Blog for Money Today

Statistics and Monitoring

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:13:00 +0000

What percentage of people click on the first listing in Google?

Only Google knows for sure, but estimates range from about 40% to 50%. AOL once released their data, which suggested that 42% click on the first listing. “Heat map” studies tend to lean more towards 50% or more.

How do I use Google alerts to monitor the SERPs?

All you have to do is get a Google account and then go to Google Alerts. There you enter the keywords you want the tool to monitor the SERPs for, choose “comprehensive,” choose the frequency you want to receive the alerts and then enter your email address where you want to receive the alerts.

Once you’ve completed those simple steps, you’ll get alerted when new pages that use your keywords appear in the search engines.

You can also use this tool to monitor your backlinks as they appear in Google. Just enter this search term into the alerts field: link:www.yourdomain.com/filename.html

Replace the above URL with your actual link, of course.

How can I track the number of backlinks I have?

There are a variety of tools available to you, such as using the Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster tools (check the links report) and SEO Quake.

Using these tools is preferable to searching directly in Google. That’s because searching manually generally yields only a sample of the sites that are linking to your site.

Ultimately they’re all wrong! Don’t obsess about tracking these things just focus on building more.

Lesson Six: Indexation

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:24:00 +0000

How do I get my site indexed?

Don’t bother submitting your site through the traditional methods. The fastest way to get a site to appear in Google’s index is to create backlinks to it. Use social bookmarking sites to create lots of easy win links from sites that are spidered regularly and submit any RSS feeds you’ve got to directories.

If you’re really keen to get indexed as fast as humanly possible –

Stick Adsense on your pages (even if you remove it later) as this forces Google to spider you.
Setup an Adwords campaign to your domain (Google has to spider you to determine your quality score).
Search for your domain name.
Perform site: and link: searches on your domain.
Visit your site using accounts with some of the most widespread ISPs (eg AOL) since their logs are used to find new content.
Email links to your site to and from a Gmail account.

How do I get my backlinks indexed?

The slow way is to wait for the search engines to naturally find them. The faster way is to ping the page after you leave a backlink. For truly fast backlinking social bookmark them or create RSS feeds with links in.

How can I tell if my site has been visited by a spider/bot?

By checking your traffic logs and statistics. Most traffic analyzing software will recognize and label the bots and spiders that crawl your site. You can also recognize these visitors manually, as the “user agent” is usually labeled something obvious, such as “Google Bot.”

Lesson Five: Advanced Link Building

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:46:00 +0000

What is link velocity?

This refers to how quickly you gain backlinks. For best results, maintain a consistent link velocity.

Most importantly don’t build a load of backlinks (especially with fast indexation techniques) and then stop. Google sees this as a news article that was interesting for a short period of time but no longer relevant so stops ranking it. “Too many links” or “links built too fast” are rarely a problem but inconsistency is.

Can I build links too fast?

Yes and no. If you’ve got a brand new domain name and you fire up some of the more powerful link spamming automation software you’ll get you domain flagged quicker than you can say, “help me my site is gone”.

If you’re building links manually or controlling your usage of serious spam software you’ll be hard pushed to build links too fast on any domain that’s already been aged a bit. Just be consistent.

If you think you can build links too fast on any site here’s an experiment for you next time you’re having a slow weekend. Go out and buy the fastest, spammiest link building software you can lay your hands on and pick a Wikipedia article that currently ranks quite well. Go nuts. All you will do is strengthen its position.

What is page rank sculpting?

There are various techniques available to channel link juice through the links you actually want to receive it and thus rank them higher. In theory Google has corrected this but several experiments have shown this isn’t the case, although the actual PR passed through the links no longer gets affected.

What is a link wheel?

A link wheel refers to setting up multiple pages on multiple third-party websites (usually at least five) as a means of getting backlinks to your main site.

You link these properties to each other, but not reciprocally. For example, you link your EzineArticles article to your Squidoo page, then link your Squidoo page to HubPages… and so on. Finally, you link each of these third-party pages to your main site.

By using sites with a ton of content (and other SEOs backlinking them) you’re naturally tapping a bigger seem of link juice. Take advantage of this by writing high quality content for them so human beings follow the links as well since they will rank alongside your money site.

What is a mininet?

This is like a link wheel, except that you own all the sites that you’re linking together. You may link together a series of smaller niche sites, with each smaller site linking to your main site.

For example, you might link your dog housetraining site to your dog obedience site, and then link your dog obedience site to a site about training dogs to do tricks. All of these smaller niche sites would then link to your main dog training site.

What makes a good site for a link wheel?

Web 2.0 properties and other websites that have a high Page Rank. The best ones are sites which you get a page that will be automatically linked to from all over the site. Article directories like EzineArticles are perfect for this since you get tons of internal links to kick things off with.

What is link bait?

This means “baiting” others into linking to your site. Typically, this means posting unique, controversial, extremely useful or otherwise entertaining content or tools so that others naturally link to your web page.

In other words, you create and post viral content.

What is a link farm?

Link farms consist of large networks of sites whose sole purpose is to generate pages that can be used to link out to other sites that are actually worth something.

They are pretty much essential to rank for more highly competitive keywords but don’t attempt this unless you really know what you are doing. Google is smarter than you!

What is a proxy?

A proxy server is one that sits between your computer and the Internet, and using one allows you to go online somewhat anonymously. If you get online using a Proxy, no one can trace your IP address back to you and your computer.

For example, you can use a proxy to set up multiple EzineArticles.com accounts.

Lesson Four: Link Building Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:31:00 +0000

What is a backlink?

This is when a third-party website links to your website. For example, if you write and submit an article to an article directory, then you’ll have an incoming link – a backlink -- from the directory.

The search engines prefer one-way incoming backlinks from high-quality, relevant websites.

What is anchor text?

When you create a link, the anchor text is the clickbable part of the link. For example, in the phrase, “go to Google,” Google is the anchor text.

The reason this is important is because you want to use your keywords as your anchor text on incoming links. So if you’re trying to rank for “gardening secrets,” then those two words should make up the anchor text for several of your backlinks.

What is a do-follow/no-follow link?

There are two types of “nofollow” attribute. The robots meta tag version –

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

Which tells (well behaved) bots/crawlers/spiders not to follow links on the page

And the link attribute

<a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>

Which tells search engines not to count the link in terms of ranking pages.

In theory these links are worthless for boosting your search engine rankings. In practice you’ll often see some benefit, especially when mixed in with a load of dofollow links.

Links are automatically “dofollow” in the absence of the rel=”nofollow” attribute. There is no rel=”dofollow” attribute.

Can paid links harm my ranking?

Google’s official stance is that buying links is an attempt to manipulate rankings – and Google frowns on this practice.

In reality, however, it’s very hard for Google to penalize you for buying links (and they wouldn’t be able to tell for sure anyway). Indeed, if there was a penalty, then you could destroy a competitor simply by purchasing links to their site and then reporting them to Google. Poof, competition gone.

