In this post I want to tell you about a tool that used recently called CrazyEgg, which is a great tool, with a free 30 day trial by the way, that enables you to track where your traffic is focussing on when they visit your websites.

The more information we have about our customers, the more we can tailor our stratagies to provide what they want. There are many ways to do this, and I will be testing lots more things soon, such as surveys, which I have used before.

I have recorded a video for you below, which shows me logging into my CrazyEgg account for this website. I found the info most helpful, and will be using this tool on others sites of my now.

CrazyEgg is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I recorded a great webinar on the topic of social media and how to position your online businesses the right way in relation to this, with emphasis on Google and SEO. A common question I get asked on this topic is how does someone with an affiliate marketing site that is in a strange niche get links from Facebook etc…Tom has a tool that helps with this, which is explained in the webinar.

Some of the key things I gained from the webinar is that your sites must have social links coming into them, and relying on backlinks alone to get your sites to the top is a risky thing, as it looks unnatural for a site to get to the top with supposedly “natural links” but not get any votes from social sites.

Also I really liked the sites example Tom the presenter showed of a professional website silo, planning sites like that is key.

Below is the link to the replay for you all:

==>Webinar Replay<==

Enjoy!

Social Media SEO Webinar is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I recorded a brilliant webinar recently on the topic of keyword research, and how to uncover profitable keywords.

Keyword research is absolutely crucial for success with any website, so make sure you take the time to watch this webinar as it is packed with great tips.

Here’s the link to the replay:

==>Keyword Profits Webinar Replay<==

Enjoy!

Keyword Profits Webinar 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

By the way if you haven’t yet watched the webinar I did with Mike Ullman the other night, he presented some pretty compelling info so I highly recommend you watch that now, here’s the link to the replay: Webinar Replay

There are various ways that you can learn about your niche and become confident enough on the topic, even if you’ve never had an interest in that particular niche before, and I’ll share some tips in this post.

I think you need to be very careful when creating your content these days, and if you outsource it, which I do, make sure you spend time with your content writer to train them on how you want the content created. Trust me on this, it makes a big difference.

Niche Research Tools

As much as I dislike Twitter, I do still find some uses for it, and one of them is niche research. If you find a good Twitter account in your niche market, they will provide useful links to great resources in the niche, which can often save you time and uncover great info for you to learn from.

You do have to hunt around to find Twitter accounts that are not just spammy internet marketing ones with only links to their own stuff, however they are out there.

For example, if you’re considering going into the ‘online degrees’ niche, and in particular ‘online nursing’ then you could get some uselful info by searching for Twitter accounts, do to with nursing in general, and also online nursing programs.

Here’s one I found with a quick search: http://twitter.com/nurse_com

Find some quality Twitter accounts to follow and hopefully they’ll provide some great links to more quality info in the niche for you.

Another way to get great resources about a new niche, is to subscribe to a few good YouTube channels. I prefer watching videos to learn something myself, as I’m a big visual learner, so I like learning up about a niche by watching YouTube videos.

I just did a quick search while creating this post and found this channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/onlinedegrees/featured which is all about online degrees, this niche pays very well by the way. So go out a find a few good channels and see what they have to say about the niche and what they recommend. I’m sure you’ll get some good info pretty quickly.

An oldie but a goodie! Google Alerts is nothing new or terribly exciting, but it can be very useful. If you have never used it before, all you do is tell Google a phrase that you want it to look for new occurrences of as they happen, and send you an email. Setting up alerts is very easy to do, and is a great way to get info about your niche emailed to you.

What I do is set up a folder in Outlook and get all the emails from my alerts sent directly to that folder, and I check it out in my own time.

Forums

Most good niches have a forum these days, and this is where the target market of the niche hangs out and discusses what happening, so it makes sense to check them out and see what people are talking about.

Magazines

Just today I was out with my family at the local mall, and I saw a magazine that was in one of the niche markets I’m building a site in right now. So without delay I bought it and have already started ready the articles and in particular looking at who’s advertising in it.

