Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program - Lesson 5/13
written by Anthony Dinh
First, I’d like to say thank-you and congratulate you for joining my Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program. You’ve taken the first step in the right direction towards building a successful online business and financial freedom. This 13-step program is your roadmap to wealth, and it’s jam-packed with invaluable information…no tricks or gimmicks here folks, just solid and proven methods that work! SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting and various internet marketing methods will be covered throughout the tutorial. I suggest that you read through it once, let it soak in, try it out, then go back and read it again because you’ll surely pick up something new that you missed the first time around.
Here’s a breakdown of each lesson for your convenience:
Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
Lesson 6 - Incorporate Affiliate Links in Your Posts
Lesson 7 - Build Quality Backlinks
Lesson 8 - Submit Your Site to Web Directories
Lesson 9 - Submit Your Post to Article Directories
Lesson 10 - Add More Content and Build More Backlinks
Lesson 11 - The Waiting Game
Lesson 12 - Tweak Your Site
Lesson 13 - Scale Your Campaign
Before we begin with “Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword“, please bookmark this page and subscribe to my full RSS feed as there are 13 steps, so you definitely won’t want to miss out! If you are just joining us now, be sure to go back and read “Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal“.
Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
After you’ve selected your niche and researched some affiliate products, it’s time to start building an interesting and informative site entirely around the keyword(s) that you’ve sniped from Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping to promote these products. The structure of your site must be built correctly in order to achieve SEO optimization and higher ranking, so it’s important that you chose an SEO friendly template. Courtney Tuttle offers a few nice ones that I would recommend. Remember, a quality affiliate site should be rich with content and keywords, be SEO friendly, and should help the visitor make an informed decision between one of two products to purchase.
You will need to create and publish a minimum of 10 posts surrounding your keyword and product with some solid content that speaks with authority on the subject matter. Before you do this, you will have to purchase a domain, preferably one which contains your keyword. This will definitely help you rank higher for the keyword, not to mention it will be much easier to sell the domain in the future if you ever choose to do so. If you’re able to find a used domain on TDNam.com that contains your keyword, it would make getting ranked significantly easier and much quicker as the domain has already been indexed and backlinked by other sites. Additionally, a domain that’s been live for awhile will help you in avoiding Google’s notorious “sandbox effect”. If budget is an issue, you can also opt to use a free Blogger sub-domain. I currently register and host all my domains with IX Webhosting, so I would definitely recommend them for your hosting solutions.
Now that you’ve got your domain, the next step would be to either install Wordpress or create your page statically using straight HTML if you are proficient at coding. Just remember that it is much easier to link build and make your site SEO friendly using Wordpress. Though you probably will be using Wordpress blogging software and your site will look like a blog, the difference is that you won’t have to post regularly as you would with a typical blog. As a matter of fact, I would suggest removing all post dates as the information you provide should not appear to be dated in the readers’ eyes. Be sure to use a nice, clear headline that catches the reader’s attention and compels him or her to click on your product. Also, including social proof, testimonials and screenshots will help in convincing the visitor that your solution works and it’s what they’re looking for.
Each of your 10 posts should be at least 300 words and contain a keyword anchor text link back to the homepage which also contains the keyword. It may seem like a daunting task to write 10 posts about the keyword, but you can simply Google for the keyword to get some ideas, but don’t copy or steal the content! Linking each of your posts back to the homepage with the keyword anchor will help your homepage rank by giving it more internal and external links with the keyword anchor text. The external links come into play in the event that an aggregator or scraper site steals your content, there will always be a keyword anchor link which points back to your homepage.
Once you’ve installed your template, place your keyword in the following locations. Doing so will ensure that your site will be well optimized.
- Page Title: This can be accomplished with the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin. I prefer the “post title | site title” format.
- H1 Tag: The keyword should appear in the H1 tag on all your site pages.
- Footer: The footer should contain a link that points back to your homepage using the keyword as the anchor text.
- Inpost Link: As mentioned above, each of your 10 posts should contain a link back to your homepage with the keyword as the achor text.
- Homepage: Ideally, your keyword should appear about 6-7 times on your homepage, but this is usually covered by virtue of the links that you’ve placed within each post. Being the homepage, it will get ranked for your keyword, so be sure that your keyword appears on it enough times. To avoid tripping off Google’s spam filter, your homepage should contain at least 1000 words, this should be covered if you have 4 posts with a minimum of 300 words each.
