IT-blogger.dk

Google+ is growing very fast at the moment and more and more people gets annoyed by all the ads on Facebook. Many people predict that Google+ will become more dominant on the social market in the future. Actually there are some people claiming that Google+ will take over the leading place as Social network from Facebook.

I am not sure that it will go that far, at least not in 2013. If so, Facebook should do many stupid things before they will force the users to Google+. But I do think that more people will use Google+ in the future. So how do we easy transfer our Facebook friends to Google+?

There is no direct method to export your friend contacts from Facebook to Google+. But there are a few tricks you can use if you wish to export your friends to Google+, if you want to see if some of your friends on Facebook uses Google+. The method first uses an Yahoo account, to export the Facebook friends to a vCard file. Then this vCard can be imported into Gmail. And if you have your contacts in Gmail you also have them in Google+.

Create a Yahoo account

First you have to create a Yahoo account for free. You do that on http://mail.yahoo.com. Then login to the account and then import your Facebook contacts to Yahoo mail:

1. Choose “Contacts”
2. Choose “Import contacts”
3. Choose Facebook
4. Click OK to share your Facebook contacts with Yahoo. Then data is transferred from Facebook to Yahoo.
5. Choose Finish and your Facebook contacts have now been imported to Yahoo.

Export to vCard file

Then you have to export the Yahoo contacts to a vCard file:

1. Choose “Contacts”
2. Choose “Actions” and then “Export all”
3. Choose “vCard single file”
4. Enter your code and click “Export now”
5. Save the file to your hard drive

Import to Gmail

At last you have to import your contacts saved in the vCard file into Gmail.

1. Login to Gmail (Create a Gmail on http://mail.google.com if you don’t already have one)
2. Choose “Contacts”
3. Choose “Import contacts”
4. Choose “Choose file”
5. Select the saved vCard file and click “Import”

Now all Facebook contacts is imported into Gmail. Using this simple trick you can easily transfer your Facebook contacts to Gmail. And if you have them in Gmail you can search for Google+ members from your Gmail contacts.

 

When you have a website, you might want to see the ranking of your website in Google SERP (Search engine result page). Then you should be aware that Google show personal result in your SERP and that this will cheat you to think that you are ranking higher than you really is. In this article I will demonstrate a few methods to avoid personal results in Google, so you can see your correct ranking.

I recently wrote an article about how you can build a good author rank, and in that case I did some research on the topic. In this research I would search for the keyword “Build your author rank”. When I do that, Google remember that I have searched for this. So when I do a search now for the same keyword, I find these 3 sites in the top 3, included two articles I have read.

 But the top 3 should really look like the picture below, if it didn’t remember that I have visited those two sites earlier. By comparing the two SERP, I find that one of the results has been replaced by one site I have visited. So the SERP is really affected by what I have searched and visited before. Google remember this both by storing the result in their Web history, and in the cache.

Log out and empty cache

One solution to get impersonal search results, is to log out of your Google account and empty your cache. You can also do an incognito browsing, to view your results. Although this solution should show you impersonal results, many people have reported, that it does not always quite work well. So I would recommend you to choose one of the solutions below.

Impersonal.me

Impersonal.me is a great tool, where you can do a Google search impersonal. This tool will automatically do a Google search, which does not include personal results. I use this tool a lot when I need to see my ranking and I can fully recommend it.

 

Another great feature is that you can set which language, TLD of Google and which location you wish to search from. You can then save the options you made on a specific options, so you can easy find it again. With these features you can also avoid local, geographically results. So if you have an international site, and wish to see what the SERP looks like in another country, you can set the options here.

Tools to see ranking of a certain keyword

The previous tool lets you see search results that was not personalized. But what if you have a new site, and just want to check your ranking? Then you should browse through a lot of pages from SERP to get there. In this case it is easier to use a tool that calculate your Google ranking.

Googleranking.com is  a website, where you enter the keyword and the URL and then you can find your ranking. However, you also need to enter an URL to a Google SOAP API, that is necessary when you will check your ranking.

I hope you can use these simple tools that I use often. Please share the article, if you could use it 🙂

Author rank is a ranking, just like Google Page rank  that rank your website in Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page), depending on your authority of a certain keyword. This means, that if a user search on e.g. “latest fashion” and you have an article about that subject, then it will rank high in Google if you have a high author rank on the keyword “latest fashion”.

Does author rank exists and is it activated yet?

We have absolutely no evidence for the existence of author rank, and if it does exist, we have no evidence that shows that is is activated yet.

The only reasons why many people believe that it exists, is because of a patent that Google filled out back in august 2005, that describes a so called “agent rank”, and some different statements from Google staffs that we have seen, and that indicates that Google is working on author rank. These are the only reasons. We don’t have any official announcement from Google that says that author rank exists.

But lets take a look into this patent that Google filled out back in 2005. The patent of author rank claims that Google has invented a technique that can give an author of some kind of content a digital signature, that can provide the author with some can of score or ranking, that is based upon the content that the author has provided. Many people believe, that this digital signature is Google Authorship, which has already been released, and that the score is Author rank, which has not yet been officially released.

It is very likely, that author rank does exist, since it is very clearly described the existence of it in this patent. But is it activated yet? Does SERP already depend on author rank?

We actually don’t know. All we know is that is has not been officially announced by Google, and we haven’t seen any big rearrangements in SERP that could come from author rank lately. So it is not likely that author rank is activated yet, since this probably would give a bigger rearrangement of SERP.

However, there has been some people claiming that they have evidence demonstrating that author rank is already activated. However, the evidence is very thin and does not convince me into thinking that author rank has been activated. The person claims that since his site is brand new and without page rank, but he has established authorship, this must be the reason why he ranked number 1 in SERP on the search keyword “Is Author Rank Active”. I cannot reject completely that this is because an activated author rank or because Google is currently testing some kind of active author rank. But SERP ranking depends on over 200 different factors, so he might have hit one of these. And the keyword he chose is very selective – he didn’t see his article as number 1 on a less selective keyword. So the conclusion must be: There is still not enough evidence or some kind of official announcement, that tells us that author rank is activated.

When that is said, we expect that Google will activate some kind of author rank in the future, since it is mentioned in the patent. So it is definitely a good idea to begin building author rank.

Why does Google need Author rank?

Lets first look on why Google wants an author rank. Until now, the only familiar ranking number we know is Google Page rank. This ranking number depends on how many sites that links to your content, what page rank these sites has and how many other websites they link to. We also say, that Google Page rank depends on your link profile.

However, this Page rank can be manipulated. There exists some techniques that can increase the page rank of your website. One of them are Linkbuilding, which is one of the more innocent techniques. Others are splogs, pure spam blogs with scraped (stolen) content. So actually some people build whole websites, just to increase the page rank of another.

This means that page rank is not a sufficient ranking to rank websites. That is why Google is also using over 200 other factors to rank websites. But author rank can provide information that other ranking factors cannot. It can measure your authority on specific topics and it can provide a digital time stamp, so Google knows the article is original.

So by implementing author rank, Google will both be able to rank websites depending on the authority towards the search keyword, and prevent scrapped content and duplicate content, because they have a time stamp, that shows which version is the originally.

A great way that Google can find good, high quality content in the future, is if the content has both a high author rank (the content is written by a person that has authority towards that topic) and a high page rank (the content is popular since many people has linked to it).

The main Google will always be to provide the most relevant and high quality content to SERP. Author rank will help Google doing this.

Problems with author rank

But there is also some problems with author rank. What if an author, that really does have a high authority towards a topic and writes a high quality article – but does not establish authorship? Google will never get every website owner to have a Google+ profile and establish authorship. So in the future the ranking in SERP will still depend on many factors.

What if you have a discussion board, where there are multiple authors? How should this be handled? Google has not yet solved this problem, but I think that they are looking on solutions to this.

What does author rank depend on?

If we assume that the digital signature, mentioned in the patent, is Google Authorship and that the score is Author rank, then the patent also says:

• that Google wants to determine the validity of Google Authorship. So Google wants to make sure, that no one associates a wrong Google+ profile to your content. One of the ways they do this, is that Authorship is  a two-way link – it has to be confirmed by both the owner of the content and by the owner of the Google+ profile.
• that if no Authorship has been associated with the content, then it will be associated with the owner of the website, that hosts the content – and will benefit to their Author rank (probably their Google+ page).
• that author rank does not only depends on content that has associated authorship, but also of content where the author is an owner.
• that author rank can also depend on what people says or think of your content, this could be comments, sharing and likes of your content.
• that it can also be depended on what you write, share and like around the internet.  It also depends on author rank of the persons you interact with.
• that this author rank can be used to rank websites.
• that an author can have a different rank, for different topics, i.e. I can build an author rank towards “cars” but another author rank towards “sport”.
• that authorship of a content will provide a time stamp, that prevents others from copying your content and prevent duplicate content.

So basically, author rank is about what content you write, what people thinks about it and what you think about other content.

How to build your author rank

But how do you then build a high author rank towards the topic you write about? This is a question that no one can answer, because author rank has not been released officially yet. The only thing we know, is the things that are mentioned in the patent. But this also gives us sufficiently with ideas to how we can build an author rank. These are some of my ideas:

• First write high quality content. Write something that people needs and that people wants to read, share and like. 
• Establish authorship on your websites.
•  Be active on social networks, especially Google+.
• Comment on posts that has the same topic you want to build an author rank towards. Become friends, follow and become followed by people that you also expect to have a high author rank towards the same topic. Share posts with the same topic. Like or +1 posts with the same topic. You should do all these things both on social networks, but also on different blogs around the internet.
• Build a high page rank using linkbuilding on your content. Author rank might also depend on page rank (which is actually also mentioned in the patent).
• Write more high quality articles on the same subject and establish authorship to this content as well.

So it is also important that if you wish to write a guest post in the future, make sure that you will get the authorship established to that content. Then you will get credit from that article to your author rank.

And don’t be afraid to build author rank towards multiple topics, because you think that this will ruin your author rank for another topic. Google has mentioned in the patent that people can have author rank towards multiple topics. It is also expected to be like this, because no person only writes about one topic. Every person have multiple interests and will interact about these.

When will author rank become activated?

There are still a lot of websites that does not have authorship. And there are still some problems about author rank that has not yet been solved. beside this, Google will in the future make a lot of small tests so they can see the effect of activating Author rank. Google will never activate author rank before they are 100% sure that this will improve the quality of SERP.

Google has two options when they want to activate author rank. Either they should activate the whole package in a big algorithm update or they will implement some of the package step by step in small updates. I think that they will announce author rank latest in the beginning of 2014.

When you need a server for your website, you can buy web hosting, where you get space for your website at very low cost. You can read more about finding good web hosting here. But if you need more advanced services, a web hosting solution might not be the right choice. In this case, it would be better to run your own webserver.

What do I need to run my own webserver?

• A computer that can run 24 hours a day.
• A good bandwidth from your internet provider
• A static IP address from your internet provider
• Ubuntu linux server edition or similar server OS

You can use any computer to run your webserver on. That could be an old computer, you don’t use anymore. You have to have the computer running 24 hours a day – at least if you want your website to be available 24 hours a day. Remember that the better the hardware is, the better your webserver will run. Especially it is important that you have enough RAM installed in the computer.

A good bandwidth is important, because this will make it quick to load your website.

You also need a static IP address, so your website can be accesses from the same address. If you choose to buy a domain and point it to your webserver, then it must point to the static IP address.

At last you need some webserver software installed. You could either have a normal desktop operating system (OS) installed and then a webserver software installed (e.g. Apache webserver) or you could have an OS installed that is especially build as a webserver – I recommend Ubuntu linux server edition, that you can download for free here.

Is it safe to run your own webserver?

Yes, it is safe to run your own webserver. Especially if you choose to install the LTS (Long term support) edition of Ubuntu linux server. This gives you 5 years of safety updates.

Your OS is also protected with a password, just as your normal desktop computer. This is enough safety to run your own webserver.

Install Ubuntu linux server

1. Download Ubuntu linux server for free.
2. Burn the content to a CD.
3. Boot from the CD.
4. Choose english as language.
5. Choose “Install Ubuntu server”.
6. Choose timezone and layout of your keyboard.
7. Choose a host name.
8. Choose user name and password.
9. Then you have to choose the partition options. The best option is if you can give the partition the whole disk. Be aware, that this erases your disk!
10. Choose “Install security updates automatically”, to setup a high security level.
11. Choose the server you wish to install. You should choose to install the OpenSSH and LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) server.
12. Install GRUB bootloader in your master boot record (unless you have a Windows partition running beside your linux partition).
13. Restart your machine (remember to remove boot CD).
14. Your machine will startup a command prompt. Login with your user name and password.
15. Now you are ready to use your server.

OpenSSH gives you the ability to get access to your webserver from a remote location. The LAMP server is the most fundamental server package you should have, since this gives you the server Apache, the database MySQL and the programming language PHP.

When you are logget into your Ubuntu linux server, you can find your IP address in the field “IP address for eth0”.

Remember that this IP address must be static. You can setup on your router configuration, that your IP address must be static, and not dynamic. Remember also to open port 80 (used by LAMP) and 20 (used by OpenSSH).

If you now open your browser an enter that IP address, you will get the message “It works!”, which is a welcome message from Apache signaling that it has been installed correctly.

Your server files should be located in the Apache folder:

/var/www/

Your webserver can be accessed remotely by SSH. You could e.g. use the SSH-command on a linux machine:

SSH xxx.xxx.x.x

Where xxx.xxx.x.x is your static IP address. From a Windows machine you could e.g. use the program Putty on Windows.

Install other servers

You can also install more servers on your server machine, e.g. a FTP server, that makes it easier to transfer files to your server. You can install a FTP server by using the command:

sudo apt-get install vsftpd

The you can install a FTP program, e.g. Filezilla and point this against your IP address.

 

Do you want to earn money on your website? One way to do this is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, is when you market another companies products, by showing ads on your website. You get payed every time a person for each click on ad, each view of ad or if an ad leads to a sale or a specific event. The payment is typically a specific amount or percentage of the sale.

When you want to start with affiliate marketing, there are more ways to do it. You can either make a website with a specific content and then find ads that match your content. You can also find the ads first and then make a website with content, that leads to the highest conversion of your ads to sale. Your goal is to get the highest conversion of your ads.

Affiliate networks

An affiliate network, is a website that links between the company that offers the ads (called advertiser) and the person that shows the ad on his website (called partner or publisher). There are many affiliate networks you can choose, and often it is a benefit to be a partner in more affiliate networks, because you then have more ads to show. You will also often see that an advertiser is represented in multiple networks.

Some popular affiliate networks are:

Commision junction

Clickbank

E-junkie

Amazon

E-bay

Affiliate vs. AdSense

One of the most popular programs to join for showing ads on your website, both for publisher and advertiser, is AdSense. AdSense is a program from Google that reminds a lot of Affiliate, but is actually not.  You can read more about AdSense and what you should remember, before choosing AdSense here.

With affiliate, you choose a specific ad to show on your website and you have to apply for each ad. With AdSense, you apply for the whole program and then AdSense decide which ad they will show on your website. This depends on your content and which visitors you have on your website. AdSense has an intelligent algorithm that automatically choose the best ad to show on your website.

With affiliate, you know before you show ads on your site, how you will earn money (clicks, views, leads, sale) and how much you can earn. With AdSense, you will always earn money per click (and a little per view) but how much money you earn depends on which ads AdSense choose to show on your website.

Many peoples experience with AdSense compared to affiliate, is that you can earn more money with affiliate, but it is easier to get started and earn money with AdSense. You could also consider to have both AdSense and affiliate ads on your website.

Different ways you can get paid

CPA is an abbreviation for Cost-Per-Action and is the same as Cost-per-sale. With this payment method, you get paid when a visitor click on an ad and then buy a product (perform an action). The CPA value is how much you get paid for each sale.

CPC is an abbreviation for Cost-per-click and with this you get paid when a visitor click on an ad. Often you only get paid for a unique visitor (e.g. unique IP address). Cost-per-click is often very rare in the affiliate network business, because this doesn’t guarantee a sale for the advertisor.

CPL is an abbreviation for Cost-per-lead and with this you get paid, when you generate a lead. A lead is when a visitor click on an ad and then do a task on the advertisers website. This task could be to buy a product (sale), to subscribe to a newsletter, answer some questions, creating a user profile, share on Facebook, like on Facebook etc. When a visitor does that, you have generated a lead. CPL is a very popular payment method in affiliate networks.

CPM is an abbreviation for Cost-per-mille, Cost-per-impression or Cost-per-view and with this method you get paid per 1000 views of your ads. This is a very rare way to get paid in affiliate networks, because it does not guarantee a sale for the advertiser.

CPO is an abbreviation of Cost-per-order and with this payment method you get paid per order the visitor make on advertisor’s website. The difference between CPA (Cost-per-action) and CPO (Cost-per-order) is that CPO is often a percentage of the sale, where CPA is a fixed amount per sale. However CPO can also be a fixed amount per sale.

Ads, text ads or deep linking

There are more ways to place an ad on your website. You can place a graphical ad on your website. You can place a text ad, which is the same as the ads you see in Googles search result page in the right side.

You can also make deep linking where you place a link in your content to a page on your advertiser’s website and get paid when visitors click on that link.

How to get successful with affiliate marketing

These 6 advises may help you succeed with affiliate marketing:

• Find the right topic to write about: you get most success if you choose a topic that match the ads you are going to show on your website. It is also best if you choose a topic that you have interest in, because then you write the best content.
• Choose the right affiliate ads: The more relevant the ads you choose are for your content, the more you earn on affiliate marketing.
• Write good content: Write high-quality content, that make the visitor attracted to the ads.
• Market your affiliate website: Use linkbuilding and social networks to market your affiliate website, and attract visitors. Read about linkbuilding here.
• Analyse your visitors and clicks: Use statistic to analyse your visitors and clicks. I recommend you to use Google Analytics to track your visitors.
• Optimize your affiliate site: Use the statistic results to optimize your affiliate site and generate a higher conversion.

How much can I earn with affiliate marketing?

This is a good question and if you ask most people doing affiliate marketing, they wont answer, because they are afraid that you might steal your idea. It is also very different what people earn.

But typically, if you have years of experience with affiliate marketing, you can actually live of it. Other people is living part time of it.

Is it easy?

Yes and no. It is easy to get started on affiliate marketing and to start earning money. But you have to work very hard. You have to write good content and choose the right ads the first many years of your carrier  Once you got more experience, you can outsource the writing of content and then earn money without working so much.