It’s really important to know your niche well if you want to build an authority style website, as not only will this help you get more conversions, but people will also share your site around and you’ll collect links naturally too. So in closing, make sure you know your niche and spend some time researching it well.

Tools for Researching Your Niche is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Hi everyone,

I recorded a really cool webinar with two friends of mine Mike Ullman and Adam Franklin. These guys are top class marketers and really know there stuff. They  have produced hundreds of revenue-generating websites and been marketing online for years and years. I highly encourage you to watch this webinar as it has some very important info in it.

The webinar is 2.5 hours long and focuses on how to thrive in internet marketing with all the changes that are happening with Google, and will be continuing to happen in 2012 and beyond. A lot of marketers don’t know this stuff, so make sure you watch this and stay one step ahead of the crowd.

Here’s the link to the replay for you to watch:

==>Webinar Replay<==

Enjoy!

Webinar – SEO, Traffic & Panda 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

In January I have lined up quite a few live coaching webinars for us, and one of them is with a keyword expert, so look out for that email. In this post though, I’ll be discussing the concept of building sites for the user, in these post Google Panda times we now operate in.

I’ve been and still am a big fan of the ‘Buyer Keyword’, for the simple reason that if you get someone to your website that is ready to buy, then you stand a much higher chance of converting that person into a commission. However you do need to give more thought to the kind of keywords you choose for your SEO websites these days, and can’t rely solely on buyer phrases only.

The reason for this is, if your site is built only on buyer keywords, yes you will be getting laser targeting traffic to your site, however unless done very carefully, the overall user experience on that site can be a bad one. In order to explain this, let me first provide some examples of classic buyer keywords: product names, model numbers, how to phrases, buy XYZ, XYZ review…

When people search in Google using these types of very specific keywords, they are much further along the buying process than someone who searches using very broad phrases such as “plasmas”. However if all your pages are built on these types of keywords and nothing else, then your site will not be able to provide a great user experience. For example if you have an affiliate marketing website on baby strollers, and all your pages are just targeting keywords which are stroller names, this might be an ok site IF you have good content of course. However I think a better site, especially post Google Panda, is to have a more balanced selection of keywords and interlink between this content as much as possible.

For example I would have pages targeting: “safest baby strollers” “most popular baby strollers” “compare baby strollers” “what to look for in a baby stroller” “baby strollers under $200″ “jogging baby strollers” etc….Even if you’re not trying to rank all of these pages, you are providing good content to improve the user experience on your site.

By doing this, you’re more likely to collect social votes from your users from Google +1, Facebook, Twitter etc and you’ll also collect natural links from various places…and Google will also view your site as higher quality because you’re not only creating sites for search engines but for the user, which is what Google wants.

As I just mentioned, some of the pages you won’t bother doing off page SEO on, however the buyer keywords you should, and also the keywords that might not be considered classic buyer phrases, as often these keywords are not as hard to rank for and will increase the scope of traffic you can get to your sites.

When choosing keywords for SEO websites, always ask yourself when doing your research “is there enough diversity in the keywords for me to create a site that will allow me to provide a good user experience, while also getting enough traffic to be profitable”. By thinking this way with your planning, you’ll have no problems with Google, as you are essentially giving them what they want.

Another simple rule of thumb is to ask yourself if you think you can create at least 3 different categories in your site, as this will provide diversity in the content, assuming you have a few articles in each category.

Also don’t forget to follow the other guidelines I discussed in my SEO Quality Score post, so you set up your sites the right way. It’s true that Google have made some big changes in 2011 with the Panda update, and what most people don’t know is that Panda is an ongoing thing. Google keep rolling out more Panda updates every few weeks. Each update Google learns more and gets closer and closer to filtering out the low quality sites from their listings, until they get what they want, which is high quality sites that provide a good user experience.

I know they have quite some way to go in order to get to this goal, as I still see some pretty terrible sites at the top, but don’t be fooled by this, as Google are not dumb and they will refine Google Panda until they have it just right. A friend of mine, who I’m getting on a webinar in the first week of January, is an expert at Google Panda, easily the most clued up person I know on this topic, and he’ll be providing some brilliant training on this topic for us, plus showing how to build sites that Google loves.

