I haven’t written in a while because, well, it’s making me want to throw up. Literally.

No I haven’t caught the latest computer virus . I’m pregnant. And this little bub doesn’t seem to like mummy sitting at the computer typing for long periods of time. About the most I can handle before I want to hurl is about 1/2 hour.

So my plans for creating lots of Amazon sites in time for Christmas has been diminished somewhat. But the good news is that I still made a decent income for September. That’s why I love passive income so much, you can be busy trying to explain to your toddler why mommy needs some rest time and still be earning money.

Last post I promised I’d write more about Linkwheels, but since then the creator of them has said that they don’t seem to work as well anymore I thought I’d concentrate more of different linking strategies and how to improve your sites rankings.

I must first say that I’m no expert on this however. But the good news is that you don’t have to be. In fact there isn’t any exact scientific formula that you need to use to rank your sites well.

One site might only take a handful of links from article directories to rank it on page one. Others might need a more elaborate set of supporting sites to get there.

The biggest question many people ask is ‘how many links do I need to get my site to page one in Google’.

The answer – As many as it takes.

Yes I know that’s a little vague, but there are so many factors that you need to consider here. Both on page and off page SEO.

I’ve already talked a bit about onpage SEO in this blog before – you know the drill – try and get your keyword in your domain name, use it in the headers tags and text and even the image alt tags and so forth. Also add related words and phrases in your text as well. And the big one – make it original. (Yes I know people will argue that you can get duplicate content ranked – and yes you can but it takes lots more work so save yourself some time and just write an original post).

Ok so now to off page SEO or more importantly BACKLINKS.

The real key to ranking well is to get as many natural looking anchored backlinks to your site from good quality related sites. Quality links will always win out over quantity, but they are much harder to get (and Google knows this). So how do you get them?

Getting Backlinks
1. Check out the current sites for your target keyword and see if they have link exchanges. Most do not – but every now and then you’ll get lucky. A blog roll link isn’t as great as an inpost link – but it does all add up.

You may even be lucky enough to get a big site to link to you naturally. Do a happy dance if this happens.

2. Write articles and submit them to places like ezinearticles and infobarrel. Especially ezine – Google loves them. Plus you can usually get some bonus traffic as well. I have one article that I wrote at the beginning of the year that has had nearly 30,000 views and over 5,000 clickthroughs.

That’s pretty rare though, most of my articles only get a few hundred views but even so, while the extra traffic is great, the main reason I write articles is for the backlinks to my site. With EA you can give two links. I usually link to the home page and an internal page with each article. Over time this really ads up.

3. Create support sites. I’ve started creating a lot of support sites to my money sites and it has really helped improve rankings. I mainly use web 2.0 sites for my support sites. So hubpages, wordpress.com blogs, sometimes squidoo (although not so much as squidoo tends to rank poorly these days), blog.com, blogsome.com, blogger.com, weebly, wetpaint .. the list goes on. You really can find a lot of great places to start a free website or blog that will help support your main sites.

p.s. I’ve also noticed that hubpages has lost some of it’s google love lately – so I now only use them as support sites, not money sites themselves.

With all of my sites, I try and create good quality original content. I experimented with spun & auto generated content a few months back and it didn’t help at all. It’s worth your time to build up your support sites properly (and send links to them as well) so your money sites get stronger.

Think of it like a pyramid. The more strong support sites you have propping up your top point (your money page) the higher you should rank.

Really that’s it. No big secret – but it does take work.

Some of my support sites are linked to each other, some not. I don’t have a linking pattern – it’s quite random. If I think a link works then I’ll add one, if not I don’t.

Some support sites are monetized, some aren’t. Again I will only monetise a support site if it makes sense to.

All the support sites are related to the money site, but not necessarily exactly the same. For example. Let’s say my main niche was exercise equipment. One support site might have fitness tips, another might be specific exercise machines. Other’s might only be somewhat related in the health and fitness industry.

I do target specific keywords in the support sites though, they are not just random posts. Often times the support sites will rank really well on their own anyway. That’s good. I don’t even mind if they get higher than my money site – it will all even itself out eventually.

I no longer bother bookmarking or digging my sites or submitting rss feeds anywhere.

I now just focus on content and backlinks and that’s pretty much it.

Keep it original, keep in random and keep at it.

See you at the top

I had such a great response to my last post about how to make money with Amazon that I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about creating your own Amazon sites.

Oh and by the way, my mission to get a link from Griz was successful. Yippee! So over the next few weeks I’ll be paying it forward and providing a few links to some other blogs that I’ve read over the weeks that I thought were funny, informative or caught my eye in some way.

One such blog was from Roland who has written a great little post about how to make money on eBay. I just found the title of his blog rather amusing (losing the rat race) even though the picture of that mouse kind of creeps me out! LOL

So back to creating your own Amazon sites.

First you are going to need a domain name and hosting. Buy a domain name with your keyword in it if you can (being aware of certain trademarked terms). I have a hosting account where I can have unlimited websites on it so it’s very cheap to host all my sites. Many places do this so look around. You shouldn’t pay more than about $10 a month for hosting for all your sites (unless you want to spread out your sites over a few different hosting accounts for diversified IP addresses – something I plan to do in the future).

And you are going to have to know some HTML. Don’t ask me any complicated HTML questions, because I’m not a big tech person. I create my sites in Dreamweaver and while I know the basics (how to place links on images, create tables and align text) I have no idea about complicated html or anything.

So if you don’t know html or don’t want to know it, get a html editor like Dreamweaver, Frontpage or the million other ones out there to make life easier (don’t use Word to create a html page as it messes up the code and looks crap).

Ok, having said that, my sites are very simple. It’s basically a big table with 4 rows. One for the header image, one for the navigation (which is just text), one for the main content and one at the bottom for another small navigation bar.

I create all my own images in Photoshop.

I grab pictures from Amazon itself, the product pages or from the manufacturers pages. Be careful about copyright. Amazon is pretty cool about you using their images as long as you are sending traffic to them. (Don’t grab an Amazon image and send traffic to Toys R Us!)

Then I just play around with text to make my headers and add some complimentary colours. As long as they look decent I’m happy. I’m not trying to win any design awards.

Most of my mini sites have around 5 pages. 3 pages that talk about the product, a links page and a privacy policy page.

On the links page I link out to authority sites like Wikipedia or the Manufacturer of the product. I used to add links to my own sites, but notice that the sites I did that on crashed in the rankings (I’m guessing Google thought they were link farms or something). I’ve been taking all of those links off now and voila – within a month they bounce back in the serps.

The privacy policy page is just a page that Google likes to see. Don’t worry too much about what to put on this page. You can generate your own privacy policy page by going to a generator site like this one: privacy policy generator

I put these links at the bottom of the page because I don’t really want people visiting them – they are only there so Google thinks my site is legit.

Now for the main content of the site.

Practically all of my sites look like this Bakugan site. A Header, some text and big click me buttons.

The content is basically rewritten content about the product that I’ve got from Amazon or the manufacturers site. My early sites do have a lot of the same duplicate content as Amazon but I’ve found that if I do this they don’t rank as well. I’m in the process of cleaning up the text into original content across all my Amazon mini sites. I’m hoping to get that finished by the end of October.

I also like to add images and a video if I can find one. Go to YouTube and search for the product name. You’ll be surprised how many videos about specific products you can find. Try to choose one that doesn’t have some random URL from someone else in it. Having a video on your site seems to make it more like an authority site which the search engines like.

The click me images are self explanatory. They have a picture of the product and something like ’save today at Amazon’, or ‘get today’s price from Amazon’.

Don’t try and trick people – tell them you are sending them to Amazon (or whatever site you are sending them to). You’ll have a much better CTR. Besides people trust Amazon – if you tell them you are sending them there they’ll feel much safer than if you have some obscure button that they don’t know where they will end up.

