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My Dependable, 100% Proven White Hat SEO Backlinking Strategy

This blog is all about complete disclosure so I’m not going to hold anything back when I write about my SEO strategies that I’ve used to get ranked for all kinds of keywords. Whether it’s a low competition niche or a very high competition niche, this white hat SEO backlinking strategy will work time, time, [...]

white hat seo backlinking strategy white hat seo backlinking strategy

How to Install WordPress

Installing WordPress is a very easy, very user-friendly process. The video walk-through below walks you through how to install Worpress in about 10-15 minutes, but first you want to make sure you’ve done all of the following:     1) Get web hosting. I personally recommend HostGator for great customer service, price, and dependability 2) [...]

how to install wordpress how to install wordpress

Finding a Profitable Niche

Finding a profitable niche is arguably the absolute most important part of being an internet marketer. It is a very frustrating and time consuming process, but if there is one skill to practice, practice, practice in this industry it’s keyword research. One of the reasons finding a profitable niche is so frustrating is because there [...]

finding a profitable niche finding a profitable niche

How to Pick Your Review Product

August 16th, 2011 Ian

Alright, it’s about time we talked about review websites. This is one of the most standard and frequently attempted versions of an affiliate website, but not many people do it very well. I’ve found a really great series of methods that has always worked for me. It’s literally been worth tens of thousands of dollars to me over the past three years.

Just like all other niches within internet/affiliate marketing, proper research and niche discrimination are essential to your success. There are a few qualifications that you should consider when picking the product you review, but you can choose any product, anywhere that has an affiliate offer you’re attracted to.

1) Pick something you’re interested in
Again, it’s pretty important you pick a subject matter you know inside out and you would be interested in using yourself. This is very beneficial for a couple reasons. You will very clearly appear informed and knowledgeable to your readers, but you will also have a good gauge of how effective the sales letter/copy are. If the product sales page makes you want to buy it, it will probably make others like you want to buy it as well. If you lose interest immediately when arriving at the web page, they probably will too.

2) Try the product if you have the resources
As always, it’s important to demonstrate thorough knowledge of whatever you’re trying to sell, which is virtually impossible to receive unless you’ve used the product yourself.

3) Look for something with high search volume, but low search competition
What search volume you’re looking for will depend on how much your commission on the product is.
-$10-$20/conversion = ~1,000 searches/month minimum
-$20-$50/conversion = ~500 searches/month minimum
-$50-$100/conversion = ~300 searches/month minimum
-$100+/conversion = Anywhere from 100 searches/month up

If you find a product with a $1,500 commission, 10-15 searches/month and only making a sale once every 5 months would mean you have a website producing $300/month. Not too bad! So it really comes down to search volume.

And as always, low search competition will result in high rankings quicker. You can achieve rankings for ANY keyword as long as you consistently build backlinks and diversify your linking portfolio. If you want to get rankings within the first 6 months working about an hour a day on backlinks, you should shoot for key terms where the top 5 results average less than 500 backlinks each. The lower the average number of backlinks, the quicker you’ll get rankings for that term.

4) Example key terms to check search volume and potentially get rankings for:
-[PRODUCT NAME]
-[PRODUCT NAME] review
-[PRODUCT NAME] reviews
-[PRODUCT NAME] scam
-[PRODUCT AUTHOR] review
-[PRODUCT AUTHOR] reviews
-[PRODUCT AUTHOR] scam

 

Most important of all, it’s all about consistency and persistence. If these rankings were very easy to get and could be achieved within 2 weeks or the first month, they probably wouldn’t be worth getting! So as long as you stick with it, you will begin getting highly targeted traffic! The next step is writing good copy to influence their buying decision, which we’ll talk about in the next post.

Feel free to write or comment if you have any questions!

 

Spinning Articles and Backlinking to Other Sources

July 29th, 2011 Ian

So in my last article I mentioned spinning your existing content and reusing it. Many internet marketers use this method and it is very effective for saving time, but if you abuse it you WILL get punished by Google. Make sure you do very thorough spins on your articles before posting anywhere else to ensure it helps instead of hurts your rankings.

