We talked about some really interesting aspects of affiliate marketing, and in this post I will be sharing with you one thing I found most helpful.

When you’re starting an affiliate website, and your intention is driving free traffic from the search engines, it’s vital that you plan the site out properly.

The most important aspect to get right is choosing the keywords that the pages of your site will target. Most of you will know what kind of keywords convert best and have a rough idea of the kind of competition you are capable of going after.

However I want to discuss another aspect of targeting keywords, that will allow you to get much more traffic in the long term, and ensure that Google loves your sites too!

OK let’s start with an example. If you have a site that sells mountain bikes, you might be targeting a particular model of bike as your keyword, such as “cell XC-1“. I haven’t checked if that phrase has any search volume, but it doesn’t matter as it’s for example purposes only.

If you were targeting “cell XC-1“, you would write an article about the bike and make sure it is monetized well and then go ahead and start getting some links to that page, so you can get top search engine rankings.

That’s nothing new to most of you I’m sure, however let me explain how you can make sure you are targeting that phrase for its true value.

When doing your keyword research look for phrases that are the longer tail version of  the phrase you are targeting. Taking this example, with the phrase “cell XC-1“, I could also potentially target “cell XC-1 cross country” or “cell XC-1 cross country mountain bike” or even “buy “cell XC-1“.

As you can see in the examples above, the core phrase of “cell XC-1” is contained in all the variations of the phrase.The longer phrase variations will have less traffic, however I will explain in moment what I am getting at.

Before I continue to explain though, I first want to explain the concept of “natural looking” link building. It’s no secret that Google prefers all link building to be built naturally, which is where people just decide to link to you. However in reality, if you rely on this you’ll struggle to get top search engine rankings.

So of course, everybody builds link themselves. However that doesn’t mean that when you are building links that you shouldn’t try and mirror what natural link building looks like as closely as possible.

One way to do this is to have variation in your anchor text that makes up your links. I don’t go over board on the variation, however I think 20% of the time, if you have a slight variation in your links it’s a good idea.

Here’s the clincher, when you are adding this variation, you should use the longer version of your keyword phrase, with the original core keyword phrase embedded inside it, just like I showed in the examples above.

There are two major advantages of doing this, the first is that your links will look more natural to Google because your link anchor texts are varied, which is good for your search engine rankings, and also you’ll start to rank for these longer tail phrases eventually and get more traffic from them too!

But that’s not all, because you are still using phrases with the core keyword phrase in them, your rankings will still be boosted for that core phrase also.

I did this recently when I has starting an affiliate site, but I did it the other way around, and I went for the longer version of the phrases first, and when I got rankings for them, I then got my link builders to start building links with the shorter tail version of the keyword.

The cool thing about this was, because I had been building links on the long tail phrase that contained the exact shorter tail phrase inside it, I was already on page 2 for the shorter tail phrase anyway!

So when you are planning an affiliate site, or any site for that matter, where your intention is to drive free traffic from the search engines, it is a good idea to add variation to your links, using longer tail versions of the core keyword you are targeting for that page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the beginning of this post I mentioned that I caught up with two of my internet marketing buddies, both absolute experts at marketing online, and the great news is that one of them is giving away a free report for a limited time where he provides a detailed plan (with video) of his best affiliate marketing tricks.

I encourage you to grab it now, here’s the link:  ==>Free Report<==

Enjoy!

Google Wonder Wheel is free and allows you to enter a root keyword and then drill down deeper and uncover more possibilities as you follow it’s branches.

In the image below you can see that I’ve searched on the phrase “finding keywords” the topic of this post. Initially Google Wonder Wheel shows me two main branches to choose from, one relating to ‘choosing’ keywords and the other related to ‘research’ of keywords.

I decided to look for words that related to ‘research’ and so I click on the right side and expand this branch out. As you can see now the Wonder Wheel shows me a whole lot of new ideas for keywords and even more branches to dive deeper into.

I then look through each branch of the new wheel and see what keywords I can uncover that I may never have thought about before. Once I find either a broad category or even a specific keyword phrase, I can then go over to the Google Keyword tool and see what the search volume is like for these new potential keyword phrases.

In the example below I found a keyword phrase “finding long tail keywords” from the Wonder Wheel, that suites this very post for my blog, that I’m writing now. All I need to do next is check how difficult this phrase would be to potentially go after with SEO, and if it’s OK I can target it.