Of course it doesn’t work that way. As such, if there’s any “penalty,” it may just be that Google doesn’t “count” links from paid sources.

TIP: Google does penalize the sites that are selling these backlinks – so if you buy backlinks, be sure that the backlinks aren’t coming directly from the penalized sites.

Are reciprocal links bad?

They’re not bad, per se, especially if they’re coming from relevant, high quality websites. However, one-way incoming links tend to be more valuable in terms of SEO.

What is a one-way link?

This is a non-reciprocal link. That means that Site A links to Site B, but Site B does NOT link back to Site A.

The search engines prefer to see one-way links from relevant, quality sites.

What is three-way linking?

Three-way linking is a way for two webmasters to exchange links so that each person’s website gets a one-way link (rather than a reciprocal link).

In order to make this work, at least one of the webmasters has to have a second site in the same niche. Here’s how it works:

Webmaster 1 links his Site A to Webmaster 2’s Site B. Then Webmaster 2 links his Site C to Webmaster 1’s Site A.

Thus Sites A, B and C all have one-way incoming links, like this:

Site A -> Site B -> Site C -> Site A

What is a site wide link?

These are links that are found on every page of a website. For example, many people have a link to their “home” page (the index page) on every other page of their web site. That’s a site wide link.

What is pinging?

Pinging is informing web-crawling bots (such as search engines or directories) that you’ve updated the content on your web page. The goal is to get these bots to crawl and index your new content immediately.

For example, if you post a new article on your blog, you can use pingomatic.com or pingler.com to inform multiple bots about this change.

Lesson Three: Google and Page Rank

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:01:00 +0000

What is Page Rank?

Page Rank (PR) is a numeric value from 0-10 that Google assigns to your individual web pages, and it’s a measure of how important that page is.

Google determines this importance by looking at how many other high quality, relevant pages link to a particular page. The more links – and the better quality those links are – the more “votes” a page gets in terms of importance. And the more “votes” a site gets, generally the higher the PR.

How often does Google update Page Rank?

It used to be every 3 months but it’s becoming more and more erratic.

Does PR matter?

Yes and no. Originally PR was all that mattered in the search rankings but today that’s just not true since there are a myriad of other factors that Google considers when weighting who should appear where.

That said, high PR is always worth having just don’t obsess over it.

What is the "Google Dance"?

When “stuff” changes the SERPs fluctuate, sometimes wildly. One day your site could be number 1 and the next nowhere to be seen. One of the main contributing factors to that is how Google sees your backlinks (which you’re consistently building, right?).

Don’t obsess over it, just keep building and you’ll be fine.

How does Google personalize my results?

If you’re signed into Google, then Google keeps track of what search engine results you’ve clicked on. And even if you’re not signed in, Google keeps track of what results people who use your computer click on.

Over time, Google starts to detect a pattern. For example, if you seem to always click on Wikipedia results, then Google will start showing you more Wikipedia results. If you always click on health results from webmd.com, then you’ll get more webmd.com results when you run a health-related search.

Lesson Two: Other factors about Advanced SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:47:00 +0000

What other factors affect rankings besides backlinks?

Where you’re getting your links, the quality of these links, the relevancy of these links, how many links you have and what keywords you’re using as the anchor text all affect your rankings. But there are other factors that affect your ranking, including but not limited to:

On page optimization factors – this is how well you’ve optimized your tags, content, formatting, keyword proximity, site map, and links on your web page. This also includes whether you use your keywords at the top of your page and in your “alt” tags (both good things).
Having a lot outgoing or reciprocal links pointing to “bad” sites (like link farms) – can negatively impact rankings.
Whether you have unique content (which the SE’s like).
How frequently you update your site. Faster isn't necessarily better. Check what ranks well for your niche and aim to match it.
Whether your domain includes your primary keywords.
Your domain’s age, reputation, IP address and whether it’s a top level domain (e.g., a .com is better than a .info although probably not by much).
Shady practices such as keyword stuffing or using text that’s the same color as the background can negatively affect your rankings. Only an issue if your site gets manually inspected and you don't have a legitimate reason for it.
Showing one page to the search engines and other page to visitors negatively affects your rankings. (Cloaking and doorway pages.)
Frames negatively affect your rankings.
Using content that the search engines can’t read, like audios, flash, videos, graphics (without alt tags), etc.
Whether you have a robots.txt file that tells the search engine bots to stop crawling or indexing your site.

Does domain age help?

Yes – search engines view older domains as more trustworthy, which means older domains may have a slight advantage. But this is only true if the older domain has a good reputation (e.g., it hasn’t been blacklisted, penalized or banned from the search engines).

Why would I want to 301 redirect an aged domain?

Google passes link juice/authority/age/ranking strength (call it what you like) from one domain to another if you do a 301 redirect on it.

For the less tech savvy out there the 301 code means “permanently moved” and is a way to announce that your site that was once “here” is now “there”.

The upshot of this is that you can buy an aged domain and “301” it to the site you’re trying to rank instantly passing on all that lovely ranking power that it’s acquired just by sitting in some domain squatters account for 10 years.

Just make sure they do a domain push at the same registrar it was originally registered at or all these effects are lost.

Also, you have to wait up to 2 weeks to see the benefits. They are not instant!

What is rel="canonical"?

If you have two or more pages with similar content, you can tell Google which is your preferred page to show in the search engine results. This is referred to as your “canonical” page. If Google agrees this designated page is the best version, it will show this preferred page in its index.

To tell Google which page you want listed as the canonical page, add the following bit of code into the head section of the similar (non-canonical) pages:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/filename.html"/>

Naturally, you should replace the example.com/filename.html with your actual domain name and file name. For example…

Example.com/file1.html is your preferred canonical page, the one you want displayed in the search engine results. You don’t have to add any tags to this site.

Example.com/file2.html and Example.com/file3.html have similar content to example.com/file1.html. As such, you’d place the canonical code within the <head> tag of these two sites to tell Google that example.com/file1.html is the most important page.

The most common reason to do this is to tell Google that these pages are all the same –

Example.com
www.example.com
www.example.com/index.html
Example.com/index.html

Don’t go overboard with this and certainly don’t use it on stuff like paginated comment pages because they are “similar” but contain the same post. They contain enough unique content to be treated as unique and Google will start to ignore your legitimate canonicals if it finds too many instances of you misusing it.

Yes, Google thinks it’s smarter than you, deal with it and move on.

What's the truth about duplicate content?

There is no duplicate content penalty when it comes to multiple sites. Otherwise, your shady competitors could just create near-clones of your site to make your site disappear. But that doesn’t happen. Indeed, run a search for a PLR article and you’ll likely see many SE results for that same article.

TIP: Nonetheless, it’s better if you have unique content, rather than competing with others for the same keywords using similar content.

