Exposing Profits on the Web

In order to win the keyword war, you really only have to beat one site. I keep saying these types of things to various audiences, but no one really seems to listen. I hear people bragging about the fact that they are ranking number 5 or number 1 among “3 million” results in Google.

The truth is, that over 95% of that 3 million are sites that do not get more than a few visitors a day (at most) for that keyword. Not that it’s bad to get a few visitors per day per keyword. If your site is found for 10,000 keywords throughout the month, and you get 3 visitors per day per keyword, that translates to 30,000 visitors in a 30 day month.

Maybe it’s my computer background, or maybe it’s just that I’m cynical. I just don’t think it’s all that relevant whether there are 3 million results, or 30, for a particular keyword. My only competition is the current number one site. As I say… you only have to beat one site to be number 1!

So, how do you go about beating the current number 1 site? Well, you’d have to know what their weakness is. I have a site in my niche that has, according to Yahoo!, over 1 million pages and 40,000+ inlinks (and growing). Can I beat them? Yes, and I do. The questions are… why, and how?

Well, the why has to do with the how, but basically, it’s because they have a weakness. As I’ve said before to a number of audiences…

All other things being equal, the site with the most content wins.

All other things being equal, the site with the most optimized content wins.

All other things being equal, the site with the most inlinks wins.

All other things being equal, the site with the most optimized inlinks wins.

So, what you need to do in order to ensure that you win is build an authority site with the most optimized content and the most optimized linking campaign. If you attack each section of your site as a mini-site and attack those related keywords with tightly focused content and optimized links, you’ll probably win at some point. Optimization plus diversity plus time equals success.

Get your content up, get your links out there to as many places as possible, and do it all in an optimized fashion, and you will win.

Take this blog. I started this blog as a test of Niche Empire Generator. That test crashed and burned as NEG turned out not at all to be the product I expected it to be. I kept the blog though, at least for now. I’m using the default template, some of the plugins don’t work as advertised, I don’t even have a Google sitemap, and I don’t write my blog posts with any particular keyword density in mind. I just kind of… write. I don’t even make my titles all that optimized. It’s not even really supposed to be getting any traffic. I just spit out my thoughts here (I may reuse them elsewhere).

Yet, I added what I consider real content, and I built some links. I posted some comments on another blog and in some forums, and I started to get some traffic.

In one of my tests of the Unique Article Wizard, I decided to see if I could split my resource box links between two separate sites. So, I submitted a couple of articles and created a resource box that linked to this blog, as well as whyamirich.com. The result is that, as of this writing, I rank on the first page of Google for “viral list building.”

If you’re one of those people who thinks you’ve done everything right, only to have some cheesy site like this one beat you, now you know why. Optimized links beats content every time! Aaron wall of seobook.com says that average content beats quality content every time. I agree. Not that you shouldn’t create quality, you should. It’s just that you shouldn’t bet the farm on it.

If you think that you’re going to create quality content around a particular set of keywords and win hands down across the board, then you have been misled. There is much more to winning the keyword war than that. When in doubt, create large amounts of optimized content, backed up by many many optimized links.

I hope this article has been helpfull, and, if nothing else, has opened your eyes to possibilities that you didn’t know existed.

Skinning the Affiliate Marketing Cat

If you’re trying to make money with affiliate marketing, you may have found out that it is not as easy as some have claimed. If you’ve been using pay per click for any amount of time, you’ve realized that you can lose your shirt pretty fast if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you usually have to burn some cash up front. Often, you’ll burn that cash only to find out that the campaign you chose wasn’t for the best offer, and you’ll have to start over.

If you have a website, you may have found that getting traffic is hard work, and getting quality traffic is even harder. If you’ve been trying the affiliate marketing route and it’s not getting you where you want to go, consider this…

Allan Gardyne had a great piece of advice in one of his newsletters once. He said that success in affiliate marketing comes down to only two things. Yup, just two.

One method of affiliate marketing that Allan subscribes to involves bringing people to a content website, and then monetizing the traffic with Adsense ads and affiliate links.

In order to be successful at this, he says to do only two things every day. One, create unique content for your site. Two, get a link back to your site.

That’s it! Or is it? Well, it’s not that simple, but it’s so easy to get caught up in the complexities of how to make money on the web, that this advice really makes sense in a big way.

There are so many ways to skin the affiliate marketing cat it’s not funny. For a while, I was buying info-products left and right. Each one had some great ideas, and I learned something from almost all of them.

But if you try to chase after all these separate techniques and systems, you’ll just be chasing your tail. The 80/20 rule takes over and it just becomes totally unproductive. In addition, most of the info-marketing products hold something back. Well, actually, some of them hold a lot back. Sometimes, this is by design, and sometimes it’s simply the nature of the beast.

You NEED focus.

After a while, if you don’t get down to basics, you won’t have a viable business. All you have are a bunch of half done tasks and half baked failures that don’t amount to any real traffic, or any real money.

What you need to do is plug into systems that are already working for others. Without buying any courses, without buying any tools, and without getting distracted by anything else, plug yourself into a system. A very simple system is the one that Allan describes. Create content, and get a link.

So, if your traffic is not where it needs to be, or your visitors are not converting into cash, try this. For 30 days, focus on nothing but these two things, every day…

1. Create unique content for publication on your website. By that I mean write on-topic, keyword rich articles for the most profitable keywords in your niche.