One thing that he said which I found very interesting was “some people falsely think Google Panda was all about attacking affiliate and Adsense sites, but this is not true. Panda is about filtering low quality sites, and sometimes this can look like Google is targeting affiliate and Adsense sites because the highest amount of low quality sites are often these types of sites.”

Hope you all have a nice end to your year and find some time to spend with family and friends. I’ll be in touch in the first week of January with some live webinar coaching.

Choosing Keywords for SEO Websites is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz on the blog about drop shipping products as a means of making money online after Matt explained how it works and how to source products for drop shipping. Seeing as so many of you are intrigued by the idea of drop shipping, I thought I would cover some of the pros and cons of using it as an online income stream.

What is Drop Shipping?

Matt’s already done a great job of explaining what drop shipping is, but just in case you need a reminder, drop shipping works like this: You find a supplier offering drop shipping services and set up an account which enables you to sell their products. Once you have your account setup, the drop shipper will provide you with photos and product descriptions for the items you wish to sell and list them on eBay, another marketplace or your website.

After you make a sale and receive payment, you pay the drop ship supplier their asking price, keep the profits for yourself, and the supplier ships the item direct to your buyer.
Sounds like a dream, right? Well, it is, but only when things go smoothly. Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of drop shipping.

The Pros of Drop Shipping

It requires little or no cash to get started. Unlike other forms of product sourcing such as buying from a wholesaler or manufacturer, which often requires a minimum spend of hundreds or thousands of dollars on a single order, with drop shipping, you only need to pay your supplier when you get paid by your customer.

This is a huge benefit for sellers who are starting out on a shoestring budget, or who want to see results before they commit to selling products online. Shipping and handling is taken care of. The logistics of packing and shipping items to buyers can be a bit of a drag and is certainly a time consuming part of the selling process. But with drop shipping, it is taken care of by the supplier so you can put away your bubble wrap and let them do the work for you!

Test product markets for free. Expanding your product range and entering new niche markets is a fantastic way to increase profits. However, diving into a new market without first dipping your toes in by testing the market is risky! Even large scale online retailers who buy in bulk wholesale still use the drop ship method to try selling new items and test how the buyer market reacts and determine whether a new product will be profitable or not.
Really, drop shipping is like real-life market research without any risk!

No storage space required! When you drop ship items, there is no need to clog up your garage with products. Because your supplier sends items direct to you buyer, you don’t even see the products which is a bonus, but, this can also cause a few problems….

The Cons of Drop Shipping

Lack of control over the post-sale process. Because items get sent direct from the supplier to customers, you don’t get a chance to inspect the item’s quality or ensure that it is delivered in a timely manner.  The major drawback here is that if something goes wrong, even if it’s not your fault, you will could still get negative feedback placed on your eBay account, or an angry email from a frustrated buyer.

It’s more costly than wholesale product sourcing.  All the service that drop ship suppliers offer comes at a price. After all, they bear all the risk and it takes them time to process orders and package and ship items. Generally, drop shippers add around $2-$5 to items they drop ship, compared to items they sell at wholesale.

This is a significant drawback for sellers on eBay which is the most competitive marketplace in the world. All it takes is one seller offering the same product as you which they have bought at wholesale price, and you have been undercut and will find it difficult to make sales.

Many drop shippers bypass this issue by only selling unique niche items, rather than attempting to drop ship competitive items like iPods or LCD TVs. One word: Backorders. Backorders occur when you sell an item to a customer and then discover that your supplier is sold out! In this scenario, you are left having to tell your buyer that the item is unavailable (not ideal!) or asking them if they mind waiting 1-2 weeks, or longer, until the item is in stock again. Most customers aren’t happy when these issues arise.

Luckily, many good, trusted drop shippers have inventory management software which helps them manage their stock levels. This lessens or eliminates backorders and makes drop shipping a lot easier for buyers, sellers and the suppliers themselves.

