EzSEO Newsletter # 75
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EzSEO Newsletter # 75
Andy Williams ez SEO
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This week:
1. What not to promote
2. Planning a successful site
3. Stomping Review
4. TIP - Using Pay per Click for testing a niche
5. Help please?
Hi again
The review I promised you last week is here - “Stomping the Search Engines” is a complete Search Engine Optimization course.
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1. What not to promote
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You are starting to build an affiliate site, and looking for merchants to promote. One of the networks which pays well, and have 1000s of products is Clickbank. Whether your niche is diets or babies, you will find products that will pay 50% or more in commission. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
Well, it can be…
If your niche is related in any way to starting an online business, or marketing, your visitors probably know about Clickbank. They probably also know how easy it to steal your commission.
It is quite common to see an “Affiliate Program” link on the sales page of Clickbank products. What does this tell you? It tells me that the merchant selling that product does not care one hoot about you.
Imagine using Pay Per Click advertising to promote a Clickbank product. You pay for your traffic that you ultimately send to this merchant. Your visitors (that you are paying for) go to the merchants site and decide they want to buy. They click on the “affiliate program” link, sign up, and buy through their own link. You get nothing.
You paid for that visitor, you may have convinced that visitor to buy with your presell, and your merchant has just shown you two fingers by letting that visitor steal your commission and get a discount for themselves.
OK, you are not using PPC advertising. Is this still such a big deal?
Sure it is. You do the keyword research, your build the pages, you optimize your site and work on getting links in, just so you can send this merchant traffic.
It does not matter whether you promote with fr-ee search engine listings or PPC, those merchants still see you as a source of f-ree traffic. You do the work for them, so that they don’t have to.
My advise is to not promote any merchants that work this way. Don’t be used. Affiliate-merchant relationships are just that - relationships. Without affiliates, most of these merchants would not have a business.
My other piece of advice is that when you see these sales pages, contact the author, and tell them that you wont promote them, because they don’t care about their affiliates.
If you want to point them somewhere to read why they are ripping you off, send them to this article I wrote in a previous newsletter.
I used to promote a great product about a year ago. I was #1 on Google for the product name (I am now #3). I made sales on a weekly (if not daily) basis for this merchant. This merchant then put up a link to his affiliate program, and my sales dropped to one every six months. Make no mistake, this is a serious problem.
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2. Planning a successful site
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Even though I have published several reports on building affiliate sites (you would have received them when you signed up for this newsletter, or downloaded from the subscriber bonus page), I still get asked for a plan, or checklist on how to create a successful site.
I have tried to break it down into 5 easy steps. Here they are:
1. Keyword Research
Your keyword research is the most important part of any site. This stage should not be skipped or glossed over. Read my Wordtracker Tutorial (you got it as a bonus when you signed up for this newsletter), and learn how to find 1000s of keywords on any niche.
2. Site structure and planning
Read my “Creating a Niche Site” report (again you received this when you signed up for my newsletter). This details how to structure your site so that on-page, and on-site optimization is done properly.
3. Articles/Content
Make no mistake. Content is going to be your passport to success. Write articles on topics related to your niche. Use the keyword research you did in step 1 to find profitable keywords. Write articles around these keywords.
I recommend that you start off with very low competition keywords (10 competing pages or less) for your initial articles. These articles will tend to rank better, and start getting traffic to your site. Gradually start picking more and more competitive terms, until you have used up all your keywords.
So how much content is enough?
Articles = Traffic.
The more articles you have, the more traffic you get. In addition, remember that every article you write gives you the opportunity to link to any page(s) on your site. You can use your articles to increase the ranking of important pages on your site by strategic linking. The more articles you add, the more links you can place to your own pages, and using the link text you choose.
So articles have at multiple roles
- bringing in traffic
- allowing you to manipulate the link reputation (and PR) of important pages on your site.
- Creating a site that visitors find useful so come back often
4. Incoming links
Getting other sites to link to yours is very important. There are a number of ways to do this:
- reciprocal linking to related sites
- submitting articles to article submission sites/ezines
- distributing your content to other webmasters
- submitting your sites to directories.
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4.
That’s it! For many, that may sound like too much work. If you are one of those people, you are thinking of going into the wrong industry.
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3. Stomping Review
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Last week I mentioned Brad Fallon and his Stomping the Search Engines course, and asked for feedback from anyone who purchased this course.
I have seen a lot of other marketers promoting it in the last year, but had held off since the sales page mentioned Traffic Equalizer (which I think can get your banned). During the week I talked with Brad about this “problem”, and he gave me the answer I wanted to hear. That product is mentioned only because lots of people use it, it is not something that is recommended in Stomping (in fact Stomping warns against page generators that produce 1000s of pages at the click of a button).
All feedback I received about this Stomping course in the week was very positive, and I even received a few testimonials from happy users. Clearly I needed to go through the course and see for myself.
The course comes as a series of 9 interviews covering everything you need to know. What I love about this course is that each of these interviews also come with a complete transcript. I highly recommend going out and buying some ink for your printer, and printing off all these transcripts.
Then, listen to the interviews as you go about your day.
When you have a little more time, go through each transcript with a highlighter pen.
While these interviews are the main meat of the course, there are some great bonuses that have been well thought out, and are extremely valuable.
The bonus interviews are pure quality. There are interviews with Linking Guru Leslie Rohde (Optilink fame) and also SEO expert Dan Thies (I just spent $197 on his new course being sold through Sitepoint.com). In all there are 8 bonus interviews with leading experts in their fields, and these offer fantastic information, tips and advice.
There is also a 77 page Resource Guide in the package - lots of the important SEO information, tools and references in one convenient place. One of the many useful sections in this guide is the list of 280 Directories that you can submit your site to. This Resource guide is very useful.
There is one other bonus that Brad is offering, which makes this course even better. When you buy Stomping, Brad will put a link to one of your sites from a high PR site. If you were to buy a similar link, this alone would cost more than the cost of this course. This link should get your site crawled and included in Google in record time, boost your pagerank, and give you a head start with one of your sites.
Brad Fallon is an accomplished SEO. His company tests theories, and then tests some more. They use real experiments on real sites to see what triggers filters, and then use that information to improve their SEO strategies. Stomping is the result of this research.
So who would I recommend this course to?
Well, I would not recommend this course to rank beginners. That is not because it is not suitable for beginners, it is just that there is a huge wealth of information in the course and I believe beginners could get very lost.
If you know how to build sites but want to learn how to improve your rankings, then Stomping is a great purchase. Brad and Andy Jenkins have put together the most complete course I have seen so far.
It is highly recommended, and the “high price” of the course is a actually a very small price to pay for such a complete education on SEO.
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4. TIP - Using Pay per Click for testing
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One way of using Pay per Click Advertising is to test pages, or niches.
Imagine spending a month building a niche site on blue widgets. You start to get traffic when the site gets indexed, but the site does not make any money. You just wasted a month!
Why not put up a few pages, drive traffic to those pages using Google Adwords, and see what sort of return you get. This is one of the techniques that many online marketers use before committing time to a major project.
I would suggest that you drive around 500 visitors to a page, see what conversion rates are like, and then decide whether that niche is worth building a site around.
Depending on what terms you use in your Adwords campaigns, this might cost you anywhere from $25 to $100 or more. Is it not better to spend $100 to test something before spending a month of your time?
Another time PPC is useful is for testing conversion rates of sales pages. Simply changing a headline on a sales page can change your conversion rates considerably. Create several different headlines, drive targeted traffic to each page in turn, and monitor conversion rates.
When you have found which header works best, change another aspect of your page. Background colour, opening paragraphs, etc etc. The important thing about this testing is that you must only change one aspect of the page at a time. Test and Track.
If you want to learn how to use Google Adwords for testing, or simply to drive traffic to existing sites, I highly recommend you read Perry Marshall’s fr-ee five day Adwords course. Perry is an authority on Adwords, and best of all, his stuff is kept up to date with regular email updates.
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5. Help please?
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I have been trying to find a copy of Borland Delphi 7 (professional version or above), but have been having trouble finding any website still selling it (there have been a couple of versions since).
If anyone knows of an online shop which has a copy, please let me know (I want a legal copy).
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them here.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster@ez-search-engine-optimization.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
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