ClickBank Blog » seo

Why an Engaged Audience Beats PPC or SEO for Affiliate Marketers… and How to Get One!

Molly Lane, ClickBank — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:43 +0000

Written by: Guest Author, Danny Iny

Affiliate marketing is the ultimate level playing field.

Anyone can get started, and if they’re smart and hard-working, they can be making money in a matter of days.

All you’ve got to do is find a good offer, run some good ads, and watch the traffic convert into sales.

Right?

Well, maybe that used to be true, but it’s not anymore…

The Low Hanging Fruit Is Gone

It was definitely true in the early days of affiliate marketing, for several reasons; first of all, there was a lot less for sale in the online world, which meant that any affiliate marketer had a much larger share of voice just by virtue of being there.

The regulatory environment was also a lot more lenient, which means that it affiliate marketers had a lot more room to maneuver in selling their offers (it’s good that this has changed, otherwise the whole industry would have been in trouble!).

Most importantly, though, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to advertising opportunities; keywords and phrases that had a lot of buying intent behind them, but that weren’t very competitive yet, and could be had for mere pennies per click.

And yes – when you can buy high-converting keywords for cheap, it’s hard not to make money.

But times have changed, and you can’t do that nearly as easily as you once could; most of the low hanging fruit has already been pulled off of the online tree, and the affiliate marketing game of finding the next hot opportunity has changed into a different game altogether…

It’s an Optimization Game

Now the game is about optimization – finding an offer that converts, and then optimizing every factor that you can control until you max out your deal value. Here are some of the factors that smart affiliate marketers will do split-testing on:

Lead Sources – This is where the leads are coming from in the first place; you’ll find that your Google AdWords traffic converts differently from your SEO traffic, which converts differently from your Facebook ad traffic, and so forth. Not only that, but your cost per lead for each of those lead sources will be different. With enough testing, you can find the lowest cost per conversion.
Ad Copy – The actual text of your ads will change both the cost of running the ad, the click-through rates on the ad, and the likelihood of the clicking-through traffic to actually buy whatever product you’re promoting.
Landing Pages – The landing page is where the most testing is traditionally done. You can test everything, from your headline, to the page format, to the colors, to the trust seals, to your affiliate disclaimers, to when the buy buttons are presented on the screen – they can all make a difference to your conversion rate, and to your bottom line.
Affiliate Offers – Finally, you can try swapping out the actual offer for something different. Maybe your leads are more interested in one brand of affiliate product than another, and maybe the second brand – even though the deal value is lower – will end up delivering more profits by virtue of a higher conversion rate.

When you’ve maximized your conversion rates and deal value, and minimized your cost per sale, you’ve got a smoothly humming affiliate marketing machine. And yes, doing that does take time, money, patience and skill – but once you’ve got it, boy is it a sweet deal!

That is, until Google stops liking you…

Until Google Stops Liking You

The trouble is that most of the major lead sources that most affiliate marketers rely on are owned by bodies like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.

What does that mean for you?

You can work your way to the top of the affiliate marketing world through diligent split-testing, until you’ve got sales streaming through your marketing system at bullet-speed… until someone’s algorithm changes, and their engine stops liking you.

Then your affiliate business is dead in the water, and you’ve got to start from scratch if you’re lucky, and work your way off of Google’s blacklist if you aren’t.

So what’s an affiliate marketer to do?

The answer lies in the old adage that “the money is in the list,” but with a twist…

The Real Money is in the ENGAGED List

If you have a list of eager buyers, then you don’t have to worry about Google messing with your traffic sources – whatever happens, your followers will continue to follow, as long as you maintain the relationship, and keep on living up to your end of the bargain.

With a list of eager buyers, you don’t have to keep working off of one-off traffic, because you can sell more than one thing to the same person – and research shows that someone who has already bought something is eight times as likely to buy from you again!

You probably agree that a list of eager buyers is a good thing to have… but where can you get such a list?

The answer is that you’ve got to build that list yourself – and for that list to be as eager to buy as you want them to be, they need to be engaged. In other words, you need more than a list – you need an engaged community.

You need an audience.

How to Build an Engaged Audience, from Scratch

Building an engaged audience from scratch is part science, and part art. You don’t have to learn it all through trial and error, because others have already done that, and you can learn from their mistakes, and from their successes.

