ArghWebWorks

With chatter today about website speed, here’s a quick test to see how long a webpage takes to download.

Keep in mind that this should be run at some interval with an average taken. Server load and speed should be taken into effect.

$ time wget –quiet –delete-after –page-requisites http://www.gmail.com

An example output is:
real 0m0.421s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.012s

“time” gives you how much time something took; the command after the time command. You want the “real” number.
“wget” is a great tool for downloading stuff from the web. The –page-requisites flag gets the CSS(link) (Cascading Style Sheets), JS, images and other things necessary for the page to be displayed. The other options (quiet, delete after) are just there to clean up the output.

This also doesn’t take into account how much time a browser might take arranging the pieces into a pie. A bunch of nested tables will cause the client to slow down. Not specifying image height and width will cause browsers to slow down. A slow computer … well, you get the idea. Run this and take an average of the REAL value and you should have a pretty good idea of how slow your site is.

Note
If you’re plugging this into a php script, keep in mind that “time” is outputting that into the STDERR stream.

One of my clients has an extremely busy website. And it’s a popular place for people to show his images and offer a cracked version of his product for sale. We can see them in the apache logs- the referrer shows their domain name. One thing I like to do in order to keep an eye on this is to tail his apache logs and pull out the refer data. I’m using this:

[code]
tail -f access.log | cut -d\ -f9,11 | grep -v (domain name)
[/code]

That’s two spaces after the -d\; the backslash is escaping the space used as the delimiter. You may need different field numbers (9 and 11 are the ones for his combined logs that show the HTTP status code and the referrer). And of course I need to grep out the domain name of his site because it’s all over those lines.

Hope that helps ya.

I found this interesting tool that should help with search engine optimization.

While I’ve been around the internet a few times ( I’ve been here since 1993 ), I tend to think that SEO is easy. Using a tool like this does the quick tests for me and determines how well I’m doing. It gives good reminders for things like alt tags, description tags and the page title, and how well they match to the page.

This is an Interesting Technique. I thought I’d take a look at generating these. As with anything that looks tedious, I figured I’d do it with scripting.

My first thought was to generate the list and then post it to a blog using the “post via email” function; straightforward to generate a list, then an email and send it on its way.

I use site5 for hosting this site, and have the log files placed within my ~/logs directory on the server. I downloaded the most recent (last month’s) copy of the log file and unzipped it:

$> scp arghwebworks.com:logs/arghwebworks.com-Aug-2007.gz .
$> gunzip arghwebworks.com-Aug-2007.gz

then I opened it up and examined a few lines:

72.51.41.47 - - [31/Jul/2007:02:40:03 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 44785 "-" "Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)"
66.249.66.1 - - [31/Jul/2007:02:40:05 -0400] "GET /2006/07/17/why-ajax-sucks/?paged=3 HTTP/1.1" 200 54123 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
212.247.189.113 - - [31/Jul/2007:02:41:04 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 44785 "-" "Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)"

Note that your log format may change, and so if you use this perl script, you might have to play with the regular expression somewhat.

I wrote this perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl 

open (LOG, "arghwebworks.com-Aug-2007" );

my %referrers;
while (my $line=) {
	$line =~ m/\[.*\] ".*" \d{1,4} \d* "(.*?)"/;
	$testval = $1;
	$testval =~ s/\s+$//;
	$testval =~ s/^\s+//;
	unless ( $testval =~ m/http:..www.arghwebworks.com/  || $testval =~ m/http:..arghwebworks.com/ ) {

		if ( $testval gt '' && $testval ne '-' ) {
			$referrers{$testval}++;
		}
	}
} 

$count=0;
# this is some magic sort sequence. I'm not really sure how it works 
foreach $food ( sort { $referrers{$a} < $referrers {$b} } keys %referrers) {
		print "$food is $referrers{$food}.\n";
		$count++;
		if ( $count > 10 ) {
			exit();
		}
	}

Yeah, I know, it’s crap. It still runs quickly enough to give me the results in a matter of microseconds.

Here’s what I get back:

http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:PpXaEbSr1p4J:www.arghwebworks.com/%3Fpaged%3D5+mysql-bind+patch&hl=cs&ct=clnk&cd=14&gl=cz is 22.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:JfMyYqbaZYEJ:www.arghwebworks.com/%3Fp%3D70+procmailrc+cialis&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us is 7.
http://viagranwnc.blogspot.com is 7.
http://phentermine--mine.blogspot.com is 6.
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=search&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP is 5.
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:wMrxXb6B59EJ:arghwebworks.com/cwc_tgc/+tara%40welcomingcongregations.org&hl=fr&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=ci is 4.
http://buy65--rphentermine.blogspot.com is 4.
http://phenterminew0-q.blogspot.com is 2.
http://airline-rrr-tickets.blogspot.com is 1.
http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/?url=www.arghwebworks.com is 3.
http://valium9-j.blogspot.com is 1.

I didn’t link those on purpose.

Look at this short list of URLs. Out of eleven, five of them contain the name of some drug. The top two are from a google search in Czech, and there are two other search engine queries (one of them references a client ). One is an obvious airline ticket splog., and one is a tool from pingdom.com.

Totally worthless.

If I were going to pursue this method, I’d want to be able to check the “spamminess” of a link. Any suggestions out there?

Here’s the deal. I don’t think you’re going to make a killing at the Google Arbitrage game.

But everyone else thinks they will.

If you’re going to make money from Google Arbitrage, the first thing you need is a niche. Suppose you had a means for generating a list of keywords and how much search traffic they had. You could sell access to your list. ( To be honest, that site has a free offer as well.)

You probably also want some advice. Jonathan Leger is a programmer who has done some work to “help other people make money.” His three-way-link site is a cunning way to help people get better search engine love with their little niche sites. Which would lower the cost of advertising (in a roundabout way). A lower cost of advertising is the other thing people who want to make a killing at Arbitrage need.

Yesterday, my example paid me $35 in a month ( gross, before I subtracted the $300 in advertising ). An account on the three-way-links site pays Jonathan $47 dollars. His advertising costs ( I imagine) are low. However, imagine if he sells 100 accounts. That’s $4700 each month. And it’s recurring; he will get this money for quite some time, and he can stop paying the advertising and still earn the money.

No, I don’t know how many accounts he has, and no, I don’t know how much he’s spending on advertising.

I’m not picking on Jonathan. His sites and his techniques are extremely smart. Nor am I picking on the nichebot guys; they’re doing the same thing I’m telling you to do. In fact, I think they’re more honest in some ways than most arbitrageurs.

When I was a kid, there was a comic strip ( I think it was spy vs spy in Mad Magazine) where two people got into a pie throwing contest. Anne bought ten pies and threw them at Bob. Bob bought ten pies and threw them at Anne. Both people wound up covered in pie, and both people had fun throwing pie at the other person. But who “won”?

The pie merchant.

If you want to make a killing from Google Arbitrage, my advice to you is to be the pie merchant. Find something that people who are trying to make money on the internet need, whether it’s keywords, links, hosting, templates, project management, whatever. Find that thing and sell it to everyone.

Arbitrage is taking advantage of the difference between two financial markets.

For instance, suppose I go to Clickbank and find an ebook that sells for ten dollars. The seller gives the advertiser a 50% cut, so if I steer people to his site and they buy a book, I make five bucks. Of course, every person who goes to his site won’t buy the book, suppose the “conversion rate” is a high five percent (two percent is normal). So for every twenty people I send to his site, I make five bucks.

Now suppose I decide that people just aren’t coming to my site fast enough, and I’m only making five dollars a month. I want to get more people coming in, and so I go to google adwords and set up an account. My ad program will pay one dollar per click for each person to come to my site. I set up the plan with a daily budget of $10. So I get ten clicks a day from this program. The user “converts” on my site to the seller’s site; assume I do a fantastic job of selling the seller’s stuff, and five people per day go to his site. It takes me four days to make one sale ( I make $5 ), and in four days I’ve spent $40. I’m $35 in the hole!. By the end of the month I’ve spent $300 to earn $35 dollars.

To make money from arbitrage, you need two things; one, a product that converts very well, and two, ads with a very low cost. As you can imagine, these things are a premium; if a product converts very well, everyone’s trying to sell it and the cost of the ad skyrockets. If the cost of the ad is very low, the product won’t convert very well.

Google Arbitrage uses the Adsense advertisements as the “product that converts very well.” Basically, you build a five page site stocked with keywords and hook up adsense advertisements to it. Now, you have a site that should get good pagerank, and if you “SEOize” it right, you should get some nominal traffic. Second, you purchase adwords advertisements ( remember, you need a low cost advertising niche ), and send traffic your way. If it’s done “right,” you will earn more money from Adsense than you would spend on adwords.

I think Google Arbitrage is legal. I’m not a lawyer, so take that as the opinion of some computer geek. Basically, you’re gambling that your site is good enough, your adsense costs are low enough, and your conversion and payouts are high enough to make it worth your while.

I’m not sure it’s “honest.” Most of the sites people set up for Google Arbitrage are scraped from other sites, poorly done clumps of keywords, et cetera. Some poor schmuck worried about his aunt Marjorie searches google for “High Blood Pressure” and finds a site dedicated to high blood pressure– it’s got articles someone scraped from the Wikipedia and it’s heavily adsensed. While he’s looking at it, he clicks on one of the adsense ads and the ( and here’s a nice fancy word for you ) arbitrageur makes fifty cents. Did he get the information he needed? I hope so. But my main beef is that the ( here’s that word again. No I don’t know how to pronounce it ) arbitrageur isn’t adding anything to the mix; there’s no actual new information on the scrape site.

I’ve heard that Google is looking at how to stop arbitrage like this. I don’t think they will. I don’t have any hard numbers but I’m sure there’s more people either making small amounts or losing money betting on arbitrage than there are people earning the five or six figure payouts that certain people advertise. I think arbitrage is a cash cow for Google. And to emphasize the point; if you have a google Adwords bill for $25 dollars, you pay it that month, right away. If you have a google Adsense “earnings” of $25, you don’t get it right away — you get it after you total (currently) $100 ( they don’t pay under a hundred bucks if you want a check ). And they have a month between when you break the hundred dollar barrier and when they cut the check to verify their results. How many of us would like to borrow $25 a month for four months from a hundred thousand people, and then pay that money back at the end of four months? Even if you break even, Google wins.

I’m not complaining about Google. I run Google adsense everywhere. I just don’t think that Google arbitrage is a very good way to make money. It’s not smart and it’s not safe.

I have some ideas on better ways to make money from Arbitrage though, and I’ll talk about them tomorrow.

I’ve seen a couple of requests go by for the ‘automatic thumbnailer’ script. I took a second look at it, and it was broken (gasp!). So I fixed it; basically it submitted to the wrong page and needed a writable ‘data’ directory. You can check it out here. Note that the php code to thumbnailize the photo is freely downloadable.

.. of my Best Selling Book website, Elibratto.com.

The domain cost about eight dollars. The hosting is free ( thanks to a friend). I spent about six hours writing the code and two hours on the layout; eight hours. Some clients have paid me $25/hour, and that’s the minimum a previous employer told me to accept.

So I’ve spent about $210 on this site. Let’s see how much it’s earned me…

Google Adsense for Elibratto.com? $ 0.00.
Amazon Affiliate for Elibratto.com? $ 0.00.

Currently it has a page rank of 3, and at least one first page result; for ‘memoirs-best sellers’”.

Domain renewal time is coming up; another $10. (just round figures).

Do I leave it up, and let it sit there, or do I let it die, or do I spend some more time either working on SEOing the pages or adding new things, ( more of a time investment ), or do I try a different domain name ?

I suspect a different domain name (one with actual “books” in the title ) might be better. A ten-dollar investment isn’t so bad, but another two or three hundred dollars worth of programming might be a bad idea.

What do you think?

(This is the second in a series of three days designed to increase your traffic. You can Read the First day or you can jump right in here. We’re aiming at about an hour per day, but that depends on you, your attention to detail (how many titles do you want to rewrite?) and your typing speed.

Our baseline is the Quiz 4 Cash site. The current traffic to Quiz for Cash is fairly small. On day one, we looked at some of the content of the site, discussed adding a Search function, and rewriting some titles. On day two, we’re going to look at some more direct means of getting traffic to your site.

First, create an account (or log into your account) at delicious, and bookmark your site. Make sure to tag it with appropriate tags. This is useful both because it’s a social bookmark (other users may search for your tag and find your site) but also because it’ll show you how many other people bookmarked it. Then create accounts (or log into your accounts) at digg and reddit. Add links to your site to both of these services, using words from your key phrases and your tags you used at delicious (which should be roughly the same).

Go to your favorite text editor (probably notepad or wordpad). It’s usually under the start button, then accessories. If you’re using a Macintosh, then it’s probably something like simpletext. But if you’re using linux, just use whatever you normally use. Either open up your signature file if you already have one, or create a new file. In this file, put two hyphens at the top, and then beneath that your name, then your website. Save this file in your documents folder as something like “mailsig.txt”. In your email program, assuming you’re using Thunderbird, go to “tools” and then “account settings.” Check the box that says “use this signature file” and then browse to where you saved this file. Click on this and save the changes to your settings. Now every time you send an email, you’ll also send your domainname to the person who gets the email.

The last thing we’ll do today is post our web address to Usenet. There are appriximately 100,000 groups on Google Groups. Do a search for a general group that applies to your site. For the quiz4cash site, I’d recommend “rec.games.trivia. Post an announcement here. There is a “new post” link over on the right side. The more interesting you make it, the more people will follow it; people on the news groups like this can be fairly resistant to advertising.

This is the first day of a three-day workshop to increase your site traffic. The goal is to do one hour per day; but your results will depend on your attention to detail, typing speed, and wit. We’re going to do one session every other day; Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

To gauge the success of these techniques, we’ll be using the Quiz 4 Cash site as a baseline. Today, the Alexa web rank is … not calculated.. the site is not within their top one million sites. And the google page rank is 0.

On day one, we will enable search, add some personal information and examine our topic headings.

Search is very important to finding items on your site. Most sites these days are driven by some sort of content management system, wordpress, blogger, et cetera. This site, for instance, uses wordpress, and so the “search” is an easy scrap of code within the template (most templates already have it built in). Other sites might want to use the Google adsense for search. Elibratto is an example of a site using adsense for search. Google provides an easy-to-use interface to creating this simple form. You’ll need to be a member of Adsense first.

On the Quiz for Cash site, the search isn’t very comprehensive; there’s a browsing list (for the different quizzes) located here: browse list. A search tool would be useful, but it could probably wait until they have over 100 quizzes. Or we could just integrate the google search box. Let’s leave search alone for now on their site, but we’ll ask about it.

The Quiz4Cash site has some good “about us” information, but might be made more personal with a nice photo of Andrew Deal, who owns CGIPro and had the original concept for the site. He’s a smart guy, with an IQ of over 130 (according to the Tickle IQ test), and he frequently travels to India for business and religious/humanitarian reasons. I think some more information about the people behind Q4C would help readers make more of a connection.

Quiz For Cash doesn’t have much in the way of “headings” that would be appropriate to what we’re looking for today, when it comes to the quizzes themselves. However, there is a news page where exciting new quizzes are advertised, as well as general site news. Most copywriters today seem to agree that a title of a page that looks like “10 reasons…” or “How to…” seems to do well with regard to catching attention. The primary, nay, only job of a heading is to get you to read the article, and “Quiz4Cash.com Coming Soon!” doesn’t do it for me. I’d recommend something more along the lines of “How your brain can get you paid! Quiz for Cash…” — it’s a little more sensationalist, and doesn’t give you much more information, but the usage of the question words (How, Why, When, Where, What) is a good example of a catchy title. Each one of the (three) headings should be more pondered, and going forward, should be considered more.

Tune in Wednesday for Day 2 traffic-building activity!