How to Increase Your Affiliate Commissions

If you are just starting out online marketing affiliate products and and wondering how you can increase your affiliate commissions, there are several steps you can take to increase your current affiliate sales and create systems that will generate new leads for you to market to. Here are several steps you can take to fine tune your current online operation and increase affiliate commissions:

Use Bonuses Use bonuses to help sell your products! It's amazing to me to see the number of beginning online marketers who fail to use this technique. Using bonuses is the easiest way to motivate people to purchase from you. Remember, you're competing with many other people online - why should this person buy from you? By offering a set of relevant bonuses with the product you're trying to sell, you'll help tip the prospect's buying choice in you favor.

Check out my blog post 'Using Bonuses to Increase Your Affiliate Sales' for more information.

Email Opt-In If you're looking to make real money marketing affiliate products, then you'll need to build a list of prospects. The easiest way of doing this is by providing an email opt-in on your website. Ideally, create a 'squeeze page' where you offer a bonus if the visitor signs up for your list. Use an autoresponder system like AWeber to collect your leads and set a series of 6-7 emails in your list with useful information and free resources. Then, once you've warmed up your prospects with good information, pitch some products they'll find useful to get them to make a purchase.

Remember, use bonuses to help make your sale. That way, you can also collect a list of the people who've bought through you and market to them via email as well.

Product Reviews Testimonials are one of the best methods to help make a sale. That's why you'll always see testimonials on sales pages. It helps close the sale. So, use that to your advantage and write intelligent, heartfelt product reviews of the products you are marketing.

The best place to do this is on a blog that you maintain. Use your blog to provide useful information in your niche and quality product recommendations, and you'll be able to generate a steady stream of sales via this method - after you take the time to promote it, of course.

Upsell on Thank You Pages Use your thank you page real estate by offering relevant affiliate products for sale, or an upsell to the product they just bought, if available. Thank you pages are a great place to market more products because people are already in the mood to buy. They've just demonstrated that by buying your product. So capitalize on this fact by marketing them other products that complement the one you just sold them.

Sell on 404 Pages If you run a content site with many pages and get a good amount of 404 (file not found) requests to your site, then capitalize on this fact by creating a 404 page that markets products in your niche. This technique is a great way of utilizing traffic which may normally go to waste.

By implementing one or more of these methods, where applicable, you will, over time, notice an increase in your affiliate sales - and increase those lovely affiliate commissions that we so love to receive every month.

Affilite Land Mines Membership Site Video Review

Check out my video review of Russell Brunson's Affiliate Land Mines membership site.

This membership site contains a series of products, updated monthly, which you can resell or give away as bonuses to your customers.

They also give you freebies with each product, which you can give away as incentives to buy, or do whatever you want with them. I give them away as freebies in my newsletter.

Each product is brandable with your own Affiliate id (you have to join Russell Brunson's affiliate program - it's free to join). When people click on affiliate links in the products (both the freebies and products you sell) and buy those products, YOU get the commission.

SO - the more products you sell and give away, the more money you make down the line... money now, and money later. Not a bad deal!

ONLY ON THIS PAGE - You can join Affiliate Land Mines now for only $1 for the first month ($19.95 per month thereafter). Click here to participate in this special offer!

To read more about giving away products as bonuses to increase your sales, read my blog post 'Using Bonuses to Increase your Affiliate Sales'

How to Make $100 Million in 23 Months

That's a bold title isn't it? And an even bolder claim. Most people would say it was impossible, but it isn't.

In fact, this actually happened to someone. He made $100 million over 23 months selling a $60 product. And then he wrote a book about how he did it.

His name is Vince James, and he's the real deal. He wrote a book a while back about how he achieved his success. Rather than trying to explain the book to you, let me share part of the book's introduction:

"I was born in northern New Jersey on January 23rd, 1974.

I grew-up poor- single parent household. I think I had some sort of learning disability, because as a child, I could not retain anything I learned in school. I'd study like hell for an upcoming test... but as soon as I finished reading a chapter in my school book... I couldn't remember what I just read. It would not penetrate into my brain. It was extremely discouraging, so I gave up. I failed everything... even P.E. class.

I finally dropped out in the 10th grade. Nobody seemed to mind.

No matter how hard I tried, it always seemed like I wasn't going to amount to anything real important in life. And this really sucked because I had a passion for the finer things. I wanted the gold Rolex, the sporty Mercedes, and the Million-Dollar Mega Mansion!

But when I looked in the mirror, I didn't like what I saw. I was convinced the good life I wanted was just a dream.

But that was all about to change. Seriously- by the time I was 19, I had a brand-new Corvette. At 20, I had 2 brand-new Mercedes Benz automobiles. And at 21, I was the proud owner of a Rolls Royce Silver Spur!

By the time I turned 28... I made over $100 Million in gross sales. I profited over $50 Million. I owned two homes- one of them was 14,000 square feet and had a seven-car garage, a billiards room and a resort-style pool with an underwater bar! And I paid cash for the home!

In my garage, I had a red Lamborghini Diablo, a yellow Ferrari 360 Spider, a white Bentley Arnage Red Label, about 4 Mercedes, and a 12-passenger Lincoln Town Car Limo!

My checking account had over $10 Million in it. I was earning $400,000 in pay each and every week. That breaks down to $80,000 a day... or $10,000 an hour! And those figures were if I worked 5 days a week for eight hours a day, which I didn't!

In the year 2002, I made more money than the CEOs of Federal Express... eBay... Amazon.com... Time Warner... Apple Computer... McDonalds... Microsoft... Nike... Yahoo... Ford Motor Company... General Motors... and Goodyear Tire- COMBINED!

Yes-COMBINED.

In the May 12th, 2003 issue, Forbes Magazine listed their top paid 500 CEOs in America. Of their prominent and prestigious list of the 500 CEOs, I made more money than 483 of them.

$17,549,000 MORE than the CEO of Starbucks.

$13,030,000 MORE than the CEO of Target.

$17,225,000 MORE than the CEO of Motorola.

Now, this may all seem like I'm some rich idiot bragging about how rich I am... and you're partly correct. I am bragging! But more importantly, the reason why I'm telling you about all this is that this course is about getting rich very quickly. If the talk of obscene money makes you feel uncomfortable, or even angers you, maybe you do not really want to be rich.

The reason why I'm telling you about all the toys I had when I was just 28, is to prove to you that if an guy like me... with a learning disability... a bad childhood... and no formal education can get filthy rich by the time I was 28... you can absolutely follow in my footsteps and build yourself your very own empire of wealth!"

Not bad for a high school dropout.

I managed to my hands on a copy of his book. It was damn near impossible to do so. And I can tell you, after reviewing it, that the techniques and strategies revealed in this book, if followed, will make you money - and a lot of it.

Unfortunately, the book is no longer in print. If you're like I am and absolutely must have it, you can still find a few copies here and there on the Internet. Good luck on that. It took me a while to find my copy.

BUT - if you want to have immediate access to his incredible story and money-making techniques, you can still participate.

Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com is making available a very special 6 hour audio course of The 12 Month Internet Millionaire, for a ridiculously low price. I just bought a copy of that as well, so I can listen to it in the car while I'm driving to and from work.

