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Stepping Into Google’s Mindset: Creating Effective Websites

January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Though there are numerous ways to make money online without having your own website, most internet marketing business models revolve around building one or more sites. And for most purposes, many of the objectives are the same: traffic & conversions. But as with so many things, it’s often the details that make the difference between success and failure.

In this new “Internet Marketing 2.0″ world, we’re seeing more critical and more frequent changes in how sites are ranked, how and where traffic is generated,  and the viability & success of monetization methods.

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Filed Under: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Business, Content, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: , , , , ,

Keyword Ranking – What Doesn’t Work, What Does, and How To Do It

January 10, 2012 By 3 Comments

keyword rankingFor as long as Google has been around, marketers and webmasters have been trying to rank for specific keywords. Before Google, most search engines mixed ‘real’ (organic) and ‘sponsored’ (paid) results, and it was easier to rank by simply buying a position. Regardless, the available traffic – the number of searches and amount of commerce – was still relatively low.

Once we reached the point where significant sums could be made by targeting individual keywords & phrases, the ‘game’ was on. In the “early days”, when the sophistication of search was considerably lower, it was possible to gain top rankings through simple tactics such as keyword stuffing. As search evolved, the effort required evolved with it.

Since the value of a top listing can be huge, and grows along with the general growth of internet usage, a whole cottage industry of keyword ranking has grown up in the internet marketing industry. Along with various keyword and website tools, products such as George Brown’s “Google Sniper” and “Google Sniper 2″, and John James Robinson’s (‘xfactor’) “Micro Niche Adsense Course” exploited these opportunities with courses in how to build and rank these ‘single-keyword-focused’ sites “quickly & easily”.

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Filed Under: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Content, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Post-”Panda” Internet Marketing Article On Article Marketing

December 6, 2011 By 7 Comments

Article marketing is still one of the quickest, easiest, and surest means to generate traffic. While article marketing is used extensively for link building, it is also a tremendous source of very targeted traffic. With as little as one article, we can begin generating quality, targeted traffic almost immediately. Taking it a step further however, article marketing can be one of the strongest, long-term traffic strategies there are.

Anyone who has perused the various Internet marketing forums has probably seen numerous threads proclaiming the “death of article marketing”. Fortunately this couldn’t be further from the truth. What is true however, is that the days of profiting from low-quality, poorly researched articles are long gone.

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Filed Under: Content, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: , , , , ,

The New Rules For Content Quality

December 3, 2011 By 2 Comments

Whether you’ve been making money online for a while, or are just starting out, one truth that holds for every business model and strategy is the old maxim “content is king”. In fact, it’s truer today than it’s ever been – and with deeper implications.

The purpose for our content may vary – articles for article marketing, website content, Web 2.0 posts as a platform, or for linkbuilding, etc. – but whatever the purpose, we need our content to get indexed in order for it to ‘work’. In some cases, we want it not just to get indexed, but to rank well.

Beginning in Feb. 2011, Google’s ongoing “Panda” updates imposed some sweeping changes on the world of content. “Low quality” content is increasingly disappearing, being de-indexed or not indexed in the first place, and at best, struggling to rank well.

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Filed Under: Content, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: , , , , ,

Boost Conversions, Boost Income

September 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

Shortly after releasing “Adsense $100k Blueprint“, we began to get feedback on the course, and customers specific efforts. The two things we heard most often were, how do I get more traffic to my site, and how do I apply these methods to other ways of making money online – other business models i.e. Amazon affiliate sites, video marketing, etc. That was the genesis of “Traffic $100k Blueprint“.

When we began work on our Adsense course, our goal was to provide a step-by-step plan that virtually anyone could follow that would enable them to build a strong, sustainable business. When all was said and done, we realized we had two ‘complimentary’ results: how to build & rank a niche website, and how to optimize a website for maximum Adsense revenue.

Within the A100k course, the ‘traffic equation’ was all about ranking: providing you did your upfront keyword research properly, you would follow the plan to get your Page 1 rankings for your keyword phrases, which in turn would translate into traffic to your site. But search engines only represent a part of the overall available traffic. And so we set about to list all the other free traffic sources we were using ourselves, along with some explanations on how to best leverage them. That took care of the traffic question.

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Filed Under: Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Business, Products & Tool Review, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Quick & Easy Rankings Boost For Your Blogs After “Panda”

July 3, 2011 By 7 Comments

Google Panda UpdateMany people have seen their rankings tank after Google’s “Panda” update, or been unable to improve their current rankings. This is due to the two main ranking aspects of the update: de-valuing of certain backlink types & sources, and new “quality signals” for evaluating the quality, strength, and relevance of pages.

