I posted earlier about how to steal your competitors links, so check that out to learn the easy and difficult methods to stealing links.

So now that you and the rest of the world know how to steal your links, what do you do to protect your sites ranking? The best way is a technique I learned from a lawyer.  He was explaining to me that he had a case against one of the largest companies in the world and has been in the Fortune 500 for many years. As he was deep into this case, he had asked the company for records of his client.  When the company sent records, the sent 27 boxes of records for the client, who had worked for the company for 15 years.  They basically drowned him in paperwork!

How Do I Keep People From Stealing My Links?

To keep people from stealing your links, you utilize similar methods to the lawyer. If you can give them so much data that they can’t sort through it to find your links, you’re successfully protecting your links. For me the easiest way to do this is to buy links in bulk. In the link above about how to steal your competitors links, I showed you two ways to steal them.  Buying links in bulk will protect you from both methods.  Places like Fiverr can give you thousands of links, some on high PR pages at very affordable prices. This contributes to a great link diversity. As I mentioned in my Fiverr SEO Test, these links aren’t going to help much, but they can definitely bury your competition in a mountain of data to sort though.

With 800 incoming links, it’s easy to see which links provide the most value, but when you show 8,000 links, how will your competition know which links are providing value, and which are a waste of time.  They won’t, and that’s how you protect your link profile.

Related posts:

1. How to Steal Your Competitors Links
2. Someone’s Stealing My Content!
3. Page Rank isn’t About Links

The “Long Tail” keywords are phrases that contain up to 5 key words and are highly specific. Since they are so specific, the search volume is very low.

Long tail example:
“Large Sony Plasma 1080p Detroit” – This key phrase is a very specific search phrase. Someone that searches for that knows exactly what they want. They want to buy a large Sony plasma TV in Detroit that has 1080p resolution. If you Google that key phrase you’ll see there are less than 10,000 results, and none of the results are any good.

A regular key phrase would be “Sony Plasma 1080p”. Not only do you have a lot more competition with that key phrase, but you don’t know very much about this visitor. You don’t know if they want a 32″ or a 50″, do they want to spend $500 or $3,000? Do they plan to buy online, or are they doing research and plan to buy locally? Do they really want a Sony, or are they looking for specs. Do they already have a Sony and need a new remote?

When you target the long tail, you will get a much higher conversion ratio because you already know what your visitors are looking for because they’ve been specific with their search. Since you know what they want, you can give it to them above the fold, quickly and easily.

The best way to find long tail keywords and key phrases is through your own data. This is your search engine referrer logs. If you’re site is new, you probably don’t have logs showing what people searched for just yet, but you will. Once this data starts rolling in, start making pages based on what people want.

Until you have that data another good way to find long tail keywords is through a keyword suggestion tool. Google has one, but Keyword Discovery is my favorite. The numbers in the search totals are not very accurate, but it gives you a good idea of what is being searched for.

Using “Sony plasma” as an example we get the following long tail key phrases:

sony multisystem plasma tv
sony plasma dvd connections
comparison chart for sony, toshiba, and panasonic plasma tvs
repair of sony plasma tvs
biggest sony plasma tv
sony plasma dvd digital receiver connection diagram
prices on sony plasma hd tv
sony 37 wega plasma tv specs
sony 950 plasma wall mount
sony bravia hdtv 46 plasma
how to get my sony plasma off standby

As you can see, after a 30 second search, you now can create 11 pages of content that is highly targeted. Some of those searches aren’t going to convert to sales (diagram, specs, off standby), but others could convert very well (wall mount, dvd connections, repair). Even if your page isn’t designed to convert, it could still make you money.

Imagine someone in a forum asks “how to get my sony plasma off standby”. Someone answers by linking to your site. When someone else comes along looking for issues with Sony TV’s, they’ll find your site. Then they might find your comparison chart, or your 1080p vs 720p guide. Since they’re looking for more information, you keep giving them information and your site makes a sale, and gets a link. Win-win for you and the person you helped.

Do you know of other ways to find long tail keywords?

Related posts:

1. AuctionAds with Negative Keywords
2. Another Way to Find a Niche

Typically I find my workers/employees through forums like DigitalPoint, but the Craigslist Philippines is a great idea, one that I had never thought of. Give it a go and let me know how outsourcing works for you.

By the way, I’m always looking for talented people, send me a message if you’re one of them!

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2. My Most Underused WordPress Feature – Post Slug
3. Advertise On Any Post With Text-Link-Ads.com!

