Keywords Selection

Doing SEO effectively starts with finding the right words, phrases, and ideas to target.

• Free: Digital Point keyword suggestion tool – free web based tool which compares Wordtracker and Overture search frequencies. (www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/)

• Various Prices (approximately $7 / day to $250 / year): WordTracker – web based leased product which has many more features than the other tools. WordTracker traffic is generally more representative of actual traffic than Overture’s tool since many fewer automated bots scour its data collection network than Overture’s. (www.wordtracker.com)

• Various prices: Keyword Discovery - deep database of keyword data. Contains historical data. Some of their partners made them sign a non disclosure agreement. The database may not be as clean as the WordTracker database, but it does contain more data. (www.keyworddiscovery.com/)

• Free: Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool – offers search frequency for the prior month throughout the Overture network. Please note that many bid checkers and other automated bots cause this number to skew high. (inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

• Free: Google Keyword Sandbox – shows related search terms but not search quantity. (adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox)
• Free: Google Search Suggestion Tool – auto-completes search queries to help you find more related search terms (www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en)

• Free: Google Sets – shows groups of related keywords. (labs.google.com/sets)

• Free: Good Keywords – free downloadable software which can be used for preliminary keyword research. (www.goodkeywords.com)

• Free: Ontology tool – finds related keywords using the Google ~ search. (www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/)

• Free: Competitors websites and related search suggestions from various search engines such as Vivisimo and Teoma.

Step 6. Pay Per Click Engines

OK lets get the snowball rolling!

Right, so we’ve got the site all nice and sticky, its been optimized for search engines and its been submitted to the major engines and automatically sent to FFA pages, now to give the little guy another push to get him going - But this time its going to cost a little!

We need to get the snowball on its way and kick start the journey down the hill.

So lets get going.

Regular search engines take months to get positions in and start bringing the traffic. The way to get traffic immediately from the search engines is to start dealing with the pay-per-click search engines such as Overture.com. (Other sites that are currently famous is Google Adwords, Google Adsense and www.miva.com)

Overture.com allows you to set up an account and then you only pay a set fee (almost in an auction model) for each visitor to your site. If you bid one penny per visitor, then you only have to pay a single penny for every visitor to your site. If you bid ten cents, you pay ten cents. If you have tested and can bid a dollar per visitor, then that is what you will pay - How much you pay for traffic is up to you.

There are now several hundred search engines following this model. Most of them don’t produce nearly as much traffic as Overture.com, but some of them can be used once you have proven the effectiveness of your keywords at Overture.com first.

The first step is deciding on which keywords to bid on and then how much to bid. Its a good idea to set aside a monthly amount for Overture.com and decide to budget for that amount. Its possible to set-up an account by making a deposit and then having automatic deductions up to a pre-determined monthly limit. When the account is exhausted of funds then the listing is removed from the engine until the next month.

Pay per click search engines are perfect vehicles for providing highly targeted traffic. You are paying only for a visitor who has an interest in your website which will be determined by the link headline and link description.

There is an optimum price which you should pay for every click through or visitor. This price will be determined by the average value of the visitor. This is why you need access to detailed website statistics as you will need to know the average number of daily visitors. Once you have this figure divide the average daily net profit received by the website and this will give the average value of each visitor.

As a rule of thumb a bid of 50% of the average value is a guideline for how much to bid for each keyword. Then it doesn’t matter how much you are spending - you are making profit. So just keep topping the account up as and when required.

There are lots of pay per click engines around at the moment

You can find them at: www.payperclicksearchengines.com

Google Adsense

With the knowledge from the previous article, now you know more about Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Let me tell you a strategy that could earn you unlimited profits from Google Adsense. A good web programmer can blend in Adsense nicely into the webpage that readers do not even feel that it is an advertisement. However, without traffic, that would render it completely useless. Now, where would the traffic come from? Blogging? SEO? Just by counting on SEO would not take you anywhere.

The trick is to be a traffic middleman. You have to combine Google Adwords to do this. Get quick, cheap and quality traffic to your website by purchasing keyword advertisements with Google Adwords or Yahoo. Bid on only the minimum of $0.05 to $0.10 or buying one of the top 3 positions on the small PPC search engine. When readers from the world wide web clicks on your advertisements, they will be taken to your web site that shows exactly the relevant information that they are searching about. Google will do a good job in analyzing to show the relevant advertisements in your page, so optimize your page content that you want readers that clicked on your advertisements to click onto your Adsense advertisements.

You will be paying pennies to obtain a visitor, a very small price to pay for traffic. By paying this small price, you can gain dollars with the Adsense advertisements on your page. Later in this article, I will show you a list of keywords that Google advertisers currently pay the most, per click.

You can bid $0.05 for a keyword and gain $0.50 for that back in your page. This is superb. There are hundreds of thousand of keywords that could literally be bidded cheaply on the smaller PPC programs as stated above this page. These keywords may be VERY expensive if you bidded on Google Adwords. The key is to survey the price of various keywords from the smaller sites and choose the larger programs (Adsense) as publisher.

