Since the search engines have moved away from meta tags and keywords as the most important factors in rankings and moved more towards links back to a website as ”votes” for which are the best websites everyone has been scrambling for links back to their websites.
One of the easiest ways to get links back to your website is by writing articles in a relevant area, and getting them published in appropriate web article directores. The articles, of course, include a resource box as the author with the all important link back information.
The main reason that this has grown so fast as a means of getting publicity and link backs to your website is that special article submission agencies have also developed, to take all of the pain out of submitting your articles manually to each and every directory that you are interested in getting it published in.
One of the best known of thes is SubmitYOURArticle.com which I joined about a month ago and I have been very impressed with how effective it is. This is a relatively low cost subscription service and the way that it works is that once you have written your article you submit it to them with the resource box included. They then manually review it and then forward it on to a vast number of relevant article directories on your behalf. You can choose to submit one “plain” article or to spend about 20 minutes giving variations and they will generate numerous other “original” articles out of it, “leveraging” the article, and submit all of them.
Within days of using this service some of my new websites have gone from having only a handful of links back, to having over 30, and as time goes on this should continue to grow.
Some people worry about duplicate content by doing article submissions if one article gets published in over 30 article directories. This is a worry, but for the article directories…. not you! As they are not sitting on your site, they are on the article directories site. You are still getting all of the links back, but no duplicate content penalty. Which I think is great value for about $30 per month.
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
http://exback.johnmcguireonline.com/
September 29th, 2007
As well as an auotoresponder, a survey tool, an article submitter service and some keyword research tools, sooner or later you are going to need a shopping cart. Hopefully this will be sooner, rather than later, as if you need a shopping cart then that means you are about to start selling stuff!
The commonly recommended shopping carts such as 1shoppingcart cost a fair amount of money, from around $400 per year to over $1000. This, of course, depends on what functions you need.
The fully featured shopping carts include a whole range of additional features, such as autoresponders, stock control, secure downloads, adtrackers, etc. So although they can seem a bit pricey they may save you on some fees that you are paying for these other services elsewhere.
Alternatives do exist and Paypal for example can provide basic transaction capabilities. These include receiving credit card payments without the need to have a merchant account, but there are some limitations compared with a fully fledged shopping cart. To begin with, though, this can be an easy and inexpensive way to get started in online trading.
I’ve decided to stick with Paypal for now although, I will probably opt for 1shoppingcart in the very near future, once it becomes clearer which of their packages would best suite my needs, as they vary enormously in price.
John McGuire
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
http://exback.johnmcguireonline.com/
September 26th, 2007
A brief follow up as promised on last weeks attempt at a bit of Adsense arbitrage, I did say I would follow up with how it went.
Basically, not very well! In terms of making money anyway, but there were many positives and I did learn a lot about how to do it better.
What I did discover is that even with just an information article as a landing page, you can get click through rates (CTR) of 30 - 50% on the Adsense ads, which is pretty good.
In my chosen area though, which was sinusitis, the payout on the adwords was not high enough (top costs approx $2). This meant that my adword costs were not being covered, so I was actually losing a little money. This is obviously not good.
The good CTR’s and high traffic that I was able to generate was encouraging and did illustrate to me that the principle could be sound. With the right keyword research, to uncover some very high paying ads, ideally at least $5per click, it should be possible to make a profit using this method.
You also need some good Google adword copy and to know what you are doing with adwords. There is one definitive guide to Google adwords which is a must for anyone getting into it by Perry Marshall, and he even does a free email course on google Adwords which covers the basics.
I’m going to try again in a different area, and hopefully can make it pay this time.
John McGuire
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainsSolutionsLtd.com
September 14th, 2007
I think arbitrage is fascinating word, it has a kind of esoteric air of intrigue and mystery. Perhaps because it is not a word in common use and I would hazard a guess that if you were to conduct a survey in the street, you would find more people who don’t know what it means than who do. Before I started in internet marketing I had heard the term only vaguely, on some stock market report or other on the news, and I had no idea what it meant.
When it cropped up again in association with the word Adsense i.e. Adsense arbitrage, at an internet marketing seminar recently, I took a good deal more interest in it than I had before, but I had absolutely no idea what either word meant, and had to work quite hard to conceal my ignorance. I left the seminar wanting to know a lot more about a lot of things but “Adsense arbitrage” was certainly pretty close to the top of my list.
Since then I have learned a lot about Adsense. This is where you get the chance for Google to have to pay you money per click, for a change! Although, unless you really know what you’re doing, it never seems to amount to very much ;-) Adsense can be thought of as the opposite of Adwords where you pay Google to advertise your product and you pay them per click.
