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Update: This post was originally posted without links. Sorry about that. I’ve added the links. There’s over 15 of them.

Google is definitely favouring authority sites over smaller niche sites. You only have to do a couple searches to see that the same sites are dominating the SERPs. These sites are authority sites, or sites that Google deems to be industry leaders. For example, if you search for anything sports-related, you’re bound to see ESPN a lot. If you search for celebrity gossip and news, you’ll keep seeing Perez Hilton and TMZ. If you search about blogging, you’ll see Darren Rowse’s picture often.

So, how can you get Google to think you have an authority site? How can you make Google think you have the next Internet Movie Database or Next Day Pets? Even you have a little site with a couple backlinks and a trickle of visitors, you can follow these tips to make your site look like an authority site to Google.

On-Page SEO

Have you heard of latent semantic indexing, or LSI? If you haven’t, listen closely because LSI is the biggest SEO secret since meta tag spamming. Why is LSI such a huge development? LSI is important because it changes how you should write your content. Because of LSI, conventional SEO writing and keyword density are on their way to graveyard. Yes, those SEO ghostwriters that you’re paying $5 for 500 words may hurt your site more than help it.

What is LSI and does it really exist? Here is a quote from Aaron Wall, one of the well-known experts in the search industry:

Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.

By placing additional weight on related words in content, or words in similar positions in other related documents, LSI has a net effect of lowering the value of pages which only match the specific term and do not back it up with related terms.

What does this development mean for your website? Basically, if your content is filled with expert verbiage and related terms including relevant synonyms, Google will think you have quality content. You’ll rank for more long-tail phrases. Also, as an added benefit, your content will be more readable and less boring.

You can use the Adwords tool to see what Google considers related terms for your target keyword phrases. To use this tool, type in the search terms you want to rank for, write down all the synonyms and related terms, and insert them in your content. Writing with LSI in mind will help your gain trust with Google.

And as search engines continue to improve their algorithms, LSI will make an even bigger impact in the SEO landscape.

If you’re behind on the LSI technology, check out these resources.

What is LSI?
LSI Explained
Theme Zoom LSI posts
Audio Interview With Howie Schwartz

Off-Page SEO

LSI also affects link building, specifically anchor text. Just like you need to add related terms to your content, you also need to add related terms to your anchor text. John Scott, in his excellent link building article, writes:

One of the easiest filters for a search engine to put in place is one which detects and devalues links with identical anchor texts.

Therefore, vary your anchor text. If you’re targeted term is online dating, use other phrases like

online dating profile
online dating site
guide to online dating
best online dating
meet people online

Even throw in a couple anchor text without the targeted term. For example, link with

personal ads
online personals
singles
romance
boyfriend
girlfriend

By varying your anchor text, your backlinks will look more natural to Google. And we all know Google loves natural links and hates artificial links.

If you think about it, most authority sites’ anchor text are not keyword targeted. Instead, the majority of their backlinks come naturally from people who link with whatever anchor text they choose.

While we’re talking about backlinks, it’s a good idea to vary the type of websites you get backlinks from. Get links from blogs, forums, static sites, wikis, web directories, bookmarking sites, social voting sites, article directories, press release sites, low PageRank sites, high PageRank sites, etc Also, get sidewide links and single page links. Again this looks more natural to Google, which further makes you look like an authority.

The Key To All This Is…

… remarkable content. Content that will snag bookmarks. Content that will attract links. Content that will invite discussion at the water cooler.

Many of us need to take some of our pay per click and paid links budget and use it to hire an excellent ghostwriter or two. The ghostwriter can write something remarkable - 5 part blogging series, short report, white paper, or manifesto. Then, write about it on your site and make it go viral by submitting it to social networking sites, emailing relevant bloggers, and issuing press releases. Well written and well marketed linkbait goes a long way to getting a bunch of natural links. Also, you will begin to have the kind of branding and exposure authority sites have.

With the advent of LSI, the growing popularity of social voting/bookmarking, and the growing number of new websites, remarkable content has become more important. LSI rewards good content with higher rankings. Social sites cause great content to go viral quickly. And remarkable content helps you stand out from the huge crowd of websites in your niche. As the internet marketing saying goes, “Content is king.” Well, it’s also becoming queen, jack, and ace.

By focusing on producing excellent content, not only will your site look like an authority site, it will become one.

So, if you’re the expert in your niche, outsource your SEO/marketing and spend more time producing quality content. If you’re not the expert, hire an expert or two to write for your site and market their content like crazy.