There is some debate as to whether or not you should use the content from your blog posts, spin it, and post it to article directories. Many say it will hurt your rankings, but if you make sure you’re doing high-quality spins you will be fine. I do it for all of my sites as do many other internet marketers. There’s no sense in paying for or writing two articles when you can just write one and spin it well.

This is a method I first heard about from another great internet marketer, Pat Flynn. He runs the blog Smart Passive Income which a few of you have probably heard of. He’s a great teacher and with his permission, I’ve pulled the following video from an entry on his blog:

In the beginning, don’t worry too much about the Web 2.0 properties and the other things. Start with backlinking to your articles, then once your comfortable there integrate some Web 2.0 sites, and then if you’re interested go for a product like Blog Blueprint.

The only part I disagree with in this strategy is the tool Pat recommends: Unique Article Wizard. I would recommend you go with the Article Marketing Robot instead. The submitting process is just as good, it comes with a built-in spinner, and there’s no monthly cost with that service.

It’s a little tricky to understand in the beginning so please feel free to comment and ask questions!

 

Basic Article Marketing Tips and How To

July 28th, 2011 Ian

Even though every article directory on the face of the internet just took a big hit by Google’s Panda update a few weeks ago, they still provide very valuable backlinks. You can spend a lot of time writing article after article and submitting them to all of the major article directories which will absolutely help with your rankings, but there are a few ways you can really boost your website’s rankings using article marketing that not many people know about. But first thing’s first: article marketing basics.

Before the Panda update, if you did good keyword research and wrote keyword rich articles you would have rankings on Google within a week. Not for your website of course, but for your articles which would ultimately funnel a few visitors to your website.

Those glory days are a thing of the past, unfortunately, so the only reason for article directories now is to diversify your link portfolio and help your website’s rankings. You might get a tiny amount of traffic just from being on the article directory itself, but the main reason to keep up with article marketing these days is strictly backlinking.

Before you get down into the really good stuff with article backlinks, you have to submit your original content to the major article directories. The ones I consistently post to are:

1) EzineArticles.com
2) GoArticles.com
3) ArticleBase.com
4) ArticleDashboard.com
5) SearchWarp.com
6) iSnare.com

Ezine is going to be the most valuable backlink but also the pickiest when it comes to content they accept. They have a pretty high quality standard so don’t just post anything there. It won’t get approved if it isn’t sound writing. They will also take the longest to approve your articles (usually around a week).

You want to make sure you don’t post duplicate content to any of the directories. This means you should have a different title, different body, and different author bio for every site. This can be achieved using an article spinner if you keep a good eye on quality, but we’ll cover this a tad bit later. For now, just know: in internet marketing and SEO – Duplicate content is a very bad thing.

There’s some debate about this amongst professionals, but especially since the recent Panda update: it’s a big “no no”.

So in the beginning, take a few days to create your accounts at least 3-5 article directories and familiarize yourself with the process of submitting an article, going through the quality check, and getting approved. It’s very simple to do, and I always submit manually to my main article directories listed above so getting the hang of this in the beginning is imperative.

We’ll talk about spinning articles and the benefits of building backlinks to your articles instead of directly to your website next. Until then, try to get a feel for the basics!

Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

 

How to Get .edu and .gov Backlinks

July 20th, 2011 Ian

In my last lesson, “How to Use Blog Commenting to Increase Your Website’s Rankings“, I showed you how to develop backlinks using blog commenting.

If you’ve done much research on backlinking at all, you’ve probably read about how helpful .edu and .gov backlinks can be to your rankings. It’s not that Google recognizes .edu and .gov domains as higher authority just because of their domain, it’s because these sites usually have high quality content and a lot of backlinks directed to their pages. Getting links from these pages leads to rankings faster. One .edu or .gov backlink can be worth tens or HUNDREDS of backlinks from regular blog commenting. But remember, you don’t want all of your backlinks to be .edu or .gov. Google and the other major search engines will find that suspicious because it doesn’t look natural.

You get comments to your site the exact same way I showed in my last lesson (click the link at the beginning of this post if you missed it), but you use a slightly different code to search.

 

For .edu backlinks: “YOUR KEYWORD” site:.edu “post a comment” -”you must be logged in”

For .gov backlinks: “YOUR KEYWORD” site:.gov “post a comment” -”you must be logged in”

 

You’ll notice the added “site:” snippet to our code, which is what enables us to easily find .edu and .gov backlinks. I usually focus about 20% of my blog commenting efforts on .edu and .gov backlinks. It’s enough to get some great backlinks while still looking natural to the search engines.

Best of luck and happy linkbuilding! Feel free to comment/write if you have any questions.

 

How to Use Blog Commenting to Increase Your Website’s Rankings

July 12th, 2011 Ian

The moment is finally here: It’s time to start building backlinks! I’m going to lead out with the most commonly used method for building links: blog commenting.

Learning how to use blog commenting to increase your website’s rankings isn’t very difficult. The first week you’ll probably need a little more time than usual, but once you settle in you should be getting a link about every 5 minutes. Doing that for an hour a day is 12 links/day, 60 links/week, and 240 links/month. Getting that many backlinks will drastically improve any website’s rankings especially if you do it right.

Here is a video where I outline the exact steps you’ll take when building blog comments:

The code I use in the video above is: “YOUR KEYWORD” inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in”

Happy commenting! Feel free to comment on this post or shoot me an email if you have any questions.

 

My Dependable, 100% Proven White Hat SEO Backlinking Strategy

July 8th, 2011 Ian
white hat seo backlinking strategy

This blog is all about complete disclosure so I’m not going to hold anything back when I write about my SEO strategies that I’ve used to get ranked for all kinds of keywords. Whether it’s a low competition niche or a very high competition niche, this white hat SEO backlinking strategy will work time, time, and time again as long as you stay consistent and stick with your efforts. Lower competition niches will take less time of course, but higher competition keywords will usually have more traffic and result in more money.

So my last post about search engine optimization talked about the necessary precautions and guidelines you should follow when following ANY backlinking strategy, and mine is no exception. Today I’ll outline the exact, precise efforts you’ll need to take over the next several weeks in order to get your website ranked.

1) Blog and Forum Commenting
This is probably going to be the most time consuming and consistent effort necessary in any backlinking strategy. You want to do your best to post on blogs that are related to your niche (there is some debate as to whether or not this matters, but most experts believe it does). High PageRank (PR) posts look better to the major search engines, especially Google.

A high PR essentially means that site is recognized by Google as very relevant to the topic it’s written on based on how many sites are linking to it, so if you link to your website in a comment the search engines will recognize that as a higher authority backlink than something you got from any ol’ website.

When using blog commenting, you want to make sure you read the post you’re commenting on and leave a valuable content related to the post they wrote. It shouldn’t say “Nice post!” or “Thanks.”  That’s comment spam and frowned on by about everyone that’s ever written, read, or followed a blog.

2) Press Releases
I regularly write and distribute press releases every couple of weeks for additional, keyword-rich backlinks. This is a very effective way to gain a large amount of backlinks to your website and will help boost your rankings quickly. I use a great free press release distribution website and I’ll get into greater detail on that in the coming weeks.

3) Article Writing
Even though Google’s recent Panda update effected almost all of the article directories, their links are still valuable. I usually try to get 1-2 articles up on the major article directories per week for each of the sites I’m trying to rank. I usually do this by spinning my blog posts very thoroughly and posting it on each of about 6 or 7 article directories. Again, I’ll do a specific post for that very soon to give you more direction.

I will also teach some advanced methods on linking to your articles to boost their PR so the link they contain to your website is perceived as more valuable by Google.

4) .Edu and .Gov Links
These are usually very, very valuable links and if you know what you’re doing they’re very easy to get. It’s not the fact that the domain extension itself is highly recognized by Google, but most of these pages have a lot of backlinks from other sites and in turn result in a value of tens or hundreds of run-of-the-mill backlinks each. These can be obtained through methods very similar to blog commenting, but with a more advanced search method.

About 10-20% of the blog backlinks I build will be from .Edu and .Gov backlinks. I’ll show you how to get these in coming days.

5) Web 2.0 Properties
These are pretty simple. Web 2.0 properties are sites like Squidoo, HubPages, WordPress, Blogger, etc… Creating pages that link to your website with regularly updated content can prove very valuable in your backlinking portfolio. Remember, diversify, diversify, diversify your links. It will appear more authentic to Google.

6) Social Bookmarking
It can be tedious, but I try to focus at least a little time each week to social bookmarking. Again, it’s all about diversity. I’ll teach many ways to approach this in the coming weeks as well.

All of these methods mixed together in a consistent backlinking strategy will ABSOLUTELY get rankings every time. In the coming weeks I’ll be doing this for every one of my sites and as long as you follow along and keep up, you’ll get rankings for your sites too.

I usually focus anywhere from 60-90 minutes per day for each website when backlinking. Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, it’s very repetitive, but these efforts are a necessity for a healthy, long-term ranking website. Most of this time will consist of blog backlinking (about 60-70%). The rest is split pretty evenly amongst the other points I’ve mentioned above.

Remember, the money will always come as long as you keep up the hard work and remain consistent!

Feel free to write or comment if you have any questions! I look forward to flexing my IM muscles in the coming weeks with all of you watching ;)

The Biggest SEO Secrets

July 7th, 2011 Ian

So what’s the big secret to search engine optimization? What is the key to getting to the top of Google? If you can put yourself in the mindset of the search engine robots, you’ll find the task of getting to page one much easier.

You’ll see SEO experts go back and forth time and time again on different search engine optimization topics because nobody knows exactly what works. Well, except for Google, and we all know how asking them for help usually works out. The best way to improve your website’s position on the SERPs is working hard to better understand how the search engines work. Don’t worry, it’s not like trying to understand women. You just have to start thinking like a 4th or 5th grader.

That’s because the search engine robots (also known as search engine spiders) function at the same level of intelligence and cognitive capacity as elementary school children and they’re improving at a rapid rate. Are you smarter than a 5th grader?

On top of on-page SEO (meta titles, header tags, keyword density, etc…) the most important thing for your ranking strategy will be backlinking. It’s also the most time consuming, and one of the trickiest, most controversial topics amongst SEO experts.

 

Rule #1 – Don’t Be Artificial
Search engines reward link portfolios that are diversified and look authentic. If you had tons of people posting links to your site, they wouldn’t use the same anchor text 100% of the time. They wouldn’t be 100% dofollow links. When building links, think about how other people would be linking to your website and mimic that linking strategy.

-Use dofollow and nofollow links.
-Use .gov, .edu, and all other top level domains (.com, .org, .net).
-Mix up your anchor text, including using the URL as anchor text.
-Link to your sub-pages as well as your main page.

And anything else you think other users would be likely to do when linking to your site

Rule #2 – Don’t Build Too Many Links At Once
You can build a few hundred links to a brand new website a week as long as you’re consistent (see rule #3 below), but you can’t build thousands of weeks a link to a brand new site, or a hundred thousand a month unless you own a site like Wikipedia or Facebook. Be reasonable. Try to build 10-15 links per day to each of your websites in the beginning, and slowly turn it up from there.

Rule #3 – Be Consistent
This is one of the most important things for you to remember when building links – stay consistent. If you have a website that gets 2,000 links the first two months and then you stop your efforts because you got rankings and receive 5 links the third month, you’re likely to see your search engine rankings drop – FAST! Keep up with your efforts even after you get rankings. Once your site is making enough money, outsource it so you don’t need to worry about it anymore. Once you get a large enough following, they’ll do a lot of the backlinking for you so you can stop worrying about it.

Rule #4 – DON’T Try to Cheat
Be very, very careful about the SEO software you use. Be VERY weary of any auto-linking software and don’t link all of your websites together, pack the bottom of your website with keywords that blend into the background color, etc… The search engines are very privy to these things and will ultimately punish your site severely for blatantly attempting to cheat their system.

 

Always keep learning. It takes a long time to get the hang of this aspect of the industry, but once you do it’s a very valuable asset and will become the lifeblood of your business. Stay consistent, always keep up with the latest SEO news, and keep trying no matter what gets in your way. You can get ranked for the most difficult terms on the internet as long as you stay consistent, build high quality links, and never give up.

Feel free to comment or write if you have any questions!

The Golden Rule: Providing Quality Content Will Make You Money

July 6th, 2011 Ian

If you read around internet marketing forums or talk to most established internet and affiliate marketers trying to find out what they’re number one, always-stick-to-it, golden rule is they’ll likely tell you this: providing high quality content will always make you money once you start getting traffic. If you work hard on your content, you will get a devout following which can result in a very large amount of money.

So how do you ensure you’re posting quality content? Well, you’ll settle into your own unique style over time but there are a few rules to ensure you start down the right track:

1) Personal: make a connection with the audience
A lot of author’s you hire will write in the impersonal form. Instead of saying, “When you go to the store, you pick out ripe bananas” they write, “When one goes to the store, one picks out ripe bananas.” If you’re trying to make a personal connection to your audience, I advise that you don’t write in the impersonal form. Feel free to keep a unique, fun writing style too. Of course that depends on your topic (you don’t exactly want to discuss disease lightheartedly) but for the most part you can always find a room for a little personality here and there. Your subscribers will feel more connected to you if your writing gives them a feel for your personality.

2) Informative: have well researched, true information
Make sure you’re not just posting a bunch of bogus, lightly researched information. The last thing you want is for people to come and read the posts on your blog just to immediately discredit you. You won’t get loyal followers, you definitely won’t get email subscribers, and it will be MUCH harder to make money.

3) Insightful: contains helpful information rather than stating the obvious
Of course you’ll need to lay down some basic information from time to time to setup for the more advanced information, but you’ll want to dig much deeper than that if you plan to provide quality information. If you plan to teach something like how to build muscle and gain weight, don’t just talk about eating more. Talk about the right foods to eat, how many calories you should be getting each day, the difference between lifting if you want to burn fat versus lifting when you’re already really skinny, etc…

The biggest reason you want to provide quality content is to establish yourself as an expert. If you show that you’re an expert, every word you write will be accepted as gold by your readers. Any product you recommend or piece of advice you give will be accepted with ease. Gaining that kind of credibility within your industry and community will shoot conversions through the roof and ensure you make a killing in internet marketing.

How to Outsource Writing Using Elance

July 1st, 2011 Ian

A lot of people are intimidated when it comes to outsourcing work, but really there isn’t anything much easier in my opinion. With the internet and reverse bidding these days, you post a job, professionals bid on your work, you review their past work and interview them over the message board, and then you award the job and that’s it!

Payment is completed through escrow so you don’t have to release money until you’ve reviewed and accepted the work as satisfactory. It’s a very, very cool system.

So I needed to outsource writing for two of my websites for this summer and I’m writing for the other two myself. My four sites for this summer (and beyond) are:

1) ianswaystomakemoney.com – Target keyword: ways to make money
2) ehowtogainweight.com – Target keyword: how to gain weight
3) edietandexercise.com – Target keyword: diet and exercise
4) howtogetajobtips.com – Target keyword: how to get a job

I’m writing for this site and howtogetajobtips.com personally, and although I know a lot of information about nutrition, exercise, weightlifting, diet, etc… I don’t enjoy writing about those topics as much as I enjoy writing about the ones I’m writing for personally.

I’m going to spend a lot of time backlinking in the coming weeks so whatever work I can get done by someone else I will, but I wanted to make sure to write personally for a couple of the posts to prove that if I can do it, anyone can ;)

In this video lesson, I teach you how to outsource writing using Elance. These steps can be followed to outsource anything on Elance, but for now all I needed was writing work.

Feel free to comment if you have any questions and I’ll answer them ASAP!

Configuring WordPress Settings

June 27th, 2011 Ian

For obvious reasons, before configuring WordPress you need to:
1) Install WordPress
2) Possibly change your WordPress theme

If you notice that my voice sounds like I’ve achieved the impossible, traveled back through time, and gone through reverse puberty it’s because I had to speed the video up to stay within YouTube’s time limit. Don’t worry though, my  normal voice should be back next video ;)

In this video tutorial, I walk you through the steps of configuring your WordPress account. Although this video is specifically geared toward configuring your site for internet and affiliate marketing, the steps I outline in this video are beneficial to anyone in any industry using WordPress.

I highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin (you’ll see why in future posts), but you are welcome to install others if you have worked with them in the past and are more comfortable doing so. Also, Pretty Link is not a necessity but will help protect you from getting your affiliate commissions stolen.

Feel free to comment or write me if you have any questions! I hope you find it helpful.

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