Affiliate Marketing Programs Blog

Blog Comments and SEO

2011-03-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

Michael Martinez has some interesting things to say about blog comments and SEO on his SEO Theory blog, so I thought I'd express some thoughts here too. I haven't really updated this blog in a long time, but I thought now would be a good time to start, and that blog comments for SEO would be a good topic to write about.

First of all, leaving blog comments for SEO purposes is an OLD technique. In fact, it's pretty much played out. The only way to get direct SEO benefit from leaving blog comments is to leave them in massive volume. That requires software and robots and all kinds of nastiness that you're better off not messing with. And if you own a blog and have to approve the comments there, then you've seen literally hundreds if not thousands of blog comments that were put there solely for SEO purposes.

Here's a question for you: What is SEO if not a marketing technique?

Here's another question for you: Is pissing off dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands of bloggers an effective marketing technique?

I daresay that it isn't.

If you want to participate in a discussion on a blog, then by all means, leave a comment. But don't do it because of any kind of SEO value that you're hoping to get. Comments that read, "This post gave me a lot to think about." aren't going to fool anyone. And the links you get from those kinds of comments are practically worthless anyway.

If you want to approach blog comments as part of your marketing strategy, then leave thoughtful comments that add to a discussion. Don't bother linking to your site or blog. Or if you do link, just use your name instead of using some lame anchor text like "Texas holdem online." If you write thoughtful and useful comments, people will search for your name and find your site without your having to leave a link.

You do have a page on your site that ranks in Google for your name, don't you?

Poker SEO Blog

2009-03-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

I'm not updating much here lately any more, but if you enjoy the stuff you're reading here, I'd encourage you to visit my new site about poker seo, especially the poker SEO blog there. I'm updating that blog daily Monday through Friday. I'll probably resume posting here on a weekly basis starting next week sometime.

Domaining

2008-05-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

"Domaining" means buying and selling domains for profit. It's only tangentially related to affiliate marketing in some instances, but in other instances it's extremely pertinent. For example, if I buy a great domain name , I have a couple of options. I can try to sell the domain for a profit over what I paid for it, or I can develop it into a money-earning site via affiliate links or other paid advertising. A third option is to develop the domain into a moneymaker and then sell the domain and the moneymaking website. The third option makes the most sense to me.

I think that the traditional use of the phrase "domaining" usually only brings to mind that first option though. Buy a good domain for less than you can sell it for, and then sell it and make a profit from it. And that's not a bad business model. For example, let's say I register a domain name for the registration fee of $8.95 at Godaddy. And then let's say in 6 months, I turn it around and sell that domain for $500. I've made a $491 profit. That's a huge return on my money in that case. You can't get those kinds of returns in the stock market unless you're really tolerant of risk. And lucky.

But what about the other option? Suppose I launch a 2 or 3 page website, and I get 30 visitors a month to the site. (A combination of 15 type-in visitors and 15 visitors from search engines.) And let's say I'm working in a high dollar industry where I can earn $1 for every visitor to my site. That makes me $30 a month, or $360 a year...for the rest of my life probably. I'm 38, so assuming I last another 30 years, that's $10,800. That's not much over 30 years.

But it's a lot more than $491.

But let's say I work a little harder. Let's say that I write 1000 pages of content for the site, and I still make $1 per visitor. I like to assume that if I have a 1000 page website, I'll get at least 1000 visitors a day. Now that domain name I bought is earning me $30,000 a month for the rest of my life. That's a little over ten million dollars over the course of my life. That's a significant amount of money, even if it takes me a year to get that much content launched on my site.

Most websites though don't make $1 per visitor. A more realistic number might be 10 cents per visitor. (Higher in a competitive industry, but anyone ought to be able to make 10 cents per visitor to their website, I think.) That's still a million dollars over the next 30 years.

How many domains do you need to make that happen? How hard is it to launch and develop those domains with content?

My ideas about domains and domaining come from several places, but the person who got me most interested in domain was Andy Hagans in some of his posts at Tropical SEO. The man makes money the way I want to make money; without working hard at it. He also gave me the idea of taking these high quality domains and turning them into high quality money-earning websites that are worth far more than the domain would be worth by itself.

A couple of other items worth reading regarding domaining:

Speaking of domains, I just picked up a domain about slot machines. I plan to spend some time developing that one into a real powerhouse of a site loaded with useful content. I've already launched a great page there listing 51 slot machine websites, and more content is on the way.

How To Write 1000 Pages of Content

2008-05-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

In my last post (Does Google penalize affiliate websites?) I mentioned content rich versus content poor websites. Having a website that's rich in useful content is going to be a long term, smart strategy for getting traffic to your affiliate website via search engine optimization. (If I wrote the post well at all, then I made that point, among other things.) I don't think a website is "real" until it reaches 100 pages anyway.

Here are some reasons why having lots of content is an effective content and traffic strategy:

Sites with multiple pages of real content are more useful to a single visitor.
Sites with multiple pages cover multiple subjects and are more useful to a wider range of visitors.
Sites that are useful to lots of people are the kinds of websites search engines must rank in order to stay in business.
Internal links matter toward your SEO. So the more pages you write, the more links you have pointing at your other pages. (A 1000 page website which links to your homepage from every page has created 1000 links. There is no better link building strategy than writing content for your site.)
Multiple pages of content give you the opportunity to present different kinds of advertising and see which types of content make you the most money.

Webmasters who want to know how to write 1000 pages of content are concerned about two things:

How do I come up with 1000 topics about this subject to write about?
How do I actually get those 1000 pages written?

How to come up with 1000 topics on any given subject

1000 football pages

I like to boil the subject of any website I write down to a single word if I can. For example, I launched a website about football last year. Then I take that single word or phrase and add modifiers to it in order to create subtopics. One example of three no-brainer subtopics related to football is how the teams are set up:

That leaves 996 pages of content needed. Two more big subcategories I can think of really quickly are professional football and college football. (And if I wanted to, I could also use high school football as a subcategory.) But that still leaves me with 994 pages of content needed.

That's easy though, because I can subcategorize the category of professional football into 32 teams and give each team its own page. That only leaves me needing 962 more pages of content. (So I have a page about the Dallas Cowboys, a page about the Washington Redskins, a page about the Miami Dolphins, and so on.)

But I can also create a page of content about every college football team in the country. I haven't even started that list yet, but there are 119 college football teams I could write about too. (And finding a list of college football teams was as easy as doing a Google search for "how many college football teams in the USA".)

But that still leaves 843 pages of content needed. It seems like I haven't even scratched the surface.

But each of those subtopics have subtopics of their own. For example, I like to promote posters. So I've also created 32 pages (one for each NFL football team) for the posters that are available for each team. So I've got a hub page for NFL posters, and then pages for Baltimore Ravens posters, Chicago Bears posters, and Detroit Lions posters. Now we're down to 811 pages of content needed.

Another no-brainer subtopic for NFL teams is individual football players. We haven't gotten around to adding that content either, but each NFL team has 53 players on its roster. 53 X 32 teams = 1696 players. Bingo. Now we've got enough content ideas to build a 1000 page site (1885 pages actually). And we never once had to use a keyword research tool to come up with ideas for the pages. Those are all just topics and subtopics.

And a site about football could be expanded beyond that even. We could also write profiles of famous retired football players (likeTroy Aikman or Tony Dorsett). We could write about fantasy football. In fact, a lot of those subtopics might even generate 1000 page content sites all their own.

Finding affiliate programs to promote on a website about a particular sport is simplicity itself too. I already pointed out posters as one possibly applicable revenue stream. Here are some more ideas, off the top of my head:

Google Adsense
Ticket broker affiliate programs
Travel affiliate programs (Hotel rooms during the Superbowl are insanely priced - I'll take 5% of that action any day.)
Sports memorabilia affiliate programs

But what if you don't want to write about a sport? What if you want to launch a real moneymaker of a site? Suppose you want to focus on products?

1000 pages about satellite tv

Heck, that's even easier. Take the satellite tv dish niche as an example. How do you get 1000 pages of content out of that?

As far as I'm concerned, that one is even easier. Two words.

Go local.

Build pages that focus around the names of locations + "cable tv" or "satellite tv". There are 50 states in the USA. That leaves you with 950 pages to come up with.

Luckily each state has at least 19 cities in it you could write about. (There are actually a lot more than that.) Now you've got your 1000 pages.

But you can't write quality unique content about satellite dishes in 1000 different locations? Actually, I think you probably can with a little bit of effort. First of all, you provide directory listings with the names and addresses of the local cable companies in the area. Then you provide a price and feature comparison that you've researched for each location. Sometimes the cable company might be providing a better deal than the satellite dish people, but at least you're driving traffic. And if you use a combination of Google Adsense and affiliate advertising, you'll still make money. Finally, provide some insight into what kind of local television programming is available in a particular area. The top 20 or so cities in each state surely offer programming aimed directly at the viewers in their area.

What are you interested in?

If you're one of those blessed souls who wants to create a website about a subject just because you're interested in it, you can still come up with 1000 pages. Suppose you're a huge fan of the tv show Lost. Can you come up with 1000 pages of content about that show? I can.

A page about every character ever featured on the show.
A page about every actor who ever appeared on the show.
A page about every writer who ever wrote for the show.
A page about every episode of the show.
A page about every novel based on the show.
A page about the video game based on the tv show.
Reviews of other sites about Lost.
Pages about the special features and commentaries on the DVD.

Like Conan the Barbarian? Use the same thing - write a page about everything related to it. Harry Potter? Go for it. Buffy? It's been done, but maybe you can do it better.

Movies

Writing 1000 pages of content for a website about movies would be so easy that it would be almost painful. Just review every movie you've ever seen. Write profiles of directors and screenwriters you like. Build a directory of movie theaters organized by location. Visit them and write unique reviews. Ask your readers to submit their reviews of movie theaters they've visited.

You can monetize your movie site with Amazon links, eBay links, Netflix links, Blockbuster links, and AllPosters links.

How to find the time to write 1000 pages of content

Finding the time to write 1000 pages of content is the easiest part of the whole exercise. All you need is one of two things:

A year
Help

If you're willing to work on a site for a year, then you only need to write 4 pages of content 5 days a week for 50 weeks in order to have 1000 pages of content on your site. If you plan on having about 500 words per page, that's an achievable goal.

The other option is to get help writing your site content. You can do that by paying a writer. College students work cheap, and they produce better writing than the folks at Elance. Or you can get people to help write your content free by launching a forum. Every page of content on a forum counts too.

Whether or not your site needs 1000 pages of content is for you to decide. None of my sites have 1000 pages yet. But I think that 1000 pages is a worthwhile goal. I know it's a profitable goal, although it's more profitable in some niches than in others.

Does Google Penalize Affiliate Websites?

2008-05-08T21:10:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is "Does Google penalize affiliate websites?", but the title should probably be something more like "Does Google penalize affiliate websites just for being affiliate websites?" I've seen webmasters go to great length to disguise or cloak their affiliate links so that Google won't penalize them for having affiliate links on their site. I think this is a silly waste of time.

I've seen editors at the Wikipedia who have displayed amazing amounts of derision about a site simply because "it's an affiliate site!" (Even though the site in question wasn't even really an affiliate site. I knew the owner, and he made his money via straight media sells. No affiliate revenue period. And the owner of this particular website was a known expert in the field, and the site had 100's of pages of high quality content.)

Do Affiliate Sites Suck Just Because They're Affiliate Sites?

Somewhere along the way, some people got the idea that all affiliate sites suck, are useless, or lame. This is probably because a ton of short-term thinking, opportunistic, and lazy webmasters have launched countless useless web pages whose sole purpose were to draw search engine traffic for the sole purpose of getting advertising revenue or affiliate commissions. But lumping all affiliate websites in with that category is silly.

Gambling Affiliate Sites and Google Penalties

I have some familiarity with the online gambling industry. It's a profitable and competitive niche. And nowhere else will you see a more motley assortment of lame, useless, and content-poor websites. The online gambling affiliate niche is so aggressive and competitive that it's hard to find a good source of information in a search engine on a specific subject, because some of the most competitive gambling webmasters have link bombed their way to the top. If they put 5% of their link bombing efforts into content creation, many of them would have a decent site.

The reason I bring up the online gambling industry is because there is a huge difference between a high quality gambling information portal and a useless content-poor website. That difference is not defined by whether or not the website has affiliate links. It's not even defined by how many affiliate links the site has.

For example, Poker News has affiliate links for online poker websites. But that site has thousands of pages of high quality, useful content about poker. But there is no Google penalty in effect for this site. Try a Google search for the phrase "poker rules" for example. Or "poker strategy". Both are extraordinarily competitive search phrases, and the Poker News website ranks just fine for those phrases.

Compare the content on that site with 10 randomly chosen sites from the search results for a phrase like "online casino", one of the most heavily link-bombed phrases on the Internet. Some of them might have respectable content. But many, if not most of them will consist of pages full of nothing more than affiliate advertisements. After reviewing some of those sites, someone might think that if Google isn't penalizing affiliate websites, then perhaps they should.

But if Google did that, sites like Poker News, which carries affiliate links, would get dinged in the results too. Google would no longer be providing what might be the best results for probably several thousand search engine phrases. That's counter to Google's interests.

Google Does NOT penalize websites just because they're affiliate sites.

I didn't write this post to bash the legions of gambling webmasters publishing low-content sites. I wrote it to point out that Google doesn't penalize sites just because they're affiliate sites. Nor should they.

A side note about linking to gambling sites.

(This is a side note, but I'll often see SEO gurus advise people to not link to sites in the gambling industry because you'll probably get penalized for linking to a bad neighborhood. Being a site about gambling doesn't automatically make a website a bad neighborhood to link to. The advice people should be giving in that situation would involve using discernment to see whether or not the gambling site in question was a quality resource that would be useful for your readers. It might make perfect sense for a site about football to link to an online sportsbook, for example, even if the focus of the football site isn't on wagering. It would make sense for such a site to link to a website reviewing online sportsbooks too. But only if the sportsbook or the sportsbook review sites are quality resources that the webmaster thinks would be useful to their readers.)

SEO Misconceptions and Myths

Being penalized by Google just for being an affiliate site is only one popular SEO misconception I'm tired of hearing about though. Nonsense like "reciprocal links don't work" or "linking is the single most important ranking factor" wears me out too. Reciprocal links work fine if you use your brain before linking to the other site. Linking might be the most important factor in ranking for some phrases, but that's not true for every phrase. Or probably even most phrases.

Why Your Affiliate Site Doesn't Rank Well in Google

If you run an affiliate website, and you think you might have been penalized for Google for having affiliate links on your site, then you are probably being penalized for one of these other reasons instead:

Linking to crappy websites.
Linking to a bunch of crappy websites which are useless to your visitor.
Having no real content on your site. Thinly disguised content masquerading as a "product review" is the worst offender in this case, and my 13 year old son is smart enough to spot this kind of nonsensical content.
Poor internal linking.
Poor on-page optimization.
Any other kind of obvious "link scheme".

Not all of the above are actual "penalties". Some of them are just reasons for your site to rank poorly. Sites that are concerned exclusively with driving traffic to affiliate links don't deserve to rank as well as websites which concern themselves with providing their users with quality information. In the long run, the high quality informational sites will make more money anyway.

How To NOT Be Penalized By Google

What to do?

It's pretty simple. Focus on building a good quality website with good quality content first and foremost. Focus on helping people solve problems. Give them the information they're searching for. Refer them to other quality resources online, and get other quality resources to refer peopel to you.

Once you've done those things, the affiliate revenue is a no-brainer. You'll have repeat visitors and a sustainable revenue stream that will last you a lot longer than a lot of other affiliate webmasters.

And it's more fun to build a useful resource too.

Manifest Linking Destiny

2008-04-16T13:15:00.001-07:00

I've been too busy to post anything brilliant here lately, but I've got time today to point out an article that's well worth reading, studying, and thinking about from Eric Ward: Manifest Linking Destiny. Now that's brilliant thinking, and I enjoyed his approach in sharing the way he thinks there. Nothing too explicit, but if you think about it for a minute or two, it'll be one of the best SEO posts you'll read this year.

An Affiliate Success Formula

2008-02-12T03:56:00.000-08:00

Some people aren't going to like this affiliate success formula. That's because it requires work, and it's not a get-rich-quick scheme. But this is the simplest formula for affiliate website success that I know of.

Content + Links = Affiliate Success

First, find a big niche. Lots of get rich quick guys tell you that you should tackle a small niche that you can dominate. That's nonsense. You can be an average player in a huge niche pretty easily still. (Big niches include stuff like dating, travel, credit cards, mortgages, etc.)

Then buy a domain name and build a website. Fill it with hundreds of pages of brilliant, useful, keyword-rich content. Update the site often. Add content constantly. Some of your pages will rank as long as you do basic search engine optimization stuff like:

making sure your keyword phrases are in your pages' title tags
using your keyword phrases in your pages' body copy
emphasizing your keyword phrases by repeating them in the copy, header
emphasizing your keyword phrases with bold text, italics, quotation marks
using your keyword phrase in the URL string of each page

The big SEO secret is that there are no secrets. Just make it clear to the search engine what your page is about.

Then get links from appropriate websites. This will keep the search engines visiting your website. As a general rule, the more links you have pointing at your website, the more important it is. And important sites rank higher.

Don't do stupid stuff like exchanging links with 1500 websites, none of which have useful information. Or spam blogs. You don't need thousands of links to compete; you need some good links.

Then add advertisements for appropriate affiliate programs.

It really is that easy, but it takes work. Most people launch lame content and get lame links and wonder why they fail. Write good content, or hire a good writer. Then get good links. Don't worry if you don't have hundreds and hundreds of links right away.

Do the work and make money. Don't be lazy. Don't take shortcuts.

SEO Blogs You Should Be Reading

2008-02-09T09:28:00.001-08:00

This is a list of SEO blogs that you should be reading but probably aren't. I've included what I think are some of the best posts from those blogs here too, along with some commentary as to why I think these blogs are so worthwhile.

SEO Theory

This is Michael Martinez's SEO blog. Many people in the SEO industry seem irritated by Michael Martinez, but I think having someone who's not repeating the "party line" is good for the industry. He's been accused of being deliberately contrarian just for the sake of being deliberately contrarian, and I'm not sure I disagree with that. But unlike some other folks, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing either.

An affiliate marketer or SEO can learn a lot about SEO just from watching what Martinez actually DOES with his blog. (Maybe they'll even learn more about SEO by watching what Martinez does than they will from listening to what Martinez says.) The main lesson to be learned from the SEO Theory blog is that lots of constantly updated content is good. And long pieces of content which repeat and emphasize keyword phrases is also good.

Most webmasters seem to think that 500 words of content is both the minimum and the maximum amount of content on a page or in a blog post. Most of Martinez's posts are 1000 words or more. What benefit does that offer?

For one thing, the more words you put on a page, the more likely it is that a searcher will type in a phrase that exists on your page. You increase longtail traffic.

At the time of this writing, SEO Theory has 443 pages indexed in Google, which is pretty good. (That's more pages than I have on any of my static sites, although I have a couple of forums which have more pages than that.)

Suppose you had 443 pages indexed with 1000 pages on each phrase. Do you think you might receive traffic?

Some of my favorite blog posts from Michael Martinez include:

The Infallible SEO Option - One of the best posts ever written about SEO anywhere. Sure, it might seem obvious, but for a beginner, it's not obvious. And so many SEO's out there seem to preach that links are all you need.
Building Content For Search - Martinez condemns cookie-cutter SEO wisdom, which is something that desperately cries out for condemnation. He also makes the point that you should use long pages of content when the content calls for it, and short pages when the content calls for that instead.
Answers to 100 SEO Questions - The questions and answers are great, but having a page that ranks for 100 different queries is even better. Wondering what you should do with the information from your referral logs? This post from Michael should give you at least one idea for what to do with that info.
The Great Link Building Mystery Unplugged - A consistent theme in Michael's blog is that getting lots of links and anchor text is only one way to rank well in the search engines, and it's not necessarily the easiest or best way. This runs directly contrary to what a lot of people in the affiliate business think.
Hardcore SEO Tips - Another great post. This one and the post above about the infallible search engine optimization method will make almost any SEO better at what they do.

What I really like about Michael Martinez's blog is that it's not aimed at beginner SEO's. Most other SEO blogs on the Internet seem to tackle very basic stuff in very basic ways.

Hundred Dollar SEO

I found this blog through a link at Michael Martinez's SEO blog. Carlos del Rio is the author of this blog. He's a former teacher and part-time artist who brings a fresh approach to SEO blogging. He's obviously a big fan of Martinez's, but I don't hold that against him and neither should anyone else. Some of my favorite posts from him include:

Cheap Seo - This is a legitimate concern for a lot of people who want to get started making money on the Internet. Del Rio offers two approaches for getting some SEO done for $100 or less. I haven't decided which approach I like better yet though.
Internal Linking Structures - Del Rio describes in some detail some of the different approaches to link structures for websites. His explanation of the silo strategy is the best explanation of that approach that I've read yet. Internal linking structure is a hugely important aspect of SEO that many SEO's never discuss. (Mostly because they're talking about different ways to get external links all the time.)
Long Copy Versus Short Pages - Del Rio looks at whether or not you should write long or short copy from another perspective, different from Michael Martinez's. He also discusses the results of a landing page contest which measured conversion rates for a long landing page compared to a short landing page.
Link Flavors - Here he talks about some of the different "flavors" of links, including "reciprocal" and "sitewide" flavors. Some people think links of certain flavors (like the two I just mentioned) can hurt your SEO efforts more than helping them. He also examines evidence that on-topic linking doesn't really matter as much as you might have been led to believe, and he gives an example.

Tropical SEO

Andy Hagans is a cool dude and an awesome blogger. He leans more toward the lazy blogging approach though, only publishing something when he has something to say. I'd rather see him post more often, because then I could learn more about how he thinks, but he's too busy living the dream and getting rich. Here are some of this best posts:

The Lazy SEO Manifesto - Living the dream, brother! This is kind of the whole point really.
You Are Better Than You Think - Some ideas about why you should start acting like a CEO instead of an SEO.
Why I Quit Working For Clients - Some people might not know this about me, but I used to work for clients too, just like Andy used to. But honestly, even the good clients can be a pain in the ass when you want to work on your own websites.
How to Build an Affiliate Site Worth $1 Million - Should be required reading for every affiliate webmaster/SEO.
How to Escape Google's Supplemental Index - Just as relevant now as when Andy first wrote it.

So many more posts from these 3 bloggers are worth reading. And so many more bloggers than this have affected my SEO thinking. I read Aaron Wall religiously for example, and I have great respect and admiration for Eric Ward. I used to read SEOmoz a lot, but I don't read it as often anymore. Lots of good stuff there though, especially in the members' area.

Here's a good piece of advice though. Don't spend so much time reading these SEO blogs that you stop producing content of your own. That's where the real money is: creating brilliant content.

QuickWebCreations.com - Quick Web Creations.com

2007-12-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

I found a really cool tool that's available from QuickWebCreations.com for only $7. It's a logo generator that generates Web 2.0 looking logos and graphics. "Quick Web Creations.com" is easy to use - it's one of those point and click type tools that you use online. I'm not good at creating graphics, especially not logos, so I thought for $7, why not give it a try? I'm glad I did.

QuickWebCreations.com specializes in creating what they call "Web 2.0 logos". The idea is that Web 2.0 logos use gradients, shadows, reflections, glossiness and stripes to make their logos look cooler and more modern. I've seen a lot of "Web 2.0" websites which do use some of these types of graphics techniques, so I guess this is pretty accurate.

I've used BannerMakerPro in the past, and I'll use it again in the future. That software cost a little bit more money, but I liked it a lot. QuickWebCreations.com is something that can probably be used easily in conjunction with Quick Web Creations.com.

My favorite aspect of QuickWebCreations.com was the gallery of user-created logos. They present over 4500 different logos submitted from users, and if you like one of them, you can click on "use this style", type new words, and have a logo with a similar look and feel

Please note that I don't normally use affiliate links when I review a product, but I've made an exception in this case. I really like the product, but I think if you decide to use it (and it's only $7, so why not try it?) I might as well make a few bucks from it too.

I hope you'll give Quick Web Creations.com a try and that you'll really like how it works for you.

6 Directories Worth Submitting To

2007-07-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

I saw a post today on a forum about whether a person's time would be better spent submitting their site to a list of 500 directories or building 10 pages of content. I think setting a goal of either/or in this situation is a little lacking in ambition, but I also think that most directories aren't worth submitting to. In my experience, here are some directories that ARE worth submitting to:

1-DMOZ - Lots of Internet pundits and SEO's saying that DMOZ is dead. They're dead wrong. A DMOZ listing is still a great ingredient to add to your optimization and backlink strategy. I've never seen so much hatred and nonsense written about a single website before. But at the end of the day, get the DMOZ listing if you can.

2- Yahoo - You'll occasionally see people who claim a Yahoo directory listing isn't worth $299 either. These people are also wrong. You definitely want to get yourself a Yahoo listing. In fact, that should usually be the 1st directory you submit to.

3- Aviva Directory - This directory just plain rocks, and that's all you can say about it. Unlike most directories, Aviva has a lot of genuine and well-written content available on their site too.

4- JoeAnt - This is a good directory with volunteer editing opportunities available. Worth checking out.

5- GoGuides - Another good, older directory. A submissions specialist there can add several sites per month, but there's a fee to become a specialist. Depends on whether you plan to do a lot of sites on a regular basis or not as to whether or not it's worth the fee.

6- Best of the Web - These guys have done a nice job, although I think they're overly restrictive with their blog directory requirements. I have a gambling blog which they won't list because it's not 6 months old. But my gambling blog has over 500 posts, and they're not miniposts either, but substantial, quality posts.

Most people are too link obsessed anyway. Build lots of quality content and you'll get links.

I'll post later about the insanity of the legions of webmasters who are now terrified of doing normal, old-fashioned link exchanges.

Affiliate Marketing for Poker Webmasters

2007-06-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't posted in a while, but I've been busy launching my new poker website. Half of the content there is going to be dedicated to online poker tips, online cardrooms, and so on, but the other half of the content is devoted to poker and gambling webmasters. I'm particularly proud of my new article, Poker SEO Tips, which I just wrote and published today. Honestly, being a poker webmaster isn't much different from being any kind of other webmaster, although it does attract a different breed of webmaster I think. Replace the word "poker" with whatever word is appropriate to your niche, and you might find some benefit from those articles there too.

Another great place for info about making money as a poker affiliate is the poker affiliate forum at PAW. Definitely worth checking out.

Another thing - Shoemoney has been posting some great stuff lately. If you haven't visited his blog in a while, you should definitely check it out. Some of his new tips for success articles are worth their wait in gold, especially the one about not hiring friends to write for your website just because they're your friends.

Poker SEO

2007-05-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

Here's an exciting new resource, especially if you're interested or involved in promoting online poker:

Poker SEO

This is, as far as I know, the only site dedicated to SEO in this specific industry. And it's written by Steve Badger, who owns and operates one of the most highly-trafficked poker websites online.

Add this one to your bookmarks. Steve's one of the best SEO's I know.

Edited on August 4, 2007 - I've added a section to my new poker site about poker and gambling seo too. If you're looking for someone, I do provide poker and gambling seo consulting, but I'm not cheap. (Don't bother contacting me unless you have at least a five figure budget.)

The Keyword Report Review

2007-01-28T11:52:00.000-08:00

I found a new service last week called The Keyword Report. This is a pretty nifty service. The company maintains a mailing list of webmasters who pay a fee to receive weekly emails with low-competition niche keyword phrases. I'm a big fan of brainstorming tools, and on any given day, there is no telling what I'm going to be interested in, so I thought I'd pony up $29/month to see what it's like.

So far I'm pretty pleased with the report. Not only are the keywords "good", but they really are non-competitive. I don't see any reason you couldn't come up with low competition keyword phrases on your own through other brainstorming techniques, but these guys have already done a lot of the work for you. They've already checked the cost per click and number of ads appearing for these phrases.

And you get the personal email of the person who publishes the report each week, and he's friendly and open with advice and information. Definitely a plus. I hate buying products with no customer support, and I love buying niche products with a personal touch.

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Down

2007-01-28T08:15:00.000-08:00

I've been using the Overture keyword suggestion tool since it was the GoTo keywords tool. Sad to see that it's no longer working, and from what I can tell by searching through some blog sites, it isn't coming back. So what's a search engine marketer to do?

(Update on 2/1/2007 - Looks like reports of the Overture keyword suggestion tool's demise have been exaggerated.)

I guess it's time to take a look at some alternatives to the Overture tool. Here are a few links to keyword suggestion tools I like. Some of them are free, and some of them charge. The ones that charge usually have some type of trial offer that can be pretty useful.

Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool
Wordtracker
Keyword Discovery
7search keyword suggestion tool
Good Keywords (Please note that this is one I haven't used yet, but it looks intriguing.)

A lot of keyword suggestion tools used to scrape the Overture tool, especially for looking at potential traffic information, but the traffic estimates from Overture were always wildly inaccurate anyway, so no great loss there. Also, I can't imagine that they'll go without a keyword generator forever, although they might restrict its use to advertisers. MSN Adcenter also has a keyword suggestion tool accessible from within your Adcenter account.

Another Dumb Email

2007-01-25T14:57:00.000-08:00

I'm literally speechless at some of the silly and dumb emails I receive. Here's a correspondence from today from someone who wanted to buy advertising on one of my websites:

Them: "Hi, we would like to add a 120x60 banner with a text link to your site to sponsored links. Let us know what you have available and for how much for a month. Regards,"

Me: "What site are you asking about?"

Their reply: "Heh, good question. I sent the same email to about 200 addresses...."

Needless to say, I'm not real excited or motivated about selling advertising to this outfit now. Chances are if they're that careless about how they email potential advertisers, they're also careless about who they link to. And I don't believe in nofollow links, so guess who isn't getting an ad from me?

Why I'm No Good at Linkbait

2007-01-24T15:46:00.000-08:00

I'm so bad at linkbait that I don't even recognize it when I see it.

I guess maybe I'm not good at the whole link baiting thing because I haven't practiced it very much. I've been spending a little more time at Digg lately though, so maybe I'll learn something from some of the amazing people there.

I'm not a fast learner though. Some people just absorb stuff really quick and are able to run with it, but I have to study on it until I really grok it.

Laziness as a Business Virtue

2007-01-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

At first glance, this Lazy SEO Manifesto from Andy Hagans looks like a clever bit of SEO humor and/or linkbait, and it works on those levels, certainly. But the post is more interesting than that, because it also makes us stop to think for a minute about what is actually a business virtue here. America has a lot of people who are so into the Protestant work ethic that if someone told them it's good to be lazy, their head might explode.

On the other hand, there are plenty of lazy people who literally want to do nothing. Andy's not wanting to do nothing. He wants to do a little bit of smart work on the front end so he can avoid a bunch of hard work later, and he also wants to make sure that he makes a LOT of money for the little bit of work that he's done. (There's a big difference in that attitude than in the attitude of some hourly employees who are convinced they don't make enough money even though they actually show up on time every day. As if showing up by itself is high value.)

Andy's post also reminded me of one of Thomas Leonard's principles of attraction, Be Incredibly Selfish. Point #1 on Thomas' list was that selfishness used to have a bad name, but now it's developing a good name. Andy's manifesto is a similar meme. Laziness used to be bad, but in the hands of someone smart and creative, laziness isn't bad at all, but a virtue.

I think I'll go take a nap now.

Google Penalties - Common New Google.com Penalty

2007-01-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

Okay, so you're hearing about the Google Sandbox, the Google -30 penalty, and the Google -950 penalty, but here's the latest of the Google.com penalties: Your Site Sucks and Google Just Figure It Out. Nice post from the fine folks at Threadwatch, and a big hat tip to DigitalGhost for mentioning it. You can also read some fine and thoughtful commentary about this phenomenon over at Aaron Wall's place: New Google Penalty.

Now of course, those guys look at this from a professional SEO consultant perspective more than from an affiliate marketer perspective. And part of their point is to advise SEO's to not take on clients whose websites suck unless they think they can get the client interested in creating a website that doesn't suck. (Unlikely in most cases, IMO.)

But what kind of affiliate websites suck? I can tell you a few things that make up major suckiness in an affiliate website:

- Reviews of products that aren't really reviews, but are instead just sales pages for the product.

- Review of products that do nothing but list of the features and benefits of a product.

- Sites full of lame scraped content and a bunch of random more-or-less on topic links that are trying to manipulate some "hub factor" in an algorithm.

- Websites that have lots of pop-up windows of any kind.

- Websites with multiple flashing banners who seem to have one purpose, and that's to send epileptics into seizures. (Ugh - I hate those sites. They're common in the gambling industry, btw.)

- Websites full of really poorly written "content" that was only posted in order to generate search visitors.

- Websites without a distinctive voice or opinion.

I'm sure I could think of some more, but I'll stop there. I'd imagine a lot of affiliate webmasters will think that this list is pretty lame, or even offensive, but chances are, they're the ones operating sucky websites.

How NOT to Recruit Affiliates

2007-01-24T07:35:00.000-08:00

So I got an email today from an affiliate manager, or an account executive, whatever you want to call him. The subject line read: "Randy will you promote our new widget".

Now that's not too bad. It at least got me to open the email. (I delete a lot of emails, especially the ones that say "You link to be removed".)

Then I read the first line of the email: "Dear sir, Widget.com has a brand new widget variation that is taking the world by storm. We would like to partner with www.genericwidgetdomain.com (place any website here) in promoting widgets."

This part, "(place any website here)" was literally actually in the email, word for word.

What's wrong with this email?

1- I'm already an affiliate, so there's no need to "recruit" me into their affiliate program. (If their affiliate managers were really on top of their game, they would know what all of my related wesites are already.)

2- Not changing the generic wording in the email is just a really bad, amateurish mistake. When I did affiliate recruitment, I hand-typed at the very least the first paragraph of every email I sent out, period. There is 0 excuse for sending out an email that isn't at least slightly customized. Hell, they obviously knew my name because they used it in the subject line, but in the salutation of the email, they referred to me as "Dear Sir".

3- The rest of the email wasn't bad, but it was short, and it didn't spell out the features and benefits of the affiliate program. Here's a hint for all you aspiring affiliate managers: if you're going to contact me about becoming an affiliate for your company, please include information about how much commission you pay, and what kind of earning potential that translates into.

Don't try to "tease" me into wanting to find out more. I'm busy, I work hard, and I don't have time for you to be coy, and the kind of affiliates you want to recruit are a lot like me.

Viral Marketing Examples - Linkbait

2006-07-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

I'm constantly intrigued by the clever ideas I see and hear about that people are using for viral marketing and linkbait. While it's only loosely related to affiliate marketing, the concept of linkbait and starting an "Idea Virus" is definitely one that can be used to generate affiliate and/or advertising income on the Internet. I'm posting a list of example linkbait and viral marketing successes here to help people get their own ideas flowing.

1. All My Life For Sale - This was originally just a guy named John Freyer who decided to sell literally everything he owned on eBay. Now it's a website, a hardcover book, and a piece of performance art that's on display at multiple museums.

2. One Red Paperclip - Kyle MacDonald posted an offer on CraigsList to trade a red paperclip for something "bigger and better". Since then he has traded up 14 times, and just finished a trade to get a house. According to the Sitemeter on his website, he's receiving close to 200,000 visits to his website daily. If you assume that he's earning an average of $1 CPM for those Google Adsense ads he's got running on the site, then he's earning $6k per month just from that advertising. (And that $1 figure is a total wild guess on my part - it would be much more or much less than that.)

3. The $39 Experiment - Tom Locke got 100 39 cent stamps and mailed off 100 letters to various companies asking for free stuff. He then recorded his responses on his website.

4. The Million Dollar Homepage - Alex Tew decides to sell 1 million pixel ads on his website for $1 each and becomes a huge success story spawning literally thousands of imitators.

5. Pink Bunny Poker - Jeremy Enke auctions off his services as a poker player (wearing a pink bunny suit) at the World Series of Poker. He generates much publicity, many backlinks, and a good deal of money from his sponsor, Golden Palace Casino, who bought his eBay auction. (Golden Palace participates in these kinds of viral marketing stunts constantly, by the way.)

You'll notice that all of the linkbait and viral marketing examples mentioned in this post have some things in common:

There's actually a person with a name involved in the stunt.
All of the stunts are outrageous and/or quirky enough to warrant attention.
Most of them involve a combination of some kind of ingenuity with something that is already on the minds of consumers.

More on the last point. All My Life For Sale took advantge, in part, of the amazing success of eBay. One Red Paperclip borrows some popularity from the incredible success of Craigslist. Jeremy's Pink Bunny idea took advantage of the popularity of online poker, the World Series of Poker, eBay, and Golden Palace. The $39 Experiment is about 100 different companies, almost all of whom are well known.

Can you cook up a recipe for some linkbait now? Can you make money with a viral marketing campaign with these ingredients? I know that I have a couple of ideas now myself.

How to Write Good Web Content

2006-07-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Affiliate marketers have multiple techniques to make money with, but the one that will have the longest half-life is publishing good content. Pay per click ad arbitrage will eventually become too competitive, search engines will eventually wipe out spam or at least reduce its profitability to next to nothing, and email marketing will go even further in the same direction as the dinosaur.

But all 3 of the major search engines want to list good quality content in their results, and that's not going to change anytime soon. If a search engine lists low quality content in their results, users will flee to the competition. Riding the "content is king" train will take you a lot farther in the long run as an affiliate marketer than just about any other method. Hence this article about how to write good web content.

Characteristics of Good Content

Good content is unique. If you think about this for a minute, it will almost seem like this goes without saying, but if you take a look at some of the results in Yahoo or MSN for some high-competitive keyword phrases, you'll find plenty of content that does nothing more than re-hash content that is readily available on many other sites.
Good content is user-focused. Google has been preaching this for ages now: focus on the user and all else will follow. This particularly useful when talking about the information you put on your website. People search the Internet for things that help them, so how-to articles, tips, and information folks can use is always going to be one of the most important aspects of user-focused web content.
Good content is well-written. Double check your spelling and punctuation. Avoid the passive voice. Omit needless words. All of the fundamentals of good writing apply to web content. These simple things amount to showing respect, not disdain, for your readers.
Good content on the internet is easy to read. Bulleted lists, short sentences, and short paragraphs are user-friendly ways to make your content more accessible to online readers. Headings and sub-headings are important too.
Good web content is honest. Don't make up BS sales letters. If you don't honestly believe in a product, and you haven't used a product, then maybe it's better not to promote it. I built several websites in a particularly competitive industry once. When I finally stopped working on the "salesy" sites and started writing about my actual experiences in this particular industry, the traffic to that new website skyrocketed beyond that of all my other websites almost overnight.

Content Mistakes to Avoid

It's easy to make most of the following mistakes when writing content. Try to avoid them.

Providing inaccurate information. Lies, falsehoods, and mistakes might rank temporarily, but that will not last. Search engines are going to continue to improve.
Anything deceptive equates automatically to low-quality content. In fact, deception is, or ought to be, the defining characteristic of spam of all kinds, both search engine spam and email spam.
Automatically generated pages. These might or might be useful in certain situations, but they never amount to "quality content".

Other Resources Related to Writing Good Quality Content

Search Engine Ranking Factors from Website Helpers (The first section is about quality content.)
The Elements of Style - Available for free online from Bartleby, this was for years the best book I'd ever read about how to write.
Writing for the Web from Jakob Nielsen - Nielsen is recognized as one of the leading thinkers on web useability. His insights into how writing for the web is different than writing in print are fascinating.
Wikipedia - How to Write a Great Article - The Wikipedia is a volunteer-edited encyclopedia where anyone can edit. It's a fascinating sub-culture on the web that you're probably already aware of, but most people already know about it. Why? Because they offer great content throughout. (With a few exceptions.)

I hope that this article is high-quality content. I probably should do another draft, now that I think about it.

A Link Exchange Email That Worked

2006-07-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

Link exchange emails get deleted pretty quickly from my inbox. But I got one today that I not only read, but I replied to it immediately. And after thinking about it for a minute, I thought that there might be a lesson to learn from how the email was phrased. (Because yes, I occasionally send a link exchange email or two myself, and I usually get the same miserable response as everyone else does.)

Here's a reasonable approximation of the email I received.

Subject Line: Red Widgets Review Website

Body:

Hello Randy-

I happened across your website on the internet as I have also spent the last few months building a Red Widget Reviews website with a friend.

I wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging links to our site.

red-widget-reviews.com

I am just starting out and was reading some of your articles, your "About Me" page, your goal of reviewing red widget review, etc...and you sound like a down to earth person.

Do you have any advice for us on how we can make our site as useful as yours seems to be?

How long did it take for you to get a lot of visitors to your site?

Thanks for any advice you can give us.

Cheers
Polite Webmaster
Co-Editor
Red Widget Reviews

Why This Link Exchange Email Worked

I have some ideas about why this email was so effective, and I'll point them out here. Some of this is common advice found on any number of sites that talk about link exchanges:

The email addressed me by name, which demonstrates that some thought and care were put into it.
The email made it clear that they had visited my site.
The praise for my site seemed sincere.
The webmaster asked for my advice on how to be successful.

I bolded the last line for a reason; I think it was a critical component of why this link exchange email worked. For one thing, they expressed admiration and flattered me, and also, they asked me for help. These were exactly the right buttons to push with me, and I think they're probably effecitve buttons for anyone else too. Who doesn't want to be told they've done a good job on their website? And who doesn't want to feel smart enough to give advice?

Some More Cool Articles About Exchanging Links

How NOT to Request a Reciprocal Link from Michael Bluejay, one of the coolest webmasters on the Internet, and one of the smartest.
Don't Hate on Reciprocal Links by my friend Andy Hagans, a link building expert and an uber-cool dude.
Reciprocal Link Software discussion from Aaron Wall, another of the smartest people I know in the search industry.

I still think reciprocal links are cool, but automated, dumb links exchanges are uncool. So be smart and trade links without automating.

GoGuides Directory - GoGuides.org

2006-06-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

GoGuides is one of the best directories on the Internet to get a backlink from. Not only is it relatively affordable compared to some of the other directories online, but the listings of other websites there are generally of a pretty good quality, which is exactly the kind of listings you want alongside your listing. (Getting listed in a directory full of crappy sites is exactly the kind of listing you want to avoid. My strong suspicion is that search engines believe the old adage about "birds of a feather".)

About GoGuides.org

GoGuides.org is actually a continuation of the now-dead Go network from Disney, which was an earlier volunteer edited directory. It's not as good a quality link as you might be receiveing from DMOZ or Yahoo, but it's still a good solid link from a reputable source, and it's probably one of the few directories that's going to stick around for quite a while, IMO.

There are a couple of different ways to submit your site to GoGuides.org. The easiest way for someone who only runs one site and who just wants to submit and move on is to pay the $69.95 review fee and submit the site. The editors at GoGuides normally turn around a submission fairly quickly, within a day or less, in my experience. You won't see that kind of turnaround time at most other directories.

Submission Specialists at GoGuides

Another option is to become a GoGuides submissions specialist. This membership has 3 levels at 3 different price points:

VIP for $19.95 per month allows you to submit 5 websites per month.
Junior Membership for $29.95 per month allows you to submit 10 websites per month.
Senior Members for $39.95 per month allows you to submit 20 websites per month.

These programs are designed to help website specialists and SEO's offer service to their clients for less money.

Free GoGuides Submissions

I am a submissions specialist at GoGuides.org, and if you're interested in a listing there, please contact me. I'll submit your site for free if you'll provide a link back to my blog, as long as I have any submissions left that month.

More Information About GoGuides on the Web

You can read more articles about GoGuides on the Internet. A couple of the sites worth taking a look at include:

Search Marketing Info's GoGuides Page
Wikipedia Article About GoGuides (This article really needs to be expanded. If you're not already participating at the Wikipedia, you should.)
HighRankings Discussion of Whether or Not GoGuides is Passing Link Popularity

No matter what the topic of your affiliate website, a few good directory listings are good to have. GoGuides is definitely one to consider. Other good directories to look at can be found here: DMOZ Directories. (God bless those DMOZ guys btw; you can always find good stuff over there.)

Wicked Fire - WickedFire.com - 10,000 Forum Posts in 6 Days

2006-06-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

There's a new affiliate forum in town folks, and it's off to a big start. The site is called Wicked Fire, and as of this morning sometime, they're up to 10,000 posts and over 800 or so threads. What's impressive to me is how they managed to pull this off in just 6 days. (In contrast, my newly launched movie forum has only managed to generate about 8 members in the last month or so.)

But the brilliance of having an active forum isn't lost on me. It's a white-hat way of achieving a black hat goal: generating tons of content pages without having to write or publish every single page yourself. With an active forum, the users generate the content for you. A forum is even better than a blog in this regard, because in a blog, even when you generate a conversation, you have to start the ball rolling. With a forum, anyone and everyone can start the ball rolling.

Among some of the other gems I've found at WickedFire.com are some links to great sites that got my imagination fired up, including:

Forum Trends - Which is all about running forums. Why have a blog network when you could own a forum network?
The Super Affiliate Marketing Blog - I'd seen Jon's affiliate marketing blog before, but like so many things you see on the web, it wasn't something I paid enough attention to. But anyone who can generate 10,000 posts on a forum in 6 days is someone worth paying attention to, in my opinion.
Hott for Teacher - This is one of the member's sites from WickedFire. It's bizarre, seemed funny at first, then just weirder as you start reading the stories of this really sad and sick women who are taking advantage of young people. This isn't a niche I'd approach to make money with, but who am I to say that someone shouldn't? (Besides that, the design kicks ass, IMO.)

Anyway, that's about it for now, but I'm planning to start blogging a little more heavily here. I'm starting to get the bug again, which I haven't had in quite a while.

Shoemoney Discusses Ringtones Landing Page Sold on eBay

2006-06-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

If you're not already reading Shoemoney, then you should be. He's funny, smart, and the stuff he writes is almost always useful as all get out. Today I read a post about how someone actually bought a ringtones landing page on eBay for $10,000. The discussion in the comments over at Shoemoney's site is pretty interesting, so check it out.

Oh, and while I'm talking about Shoemoney. The best post I ever read over there was the one where he said that Markus, the owner of Plenty of Fish, was lying about how much money he's making with his site just to get attention. (For those people who have already seen this post and the comments but haven't figured it out yet, the whole thing was a joke that Markus was in on. Turns out that controversy makes great linkbait, and that particular post at Shoemoney generated a ton of backlinks to both sites. Nice work.)

Blog Directories

2006-06-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

My blog isn't so much about blogging for dollars as it is about affiliate marketing, but there are any number of bloggers who qualify as affiliates. And one of the best ways to get traffic and backlinks is through directory listings. Over at Successful Blog today, I found a list of blog directories. She claims that her links lead to over 1800 blog directories, which seems to be quite a few. I don't know that anyone needs backlinks from all of them, but I'm also convinced that a lot of sites, especially if they're in non-competitive areas, can do just fine with 40 backlinks or so to start with and then just rely on naturally occurring backlinks.

Anyway, the list looks like a great resource, and the blog itself looks like a pretty solid one. (I just found it today.)

Reciprocal Linking Isn't Dead

2006-06-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

People keep saying it, and I for one am tired of hearing it. "Reciprocal linking is dead". Or "Reciprocal linking doesn't work anymore."

Nonsense. A lot of the people who think that reciprocal linking doesn't work just suck at it.

Here's the deal with reciprocal linking, and it's not complicated at all:

Don't link to websites that suck, and don't link to websites your audience won't be interested in.

You don't want websites that suck linking to you, and you don't want to link to websites that suck. Linking to crappy websites is a great way to send a clear signal to a search engine, "Hey! I link to crappy sites. So my site is probably crappy too."

If you can't figure out which websites suck or not, then yeah, reciprocal linking won't work for you. Here's a hint though. If you don't see anything useful or original on a site, then it sucks.

On-topic, high quality link exchanges have a place in any link builder's bag of tricks. And while I don't think for a minute that link exchanges should be the only tool in your toolbox, it's certainly a silly one to leave out just because people go around parroting to each other that link exchanging is dead.

SEO 101 - Search Engine Optimization

2006-04-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

I've got a new recommended resource. (It's not actually new, but I haven't recommended it before now.) It's Michael Bluejay's article about search engine optimization. Obviously a lot of people in affiliate marketing want to make money by getting good search engine rankings, and Michael's article will help you do that. His approach can be summed up as "build good quality web-pages", but he goes into a little more detail about how to do that, and about some of the more technical aspects of SEO in his article too.

Along similar lines is an SEO article on Aaron Wall's search engine optimization blog about creating the ultimate resource on a subject as an SEO strategy. Fine reading, this.

Fandango Affiliate Program

2006-03-18T03:56:00.000-08:00

Fandango is a website where you can buy movie tickets online. My wife and I use the site pretty regularly, because it's fast and easy and we don't have to stand in line at the theater. It occurred to me today that maybe they have an affiliate program worth taking a look at. So I hopped over to the site, found the link that read "affiliate program", and read their affiliate program page.

Let me go on record now as saying that I hate affiliate program pages that don't outline their commission structure front and center. What on earth would I possibly be more interested in than whether or not I could get a decent commission rate from a program? After reading through the sales hype at Fandango, and taking a look at the "apply to be an affiliate" link, I realized that this program was run through CJ. (Commission Junction.)

Great. I like Commission Junction just fine. So I go log in to CJ and do a search for Fandango, eager to get signed up and start making money selling movie tickets. Then I saw it.

EPC = $0.73 over the last 3 months. Huh?

Then I read the commission structure. These guys pay a whopping 10 cents per movie ticket sold through your affiliate link.

A dime.

I'd make more by running Google Adsense on a movie site. This is one of the most ridiculously low commission rates I've ever seen. Heck, even at 5%, a movie ticket commission would be 3 or 4 times that amount.

Who would be silly enough to promote an affiliate program that pays a dime commission? It MIGHT make sense if you got commissions on all the customers' subsequent purchases too, but you don't. It's a one time commission. One ticket sale, one thin dime.

Poker Affiliate Programs - PokerStars

2006-03-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

I've written about poker affiliate programs before, but I wanted to point toward a specific poker affiliate program in this post, the PokerStars poker affiliate program. They run a strictly CPA deal, which means no rev share, but honestly, having marketed quite a few poker programs in my past life, I think I'd prefer to market nothing but CPA plans moving forward. It's a sliding scale that goes up to $300 per depositing player, so the revenue potential, if you can drive the traffic, is really solid. Definitely worth checking out.

Also, PokerStars is the top poker tournament site on the internet. Every Sunday night they host the largest weekly poker tournament in the world, and both Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer were PokerStars players who won the World Series of Poker.

Poker and online poker in particular are still big profitable markets, IMO. The common advice on a lot of affiliate marketing and webmaster boards is to find a small niche market that you can compete in. I think that's great and all, but why not take a shot at something that will make you grow too?

Aren't the most important things we do in life the most difficult ones?

If you can compete as an affiliate in the online poker sector, then you've done something worth bragging about.

Classmates.com Affiliate Program - Strange Terms and Conditions

2006-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm really glad that I'm not an affiliate of Classmates.com. Because if I were an affiliate of their program, I wouldn't be allowed to use the word "classmates" on a page promoting their product.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

But I was going through Commission Junction's available affiliate programs, doing some brainstorming today, and I took a look at their affiliate program. And here are some of the terms and conditions for the Classmates program:

Publisher may not appear above Classmates.com on any search listing including the terms "classmate" and "classmates". (My comments: Theoretically, the search engines decide where to rank my site in the listings, so this is a silly condition to have for an affiliate program.)
Publisher may not bid on the trademark term Classmates.com. (My comments: I'm okay with this, even though I think it's a little bit silly.)
Publisher may not use the dictionary terms "classmate" or "classmates" in advertisements, domains, URL strings, landing pages, or any other content. Publisher may use "high school", "alumni", "schoolmate" or other synonyms. (My comments: This is absurd. Why would anyone be interested in promoting an affiliate program with such a draconian clause? I could understand requiring that they not allow a trademarked term to the left of the tld, but anywhere in the search strings or content? That's crazy.)

Luckily, I'm not an affiliate of their company. So I can use the phrase classmates anywhere in my URL string, landing page, and other content any time I want.

Affiliate Marketing and eBay

2005-12-29T08:46:00.000-08:00

This is an idea I've played with for a while. Suppose you were an affiliate for some kind of product that costs money, but isn't something that is often sold at a discount or sold used. Like a magazine subscription, for example, or herbal hangover pills.

And suppose you put auctions for that product up on eBay. And the person who buys it sends you the money through Paypal, then you log in through your affiliate link, make the purchase on the customer's behalf, have it shipped to the customer, then make your money on the backend commission.

Is this a potentially useful affiliate model? Has anyone tried this?

It's not something I have personal experience with. I'm just wondering about other folks who aren't interested in building content websites but want to make some affiliate revenue. This might be a viable, if work-intensive, business model.

Content Ideas

2005-12-29T08:44:00.000-08:00

Published an article at Poker Affiliate World about getting ideas for content based on the time of year. While the article is specifically aimed at content development for poker webmasters, the principles apply to any other niche you might target, like credit cards, mortgages, etc.

Google Search Tricks

2005-12-29T08:42:00.000-08:00

Best information about Google Search Tricks I've found yet. I learned some new ones that I didn't already know today. Thanks, Graywolf.

My Favorite Blog Posts in 2005

2005-12-27T07:02:00.000-08:00

I'm going to list the my favorite blog posts I've read this year, the ones that were most helpful to me in running my website businesses. This is an entirely personal list, and might even leave some blog posts out, but it's been a long year. Anyway, if these posts are helpful to you in your affiliate marketing career, then I'll have done something worthwhile this year:

1. How Does Google Collect and Rank Results?

This isn't a blog post, but it was pointed out to me in a blog post from Aaron Wall's excellent SEO blog. I consider myself a reasonably successful search engine marketer, but this article gave me a new perspective on how the search engine process works. One of the best things that Aaron does with his SEO book and blog is increase the amount of context from which you're doing your SEO work in. It reminds me of Charlie Munger's investing approach. He uses a variety of mental models that combine to make you a better search engine marketer, instead of going into a lot of detail about how many links you need and how to do keyword research.

2. How Not to Pick Out a Domain Name

Great post from Aaron again, about how bad some of the domain names are out there, and how to avoid making the same mistakes when buying your own domain name. Can you brand an affiliate website? Hell yeah. (My answer, not Aaron's, but that's why it's relevant to this post.)

3. 10 Tips for Training a Link Developer

This is especially useful in a way that the author never intended. It's useful for learning how to do your own link development. Last night an affiliate marketer I know asked me for advice about one of his sites, and how to improve the conversions there. I told him that I'm pretty much a two-trick pony, and the only advice I ever give is "get more links and write more content". That formula is pretty simple: links + content = traffic. More traffic = more conversions. The post above will help you with the links part of the equation.

4. Content Creation Ideas

If the formula for success in this industry is links + content = search engine traffic, then item # is essential reading for the links advice. But Jim Boykin's post about creating content is pure gold for the content creation advice. I don't have a single site that I couldn't use his list of ideas on, at least a good portion of it.

5. Writing Content

Darren Rowse has a whole category of posts devoted to writing content, and I've included a link to the category here, because I think it's so important. Great stuff in this section, especially this post: 20 kinds of blog posts.

6. Don't Hate on Reciprocal Links

I've learned more from Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall this year than from any other bloggers. Andy's post about reciprocal links is excellent, and it explains exactly what are good and bad reciprocal links clearly. Andy's a BIG fan of one-way links, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a post from him defending reciprocal links.

7. Optimal Titles SEO Case Study

This post taught me how to get down and dirty about testing my theories and assumptions regarding what the search engines like and don't like. In terms of putting together a testing methodology, the post above, along with these posts are essential reading:

Outbound Links Case Study
Google, Dictionaries, and SEO (the best of the bunch, IMO)

Push those search engine experiments past their normal boundaries.

That about wraps it up, except for a link to one post I made about a poker blogger's post here: The Ultimate Secret to Making Money with Affiliate Programs. It's the best thing I wrote all year, and the post that inspired it, The Ultimate Secret to Winning Poker, was the single best thing I read all year. (My post was actually good enough to get linked to from Aaron's SEO blog, which made my entire year.)

Your Only Asset

2005-12-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a book about Warren Buffett right now, and one of the points made in the book is one that I've heard before, but had forgotten. The book describes what Buffett explains to his managers about how to run their individual businesses.

Buffett tells the managers of his businesses to treat that business as if they owned it. And not only that, but he also asks them to treat the business as if it were the only asset that person would ever own, and the only asset his family would own, for the next 100 years. Then act accordingly.

How would your website change if you took that attitude toward building it? If your website, or your affiliate marketing business, were literally the only asset you could use to provide for your family for the next 100 years, what improvements would you make? What would you get rid of?

Here are some things I would (and should) do:

Write better content.
Write more content.
Spend more money when I hire writers to write content for me.
Have higher expectations of writers I've hired.
Proofread and edit my content more thoroughly.
Be more careful about how I pick and choose my link partners.
Look more closely at the potential ROI when determining a niche to target.
Design my site with a long term view.
Learn CSS better.
Learn html better.
Have a professional designer set me up with a real logo.

Content + links.

Quality counts. For both content and links, and when I say quality links, I mean inbound AND outbound links.

It's simple, but not easy. As a friend of mine mentioned on a forum the other day, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

Joel Comm Adsense Ebook Review - Google Adsense Secrets

2005-12-21T04:57:00.000-08:00

I'm never sure what to expect when I buy and read a new ebook. Sometimes I come across something so completely crappy that I'm just horrified that I gave my money to the author. And sometimes I think holy crap I wish I had written that, or something half as good. Most of the time I just yawn and think that I wish I had the work ethic required to actually put together something mediocre and do the work required to make the money from it.

But the other night, after reading The Lazy Pig, which was dreadful, I decided to pick up a copy of Joel Comm's Google Adsense ebook, Adsense Secrets, and I was pleasantly surprised and filled with ideas after reading it. I'll admit (and I think Joel Comm would also admit) that much of this information is now readily available in various blogs and forums about marketing now, BUT he puts the info together in an interesting way, and in a way that makes you want to actually go implement it.

His explanations of the Google Adsense program and how it works are clear and appropriate for any complete neophyte, but the real value from the book comes from the case studies and the example websites he shares. So many ebooks provide terrible examples that you would be foolish to follow, and they don't share any of their legitimate websites for fear of creating additional competition. Comm's Adsense ebook is refreshingly different in this respect, and he shares his own URL's and several other people's URL's. And all of the examples have done beautiful jobs of integrating Google Adsense with their own content.

Joel Comm is the real deal by the way. He was behind a website called ClassicGames.com, which later was purchased by Yahoo and became Yahoo Games.

Ad Rants and Viral Marketing Stuff

2005-12-21T04:31:00.000-08:00

A blogger friend of mine pointed out this blog to me today: Ad Rants. It's a thing of beauty. That's what I told him via instant messenger, and that's what I'm now telling you here in the privacy of my own blog.

I posted on one of my other blogs this morning that spammy blog comments suck. Heaven help me, but maybe I'm becoming a "real" blogger.

Anyway, you can probably think of 1000 ways to make use of the cool stuff talked about over at Ad Rants to help you brainstorm your own viral marketing ideas without help from me. I just wanted to point out how cool it was.

The Lazy Pig Ebook Review

2005-12-19T18:15:00.000-08:00

Don't buy an ebook called The Lazy Pig. It's about 40 pages long, and the content is almost all available from reading almost any forum about affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, or any web marketing forum. And some of the advice in the ebook is just plain bad.

The Lazy Pig is also full of recommendations for products to help you get started with your "turn $1 into $85" business venture. These are almost always affiliate links which earn the author commission, which makes the recommedations suspect to begin with. And I've used some of the PPC engines recommended in The Lazy Pig, and I can honestly say I wouldn't recommend them to any webmaster I'd like to remain friends with or retain any credibility with.

I was not impressed with The Rich Jerk, but it was a better ebook than The Lazy Pig. But if you're really interested in reading an ebook or two that will help you make some money online, I'll recommend three:

James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook
Aaron Wall's SEO Book
Planet Ocean's Unfair Advantage to Winning the Search Engine Wars

And if you want to learn how to make money using Adsense, you can find plenty of good information on any decent Adsense forum or blog. Jensense is a particularly good blog about Google Adsense.

Estimating Daily Visitors Via Alexa

2005-12-17T14:52:00.000-08:00

When I was a hard-working affiliate manager, we were always trying to estimate how much traffic a particular website was receiving, because we were obviously interested in how much traffic they could send our affiliate program. If you're an affiliate who buys advertising, or if you're just trying to set benchmarks for your site, you can now estimate how much unique traffic a website gets via their Alexa ranking.

If you're familiar with Alexa, you probably already realize that it doesn't give you anything besides a ranking of how much traffic you get compared to other sites. And you're probably also aware that it isn't particularly accurate. But it's still not a bad tool for setting benchmarks, and if your Alexa rating is improving, that's probably a good thing.

Anyway, here's a tool for converting Alexa ranking into traffic.

Britney Spears - How Many Ways Can You Spell Britney Spears?

2005-12-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get interested in what phrases on the internet get a lot of search traffic. I'm toying with the idea of launching some kind of site that focuses on nothing but extremely high-volume search terms, somethine along the lines of my own personal Zeitgeist site.

Today I was checking out the Lycos 50, then taking a look at some of the sites in the search results at Google for searches on those hot terms, and I came across an interesting SERP from Google. I did a search for Britney Spears, and one of the results was a page from Google showing all the different misspellings of Britney Spears name that they had seen in the last couple of months.

Could someone use this page to develop a keyword list that could be used to drive traffic to Adult FriendFinder or MrSkin's affiliate program, for example? I think they could.

Must Reading from Graywolf's Blog

2005-12-14T15:30:00.000-08:00

This post about Predictive SEO is one of the best search engine optimization posts I've seen in ages. I haven't posted here much lately, but when I see something this good, I want to make sure that I say something about it here.

Viral Marketing and Branding

2005-11-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

Another example of a site that's become hugely popular is Beer.com.

I know nothing about the owners of the site, their business model, or how they got to where they're at, but there's no reason you can't learn some lessons from how they became so popular.

The biggest thing they did to start generating lots of traffic was the virtual bartender campaign. Talk about something that got the traffic rolling in. And of course, you can submit your email address to get updates too, and I go back to visit the site every time I get an email from them.

Their content isn't specifically designed to sell a product, necessarily; it's designed to generate traffic. That traffic is then used to generate ad revenue, I'd imagine. No reason someone bright couldn't do something similar using an affiliate marketing model or Adsense to begin with, and then do their own media selling once they have the traffic to warrant it.

Martinibuster's Flying Spaghetti Monster Post

2005-11-13T07:43:00.000-08:00

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has been insanely popular and profitable. Martinibuster interviews the man behind the Spaghetti Monster.

There are probably multiple lessons to be learned that you could apply to an affiliate business model, or even a non-affiliate business model.

Another Niche Post

2005-11-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

A while back I made a list of keyword phrases that were "niche" keywords - such specific keywords that they had practically no competition.

This blog is now #1 in Google for one of those words: "craftsman 315.113860". (I got found for it just today, in fact.)

I should put up an eBay ad immediately for that product search. Their dynamic ads are really cool.

Great stuff.

Little Black Dress Shop - An Example of Niche Marketing

2005-11-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

Not much to say about this one other than everyone wanting to get started in affiliate marketing should think about this example. Go check it out.

Niche Marketing Little Black Dresses (Business Opportunities Weblog)

Little Black Dress Shop

Great food for thought. Get with the long tail and find a niche.

Lists of Directories

2005-11-11T07:30:00.000-08:00

A lot of talk goes on in search engine blogs and forums about whether or not directory listings help or hurt your ranking. Some folks are from the "any link is a good link" school of thought, while others are only interested in having their site associated with other high quality sites. The latter are picky about which directories they submit to. I think a middle road is probably best. I wouldn't submit to EVERY directory. But I do submit to a lot of directories.

I'm not going to include a list of directories here, because a lot of other people have already created lists. Instead, I'm going to include links to other lists of directories that I've found useful.

1. Link Building Blog - Directories Category has not only a list of directories, but excellent discussion of which directories are good, which ones aren't, and how to tell the difference. Andy Hagans, by the way, is one of the smartest people I know, ESPECIALLY when it comes to link building.

2. We Build Pages Directory List is a list of directories that they will actually submit your site to on your behalf. This is a pretty neat service idea, actually, and I wish I had thought of it first. It's a handy list even if you decide to submit your own sites though.

3. I like Strongest Links' List of Directories because it categorizes the directories and allows you to sort by submission fee and by PageRank.

4. Directory Archives is a list of directories sorted by category. Very nicely done.

5. SEOChat has a thread listing directories. The title of the thread includes the word 'comprehensive', but the thread hasn't had any new activity since July, so surely there are more directories that have sprung up since then.

6. SEO Guy has a list of the best paid directories. It's an OLD thread, but there might still be some gold worth panning for here.

7. High Rankings has a good list of directories in this thread also.

So when you're looking for backlinks, and you need a place to find directory lists, maybe this post will help you out.

Keeping up with All of the Blogging

2005-11-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

I'm constantly amazed at the dedication that other bloggers demonstrate. Doesn't matter what kind of blog it is either. I was reminded of this when I was looking at Problogger's network of blogs on different subjects. Here's a guy who's got blogs up and running on a wide variety of subjects, some of which are extremely lucrative, and some of which probably don't get high dollar ads but have so much traffic that even low-priced ads add up pretty quickly. (Like the Jessica Simpson blog he's running. That one in particular caught my eye because of the post about the "best cleavage" poll.)

If you read my blogs on a regular basis, well...actually, no one reads any of my blogs on a regular basis because I don't publish to them on a regular basis. I think there's room in the world for bloggers who post fewer than 4 times a day to 20 different blogs.

Using Article Directory Content for an Affiliate Site

2005-11-03T07:14:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me the other day that I could generate a pretty big website just using some of the free content that's available over at http://ezinearticles.com/. Let's say for example that I wanted to make a big website about weight loss. That's a fairly high dollar Adsense category, so there's an easy revenue stream, and Weight Watchers has an affiliate program, and so does eDiets. (eDiets is cool because they have a plan for every diet out there, including Atkins and the Zone.)

One site that generates revenue and is considered a great resource on the internet is http://www.answers.com/. As near as I can tell, the content there comes from Wikipedia and some other sources, and none of the content is original or unique to Answers.com. It's just been "re-mixed" to use one of the common black hat phrases that describes what spam site builders do.

But here's the problem with that: duplicate content. Search engines don't like to rank pages with duplicate content very high, and it's entirely possible that you could build an entire site that's 100, 200, or even 500 pages long just using the articles from Ezine Articles only to have the whole thing nuked by the search engines for not having any original content.

The solution? Find ways to make the page that has each article on it less "like" other pages with that same article on it. Your web pages don't include just the text of your content; your web pages also include a sidebar or possibly two with menu items on it. That will help differentiate your content. You could also add a paragraph of your own introducing the article, and a paragraph of your own at the end of the article, with more of your own unique insights and comments.

In the footer of each page, you could add a list of hand-selected, on-topic links to authority sites related to the article's content, along with a description of each link.

You could also use different titles and descriptions for the page.

I've seen different tools that will measure in a percentage how "duplicate" content on one page is to another, and I've also seen different guidelines to how high or low that percentage can be without triggering a penalty. I've seen some guidelines that said no more than 10% duplicate content, and I've seen other guideleines that said no more than 40%. I've tried getting some pages built around the free content at Ezine Articles myself, and I was never able to get the number below 55% or so.

Honestly though...it took so much time and effort to get to that 55% point, I would have been better off writing my own original, unique articles. Or hiring a writer to write them for me.

An Example of an Affiliate Niche Site

2005-11-03T06:44:00.000-08:00

People talk about niches and niche marketing all the time these days, but I think the best way to learn about something is by example. This site, online slots, is an example of a niche gambling site. Someone could take "gambling" as the topic, and design an entire site around that subject, but the site would be large, and it would be very hard to rank for the phrase "gambling" or even "online gambling". AND it wouldn't necessarily even be that profitable, because people searching for something that general could want anything ranging from information about gambling laws to help with a compulsive gambling issue.

"Online slots" on the other hand is pretty doggone specific. Someone searching for online slots isn't interested in Charles Fey and the history of the slot machine. That person is probably not an antique slot machine collector either. So by choosing a niche keyword, you're driving targeted traffic that will have a high chance of converting into revenue for you.

Wheel of Fortune slots online is an even narrower niche, because now you're targeting a person who wants to play a specific slot game online. I don't think in this case that you could design an entire site around online wheel of fortune slot machines, but there are sub-niches of "online slots" and "online slot machines" that you COULD build an entire site around.

You could very easily design a site that reviews specific slot games from specific online casino softwares. For example, Microgaming slots are very popular, and so are Playtech slot machine games. Either one of those could be considered a sub-niche of "online slots" that you could build a decent-sized site around, one that would have plenty of pages of content.

What kind of niches or sub-niches can you think of?

Consumer Club

2005-10-28T21:12:00.000-07:00

I used to work for Hotels.com, and while I worked there, I have the good fortune to get to know David Litman. Not only is he one of the best bosses I've ever worked for, I learned more about running a business from him than from anyone else in my life. And even though he's fabulously wealthy now because of the tremendous success he had with Hotels.com, David is as down-to-earth and real as anyone on the planet. (And Bob Diener is one helluva nice guy too, although since he was in our Florida office, I didn't get to know him quite as well as I got to know David.)

But together they have now launched what I consider one of the ultimate affiliate websites at http://www.consumerclub.com/, which is an online shopping mall offering rebates on every imaginable product in every imaginable category. One of the site's unique selling propositions is that you can elect to have your rebates sent directly to the charity of your choice.

I think that with David Litman and Bob Diener at the helm, Consumer Club is going to become a household name. It's not a unique business model, BUT no one else has made their online shopping/rebate site into a householde name. David and Bob not only have the capital to achieve this, they also have the skill and the know-how to achieve it.

I wish them every success with the site, and I'll look forward to watching the brand grow over the next couple of years.

Keeping Up With Everything

2005-10-28T21:05:00.000-07:00

I remember a professor of mine in college who explained that having too many ideas to put on paper was one of the GOOD problems to have. I think he was write, but I haven't pinpointed a lot of solutions to this yet.

Those of you who read this blog regularly probably haven't been reading it regularly anymore because I haven't been writing in it regularly anymore. The problem?

Too many affiliate sites to run.

I now operate over 45 websites, some of which I just bought over the last month. That's a lot. And to be real honest, I'm not doing a great job of running any of them. In fact, it's safe to say that I'm doing a piss-poor job of running all of them but one, and I'm only doing moderately good at that site.

AND I'm about to have my most profitable month ever online. I'm not bragging, but I have the kind of income that a lot of people only dream about. I've earned it, and I've worked hard for it, but I'm also becoming aware that I need to take the next step.

I need to hire some employees or at least contract out some work in order to get everything done that I need to get done.

I think with a little bit of help, I could double my earnings over the next 3 months or so.

The Ultimate Secret to Making Money in Affiliate Marketing

2005-09-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

I sorta kinda ripped this title off of a post by Bill Rini:

The Ultimate Secret to Winning Poker

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this post here on my blog, but I am going to suggest that you run over to Bill's blog and read it. Bill tells a story about how when he was a stockbroker, he spent a lot of time perfecting his pitch and researching stock recommendations.

And some of the brain-dead monkeys he worked with made 200 calls a day while he perfected these things. In a few years, his monkey colleagues were making 5 or 6 times as much as he was, because they focused on the fundamentals and took action.

Think about how this applies to your affiliate marketing. Chances are that while you're surfing forums reading about how to make money, and surfing blogs and reading about how to make money, and reading ebooks about how to make money, other webmasters are building pages and getting links. Guess who's going to be making more money.

I posted a few days ago about needing to get refocused on the fundamentals. And Bill's blog post, even though it's about how to be a winning poker player, has a lot of insight into how to win at anything.

It's all about the fundamentals.

Back to Basics

2005-09-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a John T. Reed book right now called Succeeding, and in it he mentions that one of the simpler and more important things that he learned about goal setting was that he should set a specific and measurable goal every single week and work toward achieving that goal. And I've been working a bit aimlessly lately, to be honest, and I need to provide some structure to what I do for a living. (Because frankly, what I do lately is work on whatever seems interesting to me at the time. Which is also a structure, of sorts, but I don't think that it's the structure I need right now.)

I've also been doing a lot of thinking about what the basics are. What are the fundamentals of being a successful affiliate marketer? Tony Robbins is always pointing out that if you master the fundamentals, you've got it made., and that getting a black belt in karate means mastering only 7 fundamental moves. I need to focus on some fundamentals.

The fundamentals boil down to two things, IMO: content and links. So my goal for this week is to get the content for my online bingo portal up to 100 pages. And my other goal for the week is to get 100 new backlinks built for the bingo site. And just for fun, I'm going to re-read what I think is the greatest thing ever written about SEO: 26 Steps to 15k.

Cash Keywords and Cheap Keywords

2005-08-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, over at Threadwatch, a site called Cash Keywords made some keyword lists available free to the membership there. These lists sell for around $150 or so each, I think, but they're high quality, well thought out, and useful.

I was surfing and reviewing my notes from the last year's affiliate marketing activities, and I came across the Cash Keywords site and noticed they also own and operate a site called Cheap Keywords now too. On Cheap Keywords you can find Google Adwords that don't have a lot of competition.

Can you think of ways to use these two items together to make money?

Finally, here's a post from Graywolf about his thoughts on Cash Keywords. I haven't actually used the keyword lists for anything practical yet, but he actually put the info to use and has a distinct opinion on their list.

Longtail Terms - Examples

2005-08-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

As I'm reading more and doing more eBay affiliate research, I came across a site that had made their referral logs available. Here are some longtail terms with very little competition I found:

White Lawn Tractor LT185
"Civil War Union currency"
craftsman model 315.113860
DishNetwork Rom3 Rev372 Blue Card

The last phrase had over 300 results in Google. The other phrases on that list had less than 100, and 1 of them had less than 20 results in Google.

So you're probably thinking how much money am I going to make from people searching for "civil war union currency"? The fact is, not much. But if you make 5 cents per click or so through a combination of eBay plus Adsense, and you get 1 click per month, then you've made a nickel.

But suppose you had 100,000 of those phrases? And you got 1 click per month per phrase? At a nickel a click, you've just made yourself $5000. I know a lot of people who don't make that much money working a full time job in management at major corporations.

How to Become an eBay Super Affiliate

2005-08-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

About a year and a half ago I read a post over at AssociatePrograms.com about an eBay affiliate who was making over $1.3 million as an eBay affiliate per year. That's some serious cash, right there. In fact, that's over $100,000 per month.

According to the post, the top 10 eBay affiliates were all making over $1 million per year, and the top 25 eBay affiliates were making over $25,000 per month.

How do you become an eBay super affiliate?

According to their best practices page, you can become an eBay super affiliate through a number of different strategies:

Natural search (regular old SEO)
Paid search
Content/niche site (They give RollingStone.com as an example.)

To truly rake in the big bucks as an eBay affiliate, no matter which of the 3 models above you want to use, you're going to need a tremendous keyword list. (And in fact, you'll probably use a mixture of all 3 business models.)

One of the top ten affiliates at eBay on their success stories page explains that he has a keyword list of over 100,000 phrases, and he focuses almost exclusively on doing PPC for those keywords. I suspect he was using a Google Cash type methodology, where he just sent folks directly to his affiliate link. This strategy is probably not going to work the same way as it used to since earlier this year Google changed their policy about how many ads they'll display for a given URL in a given search.

But the brilliant thing about eBay is that a good bit of the keyword research has already been done for you. eBay lists all the items that they sell throughout their site, including a section which is literally nothing more than a tremendous list of keywords.

All you have to do is build pages around those keywords, and drive traffic to them, then collect your check from eBay every month through CJ.

My suggestion would be to create an auction portal of some sort which is a categorized directory with sub-directories of different products, and have some actual content on each page about whatever product phrase is being targeted.

Or you might start with some small niche that you're interested in. Just picking a category at random from the homepage of eBay, I clicked on "musical instruments". You could build an entire site around musical instruments, and sub-divid the pages like this:

Brass
DJ Gear & Lighting
Electronic
Equipment
Harmonica
Strings
Woodwind

And each of those categories could have sub-categories too. Harmonica for instance could easily have a Hohner sub-section and a Johnson Blues King sub-section.

Those are all keyword phrases I picked up just by going through their site and clicking and browsing.

Another way to find keywords for eBay would be to go to your favorite keyword suggestion tool and search for "find cheap", "find good deals on", and "buy". Each of those is going to give you a list, usually in order of popularity, of keyword phrases that you can go after that are targeted and will make you money. Doing a search for good deals, I got the following ideas for keyword phrases to build pages around:

good deals on cell phones
good deals on cars (Some people might not know they can buy a car on eBay/)
good deals on computers
good deals on hotels (Did you know you can book travel on eBay? It's amazing.)
good deals on laptops
good deals on appliances
good deals on digital cameras

What about putting together a buyers' guide around each of those terms, and not only directing traffic to eBay from there, but also running Google Adsense on those pages, AND possibly even having an affiliate link to a retail website like Amazon for each product category? Now you're looking at diverse revenue from several different sources.

According to eBay's best practices page, the categories that produce the most first activities are:

Collectibles
Toys
Sporting Goods
Consumer Electronics
Computers

If you're going to go for it, then maybe choosing a sub-category of one of these categories is the best way to go.

If you're going to go for it, then you need to put together a system to track which keyword phrases are producing for you and which aren't, especially if you're spending money on PPC traffic. And if you're going to go after this niche, get some capital behind you as quickly as possible, because you want to drive enough traffic to hit the higher commission tiers at eBay.

How to Compete in a Competitive Affiliate Niche

2005-08-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

So you've decided that you're going to be a gambling affiliate, or a web hosting affiliate, or you're going to be a credit card application guru. And you want to know how to compete with the big boys. Here are some suggestions:

1- Target longtail keyword phrases. Your keyword list should be a minimum of 500 phrases. 1000 would be better. And more than that would be even better. Unless you've got boatloads of cash, and you're some kind of SEO savant, you're going to need to be getting a lot of clicks from a lot of different searches.

2- If you use PPC, keep your bid prices low and your phrases long. Here's a strategy for bidding on PPC terms. Don't bid on any term with fewer than 4 words in it, and don't bid more than 10 cents per click. But bid on SO MANY terms that even though you're only getting a couple clicks per day, you're getting a decent amount of traffic, and you're generating a great ROI.

Using long phrases will improve your ROI in a couple of different ways. For one thing, long keyword phrases convert better than short keyword phrases. For another thing, the longer the phrase, the less competition. You should be operating on big profit margins at first so you can afford the more competitive words later.

3- Be the absolute best website in your niche. This one's a tough strategy, but here's how you do it. Search through the top ten results for "online poker" or "car loans", and look at each site carefully. Then go make a website that is more relevant, has better quality content, and that's more interesting than any of the competitors. Then start telling people about it.

4- When you're doing your SEO, focus on the same strategies in the PPC tip. Long keyword phrases and lots of them, that's the ticket.

5- Network, network, network. The internet is nothing but a giant network. The more people who know and like you, the more links you can get. The more links you can get, and the better you'll do in the organic search engines.

Those five tips will help you compete with the big boys in any competitive affiliate marketing niche that I know of, including online poker.

How to Get Ideas for Smaller, Less Competitive Affiliate Niches

2005-08-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

One way to get ideas for smaller and less competitive affiliate niches is to take a look at one of the info products available on the subject. I haven't used Niche Database, but it looks like a good place to look for ideas. Another infoproduct that is available is Niche Site Confessions, which I recently reviewed. It lists 70 different blueprints for niche sites that you can put together.

I think the real value in products like that is not so much for the niche ideas that you get from the product itself, but in learning what process the author went through to get those ideas. It's the whole feed a man a fish or teach a man how to fish thing.

But even a competitive niche can be broken down into less competitive sub-niches.

For example, loans. A page on "loans" would be extremely competitive and not very targeted. A page on "car loans" would be a little more targeted, and possibly a little less competitive. A page on "car loans for people with bad credit" is more targeted and less competitive still. And a page on "dallas car loans for people with bad credit" is better still.

loans > car loans > bad credit card loan > dallas bad credit car loans

Or you could apply the loan-thinking to a different product. Car loans is going to be competitive, but are motorcycle financing loans and boat financing loans as competitive? Probably not.

Are they lucrative? Absolutely.

Another Way to Get Ideas for Affiliate Sites

2005-08-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Another way to get ideas for affiliate sites is to go through one of the lists of high dollar Adsense keywords on the internet, and brainstorm from that. I just did a search on Google and went through the list of high-paying keywords and came up with a list of sites I could launch that would be lucrative:

Web hosting
Casinos and gambling
Domain names
Mortgages
Poker
Travel
Debt Consolidation
Education
Search Engine Optimization
Insurance
Data Recovery
DSL
Gifts
Car insurance
Flowers
DVD's
Hair loss
Work at home
HGH

Finding affiliate programs for these subjects should be easy. Just do some searches for the keywords and see what comes up. Look for a button on a merchant page that says "Webmasters" or "Affiliate Program".

You'll notice that I'm focusing on high dollar areas, and you might be nervous about working in such a competitive area. I'm a firm believer that the traditional wisdom on any subject is often wrong. The traditional wisdom in affiliate marketing is that you should stay out of the competitive fields and target smaller niche markets with little competition.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that approach, but I also think that if you attack a competitive niche, and you learn how to compete in that kind of market, you'll be able to nail any smaller niche market that you put your mind to.

But if you hone your skills as a webmaster to the point where you can be #1 for just one or two of the internet's most competitive areas, say "online poker" and "web hosting", you'll likely be rich. And ANYTHING will look easy compared to it.

My recommendation: if you're just getting started as an affiliate marketer, choose two niches, one extremely competitive and lucrative, and one that is a tiny niche with no competition. Spend about half your time on each, and see how you do. If you never go for the big keywords, then you'll never rank for them. You might not rank for them if you go for them either, but why guarantee that you wont't rank for them?

How to Get Ideas for Affiliate Sites

2005-08-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

There are lots of ways to get ideas. Here's one.

1- Go to Commission Junction and log into your account there.

2- Click on "Get Links".

3- Click on "Advertiser List"

4- Click on "3 month EPC"

5- Scroll past all the new programs (the ones that say "new" in the 3 month EPC column)

6- Take a look at the top five or ten programs based on EPC. (EPC stands for earnings per 100 clicks, which will give you a good idea that these programs are profitable.)

7- Do a search for some of these product names in Google and Overture.

8- Take a look at some of the sites that are buying ads for those phrases.

9- Think about how you could make a similar site that's better. Maybe you could make a better designed site, or maybe you could add better content.

10- Start working on a site and brainstorming keywords to market under.

Here's an example of me going through this process:

Right now, the top 3 month EPC is for a program called Mortgage Intelligence. They're apparently an English company that pays 11 pounds per lead.

I do a search for "mortgage intelligence" in Google. A lot of the advertisers here are actual merchants rather than affiliate sites, like eloan.com or lowermybills.com. But one site that isn't is mortgage.best-loan-guide.com.

Taking a look at the site, I can see that what they've done is provide a directory or guide to different kinds of loans, which is apparently a pretty lucrative market, based on the EPC that Mortgage Intelligence is showing. They've got sections set up for debt consolidation loans, home improvement loans, car-buying loans using a home equity loan, etc.

Brainstorming ways to build a loan directory is as simple as going to a keyword suggestion tool and typing in "loan" to see what comes up. Here's my list:

Home Equity Loans
Car Loans
Home Loans
Payday Loans
Student Loans
Bad Credit Loans
Boat Loans

Something else I noticed was that one of the keyword suggestions was "florida home loans". So under Home Loans I could easily have 50 sub-pages, 1 for each state. Same thing for all the other keywords. So I've got the beginnings of a 350 page loan portal already. All I have to do at this point is find additional affiliate programs who will pay me for leads.

Then it's a simple matter to build the 350 page site and start working on getting links so I come up in the search engines for free. Or I could create a really big list of long-tail loan phrases that don't have a lot of competition in Google Adwords, buy cheap traffic, and make a profit on my commissions.

And that's just one idea. The 2nd merchant in CJ under the list of merchants in order of EPC is Citibank Business Cards. You could follow the same thought process to start putting together a credit card portal site. Then there are several more loan and credit card providers, but also insurance providers.

Should be an easy matter to build a portal about insurance and make a lot of money too.

The only problem with getting ideas this way is that you're choosing lucrative affiliate programs, but since they're lucrative, you also are picking out extremely competitive areas to market in. So you've got to be smart about promoting them. I'll cover how to compete in competitive areas in futute blog post.

The "Top Ten Widgets" Affiliate Website Model

2005-08-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

There's a type of affiliate website that's so common that it's almost trite and overlooked, and that's the "top ten widgets" affiliate website. Basically the way it work is that you launch a website that lists the "top ten" products in a certain category. You of course use affiliate links to drive revenue on the site, and you could theoretically also use Google Adsense or Adbrite to drive additional revenue.

My belief is that this model is trite and overlooked because it works. I don't think you'd see as many sites in the top tiers of both Google Adwords and Overture if they weren't profitable. I think the trick is making a list of ten really good products that convert really well and have high commissions available.

One thing that I think is difficult when launching this kind of site is SEO. One factor that I'm convinced almost all search engines take into account is the number of affiliate links on your homepage. If you've got 10 affiliate links on your top ten widgets homepage, then I think you're going to be at a disadvantage in organic rankings.

My feeling is that "top ten widget review" sites work best using PPC traffic.

And in keeping with the "top ten" theme, here's a list of the top ten widgets you could review and sell on your affiliate site if you wanted to try this model.

Top ten online poker rooms
Top ten online universities
Top ten credit card offers
Top ten credit repair options
Top ten online dating sites
Top ten web hosting providers
Top ten pay per click engines
Top ten payday loans
Top ten online dvd rental sites
Top ten internet service providers

Another thing that I think would be important in running a site like this is making sure that the site looks credible. Anything you can do to make your site look more professional and high-quality than your competitiors' sites is going to help you succeed. This includes things like professional and attractive layout, contact us information, and privacy policy information.

I don't currently run a "top ten widget reviews" site, but I don't doubt that it's a profitable model. I've run sites similar to that in the past, and I see sites like this all over the PPC engines, so I'm convinced it's a workable model.

Problogger's Blog and Affiliate Tips

2005-08-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

10 Tips for Using Affiliate Links in Your Blog

I added Problogger to my bookmarks in My Yahoo after coming across this article. Obviously I run a couple of blogs, and I use some affiliate links in them, but I'm always looking for new ideas and new ways to monetize them. I've made it a point to stop putting affiliate links in my posts on this particular blog because I'm more interested in developing reputation and mindshare here than I am in making a quick buck. So I want to make sure that what's written here isn't questioned because of possible commercial motives.

Tip #8 "Be Transparent" was possibly the best tip in the article about using affiliate links in blogs. This, to me, is one of the best marketing strategies of all time. Just let people know what you're up to. No need to hide anything. They're either going to support you or they're not. And you can sleep better at night too.

I'll be reading through 31 Days to a Better Blog soon too. Maybe I'll be able to make this into a "better blog".

Six Marketing Gurus I Recommend - An Eclectic List

2005-08-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

There are a LOT of so-called internet marketing gurus on the internet. I'm not a fan of most of them. Many of them overpromise, and many of them are so aggressively focused on selling that they provide almost nothing of value. Or if they do, then it's buried so deep within their sales talk that you won't remember it or even read it.

This article is not about them.

Instead, it's about some internet marketing gurus that I actually do admire. This is by no means a complete list of the people who have influenced my thinking on affiliate and internet marketing, but it's a good start. If you read half of the material on the web by half of the gurus on this list, you'll be ahead of most other online marketers already.

Allan Gardyne - Allan owns and operates Associate Programs, as well as Pay Per Click Search Engines and Lifetime Commisions. He is one of the least pretentious and most helpful internet marketing gurus you could learn from. I highly recommend the forum on his site.
Perry Marshall - Shortly after reading Google Cash I bought a copy of Marshall's book on maximizing your Google Adwords efforts. It's still the best book I've read on the subject, and it practically doubled my income after the first reading. The free articles available at his site http://www.perrymarshall.com/ will give you a taste of his style. His writing isn't fluffy or salesy; it's good solid information you can sink your teeth into.
James Martell - While I'm not a fan of slavishly following a plan laid out in an ebook, I AM a big fan of ebooks that are actually full of information, and Martell's affiliate handbook is probably the richest and most informative how-to book on the subject. He is someone who has literally demonstrated his own success as an internet marketer over and over again. http://www.jamesmartell.com/
Aaron Wall - I suspect that Aaron doesn't even think of himself as an internet marketing guru, but his SEO Book is the best book on the subject that I've read. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. I read his blog daily.
Andy Hagans - Andy Hagans is another internet marketing guy who probably doesn't think of himself as a guru, but his Link Building Blog is also on my daily required reading list. He's also one hell of a nice guy too.

Choose your gurus and mentors wisely, because if you don't, it will make your life harder than it has to be. I try to keep in touch with varying viewpoints on a consistent basis, and these are far from the only sites I read. But they're certainly toward the top of my list.

Super Affiliate Confessions Review

2005-08-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

Super Affiliate Confessions is a 346 page ebook comprised mostly of 12 interviews with 12 successful affiliate webmasters. The ebook was authored by Codrut Turcanu, who also wrote the ebook that I reviewed yesterday for Niche Site Confessions. In fact, I've seen a special offer that makes Super Affiliate Confessions available for free when you order Niche Site Confessions for $67.97.

Super Affiliate Confessions is a good ebook, especially for someone who is unfamiliar with affiliate marketing or online marketing, but it's not the ebook I had hoped it would be. Many of the webmasters who agreed to be interviewed primarily market their own infoproducts rather than working as affiliate webmasters, and much of the advice from these webmasters is repeated many times over during the 346 pages.

The questions in each interview follow the same general format. The most interesting question, I thought, was if you had $150 and wanted to make $1500 with it, how would you spend it? The answer was very similar from webmaster to webmaster, although some of the answers surprised and delighted me.

I'll address each interview individually. Some were certainly better than others.

Al Martinovic
This interview was particularly interesting to me because Martinovic promotes cigarettes through an affiliate site. I remember reading somewhere that a company selling cigarettes is always going to be extremely profitable because cigarettes cost next to nothing to produce, and your customers are going to be some of the most profitable customers on the planet.

Some of Martinovic's specific advice is:

Collect email addresses and send regular autoresponder generated emails to leads.
Use PPC advertising to buy targeted traffic, and have a keyword list of no less than 500 targeted phrases. 1000 phrases is even better.
Don't get into bidding wars in the PPC search engines. He claims to bid the minimum amount on his keywords and still gets plenty of traffic.
Create an SEO optimized web page for every product you're promoting.

Martinovic's advice for what to do with your $150 consists of writing and distributing articles related to the product you're selling, submitting a press release at PR Web, looking for joint venture partners, and dumping what money is left into a PPC campaign. This was the best action plan I saw, although it would have been good to address product selection and bid management in this scenario.

Allan Gardyne

Allan's interview was the best of the lot, and he's just as entertaining, warm, and down-to-earth in this interview as he is at his website and in his forum. Allan makes all or most of his income from affiliate marketing, so he was uniquely qualified to participate in these interviews.

Some of his advice was very specific and practical. Allan suggests not using banner ads at all to promote affiliate links, but using text links instead. Better click-through's and better conversiosn.

He also points out that an enthusiastic and personal review of a product is going to increase conversions dramatically over just having a text link.

Allan Gardyne reveals some of his current websites and how they make money, and some of his first websites as well. There are several links to some of the interesting case studies Allan has published at http://www.associateprograms.com/.

One of the best things about the interview with Gardyne was that every time the interview questions asked about how to make money quickly and easily, Allan replied that people should focus on the long term instead, which is wise. And a couple of his answers were practically memes:

If you want to be successful long term, build useful websites. (You should make that into a poster and put it above your computer while you work. This is the single greatest pearl of wisdom I've seen about affiliate marketing anywhere.)

The interview with Allan Gardyne also includes information about why he doesn't use PPC engines, why you should start out promoting lower-priced products first before moving to the big ticket items, and what mistakes new affiliates should avoid. His insights are entertaining and sometimes profound, and this interview alone makes this ebook a worthwhile read.

Andrew Henry

Andrew's interview consists largely of his opinions on how to market by being helpful on forums, why joint ventures are such a great deal, and how to use PPC marketing to your best advantage. Henry promotes quite a few info products aimed at internet marketers.

His #1 tip was a very good one, I thought. He suggests working hard at successfully promoting one product as an affiliate before moving on to another product. I think that this is probably excellent advice.

Anne Ahira

This interview was one of the weaker interviews I read. There was very little new in her interview that hadn't already been discussed in the other interviews, and one of the sites she was promoting is no longer live, which indicates to me that the project was not a long-term success.

Ashvin Ramasawmy

Ashvin provides a list of tips and a list of mistakes that are both pretty good, but not blazingly original or different from the advice given by the other webmasters. He exclusively promotes downloadable products like ebooks. One piece of explict advice that I did think was good, at least in terms of being specific, was to only promote products that pay at least $50 in commission. He also suggests buying PPC traffic at a penny per visitor, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about where to find that traffic.

Bryan Kumar

This was another very weak interview. Kumar gives quite a bit of advice on how to run a successful Google Adwords campaign, but he states at one point that he can't give a specific example of a Google Adwords campaign that he's run because he didn't have a lot of data. This indicates to me that he doesn't use Adwords much, and makes me question why so much of his interview consists of Adwords advice.

Bryan Kumar also aggressively used the interview as an opportunity to recommend some of his products and some of his affiliate products. I was disappointed in the quality of this interview.

Denise Ryder

Denise is a big believer in building strong relationships with her customers. She's made quite a bit of money writing ebooks and selling customization rights to other webmasters, which isn't really an affiliate business model. The best advice she gave in her interview was to write original presell copy; if your presell copy just re-presents the copy in the product's sales materials, you've done nothing but waste your time and your readers' time.

Eo Lim

This was an interesting interview, because Eo Lim has some different ideas and opinions than many of the other webmasters interviewed here. One of the most interesting tidbits from his interview was how he made money "ghost-selling" affiliate products. Basically, he wrote free articles for 57 webmasters that they could customize with their branding, but they had to send his affiliate links to their opt-in lists within 90 days of doing so.

Lim also gives some contrarian advice about selling infoproducts. He recommends selling infoproducts that pay 20% and 25% commissions because there will be so much less competition to deal with. He says he would rather earn $5 a day from an unpopular product than try to sell something that would make more money but that he couldn't sell. Interesting food for though, that.

Gary Huynh

Gary is another webmaster who promotes a lot of his own websites and doesn't do much affiliate marketing anymore, which makes me wonder why he was included in the series of interviews. Hynh specializes in one page websites. He recommends using NO graphics on your websites, though he doesn't explain why not, and he also suggests targeting high dollar products aimed at business owners. This interview was a little thin, and those two recommendations were the only real departures from anything anyone else had said.

Jeff Mulligan

Jeff Mulligan is the owner and operator of CBmall.com, which IMO is one of the coolest site concepts on the internet. I was excited to see an interview with him. The best thing about the interview was when he was asked how he would turn $150 into $1500 in 30 days with affiliate marketing, and he replied that he would spend his money and effort making his own infoproduct to sell instead. He said that he didn't think he could reliably achieve those kinds of results with affiliate marketing in that period of time.

I enjoyed his candor.

Kerwin Chang

This interview was more of the same, although Chang had some specific information about how to get results from safelists. His recommendation was to sign up for a minimum of 100 safelists before expecting to see any results. I don't know if this works or not, but it certainly is specific advice.

Willie Crawford

This interview was another gem. Willie Crawford is one of the most interesting and entertaining affiliate marketing gurus that I know of, and he was "on" in this interview. Willie's a big fan of recurring commissions, and he was kind enough to include an article he wrote that generated an additional 2000 subscribers to his list.

Crawford says that his biggest mistake was to try to promote too many products at one time. He also mentions which products he currently focuses on promoting: webhosting, shopping carts, nutritional products, info products, and seminars.

He offers some excellent advice on how to promote high priced seminars. His suggestion is to collect phone numbers during a preview teleseminar, and have someone actually call and sell the high-ticket seminar to the customer. This is a great example of out-of-the-box thinking, and this is the kind of thing that makes money on the internet.

Willie also talked about a PPC campaign he ran for a recipe book he'd written where he made $7 for every $1 he spent on clicks.

Overall recommendation

This ebook is worth looking into if you need some inspiration. The following things could have improved Super Affiliate Confessions:

I didn't really need to hear that I should have an opt-in list from 12 different webmasters.
I would have preferred to hear from people who really are full-time affiliate marketers instead of from people who sell their own products.
I was disappointed that the range of niches was so small. Most of the webmasters advised against promoting internet marketing products, but that was also the core of their own business.
It would have been good to include webmasters involved in some of the major affiliate niches out there: travel, dating, credit cards, adult, gambling, and others.

There were several good insights, and honestly, the interview with Allan Gardyne by itself was priceless.

Niche Site Confessions Review

2005-08-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

I've been going through my folders and reading all the ebooks that I've bought and only skimmed or just saved for when I had more time. Tonight I re-read Niche Site Confessions by Codrut Turcanu. Like my other ebook reviews, this one does not include an affiliate link. But if you decide you'd like to visit the site, you can do so at Niche Site Confessions.

Overview

Niche Site Confessions is a 73 page ebook that sells for $67 or so per copy, and it comes with the usual array of free bonuses that ebook sellers offer. This review does not cover any of the bonus materials; it only covers the actual ebook. The theme of the book is how to make passive income with niche websites using affiliate programs and Google Adsense. So this ebook is the perfect subject for this blog, since this blog has essentially the same theme.

Unlike many ebooks about how to make money on the internet, Niche Site Confessions does not overpromise or oversell. It's a simple, straightforward book that consists of interviews with three affiliate webmasters about how they make money. The interviews are all sincere, they seem very honest and down-to-earth, and they're full of practical advice. I found myself wanting to jot a few things down from a couple of the interviews.

The webmasters interviewed, and the websites they discuss, are:

Dan S. Ho, webmaster for http://www.nutritional-supplement-info.com/
John Gibb, webmaster for http://www.computer-and-printer-reviews.com/
Phil Wiley, webmaster for http://www.ozemedia.com/

I'm going to cover briefly some of the best advice I got from each interview.

Dan S. Ho Interview

Dan S. Ho used Site Build It to build his website, and he makes 5 figures a month from his nutritional supplement site. His main advice is to target lots of narrowly-focused keywords rather than a few general keywords. It's easier to rank well for a narrowly-focused keyword in the search engines, and the traffic will convert better. Instead of targeting a phrase like "gingko biloba", Ho suggests targeting something like "benefits of gingko biloba".

John Gibb Interview

The John Gibb interview was also excellent. He's also a Site Build It user, and he described in detail his philosophy and timeframe for working niche sites. One strategy that he takes is to not start a new project until he has at least 300 pages of content live on his current project. He also generally doesn't launch a website until he has at least 200 pages of content built either.

During the first 4 weeks of a project, Gibb suggests writing 10 pages of content per day and adding it to the site, and try to gain 1 link per day to the site. This seems like reasonable and sound advice to me, and I think one area I could improve on as I work on my websites is setting goals and working through them. I need solid benchmarks to hit.

After the first 4 weeks, Gibbs suggests that you sprinkly affiliate links throughout your content, and that you add links a little more quickly and more aggressively.

Phil Wiley Interview

One of the more interesting things about the Phil Wiley interview in Niche Site Confessions was his inital list of some of the products that he's selling on his affiliate sites. He says he's selling hemorrhoid cream, treadmills, books on asthma, mail-order lobsters, engagements rings, and a whole lot more.

Wiley focuses on lots of mini-sites (over 100 of them), so his approach is significantly different from the previous two webmasters'. (I find this approach fascinating, and the only mini-site project I've ever launched turned out to be profitable without exception and very easy to manage.) He gives an example of a minisite he produced on a free website host at http://ebooks.netfirms.com/.

His minisites normally run about 5 pages each and take a day or so each to create. Rather than build one big site about fishing, Wiley would build a site about fishing rods, then another site about fishing tackle, then another site about fishing charters or vacations. He uses Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mininet strategy for his SEO purposes.

I have a copy of Revenge of the Mininet, and I've read it twice, but I haven't yet tried to use the strategies. I'll eventually review that ebook here, and provide a case study of it too, but it's not ready yet.

There were quite a few product recommendations in the Phil Wiley interview section, and I'm unfamiliar with most of them, so I can't comment on the worth of those recommendations.

What I liked most about Niche Site Confessions

I didn't feel like I was getting sold the moon.
The information was practical and gave solid examples I could actually look at.
No one told me I could make a bunch of money without effort. In fact, one thing was consistent in all 3 interviews: you have to work hard to make the money in this biz.
The book was easy to read, both in terms of layout and in terms of language.

What I thought could have been improved about Niche Site Confessions

I thought the ebook would have been better if it had a table of contents.
2 of the 3 interviews were Site Build It webmasters. 1 of the interviews was a minisite specialist so to speak. I would have enjoyed a 3rd perspective from a James Martell webmaster.
I would have enjoyed seeing more than just 3 interviews. The interviews were good, but I finished the book wanting more.
The book really could have used an introduction and a conclusion section. These would provide context for the reader in terms of understanding what was being taught in the interviews.

Conclusion

I recommend Niche Site Confessions. I think it's one of the better and least-pie-in-the-sky ebooks in this market, and I think the messsage of focusing on a narrow niche that isn't competitive is one worth hearing again and again.

Strike It Niche Case Study

2005-08-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

So I decided to follow the action steps laid out in Strike It Niche and record my experiences here. Here's my experiences so far, step by step:

Step 1 of the "Quick Start Action Plan" is to select your business blueprint. I've decided to go with the "beef and steak" blueprint.

Step 2 is to decide how my business will be unique. I'm sure this step is probably more important than I think, but I didn't do much work here. The main thing I'm planning to do to make the site unique is that it's a blog rather than a static site, and with any luck, I'll be able to form a real community of steak and beef lovers around the blog. That's my goal, anyway.

Step 3 is to expand my keyword list using SiteBuildIt and Wordtracker. I'm using the Google Adwords Keyword Sandbox for this, and if I need more keywords, I'll hit Overture and also think about subscribing to Wordtracker again.

Step 4 is to select a domain name. Come on by and visit my new domain, http://beef-recipes.blogspot.com/.

Step 5 is to select a site building tool. I'm using Blogger.

Step 6 is to evaluate and join affiliate programs. I think I'm a member of Omaha Steaks, and I'm sure there are some beef recipes available over at Clickbank. I can probably find some type of Atkins-diet related affiliate program to shill too.

Step 7 is to create content. This will be an ongoing process, since it's a blog.

Step 8 is to submit the URL's to the major search engines and directories. Other than DMOZ, the links given here to submit to are outdated. Although I could submit to Google, I'm going to let Google's spiders find me naturally.

Step 9 is to submit to MSN's pay-per-inclusion. Again, outdated stuff. I'm just going to wait for their spiders.

Step 10 is to add Google Adsense to the pages, after I've created 25+ pages and am receiving 100+ visitors per day. If I do my job correctly, I should have that many posts in a week or so. I'm not going to wait for that much traffic to actually launch Adsense though.

And that's where I'm at with my Strike It Niche project so far. One thing I did find funny was that one of the 15 suggested keywords was "steak cheese pictures". At first I thought that this had something to do with Philly cheesesteaks, which I love, and I did a search in Yahoo, and the first site that came up was a steak and beef affiliate site.

But the 2nd site was an adult site called Steak and Cheese. People looking for "steak and cheese pictures" are probably not looking for a site with beef recipes. A fine example of why you should research and think critically about your keyword research.

Rich Jerk Review

2005-08-24T22:19:00.000-07:00

Who is the Rich Jerk anyway?

The Rich Jerk is creating quite a buzz on some of the marketing forums, because it was apparently written by kellyandsummer, the folks who sold the big affiliate website on eBay for so much money recently. I've seen speculation that the entire auction of the website was specifically geared to generate buzz around this ebook, and that would certainly be in line with the attitude behind the strategies outlined in The Rich Jerk.

The Rich Jerk sells for $97. I don't think that this is an outrageous amount of money to pay for solid information, but I'm not sure that this ebook provides enough solid information to be worth $97. The book is short at 40 pages, and some of the material is good, and some of it is only so-so.

What's in The Rich Jerk?

How to make affiliate websites that sell like crazy
Pay per click strategies that will kill your competition
Search engine optimization strategies
Creating your own info product to sell
Buying and selling wholesale goods on eBay
Websites you can make profitable right now (i.e. Clickbank review sites)
Other online ventures to consider
Recommended resources

The Good Stuff's in the front of the book

The section about how to make affiliate websites that sell like crazy wasn't bad. The Rich Jerk gives tips on how to write effective sales copy by appealing to people's hopes, their fears, and by establishing yourself as an impartial authority on a subject. The techniques given for accomplishing these thing probably work pretty well, although they're not what you would consider humanitarian. The attitude is more of, "Take the rubes for all they're worth, and do it fast."

The pay per click strategies section was good. The ideas for writing copy that stands out and gets click-through's were excellent. This section could have been improved by giving some actual facts and figures from the author's own campaigns, doing some split-testing between the ads he says not to write and the ads he says do write, but all-in-all, the chapter was good.

The discussion of how to make money doing click arbitrage, was excellent. I have every intention of acting on some of the tips in this chapter. The only flaw in this chapter was the list of PPC engines. Many of the PPC engines recommended have performed very badly for me in the past, so if you stick with the top tier engines recommended, you'll be okay.

The author includes a very good list of high paying keywords along with their average prices with the book as well.

The search engine optimization strategies section was a fair introduction to the subject that covered a surprising amount of ground. He covers black hat and white hat techniques, and his discussion of link building techniques was actually good.

This section could have been improved by explaining in a little more detail WHY these techniques worked, because some of them might not work in the future. If you learn how to think like a search engine though, you'll always be able to adjust. That context was what this section needed.

The Weak Stuff is toward the end of the book

The next few sections were the weakest parts of The Rich Jerk. I think the ebook would have been much more focused has the author stuck with the theme of making money with affiliate sites, but the last few chapters covered creating infoproducts, buying and selling wholesale goods on eBay, and there was some info about some other ways to make money online through some investment type opportunities.

The last chapter was a list of recommended products. These were all affiliate links, as were almost all of the other recommended links in the ebook. To me, this takes some of the credibility away from the product.

Final Thoughts on The Rich Jerk

The night I read the ebook I was upset that I'd spent $97 on it. After all, it was only 40 pages long, and about 10 of those pages were useless to me. And a lot of the other 30 pages was filled with stuff I already knew.

But when I re-read the book, I found a lot of value there. Anthony Robbins is fond of pointing out that sometimes all it takes is 1 new distinction, 1 new idea, to completely change your life. I think that implementing some of the techniques in this book will more than make back the money I spent on it. And in the end, that's all I can ask from an ebook, even one with as unusual a marketing style as The Rich Jerk.

I have mixed feelings about recommending this ebook. I think that affiliate marketing is something that can be approached responsibly and morally, and still be very profitable. I don't think that the attitude of "Let's victimize our customers" is more profitable than "Let's help our customers".

But if you can look past that at some of the practical techniques for making money in this ebook, I think you'll find it valuable.

A Couple More Lessons I Learned from The Rich Jerk

At one point I had doubted that this ebook was actually written by kellyandsummer, because frankly, every post I've ever seen written by them in a forum was polite and helpful, nothing like the voice of the author of this book. It seems clear to be that they're using a certain copywriting style for effect. I don't think it works 100%, but I don't think the author is the rich jerk that he claims to be.

If the speculation I've seen about the eBay auction of the website is true, that it was just a technique used to gather buzz around their ebook, then that would be the most powerful lesson that this book could teach. And you could probably extrapolate that from a few forum threads here and there.

Strike It Niche Review

2005-08-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

Strike it Niche is an ebook from Michael Holland that provides 70 blueprints for online businesses, all of which could be affiliate websites. The idea behind the ebook was that Michael would collect 70 high demand but low competition niches for an aspiring affiliate webmaster to target. This ebook was originally released in 2003, so I'm not entirely sure that the information is still as good as it was when the ebook was new - surely by now quite a few people have grabbed some of these niches and started dominating them?

Strike It Niche is made up of 70 "business blueprints" in 13 different categories. Some of these categories included:

Home & Garden
Sports, Recreation, & Hobbies
Food & Cooking

And some of the business blueprints included:

Kitchens
Cheerleading
Love Poems & Quotes

All the business blueprints are laid out in the same manner. They all include:

An overview which is usually a paragraph describing the niche.
A list of root keywords, or generic keywords for a given topic. You can use these to do some of your own keyword research.
Profitable keywords in that niche. There were about 15 keywords for each niche, all of which had been researched at the time of writing for supply vs. demand.
Affiliate programs. This part was pretty helpful, since a lot of times finding an affiliate program for a niche can be a bear.
More ideas for making money. This part was good too. Affiliate marketing is only one revenue stream for a website, and sometimes we're so focused on affiliate marketing that we don't diversify like we should. Every single blueprint had ideas for other revenue streams.

Strike It Niche also includes a 10 point action plan, which is not as detailed as the action plan presented in James Martell's Affiliate Marketing Handbook, but that wasn't the purpose of the book. And the action plan is a reasonable way of breaking the process down into do-able chunks.

There is also a really quick primer on search engine optimization, which mostly covers the basics. Since the information is so basic, most of it still holds true, although a few of the comments are seriously out-dated. But this isn't a book about search engine marketing specifically; it's a book about business blueprints.

What I Liked About Strike It Niche

I've been re-reading this ebook in order to write the review of it, and there is a lot to like about this product:

At $47, Strike It Niche is a lot more affordable than other ebooks about affiliate marketing and making money on the internet. (Rich Jerk, which I'll review either later today or tomorrow, was $97, and provides FAR less useful information.)
The information in this ebook is solid and useful. You could immediately sit down with one of the business blueprints in Strike It Niche and start a website and possibly even make money with it.
The book reveals by demonstration how to think about setting up an online niche business. You can apply his thought processes to your own niches and come up with your own business blueprints.

What I Think Could Improve Strike It Niche

Regular updates of some kind would be nice. One of the brilliant things about Aaron Wall's ebook on SEO is that it is constantly being updated, both in the copy itself, and in Aaron's excellent blog. Strike It Niche could benefit from similar updates. A blog with a new business blueprint every week would be a huge value add.
The section at the beginning about how to navigate the ebook was just padding. It took 13 pages to get into the actual content of the ebook.

Overall, I would say that Strike It Niche is definitely one of the better ebooks on the market for aspiring internet marketers. As a project for this blog, I'm going to take one of the business blueprints from this ebook and do a case study on it, and track the results here. I'll post more details about that tomorrow.

But the price was reasonable, and the information was useful. That's more than I can say about most ebooks I've bought. I don't promote Strike It Niche as an affiliate, because I no longer include affiliate links in my ebook reviews. I think they destroy the credibility of a review. So here's where you can go to buy a copy of the ebook: Strike It Niche

If the ebook helps you make more money on the internet, and you read it because of my recommendation, then you'll possibly become a regular reader here. Which is a lot better for me than a quick commission on an ebook anyway.

Mr. Ploppy's Affiliate Tools

2005-08-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago I posted a link to Mr. Ploppy's Affiliate Manager tools, and I was actually lucky enough to have Stuntdubl himself stop by and comment on the post. Today's post is good too, although some of the tools he mentions are on the darker side of the spectrum. Anyway, you'll find lots of good stuff to read and think about here:

Mr. Ploppy's Affiliate Tools

WealthyBlogger.com Sells for $2000

2005-08-22T05:44:00.000-07:00

Maybe $2000 sounds like a lot of money to you, maybe not. But I wouldn't mind selling a few websites for $2k apiece myself. Here's the link to the article: WealthyBlogger.com sells for $2k

So after I saw the news, I thought I'd run over to WealthyBlogger.com and see what I thought of the site. (I'm notorious for buying sites, not launching them, and then kicking myself for procrastinating. I'm trying to be smarter about how I'm spending my money these days though.) The first thing that I noticed about Wealthy Blogger is the small font. Anyone over the age of 25 or 30 or so is going to have trouble reading anything on that page.

I've seen this used as a technique to get more click-through's on Adsense, but usually the Adsense ads are in a font large enough to read while everything else is in the small font.

Maybe it's because I run a site about affiliate marketing and making money on the internet, but I was really expecting to see information on how to make money from my blog from a site called Wealthy Blogger. Instead, what WealthyBlogger.com offers is advice on credit and debt management. I run a blog about credit and debt management, but it's not called Wealthy Blogger. I'll be interested to see what the new owners have planned for the site.

Great traffic figures though.

Mr. Ploppy's Affiliate Manager Tools

2005-08-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

If you don't already visit Stuntdubl's blog, go there now, read it, and bookmark it. Stuntdubl is one of a handful of sites I actually have bookmarked and read every single day. Today's post is particularly pertinent to the affiliate marketing industry, which is what I write about, so I wanted to recommend it.

Every Monday Stuntdubl posts Mr. Ploppy's tools. Today's tool list is a list of affiliate manager tools online, but many of them are useful for affiliates as well as affiliate managers. At any rate, definitely worth checking out on a regular basis.

Vaughn's One-Page Summaries

2005-07-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Here is the site of the day: Vaughn's One-Page Summaries

Here's why: Vaughn's One Page Summaries is a fine example of a great website. It's a site with a clear purpose (providing one page summaries on a variety of topics, like Google, time and date, and which businesses suck). It's also a site that provides something unique. I don't know of another site which offers the content that Vaughn offers, or at least not in the form that Vaughn offers it.

What's this got to do with affiliate marketing though? To make money with an affiliate website, you need to know how to make a good website. One of the ways to learn to do something is to look at examples. This is an example of a site that covers a wide range of subject, and it possibly even makes a little bit of Adsense revenue. I got a good laugh out of the "which companies suck according to Google" page. Basically Vaughn did searches for "generic company sucks" in quotes for various companies and tabulated how many pages came up. The theory being that if there are a lot of pages built for that search, the democracy of the web has decided that the company really does suck.

Also, just as an example of some of the success Vaughn has seen, his site ranks #1 in Yahoo for "google ranking factors", "google data centers", and "fresno flowers". I didn't have time to check his Google rankings for anything, and I only checked maybe half a dozen sites to see where they ranked. Anyway, it's a great websites and you could learn a lot from it. I'm having some new ideas myself already.

Graywolf's Google Adsense Resources

2005-07-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

In the "I wish I had though of it first department" today, I bring you Graywolf's list of blogs, forums, and other Google Adsense resources.

This is a short post, but a high value post. (But I would like to point out that conventional affiliate marketing wisdom tells you NOT to send your traffic away from your site unless you're sending them to a vendor.) This post is high value because the list of Adsense resources over at Graywolf's site will help you make more money. And I'll tell you how.

Becaues sometimes only 1 distinction, 1 insight, can change the amount of money you're making by several thousands of dollars. The more places you have to look for those distinctions, the better off you are.

And as far as defying conventional wisdom goes, I do it sometimes just out of orneriness, but mostly because, in this case, sending people to good quality resources will encourage them to bookmark and return to this site, so they can see what other good resources I link to. (There's a moneymaking lesson in that insight too.)

SEO Tip - Absolute Links versus Relative Links

2005-07-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not, by any means, the master of SEO. But one thing I've learned is that absolute linking is better for the search engines than relative linking. Some folks might be wondering what the difference is. (I did when my mentor told me to get rid of all my relative links and move to absolute links.) So here's the scoop:

An absolute link includes the full destination URL in the html code for the link. An example would be hxxp://www.example.com/example-interior-page.htm.

A relative link doesn't include the full destination URL. A relative link looks something like this: ../example-interior-page.htm.

The reason that the absolute link is better than the relative link is because some search engine robots, some of the time, will get confused by relative links, especially if there are a lot of them, and might index your site poorly, or worse yet, rank your site poorly.

Google Toolbar PageRank Update - PR Update in Progress

2005-07-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

I LOVE PR updates because I can see in a visible way what kind of effect my linkbuilding efforts have had. I was really excited today when my poker blog had gotten up to PR 6. That's my first PR 6, so I'm pretty excited about it. I still don't do so great in Google with that darn poker blog, but that's probably because I have a few links to some bad neighborhoods over there. If I cleaned those up, I might see the Google gods smiling down on me again.

But if you want to read about the PageRank update, and see what people are saying about it, then here are links to the threads on the major SEO forums that I know of. Enjoy.

Google Toolbar PR Update at WMW

Google Update in Progress at SEOChat

Google PageRank Update Right Now at DigitalPoint

Keyword Research Tools - Compare Wordtracker, Overture, Google, Keyword Discovery, and More

2005-07-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

If you're not already reading Aaron Wall's SEO blog, then start. Today. Right now. Best blog you could be reading online right now if you're really interested in making money online.

Today you can read a comparision and review of all the major keyword suggestion tools available, including Wordtracker, Overture's Keyword Tool, Google's Keyword Sandbox, Keyword Discovery, and some more that I'd never even heard of. As usual, Aaron divides his reviews up in the format of general comments, positives, and then negatives for each tool. One of the things that I enjoy about Aaron Wall's reviews is that his negatives/criticism sections always seem as if they're aimed at helping people improve, rather than on tearing them down.

Also, I highly recommend Aaron's ebook on SEO. I think it's a bargain at the price he offers it, and it's thought-provoking in unexpected ways. He has a way of approaching material that's less straightforward and more interesting than other writers. His writing tends to have a "learn how to think for yourself" philosophy, which is a lot better than some of the cookie-cutter-here's-how-you-should-do-it approaches I've seen in other ebooks.

Adventures in Net Marketing and Affiliate Program Tutorial

2005-07-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a wonderful affiliate blog called Adventures in Net Marketing that I just love. It's very much a first person account of someone's experiences as they enter the internet marketing field, and if you're interested in getting your arms around what starting out in web marketing is like, then this site is a good place to start. BJ, the author, is a self-employed netpreneur who hails from Canada.

And as a bonus, here's another great resource I found online over at Allan Gardyne's site: the Affiliate Program Tutorial is as good an introduction to how an ordinary guy can make money with affiliate programs and a website as I've seen. There is a LOT of really good, solid information about how to make money contained in this deceptively short article. There are occasional plugs for other ebooks or products, but the real value in the article are the tips themselves.

Blogs as Affiliate Marketing Tools

2005-07-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

There was a post over at Allan Gardyne's forum about whether or not you can make money as an affiliate using blogs instead of websites. The consensus seems to be that it's not the format of the website that's going to determine whether or not you make money. I'm not 100% sure I agree. The real answer is going to be pretty similar to the answer you'll see to most poker questions, "It depends."

I know one blogger who's the premier blogger in his niche. We spoke last week because he wanted to ask my advice on how to make more money as an affiliate. When I found out what he was actually earning, I was stunned, because I had thought he was making quite a bit more than that. His niche is traditionally a high dollar niche for affiliate sites, and he gets a lot of quality traffic. But the target market he caters to often is already a customer at the affiliate sites he's promoting, so his earnings are limited as a result.

Most of the blog success stories that I've seen are bloggers making a lot of money from Google Adsense. The variety of ads that are available, and the guaranteed revenue from getting a click through, almost guarantee a maximum amount of earnings. My guess would be that if you were going to do well marketing an affiliate product of some kind in a weblog, you would do it by actually promoting the product in a post, and linking to the affiliate code in the post, rather than just running a banner ad across the network of your blog.

That's what would make the most sense to me as an affiliate marketer, anyway. And just as an aside, the initial question of can you make money with a blog as compared to an actual website is a bit of a misleading question, because it assumes that a blog isn't a website. A blog is a website though--it's a frequently updated website that "logs" something, and usually has room for the reader to interact with the blogger.

Digging Adbrite

2005-07-11T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've bought ads on Adbrite but I haven't actually run any Adbrite ads on my sites yet. I was pretty pleased and excited about the whole operation though, from the very first time I visited the site.

What I liked most about buying ads on Adbrite was the search and browsing functionality. You can find websites to advertise with a variety of criteria: subject matter, ad type, traffic, Alexa ranking, CPC, and price. The ordering process was easy and my ads went live when they were supposed to. The amount of traffic that was advertised was very similar to the amount of traffic that I received.

I don't know how Adbrite compares with Google Adsense from a publisher perspective, but from an advertiser perspective, they're a pretty doggone good deal, especially if you're advertising for one of the more profitable industries where it's hard to buy advertising, like online gambling.

Another cool fact about Adbrite: The company was founded by the owner of FuckedCompany.com, so that he could get some advertising revenue from that site.

Trading Links? How Many Links Are Too Many? Time Frame?

2005-07-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

I emailed a webmaster the other day asking him to trade links with me, and he replied that I should check back with him in a few weeks but he was full up on link exchanges right now. So I emailed him back asking if it was because my link directory was showing a PR of 0 in the Google Toolbar (it's a new site, and I wanted to explain to him that it was a high PR page, even though the PR hasn't updated on the toolbar yet.) He explained that he was trying to limit himself to about 10 0r 15 link swaps per month so as to avoid getting put into a penalty box by Google or one of the others for getting too many links too fast.

Bottom line is we're going to trade links in a few weeks.

But it was interesting to me, and I came across a post in the Link Development forum at Webmaster World asking whether or not excessive link-trading can cause penalties. This particular webmaster already has a certain number of link trades but was afraid that he might get kicked out of his positions if he had too many links. The general consensus was that there was no problem having lots of reciprocal links, but he needed to be careful not to get too many too fast, and he should try to get some one way links too, on top of his recip's. Good advice in the thread, and good reading. Slow and steady probably really does win the race at some point.

Google Adsense Keywords - Top Paying, Most Expensive

2005-07-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

The most expensive Google Adwords keywords are also going to be the most profitable Google Adsense keywords assuming you can get traffic for the phrases. There are a number of sites out there selling lists of the top paying Adsense keywords, and some of these lists are pretty good, and some are just obvious. I've bought a few of these keyword lists myself, and I don't think I wasted my money. But I don't feel like I need a constant update on these keyword phrases.

I'm also not 100% sure that a page I create based around a particular keyword is going to target exactly the phrase that I'm wanting to get the big Google Adsense bucks for. Maybe my page's content will come up 1 word off and I'll cut my Adsense earnings by 50% or something?

Something else to consider is potential volume. Yeah, you might be able to make $2 a click for some obscure keyword phrase, but you might not ever be able to generate more than 10 clicks a day for it. While you might be able to get paid $0.20 for another keyword phrase, and get 10,000 clicks for it. Which would of course mean more money at the end of the month.

(Note to Google: I know I'm not supposed to talk about my earnings and CTR and stuff; this post is just hypothetically speaking.)

Affiliate Marketing and Blog Networks

2005-07-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

Been reading about blog networks a lot lately, and I'm pretty intrigued by the potential of marketing affiliate products through blog networks. I'm sure that's probably not the model that Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis had in mind when they launched their blog networks. From what I read on Wired, Nick Denton is famous for applying regular media advertising philosophy to blogs by starting what is essentially a constantly-updated magazine or newspaper on the internet that sells advertising and is themed.

I've been familiar with Jason Calacanis's blog network for a long time now, and I guess he makes a good percentage of his income from Google Adsense, but it looks like what Calacanis has in volume, Denton has in quality and panache on his blog network. After spending a little time at Gawker and some of the other blogs in that network, I come away thinking wow, I could be doing so much better. I could be writing so much better stuff, and I could be running websites that are so much better than they actually are.

And maybe I will. I have a few blogs of my own these days, because I like to keep my writing focused on certain themes in a blog, and so suddently I've wound up with a blog network of my own, although they're all written by me instead of by professional writers. I guess since I make my living from what I write on the internet, I'm a bit of a professional writer myself now though too.

This Blog Gets a New Name!

2005-07-07T09:14:00.000-07:00

Was chatting with a friend of mine today about my blog, and he messaged me that it was "surprisingly good". Then he told me the title, "Affiliate Marketing Programs" was too spammy-sounding. And I thought about it, and he's right. That was probably the biggest search engine spider attracting trick I could pull, so I decided to rename this blog immediately. Heck, a "surprisingly good" blog deserves an interesting title, and now it has one. Hope you like it.

And if you have any comments or suggestions about what might be a better title for this blog, feel free to put it in the comments section, because I might even be willing to change the title again!

GoogleGuy - An Impostor? Or the Real Deal?

2005-07-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

Really odd discussion of whether or not GoogleGuy is for real. I'd always taken it for granted that GoogleGuy was the real thing because Webmaster World wouldn't put up with an impostor. As someone wiser than I am pointed out in the thread at Associate Programs, one of the reasons for Webmaster World's success is its editorial rigor. The thread eventually evolves into a discussion of who the web community is and who should Google really be serving anyway.

Eventually Phil Tanny launches into a rant about how webmasters ARE the internet community, and if it weren't for the content that we provide on the internet, Google would have no reason to exist. (By extension, GoogleGuy wouldn't need to exist either.)

I think what Tanny might be missing is that not all webmasters, in fact, most webmasters, are not providing content on the web, but are serving up advertising along with a hefty serving of spammy, bogus content designed to attract search engine spiders.

Evaluating How Much a Google Adsense Site is Worth

2005-07-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

There's been a few threads at Webmasterworld over the last few weeks discussing how to value a website in order to sell it. The most recent is asking how much a Google Adsense site that generates $20/day in revenue is worth. It has over 1000 pages of content. The seemingly accepted calculation for this sort of thing is either 10 months' or 1 years' earnings, give or take a little bit. At $20 a day, your site is making $7300 a year, which according to the "consensus", is what the site should sell for.

I haven't sold a site lately, but when I did, I didn't look at the earnings. This was probably a big mistake, both on my part, and on the webmaster's part who bought it. It wasn't an Adsense site though, just an affiliate site, and I wasn't making a lot of money from it. But I think I sold it for cheap.

The other interesting conversation about selling a website is in the members' only section of Webmasterworld. "Kellyandsummer" were looking to sell a site that was making almost all of its money from pay per click arbitrage with Google and Overture. I'll not spill the beans on the thread, since you're supposed to have to pay to have access to the information in that section of the forum, but it's good reading, and definitely gets you thinking. Motivated me, anyway.

Web Marketing Quote of the Day, from Aaron Wall

2005-07-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Something I read on Aaron Wall's excellent SEO blog:

"When you are new to the web it takes a bit of time and effort to figure stuff out, but after you gain a bit of experience it is not that hard to make boat loads of cash, since on the whole the marketplace is not that competitive and most websites are garbage."

This is one of the best expressions of this idea I've seen. Another friend and mentor of mine told me when giving me advice on how to write content for my new poker site, "Write stuff that doesn't suck."

Put those two thoughts together and you've got a large percentage of the formula for internet success there is. Most websites are garbage. Make sure that your site isn't garbage. Write stuff that doesn't suck. Ask people to link to your writing. Couldn't be any easier.

Affiliate Links, Google Adsense, or Both?

2005-07-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

I frequent a few different affiliate forums, and the question seems to come up pretty often. Should I use affiliate links only, Google Adsense, or both?

The consensus that I've been seeing is that most people make the most money with a combination of affiliate links and Google Adsense, although there are people who say that having affiliate links on the same page as Google Adsense ads is a sure way to lose money on one side of the coin or both. There are really three options here.

You could run affiliate-only ads. This would probably work well if you were targeting a very specific product keyword for an affiliate program with a high commission. For example, if I had a site that ranked #3 in Google for the phrase "Golden Palace casino", I would guarantee you I'd make more money with an affiliate link only than with Adsense or with a combination of Adsense and an affiliate link.

You could run Google Adsense only. For some phrases, like Mesothelioma, you might be better off running Google Adsense without any affiliate links. Off the top of my head, I can't really think of any affiliate programs that would be a terrific fit for this phrase. There might be some lawyer referral programs out there, but knowing how much law firms pay per click for ads through Google Adwords, I'd say there's a ton of money to be made from pay per click here.

Or you could run both. To me, this is an ideal way of doing it, and the general consensus I see on most webmaster boards is that you'll make more money running both Google Adsense and affiliate links.

But the most important thing you can do is try it each of the 3 ways in order to test your profitability, then make decisions based on your testing. All websites and all topics are different, and different kinds of ad campaigns are going to perform differently.

Are You Running a Content Site or a Link Farm?

2005-06-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've done both. And I've decided that not only is running a content site more satisfying, it's also more profitable. How do you know if your site is a content site or an affiliate link farm though? James Martell tells you to build sites with a lot of content pages, but I've seen some of his sites, and honestly, a lot of them are affiliate link farms. Same with a lot of Site Build It! sites.

