Affiliate Money

Should you make money with your website?

A stupid question? Not really. A lot of you, especially the celebrity fans, out there have created your websites because of a passion you have or the respect you have for a celebrity. You are a fan and you want the world to know it -- and to know all about your favorite celeb. So, would it be right for you also to make money from it as well?

A good website take time and money. Although you are not being a fan to create a profit, a little extra income can offset the cost of maintaining your site and your time - and may even give you enough money to purchase that concert ticket the next time your celeb is in town.

What is an affiliate relationship?

Simply speaking - an affiliate relationship is where you make money from one of your visitors going to an affiliate's site through a link from your site. If they purchase something at the affiliate's website, you get a percentage of the sale.

To illustrate how an affiliate relationship works - see below:

1. You make arrangements with ABYZ Co. to place a link to their website on your own site
2. Place the links on your site (with the coding they give you)
3. Wait for visitors to click on the link
4. A visitor clicks on the link which bring them from your website to the affiliate website
5. Invisible to either you or the visitor, the "click" is being tracked by a behind the scenes software. That will notify the affiliate that this visitor was referred by you.
6. Hopefully, the visitor will purchase something at the affiliate's website. If they do, you will receive either a percentage of the sale or a flat fee depending upon your relationship.
7. Wait for your check to arrive [Note: usually there is a minimum amount to be reached before payment is sent]

What are the best affiliate programs?

This is not an easy question to answer and much of it depends upon the type of website you have. We at www.PopStarsPlus.com have gone with the larger and more traditional affiliate organizations.

If you go to any of our celebrity pages, on PopStarsPlus you will see links to Amazon, Ebay, AllPosters and Contact Any Celebrity. These are solid programs, and we highly recommend all of them, but they are not the only ones out there. There are other similar affiliate programs that could easily be found on the web, and some that offer higher returns than the ones we have chosen. In addition, we have also partnered with ClickBank, Art.com and LinkShare on some of the other websites we maintain. [Be wary - some affiliate programs do not want to share sites or pages with other similar affiliate programs]

Why did we choose the ones we did? Because these programs are established and would provide our customers with good products and services. For some of our specialty sites, we have also used some much smaller programs or individual sites - but we did a lot of research first to ensure that the sites would be a good match to us and our visitors.

To give you an idea of how we use some of these affiliates, take a look at some of our sites:

• Amazon, Ebay, AllPosters and Contact Any Celebrity: www.PopStarsPlus.com (go to any celebrity)
• LinkShare.com: www.GiftIdeasPlus.com (go to any holiday)
• ClickBank.com: www.BusinessForMyself.com (go to any theme)
• Art.com: www.ArtandSell.com (go to the famous artists section) [under construction]
• Some smaller independent programs: www.ChanukahGiftsPlus.com (go to any product)

For information on how to become an affiliate partner with some of these sites you can go to the "Making Money" page on PopStarsPlus.com at http://www.popstarsplus.com/makemoney.htm.

So go out there and start some affiliate partnerships and make some money to help offset the cost of your site, or to just have some extra pocket money for those rainy days.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

What Is A Link Worth?

An Introduction to Why you Should or Should Not Link

You have created a great celebrity site with all of the most up-to-date information about Diva Starr, your favorite musician. You now want to make sure that everyone else out there knows about it too. You have done everything you can to the site - but you do not know if you should spend all of your time trying to get reciprocal links from other sites. You have also heard so many things about it -- inbound links, outbound links, link farms, deep linking, reciprocal linking, this linking, that linking. Is it all really worth it?

Google and Linking

Every time Google has a new re-indexing, some websites seem to make huge leaps in terms of search placement and page ranking and others take a dive. For instance, PopStarsPlus took a good 10 to 15 percent dive in January during and after the reindex. Luckily, we have bounced back, but we tried to see what it is that made us lose search placement on Google. Not to ignore the other major search engines here, but it seems that everyone around the web is obsessed with Google search optimization, so that is what you will find the most information about. I also know the most about that and interestingly enough, Google does generate the most traffic for us than any of the other search engines. But it is because of how Google looks at the linking of websites is how many of us develop our sites -- yes, even though we think of ourselves as being independent, Google does dictate how we go about our web business. [A good place to visit is Google's own page entitled "Google Information for Webmasters" at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.]

