Here’s the link to the replay for you:

==>Beating Google Panda<==

There has been a lot of talk about Google over the past few months, as they even brought out another new update called ‘Google Penguin’ too, which has ruffled some feathers in SEO circles. First though, Google Panda is different in that it is a permanent part of the Google Algorithm and refreshes every 4 weeks.

Every time it updates it get smarter too, so if you know how to build sites Google Panda likes, you have a BIG advantage over your competition. In this webinar the presenter, by the name of Eric, shows proof of how he has mastered Google Panda, and shows screen shot evidence of full site recoveries he has achieved for his clients. One client of his he actually got an increase of 3000 unique visitors a day!!!

In the webinar Eric explains what he refers to as the “SEO Quality Score” that Google Panda gives sites, and explains ways to improve your quality score. The higher your quality score the less backlinks you have to build, which I’m sure we can all agree is a good thing! A very big misunderstanding about Google Panda is that all you have to do is write good quality content, but this is not true at all, and Eric explains this in the webinar. There’s a lot more to Google Panda than most people know. Some people think its about taking out affiliate sites, while others claim it is for certain niches, the fact is there are a lot of rumors with little evidence to support them, however Eric is heavy on proof, as he tests a lot.

You’ll also learn about Google Penguin towards the end of the webinar as we got a lot of questions from the live audience about this, and Eric has a nice surprize on this for you in the webinar too. The current environment in SEO is somewhat unsettling for a lot of webmasters as it’s not as easy to get to the top of Google as it used to be. HOWEVER this is a real opportunity, because the people that stick with it and learn the stuff that Eric teaches stand to really cash in from SEO in the coming months and years, as they’ll know how Google thinks, while everyone else scrambles for answers.

Make sure you watch this webinar as it may well save you a lot of heartache  down the track if you get hit by Google Panda. Eric is very ethical marketer and knows his stuff when it comes to Google.

Here’s the link to the replay for you:

==>Beating Google Panda<==

Enjoy!

Beating Google Panda Webinar is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

In this post I want to discuss this latest update, and once again address some common concerns, as I seem to be getting a lot of worried people contacting me after their sites got hit hard by Google over the past few months.

So What is Google Penguin?

Penguin was an update to the Google algorithm that was released on the 24th of April, with intention of apparently penalizing sites for over-optimization, otherwise known as spamming. The first thing I want to say is that its early days, and no one knows exactly what this update was precisely targeting, but nonetheless I will do my best to share some insight, as I can happily say that I actually experienced a positive increase or no change across the board on all my websites after this update, and also after the latest Panda update which happened the week prior.

First off, we can start to get an understanding of this update by reading what Google officially states about it. If you read the Google Webmaster blog it says this:

“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”

OK so as you would expect Google doesn’t spell it out for everyone, but rather provides a very vague overview and focusses on their overall intention with the update. The key things that we can take from this statement I believe are “high quality sites” and “good user experience“, nothing we didn’t all know already, but who’s actually doing it is more to the point.

One can safely assume that this update, after reading the full Google blog post, was looking at keyword stuffing in content, as Google gives  a really over the top example of what this looks like. The example is a poor one, as that sort of keyword stuffing has been slapped by Google for years, so I guess it’s some level of more critical analysis of over use of keywords in your On Page SEO that this update was targeting. With that said, you might want to pay attention to how your content uses keywords and make it look natural. Golden rule for all SEO, make it look natural if it isn’t totally natural!!

The Good Old User Experience

I’ve been harping on about the user experience on this blog a fair bit over the past few months, and you guessed it, I’m going to continue to do so, as I keep seeing sites that get slapped by Google, where the webmasters are shocked and have no idea why. In most cases when I look at these sites, I can see glaringly obvious reasons, as the sites are clearly not designed for the user at all.

I want to also add this quote from Matt Cutts (head of Google Anti-Spam team):

“We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.”

…”even no optimization at all…” yeah right, and pigs may just fly one day too!

Also its important to note that Google Panda 3.5 was also rolled at a week prior to the Penguin update, around the 17th of April, so if you lost a significant amount of traffic around that date, then you were most likely ‘Pandalized’ rather than ‘Penguinalized!!!!’

Oh and let’s not forget the 750,000 unnatural backlink warning messages that Google sent out prior to these changes, warning webmasters to remove links that were acquired through unnatural means…what an interesting few months its been!

Google is on the Aggressive

Ok so it doesn’t take a genius to notice that Google is on the aggressive right now, trying their hardest to remove spam from the results and level the playing the field for SEO. I ‘ve never experienced this many changes so closely related than what we are seeing now.

