Accelerate your keyword research with Firefox

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Would you mind making a great browser even better? Well, I guess I know the answer... Especially if you're an avid keyword researcher and you've run into one of the few shortcomings that Firefox has, i.e. how it handles copying tables.

Basically, if you try to copy a table from Firefox into Excel (for example, results from Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or any other service), you will be greatly disappointed to discover that all rows and columns get pasted into... one cell in Excel. And I guess you do not feel like copying them one by one.

Well, extension to the rescue! Just download and install the really excellent TableTools extension and you will be able to do all sorts of nice tricks with your tables in Firefox. First of all, you can easily copy them as comma separated files which can be easily pasted into Excel. But this extension is so much more powerful. Let me quote directly from the description:

TableTools sorts, filters or copies any HTML table. Two filtering modes supported: select filtering (each column has one drop down menu allowing you to select a certain value); search filtering (each column has one search box allowing you to search for any value in the column using keyword(s) or javascript regular expressions, very powerful and flexible!).

The other extension that I find extremely useful in my keyword research (or any research in general) is ScrapBook. Basically, it just allows you to save any page locally in its original form, including css styles, javascript, etc. You can also search all saved pages - all from within Firefox. It's very helpful for example when you want to save results generated by the keyword bookmarklet - you will still be able to use the word map after saving results locally.

Please watch the embedded video to see both of these extensions in action.

Powerful way to to become a niche guru

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Let's face it - you've got a niche website that you created after a careful consideration of its potential / keywords and what-not. The only problem is that (almost) nobody is visiting it. You need traffic desperately. Sounds familiar? Then read on.

There are many ways to build traffic. And no, I will not be talking about any black hat methods or spamming. Today I am going to show you how to become a niche guru, which eventually will bring you traffic - via direct links and from search engines.

One of the best ways to establish oneself as a guru is by active participation in blog and forum discussions. This can bring you both direct links to your website (if owners of the target forums/blogs are not using the nofollow tag) or at least direct visits from interested visitors of other blogs and boards. Obviously, the condition is that you contribute valuable content, not useless one-liners in the style of "Hey, great blog".

The greatest challenge in this approach for many people is that they are simply unable to manually follow all the discussions taking place - it simply does not fit their busy schedules. Well, automation to the rescue.

I will show you three services that will let you stay on top of all the most recent discussions. Then, I will demonstrate you one tool to rule them all - just one tool to always be up-to-date with all the latest buzz. If you prefer watching than reading, just play the video now.

1. Tool no. 1 - Google Blog Search

This is actually my favorite tool to quickly search for the latest blog posts. Just enter a keyword relevant to your niche and sort results by date. You can also limit results to posts from the last several hours or days. When you find anything of interest, then simply navigate to the source blog and leave your comment.

Obviously, you can get results for your keyword via an RSS feed.

When I am saying "quickly search", I mean it quite literally. The Google Blog Search is lightning fast, which is its great advantage. However, it has less filtering options than its direct competitor...

2. Tool no. 2 - Technorati

Technorati has the same purpose as Google Blog Search - it allows you to find the most recent blog posts of any topic you like. Its advantage over Google lies in the filtering options that it provides. For example, you can search only blogs with some or much authority. It is helpful to filter out different splogs and other not too valuable blogs.

Its greatest drawback is in its performance - at times, Technorati can be very sluggish.

Also Technorati provides an RSS feed for any search term.

3. Tool no. 3 - BoardTracker

This is one of my best recent discoveries. It's a search engine focused entirely on searching forums. It currently indexes almost 40,000 of them and almost 50 million threads. It's great because it searches only contents of forum posts and nothing else so you can get very precise results.

As always, you just enter your keyword and sort results by date. At the bottom of the results page, you can find an RSS feed for these specific results. You immediately get all the latest discussions in your niche, conducted in forums that you've probably never heard before.

BoardTracker is actually extremely useful as a research tool and I am going to run a separate piece dedicated entirely to this service to show of a number of clever tricks that you can use to discover new niches or find ideas for articles in your niche.

Still, I've already mentioned three tools. Definitely too much for the average, busy internet marketer. Wouldn't be it great if there was just a single tool to aggregate results from these three sources, eliminate duplicates and sort by date? That would definitely be a Holy Grail of any niche would-be guru.

Your magic weapon

Well, guess what - there is such a tool that I've prepared specially for you with help of the wonderful Yahoo! Pipes service. If you had the patience to read until here, you will be rewarded with a tool to really boost your efforts to become a niche guru.

Just navigate to this special "forum and blog activity" pipe and enter your keyword or phrase in the field provided. Then click Run Pipe and in a second or two you will get results for your keyword from all the three services mentioned above, sorted by date, with duplicates removed.

Even better, you can simply click an RSS icon at the bottom of your results to add this feed to any RSS reader that you're using. By doing this, you will be able to monitor any new blog or forum posts with your selected keyword directly from your reader.

You can create such feeds for as many keywords as you wish.

Now just select these blog posts or forum discussions where you can contribute a valuable comment and do so, leaving a link back to your website. If you continue doing so for some time in any niche, you will see that the traffic to your website is growing steadily.

BTW, this can be one of the best methods to get your new blog / website indexed.

You can see all of the above in the video embedded in this post.

I hope that you will find this method and the tools useful. If you have any hints or tips, please leave them in the comments.

Arbitrage - treasure trove of knowledge for free

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But first, for those of you, who maybe are absolutely new to the arbitrage idea, a little explanation would be in place. There is another (excellent) blog, where you can find a very good introduction. Let me quote one paragraph here:

If you’ve never heard of PPC arbitrage let me just give you the gist of what it’s about. Very simply put, it’s like the stock market. Your main objective is to buy low and sell high, for maximum profit. Same thing here. Internet marketers are buying cheap traffic, and sending it to their sites with contextual ads on it, from such places as AdSense or YPN, thus converting the $0.05 clicks into $0.25 clicks. Of course, not every cheap click that comes to your site will result in another clickthrough on your ads, thus turning a large profit. But for the most part, it’s very simple to do, and just about anyone with a brain and a bank account can do it.

You can find more at the Super Affiliate Marketing Blog.

But what I am going to browse through today is a mega-thread on arbitrage at WickedFire - it's over 50 pages full of posts and first-hand experiences - should be a worthy read. Because it's so huge, it will probably take me the rest of today's evening, so more posts are to come tomorrow.

Arbitrage - the plan

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I've browsed through hundreds of posts and blog posts on arbitrage in order to find the best way to conduct my little test. Eventually - the plan was BORN.

Ok, so here's what I will do over the next new days:

1) I will try to find two, potentially profitable niches, using either a method described here and here, or yet another method, which still awaits description. I will try to find one niche with very strong "buy" characteristic and another, where attitude would be more like "research". I will also try to make sure that all related keywords get at least one million searches at 7search - this is the 2-tier network that I will use to drive traffic to my test sites. I've already opened an account with them and funded it with an initial deposit of $50.

2) Obviously, I will conduct thorough keyword research - related to No. 1.

3) I will use two very different templates for my sites, with AdSense ads on them. I will tweak them on an ongoing basis to see how it affects CTR.

4) I will document my progress in detail, giving you as much insight as possible into various factors that affect my outcome. Let's call it "anatomy of arbitrage".

It may seem short and simple, but I actually have a long list of variables that I want to test. It would make no sense to list them all here, without any supporting data.

Step by step - niche site building

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• finding and researching a niche
• deciding on method of monetization
• designing the site and generating SEO-friendly content
• placing ads
• hosting
• link building

If one of your new year's resolutions was to build a niche empire, that may be a good place to start with.

Technorati Tags: niche, minisite, seo, tutorial

Quick links

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• Using Profitable Spam & Thin Content Sites for Keyword Research

A very useful article, instructing you step by step how to mine some spam websites, ranking highly, to extract rich lists of keywords. The article says:

So lets say you see one of those spam pages ranking in the search results. If you are doing keyword research and have ran out of topics you can look for footprints on these spam sites to find new ideas.

• Track Popularity of Any Topic in the Blogosphere over Time

Have you ever tried to find out if your niche was hot or not? Well, it is easier than ever to find out, using some very clever tool to monitor the blogosphere. This article explains you how:

Well, there are three different ways to track the buzz around different topics in the blogosphere over a period of time, two of these methods are known to most users but the Technorati trick, which gives the most relevant results, is still a secret for many

Spyfoo - a great (but not perfect) research tool

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First of all, let me take this opportunity to let you know that I am still here, although I have not posted for several weeks. I should not make any excuses, but the truth is that this is a one-man show and I've been really busy with one of my brick-and-mortar projects.

I've now decided it's time to revive this blog to provide you some more tips, which hopefully will prove useful. I'm in the process of writing some new tutorials, but in the meantime, I would like to share this little gem of a website with you - SpyFoo. This service is really outstanding when you want to gain some web competitive advantage.

You may use it to:

• assess competition
• analyze your competitors
• search and research potentially profitable niches
• build massive keyword lists with some supplementary data

Best part, it's free, at least while still in beta.

I will have a more thorough feature on this service, but in the meantime, just give it a try - I bet you will like it.

 

How to find the most profitable affiliate programs in 3 easy steps

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Choosing the right affiliate program(s) for your website can make or break your online business. Simply follow the steps in this tutorial to greatly increase your chances of discovering the best affiliate programs available in your niche.

Obviously, I assume that you already have some ideas what your niche could be. If you need some inspiration, you may try these two articles before proceeding any further with this tutorial:

• Profitable niches in under 10 minutes
• A fool-proof way to discover the hottest markets

If you know some of my previous articles, you will probably know that I am a great fun of combining different tools to achieve the desired results. Well, today it's not any different. We will use the awesome SpyFu service that I already mentioned before - this will be our source of competitive intelligence.

Than we will do some Google magic to quickly extract the results that we need.

Ok, let's get down to business.

1. Open the SpyFu homepage. Enter your niche of choice in the input field and submit.

As you may see in the screenshot above, my niche for the sake of this example is "dog obedience".

2. In a second or so you will see results brought by SpyFu. This is when things get really interesting.

On a side note - SpyFu is an extremely capable service and it may be used in many creative ways - I will cover some of the other possible applications in the future.

Today we are interested in the section titled "Adwords results".

Your search should generate results similar to the ones below.

SpyFu may provide you with a much longer list of advertisers, but the ones that are listed directly on the first page of results are usually the ones, which are most active in the Adwords system. And this is a good sign for us!

As you may guess, websites, which are very actively promoting their products through Adwords, usually have a very good reason to do so - they are earning money! If only they had some affiliate programs, you could be earning too. And my experience is that the affiliate programs that I find this way happen to be some of the most established and profitable in any given niche.

3. But how do you find out, which websites actually offer some affiliate programs? Well, you could manually visit all websites and scan their pages, but there is a much simpler and faster method. It is time to do some googling.

Google offers a very useful "site" operator, which allows you to limit your search to any given domain. You can combine it with the "OR" operator to include several domains in your search. Do you know where I am heading?

Well, you've guessed it! We will use a search query like:

site:domainA OR site:domainB OR site:domainC affiliate.

We will simply list all domains and complete the query with the "affiliate" keyword to quickly discover any affiliate programs that these websites might offer.

There are two things to note in our example:

a) dogobediencereview.info immediately looks like an affiliate site and may not be worth including in your query
b) sitstayfetch.net (a very famous Clickbank program) actually redirects to www.kingdomofpets and this is the domain that we will have to use in our query, because this is the domain that Google indexes.

So our actual query will look like that:

site:petsmart OR site:dogproblems OR site:www.kingdomofpets OR site:shelbymarlo affiliate

And the results will look similar to the screenshot below. Please note the results highlighted in yellow - you've just discovered some very hot affiliate programs!

Ok, now you only have to sign up for this programs :-).

This method have worked for me brilliantly in many niches. It surely does not exhaust all the possible affiliate programs in any given niche, but that is not the point.

Your goal with this method is to quickly locate some of the best, top-earning affiliate programs available. And in this area, it's really a killer strategy.

If you like this article, please consider signing up for my newsletter - you will find the sign-up form in the top-left corner of this page. You may be sure that I will not send you aggressive sales pitches every other day. Actually, this article is a very good example of the content you may expect in your email by signing to my newsletter. So, don't hesitate - give it a try!

Technorati Tags: SpyFoo, Google, intelligence, market research, affiliate

Free domain giveaway at wpjoy.com

The owner of wpjoy.com is giving away 4 domains for free. offer will end March 1st so hurry up and get one, you can choose 1 from 4 domains:

mootblogger.com
emailflex.com
b2email.com
spamchow.com

Check it out at wpjoy.com

I would choose mootblogger.com :)

Google Alerts Tutorial

Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspirations posted an excellent tutorial for power-users of Google Alerts. If you don't know this service, it allows you to subscribe to email alerts, delivered whenever some new content of interest to you is crawled by Google.

Here is an excerpt:

Google Alerts

is probably one the most powerful Google service for people (especially

bloggers) who want to stay ahead of their competition. With Google

Alerts, you get an instant email notification whenever something

happens in your niche or topics that matter to you.

But are you

aware of all the wonderful features packed inside Google Alerts ? If

not, here's a short guide (illustrated with examples) to help you

harness the complete power of Google Alerts.

It is indeed a very useful tool, one which I personally use quite heavily, but still discovered some gems in this tutorial.

Google Alerts Tutorial

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Profitable niches in under 10 minutes

Update February 15, 2007 - please see this bookmarklet, which will help you automate large part of the process described in this article.

This is the second post in a series on discovering potentially profitable niches the easy way.

In the first post, I mentioned some websites, which are a good source of inspiration. Well, today we are going to actually use one of them, plus some other tools, freely available online. The ultimate result?

You will discover profitable niches in under 10 minutes, guaranteed. And best of all, at this stage, thinking is not required. Just follow the steps :-).

1. We will rely on Wikipedia, but you don't need to go there right now.

2. We will use a very convenient service, provided by Google, which allows you to automatically extract keywords from almost any web page. Go to Google AdWords:Keyword Tool and click on the "Site Related Keyword".

In the field to enter URL, copy http://en.wikipedia.org and check "Include other pages on my site linked from this URL" (checking this option is very important - otherwise you will not get too many keywords).

From the drop-down list, chose "Cost and ad position estimates". Select your currency (I've selected Euro) and enter a high, maximum cost per click value (I use 50).

Important: from now on, your results will vary, as they come from the frequently changing Wikipedia homepage.

3. Click "Get keywords" and wait for results.

4. When results appear, sort them by the "Estimated Avg. CPC" column and scroll down, looking for any high-paying keyword.

5. Here's what I found. "Accused priests" - average CPC at almost $10! Sounds interesting. Let's investigate it further.

6. Intuition tells me that it will be probably a very, very narrow niche, but it still may be profitable. Let's go to the trusted Wordtracker - one of the best keyword research tools out there.

A quick search brought me the following results:

wordtracker.gif

Wow! It seems that the subject is hot - almost 350 predicted searches per day!

7. All right, let's see how many competing pages there are for our target phrase. Here the Google's count:

Only 13 competing pages, none of them really well optimized for the target phrase.

Ok, here's what I would do in this case. Set up a quick blog at Blogger, do some googling on the subject, and write one or two articles, optimizing carefully for the target phrase, plus some supporting keywords. It should not take more than 1 hour for everything.

Add AdSense, obviously :-).

Try to get some links - you don't need much, just enough to get spidered quickly.

Wait for your AdSense income to arrive!

8. Using method described above, it's very possible to find many niches, some of them much deeper than "accused priests".

Let me give you some more examples from the very same research.

Cystic fibrosis - I would have never come up with that niche by means of brainstorming, but it seems attractive.

First of all, results obtained using the above method:

I also used the keyword tool to search specifically for "cystic fibrosis" to see, if there are also other high-paying phrases. Indeed, there are many.

And what does Wordtracker say about this niche? Well, there is definitely huge potential there for traffic.

Tibetan bells - another niche I would never though about. Definitely seems interesting.

Here's AdSense:

And here's Wordtracker

9. Using this technique, I can find many far-from-obvious niches very quickly. Many of them pay really well - see "qui tam lawsuits" - another niche I discovered using this technique, while preparing this article.

The key is to build a list of dynamic websites, such as news.google, en.wikipedia.org, which are content-rich and include links to many outside resources. Wikipedia is especially convenient, as it contains many specialized portals, list-pages, news pages, etc. - which you can use instead of the main page, to enhance your research even further.

