What is an eBook?

An eBook or electronic book, or virtual book or digital book is simply a digital text file or group of files that when put together can be read on computers or dedicated eBook reading devices.

eBooks may include text, sound, photographs, illustrations and video. eBooks may contain “hot links” that allow the reader immediate access to web sites referred in the text.

eBooks can be published in a variety of ways:

1. eBooks can be published as digital files that are downloaded and read on laptop or desktop computers. This is the primary type of eBook media discussed in this book.

2. eBooks can be created as digital files that are downloaded and read on palm-top or handheld computers.

3. eBooks can be published as digital files that are downloaded and read on dedicated eBook reader devices such as the Rocketbook eBook Reader or Softbook eBook Reader or the Everybook eBook Reader.

4. eBooks can be digital files that are copied onto floppy disks or a CD-ROMs.

By the time you are read this book, other forms of electronic books may have already appeared. I will keep you up- to-date with eBook updates when you register this book.

Give Me Examples of eBooks

Examples of an eBook would be a 400-page novel, complete with any illustrations or photographs.

An eBook could also be a training manual. A Reiki eBook is one of the best selling eBooks and sells for $20.00 a copy.

An eBook is a 5 page specialized report that focuses on solving a specific problem.

eBooks can be short stories. Instead of buying a collection of short stories by an author you are unfamiliar with, you can now purchase one or two short stories at a time for only a couple of bucks each!

eBooks may be multimedia CD-ROMs with sound, video and text just like all the new encyclopedias that are published today.

Many authors in the main stream are now publishing their books as eBooks. Stephen King and Oprah publish eBooks

Why don’t you?

Advantages of Purchasing and Reading eBooks

The eBook serves customers in the following ways:

1. The international customer who does not want to wait a month or longer for the information can now have it shortly after credit card payment is made.

2. The college student who has limited funds for purchasing books can access a computer and can quickly download, print and read information at a very low cost. eBooks generally save the student at least 20% of traditional books.

3. The travelling executive who doesn’t want to carry around heavy books in her luggage but wants access to reading a variety of topics can pack a light load.

4. Conservationists love reading this way. eBooks save not only trees in the process, but the associated inks and chemicals as well as oil production in moving those trees to the mills and books into traditional bookstores.

5. Many people want privacy. There are eBooks available that focus on religious, personal hygiene or sexual topics that can be easily downloaded and read without the reader going to a store and bringing an embarrassing title to the attention of the bookstore clerk.

6. Some readers love to use their computers. Even a slower speed, cheaper computer can hold thousands of books on the hard disk. Since there are many titles that can be downloaded for free, many readers can now have a library that competes with their local library.

7. People that have poor eyesight now have the ability of changing the size and shape of all the characters they view on the computer screen. They are not fixed into one font size like a typical paper book.

Once you start publishing your own eBooks you will be more apt to download and purchase them for yourself.

Don’t you agree?

What do I write about?

What do you write about? What are your interests in life? What do you do for a living? What lessons in life did you learn that would have value to your fellow man? What are readers interested in reading about?

Take some time and write down answers to these questions. Remember that an eBook can be only 5 pages long or it can be 400 pages long. Whether you are finding solutions to problems, writing a great short story or even a complete novel, you will find a market for that eBook if you follow the easy steps presented in this book.

You can always change content and edit your book. This means that you can keep adding and changing to meet your readers’ needs. It is impossible to do that in a cost-effective way when you march down to your local bookstore and buy a printed and bound version. You will earn money as you perfect your eBook products and become a better writer. Did you ever think you would get a lifetime scholarship or grant to write books?

Let’s get some of that scholarship or grant money right now!

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Self-publishing eBooks)

1Q. Do I need to copyright my work?
1A. Yes, you should copyright your work. In the United States, where I live, copyright law automatically protects any document you create. The reason you file papers with the U.S Copyright Office is so that the U.S. government has a record of when, where and by whom this specific document was created.

2Q. Where do I go to copyright my work?
2A. Once you have completed your eBook, you can obtain the copyright forms from the United States Copyright Office on the Library of Congress Website. A “Cheap and Easy” way to getting the job done is by going to the United States Copyright Office located at:

www.loc.gov/copyright/

3Q. What is an ISBN number and do I need one?
3A. The ISBN number is a number that you will need for each binding of your eBook. For the two eBooks and marketing plans that I am including in this book, you can get by without an ISBN number. However, in order to present your eBook to traditional bookstores that will be selling eBooks, you will need an ISBN number. I will advise you how to get ISBN numbers later in the book. You can let your sales from publishing with the two basic publishing plans I offer pay for the cost of obtaining ISBN numbers.

Here is the address of RR Bowker, the company that issues the ISBN numbers. When applying for a number, always remember that even if you have just one book to publish, you will need many additional numbers.

For example, if you publish your book on a CD-ROM you will need a number. If you publish your eBook as a digital file to download off the Internet, you will need another ISBN number.

If you decide to publish the same book in printed form you need another number. You must have separate ISBN numbers for hardbound, softcover, trade paperback, audio books, and any other potential binding you can think of. You will need at least five ISBN numbers for every eBook you publish.

In order to make the eBook strategy work for you; consider publishing a series of three to five new books.

If you publish at least three versions or bindings on each book you will need at least 15 ISBN numbers to assign.

Read the specifications and directions at:

www.bowker.com/main/home/index.html

4Q. How do I keep someone from stealing my eBook and passing it out to everyone for free?
4A. If a person wants to steal your material, what prevents him from buying your bound version from a local bookstore, ripping the pages out of the book, scanning the pages into his computer, and selling your brilliance? Theft can happen, but if you are making more money than you can spend and becoming very popular, maybe it will actually be a good thing for you in the final tally. After all, just recently Stephen King the great American author gave out free copies of his newest eBook over the Internet. Over 400000 people responded and overloaded the network servers of major Internet booksellers. Even if a few free copies were pirated, don’t you think Stephen King benefited by the publicity associated with those kinds of sales figures?

5Q. Can I publish an eBook and then publish a bound version of the same book?
5A. Yes, you can! In fact you may find you have a much better product to sell as you receive feedback from people that have spent money on your eBook and basically perform a job of editing for you at the same time. Your success in publishing in this fashion will give you new insights and new markets to explore using traditional print publishers. Make sure you study each eBook-publishing contract. Some publishers will want exclusive rights to publish your work in electronic format. Some publishers will even ask for exclusive print rights. When you see the word “exclusive” in a contract, run away. Just because print publishers may have a handle on the print world, they may have no clue on how to reach the book buyers of the electronic world.

Electronic book publishers have no lock on the Internet buying market either. The eBook publishing business changes daily. You need to keep up with what is going on. You need to educate yourself and stay ahead of the curve. You can accomplish this feat by selling your eBooks through many different eBook sellers.

6Q. Can I include pictures or video in my eBooks?
6A. Yes, you can. However, it may be best to offer text only eBooks with links that take the reader to the Internet to view full color illustrations and video. If you keep the file size small by including just a few pictures, it will be easier to deliver to your buyers’ e-mail. Generally you want to keep the file size under one megabyte so you can deliver your eBooks easily over the Internet. Hyperlinks also add to the size of the document. For example I have a 186-page eBook that is all text. The file size is 200k. When created hyperlinks and bookmarks from the table of contents to the chapter headings, the size of the document grew to 640k.

If you want to e-publish and want tons of graphics, links, sound and video then you need to purchase a CD Re- Writer. Good ones cost around $300.

Many CD-ROMs hold 600 megabytes of information. Reference books and mailing lists are published on CD-ROM.

7Q. How much money can I earn selling my eBooks?
7A. That is a hard question to answer. There is no guarantee that you will sell anything. However, if you use the techniques outlined in this book, your chances of earning book royalties are fantastic!

You will be more profitable at selling eBooks than many other Internet products.

Why? Because of the instant gratification and privacy it offers the reader and the wonderful value inherent associated with books.

8Q. How long does it take me to get my finished eBook uploaded and actually have it selling on the
Internet?
8A. With some servers it may take a week or two, with other’s including your own, it may take 15 minutes!
Yes, in 15 minutes you will start showing off your book to the entire world!

9Q. What subjects are hot right now?
9A. The best selling subjects right now seem to be how to, romance, erotica, health, and non-fiction.
Go to barnesandnoble.com and borders.com and look at the book titles they are marketing. This will give you a good idea of what is hot and what is not.

10Q. How can I sell my eBooks in traditional bookstores?
10A. Both Barnes & Noble and Borders are planning to sell eBooks out of their traditional stores. Amazon.com will be selling eBooks by the time this book is in printed form.

By the time mainstream book publishing gets involved selling eBooks, your popularity and sales figures may get the attention of store managers when the time comes to include eBooks in their business plans. Now, many independent storeowners sell eBooks in the form of floppy disks and CD-ROMs.

At this very moment, two of the major traditional book wholesalers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor are considering offering eBooks to their customers. Their customers include traditional bookstores and libraries.

11Q. Where Can I find eBooks?
11A. The cheap and easy way to get familiar with eBooks is to locate and read the many free eBooks located on-line. The largest resource is a website called Project Gutenberg, located at:

www.gutenberg.net

There you will find around 10,000 free eBooks. These will be easy to read because they are formatted in straight ASCII text, just like all of your e-mail messages. This way they can be easily downloaded on 99% of the computers in existence.

You will find eBooks that are in “public domain.” This means that anyone can distribute these eBooks without worrying about violating copyright.

Another great source of free eBooks and book samplers is called the Rocket Library. It is located at:

www.rocket-library.com

You will be able to download and read these books in the new Rocketbook eBook format and you can contribute to the Rocketbook Library.

Since many eBook-publishing houses distribute their own free eBooks to the Rocketbook Library, your free eBook may get the attention of eBook publishers.