One thing that I must say I find pretty frustrating is that Google tells us not to do much if any SEO, other than make your sites easier to crawl etc…and when it comes to offpage SEO they expect it to happen naturally. The problem for the small guys and gals doing web marketing is that it’s virtually impossible to get enough exposure in the first place so that other webmasters even know about our sites to even consider linking to you. Sure large brands don’t have to worry as they already have a following.

So I don’t think the playing field is that level when Google does the changes they make, but regardless we have to play by their rules as closely as we can, or pay the price of getting no traffic from Google.

So with that said, in light of all the carnage going on out there right now, here’s some suggestions that might help:

Build Sites that Don’t Look Optimized

If Google wants people to just blog away and build affiliate marketing sites or stores etc…without doing any significant SEO, then we really need to mimic this as closely as possible. If you take a look at a few dozen sites ranking in Google now for various keywords, ask yourself if you think they are doing careful On Page SEO or not.

It’s really not that hard to spot, just look at some of the titles of pages on sites and ask yourself if these look like they were written with the keyword in mind or the topic in mind. Of course you will see some junk that is ranking and ask yourself how this got there, but just overlook that as Google will remove the junk eventually, so don’t get caught up on that just focus on good quality yourself.

Also have a look at all the content on the sites and ask yourself if the topics were written with keywords in mind or with topics in mind. Of course if you want to get traffic to your sites, you really have to do keyword research, and then target these keywords, however do it as natural looking as you can, so you still target keywords but fly under the radar!

Create Sites that Will Naturally Get Good Signals

If you focus on building great quality sites, that your traffic will love, then they will naturally want to bookmark your site and share it on Facebook and Google Plus. Not only that though, they will most likely come back again and also search for your site in Google using the site name. Ideally you want your site to get a lot of searches for its name, as it’s a clear signal to Google that people like it. Other good signals are the time on your site, low bounce rate, high average page view etc…

The only way you stand any chance of getting these “good signals” happening on your site is if you actually have a good site, not rocket science really. The problem is that good sites take effort and time and a lot of people can’t be bothered, and instead continue to put up low quality thin sites, and try all sorts of things to dodge the Google bullets, but honestly it’s all a waste of time in the long run, trust me I’m speaking from experience.

Google are only going to roll out more and more updates like Penguin and Panda, who knows maybe the next one will be called “Google Poodle”, ha ha, then you can say your site was “Poodlized!!! In all seriousness though, the sooner you move towards managing less sites, and focussing on higher quality, and thinking about the user experience, that better you will do in Google.

Off Page SEO Can’t Hurt Your Sites…Or Can It?

Ok so here comes the bombshell, Google sent out all these unnatural link warning to webmasters over the past few months, and sites who got them experiences a drop in rankings. The result is that many webmasters frantically started to remove any links they thought Google might frown upon and then submit for a reconsideration. I assume many SEO companies got dropped by webmasters, only to be replaced by news ones who get on their high horse and claim they are pure whitehat SEO and all will go well if the webmaster is to choose them…I doubt it…no one is 100% whitehat.

So why is this a bombshell then? Well the obvious question is, “if low quality backlinks to your sites can harm them, can’t we all go out and build a bunch of low quality links to our competitors?”

My response to this used to be “No way, if Google allowed this it could well create total chaos online”

My response now is “I’m not sure anymore, and I am starting to think low quality links combined with a lack of good signals coming off your site may well cause problems for you!”

I don’t think these recent changes in regards to backlinks will cause widespread chaos by any means, the reason being that chaos, I assume, would mean the likes of Amazon could be taken down, or other well established authority brands. I don’t think will ever happen, as these kinds of sites have way too many good signals for Google to ditch them, and the same goes for much smaller, yet quality sites too.

So what about sites that are ranking well but don’t have many “good signals”, are these open for attack from this negative SEO? I can’t definitely say, but my assumption is that possibly yes, if the negative campaign against them is particularly nasty in nature and well planned out. I sincerely discourage anyone from getting involved in these tactics, as it’s not the way to win a battle, and we would all not like it if someone did it to us.

Avoid Obvious Forced Linking

I encourage people, if you are using forced link building, and I think most of us will have to, make sure you don’t use overly spammy links, such as mass auto-blog comments, profile links, very public blog networks etc…anything that is really obvious and easy for Google to spot as forced linking. Also do your best to create content and tools, anything that will increase the chances of people linking to you naturally.

Also if you create a decent following in your niche this will happen much more easily. I think the key is to use linking as much as you need to, to gain momentum, but don’t rely on forced linking only, otherwise your site will not look natural.

