Clickthrough Rate Analysis: Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo!

Back in July, the Chitika research team looked at how often Bing users clicked on ads when compared to Google and Yahoo! users. Bing users showed a 50% higher ad click rate than Googlers, so at the time our preliminary conclusion was that Bing’s success was being driven in a big part by Microsoft’s huge, expensive advertising blitz.

Now that December is upon us, and Bing keeps showing its ability to push Google from a technology standpoint, they decided to revisit and see how the numbers were looking. As it turns out, Bing users are still clicking on ads at a prodigious rate – in fact, the CTR of users who come to the Chitika network via Bing is over 75% higher than those who come from Google.

Now, it must be mentioned that Bing is still a distant third place in terms of traffic sent – Google dominates with 84% of search traffic, followed by Yahoo! at 7.40%, and Bing holding at 5.75% (AOL and Ask both have just over 1% of search traffic coming into the Chitika network). However, all things being considered the same, driving one Bing user (or AOL or Ask user) to your site can be more valuable than driving one Google user.

The Raw Numbers:

Search Engine	Ad Clicks	Impressions	Ad CTR	% of Search	CTR Vs. Google
AOL	42,597	1,706,858	2.50%	1.27%	253.56%
Ask	34,437	1,958,490	1.76%	1.45%	178.65%
Bing	134,536	7,741,724	1.74%	5.75%	176.57%
Google	1,115,452	113,332,938	0.98%	84.13%	100%
Yahoo!	136,506	9,972,035	1.37%	7.40%	139.08%

Numbers are based on a sample of traffic from the Chitika advertising network.

Top 10 ways to get people online to read your Business Blog

There are many advantages of running a blog, on top of your business website. A blog is an online diary, whereby you can easily posts clips about yourself, your thoughts and your personal life. If you publish a business blog, you posts good content, articles, breaking news or just about anything to build awareness of what you are selling.

Publishing a business blog gives your subscriber or prospect a chance to get to know you better. Through your blog, you can explain how your life has changed due to the product or service that you are selling. A blog can also be highly interactive if you also allow comments and for all to see. For sure, blogging provides a good avenue to establish some level of trust and security for an online prospect who has never met you.

Here are top 10 ways to get people to read your business blog:

1. Have a general theme and state this theme at the top or in a prominent location in your blog. Creating a general theme helps attract a group of targeted readers. However, do strike a balance. You don't also want too narrow a theme. Otherwise, you may find yourself having difficulty finding new things to talk about in your blog every few days.

2. Be current in what you post. Don't report about events that happen one year ago. You can refer to the particular event if relevant and/or via a link. For these past events, assume that people already know about them.

3. Keep a regular schedule. When readers return to your blog, they want to read about something new. Be sure to manage your readers' expectations.

4. Post frequently. Search engine spiders love sites that are constantly updated with fresh content. At the very least, posting once every few days is a good idea.

5. Keep your posts short and clear. Don't post long essays. Blog readers are known to like to zip in and out of online diaries. Keep your long essays to articles that you can publish on a separate webpage or in your newsletter.

6. Make your tittle keyword-rich. This helps in getting your posts better ranked by search engine spiders via the keywords that you use.

7. Post interesting content. No one is going to be interested in what you ate for breakfast. Not unless you are maintaining a food blog and you want to post your breakfast recipe! Making your content interesting will ensure that your readers continue to read your blog loyally.

8. Have a unique perspective. Readers are interested to know what you think. If you are offering your opinion, be sure that you are able to qualify them.

9. Take note of your language and grammer. Even if you are posting an opinion. It is always safer to write in proper English if you are hoping to monetize from your blog.

10. Don't forget to have a RSS feed. RSS means 'Rich Site Syndication'. To increase readership and distribution, this is one thing that you must not omit in doing.

Marketing Your Website Without Search Engines

I’m not old enough to remember what the internet was like without search engines. Apparently, there were lists of web-servers: they were manually updated and publicized in news updates like this. And then the search engines came crawling, indexing and sorting out pages. As the web expanded with more users and businesses putting up websites, search engines became an essential way to immediately find information.

There’s a common saying: build your site for visitors, not for search engines. A famous Google webmaster guideline asks the question: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” It’s actually quite a challenge: Pretend search engines don’t exist. How can you grow your website, get visitors and make lots of money?

I recently built a couple of sites without any focus on search engine rankings and getting organic search traffic. I didn’t block the search bots from indexing the site but I optimized nothing. Didn’t focus on site link architecture, title tags, meta-descriptions, meta-keywords, link building, competitor analysis. Forget about search engine algorithms.

I also wasn’t interested in methods of search-based marketing like finding long tail phrases and placing them on article directories or social media properties in order for these pages to rank and send traffic to my site. That would have involved researching search keywords and competition, so I did nothing of that sort too.

Ultimately, you’re dealing with a situation where the convenience offered by search engines is non-existent. No quick answers to quick questions for everyone. So how are people going to find what they need? How are they going to find my site?

Without search engines, people will do what they’ve been doing for thousands of years. They rely on each other. They rely on the community, on the collection of publications known within their geographic location or industry. They rely on word of mouth. And they also rely on getting information from common resources like a public square, library, forum or marketplace.

Go where people gather. There you will be heard. It sounds like rudimentary marketing but quite honestly, until I’ve tried ignoring search engines and focusing exclusively on gathering points, I didn’t realize how much actual marketing I was NOT doing.

There were far more forums, social networking sites, blogs than I ever imagined even for small niches. And then there are mega-sites like Youtube and Facebook. If I were to put a number to it, I would say I’m missing out on at least a few thousand visitors every day by NOT being active in these online communities. And that doesn’t include offline marketing.

This is a good amount of visitors who are likely to become supporters of your content, clients or buyers. And the truth is I’ve always made money much faster by going to them instead of waiting for them to come to me. It sure beats the usual plan of waiting for my site to get indexed, rank for longtail phrases and THEN hopefully convert into an ad click or sale.

Traffic from these sites can be as targeted as search engine visitors: many are looking for recommendations from peers or actively engaged in a specific activity that is relevant to my site. But unlike search visitors, they aren’t coming in blind into your website from a query.

They know more than your page name, url and meta-description. They know your avatar, they know your history of contributions. They have a rough idea of who you are. Your words are in their face before they even click over. You’ve already presold them by making yourself familiar.

The most common problem we face is the lack of time. Can we outsource something like forum, blog or social site marketing? Yes, of course. But use people who know what they’re doing or else you’ll be wasting your time. If you’re a one-person operation, it might not be good for your brand to have someone that’s not you out there, even if you have an excellent ghost.

But small businesses, big businesses and multi-author content sites? No problem.

In any case, the whole experience of marketing without search engines is educational. It forced me to go out and represent my brand. This is me, I own this website. Hello, here’s what I do. Take a look. Here’s why this will be interesting.. and so on.

Once again, nothing revolutionary but when you’re not depending on search engines, its a make-or-break situation. How can I not just get clicks but the most value out of each click? What web page should I link to, who should I target, what content angle to use etc.

It forced me to work and persuade on a social level you don’t really think about because you’re always focused on existing traffic/users or things that will improve a machine’s reading of your site’s worth. Then you realize the value in having a strong brand and reputation.

I would recommend that you try pretending that search engines don’t exist, even just for a week or so. Especially if you’ve got a new website. Search engine traffic is invaluable but there’s a lot of visitors out there just waiting for you to show them your site.

If you’ve already reached a plateau in organic search traffic and its not making you as much money as you like, why not focus on promoting your site outside of search engines?

So, how would you market your website if search engines didn’t exist?

Via Dosh Dosh.

Search Engine Optimization: Content That Search Engines Love

Note: This is not a "Guide to hack the Google AdSense." I respect Google and all the other search engines. The sole purpose of the article is to benefit the Google Adwords, AdSense, and the advertising community in general.

We all know that Revenue of your website, Traffic on your website, Popularity of your website, Return ratio of your visitors, and credibility of your website - all these largely depend upon the content of your website. Content is King. It's the heart and soul of any online business. Google loves good content. According to Google AdSense engineers - "Content that promotes industry of AdWords advertisers is the ideal content (so that Smart pricing doesn't hits you)."

Below I will list some great way to get quality contents for your websites.

Source #1: Article Websites

This is the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to get the articles you need for your upcoming website. You can get a number of articles from these websites on almost any topic. Many professional writers post the articles on the "Article Websites." You can host these articles on your website by giving proper credit to these writers. Industry experts post the articles on "Article websites" and wait for great links to come in. As these articles are posted directly by the experts, they make interesting reading and have credibility. These articles are technically accurate and keep your visitors glued to your website. This increases the page views.

These articles are set on broadcast mode, and the duplicate content can be found at many other places on the net. Search engines like good and motivating content, but your visitors may get bored by reading the same information again and again. Though, it doesn't mean that you should not use Article Websites, as they are still a cool source of high quality content.

One thing you must remember while hosting these articles is to give proper credit to the original writers. Read the Article Website's Terms and Conditions carefully and abide by them.

Source #2: Write Your Own Content

If you are an expert of the industry for which you are searching the content, who else can write better than you? Articles in your own words are called unique articles. Search engines as well as your visitors love unique articles. If you have unique content, it will be easy for you to ask links from some high profile websites. This will increase the inflow of traffic to your website. Unique content also gets maximum bookmarks, and visitors return to your website again and again for more interesting information.

Here are a few tips on how to write your own unique content.

1 - Surf the Forums

Almost every topic on the web now has forums for the same. People discuss problems, solutions, tips, and tricks related to your industry. This provides enough material for you to write your own version of the story. Locate the problem that most people face, search for its solution, and write something useful. This is the best way to do it.

2 - Get the Inspiration

Surf the web, dig out your competitors, and know what content they are providing, and ponder over what makes their websites so good. Use the same data as inspiration, add your own comments, add negatives or positives (pros and cons), and add comments from forums. Ideal strategy is to jot down 5-6 articles around one topic only. While writing, keep in mind that the content of the articles should be easy to understand. Avoid lengthy sentences, difficult words, and unnecessary repetition. Remember, you are not displaying your mastery over the language, instead you are communicating with your potential customer. The effort should be on trying to make him understand what you want to say.

3 - Get Content from Your Visitors

Let the visitors post articles on your website. They can email the articles to you, or else you can put up a "Post Article Form" for their convenience. Let them post comments on your articles - like a small forum thread for each article. This will keep the search engines hooked to your page. Moreover, you are generating content without moving a finger.

Source #3: Get the Content Written - Paid

Hire a content writer if you feel that you can't write the content. You can get many of them on freelancing websites. Ask the content writer to write unique content related to your industry. Specify some topics, if you can. If you can't, just specify the number of pages you want him to write for your website. You will get customized content.

Here is a list of a few websites where you can find the people to write content for you.

http://www.elance.com
http://www.rentacoder.com

Keep posting the content on your website. New content on your website keeps your website fresh and tasty - both for visitors and search engines.

Benefits of Unique Content

There are numerous benefits of writing eye opening, unique content.
- It builds web presence. People bookmark your website, and you get more returning visitors.
- It gets you links easily.
- If the content is posted on Article Websites, you get good links. If you have compiled good article website, your potential link partners look at you with respect. I have never seen an email shouting at me while I run my link partnering campaign, even if I drop them 15 continuous emails with the same content, accidentally making it a spam. I get links from the websites that are the masters of their industry.
- Source of free advertising.
- Search Engines look at you with more respect.

If you are beginner in this game, Article Websites are the best way to start with. Unique content may have more respect, but there is no point in writing content if you don't know the ins and outs of the industry you are targeting. And for God's sake, don't create confusion over internet! It's better to have duplicate content on your website than give wrong information to your visitors.

Content With Higher AdSense Payout

Content development can be tough and time consuming. For whopping fast returns, it's better to create websites either on the industries that are high paying or on the niche keywords. 

---------------------------------------

Source: Keywordcountry.com

White Hat SEO - Do Not Pay Companies To Do It For You, Learn To Do It Yourself!

You've heard all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) while browsing the webmasters forums and websites, and you saw people and/or companies charge a very high rate per hour to do it for you. While in fact, SEO is quite simple and you can even do it yourself, without having any sort of tech-know-hows beforehand.

In this article I’ll shed light on White Hat SEO. White Hat SEO are SEO techniques used to promote a website the "right" way, that is, honest, legal, within the rules and try to follow all the search engine guidelines.

First, the basics, Google ranks web pages on a scale of 0-10 with 10 being the highest. So it's not just about the amount of links, it's also about the importance of those links. For example, you could get hundreds of links on zero or low ranked pages, which have content that has no relation to your keywords, and receive a little more attention from search engine crawlers. Or you could get a few quality backlinks on high-ranking websites which are related to yours, which will greatly boost the value of your web pages.

You don't need to submit your website to any of the main search engines or others. It's just a waste of time, if your website has a handful of incoming links from other websites then any search engine will index your website after finding it from these links. However you can get indexed in search engines faster if the webpages linking to you have higher ranks.

Using White Hat SEO techniques to get ranked in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) involves:

1) Building a website with unique content and images.
2) Trading links fairly.
3) Getting your website listed in directories or on other websites with related content.

Let's look into the techniques in detail.

1. Building a website with unique content and images

Unique content is content found only on one website, the bigger your website is (the more unique content you have), then the higher it will rank in SERPS and the more traffic you will generate. You will naturally also have many internal hyperlinking keywords.

2. Trading links fairly

This means making your link exchange with other websites that have the same or a similar theme to yours. It also involves regularly checking the links to ensure both parties are adhering to the deal and that the site you are trading with is not cheating on reciprocal links. Cheating on reciprocal links can mean making a lowly link exchange into a lucrative one-way link. There are a number of ways Black Hatter can do this. White Hatter should also be aware of these techniques as they are more than likely being used against them.

3. Getting your website listed in directories or on other websites with related content

Getting other websites to link to you, without you reciprocating the link is much more important. You can submit your link to your signature in forums, directories which don't cheat you, your friends' websites, etc. Obviously if you have stuff which is free, or funny or entertaining, or your website is very useful or informative then other webmasters may link to your site.

White Hat SEO does not involve buying links of any form. Buying links is now considered by Google to be violation of their guidelines and an attempt to manipulate SERPS. Basically this means if you buy any links at all which are HTML links direct to your website then you are in violation of Google's guidelines. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such, this can be done in several ways, such as adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to <a> tag.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Within the SEO community, some optimization tactics are considered Black Hat SEO. These are tactics which are not considered to be good or fair by search engine operators, search engine optimizers, or web site visitors.

There is no generally accepted definition for black hat SEO. What may be considered appropriate by one webmaster may not be considered appropriate by another webmaster. In addition to personal differences, guidelines for appropriate conduct vary across web site categories. What might be considered acceptable for a web site in the gambling industry may not be equally acceptable for a health care web site.

Here are several guidelines for determining if a technique should be considered Black Hat SEO.

Search Engine Operator Policies

Many search engine operators, such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo, publish policies and guidelines which document what they feel are appropriate and inappropriate SEO techniques.

One school of thought believes that if you stay within these guidelines, you are not practicing black hat SEO.

One difficulty with this model is that the search engine operator guidelines tend to be extremely vague and non-technical. Another difficulty is that the guidelines differ between search engines. For example, Google prefers 301 redirects, while Yahoo prefers doorway pages which inform the user of the new URL.

The Property Rights Approach

The property rights approach to the question of black hat SEO believes that anything you do with your own property is acceptable, but that you should leave other peoples property alone.

By this standard, most on-page SEO techniques are acceptable, but off-page SEO techniques like guestbook spamming should be considered black hat SEO.

This is probably the most reasonable and fair guideline for determining acceptable SEO practices, but it does have some limitations. It does not, for example, address keyword spamming or cloaking.

The Visitor Value Approach

This school of thought believes that SEO techniques which do not add value to the visitors experience belong to the school of black hat SEO.

This approach labels on-page techniques such as hidden text, micro-text, and ALT text spamming as black hat SEO.

The visitor value approach has benefits not only in defining black hat SEO, but also in promoting general practices for good web site design. Black hat SEO practices which violate this guideline may result in a boost to your SERPs, but they will not lead to return visitors or natural incoming links.

The Unnatural Rankings Approach

This school of thought believes that anything which causes a web page to rank unnaturally highly for its keywords is black hat SEO.

Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted definition for "unnaturally highly"!
If followed to its logical conclusion, this school of though considers all SEO to be black hat SEO.

Under this approach, even the use of proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) can be considered black hat SEO.

15 Tips To Increase Blog Traffic

The blogosphere is a big and busy world with over 100 million blogs and growing. How do you attract visitors to your blog? Follow these simple tips to drive traffic to your blog.

1. Write Well and Write Often

Frequently updating your blog with useful content is the first step to building your blog's audience. The content you write is what will keep readers coming back for more. Make sure you have something meaningful to say to them and say it often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal.

Furthermore, post frequently to increase the number of chances you have for your blog's content to be noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati.

2. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

Get on the radar screen for the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! by submitting your blog's URL to them. Most search engines provide a 'Submit' link (or something similar) to notify the search engine of your new blog, so those search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results.

It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of a Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine.

3. Use and Update Your Blogroll

By adding links to sites you like in your blogroll, the owners of those blogs will find your blog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It's an easy way to get the link to your blog in front of many readers on other blogs. The hope is that some of those readers will click on the link to your blog on the other blogs' blogrolls and find your content interesting and enjoyable turning them into loyal readers.

4. Harness the Power of Comments

Commenting is a simple and essential tool to increase your blog's traffic. First, respond to comments left on your blog to show your readers that you value their opinions and draw them into a two-way conversation. This will increase reader loyalty.

Second, leave comments on other blogs to drive new traffic. Make sure you leave your blog's URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a blog post. If they read a particularly interesting comment, they are highly likely to click on the link to visit the commentor's website. It's important to make sure you leave meaningful comments that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more.

5. Syndicate Your Blog's Content with an RSS Feed

Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content.

6. Use Links and Trackbacks

Links are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs.

You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links!

7. Tag Your Posts

It takes a few extra seconds to add tags to each of your blog posts, but it's worth the time in terms of the additional traffic tags can drive to your blog. Tags (like links) are easily noticed by search engines. They're also key to helping readers find your blog when they perform searches on popular blog search engines such as Technorati.

8. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites

Taking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog.

9. Remember Search Engine Optimization

When you write your blog posts and pages, remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely.

10. Don't Forget Images

Images don't just make your blog look pretty, they also help people find you in search engine listings. People often use the image search options offered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, and naming your images with search engine optimization in mind can easily boost your traffic.

11. Consider Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can be done when you write a guest post on another blogger's blog or when another blogger writes a guest post on your blog. Both methods are likely to increase traffic as your blog will be exposed to the other blogger's audience. Many of the other blogger's readers will visit your blog to see what you have to say.

12. Join Forums, Web Rings or Online Groups

Find online forums, web rings, groups or social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn where you can share ideas and ask questions of like-minded individuals. Add a link to your blog in your signature line or profile, so each time you post on a forum or participate in another online network, you're indirectly promoting your blog. Chances are many people will click on that link to learn more about you.

13. Promote Outside Your Blog

Promoting your blog shouldn't stop when you step outside the blogosphere. Add your blog's URL to your email signature and business cards. Talk about it in offline conversations. It's important to get your name and your blog's URL noticed offline, too.

14. Nominate Yourself and Other Blogs for Blog Awards

There are a number of blog awards given out throughout the year. Nominating yourself and other blogs and bloggers can draw attention to your blog and drive traffic to it.

15. Don't Be Shy

The most important part of the blogosphere is its community and much of your success as a blogger will be tied to your willingness to network with that community. Don't be afraid to ask questions, join conversations or just say hi and introduce yourself. Don't sit back and hope the online world will find you. Speak out and get yourself noticed. Let the blogosphere know you've arrived and have something to say!

SEO - Do You Know Enough About Page Rank?

Internet has started a rat race for those participating in the competition to try all measures in a bid to outdo the others. As you are aware that having a website is just not enough, there has to be heavy traffic influx to increase the popularity of your website. How is the popularity of a website determined? With the help of page ranking. page rank is the value given to your website that denotes the importance of a web page.

This is a system that Google has created where it gives importance to a web page if it linked with another page or it is having another webpage cast a vote for your web page. The more votes you get for your webpage the more important your page becomes. The rating of a page rank varies from 0 to 10 and if your website has a page ranking of 5 and above, it is considered to have important information and attracts more visitors.

The importance of the page rank is limited not only to enabling it to secure a rating for your webpage but is also a parameter to check the quality of the websites that provides links. Your website will have high page rank if it has a lot of good back links. If your website contains useful information devoid of any back links your website will be right below in the grading list.

When Google positions your page on the topmost position in the search engine results, it means your website has a high page rank and since it is ranked high the visitors will visit your site often with the thought that they will get whatever information they are looking for.

If you want to check PageRank of your website then feel free to visit PRChecker.

Ranking Well for Particular Keywords - The Wonders of SEO

If you are into online content operations, for sure, you are aiming to make your Website become one that is ranking well for particular keywords. The initiative would mainly involve search engine optimization. For people who are already familiar with the online business, the initiative is already a simple one.

If you are providing content online or are maintaining and operating a Website or a blog on your own, you should aim to make the search engine ranking of your site high. That is because as search engine rank of the site surges up, the more opportunities and chances it would have to generate income. In the world of search engine usage, ranking is what ratings are for television shows. That generally indicates the volume and number of regular online visitors. Just like in newspaper readership, a site ranking well for particular keywords is more frequently read and visited, making it attractive not just for other readers but more importantly, for prospective advertisers.

If you want to make your site and content become one that is ranking well for particular keywords, it would be helpful if you would observe and adopt he following recommended strategies.

1. Observe a healthy keyword density. About 6% to 10% keyword density if most advisable. Lowering than that, the site would be weak in keyword and search engine optimization. Likewise, more than that, the overall quality and readability could be compromised, also leading to possibly lower readership. Keyword stuffing is not an advisable and likely practice in the business.

2. Making the site ranking well for particular keywords can be achieved by interlinking with other sites. There are ethical agreements you can enter with other online businesses that would lead to a mutual or symbiotic partnership. In this scheme, you would agree to promote and include links to other Websites in your own site. In return, the Websites also would run within their pages interlinks that would redirect readers into your site. The strategy has been proven to be effective.

3. Use search engine optimization techniques. You could hire services of professional search engine optimizers if you are not too familiar with the schemes. It could cost quite a sum, but in the long run, you would definitely realize the advantage and edge provided by the practice.

Making the site take a ranking well for particular keywords surely would boost and bolster the overall performance and profitability of your online endeavor.

Make Money From Google Adsense

Introduction

There are many ways to make money using the internet, and one excellent source of passive income is to own high traffic websites which are monetized using Google Adsense. There are basically two ways of building such sites:

1. Find thousands of keywords related to a particular topic and use an automated page generating program to build a website consisting of thousands of almost identical pages, with each page being optimized for one keyword and including your Google Adsense code.

The idea being when a person searching for information on a search engine ends up at your website, the only thing of any use to them is the list of Google ads which lead to other websites. When they click on one of the ads, you earn a small commission.

The major problem with going this route is the search engines hate these websites and drop them as soon as they find them. Because there is no useful content on any of the web pages, people also really hate them and report them as soon as they find them. The search engines don’t hang around and drop them
immediately. This means your carefully created website has an extremely short life span, and so you have to make hundreds of these web sites to make any real income. As soon as a website is dropped you have to buy another domain name and put the site back up under another name.

2. Find popular keywords related to a particular topic, which have little competition, and build content websites around them which are designed to be informative and supply useful content to human web visitors. The ideal scenario being that visitors find your content so useful they bookmark the pages to return to read more. At some point the reader will leave your site and through carefully positioned Google Adsense code on each web page, will put money in your pocket...

This report will concentrate on this second method and show you how to quickly build a content website which is rapidly indexed by the search engines gets good rankings and as a result earns you a passive income month after month.

I/ Locate Money Making Private Label Rights Content

One of the most difficult parts of building any content website is writing the content; it’s a laborious task. Hours of research followed by hours of writing (or typing). So why bother doing it at all?

Are you aware that many authors who create information products also sell them with Private Label Rights? And that in most cases these rights allow you to:

− Put your name as the author and sell the product as is.
− Modify the contents to your hearts desire.
− Use the contents in other formats.
− Use the contents in newsletters or websites.

Each information product creator who sells their product with Private Label Rights will have their own ideas on how you can use their content. Sometimes they don’t make it very obvious on the sales website or in the product, so double check and make sure you have the right to use the product as content for your website. Another thing to be wary of is Private Label Rights content that is widely available; if everybody has access to content there’s a pretty good chance there are hundreds of websites using the content which will make your task of finding traffic generating keywords all the more difficult. Besides, nothing annoys a web surfer more than repeatedly coming across the same information.

Try to make sure you buy products with Private Label Rights that have been limited to only a few customers and the fewer the better – The more unique your content the more successful your website will be.


II/ Uncover Traffic Generating Keywords

The key to getting your website earning money quickly is to find keywords related to your PLR (Private Label Rights) content that people regularly type into search engines, but for which there is not much competition.

All it takes is a bit of concerted effort using the proper tools… For the small cost of using it, WordTracker is the most powerful keyword research tool available on the internet, and the accurate data it produces is vital for your website’s success.

Using WordTracker you need to uncover these three important bits of information:

1. What keywords related to your PLR content are people typing into search engines?

2. How many searches are conducted for these keywords each month? If you are trying to get this information using free research utilities, the first thing you are going to notice is the huge discrepancy between their search results and WordTracker’s results. This is because the method WordTracker uses to get its search results tends to make the information much closer to reality than the methods the others use.

3. How many competing web pages for each keyword are there in Google? Why Google? Because nearly everybody tries to get their web pages indexed by Google so if there’s not much competition in Google, chances are there’s going to be less competition on any of the other search engines.

During the keyword research phase it’s a good idea to get rid of keywords which are included within other keyword phrases. For example, let’s assume you conducted keyword research on the topic “diamond jewelry” and among others these 3 keywords were part of your Wordtracker results:

− Diamond
− Diamond Ring
− 3 Stone Diamond Ring

The first keyword “Diamond” is present in all three phrases, so you can delete it leaving:

− Diamond Ring
− 3 Stone Diamond Ring

The keyword “Diamond Ring” is present in both, so you can delete it leaving:

− 3 Stone diamond Ring

This is the keyword phrase for which you will create a web page. Depending on how well your website is ranked in the search engines, a search for any of the three phrases will display the results for the 3 Stone Diamond Ring web page.

Why must you do this? There are many reasons "why", but two of the most important points to consider are:

1. Of the three keyword phrases there will be much less competition for “3 Stone Diamond Ring” and you have a much better chance of getting a high search engine ranking for a web page built around that keyword phrase.

Granted the traffic for that keyword is the lowest of the three, but optimizing your web page around this keyword gives you a much better chance of getting traffic as soon as your page is indexed by the search engines.

Part of your promotion efforts should include an aggressive linking campaign, and as soon as this kicks in you will get better rankings for the more competitive keywords and start receiving traffic from those keywords.

2. It’s a real pain trying to create content for two or three almost identical keywords and unless you’re careful, the resulting pages will be far too similar for the search engine’s liking. The programming they use to rank your website will penalize any pages that are too similar and they will be dropped (i.e. they will never be included in any results).


III/ How to Build Your Adsense Website

There is no "best way" to build a website that uses Google Adsense to earn money... The best way in your particular circumstances can only be found by testing various different ideas and choosing the most profitable. Obviously you need a starting point and so here are a few ideas to get you going:

3.1. Select the best keywords and make website map

There are three ways of getting visitors to your website, and the method you choose has a great bearing on which keywords you should select for building your website:

− Pay for your website traffic: You could purchase links on a highly trafficked web page or you could set up a
pay per click campaign on those search engines which offer them. If you go this route you don’t need to worry about which keywords you use at all, but you’d better know how to set up an effective pay per click campaign.

− Use Low competition keywords and simple SEO: If you aren’t interested in paying for traffic and don’t have the time to pursue an aggressive linking campaign, your best option is to use low competition keywords and simple website search engine optimization. When choosing your keywords, bear in mind that most low competition keywords are also low traffic keywords, and you will need roughly 100 visitors per day to a webpage to earn $5.00 from the Google Adsense ads (this is a ballpark figure to help you choose keywords with enough traffic, by the very nature of the internet, some web pages will do better, some worse and there will even be those that don’t earn a thing).

− Use High competition keywords, simple SEO and aggressive linking: In general, the more links you have pointing to a web page from other websites, the higher it will rank in a search engine for the keywords the web page is based on. By pursuing an aggressive reciprocal linking campaign, it is quite possible to get
top search engine rankings for keywords which have a fair amount of competition. In fact some webmasters have managed to get top 10 rankings for some of the most competitive keywords, but their incoming links number in the thousands requiring a huge effort.

The bottom line is the more competitive the keyword you choose, the more aggressive your reciprocal linking campaign will have to be. There is another massive benefit from an aggressive reciprocal linking campaign… You will receive considerable traffic from people clicking on the links that you place in the link directories of other websites. Don't discount the value of these links − for quite some time you'll get more traffic from these links than from the search engines.

3.2. Prepare a website template.

Using a template will considerably increase the speed it takes to put your website together. Here are a few tips for preparing a template which will maximize your Google Adsense earnings:

− Make minimal use of graphics, a simple header graphic is all you need.

− Placing your Adsense ads down the left hand side of your webpage, your content in the middle and your menu either on the right hand side or on the bottom of the page will earn a pretty respectable Adsense income.

− Use the following place tags in your template to indicate where to place your content:

< !−− Content Start −− >

< !−− Content End −− >

− Use a simple text based menu. Search engines find it difficult to read graphic based links. The menu links should be text based and include your keyword phrases.

To make a website map, simply take your list of chosen keywords and place them into the most logical order possible − Look at it from the viewpoint of somebody searching for information.


3.3. Choose content for each web page

The content on a website that uses Google Adsense for revenue serves two main purposes:

− It determines which Adsense ads will be displayed... If you optimize each web page for a particular keyword and use content to support the keyword, Google Adsense will display ads which are exactly the same as the theme of the page. If you choose keywords that have a high value on pay per click search engines, chances are you will earn a pretty good income from each Adsense ad clicked on your web pages.

− It must be just good enough to keep your visitors from reporting your site to the search engines as spam, but not so good that your visitor avidly reads the page, maybe clicks to a few more pages to read them and then closes the browser window when they are finished. The primary objective of each web page is to get your visitor to click on an Adsense ad so they can get more information. Remember this: you only get paid when they click on an Adsense ad. If your website earns you a reasonable Adsense income and also gets a few bookmarks every month, you've got the balance right.

If you have decided to target many keywords by creating a large number of pages, you may be limited by the amount of private label rights content you have. All you have to do in this case is create each page using paraphrased content from the e−book and a related article from any of the major article directories, e.g. www.goarticles.com or www.ezinearticles.com

You will have to introduce each article with some text which includes your keywords, just make it sound natural.

You could place another Google Adsense block between the paraphrased PLR content and the articles. The only purpose of the articles is to pad out your content to keep both the search engines and your website visitors happy.