If you're interested in finding out more about Vince James and The 12 Month Internet Millionaire Audio Course, click here.

Special Offer

I am running a very special offer for those who buy this product through me. Purchase The 12 Month Internet Millionaire through my link (click on any '12 Month Internet Millionaire' link on this page to purchase the product) and you'll receive the following bonuses from me:

1. "A 30 Day Step-by-Step Plan to Internet Riches" audio course valued at $37
2. "Private Label Domination" audio course valued at $37
3. "Virtual Real Estate Blueprint" audio course valued at $37

TO PARTICIPATE IN MY SPECIAL OFFER:

1. Purchase the product through any link on this page.
2. Go to my blog, at http://nichesiteexpert.blogspot.com, and sign up for my newsletter. Make sure to confirm your newsletter subscription.
3. Reply to your first newsletter email with your paypal receipt for your product.
4. I'll contact you via email with links to download your bonuses.

Free Web Hosting With 000WebHost

If you're looking for excellent free web hosting, then consider 000WebHost. They are a fantasic free web hosting service that I use myself to host about 25 of my domains. Their free package is just amazing. Here's what you get.

• 250 Megs Space
• 100 GB / Month bandwidth
• cPanel Control Panel
• Unlimited Domains
• PHP, MySQL, Perl Support
• Absolutely no Advertising
• Full Domain Hosting Support

Not bad for free! Oh, 000WebHost also has 99% uptime as well.

The one thing you do need if you want to sign up with them is a cell phone. They have an authentication method whereby they send you a confirmation code via SMS that you must enter into a web page when you first login to the system. It's an interesting authentication technique, but it does require a cell phone - but who doesn't have one these days?

Just remember to enter +1 (if you live in the States) before your number - I didn't catch that part at first and didn't get my SMS message. So enter your phone number like this when it asks:

+14155551212

... Obviously replace that number with your own :)

Other than that, I absolutely love these guys - great hosting, no bills. Check out 000WebHost if you need free hosting - you can't go wrong with these guys.

Check out my Video Review below:

How to Implement Peel Away Ads on your Websites

Everyone understands the importance of advertisements - it's how you get your product exposed to your customers. However, most forms of Internet advertisements these days have are essentially invisible to most website visitors - years of conditioning have made most people ignore banners, or reflexively close those annoying popups that accost you from every corner when viewing many websites.

Most people have a reflexive reaction to most Internet advertising - they either ignore your banner, or get mad at your repeated popups, pop-unders, and all the other annoying - and intrusive - methods used by online marketers to get your attention.

However, there is a new form of advertising that is showing a large measure of success - and popularity - on the Net these days. These are called 'peel away' ads. You've probably seen them before on some websites. Essentially, the ad consists of a graphic that looks like a 'peeled back' section of your webpage, usually in the upper left or right nad corner of your webpage. This 'peel' graphic is usually animated, and you can see something hiding underneath it.

When you mouse over this section with your mouse, the 'peel' peels back further and reveals an adversitement.

This is an extremely exciting - and effective - method of advertisement. Most people are intrigued when they see that little corner of your webpage peeling away, and will reflexively mouse over the area to see what's underneath it. I know I do. Instead of 'pushing' itself in front of you like pop-overs or pop-unders do, the peel-away ad 'pulls' your attention to it, which gets you to focus 100% on what is going on with the ad. That's a pretty successful ad, in my book.

The concept of the 'peel away' ad was invented by Internet Marketing superstars Harris Fellman and his business partner Richard Osterude. They have created a product called Peel Away Ads that will let you create and install a peel away ad on your website. The product is inexpensive, easy to use, and extremely powerful:

• You can install Peel Away Ads on an unlimited number of domains
• There's a piece of cake 'Set and Forget' setup. If you're not an HTML person, worry not - the set up is easy enough to use that you'll be able to set it up yourself (or have me do it - see my special offer below)
• You can set it up to rotate multiple peel-away ads on the same page - great if you want to run multiple ads - or are selling ad space on your site.
• Peel Away Ads is supported by 98% of all web browsers - so almost everyone will see your ads. Those that can't won't notice anything different about your webpage.

So, if you want to increase your ad profitability and blow away your competition, check out Peel Away Ads now.

Special Offer

I am running a very special offer for those who buy this product through me. Purchase Peel Away Ads through my link (click on any 'Peel Away Ads' link on this page to purchase the product) and you'll receive the following bonuses from me:

1. "A 30 Day Step-by-step Plan to Internet Riches" audio course valued at $37
   
2. "Private Label Domination" audio course valued at $37
3. "Virtual Real Estate Blueprint" audio course valued at $37
   

TO PARTICIPATE IN MY SPECIAL OFFER:

1. Purchase the product through any link on this page.
2. Go to my blog, at http://nichesiteexpert.blogspot.com, and sign up for my newsletter. Make sure to confirm your newsletter subscription.
3. Reply to your first newsletter email with your paypal receipt for your product.
4. I'll contact you via email with links to your bonus products.
   

Using Bonuses to Increase your Affiliate Sales

Successful Internet marketers understand the power of offering bonuses to create a buying incentive for their customers. Bonuses are a good way to get your prospects to:

Sign up for your Newsletter Bonuses are a great way to incentivize your prospects to join your newsletter. Sure mare sure you keep providing them value once they've signed up to start building a relationship with them.

Purchase your Product If your customer is unsure about purchasing your products, adding bonus products with a high perceived value to your offer will help them make a buying decision.

Sign up for your Teleseminar If you are having a difficult time getting people to commit to attending your teleseminars, then offering bonuses will help them make the decision. If you do this, save a bonus for the end of the teleseminar and let your attendees that the bonus will only be revealed at the end of the event.

By offering bonuses, you give your prospect an incentive to make a buying decision or to provide you their name and email address.

The key with bonuses is to make them valuable and relevant to the product you are packaging them with. If your bonuses don't relate to what you are trying to sell, your customers will perceive less value in them and not be as motivated to buy.

Where to Find Bonuses

There are several ways to find bonuses to package with your product.

Valuable Public Domain Information A great place to look is the public domain. Search the Internet for 'Public Domain' for more information or use this software to give you a good start with the process. Find some information that is valuable and relevant, and repackage it as an eBook.

Relevant Free eBooks There are tons of free ebooks online that you can use freely for bonuses. Again, search google for more information. Make sure to take a good look at the content you find as not all of it is good - some stuff I've seen is barely intelligible.

Resellable eBooks Many eBooks you purchase often have a license agreement that permits them to be packaged as bonuses with other products. If you find or own some ebooks that you'd like to repackage with your product, purchase them, and take a look at them - usually the license will be printed in bold letters somewhere at the beginning of the document. If not, contact the owner of the text and tell them you'd like to repackage their ebook as a bonus. They'll usually agree for some small percentage of the sale price. Alternatively, only consider ebboks that have a resale license when you purchase them. There's plenty of them out there.

Resellable Software There's tons of niche software on the Internet that comes with resellable rights. These are great to sell for a few bucks on your website or offer as bonus packages for your main product. I love these because you can price them cheaply for ann easier sale, and they usually provide great value for the task you're trying to accomplish. Make sure to take a good look at them before you package them with your product to make sure that they are of good quality.

My Favorite Bonuses

My favorite bonuses to give away are fron a membership site I belong to called Affiliate Land Mine. This site is fantastic. Every month, they provide you with a new set of products that you can either sell on your website, or package as bonuses. Not only that, but they also provide you with free bonuses that you can give away to your prospects! They also provide all the support stuff - banners, articles, bonus html, thank you page html, whole reseller sites to market the products, everything.

And the best part is that the products update monthly, so you'll always have a fresh new set of products to sell. Since you get resell rights, you keep 100% of the profits. Even better, you can brand these products with your own affiliate ID. Since the products contain links to other products - and some really nice upsells - if your customers - or THEIR customers - buy anything, YOU get the commission (your customers don't get to rebrand the products).

You can sign up for the service for either $19.95 per month, or a lifetime $197 membership. The value you get for that money is pretty incredible, I think. If you need a place to get new products or bonuses every month, Affiliate Land Mine is the perfect place to go.

Use Public Domain Content to Write Your Articles

One of the best ways to get started writing your articles is by using public domain content. There is a surprisingly large amount of content available which exists in the public domain - meaning, there are no copyrights claimed on the content, and you are free to do whatever you want with it.

There are many benefits to adopting the use of public domain content in your content generation strategy:

It's Free - and Good
Public domain content will not cost you a dime, and if you want to, you can reprint - and sell - whatever you want without having to pay a copyright holder any penalties. I know of several people who used public domain content verbatim, repackaged it, and made very profitable products that they sold online. This was because they were able to find some very valuable - and well written - information in the public domain that they saw immediate value in. There's a goldmine of information out there that's free for the taking - if you know where to look.

You'll Save Time
If you can think it, chances are that you can find it in the public domain. It just takes a little effort to find, but think of the time you'll save in creating content. You can take public domain content, modify it a bit, and republish it on your website as new content, in e-zines for your subscribers, or as articles for submission. Use informational public domain content to provide facts about your niche or industry on your blog or website, and you'll not only provide your users with valuable information, but save yourself tons of time in the process.

You'll Save Money
If you're paying people now to write articles for you, think of the money you'll save in not having to pay them $10-20 per article. While that may not seem like a lot, multiply that figure by 10 - or 50 - and you're talking serious money. Instead, pay someone to scour the public domain for information your can use on your website. You'll get a lot more articles out of them for a lot less money.

So if you haven't yet looked into the public domain and you're looking to create new content for your website, do so! There's lots of information out there on the Internet. Google is a good place to get started.

I have a great PDF that goes through how to use Public Domain content in detail. You can download it here.

There's also a great little software application that really simplifies searching through public domain content. I use it to generate content for my adsense content sites. Check it out at:

http://prowler.nichesiteexpert.com

Free Web Hosting Video Review

Here's a video review I did for a fantastic free web hosting service that I found. I use this service to host a bunch of websites, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. Check out the video, and sign up here when you're ready.

SEO Elite Video Training - Project 1

Welcome to my SEO Elite Video Training Series. This entry deals with Project 1 in SEO Elite - Analyze backlinks.

If you haven't yet purchased SEO Elite because you're not quite sure how to use it, I hope this set of videos helps. I will be releasing a set of videos over the next few days that covers ALL of SEO elite in detail.

I am making a very special offer to those that purchase SEO Elite through me - if you purchase SEO Elite from me between now and Dec 31st, 2007, I will give you a half hour of FREE consulting time!

I am an expert web designer and programmer, as well as an SEO expert, so my time is extremely valuable - I charge people $200 per hour for my services. So if you do buy from me, you're getting $100 of extra value from your purchase!

But hurry, this offer will not last! As I ramp up to start working on some of my own products, I simply won't have time to do this anymore, so take advantage of it now.

To find out more about my limited-time offer and how you can participate, please watch the videos below. Enjoy!

Keep Clear Objectives in Mind When Designing Your Web Pages

Expert web page designers understand the importance of creating web pages that have clear objectives and actions for viewers to take. Whether it’s that the viewer read an article, click on an ad, opt-in to a newsletter, or purchase a product, it is important that these objectives be considered when creating your web pages.

When designing your web page, think about the end result in mind. Do you want your viewer to opt-in to newsletter? Then make the newsletter sign-up form the primary element of your web page, and don’t give your viewer other options – at least prominently. Do you want your viewer to purchase your product? Then make that the only link on that page.

It helps to analyze a page by the number of outgoing links to identify what actions are possible from that page. Then, work to minimize the number of unnecessary links to other pages – especially if they are displayed prominently near your primary viewer target (sign up form, sales offer, etc.). Design your page to focus all of your user’s attention upon what you want them to do.

This approach to link reduction may not be the best idea in websites that strictly provide information. In that environment, you want the ability to navigate information quickly and effectively.

However, when it comes to web pages that are designed for marketing purposes, the most effective method is to provide the viewer with one option – for example, opt-in or leave. This type of approach minimizes the viewer’s available choices and drives them towards the action you want them to take.

Build a Business, not a Product

Too many creators of online products suffer from the ‘boom-bust’ pattern of online product sales. What happens to most online product creators is that they spend a ton of time creating their product, launch it to short-term success, and then suffer from a lack of income as their short-term sales dry up after their product launch ends. When they neglect focusing on their business in favor of creating their next product, online product creators doom themselves to this endless cycle forever.

Russell Brunson explained this principle perfectly during this year’s Affiliate Incubator conference. He said, ‘build a business – not a product’. As a successful online product creator and affiliate marketer, Russell not only focuses on creating great front-end products, but also spends a ton of time creating a tiered system of backend products with which too upsell his customers on.

Russell does this using an ingenious series of methods that repurpose all his content – from seminars to appearances to past products – to create a series of back-end upsells that he offers his customers. By doing this, and by creating an upsell path that he puts all his new buyers through, Russell is able to make several times as much from each customer as he would have otherwise made.

This type of success can only occur when you, as a business owner and product creator, take the time to create and implement your business strategies properly, and approach your online efforts as nothing less than the creation of a full-fledged business. Only then will you achieve the measure of success that the big boys (and girls) are able to attain.

Make List Creation one of Your Core Businesses

Most affiliate marketers take a very haphazard approach to their marketing effort. Many don’t even bother to build lists of prospects, and rely on poorly constructed and targeted online efforts to create and sustain sales. In contrast, successful super affiliates know the importance of list building, and make list building one of their core businesses.

Building a list of prospects - and establishing a relationship with those prospects - is the super affiliate’s secret tool to success. Studies have shown that people buy from those they know and trust, and that most sales are not made upon first exposure t a product offer. Most sales happen after at least 5-6 marketing efforts on the seller’s part.

Thus, most beginners lose sales by not establishing a method of communicating to their audience. They don’t make an effort to figure out who their prospects are, nor to they try to gather a prospect’s information via email opt-in, which is the easiest way of accomplishing this task.

Using an email opt-in system powered by an autoresponder is an extremely powerful tool for marketing to your prospects. Create an account with an autoresponder service such as AWeber and create a series of 5-6 emails to add to your autoresponder queue offering your prospect information and bonuses which you do not offer to your website viewers.

