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

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

So naturally that got my attention, and then I noticed I had a domain up for renewal, so headed over to Namecheap.com to renew it, and low and behold another warning pops up with a strong message to STOP CENSORSHIP ON THE INTERNET!!!

I then decided this thing is serious, so I better read up about it. I’m not that clued up on this topic yet, and I’m not trying to pretend I am, but I bet there are a lot of my subscribers that are, so I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU BELOW IN THE COMMENTS. Let’s open this thing up for discussion in the comments and hear what everyone has to say.

From what I gather, this bill works in favour of large corporations such as media giants in Hollywood, allowing them to protect the illegal piracy of their products, even from sites overseas, classic example being www.thepiratebay.com.

However most of these companies don’t understand the way this bill will affect the internet and the way we all interact on it. The reason for this is, if I user of YouTube uploads a video that is in breach of copyright material from a company, then under current DMCA notices, Youtube must act and contact the user about the issue and they much either take it down or take legal action back.

However SOPA is different, in that it allows companies claiming this breach, to stop US companies supporting these ‘flagged’ sites from operating. Google wouldn’t be allowed to show flagged sites in it’s listings, payment processors like Paypal would not be allowed to let these sites transact, so essentially if a corporation claims you are in breach of SOPA, they can cut you off almost overnight, this is scary and gives them a lot of control over what happens online…to much control!

Here is what YouTube says: “YouTube would just go dark immediately,” Google public policy director Bob Boorstin said at a conference last month. “It couldn’t function.”

Tech giants Google and Facebook both lodged complaints against this bill in November last year, and it’s having an effect, but will it be enough, as time is running out. Also these tech companies are not the only ones, as I said Wikipedia and Namecheap are just two more examples of companies that are strongly opposed to this bill. Any site that has a lot of user generated content, which is why the web has had this social media explosion in recent times, is at risk with this SOPA bill.

Here’s a video on this:

Like I said, I’m no expert on this topic and I don’t intend to be, but as much as I can understand companies wanting to stop piracy of their products, I think this SOPA bill is not the way to go about it. It will put even more power into the hands of corporations, who tend to do abuse power when they have it. I would be pretty upset if YouTube and other user generated sites could no longer function.

Anyway, I want to hear from you, as I know there are a lot of smart people on my email list, who will know a lot more about this than I do. Perhaps I got it wrong, perhaps not, so let’s open it up for discussion below!

Also if you are a US citizen, then have your say, all you have to do is contact your local government member and tell them what you think. Wikipedia is even making this really easy to do by linking to all the contacts for you. It’s as simple as a quick phone call and or email.

UPDATE: Wolfgang in his comment below just showed me this link: SOPA , however this does mean this bill is over, we need to be very aware of this thing, and by the way Godaddy supports it….hmmmm glad I shop at www.namecheap.com

Thanks

Matt

SOPA – The Death of Free Speech Online is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

This is a clever marketing ploy, and you’ll notice it’s often the products they advertise on T.V. that are these “loss leaders”. Anyway, you might be asking what this has to do with online marketing, so let me explain now. Although not exactly the same as the ‘Loss Leader’ model, what I refer to as ‘lateral keywords’ is very similar. A lateral keyword is one that is closely related to another keyword, being in the same family of keywords, almost like cousins you could say.

Here’s an example. Take these three sets of keyword phrases:

“Domains” and “Hosting”

“Dog Collars” and “Dog Training”

“How to stop a baby crying” and “baby clothes”.

It’s pretty clear that the two keywords in each set are related to each other, the first one “websites” is the common theme and the second group “baby”, and the last one with “dog” being the common denominator.

So if we look at the first one, if you wanted to sell hosting as an affiliate, which is very competitive, you could try and get people to your site on ‘domains’ related keywords instead, as they will need hosting at some point. The same for ‘dog collars’, you might not make much money selling dog collars, but a certain percentage of people looking for dog collars may well need dog training.

Perhaps a closer relationship might be ‘dog muzzle’ which someone could be looking for if they had a problem with their dog biting people. These people would most likley be interested in a dog training course, especially if the ad on your ‘dog muzzle’ page was targeted to ‘stop dog biting training’.

Keywords for Websites

So when it comes to keywords you’re choosing for your websites, often a good strategy I have used and continue to use, is to look for keywords that might be much easier to rank for and hence get traffic to my sites on, even if that keyword won’t directly make me great money, because I know that this visitor will be interested in other products/services I’m promoting on the site. So I’m getting people to my sites from one keyword set, but then pushing them to the product/service I really want them to take notice of.

The advantage of doing this, is that if you find a lot of the keywords in your niche are super competitive, or there simply isn’t enough search volume for your products, then this technique can make it easier for you to get more targeted traffic. I call this technique using “Lateral Keywords”.

It shares some similarities with the “Loss Leader” model that supermarkets use, which I mentioned above, because we’re using one thing to get people to take action at another.

What I encourage you to do is think of keywords for your niche that your target market is typing into Google, but that you might not have thought of before, and ask yourself if someone typing these keywords into Google would also be interested in what you’re really wanting to sell on your site.

You can do this with websites and also Youtube videos as well. Here’s another example for the IM niche. If someone was searching for “clickbank gravity” I could do a video on that or blog post on that topic, as I know that this is someone who knows about affiliate marketing and would be the sort of person who might like to be on my email list. So although I’m not selling them anything, I’m thinking laterally and widening my scope of keywords to grow my list.

Using a Blog on Your Site

Another way you can target these lateral keywords, is by installing a blog on your site. This is more for ecommerce stores, but I also see people using blogs in this manner for info sites. With the blog you target keywords that are these ‘lateral ones’ and direct people to your money pages from the blog posts. Very simple, but highly effective if done well.

Without giving away my niche, I’m planning a lateral keyword approach for a new drop shipping store I’m building right now and have done this for many affiliate marketing sites also. With the store, I’ll be targeting 100′s of keywords that are not really what I want to sell, but are in the same family as the products I do really want to sell in my store. So I know I can massively wider my reach by doing this. I really don’t care if I make profit on those other keywords, my main goal is getting this related traffic to my store.

Hope you found this tip useful, if you did I would really appreciate it if you would share this post around via the social buttons below!

Regards

Matt Carter

Thinking Outside the Box & the Loss Leader Model is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Essentially it works very much like the Google keyword tool, where you search for a specific keyword phrase and it provides the exact, phrase and broad match stats for the phrase. The results are ok, but there is clearly not as much data for Youtube videos yet, but I think there will be soon.

The first question that I asked myself was, “how do I use this tool for marketing?”

The obvious answer is to look at the search volume for the keywords and develop a video around something that gets decent search volume. That’s all well and good, but from what I know if still doesn’t tell you how easily you will rank your video in Youtube.

After looking at the Youtube keyword data, I decided to look for videos over at Youtube by searching on these phrases, and in particular I was looking for results where the videos didn’t look like they were optimized for that exact phrase.

At this stage Youtube seems to be mainly ranking videos internally, ie. not in Google, by the “on page” factors, such as the title and decsription, although I assume there is more to it than just this.

So at this early stage I assume if you can find keywords in Youtube that don’t have videos specifically optimized for the phrase, then these may be ones you could target with you videos.

For example if you find in the Youtube keyword tool that the phrase “lose weight fast” has a decent search volume, and then when you search for “lose weight fast” in Youtube and find no videos that are purposely targeting that exact phrase, then this may be an opening to target.

I am no expert at this, but that is my assumptions at this stage. I’m interested to know what you all think, so please comment below and let’s share some ideas about how to use this tool.

Youtube Keyword Tool is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

When you further dissect that site you will notice that most of it’s traffic is not free SEO traffic, and in fact a large amount of it is paid traffic from media buys.

This site actually had an ad on a large news site, I think it was CNN from memory, and must have been getting a huge amount of traffic, and what’s more one can only assume it was working to be advertising on such a busy site.

So what I want to talk about today is alternative traffic sources, being Media Buys.

There are a number of huge ad networks that you can use, a few are BuySellAds and Traffic Junky, theses sites provide a service for you to locate relevant sites for you to place your banner on, of which you pay for the clicks/impressions. The key is target traffic that is most relevant for your niche and track things carefuly.

I’m not a pro at this by any means, but from doing a fair bit of research into this and reverse engineering sites like the one I discussed in the last post, I can see the huge potential for this as another traffic source.

Whenever paying for your traffic it’s important to test and track so you know if it’s working for you, and improve things if need be.

Another  important thing to do is check the demographics and other stats for a site before jumping in an slapping your banner up. To do this you can got to Compete and Quantcast, which provide valuable insight into a sites statistics for you to review.

It really is important to focus on conversions when you are doing anything with websites, but especially when you are paying for the traffic. With that said I would not buy traffic through media channels like this to send to pages that are reviews of products, as this is too specific for traffic of this nature.

What I’m going to be doing is sending this traffic to a new site I’m building now, where the pages target keywords that are more general in nature, such as “best care insurance” etc…this way the content will be more relevant to more of the traffic and will convert much better. I can also change the offer that I send traffic to at any stage aswell.

Short but sweet today folks,

Matt Carter

Media Traffic Sources is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I recently caught up with a friend of mine and top marketer Ryan, we had a skype chat and he told me how to buy established websites and why it’s such a good idea.

I’ll be honest and say I’ve never done this before myself, but after talking with him I was amazed at how profitable this can be, and how it can help accelerate you into a niche. Like I said I’m no expert, so I’ll be organizing a webinar with my friend so he can teach you himself, but for this post I want to share with you some points I learned from him.

Why Buy Established Websites?

The first question is why would you want to buy an established website in the first place anyway? Well there are many reasons for this, and essentially you can buy anything you want. For example if you want to get into a niche, you can look at the sites ranking in Google for buyer keywords, and in particular look for the sites that need a some work, yet what they have going for them is their rankings.

What you can do is offer to buy their site and then you can fix up the site and you instantly have Google rankings for this niche!

Another thing you might want to do is buy a site for the email list it has collected. If you know that you could monetize an email list pretty easily, and  regular leads are coming into this site all the time, then this can be another great reason to buy established websites.

Both these things are a little harder for the person selling their site to put a value on too, which means you can get a good bargain for it!

You can of course buy a website that is already making money too, but  from what I gathered after the conversation with my friend on this topic, you can get better deals buying sites that have not yet reached their potential, and you can see clear ways to improve on them and as I’ll explain below you can offer a lot less to buy a site that is not making money yet, or atleast not much, but has ‘potential’.

Another cool trick I learned was that you can head over to the Clickbank market place and look for sites in a niche that has low gravity and preferably that has some rankings in Google, yet might have a poorly

done sales letter etc…stuff that you can improve on.

These sites are prime candidates for doing up and fast tracking yourself into the niche. Especially if the website has been around in Google for 12 months or more, as it makes the SEO much easier.

What Websites Should You Sell?

This next point is something I found fasinating, I asked my friend about an affiliate marketing site I owned and was considering selling.

The site makes about $2000 a month and is rankings for a product name in position one in Google.

I thought this would be a great one to sell, however my friend explained that although the site was good for cash, it would not be that great for selling.

I was kind of amazed, and then he explained that there would not be that much room for improvement or diversifying with such a tightly focussed site which is making it’s money by ranking for a product name. It if has been ranking for a general buyer keyword in the niche then it would be a different story, as the potential buyer has more scope with the site.

It made sense to me when he said that, after all their would be little room for improvement, so I have decided not to sell this site and instead keep collecting the cash.

How to Buy Established Websites?

You can also look for sites for sale over at http://www.flippa.com a website auction place, but I was informed that this is not the best place to buy, but is better to sell here as auctions tend to push prices up. So from what I know you are better to look for sites privately by contacting website owners yourself.

I don’t want to go into all the secrets I learned from my friend as I have a webinar planned with him next month, where he will go into more detail on how to do this like a pro. He told me one site he bought recently for $650 and three weeks later after tweaking a few things sold it for $3500, not bad at all, so stayed tuned for more about that.

That’s all from me.

Matt Carter

Buy Established Websites is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Amazon Widget

I hope you like using this Amazon widget, as I am using it on a lot of my Amazon affiliate marketing sites now. I think it works best on the home page though, I haven’t used it on any of the others deep pages in my sites, but it mighe work, just have to see what looks best on your sites.

I’ll be in touch soon with some more tips.

Thanks for stopping by,

Matt Carter

Amazon Carousel Widget is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I watched a video created by Matt Cutts, the head of the Google anti-spam team, which I have embedded below for you.

The focus of the video is about a recent change to the Google algorithm, and in particular the way they rank pages for the long tail keyword phrases. I’m interested to hear what you all think about this.

However what I think may possible be the outcome, is sites that Google see as not authority sites will no longer find it so easy to rank for long tail keyword phrases.

What is an authority affiliate marketing site? Well I think it’s one that has a substantial amount of information on it, and is regularly updated with new content. Perhaps the sites that will be affected the most are small sites with a handful of pages, that are solely focusing on getting easy traffic through ranking for specific long tail phrases only.

Form what Matt Cutts says in this video, I think that Google will rank authority sites for long tail phrases even when they are not trying to target the keyword directly. I realize this happens already to some degree, but perhaps it will be more apparent.

So what should you do?

Well I think the key thing to take from this video, is that it’s important to build quality sites, that demonstrate that you’re an authority on the topic, and avoid creating fly by night flimsy sites, that only target a few long tail phrases.

What do you guys think?

Matt Carter

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

Having a varied readership to this blog, some people being complete newbies and other having more experienced, I think it’s a good idea to first explain what Outsourcing is. Outsourcing is where you pay someone else to do tasks for your online business that you don’t need to be doing, so that you can move your overall operation forward much faster.

What to Outsource?

The first thing you need to decide is what to outsource. Now this will vary, depending on what marketing approach your pursue in your business. However some of the main things that I outsource are link building and article writing and spinning. I also outsource graphic design too, but this is not on a regular basis.

When to Outsource?

Often people ask me if they should outsource jobs for their business straight away, and my answer to this is “no”. The reason I say this, is because in order to get the best result from your outsourcing, you need to know how to do the tasks that you want outsourced first.

Before I outsource any link building or writing job, I always make sure that I have done the task myself. Before I hired any staff to work for me, I did everything myself. I wrote and spun all my own articles, built all my own links and websites.

There’s two reasons I do this. The first one being, that if I have done the task myself, I know how long it takes to complete, and number two, I know what kind of results to expect. By doing this I know what is reasonable to expect from my outsource staff.

Not only that though, you can also offer advice and solutions to your workers if they are finding the task difficult, as you’ll have experience doing it, and be aware of the common difficulties and how to overcome these. I also advise people to wait until they are making money online before they outsource any tasks.

When you are starting out in Affiliate Marketing, it is important to keep your costs low and your profits high. So hold off on the outsourcing until you can see money coming in, and it doesn’t have to be much, what is more important is that you know how you did it and could easily make more money if you replicated what you did.

One lucky sale is not really a good indication that you have worked out a good system to replicate.

How to Outsource?

Once you are ready to get some outsource staff working for you, I recommend that you go over to Odesk, as they have a huge number of workers for you to choose from, and they can work for you on a per project basis or ongoing. That link to Odesk is an affiliate link  by the way, however I am a user of this service so believe me it’s quality.

I HIGHLY recommend that you look for people in the Philippines, as my experience with workers from here is very good. However make sure you read their background information carefully and select people right for the job.

When you have shortlisted a few people that you think will be good for the job, what I recommend you do next, is set up a 30mins test for them to complete, so you can assess how competent they are and how well the follow instructions.

One of the best free tools to help you communicate with your workers is Jing. I did a post on Jing recently and I recommend you read that to learn more about it: Using Jing.

Also I always request that my outsource staff be available on skype, so that if I need to contact them with changes or feedback, I can do so easily.

My closing outsourcing tip is to make sure you check the work of your outsource staff early on. Don’t make the mistake of waiting until they have done 20 hrs for you, and then review their work. I’m only telling you from experience, because I have had a few disasters in my time. So make sure after the first day of work, that you get them to send you what they did.

I hope these outsourcing tips for Internet Marketing were helpful!

Regards

Matt Carter

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