Time to make some more easy Internets money! This is a pretty fun blackhat technique (as far SEO can be ‘fun’ at least) and what’s best is that it’s more effective than a shotgun full of bees. It’s very little work, it’s a bit blackhat, but you’re unlikely to get banned (you’ll see why later). Enough intro, lets shotgun the puppy…

The Basics
I’m going to assume you already have web hosting, so first thing is to grab yourself a domain. As usual, try and get a domain with a few keywords in, maybe something about girls (this will work for guys too obviously for my female(?) readers.. But I’m going to use girls in this guide because I’m just that way inclined). Oh, if you’re making an adult affiliate site, it might be worth noting that most of the adult programmes pay around 5 times as much for signing up a female member rather than a guy.. So if you want to get x5 more money per sign up, you might have to see a few pictures of cock – that’s the price you pay. (Or I guess you could target the gay market).

Anyway, I’ll let you decide what you want market you want to penetrate (sorry). The most important thing is that you’ll be target niches. The sex game is one of the most competitive areas on the Interwebs, so we have to find a backdoor (sorry). So we’ve got our domain, now we need to do a little “research”.

Affiliate Schemes and Niches
Personally, I used the Adult Friend Finder affiliate scheme (aff link), they provide just about every sex niche that your standard Internet pervert could think of. They’re quite generous with commission, it’s easy to use and the affiliate managers actually respond when you have an question. If you’ve had experience with other programmes, feel free to leave a comment and let us all know.

Once you’ve signed up to AFF and logged in, you can click the “other sites to promote” link at the top and you’ll see they have about another 30 or so sites you can work with. The plan is that we’ll be making 1 site to promote each one of these programmes (don’t worry – it won’t take as long as you think). So have a little scan through the list, keep a notepad handy and write down any search terms that spring to mind. Once you’ve found a programme that “interests” you enough, try and get that domain we talked about with some related keywords in.

Keyword Research
Now you’ve picked your niche, we need to get some search terms. We’re going fairly long tail here so think out of the box a bit and use the usual keyword research tools (there’s a list about 1/2 way down that post). Work at it and try and get about 100 key phrases written down.

We aren’t going to be targeting these key phrases, just so you know – but you still need them. Next, do a bit more research and find half a dozen middle-weight search terms in your niche with a decent amount of traffic, then out of these pick 1 key phrase that isn’t being dominated by other sites. Put this keyword on-page on every page you create.

Now whip up some flat HTML pages using the long tail key phrases we researched earlier. Nothing fancy, just use the page title as the key phrase, an h1 with the key phrase on page, and introduction paragraph page and most importantly: a good meta description that’s alluring. Name the page as your key phrase as well, such as big-boobed-dwarves.html or something. Don’t ask questions, just do it plzkthx

If you’re a smarty pants, make a script to do it for you… If you’re not, enjoy using find & replace.

The Blackhat Magic Begins
Hopefully, you’re still with me and haven’t been distracted by all this “research” you’ve been doing… Here’s where the awesomeness comes in… When I was trawling the Internet for the best Viagra deals, as you do – I came over this beaut:

That’s an Orange search page there, ranking for the search term Viagra. Weird, huh? Clicking on it gives you this:

If you’re not twigging yet, canadians-pharmacy.com has got an orange search page listed in Google, using the site: command to only show results for their site.

How does this work?
The main reason this works so well is because the orange.co.uk has a great authority, so by doing this you are essentially “creating” a page on their website which links to yours. Also, if you look at the search query, it’s:

[keyword] site:www.yourdomain.com

Adding the keyword before the site command will perform a search on your site for this keyword, showing the relevant results. It also keyword stuffs the page for you. The word “viagra” is on that page 15 times, so you’re showing Google a page on a trusted domain that has the search phrase all over it.

What does this mean?
This means you can hijack the authority and trust of sites such as orange.co.uk and use this to rank easily in the SERPs for competitive keywords. Visitors will then click on the orange search results and land on your site (sort of).

How can I do this?
As discussed when we talked about the organic bloom effect, when we build links we are looking at trying to do is get a mix between big authority links and lots of “regular” links to express popularity. The orange.co.uk site already has more authority than Darth Vader at an asphyxiation competition, which means that there’s only 1 ingredient missing – shitty spam links!

Here’s the best way to get your orange page indexed:

Step 1: go to and enter your medium-weight key phrase we picked earlier into the search box (don’t forget to turn the safe search off!!!), followed by the site: operand and your site’s domain. This should produce a search result page that lists all your pages (because we put our key phrase on every page), and you should have page titles covering all those filthy niches. Next, in the address bar, you’ll have a string like this:

/all?p=_searchbox&pt=resultgo&

brand=ouk&tab=web&actualtabweb=web&q=test+phrase+
site%3Awww.digeratimarketing.co.uk&tabRadio=web

(I have searched digeratimarketing.co.uk for “test phrase”). You can strip the URL down a bit removing some of the crap to:

/all?q=test+phrase+site

%3Awww.digeratimarketing.co.uk

I tend to do this to make things a bit easier to manage and it increases the density of your keyword in the URL.

Step 2: Bit cheeky, but submit the URL to Google..

Step 3:Build links (using your medium-weight key phrase as anchor text):

• This is the perfect kind of site to exploit any link laundering sites if you have them.
• Take a look at what sites other people putting links on for this technique. Grab as many of these as you can.
• Spam the shit out of guestbooks. (Here’s a guestbook spammer if you need one – 199Kb)
• Directory Submissions work a treat as well of course.
• You get the idea As many links as possible as quickly as possible

You should be able to rank for most terms within a week using this technique, the anchor text you use in the links you build will produce the title of orange search page in the SERPs.

The finishing move
Okay, so we’ve got a site we can rank in Google via the orange.co.uk search page and it displays our website with our alluring meta description and lists all sorts of naughty things. Now what?

You’ve got 1 of 2 choices here… You could if you wanted, actually build proper landing pages for each one of the html pages we made earlier… Or if you’re lazy, you could simply detect referrals from the orange search page and then automatically redirect them to the AFF landing page.

Bung this code on all of your pages:

This will make sure if anyone lands on your page from the orange site, they will be automatically redirected to the AFF page, with your referral code. Any sign ups will get you the dosh dosh you want

Why this technique is good:

• Your shitty links are doing to the orange page, not your own – so the worst that can happen is the orange page gets removed from the index
• The redirect is based on referrer, which has many legitimate uses. Your not strictly showing users and search engines difference pages – therefore it’s very hard for Google to algorithmically detect and ban you for this
• It’s quick!

This whole process should only take a couple of hours and of course, you can use it for any type of search terms, multiple times… Enjoy

Ending note: Although I am single geek, I only search the Internet for Viagra for research purposes and I’m rarely called a sex pest. I am however looking for a girlfriend so feel free to mail your CVs to [email protected]. Due to the bulk of mail I am likely to receive, I would ask all applicants to bare in mind I may be a while getting back to them. Extras points for search wizards who can manage to Google-stalk my Facebook and such.. Thank you.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently making a front-end for my own personal SEO tools, so I can finally release them to Digerati subscribers. These tools are special. They are not your normal “pay us $20 and we’ll show you a vague kind of thing how Google probably crawls you site” tools. They are, elite SEO tools.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the frontliners:

Link Backrub – This tool will increase your backlinks massively by scouring the Internet for sites that link to you, that are not indexed in search engines. Any links it finds to your site, which are not indexed by Google, it will get them indexed – almost instantly, thus letting Google see all of your backlinks. This will of course, improve your rankings.

Flashdex – This tool will get ANY page indexed in Google within 1 hour – guaranteed.

Social Storm – This neat little bit of script can get a single page – or multiple pages socially bookmarked on the top 20 social bookmarking and tagging sites over 190 times, automatically, from different IPs at random times over the course of weeks. This can give you massive traffic boosts.

StumbleXchange Automator – StumbleXchange is a great site, but it takes so damn long! This downloadable program will automate the entire process for you! No more hours of stumbling other peoples pages, just click and go to sleep!

Link Buster – My favourite tool – This tool will build you over 100 relevant links per month, to any page requested – and it’s not blackhat!