3.4. Optimize your web pages for the search engines

These are no black secrets involved in search engine optimization… All you need to do is employ a few simple, sensible tips when building each web page, and these are to use your keyword phrase as follows:

1) Once in the < title > < /title > tags
2) Once in the description meta tags
3) Once in the keywords meta tags
4) Once in the < h1 > </h1 > header tags
5) Twice in the first paragraph, with the first being in the first sentence and one of them being in bold letters (< b > < /b > tags).
6) At least once in each following paragraph.
7) Once in an < img alt=”” > tag

Don’t overdo it; you’ve got nothing to gain by repeating your keyword phrase too many times. All you are doing is making absolutely certain that the search engines know exactly what your web page is all about.

A simple test for this is to check what Google Adsense ads are displayed when you view the web page online (you might have to refresh the page the first time you view it before the ads show). If the ad content matches the theme of the web page you’ve got it right.


IV/ How to Get Your Website Online

There are two things you need to do before you can upload your website:

4.1. Choose a good domain name

The most obvious point is your domain name needs to be related to your website theme, and choosing a domain name that has your most generic keyword phrase is going to depend on availability. In the example we used earlier for choosing keywords, we had these 3 keywords:

− Diamond
− Diamond Ring
− 3 Stone Diamond Ring

A quick check on GoDaddy (one of the cheapest domain name registrars online) revealed that diamond.com and diamond−ring.com were not available, but 3−stone−diamond−ring.com was available. The only problem being it’s not all that inspiring and it’s quite limiting in terms of a website theme. When settling on a domain for your website, try all the combinations you possibly can, bearing in mind the following:

− Separating the words with a hyphen makes the domain easier to read. There’s two parts to optimizing your site for the search engines:

* The domain must mean something to the search engines and be related to your website theme.
* After all that hard work getting your website into the top 10 search results there’s no point putting the surfer off with a crappy domain name − You want a domain name that’s easy to read.

− No matter how readable your domain name is, to make sure it gets the surfer’s attention it better scream “click me” and to do that it needs to offer the surfer an implied benefit, like saving money, for example: Affordable−Diamond−Rings.com – which as it happened was available when I wrote this.

“OK, OK Affordable−Diamond−Rings.com is not the loudest screamer on the block”, but you get the idea – use an implied benefit in the domain to get the surfers interest. If your domain name is interesting, the surfer will click your listing (out of curiosity more than anything else) which sends them to a page with good content and once they’ve finished reading that you want them to leave your page via an Adsense ad.

4.2. Choose a good host

Hosting is not the big bad problem it was a few years ago. The rapid advancements in technology have made it readily available, more reliable and it’s getting cheaper every year.

For any website that earns money from Google Adsense ads, your biggest issue is going to be one of cost. You’re not going to stop at one website… You’re going to build plenty of them; after all they only take a day or two to build and upload, and can be earning an income within days if you’ve chosen good keywords, but certainly within a few weeks if you pursue an aggressive linking campaign.

The issue then is how many domains can you host on one hosting account?

Sure, you need to make sure the hosting company has generator backup in case of power outages and redundant backup systems so that in the event of an Internet connection interruption, an alternate Internet connection takes over. You also need to make sure you have adequate disk space and bandwidth, but the thing to remember with Adsense sites is you aren’t letting people download big files; your traffic is just people visiting your websites and if you use the minimum of graphics and keep your logos small, your website won’t use much bandwidth at all. Because most websites don't take up a lot of resources, some web hosts have decided to offer top quality hosting packages which allow unlimited domains, for example the ProLogic package from StartLogic. When you consider that most hosting costs anywhere between $3.95 to $7.50 per website per month you don't have to be a genius at math to realize hosting is a substantial cost, and unlimited domain hosting is the way to go.


V/ Bait The Search Engines

All it takes to get a search engine to your website is a link from another website that has already been indexed. The more popular the website, the quicker the search engines will come visiting. For example, a text link on a Google PR7 website will get your site indexed on the same day, but that one way PR7 link is going to cost you a lot. Another way is the blog and ping method, although this has been so abused that it’s not quite as quick as before. It does have one major advantage… You can link to every page on your website from a blog and ping the search engines with these details. By blogging and pinging it’s possible to get all your pages indexed quicker than with other methods.

No matter what method you use, it takes time to get every page of your website indexed by all the major search engines… For the most part it doesn’t happen in one or two days like some sales hype suggests. So your options are:

1. Purchase text links (which point back to your web pages) on a popular website − A popular website will have a high Google PR.

2. Place a link back to your website from one of your own indexed web pages.

3. Learn how to start a blog and create content with links back to your website then ping the major search engines with your blog details.

4. Start an aggressive reciprocal linking campaign.


VI/ Explode Your Website’s Traffic

The amount of money you earn from the Google Adsense ads displayed on any of your websites is dependent on many factors, but one of the most influential is the amount of traffic your websites receive. The more traffic, the more money you earn… It is possible to set up pay per click advertising campaigns which send traffic to your websites and make a profit on the Adsense revenue. It may be possible, but it’s not easy to find the right combination of cheap pay per click keywords and the best content for displaying high paying Adsense ads.

By far the best method to increase your website traffic is to get hundreds or preferably thousands of links pointing back to your website which serves you in two ways:

1. The increased number of links improves your website’s standing in the eyes of the search engines and your pages rank higher.

2. You will get people visiting your website from clicking these links.

Two very effective ways of getting thousands of links pointing back to your website are:

1. As mentioned many times in this report, set up an aggressive reciprocal linking campaign; get your link into as many reciprocal link directories as you can. It is very important to ensure these directories are categorized, not only to facilitate easy searching but your search engine optimization gets a slight boost if your link appears on a page with links of similar themes.

Don't waste time creating a link directory which you have to manually update, use a reciprocal linking script to automate many of the routine admin tasks which would otherwise take up hours of your valuable time. Make sure the linking script regularly checks that all reciprocal links in your directory are active and suspends any inactive links.

2. Write short 400 word articles from your PLR content, include a link to your website in a resource box at the bottom of each article and submit them to as many article directories as you can. Using a low cost submission service like Article Marketer will save you not hours, but days of effort. These articles ultimately find their way onto hundreds of content websites and will substantially increase the number of links back to your website.

The point to remember here is that your articles will only be accepted into an article directory or for inclusion into a website if they are easy to read and make sense. If you write and submit junk they will be rejected. You goal is to write and submit at least seven articles the first week and then a minimum of two articles per month. Don't underestimate the power of well written articles for generating both links and traffic to your websites.


Conclusion

Here is a strategy to use to when setting up your Adsense sites:

1. Use WordTracker to research keywords for the theme of your websites.

2. Create a website template.

3. Prepare a web page for each keyword using simple search engine optimization and the Private Label Rights content.

4. Purchase inexpensive attention−catching domain names from Godaddy.com .

5. Purchase the ProLogic package from StartLogic Hosting so you only ever have to pay one small monthly hosting fee no matter how many domains you host.

6. Upload your websites.

7. Get one good link back to your websites from a web page that has already been indexed.

8. Install a reciprocal linking script, e.g. this script from Duncan Carver.

9. Pursue an aggressive linking campaign for each website using both reciprocal links and automatic submissions to article directories through Article Marketer.

10. As your Google Adsense revenue increases, you can either employ someone to manage your reciprocal linking campaigns or you can reduce the reciprocal linking campaigns in favor of purchasing text links back to your websites. Just make sure these are on high traffic websites as you want both the link for search
engine rankings, and the traffic from people clicking on the link.

11. Repeat for the next months PLR products (omit step 5 from now on – you only have to
set up StartLogic Hosting once).

10 Untold Traffic Secrets

Once upon a time on the web, any traffic was good traffic. If you got a lot of traffic, you could make money somehow – by selling products, selling advertising, or selling impressions. With big traffic, you were riding high. You were the proud owner of some very valuable Internet real estate.

Back in the old days, even if you didn’t get a lot of traffic, you could reasonably expect one-half to one percent of your visitors to do SOMETHING when they got to your site. They’d either buy something, click on a banner, sign up for your opt-in list, or click on an advertiser’s link.

But those glory days are gone. The last couple of years have shown that any old traffic is not only worthless, it can cost you money. There’s nothing like racking up bandwidth charges month after month without seeing a single affiliate commission check. It’s sad but true: in theory, your web site could have a phenomenally high Google page rank, be one of Alexa’s top sites, get half a million visitors a month… and lose money.

There’s only one kind of traffic worth a pixel in today’s Internet marketplace. TARGETED TRAFFIC.

So that’s what this Affiliate Classroom Special Report is all about: 10 powerful and underutilized ways to generate TARGETED traffic. As you’ll discover, many of these tips are not for marketing wimps. A few are free. But most require at least a minimal cash investment. And they all require you to develop a rare but powerful online business skill – imagination. Yes, you’ll have to wrap your brain around your site topic and the products you’re trying to sell. That’s what “targeting” requires – being selective. You have to know not only the kind of visitors you want, but the kind of visitors you DON’T want.

1 – Paying For Links

The reciprocal link principle is simple – find websites with good rankings and plenty of traffic, and trade links with them. But when you’re just starting out, why should a big important site give a little upstart like you any kind of link at all?

There’s only one way to find out – ASK. It helps if you have some kind of relationship with the site owner. But even if you don’t, you can sometimes use the time-honored principle of bribery to get a link from a well-ranked site.

Ask for a link. If you get turned down, say “Would you consider linking to me for $100?” You’d be surprised at how many webmasters will take you up on your offer!

This technique works best with privately owned sites that rank in the top 10 for targeted keywords in niche markets. There’s no point in trying to get a link from Kiplinger’s or Newsweek’s or Vogue’s web site. But if you’re selling weight loss products, and $50 will buy you a link from a small web site that’s ranked #1 for “low-carb dessert recipes,” you’re probably better off buying that link than buying $50 of PPC advertising. This also can’t hurt your own search engine ranking.

Make sure you have a simple written agreement about exactly what the link will say (you want your keywords in it) and the duration of the link – 6 months, a year, forever, etc.

A similar technique involves finding all the sites that link to your competitors, and offering them a cash incentive to add your link to their site. You can find these sites by going to Google and typing in “link:[your-competitors-link]".

------------------------------

2 - Get Listed On Coupon And Special Offer Sites


There are dozens of special offer, coupon, and rebate sites online today. Simply go to Google and type in “coupon sites” and you’ll see what we mean. “Coupon” is searched at least a few hundred thousand times a month. Some smart folks are getting a lot of traffic with simple sites that are just lists of links to various sites with special offers.

How can this help YOU get targeted traffic? The people who visit these sites are looking for a discount, a deal, a freebie, a rebate, or a bargain. If you can offer some kind of special bonus – whether it’s a cash rebate, a physical or digital product, or a service – you can ask to be included on these sites.

As long as you can come up with an offer that qualifies, you’ll get accepted. If you wish, you can create several web pages, each with a slightly different special offer, and see what makes the most sales.

Very few affiliate marketers are taking advantage of this. Yes, it does mean you have to create a little something extra for the people who buy through these sites. You’ll have to track their purchases. But considering that you’ll also be getting incoming links from some very highly ranked web sites, it’s worth the little bit of extra work.


------------------------------

3 – Old Fashioned Business Networking

Yes, even though we’re all buried in Spam, it’s still possible to make new business contacts online. The recent JV (Joint Venture) craze reflects the simple principle that in the end, people do business with PEOPLE – not with pixels, bits, and bytes.

Old fashioned networking is still alive and well online. And it’s the best method for getting some good exposure if you’re just starting out and have no money for marketing. By building strong business relationships, you’ll soon have other marketers offering to link to you, publish your articles, write about your site in their newsletter, and even offer you free advertising.

One of the best places to make business contacts in your field is in forums. For example, if you’ve started an affiliate web site that sells specialty dog training devices, hang out in the many dog-related forums and newsgroups. But instead of trying to help end consumers so they’ll visit your site, make friends with experts in related fields. In this case pet sitters, groomers, dog trainers, veterinary assistants, and even animal behaviorists can all be excellent contacts.

As with all business networking, look for ways to help your colleagues. If they have their own site, offer them a link on yours. If they have an opt-in list, perhaps you can set up a special web page, and give them a rebate on any commissions you make. If they write their own articles, perhaps you can turn them into a mini-ebook and offer it to all your visitors. And there’s no reason you can’t be proactive, and send an email to non-competitors – or even competitors – whose sites you admire. You don’t have to consider every competitor your enemy. In a future special report we’ll explain exactly how you can create powerful partnerships with your competitors. But for now, simply look for opportunities to be helpful.

One easy way to help – provided you do it diplomatically – is to point out a problem on someone’s site or in their ezine. If you find a broken link or some other error, drop them a note. Most webmasters WANT to know if a link suddenly stops working or if their database is generating internal server errors.

Another way to make powerful friends online is to read your Spam. That’s because ALL online merchants want to know if someone is promoting their affiliate product via Spam. It’s not just the Spammer who can suffer some stiff legal penalties – they can too. So if you see someone’s ebook or software being sold via Spam, write to them and let them know. Make sure you keep the original Spam, and send it to them as an attachment (not forwarded) so they receive all the headers intact.

How can networking help get you targeted traffic? If you make 20 strong, personal, one-on-one business contacts every month, at least five of them will end up sending you traffic. Somehow, someday, they’ll start pushing the right kinds of visitors to you.

It might be by linking to you. They may mention your site in a viral ebook or one of their articles. They might want to do a joint venture or partner on a money making project. They might do all these things – and many more. Yes, it’s old fashioned. It’s not autopilot. It’s not passive. But networking costs you nothing except time – and can be worth gold in the long term.


------------------------------

4 – Exploit The Handheld Market

This one is outrageously simple, yet almost completely overlooked. Next time you create a viral information product of any kind – whether it’s an ebook, a special report, a white paper, a case study, or a compilation of articles – get it formatted for handhelds.

There are dozens – perhaps even hundreds – of sites that offer free downloads for handhelds. And most handheld users are always on the lookout for something to read on that little screen.

It will cost less than $50 to pay someone from Guru.com, Elance.com, or Scriptlance.com to format your product for the handheld market. And with over 11 million handheld users out there, that’s a lot of potential viral traffic for your site.


------------------------------

5 – Combine Surveys and Polls With PPC


You probably already know that surveys are excellent for finding out what your target market wants. But if combined with low cost, quick and dirty Google PPC, surveys can also send lots of targeted prospects to
your site every month.

First, do some keyword research. You’ll need to find keywords and keyphrases that are related to your survey topic but don’t have too many Google campaigns running. You can do this very quickly with a tool like WordTracker, since it will show you exactly how many Google campaigns are running for various keywords at any given time.

Second, sign up for an inexpensive survey service like Survey Monkey. We don’t recommend free survey services, since they tend to limit the number of participants, and the whole point is to get as many people as possible to take your survey. Now design a survey that will appeal to your target market.

Next, come up with an incentive for people to take your survey. Make it a download, so you can capture the prospect’s email address. And make it viral. Even a simple white paper can be viral. You don’t necessarily have to cram it with affiliate links. Just make sure your URL is conspicuously listed on every page.

Now put up a simple web page that introduces people to the survey topic, offers the incentive, asks for an email address where you can send the download link and the survey results, and links to the survey. Finally, use at least a dozen of the keywords your researched earlier to set up Google Adwords campaigns advertising your survey. Make sure the ad uses your keyword, and that it mentions the incentive. “Take this photography survey, get a free gift.” You don’t have to be the #1 ad. You can even be on the second or third page.

The point is to capture a targeted prospect’s contact information for a very small investment. But there are some additional serious fringe benefits in addition to traffic.

First, you’ll collect valuable information on what your prospects are looking for. Second, you’ll have their permission to contact them with the survey results and the download link for the thank you gift. And third, if you make that free gift a viral report, you’ll eventually get more targeted traffic. Nice!

You can do a variation of this with a simple one question poll. Everything else is the same, except you’ll want to come up with an intriguing question for the poll – something that will pique people’s curiosity about the results.

And if you want to pass on the free report incentive and try something different, why not enter every participant in a drawing for a valuable prize of tangible goods? Make it a prize with a high perceived value, worth at least $100. Now you have an excuse to collect snail mail addresses of your targeted visitors – a perfect way to build an in-house direct mail list, so you can take advantage of the ideas in #10 of this report.


------------------------------

6 – New Fashioned Link Strategies


It’s been true since the birth of the World Wide Web: people like pages of useful links. They’ll bookmark them and return to them. And today, because links are so important to search engine rank, link pages should be part of every targeted traffic plan.

Old fashioned link pages are the ones you build by hand, painstakingly, over many months and years. These are annotated links pages that include not only a URL, but a brief description of the site and its contents. These “handmade” link pages take a lot of time and a lot of effort. Frankly, they are slowly dying out on the web.

But thanks to web-based services and innovative software, you can build useful pages of links while enjoying all the search engine benefits – and without all that painstaking labor. Every serious affiliate marketer should think about creative ways to take advantage of these “new fashioned” link strategies.

One simple new fashioned strategy is to set up a links page through a service like Bravenet. With this type of page, webmasters fill in a form to “apply” for a reciprocal link with you. On this page, you can explain that the application is subject to review, and that you will only link to them if they’ve ALREADY linked to you.

You can also include required text for the link they give you – you definitely want your keywords or your “brand name’ in that link! And you can even set up a response email, which can be customized. This response email should ask everyone who applies to send you the full URL of the page where they’ve got your link.

But don’t stop there. Once a webmaster sends you the URL where your link appears, submit that link to Google. Just go to www.google.com/addurl.html, fill in the form, and add the page with your link. Submit it to any other relevant search engine or directory. You want those search engines to know that page exists so they can spider it as fast as possible.

After you’ve accepted the other webmaster’s link, it will get added to your custom link page. So make sure your links page gets added to your site map. In fact, make sure you link to it from EVERY page of your site.


------------------------------

7 – Give Away Unrestricted Resale and Reprint Rights

This traffic idea is simple, obvious, and still enormously underutilized. The idea is simple:

• Create short ebooks or special reports on highly specialized topics that would be appeal to your target market.
• Add your URL to every page in a header or footer, as well as on the title page and at the end of the book.
• Then give away unrestricted, unlimited reprint and resale rights to the ebook for FREE.

“Wait,” you say, “hasn’t this been done before?” Yes, to a certain extent. It’s
been exploited by some infoproduct creators, especially the how-to-make-money-online crowd and the motivational gurus.

But your average affiliate marketer selling hard goods, software, and services to niche markets rarely uses this idea to its full potential. Let’s look at an example.

Imagine you’ve built a killer affiliate web site that specializes in bridesmaids dresses. What kind of viral ebook could you possibly create? How about some special reports on…

• 20 extra special “finishing touches” for the bridesmaids’ face, hair, nails, lips, etc.
• The most popular colors in bridesmaids dresses for each season of the year.
• A dozen unique ideas for bridesmaids gifts.
• 10 ways to make the big day special for the bridesmaids, too.
• 100 online wedding resources (from music to Victorian weddings to tuxedos etc...)
• 50 love poems and biblical scriptures you can read at your wedding (from public domain sources).

All these viral products relate to the topic of your site. They have a high perceived value, and would make excellent bonuses, freebies, or incentives on wedding-related web sites. Most can be created with a minimum of effort. And all these topics should have a long shelf life – not a few weeks or months, but years and years.

If you tell the world that they can take these viral reports and do anything they want with them – including sell them on Ebay – you may suddenly end up giving away hundreds, even thousands of copies. Can you say “viral?”


------------------------------

8 – Combine Dumb PPC Advertising With Smart Virals


All PPC beginners make the same mistake. They “discover” a very popular keyword on a very popular topic that gets thousands of searches… but only three Google campaigns! They can barely contain their excitement as they write their ads and put in their bid for six, seven, eight, or even ten cents a click.

And low and behold, soon they start getting clicks – lots of them! They even make a few sales. Then a few more. And they breathe a sigh of relief when they see that their CTR (click through rate) is slightly above Google’s stated “acceptable” rate.

Until they get an email from Google’s Adwords Support, saying that their keyword is in danger of being disabled because the CTR isn’t high enough.

It’s upsetting, it’s frustrating, and it may not even be fair or ethical. But Google, for reasons not entirely known, will sometimes require impossibly high clickthrough rates for certain keywords. Instead of a CTR of .5%, suddenly a CTR of 8%, 10% or even 15% isn’t good enough. Emails to support, begging for guidance or clarification, prove futile. Bye-bye keyword.

It’s dumb to try and salvage campaigns based on these keywords. You tweak your ads over and over, raise your bids, and waste days trying to divine Google’s required CTR. Experienced PPC advertisers know that it’s almost impossible to keep one of these campaigns alive once Google starts to raise the stakes.

However, there’s a way you can grab a large amount of targeted traffic, if only for a limited time, by intentionally running these dumb campaigns. It won’t work for every niche, since these types of keywords aren’t common to all topics. And if you suddenly find yourself struggling with a campaign like this, pause it long enough to put this strategy in place.

First, you’ve got to locate a fairly general keyword that gets a lot of searches but has fewer than 10 Google campaigns. Software like WordTracker is useful for this, but it will still take some digging. The best
way to locate a good candidate is to run WordTracker and searches on extremely broad terms. The keyword “book,” for example, only has a handful of Google campaigns running at any given time, yet is searched over a MILLION times a month. “Kelly blue book” is the same way.

Next, create an unlimited, unrestricted reprint and resale rights infoproduct (see #7 above) that might appeal to people who search on a term like “Kelly bluebook.” Chances are, these folks are either buying or selling a used car. So develop an ebook of resources, tips, warnings, or other useful information on buying or selling used cars. Make sure the information will have a long shelf life.

Then run a “dumb” Google campaign on “Kelly blue book,” offering your report for free. Make sure the landing page states boldly, in no uncertain terms, that people can sell or give this book away anywhere and everywhere – even on Ebay.

Now sit back and watch the traffic come in. Google probably won’t let that campaign run for very long – at least not at .06 a click, and probably not at 20 times that. But with a little luck, you’ll probably be able to give away at least a hundred ebooks before Google disables the keyword. Even if you gave away only 20, it cost you only a few bucks.

And you never know what kind of future life that viral report will have. It may become a free bonus in a best selling package. It may end up being distributed on hundreds of car sites all over the web. Some online marketer may feature it as a brilliant example of viral marketing. It may even get talked about in a car magazine.


------------------------------

9 – Get Links on Thank You and Confirmation Pages


Another technique available to almost everyone, but exploited by a mere few. You probably already know about putting links to your site or products on your Thank You pages and Confirmation pages. You may even put links to specific affiliate products on these pages. But have you ever considered approaching OTHER sites and asking for a link on THEIR Confirmation and Thank You pages? You may be surprised at how many webmasters of specialized content sites would be delighted to offer you space on one of these pages – especially if you offer them an incentive, like a cash payment, a plug in your ezine, or a free sample of your product.

A variation of this involves “404 Error” pages. If you find a site that you feel could send you good, targeted traffic, ask if they’d like a sample of your product in return for letting you create a custom 404 error page for them. It can be a simple page with just a few links: one back to their home page, one to yours, and one to some kind of special discount offer or other incentive on your site.

This technique works best with sites that are noncommercial in nature. There are thousands of sites, created and maintained by enthusiasts of all sorts, that aren’t designed to make money. Many blogs fit into this category. They may be about a hobby, a religion, a sport, or an idea. They may exist just for fun. They may be a venue for someone’s original stories or poetry.

But if their owners have access to their server, and create their own pages, you may be able to “bribe” them into sending you targeted traffic by sharing a bit of unused space with your links or offers.


------------------------------

10 - Offline Advertising


Have you ever wondered why some of the biggest online businesses spend huge sums on direct mail, as well as TV, magazine, radio, and newspaper advertising? Is it because they have money to burn?

No, it’s because mass media ads and direct mail can actually draw highly targeted visitors – prospects who are ready to buy. Those big companies with deep pockets use mass media ads to create indelible name
recognition in the public’s mind. After branding their company into our consciousness, they use direct mail techniques such as postcard mailings to send offers to hand-picked prospects who are most likely to make a purchase soon.

It’s strange, but very few online marketers have discovered the power of direct mail. A handful have learned to use classified advertising – the distant cousin of expensive mass media advertising. But almost none are using other forms of offline ads. This can also give you an enormous edge. If you make your living from affiliate programs and related upsells, you can bet that your competition isn’t doing any sort of offline advertising. If you think offline advertising is too expensive, think again. Because PPC has become so popular, the cost of high quality online advertising is rising dramatically. It’s common for a PPC campaign in a competitive field to cost $1 or more per click – sometimes much more. And you don’t even know if those clicks are coming from real prospects or your competitors’ itchy fingers.

In fact, today PPC can actually end up costing as much, or more, than direct mail on a cost per sale basis. So do the math before you write off direct mail. A mailing of custom color postcards, for example, can definitely cost less than $3 each to print and mail, and that includes the mailing list.

More importantly, you must think about your projected COST PER SALE when comparing PPC and direct mail. Clicks may be cheap, but customers may not. All traffic – whether targeted or not – is made up of people. If these “clickers” are unlikely to be buyers, you’ll lose money on PPC no matter how cheap the clicks are.

For highly competitive keywords you can easily end up paying over $3 per click if you want to be on the first page of Google. If you stop and consider WHO you’re selling to, the direct mail campaign may be a better investment. You can target exactly the sort of person you want, with just the right demographics, and tell them to go to your site where you’ll show them an irresistible offer.

What about classifieds? With classified print advertising, you can advertise your URL in literally hundreds of small daily newspapers for ridiculously small amounts per ad. And classified ads in major national niche magazines can be very affordable – and usually pull extremely well.

These days, television ads may not even be out of your reach. If you enjoy the spotlight, you can purchase "leased access" time on local U.S. cable television. By Federal Law, every local cable station must allow the general public to purchase time on their channel, in blocks of 30 minutes. Since the costs are also controlled by law, even in large metropolitan areas a 30-minute segment may cost as little as $200.

These days, $200 won’t buy you much PPC in a competitive field like mortgages or debt management. You don’t even have to be selling to a local market to make a television segment pay. As long as you’ve got an easy-to-remember URL, put a special television offer page on your site. Then offer a high value upsell free to the first 20 people who respond to the “TV special.” Finally, don’t forget other incredibly simple offline methods of getting your URL out there. Instead of a traditional business card, print several thousand with your URL in huge letters and leave them anywhere relevant. Don’t forget pencils and pens, letter openers and coasters, calendars and T-shirts… Remember, you don’t need a bricks and mortar location to use offline advertising. Amazon, Gateway, Dell, AOL, and many other online businesses spend millions on offline promotional methods. That’s what’s made their brands and URLs famous.

You can do the same on a much smaller scale. It’s a big offline world. Plenty of people spend more time offline and on. Open your mind to using offline marketing to get your message in front of the RIGHT people. That way you can get your URL in front of targeted prospects. And when they visit your site, they’ve actually made a conscious decision to do so.

Why should I submit my site to web directories?

Web directories essentially serve as a catalog of links sorted by relevant topics. In the earlier days, when search engines weren’t as popular, directories served as the main method of finding relevant sites. But nowadays, search engines like Google and Yahoo have taken over and serve as the main medium that connects users with what they’re looking for.

So why should you even consider submitting your site to the directories, especially when not many people use them any more?

There are a few answers to this question:

To get your website indexed

Search engines like Google and Yahoo send out crawlers (spiders) to search the web for new sites that come up everyday. If you have a new site and you want search engines to know of its existence, then there couldn’t be an easier and better way to let a search engine know than having it find your site through links in various directories.

One way links -> Improvement in Search Engine Rankings

Most directories provide one way links, which is beneficial from the SEO aspect of your site. Search engines give importance to the number of inbound links to your site when ranking it for a given position during search and one way links are thought to be valued more than reciprocal links (links exchanged with other sites). Thus, directory links can help give a boost to your SEO efforts.

Targeting specific keywords / phrases

Most directories allow you to provide a link with keywords describing your site. It’s not easy getting links to your site with the keywords you want and directories serve as the easiest medium for getting such links. Getting links with targeted keywords / phrases can have search engines favoring your site over others when ranking for the given terms.

Traffic (not such a benefit with most directories)

There aren’t many directories that could boast of providing your site with traffic that would number in the hundreds per day but there are a few directories that are known to give some traffic (albeit very little) to sites in certain categories.

Most directories are free to submit to

Given the benefits and most directories being free to submit to, it makes business sense to having your site listed in as many SEO friendly directories as possible. After all, you don’t lose anything for doing so.

Submitting to directories can be a time-consuming process though and finding the right directories to submit can take quite a bit of effort. To save yourself the trouble, you may use directory submission services like ours to get your site submitted to all the top quality SEO friendly directories out there. We have a sizeable team of directory submitters who are well-trained in submitting to web directories.

Need search engine traffic? Typos is your solution!

Typos are a great way to get additional search engine traffic for your keywords. We’re all only human and we make mistakes. And we do them when we search on google, yahoo or other search engines. And we can use this knowledge when we make a website.

For example: We’re selling Blogger Templates. It’s quite easy to make a mistake here, for example leave out a letter, double the letter, skip a space etc. And now you get a wider range of search keywords for your original one:

Skip a letter:
logger Templates
Bloger Templates
Blogger Templats
Bloggr Templates

Double letters:
BBlogger Templates
Bllogger Templates
Blogger TTemplates
Blogger TempPlates

Skip spaces:
BloggerTemplates
etc.

How can you use this in your advantage? Quite simple. Make additional pages to your original one, but use the typos on these new pages. Use them in your title, description and in your body text and in your alt tags (images).

And now people who will mistype BloggerTemplates with Bloger Templates will get to your website! And the good news is that you’ll probably rank high in the search results, because there is not such a competition with the mistyped keywords as it is with the original ones.

Website Branding

Branding livestock goes back to around 2700 B.C. Even paintings in the tombs of Egyptians show hieroglyphs of people branding oxen. This branding confirmed the ownership of the livestock. You may not be branding livestock, but this certainly applies to your website. It needs to be brandable so people will connect your website with a product, service, or other type of value.

1. Branding With A Domain

Have a domain which describes the name of your business as best as possible. Shorter domains are easier to remember. People can return to your website if the name is catchy and memorable. Avoid long domain names if possible, which detracts from the professionalism of your business.

2. Create A Logo Thats Memorable

Make or have someone create a logo for you. This is also key for branding yourself. Remember, A picture is worth a thousand words. A logo, or image on your website will help connect customers, as well as potential customers with what your website is selling or promoting. You want to brand an image in peoples minds so they think of your business first when there is a service or product they need, or that their friends need.

3. Have A User Friendly Website

Make your navigation simple and easy to use. A lot of people don’t realize that the user friendliness of a site is a part of branding. When you go to a website that is disorderly as well as looking and feeling complicated, would you rather stay and figure it out or find another resource that is simple and user friendly? If your website is simple and easy to use to purchase something, then people will come to you first over your competitors.

4. Coin A Phrase

A motto is another great thing to be known by. Almost every large company out there that you can think of has a motto. If you have a Logo for your website, then it might be a good idea to create a motto that is easy to remember as well.

5. Set Yourself Apart And Specialize

Setting yourself APART from the rest really encompasses everything from the last 4 tips. Make sure to be different from your competition. Know what you want to be known for. What aspect of your company do you want people to recognize when they think of your business? If you are selling a wide variety of power tools, would you want people to recognize you as a leader in the industry of drills? That would certainly be easier as a niche than competing with larger companies which offer power tools as well.

From the last 5 tips, you can see that branding is huge! If you are starting an E-Commerce site or have one already, but are lacking the success, then this is one of those things you have to take a serious look at and ask yourself, “why would people come to my site over my competitor”. Until you think like your potential customers, you may find that your business is lacking. If you follow these tips on branding, you will be building upon something that will have a lasting effect far into the future.