I have a confession to make…
If you are just arriving at this post, this is a blow by blow analysis of a niche site campaign I am setting up. You can start at the beginning HERE.
The other day after I posted about writing articles, I got a little antsy with my sample guitar site (which by the way I’ll reveal to you after this campaign is ranking and making some sales). You see, I am waiting on some articles to be written, so I thought I would give my site a little link juice while I was waiting. Well, I got a little carried away…
In the interest of full disclosure, here’s what I did….
I first tried out an idea I got from a free ebook called “Top Spot Sniper” by someone named Brenden Clerget. The gist of the idea is to submit your site to Digg, and then bookmark your Digg submission. Apparently this gives a little extra link juice.
Since he has a free ebook on the method, hopefully he won’t mind me posting about it here!
So, what I did was take my guitar website url and submit it to Digg. In the topic and description in Digg, I ONLY put my keyword/keyphrase I was trying to rank for, then submitted it.
I then copied the URL of the Digg submission and pasted it to a Wordpad document so I could easily grab it later.
In his ebook, he then describes how to bookmark your bookmark. His first method is to do it all manually, which is the hardest. This is where you would go to every bookmark site, create an account, and submit your link.
His second option is to use a free service called http://www.socialmarker.com, which I have used plenty of times in the past.
For some reason though, when I went to their site yesterday, I kept getting a warning that something on their site was trying to get on my computer? I tried a few times and kept getting this message, so I figured it wasn’t good and left.
I was kind of bummed because the third and easiest option to bookmark my Digg submission was to use SENuke.
SENuke is a paid option, and I didn’t want to pay for anything.
So, here’s what I did…
When you go into SENuke, you have the option of getting a FREE 7 day trial. There are basically 2 options – a somewhat stripped down version for $67 per month and the “deluxe” model for $127 per month.
At first glance, I thought, “HOLY CRAP” that’s kind of pricey.
Well, anyway, I signed up for the 7 day trial through Paypal for the $127 one because it had the features I wanted.
Of course, I didn’t take the advice given and watch the intro tutorials, I just jumped in with the goal of bookmarking my Digg submission. Maybe I should have watched them, but I was in a hurry and the software is pretty self-explanatory.
I can honestly say, SENuke has WWAAYYY more cool features than I had anticipated. It easily saved me 7-10 hours of work. This is because it carries out a number of very mundane tasks like signing up for various sites, and confirming emails, automatically.
So, I input a few details and SENuke went in and created random names and login details for me for 1) a ton of social bookmarking sites, 2) a ton of RSS feed sites and 3) a ton of high PR backlink sites. It creates these accounts for you at all the sites AUTOMATICALLY. Oh, and these 3 things are only 3 of the 6 features this software has.
Then, it verified the emails for me that these sites send to verify that I was setting up the accounts – ALL AUTOMATICALLY.
Then, it went in and submitted my bookmark to all of the social sites AUTOMATICALLY, to the RSS feeds AUTOMATICALLY, then it posted backlinks to all the high PR sites AUTOMATICALLY.
All in all, I estimate that I got close to 200-300 backlinks to my site within 2 hours.
This EASILY would have taken me 7-10 hours to do manually. And while it was doing all this in the background of my computer I was doing other things.
I checked last night and my actual site was on page 2 of Google, 12th position for one of my keywords, and for another keyword, 2 of the social bookmarks were on the 2nd page! Not too bad in my opinion.
Now, will I continue the trial and actually pay for SENuke? At first I flat out did not want to, but now I’m sort of middle of the road. So, I’m still undecided.
I can see the power of this software and I think the time saved alone is worth the price, but I want to see some sales in some niches from it before I commit to it. I’ll keep you posted.
Do I think you should try the trial just to at least build some links and get exposure to your sites – by all means, an emphatic YES. Download it, use it for all your sites (the trial is a full copy), and then cancel your subscription.
You’ll probably get a nice boost in your rankings, and maybe even some sales!
Anyway, I got my articles this morning and will begin my promotion schedule today. My next post is going to detail out my daily schedule for promoting my niche site. If you can detail out your schedule and take action EACH AND EVERY DAY, you will be successful, I can guarantee it.
And there is some really cool stuff I am going to show you that I KNOW you have never seen. Stay tuned…
How To Get Massive Free (and very close to free) Traffic – Part 1
If you are arriving at this post, we are analyzing a live campaign, blow-by-blow, to outline the steps involved. You can start at the first post HERE.
We have our keywords, our affiliate products and you should have your site set-up. If your site isn’t perfect, don’t sweat it, just get the darn thing up so you can start driving traffic to it.
This is the first post of a lot on getting traffic. There are so many way to get traffic it’s not even funny and we are going to focus on the free ways. There may be a couple here or there that cost a few dollars, but for the most part they are free.
Now, our whole goal here is to get natural, page 1 rankings for our SITE (not necessarily our articles) so we have long-term organic traffic. To me, this is the best way to drive people to our affiliate pages because it lasts. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel every day trying to get more and more traffic.
Articles and article directories are great for backlinks, but if done right, you can also get a ton of traffic from them.
So, if our goal is to get natural rankings to our site so we get a constant stream of traffic, then we are going to focus on 2 things: content and backlinks.
First, we have to focus on content.
In this post, we are going to talk about the 1st step in this content process – ARTICLES!
I know what you’re thinking, “Articles, how boring, I already do that…”
Maybe you do, but I bet 1) you don’t do it right and 2) you don’t use your articles like I will show you after you write them. I’ve got some really cool stuff in store, and your articles merely form the basis of our strategy.
So, first, let’s make sure you do them right, and I’ll provide some links below to what I’m talking about. And, hey, if you hate article writing, like I do, make it easy on yourself and outsource it. I have outsourced my article writing for this campaign to a group at www.PajamaTeam.com. It’s $6 per article and the quality has always been outstanding. They research your topic and crank out some very naturally sounding, convincing articles.
Here are the steps we’ll take for our campaign:
FIRST – Write 10 unique articles centered around 10 of our keywords.
A couple general guidelines on these articles:
- they should each be between 300-500 words in length;
- each article should focus on one keyword – this is important because too many times people try to focus on more than one keyword for an article and end up not getting ranked for any keywords. We want to focus like a laser on one keyword and one keyword only. This way you have a better chance of getting ranked for that particular keyword
- your article should have about 2% max keyword density. This works out to be your keyword about 2 times out of every 100 words.
- you should use LSI in your articles – LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This basically means that you include terms related to your topic. Google looks for LSI termswhen determining what a particular page is about. Let’s use my niche and assume our article was about “learning guitar.” Some LSI words might be “music” “speaker” “fret” “amp” etc. Do you get the point? Normally, if you write naturally as if you are talking to someone, LSI terms will naturally be interspersed in your writing.
- Always try to center your articles around a number of tips, or rules, or something. People love tips and secrets that will solve their problem. I have found that odd numbers work best, and 3 or 5 has worked best for me. So, it could be “3 tips” or “5 secrets” etc.
- In the resource box, ALWAYS have your keyword as anchor text and ALWAYS have your full URL as a link. The anchor text is important for SEO, but the full URL is important in case someone ever publishes your article, but does not keep the links live. If you just have anchor text links, and they don’t work, a reader won’t know how to get to your site. By putting your full URL as a link, if the link gets messed up, they can still make it your site.
- If you outsource your articles, be sure, be sure, be sure they are written by someone who has english as their native language.
Specific Guidelines On These Articles:
- The Title is your one line sales pitch to get them to click
The title should have your keyword/keyphrase in it and should incite curiosity. I ALWAYS start my article title with the keyword first. And then I put something catchy after it.
Kind of like a mullett – all business in the front, but crazy fun in the back!
As an example, if my keyphrase was “learn guitar online,” this is how my title might look:
“Learn Guitar Online – 3 Little Known Tips To Play Like Eddie Van Halen” or
“Learn Guitar Online – Man Learns Insider Secrets, Lands Music Contract” or
“Learn Guitar Online – 3 Rules You Must Follow Before You Learn Guitar Online”
So, as you can see, these incite some curiosity. You’ll notice that I made the 2nd one kind of like a newspaper headline. I have found that I get higher views when I craft them this way. In the 3rd one I use the keyword twice. I have had a fair amount of success with this in the past as well.
If you are stuck with some boring headlines or can’t think of any, here’s a trick you can use that’s right under your nose.
Go to Ezinearticles.com and do a search of the articles for your targeted keyword. This will bring up all the articles associated with your keyword. Pick any one of them, just make sure it is in a category that is your niche.
Scroll down to the bottom of the article and you’ll notice Ezinearticles lists out the “Most Viewed” and “Most Published” articles in this topic. There can be some manipulation of these views (which we’ll discuss in a later post), but for the most part you can look at which ones are getting the most views.
Look at their title and how it is set-up – is it catchy? Does it make you want to read it?
If so, make your like theirs. Don’t copy it word for word, but use the same format and change the words around.
The title is what will cause people to click, so this is extremely important to do right.
And, trust me, in the beginning you’ll have some flub articles that get minimal views. That’s OK. Learn from it and move on.
- How to Get Killer Click-Throughs in Your Resource Boxes
OK, I can tell you from the many, many bad articles I have written, that “For more information, visit www.samplesite.com,” or any variation of this, DOES NOT MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO CLICK. Maybe it works for certain types of topics and articles, but it has never worked for me.
There are 2 types of resource boxes that have worked well for me, I call them the 1) natural resource box and the 2) curiosity continuation resource box.
In the first one, I weave my links directly into the “conversation” of the article. This is kind of hard to explain, but I make it sound as natural as possible with a call to action.
