The Cheap Bastid » Psychology of the Click

December Earnings Updated

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:52:04 +0000

: Image by Newton Free Library via Flickr

I can’t believe I totally forgot to update my earnings for December!

Well, I bet most of us had an incredible month, I know I did.

eHow, Adsense and Amazon were all amazing, I finally broke $1000 for the month! And, I might ad, without adding any content at all for the last 5 months.

This is just more proof that writing articles online is a great way to make passive permanent income each and every month.

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A New Keyword Tool | Detecting Commercial Intention

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:41:42 +0000

This is a new keyword tool for you to use. It comes from Microsoft Adcenter. Actually it’s not a new keyword tool, it’s been around for a while. It’s called the Commercial Intent Tool, you can find it here. It’s just another weapon in my arsenal of profit.

Basically, the way it works is you type in your intended keyword and the keyword tool will give you the ‘Commercial Intention’ of it.

In simpler terms, it’ll tell you if people who are searching for that keyword are looking to buy something, or, more importantly, likely to click an ad.

I find this keyword tool useful for when I’m trying to decide on which keyword to use as my traffic keyword in an article, I always choose the one with the highest commercial intent.

Here’s some examples of how it works. Lets say I write an article about barbecue. Should I use barbecue as my traffic driver? Lets see…

Ooowee, not many clickers with this keyword...

Hmm, .61, not good at all. Probably not many clicks with this keyword. Let’s plug ‘barbecue grill’ into the keyword tool…

Better, but still sucks..

A little better, but still not what I’m looking for. How about ‘cheap barbecue grill’

This is much better! I found my keyword!

Holy crap! .98, you really can’t get much better than this. This is the keyword I should use as my traffic driver. Certainly the people arriving at my article are looking to buy and that means more clicks and Amazon sales, and you know what that means… Mo’ Money!

Obviously you need to find a balance between traffic and intent. If a keyword with an intent of .80 gets 60k hits a day it’s probably better than one with a .90 intent that only gets 15k hits a day.

Use this keyword tool to decide on like traffic keywords, sometimes there is an amazing difference.

If you can get high traffic, high intent keywords you WILL get more clicks!

Let me know what you think of this keyword tool and if it makes a difference in your keyword choices and income.

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What Makes People Click? – Why are they there

admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:20:20 +0000

This is the last part of my series on what makes people click ads, and, in my opinion one of the most important.

Once I realized this reason for clicking ads, I completely changed my eHow strategy, and this is immediately apparent if you look at my article list in November 2008. In fact you can actually see the day I implemented it.

Once I did this my earnings took off, those first few articles are now my top earners, in fact every article I wrote that starts with ‘How to Buy….’ has earned money, with NO exceptions.

What is this frame of mind?? consider the following article titles:

How to Save Money on a New Coat
How to Buy the Best Coat at the Best Price
How to Cook a Great Onion Soup
How to Unclog a Sink

Consider the mindset of the person clicking a link to go to read your article.

This person is interested in saving money, in fact that’s the first capitalized word in the article title, will he click an ad? Maybe, maybe not, he’s there to save money so unless the ads specify saving money you probably won’t get a click.
Hmm, I think a person reading this article is there because he’s ready to BUY something, if the ads are relevant, you’ll probably get a click.
A recipe. Let’s look at this.. This person probably wants to make some soup but doesn’t have a recipe. He wants to log in, read (maybe print) a recipe then head to the store. Not much click possibility here.
This guy’s sink is clogged, again, get some directions print them out and leave. Higher possibility of getting a click if there are plunger and other REVIEW ads on the site. Remember he isn’t going to order a tool then wait a week for it to arrive while his sink is clogged.

Now, armed with this mindset information you can still make adjustments to your article content to get clicks. For recipe articles, mention some great pot/knife/stockpot or whatever to get a relevant ad on the page, in fact, say you use it, mention reviews to try to get a relevant ad. Best thing to do is put a picture (from Amazon, remember the computer setup article?) Pick out a great seller and put it in the caption. For the saving money article mention coupon code sites to get an ad on your page. And finally for the sink article mention a specific product type and reviews to get a review site ad on the page the reader might check before he heads off to the store.

Is he there to buy? To read reviews? To get instructions? To print something out and leave? Visit your article AFTER you publish it, if the ads are wrong include some more or new keywords, it only takes one to get an ad to show, and if you don’t believe me just look at this page. I mentioned electric shavers in a post last week and my sidebar is full of ads!

I’ll also mention that, for me anyway, I’ll find a nice keyword and after thinking about it I’ll just not use it because I feel the article will not evoke many clicks. I’m a BIG BBQ nut and can put dozens of barbecue recipes and tip articles up but I haven’t because I don’t feel they’ll earn money.

So, to summarize this whole ‘Why do people click’ series do the following…

Gain trust by providing quality content
Make sure there are relevant ads on the page
Try to get review sites or other interesting links on the page, either in the resource section or in an ad
Engineer something click able based on the visiting readers intentions by manipulating keywords

If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know! Any additional ideas on why people click ads?

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What Makes People Click? – The Easy Way Out

admin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 20:51:30 +0000

This is the fourth part of the “Why do people Click” , the boredom/excitement factor.

After a while even the most avid Internet surfer gets bored, when that happens they either log off, or start clinking on links to see where it will take them, or perhaps to visit sites they’ve never gone to before. Now for the person who paid for the ad this is bad, as it probably doesn’t generate many sales. But for us this is good since we get paid on the click. I actually clicked on something this morning, I saw the eHow earnings haven’t updated yet so I cruised around to kill time, ending up on a site that I normally wouldn’t have gone to.

When I first started thinking about this reason for clicking I felt there was nothing we could do to influence this type of click. After all, I can’t make somebody bored or excited in a few hundred word article.

Then I kind’ve realized that the reason behind the click wasn’t important, what the click is really is just an ‘easy out’ You see, in the end there are only four ways a person can leave your page:

Type a new address into the address bar
they can click on something
Hit the Back Button
Choose one of their bookmarked sites

Now if you look at #2, click on something. One of the things we can do is to give the reader that ‘easy out’ I mentioned earlier. A trustworthy, low risk exit. I do this in my articles already and didn’t even realize it.

In lot’s of my articles I’ll put an affiliate store link with the (well known) store name. After all, nobody is really afraid to click on a Macys or Amazon link.

Word of warning though, do NOT put an ‘out’ link that gives you no earnings, or potential earnings. Putting a generic link to say, Sears.com, will get lots of clicks, but you won’t know about it because it’s not your affiliate link. I see LOTS of ehow’ers making this mistake. Putting non-monetized links in the resource section of their article. If you mention a site in your article, let the ad generator put the link on your page.

As far as the excitement aspect of the ‘out’ click, you can write an article on something that isn’t generally accessible by the average person. For example, writing an article titled ‘How to Rent a Ferrari’ will probably get lots of views, and maybe some clicks on ads about renting a Ferrari, if only to see how much it costs.

So, to summarize… Provide a monetized, low risk easy way out for your readers. Whether it’s a safe out for a bored person, or an exciting, ad or affiliate link.

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What Makes People Click? – I found it!!

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:47:23 +0000

Your reader is here for coffee, give him a link to click so he gets it!

This is a simple one. If somebody lands on your article page, website or blog to get some information and there’s an ad for something that they need, whether a product or more information it’s likely they’ll click on it.

I have to say that this is key to making money when writing articles, if the reader lands on your page looking for something and can’t find it, you won’t make money, simple as that. So AFTER you publish an article go back and look at it and make sure there are ads there that are relevant, if not, adjust your keyword density.

Fist off, make sure your article title is relevant to the content of the article, which it should be if you care about getting high ranking on the search engines.

So, if your article is titled “How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee with a French Press” you should make sure that the article actually tells the reader how to do that.

Now, where does the clicking come in?

Easy, in the article in this example the reader obviously is at your page because he wants to make a great cup of coffee. We need to make sure there are french press ads on the page, as well as other coffee making ads.

Use french press, coffee maker, coffee grinder etc in your article, maybe one per step or perhaps in the first paragraph.

The reader, who wants to make good coffee will see these ads, be tempted by your text and might possibly click an ad. Whether he wants to buy a french press, or coffee grinder, or just wants to see what they cost, we don’t care.

This part is simple enough, keep the title relevant to the text, and mention some products or even review sites in your steps to get ads targeted at the reader.

Next up we’ll talk about the boredom/excitement factor of ad clicking.

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What Makes People Click? – The Curiosity Factor

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:01:09 +0000

Next we’ll look at the curiosity factor. Let’s face it, at one time or another we’ve clicked on an ad or link because we were curious as to what it was.