After 5-6 emails, your prospects have gotten to know you, and you have provided them with a good deal of value which they would not have gotten otherwise. At this stage, they are much more like to purchase for you. This is when you begin to offer affiliate products to them.

This method is extremely effective. Every Internet marketer uses this method - no exceptions - to generate massive sales. They can literally ‘print money legally’ by marketing to their base when they need to generate sales, as their base knows them, trusts their recommendations, and therefore buys at a much higher percentage than first-time visitors.

So, if you haven’t yet created an email opt-in method on your website to gather prospects in your niche, consider doing so. Your sales will improve, and so will your online success.

How to Cloak your Affiliate URL

If you're looking for a way to cloak those ugly affiliate URL's, there's a couple of effective ways to do so. Here are the methods I use with great effectiveness:

Obtain a domain that you will use for URL cloaks from a domain registrar such as GoDaddy or NameCheap. Alternately, you can use a domain you already own if you want to. Let's use one of my sites as an example - www.dogexpert.info.

1. Then, get yourself a free hosting account from a service like 000WebHost.com and host your new domain there if needed.

2. Then, create a subdirectory in your hosting account that relates to your affiliate product. For example:

/dog-training-secrets/

3. Next, create a file called index.html, and add the following HTML in the file:

<meta equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=[your affiliate URL here]">

4. Now, upload this file your newly created directory. You're done! Your new affiliate URL is:

http://www.dogexpert.info/dog-training-secrets/


Much better looking than your old affiliate URL, yes? What you've just done is created a redirect file, which redirects anyone who requests it to another URL.

There's several other ways of creating a redirect, but this is the easiest. There are also ways of creating masked redirects, which will mask the new URL so that your visitor never actually sees it.

Anyone interested in learning how to do this, or interested in having me create a video how-to on the subject, please let me know.

A Highly SEO-Optimized Website Template

I'm making available a highly SEO-optimized website template that I use to get 100% relevancy rankings with search engines. If you want proof, navigate over to Domain Tools and enter the domain hawaiivacationadvice.info. Check out the SEO score. Need I say more? I have several websites that score like this using the same template. I put up one website about a month ago that got on page one of google for my keywords within four days. Not bad.

The template itself is in php, and I'll include a readme file to describe how it works. basically, it's a snap to use and takes just a few minutes to add all your content to. There's no link maintenance, and there's adsense, amazon, and ebay affiliate pages integrated with the template. This is an awesome start to a money-making website. I use it myself on several sites that are making me good money every day.

There's a catch - the only way to get this template is to sign up for my newsletter. So if you want the template, just fill out your name and email address in the newsletter sign-up area on this page, and you'll get an email soon with instructions on how to get it.

A Powerful Keyword Research Tool

If you're looking for a online tool that will allow you to search the major keyword services all in one place to easily locate the highest traffic/lowest competition keywords for your niche or any other, then check out NicheBot.com.

This service is run by a colleague and new friend one mine, Jim Morris. I met Jim just a few days ago at the Affiliate Incubator seminar in Anaheim, CA. Jim was the one that selected me as a winner of his contest for a free ticket. He's a great guy.

His service is very cool too - get yourself an account, then check out the 5-step video series he's created to get familiar with the site. I met several people at the affiliate incubator who use this service that love it, so it comes highly recommended from several people.

Let your Users Create Content and Have Them Work for You

Are you starting to run out of ideas about what to write on your blog? Don't know what else to put in your newsletter? An easy solution is to let your readers create the content for you. There are several effective methods of driving your base to generate content for you:

Surveys
Surveys are an effective way to generate content, especially if people have some method of recording text feedback as well. To use this technique, survey your base about some important issue in your niche. Then, use their results and text comments to generate an article for your site.

Forums
Add some forums to your website and seed them with some important questions and issues in your niche. The comments that are generated by your base is effectively generating unique, relevant content for you.

Submissions
Never underestimate the power of asking your base for content contributions. Simply post a message about it on your front page, and broadcast a solicitation for contributions to your email list. This is surprisingly effective - people love to be heard, and are often happy to create intelligent content for the opportunity to be published.

Article Comments
By adding a comment system to your static content, you provide the ability for your users to provide their feedback. There is a way to do this that is completely free and requires absolutely no coding whatsoever. go to http://js-kit.com/comments/ for more information.

By using one or more of these techniques, it is possible to provide continuously growing and relevant content very quickly, thereby increasing your relevance with search engines, and your website's value to your visitors.

Use Ghostwriters to get your Content Written

If you are having trouble creating content for your websites, article marketing, web 2.0 posts, or anywhere else, don't despair. You don't have to write content, if you don't want to or do not have the ability. Many services exists today that will allow you to find and employ content writers online, for a remarkably reasonable price. Depending on your niche, you can get a 300-400 word article written for as low as $7.

Obviously, if your niche is more specialized (think - mesothelioma, or galactic pig farming) then your content may cost you a bit more. But, most entrepreneurs will tell you that it's worth outsourcing this type of work if possible in order to focus on what's really important in the creation of an online business: product creation, marketing strategies, strategic alliances, affiliate support, etc.

Here's a list of websites that provide people whom you can employ to create content:

www.guru.com
www.elance.com
www.freelancewriting.com

Every single successful online business owner and super affiliate has told me the same thing: outsource the easy stuff (content generation, SEO, fulfillment, etc) and focus on the creation of lasting, scalable, and automated business structures. So if you can, let someone else do the writing for you, and focus on the important stuff - building your business.

Use YouTube to Drive Massive Traffic to Your Website

One of the hottest ways to generate website traffic is by using viedeo sharing services such as YouTube to generate mindshare - and traffic - for your website. YouTube is a video sharing service that gets immense traffic, and you can get your video seen by a tremendous number of people, especially if you offer useful content such as video training or other edutainment.

A particularly effective method consists of creating simple, short 'how-to' videos that refer people back to your website. It's easy to create screencast videos using products like Camtasia. If you have any expertise with any software application, you can easily leverage that by creating a series of Camtasia videos that offer a how-to guide for doing something - for example, you could create a series of how-to videos for Photoshop, or Dreamweaver, or any other software application that you use regularly in your business.

Another possibility would be to create a series of website reviews. Simply fire up Camtasia, go to your favorite website, and create a 'virtual tour' of that website. You'd be surprised how many people will happily sit through a five minute video presentation of a website.

Once you've created your video, use a video editing tool to add a watermark to the bottom with your web site URL. Also, make sure to include your website URL in your YouTube posting.

This technique can also be used very effectively to directly market affiliate products. Simply create a domain name for your affiliate product, create a redirect from that domain to your affiliate link, and list your domain at the bottom of your video. If you're selling a software product, this works great if your video content is a training or informational video of your product.

Remember to leverage video in your marketing campaigns and you'll be pleasantly surprised at the power and effectiveness of using multimedia to reach your target audience.

Use CPC to Fund Your Ad Campaign

Are you looking to run an ad campaign but don't have enough money to do so? Looking to squeeze a few dollars more out of your website so that you can pay hosting fees? There is a way to make some extra money from the website traffic you get: add a CPC element to your pages such as Google AdSense.

Placing a few CPC ad boxes is an easy way to generate a few dollars from your website traffic, which, when combined with reinvesting that money in online advertising campaigns, is a great way to generate extra traffic - and extra sales - for your website. Or you can use the extra money to offset your infrastructure costs such as web hosting or autoresponder fees.

It's easy to get started: just go to AdSense and sign up for a free account. Then, go through the code creation wizards to build the code you'll need to place in your web pages. Google's web interface is extremely clean and easy to use, so you should have no problem figuring it out.

If you own several websites, I recommend that you create a Google Adsense channel for each website so that you can better track which website your clicks are coming from. This will help you determine how much money each website is making you. The point at which you create and assign channel information will be clear to you as you're building your ad so I won't go into details here.

Using this simple technique will help you generate some extra cash. While you won't become rich from AdSense income, you'll at least generate enough money to help pay some bills or promote your site. And who couldn't use a few extra bucks?

A free tidbit for my loyal readers

Here's an e-book by another Sebastian in the SEO field, Sebastian Foss. The e-book is called Top SEO Secrets, and it's got lots of great information about SEO as well as lists of tons of resources on the Internet to get you going. Enjoy, and click here to download it (pdf).

Using Press Releases to Promote your Website

Press releases are an incredibly powerful and little-known method of promoting your products and services. Do you want to get noticed by at leasy 10,000 people overnight? Create a press release. Ever notice that press releases are listed above the first result on a Google search? That's the power of a press release.

The key with press releases is to make them newsworthy and not fluff. For example, a press release about how great your product is would not be acceptable. But, a PR about your charitable contributions, or an independent survey done by your company confirming an authority source on some important issue in your niche would certainly be.

This brings up a great technique to use if you are wondering what to write your press release about. The technique is this: find an authority organization in your field - one who releases facts about your industry. Then, create a survey to verify some fact about your industry. Run this survey on your website, or poll your newsletter subscribers.

Then, create a press release that either confirms the statistic released by the authority site, or not. Make sure to appropriately name-drop the authority organization in the press release to lend yourself credibility.

This powerful technique both effectively generates a newsworthy press release, and creates tons of creadibility for yourself and your site as an expert and authority in your field.

Here's a very generic example of a press release done in this fashion:

"ABC Company Announced today announced that an independent polling of a sample of their online visitor base confirmed DEF Organization's survey last year that 100% of people will eventually die. While not scientifically accurate, as only a small number of people were surveyed by ABC compared to DEF's extensive research, the findings do lend credibility to DEF's recommendation that people not panic wholescale and hide under a rock.

For more information about ABC company and this survey, please visit http://www.abccompany.com/"

To put out your press release, use www.prweb.com - they have a free service that works nicely, but their premium, paid service will get you more exposure.

Repurposing for Success

Repurposing content is one of the Internet Marketer's most powerful weapons. By leveraging existing content, you can create new content to provide to your visitors to incentivize them to take an action you want them to. You can also repurpose content and create valuable bonuses for your subscribers or affiliate sales campaigns.

For example, here's a powerful repurposing technique: find a free eBook in your target niche. For a collection of free eBooks, go to www.free-ebooks.net. Alternatively, invest in a set of higher-quality eBooks with resale rights and use those. Then, take each main section of the eBook and package it as a series of special reports to make available to your newsletter subscribers. Lastly, take each subpoint of the eBook and turn it into an article. All you have to do is re-write at least 40% of the copy, and you'll be able to post them as your own articles.

The power of this technique is obvious: by simply taking a single source of content, a free eBook, we were able to create a great marketing tool for our prospects, a new source of content for our website, and valuable articles we can use for article marketing.

Another powerful use of repurposed content is the creation of exclusive bonuses. Affiliate marketers will often use an exclusive bonus when promoting a product. For example, I offer a free half hour consultation if you purchase SEO Elite from me (simply purchase from the link and email me your receipt and I'll contact you.). Exclusive bonuses are a powerful incentive for a prospect to buy, and repurposed eBooks, subscriber area content, and repackaged elements of older products are an easy way to create valuable bonuses which will drive your prospects to purchase from you.

Experienced Internet Marketers are masters of leveraging effort, and one of the primary ways of doing that is by repurposing content. Even entire profitable new products have been created by repurposing. So, get into the habit of repurposing in order to save yourself time and effort and multiply your effectiveness.

Four ways of monetizing your website traffic

There are several way to profit from your website traffic. Most of us are familiar with CPA - Cost Per Acquisition. IN this scenario, but are paid if a prospect from your website acquires (purchases) a product promoted by you as an affiliate. But did you know that you can also make money from gathering a Zip code?

CPL - or Cost Per Lead - is another method of capitalizing on your website traffic. There are many companies who will pay you up to a dollar simply for gathering a zip code. In this scenario, you may act as a squeeze page to gather a zip code so that a health care provider can provide localized information for their products.

If you gather a name and email, other companies will pay you up to a dollar and fifty cents, sometimes more. Many different industries, such as the banking industry with credit card offers, the health industry, and others will pay you for qualified leads.

Other methods of capitalizing on your traffic include CPT - Cost Per Trial. In this scenario, you are getting paid if someone signs up for a trial of someone else's service. These are often free trials, but you get paid regardless of whether the person remains a member of that site of not.

Finally, CPC - or Cost Per Click - is a model many of us are familiar with. The biggest example of this is Google AdWords. In this scenario, you are paid every time someone clicks an ad that is displayed on your web page. CPC is a great supplemental method of making money, no matter what other method you may already be using.

Successful marketers often use a combination of techniques to achieve their goals, and superstar marketers know how to examine a niche and quickly determine the best and most profitable methods of doing business there. This is part of what makes them so successful.

Tips for Article Marketing

Here's a few tips for doing article marketing which will drive traffic to your website when applied regularly and consistently:

Always submit your article to the major article directories. It is often unnecessary to submit your articles to the smaller directories, as those often will grab new articles from the big boys.

Submit a minimum of one article per week to each directory. The more exposure you give yourself, the more traffic you will eventually generate. I like to submit at least three articles a week in each niche I work in.

Do your best to refrain from adding too much marketingspeak in your articles, as they may be rejected by the reviewers if found to be too sales'ey and not informational enough.

Here are the major directories you should submit your articles to:

www.ezinearticles.com
www.goarticles.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.articlecity.com

Ten Ways to Generate Website Traffic

There are many different ways to drive traffic to your websites. Today, I'm going to cover the ten primary methods of traffic generation that most people use to drive visitors to their websites.

A note about traffic generation - you do not have to use all ten methods to drive traffic to your site. Many people find that it is best to concentrate their efforts on 2-3 methods and become proficient and consistent in their efforts with those techniques. Oftentimes, if you spread yourself too thin using too many methods, you will find that you are unable to maintain the consistency of effort necessary to succeed. Therefore, find the methods that work best for you and master those before moving on to other methods.


Search Engine Traffic (SEO)
Search Engine Traffic is any traffic sent to you by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Visitors are directed to your site based on the search engine's result set for a keyword or keywords. This type of traffic is great, if you can get your website high in search engine rankings. Search Engine traffic takes time and effort to develop, and requires both on and off-page optimization techniques (which are outlined in this blog.). If you are attracted to this method of traffic generation, realize that it can potentially take months of effort on your part to achieve a high ranking on Google and Yahoo, and then then there's no guarantee of success. But, if you can get the coveted #1 listing for your keywords on Google or Yahoo, you will certainly see a lot of traffic.

PPC Advertising
PPC advertising is ideal if you want to drive traffic to your site very quickly and don't mind paying for it. If you do use PPC advertising, making sure you have some method of capturing the prospect's contact info (name, email) to make the most of this traffic. Remember, once your ad campaign stops, so does all the traffic.

Article Marketing
Article Marketing is a great technique to use to build traffic to your site, increase your search engine ranking, and establish yourself as an expert. See my earlier post about article marketing for more details. Article marketing is something you'll want to establish as as long-term strategy - traffic will grow over time and number of articles published, so you must be diligent. It is recommended that you publish at least one article per day consistently over several months if you want to see real, long-lasting results from this technique.

Press Releases
Press releases are a little-known and incredibly powerful method of marketing your products and services. Want to get noticed by 10,000 people minimum overnight? Put out a press release. Ever notice that on a Google result set, press releases are listed above the first result on a search? That's the power of press releases. The key with press releases is to make them news and not marketingspeak. For example, a press release about how great your product is would not acceptable, but a PR about your charitable contributions, or an independent survey done by your company confirming an authority source on some important issue in your niche would be.

Link Building
Link building involves contacting other websites that are complementary to yours and getting them to link to you. You'll effectively 'steal' some traffic from their site, and you'll increase your own Google PR. Link building has always been a traditional backbone of traffic generation, but has been overshadowed in popularity by other techniques. Again, this is a long-term strategy, and you must be consistent in your efforts if you are to be successful with this method.

Blogs
Blogs are a great way to generate traffic to your website. By establishing yourself as an expert in your field and giving your product a personal front (you), you are helping your customers feel comfortable about buying from you, and creating a fantastic venue from which to drive traffic to anywhere you want. Alternatively, posting intelligent commentary to a posting of the blog of an expert in your field is also a good way to generate. Make sure that your comment is relevant and useful - don't just spam a link to your site in your comments or you're likely to get deleted.

Videos
Videos are an incredibly powerful way to drive traffic and grab attention for your products or services - just look at the success of YouTube. You can get literally tens of thousands of people looking at your videos within a day of your posting them on YouTube - more if your videos go Viral.

Forums
The Forum model is much like posting comments to blogs. The idea is to post a link to your site in a forum posting or reply, but you have to make sure that your post is relevant or useful, or your post will be deleted and you bill be banned from the forum. So, the best forum strategy is to invest some time in establishing yourself as a forum expert before you start adding links to your site in your posts. It will be much harder for forum administrators to kick you if you are an established and contributing member of their community.

Paid Links / Ads
Paid links on high PR authority sites in your niche are also a great way to drive traffic to your website. They will give you direct traffic to your site, as well as raise your google search traffic due to increased relevance of your website for your keywords because of a one-way link from a high PR site.

Social Networking / Web 2.0
Social Networks are currently one of the hottest ways of generating massive traffic to your websites. With some intelligent manipulation of profile pages of MySpace, Squidoo, FaceBook, and others, I've seen friends not only get on page one of google for their keywords in a day, but also get several different entries listed on the google results! Used intelligently, social networks can drive massive traffic to your websites.

Affiliate Incubator Days 2 and 3

Well everybody, the third and final day of the Affiliate Incubator was today, and boy did I come back with some great information. Today we heard from Ewen Chia, whom I'm sure you've heard of if you've spend any time in the Internet Marketing space. This guy is known as the world's #1 super-affiliate, and the quality of information he presented today certainly reflected that.

Gary Ambrose also spoke, as well as Stu McLaren and Russell Brunson. All three hit a home-run with their presentations - I could tell everyone was in information overload by the end of the day. The $595 price of the three day event was incredibly cheap, in my opinion. If I had had to pay for it, I would have. Luckily, I did not (see my earlier post.)

I'm not even going to try to cover all the information I got over the last few days in one post. What I'm going to be doing instead is creating a series of posts addressing key points I've learned over the last few days. I'll try to keep my posts short and on one topic, so you can better index each nugget of information as I make it available.

Enjoy,
Sebastian Schepis

Affiliate Incubator Blowout

What an amazing last couple of days it's been, folks! I just got home from day 2 of the Affiliate Incubator seminar being hosted by Russell Brunson and Stu McLaren. and I've had the pleasure of meeting and learning from some of the top guys in the field - Anik Singal, Jermaine Griggs, Rick Raddatz, Nick Marks, Gary Ambrose, and of course Russ and Stu.

Yesterday's first presentation was given by Russ and Stu and was called 'The 24 hour affiliate'. I'll be releasing tidbits of information from this presentation soon, so stay tuned. I can tell you this: step 1 is mental preparation - focusing on your goal. If you're a newbie, that goal is your first sale. Once you've made that, you've overcome the biggest internal hurdle most of us have a beginners - the belief that you can't make money online.

Anik Singal presented next, and gave a great overview of the steps to making money in online niches, various types of money-making sites, and different ways of profiting from your website traffic. For example - did you know that you can make money from simply gathering a zip code from your viewers? Or over $1.50 per name and email address? CPL - or Cost Per Lead - is a great way of making money online. I'll be talking more about it on this blog soon so stay tuned.

Jermaine Griggs' presentation just blew me away. Jermaine is a 24 year old self-made Internet millionaire who made his money in a pretty tight niche - how to learn to play the piano by ear. He started the company when he was 18, and he's now one of the most respected Internet marketers around. He emphasized creating personalized responder and marketing processes in conjunction with personalized follow up over phone as well as mail in order to drive repeat sales.

Russell's presentation focused on the creation of a company focused around the marketing of tiered products in order to drive back-end sales. I also got some nice formulas for ways to effectively pre-qualifying people who sign up on your lists as potential buyers. More on that later...

My next post will cover highlights from day 2 of the seminar, so stay tuned.

Write Articles to Promote your Website

Are you looking for an easy way to generate traffic to your website, increase your site's PR, and establish youself as an expert in your chosen niche? Then article-write your way to success!

Writing online articles is the best way to accomplish the three goals mentioned above in one fell swoop.

By posting articles online about your chosen niche, you quickly gain yourself some visibility as an expert in that niche.

Since most article directories will also allow you to post your website's URL at the end of the article, you'll get extra traffic from people clicking through to your site after reading your article.

You site's PR will also increase from the backlinks to your site. Make sure you link back to your site using your target keywords, if possible.

If your article is really good, others may post that article on their website - since the terms of use for these articles dictates that they must link to your site in the article, that's extra traffic and PR right there.

There are tons of article directories out there. Do a google search for 'article directory' and you'll see what I mean. One of the biggest and most popular ones that I've seen is eZineArticles, but you should do your own research to find the best ones for your niche.

If you're like me and you have many sites and many articles you need to submit to lots of article directories, you might want to think about getting some software that will help you automate the process. Here's a link to a dirt-cheap and very effective application called Article Submitter. It's eminently worth the money if you're looking to automate article submissions and save yourself tons of time.

