Sniper Sites Update

I’ve found myself in a bit of a funk where I have absolutely no motivation to do any work. I had the goal of finishing up my massive link building for all 41 of my sniper sites and I managed to get that all done last night. So I’m sort of stuck without a detailed goal right now, tired, Friday and not really wanting to work. Whenever I get in these moods, I can always come over to this site and write a blog post.

I guess we might as well get to the money right now. In my post about niche sites, I mentioned the total of $319.71 being earned since I started into the sniper sites. That was posted on November 27th, so I thought I’d do an update for all my readers.

Total Invested:  $354.20
Total Return: $652.98

So we can all chant yippie, I’m finally in positive territory, even though no where near where I’d like it to be. I think we really need to consider the fact that I just finished doing backlinks to all my sniper sites last night. Some of them had only one page of content and no monitization (which I promptly fixed). Every single one of the 41 websites had at least one new fresh page of keyword rich content that was somewhere between 500-1000 words.

The results of that work won’t be felt for a while now. I won’t expect anything for at least a month from some of the sites, so I’m not too worried about it. As of right now, I have 5 Adsense sites and the rest are Amazon. The majority of my earnings are from Amazon as well.

I only have a few sites that are in the money spot (top 3 at Google). I have a lot of them hanging at position 4, so I’m sure they’ll push up as the link juice flows through over the next few weeks. I should also say that I picked up an additional two domains, which are not listed in the above numbers. I’m going to throw them in the category of wave 3, even though there’s just two domains. They’re following the same idea. One of them is in a niche that I expect to get hot in the next few years, so we’ll see how interesting that goes.

The other domain has to do with another topic that I want to really work into.

Dominating the Top 10

I used to think the key to dominating a niche was getting the top spot for various keywords in the niche. What I’m trying to do now is dominate the top 10 positions of a keyword. This other domain I bought was the same keyworded domain as a domain in wave 1. I had the .net, so I picked up the .org (keyword.net and keyword.org). I have both sites on different hosting accounts (different IPs) and I have them ranking 4th and 5th position in Google. It used to be 3rd and 5th, but there has been a little movement lately.

I did use two different hosting accounts for the domains just so I’d have a unique IP located in a different city. I really don’t know how suspicious Google would get if keyword.net and keyword.org were ranked in the top 10 from the same IP#. If you’ve tested this please comment and let me know.

For the same keyword I’ve also created a hub (from hubpages) and backlinked the hell out of that. It’s taking an abnormal amount of time to get indexed, but once it does I’m sure it will spring into the top 10. I’ll just keep doing that with different sites until I actually fill in the top 10. And let me tell you how useful it is to have a bunch of sites fully backlinked in a niche. The keyword.net for the site was bought first and was built, backlinked and ranked for a while. The keyword.org site is a position 5 with only one backlink from my .net site. Once I do take the top 10 over, I’ll just start going into related keywords and take over the top 10 for them. And that is how to make cash or at least how I plan to make it.

That is going to be my next little project with the sniper sites. Any site that is ranked in the top 10, I will get an additional two sites that are mine to rank in the top 10. I can do this a number of ways. I can buy a domain for the keyword. So if I have keyword.net, I’ll pick up keyword.org (if available). I’ll probably go the free route with a hubpage or something like that.

Double Google Positions

Okay, now this is something that I want to do. It will allow me to occupy an extra top 10 position without actually having to hold any new site. It’s where you have your regular listing and an indented listing below it. Well, according to Griz all you have to do is link two pieces of content together with the same keyword. I linked backed to my old sniper sites post from this post I’m doing right now. What I’ll do is go back to that old post, edit it and link to this one. That is supposedly what needs to be done to create a double listing. I want to do that too.

I guess this is something that I’ll have to get done and the date to put on this will be tough. I’m predicting the best I can is two sites a day, with two extra properties each and with a double listing. Hmmm, Well, I’m heading to the Dominican Republic in March. I want to get that all done before I have to go there.

Well, I guess that is enough for this post. Just thought I’d tell you about the sites and that I’m in a positive return now, so that is a good thing. Keep at it and keep making cash.

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My Keyword Research Guide for Making Cash

I wanted to do a little keyword research guide that could help you guys make some money. I know that I’ve taken a bit of a break from the blog to do link building to this site. Honestly, I really haven’t done anything. I’ve made a support site and backlinked that, but that’s really all so far. I’ve been busying trying to finish my extensive backlinking of my sniper sites. I really want to get these 41 sites done this month, so that is where all my efforts are concentrated.

Keyword research is a very important thing to know how to do. Good keyword research means that you’ll get traffic and you can get it very soon after putting up the site. Bad keyword research means all your efforts go to waste. Building a site that no one visits isn’t enjoyable or fun, and you’re definitely not making cash doing that. Since this site is designed to show you how to make cash, I’m going to give you this keyword guide to follow.

The main tool being used today is Google’s Adword keyword tool. This is something relatively new (as in under 2 years I believe). Google used to be very secretive with their search volumes.  But they knew they had to provide something for their Adword clients, so that they would start spending money. This is the keyword tool that is the compromise. The reason that I say compromise is that sometimes it is very accurate and other times it is a complete joke.

Before Google came out with their tool, many of us used the Free Wordtracker tool. They got their data from smaller search engines and extroplated the data to overall internet volumes (IE: if search engine has 1% market share, than all keywords are multiplied by 100% to get real volume). It’s not near perfect either.

For this keyword research guide we’re going to use Google’s Tool because when it is correct, we’re good.

Finding Exact Search Volumes

Just go to the keyword tool link I gave above and type in the keyword/niche/whatever into the keyword tool and take a look at the results. The first thing you have to understand is that the results are set to broad, which makes them exceptionally over inflated. You have to set the “Match Type” to “Exact”.

When you set it to exact, you’re going to get a much  more accurate view of how many searches that you’ll get a month. For me, I’m always aiming for a minimum of 100 searches per day for the main keywords that I pick up.  That means roughly 3000 searches a month. Those are the keywords I’m trying to get. If you’re someone that is new, you might want to aim lower (though that might not help for the verification section of this post). What you’ll want to do is take all the keywords that you find and throw them into notepad.

Assess Competition

At this point of the keyword research guide I like to look at the competition and assess how much work that I’ll have to put into rank for a keyword. This can be tough for a lot of you because experience plays a big roll in this. You can look at some of the criteria out there by many of the different gurus if you want… like maybe Ed Dale or something.

Personally, all I’m looking for are weak sites listed in the top 10 when I search the keyword at Google. Just remember that aggregators are weak. An aggregator is a site that just lists products and shit automatically. They basically have a massive database of stuff. The content on the pages are minimal. 

You should also be able to pick up “webmaster” like search results. A search result like that has typical “webmaster-esque” like results coming up. You’ll see squidoo lenses, hubpages, Ezinearticles, etc. Typically with a keyword targeted domain you shouldn’t have an issue out doing them.

This is important, so don’t skimp on this. If the top 10 are dominated by power house authority sites like Wikipedia, WebMD, etc you’re going to have trouble getting anywhere near the top. I’m not saying this is impossible, or that there aren’t exceptions to the rules, but you have to recognize lost causes.

Checking for a “Dud” Keyword

Up to this point, the keyword research guide was just like any other that you would find on the internet. Essentially find the keywords, check competition and go for them. But if you’ve been at this long enough you’ve probably noticed that some keywords you go after don’t have quite as much traffic that you expected. In fact, you can be hugely disappointed by inaccurate data provided by Google.

I’m sure Google has extremely accurate data when it comes to searches, but they hide some of it. They hide it because they don’t want us gaming the search engine.

The cool thing is that I’ve found a way to find out if a keyword is a dud and can help you determine how accurate Google’s keyword tool really is. This is very valuable to those that want to make cash online.

Even though the keyword tool has issues, I’ve found that Google Trends is quite accurate with its information. I hope you’ve been using trends before this point because you can learn a lot about the keyword. Most important thing is WHERE the traffic comes from. What do you think is more profitable? Traffic from United States, Canada, Australia or traffic coming from India, Philippines, etc? We all know the western world is the best, primarly the United States. Anyway, that is an aside.

Anyway, take your keyword and type it into Google Trends search and you’re going to end up with a graph. If you get no graph, the search volume is probably below 1500/mth. There’s a cut off point on trends where it won’t give data. I’m guessing that is the magic number.

Here’s the key, an accurate keyword will have a graph that exists for a significant period of time. When I say “exists” I mean it isn’t zero. You’ll notice a lot of keywords will have sections where the graph is zero. If that makes up a small portion of the graph than you can be pretty sure the keyword isn’t a dud. But if a big portion of the graph is zero or erratic jumps from zero then it is probably a dud. And I would avoid that keyword.

Here is an example of what a good keyword would look like:

There are some zero chunks of the graph very early on. But you can see that the graph exists pretty consistently for a good two and half years. The keyword tool said this keyword gets 3600/mth. I rank top spot for it and the numbers appear to be very accurate.

Here is an example of what a dud keyword MAY look like:

 This graph is much different. Over half of the graph has the zero areas and this happens to be one of the MANY possible ways a dud keyword would show up on a graph like. The keyword tool at the time of me going after this keyword said it got somewhere around 3000 searches a month. Six months later and finally ranking for the keyword, I’ve found that it gets absolutely nothing. Maybe 10-15 people search it a day at most.

I was going to show you a graph of another keyword that I ranked for that turned out to be a semi-dud. At the time of this post trends won’t show the graph (too low volume), but as of a few days ago it showed it. It was essentially a straight line that went up. That’s all it was. Just a straight line going up. Google keyword tool says it gets 5400 searches a month. I rank for it and can obviously tell you that the volume isn’t very high.

Verifying Data Volume

You can also use Trends to verify the volume on a search term. It’s quite a useful tool. If you personally know the search volume for one keyword you can compare it against another. You just have to use a comma to do this and it can be done like in the image below.

The very first graph that I showed you in this keyword research guide was for a term that I personally know gets rougly 3600 searches each month. This allows you to create a base and judge it against the other graph. Here is an example below.

The red graph is my 3600/mth keyword term and blue is our “researched keyword”, which I also happen to rank for. As we can see, blue is just a little smaller on average than the red. It probably gets around 3000 searches a month. According to the keyword tool the blue graph is around 2900/mth and I rank for it. It gets about that.

Let’s take a look at another one.

Like before, the red is the 3600/mth base and blue is the “researched keyword”. As you can see for 2007 and part of 2008 the search volumes were about the same. Blue was probably getting about 4000/mth. But over the last year and half there has been a significant jump in the volume that is coming in. You might be thinking that the volume of this particular keyword is about 8000/mth now maybe 9000/mth. The keyword tool lists the keyword at 10,000/mth. I rank for it and I can verify that the number of searches are probably closer to 10k a month.

I can keep throwing graphs at you, but I think you get a relatively good idea of what you need to do.

Assessing WHERE the Traffic Comes From

Finishing off the keyword research guide can be done easy enough with trends. The last thing you want to know where the traffic is coming from and it should be consistent with the specific demographic you’re trageting.  If you don’t know who you’re targeting than you’re aiming for the United States. Something like the rave niche would probably be a more UK related niche. Understand? Most of the time you’ll be aiming for Americans unless it is a special niche.

Below the graph you’re going to see regions bar graph. It will list the top 10 countries where searches originate. Very simple stuff people.