Sure you’ll get the odd person who will not click your button and type in the Amazon address instead and you won’t get any commission – but that doesn’t happen as often as you think. Most people click the buttons.

Now because I try and beef up the content of my sites, I’ll usually try and create a couple more pages of content as well. If it’s a game – perhaps I’ll have a page with the instructions on how to play it. Or if it’s a kitchen product perhaps I’ll have a recipe that you can use with it. Or sometimes I just write more text with some reviews.

The more you have written on your site the more long tail traffic you’ll get until you can start climbing the serps.

By the way if you need help with rankings and SEO, then Ben from Make Money with SEO has some great tips.

After you’ve finished your site and uploaded it, it’s time to start building traffic to it. Next week I’ll talk more about how to improve the rankings of your site and climb the serps.

Until then, take care
Tracey

About a week ago Griz from Make Money for Beginners wrote a post saying that he wanted to provide links to quality posts to people. So since I’m always up for a challenge and would never say no to more incoming links, I decided to try to see if I could find out how to get a backlink from Griz.

And this post is it.

Now Griz fans would know that he is an Adsense boy. But since I prefer the Amazon affiliate program I’ll be writing my post on that. But the strategies and techniques are basically the same with both programs (with a few minor differences in choosing keywords).

By the way, if you don’t know who Griz is, he holds the top spots in the serps for terms like ‘make money’ and ‘make money online’ with a blogger blog. Ahh gotta love that boy. Anyway …

So in true Griz fashion, and to try and show up what I’ve learnt over the past 6 or 7 months reading his blog (and what you’ll be able to learn by seeing what I’m doing with this post) I need some backlinks using anchored keyword text this post so that it ranks better. After all, Google or the other search engines will never know it’s about how to make money with Amazon unless I tell them right? (Yes that was my first link).

And of course I’m going to have to write an epic post. Much more than my usual 1000 or so words. Griz has been known to write up to 10,000 words or more. I’m not sure I’ll be handle that much but I need to write much more than I usually do. I might be able to do it, or I might fail miserably. But I must try and keep typing until I can type no more .. LOL

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – making money with Amazon.

Since I’ve been rabbiting on about hubpages I’ll show you how you can set up an Amazon Affiliate hub, and also how you can create your own Amazon sites as well.

Personally I prefer having my own sites, but I do think that starting with HubPages is perfectly acceptable for beginners.

And since the Christmas selling season is about to heat up in a few weeks I think the timing of getting your sites up now is very important.

How to Choose an Amazon product to promote

Let’s get down to your very first step of choosing a product to promote. A lot of people get hung up on this but it really doesn’t have to be that difficult. There are hundreds (thousands) of products on Amazon that you can make a commission from.

Don’t necessarily think you have to stick with a high priced item either. It’s a mistake to choose a product based on the commission level that you might make.

You instead need to choose a product based on its demand and the competition. You want to promote the hot selling items. The ones that everyone just has to have this Christmas or they’ll die.

If you have kids then this might be a bit easier because they’ll already be asking you for the latest must have toy.

But if you need a bit of guidance then just head over to Amazon and check out their bestselling items, or the movers and shakers list to see what is gaining in popularity.

I’ll show you want I mean and I won’t choose an electronic product to try and prove my point.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably heard about the latest teen movie and book sensation Twilight. (Personally I don’t see what the fuss is about, it just seemed like a typical moody teenager movie to me, but that’s not important).

Type Twilight into Amazon search and you’ll get books, apparel, DVD’s, toys, and more.

I’m guessing the books and the DVD’s are going to huge this Christmas as they are an easy gift. Let’s just look at the DVD’s.

If you go to the DVD section and sort by Bestselling items you’ll see that the Twilight DVD is in position #9 (as of writing this). So my hunch was right. It’s definitely popular.

