That has not changed since there have been search engines. This basic part of the algorithm has never changed. If you have unique content on a website, if you get backlinks to your website, you’re going to get search engine rankings if it takes one day or if if takes ninety days or one hundred and eighty days, that doesn’t matter. But it’s still a strategy that works no matter what.

Now whenever we talk about (and this is going out to people that are in a program of ours called ‘Snipr’). Whenever we teach Snipr, we teach you to build a site and we want you to build 5 pages on your site with unique content. Google wants to have sites with a minimum of 3 pages, so why do we say 5? Because we have above the minimum unique content because we know that duplicate content will not rank. We have a whole bootcamp module dedicated to this. And this is what frustrates me – when people read into all the hype about what’s happening in the search engines they forget that this is what the basics are. The basics haven’t changed in over 12 years! The only thing that changes is the indexing. Yes, it might take a bit longer to get indexed on a micro-site but there are many strategies around that, and I teach these strategies as well as use them myself.

Ever since the 24th of February and the Google algorithm change went into play, my Snipr sites, my niche sites, my micro-sites traffic percentage has INCREASED by 24%. The next 24% of traffic, this update is meant to have decreased my traffic has actually increased my traffic by 24%, so do you really think I’m worried so much about it? No. Because I have unique content on my site, I have backlinks on my site, and I have 5 pages. Some of them don’t even have 5 pages and I haven’t noticed any effect or change. So you start to see here that all the hype and crap around about what’s happening is a load of crap. Follow basic search engine terms, give your site time and have patience, you’re going to get the rankings and results desired.

So hopefully that’s given you an overview of what I think is the latest hyped up updates in Google, so you can start to see the real truth behind what it actually means.

Unique Content + Backlinks = Rankings for life.

List Building

As an internet marketer it’s vitally important that you have an email marketing database so that you have a list. Without a list your chance of generating recurring income for any of your products or affiliate promotions that you do is low. You’ve probably heard before the phrase ‘The Money is in the List‘ and I couldn’t agree any more. The day I started to build a database is the day I started doubling, tripling, quadrupling (whatever it is that you might want to call it!) my income because instead of a person visiting my website once, and maybe buying from me once, they may visit my website multiple times as they sign up for an email newsletter, a free gift or an eBook or whatever it might be, and that means that i can continually market to them and get them to see my marketing and promotion’s messages. So strategy number one:

Strategy One: To Increase Your Database Size offer free gifts.

Most people out there offer a free gift or a downloadable report in order to be able to increase their database. Now that works a lot but eBooks are starting to get old and theres so many free eBooks out there without having to give out your name or email address. You should look at your target market and the market that you’re in and see what you’re after. For internet marketing, a lot of people love training videos so send them, for example, a 7 video ecourse on how to build your first profitable website or an x-amount of video ecourse on how to do this or even a downloadable audio course instead of something like an eBook or a free report. Give them something that’s different to what’s in the marketplace and to what everyone else is providing. So that’s strategy number one.

Strategy Two: To Increase Your Database Size is to put in what we call a ‘refer a friend page’

So it goes from where they put their first name and email address in and hit submit, the next page is what we call a ‘refer a friend page’ so they can refer friends to go through the exact same process that they just did and what we’ll do as they return is give them other free gifts incentify them to add to your list, to get free gifts to add friend’s emails. A great example of this is thinkandgrowrichebook.com.au because they are a site we’ve worked on previously to get the best conversion rates and we’ve seen statistics that out of 10 people that go to that website, 7 of them will provide three names of their friends, and their email addresses so instead of just getting 1 person on your database, you’re getting 4 people on your database and all you’re doing is giving away some free gifts. So strategy number two: is go from opt-in to refer-a-friend. There are some great scripts out there on the web that you can get do put in a refer-a-friend script.

Strategy Three for increasing your database is about becoming a Joint Venture partner in what we’ll call a giveaway.

I have been talking about this recently with one of my internet marketing friends by the name of Reed Floren. This is something he does quite frequently to increase his database size. He goes and finds giveaway launches that are happening, where you put your product in for free, and marketers put in their products for free and everyone emails to the sales page and everyone generates new leads by people downloading their products, subscribing to the email newsletter and lists. So that’s another great strategy of going and increasing your database size. It’s not something you can really do as a newbie though because you need to have a product that you can give away and something like a private label rights product just wont work, as it needs to be something of higher quality. So strategy number three is something you should do if you have an existing product and an existing list because you need to be able to reciprocate the promotions that are going out, you can’t do this if you just have a product but no database so you need to make sure that you have a database and a product as well.

