A Quest for Internet Traffic

Moving Up on Alexa

2005-05-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

Things are going well for Legalspring. The site just keeps gaining steam.

We're doing something right... in two months we've gone from 400K to 160K on Alexa rankings. I've been keeping track of the movement in the admin area I built for the site:

Mar 15, 05 - 399,480
Mar 28, 05 - 339,238
Apr 03, 05 - 316,141
Apr 11, 05 - 318,448
Apr 15, 05 - 305,936
Apr 20, 05 - 276,179
Apr 28, 05 - 225,155
May 6, 05 - 183,754
May 9, 05 - 172,513
May 12, 05 - 158,789

In the last ONE month we've gone from 306K to 160K. My theory is our multiple avenues of attack, paired with the dedicated server we moved to last month. We published a whole bunch of newsgroup articles on the site last month - more than 140,000 of them - and we've been getting spidered like crazy by all the major search engines.

Here are a few of the things we're doing to help things along:

* We've got a couple of big PR sites linking to LS, which I'm sure definitely helps.

* We're starting to get a natural link or two rolling in. Last week I found a link to Legalspring.com from EBay! The guy put a link to our site to prove that he had a copyright on some midi files he was selling so that nobody ripped him off... Anybody that followed the link would have known he was crazy, but I'm not complaining! That means we're starting to get recognized as a legal authority, and that can only be a good thing!

* We're really worried about keyword density on our major pages. We study the keyword density of the sites that are already in the position we want to be in using tools like http://www.googlerankings.com/kdindex.php and http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html, then we try to duplicate the results (using different language, of course).

* We've facilitated the easy spidering of LS by creating directories everywhere that point to all corners of the site.

We're currently at ~3,000 visitors per day - and moving up!

Newsgroup Discussions

2005-05-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

I recently published about 140,000 pages of content on
Legalspring.com. This technique is definitely beyond most mom and pop
affiliates, but has worked very well for me so far...

I built an NNTP library to download ALL the newsgroup conversations
for my chosen newsgroups from the server. I store the discussion in a
MSSQL database on my home server. From this data I did the following:

* I created a physical page for every discussion, with a link back to
the relevant keywords inside my site, if the discussion had the
keyword inside of it.
* I created a directory page for every day for every newsgroup.
* I created a site map page for each newsgroup, linked to from every page.
*I created a directory for my site keywords that point to the articles
that have links back to the keyword articles. This serves to let the
search engines spidering the site know which pages point back to my
more important pages - internal page rank!

The only problem this has created so far is to crash my server a
couple of times. The "Temporary ASP.Net Files" folder is getting
filled with gigs of xml and res files from all the .aspx files that
are being compiled...

I finally figured out how to change the location of the temporary
files folder using the Web.Config file... anyway, this is a blog
about web traffic, not programming.

The bottom line is this: 140,000 pages of unique content that (to my
knowledge) nobody else on the Internet has published yet. This is
going to rock...

Getting up there

2005-03-04T11:37:00.000-08:00

Our traffic is really getting up there. Using the techniques we've described here, we now have 700-1,000 visitors per day. We're doing a good job of converting these visitors into paying customers, too.

We're currently sending traffic to our affiliates, but have just introduced adsense into the site. Hopefully with this kind of traffic, we'll start to see some return from the adsense.

I'm not satisfied yet... keyword optimization is very high on my list right now. I don't think that my keywords are dense enough in each of the 30,000+ pages that google is indexing right now. I feel like the duplicate content is huring me. I also want to add supporting pages to each of my keyword pages by getting info from firstgov.gov, or populating content from a dictionary or something like that...

More to come!

Seeing If we could Advertise Business Services under Entrepreneur.com

2004-09-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

So we are looking for new streams of traffic. We checked out some ad banner prices on Entrepreneur.com, they offer advertising services on their site but the minium spend is 2 thousand dollars a month. Out of reach for now. They were kind enough to offer up audience number stats and offer up these types of banner solutions:

Leader Board (728x90) $13 cpm

Islands (300x250): $15 cpm

Skyscraper (160x600): $15 cpm

Pop Up (250x250): $15 cpm

All Rich Media: $25 cpm

*CPM means cost per thoudsand impressions.
*An impression counts as the ad being served on the page that a viewer has visted. It obviously does not guarantee that they even looked at it, but this is a way of counting how many times your ad 'might have been seen'.