Conclusion

To close this post I want to leave this final thought, spend time analyzing high quality sites in various niches, and take notes on how they make the user experience a good one, and do your best to employ as many of these techniques on your own sites.

If you enjoyed this post, I would be super grateful if you would shar on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus below.

Thanks!

The Google Penguin Update is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I recently recorded a webinar with Brittany Lynch, who’s an expert at traffic and conversions, and in particular using Facebook for niche marketing. You can watch the replay of the webinar at the link below. The strategies you’ll learn about in this webinar are great for affiliate marketing and also for products owners. I’m personally implementing some of these tactics myself soon.

==>Facebook Niche Marketing Webinar<==

The webinar is well worth watching, as there is some very practical tips on,

• How to pick a hot niche market
• How to build an email list using Facebook
• How to laser target customers interested in your offers for max conversions.
• How to build a niche profit system that generates residual income.

…and loads more.

Virtually the entire webinar is practical examples, and the live audience gave a lot of great feedback, so make sure you check it out.

I’m personally using the system that Brittany (the presenter) teaches, and am following her advice for a new niche that I have just entered, as I can see the power of this strategy, and want to diversify away from as much SEO. I encourage you to do the same, as if your only traffic method is SEO, then its not smart, as Google have too much control, and also what you’ll learn in this webinar gets results WAY faster than SEO does anyway!

Facebook Niche Marketing Webinar is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

This does take more work, but I strongly believe it is well worth the time and energy to do so, as it will help you get more viral traffic as visitors will be more inclined to share your site and it will also create good metrics to show off to Google (more on this later).

Examples of Stickiness (is that a word?)

Every site will be different, so you need to ask yourself, what could I add to my site that would make my site stick out from all the other sites in the niche. Remember your aim should be to have the best site in your niche, as this will win out in the long term.

With that said, I have just had some great tools created for one of my sites, that the visitor can play with and once done can print the results, email them to a friend, or save them! Pretty cool eh…and I hope this will get people naturally linking to the site and also good old referral traffic from social sites.

Quizzes

You don’t have to spend much on this stuff, in fact simple quizzes can do the trick, like what you find over at Snack Tools (thanks to Lisa P for that one) – can work great. The key is to make your sites more interesting than just plain text, as let’s be totally honest here, who really loves reading a page full of just text? I personally don’t myself, and enjoy a site much more, if I can interact or even just watch a video combined with the text.

Tools

You could get any number of simple scripts created for very little expense, such as a BMI calculator if you’re in the weight loss niche, or anything that someone in the niche would find helpful, and most likely bookmark your site to come back to.

YouTube Videos

On that note, simply adding a YouTube video in your content is one of the most basic forms of ‘stickiness’ you can do. I like using YouTube on sites, because what will happen is your video will get more views if it’s embedded on your site, which will help it rank higher in YouTube itself. Over time your YouTube channel will grow in authority, and I think that’s not only a good extra traffic source, but a nice signal to Google that you have a quality site, if you have a quality channel linking to you.

Comparison Tables & Lists

Proper well done comparison tables are quite interesting and can get people not only hanging around on the page, but also linking to it. This can be comparing features of multiple products and their prices, but just make sure the information is accurate, don’t guess it. You could also have a table with latest figures, for example a site on precious metals could have a chart on latest spot prices.

You could also make lists of the best and worse products in the niche and why you think this is the case. For example in the “Online Webinars” niche there are quite a few products, and the price range is massive. So you could break it down and even do demos of yourself using the tools to illustrate the features of each and then compare them.

White Papers

If you take the time to write a really informative PDF on a topic in your niche, this can be a great tool, as people will hang around to read it and also share it with people, if the quality is good. You could even survey your traffic over a period of time and find out what the most popular questions people have, and then research and answer all of these and create it into a report on your site, and tell people what you did and these are the finding from your research.

Blog with Active Comments

Having a real blog with active comments, by ‘real’ I mean one where there is actually a readership/community like this one, where people will stay around on the site and participate.

Forum

Of course you can go the extra mile and consider adding a forum onto your domain. I’m planning on doing this with my ecommerce store eventually, once I gain more momentum with it, as I believe a forum is a great way to get people to stick around, and also share your domain with other people. This has many added benefits if done well, such as adding content to the domain.

Nice Design

I have mentioned this in a previous post, but make sure your site looks nice and is easy to navigate, as if someone gets a bad impression of your site as soon as they arrive, you have to work uphill to try and convince them to stick around for the great content. I don’t even bother read content on sites that look really crappy.

