Worry

Stay on top of things, but don’t worry.

Dave has reported being banned from Amazon. It sucks. Though I do know that he had an account, his wife had an account and I suppose there could of been more. So not that big of a deal, but something that you don’t want to come to this point. Diversification is important. Get some CJ money coming in. Take a little time to try out Clickbank. I made a post about how to make big bucks on Clickbank.

Also take the time to put the proper Amazon disclaimer/disclosure on your site (listed on Dave’s site). It’s basically saying that you are advertising products and what you say might not be objective because you’re making money. I have them on my site, but I’m going through them now to make them site wide. I don’t know if you need to just have one page on your site listing the disclaimer or whether a visitor needs to be able to find a link on every single page for it. So I’m making sure a disclaimer link is available on each page of the site. Yeah, it’s a PITA, but if it saves me from a banning I’ll be happy.

I also updated my post on simple working, so check that out.

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How to Make Big Bucks with Clickbank

Clickbank is a nice because it has weekly direct deposits. I don’t think they have a sweet set up, sweet products or anything like that, but you can make money with it. And it can be part of your diversification process. So here is how you can make a lot of money with Clickbank.

Step 1. Go to CB Analytics. This is a site that has all the Clickbank products, along with all the information as affiliate commissions, gravity, etc. You’ll want to click on the top products link and it basically takes you to a top 10 page, but it’s really the entire CB product list broken up by gravity. The key here is to get into the 5-30 gravity product range. So like here.

Step 2. Pick a product between 5-30 gravity that has a unique name. (This means you want something like X10Weight as a product name, not “how to lose weight fast ebook”).

Step 3. Create a blog post/page/whatever for the product name review (or conversely you can do product name scam and sell the product anyway).

Step 4. Backlink page.

Step 5. Repeat until rich.

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Help

How do I find long tail keywords?

In my previous post on keyword instinct, I said that you should try and figure out keywords on your own because keyword tools never show you the true picture. The reality is that beyond the basic and easy to find, you can have a pretty tough time figuring out some of the longer tail keywords for an associated niche. The good news is that there is some help out there for you to get your imagination flowing and even supply you with some good ones.

Search Suggestions:

Question/Ask Sites:

Google’s Related Search (at bottom of search results):

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Instinct

Give up the keyword research tools!

I’m finding that my sites are less moved by Google updates and perform more consistently with keyword instinct. The keyword tool is manufactured and it really isn’t serving you. I have two sites in particular where I just built. I didn’t do keyword research. I just went after keywords I thought existed. The big reason I ended up doing this is that the keyword tools really didn’t have a lot of keywords to share with me.

I’m telling you, there are tons of great keywords out there that keyword tools aren’t giving you. You just need to think about it. Think about the niche. Think about what people search and just do it that way. Your sites may grow slower, but they’ll be consistent and they’ll grow as you build.

 

I thought doing little posts, like this, would be much more efficient for people.

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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is something that I’ve tried in the past and I had a bit of a sour taste in my mouth from that experience. It didn’t work out that well, but I did learn some very important things that are pivotal to getting things. I’m back to outsourcing simply because I don’t have the time. I just can’t keep up with all the work that could potentially be done. It’s tough having a full time job and doing this on the side. I really have a lot of respect for those that make it work quite well.

I’ve been trying to make things easier for me, and that means more outsourcing is to come and more tools available to be used are coming.

Earlier this year I joined The Keyword Academy, for no other reason but Postrunner. Postrunner doesn’t eliminate work or anything like that. It just gives me an easier avenue to put articles on the web that link back to me. Eventually outsourcing the content production for some of this can really help out.

Anyway, I went on trusted Elance, where I also hired my corporate accountant, to find some link builders. The fact about link building a lot of internet marketing type services is that you’re probably going to be dealing with people from India, Philippines, and other low cost areas. It’s just the way the game works. There’s always going to be a barrier between understandings, so I’ve learned a few things about doing this right.

