Are You Choosing The Right Keywords

So most affiliate marketers know about keyword research,or so they think. It's about finding a keyword that is searched for frequently with few competing websites. Right??

Well maybe not

There is one crucial ingredient missing from this formula

The missing factor is 'Searcher's Intent'

There is no single subgroup of searchers intent that is appropriate across the whole range of methods of making money online

Let's look at the different categories of Internet users

Killing time.

These people are bored.
They are looking for nothing and hoping to find something.
They are not ready to buy anything.
This is not appropriate traffic for your persuasive, cleverly written affiliate sales pitch.
They use general keywords and are more suited for AdSense type sites

Curious Cat.

These guys are interested in finding out more information about a topic but have no interest in buying.
They just want to know.
Tend to use keywords that include 'what is' or 'definition of' or just the general keywords.
It's interesting that they often use pretty long tail keywords but this is a situation where long tail does not convert to sales
Again ideal for AdSense sites

Getting Warm.

These surfers are considering buying a product at some stage in the vague future.
They know they need to buy that new plasma screen TV but are not quite sure what brand or when or where they want to buy it.
They are still at the market research place in there minds.
Keywords used are a mixed bag.
Some general e.g plasma TV and some more specific i.e Sony plasma TV.
The buying keyword prefixes e.g 'cheap', 'discount', 'sale', 'outlet'; tend to feature here
They sometimes use highly specific product specifications and those that do are closer to moving into the credit card wielding category.
This is the crowd you want to throw your sales pitch at, especially the subgroup who are ready to make the change to buyers.
These people and the keywords they target are ideal for affiliate marketing.
They are still open to persuasion and can be converted with a good pre-sell

Credit Card Wielding.

They are ready to buy.
They know what they want, where they want to get it from and exactly how much they are willing to pay.
They tend to use the exact product name that they are looking for, specs and all.
They do not browse for long.
Because this crowd have already decided, they really are not as easy to convert as the getting warm crowd. They have decided about getting the product from Amazon for example. You really need to have a good, concise and slick sales pitch to get their attention if you are not Amazon.

Ezinearticles, Traffic and Your Website 5

My posts on ezinearticles, traffic and your website walked you through how to write an article that is sure to attract clicks and get click throughs to the link in your biobox

By now you should have submitted a handful of articles to the article directory

So far I have left out one crucial step in how to maximize your articles' traffic puling power
And it's this

Promote your ezinearticles

This is crucial
Methods I suggest include

• Social bookmarking.
• Yahoo answers
• RSS feeds. Yes, ezinearticles has RSS feeds which you can distribute to RSS directories. Start with these RSS directories
• Forum signatures Here are some suggested Forums

That's it.

All the methods above are quick and easy to implement.

You'll notice I did not mention things like link exchange and press releases

The point of using these methods to promote your ezinearticles is you do not want to spend too much effort getting links to your articles. You should be investing that effort in getting links to your money pages

How To Remove Blog Name From Page Title In Blogger

Blogger is a great free blogging platform.



It is very easy to use with a lot of code built in to the template making the more user friendly, especially for those of us not overladen with technical skills.


But this advantage could be a draw back with regards to some aspects of SEO. The problem being that when you publish a new post, the title page reads 'name of blog then title of post'.



We all know that for the purposes of search engine optimization, the keywords should appear early in your title.



So how do you stop the blog name appearing in the title of every post.


How do you change the search engine listing of your blogger posts from the format indicated by the red arrow to the format indicated by the green arrow ?










It's surprising how easy this is

• Log in to your blogger account and go to your layout page


• Click on edit HTML


• Back up your current template [there is a prompt to do this on your edit HTML page]


• Click on 'expand widget templates'


• Look near the top of the html page and find this code

• Replace it with the code below


• Make sure that before editing the code you MUST back up your template


• Once you have finished save

It takes a few days for your changes to show in your blogs title in the search engine listings. The changes occur when the search engine bots have crawled and re-cached your posts

Here's the code for those of you who want to copy and paste

<b:if cond= 'data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'><title><data:blog.title/></title><b:else/><title><data:blog.pageName/></title></b:if>

Hope this helps Andy

Bloggers Be Selective About Your Traffic Generating Campaigns

As a solo blogger it is difficult, in fact impossible to individually act on all the good ideas out there. Lets narrow it down to traffic generation
There are so many possible sources of good targeted traffic
And yet the majority of bloggers have problems generating traffic to your blogs.

We know that the methods work, and you are probably thinking 'Well if the methods work and I am implementing these methods, why am I not getting thousands of visitors to my blog a day?'
The fact that the sale of any 'increase website traffic' product is almost guaranteed some success is testament to this

The problem is each blog traffic method needs some investment of time and effort to have a significant impact on your day to day traffic
It really is not enough to have two articles here and a bunch of comments there and oh bookmarked on Digg as well.

Each of the methods mentioned above has the potential to send a torrent of traffic to your blog... if done well!

But it takes time and effort to do this
So as a solo blogger, if you are here there and everywhere, no wonder you are not getting the traffic you want

Identify a maximum of three traffic generating methods and focus on them.

• Master them
• Implement them
• Tweak them
• And analyze your results from them

You have to remember you will still be generating posts for your blog as well, so you really cannot afford to spread yourself too thin

Some methods of increasing blog traffic are

• Search engine optimization - both on page and off page
• Article marketing - Use article directories that do follow
• Pay per click- but only if you are sure of your pages ability to convert
• Forum participation - Don't spam them. Contribute useful information at the forums
• Social networking -Again focus on networking sites that have groups in your niche and preferably have do follow links
• Social Bookmarking - Build a huge reputation there and get momentum for your bookmarks

And most important post regularly

Again identify the three methods you think you can focus on and master and run with them

Thinking of building your own link farm

So I was doing a little analysis of sites topping the search engines for certain keywords and noted that some of the adsense related keywords have some dud sites in position one in Google.

I mean really poor sites. No apparent layout, just words and images tossed onto a page. Content also seemed random and the design would make your eyes hurt.

So I set out to investigate how these sites got number one ranking

Thankfully I have SEO elite so I did a search for the sites linking back to one of the pages
The beauty of SEO elite is it tells you the pages linking back and also tells you what the page rank of those pages are.

And low and behold, the site in question has about 20 backlinks that were obviously by the owner of the page. oh and those linking sites also had poor content as well

Got me thinking though. There are loads of webmasters whose websites have really good content on the internet. How is it that this poorly written site gets number one position in Google.

It's about building link farms. A link farm is a series of websites that all interlink with each other and are set up for the purpose of providing an SEO boost for certain pages

Now if you are thinking of building your self a link farm, I'll tell you this for free.... It's not worth the effort

Because of the increased competition on the internet, webmasters are having to provide better and better content to keep visitors. This means that todays average internet user has come to expect a certain standard of content and design. What drives conversions is the quality of the content on your pages

So yes the webpage I explored is number one for his or her chosen adsense related keyword term. But I wonder what the conversions are.

Also link farms can get you banned, or at least thats what I read somewhere and am certainly not about to put it to the test

Sensible Reciprocal Links

So many link directories and other webmasters ask for evidence of their link on your site before they approve your link on their site

And that's okay

Personally, I do not do reciprocal linking. Just wanted to get that off my chest. I just think one way links are the gold standard so why go for anything less.

But some of you may believe in reciprocal links.

Or are just having difficulty getting free one way links. [Although I really do not understand why when there is article marketing, but never mind]

So if you feel you absolutely must engage in some reciprocal links, be sensible about it

Compare the PR of the page on their site to that of the link page on your site.
Seems simple doesn't it.

No point in getting a low PR link to your site from a directory that has no PR and then giving them a link from your PR 3 page.

I mean who is supposed to be befitting from who?

You can easily check the PR of any website linking to you using this software

Drop the duds

Facebook Vanity URL and Niche Marketing

I am sure you are aware of the recent change in facebook which allows you to create a URL with your chosen name in it.
So instead of your facebook profile address reading something like facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxxxx where xxxxxxx is a series of numbers
You get facebook.com/your website title, or whatever user name it is you choose

The advantages of this are immediately apparent.

• Search engine optimization.
  If you choose your user name with care and optimize your posts in facebook, you theoretically can get good search engine position for your facebook profile.
  
  Traffic to your facebook profile could mean an increased number of friends and therefore an expanding audience
  
• Promote your business.
  Vanity URLs make it so much easier to refer people to your facebook profile.
  
  Referring a user to facebook.com/your website title makes more sense than referring them to facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxxxx
  
• Branding.
  If the facebook account is a business account, then getting a vanity URL obviously helps brand your business

But in view of the draw backs I have seen so far which include

• Saturation.
  All the really good keyword targeted, short user names have already gone. Talk about chasing the long tail...again!
  
  We got this with trying to register a domain name, now we have to fight for a decent vanity URL for our facebook accounts?
  
  It really would be amazing if there is not a significant proportion of user name squatting going on. 500,000 names in the first 15 minutes of launch. people were waiting to pounce on this thing
  
• Locked In.
  Once you have chosen a user name, you cannot change it.
  
  So research the name you want and possible alternatives if your first choice is not available carefully.
  
  Oh and watch out for typos
  
• Unproven.
  The impact that a facebook vanity URL will have on your business as a niche marketer is yet to be proven.
  
  The great stampede is all anticipatory or speculative. May turn out to be the next big thing on the Internet, but personally I think it will just be another tool to add to your niche marketing arsenal

So how do you get your own vanity URL?

• Log in to your facebook account
• Point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/username
• The user name form page will load
• On this page you will be given a few options based on your current profile name
• Click 'more' at the bottom of the list of options and a box into which you can type your desired name will load
• Insert your desired user name into that box and select the radio button beside it. As you type you will see the new facebook vanity URL to the lower right side of the page
• Check availability by clicking the button that says so
• If available click the confirm button if you are happy with your new facebook vanity URL
• Again make sure you have no typos before confirming
• Once confirmed you cannot change your user name

Till next time

Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics First

So many people want to learn affiliate marketing. And looking at the plethora of affiliate marketing websites online, a lot of people are jumping right in...at the deep end

A frequently quoted statistic is only 10% of affiliate marketers make a significant income online

10% is not very good. In fact it's bad

So how does a newbie affiliate marketer ensure that he or she is one of the 10%

By learning the basics of affiliate marketing, learning the basics well and implementing it

Let's be honest.

Affiliate marketing is not rocket science

The beauty of affiliate marketing is it's simplicity

• You find a product that is good and has an affiliate program... Not difficult
  
• You build a webpage that presells this product to your readers.... Not difficult
  
• You get traffic to the page you built..... Well I admit, this one can be a little tricky
  
• And you get some conversions

So why make things complex!!

Recently I had a conversation with a fellow marketer about how frustrated he was getting with this affiliate marketing thing
I asked him what he was doing and he said he was doing the mumbo jumbo method. I call it the mumbo jumbo method but the honest truth is I have not a clue what method he was using or what it is called.

Why complicate things?

We have a business method that works, just duplicate the basics

A link for you. Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics

Increase Website Traffic With No Follow Social Bookmarking

'No follow' social bookmarking sites are not particularly useful for SEO. But you can generate a ton of traffic using 'no follow', yes 'no follow', social bookmarking sites

I was going through one of the social bookmarking sites I frequent and someone had sent me a shout. Well I get a ton of shouts everyday but this one caught my eye.

So I clicked on it and it was a link to the same story bookmarked on another site.

On finally reaching the page, which was a blog post submitted 3 days ago, I noticed it had received 500 visitors. And it was not a particularly useful or informative post.

Hmmm.
'I wonder what sort of a backlinking strategy he has' I thought

So I fired up my backlink analysis software and.... Nothing. No backlinks.

'Golly! My backlink analysis software must not be working!'

So I did the Yahoo links query again nothing

On digging [no pun intended] further, It appears that most of his traffic seems to be coming from social bookmarking sites

The tip as mentioned in crucial tips for social bookmarking is the number of friends or followers you have.

Another tip which this chap seems to be using is one given by Jeff Johnson in his training lab which is 'bookmark your bookmarks'

Just another little tip on generating traffic to your sites