Arbitrage, on the other hand, I had to look up in a dictionary and here is an example definition.
“Arbitrage: the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies”
Having gained a working knowledge of Adsense and at least a broad outline of what arbitrage was. I was very interested to read of an internet marketers results recently in combing a Google adwords campaign with a landing page containing Google Adsense ads, who managed to make $4000 in his first month in an Adsense arbitrage project!
What he did was to identify a topic in a subject area where the keyords are expensive, so Adsense clicks would have a high payout. He then published an article rich in keywords in this area, put adsense ads on the article website and mounted a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic to the article page.
Theis whole arbitrage concept relies on the cost per click of the adword costing you less than the payment per click for the Adsense. Also you have to bear in mind that the conversion rate will not be 100%. That is to say, that not everyone that clicks your google ad and is taken to the site (for which you pay) will click a Google Adsense ad (for which you get paid). The percentage that do is called the conversion rate and can vary from less than 1% up to greater than 50%. In general 5-10% would be accepted as very good conversion rate. So to make this profitable you have to get low cost adwords and have high payment adsense.
Getting this to work is not easy and Google also have some rules which have to be observed, such as having some quality content relating to the adword on the site, the usual privacy, about, site map etc pages and a legitimite informative exit link on the page being the main ones.
Probably the most important skill to acquire to have any chance of this arbitrage working is to study Google adwords in depth to be able to identify affordable keywords from which you can profit. There are many keyword research tools to help you do this and I’ve tried Keyword Elite, which makes it a lot less laborius and time consuming.
Having seen the results referred to above I was very keen to have a go at this method. Especially as it could be set up quick, with no product to develop, just an article to write. I decided to have a site up within a day and see how it goes. I did this eariler this week and chose a common condition call sinusits and I am monitoring the performance closely and will update with results in about a week or so.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
September 6th, 2007
I really enjoyed a nice round of golf with my son this morning, having a day off work and making the most of a sunny morning before getting down to some of my own work this afternoon.
It brought home to me the the importance of taking some time away from work and enjoying some leisure time, particularly with your kids, if you have any. Although, from the numbers on my score card you can tell that I haven’t been doing this often enough lately 
The main reason being, like many other people starting out in business, I still have a job. I am lucky enough that it is part-time and shift work, which leaves me plenty of remaining time to spend any way I chose. As I have chosen to use most of this time developing my own business at the moment, it is highlighting some dilemmas and issues in the early stages of a business startup that I am sure I won’t have been the first to face.
The first is the time commitment. Working in two different “jobs” the hours can soon add up, and even part-time employment can still be fairly tiring, especially if it involves night work and then fitting in some work on your own business projects whenever you can, gets pretty wearing at times.
This can leave very little time for leisure, sleep and the more relaxing things in life. Which brings to mind two famous sporting phrases which although now cliched still hold a fair degree of truth “no pain, no gain” and “how much do you want it?” The answer to the latter in my case being - a helluva lot! So I am willing to put up with a period of “pain”. As getting the lifestyle you want and to be able to only work if and when you want to, and even then only for yourself, doesn’t come easy, if it did everyone would be doing it.
This leads me on to the next dilemma, which is that you get to a stage in a business where you have learned the methods and have the tools and you begin to see where it could possibly go. Yet, you are limited while there is only you working on it and things can progress slower than you would like.
In internet marketing a lot of the most effective methods to improve performance of websites and sales are to generate more traffic to them by putting a lot of quality, relevant content on your sites as well as out on the net, to link back to where you want the traffic to come. This content takes a lot of time to generate as it has to be higly original to be effective, as I discussed in an earlier post, and therfore is very time consuming to produce.
Like most people there are only 24 hours in my day, so you get to a stage where you know that to really take off you have to start outsourcing a lot of the content generation, particularly the writing, to freelancers. This, of course, costs money which in the early stages you ain’t making a lot of yet. I find this more frustrating than the time issue, because at least you have more control over how you spend your time and when you really need a day off….just take it. But you can’t spend money that you don’t have, well acually you can, but who wants to be indebted to the banks heavily from the outset? Certainly not me! Although obviously looking for some good term finance is a step that most businesses have to do at some point to get the boost that they need. Or even, if the press are to be believed, to very poor term finance. As rumour has it that a very famous panel member on Dragons Den was maxed out on 3 credit cards and nearly lost his house before it all came good!
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
September 3rd, 2007
I talked earlier about one of my current projects in affiliate marketing the My Affiliate Store service and outlined some of the special features of this method of getting involved in affiliate marketing.
