I wrote a Backlink Banzai review on another blog of mine but wanted to go into more detail here on not just whether or not Backlink Banzai works, but why it works so well.

no worries, this isn’t one of those fake reviews where I try to hook you into reading a page over optimized for the search phrase Backlink Banzai, and Backlink Banzai review….

but rather… a quick lesson on what works well now for link building

Now, I hate to regurgitate what Google tells us to do for best practices for link building but one they have been been always saying that is definitely true is that:

you need to deep link,

in other words you should link not just to your main home page, but you should develop and generate backlinks to other content on your site.

This improves site quality from a search engine’s point of view, and had added benefit of raising your home page rankings.

It also increases the likelihood that your site will get more traffic because most inner urls of a site aren’t optimized for keywords and phrases that are uber-competitive, therefore doing minimal backlink building to easy competition terms increase the rankings for those terms and then increases traffic to your site (a little bit).

And as your site traffic increases, so does the search engine love, and the overall effect at some point down the line is that your site rankings for the home page terms will increase.

But here’s another added benefit to deep linking:

your site has more overall link juice and traffic to it at some point, making it FAR easier to rank subsequent content published on your sites.

Here’s another Google Algorithm change that has been revealed, and one that Backlink Banzai helps you with:

Most webmasters into the link building and seo stuff still think that using one or two anchor text towards destination urls is a good practice, but Google says that they’re cracking down on “un-natural” anchor text linking, which basically means that, “how natural is it that 95% of the backlinks towards certain urls are primarily consisting of one of two keywords only, that’s not natural and we will devalue some of that stuff”…

And surprisingly this is showing itself to be true nowadays

So what does Backlink Banzai do to help with this?

They offer a service that builds links in a more natural way, meaning that there’s inbred, inherent de-optimization anchor text link building options in their interface, which makes it really easy to avoid doing “dumb” anchor text link building.

they also employ tiered link building methods, which means you get backlinks TO your backlinks, which is added link juice

It’s also hands-free link building, you don’t have to write a thing.

Oh, and it works, too, it works well on medium competition keywords SO FAR, and I’m now testing out harder keywords just to see how powerful this system is and how long it will take to rank harder competition keywords and search phrases.

So, do I want you to join Backlink Banzai?

that’s up to you…

what I would strongly suggest that you do is read more about Backlink Banzai here on my other blog and read all the comments and feedback there first.

Click here to read more about Backlink Banzai

And thanks for reading this hastily crafted and poorly written review!

Dan

Since I wrote this a long time ago, my Adsense income went from 330/day DOWN TO maybe $2.00/day if I’m lucky.  All the money making MFA sites got penalized, so be wary of this when reading the post below

I’ve been coaching some marketing buddies on the side on how to make a “passive” income with Adsense, so instead of endlessly repeating myself I figured I’d outline the process here.

NOTE: I’ve seen many threads on forums discussing Adsense success methods and the process was pretty much the same for them too so there is some conventional wisdom after all…

Crucial steps that can’t be skipped or done improperly

1- Research

2- Site set up, content

3- site promotion (ranking the sites)

Preamble Notes…

Many people who do well with Adsense site have their own theories on how to pick niches, but they all agree on one thing; you need search volume and traffic in order to get a modicum of earnings from any site/niche.

• Some say to pick a common household item and build a site around those terms
• Some say to pick high paying keywords or niches
• Some say to focus on physical products and product names

Well, I’ve tried all 3 methods, have built all types of sites and they all perform differently, so there’s truth to all those suggestions bulleted above, and no method is incorrect (they just work better/worse depending on the target audience)

BUT… you still need traffic no matter what…

Keyword research versus niche research…

Some people think that if a keyword ranks #1 for a term getting 10 dollars CPC (cost per click) that means they will get 10 dollars every time someone clicks on their site’s Adsense ad block, and this just isn’t the case… You get a percentage of what the PPC advertiser is paying for that click and the ads on your sites aren’t always going to be for the keyword your site or site content is ranked for.

The reason I mention this is…when doing keyword research, you tend to limit yourself a little bit because there might not be many other keywords that your site will rank for that will also have high CPC and search, therefore it’s niche research you want to focus on, since advertisers will find your site and will want to advertise on it for various other terms you haven’t uncovered during the research phase.

So when doing research, make sure that there’s other decent paying CPC terms related to your site content that’s getting some searches, too.  Create a mini site that’s high CPC keyword-based, basically.

Doing the research, criteria….

Google’s keyword tool is allegedly more accurate nowadays with regards to expected search engine traffic a term gets, so focus on finding terms that getting at least 1k exact local searches a month.  The reason I stress that you want to focus on Exact  search volume counts is because broad match search volume isn’t realistic search volume and to focus on the Local counts for volume because it’s unrealistic to think your site is going to rank globally for your chosen keywords and phrases on site, anytime soon.

So focus on Exact Local search volume and keywords or phrases that show a CPC of at least $1.70 CPC and at least 1000- 1500 Exact Local searches/month.

Important research criteria - keywords or phrases with 1500 exact local searches/month and CPC of $1.70 minimum.

Site set up- The acronym EMD means exact match domain and part of your research process, and subsequent decision to proceed with developing a site in a certain niche should be dependent on being able to register an EMD for the main keyword, the one getting the most traffic.

If main keyword is not available as an EMD, then find a domain you can register that has main keyword and another “volume keyword” in the domain name.

Note: you could also buy an aged domain with PageRank and backlinks to it and rank that site for your chosen keywords, and while this might be a good shortcut, you should remember that sometimes Sites can get banned form Adsense due to prior domain owners mistake or violation of Adsense’s TOS, so I like to start fresh with my sites in the hopes that my newly registered EMD doesn’t have any “badness” attached to it…

Also, while it might take you longer to rank a newly registered EMD for your terms than it would an aged domain, over time you stand a better chance of outranking your competition, and ranking #1 for a term… if you have an exact match domain.

What kind of sites to build?

Mini-sites. One Page sites. authority sites…

I have one-page sites that rank well, but I don’t like taking chances with anything so I spend another 25-30 dollars on articles to flesh out the sites in case the search engines “dislike” my one-pagers….

Remember, the goal here is passive income which means researching niches and keywords, building sites, ranking them, then let them be (earn), leaving you time to perfect your research methods better, and build more sites.

Build blogs or HTML or other… sites?

It doesn’t really matter, and is merely a matter of preference to you, or your site builder…

So buy or register a domain and put some unique content on there.  It doesn’t have to be Pulitzer prize-winning content, but unique content does rank easier than rewritten PLR or scraped articles from directories.

Your site content should focus on all the other keywords you found during research phase that have some volume to them, and decent CPC.  you will rank the main domain url for the main keyword the domain is focused on, the highest search volume keyword or phrase.

Site promotion – the last phase

You won’t make much with Adsense unless your site’s getting traffic that converts, therefore you have to get your sites to page 1 for a specific relevant keyword in order to get impressions and clicks form targeted traffic.  The higher you rank for your keywords, the higher your CT R(click Through Rate) will be.  I’ve had sites ranked #3 on page 1 that got about 10% less , lower CTR than they now do when ranked #1 for that same term.  Also, when you’re #1, instead of #3, expect earnings to double, triple, and/or sometimes even quadruple due to the increased number of impressions and higher CTR.

I rely on search engine traffic for traffic to my sites, therefore  my real job is to rank the sites, since the research process and subsequent site building is pretty straightforward.  Researching niches and creating sites is pretty much a one-time thing, whereas striving to rank your sites is what will take the most time and where most of your energies will be spent.

Since I’ll be closing my coaching site down for a while I’d figure that I would drop some knowledge here that’ll help some people gain clarity…

How many times have you read an email from some marketers stating that the #1 most important facet to your success is:

Motivation, take action,
Treat it like a business not a hobby
Copywriting, because it affects everything you do
Getting traffic, learn this and you’ll never starve right?
List building, to have an audience receptive to your message
no..wait not list building but the size of your list, yeah that’s what’s important
Uhh no wait, they say…it’s not the size of list but how you treat it and the quality of it
Umm, no it’s direct marketing, power of persuasion (hybrid of getting traffic and copywriting skills)
Or is it to find hungry niches?
Or is it to find hungry niches that are actually buying stuff?
OR is it to find hungry niches you have a real interest in AND they’re buying stuff?

OR is it to merely find a niche that has a problem and present or CREATE the solution?

Screw all that, it’s more complicated yet more simple than that..Really

Debunking some of the blanket statements listed above:

What good are copywriting skills if your target audience isn’t hungry enough or buying stuff?

If you develop copywriting skills to present something to hungry niches that ARE buying stuff, now we’re getting closer, but you still need to learn how to get traffic, right?

So get good at PPC, SEO, or list building…add that into the equation too

Learn how to get traffic via list building, Seo, PPC and sell to hungry niches that want to buy something, even closer now!

OK, but what if you don’t like doing this? That’s where the blanket statement above states that you should develop a site and write content for a niche you have an interest in.

But what if you realize that this interest of yours isn’t in a niche that’s buying stuff hungrily?

Then that blanket statement above doesn’t apply, really

OK, hope you get the point here so far… It’s not any of these things that are important but ALL of them.

And what do you all of these things, when achieved, and rolled into one nice little ball?

A compatible business model

What’s a compatible business model?

It’s the niches you target, how you target them, what you present to them, how you get traffic and so on…but with a compatible business model, you are also doing something else here, too.

A compatible business model means you still like what you’re doing, you like learning new things to develop yourself and your business, and it’s something you’re passionate about, still.

So what about copywriting, direct marketing, list building and so on…

Well, you don’t really need to learn on site seo copywriting if you are a prolific writer who is passionately writing about the content on your websites.  When you’re passionate about what you do, the believability and integrity factors shine through your content, therefore it’s your passion that inherently causes you to write well, and to write well enough to be persuasive enough to sell whatever it is you’re selling.

When you’re passionate and authoritative in your writing, you’ll have some sort of valuable freebie to give away to your readers, and that’s how your list gets built, and if you’re involved enough in a niche, soon you’ll start thinking about making your own products.

When you make your own products, you now have the beginning of a business that will that grow naturally.

But wait, what if you don’t want to go that route either and be an authority marketer in your passion-niche?

Then that’s not the business model for you then, now is it?

What if you want to just have 150 niche websites making money from Adsense?

If that’s the case, then your business model is content-publishing, not marketing per se, which means you need to develop the set of skills necessary to achieve success with that business model.

But how do you find and achieve a compatible business model?

You only truly truly truly find this out by taking action and developing some sites, and over time you’ll realize that this interest/hobby niche is or isn’t something you want to write about or present a marketing angle to, long term.

A business model that doesn’t work in the real world won’t work for you, so once again if your business model is selling to non-hungry niches filled with non-buyers then it doesn’t really matter if it’s a compatible business model (unless you have a realistic chance of making money with it!).

In my opinion, the #1 Secret to Success in Business is to Have a good business model that’s compatible to your inherent strengths and weaknesses.

All else will follow…

It is real easy to get caught up buying into a lot of programs you think you need to succeed with internet marketing. Paid mentoring, paid coaching, paid traffic, paid forums, membership sites are all examples of programs that may not be doing you any good right now. Some people just don’t know how to write well enough to convert web site visitors into sales, so the paid link building services won’t help them achieve the income they deserve, either but it will help their rankings.

If you know enough about SEO to get top rankings, you still need to convert those visitors into paid clients. If you don’t know enough about your niche, then you might be targeting the wrong keywords to rank well for, too. The best way to succeed with anything is to keep it simple. You need to sell stuff to people who want to buy it from you, and that means knowing your niche and exactly what their needs are.

Is your online business taking more out of your pocket than is going in? That is indeed a common problem with many aspiring marketers, but it’s the ones who focus on one thing at a time and keep it real simple that do the best. You need to be patient with yourself and your expected business growth. You also need to be a student of the online marketing game, and not a victim.

Stop using whatever service or monthly program that doesn’t help you in a tangible way, but try to get the most out of those programs before canceling those memberships. In time, you will see that you know what it is you want to do online and the only services you will be using are ones that do stuff for you that you just don’t have time for anymore, like link-building services or other laborious time-consuming tasks like writing content for your niche sites.

This post is about realistic ebook-selling strategies and is dedicated to 2 types of people:

#1- anyone of the thousands of people who have bought my product the IM Toolkit

THANK YOU, the business is always appreciated and I hope it’s been of great value to you

#2- anyone who wishes to sell digital products.

Realistic Ebook-Selling Strategies

#1 – In some markets hype sells the best, but what exactly is hype?

HYPE! could mean everyone’s talking about it, there’s a buzz going on, there’s a launch and some affiliates offering 3k dollar bonuses for a 17 dollar product

HYPE! could mean sales copy promises the world and delivers something perceived as less than that by the buyers

Hype can be great sales copy and buzz combined altohugh you can have one without the other.

A great sales letter might seem hype-ish but they always convert better.  It’s an irrefutable fact that emphasizing the benefits and promises instead of the work you can expected to do to achieve realistic results means more sales for your products.

#2 – People want tactics, methods, secrets, back doors, quick and easy etc…

My IM Toolkit talks about how I made 10k in one month using some tactics and that’s what the sales letter emphasizes in its headline and sales letter copy.

How did this guy earn 10k in one month as someone who was, at the time fairly new to the industry?

That’s the hook, and the question most readers of the sales letter will want to know the answer to.

The reality of most ebooks and the reality of most money-making methods is….

You most likely won’t apply any of the tactics in the ebooks because it’s simply not something you feel like doing, and may not be a good fit for you right now.  I’ve bought hundred sof enooks explaining tactics that worked for other people, and would most likely would work for me but in my mind I said to myself,

” I don’t feel like doing that, but cool e-book!… good to know that this method works for this guy/gal etc…”

Tactics sell… “hype” sells…and good copy sells, so as an e-book seller you want to lead with hype ( A.K.A. great sales letter copy) but back it up with valuable content. To be continually effective as a marketer and seller of products you need take into consideration all facets of the sales process.

Facets of the sales process:

• Intro to the product via email or advertisement
• The sales letter
• The content itself
• The follow up with customers

Here’s my methodology behind my IM Toolkit product:

I reveal in the sales letter that I will show you how and why I made 10k in one month doing something that may be considered a tactic.

Then in the ebook itself I mention how I did that, but most of the content is about the strategies for running a successful business and how you can position yourself to achieve the same type of experience and income.

It’s my philosophy that you really do need to care for your buyers.  I know what people WANT and I give it to them, but I also know what people NEED and I focus more time on that with my IM Toolkit.

Important marketing maxim:

Give people what they want to BUY and you’ll make money all day long.  People buy into promises and want tactics and buy based on emotions and good sales copy generates the emotions necessary to compel readers to buy something.

Important business-building and relationship-building maxim:

Have a true and sincere focus on helping people build real businesses and you’ll have happy customers and clients.  Deliver unexpected value, give people what they want and need and you’ll affect people’s lives and business in a positive way!

Are you in business to help people or make money, or a little bit of both?

Most people that I’ve come into contact with in the make money online” niche want to know for themselves how to generate full-time incomes then show others how to do the same, but you really can’t provide great help unless you’ve been there, done that and speak from personal experience.

• When you give people what they want… you make money
• When you give people what they need…you actually help someone

How to tell if you, as a marketing newbie are destined for a very long path towards eventual success:

When you buy an ebook looking for tactics, realize that the tactics aren’t something you want to implement, but ignore the strategies and true business-building advice given within the products (if this information even exists in the products!)

If you’ve been overloaded with information and emails from “gurus” and aren’t getting anywhere with your business and online income, it’s probably because you’ve been tactics and gimmicks and easy-path-to-riches-focused.

I appreciate that infrastructure and strategies aren’t “sexy” topics for discussion but it’s what every business needs to focus on prior to developing tactics.

XFactor Adsense sites, Google Sniper sites, product launch promotions, these are all things you should explore after you’ve developed a good core for your business.

NOTE: I made 1300 in sales off one product launch this month (so far) and the number would have been a lot lower if I didn’t have a core business built up first.  Sales for that ONE particular product are generated from a combination of 3 new websites that took me 2 hours to build and one website that I work on daily and gets 250 unique visitors a day.

• Websites with good information are assets and resources…
• Trust built with your clients and audience are assets and resources
• Strategies determine what kind of assets you will build and are the build blocks for a business infrastructure
• Tactics are things you can comfortably implement without drawing too much time away from your core business.

OK, I’ve rambled on long enough, hopefully there are some valuable insights for you here.

Please leave feedback, thanks

I got this question posed to me via private message at a marketing forum, so I figured I would write a blog post so I can explain things in detail and also make the answer available for others to read.

Here’s the question/request:

Hi Daniel,

I hope I am not bothering you but I need your expert and knowledgeable opinion on the current problem that I have.
I have a few blogs on different niche that provide useful information and tips on the particular niche. In other words, these blogs are just informational blogs that does not seem to have anything to sell. The only way I monetize the blogs is by placing affiliate banner ads at the sidebar which is above the fold.
For your information, the visitors to these blogs are mainly from organic traffic as well as from article marketing. The people who come to these blogs are actually looking for a solution to their problem.
Since these blogs of mine do not look like a sales page/ sales letter, how do I make visitors click on my banner ads (my aim here is to make these visitors buy through my affiliate link that is embedded in the ads)?

Thanks

Name Omitted for privacy

Here’s my answer/thoughts on the matter:

You have to know your niche and how they like their data presented.

For example, SEO folks absolutely love to delve into the minutiae of tactics, strategies, analysis and results of using certain SEO services or methods.  They like “long-winded” articles and since they’re serious marketers with serious intentions, they’re also action-takers.

Therefore, what sells well in this niche is no-BS articles that aren’t full of promise and hype but filled with information that tells them whether or not something worked for ME/the writer reviewer/tester, therefore should work for them,too.

Pre-selling and “belief generation” in done with solid content which this audience seeks out and appreciates.

Another example is the forex trading, investment niches…

These people also like to read the fine print and won’t click off a page due to boredom after reading 100 or so words, (from what some of my peers in this niche tell me….) Long sales pages and lots of detail is wanted and appreciated here and leads to this audience making better decisions, or at least believing that they’re making better decisions.

More information is better here, as opposed to other niches like the MMO (make money online) niche where there’s a continual epidemic of non-focus and non-achievement…

The point here?

Understanding how your audience likes its information delivered is the second most important pre-selling concept; second only to knowing what their problems are and how you are going to offer solutions.

In the MMO niche hype sells, plain and simple.  It’s a fact and that’ll probably never change for newbies, but more experienced marketers know when they’re facing hype and fluff and not experiencing quality options.

How to make your website sell when you already know the problems and are also offering the solutions (via banner ads like the questioner is doing) ?

Banners work to a certain extent but some niches are prone to “banner-blindness” meaning that site visitors see those banner ads but don’t actually “see” them, if that makes any sense…

Simple copy writing truth that stands the test of time:

Words Sell, Pictures Don’t (as well as the words that compel others to buy)

If your website is getting organic traffic via content that is “speaking to” the target audience about the problem they currently have, but only offering the solution via a banner ad click, that’s not as effective as presenting your solution amidst/amongst the text on your site where you’re discussing the problem and the solution.

In other words, put your call to action (click this affiliate link here to solve your problem) right where your readers are going to see it and at the optimal time and/or place for them to see it.

The outline for web content that sells:

1. Present the problem
2. Discuss the problem
3. Close the deal via proffered solution
   

#1- Present the problem, concern that you know your target audience has, and that you’re going to address

#2- Discuss this in detail to get the reader “on your side” to demonstrate that you know what it’ s like to have that problem and to exhibit some authority on the topic.  Authority begets “belief generation” which is another way of saying pre-selling.  And proper pre-selling is what makes the sales come easier.

For example:

As you’re reading this you might get the “belief” that I actually know what I’m talking about here, therefore I’ve sold you on my, ahemm… “authority” and could very easily tell you that my ebook on improving web conversions is the answer and the solution for the problem I am discussing in this post.  I’m not doing that here, but my point is, so far I’ve discussed the issue in detail, have demonstrated via (all humility aside) good content that speaks to my knowledge.

After you’ve discussed the problem in detail and exhibited authority, and actually gave some useful tips, it’s time to close the sale.  You’re in business to help people find good solutions and pay your bills, and closing the sale is what pays the bills!

#3- Therefore its time to close your readers…(after your pre-selling content did its job)

Present the solution at the height of the most promising parts of the content, the part where you’ve made the problem seem so bad that your readers are foaming at the mouth, feeling the urge to solve the problem, or merely at their height of belief in you, and your content.

Let’s use a real life example so this isn’t all just impractical, intangible theory.  We’ll use the “cure acne” niche.

#1- How to cure acne is the title and focus on the article, and we’re offering various acne relief/acne cure solutions via referral links

#2- Discuss the many problems youths and other people have with acne, (self esteem issues, social stigma, maybe even some real health issues posed by having a severe acne problem.)

#3- Discussing the myriad solutions available for acne sufferers:

Tell your readers (as a supposed authority on the subject) what solutions are best for certain age groups and levels of the conditions people might be experiencing.

• If you’re a severe acne sufferer between the age sof 12-19, then XYZ is the best solution right now (aff link here)
• If you’re a mild acne sufferer between the ages of 12-19, then XYZ is the best solution right now (aff link here)
• If you’re a severe acne sufferer between the age sof 20-35, then XYZ is the best solution right now (aff link here)
• If you’re a mild acne sufferer between the ages of 20-35, then XYZ is the best solution right now (aff link here)
• XYZ is the best solution right now (aff link here) for women seeking natural solutions for clearer, healthier, younger-looking skin.
• XYZ is the best solution right now (aff link here) for young women/girls who want clearer, healthier, skin.

You offer these affiliate links amidst (seemingly) authoritative content.

A better way to think of this is that you are offering solutions, not referral links.

Present the problems and the solutions in the right way, and your websites will convert better.

Any questions? Let me know in the comments area

In the last post we discussed mostly Niche Research, but we’re going to advance beyond the basics here to discuss other details for setting up new websites and a little bit on promoting them.

Important:

Stay focused if/when you work your way through these tutorials and videos linked to on this page.  Most of what you want to accomplish for niche research, setting up websites, and yes, even learning how to get traffic can be found out for free.  If you know that what you’re being told isn’t tripe, hype or B.S. then you can rely on freely given information to help your business.

So let me just say that the videos linked to below are good content, reviewed by me, and you don’t need to buy anything just yet.

Watch and learn, literally….

Moving forward, I assume you’ve done some homework/research, have decided on a niche and have a good keyword-rich domain name, so we’ll go in to some detail on:

• How to generate Keyword lists
• How to generate LSI-related KW lists
• Site planning, design and optimization
• Install WordPress
• Install Plugins
• Install Themes

Let’s Go…

#1- How to generate keyword lists, how to plan your site content, how to structure your site

This video is 67 minutes long and the first 20-30 minutes is introductory stuff, the rest is pretty good information. Click here to watch the video then come back here if you have any questions, no need for me to repeat what someone else is saying, right?  Especially if we’re both pretty much saying the same thing….

#2 – How to find LSI thematically relevant keywords

Here’s another golden nugget freebie.  This report (click here to get download it) will show you how to use a free tools to reverse engineer the top ranked sites and generate keyword lists that will help you rank easier and faster.  If/when you combine this with the information in the video linked to above, you’ll have a pretty clear understanding on how to rank well in the search engines.

#3 -Registering Domain Names, Getting Hosting

Video  – Register domain with NameCheap, it’s cheaper than GoDaddy, easier to work with, has coupons every month, easy funding of Namecheap account with PayPal.

Video – Get hosting account with Hostgator - you can bargain hunt to find a better deal possibly, but Hostgator has live chat, 24-hour support, does weekly backups of all your sites

Video – Transfer DNS from domain registrar (in this case it’s NameCheap) over to your web hosting.  You need to do this if you want your site to be live, and hosted by your web hosting.  I highly recommend against using domain registrars to host your websites, especially GoDaddy hosting.

NOTE: What this does is in newbie speak is it tells the world that your domain name is live and well and is hosted over here (in this case it’s Hostgator’s DNS servers.  If you absolutely need to know what DNS servers are, here’s a good explanation of it…

(1) Short for Domain Name System (or Service or Server), an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses

. Because domain names are alphabetic, they’re easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to 198.105.232.4.  Source

#4 Installing WordPress, Installing and using Plugins, and Themes

NOTE: Why WordPress?  Because once it’s installed it’s the easiest way to publish content, manage that content, and create a good looking site (using freely available themes)

Video: How to install WordPress in 2-3 minutes in Hostgator cPanel using Fantastico Deluxe

Video: How to install WordPress – just a general video in case you don’t use Hostgator

Video: Install WordPress Plugins Automatically

List of free plugins I have on most of my sites: All of these are easily installed from within Admin Panel and no FTP is required

• 404 SEO Plugin – redirects dead links to keyword relevant post
• Akismet – Anti-SPAM plugin, comes installed with WordPress, you need to get a key for it via link provided in Admin Panel.  Use this in addition to Spam Karma
• AllInOneSEO or Platinum SEO – SEO Plugins that help optimize your posts for the search engines
• Comment Luv- encourages comments, comment management plugin
• Contact Form – make it easy for people to contact you privately
• Cross Linker – good for sales AND SEO… hyperlink certain words and link to posts on site or affiliate links
• FollowMe (Twitter) – sidebar graphic that encourages people to Follow you on Twitter
• Google XML Sitemaps- creates sitemap for your blog
• Post Teaser – displays “read more” or “continue reading” after XX # of words in a post
• Robots Meta – good SEO plugin for managing DoFollow, NoFollow attributes on site
• RSS footer – adds links to your RSS feed snippets, forcing RSS-scraping auto-bloggers to link back to your content when they scrape it.
• SpamKarma – advanced anti-Spam plugin
• Subscribe to Comments – emails commenters when additional replies/comments were made on something they subscribed to, good for keeping the conversation going and letting your commenters know when you’ve replied
• Targeted Subscribers – My first plugin, read about it and download it here
• TweetMeme (Twitter)- Essential for getting your content posted out to the Twitter-sphere
• What Would Seth Godin Do – Encourages RSS readership
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade -you need this to automate the constant WordPress version upgrades
• WP 125 (Manages Banner Ads)
• WP Super Cache – supposedly makes your blogs load faster
• Yet Another Related Posts – displays related content at end of posts

Plugin I don’t use but a lot of others use:

Feedburner – for building and managing your RSS readership

Video: How to Find and Install Free WordPress Themes to make your site look beautiful

#5- Basic site promotion techniques to get your site noticed, indexed, crawled etc…

Video: How to Add Your Site To Google Webmaster Tools

Video : How To Submit Your Website to Google, Yahoo and Bing Search Engines

Video: Submitting Your Website to DMOZ, the Open Directory

Video: How To Submit Articles to EzineArticles [ezinearticles.com]

So there you have a list of videos that will help you:

• Do in-depth keyword/niche research
• Generate keyword lists
• Register a domain
• Get web hosting
• Transfer DNS from registrar to web hosting
• Install WordPress, install plugins, find and install themes, and what plugins to install
• Some basic site promotion techniques

Any questions?  Let me know 

When people start on their quest to make money online, there’s almost always a period of time when I/you/we might find ourselves bouncing around from one thing to another, trying different tactics, methods, but rarely any strategies.

TACTICS are what make strategies work.

Without a strategy, no amount of tactics will work.

Some money-making strategies for internet marketing:

• Affiliate marketing- sell other’s products
• Sell your own products
• Provide a service ( writing, technical stuff like installing scripts, building websites, SEO services, etc…)

What most people are after though isn’t making their own products or providing services.

What most people want to do is create websites that make money and not have to deal with customer support or creating their own product/service.

Which brings us (finally) to niche research strategies, and finding good niches to set up shop in.

Doing niche research to find profitable markets:

Questions to ask if you don’t know where to start:

• Is there a problem here, and can I deliver a solution (via digital product, hard copy physical product or by way of offering a service) ?
• Is there enough traffic or interested buyers looking for this solution?  Offline concerns = researching solutions online research = traffic for particular keywords
• If there ARE hungry buyers in this niche, are they spending money or just curiosity clickers?
• Do I have an interest in this subject matter?  Helps if/when you decide you want to write good content

Exploring your niche ideas for profitability and traffic potential

TIP: When I do research into new niches, I usually have at least 3 tabs open on my browser, the reasons for which will be evident as you read further down

There are 2 free tools you can use here to get a good idea on potential traffic and potential profitability

Google Keyword tool -Tab 1 open in browser

As far a search volume is concerned this tool doesn’t provide truly accurate numbers because it also includes (potential traffic volume) numbers from their search partners, and this traffic is only available via other sites and pay per click advertising on those sites.

However, it does give you a good idea on what the most searched-for keywords are and what their potential profitability might be if you use the drop-down menu to Show CPC, which means Cost Per Click.  If the “CPC” is 40 cents or above there’s some potential here but “potential” is always a combination of traffic volume and profitability, therefore 40 cents a click is goo dif there’s 6,000 EXACT searches a month for a particular term, as opposed to something that gets 30 searches a month for the exact term.

Using Spyfu -Tab 2 open in browser

If/when you find something that looks profitable because it has high search volume and decent CPC, then your next step should be to see if there are any Pay Per click marketers advertising something for when these terms are searched for.

However, what you really want to know is not just whether or not there are other’s paying for clicks for this term, but how many others are paying for this term, which means you want to know how many advertisers there are for this term currently.  Any number above 8 advertisers means there’s potential and profitability for this particular term

NOTE: It’s helpful to remember that niche research is done by analyzing the big picture and how much traffic the most general terms are getting, plus knowing if there are currently solutions being searched for, plus knowing if this niche and its related keywords have already proven profitable as evinced by the CPC costs.

Analyzing your SEO competition:

The third Tab I have open in a browser in for my favorite domain name registrar Namecheap.

When analyzing your SEO competition here’s what you need to take into consideration

The top 15 websites ranking for your chosen keywords/phrases/terms

• Do they have keywords in their domain name?
• Are they authority sites like WikiPedia Amazon, YouTube videos?
• Do the highly-ranked URLS (not main sites) have any PageRank, which is merely indicative of that URL getting traffic nothing more.
• Do the highly-ranked URLs have backlinks pointing to them, if so how many and where from?

NOTE: What those highly-ranked websites (and URLs) are doing for monetization = good profitability options being handed to you here

Determining if you can rank well for the terms you’re going after

The answer to this lies not just in your level of SEO knowledge, but also in what available domain names there are that are a close or exact match to the keywords you’re going to target for a main traffic term. Domain names are still one of the most important elements for ranking well for certain terms.

NOTE: You can still rank well without using keyword-rich domain names, but it just makes life a lot easier if good domain names are available.

The strategy for getting domain names

What I like to do here is have a tab/window open for a domain name registrar while sorting through keywords that get traffic, have high CPC and most importantly of all, are relevant to what I am going to write about.

Since domain names are one of the most heavily weight on-page/on-site  SEO factors, I try to find a domain name that very closely resembles or exactly matches some of the high search terms.

In most cases the really good domain names that are exact matches for the top search terms are already taken so what you want to do here is look for domain names that include a combination of some of the top search terms.

For example:  The MLM Network Marketing Niche/Industry

I decided to build a network marketing related site last year and started off by doing some searches using “mlm”, and “network marketing” as my base terms.

I sorted the keywords list by most-to-least traffic volume.

Then I went over to my NameCheap browser tab and started searching for available domain names, starting with the most searched for terms which are usually already taken.

A lot of the high traffic terms were taken as exact domain name matches, so I got a domain name that had my main terms/keywords in its name and had some exact matches in it for other terms that got a good amount of searches.

Keep going > Read Part 2 Of Niche Research and Setting Up New Websites

Here’s some advice for those of you considering building Google Sniper sites:

Build at least 8 of them - George proclaims that 3/4 Sniper sites will make money so it’s best if you get 6/8 sites working as opposed to 3/4.

Think assembly line here since I got a little burned out

• researching some niches and finding them,
• then ordering domain names and setting up the accounts for the sites on my server,
• then building the sites,
• then going back to find more niches

So what I recommend that you do is:

1- Dedicate a whole day or 3-4 hours to researching niches, and find 10-12 of them, then pick the 8 with the most potential.

2- Spend the next day or 3-4 hours getting domain names, setting up accounts, and building the sites.

3- find products or programs to promote

4- Start adding site content

NOTE:

If I recommend this product, I will make some templates for everyone to use since you have to make the following standardized forms for these sites anyways:

• About Me,
• Contact Me,
• Privacy Policy

After you build the sites properly, you need to start adding content to them.  IF…you did your keyword research properly AND built your sites the right way, the most important next step is your content.

In Google Sniper George has a great section on writing this content so I recommend that you do the research first, build the sites, set them up, then focus on your pre-selling content.

Picking affiliate programs to monetize your efforts.

Since your site content and pre-selling is going to be focused on selling something your story may revolve around a product name or just some easy to rank for terms.  So you should know what your recommended product is going to be:

Some quick places to find products to promote:

• Clickbank – search the market place look for high gravity
• Commission Junction – takes more time since you need to get site approved
• CPA networks – requires site approval
• PayDotCom – quick and easy like ClickBank
• See what your competitors are promoting too

Note on doing research:

The main considerations for deciding to go with a niche are:

• # of searches average ( must be at least 3-7k/month
• # of competing sites with Keywords in their titles
• Is the keyword available as a domain name as a .com, .org, or .net?  If not then skip it
• Are there authority sites already ranked at the top for these terms? If so,then it’s a no-go

I decided to start building some Google Sniper sites for the Google Sniper Case Study so I’m going to pop in and out of this blog post as I’m doing things to let you know how long it really takes.

9:45 -10:00 PM – Niche Research

Found two niches with lots of searches and competition, keyword rich domain names were available, decided to go with some competitive terms here to see how much harder it really is to rank well when you have really good keyword-rich domain names (the 2 domains I got are exact matches for the keywords I’m going after, one’s a .com and the other is a .org).

Niche KW 1 - 8100 average searches a month, high advertiser competition

Niche KW 2 – 3600 average searches a month, highest level of advertiser competition (buy ***product name*** was the keyword)

10- 10:09 PM domain name registrations and set up

When I am about to build new sites I usually have 3 tabs/windows open

1. Google Keyword Tool for researching niches
2. Namecheap.com for my domain registrar
3. My WHM control panel to get ready to add accounts to my hosting

Right now I am waiting for the DNS to transfer to my hosting so I can log into the cpanel for those 2 new accounts and build some blogs.

10:09 – 10:13 Installed WordPress on both sites

10:13- 10:19 Installed 3 plugins on both sites and upgraded the version of WordPress

1. All In One SEO
2. google sitemap
3. WordPress automatic upgrade – gonna have to install this anyways

Total time elapsed:  34 minutes

Believe it or not the easiest part of all this is registering domains, setting up WHM accounts, installing WordPress, searching for and activating plugins.

What is going to make money here is what’s written and what being sold

Writing the intro post: 15 minutes

I don’t know much about this niche so I tried to imagine a cute little story/intro that would get the ball rolling here. Now I have to rewrite that intro post for the other site, albeit with slightly different keywords and the text modified enough to be deemed unique.

Installing the recommended theme – 20 minutes

I’m following the instructions to the letter here so this is fun but quite different for me.  If you have the ebook he mentions what theme to use on page 48.

Important notes:

Privacy setting in wordPress –

By default, the setting is set to not allow blog to be visible otsearch engines so make sure you change that before you publish anything.

Categories:

Make at least one new category, name it after one of your main keywords, and make it the default category to write to (in writing section of wordpress admin panel).  Then delete the category named Uncategorized.

When you DO make your first intro post, make sure you place the post inside the proper category.

Time spent so far: a little over one hour, and that includes me coming back here to update this blog post.

Gonna take a break here to

Gather together my related keywords list and post it to the blog as a draft post so I’ll always hav eit handy when writing.

For the next 2 posts I’ll try to make sure those keywords are mentioned all throughout the content.

Lastly, I’ll do some quick research to see what method I should use to monetize this site (get an aff link basically).

So far, I’ve build the foundation for 2 Google Sniper sites in a little over an hour, and I foresee this taking me 2-3 more total to

• make sure my content is pre-selling well,
• my keywords are sprinkled throughout the posts
• set up my affiliate links to be cloaked properly.
• re-read the ebook to make sure I followed HIS steps properly

UPDATE: My buddy Warner Carter saw what I was doing and skyped me, and suggested we do a few sites together, so here’s the scoop on another niche we’re targeting.

Niche KW 3- 9100 average searches a month, high advertiser competition according to Google.

Warner uses a different KW tool than Google’s free one and told me the SEO competition for this niche is weak, or almost non-existent.

Google’s Keyword tool shows you ADVERTISER competition which is indicative of PayPer Click advertiser competition and keyword term profitability but not always reflective of what the SEO competition is like.

I think George Brown in his Google Sniper ebook should have mentioned that because a lot of people will see high advertiser competition and think the niche is not “do-able” due to high PPC competition when there is really little SEO competition.

OK, I just finished reading Google Sniper by George Brown and it took me 3 sittings to go through and review all 99 pages.