What about duplicate content on your OWN site? In other words, what happens if you have two web pages with the same content but different file names? In that case, refer to the question on rel-canonical for instructions on how to deal with this.

What is a doorway page / cloaking?

Cloaking refers to showing one page to a search engine and a different page to your human visitors. Doorway pages are optimized pages that pull in SE traffic, but this traffic is immediately redirected (either manually or automatically) to a different page.

Google and other search engines do NOT like these practices.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are information that you put between the <head> tag of your web page’s source code. These meta tags primarily tell search engines and other user agents about your site’s content (description), keywords, formatting, title and whether you want the search engines to crawl (and index) the page.

There are also some tags that are shown to the user, such as the title tag (which is the title that appears at the top of your browser).

Note that the big search engines no longer take these tags into consideration when ranking your web pages (with the exception of the title tags). Some smaller and more specialized search engines still utilize the keywords and description tags when ranking and displaying your site.

What is the "freshness" factor?

Search engines such as Google prefer “fresh” (newly updated) web pages and content over stale content. That’s why when you first add content to your site – such as a new blog post – this page may sit high in the rankings for a while. Eventually it may sink to a more realistic ranking.

It’s this “freshness factor” that allows your pages to get those higher rankings, even if the ranking is temporary. Thus updating your pages frequently can help push them to the top of the rankings.

This is one of the primary reasons why you hear people talking about how “Google loves blogs”. Google doesn’t love blogs, Google loves regularly updated sites.

What is a C-class IP and why should I care?

A computer’s IP address is it’s address on the Internet. A C-Class block of IPs are ones which are next to each other. Links from the same IP have very limited value. Links from the same C-Class IP block have a little more value but still not much. Links from different C-Class IPs are worth the most.

Not as important as it once was, especially when it comes to sites hosted on huge shared server clusters like those at HostGator/ThePlanet, BlueHost and others. The shortage of available IP addresses is driving this.

Most importantly tons of domains all on the same IP or C-Class that all interlink are the fastest way to announce to Google that you’re trying to cheat the system. This may have worked a couple of years ago, now it’s just a flashing neon sign telling Google to deindex you.

What is LSI?

LSI is short for latent semantic indexing. This refers to different words that have the same or similar meanings (or words that are otherwise related). For example, “housebreaking a dog” and “housetraining a puppy” are two entirely different phrases, but they mean about the same thing.

The reason this is important is because Google analyzes webpages using LSI to help it return the most relevant results to the user.

For example, a page that has the keyword “housebreaking a dog” but NO other similar words (like housetraining, paper training, potty training, puppy, dogs, puppies, etc) probably really isn’t about housebreaking. End result: Google won’t rank it as high as a web page that does include a lot of relevant, related terms.

What does this mean to you? When you create a web page around a keyword, be sure to also include the keyword’s synonyms and other related words.

Pure LSI analysis isn't scalable enough to handle the volumes of data that Google processes. Instead they use more streamlined and scalable content analysis algorithms that have some basis in LSI and other related technologies. It also appears that this analysis is ongoing and not just a one time run through the system.

Cliff Notes: Don’t write content that a drunk 4th grader would be ashamed of. Spend the extra couple of minutes to write decent stuff and you’ll be fine.

Should I build links for human beings or the search engines?

Both but make sure you know which one you’re going for at any point.

If you want human beings to click the link then make sure your content high quality and worth that click.

If it’s never going to be seen by a human then don’t spend a week writing a beautifully crafted piece of prose use automation or anything you can lay your hands on to get links fast.

What is an XML Sitemap?

This is a listing of all the pages on a website, along with important information about those pages (such as when they were last updated, how important they are to the site, etc). The reason to create a sitemap is so that the search engines can easily find and crawl all your web pages.

This is really only important if you have a large and complex site that won't be crawled easily. A 10-20 page HTML mini-niche site doesn't really need one while a 20,000 page product catalog might benefit from one. Also avoid automating this on WordPress autoblogs since sitemap generation is a processor hog and can get you kicked off of shared hosting.

What's the sandbox?

The disappointment webmasters feel when Google's stupid algorithms don't appreciate their site. It can't be them so it must be Google's fault.

What is robots.txt for?

This is a file some include in some or all of their website directories. Search engine robots (bots) look at this file to see if they should crawl and index pages on your site, certain file types or even the entire site. An absence of this file gives them the green light to crawl and index your site.

If you don’t want search engine bots to crawl your site, then create a robots.txt file in your root directory that includes this bit of code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

You can also create a meta tag that keeps the search engines from indexing your site:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Important: Only “well behaved” bots read robots.txt so don’t use it to “protect” content on your site just to keep Google from indexing stuff. Most importantly be aware that malicious bots will look for pages you’re asking not to be indexed and go to them with priority to see why.

What's a spamblog?

A spamblog (or splog) is a blog used primarily to create backlinks to another site. Splogs tend to be populated with fake articles, commercial links and other garbage content.

In other words, they provide little or no value to a human reader. As such, the search engines tend to de-index these sites once they discover them.

What's an autoblog?

An autoblog uses an automation tool to pull in content from other sources and post it on the blog. In other words, it’s an easy way to automatically and frequently update a blog.

They are a great way to build foundation sites to provide link juice to your higher ranking, more competitive sites but a good way to get sites banned if you don’t know what you are doing.

Most importantly there is a lot of discussion about how legal they are due to reproducing content. I’m definitely not going to get involved in that discussion and I ask you not to turn this thread into a flame fest discussing it.

What's an "authority" site?

An authority site is one that is seen as influential and trustworthy by search engines, and thus it tends to rank well. Authority sites tend to be well-established sites that have a lot of high-quality, relevant content as well as links from other authority sites,

Obviously, getting your own website recognized as an “authority site” will boost your rankings. However, it’s also beneficial to get backlinks from these authority sites.

What are "supplemental" results?

These are results that are displayed in Google’s index after the main results – especially if Google’s trusted websites didn’t return many results. These supplemental results are no longer labeled as “supplemental” results. However, this secondary database still exists to index pages that have less importance, such as duplicate content on your site or orphaned pages.

For example, if you have multiple pages on your site with the exact same content, then Google will index your most important page in the main index, and place the duplicate page in the supplemental index.

Lesson One: SEO Basics - what is, how it works..

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:44:00 +0000

What is SEO?

SEO = Search Engine Optimization, ie getting your site ranked higher so more people show up at your doorstep. In theory we’re interested in all search engines. In practice SEO = Google.

What's the difference between SEO and SEM?

While some people use SEO and SEM interchangeably, SEO (search engine optimization) is actually a part of SEM (search engine marketing).

SEO refers to the process of using on and off page factors (typically free) to get your web pages ranked for your chosen keywords in order to get more search engine traffic to your sites. SEM takes it a step farther to include using paid search engine listings and paid inclusion to get more traffic to your websites.