Cheers,
Sebastian

ClickBank your way to Affiliate Success

Do you have a website that you'd like to sell an affiliate product on but are not sure where to find one? Are you looking for an online marketplace chock-full of affiliate products for you to market? When I started out, one of my big questions was, "Where am I going to find a one-stop-shop for affiliate products to market?" Well, my question was answered quickly.

It's called ClickBank, and it's an affiliate marketer's dream. ClickBank is an online marketplace dedicated to the sale of affiliate products. As an affiliate marketer, all you have to do to find a product to sell is go to ClickBank, create a free account, and then search their marketplace for products to sell. Once you've found a product, simply create a special link to ClickBank's site to place on your site / in your emails / etc. When one of your customers clicks on this link, ClickBank tracks who the click came from, and if your customer buys the product, you get a hefty commision (usually 50% - or more).

What could be better? Here's what - another marketplace dedicated to doing the same thing - it's called PayDotCom. It's like ClickBank, only their fee structures are a bit different and their website is (in my opinion) more user-friendly.

So, if you're looking to push affiliate products on your website and are not quite sure where to go to find them, check out ClickBank and PayDotCom - you'll be glad you did.

Cheers,
Sebastian

Oh my God, I won!

I can't believe this... but I won! Here's what I won - a VIP ticket to the Affiliate Incubator convention coming up next week in Anaheim!

I first heard about the convention when I got an email from the guys at NicheADay. They had three extra VIP tickets to the event that they were giving away via an email contest. I was to write something about why I wanted to go to the event. The most passionate entries would win, they said.

Well, I got a phone call from Jim Morris from NicheADay and KeywordAvalanche today! I won! I get to go to Anaheim next week and meet the reals pros in this field. How exiting! And very beneficial for you, my non-existent readers. I will be posting all kinds of tips and trade secrets I learn during the convention on this blog.

Thank you, Jim Morris and Scott Standke!

Cheers,
Sebastian

Promoting your new blog? Try these directories

Since this is a fledgeling blog and I want at least some people to see all this, I'm listing my blog in some blog directories. Here's some blog directories - more will be added as I find them:




I'm working through a great list of the top blog directories I found on the net. I love the Internet.. :)

Cheers,
Sebastian

Tips for finding new niches

If you're looking for new niche ideas, then you can't go wrong with NicheADay. It's a nifty daily email service that sends you a new internet niche every day. The really nice thing about them is that they provide you with the AdSense high PPC payout for that niche, as well as provide a zip file containing a document with the top 1,000 keywords from Keyword Discovery, a database that contains 32 billion keywords. Pretty useful, I say. So, check out NicheADay if you're looking to find some new niches to do business in. It's free, and very useful.

Website directories: vital for success

If you really want to get your website a lot of exposure, you're going to have to get it listed in website directories. Why? Three reasons:

1. Search engines will use your websites' inclusion in them (two in particular: Dmoz and Yahoo) as a sign that your website is an authority on your keywords, and rank your site much higher in placement for your keywords.

2. You'll receive traffic from the directories

3. Your Page Rank and keyword weight will increase when you've got lots of backlinks with your keywords in the anchor tag (see my other posts) and you'll get a higher ranking in a search for your target keywords.


The two most important website directories to submit your site to are Dmoz (The open directory) and the Yahoo Directory. Google's search algorithm gives a high advantage to websites listed in these two directories. Both take forever to get yourself included in, and Yahoo is not free, but it's worth the wait and money if you're looking for real exposure. Make sure your site contains quality content and is well-built, submit your sites to both of them, and wait (a while - sorry) for your traffic to increase upon your site's inclusion.

Smaller directories are worth getting in to for two reasons: visitors to your website, and backlinks. While you may not get a lot of traffic from each, multiply 10 visitors per directory times a hundred directories, and you've got yourself 1000 visitors. Not bad for a day's (or an hour's - see below) work. Also, the backlinks you get from the directories will add to your PR.

Make sure you have your target keywords in the title you provide the directories - they'll use that as the URL anchor text when linking to your site.

Also, stay away from paid listings at first if you're doing this on the cheap - paid listings are useful later once you've built up a bit of traffic to your website and increased your PR. Just go with free directories - many will add your site for free if you backlink to them.

So, the general method here is to find a list of website directories, visit each one, enter your info, submit the listing, and wait. If you have to do this manually, it will take forever. So what I do is use a program called Directory Submitter. It is a nifty program that has a list of over 2500 directories built-in, and when you visit a directory within their program, it will autopopulate all the fields with the desired information, saving you *tons* of time - you can submit to 10 directories with this program in the time it would take you to do one manually. It's great for me too as it tracks multiple websites you want to submit and tracks who you've submitted to - a huge time saver. If you've got multiple sites and want to submit to a lot of directories, then Directory Submitter will do the trick nicely.

The added traffic you'll get from submitting to directories is really worth it, so if you're trying to build traffic to your site and you haven't submitted your websites to the Big Two directories and the smaller guys, give it a try and watch your traffic soar.

How to do backlink analysis on a competitor's website

Today, I am going to show you how to analyse a competitor's backlinks, so that you can find potential high quality potential link partners to approach. The objective here is:

Find out what sites are linking to your competitors, and get them to link to you.

How do we do this? There's the hard, manual way, and then there's the easy way. Let's go through the hard, manual way first (requires no software except for a web browser and notepad):

1. Do a google search using your target keywords. In this case, let's use the example keywords 'dog training'

2. Take a look at the #1 listing in the result set - this is your primary competitor, but you're going to want to do this analysis on every listing on page 1 of the google result set.

3. Highlight and copy the URL for the first result, and then in Google's search box, type in: link:[competitor URL] - this let Google know that you want to see all sites that are linking back to that URL.

4. You now have a result set of all websites linking to the URL.

5. In notepad (or excel) create a spreadsheet with the following columns: Website URL, Page Rank, Anchor Text

6. Click on the first result - now, find the link pointing to your competitor, and in your spreadsheet, add the URL in the Website URL column, the Page Rank for that website in the Page Rank column (to find out a website's Page Rank, get the Google Toolbar for your web browser - the toolbar display's a website's Page Ran), and the anchor text that is used to link back to your competitor's website.

7. Repeat this process for all results on Google's result set.

8. You now have a list of the websites you need to focus on as link partners.

9. Sort your spreadsheet by PR high-to-low, and start going down that list and contacting the webmaster of each website and request a backlink to your website. Make sure you've added a link to their website in your links page first! This really helps show webmasters that you are serious about esablishing a partnership between your sites.

10. Watch your own PR rise, and your website soar in Google's index for your chosen keywords!

That's all there is to it. Now of course, you may not be able to get all of those websites to link to you, but do your best - it's worth the wait and extra work.

There's a way to do all of this that is practically automated, using an amazing tool called SEO Elite - it automates not only the backlink analysis process, but also adds tremendous automation to the backlink building process by giving you tools that facilitate the process of contacting other webmasters. If you are serious about doing SEO, and you have more than one website to manage (like me), then you will love the features this tool provides, and you'll make your money back on this tool in no time - it really does pay for itself very quickly. I personally have no idea how I would be able to do all this work for my 20 sites without it. Take a look at SEO Elite - of all the SEO tools I've seen out there, this one is a solid investment.

Cheers,
Sebastian

Backlinks - emulate your competitors for success

Backlinks - links on other websites linking back to yours - are hugely important in your quest for high search engine rankings. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher-ranked your site will be. So, what are high-quality backlinks? A high-quality backlink:

1. Is listed on a high-PR (Google Page Rank) website engaged in activity that is relevant to your niche
2. Has relevant Link Anchor text that contains your target keywords

Let's break down these two points and talk about them further:

1. The fact of the matter is that a high-PR site's backlinks count much more to your own ranking than a site with a low PR (or none at all). After all, high-PR sites are considered 'authority' sites in their niches, and therefore, any links from them to you will be that much more valuable when google is ranking your page. And, high-PR sites that contain many of the same keywords as your site are the kinds of link partners you want to have.

2. Let's talk about link anchor text for a moment. If you do some backlink analysis of high-ranking sites (and I'll walk you through that shortly), you will notice that their backlinks tend to contain their targeted keywords, not 'click here' or some other unrelated term. Here's the bottom line: the more backlinks to your site you have that have anchor text containing your keywords, the better your own ranking for those keywords will be.

For example: if we requesting a backlink from another site back to our website, it always pays to suggest to the website's webmaster the keywords you want to have in your link anchor:

good: Please visit the following website for more information on dog training.
bad: For a great website on dog training, click here.

The more backlinks to your site that contain your targeted keywords, the higher your ranking will be. Simple as that.

And, if you can emulate your competitors backlinking strategy - by getting the people who link to them to also link to you using the same keywords - then you will skyrocket in the search engine rankings.

Next lesson will be how to do backlink analysis on a website to find out who links to them - I'll show you the manual way, then present an awesome SEO tool that I use to do the work for me in a tenth of the time. Stay tuned for more!

Cheers,
Sebastian

Build your popularity with Link exchanges

One of the ways to build your online popularity, and website traffic, is to exchange links with other websites. Traditionally, this was done the tedious, slow way: by individually contacting other websites, adding their link onto your links page, and then waiting - hoping - that the linked site's webmaster will get back to you and agree to post your link onto their website.

Slow, tedious, boring.

Luckily, there are better ways to approach the link building problem. There are several websites out there now whose sole job is to help you connect with other websites to perform link exchanges:

1. Link Metro - This site is awesome. Simply open up a new account, list your websites in the account, and then go to their directory and start looking for websites you'd like to link to. Once you've found a website you want to link to, simply click on the 'request link' option for their listing, add their link to your links page, and voila! the link request has been initiated. Now, simply sit back, and wait for the other website to approve your link. And, once your website has gotten enough accepted link requests and gained in popularity, other people will start contacting you for link requests. Simple and easy. I love it.

2. Link Market is another link exchange site, just like Link Metro. The difference is that they want to charge you $25 a year PER WEBSITE for you to have the ability to make unlimited link requests per day, and they make you open up a new account FOR EACH website you have. That's a pain in the ass in my book. But, fledgeling Internet Marketers can't be choosers, and they do have a ton of websites listed on their service, so the extra work on this website may be worth it - it still a lot easier than the bad 'ol days...

There are other Link Exchange services out there - just do a google search for 'Link Exchange' to find them.

A NOTE: While you will be able to build up a nice base of backlinks using this service, you probably won't find a PR6 whale waiting to link to you on their home page in these services. For the most part, they are populated with other websites like yours - fledgeling Internet Marketing sites looking for more exposure. If you want PR6 backlinks to your site and you don't even have a Google PR yet, your best bet is to pay for exposure on a high PR website or directory. More about this in further posts.

Cheers,
Sebastian

Free Web Hosting - is it worth it?

One of my requirements in this whole venture is trying to save money where I can, and that's what attracted me to free web hosting to begin with. I mean, what could be better than free? Well, 99.9% uptime, and technical support, that's what! While I do love my current free hosting service, I have experienced some outage problems with them, and they offer no tech support at all, which can be a real problem to a total newbie, or even a techie pro like myself.

However, I am not complaining! While I still have not figured out what their catch is - how they make their money - I am happy currently hosting about 20 sites at 000webhost.com - by far the best free web host I've found. If you're looking for rock-solid support and reliability, go with a good paid host. But, if you're just starting out, consider going with free hosting until you can afford your own server.

Cheers,
Sebastian

Finding a niche with high AdSense per-click payouts

Here's a great website that lists some keywords with a high adsense payout: http://www.sorve.com/adsense.htm

It's pretty amazing how much some of these niches pay out per click. Do the advertisers really end up making that money back up in the long run?

Picking a keyword optimized domain name

Here's how to pick a domain name that, in combination with my other upcoming tips, will help you score high with search engines:

1. Pick your target niche. I will assume you've done this already - if not, look to my other blog posts for how to do that.

2. Go to your favorite keyword suggestor tool on the net. Here's a few I like:

The Overture Keyword Selector tool
The Google Adwords Keyword tool
The Digital Point Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. This one combines Wordtracker and Overture data

3. Enter in your keyword. Let's say your niche is parrots. So enter the keyword 'parrot' in the keyword suggestor. You'll get a result set ranked by hits - the google suggestor does not show you the number of hits, but the overture one does.

4.Now look at the list and look for a keyword combination that will best describe your site. In this example, our niche parrot site will contain a hefty helping of useful information, as well as push affiliate products via an eBay store and one or two selected parrot ebooks or clickbank/paydotcom products. There's a keyword combination 'pet parrot' that gets about 188 hits per day which should work nicely.

5. Do a domain availability search on the keyword combination. You might be tempted to add something else to the keywords - DON'T.

6. If your domain is available as a .com, you're in luck! Next best is .info, then .net/.org. Register it!

You've now got a domain which is made up of keywords from what people actually search for - which means that you'll get a few organic visits (visits from people who directly type in your url into their web browser), and once you've optimized the contents and layout of your site, will get your site indexed super-high by search engines!

For example, I have a site called Menopause Information. I just launched this site - it has no page rank at all, but I am already on page three of google's results for 'menopause information'. Not bad! And once I get some backlinks to it, I should climb up to page two soon.

Stay tuned for more information on how to optimize your web page layout and content for maximum SEO success!

My Niche Site adventure

Hello and welcome to my blog! My name is Sebastian and I am a long-time Internet programmer turned Internet marketer. I currently own about 20 niche sites, some of whom I've built, and some of whom I've purchased. All are unique content sites, and all are very well SEO optimized. Most have affiliate products on them. All have AdSense and Amazon on them. I am now in the process of marketing a few of the sites that are ready. I am currently relying on free traffic from searches and backlinks from directories, articles, web 2.0, and video marketing.

If you're curious, here's a few sites of mine:

• Menopause Information


• Natural Skin Care Tips


• Dog Training | Dog Grooming | Dog Breeding


• Resume Writing Tips and Advice

I welcome any feedback from anyone about my endeavors. My goal is to provide websites with useful content while making a decent living. I know it's possible and I'd especially love to hear from anyone else out there who's already doing the same thing.

Cheers,

Sebastian