First off let’s verify some claims from their sales letter

Can you set up automatic money-making mini-sites in 2-3 hours with this system?

Yes, I know this for a fact and could probably do it in 35 minutes if I knew something about the niche and product(s) I was going to be promoting

Is a Google Sniper site completely 100% done after the 2-3 hours of set up?

No, it will more likely be 2-3 hours of set up (for WordPress newbies) then an additional 30 minutes to add/publish the final content piece. For someone like me it’d be a total of one hour to make a site like this.

Some questions users might want to know about the income claims of $15,000.00/month from Sniper sites:

Can you make 15k/month doing this?

Answer #1 -

I have one sniper-style/authority site that makes #1,000.00/month on autopilot and the income increases a little bit each month, so technically 15 of these would be tantamount to a 15k/month income.  however, that site requires a ton of work for me but I love doing it and would do it for free just to help people out, so I probably spending more time educating on that site than I do selling.

Answer #2 – Yes, if you do your research properly and make a lot of these sites

What does George Brown’s Google Sniper ebook course tell us that’s new?

Kind of hard for me to answer that since I don’t know what i sin your head, so let me explain to you what the course covers without giving away all his content:

1- Finding a niche and it’s related keywords (this is ALWAYS the first and most important critical factor for your site’s success)

2- How to build these sites (the video modules cover this well and this info is available everywhere for free anyways)

• Why use wordPress to build sites
• Installing WordPress
• What plugins to use, how to install them, using and configuring plugins
• Designing the site
• Finding Free themes, what themes to use for certain niches

3- How to make your site sell

To me this was the real golden nugget of this course and George knows it, and even says so on page 35 of 99.

• If you build a site and nobody comes to it that means you did poor niche research, right?
• If you build a site and people come to it but don’t buy that means you aren’t convincing your site readers to buy from you, right?

The Pre-selling for 20% Conversion Rates section is something a LOT of people need to know and understand because I see a ton of people who have really crappy sites and content that I’d never even think about buying form because their content sucked, big-time.

Note: How can site content suck?

• No calls to action
• Overly pushy calls to action
• Site content didn’t make me a believer in the benefits of getting the product
• No claimed or proven proof that the product works (see bullet point above)
• …and sometimes the bonus is just terrible (unrelated + useless addition to product)

Chapter 4- SEO stuff for getting free traffic and dominating in the search engines

I know SEO pretty well and everything he says here is true, although I could add in a few things that could make it better, more powerful and more useful.

In chapter 4 of Google Sniper George writes about gathering keyword lists together using free tools, but the NEW thing I see here is he’s talking about using LSI-based keyword research.

True/False…?

He writes that getting a keyword-based domain name is the #1 most important SEO aspect to your Google Sniper site.

TRUE

He says you can extrapolate a list of related keywords to use for LSI and eventual easy rankings using Google free Keyword Rearch tool

TRUE

He says Google’s keyword tool is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to saying how many times a word is searched for each month because Google includes search partners in its volume numbers.  Therefore you should shave off something like 20% off the search volume counts.

TRUE ( I was happy to see someone else besides me say that.  I said that here a long time ago)

Chapter 5 – Cloaking Affiliate Links

This was a brief and important chapter that shows you how to make cloaked affiliate links at no cost to you and it’s pretty easy to do.  Good thing to add in here, and something a lot of marketers, myself included don’t do (cloak aff links)

Chapters 6 +7 go over creating these sites step-by-step and then talks about the site promotion angle of things

This is where I could save you a lot of time and teach HIM and/or you a thing or two about SEO and backlinks generation, but since these sites by their very nature don’t need a lot of backlinks or promotion, what he wrote here is sufficient for niches with low-to-medium SEO competition.

Chapter 8 – What everyone really wants to know, does this work and can it turn into a 6-7 figure yearly income?

It works for him, apparently, but will it work for you?

Will it work for me with the 4 new Sniper Sites I’m going to build for this Google Sniper Case Study?

That remains to be seen, but this is definitely a good ebook to get just for the Pre-selling chapter alone.

Moving forward, I will reveal the 4 niches I decided on then make a 2-post case study to wrap things up here

I decided to do a Google Sniper review at the request of about 20 subscribers so here goes…

What is Google Sniper?

On the outset/first glance it looks like another hyped-up Clickbank Product showing you how to make 6-7 figures/year using George Brown’s methods for making mini-sites that make sales for you on complete auto-pilot.

Since the methods involve using WordPress and I have a few automated sites doing this already, I feel qualified to tell you whether or not this ebook can teach you this.  And if the ebook is no good, then I’lll teach you what I do to make sites that can get built in 2-3 hours and make automated sales…

With Google Sniper you make affiliate marketing sites focused on one product or targeted terms using a variety of basic SEO methods to get ranked highly for those targeted “money” keywords.

Does Google Sniper work?

Can’t tell you that just yet since I just bought the ebook but what I can tell you is that mini-sites devoted to selling/promoting just one product will work for making automated sales.  However, you will need to make a whole bunch of these sites in order to see the Promised Land of the sales letter’s $15,000.00/month income.

To me that’s not a downside because massive action equals massive success if you’re doing the right things in the first place.

I do nothing half-ass!!! pardon my french…

When I review something I do it whole-heartedly yet selectively, so my Google Sniper review will actual be a series of posts dedicated to reviewing Google Sniper.

NOTE: Have I used the word Google Sniper too many times in this post, ya think? Geez…

Well, go to Google and search for Google Sniper or Google Sniper Review or Google Sniper bonus and tell me where my site is listed in the rankings… without any backlinks that is…hidden SEO lesson for you there.

If I’m not highly ranked yet it’s either due to:

• The other sites all have the keywords in their domain names
• The other sites did a better job of on-page and off-page SEO

Quick SEO Tip:

If you want to promote something like a product name but don’t want to buy a domain name in order to get the easy rankings, then you should make a category named whatever the product name is that you’re reviewing, then add multiple posts to that category.  This is like making a mini-site within your larger site (if you own/have/maintain one that is…).

Idea: I haven’t done any research or testing with this idea yet, but it might be powerful…

It might be worth it to create add-on or subdomains to your main site with the main keyword you’re targeting as part of the domain name.  So…instead of getting new domain names for every product you want to create a series of posts on, you could try installing a new blog on a domain named productnamekeywordhere.danielmcgonagle.name.

This way, your site inherits all the link juice your main site hopefully already has and might make it easier for you to spend less money on new domain names without having to shell out 9 bucks each time you build a new site.  Just an idea…

Who cares where my post is ranked for the term Google Sniper?

Well, I see a lot of “reviewers” who have the words “Google Sniper” in their domain names acting as if getting page 1 rankings for those words is something impressive..

It’s not, and it’s easy to do, and it’s all part of what G Sniper espouses for effective SEO tactics.

Moving forward, this review series will go over the quick start guide, the manual and all the video modules, to be followed b a case study with 3 sites I will build as part of this comprehensive review.

The reason I picked Google Sniper out of all the thousands of other Clickbank products I could have done review son is the concept and method is solid, is something I’ve been meaning to teach anyways, and if the product is crap then I will take care of you by making some blog posts and the case study to show you how mini-sites can crank out auto-sales for you all day long (if the traffic is there).

Wanna see some of my product-related mini-sites and how I do it?

Then go…

• here (page 1 for a very competitive term it seems),
• here (page one and top positions for almost all variations of the 4-5 keywords I was targeting)
  
• here (page 1, position #2 right now)
• here,(page 1 and top positions for almost every keyword I was targeting)
• and here,(this one’s not doing too well yet, but will be page 1 and top positioned when I have time to get back to it)

Analyze everything you see on those sites.  There’s good content, a good domain name, an optin box, and a follow up newsletter.  That’s “how I roll” when I make mini-sites.

ALL of those sites make money and I probably spent way more time on them than I had to because I was/am trying to deliver note-worthy quality content on the site itself not just writing pre-selling content of little to no value (mistake?)

NOTE: Some of those sites are works in progress since it does take some effort to provide valuable content that pre-sells the products being touted…

Is there going to be a Google Sniper bonus?

That remains to be seen, the official Yes, get this, or No, don’t get this will be a few weeks away so please remain patient

Here’s an email I sent out recently requesting that people let me provide them with the Internet Marketing Help they truly need:

I am sitting here and it’s 1 A.M. in the morning and I’m pondering the ways I can teach others what they most want to know…

I’m wondering what kinds of case studies, product reviews or promotions would help you the most right now.

But the problem with that is I’m not a mind-reader.

So if you don’t mind, can you help me out here and reply back to this email and tell me what your NEEDS are…??

I don’t care about what you WANT, but I do care about is what you NEED to know in order to have a better business.

Satisfying your needs will do a lot more for your business than satisfying your wants, trust me on that one….

******Options to help you reply to me better:******

Option 1 -

I was thinking of reviewing some new ebook that came out called Google Sniper to see if its trash hype or legit product.

I’d do a free case study on this and tell you how I did everything and how it’s going.

Option 2 -

Traffic Generation and SEO stuff…  I’m pretty good at this and don’t mind sharing what I know if the questions are good ones.

Option 3-

Help me make a product that is specifically designed for you.  I will take everyone questions, compile them into full length answers with necessary videos, audios and text explaining everything.  This’ll be an extremely discounted product for you but worth it since it’s addressing your specific needs

Option 4-

Need to know how the real money is made in network marketing?  I’m eyeballs deep into this right now and all I can say is that it’s just like any other niche…

Options 5- 10 

????  You tell me…  ????

I’m offering to do this for you because I don’t send out a lot of emails but still want to provide something of value to you.  Unlike a lot of the gurus who are schlepping stuff to you non-stop,  I have systems in place that run on auto-pilot and don’t ever need my manual intervention in order to make some dough…

Anyhoo, enough bloviating on my end….

I’m sure it sounds like I’m bragging but I’m really just letting you know why I’m doing this because the skeptics will always wonder,

“Why’s Dan offering to be so helpful?  What’s his angle..?”

REPLY to this email and let me know what you need

Thanks,

Dan (No angle) McGonagle.

Here’s the break down for the replies so far, feel free to add your comments below

Product Reviews -

• MLM Lead System Pro - Go here to read the MLM Lead System Pro Review that I already did.  Verdict = Yes, get it
• Google Sniper - Going to work with my buddy Jorge on this review/case study
• Magnetic Sponsoring - good ebook about attraction marketing, not the best funded proposal to use for your network marketing business.  Read the MLM Lead System Pro review for that
• Niche Horde - looks good will review
• Renegade Marketing - will probably not review it, but will research it

Traffic Generation and SEO –

• How to generate free organic traffic
• How to not lose shirt on PPC
• How to rank well for certain keywords

Researching niches and keywords

• How to find good niches
• What keywords are good ones

Technical stuff -

• Web design, WordPress stuff
• How to “do” SEO for WordPress
• WordPress set up, install, config

Advanced Business/Marketing Questions

• Automation for traffic
• Automated profit/income streams

List building

• How to build a list
• How to build one automatically
• How to maintain relationship with list, how to offer value + keep them interested in your newsletter
• I answered all these questions in my product called Automated List Building so I probably won’t go into great detail answering all those questions when those 7 audios pretty much tell you what you need to know (sorry, not going to create extra work for myself here.

Blueprints

• Systemized approach to no-fail marketing techniques ( a perennial favorite here, everyone wants a guaranteed blueprint to follow).
• How to consistently add profits and increase income for sites you already own and maintain.

Outsourcing

• For those that are making money, how do you outsource in such a way that it increases your profits?
• How to make sure your outsourced work and workers are doing a good job for your business’ bottom line?

Adsense:

• Formula for finding right keywords
• How to duplicate/build out a whole slew of money making sites

MLM/Network Marketing stuff

• How to build list
• How to increase cash flow
• How to recruit
• How to build downlines

Note: Those 4 bullet points above tell the whole story actually.

1- Build your list to

2- Increase your cash flow,

3- which gives you more to spend on advertising and recruiting new people,

4- which is how downlines are built.

Feel free to tell me what your needs are in the comments section.  I’ll be making a decision on what topics to address first then will start addressing them in blog posts and emails.

NOTE: When I say that I’ve already created a product that addresses your concerns, I’m pointing that out to you because I won’t re-create all that content for free when I’ve already created a low-cost answer, and you DO get an answer.  This whole “help me help you” thing isn’t a big production to try and sell more ebooks and audio courses; I do that daily anyways so no need for a boost, really.  The skeptics all get removed from my list eventually as part of my real life law of attraction daily practices, FYI.

I just read something by copywriting professional Craig Garber that should help you with your copywriting and your copy writing mindset for emails, website content, or sales letters.

I’ve written my fair share of sales letters and my first attempts were ones that I really liked the best:  there was truth and honesty in the sales letters and straightforward facts and Reasons Why behind the bullet points.  Those are all good things, right?

Well, those sales letters performed miserably even though I really like how they came out?

Why?

Because I had ME, MYSELF, and I in mind when writing the sales letter.

I was only tihnking of myself when I was trying to speak to an audinece that most assuredly is nothing like me.

I treated my copywriting like hiring an interior decorator; I mad eit look and fell the way I wanted, with little or no regard fo rthe fact that I wasn’t designing something for myself but fo rothers to view.

When writing copy, or when assessing the work of copy written for you, the only tihng that matters is how well the letters perform, not how much you like/dislike the layout and words used.

Copywriting is a results-driven entity…The only thing that matters are your conversion rates, price points that affect conversion rates, and refund rates.

Think about your prospects when writing sales letters, not yourself.

Think of the words that impel, compel and repel the mass majority of your sales letter readers.

You do not matter at ALL when it ocmes ot liking or disliking the copy written for your sales letters.

There have been many, many times when I’ve read sales letters and tohught,

What a crappy awful sales letter, are people actually buying this stuff?”

Only to realize that some of those pages were converting at like 5-10% rates!

You see, I am in a different situation than most people,

I don’t fall for hype,

I only buy what I need for certain projects that affect my business in the not-too-distant future.

I’ve generated millions of visitors to my websites over the years, and yet it’s still an every day learning process to get better at this so there’s really no compelling reason for me to buy  the latest SEO books.

I make thousands a mont hin affiliate commissions, too so I’m not really motivated to buy ebooks that tell me how to do this.

Therefore, due to my current situation, most sales letters have no appeal to me.

BUT….

I am not in that majority of people who need to buy yet another ebook that promises these type sof results, so my opinion’s are worthless and are to be disregarded when assessing other sale spages.

If you’re an experienced internet marketer assessing a sales letter for its possible conversion rate, you have to think about who this product is geared towards, what their mindset is like and whether or not it will appeal to THEM, not YOU.

YOU run your business

YOUR PROSPECTS are what drive your business…

3 way link building services are a good way to automated your link building, albeit with some inherent drawbacks ( not super-powerful links, not permanent, and you have to link out in order to get links IN)

Up until now, 3waylinks.net has been the premier three way link building service.  3WL has been around a long time, has proven good results for many, many people, therefore the linking style has been proven and established.

AutomatedLinkBuilding (ALB) does the same thing, for a lot less, with more training to help people use it as effectively as possible. right now ALB is free but not be free by the time you get to it (here)

Price points:

• ALB is free just for a little while longer, then will be $3.00/month and will never cost more than $17.00/month for the 3 way links service
• 3waylinks costs $47.00/month

How many 3 way links do you get with ALB and 3waylinks?

3WL – up to 250 backlinks per site, and for 50 sites total

ALB – up to 250 backlinks per site, and for 50 sites total

Are three way links effective and worth doing?

Yes, if you are realistic and target easy to medium niche keywords.  To take full advantage of 3 way links services like 3waylinks and ALB, do your KW research, set realistic goals, and consider implementing a lot of domain names to create your own mini-network that will easily target, and rank well for niche specific terms/keywords

This is more of an outsourcing case study than anything else, but I/you/we can reverse engineer what transpires here to see what the ROI is and was, and what made it all work.

You really can’t determine your ROI for something unless you know some things in advance, like conversion rates for your squeeze pages, what each subscriber is really worth in terms of lifelong value, and what each click is worth.

The case study:

• I outsourced 25 articles to be written and submitted to EzineArticles.com
• The traffic will come in forever, as long as the articles are active
• The back-end monetization comes from whatever is being sold through the squeeze page/email messages follow up tandem.

Variables:

• Rankings and traffic for articles
• CTR on the articles
• Conversion rates for squeeze page destination
• Value of subscribers

Extra variables:

These articles are “promoters” linking to and sending traffic to my destination sites, but if these articles don’t rank well on their own we may need to promote the promoters, which means adding more to the outsourcing fund for this.

Updates:

In a month or two I’ll update this with my results and some added tips

Update #2 : If you’re interested in outsourcing the best product to completely understand the How and Why to it all is Outsource and Delegate

No related posts.

I realize a lot of people want to supplement their day job with an online marketing business. I also realize that working 8-9 hours at a J.O.B. plus adding in an additional 1 hour of daily commute time doesn’t leave most people with a lot of time at the end of the day to get a lot accomplished.

Recently I’ve cut way back on my time spent doing stuff that I actually enjoyed doing like writing articles and build backlinks and creating products and what-not..

People like Donald Trump will even tell you they’re not the smartest person in their inner circle because they surround themselves with people smarter than they are at certain specific aspects of a business. “The Donald” got good at one thing specifically, then added to his knowledge by adding people to his circle.

Most people trying valiantly to earn an income on the Internet aren’t trying to master one thing only.

They’re “riding 6 wild horses” to nowhere.

They’re trying to master all aspects of this craft without any implementation.

They’re serial learners, and yet Masters of NONE.

To do more, to earn more, to achieve more:

• Master 1 thing, no matter what it is
• Surround yourself with those whose skills you need to develop your business.
• And put a value your time…

Things I now outsource:

Article writing and submissions to Ezine Articles and Unique Article Wizard. As you can tell I tend to get a little wordy with my writing therefore article marketing has a huge time-sucker for me, but still something with positive ROI.

Guess what I learned from outsourcing article writing and submissions?

It costs WAY less than I thought, I can get 25 500-word articles written and submitted to my EZA account for under 200 dollars.

They do a better job of it than I do (their article CTR rates are better than mine, therefore they are people now in my inner circle who are better than me at something )

Value:

1. 8.33 hours/month of my time saved,
2. 25 articles X 20 minutes to write each one = 500 minutes
3. 500 minutes is 8.33 hours
4. $200 divided by 8.33 = $24.00/hour

Prolonged value:

1. Higher CTR rates from articles
2. which brings in more traffic,
3. which brings in more income
4. which gives me more time to do other things, + more energy to put into “tha bizz”
5. or just more time to do nothing at all, realizing sadly, that my business runs better when there’s less of me involved in it

If you’re interested in outsourcing the best product to completely understand the How and Why to it all is Outsource and Delegate

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I was asked on another blog I have to do a Traffic bug review so here it for those of you who may not have heard about this yet…

• Traffic Bug automatically submits your sites to search engines and directories on a scheduled pace.
• Traffic Bug also submits your sites’ main RSS feeds to 12, but soon to be 36 RSS aggregator sites.

On the outset, this appears to be a great time-saving tools for webmasters who need to do all these basic SEO time-consuming SEO site promotion tasks anyways.

With Traffic Bug you can also add Related URLs, and this is a really cool feature since it means you’re not limited to just one site URL that gets all these automated social bookmarking links done for you.

Now, even though “TB” saves you time by doing all this site submission stuff for you, it still takes a long time to set up each campaign.

Every time you set up a new campaign you have to enter in new keywords, long titles, comments for the social bookmarking being done for you, and more…

However, none of this really matters if it’s an effective site promotion tool, right?

It’s my opinion that NoFollow social bookmarking links can only do so much for your sites’ link juice and SEO authority.

I’m also of the opinion that this service is severely limited in what it can do for you because there’s only a small number of RSS aggregator sites being submitted to at the time of this writing.

Did you know that there’s software that can make RSS feeds out of each and every single post or page on your site, AND submit them individually to 20 RSS feed submission sites for you?

Wouldn’t that be a much better one-time fee type of tool to use so you get 20 backlinks from RSS sites automatically for all your new and old posts or pages?

But I digress… read my case Study on Traffic bug here

There are a LOT of keyword research tools out there, but sometimes these tools give you inaccurate data or perceptions.

A lot of times with new websites you’re tempted to generate a keywords list based on the top related searches, then you head out to create site content and/or articles targeting those terms…

Sounds like a good plan, right?

Couple of things wrong with that plan, though

#1 – Inaccurate keyword research data leads to a lot of time wasted sometimes, especially if you are facing stiff competition in the search engines for those terms

#2 – The keyword research tools don’ t give you any proof that these terms are profitable, so even if you did manage to rank well for those terms in your keywords list, you still don’t know if these are to generic to convert well.

There are 2 ways to instantly tell if your keywords are worth targeting

The first way is to do a search for your keyword until you find an article published on an article directory like EzineArticles dot com..

If you type in a search term and this “EZA” article shows up, then you can go to that article and scroll down until you see how many views that page  received so far, and when it was published.

Free Keyword Research

So, if an article was published one month ago and got 30 page views, then that PAGE gets 1 visitor a day on average.  If the article was really highly ranked, like position 1-3 then you pretty much know how many daily searches there are for that keyword.

This is the reality of keyword research as it boils down to your main concern, which is,

“how many visitors a day will I receive by being highly ranked for this keyword?”

This method works well if your keyword search ends up displaying an article directory article on Page 1.

The second method for more accurately determining EXACTLY how many searches a day a certain keyword search gets on Google is to set up a PPC campaign.

• When you set this Pay Per click campaign up, you make sure your bid is high enough to get page 1 presence.
• Then you merely let that ride for a few days, preferably during the week when there are more searches.
• Since you’re paying for Page 1 displays for that keyword every time it gets searched for, you will see the number of impressions your PPC ad got.
• This doesn’t mean you’re paying for clicks,though since all you’re trying to do here is pay for Page 1 impressions, and you don’t have to be in the top positioned AD to get those impressions.
• So when someone searches for a particular term and your ad is page 1, its gets an impression every time its searched for on Google.

And that’s the most accurate way to tell exactly how many searches a certain term gets! 

ALSO: Doing niche research on your own manually without tools will also reveal to you related keywords your target audience is interested in.

One of the best things about using WordPress for a blog platform is the inherent SEO benefits it has.

However, all the things that make WordPress good for getting indexed, ranked, and some unique visitors also makes it conducive for low conversion rates for some of your “money pages”.  In order to make more money from blogging you have to convert more of your traffic into sales.

A “money page” is a piece of real estate on your blog that sells something, or in many blogger’s cases, attempting to sell something.  Reducing the distractions on your money pages leads to more sales, plain and simple.

What are the distractions causing your money pages to not convert as well as they could?

• Sidebars
• Social bookmarking icons at bottom of post
• Site header
• RSS feed icons
• Displayed tags and other entries

I have seen almost miraculous increases in blogging income just by focusing on making these money pages more appealing but I had to hack my WordPress theme stylesheet, templates, and add special code to all of my pages in order to get them to appear less distracting.

So, even though it was well worth my while to edit each money page to not having all the inherent distractions on the money page, I still didn’t apply this blog tweak to all of my sites.

When I first started blogging I considered it useful for list building since the blogs get good traffic and exit popups would build the lists for me on autopilot.  However, there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to get on yet another email list, thinking they’re going to get a barrage of promotional emails and further crowd their email inboxes with stuff that distracts them from their goal of making more money on line.

Therefore list building is not the only reason to build a blog, obviously…

You can and WILL make more sales and income by converting more of your one-time visitors into buyers.

There are several expensive WordPress themes like Thesis and Affiliate Theme that can do this for you, but at some point your site looks like every other Thesis/Affilaite Themes site out there.  Thesis and Affiliate Theme are good themes but they’re not very user friendly, and you need to switch over to their theme and activate it if you want to use their special features that will increase the conversions of your money pages.

My buddy Peter create a theme and plugin that allows you to keep your current theme activated while giving you the freedom to create or edit current money pages that do not have all the inherent distractions of a regular WordPress blog.

His theme is called the Monetize WordPress theme and he also has a plugin called Themes Manager that is espeially powerful.

The theme set allows you to make mini-sites out of your blogs without losing any SEO benefits.

It also makes great looking, distraction-free money pages for you with a click of a button.

The plugin allows you ot change the font size of all your posts and pages on an individal basis which is crucial for making easier to read money pages.  WordPress by default only allows you to change your font size to;

Paragpraph,Heading 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc…

but Peter’s plugin allows you to increase font size on a font size basis font 12,14,16,18 etc…

I wish I had come across this theme and plugin prior to hacking my WordPress themes to get them to do what I wanted them to do for my money pages.

If you want to make more money with your blogs by easily increasing your conversion rates, then you should get Peter’s theme and plugin, plain and simple.

Here’s an example of a money page about where to get backlinks that only has half of the distractions removed.

Leapfish representatives have called me 3 times this past month so I figured I’d blog about it to inform people.

Leapfish is a meta-search engine which acts like a portal for users who can then use the major search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google to conduct their online searches.  Leapfish’s service and business model is they sell you permanent top listings in their meta-search engine.

How can they sell you top listings if they’re using the other search engines for the search results?

They sell you the top sponsored listings you’d normally have to pay for in MSN AdCenter, Google Adwords or YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) .

What they’ve done here is passed up the chance to have a PPC search engine and instead are selling these positions for a one-time fee, plus an annual renewal fee.  Some low-end prices for keywords you can “own” in Leapfish cost anywhere from 300-800 dollars.

So, is Leapfish worth it?

Well, I’ve yet to see a meta search engine that made it big, permanently. Read this article from last year from a tech site about LeapFish

400-800 dollars can get you top rankings for one keywords easily, and permanently, and on all major search engines without having to go through Leapfish.

Leapfish’s Alexa rating is pretty good at 17k, but who’s going to use them in the future?

In my opinion, Leapfish has a decent business model and some people are buying up keywords and selling them for profit later on.  Other Leapfish users are also just buying the keyword spots and renting out the space for other webmasters who want to use it for a while.

The downside to this is your money can be much better spent elsewhere, and no meta search engines have made it big, permanently so this could be a waste of money, or it could be a ground floor opportunity for some people.

I’m not going to delve into this since I don’t see the value in it, so thanks but no thanks Leapfish (please stop calling me)

Just a quick note here…

I’ve been using this copy-writing service called NoLimitCopy for 3-4 months now and I’m happy with their service.

You get an unlimited amount of copy written for you, from landing pages, follow up emails, squeeze pages, sales letters, press releases, etc…

You send them your info/requests after logging in, then you wait maybe 2 weeks tops for your copy to be delivered.

You get it in word doc format, all text, and then it’s up to you to take that text and add graphics and edit some fonts and what-not to make it look good.

The service is called No Limit Copy at http://nolimitcopy.com and the reason I am telling you about it is to share a reosurce, and to help rid them of the bad press the sites’ received due to past owners’ issues.

This is a good service, and an absolute steal if you have a reason to use them

I’ve decided to outsource the creation of a set of Adsense themes that are designed to make it easy for Adsense publishers to increase their CTR..

As of right now, the themes I’ve used are the nicheadsensethemes but there’s still some issues with those themes.

You have to hack the theme code to remove a lot of the extras that appear after the posts, like tags and categories, dates of publication etc…

Plus, if you want to create a new ad block for testing, or move the ad blocks from the sidebar to the end of the posts, you have to create a new ad style, then hack the code some more to move the blocks around.

I decided to hire an elancer to make me a series of themes that will make it real easy to optimize your adsense blog themes for maximum ease of use and of course, maximum earnings.

However, it seems that you really DO need plugin functionality to do all the things I want to do with my themes.

In a way, earning with Adsense is as easy at getting lots of impressions to a site with optimal click through rates.

I used the free semiologic theme so I could have an Adsense site that displayed ads on the bottom of posts, not just the sidebar like the nicheadsensethemes ones do, but when I used the same Adsense code, it created a sidebar-style ad grouping and I had to log into Google to create a different style ad more suitable for the end of the posts..

When I went to do create a new ad via Google Adsense area, it gave me the code, I put it on my site, then it said my code was invalid…

The easier way to do all this is to use a plugin, it seems, and there are plugins that will put your ad blocks wherever you want them to go.

As you can guess, tweaking and optimizing your adsense ads for optimal CTR is where the tricky stuff comes in, and that’s why I am creating this theme series.

Not only will these themes have features that allow you to easily strip all the distractions off your site for optimal Adsense CTR, but it will also include a mini-guide to

1- Google Adsense channel tracking
2- Google Analytics guide for Adsense

As much as I wanted to make a very lightweight theme that tested, tracked, and was pre-destined for high CTR for Adsense clicks, it seems that there’s no way around using these features (channels and Google Analytics).

There’s also a bit of a hassle involved in creating theme functionality that allows you to move ad blocks wherever you want them to be while remaining a lightweight theme, so there will be 2 plugins that need to be installed on the Adsense sites you make with these themes.

The 2 plugins recommended are for managing your ad blocks and another one for Google Analytics, and that’s as simple as I could make this theme be…

I’m not sure if I am going to make these themes paid themes or freebies, but I will be letting some people be beta testers for free once theme is ready in a week or two from now..

If you’re interested in helping me test out these themes, you can opt in to the list below to get it sent to you for free.

However, I would really appreciate some feedback from you on how the themes are working for you, and if you experience any bugs with them.

Part of the reason that I’m writing this series is to share my personal experiences with Google Adsense. I’m not one of those 6-figure Adsense earners yet, and I’m learning the ropes as I build more and more sites.  All I can say right now is that making money with Adsense is all about 3 things.

1- Choosing a good niche

2- then getting a lot of Adsense impressions,

3- then increasing CTR…

Here’s a some basic outlines for increasing your ads CTR…

PART 1 – Remove all distractions ! 

The goal of having Adsense on your site is to get clicks on the ads you’re displaying.  Your content is merely the vehicle that attracts visitors come to your site prior to clicking on an ad and going elsewhere.

Front -page defaults - If you’re running a WordPress blog, then you probably know that the default number of posts to display on the front page is 10, and most people leave this setting as it is.

…and what happens here is people go to a blog, scroll down the whole front page to see what content is there, and when they get to the bottom, there’s nothing but white space, nothing else to click, so they go “bye-bye”…

That’s why blogs in the normal site design default state will have such high bounce rates.

So set your blog up for displaying a lot less posts on the front page (1 or 2), and do it and tweak it in such a way that at the bottom of your front page everything “evens out” or is close to it.

Some sidebar distractions are widgets like Recent Posts, Pages, Recent Comments, and any text widgets that are displaying banner images of some kind.

Pre-post or pre-content distractions - I sometimes use the WWSGD (What Would Seth Godin Do ) plugin to notify new site visitors about my RSS feed or better yet to let them know I have a valuable report to give away.

But on an Adsense site you don’t want that. You don’t want the subscribers, and you don’t want the RSS readers necessarily.  I feel strange writing that because it seems such a waste to never build up a list of any kind, but this is Adsense monetization we’re talking about here and it requires a different site design structure and model.

Of course it’d be great to gather new subscribers AND RSS readers AND have people clicking your displayed ads with no descreases in anything, but it’s just common sense that when people are faced with multiple decisions, they usually only pick one, not all three.

There are other widgets and plugins that could distract from the reading of your content but suffice to say that less is more on an Adsense site.

Post-content - On most blogs you will see a whole bunch of colorful and distracting stuff after the content posts, pages, or articles.

You’ll see social bookmarking icons, some related websites being linked to, some related posts being linked to, some “tags used on this post” distractions, and so on…

Look at the site design of my site you’re on right now, I tried to keep it as clean as possible, I don’t put social bookmarking icons at the end of my posts, and yet it’s still requires a bit of focus to read this post doesn’t it?

Site design is probably 80% of the battle when it comes to increasing your Click Through Rates, so here’s the checklist for Site Design Tasks To Increase CTR..

Remove sidebar distractions - Recent comments, recent posts, pages, optin box, text widgets, any banners

Remove distractions before and after your content - no social bookmarking icons, RSS feeds notifiers, links to related sites, or even related posts.

NOTE: I am still having a hard time giving up my usage of related posts plugin on my sites because I think it’s really good for SEO and helps fills out the front page with a useful sidebar widget that makes for more page views/visitor.

However, none of the 3 Adsense experts I know use this plugin on their sites and don’t display anything like it so maybe my CTR will be like theirs (20-35%) once I start doing everything exactly as they do.

PART 2 – Increasing Adsense CTR

Content must be relevant.  If you’re accepting Unique Article Wizard articles or My Article Network articles, or Syndicate Kahuna articles to your site and they’re not totally relevant to overall niche theme, then your CTR will be miserably low.

IF you have a way of linking to previous or Next posts on your site, then the moment you link to a title that seems NOT related to previous article being read, then you’ll lose that visitor.

And losing a visitor is lost money… so make sure your content is relevant  and you’ll see better CTRs that way.

NOTE: Test everything to see what works for you and your sites.

Here’s a eye heat map that shows what areas of sites people’s eyes gravitate towards when reading a site.

Increase Google Adsense CTR

The point here is to remind you that “eye Gravititation” should determine your site navigation and ads placements.

One of the downsides to internet information is that there’s so much of it, and a lot of it is conflicting…

Who are you to believe when some people say;

Google’s ripping you off, Adsense isn’t worth it, Google’s constantly changing the rules, it’s better to use AdBrite etc… ?

The best thing for ANYONE to do when faced with half-truths or conflicting information is to consult with multiple experts on a certain topic.

It’s important to note that “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” as they say, so the best thing to do is see what the common denominators are…

I’m lucky enough to know people who are quietly making 4-5 figure monthly incomes with Adsense and each of them do things differently, but there are some principles they have all abided by.

• Some put up small 5-10 page sites focusing on a few high-paying keywords
• Others build monster sites with a lot of content focusing on high-search volume keywords…
• Another one does a combination of both…

Even when analyzing these truly successful people there’s still some conflicts because they each are successful in their own way, but they ARE successful, and that’s the whole point.

Here are the common denonimators exhibited by these experts…

1- Unique Content only - no dupes, no EZineArticles re-posted, not even any spun content articles from Unique Article Wizard plugin. (I have had minimal success with an Adsense site 100% populated with UAW articles…)

Also, it’s widely reported that 250-word articles are the bare minimum for content pieces, but these 3 experts are posting no less than 300-word articles to their sites.  Sometimes they’ll even get 500-word or 750-word articles written for them.

2- Don’t put Adsense on these sites right away. Let these sites get ranked, add unique content periodically, make sure previous articles are indexed before posting new articles.

Once these pure content sites are getting new posts or pages indexed quickly via frequent spidering, the next step is to ascertain the rankings and traffic numbers.

If rankings are good and traffic is coming in steadily, then there’s enough traffic coming in to start testing Adsense on the sites.

3- Testing ad placements and colors. They all tested their site design with various themes.  It doesn’t seem to make a difference if they sites are WordPress blogs or HTML sites, and it doesn’t seem to matter if these are static sites or site with new content being added frequently, either.

Part of the reason why Adsense isn’t put on the sites right away is to build up the “trust” with the search engines and to build up enough incoming unique visitors to the site to test Adsense colors and placements accurately.

4- MORE, about site design…

Adsense sites are built with one goal in mind; to get visitors to click on the ads displayed…therefore the site design is instrumental in achieving this desired action.

There’s no distracting banners for affiliate products on their sites, and no link leakage that sends visitors elsewhere…  A site designed with Adsens ein mind has to be built differently than other types of sites…and that even includes the way the content is written…

5- How to write content for Adsense sites…

The content has to read like any of the boring articles you might read in article directories that only give you a “taste” of what you really want to know and/or read about.

An effective article submitted to an article directory will act more like a teaser and produce high CTRs (click thru rates).

Since article directories are content sites, your Adsense sites should emulate this type of business model and focus more on the content than anything else.

If your content is TOO good, then you’ve done a good job by FULLY informing your visitors, but therein lies the “danger” of over-fulfilling the visitors’ needs (for information) and could result in low CTRs….

For example, if you wrote an article on your site about mortgage calculators, you’d be better off writing about how best to use one than actually providing the calculator to use, otherwise, there’s nowhere else to go, and nothing else for the site visitor to do once you’ve fulfilled their needs…

Remember what your goal is here with your Adsense sites (to get clicks) and keep that goal in mind as you post content and design your sites…

NEXT UP – Simple ways to easily get decent CTRs for Adsense sites

Niche research and selection is probably the most important factor in your Adsense success.   Back when I started pursuing Adsense as an added income stream, my niche selection was poor.

Currently those sites still manage to pull in some earnings daily but i/you/we can do a lot more with less effort if you pick your niches carefully and with a certain goal in mind ( make more by doing less).

As mentioned in the previous post, there’s 2 schools of thought when it comes to finding good Adsense niches (find high-paying-niches with low competition or just pick common household terms)

There are some niches that I recommend against going into and this non-recommendation is based upon my personal experiences, what I’ve read on other blogs, and from the truly successful Adsense people I know.

Avoid tech-related niches because that audience is web-savvy and more apt to be banner-blind therefore Adsense Ads-blind.  However, I have a tech-related site running on complete autopilot and it makes close to $1.00 a day with automated content but the click payouts are very low…

Avoid the internet marketing niche for Adsense as well, as this niche doesn’t really do well for same reason as the tech niches don’t; banner blindness and besides, with the IM niche, you want to build your list not send people elsewhere.

What you want to do is find some niches that are paying out over $1.00/click for Adsense clicks and the way I do that is to use Google’s Keyword Tool to ascertain what the CPC (cost per click ) is for their PPC advertisers.

IF the PPC-ers are going to have to pay 3-5 dollars per click, then it’s somewhat safe to assume that you MIGHT be getting some $1.00 Adsense clicks on your site if you have content and titles targeting those keywords, and other related terms as well.  In other words, write for those higher-paying terms but also include some other ralted keywords on the site content articles, posts, pages etc…

Now, a lot of people will tell you to find the high-paying niches with little to NO competition and you’ll be spending a long time shooting in the dark before you happen to find that perfect, undiscovered niche like that.

In my opinion, and experience you can level the SEO competition and playing field by getting a great keyword-rich domain name since that’s one of the most important SEO elements on a site…

With a great domain name you can get ranked pretty well for the keywords you’re targeting, over time, but it will be a lot easier if your domain name has some of your main keywords in there.

Summary:

Finding a good Adsense niche means finding niches with high-cost CPC keywords, then finding good domain names that will help you level the SEO competition.

Then you need to write content that targets those terms and terms related to them so the content seems more relevant to the site topic overall and so it’s doesn’t appear as if you’re making a blatant effort to optimize a piece of site content for just one particular keyword of phrase….

NEXT UP – 3 Adsense Success stories and what they all have in common

This is the first post in a series of posts I’m going to be making on earning money with Google Adsense.

I’m going to start with some of the myths surrounding Google Adsense, then move on to effective methods for earning money with it…

Google Adsense Myth #1 – “nobody’s really making any money with Adsense”

I have a “skype-buddy” who makes 1500/day with Adsense in a completely, 100% automated fashion.  The method he uses is pretty high-tech and involves uses some custom-made scripts (that’s all I’m gonna say on that…)

Google Adsense Myth #2 – ” you only make like 15 cents a click with Adsense sites”

Again, not 100% correct here, , and I’ve seen clicks ranging from 10 cents to $3.38 per Adsense click and those clicks both came from the same site…

However, if you target a niche that has high-paying keywords, then you’ll most likely receive higher-paying clicks for Adsense clicks on your site, generally speaking…

Google Adsense Myth #3 – “…but you need to have a site that’s 3 months old before you can put Adsense on it”

When I start a new Adsense site, the first thing I do is activate one of the most SEO-friendly themes I’ve ever used (the theme this blog uses, Code Blue Revolution).

After the new sites has been indexed, and subsequent posts have all been indexed, I active an Adsense-friendly WordPress theme time-tested for high CTR and start making Adsense “click-dough” shortly thereafter.

Google Adsense Myth #34 – ” You have to get luck and find high-paying Adsense niches with little to no competition in order to make big bucks with Adsense”

Well, there’s 2 schools of thought for finding good Adsense niches

#1 – The first school of thought says to blog about common every day items that get a lot of searches, like household items, any items that are lying around your home or office like furniture, desks, pens, speakers, kitchen appliances etc…

#2- The second school of thought suggests finding the high-paying niches with low competition and “doing more”, or making more with less clicks.

Next up: How to find both types of Google Adsense niches

For easier reading, I organized all the 6 parts of the Unique Article wizard review series into a quasi- Table Of Contents

*each link opens in a new window*

INTRO - Since I am highly recommending Unique Article Wizard, I created a newsletter which will serve as my version of a Unique Article Wizard Bonus.   It is available to anyone who wants to see proof that Unique Article Wizard works as advertised, with case study results and some tips on how to write articles that sell..

Click here to start >Unique Article Wizard Review Series + Bonus Training Newsletter Announced

Part ONE - What is Unique Article Wizard and what does it do?

It’s an article marketing service that submits your articles to thousands of directories, but with a twist.  They have a special methods for making your ONE article appear as unique when posted to thousands of places.

There’s there’s no other service like this because UAW submit to more places, plus they keep adding to the number of potential directories you could be submitting your articles. Read the rest here

Part TWO - Linkbuilding and higher rankings

Part THREE – Making Google Adsense $$ with UAW

Part FOUR – Listbuilding with Unique Article Wizard

Part FIVE - Making money, outsourcing, niche research…

I highly recommend this service, but I want to make sure you do well with it by learning some valuable tips in the newsletter below.

Get Unique Article Wizard here then get my newsletter training series on how to use it effectively…

How to make Unique Article Wizard pay for itself and then some with just one article.

This is the last post in this review series on the Unique Article Wizard service. So far, we’ve covered

• what “UAW” is,
• what it does,
• how to make Adsense income with it
• how to list build with it,
• how to do linkbuilding with it
• …and how to increase traffic and rankings with it…

But let’s say you don’t have a “plan” and don’t have any real idea how you’re going to use this great service to build your online empire…

Let’s assume for the sake of this article that you’re looking for a way to just write articles with your affiliate links embedded in them and getting those articles widely syndicated via Unique Article Wizard.

This business plan means you don’t want to build a list or get any of your websites highly ranked, and just want to write-and-earn.

While I think this is a rather short-sighted approach to running a business and using this service, there’s still value in knowing how to do this because:

You could use this method to offset some off your costs for using their service.

You can hire someone to write and submit articles that bring in sales for you witohut “lifting a finger” yourself.

You will pay $67.00/month for Unique Article Wizard, and for $20.00 have a writer write 2 articles that should bring in enough sales to more than cover your costs (67 + 20 = $87.00) leaving you with a self-funding service to do with what you will.

Now, the trick here is not just to write articles that sell well and get high click-through-rates but to figure out what it is you want to make sales with and that requires doing a little bit of research.

If you want the winning article-writing formula, you can get access to that in the 4th installment of the Unique Article Wizard training newsletter that available for you at the end of this post.

Researching niches to find products to write articles for…

If you’re in the MMO, IM niche there’s plenty of flavor-of-the-day products coming out daily that can be promoted and some places to get head starts on everyone else include:

IMNEWSWATCH - A service that regularly posts new information about new products in this niche

Warrior Forum Special Offers forum - Occassinoally you’ll see some new products or services coming out here that announce the launch of a new service or products, but usually at Beta-tester discounts, regulay discounts, or even free copies of products in return for reviews.

Also be sure to check out their JV section, too

$7Dollar Offers - This is a site that has a lot of products that you can promote for 100$ commissions.  They have 22 categories besides Internet Marketing products here

Clickbank and Paydotcom – lots of different types of digital products to sell here as well

Sites dedicated to announcing product launches:

http://www.jvproductlaunch.com/

http://www.jvnotifypro.com/

Well, I think that that’s good enough of a “starter list” for finding new or old Internet Marketing- related products to promote, so let’s discuss how to find products in any niche that have very little competition, are new, or just not widely promoted yet…

Criteria for product promotion selection:

1. Is sales page compelling to you, make you want to buy product?
2. Is this something you or your writer can write well enough about to create and distribute a money-making article?
3. Is the pay-out commission good for you?  If commission percentage is less than 50% I wouldn’t bother promoting it.

Remember that 2 sales of a $47.00 product at 50% is $47.00 in your pocket, which means you’ll need to make 4 affiliate sales to earn $94.00, which more than covers your costs for Unique Article Wizard (and cost of hiring a writer).

Also remember that this is a numbers game, and you’ll need to get 100 clicks on your affiliate link to make 4 sales if the product’s sales page is converting at 4%…

NOTE: If you just made a blogger blog and put a landing page, you could link to your landing page instead of your affiliate link to get that landing page highly ranked and to receive 100 visitors on auto-pilot…

But again, the main components here are really the quality of the products sales page, what the payout is for you, and if the niche is full of Desperate Buyers (people looking to lose weight, get out of debt, cure medical ailments or embarrassing physical problems, relationship troubles, foreclosures etc…)

If you come across a niche that doesn’t have a ton of competition then you’ll do well simply by writing a good article that sells well and getting it distributed and syndicated via Unique Article Wizard.

The Unique Article Wizard newsletter is Free and in issue #4 you’ll learn the step-by-step formula for writing an article guaranteed to convert into sales for you.

Get Unique Article Wizard here then get my newsletter training series on how to use it most effectively…

I wish I could “reveal” more about this service and it’s many uses, but this is the 6th post I’ve made on this subject and the newsletter covers some other information not discussed in the 5-6 part Unique Article Wizard review series.

Unique Article Wizard list-building = How to get thousands of websites promoting your squeeze page for you.

Do you ever get those SPAMMY emails that say something like,

“There are 6 million people who want to send you $6.00 by PayPal”?

Well, to an online business-person who knows the value of list-building, getting your squeeze pages promoted by thousands of relevant websites and directories seems like fairy-tale, Spam-hype-nonsense, too.

This can be a reality when you use Unique Article Wizard for listbuilding, however are 4 Points that need to be addressed:

1- Unique Article Wizard will allow you to get thousands of backlinks to your squeeze pages, but the effects are somewhat temporary.

2- You will get a quick surge of referral traffic during the first few days of your article submissions, but then it dies down and you’re left with “just” a massive link build up afterwards.

3- To list build with article marketing is extremely effective because it’s like having informative articles acting as solo advertisements and it also increase the organic traffic those squeeze pages get via the linkbuilding (if the links to the squeeze page had anchor-text keywords in there)

If all of this anchor text and linkbuilding stuff is confusing to you, try joining Automated Linkbuilding to get some detailed and informative free PDFs on linkbuilding, how links work, and after using that service, you’ll see how backlinks affect your rankings and organic traffic.

4- You sometimes have to sacrifice anchor text backlinks for calls to action and the end of articles that result is better click-thru-rates.

For example, below are 2 different calls to action, A.K.A. resource boxes that could be at the end of an article about dog training methods.  See which call to action (Capitalized and Bolded) seems more compelling to you:

Resource box/Call to Action #1

Joe the Dog training guy has a free report on DOGTRAINING TIPS that will help you blah, blah, blah.

Resource box/Call to Action #2

Joe the Dog training guy has a free report full of dog training tips that has helped 1000s of pet owners train their pets. Click HERE to get this Free report….blah, blah, blah

OK, the point here is that sometimes you will sacrifice some anchor-text-based backlinks in your articles in exchange for higher CTRs (ClickThus) on links in your articles.

The Ultimate Call to Action in a resource box will have a perfect merging of high CTR on links that are keyword -anchor-text-based.

OK, to be clear on this point about having keywords in your anchor text in articles that link to your squeeze pages, here’s what I mean:

The following is an example of some anchor text (the words that are clickable and linking to something) that is not going to help the site it’s linking to rank well for anything useful since the clickable text, the anchor text is the word HERE

HIGH CTR blurb with no Keywords in Anchor text

Click HERE to get a Free linkbuilding guide, and the 42-page Sensible Guide To Traffic Generation.

LOWER CTR blurb with Keywords in Anchor text

Daniel runs a 3 way linkbuilding service, complete with 3 free reports (on-page optimization guide, linkbuilding guide, and the 42-page Sensible Guide To Traffic Generation)

The next part of this review series will demonstrate how to make Unique Article Wizard pay for itself and then some with just one article

Part 3 of this Unique Article Wizard review series shows you how you make money with Google Adsense and Unique Article Wizard...

Making money with Google Adsense can be simple if you remember  4 things:

1- Pick a niche and write about it’s related keywords

2- Get traffic to your sites – UAW to the rescue!

3- Keep adding content and links to drive impressions up, because more impressions means more Google Adsense money for you

Picking an Adsense niche – So many different opinions here and so many contradictory pihilosophies about what Adsense niches are the best ones to go into.

Some people say, high click low competition niches with approximately 1000 visitors a month for top 50 keywords, and some people just say to write about the most common items in your house like cosmetics, office furniture, perfumes, handbags etc..

Picking an Adsense niche kind of goes outside the boundaries of a Unique Article wizard review but suffice to say, it’s step 1> researching a niche.

Getting traffic to your Adsense sites using Unique Article Wizard:

Get more traffic by adding more content to your sites. The more articles you have on your site, the more keywords your site will get found for.

Unique Article Wizard can send you FREE, relevant, and laser-targeted unique content for publishing on your sites (if you have certain free plugins installed)

Adding content to your site is what makes sites “robust” in the search engines eyes, and when they see a site has enough content on there, it will start ranking it higher and higher.

Get backlinks  to your relevant site content that has had it’s on-page optimization done properly using Unique Article Wizard article syndication service.

Thousands of backlinks to properly optimized sites will drive your impressions up, and that’s it for making money with Adsense.

Rinse and repeat for more traffic and impressions by adding more content and backlinks using Unique Article Wizard and other sources for free content.

Where to get free unique website content and images (bookmark this).

Summary: how to make money with Google Adsense using Unique Article Wizard.

1. Use Unique Article Wizard and the other resources listed here to get free content for your site and/or write some yourself or pay a writer to do that for you
2. Use it to get traffic for your site by generating referral traffic and backlinks via article submissions
3. THAT’S IT!

This is part 2 of the Unique Article Wizard review series.  Part 1 is here

Part 2- How to get higher rankings by implementing powerful linkbuilding campaigns with Unique Article Wizard.

As I mentioned in part 1 of this review series, you can get 1500 backlinks with just one article submitted using Unique Article Wizard’s service…

But there’s a danger to getting too many links all at once… and that can have negative effects on your rankings and sometimes even makes much of your linkbuilding go to waste.

Overly aggressive linkbuilding means you just wasted your time doing a lot of work for nothing, so it’ s important to notify you of that up front before you get Unique Article Wizard.

So what’s the best linkbuilding strategy to use with Unique Article Wizard?

1- Your articles should try to link to 3 different urls in each article, and NOT THE SAME urls in all 3 places of the article.

2- Try to put 2 backlinks in the body of the article and leave one at the end of the article in the author resource area/box at the end of the article..

Why?

Because anchor text-based backlinks amidst body of article or site content seems to count for more than “footer” or resource links.

3- Try to link to 3 different sites from each article to spread the linkjuice around a bit.

Why?

Because a backlink from a site is worth more (usually) the first time it links to you, but if they are repeatedly linking to you, there’s less value to those backlinks.

So have your article link to three different domains in case you ever get articles re-published on that person’s site…

This lessens the pace at which your articles are generating backlinks to your sites by spreading the link luv and linkjuice around.

Not only is this more effective as a linkbuilding strategy, but it also means you’re doing things safely while getting links to multiple sites at once!

Wait, multiple sites?

Yes, multiple site or domain names.  I always recommend that you write 2 articles back-to-back and publish them to EzineArticles, then once they’re published (with your keywords at beginning of title and in content of article) use Unique Article Wizard to get backlinks to them from your submitted articles.

Why build backlinks to EZineArticles and not just your own site only?

EZA is an authority site, and articles there will most likely compete with your site for certain keyword rankings.  Therefore it is important to “promote the promoters”

And since your EzineArticles’ article are backlinking to your main sites anyways, this only benefits you and linking to your published article directory article URLS, means you’re creating a mini-3-way link network.

This is also how you take up more spaces on Google for your main keywords.

Now all you do is rinse and repeat for all your sites and keywords and you can start taking over multiple listings on page 1.

Next up in this Unique Article Wizard review series…

• How to make money with Adsense using Unique Article wizard
• How to use Unique Article Wizard to build your lists on autopilot.
• How to make Unique Article Wizard pay for itself with your first article.

This is part 2 of the Unique Article Wizard review series.  Part 1 is here

Get Unique Article Wizard here.

Then get this Free email newsletter showing you how to make money with Unique Article Wizard so that it pays for itself right away with one article.

After getting UAW get my UAW Tips newsletter to discover how to grow your business with this powerful service that will be paying for itself.

In the previous post, I kind of rushed my review of Unique Article Wizard, so here’s  a 5-part Unique Article Wizard review that this  service deserves.

1- What is Unique Article Wizard and what does it do?

It’s an article marketing service that submits your articles to thousands of directories, but with a twist.  They have a special methods for making your ONE article appear as unique when posted to thousands of places.

There’s there’s no other service like this because UAW submit to more places, plus they keep adding to the number of potential directories you could be submitting your articles.

Suffice to say, this is the BEST service of it’s kind, and that includes My Article Network ( AKA Article Marketing Automation), content Compose and many of the other ones that seem to keep popping up.

To use it you:

1. Write one article with 2-3 backlinks in it pointing to whatever affiliate link, landing page, squeeze page, or domain name you want.
2. When you write an article for Unique Article Wizard, it has to be in a special “UAW format” as I like to call it.  The reason for this is so you can take advantage of their “stealth technology” that allows one of your articles to appear as many different unique versions.
3. When you go to submit your article, Unique Article Wizard tells you how many places your article will get submitted to, and this number has always been over 560 for me, sometimes even reaching 1200 directories being submitted to.

NOTE: They use the word directories a lot because a lot of your submissions are going to article directories, but also included in this huge list of “directories” being submitted to are websites and blogs, which means you’re not doing just article submissions here.

You’re spreading a very wide net by placing your articles on a variety of places, and this helps you reach more people, and that’s the goal here.

This variety also improves your linkbuilding immensely because you’re getting links form various types of sites and sources, and this does get noted by the search engines, and helps you establish a well-rounded money-making linkbuilding campaign, in one fell swoop.

If you’re going to read the whole Unique Article Wizard series, you probably want to know why THEM and not other services, right?

They will get your articles syndicated better than anyone else because they’re giving you options for:

Timing your submissions to avoid aggressive linkbuilding methods which only hurt you in the long run.  Set your submissions to 20/day and let one article works it butt off for you all month.

OTHER services that send your articles to as many places as possible at once = DUMB.

Variety of backlink sources are offered here.  Most article syndication services offer syndication via blog networks or just mass-submit your articles to directories ONLY.

Variety adds spice to life and when it comes to linkbuilding, because you want a well-rounded horde of backlinks pointing to your site, not just one type (article directories only, or blogs only, or social bookmarking only etc…)

Video promotions can be done with Unique Article Wizard because they allow you to insert your YouTube video embed codes into your articles.  As hundreds of sites start syndicating your articles, this drives up the play count on your videos and gets them ranked higher automatically.

NO OTHER article syndication service does this…

Next up in this Unique Article Wizard review series…

• How to get higher rankings by implementing powerful linkbuilding campaigns with Unique Article Wizard
• How to make money with Adsense using Unique Article wizard
• How to use Unique Article Wizard to build your lists on autopilot.
• How to make Unique Article Wizard pay for itself with your first article.

Get Unique Article Wizard here.

Then get this Free email newsletter showing you how to make money with Unique Article Wizard so that it pays for itself right away with one article.

After getting UAW get my UAW Tips newsletter to discover how to grow your business with this powerful service that will be paying for itself.

This is a 2 part post, part 1 of which is a mini Unique Article Wizard review and announcement that I’m offering some training for current or future Unique Article Wizard users.

Part 2 of this review lists the top 5 link building services that I’ve spent thousands of dollars testing

Since I am highly recommending Unique Article Wizard, I created a newsletter which will serve as my version of a Unique Article Wizard Bonus.   It is available to anyone who wants to see proof that Unique Article Wizard works as advertised, with case study results and some tips on how to write articles that sell..

My mini Unique Article Wizard review is as follows:

It’s powerful for generating traffic, backlinks, direct sales, and even for pushing your YouTube videos to #1 rankings on Google.

For all of those reasons above, which I’ve proven and tested, I highly recommend that you get it and keep it.

Part 2- I haven’t posted here in a while because I’ve been cleaning up and improving a lot of my marketing system pieces but also testing various linkbuilding services.

As you may, or may not know, I have a site dedicated to testing and reviewing link building services and have been busy posting results and tips over there.

Results and testing have shown the top 5 linkbuilding services to be:

1. BackLink Solutions - (SOLD OUT) perfect mixture of price (under 100/month) and time expended to get quality backlinks that are extremely effective.
2. Unique Article Wizard - it costs less than BackLink Solutions, yet it is still powerful but requires more effort on your part to make it work well.
3. LinkVana – a high end service for high-end people, not for newbies trying to make their first buck, and not for people who don’t know much about linkbuilding on-page optimization, and so on…LinkVana is for people who can afford 147/month to automated their linkbuilding 100%.
4. My Article Network - good service, lots of sites in their network, but links are somewhat anemic as compared to LinkVana, BackLink Solutions, and even Unique Article Wizard backlinks generated. Still a good service to get and the cheapest of all of the 4 ones listed here.

If you want to get the full membership to BackLink Solutions, I can get you in via one of my special links that they gave me to use.

If you want to get going with Unique Article Wizard, then get some training on it below.

If you come across this site for the first time and you see that there’s no posts for over a month, it’s because I’m taking a month off from blogging to do a few things.

TESTING-

#1- Testing to see if frequent posting is REALLY necessary to gain more traffic or can you just spend time getting more links to your pre-existing pages and posts to increase their traffic?

#2 – Testing to see what’s going on with my adsense project ( to make 5k/month in Adsense by end of the year)

Current customers –

I’ll only be responding to Marketer’s Relief members (http://marketersrelief.com) and doing the coaching with them

Other projects:

1. Responding to customer support tickets..
2. Finish up my niche affiliate marketing book (was done 4 months ago but never released)
3. Test out some more link building services, traffic generation services, and some content provision services for my niche adsense sites.
4. Get in shape for the summer, to do yardwork, planting trees and bushes

SO…

If you leave a comment during the Month of May, now you know why.

BBL (skype-chat-talk) for Be Back Later

I just finished putting together an audio product focusing on list building but automated list building that anyone can do

I know it’s a catch-phrase, but if you’re not building a list you’re not building a business and/or income.  It’s always been my notion that your list is your biggest asset as an online entrepreneur, but there are other assets that are almost as important, too; websites that build those lists.

My method for automated list building is simple in concept and simple in implementation, too. The reason I never have to rely on ad swaps, affiliate programs, jv mailings or anything like that to build my list is because I like doing two things at once, building up low-medium-high traffic assets that build my list for me, but also make money from those who don’t want to join the email list and just want to be RSS readers of blogs.

One part of my automated list building system that pay special attention to is list building via giveaway events.  The reason for that is many times these new subscribers are harder to reach, and less value to me as a list owner, but there’s a very specific way you have to go about treating these newly acquired subscribers versus subscribers acquired by other means.

But what about miche marketers who are not in the “IM” niche?

How can you build a list of subscribers on each and every site you own, automatically, on autopilot while your sites and your emails make you an income?

That’s what this extremely under-priced course covers in great detail

Get it here

I joined My Article Network about a week ago (at the time of this writing) and I’ve already seen some positive developments.

Don’t worry though, I’m not hopping on a hype-train here and recommending this service the very second it launched like every other reviewer has done.

Instead, I am going to target two very profitable and difficult-to-rank-well-for terms that I have not given much attention to lately, and that will be the way I test this service out.

If you want to know what My Article Network is, how it works, what it’s all about etc…you can read the MyArticleNetwork review on my link building services review site.

At this time I don’t recommend this service.

I CAN’T recommend it because I haven’t used it long enough to have case study proof of results from using it, so check out my My Article Network review and bookmark that site url to get notified of the updated case study results.

All I can say so far is that my passive Adsense income is growing steadier, and one site in particular has gone from page 7 to page 4, then to the top of page 2 in less than a week, but I am testing My Article Network out for other keywords on different sites to make sure this isn’t a fluke, and to give it some more time to prove itself to me (and you)

UPDATE: I’ve used this for 2+ months and it does a fairly decent job of getting instant backlinks and lots of them.  I tested this out with several different “level of difficulty” keywords and it performs as expected.

There’s another service that I am testing now that costs more than My Article Network and seems a bit more powerful… but for now I can safely assure you that this is a good service and you will see results with it

Click here to start using My Article Network

By the way, My Article Network is rated by LinkVana Reviews as the 4th-best link-building service…

I’ve been dying to tell you about BackLink Solutions for a while now, but I made a decision to wait 90 days before promoting any type of link building service, especially after wasting 4-5 months with 1waylinks.

It takes about 60-90 days to see if a link building service has an effect, and it also takes a little bit longer than that to measure just how much time and effort is needed to work the service effectively.

BackLink solutions is “copy-and-paste easy”.

Seriously, if you can copy and paste, you will achieve high rankings with this service, and I’ve shown a couple of my SEO buddies just how easy this is.

If you think I’m trying to B.S. you here, read some other blog posts and you’ll see I don’t do the B.S. route…

I also have a site dedicated to reviewing link building services so I know how to test these types of services out, and that site is also providing readers with the necessary information they need to use services like BackLink Solutions effectively.

Before doing any link building you should know about:

• On-page optimization
• Site Structure
• Link building basics
• Link building strategies

Some people don’t even know what keywords they’re going after and just think that links = traffic… That’s not how it works…

Links  accrued over time = higher rankings eventually = which then equates to more traffic

Anyways, I’m lapsing into teacher mode again when I’m just trying to inform you about BackLink Solutions..

BackLink Solutions is a one-way link building service that gets you tons of incoming links without a lot of effort on your part.

I have 15-20 sites getting backlinks from them and it takes me about an hour a week to do this myself. That means I spend 4 hours a month to solidify and increase all of my sites’ rankings.

With my method for using BackLink Solutions you don’t have to write anything, except for when you type in the URLs you want backlinks to…

I’m not going to reveal this method publicly, but it is safe, effective, doesn’t involve anything Black Hat, doesn’t involve using PL Rcontent and will be devastating to your competition, so you’ll have to contact me after joining BackLink solutions to view the video for that.

Please don’t try to get clues out of me about this method…

Have you ever wondered why people like myself promote something so openly that their competition would see then be able to use against them?

Yeah, I was seriously considering only sending an email for this and not blogging it, but there are those who will click the link, go to the site, and think it’s not for them, so no worries there…

As for my SEO competition?  Well, I can always ramp things up a bit by adding other services, but BLS is helping me “kill it” with my niche sites, so I’m good either way.

Go to BackLink Solutions site here

OR

Watch this Backlink solutions review video for proof of results

NOTE: I had a cold and wanted to make video load quickly so I left audio out and made this a self-explanatory silent video

Here are some blog writing tips I thought you could use:

I often show my Marketer’s Relief members this blog you’re on right now as an example of how to Structure and Optimize a blog, but they often say to me,

“Dan, it looks like you’ve spent years and thousands of hours building that blog up to what it is today”…

Well, that’s not exactly true… This blog is less than a year old and I’ve spent some hours on this blog but not thousands of hours.

You see, once a blog is set up and configured the way I want it to be, the rest is merely writing.

1. The #1 hardest part for many people who want websites of their own is getting them set up the way the want it to be.
2. The #2 part is getting comfortable adding content to it.

THEN…. if you have a site set up in a “passion-niche” then the only thing left to do is write good content once the motivation to do so “hits you”.

So how do you write often, and write well?

Write when you feel motivated, and you got something to get off your chest, and the words will flow naturally.

“It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The content will be good and won’t seem manufactured, like you’re trying to “go after” certain keywords or whatever with your writing.

As a matter of fact, as I’m writing this I have no idea what keywords I will optimize the post for but I will get to that later.

I just want to share a writing tip with you because writing is essential to creating good, unique quality content not seen elsewhere, and this type of content is NOT achievable via outsourcing.

The more important point to consider here is that the content flows outwards from brain  > to keyboard  > to published blog post rather quickly when you write without regard for the distractions such as keyword optimization, what to write about etc…

Again, the secret to writing a lot and writing well is to write when you have a burning desire to do so, and/or an important tip to share

When you have something to share, just share it, because those are the times when you can just forget about SEO and KeyWord optimization for a second and just focus on writing good content…

As I mention in my Increase WebSite Traffic Tips newsletter in the very first email in that eCourse…the #1 best SEO tip/thing to do is to write excellent content, or good enough content that gets noticed and linked to without having to ask for it.

When you write with a passion…when you write with a lot to say and  to express, you will find the words just piling up and coming to you.

You may also find out that you actually have a lot more to say that you thought when you first went to publish a new post.

Why is this writing tip important?

Because I said so, that’s why!  Just kidding… 

Writing unique, impassioned content pieces will make your content stand out from all others in your niche.

What are most other blogs you see in the internet marketing niche like?

They’re mostly..

1. Joeblow released his latest product to day here it is…
2. My review on XYZ product, here it is….
3. I went to this seminar, here are some pictures

• What going to make you and your blog stand out and be original?
• What’s going to make your content something people will remember you for?

If you have something you want to share, and it’s something you want to get off your chest, then throw it out there and just write…

In today’s ADD generation, it’s especially important that you adopt this writing method/style since you may not find your focus again and may lose the chance to write that piece of content that makes your site different from everyone else’s.

Why did I write this and what is the purpose here, what do I want you to buy?

Nothing to buy, except into the idea that anyone can be a proficient and prolific writer, especially with a blog…

I wrote this because I saw someone perceiving that creating a blog like mine (such as it is.. fake humility there) as an obstacle because they see my content and all the articles and think,

“Ill never have a blog like that with all that content on there!”…

“I’ll never never have enough stuff to write about!”

“I don’t/can’t write that well!”

Since this niche is my passion, I write as the moment hits me or an important announcement needs to be made, or review posted etc…

But this blog only has about 150 posts on here, when means you could have just as much content if you posted twice a day for 75 days, which is 2 1/2 months.

Overcoming mental hurdles about writing and blogging is the first step towards unleashing all the content you have stored up inside you.

Once that comfort zone has been achieved, and you see just how easy it is to post new content, you will become a writer.

NOTE: I’ve FORCED some Marketer’s Relief members and fellow marketing buddies to get blogs going and now they thank me profusely.

I even have some Marketer’s Relief members posting to their blog from work on their lunch breaks now, then again when they get home because in the 7 hours that had lapsed from when they blogged at lunch, their lunch-time blog post got indexed, and their site is now waiting for new content.

Therefore, 75 days is all it takes to “catch up” to me…

2 MORE FINAL BLOGGING AND WRITING TIPS…

I know, I know I should make this into a series of posts, maybe later right now I’m zooming along here and content is flowing so let me wrap this up with 2 final writing tips…

1- Blog with Firefox

Use Firefox when writing to your blog since it has a built-in spell-checker that I don’t see working when I use Internet Explorer.  As I have come to find out from using Firefox, my blog posts are unprofessionally replete with typos and thanks to Firefox I realize this now and I will slowly fix these typos as I come across them.

2- Don’t Fix Your Typos As You’re Writing…

The thing that wastes more writers’ time is fixing typos as you are writing.  so you write a sentence or two, then go back fix something, another sentence of two, go back and fix etc…

It will take you an hour to write a decent blog post that way, so what you need to do instead is focus on getting what you have to say out of your head and onto “paper” so to speak and most importantly..

DO NOT INTERRUPT THE FLOW…

Don’t stop writing to fix your typos because that interrupts your writing flow, makes it take longer to write what you have to say, and the constant stopping and starting will make your content less unique and less readable because your flow keeps getting broken…

Writing is important and a skill you must learn and anyone that can send an email can have a great blog with great content…

REMEMBER…

I was inspired to write this post due to some feedback I heard from people and if they were experiencing these thoughts then so will others…

THAT means I’m writing about things that my niche is truly concerned about, but doesn’t show up in any Keyword research tools, and it’s why you need to adopt this method of writing.

P.S.

I just noticed this post is well over 1000 words and could have been broken up into 3-5 separate blog posts, but this only took me 30 minutes to write and publish.

So when you write the way I recommend you do, the words will flow.  The 30 minutes it took me to write this blog post could translate into 4 blog posts that took 7.5 minutes per post to write…

Leaving you with 22.5 or 52.5 minutes left for your office lunch break  

Click Here To Get My Top-rated ebook about making insane profits with your blog

Internet Marketing Product Launch Jockeys

I heard this term the other day and it made me laugh because I immediately knew what the guy meant when he wrote it.

An internet marketing launch jockey, or product launch jockey is someone who read ebooks such as GoogleSlapper, Conduit method, or Secret Affiliate Code and was determined that this was the business model they would follow.

Here’s how launch jockeying works:

1. Affiliates are on the lookout for new product launches
2. When they’re told that a launch is going to hit on XYZ date, then they immediately go get a domain name with the product name and word “review” in it. (productnamereview.com)
3. Then they slap together some pages quickly using a review site template (usually)…
4. Then they go grab some PLR and MRR products, or some of their own products to offer as bonuses.
5. Then the launch jockeys say:  “Buy this incredible (untested) product from me and I’ll give you $1,000.00 worth of bonuses (that really only cost me $27 with my MRR/PLR site membership).

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this business model, but what gets me all fired up is when I see people promoting absolutely crappy products as the “thing” we all just gotta have….without testing it first.

Case In Point: Google Annihilation Affiliates were lining up to promote this because it was coming from a well-known guru, but even the usual crowd of mostly positive marketing product reviewers were not drinking the koolaid on this launch, but there were still plenty of people promoting it.

How can these affiliates/wanna-be reviewers determine if the product is any good if it hasn’t even been out long enough to test the validity of the service or product?

• And if the product is so great, then why offer bonuses?
• And why are these launch jockeys offering bonuses unrelated to the product/service being touted as Tha Greatest?
• And why do these product launch jockeys think that offering you dime-sale quality bonuses in large quantities is going to do you some good?

They don’t care dude!

They don’t care that offering you the chance to download 10 bonus products is most likely going to give you more information overload, and is merely obfuscating the fact that the smoke and mirrors of the bonuses is distracting people from asking themselves if they really need those 10 extra downloads, or even the product itself that is being promoted.

Look, I know that offering bonuses is a time-honored tradition in affiliate marketing and I know it works wonders, but my whole point to this post/rant is the affiliates pimping themselves out by promoting untested crap and selling untested crap by offering 10 extra crap downloads.

There are a few reviewers who do this right, and to them I give much credit, but I hardly see any “reviewers” who do much beyond listing the features as seen on the sites’ sales pages or blogs, then adding their bonuses.

What do you think?  Am I being too hard on these launch jockeys?

Do you know that the #1 ASSET for online marketers like you is your subscriber list and the loyalty you gained with them?

Maybe you know that already…

BUT did you know that the vast majority of email marketers who do have a list do not treat them right?

It’s kinda funny when you think about it (and sad) because there is a lot of hard work that goes into build a mailing list via verified opt ins, and yet many people are failing to make good use of their #1 marketing asset.

1. How often should you mail out?
2. What should you mail out for?
3. How best to increase “open rates”?
4. How to actually build your lists in the first place?

My buddy Warner Carter interviewed several marketing experts about their email marketing strategies in his latest product Proven Email Strategies…

What I love about this type of product is that it is an evergreen type of product, meaning that it’s something almost every online marketer will need to know well at some point in their online marketing career.

Now, even though the sales page doesn’t well at all, I am still highly recommending this product because it is absolutely essential for business owners to take good care of their #1 asset.

I know that may sound a bit de-humanizing to call your list an asset, but your customers are really your number 1 asset in business, not just the people hoping to get free stuff (who are also valued, but in a different way)

Without customers, you don’t have a business.

If you don’t learn how to treat your customers and potential customers right, then they will go elsewhere, especially in the MMO/IM (make money online/marketing-to-marketers) niche.

Sometimes it bothers me a bit when I see people taken aback by a price tag of 17, 27, or even 47 dollars for an ebook, and that’s really the person’s fault for not truly understanding what the True Value of the information they’re about to receive is worth.

Your most valuable physical sset is probably your home, and you have insurance for that in case something should happen to it, right?

So why would any businessperson NOT want to maintain and improve the quality of their #1 asset for online marketing, their customer list?

The reason I’m babbling on about that is to also teach you that the people who buy what they need right now for their business are the ones destined to succeed.

Your buying tendencies reveal a lot about you and what your focus is like.

Anyways, back on point here.

Check out my buddy Warner’s Proven Email Strategies book:  the interviews with the marketing experts are outstanding, and truly valuable gold-mine type of information that you just won’t see anywhere else.

Check out Warner’s Proven Email Strategies today so you make good use of your #1 marketing asset, and/or to actually create it!

Wait!  Before you buy, ask yourself these 2 questions:

A- Do you need some tips on building your list?  Warner interviewed marketers with mailing lists in the tens of thousands in his latest product, and the list-building tips are merely one of the side benefits to this product

B – Do you have a mailing list and need to know how to “work it” well? Now that’s truly valuable information because a lot of marketers suffer from poor conversion rates, low open rates, or even both…

If you need to know how to build a list and then maintain it properly,  you don’t want this, you NEED this, plain and simple.

I admit that “How To Get Started With Online Marketing” isn’t a very awe-inspiring title for a blog post..

…but I still get emails from people who are overwhelmed at all the directions in which they’re pushed, pulled, cajoled etc…

So here are your choices for getting started with online marketing:

Promote business opportunities – a regular favorite but authority and a list is really needed here. Build a home business review site and do nothing but review home business opportunities.

Product launch affiliates - follow or get ahead of big product launches and get set up to promote these ahead of the launch dates so your sites are page #1 on the search engines during the product launch phase.  Helps to have “incredible” $1,000.00 bonuses here …you know a bonus offering you tons of ebooks and stuff if you would only buy from them

Niche Affiliates - find hot markets and put up sites selling hot items in niche markets.  Requires good niche research skills and ability to write knowledgeably on subject matter, (unless you know my tricks for this).

Passion-niche marketing - This is where you dig deep (or not so deep) and try to figure out what it is you know that is worth sharing on a web site in a monetized fashion.

Basically, you discover your “guru within” and next thing you know you have a lot of ideas and so much you want to write about.

Passion-niche marketing is where it’s at for beginners who barely have time to figure out how they want to make money because we’re ALL getting besieged with different ways to do it.

Passion-niches are really just niches that you have some interest in, or want to know more about, and are willing to put up a site for.  The reason this is widely believed as the best way to get started with online marketing is:

People have busy lives

Many lack focus

…but many will find the time and the focus if there’s an interest behind their site and content generation.

IF the proper steps are taken, then results ensue quickly…

By proper steps what I mean is:

Doing proper research on the niche: make sure there’s decent amount of interest and monetization possible.  How many people are buying, searching for solutions?  Then offer the solution, or a variety of solutions on your properly built website.

Building sites properly – Starting with Keyword-optimized domain name and moving onward from there to proper on-page optimization, and knowing what to write about for traffic and how to build a site that sells.

Getting traffic - Backlinks and article marketing (done to utmost effectiveness which means doing things that have long-lasting permanent effects on your sites no matter how much time you can devote to your business)

Monetizing the site(s) - I love doing this part in my one on one sessions with Marketer’s Relief members.  All you have to do is brainstorm for a bit, and the intense focus when your “marketing hat ” is on will basically reveal to you/me and the site almost every single way in which those sites could be monetized.

In my previous 1waylinks review and on other blogs I run, I was touting the 1waylinks link-building service as a pretty good solution to getting one-way links.

You can just continue on down this page to read why I’m not happy with the 1waylinks service anymore.

Let me say this, though: it DID work for a bit when articles I posted to the network were showing up as active links (evidenced by pingbacks and seeing the backlinks in my WordPress Admin Panel Google Blog Search widget).

It worked for maybe the first 20-35 days, so once I saw it work, I thought it was OK to tell others to use it since I saw results.

…but for the last 45 days, I haven’t seen any good results (via pingbacks, active credited links, incoming links section of WP admin panel etc…) so I decided I needed to write more articles.

Go to the bottom of this to see why pingbacks and credited incoming links showing up does matter…

Well, I realized after a month or so of using it that I wanted more active backlinks so I wrote more articles, and doubled the number of articles I wrote,

…but it didn’t seem to matter much, and actually lessened the number of active backlinks received per article submitted.

With 1WL you basically submit an article you write to a bunch of blogs that will automatically repost them for you.

This works…

IF… all the articles you wrote were hosted and posted by sites whose posts got indexed…

IF…. all the articles you wrote were deemed unique enough to warrant getting indexed.

With 1WayLinks you have to submit a “dummy” blog that will act as a hosting platform for other’s articles.  Those dummy sites are usually putting your articles in a category called uncategorized and not many of these dummy site articles are getting indexed.

Oh yeah, I said that already…but bears repeating…

Anyhoo, I started thinking about my time spent here.

Submitting 10 articles to get hosted-and-posted on 25 sites each resulted in about 50 active backlinks per month out of the totalpotential 750 links advertised.

The reality is that you can generate a potential 750 links, but what you get credited for is a totally different story.

Also, since your submitted articles can have up to 3 backlinks/articles this means the sites hosting your articles are linking out WAY more than they’re getting linked-TO…

That’s upside-down link-juice there, which makes it even harder for the articles on those sites to get indexed, thereby not delivering active, “seen”, credited backlinks.

When I used LinkVana, each and every backlink showed up in my Google Blog Search Widget (every single one!).

Go to the bottom of this to see why pingbacks and credited incoming links showing up does matter…

Why did LinkVana work better than 1WayLinks?

Don’t worry, this post isn’t about trying to sell you on LinkVana, but more to point out why I abandoned ship with 1WayLinks.

Because LinkVana’s network of blogs has a bunch of high PR sites with good linkjuice acting as your backlink generators.  And each link got credited and counted for something.

Because LinkVana only allows one backlink per post, thereby lessening the linkjuice inequality of their blogs.

Because LinkVana’s network of blogs are putting your backlink blurbs in relevant categories

That’s why LinkVana is $147.00/month though, it works well and the links are powerful.

I think Jonathan Leger is a great guy and very knowedgeable about SEO, but his 3WayLinks service has now been overshadowed by NeuroLinker, which does a LOT more for a LOT less.

Plus my similar service is Free for a limited time – http://automatedlinkbuilding.com

Also, the Answer Analyst tool isn’t that great and wasn’t helpful to me in writing articles for niches I knew nothing about.  It only pulls off ask.com and Yahoo Answers.

Also, the Instant Article Wizard didn’t really do much for me, either, and is more useful for gaining knowledge on stuff you don’t know much about by searching…the Internet, lol.

I could care less about the small amount of money these products cost, but the time spent trying to use 1WayLinks, Unique Article Wizard, and Answer Analyst just wasted a lot of my time.

We’re here only once on this planet (or so many believe) so I really don’t want to waste any time with things that don’t work.

I suspect you may feel the same way.

I tried another service called BackLink Solutions as a beta tester.  My review on that service is still pending because I’ve learned that it sometimes takes a month just to learn how to best use these services, and 2 months to get it just right.

And possibly 3 months to tap out the usefulness of these types of services.

With BLS, all you have to do with them is write a short 60-100-word blurb with ONE backlink in it, specify your URLs, then automatically create as many blurbs as you want.

Point being… I got 3 pingbacks from a test run I did recently with BackLink Solutions and it took me about 3 minutes to get those created, and I only had to write a blurb once that took me 45 seconds to write.

Compare that to having to write a 250-word article for 1WayLinks, and you can see how much more effective and time -saving “BLS” was for me.

Don’t worry (again), I’m not trying to sell you on BLS either (maybe later ).

I have a review site for link building services that you can go see where I review other link building services like LinkVana, 1WayLinks, NeuroLinker, Next GenLinks, and more…

One thing that I haven’t been able to figure out is how all of these services can continue to be effective is you use them for a while.

After all, there really IS a limit to the number of GOOD links you can receive, and at some point you’ll be getting linked back to repeatedly by the same sites, especially if they claim to get you backlinks from relevant, related sites and categories.

The flaw to almost all of these blog network backlinks services is two-fold.

1- You’re only getting one type of backlink ( a link from a blog)

2a- You’re not getting backlinks from related sites with related pages and categories, usually.

2b- If you are indeed getting backlinks from related sites and your posts are put into the proper categories, this is still an issue is that at some point because you’ll be getting multiple backlinks from the same IP addresses and this lessens the effectiveness of those links over time.

That’s also why using EzineArticles article submissions isn’t really the best backlink building strategy either since you’ll be getting backlinks from same domain name…

So much more to share here, I think I’m coming to a conclusion many long-time SEO gurus already know about, we’ll see.

UPDATE: Some people say that NOT seeing pingbacks and incoming links showing up in Admin Panel is not really that important.

Really? 

Most of the initial comments on this posts were from my other blogs (quality indexed sites with a bit of linkjuice) which referred to this post here, and they all showed up as backlinks, incoming links and as Ping Backs, and this morning a BLS snippet showed up as a backlink, too.  What matter is how many links you are CREDITED with, not how many potential ones are generated

Where can you go to get Internet Marketing Experts Providing Laser-Targeted Advice for cheap, cheap, cheap?

You can try going to internet marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, but everyone knows that forums can be time-wasters.

In marketing forums, marketers are either looking for advice, (and getting it) from other marketers looking for advice, or looking to plug their links.

The Warrior Forum is hands-down the best marketing forum on the Internet because it’s self-policed, it is run by the members with moderators keeping things in check.

What’s wrong with that is:

People are asking the wrong questions many of the times.

They’re worried about inconsequential nonsense when they don’t even have a good marketing plan or sales funnel or are still wondering,  “How to get started…”

And a lot of the forum members are trolling the forums to get their product links noticed, so they can make some sales off their PLR products.

THEY have no expertise!

Just ask the guy who is asking how to get high Page Rank backlinks when his signature file on the forum is promoting his/her ebook on how to make 300/day with CPA offers.

If I was making 200/day with CPA offers I could care less about SEO stuff…

Ridiculous!

Since the Warrior forum is self-policed, some people will INTERject and OBject when there is fallacious advice being given.

..but when bad advice is given, they’ll also remain quiet and sit back and say to themself, “that person is wrong, that advice is incorrect, but I don’t want to get into an argument”…

and the person on the receiving end of the bad advice goes on their merry, ignorant way, thinking they’re on the right track…

Paul Myers, a great marketer and frequent poster on the Warrior Forum once created a forum thread whereby he asked what was really new with marketing on the internet verus offline marketing.

Many marketers responded and offered up their suggestions on what was different, and Paul knocked almost all of them down as not being unique to the Internet.

His point:  That while everyone is worrying about widgets and trinkets and PageRank and article spinners and technical details, what they’re missing out on is this:

Yes, this is the internet.. the medium used to market online products and services, but the broad point being missed by a lot of people is that:

 success with marketing is not really about overcoming technical details, but overcoming the objections of people considering whether or not to buy from you.

So  not only are people asking the wrong questions there, but sometimes they’re not being given good advice.

Let’s get to the point, since this post is titled: Internet Marketing Experts Providing Laser-Targeted Advice.

Here’s where you can go to get that internet marketing advice

The Site is called EasilyAnswered and it has a crew of top-notch marketers involved in this service to the internet marketing community.

I’ve always said that services, when used wisely will produce more benefical effects for your bottom line that ebooks and products which teach you things.

After a while you will get tired of reading ebook after ebook and decide to take action on something.

If you have a good plan and you know WHY you need a certain service, then services will be virtual employees working for you.

EasilyAnswered Experts are there waiting to help you, and these experts are there only by way of an application that has to be filled out and some income and list size requirements.

I was honored and more than humbled to be asked to participate on their panel of experts, which once again proves my point that it’s not often that you will find true experts who make real incomes willing to give their time to help you answer your most pressing questions.

Take a look at the video here, it’s 30 minutes long so take the time to watch it all the way through so you find out how and where to get your special discount.

Not sure if I was supposed to reveal how you can get that special discount, hehehe… we’ll see.

Take a look at the video to see why it can help you move forward faster with your business

Watch the Easily Answered.com video here

A lot of the questions that are piling up on the inside are pretty specific and I am giddy at the prospect of answering the ones that play to my real expertise, while the other experts play to theirs.

Anyways, you’re not going to find a suite of expert marketers answering your questions the way WE do anywhere else on the Internet…

So check it out by watching the video first, ok?

Watch the Easily Answered.com video here

PROOF…  PROOOF…PROOF…

Here’s proof I just came across recently that kind of reinforces my point.  Someone on a forum was asking the resident SEO experts for help and the first few responses were pretty half-assed, incomplete asnwers that were gratefully accepted, sorry to say

Watch the Easily Answered.com video here

When it comes to marketing on the internet it seems like there are a lot of moving parts to the most minor marketing tasks.

For instance, building a squeeze page:

Sounds simple, right?  Just throw some words on a page, put the optin box there and get some subscribers…

Not exactly, because you have to write the squeeze page, have something of value to give away, then have some follow-up messages set up…

Plus, you have to decide if you’re going to provide whitelist instructions or just the default “Thank You” page…

Plus you should customize your autoreply message, the one that gets sent out automatically when a new subscriber joins…

And so on, and so forth…

It’s very easy to get bogged down and frustrated dealing with these little details that mean so much, but there’s a way out of that mindset trap.

THE Anti-Information Overload Tip… Compartmentalization is key here…

Think of assembly lines and how they “kicked off” the Industrial Revolution…

Assembly lines broke down each of the many moving parts into seperate tasks handled by methods, machines, or people who were experts at doing that one task extremely well.

Many marketing coaches (myself included) like to say that you should treat your business like you would treat the prospect of eating an elephant, you  have to do it one bite at a time.

Maybe a better metaphor would be:

Treat your business like you’re creating a Model T Ford…

There are many moving parts to a business, and if you were to try and build a car going from one station to the next, it would take you a very long time…

But if you employ the assembly-line method to organizing and carrying out your marketing duites, then you’ll be a whole lot more relaxed and a heck of a lot more efficient.

Example:

I do some article marketing for backlinks and traffic and I write the articles myself, but I wait until I’m in the mood to write that way and I do it all day long.

I write until I reached my goal or until I get burned out writing.  This may take 2-3 days, but I’m done with that task for the month and I won’t have to go back to it until next month.

Then I move on to blog posts.  I have 20 blogs that I write to on a regular basis, and again, I have these tasks compartmentalized as well.

When I feel like writing about link building and SEO, I write posts on my link building services site.  If there are home business opportunities worth reviewing, I will write a blog post or 2 on that subject on my home business reviews site.

If I have a lot to review and write about, I write several blog posts, and save some as drafts so I don’t spew out 4 posts in a day.

…but even my sites are getting compartmentalized now, since I don’t try to have one site be about absolutely everything.

The list goes on and one and I don’t want to bore you, so here’s a more general view of how you can beat information overload and overcome a lack of focus:

Pick one thing and learn it well, become obsessed by it.  I spent a good part of 2008 totally involved with SEO stuff and it was fun and exasperating, but after 8 1/2 months of learning what I could by trial and error, I moved on…

One thing that I’ve always been complacent about is list building, for the reasons stated below:

• What to write on the squeeze page?
• What to give away?
• Whitelest, or default Thank You pages?
• Follow up series email? how many and What are they about?
• etc…

When I turned my attentions back to list building, I learned from my past moments of inneffective, time-wasting, scatterbrained behavior.

I compartmentalized the making of a squeeze page by doing one thing at a time.

Here’s how I did that:

I wrote the squeeze page first, and I made life easy for myself by copying a template I had used before and just changed the words aorund a bit

As I developed the squeeze page, I felt like offering more and more in this newsletter series that I was going to be giving away.

The more I offered in the newsletter, the more potential follow up emails I would have to write, but at least there was plenty of content ideas for the follow up series ( a true Ecourse not a sale spitch-a-day newsletter).

Once squeeze page was done, I went to work on the newsletter.

This took 3 days of writing since there were/are 26 emails in the newsletter (so far).

As I started writing the newsletter, it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of what product recommendations would tie in appropriately  so I started to get agitated again, and losing focus.

But the funny things is, every 2d or 3d email require the newsletter reader to go look at a product I recommended…

So this part took care of itself nicley, and it came naturally without stress or aforethought.

Since I didn’t anticipate finding anywhere appropriate to list the product recommendations before, I didn’t have my affiliate links handy.

I ALMOST stopped writing the newsletter to go find them, but I didn’t.

I stayed the course and finished the newsletter and finnaly completed it.

At this point, in one week’s time, I had written my articles for the month, built a squeeze page and a newsletter.

Time to sit back and say, “WHEW!” huh?

Not exactly…

Now I want traffic to this squeeze page so I got some backlinks pointing towards them to help that get get some search-engine-generated traffic.

This may sound like a lot of work to you, but for me it was fun, since I was doing what I felt like doing at that time and was enjoying myself.

When you’re in a “zone” enjoying yourself, and are focussed on doing one thing and one thing only really well, you will get a lot more done that you ever could have realized.

Compartmentalization…

Absorb this…

I just finished interviewing Mike Spencer about his system for making thousands of dollars a month in Google Adsense…

I love interviewing people like Mike because they’re not “showboats” who need to be up front and center of your attention for branding purposes.

Mike has been quietly raking it in with Adsense for years now, and Matt Garrett, whom I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, told me he’s the most knowledgeable guy he knows when it comes to SEO/Adsense paired knowledge.

When Matt tells me that someone is “high up” in his book as a person to listen to in regard to SEO/Adsense, then I’m all ears.

Mike has to  know SEO and Adsense pretty well since his income is largely derived from getting his sites’ pages ranked highly.

So, I interviewed Mike for close to an hour about his Private Adsense Coaching since 5k/month in Adsense residual income is one of my goals for 2009.  When we were talking about his system, he mentioned something about SEO that came as a little bit of a surprise to me.

He mentioned that he likes to keep his sites “small” and under 60 pages for best results in ranking his sites’ pages.

I found this rather odd since I always held to the SEO theory that having more indexed pages means a larger footprint out “there” in Internet-land, therefore more feelers being put of there for to attract more traffic.

Kind of like how a gas-guzzling SUV expands your carbon footprint, but in a good way, in my case…  I think 

Mike said he likes to build compact sites because the larger the site, the more diluted the link juice of the site becomes, unless it’s one of those true authority sites like Amazon.

Imagine if you have 200 inbound external links to your site.  Now, also imagine that the juice of those inbound links are spread evenly across all of the pages on your site.  According to this SEO practice/theory, the more pages you have, the less effective your inbound links will be when applied and credited towards your site’s main url.

Kind of like what Obama said to Joe the Plumber when he said, “we take the wealth and spread it around”….

Interesting… and I can see how this would hold true…

I have 2 domain names that I chose to build sites on to promote LinkVana, and Web Prosperity.

The LinkVana blog slowly turned into a link building tips and link building service reviews site since I wanted to keep fresh relevant content on there. So the initial 3 page site for linkvana reviews has now turned into many more pages about related topics.  It ranks well without many backlinks to it because of the keywords in the domain name.

The blog about WebProsperity is tight, and on focus and will be a tightly spiralled site.

I’m rambling, I know.. the Ridalin hasn’t kicked in yet….

The point being, that YES, search engines DO like new content and YES, you should add content regularly.

But the goal is to get ranked well, isn’t it?  So why not do more, with less effort?

Search engines also love links, and reward sites that get links….. with higher rankings.

So, you can write a ton of content for your sites, or have them written for you, with the hope of getting some long-tail traffic that eventually adds up to a lot of traffic, or just focus on your best KWs and work on getting your pages ranked better.

A tightly spiralled site, SEO-wise, and even design-wise will link to other pages on your site in as many ways as possible.

Think  of your website as a tear in you jeans and each time you link from one post to another on your site, it’s as if you’re applying needle and thread to tighten things up.

Sometimes a month or so after a product launches, I will look to see what sites did well in the long-run and what I find is that the sites that did well were either old, aged domains with a lot of inherent link juice, and already have a lot of their pages ranked well.

I also see some new sites that have only a few backlinks, but ranking well due to having a tightly spiralled site.  This is proof that on-page optimization can be just as important as off-page optimization…

Some properly built, silo-style, tightly-spiralled sites will outrank other competing sites that are not as well built, SEO-wise and their competitors will never know why…    You can easily build silo site structure sites, and you can even take your current old sites and make them go “silo” with a simple plugin.  Silo site structure is a way of building your site to make it easier for the search engines to categorize/rank what your site is about.

How do you make a tight SEO spiral?

• Keep the site small in size, have no more than 60 total pages per site unless you’re going to make it a true authority site with a lot of incoming links and unique content being added on a regular basis…
• Inner-linking, or inter-linking - Link to inner pages of your site from other pages on your site whenever possible (which means every post).  Example:  When you write a new blog post, link to a previous post or page…
• Add to your site’s link juice- this is the power behind the arm throwing the tight SEO spiral….the more external links you have pointing to your site, the stronger the arm is that’s distributing link juice and page rank down to your new posts and pages, if that’s how you want it set up.  Silo site structures tend to keep the theme bleeding and PageRank bleeding down to a minimum, but Mike’s method for building sites wants the page rank to be bled from main site down to the pages because he knows there’s going to be a limit on the PageRank bleeding due to him only putting 60 pages, maximum on his sites.

The more pages and posts you have, the more diluted the link juice will be and the more links you’ll need just to keep up with things.

When I learned this, I realized that I’d made some SEO mistakes in the past year or so…

I’d been trying to get ranked for sub-keywords by getting backlinks when all I had to do was just go “wide” with my domains strategy and get a domain name with my sub-keywords in there.

Once I got a good KW-rich domain name, I was page 1 in 3 days for my terms…

Point being, Adsense guys need a lot of domain names in order to target new niches easily…and their goal is to get their pages ranked quickly by throwing a tight SEO spiral.

Please do NOT waste time trying to rank well for keywords when all you have to do is get a domain name with the keywords in there and create some content based on the sub-keywords.

My story: One of my first products was a free report on the top ten internet marketing mistakes.  I gave this 82-page report away via squeeze pages, and it converted well, but I wanted to automated that list-building so I tried to get that squeeze page ranked highly in the search engines for the term (internet marketing mistakes).

I wrote some EZAs (ezinearticles.com articles), got backlinks to the squeeze page itself and did many other tactics to make the search engines notice this page.  So far, the results were not very promising.  The squeeze page wasn’t properly built with all that privacy policy and terms and  conditions stuff at the bottom, so it just never ranked well.

So I got a keyword-rich domain name for internet marketing mistakes, made a blog post, pinged it out, and was page ONE in a couple of days…  I also wrote an EZA article which linked back to this site, and now I have 2 spots on page one of Google for my terms.

Now I’m practicing what I preach and started to build another internet home business reviews site as a reminder that I may have been wasting time trying to get rankings for domain names that were self-limiting.

Point being, you can do more with less time and effort if you’re willing to spend a few bucks on domain names…

I think it also forces you to ask yourself,

“What is the goal of this site, what do I want this site to do for me, what will I write about, how will I promote its pages and posts etc…”

and asking these questions lends focus to your marketing efforts.

Do not confuse motion with accomplishment, be smart, work smarter, not harder

NOTE: When inner linking, it’s better to open link in SAME window, not open in NEW, but it requires testing to see if sending people off your site via “open in new window” when clicking on affiliate links is a good idea

Why the Home Business Reviews   Site Business Model Works So Well

Surely you know by now there is more than one way to create a successful online business. The home business review site model, or even just a generic review site model, is one way to go for producing an online income for yourself.

Some techniques require more skill and practice than others. Most do not require a lot of up front money, which is what makes them appealing for the everyday person looking for an extra income.

Let’s look at a dose of reality. Not everyone is good at marketing or sales. Writing is one skill that nearly every kind of online business requires in some form.

• Writing product reviews is one technique.

Look closely at the things you read. You can learn from the experts when you analyze HOW they write things.

As an online business owner you will need to function in many different roles:

• Marketer to sell your products

If you select a review site business model, you can minimize some of these tasks. One good aspect of this model is because the good content in your reviews replaces your marketing. It is easy to tell when someone has written a bogus review simply to make a sale. Look closely at the content. Straightforward content is the best form for this kind of writing. Actually most people with basic reading, writing and analysis skills have the ability needed to build and maintain a review site.

Should you ever write a bad review?

Yes. If all you do is praise the product or the producer you are not going to be taken seriously. When you see a product’s flaws, point them out. It is not necessary to be confrontational, just honest and direct. If all you are doing is writing a review in order to make a sale, people will see through the process. Many review sites make this mistake. You are not going to make a sale from every review you write.

If you found a product that is not worth recommending, find a suitable alternative and tell people about it. Actually that is a method that some reviewers rely upon. They point out the flaws in one program and identify how the other one compensates for them, thus recommending an alternative. By searching forums you can find programs that people are recommending or complaining about, so you will never run out of topics.

You can also search for other home business reviews to see how those sites are run

With that all understood, who is going to read your reviews? Who will find them?

They say find a need and fill it. But how do you know who needs reviews and how will they find your site among the millions of others out there?

Here is the exciting part. You want a very specific audience that is already interested in a particular product but they need some extra input about it. Your good review can give them that. You’re attracting very targeted traffic. Consumers appreciate integrity and good content.

The next issue is how do you get people to read what you wrote? Several methods help you here.

• Email marketing is one. Send an email to your subscribers and let them know you have written an informative review. That is not marketing actually, you are saying something like ‘I saw this abc product and wrote a review on it. You can go to this link to read it.’ This is delivering content by email.

Affiliate Marketers can really benefit from using the review site model. By the way, these steps are much the same as those you would apply when you are ready to build a marketing funnel.

Daniel McGonagle is an entrepreneur, marketing coach, and business consultant. His blog at http://firsthandreviews.com reviews home businesses and marketing products.

Article Source: Home Business Reviews

A Review of the AWeber Autoresponder

Before we get into the review of the AWeber autoresponder, the question of whether you should even use an autoresponder must be addressed.

Here are 2 reasons why you need to use an autoresponder.

1. Small businesses are NOT taking full advantage of their customer contacts and leaving a lot of money on the table because of this..
2. Small business owners are also not following up with their customers in such a way as to retain their loyalty.

A customer list that is easily contacted by email is a gold mine for small businesses, and even more so for larger businesses.

There are too many people on the Internet trying to make sales from their website vistiors while overlooking the power of having a subscriber list to mail to… on demand..

The best way to build a list of subscribers is to use an autoresponder, and AWeber gets my vote as the best autoresponder of choice for small and large businesses.

1. AWeber pro-rates their service fees to accommodate the person who is just beginning to develop their subscriber base.
2. AWeber has tracking and analytics tools to help you get more out of your email marketing efforts… This continued devotion to helping you increase your conversions is one of the primary reasons they’ve been considered the top autoresponder by almost all the top internet marketers…
3. AWeber customer service is by far the best support you’ll get from an autoresponder company. They have a support blog that continually gives out good information on their new developments and tools.
4. They also have a Live Chat support function with minimal wait time, with support representatives available to help you during normal business hours and beyond. In fact, they expanded their support hours in 2008 to help accommodate more people, due to the popularity of their autoresponder service.
5. AWeber also offers a free trial period of 30 days so it’s basically a risk-free venture on your part.

Your customer contact, follow-up and communications are the backbone of your online business, so it’s safe to say that a risk-free trial period from the top-rated autoresponder service is a welcome addition to your portfolio of online marketing tools…

Also, the deliverability rate of the emails you send is guaranteed, at a 99% plus rate…

When you read an AWeber review you expect it to be a candid review, so here’s some of the things most AWeber reviews won’t tell you:

• There is a bit of a learning curve to learning how to use AWeber. I can remember learning how to use it years ago, and I got frustrated with it because I did not have the mentality to be patient, but at that time I also didn’t realize just how valuable a skill I was learning.
• Not many people know how to use an autoresponder properly, therefore just having one isn’t going to increase your income, you need to use it effectively, too.
• Building a subscriber base is something you will always be doing because your list size will decrease over time. You need to use your autoresponder effectively if you want to have an automated way of keeping the subscriber base growing.

So here’s a tip for you…

Go into learning how to use an autoresponder with the following facts in mind:

1. Your online income is usually proportionate to the size of your customer list
2. Email marketing is the back bone for online business owners and where the real money is made
3. Your subscribers list (free subscribers and paid customers) is your on-demand gold mine if handled properly

Those three sentences reveal undisputed facts, just ask around and you’ll see and know this is true. If you keep those 3 sentences in mind while you’re learning how to use your new autoresponder, you’ll be a bit more patient than I was with learning how to use it and will probably get more out of it than I did my first week or so.

If/when you get AWeber or any other type of autoresponder, you should devote the first few days to learning how to use it, and spend the next day or two building some squeeze pages, and the rest of the 30-day free trial period to build up enough of a list to pay for your first month’s fees.

If you go into this committed to using it properly and for the long-term, AWeber will pay for itself before you have to make your first payment…

Article Source: AWeber Review

This is not another blog post about the Web Prosperity MLM Program

This post is SEO-related and about how I maintained top rankings for the terms WebProsperity, Web Prosperity, WebProsperity Review and Web Prosperity Review, before, during and after the Web Prosperity Launch…

The 4 steps I took…and the 4 steps I know you can take as well…

Step 1- Decide on whether or not I wanted to get back into MLM…

Well, before I did anything I thought long and hard about getting involved in another MLM program like Web Prosperity. I still had mis-givings about MLM in general so I spoke to Stu Stirling, James Brown, and Kevin Riley about it…

None of us are/were big fans of MLM, but if they were convinced of the “good-ness” of this program, then there was a good chance that I would be convinced, too.

And I got convinced… I decided it was OK to get involved it

Then I got conviction…I got excited and really “up” on the concept

Then I got committment…I went all-out in my dedication to promoting Web Prosperity…

So, Step 1 was committing to the project, or not… and that’s really the most important step to anything you do, and something that cannot be taught, but the rest fo the steps can be taught and adapted tohugh.

Quick note:  Isn’t it “funny” that many of the most important steps we can take with any type of venture or project begins with a mental assessment of self?  Something to think about….

Step 2 was getting a good domain name, keyword rich, with name of company or product or program in the name of the domain itself.

This was fairly easy to do at first because not many people were thinking about promoting Web Prosperity for the long haul when I went looking for domain names, just blogging about it and putting up additional pages on their sites.

When choosing a domain name, I went the same old route I usually go with, which is to get a domain name with the product name and the word review in it, but the dot.com name was taken so I got the dot.org name instead…

(Kevin Riley can thank me later for the dot.me name I pointed out to him, which I should have got, too 

Many people overlook the .org extension when ordering domain names but they’ve proven to perform very well in the SERPS. 

A keyword rich domain name virtually assures anyone who knows a little bit about SEO that they’ll get top rankings for the terms in the domain name. 

So nothing special was done there, really…

Anyone can do that…

Actually…. anyone can do what I’m revealing here in this post 

Step 3- building the site up….

What kind of content was I going to add to a brand new site about a brand new program and product, in an industry of which I am not too fond?

Here are some simple ways to add content to a site that is new in topic to you…

Write about:

• What it is- pure information
• Why you joined- your opinion
• Why you’re excitedh about it and believe in the product
• What others are saying on other blogs, especially the eventual negative bloggers…
• Copy and paste the emails you’re being sent by the program itself onto your site as added content (believe me they don’t mind that a bit)
• Write a review, or another review
• Write about the specific individual products being offered
•  Rebuttals to other bloggers’ negative comments to offset their impact…(My favorite)
• You can also write an Ezine Articles article and republish it on your blog/site.  When you re-post an EZA article on your site properly you’re linking to it and that helps that particular article get read more (higher rankings for those terms)

So, right there those are more than enough ideas for site content.  You can also do some searches to see Who is writing What and How…

Some extra sites you could build:

Sqidoo Lenses - make one or two of these based off the main keywords you’re targetting..

Hub Pages, same thing…

Free wordpress.com blogs – same thing

Focus most of your time on the real site though, since the Hubs and Lenses won’t be on Page 1 for too long, history shows…

When a launch proves to be big like the Web Prosperity one is/was, the lenses and hubs and ezinearticles.com articles seem to disappear from Page 1 and it’s sites optimized and edicated to ranking well for those specific terms that will end up filling up Page 1.

There are some things you can do to boost your hubs and lenses and article sin the SERPS, but more on that later. 

Suffice to say it takes more work on your part to get an EZA ranked highly than it does to get a good domain name ranked highly.

Click here for proof of that, it’s a link to a search for a review of a product that was launched in a big way…and no lenses or hubs listed there on Page 1 of the search results, just sites with the keywords in the domain name…

Point being… use hubs and lenses as helper sites, but don’t make themyour main focus.  Use them for backlinks and for republishing your blogs’ RSS feeds.

Steps 1,2. and 3- Recap

1. Commit to the project,
2. get a domain name,
3. build up the site content, maybe even add in some helper sites…

Step 4- Watch the SERPs and if you start to drop, add another piece of content and get more links.

I watched this Web Prosperity launch like it was another SEO case study, and whenever my site dropped in the SERPs, I would write another post and climb back up to Page 1 or 2 for the harder terms I was going after (the name of program itself, without word “review” in there)

I also wrote an article ( 2 articles now) for EzineArticles.com and re-published it on my network of blogs.  This made the first published EZA article rank well, and since the article linked back to my main site, I now had a high-ranking article in the SERPS linking back to my main site.

This helped the main site maintain its rankings, too, so re-publishing the EZA article had a two-fold effect…

Then team members who were added to the main site’s blog roll were re-publishing the article and the effect was increased some more….

At some point though, I ran out of blogs to re-publish the article on, and didn’t want to write the main site’s content on all my other sites because it wouldn’t be totally relevant…so I was out of ideas and places to get links from.. 

I started to see some slippage in the SERPs again after the launch hit and more videos and lenses and keyword rich sites and press releases came out…

This was driving my site’s SERPs over to page 2 and even to page 3 for a day or two…

So I shot out a few articles for syndication to the 1WayLinks link building service and the main site I have been referring to is now page 1 for every single term I was going after…

What makes me particularly happy is that 4 of the terms I was going after are above the fold, ranked #1,2,3 or 4th in the SERPS now…and ranked #7 and 9 for the harder terms…at the time of this writing…

Sometimes good content on a great domain name may just not be enough to get the ranking you want, no matter how hard you try….

If attaining the top SERPs are important enough to you, then you should have a link building service at the ready to help solidify what you’ve achieved…

You can use this simple strategy for anything you want to rank well for, but none of it will be possible for you without the all-important step of Total Commitment… then it’s all fun stuff after that 

Internet Marketing is a cut-throat niche…

The following post may sound a bit negative to you, but the feeling has crept up in me over the years and now it’s come to the point whereby I cannot ignore it any longer.

What am I talking about?

Well, as an idea person I share ideas freely with people, especially other marketers, but those ideas get copied/implemented based on what I told them.

If I am using a certain blog theme, they might use the same one to emulate the look and feel of my sites.

If I am promoting a certain product in a certain way, they will copy that, then do it better usually…

If I express an idea for a certain home business product, they will invariably come out with one of their own based on what I told them (home study course, information product, even a certain niche).

It makes me rather suspicious when I see others copying me, but should I be flattered, “get over” myself, or get ticked off that these other allegedly successful marketers are probably glomming on to me for ideas on what to do next in their business promotions?

This kind of stuff makes me want to take a shower to wash the “fleas” off…

You know like… when you lie down with dogs you come up with fleas…type of thing?

This makes me want to “go niche” under a pen name and turn off my Skype.

How my stuff gets copied the most:

Stolen content:

Whenever there is a product launch I am interested in, I will write a review or article about the product… Then, if the review or article was good enough, it will get scraped and put on a squidoo lens or a blog and whover scrapes tht content will pass it off as their own.  The most prevalent violation is done when people republish the EzineArticles.com articles without linking back to the article or leaving hyperlinks intact.

I understand that a sure fire way to success with business is to take something that works and make it better and can appreciate it when it’s done well and honorably…

Case in point:

I heard on talk radio the other day that Japanese steak houses in my area of New England are making a better product and putting it on the table for less money, much like they did for the automobile industry.  As a result of that Japanese Steak houses are gaining in popularity and success in this region (so says the Phantom Gourmet brothers).

But still, when you see your marketing buddies from Skype or wherever copying what you do and watching you, it is kind of creepy.  I mean, they’re successful people too, allegedly so why the need to copy me?  I’m as humble as they come, and deservedly so…. so I can’t really understand why people are so lacking in ideas for business promotion.

One thing I will admit to though, is that when it comes to double-checking my SEO knowledge or theories, I head on over to Matt Garrett’s blog to see what he’s doing, and how he has things set up.  

No content or marketing methods are copied, but a couple of things are clear when you look at any of Matt’s blogs…

1- They get a lot of traffic

2- Therefore must be configured properly

I won’t scrape and copy Matt’s stuff, or re-word it to make it my own, or grab his blog theme and create a look-a-like site.  He’s a Skype buddy, and I’m no copycat and can think for myself, lol.

BTW, Matt rocks in just about everything, from SEO (true SEO knowledge, no untested theories) list-building,  blogging (has an authority site on just this topic), domaining etc…

So why did my ADD kick in on an already rambling blog post to spin off to talk about Matt?

Because Matt has experienced the same things, too. 

Matt, like all internet marketers, sends out promo emails and someone was copying his promotional and putting it on a blog as content.

Matt got irritated by this so he did the same thing, but his SEO expertise pretty much made what that other person was doing ineffective, or at least less effective.

If you stick around this niche long enough you will get copied, one way or another.  The copycats are looking for shortcuts or just temporarily out of ideas.  I honestly have no problem with someone taking an idea and running with it by making it better, but cannot condone stealing of content and passing it off as your own.  I just find it weird that these alleged entrepreneurs are actually out of ideas and need to emulate little ole me…

This rant and rambling post is done, hope you learned someting from it, I know I feel better now for having written it  and getting this off my chest.  I promise you that more suitable ORIGINAL content is soon to follow :)

No related posts.

Online Marketing Mistakes – What Online Marketing Mistakes Are You Making? 

There are more and more people coming online every day trying to earn money online, especially with the global downturn regarding the economic outlook.

When more people come online some “new” programs arise and it’s the new-comers to the internet marketing scene that get caught up by blatant false statements made my promoters of certain programs.

One of the most common types of programs are the ones that promise you all you have to do is get other newcomers to join your free site via your referral link, then once they are in the system, they are encouraged to join several other monthly programs in order to be an affiliate.

How is this a business?

Do you really want a business or do you just want to promote something as an affiliate in order to earn some sort of income?

That’s a hard question to answer if you are still trying to figure out what exactly it is you want to do online…

However, one of the top internet marketing mistakes is building someone else’s list for them instead of your own.

What many people don’t know is that the successes and riches being reported by certain affiliates are either not true, or only possible because they built their list up first.

It is natural to make mistakes when you’re first starting out with something new like an internet business, but you need to be aware of what those mistakes are, and realize how to move past them.

As mentioned above, building someone else’s list is one of the most common mistakes new-comers to internet marketing make. There are many other mistakes you will make along the way, so please be aware of that and become a student of this business and industry, and learn from what does and does not work.

Daniel McGonagle is an entrepreneur, marketing coach, and business consultant. His report, “The Top 10 Internet Marketing Mistakes And How You can Avoid Every Single One Of Them”, has achieved widespread acclaim as one of the best free resources for newcomers to the internet marketing scene.

Go here to get your copy of the  Top 10 Internet Marketing Mistakes Report

Article Source: Internet Marketing Mistakes

Is Your Online Business Taking More Out Of Your Pocket Than is Going In?

It is real easy to get caught up buying into a lot of programs you think you need to succeed with internet marketing. Paid mentoring, paid coaching, paid traffic, paid forums, membership sites are all examples of programs that may not be doing you any good right now.

Some people just don’t know how to write well enough to convert web site visitors into sales, so the paid link building services won’t help them achieve the income they deserve, either but it will help their rankings.

If you know enough about SEO to get top rankings, you still need to convert those visitors into paid clients. If you don’t know enough about your niche, then you might be targeting the wrong keywords to rank well for, too. The best way to succeed with anything is to keep it simple. You need to sell stuff to people who want to buy it from you, and that means knowing your niche and exactly what their needs are.

Is your online business taking more out of your pocket than is going in?

That is indeed a common problem with many aspiring marketers, but it’s the ones who focus on one thing at a time and keep it real simple that do the best. You need to be patient with yourself and your expected business growth. You also need to be a student of the online marketing game, and not a victim.

Stop using whatever service or monthly program that doesn’t help you in a tangible way, but try to get the most out of those programs before canceling those memberships.

In time, you will see that you know what it is you want to do online and the only services you will be using are ones that do stuff for you that you just don’t have time for anymore, like link-building services or other laborious time-consuming tasks like writing content for your niche sites.

Spider Web Marketing System Review

I looked into this “new” marketing system and it seems like a re-hash of the PayItForward4Profits system…

Spider Web Marketing System:  It’s free to join but in order to make something out of the program you will need to join several other services and paid-for programs.

Then, after joining, it’s up to you to get people to join the SpiderWeb Marketing System via your referral link.

Once you get people to join via your referral link, you make money when you refer people to those paid programs. This is very similar to the PayItForward4Profits program because it is initially free to join but you end up paying for a bunch of other residual programs just to have something to earn income from as an affiliate.

So, the way you make money with this system, if you make money with this system, is by referring people to join the paid-for services and programs you joined. The added downside to all of this is that the programs you are urged to join will scatter your focus like a NorthEast wind blowing leaves all across a lawn in October in New England.

If you find yourself attending different training calls and opportunity calls and having to explain to your new referrals what each program is all about and why they should join, then you’ll probably end up spending a lot of time explaining things and very little time making any money.

One of the top ten internet marketing mistakes is not promoting yourself first, and that will always be true. Don’t build the SpiderWeb Marketing System’s list by referring people to their program, build your own list instead.

Article Source: SpiderWeb Marketing System Review

3 Steps For Niche Affiliate Marketing Success – Niche Marketing Myths Uncovered

What is Niche Affiliate Marketing?

Niche Marketing is when you focus your attentions on a specific niche in order to ascertain and fulfil that niche audience’s needs. Some of the myths about Niche Affiliate Marketing are as follows:

1- Focus on what you love to do

2- Sell digital products

3- Build your own websites

Those 3 items above are actually decent niche marketing tips but the fact of the matter is, if you gathered up some PLR (private label rights) material and sold them off your niche website, or even off a Squidoo Lens, then you’re sure to do well.

You don’t have to focus on what you love to succeed with niche affiliate marketing, you don’t necessarily need your own websites, and some niches don’t do too well for digital products but do very well for other types of products.

The point here is that there’s a lot of good advice out there about niche marketing but the real proof of effective niche marketing strategies comes from copying what real successful niche marketers do.

So what do successful niche marketers do?

They do things the easiest way possible. They get a Squidooo lens, then build some entries and content for it and see if there’s any traffic coming to it. If there’s traffic coming to that lens in high enough volume and it’s producing income, then it’s time to expand upon that premise some more by getting a domain name and self-hosted blog or website.

Niche affiliate marketing is for those who want to make money the easiest way possible, and getting a Squidoo Lens prior to building a website is a great niche marketing tip I hope you remember and apply.

Article Source: Niche Affiliate Marketing

I don’t know man… are people really that stupid or ignorant about SEO that they’ll actually pay for submissions to the search engines?

Apparently so… Wow… I mean,,, WOW!

Look, don’t bother with this stuff ok?

It’s better to just spend your time writing good content and letting the search engines find you on their own.

Once one search engine finds you the others will find you, too, eventually.

To start your blog or site off on the right foot, submit the sitemap to Google WebMaster Tools, and maybe to DMOZ directory, but focus more of your time on building a good site with good content and good backlinks.

Also, if you have a blog submit it to FeedAgg.com and Feedage.com for maximum results from minimal effort.

A lot of people submit to as many RSS places as possible and also focus on doing a lot of submissions of site urls to search engine directories.

That’s an absolute joke/waste of time/money and shouldn’t even be a serviced offered by “SEP pros”

No related posts.

What Really Works For Search Engine Optimization
By Daniel McGonagle

The evidence is right in front of your eyes when it comes to realizing what works for SEO.

If you are a student of SEO and Online traffic generation like I am, then you learn to look at things in an analytical way.

Some things that I see when analyzing new SEO trends is what types of articles, blog posts, and sites are ranking well.

A great way to determine this is to watch the SERPs during a popular new product launch. At the very beginning of a launch you will see some Diggs, some FeedAge and Feedagg RSS submissions, and even some Mixx-es and “Stumbles”.

But you hardly ever see those social bookmarking urls in the top of the SERPs for a very long time. Sometimes you’ll see a new social bookmarking site doing really well in the SERPs, but it’s difficult to keep track of which ones are currently working.

In my experience, the following types of web real estate do very well in the SERPs over a long period of time.

• Blogs with good domain names (keywords in the title of domain name)
• Articles from EzineArticles.com
• Forum posts from DigitalPoint and the Warrior forum
• Slideshare
• WetPaint blog posts
• WordPress.com sites
• Squidoo Lenses
• HubPages

Recently though, I have seen Google’s version of EzineArticle’s doing really well. Google’s version of EZA is called KNOL, but the KNOLs I’ve seen are pretty heavy-handed and promotional, unlike EZA articles.

When you watch the SERPs during product launches you will see some sites come and go, You will hardly ever see a social bookmarking link maintain its position in the SERPs for a long period of time.

Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and WordPress.com sites can do pretty well and have some staying power, but the sites that maintain the top rankings are those that are self-hosted sites with keywords in the domain name.

It is possible for lenses, hubs and free blogs to do well if you put some links pointing to them, but it would take more effort to get those to rank well than it would for a regular site to rank well.

The point of this article is to tell you that SEO isn’t complicated if you know what to look for.

Here’s a checklist to teach you how you can learn what really works for SEO

1. Type in your search term at Google
2. See what kinds of sites are ranking well on first 2 pages of listings
3. Check back in a week and see what kinds of sites are still there
4. Make a note of what kinds of sites are doing well for your search term.
5. Do not try to reinvent the wheel with SEO, just open your eyes to see what is really working right now.

It’s that simple, so keep it simple. If you want to take things another step further, install the SEO for firefox plugin to assess the SEO competition you’re up against. The SEO for firefox plugin will tell you how many links other sites have pointing to them, and conventional wisdom states that if you get more links than your competitors, then you will outrank them.

However, that conventional wisdom is not always true, because the search engines like to rank new content higher sometimes, and not all links are created equal. So getting more links than your competitors may not work for you, or it will work really well.

Earlier I mentioned that lenses and hub pages and EZA articles and do well for rankings and they can achieve this without any backlinks because of the power of the system they’re tied into (Squidoo,com, HubPages.com, WordPress.com). That right there is a testament to the fact that not all sites are created equal.

Things are also subject to change at any time when it comes to how Google and other search engines rank certain pages. Recently I’ve noticed that EZA articles are doing really well in the SERPs, and KNOL is making some appearances as well.

An ezinearticles.com article I wrote about how to start an internet business has been at the top of the search engines for 2 weeks now at the time of this writing, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found prior to that. So things change when it comes to ranking pages in the SERPS.

Some things that will always work for you SEO-wise no matter what:

• Keyword-rich domain names
• Getting relevant one-way, anchor-text style backlinks
• Adding fresh new content to your sites

A lot of people look at PR, or PageRank as an indicator of how much traffic a site gets or how much link juice a site has. Well, I’m here to tell you that PageRank is not as important as the linkjuice your site has and also, how often your site is getting spidered by the search engines crawlers.

The more frequently you post to your sites, the more frequently the search engines spiders will come back. If your site is not properly optimize for on-page SEO, then it may take a few passes of the spiders to have additional pages noticed by the search engines.

A lot of blogs and themes comes with calendars and many people leave these on their sites and it’s a mistake to do that because the calendars send the spiders into an endless loop and they eventually just give up spidering your site after a certain period of time.

The better your site is built, the easier it will be for the spiders to crawl your site and rank and index your pages.

One last thing you should know about SEO….

You can do a lot of the wrong things and still get ranked well if you have other good things happening to your site, like getting linked to by a particularly high-ranking site with good link juice and relevant anchor text-style link back to your site.

And everything I stated here is just for Google.

Yahoo ranks sites differently, as does MSN

Article Source: SEO Tips

How to Start an Internet Home Business – 3 Things You Should Know, and How I Would Start Over
By Daniel McGonagle

Before you Learn How To Start An Internet Business, there are 2 things you may not want to hear about running an Internet Home Business. I will also include the 3 things I wish I was told when I was first learning how to start an internet business.

#1- The first thing you should accept as a reality is that there is a bit of a learning curve to starting a new business, and that’s putting it mildly.

There are several online tools and services you will have to become accustomed to working with and using properly. Building websites and using autoresponders are the 2 biggest learning curves for most people that are first starting out with their internet business.

Many people will consider technical challenges as being the obstacles preventing them from achieving their eventual online business success, but nothing can be further from the truth because building a business and running an internet business are 2 different things.

You see, some people are hung up on the technical details of site and page creation, but you must also see and think past your nose here. Instead of focusing on technical details, try to think beyond the know-how of HOW to build a website, and at some point start thinking about:

WHAT kind of website to build

WHY you are building the next website at all?

• Is it to explore another niche for profitability or,
• To expand your organic traffic reach in the search engines, or
• To brand yourself via positioning?
• etc…

NOW that your site is built, what are you going to do with it?

• Will you send PPC traffic to it?
• Will you build links to it to achieve rankings?
• Are you going to implement any traffic tracking and sales page conversion tools?
• What are you going to promote on your site, and how, and why?

#2- The second thing you might not want to hear is that experiencing running a previous or current business will come in quite handy for you.

When you first decided you wanted to learn how to start an internet business, you may not have had any previous experience running a business online or offline. With no prior business-running experience, you are facing quite the learning curve when it comes to thinking about market research, positioning, branding, return on investment etc…

There’s also the drawback of starting a business that seems so intangible simply because it’s all bits and bytes, basically. With an Internet Business,there’s no doors to open, no customers to greet, no front walkway to sweep and greet the passersby, it’s merely an online, virtual, non-physical entity that you’re hoping will produce a real, tangible income for you.

And there’s really not set hours, either

3 things I wish I knew when I started my Internet Business: If I were going to learn how to start an internet business again, here’s what I would have dearly liked if someone told me:

1- You need to possess or develop some business experience to run your online business (DUH!).

In other words, you need to walk into this whole home internet business idea with the attitude and outlook that this is and always shall be a business venture, not a time-wasting hobby. You will have to make business decisions every step of the way as you and your business grow alongside each other.

2- Mental discipline is the key to your internet business success, (it really is)

The #1 malady affecting many people learning how to start their internet business is the lack of focus, direction, information overload, and not listening to good sources of information. Many people allow themselves to be led down the path of easy instant riches and fall into the trap of believing everyone’s scamming them, and everyone’s a scammer when it’s their fault for running with the wrong crowd in the first place.

The Law Of Attraction principles play a big role in who you decide you will listen to, and are listening to right now. You chose to align yourself with whoever it is you’re listening to now, and that is your choice, so choose your online mentors,friends, and influences wisely.

It’s your fault and nobody else’s fault if you keep falling for those easy-get-rich-quick scams.

3- Personal development an internet business development go hand in hand with each other.

As you meet, address, and overcome the new challenges that are part of your learning curve, you develop as a person whilst developing and fine-tuning your business.

Business and personal development are not mutually exclusive concepts and while I can only tell you that this have proven true for me, the only way you will truly, truly, believe me is if/when you figure this out and experience it for yourself.

If I were to do this all over again, I would read more hard-cover books about business development, then learn more about the Art of Selling since that’s basically what this is all about, if you want to learn how to start an internet business, that is.

If you want to build an online presence as a hobby, that’s a different story, but we’re talking about business here, and businesses need to sell to stay in business. So learning the art of selling and writing good copy for online sales letters is crucial, too.

If I had to do it all over again, I would also learn how to properly do PPC marketing in a risk-free way without damaging or emptying my wallet too many times. When done correctly, PPC marketing is a guaranteed source of instant on-demand traffic.

If you want to learn how to start an internet business, the core concepts you must learn are business (management and development), learn how to sell (copywriting, art of selling) and then add traffic to your sites, either by PPC or myriad other methods available for getting traffic.

Daniel McGonagle is an entrepreneur, marketing coach, and business consultant. Please visit Daniel’s blog at http://danielmcgonagle.name

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Daniel_McGonagle
http://EzineArticles.com/?Learn-How-to-Start-an-Internet-Home-Business—3-Things-You-Should-Know,-and-How-I-Would-Start-Over&id=1796499

There are some really cool link building services out there now and NextGenLinks looks like one of the more effective ones.

UPDATE: Not recommended after 2 different tries with them, so skip the rest of this review, and head over to my link building blog to see what the top 4 link building services are.

There’s Neurolinker which looks like it’s better than 3waylinks.net (I used to use 3waylinks.net but was never a fan of losing all my links should I ever quit their service.)

I’m not sure when BackLink Solutions is coming out…and LinkVana is still doing a good job, too.

But this is a NextGenLinks Review…

NextGen Links is basically a one-way link building service that gets links to ALL your sites’ pages.

Most webmasters only think of getting links to their domain name and tend to forget to get links to their inner pages as well to build up the authority of their other pages on site.  This is a crucial mistake made by many webmasters since it’s good SEO practice to not be too top-heavy with your linking.

Does NextGenLinks Work & how does Next Gen Links work?

I don’t know how well or IF it works well since I joined about 20 minutes ago (at the time of this post) and am writing this pre-review while waiting for their system to crawl all my pages on one of my largest sites.

That’s part of what NextGen Links does.

You add a domain name to their system,

You add some code to your site (copy and paste easy to do here, especially for WordPress blogs)

Once you’ve added the code they give you to your site, their system crawls your site and takes inventory of all your sites’ url and what those pages or posts are about.

Man, that was a mouthful, eh?

Let me break it down some more

• Join
• Add domain name url to their system
• Copy the code they give you and paste it onto some area of your site where the code will display on every page that loads, like a header, fotter, sidebar etc…
• After you put this code on your site, their systme crawls your site, registers the urls and titles of your pages/posts, and saves them to a CSV file.
• You then import the CSV file into their system again and wait for the backlinks…

This is all there is to it and their system is very easily navigated and intuitive and real easy to use.

Where does NextGenLinks get their links from to give back to your sites?

I don’t know that yet, but I will post the answer here

My goals for NextGenLinks?

I want some of my sites to benefit from a different style of links being built to them.  I’ve used Linkvana in the past, then used 1WayLinks.  I like LinkVana and think it’s great, and definietly very powerful, but LV is for people with at least 5-7 sites that would need links to them.

Since it’s pretty tough for a one-man show like myself to track and test a whole bunch of link building services all at once with accuracy, I recommend you check out this review of BackLink Solutions while we’re waiting for Next Gen Links to update their spidering system

UPDATE: Not recommended after 3 different tries with them, so go here to see the top 4 ways to get backlinks.

No related posts.

I get the same email over and over again but from different people.

I was once told that if you have to do something more than once find a way to duplicate the process or make it happen quicker.  So if you sent me an email and I directed you towards this post, it’s nothing personal and it’s actually an attempt to give more than a quick 2 minute answer to your pressing questions. 

This post isn’t about airing dirty laundry or making people feel bad, but rather to make it easier for me to help more people.  When my Inbox gets hit with this repeat question, I answer as best I can if I think the person is serious and if it seems like they have a chance of actually succeeding.

This is my response, fully fleshed out and perhaps longer than I would normally do via email.  This might be more effective help-giving on my end. 

The typical email goes something like this:

Hey Dan, I’ve read your Top 10 Internet Marketing Mistakes Report, have read your blog at http://danielmcgonagle.name and am reading your emails when I have time. 

It seems like you’re a person who can help me, so here’s my predicament.  I’ve been trying to succeed with this internet marketing thing for (x #) of years and it seems like all the programs I joined that were going to help me ended up failing me, or I ended up failing with them.

So, do you think you can help me and if so how?   I struggle with HTML and building sites and technical stuff like that but am willing to learn.  Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Thanks,

Someone who may or may not take your advice 

End of typical email

In response to “I’ve been trying to XX # of years without success” :

You’re not alone when it comes to doing this for several years without much success.  In fact, you’re in the majority there, but seeking minority status with regards to internet marketing and internet business success. 

Don’t let this prolonged period of failure or perceived lack of success get you down.  Learn from those mistakes you made. 

I understand if your confidence is shattered and that you might be starting to think it’s all a scam or that it’s not for you.

Internet Marketing is no different from Offline Marketing at its basic levels.   You are either willing to run a successful business or you are not.  This really has nothing to do with you having a business that is virtual in nature, ie. an internet business.

Which brings me to address the next point…

In response to “I struggle with technical issues and need help overcoming those so I can see my business grow, and to succeed” :

NO, your biggest challenge is not with technical issues at all, you just think that.  Believe this before moving moving with a business of any kind. 

• Do restaurant owners fail because they can’t hammer a nail? NO
• Do restaurant owners fail if they can’t push out good food?  YES

Is a restaurant owner’s product the building that houses their food?   Maybe, if you include ambience as part of the overall product being presented, but in most cases food businesses succeed or fail based on the quality of their product, not the building that houses the product.

As a marketer, you need to remember that this is a people business, first and foremost.  With an internet-based business, you merely use the Internet as the primary medium by which you attract clients. 

So, yes, your websites and overall web presence is important because they’re part of what will bring customers to you, but when you start thinking that your success is based predominantly on getting those sites built, that is just plain wrong.

Maybe you’re scratching your head right now thinking WTF is this guy saying? 

First he says technical struggles aren’t what’s holding me/us back, then he says that having an online presence is important?  Sound twisted…

The reason I KNOW that technical issues are not the reasons for any businesses failure is because it’s really a mindset thing that could be holding you back.  Insisting that technical issues are your online business albatross or cross to bear preventing you from succeeding is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You might be thinking that the one thing you’re not excellent at yet is the one thing that is holding you back, but the fact of the matter is, anyone can learn how to build a website.  As a matter ofact there are hundreds of video tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere telling you how to do this stuff.

There’s even WYSIYG editors (What You See Is What You Get) editors that make html site and page creation a snap.

XSITEPRO and WordPress are probably the 2 easiest programs and content management systems to use for site creation.

You can even buy websites, maybe even one in your niche for $50.00 or more…

Why struggle with Tech stuff when it can be done for you or you can simply overcome this minor obstacle to your success with a little focus?

The reason this is an important lesson to understand has to do with smokes and mirrors and misdirection.  Imagine the “technical issues as the obstacle myth” as an illusionist is drawing your attention to something you shouldn’t really be focused on to make you think something he/she wants you to think. 

To think that technical struggles is what’s keeping you back from success is a form a self-defeating and self-fulfilling prophecizing.

In response to “you seem like someone who can help me.  Please tell me what, how, when etc…”:

Maybe, maybe not.  Some people are not coachable and are too self-destructive and self-limiting to accept the best of help. 

What happens to a lot of people in their quest for Internet Business Success is this:

They get hooked in by the promise of easy instant riches, then try more than a few of these shortcuts without much success. 

After trying different programs and shortcuts for a while, something happens to the person trying these shortcuts. 

That person either decides to toss out all the shortcuts and accept a reality check then buckle down to achieve some sort of progress (success!)

or they start getting negative. 

If they start getting negative with their thought processes, they’re building walls that insulate them against any hopes of accepting a reality check.  They might even start thinking that everyone is passing them by except for people like me who seem like they’re doing well with it.

Some people resent the successes of others and develop a “yeah, but…” attitude… 

You know how it goes, when you seem some screenshots of someone saying they made 10k in 3 days using the XYZ method and we say…

“yeah, but they are connected, have a large list, know how to do ________, are good at ________ or any other type of reason that discounts their success etc…”

If you know that their success is based upon something else they built up and developed over time and with hard work, then you’re close to understanding how that same sort of success is possible for you, too.

The longer anyone continues thinking their negative thoughts, the harder it will be to change the way they think.

I do believe I can help you, yes, but that all depends on you, as everything does. 

Everything depends on you ultimately.  It’s all on your shoulders. 

When you’re presented with what to do to succeed and you don’t do those things, what else can a coach like me do, except not worry too much about it?

I won’t build all your sites for you. 

I won’t build your list for you.

I won’t write your emails for you, send the exact traffic you want to your sites for you, nor make your business decisions for you.

I’m not stating that you asked me to do these things for you, but emphasizing the fact that I can teach you the things you need to know and do to help guide you towards developing a business that works.

I can and will help you with the attainment of the proper mindset since that’s really a crucial part of the business development process. 

Personal development and business development go hand-in-hand because the success of your business does hinges on how you think and operate.

I can help you with undertstanding traffic generation, niche research, copywriting, blog, site-building, and so on… but I do make it a point to mention to people when I see them working too many angles at once ( not focussed). 

You can’t get really good at a lot of things at once and expect to see your business develop the way you want it to.  That’s why I also help you with your focus as part of the training I provide. 

If this post doesn’t address all your concerns please leave a comment below and I will expand on this.

Thanks,

Dan

http://marketersrelief.com

No related posts.

Before you Learn How To Start An Internet Business, there are 2 things you may not want to hear about running an Internet Home Business.  I will also include the 3 things I wish I was told when I was first learning how to start an internet business

#1- The first thing you should accept as a reality is that there is a bit of a learning curve to starting a new business, and that’s putting it mildly.

There are several online tools and services you will have to become accustomed to working with and using properly.  Building websites and using autoresponders are the 2 biggest learning curves for most people that are first starting out with their internet business. 

Many people will consider technical challenges as being the obstacles preventing them from achieving their eventual online business success, but nothing can be further from the truth because building a business and running an internet business are 2 differnet things. 

You see, some people are hung up on the technical details of site and page creation, but you must also see and think past your nose here.  Instead of focusing on technical details, try to think beyond the know-how of HOW to build a website, and at some point start thinking about:

WHAT kind of website to build

WHY you are building the next website at all?

• Is it to explore another niche for profitability or,
• To expand your organic traffic reach in the search engines, or
• To brand yourself via positioning?
• etc…

NOW that your site is built, what are you going to do with it?

• Will you send PPC traffic to it?
• Will you build links to it to achieve rankings?
• Are you going to implement any traffic tracking and sales page conversion tools?
• What are you going to promote on your site, and how, and why?

#2- The second thing you might not want to hear is that experiencing running a previous or current business will come in quite handy for you.

When you first decided you wanted to learn how to start an internet business, you may not have had any previous experience running a business online or offline.  With no prior business-running experience, you are facing quite the learning curve when it comes to thinking about market research, positioning, branding, return on investment etc…

There’s also the drawback of starting a business that seems so intangible simply because it’s all bits and bytes, basically. With an Internet Busines,there’s no doors to open, no customers to greet, no front walkway to sweep and greet the passersby, it’s merely an online, virtual, non-physical entity that you’re hoping will produce a real, tangible income for you.

And there’s really not set hours, either

3 things I wish I knew when I started my Internet Business:  If I were going to learn how to start an internet business again, here’s what I would have dearly liked if someone told me:

1- You need to possess or develop some business experience to run your online business (DUH!).

In other words, you need to walk into this whole home internet business idea with the attitude and outlook that this is and always shall be a business venture, not a time-wasting hobby.  You will have to make business decisions every step of the way as you and your business grow alongside each other.

2- Mental discipline is the key to your internet business success, (it really is)

The #1 malady affecting many people learning how to start their internet business is the lack of focus, direction, information overload, and not listening to good sources of information. Many people allow themselves to be led down the path of easy instant riches and fall into the trap of believing everyone’s scamming them, and everyone’s a scammer when it’s their fault for running with the wrong crowd in the first place.

The Law Of Attraction principles play a big role in who you decide you will listen to, and are listening to right now. You chose to align yourself with whoever it is you’re listening to now, and that is your choice, so choose your online mentors,friends, and influences wisely.

It’s your fault and nobody else’s fault if you keep falling for those easy-get-rich-quick scams.

3- Personal development an internet business development go hand in hand with each other.

As you meet, address, and overcome the new challenges that are part of your learning curve, you develop as a person whilst developing and fine-tuning your business.

Business and personal development are not mutually exclusive concepts and while I can only tell you that this have proven true for me, the only way you will truly, truly, believe me is if/when you figure this out and experience it for yourself.

If I were to do this all over again, I would read more hard-cover books about business development, then learn more about the Art of Selling since that’s basically what this is all about, if you want to learn how to start an internet business, that is.

If you want to build an online presence as a hobby, that’s a different story, but we’re talking about business here, and businesses need to sell to stay in business.  So learning the art of selling and writing good copy for online sales letters is crucial, too.

If I had to do it all over again, I would also learn how to properly do PPC marketing in a risk-free way without damaging or emptying my wallet too many times.  When done correctly, PPC marketing is a guaranteed source of instant on-demand traffic.

If you want to learn how to start an internet business, the core concepts you must learn are business (management and development), learn how to sell (copywriting, art of selling) and then add traffic to your sites, either by PPC or myriad other methods available for getting traffic

 The new SEO Voodoo term that making more appearances these days is the term LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing.

LSI in academic terms refers to methods of accurate data retrieval, or data retrieval methodology.

In layman’s terms, in marketing terms, here’s what is really means.

Search engines like Google want to rank your sites according to what they think you should have on your site in order to rank you well for certain search terms and phrases.

If your site is about dogs, and all the words on your site are about cats, not only does that make for a poor visitor experience, but it also makes for misleading on-page optimization.

By misleading on-page optimization, I mean that you shouldn’ t optimize and design your site title and meta tags to “claim” your site is about dogs when it’s really about cats.

A while ago, a long time ago, on-page optimization was a very critical part of your efforts to rank well in the search engines for certain terms.  Then Google realized that many marketers were gaming the system with meta-tag stuffing and keyword-stuffing their pages to fake the search engines out by making them think that their site was about something it really wasn’t.

After that happened, another change took place and search engines like Google started relying on off-page optimization factors like link building and links in general to determine the popularity of a site. Once SEOs or SEO professionals saw this change take place, they started gaming the system by getting massive amounts of links using linkbuilding services and networks of blogs.

As a result of this, the search engines had a choice to make and let these link builders game the system or make another change.  The change that is now taking place refers to LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. 

As mentioned earlier in this article, LSI refers to data retrieval and the reason it applies to SERPs and rankings is that search engines like Google are basically just data retrieval systems that find sites that have certain words on them and add them to their index of sites that are about that certain word or phrases.

This indicates a shift towards on-page optimization playing a larger factor than before when it comes to ranking well in the search engines.  With the advent, or coming predominance of Latent Semantic Indexing in ranking factors, the search engines appear to be looking for the best of both worlds by taking into account what relevant and related keywords are on your site, plus what kinds of sites are linking to yours.

The search engines that don’t present the results and sites and SERPs that the searcher is looking for are search engines that are going to lose business, especially with it’s advertisers since they are in the business of presenting the most relevant search results to its users.

What’s the best way to use LSI, Latent semantic Indexing in your efforts to rank well in the search engines?

Do what professional SEO have been telling people to do for years!

• Write and publish quality unique content which will result in getting a natural pace of backlinks to your content
• Use the terminology that is often used when the topic is discussed, so use words, terms, terminology and verbiage that is naturally used when this topic is written about.
• For example, a site about gas grills should probably mention charcol, brisquettes, pool party, Fourth Of July, beer, wine coolers, tongs, meat, burgers, hot dogs, gas grills, electric grills, getting burned etc…
• Those words are words often asosciated with people that use gas grills therefore the theory of using LSI to rank well in the search engines would naturally assume that a site that uses these words on its pages would be found to be most relevant to that niche even though it doesn’t present every possible alternative version of the word gas grill, grille, grills etc…
• Site structure seems to be another factor tha tis having mor emhpasis being put on it when it comes to ranking well, and the term most often used when describing the new site structure site builders should use is called Silo structures.

Can LSI be gamed by marketers?

Yes, and it’s already happening, with some sites and services offering LSI keyword research services, and offering to build silo structured sites, which is another part of the LSI ranking theory for SEO.

Does Link building still work?

Yes, it does but the reason it works well still is that natural link building comes from people linking back to your quality content pieces and usually thes elinks come from appreciative people with similarly-themed sites, therfore those links are relevant and naturally given.

How does one write content that is good enough to get linked to witohut asking?

By writing knowledgeably about your subject matter an din such a way that is resounds well with your readers. 

A lot of marketers that get tons of traffic tell me that LSI is nothing to even be converned about because you should be writing naturally anyways and using the words that come naturally to you you when writing about something you know about.

Here’s an example of how to naturally use LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing in your writing:

If you write a review on a product made by someone, include the product owner’s name in your review because the search engines using LSI in their ranking factors know that most sites that write about this product also mention the owner’s name so including the owner’s name in your review helps your site rank better merely by including a keyword that is associated with that product.

No related posts.

There’s a lot of disagreement among marketers and how to get started in niche marketing…

Some say focus on an interest or passion and research the profitability factor.  Others say just focus on finding the hottest, easiest, most profitable markets to target and focus on that.

So, I’m going to focus on the latter business model in this post.

When you focus only on selling what will sell easiest and best, it reminds me of convenience stores.

Think of your overall business as a convenience store… In these stores you will only see items that are proven to sell well.  In any offline business, they only have so much room so they only keep in stock what is selling.

There are a variety of items in the store, of all different types and sizes and prices…

But what’s the one thing all the products on the shelves in the aisles have in common?

They are all items proven to sell, otherwise they wouldn’t be on the shelf.

So, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t want to corner a market, or get branded as an expert in a certain area, or put all your efforts into niches you have expertise, passion, or interest in, then consider the convnience store business model.

Focus on a variety of niches that you researched thoroughly and have pretty good reasons for thinking they will sell easily and often. 

I know for a fact that a lot of people just want to make some money online without having to turn their passions and interest from a hobby into a business. 

I think you should examine this method, but be warned… when you don’t have any expertise or interest in your business sites or topic, you will find it more difficult to present yourself as an expert and become believable in your visitors’ eyes

There are a lot of people who have discovered their own unique methods for doing niche research…  They know how to find hot niches and market to them and they make “bank” because their research was done correctly.

But with all the methods revealed, what’s the true method for doing niche research that will work for anyone and everyone regardless of their interests and strengths?

As always, the best way to learn the truth about anything is to ask Experts that have been doing it for years with great success.

So that’s what I did.

I interviewed 5 niche marketing research experts and put together 5 hours of audio interviews where they discuss their methods and just how easy it really is to do once you know where to look…

This new product is coming out soon, so bookmark this page or get on the list (via top right box on this blog) and watch for the release date

Business is merely a small, yet important part of your life.

Sometimes it is all too easy to get consumed by trying to make your online business grow, and there are some things you need to take into consideration when creating and running your own business…

1. Creating and running your business is a journey, not a race
2. There are certain phases you will go through with your personal development as you and your business progress along side each other.

#1- Has your life been filled with upsides, downsides, struggles, and triumphs?  Has your life been an even-keel experience for you?

If you’re like everyone else on this planet, it probably hasn’t…

Therefore, you need to accept the fact that there will be triumphs and glory and despair and frustrations with your particular business.

Knowing this and believing it can actually set your mind free because it could dampen any frustrations you experience with your business.

Business owners tend to worry about each and every aspect of their businesses, especially if they’re one-man (or woman) shows…

Sole proprietorships are more often than not just jobs with an LLC or corporation or some sort of legal entity attached to them.

The reason for this is sole proprietors tend to get caught up with doing almost everything themselves and a lot of time is wasted.

The beauty of having your own online business is:

• There’s a lot of automation that can be included in your virtual real estate empire (SEO, email marketing, affiliate programs)
• The low-cost of entry into the online business world makes it easier to succeed (but also attracts a higher percentage of unrealistic dreamers.)
• It works 24 hours a day, even while you’re sleeping, unlike the offline world where there are dedicated hours of business
• It’s a challenging and rewarding experience whereby even non-business-savvy folks can make it through sheer persistence

 There is a story (true) that I like to tell my clients when I see the time is right for them to learn this particular lesson…

I ran 2 Boston Marathons and completed them, but it pretty much destroyed my knees.  The goal wasn’t to get a good time, merely to finish…

Life is much like a marathon, in that you keep on chugging away until you reach that finish line.

If things are going rather poorly for you, you might consider quitting or dropping out or being complacent and this leads to you not reaching your goals.

When I was taking psychology courses in high school and college, they often mentioned the concept of self-actualization.  To me, this terms basically means “reaching your full potential” as a person.

1. If you don’t meet and overcome obstacles, you will not grow as a person.
2. If you don’t try to break thorugh comfort zones you will not grow as a person
3. When you do overcome obstacles, you realize that you’re a pretty tough cookie
4. When you do break through comfort zones, you may realize you were being complacent and that it really wasn’t as hard as you thought it was (looking back with 20/20 hindsight)

When I ran the marathons, I never thought I wouldn’t finsih.. That idea never actually occurred to me and that’s an important concept to absorb…

To know I didn’t quit… realizing that the thought never occurred to me… those are the true rewards of running a marathon.

I’m definitely not the fastest marathoner who ever ran/walked the Boston Marathon, and not an elite runner, but it was the journey that was the reward…not the race, not the time, not the name in the local newspaper, not the congratulations from family and friends…

The reward was revealed to me between miles 1 and 26.2…   

Running your own business is much like a marathon, too

You don’t have to be the best to get to the finish line…

There are times where you will want to quit…

There are times you wonder why the heck you ever wanted to do this in the first place…

It is so easy and immediately gratifying to quit when you feel like it, and that’s where you need to take an assessment of yourself.

Do you want the easy way out whereby you gain a little by doing a little, or do you want to grow by leaps and bounds by forging on ahead through the toughest of times, when you rmind and body are working against you?

In life, everyone experiences their hardships and we all move on, and in business there are certain stages you will go through.

Sometimes it takes getting burned numeorus times before you realize some important lessons.

Your mistakes are valuable lessons that can help you and your business grow in tandem…

However, if you go through life and business with Mind Wide SHUT, and not Mind wide OPEN, then you’ll never learn anything.

You need to be aware of the lessons and teachers that surround you daily…

One of my greatest teachers is currently 9 years old.  He has taught me more about life than any book, person, movie or whatever…

Because I watched a young child grow, I learned what true happiness can be…

Young children act like “babies” sometimes when they give full vent to their emotions, but they’re also incredibly resilient because of this…

When we were all children, we breathed the way we were supposed to, by filling up the stomach area first, then the chest with air..

As adults we un-learn this all-too-important every day habit and most of us end up breathing shallow chest filled breaths of air.  The older and “smarter” we get, the more damage we do to ourselves, it seems.

Why are children so resilient, and why are they able to move on so quickly?

They give full vent to their emotions, leave nothing on the table, and move on with feet skipping…

If/when you get frustrated with your business or your life, experience that moment in time with mind wide OPEN and learn from it…

Ask yourself if there’s a lesson to be learned and absorb the lesson…

#2- The phases of personal and business development…

You start with a compulsion- to earn money, time freedom, finacial freedom etc…

Answer this:

Would you rather earn 100k a year doing something you enjoy or 300k doing something you don’t enjoy?

Money does not equate well with happiness, and sometime shaving money is the cause of much UN-happiness.

Many people will tell you that you should not go into business purely for the expected monetary gains, but that is half-assed advice.  IF you’re no tin this for some sor tof expected income generation, then you might as well expect to see ZERO income generated!

Here’s a common thing I see pretty often…

People start the online business “Cuz they want to make some money” and don’t really care how they do it…

Then they realize that there are challenges to be faced if they are doing something they enjoy or if theyre doing sometihng they don’ tenjoy.

So when you’re told by someone to stop thinking about how much money you’re going to make, remember that it’s best to do what you love, or like, because your enthusiasm for what you’re doing is what will help you overcome your obstacles.

Why are doctor’s offices staffed predominantly by women? 

Why are construction workers predominantly men?

Because those jobs and business speak to their unique talents and it’s what they like to do.  They can go into many other fields that could pay them more money but we all just want to be happy, not rich, so we end up doing things we enjoy….

Some evidence to that fact is me.. I have a criminal justice degree but “fell into” marketing and teaching because that’s what I truly enjoy doing.

That’s why a lot of people graduate form college or get degrees and end up doing something entirely differnet with their lives.

That’s why a lot of people start their online businesses with a “pure” , sole desire for income generation for the sake of income generation.

They didn’t know they’d have to find out for themselves that their original intentions were a bit mis-guided and only experience in certain fields and industries will eventually guide them into doing something they truly enjoy doing.

The second phase is whereby you realize you don’t enjoy the focus being just on earning money, but you want to help others since you realize hat you can get paid for doing something you really enjoy doing

My family sees it when I interact with my son and little nieces and nephews and they want me to become a school teacher…

However, what they don’t realize is that teaching is only one of my strengths, and that marketing, business development, and coaching are other skills I have, too.

So, I found my niche, and probably just like you, I started out with a desire for gobs of money, then switched over to just wanting to enjoy doing what I do, and the “secret” to your happiness with your business is to find a mixture that works for you…

Again, that’s why the journey is the reward, not finishing the race… 

No related posts.

“Make $8,372.80 A Week Working Just 2 Hours A Day”

Have you ever seen headlines like this on sales page or advertisements that direct you to a sales page that says something similar?

To me, these are the epitome of hype-driven sales pages and hype-driven advertisements…

In reality I know that it is doing 2 harmful things to the people getting sucked in by these compelling headlines…

#1- Even if it were possible, is it possible for the person buying it to actually make that amount or just the product owner/theoretician behind the product and sales page?  What else is needed to make this happen and what point does it only take 2 hours a day?

#2- If/when people buy products based on headlines like this, what happens to them once they buy the product?

Well, they might realize there are some unanswered questions (see #1 above) or… they buy it and try it and don’t reach that goal of $8,372,80 working just 2 hours a day…and they feel cheated, lied to, or just disappointed with themselves…

Sometimes I think it’s possible to determine the value of a product being sold by the sales copy on the sales page…

Too much hype usually means too little product…

Good hype mixed in with something being revealed about the product in the copy on the sales page seems to be a better “buy” that something that promises everything and delivers nothing but compelling words, hype, and curiosity on your part…

I know hype works, it’s part of what copywriting is supposed to do.. to sell the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)

I recently listened to a rather uninformative audio interview between Ed Dale and John Carlton, but one thing did stand out to me as a reasonable way of going about writing good sales copy…

In the interview John mentioned that good sales copy = Hype + Reality…. meaning that good sales copy mixes a bit of reality and truth with the WIIFM Hype…

So, moving forward, to be a smarter shopper, and to be a better marketer, analyze the sales copy to ascertain what kind of marketing you’re being presented with…

If it’s merely make XXXX dollars in XXXX days using only XXX hours a day, with no “revelations” on what the “secret” is…. then you’re not faced with the best marketing mechanisms here.

If you see a sales page that mixes a dose of reality and truth and revelation (“secret” method on how to make money with product launches… for example…) then you’re looking at a better product here because you’re faced with better marketing that is less hype-driven and uses less hype to deliver a better product because the owner knows their product is good and less prone to being asked for refunds…

I hope this makes you pause when reading a sales page, or even makes you read the whole sales page in its entirety when presented with an offer..

Have you ever been told that the ONE thing you need to make your business successful is X, Y, or Z…?

Sometimes you’ll hear that it’s list-building or building websites properly or any of the various other skils you need to develop that will “put you over the top”…

However, there is something basic that is sometimes overlooked.

How to think like a business person…

If you’re interested in building a business, then you need to develop your business-sense…

The real reason why many online and offline businesses fail is not due to the lack of a “list” or products or traffic or even a sound business plan…

Many small businesses fail because the person guiding the ship may not have the business-sense to guide their “ship” in the proper direction…

YOU, as the CEO of your one-man or woman show have to make daily decisions on how to guide your business in the right direction.

That’s why CEOs get paid absurd amounts of money to correctly interpet the big picture, analyze market trends, decide on market share strategies, and a lot more…

To fully understand what a real business entails, I strongly recommend you get a book called eMyth, Revisited by Michael Gerber.

It is a timeless classic and available here on Amazon:

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=EBCzZ&m=1fX9v.IvcUZIjv&b=j_ebTAA.K1VxwKlT9GIFJg

You can also get a copy at your local public library…

This is one of the most important books I ever read and it will help you understand how to establish a business and more importantly how to expand your business outward to the point where you no longer work every aspect of your business yourself..

I write reviews here on this blog and at Firsthand Reviews, a site dedicated to Home Business Reviews

The person who is totally new to the home business and internet marketing industry will consider review sites as resources that are created for the purpose of satisfying their due diligence efforts.

Those of us in the know realize that the main reason people create review sites is to get targeted traffic in a very easy manner, and to make affiliate sales for recommended products…

Once a reader of a review satisfies their 5 minutes of due diligence by reading one or 2 or maybe even 3 reviews… then they take the common consensus/opinion put forth by those reviews and absorb it as truth… (usually the product is recommended).

but…

Why would anyone spend time putting together a review site unless it is to eventually sell something?

Writing honest and unbiased reviews in an altruistic manner (expecting nothing in return) doesn’t feed your family…

The review sites business model is an effective one, but where most people go wrong with their review sites is they think only of the money to be made.

The review site owner will either trash everyone except his/her own products for sale on the site, or recommend everything on every review written since their business model is to write reviews only on products they recommend.

Like in anything you do in life and business the middle, moderate ground must be found in order to present a legitimate opinion to your site visitors.

Again, I realize that there is only so much time in a day and as a review-writer and review-site owner you can’t review every single product out on the internet.

As a reader of reviews, you need to understand what is going on in the background when you read a home business or internet marketing product product review.

The reason I wrote this post is because it is far too easy to manufacture trust from the “innocent” site visitors.

All you have to do is say…

“I review products for a living, and these are the ones I recommend”

The biggest issue I have is that some “legitimate home business” review sites are recommending outright fraudulent programs or selling ebooks that are absolute trash…

How do I know this?

Because I used to do it, that’s how…

Well, let me explain that for a bit…

I used to sell an ebook off my review site mentioned at the beginning of this post but the sales page for the product was far better than the product itself and resulted in the highest refund rate for any ebook I had ever sold in massive quantities!

I honestly thought the ebook was a good product but the #1 most pressing concern for me was whether or not the buyers were happy with it… and they weren’t.

There comes a time in the wanna-be internet marketers career where just about any ebook has some sort of valuable insight that can be gleaned for the ebook text.

For me, there were some valuable insights in the aforementioned ebook, but I stopped selling it because the people weren’t happy…

On the other hand, I have sold thousands of copies of my own online marketing guide ebook and have only had 1 refund requests in the 2+ years of selling it.

In my online marketing guide, I revealed a method by which I made $10,000.00 in about one month and also delivered 8 videos and 12 audios explaining various other tools people needed to make thier businesses work.

Review site owners must create fair and balanced content if they wish to have a long-term business and to establish a good reputation and good branding for themselves if they plan on repeat business and marketing to people more than once.

October 9th, 2008
Jonathan Leger recently released a new linkbuilding service called 1waylinks.net and I’m comparing how it works versus the LinkVana linking service.

Here’s how 1WayLinks.net works and how you should use it.

It’s a blog network that hosts your blog posts for you.

This means you get your content syndicated across hundreds of blogs (over 800 in the network at the time of this writing).

The syndication of your content provides you with backlinks to your sites because each post you submit for syndication can have up to 3 links in there.

When you submit your posts for syndication they will have 3 links in there serving as backlinks to your specified sites.

You can get over 200 backlinks per month per account and you have the ability to use an article spinner to make sure you’re not syndicating 100% duplicate content to this network of blogs.

You will need to have an active WordPress blog with WordPress 2.6 on it.

How does 1WayLinks.net differ from LinkVana?

Linkvana costs a lot more and can be more time-consuming for you if you decide to write all your blog posts yourself.

You do not get 1 blog post spread out over 200 other blogs automatically with LinkVana, but the upside to LinkVana over 1wayLinks is that the links you get from LinkVana are more powerful, so less links are needed to achieve your goals for rankings.

I use both of these services so I have tested them out sufficently to know that LinkVana’s links are more powerful, plain and simple.

1WayLinks.net uses the “power” of getting massive amounts of links in a short amount of time to help you with your rankings.

BEWARE of the FACT that getting a lot of links to a site all of a sudden will not do your site too much good.

For a new site, it’s best to use LinkVana to get it going properly.

For existing, aged, sites, you can use 1WayLinks.net to increase the number of your backlinks more efficiently.

Another LinkVana Review

A review on 1WayLinks

Join 1WayLinks here

A lot of people and companies offer the service of doing keyword research for you.  But what are you getting exactly?

The low-end types will use Yahoo Overture and tell you what keywords to use.
The next step up is people who use a combination of services and tools to compile more relevant data like Search Volume, KEI values, Number of Competing sites etc….
However, research is always done by humans and always subject to their interpretations of what words and phrases to use.  The person doing the KW research for you is probably someone who has a different goal in mind than you do.
I ran into this issue recently from a reputable service provider with whom I am still working.

Here is what happened:
I hired someone to do some traffic generation for me, and was outsourcing/outtasking a new project to them.
Their service included:
Doing some “deep” KW research and returning with a list of keywords and phrases for some content.  Creation of Squidoo lenses and adding periodic content to them, and social bookmarking some articles written and submitted by them for m
Here’s what the problem was:
There was a disconnect right from the get-go.  They were interested in KEI values since these would help me get traffic right away.  I was interested in achieving SERPs and rankings for specific terms.
KEI is a ratio/score of search results/search volume.  KEI basically is an indicator of how many people are searching for something and how many competing sites there are for just that one keyword.
Article marketers, listen up! KEI is what you want to focus on.  Articles writen with KEI in mind will get traffic right away
Site owners looking for rankings, listen up!  SERPS, backlinks, indexed pages, keyword density is what you should be concerned with if you have a long term approach to the business.
The story continues, I get ticked off!
So, I’m going over MY truly deep KW research analysis sheet and comparing it to my new outsource team’s KW research.
Wow, almost nothing was the same… Did I get ripped off by someone who has hoping to take advantage of a newbie?

I know how to do the truly deep research, and was testing and double-checking my outsourcing team’s work.  I was about to ask for a refund when something dawned on me.
All niche and keyword research is not the same.

My outsourcing team was focused in getting immediate traffic for me via articles based focus on KEI-laden keyword research.   My focus was on long-term gains in the SERPs, but I’m OK with getting immediate traffic, too.

Anyways, the discovery was another hard-won battle in the trenches for me.  I found out stuff that only the true experts know, and I found it out from a BUM.  A Bum Marketer, that is.  an article marketer/niche marketer.

Even though I “laid at his feet” and listened like a sponge, it was still quite overwhelming how much data there is to pore over before you start to get a clear picture of what Keywords you really want.

So, if you’re an article marketer, find relevant keywords with good KEI values for your articles
As an article marketer, your goal isn’t necessarily to gain rankings or get better SERPs.  Your goal is immediate type-in traffic that finds your articles and sends people to your links eventually.
If you’re a website owner trying to figure out what you want your site to rank well for, there are many factors to consider.
1- How long are you willing to wait to unseat the entrenched top ranked sites?
2-   How much time, effort, and money are you willing to spend to gain SERPs?
The answers to these 2 questions will help make the rest of the decisions easier.  Now, when doing Keyword Research with a long-term SEO view, not the KEI/article marketer’s view, then you need to take into consideration the following factors.
Search volume- obviously a pretty important statistic.  You want a few hundred searches a month, at least.  But remember that ranking #1 for a KW that is extremely targeted is often better than 10X the traffic to a generic term that doesn’t conver the visito rinto a reader, buer, subscriber eetc…
Number of Competing sites-  the number is almost always going to be 10, since you’re really only worried about the top 10 site sin the SERPs.  these 10 sites represent page 1 of search engine sites, and everything else is unimportant, IMHO.
Number of indexed pages- This surprised me as being an important factor.
Who care how many pages a site has, right?  Well, apparently the search engines do because it’s one of the reporting features that they look at when spidering sites and research tools usually return this as a sought after value, too.  Looking back on things, I can see that it’s true.  One of my review sites outranks other sites in the same niche because of the large number of indexexed pages it has, even thoug hit has less links pointing towards it.
Number of backlinks- Pretty important.
The more links that point back to your sites with the proper anchor text, the more “votes” that say your site is about XYX content.  Generally speaking, the more links you have, the better, but links from related sites that point back to your site with anchor text…that’s much, much better.
So, in order to do some Deep Keyword research you need to know your goals ahead of time.
KEI and immediate traffic   OR   Long term SERPS?
Once you know this, its time to gather all this data together and make decisions…
If you read this far down, then you definitely want to get my free newsletter on  How To Find Hot Niches For Niche Affiliate Marketing by going to http://nicheaffiliatemarketingsecrets.com

Your niche affiliate marketing efforts are sometimes only as good as the research that went into everything before you got started marketing to that niche.

By niche affiliate marketing, I refer to the business model of being an affiliate and selling products as a non-owner of products, and not creating your own products and establishing a reputation as an expert in that niche.

How do you find hot niches and profitable markets?

Well, it’s actually a lot simpler than you may realize and you can discover what these hot niches are without even using online tools (although they do help quite a bit!).

The answer to where the hot markets is:

All Around You…

• What items do you see being sold in stores?
• What items do you buy regularly?
• What advertisers are buying space in offline magazines?
• What are the news-worthy items being written about in your newspaper?

Think about those things for a bit and your answers to those questions will reveal what some great niches are for getting into…

Go here to find out more about Niche Affiliate Marketing and the Niche Research process

If there’s one thing I’m realizing with my forays into the “Offline Gold” niche it’s that basic marketing skills are highly prized and sought after by offline businesses.

The average marketer or home business opportunist who has been “trying” to succeed online for more than 3 months should possess more than enough knowledge on their hard drive, right now… to make big bucks catering to oflfine businesses that need web presences.

A long time ago I read the hardcover ebook called EMyth Revisited, which spoke about how real businesses are run.

Think about the guy who works 14 hours a day at his convenience store on the corner…

If he’s sick or can’t work the shift that day, he usually has a low-paid employee work that shift for him, or has a family member cover for him…

Is this a business?

Let’s assume this owner of the convenience store has a corporation (has his business incorporated) or has an L.L.C. or whatever kind of legal term constitutes owning a business on paper…

Does that mean it’s a business in the truest sense of the word?

Not exactly…

If the corner store guy can’t step away from his business without sales dropping or income being reduced significantly, then what he has is a JOB…

Back to the point here…

The internet marketing world of marketing to other marketers is somewhat competitive, with many marketers selling the newest Flavor-of-the-day products.

Why is that?  Because the audience demands it, that’s why…

How does the audience demand it?  Because if it seems new then it sells better.

This is what I dislike about the Internet Marketing niche… it’s usually the same concepts put in different packages and re-dressed as new.

However, since business is an ever-changing entity and market situations change with it as a result, there are many things that are new.

WordPress blogs, Joomla, LSI, Drupal, Twitter etc…

These are all new or were new at one point and only after a while did it become glaringly obvious that learning some of these new concepts or tools were necessary to implement…

But basic marketing skills are easily come by, aren’t they?

Look, here’s the basics of making money online.

• Research some niches
• Find one that is profitable
• Find a solution
• Deliver the solution
• Offer the solution
• Rinse and repeat, or expand that particular niche outward…

Do you need to know about traffic generation?

Grab a good ebook on the subject and implement it then…

Same goes for copywriting, making sites, squeeze pages, blogs, email marketing etc…

The basic marketing skills are easily come by, I’ll write that one more time…

Most people already possess these skills or have this knowledge sitting on their hard drives…

Most offline businesses want NO part of learning any of this and that’s where the skills you possess or under-value can become very valuable…

Scenario:

Someone comes to you and says,

“Hey, you got a great site there, how did you build it, does it make money for you?”

And if you can answer this question properly, then you have enough knowledge to charge for it.

• If your site isn’t making money, get more traffic to it
• Get the right kind of traffic to it
• Build a list from that traffic
• If it’s still not making any money even with traffic, improve the site copy…
• If your products don’t sell via email marketing, improve that, too.
• Buy an ebook, implement some changes, and move on…

By the way, if you want an online marketing guide that explain all of this via text, audios, and videos get this online marketing guide.

If you want to know how to cater to offline businesses, check out this post here on Offline Gold…

Several readers have asked me if Internet Marketing will be affected by the looming recession in the United States.

Here is my answer:

No…

Here’s why…:

There are many people who like to repeat the untrue cliche that summer time is when sales slow down for marketing to other marketers.

That’s simply not true for people who know what they are doing.

If you’re doing what everyone else is doing (advertising in the same places as everyone else, for instance) then your results will be the same as everyone else and you will be affected with a summer slow down.

The same theory holds true for looming recessions for people marketing from an area that is suffering financially.

Many people assume that bad financial times in their geographic region, country, continent will mean less sales for them personally.

This is not true.

This is the Internet folks!

You have access to a GLOBAL economy at your fingertips!!!

Therefore, a recession in your tiny little corner of the planet shouldn’t affect your internet marketing business (if you know what you’re doing.)

The majority of my site visitors and email subscribers are from the US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany. About 50% of that audience is outside of my geographic area, therefore 50% of my business is technically immune to localized situations.

But those are just numbers to toss aorund to make onself feel better, really.

The reality is in the nature of the “beast’ here. The nature of the Internet Marketing Beast as a whole, what it offers and what it promises makes it less-susceptible to economic downturns, and if you’re in the right niche markets, you could be totally, 100% immune to what happens in the offline world.

Here are some quick side-industries to reference to make you see for yourself just how unaffected Internet Marketing should be by economic woes in any region.

Think about the real estate industry…

Real estate investors see volatility in markets as room for more opportunity, not less. Trump says it’s a great time to buy and he’s right ( and tempting me so bad right now!)

Think of the stock markets

Same idea applies here, too. The markets’ volatility means there are bargains available and money to be made off the margins (possibly) Buffets looking to buy up a ton of stuff, too since the bottom will be reached soon and once things rise, his purchases will rise in value, too

The Internet Marketer who knows their business realizes that bad times are what cause many people to pursue internet marketing in the first place, so why would looming/impending bad times cause a decrease here?

Sometimes you have to take a look at this from the mindset of a marketer, not a consumer or employee mentality.

Me?

I’m a business person/marketer, and I see this as a great time to make myself more available for coaching and doing some research for product development.

You?

I hope you’re the same way and thinking like a marketer here.

• Think like an employee and a consumer and you’ll fear the looming recession in the U.S..
• Think like a marketer and you’ll flourish….

The point here is, there’s nothing to fear if you understand people’s motivations.

You might be reading this saying, “yeah, but if a recession hits, then people spend less money on things” and while this is true, you’re once again forgetting what drives people to do things.

When times are tough, people

• spend less on their cable bill
• do less eating out
• buy less junk food
• there are less movie nights
• they wash their own cars themselves,
• they take public transportation more often (if it saves them money)
• they mow their own lawns,
• and even fix their own cars

If there’s one thing you can’t fix though, it’s people.

Ever since the creation of 9-5 jobs, people have been wanting to quit them… That’s not going away either.

As long as people want to get away from financial stress and take their destiny into their own hands, then there will always be room for internet marketers marketing to other marketers.

Hope springs eternal, and who wants to fix that?

Here’s a mistake I see a lot of people making with new websites and I’ve actually made this mistake myself…

When you start on a new website and business, you come up with a niche idea, then a product idea, then you start with the webdesign and perhaps even a sales letter, too

I realize all too well that compartmentalizing your efforts helps you get more things done and makes you a more productive business-person, but the reality of websites is that you will always need to work on your traffic generation.

• Linkbuilding
• Adding new content to your site for organic traffic
• Testing out your sales page and tweaking it for conversion improvements
• Adding new products for sale on your site(s)
• Getting sites indexed
• Getting articles published
• Getting better SERPs
• Creating and wriitng the products
• etc…

So, when I see my clients doing things in a compartmentalized manner, I’m proud of their foucs but I’m worried that they’re going to be burned out by the time their site, product, and sales letter are ready.

After all those things are accomplished, it’s the heavy-duty task of traffic generation that awaits them…

You cannot perform accurate testing on a sales page that gets zero traffic…

Nor will you be able to see the fruits of your labors once your product and sales letter are finished because you don’t have any way of monetizing that sales letter yet…(no traffic yet!)

This is part of the reason why so many people fail with online businesses…

There are so many things to learn at once and so many things to do at once…

 From the day you get that domain name, start working on your traffic generation, at least one hour a day, and devote the rest of your time to creating the other parts of your site

No related posts.

There are new downloads available for Marketer’s Relief members that requested more information on the topics below.

These audios cover 3 topics:

• Offline Gold
• Promoting High Ticket Items
• Running A Review Site Properly

1- Offline Gold…

Offline Gold is the practice of getting offline businesses some web exposure using basic marketing techniques and it is very surprising how well this pays.

This is a 2-part audio series and I’ve been told by people in the “know” that there’s way more practical information in there than in some products that are being sold right now.

Why? Because I’m actually doing it…

2- How to promote high ticket items

Some MR members are promoting those 1-up and 2-up programs and need to see some sort of return for their large investment.

This is a 1 audio series also made by request, and it also delves into how to promote these programs via review sites.

Why do these methods work?   Because I’ve actually used them and know they work

3- How to run and maintain a review site.

Review sites and the review site business model seems to be another recent craze even though it’s been around for a while.

If you can remember far back enough, 6-8 months ago it was membership sites that were all the rage, now its Offline Gold and doing review sites.

I’ve had a review site for close to 2 years and also know firsthand how to run them properly.

You can find these audios when you log in to Marketer’s Relief and go to the section called “Treasure Chest”.

I am trying to keep the member’s area from looking too “busy” so I will be putting a lot of new downloads in the Treasure Chest area moving forward…

Thanks,

Dan

http://marketersrelief.com

I’m by no means one of those list-building gurus, but I can tell you this:

My list grows daily and I haven’t done much to make that happen in the last year or so, or so it seems since I don’t spend too much time dedicated to that purpose, foolish as that may seem…

Here’s one thing I’ve realized over the course of the last year or so:

Traffic solves everything…

Get traffic to a blog like this one and you get RSS readership AND email subscribers, too.

If you have other means of passive list-building you should try to incorporate as many of those as you can into your business plan so you don’t have to be worried about your list size all the time.

Affiliate programs works wonders for listbuilding, too.

All you have to do here is have an exit popup on your site so if a visitor doesn’t want to buy just yet, you offer them a freebie of some kind in exchange for an email address.

This helps your affilaites make more sales, which makes them want to send more traffic to your sites, and you don’t have to do much here except have a good exit popup and follow up series of messages.

Another passive way of building your list is article marketing….

Article marketing is so cool….

You get traffic from your articles, plus backlinks and this can evolve into a steady stream of traffic once you have enough of them in play.

I know that the giveaway events are truly the fastest way to get a lot of subscribers and I admit I have been remiss in that area…

But this can be considered passive list-building too once you have a great gift lined up and ready to promote…

Ad swaps with other marketers is probably the best kind of list-building you can do because you’re dealing with like-minded people ( other marketers) who have more like-minded people ( home business types) on their list who want to see what you have to offer them…

This is a semi-passive list-building technique because you have to expend some effort to find those like-minded marketers then schedule a mailing date and write a specific email for that ad swap.

Co-registration methods…

I used to use Get Response’s co-reg method for list building but the quality subscribers weren’t there really, but you can do hybrid versions of co-registration by adding ad swap type emails into your followup series of email messages, and ask that other marketers do the same for you. 

These are some of the methods I’ve used to keep my list at its current size for the past year ( over 5000) and if time allows I’ll give it some proper attention…

However, if you want to build up other areas of your business, using any or all of these passive list-building methods will keep your list new, fresh, and active even with all the un-subscribes you’ll eventually get…

I’ve been thinking of writing this post for a long time but I never seemed to get around to it until now.

I recently saw something in my InBox regarding Travis the Bum Marketing Method Guy’s latest…

I won’t bore you with the details on that but one thing that struck me as very unique and powerful was how much support he gives his affiliates.

Most product owners merely create a product, then the affiliate program, then might even offer a few sample emails and blog posts for their affiliates to use for their promotions of the product.

What Travis does is he provides an article for you to use, plus some keywords to target for SEO or PPC marketing, and he also provides a whole lot of other affiliate marketing tools, too.

So, this got me thinking… what are most program and product owners missing in their support of their affiliates?

Now granted, most affiliate marketing sales come from marketers promoting each other’s products but that is more for the IM niche, and doesn’t necessarily apply to the world outside of IM.

Yes, Virginia, there is a world outside of IM

Some of the biggest and best product launches that I’ve seen did a few things

#1- When clicking the order button, the clicker isn’t immediately directed to the order page, but to a follow up page for further reinforcement of why the person should get the product.

#2- These really good launches only had optin boxes instead of sales pages and to me that’s a big YES for the program owners to do.  I think it’s a great idea to get the optin because as we all know, people don’t buy right away from the first contact and sometimes it requires a few followup emails to get tire-kickers to conver tinto buyers, and that’s why the optin box instead fo the order button seems to work really well.

Plus, since most affiliate programs work off of cookies, merely sending interested parties to the sales page and letting the followup emails do more work for your eventual affiliate commissions means more sales for the affiliates.

#3 As mentioned above, making it super-easy to promote your product is really the best way to treat your affiliates because it shows you have a certain empathy for how well they do promoting your product.

Blog posts, articles, places to advertise, keywords to use, sample emails to use etc….

These are the things I’d like to see more product owners doing for their affiliates.

Now, if I could only stop writing blog posts to practice what I preach 

I spoke to Dave Kelley from LinkVana recently and the conversation was pretty enlightening to me.

I’ve also watched Jonathan Leger come out with some pretty good SEO products in the last year or so, too.

Dave runs LinkVana and has 8+ years experience as an SEO (AKA search engine optimization guy)

Jonathan Leger is also a well known SEO guy, too, but there are those who look down their nose at him despite the success of his many products, like 3 waylinks.net and the $7 script (which he sold off to another marketer)

What does LinkVana do?

LinkVana builds links to as many sites as you want at whatever pace you want ( up to 1 link/day)

LinkVana itself is a network of blogs that place posts you create ( or outsource for $2.00) on the network of blogs they have.

These blogs have a lot of link juice since they have decent PageRank and more incoming links than outgoing links.

Jonathan Leger’s 1waylinks.net program is similar in that it is also a network of blogs, but it allows for duplicate content to be placed on the network of blog sites acting as backlink posters to whatever links you desire.

With 1waylinks.net, you can get an incredible amount of links (hundreds) per month up to 3 sites or more, all depending on how you want to go about your linkbuilding campaign.

The difference between the 2 services and some information about linkbuilding you won’t read in too many places:

Not all links are created equal. A link from 100 sites that do not have much linkjuice isn’t worth the same, SEO-wise and rankings-wise as a link from one site, properly placed, as unique content, from a site with plenty of link juice and PageRank.

That’s the difference between Linkvana and 1waylinks.net.

You get a lot of links from dupe content from 1waylinks.net which I am/WAS a member of, and you also get a whole lot of links at once in a very short period of time, too.

That’s not necessarily a good thing because Google knows how old your site is…

Google knows how many links you’ve accrued over the lifespan of your site

Google can easily figure out the average number of links your site gets per month so when it sees your 2 year old site with 5 links go from 5 links to 175 links by the next month, it discounts and does not credit you for many of those links right away.

Over time you may get credit for some of those mass-gained links but usually you don’t get credit for all of them and the links themseleves will be sandboxed/not credited while some others will stick.

You want links that stick.

You want links that apply towards your site’s and site url SERPs.

One of the most lucrative Internet Marketing niches is personal coaching 

Here are some of the war stories that I’ve heard from coaching clients.

War Story #1-

Guru X told me he’d help me launch my IM business in a big way.

We had 4 phone calls each lasting an hour over the course of a month.

We decided that I would launch a new IM product and then he’d promote it to his list

A month goes by, the product is made, and he even gives me some pointers on my sales page

He mails his list, the repsonse is pretty good and I’m on the map.

THE END… 

No more coaching sessions or calls or contacts.  Not a bad deal for the coaching client but they still have no idea where to go from here, because all they did was create, sell, and launch one product.

NO upsell, NO marketing funnel, NO idea on what kind of positioning would be achieved with a mini-launch like this…

War Story #2

Client gets a coach, and coaches’ forte is in copywriting.

This coach tells him how to improve the conversions on his exisitng sites and tells him a little but about positioning, the marketing mindset, the herd mindset etc….

The client gets a lot of great copywriting advice here and implements it and sees some improvements in conversions.

THE END…

The client is still not getting enough traffic to warrant any justification on why he changed his sales copy, still doesn’t know how to get enough traffic to make a great income from his new-and-improved sites, and doesn’t have a marketing funnel in place yet…

War Story #3

The group coaching program

This to me is the worst kind of program because there’s no personal attention being given and there’s really nothing unique being told to you about your specific business.

In case like this you don’t get to talk to the “guru” but you are in contact with staff members told to regurgitate their highly sought after advice in mass form, via mass communication and group calls.

You’re told the basics of researching your niche, using the right keywords on your site, and given some copywriting ebooks to use to help you write good copy for your sites.

THE END…

No sales funnel exploration or discussion, no real business plan established, no idea of where to go form here, and a feeling of being dropped like a hot tamale once the coaching period is over.

What you need to do before investing in an internet marketing coach…

Ask for referrals- don’t be awestruck by the fact that some “guru” is willing to take your money, (thank you so much…)

Ask for detailed explanation on what will be taught- ask about marketing funnels, postioning ideas, traffic generation tips, and copywriting tips.

Ask about followup support-when are you cut off from their sphere of influence?

Ask for site and biz plan analysis- How can this coach help you grow and develop what you already have?

Ask how much time is involved on your end- A lot of coaches trying to help you will overwhelm you with a lot of necessary ( and unnecessary ) tasks to do because they’re trying to get you up to speed ASAP, but many forget the fact that most people seeking personal coaching also have fulltime jobs during the day, and they’re adding to the overload by giving too much of a workload.

A business is something that runs on its own.  Serial book producers do have a business of sorts, but their income is largely dependent on flavor-of-the-day marketing products and their income spikes during the product launches then slowly subsides over time.

The internet marketing coaches giving you their personal time and attention in exchange for coaching fees have an evergreen product; themsleves.

As long as they continue to show how they are the top-of-the-top then they will be in demand, but they’re also trading time for dollars…

However, the better they are at it, the more they try to charge and if they truly enjoy what they do, then its more of a labour of love than a JOB trading time for dollars.

What kind of coaching do you need?

Personal hands-on coaching and help with technical stuff?

Mindset work- getting you to unthink what you think you know and retrain your brain into the right way of thinking ( the success mindset)?

Increase your sales via better conversions, or increase your income via better business planning?

Only you know the answer to this, and you can do yourself a big favor if you do some sort of self and business-analysis before seeking out an internet marketing coach.

Chances are, you’ll not hear anything new, but you will respect the information you’ve heard and digested before in an ebook or video you bought even more when you hear it from a coach.

A firesale is when some marketer puts together a whole suite of PLR and MRR products and sells them off in a bug bundle

Usually you will see that each product is worth XX number of dollars and the total package is worth 500 dollars or so, something like that….

Now, while the math may add up, and the products might be useful, I know for a fact these types of sales are damaging people’s chances of succeeding online.

What doesn’t add up is how someone can possibly read and implement anything from each of these products before they buy something from the next firesale…

I mean, people are buying these products to actually use them, right?

right…?

Not only do firesales devalue the information being sold because people are buying 40 products for average of 5 dollars each, but nobody can take full advantage of the knowledge contained within these products in any short period of time.

However, the buyer will think that they’re being a good shopper and are getting a great deal but I tihnk we all know they’re really just adding to the digital dust bin.

right…?

I live near the center of my town, and I see a lot of offline businesses come and go.  The landscape is ever-changing with pizza shops and delicatessens and hair salons and breakfast shops and so on…. moving in, then leaving within 2 years because they went belly-up.

It’s tough to run a food business these days what with the food prices going up and if you’re renting your business space, the rental market is tightening up, too.

When the rental market tightens up, landlords get the feeling of security back and usually start raising rents when there’s more rent to be gleaned from the business tenants. 

Then again, most business tenants sign long-term leases so today’s pressing concerns with real estate don’t really affect most businesses unless their lease is up.

For online businesses, conditions are much different.

You don’t need a business permit to conduct business online

You don’t need a business plan or even office space…

All you need is a website and an autoresponder, and technically, you can get by without those, too.

For offline businesses, there has to be money made off each and every action in order for the overall business to thrive.

For online businesses, the overhead is so low that you can waste 90% of your time doing stuff that is non-productive then write an email to your list and make a day’s pay from that alone.

It is this ease of entry that makes online business development so alluring, but it is also why so many people don’t take it seriously.

If a large number of people fail within 2-3 years with their offline businesses, why should it be any less, or lower for the online world where the barriers to entry and almost non-existent.

Put up a website, become an affiliate of something, and get traffic to your site, and Presto! you got yourself an online business.

Online business people face the same challenges of Offline business people…

What it comes down to at the end of the day is,

“is all this effort providing me with financial freedom and happiness and success”

Because of the almost non-exisitent barriers to entry to the online business world, there are more people failing on average.

On the postive side to all of this, the low barriers allow people to see if they possess the acumen for any type of business at all with low risk, and that is part of the appeal, too.

This is Post #5 of The Niche Marketing Case Study

As of right now, the traffic is still good for the niche sites and the rankings have increased for all of the major terms.

For all the major terms, her sites are either page 1 or page 2.  We did this by using WordPress blogs, some automated content, and some link building.

She got approved to be an affiliate because she commanded those rankings and was able to display her Alexa stats (some vendors still rely on that as an accurate tool for traffic volume).

She’s made a few sales here and there for some affiliate products but the audinece isn’t really buying much of what she is offering.  As it turns out, this niche would rather buy hard cover books from amazon that digital products from ClickBank.

This is the part of the research process that was overlooked because if we knew ahead of time via careful research what this niche was buying, then there would have been more sale.

However, without a lot of traffic, it is difficult to determine the reality of what is really selling in this niche.  Her sites are getting traffic via top rankings in the search engines, and it’s just a mtter of finding out what the site visitors want to buy, or be sold.

She is also making her own ebook/digital product to sell on all her sites, and this should convert pretty well when the visitors see that it’s not an affiliate product for sale, but a product written by an true expert in this field.

When it comes to niche marketing, the research process must be conducted thoroughly to shave off a lot of time when it comes to finding the right product to sell.  Since this niche site is centered around her passion/hobby we took some shortcuts and didn’t do enough of the right kinds of research since we were both already committed to building sites for this niche.

This is the last post for the Niche Marketing Case Study since business is ever-changing and these posts could really go on forever…

I’d like for you to consider the all-too-important lesson here which is that anyone can get high rankings for their targetted terms, but if the niche marketing research wasn’t fully fleshed-out ahead of time, you will stand to lose a little time making your niche sites convert into money machines.

Please click here to see my site on Niche Marketing Research and Niche Affiliate Marketing

OFFER WITHDRAWN SINCE RAP DOESN’T PAY ITS AFFILIATES PROPERLY

Sid Hale’s Rapid Action Profits is a powerful script that does a lot of things…

What I like about RAP:

• It is a centralized location from which to manage your affiliate programs
• It is a great tool to use for launching your first digital propduct
• Very efficient at setting up pages for Joint Venture partners to promote your product
• You can designate different levels of affiliate commissions for certain sellers/JV partners
• You can standardize and systematize your info-product business via sales page templates and JV partner pages

What I don’t like about Rapid Action Profits:

The order process by which you have to order the product is confusing and the delivery of the script seems faulty

The RAP script is challenging to set up, to say the least so you’d better have a strong desire to work through the HTML stuff here

There is an Add-on product called RAP Wizard that helps you navigate the setup and adding of products, and I don’t think there should be an added charge for something when the product should be somewhat user-friendly in the first place.

Who should get Rapid Action Profits?

If you are sick of the non-deliverrability issues with the $7 script, then you will like the improved deliverability that the RAP script gives you since it will lessen your support tickets from customers who paid, but never received, their product.

If you have more than one product for sale that has an affiliate program tied into it, then you should get Rapid Action Profits to improve your credibility to potential JV partners and customers, too.

If you have a lot of PLR material that you would like to make products out of for later publication and resale, then RAP is right for you, too.

Rapid Action Profits comes with a time-based guarantee so if/when you get it, check it out and see if its right for you.

If not, then you can always just put your products on ClickBank or continue to use the $7 script for your affililate program, product deliverance and sales mechanism.

Rapid Action Profits Bonus:

Buy RAP through my affiliate link and I will promote your  internet marketing related product if it is a good product and I will also write a review about it on this blog.

OFFER WITHDRAWN SINCE RAP DOESN’T PAY ITS AFFILIATES PROPERLY

A lot of people claim to tell the “truth” about internet marketing and having an online business, but the fact of the matter is, truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

As I learned in my college philosophy clases (when I wasn’t dozing off a hangover) is that philosophers have realized that truth, real truth is not attainable because it is based upon the sensory perceptions and observations of humans.

And humans are faulty all over… from our thought processes to our bodies to the way we interpret data.

When I wasn’t sleeping through my psychology classes, I also learned that the observer of an experiment affected the experiments under observation just by being there.

All I can tell you is the “truth” as I have experienced it in my 2+ years of marketing to other internet marketers and coaching dozens of people to help them build real businesses online.

There are 4 types of people out there in the internet marketing world…

1- There are those who blame their failures on the “gurus” not giving them what they need to truly succeed, and while this may be partly true, there’s a large degree of personal responsibility that isn’t being addressed by these people.

The internet has a ton of information out there and a lot of the good information IS available for free, so it’s just a matter of aliigning yourself with good sources of information and finding people that truly want to help you.

2- There are those who are serial learners who are meant to be followers. They follow all sorts of different marketers until they find someone that speaks to them in a way they can understand and abide by their teachings.

After a while though, the search for the right teachers must cease, and the implementation must begin.

Serial learners must take action and there is a fear aspect to their mindset because they’re looking for that magical step-by-step guide that will finally “do it” for them.

3- The third type of person that I have worked with is the type that is trying, they are taking action and doing “all the right things”, but the massive success seems to be eluding them.

I love working with these types of people because I find that their business only needs a few simple tweaks in order to grow at the rate their efforts deserve it to grow at.

4- The fourth type of person I see out there is the one who is totally not focussed at all. They’re the ones telling me about the latest product, showing me the latest sales page, and when they ask me my opinion of those products, I cringe inside.

I cringe inside because these types of questions reveal to me that they are still wading in a whirlpool of unfocussed thinking and they’re so hooked by the “IM” niche that it will be a small miracle should they ever find a way to extricate themselves from their mindset trap.

But what about the Internet Marketers themselves?

If you think the “IM” niche is just a bunch of buddies promoting each other’s products and scratching each others’ back via product promotions, you are partially right.

There are also some marketers who are doing 2 things at once:

1- They’re in the trenches learning new things daily to share
2- They trying to be the marketers by selling while learning.

If you’re an internet marketer marketing to other marketers then you have to get really good at one thing while you’re off learning new stuff in the trenches.

For example:

You could be a list-building dynamo and then have some followup emails doing your marketing for you and you can enjoy a nice income from that…but in the meantime you should be learning something of value you can pass off to your list in a free report or something like that.

To be a seller with no real knowledge gained in the trenches means you have absolutely no idea what really works and you should be aspiring to develop real knowledge that you can share with your subscribers/readers.

I consider that a self-fulfilling prophecy-type of business plan because sooner or later, your readers will realize you have nothing but sales pitches to offer and you don’t really know how to help them… only how to sell to them.

As mentioned before, the “IM” niche is full of people promoting each others’ products and the smart marketers only promote quality products.

This is a business-world here though and in real businesses, contacts are made, and Joint Ventures are done, and networking does take place between like-minded business people.

Therefore, to think of the “IM” niche as a good ole boy system isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it is the way things work in the real business world.

The “guru-envy” that causes people to unsubscribe from lists in masive numbers every time there’s a major product launch is really not hurting these “gurus” and is really only a manifestation of your pissed-off-ness at all these buddies ganging up on you, (or so it seems to you maybe)…

This is what I have seen an experienced in my time doing this.

Agree, disagree? Let me know your thoughts….

There is an extremely low barrier or entry into the online/home business world.

You can become an affiliate of just about anything for free but it’s really the learning curve that will cost you the most.

TIME is something that is irreplaceable therefore it is the highest expense of all you can pay when building a business.

Many people I know have spent years with little to no success with their online businesses and it takes a major toll on their psyche and attitudes towards running a business.

If you’re new to having a business there is a steep learning curve with regards to your personal self-developemnt.

If you’re new to marketing on the internet, there is a steep learning curve coming to grips with all the new technical skills you need to grasp, too.

But, as one of my coaches would say, Literal Dan is about to “speak” here.

You may want to know literally, the exact cost of running an internet business, and that’s not an easy thing to determine for you without knowing what your business is about.

However, for most people the costs can be broken up into into essentials and non-essentials.

To me, the essentials are having webhosting and an autoresponder.

With these 2 items in place you now have your virtual office real estate established ( your website hosting) and a way to contact your would-be customers repeatedly ( autoresponder)

As your business grows, and I truly hope it does, you may need bigger and better hosting and perhaps entry into a membership site that teaches you what you need to know right now in order to move your business forward.

Webhosting shouldn’t cost you more than 20/month if you’re just starting out

An autopresponder won’t cost you more than 20/month if you’re just starting out either.

So, to answer this question literally, it costs 40/month ot have the bare essentials for running a home internet business…

Add in a useful membership site fee, and you could be looking at less than 100/month to get training and hosting and customer contact capabilities.

Gotta love that low barrier to entry, eh?

If you have any good experiences with Internet Marketers that have helped you with your business, please leave a comment here to let me know who they are and how they have helped you.

No affiliate links will be allowed here, just some honest feedback on who helped you, what they helped you with etc…

Thanks,

Dan

About 2 years ago I compiled an 82-page report titled, The Top 10 Internet Marketing Mistakes And How You Can Avoid Them.

Click here to get it

Niche Case Study Post #4: Watch Me Build A Profitable Site From Scratch

This is post 4 for the Affiliate Marketing Case Study…

Well, we were hemm-ing and haww-ing on what niche to pursue, then we went back to an old, tried and tested method for developing a niche marketing site…
To go with the passion and the “guru within”..  Read this post here to fully understand what I mean, the come back to reading this post….

Here’s the first 2 things we did:
1.We did some keyword research on her “passion-niche” but I can’t tell you what it is or she’ll cry “fowl” (that’s a hint, by the way) 
2.We use Google’s Free Keyword Research Tool to determine what the search volume was for her niche.  I was amazed not only at how much traffic there was to be had here, but also how little competiton….

Then we made a game plan, and here it is:
1.Create a new blog, transfer old pages from old dying site with no traffic over to new blog that I created for her and trained her on how to use WordPress (just like I would do for any Marketer’s Relief member…)
2.Start writing articles, and linking back to her blog from those articles. ( the interview I did with article marketing expert Fabian Tan proved very helpful)
3.Start adding new pages to her new blog once a day (when it’s your passion, you actually enjoy doing that)
4.Came up with some ideas for pillar blog posts (series of blog posts addressing a certain topic, great for SEO and authority building)
5.Started some blog commenting on the authority sites in this niche to get noticed by the bigger bloggers ( good for getting backlinks from her comments to her site and also a good way to get a guest author post there, too)
6.Started a link building campaign (easy and automated)
7.Discussed strategies for future of the site ( monetization, traffic streams and rivers)
8.Started watching to see just how this was all working out in regards to traffic generation.

NOTE: The blog has been installed for less than 30 days and she has attracted an average of 50 visitors a day, and should get about 1500 targetted visitors this month.  People are already commenting on her blog, and some of her posts are on page 1 already, with others on pages 2 and 3…

Here’s what she has going for her, besides being smart…
She’s a writer
Passionate about her blog and niche
Works hard
Learned WordPress in an amazingly short amount of time with a little help from me ( one it’s installed all you have to do is configure it properly)
Is exhilirated that her blog posts are being seen on page one of Google
Surprised and pleased she’s already getting comments on her blog
Is also working a full time job during the day and freelance writing and blogging at night.
She’s going to get over 1000 visitors to her blog this month, perhaps 2000 and in the next few months will be close to getting about 5000 visitors a month.

NOTE: We have already started monetization procedures here, even though I recommend that most people wait a while until they start looking for income from a new site.  Her site isn’t exactly new, just went from dead in the water to alive and well with a properly optimized WordPress blog, links and allowing user interaction.

Summary: 
1.We took a dead site with 60 published pages and transferred them over to a new blog. 
2.We designed a plan to get links to those sites to get new pages, posts and article indxed:
3.Blog commenting to develop inroads for future guest posts and establishing some traffic streams and rivers.
4.Article marketing for backlinks and developing authority status
5.Monetization methods are being investigated and used.
6.Watching the SERPs for certain blog posts and working to get more links via manual and automated methods.

Once the traffic hits 2000 visitors a month, we will display site income in the next post in this pillar series… 

I know that blogging with WordPress is the Average Joe’s dream for content publication and for use as a content management system, but how do you get your blog indexed quickly?

First of all, sooner or later your blog will be indexed if you continue adding fresh content to it, but most people will spend a lot of time building the “perfect site only to wait and rest until it gets indexed.

That’s not exactly the best way to go about getting traffic to your site because while you’re waiting for the search engines’ spiders to visit your site and index it, you could be busy creating more site content.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you create a blog and get it published with at least one post and several pages created.

Here are some things you can do to get indexed quickly

• Submit the url of your blog to some RSS sites like feedage.com and feedagg.com
• Comment on high traffic, high PageRank sites or urls and link back to your blog
• Get some social bookmark-style links back to your site
• If you have another site that is getting spidered frequently and it is related to your new blog, point a link towards it from within a post on the “already-indexed” site and also add it to the blog roll, if the other site is a blog.
• Use a good ping list to increase the spee din which your new posts get indexed.
• Re-purpose your blog content and use them for articles you submit to article directories. Link back to your site from the author resource box and link to inner pages of your site form the body of the article itself.

NOTE: By re-purposing your content, what I mean is, take your blog post/site content and edit it to make it acceptable to the article directories for publication, then get those articles accepted/published for free backlinks and more traffic…

IF you’re too busy to do the blog commenting and article writing and social bookmarking, then a good PING list and a one-time RSS submission for your site url should do the trick

The Reality of Automated Blogging and Automated Niche Blogging

With truly automated blogs, you only have to maintain them, and never tweak them, add content to them, upgrade them etc…

However, many people think that Automated Blogging is as simple as installing WordPress and configuring a few plugins.

It goes far beyond that but once you do the initial work, then it’s completely on autopilot.  With automated blogs, you need a lot of them to make a decent income (in 90% of the cases) and you may even get a few winners that make 150-200/month, but most automated blogs will not be SEO powerhouses or major bread-winners for you.

There is strength in numbers with this business model because 200 sites making $1.00 a day is a nice income.

But imagine how long it will take you to make 200 sites, especially if they’re blogs!!!

Another thing that gets most people worked up about created an automated blog is that they’ll read an ebook on how to make money with them but they are presented with way too much detail or urged to buy more stuff in order to get started properly.

And as usual, they’re left holding the bag, or half the bag in most cases.

I’ve been blogging for about 8 months now and have learned how to harness the power of blogs and what really is working for SEO and blog automation.

• Did you know that when it comes to site flipping, the sites that sell the best are those that are automated and making some sort of income already?
• Did you know that it’s somewhat easy to create sites that make a small amount of money per month if you have all the hard work done for you?

Well, I’ve created a program where you can have automated blogs created for you.

It will be called the Total Marketing System because it does a lot of marketing for you once it is set up:

• You will have WordPress installed on your site for you
• Unique content gets posted regularly
• You can sell the sites that are created
• Get some free backlinks to your sites…
• All the plugins you need to have a full-blown blog optimized for the search engines
• You wil have all the settings pre-set to make sure you don’t make any configuration mistakes
• All your plugins will get automatically upgraded for you, so you don’t have to do anything on that end.
• RSS plugins, widgets, Aweber forms, themes, you get all of those pre-installed for you.
• Five Niche Research and Keyword Research video tutorials
• The Double Your Blog Traffic report
• The Blog configuration guide
• and more…

This is for people who want to Flip Websites or generate automated income via automated niche blogging.

My recommendation to you is to decide whether or not you want to make sites to flip later on, or to increase the number of sites you have that make a few dollars a day each.

1. Entry into the program is $197.00, (one-time fee).
2. If you build the right sites and flip them, you make this back with the first site you sell.
3. If you build sites and hold on to them, they will gain value over time.  Either way, it’s a win-win situation for you
4. Hosting is free for the first month, and $37.00/month afterwards.  (You will have to get the hosting with me because I know I know that everything will work properly with my hosting company.)
5. If you flip these sites, you can also avoid the hassle of transferring a site to new hosting by telling your client that they can get hosting with me and I’ll reset their cpanel information…
6. These prices will go up after the beta testing period is over, so bookmark this page and wait for the next update.

When this is ready to go, 20 beta testers will be able to get in for $77.00, then price will go up to normal.

Bookmark this page

This is PART 2 of the Traffic Fusion Reviews.

I’m writing a followup post to the original Traffic Fusion Review because I suspected that foul play was at work here when my prevous blog post disappeared from the SERPs for the term Traffic Fusion Review

After meeting with an SEO expert about this, we determined that blog post is not de-indexed and could just be in limbo with the SERPs for a bit, and he didn’t see any foul play at work here.I still find it odd that a blog post could go from page 4> to page 2> to page 1…and then disappear entirely from the search engine listings.

Maybe I’m paranoid here, (some marketing buddies told me I’m not being paranoid, but I really don’t think anyone cares about me as SEO competition, page 1 or not), so I decided to write a followup post with more details on this and to show that this isn’t some anti-guru rant, or rave.

Anyways, this followup review contains more information about Traffic Fusion, what Integration Marketing is and Mike Filsaime’s HyperJava plugin…

Part 1, About Marketing…

When it comes to marketing, there really isn’t anything new overall, but some things are new to those who haven’t heard of them before. Packages can be new, and since packages are technically products, NEW packages = NEW products.

As more people come onto the Internet every day, these new packages are perceived as new products.

So, to say there’s nothing new all depends on the viewpoint of whoever is looking at something. Perception is reality here…

Part 2, About Integration Marketing, Traffic fusion, Advertising, and forgotten Virtual Real Estate:

The concept of integration marketing seems to mean using your forgotten virtual real estate and using it to maximize your sales funnel effectiveness.

I know for a fact that thousands of dollars are wasted when people don’t use OTOs (one time offers) and upsells on the web pages they template-ize and pretty much forget about once they publish these pages.

Integration Marketing like Traffic Fusion and using this hyper Java plugin, is an advanced topic and strategy and method that may be well over many people’s heads.

Just to show you that I can see both sides of the story here, I can tell you that testing and tweaking is important and using any type of software to help you gauge your results will help your business, IF you’re ready for that..

Think of Traffic Fusion as fusing, or melding together, traffic with conversions…

My objective to writing this/these reviews is to advise people that there are products that are well beyond your capacity to implement right now and to think before you buy something.

If you think that learning how to improve your traffic and conversions is going to help you even though you don’t have a marketing sales funnel or affiliate program or your own product or even a sales page in place… then you don’t need to get this.

Instead, you need to build a business that needs this advanced stuff, or stuff like it.

Part 3, OK Public Service Announcement Over….Should you Get It?

If you understand what I said here, and truly, truly think your business needs this type of product, then Google the term Traffic Fusion where you’ll see my buddy Folusho’s blog post at postion #1.

It’s pretty obvious that being #1 for that term requires the skills of someone who knows what they’re doing SEO-wise, go get his bonus If he promises to tell you what he’s done to rank well for terms like this.

Why write this review, isn’t Dan wasting his time here writing about something he’s not promoting?

Yup, I feel like I’m kind of wasting my time writing about something that I’m not even promoting, but this is a topic that I always meant to write about.  When the next big gotta-have-it product launch comes around and people ask me if they should get it, I’ll point them towards these 2 reviews by way of answer.

Look for my next post on SEO and traffic generation and all the changes that are taking place right now that will have great effects and change the SEO rules for good. It has to do with Google Chrome browser, Google’s version of Ezinearticles.com, the future of links in SEO, and more…

Is the Conduit Method guaranteed success with Affiliate Marketing?

The Conduit Method seems like another method like Secret Affiliate Code and Googleslapper, but going by a different name.

The method is very similar to writing reviews and selling products based off of reviews written with the purpose of pre-selling or side-selling over to better products. This is an effective affiliate marketing method no matter what name it goes by…

I wrote about the review’s sites business model recently and the Conduit Method/Secret Affiliate Method is similar to that, but the difference with this method is that there’s no pre-selling here.

With the Conduit Method, you’re receiving visitors that are closer to buying than review site readers (but not by much) and all of that method is explained in the Secret Affiliate Code post.

I bought the Conduit Method in order to do a full review on it and it is by far inferior to the Googleslapper and Secret Affiliate Code products…

It’s actually laughable that this product has so much buzz, because it’s pretty much the same thing that Secret Affiliate Code is, just not as good.

And GoogleSlapper reveals the same method all over again, but with some extra details in there that neither Secret Affiliate code nor the Conduit Method provided.

Also, the recommended practice of scraping testimonials for other sites like forums and what-not is technically illegal since testimonials and forum content is the intellectual property of the person who wrote the testimonial and of the forum owner, too.

Read the comments below for some more points about this

I call this my “10 Articles Method”

Here’s how it works:

You have a brand new site and you want it to get indexed, traffic, and you want to build up your subscribers, too.

The first thing you need to do is write a 10-part series of site content pages on a certain topic, like “10 ways to get out of debt fast”.

Each of the 10 ways, or tips is an individual article or blog post or site page

You will publish all of these to your site first

Then, you take each content piece and submit it (modified of course) to the article directories for publication.

In your author resource box, you link to the main domain name of the site.

In the body of the article you link to an inner page of your site, the better longer version of the original piece…

You do this 10 times using the pre-written content from your site

Then, you take all 10 content pieces and make them into a short PDF report.

You will give this free report away on your site to build up some email readership.

In your free report, you will recommend 2 or 3 things that you recommend people buy to help them with whatever the free report is about.

Then you make some affiliate sales from that.

And all you did was fill your site with content, re-purposed the articles for article directory traffic, publication and backlinks, and of course, to make sure your site is now indexed.

Out of all of this you got 10 backlinks ( 20 actually) a report to give away to your site visitors and a free report promoting your recommended products.

Plus, you have an email list to contact again, repeatedly 

I remember when everything about internet marketing was a totally overwhelming experience for me.

• What is a domain name, how do I get one, now what do I do with it?
• What is hosting, where do I get it, how do I use it?
• What kind of site do I build, what kind of content do I put on it?
• How do I get traffic, what are links, how does all that work?

What happens a lot is some marketers that become successful by fighting through new obstacles and challenges and move on to start talking about what interests them…
However, as you grow, your audience may not be developing at the same pace….

You may have advanced as a marketer personally and acquired a massive amount of skills over your time spent thus far, but you need to remember that there are people following in your footsteps, too.  Not your exact footsteps, per se, but there are still people who are wondering how all of this works…

If you write about a new concept you just learned and adapted, it may not be a method your clients are familar with…
For example, I was reading some interesting (and dry) information on positioning marketing and as always, wanted to share…

But… who cares?

My audience may need a beginner’s guide to internet marketing or they might still be searching for information on list building and email marketing so writing and talking about how to do joint ventures and position marketing isn’t really grabbing your readers’ interests.

• Don’t forget where you came from..
• Remember that at one point in time you didn’t do anything with the poducts you bought, either.
• You were not focused well at one point in time with your business (I hope you are now though…)

If you do a good job of teaching your client base how to achieve their goals, then, YES, they will grow with you over time.

You should still be ahead of them in regards to your new experiences and as you learn, they should learn with you but make sure your messages to those people are being well-received.  That’s where list segregation comes into play.

• Know your subscribers and what they need.
• Be sympathetic to the fact that some of your subscribers are in the same shoes as you once were. Do not ever look down on someone who is trying to navigate the learning curve of internet marketing while also struggling with the 200 emails they’re getting a day…

That was you once… and me, too.

Some marketers have lousy email open rates because they’re not grabbing the atnetion of their readers any more and talking about stuff that is of no interest to their readers.

I remember being on an email list years ago of one of the Big Names in the industry and the emails he sent me were mostly about attending high-priced seminars and conventions he went to  and who he met.  I could care less then and could care even less now….  which makes we wonder how lousy his email open rates are.

Don’t forget that your interests are not the same as others, and remember who you’re speaking to!

Respect your customers enough by remaining on target with your messages.

5 Must-Have-Or-Die-Without-Them Items For Your Internet Business
Every day there are thousands of people turning to the Internet as a possible source of income. Many of these people will get scammed, lied to, and disheartened after just a few weeks or months of attempting to glean this extra income.
Most of them will deserve their failures, in fact almost all of them will get their empty wallets handed back to them while being kicked in the rear end.
The main reason why people are failing with Internet businesses at a higher rate than regular offline businesses is because it’s too easy to get started with an online business. All you have to do is hand someone your money and you now have a site to promote and a chance of earning some money. You can be in business in 10 minutes, but’s not how things work in the offline world, though.
Here are 5 things you must have in order to succed with your Internet Business:

Type-A personality. You need to be self-motivativated and a go-getter type of person who will drive his/her business to the profit point you want it to be at
You Must Be Disciplined- When you work your own online business there’s nobody telling you to get up early and get to work. You need to have the discipline of forcing yourself to adhere to a set schedule even though nobdy is forcing you to sit down and work
You Have to Be Serious- A lot of people like to play the game of “I have a business” so they can tell people they run an Internet Business, but many people are merely enthralled with the idea and not the realities of running a business
A Good business head on your shoulders- Can you make good business decisions as the owner of your own business? For most of your life you’ve probably been second-guessing your boss behind his/her back, but now that you have your own business, are you sure if you’re making the right choices for it?
Thinking outside the box- You think you’re different because you don’t like working at the brick-and-mortar 9-to-5 job anymore? There are millions of people just like you out there, but you’re different from some of them if you do something about it. You will increase your chances of success even more once you separate yourself from the rest of the people who took action just like you did. Be different from all the other newbies out there, and your success and profits will be much different also.
When students in college decide on a career path they study up on that particular topic and take classes on it. Marketing majors and advertising majors study various textbooks and take a battery of tests to become worthy of being hired a a professional in that field. Since the Internet does not have much of a policing presence out there, the chances of getting caught up in programs that don’t work can be high for some.
However, the closest thing you have to training for Internet marketers online today is Marketer’s Relief which has a virtual library of over 1500 video tutorials showing you exactly how to succeed with an online business. Videos are the best training materials out there since they show you exactly what to do when setting up a site or explaining a concept.

You want your blog to get noticed not only by the search engines, but also by other visitors as well.

In the last blogging tip, we discussed your Ping List and how having a good one will help get your site noticed quicker and spidered more deeply.

NOTE: By the way, the ping list discussed in the last post really does work well, as it was during the writing of that particular post that I updated my ping list to a better one.  My most blog posts take about 2-4 hours to get indexed, but the last one (with the updated ping list) got indexed in less than 2 hours, so a slight improvement was seen there.  That is definitely a better ping list to use, so use it!

Once your latest blog post is indexed, you will gain some traction somewhere in the search engines and expand your “share” of the traffic available for whatever it is you wrote about.  But again, not everyone is searching on Google or Yahoo for your content.

Some people, in fact, many people are hanging around social networking sites reading the latest news items and interesting articles recommended to them by their “friends” in those networks.

How to get automated backlinks and visitors to your blog and blog posts:

There is a plugin called Autosocial Poster that allows you to post to a random number of social networking accounts you’ve set up already.  Here’s how this works:

• You get the plugin, upload, install, and activate it
• It tells you what sites it can auto-post your content to (you don’t need to do them all!)
• You select how many accounts you want posted to with each new post you make.
• You write a new blog post and it updates to a random number of accounts you have in your name.

This means you get backlinks and traffic visitors from those high PageRank sites.

Some are turning their links into NoFollow now, but there is still value in those links because they are still backlinks to your post(s) and have the ability to bring in visitors you may not have otherwise received from the search engines. Social networking traffic or social bookmarking traffic isn’t the “stickiest” of traffic but it can be automated and still can get you a few interested parties.

Also, since many people still don’t know what RSS is, or how to use an RSS reader, there is a good chance that the “social marketing traffic” wil increase the RSS readership of your blog because those people are more techie-inclined…

There’s also a way to automate the RSS submissions of your latest and greatest blog posts to RSS sites,

(more on that later)

If there’s one thing that many people disagree on, it’s Keyword Research.

A lot of niche marketers will tell you that KW research is everything, and that is only partially true.

Some SEO experts say that keyword research is kind of a waste of time, and here’s why:
Keyword research tools like Google’s External Keyword Tool, Marketing Samurai, SEOBook, Niche Inspector/Detective, Overture, Wordtracker, etc… all mislead you when they provide you with the number of competing sites as a relevant indicator of the SEO competition for a keyword or niche, or keyphrases.
The number of competing sites simply doesn’t matter because all that means is the search engine found XX number of sites that have that word on their site somewhere.

Not many of those sites are actually dedicated to the exact keyword or term you’re going after here, therefore there really isn’t a lot of competition for the keywords you’re targeting.
Theoretically, there could be ZERO competition for the term you’re going after because not a lot of sites actually dedicated themselves to ranking well for the keywords they’re showing up in the SERPs for… they’re just there.

When keyword research tools show you a really high number of competing sites for a keyword or phrase this will make you think that a certain niche isn’t worth targeting, and this is my main point here on why this statistic (# of competing sites) means very little to you when deciding on what keywords and niches to target.

Here’s an example of how my site ranks #2 or 3 amongst 24 MILLION other sites by making a few simple changes to my blog
The search query:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS277US278&q=marketing+business+product+reviews

My blog  ranks #2 or 3 for this without a sweat, but a keyword research tool would show you that based on # of competing sites, this term isn’t worth going after.
I do agree that the term in that search isn’t worth going after, but only because they’re aren’t a lot of people searching for that exact phrase, so it’s not worth my time to target those keywords.

How did I outrank 24 million other sites so quickly?
By making the site properly optimized for those terms.  I have ZERO backlinks to this site with those words in the anchor text of the links.
But who the heck is searching for that exact term?
Not many people search for that term… so the  # of competing sites is not indicative of a search term’s popularity, only how many sites Google decided to include in the index for those terms.
What does matter?
Search volume matters, really….who cares if you outrank 24 million other sites if there’s no traffic for that term?
The keyword research tools mentioned above show you the search volume in addition to # of competing sites.  However, these tools also show wide ranges of numbers of searches for the same terms entered into each tool…
This means that not one of these tools can be regarded as “Gospel” so you need to take everything you’re being handed with a grain of salt.
Why do Keyword Research Tools show such varying numbers?
Because they’re pulling from different databases, or have outdated information or just revealing what they want to reveal (kind of like how Google doesn’t really show an accurate number for how many backlinks your site has pointing to it, but Yahoo Search Marketing does…)
Also, Google’s tool shows the $$ being spent on PPC as an indicator of $$$ being spent in a niche, but that’s only telling you what’s being spent on pay per click advertising…  Some niches many not do well with pay-per-click marketing…
I know for a fact that this is misleading because I have a client who is getting a lot of traffic easily to her site, and there’s a ton of money in this niche.
The SEO competition was allegedly fierce, but it wasn’t so performing basic SEO works wonders for her site.

Since we believed what these tools were telling us, we shot too low and went after less competive terms and got high rankings easily,even with her PageRank dropping, too.

Since the SEO competition wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, we revised the site to go after the KWs we thought were previously unreachable, SERPS-wise…
A GOOD Keyword Research tool will tell you the in-depth SEO analysis of those “competing sites in the top ten for that term.

Micro Niche Finder does that, by the way…

• I highly recommend you don’t aim low with your SEO and just exercise basic SEO to rank well for your terms.
• Get a KW rich domain name…
• Have it SEO-ed for 2 or 3 main terms…
• Then analyze your tracking statistics to see what you’re actually being found for, and you’ll see terms there NO KW tool uncovered for you.
• Then write about those “weird” terms you see your site getting found for.  This is sort of a backwards way of doing LSI for your site, but it works.

Kurt Melvin (SEO guy with 12 years of SEO experience) once said that KW research is an “iffy” thing at best because the way people search is ever-changing.

In the 70s, people said G’s to mean thousands, now in the computer age with K meaning kilobytes, or thousand bytes, we now say K instead of G to mean “thousand”.
Not many people say I want to make 10 Gs a month, and now more people say I want to make 10k a month.

People’s search, language and behavior patterns change over time, so being “married” to a keyword or keyphrase or keyword research tool leaves you trying to get traffic for a limited # of search terms…

How insulting is it to pay a monthly fee for a keyword research tool that is leading you astray?

• The SAFE way to do keyword research is to use a variety of tools and find the common ground.
• The SECRET to getting traffic and high SERPs isn’t always vast numbers of links, but highly targetted links.

What do the search engines have to do to stay in business?
They have to provide the most relevant search results to their searchers or they’ll go out of business, right?

So how do you make your site seem more relevant to the search engines eyes?

• Link yourself to other sites that rank well for the terms you’re going after.
• Find the top 10 sites in your niche and comment on the EZA articles,  Squidoo lenses, hub pages and blog posts…
• You can even trackback to other blog posts if you want.  As a blog owner myself I delete all trackbacks that are not from good sites, but I DO leave the trackbacks that are from related sites. This bolsters me in the SERPs, and them, too.
• It ties us both together in a WEB of sorts.  Yes, a WEB…You know….the WEB…the Internet (interlinked sites sending traffic and relevancy to each other) ?

If your SEO competition is doing their job well, then you’ll still need to get some backlinks.

Get backlinks with ANCHOR text in them linking to your sites.
Anchor text describes the site it’s linking to, lending relevancy to the site the anchor text is linking to for the clickable words that construe the text.

I have yet to meet the person who told me they’re getting the exact amount of traffic a keyword tool told them to expect to get for a certain term they’re ranking well for.

You need to get found for ALL the terms that are related to your site, not just one.
As mentioned above, you can install a tracking script on your site to see exactly who, what, why, where, when your sites’ visitors are coming to your site.
WHY they’re coming to your site is important because it lets you know what you should be writing about more often.
This is a tip you don’t see spoken about too often, but it’s a great way to make your site seem like it has an overall tighter theme, content-wise.

I joined Perfect Wealth Formula after talking to one of its top promoters for 90 minutes on Skype…

I absolutely grilled her about the program and its products…

I got sold on the notion of this being a great product…

I decided to go with PPC as the marketing method of choice here and I approached the PPC videos in the back office like a newbie since I was testing this out to see if it was worth doing and it if would indeed work for a newbie.

I’m not a newbie, far from it actually, but I went into this with newbie “eyes” and blindly followed the tutorials as if I knew nothing about anything, especially PPC marketing.

I spent over 300 dollars in PPC advertiisng costs, got 87 leads, and ZERO sales…

I put way more concerted effort into this than most newbies would and didn’t make a dime, although there were a lot of interested parties responding to my emails…

It was at this point that I decided this wasn’t a newbie-friendly program and that the PPC videos were sorely lacking, and even had a 3-way call with Jason, the owner of the program and got some more inside tips about PPC marketing.

So, I cancelled my membership there and went on my not-so merry way…

A week or so later, one of the subscribers receiving emails to the Perfect Wealth Formula newsletter emailed me to say my affiliate site was down when they went to go join and I told him that I didn’t think the program was any good and didn’t recommend it…

So, I gave up a 700 dollar commission here but this also prevented me from promoting something to my list that they would not have enjoyed much success with…

That’s the stuff that goes in in the background of my world… The stuff nobody sees…

I test things out before I promote it to my list…

I wish more marketers were the same way, too

What’s the point?

Don’t sell your soul for a commission, and think of the people less experienced than you before you recommend a product.

Your good name and reputation will last longer than 700 lousy bucks.

Please link to this review to help spread the word, much appreciated…

No related posts.

How much money do you put into internet business building versus how much you’re taking out?

The simple fact of the matter is, you can only learn to do one thing well at a time, therefore there is no need for you to be a member of mastermind group memberships, PLR and MRR membership sites, paid forums, traffic-teaching sites etc…

You can only do one thing well at a time and once you learn this, you will begin to see some clarity and positive production within your business.

Why is it that some people seem like they’re taking the internet marketing world by storm, whle others spend years humping along and not really getting anywhere?

If you got excited about what you’re doing, amazing things happen…

You have crystal clear focus…

You have energy you didn’t know you possessed, still..

You become way more productive than you have ever been before..

And it all starts the second you focus on doing one thing and doing it well.

I’ve been doing this internet business “thing” for a couple of years now, and I’m just finally coming to grips with the fact that I truly am ready for some copywriting lessons.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m going to be writing a lot of sales letters, but it does mean that I will soon begin to apply some better communications to my business contacts (subscribers and web site visitors)

I see a lot of good products come and go, and many of them are appealing to me, but I just got over learning how to blog more than adequately and that alone took me a while to do because I was definitely a Reluctant blogger…

After a while I learned to love blogging because I can write what I want in my own voice and hope it resonates with some people…

THE POINT here is that I enjoy doing this therefore I stuck with it after I got over the learning curves…

Then I got excited about doing it….

Then I got halfway decent at it….

THEn I moved on to learning SEO, which is really a never-ending education and I got pretty good at that, too

And now it’s time for something else…

I have produced and sold products, learned blogging, learned a good amount about SEO, and it seems to me that copywriting is the next pin to knock over…

But this blog is not really about me, it’s about you…

Cancel all those membership sites you’re not doing anything with…

Ask yourself what it is you need to imrpove right now and focus on that, and once you’ve leaped over those learning curves, move on towards your next challenge…

Just remember to drop one membership site before you join another… and be comfortable giving up one learning curve before moving on to another

Why The Review Sites Business Model Rocks!

Creating an online business based on writing product reviews is a sure-fire way for the “common man” to make a good living online. Look, the fact of the matter is, not everyone has marketing in their blood.

• Article marketing takes a special style of writing.
• Email marketing takes a special style of writing.
• Video marketing takes a special style of writing and recording.
• and so on and so forth….

Being a marketer is just one of the many hats you have to wear an as online business owner.

• You also have to be a content producer creating site content.
• You also have to be a manager taking care of business with help desk tickets.
• You have to be a business person making good decisions
• You have to research products and read a lot in order to give good reviews or blog posts.

The review site business model can pretty much eliminate marketing from your overall list of things to do because good content in the form of well-written reviews is a form of marketing.

Who reads reviews, and who will find your reviews on the search engines?

People that are already interested in that product but want a little more information on it.  You’re attracting very targeted traffic and they’ll appreciate an honest  review and good content. You can tell when someone wrote a half-a**ed  review just to get a sale by judging the content of the review.

Therefore, writing pure content is actually the best kind of marketing you could do in this type of business model.

The reason why this can work for anyone is that if you can read and write you can run a review site.

Can you write bad reviews? Will that help in any way?

Yes, of course, otherwise the visitor to your site will see that you highly recommend everything therefore your reviews aren’t to be taken seriously.  This is a mistake many site owners of review sites make. They look to get a sale off of each and every  review they write.

What you should do here, if there’s a NON-recommended product being reviewed, recommend a better product that is similar to the one you reviewed. Here’s an example of a review I did a long time ago that didn’t recommend the product.  If my business model was review site-based, I would have recommended a better alternative here.

This is how you make sales with those 1-up and 2-up programs: you  review the competitors and convince your readers why your recommended product is better than the one that met with a poor  review.

So, how do you get people to read your reviews?

Article marketing- write the shortest  review that you can, submit it to article directories, and link back to your review page for that product via the article you submitted.

PPC- Set up some Adwords or YSM campaigns for getting traffic to the pages you want traffic for. These will be extremely low-cost terms and the traffic is easily obtained here.

Google alerts and blog commenting- Set up a Google alerts to see who is writing about those products you’re reviewing. If they have a blog, make a comment on their post on this topic, and leave a link back to your review page.

Email marketing- Now, I know I mentioned earlier that marketing was sort of taken out of the equation here, however, all you have to do is send an email to your subscribers when you’re written a pretty good and long and informative review.

No marketing is involved when you’re simply stating, ” I reviewed the XYX product, go here (link) to read it…”

This is content delivery via email and doesn’t take an email marketing genius to do this. Email marketing is recycled traffic, therefore can be considered a traffic source.

This is a great business model for the affiliate marketer, but it’s also a great way to develop a marketing sales funnel

Blogging Tip #11- Working With WordPress Blog Widgets

It’s time to clean up your default WordPress installation/blog by deleting some plugins and blogroll links.
1.    Delete or deactivate the Hello dolly plugin- Go to plugins and DE-activate Hello Dolly Plugin,or FTP into site and delete the plugin that way
2.    Delete the default Blogroll links- Go to Manage tab of WordPress Admin Panel, select Links, and delete all the default links already populating your WordPress install.

Working With Widgets
You used a text widget to create RSS feeds and Aweber optin forms, but there’s more you can do here…

Add your EzineArticles widget to sidebar-

If you’re writing articles and publishing them to article directories like Ezine Articles.com then you can always grab your Article author feed and place it on the sidebar of your site.
Go to Design Tab, widgets sub-selection, and add a text widget there, then paste in the feed code that EZA gives you to display your feed (or someone else’s…)
This helps when you have a visitor that doesn’t see something in your most recent posts that’s of interest to them, but if they see your “EZA feed”, they might go read one of your published articles dispayed in EZA feed snippets on sidebar…
Of course, you will link back to your site from those articles, so that helps keep your visitor “dialed in” to what you’re saying without losing them for good by sending them off your site to read something.

Add a Tag Cloud to your sidebar-
Supposedly this is good SEO because it displays “tags” that show the keywords that your site has content on. Go to Manage in WordPress Admin panel, TAGs tab, to add new tags.  Then go to Design Tab, widgets sub-selection, and find the TAG Cloud widget and add it to a sidebar

Should you add a Calendar to your sidebar?
I never understood why people choose to display a calendar on their sites.
·    What’s the purpose of this, to tell me what time and day it is when I have a computer that tells me this anyways?
·    Is it to show the search engines that some thing has been updated on your site (ne wmonth now, yay!)
From what I’ve read about calendars’ effect on SEO and spider crawls, having a calendar on your site sends the search engines spiders into an endless loop of crawling activity that eventually causes them to stop digging thorugh your site.  If the spiders get confused your site suffers…

I say get rid of the calendar and choose to optimize your web space with more effective displays…

If you read my 2-part report on Making money with Google Adsense and MFA sites, you know that I’m not a big fan of Adsense as a foundation of a sound business plan.

However, if you’re committed to following this type of business model here’s one way to make money with Adsense on every blog post.
Here’s what a lot of marketers are doing today, especially those in the IM game of marketing to other marketers.

First you need to have Adsense ads on your site.
Secondly, you need a list of subscribers, a mailing list.
Notify your list via email when there’s a new blog post, and the readers will either read the post, click on an Adsense ad, or click away.
That’s a good way to make money with every blog post.

The general way to make money with Adsense is outlined below.
1-Pick a niche you want to have a site or blog about.
2- Get an Adsense account, and pick your channels
3- Create content for the site
4- Get traffic to the site(s)
5- Test the placement of the Adsense ads for optimal click-throughs
6- Track your channels and traffic
7- Wait for the checks to come from Google, if you make anything from this at all
If you’re good at getting traffic, you can make money with anything
With MFA sites, all you need to do after you put the Adsense blocks are up is to test and see how to get the most amount of clicks.

Get Free Advice And Help From Panel Of Internet Marketing Experts

As you may have read on this blog before the fastest way to suceed with online marketing is to copy what works for experts that are doing really well with their businesses.

Well, I have been working behind-the-scenes and convinced some Internet Marketing experts to give away their valuable expertise. No, this isn’t another giveaway, but it might be the death of them since this is top quality information designed to specifically help you with whatever questions you may have on a certain topic.

I can safely say that this site and the people on it are guaranteed to help you.
You can and will achieve results with your business quickly and easily by following True Experts who do well for themselves. As of right now, here are some of the areas of expertise you can expect quality advice on:

Blogging, Article Marketing, Business Building, Product Creation

Matt Garrett is a professional marketer whose main expertise is blogging, and automated traffic and residual income generation. He really knows his stuff when it comes to blogging, and I’m always learning something new from him about blogging and automatic traffic generation.

Kevin Riley is known for his “recipes” and from what I’ve seen of his products, they’re very good. He can show you how to quickly and easily create good products. Kevin shows you how and where to promote your products, too.

Fabian Tan is an article marketer who has enjoyed $1,000.00 days… He has thousands of article published and can show you how to harness the power of article marketing. I interviewed him for 3 1/2 hours to ask him all the questions that the typical article marketing ebook doesn’t “remember” to tell you. Check out these experts today to do what every successful marketer has done: Get good at one thing, and reap the benefits…
Here’s that link again to enjoy the benefits of their knowledge.

Just click on Internet Marketing Experts

There wil be more experts added on as time goes on.  To get the free gifts and help from the people listed on the site, you will have to fill out a survey.  This is done to make sure your specific concerns are being addressed and to allow them/us provide follow-up help based on your answers to the survey.

Here you go:  http://asktheimexperts.com

This Micro Niche Finder Review explains how I got my hands on MicroNichefinder a few months ago but hardly ever used it at first, (I will explain why later).

The reason why Micro Niche Finder beats out a lot of other keyword research tools is the following:

1- It’s now pulling from Google for its search volume results, and not WordTracker like some out-dated keyword research tools are doing.

2- It analyzes the profitability of a niche based on the keywords you entered, and seeing how much people are spending to advertise these keywords via Pay Per Click (if people are spending over a dollar per click for a keyword, there’s money in that niche, and especially for those keywords)

3- It can “dig down” to find keywords and phrases with little competition and can create huge Keywords lists in a matter of minutes.

4- It analyzes the SEO competition for those terms based on InAnchor, InTitle, and InURL, which means it’s telling you how many people are doing proper optimization for those terms by:
· using proper anchor text, (InAnchor)
· putting the keywords in the title, (InTitle)
· and even putting the keywords in the domain name ( InURL…a dead giveaway that someone is “going after” this term…)

5-If you’re stuck on where to start for keywords and have no niches in mind already that you want to research, you merely hit the Brainstorming or HotTrends buttons to get a big list returned to you (this helps when you don’t know where to start…)

The best thing about MicroNichefinder- there’s NO monthly fee, like some other keyword tools.

The second best thing about MicroNichefinder- it’s being upgraded soon (at the time of this wiriting) to include some point-and-click-easy ways to find hot profitable niches…

The BAD part about MicroNichefinder- James is going to raise the price soon after the BIG upgrade is done…and may even raise the price to a monthly fee, but if you get MicroNicheFinder before he does that, then you’ll never pay for upgrades or monthly fees.

My recommendations:

Get it now before price goes up so you can get the free upgrades. If you’re not a niche marketer, you still need to know what kind of traffic is easily obtained and MicroNicheFinder does that for you as well.

Definitely get this if you’re niche affiliate marketing, because it tells you whether or not a niche is worth getting into before you spent time on it… saving you hours of valuable time…

Download MicroNicheFinder Here, You will get immediate access to 5 Bonus Videos on that page

Blogging Tip #5- Configure Your NoFollow and DoFollow Settings

This Blogging Tip is going to address the concepts of DoFollow and NoFollow.

When you allow DoFollow, this tells the search engines to Follow the sites you link to in post, comments from blog commenters, and lends PageRank of blog down to your categories and posts

IF your blog has Page Rank then if could be lending PageRank and importance to whatever you’re linking to from your blog whether it be blog posts, categories, or comments made on your posts.

Interlinking from one blog post to another is automated with the Related Posts Plugin on the YARRP (Yet Another Related Posts plugin, as seen in Blogging Tip #4- Gather Your WordPress Plugins.

Now, even though the Related Posts at bottom of your blog posts display links to other posts based on relevancy factors, those are like footnote links. You also want to link to inner pages of your site from the body of the post itself, too (see example above where I linked to Blogging Tip #4).

Should you allow DoFollow on your Blog Comments?-

Yes, if your goal is to lend some PageRank to people commenting on your blog, which also encourages more comments

No, since you’re bleeding PageRank when you do this, and it also cuts down on the number of inane comments you receive on your posts.

Look at it this way. Your blog can be an asset if you provide good content.  Your good content is added to when people post quality comments and they benefit from their useful feedback and contributions, too.  Read the post on How To Get Traffic From Blog Commenting (the right way).

Encouraging more comments by providing DoFollow link-love for blog commenters may be a short-sighted strategy here.  That’s just my opinion tohugh, do what you want here.

Should you allow DoFollow to Blog Categories and Blog Posts?

That depends on whether or not you want to rank well for your Main KWs or for blog category and post keywords.  Over time, lessening the Page Rank-bleed will allow your categories and posts to rank well anyways.

Should you allow DoFollow on links to inner pages of site?

Same as above, no, not really since it’s the same as lending Page Rank to posts…

Do Nofollow links still have any value?

Yes, they do, since they’re still seen by the spiders, but not valued as much since there’s no Page Rank being lent to them.  If a blog is DoFollow and post itself is a PR4, your link will still be seen by the search engines, but won’t get Page Rank points for the comment(s).

Note:  The way you design your blog is important and I’m not talking about graphics or themes or anything like that, but how posts are linking to each other beyond the NoFollow and DoFollow discussion.

Blogging Tip #6 will show you how the SEO Experts are saying you should design all sites nowadays to make your site more user and spider-friendly… (think silo site)

My best affiliate isn’t a household name, nor does he get a lot of attention..

You won’t see his testimonial on dozens of sales pages, either.

He’s very close to retiring from his 6-figure full-time job.

He already has a good foundation for earning a great income online.

Would you like to know how he does this?

Read on…

Naturally, he has a decent- sized list, and he’s a very personable fellow.

He understands how business works and he’s doing something that a lot of people just don’t understand:

“Sell stuff that sells well, but don’t sell junk products”.

If someone thinks that they’re going to set up a 7 Dollar Mall and a ClickBank Mall for the low, low sum of XXX numbers of dollars and then they’re gonna be rich???

Not…gonna…happen.

However, people like buying that stuff and it makes for a decent looking site.

I don’t think those sites are going to convert well for people, but it’s still something that people are happy to buy, over and over again.

And that’s Secret #1 to marketing: Sell feel-good products that sell well.

Now, for Secret #2

Secret #2 is if/when you find a product that contains some very useful information and has a pretty good sales page, you promote the heck out of it. The IM Toolkit is one such product like that.

When my Super Affiliate realized how much value was in the IM Toolkit, he got excited about the product, his enthusiasm showed in his marketing efforts, and he did really well with it. He also mailed more than once to his list aobut this, and that’s important, too.

Repetition: Most marketers are too scatter-brained and overloaded with projects to remember what sold well for them in the past. Sometimes I’d tell someone that mailed out for the IM Toolkit how things were going, and they’d ask me:

“Who are you again? what was your product?” soon to be followed by:

“Oh, right, hey, how you doing, I gotta mail out for that again, it sold really well, people liked it, too. Where’s the affiliate’s section for your product?”

They don’t even remember what made them money in the past, even though it did really well for them!

Now, back to SuperAffiliate Guy.

He sells people the feel-good products, and when he finds something that is a combination of useful information and feel-good purchasing, he runs with that for a few weeks.

They know what people want to buy

SuperAffiliates believe in the products they’re promoting

They take massive action, not just one-time action, when they do things.

He’s personable, polite, and knows when to take massive action on something.

He stands behinds products he’s really excited about and doesn’t just mail out once for it, and move on.

He’s about to become my Number One affiliate for one of my other big projects, too. The project is a membership shite, and
the affiliate commission structure is 2-tiered and incentivized, with a very low attrition rate. At some point point he’ll be making 5-7k/month promoting just this site alone.

And they get rewarded in the long run, too. It is not uncommon for Super Affiliate Marketers to get special affiliate commissions thrown their way since they deliver so many sales every time.

One last thing that Super Affiliates do is offer bonuses. They offer a free membership or a free product to entice a reader to buy something they’re promoting. I’ve done this before, and it works.

Everyone wants to know the quickest and easiest way to make money online.

Well,I got something for you that I know you’ll love if you’re willing to do a little bit of work to get there.

First, let me explain a little bit about HOW this is going to work, then I will explain WHY this works so well.

How this works…

1. I have a review site that I built to funnel sales and traffic towards specific sites that I wanted to get traffic to.
2. The review site is being turned into a WordPress blog to allow guest authors (you) to post to it
3. This means you’ll be able to post your reviews to the site.   Content MUST be unique and proper reviews written.
4. If you’re promoting some sort of affiliate program, all you have to do is write a review on it and this will get traffic to your affiliate link if the review is written properly.

Why does this work so well?

1. People go to the search engines and type in ProductName+Review or Product Name +Bonus when they’re considering  a purchase. A well-written review will get you sales or an optin or both.
2. For the majority of these types of search terms, there’s easy ways to get ranked well for those terms.  I will explain this later on when the site/service goes live.
3. The site/domain name now has a PageRank of 2 and ranks well for its chosen terms.  There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages on it ranked #1 in the search engines for those terms.  This is proof that your blog posts will rank really well if you follow the steps I outline for you.
4. This is drop-dead easy.
5. This is anyone-who-can-write-an email-easy

Grand Summary of the total plan:

I am opening up my blog to guest authors so you can write review-based content and post it to this blog with your content, your review, your affiliate links, and also will serve as a backlink to your site if you choose..  Your reviews will rank well in the search engines so you don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting in regards to setting up a wordpress blog, and getting the new posts indexed quickly. The beauty of this is that it’s free and will be driven by the power of a community effort (more on that later).
It’s FREE, for now just to get some testimonials and to work out all the kinks before making this a paid monthyl fee.

Once it’s out of BETA,there will be a monthly fee for this service because you can’t give away page #1 rankings for free, right?

When you write your first blog post, I recommend you do it with a goal in mind.

Think about what kind of traffic you want to get and what you’ll “do” with this traffic once they get there.

What should you write about on your blog?

• If you’re in business for yourself, what’s the point of attracting a visitor and not having a goal in mind for them?
• What if they like your content a lot, but are left without any course of action to take from here-on in? (buy something, get on the email list, become the next RSS reader…)
• If your blog is about something you’re passionate about, then it’d be easy for you to write a lot on just one topic. And that is perfect for SEO, site navigation and for your readers.!
• When you start writing to your blog, a good strategy is to fill up one of your categories with 5-10 posts on that subject matter.  The category could be Blogging Tips, or 10 Dog Collars Reviews.
• Once you’re done with the first 10 posts, re-purpose your blog content for article submissions by using the effective time-saving power of the 10 Articles Method to build backlinks to your site and generate some initial traffic to your blog.

10 things You Should Do When Posting To Your wordPress Blog

1. Have goal in mind for what kind of traffic you want to get and what to do with that traffic (if anything)
2. Use the All In One SEO section of the writing area of WordPress to place the correct keywords in the title, description, keywords area, tags, and excerpt.
3. As you write more posts, add more tags to your WordPress Admin panel.  This is the easiest way to not get overwhelmed by thinking up all your tags ahead of time.
4. Social Bookmark your blog and blog posts from a stumble upon and digg account, for starters…
5. If you haven’t claimed a technorati blog yet, you should do that ASAP.  Just jon their site to claim your Free blog.
6. Comment on a few blogs that have written something specifically related to your latest blog post, and leave a link to a blog post of yours that is most relevant to the post of theirs you are commenting on.
7. Submit URL of latest posts to RSS aggregator sites
8. If post is not your first post, link to another post on your site whenever applicable and relevant
9. Rewrite the blog post to make it acceptable as an article submission.  Publish the article and link back to blog post form body of the article you published.  This is almost the same as blog commenting, but article directories are Authority sites, so you’ll definitely gain a lot from doing this as well.

If you have readers on an email list, send them an email notifying them about your latest blog post if you think it’s something they’d be interested in (it should be!)

If you’re doing each of these basic steps to promote your blog posts then you’d have:

• You’d have written a blog post with a goal in mind,
• Got links to your blog posts 3 different ways (social bookmarking, blog commenting, re-purposing content for article submissions and backlinks)
• Started a series of post to fill up a category of content pleasing to your human visitors and search engine spiders.

It amazes me still how desperate people are and it’s really quit obvious on marketing forums.

Some people get it into their heads that they’re going to be an SEO service provider, but you’ll see them asking questions about SEO even though they provide a service that you would naturally think they’d know about in the first place since they’re touting their SEO services.

Sometimes you’ll see people plugging their own products in their forum signature files selling a product that promises you can “make an automatic 350/day with PCC here” but are asking other marketers how to make merely $50.00/day.

Many of these beginners are just plain stupid and do not realize that marketing is all about presentation, so if you want people to think you’re an expert on these forums, don’t ask questions or involve yourself in discussions that betray your ingorance, since it presents you as an ignoramus, not an expert.

On the other hand Marketing forums are good for doing research for certain types of marketing roducts to create tailored for them based on what the conversation is…

The downside to that is that people on marketing forums are more tuned in to the work required to make a business grow, so selling an ebook on article marketing at a forum will convert better than to a general mailing list ( good and bad thing)

Some people on the general mailing list are not really happy about doing the grunt work involved with article marketing but when other marketers see people talking about its effectiveness on marketing forums, the public opinion could persuade people into doing it more.

Here is Post #1 of the Niche Marketing Case Study
Here is Post #2 of the Niche Marketing Case Study
You’re reading Post #3 Of The Niche Marketing Case Study

Building a business is a system and an orderly process, so I recommend you read these posts in order so you truly understand how to Build A Profitable Site From Scratch.
In Post #2 we touched upon how we did some Keyword Research to determine what to write about.
Knowing what to write about and what words to use is extremely helpful for a number of reasons.
1- You have a “honey-do” list.
You know, like, honey-do this, honey-do that… Married guys understand what I’m talking about here
2- You know what you have to do and why.
You’re writing and publishing content to attract traffic. Many people flounder from one thing to the next because they have no sense of purpose with their business, and most of those people fail. When you’re armed with a to-do list and a reason why list, you’ll be more than happy to get to work knowing that soon positive results will ensue.
If you don’t like to write, outsource it or quit thinking you can run an online business that is almost wholly dependent on words on pages.
3- The more you write the better you get at it.
4- The more articles you publish to article directories, the more traffic you get.
I’m not a prolific article marketer by a long-shot, but these are my stats at the time of this writing. The important statistics to look at here are bolded:
· Article(s) Views: 12,773
· Profile Views: 191
· Articles Published: 365
· URL Clicks: 2,493
· Comments: 9
· Emailed: 1
· Live Articles: 54
These are actually pretty good statistics for someone who hardly has any time to do article marketing. Think of those 54 published articles as 54 backlinks that also sent me 2,493 visitors….so far

5- The more pages you have on your site, the more traffic you will get if you write for traffic and human visitors.
See the stats above which prove my point. Check to see where your pages rank for the longtail keywords you’ll be going after here
6- The more site pages and articles you have published and viewed, the more you will be seen as an authority on your niche topic.
7- The more of an authority you seem to be, or are, the more people will really tune in to you.
However, there’s something else that you need to realize about Keyword Research before we continue onwards to site design:
Many SEO experts say that Keyword research is near useless because the words and phrases your site gets found for is actually all sorts of words and phrases not shown in any keyword research tool.
The key to getting traffic is simply to have lots of words on lots of page and linking to those pages. Keyword Research is important because it tells you how to get the easy traffic, basically. But again, the more you write and the more you expand your known presence on the Internet with numerous linked-to pages, the better off you will be.
OK, enough of that, let’s get down to site design….
It’s far better to get traffic to an ugly site that has words on it that people read than it is to have a flashy site with garbage content.
Build a blog using wordpress, nothing else. Get a free wordpress theme indicative of your niche.
When you arrive at a site for the first time, is it immediately apparent what the site is about?
Is this blog pretty clear of what the subject matter is?
Words sell, pictures don’t.
Fancy flash images and animated banners distract your visitors from reading the content that drove them to your site in the first place. Create an easy to read site that is also easy to navigate. Blogs are good for this since you can easily create categories and sub-categories.
At this point in the process,
You have a list of keywords upon which to base your written content.
You know the basics on how to create a good looking site that people like.
Plus, you know WHY you’re doing these things, which is really important.
NOTE: Many people say you should do Niche Research to see if a niche is Profitable. Well, the traffic that is so very easily obtainable with the niche we’re doing for the case study, there’s no need to worry about that. With the massive amount of traffic to be had here, even minor league monetization will pay off nice dividends.
*- If you don’t know how to do Article Marketing like a “pro”, I interviewed an article marketer who makes $6,000.00 a month and you can get a copy of that interview here.
**- If you don’t know how to set up and create a blog, you can get all the videos and plugins to learn that here.
***- If you still don’t know how to do Keyword Research and site-building, you get all the videos and to learn that here.
The next post will cover how to start getting traffic to your site instantly and how to double it every 45 days.
This is the end of Post #3 Of The Niche Marketing Case Study

“Been there, done that, bought that shirt” …

If you’re in 10 niches, it’d be better to dominate one or at least become expert in one niche then expand outwards into the natural sidesells and upsells that are abundant in most niches.

Let’s say you have a website that’s REALLY out there, like one for pet-owners looking for pet psychiatrists… the upsells, sidesells are training guides, accessories for the pets, toys, pet names directory etc…

Just get good or expert in one niche, AUTOMATE IT, then move on to the other ones, repeating what worked for you in the first niche you did well at….

Systematize what works, define it, write it down, save it, and repeat it by applying those methods to other niches.

Focus on one niche, Master it, then try to be a Master of 10 niches instead of a Jack of all trades, and a master of none.

Sermon’s over, someone took my soapbox.

Good luck!
Dan

No related posts.

Something many marketers don’t talk too much about is that running a business requires a type of mental stamina that many do not possess. Your chances of success are based more upon your mental stamina than anything else.

Developing the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed with your business takes time.

Here’s a checklist of skills the average marketer should develop in order to earn a somewhat decent income:

1.    Traffic Generation
2.    Email Marketing
3.    Product Creation
4.    Adopting New Marketing Strategies
5.    Develop Systems

#1- Traffic Generation
Most marketers struggle with traffic generation, and there are others like me that pick up bits and pieces of knowledge over time and and implement them.  This is part of the reason that online business owners struggle for a number of years before they finally “get it”.

#2 Learn Email Marketing

What’s so hard about email marketing?  You just send an email and make money, right?

Well, you have to write content for your list (like this post here) and mix the content pieces  in with some good offers, too.  Email marketing is IMpersonal relationship marketing.  It’s the attempt to build a relationship with people with whom you may never speak… (there’s a lesson right there for ya)…  If I wrote promotional emails according to what I was really feeling, it would be direct and straight to the point.

Here’s an example of the type of email I wish I could send out:

“Hi firstname, you need to learn list-building to assure yourself of an online income, so get product XYZ, it’s great and will help you… link here” …

That sentence above is a rather impersonal way to treat people with whom you’re trying to build a relationship.  Nobody likes to be bossed around all the time, therefore the relationship cultivation is crucial to your email marketing success.

Email marketing and relationship building requires tact, grace, good subject lines, and geting good at these requires time to develop.
Mental stamina and perseverance is what will make your email marketing efforts successful.

#3- GOOD Product Creation:

Anyone can buy Master Resell rights products and put their name on them to sell as their own, but at some point in time you will want to create your own product from scratch.

You can use PLR, Private Label Rights material to create your own product, write it entirely yourself, or even hire an expensive ghostwriter to do it all for you.

It’s easy to get bogged down with product creation, but it’s well worth doing because you will learn how to write by perservering through this process.
If you use PLR to create products, you first need to buy it, then edit it, then make a sales page for it.

Making a sales page requires that you learn the basics of copywriting, and copywriting is a skill that takes years to develop properly.  It takes really good copywriters about 3 weeks to make a good sales page.

Internet Marketing

All of the skill development listed above should make you realize why affiliate marketing is so popular… and why so many people get frustrated with internet marketing…

As an affiliate marketer on the inernet, you can skip the grueling processes outlined above and focus merely on getting traffic to your links, but you still need the traffic generation skills for this, too.
Running your own infoproduct empire requires constant business decision-making and skill development.
However, if you have the mental stamina for running your own business, you will get better at everything over time.

#4 Adopt New Marketing Strategies

Adopting new “strategies” could be considered a fancy term for program hopping, or evidence of a lack of focus, but even I adopt new marketing strategies once in a while.
For instance, I teach people how to develop their niche markets outside of the “IM” arena, and most of my income is derived from this.  Once in a while I will delve into a niche, set it up, and drive traffic to it just to say that I did it and that the usual methods still work.
Some methods aren’t as effective as they used to be, and some still are, but the only way to know for sure is to try new things.  Marketing on the Internet at its base level still works the same no matter what the target audience is, but it’s still nice to get a fresh new outlook on the world outside of Internet Marketing.
As a business owner, you have to adapt to changing trends and stop doing the things that don’t work anymore.  As your business develops you will need to try new things to further your expansion. And this requires more trial and error, frustrations, failures etc… Almost all marketers experience these frustrations and temporary pitfalls.
Those with the mental stamina to keep getting back up after getting knocked down are the ones that will keep succeeding and growing their business…

#5 Develop Marketing Systems
When you’ve been running a business for a number of years you develop certain work habits, and eventually those habits turn into a system that works for you.

Work habit system + Sales funnel = Marketing System

Example of a work habit system:

• Check email twice a day
• Generate Traffic to sites for certain period of time each day
• Work on product creation
• Improve sales copy and conversions
• Tweaking your marketing sales funnel
• …and so on

You can’t develop marketing systems overnight…  As a matter of fact, if you plan too far ahead, you’ll soon see that your original blueprint is quite different than what you now have.  How do you know if your marketing system is working?
Simple..  Go on vacation for a week and if sales are being made then you know your systems are working.

Do I get frustrated sometimes with running my business and systems?
Sure, but not too often…

Example: I ran a survey and asked people what their biggest concerns were with building their online business and many of the answers were, “ I want to know how marketing works, and how to build websites”

So, upon reading those responses, I was happy that I had the answer to their problem.  In fact, I know that I had the perfect product that would answer their questions, address their needs, and resolve their problems.

• I did a good thing there.
• I asked them what they needed
• I provided a resource that would resolve that issue for them.

But only a small percentage of those survey-takers took action on the solution offered to them.
This puzzled me for about 20 seconds, but I didn’t lose any sleep over it.
Here’s why:

You can’t get too emotionally attached to expected results, or you’ll be riding a roller-coaster of emotions with your online business.
You’ll be riding a “high” when you make sales, and despondent when you don’t.
If you run a business like that you’ll be a basket-case in a few months.
How can you remain even-keeled with your business and keep on plugging away at your eventual success?

Yup, you guessed it…. Mental Stamina

Thanks,
Dan

NOTE: This online marketing guide is 82 pages long, has 12 videos, and is pretty much everything I’m willing to reveal to you for 3 cups of Starbucks java

I was doing some research on a marketing forum lately and wanted to share something with the article marketers and niche marketers out there

A lot of niche marketers do their research, write some articles, and make some sales..
That’s great if your goal is to be an employee of the product owner…

Affiliate marketing is a great business to have if you run it as a business, but you have to stop treating it like a job!

I mean, think about it…

you’re going to spend time writing articles to promote someone else’s products, and then kiss that customer good bye forever once they buy from you????

If you’re not building a list, then you’re banking on one time sales from an article reader to make a sale and therein ends your relationship with your reader/customer.client.
You lost a valuable customer in a one-off, trade-off (article written, info presented, sale made, nice knowin’ ya!, we hardly knew ya!)
You made a sale and gave the customer away!  This is short term and myopic thinking….
The reason many article marketers don’t build a list is they think there’s no reason to build a list to upsell or side sell them anything.
Niche marketers want the sales, and they get the sales… but have no idea on what else their potential clients (that they’re giving away) could be interested in…
I hear this a lot from people I coach, and it kinda blows my mind when I hear that:
·    there’s no reason to build a list because there’s really nothing else to sell those people or…
·    there’s nothing else those visitors would be interested in besides the article they read, or…
·    there’s no compelling reason why an article reader would want to join my list (have nothing to offer them)
·    etc…
BUT…where the JOB of article marketing starts to turn into a business is when you introduce automation via list building and email marketing.
This is where you will start to see business growth, by leveraging your time better.
Sure, the accrued backlinks and smattering of traffic from article marketing will help your site get traffic over time, but if you make an extra 100 dollars a month with your automated email marketing, then that’s about 20 good articles you could be outsourcing regularly.
And once you have 20 articles being outsourced and paid for in an automated fashion, perhaps your income will grow an extra 200 /month in an automated fashion, too.  It worked before when you wrote the articles, didn’t it?
1.    When you can afford outsourcing because it is being paid for by business automation strategies = you have LEVERAGE.
2.    Apply leverage to the working points in your business and you no longer have a JOB
3.    All you’re left with is a business.
PART 2…
Maybe you don’t know why you would want to build a list because you’re not sure what your list is into, right?
If you’re writing articles on this niche, then you just might know something about it, therefore you can offer an ecourse which could be 5 articles broken up over 15 messages, or a top ten list of tips, or whatever you know they would like.
Offer that to your article readeras via the author Resource box and send them to a squeeze page, which is also easily done.
All it takes is a little thought on what a (nursing school) person might be interested in for side products or services and the next thing you know, you’ve got a head full of ideas on what to put into your autoresponder series.
If you have something that is working for you, apply leverage to it and relax…….. the money will come in even though you may feel like you’re giving away all your profits to pay someone else to do your JOB for you.
1.    With each article you outsource, you will get a backlink, and that’s something right there.
2.    If there’s quality traffic derived form those outsourced articles, so much the better.
3.    Get a lifetime customer instead of giving them away to the product owner… priceless

5 Steps To Success With Online Marketing (free report)

Here’s a report I wrote a while ago.

It will help you get your head on straight by achieving a positive mindset, and making sure that you’re not failing before you start.

If the concept of failing before you start doesn’t make sense to you, then you need to read this report A.S.A.P.

It’s free, so just click and benefit

5 Steps to Success with Online Marketing
Thanks,
Dan
I’d appreciate any feedback you might have, so please leave your comments below

Man, I couldn’t have written this better myself!

I was doing some research for a checklist of things to do for WordPress and SEO when I came across a very interesting post.

Read it and enjoy, or weep, when you see how much there is to do to properly SEO your blog.

I have this bookmarked and I suggest you do the same.

It’s an excellent read so instead of rewriting it into my words, I thought I’d give some link love to someone that wrote a thoughtful post.

Go here to read the Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog

It’s time to enhance your blog some more before you get started posting or tweaking any settings.

Here is a list of plugins I am using at the time of this post.

You can download them all through the link at the bottom of this post

FTP them to your site to the public-html/wp-content/plugins directory, then activate and configure them…
(Akismet and AllInOneSeo have already been covered in previous posts…)
1.    Advanced WYSIWYG Editor- make your posts look nice with a What you See Is what you Get Editor)
2.    Did You Pass Math-asks blog commenter a question before they can post a comment (further antispam feature)
3.    FeedBurner Feedsmith- to Create An RSS feed for your blog (important)
4.    Related Posts or YARPP Plugin- displays links to related posts based on relevancy factors you can set
5.    Ajax Edit Comments- Nice plugin that gives you more control over blog comments, and allows commenters to edit their comments within a specific time frame after posting
6.    Global Translator-allows foregin language visitors to translate your content into their native language
7.    Google SiteMap Generator- helps you configure your site map for inclusion in Google and other search engines plus notifications of changes
8.    One-click plugin updater- very useful to have, can automatically notify and update your plugins for you.
9.    Share This- good for allowing visitors to share your posts via social networking and bookmarking sites
10.    Google Analyticator- for statistics and tracking information about your site visitors
11.   Stat Counter- same as Google Analyticator
12.    WordPress automatic Upgrade- to upgrade to latest version of WordPress automatically
13.    WP Backup- sends you an email with a backup of your wordpress blog. Better to do a cpanel backup weekly, in my opinion, but good tool to have.

The WordPress Link will Return

In the past week I’ve received 10+ emails/comments from people saying they need to stop the “bleeding”.  For many people more money is going out than coming in.

Here are 5 ways to stop the outpouring of money from your pockets while you’re trying to do get into profit-mode…

#1  Buy only what you need to advance your business right now, right this second, today.  Make sure it is necessary, and not wanted.

#2  Reduce your learning and increase your implementation habits.  Real learning, education, and wisdom comes from actually trying to implement your ideas/methods etc…

#3  Stop wasting time.  Use RSS readers to get quality content on the subject matter of choice and stop eating from the email marketing trough waiting to buy stuff.  Develop into a person who is building a business NOT by purchasing items, but by building up your online empire and virtual real estate.

#4 Cancel everything except for what you really need for your business right now.

Are you in a paid forum?
·    Why are you paying for advice that’s freely available at the Warrior Forum?
·    Why are you lurking in forums in the first place, to feel like part of a group?
·    Is anyone in that group actually doing something (implementing) for you besides advising you?

Are you a member of a membership site that delivers a certain # of products for you?
I consider these one of the most useless types of membership sites because they’re actually harmful to you and your business.
·    Is there a real benefit from gaining access to 10 new products a month?
·    Does your business really need 10 products a month?

·    What can you possibly do with 10 new products each month besides read them and possibly re-sell them?
I’m pretty sure you can’t implement 10 new marketing methods each month, or can you?  Most people right now aren’t implementing anything

I understand these types of sites are providing the illusion of “great value”, but it’s harmful to many people because it’s adding to their information overload and it’s a method by which people self-damage their chances of succeeding by making it harder to extract themselves from the information overload trap.

Are you a member of a mastermind group?

Why?  To get ideas, more ideas, more ideas, and hob-nob with others to create… more ideas?
Are any of these other masterminds actually doing something for you like creating a site/offer/deal/discount/JV/ links for you?
I understand that making plans is exciting and really fun to do, but:

• It doesn’t get sites built.
• It doesn’t make sales.
• It doesn’t benefit you unless implementation is involved in some way

#5 Fire the mentors/local gurus whose mail list you’re on.

I’m not saying to ignore or refuse to get emails from other marketers, but do some introspection to see what it is you need to DO right now, and then go do it.  If you’re on someone’s list that doesn’t help you with what you need right now, unsubscribe from that list.

Go back later if you wish, but get rid of your email clutter ASAP.  Keep doing this until you see yourself checking emails less frequently because there’s less Inbox “help” waiting for you and the only thing left for you to DO is to….  Do something

Naturally, of course, you want to unsubscribe from those who

A- Don’t provide valuable newsletters
B- Don’t honor your unsubscribe request (many big names do this)

So, What’s your plan?

If I met you in an elevator, what would you tell me if I asked you,
“So, what’s your marketing plan for the next 30 days?”

It’s time to start using your noggin’ folks… your most valuable online marketing asset is NOT your list
Nobody is going to do this FOR you. Nobody is going to think for you.

Education eventually comes down to what you DO.
What you DO builds experiences, good and bad.
Those experiences build up your most valuable asset ( see above)
With experience comes true knowledge and confidence.
With confidence comes the proper mindset for business-management: A no-fear attitude.

The business-person that builds up his/her most valuable asset while strutting around with a TRUE no-fear mindset succeeds where over-analytical, smarter, serial learners fail.

Thanks,

Dan
P.S. I’d appreciate it if you would link to this post or social bookmark it if you thought it worthwhile reading that others may benefit from.

There are more opinions in the online marketing world than there are blogs!
One hotly contested debate is what blog platform is best for you.  You are on a WordPress blog right now.  WordPress is the only blog platform you should consider using for a number of reasons.
You own the site ( if you install blog on your own hosting and domain) and you can integrate it with many Web 2.0 friendly plugins and widgets.  WordPress is by FAR, the leader in blog platform technology, and there are many new cool features being added daily that can help make your site even better.

WordPress “out of the box” isn’t a complete solution, though.  You need to add whatever functionalities you desire to make your site even more functional.  You can get WordPress themes, plugins, and video tutorials here as part of your membership with Marketer’s Relief.
Blogs in general are very SEO-friendly, meaning that the search engine slike Google love them.  Structure your blog properly and you will get a lot of search engine traffic, even form places you never suspected.  When you combine a well organized and optimized blog with good Web 2.0 traffic generation techniques, you are in the driver’s seat with your business.

To learn more about blogging with WordPress, check out all these  WordPress video tutorials

Buyer’s Reviews of the IMToolkit Online Marketing Guide
Since you’re reading this you:
1.    Bought the IM toolkit already (thank you!)
2.    Are considering purchasing it…
3.    Are a stray visitor to my blog (welcome!)

My goal is to make a helpful and life-changing ebook, so I’d love to hear your feedback on the IM toolkit.

The IM toolkit is everything that I think marketers just starting out should know.  However, the information should “speak to” more advanced marketers, too.

The idea behind the IM Toolkit is to make a document that gets read more than once, and used quite often.  I want it to be your reference guide.

If in any way you found that it didn’t meet all your needs please let me know here…  The latest version of this online marketing guide is 90 pages, with 20 videos so if I can add to it, I will.

If I cannot add more content to the IM Toolkit, please suggest another topic you’d like to see written for you.  I know traffic, outsourcing, linkbuilding, Joint venture marketing, forum marketing, etc…

Anyways, enough chitter-chatter, please tell me what you think of the IM toolkit.

My goal is to please as many of you as possible.

Thanks,

Dan (I-really-put-my-reputation-on-the-line) Mcgonagle