“Directory Backlinks” is an old way to get an easy link. In general you have to be a little leary of wasting your time with 3000 rubbish directories, but there are a few good directories from whom it is worth getting a link.

Which directories?

• DMOZ – an excellent backlink, and its *free*, although unlikely to send you any traffic. DMOZ can be extremely difficult to get into. Fill out the sumission form, make a note of when you submitted (because you may be barred as a spammer if you forget you’ve already submitted and submit again) and forget about it.
• Yahoo – again, an excellent backlink, but quite expensive at $300 per year.
• BOTW – modest charge and an excellent backlink. This is definitely one to target. Keep an eye on them as they run discount promotions every year or so, and thats a great time to apply with all your sites. BOTW is probably the most recommended directory on the web, because they have done the work to provide backlink value to your submission. Definitely one of the first places to get a link.

So, 3 easy places to get links from – what other directories do you know of that will push you up the organics?

I run a high traffic site that has significant .au “Mum and Dad” traffic.
The large majority of this traffic comes through search engines (oh, how I wish it wasn’t so!).
Inspired by Hobo’s List Of Top Ten Search Engines in 2008, I thought I would examine my search engine referers for the year past.

Here’s the organic search engine spread for 2008:

(Although I have no idea who Alice is!)

And, yes, rankings are similar on Yahoo and MSN/Live to those on Google.

So, what does this tell us if we are targeting Australian mums and dads?
Get in bed with Google.

Traditionally, I haven’t had a huge success with affiliate marketing in this niche – the visitors tend to be in and out fast, with perhaps a click on an ad. Nonetheless, I have everything set up to do Aff Marketing, so my first thought is to swap out some of the adsense with affiliate offers. With the adsense payoff falling, it is at least worth trying.

So I dropped in some offers, and watched while the adsense ctr fell yet even a little further.

But wait, I thought to myself, what if seeing the graphic affiliate offers against the text is putting people off clicking the adsense even further?

There was only one thing for it – a split test to check the aff offers weren’t interfering with the adsense.

The easiest way to segment the audience was by grabbing their IPs, looking at the last digit and splitting by oddness. Here’s the PHP code I used:

$flagOdd = false;
$txIP = substr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], strlen($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) - 1);
if (1 == ((int) $txIP) % 2) {
$flagOdd = true;
}


Then, if the flag was odd, I showed them a split between adsense and aff offers, and if it was even I only showed them adsense.

The results

Unbelievably, the adsense ctr and ecpm was *higher* if aff ads were shown sometimes.
WTF? I hear you chime in with me.

I have 2 possible explanations:

1. The visitors were ‘tired’ of the adsense and were more likely to click if they had other options.

However, the site has 80% new visitors, so this doesn’t seem likely.

2. The ctr was dropping because traffic growth was making me reach the limits of growth of what this site can get from adsense – I am running out of advertisers.

I’m not sure how much I like this reasoning, as the ctr is low all day – its not as if it drops at the end of the day. We do not know how adsense segments the day – by the hour perhaps? – and their reports don’t allow you to accurately track how the clicks change through the hour, so its possible, and its what I am going with now.

So – split testing has shown me that this site has reached the limit of Adsense’s advertisers. For further traffic growth I need to find additional funding sources.

What can you think of that you should be split testing?

Sound simple? It isn’t. Read on for more.

(This was the old content of the homepage for ages, so I thought I should put it somewhere)

Not sure how often I will post, as giving information without giving too much away is a tricky business, but we shall see.

Welcome to the blog – looking forward to your comments. Spam won’t be tolerated, so at least try to make it look like a genuine comment, eh?