Well it’s been real hectic here with a lot going on. This week I signed for a place in Oxford city, so I’m real excited and can’t wait to move in next weekend! It’s a two bedroom apartment in the beautiful North Oxford area, just a few minutes walk from Jericho.
I’m VERY happy to say that a lot of my rent will be funded by my internet marketing efforts – it’s a really rewarding feeling and I now aim to make this figure the whole sum. That’s my goal for 2010 – something I’ll work hard to achieve in my spare time away from my full-time job as an SEO executive.
As a small celebration – check out my presentation for introducing beginners to Social Media. This has been used on real world clients and went down a storm! Use it freely, elaborate on the points and always be enthusiastic in your presentation of any marketing method you’re promoting.
Comments and feedback are always appreciated, so please leave your comments below :)
To target multiple keywords for one page without looking spammy – create ‘second-level’ pages that specifically target the necessary keywords in the core elements of SEO:
Page Name
Page Title
Header (H1, H2…) Tags
Copy (Keyword density of 2% for under 300 words and up to 6% for around 750 words)
Note: These pages link to the rest of the website as if a natural extension of the sitemap. However, links from the main core pages of the website will not link to the pages targeting alternative keywords. These are used only to rank on search engines for alternative terms.
What Does This Achieve?
By using this strategy, you can drive extremely targeted traffic from the search engines to your product or service, spread across a range of keywords without looking unnatural. This is a GREAT way to draw in long-tail traffic for very specific terms.
For example if you are a hotel in London or New York, to target Hotel London might be a tough task. However, to target longer-tail terms such as Hotels inside M25 motorway and hotels inner city london might be much more achievable. So long as you funnel everything to the originally targeted content, the user path hasn’t changed and you’ve covered a wide net of terms.
This is particularly useful if your website/product/service/business has local events or key landmarks nearby that you can leverage for extra traffic and business.
Well it’s been pretty full-on over this Christmas and New Year period, with lots of family events and catching up with friends. I’ve also been thinking about 2010 and which income streams I want to really focus on… You didn’t really think I was going to list 2010 ways of making money online did you?! :P
Adsense I like AdSense. It’s the first income stream I ever started, and has paid me every month for over three years now. I love the simplicity of earning with it and the scope of what can be covered. You can really explore the very niches of niches and profit from it, and all on autopilot too… My highest earning website averages $150-200 a month on absolute cruise control, with minimal maintainence. This for me, is passive income at it’s most manageable. A few more sites like that and I’ll be a happy man!
In addition to all of this, it’s incredibly easy to outsource adsense projects. I’m currently in the middle of recording my whole process so that I can work out what I don’t like doing and what takes up time I don’t want to spend… Then I can plan to outsource these parts on short-contracts using oDesk, Rentacoder or similar. A couple of weeks of hard work and focus can easily result in years of passive income.
One pitfall is sustainability – what if Google bans you? It’s never a shock when people get banned… What is weird, is when they claim they followed the Adsense TOS to the letter. Do I believe them? Not really, but that doesn’t disprove the fact that your income is in their hands.
Affiliate Affiliate income is a great way to start making money online… You don’t have to create the product, all the graphics and sales copy is made for you and you can rake in some good commissions! With ClickBank and PayDotCom as well as various others, there are lots of playgrounds you can use to find related products to your niche. I still have a few affiliate sites, and my personal preference is to combine this with AdSense so that you can quickly have ready-made products for the many niches you will no doubt explore. This is much faster than creating your own products and reduces management time.
Using a trusted vendor like Amazon and selling physical products through niche mini-sites can be a huge money-spinner… It’s a process I hope to automate through outsourcing this year so that I always have new web properties being released, whilst I can focus more on my business.
Affiliate marketing will also train you well for learning to market your own products which can be extremely lucrative, but isn’t for the beginner.
CPA CPA or Cost-Per-Acquisition is a really fantastic way of leveraging the marketing budgets of HUGE companies to fill your own pockets. Companies pay CPA networks such as Never Blue, Azoogle, Max Bounty and others to use their marketers. If I need 1000 solid leads of people looking to clear debts, it’s much easier to set a budget of $10,000, pay $10 per lead and let someone else manage it. That’s where CPA marketers come in. Some of the commissions can be big, and the smaller ones can be extremely easy to get – an email or ZIP code in exchange for $1-5 is pretty damn good. With the cost to the user being ZERO, filling out those sort of forms is cheap and it means the profits can be huge!
Again, a mini-site with a combination of AdSense, affiliate products and CPA offers can be a really great combination… BUT only if you are bringing in worthwhile money. If you are new to Internet marketing, focus on one model to begin with or you will find yourself struggling to earn good money with any.