Today that is different.  If you take a look through the SERPS for most keywords, you’ll find about one third of the domains have keywords.  Compare that with 2005 and I would imagine that 75% of the domains in the top 10 had keywords stuffed into them.

So does the domain name really matter?  Not to me.  I still own a lot of domains that are stuffed that I purchased over the last few years, but I’m finding that they rank just as well as domain names without any keywords (or words).

So if you have the choice between a brandable keyword domain such as Flickr, Google, or Technorati, choose that over a keyword stuffed domain.

Related posts:

1. Who Do You Write For?
2. Are You Watering Your High Dollar Pages?
3. AuctionAds with Negative Keywords

According to research on consumer behavior, receiving a personal recommendation from a customer is one of the best ways to achieve as successful sale. Why? Product and service suggestions appear as more genuine, honest and trustworthy than standard advertisements.

If you want to increase your online visibility, sell more products or get more subscribers, word of mouth is a strategy you need to consider for affiliate marketing. By enlisting the help of past customers, you can dramatically increase the size of your “sales team” and draw an abundance of new customers.

Getting Started With Word Of Mouth Marketing

The first step in using word of mouth in affiliate marketing is to handpick a number of proven guerrilla marketing strategies. While you may later opt to expand into other areas using fresh ideas and techniques, focus on the tried and tested methods during the initial phases of your word of mouth marketing campaign.

No. 1 — Target Influential Customers

The best way to spread the word about your affiliate marketing offers is to get influential people to start talking about them. Spend some time exploring the web to find websites, blogs and communities devoted to your topic.

Select some target individuals and send them information designed to grab their interest. This might involve simply describing what your website does, or producing promotions that are specifically aimed at these individuals. But remember that these people probably get a lot of similar product promotions. So spend some extra time making yours appealing and personal, it will pay off in the long run. When done correctly, these influential customers can become one of your biggest sales allies. By mentioning your products in their websites, blogs and discussion boards, you can reach out to an even broader audience.

No. 2 — Give People A Reason To Talk About You

According to marketing guru Seth Godin, it is essential to give people a reason to talk about your business. “Provide something of value. The first step is recognizing that marketing is asking for someone else’s time and attention. You need to provide something worthy…when you educate or entertain other people, they’ll pay attention. If you bore them, they won’t,” Godin explains.

Consider the strengths of your affiliate marketing business, then build upon them to create outstanding word of mouth. If your site offers lots of valuable information, make sure that this content is prominent on all major pages of your site. If your affiliate offers are the best in the business, make a point of explaining exactly what makes your products or services so much better than the competition. If you have the possibility, try to exemplifying it with graphs and pictures, to make it stand out from the millions of “best deals” that are out there. By offering something of value, your customers will provide word of mouth testimonials in return.

No. 3 — Enlist The Help Of Satisfied Customers

After every completed sale, always strive to maintain contact with your customers. As part of the purchasing process, include an option for customers to receive further email offers, newsletters and promotions. Then, periodically remind your past customers about your business offerings. By staying fresh in the mind’s of your core audience, they will be more likely to promote your affiliate marketing offers to friends, family and online communities.

Some possible ways to stay in contact with past customers include creating informative email newsletters, offering special promotions or simply informing people about your latest products and offers. The key to success is to make these contacts useful and meaningful.

Always ensure that your emails display content specifically targeted to the needs of the customers. Offer something of real value in the form of information or access to affiliate offers.

No. 4 — Make It Easy for Customer To Rave

On every page of your website, include links that allow customers to email information about your affiliate marketing business to friends. This is a great way to quickly capitalize on the enthusiasm of your viewers.

Social bookmarking is another successful word of mouth tool in guerrilla marketing. Websites such as Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon allow users to share their favorite sites with like-minded web viewers. By including social bookmarking links on your website, your customers can help promote your site to an even wider online audience.

No. 5 — Monitor Your Word Of Mouth Results

Finally, always try to monitor the success of your word of mouth campaigns. Start by noticing important numbers such as website traffic and affiliate sales before launching any type of new marketing strategy. Then, collect records periodically on these numbers in order to determine if your word of mouth efforts have had any impact on your affiliate marketing results.

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1. 2,000 unique visitors. For the past few months this site has had about 30 uniques total.
2. $100 revenue. This site currently generates $0 revenue.
3. 150 total articles. So far we have about 6.

As the title says, we’re going to take this site from 0 (nothing) to hero (generating income) in one month. If we can do it, so can you!

