October 7th, 2008

Late last week it looks like GoClick, a company bought out by Marchex years ago, finally went offline.  While many people publicly blogged how they were sure that GoClick was nothing more than a third-tier click fraud site (because they didn’t know what they were doing), I had huge success with it, and I’m sorry to see it go.

For a long time I promoted some of my financial sites via GoClick.  For 1,2 or sometimes even a whopping 5cents a click, I got a decent amount of (somewhat targeted) traffic.  I kept an eye on the spending, and could go through perhaps as much as $40 a month (big spender, huh?).  That $40 spend would result in $200-300 in revenue from Financial Affiliate Marketing and another $200-300 (or more – once I made $750 in one month) from contextual ads like AdSense and YPN.  It was easy money.  With the low priced ads, you can afford a lot of ‘fraudulent’ clicks and still make a profit.

Now that GoClick is offline, I’ll have to push more of my efforts to other places.  Lucky for me, there are still plenty of places to spend my money and get decent traffic – such as ExoClick and Bidvertiser.  I’ll be on there soon, and if you’re smart (and you enjoy money), you’ll be looking them up as well.

And  yes, these are affiliate links. I just told you how to make some nice cash, so I don’t see a problem.

I stumbled across another website design company today and did a little snooping around. Sure enough, three pages deep in their list of services they listed “Search Engine Submission”. Excellent.

Truth is, there is no need to ever pay someone to submit your website to any search engine. Think about it – search engines make money by discovering websites and indexing them. Their main function is to find websites and rank them according to which they think is the best for what you are looking for. So it is in their best interest to find websites and add them to their index. You don’t have to pay someone to tell them what they already know.

Now, it doesn’t hurt to expedite the process by joining something like Webmaster Tools and verifying your website, which takes you less then a few minutes from start to finish. Letting Google know that there’s a real human behind a website goes a far way towards your site getting indexed.

Another way to get indexed is simply to get a link from another page to your website. Ask your web designer to link to you in his/her portfolio. Get a link from your Chamber of Commerce. Submit your website to DMOZ (although that one may take a while to reveal itself). Add a signature link to your website on your favorite forum. Reply to a few blogs using your link.

The search engines will find you. I promise.