To get you started, here are three things that you can do to convert your one-off affiliate traffic into a loyal list that will stick with you for the long-haul:

Start blogging and showing your true nature. The days of the anonymous affiliate marketer hiding behind a copied landing page are over; too many people have been burned by false claims, and for your prospects to trust your recommendation, they will have to know who you are. So tell them – start blogging, and give them a reason to keep coming back, so that even if they aren’t ready to buy now, they can start following you, and buy from you in the future.
Create a value-adding auto-responder sequence. People are justifiably careful about who they let into their inbox – so don’t just offer some PLR e-book and start marketing to them non-stop. Instead, give them something that they will get real value out of, and that will demonstrate to them just how trustworthy and credible you are (like we do with our free video course about how to Get More Cash Out of Any Business, Website or Blog).
Offer an incentive to buy through your link. Instead of just recommending your affiliate offer, why not give people an incentive to buy through your link? This is great for improving conversions, but the best part is that it gives you a good reason to keep on interacting with your prospects after they have made the purchase – which means that you retain control of the customer relationship, and you will have the opportunity to sell to them again in the future.

Of course, this is just the start, but if you start with this, you’re already three steps ahead of most affiliate marketers, and that much closer to the pot of gold at the finish line.

And if you need a little more help…

Yours Free: Engagement from Scratch!

All of these ideas are expanded with pages upon pages of details and ideas, which I compiled into my new book called Engagement from Scratch! How Super-Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience and How You Can Do the Same!

Today, the book is launching, and I’m very excited to be able to share it with you – for free!

Yep, that’s right – the book is free. You can download the entire book without paying a cent. Just visit the book’s website, click on the download link, and tell me what email address to send it to, and moments later you’ll the full-length PDF waiting for you in your inbox.

Prefer a hard copy? Spend a few extra bucks and get the paperback version so that you can read on the couch or in bed, and write notes in the margins.

About the Author

Danny Iny (@DannyIny) is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, expert marketer, and the Freddy Krueger of Blogging. Together with Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark and Mitch Joel, he wrote the book on how to build an engaged audience from scratch.

Take a look at these related posts:

Affiliate Marketing Today Podcast: SEO for Affiliates with Matt Carter

Beau Blackwell — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:36:52 +0000

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Client Knowledge Guru

On the latest episode of the Affiliate Marketing Today podcast, we’ve got affiliate marketing master Matt Carter, who has built a huge network of profitable SEO-driven niche websites.

Matt has mastered the art of identifying profitable niches and building websites that Google loves to get his sites ranked highly. He then monetizes these sites with affiliate links and other methods to bring in a great income purely from free traffic.

Matt shares some of his best tips and strategies with us, including the reason many affiliate marketers struggle to get traffic and make money, and how to make sure you approach and analyze new markets properly to make serious money using SEO traffic. If you’re looking to get the most out of free traffic from the search engines, this episode is a must listen!

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN NOW!

Take a look at these related posts:

The Latest in SEO with Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz

Beau Blackwell — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:52:09 +0000

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Client Knowledge Guru

At ClickBank Exchange 2011, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz wowed the crowd with his presentation on how SEO opportunities have evolved over the years, and what you need to do now to rank highly in the search engines. His presentation was so popular that we asked him to join ClickBank team members Beau Blackwell and Molly Lane to give his presentation again, with a few extra updates to talk about the latest changes.

If SEO is important to your Internet marketing efforts (which it should be!) you don’t want to miss out on the amazing tips and techniques Rand shares in this video. He shows how there’s much more to SEO these days than just plain site listings, and how you can use the latest advances in new listing types to get more traffic to your sites, increase your credibility, and much more. Check out the video now:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Download the slides from Rand’s presentation here!

Take a look at these related posts:

Google Panda Effects on Affiliate Sites

Molly Lane, ClickBank — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:09:44 +0000

Written by: Guest Author, Mark Ling

Hey everyone,

I’m writing this blog post for ClickBank Affiliates (and this applies to vendors too for that matter) who are concerned about the impact of Google Panda‘s update has on the way in which they should be optimizing their sites for the search engines going forward.

Since February 24, Google has run several Panda updates (the most recent was Panda 2.2 on June 16, 2011). Firstly I want you to be aware that Panda is an update, not an entirely new ranking algorithm so many of the things you do to try to achieve high search engine rankings still apply as they used to.