Let me know in the comments how you like this approach to the niche discovery process.

Technorati tags: SEO, keyword, research, niche

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

A fool-proof way to discover the hottest markets

In a recent article I wrote about a quick and efficient way to discover new and profitable niches you would probably never think about.

The article generated quite a lot of buzz and was discussed in several forums. If you have not read it, please do so now - I believe you will not regret it. In short, it shows you how to use Wikipedia and a keyword tool from Google to automatically generate new niche ideas.

However, some of the people asked in the comments and in the forums whether this technique is limited to Wikipedia only. Of course it is not! Wikipedia was just an excellent example, because it's so content rich, but as a matter of fact, you could use virtually any website as your source. Obviously, depending on the quality of the website, your results will vary. Today I am going to show you a new twist to the same method. I hope you will enjoy it.

This is actually how I've found some of my best markets. And it is one of the easiest way to do so I've ever tried!

BTW, this is the third article in a series on discovering profitable niches.

In the first approach, we will use the Commission Junction website (if you don't know it yet - you probably should check it out - it's probably the best affiliate program out there). When compared to the "Wikipedia" approach, one important difference here is that we will actually select a niche, as wide as it may be, before doing any keyword research. What's best, you will know for sure that this niche is profitable. The only task remaining will be to slice a part of it for yourself.

1. Ok, so go to CJ. If you don't have a publisher account yet, sign up for one - it's free. Once you're logged in, click on "Get Links" in the upper menu. You will see a directory of all the advertisers that are members of CJ. Conveniently enough, they're already sorted into detailed categories. Just pick the category that you're interested in.

2. When you see a list of advertisers in your category, sort it by 3-month EPC. This value tells you the average affiliate revenue that any individual advertiser (merchant) generates for every 100 customers that the publisher (i.e. you) sends. Obviously, you want publishers with the highest EPC value in your category. But not because you will try to sign up with them immediately ( you may try, but it is quite difficult at times, so be warned).

What's important here is that these merchants will usually have the best websites, which can be used as an excellent source of niche ideas for us. Even if you don't sign up for any of the related affiliate programs, you may still produce a great website and monetize it with AdSense or other programs.

3. For the sake of this example, I've selected the "Furniture" category. When I checked, Merrick Mattress had the highest 3-month EPC value (EUR 55.62) (7-day EPC was even better - EUR 146.69). So let's find out more about this merchant. Click on its name. A new window will pop up.

4. The new window will provide you some basic information about the merchant. What we really need though is its website address. In this case it's http://www.angelbeds. You may visit this website to get a feeling for that particular niche. When you're finished, let's move to the next step.

5. From here on we will repeat steps 2 - 5 from my previous article on discovering profitable niches in under 10 minutes. I will not repeat all of all these instructions here. The only important difference is that you should substitute http://en.wikipedia.org with http://www.angelbeds.

6. Wow! It seems that we have a true winner here! Not only high CPC (cost per click) values, but also many different keywords, which is great if you want to create a content-reach website.

Here is a summary of our very fast research:

- over 260 phrases
- average CPC for all these 260 phrases is EUR 4.4
- max CPC is EUR 15.79

Here's a partial screenshot from the Google's keyword tool.

If you wish, you can download the file with all phrase from this research: mattress.zip

Of course you can dig it down deeper from this point on. I would definitely suggest using Wordtracker for that - your 260+ phrases give you a great starting point for coming up with probably thousands of related keywords.

8. Further possibilities are almost endless. You could use the same technique on some subpages of your selected merchant. You could use it on additional merchants' websites from the same category. Or you could quickly test different categories that CJ offers. I am sure you will find dozens or even hundreds of hot niches this way.

9. One final piece of advice - when you discover your golden gem - work on it! Don't get too excited about discovering hundreds of niches - unless you do something about them, they will be of no value to you!

Technorati Tags: niche, affiliate, internet marketing, keyword research, tutorials

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Harness the power of archived knowledge

Today I will show you how to use two great services to do your market research. They will be helpful whether you are trying to come up with a new niche idea or trying to generate some content ideas for a niche you've already discovered.

The two services in question are answers.yahoo and answers.google.

Generally speaking, they are used by people, who need to ask others specific questions and get some answers. Yahoo's service is free, while Google employs qualified researchers, who charge a fee for the answers they provide.

But today we will not be asking any questions. We are going to do some treasure-hunting in the archives that both services provide.

It's a common knowledge that one of the best ways to find product ideas is to discover problems that other people have - and solve them with your product (i.e. your website).
Well, both Yahoo's and Google's archives will provide just the information we need. What's more, they will provide not only questions, but very often also answers to them.

As Yahoo's service is free, it has grown enormously - currently it has over 25 million questions in its database! They cover virtually any subject imaginable - from humorous to technical.

Google's archive is not as big, but because researchers are paid, some of the answers are of extremely high quality - if you've never used this service, you will be truly surprised how many hours of work they sometimes spend to answer a single question.

It means that by combining both services, we will discover both problems that people have and the same time, we will learn quite a bit about our niches.

Using answers.yahoo to discover new niches

One good thing about Yahoo's service is its excellent tree of categories, which allows you to precisely narrow your potential niche. Here's the method that I usually use.

1. I select a broad category and I dig deeper until I find that there are no narrower choices. For the sake of this example, I've first selected Education & Reference and then Home Schooling. It's not because I had any particular inclination for that niche. It just caught my attention.

2. The key is to be able to quickly judge how hot any niche is. To do that, click on the "Discover Resolved Questions" tab after selection your niche. For me, this proved to be the most efficient way - I don't bother with unanswered questions.

3. In the next step, sort all questions by the number of answer provided, so that questions with the most answers will be on top. If you discover that top questions receive only a handful of answers (less than 10), it is usually an indicator that the niche may not be so hot.

4. In our case, question no. 1 is "What do you think about Homeschooling? And why?" and it has 1425 answers at the moment of writing it. Well, it seems that there are some people passionate about the subject!

5. Click on the question mentioned above to open it and the first set of answers.

6. No doubt that people have a lot to say about the subject. But what about monetization of this niche? At this point, we will use a method that I described in a previous articled Profitable niches in under 10 minutes. Just follow the steps 2-5, but with two important differences. Substitute en.wikipedia.org with the actual URL of the page with the question and answers from step 5 above. Then deselect the "Include other pages on my site linked from this URL" option - otherwise our results would include totally unrelated phrases.

7. Bingo! We have a very nice and deep niche with many high-paying phrases.

8. As usually, I would recommend that you head to Wordtracker and do further keyword research, using phrases provided by Google as your starting points. I run a quick test and within minutes found thousands of related phrases. Some of them have very little competition.

NOT FOUND: wordtracker.gif

9. But that's not all. If you need some inspiration and potential subjects for your articles, just go back to a list of questions. You will find all that you need over there:

Just some examples:

• Are home schooled kids smarter?
• Why do parents choose to home school their children?
• How is home schooling better than a public school?
• How do you home school your children, where do you start?
• High School or homeschool?

What's best, you will also get dozens of answers to these questions, so you can immediately gather some good arguments even if you're completely new to any particular niche.

Using answers.yahoo and answers.google to explore profitable niches

If you have not read a previous article called A fool-proof way to discover the hottest markets, please read it now.

It explains how you can use Commission Junction to discover profitable niches. In the example that we discussed, it turned out that mattresses were a huge and profitable market. Fine, but if you're like me, writing about mattresses is not the most exciting prospect.

Unless you can discover that some people have very specific problems in that area. Let's see how Yahoo's and Google's services can help with that.

1. Go to answers.yahoo and in the search box, enter mattress. In my case, this query returned 883 results. Well, quite an inspiration for a niche website! In fact, I was able to quickly get ideas for over 20 articles - in under 5 minutes. Even better, I could also use the answers provided to greatly speed up the research process.

2. Quite often I use the advanced search offered by Yahoo's service. I choose to search my keywords in the questions only (this way I avoid many unrelated questions, in which my keyword appeared incidentally in any of the answers) and to search only among resolved questions, where the best answer has been chosen - it generally leads to more targeted content of higher quality.

3. Now go to answers.google. Remember, this is a service where askers have to pay to get answers. But in many cases, you can expect very solid research. In the search box, enter mattress and select the "answered questions" option from a drop-down menu.