Here is what a good demographic will look like:

You have the United States first and primarily Western countries in the rank. Don’t worry if you have Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom coming in first. They’re all pretty similar when it comes to a credit card.

Here is what a bad demographic will look like:

Most of the searches are coming from Nigeria. How many big spenders do you think come from the top 3? Not many. India will be a game changer in the future (a few decades), but they’re hardly the traffic to target right now. Unless, you’re targeting something specific to that audience.

I guess that is enough for the keyword research guide. I’ll add more to it if I think of it, but other than that it looks good to me. Should be enough to go on and start making cash.

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Make Cash Online Now With Niche Sites

I guess this is going to be my post that will update you on my sniper sites. It’s odd for me to be writing this on a Friday morning, but I’m just not feeling that good. I’m sick, but sorta sick. I started feeling it yesterday, but I was still able to pump out 30 articles, but I digress. I thought I should write this post and get something done while I’m not feeling that great.

Things have changed a lot. I currently have moved most of the sites to an Amazon based monetization. Currently I have 6 Adsense sites, 1 Clickbank site and 34 Amazon sites for this project right now. The thing about Adsense is that there is this thing called smart pricing. And it usually happens when Google doesn’t view your traffic as very valuable and just gives you shit for clicks.

Adsense was great at the first because my sites got a lot more search traffic at the first. When you’re in these tiny niches the Google dance doesn’t occur right away. I had sites that were hanging on the front page for nearly two months and then I was getting the dance, which pushed me way off the front pages.

I started to get smart priced and that wasn’t helping the sites that were still on the front page providing valuable clicks. A few days after I did this, my cash per clicks improved greatly and I was able to make cash online in a little more efficient manner.

Will I Change Sites Back to Adsense

Honestly, I don’t know. I can always switch back to Adsense when I’m getting more search traffic to the sites, which Google will view as quality. But the big hurdle for me is that I really have issues with Adsense as a business model. And I just can’t seem to get past it.

My mentor (who is an adult webmaster and who I talk to from time to time) told me to avoid Adsense because it is a “ripoff” as he put it.

I was reading Griz’s blog and he made the comment that Adsense was the best because it had the most people using it. That really isn’t an argument. Islam is the biggest religion, so should I stop being an atheist and convert to Islam.

Adsense is great for a certain type of site. The site that has a lot of content being added to it that comes from very diverse categories. Of course a news site is going to use the program because they need something that will target the content. The same is true for article directories. This is really the main reason why Adsense is a big program, but it doesn’t mean it is the best way to make cash online for you.

With niche sites or sniper sites, you know exactly what the hell to advertise. If I have a site on hair styling products than I already know what I’m going to have to advertise. It’s not rocket science. I could put Adsense on the site and get 50 cents a click, but is that worth it? If you actually look at the ads which come up (don’t click, type in the url manually), you’ll see that a product is being sold and that you could quite easily sell it yourself.

Let’s get right down to the facts. If someone is paying Google to show up in the ads, they’re going to want to turn a profit. If the ads are going to last for the long term than the advertiser has to be turning a profit. Google turns a profit no matter what and you get the rest of the click value. In this scenario you’re getting the short end of the stick. You can easily cut out the middle man and sell it yourself.

The big issue with Adsense is that it isn’t a business model based on value for value. It’s more like potential value for cash. There is more risk in that and I think the business model is flawed. That’s not to say you can’t make cash with a flawed business model.

You get paid for something that might not bring value. If someone clicks the ad and doesn’t buy, well, no value has been created, but you got paid. Since this is such an easy to abuse system (click on an ad) Google has to spend a lot man power watching over it. The integrity of the system is something that can knock off good people because value has to be created on both ends.

With Amazon, for example, I don’t make a single penny until someone buys. I don’t receive value until value is created for Amazon and that is the big difference. Amazon isn’t a wrecking machine trying to ban members because it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re not doing anything illegal, it really doesn’t matter. Because you can’t defraud the system. Someone has to buy and if they don’t buy, you don’t get shit.

That was sort of an aside on Adsense. I’ve been thinking about it lately and I’m just not thrilled with it. I’ll still pursue it in a minor way since I want to be a little more diversified.

Making Cash Online With Niche Sites

Well, I guess I should get right down to the numbers on this. I actually haven’t even calculated it yet, with almost 900 words written in this post. I’m going calculate it now and write it below here.

Total Invested: $354.20 US
Total Return: $319.71 US

It’s fast approaching the break even mark. I know that I’m not making any huge strides or anything with them, but I haven’t really done much work on them lately. I just got them up, built a few links to them and mainly let them site for a while. I’m making more with Amazon this month than Adsense, which is nice.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been going into a more aggressive mode getting backlinks for these sites. And with 41 of them, it is really time consuming to get through them. I’ve been able to write 15 articles each for 17 of the sites (that’s 255 articles).

I’m basically in the crunch time right now where I want to get the sites up as high as I can for Christmas that is fast approaching. One of my sites is Thanksgiving related and it’s the first time that I built a site completely for one holiday. I wasn’t able to get the site anywhere near the front page for its main keyword by the time Thanksgiving in the United States rolled around (which was yesterday). But the interesting thing is the amount of long tail searches that I got during that time. That is all important search behavior that I can target more aggressively next year, so I will make cash online in much bigger numbers.

Site News Side Note: I thought I’d jam a little site news into the end of this post. If you actually read these posts you’ll probably see it… if not, I don’t care.

I try to write a post once a week for this site. I’ve been trying to see how valuable writing these monster posts on making cash would work out, but monster posts only go so far. I need to do a lot of link building. This site isn’t monetized, so it isn’t a priority to do work for. I have a ton of other sites that need work and they actually make me money.

I usually spend an hour or two writing these posts, so I thought instead of writing them I’ll just build backlinks. That means I’m not going to be updating the site with new posts every week. I’m probably going to stop for a month or two and get some backlink work done. We’ll be able to see the real value in all these long posts when I get it done.

FYI: If you’re planning on linking to this site, try to use some sort of long tail of Make Cash Online. You can use how to make cash online copywriting, make cash online with sniper sites, etc.

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Make Cash Online Selling Benefits

I thought it would be nice to do another post on copywriting and selling stuff. I seem to get more long tail traffic related to this sort of subject manner, than the other affiliate marketing stuff that I talk about. I am meaning to do a post on my sniper sites. It has been a while since I talked about them, and you guys really do need an update on them. But for now I’m going to continue on with copywriting talk.

A big problem that people run into when they’re selling is that they’re trying to sell a product. It seems a bit odd, considering that your goal is to sell a product. You’re not going to make any money if you don’t have people taking out their credit cards and buying. But there is a difference between what people actually buy and what you’re selling.

Let’s say that you go to Walmart and buy a bed side lamp. What you bought was a bed side lamp, but that isn’t what sold you. You didn’t buy a lamp because it is a lamp. No one buys anything because that is what it is. You don’t buy televisions because their televisions. You don’t buy for that reason because it is not a benefit.

You end up buying a bed side lamp because it provides light. It allows you to read while you’re lying in bed. You buy a television, so you can be entertained with great shows or movies. You are buying for the benefit, not for what is being sold.

This may sound a little convoluted, but it’s important. You don’t sell a product. You sell benefits a customer can derive from a product.

For main regular things that we buy, we don’t really need to be told the benefits because we already know them. We already know chocolate chip cookies at the grocery store taste good. We know that benefit. But for affiliate marketers, we are less likely to be put in this situation.

It’s All About the Customer

As a marketer, you’re in a constant battle to understand your customer. The best marketers in the world are very good at knowing them. I don’t give a shit how you do it, but you have to figure out the people that are going to buy whipping out their credit card for you.

I’m an affiliate marketer (I don’t like the term internet marketer) and I can figure out customers in a pretty good way if I was selling something related to that niche. I remember starting out and what I was doing. I remember busting my balls each day doing things, without even knowing if I would make a penny at it. I went 23 days of working full time before I made my very first sale online.

But if you’re in a niche that you really don’t understand than you have to do the research if you expect to make cash online. And the reason that you really need to dig deep down into your potential customer is because you’ll never know exactly what they want to hear. You may think you know what they want, but unless you’re living it, you don’t know.

Let’s take my latest product that I’m still playing with and testing. I have some interesting asides to add to this, after I make my point. I made my sales letter and I came out with something decent. It needs work, but I am making sales and it’s not a total dud. Trust me, making sales shows that you’re on the right track. Making no sales is dud.

I haven’t tested this yet, but it appears to be the case. I came at my customer from a very logical point of view. I was appealing to their logic and providing benefits in that way. I shouldn’t be doing that, but I still have to test it. I have to appeal to them on a different level. I’m going to be working on my 5th edit and trying to hit up a much more emotional impact on the reader.

I don’t want to go into detail about the niche until I release it, but I want my customer to have their adrenalin pumping and getting excited, not logically intrigued. Logically intrigued as been getting me sales though. In November, I’m converting at a much more respectful1:75. And that’s without any changes to the sales letter from the previous month, so it’s hard to figure it out.

My Aside on my product: Things have been getting a little more exciting. I’ve been getting more sales over the last week now, which is nice. But it looks like the niche I’m in is much more hungry than I thought.

First, I had someone contact me from a newspaper/magazine in my niche. A reporter was looking to get information on my niche. Considering that I’ve done absolutely no backlink building, I’m being viewed as an authority. I don’t know how big this newspaper/magazine is, but obviously big enough to hire reporters. I haven’t got to talk to them since the original request, so I’m not sure if they’re looking for information on the niche or if I’m possibly going to get a plug for my site.

Second, I got contacted yet again. But this time it was about the other site that ended their affiliate program and took my money. This person wanted help in tracking down information about the other owner because he was going to launch a copyright suit against him. Yes, the asshole that stole my money, also stole his product from this guy. And I want to point out that this guy isn’t an internet marketer. He has a legit business that deals with this niche.

So justice could be on the horizon. My main competitor (and scam artist) could be eliminated through legal means. Sweet. This is the big news and it is pretty exciting.

Okay, back to how to make cash online copywriting.

Customers Only Want to Know What is in it for them

A potential customer that is going to come and read your copy only cares about himself (or herself). When I read a page, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think or how good you are. It means nothing to me as some guy on your website.

…but if you’re an expert, doesn’t that make it easier to sell?

Absolutely, but that comes later. I have to know what is in it for me before I give a shit whether you’re Doctor King Shit or Affiliate Marketing Millionaire.

When someone lands on your sales page, assume that they don’t know what the fuck they’re here for. Telling them you’re Dr. King Shit doesn’t matter to them at first. Let’s say that you’re flipping through the channels on TV and you come to a station and stop for a second. “Hi, I’m Dr. King Shit and I have six medical degrees from the University of ” *click* Off to the next channel.

When you have authority like being a doctor, it will really help you sell medical related stuff. But no one is ever going to buy unless they know about the benefits. Instead of telling them that you’re Dr. King Shit, tell them the benefits.

“Imagine never having to see a single blemish on your face again. In just 30 days you can be completely cured from Acne for good,” and this can go on for a bit.

You have to view it from the point of the view of the customer. When they’re first on the site, they want to know what is it in for them – not who you are. You want the person reading to say “Hmmm, this sounds really good, but how do I know that you can help me.” Bam, Dr. King Shit enters the sales letter and reassures the customer that he/she is the real deal and has the knowledge to provide the benefit.