12Q. Where Can I purchase new eBooks?
12A. Here are some wonderful places to purchase eBooks.

1stbooks Library:
www.1stbooks.com

The Booklocker:
www.booklocker.com

Fatbrain:
www.fatbrain.com

Mightywords:
www.mightywords.com

Rocket Edition Books by NuvoMedia available at Barnes & Noble and Powells.com:
www.bn.com
www.powells.com

Softbook Editions by the Softbook Press:
www.softbook.com

Softlock:
www.softlock.com

The NetLibrary:
www.netlibrary.com

To get a more complete and up to date list, go to major search engine directories like Yahoo, altavista, excite, etc, and search on the words, “eBooks” or “electronic books.”

Are you excited? The list gets bigger every day. Good luck! Your first eBook will soon be listed and sold by many of the above eBook sellers!

The Traffic Snowball needs to become linked with others to pick up REAL momentum.

A recent check at linkpopularity.com showed that Yahoo has over one million links sprawled across the web. That’s a lot of links. And while reaching that milestone at your site may seem impossible, it is important to at least grow your links regularly.

The number will have a direct affect on your website traffic in many ways. Here’s an example… Lately I’ve noticed a steady increase in visitors coming to my own site from search engines. But not just the major search engines. Many newer search engines are now directing fresh traffic to my site too. New subscribers to my newsletter have reported finding my site through newer engines.

But why? It’s been a long time since I really put much effort into my search engine ranking.

Well after a little research, my findings pointed directly to one explanation… “Links.” At many search engines, new and old alike, the number of quality links you have into your site plays a key role in their relevancy algorithms. In a nutshell, the more sites you have linking to yours (preferably related sites) the higher your site will rank in their returns.

Power of reciprocal linking is growing and is sought after as the new medium of advertising.

You should set up a Links Page with link access from your homepage, and promote your specific Reciprocal Links Page URL address in all the major search engines. (This way everybody wins). By setting up a reciprocal links page it will help you to get a better listing in the search engines the more links you got coming to your page the popular it becomes so you want as many people linking to you as possible and if you promote your links page you will gain more traffic and increase more links to your site.

With each member promoting each other’s websites, you create a tremendous amount of leverage for minimal effort, and your websites traffic will increase dramatically! This method also gets higher rankings with some Search Engines. Many of the different Search Engines spider your web pages looking for other sites linking to yours. The more sites these spiders find linking to your web site the more popularity ranking your web site gets. This will get you a higher ranking positioning when people search the web.

If you have a lot of links to your web site, the robots will find you faster and more often, as they travel the Internet. They will spider your pages more often and they will believe your site is more popular than the others. This will also automatically submit your pages to search engines, with you never having to do that chore again, once you have the reciprocal links pointing to you. This will put you near the top of their listings.

Zeus Internet Marketing Robot is an automatic reciprocal link generator! One good reciprocal link can give you the same traffic as a major search engine and, with a Zeus robot, you are able to have thousands of reciprocal links. Its an easy-to-use, intelligent, Internet marketing robot that builds a search link directory and creates reciprocal links for your web site. A totally new concept in generating web traffic, this revolutionary software product has features and benefits that enable it to create traffic to your web site.

Zeus Internet Marketing Robot - Automatic Reciprocal Link Generator and Link Directory Creator

Lets give our Traffic Snowball a little push!

So now you have completed the design of your website and you have uploaded the content to your server. The next step is to bring traffic to the website by announcing to the world that your site is live through search engine submission. This should be considered the first little push that we are giving your traffic snowball.

With a rapid increase in the number of web sites competing for exposure, the role of online search engines and directories is becoming critical to any websites success. Eighty seven percent (87%) of web site visitors find their chosen site through search engines.

What’s more, almost all of them use just seven - namely AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, LookSmart, Google, Hotbot and above all, Yahoo

This means that if you don’t have a top listing on these engines, thousands of potential clients will never find you.

There are 3 steps involved in search engine submission
1) Optimization of your web site
2) Submission of your site to the search engines and directories
3) Monitoring of your listings

Lets deal first with Optimization

The website needs to be made “search engine-friendly” before it is submitted to the major search engines This is an art in itself and there are specialist companies, such as Traffic Builder Systems, that deal only in Search engine optimization and rank management.

The first step that is undertaken is to determine the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Some people achieve a top 10 placement in a major search engine and get plenty of traffic. Others do the same but get nothing.

Why?

Simple. The first group selected keywords that many people are searching on, and the second did not!

To find the optimum keywords that are going to bring you the most targeted traffic you could use a tool such as Wordtracker

Wordtracker will compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and they tell you how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered. You’ll find out how popular these keywords really are. Then for each major search engine, they will show you the chances of making the top 10.

Once you have got the correct keywords together you will need to format them into META TAGS to place into the HTML of your webpages

If you are going to submit your site to the search engines individually it must be sensitized with META tags.