What's the difference between paid and organic search listings?

Organic search engine listings are the main results users see when they do a Google search. The websites appearing in the organic listings appear because those sites are most relevant to the user’s keywords. Indeed, most of these sites appear in the top of the search engine results because the webmasters of these sites have used SEO tactics to ensure top rankings.

The paid (or “sponsored”) listings usually appear on the top, bottom and to the right of the regular organic listings. Usually these are pay per click (PPC) ads, which means the website owner only pays when someone clicks on his ad (as opposed to paying for impressions).

This isn’t an either/or game. Just because you do SEO doesn’t mean you can’t/shouldn’t use PPC and vice versa.

SEO is not free traffic, it takes time and/or money to get good organic rankings but in the long run it’s usually cheaper than PPC.

What's on-page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to the things you do on your own site to enhance it’s ranking in the search engines. This includes but is not limited to:

Creating content around specific keywords.
Formatting/designing your site so that the most important keywords are emphasized and appear near the top of the page.
Including the chosen keywords in meta tags.
Including the keywords in the navigation menu and other links.
Using your keywords in other parts of your site, such as the title of the page, the file name, etc.
Using related keywords on the site (see the question on LSI for more information).

What's off-page SEO?

Off page SEO refers to those things you do outside of your own web pages to enhance their rankings in the search engines.

This is a glorified way of saying, “get links” and did I mention, “more links”.

How quickly will I see results?

If you target long tail keywords you can see results pretty quickly but always remember SEO is a long term strategy not a set and forget thing.

If you’re after more competitive keywords prepare to commit to it for at least three months of consistent effort.

Should I rank my own content or articles on other sites?

Yes – but let’s qualify that.

Because you can’t control what third-party sites do, you should focus the vast majority of your efforts on ranking content on your own sites.

However, you can leverage high-ranking third-party sites by posting SEO’ed content on them and then you including a link back to your own site. Not only do you get the SEO benefits of the backlinks, you’ll also get indirect search engine traffic from people clicking through to your main site.

(To be continued)

Master SEO Sheet REVEALED!

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Sat, 28 May 2011 05:35:00 +0000

I've been focusing on SEO this month for my blog, and want to share an important and necessary recipe for SEO success that I've been using.

I want to share to you today, what I believe to be a complete ON PAGE SEO strategy that will help anyone progress towards acheieving first rank on the Google search engine. I've studied these techniques of which I am about to share with you today, from multiple top level internet marketing gurus on the web!

Here are some important and necessary search engine optimization tips, in order to increase search engine rankings on Google!

Here is YOUR Master SEO Sheet!

1) Place Main Keywords In Domain Name

2) Main Keywords Placed In Home Title Tag 2 Times

3) Main Keywords Placed In H1, H2, H3 Tags

4) Inlcude Main Keywords In Beggining Of First Sentence Of Each Paragraph

5) Inlcude Main Keywords In Last Sentence Of Each Paragrapsh

6) Keyword Density Of 3% Of Entire Post

7) Use Main Keywords On Site As Anchor Text Linking To Another Internal Page Of Website In Each Post

8) Use Main Keywords As Anchor Text Linking To An Authority Site. Use A No Follow Tag.

9) Remove Every Other Link On Your Website Besides Affiliate Products And Links Mentioned Above.

10) Bold, Italicise, Or Underline Main Keyword Once In Each Of Your Posts.

11) Add An "alt" Tag With Main Keyword Included In Each Image.

12) Optimize Names Of Each Image On All Posts

13) Create 850-1,000 Word Posts.

Please be sure to note that these SEO tips are ON PAGE SEO strategies; and that key ingredients to first page rankings on Google also require Off Page SEO, which includes high quality link building.

Top 10 Facebook PPC marketing tips

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Fri, 27 May 2011 16:09:00 +0000

Based on market research, close observation, and personally spending almost six figures in testing, here are the 10 MOST powerful Facebook ppc marketing tips you can learn and profit from today.

I felt it also necessary to lay-out some of the more costly mistakes I see made by marketers and small businesses make regularly as well.

1. Know your audience.

Too many jump into running ads way too soon without completing market research. You must know the ins and outs, demographics, keywords, and fine details about the local or global market you’re advertising in.

Here's an example:

I saw an add the other day that was geared toward dentists to the tune of “getting new customers.” The reality is, dentists don’t want new customers… they want NEW PATIENTS!

Know the language of your market and common terms they use to communicate their needs. You could also target dentists based on the school they attended or an actual keyword in the profile.

2. Rotate ads frequently

In reality, the ad-life on Facebook is short, especially if you’re targeting a smaller niche market. You’ll see a spike in traffic, high click-through-rates (CTR’s), then it will drop off in a week or two.

You must keep your ads fresh to maintain high click-throughs. This is a key point many marketers and business owners overlook.

3. Know what time to run your ads

Most people are on Facebook at work… period. Employers have started to ban the social network on office computers… lol. Take the hint!

Optimal times to run ads for most are between 8am – 5pm. This is not 100% and may vary on your market. Weekends are hit and miss.

4. Test different headlines, images, or text descriptions

This could be a separate blog post or two in itself. If your Facebook ad’s not generating clicks, the bid is either too low or the ad you created sucks.

Test many different headlines, images and text descriptions to see what is converting the best. Think “attention grabbing.”

Don’t settle for anything under a .03% CTR when running an ad.

5. Give the ads enough time to run

I recommend giving the add at least 50 clicks to see how well it’s performing. Don’t pull the trigger and 86 the ad too fast without accurately assessing the ROI.

The good thing I’m finding on Facebook is that you can gauge performance of the ad faster than with Google.

6. Set a reasonable daily budget

Facebook has over 600 million users so they can deliver all of the traffic you can handle, for that matter. If you set a budget of $200 / day, your ad will be shown more frequently since Facebook will try to max that budget with clicks.

Conversely, if you set a budget to $12 / day, your ad will be show less and spaced throughout the day. Set a budget you’re comfortable with but realize that if you want to be more aggressive, your daily budget will have to be higher.

7. Always drive traffic to a landing page to capturing leads

YOU MUST DO THIS. You’re literally throwing money down the tubes if you don’t have a converting lading page to funnel the targeted Facebook traffic.

Far too many businesses pay for traffic only to let everyone look at their page for 2 seconds then bounce off. There should be a blatantly obvious (and irresistible) offer on the landing page that clearly tells the visitor what to do next.

8. Provide a clear and concise call to action

A clear call to action should be found in the Facebook ad itself and on the landing page. Examples are text descriptions that conclude with “click here now,” “click the LIKE icon,” or “call 555-555-5555 now.”
Your images can also have calls to actions.

9. Understand how to measure your ROI (return on investment)

This will vary based on the local or global market you service. Your first goal if you’re a beginner marketer is to try to break even on your ad spend. Doesn’t matter if you’re promoting physical products / services or digital ones.

If you’re a chiropractor (for example), you should know your average case value per patient… or lifetime value. If you get 1 new patient from Facebook Ads (worth $1,500) and you spend $800 for the month, it’s a no-brainer to keep running the ad.

10. Don’t give-up

This is one of the most valuable Facebook PPC tips, as they WILL deny your ads. Don't stop submitting them for approval, though. They are way more relaxed than Google. Don’t be weak or scared of rejection.

Be persistent and always test new ad variations. Facebook (to this point) just denies your ad, they don’t permanently ban you like Google does if you submit an add that doesn’t meet approval.

If you want to short-cut and dramatically REDUCE your out-of-pocket testing costs, find someone that’s mastered successful Facebook Advertising that can assist you.

I’ve spent enormous amounts of money, time, and energy into discovering what’s working the BEST and what doesn’t. Facebook is dynamic, too. That means the game is always changing.

With any PPC advertising, you can expect to easily spend a few grand in testing if you don’t seek the expertise and guidance of someone that’s successfully (and profitably) doing it. Hopefully, you gleaned some good insight from this post.

The magic formula to make $10 - $20 a day with CPA Networks

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:36:00 +0000

I decided to share this valuable free information with all buddys: If you want to finally make money promoting CPA offers, then read how I started my career in CPA marketing.

Now I had some unique and profitable strategy that will help you to kick-start your career in the CPA marketing.

1. Sign up first for some cpa marketing company

2. Choose an offer or offers

3. We are going to be focusing on creating a wordpress site for FREE things I.e. people type things like “free Adwords codes” on Google all the time. I use this tool from Wordtracker to help me find out what people are actually typing on Google.

There are an insane amount of different “free” searches people are typing on Google. Let's pick one at random.

For example, “free printable grocery coupons” is a popular search phrase according to WordTracker. If we look at the competition on Google you will see there are over a million results and it would be fairly easy to be able to rank on the first page.

Create a simple wordpress blog, but do not forget to include some keywords in titles and headlines.

The concept is simple. People who want “free printable grocery coupons” will come on this website, follow the simple instructions and then complete the offer.This is a great way to 'entice' the person
to fill the offer.

You can do this same concept with other “free” phrases people are searching for. For example, free movies, free movie downloads. Basically anything you can think of that something people would want. And the beauty of this method is that it will never get saturated as long as you are within the radar and are careful.

Here are some other markets you can exploit with this method:

Free DVD Horror Movies
Free Mp3
Free Games

Even if you have a blog with 100 people seeing it every day and only 7-10% complete an offer, then you will have around $10-$20 at the end of the day. Let´s say you have 10 blogs and post great content every day. You have then around $100-$200 every day or $3000 - $6000 a month. Isn´t it great?!

I hope you enjoyed this short post and now can get to work!

Believe me if you start using this method you can generate good commissions very quickly.

To Your Success!

Why most people fail with autoblogging?

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Thu, 26 May 2011 17:07:00 +0000

Some of my online properties are my autoblogs. I first learnt about autoblogging in the internet, created my first autoblogs with the help of the countless great posts here about autoblogs.

When I first learnt about autoblogging I was so excited: "Im going to create a blog that take care of himself and its going to take care of my financial future", I can't imagine a better way to make money than this!! Money machines here I come...

My first autoblog was banned from google in less than a month it was created. After that I thought autoblogging is a myth and kept away from these nusty-easy banned machines for about a year.

But, something tickled my fingers, autoblogging sounded so romantic to me

I tried again, and failed ~10 times before I had my first successful autoblog (it made US$3 per day for several months before I had the nerve to call it a success).

Today, after 2 years Im earning a nice income from autoblogging (no, it is not my main IM source of income, but it is the one I love the most) I know why most people fail with autobloggin:

If you tried autoblogging and failed 99.999% it is because: You didn't give it the respect it deserves!!!

Most people (in the past - me at the top) disrespect their autoblogs, it starts with the thinking "let the donkey work as hard as it can, if it fails not too bad, let it die, anyway I like horses better".

The fact that a blog is automatic doesn't mean you don't need to put some effort and thinking in its design, niche selection, keyword selection and the most important thing:
SEO

Myth - long tail keyword don't need SEO they will be ranked high cause they are long tail, since autoblogs aim to long tails, no need to SEO it = BULL****.

The reason MOST of us fail/failed in autoblogging is because we didn't do enough (or at all) SEO.

Can you imagine creating a money site, writing good content, thinking about it, loving and caring it and after its online doing none/almost none SEO and expecting to earn money from it?

Today I know that autoblogging is one of the easiest ways to earn money online (the fact its the easiest doen't mean it is easy... ), but like in ANY buisness you need to do it right.

In autoblogging there are several things you need to do right. As I wrote I started from information of the internet, it is loaded with it, but knowing what I went through on my journey to a successful autoblog net, and reading what people are talking about, I'm sure most of the "things you should do to success in autoblogging" are done by most people. Most people don't go the one (or two) extra step needed to make this beast work properly.

Today I have my autoblogging empire, my average income is 10$/day/blog, it happened when I started respecting my autoblogs, this respect made me put some effort into them, small effort that made the difference, one of the most important things I did is to put some SEO into them.

SEO your autoblogs and they will pay you for it

I don't want to sound like you can create an autoblog and all you need to do is to SEO it and your troubles are over, FAR from it.

I say you need to do it right, I say it is not rocket science to create a good autoblog, but still it requires some knowledge and effort. I say after you have an autoblog think - if it was my money site, what extras would I do?

I can keep on bubbling about autoblogs endlessly, but there is too much to say, most/all of it was already written in this blog, but if you guys want to shoot me with some questions, I'll
try to help... After all I owe my blogs success to all of you.

Simple strategies that you can do with SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Mon, 23 May 2011 18:46:00 +0000

If you are quite new in the online advertising field, you may not be too familiar yet with the many search engine optimization strategies that make your internet advertising campaign more effective. To guide you on your online marketing journey, here are a few simple search engine optimization strategies that can help you boost your website traffic generation efforts.

The content of your articles will always spell the failure or success of your online advertising campaign, after all, what the customer needs is helpful information, data that they can use to alleviate their current situation, additional information on something that they already have preliminary knowledge on, or a very new and innovative process that will help them simplify what is normally hard for them – these are some of the contents that you want to delve on and discuss. Content is always king and nothing will beat an article like impeccable information.

Now, however good your article is, your marketing campaign would go nowhere unless more people are able to read them, and if your articles stay inactive, then it’s just similar to the best actor in the world, yet the only person who have watched them act is their mother. Become popular, get paid, increase your website traffic, build your reputation as an expert, make so many conversions, these are just some of the benefits that you will get if you increase the readership of your articles and that can be done by using the many article directories and submitting your articles to them.

Write good articles, and then submit them to as many popular article directories as you can. To further increase your submission, use an automatic article submitter and what it does is it lists all the many article directories available online, and then you choose the ones where you want to submit and the tool automatically does that for you from now on.

Get as many back links as you can and with this topic, we go back to the topic on article content because the only way your site is going to get attractive enough for other older and more popular websites to want to link up with you is if your article contents are really moving and interestingly written. Keep in mind that the search engines, especially

Google just loves back links and they reward web sites that have so many relevant back links attached to them by ranking them high in the search results pages.

Nowadays, video marketing is increasingly getting popular and you also ride the tide while it is still easy to do your hang tens. Study how simple marketing videos are made and post one or two instructional videos on your site.

Strategies to increase conversions of organic keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:05:00 +0000

After a week of website exposure via the different search engine optimization strategies, you will be able to bring in traffic into your website and that is when you need to get real busy by using Google Analytics or any other tracking tool to determine how your advertising fronts are doing in terms of driving traffic to your website and at the same time knowing the kind of traffic that is coming in. Your organic keywords are the bait that reels in the traffic and it would do you good to determine how each of these keywords are performing and which ones that you have chosen produce more results than the rest.

Knowing which specific organic keywords are really bringing in the proper targeted traffic will help you increase your conversion rates and eventually raise your website revenue generation. And In order to track your conversions via the use of your organic keywords do the following:

You first have to carefully select your keywords which are also your traffic sources. With the right keywords, you will also get the right kind of traffic, and reversely, choose the wrong one and all you will get is traffic with a very low conversion rate.

After laying out your keywords and placing them where they would be more effective, set a specific time frame for the usage of the keywords selected and the ideal exposure would be from 3 months up to half a year and that would be more than enough to determine whether the keyword that you chose will perform or not (bring in traffic and conversions at the same time). Once you have seen the statistics, then you can decide whether to maintain the current keyword or replace it with a new one.

On the options, select “Show: non-paid”. And then afterwards, click on either the Ecommerce tab of the Goal set tab and if you want to sort visits, you only have to click on the column title and this is quite important so that you would be able to sort the data in many ways and be able to interpret the many facets of your online campaign.

With a competent tracking tool, you would surely be able to see on what specific points of your campaign you need to get a move on and on what portions you need to maintain status quo since you are already doing perfectly well on that end. Without a monitoring setup, you would be campaigning blind, not knowing where you stand now and what the real status of your online company is.

With the proper tracking tool, you would be able to determine which steps you have to take next and what other options you have to mitigate on certain online advertising situations. And that is the reason why tracking is very essential in search engine optimization.

Ways to promote your site or blog and get huge traffic with a bit of money?

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Sat, 21 May 2011 15:57:00 +0000

1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry about it, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).

2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads

3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, called StumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.

4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies

5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.

6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche.

7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars.

Forum Advertising Via Signature

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Sat, 21 May 2011 15:34:00 +0000

Hello Everyone,

My next tip is actually very useful and can make you some cash without ever spending a dime.

Forum Advertising Via Signature

Step 1

Find a good offer to promote in a popular niche. For example, I have found success promoting "free ringtones" in my signature on forums based around popular teen music artists.

Example: Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens, The Jonas Brothers, and much more.

Step 2

Find a good forum that see's a good amount of traffic daily.

Use this link to search for popular forums in the niche of your choice.

Once you get into Big Boards if you are going to use a offer promoting "free ringtones" then just search for music on the top search bar.

Step 3

This is perhaps the most important step. Try to avoid "spamming" and focus on building a relationship with the community first. Ask questions, Answer Questions, Start New Topics, and so on.

The tip here is to join say 5 forums and for a week just post a few comments over a time period.

Step 4

Most forums may not let you direct link to another affiliate link using your signature. You have two options here.

The first I do not recommend...Post the affiliate link and direct link in your signature. This might work for a few hour or days. You run the risk of being banned from that forum.

The second option still brings me in about 15 to 25 dollars every few days and I have not touched it for about 2 months. Create a simple landing page, a 1 page review of several pin submit offers based around ringtones. Link to this page in your signature.

You may even want to set up aweber or getresponse and offer a free ebook on how to get free ringtones in exchange for their emails. The key here is keeping your posts up for the longest time possible.

Step 5

Give it some time and watch the dollars flow in. If you havn't made a dime keep trying and test different offers and "sentences" in you signature.

I know this still works today since I am getting conversions here and there and I know people how actually make a lot of money this way!

Good Luck!

Get the most out of your Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:43:00 +0000

We all know that tracking our stats is absolutely crucial to be successful. Here are few tools I found on internet. Hope, it can help some people.

1. Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics – it pulls the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content Detail reports automatically, with links to the social media sites for your pages. It pulls in data from Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, with more to come.

2. Get Email Alerts from Google Analytics – With this script, you can get an email when any of your websites drop in visit or page view counts (or anything else you want).

3. Better Google Analytics Firefox extension – This wraps up several scripts into one. Among the MUST HAVE plugins. This super-script will allow you to:
Auto press the “Access Analytics” button, if it is displayed
Remembers settings you set when you switch between profiles, and allows you to open another profile in a new tab quickly.
Allows you to export any report available as CSV to Google Spreadsheets.
Converts percent values to absolute values in tables.
Provides one-click access to year-over-year reports in Google Analytics.
Sorts the visible table rows.
and Adds Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo InLink Metrics to your content detail reports.

4. The Google Analytics Report Enhancer – Get enhanced segmentation, you will also be able to segment by transaction, adgroup, and referral path anytime a segmenting opportunity comes up. Now you can see exactly which transactions are attributed to each source, medium, source/medium, keyword, campaign, new or returning visitors, and more. You also get the ability to see the raw number of conversions for each goal you have as well as goal revenue.

5. Unusual Keyword Trends in Google Analytics With Greasemonkey – provides a “What’s Changed” report which tells a) which referrers have sent most traffic in last few days and b) which have sent most traffic where they never did before.

6. Google Website Optimizer multivariate experiment data to show up in Google Analytics – While Google Website Optimizer by itself can give you a quick look at which combination is best at improving conversion, it tells you nothing about transactions, revenue, micro-conversions, navigation, segmentation by source, and bounce rate. If you integrate Google Analytics into your Google Website Optimizer experiments, you will get much richer data, and be able to get a true idea of how your test is doing.

7. Google Analytics Notes – Keep track of events by adding notes directly into Google Analytics.

8. SiteScan – A Google Analytics Diagnostic tool designed to provide you with a complete audit of your Google Analytics setup. SiteScan is a free way to ensure that your Google Analytics is configured properly on your website. The most comprehensive web analytics debugger is the WASP Firefox extension.

9. Goal Copy Extension – The Goal Copy extension records all of the values in a Google Analytics Goal Settings form. You can then navigate to another profile where you want to put that copied goal and paste all of those values into the new form. That way, you can get your goals from one profile to another without all the tedium.

10. The Google Analytics API – Use the Google Analytics Data Export API to download Analytics data in the form of Google Data API feeds. With the Data Export API, you can embed a customized dashboard in your website to display the most commonly viewed or requested page statistics for all your reports users. Or, you can integrate your Google Analytics Data with other website data that you might be tracking in a separate system.

11. Google Analytics to Google Docs Greasemonkey Script – do a one-click export to create a Google spreadsheet for analyzing Google Analytics data.

12. Get Detailed PPC Keyword Data from Google Analytics – This filter shows exactly the Search Term (i.e. keywords that are searched on) rather than just the Bid Term (i.e. the keywords that triggered a PPC advert). For example, if a visitor searches for “sony digital camera” and you have an ad configured for the keywords “digital camera” as a Broad Match in Google AdWords. With this filter the same search will show “digital camera, (sony+digital+camera)” in any Google Analytics report that shows keywords (e.g. Marketing Optimization -> Search Engine Marketing -> Overall Keyword Conversion) or any time you cross-segment against keywords.

13. Analytics KPI gadget for iGoogle – This widget allows you to see important KPI information from Google Analytics directly in iGoogle.

14. Google Analytics Reporting Suite – Using Adobe Air the Google Analytics Reporting Suite brings Google Analytics to the desktop.

15. Customize the list of recognized search engines – Adds 60+ additional search engines for detection (rather than listed as a referrer) and differentiates regional variations e.g. google.co.uk, google.com, msn.se etc.

16. Script to capture first and last referrer in Google Analytics – From my friend, Brian Clifton’s book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

17. Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way – Make sure your data isn’t polluted with your own or your company’s clicks.

18. Tracking Your Twitter Tweets with Google Analytics – This method will track anyone visiting the site as a result of your tweet, regardless of where they clicked on the URL. It doesn’t matter if it’s in an email client, hosted email app. etc.

19. The Official Google Analytics blog – Get the latest from the Google Analytics team. They also publish the excellent Conversion University.

20. Google Analytics Help Center – The official forum to get your questions answered about Google Analytics.

21. Google Analytics for iPhone – Access your Google analytics on your iPhone.

22. Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog. This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. This WordPress plugin also gives you the possibility to track downloads with Google Analytics based on a set of extensions you specify and adds the possibility to track all image searches as organic and collect their keywords.

23. Multiple Profile Greasemonkey Script – If you have multiple profiles setup for your google analytics account, you will be able to select a new profile to view you will see the same report you were just on, but it will be for the new profile which you selected. Also, if you wish to compare reports from two profiles, there is an option to view the new profile in a separate tab.

24. The Enhanced Google Analytics Firefox Plugin – is designed to allow analysts to get more action out of what changed in the Referring Sites and Keyword Reports.

25. Kampyle/Google Analytics Mashup – this plugin allows you to incorporate the feedback you get from using Kampyle on your website (you need account for both) and integrate it with your Google Analytics.

26. Excellent Analytics is a simple Excel plug in that lets you import web analytics data from Google Analytics in to an Excel spreadsheet.

27. Google Analytics IQ Lessons – become qualified in Google Analytics. Includes lessons and videos.

28. Insights For Analytics – you can now easily view traffic patterns for the keywords you are analyzing in Google Analytics inside Google Insights. You can select up to 5 keywords at a time and Insights For Analytics will automatically grab the date range you are viewing and send that to Google Insights as well.

29. Polaris for Google Analytics – Adobe Air desktop application for Google Analytics.

30. Google Analytics hacks to obtaining full referring URLs – Provides two ways to get full referring urls into Google Analytics.

31. Google Analytics YouTube Channel – some great video content produced by the Google Analytics team.

32. Integrating Google Analytics with a CRM

33. Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder – a more visually appealing and intuitive version of the Google URL builder with additional options such as changing the conversion attribution, parameter separator and creating a short URL for easier distribution.

My Favorite Marketing Model

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Thu, 19 May 2011 20:02:00 +0000

Article Marketing
I publish to the main hubs, then I push links to those pages to grab more market share via Google.

Video Marketing
I publish my video's to the main hubs, then push links to them so they start ranking for competitive keywords

Media Buying
Once I have my ads created I go to the major media networks and start buying ad space. You can find cheap ad space that targets your market specifically, especially if you go direct with that publisher. I just recently got hundreds of thousands of impressions for only $300, which couldn't target my market any more.

PPC - Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Myspace
Grab all my keywords I want to target for Google and Yahoo! and drive traffic to landing page. For Facebook/Myspace, target my key demographic (learn how to do this...know your market, most don't know who they're targeting, just the "type" of person) and send them to landing page as well.

Send All Traffic to Capture Page
I send all traffic to landing page to capture email address then forward to sales page, if they buy, they're taken off the first list. If they don't, then I send follow-up emails to close the deal.

Then it's just a rinse and repeat when going into other markets, while creating bigger and better products within the current niches I'm in.

I also use some of the other tactics above, but the ones I outlines bring in the most traffic, specifically when they start to rank in Google.

PS - Once you've capped out with these methods, then next plan is go to the CPA networks and then blow it out of the water with traffic.

PSS - Don't forget to use direct mail to drive visitors and sales.

How to Make Winning Products (& Money) With $0 And No Internet Marketing Experience - 3 Easy Steps

noreply@blogger.com (Marcos) — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:54:00 +0000

I recently surveyed a list of mine and asked them what problems they were having, what questions they had with Internet Marketing.

Although about 70% of them wanted to know about traffic generation, I got one very different response that I wanted to address here because I know it’s a HUGE problem most beginners are struggling with.

In fact, it’s something that keeps a lot of people “beginners”, not making any real money online and it has a surprisingly simple fix.

Here’s the gist of the response I received (slightly reworded):

“How can a person who is new to Internet Marketing venture into the Internet Marketing niche as a successful product creator? How do you create products in the Internet Marketing niche if you aren't an expert in it?”

That’s a good one, isn’t it? Now, I know a lot of you don't have anything set up yet.

No list
No products
No money
No experience

And believe it or not, these things probably stop a LOT of you from taking action on anything and moving forward (keeping you in said ‘beginner stage’).

So, I'll share something with you. I could charge for this information (and I was going to, actually), but I think I'll share it all for free instead.

Here’s the deal: Product creation is about providing value. It’s about providing solutions to problems. Along those lines…

There are 2 Truths in Internet Marketing that should really get your wheels turning:

You don’t need to be making money online to provide value to people.
And, ironically, by providing value to people you CAN make money online.

Product creation is about providing value. It’s about providing solutions to problems.

People think you need to be making money online (or have 5-figure weeks in Clickbank and such) to make and sell winning products and provide value to customers.

Well guess what? You don’t.

You don’t even need to create “how to make money” style courses necessarily, which is something I’ve found a lot of beginners believe.