I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it, but I sure do hope we can. For me, it’s fun to be working with a partner on a project like this. Andrew is an exceptional writer and we should have great success with this. I’ll keep you updated with how our goals are coming along, and if you want to help, just link to the site!

You can also view all of the posts from this project.

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When attempting to blog for profit, it would make sense that you find a profitable niche, right? However, for some people, the niche is an afterthought.

I have a friend who loves playing video games. That’s great, but there are about a million good blogs that cover video games and have 10 full time writers on staff. You, being one person, will fail 99.99% of the time against competition like that. They’re big, established and can blow you out of the water with their marketing budget. Don’t read that number and think you are the 0.01%. You’re not, you will fail if you tackle the wrong niche.

So what does it take to make a profit running a blog? The right niche and the right personality.

The right niche is easy to find, but matching a great niche with your personality might be a little more difficult.

If you’re like me, I can write a post per day about literally any topic in the world, even if there aren’t any current events on the subject. So for me, finding a profitable niche is easy, and I can find a profitable niche in literally less than 5 minutes. I could have a good domain purchased and blog up in 15 minutes. Once the DNS transfers I could be posting in less than 24 hours. If you are like me in this area, check out my free niche ideas category or shoot me an email and we’ll talk about niches.

If you have trouble thinking of posts or find yourself sitting in front of a blank screen that says, “Create New Post”, then finding your perfect niche might be a little more difficult. That is where this post comes in.

Here are a few ways that YOU can find the perfect niche, that is something you’re interested in (at least a little) and can be profitable as well.

What do you like?

Do you like eating? Running? Shoveling snow? Backpacking? Doing crazy stunts? Blowing up dining room tables that you found in a dumpster? Testing new technology? Making new things from old items?

What exactly do you like to do? Write down 5 things that you like to do on a piece of paper. Or in Photoshop like I did since I don’t have a scanner handy. Step one should look like this:

Now that you have 5 things you enjoy or like written down, write 3-5 ideas that are in the same niche as the first step. Should look like this:

Now you should have 15-30 ideas written down that are becoming a little more focused. Hopefully your list isn’t a technology focused as mine is. Technology is a tough niche to compete in because everyone that knows about technology knows about the internet and knows how to create a website which creates competition. Too much competition is a bad thing. Then again, zero competition is a bad thing as well.

Now that you have your second set of words and ideas, look through them and pick the one that most excites you. Don’t worry if you don’t think it can make money. As long as you can get traffic to a website, monetization is easy. Traffic will come through the niche and long tail keywords.

For me, I might pick landscaping. I really enjoy working in my back yard. It’s fun for me to be out there mowing the lawn, edging, pulling a few weeds, fertilizing, etc. By the way, I do have the best looking grass on my block!

So now that I have a general niche, we need to see if it is too broad and if there is money to be made in “landscaping”. First go to google and type the word ‘landscaping’.

Search Results Matter

1. Advertisers (amount, quality of ad, keyword focus)

2. Domains in top 10 (are they corporations or individual sites? Is the .com of your keyword listed? .Gov sites? Wikipedia?)

3. Other possible keywords (for landscaping, those words were “DIY, Ideas, Planning, pictures, estimates)

Those three bits of information tell us the following:

1. Advertisers. If there are 3 advertisers, drop the niche and move on. Nobody is bidding on ppc keywords, there might be a reason. If the niche is really broad then try to narrow it down. If you still can’t find advertisers, find a new niche. This will also give us an indication as to who the competition will be. It is good to see products listed in this section.

Here are the top advertisers for ‘landscaping’ and my thoughts on those ads:

Even though there are only 8 advertisers listed, these seem promising. Now, see how many advertisers there are with the related terms. If you search for “landscaping ideas” you find a goldmine. Plenty of advertisers, tied to a bigger niche (landscaping), it isn’t a dying niche, and you should be able to find advertisers other than Adsense as well.

If I were looking for a niche, I would buy a ‘landscaping ideas’ website and get a blog set up.

2. Domains in the top 10.

For the top 10 results for my selected keywords (landscaping ideas) I found the following:

1. landscaping.about.com

2. www.the-landscape-design-site.com

3. www.homeandfamilynetwork.com/gardening/landscaping.html

4. landscapingideas.the-landscape-design-site.com/front-yard/

5. www.hgtv.com/hgtv/pac_ctnt_988/text/0,,HGTV_22056_60415,00.html

6. www.gardenandhearth.com/Landscaping-Ideas.htm

7. www.bhg.com/bhg/category.jsp…

The competition I would be worried about is HGTV.com and BHG.com (they’re huge and get a lot of link love). The rest of the competition isn’t great. Static sites that would probably even link to you with the right persuasion. The right persuasion in this case is probably not money, but a good resource for their existing visitors.