1. Exact action points

What do you think is going to result in a poor outcome? “10 backlinks from related niche sites of PR2 or higher” versus “I want to get on the front page of Google”. Or another example, if you were hired by a business and they told you do task a, b and c versus them telling you “go make money”? Which one would you expect to end up better? Obviously the one with exact ACTION points.

You want to stay away from vague because you’re going to (first) get someone that isn’t going to preform the way you need them too and (second) you’re going to pay a premium for this “unknown”.

If you want to do some link building than tell them what you want exactly. You want 10 unique article posts with a link back, 10 press releases with a link back, 10 social bookmarking with a link back, and 10 forum profiles with a link back. That’s exact. It’s hard to screw something like that up. A lot of people that provide these services will actually have link building packages that you can pay for and it’s simple, easy and understood. I’m sure a lot of people that do the outsourced work get a lot of shit from clients because of all this vague bullshit.

2. Be Patient and Let Them Work, But Have Accountability

It is important that you just let them work. This past month I outsourced my main site (which is still down from the latest Panda update) to do back linking on it. I just let them go and do it. It was three weeks into the month (I paid for a month of backlinking) and I didn’t see any evidence of backlinking in my stats. The point is that I let them do their work as they promised me. But I could do that because I required proof. At the end of the project, I was promptly sent a spreadsheet that documented every link. Very simple.

3. Reputation Counts

I won’t touch new members on Elance. I know that they need a chance, but I’m not interested in the risk. It’s easier for me to just hire someone with a reputation and that’s what you should do too.

Like I mentioned above, I did pay for outsourced link building for the very first time. It actually did show some results, which I’m happy with. The niche of this site is what I call a stubborn one because it takes forever for a site to show any movement. When I was doing my sniper site experiment, this site took the longest to get to the front page. I pounded it with links at that time and I gave up. One day it was on the front page making money. Since the Panda update it has been down in the rankings and I don’t have the time to throw the necessary links at it that it needs. Paying this outsourcer I did see a bounce. It’s not on the front page, but I’m almost certain it will stubbornly move up the ranks until it is back to normal.

I was happy with the service of this outsourcer, so I paid them for another month on another site.

I still have a lot to learn and long way to go with outsourcing, so I’m not trying to appear like an expert or anything. The plan this month is something a little different. I’m going to sign up for Build My Rank and going to try it out. I’m going to add a site, and pay to have them make the articles for it. 1 article a day for 30 days. It costs $2.50 per 150 words, so I’ll pay for a full 300 word article each day. Plus the $59 monthly fee. So the experiment will cost roughly $209. I’ll report on the results.

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Simple Works and I’ll Prove it

My previous post is gold because it explains what you need to do, quite concisely. Dave over at Zen Duck did a post titled focus, but it’s the same deal. I’m going to prove it works for you too. I’ll apply Dave’s advice for a month straight and prove it.

Dave suggests sticking with one niche, write a shit load of content going after long tails, backlink and win. I’m going to do that. The only difference is that I’m going to do it for two different niches (2 sites mainly). One of them is going to be wordpress based on a subdomain and the other is going to be just regular HTML site. Both will have the same results. I’ll just focus on winning the little battles. Or looking after the pennies, so the dollars take care of themselves (see previous post).

It’s that simple. You just have a lot of tedious work to do it.

Update

Site 1: 40 blog posts focusing on long tail keywords. All long tail keywords were found in my money site’s keyword traffic (ie: no running around for it and keywords you don’t find in the keyword tools). I did some very minor backlinking. Right now just letting all the posts marinate inside Google probably for a month or two. All content around 300-350 words.

Site 2: Haven’t officially started this site yet, but it’s next.

Update (Mar 31)

Site 1: I have let the 40 blog posts marinate in Google for a while now. It’s interesting looking at how things behave because there’s a dance. I understand how it works. When you first put up this content and it gets discovered, Google will often give it a favorable rating and later the site disappears. This is really good testing the grounds to see if you deserve to be ranking for these keywords. It’s obvious. Google doesn’t manually choose your position, so it is forced to throw you on the front page and examine what the probable click through rate (CTR) should be. It later pulls you away while it assess your value as a whole. Check out the stat image below:

 

 

So notice the fact that early on I got a little taste of some traffic as a new sub-domain website. Google tests the ground to see how worthy I am to compete for the keywords my site is about. It later takes it away from me. About a month later I return to the front page again. I guess this is a little rule or reason why you shouldn’t worry about ranking for something quickly and it disappearing. Don’t worry, you’ll be back. The next step I’m going to implement is backlinking.

Site 2: I still have a massive list of keywords that I plan to eventually go through, but I haven’t done them all. Though I do have some decent pages up now. I’m also planning to do some back linking for these too.

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The Best Advice on SEO You’ll Ever Need

Everyone gets so caught up on getting that heavily searched keyword that they often miss out on the most important part of SEO. There is a very good quote that people use for personal finance,

Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves

The phrase is a bit outdated for personal finance. I would probably say take care of the dollars and the hundred dollar bills will take care of themselves. Anyway the point is evidently clear. The point is that you need to take care of the little things and the big things will just come.

For example, if you’re looking to get ranked for a heavily searched keyword like “best vacuum cleaner”, don’t worry about it until you’ve taken care of the small things. If you’re not in position 1 for “best vacuum cleaner on the market”, “best vacuum cleaner 2012″ and all the other long tails, you’re not in a position to go rank for that keyword. While you’re busy winning the easy battles for these longtail keywords you’re going to end up winning the big battle too.

This is the best piece of advice I can give you. Do this and you’ll make money and you’ll be successful. If you don’t know what some of the long tails are, go look at your site stats. See what people are searching and see where you show up in the results. Once you get all those long tail keywords number one, I’ll give you permission to go after the big ones.

Good luck.

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Attributes/Characteristic Type Keywords

In one of my previous posts about getting back to the basics, I mentioned that applying attributes and characteristics to keywords is a great way to get traffic with ease. If you don’t remember I’ll give a brief summary here.

Let’s say that you have a site on dress pants. And let say there is a keyword you want to rank for like “pleated dress pants”. I don’t know how tough it is to rank for such a keyword and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that people are looking for attributes and characteristics of pleated dress pants. This means that you can go after things like:

black pleated dress pants
blue pleated dress pants
white pleated dress pants
tight pleated dress pants
baggy pleated dress pants
cotton pleated dress pants

You get the idea with those examples. People search all of those terms. Some might only have a few dozen searches a month and others will have a few hundred. The big thing I was trying to illustrate in my previous post was that this type of term is relatively easy to rank for if you target it.

I did a little experiment to see how this would end up working if applied two different ways. This experiment isn’t scientific in anyway, as I used different niches and the number of links may differ. I’ll give the examples as if they were pleated dress pants related. All pages are in the sub-directory of the main domain name.

Method A

Pleated Dress Pants main page that links to the following pages:

black pleated dress pants
blue pleated dress pants
yellow pleated dress pants
…
etc

Method B

Pleated Dress Pants main page that contains all the different keywords (or slight variations) within the pages content (obviously much longer piece of content).

————————-

The question boils down to which one had better results from a search engine point of view. Personally I like method A better because you have laser targeted pages, which pretty much guarantee a click in the search results. Before starting I suspected method B would be the winner.

The Winner? Method B.

When you compare the attributes/characteristic keywords between the two you don’t notice that much of a difference. Some of the keywords hit the front page and some didn’t. With method B, the pages that did hit the front page were much closer to number 1, with many hitting it.

The big difference that separates the two is that the main keyword (pleated dress pants) is shuffling around position 10-12 with method B. With method A it is no where to be found and it makes sense. The fact is that when you build a link for red pleated dress pants, you’re also building a link for pleated dress pants.

I want to point out that this method isn’t as scientific as I’d like it to be. I didn’t send a lot of links to have conclusive results. But I did send fewer links to method B than I did to method A.

Mr. Obvious

This should bring home the obvious point. You should never be building pages of content targeting one keyword. There should always be other related keywords that you put in there. You don’t have to use a high density of those bonus keywords. One time or even zero times works fine. The point is that when you start building links to the page you focus equally on all the keywords you put in.