The initial Panda update did in fact affect approximately 12% of the websites in Google, however the effects were much larger than Google has stated because most of the sites that were affected were websites that rank in the top pages of Google.

In addition, Google have also publicly stated on Google Webmaster Central Blog that Panda is not the only significant update that they’ve been running and that there will be more than 500 tweaks to their algorithms throughout the year. Furthermore, Google states “Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.”

What’s more, Google’s representative says, “In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. SEO is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

Google’s representative went on to list the following as questions that one could use to assess the quality of an article or a page:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?
Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
How much quality control is done on content?
Does the article describe both sides of a story?
Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

As you can see based on the questions above, Panda is an attempt for Google to assess websites that have too many low quality pages. If your site carries a Panda penalty, that doesn’t mean your site is out of Google, however it does mean that your website’s pages carry a penalty that makes it harder for them to get to the top of Google’s search results.

Also remember, if you make changes to your pages based on the information above, it may take several weeks before you notice changes to your rankings as Google only runs the Panda filter periodically to calculate the values it needs (about every 5 to 7 weeks).

Going forward, the key takeaway from this is that when you build your websites you need to start with your potential visitors in mind. This is a key distinction from those who have been creating websites based on highly searched for keywords and on securing low quality writers to throw up content based on those keywords.

You now have to think about producing content that users actually want to read.

This was always a good practice, however it has become even more important for those wanting to thrive with their affiliate sites (and vendor sites) going forward.

About the Author

Mark Ling is the founder of Affilorama. Visit Affilorama to gain free and instant access to over 100 hours of easy-to-follow, step by step video lessons on affiliate marketing, plus online web based tools and a community of over 150,000 members willing to help with your affiliate marketing success. Click here to visit Affilorama.

Take a look at these related posts:

Affiliate Marketing: Creating A High Content Authority Site for Affiliate Sales

Beau Blackwell — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:50:00 +0000

Written by: Michael Cecchin & Alex Miller of The Fat Loss Authority

Getting Started

Before you begin building your website or hiring freelancers, you need to decide what your niche or subject matter will be. I would suggest selecting a niche that you are familiar with, enjoy, and that has a definite demand for continuous content.

The worst thing is to be three months into the project and realize the niche puts you to sleep. You need something that is exciting for you!

I decided to choose the mother of all niches, weight loss. I guess it’s fair to say I like a good challenge, but you have to manage your expectations and figure out what is realistic when it comes to achieving your goals, and how much effort and investment you are willing to put in.

Your content should always solve problems and answer questions that users are likely to be searching for in the various search engines. Doing plenty of keyword research is necessary so you can target long tail keywords and avoid hard-to-rank-for terms like “how to lose weight” or “lose weight fast.” As a new affiliate marketer you have to be realistic with what you can achieve. But the long term goal is one of residual revenue and an online property you can eventually sell to reap the benefits of all of your (and/or your outsourcers’) hard work!

For example, a recent article I posted is on how to make your body burn more calories, which is obviously a topic with significant search volume. Once searchers find it, strategically placed affiliate ads will take users to a weight loss or diet supplement website. See how that works? Find a market you can corner that’s not over-saturated with competition and you can start building from there.

Content Needs

The days of content farms are drawing to a close, with even EzineArticles.com losing over 30% of its traffic due to a recent update to Google’s search algorithm.

The path to the future is clear—create an authentic site with quality content and a positive user experience. Otherwise, your organic ranking days could be numbered!

Once you’ve chosen what your website will be about, it’s time to start generating some excellent content. The keys to improving the flow of traffic to your website are quality content and genuine inbound links (link farms are also on the swift decline).

Setting your website up as an authority on a particular topic ranging from auto repairs to weight loss, using unique, quality content that is well-written, will help ensure your content drives the “right” kind of customers to the websites you promote.

The goal is to get people to your site and then on to the vendor’s site, and that requires helpful information that’s related to the vendor’s content. If you’re not a writer, or if you simply don’t have time to create content for an entire website, utilize the services of a freelance writer. These services can be found at sites like Elance, where I’ve found some of the best business partners around. Try to find someone that is already familiar with your niche, who has a basic understanding of search engine optimization and who can freely post quality content onto your site without you having to.

A professional with these skills will be able to provide you with high quality content that’s sure to bring visitors to your website. Without good content that keeps readers coming back, your affiliate links and promotions may not generate any additional income.

When you choose keywords to optimize for, make sure to choose phrases that are relevant to your subject matter and related to your vendor’s subject. You should also make sure to use phrases that would actually be searched for in search engines. For example, instead of ‘how to lose weight with oolong tea,’ which is too wordy, optimize your keyword text to read ‘oolong tea health benefits‘ and create a page title around that phrase.

Posting Frequency

An important factor in building a reputable site for affiliate marketing is posting fresh content to your site often. You want your site to become an authority on a subject, which means you want readers to check in with your website often for new content. By posting content at regular intervals, your readers know when to come for new information. Think of your website like a television show—you want readers to know when to come back for the next episode.

An authoritative website has many pages of content, which you will build up over time. This can’t be done in a few days. Give your website an edge by having a large amount of content ready for posting when your website goes live, and then continue to post high quality content regularly.

Networking

In addition to paying for the services of a freelance writer, you immediately want to begin networking with other bloggers. Bloggers with similar content may be able to act as ‘guest’ writers on your blog and you can do the same for their website.

[NOTE: If anyone is looking to exchange guest posts with us, just send a message via the contact form on our site].

By acting as a guest writer on another blog, it builds your reputation, and your website’s, as an authority on a particular subject. It tells your readers that you’re not just trying to make money, but you actually know what you’re talking about too. And those back links you get by guest posting will also help give your website’s rating a boost.

Inadvertent networking is another great way to boost your ranking in search engines. By creating high quality content that provides helpful information, other bloggers will link to your website as a credible resource, which will also improve your search engine ranking. This is why enjoying your niche is important, since it will make it easier for you to keep pushing out great content and chatting with new people in the industry.

Starting an authoritative website is fairly easy, and with the right tools you can be up and running in no time. Find your niche, stockpile your content for frequent updates, build your website and start linking! It’s easier than you think, and who doesn’t need another avenue to earn income these days?

Good luck!

About the Authors

Michael Cecchin in a successful Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur, and professional J-O-B escapee based in Toronto. Michael owns a number of online properties in the diet and fitness niche and is currently exploring opportunities in other niches. He has been working full-time online for the past 2 years and claims the terrifying memory of cubicle life is what keeps him motivated to continually expand his online business and live the dream.

Alex Miller is an affiliate and SEO superstar, originally from the UK and currently living in Orlando, Florida. Alex started as an affiliate in the Forex and fitness niche while building his SEO credentials. His main projects are now in the SEO niche, helping other business owners improve their site rankings through white hat tricks and tactics unavailable to mortal men.

You can check out their own authority site at The Fat Loss Authority Blog.

Take a look at these related posts:

Moneywords: Your Key to the Keyword Kingdom – Part 2

Beau Blackwell — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:14:53 +0000

Written by: Adam Short, Guest Blogger

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of identifying and targeting search keywords that aren’t overly competitive, but that also receive enough searches to build a profitable site around.

Let’s walk through the process now of finding these “Moneywords.”

Take a moment to look at the Moneyword Matrix Chart, developed by my team at Niche Profit Classroom. You can see exactly what keywords you’re trying to find within any given niche market.

As you can see, the sweet spot is finding keywords with over 500 searches per month but under 10,000 competing pages for that particular keyword. The higher the search volume per month and the fewer the competitors, the better the keyword. You can plug any keyword you like into the matrix and instantly see whether it is poor, fair, good, excellent, or jackpot. Let’s walk through a real-world example of how to use this matrix, so that you can apply it to your own niche.

To begin, you’ll want to type the general niche topic into Google’s External Keyword Tool.

For example, if you type the term “Roses” into Google’s external keyword tool, you’ll get back hundreds of results. These are the terms related to roses people are actually searching with when they’re looking for information.

In the screenshot below, you’ll see three different settings you should use for your initial keyword research:

Type the niche topic into the search box.
Set your Match Type to “phrase.” Without going into too much detail, this gives you more accurate information to base your keyword research on. Some people use the exact term, and that’s a great tip for PPC advertising. But for information on organic search results, I prefer the phrase match. (The “exact” match is too restrictive).
Use the advanced filter to remove any keywords or keyword phrases that get under 500 Global Monthly searches per month from the results.

While not highlighted in the picture, note that we use the United States as the locale. Using a different country, even if you live in that country, is not going to give you the full potential audience, since you’re marketing to people worldwide.

If you get a lot of results that aren’t specific to the niche you’re looking at, use the “Include terms” and “Exclude terms” boxes in the upper left to further filter your results.

Looking at the results, we find there are tens of thousands of searches for many of the keywords. For example, according to Google’s tool, the phrase “blue roses” gets an estimated Global Monthly search volume of 49,500, as pictured below:

However, the number of competing pages for that term is 6,040,000 — which means over 6 million others are competing for it.

How did I find the number of competing pages?

Go to Google’s home page and type in the term within quotes. It’s important that you use the quotes so that you get the correct phrase match search results and the correct number of competing pages.

The picture below shows the correct way to look for competing pages for a particular term.

Now, if we plug those two numbers into our Moneyword Matrix, we can see immediately that the results are not very encouraging. This is a poor keyword to target for your website.

One of the terms that came up in our example above was “Rose Drawings,” which has 6,600 Monthly Global Searches per month. When we put that phrase into Google’s search engine inside quotes, the number of competing pages is 12,600. Can you see where we’re going here?

Let’s plug these numbers into the Moneyword Matrix.

We’ve found a Moneyword!

This would be a superb keyword phrase to build a page on your site about. You could feature pencil drawings, or have other drawings displayed, or maybe include an article on drawing techniques to create the perfect rose drawing. Such a page or article is likely to be ranked at the top of the organic search results within days or weeks, and can drive continual traffic to your site.

Finding 10 or 20 of these types of Moneyword keywords will cement your site, articles, and content at the top of Google’s organic search results and drive thousands of visitors to your site every month.

You definitely want to keep all the Jackpot, Excellent, and Good keywords, but don’t discard all those “Fair” keywords just yet. They can be useful in finding additional Moneywords. First, however, I want to tell you that very few people are going to take the time to do manual research for keywords in this manner, even with the Moneyword Matrix Chart to give them exact results.

This means that if you’re willing to take the time to do your due diligence, you’re going to be way ahead of the game when it comes to competing for search engine rankings.

Fortunately, there’s an automated solution that will save you time and effort. We’ve developed a tool that does most of the work for you. Simply download the Google results to your computer via a CSV file, and then run the tool. It will automatically get all the competing pages, match them with the number of searches per month, and return the rating of Jackpot, Excellent, Good, Fair, or Poor.

Here’s a screenshot of Niche Profit Classroom’s Moneyword Matrix keyword tool, which is available to Niche Profit Classroom members.

Remember I told you to not discard those Fair keywords? Search through the Fair keywords and locate the ones that have over 10,000 searches per month. You can then use those keywords to do additional keyword research and find other terms that may be useful.

For example, let’s take our “blue roses.” If we put “blue roses” into Google’s AdWords Tool search suggestion box, one of the terms returned is “blue roses meanings,” which gets 4,400 searches per month. If we go to Google and type in “blue roses meanings” with the quotes, we find the competition is only 7,700 sites. Using the Moneyword Matrix Chart, we discover that this is another Excellent keyword.

So while “blue roses” is not a Moneyword, the phrase “blue roses meanings” (note that it’s plural) is a Moneyword we can confidently rank for.

One way you can put Moneywords into action is by searching ClickBank’s Marketplace to find affiliate products to promote. By using our explanation here to find the right keywords, you can easily dominate the affiliate market for that product.

Once you’ve found a market you know is profitable, these steps make it easy to find highly searched, low competition keywords and phrases. This is the key to your continued success and profits. The Moneywords Matrix is your key to the keyword kingdom!

About the Author

Adam Short is a successful Internet marketer, speaker, and coach. Through his training, software and coaching platform at Niche Profit Classroom, he helps others start and grow successful and profitable online businesses.

Take a look at these related posts:

Moneywords: Your Key to the Keyword Kingdom – Part 1

Beau Blackwell — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:56:20 +0000

Written by: Adam Short, Guest Blogger

Have you ever tried to optimize your website for Google and other search engines, but failed to attain the results you were after? Most Internet marketers at one point or another find themselves quite frustrated with their lack of search engine success. Many elect to throw in the towel and pursue other avenues of traffic. Unfortunately, this is often a mistake. Most marketers don’t realize that just one simple change to their approach to search engine optimization could revolutionize their results. So what is that one simple change? Simple – it’s keywords. Website traffic success depends on the keywords you choose, and most people use the wrong ones, which inevitably leads to disappointment and wasted time.