Your products just need to help the buyer achieve an end goal and save them time and/or frustration. (Or, in short- provide value to them.)

Here’s an example: Jason Fladlien (who I’m a bigger fan of every day) has a product out on how to write an article in 7 minutes or less.

He doesn’t tell you how to syndicate that article, which directories to submit it to, resource linking strategies, or how to make thousands of dollars with it… just how to WRITE IT in 7 minutes.

And guess what? Though it’s not a complete course on how to be a millionaire, it DOES help people write an article in 7 minutes or less. And it sold like hot cakes.

Learn how to be an information marketer, or someone who “markets information”.

Here's a secret I wish I would have known very early on in my business career. It’s a “dirty little secret” successful product creators understand:

In the IM world, you either have experience or you know how to leverage it.

Really think about this, because it’s horribly powerful and not just applicable to the IM landscape.

But for those who want to crack into it anyway, here are some interesting thoughts:

Did you know that you don't need to know anything about SEO to crank out a winning product on it? Or how about this: you can make that product effortlessly, with $0, and without a single web page ranked?

How, you ask? Well, just use a little creativity.

How could you both get questions answered AND create products at the same time, all without doing any of the work?

And that brings me to the "3 easy steps" I mentioned in the title of this thread…

Step 1) Find a problem people are having.

This is where you’d peruse highly-trafficked niche-related forums to see what problems people are having. Check the thread view counts and the number of replies to easily determine popular threads.

(I know this sounds cliché, but it’s cliché because it works. Don’t make this hard; go to the place people in your niche hang out. In my opinion, forums are the BEST place for market research because you can get an instant pulse on the niche.)

Step 2) Find someone who has the success/experience in the given area and interview/ask them how they’re doing it.

What do I mean by this?

Well if the problem I’m researching is SEO and ranking sites in Google, then someone with “success dealing with this problem” would be someone with websites ranking in the top 10 in Google.

Those are the people you want to target: people who have experience with the problem you’re trying to solve.

Then simply contact them and ask them for an interview. They provide the content, you don’t do any of the work, and you get a product.

Step 3) Turn the answer(s) into a product.

This is the easy part. Take their responses (or the audio file if you recorded one with them) and turn it into a product. Don’t worry about sales copy and all that… This is about making products themselves. End of story.

Now STOP.

Don’t go thinking, “Oh great, another interview product”. That’s partly wrong. It’s a LEVERAGE product.

Yes, you will be contacting these people asking them to share their experience with you (via recorded interview or just written responses), but there’s a way of doing it that you can template out to any situation and make it work.

And btw- don't go thinking you can't do this. You can just email the person and send them questions that way, you don't have to jump on the phone with anyone. If you can't send an email, then I don't know what to tell you.

I want to give you concrete steps in addition to the theory behind it (that’s how I roll).

So, here are some specific ways you can implement this ‘leverage’ concept:

Let’s stick to IM for this example, since this is the Warrior Forum and all. Heck, let’s use the problem 70% of my list is having: traffic generation.

Example 1- How to Create a Product on Traffic Generation

Knowing beginners don’t have a lot of money, how about I narrow “traffic generation” down to free traffic, specifically SEO.

So… How would I create a product on how to rank sites in Google (SEO) if I had NO sites already ranked or any experience in SEO to begin with?

Here’s what I would do:

I’d go to the Google Keyword Tool and find keywords that are competitive but not too competitive. I’d target keywords that get 10,000-20,000 searches per month. This indicates competition, but not TOO much competition. To rank here, you’d need to know what you’re doing and have some kind of SEO game plan.
Next I’d Google search those keywords and browse the top 10 results for each one, looking until I found either websites or blogs that are clearly affiliate/marketer-driven. Indicators of this would be affiliate links, opt-in forms, backlinks, and/or strong on-site optimization (which, by the way, you can tell from simple FireFox Add-Ons).
Contact that site owner and ask for an interview. Do this with each site you find until someone says YES. Hell, it only takes one “yes” to make a product. (Ah, the power of perseverance.)
Turn that into a product.

…And BAM! I’m the marketer that would release the product, so I’d be associated with being an expert on SEO. Not directly, but via association. It’s MY product, but I’m leveraging other people’s experience.

Now how about another example? Let’s do something in the other direction.

How about getting affiliates to promote your products? How would I make a product on how to get affiliates to promote my products if I don’t have any products, have never had ANY affiliates promote anything for me and have ZERO experience with any of it?

Example 2- How to easily get affiliates to promote for you

After about a second of thinking, this is an easy one too:

I’d start by going to Clickbank and look for products that have a Gravity of 20-30. This would indicate affiliates are promoting the product, but the product isn’t a super best seller, with the product owner totally inaccessible.
I’d contact him/her saying I’m an affiliate marketer and wanted to interview him/her for a product I’m creating and I wanted to feature/promote their product in it as well.
Ask them what they did in the beginning to get affiliates to promote for them to gain traction, and how they grew that number of affiliates to what it is now.
Turn that into a product.

Right there, you got the knowledge AND the product. It’s a win-win, wouldn’t you agree?

And look, those are 2 ideas you can run with right there.

Notice how easy this is though? You wouldn’t need to be an expert on anything to implement this 3-step strategy.

And better yet, every single person you ask will have a different answer from that last one, so what’s that mean?

…This tactic won’t get saturated!

And hell, along those lines you could even compile 5-10 different responses on a given topic into one product to add beef to it. The possibilities are endless.

Tips: Though you can implement this strategy with ANY niche imaginable, there are certain factors that make IM the best market to go into. To name a few:

if you interview someone in the IM niche, they can double up as an affiliate for your product (which can be VERY powerful)
the Warrior Forum gives you a hyper-active community with a built-in source of traffic
you can launch these quick and easy products as WSOs, getting large exposure to hungry buyers very quickly (to my knowledge, no other industry has anything like this)
when contacting the people for interviews, you can mention you plan on launching the product as a WSO… More exposure for them (you promote their product/site on the interview) and you can split the profits to make it more beneficial to them
you can pick up affiliate traction for your products even easier, since you’re essentially marketing to marketers

I’m not saying this wouldn’t work for other niches. In fact, I already made a product on how a guy named Jim Katsoulis tore it up in the fitness niche using interviews as a basis. It can work in any niche you want, but the factors above make IM very attractive.

…And that’s all I have for now!

Honestly, take this stuff seriously. Leverage is a vital part of online business in my opinion, and it can VERY quickly get your business off the ground, if you learn how to use it in a positive way that adds value and helps people out.

And lastly, a word of advice: don’t create these value-packed products to just finish and sell. Use them! If you did it right, the value should be there, so why not use it in your own business? Don’t always think in terms of just creating content to sell… Create content to help build a business, use it, and then sell it. What do you think you’d make more money doing: using the information or just selling it? How about you do both? (…By the way, you should.)

Thanks for reading and please let me know what you think.