EXAMPLE

I did a search on the price of keywords of “Search Engine Optimization” on Miva.com and found out that it costs $0.21 to bid for the first placing. I did a similar search in Google Adwords for the same keyword and found out that i costs a WHOPPING $7.00 for it. The same keyword, one at the price of $0.21 and the other, $7.00 per click. Now, tell me, is that a huge difference? The fact is larger programs have a higher bidding price if compared to the smaller ones.

The only program that tells you how much an advertiser is bidding on a keyword is Overture (Yahoo). However through experience and research, I found out that Google has quite the similar maximums. The have a look at the list of most paying keywords, click here. You might be surprised that some advertisers even bid more than $100 for a single click on a particular keyword. Do you see the potential now? A few pennies to exchange with at least 50% of $100?

WARNING : Google has very strict policies. Any wrong-doings will lead to a bad for life. Please do not overlook these policies. You can view the Terms And Conditions and the Program Policies here. A few quick pointers if you are too lazy to read all the small caps in the policies :

1) Never click on your own Adsense advertisements
2) Never put Adsense in a page with little or no contents
3) Never point and guide the reader to click the Adsense advertisements (eg. Click here)
4) You can only put “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements” above the Adsense snippets
5) No adult contents allowed

Pointers for your ads to blend into the page and to trigger relevant Google advertisements

1) Do not use borders around the Adsense advertisements. Make it look more like a part of your content
2) Use the same background colour for Adsense and your site page.
3) Put Advertisements within your content, thus to look like a link
4) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the page title
5) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the meta tags
6) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the the description tags
7) Make sure that you have the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” in the content several times, with at least 1 rendering it with “bold”
8) You should have a H1 and H2 heading tag on the page for the keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization” as well
9) Make a link back to the homepage with an anchor text of keyphrase “Search Engine Optimization”

NOTE : Sometimes getting contents are quite a hassle. You just can’t seem to find enough content to put into your website or you are too lazy to write, think and type contents into the website. Do not worry. This is not the end of the world. There are tons of sites that provides thousands of free articles and you are free to use it on your site. Here are some of those sites that you might be interested in:

Article City
GoArticles
Ezine Articles

Alternatively, you can use an automated tool to generate contents about the keywords that you input. Below are the sites that you can use:

The Article System
Article Bot
Traffic Equalizer

The most important factor is to find and create a page with Good Paying Keywords. The ones that is in the Excel sheet above. (I hope that you have successfully downloaded it). Another important thing to do is to bid variations of those keywords such as “biggest”, “cheapest”, “most affordable” and “cheapest”. Create lots of variations, again, be creative! The next thing is to send click-throughs to the page that you have just created and you would most probably get the advertisers that bidded $1-$100 for the top spots. You will also obtain a 20%-50% click through rate if you have followed my instructions earlier. Keep doing this for more and more keywords. Impressions and click through rates may be low, but you can do this with thousands of keywords. Let us imagine, if you get $1 out of each keyword, multiply with 1000 keywords per day. you would get an average of $30,000 per month! Now, how’s that. Keep increasing your max bid penny a bit at a time, until you reach your definition of “peak” profit rate.

NOTE : There is a danger of choosing high paying keywords to advertise to your site. Let us take for example of a $50 advertisement. It is an average that Google Adsense will pay around 50% of the revenue to you. In this case, you SHOULD be paid somewhere around $25. However, to protect the advertisers, if you own a fairly new site or your article does not really match what the advertiser is advertising, you could get lesser than the amount of what you should get. I would approximately guess that it would be somewhere arounf $15-$20. DO NOT PANIC. You could easily tweak your page content back to the original advertisement that was put on your page. For instance, if the advertisement is regarding to “Computer Software” and you are showing “Computer Repairs” on your site, you can easily tweak and add contents about computer software to match bank the advertisements. You would need to test alot of different keywords to choose which one is the most profitable to you.

For me, I would always prefer to stick to those of $1 to $2 advertisements and bid a less amount ($0.05-$0.10) in Miva.com and get a click through rate of 20% or so. For $1 i get 20 visitors. 20% of click through rates would give me somewhere around 4 clickers per $1. Now, 4 clickers would be doubling or tripling off what i invested. While I playing around with cheap and low-bidded keywords I have a few advantages:

1) I can play with thousands of those keywords
2) I can keep on testing and retesting as those keywords are CHEAP!
3) I can avoid the possibility of not getting full percentage if compared to high bidded keywords
4) I always get favourable percentages as these are the keywords that is not usually played with

Another way to attract clicks is to place pictures around the Adsense snippets. (Be careful not to put graphics such as “Click this” or something that resembles that). Here is an example:

sample Adsense

It’s also important to create a “channel” in your AdSense account for each of your domains. You can also create
sub-channels for different pages within each URL. This will enable you to track exactly which pages are earning you the most money.

