SEO And Blogging Tips

For anybody who is not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier will probably be a new term to you. But to those who are involved in this kind of marketing; it means a reliable stream of income. Two-tier is a feature of any particular affiliate program where affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In a two-tier system, the first tier of commission is just like the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/ or sub-affiliate, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales. Affiliate programs can have a multi-tier program with infinite number of levels; however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate programs are also recognized as Multi-Level Marketing. When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier. If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. This is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

So if you want to use two-tier affiliate programs to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant. Pick those merchants who generate a stable stream of high quality products. Make sure your merchant has a good tracking system and has a good reputation for looking after their affiliates. Look for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It’s also advisable that you find yourself a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime to monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

Pick wisely or you will just be wasting your time and effort, worse still damaging your reputation. As soon as you start promoting a poor program it will reflect on you and your site. This is the reason why it’s so important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you. You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because eventually someone has already closed those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Which of these two programs are better? Let’s look at the benefits you could get out of the two-tier affiliate program.

First off, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services. You gain more stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could develop a lifetime loyalty for your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier programs are a proven winner and should be the number one choice for affiliates as well as for the affiliate program managers. So I hope you can now see the advantages of two-tier affiliate programs.
As Spok would say live long and prosper.

On Day 1 and Day 2, I did insanely fast idea generation using only the places Michelle told me to use; uncovered my awesome new niche and targeted my primary and some secondary keywords; selected my domain using each of the tools Mich recommended (which idea generation led me to another great long-tail keyword I want to use) and purchased my domain.

What I accomplished today:

Today, I actually started and completed the entire Module 2 which is Optimize for Size.  It didn’t take a lot of time to complete but you get more and more stoked as you go and you just don’t want to quit!

Module 2, and my accomplishments for today are:

–> Installing Wordpress and customizing the settings to the specifics Michelle gave which will optimize my site for superb keyword optimization and site ranking.

–> Optimizing my ‘on page’ factors to ensure the search engines clearly understand what my site is about and gravitate toward it.

–> Chose some LSI keywords and optimized my site for those.

–> Downloaded the SEO Optimized Wordpress Themes Michelle provides and installed a few, chose the one I liked and listened while she explained what an SEO optimized WP theme should contain.

–> Set up my widgets according to Michelle’s specifications (that was super fun and exciting because you can just feel the success as you do this!)

–> Downloaded the huge plugin pack Michelle put together, installed them all and set them all according to the specifications Mich provided. These are seriously plugins you MUST HAVE and setting them up the way Mich directs, yet again, gives you that feeling of success as you do it!

–> Set up my site to look good on mobile phones since more and more people are now searching for information and viewing sites on mobile phones.  I hadn’t thought of this before and it’s really fab advice!  She tells you exactly how to ‘floss’ on a mobile phone!

Now I’m going to move on to Module 3 which is Content Architecture…and once I’ve completed Module 3, I’m halfway through Boot Camp and well on my way to raking in the dough with my new niche site!

If you’re brand new to niche marketing, there’s no possible way you can go wrong with these step-by-step, from scratch to money-making, video instructions.  If you’re already knee deep in niche marketing, I’d still be willing to bet that you can benefit greatly from this course, learn a lot of new things, and pick up some fantastic new tricks along the way…nevermind have access to the exclusive tools like:

You’ll recall, yesterday I did massive, quick, idea generation with the avenues Mich told me to use to uncover my new niche; keyword selection using Michelle’s specific instructions on how to find the “gems”; and found my primary keyword that looks promising for some comfortable money and my secondary keywords.

What I accomplished today:

Okay, so I came with my “gem keyword” in hand. I watched the video Michelle made showing how to do domain selection.  Now, you might think, “Hey, I know how to choose a domain.”  Well, so do I. But Michelle gives some great extra tips and thoughts on how to choose a domain and why.

No matter your level of marketing, you’re SURE to get some good tips, extra things to consider and analyze, etc. on the things you already know.

Whether you’re brand new to making money online and building sites, niche and otherwise; or you’re seasoned, there’s crazy value everywhere around.

I went through every single step Michelle told me to go through since this is about following her teaching step-by-step to build a new niche site. I followed the various steps she demonstrated and came out with a domain I love, it’s simple and to the point, but a perfect match for traffic!

Well, there was actually another phrase - had 1 extra word from my original keyphrase and I liked it! When I thought of that, I went back and got a little more key word market info from it.  But, it just so happens that when I went to register the domain…it was gone! Grrr.  But that’s okay I chose a synonymous action word and figured I’ll still build a page around that phrase later even though the competition is a little sticky.

