BizFancy

Today I got an email from a list I’m on… from some marketer’s list I forgot I signed up for and haven’t heard from in ages. This mailing linked to what seemed like an informational blog post, but what it was was one of those incredibly long sales pages that markets the latest hot product that will have your bank account filled with money seemingly overnight. Yeah, sure. This is the stuff I hate, these are the marketing tactics that I can’t stand. These marketer’s make tons of money preying on people who just don’t know any better, and are often desperate. They aren’t dumb people, but they are easy targets, because they’ve been recently laid off or unemployed for a while or whatever. I really hate that marketer’s and “gurus” take advantage of these people.

I know that people make huge money with these big product launches, and these hyped up sales letters, but I just can’t bring myself to walk that path. I would feel like I’m lying to people. When  you buy these products, and then actually enter the member’s area or download the files, 99 times of out 100, you will see that it’s nothing like the sales letter. They gloss over little details like how much you need to spend on outsourcing or buying other products or advertising. To me, it’s just lying, and I can’t do that and feel good about myself. I wish I could, but I can’t.

Here are some thing that you see most in these over-hyped products, tools, special offers, etc.:

- Big red text

- Big text that is highlighted in yellow

- They start out with the word “Discover…”

- They start the sales letter with the phrase “Who else wants…”

- They use the old “limited supply” trick “I don’t know how long we can offer this for, so you better buy it now!” “We’re taking this down tomorrow, better buy now!” “We only have limited copies to sell, don’t miss out”. This is an especially awful trick, because, this is not like a book or actual tangible product, but 99% of these things are DIGITAL PRODUCTS, that you can’t run out of!!! Ugh.

- They have a fancy video at the top, with some kid in a suit acting like he can teach you how to make money online. Sure.

- They have lots of testimonials! Of course, they always have lots of testimonials, even from other well-known marketers. Always glowing, always saying the product is the best thing since sliced bread. What they don’t tell you is that most testimonials are either fake or they solicit these testimonials from other marketer’s for a free copy of the product, so of course they will love it. If they ever received a bad review, would they post it on the sales page? Yeah, right!

- Many marketer’s and “gurus” use the old repackage and re-purpose trick. In fact, many marketer’s are famous for doing this. They take old products and splice them together with a little new content to make a brand new product that they can peddle to their list. Ugh, hate this!!! Just surf around a few black hat forums and you’ll be able to learn about which marketer’s are famous for this trick. Some big names, in fact.

- They always have super-fancy, super-slick graphics, especially for their e-book covers or software.

Well, I could go on, but these are just a few things you always find on these sales pages.

I am certainly not saying that every product or system or course or whatever is worthless because they use these tactics, I’m just saying that a lot of them are. If you are ever interested in a product with a hype-y sales page, do yourself a favor and STOP. Do your due diligence before clicking BUY NOW. Don’t do a Google search for the product like “name of product reviews”. Why? Because if the product has an affiliate program, I guarantee that all the top results will be taken up by fake “reviews” that are just trying to get an affiliate commission from selling you the product. Instead, visit several reputable marketing and webmaster forums, and do a search there for real reviews of the product. I like to check black hat forums especially, as they will tell you the truth about what a product is, and if it’s worth buying or not. They usually do this by stealing it though, which I don’t condone, of course.

While I have many content based sites, making money from Adsense or CPA ads or whatever, I thought it might be prudent to explore why my most successful sites became that way. Exactly what tactics did I deploy in terms of link building or other promotions… let’s find out.

Site #1

This was and still is my most successful site to date. It makes money from Adsense and another ad network. This one site has made me 5 figures a year for the last couple years. I guess it isn’t too much of a surprise, as this is the site I put the most time into. Whereas with some sites, I put in an hour or maybe a few hours into creating and refining the content, with this site I probably spent 25 or 30 hours on content creation over the span of a few weeks. I guess because the subject was one I was passionate about and interested in, in fact, its something I do quite often, that it didn’t seem like hard work at the time. It seemed very much like a true labor of love.

