How i wish i knew SEO while starting out in the MMO world, affiliate marketing would’ve been a piece of cake…ah well..lets get on with the post then shall we?
** Note : While working with affiliates i suggest any affiliate company out there EXCEPT CJ.com, this is due to personal bad experiences many sales that were never recorded and i just don’t tolerate that **
This article is targetted at telling you the best ways to go about with Affiliates without spending a dime, because..lets face it..while starting out you won’t have much cash to work with anyway and whatever cash you do have must be invested towards the backend (server..scripts..domains..etc). Now these are my tried and tested methods that i have used and had alot of success with as well.
SEO, is the best approach towards Affiliate Marketing, now a good pitch towards your customers would do good too but this is easier and cheaper, lets say you are an affiliate of a Hardware Supplier and you are selling products on your site or in other words leading them to the suppliers site, the best way to get POTENTIAL BUYERS is to search for them, don’t go around spending money on PPC yet, heres what you should do:
1- Google for terms like
“Forum -Where do i buy hardware online?“
Now, if you skim through the results you will find alot of forums “hopefully” and you need to post your links there, register as a member and say something like..
“Hey there! I buy my hardware and blahblah.com and they have great prices! You should go there too!”
This will get you targeted visitors only, the only people who will click the links will be potential customers, quality over quantity.
You can try the same technique with other sites as well, this is the best kind of marketing tactic that i have ever used because i don’t have to spend much money this way and that makes me really happy, you can pull in some really good customers as well as get a-LOT of link love to your inner pages and slowly you can add more interactivity to your affiliate site and have even more users coming in for more then just hardware..maybe hardware reveiws..etc?
Now google is not the only place you can do this try google search and technorati or even Yahoo Answers which in my opinion is THE best place to promote these products, here are screenshots of those queries, blogs/forums are good place to promote your products/site because they let you post on the same page as the question whereas most sites do-not have a user-based commenting system or a thread system.
This was so overdone that it was obvious that this kid wasn’t going to get anywhere in the marketing world with that kind of attitude, this thread at dp was posted a few days ago and since then it has generated alot of hype, and not the good kind.
This kid “Waqar Ali Shah” going by the name “manchesterguy” on dp, posted a thread on how he “alone” destroyed the entire SEO industry the minute the thread went live i knew it was gonna end in one of two situations on the Poster’s part..
“..And now i’m going to release this $500 ebook that will tell you all the secrets big SEOs don’t!”
or
“..Now heres my site where i blog about SEOs and how they are in reality so that you the users know if you are getting ripped off or not, now pay me for it!! its a once in a life time chance!! Don’t miss out!!”
I posted this because this is just one sad-sad attempt at selling ebooks or products online..
Now if a marketing pitch or any claim made on the web has the following characteristics, its pretty much a cry for money..
Promising ground breaking or earth shaking results
Claim to prove a 1000% profit on your investment
Bashing reputed companies that earn 1000x what they earn (its jealousy, too obvious)
Posting annoyingly long replies which are so long that they are borderline bullshit..
..And people who claim to be “experts” or “the best”..truth is no one is good at making money online, everyone lives and learns..
Since my MFA outrage (which by the way is still booming) people have been asking me how i got that many indexed pages and how they can achieve the same, so here i am, releasing aFree SEO Book that will give you all the info you need to be a successful webmasters and do much better on your sites, the tips i discuss in the ebook are completely ethical and nothing but pure white hat.
This can be considered a webmaster startup guide, every webmaster/marketer is a SEO in their own way and as a matter of fact SEO is used in every step of being a webmaster.
Funno is my latest project, its basically just to prove a point that no matter what methods (hosted/non-hosted) you use as long as you have 1-10% user approval you can make it work and maintain the traffic and probably have the whole site running on and funded by Adsense.
The media on Funno is perfectly divided into hosted media and non-hosted media, i am getting nearly a 10% bounce rate, mostly from the traffic that i am receiving from stumbleupon. The site launched just today and got 2 unique stumbles on inner pages (fresh content).
The good thing is that during the launch i got users posting deep links on other sites (craiglist forums/general forums)
I am gonna go ahead and make sure this project is updated and perfectly documented on this blog properly so that anyone can go through the blogposts to see the development.
Well, after my recent post on the traffic splurge from simple seo, people started asking me about how to do basic seo and how to promote their blogs that were being overlooked by google, so here i go.
First and foremost thing that i would enforce is relevancy, nothing else, if you are relevant to your niche, you’ll be just fine.
Now here are some steps you can take to have a bit more interactivity going on your site which leads to “returning traffic” that keeps coming back for more.
This one is terribly simple, blog directories and communities such as mybloglog and blogcatalog they both are very powerful blog communities, blogcatalog is a blog-directory as well (where i have listed my blog too), it provides carefully reviewed submissions to their directory, which by the way is FREE, so go for it!The more interactivity you have on your site such as those oh-so-cool recent readers widgets that both of those blog communities provide.
One more directory that you might want to submit your blog to would be the BlogFlux Directory, you could do this on a later note too because its not that important to have your blog in there, but an extra link never hurts and blogflux gets tons of traffic! (yep, i have my blog there too)
Now the second step if you wish to, you could take SMM as a promotional strategy for this, make sure your tags for each post have something to do with the original niche that you are trying to base the blog on, and to make this easier i’d recommend using OnlyWire , its an all-in-one kinda social bookmarking site, you can just use one interface in order to bookmark tons of posts/pages on your site/blog.
Link Building : This is the easiest and most fun part of making and promoting a blog, you don’t have to buy links for every site, its better if you link exchange with relevant blogs on the same niche, make sure they don’t contain any off topic rants or anything, while launching a blog you need to be zero-tolerant on getting links from in-active blogs/sites, usually those sites get de-indexed to the bare minimum amount of pages at google and it stays that way, although some links are better then none links so you should get those too but try to make them your last priority.
If you can’t convince yourself you are basically screwed from the very start, so don’t care what other people say is a high paying keyword, do your own research and then you’ll have proof that what you are doing actually DOES work!
On an almost daily basis i use Google Trends you can compare products and search phrases on there to get a more accurate view of the whole situation this is something alot of people skip doing and rather pay marketers and seos to do, Its just one simple query and it can get you a ton of good info.
For example, look at the stats below.
You can see clearly that free games has the highest frequency of searches and activity, so targeting for that keyword would be a bad bad move unless you have a good advertising budget and one kick ass site, so this way you get the full stats of whats the highest used keyword and what keywords you should be using for your sites, in this case id suggest free online games since its easier to land compared to the rest and once you have that you can get free games easily as well because you are on the much relevant, same niche based and less used keyword already, that gives you leverage at serps!
Monetization : While starting up your blog (early stages) you shouldn’t load up your blog with tons and tons of ads, it would just make it look like a “Cliche” site that webmasters are making now adays and would be discarded as one of them as well, be careful of what you monetization techniques you choose for your blog.Do anything but use sites like PayPerPost, since google does-not like PPP and what they do at their sites,threatened or not i do-not care all i care is about results that i receive from sites i invest my time into and PPP although pays alot but is a big risk, just like john cow got de-ranked i don’t want to hurt my rankings.I won’t say what you should do but i sure as hell would tell you what not
It makes you wonder doesn’t? why everyone else who was selling links get penalized and not yahoo’s dir?
Well for one they are linked from one killer strong domain (yahoo.com) what more is that their directory does not revolve around their database of links, its more like a blog with a side order of links, so who ever is visiting the directory or that page that they call a “directory” home page, they aren’t there just for the links they are there for the news and the latest posts from their blog.
Its pretty simple actually with a few edits to phpLD and Wordpress you can have your very own Yahoo! Dir Template/Setup, so that the traffic you get is relevant as well as pleases Google. Simple yet effective makes me laugh actually it was just this simple to be border line approved by Google.
Your directory should revolve around news and latest review or anything that you update on a daily basis which is in fact unique, and people WANT to read or get to know better. Its all about user satisfaction, and whenever a user bounces of your site to another page Google gives the landing page more authority then you.
If all you have to contribute is tons and tons of links and you are getting backlinks to them then you won’t get squat out of Google.
Backlinks will only help your current situation, think of it like a booster shot, for example : my blog has the proper tags and proper content and relevant information for the term “SEO Blog” so i targetted that term actively and within a week im in the top 30’s of that term at google:
Now, heres Yahoo’s dir page, unique content covers the page by 80%, the categories to the directory are on the left so the home page is safe, and passes the proper PR, the difference here is that the content is actually hosted on the same domain and is shown FULLY no excerpts on the front page, most dir owners use feeds to publish news on their directories (thats a serp killer too, in a bad way).
So in conclusion, here are the things you have to keep in mind while making a directory.
Links should only be like a second feature to the site and the front page.
NEVER make general or web directories, they are irrelevant, choose a niche and run with it. (Specifics help you get better rankings)
News or any other kind of info should be the whole idea of your directory.
All news/info used should be unique and hosted on the same domain.
No RSS feeds under categories (this has only a few down sides, better safe then sorry)
Resources for regular users not just webmasters, the kind of traffic you get is a key factor in authority at google.
Backlinks should be your last priority here, you are not selling PR now you have to sell relevant traffic.
You CAN use category links in blogposts to get more backlinks and relevance as well.
The more you from within the domain the better, those links count as backlinks at google as well.
In the last 24 hours there were more emails to me about the post about John Cow’s Marketing Method then there were comments, so i think this is a valid enough reason to explain just why i do-not like what he tried on his blog.
-First i want to make it clear, i do-not think that the donations from the hacked page was what he was after - AT ALL!
Now this was all a link bait/marketing stunt to get in more links/be blogged about and get a little controversey going on, now the links part he did that very well, hell he even got a link from mine, now he must have got blogged on almost 20 blogs including this other auto blog that fetches all his posts ( i saw him in my trackbacks ).
The reason i posted the post before was because these are the tactics and and methods to get a blog or site more popular the wrong way, i do-not support it one bit, people may have their own opinion some of them think that the blog WAS actually hacked and the money that was lost Mr.John Cow made up for it and some think it was just a “joke”, let me tell you something if you have a good thing going and we all know that he does, would you go around and screw with it? Yea, didn’t think so..
This was all just a sleezy marketing tactic no matter what anyone says to me because i can see all the points here, i don’t see any reason for him to go on and mak
Recently, the author of John Cow posted that it was actually linkbait, here is what he posted in his post..
We really didn’t do it for the $100 or thought it to be linkbait. We just think that it doesn’t have to be the 1st of April to play pranks. And our adorable advertisers needn’t worry, you will all receive your full 31 days obviously.
Now, tell me this, can you actually take advice from someone who would jeopardize his blog’s integrity and credibility for a joke?
And as far as me thinking he is the “scum of the earth” , no you have me all wrong, you have a good thing going with one really bad move that did change your whole established image for me. Personally i don’t even read JohnCow.com i read a thread on dp which made me want to blog this, I do know your popularity was pretty much directly proportional to johnchow’s de-rankings earlier, so i followed threads and posts wherever i saw the title “john cow“.
This one is terribly simple, blog directories and communities such as 
One more directory that you might want to submit your blog to would be the BlogFlux Directory, you could do this on a later note too because its not that important to have your blog in there, but an extra link never hurts and blogflux gets tons of traffic! (yep, i have 
Now the second step if you wish to, you could take SMM as a promotional strategy for this, make sure your tags for each post have something to do with the original niche that you are trying to base the blog on, and to make this easier i’d recommend using