So that’s three simple tips to help you increase your database size. As we continue going through and keep blogging we’ll have more tips, more strategies and maybe some videos that go through and shows you and talks more about increasing your database, because as I said before, the money is in the list. The bigger your list, the more chance of generating income. Again, another quote you’ve probably heard: “Every person that is on your database should be worth $1 a month to you.” If you’re not generating at least $1 per month for each of those people on your list, then you’re wasting your database. So look at it, for example, if you have a database that is 300 people, that should be $300 a month that you should be making from your database. If you’re not, you obviously need to look at your marketing plan and strategy and work out what needs fixing. It’s all about building your list so then you can go through and generate more wealth. If it works for all niches, not just the internet marketing niche, but the personal finance niche, the health, beauty, any niche. At the moment we are running promotions for a travel company in Phuket doing the exact same thing, generating a database to which we can sell tours and accommodation to them.  These three strategies will work for any niche, you just need to apply them.

1. Give Them Away: Make sure the articles have your website in them and give them away or even better give them to other people to give away. By having your URL in them your site will get more attention / traffic.
2. Bonus Bundle: Bundle the articles into “niches” and offer them as bonus’ for when people buy something from you. This is a great strategy if you are a ClickBank marketer to incentivise people to buy through our affiliate link rather then someone else’s.
3. Language Translation: Get the articles translated into different languages, this will make the content “unique” and also give you a different target market to everyone else that has these article. Make sure that the person who translates the articles speaks the language well otherwise it’ll be a dismal failure.
4. Audio Article: Record yourself reading the article out aloud and offer them as either “pod casts” or just downloadable audio’s.
5. Create FAQ’s: Use the articles as answer’s to FAQ questions, you’ll need to provide the questions though.
6. Make Them Over: If you provide article services re-write the PLR article into better English with better content to show that your services are high quality.
7. Blog Posts: Re-write (or get your VA to) the articles and publish them as unique blog posts on your website, easy way to get high quality content without having to think about it.
8. E-Course: Put the articles into an auto-responder and use them as a e-course on your website to get more subscribers.
9. Direct Mail: Print the articles out and send them out as physical mail as a lead generation technique for your website/business.
10. Power Point Presentation: Create the articles into a PowerPoint Presentation and give it away on your website again as a lead generation technique.
11. Sell Them: As PLR article you have the RIGHT to sell the damn articles, why not do that…!
12. Create Checklists: Divide each of the articles into “task-related” statements and put a checkbox next to each of the statements and then you have a checklist from the content that you can give to your readers.
13. Forum Replies: Use the articles as replies to questions on Forum’s or things like Yahoo Answers.
14. Create A Speech: Get the content from the articles, put them together and create a speech that you can present.

Well there’s 14 simple uses for PLR articles, hope one of them give you an idea on what to do with them.

Fiverr Article Marketing

To follow on from yesterday’s post on using Article Marketing to start building a $400/day business I’m going to talk about some simple SEO strategies you should be implementing in your articles.

I’ll try try and keep this short and sweet, as it’s not meant to be a hard task. When it comes to the one key thing that’s really point out solid traffic/commissions, it’s your title… I’m here to show you that despite what you’ve heard, your not going to have to spend hours on tones of techie SEO stuff, if you follow simple core principles you’ll still get the same results

It really is as simple as heading over to Google and doing a search. What you want to aim for is to find 3 or 4 quality keyword phrases that your competitors aren’t targeting. These keywords will generally consist of the product name, author name, and a few other general search terms. Let’s break that down further:

As an example, lets say you doing the product “Fat Burning Furnace”, which was created by Rob Poulos. Here are some of the basic keyword phrases that I’d use, and that you should check for in Google:

• Fat Burning Furnace by Rob Poulos
• Fat Burning Furnace System
• Fat Burning Furnace – Is It a Scam?
• Fat Burning Furnace eBook by Rob Poulos
• Fat Burning Furnace eBook Review

The best titles I use and get the most success with are:

“Product Name Ebook Review”
“Product Name by Author Name”
“Product Name + Software”
“Product Name + Ebook”
“Product Name – Is It a Scam?”

Now obviously, you may have to tweak or change these up a bit, but you get the idea. Simply look for exact phrases that buyers would search for, and whether they are being targeted by anyone else. More often then not, they aren’t. You will be amazed at the amount of keyword phrases that big-time competitors are NOT targeting. Blows my mind.

Many of the articles that you submit will hit #1,2,3,4 spots on front page Google within hours, and they’ll stay there. This is where most of your profit will come from, but the article directory itself will also account for many.

