EzSEO Newsletter # 107
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EzSEO Newsletter # 107
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Kim Standerline’s New Health Site
2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part XIX
Hi again.
This week, the miniseries looks at owning your own products, and why this strategy is one of the best ways to ensure your online success. If you currently do not have your own product, make it a goal for 2006.
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1. Kim Standerline’s New Health Site
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In recent weeks, I have promoted Kim Standerline’s excellent Niche Health Products membership site.
This membership site gives you two infoproducts per month, that you can use, modify and sell as your own. I have been a member since it opened, and love it. However, I have received a lot of emails from people who have signed up as a result of my recommendation asking about getting more content for their niche health sites.
Kim has addressed this issue and opened a brand new site offering Niche Health Articles.
As with her other site, membership is limited to 500 people only. This article site offers the following:
* 200 Private Label Health Niche related articles every month
* Tightly researched keywords appropriate for that month’s niches
* Free Hosting for 5 web sites including Front Page Extensions
* A forum to discuss your progress with other members.
There are a few other things as well, but you can read the sales page if you are interested.
Kim has started off (and hopefully will continue) supplying articles in the same niches as her Niche Health Products. That way, members of both sites will benefit from having complimentary product and articles.
I have had a look through a lot of the articles, but read 5 of them, just to gauge quality. They are good, very good.
Not only is the information well written, and obviously written or edited by a health professional, but they are also quite lengthy articles. The 5 I read had the following word counts: 379, 752, 688, 586, 506.
As you can see, these are not lightweight articles.
OK, so I am impressed with the articles and the membership site on the whole, but I do have one reservation that I should share before you decide whether it is right for you.
With 500 other people sharing the same articles, you will need to do some work on these articles to make them different. If you are not prepared to work on this, then this site is not for you. This is the exact same warning I gave when recommending the Niche Health Product site. If you are not prepared to customise and work on each Niche Health Product, don’t join the site.
Niche Health Articles and Niche Health Products are two complimentary membership sites, that if used properly, can be very profitable. However, your profits will be directly related to the effort you put in. If you are not prepared to work at your business and put in the required hours, don’t join. For the rest of you, I think the opportunities these sites provide will reward you for years to come.
Niche Health Products & Niche Health Articles.
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2. Building Affiliate Sites - Miniseries Part XIX
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If you have been following this course so far, you will have:
a) identified your niche and checked for profitability
b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.
c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.
d) selected several phrases to use as main page keywords.
e) selected suitable phrases to be used for article pages.
f) learnt how to theme pages. You should use this information to begin collecting themed keywords for your planned pages.
g) seen how main pages differ from article pages, and understood how these differences dictate how the pages are created.
h) seen how selling differs from pre-selling, and learnt one way to sketch out a blueprint of your pre-selling content.
i) looked at a top selling sales page, and dissected out the various pre-selling techniques highlighted by the “pre-selling blueprint questions”.
j) looked at two models for building main sales pages.
k) looked at how to write articles, and learnt a simple “Value Test” you can use to decide if your article is good enough.
l) Found a suitable web host, domain name and web editor.
m) Looked at links, and understand that some links will server you better than others.
n) Seen how Page Rank can be passed onto other pages, and also that the Google toolbar is not accurate.
o) Seen that links in to a page are a vote for that page, and that the link text used on incoming links, gives your page some reputation for that term. The more incoming links with that term, the higher the reputation.
p) Seen how tracking your visitors can give you a lot of useful information, and chosen a stats script for your own site (if your host does not provide one).
q) Seen how to create a useful links page that can act as a resource for your visitors, and looked at one way to automate this page.
r) Seen that putting Adsense ads on all pages is not usually the best strategy for maximum profits.
If you missed any of these newsletters, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/
This mini course begins in issue #89 and continues to the latest post in the blog.
This week, I want to talk about owning your own products for selling on your site.
Having a lot of affiliate sites can be a great way to make a living. However, with search engine rules changing on a monthly basis, only those that have created pure “white hat” affiliate sites, with engaging and informative content, will survive long-term. Having all of your eggs in the affiliate marketing basket is dangerous to say the least.
In 2006, you should create a goal for yourself.
CREATE YOUR OWN PRODUCT(S).
This might be an eBook, software, or video tutorials on a subject you have a lot of experience in.
Not everyone is a writer or programmer, but everyone can own and sell their own online products. In section 1 of this newsletter, I recommended Kim’s site - it gives you two products each month that you can use as a starting point.
Other alternatives include hiring programmers or writers at places like elance.com.
As a programmer myself, I have never hired a programmer to create my own products, so I cannot tell you how much it would cost, but I have hired authors.
Articles (250 - 300 words) can be bought for between $5-$7. You do need to be careful about who you hire, as plagiarism of online material by some authors is common. When I have bought articles, I have used justarticles.com. They check all articles for online plagiarism, and also check batches of articles for duplicated sentences/paragraphs. This ensures that your articles are unique.
What if you wanted to get your own eBook written by a ghost writer?
Well, my wife did just this recently for a new project of hers. She got justarticles.com to write an eBook for her on a topic she is interested in. Justarticles.com charged $20 per page (450 words per page). The eBook ended up being just over 30 pages in length costing just over $600. As my wife edits the eBook, adding her own content, pictures etc, the eBook will likely rise to 60 or 70 pages in total. I have been watching her progress, and can see the immediate benefits to getting ghost authors to write for you, especially if English is not your native tongue (as is the case for my wife).
I should add here that the eBook was top notch, and the author that wrote it obviously became very involved and interested in the topic as she wrote the book. I will be making use of this service myself in 2006, as I create more of my own products.
The ordinary person starting out probably cannot justify $600 to get their own product custom written for them. That is why sites like Kim’s mentioned earlier are a great deal for those starting out.
Incidentally, I often see questions on forums asking how to create cover graphics for eBooks and software. These covers increase the perceived value of a product and do increase conversion rates, so you should use them on your sales pages.
I have created some that I am very happy with. My tool of choice for that is called eCover Studio (search Google for it if interested). If you are going to be building your own inventory of infoproducts, this is one tool I can highly recommend. You can see a couple of covers (software box and training manual cover) I created using this tool on my SEO Website Builder homepage.
So, what are the advantages to owning your own products?
Well, there are a lot of advantages. I have summarised a few of them below.
1. Selling your own products from a website can make that site unique. You are offering something no other site does (even if you get affiliate to sell for you). This means you don’t have a thin affiliate site on your hands - you are the merchant, not the affiliate. This means that sites built around your own products are likely to last for years to come, earning you a nice residual income.
2. You can get affiliate to sell for you. When you bring out a product, create an affiliate program for it, either at Clickbank, or Paydotcom. Offer your affiliates a good percentage (50% is usual for infoproducts), and then go looking for sites related to your eBook. Contact the webmasters, and tell them about your product, and your affiliate program. Many will sign up and sell your eBook from their site.
This is a fantastic way to create inc0me. You do not rely on your own traffic for sales, and you only pay your affiliates if they make a sale. What is even better than this is you can and should target really competitive niches, since the competitors who rank well, often become your affiliates, so you can benefit from their traffic, and not have to worry about all the SEO stuff to get traffic directly to your site from the search engines.
3. Owning your own products can make you an authority in your field. Besides selling the eBooks, you could open a forum on the site (which can have Adsense advertising), run mini-courses designed to pre-sell your eBook and other affiliate products, and create a newsletter, which keeps you in contact with highly targeted visitors. You can quickly build a business out of a single product, then repeat.
4. Owning your own eBook gives you the chance to sell affiliate products from within the eBook. If you have an eBook on “Car Maintenance”, you can point your readers to online suppliers via your affiliate links. This type of back-end sales can often be very large, and in fact, I often give eBooks and material away, knowing that the links I have placed in the eBook will pay back many times what I would have received had I sold the eBook.
Hopefully you can see the potential of owning your own products. Since it can be done relatively inexpensively, you don’t really have an excuse. Any costs involved are business expenses, and the rewards can be huge. Also the costs involved in an online business are so much lower than a bricks and mortar business.
One type of infoproduct I have not really mentioned yet is video training courses. For this type of product, I use a tool called Camtasia Studio. This is not the cheapest, but it is the best. You will see a lot of online videos created with this tool, by many of the top marketers.
If you want to dabble with this type of infoproduct, you can do so for fr.ee, with a neat little tool called CamStudio. Do a search of Google for it (I have mentioned this tool before in this newsletter). While this tool does not have the features of Camtasia Studio, you can get a feel for what this type of infoproduct can offer.
You can easily create membership sites based on video tutorials, and combine them with an eBook, forum etc. You are only limited by your imagination.
2006 is going to be a year in which my own business will see a massive increase in the number of products I own. Many will be written and created by me, others will be farmed out to ghost writers. I intend to create infoproducts on a wide range of different niches, 90% of them wont be related to internet marketing. Internet marketing will become the tool I will use to sell them, and affiliate marketing will be something I do from within my infoproducts.
Hopefully this has got you excited. I know I am. 2006 is going to be a great year.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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