2. Get a link back to your site. This can be from a directory, or a related website, or by submitting an article to the article directories. It could even be by blogging and pinging, and/or using trackbacks. If you can guest blog on someone else’s blog, even better.

I used to work on getting listed in directories, but I’ve found that for the most part, it doesn’t give me that much benefit. The exception might be some niche specific directories. You’ll have to decide whether you think it’s worth it in your niche.

Seriously focus on this and try this for 30 days, and your business will improve. It usually takes me two to three months to really see the effectiveness of my efforts on this, but it will come.

Tips:

1. I highly recommend submitting articles to get links. That should be your primary method of getting links back to your site.
2. Use an article for your site as the seed to write the articles to be submitted.
3. Use the Unique Article Wizard to submit your articles to the directories to ensure unique content throughout.
4. Submit to ezinearticles.com manually.
5. Rinse/repeat.

One last thought. I highly recommend that you start thinking web-centric rather than site-centric. Start thinking in terms of setting up web-based profit centers, and don’t marry yourself to any particular website, theme, or product. Do what works, and fine tune and refine other people’s working systems to suit your needs. I’ll talk more about what it means to be web-centric as opposed to site-centric in upcoming posts. For now, follow Allan’s advice for 30 days and see your results improve. Enjoy.

John Reese has just released BlogRush, the first offering from his new income.com project. It seems like it might be promsing, so I’m going to try it out and see if it brings any additional traffic.

BlogRush is a viral marketing blog “widget” that works, in some ways, like many of the viral programs out there, but has a few twists to it. If you’d like to sign up for an account and try it out on your blog, head for the BlogRush site.

You can always utilize another method of generating traffic, and this one is totally passive after you set it up. I’m going to let it run for a while and see what happens.

I love ezinarticles.com. They send me traffic every single month, and they have a great set of stats. If you’re a platinum member, they even speed up your approval time. This, of course, helps you to get indexed faster, get backlinks faster, and hopefully, moves you up in the search engines.

I love the Unique Article Wizard. They send me traffic every single month, and they have a great set of stats. They get you approved quickly, and start submitting to the directories within a day or so. This, of course, gets your unique content spread all over the Internet world fairly quickly, brings traffic, backlinks, and rankings. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

One thing I don’t like about the Wizard is that they don’t submit to ezinarticles.com. Bummer. I wish they did, but I knew this all along.

So here is what I do to get the best of both worlds. I write an article with the idea of submitting it to the article directories. I format a resource box and rewrite my article based on instructions from the Unique Article Wizard so it is ready for submission.

Since the chances that my original article will ever appear in any directory are almost zero, I could then safely place this article on my website or submit it to ezinearticles.com in its original form. But, I usually go one step further.

I don’t want content on my website to be the same as what I submit (following a recommendation from Allan Gardyne I read a while ago). So, what I do next depends upon how anxious I am to get the material up on my site. If I’m anxious, I’ll put the original, or a slight rewrite, on my website and I’ll rewrite it just a little and submit to ezinearticles.com. 

If I can wait, what I’ll do is wait until my article shows up on uberarticles.com, and grab a unique copy. Then, I modify that unique version of the article just a bit for my website (if appropriate) and post it. Sometimes, I like some things about the original better, so I use that as my guide. Then, I grab another unique version from uberarticles.com, and reformat it just a tad for ezinearticles.com and submit it.

At this point, I can now grab unique versions, or just use the original, and send them to my newsletter subscribers, and post the content on forums if I’m in the mood. So, one article, thousands of unique versions, many uses. And, I get to submit unique content to ezinearticles.com, which is something I suspect very few people are doing.

So I was looking at my stats, and I notice that before my article marketing test, I was ranking almost no where for the term cat lovers, and I also noticed that my top keyword that I targeted in my testing is now producing more page views. A lot more.

As an added bonus, I got Google to love the site. Finally! 

If you’re wondering if article marketing works as a website promotion tool, have a look at some of my stats and you’ll see that it definitely does. Since May, I’ve added very little content to the site and done very little updating of existing pages. Yet, there are many more referrers and my site has been found for many more keywords. The number of times my site has been found for my targeted keywords has increased exponentially.

This is only from submitting a few articles using the Wizard.

Here’s what we looked like in April, prior to the test. Oh, and this was during my test of another article submission service, and my traffic was going down at that time…

 Notice 748 total keywords that my site has been found for in the engines, and that the term cat illness has resulted in 70 total page views from searches for the month.

Now let’s look at August (remembering that August is not quite over as I type this)…

Wow! A 344 percent increase in total keywords, with a few days left to go in the month. And… my two target keywords are now on top. With cat illness pulling in 1024 page views, up from 70 in April. That’s over a 1462 percent increase in page views from just that one keyword.

Also notice that in April, my top keyword had 181 page views, and now my top keyword has 1024, and my number 2 keyword has 353. I believe this is quite the proof of the effect of article marketing, since that is my major method of promotion here.

Keep in mind that these numbers show the results from organic search. You’re looking at how many page views have resulted from free search per keyword. This is an addition to any other traffic generated in any other way, including from the articles themselves. I highly recommend that you use article marketing and distribute unique content, and I highly recommend that you use the Unique Article Wizard to do it for you.