History of How Search Engines Look at Linking

The More Links The Better

Going back a few years, the theory was: the more links you had the better. This was then modified to: the more links you have pointing to your website the better. Having links pointing to your site are called inbound links. Links from your site to another are called outbound links. In a perfect world, you would expect the better your site, the more other sites would want to link to it -- therefore, the more inbound links, the better the site.

Link Farms and Relevancy

But we do not live in a perfect world, so link farms were created. These are web sites that will trade links with any site in order to get more links so that they can rise in the search engine rankings. They may link with websites that have nothing substantively in common with them. There is no relevancy between the two sites. The search engines became suspicious of these sites and began to think of ways to circumvent this. They tried to place a relevancy for each site based on its content. So, a link from a website about Angelina Jolie to another website about Angelina Jolie would be linking of relevant content to similar relevant content. Supposedly, this would give more "weight" to the link as opposed to a link from a Zsa Zsa Gabor website to the same Angelina Jolie website. So, if a Brad Pitt website has 3 links from other Brad Pitt Websites and 100 other links from other celebrity websites, it may not list as high in a search result for a Brad Pitt Website that has 10 links from other Brad Pitt websites and only 15 links from other celebrity sites. [If the search engine were only looking at linking as a factor]

Here is an example of what I think relativity is akin to: Let's say you want a guide to lead you on a mountain expedition in the Andes. One person you interview has been climbing for about 11 or 12 year, but has been to the top of Everest, K9 and a few other high peaks. The second person has been climbing for about 20 years, but most of it has been limited to the South Eastern United States, with one ascent up Mount Marcy in New York state. Here you have two different people with relevant experience -- however, if I am heading to the Andes, the guy with the Everest experience is the one I want with me.

Personally, when it comes to search engines, this is not the best factor to judge websites by. New websites have not had the chance to get sites to link to them and others just may not spend the time trying to find reciprocal links while less "relevant" sites perform this task very aggressively. As I said in a recent post, I am going to be spending more time trying to get these reciprocal links to keep up my traffic - even if I do not like it.

Inbound Only Links

The buzz about last year's Google reindex was that inbound only links are the best to have. What these are are links that come in from another relevant website but you do not have a link back to them. My comment is that if you are a site that provides resources to your visitors and the website that links to you is so "relevant" than why should you be "penalized" (I cannot confirm this) for not linking to another great resource?

Other Linking Tips

Another point is how the text of the link is written. If other websites are linking to your Donald Trump website and "Trump Empire" are your main key words -- try to get the text of the reciprocal link to read "Trump Empire" -- this is another one of those little things that the search engines like.

And one more quick comment - the search engines may also look at the currency of either the link itself (when it was put up) or the web page that the link is coming from (when was it last updated). [This is something that I read somewhere, but cannot confirm that the search engines are actually using this as a current factor.]

Link Summary

So should you get as many links as you can? I guess it would be best if you found websites that you like or are relevant to your own content to go ahead and try to links. Do not worry about inbound or outbound only links, just that the links are "relevant" to your site. But just remember, especially those of you who have set up celebrity sites because you are big fans -- the most important thing is to have fun with your sites.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Celebrity Pregnancies: Jolie & Stephanie Are, Britney Denies It and TomCat Are Rumored to Be Fighting Over It

A quick way for celebrities to get into the buzz index for most search engines is to have a baby - or even to be rumored to be having a baby.

Why? Most information about the kid are going to be kept confidential - the baby might not even be brought out into the public for years after they are born. So why do we care? Well, I think that we all have a soft spot when it comes to cute little babies (yes, even the guys out there). Then, put on top of that an event that occurs to many women, be it the most successful or celebrities or Mrs. Smith from Anytown. I think it kind of creates a equalizing effect -- Britney went through the same 9 months of carrying a kid that other mothers have done since the beginning of time. [It was before my time, but does anyone out there remember when Lucy had little Ricky? The most watched TV show, ever at that time.]

When a child is going to be born into an already interesting celebrity lifestyle, then the interest becomes even greater. For instance, the relationship between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes made a media splash (especially after Tom's chair dancing episode) - and now that she is having a child with him out of wedlock, makes for an interesting story. Having a child is beautiful, but it can sometimes be stressful, even for multi-million dollar celebrities. Some tension is expected
between the soon to be mom and dad. If they seem to be arguing, it is only natural. However, unless you are the fly on the wall, do not believe all of the stories you are reading out there. She is still very young and they have both been kept behind the curtains from real life - so they may not be having an easy time of all of this. Yes, they have the money to take care of the kid, but even to ordinary people like us, how would you handle issues regarding: having a child out of wedlock, different religious backgrounds, different personalities, etc. So, let's just wish them luck and put away the rumors for a while. [Did I actually just defend TomCat?]

Britney and Kevin are another story. They have already had one kid -- why? Neither has lived a "real" life and seem very spoiled to most people. They do not have a solid relationship themselves - so why have the first kid? I hope those rumors are false about #2 -- she just may be gaining a little weight. But anyone can have a kid, it takes a lot of work to be a mom or dad. Even if the rumor is not true, just the hint that she may be pregnant again has done wonders for her Internet buzz.

I am not going to go into the whole Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt pregnancy, but here again, we have two super celebs, in a tabloid relationship, having a child together --- Buzz, Buzz, Buzz. I do not know what to think about Gwen Stefani - I think that behind the scenes, she is unlike her public persona and will probably be a great (albeit, very busy) mom.

Let's just give our congratulations to all of these soon to be moms and dads and make sure you have their pages on your website because in 9 months or less their buzz will be even higher upon the delivery of their children.

Until next time. . . .

I.R.

Keeping Up With The Blog

Okay -- I missed writing a post yesterday, but it is not easy to keep up a journal day after day. There is family, the "real job," the websites, commuting, eating, sleep and some occasional fun. Well, right now, when I have a chance, I am trying to maintain some of the entries on www.PopStarsPlus.com and www.BiographyPlus.com -- although most pages have current news feeds, the bios may go a little stale, and it is important to keep your data as up-to-date as possible. We also have over 100 celebrities in our "coming soon" category. This is way too many and we are trying to push those celebs into the regular section of the site. It also seems that googol does not like any of our pages that are in this category -- it has either taken older pages out of their index or not indexed any of the newer pages added since the previous update.

So, while I am busy updating these and the other websites I work on, I probably will be posting less over the next week or so -- but will add comments when appropriate.

Until next time . . . .

I.R.

Phishing Down By the Pond

Today, a few words about phishing and scam emails.

If you have a celebrity site, do not resort to phishing to generate a stream of visitors. I personally find it incredibly annoying. I believe in a free market economy where individuals should be able to market their wares. However, the items I would probably purchase are never part of such solicitation. I luckily do not need viagra and hopefully will not need it for many years to come -- I also do not need any other pills or medications. The spammers selling products, I can stand -- but it is those Phishing emails I dislike the most. They can really screw someone for a lot of money if they fall for it -- and unfortunately they do. I am admittedly an occasional listener to Howard Stern -- and every so often an old person would call up his studio lines about an investment they made. It seemed that the scammer gave them Stern's phone number as a contact. Some of these people lost thousands. I also cannot tell you how many contests throughout Europe I have won or how many relatives of deceased rich politicians from third world countries have received my email from a "reliable source." Can you believe that I am having multiple eBay and paypal problems on accounts that are not registered with either website!

The plan that some email carries have to charge bulk-email senders may be of some help, however, it is coming at a cost of legitimate businesses. Maybe legitimate businesses should be able to go through a screening process to have themselves removed from the bulk email charge. Another idea I have is to have all bulk non-solicited email to be "tagged" or "coded" as such and automatically placed into an unsolicited mail folder in the recipient's mailbox -- that way if you are looking for that male enhancement product, you will not be out of luck, and the seller is not denied his/her right to disseminate information. The fear is that a small site like ours, which will soon have a free newsletter, will be sending out bulk email to our subscribers - and we want to keep it free without being hit-up with these bulk fees that are not even meant for us.

What else can we do about it. When I get emails on my aol account I automatically hit "Report Scam" - but I keep on getting the same ones over and over. Sometimes I will send out an email that says that we have detected your email as being a scam and have sent it to the proper authorities. I wish I sometimes knew who the proper authorities were (e.g., if you get an eBay or paypal scam - forward the email to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com, some of the other big companies have similar addresses as well.

If there is someone from a government agency or police department that needs some help fighting phishing -- we at www.PopStarsPlus.com are willing to help out if it will get rid of the real spammers. Just tell us what we or our visitors need to do.

A nice day out on the lake in the middle of Spring with my fishing pole, a radio, food and drink would be very nice right about now.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Making Money With Your Celebrity Website (part 1 or 9?)

Celebrity Websites: Making Money

Because we do not live in the utopian world posed by Lennon in "Imagine," we all want to make money to move upward within the social environment around us. There are three reasons why you may read my posts - because:

1. You want to see what I have to say about your favorite celebs
2. You want to get more visitors to your site
3. You want to make more money from your celebrity website

Every post in this weblog relates to #s 2 and 3 either directly or indirectly. If you have any type of revenue stream already set up, then #2 will usually translate into #3. So, you should have already learned a few things over the past few posts to help you out already. So this may be the first post directly relating to generating revenues from your celebrity site, but it is really the ninth to provide you with at least some information.

The Bare Bone Basics About Generating Revenue From Your Website

1. Create a website

2. Place income streams on the site

3. Get people to come to your site

Okay, that's it. Good luck to you - go out there and make millions.

Of course I am just kidding. Each of these three items need to be explained in much, much further detail. Then, because it is not not an exact science, after what you read here and elsewhere, you need to try and try again. [You should be reading as much as you can from as many sources you can. Although you may see many different theories, you need to do what is right for you and your website or blog]

Today, I will share a few thoughts on the above items and will not go into much detail here. Other posts will be forthcoming that will help to round out the details.

Create a Website

Build it and they will come -- well, first you need to build something and worry later about getting the people to come. First, are you an absolute beginner? Then maybe you want to start out by using one of the free website programs, such as at www.Geocities.com (it is where I built my first website almost ten years ago). If a blog is more your style, try www.blogger.com (which is what you are looking at now) or www.Xanga.com. There are also other options available (which I will cover at a late date) if you perform a search for "free website" or "free blog." If you are a little more advanced, then create your own website with one of the many programs available such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage.

What kind of website should you create? -- One that you will enjoy building. The first real "ecommerce" website we built was www.GiftIdeasPlus.com, a good website, and exciting to build at first, but not really based on a lifelong passion of mine. The site is updated from time to time, but not as much as needed. The site that received the most visitors by far is our www.PopStarsPlus.com site -- which was created solely for fun without any though of real revenue potential. However, it was about celebrities and all of the stuff we liked, so it flourished and we are not bored of it. So, go ahead, build a site about a subject you like. [Start with one, then later on, begin to build other sites for other subjects you have a passion for].

Now that you have a website in place, you need to find a way to make money with it.

Place Income Streams On The Website

A website in of itself will not make money. You either need to sell items on the site (and set up an online store), set up affiliate relationships or place advertising on the site.

For those of you starting with your own sites, many of those services have tools that allow you to place some of these revenue streams on your site with very little difficulty.

Selling your own items -- To do this, you need to set up an online store. They can be started up for fairly little money from services provided by places such as www.Yahoo.com, www.GoDaddy.com and even www.eBay.com. This could be the most challenging way to earn income on the web, but if successful, the most rewarding.

Affiliate Relationships -- This is basically placing text, banners and product images on your site that link up to a third party website such as www.Amazon.com or www.Posters.com. The catch is that you have set up an agreement with these places so that if someone is directed to their website through your link and they purchase something, you get a percentage of the sale. No warehouse, no store, no customer interaction needed - just remember you are only getting a small percentage of the total sale. For some affiliate money making ideas, Click Here.

Advertising -- The most common form of advertising these days is by ad banners. You may see many of these on the websites you visit, even this one. If you look towards the top of this page, you will see a small ad from www.Google.com, these "AdSense" ads have become very popular as of late and the way you make money is from people clicking on the ad. These ads are set up so they have some type of relationship with the content of the page so your visitors are more likely to click on it. Over the past year, a number of competitors have also appeared that do the same thing. Other forms of advertising include selling space on your site to place a banner or ad. [Note: www.Blogger.com gives you an option to set this up when first creating your blog]

Get People to Come to Your Site

The first two steps are comparably easy next to this one. The site with the greatest content on a particular subject may not be found if you do not "help" people to find it. People usually "find" your site from one of three different means: word of mouth & offline advertising, links from other sites or search engines.

Word of mouth & traditional offline advertising -- Does "Do You Yahoo?" sound familiar? Did you read that on the web -- no you probably heard it on the radio or television. This was a way for the online company to get people to their site. Most people & companies do not have that type of ad revenue, but there are some things you can do, such as handing out business cards to every person you meet or handing out flyers in your local area. If your site is good, those people will tell other people, who will tell other people . . . well you get the idea.

Links on Other Websites -- Get a link to your website on other related websites. For instance, if you have a sight about reptile grooming, try to get your link placed on other reptile or reptile grooming sites. Depending on where and how the link is placed, you may actually receive some traffic from this link. Many times you will need to trade links with the site, so be prepared to place a link to their site on your own page as well.

Search Engines -- I can spend the next several days writing about this, but what it comes down to is that most of the time your site will be found through searches on the search engines. There are a great number of strategies to consider, but for this introduction, at least do the following: (1) Submit your URL (website address) to the major search engines (Google.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com) and whatever other search engines you can find (do a search for "Add URL") (2) Try to update your website regularly (3) try to get links to your website on as many related websites as possible. These are the bare bones here -- for those with a little more knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization), you are probably laughing, but this is good for the beginner.

If you have any questions, please leave your comments below.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Respecting Privacy Rights of Celebrity Minors

Without getting into all of the technical legal stuff do celebrities have less privacy rights than non-celebs? If you were shot into the spotlight and have become a celebrity yourself, what privacy rights would you expect from the public? If you are having dinner with your spouse, is it okay if people come over to your table and ask for autographs? If you are going shopping for some clothing, is it okay if you are mobbed by crazed fans and photographers? If you throw out your garbage, should people have the right to go though it? No, I am not a celebrity, but I would be pretty pissed if I could not go out for a quck bite to eat without being hassled. But, maybe that is just the price of being famous, because being famous has its many perks as well including going to exclusive clubs that us common folk are unable to enter (or afford), living in gated houses so no-one can enter, attending social events that most people would not recieve an invitation to, etc. So, the good and the bad go hand-in-hand.

Now, as a celebrity, how much information should the general public know about you? What is off-limits and what is okay to disseminate in print and on the web? For instance, we include a lot of information about celebrities on our site, www.PopStarsPlus.com, and some of the info includes facts about their personal lives. Sometimes we have excluded information that we found out because we thought it was too personal - in fact, we still have an ongoing discussion about printing the names and birthdates of the children of the celebrities, unless the celebrity makes it into a media event themselves (e.g., Britney Spears & son Sean Preston). Speaking of Britney, is it even proper for us to be printing stories about her relationship with Mr. Federline (the poor guy's been through too much already for me to call him Mr. Spears like everyone else). In their case, the public wants to know and I think that they like the media attention, so some of the drama was played out for the media instead of keeping it to themselves.

But back to Sean Preston. Beyond what his mother does to bring him into the public eye, should the fans and the press try to obtain any more information? He is just an infant. What if he does get a little older and goes into the entertainment business, does he then become open season for the press, fans and the papparazzi? Sean's aunt, Jamie Lynn Spears has made a name for herself as a teen/pre-teen star at the ripe old age of almost 15. On our site we include a whole lot of information about her, including the fact that she has mild asthma and her favorite food is crawfish. Is all of this information necessary, are we crossing any line because she is just a kid? The answer is no. If this information is readily available to the general public on a source such as the Internet, then it is generally okay to publish. However, there are just some things that you may want to stay away from if you have a child on your celebrity site -- if they are dating someone, that is cute to mention -- if they are having pre-marital sex, don't mention it unless it is front page news and part of a huge scandal. Of course, do not have any pictures of them naked or even have links to them being naked -- that's just wrong (and illegal). Try to stay away from any personal issues they may have outside of their professional life. Finally, although it may be had to do, let's not publish any rumors about kid celebs -- only print the facts. If you see them on the street, unless you are a pre-teen, let them go their own way.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Kirby Puckett and Dana Reeve - A Superstar and the Wife of a Superman