So I got my domain name; found another phrase I want to focus on later and learned a little more about my market from the keyword research I’d done.

I’m armed and dangerous now! Ready to start building my site and monetizing it!

So, ho hum, I’m waiting for my domain to be set up so I can use it! Otherwise I would have been here with a few more steps to cover.  After I do a little bit of other work, who knows, I might be back tonight!

How to make better use of PLR

First up; for anybody who is not familiar with PLR (Private Label Rights) products, then here’s what you can do with them; on PLRs you have exclusive ownership of that product. You can then use it anyway you wish: change the packaging, the title, the contents; you can do just about anything you want with the product.

Finding PLR Products

One thing’s for certain you don’t have to look that hard to find PLR bundles, there are PLR membership sites everywhere. What you will find is that the quality of some PLRs is to say the least less than perfect; you get what you pay for, so shop around. If you do have poor quality PLRs on your hard drive then you will be doing a lot of editing. There is no point in just slapping this PLR on to your blog, you will have to work the articles and put your own stamp on it. The key to successful posts is rewriting the PLR and shaping it to your own style.

I use PLRs on many of my Blogs and websites;
I can’t proclaim to be an expert on every subject and have used many PLRs myself, but I still research the post properly before I publish the finished article. You might be quite surprised to know that a lot of popular blogs and big corporate sites use PLRs quite frequently.  What you will find from some PLR membership sites is that outsourcing is done by non English speaking writers. This is not good as the content is often poor quality and unreadable. I have come across such PLRs frequently and they take up a lot of time re-editing.

What you can do with PLR products;

There are a multitude of uses for PLRs, here are the main ones.
Offer PLR information products as free bonuses, or to opt-in to your email list. Or you can create your own original information products; how about making promotional content for your affiliates as an inducement to promote your main sale. PLR can also be used to create your own real estate for profitable Adsense sites. Of course PLRs are invaluable for updating your own money making blogs. You can rapidly create eZine content and an autorespondor series. Last but not least use PLR content to create viral eBooks; if you have Open Office then you can convert it into PDFs very easily. And with a good graphics editor like Dreamweaver or the free Gimp application produce great eBook covers.

The great thing about PLRs is that they actually encourage you to learn and improve your writing skills, forcing you to get your own personality across to your readers. It’s a great way to fire you up and start forming your own ideas for future articles. To make your articles sing out to the search engines you will need to start placing keywords throughout your post, this can be a progressive action which in time you will get better at.

One note of caution; Do not use other peoples content and then use it for ad filled blogs, this is Wikipedia’s definition of Splogs;  “Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites” Beware because Google actively goes after these types of blogs or websites and bans them without a second thought.

PLRs are hugely popular and will continue to be so with millions of bloggers around the world monetizing their use.  “Happy blogging”

Okay, so you know what this series is all about - me building a niche site, from scratch, using the No Marketer Left Behind Internet Marketing Membership site that I’d bet my kids on to be the best around!

For this project, I’m building something OUTSIDE of the Internet Marketing Niche.

So here we go, Day 1 of building my new niche site!

I printed out my Module 1 Worksheet that I will use as I work through each video in the first Bootcamp Module which is “Niche the Niche“.

In this module, we learn how to generate niche ideas, find the “keyword gems”, drill down in keyword research to find the perfect keywords to build a site around and the keywords we’ll use, and select our domain.

What I accomplished today:

1.  I created an insane list of great niche ideas. 

These are just the ’scratch the surface ideas - the ones I’ll drill down on to find where the money is. Michelle gives you some great, super easy, avenues to generate ideas from. (You can also use these avenues to generate ideas on creating informational products - which you can give away for free to build your rep and your list; and/or sell to make money on; or both!)

I used the avenues she told me to use and quickly generated PAGES of niches and sub-niches that I can dig deeper into and investigate to find the money. It took me maybe 20-30 minutes to generate several pages of ideas (from which, as we go through the steps, I’ll find the first niche I’m going to build on and then still have tons to pursue as well as some great ideas for information products I can create along the way to help me build).  This is seriously idea generation at its best (you can do SO MUCH with this list!)

I used the 5 top places recommended (one is SO FREAKING SIMPLE and I never thought about it before, it’s totally that ‘duh’ moment) and really I could have generated thousands, literally, of ideas but I limited it to a few pages for now.

2. I narrowed my list down to the top ones I had an interest in pursuing the most at this time.

3.  I narrowed my list down even further to the best choices to start with out of that list using the rating system Michelle provided.  This rating system helps you determine which of those ideas you should start with (the top 2 or 3 to start investigating).