For those of you who are less technically inclined and wish to simplify things by automating that whole process, I would recommend using Ken Evoy’s Site Build It (SBI) software.
SBI is an all-in-one program that will enable you to build, host and promote your site all from a single location. Once you’ve built your page(s), SBI will teach you how to optimize them so that they are SEO friendly simply by clicking on the “Analyze It” button. Its comprehensive manual, step-by-step Action Guide and user forum are invaluable and will surely get you started on the right track to success. SBI will help you simplify the process which will save you some valuable time so you can focus on the more important aspects of building your site, such as writing interesting and informative content.
To learn more about Site Build It, I highly recommend watching the video tour below.
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Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program - Lesson 3/13
written by Anthony Dinh
First, I’d like to say thank-you and congratulate you for joining my Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program. You’ve taken the first step in the right direction towards building a successful online business and financial freedom. This 13-step program is your roadmap to wealth, and it’s jam-packed with invaluable information…no tricks or gimmicks here folks, just solid and proven methods that work! SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting and various internet marketing methods will be covered throughout the tutorial. I suggest that you read through it once, let it soak in, try it out, then go back and read it again because you’ll surely pick up something new that you missed the first time around.
Here’s a breakdown of each lesson for your convenience:
Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
Lesson 6 - Incorporate Affiliate Links in Your Posts
Lesson 7 - Build Quality Backlinks
Lesson 8 - Submit Your Site to Web Directories
Lesson 9 - Submit Your Post to Article Directories
Lesson 10 - Add More Content and Build More Backlinks
Lesson 11 - The Waiting Game
Lesson 12 - Tweak Your Site
Lesson 13 - Scale Your Campaign
Before we begin with “Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping“, please bookmark this page and subscribe to my full RSS feed as there are 13 steps, so you definitely won’t want to miss out! If you are just joining us now, be sure to go back and read “Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal“.
Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Now that you’ve selected the niche that you want to write about, the next step would be to “snipe” the keyword. When deciding on a keyword to snipe, some factors to consider are:
- The more specific and the more long-tailed the keyword, the fewer the competition, and the easier it will be to obtain a high ranking (i.e. “breast surgery doctor philadelphia” vs “breast surgery”).
- Your keyword should be searched at least 200 times a day, obviously, the more the better. There’s a bunch of keyword search tools out there, but I use WordTracker which shows daily search volumes, and it’s free! You can also use Google’s Keyword Tool if you already have an Adwords account.
- There are fewer than 1 million competing pages returned for this keyword in Google, obviously, the fewer the better. You can determine this by searching “your keyword” with quotes around it.
- The keyword has value to advertisers. Basically, anything that can be sold or has commissions has value.
- Select a keyword that is outside of the techie/internet world. Think of a keyword that your average teen or 70-year-old would likely be searching for. Doing so will not only leave you with fewer competitors, but it will also increase your conversion rate as people who aren’t as tech-savvy are more likely to click on ads.
Just to give you a few ideas and to get your mind going, here are some niches I would consider looking at:
(pest control, lawn care, hair products, acne treatments, teeth whitening, mortgages, loans, debt consolidation, home improvement, baby products, men’s/women’s health, weigh loss, etc.)
Bear in mind that questionable topics such as firearms, ammunition, butterfly knives, brass knuckles, concealable weapons, prescriptions drugs, beer and alcohol, tobacco or tobacco-related products, racial intolerance or gambling will not be not be supported by Google Adsense ads. Check out Google’s Program Policy for a full list.
The daily search volumes and competing pages figures mentioned above are just guidelines that I would stick to until you’re comfortable and have gained more confidence with keyword sniping. Once you achieve a #1 ranking for the long-tail keyword, then you can certainly focus on ranking for the bigger and broader keyword. One big advantage that you already have going for you is that most sites out there are targeting keywords with a single subpage. It’s much easier to obtain a higher ranking if you build a whole site(s) around a keyword as we will be doing in Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword.
To snipe your keyword using Google’s Keyword Tool:
1. first, login to your Adwords account and navigate to Tools->Keyword Tool
2. next, check the “Website Content” radio-button, enter the URL of the site you are going to promote, check the “Include other pages…” checkbox, and click “Get Keyword Ideas”
3. a list of keywords relating to the site you entered will be returned and organized in “groups”, click on the “Avg Search Volume” column to sort the list by highest to lowest search volumes
4. then, copy and paste the top keyword from each group into a text document
5. now search Google for forums where each of the keywords from step4 are being discussed by placing the “keyword” within quotes followed by the word forum: “keyword” forum
6. visit the first forum from the results list and browse through it, looking for additional keywords that are not included in your list. for example, if your list includes “weight loss”, then you wouldn’t add “weight loss excercises” since the phrase matches a keyword that’s already on your list. instead, you want to look for completely different keywords that are the subject of popular discussion threads with many user responses within the forum such as “yoga” or “pilates”
7. taking one word at a time, Google your entire list of keywords and copy down the URLs of all the Adsense ads displayed on page one of the results
8. take the resulting list of URLs from step7 and enter them one at a time back into the Adsense Tools->Keyword Tool->”Website Content” and click “Add all” which will add all the keywords to the selected keywords pane on the right-hand side
You will find that many of the resulting keywords are shared between some of the URLs you entered, but there will be some new ones as well. You now have a very powerful list of valuable keywords related to sites that are willing to pay for them! Click on the “Download these keywords” to your desired text or csv format for safe keeping…this is the list of keywords you will be using to build your affiliate site.
…Next >> Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
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$100 a Day in 7 Easy Steps
written by Anthony Dinh
You may not realize this, but it’s easier to make $100 a day online than you think. For most of you, the concensus seems to be that making an extra $500-1000 a month would make life a whole heck of a lot easier. With this “wash, rinse & repeat” method which is surprisingly easy to duplicate, you could make up to $3000 a month per site right from home. If the $100 a day goal is a bit high for you beginners, then you can certainly shoot for a more modest goal of $50 a day which will still net you a nice $1500/month. Whether you choose to start a blog, write a content website, pursue affiliate marketing, build lists, generate leads, provide an online service, create informational e-products or open an online BANS (build a niche store), you can apply the “wash, rinse & repeat” method to start multiple money generating sites and scale your business over time. For this excercise, we will be promoting ClickBank digital products.
Step 1 - Find Your Niche
I would start with something that interests you or that you’re knowledgeable about such as cars, sports, fitness, men’s/women’s health, lawn & gardening, wood-working, making money, arts & crafts, pets, baby products,debt consolidation, hiking/camping, traveling, etc. Picking a niche that interests you will make writing content for your page much easier. If you are unsure about what niche to get into, search forums, usergroups and sites like Yahoo! Answers to get some ideas of current hot topics that people are discussing and the kinds of questions that they’re asking.
Step 2 - Snipe Your Keyword
Keyword Sniping can be done using one of the many free keyword search tools that are readily available such as WordTracker or the one offered by DigitalPoint. Both tools will return a list of related keywords with their daily search volumes. A search frequency of at least 200 times a day is recommended. Google search “your keyword” with quotes around it to get an idea of how many competing pages there are for each keyword. The fewer competing pages the better, but the rule of thumb that I go by is anything with fewer than 1 million competing pages should work nicely.
Step 3 - Find a Webhost
Due to the competition with so many hosts out there, you can find hosting service for really cheap these days if you look around. I would recommend HostGator.com since they offer first month’s hosting for only 1 penny if you use the “wordpress” or “jury” coupon codes when prompted.
Currently, DiariesOfABlogger.com is hosted on IX Web Hosting, and I couldn’t be happier with the service. Both Linux and Windows platforms are supported, so you may pick the one you’re most comfortable with. Three levels of service are offered, so there’s one to suit everyone’s needs (Unlimited Pro, Business Plan, Elite Plan). I purchased the mid-level Business Plan package and prepaid for 2 years, so the monthly fee came to $6.45, but you can get a free domain and hosting for as little as $4.95/month. Check out the plan comparison chart here for more details.
Step 4 - Create or Find Your Product
You can either opt to write your own product material, or you can market one of the many digital products available at ClickBank and earn a commission for each sale. Just make sure that there’s a high demand for your product. I would chose one that pays at least $15 commission per sale, one with a high %rfd which indicates that many affiliates are making sales on the product, yet it still has a low gravity and not too many affiliates are currently marketing it (between 10-50 is good) to avoid market saturation and too much competition.
Step 5 - Build Your Site Around the Keyword
You will need to create and publish a minimum of 10 posts surrounding your keyword and product with some solid content that speaks with authority on the subject matter. Though you are using Wordpress blogging software and your site looks like a blog, the difference is that you won’t have to post regularly as you would with a typical blog. As a matter of fact, I would suggest removing all post dates as the information you provide should not appear to be dated in the readers’ eyes. Be sure to use a nice, clear headline that catches the reader’s attention and compels him or her to click on your product. Also, including social proof, testimonials and screenshots will help in convincing the visitor that your solution works and it’s what they’re looking for.
Step 6 - Setup Autoresponder to Harvest Emails
Although not completely necessary, setting up an autoresponder will allow you to harvest your visitors’ emails when they sign-up for your product. Doing so will allow you to send out newslettters in the future to promote other products which would be of interest to your niche audience.
Step 7 - Market Your Product
There are many channels you can use to market your product. You can either promote it by posting in Yahoo! Answers or some of the forums that you came across in step1, by including a linked signature in your profile or newletters to your product landing page or by getting involved and answering questions posted by others within the forum to gain exposure. Yet another way to get word out is by submitting articles regarding your product to article such directories such as EzineArticles and ArticleMarketer. Cross promoting with other sites within your niche through link exchange programs can also be an effective way to market your product.
As with anything else, you will have to try it, make some mistakes, learn from your mistakes, then improve and grow. It will take some time, trial and error, testing and tuning before you come up with a formula that works for you, but persevere, push on and don’t give up! Once you discover that secret winning formula, it should be rather easy to duplicate your success by simply washing, rinsing and repeating.
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Keyword Sniping 101
written by Anthony Dinh
key•word snip•ing [kee-wurd snahyp-ing] - noun
1. selecting a keyword, and building a niche site or network of sites around the keyword with the intent of achieving #1 ranking for that keyword.
1. Selecting the Keyword
When deciding on a keyword to snipe, some factors to consider are:
- The more specific the keyword, the more difficult it will be to obtain a high ranking, so keep it broad for now (i.e. breast surgery vs. breast surgery doctor philadelphia).
- Your keyword is searched for at least 200 times a day, obviously, the more the better. There’s a bunch of keyword search tools out there, but I use WordTracker which shows daily search volumes, and it’s free!
- There’s less than 1 million competing pages returned for this keyword in Google, obviously, the fewer the better. You can determine this by searching “your keyword” with quotes around it.
- The keyword has value to advertisers. Basically, anything that can be sold or has commissions has value.
- Select a keyword that is outside of the techie/internet world. Think of a keyword that your average teen or 70-year-old would likely be searching for. Doing so will not only leave you with fewer competitors, but it will also increase your conversion rate as people who aren’t as tech-savvy are more likely to click on ads.
Just to give you a few ideas and to get your mind going, here are some niches I would consider looking at:
(pest control, lawn care, hair products, acne treatments, teeth whitening, mortgages, loans, debt consolidation, home improvement, baby products, men’s/women’s health, etc.)
The daily search volumes and competing pages figures mentioned above are just guidelines that I would stick to until you’re comfortable and have gain more confidence with keyword sniping. Once you achieve #1 ranking for the long-tail keyword, then you can certainly focus on ranking for the bigger keyword. One big advantage that you already have going for you is that most sites out there are targeting keywords with a single subpage. It’s much easier to obtain a higher ranking if you build a whole site(s) around a keyword as we are doing here.
2. Sniping the Keyword
- Building a Website/Blog Around the Keyword - In order to successfully target a keyword, you will have to build an entire site or blog around the keyword. Before you do this, you will have to purchase a domain, preferably one which contains your keyword. This will definitely help you rank higher for the keyword, not to mention it will be much easier to sell the domain in the future if you ever choose to do so. If you’re able to find a used domain on TDNAM.com that contains your keyword, it would make getting ranked significantly easier and much quicker as the domain has already been indexed and backlinked by other sites. Additionally, a domain that’s been live for awhile will help you in avoiding Google’s notorious “sandbox effect”. If budget is an issue, you can also opt to use a free Blogger sub-domain. I currently register and host all my domains with IX Webhosting, so I would definitely recommend them. Now that you’ve got your domain, the next step would be to either install Wordpress or create your page statically using straight HTML. Just remember that it is much easier to link build and make your site SEO friendly using Wordpress.
- Link Posts Back to the Homepage - You will need to create and publish a minimum of 10 posts surrounding your keyword with some solid content that speaks with authority on the subject matter. Though you are using Wordpress blogging software and your site looks like a blog, the difference is that you won’t have to post regularly as you would with a typical blog. As a matter of fact, I would suggest removing all post dates as the information you provide should not appear to be dated in the readers’ eyes.
- Post Requirements - Each of your 10 posts should be at least 300 words and contain a keyword anchor text link back to the homepage which also contains the keyword. It may seem like a daunting task to write 10 posts about the keyword, but you can simply Google for the keyword to get some ideas, but don’t copy or steal the content! Linking each of your posts back to the homepage with the keyword anchor will help your homepage rank by giving it more internal and external links with the keyword anchor text. The external links come into play in the event that an aggregator or scraper site steals your content, there will always be a keyword anchor link which points back to your homepage.
- Keyword Location and Site Structure - The structure of your site must be built correctly in order to achieve SEO optimization and higher ranking, so it’s important that you chose an SEO friendly template. Courtney Tuttle offers a few nice ones that I would recommend.
Once you’ve installed your template, place your keyword in the following locations:
- Page Title: This can be accomplished with the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin. I prefer the “post title | site title” format.
- H1 Tag: The keyword should appear in the H1 tag on all your site pages.
- Footer: The footer should contain a link that points back to your homepage using the keyword as the anchor text.
- Inpost Link: As mentioned above, each of your 10 posts should contain a link back to your homepage with the keyword as the achor text.
- Homepage: Ideally, your keyword should appear about 6-7 times on your homepage, but this is usually covered by virtue of the links that you’ve placed within each post. Being the homepage, it will get ranked for your keyword, so be sure that your keyword appears on it enough times. To avoid tripping off Google’s spam filter, your homepage should contain at least 1000 words, this should be covered if you have 4 posts with a minimum of 300 words each.
- Backlink Methods
There are many ways of creating inbound links to your site, but if you focus your efforts on the following methods, you will surely be able to out-rank all the other sites.
- Varying the Anchor Text: By varying the anchor text while still maintaining your keyword within the links, you will be able to avoid setting off the Google link spamming filter. For instance, if I’m targeting the keyword breast surgery, I can vary the anchor text with words like “breast surgery doctor”, “breast surgery philadelphia”, “about breast surgery”, you get the idea.
- Obtaining Links from Pages About Your Keyword: To achieve this, write an article about your keyword like “What You Should Know About Breast Surgery”, and submit it to a bunch of article distribution sites like Article Marketer or Ezine Articles. Then, use the author profile/bio section to link back to your sight with the desired anchor text. Also, you can start forum discussion threads about your keyword and then link back to your site using your signature.
- Obtaining Links from Other Types of Pages: Though not as effective as getting links from pages pertaining to your keyword, getting links from other pages will still contribute to your ranking to an extent. You can comment on other blogs that don’t pertain to your keyword and use your brand to link back to your homepage, but keep it mind that some authors may ban you for keyword stuffing their comments, so use it sparingly. Also, this method will only work if the author has disabled the “nofollow” feature.
- For more tricks on building backlinks, check out Courtney Tuttle’s “102 Ways to Make Your Site a Backlink Superstar“.
As far as timeline goes, getting ranked for a used keyword based site can vary, but you should have no problem achieving it within 1-2 month’s time. Getting ranked for a brand new site, on the other hand, may or may not take more time. There’s simply just too many variables to tell, like the number of existing competing pages for your keyword, so starting off with a single, long-tail keyword would be the route to take. Once your’e comfortable with the whole process, you can go for the gold and start targeting bigger keywords. If you follow the steps that I’ve outlined here, you should have no problem achieving a high rank for your keyword and blowing your competition out of the water!
* source: CourteyTuttle.com
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