Adding Contact Info – Here’s How
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Wow what a beautiful day so far here in the windy city! We had a pretty decent storm here over the weekend (70+ mph winds).
I love standing at my window and looking down 15 floors when a storm blows into the city; it’s always funny to watch people scatter for shelter like their lives depended on it.
Today I want to talk about something that seems a little boring but can be incredibly important to your adsense empire; namely, contact information.
For some reason, Google seems to put a lot of stock in companies adding contact information to their websites. By contact information, I mean:
- Company Name
- Street Address
- City
- State
- Zipcode
- Phone Number
For the longest time, I never put any contact information on my websites (affiliate website or otherwise). But these days you really have to or you’re going to take a hit at Google.
Well, there’s a few different reasons.
- Google is really interested in local search, and in order to have local search they need to be able to identify companies geographically.
- Google hates MFA (made for adsense) spam sites (and let’s face it, a lot of our sites are purely mfa sites).
- Google wants to show the most relevant and complete information as possible.
I’m sure there are other reasons as well, but that’s a good enough start.
I’ve talked in the past about making your adsense sites look as legit as possible by using decent design templates, and adding as much company info as possible so that the Google quality reviewers think you’re a real company and not just some person throwing up thousands of MFA sites.
I’m with you, there’s no way I’m giving out my actual contact information on the Internet…ever. But that’s ok. Make something up!
You can do it in several different ways, and all of them work well.
First, if you’re squeemish about skirting the lines of propriety…then why not go to your local post office and rent a P.O. Box. Listing a PO box will still (mostly) maintain your privacy. Especially if you never actually go to the P.O. Box to check your mail.
P.O. boxes are incredibly cheap, often less than a hundred bucks a year (I think I pay $60 a year for one in Chicago and like $40 a year for one in a more rural area).
Or, you can always make something up! Just pick an address and list it. Who cares? You aren’t expecting to collect mail at this address, it’s just something you’re going to list on your site to appease the Googlemonster.
Don’t forget to add a phone number, it’s also pretty important. But don’t use your actual number! Fortunately there are a number of free or low cost alternatives.
You can get free phone numbers from Sipgate, or Google Voice. It’s easy to have those numbers automatically dump into voicemail and you can check them from your computer.
Another alternative is to buy a cheap pay as you go cell phone. Virgin Mobile offers plans that cost less than pennies a day.
I started listing phone numbers on all my adsense sites last year. I listed them prominently at the top of each web page…and a funny thing happened…
I started getting lots of voicemail messages from people looking for specific products. The messages are all the same…
Hi my name is X, I’m looking for a model xyz…with part number 123 and can’t find it anywhere, can you help me?
I’ve gotten hundreds of these messages over the years. I generally just delete them, because helping people individually doesn’t fit into my business model.
But if you wanted to grow your affiliate sites into an actual business (maybe by drop shipping actual products) then this would be a good little income or lead generator.
The bottom line is…you should definitely be listing full contact information on all your websites. And it can be the same address and phone number on all of your different web sites.
That’s all for today…Keep on building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