But that is the difference I’m talking about. Everything is about the benefit, even when the reader is told about you being Dr. King Shit. So here is what you have to take out of this whole thing…

You’re selling a benefit and the product is the answer

So let’s spend a little time talking about persuasion. I want to get right into the details about the key elements of persuasion. I’ve talked about persuasive verbs, but we really need to get down to the actual psychology of the whole thing. All of these points come out of the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It is a great read.

  • Reciprocation
  • Commitment and Consistency
  • Social Proof
  • Liking
  • Authority
  • Scarcity

I’ll give you a little breakdown of all these points because they’re important. You’ve probably seen some of these on sales pages. You should try to implement these too when you’re trying to sell.

Reciprocation

I guess the best way I could sum up this particular point, is that you want to create a feeling of debt in the mind of the reader. You want them to feel in debt to you. Psychologically we are driven to always even things up. If I buy you lunch at work, you’ll feel in debt to me. You’ll want to buy my lunch to even things up. But you can be pushed easily into doing things. I could spend $5 on lunch and I could easily suck more out of you if I recognize that you feel in debt to me.

You may have seen some sales pages that offer part of their product for free. Granted they’ll ask you to opt into a mailing list, but they’re going to give you something absolutely for free. This creates a feeling of debt in their mind and can be later persuaded to buy.

Commitment and Consistency

This can be best summed up as you give an inch and they take a mile. If you can get someone to hold a small position, than you can push them further and further over time. You can change the way they feel about things. This is something that requires the book to do some studying on it. It’s a little more complicated. So if you view yourself as a charitable person, than if someone positions themselves in a way where they need charity, you’ll probably give them money.

The example in the book on this subject is very interesting. He talked about the Korean War and Chinese POW camps. Americans that were in these camps actually started hating America and still hate the country to this date. And the Chinese did it through commitment and consistency. They’d have Americans write essays just asking them to write one bad thing about America and they literally exploited the hell out of it. It’s interesting stuff.

Social Proof

This is the most common thing you see and it is just a testimonial. People are sheepish in nature. You may think you’re independent, but you’re still internally wired to want to know what other people are doing. Have you ever been watching someone on a stage and they say something that could possibly funny, but you look around to wait for someone else to laugh? That is social proof. If you identify with person A. Person A bought this product and had success. You’ll feel more likely to buy.

Let’s say that you’re a nerd that can’t get a date. If the testimonials are all of nerds. You’ll identify with them. You’ll see their success and you’ll think that you can accomplish it too.

Authority

If you’re Dr. King Shit than you can probably sell any medical related product you want. I think this is pretty self explanatory.

Liking

This has to do with your likability as a seller. We’re more likely to buy from people that we like. I thought the example listed in this book was the best. Women are known to be the ones that have Tupperware parties. So you go over to your friends house, you talk, eat food, etc and then you’re sold stuff. All the women that go over to it know that they’re going to be sold something and they still go (and buy).

You’re more likely to buy from someone that you like. Guys will buy from very beautiful women. Friends will have difficulty saying no to their friends.

Scarcity

This is a way of limiting something and the idea is to force someone to ACT NOW to buy the product. As a marketer, you need them to BUY IT RIGHT NOW!!!! You can’t afford to let them go. You don’t tell them to sit down and think about it. When you give them time, they’ll come down and the emotional pull will be gone.

You want people to feel the benefit and feel a loss if they don’t act right now. It’s like the Shamwow infomercials on television. If you buy in the next 10 minutes, you’ll get two additional Shamwow’s absolutely free. You can call in anytime you want, you’re getting the two free, but they tell you that to make you want to buy. It puts pressure on your mind. “I better act now, or I might lose out on that good deal.” Ebooks are a little different. Scarcity is applied to the actual product or price. You may only limit the book to the first 50 customers, or your price might go up after the first 50 customers.

All of these points make up what it takes to persuade people. This is how you persuade with your copy and it is how you’ll make cash online. There is one other point I got from this book, but I can’t remember exactly what section it falls under. Probably falls under the Reciprocation category.

It is the concept of contrast. By nature, we are wired to compromise with other people. It’s basically what is needed for our survival as social creatures. The idea is that you can make things sound better through contrast. If you ask a friend if you can borrow $100 she’ll probably say no. But if you ask, how about $10? It’s a lot easier to give it because they’ve made a big step in asking less. Since they’ve made an attempt to compromise, you’ll want to do it too.

You should be able to see the power in such a thing. You’ll see this on sales letters where they list the price at $197, but they slash it out and say that it is $37 for a limited time. It’s a compromise and you’ll be more likely to act on it.

Another example, which I want to implement, is pricing through different packages. Let’s say that you can buy a living room chair for $299. But I also tell you that you can get the matching sofa for $649 and that you can get the chair and sofa together for $699. Contrast hits you. You’re going to go for the sofa and chair because it is the best deal. In fact, it’s a really good deal when you compare the prices. *Hint* that doesn’t mean the prices are logical to begin with. It’s the contrast that sells it.

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Stay Away from the Warrior Forum to Make Cash

Well, this is a post early in the week for once and I was actually motivated to post this one. There is just something about the Warrior Forum that you need to pay attention too because it is quite apparent. You’re going to see strategies (which blow and involve “bitch marketing”) and you’re going to hear about success stories. Hell you’ll see questions too. You’d think that is normal for a forum and I suppose it is.

Let me give you a good example. I was reading through a tread the other day on some success story. This guy talked about his “blah blah” method and what he was doing. After I got through the post I thought that it sounded pretty cool and I that I would give it a try. Guess what I see? Right in their signature it has a link to buy the “blah blah” method. I’m serious. I see this all the time.

I remember a while ago there was a thread on anti-article marketing by a person. It was several pages long and the OP mentioned something about making static RSS feeds. At the time, I wasn’t sure how to do those, so I asked a question about it in the thread. For whatever reason the OP missed the thread and it pushed onto the second page. I PMed this person and just asked them about it. Guess what the reply was? Buy my WSO on it.

Everyone on the Warrior Forum is selling. Everyone has an agenda and you need to aware of the information being fed to you. With that said, I’m not against making cash for your own methods. Do what you need to do to make money and stuff, but I know there is an agenda and it pisses me off.

Don’t get me wrong though, there are some good people there (few and far between), but you can usually tell the difference. The first is obviously these long drawn out posts that have no value. I can only describe them as Steve Pavlina posts. Just complete fluff that sounds nice, but contains absolutely no value.

This is the kind of stuff you have to watch out for. I just made a post called How to Make Cash Online Copywriting. Even though these forum posts appear to be regular posts, it fits into the elements of a sales letter. There is always some big explosive title like “How I made $100/day with one month of work” or something like that. You read it and the benefits are focused on. “It’s easy”, “saves time”, “get in the top 10 fast”, “get loads of traffic”, but the substance is missing. There really isn’t much about the method. Just how fuckin’ “uber elite” it works. And it is all topped off with a sig link.

You will also see the Warrior Forum flyer that just pops into threads related to their topic and basically talk about their method. Now, I know that I’m describing this in a way that makes it appear like this is blatant spam and that’s not what I’m talking about. They’re premium long time members of the forum and people that you would probably trust. They’ll just make long “fluff” posts that add no value, but sound nice. And it becomes even more difficult to think about what is right when every shit brain member praises them for the “amazing post”.

I’m a member of the War Room at the Warrior Forum and it isn’t too bad. There are some interesting things in that forum, but there is another aspect of it. It’s basically list building up sell central. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few things listed in there that are cool, but for the most part you’re getting teaser information or methods that are a bit old.

Oh I just got a PM about something. I guess I’ll talk about the topic. It was about Article Spinners and I was curious about how you can write articles with a 70% uniqueness. Well, of course someone highly promoting the idea of it is someone that is plugging their own program. The traditional spinners use {} syntax. It works like this:

I {like|enjoy} to {walk|drive|hitchhike} to the {mall|store}.

Essentially it randomizes the entire sequence of words, so the sentences are different. Well this guy says that the {} syntax is shit and he give me a promo video for his product to watch how he does it. He has a system that is just like it, except it doesn’t use {} syntax. It just has some other syntax and made in such a way that it actually slows you down when you’re writing.

But this guy has a kicker, he just uses paragraphs and spins entire paragraphs around.  It’s ridiculous and just stupid. You only get so many variations of the article (which are essentially unique because you wrote them) and then you’re just using copied paragraphs which I’m sure Google sees.

I’m more interested in recursive {} syntax and do it at a much more micro level, so that it is spun and you get that 70% unique rate. I’m probably going to do a post on this later though.

I just found this funny. Absolute joke on this guys part. His product is nothing more than the {} syntax he called “crap” and it is built in a less efficient way. Plus his method is all about swapping (not spinning) paragraphs. Which you can do on your own and don’t need to purchase this asshole’s product. But this is a prime example of how people are biased and lying to make cash on the forum. They’re not going to tell you the truth. They’re just trying to sell you crap. And they’re hoping you’re too dumb to fall for it.

This is just so ridiculous. I’m literally laughing at the stupidity of this video and this moron on the Warrior Forum. While I was dicking around with the crappy {} syntax I have an article up to around 70% uniqueness. I’ll be able to produce 50 copies of it at that rate and Google probably won’t even be able to tell the difference.

What a fuckwad. Stay away from the warrior forum if you want to make cash online. It is something that is going to full you with bitch work and bitch ideas that are really people selling your some bullshit.

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How to Make Cash Online Copywriting

I thought it was about time that I sat down and did another post on copywriting. Like I mentioned in the previous post I did, my copywriting post is by far the most popular with Google. That’s not to say that it gets a lot of traffic, but it seems to be viewed as a good thing with Google. When I run a site: command at G for my site, it actually comes up first. Usually your root site will come up, but not in this case. Here is the Copywriting, Persuasion and Active Verbs post.

What is Copywriting?

Take notice that the word is writing and not righting. We’re not talking about intellectual property rights here. Copywriting is the ability to write persuasively. Fundamentally it is your ability to use words to sell things. This is very important for marketing. If you’re trying to make cash online with Adsense than you really don’t need to know how to do any of this stuff. The goal of Adsense is to let someone else click and that’s how you get your money.

You can make cash with Adsense, but I’m yet to be convinced it is the best route to go. You have to accept the fact that the page people click through too is selling something. If the business that buys the ads are continuously doing it, than they’re turning a profit. I find this quite annoying because you’re getting squeezed.

When you step away from Adsense and try to make cash from home with affiliate marketing, the game changes. You don’t have to write useful content anymore. It’s bullshit. Google can’t tell whether you’re writing quality informative content or if you’re writing persuasively to sell something. The SEO value is still there, but you’re putting yourself into the position of turning more profit.

Pull on their Emotions, not their Sensibilities

The problem with being a webmaster is that we’re really desensitized to marketing. Well, if you’re an Adsense type of guy, you might not, but I’m pretty desensitized to it. What we end up thinking is that logic will inevitably win them over. And I know I make that mistake. My current sales letter for the new product I’m testing out is sort of on the logical side. It’s converting now at about 1:150. It’s not anywhere near where I want it to be, but not a total bomb.

You’re going to get people to buy on a logical level, but emotional has a bigger impact. It just hits you differently. You feel it deep down in your stomach and it hits you differently.