Community - The Authority Site’s Biggest Asset

While you’re producing great content, start planning to make a great community. You’ll need great content first, because that will attract internet users to participate in your site. Blog comments, trackbacks, forums, ratings, polls, wikis, and reviews make your site more sticky, active, and attractive. Anything user generated will make your site look good to Google. Your site will be updated more often which will results in better spidering, indexing, and rankings. And your branding will go through the roof as more people join your community.

Once you build a thriving community, you will truly have an authority site. Your site will be hard to compete against. And if you ever want to sell, your site will be worth a lot of money.

So, there you have it. A quick and dirty guide to authority site nirvana. Will it take some work? Definitely. But remember you’re not building a small town. You’re building Rome. And you know what they say about Rome, “It wasn’t built in a day.”

Be patient. Work hard. Work smart. And you’ll reap the rewards

Clickbank Affiliates = Short term Success

It’s the Real Business Vs Make Money scenario.

By becoming an Affiliate, especially with Clickbank, you’re not building a solid sustainable/scalable business in my view. Some will disagree I’m sure, I know there are some great Affiliates out there but how many make a decent living?

All I’m saying is, Affiliates struggle and I’m willing to take a punt that 90% do!!?? the Vendor/Merchant always get the cream if they have a great product.

Affiliates will always be chasing the next product, eBook/Software to make the quick sale while the product is still HOT. Being an Affiliate is not easy, you need to able to adapt, act fast and have an excellent Marketing plan to make it work.

The Majority use PPC why? because it’s the fastest way to the consumer, and they’re lazy. I don’t blame them really if it’s there, use it. The sad thing is, most struggle and lose to never return. I took part in an Affiliate Census recently and one question was “What is your most popular way to promote a product for a merchant” I wasn’t surprised to see that the successful one’s said the long term organic Search Engine Optimisation worked best for them.

This takes time and huge effort which most Affiliates don’t like, they want immediate results they don’t want to waste hours/weeks/months marketing a website aimed at a merchants product(s) to find out all their hard work flopped! it does work though and if done right pays off big, especially if you target the merchants best performing keyword(s).

Creating a product is the hard part and that is probably why becoming an Affiliate sounds the easy way out right? wrong! it’s just as easy to be a Vendor. Ok..you’ll get the customer service emails and the product support questions but all that is easy to handle when you know you have at least 100+ affiliates doing the real work “Marketing Your Product” for you while you sip “English Tea” with your feet up. It’s a nice position to be in let me tell you and I should know as I’ve managed over 2000+ Affiliates and I loved them all.

Well…the ones that worked hard, the whole 80/20 rule comes into play here.

I’m going to throw myself in at the deep end and attempt to create a product that I will eventually sell on Clickbank/Pay DOT COM to show you what these guys (Vendors/Merchants) get up to and how they make great money being the Vendor and not the struggling Affiliate.

Step One: Find the market

Step Two: Ask the questions

Step Three: Create the product/sales page/payment

Step Four: Create Buzz / JV Maybe?

Step Five: Launch Product

Step Six: Collect cash/deliver product

As soon as I start I will keep you all informed of progress.

Buying and selling domains is a hard market to enter into (because of the lack of great domains) but making money using keyword rich domains for building mini niche sites is a whole lot easier, with the right niche and a decent amount of traffic you can do well.

A tool that helps you find keywords rich domains is going to speed up the process as it allows you to come up with ideas quickly and conveniently. I have just used this tool and this is what I came up with.

This is how quick I can build a mini site and a potentially (maybe) make some money from it (who knows really) It’s just enjoyable doing it!

I’m going to time stamp this (13.40pm) - used the tool mentioned above. I decided on “salmon river rafting” why? because I like the sound of earning upto $7.00 + for a potential Adsense Click (the keyword tool also shows you how much “approx” it could be worth for an Adsense Click).

(13.45pm) - check the Google trend which looks healthy and fairly well searched. Head over to NameCheap and register the domain name. Bit gutted! I have to register the DOT CO DOT UK not a problem for me as I’m in UK but this is not the point, we are not building a brand business here. We are going for the quick and out, get it into Google SERPs fast and make cash. I may do well, I may not…I don’t care ethier way but I would like to make my money back from the domain name cost and time.

I also may really enjoy it and build a better site later on, only if I see great results (in terms of traffic) and long term potential. The main point of this (tutorial/post) is to try and highlight how quick it is to build a mini site and make some money from it. Note: I don’t really like this way of making money online but it’s good to have a go and the real joke is that it takes so little effort! (the marketing will be the hardest part and getting a decent listing in MSN/Yahoo/Google - MSN/Yahoo should be easy (he say’s!).

(13.53pm) - Got the domain now, time to build my site and make it look pretty for my visitors (who love their salmon adventures!) head over to OSWD as I want to create a site fast and not from scratch, (there’s no need). I chose the design Dreamy. Now time for some customisation to fit my niche, head over to SXC for some free stock images, choose a suitable image and then open up Photoshop to adjust the size and anything esle I need too. Now I need content and I’m lazy so I go to EzineArticles to look for decent articles in my niche. With that done, I want some Adsense, this template already has a 468×60 spot so I use this although I know the 300 x 250 is a much better performer in terms of CTR.

(14.08pm) - Time for some very basic SEO (SEO is a simple process really) adjust more of template and possibly add Affiliate links that relate to my niche. I will also look at other ways to make it look more appealing and improve the monetization. Amazon store add-on might be a option and some eBay ads.

(14.19pm) - Ready to start marketing, this is what I will do next - manually submit to Google/MSN/Yahoo or I may buy a text link for the robots to come over and spider me. Get someone on DigitalPoint to do some directory submitting and possibly pay for inclusion into the better one’s like:

Yahoo Directory (http://directory.yahoo.com)
* Open Directory Project (DMOZ) (http://dmoz.org/)
* Joe Ant (http://www.joeant.com/)
* Gimpsy (http://www.gimpsy.com/)
* GoGuides (http://www.goguides.org/)
* SevenSeek (http://www.sevenseek.com/)
* Business.com (http://www.business.com/)
* Skaffe.com (http://www.skaffe.com/)
* Wow Directory (http://www.wowdirectory.com/)
* Microsoft bCentral Directory (http://sbd.bcentral.com/)

Also -
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html

That’s it for now, was that fast enough? here is the not quite finished result - www.SalmonRiverRafting.co.uk - I might have missed some bits out but I will update you on what I am doing with the site perdiocally. Depending how it goes, I may even launch one every week.

Added Note: I didn’t mention hosting but just incase you wanted to know, I have a reseller account with HostGator.

You’ll find it hard to distinguish the difference between a merchant and or affiliate. To become successful with an eCommerce retail store amongst other things I had to become a good affiliate and merchant, having a general understanding of how an Affiliate works not only helps your revenue but enables you to be personable with your affiliates understanding their needs and working together to push your brand and profits. Recently Ash Wills emailed me and asked me to take a look at the following eCommerce turnkey websites.

Lets take a look at Shopster - When you join Shopster, you get a top of the line E-Commerce website complete with inventory.

Straight away I see some professionalism in the design and layout of the website. This automaticallly gives me confidence to start reading more about their service.

You choose the products you want to sell from the 700,000 products in our warehouse. When you make a sale, we ship the order directly to your customers anywhere in North America. You never have to deal with the inventory and you make the difference between the price you sold the product for and the wholesale price in the Shopster warehouse.

Although it all sounds very appealing you will definately lose the experience you would have gained by setting up an eCommerce store yourself. I’m sure some will love the fast entrance into eCommerce but by missing out on the fundementals you will naturally lose certain business experience that may help you in the future. It’s really just a very un-inspiring way into eCommerce.

With Shopster you get a business in a box for $329.99 a year, with an option to pay monthly. All they leave you to do is the marketing and determine the profits levels for your product(s). They cater for Entreprenuers/Webmasters/Dropshipping and Affiliates.

Set-Up:

- No plug-ins / programming
- Easy for beginner
- Full customization options for advanced users
- Web based administration
- Complete storefront system
- Sell any of over 700,000 products and growing
- Set your own prices and margins
- Free manual and help docs
- HTML knowledge not required
- Graphic design skills not required
- Logo creator included

In comparison to starting your own eCommerce store what they’re offering seems very appealing. If you’re looking to get in eCommerce without the sleepless nights it seems they have covered everything.

I think services like this can work well if you make sure to work with the company and maintain close contact making sure to check stock and customer satisfaction levels as these two are fundemental in ensuring the smooth running of your store. The only thing that will remain is your ability to generate traffic and price competitively, if you have need too (you may not if there is not much competition in your marketplace) depending on the type of product you choose.

Do your homework before signing up by researching the marketplace you’re interested in and make sure to choose a product that is in high demand (sounds simple but some miss this part) otherwise all else will go in vain if nobody wants to buy what you’re selling!

If you’re not going to enjoy the procedure of setting up your own eCommerce website, I would also seriously consider becoming a great Affiliate for a merchant through sites like Commission Junction or Affiliate Window. Sites like Shopster really take all the fun, pressures and overall satisfaction away from building your own eCommerce store. That said, I can see the attraction for this type of service and with the influx of people wanting out of the 9-5 an into the land of online with dreams of fortunes awaiting them. The likes of Shopster and CuttingEdgeProducts servicing these people should do well.

