21st Century Affiliate Marketing

How much do you know about Google’s personalized search feature?

For some time now, if you were signed in to Google (through any of the accounts you may have there), your search results were subject to being personalized.

I first realized how important this was when I was doing some search engine optimization and promotion for a client. I told my daughter that we were already getting page one placement for that client and she said she didn’t see it.

That’s when I remembered that I was logged in to Google. When I logged out, and did the search again, the results were different. My client was not on page one and these new results were consistent with what my daughter saw when she did the same search.

So, after that, when I was testing search results, I had to remember to log out of Google.

Last Friday, however, Google rolled out personalized search results for everyone and you’ve been opted-in by them automatically, whether you are aware of it or not.

Here’s their announcement…

Personalized Search for everyone

Now, personally, I think this has potential for real differences in how people see search results and I think it’s going to get more different over time.

How good or bad it is would depend upon how you’re using the search engines - Google, specifically.

As a marketer, I’m not much in favor of it and won’t be until I see how it affects traffic flow in the future. I’ve worked hard for many years to rank well for some search terms and this has the potential to destroy all that effort. I don’t know that it will, but it might, so I’m going to try to watch and see what happens.

As a user, it may have its benefits, but, again, only time will tell. I am not happy that Google opted me into this with no say on my part, however. I want a way to turn it on and off, and at this time, I don’t know if that’s possible. I’m still learning about it.

Danny Sullivan wrote an excellent post on the topic…

Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Danny knows a lot more about all this than I do and I’ll be watching to see what else he has to say on this topic.

So, what do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

For the last several months, I’ve been researching information to help me build a new website that will be found in the search engine results.

Choosing keywords is more of an art than a science, despite what some people say about it. It’s not enough to write pages on a site using topics related to the most searched keywords or the most used keywords.

If it were that simple, then we’d all buy a list of the top 1000 keywords and write pages around them.

If you’re new to keyword research, you may have used one of the online keyword research tools that provides a list of phrases that people have searched for lately. With some of them, you enter a word or phrase, and a few seconds later you get a list of related phrases that contain the words you entered along with other words.

For example, this morning I was doing some research on what people were really using when trying to find a place to eat. I’m promoting a local family-style restaurant, but could not find good keywords to attract visitors. So, I did some vertical research on words like eating, eat, food, restaurant, dining, and a few others. Over a couple of hours, I looked at a couple of thousand long tail keyword phrases that contained one or more of those words. None of them had the numbers I was looking for, however.

Later, I did a lateral search for keywords related to restaurants. This produced several hundred keywords that were found on the top-ranked pages about restaurants in Google, but which did not contain the word, “restaurant.”

After that, I researched the word, “dining,” but most of the good-ranking phrases were related to furniture, not restaurants.

So, that’s the challenge. I need to find what real people are searching for when they want to find a good place to eat. I’ll keep working on it.

Finding the right keywords

Earlier, I mentioned that lots of people look for the most searched keywords and use them when writing their pages.

That’s an important consideration, but it overlooks something equally, or possibly more, important — how many other people are doing the same thing. In other words, what’s your competition?

About a decade ago, Ken Evoy wrote an ebook called Make Your Site Sell!, where he talked a lot about being found by the search engines. He was the first author I found who talked about both supply and demand when it came to keyword research.

By writing about topics in the top searched keywords, we are doing part of it right. We’re writing about things that have a high demand — people searching for them on the search engines.

But, what about all the other people who are doing the same thing? How many other pages are there that are competing with you for those search engine results?

I don’t know about you, but I want to find just the right combination of words that have a high demand and a low supply. Then I’ll invest the time and effort to write about them.

If you have a choice of two phrases with approximately equal demand, but one has ten times the number of competitors as the other, which one would you choose to write about?

I’d choose the one with the least number of competitors — most of the time. Now and then, I write about something that I know I probably won’t rank highly for, just because I want to write about it.

I do basic keyword research, but don’t get bogged down in all the SEO (search engine optimization) discussions and postulating. I don’t have time or energy to waste trying to guess the exact keyword density Google wants. Page rank discussions leave me bored to tears.

