Niche Site Case Study: Real Life Affiliate Marketing Site Example

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photo credit: ign0me

In 2007 I packed my bags and headed off to Cuba for two weeks in the sun. My girlfriend and I had carefully chosen the specific resort because it had an internet cafe where I could check on my websites and respond to emails while we were away. So imagine how annoyed I was on arrival to discover that they had a problem with their internet connection and as a result the internet cafe was out of action.

Miles from anywhere on a small Cuban island I simply had to forget about the internet while I was out sunning myself. Forget, that was, until the very last day of our stay when I overheard someone else talking about another resort a 30 minute walk along the beach that would let non-residents use their own internet cafe for a small fee.

So I packed my suncream and my passwords and off I trekked. A short while later, like a junkie getting their latest fix, I was logging onto the web while breathing a huge sigh of relief. How had everything gone for the last two weeks? Had anything terrible occured?

However soon enough my new relaxed state turned to unbridled excitement as I logged into my various affiliate accounts. As it turned out not only were things going just fine – infact they were doing better than ever. A round of link-building before I headed off to the sun had led to an increase in search engine rankings for a number of my sites – including one small niche website that had brought in so much revenue that this little 10 page website had already paid for my vacation. Without even logging onto the internet for two weeks.

That was when the power of niche websites really hit home. That I could sit around in the sunshine, drinking strawberry daqauries and chatting to my girlfriend, then come back with more money than I left with. Passive income at it’s best. Money flowing into my account on autopilot while I just enjoyed life. It’s the internet dream. And for me it had become a reality.

The Problem With The Niche Website Business Model

Niche websites work. They bring in passive income like clockwork with minimal interference (though of course they require some up-front effort to get them there). But here’s the problem: for all the courses, ebooks and webinars out there niche website owners don’t like sharing their specific sites with others. They don’t want you to know what niches and keywords they’re targeting; otherwise competition quickly becomes rife and the “easy ride” can be over. This means that despite all the training available to you there are still some “unknowns” – it’s still necessary to go through a process of trial and error to see exactly what works. What keywords, what monetization strategies, what site layouts, how much content and so on.

Typically this means if you’re a total newbie that you’re going to still have to spend months building sites until you either hit a “home run” of a site that starts pounding out cash like there’s no tomorrow or you’re going to have to be constantly going through a process of trial and improvement, testing out concepts to see what works and what doesn’t in this particular marketplace. Where should I put my ads? What links are working right now? And so on.

The Solution

Remember that niche site I mentioned earlier that paid for my vacation? That site was in a niche that has since died a death for affiliates – the online music downloads niche. Why did it die? Too many lawsuits around “music sharing” peer-to-peer networks and the arrival of just a few dominant players like Amazon and iTunes selling legal downloads while their old competitors went bust. For 6+ years that site cranked out profits month-in and month-out without ever being touched after the initial launch but eventually evetything comes to an end. These days there is no mystery of where to download music from the internet – but some years ago this wasn’t the case – and an affiliate could make good money pointing people in the right direction.

However because this niche died a death the site’s profits eventually dropped through the floor. And I stopped renewing the domain. This means I can reveal every aspect of this site to you right now without worrying about the competition. This means I can leave no stone unturned in showing you a perfect example of a profitable niche website for you to use for inspiration and modeling. And that, my friends, is priceless.

Revealing A Sample Niche Affiliate Website

The site I want to talk about today was called Music Download Sites. Obviously that’s the exact keyword term I was primarily targeting having registered the domain Music-Download-Sites.com, a keyword that got 49,500 global searches per month. From that I derived several hundred very motivated visitors per day, and an income of around $500 a month on average (though sometimes much higher) for many years on end. Even better I never updated, improved or added to the site once it was built – apart from split testing some monetization strategies. It really was hands-off income.

Niche Site Concept 1: Keywords

Typically most of the “gurus” of keyword research recommend looking for keywords with a lot of searches and very weak competition to give you the best possible chance of getting onto the first page of Google with minimum effort. Personally though I’ve gone about things in a slightly different manner that has led to greater success for my niche sites…

I still pay attention to these factors of searches and competition for sure. I want to know that my efforts are going to be rewarded with a decent number of visitors, but I also like to look at two additional elements when selecting keywords to build a niche site around.

The first of these is what is going through the mind of the person actually doing these searches. For example if someone was searching for “free photo editing software” it’s clear they’re not looking to spend any money. Sure, there’s a chance that you might upgrade a handful of these people into buyers but generally it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

On the other hand consider a search phrase such as “best photo editing software”, “Photoshop price” or “photo editing software reviews”. These are “commercial” searches from people who are looking to make a purchase – they just need some guidance on what to spend their money on. And that’s exactly where your site can come in. In a word, then, I consider the commerciality of the keyword – or how likely that person is to be looking to spend some money rather than just looking for freebies or simply tips and advice.

Secondly I look at the estimated Adsense per-click value for keywords, even if I’m not planning to monetize my site with Adsense. Why? Because the more an advertiser is willing to pay for a visitor, the more they’re expecting to get out of that visitor. It’s another “backup” tip for finding commercially-profitable keywords. If someone will pay a dollar or more per click then I know they’re probably making a profit off these visitors and so I know these visitors are almost certainly willing to spend some money.

Let’s take a look at a sample keyword search just to highlight these elements with a real set of searches…

Notice how the people searching for “free” solutions are far less valuable to advertisers? By avoiding those and targeting other keywords the amount you could earn per click with Adsense could double.

So to summarize, consider how likely your visitors are to spend money. By all means consider the search volume and competition but tie these in too. Infact, of all these factors, the one I probably pay the least attention to is actually the competition – how many competing sites there are and how “strong” they are because when you know how to build links properly it’s possible with enough patience to rank for virtually any keyword I choose.

Niche Site Concept 2: Monetization

I see far too many people on discussion forums saying they own a website that gets 200 visitors a day (or whatever number) and how should they monetize it? In my experience the most successful niche websites I’ve built have had the monetization strategy in place before the site is even launched. There are a couple of reasons for this…

Firstly if you’re looking to build a website that makes you a profit, you want to know well in advance there are things you can promote whether that’s CPA offers, affiliate products or Adsense ads that pay more than a few cents each. You don’t want to spend months getting to the top of the search engines only to discover that there’s nothing you can promote (and trust me, I did just this a few times in the early days).

Secondly the monetization strategy you choose can help to direct your site content. Let’s go back to our “best photo editing software” example for a moment. Many niche site builders would then outsource an article about the best photo editing applications, paste it onto their site and slap some Adsense ads on it in nice obvious places to maximize clicks. And to a degree this will work.

However my own experinces suggest that selling products as an affiliate is normally much more profitable than getting Adsense clicks. Not always, but often. Indeed you can always employ both strategies – hoping for affiliate sales yet using Adsense as a “backup plan”. But wherever possible I want some affiliate products I can promote.

From the perspective of monetization then it makes sense to do your research here. In this case look for affiliate programs for photo editing software. Look at the stats to see which ones seem to convert best and/or pay the highest commission rates. Then buy a number of them and test them out so you can find the “sweet spot” of a product that is genuinely great and has a fantastic affiliate program that will let you turn site visitors into profits as smoothly as possible.

(Note: Yes, I said buy them. Don’t just regurgitate what other people have written about whatever you’re promoting. If your reviews are going to be honest and legitimate – and stand the test of time – then please do things the right way).

A major element of your content then becomes to pre-sell the top products you’ve found and “name drop” them inside your articles. Suddenly your article about the best photo editing software isn’t just a general article written by an outsourcer but is a high quality piece of writing that discusses a range of software (all of which you’re an affiliate of) and then gently highlights the benefits of that specific “sweet spot” product.

Many years ago when I first built that music downloads site it was only making $40-50 a month. This was a combination of Adsense income and affiliate sales. Not only was I not promoting my affiliate products in a very smart and convincing way, but I was promoting products that weren’t really converting. The real “break through” moment came when I started testing different affiliate programs and products to see which ones really converted. Once I had found the “perfect match” my income literally went up by ten times overnight, so never underestimate how important intelligent monetization can be.

Niche Site Concept 3: Maximizing Clickthroughs To Your Affiliate Promotions

There are two strategies I use which work better than any other I have tested for affiliate promotions. The first of these is to judiciously place text links within the body of your articles that then lead off to an affiliate product. You can do this for not just product names (“The best keyword research tool that I have found through all my testing is LongTail Pro which will check the competition, search volume, Adsense value and available domain names”) but also for general product descriptions (“The best keyword research tool that I have found through all my testing is LongTail Pro which will check the competition, search volume, Adsense value and available domain names”).

The second technique seems to go against the grain but my own findings have found it to be tremendously successful in a range of niches and I hve spoken to other niche site owners who have experienced similar things.

If you visited my old site then the first thing you’d see on arrival was a giant banner ad the size of a postcard! Talk about “in your face”! Personally I never thought this would work because it’s too obvious you’re trying to push a product and that people would shy away from that.

However from testing where my affiliate clicks were coming from it seems a large number of people who were tight for time didn’t want to wade through my detailed, carefully-constructed affiliate articles and instead just wanted to click the giant banner and be taken straight to an offer for them to make a decision on. I made more profit from that giant banner than from all the subtle affiliate links across this entire site.

As an additional note I always like to try and ensure my affiliate links open in a new browser window. In this way if the prospect doesn’t end up buying for whatever reason they will still have your site open, meaning that they may take another action (clicking a different affiliate link or an Adsense ad) thus increasing your profit per visitor.

OK so now you know the two techniques I was using to drive traffic from my site to the affiliate programs I was promoting but there’s another element here to consider: testing the specific affiliate programs – and this is where these two linking methods can come in so handy…

Take your content and then turn general keyword terms into affiliate links. Initially just ignore the direct product-based links (i.e. turn the phrase “best photo editing software” into an affiliate link but not “Photoshop”). These are now generic enough to run through a split testing process – sending some visitors through one affiliate link when they click and others through another. By doing this you should be able to send an equal number of visitors to a number of affiliate programs to observe which ones generate the best response.

Banners are just as easy to do as you can use a free WordPress plugin like WP-Ads to rotate different banners and see which ones pull the best results.

In addition by adding tracking IDs you will be able to see exactly which pages your sales are coming from and whether your text links or banners are pulling best.

At the end of all this you should find a clear winner based on what’s working and can then rework your content gently in such a way as to push the maximum number of visitors to the affiliate program that earns you the biggest profits.

Niche Site Concept 4: Maximizing Adsense Revenue

Maximizing Adsense revenue is always something of a trade-off. The most aggressive Adsense layouts that get the highest responses also risk making your site look tacky or unprofessional and almost certainly like a “made for Adsense” (MFA) site. In the Google Panda update it seems as if Google is also punishing sites that display too many adverts above the fold so going for the highest converting layouts also potentially risks your search engine rankings. In a nut shell you may make more revenue initially but there are longer term risks.

On the flipside more subtle Adsense layouts are less likely to scare off visitors but your revenue per visitor is likely to be lower. And of course only you can decide on what is “right” for you, though personally I try to aim for a compromise.

For advice on the best Adsense layouts for maximizing profits I recommend you check out the following free resources all of which are high quality and offer advice from seasoned experts after considerable testing:

• 5 Simple Adsense Layouts For Increasing Click Through Rates

• AdSense Flippers Podcast: Ad Unit Layouts And Strategies

• Google’s Own Adsense Heatmap

• How to Triple Your Adsense Revenues Without Additional Traffic (PDF)

Using a range of various Adsense plugins for quickly adding Adsense to various places on your site it’s reasonably easy now after the initial setup to change the arrangement of the Adsense ads on your website and observe the direct results of your experiments.

My own experiments suggest that the leaderboard advert, placed toward the very top of your site, can be one of the most profitable implementations and has doubled the revenue on many of the sites I have placed it on.

The problem that I had with the leaderboard ads was quite simply how to find WordPress themes for my sites that (a) I liked and that looked professional but also (b) that made it easy to add a leaderboard ad at the top. There are a few very generic themes that I found such as Acme but to me they don’t look too flashy.

Fortunately I discovered a simple snippet of code that can be applied to any WordPress theme that will display the leaderboard right above your article and it is this technique I use currently. In this way there is no need to buy a new theme or move from your current theme; instead you can just modify it in just a few minutes to easily display the leaderboard. Here’s how you do it.

Niche Site Concept 5: Content Creation

I’ve never been a niche site builder that has worried too much about content length. I’ve just written the best article I can on a subject and finished it when I’ve said all I wanted to say whether that was 300 words or 3000 words (which is how many words this article is rapidly heading towards . However I have consistently discovered over the last few months that my longer articles tend to rank better than shorter articles. Also websites which focus on “shorter” articles such as Ezine Articles have suffered penalties from Google recently and lost a lot of traffic as a result.

The core concept now if you’re trying to rank your content in the search engines is value. No more cheaply-bought, low-value content bought from an outsourcer that barely speaks English. No PLR or spun content. Just high quality, high value content that will really impress your market (and indirectly as a result Google too).

There are other benefits of longer content too. Firstly you can include more Adsense ads or affiliate links without it looking too “forced”. Suddenly they don’t all have to be squeezed into a 250 word article but can be spread out comfortably over 800 words or more.

A smaller number of longer pages also makes your link building easier. Rather than wondering how you’re going to build deep links to hundreds of pages you can focus more on just building links to a smaller number of pages which is not only easier but should also result in more links to each page because your efforts are less diluted. Of course more links mean better rankings and thanks to the value you’re offering you also increase the chances of genuinely natural links occuring as people find your content, are wowed by it, and link to it from their sites as a genuinely useful resource for their readers.

Google seems to be measuring the length of time that a user spends on your site after clicking through from the search engines so once again, a longer article – carefully interlinked with the other content on your site – significantly increases the chances of a visitor staying on your site for a period of time. I have some pages where the length of an average visit is over 5 minutes – compare that to the few seconds you may get when you offer crummy content. So this is another way in which you’re likely to win in the search engines.

Oh and lastly we should mention long-tail traffic. Google estimates that 20% of it’s daily searches are totally unique. They won’t appear in the keyword suggestion tool and each one is searched so infrequently that there is no point in deliberately trying to target them but for each of these searches Google will display an assortment of websites. One of those could be yours.

Pat Flynn reports on his niche site project that 72% of his search engine traffic is coming from longtail keywords he hasn’t deliberately targeted.

So once again here longer articles have more potential longtail keywords in them to appear in the search engines. And when you combine this with an intelligent link-builging process too, it’s entirely possible for your site to appear for all sorts of keywords you hadn’t considered.

All of these factors add together to mean more traffic from the search engines and happier visitors when they arrive at your site. That sounds like a win-win situation to me.

My music downloads site was just like this. It offered long, detailed articles completely covering a topic and examining it from every angle. It may have only had a dozen or so articles on it but each one showed a high degree of dpeth and detail.

Niche Site Concept 6: Link Building

Because it can be so easy to build a niche website that earns a few hundred dollars a month but building a site that will replace your entire living expenses is so much harder the normal route for niche website builders is to build numerous sites over time. All of these small sites and minor income streams then run together like small streams gathering to create a huge flowing river to produce an income that the marketer can live off full time.

An additional benefit of the “many small niche sites” model is that it affords a degree of security because having dozens of sites in different niches with different competitors means that changes in the search engine algorithms have a smaller impact as typically when one site goes down in the rankings another rises to counteract the loss. In contrast if you had only one niche site that dropped, and you were relying on the affiliate income and Adsense profits it produces to pay your bills, you could be in for a nasty surprise.

However these numerous sites also cause a possible problem. Typically link building takes a lot of time and effort – and it’s very difficult to do so when you have numerous niche websites. As a result many niche website marketers find themselves trying to use low-quality automated link building such as submitting their site to plenty of poor quality directories or sending out thousands of automatic spam blog comments.

My own experiences have been that these “low quality” links tend not to be particularly beneficial. Infact, of all these “scalable” link building techniques the only one that I have seen significant results from has been from the blog networks. And Google just killed them, so that link building technique is also out of the question.

For my music downloads site I didn’t rely on these spammy techniques for link building. I generated only high quality links from other high trust, high PR sites in my niche. And it was this impressive link profile that helped me to “weather the storm” of all those search engine algorithms over the years and retain my top rankings for highly competitive (and profitable) keywords. And with the latest changes at Google building high quality links is more important than ever before if you want to rank for worthwhile keywords.

A few strategies I am using right now that are working better than ever before for my niche websites:

• Guest posting on related, high quality sites

• Outreach to other high traffic sites in my niche to request a link

• High quality, paid directory submissions

• High quality, manual blog commenting on related blogs (that I actually read!) to build my profile

• The creation of infographics and their submission to the social bookmarking sites for natural link building

• Active participation in social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to spread my content

Of course while these methods get me fantastic results, they either take a lot of time or money (or both) so be aware of this. This is why I have put together an ebook that outlines the scalable link building techniques I now use with great success. We’re talking easily generating dozens – even hundreds – of high quality authority links on autopilot that glue my websites to the first page of Google. You can check it out here.

Epilogue

I’m forever testing new tools, resources and ideas for niche sites including keyword research, content creation and marketing so now I’d like to give you my “must have” tools so you can see what a “real” niche site builder considers to be the “best of the best” and uses on a daily basis to generate significant results rather than all the tools pushed by the numerous affiliate marketers hoping for a quick buck.

Keyword Research: Having tested out dozens of different keyword research tools over the years I have been using Long Tail Pro since it first launched and find it incredibly powerful, quick as well as giving me all the information I need to find top keywords including competition analysis, domain checking and even rank tracking.

Content Creation: I like to create my own content in general because I enjoy writing and it’s the easiest way to guarantee that my content is of a quality I expect. However from time to time I will outsource some content creation and in this instance I have had good results with The Content Authority when you select the higher quality option. They’re not cheap in comparison to many of their competitors but the quality warrants my extra expense.

Backlinks:

I have spent over a decade building sites and ranking them in the search engines. if you’d like to see more information about my ebook that contains all the free link building tools and strategies I use on a daily basis please click here now.

In closing, if you feel you’ve benefittted from this article then please take a moment to show your appreciation by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, linking to it from your blog or letting your email subscribers know about it. Clearly the bigger the response this article generates the more motivation I will have to keep creating “top notch” content for you in the future. And after several hours writing it’d be nice to get a few “props” – so thanks in advance if you can spare a few seconds to share this post.

Finally please leave any questions you may have in the comments box below and I’ll do my best to stay on top of them and respond personally to you…

Adsense Tricks: 7 Ways To Increase Your Adsense Earnings

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photo credit: alt1040

Google Adsense is one of the simplest yet most popular ways to earn money from a website. However because it is so simple to implement – just paste in a snippet of code and you’re off – many people end up missing out on money that could rightfully be theirs. They simplky paste in the code and immediatel get on with something else assuming their site is now “monetized”. Unfortunately this just isn’t the case…

Whilst any Adsense advertising on your site is better than none there are also some neat little tricks that have have a very real (and significant) impact on your Adsense earnings if only you take a little bit of time to implement them on your very own sites.

Today then I’d like to reveal seven different Adsense tricks – all of which are well within the guidelines of Adsense – but which have all proven time and again to significantly increase Adsense income from the same number of visitors.

Use High Converting Ad Blocks

Some ad blocks tend to get far higher click-through rates than others which means extra income for you. The two ad styles which tend to garner the greatest results are the large rectangle and the leaderboard ad. Try using one or even both on your sites if you’re not already because these larger ad blocks tend to attract more visual attention and as a result lead to more clicks.

Image Ads Versus Text Ads

Historically marketers have been told that text ads convert far higher than image ads and so for maximum results Adsense publishers should avoid banner-style adverts and instead opt for those that contain merely text. However extensive recent testing by many authorities suggest this may no longer be the case and that, in contrast to “collective wisdom” it is now generally more profitable to accept both kinds of ads on your site.

Split Test Color Variations

Each website (and each audience) is different so while we can assume certain general rules for what colors to use in your ads (match the background of your ads to the background of your site for example so they “blend in”) nothing replaces proper split testing. It is entirely normal to find a certain color combination that gets double the number of clicks when compared to others so ensure you do your testing to find the best color combinations.

Target High-Paying Keywords

It’s a fact of life that certain keywords are worth far more than others. If you’re just building a website for love and want to cover your hosting fees then by all meand write about whatever you like. However if you’re serious about turning Adsense into a proper source of income for you then it’s wise to do your research properly and target those keywords that are likely to offer the highest per-click payout rates to you.

Place Adverts Obviously

Ad placement is always a difficult subject; you want to place adverts obviously-enough that they get seen by your visitors and clicked yet you don’t want your site to look tacky by pasting them all over in a very desperate, in-your-face, “please click me” fashion. Once again a degree of testing is wisest though generally speaking adverts towards the top of the page are likely to receive far more clicks than those further down the page. In light of this placing one fo the highest-converting ad blocks at the top of your article (above or below your article title) can often work very well without looking too tacky.

Use Click Tracking

When someone arrives at your website for the very first time certain sections will stand out to them far more than others. These sections are far more likely to get read and/or clicked while other sections may be “brushed over” and barely noticed. It is these “priority” areas – that draw the eye (and the mouse) that are ripe for placing our Adsense ads in, seeing as adverts in these areas will get the most visibility.

Use one of the various heatmap plugins for WordPress or services like ClickTale to see where the “hotspots” on your own site are.

Build Your Authority

As your traffic and earnings go up there is a decent chance sooner or later that your account will go through a “manual review”. Trashy, poor quality sites with few incoming links which have been built specifically to earn money from Adsense (“made for Adsense” or MFA sites) are often “downgraded” where either they lose their search engine rankings or find their earnings per-click drop to pennies making their business drop like a lead balloon. However having Adsense on a high-quality site with plenty of incoming links and quality content will help to keep Google happy and ensure your Adsense account is kept safe (and profitable).

Lastly if you’re looking for more Adsense tricks to take you from barely covering your web hosting account to taking you up to a full-time income then I recommend you check out the 100k Adsense Blueprint.

4 Unusual Ways To Increase Your Blog Profits

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photo credit: baxterclaus

The most common sources of revenue generation for bloggers are either by adding affiliate links or Adsense to your blog but there are a whole range of other “non-standard” monetization strategies out there that you may not be aware of.

In this article we’re going to look at four easy ways to earn extra revenue from your blog that you may not even know exist. Even better all these new monetization sources are free to use and can be used in addition to your current techniques. Therefore if you follow the steps outlined below I can virtually guarantee that you will earn extra revenue from your existing blog.

JustAnswer

JustAnswer allows you to pose questions to verified experts about a wide range of topics and get detailed responses. You can ask additional questions and when you’re satisfied that you have the answer you’re looking for the expert gets paid for their help.

JustAnswer also has an affiliate program which can make for a great way to earn some additional money from your blog. By adding a JustAnswer form to your website your visitors can pose questions they would like answering about your niche and you can earn a percentage of any revenues generated as a result.

The reason that JustAnswer can work so well is that you’re not trying to sell a product to your blog readers but instead you’re simply providing a useful service to help your visitors find the information they’re seeking. After all, the majority of your blog readers don’t visit your site just to click one of your affiliate links and buy a product. In contrast most of your readers are looking for information on a topic and becoming an affiliate of JustAnswer is a great way to make your site more useful while increasing your revenues.

As a side-note, one way that I am successfully using JustAnswer on some of my blogs is to use it on my contact page. For example I run a pet blog and get a lot of general pet care questions submitted through my contact page. I have now modified by contact page to explain that due to the volume of emails I get it can take me several days to respond to questions but for a far quicker answer – from a qualified professional to boot – visitors can simply submit their questions in the JustAnswer box I provide.

In this way my emails have gone down, my revenue has gone up and the user-experience at my site has improved which is surely a win-win situation for both me and my readers.

Find out more about JustAnswer here.

Sponsored Comments

Sponsored comments are just like standard blog comments that you receive now but with a few major differences. Firstly sponsored comments appear above all the other comments on your blog to maximize exposure for advertisers and they are typically submitted by companies looking to increase traffic and sales for a product or service that relates to the content of your blog post.

At first glance it seems that Sponsored Comments may be quite a low-quality way to monetize your blog by simply accepting spam comments on your blog but the truth is rather different.

Firstly these comments are clearly marked as sponsored entries so you will never be “duping” your valuable readers and secondly you have complete control over which comments you are going to publish on your blog so you can maintain your existing quality guidelines of what appears on your blog.

Indeed with these aspects in place using Sponsored Comments can be a great way to not only earn additional revenue from your blog but to also increase your blog comments at the same time – another win-win strategy.

The best way to get involved in the sponsored comments market is to go through TalkAhead who have designed a marketplace specially to connect bloggers with potential advertisers which will in turn help you to sign up as many commenters as possible.

Find out more about TalkAhead here.

Kindle Blogs

Did you know that if you’re based in the US or the UK you can now add your blog to the Amazon Kindle store for free? Furthermore users actually pay a small monthly fee to subscribe to a blog through their Kindle and you as the publisher can receive a percentage of that revenue.

Adding your blog to Amazon takes a matter of minutes and having tested out this monetization strategy recently I can tell you that simply by having my blogs listed on Amazon has brought in additional subscribers and revenue and that’s without doing any form of real marketing.

Find out more about adding your blog to the Kindle store here.

Viglink

Have you ever linked from a blog post to a product or service without using an affiliate link? I know I have. Viglink is a service which automatically transforms these standard links into affiliate links for you – without you having to manually adjust those links and without you having to join any other affiliate programs.

Quite simply you sign up for a free Viglink account and you’ll automatically be able to earn affiliate commissions through thousands of different affiliate programs without having to manually join a single one. You add a few basic lines of code to your blog and where you have linked to a website that has an affiliate program registered with Viglink they’ll automatically transform your standard link into a revenue-generating affiliate link.

In other words you can take all the articles that you’ve already published on your blog and add affiliate links throughout them in a matter of minutes thus increasing your revenue by doing virtually nothing.

Click here to find out more about Viglink.

Now it’s your turn. Please leave a comment below if you’re using any non-standard revenue generation models on your blog and tell us about your experiences with them…

3 Powerful Tips For Finding Affiliates That Produce Results

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photo credit: mark sebastian

Finding affiliates is one of the “silver bullets” to online success if you sell any kind of product. Yet for every successful product being promoted by an army of affiliates from every corner of the web sending consistent, reliable traffic to the product-owners site there are hundreds more that struggle to ever find more than a handful of affiliates.

Over the decade or so that I have been online I have launched dozens of products including ebooks, physical courses and software applications and have received literally hundreds of thousands of free visitors (and plenty of sales) from my network of affiliates.

In this article I’d like to discuss some of the most successful tips for finding affiliates that I have used to not just rapidly sign up a healthy number of affiliates but additionally to sign up the right kind of affiliates – targeted affiliates that can send you considerable numbers of ready-to-buy leads. After all, what’s the point in finding affiliates if they send no traffic or visitors who aren’t ready to spend some money on your product?

Finding Affiliates With Complimentary Products

One of the most powerful ways of finding affiliates is to look for people who sell products that are closely-related to yours but aren’t in direct competition.

For example if you have written an ebook on making money from blogs using affiliate marketing you could quickly find a list of other ebooks about blogging or affiliate marketing.

Assuming these related ebooks are selling even just a small number of copies each week then these website owners are attracting exactly the kind of people who would be interested in buying your ebook. What’s more they’ll also be consistently building a mailing list of these prospects and customers so they can contact them again and again with promotions for similar products.

This is arguably the single best technique of all for finding affiliates because the traffic these sites receive is simply so targeted that not only will the website owner often be very interested in checking out your product and recommending it to his or her list if they like it, but additionally due to the relevance of your product to their visitors you will often see a very high sign-up rate for your offer if they decide to promote it.

Finding Affiliates With Active Blogs

Somewhat less effective than finding the owners of existing related products is the technique of finding affiliates who run active, high traffic blogs on a topic related to your product.

In the case of our affiliate marketing ebook we might look for blogs about affiliate marketing, residual income, blogging or even more broadly simply about how to make money online. There are thousands of blogs on these topics receiving crazy amounts of traffic and so a promotion on a few of these sites can rapidly send plenty of sales your way.

The reason why this technique is a slightly less effective way for finding affiliates is firstly that a large proportion of the traffic these sites receive will simply be freebie seekers looking for free information rather than proven buyers who are willing to pull out their credit card and actually purchase something. Also due to the broad niche of making money online only a portion of each blog’s readers might be specifically interested in making money from affiliate marketing.

So while there is a lot of traffic available you will typically see a far lower clickthrough rate on any affiliate links pointing to your website and those visitors you get will in general be less likely to spend money with you.

Equally this is still a valid way of finding affiliates and getting featured on a number of related blogs over a short space of time can really help to boost your visibility and even encourage other affiliates to come and promote your product.

Finding Affiliates With Large Lists

A year or two ago I was preparing to release a new product and spent quite a bit of time finding affiliates who had mailing lists of people who would be interested in my product. Just one single mailing from a single affiliate sent just over 1000 unique visitors to my website in a 12 hour period, built a mailing list of my own of around 200 interested prospects and sold a large number of products.

I knew this affiliate had said they were going to mail their list about my product but I didn’t know exactly when. I was sitting in my living room a few days after they confirmed their participation when my computer literally started to go crazy. A was getting someone new signing up for my newsletter every 30 seconds and my screen was lighting up as hundreds of people poured into my site and started to buy. I’ve genuinely never seen anything like it before.

So finding affiliates with mailing lists of prospects interested in products like yours can be an incredibly powerful (and rapid) way to explode your sales. Even just a single email from a single affiliate with a decent-sized list can literally send a truckload of leads and sales your way.

What To Do After Finding Affiliates For Your Product

Of course finding affiliates is only part of the puzzle. Once you have your list of prospects the other half of the equation is figuring out how to contact them and what to say in order to encourage them to become an affiliate of yours and start actively promoting your product. Incase you’re interested I have a whole ebook on the subject of finding affiliates, contacting affiliates and building sales through joint ventures which you can read more about at Get More Affiliates.

Ed Dale, Fiverr And The Power Of A Single Tweet

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photo credit: eddale

On April 19th this year Ed Dale, well-known Australian internet marketer and all-round good-guy, posted the following tweet to his 45,000 Twitter followers:

That little link at the end points straight to my article about Fiverr which I published here on Lifestyle Design Unleashed recently.

Now, as calls to action go there was no real benefit for any of Ed’s followers to click on the link. He didn’t promise any freebie, any exciting new time-saving or money-saving service. Just an intriguing link to a resource Ed thought his followers might find useful.

And the result?

Over the next 48 hours that one single tweet by Ed sent my little article 684 unique visitors. What was even more surprising was that Ed doesn’t even know who I am. I’m a nobody to him. I’ve never contacted him in the past and as far as I’m aware he doesn’t read this blog or follow me on Twitter.

But somehow he found my article and posted it out. I tried contacting Ed directly to find out how he discovered my article but unfortunately he never got back to me. My assumptionis that Ed has a Google Alert set up for the word “Fiverr” but really your guess is as good as mine. 

(As a sneaky side-note I have deliberately included both Ed’s name and the word “Fiverr” in the title of this article just to see if Ed manages to catch wind of this post!)

The real take-home here is that Twitter can send significanttraffic if you have a sizable, highly-engaged following. It can equally send a lot of new visitors if someone else with a healthy following tweets about your site.

If you’re not yet on Twitter then my own experiences over the last few months suggest that you’d be wise to do so. Not only can you derive significant traffic from the experience but it’s also a fantastic networking tool. I have connected recently with a number of like-minded, fantastically-inspiring people thanks to Twitter and I’ve also had a number of invites to beta test out new books and software which I will be telling you more about in the near future.

Oh, and if you’re already on Twitter then follow me for some interesting conversations and the most helpful, interesting and profitable resources as I find them in real time. I’m at http://www.twitter.com/richardnadams – get over there now and hit that follow button

The Definitive Onpage WordPress SEO Tutorial

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photo credit: dcJohn

If you have any kind of WordPress-powered website – whether that’s a static site or a regularly updated blog – then you may well have fallen prey to one of the most common WordPress SEO myths around. And it’s costing you a lot of traffic…

If you listen to some of the blogging “gurus” online then you could be led to believe that WordPress is perfectly optimized for SEO and the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo simply lap up the content on WordPress blogs. Indeed, many authorities seem to suggest that merely by using WordPress your content will get an “unfair advantage” in the search engines. However my own experiences of 6+ years of using WordPress for SEO is rather different…

Having started off SEO back in the year 2000 and having been testing, learning and experimenting ever since then I still believe that in general it’s easier to rank a well-designed static HTML website than it is a WordPress blog and a major reason for this is all the “bulk” that WordPress adds to the code that makes up your site in terms of formatting and so on. Certainly WordPress blogs can get ranked, but to do so requires a degree of effort for anything other than those keywords with the weakest of competition.

Additionally please bear in mind that many marketers focus most of their efforts on going for the “money keyword” – that is the high traffic keyword you’ve chosen as the main theme of your site. The vast majority of links point to this homepage and certainly in time you may well find your site ranking for this term.

The fact is though that it’s not just your homepage that should be ranking well in the search engines. Every single article you add to your WordPress site should be receiving decent search engine traffic in it’s own right which means the more articles you publish the more traffic you should be getting.

I have seen too many situations over the years where each blog post or article that gets published adds little or nothing to the overall traffic that a site is getting as a result of focusing primarily on the homepage rather than putting the same amount of effort into ranking your internal pages.

In this article then we’re going to look at some “best practices” that I have found to work time and again in the real world for onpage WordPress SEO so you can get the best results possible from every article you publish on your site. And we’re not talking theory here – these are the specific onpage factors that I apply to my own sites on a daily basis and that will guarantee you the best possible chance of ranking well.

Offpage Versus Onpage SEO

Before we dive in it’s important to appreciate that in many cases you can rank any page of your site if you build enough links to it. Unfortunately for many people (myself included) link building is quite frankly dull and repetitive. It also takes considerable time and, depending on the methods you choose, has cost implications too.

In essence getting your onpage WordPress SEO factors correctly set up gives you the best possible chance of ranking for a certain keyword and also in general means that it is necessary to build fewer links to attain the ranking you seek. Of course for most of us making a few changes to your article is a lot quicker, easier and more interesting than trying to build hundreds of high-quality links to each of your articles.

In other words ignore onpage WordPress SEO at your peril because your competition are probably doing it and you’ll have to work that much harder without it to get the sort of traffic you seek.

Content Creation For Onpage WordPress SEO

Onpage WordPress SEO all starts with the text on the page you’re trying to achieve a high search engine ranking for. Getting the right content on your WordPress site to begin with is therefore going to make a major difference to your results.

We’re going to start off this tutorial then by taking a look at how to go from a blank screen (or piece of paper) to a carefully-written article with the best chance of ranking highly in the search engines. Once we’ve covered these bases we’ll move onto the correct ways to format your articles for onpage SEO so that you’re familiar and comfortable with both aspects of onpage SEO which will work together to help push you up the search engine rankings.

Primary Keyword Selection

There are three ways to write an article for your site. The first of these is to simply write like the author of a book or magazine article might and pay absolutely no attention whatsoever to keywords.

The second is the person who is reasonably new to SEO and decides to write an article based purely on one or more keywords, squeezing them in wherever possible irrespective of how well the content actually reads to a human visitor.

The third way – and the route I strongly suggest you follow – is to use keyword research as a basis for your article but to tow the line between creating an article for the search engines and writing one for your visitors.

The best website articles manage to cover both these bases so smoothly that you may not even be aware that any form of onpage SEO has even been done on the page.

Why is this “double whammy” so important for onpage SEO? There are a whole host of reasons not least that the search engines now more than ever are using social signals as a ranking factor so the more people who share your content on Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites and even use Google’s own “+1″ service the higher your content will likely rank in the search engines.

This is a pattern that is only likely to become more prevalent over time as it has the potential to significantly increase the quality of the search results and so it’s wise to start creating evergreen content around these principles now so it stands the test of time.

Of course there are other reasons too. Tricking someone to visit your website which only offers poor-quality content is really a recipe for disaster because you’re unlikely to manage to convince that visitor to subscribe to your blog or mailing list or to buy any kind of product or service off you.

In contrast if you can draw visitors from the search engines and then offer them an exceptional visitor experience then your marketing will be that much more effective as these people bookmark you, tell their friends and become drawn into your online community.

In other words: quality counts. Now more than ever.

That said, the process of onpage WordPress SEO all begins with a germ of an idea. We take that initial idea for an article and then use keyword research to look for the “ideal” keyword to focus our article on.

This keyword that will the main focus of our article is typically known as our “primary keyword” – it’s the high-traffic phrase that, if we can get a top ranking for it, will draw in the most traffic for us.

Selecting primary keywords is something that can be difficult to teach and the best results come from your own trial and error as you discover how much effort it takes to rank your articles for certain keyword phrases but there are a number of factors worth considering when you’re trying to select a primary keyword phrase:

Traffic Levels

If we’re going to put the effort into creating a great piece of content, formatting it correctly for onpage SEO and then building links to it then it makes sense to try and attract as many visitors as possible. If it takes the same amount of work to rank well for a keyword that can draw 100 visitors a day to your site, or another that will drive 25 per day, then it makes sense to go for the higher traffic phrase whilst bearing in mind the points listed below.

Searcher Intent

What is someone who types a specific keyword phrase into the search engines actually looking for? Are they looking for articles? Videos? Are they looking for information, entertainment or to make a purchase? This is important because essentially you want to be focusing on attracting visitors who produce a result for you – though what kind of result you’re looking for is up to you.

Let’s take an example and consider that we’re considering writing an article about beginners tips for learning to skateboard. What do we want to achieve from this article? Do we just want eyeballs on our website or are we hoping to convert that visitor into a paying customer of our skateboarding ebook? Are we looking to monetize visitors though contextual adverts like Adsense? If so it pays to consider the per-click rate so we can target more profitable keyword phrases. Are we looking to promote a product as an affiliate and if so how likely is it that the people searching for a certain keyword phrase are in a “buying” frame of mind?

Consider these potential primary keyword phrases as examples:

- skateboarding - a very general keyword. Searcher could be looking for all sorts of information and predicting the type of content they will like is difficult. Equally this is likely to be a high-traffic keyword phrase and so can draw considerable traffic to our site if we rank for it.

- skateboarding tips – we have a slightly better idea of what this searcher is looking for and a small number of visitors may convert into an action though it is likely that the majority are simply looking for free information.

- books on how to skateboard – we have a far better idea of what this searcher is looking for so we can tailor our content far better to this searcher’s needs and wants. Furthermore by mentioning a product type we know there is a good chance that this searcher may be considering a purchase so this phrase has a higher “commercial intent” than the previous phrases. Whilst the longer phrase means that traffic will likely be far lower than the keywords above, we stand a better chance of selling a product or receiving a decent per-click rate for any advertising we display on this page.

- best skateboarding course – this person is hinting even more that they are looking to make a purchase and are simply looking for guidance on exactly which product out of a selection they should opt for. Therefore a high commercial intent again.

- “skateboarding for beginners” review – this searcher has discovered a product called “skateboarding for beginners” and is seriously considering buying it but just needs a little extra push before they make their final decision. Keyword phrases like this typically have the lowest traffic but the highest commercial intent and so it is easiest to encourage these visitors to take an action.

As you can see different keywords have wildly differing traffic levels and degrees of searcher intent. Unless you merely want to drive as much traffic to your website as possible it makes sense to try and find the “sweet spot” when selecting keywords so that you manage to select a keyword that receives a decent search volume but also has a high level of commercial intent as it is these people that you can profit from most easily.

Examples of words that suggest a high commercial intent (people considering making a purchase of some form) which are therefore handy to see in a potential primary keyword phrase include:

- review(s)
- buy
- purchase
- deal
- coupon(s)
- voucher(s)
- discount(s)
- rent
- lease(s)
- finance/financing
- price
- comparison/compare

Ease Of Use

How easy is it going to be to “naturally” include this keyword in the body of your article? Sometimes a keyword phrase like “tattoo designs free and colorful” might get lots of searches but would be very difficult to weave into your content without it looking odd. So consider just how “usable” a keyword phrase is too if you’re going to succeed in creating content for both the search engines and your visitors.

Competition

It goes without saying that irrespective of the primary keyword phrase you go after there will be other websites – sometimes millions of them – competing with you and vying for top spot in the search engines. However not all competitors are created equal – and some are easier to “beat” than others.

By analyzing the websites that are already ranking for a specific keyword phrase you will be able to make an educated guess about how easy it will be for you to rank well for it.

There are a number of factors which can help you to make an informed decision about the strength of competition for a specific keyword phrase:

Keyword In Title – is the primary keyword phrase you’re looking at actually mentioned in the title of their webpage or not? Generally the fewer sites in the top 10 who are using the specific keyword phrase in their page title the easier it will be for you to rank your site for that page.

Homepage Vs. Supplementary Page – take a look at the specific website addresses (URLs) that are ranked for a keyword phrase. Are the sites that show up the site’ homepage (such as http://www.example.com) or a supplementary page (such as http://www.example.com/another-page.html). The fewer results that are ranking purely for their homepage the easier it will generally be to rank your page for that phrase.

Keywords In URL – is the keyword phrase you’re considering actually mentioned in the URLs of the top ten results? So if you keyword phrase was “blog marketing” examples of URLs that might be harder to beat could be http://www.blogmarketing.com or http://www.example.com/blogmarketing.html while an easier site to beat would be http://www.example.com/unrelated-phrase.html.
 
PageRank (PR) – Whilst many SEO-newbies over-rate the importance of PR as a ranking factor it does have some relevance in my experience as the PageRank of a page is to a degree an indication of that site’s trust and authority. Marked on a scale of 0 to 10, the higher the PR of the pages you’ll be competing against generally the harder it will be for you to rank well for that term. However lots of sites that show PRs of 0-3 means you have a reasonable chance with that keyword.

Inbound Links – How many links do your potential competitors have pointing to their sites? The lower the numbers the easier you’ll find it to rank for that phrase.

High Quality Directory Listings – Are the sites you’re looking at listed in high quality, human-edited directories like DMOZ or Yahoo? If so, these links carry a lot of weight and so it can be hard to “dislodge” them from the topspots.

Some authorities also like to look at the number of competing sites for any keyword phrase but my own experiences have shown this to be less effective as an indicator than the above ranking factors.

Overall I find the above factors give a fair estimation of how easy it will be to rank for a certain primary keyword phrase assuming you have properly optimized your article. In general we want to be competing with sites that have a low PR, few incoming links, that don’t have the keyword phrase in their page title or URL and we’d rather be competing against individual pages of a site rather than it’s homepage. If you see a number of the top ten results fall into this category then this should be seen as a green light to move forward with a keyword idea.

Primary Keyword Selection In A Nutshell

Selecting the “ideal” keyword is more of an art than a science and one that you get better at over time through the process of trial and error. In essence selecting the perfect primary keyword phrase for your onpage WordPress SEO efforts is finding the perfect balance between each of the factors listed above. In an ideal world you’ll find a keyword phrase that receives a decent number of searches each day, is going to be reasonably easy to beat the competition for, is easy and natural to use in your content and has a moderate to high level of commercial intent.

In this way you’ll stand the very best chance of getting a good ranking for a phase that will draw plenty of cash-in-hand visitors to your site and it’s exactly these kinds of visitors – rather than those looking for freebies – that can make a massive difference to the results you generate from your WordPress site.

The Process Of Keyword Selection

There are many different keyword research tools around and every SEO expert has their own preference. For example Market Samurai is a very highly regarded tool in the internet marketing industry and for good reason. It will not only you to generate plenty of possible keyword ideas but it also provides a detailed analysis for each keyword offering up the number of searches together with the competition factors for each.

It is therefore currently one of the very best tools for making informed decisions about which keywords you should target in your content. Essentially Market Samurai does most of the “thinking” and analysis for you so you simply need to look at a simple table of results to decide whether a specific keyword phrase is a “yes” or a “no” for you.

In terms of the free tools available Google’s own External Keyword Selection Tool is as good as any for generating keyword ideas as well as analyzing the number of searches each phrase gets and the estimated per-click price should you be monetizing your site with Adsense.

However competition analysis for WordPress onpage SEO is far more repetitive and time consuming in this way where one must type each of the potential keyword phrases on your list into the search engines and then use a tool such as SEO For Firefox to analyze the competition for each. It works, but it’s a lot slower than using a tool like Market Samurai.

Secondary Keyword Selection

With the correct optimization it is possible to rank a blog post or article for more than one single keyword phrase. Certainly the primary keyword you have chosen is likely to be the keyword to deliver the vast majority of your traffic but secondary keywords have two real benefits.

Firstly these lower traffic, yet closely related, keyword phrases can still draw some visitors from the search engines so that overall your article receives a higher number of total visitors.

But secondly – and just as importantly – having these secondary keyword phrases on your page supports your optimization for your primary keyword phrase. Many SEO experts believe (and my own experiences suggest) that the major search engines use a “silo”-type analysis when looking at web pages so they don’t look purely for the primary keyword phrase that you are optimizing your content for but they also look for other related phrases which act as additional ranking factors.

So how do we find these secondary keyword phrases?

Personally for this I tend to use Google exclusively and use three distinct tools that they provide.

Firstly I type my primary keyword phrase into the Keyword Suggestion Tool to see what related phrases are suggested by Google.

Secondly I do an actual Google search for my primary keyword phrase, then scan down to the bottom of the page to see what “related” searches Google suggests.

Finally I use the Wonderwheel to gain further suggestions.

By now you should have generated a varied list of secondary keyword phrases. I certainly don’t aim to use them all but keep this list easily to hand whilst writing that specific piece of content as reminders of potential topics and keyword phrases to include.

Competition Analysis

When it comes to creating high-value content that over time should naturally acquire links it is a smart idea to type your primary keyword phrase into the major search engines and visit the first 5-10 results just to see what other authors having been writing about the topic.

The aim here isn’t to steal ideas from them but rather to gain a better understanding of the overall content structure they’ve used (which, we can assume, works well for this keyword in the search engines) and also to look for ways to make our content even more appealing than that of the competition. What have they missed out? How can we make a point clearer? What would make this article even more useful or worth passing on to your friends?

Remember that the higher the competition for a keyword phrase the higher quality our article needs to be to hit the top spot and so as a general rule I try to create the best possible article every time I write. Setting this as the “baseline” ensures highly-sharable, highly-linkable content with a long life-span.

Thinking Like Your Readers

Image you typed the keyword phrase you’ve chosen into the search engines. What would you want to see? What would make you say “wow!”. And conversely, what is likely to make you want to click the back button immediately?

Hopefully now you’re starting to see that effective onpage WordPress SEO isn’t about hiring someone who speaks only basic English to create a load of junk articles for you on the cheap. Quite the contrary – if you’re serious about the search engines that means you also need to be serious about producing content that will blow people’s socks off.

A handy trick here for producing fantastic content is to take a look at some of the more popular social sites to see what content is getting shared and bookmarked on a regular basis. Type in the most basic version of your primary keyword phrase (for example if you selected “how to lose weight fast” try shortening it to “how to lose weight” or even just “lose weight”) and look for patterns and ideas in the most popular content on these social sharing sites.

A few useful resources for this are:

- - - Tweetmeme

Article Titles For SEO

In line with our hybrid “SEO/visitor satisfaction” model of content creation we need our article title to both include our primary keyword phrase and attract the interest of visitors.

It’s important to consider here what happens when someone uses a search engine. They type in a keyword phrase and are then presented with a list of possible results to click. All things being equal, a search engine user will typically start at the top of the page and click the first listing. If that doesn’t satisfy them, they click the “back” button and instead visit the second listing and so on.

So the higher your ranking, the more traffic you’ll get.

But things aren’t all equal. Each of those listings says different things and if your listing has a hypnotic title you can often draw more than your fair share of clicks from the search engine result pages (SERPs) simply because searchers set eyes on your listing and immediately want to learn more.

Techniques For Creating Hynpnotic Headlines

Creating a winning article headline is very much like creating a headline for a sales letter. They both have the same purpose of attracting interest, getting someone to click on your website and then drawing them into our content. The only real difference with onpage WordPress SEO is that we want to include our primary keywords too, so that our title is appealing to both the search engines and real people.

Here are a few “tried and tested” strategies for creating headlines that get results…

- Promise A Result – for example “How To Lose An Extra 2lbs A Week Without Exercising”

- Elicit Intrigue – for example “How I Shed 9lbs Of Fat In A Week While Living On Pizza”

- Use Specifics – for example “37 Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Ebook Sales”

Take the time to brainstorm how you can combine your primary keyword phrase with one or more of these elements to create a headline that searchers will simply have to click to find out more.

Subtitles For Onpage SEO

Most “articles” included on WordPress sites simply consist of an article title followed by a large body of text. And while this works – to a degree – such content misses out on a whole range of possibilities.

Better formatted content not only helps to make your articles appear more readable – thus increasing visitor engagement – but there are also a number of ways to use these formatting elements to help with your onpage WordPress SEO.

Subtitles or subheads (depending on your preference) are an excellent example of this.

Generally speaking it appears that the search engines place more emphasis on text formatted in certain ways than in others. So, for example, all things being equal text that has been emphasized by making it bold or italic is likely to rank better than plain text. Further still text that has been made larger – just like a subhead – will often suggest more importance and so increase one’s rankings.

When creating content for the search engines try to break down the full story into smaller more “bite-sized” chunks and use subheads to break them up. Once again think of the subheads in a sales letter that keep the content neatly organized and compartmentalized leading to easier-to-digest content for your readers.

Including your primary and secondary keyword phrases naturally in your subheads can act as a strong indicator the the search engines need to place extra emphasis on your page’s rankings for those keywords mentioned in your subheads so try to look for ways to naturally include them.

The All-Important First Paragraph

A visitor arrives at your website. Within seconds they’re making a decision about whether your content is likely to answer their question and so second to your article title your lead paragraph is a major deciding factor on whether a reader will be drawn into your content or not.

The first paragraph in many articles contains a boring, rambling introduction to the overall subject before the writer actually gets into the meat of the topic. However a great first paragraph starts with the big guns and immediately attracts the readers attention. Think of it like a far longer article title that uses the same strategies such as promising a result, eliciting interest and/or using specifics. Take the time to craft a first paragraph that makes you really want to read on. If you could happily skip over your first paragraph then you may want to rethink it.

In terms of onpage WordPress SEO it has also been suggested that text that is included higher up the page may be given more emphasis than text in the main body of your content so ensuring you manage to naturally include your primary keyword phrase and ideally your secondary phrases too in the opening paragraph of your article can give you a further boost in rankings.

Using Images And Videos

Gone are the days where visitors expect purely text-based content. Certainly in terms of the search engines the text on your page is arguably still the most important element but increasingly the use of images and videos are helping to create top-level content. So why are these media so important?

1) Including images in your content helps to make it look more readable, increases interest, helps to drive home important points and in many cases will reduce your bounce rate. In other words the liberal use of images and video in your content simply makes for a better visitor experience because it is easier on the eye and holds the readers attention for longer. In many ways images can be seen as rather like the subheads on a sales letter in that they help to draw the eye in and keep the visitor engaged.

2) Images can become an important part of your onpage WordPress SEO efforts thanks to such additional elements as the ALT tag and image captions as opportunities to include further keywords.

There are a wide range of different ways to find relevant images which are covered in the “tool” section at the end of this article.

Content Length

Back in the day marketers used to recommend breaking up a longer piece of content into a number of smaller pieces. In this way a 2000 word article would become 4 articles each around 500 words in length. Some people would try to stretch this even further by turning it into even more linked articles with the theory being that it was easier to optimize each of the smaller articles for a specific keyword phrase and as a result receive more traffic from the search engines overall.

My own tests though suggest that this landscape is changing. In general I find that longer articles tend to perform better and there are a number of reasons for this:

1) Longer articles by default contain more content and as a result you’re far more likely to receive a large volume of long-tail traffic from it.

2) Longer articles seem to hold more “weight” with the search engines. The search engines are all about providing the best possible resources for an individual search and in general it’s fair to say that a longer article is likely to contain more “meat” than a shorter article.

3) Longer articles can be better for your visitors. An article of a decent length means lots of interest for your readers if it is suitably broken up with links and subheads to keep it readable. Think about the concept of “pillar content” and appreciate it’s far more likely you’ll create the “go to” guide for a particular keyword with a longer article than a shorter article.  Of course more visitor satisfaction means a smaller bounce rate and a greater likelihood of natural, organic sharing and linking which will further help to improve your search engine rankings.

4) Now that the search engines are paying more and more attention to latent semantic indexing a longer article gives you more chance of including all those important related keywords and phrases that will help reiterate to the search engines that your content really does have the answer to their users needs.

5) Even with decent onpage WordPress SEO strategies in place it’s likely that your content will require some link building to really hit the top spot. Of course the higher your authority and the lower the competition for the keywords you’re chasing the less links will be required to hit the top spot but generating a few links is beneficial irrespective fo the situation because it will really help to “stick” your content to the top of the SERPs.

But link building takes time and – depending on how you do it – costs money. Fewer articles of a greater length and with a better visitor experience means that your link building just got easier.

After all, would you rather try to manage a link-building campaign covering dozens of pages of low-value content or just a handful of high-value articles? Clearly the latter requires less work not only because you’re dealing with fewer pages to link to but also because people will want to link to it if it really is that good.

In short (no pun intended) I now prefer to opt for longer content where appropriate. Now I’m not suggesting you pad out your content and make it longer than necessary. Writing content for your website should be just like writing a salesletter in that you say exactly what you need to say – no more and no less.

Don’t get boring but don’t miss anything out. An example of a WordPress blog using longer-form content is Glen over at Viperchill. Whilst he posts far less regularly than many “gurus” would tell you is essential, each of his posts comes in at several thousand words and offers incredible value both in terms of the quality of writing, the topics covered and Glen’s unique perspective.

And that’s why Glen’s blog is really becoming one of the major “go to” resources for those looking to make a living online.

A Recap Of Content Creation For Onpage WordPress SEO

We’ve covered a lot of points so far so before we continue onto how to format your content using WordPress let’s just go back over the major points covered so far which you should bear in mind when creating content to rank well in the search engines.

1) Select a primary keyword phrase to base each of your articles around. This keyword should have been carefully chosen rather than pulled out of a hat and should offer a decent search volume with a degree of commercial intent and with competing sites that you can “leapfrog” over easily.

2) Analyze your competition and consider your primary keyword carefully in order to create the very best content possible for that keyword. Remember that in general longer content tends to work better than shorter content. Aim to create “pillar content” that others will want to link to.

3) Include your primary keyword phrase in the main title of your article, in subheads and liberally throughout the body of your article whilst keeping your use of it sounding natural rather than forced.

4) Consider including images and/or videos if they help to back up a point and use the ALT tag to include your primary keyword phrase here too (we’ll discuss how to do that shortly).

5) Find related secondary keyword phrases to include in the content of your article to increase the traffic it receives.

Content Formatting With WordPress For Onpage SEO

So you’ve created the single most amazing piece of content you’ve ever written based around a carefully-chosen keyword phrase. By now you’ve already got an unfair advantage over your competition but the second part of the puzzle is all about formatting. Essentially we want to use the built-in formatting tools which WordPress includes to not only make your content easy to read but to really drive home the point to the search engines that they need to really make your content highly-visible in their results.

In other words in this section of the article we’re going to take your basic text article and turn it into a WordPress SEO “powerhouse” of a finished article, so let’s log into WordPress, click on the “new post” link, paste in the content you’ve created and get formatting it so it turns from a basic block of text into something so much more.

WordPress SEO Plugins For Onpage Optimization

In just a few moments we’re going to take a look at the specific elements you should be focusing on in order to format your article so it performs well both for the search engines and for your visitors. But before we go through the nitty-gritty details it makes sense to tell you about a couple of tools that can help to make your onpage SEO efforts a lot simpler – namely a couple of powerful WordPress SEO plugins that will do a lot of the work (and the thinking!) for you.

SEOPresser is a WordPress SEO plugin which will analyze a huge number of onpage optimization elements including your article title, subheads, content length, keyword placement and images to provide you with a “score” for your content based on SEO best practices. It then provides guidance on what to do in order to improve your score and thus give you the best possible chance of ranking well in the search engines.

But whether you opt to take one of these WordPress SEO plugins for a free test drive or not it’s still worth being aware of the onpage formatting factors that can affect your site’s ranking so you understand both the “why” and the “how” on onpage SEO with WordPress so let’s take a closer look at those factors now.

Subheads

Highlight each of your subheads and select the “paragraph” drop-down menu from the formatting options. From here you can select larger-sized text which of course adds a little more emphasis to your primary keyword phrase. Personally I tend to use the ”Heading 1″ option for my own subheads.

Images

Inserting an image is incredibly simple and there are a number of ways to do this. One way is to upload an image that you have the rights to use by clicking on the “upload image” button. Select the image on your computer hard drive and then click the upload button. At this point you will see a tiny thumbnail of your image together with some basic details about it such as it’s file name etc.

It is on this screen that you can add your primary keyword phrase to both the ALT and title sections and thus increase the keyword density of your content. Appreciate that you can edit this image at any time – including the tags you have used – by simply clicking on it and then selecting the “edit” icon when it appears in the top-left of the picture.

There are also several highly-effective WordPress plugins that will search for royalty-free images that you can easily insert into your WordPress content though if you use them ensure that you “edit” the image using the technique above to add a suitable title and ALT tag. My own personal favorites are:

PhotoDropper – Simply click on the little PhotoDropper icon in WordPress and a search box will popup. From here you can enter a keyword and PhotoDropper will find relevant images for you on Flickr. Simply select the one you like and it’ll be pasted straight into your article.

Zemata – Zemanta is a free WordPress plugin designed to help you format your WordPress articles in a more interesting way. Just one feature they offer is the ability to search for images which you can then “drag and drop” into your article.

Links To Related Content

As mentioned previously most articles published on the internet consist purely of an article title followed by a body of text. However when we’re creating pillar content and working with onpage SEO the formatting can become almost as important as the text of the article itself. That’s why we add subheads and images. And links are just one more useful formatting technique for better rankings.

So why does adding links to related content help us to rank better in the search engines?

1) The major search engines seem to pay attention to who a website links to. The higher the quality of a website that you link to, the more authoritative your own article will appear to the search engines.

2) Creating links to other articles on your own website helps to “recycle” traffic and keep visitors on your site for longer as they end up visiting multiple pages rather than just the initial article they landed on. This reduces bounce rates and increases the chance of a visitor clicking an advert, buying a product or subscribing to your blog.

3) As mentioned earlier, the search engines place more emphasis on certain text which is one reason why we increase the font size of our keyword-rich subheads. By making them bigger we get a ranking boost. My own research suggests that having other links on your site – that include your primary keyword phrase – can also act as a signal to the search engines that your content is highly relevant for the search term you are targeting.

So how do we add links to related content? There are a number of ways to achieve this result and fortunately a number of free WordPress SEO plugins help to make this job considerably easier.

WordPress Related Posts Plugins – There are a number of plugins that will quickly and automatically add a list of other related articles at the end of your content. The WordPress Related Posts plugin is a simple yet bulletproof solution while LinkWithin has a similar remit but also includes images as well as the text link to your articles thus helping to draw the visitors eye.

Link To Post – Do you have other content on your site that is closely related? If so the Link To Post plugin will let you automatically search through all the other articles on your WordPress site to find related content before enabling you to quickly insert links to these articles within the body of your content.

Zemanta - Mentioned previously as a tool for adding images to your site Zemanta also has a handy feature that will search through the content of your article before suggesting certain in context links you can add. For example it may offer up links to certain pages on Wikipedia as further resources and adding these links to your content is as simple as clicking a button.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a plugin that will turn any word or phrase you specify into a link to any URL you specify. So if you were writing an article about “oven cleaning” you could tell this plugin to automatically link every instance of this phrase anywhere on your site to this specific piece of content thus helping to build keyword-rich internal links to your new article.

WordPress Tags

In the “tags” section of WordPress ensure you include your primary and secondary keyword phrases.

Page Load Speed

Google has openly admitted that they are using page load time as a factor in their ranking algorithm so a faster-loading page will rank higher than a slower-loading page if everything else is equal.

But that’s not the only reason to try and ensure your WordPress site loads as quickly as possible. It also leads to a far better visitor experience because when someone sees a link in the search engines that points to your site and then clicks it they get the information they desire that much quicker. Which means a better visitor experience, a lower bounce rate and once again more chance of organic links being built to your site over time.

Unfortunately this is one major area where many WordPress blogs really trip themselves up. Many WordPress users like to load up their sites with numerous plugins and add-ons which significantly slow down page load time. Indeed there are a few blogs that I have come across in the past that offered great content but took so long to load that I simply never bothered going back again. What a shame.

So what can you do to speed up the load time of your site and so improve your onpage WordPress SEO?

Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins – every plugin you use will slow down your site. Go through all the plugins that you’re using on your WordPress site and decide whether it’s really essential. If not, get rid of it.

Eliminate Social Sharing Bars - It seems “share bars” like Wibya are all the rage at the moment with bloggers hoping to encourage visitors to share their content but unfortunately these share bars tend to load incredibly slowly. Consider getting rid of them altogether and just using one of the faster-loading WordPress plugins for adding social sharing buttons.

Caching - Plugins like WP-Cache store regularly-accessed website files in such a way that they load far quicker.

Minify - All the different files that make up your WordPress site take time to load. All the various CSS files, javascripts, HTML and PHP all cause an extra drain on your server and slow down page load times. WP Minify is a plugin that aims to deal with that problem by combining and compressing these files so they load far quicker.

Proofread

Take the time to personally read your content before you hit the “publish” button. Ensure your writing is clear and makes sense to your readers and where necessary remove pointless or muddling sections to leave you with a clear, focused, logical article. Even better have someone else who hasn’t seen the article before look it over to ensure there’s nothing that doesn’t make sense to them or any “weird” punctuation that sounds fine to you but muddled them.

Additionally, assuming everything makes perfect sense use the built-in spellcheck in WordPress to ensure that your carefully-crafted content isn’t suffering from any typos (as mine invariably is thanks to typing faster than I can think!).
 

Encourage Social Sharing

As mentioned earlier on search engines and using social signals more and more to analyze and rank web pages. If you’ve followed the guidelines in this article then you’ll have really created some content to be proud of and that your visitors will love so make it easy for them to share your content with their friends – and in doing so you’ll not only receive extra traffic as a direct result of all that sharing but all those likes, shares and tweets also have the very real potential to give you a boost in the search engines.

There are dozens of different plugins and services that will allow you to add buttons to your content so your visitors can easily share it on Facebook, Twitter and so on so feel free to do some experimenting with the differen options but if you’d rather just go with a recommendation then I have found the Sexy Bookmarks plugin to do an admirable job as well as being visually attractive.

A Recap Content Formatting For Onpage WordPress SEO

Once again we have covered a lot of information when it comes to properly formatting your content for onpage SEO so let’s recap the more salient points as a quick reminder of what you should be bearing in mind.

1) Add image(s) and use the ALT tag to include your primary keyword phrase.

2) Increase the font size of your subheads to aid in readability and emphasize the importance of those keywords to the search engines

3) Link to relevant, related content either on your own WordPress site or on high-trust authority domains like Wikipedia. Also link your primary keyword phrase to the permalink of your article.

4) Aim to speed up the load time of your page wherever possible

5) Add your primary and secondary keyword phrases to the post “tags”.

6) Make it easy for your visitors to “share” your content on the major social bookmarking/networking sites.

How Can I Help?

This monster article is almost 8000 words is length and has taken the best part of a week to write (as well as years of trial and error to discover all the tips it includes) so if you have enjoyed it and feel you’ve benefitted from it please take a moment to click the “like” button below or tell your friends about it.

Given the effort I’ve put into this article I hope you’ve learned a few things that will help you to significantly improve the results you’re getting from your onpage WordPress SEO efforts. Please leave me a comment below if you have any feedback for me or if you have any questions and would like a personal response. I look forward to hearing your thoughts…

How To Get Free Products To Review On Your Blog

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photo credit: Howard Dickins

Creating honest reviews of products on your blog is one of the best ways to attract highly-targeted traffic from the search engines and then convert these visitors into affiliate commissions and advertiing dollars.

The problem with “product review” articles though is getting hold of the products in the first place. Either you have to spend considerable sums of money upfront buying the items you want to review, rely on the products you already own as a result of your own consumer purchases or try to borrow products off friends and family.

None of these is ideal. Fortunately there is another way to achieve the same result and in this article we’re going to look at exactly how to get free products to review on your blog so you not only have a constant supply of new products to feature but you also save your cash along the way.

Setting Up Your Website To Get Free Products To Review

Generally speaking when it comes to the subject of how to get free products to review on your blog the higher profile your blog is the easier you’ll find it to get products to review. This makes perfect sense of course because retailers and manufacturers only have so many free products they can give away so it typically makes most sense to give them away to the bloggers and website owners with the greatest reach. In this way they can get the maximum results possible from their giveaways.

This means that a key step in how to get free products to review is to make your website highly visible by actively promoting it in the search engines, by guest posting on high-traffic blogs in your niche and by building your social network such as on Twitter and Facebook.

When you look like an authority – like an opinion-former who has access to a lot of potential customers for a product or service – you’ll gind it far easier to get free products to review on your blog.

Furthermore with enough visibility you will often find these opportunities coming to you rather than you having to go and seek them out. Over the years I lose track of how many freebies I have received in the hope of a review due simply to having a highly visible website and by making it easy for companies to get in touch with me.

Where To Find Free Products To Review On Your Site

While a well-marketed site will receive offers of free products from time to time, if you’re serious about how to get free products to review on your blog or website then there are a number of resources worth taking advantage of which will enable you to be far more proactive in requesting free products.

Tomoson

Sign up for free with Tomoson and you will have the opportunity to receive all sorts of free consumer products to review on your site. The majority of the opportunities available are targeted towards the US market and many have prerequisites in terms of your Alexa ranking, Twitter followers or Facebook fans. However there are opportunities available for virtually anyone here including international bloggers and what’s more it’s absolutely free to get involved in the community.

BookSneeze

BookSneeze focuses purely on providing free books for you to review and covers both physical books and ebooks. Once again it’s free to register and you’ll receive a constant supply of new books to read and review on your website.

Blogger LinkUp

One feature of the Blogger LinkUp community is that it provides an option for product creators and sellers to offer up free products to other community members so they can review the product on their blog thus helping the provider of the free products to gain extra visibility among his or her potential customers.

Contacting Companies Directly

This is probably the most powerful technique of all when it comes to how to get free products to review but it comes with a warning. While anyone willing to contact enough companies will no doubt ending up receiving a few products from time to time, if you want to get some real results you need to know exactly what you’re doing.

Robb Sutton launched a mountain biking blog and succeeded in getting over $100,000-worth of free products to review in just his first 12 months of blogging so he really knows what he’s talking about. Read more about how Robb managed this impressive feat here.

Have you managed to get free products to review on your site? What did you get and how did you go about getting those freebies? Please leave me a comment below with your experiences…

EasyAzon Review: New Amazon WordPress Plugin Launches

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EasyAzon is a new Amazon WordPress plugin created by affiliate marketer Chris Guthrie. I have been lucky enough over the last few weeks to be able to extensively test the EasyAzon plugin after Chris invited me to be one of his beta testers and so I thought it might prove beneficial for other Amazon affiliates if I reveal exactly what the EasyAzon Amazon WordPress plugin is all about as well as providing an honest “nuts and bolts” EasyAzon review for anyone that is considering purchasing this new WordPress plugin.

What Is EasyAzon?

EasyAzon is a WordPress plugin designed purely for those of us who make money from Amazon’s affiliate program. Whilst there is good money to be made from Amazon’s associate program there are a few “niggles” that mean it isn’t the easiest affiliate program around to promote.

The purpose of EasyAzon is to rectify these problems making it easier to add Amazon affiliate links to your WordPress-powered niche sites and blogs as well as providing powerful functionality to increase your affiliate sales.

A Review Of The Main EasyAzon Features

EasyAzon has two main features at present – one which will save you time and the other of which will help increase your profits. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Adding Amazon Affiliate Links To Your WordPress Blog

Typically when you want to add an affiliate link to an article on your site you would need to complete the following steps:

1) Log into your Amazon affiliate account
2) Use the product search feature to bring up the specific product you want to link to
3) Select what type of link you want to include on your page (text, image or a combination of the two)
4) Copy the HTML code given by the Amazon associate program
5) Paste this into your WordPress post and edit as necessary before publishing your article

It works, but it’s slow. For the purposes of our EasyAzon review, here’s how it works with this new Amazon WordPress plugin:

1) While writing your article in WordPress, simply enter a keyword into the search box to immediately bring up relevant products from within your WordPress blog
2) Select what type of link you want to include on your page (text, image or a combination of the two)
3) Click the button to automatically insert the link into your article then publish it

In short you can now grab affiliate links for any Amazon product from within WordPress in a matter of moments without needing to log into your Amazon associates account and without dealing with any code. It therefore makes adding Amazon affiliate links much quicker and easier than doing it without. Which means you can publish more articles in a shorter time.

Increasing Your Amazon Affiliate Commissions

One of my many niche websites promotes filters for koi ponds. Yes, I know it’s quite a small niche but these pumps can be pretty expensive so the commissions make it worthwhile. But here’s the problem…

While lots of my visitors come from the States, a decent percentage come from other countries. Just look at this breakdown from my Google Analytics account to give you a better idea:

Sure, most of my visitors come from the States as shown by the dark green color, but what about all those visitors from other countries represented by the lighter green?

If my affiliate links point to Amazon.com then it’s unlikely anyone outside of the USA will actually bother ordering a filter. The currency conversion and the costs of shipping mean they probably won’t bother ordering. The result? Lost affiliate commissions.

The thing I’m most excited to tell you about in this EasyAzon review is that this Amazon WordPress plugin has a geotargeting feature which will automatically work out where each visitor comes from. It will then “swap” your affiliate links so that visitors from the UK will be given links to Amazon.co.uk, those from the US will be sent to Amazon.com and so on. Each visitor gets taken to their own local version of Amazon meaning a significant increase in your affiliate sales – and bottom line as a result.

In other words, EasyAzon makes it easy to increase your affiliate sales.

So how does this geotargeting really work? Well Amazon uses an internal “numbering” system for it’s products. When the plugin works out where a visitor is coming from it finds the equivalent product from that country’s version of Amazon and send them there – all without you having to do anything.

The Benefits Of EasyAzon

Over the last few weeks I have been testing the EasyAzon Amazon WordPress plugin on a number of different WordPress-powered sites that I own to help me quickly create articles laced with Amazon affiliate links. During that time I have been able to really see what the plugin is capable of in a “real world” scenario on live sites and so below you will find a list of the EasyAzon features that really caught my attention.

Unlimited License

One key feature worth pointing out in my EasyAzon review is that unlike a number of other “premium” WordPress plugins on the market you can install EasyAzon on all of the WordPress-powered sites that you own. There’s no need at all to pay for a license for every site you want to use it on and so this makes it really good value for money. For niche marketers like me with dozens of websites this one small purchase can be used on all your sites for a rapid return on investment.

Ease Of Installation

EasyAzon installs in a matter of moments like most WordPress plugins. Thereafter you simply need to visit the single configuration page (shown below) in order to add some basic details. All you need to do is to add your various Amazon affiliate ID’s (for all the different country-related versions of Amazon you want to promote) – all of which are easily found within your Amazon associates control panel.

These details only need to be entered once and thereafter the only reason to log into your Amazon affiliate account will be to check your sales as everything else can now be done from within WordPress.

In other words this Amazon WordPress plugin can be installed, configured and ready-for-use within 5-10 minutes of downloading it – it really is that easy to set up.

Extensive Testing

Chris has put a lot of effort into testing this plugin and I personally have it installed on close to a dozen sites of mine. These sites have different themes and plugins installed on them and are in different niches and yet EasyAzon has behaved itself perfectly during testing.

Too often I have bought a WordPress plugin and tried to use it only to find out that it is incompatible with some other essential plugin I’m using on a site. To date, no such issues have been found.

Speed Of Use

I love my Amazon affiliate commissions, and I also truly enjoy writing the content for my niche sites, but the one thing I always dreaded was messing around at the end adding all my affiliate links. Now, I now longer have this problem and adding my affiliate links couldn’t be any easier.

Accurate Search Features

Chris has put a lot of time into the search functionality of his Amazon WordPress plugin and I have always found the search results to be incredibly accurate. This is important because it makes it quick and simple to find the product you want to promote this further speeding up the process of adding your affiliate links.

Increased Affiliate Profits

I don’t want to go over this one again but in short I think the geotargeting element of the plugin is genius and should help anyone increase their affiliate profits.

The Downsides Of My EasyAzon Review

No product is perfect and Chris Guthrie’s plugin is no exception. Personally during testing while I love how quick and easy it is to add Amazon affiliate links to my articles and I’m literally in love with the geotargeting feature there are a couple of “limitations” at present.

The first of these is that I like external links from my sites to open in a new browser window so that if a visitor changes their mind, my site is still open for them to do some further browsing. With the current version of EasyAzon all your Amazon affiliate links open in the same browser window taking visitors away from your site.

Secondly there is currently no affiliate link “cloaking” feature which means that when you add an affiliate link it’s pretty obvious.

However realistically these are really only small niggles and having spoken to Chris about them, they’re both features pencilled in for future updates which customers will receive for free.

Who Should Buy Chris Guthrie’s Amazon Affiliate Plugin?

If you have yet to make a penny from the Amazon affiliate program then realistically it’s only fair to say in this EasyAzon review that the plugin we’ve been discussing isn’t going to take you from zero to hero overnight.

Equally though if you’re serious about the Amazon affiliate program and are really putting in the necessary time and effort to write good quality content and drive traffic to it then the EasyAzon Amazon WordPress plugin is going to not only save you a ton of time and effort but also has the very real potential to significantly boost your income.

I don’t believe it’s an essential tool – after all there are people making five-figure incomes without it – but I do believe that it offers enough benefits to be well worth the investment for anyone serious about their Amazon associate commissions.

For the price Chris is currently asking, I think the plugin is a huge bargain and I strongly recommend you take a closer look at EasyAzon today.

How I Just Got Published In A Print Book (And Some Important Lessons I Learned Along The Way)

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photo credit: Lori Greig

In early July a new book is going to be published which will feature contributions from a number of writers. As you can guess from the title of this post I’ll be one of them.

Now this isn’t a book about internet marketing or lifestyle design it’s in another niche in which I am active and furthermore it’s an old-fashioned print book that is being produced by a major publisher and should have considerable reach.

How Did I Get Into A Print Book?

I know few people who have spent years trying to get their books, articles and short stories published as a book so they can admire their work in the book store (and also hopefully earn some royalties into the bargain). I’m not one of those people. I have ideas for books but I haven’t got around to pursuing them yet so this experience has all come as a bit of a bonus really.

A short while ago I was contacted out of the blue by one of the guys putting the book together to say that (a) he liked my blog, (b) he thought a few of my articles would fit perfectly into the context of his book and (c) could he republish them if he fully credited me for my writing?

Of course, without hesitation I said yes.

So was I out there finding an agent? Was I touting to publishers? Had I worked long and had on a book proposal? No, I was just going about my thing, writing the best content I could and then promoting it to my niche. The publishing offer came to me.

Take Home Points

1) Create the best content you possibly can because sooner or later you might have an experience like this.

2) Promote your site and your content effectively so that it can be easily found – doing so increases the chances of your content being shared around the net and influential people setting eyes on your work.

3) Make it easy to contact you. Over the years I have been contacted through my websites with a number of offers. These have included free products to review on my sites, guided tours, some consultancy work for a major TV company and now some of my writing getting published in a print book. Ensure your site offers a number of ways to contact you, make your contact page easy to find and check the emails/tweets you get on a regular basis.

How Much Am I Getting Paid?

The offer I received was a one-off payment for the rights to use my work in print. I’m not going to divulge the exact amount but it’s not a lot. Equally as the articles were already written it was really “bonus” money as all I had to do was to sign a publishing contract and wait fo my check to turn up.

The point here is that not only have a monetized my blog in an unusual way by “selling” my articles but of course I will now have my name and website mentioned in a book which will not only mean free marketing for my site for years to come but additionally it’ll be easier for me to approach publishers in the future with my own book ideas as I’m already “published”.

Take Home Points

1) There are more ways to make money from your website than just from Adsense or affiliate links. A high quality site that has been well marketed can earn money in all sorts of “hidden” ways if only you keep plugging away over the long term. Oppotunities can come out of the blue when you’re really striving to produce the best content possible.

2) I accepted a minimal fee in exchange for the use of my content because to me money is only a tiny part of the value I am receiving from this deal. How can you utilize this in your business by offering value other than money to your readers, customers and business partners? What will make them take action?

Stop Planning And Start Living

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photo credit: Xelcise

Open any self-help book and you’re bound to come across the topic of goals. From to-do lists to bucket lists, short term to long term, one key aspect of creating the lifestyle of your dreams is about knowing where you want to go and then figuring out how you’re going to get there.

And for that you need a plan.

Making plans for the future is heady stuff. It’s a world of unlimited possibilities where you can safely let your mind wonder. Yes, plans are important and plans are fun. But is it possible to plan too much?

I’m sure by now most of us have heard the story about the guy who wanted to go on a trip but was waiting till all the traffic lights across town turned green before he start his journey. The chances of this happeneing are pretty slim so he never got started. He had a plan but he didn’t take action.

Waiting until the time is right, until everything is in place and everything indicates success is a recipe for disaster. Plans mean nothing unless they’re acted upon.

Don’t be one of those people. Every journey starts with a single step so why not take that step – no matter how small – right now? After all, even the best plans change over time. We learn. We adapt. We find better, newer, faster, more exciting ways of doing things. Often the experiences we have along the way lead us to modify (even improve upon) our original plan.

Let me give you a personal example. Years ago I built a website. I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t very good. It made a total of $20 profit in the first six months. Not one of my greatest successes.

But what I discovered was that one single page of that site – an article I threw up in a few minutes – was driving the vast majority of the traffic I was getting. People were emailing me for more information on the subject. I was getting linked to left, right and center.

I saw an opportunity.

So I tore down that tired, battered old site and built a whole new one all about the subject of that one single page. I went into far greater depth. I provided case studies, resources and reviews. And the site took off like a rocket, quickly replacing the income from my day job.

It was a niche I would never have considered in a million years if it weren’t for that initial experience. No amount of keyword analysis, competitor analysis or niche research would have led me there. What led me there was having started.

I started the journey, then adapted it as I went based on my own experiences. I learned along the way. I tested ideas. I tracked my results. The goal of quitting my job didn’t change but the process to get there – my plan – did. And for the better. 

So don’t be the person waiting for all the traffic lights to turn green. Be bold. Grasp the nettle and make today the day you decide to start taking massive action to accomplish your goals. Stop planning and start living.