If you look at more information on it you’ll see that it’s been in the Top 100 products for over 235 days and that according to the Movers & Shakers section (which you can find by clicking on Bestsellers, and then Movers & Shakers under More in Movies & TV) it’s been slowly gaining in popularity and is up 31% from yesterday.

So overall I can see that this is a hot product. This is the type of product that you can make Amazon commissions from. It doesn’t matter that it only costs $16. If you can get massive traffic to your website – which you’ll be able to do if you choose a product that is in high demand – then you could easily make many sales of it per day.

And of course another thing I love about the Amazon affiliate program is that you also get credit for whatever else someone puts in their shopping cart. And at Christmas time people put a lot of stuff in their shopping carts so I might as well earn money from it.

Ok so we’ve chosen our Amazon product now what.

Let’s look at some keywords and their competition. After all there is no use trying to promote something if you don’t have a chance of getting on the first page.

First keywords.

I usually use two keyword tools. The free Wordtracker suggestion box and Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool.

Type a few variations in that you think people will be searching for. You’ll get some other suggestion from Google as well to help you out.

I put Twilight movie and Twilight DVD into the Google Tool and got a large list of possible keywords – some with huge monthly search volume and other’s with smaller volume.

Make sure you change the Match Type to Exact. I like to then sort by Global Monthly Search Volume as well.

I get a large list of over 150 keywords that I could possibly use. Of course I probably couldn’t rank with all of them unless I did some major work, so let’s look at those that I think I can rank for.

As you know I like to put intitle:”keyword” into Google when searching for competition. That’s just how I do it. You may have a different way. I don’t want to get into a discussion on the best way to determine your competition because there are many ways to do it – this is just how I do it.

Although if you want to get down to it, you really only have 10 other competing sites. Those 10 on the first page of Google – since they are the pages you want to beat.

But I digress. Let’s just use intitle to keep things simple.

I usually like to find intitle results of less than 1000 but because it’s such a hot item, I couldn’t find many that low so you could use but here are a few you could use:

[twilight the movie 2008] – 480 month search – intitle results 152
[twilight film 2008] – 320 month search – intitle results 317
[twilight dvd movie] – 284 month search – intitle results 284

So should you break the rules and go for something that has lots more monthly searches but higher competition?

That’s up to you. Personally I would but I’m willing to go and find backlinks to help me rank better. If you are willing to do the work to find backlinks then sure go for something that has more competition and more searches, but if you are just going to stick up a hubpage and leave it, then stay with the rules.

Ok, what’s the next step?

Building your site!

If you are going to build a hubpage then make sure you get your keyword into your url name. So something like hubpages.com/hub/twilight-the-movie-2008 (that hub doesn’t exist right now, but I’m betting it will pretty soon after I post this article on making money with amazon – so first in best dressed readers – get a free link by taking action!)

Next is layout. You’ll need at least 500 words of original content if you want your hub to rank well. Go to Amazon or to the Twilight site and in your own words, write about the movie (if you’ve seen it then go ahead and write your own review if you like).

Add your Amazon affiliate links directly to the hub. I like to add one at the top of the page in the page text and around the middle of the page as a link that says Buy Product Here.

You can only have two links to the same domain in a hub so think carefully about where you will place your links.

I also use the hubpages Amazon capsule as well, but it’s usually down the page a bit as I’d rather people use my links first.

Add other things you’d like, video’s, images – they all help with your hubscore. (Even though hubscore doesn’t make any difference to how well you rank or not).

Here’s an example of one of my hubs for a book I promoted earlier in the year when it was hot.

Creating your own sites.

What if you’d rather create your own sites and have full control over layout, earnings and more. Then you’ll need to buy your own domain name and hosting. I’m not going to recommend which company to join as there a lots of good ones – do a search. If you are a cheapskate like me, look for a web hosting company that allows you to host as many domains on the one account as you like for no extra cost. Then the only extra cost you’ll have is buying domain names.

Again you want to get your keywords into your domain name if possible, but you’ll need to be a bit more careful here as some terms are trademarked and companies get all upset if you use their name in your domain. So of the big ones to avoid are Lego, Harley Davidson, and Amazon. (that doesn’t apply to folders, post names, hubpages, webpages which you can call what you like – just the top level domain name).

It’s a judgement call. I sometimes use brand names in my domain name, sometimes I don’t. Depends on the product.

There are many ways to layout your webpage that helps promote Amazon products the best, but the method I use is the one I was taught with IPK (with a few tweaks of my own). It’s basically a simple html site (not a wordpress blog – but I hear they are moving into that direction now) with a big ‘click me’ image and again some original text.

This is basically what all my Amazon sites look like. Lots of text for Google and lots of big images that scream ‘click me’ for people who land on the page.

So now you’ve got your site up and you can just sit back and wait for your Amazon account to fill up with sales right?

Er, not quite.

While you may be luckily enough to rank well with just all your onpage SEO you probably will need backlinks to help rank your site high. Anchored backlinks using your keyword that is, not just any old link.

You probably need less backlinks than you think you do depending on your competition. Most of the competition, even if they have backlinks are not usually targetted to the term they want to rank for. They instead rank highly on factors such as age, authority (in Google’s eyes), and relevance (again in Google’s eyes).

While you won’t be able to compete with age, you can make yourself look more authoritative or relevant to that term by getting backlinks to your site.

So how do you get backlinks?

There are many ways:

• You can create your own backlinks from other sites that you own.
• You can write articles and submit them to directories such as ezinearticles and goarticles with anchored links in the resource box back to your site
• You can ask people for blogroll links
• You can comment on dofollow blogs
• You can make hubpages, squidoo lens and other web 2.0 sites with links back to site.
• You can try and get the attention of the big boys (like Griz) by linking to them in the hopes that they’ll link back to you.
• You can create profile pages on high PR sites such as what I do with Angela & Paul’s backlinks

Be creative. There are actually many ways to get backlinks, and yes even social bookmarking will give you backlinks even though I tend not to waste my time because they give low quality juice.

So that’s it. That’s how to make money with Amazon.

I think that’s enough from me today. Not quite a Griz epic, but over 2,000 words so it’s my longest post so far.

Hope everyone learnt a few things about making money online.  (And I hope it caught the attention of that Canadian Bear).

Until next week
Tracey xx

Yes it’s true.  I’m snuggled up in front of the computer looking very glamorous in my dressing gown and fluffy socks.  I love that I can wear whatever I like to ‘work’.  It’s lilac if you are wondering.  And I know you were. 

This week I’ve had quite a few people ask me why I love HubPages so much and to be honest I wouldn’t say I love them, but I do like them a lot.  However, they are still just a means to an end.  Right now they rank well in Google on their own and they are great for backlinks to your own sites but I’m fully aware that they are becoming more and more popular so the good times might not last forever.

It was the same with Squidoo – at one time Google loved them, but not so much anymore.  And also with Blogger – it used to be that you could get a blogspot blog ranked within 24 hours.  It seems to take a week or more now and they don’t have the same Google love as they once had unless you can point a heck of a lot of backlinks at them.

So I’m not naive enough to think that HubPages is going to be great forever.  But for now I like them.  They work.

And of course they are a free way to get a lot of different pages up online – so they are really good for beginners.

But if you are REALLY serious about making money online then you do need to start building your own websites.  Yes it costs money for hosting and domain names.  Yes it takes a bit more work to get them going when they are new.  But Yes you have full control of them and as long as you don’t create big ol’ spam sites it’s likely that you’ll get Google’s approval fairly easily.  And of course Yes any money that you make is 100% yours.

That should be the goal of everyone online – to have their own sites that they have full control over – but in the meantime, whether you are testing out which affiliate products are going to convert well for you, or what keywords are likely to bring you the most traffic then it’s perfectly acceptable (and I encourage you) to use Hubpages.

Using eBay and Hubpages

Last week I made a lofty goal of a making lots of eBay related Hubs so I could increase my eBay affiliate income and so far I’ve got less than 20 up.  Some on my regular hub account and some on another hub account I have (yes I have more than one account because I’ve started noticing people copying my hubs so I’ve got a ’secret’ hub account to test further products).

What I’ve found so far is that hubs that I have the article and then the ebay listings directly below it are getting a few clicks but not that many.  The hubs where I’ve put the ebay listings to the right of the text are getting a much higher clickthrough.  I suggest that whatever you are promoting on hubpages that you take advantage of that top right area as the key place to put your monetisation.

More about HubPages for beginners

I’ve had some people ask me how they get started with hubpages, so if you are a beginner then read this (if you are already a seasoned hubber then you can skip this part).

Basically HubPages is a site where you can create one page ‘mini-sites’ on any topic you like.  You can have as many of these ‘mini-sites’ as you like on whatever topics that you would like to write about.  You can add text, video’s, polls, images, links through the use of various capsules that you can use with your hub.

Each hubpage has a score, and you also have an overall author score.  If you are using hubpages for backlinks to your own site then you’ll need to make sure that your hub has a score of over 49 and your author score is also above 75 to make the links do follow.  That’s pretty easy to do if you have a good quality hub.  Because the top level domain has a PR 6 they are good for high quality backlinks.

If you want to make a good hub that will rank well in the search engines then you’ll need to write at least 400 words of original content (placed in a text capsule).  While they will accept and publish duplicate content it will get flagged as substandard  and your hub score will suffer – so it’s worth the extra bit of time to write something unique.

Because hubs tend to rank well on their own, or with a few links pointed at them they are also great for directly monetising them.  You can use the ebay or amazon capsules that hubpages provides or place your own affiliate links directly into either the text or links capsule.  (Note: you can’t place a direct ebay link on your hub because ebay doesn’t allow direct links on sites that you don’t own).

If you are thinking of promoting Clickbank products then I’ve written a hub on how to do that as well – Promoting Clickbank Products on HubPages.  I don’t have a lot of Clickbank product hubs up there myself but the ones I do I get a few sales per month – I’m looking to expand that next year.

The way most people use hubpages however is for adsense income.  And money you make from your hub through the capsules or from adsense you’ll get 60% of the revenue (hubpages get’s the other 40%).  Think that’s fair?  I do.  I’ve got tons of articles up at ezineartlces.com and not once did they give me a dime for the ads on my articles.

You need to make sure that you take advantage of hubpages tag’s as well.  Many of the tag pages on hubpages are high PR as well which means more high pr links pointing at your page.  I usually try and add between 5 and 15 depending on the subject of my hub.

Because they are free and only cost you a bit of time to write something it’s definately worth your time in setting up a few hubpages to see how you go.

More Amazon Tips

Have you got some Amazon hubs up yet?  I want your goal to get at least 20 or so up before Christmas.  You’ve only got around 2 months before the Christmas selling season starts up and people buy physical products by the bucket load.

The usual pattern is October your sales will start to pick up and in November and early December they will explode.  You want to get as many sites up as you can because you not only get credit for the products that you directly promote, but also whatever else they put into their shopping cart.  Last year I had someone purchase a stripping pole in their shopping cart as well as the item I was promoting (which was a child’s toy).  Hmm not sure how they go together, but I get the commission no matter what they buy so who cares.

If you can afford it, I’d also suggest getting a few of your own sites up as well from the products that are selling well.  (Last year I’d notice that I was getting sales for lots of products that I wasn’t promoting, so I’d quickly get a site up as quick as I could).

Well I’m off to curl up in front of the TV now.  I’ll catch you all next week. 

Take care
T xx

I’ve had quite a good week in terms of getting things done but surprisingly I haven’t made one ClickBank sale as an affiliate. Not one!

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