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 like to think of websites as flowers. Now just before you unsubscribe to my feed, de-bookmark my site and thumbs down me on stumble, hear me out. It’s actually a pretty good analogy!

Okay, so I don’t literally think of websites as flowers, but I’m going to roll with this because I think it makes everything a bit more interesting to imagine pretty flowers than Googlebots (what does a Googlebot look like anyway??). I was looking at some SEO forums today and I saw some pretty bad advice being dished out, unfortunately a lot of people were agreeing as well. So I guess this post is really to bust some link building myths and most importantly, give you a perspective where you can make your own link building decisions.

Simplifying things, there are two main things that are measured when looking at link profiles with websites:

Authority
Gaining links from highly ranked powerful sites, will of course pass some of this authority onto your website. Getting some authority links shows your website is trusted and isn’t a pill-popping-phishing-farm.info. Obtaining these kinds of links tends to be tricky, because you generally have nothing to offer these websites and a lot of them will rather just compete with you than help you out, because they are in the dominant position. Google has to be more careful nowadays and use a series of measures to rank websites as there’s a lot of webmasters who are whipping up their own authority real estate and using it to their own ends [insert evil laugh]. While helpful, in competitive market link building, a few big authority links aren’t going to have you sitting #1. So Google also takes close stock of…

Popularity
Link popularity! Diving head first into dangerous PageRank “is it meaningful, is it not”? territory. I’m not even going to touch on that subject, there are a lot of people who’d rank a whole lot better, if only they spent the time they stare at that stupid green bar actually doing some SEO! I really want to talk about Link Profiling.

Link Profiles
To understand how important this is, we’re going to use my wonderful flower analogy. So lets imagine we’re at a flower show and everyone has put their flowers (websites) out on display. The flower judge (Google) is going to come along and rank these flowers in order of how big and well developed they are. Unfortunately, our judge is blind. So he can’t tell how beautiful the flowers are, only how big they are. However, our judge can still judge the show, because he has a clever way of working out how beautiful the flowers are as well.

Since this is a kind of weird flower show, there are some extra rules. Everyone with flowers is allowed to take some of their flower food and give it to what they think are the beautiful flowers in the show to help them grow some more. Naturally, the biggest and most beautiful flowers attract the most food and grow even quicker. However, there are also some small flowers with really nice, um “buds” on them that attract a few people so they get a nice boost too.

So the flower judge goes around and ranks the best flowers as he sees (hawhaw) fit and takes notes on how well everyone is doing. He sees some really bad flowers too, seriously, they’re like f**king twigs and nobody has fed them at all.

Since the flower show as over 100 billion flowers in it, the judge really never gets a rest. He kind of does laps constantly re-ranking flowers, getting minimum wage in his never ending job. So when we get back to our first group of flowers again, everyone has been working hard on growing them. Poor old twig man’s flower is still looking as crap as ever. So twig man walks around the field before the show and picks up all the flower food he can find that other people have dropped. This flower food is a bit rotten, but it’s certainly better than nothing. The food makes his flower grow a lot bigger, but not all that beautiful. “That’s okay” he thinks, “The judge is blind, he can’t see my flower isn’t beautiful and I’ll be sure to win!”.

When re-ranking the flowers, the judge comes twig man’s flower and has a feel and thinks “Well, this is has certainly grown quickly compared to the other 100,000,000,000 flowers in the show. It must be quite a beautiful flower, I’ll rank him a bit higher”. Twig man is dead chuffed and his flower gets 10th position in his flower niche.

Before the judge comes around again, twig man sets off to find more dropped flower food. Crap! There’s nowhere near as much as last time and what is left is really rotten! Still, nobody is feeding twig man’s plant for him, even though it’s a big plant, it’s an ugly plant. So twig man feeds his plant what bits of rotten food he can. When the judge finally returns and examines twig man’s plant again, he thinks “That’s strange. This plant had grown a lot last time I saw it. Now it has hardly grown at all. Almost all of the other plants, when they start to bloom, grow faster month on month. I think this man is cheating…”

..and so twig man of course loses his place in the flower show…

WTF? Can you say that again, without the patronizing story?
Okay, so what we’re describing here (if my little story wasn’t too abstract): flower food is links, the size (authority) of the flower (site) is relevant to how much food (links) it has and how beautiful a flower is describes the quality of it’s content. The amount of flowers in the show is trying to demonstrate how much comparative data Google has at it’s disposal. So, what you may think you can squeeze by, will stand out like a sore thumb when compared to the profiles of millions of other pages in your niche.

Googlebot’s are not human so they really read your content and decide on it’s actual quality. Googlebots rely heavily on links and most importantly, trends in links. The best term I’ve heard used is the “organic bloom” effect, which describes a continued up-surge in links. The theory is; if you write some excellent content, people will link to it, people follow these links, agree it’s good content and link to you as well. This effect is exponential, the more links you have, the more new links you are likely to attract overtime. It can be quite obvious to Google that you have poor content if you try wham 100 top directory links at your site, they get indexed then the following months you get nothing. If you had great content, your website would continue growing.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into one of those people that says “The best SEO is just write good content”, because that’s not SEO, that’s just writing good content and having a worthwhile website and frankly people that say that are cop outs. There are ways that you can mimic the “organic bloom” effect and make Google think you’ve got the best website in your field.

Which brings me neatly to the crap I saw on an SEO forum today…
A chap was asking how many directories he should submit his site to and if he should outsource the work. He said he had found people offering 500/1000 directory submissions for $200. The advice given to him by the resident “SEO Experts” was “only to submit to the top 50 directories, everything else is a waste of time”.

My outlook is this; a “top” directory is obviously popular and therefore normally has 2 million other links in it, reducing the quality of the link you receive, so although the link will get indexed, it’s still only a directory link at the end of the day. Also, as we just demonstrated what good is having 50 new links just suddenly appear to your website? Guff all.

Yes, small directories may seem like a waste of time, however they also provide this “organic bloom” effect. If you pay $300 for 1,200 directory submissions, you’re guaranteed to get new links indexed every month for absolutely ages. Not to mention the time you’re going to save. If you can find someone with a good reputation to manually do these links for you, it’s worth forking out so you can spend your time working on more advanced tactics.

The organic bloom effect is the exact reason that link laundering and exploiting link velocity works so well. I’ve been approached many times by e-commerce clients asking for help with SEO, because they are in a sticky position with content. People don’t go to e-commerce sites for great content, they skim a variety of sites for research then land on a chosen e-commerce site to buy. Sometimes optimising a page for links/search engines is at the other end of the scale to optimising for purchase conversions.

If you’ve got a site like this and your competition is outranking you just because they’re older and bigger, copying the organic bloom effect can make Google think your site is more beautiful and you’ll have an advantage that your competition didn’t even know existed. That will give them something to think about when their staring at their silver medal!

edit:

Found this search “recommendation” somewhat amusing:

Hehe

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!

Nothing major today, just more of an observation that I followed through and experimented on and would like to share with you. One common trait you’ll find in successful search engine marketers is that they are never satisfied, even when they have #1 position. I had been reading what Eli had been doing, using special characters to increase SERPs CTR, essentially experimenting to make your site stand out. When I tried playing around with my title, I managed to grab myself about 2-3% extra traffic. That may not sound a lot, but it certainly adds up over time and for the seconds it took to do, was well worth it.

Your meta description, that is displayed in the SERPs is very important and sometimes overlooked but search engine marketers, since it has no direct impact on your actual rankings. It is however, important for getting you clicks, which is why you’re trying to rank in the first place. It needs to stand out, be relevant and alluring. One simple thing got me thinking the other day when I was looking at my description; I was only using one line. I’ve always been a fan of the marketing studies that show the effect of the subconcious on fast decision making, so I thought surely bigger is better.

Lets look at an example:

Here you can see for a search for “cheap laptops”, the top site cheaplaptops.org.uk takes up more space than the second place, val-u-computers.co.uk. I experimented on my site and I found that by re-writing my description to take up two-lines, I consistantly got another ~3% extra traffic.

Consider these two small things, using special characters in your title and making full use of your SERPs description, change both takes about 2 minutes and you could take yourself from 10,000 visitors per month to to almost 11,000 just by these small changes. Out of those extra 1,000 visitors a month, maybe a couple have high ranking sites and decide to link to you, so you’re finally top for cheap laptops? (One for you, Gedge)

The last thing I’ll point out is if your Google SERPs description is being pulled from ODP (i.e. you submitted to DMOZ) you can disable DMOZ snippets by putting this in your code header:

That’s all for now, as usual have an experiment and let me know how you get on!