Fortunately, choosing the right keywords is a relatively simple and straightforward process. You don’t need to be an SEO guru, and you don’t have to spend a ton of time, money, or effort. In this article I’ll show you how to pick the right keywords to obtain top organic search engine rankings, thereby securing a free flow of highly targeted traffic to your website.

Before we get started with keyword research, let’s answer the question: Why is search engine traffic so desirable for website owners?

Here are a few of the key reasons:

Search engines are collectively one of the largest traffic sources in the world.
Search engine traffic is highly targeted traffic.
Organic search engine traffic is free.

On top of that, organic search engine traffic can be very low maintenance and low stress. Once you obtain top rankings for your “Moneywords” (we’ll define this term later), your rankings will often stick for months, or even years. This means you do not need to constantly fret over losing your rankings, thereby enabling you to direct more positive energy towards other aspects of your business.

Furthermore, obtaining top rankings in Google (and other search engines) is a win-win situation for both you and the search engines. Here’s why:

Google wants to give people the most relevant search results they can. Google wins when it can provide quality, relevant search results.
People who search on Google win when they find web sites that give them the information they’re searching for.
You win by targeting the right keywords and having your site appear at the top of the organic search results, thus capturing the attention of people who are looking for the very subject or niche you’re marketing.

So ultimately, everyone gets what they want. What could be better? With that said, let’s get into the “nitty gritty” of keyword research and how you can use it to drive swarms of free search engine traffic to your website.

First off – what is keyword research exactly? In a nutshell, keyword research is the foundation of Internet marketing. If you understand what terms or phrases your customers use to find information in search engines, you’ll know how to reach them. You’ll understand exactly which keyword phrases you should focus on so that your marketing efforts reap the most rewards.

I’m sure you’ve heard the famous marketing tenet, “Find out what people want, and then give it to them.” The problem is, no one really explains how to do that. That’s where keyword research comes in. It enables you to find out what people really want.

By knowing exactly what keywords people are using to search, and by understanding how to target those valuable keyword terms and phrases, you can rank at the top of Google’s organic search results any time you want.

Let’s explore two of the most common approaches to keyword research. Do a gut check and ask yourself if you fall into one or both of these categories:

Targeting the highest search volume keywords in your niche
Targeting only long-tail keywords in your niche

While both of these methods are common, neither one is ideal.

Let’s look first at high search volume keywords. These are usually keywords that are just a few words, such as “Roses Flowers,” or just the term “Roses.” Sure, it may be a profitable market, but getting ranked for such short keywords can be very difficult.

The number of other sites targeting or competing with you for these keywords is often enormous, so even if you do make it to the top of the organic results for such keywords, someone is always nipping at your heels, trying to knock you off of Google’s first page.

It’s a no-win situation. You‘ll always be competing for the top spots, always marketing to keep your keywords ranking where people can find you.

Long-tail keyword targeting also has serious drawbacks. These are words, terms, or long phrases of four, five, or more words within any given keyword phrase. (Such as “pink roses grow best in organic soil”.)

The problem with long-tail keywords is that they get little to no traffic each month. You have to target and maintain high-ranking results for hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords to generate enough traffic to continually sustain a profitable web site. That’s a lot of work. Creating content for that many keywords is time consuming and can be very expensive.

That brings us to a superior method for doing keyword research – targeting “Moneywords.” This approach examines keywords in a more scientific way. A “Moneyword” is a keyword that has very high search volume (lots of people are searching for the keyword each month) and very low competition in the search engines (very few websites are targeting the keyword).

The benefits of targeting Moneywords are many:

You’ll achieve multiple first-page ranking in Google’s organic results within weeks, and sometimes even within days.
You’ll spend minimal effort — especially with our Moneyword Matrix formula and keyword tool.
Your website ranking will stick to the top of the organic search results like super glue.

All of this results in long-term, automated traffic.

Sound good? Be sure to read Part 2, where I walk you through the exact process of identifying Moneywords and learning to dominate your niche.

