Random Thoughts On Effective Headlines…
This morning as I was getting breakfast for my kids, I noticed an interesting saying on the side of the box of Apple Jacks cereal. It said “Life is better when your kids are healthy.”
That grabbed my attention because of course its true. You don’t want your kids to be sick, and life is much easier when they are healthy. And God forbid you feed them something unhealthy so they get sick or malnourished!
This got me thinking about an old slogan for Jiff Peanut Butter. This is showing my age I guess, but the slogan on the commercials and all the print used to say “Choosy moms choose Jiff.” Have you heard this before?
I remember as a kid this being plastered everywhere to where it was virtually branded on your brain.
And if you were a mom, it made you think, “Well, I’m choosy about what I feed my kids. I don’t want to just give them any old food. I probably should give them Jiff!” Maybe not just like that, but you get the point.
You see, I have NEVER liked the headlines people use in Internet Marketing.
Things like, “Discover How I Made $50,376.48 In My Sleep In 2 Hours!” or crap like that. It’s too spammy and I hate when people advocate using headlines like that because in my opinion it’s almost like you are preying on peoples emotions.
But if you break down the above examples I gave for Apple Jacks and Jiff, what are they really doing? Are they also preying on peoples emotions, but in a more subtle way?
Here is the way I think about them – 1) they are attention grabbing because they touch a nerve with something most people already think about themselves (keeping their kids healthy, not just putting any ‘ol junky food into their kids), and 2) people reading the headlines have to agree with the statements otherwise they would be “bad parents.”
I am no psychologist (but I love psychology), but my guess is that if the headline states something they CAN’T disagree with and implies what just about every parent wants (to be a good parent), then the copy below it ties in the product and BINGO, they now associate the food with being a good parent. Make sense?
It’s brilliant in its simplicity.
So, how can we use this type of knowledge to become better Internet marketers?
I think first you have to know and understand your prospects deepest and darkest fear, belief and/or desire about a given ailment or problem they have. Then you have to state the obvious in your headline, something they cannot disagree with.
Finally, in your copy, you have to tie in your product as the perfect solution to reinforce their beliefs.
I am doing this off the top of my head, but let’s say we take anxiety as an example. I know for a fact that people who suffer from anxiety believe that life would be better if they did not have anxiety and they look for “cures” to their disorder. So, maybe the headline could somewhat copy the Apple Jacks example:
“Life Is Better When You Are Cured of Anxiety And Panic Attacks…”
Or…
“Life Is Fuller When You Are Cured Of Anxiety And Panic Attacks…”
Or…
“Life Is Full Of Opportunity When You Are Cured Of Anxiety And Panic Attacks.”
Like I said, these are just off the top of my head and I plan on testing some of them in my campaigns.
But I like it better than the same old “See How I Cured My Anxiety In 5 Minutes!!!” kind of garbage.
Do you think it would be more effective, less effective? Is it as attention grabbing as the spammy headlines? What would make it more attention grabbing? Is it also “preying” on peoples emotions?
I’d love to hear your feedback.
How to connect with your website visitors?
OK, this idea is so simple it is stupid, but it uncovers a goldmine of information that you can use to establish a connection with your website visitors. Hope you enjoy it, and feel free to leave a comment below the post (or even Tweet it!)…
Having trouble making sales? This may make it easier…
OK, if you are having trouble selling digital e-books, whether you can’t connect with the customer or there is just way too much competition, watch this video on a whole other world in affiliate marketing that most affiliates don’t even bother with – BUT, and keep this a secret — it’s profitable!
It happened sooner than I thought…
I got my first sale yesterday with the guitar niche. Quite frankly this happened sooner than I thought it would. I have only gotten about 40 clicks to the sales pages, so that is pretty quick to me.
Also, the sale was not even the main product I am promoting! Hmmm.
So, from here I will keep promoting just like I have been except add in some new keywords to target, just as I was planning on doing anyway.
One sale means nothing really, but I still get a thrill when I get them, especially in a niche I have never gone into. And I am not concerned that I didn’t get a sale of the main product I was promoting – if this happens some more I may change the main product to the one that is selling.
Not that I want to invite competition, but the website I made is http://www.learnelectricguitaronline.net.
It’s a simple “review” style site made with Affiliate Genie (which makes the whole process extremely easy by the way). I started off targeting a few keywords, like “learn electric guitar online,” “learn to play the electric guitar,” and “learn to play electric guitar.”
But I stopped targeting these and targeted product names ONLY, like Jamplay, Guitartricks, Elmore and Jamorama. I also added extensions to these keywords like “review,” “reviews,” “lessons,” “scam.” You get the idea.
Then I did exactly what I have been explaining on this blog in THIS POST by getting my content out there and building links. I use SENUKE to save time and automate the process, but all of this can be done by hand.
Otherwise, that’s it. It’s not rocket science. To me it’s a numbers game – you find a hungry crowd, find an affiliate product, build a blog or a site, drive traffic, and you will make sales.
Does it happen overnight? Sometimes yes, but it’s rare. It takes time, patience and work, but you can make it happen.
I will keep you updated on how this site grows and progresses, but I plan on continuing to spread content and links so that it becomes a nice little passive income generator for me.
And I am also working on some cool stuff I will be posting here in the coming weeks on new ways of building links as well as how you can make a ton of money in little goldmine niches that literally no one goes after.
How To Get Massive Free (and very close to free) Traffic – Part 2
If you are just coming here to this post, I am showing you a sample campaign, blow by blow. To start at the beginning, go HERE.
I’m excited about this post because I have been getting some FANTASTIC results with this process recently. The goal here is to absolutely splatter our content all over the place, creating tons and tons of backlinks to our site AND our content.
When it comes down to it, there are really only 2 things that matter in getting free traffic from organic listings – content and backlinks. Think about it like a huge spiderweb on content and links all coming back to the center of the web, which is our site.
And my approach is to pick my 1st keyword and do everything to dominate the 1st page of Google with that keyword. Then after I conquer that one, move on to the 2nd keyword, and so on. You can do it however you want, but I have found that if I focus my content on more than one keyword at a time, I end up not ranking for anything. Call me stupid, but I get too confused as to which
keyword I am creating content on or building links to if I try to focus on more than one at a time.
SO, choose whatever works for you, but I start off by picking one keyword and focusing on that one until I dominate, then move on to the next.
Here, in order, is what I do to dominate:
1. Now, to get things started I blast my site to about 400-600 Web directories. This puts a link in these directories back to my site. And they all don’t happen at once, they come in over time due to the nature of the approval process for most of these directories.
I use a new service to do this called Deep Linker Pro, by Josh Spaulding. If you don’t know Josh, he is an honest, stand-up IMer who stands behind everything he does 100%. Deep Linker Pro is a one time fee software program with free lifetime updates to the directory list and to the software. I HIGHLY recommend it if you can spare a few dollars.
Is it 100% necessary to buy this software? No, it’s not. Will it save you time getting backlinks? Yes, it will save you a ton of time.
***IMPORTANT – the only time, in my opinion, that you should pay for ANYTHING in internet marketing, is if 1) it fits into your goals and 2) it saves you time. By sticking to these 2 criteria, you will save yourself a ton of time and money by not buying every new guru “magic formula” that comes on the market. I will ONLY recommed products and services that fit these 2 criteria. If I don’t think it will help you in some fashion, or I don’t use it in my own business, I WILL NOT tell you to buy it just so I can make a few bucks.
2. I submit my article to www.Ezinearticles.com. We spoke about this in THIS POST so I won’t go over it again, but plain and simple, I submit it to Ezinearticles.
3. I take that article and submit it to Unique Article Wizard. Again, Unique Article Wizard is one of those services that saves me a TON of time distributing content and creating backlinks. Basically what it does is takes one of your articles, changes is it around into 100’s, if not 1,000’s of combinations and distributes it to 1,000’s of article directories, all on autopilot. It takes me about an hour of work and everything else is automated. It’s not cheap, but it is a fantastic service that has helped me rank on quite a few keywords.