4. I will now point out some of the answers that I've found, all related to our sample niche. They really give you a nice start and a lot of knowledge required to start writing your original articles.

• A complete list of major brand names mattresses - pure gold in any SEO-related efforts.
• Best mattress cover for people with allergies
• Incredibly detailed information on mattresses replacement for wound care

There are many more, but my intention here was only to show you the quality of information on sometimes very obscure subjects. Given that your probably will venture into niches that you know little about, such sources are invaluable.

Stay tuned for the next articles in a series on discovering profitable niches!

Technorati Tags: seo, marketing, niche, affiliate, research

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Is your niche deep enough?

If you intend to build a blog around your newly-discovered niche, you must ensure that it is deep enough, so that you don't exhaust its potential after 2 days of blogging.

I've recently started using a new tool to very quickly explore various knowledge sources in order to assess whether there is enough content to sustain my blogging in any given niche. Plus, I've discovered quite a few novel ideas and angles for my niches the same way.

The tool in fact is not new - it's the A9 search engine provided by Amazon. But in a market dominated by Google and Yahoo, one's not too likely to test another search engine without a good reason.

All goodies in one place

Well, one feature of A9 really makes it stand out of the crowd. You can select from hundreds of different specialized search engines (many of them focused on single sites) and combine them all on a very convenient, Ajax-driven page, in a column layout. This way, you get all the most important information at a glance.

In my setup I have six columns (I've selected the smallest font size in preferences to fit more content on the screen). These columns include: web search (results provided by Windows Live, enhanced by Alexa statistics), books (from Amazon), news (Windows Live), blogs (IceRocket Blog Search), Wikipedia and About.

When I do a search on any potential niche, I can immediately see the number of results in each category and the actual content from some of them (like Wikipedia).

For example, I like book results a lot. If I discover that there are dozens or even hundreds of books on a given subject, it's usually a good indicator that I will not run out of things to write about.

Wikipedia results allow you to get immediate overview of the information that is relevant to your niche. About is equally useful in this field. This is particularly handy if you're not an expert in that niche.

The interface is very clean, you can easily resize column widths, and the server responses are generally quite prompt. At least, it's many times faster than browsing to all of these sites one by one.

So, give it a try.

Here's a screenshot of my set-up:

Technorati Tags: A9, research, niche, internet marketing

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Overture and Google in one search

Here's a neat, little trick that may either save you some time, or help you kill some time, depending on what you're up to.

BTW, you should be using FireFox to fully follow this method.

This trick will allow you to open Google results page and Overture keyword tool side by side with one quick shortcut. Excellent when you want to quickly go through several niches and get an overview of them. Your results screen will look like this:

Ok, here's how.

1. In the background, we will use the extremely useful yubnub service - the command line for the web. Go and explore it for yourself - it's a great tool that will save you time on many other occasions, especially when searching.

2. We need to configure FireFox in such a way that when it cannot recognize the URL in the address bar, it forwards the entire command to yubnub.

3. In order to do that, enter "about:config" in the address bar. A new configuration page will open.

4. Do a search for "keyword.URL" and change its value to "http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=". Thanks Brian for the tip.

5. Now, in the address bar of FireFox, enter "gok your_keyword", for example "gok forex". It will open a split screen, with Overture results in the left frame and Google results in the right frame. "Gok" is one the endless commands available at yubnub.

6. BTW, you can create your own commands at yubnub - this is really powerful!

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

SubExpress - quick subdomains

I will make a longer description available soon, this is just a draft, but I guess that people, who need this tool, will know what to do with it anyway.

SubExpress allows you to instantly create subdomains on accounts with cPanel. It's a desktop application, no installation required.

The main features:

• create subdomains in bulk
• verify that your subdomains exist
• delete subdomains in bulk
• save your lists of subdomains for future use
• works on any account with cPanel - no need for Web Host Manager (WHM)

You can download it here.

The software is freeware. Hope you find it useful.

Domain creation screen:

Domain verification and deletion screen:

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

A new concept at Qassia

Recently, when wandering around, I stumbled upon a new site that's still in beta, qassia. In short, you earn "qassia dollars" by either post link, post your own content or if you don't have time to author one, just post something you feel interesting and earn! It's not currently clear at what rate the qassian dollar is to $ or Euro in the future but if it's working, it's better to get started now ;) Clearly they are acquiring content (claiming to be "the mother of all web sites), but you can just add content from others and earn.

The site is still in closed beta, you can't just go ther and click register, instead, you must have some referrer. My page is http://mmania.qassia.com/, there will be a sign up link there for your convenience:)

Try the best to refer people in the frame of 12 hours, you'll get 500 qassia $ each! (compare to $20 for copy an article or $300 for writing one)

They describe themselves as follow:

What can I do at Qassia?

You can add your websites, and get unlimited quality backlinks. There is no need to pay, or to link back to Qassia. Websites are processed instantly and ranked by the amount of credits you have amassed. To earn credits, you can add intel, i.e. tidbits of intelligence.

Why is Qassia needed?

Promoting a new site has never been easy, and it's getting tougher every day. Site owners are forced to spend hours upon hours doing mundane and unproductive tasks such as exchanging links. Many give up, and splurge on advertising - which is why Google Adwords earns $1 billion per quarter.

How will Qassia generate traffic?

At Qassia, you will get credit for adding your intel. The more credit you get, the better your sites will rank. This provides incentive for site owners to contribute to Qassia. Thus harnessing the minds of millions, Qassia will become the largest repository of intelligence on the web.

For SEOers: you can add all your sites and get FREE backlinks, without linking back so there's no way one can lose :P

 

How to Buy Foreclosed Homes: A Quick Guide - Part 2

The Specifics of Buying Foreclosed Homes

Read Buying Foreclosed Homes: Part one

With the current sub-prime crisis and the real estate market still somewhat in flux, the opportunity exists for people to take advantage of low prices associated with foreclosures.

It’s certainly unfortunate that foreclosures are increasing. But at the same time, it does present an opportunity for those wanting to invest in houses while the market is poor. An until the housing market comes out of this funk, there should continue to be some great deals out there for people who are willing to take a chance. How do you go about purchasing one of these foreclosed homes, though? What exactly does the process entail? Here is a breakdown of a few of the basics.

Steps in buying a Foreclosed Home

Once you have gone through the process of finding a good deal, there is still an extensive process that must be completed in order for you to own that property. Specifically, buyers have to go through all of the appropriate channels, which tend to be extensive when dealing with foreclosures.

Do I have to attend a foreclosure auction?

Technically, you can get around dealing with a foreclosure auction if your timing is right. If you can get in touch with the homeowner just before the home is returned to the bank, then you could make a deal with them that will allow you to purchase the home at a huge discount.

There is also the option of making an offer directly to the bank. If you can find out exactly when the home is going to be transferred back to the bank, then you can make an offer before the bank puts the house back on the market. This will allow you to get a better deal than what you might get when competing with other buyers. Otherwise, you will have to go through the standard auction process and compete with others for that home.

What’s the auction like?

If you are buying a HUD home or a VA home, then you have to make a sealed offer in order to qualify. HUD homes can only be sold through these written, sealed offers. In order to do this, you must find a real estate agent that is certified to handle this sort of home buying.

For all other bank foreclosed homes, the process will vary depending upon which bank and what sort of home. Banks will generally advertise the foreclosure auction in the newspaper, so you have to be on the lookout in order to know when the auction is going to happen. Then, you will have to attend the auction and be prepared to pay the minimum amount by way of bank check in order to win the home in auction.

What steps should I take?

There is a lot of information floating on the internet about how you can purchase a foreclosed home with terrible credit and no money down. Though it is certainly easier to purchase a foreclosed home than it would be to purchase another type of home, you still need good credit to buy a foreclosed home. In addition, you will be able to get by with a lower down payment, but there are not many homes that will require tiny down payments.

In addition, research is absolutely imperative to your home search. Because auctions are intense in terms of competition, you should take the time to scout out a few houses in order to have a good idea of what you’re looking at once the auction begins. It is in your best interest to enter the actual auction with as much information as possible and you should know how much you are willing to pay for the home in question.

Read Buying Foreclosed Homes: Part one

For Sale Signs Image by karlfrankowski

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

How to Buy Foreclosed Homes

We can only hope that the housing crisis ends soon. Its causing good families to lose their homes, and the houses and condos they worked so hard to buy and keep.