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‘Round the World is Happening

The gears have finally been put in place to do my very first RTW (’round the world). The whole reason that I got into internet/affiliate marketing was this. It was a big driving factor for me. Even though I’ve financially surpassed what is required for such a thing a while ago, it’s something that got lost. You can see my old post here on the original blog. This is exciting for me and I plan to embark on the journey in Spring of 2013.

Lately, I’ve been working hard to change the way I work with my business and the way the business works itself. Backpacking around the world doesn’t really give you the optimum work environment for a business to thrive. It requires a delicate approach because I’m going to be in countries where the internet is patchy at best. Working out of your backpack with a laptop isn’t easy. These are new challenges I’m face with now and as the time comes closer for my RTW, I’m probably going to talk about these kind of issues and building a business that works this way.

Building a Cloud

This is something that I’ve been working on probably for the last 6 months. That’s not to say that I’ve been working on it for 6 months straight. I’ve been playing with it and seeing what will work best for me. The idea behind a “cloud” is that you can access your stuff from multiple computers. It’s often managed on many servers, so it’s virtually never down. I need my entire work operation cloud based. My laptop might break on the trip. It might not be secure to work over a WiFi connection in some countries. My only option could be sitting down in front of an internet cafe computer and working there. What I’m creating is the exact same environment through a cloud. Everything is completely the same because of the cloud.

But this goes well beyond just websites. My business used to be sole proprietor from a government tax view and now I’ve incorporated. This saves me a lot more in taxes, but brings on a more administrative side of things. I need to be able to cloud my physical mail. This allows me to see my actual mail. If I have to forward something to my accountant, I can do it easily over email. These are the challenges of running a legal corporation while traveling around the world for a year (or more).

Automating As Much As I Can

One of the biggest things that pisses me off about Amazon, as a Canadian affiliate, is that they don’t do direct deposit. Shitty Clickbank is able to do this on a weekly basis, yet Amazon has a problem with this. They claim that it is an issue with converting currencies. I have a US Dollar bank account at a Canadian bank, so it really isn’t that big of a deal I don’t think. Anyway, I hate checks. I hate depositing them. Being out of the country makes it impossible unless you have someone acting on your behalf.

As a Canadian, I’ve been able to get around this problem by opening a corporate bank account in the United States. This took a little while to setup, but I actually got it to work. It will be the topic of a future “how to” post for the Canadians out there that want to direct deposit their Amazon earnings. I need to have all my earnings to be directly deposited into a bank account. This means Amazon, as well as some of my other earnings like Clickbank and Commission Junction.

Outsource Like a MOFO

One of the big things I’ve learned since I went from full time (I was doing full time Internet marketing from the very start) to part time is that I honestly don’t have all the time in the world to get what needs to be done. I need to start adding in outsourced work for my sites. Right now this aspect isn’t that important because despite only working part time on this I am still pretty good at getting the necessary work done. I have a pretty good routine and understanding of what works and doesn’t.

But with all that I’m going to end up without internet for periods of a few weeks. That’s not going to make or break me when it comes to earnings, but I need to make sure that work stays relatively consistent over the year. I know I’m going to be taking a crowded 7 hr train ride around a country. And when I get off, I’m not going to feel like working. It’s just one of those things. I need to develop more of a “project manager” role with outsourced groups. I’ll still work like I do now, but I need to accept the fact that I’ll not be able to do it all.

I also have the goal of having more money when I return from my RTW than I had when I left. So another reason for this.

As you can see, my challenges have changed. This means the things I’ll inevitably talk about will change too.

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Possible Algorithm Update?

I know that Google uses a lot of “location” related things to determine search results, but I think I’m actually watching an update take place. My sites are bumping around (in a positive way). Been watching my sites bounce around 5 positions every 5 minutes for the last few hours as I work. Pretty cool. Hopefully it’s all positive for Cyber Monday.

Current Time: Nov. 26 at ~ 8:00pm Mountain Standard Time.

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