Creating a real business online
My latest article posted on SearchEngineWatch.com
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If it isn’t quite clear that traditional (old) affiliate marketing is dead, then you’ve been living under a rock the last year.
“Pure affiliate sites consisting of content that appears in many other places on the web is unlikely to perform well in Google search results and can cause your site to be negatively perceived by search engines,” according to Google.
It is unlikely that you can realistically create a sustainable long term search based business employing strategies that are outdated and marketing products or services that are already eating away at your profit margin. How can you fix this?
Stop Being an Affiliate
Start thinking outside the box and turning your passion into a real revenue creating business. Create something.
If you have an affiliate marketing site that is based around selling rubber bands, cut the middle man out and find yourself a rubber band drop shipping partner. Or, better yet, inventory it yourself and think big.
There are hundreds of suppliers in China and around the world willing to supply you goods at rates you can make a real profit on – way better than you ever could being an affiliate.
So this is great if you sell a product or were an affiliate marketer to a product. What if you aren’t? Let’s look at another example.
Let’s say you’re selling auto insurance. Sure it was easy to generate some HTML code from CJ or another partner slam it on your website and be done. But you know where you can really make money?
Host the form yourself. Find a supplier locally to fulfill the insurance leads and get paid. You will make more money than a web affiliate program will ever pay and you can test the market out locally and just trial it in your area – then, expand.
The Beautiful Part of Not Being an Affiliate…
Is creating a database. For years I used to run affiliate marketing sites and at the end of the day you’re left with nothing.
If you create a real business with a real website, not only does Google approve but you’re also showing some determination and perseverance, which puts you ahead of the black hat spammers from the get-go.
A lazy man won’t go to these lengths. If you’re willing to put in the hard work here, you will be rewarded dearly.
Once you’ve successfully transitioned away from being an affiliate, you can then remarket your database of customers. Newsletters or other cross-over offers can help bolster your profit lines.
Passion
The most important thing is to actually create something you’re proud of and happy to work on. Forget the figures and the potential for financial riches. The best rich you will ever have is waking up knowing your work doesn’t feel like work.
If you like horror movies, write about horror movies. There are ways to generate passive income from doing what you love. Plenty of people do already.
My last piece of advice to the old affiliate marketers: just pick one thing and stick to it. You can never successfully create a sustainable business by slamming out hundreds of mini-sites and doing a shotgun approach.
Find what you love and start working on ways to make it generate money for you and stay focused.
(Source: searchenginewatch.com)
Mobile SEO Toolkit
Ever found yourself needing easy access to your favorite SEO toolbar, only to realize you’re without your desktop or regular computing platform and stuck with your somewhat clumsy mobile device?
I’m going to show you how to fix this, and make your mobile platform a totally viable SEO toolkit.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself in need of things like:
- Google PageRank
- Number of indexed pages in Google
- Number of indexed pages in Yahoo
- Domain historical data (using DomainTools)
- Alexa data
- W3C validator
- Wayback Machine historical data
- Yahoo links to URL
- Yahoo links to domain
- MajesticSEO data
- Open Site Explorer data
All of which, by the end of this article, will be one click away from your phone.
No, you aren’t going to need to download some third party software or anything from me to do this. All you need is this crazy little invention called bookmarks. You still use them, right?
For example, say we’re currently on mattcutts.com and need to look up some information about the website. Within two clicks, I now have access to all of this data by using my custom built bookmarks file (which you can easily import into your browser or phone and sync it across).
I’ve tested this out on iPhones (works great) and Android devices with bookmark syncing.
How does this work? Well, I’ve crafted some simple JavaScript into the bookmarks that takes the current URL and plugs it into all of these services listed above.
The bookmarks download file is here: Bookmarks.html. Just import it into your Firefox, Opera, or Safari, sync it with your device, and you’re on your way.
Alternatively, if you don’t feel comfortable importing the bookmarks, just pick and choose these links below and add them yourself!
- Force Google US
- Load in Popurius
- Load in MajesticSEO
- Load in DomainTools
- Load in Alexa
- Load in Wayback Archive
- W3C Validate
- G # of indexed pages
- Y! site:domain
- OSE Links to URL
- OSE Links to Domain
- OSE Linking Domains to Root
- OSE URL Anchor Text
- Y! Links to URL
- Y! Links to Domain
- PR History
I use this daily, more often than not when I’m out at lunch waiting on an order, or brainstorming up a potential new venture and checking out the competition while in bed. Work never stops right? This will help you work even more.
Google Keyword Tool Update
Start checking the numbers and get back to the drawing board. That’s what a lot of search marketers will be thinking once they take a look at the new Google Keyword Tool figures.
Google quietly updated the numbers in the keyword tool late last week, which brought about numerous reports of huge drops in search traffic numbers on forums and industry websites, and speculation that the keyword tool was broken.
After analyzing a handful of sites that I know the correct traffic numbers for, I’ve concluded that the update has improved the accuracy of exact match searches.
The Problem for SEMs
Google’s Keyword Tool has become such an important element in the planning stage of building a website that the discrepancies between the old data and the new may be quite alarming to someone who has vested a large amount of money into a campaign that may be flawed from the beginning.
For example, the (exact) phrase [golf clubs” used to report an estimate of 165,000 monthly searches two weeks ago:
As of right now, the (exact) phrase [golf clubs” reports 33,100 monthly searches.
Not everyone takes the old Keyword Tool figures too seriously. Some people divide estimates in half; others divide by 10. There are lots of varying ideas as to what was accurate with the old data, but it appears that the new data is substantially more accurate than it ever has been.
In the case of the [golf clubs” example, assuming you take the exact figures for what they are — suddenly, overnight, your profit forecasts for having a brilliant “Online Golf Clubs” business at the top position in Google have gone down 80 percent.
How Would This Impact Your Marketing Budget For a Campaign?
I’ve looked over some other examples (single keyword phrases in particular) and seen numbers drop from more than 100,000 to a relatively small 9,900.
If you’re currently halfway through a search marketing campaign, perhaps now is the time to check your numbers and possibly go back to the drawing board on a few.
More than a few of you have probably experienced the excitement of reaching the top positions for a particular phrase, only to be disappointed by the poor traffic at the top. This accuracy update should make things easier for SEMs in the long term.
However, it highlights the fact that one should never rely on a single source data when deciding on a new project or campaign.