Let’s say that you’re going to sell a career to someone. You can say that you’ll make $50k/year. You’ll get full medical, dental and a beefed pension. You’ll get plenty of unemployed people that would want that. But that is logical and it’s a little different. Most customers aren’t like that though. Staying in their comfort zone is a lot easier and they’re more likely to do it.

Let’s say that you were going to sell a career to someone that already had a career. They get similar benefits and pay, so how would you sell this new career now? The logical approach isn’t going to sell this person, so you have to reach and think on an emotional level. What are some of the emotionally good things that this person would be doing in this career. If it was a job with the police force than they’d be hunting down criminals, kicking in doors, shooting, etc. It would be an adrenalin pumping type experience.

You have to bring that to your niche because that is what sells. There is a very good saying in copywriting that goes along the lines of “you’ll buy for emotional reasons and rationalize it later”. What that means is that you’ll pull out your credit card for the adrenalin pumping experience, but you’ll later rationalize it in a calm state as a secure job, with good benefits, etc.

There is another aspect of copywriting that I should of went into first…

Benefits and Features

This is about the biggest breakdown for most people trying to sell. Customers buy for the benefits, not for the features. If you want to make cash online you have to sell the benefits to people.

Let’s say I’m an average car owner. I don’t know much about cars, but I know I need winter tires. Telling me that you have 15 inch studded tires, doesn’t tell me shit. That doesn’t help me.  As an average stupid car owner, I really don’t know why I need to know the inches of the tire. Most people aren’t going to know that they have 14 or 15 inch rims and need a specific sized tire.

You may think that studded tires is a benefit, but it really is a feature. The benefit of studded tires is that you can stop on a dime while driving on ice. Don’t ever assume that the person you’re selling to is going to make that connection. If your customer has to figure something out, they’re probably not going to buy. Even if they do figure out that benefit they’re not necessarily going to buy because you don’t really get the same emotional response that way.

Make sure you spell this out to your customer. Just keep it simple and say it. You don’t have to leave out the feature, but if you’re going to list the feature you should at least say the benefit too. “Studded tires will allow you to stop on a dime while driving on ice.” Bam, Done!

But you also have to know who your customer is. Depending on your customer a feature could be a benefit. If you’re selling computers to high tech computer geeks, telling them that the computer is “really really fast” isn’t going to help them. Saying a “3.5 GHz Dual Core Processor” would be a benefit to them because that’s a fuckin’ powerful computer.

There are still benefits to be sold though. I keep thinking of people that build up cars for racing. Like street racing. It’s like the amateur person, but they know a lot about cars. They know a lot, but the benefit you’re selling is speed. It doesn’t matter if they’re buying nitro or if you have a new way of keeping the engine cooler. They want speed. They want to drive around at 150mph and kill themselves. Give them what they want.

Conceptual or Tangible Selling

There was a great video of Eben Pagan that I saw. Eben Pagan is the David Deangelo guy. He got famous because of his Double Your Dating brand. He was in that whole Pick up Artist, Getting Laid, etc sort of niche, but it actually launched him into marketing and things like that. When I first heard of him (David Deangelo) I heard that he was a brilliant marketer and that’s what he is.

This is a really good video. Just take note that the guy asking the question is a fuckin’ idiot and I don’t think he’s even listening half the time. He doesn’t even answer the questions directly.

Eben makes the good copywriting point here because you have to sell something tangible. People aren’t going to buy conceptual ideas. You have to dig deep into the mind of a potential customer and figure out that exact emotional trigger and tangibly hit it. In a later post, I’m going to go into what the emotional triggers, so for now I’ll just leave them out. But let’s look at a few examples. Which one is more exciting to you.

“Financial Security” or “$100,000 in Cash”

Definitely the cash. I think we all want financial security, but it is only a concept. It’s not tangible or anything along those lines. The way it is thrown around today it is literally a cliche. What is financial security? When you boil it right down to the root of it, it’s just money. Selling money to people is a good place to start because GREED is one of the emotional triggers. I said I wouldn’t get into the triggers, but that’s one to illustrate the point.

“Be An Amazing Investor” or “Earn $1000 A Week in the Stock Market With No Risk”

It should be obvious which one is going to sell. We all want to be amazing investors, but just because you say it doesn’t mean that I’m going to feel it and want to buy it. It is the tangible that I can see. Making a $1000 a week, with no risk. Fuck, sign me up now.

“How to be a Good Hockey Player” or “Discover the Triple Deke the Scores Every Time”

This is hockey reference and since I’m Canadian, you guys might not get it. A deke is when you stick handle in such a way where you can trick the goalie score. It’s used in penalty shots and shootouts.  Being a good hockey player is abstract.  If I wanted to know how to be a good hockey player, I would be looking for specific things. I want to know how to skate faster or score more goals.

This is a very big part of copywriting. If you want to make cash online you have to understand the difference between the conceptual idea and the tangible. The reason that conceptual is such a problem is because people think they’re clever when they use it. Financial Security sounds like a good idea. Who doesn’t want to have financial security? It sounds nice, but you’re not here to sound nice. If you’re copywriting your goal is to make sales, ie: make cash. You’re not here to wow the reader. Only wow them to sale.

Financial Security doesn’t get my engine revving. Making fifty grand on autopilot every year gets me all revved up.

Grab Attention

If you haven’t already noticed, sales letters really fuckin’ long. But if you want to make cash online copywriting than you need to understand that they work. A big rule of copywriting is to make sure that you make it nice and easy. You want to make sure that the reader doesn’t have to work. It seems sort of counter intuitive to have a long sales letter because the prospect has to work hard to read.

You have to get their attention and hold it. This is sometimes difficult. Don’t expect to sit down one day and start writing persuasive copy. It’s something that you’re going work at, test out, come back to later and edit. The product I’m testing out now is currently on it’s 4th copy to convert at 1:150. It can take up to 8 rough copies before you get somewhere with it.

The headline is the most important thing to grab attention because they’re not reading if you don’t get their attention. Here’s a way of looking at it. I come to a page and there is a lot of fucking text to read. Why should I? Your headline should be able to answer the question. It has to contain the most powerful benefit you’re selling to me because that is the only way I’m going to even try and read this monster letter.

But you also need those powerful subheadings throughout the letter too because we have to face the facts. Not everyone is going to read the letter word for word. They’re going to skim through it and see what they like (or don’t like). You need those headings to suck them into the copy.

It is a big part of copywriting. You’d be surprised how many people just tweak the headline at the top of the page and their conversion rate doubles. The reason is probably because their copy isn’t that bad. It’s probably pretty persuasive, but their headline wasn’t sucking them in to read the persuasive copy. That is how a simple change in the headline can help you make cash and make a lot more it.

Persuasion is a Soft Science

I come from the realm of hard science. That is the subjects of physics and chemistry. The answers are exact and to the point. Gravity is 9.8m/s on Earth and nothing changes that. Persuasion is a branch of psychology and that is a soft science. There is no exact or necessarily a right way of doing things. Somethings work and others don’t. Sometimes going against the rules can help you make cash, while following the rules can lead to failure. It’s one of those odd things because we’re playing with psychology.

When you see the link for Christine Taylor’s tight ass, do you want to click? Are those 4 words persuasive for you? What about Casey Cartwright ass? For me, it is less persuasive than tight ass, but it’s not a science.

Even though I brought in those links, which was for more of a SEO experiment then anything, the point is that you have to test things out. You have to play with. You have to throw things out there and see what happens. You still have to hit up those emotional points, but identifying them is difficult. Think of it this way, how can you identify these emotional points if you couldn’t even identify them in yourself?  You have to understand the fears, goals, desires, wants, hates, etc in your current prospects and it can be hard to figure this out. Often people aren’t willing to share things with you.

Here is an example: making cash. Investing to make cash you would assume that the prospect would be interested in money and making it. Certainly they are, but is that the big emotional trigger?

When I think of investing in the stock market, the idea of making cash from my investments sounds awesome. It is an exciting feeling, but I can also think of another powerful feeling. One that is a lot more powerful. The feeling is losing my money. If I take 10 grand and invest into a company lose it all. Holy fuck. That scares the crap out of me. I know there is a lot of people out there that feel the same way.

The fear of loss can often be more powerful feeling then gaining something. As a copywriter you should be thinking about those things because you never really know what a person wants. They might not even be interested in gaining money, more then they want to not lose money.

SEO Copywriting

This has been a hot topic in copywriting that many people have been discussing. We all understand that SEO is very important. It is by far the most important thing (on page) that you can do to get traffic from search engines. The real debate comes from the perspective of persuasion. Does SEO copywriting diminish your ability to be persuasive? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer and I’m guessing that a lot of copywriters don’t have an answer.

SEO is important and Persuasion is important. I suppose the copywriter has to find a balance. I’m going to say that balance to should fall toward persuasion since that is the most important thing. You  have to make sure that you’re able to sell and if you can work the keyword in normal conversation then you should be fine.

But let’s make no mistake, links play the bigger role in search traffic. I have a site that ranks for niche name remedies and I don’t even have the term remedies on the page. In fact I show up in the top ten when you search “niche name remedies” in quotes. It’s like Google doesn’t even give a fuck anymore about that type of query.

So How do you learn Copywriting?

I guess this is the question that will help you make cash online. I don’t know if there is necessarily a method to explain this. I fall under the category of learn by doing. And I suspect this is the best way for all people to go. You can read and read all day, but all you’re reading is ideas on persuasion and putting them into practice is a little different. Everything needs to be changed to your potential customers and that is can be tough.

It’s something that will require your attention and it will evolve over time. If you play with it, you can learn. You see what is working and what isn’t. And it really is the best way to go, at least for me. I’m currently have a bunch of copywriting books to finish reading and I’m currently on the second book (Cash Copy). The thing is that it always takes many edits and changes to your sales letter to make it work the best. And even when it is going good you still tweak it to try and get a little more out of it.

You build a sales letter for something. Grab something off of Amazon and try to be persuasive. You don’t necessarily have to write a long letter. The length of the letter is typically designed to meet how much you’re selling it for. Selling light bulbs for $1.50 isn’t going to require a huge sales letter.

Just build that sales letter for something and drive traffic to it. Remember to focus benefits over features like I mentioned above. Start learning and reading as much as you can on the subject and apply it. Seriously hang out at copywriting forums. All the douchebags hang out in the internet marketing forums, but copywriter forums are much different. You can learn a lot just by reading the threads. Read the critique requests. This is where you get to see a sales letter and watch professionals dissect it.

This is a really good skill to learn. If you want to make cash online or even make cash anywhere, you have to know how to be persuasive to sell the product. This skill can take you a lot of places. You can do a lot with it. I know that businesses like to work with people that can write persuasively.

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Make Cash Online With Link Networks

Up until now, all my sites have been completely independent entities. This means that none of them touched each other. None of them linked to each other. Every time I got a new site, I would find new links for it and continue to build them. It’s not something necessarily wrong because I have made cash doing it, but it’s a huge pain in the ass. I’ve been reading Griz’s blog lately at Make Money Online. Plus I’m also a reader of Blue Hat SEO, which is a pretty advanced blog. I’d have to say that the average reader of that blog has themselves a dedicated server.

I first heard about building a network on the blue hat site and it seemed a little advanced the time that I read it (a while ago). But both these sites claim that if you want to rank for pretty competitive terms than you’re going to need a network. Or in other words, a link farm or blog farm. I sort of discounted this since I was content for ranking with the less competitive terms, but with a network it would be a hell of lot less work.

So basically, I’m going to try to build my own link network. I want to know how to make cash online with a link network and I’m starting to put that together. It really isn’t that complicated of an idea, even though the blue hat instructions can be a bit daunting. But the point is to get a lot of stuff out there on the internet. It doesn’t matter what. Big sites, little sites, niche sites, authority sites, blogger blogs, squidoo lens, etc etc etc.

This is going to take some time for it to generate cash online because it’s a  very complex thing. I’m hoping it doesn’t take too long though. While I’m walking you through this post on link networks, I’m going to spend a little time stuffing a lot of different keywords in here. Related keywords of course.

I was going through some of my old shit that I normally just left. I have some 2 year old squidoo lenses and other old stuff. I think I have a ton of old hubpages too. I guess I’ll have to dig into those too. I noticed some of the squidoo lenses had a little PR in them. Mainly PR1. They’re not great, but every little piece of link juice helps. The idea is that I put up a new site, send a lot of these links to my site and I rocket up the search engines to make cash fast.

The idea behind building this is to incorporate it into my regular site work. I don’t think there is much value in just making these sites without immediate benefit. Let’s say I’m working on a “Make Cash” site. I might as well set up networks of make cash sites. I can pick up a few domains. Pick up a blogger, tumblr, wordpress, weebly or whatever other free blog service. I start building them up. I build links to them, which will be daunting, but I at least get some benefit for my site. While I’m making cash online doing my regular thing I’ll have the chance to build my network.

I’m not sure I can talk anymore about link networks because I really have to build it before I know more about it. So I’ll leave it at that. Since I’m under 600 words at this point I’m going to talk about this site.

How to Make Extra Cash

Yes, that is a completely unrelated to what I’m talking about, except for the fact that I’m targeting the keyword make cash. It doesn’t get a lot of searches, but I thought why not. I haven’t done any link building for this site and I really need to sit down and do it. I want to let the keywords I get now to guide me.

I’m getting absolutely nothing in the way of long tail keywords for anything related to making money or cash. It’s odd. There are only two pages on this entire site (at least blog.amxpert.com) that are getting long tail traffic with no backlinks: Michael Jones Scam and my Copywriting post. In particular, with the copywriting post they have been interested in persuasive verbs. There have been a few active verb interests as well. I was ranking in position 10 for the term at Google, but I’ve slipped off the front page. The keyword says that it gets 58 searches a month. Sorry to say that it gets more. Not a ton, but if I’m getting traffic in position 10 than it must be getting something.

I don’t know. Maybe I should talk about copywriting and writing persuasive copy. I don’t know. I’m still not good at that, but it seems to be a less saturated niche. Oh. I just looked. I had one keyword related to the site: make cash online selling sit back. Not the most common terms and I’m no longer ranked for it. I also get some related traffic for sniper sites, so that is good at least.

I’ve noticed this important thing on some sites and not 0n other sites I’ve own. And I think Griz put the word to what I was seeing. Google doesn’t care about your keyword on the page, but relevance of it. For example, I have a post where I talk about Christine Taylor’s tight ass. I’m the only site on the net that has that exact phrase on their site, but I don’t rank for it. It comes down to the fact that it isn’t relevant to the rest of this site. In the same post I mentioned the phrase Casey Cartwright ass, which hasn’t been phrased on the internet and my site doesn’t rank.

I need to build up a foundation of good keywords that are related to the content of this site. My main keyword is “make cash”, so let’s derive a list of relevant keywords that I could use.

make cash

make cash online

how to make cash

how to make cash online

how to make cash online with prostitutes

how to make cash online with midget prostitutes

how to make cash online with midget prostitutes with an amputee leg

I’m getting off base there, but you get the idea that you can come up with all this shit in your niche. The idea is that I want to write a long post today and stuff a lot of those keywords into the content. I just want to see if Google sends some some traffic for it. It’s just like the persuasive verbs keyword because I got a little traffic for it before it disappeared off the front page of Google. There could be value in that.

My Clickbank sucks site ranks first for that keyword. I didn’t go out and build links for it or anything. I just kept talking about how much Clickbank sucks. I’m not saying it is hard to rank for, but relevancy plays a role. After a while Google pieces together what the site is about. Especially the fuck you Clickbank (yes, I rank top for that too). Maybe this little test in relevancy will see me ranking for midget prostitutes with an amputee leg or something. Time for me to link back to the first page of this site with my proper keyword anchor text Make Cash Online.

I tried to Make Quick Cash Thursday

I flipped on the news the other day and say the fort hood shooting thing. Instantly I thought about how I could make cash today doing this. I immediately pumped up a site and started building it. It took forever for the damn thing to index, but it eventually did. I made several pages of content on the site for it focusing on some main keywords like “fort hood shooting”. I wanted to try this to see how much traffic I could catch. Even if I wouldn’t rank for the main keyword, I was bound to pick up some long tail traffic. I didn’t have any monetized stuff up on it cause I was just testing.

Even if it was monetized I wouldn’t of been able to make cash from home with it because no one came to the site. I didn’t get any long tail traffic for some reason. Nadda. I’m thinking that if you want to capitalize on that trends stuff you’re going to need a site that already has authority to begin with. I know the time I was waiting for it to get ranked ate up a lot of the traffic. It just didn’t have any kick in the search engines. I thought since it was a new item Google would be more in the position too index things faster. Who knows.

I heard trends can send you a lot of a traffic, but it’s hard to monetize. A musician dying would be easy though. Imagine creating a site when Michael Jackson died and put up links to his music. Man, you would of been able to make extra cash online. Like a lot of it.

Okay where am I at:

  • Talked about Link Networks – Check
  • Talked about Christine Taylor’s tight ass and Casey Cartwright ass – Check
  • Talked about midget prostitutes with amputee legs – Check
  • Talked about how to make cash – Check
  • Talked about fort hood shooting – Check

I still have to go because my list of keywords is still at about 15 keywords left, so I’m going to have to figure this out. What else could I talk about? Oh I see…

How to Make Extra Cash

Let’s say that some of your higher income sites are tanking. Maybe they got penalized, for whatever reason, and are moved down the ranks of the big G. Maybe your offer, product or Adsense CTR isn’t what it used to be and you’re coming in a little short for the month. What do you do? I think it is important to not dip into your savings when you’re in this type of position. I have savings and I hope you’re saving some of your online earnings. You never know when things might go to shit and the last thing you want to do is end up at some shitty fuckin’ job making ends meet.

Freelance work is the answer to this. You can do practically anything, so don’t get the idea of going into doing writing work to make easy cash because you’re going to run into some fuckwads that will want to low ball you. They’ll want you to cut your price down and they just want more and more from you. The only good customers that I had were the ones that were paying a premium. Period.

There’s all sorts of shit that people need done, so you don’t have to limit yourself to this type of shit. You don’t even have to look on the internet for clients. Local businesses will pay you big money for something you find absolutely easy. Remember how I said a friend and myself made a certain site for a sports league. Well, we’re not in the business of web design or anything like that. We coded out this site and we want to sell it again and again to other leagues. Here’s the funny thing. Our first client told another guy. He doesn’t want our sports league software. He wants his own static site. Here’s the kicker… he’s willing to throw down a $100/mth on the hosting/maintenance costs. And yes, we’ll take a grand from him up front too. Businesses have money, so sell something to them.

Just think of how much money that is guys. And it’s easy cash generation. Let’s say you’re running a little short for the month. You could easily pick up an extra grand and a recurring income. Even if you didn’t need the money you could go out and make cash now. It’s not like you need to hear yes from all businesses. You could send out a flyer to hundreds of these businesses and just one has to buy. You can do more though. You could design restaurant menus, brochures, business cards, etc. It’s insane the shit that you could be selling to a business to make cash at home as a freelancer.

But I guess we are webmasters and in the business of making easy cash online, instead of in the real world. I would never forget such things though. Making cash online doesn’t have to be hard for a freelancer, but you have to accept the fact that you’re competing with more people than you would with locally. Not to mention the fact that you have to compete with someone in India that can survive on $2/day, whereas you’re going to need a lot more than that.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s not to be a bitch. Don’t compete on price – compete on value. People that want cheap prices will only demand more and they’ll be bigger pricks to you too.  A lot of people think that if they want to get cash online then they’re just going to have to put up with them.  It’s your headache.

Hmmm, 6 keywords left. Bah Forget it. It’s enough for now. Toddles!

Wait, I should probably end on some sort of football video since I’m playing fantasy football. Last week the Falcons took on the Saints. Some of my best players are on both teams. You can watch Michael Turner with some great runs, Pierre Thomas with some great runs and Roddy White making some catches.

Filed in Make Cash Online | | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to Make Cash Online by Screwing EZA

I suppose you could call this a continuation in what will be a series of screw EZA posts. I know that a lot of you hate being dependent on Ezinearticles and I feel the same way. But why not take advantage of it? There is such a huge advantage here to make cash online taking advantage of what this directory makes public. With the amount of information that this directory shares I can’t believe there aren’t people that use.

I’m sure this has happened to a lot of you. You go to Google’s keyword tool and do a little keyword research. You find a great keyword and decide that you’re going to rank for it. You buy a keyword rich domain, write content for it and build links over several months. One day in the future you’re checking on the progress of the site and you see that you finally pushed into the top 10. You take a peak at your stats and notice you’re not getting much traffic for your keyword. So you head back to the keyword tool and check the traffic volume. What do you see? A low number like a 1000/month.

The problem is that these keyword tools aren’t necessarily accurate. Sure they can be extremely accurate and other times they’re not. The only way you can get the real numbers is to rank for them and see what comes in. That really isn’t a good answer for us that are looking to make cash from as many sites as we can.

This is where EZA can help us. EZA is an authority site and that allows articles to rank very high for no backlinks. The odd thing is that EZA actually shares the view count at the end of each article. This tells us exactly how much traffic an article gets. Most people that write for directories understand the concept of keywords and using them, so you can reverse engineer articles.

EZA ranks in the top 10 for these articles, but it isn’t a strong ranking. I laugh anytime I see an article directory in the top 10. Seriously, you should be laughing too because you can easily outrank it. This is what I mean. Why be a bitch to EZA writing all the time for them, when you can just reverse engineer all the articles on their site and take it.

I have to admit that today I wasn’t planning on posting on this subject. I made a post over at DP in a thread about someone banned from EZA. I said that this was the best thing that ever happened to them and that this directory was a crutch for most people. Some guy made a cocky one line reply like “yeah $5000 a month is a crutch” or something along those lines. I find that incredibly funny to post on a forum.

When I use the word “crutch” it refers to slowing you down making cash online. You can’t run if you have crutches, but it doesn’t suggest that you can get to places. But it’s still a crutch even if you make $5000/mth passively. And I’ll prove it.

If you’re making $5000/mth article marketing we have to stipulate a few things.

  1. You’re writing a shit load of articles each and everyday OR
  2. You have a lot of articles ranking in Google pulling traffic

If you’re in category 1 than you’re just doing bum marketing. It’s not different then doing double shifts at McDonald’s everyday. I’m sure if employees were allowed to double shift everyday they’d make good money. I’ve already addressed this in my post titled the Biggest Mistake in Affiliate Marketing.