4. I then come up with 3 alternate titles for my article so I have 3 of the same exact articles, but with 3 different titles.
5. I take these 3 articles with different titles and I submit one each to 3 different document sharing websites. The major document sharing websites I submit to are:
www.docstoc.com
www.scribd.com
www.calameo.com
If you are not familiar with these sites, you need to be. The things I like about them are 1) you can include anchor links anywhere in the document, 2) there is no approval process, 3) they get indexed VERY quickly, 4) they usually out rank EZA articles, Goarticles, articlesbase, Squidoo and Youtube and 5) you can add pictures to your article.
Here is an example of one I have up for this guitar campaign:
Looks way better than an Ezinearticle, huh?
There are other document sharing sites, like www.slideshare.com, www.authorstream.com, and www.yudu.com, and I am trying some of these out, but for now I simply use the 3 above. By the way, you’ll notice again that my name on the article above is not my name – I do this for anonymity.
6. Once these documents are published, I then take the URL’s of the documents and ping them at www.pingomatic.com. This let’s the search engines know that this information is out there.
7. I will then social bookmark these same URL’s. You can use a social bookmarking service like www.socialmarker.com, or you can even buy a service that will automatically submit to a bunch of social bookmark sites, but I have found that Digg works the best. I will typically submit my documents to the following:
www.digg.com
www.propeller.com
www.reddit.com
8. Next, I head over to www.html2rss.com and create an RSS feed out of my document URL’s. This is a pretty cool free service because it allows you to take a number of URL’s and create on RSS feed out of all of them. Then I take that RSS feed and submit it to the following RSS aggregators:
www.badrss.com
www.friendfeed.com
www.feedage.com
www.postrank.com
www.blogdigger.com
www.blogpulse.com
www.plazoo.com
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php
There are tons of others, but I have gotten good results with these.
9. I then create high authority backlinks to 1) my site and 2) the document URL’s (at scribd, docstoc, etc.). I do this manually through a service that costs me $5 per month. With this service I get 30 very high PR sites that I can put my links on. It’s a very cheap price for the kind of link juice you get out of these. It’s called Easy Backlink Builder.
I will typically create 5 links to each of my documents and 5 to my niche site for my 1st keyword I am targeting.
10. As I build these links, I keep track of the URL’s for the profile pages where the links are by pasting them in a text document.
11. Next, I ping these URL’s one at a time at Pingomatic.com
12. Then I create another RSS feed at www.html2rss.com of these profile page URL’s and submit this RSS feed to the RSS aggregator sites listed above.
13. At this point my Ezinearticle submission should have been approved. Once it is, I social bookmark it at Digg.com, reddit.com and propeller.com. Then I create an RSS feed out of its URL and submit the feed to the RSS aggregators.
14. Finally, I let it simmer a few days. Google will naturally shuffle around. You may be on the 1st page one day, then nowhere to be found the next. I let this whole pot of stew simmer and then I check over the next few days to see where I am ranking for my keyword.
If I am nowhere close to ranking, then I will either 1) build more high PR links from Easy Backlink Builder to my site and my documents and/or 2) start the cycle over with a new article but the same keyword.
I will continue to pound Google with my content and links until most of my content shows up on Page 1 for my keyword. Eventually, if your competition is not too tough, you will dominate the 1st page.
***IMPORTANT – this is how I currently do it. I usually try out different things in addition to these steps, but these are the core things. For example, I may create a blogger blog pointed at my site, ot I may create a Squidoo lens (although I hate these!) pointing to my documents and my site. You have to flexible and try out new things because you generally can’t go wrong.
So, get to work on that first keyword and get ranked. We want to start getting some natural traffic in there and start getting some sales!
Related Blogs
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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 – 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…
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Tools I Personally Use & Recommend