Go to the following link and you’ll see an example of this:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Out-of-Control-Teenagers—Where-Did-I-Go-Wrong?&id=3773662
This article has gotten like a 55% click through rate – pretty good in my book.
In the 2nd one, I offer them more tips or something else if they click through. Read the end of the article in this one and you’ll see what I mean:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Get-Rid-of-a-Double-Chin-Fast—2-Secrets-of-the-Sculpted-Gods&id=3816225
As a side note, you’ll notice “Dirk Jensen” is not me! Well, it is me, it’s just a pen name, which you can do in Ezinearticles. This bears some mentioning. These days, for each niche I get into, I create a pen name. This way, when someone looks at my bio, they don’t see that I have written articles on 20 different topics. We are ultimately trying to be the “expert” in our niche, so if they see you have written about guitars, weight loss, double chins, etc., they will most likely automatically think that you ARE NOT an expert.
Bottom line is that the most valuable piece of real estate in an article is your resource box. You may have to play around with a few variations of what works for you and gets the most click-throughs. These ways have worked for me.
SECOND – now that you have your 10 articles written, go back and re-write those 10 articles
Center them around the same keywords. So, when you are done with both steps you’ll have 20 total articles.
In my next post I am going to tell you what to with these articles. Ezinearticles is part of it, but a very SMALL part of it. We are going to take this content we have created and put it into multiple formats and directories so we can squeeze every lasy bit of traffic juice out of them!
Stay tuned!
The #1 Reason You Will Fail At Internet Marketing
People come and go in this business at lightening speed. Every day it seems there are thousands more giving it a go, which is great! The problem is, just like in the offline world, 95% of them will fail or give up saying that they can’t make any money.
Not too long ago, i was in the same spot. I got so frustrated with this business that I actually put up a website called isuckatinternetmarketing.com! It was my ranting and raving about how I am terrible at this business and how much I hated it and all the guru’s in it.
Looking back, it was kind of funny and stupid at the same time.
2 things turned it around for me though. The first was a phone call from across the world from Australia (I live in the US) from a guru named James Schramko. He talked to me about what I was doing, what to change and what to do going forward. I feel that I owe a lot to him for helping me get on the right path.
And what an incredible gesture on his part to call me at 2AM his time across the world to help me out. If there is ever a true gentleman, it’s him. Thanks James.
The second thing that turned it around for me, which if you don’t learn to harness it you WILL fail, is focus.
Now, I am about ADD as it gets. I own an offline business, a few online businesses, have 4 kids all under 8 years old, a wife, a dog, cat and a few fish. To say I have a few things going on is an understatement.
So, when I started online, I jumped around from one thing to the next, trying every new shiny thing that popped out of the woodwork. I was seduced by every sales letter promising that I could make $2,834.57 in 10 minutes if I just did “this” or “that.”
And I bought in and did “this” and “that” for a week or so then would jump to the next “answer” to make my riches. I swear I must have tried 100 different ways to make money online. You know how much money I made?
About $2,000 total.
You know how much I spent on books, courses, software, etc?
About $6,000 total!
Hmmm, not sure about you, but to me that looks like a business that won’t survive very long!
So, after I spoke to James, I decided to take a break for a few months. I shut off Internet Marketing and put it out of my head. I stopped going to any and all forums or blogs. I cancelled all my memberships except for one.
I simply shut it all off and spent more time with my family.
What I realized during my time off was that I was making it way too hard. Online business really is just like offline business.
In my offline business I provide way more value to my clients than they pay for and while we only do a few things, we do them extremely well – we overdeliver and focus on just a couple of things. I could not imagine how fast we would be out of business if we jumped around to one thing after another week after week!
Online is no different. Focus on one or two projects at a time and you will make money, I can virtually guarantee it.
Lack of focus on one method, strategy, niche or website, especially when you are starting out, will cause you to get frustrated and fail. Trust me, I’ve been there.
A question I get a lot is “OK great, I know I need to focus, but how do I know when to stop focusing on a certain niche or product?”
It’s a tough question because there are a lot of variables, but my rule of thumb is that if I get 100 click thrus to the merchant and I have no sales, something is wrong with my message, the vendor sales page or the product itself. It warrants further research.
If I get 200 click thrus and no sales, I usually move on to something else. I just ditch it and move on. It’s hard to do this, especially after you have worked so hard on that project. But its part of the business – you’ll have more misses than hits.
So, if you take one thing out of this post, it is to stay focused on your goals for a particular project and don’t get distracted. If you need to, stay out of forums and resist reading about all the “new” strategies.
Once you learn to harness the power of focus, the sky really is the limit to how much you can earn in this business!
Campaign Anatomy – Let’s Get That Profit Center Up!
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
How’s it going guys? I’ve had my grande black eye from Starbucks, so I’m ready to go!
So, we have our keywords, we know what vendors we are going to promote, what do we do next?
At this point you have to decide if you want to do a free campaign or if you want to pay a few dollars to get it up and running. The difference, other than a few dollars, is that with free services, you don’t own anything, and with paid you own your own little piece of Internet real estate.
Some people say to only use free methods to start, like Squidoo, blogger, Wordpress.org, weebly, etc. However, I like to have my own domains. This is because I can do whatever the heck I want to with my site on my own domain.
On the free sites you are a slave to their policies – at any moment your site could be taken down. This happened recently to me over at Squidoo with a Magic of Making Up lens. One day it was there, the next it was gone.
Poof! All that work down the drain.
So, for my main sites I direct traffic to, I buy my own domain name. It’s super easy to get one. I get mine from Hostgator because it’s about $7-$8 a month for unlimited domain hosting. You can, however, use whoever you want really, but Hostgator is one of the best.
Some others are Namecheap, Godaddy, and ProHost.
A couple guidelines on domains:
- I like to get a .com or .net since they are more common and people are more familiar with them.
- I pick one of my keywords (the one I like the best) and I try to make that my domain name
- I try NOT to have dashes, underscores or any other symbols in my domain name.
- If I cannot get my main keyword in my domain as a .com or .net, I will add something to the keyphrase, like “now” or “site” or something like that. For example, if my keyword was “dog training tips” and I could not get dogtrainingtips.com or .net, I might try for mydogtrainingtips.com or .net.
- If this does not work, I will move on to the next keyword and try with that one. And then the next one…and on and on.
- If I cannot get any of my keywords in my domain, I will resort to dashes.
- If dashes fail, then I will try for a .info or .org name, but this is a last resort.
After all this I should have my domain name.
Now you have to build your site…
Let me just tell you that if you have no experience building a web site, go with the free methods talked about above, like Squidoo, or even set up a Wordpress blog. I say this because the layout and design is already set-up for you for the most part.
While you do this, become familiar with building sites and look at tons and tons of other peoples sites to see what you like and don’t like.
Keep a file and make notes of what you like and don’t like – what grabs your attention at certain sites. What’s your first impression of sites you visit?
There are 2 parts to building websites: the aesthetic and the technical.
The aesthetic is how pleasing it is to the eye. I have found that you should stick with red, black, green and blue as “buying” colors.
The technical is how to actually get it up and running online. I can’t go into a full tutorial here on how to actually build one because there are tons of software programs (paid and free) that you can use to get it up and running.
But here are some guidelines I use to set mine up:
- I generally do not use dark background colors.
- I almost always have an attention grabbing headline.
- I keep the typing to a minimum and have a fair amount of white space.
- I have a lot of “call to actions” (i.e. affiliate links)
Ultimately you want to make it easy for the person to get through to the vendors website without being spammy or hard sell too much.
IMPORTANT***ALWAYS keep in mind that your job as an affiliate is to “pre-sell” NOT sell. Let the vendors sales page do the selling. Your job is to just get them to click on your affiliate links.
Now, as far as what type of site to set-up, there are a few kinds you can choose from. You can have a mini-site, an authority site with 100’s of pages, an e-commerce “store”, a review site, a squeeze page, etc.
In this sample campaign we will be using a review site. Review sites work fairly well when you have multiple products in a niche that are similar. In this guitar niche I am doing a review site because of this – there are a number of guitar lesson courses online, so I will review them for the visitor.
Resources To Build Your Sites
When I started internet marketing, building a website was a daunting task. Not that I am technically challenged (well, not too much!), but it was just all so new. I’m also 37 years old, so I didn’t grow-up with the internet!
I went out and bought a software called XSite Pro 2. I set-out building my own sites by pure trial and error. I figured out ftp (file transfer protocol) and built quite a few sites with X Site Pro. And looking back now, I built some really crappy ones!
The point is, DO NOT BE AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES. Your site will NEVER be perfect, just get your content on there and publish it. Start promoting it as soon as possible and you can make changes as time goes on.
A tool I just started using which is literally allowing me to have sites up in minutes (I have to add content, but the design, meta-tagging, etc are 90% done from the get go) is called Affiliate Genie.
Chris Rempel, aka the Lazy Marketer, developed Affiliate Genie from the ground up and has put some truly amazing features in it that allow you to crank out SEO friendly affiliate sites pretty fast.
If you invest in tools like this to make your life easier, you can check it out at his site at www.AffGenie.com
But, again, keep in mind that it is not necessary to have this tool, there are free methods. They take a while longer to learn and get sites up and running, but heck, they are free.
One such free software is NVU. NVU is a free website design software with a lot of great functionalities. I still use it for some quick, easy squeeze pages. Play around with it and see what you think.
So, the goal for now is to:
1) Get a domain name and hosting at a place such as Hostgator
2) Review other sites and make note of design elements you like and don’t like
3) Get your own site up and running if you use a domain name. For this, you can use Affiliate Genie, XSite Pro 2 or NVU. If you opt for the free methods, build a free site through Squidoo, Wordpress, or weebly.