4. From that list, I started my keyword research using the idea that had the highest rating on my worksheet. I know, I know, keyword research - not usually our favorite thing to do but it must be done to find the money and with the keyword research tool we use, it’s almost fun because the results are SO detailed and there are so many ways you can utilize it. I said almost! I’m not going to pretend it’s now my favorite thing to do, but it didn’t seem quite as painful because this is keyword research at its best. And, again it’s a vital step in finding the money - which is the entire point of niche marketing!

I used the video instructions and the keyword tool to drill down into my top level keyword and find other keywords as well as an even better keyword to build the site around.

I discovered the MONEY MAKING words to build my site around and the other keywords I’m going to use within by using the keyword tool to analyze:

    Analysis of my potential would-be top ranked competition for this keyword(s) such as: how old, or new, their site is; what their pagerank is; how many backlinks they have to the main domain; how many backlinks they have to the particular page that is targeting my prospective keywords; whether their sites are listed in particular directories; if ‘our’ keyword is in their page title, URL, description, header; and the number of days since Google last indexed the page.  All of this information gives me great insight to even more details about how competitive a keyword is and how easy or hard it will be to rank highly fairly quickly and start raking in some cash!  It even shows me everything color coded using green, yellow and red so that I can quickly see whether it’s a “go” or “no go” for me.

Here are 2 screenshots from my keyword research that show WHY I’ve chosen this primary keyword to build my site around (showing the stats outlined in the bulleted list above):

This first screenshot shows the keywords I’m looking into (with the orange field being the one I’ve decided to roll with).

Searches = searches per day (higher is better)

SEOT = approximate hits a number 1 listed page could expect (higher is better)

PBR = percentage of phrase match searches out of broad matched searches (higher is better)

SEOC = SEO Competion (Lower is better)

SECTC = SEO Title Competition (Lower is better)

Search = Monthly traffic trends

OCI = Percentage of chance that someone is looking to buy (Higher is better but should be taken into consideration w/other factors)

AWV = daily traffic value, and cost, adwords advertiser in #1 spot might expect

SEOV = daily traffic value #1 spot might expect

So, taking all of these values into consideration, I chose to go with the keyword in the orange field because it has stats that I like, particularly when taken into consideration with the next screenshot which shows my current top competitors.

niche-keyword-stats-blurred

This next screenshot shows the Top 10 Google search results (my soon-to-be-competitors) and their stats.

DA= Domain Age

PR = Page Rank

BLP = Backlinks to “Page”

BLD = Backlinks to “Domain”

BLEG = Total links pointing to from .gov or .edu

DMZ and YAH = Whether or not site is listed in these directories

Title / URL / Description / Head = whether or not page is ‘on page’ optimized in these areas

CA= How many days ago since Google reindexed the page

Colors: Green is good for ME, Yellow is so-so, Red is not good for ME

seo-competition-for-niche-marketing-keyword-blurred

You’ll notice there’s a lot of green = good for me; a slight bit of yellow I feel I can overcome; and very little red for me to worry about.  The big yellow caution area- the backlinks to the primary domain isn’t a HUGE concern for me because I can beat them out in the green areas…and get my site listed on some of the sites contained in the actual ‘domain’ part.  The backlinks to the pages (that focus on my actual keyword) I can certainly beat out without an extreme amount of effort.

Using the various keyword stats and taking everything into consideration, I now have the main keyword I’m going to build my new niche site around.  Let’s see how it goes!

So, recap summary - I created a list of tons of niche ideas (containing many others I’ll be looking into in the future too), filtered it down to the best ideas I wanted to check into now, narrowed it down some more using a rating system to pick the top 2-3 I wanted to dig into, chose 1 and started finding the money-making keywords in my first choice niche using DEEP stats that yield results FAR superior to the Google Adwords or Wordtracker keyword tools (I’ve always loved those tools but they can’t give you these kind of results - and you can use the keyword tool we use for free even though there’s  paid version that I recommend purchasing when you can).

As you wrap up this research, you can’t help but to be super stoked about what’s to come!  You know you’ve found the money and you know you’re on your way to achieving success in this newfound niche!

You’re probably wondering about my keywords I’ve found? Can’t tell you just yet, but I promise it will all be revealed as the building continues!

The next thing I’m going to do is choose my domain name according to the steps in the video.

Want to start a blog but have $0 to spare? When the recent down turnings of the economy, more and more people are turning to blogging as a way to make some spare change. Although blogging isn’t a get rich quick method, it is a great source for additional income. You can easily start up a blog, market it, and gain significant traffic before ever having to pay for hosting or your own domain–a huge plus to those who can’t afford to start a new website.