Archive for Tips and Tricks
Internet Marketing – Get a Step by Step Plan
Posted by: | CommentsIn another article/post, I have discussed ways of increasing productivity in terms of avoiding time wasting. This article shows you a practical example of how I do this.
Here is what I would do.
First, it is vitally important that you start your plan with a goal in mind. This is key and you will find in centrally placed in all goal setting guides. The reason is simple – if you don’t know where you are going, how can you plan the journey?
This can be off putting but it need not be.
The problem lots of people make is to worry because they don’t know whether they will succeed if they set themselves a goal and this freaks them out.
The fact is, you won’t know what succeeds until you try. So instead of worrying about it, in the early days, see each project as a learning curve. If you throw up 30 projects and 5 work, that’s great but you may need to ‘fail’ in four out of five campaigns in order to find the one that works.
There is a great deal of ‘suck it and see’ in this business. The fact is also what works for me may not work for you and vice versa. It’s hard to say why but I have the feeling there are many subtle factors. I may set up a PPC campaign on, say, ditieng. I create a character and a voice, structure my landing pages correctly, use competition analysis to find good ads, split test my ads and landing pages, and do everything right – but still fail.
Maybe the whole tone of the campaign is simply wrong and doesn’t connect all the way across from surfer mindset to ad to landing page to sales page.
You might do the same things as me but your tone is slightly different your character slightly better drawn – and suddenly the combination clicks and you make a pile of cash.
However, you will not know this until you actually do it.
Once you have set up a whole campaign or a website you can analyse the traffic stats or your PPC stats and try and find out what is not working and begin to split test different parts of it until you start to get better results.
However, information is power and the only real genuine information you get is from your own campaigns and work.
The point is therefore, you won’t know what the view is from the top of the hill until, you walk up it.
So let’s say you decide to spend a week constructing a website selling diet e-books and exercise ebooks.
First, do you want this to be a review site or a ‘story site’ (Hey, I was obese, now I’m skinny!) Maybe you don’t know – so lets do both and see what works.
So what do we need? Products. Then keyword research. Then a website. Then content. Then a structured PPC campaign. Then secondary websites and backlinking.
So Day 1, I will work from 6 – 8 in the morning before I go to work. I will analyse the Clickbank marketplace for high gravity products with good payouts and low refund rates. I find maybe 6 products that look good.
I will then go to each sales page and read it through. I make a note of certain keyword phrases that sounds good and write down a list of benefits the product provides and what problems it is aimed at solving. Who is the product aimed at?
Do they have affiliate tools that are useful such as keyword lists, graphics. I write this down in a notebook.
Day 2 – also 6 am to 8 am. I will take the URLs and enter them into the Google external keyword tool and analyse each one for keywords. I download these each into an Excel file.
Next, I will fire up Market Samurai or Keyword Elite and enter the main product names and the main high volume keywords the above stage generated.
I will then get MS to analyse the keywords in terms of PPC and SEO.
Day 3 – same time. I will now have a list of keywords and I will do a trick from Commission Blueprint to turn these figures into a more realistic amount.
I then work out which keywords I wish to aim for with PPC and which ones I might optimise for the sake of SEO.
I also head over to Namecheap and buy a domain name.
Day 4 – I will think about my message and what my website will say. Now I have looked at keyword phrases and products, I will have an idea of what problems and benefits are on offer as well as what keywords people mostly use to get to those products.
Using that information, I will work out a message and a character and a website map.
Day 5 – 7 – I will fire up Xsite Pro and start to create the site. I will have a home page, a blog section in a sub directory, a series of information pages, six landing pages for each product, and three review pages.
And so on – a step by step plan I can follow. So I will be able to sit down on Day 4 and think, ok I have done this, now I will need to do this because I am aiming towards this.
Once you have done this, you will find your productivity goes up a great deal and your ability to get structured stuff done will go up hugely.
Affiliate – Marketing – Just Throw Things Against the Wall and See What Sticks
I can’t stress enough the importance of this in affiliate and internet marketing.