The reality is, because of the current housing slump and credit crisis, many more foreclosed and could soon be foreclosed houses are being sold at steeply discounted prices. And someone is going to buy them.

If you are considering purchasing a foreclosed home there are some things that you should know. One helpful site to give you a basic guide for buying foreclosed homes is this government home buying guide.

Base Decisions on Logic, Not Emotion

One thing is a common denominator among all forms of real estate buying. If you are going to do it successfully, you have to remove all emotion from the equation. This is especially true for purchasing foreclosed homes. Make sure that your decisions are rational ones that are based upon solid information. It never makes sense to make a snap judgment on a home. Go through the normal process of analysis and make sure that the foreclosed home you’re buying is a good deal.

Evaluating the Property

When you are doing research on a foreclosed home, there are a few factors to keep in mind. Obviously, you will be taking a hard look at price, but that can’t be the end of your analysis. It is equally important to take into account the condition of the home you are observing. Some experienced home buyers might be able to assess this on their own, but for most of us, hiring an inspector is a good idea. This can become quite costly, though, so you should only hire an inspector to take a look at homes that fall on your proverbial “short list”.
One problem with many foreclosed homes is that they are in bad neighborhoods. This certainly is not true for all foreclosures, so you need to be sure of what you are buying into. Even if the home is in good condition, your property value will drop if you purchase in a neighborhood with above average property devaluing.

You should be looking for homes that don’t need a whole lot of substantial repair. Remember that the good thing about foreclosures is that you are getting an excellent price. If you need to put a lot of money into repairs, then you are practically giving back all of those savings. Unlike other types of homes, you are buying a foreclosed home just as it is. It is absolutely imperative that you uncover its actual state before making the purchase.

Stick Within Your Budget

There is another important thing to consider in addition to those, and it is something that lots of home buyers fall victim to when they purchase foreclosed homes. You must remain in a reasonable price range. Even though there are some excellent values out there, you have to remain logical about your ability to pay for these homes or else you might end up being the one foreclosed upon.

Next post, Part Two of How to Buy a Foreclosed Home we’ll get into more detail about how to go about actually buying foreclosed houses.

For Sale Signs Image by karlfrankowski

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Video Interview with Simon Heseltine of RedBoots at SES Chicago

After the "Dealing with Difficult Clients" panel at SES search marketing event here in Chicago, I got the opportunity to sit down and speak with Simon Heseltine of RedBoots about the topic he covered on this very interesting panel.

Simon pointed out 6 different types of difficult clients, and talks with me in a little more detail about 2 of those types in this video interview.

For the coverage on all 6 types, plus the other two panelists, check out the full coverage on the Dealing with Difficult Clients session.

Google, That NoFollow Thing? Could You Explain How To Use It, Officially?

Can anyone from Google explain to me (and the rest of the search industry) why on earth you have no documentation on how you want website owners using the "rel = nofollow" attribute on links?  Honestly, I'm really frustrated and quite frankly annoyed about "speculation" and "theory" about what nofollow should be used for and not used for.

While I respect Matt Cutts, a lot of time Matt treads a very thin line between giving too much information that can be totally misconstrued, and yet not enough information.... which again, can be totally misconstrued.  See the little predicament here!? 

I would like to request that Google - OFFICIALLY, put a page in your FAQ's on the webmaster central area, about NoFollow and a link to that FAQ page in its Webmaster Guidelines.  Please explain what Google views it as, how it should be used and how it shouldn't be used.  Give examples, give webmasters something concrete to work with rather than summations from people within the search industry, who don't work at Google.  You see, by not having something official, you confuse webmasters or website owners who have no clue about optimizing their site.  It creates confusion, rumors and misinformation, all things that are BAD for your search engine.

I've searched, and I've wrote about this before, throughout the Google Terms of Service, the Webmaster Guidelines, the FAQ pages, the About Us section, and I can find nothing that states what nofollow is, nor how Google wants webmasters to use it.  I do find that Google wants you to Report Paid Links and to use nofollow stop spiders from falling into Calendars that create spider traps.  I've found a posting in Google Groups about nofollow (btw, no one from Google's posted to this thread yet), but beyond these drips and drabs of small information - there is nothing official.  I don't understand why Google hasn't done this already.  Maybe they like to see the search engine industry run around and try and figure it out? (I have an inkling they do LOL)

Take a look at all the interesting theories, mentions in drafts and even comments from your lead Spam Engineer all within the last couple of months:

• Why Rand Fishkin's NoFollow Post was Wrong
• Matt Cutts Interviewed by Eric Enge
• Discussion on Sphinn
• I Disagree with Danny Sullivan & Google Engineers about Link Buying Practices
• NoFollow Makes it Into HTML 5 Specifications
• Matt Cutts Clarifies Proper Use of the NoFollow Tag

See that last one in the list?  Why does it have to be Matt Cutts on someone else's blog (not on Google's site, and not on Webmaster Central Blog) clarifying what the "proper use" of NoFollow is?  How does someone who doesn't really know the ins and outs of this particular industry find this information when it's not on your site?

Even on the Webmaster Central Blog, I have found advice on lots of things but nothing about NoFollow.  I found FAQ's on Sitemaps, best practices given to the audience at Pubcon,  and how to remove my content from Google.  Where's the stuff on NoFollow?  Come on guys and gals - it's really not that difficult to produce a page that can be easily understood by not just the search community but by any webmaster whether they have SEO experience or not.

Google, since you've been the most vocal and the search engine who's change the meaning and use of nofollow the most since it was introduced at a SES Conference so long ago, could you please, pretty please, pretty please with whipped cream and a cherry on top - produce an FAQ page on the use of NoFollow!  It probably wouldn't be a bad idea either for Matt to post about it on Webmaster Central since you do have over 25k in a subscriber base!

Google Quality Score Myths & Truths

In today's world, most SEM Gurus play the quality score game with Google and to some extent Yahoo. However, in order to impress a client or get kudos for a really innovative idea to improve CTR% or conversion, we are forced to some sort of A/B test, Ad multivariate tests and sometimes Day-parting (with the help of analytics). Typically speaking, one would think that all of this testing would wreak havoc on our goals for high Google Quality Score. Well, after a bit of thought and a quick call into Google, I can confirm that it's not as bad as we all may think it is. Let's discuss.

Day-Parting:
Day-parting DOES NOT AFFECT overall Google Quality Score because Google keeps the CTR% history. However, day-parting could backfire on you if the CTR% for that specific time is lower than it's original full-time running. So it's important to use analytics to verify when is the best time to segment the day parting.

Pausing & Deleting of Keywords:
At first, I assumed this was a no brainer that it would affect quality score, but oddly enough according to Google the deletion and/or pausing of a particular keyword/search term DOES NOT AFFECT Quality Score, because there is no loss of performance history and hence keeps it's own Quality Score.

Quality Score & Ads/Creatives:
When I attended the SES NY conference in April, 2007, one of the presenters mentioned that when testing Ads on Google, it's important to not change the Ads too much because you will lose history and eventually Quality Score. However, it's importance to note what really effects quality score at the Ad/Creative level is any change made to the landing page of a Destination URL field. (Note: This is different than losing performance stats that get recycled  when making a change to any of the Ad fields) To back up my claim, here's a real example from Google regarding an inquiry I had made about a past client of mine. "As long as the landing page of the Destination URL is not changed, merely adding additional tags to the URL will not affect your Quality Score or average cost."

So, in a SEM-nutshell, the skepticism of on-going testing (day parting, deleting/pausing of keywords and Ad Variations) does not hurt the ongoing efforts of Google quality score. Frankly, I was a bit surprised that Google continues to capture of history on all of these areas. I have to admit that I am impressed with Google's dedication to allowing it's customers test and improve performance of their keywords/campaigns, etc... Let's just hope that neither of these testing elements change in the near future, especially since it's getting more expensive everyday to compete in the space.

eBay vs. Google: Google Protests, eBay Pulls U.S. Adwords

A collective sigh of relief can be heard from a lot of online marketers right now.  eBay's pulled all of their U.S. ads on the Adwords network.  According to Computer World and other industry blogs,  eBay spokesman Hani Durzy characterized the decision to pull the U.S. Google ads as "an instance in a continued experiment eBay does to determine the best allocation of its advertising and marketing budget."

eBay's rather notorious for there ads on every imaginable keyword out there.  At one point you could even buy "Danny Sullivan" on eBay.  That was at least, according to their paid advertising if your searched for information on Danny.  One of the most annoying things for almost all online marketers is dealing with EBay and its very broad marketing campaigns, tonight at least for a little while, perhaps campaigns might see some relief with not having to compete with eBay.

