readers and syndicators use). It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to the average person looking at in a web browser, but news readers and syndicators can understand all that code and those funny XML tags, and make use of them as noted above.
4. You can’t see it, but when we post a new story via the blogging software and hit “Publish”, the blogging software automatically notifies (”pings”) a whole of bunch of services that our blog has been updated, telling them that the new story should be indexed as soon as possible.

AWeber (the Autoresponder people) released some very interesting statistics which are bound to be of interest to opt-in newsletter publishers.

Here they are, republished with AWeber’s permission (and by the way if you’re looking for a good autoresponder, be sure to check them out).

Before you get into the nitty gritty details, one thing to note, these statistics are for AWeber ’s own service, and may not always represent the Internet average. One such example might be the excellent delivery rate - AWeber’s emails, because of their good reputation (and because they’re all opt-in) tend to be relatively rarely filtered.

Real World Newsletter Statistics:

12,561 subscribers in an average customer opt-in newsletter list.

4 minutes and 24 seconds is the average amount of time between when a customer queues a newsletter and when AWeber completes delivery.

94% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 5 minutes of when they are scheduled.

98.4% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 30 minutes of when they are scheduled.

99.34% of all email was delivered successfully in the last 30 days.

0.66% of all email was undeliverable in the last 30 days. (mailbox closed, non-existent user, etc.)

Average open rate of HTML and Text/HTML newsletters is 29.7% over the past 30 days.

Sunday generates the highest average open rate of 41.1%, followed by Saturday at 36.7% for newsletter sent date.

Average Open Rate by Sent Date: (higher is better)

• Sunday 41.1%
• Saturday 36.7%
• Wednesday 34.0%
• Friday 32.8%
• Tuesday 29.6%
• Thursday 24.6%
• Monday 23.2%

Sunday generates the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.36% for newsletters sent on that date.

Average Undeliverable Rate by Sent Date: (lower is better)

• Sunday 0.36%
• Saturday 0.45%
• Friday 0.47%
• Thursday 0.56%
• Wednesday 0.77%
• Tuesday 0.83%
• Monday 0.88%

Monday is the most popular day of the week for customers to send their newsletters with 17.1% of newsletters being sent.

Percent of newsletters being sent by customers weekly:

• Monday 17.1%
• Tuesday 17.0%
• Thursday 16.2%
• Wednesday 15.8%
• Friday 14.5%
• Saturday 10.3%
• Sunday 9.0%

An 8:00 AM EST send time generates the highest open rate of 50.6%. Interestingly sending at 9:00 AM EST has a significantly lower open rate of 33.7% with the worst time to send being 3-4 AM at only 19% open rate.

Plain text messages are the most popular format of sending newsletters with 65.9% of all newsletters sent. Mime format Text/HTML messages follow at 23.8% and a remaining 10.2% of customers still send HTML only messages even though it is strongly recommended to always
include a plain text version.

Plain text messages generate the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.46%. Mime format Text/HTML follows at 0.56% and HTML only messages have a whopping 1.09% undeliverable rate. This is a significant reason behind our recommendation to always send a plain text alternative with HTML formatted messages.

Subject line personalization using the date generated an average open rate of 51.4% compared to personalization using the subscriber’s first name generating 40.9% open rate. Newsletters sent without personalization of any type in the subject line generated average
open rates of 28.9%.

17% of customer newsletter subject lines sent in the last 30 days contained date personalization while 19% used the subscriber’s first name. 56.3% of subject lines did not contain any type of personalization. Interestingly, using the subscriber’s full name or last name generated lower average open rates at 20%.

We’re now paying up to 75% (up from 50%) of net, commission on many MarketingRocket.com products through our affiliate program. You can check the commission rates and get the linking code here. This rate rise will run for at least August.

Consider this an experiment to start with. If it helps boost affiliate sales, we’ll extend it to more products and the time period covered. We may even extend it indefinitely.