sulumits retsambew

Now there's a title! What does "sulumits retsambew" mean? What's it for? What is the point?

Well, the meaning is actually quite straightforward: it's just "webmaster stimulus" spelled backwards. Now that wasn't too hard, was it?! However, the point of the whole exercise is an interesting SEO (search engine optimization) competition run by the forum Net Builders.

The aim of the competition is to see which 3 websites hit the top spots on Google.com. The competition started in March and ends on 15th August 2009 at high noon GMT. So only a couple of weeks for budding SEO experts to try and beat the current crop of top websites. To enter the contest, you must post the domain you are entering into the contest in a message here at NetBuilders.

There are prizes too!
First Place: $1,000
Second Place: $500
Third Place: $250

OK, this may seem slightly frivolous so late in the day but one interesting comparison is whether all those newly registered "sulumits retsambew" domains will beat more established websites with articles or features using the keywords. Is the domain name more important than the content? Some of the websites I've peeked at don't have much meaningful content at all and yet rank highly on Google. In one sense this shows that SEO is vital to get noticed... and content is crucial to get people coming back!

Men with Pens - Helping Writers and Freelancers

Smokin' Business Tips

To Help Writer, Freelancers and Entrepreneurs
Make a Decent Living Online

We build sites, create designs and write copy that draw customers to your blog or business – because that's how it should be. Our years of experience, creative finesse, expert skills and killer business sense make sure we fit your needs just right.

As the sales pitch says, these guys are writers and web designers and want your business! There is, however, a lot of useful information for freelance writers. Not so much on the "where can I make money" theme, but rather in helping you get your mind around certain issues about being a freelancer. Very much in the work smarter camp rather than the work harder routine. Enjoy the site!

Go to Men with Pens.

How to Find Which of Your Articles Are the Most Profitable

The question of which articles are the most profitable is one that crops up over and over again. It is wrong to assume it is always the most popular articles. There is also a balancing act between low traffic high cost per click (CTC) and high traffic low CTC keywords.

If you have your own website or blog you can easily use Google Analytics to get a wealth of data about which articles are doing best, how users come to your articles, which search terms your blog ranks highly on, and so forth. But writing for a third party website such as Xomba or Hubpages means it is not possible to use Google Analytics. The problem is that to enable Analytics you need to insert a special code into your page header, and this is only possible to do if you have admin access.

There is, however, a slightly time-consuming but nevertheless feasible way to get this precious data of which articles are winners and which are sleeping. The only way I can see how to do this is to create a custom URL channel in your Adsense account for each article.

Once your article is published immediately copy the article URL and create a URL channel in your Adsense account. You should already have a general URL channel for your writing site, such as xomba.com. Now you will have a channel for each article, such as:
xomba.com/my_first_article
xomba.com/my_second_article
and so on. Note that Adsense channels leave out the http:// and you can also leave out the www.

There is, however, one problem here, which is that you have a limited number of channels available in your Adsense account. Last I looked there was a limit of 200 channels available. If you are writing maybe just one article a week this is not a great problem, but if you are writing numerous articles across multiple websites that 200 is going to shrink very rapidly.

As the aim is to find the most profitable articles the only solution to this limited number of channels is to slowly delete those articles that just haven't been earning. You will then be able to see your best articles and be able to decide what to write next. Unfortunately this also means that if a "dead" article springs to life in the future you won't know about it.

It isn't a perfect system but seems to me the only way to get article-specific data on revenue sharing writing websites.

Let me know if it works or if you have any problems setting up Adsense channels.