EzSEO Newsletter # 231
February 15, 2009 by Andy
Hi Again
This week I got a phone call from someone stating their had been assigned to me to help me start my Internet business. I’ll tell you about it later in this newsletter, plus news of a nice fr.ee tool and more..
In this issue:
1. Neil Shearing’s Spider
2. Converting a website to WordPress
3. Help me love my Mac!
4. Latest Niche Blueprint
5. A couple of rants
6. Answer Analyst – a question
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1. Neil Shearing’s Spider
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You may have already heard about this, but if not, its an $80 gift. Neil Shearing developed and sold a tool called the Internet Success Spider for many years. He has now decided to give it away. The idea behind the tool is to help you find Super Affiliates to promote your own products.
Now, before you think that you don’t need Super Affiliates because you don’t have a product, let me just tell you of one way I have used the Spider.
1. Find a competitor site.
2. Type in their URL.
3. Spider results tell me – who is linking to that site, and who that site is linking to.
The above data can be used to find potential link partners!
The best results for this would be to find another affiliate site in your niche, and then look to see who is linking to them. It’s a great way to find WILLING link partners, as well as other places you can grab links (forums, blogs etc that your competitors are using).
Neil will show you a help video to get you up and running with the Spider and show you what it can do. You will have to fill in your name and email to receive the unlock code, but Neil is one of the Marketers I trust 100% so this isn’t a big issue.
Grab your copy of the Success Spider.
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2. Converting a website to WordPress
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Do you want to learn how to convert an existing website over to WordPress WITHOUT losing current rankings? If so, read on…
For the last 6 – 8 months, I have been running a course on using WordPress to create affiliate sites. The course has been a big success, and there has been a lot of very positive comments on it by those who have taken the course.
However, there is one question I am getting asked more than any other by people interested in signing up for the course.
That question is:
"Will the course show me how to convert an existing site over to WordPress?"
The answer to that is no (but do read on..).
The WordPress for Affiliate Sites course was created to take a complete beginner through every step necessary in creating a successful affiliate site. The first few modules look at finding a profitable niche, keyword research etc, and move on to configuring WordPress (including some template editing), actually building the site, writing the content for the site and promoting the site. The course was created to pull everything I teach in this newsletter together into a coherent, step-by-step process.
You can read more about that course, and see a couple of videos showing the site I built during the course and initial results here:
OK, that’s the bad news (at least for those wanting to learn how to convert existing sites over to WordPress).
The good news is that I am burning the midnight oil working on a course that shows how to convert an existing site over to WordPress.
I have picked one of my old sites that makes a couple of dollars a day in Adsense and the odd affiliate sale. I’d say the site makes me an average of about $70 a month. Not great is it? The site has not been touched for a couple of years now, and the content on it is truly awful.
I am going to show you exactly how I am converting the site over to WordPress, upgrading as I go to include better content, better site structure and all the time trying to preserve the rankings of the pages that are actually making me some m0ney.
I don’t just want to convert the site from HTML to WordPress, I want to convert the site from one that pays for a meal out every month, to one that pays my mortgage every month.
The course is still a couple of weeks off being finished, but if you want to know when it is released, you can sign up for notification on the page here:
Converting HTML sites to WordPress
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3. Help me love my Mac!
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I bought a MacBook Pro over a year ago, and for much of that year it has sat on my desk, unused and unloved (in fact it looks a lot like an in-tray, being covered in papers and other stuff I have put to one side).
The problem I have is that every task I need to do in my business can only be done efficiently on a PC.
I have really tried hard to love my Mac.
* I thought I could use it for updating my sites as they are nearly all WordPress blogs now. However, I use Windows Live Writer for that, and there isn’t (as far as I have found) an alternative to that excellent (and fr.ee) tool.
* I thought I could use my Mac for writing my newsletter. However, I use Windows Live Writer for publishing my newsletter to my blog, so it would mean copying the newsletter across to my PC anyway.
* As I am moving into video editing as a new part of my business, I thought Final Cut (Mac video editing software) would be a good idea (it seems like an industry standard), however, I just could not get my head around it so ended up with Sony Vegas on my PC.
* I have thought about games, but the Mac just doesn’t seem to be a games machine.
All of those ads about Macs being better than PCs just does not seem to be true in my case. They might be better built, and the operating system might be more stable than certain versions of Windows, but in every other way, I find the PC a better machine (and much cheaper).
Over the last week, I have been searching again for a use for my Mac, and I think I have found one. I have always wanted to write a children’s story. Not for publication, but for my kids. The Mac is undoubtedly a lovely machine to work on, so I looked for some software to help me write my masterpiece. I ended up buying Story Mill (it was between Story Mill and Scrivener) which really looks like a great tool for helping aspiring writers organise and write their books.
However, apart from that, my Mac sits on the desk gathering dust. Also, with so little time on my hands to actually write my story, I think I need another use for my 2200 euro paper weight.
After talking with Michael Campbell about Macs, it looks like it could be the perfect tool for podcasting, so that is an option for the future.
I would love to hear the views of other Mac users. What tool or software do you use that is indispensable to you, and requires a Mac?
BTW, I am aware that there are tools like Parallels which means you can dual boot Macs, but my experience with them has been less than pleasurable.
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4. Latest Niche Blueprint
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I released the latest Niche Blueprint to the notification list a couple of weeks ago. There are still around 20 copies left if anyone is interested.