What I want is a tool that helps me find the right keywords and then get on with my life.

This morning, I got a very pleasant surprise.

Sitesell introduced version 3 of their Brainstorm It! tool

Now, if you’ve been reading along lately, you know that I’m building a new site for promoting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the site is powered by Site Build It!, the main product offered by Sitesell.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using the beta version of Brainstorm It! 3, but the actual current version was 2.2.

This morning, without thinking, before my first cup of coffee, I logged into Site Central and clicked the Brainstorming link.

I was pleasantly surprised to see version 3 load in my browser. As late as last evening, I had to go to the beta address to use version 3, but this morning, it’s the standard version.

I logged into the Sitesell members-only forums and found the announcement by Ken Evoy that the new version had been successfully deployed overnight.

Not only does version 3 produce better results, it’s much, much faster than version 2, even on the slow dial-up connection I have.

Everything is working as expected. All the hundreds of top-ranking keyword phrases I had in my Master Keyword List (MKL) were there. The changeover was painless and I didn’t have to do anything at all.

So, how much is the price of Site Build It! going up because of this new tool? Not one penny. We continue to get more and more functionality with SBI at the same price. You gotta love that.

Currently I have about 600 keywords in my MKL that have a relatively high demand and low supply. Over time, I’ll keep on researching, comparing, and pruning this list to make sure that I’ll spend my time well, writing about topics that Google may rank highly.

Although it isn’t perfect, and I have to use my own intelligence and intuition when comparing which long tail keyword phrases to use, the new version three of Brainstorm It! is already a very nice tool in my Internet marketing arsenal.

Of course, it comes at no extra charge with a Site Build It! subscription.

It almost makes keyword research fun.

Act on your dream!

JD

Over the years, I’ve shown many thousands of banner ads on a variety of sites, including traffic exchanges.

Now, I know some of you aren’t fans of traffic exchanges and even I don’t use them as much as I used to.

When I first started marketing online, I could depend on good banners getting a pretty good click-through rate, on the order of 1% or so. That has changed over the years and now the click-through rate I’m seeing is much lower than that, even for well-designed banners.

I still use them now and then, but not to the extent I did a few years ago. In fact, I’ve pretty much given up on them until this morning.

What changed?

I was reading an article by Seth Godin that he posted on his blog a couple of days ago: On becoming a household name

Part of what he said in that blog post jumped right out and grabbed me…

Being a familiar name takes you miles closer to closing a sale. People like to buy from companies they’ve heard of.

It turns out that this is an overlooked benefit of banner ads….

On some level, I’ve felt that it was unfair to me - the affiliate - to use some banner ads, because they promoted the merchant and didn’t really help me make the sale.

When I read what Seth wrote, I realized that this may have been the purpose of the banner in the first place - to build name recognition for the merchant while I paid for the advertising.

So, how can we turn that around? How can we use banner and other graphic ads to build our own brand and name recognition?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that for a new site I’ll be unveiling soon and I can see several ways that good graphics shown on similar sites can help build awareness of my new site and hopefully bring more visitors.

Even if I never get a single click-through from those graphics, they may do their work well if they help build name awareness of the brand.

It’s not a complicated concept, just one that I hadn’t thought of since I was so focused on getting clicks that lead to sales.

Have you ever thought of banner ads from this perspective?

Act on your dream!

JD

Over the last couple of years, I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into using a variety of social networking sites to enlarge my circle of friends and associates on the web. I believe that it is working out well for me and I’m enjoying keeping in touch with my online friends.

Until today, I was showing a couple of widgets from MyBlogLog.com that showed the social networking sites I’m active on and some of the latest things I’ve written on a variety of the sites I frequent.

It turns out that those widgets were interfering with the appearance of polls I create using PollDaddy.com, so I moved both of the social networking widgets to a new social networking page, here on this blog.

That solved two problems I’ve been having.

One, it speeds up page loads a bit because it reduces calls to MyBlogLog.com from every page.

Two, it makes it possible to add polls to articles I write. I don’t know how many polls I’ll be creating, but I’m going to try a few to see what we can learn.

There is an art to creating polls that get reliable results. I am not a master of that art, yet. Therefore, I’m afraid that some of my polls will be worded incorrectly and may skew the results. Since nothing really important will be affected by these polls, I’m not going to worry much about it and I’ll just add polls when there is something I’d like to learn more about from the readers of this blog and other places I’ll show the polls.

You never have to participate in the polls, but I welcome your voting and your comments.

In the following poll, I’m asking your opinion of social networking. I realize that your opinion may not match my preconceived notions, so you can select multiple choices and add your own if it isn’t already there.

To add your own answer if it doesn’t match one of the choices next to the checkboxes, just enter it in the gray text bar between the last checkbox and the View Results link. (At least, that’s what I hope it will do.)

When you’ve made your selections or added your “other” opinion, don’t forget to click on the Vote button.

I look forward to your opinions and thoughts about social networking.

Act on your dream!

JD

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2.9

What are keywords?

I suspect that you probably know something about choosing the right keywords for your site, but, just in case this is your first introduction to this subject, let me give you a brief overview now and offer a couple of links to where you can learn more later on this page.

Keywords can be loosely thought of as the words or phrases that succinctly describe the topic of a page on a website, a Squidoo lens, a post on your blog, or anywhere else on the Internet.

Another way to think of keywords: they are words or phrases that people type into search engines to try to find websites that offer matching and relevant information.

You’ve probably done it yourself. Some of us search for information dozens or hundreds of times every day. The better you get at entering appropriate keywords into the search engines, the more likely you are to find what you are looking for quickly.

Now, let’s think about this from the other side of the screen.

How do we build our sites so that they will be found when people search for related topics and specific information we cover?

I’m sure there are more than two ways to approach this, but let’s think about the difference between trying to write about the most searched keywords versus choosing the right keywords.

One reason you should learn all you can about choosing keywords: it can bring more visitors to your blog or site and, if you do your job, this can result in more income.

How to find good keywords

What is one of the things professional webmasters, lensmasters, and bloggers do that sets them apart from their less-successful competitors?

They research topics within their subject areas that are being searched for many times each month in the search engines and then write quality content and put it on their sites to compete for some of those searchers’ attention.

If you’ve studied this topic at all, you probably know several free sites that you can go to that will show you adsense keyword lists, some of the highest paying keywords, or the most searched keywords.

These sites and lists can be worth knowing about, but they may not help you attract more visitors to read what you’ve poured your heart into writing.

Why not?

Many thousands, possibly millions, of people who are writing on the Internet know about those sites and lists, too. They’re busily writing content in the hopes of getting some of those searchers to come to their sites.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t try too hard to get a page one listing on Google when someone searches for topics like affiliate marketing. That’s too broad a term and there are too many competitors. I want to find a term that perhaps fewer people are looking for, but which also has many less competitors. The better I do this research, the more likely I am to get a higher listing on Google and other search engines and that means the probability of more visitors who are interested in a particular subset of affiliate marketing.

I’d much rather have someone who is sincerely interested in learning how to make money with an affiliate program and who is willing to put forth the time, effort, and money it takes to learn affiliate marketing in order to build a successful home based affiliate business.

So, I’m doing my best to attract someone, possibly you, who is looking for a high-quality affiliate marketing opportunity rather than just anyone who has a passing interest in affiliate marketing and learning how to make more money online.

This is more of an art than a science, but the tools to help us identify better niches are available and they’re getting more sophisticated all the time.

Rather than writing about the most searched keywords and fighting for recognition among a crowd of thousands or millions of sites, I concentrate on finding good keywords that fewer people are searching for, but which have only dozens or hundreds of competing pages on the web.

Just imagine for a moment…

What if all those people who are searching for affiliate marketing are standing in a long line in the real world where you can see them.

That looks pretty attractive, doesn’t it?

You see all those people there - potential customers - and just can’t wait to show them what you have to offer.

…but, then you notice something else…

Almost all of those people are lined up in front of one store. A little farther down the road is another store with lots of people lined up.

As you look down the road, you notice that each store has a shorter line waiting in front of it, and after the tenth store, there just aren’t that many people wanting to browse any of the other thousands of stores that are waiting there with their doors unlocked, the lights on, and darn few customers.

That’s essentially what happens when you compete for the most popular keywords that people search for on Google and the other major search engines. They enter those keywords in the text box at Google and Google shows them only the first ten stores on that long road with thousands of stores. If Google has done a good job of matching those popular keywords with the most relevant store, then the great majority of people will click on the very top link and off they go into the most popular store.

A few don’t like the looks of that store, so they’ll click on the second or third link. Almost all the searchers will pick one of the ten stores on the first page of the search results and then they’re gone.

Only the most dedicated - or possibly hardest to please - searchers go on to page two or three or further. Hardly anyone goes past page ten.

If your store isn’t one of the top 20 or 30, don’t expect Google to send many people your way.

Are you doomed?

Of course not!

But, you have to “think different” and try to make your “store” more attractive to someone who is looking specifically for what you are offering.

You have to specialize and let people know it. Yes, you’ll get far less people coming to your site than those thousands or millions who are searching, but you’ll get people who are looking for precisely what you are offering.

You have to understand your customers and what they are looking for. You have to understand the merchants and companies you represent. You have to find a way to get in between the people who are looking for exactly what you can offer, and then give them a convenient link to a merchant who can provide what they need.

When you learn how to master this art, you’ll achieve more success with your affiliate marketing business.

So, how do you learn how to do all of this?

I know of two excellent ebooks that will teach you how to segment your target market, find quality merchants who will offer products and services your market is looking for, and how to write your site in such a way that they’ll find you when they search for specific keywords in the search engines.

Interestingly enough, Ken Evoy wrote both of these ebooks. For years, one was sold to thousands of people at around $20 each. The other has always been free.

You can download his Make Your Site Sell! and you don’t even have to jump through any hoops or even give your email address. I was happy to pay about $20 for it when I originally bought it. You can get it free. It’s just as valuable now as it was then.

His other book started out as a free tutorial course delivered by email, but later was converted to a downloadable ebook. His Affiliate Marketing Course was updated in August 2008 and you can download it for free right here on my blog.

In addition to teaching you how to evaluate and identify the best keywords you can use to attract your target market, they’re going to tell you why Site Build It! is the best way to build an online business that attracts highly-targeted visitors. But, of course, you don’t have to subscribe to Site Build It. You can take what you learn and use it on any of your sites in any way you want. You just won’t be getting the full set of integrated tools that SBI offers.

Brainstorming keywords

Part of what you’ll learn from Ken is how to brainstorm and build a large list of keywords that are related to your site, and then to prune that list to select only the ones that will most likely attract the visitors you want most.

Site Build It has a module called Brainstorm It! that helps you in this process. It works quickly and stores what you find in a database on Sitesell’s servers. It makes extensive use of two popular sites that know a lot about keywords: Google and WordTracker.

So, if you are a Site Build It! subscriber, as I am, you have a tool that was designed from scratch to provide the best keyword optimization tools.

If you’re not a subscriber to SBI, you can still learn the art of choosing the right keywords to attract the people you want to visit your site. It will just take more work and you won’t have a database that you can refer to easily in the future, unless you build it yourself.

You can use WordTracker for your keyword research and they offer a free trial, free videos, and a free guide to help you.

If you are serious about using the best keyword selection tool, you’ll understand the value of Site Build It! or subscribing to WordTracker’s keywords analyzer.

You may insist on using only free tools, but I believe you will be limiting your earning potential when you do that.

I am happy to pay for the best tools I can find to research topics, brainstorm keywords, and build sites that attract lots of free, targeted visitors from the search engines for weeks or months after I write a page.

I’ve invested the time to learn this art, although I still have not mastered it, and I show many thousands of pages to interested visitors every month on my blogs, websites, lenses, and other sites.

You can learn these skills, too. It just takes time and effort. The ebooks are free and they explain what you need to know. You’ll have to pay for the best tools to help you, but they’re optional.

If you’ll take the time to study what many of your strongest competitors already know, a year from now you should become a better affiliate marketer than you are now.

So, what’s your strategy for choosing the right keywords for each page on your site?

If you want to win the competition and get more visitors from the search engines, it’s not enough to target your whole site for a particular niche, you have to target each page of your site to a particular sub-group of that niche. Yes, it’s more work and takes more knowledge, but it makes a big difference in the results you’ll realize.

Do you prefer to try to get people who have entered the most searched keywords, or do you present them with quality content based on the best keywords for your niche and each page you write?

Before you leave, take a few minutes and download either Make Your Site Sell! or the Affiliate Marketing Course. They’re free and will teach you quite a lot about affiliate marketing. You don’t have to choose one or the other, get both if you want.

They won’t do you a bit of good, however, if you just download them and let them sit on your computer. You have to read them, study them, and put into action what you learn. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t bother downloading them.

Act on your dream!

JD

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2.9

I have found that participating on social networking sites has helped my business grow and I’ve met some great people in the process. Some have become real friends.

It takes time and effort to network effectively, so don’t think it can be done in a few days or weeks, and don’t try to do it more quickly by using software to speed up the process.

If you sincerely want to network with other like-minded people and you’re willing to take your time and socialize with them - not just spam your ads towards them - then you’ll find a great list of social networking sites on Kelly Stone’s blog:

Want A List Of Social Networking Sites?

I just found Kelly’s blog and I’m finding lots of topics that interest me there.

Yes, I found her through social networking.

I saw her on a Recent Visitors widget on my Squidoo Marketing community and followed the link back to her MyBlogLog profile where I found her blog’s community and then visited her blog.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but it took only a few minutes.

Along the way, I joined her blog’s community and added her as a contact at MyBlogLog.com. Then, I subscribed to her blog via email so I won’t forget to keep in touch.

Have you been using social networking to help build your business and make new friends? It takes time, but it works.

I noticed that she didn’t have a link to www.apsense.com, which has a Google PR of 4, and an Alexa rank of 45,857.

I like Apsense, but haven’t had the time to play in their sandbox lately. It’s one of the things I intend to do more of in the near future.

If you’re not already a member, I’d like to extend an invitation to join Apsense and network with me there.

For an example of what you can do on Apsense, I would like to invite you to visit my profile and business center on the site.

If you would like to network with me on some of the other major social networking sites, please see the links to my profiles on the About page of this blog. I look forward to meeting you. We can probably connect most quickly on Twitter and MyBlogLog, because I’m more active on them than the others.

If you are active on any of the major social networking sites and would like to network with the readers of this blog, please leave a comment with links to a couple of your profile pages. While you’re doing that, I would enjoy reading about your experiences in social networking and your major areas of interest.

So, on which of the social networking sites have you pitched your tent?

Act on your dream!

JD

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2.8

Do you want to get started in social networking, but don’t have the time or expertise needed to do it yourself? Now, you don’t have to. You can have your lenses built and promoted and then transferred to you, all in a couple of weeks or so.

Tiffany Dow and Lewis Smile - experts on Squidoo - are now at your service.

Who are they?

Here’s part of what Tiffany has to say about herself and her qualifications…

I know how to get into the Top 100 LensRank, how to create content both Googlebots and human traffic devour (since I’ve been the top ghostwriter to many famous marketers over the past 6 years), and how to use group participation to garner traffic! I’ve achieved lens of the day for an instant flood of traffic and I’ve earned tens of thousands of dollars using Squidoo as my traffic funnel to products and services alike.

Seth Godin (owner of Squidoo) even blogged about my Squidoo success on his own blog! Plus, I’ve been bestowed with Giant Squid Status!

Lewis talks about his qualifications and says this (and more)…

He’s a Citizen Squid Alumni (one of the 6 original lensmasters chosen by Squidoo HQ to work on secret Squidoo projects). He is also a retired SquidAngel (one of the 12 human elements of the Squidoo algorithm).

He has achieved Lens of the Day THREE TIMES, which is more than anyone else, so he knows exactly what it takes to make a great lens. In total, his lenses have spent over 600+ days in the Top 100 LensRank list, and he has achieved the elusive Lensrank 1.

And he has created over 500 lenses and groups across various Squidoo accounts, so he’s no stranger to the ‘Create a Lens’ button! Lewis is also a Giant Squid. Oh, and he recently won the ‘I Love Squidoo’ competition.

Even if you don’t know anything about Giant Squids, Squid Angels, or Citizen Squids, you can appreciate the talents of anyone who can compete with over a quarter-million people building lenses on Squidoo and still get in the top 100 of all lenses based on a number of criteria that isn’t known outside the people who own and manage Squidoo.com.

Anyone who can achieve what Tiffany and Lewis have, obviously know what they’re doing.

They’ve been developing their skills for building Squidoo lenses for a combined total of over four years and almost 1,000 lenses.

Now, as someone who has built about 70 lenses and who has been working on it a couple of years or so, I can tell you that there is a difference between building a lens - which anyone can do - and building a lens that ranks highly, attracts visitors, promotes your business, and earns money.

I’m a Giant Squid, too, but I haven’t achieved the kind of success that Tiffany and Lewis have. I’m still working on it, however!

Now, you don’t have to develop the skillset, do the research, write original content, build the lens, and promote it. You can outsource these tasks to a couple of specialists who will combine their talents and do it for you.

As they say…

So - you want to get into social networking, but don’t have room in your busy schedule to navigate a new site and set up your system of socialization?

Who has the time, knowledge and skill to set up a Squidoo lens, write 100% unique content, bookmark it at social bookmarking sites, add tags, blog about it, post it to Twitter, and generate some backlinks, to give it the best chance possible at pulling you visitors from Google and other search engines to funnel them to your main site as customers?

As a successful business owner, you already know the value of outsourcing tasks that require special skills, qualifications, and talent. That’s why you have a lawyer, accountant, copywriter, and other specialists on your team.

If you want to develop a better presence on the web, you should consider hiring Tiffany and Lewis to do it for you, in as little as two weeks.

Don’t put this off. Go right now and see what they will do to build your lens for you. It doesn’t cost a single penny to click the link and see what they have to say.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. On the other hand, if you prefer to learn new skills and do your own promotions, you can build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free.

Click the link to get started. Don’t get stressed out about your first lens. Build it on something you love and learn how Squidoo works. If you like it, you can keep it. If not, you can delete it and use what you learned to build a real lens.

Feel free to play with the first one just to learn how it all works.

Rate this:

3.2 (1 person)

Jonathan Morrow wrote an interesting article on Copyblogger called How to Stop Being Invisible and I think you will find it both educational and interesting.

You know the feeling of working hard, writing your best, and pouring everything you know into your blog, only to feel like nobody knows you exist.

Jonathan addresses this issue and one of the things he says is:

We’ve established that valedictorians make lousy bloggers because they’re boring, and class clowns rule the blogosphere because they’ve become adept at getting noticed. But how do class clowns do it? And why are we so apt to pay attention to them in school?

In one word: value.

I admit that I fit the boring valedictorian role, even though I left high school a year early to attend Georgia Tech and transferred enough credits back to high school to graduate. I wasn’t the valedictorian, but I was darn close.

So, I admit it. I’m boring.

I tend to pass along information, but I really don’t know how to attract attention. I’m not the type to walk into a crowd and try to get people looking at me, but isn’t that exactly what we want when we write a blog or create a website.

“Hey! Look at me!”

One of the surprising things in Jonathan’s article is this:

Blogs are a diversion.

That thought never once occurred to me.

I think of reading blogs as working, not as a way to procrastinate and get away from working for a few minutes.

So, my take-away lesson from Jonathan’s article is that I need to be a bit more entertaining and a little less serious in my writing.

What do you think?

Are you looking for entertainment or education when reading a blog that talks about affiliate marketing?

I welcome your opinions and ideas.

Act on your dream!

JD

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2.5