1. Snapping up “Trend Domains” - For example, rushing to your registrar and picking up some short, brandable domains related to new releases such as the Wii or iPhone.

2. Responding to the evolution of new extensions - The .mobi release was heavily anticipated, and although the .mobi extension isn’t strictly comparable to the new .asia, both releases carry a lot of potential. The .asia has a huge geographical reach behind it, and in covering booming online??nations like China and Japan, the potential for profit is massive with short, generic type-ins.

Unlike other new regional domain extensions, the DotAsia registry will use an auction system to allocate domains to competing rivals. In the preliminary stages, beginning today, corporations and governments??will be permitted to apply to the registry for domains. Companies with particular trademarks will get first preference, and then competing firms may face auctions to land some of the remaining generic domains.

However, what is for sure is that in February 2008, when the .asia extension goes live to the public - there will be thousands of generic words and phrases left to register. If this extension takes off as much as the Asian Internet usage has in the past few years then some of the quick witted domainers out there could bag a lot of long term traffic, or a quick profit - baring in mind the Flowers.mobi address landed its owner something in the region of $200,000 soon after its registration.

What domains will you be trying to pick up come the .asia release?

1) Edit the WordPress Footer - Login to your File Manager and edit the Footer.php file for your selected theme. To rank well for a term onpage you should try to make that term you wish to rank for??the last thing the search engine spider will read on your site. So, for example, you could change your copyright message to “2007 MyBlog - Make Money Website Blog”. If possible, depending on the theme you’re using, delete the credits to the theme designer and replace it with the keyterm you’re trying to rank for to ensure it’s the last item of text on the page.

2) Managing Outbound Links - If you consider each outbound link to be a “vote” for another site, then effectively the more “votes” your site is distributing, the less weight each one carries as a portion of your pagerank. Although this is more applicable to larger blogs that have an established PageRank and many link partners, the PageRank formula takes into account the amount of outbound links on a page. If you have say 20 solid Blogroll link partners, but include say 50 links at any one time on your blog’s front page, then the important??reciprocal links are diluted. You may think, sure, but that only means that less PageRank weight is passed on to my partners. Wrong. The accumulated lesser PageRank you pass on to these partners has a detrimental effect on your rankings, as they in turn have less to pass back to you. Although this is largely applicable to established blogs with a bank of link exchanges, it can make a significant difference.

3) Experiment with Keyword Density - as your blog begins to fill with posts, start to experiment with??different densities of your chosen keyword. You may set yourself a target, for example, to include your keyword??at least once per 500 words on your blog’s frontpage.??Although??density tweaks won’t make a difference if you’re not simultaneously carrying out offpage optimisation,??selecting??the correct frequency??of the keyword can be a balance between spamming and not??putting on sufficient emphasis. By experimentation I mean try using the keyword once per a certain amount of??overall words??in your posts and then analysing what effect??this has on your ranking, assuming your offpage optimisation is getting you ranked.

4) Bold and Italicize - It’s incredibly easy to embolden or italicize text with the WordPress editor. Using these effects on your keyword, say once per post, can have an impact through differentiating that keyword, in the eyes of the search engine spider, from the rest of your text.

5) Use Optimised Images??-??there are numerous benefits of including pictures in each post, not least because it is visually appealing and diversified to your audience. However,??well optimised images can carry SEO benefits, from web search and Google Images.??I’ll go into more detail on getting Google Images traffic another time, but selecting and saving a picture as your keyword, for example “makemoneywebsiteblog.jpg”, can again put emphasis on the term you wish to rank for through yet another form.??

It’s important to emphasize that these quick steps are not the be all and end all of SEO. Offpage optimisation is the key to ranking for a term. But, as you can imagine, it’s wasteful to exert a lot of effort into getting backlinks when your site isn’t giving you the best possible foundation for ultimately ranking for a suitable term. Thus combining quality onpage SEO and offpage techniques provides the best possible chance of getting ranked highly. Bare in mind, with a blog you’ll be judged on the quality of your posts more so than most other websites. Don’t aimlessly throw in your keyword wherever it fits, try to seamlessly integrate it with your post to ensure readability and satisfaction amongst readers.