One more thing: PRODUCT LAUNCHES

This is a great way to make some huge income. Targeting products that are about to launch can pull you over $500 in a single day. You follow the same strategy as outlined above and in yesterday’s post, but instead of looking for products in the ClickBank market place, join the JV lists of some of the big ClickBank market places or even check out: jvnotifypro.com you’ll be able to see what products are about to be released.

Write 3-4 good quality articles and set them to publish a couple of days before the or at the latest, the day of the launch. This will allow you to get ahead of your competition and start pulling in the commission when the product is launched.

Now For Where Fiverr.com Comes Into Play

If you’re having a slow week with your commission or if you have some spare time head over to Fiverr and create some simple Gigs that you can complete without much hassle (like simple SEO, link building, testimonials or anything you can complete). Once you’ve completed the job try and push a product to the person who brought the Gig from you (make sure the product you push to them will help them with what you’ve already done). You can pull another $200 – $300 a week doing this simple strategy..

Recap and More Tips:

• Use multiple account on EzineArticles.com and ArticleBase.com, you don’t want to have all your articles in the one account incase you have an issue with the account and they suspend it. Best to “share” the love around.
• Spread your focus, don’t focus on just one niche for your products, more niches will give you a better idea as to what niche will convert best.
• Only put your affiliate links in the body of your articles, don’t put them in the author box.
• To get your articles to go “viral” use social media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com to promote your article.
• Think about creating video reviews and uploading them to YouTube.com
• Don’t give up, a lot of marketers fail when starting out because they don’t see amazing results within the first week, if you keep following the strategy you’ll have no problems making sales

Tools To Make This Easier:

• Article Marketing Course: If you are new to Article Marketing and want a more in-depth understanding this guide will give the insider knowledge to become a successful Article Marketer. Read More Here…
• The Best Spinner: Writing an article once is great, but writing an article once then spinning it into a hundred articles then submitting them to different directories is what we call AWESOME. The best spinner is exactly that, the best at what it does. Read More Here…
• Back Track SEO: A Comprehensive SEO Guide, if you are new to SEO and want to find out more strategies to increase your rankings the Back Track SEO is for you. Read More Here…

Article Marketing

The strategy I’m about to teach you in this post is one that you can use to generate anything from $5/day to $400/day depending on how much time and effort you put into completing the steps. I need to disclaimer right up front that this strategy is one that will require you to do some work to get the reward, but that’s what Internet Marketing is all about, if the reward out weights the effort then in my eyes I’m happy to put the effort in.

Things You’ll Need For This Strategy:

• ClickBank.com Account
• ArticleBase.com Account
• EzineArticles.com Account
• Fiverr.com Account

Before We Get Started:

A lot of people out there will be thinking that Article Marketing as a strategy is out-dated, old and doesn’t work any more, well sure it is old but it’s certainly not out-dated and it certainly works and works well if you put the effort into it.

Generally when you do Article Marketing the major article directory you’d use is EzineArticle.com, this strategy that I’m about to teach you will more focus on using ArticleBase.com because EzineArticles.com have become more of a “spammy” directory and it can take weeks for your articles to be approved whereas with ArticleBase.com you can usually get an article approved in a day or two and once you have written (and had approved) 15 or so articles you are then able to get your articles auto-approved which saves you a lot of time.

The strategy alone will generate you a good income, then if you decide to put the Fiverr.com twist to it that i’ll show you as well, it’ll increase your income another 10-15% which isn’t bad.

The Strategy:

Okay so the very first thing you need to do is figure out what your niche is and what products you are going to promote. Below are some things that you’ll need to consider when selecting a product and niche:

Gravity

This is where I’m going to go against a lot of marketers, most people will tell you that you should be looking at selling products with a high gravity. A high Clickbank gravity means that the product is selling well which is a good thing when you’re trying to make sales, but it also mean’s that there is also high competition, which will make it hard for you to get top rankings and make good sales. So when selecting a product the gravity is an important factor but there are more important things to consider like:

• The Salescopy: When you’re looking to promote a product have a read of the sales copy and think to yourself “would I buy this”, “is the sales copy making me want the product” because if it can’t make you want to buy, is it likely to make others buy? No use in promoting a product that has crappy sales copy/
• Site Design: Graphic’s are a major player when coming to converting from a person coming to the site to a person buying from the site. So look at the site and think: “does the site look appealing to me”, “is it easy for me to see the buy now button”.
• Bonus Packages: Has the product owner put together bonus’ to entice people to buy, do they bonus’ add value to the product they are selling? You want to make sure you’re promoting a product with HIGH QUALITY bonus’, not just junk ebooks that no-one will read, they MUST add value.
• Product Price: The price of a product will be the success or the failure of the product, if the product is low people may deem it to be of no value so they wont buy it because they think the value is low. If the product’s price is too high it may scare them away from buying. There is no “ideal product price” you’ll need to use your own common sense for this one.
• Gravity & Keyword Competition: Is it going to be worth your time promoting the product. No use in do the strategy if there is no search traffic for it’s related keywords.