Advanced Middleman Traffic Trick

Here is a simple trick that can be an alternative too for gaining profits from Adsense. This trick uses the technology of the search engine. Create a search engine for your site that returns a pre-populated searches for the smaller PPC search engines and make the first few results SPONSORED results from Google or SearchFeed.

The following is an illustration of what i was talking about:
http://www.uncoverthenet.com/search/?q=pay+per+clic

Now if UncovertheNet were to purchase the keyphrase “pay per click” on Miva or another small PPC search engine for say 10 cents, they would make sure their paid ad led people to the URL above. Now when visitors reach that page, they will see results for the same keyword they originally typed in, so they won’t likely understand what happened when they were shipped to UncovertheNet’s results. Now if they click on the sponsored ads at the top of UncovertheNet’s pre-populated page (which are from searchfeed), or the sponsored ads on the right (which are from Google), UncovertheNet will make 20 cents, 40 cents, or whatever the current rate is on Searchfeed and Google.

Basically you will be paying Miva or another PPC search engine to send people to your search engine that shows relevant results. And hopefully the visitors will click on your sponsored ads because:

1) What they are looking for are relevant
2) The advertisements are on the top-right. This place is the best placement for click throughs
3) They look like real results. Readers do not like advertisements. This serves a very good way to blend in

Now that you have harnessed the power of Google Adsense, i believe you can start a crusade on gaining profits from it. Our next stop, Google Adwords! Enjoy!

6 Steps to QuickStart Your Affiliate Business

In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.

Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics

The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand. You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has high demand?

Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is located at:

inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site and it will show you:

• Related searches that include your term
• How many times that term was searched in the previous month

So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.

To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word ‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for 971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!

That’s almost a million people! Wow!

As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a winning topic for an affiliate web site.

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services

Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online, AND how much commission they pay.

For that, I go first to Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called ‘publishers’.

To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll need to set up a free account.

To do that, go to Commission Junction, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right- hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on ‘CJ Marketplace’.

At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process. Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you don’t already have a web site.

Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.

My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the network.

In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings and commissions.

What is an EPC Rating?

3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.

7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.

So how well did our insurance merchants do?

Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.

Wow!

Now what about those commission rates?

Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.

And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.

Not bad!

You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:

„ Linkshare
linkshare.com

„ BeFree
affiliates.befree.com

„ Clickbank
clickbank.com

Cheap Sources of Site Content

Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to ‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.

To pre-sell, you need site content.

Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases, webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.

However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:

„ Find Free Content
„ Use Merchants’ Ad Copy
„ Pay for Content

I like looking for free content first.

Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google for the terms “Free Articles”+ “Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:

• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs”
• “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan”
• “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!”

In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include credit to the author and a link back to his site.

This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can make money from that link.

To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.

Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to their affiliates.

For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.

Dear Friend,

This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the entire thing… I would feel terrible if you missed out on this because you did not get my e-mail in time.

I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said there were only 150 copies left of the new version of his best-selling Internet marketing course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!

Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150 copies are already gone.

Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally “the” guru of Internet marketing… he’s grown his online businesses to over $7.6 million in online sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors to his web sites every month!

And in the new version of his best selling course he is going to show everything from step-by-step instructions you can use to start your very own Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to build a top-selling web site… for less than $100!

No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!

He is going to show you where to find hot products (in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot cakes, no matter what your experience!

Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and software that you can use to automate your web site (and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!

And if that’s not enough, he is going to even reveal, for the first time, some of his most advanced strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search engines and get tons of free traffic from the “Big Guys” like Google… and his secret to writing sales copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!

Like I said before, I know these strategies are going to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience the same rewards, so go to…

www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/3885

… if the page is still there, this means you made
it in time and he still has some copies of his course with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!

So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just let me know.

All the best…

As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.

Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.

To find ghost writers on the net, check out some of these sites:

Guru.com
FreelanceWriters.com
Elance.com

Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site together.

The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite

There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:

1. Register a Domain
2. Domain Hosting
3. Buy Template

Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com where it will cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you register for more than one year.

Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.

GoDaddy.com - $8.95/mo.
• HostRocket - $9.95/mo.

The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of the best template sites I’ve found to date:

o 4Templates.com
o BigWebmaster.com
o BoxedArt.com
o DollarTemplates.com

My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.

Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s time to join affiliate programs.

Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs

Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.

The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.

Get Oodles of Traffic Today!

After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your site.

Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap Pay- Per-Click search engine advertising.

The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if they ever do.

Just a few of these include:

Google.com
Overture.com
• Enhance Interactive
Findwhat.com
Kanoodle.com

Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site. In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool produced a list that included terms like:

car insurance
insurance
health insurance
life insurance
home insurance
affordable health insurance
travel insurance
renters insurance
insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead

You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more exposure your site will get.

I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.

So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…

„ Find a HUGE Market
„ Find Products & Services
„ Collect/Create Web Content
„ Build Site
„ Market Site
„ and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!