These results are great because their aren’t a lot of really big corporations, no .gov sites, just some old established sites.

3. Other Possible Keywords.

Funny thing. Google gives you a list of keywords at the bottom of this search page that GOOGLE thinks are related. Whether they are or not, Google thinks they are, and that’s good enough.

Here are those words:

desert landscaping ideas
backyard landscaping ideas
landscaping photos
landscaping plans
patio ideas
flower bed ideas

A page on the site for each of those words is where I would start. I would turn the landscaping photos site into a gallery. That will garner some linkage. The rest of the pages should fit well within the existing framework of your site.

Looking for more keywords? Here is a list of 200 keywords that you can download for landscaping ideas:

Landscaping Ideas keyword list

Will it work?

“Landscaping Ideas” satisfied all of the criteria. It is something I’m interested in, has advertisers, is active, and the competition isn’t too tough.

If you check Adwords you’ll see an average click cost of $1.00 for “landscaping ideas” but only 10-50 searches per day. If you search for “landscaping” you’ll see $1.28-1.50 cost per click and 1872-2292 clicks per day. That is perfect. You’ll be able to use PPC to promote this website. However, Adsense won’t be a huge earner. I would look for affiliate programs and after about 6 months you might be able to sell some text link ads.

Normally the first idea doesn’t work, but the rabbit hole will lead you to a niche that does work. If landscaping ideas didn’t work out, I could have continued that line of thinking and done lawnmower reviews, fertilizer comparisons, etc. The purpose of this exercise is to see how easy it is to find a niche.

What’s Next?

Now it’s time to write, write, and more writing. I would write for two months straight before I worked on promotion. You’ll want to ping the major blog sites (Technorati especially) and maybe email a few people with similar sites and tell them you’re linking to them. Outgoing links won’t matter now because you’re not making any money. In fact, I would leave out ALL advertising for those 60 days.

Those will draw in more visitors and will capture a lot of clicks just with the title. Those post should probably be pictorial with a lot of content to make them major linkbait.

That’s It!

To answer Michael Gray’s original question, “Can You Make a Living Blogging?” Absolutely! Find your perfect niche, exploit it, write it, live it, breathe it, and make a living from it!

Hopefully that helps you find a niche and make some money online! Let me know if you have any questions, comments or need clarification!

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You know, the text says stuff like, “Have you ever wanted to run your own online business from the comfort of your own home with the potential to make over $100k per year but did,nt know where to start.If so then you have come to the right place.This is your chance to bid on a popular proven real ecommerce website business and not an amateur maybe it might make you money website that is found on so many auction.”

Here is one such scammy, scummy, site for sale. What I don’t like about them can be found in the following picture:

Now “scam” might be a strong word, but Merriam-Webster says scam is defined as, “a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation”.

So saying that the appriasal for this website is $22,400 is definintely deceptive. The website is worth $10 (domain) plus maybe $30 for an ugly template that has been used on at least 5 other identical websites.

So here is me, calling you scammers out. If your websites are really worth anything, lets have a contest. You vs. Me, Head to Head, One on One.

If your websites can make $100,000 per year like you say they can, I want to see a check!

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Here is some proof:

I have two sites, one with about 5 incoming links, one with 1500. Which should have higher PR?

PR 3 Here are the incoming links for site 1…only about 5 links are coming from outside sites.

PR 0 Here are the incoming links for site 2…over 1,000 links coming from outside sites.

You decide, is Page Rank really about links or is the wool firmly over our collective eyes?

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2. How To: Get a SEO Blog to Digg’s Front Page – The 6 C’s
3. 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007

What would you do? How would you spend that $100?

All you have to do is send me an email with the best way to spend $100 marketing your website. The website could be new or old, but you can’t spend over $100 exactly on your marketing.

You could have articles written, buy PPC ads, buy a site review, whatever. Make sure you give me some details because I might be using your idea in a future post.

If you are the winner, you will get your choice of spending $150 on this site. $150 will get you the following:

Complete Site Review (1 review)

Contextual links (2 links in either one or two posts, your choice)

Sponsored Posts (3 total sponsored posts)

So all you have to do is send me an email with your best marketing idea under $100!

If you win I’ll contact you to get some info on claiming your winnings.

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