Author Archive
So, following on from my previous feature, you have created your affiliate marketing site, signed up for stacks of presuming schemes, chosen the links of websites whose products fall into your niche market and inserted them on your pages. You have chosen the keywords for your site, put them into the header that depicts your site, what it does and what it offers. Those are the first 3 elements of SEO finished and you are ready for the main one, the off site promotion.
To that end, as we left it last time, you’ve been through the wearisome task of getting your shop entered on hundreds of internet business directories. At least you only have to do it once. But they will only be of importance to the search engines for a fairly short time, though they will still use them but what Google, Yahoo and the rest really love is to uncover up to date links in disparate places and that entails keeping links fresh. To do this you can employ social networks for search engine optimisation use. First, create a username with Twitter using your site name as full name and Twitter name, or something similar if they’ve been bagged. For instance, my affiliate marketing website is internetfishingshop.com so I have a twitter name of ‘@internetfishing’ and full name ‘Internetfishing Shop’. Find shops (I just searched on ‘fishing’ which turned up plenty) that come into your niche marketplace and follow them, and some will follow you back. And then, minimum once a day, tweet a message which includes a link to your website. Something along the lines of “Get the greatest XXX products in the world at http:// your site address here” (ensure you include the http://) and that will create a link which the robots will see and make a note that it’s new and when they follow it to find your site which will register that it is still current.
Also, make a Facebook page for your site, and use the Twitter app to join it so that it also displays the Twitter messages and links as well.
Now, since your page is in the field of affiliate marketing, you want some suitable shoppers to go to it, so sign up for some forums that match with your niche area. Join in some of the chat so that your id gets known. And then, after a while slip in a thread that you got something really brilliant from going to your site and leave a link. Also, investigate Usenet, though these are slipping from favour but still, construct a message with your link in and post it in lots of newsgroups. Someone may find it, follow it, like it, bookmark it and be a frequent visitor. All of this is good, effective search engine optimisation and will target search engine robots and potential customers equally. But it won’t push you far up the search engine rankings.
The next element of SEO that is going to make the most significant result in getting your affiliate marketing website up the search engine results table is, of course the hardest and most labour intensive part of SEO. It is also the most controversial which is why it is going to take all of the 3rd part of this little series of monograms all by itself, but it is the most effective and, if you want your site visited by loads of people, it’s the one you need to find out how to do right.
20110210
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I have spent so much time lately performing SEO that I’d nearly forgotten about the IT support part of my activities. That was until I was called to an office the other day that was operating systems for it’s office admin that was so old, they were having issues with the software they’d lately installed which couldn’t summon up enough processing power to be able to work properly and continually crashing the PC it was running on.
The memory on the PC’s had 320MB size and the hard disk was down to its final 80MB of free space. They had wanted to change as they were being sent files from important partners that were beyond the capabilities of their previous software to open, software they had had been using for more than 10 years. So they got the current MS Office suite which they somehow managed to install but wound up using all the machine resources when it loaded. It was not really an IT support issue at all as there was not a lot I could do, however I was able to thrown some software at it which was able to clean up and defrag the hard drive (huge improvement) and unlock some RAM but that was only going to be fine on condition as they did not close the machine down or try operating anything else.
I finished disclosing the news that after spending plenty of money on the software improvement, they now were required to lay out more either purchasing or leasing new computers too and I’ve promised that I’ll go back later and help get that installed for them and re-install the software they will want as well as look to see what else they could benefit from. It is a pleasant IT support call to get, especially because I could advise that they did not have to purchase the new PCs at all and that they can arrange a lease deal with most of the manufacturers which would also mean that they would get frequent updates, as well as free. (The owner had looked quite glum when I said he needed to change all his PCs and laptops, but was quite happy when I left, which always makes one feel pleased).
This isn’t the 1st occasion that I have encountered this circumstance. Where you have manufacturing companies in the Black Country, you see lots of highly skilled and bright people in the engineering industry but they do not often have somebody who knows too much about their technology requirements and they go on with the systems they have that have worked for so long, frequently with no proper IT support in place whatever. It all works so they have no thought to remain up to date until suddenly it’s all too late and they need to suddenly expend money they had not budgeted for.
I would persuade small company owners and managers to look hard at their computing needs regularly, or get someone in who can examine what they have, and ensure that they are up to speed. It does not need to be cutting edge gear, or a huge expense, but companies nowadays need to share more and more files with their partners, suppliers and clients. The big boys often spend money on systems upgrades, IT support and SEO and have resources in their budgets for it There’s a reason why they do and smaller firms have to acknowledge that reason and act appropriately.
20110222
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It has become a regular line for comedians, mainly on telly panel shows, to make a gag of promotions saying ‘work at home’ or ‘make riches on your computer’. There is a point, there are thousands of such adverts and they are very easy to find on sites everywhere. And, they are getting a bad name because they promise the world, easy cash for little work and watch the cash roll in! Alas not, the old proverb “if it looks too good to be true, it definitely is” truly does apply here because what is not said is the same for somebody putting up a website for anything is that they need to know, or know somebody who does, SEO.
Let me, while I admit an interest. I run an affiliate marketing site which I have built as a fishing tackle shop to sell tackle dangling gear, DVDs, books and travel goods and services for fishers. I have signed up to several affiliate programs and have inserted advertising links to lots of firms who sell fishing tackle, insurance for anglers, travel companies offering products for anglers and other items. Why? Well, because when I was studying SEO, I was looking for help on how to develop my familiarity and abilities, and very often came across affiliate marketing as a phrase, and after a while I looked into it to find out more. I’ll explain how it works.
There are many hundreds of companies offering goods and services online as we know. They all face the same challenge, which is attracting clients to their shop to buy stuff. They all have their SEO to promote themselves and their goods so that people can find them on the search engines, but that often is not sufficient so what they do is to join affiliate marketing programs and offer a commission of any sales brought about by anybody carrying their banner or link on a site to their shop. It’s an excellent way of drumming up business in the United States and is becoming more so in other nations, and of course somebody building up an affiliate marketing site like mine can carry ads for businesses anywhere in the world and still make money.
Where the adverts for affiliate marketing are disingenuous is that it is really simple to put the shop up and the providers provide you everything you need (you do not need any technical ability at all). The main skill is to know how to cut and paste the code for the banners. So, the shop can be constructed and put online in no time flat, but that doesn’t mean anything because how are you going to bring shoppers to go to your site in order to click on the links to go to your partner’s online shops? You need SEO to do that, and it doesn’t happen fast.
However, while the SEO work is having it’s effect, then adverts can be inserted in the search engines which only cost when they are clicked. The cost can fluctuate as you have to bid for placing on the search engine results pages and you have to rely on your website being good enough to interest the visitor and that they go to your partner sites and purchase something.
So, don’t be mislead. Yes, the idea of affiliate marketing is a good and workable one, but expecting to set one up and then being able to take a trip to the Ferrari showroom in the next week is not really likely. You need SEO to enhance your site, put it in the search engine results and then keep it there. The two operations complement together, SEO is the key, affiliate marketing is the cash generator.
20110204
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Welcome to the third of this little series explaining how to employ SEO to have your affiliate marketing website work to earn you money.
To this point we have examined how to put your site’s keywords into the pages of your website, getting the site included in business directories which exist all over the internet, and how to utilise social networking to create loads of links back to your affiliate marketing shop. What we have to do now, in order to have the search engines take proper regard of the website, is to place links and keyword references to it in thousands of places.
The most effort demanding and time consuming area of the search engine optimisation work is article output, and then having that article included on blogs, in article banks and similar spots all across the internet where they will be seen by the search engines readers, and the links and keywords logged which will bolster your website’s ranking for significance. This is controversial because in some quarters it is considered as fixing the system and I completely do not concur with this, AS LONG AS the piece is original material, the theme is germane and there are no hidden agendas.
The piece can be about anything, it can recall personal tale, a take on a subject in regard to what your website is about, a how-to piece, a review of a product or whatever else. I myself aim to average five hundred and fifty words, have two links to my site chained to my keywords, of which I aim to include both but at least 1 in each paragraph if I can. It’s a rule of search engine optimisation that you don’t stuff your item full of keywords, but utilise them sparingly, and one link on each keyword in the complete article is a decent rule.
What should it look like? Well, this article is me doing search engine optimisation for my firm’s website however, not for my affiliate marketing shop, and if you go through it again you will see my instructions above are followed in it and if you select the link in the second paragraph you can find in the News area a copy of items that do enhance my fishing shop website.
When it is complete, the subsequent task to do the search engine optimisation is to amend the appearance so that when it is inserted into in lots of diverse places, each one receives a unique version. To do that you ’spin’ the article. Go through every line and find words that have substitutes. I will utilise the 1st line of this paragraph as an example:
“[spin]As soon as|Once|When[/spin] [spin]it is|it’s[/spin] [spin]complete|done|finished[/spin], the [spin]next|subsequent|following[/spin] [spin]job|task|chore|thing[/spin] to do the [spin]SEO|search engione optimisation[/spin] is to [spin]alter|amend|change|rearrange[/spin] the [spin]appearance|look|format|words[/spin] so that when”
That line now has 8 alternative sets of words which can be reproduced in any of 4608 ways any and all of which will still make sense. What happens is that the publishing software will choose 1 word from between each pair of tags and print that. Try to average three substitutes each, but don’t push it, if there are only two, leave it at that. And the little “|” sign comes from “shift+\” by the Z key. The search engines do not appreciate finding 1000’s of duplicate pieces and the operators of the publishing blogs also only want unique versions, and so search engine optimisation demands this approach.
For publishing, I employ a site called Unique Article Wizard but you pay to use this. You might rather try and find a free service or, for a small fee I will do it for you (email enquiries@osiriswebservices.co.uk) but very quickly you will make up a large chuck of back-links to your website. But, it will need time, usually a long period time, before it starts to make a difference and push your affiliate marketing up the search engine results.
The next piece in this run will look at how you can use another SEO method to propel your affiliate marketing shop to the summit of the search engines faster, but it needs money, though this can be controlled.
20110211
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Until now we have analysed how the search engine optimisation for our affiliate marketing website kicks off as the keywords are identified and included in the code of the pages, we have examined how we can utilise social networking to create links to our shop and how we can produce articles which will have links to the site in conjunction with keywords relating to what the website does, and how we can publish 1000’s of individual copies of the pieces around the net for the search engines to read and build the quantity of links back to our site.
This is excellent, effective search engine optimisation. The search engines will build the relevance of the shop against the rival sites and gradually, our affiliate marketing shop will work its way up the results tables in response to shoppers searching on our keywords. The trouble here, is that is takes weeks. It’s not a fast procedure and here is a sticking point, because for the time we are climbing the tables, we are paying money to our service providers and if you are spending for article distribution services, that too. What we have to do is discover a shortcut that sends us to the view of the shoppers in the meantime.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will achieve this for us. As the name implies, it does cost. It is advertising, what do you expect? But it can be strictly managed so that it does not get out of control. We must also remember that users (like me for definite, how about you?) prefer to click links in the ‘organic’ results on the page which is what most SEO is trying to achieve, rather than paid for adverts, but that doesn’t mean it is not worth doing because folks will choose them, see your affiliate marketing site and hopefully spend money which makes you cash. So, how to do this?
You could employ a specialist, but my concern is that as they charge you a fee for each click, the cynical human being in me wonders if they don’t employ others to click the links. The easiest way is, like the rest of your search engine optimisation, to work it yourself and use something like Google Adwords. You are going to require a Google id later for the tools explained in Part Five, so if you haven’t already, go and join now via Adwords. What you have to do is to begin a new campaign for your affiliate marketing shop and you will be guided through.
Choose your target territory (go for “All” if you have affiliate marketing partners in different nations and check the languages that may be relevant), keep the defaults for the remainder and tell it how much you are prepared to spend as a maximum per day. Leave the other option and then click “save and continue”.
On the next page, give the Ad Group a title and then write in the advert text in the boxes below. CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR! Now the really vital sections. Open a new tab or window in your browser, go to your affiliate marketing website and then someplace in the page, right click and choose ‘view source’ from the list which will open another window with prints the HTML code for your website. At the top, find the meta name=”keywords” text and copy the keywords shown between the quotes. Go back to Adwords and paste these into the keywords box for the campaign, which instructs Google to exhibit the advert when users search on those words. It also obviously compliments our search engine optimisation program, and as people follow them, again the affiliate marketing ranking score increases.
The subsequent job is to bid on the keywords. Remembering your daily limit, you need to chose how much you are prepared to pay each time someone clicks on your ad to go to your affiliate marketing site. For now, just enter your default bid. If you are really intent to be on the front page every time, type in a high amount but do remember that lots will visit your shop which will cost, but not purchase. You will not pay that amount each time, you will pay the next amount up after the next best bid, so if you bid 1.00 and the next best is 25p, you will most likely pay 30p. For now, be cautious because the Adwords monitoring tool will be able to help later.
So now, when you save it, the advert will be reviewed by Google and if there is anything wrong you will get an email. But by checking the Campaigns tab at the top of the screen, you can view how your advert is getting along, how many times it’s been displayed and how many times selected. All handy stuff, but review the Adwords tool and get used to it, go over the FAQs and the rules and learn better exploit it to promote your affiliate marketing site and further your search engine optimisation programme.
20110214
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I need to get a job. And fast as unless something changes and I start earning a regular income that we can live on I will have to go on the game. This may be interesting, but most likely not terribly lucrative unless huge hordes of ladies like their men on the chunky side. Of course what I would prefer do is carry on and work from home, do my SEO and affiliate marketing stuff and allow myself to take Friday afternoons out by the pond with my fishing tackle instead of anticipating a commute home.
I really adore doing what I’m doing in performing SEO and affiliate marketing to promote my fishing tackle shop as it permits me to work at home, support my wife through her cancer treatment which has now ended as far as chemo and radiotherapy but she will be going on treatment with Herceptin for the next twelve months. I am also able to make the school run to take my boy to kindergarten in the afternoons. And of course, if I get a break, I can get my fishing rods and make a sprint for the canal for a few hours.
I would opt for an SEO job that allows me to carry on the skill set that cost me so much to learn, not just in paying for the course but the longer term outlay in using my own resources until I knew for sure I’d been done and the ‘guaranteed’ job that was promised in the initial advert was never going to happen. And of course they are my current up to date skills, I use them everyday as doing SEO and affiliate marketing work has a very nice symbiosis.
However, though I have no doubt that my fishing tackle shop will make an income, it won’t be soon as SEO takes a while to actually make a substantial difference. It would be excellent if it was immediate as you could get it sorted and then be away with the fishing rods and leave the search engines to point the traffic to the website and then get paid commission from the affiliate marketing firms managing commission from tackle danglers purchasing fishing tackle from my partner shops.
So, I need to get a job. Which does mean that it wrecks the long term idea of having lots of affiliate marketing sites and doing the subsequent SEO for them but hey ho, ideas very rarely go smoothly and it would be superb to go back to collaborating with other people again. When I was driving to Wolverhampton every day to take the present Mrs Izzard for radiotherapy, it was quite nice to be doing a daily drive again. I know it would become very hateful very fast, but at the moment it is quite an appealing notion.
Ooh, a thought! Perhaps someone will pay me to work as a professional angler and fishing tackle manufacturers will pay me masses of loot to endorse their fishing rods, and if I get an iPad perhaps I can do SEO and affiliate marketing while I am sat by the water? Or it could be they won’t. Stick with the real world old chap and get a proper job.
20110121
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I wonder how simple it is to combine work and go maggot drowning together? In supposition at least, with modern technology it should be quite simple, after all, when one has been to the fishing tackle shop and got all that will be required for the day, the need to move around too much is reduced. One can therefore foresee periods when nothing much is going to happen and a chap like myself can do SEO and affiliate marketing work from anywhere, I don’t particularly even require a 3G service to get on. If there is a service, all a fellow really wants is a mi-fi gadget which works as a portable wireless router and considerably more practical than a dongle as you can of course connect smart phones, laptops or tablets to it.
SEO jobs can be performed anywhere, as long as there is a screen and keyboard close by with enough battery resources to maintain both, and since it largely needs a word processor for creating articles, press releases and suchlike, if a lad was maggot drowning in an area bereft of 3G coverage, it does not have to slow one’s efforts down.
And if the imaginative juices aren’t streaming of course, then diversion may be found in fishing books which are a fine solace on circumstances when the fish are especially lax about scoffing. naturally one ought to come prepared, either by bringing one from the home or qcquiring a fresh one from the fishing tackle shop.
Another option of course, and another that will demonstrate the usefulness of the mi-fi, is having an electronic book gadget such as a Kindle and downloading new fishing books should the occasion see fit. And particularly useful, as it may be able to find suitable material relating to the water that one may be fishing at that particular moment, with tips on improving matters.
Additional uses to put the machinery to might be to visit an online fishing tackle shop to order new tackle or restore that which may get missed during a day’s adventures. However, the most useful thing would be to put the tools to employment, in between resetting the tackle and landing fish, as nature intended , that is in writing SEO pieces to advance affiliate marketing sites and extend the inventive juices.
How glorious, to be able to combine ones pastime and such a fantastic venture. We can honour the day that somebody thought up the notion of affiliate marketing which lets one to get a business enterprise in place which needs nothing by way of stock, just the means of matching those who desire to buy, to those who desire to sell and graciously accepting the commissions for any business transacted. And then being able to pop by the fishing tackle shop, move on to the canalside, set up the fishing tackle and do some SEO to enhance our affiliate marketing site, in between catching a fish and catching up on the latest fishing books.
20110223
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If you have followed the 1st 4 pieces in this series, you now have built your affiliate marketing site, have loads of banners to your presuming partners and you are well advanced with your search engine optimisation effort, having found the keywords, registered the website with 100’s of internet business directories, you are promoting it using social media, producing articles to spread links and keywords back to your website which will be slowly escalating the results tables and you ought to have pay per click (PPC) ads in place pulling prospective customers to your shop.
The last of this series of items is to show you how to watch how your SEO labours are doing, and where your affiliate marketing website is as far as moving it into the notice of your buyers. These tools are all free, easy to use and should be monitored at least once each week.
Firstly, have spreadsheets set up. 1 ought to be a job sheet which will have a list of processes to carry out when producing articles, a note of the keywords used and all the tasks involved in writing such as: produce article text, write title, review and alter article, ensure links work, spin title, spin article text and then make a note of the different submission theme headers used if necessary. This helps ensure that your SEO is moving forward and putting links in the right place. Also have a spreadsheet with a list of your keywords, and a note alongside demonstrating on which date they were used in an article, which will help you keep your efforts balanced. To kick off with, choose the 2 most crucial keywords, create and upload 10 articles with those in as fast as you can.
Download and install the Alexa toolbar. This is a fabulous tool which, when it has indexed your site, will display the ranking number of your affiliate marketing site (and you can monitor your rivals rankings too!) and it’s worth keeping a record on your spreadsheet to monitor how your site is moving up (or not!). I check mine every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Using your Google userid, you now have access to some excellent Google tools. The first of these, Webmaster, tells you how your shop is viewed by Google. It shows you the number of links it has read to your shop, which searches it has shown in the results and how many times it has been shown, and how many times searchers have chosen it. This is very good when it comes to calculating where you want to concentrate your search engine optimisation work to make certain of a good all round enhancing for your affiliate marketing shop.
Google Analytics will require you to insert a line of code in the header of the HTML of your shop pages, and then it will track how many browsers you have had, how they came to your affiliate marketing shop (via search engine, direct or through a link from somewhere else), how long they stayed and how many pages they viewed. It even shows you where they were in the world. This is powerful information and you must make a point of learning how to view it because you may want to adjust your search engine optimisation accordingly.
Another good procedure is to get yourself a blog on something like Blogspot or Wordpress. Upload a copy of the unspun text of each article you write in here, create the links to your affiliate marketing shop, and it creates an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and you can then use a website called “Ping-o-matic” to advertise to RSS feeds, and you can put the Social RSS app on your Facebook page which will post a copy in your profile page. Wordpress will also announce each posting on your Facebook and Twitter accounts as well. These are easy painless ways to produce really find search engine optimisation for your affiliate marketing site.
Other tools you can use occasionally are press release services, sometimes free, which will distribute a statement including links to different places which may not make much of a splash to the search engine optimisation, but the wider you can broadcast the message, the better chance you have that your affiliate marketing shop can be profitable.
20110215
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The arctic climate may be lifting, bit by bit and it may be lifting above frozen for lengthy periods, but the canals continue to be frozen solid, so there’s no point taking out the fishing tackle for a while.
What we have been enduring is unusual naturally. The mix of air and ground frost gave the trees such a coat of white ice such as I have never seen before, and the outcome was something that Christmas decoration manufacturers must pay squillions in research to attempt to produce! As I sit at my desk and stare out at the trees and field outside my window, it is hard to contemplate SEO work since it’s so fabulously beautiful.
Naturally this season of year is the time when the highly dedicated maggot drowner reveals himself and can find it extremely simple to get a decent swim by the water and crucial fishing tackle to go into the tacklebox needs to to include an umbrella, one of those brilliant small green tents and a portable cooker as well as thermals below the Barbour.
Waiting quietly by the water naturally gives one plenty of time for meditation of life, the cosmos and SEO and this can produce the odd flash of genius such as considering affiliate marketing and founding an internet fishing tackle shop.
And, because the two operations can be pooled with a handy synergy, one can make the best advantage the time taken to work on them. And that seems like an acceptable scheme to me, so that is what I plan to do for the immediate term and see where it goes.
20101210
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Here we go again with another let off for the United Kingdom’s maggots which are presumably being spared a freezing drowning as maggot drowners stay away from the water, even where it is not frozen over. I’ve often wondered what happens at the fishing tackle shop at times like these when the build up of bait must eventually get critical, as must the smell. Of course no one is going to get their bait and tackle out unless they are a) bananas b) very dedicated or c) copping huge amounts of money to do so. And anyway, even if any of those scenarios were applicable, the chance of any fish feeding in these conditions is remote in the extreme.
The snow might mean that instead of going out into the rural areas with bait and tackle, that people pull the heavy outdoor clothing on and take the camera instead and take advantage of the beautiful scenes as despite the devastation to travel, when you get beyond that it is gorgeous out there. Anywhere that has a tree is going to look like it should be on a picture postcard. However, there is a disadvantage, because the weight of the snow has caused the buddleia on my drive to break which is very annoying.
I reckon that the only trade being done at the fishing tackle shop this week can be for people shopping for gifts for angler friends and family so that is most likely the positive side of what at any other month of the year would mean bleak trading indeed. If it was me and it was anything other than Christmas week, I would either be staying at home or donning some sturdy footwear, getting the camera and my little son and going out into the Black Country hills.
Another upside of going out into the countryside of course is that there is always the likelihood of discovering a new location to fish, either a pond or lake that had hitherto escaped notice or a part of a river that may offer a decent day’s sport. We do not have many rivers in the immediate area close by here, though the Severn Valley is half an hour away, but there are many canals and a stroll down the towpath could be worthwhile if a spot can be discovered to take the bait and tackle in more temperate times.
We are being informed that these conditions is peculiar but is it? This is what the winter was like when I was a boy, though not generally in the approach to xmas, but it was usual to expect it in January and February and these were the periods when days out with bait and tackle were out of the question, and with the termination of the season coming anyway, from December to June I would very rarely bother to go fishing and find something else, preferably warmer, to do instead. And this is what we should be doing; work off the fat accumulated over the holiday season, get out and look for somewhere fresh to go when fishing becomes available again.
20101219
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