What’s Next?

Okay so the next steps are:

1. Pick 2-3 product daily
2. Write 3-4 QUALITY review article on each of the products you have selected (see the resource below if you hate writing)
3. Submit Your Articles – (submit them to ArticleBase.com & EzineArticles.com if you wish) – Once you have submitted and they are approved Up the votes for your article to visually appeal them to reader.
4. Promote the articles using Twitter, Facebook, Social Bookmarking etc
5. Rinse and repeat – just keep doing the same steps day in and day out..

Basically all you need to do is select 2-3 good products on a daily basis, write 3-4 articles for the articles and submit them then your done..

Tips On Article Writing:

Okay so I want to flesh out the article writing a bit to give you a bit more of an understanding on how you should structure you articles to make them standout from all the other articles that are submitted..

The first thing is you gotta be thinking quality over quantity, rather then the reverse. When writing articles you want to try and personalise them as much as possible, you’re not creating sales letters to promote the product, you’re creating a review on the product. You want it to be an objective review that warms the readers up and gently leads your readers to clicking to the product page. Don’t worry about hyping the product up, thats what the sales page is intended to do, just write about your personal experience and how the product has helped you (or others).

The biggest thing with your articles is to be as least spumy as possible, readers don’t want to see sales text when they read your article, they want to know what other people have thought about the product so make sure the article is personable and relative to the topic.

A lot of Article Marketers like to flood their articles with affiliate links, but again this is just a sign of spammy sales copy and something that will put potential buyers offside. So you just want your article to be as normal and unsuspecting as possible.

Simply talk about the product, what it does, who created it, why you feel it’s better then 99% of other products out there in the same market and how it’s helped you (or others). At the end of your article just put a simple line like:

“When it comes to <Article Topic>, I strongly recommend a high quality resource called <Anchor Text with affiliate link here>, Check it out ”

A small call to action like this will make you come across as just any normal person supplying a link to the product site out of good nature.

Tools To Make This Easier:

• Article Marketing Course: If you are new to Article Marketing and want a more in-depth understanding this guide will give the insider knowledge to become a successful Article Marketer. Read More Here…
• The Best Spinner: Writing an article once is great, but writing an article once then spinning it into a hundred articles then submitting them to different directories is what we call AWESOME. The best spinner is exactly that, the best at what it does. Read More Here…

SSM Re-Launch

It’s been awhile since I sat down and wrote a blog post for SSMMarketing.tv due to other business ventures I’ve been working on and to be honest laziness.. But with all that said we’re excited to have a brand new Design for the site and a brand new outlook on how we are going to be running the site.

When we first came up with the idea of SSM Marketing a couple of years ago we had massive plans for what we were going to do which has large time commitment on our end, since then we’ve been busy with other sites, product and just generally enjoying our life living in Thailand, but now we are rejuvenated and ready to get back into blogging and sharing simple and advanced Internet Marketing strategies and techniques with our readers.

Over the next couple of days we’ll be refining the site design and content plan then we’ll be back in full force with amazing content coming through to you.

Personal Update

Let me say that again, I love Australia!  In the last month or so I have been to Jakarta, Surabaya, Kuala Lumpur, New Zealand and as I write this I am on my way to Hong Kong.  One of the things that I have learnt from my travels is how much I love Australia.  In fact I was talking to some Aussie clients the other day and in doing so I was constantly reminded about how lucky we are as Aussies.

I know when I was in Australia I took it for granted, I took for granted how safe we are, how strong our dollar is, how good our economy is, how well managed our public transport is.

Yes I know you’re probably reading this and saying “Shaun, you have gone crazy, none of that is true”.  A few months ago I might have agreed whole heartedly with you, but after my experiences over the last few months I can tell you, to be an Aussie is to be lucky!

I personally believe that it would be great for anyone, who is in a negative state of mind to take a trip to a less fortunate country.  To see how other people live and survive, it will make you appreciate your life and your country so much more.  In fact when I landed back into Australia last I actually kissed the ground, yes I was one of those crazy people who land back in and kiss the ground.

I want you to take some time out this week to appreciate all of the good things you have in your life.  We spend so much time thinking about what we could improve in our life, that often we forget to appreciate the positives that already exist in our lives.

What do you have to be grateful for today?