For instant access to the SaleHoo supplier directory with over 8,000 verified and trusted suppliers, including drop ship suppliers, check out SaleHoo.com. Got questions about drop shipping? Feel free to ask anything by leaving a comment below!

The Truth About Drop Shipping is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I think the most important thing to start doing, is develop a profile on the major social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google +1. This is something that I haven’t done much myself, and to be honest I haven’t had time to do it, and haven’t really seen the need to, until now that is. I don’t like Twitter myself, I see as a stupid tool, and although I used it for about 6 months a few years ago, I just couldn’t see the point in wasting my time with it, as the returns I got back from it were virtually non-existent.

So why am I saying to get involved with social sites like Twitter then? Well Google and Bing have said that they do pay attention to Tweets as SEO ranking signals, and the more authority a user has at Twitter the more weight placed on their recommendations. Also the number of times something gets retweeted is a factor. So if nothing else, from a search ranking point of view, I think Twitter can be helpful.

As for Facebook, I think it has more benefit than just a signal to search engines, as once you build a presence on Facebook things can be shared in a viral nature, which can be a nice traffic source for your sites.

When it comes to Google +1, it is still early days, however it doesn’t take a genius to work out that considering Google owns this, they will most likely be paying attention to what happens, and use the data as a search ranking factor. I assume the more followers you have in Google +1, the more authority Google will place on your account, and probably pay attention to links you recommend.

Matt Cutts, one of Google’s head engineers for search says: “When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality,” and also “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings.” The thing that I can’t work, and was also brought up by someone commenting below too, is how Google can access the info from Facebook and Twitter, as I’m pretty sure Twitter is no follow, and Facebook blocks Google. Perhaps Google reads the social vote plugin info, or maybe someone can comment below and shed some light on this for us all.

Social Interaction

It makes sense that if these social sites are becoming more of a search signal to Google, then the more networking you do at these sites, the more friends you will acquire and they will start recommending your stuff, which will only further increase your traffic and search signals coming off these sites.

So with that said, once you have a profile on the social sites, start to interact with other people, and share their content, so you can build contacts.

The one issue that I face however, when it comes to all this social media stuff, is the time it takes to continually be interacting and adding content. However this again just goes to show why managing less sites, and focusing on quality is key, after all Google made some big changes this year, known as Panda, which was all about quality. One thing I will have to do is hire a worker to manage my social profiles, otherwise it will not be practical for me.

Affiliate Marketing & Social Media

I know a lot of my readers are into affiliate marketing, so I want to address a few common questions that I know people will have.

Depending on what style of affiliate site you focus on, you may have different questions in regard to social media. In particular, what I mean is if you only focus on small thin sites, and prefer to build lots of sites like this in various niches, then you’ll probably wondering how you can have a social profile at Facebook etc…around these types of sites. The best answer I can give is, you’ll struggle, and may want to adjust your strategy and build fewer sites, with high quality content, so you can focus on becoming an authority in your niche.

This way you can build authority on the social sites and interlink everything. Not only that, but if your sites are authorities and visitors who use them actually like them and find them useful, then they will be more inclined to share them from their profile at the social sites through the social button on your sites. You don’t have to big giant sites, just make sure they are quality.

I haven’t done this myself, as I haven’t needed to, and to be honest my affiliate sites do great, but I’m thinking ahead now as there could come a day when it might be hard to get top rankings if you don’t have any social media authority or aren’t attracting links from other people’s profiles at these sites. So with that said, I think it’s a good idea to think of your online business as more than just your websites, and rather a network of your sites and social profiles.

I have arranged a free coaching webinar with a social media experts for early January for us all, and this guy is a gun at all this stuff, as his entire business model is around social media, so we can all grill him for everything he knows. I’ll be sending out the webinar details the first week of January if all goes well!

If you liked this post, I would really appreciate it if you can help me spread the word by sharing it on Facebook, Google +1 and Twitter, using the links below, and as always I love hearing from you, so comment away!

My Social Media Internet Marketing Strategy is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing