You might not think there is duplicate content, but you need to set it up in the right way otherise Google may think there is!

Have you bought all your domains from WebEden?

What you need to do is enter all the domain names (with and without the www) under

Admin -> Site address -> add your website address.

Then at the bottom of that dialogue box you can choose your ‘preferred site address’.

Choose the one you want. All your other domains will be forwarded to this one!

Ken

There is no search engine advantage you can gain by point multiple domain names to the same website.

In fact, there are some disadvantages.

Google ignores duplicate content. So it will only rank your website once in the the Search Engine Results Page, not twice (one for each domain).

You also lose control about which is your ‘main domain’ – Google will decide one or the other and you won’t be able to influence that.

In addition, Google may suspect that you are trying to spam them with more than 1 version of your website, and therefore rank your site lower on the search engine results page, or even remove it altogether.

Having said that, there is a benefit in owning all variations of your name as a domain name, since many people might try to guess your website address by typing your name directly into the search bar along with ‘.com’ or ‘co.uk’ at the end.

For these people, you should forward them to your main website.

Hope that makes sense!

Ken

Do you want to keep your domain in the WebEden control panel and point it at your new website, or do you want to transfer your domain to the other provider?

Thanks,
Ken

As to how much you can make, that all depends on how many visitors you have, and the sort of market that you’re in.

The best way to test the idea of selling advertising is to put Google Adsense on your site, and see how much money that makes you – do you know how to sign up to that?

Online advertising is sold either on a per click basis, on a ‘per thousand impressions’ basis, or on a ‘sponsorship’ basis.

If you go down the per click route, then the amount you can charge depends on your ability to calculate the clicks (no feature yet available for this with WebEden), and the market you’re in.

Let’s say you run a website all about your local area: you might get a taxi company to advertise, but they’re only going to want to pay 20p per click or so. That’s because only a few of the people who click on their advert will book a taxi, and then their profit per booking is probably quite low. So they can’t afford to invest much per click.

However, if your website compares mortgage providers, you might be able to charge as much as £10 per click, since a mortgage broker can make up to £4000 for selling someone a mortgage, money which can of course be invested in marketing.

The easiest route is probably sponsorship. By this I mean approaching advertisers and saying: ‘This is what my website is all about. This is the sort of person who visits my website. I have approximately X number of visitors. I will charge you £Y per month to have a box on my page.

You’re being honest about your visitors and your website content, but you make them no guarantees about the number of clicks or impressions they might get.

I’ve just touched on a few areas here, as its a very big topic. However, to kick off your advertising ideas, try putting Google Adsense on your website.

Please let me know if you need any help with that.

Good luck!

Ken

I imagine that it’s done on a pay per click basi? And now that we have the HTML widget, we could maybe run a bit of code on an hyperlink image to count the clicks or something? Maybe webeden could create something like that as part of the next upgrade (only joshing, stop banging your head off the desk)

Does one sell it at something like 10p per click? Or a £1 per click?

Or do you need to be a really big player before you can sell advertising?!

AX