The more I work on this project the more impressed with it I become and there is probably no easier way of getting a good looking website up and populated with a good range of affiliate products. The products here can be almost anything including a impressive range of even physical products, it’s not just all downloadable digital products either, although it does those as well.
The topic I chose to get into was gardening at www.TheGardenLovers.com as I live on a smallholding which has a large garden and I spend a lot of time working on the garden and have got more interested in gardening as a result. This has the benefit when doing research for the site that it’s an area that I know and in doing so continue to learn more about. This makes adding content such as articles much easier and it keeps it more interesting. It also helps in chosing relevant products and in creating logical department and category indexing.
The built in SEO in the product is pretty good at getting your pages indexed and as content and product numbers increase over time they should climb in the rankings organically. I am seeing this work already and have only had the site up for about a month although traffic does take time to increase. Obviously in addition to leaving it to their system you can employ any of the other traffic generation methods you want, such as pay per click adwords campaigns, article writing, blog posting and trying to get incoming links.
The sites themselves do come from templates but these are very customisable and a number of other members are a bit ahead of me and have improved the visual appearance by steps such as customised banner heading and added more functionality like customer voting surveys and video articles.
Two particularly good examples of what can be done with the websites at My Affiliate Store are www.stylishcoffee.com on a subject which is very close to my heart, as you may know from my earlier posts and www.dreamweddingsource.com which I think is another very attractive site.
So I am planning to emulate some of the features from examples such as these sites by getting a professional banner done first off, which is very important, as the banner is really the first impression someone gets of your website. I also plan to add an “ask us a question” type feature which improves the browsing experience making it feel a lot more interactive.
As well as improving the look and functionality of the site, it continues to just need a steady progressive approach in adding product content and is an ideal type of project to keep just ticking over and growing, in the hope that it will start to pay dividends some way down the line. It and can therefore easily be combined with “juggling” some other more demanding projects.
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
September 1st, 2007
In the early stages of a business startup it is sometimes worth reminding yourself of the attractions of the field you have chosen and the reasons that led to the decision.
In online marketing luckily this is relatively easy to do. If you compare it with a physical “bricks and mortar” based business it seems there is almost just one big list of advantages.
For starters no spending physical premises is required, anywhere you can use a pc you can conduct this business. Therefore no rates, no long term binding lease to sign and no maintenance cost. Set up costs are also relatively low so risk is minimised from the outset.
Many of the products are non-physical and downloadable so no headaches with storage and stock control. This also means no carrier costs and the market is very large, often global!
Business is conducted mostly via a website and therefore is open 24/7 and is not dependent on your own personal input. Marketing can also be much easier, for example with Google adwords you can write an ad, publish it and start to see an effect within 10 minutes! All of the other traditional options can be used as well e.g. press advertising and direct mail if needed.
Secure online payments also avoid the need for expensive fixed and mobile swipe devices and the whole payment process including follow up and continuing communications to maintain a customer relationship can be automated. This is to name just a few of the benefits the list could go on and on….. No business is without downsides, of course, and online marketing is no different. The main ones seem to me to be:
· It is a very competitive market with a lot of people selling similar products
· A fair amount of technical and IT ability can be required
· It is highly reliant on technology and therefore prone to failure
· As it is a global market there could potentially be some tax related difficulties on profits
All of these can be overcome and, in my view, the benefits far outweigh the downsides, especially when compared with most other forms of business.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
August 30th, 2007
Join The Federation of Small Businesses?
I first became aware of The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) when it was recommended by Nick James the well known internet marketing entrepreneur, at his seminar earlier this year.
He spoke very highly of it and outlined a number of the benefits of membership for small business owners. Having investigated it further since then, it seems to me that for anyone either already in or starting up a small business, getting a membership has to be a no brainer.
Not only does it provide an opportunity to network in person at local meetings with likeminded individuals, albeit in a range of different business areas, it is only about 150 quid per year and for this you also get a whole host of other benefits.
These include business related legal advice including some insurance cover if you are unfortunate enough to get a tax investigation, very favourable terms business banking, general business advice, discounted financial and telecom services and the possibility of attractive rate finance just to name a few.
On applying to join I was surprised, especially these days, to be offered a visit to my home by a rep, which I thought was a nice touch. Although in the event, it was perfectly pleasant, but in many ways it felt more like a visit from an insurance agent rather than a business assessment meeting. They did try to get me to sign up to various services on the spot in addition to the membership.
The FSB are a nonprofit making organization though and all profits, we are told, are plowed back in for member’s benefits. So I guess I can deal with a little bit of sales pitch, who can blame them for that?
I plan to give it a year or so anyway to see if I feel I’m getting value for money and I’ll be very surprised if I’m not.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 29th, 2007
Juggling a number of projects is hard to avoid. We all know that completing one project before starting another is the best option.
But the temptation is usually overpowering to “just do a little bit” on another one, to get it ready for when you are, or tweak another a little bit here or there. Before you know it you have at least 5 projects on the go, like I have right now.
I mean, when is a project complete anyway? In online marketing you could say it is at product launch, but it’s not really done and dusted there. You can’t then just “leave it on the shelf” to sell itself. In some ways that’s more like the start rather than the end of the project, and for certain other products it almost literally is the start like a membership website.
I try to console myself that this is the nature of the business and think the best way to deal with it is to accept it and learn to enjoy multitasking.
My feeling is that for practical purposes an important staging post to get to as a minimum with each project is to get a website live. I’m not saying, put up a substandard site but if your website is your shop don’t leave the door shut!
The juggling also has to include time to read, listen to, or participate in e.g. webinars etc. all of the learning materials that you pick up along the way.
I’ve got some high priority webinars to listen to at the moment, for example and the most pressing of which is the last 2 in a series of Google adwords classes by Greg Cesar. I mentioned these in an earlier post and promised to update my thoughts on these after being very impressed with the first. They do last 2 hours and I for one reason or another have been unable to participate live in any of the classes. I’ve been listening and watching them via a Camtasia recording later which actually suits me better. I will be giving my impression here when I’ve got through these last 2.
For me though the need to get on and use some adwords in a campaign before I could learn everything there is to know about them! Has overtaken the time to do so, as it seems to have done in web design and almost every other area of internet marketing that I’ve been involved in so far.
Sometimes you just need to get going with something and pick it up along the way. This is not a bad thing as when it comes to getting back to the theory and teaching I find a bit of experience places it in context and makes things easier to understand.
Although so far in the case of Google ads so far I’ve lost money.
So I’m off to do my homework and to try to continue to keep all the balls in the air
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 27th, 2007
After a nice BBQ at the weekend I got back to trying to do a little work. I concentrated yesterday on methods of generating traffic to commercial websites involving writing pieces of text.
I use the term pieces loosely as, when you start to write for online marketing purposes, it quickly becomes apparent that each different purpose requires at least a slightly different structure and content if it is to serve function that you desire. As I am fairly new to this I thought it would be worth sharing my experience.
A commonly used method of increasing sales is to send prewritten messages in a timed sequence to people who have opted-in to your email list in any given topic. The purpose of these messages is to develop a relationship with potential customers. These generally should contain some informative and useful content with little or no sales pitch and although useful should be partly incomplete as the complete version will usually be one of your products which you hope to sell to them at a future point in time. These are called autoresponder messages and once written require little or no effort as they are sent out by the software as scheduled.
There are a number of providers of autoresponders and the one I have opted for seems to be the most recommended by experienced online marketers that I have spoken to and it is called AWeber. This is a subscription bases service and costs about $20 per month. It is very useful but I have found it has a bit of a learning curve to get used to how it handles email messages and lists. Although it is pretty easy to generate the code for your website for email opt in forms etc.
One of the most frequently used content approaches for these early messages to new list members is brief hints or tips on how to do something that is relevant to the subject of the list.
On writing these messages though in order to maximise the benefits of your time and effort it makes sense to use the information in other ways as well. Examples would include as articles for submission to online article directories or even a web page.
The problem that can arise here though is a straight duplicate will be picked up by the search engines and if the purpose of the feature is to generate traffic it won’t work. The problem being that duplicate content is usually not ranked by the search engines. So this defeats the purpose.
A useful way to try to avoid this is provided by a website called dupecop . This handy little program checks the source and the modified version and rates it in percentage terms for originality. To avoid duplicate penalties you should aim for greater than 50% originality.
In addition to the duplicate content problem the text would usually need altering a little anyway, as an email tip would usually be less complete and comprehensive than an article and would also include some personalised information. So writing a fuller version is usually necessary for this purpose and again a web page has different requirements as well and will require a third slight rewrite.
So for any given topic to write about it can require at least 3 versions! This can make it start to feel a little like hard work. It does make sense though, and I think it can be justified as long as the information is genuinely useful and the rewrites are serving a legitimate purpose.
Obviously online marketers who get more successful would outsource a lot of the writing to free lancers although this does run the risk of losing a large element of the character and personality behind the information.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 26th, 2007
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