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

As you all may be aware I am releasing a brand new article spinning and rewriting tool, plus my Backlink Blueprint course on April the 27th at 3pm EST, so mark it in your calendar now!!

As part of the lead up to this I have been running a contest for the best comment on the pre-launch blog. Thanks to all those who participated, I had nearly 500 comments in total and over 5000 downloads of the free SEO report I was giving out.

The lucky winners have been notified and they are….

Leiif, Dwight, Anna, Brad, David…and I squeezed one more in with Ray, as I was feeling generous!

Thank you all for your comments, I greatly appreciate it, and remember the launch date is 27th April and the first 300 people get a special discount.

Thanks again,

Chat soon,

Matt

Rapid Rewriter Launch and Winners! is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Recently I caught up with a friend of mine and he shared with me some really great ideas on outsourcing my business, among other things.

However one really cool thing he showed me, which I was aware of already, but had never taken the time to look into, is Jing, a website video marketing tool!

In this post I am going to discuss why I now like Jing so much and how it might be of use to you also. The best thing is that it is totally FREE!! (got to love that)

After installing Jing and playing around with it for a few minutes, I realized how awesome this free tool was, and started thinking of all the ways I could use it.

My friend who told me about Jing (an outsourcing guru) explained that he was using this tool to communicate with his outsource staff in the Philippines….and that is definitely one of the ways I will be using it also, however there are some other cool things you can do with it too.

Outsourcing

First off lets talk about how you could use this tool in your outsourcing, and if you are not yet at the stage where you are hiring workers in the Philippines to work on your business yet, then when you are, this will be helpful (keep in mind that you can hire people for cheap rates in the Philippines).

Whenever I am training someone to do a task for me, such as building links or using a new software tool, I always record a video of myself doing the task. Then I save this video in my training videos library and send it to my worker.

However up until recently I have been using Camtasia, which is a paid tool, that records my screen. Camtasia is awesome, however Jing (made by the same company) does the job you need for free!!

Not only that though you can also take screen shots and Jing has simple but effective editing tools that allows you to draw straight onto the screen shot. This way you can comment on what you are viewing, and send that over to your workers for feedback too!

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Video Marketing

Most of you have probably been through my 12 part (actually about 14 now) free video marketing course on internet marketing. If you haven’t then you can sign up for it in the top right of this blog now.

The response I get from this free website video marketing course is outstanding, and the number of leads I have gained from it is mind blowing! I don’t say these things so that you think I’m cool, I say it to encourage you guys to do similar things yourself using Jing. People love video, especially when it’s free.

However I realize that not every niche will work with the style of videos I created, as they are for the Internet Marketing niche. However you can just as easily create  a slide presentation with great information for people in any niche. Really all you need to do is turn your emails into slides, add images and record it all with Jing!

This approach does require an email list to market too, but you could also you these Jing videos on your sites or blogs too I suppose, but like I said I am new to Jing myself so haven’t tried that yet.

One thing I have seen people do though, is create free PDF’s focusing on good content, and in the PDF have links to Jing videos, which I also thought was a cool idea. If you made a great PDF and it got passed around, of course making sure you had a link to a squeeze page in it too, then it could work really well!

Simplicity!

What I also like about Jing is that it so easy to use. Once you have created your video or screen shot, all you need to do is click a button and it is automatically uploaded for you and they give you a URL that you can send out for people to watch. This takes all the hard work out of having to upload it yourself!

Well that was just my thoughts on why and how I would use Jing. If you have some others ideas why not share them in the comments below, and if you liked this post please give it a Tweet using the Tweet icon at the top of the post.

Oh yeah and to give credit to my buddy who told me how to use Jing, it was John Jonas who I did a webinar on outsourcing with recently, which was a pretty awesome webinar with more awesome tips like this too. The recording of that is here if you want to watch it:

==>Outsourcing Webinar Replay<==

That’s all from me, enjoy using Jing in your website video marketing ventures and what ever other cool ideas you have to use it!.

==>Click here to download Jing<==

Matt Carter

Put a Little ‘Jing’ in Your Life is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing