EzSEO Newsletter # 89
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EzSEO Newsletter # 89
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Avoid Being a Thin Affiliate
2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part I
3. Other Stuff
Hi again.
With Nicheology opening its doors again to new members for the first time in several months, it seems now is the perfect time to talk about owning your own products. In the first section of this newsletter, we will look at some of the benefits of owning your own products, not least being a great way to avoid being labelled a thin affiliate by Google.
We are also starting a brand new mini-series. If you ever hesitated over starting your own online affiliate business, now might be the time to open your editor and start building. Over the weeks to come, we will look at every aspect of building an affiliate site, the pitfalls, and the right way to go about things.
Let’s start…
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1. Avoid Being a Thin Affiliate
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I don’t often send out a mid-week announcement, but in the past, when Nicheology has opened to allow in new members, it has only taken hours to fill up. Hence the reason for my notice a couple of days ago.
If you missed that, you can read more about Nicheology.
I have been a member of Nicheology since it first started and love it. Before we talk about “thin affiliates”, and the benefits of owning your own products (which Nicheology makes easy), let me just make one point clear.
IF you are not prepared to put in some work, then Nicheology is NOT for you.
IF you are not prepared to put in some work, then owning your own product IS going to be difficult.
For those who want to create a thriving online business, Nicheology might just be the secret you have been looking for.
OK, so what’s all this about thin affiliates?
In a recently “leaked” document reportedly coming from Google, the big G gave guidelines to human spam-busters on how to classify affiliate sites as thin or not. It seems that the algorithms handled by Google’s computer network are not the only ranking factor involved in where your pages end up in the search results. Now, human beings are scouring the internet looking for sites to penalise.
A “thin affiliate” is basically one that creates pages with the sole intention of ranking well and directing traffic to an affiliated merchant site, without adding anything unique.
You can read more about this report in issue #84 of this newsletter.
In my opinion, probably 99% of affiliate sites being built today are “thin”, and wont do well in Google.
If a thin site gets spotted, it gets penalised.
OK, so how can you make sure your site is not labelled as thin?
The answer is in what you can provide your visitors that gives them something extra, something worthwhile. Here are a few ideas to make your site useful to your visitors:
* Write reviews on products (or merchants).
* Compare prices for a product from different merchants.
* Help your visitor make the best buying decision.
* Provide something no other site does.
All of these are ways to make your site valuable, and avoid the “thin” tag.
The last point is easy to achieve..
“Provide something no other site does.”
Isn’t owning and selling your own product from your site going to be a way to provide something no other site does?
Think about an affiliate site on Scrapbooking. There is a range of products you could sell from Amazon or other stationery merchants, but you do run the risk of becoming a thin affiliate, unless you help your visitor in some way, or provide your visitor with something valuable or different that no other site does.
Well, what if you had your own eBook on scrapbooking? You could put links to it from every page of your site in one of the margins. You could also promote and sell a range of scrapbooking products from different merchants. In this way, not only are you providing something unique (your own eBook on the subject), you are also helping your visitors find sources of materials for their hobby.
One of the very first eProducts given to Nicheology members was an eBook on Scrapbooking (in fact, I believe that product is still available for new members).
You take the Scrapbooking “Product in the Rough” as Nicheology calls it, edit it, and compile it into an your own eBook. This can be sold via Paypal, or Clickbank (Clickbank makes it easy for you to get affiliates of your own to sell your book for you).
Your site has just avoided being labelled as thin (assuming you put a little effort into the building of your site).
*** QUICK NOTE ***
The best format for an eBook is Adobe’s PDF format. It can be read on PCs and Macs, and avoids the potential virus threats that EXE eBooks can harbour.
The simplest method of compiling an eBook is to use something like the software I use from Neevia, called Docuprinter LT. Do a search at Google for it if interested. I use it myself for all eBooks and reports, and it is simple, reliable, and does not have problems with hyperlinks that so many free tools do. All you do is create your document in your Word Processor, and save it as a PDF.
*** END NOTE ***
Above I wrote in brackets “assuming you put a little effort into the building of your site”.
What does this mean, and how can you avoid potential problems?
This is where the new mini-series comes in. Follow the course, and by the end, you will have a site that you would be proud to show a Google representative, or one of their spam-busting “thin affiliate” tell-tales.
If you currently do not have an affiliate site up and running, why not use this mini-course to keep you on track. We will be covering everything in small steps, over a period of several weeks. A perfect, slow pace to follow if you have limited time.
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2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part I
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There is a lot of planning and decision-making involved in starting an affiliate site. It is tempting to take short-cuts because everyone wants to see quick results. However, I cannot emphasize enough the need to take your time. F
Follow each step carefully.
Don’t move on to the next until you are 100% happy with the previous step.
Before we start looking in detail at what is involved, let’s look at an overview of the complete process from start to finish, a kind of quick summary for the whole mini-series that we will cover in the weeks to come.
Overview of building a “FAT” Affiliate site
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1. Identify a profitable niche (which includes checking for products that you can promote).
2. Carry out keyword research to find out what people are actually searching for at the search engines.
3. Analyze your keyword research and split your keywords into groups, according to their future use on your site.
4. Sign up with a web host, so that you can get your site on the web. This particular stage is very important since not all web hosts are equal and it is a pain to change over to a new host when you find your current one is not living up to your expectations. To confuse matters further, price is not a good indicator of quality.
5. Buy a domain name, and set up your host ready to upload your pages.
6. Create pages preselling the products you are promoting. It is important to create quality content that helps your visitors with their buying decisions, as this not only makes your site valuable, it also helps prevent being labelled as a thin affiliate.
7. Add tracking code to your pages, so that you can analyze where your visitors come from, how many, and how they found your pages in the first place.
8. Join affiliate programs that provide products related to your chosen niche. It is often better to have the basic site up an running before trying to sign up for affiliate programs, since many merchants will want to see the site you are going to promote them on.
9. Add affiliate links, and/or Adsense to your pages.
10. If you are selling your own product, create a sales page for the product, sign up with Paypal or another payment processor, and add a Buy button or link to your sales page.
11. Create an eBook “cover image” for your product, and add this image to the pages of your site so that anyone visiting a page, can see your eBook and click through to the eBook sales page if they are interested in more information.
12. Link your pages together into a site, so that it helps your visitor, the search engines, and your rankings.
13. Upload what you have done so far so that it can be found and indexed by the search engines. Get a link to your site from another site that is already in Google so that the search engines can find your site.
14. Add quality content in the form of articles that are 100% relevant to your niche. These again should be quality articles, that are informative, and provide a genuine “value” to your site. Add these slowly over time, so that your site appears to grow in size naturally.
15. Get links to your site. This can be done in several ways, and not all of them are painful!
Repeat steps 14 and 15.
These are the topics we will be looking at in detail, starting next week. No stone will be left unturned as we discuss the essential elements to creating a niche site.
This will be a complete guide unlike any other available, and of course, it won’t cost you anything.
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3. Other Stuff
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The August Secret Niche Blueprint was released earlier this week. Tomorrow, I will be sending out a notification to those on the Niche Blueprint list making remaining copies available for sale. If you want to be notified when these Blueprints are released, I highly recommend you sign up on that list. There is a sign up form at the bottom of the Niche Blueprint Homepage.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old ezSEO Newsletter archives.
Have a great week!
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