For the phrase “finding long tail keywords” the competition isn’t very hard, with no one really specifically targeting it on the front page of Google, and it gets about 200 exact match searches a month. Therefore I will add this phrase into my meta tags for this post also and see if I can drive some traffic from it.

When you are blogging or building a standard website, targeting additional keywords is this manner is a good idea to broaden your reach and the Google Wonder Wheel is a trusty companion for finding keywords!

I try my best to provide quality content for my readers in this blog, so if you like my posts, I would greatly appreciate it if you leave a comment and use the Twitter and/or bookmarking buttons to spread the word!

Thanks

Matt

I hope enjoyed this backlink trick!

As I mention in the video it is important to create a diverse backlinking structure for your sites, as this looks more natural to Google and the other major search engines and will help you get higher search engine rankings.

Also getting links from government and education domains is also valuable, so do some hunting and create as many of this high quality backlinks  as you can.

One thing to keep in mind when building this links, is that if they are on a PR 0 page, as long as it is in the forum thread itself it should be fine, in that your links will be discovered by Google eventually, however it’s not a bad idea to send some bookmark links or even RSS to a PR 0 page to help get the search engines attention quickly.

Just remember that this backlink trick is one of many that I use, so don’t reply on this trick alone but instead add it to the  mix and keep building links, as the people that are patient and consistent with backlinking are the ones that win in the end, it reminds me of the tortoise and the hare children story I read at school!

Enjoy!

]]> http://mattsmarketingblog.com/backlinks/backlink-trick/feed/ 107 http://mattsmarketingblog.com/graphics/creating-graphics-for-websites/ http://mattsmarketingblog.com/graphics/creating-graphics-for-websites/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:26:05 +0000 Matt Carter http://mattsmarketingblog.com/?p=1087 I have had a few people email me recently asking about great free ways for creating graphics for websites, so I’m going to tell you about the best free graphics tool, which a friend of mine recently put me onto.

The tool is called Pixlr, and it is an online tool that requires no installation at all and is not that difficult to use either. I think it’s a great way to crop images, and create website header graphics and all sorts of other things that are needed when you are building an online business.

Now I’m no graphic design whiz by any stretch of the imagination, but I have used a number of free graphics tool over the years when working on my sites, and this one seems to be the easier to use.

Below is a screen shot for you:

(Click here for Pixlr)

It pretty much has most of the functions of expensive graphics programs like Photoshop, and for what most internet marketers need this little thing is perfect.

I like to have graphics in my posts on this blog as much as possible to bring it alive, and I also use advertising banners in my affiliates websites too. However sometimes I find that merchants don’t have banners to use, for whatever reason, so this is where creating graphics for websites can come in handy, and using a free tool like Pixlr.

That’s all from me, just wanted to pass on another great free tool that I am getting use out of.

Enjoy!

Matt Carter

There are many things that I do to make sure that I select great keywords for search engine optimization, such as the competition level and the search volume, however one other important thing to do is check the viability of akeyword.

By this I mean, is the keywords likely to make money, and is it in an active niche where money is being spent. Recently I did a post on Google trends, so if you haven’t read that then here is the link: Best Selling Affiliate Products.

One easy way to check this is to use the free Google Search Based Keyword Tool. All you need to do is type in your intended keyword phrase and check out how much money per click Google suggests you would need to spend on PPC Advertising for it. If you see that at least 50 cents a click is the going rate, then this is a good indication.

Below is a screen shot for you:

In the image above I have entered the keyword phrase “affiliate marketing” for example purposes. You can see where I have circled in blue that the price for this keyword is $3.77. This tells me that people are willing to spend money on this keyword, which is a strong indication to me that it is a viable option for me to go after for SEO.

Considering that SEO takes much longer than PPC marketing, it is important to select the right keywords from the start, otherwise you may regret it later. The last thing you want to do is spend weeks and months building links to a page so you can rank it for a particular keyword, only to find out later, when you are getting traffic from that phrase, that there is not much money in it.

This is one, of many simple but effective affiliate marketing strategies that you can implement for free, to help ensure you are building your sites on profitable keywords. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure you take the time to select the right keywords for any site you are planning out.

All the best

Matt Carter

]]> http://mattsmarketingblog.com/affiliate-marketing/affiliate-marketing-strategies/feed/ 30 http://mattsmarketingblog.com/affiliate-marketing/best-selling-affiliate-products/ http://mattsmarketingblog.com/affiliate-marketing/best-selling-affiliate-products/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:32:08 +0000 Matt Carter http://mattsmarketingblog.com/?p=1055 One of the most common questions I get asked by people is “what are the best selling affiliate products?” It’s a great question and one that we all ask at some point, so in this post I’m going to discuss this topic and also tell you about a great free Google tool that I use.

Although I do sell and will continue to promote information products as an affiliate, I am preferring to target physical products more these days, because I am simply getting better results from them. My conversions are higher and the opportunities are huge, because there are more products to choose from.

I find health supplements sell very well, as people who have some sort of health problem are very willing to pay good money to remove the problem, and get their quality of life back. Any kind of health related product tends to fall into the category of best selling affiliate products from my experience, just make sure you choose good keywords to market them on.

Google Trends

Google provide some fantastic free tools to help online marketers, and one of my favorites, that I use when analyzing potential products to promote is Google Trends.  This tool allows you to see the search volume of keywords over time, which is a great indication of how well the products in the niche sell.

Recently I was looking for more physical product ideas to set up a site for, and the niche I was looking at was Snowboards and Ski gear. I thought it could be a great niche to be in, as the keywords I was looking at had decent search volume.

However it didn’t take long for me to see my flaw, because when I typed in “snowboard gear” into Google Trends, there was a huge spike in the North American winter.

This is a more obvious example of trending, as it is caused by seasonal variations, however if I had just gone on the average yearly search volume, I might not have made many sales during the Snowboarding off season for North America.

However you can also look at the trend over years and see if the niche is growing over time, or slowly dying out. If you search in Google Trends for “Buy Halloween Costumes” you can see that the trend seems to be going up since 2007, therefore you might be able to find some easy to rank on keywords with search volume, and whip up a Halloween blog promoting costumes as an affiliate and make some decent sales, even if it is only once a year.

Google Trends also provides some other interesting info about the location of people who are typing in keywords. This info can be very useful if you want to do geo targeting. For example you might be selling product XYZ, and decide to target a keyword with the city name in it, EG. Product XYZ New York. Building large geo targeted sites can often work well, even if each keyword has lower search volume, you can make up for it with many pages on your site.

The best selling affiliate products are ones that are evergreen, and potentially bring in sales all year round. However you can still make some great sales at certain times of year, such as Halloween if you are selling costumes, but just be aware that the sales will not last long. Also as mentioned anything health related is also sells well.

***IMPORTANT NOTE***

For those of you who are not aware, I’m running two in depth workshops on selling physical products over a 2 week period for anyone that grabs CWealthsystem through me, where I will be going into a lot more detail on marketing physical products as an affiliate and revealing some great niches to target, how to pick the best keywords, SEO, link building and much more…

Plus you get a whole lot of extra stuff too, such as templates and the Keywords Academy product for free also. To join the others who have already signed, up all you need to do is grab cwealthsystem through my affiliate link and email me your receipt.

For full details you can either watch the webinar I did recently with Daniel from Cwealthsystem here: Cashing in with Physical Products Webinar, which has got some awesome free content in their for you. Or you can skip straight to the bonus video here: Mega Bonus Pack. which contains the link you need.

All the best with your marketing

Matt Carter

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 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

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 Internet 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

It’s obviously very important to continue to build as many backlinks as you can to your web pages if you want them to rise in the search engines and eventually get to the top.

However what I’ve found, is that not many people discuss the crucial elements that ensure you stay at the top.

Google are clever, they have to be, and one thing that many SEO experts will agree on, is that Google records the amount of time that a visitor spend on your page, and this plays a role in your search position. Remember that Google’s main goal is to provide relevant information for its users.

In fact all search engines would be happy if the user typed a search phrase in and the very first result they displayed, ended the user search, because it was exactly what they were looking for.

With that said, one way Google and other search engines can tell if they have provided quality to the user, is by measuring the amount of time the user spends on your page. If the user very quickly hits the back button, it’s not a good thing, and Google will take this very seriously.

Three Ways to Decrease Your Bounce Rate

1.) Make it Obvious: Once the user is on your page, your job is to immediately tell them what they will get from this page. DO NOT leave it up to the visitor to work it out, or have to read the first paragraph of text to see if they are on the page the need to be.

Look at the first sentence of this blog post, I have written: “In this post I am going to give you three tips….”

Do you think if someone lands on this page, that they will be wondering what the post is about, and if it will be useful to them? No of course not, because I have purposely engaged the reader with a hook, to encourage them to stick around!

Headlines that are tightly focused on the keywords your are targeting is also important. So make sure the headlines and relevant and enticing.

2.) Clean Layout: This next point is rather obvious, but I’m still amazed out how many websites that I see with terrible layouts, that make it very difficult to see what is going happening on the page.

Make sure you space every thing out and use plenty of white space in your text.

I for one hate landing on a page that is giant pile of text and nothing much more. I can’t be bothered reading something like that, and very quickly hit the back button.

3.) Using Video and Graphics: To further engage the visitor in your page, the use of video and eye catching graphics can help. Not all videos will work for every site, but if they do, then I encourage you to use it wisely as it is a great way to keep the visitor on your site, especially if you remove the fast forward option on the video.

One thing to be careful of is not to use videos from Youtube that give the visitor links to other sites, as this can backfire and the user may leave your page in favor of the link in the video. Just use pure content and non-promotional videos.

If you do these simple but highly effective things well, you can increase the amount of time that someone spends on your web pages and in turn this will help you to maintain number 1 position in Google.

Matt Carter

RapidRewriter.com

In this post I am going to share with you some important aspects of professional link building, which you need to make sure you are using on your sites.

Google and the other major search engines are not silly. They have some of the brightest minds in the world working for them, who are always coming out with new ways to ensure that the results their search engines display for their users are quality.

We all know that getting backlinks to your sites is a key part of getting top search engine rankings, and at this stage the volume of links you can get seems to play the biggest role. However with that said, there is more to it than just the number of links you can get.

Mixing Up the Anchor Text

When ever you build links to your pages, you have to use good keyword rich anchor text for your links. However if all your links have exactly the same anchor text, this can start to look very unnatural, and something Google dislikes.

If you ever analyze the top sites in any niche in Google, by checking out the anchor text of their links, you will often notice that there is a vast mixture of different anchor text.

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to vary up your anchor text in your links, because if the links to your site were developed naturally, which is what Google is looking for, then the chances of them all having the same anchor text is very low.

Therefore a rule of thumb that I work on is, 80% of my links are the exact keyword I am trying to rank the page for, while the remaining 20% are slight variations of this keyword.

For the 20% that make up the variation, I will purposely make spelling mistakes or just a variation on the main keyword I am targeting.

No Follow is Not All Bad

In order to deter people from placing links on their sites, some web masters have the ‘No follow’ on. This tells the search engines to ignore all links leaving the page. Obviously this is not the best thing for your SEO, and relying on these kind of links will not get you top search engine rankings.

However it is still a good idea to get the odd no follow link. Once again, the reason is that this looks more natural. If all your links were not ‘no follow’ this would be odd, and may raise red flags at Google.

Link to Your Links

I have mentioned this last point in a previous post, however I want to repeat it here, because I am starting to realize just how important this is. What I’m referring to is making sure that some of the pages that contain links pointing to your pages, need to have links pointing to them also.

If all the pages that link to you, have no links pointing to them, then once again this will not look natural. What I do is add a second layer of links pointing to these sites and this reinforces the integrity of my overall link structure.

The Danger of Bad Link Neighborhoods

I receive a fair amount of emails from people worried that they have ruined their rankings by creating links on sites that Google doesn’t like. Some people become very worried about this, and rightly so, as losing your rankings is never a nice thing.

However I have a couple things to say about this matter, and this opinion is shared by a lot of my friends in the industry also.

The first thing you need to know is that SEO is not instant. By this I mean, just because you do one thing today it does not mean the result tomorrow was caused by what you did the day before.

The danger you run into if you think that what you do today must have caused the result the next day, is that you might change your plan based on the wrong infomation.

For example if you build some links from certain sites to your pages, and the next day your site drops in the rankings, it does not mean that building these links had anything to do with it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: With that said though, I strongly believe that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to your rankings, if you build links from sites that you might consider to be of low reputation. So if you somehow get a link from a site about “Viagra” then don’t worry about it.

The reason I say this, is that if it were that simple to get a site penalized by Google, then all you would need to do, to get all your competitors out of your way, would be to build a hand full of “Viagra” links to their sites!

Seems a little unfair don’t you think. Imagine if you worked really hard to get to the top of the search engines, and then one day some new site decides they want your top spot, so they just build some dodgy links to your site, and bang, you’re gone!

The only thing you need to be careful of, is NOT to reciprocal link back to a site that is linking to you, as this can cause a penalty from Google, as it doesn’t look natural.

That’s all from me!

Matt Carter