You can brand your website/name.

This is what most internet marketers are doing right now. It can range from getting a funky name that’s easy for your visitors to remember to building a perception or idea of what you want your visitor to think or feel when they visit your site.

It’s probably the simplest way to start branding because you can tie in both visual elements (your blog logo and site design) and your content together making it easy for people to instantly know at a glance what the site is about.

This works best if you know the direction that you want your site to be in and what you want to accomplish with it. Your marketing focus should be you want a person to remember your site name or brand rather than find you via search terms (which is still important but not the same as being known for your brand).

You can tell if a company is branding its name or business if you think of that brand instead of the object.

Ask someone which is the first search engine they think of and they’ll say Google. If you have to send a parcel, people will tell you to Fed Ex it. These are examples of name brands.

Branding Your Products/Services

Not everyone wants to create a name brand however, and instead build their brand around their products or services.

Apple is a good example for branding their products rather than themselves (even though Apple itself is still a strong name brand). But generally they will brand their products from placing i in front of them: iPad, iPhone, iPod etc or their Mac products which they’ve even created persona’s for as being cool hip computers.

They are branding their PRODUCTS to be the first thing that you think of when you want a tablet, smartphone etc.

Amazon also does this with its Kindle. It’s branding that as the number one e-reader.

You would want to pursue this type of branding if you want your PRODUCT or SERVICE to be the first thing customers think of when looking for your ‘thing’.

Tim Ferris did this well with 4 hour work week as one of the number one business books for entrepreneurs. (You could also argue that Ferris is also a person brand, however his focus has mainly been on his book hence why his website is called 4hourworkweek.com and not timferris.com).

Branding yourself.

Not Me.

I may have joked around about this in the past (no I actually don’t really have a tattoo on my ass guys – I’m a conservative mother of two dont’cha know – it’s really on my boob) but branding yourself is another great way of building your business.

It’s probably slightly egotistical (since you are effectively saying that YOU are more important than your product) but it can also help build your profile much faster than building a website since people connect with other people much faster than connecting with a website.

Celebrities are good examples of this (including iconic ‘person’ brands such as Martha Stewart, Oprah, Snooki) but you don’t need to be famous to be known as yourself in certain circles. Just mention ‘Griz’ in my internet marketing circles and most of my colleagues will instantly know this is. Whether it was his intention or not, he has branded himself as the guru of search engine marketing.

In fact once you get to first name basis in your ‘circles’ then you’ve effectively branded yourself as an authority on your subject and it’s just a matter of expanding on that to become more widely known.

The reason why branding is important is that it’s the first thing that people think of when they are looking for your ‘thing’. And that builds loyalty, trust and repeat business. Which leads to MONEY BABY.

Often choosing which type of branding you want to do will help you to focus on that aspect of your business. Whether that’s your biz name, your product, or you.

How to build your brand

Ok so you’ve chosen where to focus your branding; now how do you actually do that?

The easiest way to go about this is to specialise and drill down. And I mean down down down. Be specific specific specific.

So, let’s say your niche is microwave ovens. Just trying to become the best microwave oven site isn’t enough. It’s too general and isn’t really going to brand you (no matter how many ‘authority’ articles you write – sorry).

What you want to do is become, say, the best microwave oven website for guys going to college. Then you need to tightly focus your entire site to JUST focusing on that customer. Write to him. Get into his head about what he wants to do with his microwave oven. His needs are likely to be a lot different to a mother of three. For example he may only want to use it to heat ramen noodles or defrost the beer he left in the freezer (and he’ll need to be told that this is a BAAAD idea).

You want to be the first thing that guys going to college think about when they are in the market to buy a microwave. They’ll ask their buddies that they are thinking of buying a microwave and their buds will say your website is the best. You’ll become a strong brand for this niche market.

And guess what. You’ll get natural links too. Yeah you will.

Now right now I know what you are going to say – doesn’t specialising and narrowing your focus actually reduce the amount of customers that you’ll get?

Surprising no. The tighter your focus the stronger your brand will become. The stronger your brand the more you’ll be seen as an authority. The stronger you become the MORE customers and sales you’ll get. And the money will come. Oh yeah baby.