In the next post, we are going to talk about getting loads of targeted traffic. Without traffic, there’s no sales, and without sales, there’s no moolah!
We’ll talk about some basic traffic strategies as well as some advanced ones.
I am also currently working on some pretty cool traffic strategies that can dramatically increase your traffic. I hope to be done testing them in the next few weeks and will let you in on them as I perfect them!
Keep moving forward!
Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 2
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
OK, whew, that last post was a long one, and this one is kind of long too. But keyword research is soooo important to get right. It literally means the difference between making money or spending hours and hours making content that never gets looked at, which means all of your work will be wasted.
So, we have our spreadsheet with 10-20-30-however many keywords. If you find lots of good ones from the previous steps, great, use them. If you only have 5 or so though, go back and find more. Our goal here is to further narrow down our list to 5-10 keywords we will initially target.
I like to find 10 total, but then pick 5 to target. Once I saturate those 5, I evaluate and move on to the other 5, etc.
The first thing we need to do is fill in the columns we did in the previous steps with what we find out from Google. These steps explain how to do it for one keyword. Just go back through the steps for each keyword. Here’s what we do:
1. First do a search in Google with quotes around your search term. So, if I were searching for “jamorama review” I would type “jamorama review” into the search box with the quotes. Easy enough, huh? Make note of the total search results and enter that number in your “Quotes” column next to that keyword.
IMPORTANT**This is where most aspiring IM’ers make a major blunder – they are taught to only go after keywords with 5,000 or less results with a quote search. So, if they get more than 5,000 in this Step, they automatically discard the keyword as too competitive. Read on to Step 2 to see why they are WRONG…
2. Next, read THIS POST first on how Google lies to us. Hopefully after reading that post this makes sense, but basically you want to scroll all the way down to the bottom of page 1 of the search results from the search in Step 1.
At the bottom of the page, google lists out the results as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Click on the 10 to go to the 10th page of search results.
Do this over and over until you get to the last search result. You’ll be surprised to find that the last search result is much lower than what you found in Step 1.
Make note of the total search results after reaching the end and put this amount in the “Revised Quotes” column.
3. Next, we want to go back to the Google search box and type the keyphrase in as follows (using the Jamorama review example):
intitle:”jamorama review”
This will tell us how many pages have our keyphrase in the title.
BUT…
after you do this search, do what you did in Step 2 again (go to the very end of the search results). Record this result in the “Intitle” column.
4. This step is exactly the same as Step 3, except you want to type into the Search box the following:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
Notice there is no space between the : and “, but there is a space between ” and inanchor. Again, this tells us how many pages are specifically optimizing for our keyphrase by putting it in the title and anchor text. Go to the end of the results and record what you find in the “Intitle/”Inanchor” column.
Now, let’s pause for a moment so I can explain something.
Ultimately, we should only be concerned with how strong the 1st 10 results are in Google when doing a normal search (ie without quotes or operators) because this is where we are trying to rank. So, are the above not important?
I have heard some say that Steps 1-4 don’t even matter because we should only be concerned with the first page results BUT, I like to look at both the results in Steps 1-4 and the Steps I outline next. This is because if I find that the 1st page results are weak competitors, but there are 300 pages optimized for my keyword, I may still have a tough time ranking. As a result, I like to look at a combination of the above Steps with the following Steps.
Ultimately, you have to do what you are comfortable with, this is simply
the way I do it and what has worked for me.
OK, on to Step 5:
5. In this Step, we are focusing ONLY on the 1st page results. So, first you want to do a search in Google for your keyword without quotes or operators – just a plain old Google search.
We are looking at the Page Rank of each of the results on the 1st page. If you are not familiar with Page Rank, it is basically how important, on a scale of 1-10, that Google thinks a website is. The higher the page rank, the more important in Googles eyes. You can read more about Page Rank HERE.
So, how do you determine each pages page rank? Well, in the previous post I mentioned SEObook.com. We want to go back there and download their SEOToolbar. You can find it at http://tools.seobook.com/
Once you download this, you will have a Page Rank bar in your toolbar. So, every time you go to a page, it will tell you automatically what the page rank for that page is.
So we want to go to each page in the top 10 results and write down what the page rank is for that site. When we get all of these, we add them up and divide by 10. This gives us the average page rank for our keyphrase.
ONE IMPORTANT THING**do not add into the results any results such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Articlesbase, Zimbio, Digg, or any other social type site. This is because their page rank could artificially inflate our average. AND, we can publish on these sites too. We are really looking for websites other than these types of sites.
So, if you look at the 1st page results and you have 8 “regular” old websites and 2 Ezinearticles, you would add up the page rank of the 8 sites and divide by 8 to get your average.
OK, almost done!!
6. In this last step, I simply scan the 1st page results we got in Step 5 for these social type sites. You can really do this step in conjunction with Step 5.
The reason for this is that if there are Ezinearticles or other sites like Digg on the 1st page results (WITHOUT quotes or operators), I know I have a really, really good shot at getting on the 1st page also because I can put content on these sites as well.
So, on my spreadsheet, I just make a notation that there are some of these social sites on page 1 and which sites they are.
You’ll go through these steps for each of your keywords. And by the way, there are software programs, like Micro Niche Finder, that will do the majority of these steps for you, but it’s nice to do it for free and I think it’s important to understand the steps involved.
How To Interpret What You Have
So, we have all these numbers in front of us and we need to pick the ones that we think we will have the best shot at ranking for. We want to start off by choosing 5 that we like.
IMPORTANT**I am going to give some guidelines below on what to look for, but the absolute most important thing to remember is that you have to not get frozen in choosing your keywords and determining which ones to target.
ALOT of people get frozen with fear at this point because they worry if they are doing it right or wrong…
DO NOT DO THIS, and don’t make it overly complicated. It’s not rocket science!
Pick what you think is best and get to work with your site and content (I’ll get into way more detail on this in a later post) because as you gain experience and confidence, you will start to know pretty quickly what you will be able to rank for and what you won’t be able to rank for. Just remember, keep moving forward.
OK, the guidelines I follow are as follows:
1. intitle/inanchor results below 20-25, the lower the better
2. Average page rank < 2-3
3. A social site on page 1 results
These are my “ultimate” guidelines, but I am flexible because I can’t always have my cake and eat it too. If you meet 1 & 2, but not 3, it’s probably fine. If you meet 2 & 3, but not 1, you’ll probably be OK.
I have ranked on page 1 for phrases with 200 intitle/inanchor and I have ranked when no social site is on page 1. These are simply guidelines. Again, choose what you think is best and move on to your site – you can’t sell anything if you don’t get some content up!
OK, this will keep you a little busy…my next post will be on getting our domain and setting up our site – and a cool tool I use that gets my affiliate sites up in literally minutes!
To your SUCCESS!
Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 1
Catchy title for my post, huh?
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
This post is kind of long so bear with me!! I am breaking it down into 2 posts so you can digest it all.
OK, so we have decided on our niche, and now we have to find the keywords that are going to bring us traffic from the search engines. In other words, we want to rank for these keywords, on the first page of Google, to get natural, organic traffic.
And keep in mind that we will initially get traffic from articles for these keywords, but the whole goal is to get our pages ranked. Articles will most likely die off, so we want our real estate (our sites) to gain value and go up in the search engines.
Here is exactly how I do keyword research, and the reasons I do it this way:
1. First, I open a new Excel spreadsheet and I list out in column A all “buying” keywords. Buying keywords are the ones that I feel people would type in to the SE’s if they want to buy a product. They typically include 1) the product names I am promoting, and 2) combinations of the words “buy” “purchase” “review” and “reviews.”
So, for example, for one of the guitar products I will be promoting, Jamorama, I would type into my spreadsheet:
jamorama
buy jamorama
purchase jamorama
jamorama review
jamorama reviews
2. Next, I go to the affiliate sections of the vendors sites I plan on promoting. Most vendors will have a fairly good affiliate section full of banners, sample email templates, other graphics, and yes, keywords. Take these keywords with a grain of salt though because I have found that they are generally just generic keywords.
I take these keywords from each vendors site and I paste them into my Excel spreadsheet vertically in column A below my keywords in Step 1.
3. I then go to the Google external keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and I do a “Website content” search for EACH of the vendors websites.
I take every one of the keywords I get and paste them into column A of my spreadsheet.
4. I then go to SEObook at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (register for an account, it’s free, and a great keyword tool) and I type in my “root” keywords. The root keywords are my main important keywords.
I am focusing this campaign on learning the electric guitar since it is a little more focused than just “learn guitar,” so I type in “learn electric guitar” into SEObook’s keyword tool. I take these keyword results and paste them into my Excel spreadsheet like the other lists.
Don’t worry about search volume or anything like that yet.
5. I then go to Micro Niche Finder and do the same keyword search as I did in SEObook. If you are not familiar with Micro Niche Finder, it is a keyword tool that you have to pay for. In my opinion, it is well worth the money, but it is not necessary to do the keyword research I am talking about here.
As a side note – any tool you use in IM should be judged on 1) whether it saves you time or 2) it helps you accomplish your goal. Like any tool I use, Micro Niche Finder saves me a ton of time and gives me some great keyword ideas.
If you have the time, do it by hand and save your money. If you don’t have the time, get Micro Niche Finder or another keyword research tool to speed up the process.
I take the keywords I get from Micro Niche Finder and paste those into my spreadsheet.
So, now I have a really healthy list of keywords.
6. I then go back to the Google free keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal but this time I do a “descriptive words or phrases” search with my newly generated keyword list.
I simply take my list from Excel and paste all of them into the Google Keyword tool search box.
7. This filters out all of the duplicates and gives me a nice keyword list, with synonyms, to work with. I take this list and export it to a new Excel spreadsheet.
8. I then do a couple things. I create a couple column headers titled as follows (right next to the search volume column): 1) Quotes, 2) Revised Quotes, 3) Intitle 4) Intitle/Inanchor, 5) Average Page Rank, 6) Social Page 1.
Here’s what they mean -
- Quotes - this is the number of search results when I type in the keyword with quotes
- Revised quotes – this is going to the end of the search results found in number 1. For an explanation on this, read THIS POST.
- Intitle – this is the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “Intitle” operator. This tells me how many pages have my certain keyphrase in the title, in that order
- Intitle/Inanchor - this displays the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “intitle” and “inanchor” operators. This tells me how many search results there are for my search term in the title of a page and the anchor text of a page. This gives me an idea of how many pages are actually optimizing for my keyphrase. An example of what this would look like is as follows:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
- Average Page Rank – this is the average page rank of the web pages in the top 10 (first page) search results on Google (searched without quotes or any operators). You can download a pagerank toolbar for free at SEObook.com (the same site with the keyword tool) to easily tell the pagerank of websites.
- Social Page 1 – this means when you do a non-quote and non-operator search in Google, are there any social sites, like Ezinearticles, Go articles, Articlesbase, Digg, weebly, etc. on Page 1 of the results. If there are, this is a great indication that you can get on Page 1 fairly easily. If you notice that most of the 1st page results are authority sites, like Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, etc., you’ll have a much harder time competing.
9. Now, I take my big list of keywords and I sort them according to search volume. I only pay attention to the Gloabl Search Volume and not the Local Search Volume. So, just delete the “competition” and “Local Search Volume” columns.
10. Next, I get rid of all keywords with less than 500 searches per month. You can adjust this as you see fit, but I have found some great, low competition keywords at 500 or so searches a month that have been goldmines. Some people go lower than 500, some go higher.
11. I then scan my list for any keywords that “look good.” What does this mean? To me it means they make sense and sound like someone who is looking to spend money. For example, if I am targeting people who want to learn the electric guitar online, “learn electric guitar online” is a slam dunk keyword for me to target. But, “learn acoustic guitar online” is not a good one. Make sense?
I highlight these for further research.
12. I also get rid of all the “junk” keywords or keywords that don’t make any sense. For example, one that showed up for my guitar keywords was “guitar learn online.” In my opinion, this is jibberish. It may show that it gets 10,000 searches per month, but it does not make sense that someone would type this into the SE’s. So, I just get rid of them.
13. I try to find 10-20 (or more, if possible) good keywords that fit my target market. Once I identify these, the real fun starts!
In my next post, I reveal how to look at each of these keywords we just found to narrow them down to which ones we think will make us a bunch of moolah and which ones don’t have a fighting chance.
Stick around, it’s awesome having you here!
The Anatomy of a Campaign-Why Did I Choose This Niche?
If you are just starting at this post, start at the first “Anatomy of a Campaign” post for it to make sense. OR, go to the “Anatomy of a Post” dedicated page to see all the posts in chronological order.
You’re probably wondering why I chose the “learn to play guitar” niche? It’s actually a pretty simple answer. But first I have to confess that I have been looking at this niche for a few months now.
I had heard it mentioned by others a few months back and I researched it briefly back then.
I found out that there is a ton of search volume for it. And I have a guitar myself (which I bought and never learned how to play!) which I bought lessons for.
But just think about it this way – playing the guitar is cool. You can play along with your favorite songs, be in a band, and just generally have fun doing it.
But it aint easy, I can tell you that from first hand experience. Any one that gets a guitar, and A LOT of people do, NEEDS some type of instruction. You can’t just pick up a guitar and start playing (at least anything that sounds good!).
The thought process is usually like this – someone hears their favorite song and thinks, “man, I would love to be able to play that on guitar. That would be so cool.” They then go buy a guitar with no idea how to play it. They quickly realize they need some sort of lessons to learn even the basics.
At this point they have a couple options – they can get private instruction, they can buy a DVD or book, or they can go online and start learning immediately.
Private instruction is expensive and a book is a horrible way to learn guitar, trust me. A DVD is helpful, but you generally have to go to the store and get it or order it online and wait for delivery.
My thinking (and my research bears this out) is that a lot of people will go online to find on-demand videos so they have immediate access from any computer.
I also wanted to choose a niche that was wide and deep with A LOT of keyword opportunities. I have tried ultra-targeted niches in the past and have not had a lot of success.
I have come to the conclusion that you have to go after the BIG niches with A LOT of traffic to make money.
And they have to be niches that have proven to make money – don’t reinvent the wheel, just go with what works.
However, this does not mean you have to go after keywords like “learn guitar.” If you do, you’ll get buried and never make any money, it’s just too competitive.
But, if you drill down and find that, say, “learn how to play acoustic guitar online” has some healthy search volume and is not that competitive, you have a good shot at making some serious cash.
So, in summary:
1. Go after broad and deep niches that are already proven money makers and have a lot of search volume
2. Drill down the niche to smaller sub niches with longer-tail keywords. In the learn guitar niche, for example, you can drill down and focus on acoustic guitar, electric guitar, blues guitar, worship guitar, beginners guitar, etc. And once you start doing some keyword research, you’ll see there are a number of fantastic long-tail keywords.
Next up – How I do keyword research to find the money getting keywords. Don’t miss it because it is not what you’d expect (AND you can duplicate it in your research too!).
The Anatomy of a Campaign – What Niche Did I Choose?
I’ve been thinking about this sample campaign for the last few days and have decided on which niche I would like to promote and how I want to structure it. I’ll get to that below…
If you are arriving at this post, and have not read about this campaign, start at the first Anatomy of a Campaign post so it makes sense.
I think thinking through the structure of a campaign is important on the front end before you jump in and start creating sites, articles, etc. At least for me it is, because I like to think it through and get my head around it before I jump in. Then I like to come up with a schedule of what I will do on which days.
This way I can plan out my steps in a very methodical fashion and adjust it as I go along, if necessary.
I also struggled with if I wanted to do this campaign totally free or with certain paid aspects. I want it to benefit the most people so they can use this “formula” to make a profitable campaign. At the same time, I am at a certain point in my career that I can outsource some of it to save time.
So, I have decided to outsource some of it, and do some of the other parts for free. All of it can be done for free one way or another, but, again, I am going to outsource certain aspects of it (like article writing) because it is 1) either
something I hate (like article writing!) or 2) it saves me a ton of time.
I also plan on putting all of the posts and comments into a pdf when it is finished so it is in an easy to understand format.
However, during the campaign, I will keep one or two things private, such as my keywords and the actual site.
I am doing this because, unfortunately, some people find it easier to steal someone else’s work rather than do it themselves. And if I am part way through the campaign and someone copies it, it could derail the campaign and no one will be able to see it all the way through from start to finish.
With that said, however, when it is all said and done, I will disclose all of my keywords, domain name, etc. with explanations so you can see the full details.
So, what is the niche I will target in this campaign?
Drum roll, please…..
“Learn to play the guitar”
Why did I choose this niche? Is it too competitive? Can I make money? What kind of site will I do?
Stay tuned to my next post where I’ll let you in on how I chose this niche, why I like it, my set-up and promotion schedule, and a whole lot more…
Until next time…
Is Google screwing with you?
Gotta love Google, right?
When I started internet marketing a couple years ago, one of the first things I learned was to go after “low competition” keywords.
This meant to do a Google search of your keywords with the term in quotes. If I got under 5,000 results, use it. If not, move on to another search term.
Only problem was, I couldn’t find many. And any keyword I managed to find with under 5,000 results, didn’t make sense. There was no way people were searching for such odd ball terms.
Then I stumbled upon Google’s big lie…and my results started to change after I discovered it…
Want to know what it is?
Lean closer, so I can whisper it to you. I don’t want many people knowing about it…
The results they display are not actually the real search results.
What?!?
In my experience, they are drastically overstated.
How?
Try this little exercise and you will see what I mean:
Go to google right now and do a search for “get rid of tonsil stones” in quotes. When I do it, I get 1,350,000 results. So, if this is the case, I would automatically discard this term as too competitive.
Now, try this. Scroll to the bottom of those search results. Click on the “10″ for the 10th page of results. Keep clicking on the last number until it stops displaying results.
When you get to the end, how many does it show?
For me it’s 416 results!
Does this mean “get rid of tonsil stones” is a slam dunk keyword you will make money off of?
No, it doesn’t, because there are a few other important factors involved, BUT…
It does mean that instead of discarding this as a competitive keyword, you actually probably have a chance at ranking for it with some work. And this can open up a whole new world of opportunity for you.
Try it with your keywords and see what actual results you get, they may surprise you.
The Anatomy of a Campaign – From Start To Profit
Recently I was thinking about what would help my subscribers as well as other new internet marketers and I tried to think of what helped me the most when I got started.
What really helped me the most was when someone would detail a campaign they were setting up, step-by-step. I only ever saw this on some private forums and the campaigns were never detailed all the way through to a sale because at some point someone would steal the ideas and copy it to their own campaign.
So, what I thought would help the most people, new or not, is to detail a campaign, from start to finish, revealing all the tools I use, market research I do, keywords I target, articles I write, traffic generation techniques I use, backlinks I build, etc. so that they can see the exact steps I go through to make a profitable campaign.
This will be done right here on my blog real time, updated every day or two, until I make my first $100, whether that is in 5 days, 60 days, or 300 days.
I encourage any and all questions along the way so that YOU get maximum benefit.
And when this is finished, I will put it into a nice PDF document so that you can have it all in one nice little package for reference.
Stay tuned and get ready for an exciting ride!
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Tools I Personally Use & Recommend
