Google AdSense Tips
If you like these tips, be sure to check out my AdSense book, Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program, from Peachpit Press. See memwg.com for details. The book was mentioned in an article about AdSense in USA Today.
As explained in Why are ads displayed on this site?, most of the pages on this site display text ads from Google's AdWords program. To display these ads, a site must join Google's AdSense program. Joining is free, but not all sites are eligible to join. Once you're accepted, however, it's very simple to place the ads on your pages and to start generating revenue for your site. AdSense will serve ads that are generally very relevant to the content of a particular page. Here are some tips based on my experiences so far with the AdSense program.
Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.
If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:
Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.
Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.
It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.
Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions
If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:
Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.
Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.
Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages
This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.
Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:
Hello Eric,
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.
We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.
We appreciate your patience.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.
Tip #4: Check your keyword density
Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.
More AdSense Tips
You can find more AdSense tips in my Make Easy Money with Google blog. Here's the complete list so far:
* AdSense Tip #5: Manage your own AdSense account
* AdSense Tip #6: Carefully craft blog or forum pages
* AdSense Tip #7: When NOT to use CSS
* AdSense Tip #8: Access your console from alternate domains
* AdSense Tip #9: Use section targeting to exclude stop/poison keywords from your content
* AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program
* AdSense Tip #11: Plumb AdWords for keywords
Note that Tip #6 needs to be updated to refer to the new section targeting feature.
based from http://www.ericgiguere.com/about/google-adsense-tips.html
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
What is Affiliate Marketing?
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Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors and various types of affiliates/publishers who utilize a number of different methods to advertise the products and services of their merchant/advertiser partners.
See module below for some of the best affiliate programs/networks.
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors and various types of affiliates/publishers who utilize a number of different methods to advertise the products and services of their merchant/advertiser partners.
See module below for some of the best affiliate programs/networks.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1
I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to get my copy of the Definitive Guide To Google AdWords at the discounted rate, however I’ve started to realize there is a lot more value in it than just the AdWords eBook, which I guess makes sense since Perry wants people to stay subscribed to his club, so he must keep dishing out good stuff.
Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.
Who Is Brad Fallon?
You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).
As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research - lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.
The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing
When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.
There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons - anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques - these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.
The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques
I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.
Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories - On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.
On-Page SEO
1. Title Tags
If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.
Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.
During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.
2. Keyword Density
Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works - copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.
To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource - go to this website - www.Ranks.nl and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density - how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).
3. Site Structure
Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why - he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me - it’s your sitemap - whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.
4. Internal Links
You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this - The Backlink FAQ and this - Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?).
The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.
Two words of warning with this - don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2
That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.
Part 2 is now available - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2
based from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/331/search-engine-marketing-part-1/
Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.
Who Is Brad Fallon?
You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).
As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research - lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.
The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing
When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.
There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons - anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques - these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.
The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques
I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.
Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories - On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.
On-Page SEO
1. Title Tags
If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.
Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.
During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.
2. Keyword Density
Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works - copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.
To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource - go to this website - www.Ranks.nl and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density - how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).
3. Site Structure
Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why - he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me - it’s your sitemap - whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.
4. Internal Links
You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this - The Backlink FAQ and this - Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?).
The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.
Two words of warning with this - don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2
That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.
Part 2 is now available - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2
based from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/331/search-engine-marketing-part-1/
The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2
In The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1 I covered the first four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques as explained by Brad Fallon. The first four methods were applicable to On-Page SEO, techniques you can manually apply to your website internally. The remaining four that I am about to discuss cover Off-Page SEO, which in my mind is a lot more difficult to control since you are dealing with external variables.As I mentioned in part one, these techniques come from a special seminar recording that I received as part of my welcome package for joining Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club.
Off Page SEO
If you are at all familiar with search engine optimization you are probably more interested in Off-Page techniques. With a bit of study and practice you can quickly grasp the most important On-Page variables to play with on your website. There is always more you can do of course, but as long as we are talking 80/20 rules there are only a handful of really important On-Page things and most of them were covered in part one of this article series.
Off-Page SEO in my mind is more important than On-Page. You can get your On-Page content perfectly optimized but without any good Off-Page SEO your On-Page efforts are wasted. No website can be a success in natural search engine results unless there are links flowing into it. This is what Off-Page SEO is all about, getting good quality links coming through.
Quite frankly I don’t believe there are any consistent, easy and affordable ways to conduct Off-Page SEO, and that is why I was so interested to hear what Brad was going to cover in his presentation. To be honest I wasn’t blown away by his comments. It didn’t cover anything new to me but I have been reading about SEO for a number of years, including some of Brad’s other materials, but it did reaffirm what I currently practice in my own Off-Page SEO activities and it’s always good to be reminded of what is smart practice.
Let’s go through the final four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques so you can also do a mental check list and be certain you are following what the experts do.
5. Links and PageRank
Brad mumbled this first point out but later it was clarified that he said links. Really his Off-Page SEO technique discussion was more of a gradual break down than a top 4 list, with each point flowing into the next (which you will see is mimicked in this article) so the first place to logically start is links.
Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.
PageRank
If you read my blog you should be well and truly familiar with PageRank. Most of my SEO posts are laden with the term but just in case you don’t know about PageRank head over and read this article to get yourself introduced to the topic - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple - this is one of my most popular articles and it should answer your basic questions.
Brad Fallon did not do anything more than a basic introduction to PageRank but he did make one interesting comment that I think is worth repeating. He gave a typical scenario of a person conducting search engine marketing for a website (or a company hired to do so), which usually starts with submitting to directories and hunting around for link exchange partners. Not exactly the most effective means of SEO because you tend to get low quality and low PageRank incoming links.
Brad went on to note the perils of over optimizing, which often happens when techniques like low quality link exchanges and free directories are over used, generating thousands duplicate anchor text incoming links from sites with low PageRank. He stated that the search engines don’t reward these techniques well, but strangely enough these are often considered the foundations of SEO campaigning but don’t lead to great results.
What Is A Good SEO Plan?
A more sound search engine marketing strategy is all about quality over quantity. Get your site listed in the best directories - DMOZ (the open directory project) and Yahoo! - and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results.
Brad pointed out that 1000 low quality and low PageRank backlinks generated in a short period of time will not be nearly as good as a handful of high PageRank incoming links added over many months. The emphasis is on oh-na-tur-al. Don’t follow the crowd and exchange links with anybody and everyone that comes asking for a link (perhaps I should drop my link exchange practices for this blog?) and don’t spend all your time asking for links from any site you can find that is remotely relevant to yours.
How To Get High Quality Links
It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something. Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.
Unfortunately I don’t have a full-proof method for gaining quality links other than what I have already written about before and what is repeated over and over again all over the Internet - Content is King. The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.
If you need a practical example of how to get high quality backlinks using content read the second part of this article - Smarter Online Marketing. This article explains how one of my blog articles enjoyed some major exposure around the web resulting in lots of links.
In the case of commercial sites the same rules hold true, content will bring in links and visitors. With a commercial site the secret sauce is great content that is tightly aligned with your target market. Whitepapers, articles, free reports, resources, anything and everything you can come up with that will bring your market to your site. If you have just launched a new site put together a whiz-bang whitepaper, it doesn’t have to be too long, just a few pages of really really good stuff and make it available on your site for free.
Once you have the resources on your site you just need to get out there and tell everyone. At the moment one of the best ways is to comment on blogs and forums where your target market congregate. As I mentioned above, if one popular site owner reads your whitepaper, thinks it’s great and tells her audience, your job may be done already. This alone may bring in hundreds of backlinks and definitely lots of real visitors. It’s not easy but good content will lead to good results - it’s almost guaranteed!
6. Page Reputation
Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!
Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link. The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites. If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.
That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.
7. Anchor Text
Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.
This issue is all about your keywords. First you have to know what keywords you want people to use to link to your pages and then you need to figure out ways to make sure people use those keywords. For the basic link exchanges you usually communicate with the person providing you with a link and stipulate what anchor text to use. However most of the valuable links will come in response to you writing some good content and it will be quite random, the linking person won’t approach you to ask how they should link to you, they will just slap up a link as they feel appropriate.
In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles. Yes usability and marketing comes first - you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.
I wouldn’t stress about external anchor text too much otherwise you can become bogged down in little details. Often the people linking to you will use completely random text that means absolutely nothing (for example - visit Entrepreneur’s Journey - click here - “click here” is not good anchor text) but at least will bring in human visitors. Just stay consciously aware of the importance of keywords in anchor text whenever you produce new content.
8. Link Popularity
Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.
The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.
Google - 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
Yahoo! - 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity
Now I can’t verify that in any manner but it does make for some interesting discussion. This shows that Google cares more about quality and Yahoo! cares more about quantity, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that. I’ll leave it up to you to test this theory on your sites.
Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’
Before I wrap this article up I want to make one comment regarding how relevant backlinks have to be and whether keywords in domain names matter. Brad made some interesting comments about these topics.
My assumption was that relevancy meant that the pages your incoming links come from should be relevant to a pretty high degree, for example, Entrepreneur’s Journey would appreciate links from business, marketing, SEO and entrepreneurship sites but universities, sports clubs and cooking sites would not be relevant. Brad stated that Google’s relevancy scope is quite wide, as wide as the top categories in the DMOZ directory. A site that on first inspection may not be relevant may actually in fact offer some relevancy even if the connection is obscure or drilled down (is every link from a blog relevant to a blog simply because they all belong in the “blog” category? I think not). It’s a hard thing to judge given that determining whether a result (say a search engine ranking increase) has a direct correlation to a single backlink is next to impossible.
What was really interesting and actually makes total sense is what Brad said about domain names. One of the age old questions in SEO is whether keywords in your domain name are important. Brad straight out said that the Google algorithms do not consider keywords in the domain name, however when people link to you they often use your domain name and if your keywords are in your domain name then the anchor text people use to link to you will contain your keywords. In a round about way, yes, keywords in domain names matter.
Conclusion
There you have it, the top 8 search engine optimization techniques as presented by Brad Fallon, one of the web’s most respected search engine marketers, along with lots of additional commentary thrown in from yours truly. For some people there won’t have been much new material but what these two articles do provide is a solid list of the 80/20 variables that you should work on if your organic search engine results are business critical. For solopreneurs with little time on you hands knowing what the key two-to-three things you need to worry about makes for efficient business.
A few people have emailed me questioning the validity of Brad Fallon and I can say one thing only - Jay Abraham would not have selected him as the presenter on search engine optimization if he wasn’t the real deal. If you don’t have any confidence in Jay Abraham then perhaps you need to start studying business and marketing.
Take care everyone,
based from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/331/search-engine-marketing-part-1/
Off Page SEO
If you are at all familiar with search engine optimization you are probably more interested in Off-Page techniques. With a bit of study and practice you can quickly grasp the most important On-Page variables to play with on your website. There is always more you can do of course, but as long as we are talking 80/20 rules there are only a handful of really important On-Page things and most of them were covered in part one of this article series.
Off-Page SEO in my mind is more important than On-Page. You can get your On-Page content perfectly optimized but without any good Off-Page SEO your On-Page efforts are wasted. No website can be a success in natural search engine results unless there are links flowing into it. This is what Off-Page SEO is all about, getting good quality links coming through.
Quite frankly I don’t believe there are any consistent, easy and affordable ways to conduct Off-Page SEO, and that is why I was so interested to hear what Brad was going to cover in his presentation. To be honest I wasn’t blown away by his comments. It didn’t cover anything new to me but I have been reading about SEO for a number of years, including some of Brad’s other materials, but it did reaffirm what I currently practice in my own Off-Page SEO activities and it’s always good to be reminded of what is smart practice.
Let’s go through the final four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques so you can also do a mental check list and be certain you are following what the experts do.
5. Links and PageRank
Brad mumbled this first point out but later it was clarified that he said links. Really his Off-Page SEO technique discussion was more of a gradual break down than a top 4 list, with each point flowing into the next (which you will see is mimicked in this article) so the first place to logically start is links.
Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.
PageRank
If you read my blog you should be well and truly familiar with PageRank. Most of my SEO posts are laden with the term but just in case you don’t know about PageRank head over and read this article to get yourself introduced to the topic - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple - this is one of my most popular articles and it should answer your basic questions.
Brad Fallon did not do anything more than a basic introduction to PageRank but he did make one interesting comment that I think is worth repeating. He gave a typical scenario of a person conducting search engine marketing for a website (or a company hired to do so), which usually starts with submitting to directories and hunting around for link exchange partners. Not exactly the most effective means of SEO because you tend to get low quality and low PageRank incoming links.
Brad went on to note the perils of over optimizing, which often happens when techniques like low quality link exchanges and free directories are over used, generating thousands duplicate anchor text incoming links from sites with low PageRank. He stated that the search engines don’t reward these techniques well, but strangely enough these are often considered the foundations of SEO campaigning but don’t lead to great results.
What Is A Good SEO Plan?
A more sound search engine marketing strategy is all about quality over quantity. Get your site listed in the best directories - DMOZ (the open directory project) and Yahoo! - and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results.
Brad pointed out that 1000 low quality and low PageRank backlinks generated in a short period of time will not be nearly as good as a handful of high PageRank incoming links added over many months. The emphasis is on oh-na-tur-al. Don’t follow the crowd and exchange links with anybody and everyone that comes asking for a link (perhaps I should drop my link exchange practices for this blog?) and don’t spend all your time asking for links from any site you can find that is remotely relevant to yours.
How To Get High Quality Links
It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something. Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.
Unfortunately I don’t have a full-proof method for gaining quality links other than what I have already written about before and what is repeated over and over again all over the Internet - Content is King. The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.
If you need a practical example of how to get high quality backlinks using content read the second part of this article - Smarter Online Marketing. This article explains how one of my blog articles enjoyed some major exposure around the web resulting in lots of links.
In the case of commercial sites the same rules hold true, content will bring in links and visitors. With a commercial site the secret sauce is great content that is tightly aligned with your target market. Whitepapers, articles, free reports, resources, anything and everything you can come up with that will bring your market to your site. If you have just launched a new site put together a whiz-bang whitepaper, it doesn’t have to be too long, just a few pages of really really good stuff and make it available on your site for free.
Once you have the resources on your site you just need to get out there and tell everyone. At the moment one of the best ways is to comment on blogs and forums where your target market congregate. As I mentioned above, if one popular site owner reads your whitepaper, thinks it’s great and tells her audience, your job may be done already. This alone may bring in hundreds of backlinks and definitely lots of real visitors. It’s not easy but good content will lead to good results - it’s almost guaranteed!
6. Page Reputation
Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!
Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link. The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites. If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.
That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.
7. Anchor Text
Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.
This issue is all about your keywords. First you have to know what keywords you want people to use to link to your pages and then you need to figure out ways to make sure people use those keywords. For the basic link exchanges you usually communicate with the person providing you with a link and stipulate what anchor text to use. However most of the valuable links will come in response to you writing some good content and it will be quite random, the linking person won’t approach you to ask how they should link to you, they will just slap up a link as they feel appropriate.
In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles. Yes usability and marketing comes first - you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.
I wouldn’t stress about external anchor text too much otherwise you can become bogged down in little details. Often the people linking to you will use completely random text that means absolutely nothing (for example - visit Entrepreneur’s Journey - click here - “click here” is not good anchor text) but at least will bring in human visitors. Just stay consciously aware of the importance of keywords in anchor text whenever you produce new content.
8. Link Popularity
Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.
The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.
Google - 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRep
Yahoo! - 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity
Now I can’t verify that in any manner but it does make for some interesting discussion. This shows that Google cares more about quality and Yahoo! cares more about quantity, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that. I’ll leave it up to you to test this theory on your sites.
Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’
Before I wrap this article up I want to make one comment regarding how relevant backlinks have to be and whether keywords in domain names matter. Brad made some interesting comments about these topics.
My assumption was that relevancy meant that the pages your incoming links come from should be relevant to a pretty high degree, for example, Entrepreneur’s Journey would appreciate links from business, marketing, SEO and entrepreneurship sites but universities, sports clubs and cooking sites would not be relevant. Brad stated that Google’s relevancy scope is quite wide, as wide as the top categories in the DMOZ directory. A site that on first inspection may not be relevant may actually in fact offer some relevancy even if the connection is obscure or drilled down (is every link from a blog relevant to a blog simply because they all belong in the “blog” category? I think not). It’s a hard thing to judge given that determining whether a result (say a search engine ranking increase) has a direct correlation to a single backlink is next to impossible.
What was really interesting and actually makes total sense is what Brad said about domain names. One of the age old questions in SEO is whether keywords in your domain name are important. Brad straight out said that the Google algorithms do not consider keywords in the domain name, however when people link to you they often use your domain name and if your keywords are in your domain name then the anchor text people use to link to you will contain your keywords. In a round about way, yes, keywords in domain names matter.
Conclusion
There you have it, the top 8 search engine optimization techniques as presented by Brad Fallon, one of the web’s most respected search engine marketers, along with lots of additional commentary thrown in from yours truly. For some people there won’t have been much new material but what these two articles do provide is a solid list of the 80/20 variables that you should work on if your organic search engine results are business critical. For solopreneurs with little time on you hands knowing what the key two-to-three things you need to worry about makes for efficient business.
A few people have emailed me questioning the validity of Brad Fallon and I can say one thing only - Jay Abraham would not have selected him as the presenter on search engine optimization if he wasn’t the real deal. If you don’t have any confidence in Jay Abraham then perhaps you need to start studying business and marketing.
Take care everyone,
based from http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/331/search-engine-marketing-part-1/
The Top 16 SEO Tips From A Yahoo Insider
Recently in the private forums Rich Schefren provides for his Strategic Profits clients there was a discussion started about search engine optimization.
The topic initially began with two questions. The first was about whether non-Google search engines penalize sites that advertise with Google AdWords (false) and the importance of having an “aged domain” and how it relates to number one rankings.
I became interested when Darryl Peddle, who claimed employment at Yahoo!, entered the discussion and offered some great SEO advice. I asked Darryl for permission to republish the tips from the discussion, which I provide below interspersed with my own opinions based on my SEO studies and experiments. Darryl also has a site called Rank Study.
SEO Advice From A Yahoo Insider
This from Darryl regarding the first question about advertising on AdWords and the possibility of penalties from other search engines as a result:
As an employee at Yahoo I can tell you that advertising on Google will in no way affect your rankings in Yahoo… that’s completely inaccurate. Why would we reduce our quality by dropping relevant sites and advertisers?
This regarding aged domains:
Regarding the aging domain. This is information that is available from the latest Google patent. And yes domain aging is becoming a solid way of determining a sites long term value and quality score. It is just one of many (100+ factors), but it’s becoming more important nowadays.
Top 16 SEO Tips
Here are some tips from Darryl, followed by my own opinion and feedback.
1) Register your domains for 2-5 years, not 1 year
I’ve read this absolutely everywhere from every SEO expert I find, including me! I don’t know when I first heard about it, but it makes complete sense and if you want to know why buy my upcoming e-book on SEO for blogs. Early last year for some of the domains I have really committed projects behind, I renewed for multiple years - 5 years or more. This is also a good thing so you don’t lose a domain because you never received the renewal email.
2) Avoid buying domains with multiple dashes
I’m not entirely sure how many multiple dashes is bad, but obviously something like www.make-money-online-with-at-home-business-opportunities.com reeks of spam.
Generally I try and find domains that have both the dashed and non-dashed version and will buy both. For example I purchased BlogTrafficSchool.com and Blog-Traffic-School.com and there are arguments for promoting either domain as the actual site (that’s another article topic). I feel best knowing I have both so I don’t risk losing any type-in traffic or any possible keyword or SEO advantages. Just be careful you don’t head towards the five or more dashes domain names.
3) Do begin to obtain RELEVANT links from high authority pages and directories as soon as possible for both new and old sites
This is the golden rule and the key to building search engine authority, however it’s also the hardest part of SEO for many people. I think it’s especially important to note the word relevant is highlighted, which means you should look to attract links from sites within your neighbourhood of topics. Theme relevance is very important, as is the quality, age and spread of links you attract.
4) Beware who you link out to and do not participate in link exchanges with non-related content sites
I flat out refuse link exchanges nowadays and recommend the same to people who ask me to swap links. It’s a dated process. Yes perhaps for a brand new site a few link exchanges with theme-related sites will get you going, but I believe it’s a waste of energy. Spend your time forming relationships and writing content instead.
Be careful what sites you send links to as well. I can’t prove this, but it make sense to me if your site is seen sending a lot of links to sites that are prime candidates for search engine penalties (for whatever reasons), you might suck up some of the penalty too. This is especially important for you bloggers selling text links - I make this mistake myself - check every site that buys a link from your blog to see what you are endorsing.
5) Have a plan in place to update your site regularly with new content and shuffle featured content (e.g. homepage features) regularly. This will encourage more search engine spider activity and faster updates of your site.
I love this advice because it explains why blogs rock at SEO. It also explains why my blog content appears in Google results within a few days after publishing.
The idea here is that your homepage is different each time the search engine spider visits, prompting it to visit more often. This sends all the right signals to the search engines and makes a lot of common sense too - since the search engines want to deliver the best AND freshest content for each keyword search. If you are not consistently delivering fresh content then the search engines won’t flag your site as an authority.
6) Do use Yahoo Site Explorer (beta) to monitor your site to see how many pages are indexed and to analyze the links to your site (and your competition)
Yahoo Site Explorer recently got a whole lot cooler. Most people I speak to say they look to Yahoo as the most accurate representation of public backlink counts. If you are not clued in to why you should care about your backlinks start by reading why backlinks are important and my somewhat dated backlink FAQ.
Knowing how many pages are indexed is another important stat you can retrieve from Yahoo Site Explorer. This data indicates how good your site’s internal structure is and whether your site is crawled extensively. I believe the key for deep indexing (your goal) is regularly updated content AND content that is well structured - i.e. interlinked in a logical manner. If you use a WordPress blog, the job is half done for you, the other half is your responsibility - publishing regular content.
7) Do write unique quality articles and submit them to article directories
My own experience with article directories has been discussed already on this blog and was included in a free PDF published by Brian Clark. Personally I am not a big fan of this method of marketing for links because it takes significant work for often poor rewards. But that’s just my experience. Plenty of other people report back great results.
8 ) Do use press releases and submit the to places like prweb.com
My take on this is just like article marketing. You can “strike it rich” and score huge publicity and links via PR sites like PRWeb.com, but it can easily fizzle as well. The best strategy is to have a strategy and work at it for the long term with a clear message to market.
9) Do not buy ROS (run of site links) if you want to rank well on Google, particularly on a new site. (A ROS link is a link that is placed on every page of a site, like in a footer or navigation bar)
Just recently I had two people tell me that they believe - in fact are almost certain - that due to recent changes at Google their site rankings were penalized because they purchased ROS links from a text brokering service. Alborz Fallah, a mate of mine in Brisbane, noted that after informing Google that he had removed site wide purchased links that were pointing to his car blog, the penalty affecting his site was removed. You can read his story for more details.
It’s well reported that Google is attempting to crack down on links purchased purely for SEO benefits (links purchased for direct traffic is okay). A site wide link is a good indication to Google of the wrong motivation, however it’s not 100% proof, because for example many people have a blogroll that carries site wide links that are not there necessarily for any other reason than as a recommendation of good blogs. In general stay clear of buying site wide links across many sites all at once and if link buying is a strategy you intend to use for SEO, focus on in-content links or homepage only links.
10) Build your links and submit to directories gradually. Mix up the anchor text of your incoming links with your top 5 or 6 keyword phrases and category keyword phrases.
This first part of this advice about directories is okay for new sites and in particular non-blog sites that might otherwise have trouble building links. I consider directory submission one of the weakest link building methods around though, and rarely submit my blogs to directories.
The second part of the advice regarding mixing up keywords is a very good tip, but something that is difficult to implement if you don’t control how people link to you. As a good example, people often link to this blog with my name, which really doesn’t tell the search engines anything other than this is my blog. If you are buying links or article marketing or submitting content to other bloggers and you have control over what anchor text is use, try and mix it up as often as you can, but keep it natural too - don’t force keywords in for the sake of search engines.
11) Standard onpage SEO is enough (title tags with keywords, h1 for heading, static url, proper internal link structure, sitemap, deep content, article content focusing on the search tail and funnel pagerank back up to category pages).
Wow, there’s a lot of advice there and some of it might be over the top of your head if you have not studied SEO before. If that’s you, go read my intro to SEO series here - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing.
Most of the items mentioned in this tip relate to your internal site structure. I don’t 100% agree that you only need to worry about your internal elements. I think you have to take steps to increase site authority by attracting organic link growth as well. However since you have complete control over your internal structure you have no excuse for not getting this part right.
One of the key tips listed is about the Long Tail. It’s very possible to attain top rankings in long tail keyword searches with minimal effort by focusing on your internal structure and content. You may not receive mountains of traffic, but it will be very focused. This blog you are reading now takes full advantage of the long tail and dominates many Internet business and marketing related terms because of the keywords I use and topics I write about.
If you haven’t come to grips yet with basic SEO elements like titles, headings, pagerank, keywords and how it all goes together to generate top search rankings, I suggest you start studying. Read my article archives as a good place to start.
12) Avoid search engine forums and areas where kids and beginners with no experience spread bogus rumors.
I’ve learnt a lot from forums. One of the first articles I ever read about SEO that really helped me was in a forum. However as Darryl is suggesting, be wary of what you read and don’t assume anything as the absolute truth. Test something yourself before you really believe it or at the very least review the credentials of the people you are following and see if they have proof by looking at their sites and reputation in the SEO industry.
Two of my favorite SEO forums are:
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
13) Do read Matt Cutt’s blog, threadwatch.org, Pandia, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land (new), and other top expert sites for additional information.
There’s a list of some of the top sites and blogs with SEO related information. If you really intend to be the SEO person in your organization or small business, then these sites are like your news portals. You will get the latest stories and events from the search engine marketing world by visiting these sites each day.
I have to confess that I do not spend too much time at sites like these. I’m more interested in monitoring my own search results than reading about what’s going in the industry. The things that I need to know generally filter down to me eventually once I go looking for answers to specific problems. In a world full of too much information I prefer to focus on finding answers to my specific problems, but if SEO is your thing then you need to follow these sites to make sure you know what you are talking about.
14) do invest in the right professional tools for seo and avoid the spam *tool of the day*
I’ve said it before - don’t be afraid to spend money on information products from credible experts who have achieved what you want to achieve. They are the best to teach you how to do what they do and will provide you with a concise, book sized and structured collection of only the information you need to know. Just be absolutely certain you are in a position to action the information you collect and it solves your immediate problems.
The second point about avoiding tools of the day is a good one. Avoid the hype - when it comes to SEO there are a few fundamentals you need to know and test for yourself, and that’s it. The only area where I would even considering investing in a tool is to help with keyword research, something like SEO Elite or WordTracker.
15) Avoid auto-page generators at all costs. They leave footprints and are a waste of time.
I was once asked if would consider using a blackhat SEO tool if meant a serious increase in traffic to my business BetterEdit with no risk of penalties to my site - the worse that could happen was the traffic coming in from the blackhat technique stopping. The technique in question was cloaked pages created automatically with software.
My initial response was no way, based on a moral knee-jerk reaction, but the more I thought about it the more I was tempted. Why not take advantage of a loophole in Google while the loophole exists? I decided against it because it didn’t feel right and I believe this sort of thing can come back to haunt you in ways you don’t realize.
I’d rather work in ways that are in unison with Google policies. I think the rewards long term are more stable and difficult to compete away if you use your head to simply be a better player at the white hat SEO game. Don’t fight the hand that feeds you, just make sure it feeds you first and gives you largest share.
16) Do have a long term SEO and content plan. Long term unique valuable content will always beat out spam in the long run.
Can you honestly say right now you have a plan regarding what keywords you want to rank for and how you intend to leverage content to target those keywords? Guess what - I don’t either!
Well, that’s not entirely true. In my case I’m confident of my blog’s authority and know that if I want to target a certain phrase I just need to produce some content focused on that. Most people reading this are not in the same situation.
Your blog probably doesn’t have a lot of authority yet, but at least you are blogging so you are on your way as long as you keep focusing on content output in your niche. If you are a small business owner with a static site, you have the the most work to do since it’s going to be very hard to increase your search rankings without dynamic content published regularly.
The advice here is to realize the potential that targeted search traffic represents and then strategically go after it. Don’t expect results quickly, but once you are established rest comfortably knowing that as long as you focus on your niche area you can dominate search rankings just by leveraging well structured content, slowly but consistently released. In other words - start blogging!
The topic initially began with two questions. The first was about whether non-Google search engines penalize sites that advertise with Google AdWords (false) and the importance of having an “aged domain” and how it relates to number one rankings.
I became interested when Darryl Peddle, who claimed employment at Yahoo!, entered the discussion and offered some great SEO advice. I asked Darryl for permission to republish the tips from the discussion, which I provide below interspersed with my own opinions based on my SEO studies and experiments. Darryl also has a site called Rank Study.
SEO Advice From A Yahoo Insider
This from Darryl regarding the first question about advertising on AdWords and the possibility of penalties from other search engines as a result:
As an employee at Yahoo I can tell you that advertising on Google will in no way affect your rankings in Yahoo… that’s completely inaccurate. Why would we reduce our quality by dropping relevant sites and advertisers?
This regarding aged domains:
Regarding the aging domain. This is information that is available from the latest Google patent. And yes domain aging is becoming a solid way of determining a sites long term value and quality score. It is just one of many (100+ factors), but it’s becoming more important nowadays.
Top 16 SEO Tips
Here are some tips from Darryl, followed by my own opinion and feedback.
1) Register your domains for 2-5 years, not 1 year
I’ve read this absolutely everywhere from every SEO expert I find, including me! I don’t know when I first heard about it, but it makes complete sense and if you want to know why buy my upcoming e-book on SEO for blogs. Early last year for some of the domains I have really committed projects behind, I renewed for multiple years - 5 years or more. This is also a good thing so you don’t lose a domain because you never received the renewal email.
2) Avoid buying domains with multiple dashes
I’m not entirely sure how many multiple dashes is bad, but obviously something like www.make-money-online-with-at-home-business-opportunities.com reeks of spam.
Generally I try and find domains that have both the dashed and non-dashed version and will buy both. For example I purchased BlogTrafficSchool.com and Blog-Traffic-School.com and there are arguments for promoting either domain as the actual site (that’s another article topic). I feel best knowing I have both so I don’t risk losing any type-in traffic or any possible keyword or SEO advantages. Just be careful you don’t head towards the five or more dashes domain names.
3) Do begin to obtain RELEVANT links from high authority pages and directories as soon as possible for both new and old sites
This is the golden rule and the key to building search engine authority, however it’s also the hardest part of SEO for many people. I think it’s especially important to note the word relevant is highlighted, which means you should look to attract links from sites within your neighbourhood of topics. Theme relevance is very important, as is the quality, age and spread of links you attract.
4) Beware who you link out to and do not participate in link exchanges with non-related content sites
I flat out refuse link exchanges nowadays and recommend the same to people who ask me to swap links. It’s a dated process. Yes perhaps for a brand new site a few link exchanges with theme-related sites will get you going, but I believe it’s a waste of energy. Spend your time forming relationships and writing content instead.
Be careful what sites you send links to as well. I can’t prove this, but it make sense to me if your site is seen sending a lot of links to sites that are prime candidates for search engine penalties (for whatever reasons), you might suck up some of the penalty too. This is especially important for you bloggers selling text links - I make this mistake myself - check every site that buys a link from your blog to see what you are endorsing.
5) Have a plan in place to update your site regularly with new content and shuffle featured content (e.g. homepage features) regularly. This will encourage more search engine spider activity and faster updates of your site.
I love this advice because it explains why blogs rock at SEO. It also explains why my blog content appears in Google results within a few days after publishing.
The idea here is that your homepage is different each time the search engine spider visits, prompting it to visit more often. This sends all the right signals to the search engines and makes a lot of common sense too - since the search engines want to deliver the best AND freshest content for each keyword search. If you are not consistently delivering fresh content then the search engines won’t flag your site as an authority.
6) Do use Yahoo Site Explorer (beta) to monitor your site to see how many pages are indexed and to analyze the links to your site (and your competition)
Yahoo Site Explorer recently got a whole lot cooler. Most people I speak to say they look to Yahoo as the most accurate representation of public backlink counts. If you are not clued in to why you should care about your backlinks start by reading why backlinks are important and my somewhat dated backlink FAQ.
Knowing how many pages are indexed is another important stat you can retrieve from Yahoo Site Explorer. This data indicates how good your site’s internal structure is and whether your site is crawled extensively. I believe the key for deep indexing (your goal) is regularly updated content AND content that is well structured - i.e. interlinked in a logical manner. If you use a WordPress blog, the job is half done for you, the other half is your responsibility - publishing regular content.
7) Do write unique quality articles and submit them to article directories
My own experience with article directories has been discussed already on this blog and was included in a free PDF published by Brian Clark. Personally I am not a big fan of this method of marketing for links because it takes significant work for often poor rewards. But that’s just my experience. Plenty of other people report back great results.
8 ) Do use press releases and submit the to places like prweb.com
My take on this is just like article marketing. You can “strike it rich” and score huge publicity and links via PR sites like PRWeb.com, but it can easily fizzle as well. The best strategy is to have a strategy and work at it for the long term with a clear message to market.
9) Do not buy ROS (run of site links) if you want to rank well on Google, particularly on a new site. (A ROS link is a link that is placed on every page of a site, like in a footer or navigation bar)
Just recently I had two people tell me that they believe - in fact are almost certain - that due to recent changes at Google their site rankings were penalized because they purchased ROS links from a text brokering service. Alborz Fallah, a mate of mine in Brisbane, noted that after informing Google that he had removed site wide purchased links that were pointing to his car blog, the penalty affecting his site was removed. You can read his story for more details.
It’s well reported that Google is attempting to crack down on links purchased purely for SEO benefits (links purchased for direct traffic is okay). A site wide link is a good indication to Google of the wrong motivation, however it’s not 100% proof, because for example many people have a blogroll that carries site wide links that are not there necessarily for any other reason than as a recommendation of good blogs. In general stay clear of buying site wide links across many sites all at once and if link buying is a strategy you intend to use for SEO, focus on in-content links or homepage only links.
10) Build your links and submit to directories gradually. Mix up the anchor text of your incoming links with your top 5 or 6 keyword phrases and category keyword phrases.
This first part of this advice about directories is okay for new sites and in particular non-blog sites that might otherwise have trouble building links. I consider directory submission one of the weakest link building methods around though, and rarely submit my blogs to directories.
The second part of the advice regarding mixing up keywords is a very good tip, but something that is difficult to implement if you don’t control how people link to you. As a good example, people often link to this blog with my name, which really doesn’t tell the search engines anything other than this is my blog. If you are buying links or article marketing or submitting content to other bloggers and you have control over what anchor text is use, try and mix it up as often as you can, but keep it natural too - don’t force keywords in for the sake of search engines.
11) Standard onpage SEO is enough (title tags with keywords, h1 for heading, static url, proper internal link structure, sitemap, deep content, article content focusing on the search tail and funnel pagerank back up to category pages).
Wow, there’s a lot of advice there and some of it might be over the top of your head if you have not studied SEO before. If that’s you, go read my intro to SEO series here - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing.
Most of the items mentioned in this tip relate to your internal site structure. I don’t 100% agree that you only need to worry about your internal elements. I think you have to take steps to increase site authority by attracting organic link growth as well. However since you have complete control over your internal structure you have no excuse for not getting this part right.
One of the key tips listed is about the Long Tail. It’s very possible to attain top rankings in long tail keyword searches with minimal effort by focusing on your internal structure and content. You may not receive mountains of traffic, but it will be very focused. This blog you are reading now takes full advantage of the long tail and dominates many Internet business and marketing related terms because of the keywords I use and topics I write about.
If you haven’t come to grips yet with basic SEO elements like titles, headings, pagerank, keywords and how it all goes together to generate top search rankings, I suggest you start studying. Read my article archives as a good place to start.
12) Avoid search engine forums and areas where kids and beginners with no experience spread bogus rumors.
I’ve learnt a lot from forums. One of the first articles I ever read about SEO that really helped me was in a forum. However as Darryl is suggesting, be wary of what you read and don’t assume anything as the absolute truth. Test something yourself before you really believe it or at the very least review the credentials of the people you are following and see if they have proof by looking at their sites and reputation in the SEO industry.
Two of my favorite SEO forums are:
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
13) Do read Matt Cutt’s blog, threadwatch.org, Pandia, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land (new), and other top expert sites for additional information.
There’s a list of some of the top sites and blogs with SEO related information. If you really intend to be the SEO person in your organization or small business, then these sites are like your news portals. You will get the latest stories and events from the search engine marketing world by visiting these sites each day.
I have to confess that I do not spend too much time at sites like these. I’m more interested in monitoring my own search results than reading about what’s going in the industry. The things that I need to know generally filter down to me eventually once I go looking for answers to specific problems. In a world full of too much information I prefer to focus on finding answers to my specific problems, but if SEO is your thing then you need to follow these sites to make sure you know what you are talking about.
14) do invest in the right professional tools for seo and avoid the spam *tool of the day*
I’ve said it before - don’t be afraid to spend money on information products from credible experts who have achieved what you want to achieve. They are the best to teach you how to do what they do and will provide you with a concise, book sized and structured collection of only the information you need to know. Just be absolutely certain you are in a position to action the information you collect and it solves your immediate problems.
The second point about avoiding tools of the day is a good one. Avoid the hype - when it comes to SEO there are a few fundamentals you need to know and test for yourself, and that’s it. The only area where I would even considering investing in a tool is to help with keyword research, something like SEO Elite or WordTracker.
15) Avoid auto-page generators at all costs. They leave footprints and are a waste of time.
I was once asked if would consider using a blackhat SEO tool if meant a serious increase in traffic to my business BetterEdit with no risk of penalties to my site - the worse that could happen was the traffic coming in from the blackhat technique stopping. The technique in question was cloaked pages created automatically with software.
My initial response was no way, based on a moral knee-jerk reaction, but the more I thought about it the more I was tempted. Why not take advantage of a loophole in Google while the loophole exists? I decided against it because it didn’t feel right and I believe this sort of thing can come back to haunt you in ways you don’t realize.
I’d rather work in ways that are in unison with Google policies. I think the rewards long term are more stable and difficult to compete away if you use your head to simply be a better player at the white hat SEO game. Don’t fight the hand that feeds you, just make sure it feeds you first and gives you largest share.
16) Do have a long term SEO and content plan. Long term unique valuable content will always beat out spam in the long run.
Can you honestly say right now you have a plan regarding what keywords you want to rank for and how you intend to leverage content to target those keywords? Guess what - I don’t either!
Well, that’s not entirely true. In my case I’m confident of my blog’s authority and know that if I want to target a certain phrase I just need to produce some content focused on that. Most people reading this are not in the same situation.
Your blog probably doesn’t have a lot of authority yet, but at least you are blogging so you are on your way as long as you keep focusing on content output in your niche. If you are a small business owner with a static site, you have the the most work to do since it’s going to be very hard to increase your search rankings without dynamic content published regularly.
The advice here is to realize the potential that targeted search traffic represents and then strategically go after it. Don’t expect results quickly, but once you are established rest comfortably knowing that as long as you focus on your niche area you can dominate search rankings just by leveraging well structured content, slowly but consistently released. In other words - start blogging!
7 Ways To Make Money Using Nothing More Than Your List
An opt-in list can be quite crucial to any site or internet based company. Even for a small venture such as a niche profit site an opt-in list can make a world of difference and also add some extra income for your pocket. Rarely would you see an e-commerce site, big or small, without an opt-in list.
An opt-in list allows for a company to market their wares and site via an e-mail. With an opt-in list, a site and a subscriber consents to sending and receiving a newsletter from your company. Through this, you can keep your subscribers abreast of what is currently available in your site as well as whatever is coming out.
And because there is mutual consent between the two parties, any mail sent to the list is not considered as spam mail. There is a great number of successfully read promotional materials such as catalogs, newsletters and such that are sent because the subscribers themselves have signed up for them, meaning, they do want to be sent those items.
Building a list is crucial, only a small percentage actually subscribes for an opt-in list. Many people find promotional mails annoying but if you provide a good newsletter or promotional material, you will see your list build up and grow. You can also achieve this by having good content on your site. If people like what they see and read on your site, then they surely would want more. Newsletters would be a way to attract them back to your site. A little teaser or appetizer if you will.
But other than marketing your wares and your services, an opt-in list can also be used to earn extra profit. Not all lists can be used though. It would be good to first build a successful list with a huge number of subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the more money you can get. Here are seven ways to make money using nothing more than your list.
1) Place advertisements. There are many corporations who will be willing to pay to put their banners and ads on a list with many subscribers. Selling or renting out lists is not a good idea so rather than doing that, many companies would just rather place ads with lists that have a huge subscriber base. Your newsletter could be placed with many ads and each one spells money.
2) Have affiliations with other companies that have at least a semblance or relation to what your site is about. Here other companies will provide links and brief descriptions of what they offer, products and services. With every click made on the link that directs or leads a subscriber from your list to their site, the company will pay you. This P4P or pay for performance.
3) Make deals with other companies by asking for a small percentage of sales done through your list. With every sale done by customers that have come from your list and have gone there because of your newsletter, the other company will pay you a small percentage of your sales. The more people who buys from them, the more earnings you get.
4) You may also get products from other sites on a consignment basis and sell them to your list via your newsletter. Place descriptions, articles and photos of the product in your newsletter. There will be those who will buy from you and when that happens, you can order the product from the other site and sell it to your buyer.
5) Sell e-books or a compilation of your articles on your list. Manuals and how-to articles are in great demand. Many people will be willing to shell out money to gain knowledge about a certain topic and subject. With your existing list trusting your expertise in that area, an e-book could be offered and sold or used as an incentive.
6) Create a network out of your list. Get people to invite more people to view your site and subscribe to your list. The larger your list is, the more people will be able to click on your links and affiliate links as well as make your advertisement rates higher.
7) Subscribers are willing to pay for information if they know that it can be trusted and relied upon. Use your list to get more and more people to subscribe to you as well as browse your site. Lastly, you can use your list to earn money by making them your partners. Your list will be the bloodline of your growth and increase.
An opt-in list allows for a company to market their wares and site via an e-mail. With an opt-in list, a site and a subscriber consents to sending and receiving a newsletter from your company. Through this, you can keep your subscribers abreast of what is currently available in your site as well as whatever is coming out.
And because there is mutual consent between the two parties, any mail sent to the list is not considered as spam mail. There is a great number of successfully read promotional materials such as catalogs, newsletters and such that are sent because the subscribers themselves have signed up for them, meaning, they do want to be sent those items.
Building a list is crucial, only a small percentage actually subscribes for an opt-in list. Many people find promotional mails annoying but if you provide a good newsletter or promotional material, you will see your list build up and grow. You can also achieve this by having good content on your site. If people like what they see and read on your site, then they surely would want more. Newsletters would be a way to attract them back to your site. A little teaser or appetizer if you will.
But other than marketing your wares and your services, an opt-in list can also be used to earn extra profit. Not all lists can be used though. It would be good to first build a successful list with a huge number of subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the more money you can get. Here are seven ways to make money using nothing more than your list.
1) Place advertisements. There are many corporations who will be willing to pay to put their banners and ads on a list with many subscribers. Selling or renting out lists is not a good idea so rather than doing that, many companies would just rather place ads with lists that have a huge subscriber base. Your newsletter could be placed with many ads and each one spells money.
2) Have affiliations with other companies that have at least a semblance or relation to what your site is about. Here other companies will provide links and brief descriptions of what they offer, products and services. With every click made on the link that directs or leads a subscriber from your list to their site, the company will pay you. This P4P or pay for performance.
3) Make deals with other companies by asking for a small percentage of sales done through your list. With every sale done by customers that have come from your list and have gone there because of your newsletter, the other company will pay you a small percentage of your sales. The more people who buys from them, the more earnings you get.
4) You may also get products from other sites on a consignment basis and sell them to your list via your newsletter. Place descriptions, articles and photos of the product in your newsletter. There will be those who will buy from you and when that happens, you can order the product from the other site and sell it to your buyer.
5) Sell e-books or a compilation of your articles on your list. Manuals and how-to articles are in great demand. Many people will be willing to shell out money to gain knowledge about a certain topic and subject. With your existing list trusting your expertise in that area, an e-book could be offered and sold or used as an incentive.
6) Create a network out of your list. Get people to invite more people to view your site and subscribe to your list. The larger your list is, the more people will be able to click on your links and affiliate links as well as make your advertisement rates higher.
7) Subscribers are willing to pay for information if they know that it can be trusted and relied upon. Use your list to get more and more people to subscribe to you as well as browse your site. Lastly, you can use your list to earn money by making them your partners. Your list will be the bloodline of your growth and increase.
Affiliate Marketing - Creating Residual Income
It has already been established that affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and easiest ways to make money from your own home based business.
The products creator erases the need for research and development. You, as the affiliate, have only to deal with the marketing end. In most cases the merchant will even provide sales material for you.
This is great for fast profits, but what about the long term?
Think about this for a minute. The affiliate does all the work on getting interested prospects to the product sales page through their affiliate link. Hopefully the prospect buys and the affiliate gains the commission.
But what happens after that?
The affiliate must then repeat the process all over again to bring more prospects into their sales pipeline. All for a one off sale and commission.
This can turn into a costly proposition depending on the cost of getting the leads to the sales page and the conversion ratio of said sales page.
With that in mind, what can an affiliate do to increase their return on leads and qualified prospects?
Two things.
First, as an affiliate marketer in any niche you must set up your own lead capture page and build your own list of targeted prospects.
This can be done simply by using an autoresponder to capture names and email addresses that is set up with seven to ten follow up messages extolling the benefits of the product you are promoting.
Give away a free report or a review of the product as an enticement for the prospect to leave their information.
This way you can send endorsements of other related products as well if they don’t like the original product.
Second, find membership sites or services to promote in your particular niche.
This is a truly spectacular way to maximize your advertising by gaining recurring income instead of a one-time sale.
Think about what is happening right now with cell phones. You can purchase a phone with all the bells and whistles - camera, Internet ready, text messaging - the works for very cheap. Heck, you can even find some going in a two for one deal.
So what is the catch?
You have to sign up for two years of service.
That is where they make their cash. The recurring income model.
That is what you, as an affiliate marketer, should be looking to promote.
It has been said that it’s as easy to make $100 a day, as it is to make $5 a day. That’s especially true when you already have money rolling in from previous sales.
By promoting services with a recurring monthly charge, you’ll set yourself up with a nice residual income.
By the way I have 7 membership sites which pays recurring commission every month.
You can signup as affiliare here
based from www.xodomarketing.com/amember/aff_signup.php
The products creator erases the need for research and development. You, as the affiliate, have only to deal with the marketing end. In most cases the merchant will even provide sales material for you.
This is great for fast profits, but what about the long term?
Think about this for a minute. The affiliate does all the work on getting interested prospects to the product sales page through their affiliate link. Hopefully the prospect buys and the affiliate gains the commission.
But what happens after that?
The affiliate must then repeat the process all over again to bring more prospects into their sales pipeline. All for a one off sale and commission.
This can turn into a costly proposition depending on the cost of getting the leads to the sales page and the conversion ratio of said sales page.
With that in mind, what can an affiliate do to increase their return on leads and qualified prospects?
Two things.
First, as an affiliate marketer in any niche you must set up your own lead capture page and build your own list of targeted prospects.
This can be done simply by using an autoresponder to capture names and email addresses that is set up with seven to ten follow up messages extolling the benefits of the product you are promoting.
Give away a free report or a review of the product as an enticement for the prospect to leave their information.
This way you can send endorsements of other related products as well if they don’t like the original product.
Second, find membership sites or services to promote in your particular niche.
This is a truly spectacular way to maximize your advertising by gaining recurring income instead of a one-time sale.
Think about what is happening right now with cell phones. You can purchase a phone with all the bells and whistles - camera, Internet ready, text messaging - the works for very cheap. Heck, you can even find some going in a two for one deal.
So what is the catch?
You have to sign up for two years of service.
That is where they make their cash. The recurring income model.
That is what you, as an affiliate marketer, should be looking to promote.
It has been said that it’s as easy to make $100 a day, as it is to make $5 a day. That’s especially true when you already have money rolling in from previous sales.
By promoting services with a recurring monthly charge, you’ll set yourself up with a nice residual income.
By the way I have 7 membership sites which pays recurring commission every month.
You can signup as affiliare here
based from www.xodomarketing.com/amember/aff_signup.php
Getting the most from your affiliate program
Everyone wants to most income possible from their affiliate program, but with so much competition for those affiliate checks, it can be hard to get those big commission checks.
It is vital to any affiliate to create a list of subscribers, and to provide those subscribers with content they will find compelling enough to respond to. After all, the goal of any affiliate program is to provide business for their affiliated merchants, and commission checks for themselves.
Therefore, the key element of any successful affiliate program is to create content that is intriguing enough to urge your subscribers to take the intended action, in this case visiting the merchant’s web site through your affiliate link.
When sending emails to your subscribers, the subject line is all important. The subject line needs to be intriguing, and it needs to speak directly to the recipient. When analyzing a successful affiliate subject line, it is important to look for several key elements.
Make the subject line results oriented The subject line should tell the reader what is in it for them, and what the email has to offer them. The best way to do that is to focus on the end result – the thing that the reader wants.
For instance, “get subscribers to read your emails” conveys an important end result to your target audience, in this case an audience of affiliates and merchant partners.
It is important to tailor your compelling subject lines to the market niche being targeted. Most successful affiliates have more than one list of subscribers, and each list focuses on a particular interest, hobby or activity. It is important that each subject line focus on the subject at hand.
For instance, “Catch more fish than you can shake a rod at” would be a good subject line for your fishing enthusiast subscribers, while “put an end to your headaches” or “stop smoking in two weeks” would be perfect for your health conscious subscribers.
Provide an example for your subscribers
Everyone wants to learn from an expert, and everyone has felt the need to seek expert advice from time to time. Whether it was advice on dieting or tips on picking stocks, everyone wants to follow the example of one who has been there and done that.
Nothing speaks the reader like personal experience, and providing clues to your own experience is one of the best ways to get subscribers to read your emails. Therefore, personal experience subject lines, such as:
- How I lost 20 pounds last month
- How I taught my child to swim
- How I house trained by dog in no time
- How I made my lawn the envy of the neighborhood
and the like are some of the best ones for getting attention and results. Including the word “How” in an email subject line, especially starting the subject with the word “How” is one of those secrets of successful marketing. It suggests that you have important information to impart, if only the person receiving the email would open it and take the requested action.
It is vital to any affiliate to create a list of subscribers, and to provide those subscribers with content they will find compelling enough to respond to. After all, the goal of any affiliate program is to provide business for their affiliated merchants, and commission checks for themselves.
Therefore, the key element of any successful affiliate program is to create content that is intriguing enough to urge your subscribers to take the intended action, in this case visiting the merchant’s web site through your affiliate link.
When sending emails to your subscribers, the subject line is all important. The subject line needs to be intriguing, and it needs to speak directly to the recipient. When analyzing a successful affiliate subject line, it is important to look for several key elements.
Make the subject line results oriented The subject line should tell the reader what is in it for them, and what the email has to offer them. The best way to do that is to focus on the end result – the thing that the reader wants.
For instance, “get subscribers to read your emails” conveys an important end result to your target audience, in this case an audience of affiliates and merchant partners.
It is important to tailor your compelling subject lines to the market niche being targeted. Most successful affiliates have more than one list of subscribers, and each list focuses on a particular interest, hobby or activity. It is important that each subject line focus on the subject at hand.
For instance, “Catch more fish than you can shake a rod at” would be a good subject line for your fishing enthusiast subscribers, while “put an end to your headaches” or “stop smoking in two weeks” would be perfect for your health conscious subscribers.
Provide an example for your subscribers
Everyone wants to learn from an expert, and everyone has felt the need to seek expert advice from time to time. Whether it was advice on dieting or tips on picking stocks, everyone wants to follow the example of one who has been there and done that.
Nothing speaks the reader like personal experience, and providing clues to your own experience is one of the best ways to get subscribers to read your emails. Therefore, personal experience subject lines, such as:
- How I lost 20 pounds last month
- How I taught my child to swim
- How I house trained by dog in no time
- How I made my lawn the envy of the neighborhood
and the like are some of the best ones for getting attention and results. Including the word “How” in an email subject line, especially starting the subject with the word “How” is one of those secrets of successful marketing. It suggests that you have important information to impart, if only the person receiving the email would open it and take the requested action.
Affiliate Marketing For Newbies
If you’re an affiliate marketer and you are directing traffic straight to your affiliate link, then you are doing it all wrong. By making this common mistake you are missing out on a huge income potential. A better way to set up your affiliate marketing campaign is to set up a squeeze page.
What’s a squeeze page, you ask? It’s a page which has an overview of the specific service which you are marketing including a form requesting the name and email address of the person viewing your page. If the person is interested in hearing more about your product or service, they will fill in the form, click submit, where they will be directed to a thank you page including an exact link to your specific product or service. Notice that said “exact link”, this means you don’t just direct them to your homepage where they will have to search through all of the products and services you are selling. You direct them to an exact link where they will see more information about the product that got them interested in visiting your site. Nothing turns customers off quicker than directing them to some general website that sells a bunch of stuff.
Something else to keep in mind is, for every product or service you want to promote; you must have a separate squeeze page for each. This is really the key to marketing online successfully. You should start out with only one affiliate program and create your marketing campaign, where you will focus on a couple of products to promote through squeeze pages.
Another way to market your goods is to design your own website and/or blog. You can get a free blog through www.blogger.com and a website through www.freewebs.com.
For those who don’t know, a blog is a type of website which contains journal-like posts which are updated frequently. You can create a blog around any topic you choose, and sign-up for affiliate programs which correspond to your topic of interest.
Also, it’s a good idea to get your own domain name for your website. You can get a free domain with no ads through www.co.nr. From here you should create posts on you blog and ping it every time you submit a new post. This simply means that you will request other sites to be notified that you have updated your site. This will trigger your site to be crawled by indexing spiders, which will increase you site’s popularity (thus increasing your search engine rank).
After setting up you blog, you can create posts which contain a link or two to your website or an affiliate link which is relevant to the topic of your post. The benefits here are two-fold, you are advertising without “selling” (no one likes to be sold) and you are increasing the number of links to your site which will increase your rank on search engines.
What’s a squeeze page, you ask? It’s a page which has an overview of the specific service which you are marketing including a form requesting the name and email address of the person viewing your page. If the person is interested in hearing more about your product or service, they will fill in the form, click submit, where they will be directed to a thank you page including an exact link to your specific product or service. Notice that said “exact link”, this means you don’t just direct them to your homepage where they will have to search through all of the products and services you are selling. You direct them to an exact link where they will see more information about the product that got them interested in visiting your site. Nothing turns customers off quicker than directing them to some general website that sells a bunch of stuff.
Something else to keep in mind is, for every product or service you want to promote; you must have a separate squeeze page for each. This is really the key to marketing online successfully. You should start out with only one affiliate program and create your marketing campaign, where you will focus on a couple of products to promote through squeeze pages.
Another way to market your goods is to design your own website and/or blog. You can get a free blog through www.blogger.com and a website through www.freewebs.com.
For those who don’t know, a blog is a type of website which contains journal-like posts which are updated frequently. You can create a blog around any topic you choose, and sign-up for affiliate programs which correspond to your topic of interest.
Also, it’s a good idea to get your own domain name for your website. You can get a free domain with no ads through www.co.nr. From here you should create posts on you blog and ping it every time you submit a new post. This simply means that you will request other sites to be notified that you have updated your site. This will trigger your site to be crawled by indexing spiders, which will increase you site’s popularity (thus increasing your search engine rank).
After setting up you blog, you can create posts which contain a link or two to your website or an affiliate link which is relevant to the topic of your post. The benefits here are two-fold, you are advertising without “selling” (no one likes to be sold) and you are increasing the number of links to your site which will increase your rank on search engines.
4 Ways To Get Your Opt In Subscribers To Trust You Quickly
While the rest of the world have developed many barriers and protections to keep their e-mail accounts spam-free, there are also those that subscribe to mails that promotes their products, services and their site. This is mainly because these subscribers want to know more about what the sites are offering and how it can be beneficial for them. They expect to be kept posted on what they are interested in and what are new in the market or field they have chosen.
Businesses would be so lucky to have these kinds of customers; the basic element needed to get these type of people is trust. When your customers trust you they will reward you with their loyalty. Many internet users have gone to great lengths in protecting their email accounts from spam mail. Some free-mail internet providers and internet service providers offer spam protection while there are also some internet based companies that screen your mails for you.
With an opt-in mail list, the mails you send containing your promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and marketing media will go through. Your intended recipient will be able to read and view what you have sent making it a successful transfer of information. To be able to be allowed to do so, you will need permission from your recipient, to get this permission; you need to be able to get their trust. With the great lack of disregard for privacy on the internet, getting the trust of an internet user you don’t personally know is a big achievement.
To build a good opt-in list you need people to trust you, for a faster and quicker build up, you need to get your opt-in subscribers to trust you quickly. The faster you build your opt-in list the faster word about your site and company gets to be spread. The bigger the scope of your opt-in list the more traffic you get spelling more profits. Its easy math if you think about it. Getting the numbers is not that simple though, or maybe it is?
Getting the trust of your client shouldn’t be so hard especially if you have a legitimate business. Getting your customers trust should be based upon your expertise. People rely on other people who know what they are talking about. Garner all the knowledge and information about your business, frankly if you decide to go into a business most probably you have an interest in it. Like how many basketball payers become coaches, you don’t really venture into something you don’t have any interest in.
Show your clients that you know what you are talking about. Provide them with helpful hints and guidelines that pertain to what you are selling. Talk about how to install a roof if your into hardware products or provide articles on insurance settlements if you’re a settlement lawyer. You don’t have to be a big corporation to make use of an opt-in list. If your customers see you as someone who knows what he is doing and saying, they will trust you quickly.
Be true to your customers, if you want to hype up your products and services, provide guarantees. The more satisfied customers you get, the bigger probability there is that they will recommend you. Generally, people will trust someone they know, when that someone recommends you then you’re a shoo-in. They will go to your site and check it for themselves and be given a chance to experience what the others have experienced from you, so make sure to be consistent in the service you provide.
Another tip in getting a customer to trust you quickly is to provide them an escape hatch. Show them that you are not there to trap them. Keep a clean list that would enable them to unsubscribe anytime they want. Elaborate your web form by providing information on how to unsubscribe from the list. Guarantee them that they can let go of the service when ever they want to. Many are wary that they may be stuck for life and would have to abandon their email accounts when they get pestered with spam.
Remember that when you get the trust of your clients don’t lose that trust. Because if you do anything with their email addresses like sell them or give them out, you will lose many members of your list as well as potential members. The true quickest way to gain the trust of your subscribers is when you are recommended by someone they trust.
How to get new, fresh leads monthly without any work?
Businesses would be so lucky to have these kinds of customers; the basic element needed to get these type of people is trust. When your customers trust you they will reward you with their loyalty. Many internet users have gone to great lengths in protecting their email accounts from spam mail. Some free-mail internet providers and internet service providers offer spam protection while there are also some internet based companies that screen your mails for you.
With an opt-in mail list, the mails you send containing your promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and marketing media will go through. Your intended recipient will be able to read and view what you have sent making it a successful transfer of information. To be able to be allowed to do so, you will need permission from your recipient, to get this permission; you need to be able to get their trust. With the great lack of disregard for privacy on the internet, getting the trust of an internet user you don’t personally know is a big achievement.
To build a good opt-in list you need people to trust you, for a faster and quicker build up, you need to get your opt-in subscribers to trust you quickly. The faster you build your opt-in list the faster word about your site and company gets to be spread. The bigger the scope of your opt-in list the more traffic you get spelling more profits. Its easy math if you think about it. Getting the numbers is not that simple though, or maybe it is?
Getting the trust of your client shouldn’t be so hard especially if you have a legitimate business. Getting your customers trust should be based upon your expertise. People rely on other people who know what they are talking about. Garner all the knowledge and information about your business, frankly if you decide to go into a business most probably you have an interest in it. Like how many basketball payers become coaches, you don’t really venture into something you don’t have any interest in.
Show your clients that you know what you are talking about. Provide them with helpful hints and guidelines that pertain to what you are selling. Talk about how to install a roof if your into hardware products or provide articles on insurance settlements if you’re a settlement lawyer. You don’t have to be a big corporation to make use of an opt-in list. If your customers see you as someone who knows what he is doing and saying, they will trust you quickly.
Be true to your customers, if you want to hype up your products and services, provide guarantees. The more satisfied customers you get, the bigger probability there is that they will recommend you. Generally, people will trust someone they know, when that someone recommends you then you’re a shoo-in. They will go to your site and check it for themselves and be given a chance to experience what the others have experienced from you, so make sure to be consistent in the service you provide.
Another tip in getting a customer to trust you quickly is to provide them an escape hatch. Show them that you are not there to trap them. Keep a clean list that would enable them to unsubscribe anytime they want. Elaborate your web form by providing information on how to unsubscribe from the list. Guarantee them that they can let go of the service when ever they want to. Many are wary that they may be stuck for life and would have to abandon their email accounts when they get pestered with spam.
Remember that when you get the trust of your clients don’t lose that trust. Because if you do anything with their email addresses like sell them or give them out, you will lose many members of your list as well as potential members. The true quickest way to gain the trust of your subscribers is when you are recommended by someone they trust.
How to get new, fresh leads monthly without any work?
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