Oh and don’t be shy to tell everyone exactly what your brand is.

You can see I’ve done this with my simplerules site. I’m branding this site to not ‘just’ be about finance books. But finance books which are fun and simple (which is why I’ve put the tagline in the logo and kept the design of the site clean). This brand will build as I write more ‘simple’ finance books and eventually become an authority on easy to read finance books (well that’s the long term plan anyway).

Contrast that with my traceywrites and this traceyedwards websites where I’m branding myself as writer or internet marketer (but not combining both of them together into one site). Traceyedwards.com is very much tightly focuses on online marketing whereas my traceywrites site understands that my reader base is likely to be VERY different and expect different content so I’m keeping each of them tightly focused on two specific audiences. I’ve branded them differently (even though all sites have a similar look since I fucking love that theme right now). What – you didn’t think I could write over 1,000 words without swearing once did you? Oh yeah – that’s part of branding this site as well – the language I use.

Ok, so I’ve talked about a lot of concepts here. Let’s summarise:

1. Decide where you are going to focus your branding. Will it be your website, your products or yourself?
2. Think about your customer and make that site for them. Try and be specific.
3. Tell customers your brand to begin with. Eg. Truck rentals for divorced couples
4. Make sure your content and look and feel fits in with your brand concept.
5. Give Tracey a donation (what? How did that get in there?)

You really can build a strong brand. Yeah you can. Go forth and specialise young grasshoppers. Oh and get a tattoo – its great branding.

Thanks for reading Branding – It’s Not Just About Butt Tattoo’s Apparently. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Do you have a website that provides similar information, looks the same, has a similar layout than another site in your niche? Then you might have a problem.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about my sites is that the ones that do the best in terms of both search engine placement and conversion rates are those that are a little bit different to many of the other sites out there.

If a site of mine either contains a new or unique viewpoint or presents information in a different way to most of the other websites in its niche then it’s so much easier to rank and essentially get conversions (sales) from it.

So is originality or uniqueness a ranking factor in Google?

While I don’t even pretend to have any idea about what G is looking for, it would make sense that a bot would be able to determine how different your site is compared to others in a similar niche.

It’s the reason why most ‘make money online’ eBooks/courses fail for buyers, even if it did work for the original author. Once a method has started to gain in popularity it no longer becomes unique. I mean how many IPK, Google Sniper or Xfactor sites worked as well for the buyers as they did for the author? You’ll find thousands of forum posts from buyers asking why they aren’t raking in the millions even though “they followed the steps exactly”.

If you followed the steps exactly as someone else, then you are no longer original.

So how do you create a unique site?

As marketers our challenge is to think outside the box a little bit. That doesn’t mean that you have to re-invent the wheel – I mean how unique can you be talking about food dehydrators? But it does mean that you have to add elements to your website and content that other sites don’t have.

It could be as simple as using a static html site when everyone else uses blogs. Or it might be that you have to go all out and add flash elements, video case studies, unique design layouts or more.

So I’ve included a few tips here that can help your site becoming a little bit different to others in your niche.

And yes I understand the irony of providing this advice that many people may or may not follow and therefore will no longer make your site unique. I’m counting on the fact that I’m still very unknown (I like it that way) so there won’t be many of you actually reading this.

1. Add a contact page.

No I don’t mean just adding a contact form – everyone does that. I mean a fully fleshed out contact details page including physical addresses and real phone numbers.

You are probably thinking I mean YOUR address and phone number (no I don’t – unless you like getting phone calls at 3 am asking if you have ‘such and such’ in stock and yes that HAS happened to me – my partner answered and wasn’t at all impressed).

But the contact details of the companies that produce or manufacture the products you promote. If you primarily sell Bugaboo Prams then put down the contact details for Bugaboo including address, phone number, contact people (such as media or sales enquires) and email addresses if they have them on the site).

Don’t say that YOU are Bugaboo though – you don’t want any lawsuits – you are just providing the contact details FOR the manufacturers for good customer service.

Ok that was an easy one, but you’d be surprised how few people do this and how something so simple can make you look much more credible and give you a tiny boost to rankings.

2. Creating Original Images

You usually just go to Google images and save a good picture from there right? Yeah so does everyone else too.

So if you really want to stand out that means you are going to have to create your own images. If you have a camera then start clicking away. This works really well if you are writing a review and can take your own pictures of the item from different angles.

You holding the item will be a good selling feature too – it builds trustworthiness.

Don’t have the product to take pictures of? Then get a really good image from the manufacturer and make it your own by adding facts or information right there on the image.

Or if you prefer it could even be as simple as adding your own personal headers.

Oh and if you don’t want people stealing YOUR images from Google images, add this to your robots.txt file

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/

Although personally I don’t bother too much – it is a source of some traffic after all.

3. Adding Helpful and/or Interactive Features

How many times are you searching for information and all you seem to find are boring websites full of just lots and lots of 300-400 word keyword enriched articles. I even have a couple of these old sites myself. They suck. They don’t convert. They are not memorable.

Think about what your customer wants that they currently are not getting from other websites.

One feature that has really increased my conversions is creating pages of ‘sorted’ products. You can sort your products by price, colour, size and so on. Sorting products by price is one of my most popular features.

And no I don’t use a plugin for this – I manually go and create these pages myself. I create a list of all the products I’m promoting within a category and create pages for products say “Less than $100”, “$100 – $200”, and so on.

It’s not an article or post – It’s an actually page with the menu on the main navigation so customers can find it easily.

I check and update this monthly to make sure that Amazon still has the products in stock and they are selling in the right price bracket.

Does that mean you should put the price on your product page? No. Amazon doesn’t allow that. But they will allow you to put a price guide on your page. So you can say – Price Guide: $100 – $150 for each product. Customers like this – especially for higher priced products.

If you have a shoe site then use a sort by size or colour. A toy site, then sort by age groups. You get the idea.

Again, it’s amazing how something so simple can really make your site unique amongst the rest of the affiliate crap out there.

Ok, so far we’ve been talking about lots of onpage stuff that you can do to increase your uniqueness. But what about offpage things like links?

4. Getting Unique Links

Is it really possible to get a bunch of unique backlinks that your competitors don’t have? Yes it is. But you have to know your industry and be prepared to put in the work.

Most affiliate markets (me included) are lazy. We stick to using tools such as BMR or article syndication.

More links for less work right?

Well that can help, but what works even more is getting REAL links from REAL blogs and websites. Unique links that your competitors don’t have.

What you think no-one is going to link to your pink sock website? You’d be surprised, but it does take some work.

Guest posting is nothing new, but the way most people do it is send out a whole bunch of spam emails to related sites asking if they would like a guest article. Or they’ll do a search in Google for niche + “guest post” or “write for us”.

You’ll get the obligatory list of sites and perhaps even a few will respond. But it’s what everyone does and it usually isn’t the best way to do it.

The best way is to get noticed by the big players in your niche (even if it’s loosely related like a fashion blogger who see’s your article on cat hats for dogs and thinks it would make a good story) is to start 1) commenting on their blog regularly, 2) responding to some of their twitter posts and 3) write articles and link to them.

Yes that means being social in your niche.

How do you think I got big players like Grizz to link to me? I was a regular commenter on his blog and I wrote posts that linked back to him.

I engaged him and he responded.

Before him I was unknown by the three people that read this blog. I don’t try to get search traffic here. I don’t actually want search traffic here. I like being relatively anonymous.

But on my money sites – it’s different. I engage, chat in forums, link to other blogs in my niche. It’s easier and much more effective than spinning articles and sending out the various copies to directories.

People link to people. I have had some great blogs (including TVguide.com) link to me. Think a link from tvguide.com will help your rankings. You betcha!

Well, it looks like I’ve just hit 1,500 works so it’s probably time to go and hang the washing on the line – ahh a stay at home marketer’s job is never done.

But before you go I’d like to mention two things.

One – a big thanks to Alexis for kicking me up the butt and telling me I needed another post on this blog. This one’s for you – I hope you liked it.

And Two. Anyone a member of Threadless (the t-shirt site)? Then go and give my partner a 5 on his latest t-shirt design so his design talents can be validated.

Cool!

Until next time …

t

Thanks for reading Is Originality a Ranking Factor?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

I wrote this post at the start of the year about how I was going to write lots of articles, do lots more Squidoo lenses, and do lots of things to increase my rankings.

You know what; I didn’t do any of it.

And I don’t plan to either.

Because I’ve found being lazy is much more productive and much more profitable.

Instead of doing more lenses I just picked the ones that were already making money (about seven of them did the most money for me) and hired someone on fiverr to write some articles which I then broke up into 150 word snippets and posted them on Build My Rank. Those lenses are doing great now. Lazy work accomplished. Total work time, maybe 10 minutes? Total cost around $25. Total revenue earned (nice amazon $$)

And I gave up on EZA after a few people stole my articles without my resource box. I sent those scraping losers a firm email. I don’t want to write for EZA for people to steal my work.

So I got lazy and wrote for BMR instead. Because they will keep my links intact and it’s much easier to write 150 words than it is to write 500+ . Total work time, 1 hour a day writing BMR’s (I can usually crank out quite a few in an hour).

And lazy is paying off. My adsense income is increasing. It was my second highest earner for January. Yah.

I’m going to continue to be lazy and work smarter.

This post is only going to be short. I’m too lazy to write any more.

Thanks for reading The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Making Money Online. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Now while there isn’t an official definition of ‘content farms’ anywhere online, the general consensus is that it basically means sites that produce thousands of pages of low quality information. That’s why Demand Media was mentioned, because they typically add hundreds of thousands of pages to their site per month from different writers all producing crappy 300 or so word articles of dubious quality.

Autoblogs and scrapers especially are considered ‘content farms’ and it’s likely also true for anyone that produces sites based soley on PLR, republished EZA or spun articles.

So if that’s the case then, are big sites like EZA and eHow considered content farms? You bet! But I still think EZA and the better article directories will be given a bit of a free pass anyway. But if you own a site and get your articles from here, then it’s likely you might be affected. I wouldn’t be taking half the garbage off there anyway just to send my traffic to someone else’s crappy MFA site.

Now before all the article marketers reading this start whining that their 350 word article is genuine quality then I’ll have to say that’s bullsh*t. Look I know – I’ve got hundreds of 300 worders on places like EZA as well – all with the keyword mentioned three or four times, bolded where necessary, and a strong call of action at the end.

But it ain’t gonna work the same in the future.

You need to be looking at good quality 800+ articles on your own sites that ARE actually quality – in that they provide value to the reader, are original, offer a unique perspective or something else compelling. You know when your stuff is good. So does your reader. And now, so it seems, does Google.

I still plan on using EZA (and writing LONG quality articles), but I want to start using it for what it was originally intended for – for ezine publishers to find good information to include on their sites and in their newsletters. And once they publish one of my articles then it’s likely that they’ll take more too. (You can easily find out who publishes your articles by setting up a Google Alert on a phrase in the article). So then you can contact the sites directly and hopefully build up a good network of sites that will publish your articles and more importantly already have targeted traffic frequenting their sites.

99% of articles on article directories are what splork calls web sewer sludge. So if a publisher with a good PR site comes and finds one of my articles that’s decently written and doesn’t offer a free report on eliminating yeast infections in the resource box (yeah like anyone is going to publish that) and fills a good amount of space on their site then they’ll be publishing it all over the place. It will take time to build up a network of sites like that though. But you are in this for the long haul aren’t’ you?

You can also seek out sites that accept guest posts too. I’ve been looking closely at sites like MyBlogGuest.com as well as doing searches like “keyword” + “guest post” OR “write for us” OR “guest author” to find related blogs to write for.

The times they are a changin’ my friend and we need to adapt.

So what should you do? You should do what everyone has been harping on about for the past few months. Build up some good quality ‘authority sites’. Start writing some really good content for it. If you write a long post then it’s highly likely that you’ll naturally include lots of juicy longtails in it for Google to masturbate over.

LSI or ‘theme words’ as Xfactor calls them are becoming more important too. I wouldn’t bother with the software that he mentions in his latest $97 ripoff (the book is good, the price tag is NOT). If you want to find the top LSI keywords from the top 10 ranking sites just use these free sites: LSI Keywords, Keyword Finder. Just make it look natural and don’t stuff, yeah?

Now I’ve got to go. Got a million things to write – catch you soon. T xx

Thanks for reading What the F*&^ is a Content Farm? And What Does This Mean For Me?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

So it’s time for some internet marketing anarchy – let’s break some rules and see what happens! (yeah the baby was up twice last night so there is no oxygen in my brain right now – I’m feeling a little on edge).

So for this little experiment I’m using one of my old sites that I only seem to touch around Christmas time. I started it in 2008 as the ‘mother’ for IPK but never really did anything with it. It had (has) around 50 static pages on it.

So I added a blog on top of it. Only added about 7 new posts (the static pages are still there in the background though).

Three of the posts are reviews of different toys and I submitted the EXACT same article to EZA too to see what would happen about the duplicate content myth. Can both posts get indexed? Hmm – Right now EZA is outranking me for the main terms – but we will see if that continues.

A few of the posts have very little content and a LOT of links to Amazon. In fact one of them has 35 outgoing affiliate links to Amazon in the one post. Will Google still rank me for it? Let’s see.

(Oh and I’ve deliberately left all my links dofollow – just to see what will happen).

Backlinks – who said you should only get a handful a day. Last week I ordered a Senuke blast of 2000 links (probably only 60-70% of these will stick though), an article spin and submit to UAW, Article Ranks, SEO Link Vine, Traffic Kahuna, MAS & MAN (so probably 2000+ article links), and a Backlinks Phillipines run (40 profile links which now seems small in comparison to the others – LOL).

So that’s about 4000-5000 links in a very short space of time. Will I get penalised? This will be interesting to find out.

I’m keeping a close eye on traffic and rankings and will let you know what happens to this site over the coming weeks.

What do YOU think will happen?

Thanks for reading Breaking the Rules. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Now there are numerous ways to go about this, but in this post I’ll talk about how I do this with Amazon products (since they are my favourite affiliate program).

Now while sometimes I’ll get ideas for products to promote by watching tv or reading magazines, usually my first step is to head over to amazon.com and look at their bestseller lists. They have them in nearly every department, and often you can drill down quite well too.

So for example, here is the bestseller list for Air Purifiers (Home & Garden, Vacuums, Air Purifiers). I just chose that list totally at random as it sounded cool (and let it be known that I know nothing about air purifiers LOL). http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/home-garden/267554011/ref=pd_ts_hg_nav (not an aff link).

As you can see, there are lots of different types of air purifiers to choose from, so the next thing I usually do is pick one at random. I usually like to pick something that has been in the top 100 for more than 60 days, have at least 10 customer reviews, and a four or more star rating.

Just from a quick glance, the Honeywell Air Purifiers seem very popular (lots of reviews), are a good price (so your commission will be decent) and have been around awhile (most of them more than 900 days in the top 100).

So I’d probably pick one of them (again at random) and write a unique hubpage around it.

Don’t worry too much about how much the item costs, many people will tell you to choose only products that are high priced, but I’ve promoted things as low as $10 before and still made good money (because I can sell more, and people always put more stuff in their carts at Amazon).

Then I’d repeat that for 9 other products (all in totally different categories and lists – so your next one might be a baby product, and other might be a garden chair etc) and write hubs around those too until I have 10 new hubs written.

With my hubpages, I’ll write a 300-400 unique post usually review style just talking about the product. I often will read customer reviews and reword this when writing my hub. Add a picture of the product top left and underneath it place your affiliate link directly to Amazon in a link capsule. Also in the first paragraph of the article, as a text link, I’ll also place a link to the product on Amazon. (You are only allowed two links – so keep it as one in the first para of the article, and the other under the picture in a link capsule).

At the end of the article I’ll also place a hubpage Amazon capsule too (you only get revenue share with hubpages with the capsule, so don’t put it at the top).

Once you’ve done all 10, sit back and wait a week.

At the end of one week you need to identify which hub got the most views, was ranked the highest and (fingers crossed) made you some sales. (Although to be realistic, most hubs don’t start earning until after a month or two).

Once you’ve identified your best item, this is what you are going to build a site around. Buy a generic domain name and get some hosting. I like using wordpress blogs, but you can use static hmtl sites too – makes absolutely no difference in ranking in my experience.

Let’s say your best performing product was about a lawnmower. Don’t think mini site, think authority site, with lots of different reviews and articles about lawnmowers. So perhaps you want to buy lawnmowerblog.com (no idea if it’s available). Try and get your main generic keyword in there if you can (it’ll be hard to get exact match so be creative – toplawnmowerreviews.com, thelawnmowerwebsite.com, ilovelawnmowers.com – you get the idea).

For the next 30 days write one post/review to your blog every day, and write one article to submit to ezinearticles.com (you can also add the eza article to your blog as well if you like).

Within a month you’ll be earning some sweet sweet cash. Most of your traffic at this time will be coming from ezinearticles, but over time your backlinks will build up too and you’ll get google traffic as well.

Oh and don’t forget to add a link to your new blog from that old hubpage as well. Once your site is established, then you can go and get some more backlinks for it if you like. Or you can repeat the above steps with a new site.

Hope that’s helped!

Tracey

Thanks for reading How to Get Started Making Money Online. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

At the time I just answered with the typical – focus on one thing, take action – answer (which I still believe to be true), but is this really enough for a someone new who doesn’t even know WHAT they want to focus on or HOW to take action.

Do I take it for granted that new players know enough of the basics to get started, or do I need to go back to grass roots here and hand hold them with keyword research, setting up a blog/hubpage, and ways to get backlinks and/or traffic?

I have a feeling that I (not deliberately mind you) leave out a lot of the puzzle when I tell people how to make money online.

So tell me… if you are a new marketer who hasn’t yet starting earning anything (or not much) online, what DO you need help with?

Thanks for reading Can An Experienced Internet Marketer Really Teach A Newbie?. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

Well, I thought I’d help you get there by providing some simple steps on how you can do it. I mean we can all use some extra cash can’t we?

And by the way, there is no reason that you can’t scale this up to make much more than that, but I wanted to be conservative so I think a target of $700 by using this method I’m about to share is achievable.

For this to work we’ll be promoting a ClickBank product called Info Product Killer (IPK). The reason I’ve chosen this product is because it pays a commission of $70 per sale and it was hands down one of the best products I’ve ever purchased online (which you’d already know if you read this blog). (If you’d like to purchase it yourself you can do so here – although that’s not the purpose of this post – This post is all about helping YOU to make money). So to reach $700 you’ll need to make 10 sales of this.

This product converts at around 5%, which means to make 10 sales you’ve got get around 200 people to look at the offer. And I’m betting most of you already have a mailing list of more than 200 (or know how to get lots of eyes on this offer through SEO).

Sound achievable?

Awesome.

Of course I must let you know that I didn’t write/produce IPK and I’ve never met the author (although I have emailed him a few times and he seems really nice). I just really love the product, and you can’t beat that commission! $70 a sale – that’s good money.

So how do you get started?

First, register to become an affiliate for IPK. Head over to this affiliate sign up page and enter your details (for tracking your sales).  THIS IS IMPORTANT.

The product launches on July 13th and it’s only going to be live for 2 days so you’ve only got a little bit of time.

Craig Kaye (the author) has provided some pre-written emails that you can send out, starting a few days before and leading up to the launch day.

You can use these or write your own. (I prefer to write my own).

From now until then you can work at building your mailing list or you can just set up your autoresponder ahead of time.

Easy peasy.

I’ll be doing the same. In fact if you are on my mailing list, then expect to see some promo emails from me on this one. I am an affiliate after all

Good luck to everyone, and here’s to an extra $700 (or more) in your pocket.

UPDATE – Promoting Info Product Killer 2010 without a List

I’ve got quite a few people that said they would like to promote Info Product Killer 2010 but don’t have a list – is it still possible to make money? (Oh and by the way this method will work with any Clickbank Product)

Well yes it is. But it’s going to be hard work – are you ready?

Now since a lot of big name marketers are going to be promoting this, that means that lots of people are going to be searching online for reviews and information about it once they first hear about it.

That means you are going to have to make a blog post or article with words like

Info Product Killer Review
Info Product Killer 2010 Review
What’s in IPK 2010?
IPK Scam
IPK Case Study
IPK Bonuses (if you plan to offer bonuses)

And so on.

You can add this to your existing blog, hubpage, squidoo lens etc or you can make a new page or blog.

I probably wouldn’t bother writing an article for Ezinearticles at this stage since IPK is only going to be live for a few days and EA might take too long to approve your article, so use places where your article or blog post will go live immediately.

I’ll be using my already existing Info Product Killer Review site.

Remember, if you want to promote this you need to go to http://www.infoproductkiller.com/jv/859358/ and place your details in the ‘stay in the loop’ box so you can get all the latest info and get your sales tracked.

You’ll make $81 a sale.

Craig has also added some banners on the site too which you can put on your website.

Here’s to a successful campaign!

Thanks for reading Make $700 in 2 days. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

At first glance it’s pretty much your standard sales page with the red headline benefit at the top (which in this case reads more like a good article title than a sales headline) and goes on to tell us the benefits of the product with a few testimonials thrown in and finally the big ‘click me to order’ button at the bottom. This page has three such buttons.

Now usually I read a page like this by looking at the headline first, then scrolling right to the bottom to see how much the product is before I actually read the page.

This is not a bargain product. It’s quite a substantial price at $67. (And call me cynical but why do internet marketer’s always have a higher price crossed out and then put the real price?)

Ok. So if I’m going to shell out that amount of money I’m going to want to see some real value, so next I usually see what exactly I’m going to get for my money.

Tim is offering a large bundle of article marketing resources that he has written or recorded himself (so no crappy PLR thankfully).

The first is his article marketing answers book, then his article marketing domination report, a video presentation of his 2008 System Seminar talk (and some extra bonus vids), a monthly report that will contain strategies and tips on article marketing and finally a special email address so that you can ask him any questions you like about article marketing.

He also offer’s three bonuses which are all reports: 15 Lessons Learned from 1500 article submissions, 6 figures from Adsense and an Article Marketing Mindmap.

So all in all – a massive amount of products.

I need to say that I already had his 6 figures from Adsense report (and it is excellent) which I got some months back (I can’t even remember from where).

I also like to read Tim Gorman’s posts on the Warriorforum because he gives away some really good writing and marketing tips from time to time.

But I don’t know him personally. And he certainly doesn’t have a clue who I am.

Well next post I’ll start to delve into the actual products (without giving away his secrets of course) so that you can get a better idea about what to expect if you purchase Article Marketing Lifeline.

Jump to the review about:

Bonus Report #1 – Lessons Learned from 1500 Article Submissions
Bonuses #2 & #3 – 6 Figures from Adsense and Mindmap

Thanks for reading Article Marketing Lifeline Review – Part 1. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)

I think perhaps this week I need to spend a bit of time increasing the ranking and amount of pages that I have out there. The more pages you have, the better chances you have of making some sales.

Autoblogging Update

I told you last week that I was trying out Instant Blog Submitter to test autoblogging on one of my old domains. Well the program up and stopped working on me last Tuesday. It keep coming up with an error about sockets or something. (I don’t know – I’m so untechnical).

I was still keen on the idea of autoblogging though, so I’ve downloaded a free wordpress plugin called wp-o-matic. That does all of the stuff I was using Instant Blog Submitter for (pulling rss feeds and publishing them to my blog) but it’s free. Can’t do better than free I say.

So far I’ve got 81 posts on the site – and I haven’t written one myself. Google has indexed about half of them. I’ve only had 4 search engine visitors so far though. Once I get to about 10 per day then I’ll add some eBay monetisation.

Just a note. If you want to try this I suggest that you DO NOT put adsense on your sites to monetize. It creates kind of junky posts and some don’t make much sense. Use either clickbank, ebay or amazon (depending on your niche).

I also suggest adding some youtube video’s and articles (grab them from ezinearticles keeping the resource box intact) so you get even more content.

Making Money Online with Amazon

I had quite a few people want to know more about making money with Amazon so I thought I’d let you know exactly what I do. This method can be applied to clickbank, cpa or anything really. I should really write an ebook and charge you all $27 for it – and if I was a good internet marketer that’s probably what I’d do, but you know what, I don’t care about that anymore and I really don’t have the time.

Anyway the biggest trick for making money with Amazon is to target actual product names. This way you’ll get people at the end of the buying cycle who are looking to buy with credit card in hand. Don’t bother yourself trying to find related long tail phrases, go right to the people who are ready to buy.

I usually head over to Amazon and check out their bestseller lists first, then look in Google Adwords to see how many searches they get. Finally I check out competition by using the intitle search parameter to see my competition. I usually do this for around 10 or so products and then set up hubpages or squidoo lens (I’m preferring hubs at the moment) around those products. If one product starts to make some good money then I’ll build a website around it to further capitalise on it.

Let’s take a look at this in more detail. I’ll take you through a process so you can follow along.

Let’s say that you want to target kids bicycles. Looking at Amazon’s bestselling products the top seller (as I write this) is a trike called Schwinn Roadster 12-Inch Trike. It’s a good price so you’ll earn a decent commission (although I rarely worry too much about price).

Heading over to Google Adwords Keyword Tool I plug in a few variations to find out the exact match searches for various phrases that people might use when searching for that item.

Make sure you have exact match selected in the match type drop down.

The results I get for this trike is:

schwinn roadster – 1,600
schwinn roadster 12 inch trike – 720
schwinn roadster trike – 590
schwinn roaster 12 inch – 36

Right now the top three look promising. I like them to have over 500 exact match searches – preferably over 1,000 though.

Now let’s look at the competition for the first three. I go to google and type in intitle:”keyword” to find competition. That’s just how I do it. You might have a different way.

Using this I find that I get the following number of competing pages:

schwinn roadster – 12,800
schwinn roadster 12 inch trike – 1,020
schwinn roadster trike – 163

I usually look for results under 1,000. I’d probably made an exception for the second one because it’s so close. The top phrase has too much competition – it’s unlikely to make you any money, but the bottom two are good candidates.

Next I’d create a hub or lens using that exact phrase in the title and probably a few extra times through the text too.

There you go. Easy! Now go and build yourself some pages.

JV Auction Profits Review

My former coaching teacher John Thornhill has just released a new ebook called JV Auction Profits and I was lucky enough to get a review copy from him. In his latest guide, he talks about how to use eBay to secure joint venture deals.

You can use his ideas whether you have a product or a list. He even gives help and advice if you have neither of these, and how you can still make money using this method.

He will give you his exact email that he uses to send to potential JV partners, what to say and how to set up the deal. The best part of the guide however is Chapter Nine in which John goes into detail about how he used this method to make $34,000 from one deal. The ebook is worth it just for this chapter!

It’s only a short little guide – 30 pages – but it’s got some really great information on making money this way. And the best thing is that John is only charging $10 for it. An excellent price for some good information.

Find out more …

My plans for this week

Well I’m going to concentrate on my adsense sites this week. I’m getting some good rankings for long tails, but I’d like to get my main keyphrases a bit higher in the search engines. I’ve written a few articles and I’ll also do some more backlinking from commenting and using Angela & Pauls links as well to get this higher if I can.

Phew, my fingers are starting to hurt. I think I’ll leave it there for now, but I’ll write more soon.

Take care
Tracey

Thanks for reading Making Money with Amazon & Other Stuff. If you liked it, consider leaving a comment. Tracey :)