These tools are all working at the moment, but I require a dozen or so experienced testers for them. I plan the official release on 1st November, when the testing and refinements are complete. Due to the nature of the tools, the sign ups will be limited and I most likely will be charging a little fee to access them.

If you are one of the testers for these tools and give feedback on their development, you will have lifetime free access to them. If you would like to sign up to be a tester, leave a trackback to this post by writing your own blog post about these tools. 20 people will be chosen at random, then after a chat, 10 will be chosen to help me test and refine these tools.

Go!

This is a jumbo post which I have contributed to Jon Waraas’ Blog so you’ll have to pop over there to read it. It’s a bit of a biggie (about 3,000 words).

I’ve also been working on that as well as the next part of Making Money With An Affiliate Empire series, so with a bit of luck that should be live by the end of the week..

I also have a special announcement later in the week, which you’ll like. That’s going to be first come, first served though

I thought I’d share with you a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way with Adwords. When starting a campaign, one of the most important things is to get a good CTR (Click Through Ratio). Google will give your campaign a “quality score”, part of which is the CTR. If you get a good quality score, your ad will show higher up in the Pay Per Click results, for less cash per click.

1. Use non-alphanumeric characters

Much how Eli talked about using non-alphanumeric characters in SERP results to increase CTR, we can do the same with Adwords. For instance:

Which of these two adverts stands out the most? Try running an ad rotation with the identical ad, one with “arrows” and one without. I bet this monthâ??s Adsense you get a higher CTR on our little arrowed friend! If you want to give the arrows a try, you could copy and paste them from here: ã??ã??

2. Sometimes less is…

Another interesting technique is doing something which seems totally illogical. Cut your ads off early and add a “…” at the end of the advert. This triggers a response in a lot of people, assuming there is more information will automatically be drawn to your advert.

So we’ll have something that looks like this:

3. Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Something that will really attract clicks is if you can get your title to exactly match the user’s search query. Rather than writing thousands of adverts, you can use (a sparsely documented) feature of Adwords, DKI.

You can use DKI anywhere in your adverts.. in the title, description line 1 or 2, display url and in your destination url (Usually for tracking purposes, be careful not to break your links with this method!)

Ok, how do I use Dynamic Keyword Insertion then?

You specify how youâ??d like the dynamic keywords displayed, and give a default phrase which will be displayed if your dynamic keywords cannot for whatever reason. The format is below:

{keyword:defaulttext}

You can also use the following capitalization on the work â??keywordâ?? to get different effects:

* keyword – no capitalization
* Keyword – First word is capitalized
* KeyWord – Every Word Is Capitalized
* KEYword – EVERY letter in first word is capitalized
* KEYWord – LIKE Above But With Each Word Capitalized
* KEYWORD – EVERY LETTER IS CAPITALIZED

Example:

{KeyWord:Widgets}
Buy your {Keyword:Widgets} here
{KEYword:Widgets} with free delivery!

User searches for â??blue widgetsâ??, which you have as a targeted term.

The resulting advert:

Blue Widgets
Buy your Blue widgets here
BLUE widgets with free delivery!

If anyone else has any quick tips that you don’t see everywhere else on the net, drop them in as a comment and share! Id love to hear what everyone else is doing, I’ve been pretty lucky with my Adwords success myself!

Oh, Happy 4th July to all my American readers. Congratulations on escaping British oppression… We’ll get you yet…..

A quick note before we begin: I’ve been sitting on this post for a couple of months now and I’ve re-written it several times. I tried to shorten it, so as not to bore the more advanced readers, however I decided in the end, to leave it at the original length – so everybody can benefit, regardless of your level of experience in affiliate marketing/seo etc. Generally, I write posts with just the “what you need to do” aspect in mind. For this guide though, I have included a lot of background information, because you will all need to do your own thing and by giving key bits of knowledge, I hope to give everybody what they need to make their own informed decisions and most of all make as much money as possible! With that in mind, enjoy part 1….

This is a commitment
Affiliate marketing is a huge area with a lot of players in it, as well as “super affiliates” who spend vast amounts of money on pay per click models to drive traffic to their sites. My personal approach with web projects has always been to keep my expenditure low, this keeps profits higher and guarantees that in the worst case scenario where I don’t succeed, my losses are minimal.

In the long-term, affiliate marketing has been my best earner, which is how you have to look at projects like this. If you’re going to make decent money on the web (save a lot of time) you’re going to have to invest time. For those of you who want a quicker route to making about $1,000, check out the guide to making money with a video blog. Lets hammer this home for the skim readers: The strategies outlined in these posts will take a serious investment of time, it is not a get rich quick scheme! Affiliates will provide you with the most stable revenue – but you will have to put the hours in!. If you want to make a living online, affiliates are something you want to get into in a big way. Now that’s clear…

A quick overview of the plan
Okay, so it would be nice to be able to open a massive affiliate store with all manner of popular products and having some good Google rankings, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy – but it is possible. I’m going to give you the bones on how to start building a large network of websites selling affiliate products, which ranks well in Google. I’ve had this post on backburner for a while and it wasn’t until I started writing it I saw just how detailed it was going to have to be to be of any good to you guys, so I’m breaking down into parts. I’m not sure how many parts there will be, I’ll just write the parts in stages, so you can action them, then publish another part in a month or so. Here’s a basic overview on what we’ll be doing:

1) How to find and select a niche
2) Keyword research – how to find gaps in search competitiveness
3) Building niche affiliate sites
4) Interlinking affiliate sites into larger network
5) Production of well ranking “super affiliate” site (that’s fully automated)

I certainly wouldn’t label myself an “expert” on affiliate marketing and there are a lot of other ways you can approach the challenges I’ll be writing about. I found a way that works well for me – using knowledge of search engines to get massive visibility and drive sales and I’d like to share this with you. From what I’ve read on affiliate forums – there’s a lot of other people having a harder time than me!

So lets get started with part 1……….

Sign up to an affiliate network
Choosing an affiliate network, or several affiliate networks is going to be your first step. There is a massive choice of networks about, so it’s worth finding one with a decent amount of merchants and a good interface. I’m not going to get bogged down on this particular area, my favourite affiliate network at the moment is Webgains, but I’ve also used Trade Doubler and Affiliate Window with no problems. The only network I’ve ever had trouble with is Affiliate Future, who have (in my experience at least) been somewhat slow in updating feeds, leaving you to filter out the duds. Outside of affiliate networks, the original is very generous with its payouts, so if you’re thinking of selling anything Amazon stock, I’d definitely sign up there. As I said, I’m not going to go into gory detail about this at the moment because at this stage, it’s not overly important and it is something we will cover again when we come to building our “super affiliate” site.

Finding a niche market
Okay, this bit is important, so don’t rush it. Before you can start breaking into competitive areas you’re going to need to identify niche that fills a few criteria:

1) It has enough monthly searches to produce some sales
2) Not much competition for the core terms
3) It is something you can easily buy over the Internet
4) Preferably – expensive

Here’s a nice one for free: Pregnancy Clothing.

Why choose something like that?

Pregnancy clothing actually as a lot going for it:

• The search term “pregnancy clothing” has a healthy amount of monthly searches
• The top site for “pregnancy clothing” only has ~350 links – not hard to beat at all
• Pregnant mums will spend a lot of time home, on the Internet
• When you’re pregnant (I imagine) you don’t want to huff around the city!

I’ll probably use this as an example throughout this guide, you’re welcome to go for it if you want (although if all of you do, you’ll be competing with each other!), so try and find something else. It only took me about 45 minutes research to find that little gem and there’s a lot more out there! You just need to put the effort in!

At this point, it is worth having a look at a very basic overview of the buying process (apologies to those with qualifications in marketing for this gross simplification).

The Buying Cycle

Okay, this is the basic “process” that most people go through when deciding to make a purchase.

Awareness: This is the awareness of the solution to a problem or the possible fulfilment of a need. So, “I got a bun in the oven and I got really fat and none of my clothes fit anymore”. Is a need. Hopefully our young mother-to-be knows that there are clothes out there for ladies of her figure. If not, at some point when surfing though pregnancy forums or hormonally stumbling through Mothercare, she’ll make this discovery. Awareness is deeply ingrained in our sub-conscious, so if someone says “I need a burger, fast” a lot of people will instantly think “McDonalds”, even if the term “burger” must be taken loosely. It is the awareness of the solution and possible provider, which is connected to our final stage, loyalty. For our current affiliate project, we’ll leave awareness for now.

Research: The bread and butter, the real meat, whatever you want to call it. This is where the Internet comes into its own. No longer must you rely on journalists in magazines or the sales clerks in the store, with the Internet you can hear what actual consumers are saying about products, compare the prices of 50 different outlets and make your own views heard – all while trying to work out how to get Outlook to auto send and receive.

The research part of the cycle is what we are going to be focusing on. We want to draw people in from the search engines, give them everything they need to know about the product they are after, then kick them off to an affiliate so we can make our bucks. It is worthwhile having a look around at some other websites doing similar products and take note of what they provide in terms of item description, price comparison, images, delivery, specifications, advice and reviews. Make a list of this information for later as we will be basing our page design around it. We’ll come back to this later, but the thing to bare in mind is you are aiming to become a key resource for your chosen product or service.

Purchase: So, we’ve summed up all our options got our shortlist and made our final choice. Do I buy? There are a lot of factors that go into this critical purchase decision stage, some are out of your control, some are well within your control. This is the make or break for e-commerce sites. Most of the final decision will rest with the affiliate site you send your customer to, however there is a lot we can do in terms of wording, design and content to “prime” this customer to make the purchase immediately and from your site.

Loyalty: Was your site useful? Was it designed well? Was it easy to find? Was the payment process easy? Again, this final stage is split between your site and the final affiliate site. In the first part of our project, we won’t be too worried about loyalty, because we will be grabbing all our traffic from search engines. Later however, when we build our ultra-automated-mega-all-knowing-all-selling affiliate site, loyalty will be one of our key focuses. Getting people to come back and back and back. $-)

Stop! Keyword Research Time!
I’ll just clear up some jargon before I move on:

Affiliate Network: Middle men so to speak, who put Merchants in touch with Affiliates and sort out all the nitty gritty payment issues and such.
Merchants: These are the actual guys who are selling the product/service. They decide their commission levels and product offerings and join the affiliate network in the hopes that affiliates will join their scheme.
Affiliates: Hey! It’s you! Affiliates are the “end sellers” who build and optimise their own sites and advertise merchant’s websites and products, in the hope of passing them a sale to earn commission.

Now that’s cleared up, you should be logged into your chosen affiliate network and browsing the list of merchants for inspiration. Most affiliate networks have them ordered in categories, so for your own sake pick something you have an interest in.

A typical merchant directory

A quick and easy way to decide whether a product is worth going after is to perform a little bit of keyword research. Have a think about a couple of main keyterms you would chase and run them through some keyword research tools.

This is a full list and brief summary of the keyword research tools I use:

Google based tools:

Google Keyword Tool
Provided free by Google AdWords. Shows basic search volumes and related terms.

Google Suggest
As you type, Google will offer suggestions. Good related keyword search.

Google Trends
Provides useful insights into broad search patterns across the world.

Google Zeitgeist
Weekly Google Search patterns and trends.

SEO Book Google Suggest Scrapper Tool
Scrapes Keyword Suggestions from Google Suggest.

Yahoo! based tools:

Overture/Yahoo! Keyword Suggestion Tool
Official Overture Keyword Selector Tool.

Yahoo! Buzz
Statistics of Top Searched Terms on Yahoo! by Category.

Overture SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
Scrapes the Overture Suggestion Tool but includes much more useful information. You can also target by country.

DigitalPoint Keyword Suggestion Tool
Used Suggestion Tool and Wordtracker and compares the two results.

MSN based tools:

MS AdLabs Search Funnels
You can use the adCenter search funnel tool to help you visualize how people search by entering related keywords in certain sequences and analyze these search behaviours.

Other keyword research tools:

Trellian Free Keyword Discovery
Another good, free keyword tool. Also offers advanced features on subscription.

Free wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
generates up to 100 free, related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume.

Keyword Suggestions by CheckRankings.com
Shows number of searches, competitors and competing AdWords in Google. Also provides a free ranking monitoring tool.

Lycos Top 50
Top 50 keyword list from Lycos.

Nichebot Classic
A 3 in 1 keyword suggestion tool: keyword discovery, overture and wordtracker.

NicheWatch.com
Find exactly which competitors there are in your niche.

GoLexa Search Tool
The Search Tool with Complete Page Analysis for each Result and much more.

Keyword Lizard
By Google AdWords Expert.

Ontology Finder
Related Keywords Lookup Tool by goRank.com.

It’s worth having a peak at most of those tools. Which tools I’m using will depend on if I think I’ll be targeting a specific country or if I want to check results for a specific search engine. Generally you’ll want to use 3 or 4 as a comparison, such as the Google Traffic Estimator, Overture and Keyword Discovery. You’ll find a lot of tools give a rather large variance in search frequency, so the best thing to do is enter a keyword that you know how many searches there are and how much traffic this delivers and just math it out.

So for example if overture says “pregnancy clothing” has 2,000 searches a month and Google says it’s 6,000 I’ll enter a keyword I know, and say okay this keyword I know gives me 10,000 visitors a month and Yahoo says there are 20,000 searches a month. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume “pregnancy clothing” will give me 1,000 visitors a month. (I did just make these figures up as an example of how you would work out traffic before anyone e-mails me!)

You can use a lot of common sense here, so don’t waste your time looking under the loans section for instance. We are specifically after low/medium traffic terms So anything between 200-5000 searches per month is perfect. Once you find something in about this range, we need to move onto step 2 of our selection, which is checking how competitive it is.

Finding out how tough those search terms are
The more SEO you do, you’ll develop a good instinct as to what is going to be tough and what is going to be easy. One of my essential tools for having a quick glimpse at the competition is SEO Quake extension for Firefox. If you don’t have this, download it immediately!

Okay, I’m assuming you’ve installed SEO Quake now. Head over to Google and perform a search for your main keyword in the niche you are looking at. SEO Quake tools will be overlaid and provide you with a “Request Parameters” button (circled in green). Click that badboy.

SEO Quake gives you information such as:

• Google PageRank
• Pages indexed in Google
• Links to that page according to Google
• Last cached by Google date
• Pages indexed in Yahoo!
• Links to that page according to Yahoo!
• Links to that domain according to Yahoo!
• Pages indexed in MSN
• Links to that page according to MSN
• Alexa Rank
• Archive.org Age Date
• Server IP
• and some links to whois and info on robots and such

In seconds, you’ve got a great idea of what you’re up against. One of the most important metrics here is the Yahoo! L & LD (links to page and links to domain). Factor this in with how old the domain is (the newer the better) and you’ll get a rough idea at how quickly they are getting new links. If you can find a site with less then 2,000 links to the domain, you could well be onto a winner. If you click on the Yahoo link number, Yahoo will kindly order their incoming links roughly in order of importance. Check through this list just to make sure they don’t have any super-linkers (relevant PR7+ linkers) or that they are part of a much larger network.

Take stock of your new enemy, look through their website and ask yourself some questions: How professional does their site look? Is it updated regularly? Are they supported by any offline promotion? Is their site out of date? Anything you can think of to try and gauge how serious they are. Later, when we go into our aggressive SEO phase we will be deconstructing our competitor’s site, making sure that everything they have going for them, we have going for us – plus a little extra on top of course.

I would like to continue here, however I donâ??t want anybody rushing this research stage, which is one of the most important parts of our project. You should look at doing the following:

• Make a list of half a dozen niche areas
• Investigate all possible search terms related to these niches
• Go a little deeper and use Google Trends to see how they are affected by season and so forth
• Make a list of all the information that you will need to provide your users on your selected product/service
• Research and make notes on your competitors, what features their sites have and how well entrenched they are

• 
  
  In Part II we will be looking at taking this information and how to logically start building your seed niche sites which will be the foundations of your affiliate empire!

  What are you waiting for? Scram!