With saying that, you might be wondering why eBay's "really" pulled there ads. 

Ruin Your PPC Campaigns With Analytics*

Numbers are your enemy.  They will only complicate your life and take time away from your instinct and opinion.  In fact, I think analytics just might ruin your pay-per-click campaigns.  Read on to learn to stop loving metrics and start loving subjective decisions!

Too Many Metrics?  Just Optimize For One

Listen, there are a lot of data out there.  Trying to look at all of the data takes too much time.  That's time you could be spending turning on all of the automatic management features of AdWords and getting a martini. 

Web Analysts want you believe that analysis is hard.  It's not.  Just pick a number for your campaign that matters to you, say conversion rate.  Now base all of your optimization decisions around that one metric. 

Who cares how many impressions those other keywords got?  Revenue and cost-per-sale?  Forget them.  Optimizing for one goal is easier and people love seeing conversion rate go up and to the right.

Everything That Matters Happens Before The Click

Keyword research is really time consuming.  The same goes for setting up campaigns, ad groups, and creatives.  That's why you should spend your time measuring those things.  Don't waste your time seeing what happens when people land on your site.

Effective PPC Strategies For Political Campaigns

In a previous post on SemGeek entitled "Study: Search Marketing In Prime Spot To Play Major Role in Political Spending" I discussed the great opportunities that awaits for the Search Industry to get a bigger piece of the campaign spending pie. The only thing in our way is convincing the Politicians and Campaign Managers to see the value in all that the Search Industry has to offer. Especially the "high level" online strategies that can be created, implemented, tested and reported on in Paid Search. If we can convince them of that, then we will strike that "all important" commonality of getting a greater ROVP (Return On Voter Participation). However, it is that same messaging power of the web that also scares them to put more money into it. But over time, Analytics and actionable data will change their minds.

To help reinforce this skepticism, acccording to this study done by Borrell Associates which states “The jury is still out regarding the Internet’s effectiveness for
reaching and targeting the undecided,” the report read. “There is a
fear that their message may end up going to an unintended recipient.
Consultants would need to be convinced of the accuracy of this type of
direct advertising reaching and persuading the intended targets before
they would find sufficient value to devote much money toward it.”

Who's Helping To Get This Message Out:
I have been fortunate enough to be a part of a new company called CampaignGrid which is headquartered in Philadelphia, PA where the goal is to not only educate and persuade the massive opportunities in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Analytics and Testing, but also drive measurable results that help the candidates, non-profits and charitable organizations who need help. In a nutshell, it's all about Raising Money, Advertising and Organizing Online to drive the best possible results. Results consist of online donations, capturing information from volunteers and cross channel support.

Here are just a few of the things we are doing at CampaignGrid:

• Behavioral Targeting with Interactive Video and Transactional Banners
• Using PPC to persuade voters of all parties on the candidates messaging.
• Counteracting negative campaigning tactics (which is essentially reputation management)
• Testing different messaging tactics across different Geo and Demographic  audiences.
• Creating streamlined data flow processes to maximize the effectives of all online advertising
• Implementing robust analytics tracking to provide political campaign managers with everything from the amount of donations and volunteer submissions on any given day to how effective specific PPC campaigns are doing against others.

In conclusion: There is a big perception problem with political parties that the Internet is a very dangerous playground and it's easier to spend millions on traditional media such as TV, Radio and Print. However, we can bridge that gap by simply educating the political arena that Search Marketing is not only much more cost effective, but it is comprised of "cutting edge" strategies, best practices and highly detailed analytics which allows for a greater understanding of how the campaign's money is being spent.

As an old Mentor used to tell me you need to tell clients "Fish where the Fish are!" It doesn't get any easier than that in Search.

Twitter's 140 Characters Teach Wonderful Lessons

140 characters can lead a lot of marketers to learn a lot of new lessons.  Enter into the world of Twitter and you'll see why.  Tweets fly through Twitterdom faster than it seems an email can land in my email box.  Hitting the enter button, can forever preserve a thought that can be totally taken out of context, twisted and used for other purposes.

Those 140 characters can also point out just how free flowing and "not thought through" statements can be.  Just ask Steve Rubel about his lessons learned from Twitter.  Last week, without even putting a second thought he passed a Tweet into Twitterdom that couldn't be clarified beyond what he posted.

"PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash."

What Steve didn't clarify in his "Tweet", is that he does read PC Mag - only online and via RSS Feed.  However, none of that got related through this space of flying messages on Twitter, and the folks at PC Mag responded in a rather harsh manner.  Steve, in return, admitted his wrong, in an open letter to PC Mag's editor-in-chief, Jim Louderback. 

It brings an interesting predicament to the forefront.  When using these social media technologies, we get so engrossed in how easy it becomes to communicate that we forget others can be listening and come into the conversation without the entire story.  Limited messages can have an entirely different meaning than what was intended.  Then there's the whole cultural boundaries, what someone is saying in the US can be totally offensive to someone in another country. 

This is where businesses venturing into social media and web 2.0 tools need to tread carefully, especially with tools like Twitter and there instantaneous nature.  I'm not advocating companies put a gag on their employees utilizing the service, but perhaps a quick lesson in "when talking about the company, think twice about what you are sending across Twitter." 

Is there a lesson a business or a PR company can take from Steve's experience?  Most certainly there is.  It can take less than a second to send a "Tweet", but one "Tweet" can have your entire PR department working for days to clarify, quantify and apologize.

If you'd like to add me to your Twitter, feel free to!

Blogs: Making Your Pitch - What Not To Do

As a blog gets older, grows in audience and continues to put out content that proves it is an active blog, it's inevitable that the blog will get pitches about stories "they must" cover.  Coming from a PR background, I really wonder where some of these PR practitioners learned their trade, based on the couple of pitches SMG receives a day.

A few weeks ago Lee Odden at TopRankBlog posted a great list of "How Not to Pitch a Blog".  I'd like to add a few more bullets to the list, or give a different perspective or meaning to some of his bulleted points.

• 
  Investigate the Blog:   Learn everything you can about the blog, check out the "About Us" section, reader the bloggers profiles, find out if they even take pitches. 
  
  • Who owns the blog?
  • Is the owner of the blog a writer?
  • Do the contributing writers have their own blogs?
  • Can you contact the writers' individually?
  • Has the blog written about you before?
  • Has the blog written about your industry before?
  • Does the blog or blogger(s) subscribe to your service?
• Don't Email Blast Your Press Release:  If you want to pitch a story, email the blogger.  Bloggers are rather unique individuals and like the personal touch.  To be honest, we hate the canned automated messages, especially ones that have "Error! File Name Not Specified". 
  
  • Pitch the blog before you mass email your press release
  • Make it personal - address the blogger individually, point out why you believe the story would be important to them.
  • Don't send the same message to all the members of the blogging team, especially if only one contact email is listed for the blog.
• Don't Treat Bloggers as Just Another Press Release Outlet: Don't just email the press release.  Unless of course your Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, you will just annoy the writers, editors and owners of the blogs.  Again, it goes back to making it personal. 
  
  • Bloggers are not just another outlet to mass email your press release too
  • Unless the blog has a general email they say "send press releases to this address", resist the urge to add that email you see to your distribution list.
• Take the Time and Email and Establish a Relationship with the Blog:  Yes, I know, this takes a bit of time. However, if you know anything about Public Relations, it's about establishing relationships.  A blogger can become an important resource for you, if you take the time and nurture the relationship.
• 
  Remember, Bloggers can Tarnish Your Name, Just as Fast as They Praise It: Piss off a blogger with your email blasts about your boring product launch, and it's likely a blogger will out you, your client or company.  They might even dig for information on something your don't want to be reported.
• Remember, Bloggers Talk to Other Bloggers:  Especially in niche industries that might not be that large, it is even more prevalent.  Like minded people like to bond over subjects they have in common.  It takes one conversation of "hey did you get that press release from WYZ Company?" and the bloggers discover they were both pitched in the same way.  That gets the ball rolling for other bloggers to just unite and possibly join against you and your PR Strategy.
• Lastly, Don't Leave Your PR Blog Strategy to Interns: You may think, contacting bloggers is something so simple you can just pass it off to your interns to do.  Resist that urge.  Instead, have the interns do the research on which blogs you should contact and also the research on why you should contact the blog.  The relationship with the blogger should be established by the Public Relations professional within the company, as they are the most experiences about the services, products and reasons the story should be pitched.  Remember in one fell push of the publish button, a blogger can start a campaign against your company, rather than for it, and that could spiral out of control rather quickly.

Public Relations professionals really need to stop and think about their strategies when dealing with bloggers.  Bloggers are NOT your typical news outlet.  Bloggers, in most cases, don't answer to editors, or multi-million dollar conglomerate owners.  Bloggers usually have one boss, their own conscious.  Working with bloggers requires more time and investment, which involves cultivating a relationship. 

Taking the time to cultivate the relationship could possibly be your best break in helping to get your story out to the masses, so don't leave it to just an intern, canned messages or email blasts.  Invest the time and resources and you will find that your PR Blogging Strategy could be a your best bet when getting your story ideas covered.

"Good" vs. "Bad" Search Affiliates

I want to thank Li for inviting me to SMG. I hope to bring to light some of the issues
that affect affiliate marketers, strategies that they utilize, and tools that
are currently being utilized.

For my first entry on SMG I wanted to clarify my view on the
“good” vs “bad” Affiliate Marketers utilizing search. Unfortunately, there are people out there that who give some
amazing marketers a bad name. For me it
simply comes down to whether the affiliate adds value to the merchant.

There are many affiliate marketers out there that are more
advanced in PPC strategies then the merchants. A quality affiliate will build customized landing pages for niches
within the merchants business. They
will target their keywords towards this niche often going deeper than the
merchant. Even if the merchant has a
quality search campaign these affiliate still add a great deal of value by
blocking competitors from the space.

As recently as a few years ago many affiliate managers rated
the success of their program based on the amount of affiliates in the
program. Now it makes much more sense
to run small controlled programs where the Affiliate Manager has more power
over who they are working with. By
manually approving all affiliates and sticking to strict guidelines it makes it
easier to weed out the offending affiliates. This includes trademark bidders or people who bid on important keywords
and send the traffic directly to the merchant’s site through an affiliate link. These types of affiliates are not good for
an individual program or the industry as a whole. It is these behaviors by individuals is what gives affiliate
marketing a bad name in the search space. They are also a major reason for the recent change in Google’s algorithm
that has led to false positives, negatively affecting the campaigns of
legitimate merchants.

In future blog entries I will go into more detail on
the top affiliates in the space as well as the offenders giving Affiliate
Marketing a bad name.

Do Linkshare & Commission Junction Need to Worry About Google?

Google announced through two of its blogs today(Inside Adwords, Inside Adsense), that its launching its own CPA (Cost Per Action) network in beta.  Although they didn't come out and call the beta test "Affiliate Marketing", that is exactly what it is.  Google may put its own tweaks and spins on its service offerings for both the marketer and the advertiser, but in essence, Google's beta testing its own type of affiliate network similar in nature to LinkShare or Commission Junction.

Do CJ and LinkShare need to worry?  Is this the death to Affiliate Marketing as we know it?  Is Google's type of service offerings a huge threat to the big players in this market?  I'd like to point to a still surviving and now thriving Yahoo! (once Overture/GoTo) that's still in the PPC market long after Google entered. 

That's to say I highly doubt this is going to "do in" the major players in this market space.  The sky isn't falling in affiliate marketing at all.  It's just another competitor.  Granted it's one with a huge brand name, but CJ and LinkShare have a lot behind them, they just need to have a plan to keep their affiliates and advertisers happy and not jumping ship to go to Google.

Overall this is great news for the market, at least from my perspective.  It can only make the major players in this space step up to the plate and provide more valuable services.  Competition, as we know, is great for the market place, not the death knell.  So back to my question - Do CJ & Linkshare need to worry?  Nawh, they just need to deal with more competition now.

Google "Universal Search Model"

Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim reported on the upcoming algorithm and interfaces changes out of Google.  The most notable change is that Google will be displaying results from all of its properties including web, image, video, news, etc in order to provide what they feel to be the most relevant results.

What does this mean for affiliates?  It looks like it result in less space in the sandbox for affiliates to play.  It will also make it necessary for affiliate marketers as well as merchants to optimize their placements in the video, image and news/web PR space.  In the grand scheme of things I do not think that this change will negatively affect affiliates on a whole but will force the ever resilient group to change how they think about the ways that they are currently promoting their merchants.

Affiliate Marketing Is Not on the Decline

This is my first post for SMG so please bear with me if I don’t follow the usual rules of  blog posting.  I’m sure I’ll pick it up along the way.  My posts are primarily going to be about my observations working in the affiliate marketing space.  One of my biggest pet peeves as you’ll soon find out are those folks who criticize the affiliate industry and who have truly never really taken the time to do their research to learn how the industry works, or put the time and effort required into making a successful program.

I’ve read a lot of posts recently which state the affiliate industry is dying or on the decline. (How the Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself.)  I find this quite fascinating and can only assume these folks are not looking at the same year over year results I am.  The preliminary 4th quarter data I have seen so far indicate the affiliate industry is  actually on the increase.  Early revenue numbers indicate the 4th quarter of 2007 was stronger than ever.  In most cases, merchants reporting double digit revenue increases over last year.  With results like this I think I would disagree that the industry in a decline.      

Steve Denton, President of LinkShare addressed the same topic in recent interview with Revenews titled “LinkShare 2008 Preview - Part 1 of the Revenews 2008 Affiliate Network Preview Series”.  When Steve was asked about the annual proclamation of the affiliate industry's demise?  His reply was: "It's simply not true." Every year someone is posting something that announces the death of affiliate marketing. You remember when a certain large search engine was going to kill affiliate marketing because they changed their business model? Many people said when they changed their model it was going to kill affiliate marketing, but it didn't. Again, when all the adware and spyware issues first surfaced several years ago others predicted that was going to kill affiliate marketing. But it didn't. As an industry I think everyone works hard to resolve the issues that exist. I think we continue to demonstrate it is a proven, valuable channel." 

I think Steve summed it up best when he said “ Year in and year out this channel continues to deliver. Affiliate marketing is a robust channel that can't be ignored, especially as part of a multi-channel strategy."

What Affiliate Marketing has Taught Me About Email Marketing

In a recent discussion with our email solution provider I was asked to potentially speak at their next conference on the topic of Affiliate Marketing.  When thinking about what I may speak about it sparked me to look back at the first 6 or 7 years of my career and how much Affiliate Marketing has allowed me to learn.   I know that I am slightly biased but I cannot think of another online marketing specialty area that touches on so many niches of online marketing.

Quick Career Update:  In November of this past year I joined Taylor Gifts as the Director of e-Commerce.  In this new role I am responsible for all areas of online marketing. In the interest of full disclosure it should be known that I am not currently directly managing our Affiliate Program but am excited to be working with the great folks over at Converseon.

Effective Communication is the biggest differentiator between great and average Affiliate Managers.  There are thousands of Affiliate Programs all vying for the same real estate.  Top Affiliates receive hundreds of emails a day all asking for placement.  The affiliate program that can stand out from the others will have the best chance of winning the placement.  The communication techniques that I have utilized over the years for affiliate marketing carry over into successful email strategies that I am implementing today.

4 of the most important strategies / rules that I have learned from Affiliate Marketing that carry over into Email Marketing are:

1.  Be Unique
2.  Segmentation
3.  Offer
4.  Create a Two Way Interaction

Will Longer Keyphrases Hinder the Effectiveness of Your Copy?

The length of search phrases continues to grow. Back when the Internet was just an upstart, single keywords were the only thing you needed. But in recent years we've seen the number of words used in search phrases triple and quadruple. Rather than a single keyword, searchers who live in countries where English is the primary language are now using three- and four-word phrases as a standard, according to Web analytics company, OneStat.com.

While the worldwide average is two words per search phrase, the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia all show that searchers prefer the use of three- or four-word terms. What does this mean from a copywriting standpoint? Writing with a single keyword in mind is relatively easy. Using two-word terms is a bit more of a challenge. But when you get to three- and four-word phrases, your risk of sounding stiff and awkward increases substantially.

Why Longer Phrases?

Longer search phrases are the natural progression of the Internet population boom. As more and more information is placed online, it becomes increasingly difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. When there were only a few thousand sites, entering the word “marketing” into a search engine would bring up a handful of sites for you to choose from.

Now, however, you find hundreds of thousands of sites dealing with everything from marketing plans to marketing jobs to university curriculums for marketing degrees. The natural action for copywriters is to follow the search trend of the target audience and use the keyphrases that they use.

That leads us back to our original question ... how?

Tips for Writing With Keyphrases

The biggest mistake I find search engine optimization (SEO) copywriters making is attempting to substitute a generic term for a specific keyphrase. For example:

At our Mexico cruise vacation site we offer the best rates on Mexico cruise vacation packages to the most exciting Mexico cruise vacation destinations. Visit our Mexico cruise vacation specials page for deep discounts today!

Or

Welcome to our Chicago web design firm site. If you're looking for innovative and creative Chicago web design firm, you've come to the right place. No other Chicago web design firm has the talent or technological skills to develop the type of high-end sites we do. When you're ready for a truly professional Chicago web design firm, contact us today.

Oh please! My 10-year-old nephew could write better copy than that. When you substitute generic terms

(in this case: site, packages, vacation destinations, vacation specials, etc.)

with the specific search phrase, you get a bunch of repetitive, awkward babble. The longer the keyphrases are, the more clunky the copy will sound.

The best advice I can give is to break up some of the mentions of longer keyphrases. Yes, you do need to keep the words of the phrase in the same order most of the time. However by using punctuation and other elements you can still make the phrase appear less obtrusive.

For example,

let's look at our Mexico cruise vacation site again.

Rather than using that bunch of fluff written above, try this instead:

Long stretches of sunny beaches, delightful fiestas filled with lively bands and some of the most delicious fresh seafood you've ever tasted. Where can you find it? In Mexico! Cruise vacation destinations from Cancun to Cozumel offer some of the most exciting adventures and beautiful scenery found in Mexico. Cruise vacation specials make these remarkable getaways even more affordable than you might think - etc., etc.

Do you see what was done? Using punctuation, the phrase

“Mexico cruise vacation”

was broken up between sentences. Because the search engines all but ignore punctuation, they see the phrase as one term. However, the site visitor doesn't. They don't notice that the phrase is being repeated because it spans two sentences.

If the trend continues as it has in the past, search phrases will get even longer in the not-so-distant future. However, when you get creative with keyphrase use in your copy, you'll find longer search terms are not a problem to work with.

Happy lunar new year

Happy lunar new year, to everyone whom it corncern ;)


Gong Xi Fa Cai! Xin Nian Kuai Le! Wan Shi Ru Yi! Xin Xiang Shi Cheng! Ying Chun Jie Fu!

Directory Submissions - Understanding DMOZ and Yahoo!

Directory submissions, unlike search engine submissions, are reviewed by human beings and undergo a great deal of scrutiny by the editors reviewing them. It is important that your website is submitted correctly in order to obtain the listings you need.

Listings in DMOZ (Open Directory Project) and the Yahoo! Directory can be very helpful for boosting your site in the search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN view websites listed in these directories as more important than those which are not.

Being well acquainted with the specifics of the Yahoo Directory (pay directory) and DMOZ (free directory), we are able to submit correctly the first time and obtain the best listings possible in the least amount of time.

How to Submit Correctly

If you are interested in submitting your website yourself, there is much to consider. The problem for most webmasters is that getting a good listing in a reasonable amount of time rarely occurs. In fact, some webmasters find it impossible to get a directory listing in DMOZ at all.

One of the biggest mistakes webmasters make is submitting their site to directories too soon. There is an excitement and urgency associated with getting your site “out there” for the world to see, that is understandable, but it simply doesn't work.

The solution is understanding the expectations these directories have when it comes to submissions. Once you understand how to submit correctly, you can obtain the best directory listings in the least amount of time possible.

Prepare before you Submit

Get your site in shape.

Never submit a site that appears to be under construction. Of course, you are going to be adding to your site's content for years to come, but don't submit if you have any pages that are BLANK or any words on your site such as “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction.”

Make sure your site loads properly and quickly. If there is difficulty with the loading or error messages pop up, the editor who is trying to review your site won't stick around.

Check all your links. Having broken links is a real sign of a site that is poorly managed.

Yahoo and DMOZ directories, and many others, simply will not list your site if it does not appear to be complete, is difficult to bring up, or has broken links, even if you have paid a submission fee.

To prevent these problems, thoroughly check every page of your site for any sign of the appearance of it being incomplete, double check every link on every page and present clean code.

We use the CSE HTML validator to validate our code AND check our links. We recommend it because it performs beautifully, is user friendly and does more than the expensive validators we have used in the past.

Find the Appropriate Category

A grueling but necessary task in submitting to any directory is finding the most appropriate category.

All directories expect you to find the perfect category (and sub-category) for your site before you submit. You must drill down to the category and sub-category (or multiple sub-categories) where your site fits BEST in each directory.

If you have a bricks and mortar company website, or offer locally specific services, always opt for the Regional category first. Depending on the circumstances, your site may qualify for 2 listings, one regional and one product or service specific category.

Once you find the perfect category for your site, having drilled down to the last sub-category possible, you will click the “add site” button FROM that PAGE.

If you add to the wrong category 1 of 2 things will occur, depending on the directory.

Scenario 1: Your site will be tossed to the appropriate category where it will go to the back of a long line for a long wait to be reviewed by a 2nd editor.

Scenario 2: Your submission will be denied. In this instance, you may or may not be notified, depending on the directory. You will then have the option of re-submitting.

Obviously, it is worth taking the time to find the appropriate category to start with.

Submit the Correct URL

There are very few circumstances in which these directories will accept a sub domain listing. Always submit the top-level domain of your site and use the most direct form of the url.

For example: The correct url to submit for this site is

www.increaseranking.com/

No other url is acceptable. Do not add index.html or any sub domains.

Submit the correct URL or you will not get an editor to give your site the time of day.

Write an Acceptable Site Description

Writing a description for your site is the trickiest part of getting listed in DMOZ and Yahoo.

Your meta description will not suffice for directory submissions. These directories want an objective description of your site in no more than 2 sentences. Basically you are required to write a fairly dull and very objective sentence or 2 that describes your site.

A few rules of thumb:

• Do not repeat your title in the description.


• Do not use all caps;use mixed case.


• Use complete sentences.


• Do not say the word site or website, as in “this site offers”


• Do not use any hype like “the best” or “excellent.”


• Keep it short and to the point.


• Fit your main keyword phrases in but do not repeat them.

If you have written a short boring description that generically describes your site, you have probably written an acceptable description for DMOZ and Yahoo.

I suggest going to your appropriate category in each directory and studying the descriptions that are given to the sites that are listed there.

Even if you write the perfect description, it may get changed by the editor who reviews your site. However, the closer your description is to "acceptable" according to their guidelines, the quicker your site will get listed and the better your chances of not having the description re-written (destroyed basically) by the editor.

Use the Official Title

When DMOZ directory or the Yahoo directory refers to your site “title” they want the REAL title of your site. They do not want your title tag (the one that shows in your browser's title bar).

For example: The title of this site as supplied by the title tag (main page) shows as:

“IR Internet Marketing Consultant- Strategic Marketing and SEO Services”

That title is not acceptable to Yahoo or DMOZ (though some directories give more leave way). The "official" title must be submitted. In this case the official and correct title is Increase Ranking.

What to Expect

Yahoo!

The Yahoo directory charges a non-refundable 299.00 to review your site. If you have submitted correctly, Yahoo should list your site within a day or 2 and charge 299.00 per year to maintain the listing. If your submission is declined, they will inform you by e-mail.

DMOZ

“Submit and Forget” is the theme! This free directory is run by 2 employees and a host of volunteer editors. It may take anywhere from 2 days to more than a year for your site to be reviewed.

DMOZ does not inform you of the status of your submission. I highly recommend that you do not give any thought to your dmoz submission status. It's best to submit correctly and forget it forever. However, once 6 months have passed, you can check the status by posting in their forum at resource-zone.com. They will need to know your url and the exact category of the submission. They won't give you much information but an editor will tell you whether your site is still waiting for review or if it was declined.