The second scenario is the one that I want to address for this post. The idea that the articles are getting a significant amount of search engine traffic and that is what makes a nice passive income. This is great and everything, but it disturbs me when people think that it is good. Here’s why:

EZA Articles Aren’t Strong

I know that the articles are going to rank in the top 10 with absolutely no keywords, but that happens only on keywords that are relatively weak to begin with. A little bit of work with your own site and you can out rank them. It’s not like the articles are invincible or something. Every time I see some sort of directory in the top 10, I laugh. I laugh because I know that I can rank for it with virtually no work.

It’s so damn easy that a keyword rich domain would be enough for you to get the top 10. A few backlinks and you’re golden. Obviously getting your site in the top 10 at Google is more important than EZA in the top 10 because …

EZA Only Gives You 30% of the Traffic

Gurus will tell you that a good respectable click through rate on your articles is 30%. In other words, 70% of the traffic goes to the directory for their profit. The CTR on your articles will generally fluctuate though, so it is hard to say. You may only get 10% on average.

If your site is in the top 10 getting the traffic than you’re getting 100% of the traffic. Hmmm, 30% vs 100%. I don’t know about you, but I prefer 100% of the traffic. If the 30% coming from EZA is helping you make five grand a month, than 100% would make you $16,667/mth. If you were looking how to make cash online, which would you prefer? I know, which one that I want.

I can hear the objections now…

But But But this is a lot easier than making new sites

That is true. It does take a lot more work to make a site and see if it works. You have to build links, make content, monetize it, etc. Well, if you’re writing articles you’re going to have to drive your traffic to something. Can you sell your articles VALUE (IE: ranking) on a directory? No. Can you sell your sites that are ranked? Yes. I suppose this is the difference between renting and buying.

I know the deal though. I get it. This is really how to make cash online for beginners and I agree with that. But that doesn’t make it right or something that you should continue doing. There is something that is a lot easier for beginners to use. Something that is much more accurate. Much more fun and makes much more money…

Reverse Engineering EZA

The people on EZA that are making a nice passive income of $5000/mth, I’m gunning for you. I’m literally gunning for you now. It’s nothing personal. It’s not unethical. It’s business and I’m taking you out. At this point you should know exactly what to do, but I understand some of you don’t know how to read between the lines. Here are the most important pieces of information I listed above…

  • EZA lists the number of views an article receives at the bottom of the page
  • Even though EZA articles make it into the top 10, they’re weak and easy to beat
  • 100% traffic going to your own site is much more valuable than 30% coming from EZA

What I’m talking about is going to EZA and looking through the articles. Find the ones that are getting the traffic and dissect them. For the most part it should be relatively easy to identify the keyword of the article. It will be in the title and all through out the article. You can search the term at Google to verify that it is ranking and you can check the search volume at the keyword tool.

Okay, A Walk Through

I guess the best place to show you this method is with a walk through. There are a number of ways to find articles with high visit counts, including a Google function way. I’m not going to show you how to do that one. I’m sure if you learn the syntax methods of search engines you might be able to figure it out.

But you can just do the most obvious thing and that is going to an article and looking at the most viewed. For this walk through I’m looking at an article in the mobile computing section. I’ll point out that this was completely random. I clicked on the first article on the front page of EZA.

mostviewedUsing the technology niche probably wasn’t the smartest choice since this is a niche that has a social aspect of it. People like to talk about their laptops and gadgets, but it’s still good. Take a look at the one I highlighted. It appeared to me as the one that was the most “webmastered”, if that is a word. But you can take a look at the views and see that it has a ton. Actually EZA is fucked right now because this article is older than 90 days.

viewsThis article has been up for around 20 months now. That means that it is getting roughly 1300 visitors a month. That’s not a ton of visitors, but it’s enough to make it worth wild. If 1300 visitors a month over a year can make over $10 (cost of a domain) than you’re profitable. Obviously you want to make more, which you should be with 1300 visitors a month.

So what is the keyword? The keyword stuck out like a sore thumb for me. It’s “free laptop for students”. I went and type that in Google (without quotes) and it comes up in third position. It came up in first for Google Canada.

free-laptop-for-studentsClick to Enlarge

The last step in this whole thing is to take a look at the keyword in Google’s keyword tool. This is where we can see if it is actually the keyword that is the driving force for the article. Inevitably it is the keyword that is going to help you make real cash online.

trafficClick to enlarge

I just noticed I took the wrong screen for the keyword. Laptops is plural in this one. But doesn’t matter. Same amount of searches. As you can see it gets around 2400 searches a month. It’s not something that I’d personally go after. I don’t think 2400 is a enough for me. Though, you might dig through the niche and see a lot of other related keywords that get 1000’s a month too. You could rank for all of them and have a site getting a hundred unique visitors a day. I’m not going to investigate this particular niche for you because I just want to demonstrate how you can use and abuse EZA for keywords.

For the keyword “free laptop for students”, it’s something that you can can go after. I actually didn’t document this to show you how easy it could be to rank. I just did this spur of the moment thing. So if you’re planning on going after the keyword, it is all yours. No one else is in the niche and since EZA ranks 3rd you should have no problem over taking it.

What if you can’t figure out the keyword? This happens a lot. The article gets a lot of views, but I can’t figure out the keyword right away. I’ll admit, some of the articles are a mystery. I can’t figure out how they got that many views because I can’t find the keyword. It’s life. They could be an abuser of the system sending traffic to it, but I don’t know. I do have a method you can take advantage of to find the keyword. Just use SEO Quake Firefox addon. Just click on the Page info option and you’ll get a screen like this:

pageinfoClick to enlarge

There is a lot more analysis done than just what is listed there. But essentially what it is doing is checking the keyword density of words on the page. If the page has traffic than it will probably have some keyword with a high density. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the title.

This is one keyword that I found in around 120 seconds of searching this directory. Is it a perfect keyword? Probably not. But it is something that can help you earn cash online and it demonstrates the entire exercise of how you can get good PROVEN keywords on EZA. And that’s what you want. You want PROVEN KEYWORDS that you know work.

I could end the post like this, but I would have only taught you how to abuse EZA. I want to show you how to SCREW EZA.

Dominate the Keyword Then Dominate the Niche

When I say dominate the keyword, I don’t simply mean get to position 1 at Google. It’s a matter of getting position one, two, three and all the way to 10. Of course there is no guarantee that you can get them all, but ideally that is what you should be aiming for. Don’t get me wrong. Getting position one or two or whatever the hell EZA was ranked at. You’re going to get 100% of the traffic instead of 30%. But you can always have more. In my Make Cash Online with sniper sites post I pointed out how much the top spot at Google gets and it’s not that exciting.

Here they are again for your convenience:

  1. 42.30%
  2. 11.92%
  3. 8.44%
  4. 6.03%
  5. 4.86%
  6. 3.99%
  7. 3.37%
  8. 2.98%
  9. 2.83%
  10. 2.97%

As you can see the first spot has the most (obviously), but it’s only 42% of the total search volume.  If you get the first spot of Google for an awesome keyword than congrats, but that is only 42%. You can get much more off that traffic. If you got to position one than you can obviously get 2, 3, 4, etc.

Before you go dominating crazy, you want to make sure whether it is worth wild. Make your first site and take over the position that the EZA article holds. See what happens. If it is profitable than your goal should be to have every single position on the front page.

You won’t be able to do it with the same site though. I’m not even sure if you can do it from all the same host (same IP). I haven’t tested that though. You can always get a blogger blog, hubpages, squidoo, etc to rank in the top 10 and take up positions. While you’re taking over the top 10, you’re pushing EZA off the front page. That is how they screw them.

Reverse Engineer Your Own Articles on EZA

I hope you guys are aware that EZA does share search engine stats for your articles. They only give you the top 5 search terms over a month period. But that is usually enough to give you a rough idea of what you need to know.

Just go into your articles where you get a list of them. Click on the views number. It will be a link that you can click. It will take you to a page where you can see all the search engine traffic over the month. One thing to understand is that the numbers they give aren’t accurate at all. For example, I have an article that gets like 3000 views a month. That’s roughly 100 a day, yet it lists like 10 visits for my top keyword. I know that is wrong. The important aspect of this feature is the actual keyword. You can verify for yourself that you’re ranked for it and you can check with Google’s keyword tool to see the volume.

There is absolutely no reason why you should have a 3000 views a month article on EZA. I know I shouldn’t have lol. That particular article is in first position too. I am in the works of taking over that position. I want the top 5 at least.

I hope this post has been enlightening. This explains how to make cash online by screwing EZA and it rocks. All the guess work is taken out of the equation because you can see the views. Mmmm mmmm GOOD!

I thought I should do a little case study to demonstrate how this works. I spent a few hours this week coming up with some keywords. I found a few that were getting 10,000 searches a month and EZA was ranking for it. Yeah, I’ll take over them and laugh all the way to the bank.

Filed in SEO, Screw EZA | | Permalink | Comments (0)

Screw EZA: Authority Backlinks – Part 1

This topic comes from my planned experiment post. This is a rather long post, so grab a beer first. I hope that all of you are aware of what is happening with EzineArticles. I wish I could link to the actual blog post, but I refuse to pass any link juice. And for some reason the blog posts don’t index in Google (for me to grab the cache link). The title of the blog post was “Our War With Affiliate Marketers” and I couldn’t help but feel that was probably one of the most honest pieces of information produced by an article directory.

I’m particularly disappointed with the Warrior Forum and the people on there. Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of upset people, but there seemed to also be the ass suckers. The ones that were glorifying this as something good. It is something good, but to who?

When you get right down to it we all have different loyalties. Google is at war with us too. Google owes it’s loyalty to it’s visitors. Even though they make their money with advertising, they still need people to search. And that means providing the best possible results. Google is at war with us because we game it; because we market; because we don’t have the intention of giving things away, but to convert a buyer.

Where does EZA’s loyality lie? Their loyality lies with keeping Google happy (which includes search results and Adsense) and it’s visitors. I’m starting this post like this to point out that it is EZA’s prerogative to do this, but you have to understand it from an objective point of view.

The point is that EZA’s loyality is not you, but their loyality is contrary to your benefit. Remember that. Don’t ever forget it.

That is what pisses me off about the douchebags on forums saying this is good. It’s good for EZA’s benefit. Who doesn’t want nice high quality articles for free? I want some. Most of the people that are praising this move have a lack of anonymity. They have their username on the Warrior Forum as their actual name. Nothing boils my blood more than Bev Clement. Here cocky attitude and condecending attitude make me sick. This is from a person that not to long ago had a thread on the forum looking for donations because she was in trouble.  Finally after thousands have been donated we find out that she couldn’t pay rent on her little trip to Hong Kong. But I digress.

Here is why I think the move by EZA is contrary to our benefit:

What the fuck is a “quality article”?

Everyone keeps saying ‘well all you have to do is write quality articles and you won’t have a problem.’ That’s excellent advice. It’s just about as esoterically vague as ‘work smarter, not harder’.

No one has defined quality to me. And I mean not in a past tense way. An example of past tense would be the reader likes it than it’s quality. It’s past tense because the article needs to accepted and read by the reader first before quality is viewed.

That means there has to be criteria in place of objectives that must be met to be “quality”. What are they? EZA will never ever tell you them because frankly they don’t have the first fuckin’ clue what they are.

My point is that they don’t give the first flying fuck about “quality articles”. They are at war with affiliate marketers. You can bet your ass that the subject and where your landing page goes will have a much more direct effect on what determines “quality” of that article.

And I can prove it.

I was recently downgraded at EZA. After nearly 3000 articles with them, I was moved from Platinum to Basic PLUS. I didn’t even get an email telling me why. After that all my articles get rejected, so obviously I stopped completely.

The big thing that the word “quality” implies is that the information is quality. This is where the argument of quality articles will die. EZA doesn’t verify information in articles.  It doesn’t have the time, money or resources to do it. Quality other than the information provided in the article could only come from spelling, grammar, punctuation and article length. Oh and from my thesis, the writers intent *cough* marketing.

So how do they determine what is a “good” article and one that deserves to be rejected? I could write long coherent articles on how push ups cure migraine headaches. I can articulate it in a very smart way and explain it with a very convincing physiological theory. The article is crap and doesn’t help the reader in anyway, but I’m sure EZA would eat it up.

That’s the whole point. There is no way to determine what is good and bad in the eyes of EZA. That means the process isn’t equally applied to all members and it also means that some writers are going to be targets. And since they’re at war with affiliate marketers, you’re always a target to be picked on.

Old Articles Are Being Revisited

The whole reason for this crack down is all about Google. I’ve seen the results of EZA decline over the last year and I expect the trend to continue that way. This is how EZA plans to stop this and get their shit together. It isn’t enough for them to simply start enforcing a policy from this day forward, but they’re going to start applying the new standards to old articles. “In the past, we’ve grandfathered existing articles in when new quality levels are set, except when a live article is edited, today’s standard is applied to that content.” – EZA blog.

If you’ve written articles that meet the “quality” of today’s standards (whatever that is) your articles are fine and it shouldn’t be a big deal – for now.  6 Months from now they could tighten the bolts again and some of your articles are dropped. I don’t know, but that’s something that you have to think about it.

When I work, I expect my work to provide long lasting results, but you could lose it. Seriously, I could wake up tomorrow and my account be banned because my past ACCEPTED articles were not up today’s standards. You have to think of that shit.

There’s a point where it’s just too much work to satisfy the demands of someone else and I don’t feel like satisfying them anymore.

Your Articles Aren’t Ethically Used

A big selling point for using EZA is that other webmasters will take your articles and put them on their site. They’ll use your resource box, so that you get traffic and a backlink. It sounds like the perfect plan on paper.

Here is the reality: No site that has any valuable qualities is going to use your articles. I’ve never ever seen EZA articles on a site that would provide a quality backlink in any way. Do you see me going to EZA looking for articles to put on this blog? No. Even if there was a quality article on EZA, I would be interested in writing my own article on the subject and putting it on this blog. If I have a valuable site I’m not going to just play a game of copy and paste with my readers. I want to take care of them.

Obviously your articles are getting published on sites because you can see it count in your EZA stats. My stats say I have over 6000 published on other sites. I’m sure if you’ve been looking at your traffic stats you’re well aware of the quality of site that links back to you.

Most of them are spammy piece of shit sites. They have no traffic, they have spammy backlinks and they’re probably part of a blog farm. I know Google is in a tough spot here. Obviously, site owners can’t control who is linking to their site. But on the other hand it has to stop blog farms. After enough of these spammy sites use your articles, you’re just getting viewed in a negative manner by Google.

Some of the sites will bring you traffic, but not a lot. I don’t want to call these links spammy, but they’re definitely not quality. A lot of these sites are by people looking to build up their content really fast. That usually means they’re trying to flip the site.

There is no quality links coming to you from people using the articles on their own sites. Spam sites, bots and scrapers will go to the sites and autoblog 1000 of your articles in a few hours. Is that really something you want your sites to be a part of?

Just think of it this way. If I worked hard to build this authority site over years. I spent money on SEO companies to get it to the top. Am I going to EZA to get myself a free article? No fuckin’ way. Only people with nothing are going there.

They Want Longer Articles – They Just Won’t Say It

I think we can all recognize that they want more length. Often now when articles are being rejected they tell you in the email that you should write 450-700 word articles. The rules say 250 minimum, but we all know they’re looking for more. And like anything where you are asked to give more, they’ll just keep asking for more and more. Yes, that phenomenon is right of the book Influence.

Let’s stipulate the common definition of quality articles as a lengthy informative article (which EZA will never verify beyond length). What benefit is there to me? I can see the benefit to Chris Knight; more long tail traffic and higher Adsense CTR.

See, we’ll get lower CTR off to our site because of the length. There are a few reasons for that. It takes much more work to read through the article. It is incredibly easy to get bored. When I’m looking for information online I’m not reading a long article. I’ll look for something else and the first thing that you’ll see on EZA is an Adsense ad. Since there is so much text between the start of the article and your resource box at the bottom you’re just going to get less clicks.

Another problem that I have with lengthy quality articles is the fact that you have to give away too much. People say that this is the best way to sell. I disagree since we’re affiliate marketers. Let’s say I’m selling an ebook on curing migraine headaches. What keywords would I be writing my articles for? Cure Migraines, Cure for Migraines, etc. If I’m using that keyword in the title than I have to supply information for that. If I fill it with real solutions that work (an informative article) than why the fuck would they buy the ebook? There is a simple rule I learned when I was an adult webmaster and that was make them pay for pink. Simply put, we show them softcore to warm them up and they pay for hardcore (our sponsors). What EZA is looking for is you to provide “hardcore” type content for their site. It’s super beneficial to him and counter productive to us.

Another example on this point can be completely verified from my apartment when I was at University.  Moved in one day, hooked the TV up to the cable wire and it worked. It worked the entire time we were there. We got free cable for whatever reason. Do you think I called up the cable company and asked to purchase cable service from them? No. Why would I pay for something that I can get for free? That’s essentially what EZA wants. They want us to provide the free cable to their readers and try to sell it to them aswell.

The Rules of Creating Content for Affiliate Marketers

I put in a lot of thought on this point. You need standards for your articles or you’re just going to be a bitch. I’m sure you have standards for a mate. If you didn’t have them you’d end up with the ugliest looking person. It might sound mean, but you need standards. Here is what I came up with when you’re writing high quality articles…

  • The Content is going to be beneficial for my visitors.
  • The Content is going to be paid for if someone else wants it.
  • The Content is going to provide a stellar backlink.
  • The Content is going to send high quality traffic – not the lower end of quality.

I try to at least meet two of these. I’m sorry. EZA provides absolute SHIT when it comes to link back value. EZA also filters off the top quality to their Adsense ads and you’re left with the a small percentage of lower quality visitors (30% if you’re lucky). I’ve talked about this in detail on my rant about bum marketing.

If I’m going to work hard to create long informative quality articles than I’m putting them on my site. I have no desire to give my shit away to unappreciative pricks like Chris Knight. I will also create content for quality links, but you’re not going to get SHIT from EZA. They just give you nothing in return and your site isn’t going to be getting extra SE traffic. The boost you’ll get is very basic and if you do make it on the front page of Google you could of done it with a few blog comments, so let’s get real.

Plus 30% CTR are considered good, but I prefer to have 100% of my readers coming to my site and reading my content. Rather than filtering through a spammy looking page full of ads. Yes, it’s spammy and Google sees it regardless of their catch 22.

I think I’ve ranted enough for over 2000 words, so let’s get into some of the meat. The point of this post is to screw EZA. Let’s all drop them and do something a hell of a lot more productive with our time.

How to get REAL authority backlinks

The advice I’m going to share with you is incredibly simple and you quite possibly may have heard it before. The problem is that we easily get intimidated by it. Instead of working your ass off for a 30% CTR (which is the only benefit of EZA) why not write articles for the most authority website in your niche?

That sounds a little more intimidating.

I know that I was intimidated by this sort of thing. It left me trying to get authority backlinks other ways. I would try to write a comment on a blog or hope that an authority site would accept listing of websites. That’s the wussie way of doing things.

I know this is intimidating, but you need to open your mind up to this type of thing because it is possible. I have seen this for a while. I’m subscribed to the RSS feeds of some high authority personal finance blogs. And a lot of times they have guest bloggers and things like that to fill in the posts.

You have to understand that authority owners are busy people. The idea of someone producing them a nice piece of high quality content (I’m talking about the real definition of high quality). It works the same way as article writing because you’re going to get an about author section where you can place your link. You’ll have to use the About Author box properly because it’s an authority site.

But think of the value. You’re going to get traffic from this site. The CTR might not be the best because you can’t really sell your author space and you’ll be writing a rather long article, but you’re going to get the best backlink possible. We’re talking about the king shit backlink that all the other internet marketers are looking for.

Here’s the even bigger kicker for you guys… it’s easy. All you have to do is find the contact information on an authority site and send them an email. Obviously you’re not going to get backlinks from Amazon or anything like that, but others will.

You’re probably thinking that this is a great idea, but you have two specific objections that pop into your head:

  • Why would they choose you?
  • How do I write content worthy of authority sites?

Obviously there is only so many authority sites in specific niches, but despite what you think no one is doing this. I went around looking for links in a niche and emailed people. My reply rate is like 70-80% and they were favorable. I had two that were really happy that I emailed them about this and were very interested. I’m talking about sites that have been around more than a decade. We’re talking good links here. I had one that asked me if I’d be interested in doing Guest Blogging on a regular basis BEFORE they even seen my writing.

I owe all this to not being a bitch and submitting to EZA. All I did was look up sites, get contact information and just ask them. Wow that was hard. High quality backlinks for my articles for very little work. The owners of these sites want your content, so ask them.

The other objection that you have (and it’s the main reason why I didn’t start this sooner) and it was my ability to write the content worthy of their approval. I guess we can all get intimidated and we often look at our own work in the most critical way.

All you need to know is that the only difference between a regular article and a kick ass article is a little more time. You can talk about any topic with authority if you spend more time on it. Instead of pumping out articles every 10 minutes. Spend an hour and write a kick ass 1000 word article. An authority site owner will eat this stuff up. They want quality and as long as you can present your ability to write it than they won’t be able to say no.

Finding Potential Authority Sites

This is the easy part. Go to Google and type in your niche. Go through the top 20 websites that aren’t large corporations (like Amazon, Walmart, etc) and find an email address (or a contact form). If you can’t find an email address or contact information go do a whois on the domain (samspade.org) and see if there is an email listed.

Just repeat the process with secondary keywords. For example, if your niche is bodybuilding than secondary keywords would be bodybuilder workout, bodybuilding diet, etc.

Not all niches will be as simple as bodybuilding to find the real authority sites. You’re not going to find authority hemorrhoid site. They don’t exist. Well, I don’t think they exist. You’ll have to aim in a different direction hitting up authority health sites related to constipation or something that is similar.

Propositioning

Now that you got their emails you have to send them a message and presuade them to do this. If there is a piece of information that copywriting has taught me it is that you have to start EARLY into the benefits for the reader (ie: authority site owner).

I’m not going to give you a template for you to copy. You have to learn to do this yourself.

Your subject line has to be something that they’ll actually read. That doesn’t mean spamming up a hype like subject. Just something honest that they’ll read. The very first sentence of the email should list the benefit. If you haven’t been paying attention the benefit is a high quality article on their site. Communicate that fact without hype and without displaying your benefit (a link back to your site).