Here's the difference. The reason for a content site is the content. You might monetize the site by having affiliate links or other paid advertising on the site, but the reason people are there is to read the content. The content is unique. It's useful. It's worth reading, it's worth visiting, and it's worth bookmarking. Search engines will list it highly because users will like it.

An affiliate link farm might have "articles". But a lot of them are just re-hashes of other articles online. Even if you're not using a software like Articlebot, if the only reason your articles exist is to draw traffic to your website so that you can refer your visitor to some affiliate links, then your site is an affiliate link farm, not a content site. Even if you have 300 pages of "articles".

I'm not drawing a moral distinction. I have good friends running affiliate link farms. Some of my own sites are still affiliate link farms. There is room on the internet for advertising, and even sites devoted solely to promoting advertising. Heck, that's why newspapers have classified's sections, and there are newspapers that are made up exclusively of classified's. So there's nothing wrong with having a website made up exclusively of advertising.

Just don't call it a rich content site, because it's not. And if you haven't tried it yet, give a rich content website a try and see if you make any money with it. I think you can, and I think you can make a lot of money with it.

Why I Don't Use Affiliate Links in eBook Reviews

2005-06-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that most of my ebook reviews do NOT include affiliate links to the ebook in question, and you might have wondered why, especially since this is an affiliate marketing blog. The answer is really pretty simple if you think about it: how good a review could it be if the goal were to sell you the product? Doesn't that just make it an "advertorial" instead of an honest-to-goodness review?

My goal with the ebook reviews on this site are to provide other affiliate marketers with authentic and honest recommendations about whether or not to buy certain ebooks. These are of course only my humble opinions, but they are not attempts to sell or shill these ebooks in exchange for a commission. I'm not 100% convinced that there's much money to be made selling affiliate ebooks anyway, although maybe some of the sites that do really well in the SERP's for certain ebook titles do allright with it.

On a slightly parenthetical note, I've been giving some thought to writing an ebook about affiliate marketing. I've read some of the major ones, and I suspect that I might actually be able to add a different perspective. Most affiliate marketing books I've read have been overly promotional and short on actual content. (Although Martell's book and Rosalind Gardner's books are both pretty good on the content side of things.) But I might enjoy writing, and someone might enjoy reading, some content on how to be an affiliate webmaster and be proud of what you're doing because you're adding value to the internet community instead of just getting a quick paycheck.

A friend of mine wrote on an affiliate marketing board I frequent that one of the most common mistakes in affiliate marketing is having too little respect for your visitors and customers, and another is trying to make as much money as you can in a week or else you'll die. (I think I'm paraphrasing a little bit.) How true. That about sums up why I'm not using affiliate links in my ebook reviews--I have too much respect for the readers of this blog, and no need to make as much money as I can in a week. I want to make a lot of money over the next year or two or five instead. And to do that, I need readers who trust me and come back to the site time and again.

And the easiest way to develop trust is to be trustworthy.

CAP Spring Break - Miami Beach 2005

2005-06-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

I'll be joining some other webmasters at the CAP Spring Break even in Miami this weekend. My wife and I haven't been anywhere together since we got married 3 years ago, so this is sort of like a honeymoon for us. The point is that I won't be blogging quite as much while I'm in sunny Miami. Although I probably will post some pictures and stuff when I get back.

Review of Google Cash by Chris Carpenter

2005-06-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

I owe Chris Carpenter and his GoogleCash ebook a great debt. Google Cash was the catalyst that enabled me to leave my day job and become a full time internet marketer. The book was published online in 2004 and has spawned a couple of imitators, but it's also spawned an entire army of people using the Google Cash system to make money online. I'm not sure the Chris Carpenter was entirely aware of the effect he would have on internet marketing.

In brief, here's the Google Cash plan of action: you create Google Adwords promoting companies that have affiliate agreements. You send the traffic directly to your affiliate link, rather than having a link to the affiliate merchant on your website. You track your ROI very closely. You absolutely must know how much you're making per click and how much you're spending per click so that you'll be able to maximize the profitability of your ad campaigns. It's a good system, and on the surface, it seems pretty easy.

But some things have changed in the internet marketing world since the initial publication of Google Cash. One major change is the increased amount of competition on Google for keywords. When GoogleCash was written in 2003, it was fairly easy to find a profitable product to promote where you could get on the first page of Google results paying only a nickel a click. Now that several thousand people have read Carpenter's ebook, your competition for profitable niches has become much higher.

Another major change in the industry is Google's new rule about showing a particular display URL more than once in their sponsored results. At one time, you could find 7 or 8 ads all for the same company in the results of some searches. That's no longer possible, since Google's new policy is to only show each URL once for a search. If multiple ads are running that go to the same URL, the ad with the best click-through ratio times cost per click is the ad that gets shown, and the other ads are not shown.

This is not to say that Google Cash is no longer a workable system. In fact, there is quite a bit of support at Adword Mentor in the discussion forum there. The system definitely requires some tweaking now. For one thing, if you want to make sure that your ad is going to show up, you'll more than likely need enough web knowledge to at least be able to create a landing page for the program that gets high click-through's and conversions. A couple of hours spent reading a basic Frontpage tutorial should be enough to get you through this part.

Another thing to keep in mind is that most profitable niches are extremely competitive, so in order to make money, you really need to focus on creating a huge list of what are called "longtail" keyword phrases. You're going to be much better off and make much more profit with the Google Cash system if you have 1000 longtail phrases picking up 5 clickthrough's a month at a nickel each than you will if have you 10 competitive keyword phrases picking up 500 clickthrough's each at a dollar a click. (Do the math and you'll understand why.)

The only real criticism I have of Google Cash is that they make the same mistake that so many other ebooks make: they make it sound like making money with affiliate programs is super easy and requires little effort. In fact, affiliate marketing can be difficult and frustrating, and it can require a lot of effort in order to be worthwhile. There is less hype surrounding this "get rich quick" mentality with Google Cash, but there are still enough hints of it surrounding the book that it's worth mentioning. I also think that, like most ebooks, it's overpriced at $49, but at the same time, if you learn one distinction or one new technique that you weren't already aware of, you could easily make that $49 back in a day or two.

Lifetime Commission Affiliate Program Directory

2005-06-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Lifetime Commissions is a site run by Glennys Faulds, who is an associate of Allan Gardyne's. Glennys also runs Pay Per Click Search Engines, and Allan is well known for Associate Programs. Lifetime commissions is an interesting site because it's a directory of affiliate programs who pay commissions for the life of the customer. It's an interesting and good business model, especially if you're a big fan of ongoing revenue streams.

Lifetime Commissions includes an affiliate tutorial which is well thought out and well written by Allan himself. The directory of affiliate programs that pay lifetime commissions is organized by categories like autoresponders, education, dating, and domain names, to name a few. There's also a category for the top 3 programs, which are listed as Sitesell's Five Pillar Program, the Secrets to Their Success program, and NewWebsite.com.

I'm only peripherally familiar with the first two programs, and I'm not at all familiar with the third program. BUT the 2nd program, Secrets to Their Success sounds really interesting to me as a customer and I might get a subscription to that one. According to the description at Lifetime Commissions, Secrets to Their Success includes archived interviews with mom and pop websites that earn over $100,000 a year through their web businesses. This is the kind of heavy content original website that earns money day-in and day-out on the web. I'll probably check it out and add a review of it here in a couple of days.

Heck--I might even sign up for their affiliate program. They pay $6 a month on all memberships you sign up as long as the membership is still active, which isn't bad.

On a slightly paranthetical note, I've promoted some dating affiliate programs and a couple of adult programs which were monthly-fee membership based that would be considered lifetime commission programs, and I liked promoting them. Most gambling affiliate programs are lifetime commission programs too if you opt to go for the monthly revenue share option instead of the CPA option.

Mini Site Profits Ebook Review - Phil Wiley

2005-06-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

I bought a copy of the Mini Site Profits ebook today from Phil Wiley for $67. One situation I've seen when searching for a review or any discussion of any online marketing ebooks is that they're almost always just sales letters for the ebook rather than an actual review of it. I'm a Clickbank affiliate, but I am not promoting a link to Mini Site Profits. This is an honest review from a real affiliate webmaster in the business.

What I Liked About Mini Site Profits

The strategy outlined in Mini Site Profits is a clear and easily accomplished strategy. I suspect that some of Google Cash's inspiration came from this ebook, and it's entirely possible that with the recent changes in Adwords policies at Google that people are running back to Mini Site Profits for reference in a world where you can no longer buy traffic and send it directly to a merchant.

The core idea of the book is that you can build a mini site in a short period of time and create profits from it, especially if you do a great job of preselling the product. A minisite is defined in this book as a site that sells only one product or promotes only one affiliate program. Wiley sub-divides these mini-sites into micro mini sites, mini themed content sites, and value added mini sites. He gives a formular for creating mini-sites that do a great job of preselling affiliate programs, but I won't go into detail about that here other than to say that it might apply to some products but it could very easily not be appropriate for other products.

What I Would Change About Minisite Profits

Mini Site Profits was apparently published originally in 2001 which makes the ebook almost five years old. Unfortunately, in the affiliate marketing business, information can grow dated very quickly, and that would be my major criticism of this ebook. The information on search engine optimization is clearly dated--in fact there are several references to GoTo.com, which of course no longer exists. There are other references to smaller PPC engines that are no longer in operation.

What was most disappointing were the example sites, the majority of which are no longer online. I understand that ebooks are sometimes a product of when they're written, but when paying $67 for internet marketing information, you hope to find something that's been updated. Some great examples of ebooks that are constantly being updated are Aaron Wall's SEO Book, Planet Ocean's Unfair Advantage, and James Martell's Affiliate Handbook.

There are screenshots of some of the example minisites in both the examples section of the book and in the success stories section of the book, but many of the example websites are no longer online. This makes me question the effectiveness of the Minisite strategy. If it was a strong internet marketing strategy, I'd think most of those sites would be too profitable to let fall by the wayside. Or at least the majority of them would be. (That being said, I can understand that situations change, and a product that would be available and popular at one time might well become unavailable and not-so-popular later.)

Recommendation

To be a really worthwhile value, Mini Site Profits would need to be completely updated with example sites that are still live and with information about search engines that is current and up to date. I do not recommend this book at a price of $67, although if you're a raw beginner, you may find some value within. I think Google Cash would be an ideal value if you did decide to buy this book as a companion volume to it. The synergy of the Google Cash techniques and the Mini Site strategies might make a very good start to an online business for you. But if you have the money to spend, I recommend going with another product like Sitesell, James Martell's book, or even a good seo book and/or a Webmasterworld supporters subscription.

Narrow Niche Market or Competitive Keyword Phrase

2005-06-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

Traditional wisdom in affiliate marketing is that a new webmaster should target a small niche that doesn't have a lot of competition. Reasons for this probably include the self-confidence that getting quick traffic and revenue brings. It also possibly includes the thinking that a narrow niche is going to convert better and be a lot easier to get market share in. But I question traditional wisdom about everything when I can.

Competitive markets include things like web-hosting, online dating, travel, poker, mortgages, etc. Essentially anything with a high profit margin is generally pretty competitive, especially when it comes to picking up search engine traffic. Traditional wisdom has it that a new affiliate webmaster can't penetrate these markets because of the high levels of competition for them. I have a different opinion about this. I think that the best thing an aspiring webmaster and SEO can do is target the high competition phrases.

Here's why. I cut my teeth in the affiliate marketing business on the gambling industry. Nothing is more competitive than online gambling, online casinos, and online poker. Again, mostly because it's so profitable. But as a result of learning how to get SERP's in such a competitve niche, I'm now a skilled enough amateur SEO that I can pick up good SERP's for almost any keyword phrase I want, especially if it's a fairly non-competitive phrase. And that means money in the bank.

Here's something else to think about. If you want to be a great poker player, or chess player, or golfer, are you going to play constantly against the worst players you can find? Or are you going to get your ass kicked over and over again by playing the best out there? Olympic athletes become Olympic athletes by training hard, not by competing against wimps.

Should you target a non-competitive niche for your first affiliate site? Sure, if you want to. But you should also consider starting a site that targets something really competitive and profitable, just to see what you can learn from the experience.

New SEO Blog from the Folks at OptiLink; Gambling Lawsuit

2005-06-08T07:23:00.000-07:00

Optismarts is the new SEO blog from Optilink. I used Optilink a few times when I first started. I haven't used it lately, but it's a great software for doing link research and finding new link partners. So far the blog looks pretty good; I definitely like the style.

Not related to the previous paragraph, there's a class action lawsuit against Google, Yahoo, Overture, Sex.com, et al regarding online gambling in California. You can read the article in the Las Vegas Sun and also read the actual text of the filing here. This lawsuit was not good news when it was filed, and it's bad news now that the courts have refused to dismiss it. I'll be sure to update the blog with additional info if and when I have it.

And a final note about weblog networks. There are two notable ones out there right now, WebLogs Inc and Weblog Empire. I have aspirations in this area too. (This little site being one of my own forays into the world of attempting to generate an income by blogging.)

Keyword Price Index Drops 15%

2005-06-08T07:19:00.000-07:00

Marketing Vox keeps a keyword index which measures the average keyword price for online advertising, sortuva stock market type index which measures advertising revenue. According to them, the average keyword price has dropped 15% month over month from April to May. Much of this drop is attributed to changes in the mortgage industry.

This is probably of interest to affiliate marketers for a couple of reasons. I might be an opportunity to pick up some mortgage related keywords at a bargain. Or it might be an indicator that now's not a good time to launch a mortgage related affiliate site.

Affiliate Quiz: Do You Have What It Takes to be an Affiliate Marketer?

2005-06-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

Are you thinking about trying to make money as an affiliate marketer, but you're not sure it's for you? Here's a quick quiz I dreamed up to help you answer the question for yourself. Scoring information after the quiz.

Do you work hard? (Be honest.)
Do you enjoy working?
Do you believe in the slow and steady approach to making money?
Do you save money on a regular basis?
Do you know or are you willing to learn html?
Do you know or are you willing to learn to write well?
If you fail at something, are you willing to try again? And then try again if you fail at the next thing? And then try again if you fail at the next thing again?
Do you have enough money saved to live for six months without an income?
Do you keep a to-do list?
Do you read a lot?

Give yourself 1 point for each "yes" answer and 0 points for each "no" answer. If you score below a "5", then affiliate marketing is probably not for you. If you scored a 6 or 7, then you might make it as an affiliate marketer, but you've got some challenges to overcome. If you scored an 8 or above, then you've probably got what it takes to work as an affiliate webmaster and make some decent money.

About the questions.

Do you work hard? If you're not willing to work hard, then you will not be successful as an affiliate marketer unless you're really good at delegating responsibility and you have a lot of money available to you for outsourcing.
Do you enjoy working? Affiliate marketing is not an easy road to riches, and it's not for people who hate working. You get to set your own hours, but to be successful and stay successful, you absolutely must be willing to work hard and like it.
Do you believe in the slow and steady approach to making money? You might be able to make a quick buck in affiliate marketing if you're the type that doesn't mind spamming blogs and autogenerating tons of bogus content, but those techniques don't work nearly as well as gradually building quality content and links over time and enjoying the benefits of that type of traffic. And if you want to make a lot of money with affiliate programs, the best way to do that is to be a long term success.
Do you save money on a regular basis? If you're an affiliate marketer, you are self-employed. If you can't save money on a regular basis, you won't be able to pay your income taxes or ever retire. Neither are good for a self-employed person.
Do you know or are you willing to learn html? While it's not strictly necessary, knowing html is extremely helpful if you're going to be an affiliate webmaster. The more you know, the more you'll make.
Do you know or are you willing to learn to write well? This is another of those items that you can outsource if you have to, but you'll make a lot more money if you're able to do it yourself.
If you fail at something, are you willing to try again? Not every website will work. Not every affiliate program will make you money. If you quit because something doesn't work, you're not going to make it as an affiliate webmaster unless you're very lucky.
Do you have enough money saved to live for six months without an income? If you don't, you're going to need to keep working a day job, which will cut into the amount of time and energy you'll have to run your affiliate business. It can be done, but it's not easy and it takes more of a toll on you.
Do you keep a to-do list? When you start making money from affiliate websites, you're going to start having ideas about how to make more money. You'll think of content to generate, places to find links, and new niches to explore. If you don't keep a to-do list, you'll forget and/or lose some of these valuable ideas.
Do you read a lot? It's important to keep abreast of what's going on in SEO (search engine optimization) if you're going to succeed as an affiliate webmaster. To be able to do that, you're going to need to read SEO blogs and forums. You'll need to read until your eyes hurt. You should also be reading a daily newspaper, a weekly news magazine, and several monthly magazines that you're interested in, and also various books about subjects that interest you. This will keep you thinking three-dimensional and keep ideas about trends that will affect your marketing flowing.

White Tank Top Lover

2005-06-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

To me, this is a brilliant example of a narrow niche site. An Ode to White Tank Tops

Why is this of interest to me as an affiliate marketer? It's interesting to me because it's as narrow a niche as I've ever seen, and it's probably the definitive resource for that niche. They're not currently running any affiliate advertising that I can see, but they could easily be running affiliate ads for Adult Friend Finder or even one of the other online dating sites that offer "steamy" ads. And of course, they could run Adsense on these pages if they wanted to.

I'm not even sure why this particular person decided to run this on a Geocities site, but I love the concept. It's a site full of picture of beautiful celebs and models wearing white tank tops. (I think there might have been a photo or two that might be considered offensive, so if you're particularly prudish, stay away.

What are you interested in that could turn into a narrow niche site that makes money? Take something general and competitive, and add an adjective or two to narrow down the niche. Maybe you're a professional wrestling fan. But maybe you really LOVE the wrestling figures from the 1970's. Write a website profiling the biggest names in wrestling from the 1970s' and make it the most definitive site on 1970's professional wrestling out there. I guarantee it would make money, and there are probably as many ideas out there as I have readers, and then some.

(Interestingly enough, I did some more looking around on the website, and it turns out that it's run by a woman. Looks like she hasn't done any updates or made any changes in a couple of years.)

Google Search Result Quality Evaluators

2005-06-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

This post should be required reading for any webmaster who wants to receive Google traffic over the next few years. It pretty clearly describes in detail what Google search quality evaluators are looking for in a website when determining whether or not it's a quality website. Of course, if you stop to think about it, most of the criteria are common sense and unremarkable: create quality content that adds value to the web experience of the user.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about that concept is that so few webmasters are actually willing to do such a thing. The web is full of low-quality sites full of banner advertising and affiliate links without any original content. I've often said that in the long run, the health and well-being of the web are what's at stake when you launch 1000's of spammy pages. If you destroy the internet user's experience by providing tons of advertising with no useful content, then you'll eventually destroy that entire marketing channel.