There are three META tags used by the popular search engines. META tags are added to your website’s HTML coding, and do not appear on your visible webpage. These tags are placed within the head portion of your HTML document, usually directly beneath your tag.

1) The “Keyword” META Tag

The “keyword” META tag helps meta capable search engines in indexing your website. It tells the search engine under which search terms your website should come up under.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”widgets, cheap widgets, widgets for sale, john store etc..”>

Within this META tag, use your prioritized list of keywords and commanding combinations. Don’t duplicate your keywords too many times. Each keyword should be separated by a comma, and there should be no spaces. Different search engines allow different numbers of keywords. Make sure all keywords listed in your META tag are related to your site.

If you put unrelated keywords in your keyword META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you. Be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags. Some companies have sued because they found their names in the META tags of their competitors.

2) The “Description” META Tag

The “description” META tag helps meta capable search engines to summarize your website.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”John’s widget shop has the largest and cheapest selection of widgets”>

Within this tag, use a description of your website and keep the tag length under 200 characters. Some search engines allow longer or shorter descriptions. Put the most important part of your description first, for cases where search engines do not use all of it.

Some search engines extract your website’s summary from the first 250 characters of your webpage, so be sure you include a good opening paragraph on your webpage. Make sure everything in your description is related to your site. If you put unrelated words or phrases or sentences in your description META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you.

As discussed above, be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags.

3) The “Robots” META Tag

The “robots” META tag tells meta capable search engines which pages should get indexed, and which pages should not. You may have certain pages which you may not want to show up in the search engines. You may have test pages, private pages created for a particular customer, and so on.

If you have a frames site, you wouldn’t want to index your HTML documents which display within the various frames which make up your page.

The following options are available for this tag: all, none, index, noindex, follow, nofollow.

If you wanted all of your pages indexed, you would use this tag on your main page:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”all follow”>

It would tell the search engine spider to index your main page, then follow any links it finds on that page, and spider those links.

Use this tag on a page which you don’t want indexed:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>

After entering the META tags into the HTML of your website pages and then uploading to the server, you will then need to proceed to the search engines to submit your website.

Doorway pages

Most people optimize each of their webpages for all of their keywords, and to be submitted to all the major search engines. For less popular keywords this strategy will often suffice. However for competitive keywords it won’t get favorable listings, mainly because when you overly fine tune a webpage to score well for one search engine, it will likely score lower for other search engine. For competitive keywords you should consider using a “multiple entry page” strategy.

This involves using multiple entry pages (also called doorway pages, bridge pages, jump pages and gateway pages), each optimized for a particular keyword and/or search engine. Entry pages act as “front doors” to your website. These special pages are designed to score high in keyword density and relevance.

Each entry pages can be fine tuned for one or a few keywords, and can be fine tuned for a particular search engine. It is not advisable to use the above page naming convention with all search engines, as certain search engines may detect that you are using multiple doorways.

To be safe use names which do not resemble one another: The second step is the submission to the search engines

You have the following options:

1) Submit your site manually to the search engines by visiting each one individually. This can be very time consuming and also there is the problem that every search engine is different in the sense that they each use different logarithms for analyze and ranking the website submission.

2) The submission service will submit your website to many hundreds of search engines and directories on a regular basis. This is usually an automated process, with the drawback being you get no advice on optimization. You may or may not receive reports charting your success.

3) The meta-tag optimisers will take your site and optimize it for a one off fee. They may also offer a service to submit the site once it has been optimized. With this service you have little idea of how successful the service has been long after your money has gone.

4) A small number of companies are taking a Search Engine Rank Management approach. This involves the specialist company taking complete, ongoing control of your search engine marketing needs by optimizing, submitting and monitoring your ranking activity on an ongoing basis.

High search engine ranking is the key to unlocking the true potential of your company’s web site.
Based on our industry leading knowledge of search engine technology, Traffic Builder Systems brings you Traffic Builder, an affordable rank management solution for all web site owners.

Finally, the choice is yours but remember that search engine promotion is fundamental to your success and should be the start of the the initial push to get noticed. Investment in good search engine promotion will pay dividends later.

Lets start by giving the Traffic Snowball a name.

The starting point with every website is the domain name and now there is a wider choice than ever with the introduction of NEW domains (.info & .biz)

So what is the difference and which do you choose?

Basically, for the moment .com still rules. If you are not using “.com” address, then you are losing your hard earned visitors. Everyone remembers “.com” before “.net “, it’s that simple. Even most web browsers, if the extension is not entered, will default to “.com”.

A credible and serious business must have its own domain name that is relevant and appropriate to the nature of the business. For example let say the business is “Johns Widget Store” A first and natural choice choice would be johnswidgets.com.

However, you do not need to register ONLY one domain name. You can register as many as you want and point them to the same web content (we’ll come back to this point later)

For example, you can LOAD the domain name with “keywords” which are relevant to the nature of the website.

By registering “KEYWORD RICH” domain names you are going to help skyrocket your search engine rankings! (That’s right just by using keyword saturated domain names you can drastically improve your search engine rankings… really it’s that easy!)

“Keyword Phrases” are now a HOT opportunity… a catch phrase alone can generate a giant source of traffic to your website.

Why? - Because it is catchy!

Not only are these phrases catchy but they can also boost your search engine rankings. Search engines love url’s that are saturated with keywords!

So, think of all the keywords and keyphrases for your product/service/website and put them in your URL.

Load the domain name with your best keywords to get ranked higher in the search engines. Then have it redirect to your main site or use it as a “doorway” page (as we talk about later in the article) to get a much higher ranking in the search engines to forward traffic to you.

Here are example URL’s that will pull great in the search engines ……

www.computer-discount-software-store.com, www.computerdiscountsoftwarestore.com

Notice that I gave the above example with hyphens and without hyphens… it is a little known fact that search engines prefer URL’s with hyphens and visitor prefer them without so make sure you register both!

Also there are the country code domains. For example a url ending in .co.uk would be a first choice for businesses operating in the UK.

As general rule of thumb it would be wise to buy both the .com and the country domain to start. There are only a few companies that are registering the 67 character domain names, and even fewer that are reliable companies. When you come to register your domains (s), you should consider using a domain registration service with at least the following facilities:

- Real-time modification of web forwarding
- Real time modification of url masking

Its important that if you are going to register a few domains for the purpose of creating doorways to your main site that you have the ability to forward the domain using an interface and you are able to modify this at any time in real time.

Some companies provide the forwarding free of charge and may also include a masking service which would be useful for keeping the new domain name visible in the browser whilst serving content from the redirected domain name. URL masking could be used for a variety of purposes but its important that there is a facility to add META tags to the masked domain name.

A domain service that provides URL masking with meta tags would be preferable than using one that provides only standard redirection as the masked domain will be more sensitive to search engines.

Give the search engine spiders a map

Create a site map for your site. Setup a page and take some time and link to each and every page on your website, including a short description for each page.

This may take some time to initially setup, but if you add this to your list of to do items whenever you add a new page to your site, it won’t be so bad.

Link to this page from your home page and from each of the pages on your website. Most spider based search engines (like Google) really love to find pages through other links.

A site map makes their job easier, and it ensures that each page of your site will eventually get indexed.

Fill it with keywords

Make sure to include keywords describing each page listed on your site map. This will also help in the ranking for the pages your site map points to.

The keywords you use here will help set the initial theme for the spiders as the reach that page. If you’ve done your job well and followed the advice in the previous article properly, you’ll make it so much easier for the search engines to index your pages the way you want them to be indexed.

They’re good for people too

The main purpose for your site map will be to make it easier for search engine spiders to find all the pages on your site.

But they can also be useful navigation tools for your visitors. Keep this in mind when creating your site map and you’ll be adding more value for your visitors.

Having good navigation for your website is essential for getting your visitors to stay longer and browse around on your site.

If they get confused and can’t find their way around, they’ll head straight for the nearest exit.

Slowly but surely, links are where the traffic is!

Link popularity and link relevancy, have become the most important factors in determining whether you show up on page 1 or page 1,000 of the search results.

Requesting links is tedious, boring, and too closely resembles work! But you have to do it… if you want to get any traffic from the search engines, that is.

Stay away from the shortcuts on this one because they’ll cause you more harm than good. Spend the time finding sites that have a lot of links pointing to them and that get a great deal of traffic.

Each time you convince a decent site to link to your website, you stand to gain more visitors to your site, as well as a nice boost in the ranking of your site on the search engines.

As more and more sites link to you, you’ll see your search engine traffic start to increase because they will view your site as being more important.

Think about it: What if every site that links to you sends you 10 visitors per day. Find just 10 of those and you’ve picked up another 100 visitors per day…FREE!

Burn a little midnight oil and get that number up to 100 sites, and you now have 1,000 visitors a day sifting through your site!

Keep in mind that some links won’t bring you any traffic at all, and others will send one here, and one there. But these add up over time, so don’t dismiss a site because you don’t think you’ll get thousands of visitors from it.

Another reason I stress finding your own link partners rather than using some of the “5,000 links a day” programs is that the latest search engine trends are to rank the sites that link to you.

It’s not the quantity, but the quality that counts!

This means that 10 sites that have 100 sites linking to each of them is better than 100 sites with only 10 sites linking to them.

Basically, the search engines give a higher weighting to sites that link to you that are also popular themselves. There are many more factors in determining the popularity of a site, but you can typically use this as a good rule of thumb when searching out partners.

This makes sense because if an important site likes your site enough to link to it, then the search engines will like it too.

This is called Link Relevance, or Link Importance. Where Link Popularity merely counts the number of incoming links to your website, Link Relevance attempts to actually rank each of those sites that are linking to you.

By the way, the best tool I’ve seen out there for finding important sites to request links from (those that have many incoming links to them), is called Internet Success Spider by Neil Shearing.

You can either choose to enter in the URL of a popular site, or enter in search keywords that your target audience would search for. When the Spider is finished crunching, it will give you a list of sites, sorted by number of incoming links, that you can then contact and request a link from.

This can save you many, many hours of wasted time requesting links from lesser important sites, and allows you to focus on only the ones that will increase your website’s link relevance. You’ll also stand a good chance of getting a quite a bit of traffic through from these sites.

Internet Success Spider can save you a ton of time and allow you to build partnerships that can be worth many, many thousands of dollars.

I’ve used it to find a number of great affiliates for my affiliate program. In fact, one wonderful lady I discovered using the Spider software jumped onto my top 10 affiliates list in less than a week after I contacted her!

Use it to find out what sites are linking to your competitors, or that link to high ranking sites, and then contact them to see if they will link to yours as well.

Create some mini sites

An inexpensive and not-too-time-consuming option is to create several mini sites, and link them to your main site.

Mini sites are great at getting top rankings on the search engines because they are typically very focused on a particular topic, which the search engines like.

If you spend some time learning the steps to creating successful mini sites, you can get a quite a bit of traffic from them, while also increasing the link popularity of your main site.

The best resource by far on this subject is Phil Wiley’s “Mini Site Profits” ebook. If you understand the profit potential of mini sites, you’ll make sure you have Phil’s ebook in your library!

Setup a few of these sites and you can quickly start to see a large increase in traffic to your website, as well as more sales from the targeted visitors. (The extra sales should easily cover the small expense of Phil’s ebook)

A little creativity goes a long way

There are many different strategies that you can use to get more links to your website. In fact, i can recommend one of the ebooks named Website Traffic System with the topic “131 Link Building Strategies”.

I highly recommend that you put some effort into this because nothing else you do will give you as much long term rewards for your time.

One thing that I learned (another one of those “Why didn’t I do this earlier!”) is that for some sites it works better if you create a graphic of some sort for others to link to you with. I had always offered up a text link to people that added their affiliate program to my directory.

I rarely received links this way! I know that you would think people wouldn’t want a graphic on their site, but I found that when I created a few graphics and then told them they could use the graphic to link to me, the number of sites linking to me increased very quickly!

This may not work for your type of site, but I give this as an example to show you that you need to keep an open mind and be willing to try different methods.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting lots of links!

Every page on your website needs

Every single page on your website must be optimized for the search engines. This means every page needs:

1) Page Title
2) Meta Tags
3) Keywords in Header tags
4) ALT tags on all images
5) Keyword-filled content
6) Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible
7) Keywords in links to other pages
8) Keywords in outbound links

Page Title

Most search engines will use this as part of the information that is displayed when your site shows up in search results.

It is also important in the determination of what a particular page is about. For this reason you should make sure to put keywords in your page title, and preferably at the beginning of the title.

For example, for my AffiliateMatch.com website, my page title is:

Affiliate Programs Directory - AffiliateMatch.com

This helps my site to rank well for searches on “affiliate” or “affiliate programs” or “affiliate programs directory.”

Make sure you put in your most important keywords that you found in the previous article, and try to position them at the beginning.

It is not always possible to put them at the beginning and still be readable, but will definitely help if you are able to do this.

Meta Tags

These things become less and less important as time goes by.

At this point I don’t believe very many search engines even look at Meta Tags anymore, but since they are easy enough to setup, and because some engines do use them, it can’t hurt.

For the search engines that no longer use them, they just ignore them, so it won’t hurt you to have them on your pages.

You can find a Meta Tag Generator easily on the Internet. Just do a search in Google or Yahoo for that keyword. Simply enter your keywords and description and it will create them for you. Just copy and paste that into your page and you are set.

Keywords in Header tags

This means creating a heading for each page that contains the keywords you are targeting on that specific page. For example, if you want to target “search engines”, create a heading with the following code:

<h1>Search Engines</h1>

To your visitors, this would look like:

Search Engines

If that is too large for your particular page, you can also go with <h2> and <h3> tags instead.

To the search engines, this would be considered an important keyword phrase for that page.

The search engine would then compare that to the rest of the text found on the page and use all of this to determine the most important keywords for that particular page.

Make sure you do this on every page of your website!

ALT tags on all images

Another tip is to make sure every image on each page of your website has the ALT attribute. You want to put keywords in these. Don’t overdo this, but use them as an additional place to plug in a few keywords.

The way this looks is:

<img src=”/images/someimage.gif” alt=”search engines”>

In this example, I’d be adding a little more weighting for the phrase: “search engines”.

The actual purpose for this tag is to display text for those that surf with images turned off, or when you move your mouse over an image this text is what will popup.

Somebody along the line figured out you could stuff keywords in there because some search engines use the information in the alt tags for keyword relevancy calculations as well.

Keyword-filled content

You really can’t get away from this one. The more content-filled pages your website has, the better.

The fact is that they like lots of relevant, keyword-filled content. The more they can find, the happier they (and you) will be.

The best way that I have found to do this is with articles.

Articles can be reused in so many different ways, and they add excellent search engine bait for your website.

In later articles I’ll give you some great ideas for using articles as an important part of your traffic-building strategy.

Keywords as close to the top of each page as possible

This is my favorite, and I only wish I would have figured it out sooner! What this entails is very simply making sure you have the keywords you are targeting with a particular page as high up in the code for that page as possible.

To see this, open your web page with Notepad and look through all the gibberish … Title, Meta Tags, all that junk and look for the very first words that would be visible to someone reading your page.

The absolute first words need to be keywords!

As an example, take a look at my AffiliateMatch website by clicking here. Once that window opens up, go to the View Menu in your browser, and then Source. This is the actual code that makes up this page, and is also what the search engines see.

After you wade through all the gobbledygook, you’ll get to the text that visitors will actually see. In this graphic I’ve highlighted the first two words:

Even though there is a ton of junk above that, the search engines know that these are the first ‘visible’ words on this page.

The very first words for this page are affiliate programs. That’s the phrase I’m targeting.

Go to Google.com and type in affiliate programs and see what site is number one, and you’ll see how well this works.

When I first discovered this I actually redesigned this particular website to make sure I put those words at the top like that.

Before this I had a menu on the left that actually was higher up in the code of the page.

The problem was that I had text in there too, like: “Signup for my newsletter!” and things like that. This greatly affected my rankings.

After redesigning my site to allow me to put keywords higher up in the code, I quickly started seeing it rise in the rankings.

If your present design doesn’t allow for this, you might want to give some thought to either having only graphics in the menu, or redesigning it.

The idea for having more graphics is that these will be overlooked by the search engines as they search for the first ‘visible’ text on the page.

Keywords in links to other pages

Make sure when you have links to other pages on your site, or to other websites, that you use your keywords in the link.

For example, if you are targeting “search engines” on a particular page, create a link to a page on your site, and in the link call it: search engine listings.

The page the link points to can simply be a list of the most popular search engines.

Here is the same screen shot of the source code from my AffiliateMatch website so you can see an example of this, but this time I’ve highlighted it so you can see that the first two words that I showed you above are also part of a link:

Search engines will use the text from your links as another determining factor as to what your page is about, and also what the page you are linking to is about.

In this example you’ll notice that I’ve also bolded these words to give even more emphasis to them and make them look more important to the search engines.

I highly recommend that you combine the methods mentioned on this page whenever possible. For example, the first words on your page could be included in a header tag and be a link pointing to another page on your site.

Combining them in this manner can greatly increase your chances of getting great rankings.

Keywords in outbound links

This is the same as the last one, except this refers to using keywords in the links to other sites.

Again, if you are talking about search engines on a page, and link to someone else’s site for an article on search engine positioning, put “search engine positioning” in the actual link so it looks like:

search engine positioning

The alternative that many people use, but that doesn’t help their search engine ranking any, is to just show the website address like:

www.joeshomepages.com/~redy4u/search.htm

This doesn’t help either of you very much … at least not as far as search engines are concerned.

Whenever you are putting together a page to add to your website, fire up this page and incorporate as many of these steps as possible.

How do I know which keywords to target?

The most important task you will have is determining which keywords you should target on any given page of your website.

I say “any given page of your website” because you should optimize each page individually. Each page on your site needs to be able to stand on its own as far as ranking for keywords on that particular page.

This enables you to bring in visitors on many different keywords and keyword phrases instead of just the few that your home page will be optimized for.

I don’t recommend simply copying and pasting each page and then modifying the content. You should take the time and start each page from scratch.

This enables you to better optimize each page for the keywords you are hoping to target. You want to try and take full advantage of the potential traffic you can get by having many ‘doorways’ into your site.

The more doors you have, the more traffic you can get. View each page as a new ‘doorway’ into your site through which Web surfers can enter.

Although your first instinct will be to go with more popular terms such as music, marketing, or cars, you should narrow the scope quite a bit.

Some reasons for not optimizing your pages for these types of keywords are:

1) They are too broad - If your website is about Rap music, would you want to attract thousands of Country music or Gospel music fans? Even if you are tempted to answer ‘yes’ to that question, you should say ‘no’. These visitors won’t be interested in your music, and will quickly leave in search of a site that fits their interests.

2) Too much competition - You will have a much more difficult time getting a high ranking on the search engines when you use these more general and more popular terms because you will have literally millions of websites all trying to get the same spot you are.

3) Too much time and effort involved - If you decide to try and compete with the other millions of webmasters out there trying to get into the top 25 or so listings, you’ll spend an awful lot of time trying to get there, and spend even more trying to keep your position!

I’m sure your next thought will be: “Okay, I’ll go for Internet Marketing, or Rap Music, or Used Cars!”

Well, that does narrow things down a bit, but these phrases will still have a ton of competition.

The better (and more profitable) approach is to search for keywords and keyword phrases that meet both of the following:

1) Popular - They are searched for by a lot of people

2) Have little competition - It is so much easier to get a high ranking (and stay there!) when you target keywords that have little competition.

The key to success with the search engines is to find keywords that many of your potential customers are searching for, but that few of your competitors are optimizing for.

How in the World do I do that?

The absolute best resource you’re going to find online for finding keywords that fit the above criteria is: WordTracker

They offer a free trial, and if you need to have access to the more advanced reporting features, or would like to research other search engines not offered in the trial, you can subscribe to their service for a small fee.

The trial will work just fine, but if you decide to get serious, this will be the best money you spend. Each time you add a new page to your website you should research the best keyword phrases and optimize that page for them.

Since this is such a valuable resource, and because this part of your search engine strategy is so important , I’m going to give you a quick tutorial (complete with screen shots!) of how to use WordTracker to find the best keywords.

Obviously you’ll need to have a general idea of what the subject of your website is, or is going to be, and then click here to go to the WordTracker website.

Once there, find and click on the Trial link. You will then be asked to enter your name and email address to start your trial. (They will send the results to this email address, so make sure you enter a valid address.)

Make sure you check the box to get the weekly Top 500 Keywords report! This is a very useful email that you’ll get once a week that will show you the most popular keywords for that week.

Then you’ll see the following:

For this example I’ll enter in “marketing” and click Proceed, which will then bring up a list of related keywords and phrases:

You will have a left window and a right window, and when you click a keyword it will display the results in the right window.

By clicking on marketing, I get this result in the right window:

This list gives various keyword phrases with the word “marketing” in them, and sorts them by number of searches.

What you will then do is click on a few of these keywords to add them to your basket (don’t worry, this will make more sense after you’ve gone through it once.)

After you’ve added a few of these keywords to your basket, click the link to move to Step 3.

This step gives you some choices that are only available in the full version, so just click the link to go to Step 4.

Step 4 is where you’ll find the good stuff!

The important information on this page is the KEI Analysis. This gives each keyword a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.

A low score means that either not many people search for the keyword, or that there is too much competition for it.

The amount of competition is determined by searching for each keyword on the selected search engine, and finding out how many sites come up in the results.

What you want is a good mixture of popularity and competition … or lots of popularity and little competition!

If you look at the scale just above the table in this graphic you will see what KEI numbers will mean you have found a good keyword or keyword phrase.

In this example it appears that I didn’t find any good keyword choices.

But, another search I ran found these:

As you can see in that list, there are a few terms that have a very high KEI ranking. This means that these would be good keywords to target because they have a good ratio of popularity to competition.

This is exactly what you are looking for when trying to find the best keywords to target for your website or for individual pages on your website.

When you choose keywords that are popular and that have little competition, you’ll be able to quickly get your site into the top results for that keyword.

The following articles will show you what you must do to make sure you take the right steps to take advantage of the great keywords you discovered during the above process.

Edit : These is a new upgrade from Wordtracker that gives more accurate results. If you find that you liked Wordtracker, you should try KeywordSpy.

KeywordSpy - keyword research technology

The question that I’m asked most often by my customers and subscribers is:

“How do I get more traffic to my website?”

And whenever the subject of search engines comes up, it’s quickly followed by:

“But how can I get a good listing in the search engines when they keep changing the way they rank sites?”

Well, there are many ways to get traffic, and the good news about search engines is that they don’t change the way they rank sites that often.

What changes is that they put in better ways of catching those that try to trick and spam them.

For example, if you have an illegal adult site and you’re trying to get it to show up when people search for “mortgage information”, the search engines will figure this out and will probably ban your site.

As long as you play by their rules, you don’t have to worry about this happening to you. I know there are some horror stories out there on this, but for the most part if you play your cards right you can expect to get traffic from the search engines for a long time.

Some examples I’m sure you may have heard about are:

1) Put popular search terms in your Meta Tags (even if it has nothing to do with your site.)
2) Place many, many keywords at the bottom of your page and change the font color so that visitors don’t see them.
3) Purchase software that will greatly inflate the number of links to your site.

This is just a small sample, and I’m sure at one point these tricks actually worked, but the search engines eventually figure this out and put in special exclusions for sites using these methods.

Because so many people subscribe to these theories, many will have you believe that search engines are really not even worth your time and effort when promoting your website.

To put it simply: Yes they are!

The long-term, targeted, and in most cases FREE traffic generated by the search engines just cannot be overlooked.

It does take time to get listed, and even longer to get listed well. But once your site is listed and is listed well, you can expect a steady stream of targeted visitors for many months to come.

What may really shock you is that it is not that difficult to get a great listing in the search engines … and to even get listed well for great keywords.

It doesn’t happen overnight, and you can’t just push a button and expect to magically appear at the top of the listings, but it can be done.

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:

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!