Instead of spending hours working on one project in minute detail, create five projects that are less polished but consider them as test projects.
I can guarantee only a few things will work first time but you will learn a ton of information about each project through split testing and monitoring your results. At the end of the day, like most things, internet marketing is a numbers game.
Some people create a few websites and when they don’t work, get angry and wine in the forums. It’s understandable because when you read Guru guides, they suggest it’s all so easy. (However, read Affiliate Judgement Day to see how to not get sucked into this and to make sure you are not buying the dream’.
So people just do one or two things, sit back and wonder why they are not multi-millionaires and then complain. They were ‘scammed’.
What they need to do, instead, is to do a hundred projects quickly. Yes, a hundred!
Let’s say you are pushing some dieting e-books. You put your website up. Write a few Squidoo lenses, a Hub page and wait to hit Number 1 in Google. I mean, that’s what the Gurus teach us, right?
Yes. But where do you get? Page 25? After a few weeks? But I’ve done everything right? Why so low?
Because you’ve done very little, my friend unless there are 7 other competing phrases in Google, you have to compete. Yes, compete!
But what if you created a blog site, stuffed full of content. You wrote say twenty Squidoo Lenses each aimed at one keyword phrase and pointing towards the same keyword optimised page in your main site (often called your money site)?
And twenty hub pages likewise? And each page is pinged with Pingoat and is linked over time to many blogs through blog posting and forum posting?
It takes time, but if you did one thing a day in ninety days or so you will have a hundred backlinks to your pages. And then, you will see your site go yup and up in the rankings if you don’t do too much too fast.
Effort and time.
With PPC campaigns, you may need to try ten before you find one that is profitable. You will often loose money to start with but once you have found that one good campaign you can optimise it and turn that one into the money maker.
When selling websites, you may need to try buying from eBay and selling on Sitepoint, or on Site point and selling on Digitalpoint. You may need to try this niche or that. You might sell shell sites without hosting or fully fledged sites that have been up a few months.
After a few weeks of doing this, you will know what works. You throw twenty ideas against the wall and three stick. You then sit down and work out how to maximise those three successful ideas and move on.
So go and throw some ideas against the wall and see what works. You will learn more from doing this than in reading two hundred articles or buying top dollar Guru products.
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Ten Ways to Improve your Internet Marketing Productivity
Posted by: | CommentsI have noticed that effort gets results. But the key is to do more in less time and to make the effort count. In this article, I will give you ten ways in which you can do more in less time.
Is this a shocking revelation? Not really. However, I find (as you will see in my Affiliate Judgement Day ebook) that this is often a missing piece of my puzzle.
I suspect that many people are similar in this regard to me. They may sit at their computer and ‘work’ for a period of time, say two hours, but how much money making effort is actually done?
People often fool themselves that if they are sitting at their computer, they are doing something. But the reality is often we waste a good deal of time. We take phone calls, we answer emails, we check out other sales pages, we read the Warrior Forum –oops, there’s an hour and a half gone. Mm. That WSO looks interesting, I’ll check that out. . . interesting feedback, led me read on a bit, mm, interesting, only $7, I’ll check that out. . . while it’s downloading, I’ll make a cup of tea. . . mm. . . two and a half hours gone.
Does this sound familiar?
So what actual income producing effort have we done?
None.
Now, don’t get me wrong- there is very much a time and a place for forum browsing and education. In fact, education is key. But it mustn’t detract from the day to day stuff we must do to see consistent results at Internet Marketing.
So here are my ten top tips for increasing productivity when we sit down to do internet marketing.
1. Work out income product efforts. So work out that you want to sell something on eBay, or create a PPC campaign, or write a Squidoo lens to promote a product. Always have in mind concrete things to do that will lead to the potential of making money.
2. Have a plan. In fact, this is so important, I’ll talk about it in another article. The reason why most of us waste time is that in reality we don’t know what to do. If we had a step by step plan of six or seven things to do a day, wouldn’t that help? We just open the list, and work through.
3. Make this plan step by step and easy to follow and have one for each day you propose to work. Either set up the plans for the week on a Sunday or do them first things before starting your efforts.
4. Give yourself a time slot each day to work on these steps. Put it in your diary as an appointment. If this needs to be half an hour before work, your lunch hour and an hour when you get home, or less, split it up.
5. Follow the plan consistently. It doesn’t matter if you have a plan if you don’t follow it. Follow it!
6. Make your plan measurable so that when you have worked through it, you can actually see what things you have done to advance your internet marketing business. So, you have written three blog posts in Niche 1, written a sales page or a landing page for affiliate product 2, etc.
7. Have a full tracking system in place and make sure you build into your income efforts tracking. That way, when you collate your sales data and relate it to your individual sites and efforts, you can see which days’ efforts made money. This is very motivating!
8. When working on this plan, don’t do anything else. Don’t check your emails or check your answerphone. Work on these steps for the time you allocate for yourself and do nothing else until you have finished those steps.
9. If you are prone to wonder and surf, turn off your internet connection for the time you are working (unless you need it, of course). Be disciplined during this time and you will not regret the time you spend surfing or doing educational stuff as you have already done your stuff for the day.
10. Monitor your productivity, either during the time slot you give yourself or after, when surfing and relaxing. If you are just wasting time and not achieving anything positive, stop and turn the computer off and go and do something else. Make your computer time important and not associate it with time wasting!
If you follow these steps, I believe you will find your productivity increases a lot.
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Using SEO Software To Dominate A Keyword Phrase
Posted by: | CommentsSearch engine optimization is, as many of us know, a great way of optimizing a web site to rank in the organic search engine results for certain key words. For instance, you aim your website internet marketing efforts at, for instance, the phrase search engine optimization resources.
This can be quite a laborious task without access to search engine optimization software. However, many people only use such software to optimize their own sites and fail to exploit it to find keywords and to study and understand the competition.
A key ingredient in ranking well for certain key words involves back linking. The more sites that link to your page picture which to optimize, preferably with your main keyword to which you aim to optimize being in the “anchor text”, the more significant your page will seem to the search engines. Your ranking will therefore improve.
A keyway, however, of studying your competition with a view to beating them is to analyze their back linking strategies. For instance, in the recent software release called ‘SEO Equalizer’, and there are various functions called ‘Promote your Site’ and ‘Maintain Your Site’.
These functions however can be used to in fact analyze other sites. In the software package, instead of entering your own website URL, analyze the ones of your competitors and superiors.
Finding your competition sites is very straightforward. Once you have identified through keyword research the keyword which you wish to dominate, you enter that term into Google and literally copy and paste the organic search result URLs from the first page one by one into the analyze feature of your SEO Software.
Within a few moments, you will get a list of all of the websites that backlink to that page. All the major packages also will tell you the Google PR of those sites. This information is extremely helpful. It is staggering how often, particularly in even a very competitive niche such as the internet marketing environment, the sites that appear in the first page of the organic Google search results have hardly any quality back links or are hardly optimized for the relevant keywords in the niche.
They will usually have 10 or so links that most of these will be to sites with a Google PR of zero. It is clear that hardly anyone is utilizing a sensible search engine optimization methods.
The major packages, including the new release SEO Equalizer, also have an ability to analyze keywords utilized in a relevant page. This information can be used in two ways. First, you can analyze your direct competitors to see whether their pages are optimized for the key word phrase to which you are aiming. Secondly, you can go to a website like Clickbank and find the best sites advertising products in your niche.
You then one of that site through the key word analysis of feature on your SEO program and find which sites are optimized for what keywords. If you feel that site is being run by someone who knows what they are doing, (an authority site) the chances are they have optimized their sight for the best keywords. And they have it, immediate quick keyword research. Copy and use.
Of course, you can then run those authority sites through the back link Analysis feature and find the source of their back links. Once you have a list of back linking partners for the authority sites and a list of the back linking partners for your competitor sites, you can begin to approach and compile your own list a back links with a view to dominating those keywords.
SEO software is therefore a vital ingredient in the internet and affiliate marketers arsenal in finding keywords and creating an effective SEO campaign. Buf use it to study your competitors!
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A Combined SEO and PPC Strategy
Posted by: | CommentsMany people leave money on the table by NOT combining a powerful SEO strategy with a PPC. PPC first, in the short term leading to greater SEO results in the future.
Through your main keywords from a long list of keywords from keyword research into Affiliate Elite/Competition Dominator/AdSpy Pro. Monitor them for a week or more. Find what keywords are competitive and what are not. Find out in the competitive ones which ads are good and which aren’t.
Bingo. You will have a list of potentially easier phrases to bid against (subject to it being a phrase associated with demand, of course.) You will have a list of in demand phrases too.
Then run a Google Adwords campaign based on those phrases you identify as easy marks and those as competitive but set up separate campaigns for both.
The good thing if you track PPC keyword conversions using a software package like Xtreme Conversions and use Google Analytics is that you actually get a good idea of what keywords are actually being clicked on by people who click on your ad.
The information you get from impression numbers on your Adwords campaign is very helpful indeed.
This sort of keyword analysis is actually priceless. I like to run as cheap as possible a campaign as I get get away with and see how often a keyword is actually shown even if not clicked. As long as I am on Google Page 1 I am happy. (I always choose option to only show my ad on Google and its feed sites and not the content network)
I like to set up as many exact phrase searches as I can, as well as a more general search term as identified above. These I identify with a program like Keyword Elite but also common sense.
I then track to see on a landing page with GA what keywords brought the clicker to that landing page as well as what are getting impressions and clicks.
This, is proper, truthful and accurate keyword research I find!
At the end of the process you have a very good idea, cheaply, of what keywords people actually search for in that niche. You can then run that information back through your competition analysis software and monitor the ads for a while (either with your campaign running or not).
I then take those keywords that look the absolute best and begin the usual Optimisation process, running my competitor sites through an SEO program and working out a better SEO strategy than theirs.
Knowing which keywords therefore gfet shown alot and which convert, I begin to optimize my bidding processes for those keywords.( I.e better landing pages, increased bid.) I raise the bids enough to see a better click through rate but I monitor and split test to get the best conversion.
My tip – make separate landing pages for each keyword phrase the above identifies. Not only can you SEO Optimise those pages but also your ranking will go up in Google because your relevance and click through will go up.
Then go for the Squidoo lenses, the articles, blogs, posts etc aimed at those phrases too.
I use them together, in other words. One a short term, traffic getting strategy that also generates research you cannot get elsewhere and the results of that research fuel the second approach, finding out what is worth optimizing.
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Search Engine Optimization – A Back Linking Strategy
Posted by: | CommentsSearch Engine Optimization (or SEO) is a necessary part of getting any website noticed. These days, the internet is so huge that without a well thought out strategy for getting your website ranked. Without it, it is like opening a shop in New York or London and saying ‘come and visit my shop, it’s in New York’. What are the chances of anyone finding you?
The key of course is to make your site feature for the keywords which you are targeting. It must all be part of a coherent and well thought out strategy.
Back linking is a key strategy to getting your website ranked for certain keyword phrases. Without the keyword research, you are blundering around in the dark as to what to aim your site towards for the purposes of SEO, of course. However, once you have aimed your site at a certain keyword you know is searched for, you must maximize your efforts towards that keyword phrase as part of your SEO campaign.
As a start, I go to Google and type in the keyword phrase I am targeting my site or page towards. I then work out what makes that site great and key to that is to research their back linking strategy.
This can be done in a number of ways. Enter the full URL into Google of the site that is number 1 with ‘link:’ at the front (but not in the inverted commas). This will tell you which other sites are linking to that site. If you have the Google Toolbar installed, make a note of the Google PR too.
You must then perform a similar search with ‘allintitle.
However, I find it much easier to run such work through software like SEO Equalizer as this automates the process for me. I can look through MSN and Yahoo as well. It will tell me the Google page ranking as well of the sites and the whole search takes a matter of a minute.
However you do it, the key information is to find out what sites are linking to your competitors and whether they are well regarded sites by Google. You need a list.
This will tell you to some degree how many backlinks and of what quality you may need to compete with in order to compete. You then set out to have more backlinks of better quality.
If your competitor site has, for instance, 12 backlinks , 3 of which are Google PR of 2 and the rest none, you know this site will be quite easy to compete with.
However, a key ingredient is what anchor text is being used in those backlinks.
Many people use ‘Click Here’ for their links to sites, but for SEO, this is a disaster. If I want my site ranking well for ‘SEO Equalizer’, for instance, I ensure my backlinks have the link that is clicked to connect to me as ‘SEO Equalizer’ and not something else.
This is key because Google will associate my page with those keywords and my site will go up a few points accordingly. If a lot of sites point to my site using this anchor text of SEO Equalizer, Google will associate my page as an authority for those words.
This is why it is essential to have your keyword research done before you begin optimisation of your site.
Key also is to link your site to as many other sites as possible. Hence, linking your site to a blog or a forum through signature posts improves your score. Setting up separate blogs and Lenses for instance also makes Google think your site is an authority site and improves your ranking accordingly. Google may not know you also control or own those sites . . .
A key strategy here is if you set up satellite sites to create good anchor text backlinks to your main page, you can also then optimize those sites by back linking those to other sites. If you can push your satellite sites and improve their scoring, these will raise the score of your main site.
If your competitor site has links to various places (and check them out), you can also email them and ask them for links as well. If you have links for the same sites as they do and your own back links form other sources, your page will eventually outscore that one and get to the top.
Researching these links is quite time consuming but it worth it. However, using SEO Equalizer will dramatically cut the time down as you can email those sites your competitors backlink to directly from the programmed ask for your own backlink.
Also useful is that in programs like SEO Equalizer, you can set up auto compete and look for relevant link sites to add your site to. This will also in the long term allow your backlinks to really flourish and doing this with SEO Equalizer is a real time saver.
It is surprising how vulnerable many sites are for even competitive keywords when you look at their overall SEO Strategy. By putting some of these tactics into play, you can do a lot to exploit those vulnerabilities or perhaps to look to see how vulnerable your own site may be.
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Split Test Your Way to Success
Posted by: | CommentsSplit testing is an essential component of all affiliate marketing and if you don’t do it you have no idea what really works and what doesn’t in your work.
Only one thing really decides whether an ad or a landing page works – and that is results. The market decides what is likes and what it does not. Some people are tuned into the market more than others but the market always decides.
If you don’t split test, you are hoping you are in tune with the market but have no idea.
Split testing allows you to constantly refine your campaigns or work to make sure it is more and more like what the market wants.
With pay per click adverts, the process is rather easy. You set up a campaign and chose to have two rotating adverts with the same link. Choose the option that allows for the adverts to be shown evenly rather than the option that promotes the better scoring., That may give you skewed results if a certain advert by change is preferred.
Over a hundred or so clicks though you should get a much better picture of which advert is better than the other.
You can then choose to ditch the under performing ad and then try a further variation of the ad and run the two off against each other.
If you use competition analysis software, you can also see which adverts are your regular competitors and try and improve on their adverts in your variants.
Once you have an advert the market tells you is clicked on the best, you can then try and split test your landing page. This can be done in several ways.
You can either simply create a second advert identical to the first but with a different destination URL and choose to run them evenly. Put into your different landing pages different tracking codes or auto responder codes so you can monitor which is the best in terms of sales. You can try out different landing pages, different headlines, different colours, different tones and so on.
The point is – you let the market tell you what it likes and what it does not.
This takes the guess work out of the whole thing. You let the market tell you what is likes and what works.
There are some great software packages that allow you to do this easily such as Xtreme Conversions or Conversion Prophet. However, if you are not tracking your keywords with split testing, preferably combined with competition analysis software you are likely loosing a lot of money you need not loose.
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