About the Author

Take a look at these related posts:

5 Steps to Making Your First Sale as an Affiliate Marketer

Beau Blackwell — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:49:11 +0000

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Blogger

One of the things I get asked a lot is where to begin as an affiliate marketer.

It can all be so overwhelming. There are so many different ways to get traffic, build sites, and pick products to promote (these are the three components of any affiliate marketing effort). In addition, some of these traffic and site building options can be expensive and highly technical, requiring a lot of training and expertise.

My goal in this post is to highlight a way to get started as an affiliate that’s relatively easy, risk-free, zero cost, has a great chance to make your first money online, and doesn’t require any technical knowledge or experience.

We’re going to use ClickBank for our product, a BlogSpot blog for our website, and search engine optimization to get traffic. If you’re totally new to search engine optimization and want a very quick introduction, you may want to check out this video.

Step 1 – Find 10 products you’re interested in promoting

One of the best parts of being an affiliate for ClickBank is that it’s so easy to get started because there are thousands of unique products to promote. Once you have a ClickBank account, go to the Marketplace and browse it to find products that you have an interest in and/or that you or someone you know would buy.
Make a note of the products, including their Pitch Pages and the custom HopLinks you’ll use to promote them (you’ll get these by clicking the Promote button next to the Marketplace listing). It’s a good idea to save this information in a text file on your computer.

Step 2 – Find potential keywords using Google’s keyword tool

Go to Google’s external keyword tool.
For each product you picked in Step 1, enter the most generic keyword that applies to your product. For example, if you’re promoting a product on how to cure tinnitus, use the keyword “tinnitus” and click the Get Keyword Ideas button.
Go over to the Match Type drop down box and select Phrase Match.
Sort the list in descending order of global search volume by clicking on the column Title.
Make a list of any keyword that is between 10000 and 30000 global monthly searches, and that has something to do with your product.
At the end of this step, you’ll have 10 lists. Some of these lists may be empty, as it’s possible that there won’t be any keywords that meet our criteria. We’re being very careful about selecting only the ones that will work for us, so have patience and don’t get discouraged.

Step 3 – Evaluate the competition for SEO

Now we need to see if it would be possible for us to actually rank in Google for terms that would drive traffic to the product we’re going to market. For each keyword identified in Step 2, head over to Google and type the keyword in quotes. For example, if the keyword phrase was “cure tinnitus,” you’d type “cure tinnitus” into Google.
You’ll see the search results and the words “Results 1-10 of about xx,xxx” on the right hand side. If the xx,xxx number is less than 100,000, move on to the next step. Otherwise, discard this keyword.
Do another Google search by typing inurl:”keyword phrase”. For example, for our keyword above it would be inurl:”cure tinnitus”. Take a look at the number of results again. If that number is below 1,250, this keyword is a winner. Make a note of it.

Step 4 – Pick the keyword you want to start with and build a BlogSpot blog

We’ve picked a BlogSpot blog for 2 reasons: it’s easy to build a nice-looking site quickly, and blogs rank very well in Google.
In general, pick the keyword phrase that has the highest search volume, the lowest competition numbers from step 3, and seems to be the best fit for someone looking to actually buy your product. There are really no wrong answers here, just go with your instinct using these criteria as a guide.
Build your BlogSpot blog. Sign up and watch the tutorials on how to create content like posts. When setting up your blog, make sure that the blog title is your keyword phrase.
Make sure that the blog address (URL) also contains the keyword phrase you’ve picked in some way. So in our example, best-tinnitus-cure, my-tinnitus-cure, etc., all work just fine. Dashes are fine anywhere, so with a bit of creativity you should have no trouble coming up with a name that’s not been taken.
The goal of your blog is to inform and to sell. Provide valuable content from the Pitch Page of the product, as well as outside resources. Add your HopLink to the actual product using text and possibly images. You can often get images from an affiliate page for the product, which can be found in the product’s Vendor Spotlight in the ClickBank Marketplace.
Important: Never make up any information about the product! I encourage you to buy the product or have someone you know purchase the product, so you can give a truthful and accurate opinion of it.
The exact steps to build out the site are too extensive to go into here, but an example should do the trick. Check this page out. It will give you a great idea of what we’re after.

