Yoobam

I’ve learnt so much from this geezer

Feb 26, 2010 General Stuff, SEO Leave a comment

Just thought I’d share a link with you folks cos I think it would be of huge help with your SEO.
The Blog is called Blue Hat SEO by a chap called Eli. You might have heard of it already. If not; get yourself over there now and learn some serious shit.

I really enjoy the way Eli writes, he is very laid back and just blogs away in an informal, chatty manner. I like his style and I’m going to try and be a bit more laid back myself

Some of the tips on there are quite dark grey but I think it’s important to know some of that stuff if your gonna get your sites ranking quickly.

Making Money with Affiliate Marketing 20 tips

Feb 3, 2010 Affiliate Marketing 4 Comments

Your probably thinking, Who is this bloke and why should I believe a word he says. Fair comment, there are plenty of more successful affiliate marketers out there who will be earning considerably more money than I am, but I think I have learnt so much on my journey and I would just like the chance to share some of my tips and secrets with you. Some of this information is pretty simple, but it never hurts to go back to basics.

• Be patient… the average site takes between 6 and 8 months before it is ranking properly and in a position to earn “decent” money. Don’t expect to set up a website and earn money straight away because you are likely to be very disappointed.
• Be prepared to work hard. Very hard… Most affiliate marketers seem to spend every hour of the day sat in front of a computer monitor. This can have an adverse effect on your social life as well as your health. I try to break my day up by going for a run or taking the dog for a walk. This is great for clearing your head. I have come up with some of my better ideas when I am “out and about”.  N.B If you don’t have a dog then you can try this with your cat but from my experience, cats are rubbish and don’t understand the concept of “walkies”.
• Always be learning… I have learnt so much from reading blogs, books and forums. Learn to code, learn CSS and learn SEO. You don’t need to spend a fortune on expensive courses when all you need can be found on the web.
• Have more than one website… Obviously, it is a lot easier to make £1,000 from three sites than it is to make £3,000 from one site. My portfolio is made up of many different types of sites. I have some that are one page micro-niche sites and others that are several hundred pages. It is good practice to not have all your eggs in one basket. How would you feel if you had one site sitting at the top of Google and generating a nice income and then one day because of a change in some algorithm your site plummets down the rankings? You would be pissed off for sure, but if you had other sites generating income then this wouldn’t be as big a problem.
• Research your niche thoroughly… You need a lot more research than just sticking your keywords into a keyword tool to see how many searches it got last month. I always look at the competition in Google, to see the page ranks, ages and backlinks of the top few sites. If the top sites are above, say pagerank 4 with kazillions of backlinks then I know it’s gonna be really tough to beat these and I move on to the next niche.
• Check the commissions… Don’t waste your time promoting items that are only going to pay you a few pence commission unless you are an SEO genius and your expecting hundreds of thousands of highly motivated visitors.
• How big is your niche… The smaller the niche, the easier it is to establish your presence. Micro-niche sites can be knocked up pretty quickly and can sometimes start earning small amounts of money fairly early on. Alternatively, a much bigger niche is going to take a lot more resources and time to become established, however they will usually earn more money over longer periods of time. That’s why I recommend that you have lots of different types of sites. If you are just starting out then you should definitely start with a Micro-niche.
• Always go for keyword rich, top level domains… You will hear people say that a “org.uk” domain is just as good as a “co.uk” domain. I bought into that originally and it proved to be false! If your keywords are “blue widgets” then register “bluewidgets.co.uk” if that is not available, go for something like “bluewidgetsale.co.uk”, “bluewidgetshop.co.uk” or even “bluewidgetuk.com”.
• Find a good hosting provider… If you’re going to have a portfolio of sites then you need a reseller package from a reliable hosting provider. I have tried 3 or 4 different hosts and without any doubt, my favourite is heart internet. If you are planning on building lots of websites then it is a good idea to have 2 or 3 hosts and spread your portfolio between them. This is also good if you’re going to be linking between your sites.
• Make it pretty… If your site looks like shite then how can you expect people to want to spend time on it? Learn some CSS or find a free WordPress template. I use WordPress for lots of my sites. It is easy to use and the search engines love it.
• Consider your visitors… Try and be totally impartial when you look at your website. Consider your target audience. What will they be looking at on your site. They have come to your site to solve a problem or satisfy a need. Are you offering a good user experience or an ugly site full of irrelevant bollocks?
• Deep link directly to products… Most of the time a visitor is on your site to find a product or service. Make it easy. Have best selling products on the first page with direct links to the relevant page on the merchants site. Keep it simple. I like to get the visitor to the merchant in the minimum amount of clicks.
• Speak to your affiliate account manager… Don’t know what product to promote? Drop the affiliate account manager a quick email and ask them what there best converting products are. Put these on your main page.
• Write good content for both people and search engines… I am pants at writing content. That’s why I outsource some of it to people who are much better than me. It’s much cheaper than you think (look here). My girlfriend also helps me out with this because she is very good at writing copy. She’s a lousy cook, but you can’t win em all! It’s about getting your keywords into your content but without it looking spammy.
• Build links… You should always be building links to your websites. This is very time consuming but I can’t emphasize enough how important it is. Building quality links is a fine art and I am working on a tutorial. In the mean time read this wonderful guide to link building by Leo Dimilo.
• Commenting on blogs is not building backlinks… I’m not saying that it won’t get you traffic. It will; and for some sectors it is a viable way of marketing your website or service (as long as your not posting pointless crap). But as a way of building backlinks for SEO purposes it is totally pointless. Believe me, I have wasted hundreds of hours searching for relevant blogs and participating in dull conversations.
• Make your link building look natural… Don’t get all your backlinks to your main page. Make sure you build some links to your deep pages. It just looks a lot more natural. And always remember to vary your anchor text.
• Consider other Search Engines… Google is the biggest search engine by a long way, thus when we think of optimizing our pages it is always done to rank well in Google. I have noticed that new computers always tend to come pre-loaded with the MSN browser and a lot of people, especially newbies don’t get round to changing it. Getting higher ranks in MSN is a lot easier than it is in Google because there is a lot less competition. Just think of all those newbie internet users who are looking at trying a spot of shopping online.
• Use Pay-per-click for keyword research… I realize that if you don’t have much of a budget then this tip is not really practical but it can potentially save you a lot of wasted time optimizing a site for specific keywords that are not converting.
• Don’t be scared to ask for help… Considering that affiliate marketers are sometimes competing with each other they are still predominantly a friendly bunch. It is always worth participating in forums and blog comments. Don’t be afraid to ask one of the successful affiliate marketers for advice. I have done this on a few occasions and have received some invaluable advice, after all we all have to start somewhere.

I hope this post has been of some use to you and I would love to hear of any tips you have to add.



Using iMacros to automate Firefox

Jan 28, 2010 Tools Leave a comment

I’ve been using the iMacros add-on for Firefox to automate my web browsing and remember all my passwords and log in details.

It’s like Roboform, only better. and the best bit is that it’s FREE!

You can set it up to do just about anything that a human can do in Firefox. When I first tried it out, I remember thinking – “This is bloody brilliant”

A few examples of the things you can set it up to do are -

• Fill out web forms
• Submit to directories
• Check all your affiliate stats
• Download log files from your server
• Download images from websites
• Scrape websites and save to a csv file!!
• Automate searches in Google and Yahoo

Here is a quick tutorial to show you the types of things you can do.

If any of you guys are using iMacros, I’d be interested to see what for. And if any of you have any scripts that you would like to share, then even better.

How to find good “do follow” links

Jan 25, 2010 SEO Leave a comment

As I keep harping on about it; getting good quality back links to your site is the best way to help climb the rankings of the major search engines.
When I first started out, I just indiscriminately sent spammy emails to webmasters or posted comments on blogs. Obviously this did not work, so I set about to become a link building master! I’m nowhere near that yet but I do think that I have come on leaps and bounds and I would like to share with you a couple of really useful tools that I use.
If your building links for SEO purposes then you need to be able to find good quality links from established sites that will pass on some link juice.

Here is how I do it -

Firstly, you need to download and install the Quirk Search Status plugin for Firefox. This free tool will highlight links on a website that are “no follow”. So when you are researching a potential site for a link request you will know immediately whether to bother or not.

I will head on over to Google and enter the main keyword that I want to rank for. eg “computer desks”

Starting in the number one position, I copy the web address and head over to Link Diagnosis where I paste the address to get a comprehensive back link report.

The brilliant thing about Link Diagnosis is that not only does it give us all our competitors back links it also lists them in order of page rank and link strength. We can also see whether a link is “no follow”.

Now the hard work really begins! After exporting the Link Diagnosis results into a csv file I will slowly work through the websites one by one (I don’t go lower than PR3 ). I will have a look at the site and get a feel for it and hopefully find a “Contact Us” section. I will also double check with the Quirk Search Status plugin that the links on the site actually are “do follow”. If they are “no follow” they are highlighted in red.

Then I will send a friendly email to the webmaster. I always like to mention something relevant so that they know my email is not spam and I have actually looked at the website. I usually don’t ask for a link exchange. I might explain why my site would be of interest to his or her readers and add that they may want to post a link to my site.

Link Building is a time consuming pastime and I try to break it up into small chunks. I aim to send around 10 emails to prospective sites per day. It is also a good idea to keep a spreadsheet so that you can track your progress.

I use Filemaker, and have written a small database so that I can see who I’ve emailed and on what dates etc. If you have a copy of Filemaker it’s pretty easy to do.

Another site, another WordPress custom theme

Jan 21, 2010 Affiliate Marketing, Theme Design, Wordpress Leave a comment

I’m quite getting the hang of creating my own WordPress themes now. I’m still having problems with them displaying correctly in all browsers but I am sure that I will have that problem solved soon.

My new site is – Cross Trainer Sale and I think the subject matter is fairly self explanatory!

I’m doing quite well with domain names that have  “sale” on the end.  Obviously, I would have preferred “cross trainer” but by sticking the word “sale” on there I should pickup traffic for “cross trainer”, “cross trainers” and “cross trainers for sale”.

Who knows if I will earn anything from the site. I’ve been working really hard creating my latest sites and I am too impatient to wait for natural rankings so I think I will PPC this one too.

Having said that, I have started the laborious job of link building. I use a mixture of forum posts, blog posts and link exchange requests. I’ve wrote a simple database in Filemaker that enables me to track  the webmaster’s I’ve contacted and check that my link is live.

The next few weeks I’m going to knuckle down and work on my custom WordPress themes. I am confident that there is a market for affiliate marketing themes and when I have reached a level that I am satisfied with, I’m going to look at releasing some for public use.