CuttingEdgeProducts works in much the same way but they only offer a Dropshipping service and you are limited to selling their only product line which is Home Security Products. If you feel you can go up against all the other users who sign-up their service then fine, I personally wouldn’t fancy it. I not a fan of the look of this site and it lacks in professionalism that I would normally look for although they state they have over 15 years experience in this industry. A bad looking site does not always mean there is a bad service behind it. I’m all about nice looking design as well as functionality because I’m fussy, so I would look to improve this which I think would benefit them and improve thier sales I’m sure.

With CuttingEdgeProducts you get a business in a box for $595.00 which covers their one time setup fee, they have other options which are costly if you compare it to Shopster pricing who include these extras in their monthly or one time fee. Again you’re going to be left you to do the marketing and determine the profits levels for your product(s). They cater for Dropshipping only.

If I had to choose between the two I would opt for Shopster as they give more options for inventory and the added extras seem to be very appealing for the cost. CuttingEdgeProducts only has one flaw and its that they are limited to one product range. If you feel you can compete do your market research and try to be different to all the other Security stores out there. If I really wanted to sell their goods I would contact them and ask them to dropship their products for me with a view to eithier build the store myself or get someone to build it for me. This will set you apart from 99% of their customers. This is just one thing I would look to do.

Update Shopster: After speaking with their live help I discovered they will only ship to Canada and the Continental US only. Make sure if you are going to use the likes of Adwords to set-up Audience targeting to US/CANADA only. That could be costly mistake. Also CuttingEdgeProducts offer a full 30 day money back guarantee whereas Shopster do not, something to think about.

One thing you cannot buy from these companies is the drive, determination and desire to run a successful eCommerce store. Add this to hard work and it’s this sort of attitude that will set you apart from your competition.

A lot of people abuse Free Classifieds Sites, being relevant and providing a high quality advert will see you stand out from most who just use Free Classifieds to SPAM!

Craft a good looking advert listing the benefits of the goods/service/website you’re promoting and you will do fine. I write my advert using notepad and then I can just copy and paste when submitting it to as many Free Classifieds sites I can.

Always abide by the terms and conditions of these sites and you should see some great results.

I have listed below what I think are the most popular out there:

Craigslist.org - Mother of all classifieds but doesn’t win in the design awards, the traffic it commands speaks volumes.

MySpace - MySpace marketing is something I have read alot about and I think something Internet Marketers (Gurus) use.

USFreeAds - Since 1999 USFreeAds has been providing free adverts. I love the simplicity and how quick your advert goes live!

USMetros.com - Looks tad similar to Craiglist, add an active link to your webpage, photos, buynow button for selling your items or reach national or statewide audience.

Gumtree.com - Gumtree now owned by eBay, tap into this huge amount traffic.

ePage.com - Free Classifieds since 1994, The world’s largest original free Internet Classifieds Network.

InetGiant.com - InetGiant is your place for free ads, they provide high response free classifieds and free advertisement.

Classifiedsforfree.com - Classifieds For Free is an online ad site for business opportunity, personal ads, automobiles and real estate.

LiveDeal.com - LiveDeal’s mission is to provide the world’s leading online classifieds platform, connecting people locally everywhere.

Citynews.com - CityNews Photo Classifieds and Bargain Statewide Ads.

Freeadvertisingforum.com - Free Advertising Forum is a place where you can post your free classified ads to thousands of active marketers.

Ablewise.com - Ablewise.com provides free online classifieds in 10 Countries around the world with categories such as automobile, real estate, merchandise, services, business opportunity, personals, pets and more

This type of marketing may or may not be targeted but non-the-less it’s FREE and you cannot beat some free traffic for a few hours work involved submitting your advert.

Calling all bloggers…

What’s the difference between a dentist, doctor and a blogger? we all get paid roughly the same income (one the apprenticeship has been served) we all help and improve our visitors life’s, so why is it then that doctor’s and dentists don’t get negative comments!

Its a trust thing…

Everyone loves a doctor, whatever they say you listen too and you never judge his/hers comments and opinions towards your health. The same exists with a dentist, some people are so scared of them that once they have their work done they never question or make a comment about the quality of their teeth even if the job is done to an unsatisfactory standard.

This is because they’re helping us with our health and our life in some respect. They both make us get and feel better about ourselves.

They can do no wrong in a high percentage of societies opinions. Why is not not the same then for a blogger? We help and improve peoples life’s in some way…yes? so why is it that we get the most grief and highly opinionated users/visitors?

I should have become a doctor, but then I’d have to deal with hypercondriacs and that would have driven me insane!

I’ve just worked it out…it’s because they don’t have a comment plugin at the surgery right?

SlimStat is a nice little plugin for Wordpress, the thing I like about this plugin is its simplicity.

I am a bit of a freak when it comes to visitor habits, I love to know where they came from and SlimStat gives me the basic information I need to use to help me improve my search engine rankings and visitor experience. Google Analytics has too much going on sometimes, this gives a refreshing, fast way to get the basic stats you need for the day.

Features:

* Drill-down and filter data in any way you choose
* Shows visits and unique IPs, not just hits
* Option to hide visits from search engine crawlers
* Allows you to ignore specified IP address ranges
* Attempts to filter out spam

Just another overkill for me when you think there is AwStats/Google Analytics to play with. Just incase I don’t believe one I can always check another (paranoid). I have also just found out about Live which I will be testing as I love realtime voyeur watching of my visitors. Another I should mention is Who’sOn which I used in my last eCommerce business and I loved it.

Give it a go and become addicted to Statistics like me, I promise It won’t do you any harm.

If you’re at least somewhat active in the internet marketing industry it’s probably a safe bet to say you’ve heard of Bidvertiser, a PPC advertising network (i.e. Adwords/Adsense alternative).

BidVertiser is a pay per click advertising network that allows publishers to earn money by displaying text ads on their website and allows advertisers to advertise on participating sites. Advertisers can choose to place ads on all websites under a certain category or choose specific websites, as well as to target by country. Advertisers whom are also eBay sellers can run ads for the eBay items automatically.

I’ve been using Bidvertiser for a while, albeit on a small scale, but at least I have some experience with it. I’ve always enjoyed the service both on the publisher and the advertiser end and have yet to be disappointed. The PPC is a little under par when compared with Adsense, but it is also an easier network to get into. The ROI on my campaigns was always satisfying as well and cheaper than Adwords (hence the lower PPC on the publishing end).

Although to be quite honest there isn’t really any standout features with Bidvertiser. At the end of the day it is a solid alternative to Adsense. A couple nifty things are the Paypal payout, better referral program, and (correct me if I’m wrong) they are more open to foreign traffic.

Finding a viable alternative to Adwords/Adsense is very difficult, but if you’re looking I would definitely suggest Bidvertiser. It’s a fair product with fair results. Give it a shot.

Forums are great places to chat, have heated debate’s and learn lots of information from. The main point of posting in forums (from a marketing/business point of view) is to get people to visit your website.

Procrastination sets in when you visit forums. If you must visit them, get in and get out, close the browser or tab once you’ve got what you need. You’ll end up wasting even more time consuming sometimes useless information that will take your mind away from what you were mean’t to be achieving for the day.

For a Marketer using forums is a great way to get FREE traffic but I would rather pay someone to leave informative posts which would have my signature/URL at the bottom of it. This leaves me to produce good content for my website. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Marketing and organising a Marketing Campaign but I would rather organise it rather than spend time actually leaving comments for FREE traffic!

The point of this post was to get across the fact that forums don’t make money and I think its fairly safe to say they don’t. When I say don’t I mean not a lot. Hardly enough to live on anyway, they are hard to monetize, they take up lots of time to manage/moderate until you get to stage, way down the road where you can pay a forum moderator to run it for you. This means paying them a wage out of your already small profit.

One good way to run a forum would be to build one up around your content/website not for monetization but for the high Traffic levels your users will generate for you. Eventually getting enough advertising on the site to pay someone to run it for you. You’ll now have the free time to concentrate on your other projects while your forum brings in some great targeted traffic for your website.

This is how I would look to do it anyway….

Do you have a forum that makes a lot of money, by this I mean enough to leave your day job? lets hear from you, prove me wrong.

Most of you will know I recently purchased this blog, until then I didn’t have a clue about PayPerPost, ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews.com.

You can command a nice (large) price for a review when compared with CPA or Text Links Ads. I have just read a post at Digital Inspiration that got me thinking about these third party services. Would I be harming this blog and my reader level by adding pointless ReviewMe posts that may have in the majority of cases nothing to do with my subject matter and or content? I mean, the readers are here for Online Business articles/news not a review of a Flower Shop of something similar.

I would prefer to keep my readers happy and still be able to earn an good level of income for the time and effort I put into this blog - I think I will end up offering this service myself and not through a third party. If someone wants a review they can have one, but I would prefer if it was on topic and had something that readers could benefit from.

What are your thoughts on these services and do any of you use them? - I think I will also be looking to change the advertising model on this blog soon…