1. Define the aim/purpose of your blog - ???If you don???t know where you???re going, you???re going to end up somewhere else.??? Place yourself in your readers shoes, and see the posting style that most appeals to you. By defining the purpose of your blog, your posts will follow more consistent trends. If possible, try to be original in your coverage of a particular topic. If your style is based on that of a related site it may be worthwhile establishing a link with the writer to gain some mention whether it be through blogroll exchanges or in post links. Ultimately, it is important to design your blog for an audience, without trying to design an audience??for your blog. Why? Because it may well not exist.

2. Define a style of writing that appeals to readers - Be consistent and make worthwhile posts. Consistency sticks with readers as this sense of repition is exactly what you want, but in terms of their return. Your writing style should??appeal to readers, and if possible engage them in??maximum discussion. Comments provide a range of benefits from traffic to SEO. And whatsmore a visitor that leaves a comment is likely to return to see the response. There is certainly a market for controversial writing, if you??make controversial, opinionated and thought provoking posts it will be easier to gain a voice. Regurgitating other people???s style of writing won???t seperate you from the crowd, a crowd of about 60 million other blogs.

3. Network - the foundations of traffic can be sourced from other established blogs in your field. By requesting a link exchange and prompting discussion in webmasters in similar fields to yourself,??you can gain a reputation, SEO benefits and traffic. Leave useful comments on similar blogs to your own, comments are a great way to show your knowledge and if you can contribute insightful opinions on a selection of subjects, your potential reader base will be inclined to visit you. Also try joining some blogging networks, and contributing to relevant forums won???t do you any harm either.

If you???re thinking of starting a blog, plan your ideas. Be market driven, think about who would want to read your blog and why. Don???t try to create??a new??reader interest in your writing, create your writing for their interests. There are opportunities to be grapsed in trying to create a unqiue approach but ultimately, you’ll need posts that are helpful, possess substance and are coherent. By this I mean I’d only visit your “make money online” blog if I believed it could assist me in increasing the profitability of my own sites. To do this you’re going to have to start delving into your own experience to satisfy readers and grow.

Good luck!

CLICK HERE TO VIEW ONE OF THE FIRST SCREENSHOTS OF THE CENSORSHIP

So what repurcussions does this have marketing wise? Well, it’s too early to tell, but this certainly sends a strong “e”signal from Iran to the West in what is becoming an ever more tense relationship.

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In this post I’ll tell you how to spot an undervalued site and make a valuable acquisition. There are a few characteristics of a site that you can use to decide whether or not the site’s price constitutes a bargain or not. They’ll come in handy when you’re browsing sites like SitePoint for potential acquisitions (bare in mind these characteristics are only really applicable to already established sites):

• Undervaluation - the best way to spot an undervalued site is to analyse its current income streams. Go over to SitePoint, for example, and find an appealing listing and open a text document. Once done, you’ll want to collect a list of the features of the site that hold monetization potential, and the corresponding potential and??current monetization methods being used by the owner. I’ll show you how it’s done. Over at the SitePoint Marketplace this site??is advertised as generating revenue from custom theme requests and theme sponsorship. The below process is the type of thing you’ll want to do to evaluate the effectiveness of a purchase, along with the confirmation of the other stats.

Assets of the Site

• Various Wordpress Themes
• PR6
• Good SERPs
• 51,000 Monthly Pageviews
• Opt-in email list?

Corresponding Monetization Potential

• Various Wordpress Themes - I consider, in this instance, the wordpress themes that the site in question possessess, to be an undervalued asset. One of the most important things to analyze is the potential for passive, recurring income. Now that the site is firmly established, could a “Premium Membership” option be setup to generate subscription revenue from bloggers, in return for access to each theme? In addition, you’d want to find out to what extent the themes are already branded. Is there potential to maximize revenue and SERPs??by including a footer link in each theme with anchor text like “Wordpress Themes”. Another thing I noticed in this instance is the fact that the theme sponsorship income stream isn’t heavily advertised at the site. This suggests the themes are an undervalued asset, because a simple advertising page could pull down far more sponsorship sales. This is good news for a buyer.
• PR6 - Whenever I see a quality PageRank I’m interested. It shows a degree of longevity. I think this feature is not being properly exploited by the current owner either. There’s potential there for an extra $500 per month revenue from text link sales and text-link-ads referrals.
• Good SERPs - This again consolidates the fact that the site is firmly established and able to attract organic traffic.
• 51,000 Monthly Pageviews - This opens up the potential for using Ad Programs like Kontera to supplement revenue.
• Opt-in Email List - An already established opt in email list is a huge asset. If I created a premium membership area for this particular site I’d expect 5-10% of the list to convert into sales.

In this example case study I would conclude that the site isn’t being monetized to its maximum potential. From this I can look beyond the silly 12x Monthly Revenue rules and be at a real advantage over other bidders. Many people wil simply check the revenue and multiply it by twelve to decide whether or not to bid. Following this process you can put yourself in a distinctly better position by not only knowing the current revenue, but the inherent chances of bulding up more passive revenue. From this analysis you can also??derive which questions to be asking. In this instance I would want to know how many email subscribers they had, and how often the emails have been used for promotion, for example.

This completes one of my favourite strategies: Developing an Affiliate site for a flip profit (maximizing the site’s value when sold), then reinvesting the profits into an undervalued site with potential for much greater monetization. It’s worked for me and it’ll work for anyone with sufficient staying power to try it out and work with it!

??1)????Choosing a Niche - Many step by step guides on affiliate marketing will tell you to go out and pick up a domain and build a site before choosing an offer, but I strongly suggest you select the product you’ll promote first. It might be an idea to choose a topic that interests you, but if you??want to profit??from my angle (the website flipping approach), it’s a good idea to select a product that appeals to the market of potential buyers later down the road. From my experience, members of SitePoint and other website marketplaces are always attracted to sites promoting “make money” style products. I’m not sure why exactly this is, but the members at these forums seem to have the vision to understand the potential of this particular niche - perhaps because they’ve purchased a product of this nature themselves in the past. After selecting the niche, skip over to ClickBank or whichever marketplace you use - and use the search system to select an offer.

2) Choose a Domain/Site - Next up, choosing your domain and site. If this is your first go at implementing this strategy I’d advise you to run your affiliate site with an individual hosting account so you can eventually benefit SEO wise if you build up a network (backlinks from different IPs are more effective). From personal experience, Lunar Pages are a good choice as they tick the boxes you’ll be needing to fulfil - they’re reliable, provide ample space and a free domain that you can use to launch your site. If you choose to flip your site after 4 weeks (you’ll find out what I’m talking about later),??you’ll literally have paid nothing for hosting with their deal.

Now there’s numerous ways of approaching this, to suit all budgets and experience levels. You could promote a product that provides a free sales letter and template, on a cheap .info domains. On the other hand, you could reach the opposite extreme and register 10-15 domains on a uniquely designed site and carry out some of the effective testing strategies I’ll explore later. There is no right or wrong option. If you’ve already got some experience in marketing, I’d advise you choose the latter and follow the staggeringly effective tweaking and testing ??strategy I’ll explore later for marketers with multiple domain names based on that same niche or offer. Alternatively, if this will be your first plunge into affiliate marketing, get a cheap .info and throw up a WordPress blog or simple template.

3) Building the Site - Bare in mind, this guide is targeted at the ultimate strategy of flipping at a later date. If you want to do this on a grand scale, I’d suggest going out and hiring a web designer to produce 10-15 custom landing pages - I’ll explain why in the testing section. You may want to take the colour scheme from the site of the offer you’re promoting for consistency, as this can help entice your leads into a purchase. My technique is probably a bit of a middle ground - which basically involves using professional looking??sites to pitch products from a range of designs. This works well for me, and I always seem to find at least one design to suit the niche and colour scheme I’m targeting. Anyhow, if you want to take this route to professionally pitch your deal, then check this out. However, if you’re looking to dip your feet and still generate a handsome profit it’s a good idea to throw up a free wordpress blog and theme.?? If you choose the latter then you’re outlay will only really be about $3 on a cheap .info and theme. The key to the site design is that affiliate marketing is a money making opportunity regardless of experience. Your outlay will, ultimately, be proportionate to your eventual profit - so choose whatever suits you best from the three options above.