This niche is great for Adsense or affiliate products. There are lots of potential affiliate programs, and a couple of have EPCs over $100 (that’s the average income an affiliate makes for sending 100 visitors to the merchant). In terms of Adsense I have included a text file with over 250 phrases with estimated CPCs from $1 up to $18+.
The version of KRA that comes with this Blueprint is pre-loaded with THREE databases of keyword data. One of the databases in nearly 900 "question" phrases, which are ideal for creating content around, since these are real questions asked by people at the search engines. The second database is a small database of phrases that reflect a highly lucrative sub-niche of this blueprint (in fact I would make it the main niche of the site). The third database is the main database contains over 3500 phrases related to the niche.
This blueprint is related to Wine and 931 phrases in this niche have ZERO Competing pages in Google. Just these 931 phrases amount to 1777 searches a day in Google alone.
If you are interested, you can see a breakdown of the keyword data on the Niche Blueprint site:
Click the link top right to "Related to Wine".
As always, only 100 copies of this blueprint will be sold.
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5. A couple of rants
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There have been a couple of things that really annoyed me this week, and it relates to how other Internet Marketers.
Firstly, I bought a product that looked really promising. I haven’t actually gotten around to reading it yet so I cannot comment on whether it is any good yet. However, after paying my money, I wanted my download URL. However, I had to go through 2 or 3 "One time offers" (OTO) first, before I was taken to my download URL. The links to say "No Thanks" to these OTO was difficult to find on all of these pages, and I got progressively more annoyed at the hoops I was forced to jump through before I could have my product. That in itself was almost enough for me to tell the guy to shove it and ask for a refund.
What really annoyed me though was what happened later in the week. I got a phone call from someone saying that I had signed up for a course by (name withheld) on "Starting my Internet Business", and the guy on the other end of the phone was my advisor, assigned to me to help me get started.
I told him that I had not signed up for any such course, but they said that didn’t matter as they would help me start my business. Well, after politely telling the guy I wasn’t interested, I went to look up the "guru" who was running this opportunity, to see if I could find out how he had got my phone number. It turns out, the guy who was running this was the same guy who made me jump through hoops to get my download URL.
Incidentally, the product I bought was nothing to do with star.ting an Internet bus1ness.
Totally unethical IMO.
OK; onto rant #2.
I am interested in getting back up to speed with Adwords, and signed up for a notification list on a product that was going to be launched.
Shortly afterwards I started getting the email promos on a daily basis. I clicked the unsubscribe link to be removed from the list, but the notifications kept coming. Each time I would click the unsubscribe link, and each time I would be unsubscribed from a DIFFERENT mailing list.
I signed up once, but this guy put me 4 or 5 different lists, all sending the same cr*p to me.
No wonder people are reluctant to sign up for newsletters these days.
OK; rants over. If you have any rants you would like me to air for you, please send them to me via my help desk, and I’ll do my best (though I cannot promise to name and shame the culprits).
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6. Answer Analyst – a question
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In the last newsletter, I mentioned a cool new tool by Jon Ledger called Answer Analyst. I see a fair number of people have bought it since my recommendation, and I really hope you are finding it as useful as I do. Anyway, there was one question that a number of people have written to me about, and this is it:
Article Analyst will return the questions people are asking on any topic, but it does not tell you how many searches a day are being done on those search phrases. Does that matter?
The answer: Not at all.
In the old days of SEO, we would pick a phrase and create an optimized page around that phrase (I realised how bad that was as I began creating my course on converting an HTML site over to WordPress, and saw some of the pages I had created 4 years ago!!!). If the phrase had 100 searches a day, and you could get to #1 in Google for that phrase, you could expect up to 100 visitors a day to your page – at least that was the theory.
Today, optimization is not about optimizing pages for a specific phrase. Its about themeing a page around a specific phrase so that the page can rank for a wide range of phrases (as well as the specific phrase).
I have talked many times about themeing in this newsletter, and even created this page on themeing tutorials:
http://www.keywordresearchlab.com/krapro/themecourse/
However, let me give you an example (based on the same example I gave you in the last newsletter).
When I search for the word insulin in AA, I get 25 questions returned. Here is one of the questions that I used to write an article about on my own diabetic site:
How Does Insulin Work?
While AA doesn’t tell me how many times that phrase is searched for, Wordtracker estimated that it was search for 16 times a day. I created an article for my site based on this phrase, but themed around insulin and how it works.
My page is currently in the top 10 of Google for the main phrase (it’s #5 here in Spain today), and in the last month, it has been found 260 times at Google. That equates to 8 – 9 visitors a day finding that page. What is interesting though is that only about half of those people found the page by typing in the main search phrase "how does insulin work". The other half typed in something else. In fact, that page has been found for 58 different phrases in the last month.
Since the page was created on 10th November 2008, the page has been found for 117 different phrases, and averaging around 5 hits per day over that period.
My point here is that the actual question you use to write content on is only the beginning. It is the other keywords and phrases that you put into that content that will make or break your article, and in fact, probably lead to most of your traffic to the page.
If you want to add real quality to your own sites, and give Google and the searchers the information they really want, Answer Analyst is an indispensable tool:
BTW; if you missed the video in last week’s newsletter, you can watch it here. It shows a few more details of how I create content for my own sites (Article Analyst is shown in that video, but since then there have been several updates so it looks a little different now):
http://ezseonews.com/blog/ezseo-newsletter-230/237/
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:
Have a great week!
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