All ads are 'RUN OF SITE' a new phrase to me, but I looked it up and meant they run the ads across their site basically meaning they determine where the ads will go. You can't ask that your ad appear on a particular page.

They had a bulk rate for email addresses at 10 cents a name. Yowza. Kinda pricey if your conversions are costly.

David Martinez
http://www.legalspring.com/

Wish list...

2004-08-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

I wish my ppc clicks were always customers - and never competitors...
I wish my ppc customers would quit being so damn unpredicatable...
(one out of every such and such a number should buy, and that's it)
I wish John Elway was still playing for the Broncos...
I wish all my partners would publish the IP address of the customer
that purchased...
I wish it was easier to collect the search term that my ppc customer
searched with... (it's collected differently for every search engine)
I wish Hollywood would finally come to it's senses and quit making
"romantic comedies" - my wife always drags me to those damn things...
I wish it didn't cost $10/click for the term 'incorporation'...
I wish I got my affiliate check on the first of the month for the
previous month's performance...
I wish it was easier to get massive content...
I wish my car looked more like a Ferrari, and less like a piece of shit...
I wish I had unlimited google credits...
I wish I would have started this affiliate thing years ago...
I wish that Legalspring.com had a pagerank of 9...
I wish everyone else thought I was as funny as I think I am...

This is still a quest for more traffic...

2004-08-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today is August 12, 2004. This month, the site has received 5,438
unique visitors. Of those... I don't know how many are paid, and how
many are natural. I'm inclined to think that we've paid for most of
those people...

So, in an attempt to get more natural search users to our money pages,
I've purchased a subscription to the Microsoft Small Business
SubmitIt! service. This service is pretty cool... at least it seems
that way to get started - the results will guide my opinion in the
end...

SubmitIt (all web based) first spiders your site, and finds as many
pages as it can under your url. It does not do this very well... I've
got 1,500 pages on my site, and it found 101 of them. That may have
been at least partially my fault, and I've since changed my navigation
a little bit.

SubmitIt then lets you choose which pages you want to submit to the
search engines, and gives you easy to follow instructions on how to
optimize those pages to get the most bang for your buck. Every time
you make a change it recommends, you can have the program re-scan the
page to ensure that it meets the requirements.

Once the page is ready for submission, SubmitIt automates submission
to a lot of search engines and directories. Pretty cool stuff. In
the two days since submitting my pages, I've gotten a whole lot more
clicks to all my non-money pages than I was before - but I've yet to
see any improvement in my non-paid money page clicks.

The quest continues!

In other news, we lowered our PPC ad spend to only the products that
are making us money. We're on pace to do more sales than last month,
and spending slightly less money for it - both good things. We
analyzed the keywords where we spent money, and the ones where we made
money, and only kept the winners. I think this is how affiliates
really make money - analyze your data - re-think your strategies - try
new things - expand into new areas - re-analyze your data.

TG

Slow Periods and Non-performing Products

2004-08-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Well, the last week has been an education in the finer points of
affiliate marketing. We seemed to have noticed two distinct trends in
the last week:

1. At the end of the month the orders slowed down considerably - and
then had a huge kick right at the beginning of August. We think
everybody ran out of money to buy legal products at the end of July -
and then bought en-masse after the pay period. We may slow down the
advertising schedule at the end of the next month...

2. We've been paying hundreds of dollars for traffic to pages that did
not convert into buyers during the last month. A couple of our
products had money and traffic thrown at them, but we didn't make any
money off of them. We took down a couple of the advertising campaigns
that didn't make us any money, and redirected that cash into other
products that did better. As a result, today, our click-throughs to
affiliate sites has slowed considerably - but hopefully the traffic
that we are getting through is more relevant.

At the end of one month of making sales from our affiliate program, DM
and I did pretty well...We doubled the money that we threw at the
thing - and I'm pretty happy with that (as you can imagine!)

Here's a couple more stats to prove that we're doing something right:

Unique visitors:
- June: 262
- July: 8,789 <-- we're on pace for that many by the 10th of Aug!

Distinct visitors on the first and last Thursday of July:
- First Thursday: 35 visitors
- Last Thursday: 737 visitors

We're thinking about expanding into other markets... this is kinda fun...

TG

I need more traffic! Please?

2004-07-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

Does "please" work when asking search engines for more traffic? I've heard that the technique isn't very successful. Well, maybe thousands of pages loaded with different keywords will be...

I created a little technology to "inherit" an existing pages' content inside the LegalSpring file structure. This way, I can take my base "Incorporation" page, and create a page for "Georgia Incorporation" or "Connecticut Articles of Incorporation", without having to manually
populate the content into every one of my 500 incorporation keywords that I think people will be searching on. It just takes the content from the main page, and replaces the appropriate text with the proper keywords.

If I say "please" will Google index me faster? I'll try calling them...

On a more cautious note... is this technique legal? Do SE's frown upon this practice? The pages still look great! They're still very relevant and useful for the person that found them... I hope I don't get dinged for this - I want more traffic, not less!

TG

p.s. - It was a good weekend! We had 6 orders on Sat/Sun. I tell you - absolutely NOTHING beats sitting by the pool on a warm day, with an ice cold beer in your hands, and some friends, while your web site is making you money... ha!

YES! And here come the clicks! and the dollars?!?!

2004-07-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since we last posted. It's because we've been busy
counting all our money!

We're doing something right, because every day we make sales on our
affiliate sites. Every day we have more click-throughs than the
previous. Every day we have more natural search visitors than the
last. Every day, it seems, we're making a little more money than the
last.

I'm amazed at how simple this whole thing was. Put up a site,
generate some content, sign up as an affiliate, pay for some clicks,
and watch the money roll in. I've been in many, and started several
of my own businesses before. It's all very complicated. You've got
to have an idea, create a product, infrastructure, sales materials,
marketing plans, accounting structures, legal entities, blah, blah,
all before you can even go out and see if anyone wants to buy your
gizmo.

Well, for now, I'm a happy camper - and couldn't be happier with DM's
awesome work. This guy is gonna make me rich!

Maybe soon I'll spill the beans on how much money we're actually
making... it's not Yacht type of money yet, but it's not a bad little
extra paycheck...

TG

Overture, a roller coaster Ride

2004-07-08T17:53:00.000-07:00

So TG and I have been working Overture and Adwords. Yesterday we saw some sales (and even turned a little profit) - so today we tweaked both Overture and Adwords for more clicks. We got many more clicks - but no one was buying! We didn't know what to think of it. People find our site. They click through to learn more about the product. Then they stall? I have to wonder why they didn't stall yesterday! The lesson here is more targeted traffic do bring more sales. But even with good traffic sometimes you have off days. So we are writing this day off.Hopefully next week we will experience a few spikes.

DM

FindWhat, continued...

2004-07-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

FindWhat was a little bit tricky to get started. They've got some
automated functions that allow you to get ranked in the top 1 or 2
spots. It sounded good to me, and it's a pain in the butt to set the
price for a hundred keywords separately, so I clicked it!

Well, I got a bunch of clicks... I spent 1/5 of my monthly budget for
advertising in a half day! What happened? They automatically set my
per click price at whatever it needed to be to put me at the top for
the keywords I entered. I got a lot of clicks... but they were
expensive clicks - and that's not what I'm trying to do. An affiliate
needs to work around the edges of the ppc field, because we aren't
selling our own product with high margins...

Lesson learned...

TG

FindWhat.com - what?

2004-07-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

I signed up for FindWhat.com, an online per-click advertiser that was recently described to me by a friend as "the best of the second tier" advertisers.

Well, so far, I'm not a big fan. AdWords lets you get up and running in a matter of minutes. Overture has real-time changes to your ads. FindWhat.com fails in both categories. You have to submit your ads AND keywords for review each time you want to add new, or make a change. That sucks!

My friend also told me that you really need to watch this group daily, as there sometimes is an influx of possibly fraudulent traffic... What am I doing with these guys? Well - I'll tell you - they're cheap for clicks. And I'm basically a pretty cheap kinda guy...

I'll keep the blog posted with the saga of FindWhat.

TG

Working the System

2004-06-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

Some headlines in Adwords and Overture get much better click rates. Here are a few simple things you can do to ensure a higher click rate right off the bat. Some of the stuff I just figured with TG is part of our personal secret sauce, but we will share the obvious with you.

1. Make Sure Your Search Term, or Search Term Phrase in the first or close to the first word in the headline.
2. Make this rule the same for the adjoining text that goes with the headline.
3. FLOOD Adwords and Overture with keyword phrases and combinations! When I say flood, I don't mean get up to 50 phrases or terms in there. I mean hundreds!
4. Watch your spending, if you come accros a really great formula by accident, you might get a high click through rate with no purchase on the other end (if your relavancy is high, this is highly unlikely). Watch out for that by capping your spending costs. Adwords and Overture have systems that limit spending, so we can all stay with in budget.

Cheers!
DM
http://www.legalspring.com
http://www.google.com
http://www.overture.com

Press Release through PRWeb.com

2004-06-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

I created and submitted a press release through the PRWeb.com free press release site.

While the Internet is changing everything these days, it's truly
amazing how the Legal industry is being transformed.
LegalSpring.com's first press release outlines a couple of different
areas that the Internet is changing the legal industry.

You can find it here:

June 23, 2004
LegalSpring.com - How the Legal Industry is Being Transformed by the Internet

Posted a message to alt.support.divorce

2004-06-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

I've seen a lot of questions on the newsgroup alt.support.divorce asking for information about, and feedback from past users of, Legalzoom and CompleteCase. These are the two powerhouses of online
uncontested divorce, and we really want some more feedback from actual users of the services. So, I posted a request for feedback to the group.

I asked experienced users to come to the site and post a review. Hopefully it will generate some positive response for the site - and not get flamed too much for being overtly self-serving... I'll write
and let you know what the results are.

I've included the text of the posting below:

I'm writing on behalf of a legal service review provider named
LegalSpring.com. I've seen several pages of postings in this group
about the divorce paperwork providers Legalzoom, and CompleteCase. If
you have experience with either of these companies, you can help
others to understand what was good and bad about them.

Legalzoom Postings on alt.support.divorce
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=legalzoom&meta=group%3Dalt.support.divorce.*

CompleteCase Postings on alt.support.divorce
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=completecase+group%3Aalt.support.divorce.*&meta=group%3Dalt.support.divorce.*

Please, if you have had a good or bad experience with either of these
companies, come to LegalSpring.com and enter a review. You'll be
helping future potential customers of these services to make an
informed decision. If desired, you can choose to remain completely
anonymous.

http://www.legalspring.com/content/divorce.aspx

Your input helps. Thank you very much,

LegalSpring.com
http://www.legalspring.com

TG

Getting On Overture

2004-06-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

I have been hearing some good things about Overture. So good that we decided to sign up. They are hooked into a MSN, Yahoo, and other large portal type sites. Much like ad words they place sponsored ads in just the context relevant places, just like Awords. The sign up was pretty easy. You need to put aside a good 20 minutes to figure out your keywords and write your ads (if you are bidding for 3 keywords and or phrases or less). I found myself spending the most amount of time in the writing portion, checking on coutner bids for the same words and phrases - and writing my ads. You have some limited character sets to work with, so you have to write aggresively to get the click throughs you are looking for.

The funny thing is, they actually have your ads reviewed (after sign up) to make sure your not making any BS claims! That happens with a human reviewer, but on a programming level (during sign up) they have a filter that warns you of using 'superlatives' - a list of words such as: best, top, cheapest, fastest... they really want to make sure you play the gray area aggresively without making false claims. You type in your headline, and description, they the website warns you of your own bad ad copy... It ain't easy!

There is also a bidding tool and a tool that reccomends even more search terms. This way you can do some research and writing at the same time. I thought that function was really fresh, cool, slammin, yah know. Sample who else is out there and get a taste of what they are bidding per keyword. Now bid on the same keyword for one penny more! Ha. I really enjoyed that feature. It was like being at an auction and watching your competitor exclaim '10 cents' while you get up and say '11!!!'.

So we have three search 'phrases' (more than one word) with ajoining headlines and text to go with the searchable phrase. Hopefully we will see good ROI on this, as I heard through the grapevine, that if done correctly - it can give better returns than Adwords! That from someone who has been in the affiliate game for a few years, so I trust that comment.

Let's hope this works
DM
http://www.legalspring.com
http://www.overture.com
http://adwords.google.com

Added link in iDirectory - does this help??

2004-06-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

Today I added our link to iDirectory
(http://idirectory.topsitenet.com/). This looks mostly like a
collection of porn sites... at least that's the impression from the
home page. When you drill down, they actually seem to have a nice
collection of sites.

They're ranked 16,291 by Alexa, so they've definitely got some traffic...

TG

WebRings - do they really help?

2004-06-23T12:16:00.000-07:00

When reading about increasing web site traffic on the internet, it isn't long until you find some tip about joining a webring or two. The reason for this is obvious. You're part of a group of like-minded sites that pass users around. If they've got traffic, then I want it, too! I can't help but imagine that this will also help LegalSpring's PageRank, as I'll add a couple more links to my site. Plus, I know that Google likes directories...

I added LegalSpring.com to a couple of WebRings, found on WebRing.com. Namely, these webrings:

Pro-Se Litigant
Pro-Se Webring links web resources for persons who choose to, or must, represent themselves in legal proceedings Without a Lawyer.

Legal Support Services
Resources for law firms and sole practitioners with a focus on businesses that provide products and support services to the legal community.

Juris Doctorate
This ring contains information on the legal profession, an attorney, lawyer, and paralegal resume service, and a legal profession job search tool.

I've also applied, but am yet to be approved on the following rings (also webring.com):

In Forma Pauperis
Legal Help Webring
Legal Research Ring

I placed the requisite code on my home page, and I'm waiting with baited breath for masses of clicks to come through. Well - it hasn't happened yet! I'll wait a little longer, though...

TG

About.com, hard to get listed?

2004-06-23T12:04:00.001-07:00

Ok, so it says on About.com that all you have to do if to get listed there is this:

'just write the editor of the page or section you are interested in being listed in, and see if if the editor approves of your plea'... well I can't find this email link to the editor....About.com is looking wack right now. I hope I am just looking in the wrong place. I am about to write them to see if they can help me find out how to contact the right reviewer.

DM
recommender of Legal Services Online
http://www.legalspring.com/

Blowing money on Google Adwords

2004-06-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

LegalSpring.com is basically a fancy affiliate web site. We want to
help people choose the right legal service provider, but we want to
make a buck, too.

So, we've got a kick-ass site. We're building our relationships with
some really great companies, and feel that we know our customer.
After all, we've been studying these legal sites for a while now...
So, DM makes a real nice landing page (which can be seen here) and we
throw up some Google Adwords ads for incorporations and trademarks.
Below you'll find the text that we used:

Incorporation Site Review
Comments and reviews on websites
offering online incorporation.
www.legalspring.com

Reliable Incorporation
Find someone you can trust to
incorporate your business.
www.legalspring.com

And the results? ...drum roll please...

SQUAT!

71 clicks from google, 56 click-throughs to our partners, and $57.21
later, we've generated exactly 0 orders for any affiliate. A good
click through rate based upon our traffic, but... Something is
definitely wrong...

Here are the possibilities, as I see them:

We didn't pre-sell the customer enough - made it too easy to click right on through.
We didn't hard-sell the customer enough - our proposition wasn't good enough
Our message wasn't easy enough to read - we confused people, but made it easy to click through.
Paid too much per click, and lost the numbers game - this is the most likely scenario in my mind. In other words, we just need to generate a lot more traffic through to our partners (and obviously pay way less for it).

Getting on Dmoz.Org

2004-06-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Big thanks to TG and the many hours he has put into LegalSpring.com. That being said, we are trying to boost our traffic, as you might have read already. Today I took to a trip to dmoz.org, the open directory project. I figured out a few nifty things about Dmoz.

1. Humans still review your site for listing accuracy and to make sure you are trying to get listed into the right category.

2. You have to find a category 'specific' enough that a 'suggest url' url link becomes apparent in the green nav on top. Any category with no link like this is deemed too broad for you to list your site there - their subtle way of saying "Hey, really put your URL in the right place so when people dig down through the links they will be able to find it!"

After submitting I got a confirmation page saying to check for our Legalspring.com listing in 2-3 weeks. Since we do provide lots of links to other law resources and we provide user input on any services rendered, we will be listed soon. We tried to index Legalspring.com under this path of links/directories:

Top: Society: Law: Products: Self-Help

TG, I got my fingers crossed!
- now How the hell do you get listed on about.com....

DM
recommender of Legal Services Online
http://www.legalspring.com/

A Quest for Internet Traffic

2004-06-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

My friend DM and I worked together to start a site called LegalSpring.com. I coded the codes, and DM drew the pretty pictures, which worked out pretty nicely. The site hosts comments and reviews of legal service providers. It's intended to help people choose the right company to create their will, incorporation, copyright, patent, trust, divorce, etc...

As anyone that has ever created a web site knows, it doesn't come with traffic built in! You've got to work hard to get people to come to your site. It takes some knowledge, some hours, and some dedication to get the word out. This blog is intended to help my forgetful self to keep track of everything we've done, to make it possible to duplicate... assuming of course we want to duplicate what's about to happen here!

Could be a spectacular train wreck, could be a home run - but it'll probably be something in-between... as most of life seems to end up that way. It will most certainly, however, be interesting.

TG