The Affiliate Journey

The Long Walk to Full-Time Affiliate Marketing Success

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Social Media Link Building Test

September 24th, 2009 · Link Building, SEO

There always seems to be some new technique coming out for how to use social media for link building. I had a mind flash the other day so I grabbed my business journal and started sketching out an idea I had to use social media sites along with article marketing, blogging and a couple of other techniques to build good quality 1 way links to the money pages on my affiliate sites.

I just started the test today, and it’s looking like it’s going to take about a week to get it fully setup. There’s a lot of content writing/creation required to test this.

How ever I intend to release my results in a report. I’ll likely have to do some videos to explain what it is I’m doing, but if it works the way I hope it’ll be a nice link building competitive edge you’ll have over your competitors.

Let me say that while this technique could be copied it does take quite a bit of work so one down fall is that not a lot of people would be willing to put the work in.

I’m interested in giving myself every edge I can over my competitors for my converting keywords so I’m willing to test it out on one site to see how well it works.

I’ll keep everyone updated with my status as I work through this test.

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Boosting Earnings Per Visitor and Revenues with Adsense

May 10th, 2009 · Make More Money

I know a lot of you have come to the same conclusion in the last year or two that Adsense is the worst performing affiliate program out there.

Maybe calling it the worst is a little harsh, but in comparison to programs that are targeted to your visitors it does not earn you the maximum revenue per visitor.

Recently something was brought to my attention that potentially we could be leaving a few bucks on the table each month by not having Adsense on some of our pages.


What exactly do I mean?

If you’re not familiar with conversion rates take a minute to read my post about increasing conversion rates to pump up your income.

You see not every page on your website is going to convert visitors to sales as well as each other. This could be because of the keyword people are finding you for, your content, or a slew of other reasons.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to capture a few bucks from those visitors though.

so here’s my:

3 step plan to maximize earnings per visitor with Adsense

1. )Know your conversions and where your sales are coming from.

The first step is knowing which pages generate sales on your website. So you must setup tracking for each page on your site. This way you will know which pages are generating the most click-through s and which are generating the most sales.

From here you can see which pages are under performing (i.e. lots of traffic and no click-through s or sales). You can first try to increase click-through s and sales (tweaking content, testing different calls to action) but if you can’t seem to get the numbers up this is where Adsense comes in.

2.) Place Adsense in a prominent position on your under performing pages

First off I don’t think we should just splash Adsense everywhere. If you have a top ranking page that reviews a high converting ebook placing Adsense on that page isn’t necessary (nor does it make sense in my opinion).

How ever if you have a “how to” article that doesn’t seem to convert that well but gets a lot of visitors each day this is prime Adsense real estate.

So place Adsense on those pages that revealed themselves to be under performers in terms of sales and conversions.

3.) Track your results

From step 1 you could have effectively figured out your earnings per visitor by looking at your analytics to see how many visitors came to a page in a given number of days, and then compare that to the earnings from that page for the same time period.

This isn’t easy to do with Adsense unfortunately (because it’s tough to track individual pages with Adsense), but you can look at the over all increase in revenue of your site after you’ve added Adsense and compare that to the affiliate income you’re still getting from those pages.

The over all revenue should increase. If it hasn’t then consider taking Adsense off of the pages.

This isn’t going to double your income or anything (Or at least I hope it doesn’t, if it does revisit your keywords and business model).

It will add a few bucks to the bottom line each month. It’s a worth while test in the quest to squeeze every ounce of revenue from a website.

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The Secret Ingredient Super Affiliates Use to Sky Rocket Commissions…. Conversion Rate

May 9th, 2009 · General, Make More Money

For those that know me, I’m a big organic SEO guy. I don’t do a lot of PPC, I tend to get frustrated with it. How ever I’m sure that if I did do more PPC I’d be a better writer, more diligent tester, and probably pay more attention to my conversion and click through rates on my sites.

I was doing some brain storming in my business journal this week about how I can grow revenues, and it occurred to me that I haven’t really tested or tracked my conversion rates that well on any of the sites I was reviewing.