Warm regards,

Personal Update

I don’t know if you have realised but over the last week or so the posting frequency has slowed down on our SSM Marketing site. I do apologise about this, but our team has been seriously busy.  Now if you read last week’s newsletter you probably know why.  We are preparing for our last few events before the year finishes and this time I am not personally presenting. I have invited along an internet marketer who has significantly more experience then me! In fact this guy (let’s call him Mr X) has over 12 years of experience in internet marketing. Not only that but he is known amongst friends as being an internet income innovator.

To secure your seat to see him while tickets last, register here: Twitter Cash Machine

Now as the year gets closer to an end it’s important to sit back and review what has, and hasn’t worked for you this year. In fact I would like to suggest that you head back to business marketing 101 and do an internal SWOT analysis. Whether you are a business owner, entrepreneur, internet marketer, investor or employee a SWOT analysis is extremely important to conduct. I personally suggest doing a SWOT analysis on the following:

• Finances
• Relationships
• Business/Employment
• Health
• Fitness

This will give you the opportunity to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats before starting to plan for your next year.

Warm regards,

Advanced Twitter Search

We have been talking over the last few weeks on how to use Twitter to generate traffic to your website. Today I want to show you how to use Twitter to find people that are interested in what your website is promoting or just the general content on your website.

Now I know from personal experience that there are LOTS of blog posts out there that teach you how to find people on Twitter by keywords and such, but I am going to do it a little bit different. Yes, it will be finding people by keyword, but for you to be able to find the right kind of people on Twitter you need to write specific words in your searches that will ensure that you find the people that are looking for what you have to offer, not people that are offering something that is similar to you.

When you think about it, if I was looking for people on Twitter to follow that are interested in Internet Marketing, would it make sense for me to search Twitter for the keyword Internet Marketing? Now I know alot of you would say yes, but I totally disagree! And here’s why:

People that mention Internet Marketing in their tweets could be anyone from an Internet Marketer to someone who has no clue about Internet Marketing, now personally if I’m trying to sell an Internet Marketing product I don’t want to be marketing it to other Internet Marketers, I want to market it to the people who are looking for an Internet Marketing opportunity.

How Do I Find These People?

This is the million dollar question and the question that many people are yet to find the answer to..

If you are familiar with Twitter you will know that Twitter has a search functionality, what alot of people don’t know  about is how to use the Advanced search functionality which is where you are able to find the people that are looking for opportunities or looking for the information or services that you provided.

The advanced search area in search.twitter.com allows you to not only search twitter by keyword but it also allows you to:

• search by location
• see if people are asking a question
• show results without links

So your basic keyword search has just became a whole lot more advanced, and instead of finding every Tom, Dick or Harry that is talking about your topic, you are finding the people that are wanting to buy!

For more strategies like this one, make sure that you register to come along to one of our Twitter Cash Machine events

Personal Update

I emailed you earlier this week about an upcoming event with a mystery speaker who has spent little time on stage anywhere in the world.  I don’t normally send out emails a couple times in a week so I do apologise about that.  But I just had to email you as I am SUPER excited about it.  In fact this guy has been working with some clients in Australia behind the scenes and they are getting awesome results.

Over the last few days I have spent some time with Mr X and I am amazed by his work ethic. In fact, I think that he works harder than me   That’s why this week I was reminded of a story called Two Brothers And The Geese…

Two sons worked for their father on the family’s farm. For some years the younger brother had been given more responsibility and reward, and one day the older brother asked his father to explain why.

The father said, “First, go to the Kelly’s farm and see if they have any geese for sale – we need to add to our stock.”

The brother soon returned with the answer, “Yes they have five geese they can sell to us.”

The father then said, “Good, please ask them the price.”

The son went to the Kelly farm and soon returned with the answer, “The geese are $10 each.”

“Good, now ask if they can deliver the geese tomorrow” the father said.

And duly the son returned with the answer, “Yes, they can deliver the geese tomorrow.”

The father then asked the older brother to wait and listen, and then called to the younger brother in a nearby field, “Go to the Davidson’s Farm and see if they have any geese for sale – we need to add to our stock.”

The younger brother soon returned with the answer, “Yes, they have five geese for $10 each, or ten geese for $8 each; and they can deliver them tomorrow – I asked them to deliver the five unless they heard otherwise from us in the next hour. And I agreed that if we want the extra five geese we could buy them at $6 each.”

The father turned to the older son, who nodded his head in appreciation. He now realised why his brother was given more responsibility and reward.

While I believe that making money online is about creating time freedom, you have to be willing to input the time before the freedom comes.  I want you to think about what you have done lately to invest in your success!

If you want to learn what I think is the best way to invest your time, head over here.