A quick entry:

We were saddened to hear about the deaths of a sports legend Kirby Puckett and an amazing woman, Dana Reeve who both died earlier this week. Puckett is a member of the Baseball Hall of fame and a true leader, role model and sports hero while he was playing (although after he could not play any longer, he became depressed and began to tarnish his own reputation). Dana Reeves was the co-founder of the Christopher Reeves Foundation and a huge supporter of her husband's cause to cure paralysis, even after Christopher Reeve's own untimely death.

Searches for Kirby Puckett and both Reeves are hot this week - so make sure you have their pages or have them updated. If you have eBay -- Puckett memorabilia will also be hot, so have your eBay banners is very visible places - Puckett specific banners would probably work best.

Reality check -- I always have a guilty feeling when I do something to try to maximize the profits of my site after a celebrity passes away. But if I consitently have eBay, Amazon and other like banners on ALL of my pages, then I am just doing the same for this celebrity that I would have done for any other celebrity dead or alive.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Jessica Alba Not Naked in Playboy: Using Keywords

There are basically three ways that a surfer is going to come to your site (1) They already know of your site and type the URL directly, (2) they "hear" about your site from another person, website or advertisement and go to your site, or (3) they find your site on a search engine.

For my celebrity site, #3 is probably the way most surfers find it. Using Jessica Alba as an example, people might search just for her name "Jessica Alba," or add another word/term to the search, such as "Jessica Alba Fantastic Four." You, as the provider of Jessica Alba information want this person to come to your website. You might have all of the vital Jessica Alba news and info, but your site is also "family friendly" - i.e., you do not contain any of that adult content links or stuff on your site.

Last week, www.TheSmokingGun.com published papers that explained that the Jessica Alba camp was upset with Playboy for publishing a sexy photo of Jessica on the cover of their 25 Sexiest Celebrity issue (March 2006 issue). Supposedly, they only gave permission for the picture to appear inside the magazine - and not on the cover. [For more information, see Greg Levine's article on www.Forbes.com at http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/01/jessica-alba-playboy-cx_gl_0301autofacescan13.html.

This is news directly relating to Jessica Alba, and if you have an Alba page, you can provide information about this news event to your readers. This will allow you to keep your website family freindly and allow you to place some of those "dirty" words into your content such as "naked" and "Playboy." With just a litle imagination, you can also add "nude, sexy, hot" or such words that many surfers might use.

Using those words in this context is a way of attracting more users while not trying to cheat the search engines. However, remember that most of your key words should be directly related to your website. If your website is about the Sexy Jessica Alba, then have those words appear throughout the site in the textual content, in the headers, in the links and in the meta tags. Also include links to [and more importantly] from other sites with the same related words.

One test you should try at home is to enter different search terms into the major search engines and see where your site is listed for each term. You want to rank somewhere in the first two pages (the first would obviously be better). Most surfers do not go beyond two pages and only a very small fraction even would venture to the fourth or fifth page of a search result. However being listed on the third to fifth page means that you have potential to rise in the rankings in the not so distant future. What terms work best for you? If you have terms that work, you know what to add onto any new pages you ad -- if the terms you chose are not working, then either you need to find new keywords for your pages, or work a little harder on other aspects of optimizing your page. [Alot more on optimizing for search engines will appear in subjequent posts]

Just a quick note: The reason for me placing "nipple slip" in the title of my first post was to get additional visitors to the site. Hopefully once they get here they will stay -- but just like in the brick and mortar world, sex sells.

Until next time . . .

I.R.

Oscar Winners

What kind of a celebrity blogger would I be if I did not mention the Academy Awards? However, it was not the most exciting of awards show this year (or even compared to other academy Awards shows of the past). This is my opinion - take it or leave it. However, I am not here to talk about the show it self or the endless hours of red carpet interviews -- but I am here to talk about the buzz of the show on the net and what it means to our celeb sites.

Award winners will obviously gain momentum in searches over the next few days, but many of the winners were not the most "popular" with the fans. For instance, Philip Seymour Hoffman (in my opinion) deservedly won for best performance in a leading role - however, his fan base is not as large as lets say nominee Heath Ledger. Winner Rachel Weisz is one to watch - put her on your site if you have not already done so, in our opinion her popularity will begin to rise big time over the next year or two.

Some of the big buzz winners were Reese Witherspoon got the nod for best leading actress (it should have gone to Judi Dench) and will increase her already large popularity and George Clooney's popularity will rise even greater from taking home an Oscar.

The cast of Crash will get some buzz from the Oscars by winning the big prize for a movie, especially ex-teen idol Matt Dillon. I must admit, I did not see this movie (along with most other people), but will now try to see it on DVD as soon as it comes out. So if you do not have pages for the cast members on your site, last week was the time to add them (no, we did not add them either).

Results of the award show will also be a popular search this week, especially today -- so get up the results as soon as possible. Unfortunately for us, my partner was not feeling well and fell asleep early on and was unable to post the results last night -- but not to worry, they will be up on www.PopStarsPlus.com by this evening. I'll forgive him this time.

I.R.

Zac Efron, Emma Roberts and Other Teens are Hot

Teens and pre-teens are usually overlooked when promoting an ecommerce site. They do not have credit cards, so they cannot buy your items, so why bother? However, many of today's youth are actively surfing the internet (hopefully with some parental locks or better yet, parental guidance).

The big problem is that most web content developers are older than these Gen80-90 (born in the (late) 1980s and 90s) web users and may not know what is "hot" or who is popular. Well, let's go down a quick list:

• Cast of Harry Potter - The buzz of the last movie may have calmed down, but all of the main characters are still fan favorites and heavily searched.
• Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and other Youth stations - The stars of their biggest shows are also very popular on the web, especially Jamie Lynn Spears of Zoey 101 (yes, Britney's kid sister), Emma Roberts of Unfabulous (niece of Julia Roberts), Zac Efron from Disney's TV movie High School Musical (the movie was surprisingly well produced) and Drake Bell of Drake and Josh (Josh isn't as popular, but a talented natural comic/actor).
• The "kid" musicians - There is a whole list of them, now that Jessica, Justin and Britney are getting older a new group of hot stars are coming in such as: Teddy Geiger, The Cheetah Girls, Aly and AJ, Drake Bell, Zac Efron - also worth a mention are the older teens/tweens such as Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, Ciara, Omarion and Chris Brown.
• Cast of Aquamarine - The latest movie for teens starring three talented young actresses: Emma Roberts, Jojo and Sara Paxton.
• Cast of Outsiders - Just kidding - I guess I am dating myself, but that movie had a young cast of many future stars.

Well, this is a good start if you are trying to add a younger crowd to your site. But of course this list changes from year to year as the next new hot thing comes up or as the old thing just gets too "old."

In another post, I think I am going to discuss the appropriateness of having kid celebrities on our websites and if we do include a page for them, how much information should we include -- they are kids, after all.

Why Isn't Google Indexing Deep Pages?

Google has not been very freindly to our site [http://www.PopStarsPlus.com/] over the last few weeks. Because of all of the re-indexing and shuffling around of their rankings, we seemed to have been shuffled around - and not in a good way.

During 2005 our site has been increasing by 10% to 15% in unique users each month. But then skidded to a halt in January. Even with the addition of several pages the number of uniques has remained the same. The same is true for February. What is going on here?

The indexing of the site has also gotten progressively worse. In December, the home page was indexed at least once every two days with about a four day lag between going deep into the website. In fact, today, March 2nd I have some pages that have not been indexed for one whole month (February 3rd) with any new page not showing up at all (luckily most were picked up by on Yahoo and MSN).

What I find strange is that on February 19th or 20th, all of the pages on the site were indexed (and given new page page ranks) but dissapeared within a half a day -- and still have not returned.

Being fans of many celebs, we originally started this site to provide information about celebrities for others on the web to enjoy. We did not really want to concern ourselves with SEO (search engine optimization), we have other sites that are specifically for e-commerce and we have tried to do every kind of SEO imaginable. But for this site we tried to take a modified Field of Dreams approach - not just "If you build it, they will come," but "If you build a site with good information and resources, they will come." Until the beginning of the year, that has been the case -- but it seems that the power of Google has taken hold.

Over the past few months we have had requests from other celebrity sites to swap links -- in most cases we have said no. Remember, we do not merely put the link on our page, but we have to go to each of the celebrity pages and review them so that we can give them our own rating. This takes a lot of time -- especially if the other site has 400-500+ celebrities that match ours. We have decided that it would be of a much better use of our time to add more content on our site. [Content is "King" and all that jazz] But it looks like reciprocal links with other "quality" and "relevant" sites would give us better ranking, which would give us a large numer of visitors. Does it pay to add content to a site that no one would read? So over the next few months our readers will begin to see less content being added and more reciprocal links.

We have also found this true on one of our new sites - www.BiographyPlus.com, which is based on PopStarsPlus, but will include many more celebs and non-so celebrity individuals such as historical, social and political figures. We have also decided to hold off on a rated links section for that site so we can add more people a lot quicker.

I do not know if you have learned anything from my scriblings today, but if you have a website of your own, you may be going through some of the same troubles as we are.

I.R.

Dennis Weaver and Don Knotts bite the bullet

Death of a celebrity brings about a buzz on the net. We have had two celebrity deaths recently of two well liked stars, Don Knotts and Dennis Weaver. Knotts always played the bumbling, yet endearing funny man and was most know for his role as Barney on the Andy Griffith Show. Weaver has had many different Marlboro man type roles throughout his long career. Both have a large fan base who are curious as to find out about their demise, even if they are not "big fans." For instance, I have always enjoyed Don Knott's movies and television shows (I saw Pleasantville just the other day -- one of my favorite movies), but if I was not involved with an entertainment site, I would probably not have looked up information about him online until his death.

So what does this mean to search engines and other celebrity sites? If you already had a Don Knotts/Dennis Weaver page or site and it was indexed by the major search engines prior to their deaths, then you have probably seen an increase in traffic over the past week. A few months ago, when Don Knotts was in the hospital, it caught my attention and I put up a web page in his honor. Yup, we got a nice amount of hits over the past few days. However, we did not put up a Dennis Weaver page. Even if we put it up the day he died, it would still take time to be indexed by the major search engines, so by the time the buzz wears down, the page will be accessible.

Ian

Are celebrity nipple slips good for the Internet?

A strange question? Not really. We humans are curious people. We are also yentas and voyeurs. I think that the Internet would be successful in business even if it were not for celebrities, but the fact that people want to know more about what is behind the celluloid exteriors of their favorite stars is what has really driven the web to its current height of success. This is not a new phenomenon - VCRs would have never made it big if it were not for the porn industry. But where you had to pay for a movie of a porn star on the Internet you may be able to find a picture (or even a video) of your favorite celebrity for free (or for a small monthly fee). For instance when Tara Reid, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and a number of other famous celebrities had public nipple slips, it was up on the net and shown around the globe in hours. Even if you want to see some of your favorite celebs having sex (Paris Hilton and others) -- there are websites out there that will show you it as well. [Note: the links are to my website, PopStarsPlus.com -- which does not contain links to nude photos or sex videos -- to find those just enter a search into your favorite search engine with the name of the celebrity and what you are looking for, such as "sex video" and you will find thousands of sites that are more than willing to show you what you are looking for.] What, you do not care about all of this sex stuff? That's cool. Then you are probably into the latest news and rumors about your favorite star. Then you probably want to know the answers to one of the following questions: Who are they dating? Who did they just break up with? Are they pregnant? Why did they hit that cop while in a drunken rage? Are they really anorexic? Did they really say or do that? -- etc. Yes you all want to know this and much more --- and I am just as guilty as the rest of you. I am going to try to approach this blog with the intent of relating the celebrity and their relationship to the Internet and to you, the Internet user (for now on - celeb surfers). I'll try to be as consistent as possible and as up-to-date as possible - however, believe it or not, I do have a life, a family, websites (e.g., PopStarsPlus.com) and a real "daytime" job. Welcome celeb surfers to this new blog and hope to see you around again. Ian Ripley