Summary

In closing, I think focussing on making sites stickier is very important aspect on online marketing, and again it comes back to improving the user experience. If your visitors hang around on your site, visit multiple pages on the site and share it on the social networks, then you’re in good shape, and Google LOVES to see this kind of activity. This is when I think it’s a good idea to have Google Analytics installed on your domain, as these sort of metrics are awesome to show Google, as it proves to them that you have a high quality site.

Google will see that not all traffic comes from search engines, you get social media recommendations, people stay on the site for a decent amount of time, you have a low bounce rate, and lots of return visitors, what more could Google want!

I would really love to hear what ‘sticky’ ideas you guys know about, as the more ideas we share with each other the better!!

Also if you like my site, be awesome if you would share it with the social icons below;

How Sticky is Your Site? is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Online marketing offers many great benefits, a few being the flexibility it provides of when and where you can work, and also the scope of customers you can reach anywhere in the world. Many people also prefer not to have to deal with customers face to face, and this again is an appealing aspect of the web.

However there are many things that are not so great about online marketing, in particular I’m referring to ‘ethics’ and lack thereof from many people.

There are a number of causes for this lack of ethics, and I’ll going into specifics later in the post, however I believe a common one is desperation. When people struggle to make money online, they often resort to doing things that they would otherwise not ever do, and especially never do if they had to deal with the customer face to face. It’s this lack of personal interaction, which somewhat makes it easier for people to be unethical in their ventures, because they never see the impact on real people, they just deal with their keyboard.

In addition to this, another HUGE factor that contributes to unethical behaviour is greed. When people start to get a taste of making money, and I’m guilty of this too, it can be all too easy to keep wanting more and more money, and then to compromise on ethics to get it. There is no excuse for this, it’s just simply not cool.

Common Areas of Unethical Behaviour I See

Although I’m referring to unethical behaviour in the internet marketing world, I see much worse unethical behaviour in the corporate world all the time. The banking section is the worse I’ve ever come across, you can’t tell me that ‘fractional reserve lending’ is ethical and fair, and that’s only the start of it when it comes to the corrupt international banksters. Just look at the Federal Reserve Bank of America, most people falsely assume this bank is a government agency…I’m afraid not. Anyway, the point is that corruption is everywhere, and the common areas I see online marketers become unethical is with affiliate marketing and also selling info products as vendors.

Affiliate Marketing Concerns

The main issue that I’ve battled with over the years of doing affiliate marketing, is how to create a content based site that is not overly bias towards the vendor you’re an affiliate for, to the point where you cross over into deception. A lot of this comes down to the keywords you choose to market the site on. For example, if you target ‘buyer keywords’ such brand names, product names and model numbers, these can be great for conversions. The reason they are great for conversions is that people who type these keywords into Google are at the end of the buying cycle and often just looking for one more site to push them over the line to buy, unless their is something they should know to stop them.

So what’s so wrong with that, I hear you ask….well the issue I have is that most affiliates who rank for these types of keywords always place the product in a positive light, often regardless of whether they actually know if the product is good or not. Most affiliates don’t go to the lengths of actually researching the products that they are writing about, and just whack up some content and hope that it does the job and makes sales.

The fact is this does make sales, although not as well as it used to, however I know it works. The reason I know is because I used to do it myself, which I now think is not cool. If you purchased my Rapid Profit Formula, in the first version I showed an example site that did this, however I no longer think that’s the right way to write reviews, which I will go into more detail now.

I think a better way to build affiliate marketing sites is to either buy the product that you are affiliated with, and do a proper review of it, or at least research it very carefully and do real comparisons against other competition products and tell the truth.

You can always be an affiliate for all the options, this way you can be upfront about the product, and if it’s not a great choice, say so in your review and recommend a product that’s better. However this does not mean you should recommend a product that pays out more commission just to make more money. It’s possible to write good reviews on products, as long as you research. The aim for an affiliate should be to act like a friend to the website visitor and help them. If you’re in a niche where you don’t feel you can do this with the products, then I suggest starting a new niche.

Furthermore, if you choose keywords that are not product related ie. info keywords, you can simply provide valuable content on the topic and then tell people if they want to try a product that helps do XZY then here’s a one ==>Affiliate Link<==, or again just use banners and let them do the work.

I think the ideal position of the affiliate is to be a solid resource for a potential buyer, like a mini Wikipedia on a particular niche topic, so their sites actually help the visitor to make a more informed buying decision. Far too often, and again I have been guilty of this myself, I see affiliates building sites solely targeting buyer keywords because they convert well, and producing dishonestly positive reviews, to coerce the visitor into buying the product. There is no way this is ethical, and the worse culprits are affiliates that pretend they have used the product and it falesy claim it gave them great results, even worse is having  a fake photo on the site pretending it is a photo of the website owner. You must have seen the reviews that go something like this:

“I used suffer acne, then I bought XYZ product and now my acne is gone and I feel amazing…you can check it out for yourself here ==>Affiliate link<==”.

I can happily say that I never once did that, as I always thought that was going way to far, but I have been guilty of writing positive reviews about products I didn’t research as well as I should have, but will never do it again.

With all that said, there is a place for well-done affiliate marketing sites, but I strongly believe they have to be seen as great mini resources for people, and have real solid, well researched and written content, and even videos if possible, that come along side the potential buyer and help them work out what product, if any, is right for them. This can be done on the site itself, or later through email marketing, or like I said earlier just have banner ads in your sidebar if like.

Info Product Owners

Now this is where I’ve seen things stoop to very low levels of ethics indeed. The Internet Marketing niche is the worst, but not alone, as I’ve seen pretty terrible deception in other niches from product owners also, the dating niche comes to mind. Anyway, what I find the most frustrating are the marketers that create products on a particular internet marketing topic that they themselves know nothing about, and are not even doing themselves. This is really bad in my books and frankly pretty difficult for more to comprehend. These products come in the form of ebooks and software, it doesn’t matter it all bad news. So please be very careful before you buy something from someone who has not proven to be legitimate.

You might ask yourself why these dodgy products sell at all, and the sad fact is that unsuspecting people who read over hyped, yet well written sales pages, are easily convinced and buy. These pages are full of lies, such as fake earnings, fake testimonies, and outlandish claims of success people will have while using the product. Again I can gladl say, that none of these things I have ever done myself, as all my products are birthed from real results.

However I have not been 100% squeaky clean (although I will be from now on), so in the vein of being ethical let me lead by example, as I like to make sure I always do the right thing be everyone on my email list.

Although I never promote products unless I think they are very good, and I know the owner is a legitimate marketer who knows their stuff, I have fallen guilty of doing a few tactics that I now look back on with disapproval. For example, I have in the past stated that bonus packs I have offered as part of a promotion I’m doing for a joint venture partner are limited, when in actual fact I have not followed through on that and ended up letting as many people have the bonus as wanted it! How is that ethical, it’ not, and I should never ever have done it. For this I’m sorry, as it’s just not on, and can assure you that you’ll never see me do that again.

I’ve also been caught up in other tactics that I saw other marketers using, or listened to advice from people who told me to do it, which I’m also not proud of. For example, I’ve promoted products as an affiliate to my list, and said there is a limited number before we close the doors, and in reality the doors never closed. How is that ethical, it’s not, and again I apologize and will never do this ever again either, and if you feel I may have done this to you, and want a refund for a product you bought from me, I will refund you if you think this caused you to purchase a product and you are not happy about it, as long as you can send proof of purchase of course. However I do need to clear, I only did this on a few occasions, it was not often, but like I said I want to be transparent with everyone.

I also need to make something clear, when I have had price increases on products I own, such as my recent VideoCommissionFormula.com launch, these are real, and you can check that for yourself, as the price is now $67. And when I have done webinars and there is a special price on offer, these special deals are legitimate discounts for you all, so please don’t be mistaken there either. For example I did one for SECockpit and also SYNND and these plus others, are very real discounts and savings which I negotiate for you all.

I never make anything about false price hikes, and my sales pages are real, with real results I got, which often is why they come across as a lot less hyped up as some of the ones you see on Clickbank, although fair play to Clickbank, as they are cleaning out scammy offers these days.

Conclusion

So there you have my rant on being ethical when online marketing. I think you can sum it up by asking yourself, if your grandmother were to come to your website, would you feel comfortable that she, in her elderly stage of life, would be in a good hands? It’s not a hard question to answer, but it’s often a hard question to ask.

Although there’s a lot of unethical behaviour going on across the web, I think we all should strive to clean this up, and not tolerate it and most definitely not get involved in it. I’m double checking all my websites this week to make sure I don’t have ‘fake’ affiliate reviews or misleading information out there.

In addition to this, Google also wants people to build websites like this, and if you do build great sites, you will win out in the end and rank well in Google, as your sites will collect natural links and social votes, get return visitors etc…

Thanks for putting up with my rant folks, I’ll have plenty more online marketing tips coming your way soon!

Being Ethical in Online Marketing is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

The main network that got hit hard recently was BuildMyRank which a lot of affiliate marketers have used. They got pretty much all of their sites deindexed from Google, and I’ve heard some estimate it to be in the 10′s of 1000′s of domains. They are not the only one that got hit hard, others such as SEO Link Moster and Authority Link Network, plus others.

Blog networks are an easy way to get backlinks to your sites, however Google doesn’t like this type of link, as they do see it as paying for links, which we all know they frown upon, even though Google themselves have done this sort of thing!!

Google sent out over 700,000 notifications over the past few weeks to webmasters, warning them of unnatural linking. The result of this warning is varied, but I can say that one of my sites had this warning, and has consequently had a minor drop in rankings, but nothing too major at all.

Why is Google doing this then?

Well the short answer is that Google wants all backlinks to sites to happen naturally. Matt Cutts the head of anti-spam at Google says that all you need to do is put up good quality content and let Google do the rest. This really doesn’t work though, as you need to do a lot more than that, especially when their is so much link buying going on. My point is that Google is trying to level the playing field all the time, by removing any source of paid links, and blog networks are a prime place to target.

If you had all your eggs in one basket and got all your links for your sites from say BuildMyRank, then you would not be having a very nice week, as one can only assume your rankings will soon, if not already, drop and your traffic and income with it.

However I don’t consider spreading your risk as simply joining more blog networks, as these may also do the same way as BuildMyRank, the way of the internet grave yard. The problem with neworks like BuildMyRank is that they own all the domains in the network, and hence a footprint, or pattern, is much easier for Google to spot. This is made worse when these networks get more and more popular.

What to do now?

In order to best explain what I think is the best solution to do if you have been heavily using blog networks, I’ve recorded a YouTube video for you below.

Essentially it comes back to quality, because if you have higher quality sites, it opens up many more opportunities to gain backlinks. If you have a good quality site, you will to a certain degree get people naturally linking to you, this blog does. Not only that, but you will also get a higher percentage of people that will be willing to accept a guest blog post from you, which they will publish on their sites, and of course there will be a link in that to your site. Social links will come more easily when you have a great site too.

These changes at Google just further reinforce to me that gone are the days of throwing up lots of low quality sites, that really solely on forced link building methods. Google Panda was the first big wave from Google to clean up their results, and this backlinking move is yet another wave. The sooner you move away from the mindset of trying to trick Google so much, and move towards giving Google what they want, then you will be in a better position.

I personally have scaled back massively on the number of sites I focus on now, because in order to do sites the way Google likes, and the way they should be done for that matter, takes more work, and therefore I find managing less is best. You have to manage Facebook fanpages, Google Plus, create quality content, etc…a lot of this was what Lisa Parmley spoke about in her recent webinar.

I see these changes at Google as a good thing, as if you stick with it and build good sites, which most people are too lazy to do, then you will win out big time folks, plenty of opportunity out there in SEO.

YouTube Video Below

Google Drops Bomb on Blog Networks is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Google are being pretty clever with their promotion of Google Plus, as it’s growing very rapidly, gaining more followers than any social platform ever did in its early days. It’s not taking Facebook down yet, or perhaps ever, but they are doing some very interesting things, and if I were Mark Zuckerberg I’d be keeping a close eye on Google Plus, which I’m sure he is.

Before I explain how to add a Google plus badge to your WordPress sites, I first want to look at some of things that Google are doing to virally grow their Google Plus network, as we marketers can learn a lot from this. If you login to your Google Plus account, if you have one of course, you will notice that Google have made it very easy to tell others about Google Plus.

Here are some ways Google is facilitating viral growth:

The reason I wanted to show this, is that this is classic demonstration of excellent online marketing from Google, and we can learn some things from this. On our own websites I believe we should be asking our visitors to help us spread the word about our sites. If you have good content most visitors would be glad to tell a friend, so make sure you make this process as easy as possible for them to do so. It can as simple as having social sharing buttons on your pages, but don’t forget to ask people to share using these, otherwise a lot people may not bother.

Why Bother with Google Plus Anyway?

I know that managing multiple social accounts for a website is time consuming, such as Facebook and Google Plus, and I myself have not been too keen to do so until more recently. However when one looks at the rate Google Plus is growing and the things that Google are doing with it, it’s not hard to imagine that some time in the near future Google Plus penetration will become more of an important ranking signal, as well as a traffic and trust signal for human visitors.

If your website is mentioned a lot in Google Plus from many profiles and your profile itself is also followed a lot and you connect your website to your profile, I believe it will pay off in the long run. I don’t think you can rely solely on this for SEO ranking signals, but it’s also not something to be ignored.

Of course like anything online, the system can be gamed, like backlinking is, although Google are getting better and better at spotting unnatural link patterns too, however it is a lot more work to game the system and have a popular Google Plus and Facebook fanpage with lots of content on them and also get lot of links from social sites to your website directly. Yes I know it can be artificially created, but you have to agree it is more work to do. So perhaps having a solid presence in the social networks like Google Plus will pay off more than we realize.

Using Google Plus

There are quite a few things you can do with Google Plus, and I will discuss some of these now, however I encourage you all to become familiar with Google Plus for yourself.

Searching

You can search inside Google Plus like you do in a regular Google search, however the results that are shown varies. For example you can choose to show results for ‘everything’, ‘everyone’ and ‘from everywhere’

What I think most marketers will be interested in, is how Google Plus decides to show the results they do. In other words, how does the SEO for Google Plus work, and how do we make sure are Google Plus profiles are optimized? I have done a little researching on this and having the core keywords you would like to rank for in your profile page helps. I have added “affiliate marketing” in certain places on my profile.

Intergration with Google Search

Google are starting to intergrate Google Plus profiles in regular Google search results, placing them over on the right. I don’t know how they decide what Google Plus profile to show over there, but one could safely assume that they most likely show people in your Google Plus circles, or potentially people with a large Google Plus following. BlindFiveYearOld has a very indepth overview of Google Plus features by the way.

Adding a Google Plus Badge to Your Sidebar

I played around today with the Google Plus badges, and below have explained how to add one to your WordPress sidebar. I tried three different plugins for this, and all three didn’t work properly. They either gave errors on installation, or simply didn’t show the badge at all. All of the plugins I found had very little downloads, and you have to be careful with plugins that are not tested. With that said I just decided to add the badge manually, which I explained below, however if someone knows a stable plugins that works, please tell us below in the comments.

Step 1:

Visit this page from Google – https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/config as this is where you get the code you need

Step 2:

Get your Google Plus account and click ‘account settings‘ ==> ‘profile and privacy‘ and copy your account ID

Step 3:

Go to the URL I privided above and paste in your ID and the code will be generated for you in the box below:

IMPORTANT NOTE – Google are incredibly annoying in the fact that if you are logged into another gmail account at the time of doing this, and you currently don’t have a gmail account as your primary email from your Google Plus account, they will automatically make the gmail you are logged in with the primary email for your Google Plus and they make it virtually impossible to change. Typical Google style telling the people how it is and making it hard to change, so just make sure you are not logged into Google when doing this, or if you are that it is the Google email you want associated with this Google Plus.

Step 4:

Login to your WordPress dashboard, and click ‘appearance’ ==> ‘editor’

Step 5:

Google will give you two blocks of code, one of them needs to go in your ‘header.php’ file after the opening <head> tag and before the closing </head> tag. The other peice of code needs to be placed in the ‘sidebar.php’ page which you can also access from the editor. All you have to do is paste this code in that page and it will show your Google Plus badge on your sidebar…well it did for me anyway, and I am not very good with coding stuff.

Alternatively you can just grab a Google Plus image yourself and link to your Google Plus account page from a text widget in the side bar. Some of you might prefer to do that.

In closing, I think Google Plus is here to stay, and if you don’t start to build a presence with it, it might be something to regret down the track.

That’s all from me for this update folks, more on the way soon, and as always if you like my content I would greatly appreciate it if you shared it around using the social buttons below!

Adding Google Plus to Your Website/Marketing is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I’ve launched a new course with a friend of mine Mark Dickenson, called ‘Video Commission Formula‘.

The course is all about affiliate marketing via YouTube videos. The great thing about YouTube is that the videos rank really easily in Google and in a fraction of the time a website does.

We also teach list building with YouTube videos in the course. There is a huge scope for targeting various types of affiliates offers, ranging from Clickbank products to CPA and even physical goods too.

We are doing a launch special discount of $47, which expires next Thursday midnight.

This is by far the easiest method of affiliate marketing I have ever mastered too. Anyone should be totally able to get results with this.

Here’s the link to the sales page:

==>Video Commission Formula<==

Enjoy!

Matt

Video Commission Formula is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

The main things I’ve been doing with video focus on YouTube and getting more leads on my email list and making affiliate commissions directly from videos also.

The thing I like about using YouTube is that it’s a Page Rank 9 domain, that’s owned by Google, so when you create videos using YouTube, you can ride on the back of this authority and the results are very nice indeed.

We all know that when creating websites to make affiliate sales or get more leads for our email lists, it takes time and a fair amount of work. You have to buy the domain and hosting, get all the content written, build the site, and then of course plan your SEO strategy and hope Google gives you traffic. I do all of this and will continue to do so, as I love managing websites, but my point is that with YouTube videos you don’t have to bother with any of that, which is kind of nice!

You can put up a lot more videos and do it a lot faster than with websites. If you screw up a video, then you can quickly make a new one, and you haven’t lost much at all. I’ve made some websites in my time where I’ve wasted 3 months on them, only to find out it’s a dud and I move onto something else, thankfully this doesn’t happen much these days though.

Furthermore a lot of people like video, myself included, as it’s easier to take in the information than reading a page of text.

Higher Click Throughs

Click throughs on a video are often much higher than a standard website listing on the front page of Google too. If you see a video in the Google results, it’s a thumbnail of the video, and it stands out a lot more than a regular website listing does, so tends to attract more clicks.

I’ve provided an example with the ‘nursery rhymes’ image on the right, something I’ve been getting into more recently, having a 16 month old….some of them are quite good!

What I’ve been doing with great success is creating videos for lead generation purposes, and tracking the opt in rates. My YouTube channels have been doing very well, with some of my highest conversion rates compared to any other traffic source.

Much More Traffic

Once we figured out how to get lots of traffic to our videos quickly, we started to do straight affiliate promotions from the videos. Using the the same techniques for getting traffic to the videos, we experienced impressive results again. For example with a new website, if we targeted a keyword phrase that gets 1300 exact match local searches a month, according to the Google Keyword Tool, it can take months to get to the top for that, depending on the competition. However with YouTube videos we’ve been able to target keywords of this search volume and get to the top in 72 hours!

For example – Mark made a video recently where he targeted a keyword phrase that got 8100 exact match searches a month, and it took 2-3 weeks to get the affiliate video to the front page of Google, where it started making affiliate commissions straight away, and made $500 in it’s first month, for a video that took 15 mins to create.

Now don’t get me wrong, you can’t just go after any old keyword and get this sort of result, as I wrongly assumed when I started doing this, as some keywords simply do not respond to video, because the rules with video is slightly different than webpages. However once we worked out what keywords to target, it then became pretty easy to fly to the top of Google with all our videos. You also need to know the tricks on how Google and Youtube rank videos, as it’s not the same as websites, and more importantly what kind of keywords and offers to promote, which we worked out by a lot of trial and error.

Needless to say, I was getting more and more interested in YouTube videos! My fastest result from time of making the video to first affiliate commission was 36 hours. That’s no lie, it was actually that fast, but it’s only happened that quick once, most take a few weeks.

The key with videos, is to make sure you know how to convert the traffic that watches your videos. Along with my buddy Mark Dickenson, who I’ve been working very closely on video marketing with for the past 12 months, we’ve tested numerous different methods of videos, and finally worked out a formula that converts very well. All I’ll say is that you need to make sure you focus on the benefits of a product, and come across as genuine in your videos, to increase conversions, otherwise the video don’t make a penny!

When I started to get such good results with my YouTube videos, I wondered why I had not got into this earlier, and I really didn’t have a good explanation to give myself. I guess I had a mental block that video was difficult and I put it in the to do list. The truth is that video marketing is actually easier than website marketing, as there are much less technical things to do. You don’t have to worry about hosting, name servers, cpanel, plugins, writing, domains, Google Panda etc… as it all happens with a simple YouTube account.

You also don’t need to have a camcorder or know anything about all those confusing video formats….MP4, MOV, FLV, WMV etc…. can’t we just have one video format for goodness sake!!! Anyway, my point is I don’t understand all that, but I don’t need to either, as with YouTube all I do is use a simple free screen recording tool that spits out a video file which easily uploads into YouTube, end of story.

The videos I’ve had most success with are simple screen recording videos, where I either have a PowerPoint presentation, of about 2 -3 slides maximum, sometimes I only have one slide and an image!

Important News – My New Product

After working out this formula for video marketing success, I decided to partner with Mark, my buddy from Seattle who I’ve been working closely on video with over the past 12 months, and create a product so I can pass on precisely how we have been able to have such great success with video marketing. The product is coming out very soon, might even be later this week, so keep your eyes peeled for that email, as we’re going to do a launch week special discount for you guys, that only lasts 7 days.

That’s all for this update folks,

Video Marketing Tips is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I recorded a webinar recently on the topic of building Authority websites and have linked to the replay below for you.

In this webinar you will learn how to build high quality websites that Google likes and rewards with consistent traffic year in year out. You’ll never have to worry about Google updates, because these kinds of sites are ones that get more traffic when Google changes things!

In the webinar our guest presenter Lisa shows how to set up and structure authority sites, explains what an authority site is and benefits of them, does a live example of planning a site, and much more. Lisa starting making over $100,000 a year from affiliate marketing way back in 2004, and now she makes over $100,000 a year just from Adsense!!

You really must build websites like this if you want to build true residual income online.

Here’s the replay:

==>Authority Website Webinar<==

Enjoy!

Authority Website Webinar is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing