EzSEO Newsletter # 189
This week:
1. What it takes to become successful.
2. Using Adsense Data to Create Better Sites
3. Using Videos To Promote your Site
Hi again.
Hopefully today’s newsletter will mark the start of a weekly schedule again. The Christmas period is always a tough time to try to write a newsletter, and since the last one at the beginning of January, I have been to Disneyland Paris with my family for a 5 days. Now, refreshed, I am raring to go.
I have been doing a lot of reading, testing and playing with software this last week, so have some good stuff to tell you, including my experiences with using video to promote my business, and how I plan use a great little script to create a laser-guided adsense site.
Let’s get on..
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1. What it takes to become successful.
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I was reading an eBook by a top SEO expert this week (Jerry West) and towards the end, he has a brief biography. He tells the story of how he used to work as an SEO, pulling his hair out at deadlines, lack of time off, and long work days.
He was given a piece of advice many years ago by an online marketer to “sack his clients” and do SEO for himself on his own sites (promoting affiliate products).
Jerry thought it was the worse advice he had ever been given. How on earth could he do that? How would he manage to pay the bills? He would have no security!!
For 5 years Jerry carried on with his job, but eventually he saw the light, and fired hired clients.
The first month on his own, he made more m0ney than ever before, and he’s never looked back.
The online marketer was that gave Jerry the initial advice was none other than Michael Campbell.
Michael Campbell was in fact the marketer that got me started too. It was after reading his “Nothing But Net” eBook that I decided to make a go of Internet marketing (and he was also the first person to promote my very first software tool - Sitemap Creator). Both Jerry and myself have a lot to thank Michael for.
It was only a couple of months after starting our first site (my wife & I) that we had out first commission. It was $2.49 for a coin sorting machine. Later the same month, my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I went to check my Commission Junction Stats. We had a new commission of $520 sitting in our account. It was only 5 am (I got up to do an hour of work before I had to head off to work), but I went and woke my wife up to tell her. I was convinced it would be reversed, but two months later, a cheque arrived which included that commission.
So, what exactly does it take to become successful at Internet Marketing?
While reading Jerry’s book, and thinking about the stories I have been told by friends who are now successful at Internet Marketing, I have come to the conclusion that ANYONE can become successful at this.
Here is what you need:
1. You need to take a leap of faith. That often means putting yourself outside the comfort zone and doing something you may not want to do, or don’t think you are capable of doing. e.g. You WILL need to learn new skills, and for some, this is a daunting task and one that can often cause people to quit. Suck it up and get on with it.
2. You need to have a stubborn determination to succeed. Not everything you try will work, but you need to analyze why things did not go to plan and formulate a new strategy, all the time learning from your mistakes and building on your successes.
3. You need to plan long-term and not just for short term gain. Many people jump from one bandwagon to the next at the promise of quick riches for little effort. If these products work, they only work for a very short time (and usually nowhere near as well as the sales letter that sold you the product).
Trying to constantly trick the search engines is a never ending battle, and one that you cannot win long-term. Wouldn’t it just be better to play within the rules and be nice to Google. Give them exactly what they want, and they will be nice to you. Build a long term business, and you wont be constantly looking over your shoulder.
That about sums up the characteristics I see in many successful marketers. You might want to add to that a thick skin helps (since when you first start, even your own family may tell you to stop wasting your time).
The only other piece of the jigsaw is to find a mentor. That does not have to be a real person, it can be a course that shows you how to create an online business. The only requirement here is to find one that you believe in, and is recommended by others who have been successful with it.
When my wife and I started, our personal mentor was this one:
That package contains absolutely everything you need to succeed (and now has way more features than when we used it), and is ideal for beginners (and seasoned pros). Remember that when my wife and I built our first site, it was using that tool, and we started making money within two months of going live.
If you haven’t started an online business and want to be sure you get everything right, you could do a lot worse.
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2. Using Adsense Data to Create Better Sites
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I am about to start planning a new website in Spanish. My Spanish isn’t good enough to be able to write the content and my wife doesn’t have the time, so we are paying someone to write it for us. The lady who is going to create the content is a computer programmer and the site will be about computer programming languages, so she is an expert.
I’ll be doing all of the keyword research, and using KRA to find the best theme words for all of the pages, so I am confident I can put together a great site blueprint covering a sub-niche of computer programming.
The biggest choice I have is what sub-niche?
Back in 2003 the same lady created another site for us on the same topic. She wanted to learn how to create websites so that she could add that skill to her C.V.. She agreed to create a site for us in return for us teaching her HTML etc.
That site had 64 pages and covered a whole range of computer programming languages and comptuer products. I don’t want the new site to cover everything. I want to cover the topics that make the most Adsense revenue (or the most affiliate income). So how do I do that?
Well, for the last few months, I have been playing with a script that can tell me everything I need to know to make informed decisions on this new site. The fact that the script comes from someone I trust is a bonus. Let me show you the tool first, and then I’ll explain what it does, and how I am going to use it to create a laser-guided Adsense super site. Here it is:
This script requires you to have a MySQL database available for use. If you don’t know anything about MySQL, don’t worry (remember what I said earlier about taking yourself outside your comfort zone)?
You actually don’t need to know much about MySQL databases, you just need to have one available in your hosting package, and then follow the install instructions.
This script tells me all the information I need to make informed decisions on the site I am planning. In fact, it tells me a lot of useful information for my other sites as well, so that I can maximize my pr0fits from Adsense.
Here is my plan for the new site:
1. Install the script on the old programming language site.
2. Let it run for a couple of weeks.
3. Identify which pages are getting the most clicks.
4. Identify which Adsense ads get the most clicks.
5. Identify which keyword phrases used to find my site are generating the most clicks.
With the above information, I can then see which of the sub-niches found in the original programming sites are the most profitable, and even which keyword phrases to target as m0ney-making phrases (not all keywords used to find your site will convert very well, so it is important to find those phrases with high conversion rates).
This is valuable information. It will mean that I can create the site around only those phrases and topics that I know are profitable. Previously, the only way I know of doing this was to experiment with Google Adwords.
If you have sites that under perform, this type of script can help you analyze the site and find out a lot of information. e.g. there are heat maps showing where the users are clicking on your site. If there is a link on your site that is not monetized, yet getting a lot of clicks, maybe you should remove it, or move it.
I wont go into all of the features. You can read about them on Jonathan’s sales page:
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3. Using Videos To Promote your Site
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In the last newsletter, I mentioned a membership site called Traffic Geyser. As a reminder, here is the URL.
This membership service makes it easy to create videos, and submit them to a number of video sites online. Traffic Geyser includes a tool that helps subscribe to a number of the video submission sites automatically (though for me, about 1/3 of the sites didn’t work). You also have tools for creating slide show style videos.
The idea is simple. Create a video promoting your tools or services, submit them to video sites, social Bookmarking sites, and even podcast sites, and get traffic back to your domain.
This Thursday and Friday just gone, I created two videos and submitted them through the Traffic Geyser system.
Within an hour of submitting, my videos were in Google. That’s quick! In fact, one video turned up within 20 minutes (not sure how quick as the first time I checked was 20 minutes after submitting).
When you submit these videos, you optimize title and keyword tags etc. The good news is that they tend to rank quite well as long as you have not targeted really competitive keywords. Here are some of my results:
Video 1 was submitted with a title and keywords revolving around Latent Semantic Indexing, and targeted traffic.
The video did not rank in the top 20 for either of those phrase, though funnily enough, if you type in:
latent semantic indexing targeted traffic
or
lsi targeted traffic
My video appears several times in the top 10, including a #1 and #2 for the first phrase in Google.
Now, I know what you are thinking. No one is searching for those two phrases. Well, you are correct, but this does highlight an important point. For lower competition phrases, you can rank well with video.
After my lack of success for the first video, I changed the title and keyword tags, and optimized it for the phrase article writing course.
The video currently ranks #8 and #9 in Google for that term, and #9 and #10 for article writing courses.
Now that’s a bit better.
For my second video, I created a small tutorial using KRA. My target phrase was keyword results analyzer.
That video is currently ranking at #8, #9 & #10 in Google, as well as several other spots in the 11-20 positions.
It looks like video is a good way of getting into Google, but, there is a problem.
With videos hosted on other sites, there is no way to automatically redirect viewers at the end of the video to your site. You need to create videos that contain your URL, and then have some compelling reason for that viewer to type your URL into the browser bar. If you don’t have that, you wont get any traffic.
The Keyword Results Analyzer video results did get me thinking. Next time a new product comes out that I really like, I’ll create a “review” video optimized for the products title, and maybe “product title review”, and submit it. I’ll include a URL in the video (which will be my affiliate link) to the product sales page, and see how many sales I make. On the Traffic Geyser forum, I did read of at least one person having some success with this technique.
Certainly, the small success I have had so far with Traffic Geyser is enough to convince me to carry on with video submissions. I just need to perfect my technique a little, and as always, think outside the box to find ways to get people to my site after watching the videos.
Incidentally, if you have signed up for the Traffic Geyser program, do look at the bonuses. The “Viral Video Secrets” bonus is well worth the read, and will get you thinking of ways to make video work for you.
If you are tempted to subscribe to Traffic Geyser, let me just give you one piece of advice. Don’t expect instant avalanches of traffic. This one takes some effort, and a little ingenuity.
If you are not ready to subscribe to a service like Traffic Geyser, but want to try using video yourself, here is a short tutorial sent in by one subscriber.
Well, that’s it for this issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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