Since the update, I’ve been experimenting with some “passive” ways to boost blog rankings. By “passive” I mean without getting new backlinks or adding new content. While these are certainly the means for good and improved rankings, I wanted to see if current rankings could be affected by modifying a blog “as-is”, while not significantly altering it’s already-indexed URL’s.

“Two and a Half” Modifications

There are three modifications that I’ve found to have the most consistent positive impact (I say “two and a half” since one of them is already implemented with many themes; for some, all three might be implemented). These are homepage content configuration, site-wide internal linking & content, and tags, specifically “H1″ tags.

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Filed Under: Content, SEO & Ranking, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Cool Tool: Copytalk

March 3, 2011 By 6 Comments

Write an article – or ebook – over the phone with Copytalk!

Regardless of the particular business model, making money through Internet marketing involves content. Whether it’s website content, articles for backlinks, blog posts, etc., creating content is a given. Beyond website content, one of the best ways to profit in Internet Marketing is to have your own product – we’ve all heard this before. But this is where a lot of marketers get hung up.

There are plenty of ways to generate this content, from buying & editing PLR material, to hiring a copywriter on Elance. One way is through voice dictation using Dragon Naturally Speaking (which will be the subject of an extensive review soon).

Here’s a new, interesting, and (potentially) free method: dictate it over the phone!

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Filed Under: Content, Products & Tool Review Tagged With: , , , , ,

Creative Commons Content Resources

January 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You can just never have too much good content – “Content is King!” – how many times have we heard that? There’s good reason, though. The Internet revolves around content. Whether you’re creating a sales page, website, or info-product, good content is key.

One of the biggest issues for content is copyright.

The following is from a post I did on John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2 forum:

“Creative Commons” is a licensing structure that allows you to use content without traditional copyright restrictions.

There are a few different Creative Commons licenses. Some allow use for commercial purposes. It’s important to understand the particular Creative Commons license assigned before using the content.

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Filed Under: Content, Resources Tagged With: ,

Content is King – Now Here’s How to Get it…

January 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

Content is the core of what we do with the Blueprint. It’s the ‘life blood’ of our sites. “Content is King”, the Internet is built on content. The moon and stars revolve around… Well, you get the idea.

Some of like to write. Some of us like to write but aren’t very good at it, or write very slowly. Regardless, we need to go beyond just straight writing ourselves, if not now, then in the future.

Fortunately, there are a lot of avenues for content.

I outsource a lot of content. One of the places I frequent is Freelancer.com. There are plenty of writers for hire there, and I’ve ended up with some excellent long-term writer relationships.

Another ‘favorite’ of mine is Text Broker. The big benefits there are that you can choose from quality levels at different prices, and usually get your projects back in as little as 12 hours, sometimes even less.

Another fav is Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is easily the lowest-cost, but the most work in terms of diligently checking the results. I’ve often had to go through 3, 4, or more submissions to end up with one keeper. Still, if you’re on a budget, it can’t be beat.

In addition to outsourcing – and often in conjunction – I do a lot of spinning. I didn’t use to, but since The Best Spinner came along, I find myself doing more and more. The program is simply terrific.

Another good source for content is the public domain. Though many think ‘old books’ when they think public domain, there is actually tons of ‘not old’ material available – books, articles, reports, manuscripts, etc. One absolutely phenomenal source – more than one really – is the US federal government. By law, everything the federal government creates that isn’t classified is automatically in the public domain (the other exception is material that is contracted out to private concerns).

I created the bulk of a large website and product using primarily government reports & articles (I eventually flipped the site & product): http://www.gasforlessmoney.com/. Here’s the product pitch page – if you scroll down and take a look at what’s included, you’ll see that in addition to the main ebook, most of it is fed public domain stuff, some re-packaged: http://www.gasforlessmoney.com/UltimateGuide.html

There are a number of content networks that you can sign up with – usually for free – that will send you ‘original’ content. Unique Article Wizard (affiliate link) allows you to sign up as a publisher for free, specify keywords / topics you’re interested in, and they email you a ton of articles every day. These are UAW ‘spins’, so they are ‘semi-original’. I’ve used those articles as content for my Web 2.0 backlinking sites. Brad Callen’s SEOLinkvine.com is another, though I have to say the majority of the articles are unusable. Even with UAW you have to pick & choose, but there are plenty that are very usable.

Lastly, there is Dragon Naturally Speaking (affiliate link) speech-to-text. I’m not going to go too far into it as I’m saving it for a full review, but I can comfortably say Dragon is a game-changer. Providing you get a good mic and take a little time to train it, the accuracy is phenomenal. All of a sudden, you can produce massive amounts of content, quickly & easily. I couldn’t live without it, it’s that good.

Filed Under: Quickies, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: , ,