RSS feed for InstantSpot site Aaron Lynch

InstantSpot brings the traffic!

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 03:56:20 GMT

Great testimonial from a very active InstantSpot user. Chris tells about his 1st month using InstantSpot and how he has 477 Google searches for the month.

see his post here

Chris also makes nice use of the open stylesheets via the Style Manager in his control panel.

Loan Consolidation and Insurance Quotes: Serious CPC

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:40:25 GMT

I'm not sure what keeps bringing me back to this fascination, but I hear about "that guy" who makes $X,XXX a month off of targeting web sites to specific valuable key-words. Any Google search you do for "expensive adwords" or "valuable cpc" etc is not short on results...which tells me that there must be a lot of money on the table for this type of activity.

BUT, whenever I get that urge to do some research on this topic I just can't help but feel like it is some kind of scam, or "dirty" in some regard.

Do any of you run these type of targeted key-word sites? Have you been hired to build some? Is it a scam to build this kind of site?

I can't decide...I guess my stance would be if the site adds to the betterment of the internet or provides some actual service to the user, then maybe it is perfectly fine to do so.

Just in case you haven't done any research in this area before, here are the to top 10 most expensive Adwords (as of 9/11/06) source

(yes, that does say $69.16 PER CLICK!!!)

school loan consolidation - $69.16
college loan consolidation - $68.35
car insurance quotes - $66.88
school consolidation - $66.29
auto insurance quotes - $65.90
college consolidation -$64.04
student loan consolidation rates - $60.14
sell structured settlement - $59.82
sell annuity - $58.92
federal student loan consolidation - $58.58

---EDIT---

Thanks to a friendly comment, we all (by that I mean me) heard about Overture.com. They have cool way to see what advertisers are paying for key words. I'm not sure how this really ties in to Adwords, as this is a Yahoo ads tool. But, it might suggest a more realistic CPC for these keywords.

The same top 10 list with bid prices pulled from Overture (Yahoo)

school loan consolidation - Advertiser's Max Bid: $3.61
college loan consolidation - Advertiser's Max Bid: $8.01
car insurance quotes - Advertiser's Max Bid: $5.99
school consolidation - Advertiser's Max Bid: $1.15
auto insurance quotes - Advertiser's Max Bid: $5.99
college consolidation - Currently, there are no bidded listings on this term.
student loan consolidation rates - Advertiser's Max Bid: $5.01
sell structured settlement - Advertiser's Max Bid: $15.10
sell annuity - Advertiser's Max Bid: $15.50
federal student loan consolidation - Advertiser's Max Bid: $5.03

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!