Each site was doing OK, and as a whole this group of 8 sites earned between $5K and $7K in commissions each month. How ever I was pretty sure I could get it to $10K.

This led me to do a bit of reading on the subject of conversion and I came to realize that most of the super affiliates I’ve read about don’t have 150 websites. Nor are they promoting 100 different products on one site. They’re laser focusing there efforts on a hand full of offers at any point in time, and usually only one offer per site.

They’re putting there heart and soul into making the most money from that affiliate offer.

This led me to put together the following list of to-do items and things to test for my set of sites.

Focus on one product for the entire site where possible (outside of product reviews)

Each individual article or content page will be focused on promoting one particular product. So for instance if you have a SpyWare site you might have reviews for a multitude of products, but on each article page I will test just one of those products at a time. See which one appears to convert the best then try to improve the Click through rate for that product.

The theory goes is that if you’re conversion rate for the merchant stays the same and you can double the number of visitors you send that merchant you should double your commissions.

Ensure tracking is implemented on every page

Along with tracking, ensure I have unique tracking codes for each page, and possibly even link position.

Knowing which product seems to generate the most revenue for your site is good stuff. Learning which page(s) on your site are generating the most click through s to the merchants site is next.

Setup a unique tracking code for each page of my site, it could be a letter, number of combination of the two. It could also be the keyword the page is focused on.

When I do this I log it all in a spread sheet so I can frequently check my stats to see which pages are producing sales, which are getting a ton of click through s with no sales etc.

You should take tracking into consideration when you’re choosing affiliate merchants to work with. The big networks such as Commission Junction have this type of tracking available, but some in house programs do not.

Test Calls to action on each page

Always be testing is a pretty good modo I think when we’re talking about affiliate marketing.

I’ve often built a site, did the SEO work, and say that site generates a few hundred a month then I walk away to the next project. How ever what I never really thought about was I’m leaving dollars on the table because I don’t know if this site is converting as best it can.

To improve this I need to test different calls to action, content, copy and layouts. (i.e. buttons, anchor text for your links, images, positioning of each). Test them for say 100-200 visitors to that page and then consider tweaking it a bit. Keep notes of changes and dates as well as back-ups of the previous files you modify so you can always go back to a better converting format of a given page.

This can have a HUGE impact on your revenues.

Let me explain with an example.

You’re site gets 100 unique visitors a day, and you make $25 per sale on the particular product you’re promoting.

You see 15-20 clicks through to the merchant and on average you get 1 sale a day from that.

So for argument sake we’ll say you have a 15% CTR (click through rate) and a 6% conversion rate with the merchant. So for any 30 day month you’re making about $750.

There isn’t a lot we can do to improve conversion rates on the merchants end besides as far as layout and call to action goes. We can improve the quality of traffic we send OR improve our education and pre-sell of the product on our site.

The other thing we can aggressively work on is improving our CTR to the merchant.

Let’s say we test, tweak and track some changes to our layout, text, buttons etc. By the end of the month we were able to bring up that 15% CTR to 31% CTR.

That’s a pretty huge change, and assuming that the quality of the traffic is the same or better the 6% conversion rate should hold true so instead of 1 sale a day you’re seeing about 1.86, or let’s call it 2 sales a day.

What does this mean to the bottom line for this particular site?

Well you’ve just taken a $750 a month revenue stream and turned it into a $1500 a month revenue stream.

Could you do that across all of your sites?

Freakin right you could!

You could give yourself a hefty pay raise without creating new sites, just improving the ones you’ve got.

Now I’m not blind to think that this can all be done in a week. It takes time, planning and depending on the number of sites you have probably a few months. How ever doesn’t it seem like it’s worth the effort?

I thought so.

Take some time on Monday to think about how your sites are converting. First step is if you don’t have it setup implement tracking for each page so you can check your CTR’s. This stuff is what Super Affiliates gobble up to increase revenues.

Some people say the money’s in the list. If you play with conversion numbers long enough you might think other wise.

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Challenge, Learn and Live to be Successful in Online Business

April 19th, 2009 · General, Make More Money

One thing that I’ve really come to realize in the last 12 months is that we always have to be learning.

We need to be learning new skills, trying new things, challenging ourselves more and more.

I came to this conclusion both in my affiliate marketing business, as well as in my personal life at home.

Why am I writing about learning and trying new things?

I feel that this is a key trait/skill for affiliate and online marketers in general to have.

You see if you get comfortable with an exact system, set of steps, or tasks in the online world then you can quickly be left behind.

Also, it’s key to have a firm grasp on how particular tasks are done, even those which you outsource to others.

Why?

To avoid having the wool pulled over your eyes by a contract worker, and to ensure you’re paying for quality.

EXAMPLE:

I have two graphic designers I use on a regular basis, but sometimes my drive to launch a new test site dwindles while I wait for my designer to get my template back to me for the site.

This morning I decided, “Hey I can probably whip up some of my own landing page templates for my new PPC testing I’m starting” (see my post from earlier this week if you’re wondering about my new PPC test).

So I set out to find some worth while Photoshop tutorials to see what I could learn.

Guess what, a couple of hours later I had created a sample layout by follow a couple of tutorials and I feel pretty confident that with a bit of practice over my next couple of sites I could start creating my own landing pages.

Pretty slick!

Now, I’m not suggesting that I will always do this, and realistically it’s not the best use of my time, but I have to say I feel some what empowered this morning after learning this new skill that I could come up with an idea, research the niche, create a simple landing page design and have it going by the afternoon if I really wanted to now.

The Bottom Line

Never rest on your laurels in this business.

If you want to keep growing your business, then you have to keep growing yourself. Both with new skills, mental and emotional capacity etc.

Always be reading something challenging, always be challenging yourself to learn a new skill. You might not see the results right away, but trust me you’ll begin to build more and more self confidence in yourself that will spill into other areas of your life and business.

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Embracing Outsourcing and the 60/40 Earnings Split

April 18th, 2009 · Make More Money

I watched a breif video today by Mark Ling (creator of affilorama.com an affiliate training program).

I have never bought one of his products, nor have I ever watched a video or recieved one of his newsletters (I’m not big on buying into IM or Aff. marketing products).

How ever something struck a chord with me in that video this morning, he talked about his method of going full time in affiliate marketing, making $10,000 a month in total commissions, and living off about 60% of that.

I realized that not enough people talk about the importance of not “taking the money and running” when you see a profit. It’s important to scale with profits, outsource, build new sites etc.

The 50/50 or 60/40 split

I personally follow about a 50/50 split with profits and re-investment. I take 50% of my earnings each month and use that as my personal income (I continue to keep my living expenses consistent and save/invest the remaining for slow months and retirement etc.).

I take the other 50% and that’s what I run my network of websites on. This money is spent on template and graphic design, content creation, link building, article and directory submissions etc.

You can’t do it all

It’s very tough to be a one man show in this business, unless you are a successful blogger of have a huge authority website in a market that has a huge problem(s) to solve.

In order to hit that 10K a month mark you’re likely going to need between 5-50 sites (50 is a big overage, but if you’re doing it with adsense it’s quite possible).

To build, maintain and grow that number of sites is going to take some help. Where people help is up to you, but you’re going to need to hire some contract workers (aka. freelancers).

Start Practicing this Now

If you’re not currently outsourcing, or you feel stressed about how much work you’re continually doing on your network of sites, try this for the next couple of months.

1.) Make a list of all the tasks you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis
2.) check off which ones you can release control of to outsource
3.) Post projects for those jobs on sites like getafreelancer.com, rentacoder.com etc.
4.) Hire 2-3 providers for each project to do a small test job (i.e. if it’s article submission have them submit 2 or 3 articles not 10 then choose the one or two providers to keep working with that seem to do a good job)
5.) Allocate 40% or more of your monthly earnings towards outsourcing these tasks.

So what do you start spending the time you’ve now free’d up on?

Well, you will need to manage those people that will take time. But now you can also start to plan expansion, growth and new sites.

Start to think about long term goals, new sites you could build, tests you could run to improve conversion, revenues, and traffic on your current sites.

The sky is the limit, and this is where the real growth begins. You’ll make more with your mind and ideas then you will with submitting articles, writing content, and coming up with ways to manipulate link building.

You can always pay someone to handle the mundane tasks.

As John Reese once said, “Write small checks to collect bigger ones”.

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Guarantee your SEO Success by Using PPC

April 17th, 2009 · SEO

The title of this post might seem like a bit of an oxy moron, but trust me. I’m not going to suggest you stop building links, writing content and doing regular old SEO. Quite the opposite. I want you to keep doing regular SEO techniques for keywords, pages, and sites. How ever I want you to have complete conviction that the keywords and pages you’re building links for will CONVERT to sales once you get that top 5 or top 3 ranking.

I’m trying a new method for launching & testing new affiliate markets, sites, and concepts.

I can’t steal all the glory for this concept since many others have done it before me, and some very well respected SEO experts use it for every new site, page, keyword they launch.

Using PPC to test keywords

I’d read about using PPC to test keywords before you put the effort into build links etc. and begin ranking for the terms.

WHY?

It makes sense to know if a particular keyword is going to convert into sales for you or no before you take 30-60 days and possible $100’s if not $1000’s of dollars to build a variety of links for the keyword and it’s variations.

By launching a new affiliate campaign first on PPC you can test a vast number of keywords in far less time, and for far less money then by just SEO’ing the terms and hoping all, a few, or at least one of them converts.

So here’s the 30,000 ft. overview of my new plan I’m testing as I write this

1.) Choose a market: This is a no brainer. As I’ve written before I’m big on choosing markets where the need is so strong people are compelled to take action (i.e. health and beauty niches, financial niches etc.)

2.) Grab some keywords: I won’t get into the details of keyword research but if you have an idea how to find the “buy” keywords in your research grab about 50-100 of those if possibe.

3.) Write titles and Ads: For each keyword, or group of keywords if some of them are closely related write and adwords ad and title.

4.) Create landing page(s): Now create some landing pages for your adgroups. Again, an entire series or ebook could and has been written on writing landing page copy, and design. Be sure to implement some sort of tracking code between adwords, each keyword, and your conversion to sale or lead so you can track this later on.

5.) Turn the Traffic Tap on: Launch your campaign bidding about 50% of what the top bidder for that term is paying. Don’t worry at first if you’re losing some funds. You’re goal here is to test these keywords to see which onces are winners and which ones don’t turn up sales.

NOTE: Turn the content network off when you’re running this test, and be sure not to use broad match. Use variations of exact and phrase match and take advantage of some of the obvious negative keywords like “free”.

6.) Turn the Traffic off: Once you’ve had about 100 clicks to your campaign turn off the traffic and take a look at what you’ve found. What words got the most impressions and clicks. What keywords turned up sales? If you got zero conversions, could it have been the landing page? The copy? If you’re not getting any clicks, could it be the ad? The title? Test, Tweak, Re-test is the PPC advertising mantra.

7.) Let’s start SEO’ing: Now that you know what terms are converting thanks to paying for traffic for a bit. Now you can get out there and start link building for those terms. The idea is obviously to maintain good conversion on those keywords but stop paying for the traffic.

My first reaction to this method was nervousness. I am not a PPC affiliate, and I always liked throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck.

The downside is as your network of sites and income grows you want to start calculating your time usage and ensure you’re spending it on profitable activities. If you can know that a keyword(s) will convert to sales before you begin your SEO campaign then you’ll be far more motivated to spend the quality time getting the links, submitting the articles, building the squidoo and other 2.0 properites etc.

I know this was a quick overview, and I’ll keep you all updated on my progress as I test this method. As I mentioned I’m doing my first test this week with this method, and I’m just awaiting my landing page design to come back from my designer.

Once I have some testing results I’ll post them for all to read.

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The freedom of Affiliate Marketing

March 27th, 2009 · General

OK before I begin to write don’t take this post as bragging because that is not my intention. I did how ever want to pain a realistic picture of what you can accomplish when you are able to replace your day-job income with affiliate income.

Currently I have about 10 good sites running, I maintain them each week with the help of contract employees who handle tasks like

  • Link building
  • Article submission
  • Directory submission
  • Content creation

I strive for each one of those sites to generate $1000 + a month in revenue, however that doesn’t always happen.

I spent about 30-40% of a websites revenue on maintaining, updating, and growing that particular site. This to men makes sense because if I find a niche where I’m making money I want to suck that niche dry, no sense moving into a new niche before I’ve accomplished all I can in the current one.

So what are these so called “luxuries” I’m talking about in the title of this post?

The #1 luxury is free time, if I want it. I’m typing this post from a friend’s apartment in Rockville, Maryland. We’re heading out tomorrow for a week tour of the Dominican Republic, and my business is going to keep running while I’m not there.

I can afford the time off because of the systems and people I have in place to keep the machine running without me.

Now this isn’t a pitch at “outsourcing your life” because I think that’s kind of Bull S*%t myself, how ever for a few days, or even a couple of weeks I can take off, not login to a computer, check email, stats, write content etc. And everything is going to run along as normal.

Outside Affiliate marketing, and some Internet Marketing endeavours (i.e. info product creation) you can’t always do that.

Of course there are other luxuries such as the ability to grow my income as I see fit since my system is scalable, outsource even more to free up more time (although I truly do like working).

The real key for me is time, I love having the ability to take off, not work 8-10 hour days, or cut my week down to 3 days if need be.

Affiliate marketing, while may not be here forever, right now is a viable method of replacing your current income,.

With hard work you can create systems and a team around you to handle a lot of the mundane tasks that take up hours and hours of your days, nights, and weekends.

In the beginning yes I had to work weekends, evenings, and early mornings to make things happen.
I did it all.

The key for me was embracing outsourcing, not being scared to try it. Testing new link building and promotion methods, and not being afraid to try that either.

Try things, work hard, test, tweak, compare, read, and think outside the box.

All of these things will push you to become a better entrepreneur, a more innovative thinker, and a leader.

I know this post didn’t really touch on a skill to do with affiliate marketing but I think it’s important for people to stay motivated that they know what’s possible in this business, that people do make a go of it.

I am living proof of this, not a millionaire on a beach with no worries, but on my way to being well off and being able to grow this business or move into other online ventures.

I have some big plans for my blog so if you’re just reading this now please sign up for my RSS feed to receive my new posts each day via email. You can do that at the top right of the right hand column of this page.

I’m going to knock your socks off with free content here on this blog, and help all of you reach the level of success I’ve had with affiliate marketing. It can be done, and for those of you who will work, will test, and want it… You’ll get there, and I’ll help you.

I won’t have another post for about a week since I don’t think I’ll have Internet access but watch for some great content when I get back!

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The Best Article Keyword Density – is it just a number?

March 20th, 2009 · Content, SEO

I’ve been tweaking several of my affiliate sites these past couple of weeks. The title and meta tags, as well as reviewing the page content and article keyword density.

I feel that a lot of affiliates don’t put the time into writing great content, we’re concerned with getting as many pages up on the web, building a few links and slapping some offers on them. From there we expect people to show up, click and/or buy.

Unfortunately as the Internet landscape becomes more competitive it just doesn’t work that way. So I’m going to put together a series of posts on writing good affiliate web content for your websites.

This first post is going to be on article keyword density.

I know not a really exciting topic, but one that you should consider if you want to avoid looking like a spammer to the search engines (especially Google).

Let’s get started…

What is the ideal SEO Keyword Density?

You’re going to get conflicting information on this but I say (and so do a lot of other respected SEO’s in the business) an ideal keyword density is 3%-5%.

If you’re someone who focuses on LSI (Latent semantic indexing) and uses synonyms remember that the main keyword you’re focussing on could be part of the synonym so this will count to your over all article keyword density.

Let’s look at an example of what I’m talking about:

You’re writing an article on dog training, and the keyword dog training is the word you’re targeting. You do some research and realize that these keywords appear to be related as far as Google is concerned:

  • dog training
  • best dog training methods
  • train you dog at home

You write your article with 3%-5% keyword density for dog training, how ever you also sprinkle in the keyword best dog training methods along the way. If you haven’t used an SEO keyword density checker then you may have just pushed yourself over the limit for how many times you should have the keyword dog training in your article.

Which leads me to my next point…

Check your SEO Keyword density

Before publishing you should always check the keyword density of your article. Don’t get fanatical about it, but knowing that you fall some where in that 3-5% range is good.

here are two free tools you can use to check your article keyword density.

SEO Chat Keyword Density Tool (My personal favorite)
KeywordDensity.com Tool (allows for comparison and you can enter the keyword you’re checking the denisty of)

Where else should your keyword(s) be going

When we talk about article keyword density we usually just discuss how many times the keyword appears in the article, but for seo keyword density we want to pay attention to where the keyword appears on the page as well.

Title Tags

Your title tag is a very important part of every page you publish. Why? Well it’s the click-able text that appears in most SERPs online.

If you were writing an ad for a PPC campaign you’d take careful time writing that title wouldn’t you?

So why don’t we all do the same for our title tags?

I like to have my main keyword appear once in the title tag if it makes sense. This is a good rule of thumb, and it’s not really taken into consideration for article keyword density but it’s something worth while mentioning while we’re on the topic of web content.

NOTE: You don’t need your keyword in the title tag to rank on the first page of Google. There are numerous sites that are doing it now. You just need the right anchor text and mix of links. How ever for conversion, and click through purposes often having your keyword in the title tag is a smart decision.

H1 Tags

Always have your main keyword in your H1 title tag on the page. Please don’t have it be the only text in your title tag. Work your keyword into a relevant title for your page it’ll improve reader confidence and make your content seem less spammy.

Using your keyword in the H1 tag will count towards your over all article keyword density.

Bolding

Another best practice is to use bolding of your keyword(s) on your pages. Use this sparingly but ensure you’re doing it some places on each page.

I can’t give you an exact number of times to bold, or where to bold, but if you bold items with the idea of benefiting the reader and not the search engines you’ll be alright.

When it comes to trying to calculating the best keyword density you can only go so far to tweak the numbers. Remember web content is ranked for web users and readers. While the search engines might be the medium between you and your visitors in the end it’s your visitors that click on the ads, buy your products and purchase from your affiliate merchants.

It’s important that you pay attention to keyword density, but don’t sacrifice readability in the name of exact SEO keyword density. You’ll drive yourself crazy and probably make less money.

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Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Niche for you and your business

March 19th, 2009 · General, Make More Money

There’s a lot more to choosing a niche then pick something you know, love or are passionate about.

You need to take into consideration your business plan (if you have one) income expectations and goals over all and on a per site/campaign basis, competition, and available knowledge.

If you’re not using at least some of these items to decide on the affiliate marketing niches you’re going into that you could be wasting time, losing money or worse BOTH.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to a further explanation on the above listed 5 critiques of a niche.

Business Plan

Few affiliates have a business plan but if you’re taking this business seriously then you need one. It doesn’t have to be written to academic standards but it should outline your goals, methods, plans for growth and expansion etc.

In terms of choosing a niche for a site your business plan will guide you in a couple of ways.

  1. Are you going to have one or two sites or an army of mini sites
  2. How are you going to make money? (affiliate programs, CPC ads etc.)

Knowing if you plan on having a bunch of sites will allow you to target smaller niches that can often be quite profitable. How ever the flip side if you intend on having only 1-3 sites to meet your income goals then you’re going to want to choose a broader niche, or a complete market.

i.e. Golf, rather then just golf instruction videos or How to fix a golf slice.

Income Expectations

If you expect to make $10,000 a month from affiliate marketing then I wouldn’t suggest you start trying to build a huge site around scrap booking.

Why? Well not because there isn’t huge traffic in that niche, but the sales volume is lower so you’re going to need more actions to make the same amount as a more lucrative niche. Also it doesn’t focus on a burning desire that someone needs to solve, or a serious problem (i.e. stretch marks or bad credit) that the visitor needs to solve.

When choosing a niche you want to keep your income expectations close by. Choosing niches that are going to be conquerable and will provide adequate payoff for your work is key here.

Goals

Closely related to income is the goal part of choosing a niche. I break my income goals down to a per site basis. For me saying I want to make $25,000 in commissions this month isn’t really doable, it’s just a number. How ever if I say that I want site A to make $1500, site B to make $2400 etc. then I have something I can work with.

Before choosing a niche for a new site, or your only site keep in mind of course your income expectations as we discussed in the last point, but also your income expectations on a per site basis.

Using this as a rule of thumb when choosing a niche is a must to ensure you achieve your target income and goals.

Competition

Of course we couldn’t skip over this.

FIRST let me say if you look at several of the money keywords for you new potential niche and see that the top spots are Wikipedia, Amazon or some other behemoth of a site you might want to keep looking.

I’m not saying that these sites are immovable, but there are a lot better uses of your SEO and promotion enery.

Look for niches where there’s lots of paid advertisers (means someone is making money right) and where other affiliate, content or review sites are sitting in the top 10, 20 and 30 sites in the SERPS.

You can always back engineer a competitors affiliate content or review site, but forget trying to compete with the HUGE authority sites.

Available Knowledge

This is something people often over look, but can you find information about this niche to write for it, make videos, audios, newsletter content etc?

I know most niches have information readily available, but some are harder to write for conversion then others.

Think about how you would potentially write for this niche before you jump in.

Do you already have the necessary knowledge, is it easily researched? Do a bit of leg work up front to avoid getting into something you won’t finish later on.

Spend a bit more time planning, and researching a niche before you go into it and you’ll find that you start to make more with each site, and you reach your income goals quicker.

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Stealth Link Building: Get More Back Links From Your Competitors

March 14th, 2009 · Link Building, SEO

A really short post today, but a powerful tip.

Everyone knows you need more quality text links with the right anchor text to increase your page(s) rank.

Of course there’s more science to it then just getting a whack of backlinks (Although a lot of IM product developers certainly don’t want us to think that the case).

In this post I’m going to show you how to

  • check how many backlinks a competitor has
  • Actually view where those backlinks are coming form
  • How to steal a few of them for yourself

To do this we’re going to need one plugin that I use for Fire Fox. If you don’t use Fire Fox as your browser I would suggest you at least download it and have it. There are so many great free plugins you can get to help you in your SEO efforts.

The plugin we need today is from Arron Walls SEO BOOK site. It’s called SEO For Fire Fox

Download the Plugin here from SeoBook

You’ll need to restart Fire Fox after the plugin is installed.

2 – Head over to Google

Ok, do a search for your top keyword, or one of your most lucrative key terms for conversion.

NOTE: Most keywords that make money are known not just by you but other savvy marketers so they are often the ones harder to rank for since more then just you is trying to optimize your site around it.

Note below each SERP there is a smaller line of info you want to click on the question mark beside !Y links (this stands for yahoo links).

picture-2

This will reveal how many links that particular page is showing in Yahoo Site explorer.

A Mention about Yahoo: Why are we using Yahoo to track links? Well truth is Yahoo may not have the majority of Search users but it does have a more upto date visible index of incoming links for sites.

3- Find some Links

Alright. First thing to notice here are sites that appear to have far more links then any other site in the results. Check those first.

When you click on the !Y Links text it will open a new tab or window and bring you to Yahoo where it lists all the links pointing to that page/site.

From there it’s as simple as scouring the links that site has looking for

  • Blogs you could place a comment on that they’ve found
  • Directories you could submit to
  • Potential blogs that could post your content (if you contacted them)
  • Sites to trade links with, or setup 3 way link exchanges
  • Sites you could potentially Buy text links from

We Internet and Affiliate marketers often try to re-create the wheel sometimes when a simple method like this can often yield 10-20 or even 100 new links depending on your niche, page, and competitors.

SO get out there and get some links! This method is easy to do, set aside maybe 30-60 minutes.

Grab one of your sites, download the SEO for FireFox plugin and go through the steps. See how many links you get in that 60 minutes. If you can grab 5 or more new links then the time was well worth it.

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