Maximize Results

Link Building Success

Every web owner wants to get one way natural links but oftentimes this is easier said than done. If you’re not a link baiting enthusiast then you’ll need to get links the old fashioned way: ask for them. First though, you need to ask yourself, “Do I really want to get this link?” don’t just link for the sake of it, make sure that it is relevant to your site.

Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks

One of the best tried-and-tested recommendations is to analyze your competitor’s backlinks. You can make this the starting point of your link building campaign. Remember though that you need to keep track of all information you get in excel or word file; this will not only make you organized, you will also discover the link map of the whole industry as you progress along. Soon, you will have an impressive list of link prospects.

When you visit the sites that your competitors are linked from, look for the “recommend as site” and “add URL” links. There are times when it would be easy to just fill out the form and submit your link but there will also be times when you need to dig a little before you find the “add URL” link or even find their contact info.

Stay Organized

Once you have a healthy list, stay focused and organized by grouping your prospects into different sections including authority links, blog links, directory links, social media links, newsgroup links, and forum links among others. And depending on your industry, you can further categorize your list. For example, if you have a “make money online” site, you can categorize your links into:

• Sites about Blogging
• E-commerce Sites
• Auction Sites
• Search Engine Optimization Sites
• Web Development
• Business Information Websites

Having an organized list will also help you determine the anchor text you should use. Once you’re organized, you’re ready to start your successful link building campaign.

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Website Flipping Business Model Explained

Most of your know by now that my main business model is in buying and selling websites.

But what most people don’t know is HOW this business works or why I strongly believe it’s the most profitable internet business you can ever run.

Well, one thing I’ve learned to be successful in business is to take what’s already working in a different industry and apply those same principles to a new industry.

Basically what I did was model the real estate investing industry for the internet. I guess you could call it “virtual real estate investing”. Only, rather than buying hundred thousand dollar homes or apartment complexes, I buy “fixer upper” websites and make a lot more profit per deal.

Watch this video to see how I restructured the real estate investing model into a strong and viable internet business.

The main difference between my virtual real estate investing business vs offline real estate investing is the cost to get started and the minimal risk.

The way I run my business, you can literally buy websites for as little as $400, compared to buying homes for $150,000. You can even build the websites yourself for virtually nothing besides an $8 domain name and $8 for web hosting.

Last I checked, you can’t build a home yourself, especially for $16

It really is as simple as that!

The more complicated something is, the less likely it will work, so I keep everything I do as simple as possible.

If you want to learn more, you can signup to watch more free videos like this one on this page.

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Article Marketing 101

The concept of article marketing has been around for awhile and there’s a good reason for that. I’ve never found it to be the best method around but it will give you some decent backlinks and possibly a bit of exposure for a very small investment. The real beauty comes in the simplicity of it. You just have to write an article about your niche and click a few buttons.

There is one tip I have for you. I really wouldn’t bother hiring an article submitter to send it off to a bunch of directories. The duplicate content penalty removes a lot of the link juice and at the end of the day you’re not much better off than if you had just done the directory submission. The only way it would be worth it is if you use a service like Isnare to get thousands of submissions for $2. It’s still basically directory submission but at least it’s cheap.

EzineArticles –

This is just one of many sites in the genre of top article directories. Google doesn’t tend to penalize their articles, it’s not too rare for them to rank favorably in a search, and they’ll usually hold a decent page rank. This makes for a decent long-term linkback with a good chance of relevant traffic.

How exactly do you use it? Well like I said its pretty simple overall. You just have to write an article in your niche. They usually just need to be about 450 words long. Sign up for an account with them and you’ll get 10 free article submissions. The form is pretty standard for the industry. You’ll pick the appropriate category, write a little summary, and then add the appropriate link to your resource box. You cannot use a direct affiliate link in the box. It needs to be a link to a personal website or blog. It’s okay if that page is full of affiliate links as long as you keep the actual box clean. They’ll “review” your first ten submissions and decide whether you’ll get pushed up to a platinum rank. The truth is that any readable article will get through, so don’t sweat it too much. Your articles will be reviewed and accepted within a few days. That’s it.

Associated Content –

This is another good choice for article submissions. My tip is to write one article for EzineArticles and then take five minutes and quickly rewrite the article enough to pass copyscape. Then you can submit this one to Associated Content. If you want you can repeat for the process for submission to a few other top directories, but let’s get these two under our belt first. It works in a similar fashion to EzineArticles. You sign up for an account and then submit your pieces. Submission occurs through a four page form, but you can skip most of the parts about adding pictures and citing sources.

The important part here is to keep the entire article clean. They will not accept blatant advertising and they will ban accounts if you put affiliate links in the article. You need to follow the rules and link to your own site via the related links section. The really great part about their system is that they will pay you for the articles. You can usually get about $3 for a standard 500 word SEO article. If they don’t want to buy it you can submit it for free and still earn a few cents for the pageviews. It may not be a king’s ransom but I consider it incredibly cost effective advertising.

One special note is that Google seems to really like AC articles for specific topics. I once wrote a test article in a few minutes explaining why I liked Trident Splash gum. I stumbled it and dugg it and then left it alone. I’ve received about 950 pageviews over the last few months and it ranks in the top ten for Trident Splash. If you know what you’re doing you can get some great links while making money.

This is really basic information to get you started with article marketing. Learn the basics first with these websites and you’ll be on your way to capturing a nice chunk of your market.

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Broad Matching PPC: Good or Bad Idea?

Most search engine has different matching types for their Pay Per Click (PPC) programs. Since Google has the largest market share of online searches, this article focuses exclusively on their keyword matching options.

Exact Match

Exact match is exactly as it reads; it will provide exact matches for the terms you type inside the brackets on your account. For example, the keyword you typed for the exact match should read [banana cake]. Ads that are related to this exact match will only appear for specific keywords; for example, it will appear for “banana cake” but not for “banana cake flour”.

Phrase Match

Phrase match is a little bit broader than exact match. You need to use quotes in your account if you want to take advantage of phrase matching. For example, [banana cake] in the exact match should look like “banana cake” for phrase matching as quotes need to be used. Phrase match will allow your ads to appear when searchers type in “banana cake bakery” or “best banana cake”.

The Extended Broad Match

Meanwhile, Google also made a third option available for webmasters: broad match. It is a little bit more complicated than the first two options but a lot of web masters use this option as well. With broad matching, you don’t need to use any special characters in your account when you type it. Google has a default response to these keywords; your ads will appear for search queries that contain “banana” and “cake”.

But over time, Google has introduced the concept of “extended broad match” as well. Now, for example, when searchers type in “dessert”, search results can show ads about “banana cake” and “fruit cake”. In its early stage, broad matching is a great way for your site to be exposed to its relevant audience. However, Google stretched this relationship that sometimes, it is difficult to see any logical connection between the searcher’s query and the displayed ads.

What Should You Choose?

Because of the problems associated with broad matching, many people recommend that you completely disregard the use of broad matching. On the other hand, if you decide to go ahead and use it, you should adopt a practice of using long tail terms (terms with several words in the phrase) to minimize the chances of ad misplacement. When there are fewer people competing for terms (as there are with broad matching), lower prices will often offer great opportunities for those that are able to master the tactic.

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May 2008 Income Report

It’s that time of the month again for the income report of this blog (and the spinoff business created by leveraging this blog)

If you read the April income report, you’ll notice that in one short month, I’ve transformed this blog from a modest $1500 per month profit to just under $5,000 per month. This was largely due to the new product I created on buying and selling websites, where I used the traffic of this website to launch that business.

My “goal” for May was to hit $6,000 in profit for the month between this blog and the new spinoff business.  Did I reach the goal?  You’ll have to read below to find out what happened (like the annoying commercial breaks in American Idol..)

The sales of the premium wordpress themes slowed down a bit this month, but the other income streams improved, so it was a pretty interesting month to say the least.

Income

Here’s a look at May’s income. I’ve included the figures from April in the parentheses for easy comparison.

Private Advertising: $0 ($0)
Sponsored Reviews: $0 ($0)
Affiliate Sales: $1,643 ($871)
Theme Sales: $450 ($750)
Buy & Sell Websites Training Class: $10,058 ($3,400)
________________________
Total: $12,151 ($5,021)

Expenses

I did put up a couple ads for the training class and had some sales from affiliates, so let’s look at my costs…

Advertising: $850 ($0)
Affiliate Payments: $680 ($25)
Contest Payments: $25 ($25)
________________________
Total: $1,555 ($50)

So, when all is said and done, I had profit of $10,596 this month which is $5,625 more than April’s income.

Analysis

Well, it didn’t take nearly as long as I originally thought to turn this website into a $10,000 per month+ full blown business. The nice thing is, this “investment” we made in blogging experiment has COMPLETELY PAID FOR ITSELF in just 3 short months.  Every drop of income this website makes from now on will now be pure profit, which is good.

Hopefully you’ve learned a lot from what I’ve been teaching on this blog and can use my real life case study to do the same thing in your niche market. This project was no different for me from any of the other websites we’ve bought and sold over the last 5 years. I just applied the same business model (buy site, fix it up & add revenue streams, make it ultra profitable, enjoy the profits and/or sell the site).

This is the exact same strategy I teach in the full blown course at Buying And Selling Websites if you want to learn more about how I do it. You can join the current class for $200 off by using coupon code 1D28

Up Next

This will likely be my last income report that I publish on Blogging Experiment. You’ve already witnessed a huge transformation of this blog in just a couple months. In the future, I’ll keep ramping up these businesses, and I’m not sure I want to be publicly sharing how much the sites are making when I reach my next income goals for these projects…

Am I going to be selling BloggingExperiment? No, at least not for a while.  If you’ve taken my training class, then you know it’s a dumb idea to sell a site you’ve only owned for a couple months. So, you’ll be stuck with me for quite a while yet, at least another 10-11 months.

During this time, I’m still going to be providing as much valuable content to you as possible. Ben also has another 15 or so posts to turn in, so you’ll be hearing more from him shortly as well.

I’m not sure what the focus of the blog will be since I’ve pretty much met all the goals for this project already, so it will likely just be a continuation of what I’ve been writing about for the most part.

So, have you learned anything from me whatsoever in the last couple months? I’d be interested to hear your feedback and takeaways in the comments below…

(image source: sehgal asad)

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Do You Have A Mastermind Group?

I never realized how important it is to have a mastermind group of like minded people when you are trying to accomplish something.

Over the past 5 years of my full time internet marketing career, I had basically been living in a cave. I would work on our private projects and not interact with anyone besides by business partner.

Sure, I would read the occasional blog post or participate in a couple forum posts here and there, but I just never got too involved with other people who did the same thing I was doing.

My wife has absolutely no idea what I do for a living and most of my friends, neighbors and family all have typical 9-5 jobs, so I couldn’t exactly talk with them about my latest split test results or sales letter copy.

In fact, teaching my buying and selling websites training class over the last 2 months has been the first time I’ve really been super involved with people who love internet marketing. Not only have I been sharing my knowledge with the students, but I’m also learning a lot from them as well. Everyone has knowledge and experience to bring to the table.

That’s another good lesson you should take away…becoming friends with your customers is a GREAT way to become more and more successful online. Your customers are your market. They know other people in that market. When you treat people right and make friends in that market, the word starts to spread and before you know it, your business grows dramatically as a result.

(You’ll see proof of this in my May 2008 income report I post next week, pretty interesting month we had)

Aside from working closely with my training class students, I also recently joined a smaller, closed door mastermind group of internet marketers. There are a total of 7 of us, each in a different niche market, but all working on the same goal (generating money online).

This is an informal mastermind group that we put together. Nobody paid anything to get into it, but I think it’s one of the most valuable things I’ve ever been a part of. Since there are only 7 of us, we can be completely open about all aspects of our businesses without worrying about someone stealing our ideas.

We share exactly what we are working on, what we are testing and what we are having trouble with. Since we meet on the phone every Wednesday, it also keeps us accountable for our actions (if you report that you didn’t do anything since last week’s call, you feel like a complete moron)!

Our mastermind group has one person from California, one in Washington, 3 from Canada, myself in North Carolina and one in Australia. All we do is get on a Skype conference call for 2 hours on Wednesdays and chat about business. It’s absolutely incredible the amount of great advice you can get in that short amount of time.

Finding a mastermind group isn’t all that difficult. You can go to any forum in your niche and find people interested in the same things as you. Put up a post asking if anyone wants to join your mastermind group. You can filter out the responses based on the type of person you are looking to mastermind with.

If you can find people that are more experienced, smarter, or have more contacts than you, then that would be great. You should probably avoid a mastermind group if everyone is a newbie and nobody has ever had any success (unless you are all willing to work hard and share with each other what is working vs what’s not).

Sometimes it just takes an extra set of eyes on your website and with a couple changes, you could go from making $20 a day to $100 a day literally overnight.

I’d HIGHLY recommend starting up some kind of mastermind group if you want to make money online. The key is you all must stick to it and the conversation must remain positive & optimistic. You also need everyone on the call every single week for it to work. Everyone holds each other accountable, and that’s where the success comes from.

Go out and find 3, 4, 5 or 6 people to mastermind with. Report back here after your first call and let me know what you think.

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10 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Blog

1. Excessive Ads - Hey, there’s nothing wrong with making some money from your blog (that’s why your reading this blog right?). But, when your advertisements begin to take up more space on your blog than your content, you’ve got a problem. People visit blog to learn and discuss topics that interest them. They want to share their ideas or ask questions. They DON’T want to have to sort through a million ads, to find your content. Think of it this way, you don’t tune in to your favorite TV show to watch the commercials do you? Well neither do your readers.
2. Lack of Interaction - Many people view blogging as the digital version of giving a sermon. The blogger sits behind his pulpit (keyboard) and preaches to his or her loyal followers. However, if you look at the most successful blogs online, you’ll notice that the interaction is a HUGE part of the blogs success. The ability to leave comments, read other comments, and interact with the content that you’re consuming is what has made blogging what it is. If you don’t make yourself available to your readers, don’t answer any questions and don’t accept any feedback on your content, you’re dooming yourself to the digital equivalent of talking to yourself.
3. Trolls - Everyone’s encountered a troll whether you knew it or not. The Urban Dictionary defines a troll as “someone who gets pleasure by typing annoying/controversial/offensive words on internet forums or message boards.” Unfortunately, trolls are no longer confined just to forums, they’ve invaded blogs as well. I can promise you, if you blog for long enough, and have any sort of success, you’re going to encounter one. Trolls bring absolutely NO value to the blog or your community and instead sit back and generally annoy you along with everyone else that takes the time to comment. They simply aren’t worth the hassle. To top it all of, many times, not only are trolls an annoyance, but they end up starting…
4. Fights - Now don’t think for one second that you’re going to agree with everyone all the time. And yes, I still stand by my statement that controversy is good. However, I’ve seen many bloggers allow themselves to get completely side-tracked by their fight with another blogger to the point that it consumes the blog. A good general rule of thumb is that when you get into name calling and personal attacks, it’s time to shut it down. If you allow a fight to go on long enough, you’ll lose readers who simply don’t want to hear the pissing and moaning anymore. Remember, your subscribers read your blog to get your thoughts and opinions on the subject matter. Unless that subject is fighting with other bloggers, chances are your fight will be interesting for a while, but in the end it will lack substance for your readers to survive on.
5. Playing Follow the Leader - I borrowed that phrase from Max but the premise behind it is 100% true. If you don’t bring anything unique to your blog, whether it’s a distinct style, a special way of covering the information, etc. chances are your blog will die. There are simply too many other options out there for people to read. If you’re not interesting and exceptional in some way, readers will have no reason to return to your site. Find the one thing that makes your blog exceptional, and make that your brand.
6. Under Posting - Ghost towns aren’t exactly hot tourist attractions. If you can’t manage to create fresh content for your readers to digest on a fairly regular basis, you might not be cut out for blogging. I’m not saying you need to post every day, or even every week, however, you need to post regularly enough that your readers know your blog is still active and you haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. On the opposite end of the spectrum…
7. Over Posting - Believe it or not, posting too often can drive away readers as well. If you’re slamming your readers with a high number of posts each and every day, there will be no way for them to keep up. Also, it’s going to be tough to keep up the quality of the posts if you’re cranking them out at such a frantic pace. If you slip into the mistake of posting too often, your “signal to noise” ratio will drop considerably, meaning readers will have to sort through more information to find something worthwhile or valuable to them. That’s a quick recipe for a failed blog.
8. Violating Privacy - This one’s a no-brainer. When people sign up for your blog, whether it’s to comment or subscribe by email, they almost always have to leave an email address. Quite simply don’t abuse that information. Don’t sell your email list or start spamming your readers with your latest chain letters. Trust me, they won’t appreciate it. You’ll damage your reputation and lose readers and commenters all in one fell swoop. Just don’t do it. See, I told you this one was simple.
9. Slow Site - You remember how slow dial-up internet access used to be? It sucked right? Especially if you’d ever used a high speed connection. Well, having too many ads (yes, it’s worth mentioning again), widgets, plugins, or those cool ad-ons included on your blog can drag your site back to the dark ages. It won’t matter how great your content is if it takes years for a single page to load! We’re now firmly entrenched in an age of instant gratification and if your site is slow to load, your readers and visitors simply won’t put up with it. They have too many other sites out there to sit around and wait for yours to get it’s act together.
10. Actually… there is no #10 - Oh wait! Over promising and under delivering. This is pretty much a good rule for life in general but it definitely applies to blogs. If you tell your readers you’re going to do something (add a feature, take care of a problem, listen to suggestions) then you’d better do it. Be very careful in what you promise and remember, this is a blog so everything is in print. You’d be surprised what people remember and call you on later. A couple of slip ups will likely be forgiven (they have been for me on this blog) but if you make a habit of getting people’s hopes up, only to disappoint them, don’t be surprised if you have fewer and fewer people to cry wolf to next time.

And my last bit of advice will be this… You’re going to make mistakes. It’s inevitable. But, if you follow the tips and lessons posted on this blog previously, and try to avoid things on this list, chances are, you and your blog will be able to withstand those occasional slip-ups. Most of all, be honest with your readers. You’ll be surprised how much slack they’ll be willing to cut you. I hope you enjoyed this post and as always, if you think I’m wrong, or left something out, feel free to chime in through the comment form below!

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