One great way to earn with CPA is with article marketing. You can setup a free blog using Blogger or Wordpress (or host your own) and then write articles to drive traffic through. 20 articles per CPA offer, submitted to top article directories such as EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and other directories should see some money start to come in.
These are three great methods for starting out in online marketing and they are great side-incomes for even the most experienced marketers. It’s all about sticking with one and becoming more efficient at it, than losing direction by focusing on many. When you are completely comfortable with that one, then you should start to explore the others.
I watched this today and just felt I had to post it because I felt it provided fantastic motivation into how a business can really be started in 24 hours with some hard work and a plan behind you. These guys at White October, a design agency in the UK, spent 24 hours creating a business from scratch and auctioned the whole thing off on eBay for $5100! Genius!
So what does this tell us?
Well, firstly I think the main thing to note is the fact that this whole business concept was and did become a reality within a 24 hour period – that in itself is astonishing and should give us all the belief that an idea can be made a reality very easily. Not with out hard work and a well-thought out strategy, however.
Secondly the actual plan (narrated throughout) suggests a very good frame from which to follow. From brainstorming, narrowing down ideas, branding and right through to the actual going live of the site. How many times do we, as internet marketers, spend time creating a niche website, a product, an e-course or similar? I know that for me, it’s a constant thing.
It’s all about having a strategy in place to ensure that the next time I do it, I know exactly what course of action to follow. This is something I’m constantly tweaking and being indecisive about. The business model you choose for anything should be a solid plan. I’m starting to realise as I become more experienced that you have to sometimes be less involved with your own feelings for a particular site or niche. If you’re too involved, it becomes a hobby and not a business.
The video shows multiple people pulling together to come up with one business concept. This is, obviously, not something that we will all have access to. However, we can learn from it nonetheless because it’s clear to see how tasks are shared out. In the online world, in my opinion, this is no different. Places like oDesk.com and Rentacoder.com make outsourcing certain tasks a complete reality.
We are all able to be managers of our own business ‘destiny’, but the chances are that we can’t do it all ourselves. This video goes a long way to show what’s completely possible with solid foundations in place.
Well guys, the first of many WSO’s for me is now launched! The Pre-Selling Article Blueprint is a concise, 15 page report that is full of CONCRETE information that you can use to start 2010 off with a bang!
Pre-selling can be one of the hardest things to do because of its huge involvement with language and the psychology of buying. Well this is what I do each and every day, so I’ve picked up a lot that I share openly in this no fluff, step-by-step guide.
Here is what a fellow Warrior, Cypherslock (or Erik in human) says about the guide:
These are going quick folks, so don’t delay in getting over to the WSO section and picking up a copy before the price goes up! I’m not going to go on forever on this post, you can read all about it right here and read reviews from happy buyers who took action!
I’ve been getting back into Adsense recently (after reading The Longer Long-Tail by Chris Anderson) with the intention of testing the design for CTR and build speed. I am planning on recording the whole process I go through to create a website from scratch, noting down each stage of the build. Then I intend to test all stages to see what the benefit of it is and if it’s worth having as part of the process.
The short-term target: To create a process for building super fast adsense sites that convert and rank well. Each site should earn $3+ per day on autopilot. The long-term target: To outsource these builds to start creating a target of 10 websites a month (to start) and increasing from there.
The first layout in the image above shows my first ad placements. Note that the ads are all placed above-the-fold. This method is tried and tested and has existed for years (newspapers and other early print). The idea is that every CTA (Call To Action), in this case the adsense ads, are placed in the visitors immediate vision. There is no need to scroll down and so if any ‘exit’ actions are taken, the chances are that they will be through a profitable channel.
You will notice the big picture in the post. This is an honest picture being used to support the article. However, the width of the post, along with the 300px wide ad block means that the text is automatically wrapped down to the next avaialble line. It will be interesting to see how this effects CTR. I shall be monitoring this only once I am happy that ad placement and format has been fully optimised.
Mapping out your site structure is pretty crucial to your websites success in the long run… If you fail to plan correctly you risk your website being dysfunctional, messy and incoherent. A badly structured website will put to waste your hard work finding those golden keywords, so spending an hour of your time is not asking much.
You can see from my map (see picture) that I cover everything from site hierarchy to linking and funnels, right the way through to stuff I don’t want indexed or stealing page flow from the more important content.
I’ve seen a lot of videos and posts lately that completely skim over this subject and encourage people to make websites on the fly! If we’re talking a 3 page mini-site, then maybe… But think of a 10, 15 or 20 page website. Can you really figure ALL of this out in your head and visualise your sitemap in 5 minutes? Here are just a few questions you should be asking yourself when planning your next website…
Is the most important content easily accessible?
Is the most important content under the right category?
Do all of your keywords fit in?
How many clicks/levels does a visitor have to go through before they reach a certain page?
What links are sitewide?
Do they have the correct anchor text?
Are links like ‘about’ and ‘contact us’ outnumbering your actual keywords?
Have you considered your nofollow’d and noindex’d content?
Which pages are sending out the most links?
Is there unnecessary content?
Does every page give value?
Let me know how it goes, and please get in touch if you would like help with anything in this post. I answer all questions personally and will do my best to help you out :)
Linkbait is something that is a bit of a taboo in the Internet marketing world… We all discover somewhere along the line what it is but 99% of us struggle to create linkbait or even think of what to write/talk/video about. How do we find out what is causing people to talk, or what people are interested in right now?
Well… I use one method to extract all the highly discussed articles on Digg. These are articles that have had buzz, and will help give an idea of:
What people are talking about
What current affairs are causing controversy
What you need to be creating content for
To extract this buzz data from Digg, type the following search query into Google:
site:digg.com ”200..10000 diggs” + “1000..10000 comments” + “Made popular 1..59 min ago” | “Made popular 1 hr * min ago” inanchor:”keyword“
What does this mean?
Let’s break this down into what the search means:
site:digg.com – Here we are saying to search only the website digg.com
”200..10000 diggs” – We are specifying here that we only want stories with more than 200 diggs and upto 10,000. Of course, you can change these numbers to suit your needs. Perhaps you are targeting a small niche where just 50 diggs might be considered buzz.
+ “1000..10000 comments” – We’re also saying that not only do we want diggs (because anyone can swap/share/buy these), but we also (+) want at least 1000 comments. We want content that is causing people to talk. Again, change these numbers as you feel necessary.
+ “Made popular 1..59 min ago” – We want FRESH content… stuff that is current and happening right now. We’ve said here that we’re only interested in stuff thats been popular for up to 2 hours…
| “Made popular 1 hr * min ago” – …OR (|) under 1 hour.
inanchor:”keyword” – We’re specifying here the exact topic we’re interested in… for example, “iphone”. By specifying the anchor, we’re saying that it must be a part of the URL. If it’s not, we risk it being unrelated to what we actually want.
Using this will really help get your creative juices flowing and will give you ideas on how you can drive buzz to your projects now and in future.
Let me know how you get on, and I’d love to hear your success stories :)
Alex
Well it’s time to kick-start this blog off, and to be honest I have no idea what I’m supposed to do! I mean, is there some sort of standard I should follow? I guess the first thing I am going to put here is a quick test I am conducting with Squidoo this Christmas.
What Do You Plan To Do With Squidoo, Alex?
Thank you for asking! Actually, I have been pondering the thought of whether or not Squidoo can make any decent passive cash or not (without putting in too much legwork). Of course, I know that money is there to be made. One of my old graphic design clients, Kelly Stone, probably better known by her self-proclaimed title of ‘Squidoo Queen’ has managed to be quite successful with it.
What I am interested in testing is using the authorative domain status to my advantage, in a relatively short space of time. With Christmas coming up, I have decided to put up three lenses (a lens is the nae given to a Squidoo webpage). These will target Christmas gifts for him, her and the whole family. Each lens will utilise the built-in Amazon modules to send traffic to the store to purchase recommended gifts – kind of a ‘I-can-save-you-time-by-listing-all-the-cool-presents-here-for-you’ business model.
Pretty standard stuff. However, there is an underlying plan to the whole thing because I’ve noted some possible money-spinners that might not be as plainly obvious as simply listing cool products. Here are some things that are crucial to the test I am carrying out:
Amazon holds 90-day cookies. This means that anybody who visits Amazon through my lens will automatically pick up my cookie… meaning if they make a purchase within 90 days, I will still be credited for the sale!
90 days covers December (Christmas shopping madness), and January (Probably even more madness for the January sales). Perfect for my “fishing net” test.
Amazon converts at roughly 9.2% with an average spend of around $100. With such a great sales platform doing all the hard work for me, I only have to entice people to click-through and chances are the credit card is GOING to come out…
Now there’s reason for the 3 lenses…
One lens will test if showing price is complimentary to my lens, i.e. if people see that they could save $xx, are they more likely to click-through or…
Lens #2 will not show the price. I want to challenge peoples curiosity to see if they think to themselves, “hmm, could I make a saving here?”.
Lastly, the 3rd lens will be a control, using a standard format for the module, to test the default settings.
This could make for some interesting results, hopefully throwing up some interesting conclusions as to how best we should use the Amazon module on our lenses. Of course, I shall be interlinking all the lenses and specifically outsourcing backlinks to each of them. This will all be of the same package, so there should be no priorities given within my control. If other people link to them, that’s another story.
There are also some things I won’t be able to control, such as traffic or demand for the gift ideas.