4) Let’s Start PPC??Marketing - There are many ways to approach affiliate marketing itself, but I’ll describe to you exactly what I do with my fairly unique affiliate marketing to website flipping strategy to make cash. If you’re starting a fresh AdWords campaign for a fresh affiliate site then login to your AdWords account and enter 203680101737??in the billing preferences section of your account. To be eligible for this free credit, you must be using a new AdWords account - so you’ll either have to signup??fresh or??create a new account. This helps you to experiment and be even more cost effective in achieving a great ROI. One particularly important aspect of PPC marketing is your affiliate site’s Quality Score. Basically, Google will make you pay more to appear under specific keywords if your site is deemed poor quality. The best way to manipulate your “QS” to ensure the most cost effective clicks is to prevent Google from thinking your site is intended purely to pull AdSense clicks or Affiliate sales. I strongly suggest you avoid AdSense as a so called “income supplement” and produce a reasonable sales letter. Now some publishers will provide you with a sales letter, but if not, you should now set aside 1-2 hours to research your offer and niche - to produce a professional pitch. This doesn’t have to be gramatically perfect and you could take a lot of inspiration from the sales letter of the publisher behind the product your promoting. However, you need to find a healthy balance. You want to achieve a reasonable QS, but you shouldn’t duplicate the sales letter of the publisher or your leads may simply become confused and bored when you link them through to the sales page itself.

By this point, you should have yourself a clean looking website and a reasonably compelling and accurate sales letter offering your site a decent Quality Score. The next step is setting up your AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter campaign.

4a) The Advert - One key to the advert is maximization. Think to yourself as you write your advert that different keywords and adjectives will appeal to different customers. This is obvious in practice, if we apply it to the weight loss niche for example,??- as some customers might be attracted to an “easy” method whereas some may be focused on how “quick” the weight loss plan would be. You may only have 25??characters for the title and 35 characters per line but you really should aim to leave no more than??1-2 remaining characters per line if you’re looking to maximize your reach and appear. I’ll demonstrate and analyse a ??good advert I produced??below:

The Title - The above title consists of just 22 characters but has one overwhelming unusual feature - it is extremely unique and compelling. Go ahead and search for “weight loss” as an example niche in Google. I guarantee you’ll get bored pretty quickly reading repetitive and monontonous stuff like “shred weight today” and “lose three pounds today”. Your title must tick the “catchy box”, it needs to differentiate from your competition maximize clicks by being extremely compelling. The title I wrote above qualifies as it doesn’t reveal too much information (it would be difficult too in 25 characters!) but has the capability, in my opinion, to engage buyer interest in reading more. This is majorly due to the fact that it goes against the age old belief that weight loss requires dieting and exercise - and the title therefore represents something seemingly revolutionary and extraordinary. However, remember to keep your title factual, if you were in the weight loss market and wanted to use this title I’d advise researching all the affiliate offers open to find the one least focused on dieting and exercise.

Text - It’s particularly crucial that your text builds on your title and maximizes appeal by including as many interest arousing keywords appealing to your entire market. The example ad I produced uses up 68 of the 70 available characters which maximizes my chances of hitting a customer’s interest. As a marketer I believe language is a remarkable tool, and that every person has certain??inbuilt??inclinations to particular words. The way to take advantage of this is through the testing I’ll explore later, and including as many persuasive words as possible. My example ad is targeting the revolutionary interest in the weight loss market. If you’re targeting a saturated niche I strongly advise you take the “revolutionary” approach to your advert and sales letter - to avoid looking like just another boring ebook telling you to exercise and eat vegtables. Many customers in the make money and weight loss markets will have already purchased several ebooks on the topic, and with that in mind, you should try to target buyers looking for something different in a saturated, competitive market.

You’ll see my advert uses the words “revolutionary” and “unique” to hammer home this strategy effectively - making the use of space in the first line very efficient. I then build on this with words like “control” and “today”, which reinforce an idea of quick and easy to manage action on weight loss in this particular niche. It’s important to include 4+ “appeal” words??in the main body of your advert. These are typically adjectives that appeal to a particular need in your niche. By this I mean words that might create a wide interest in your average customer. My example advert contains “revolutionary”, “unique”, “control” and “today” all of which could arouse interest in the weight loss niche. I also sacrificed an extra appealing adjective to include “weight loss”, to ensure the very crux of the product I’m promoting isn’t forgotten.

4b) The Keywords - Your choice of keywords is every bit as important as your sales letter and advert. The trick with PPC keywords is to avoid the established, competitive and high traffic keywords. Targeting these words can provide a stable, reliable and dependable source of traffic - but you’ll pay for the privilege. I don’t include these words in my PPC marketing campaigns but I could imagine something like “make money” or “weight loss” could attract $10+ per click to ensure a place on Google.??According to Overture??”weight loss” is searched 647,612 times, which may equate to almost 1.8 million searches in Google. What effective PPC marketing does is target longtail keywords which are less mainstream search terms, that are??far less competitive, and subsequently attract far less searches. For the last year or so I’ve been taking advantage of what, from my experience, is by far the most effective longtail keyword generator. If you generate a list of??1000-5000 longtail keywords of 4,5 or more individual words per keyword, and each phrase can attract 50 searches each month, it’s possible to gain an exposure to a market of 50,000 - 250,000 highly targeted customers. These people are searching for a product in the same general niche and will be attracted to your advert as much as a customer using a more generic search term. The advantages of longtail keywords:

• Fewer advertisers target them and thus you have a more captive audience if you are the only marketer placing an ad to each of these customers. This means a greater percentage of the overall search volume will click through to your site, and you’re less likely to be in direct competition with others if you’re one of a very limited number of advertisers targeting such a keyword.

• Longtail keywords are cheaper per click as they are less competitive, which maximizes your ROI.

• If you have a high quality site design and sales letter, you might be able to convert at 1%. If you’re effectively targteting high quality longtail keywords at $.05 a piece, then let’s say after you’ve carried out the tweaking and testing I’ll explore later, you’re able to get one conversion for each $5 spent. This should easily work out at 300-400% ROI. This particular advantage of longtail keywords doesn’t apply to affiliates, but if you’re selling your own product, it can be massive. If you’re pricing your ebook or product at $25 but you’re converting for every $5 spent, I’ve found it to be extremely effective to run a trial price promotion that is still profitable, say at $10. It stands to reason theoretically that sales will rise at a lower price and you can increase conversions even more, helping spread your product more rapidly. Sales volumes might be important for a number of reasons - perhaps your ebook or guide contains affiliate links so the more readers the more profit that way. In addition, an increasing sales volume can drive profits away from your competitors. Ultimately,??your ability to manipulate prices with a good PPC ROI??can help bring about buzz in a potentially saturated market and??in the end - the more traffic and sales you can produce the greater??price the site will eventually attract if and when flipped.??

Finally,you will want to gear your campaign towards longtail keywords because they are more specific, niche phrases. If you were to search “make money” in Google there is no end to what you might want - what sort of opportunity you would be looking for, whether it would be specific to a particular area or even the cost. When someone searches a longtail keyword they are more likely to have a specific idea of the product they wish to purchase - which allows your campaign to attract customers in buying mode which ultimately equals greater conversions. From my experience, I’ve found that this software is by far and away the most effective way to run my longtail keyword campaigns for maximum ROI. If you’re serious about making maximum ROI and profit when you flip the site then??freely distributed keyword lists are not the way to go.

5) Maximising each Click and Retaining those who don’t buy first time - I’ve read a ton of??research over the years into the purchasing habits of potential leads you can send to your affiliate??offer. One of the most crucial statistics is the amount of times any buyer will visit a site before making the purchase. I believe it’s something like, on average, 6-8 times before making an eventual purchase. To maximise profit you need to ensure you yield the maximum benefit from every ad click you receive. One problem I faced was in generating good leads that eventually converted, but when they did, I wouldn’t receive credit because on whichever occasion they purchased - they may have gone directly to the publisher’s site rather than through my affiliate link. I know many affiliate programs track the original vist with cookies but this can still be a problem. What you want to do with your PPC marketing is get 1000 unique people for every 1000 clicks. By this I mean you don’t want 500 unique people to search the same keyword on a few occasions and end up clicking your advert twice - clearly this would be far less effective. Well, the best way, without doubt, to retain visitors without the cost of extra clicks is through an email newsletter signup form. This should be absolutely paramount to your plans and your site. If you can convert 1/100 clicks into a sale you want to make the most of the other 99.?? We all have phases and periods where we or more or less inclined to spend money and building up an email list will enhance the eventual flip price of your affiliate site - as well as boosting the site’s ultimate conversion rate if you can dish out a promotional email to the list of subscribers every once in a while.

I tend to find that providing an incentive to leave an email is fundamental, as well as positioning the subscribe form in a prominent area towards the top of your site. By an incentive I mean, for example, offering a free ringtone download if you’re promoting ring tones or giving away an exclusive article relating to whatever niche product your promoting. I believe there are two conversion rates in affiliate marketing, 1) Clicks into Sales and 2) Clicks into Email Subscribers. Due to purchasing habits the latter can be every bit as important as the first. If you incentivize visitors to leave an email you are, in essence, giving yourself as long as it takes and as many attempts as it takes to turn this person into a sale. In addition, they’re less likely to cost you more money if they come back to your site through an email link rather than through another ad click.

6) Testing and Tweaking your Domain and Ad for maximum ROI??- this is all about percentages. Like??I said earlier in the section on writing an ad, certain keywords and adjectives can incline certain people to click your ad.?? What I suggest is you write about 5 PPC ads, and in each one try to include a different set of 4-5 words that can appeal to your market. So if you’re promoting a “make money” style ebook, you could write an ad including “fast”, “easy” and “profit” and test that against an ad with “quick”, “simple” and “huge”. After a few days analyse the amount of clicks your attracting under the same keywords and you’ll be closer to seeing which words are most appealing to your market. This testing and tweaking can take your ROI even further.

Next up, if you’ve got $60 or so to invest, my advice is to register about 10 suitable domains. So if you’re promoting a weight loss guide, for example,??you might pick up “loseweightnow.info” and “weightlossblueprint.com”. From experience the domain name featured in the ad can have a profound effect on whether or not you get a click. So once you’re set on a particular ad and particular keyword set it’s time to start shuffling your domains. Again, give each domain a few days under the same ad and same keywords and then start analysing. Which domain name brought about the most significant rise in clicks.

I advise you spend about 2 weeks dedicating a few hours to this to take your ROI to the absolute limit. By the end you should have an insanely effective domain, ad and keyword combination.

7) The Flip - When I implement this strategy, I’m ideally looking for a turnaround time no longer than a month. That’s between registering the first domain and making the sale.

My Average Costs and Stats??Breakdown over 4 weeks??using this Strategy

• Timespan: 4 weeks
• Hosting: Essentially nothing if you get a free domain
• Domains: $60
• PPC expenditure: $500
• Converted Sales Revenue: $1,500-$2,000+
• Email List: 500+
• Profit from Site: $1,000
• The Flip (SitePoint, DigitalPoint etc): $12,500-$15,000

Using this strategy and knowledge I sometimes literally set aside an hour or two a day for four weeks and turn an eventual profit of around $15,000 from the flip. It’s astonishingly effective. It’s true that a lot of markets are reaching heavy saturation but it’s also true that anyone can succeed in affiliate marketing with desire and thorough??knowledge of the product being promoted.

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