Planning an Affiliate Site

Recently I caught up with two of my internet marketing buddies and we had a good odd chat about SEO and planning an affiliate site.

We talked about some really interesting aspects of affiliate marketing, and in this post I will be sharing with you one thing I found most helpful.

When you’re starting an affiliate website, and your intention is driving free traffic from the search engines, it’s vital that you plan the site out properly.

The most important aspect to get right is choosing the keywords that the pages of your site will target. Most of you will know what kind of keywords convert best and have a rough idea of the kind of competition you are capable of going after.

However I want to discuss another aspect of targeting keywords, that will allow you to get much more traffic in the long term, and ensure that Google loves your sites too!

OK let’s start with an example. If you have a site that sells mountain bikes, you might be targeting a particular model of bike as your keyword, such as “cell XC-1“. I haven’t checked if that phrase has any search volume, but it doesn’t matter as it’s for example purposes only.

If you were targeting “cell XC-1“, you would write an article about the bike and make sure it is monetized well and then go ahead and start getting some links to that page, so you can get top search engine rankings.

That’s nothing new to most of you I’m sure, however let me explain how you can make sure you are targeting that phrase for its true value.

When doing your keyword research look for phrases that are the longer tail version of  the phrase you are targeting. Taking this example, with the phrase “cell XC-1“, I could also potentially target “cell XC-1 cross country” or “cell XC-1 cross country mountain bike” or even “buy “cell XC-1“.

As you can see in the examples above, the core phrase of “cell XC-1” is contained in all the variations of the phrase.The longer phrase variations will have less traffic, however I will explain in moment what I am getting at.

Before I continue to explain though, I first want to explain the concept of “natural looking” link building. It’s no secret that Google prefers all link building to be built naturally, which is where people just decide to link to you. However in reality, if you rely on this you’ll struggle to get top search engine rankings.

So of course, everybody builds link themselves. However that doesn’t mean that when you are building links that you shouldn’t try and mirror what natural link building looks like as closely as possible.

One way to do this is to have variation in your anchor text that makes up your links. I don’t go over board on the variation, however I think 20% of the time, if you have a slight variation in your links it’s a good idea.

Here’s the clincher, when you are adding this variation, you should use the longer version of your keyword phrase, with the original core keyword phrase embedded inside it, just like I showed in the examples above.

There are two major advantages of doing this, the first is that your links will look more natural to Google because your link anchor texts are varied, which is good for your search engine rankings, and also you’ll start to rank for these longer tail phrases eventually and get more traffic from them too!

But that’s not all, because you are still using phrases with the core keyword phrase in them, your rankings will still be boosted for that core phrase also.

I did this recently when I has starting an affiliate site, but I did it the other way around, and I went for the longer version of the phrases first, and when I got rankings for them, I then got my link builders to start building links with the shorter tail version of the keyword.

The cool thing about this was, because I had been building links on the long tail phrase that contained the exact shorter tail phrase inside it, I was already on page 2 for the shorter tail phrase anyway!

So when you are planning an affiliate site, or any site for that matter, where your intention is to drive free traffic from the search engines, it is a good idea to add variation to your links, using longer tail versions of the core keyword you are targeting for that page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the beginning of this post I mentioned that I caught up with two of my internet marketing buddies, both absolute experts at marketing online, and the great news is that one of them is giving away a free report for a limited time where he provides a detailed plan (with video) of his best affiliate marketing tricks.

Enjoy!

Affiliate Marketing Ideas

Hey Everyone,

With Christmas only 3 months away it’s time to start thinking about some affiliate marketing ideas for this time of year.

You can make great commission from the massive surge in buyer traffic that is due to hit the internet at Christmas, so get ready now.

The key to doing well at Christmas as an affiliate, is to make sure you start your traffic generation methods early, free traffic anyway.

In this post I’ll provide a few helpful tips on what I’m doing this year with a some of my sites, that I’ve ready to sell things from Amazon.

There’s a large spike in traffic at Christmas, and not just ordinary traffic, I mean traffic that has credit cards in hand and are ready to buy. So keep this in mind when you’re checking the Google keyword tool, because if a particular keyword phrase gets an average amount of searches now, it will most likely shoot up, if it’s something that could be bought as a gift.

I’m focusing on Amazon myself because it is full of so many great affiliate marketing ideas. However the main reason I’m doing this is because from other sites I have that sell Amazon products, I’ve noticed that the traffic I send to Amazon often ends up buying a totally unrelated product to the one I was trying to sell!

This is great for me, because I still get paid the commission, no matter what the customer buys. This works in your favor even more around Christmas time, because people are looking to buy more than one item in most cases. So half the job is just getting the traffic over to Amazon and let Amazon do the rest!

You can target products on your site that are low dollar value but high search volume, in hope of achieving the result I just discussed above, however I’m targeting items that are a minimum of $400, so I atleast make a decent commisson from that product itself.

If you are into SEO like me, then I encourage you to get a site set up for Christmas now, because you really need to get your rankings by late November early December. If you don’t get the traffic by then, you’ll simply miss out.

So start thinking what would make a popular Christmas gift now and what you could potentially create a mini affiliate site around. You don’t need many products, in fact you could just select one if you wanted to and build a mini site around that and drive SEO traffic to it on product specific keywords.

There are so many affiliate marketing ideas out there for Christmas, such as toys, electronics, sports gears, tools to name a few, the potential is huge!!

All the best and Merry Christmas (even though it’s only September!)

View the original article here

Affiliate Research

Hey everyone,

Below is a video that demonstrates how to do some very effective affiliate research for finding quality products to promote, and also how to find some great content for your review pages.

The focus of this video is on physical products, and I’m sure you’ll agree there is a lot of choice out there when you head done this path.

Watch the video and if you could be as kind to comment and rate my Youtube video, I would appreciate it!

 

Get Indexed by Google Fast

If you’re building niche sites using Wordpress then you’ll love this post, because I’m about to share with you how to get indexed by Google fast.

I’m using this method on this very blog and Google indexes new posts of mine within about 60mins, sometimes as fast as 15mins. This technique is very easy to implement and once set up you don’t have to do anything.

If you login to your Wordpress control panel, and look at the left menu under “Setting ==> Writing” and then scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a box called “update services”. I have included an image below to demonstrate this.

By default most Wordpress blogs will have pingomatic in there. What this means is that everytime you make a new post on your site your Wordpress site gets pinged and this is meant to notify the search engines, so they will come over and check out your new content.

The problem is that it doesn’t always work, which can be very annoying. There is however something you can do to drastically speed up the process and virtually gaurantee Google will come over and index your content fast. What you need to do is add a whole heap more pinging services to that list, and more importantly add pinging services that Google own.

I’ve included a list at the link below of 180 pingers, most of which are Google ones. All you need to do is click the link and download the text file, then copy the list into the ‘Update Services’ box I showed you above, in your own Wordpress site.

==>Click HERE to download Ping List<==

Once you have done this, click save, and then you’re done. Now when you make a new post on your blogs, Google will be notified instantly at numerous of it’s own pinging services and you’ll see how easy it is to get indexed by Google fast.

One thing to note is that you shouldn’t keep re-publishing your posts, once a day is plenty. The reason being that if you do make a change and publish again, Wordpress will re-ping your post everytime, and this can be considered ping spam. Also if you have pingomatic as the default in your “update services” you should remove that before adding this list, do avoid duplication of pinging services.

View the original article here

Affiliate Wordpress Theme

I have a free gift for you all, it’s my very own Affiliate Wordpress Theme! I got tired of there not being any decent Wordpress themes that did what I needed them to do for Affiliate Marketing, so I created my own, just the way I wanted it and now you can use it too!

There’s a video below that demonstrates the theme in action and how to use it. The link to download the theme and my special Wordpress Plugin that comes with it is here:(in the video I mention that you need to leave your name and email, but you don’t need to as the link below bypases that for you)

Enjoy,
Matt Carter

View the original article here