This is quite a simple concept, but when it comes to article writing it’s a very difficult think to do.

I’ve come up with a few things you can do..

First off, to get the most of this you may have to publish the article, look at the ads, and then edit it to add ‘curiosity building’ text.

You can intrigue the reader with the article title
Continue getting the reader curious with your first paragraph
In your article body, hint at what the links may offer
And finally, in the tips/warnings section once again hint at the ads

Now I must say at this point that actually coming out and saying ‘click on blah blah’ is a violation of the google adsense terms and you will get booted if you use terms like this.

However, you can say.. “Try going to a review site to find out which is best”, obviously you must publish the article first, make sure there are actually review ads listed before you can be sucessful using this term. You can hedge your bets by using ‘reviews’ a few times in your article, perhaps in other ‘curiosity building’ terms.

We actually see these tactics used all the time. If you don’t believe me just go to google and type in making money and go to any site that comes up.

More often than not you’ll see phrases like “Join up to learn my secret blah blah blah” and “You too can make 100 dollars a second by using my secret technique” these are all terms to get us curious, and they do work.

In my articles I like to put in the title, How to get the best whatever at the best price, this get’s people interested in a) buying the best and b) getting the best possible price.

Then in the body i’ll say something like, follow these steps to find out how to get a great deal. Finally i’ll end with, use online retailers since they offer better prices and online reviews.

Hopefully they get interested in saving, read the steps and get interested in the product, and then they are curious enough to actually click a review or merchant link to check out their ‘better prices’

You can use this in other ways..

How to buy a car for pennies, probably not possible, but I guarantee people will click on it just to see what it’s all about

How to file your taxes online without paying for it. Here is an interesting title, we all know that most everyone can file their federal taxes for free, but I didn’t say free, I said without paying for it. That makes the reader curious as to how you ‘get away with it’

I hope this helps you all make some additional money from your articles, as always feel free to post a question or comment. I especially want to hear any more tips from other successful writers and experiences from new folks too.

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What Makes People Click? – A Question of Trust

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:30:15 +0000

I’ve been noticing lots of people on the eHow forums lately asking why they aren’t making any money despite having dozens, or even 100 or more published articles.

Well, I recently began searching the web trying to find information on the psychology behind the click. The consensus is there are five factors that make people click an ad.

Trust
Curiosity
Honestly want the product/information
Boredom/Excitement
Frame of mind

Let’s talk about these, and try to apply these principles to our articles.

In part 1 we’ll talk about trust. This simply means that the visitor trusts your site and opinion and has no problem clicking an ad.

We all trust sites like CNN, Amazon etc.. These sites get clicks because people trust the site.

But how do you build trust on a one page eHow article that the user will more than likely only visit once, and only stay a minute or so?

In my writing I often put a phrase like “but I wouldn’t personally recommend this as it’s a waste of money” not much, but there isn’t much more we can do, and some people will be swayed by this. A phrase like this shows you care about the reader and you aren’t out to get their money.

Remember, there’s a large cynical group out there that automatically believes that any lesser known site has one goal, to get their money.

Another way to get trust is by keeping the reader on your page as long as possible, studies have shown that the longer a person is on a site, the more likely they are to click something. One way to do this is by having a long article, I’m not saying a novel, but make it wordy, but not full of fluff. Provide useful, relevant content that the reader can honestly use. Use bulleted lists and format your articles nicely, again, this shows you care.

Make sure the content is relative to the keyword and article title that you’re using. We’ve all clicked on links, believing the site has what we’re looking for, only to end up on a useless fluff site full of more ads than the sunday paper. Needless to say we can’t hit the back button quick enough.

Another way is to have pictures, the more the better. A site with pictures sends two messages; the writer cares, and the writer wants to provide help to the reader. In addition, looking at pictures takes time, and the more time the reader is there, the more likely a click.

I can’t say enough about the visual impact of your article page. Most of us can tell within a second of landing on a web page whether it’s a quality site, or fly by night money grubbing scam site. Format well, add pictures and make it look pretty.

So to summarize, build their trust by providing useful, long content. Show your not out to get their money by making a statement that shows you care about them. Add some good photos to your articles. Make your page visually appealing and give the impression you put some time into it.

Part 2 will talk about curiosity. Ever click an ad because you wondered what it led to?

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