Step 5 – Do some link building

Link building is the key to search engine optimization, and the best way to quickly get included in search engine results for the keyword you’re targeting.
The process of getting a backlink is a bit different for each option listed below, but you can’t go wrong here. The idea is to do three things: get a link to your site, use your keyword phrase in the description or tag when you’re using a bookmarking site, use your keyword phrase as the “anchor text” (the text that’s clickable…that is the actual link to your site) whenever possible. Don’t worry about getting this perfect…any link is better than a perfect link, and you can do no harm!
Blog comment posting is a popular way of getting backlinks. Here’s a nice page that explains how to do it.
Social bookmarking can be a great way to build backlinks to your site. Here’s a huge list of them! Just set up an account with them and add your site.
Web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. are great places to put up a small amount of content and then to add a backlink to your site. Here’s a nice list of these types of sites.
Also take a look at this guest blog post I did previously for other ideas.

Try to build at least 5-10 backlinks every single day! This will give you the quickest results.

Conclusion

The most important part of this process is the keyword research in steps 2 and 3. If you have trouble finding the right keyword phrases for the 10 products you selected, go get 10 more and try again. Have patience. If you stick it out and find the right keywords, the rest will usually take care of itself.

After a while… it could be days, could be weeks, you should show up in the Google search results and people will click on your links to the ClickBank product and you’ll make your first money online! Best of luck in your affiliate marketing efforts.

About the author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of several best-selling Internet Marketing information products, including Commission Blueprint 2.0, Niche Blueprint, and SEM Business Blueprint. You can get more great advice and information on their blog.

Take a look at these related posts:

Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 4

Beau Blackwell — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:51:27 +0000

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 4 in my “Competitive Niches” series. Be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 if you haven’t already!

#4 – An organized link building campaign

It’s been said that 80% of search engine “love” comes from backlinks to your site. That’s not to say that all the on-page SEO you do is not worth doing – it is – but you should remember that without backlinks you won’t stand a chance in a competitive niche.

Link building can be challenging and you might actually feel it’s more ‘link begging’ than link building. While there’s nothing wrong with asking for a link, remember there are lots of other ways you can get a backlink to your site. Here are a few suggestions:

Article directories such as ezinearticles.com or squidoo.com
Industry directories that are directly related to your niche
Forum posts or blog comments (search for CommentLuv blogs that offer dofollow comment links)

The advantage of creating your own backlinks is that you can use the anchor text of your choice, and using the keyword phrase in backlinks to your site is a huge plus for boosting your site’s relevancy for a specific keyword phrase.

Remember to monitor your backlinks with SEO tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster tools or Traffic Travis. While not all backlinks are reported, these tools will help you gauge how successful your link building campaigns are.

Stay tuned for Part 5, where I talk about focusing your niche to be even more competitive.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Take a look at these related posts:

Competitive Niches: 5 Ways to Beat the Big Guns- Part 2

Beau Blackwell — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:52:22 +0000

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

This is Part 2 of my series “Competitive Niches.” Be sure to check out Part 1 first if you haven’t already.

#2 – An effective SEO strategy

Most website owners say they do SEO, but a lot of them are half-hearted about it. They forget that the O in SEO stands for optimization. When you optimize for something it means you are thorough in covering all your bases to make sure your site is built for ranking, with every screw tightened and every page fine-tuned for search engine love. Just having the keyword in the page title is not enough!

You can review how heavily optimized the top 20 sites are for any given keyword phrase using the SEO Analysis feature in Traffic Travis. It looks at 12 different things a website can do to optimize for a phrase, so you can check if a site is dropping the O out of SEO!

Some particularly important SEO factors to keep in mind:

Keywords in H1 headings, page titles or page description
Directory listings in DMOZ or Yahoo!
Backlinks to your site (including trusted backlinks from .edu and .gov sites)

If any of your competitors are missing one or more of these things, then you’ve just found a significant weakness that can be exploited for your own benefit.

While SEO is sometimes talked about like a way to ‘game’ the search engines, it’s better to think of it as preparing a good CV (or resumé for you Americans). And as we all know, when it comes to getting a job, sometimes half an hour’s extra tweaking can make all the difference.

Stay tuned for Part 3 tomorrow, where I’ll talk about “thinking outside the box” when it comes to your niche.

About the author

Take a look at these related posts: