Monday, July 26, 2010

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint

The reality of Affiliate marketing is quite simple. And I lay it out in the link for this article.

Now I'd do it a little differently these days, since I've found more tools.

The blueprint for this is just a few steps:
  1. Do your research and discover a long-tail niche that is underserved. Find the keywords with high KEI and low R/S ratios with a product that is in demand.
  2. Out of that homework, research for the data you need to write a half-dozen good articles. If you already have PLR on this, that's even better - but they'll still need to be re-written so it sounds like you and not a translated version.
  3. Get a CMS to set up a mini-website just with that original content. Link this up properly to your affiliate site and have scattered internal linking so that the viewer is invited (along with search engines) to check out the other pages on that site.  This can be a subdomain or subdirectory on a hosted site (not a free web host, as these can disappear.) Make sure you plug-in analytics to this before you leave it.
  4. Now spin those articles into several versions and post them to the main article directories which actually do send traffic. Set up your system for this so you can repeat this process.
  5. Set up Hub pages, Squidoo, and half-a-dozen or more high-SERP sites with variations of those articles and linking back to your main site again.
  6. Also from that homework above, get out and contact the relevant blogs which have conversations going about this subject area. Make sure you can leave your website address at each one - and leave deep-linked pages, not necessarily the front page.
That's the essence of it.

Now, you can pretty this up by putting all your content into video's and post these, then embed them into your pages at #3. Then come back and link them into your remote hubs at #5. Some article sites will also accept video's.  And you can go find other video's on YouTube and others to leave your video as a response - where it's appropriate.

Just make sure your posted videos always links back to your main site. 

Your squidoo and hub pages can also have videos, which makes them more interesting - and gives you traffic to your video pages as well.

A follow-up would also be to then take that site and make it into an ebook (pdf is best) to give away on your site for an opt-in gift, and then also post that on the various doc-storage sites as a paid download.

Affiliate marketing is actually rather easy. And you just keep repeating the above for each niche you find, testing and tweaking to improve the results according to what your analytics say.

The only secret in this is how long it takes someone to find out about how to do it. But right now, it's a piece of cake - other than in how long it takes to do all of the above thoroughly and get your actual results.

The theory and reality of remote blogs

803492184_53354026c5Remote blogs aren’t worth it for most people.

Remote blogs are blogs hosted by another company for free – to you at least. Most are advertiser-revenue-driven.

The majority of people really just want to vent and play around with whatever they are interested in at the moment. This is why Facebook has taken off so well. Hobby-minded people love it.

Professionals who want to make a living online are interested in getting the top spots of the SERPs because that is a simple way to get traffic. 80-90% of the SE traffic from Google comes from the first and second pages.

So the use of setting up remote blogs is similar to article directories – backlinks and potential traffic for your main site (which needs to be an SEO-optimized CMS.)

However, out of the minority who would go this route, few want to have to log in and out of these remote blogs and keep them current pm a regular basis in order to keep them all on top of the rankings.

It means you have to join the elite few who can produce tons of content every week. The more blogs you maintain, the more content you have to produce.

The workaround is possibly to treat them as article directories and spin your single post into several.

Now, when you have multiple blogs on the same host, you have to ensure you don’t have duplicate content on that server. So you have to be able to “theme” each blog on that server to have it’s own material. (Which is fine if you are pushing several product lines.)

Otherwise, you can post the same stuff on several different blogs, but don’t expect anything but “supplementary result” vacuum. And no traffic, but you might get some incoming links.

Spinning your content is the only way to do this. And you will have to figure out how to also get your content posted to all these blogs.

There are workarounds for this as well, but I’ve given enough clues already in this blog post. As well you have security issues on all these blogs just to avoid them looking like spam blogs (splogs).

I do have to keep an eye out for the blackhats (who already spam my comment boxes already.)

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Freedom Lessons for Free


Life is simple - unless you've bought into the ideas advertising and politicians have told us all our lives. Freedom is naturally yours. Claim it