Here is a rough example…

Hello,

I wanted to know whether you’d like some high quality articles for your website. I’m a *authority in the niche* and I can produce some very honest articles. My perspective can be a very valuable asset to your readers and can help you bring in a lot more search engine traffic. All I ask in return for free quality articles is that I get an author box for exposure.

Let me know if you’d be interested in such a thing.

Thanks,

Name

That’s a very simple and to the point email. It follows a very simple pattern. Opening sentence talks about the big benefit for the authority site.  I mention after that reasons why I can provide that benefit to their readers. I follow up with some secondary benefits (good stuff for the readers and search traffic). I finally end with my author box. It’s sort of like a sales page. I write about the benefits and I end it with the price, which is just an author box. And that cost is very minimal.

You can always add more to it, but I always advise short emails. I’m a busy guy and wouldn’t read a long email. Just get to the point. You can add another sentence after the ‘let me know’ sentence that says, “In the next few days I’m going to prepare for you a 1000 word quality article for you to see exactly what I can give you.” That takes away buying pressure.

I have had nothing, but great comments from people that are interested. If you can, try to add in something unique points about the site. For example, the first person to email me back was the most receptive. There site didn’t really have articles on it. They just had a directory listing for every single authority person in the niche. I just added in an extra sentence after I mention the articles, “I know that your site is a directory of information on *niche* people, but I think having quality articles can give more to your readers.” They replied back immediately to that email thanking me and thinking that I was right.

I wrote a 1200 word article for them that they liked. The big selling point for that person was the benefit of the article, but I was able to show them that I was looking at their site and I was giving them genuine advice on how to improve it.

Writing the Articles

There needs to be a lot more care put into these articles. Unlike EZA, the owners of these sites (for the most part) know their niche and they can smell bullshit articles. You really do have to develop a quality article here. Remember, it might take you a few hours to make one, but that’s okay. The benefit you’re receiving is a kick ass link.

Think of it this way. If you can only get 1 kick ass article done a day, which results in 1 authority backlink than you’re kicking ass. It just takes a few authority links and your site will skyrocket. One authority link will outdo hundreds of article directory links, blog comments and link wheels.

Take the extra time to write something good. Go through it and make sure that it sounds correct. If an article directory rejects your article you can always submit again. With authority sites you may not have another chance, so make sure you don’t screw it up.

You may feel intimidated that you have to produce this content, but it shouldn’t be hard. All you have to do is put more time into it. Time is all it takes to produce a great piece of content.

There is a little more that needs to be done though. It’s not enough to write information on your niche, but it has to be something that the site owner wants. For example, lets say that your niche is bodybuilding. If the authority site has several articles on how to get six pack abs than he probably doesn’t want an article on the same subject.

You should take a look through their content. See what they have, and more importantly, what they don’t have.

Another aspect I learned in copywriting is the Unique Selling Point (USP). It’s the way that you differentiate yourself from others. Lets go back to the bodybuilding example. I’m not saying that you can’t write about six pack abs. You can do it if your article has a unique selling point. When I say USP I don’t mean selling, but something that makes it different than the other articles on the site. For example, if the articles on this site were about getting abs from doing unique crunches than write an article on how to get abs without doing any exercise. This is a rough example, but you have to get them something unique or it is just useless to them.

Also, you have to consider where your article is going. I noticed a lot of authority sites have their own little section to put articles. This means that you can write nice long pieces of content. But if the site owner is going to put it on a blog than you’re going to have to write it differently. I know that I’ve been writing monster posts for my site (an experiment), but most blogs are looking for something easier to read.

That’s not to say that you have to write something short, but the type of content you write is different. You might have to do a post like the “Top 5 Reasons to …” where you bold each reason as you write about it. It’s something that is much easier to read, especially for blog readers. I’m not saying that a site owner wouldn’t appreciate a long detailed article, but let’s make it as easy as we can for them to please their readers.

A Few More Resources

While doing some of these searches for authority sites I noticed that a lot of them already accept articles to begin with. Obviously they’re going to be picky as hell though. But the fact that they list this shows you that you can get one accepted. It means they are already open to the idea of taking content from others and they know how the game works.

All this means is that you can carefully prepare your article and submit it to them when you’re ready. It’s not rocket science. There is no reason to reject a quality article that benefits their visitors.

Finding these sites are really easy at Google. Just type in: Niche +”Submit Articles”

You can change the variation from submit articles to whatever you think  a site would list. I’m not saying that every site that comes up will be an authority in the niche. You have to remember that this is going to be a targeted backlink from a niche related site. This should count higher than a link from a article directory.

But I have one more place for you to look: niche related article directories. I want to emphasize that this is the lowest on all the backlinks I’ve listed today, but I still think there is more value to them. They are still niche related and I think it makes a much better link in the eyes of Google.

Finding niche related article directories is the same as above (Niche +”submit articles”). You can also search variations of that. The most common directory software should have variables you can search. You’re going to get a lot of general directories this way, but just go through them. You’ll find some niche related ones.

Conclusion

I thought I should sum this all up for those of you that aren’t interested in reading this massive post. EZA is a business that has its own prerogative. Actually it’s prerogative is to our detriment. The harder we work, the less we market and the less we make is good for EZA. Isn’t good for us.

It’s not a matter of adapting to Ezinearticles new rules because that’s no guarantee in itself. Normally when they changed rules the old articles on the site were fine. That’s not the case anymore. They’re going through our old articles right now and they’re taking them off the site. Even if you bust your balls today writing an article that gets accepted, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be rejected in 6 months time.

You’re a business. Your job is to make money. You have to work with others to make that money, but there’s a point where you can’t put up with the demands and bitching from another person. You want work with people that want to see both succeed. Despite what EZA says, they really hate us. And the less we make, the better off they are. That isn’t a good partnership for me.

The good news is that you can put your work to more productive use. There are tons of authority sites in your niche that would gladly link back to you. Just write a nice high quality article for them. It’s easier than you think.

Just contact them by email. The worst you’re going to get is a reply that says “no”. Some won’t even reply. But you’ll probably get a few emails like I did of excited site owners just dying for your content. Remember, you don’t have to get all the authority sites to link to you. Just one or two links is enough for you to jump to the top spot of Google.

Why bust your balls day after day writing articles for EZA for very little link juice? Write one high quality article a day for a week and give it to each authority site in your niche and you’re set. 

Seriously, this is so easy. I can’t believe that I was actually intimidated doing this in the past. The fact is that most people are intimidated. Some of these site owners I emailed have sites that are 12 years old and they’re excited to hear from me. They haven’t even had someone reach out and send them an email.

Trust me. You won’t regret doing this. Though I’m sure 99% of my readers will never ever try it. Remember, it just takes one or two authority backlinks to send you to the top of the search engines.

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Planned Topics and Experiments

This is just a short post of things that I’m looking forward to trying out and experimenting with. I’m one of those people that like to see how things work from a logical point of view, so that’s just what I do. I know I have subscribers out there. If you’re looking for something that you want me to talk about you’re free to comment. I doubt anyone will though lol.

Copywriting Resume Experiment

Ever since I got my copywriting literature I’ve been dying to try this. I want to take my regular resume and make a new version of it with applied copywriting techniques. I’m going to send it out to a bunch of local job listings and see what happens.

The resume is the ultimate sales copy that I’ve never poured more than 10 minutes of my time into. It’s one sheet of paper that needs to stand out, be read and viewed by the reader as something valuable. All I’ve ever done is list who, what, when, where and why on it. I think most people do that.

I want to test out copywriting and what I’m learning. I want to try to work in as much as I can, including a headline. It’ll be a fun experiment and a valuable learning tool.

Amazon Sniper Sites

Yes sir, the next sniper site experiment is going to be completely for Amazon. I suppose the main reason for this is paranoia. I just don’t trust Google. I think they don’t like the concept of sites like this and it’s hard to tell. The rules are incredibly vague, so I’m not sure if I have made for adsense (MFA) sites or if they’re value.

I am actually pretty surprised with my Amazon results so far with the few sites that I actually have set up right now. Plus I don’t have to worry about Amazon freaking out and banning me. It’s not going to happen unless I’m spamming or something along those lines.

3 Product Creations

This is actually different than what the heading suggests. I’m going to make three products (one of which is complete) that fit into specific categories of development.

  • You’re selling someone else’s product and they close down
  • You’re selling cheap $7 reports
  • You’re in a no competition niche

The first product creation listed has already been complete. I’m in the testing phase of the sales letter though, but you know the story. I was selling a product as an affiliate for year and the idiot vendor ends the affiliate program. Since there are no competing products I made my own. That’s the situation of the first one listed.

Second, this is for a site I have that is selling $7 reports. I actually bought a site and made a cheap $7 report for it. The idea behind it was purely testing. I wanted to see if I could sell something in this niche by myself. I planned to see how the report would sell and if it did well I would just make a better report to sell for more.

Third, I have a site that I bought in my more naive days to build a product. It was before I ever learned about market research. Creating a product in a niche that has no products is like internet marketing suicide, but there’s still a part of me that wants to try. It is in a niche that is growing and relatively new. It’s the growth I want to tap into. I rank first in Google for ‘niche name training’ and from the start I wanted to make a training manual. The plan with this one is to make a report and see what happens. If it is something that sells than I could very easily be sitting on an untapped niche.

Flip Sites Online and to Local Businesses

I’m very interested in trying this out. Flipping the sites online, just means to people that want to buy them on auction forums. That would mainly be new internet marketers looking for sites that are already set up. Depending on traffic, content and earnings you can make a little bit of scratch. Not huge amounts of it though, but something that might be worth my wild to pursue.

The business side of things seems much more profitable. Business owners are retards when it comes to internet marketing stuff. I can pick up domain names that are brandable and an owner might want to have it for that reason. We’ll see how that pans out.

Operation Screw EzineArticles

That’s right. Recently I had my EZA account downgraded from Platinum to Basic PLUS. My article review times are like 10 days now and all my articles are getting rejected now. They recently added a post to their blog that they’re at war with affiliate marketers. I won’t link to it though and there appears to be no Google cache to link to.

With 2729 live articles I’m officially ending writing for EZA. I don’t feel like writing high quality articles for them because they go on my site. I’m not producing long fulfilling articles for any article directory because EZA backlink juice is crap at best and the click through rates are pitful with a fulfilling article. Without some way to cliff hang there is no reason for clicking. So fuck’em.

The plan is to find alternative approaches to this whole thing and obviously that is a work in progress. But I have some interesting routes to go down now. Maybe this EZA crack down will make me more money because I’ve finally given up the article directory crutch and moving onto bigger things. Time will tell.

My Friend and I’s Business Idea

I mentioned somewhere in a post about this, but a friend and me are working on a project. He was actually approached by a business to do a project for them. My friend got on MSN messenger in the morning and was just going to pass the project onto me. He didn’t have time to do it and I was more than willing to flex my new PHP skills. Well that morning he messaged me we tossed the idea around. Hungry niche, a lot of customers and they have money.

We’re going full blast at it. We started at the first of October and we have to finish the project by November 1st. We are practically done now. This is going to be my first real attempt at an offline business. I’m going to keep you guys updated on this because there are a lot of valuable things that I learned from affiliate marketing that I want to apply to this business.

Well, this is all the planned topics and experiments that I want to hit on. Feel free to leave a message on anything else you would like to see. Hmm, over a 1155 words. I guess when I said that this post was short… I lied.

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