Obviously it has been a while since my last post, been really busy. About a year ago I took on two large development projects. One was a side project and the other was a recode for a site at my full-time job. Both have finally settled down and now I have an opportunity to get back into affiliate marketing. I’m going to be posting some thoughts and steps that may help you as well. Here’s a quick status of where I am.

In order to get back in the game, I need to figure out where I am and what in the world is going on.

Naturally, I’m going back to the bread and butter store and niche type shops. So, this means EPN and Amazon. I spent some time over the last few days checking out the EPN terms of service and agreements. Looks like everything is the same as it was a year ago. Amazon, check. Pretty much good to go there.

Next, the current sites.

If you have been following me for any amount of time, you know that I have a bunch of sites. Essentially those sites have been on autopilot over the last year. I have not added any content, built any links, updated any code or even checked stats other than revenue once per month. Yes, that’s how busy I have been.

I checked my traffic stats and have been really surprised that a bunch of sites have really taken off traffic wise. However, as a whole, my revenue has been cut in half. Partially because when I left off, I was in building mode not really monetizing.

So, what are my plans to correct this and get revenue back up.

1. Apply updates – Number one revenue killer is not keeping up with software updates. Specifically to PHPBay and other plug-ins like it. URLs change and I have a feeling I’ve been missing out because I have been too busy to stay current.
2. Optimize page monetization – When I left off last year, I was midstream building around 9 sites. Those 9 are all on the top 10 search results but are under performing with revenue. Need to get those pages optimized with a combination of EPN and Amazon.

Again, the key for me right now is to take a look back at the last year and figure out which sites are not making what they should be and fix them!

From there I’ll be able to start building out new sites in 2012, which should be huge!

Here’s how i use it to find a niche. I’m not going to go through every detail, instead I’m going to hit the high points. You should be able to connect the dots.

Step One: Run your general search & filter

For this example, I run a search on hybrid golf clubs and I set the following settings to filter those results.

SEO Traffic: 50
PBR: 15
SEOC: 30000

Step Two: Identify Potential Keywords

From there I’ll look at the results for high SEOT and low SEOC. In this example, “callaway hybrid” looks perfect.

Step Three: Check SEO Competition

At this point i like the potential traffic of the keyword so now I will check the competition.

SEO Competition settings should be

PR
BLP
YAH
Keyword in title
Keyword in URL

The results above are very interesting! For me, you always have to be careful going up against high PR sites. Ideally you want this screen to show as much GREEN as possible. The results above are not ideal as the top 2 positions are dominated by a Callaway site that has good PR and ton of backlinks and is both in the Yahoo directory and is SEO on page optimized.

That being said, it’s a judgment call on your side if you want to take it on. I personally want to be in the top 3, so I would not invest any time in that keyword. That and the .com domain is already taken. Which you will want.

I personally think there are better opportunities, so I run another SEO Competition scan that I find on my main list. I scroll down the list and see “callaway hybrid golf clubs”.

Again, this one does have some risk but at least the domain is available. For this one, I would probably give it a go as the rest is pretty green and there is some potential there.

Ideally, this is what we are looking for.

This scan on “wilson fat shaft” has no RED at all in the top 5 and sites with PR 0 in the top 3. This would be an extremely easy keyword to rank in the top 3 with quickly, if not that same day.

The only reason why those sites rank high is because of their Yahoo directory listing. All you would need to do is buy a keyword based domain, build more than 5 backlinks and SEO the page. Pretty easy!

Review

OK, to review… We started off with a general broad niche idea of “hybrid golf clubs”. We entered that into MS. MS returned a slew of results and we identified a few that had potential. We used the SEO Competition feature to eliminate micro-niches that were too competitive and ultimately found one that seems easy to rank with.

That’s the progression. We start out with a general them and then Market Samurai tells you the exact micro-niche you need to focus in on.

In the past, I really paid no attention to how I named images. Whatever my camera named it or whatever photoshop kicked out with the slices is what I went with. Earlier this year, I changed that habit and started spending some time naming my images properly.

For example, an old image I had was named DCI20056.jpg. This is what my camera named it, so I went with it. I have since named that file to something like hybrid_golf_clubs_1.jpg. Also, I’ve added the alt tag to the images as well and made that keyword rich.

Now what happens is google-bot comes by and is able to digest and categorize what that image is.

Those two simple changes have increased my traffic 25-50% because I’m now getting traffic from Google image search. By simply including my keywords in my image names, Google is picking those up and giving them priority over poorly named images.

I know it has been a while since my last e-mail and post, I’ve been really busy reviewing some products. You know, those get rich quick, “I make $500 a day” deals to see if they are legit. By far most are regurgitated methods people learned from blogs and PPC-Coach.

Anyway, I actually found one that is worth spending a little money one as it has made me triple the cost inside of a week.

That products is called CPA Instruments. It’s totally awesome and has taught me so many tricks to CPA marketing that it has now boosted my revenue by about 25%.

The great things about the training is that it is all VIDEO based. There are 9 Modules, each consisting of about 5 20-minute videos. So, in total there is roughly 900 minutes of training. Added to that are exact transcripts of every word said on the videos.

In short, CPA Instruments is an extremely detailed and organized CPA boot camp that can benefit those starting out with CPA and seasoned CPA veterans.

I personally have followed the methods set by step for my last 3 sites and all 3 are making a combined $150 a day profit. It works, I know it does because I’m doing it and all it has taken is about 30 minutes of work per day for 2 weeks.

Anyway if you are looking for some really great CPA training that incorporates everything from foundation training to advanced traffic methods, you will want to get CPA Instruments. Totally worth the buy.

BTW it covers many traffic methods including:

• SEO
• Article writing
• PPC
• Social media
• PPV
• Mobile
• And MORE!

I work with a lot of small businesses. Mainly Web development and 2.0 marketing. I have clients that are single employee shops all the way up to major corporations. These companies may differ in size, however they all share one common trait. They all have to make decisions. No matter how large or small your business, every business faces decisions they have to make. The success of your business hinges on your ability to make sound decisions.

One pattern that I have noticed, especially with small businesses, is erratic decision making leads to failure. If you look at successful businesses, they all have one thing in common. A plan.

Successful businesses all have a plan or road map for their business. This organization then extends into their decision making process. Decisions are made with education, planning and commitment. They are documented and hashed out with a beginning and an end or exit.

Failed businesses start with no plan, no educated decisions, no planning and no commitment to a decision. Failed or soon to fail businesses to not make educated decisions and do not see decisions through to completion.

So, how can you set yourself and your business up for success?

• Develop a business plan.
• Base your decisions on your business plan.
• Document your decision.
• Document the reason you made the decision.
• Document  how it fits in your plan.
• Document how long the decision should be in place.
• Document the goal for the decision.
• Document an exit strategy for the decision.

Why is this important? It’s important because people are inherently erratic. We have an innate nature to be impulsive and shortsighted. Successful people have learned to conquer this nature with the ability to tame their impulsiveness.

Now the question is, how erratic has your decision making been?

Be advised that Bing will partially start delivering Yahoo’s organic results by the end of this month. If you have not already done so, make sure all of your stuff is listed in Bing.

Here’s a link to Bing’s Webmaster tools.

If you ignore this, don’t complain that you lost a quarter of your traffic. You have been warned.

In last year’s 30 Day Challenge, I was introduced to Traffic-Bug.com. In a nutshell they claim to go out and naturally social bookmark your content. This is a great concept of a service because it’s very time consuming to social bookmark manually. Especially if you are doing things in volume.

So, I gave it a shot and to be blunt… to say it totally sucked would be an understatement. To say it actually did anything at all would be an overstatement. I never found one link it social bookmarked, not one. I let it run for 30 days and never saw anything come of it.

That and the concept contradicts previous 30DC training. You don’t want 125 social bookmark links pointing to a new domain without any real back links. Google will slap that domain and you will have to start over.

So, what do I do now?

For new domains, I social bookmark once via socialmarker.com. That will get me indexed inside of 24 hours.

From there I use a link building service called TheLinkJuicer.com. I’ve been using them for a couple months and am seeing the value. Gaining positions in tough niches week by week.

Again, they are different services. TrafficBug is just to get indexed. Link Juicer is to build backlinks. To me, I’d rather invest the money in backlinks than a social bookmarking tool that doesn’t work. Especially considering it takes me all of 5 minutes to bookmark content on a new domain.

Just got an email from EPN announcing some enhancements. Mainly related to customer banner and EPC reporting. Here’s the announcement in a nutshell.

Custom Banner Enhancements

Custom Banner will continue to offer Flash but will now provide HTML options nad the ability to filter for free shipping and top sellers. Will also have the ability for multiple keyword and category search; you can now search across several keywords and eBay categories, or select the “Use Popular Search” option.

Enhancements to your reports:
“A new EPC Download Report: The EPC Download Report allows all publishers who are on Quality Click Pricing to download their daily EPC at a campaign level for each program. This report will only include information for campaigns that had click activity for the date(s) selected.”

It’s good to see progress and new features with such a great program.

Obviously, my preference would be an exact match of bluewidgets.com, .net and so on. However, you will find that many of those domains are already purchased. So, what do you do?

You can either attempt to buy the domain.

Or…

You can suffix the domain with another common term like the following:

• blog
• spot
• site
• info
• news
• tips
• scout
• source
• connection

Or any other action type word that suits your business.

This will get you a keyword rich domain that the search engines can eat up, but more importantly catapult you ahead of your competition.

OK, just finished getting caught up with this year’s Challenge and am very excited to take things to the next stage of the program. Here are my quick notes from module one. There was a lot of good stuff, but these are the things that really stuck out for me.

Market Samurai Settings

There is a lot of settings in Market Samurai. Here’s what the recommended filters are:

• SEOT of 80
• PBR of 15
• SEOC of 30000

Types of Searches

• Broad Match – For gauging long term traffic/competition potential.
• Phrase Match – For gauging mid-term traffic/competition potential.
• Exact Match – For gauging short-term traffic/competition potential.

Now I did go into the training knowing the types of searches, but I never thought of them in the way they explained it in the videos. Good stuff.

SEO Competition

Settings should be:

• PR
• BLP
• YAH
• Title
• URL

Again, the point of this is to get at least one row of all greens. This means you have a competitor that should be easy to knock out of the top 10 in google.

Anyway, hope this post was helpful. It’s mainly a point of reference as I always forget the proper settings.