As far as the promotion, I recall that once I launched it, I did several things:

Wrote an article for distribution – This was an extensive how-to type article, nearly 1000 words long. It took a couple hours to write it, but it paid off. I posted it on my site first, then I submitted it to EzineArticles.com and the other major article directories. It was picked up and posted by quite a few niche sites.

Niche Directories – I submitted to several niche directories that specialized in the topic. None of which required any fees. Though one did require a reciprocal link, which I provided.

General Directories – I submitted to Yahoo Directory, since the site was non-commercial. Though it never got in. I also submitted to DMOZ, but it did not get in by my submission. Instead, a few months later, an editor added the site to a different DMOZ category. Interestingly, the DMOZ editor added an internal page of the site. I also added the site to JoeAnt and GoGuides as an editor.

Social Sites – I also submitted the site to Digg and StumbleUpon and a few other social news and bookmarking sites. Though it was a manual submission, not automated, so it was just a few.

RSS Submission – The site has an RSS feed, which I submitted to some RSS directories, like Technorati.

That’s pretty much all I did at launch. I did a few more updates after that, adding another section and updating a few pages. A few months later, I submitted to a few more trusted general and niche directories, created a Squidoo Lens with unique content and contextual links and did another article distribution.

Not long after, it had achieved good rankings on MSN and then on Google for a very competitive phrase. At this point, I stopped doing any promotion, as from my stats, I could see that it was naturally gaining excellent links every single month, often every single day. The quality of the content and the time I put into it paid off big time. The site was mentioned by a major newspaper, was site of the day on a local newscast, was included on About.com as a resource, it was mentioned by people (not me) as a resource on Yahoo Answers, eHow and sites of that nature. Pretty soon it gained blogroll links on major niche blogs.

I really haven’t done any promotion at all in the last couple years and it just keeps gaining traffic!

Lesson Learned —

Putting the time and passion into your content PAYS OFF, eventually. When you have great content, you don’t need to build links or send out press releases or articles or spam other sites with comments and profile links. You get superb quality links, naturally, for free, without any work!

Site #2

This is a bit of a different story than site #1, however, many days, I make more money with this one than site #1, with about a tenth of the traffic!

With this one, I took shortcuts, and perhaps I got lucky. It is a simple 10 page site that is based around an up and coming health product. I hired a (good) writer to create articles about 10 different keyword phrases on the topic, then added them to the site. I properly SEO’d it, of course, but didn’t go overboard. The phrases were not very competitive. All in all, I spent no more than an hour setting up this site. The promotion I did:

Social Bookmarking – I bookmarked it using OnlyWire, once.

Link Wheel – I used 6 unique articles to create a link wheel at 6 of the top web 2.0 sites, including WordPress.com, Squidoo, Quizilla and others.

This is it. That’s all I did, because I had to move on to another project right away.

I don’t know if I lucked out or what, but the site gained the #1 listing on Google for the exact phrase I optimized for with the link wheel. It still has that #1 listing, in fact, it has an indented listing for it.

I have added a few additional articles over the last year or so, but that’s it.

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Interesting, isn’t it? One thing I will say though, neither of these sites were built using WordPress as the CMS. Both sites are built in HTML. I don’t know why, but I don’t have as much luck with content based sites made in WordPress.

Ninety Nine Ways is having a relaunch contest with over $900 in prizes to be won!

There are some great prizes like a logo design package, WordPress themes and an SEOintelligence subscription. I personally would love the 1st prize with the SEOintelligence sub and I always enjoy putting new WordPress themes to good use. This site could definitely use a makeover with a new theme… that’s for sure, so that’s why I should win it!

Enter here.

Ok, if you’ve been trying to promote your website very long, you’ve no doubt heard of article marketing. It’s still an effective way to bring in targeted visitors AND build links at the same time. Needless to say, this double edge benefit is certainly worth the time you must invest in this tactic. Most people simply write an article, then submit it to a few directories by hand or use a service like ArticleMarketer, iSnare or submission software. This is ok, but you’ll get MUCH more out of each article you write if you use some other services. Here are some service that are pretty effective at taking your article and multiplying the benefit it will have:

Unique Article Wizard – This is a service that you must pay for each month. Basically, you take your one article and spin many unique versions from it, then a unique version is submitted to hundreds of different article directories. Because each article is at least somewhat different, you should get many links from that content. One of the best things about it, is that you can spin the article title and also the resource box, so you can get links with many different anchor texts from just one article.

Article Marketing Automation – UAW gets you links from article directories, but AMA is different. It spins the article for you and posts it to many blogs, including related blogs. So, each blog gets unique content with your links inside the text of each article. This is another great way to get links.

If you combine these two services, you are getting links from two sources, ie, blogs and article directories, just throw in a few links from other methods each month and you have link building synergy.

The great thing is that you are not spamming social bookmarking sites or social news sites or wasting hours trying to find dofollow blog comment links and all that. These two tools are fantastic for people trying to promote sites that are usually quite difficult to build links for, like BANS sites, eBay affiliate sites, Amazon affiliate sites and Adsense based sites.

If you hate article writing or simply can’t seem to find the time to get it done, there are MANY options for outsourcing. Decent quality articles that will work perfectly fine for spinning can be had for a few bucks each. Pay a little more and get better quality. Try the freelance sites and webmaster forums… but do watch out for scammers. Many article writers that do work cheap, even ones with good feedback ratings will disappear after a while and take the money and run. A reputable site to buy articles is Needanarticle.com, but also try Getafreelancer.com and Scriptlance.com to get bids on your work.

While I usually tell SEO clients that link building must be done manually, I am always checking out the latest software that can streamline, speed up or complete automate some link building tasks. Here’s my opinions on the ones I’ve used:

DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS

Autofill Directory Submission Software

SubmitEaze – This is a nice program, it does streamline the directory submission process quite a bit. The problem with it is that some directories in the list have broken captcha’s which makes them useless. Even with this program directory submissions can take a while to do.

Directory Submitter Gold – This one isn’t quite as slick as SubmitEaze but it seems to have more directories that work.

Semi-Automated Directory Submission Software

DigiXmas Submitter – This tool does a good job of automating the process as much as it can be done. You still have to enter the captcha’s for any directories that use one, but you do not have to visit each site, which obviously saves a lot of time. The problem with this program is they charge for each URL you want to submit. At $15, this can add up fast and not only that, you pay the $15 and still have to spend the time submitting yourself. Not exactly the deal of the century when you consider you can outsource directory submissions to someone for around the same price, leaving you to do NONE of the work instead. If they lowered their price or had some subscription plan, it would be worth considering if you do a lot of directory submissions. I should note that they do allow you to submit to 150 PR 0 directories for free.

Website Based Directory Submitters

GTSee – This is actually a service/script that you pay to use. It is $6.95 and it submits to 1000+ directories. It would be great if it actually worked. I tried it and found that I only got a few approvals from these submissions and tons of submission declined notices.

EasySubmits – This is a nice service, it’s free and best of all, it actually works. Now, this will cost you some time, as you have to enter the captcha’s for each site and you have to go through page after page of directories, but submitting with this tool was easy and I got loads of confirmations to my email and tons of approvals! You know a submitter is working well if you get actual APPROVALS to your email address.

Other Link Building Tools

SENuke – SENuke generally does what it says, it makes it much easier to do social bookmarking, create WordPress MU blogs and links on those blogs, creating social networking account and links, submit videos, submit your RSS feeds etc. I found the software buggy at times, especially the social bookmarking part. Plus, it’s an expensive investment at $127 a month.

Bookmarking Demon – This one is for social bookmarking only. It does what it says it will do and it even creates social bookmarking accounts. That said, I found it buggy as well and slow at times. This could be because I was using the older version, and they did recently come out with a new version. Worth a look if you need social bookmarking done.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Some alternatives to the above social bookmarking software are these sites that allow you to post to your accounts for free:

OnlyWire – This is not free anymore, but you can use the service by just providing them a reciprocal link, which I think is worth it. Supports quite a few sites, basically all the biggest and most important ones, even sites like Twitter. The only drawback is that you must create the accounts yourself. Which will take you a bit of time. Also, it doesn’t support multiple accounts or anything like that, you must log in and change the account information yourself if you want to do that. Still, I do believe this is the best service of its kind right now.

SocialMarker – This one is a good alternative to OnlyWire. You have to create the accounts yourself but it supports more sites. Not as automated though as you have to visit each site to submit the bookmarks.

With the current global economic state, just like in the real estate market, it’s a true buyer’s market. Great deals on websites can be had right now if you have some cash available.

I’ve done a bit of buying and selling of websites over the years and here is my opinion on some of the popular places to buy websites online:

SitePoint Marketplace – You are most likely to find a legitimate website deal here. The only bad part is that most everybody knows about it, so you aren’t as likely to get a bargain. Ask lots of questions and you should be fine.

eBay – There’s a ton of crappy websites being sold on eBay. Probably 90% of websites on eBay are total crap and have little to no chance of making money. There’s these membership sites like DotComBuilder and Prozilla where people can sign up and easily create any number of websites built on templates and cheap or free scripts. They market these memberships on eBay for people to turn around and create and sell the individual cookie cutter sites on eBay. The problem is that you end up with tons of these sites on there to sift through. You can find many of them at 99 cents starting price and the seller will just make money through the hosting. Maybe at first you could make money on these, but once more than a few people started selling these sites on eBay, forget about it. This is not to say that there aren’t legitimate sites being sold on eBay, but that it’s just hard to find them. You have to look hard and do your research. Take a look at the sellers other items and previously sold items to see if they just copy the same site and sell it over and over. Lots of sellers do this.

Digital Point – There’s tons of websites being sold on here. Unfortunately, this site is also loaded with tons of scammers. There are ways to fake the iTrader ratings, I’ve seen threads in some black hat forums where people ask for or trade fake iTrader ratings, so it’s that easy.  So you can’t really trust the rating of someone who has just joined recently. For me to even consider buying a website on there, the person needs to have been on there for some time. That said, you can get some great deals on here if you are fast. I’ve gotten some domains, websites and scripts for a steal on here. Yet, I’ve also been scammed a few times as well. You have to be vigilant. One thing scammers do is create a website quickly, then send some traffic to it by buying it or faking it to inflate the stats and any Adsense earnings. I bought a blog last year about a sports star. The seller said it had made about $6 from Adsense in the last month. Well, once I took ownership, I saw the stats after my Adsense code had been placed on it. The pageviews numbered at 1 and 2 each day, which is virtually nothing, or likely me looking at the site.

I do a lot of SEO work in addition to my own projects, and link building is a huge part of SEO. I often get clients who can’t afford a big monthly package for link building work, so I try and give them tips for how to do it themselves. Maybe that’s not a wise thing to do as far as making money, but I hate to see people struggling when they get started and helping people in this way makes for some very satisfied and very loyal customers. I always get more business from them once they get going, plus lots of referrals. Anyway, I tell them each something a bit different, since every site is different. However, for most sites, I recommend the following to start with and to do on a regular and consistent basis:

• Local Search Submissions – Get listed on Google Local, Yahoo Local, Merchant Circle etc., there’s about a dozen or so big ones currently.
• Major Directory Submissions – Submit to Yahoo Directory only if you have plenty of space in the budget for it, then submit to DMOZ, then to JoeAnt and the other large and reputable ones, 20-50 submissions should cover the important directories.
• Niche and Regional Directory Submissions – For most niches, there will be a directory that pertains to it. For example, if you have a  health related site, submit to health directories. Another example: If you have a wedding site, you can submit that to all wedding and bridal directories, women’s directories and shopping directories. Don’t forget to submit to your regional directory, like if you’re in the UK, submit to UK directories. If you are in Canada, Canadian directories. If you are in a big city, most of them have a directory or search engine. Just do a search and you’ll see there are directories for every region and niche.
  
• Forum Profiles and Posting – For just about every niche, there will be appropriate forums that you can join. Find the main ones in your niche, join, add your link to your profile and your signature, then add something of substance to the discussions on a regular basis.
• Press Release – When you launch your site, announce it via press release. Every time you make a major addition of a new service, product, feature or have some other news, announce it in another press release.
• Social Media and Community – Like forums, there are going to be social sites and communities that cater to your target market. If you have a wedding site, join wedding, bridal and women related communities. Add your link to your profile, post blogs, join groups and discussions. Don’t forget to join business and entrepreneur sites like Ryze, LinkedIn, Startup.biz etc.
• Social News Sites – Submit articles, blog postings and content (of good quality) to social news sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller etc.
• Content Syndication – Create content sites and blogs at sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Vox, Livejournal, Blogger etc. Put unique, interesting content on each site like tips, articles, recommendations, reviews etc. Try to update these sites once a month, at least.
• Article Writing – Write quality articles and submit them to article directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles. Put this method on steroids by using a service like JetSubmitter or UniqueArticleWizard.
• Link Exchanges – Consider a few highly targeted link exchanges with reputable sites.

With every method, don’t forget to vary anchor text and don’t forget to build links to internal pages of your site as well.

Traffic Travis was a bust… buggy and sometimes didn’t give results for certain engines. I’ve switched to Rank Tracker, which is very accurate. The only thing I don’t like is uploading the reports. The reports have too many unneeded files, images and directories. I have to delete certain files before trying to upload, otherwise my server times out or the upload is corrupted. The reports seriously need to be streamlined. I wish their reports were more like Traffic Travis, very simple and clean with no images.

I do quite a lot of search engine optimization for selected clients on the side. Pretty much every client wants a progress report of their rankings. While sales and/or traffic is a much more effective and important indicator of the success of a search engine optimization campaign, most clients simply don’t want to hear that. They want to see themselves #1 for whatever oddball phrase that they think is important. Nevermind what you tell them. Hence, the important of giving your clients a weekly or monthly report of their search engine positions for their targeted keyword phrases. So, what to do, what to do…

I’ve tried, bought and used many different pieces of software over my 10 years of doing SEO. It’s much more difficult to find a reliable program that generates easy to read and understand reports, that you can send to clients than you might think. Here are my experiences:

WebPosition – I used this program way back last century and dropped it around 2000 or so. You know it’s bad when Google talks about it in their webmaster guidelines. The reports were ok, but it’s expensive for what it does and you have to keep paying for updates. Haven’t used it in a while, so perhaps it has gotten better. Still wouldn’t use it again though.

AgentWebRanking – This used to be a freeware program that generated reports that were ok. It stopped getting results from each search engine after a while. Then the company introduced very expensive paid versions. While the new program and reports are excellent, I can’t justify spending so much for the relatively small amount of reports I need to generate each month. Not only that, but you have to factor in the updates you have to keep buying. (the cost is in Euros as well, so for US customers, the price is quite high)

Search Engine Commando – This one I liked a lot. The reports were nice and customizable and you have lots of search engines available to check. However, I ran into problems using this software after about a year or so. I found that the reports weren’t very accurate. So, back to searching for another program!

Ranking Manager – This is a nice program as well. I love that it’s dedicated to ranking reports ONLY. No “submission” tools or analysis or anything else. Just good, solid reports with lots of options! I purchased this one in early 2007, and it came with 1 year of updates. Unfortunately, it stopped getting results from Yahoo after about 6 months. I used the support contact form again and again, with no response. Is there an update? Is it a bug? What’s the problem? No answer! Ever! So, I’m stuck generating reports and then having to check Yahoo manually, which added a couple hours of extra work each month. The update period has passed and I haven’t bought an update… and won’t… not without support.

So, my search begins again…

Then I found this thing called Traffic Travis:

Now, I usually don’t go for the kind of software that seems to be everything in one, but this one seems different. I’ve only tried the free version but the ranking check is very fast, faster than the other programs I have tried, not sure why. If you upgrade to the professional version, which is not exorbitantly priced at $99, you can generate reports for clients. I’m really liking the program so far, and I haven’t even tried the other tools included like the keyword research tool (which I can certainly make use of) and PPC tools. One thing I don’t like so far is that every time I open up the program they have a new update to download. I opened the program earlier today and then this afternoon and they are already prompting me for another update. Perhaps that’s a good sign though, but it’s annoying to me. I’m going to sign up for the professional version and will update this post with any additional thoughts on the product. Hopefully I’ve found the solution!

Optimizing your content site for your researched keywords and phrases is another extremely important step you can’t skip over. In order for search engines to find your website under your desired keywords and phrases, they need to show up on your website pages somewhere. This is especially important when are targeting long tail keyword phrases. Here’s how to easily optimize your pages:

First, break up your phrases into small chunks of several phrases each. This also assumes you have prioritized your phrases already, according to importance, relevance and number of searches. Then start integrating the phrases into your site in these areas:

Page title – The #1 most important place for your keyword phrases! The page title appears at the very top of the web browser and appears in the code between these tags: <title> and </title>
Example page title: <title>Free Hand Stitch Quilting patterns for quilting by hand, free hand quilting designs</title>
Notice 3 phrases are included here.

Body text – Write some natural, flowing text for each page, including some good information whenever possible. Include keyword phrases naturally in the text.

Meta information – The meta tags should be filled in for each page. This mainly includes the description and keywords tag, but other meta tags such as copyright, author can also be filled out. Include your most important phrases in the keywords tag and write a concise, but brief description of your site for the description tag, integrating keyword phrases naturally.

Internal link structure – On every page of your website, you will be including links to your other pages. Make sure the anchor text of these links makes sense but also includes keyword phrases. If you have filled in your page titles with proper keyword phrases for every page, then this element should be no problem, as you can use the same text, or shorten it slightly for your anchor text.

File names – Instead of page1.htm or quiltpage.htm, name your page file names with keyword phrases. Example:
hand-quilting-patterns.htm
free-hand-quilting-patterns.htm

Alternate image text – Each image on your website can include plain text that will show up should your site not load all way for whatever reason, if a browser fails to load the image or for people surfing with images off. This is called alternate image text. Inside the image tag, you’ll find this attribute:
alt=”this is the alternate text”
Integrate keyword phrases in this area for your images, but don’t go overboard. For each image, make sure you describe it, whether or not you are integrating keyword phrases. Example:
alt=”hand quilting logo” (for the logo of your site)
alt=”about hand quilting” (for the about us image)
For other images, it’s a good idea to name them properly, example:
alt=”contact us” (for the contact us button)
Be careful not to spam here, 1 relevant phrase maximum for just a few images just to be safe.

Headings – For each page, use a keyword phrase in a heading tag. Example:
<h1>Keyword Phrase</h1>
Insert informational paragraphs here.
<h2>Keyword Phrase</h2>
Insert informational paragraphs here.

Text Attributes – It’s not yet proven that these make a difference with search engines, but they are helpful to your visitors, at the very least. Consider using the following attributes in your text to place emphasis on keyword phrases:
Bold: <b> </b>
Italics: <i> </i>
Strong: <strong>  </strong>
Different font sizes, bulleted lists etc.

These are the main optimization factors for on page optimization. If you use XSitePro, you’ll find it easy to use the SEO tab for each page.