Glowleaf

The tabula rasa problem

Tabula rasa, a blank slate. It means a fresh start, but here I am talking about the problem of looking at a clean sheet of paper for hours. More commonly known as writer’s block.

It’s a usual problem, and it happens to all writers. As an internet marketer, you probably have 5-10 websites, on various niches, which need a constant update of content. One of the tips every starter guide to affiliate marketing is “pick a niche you are passionate about”, and this is the reason. Its simply boring to come up with content for a subject you don’t care about.

For example, I don’t play poker. I don’t even know the rules well enough. It is very difficult for me to keep my poker sites up to date. The fact that they are profitable is the reason I push myself to work on them, but its always a burden.

There are a couple of ways to overcome writer’s block, and get your creative juices flowing again.

Google alerts. They are very easy to set up, and very useful. What it does, is simply mail you once a day every new topic on the net containing your keyword. When you sit down to write content, just check out the posts, and you will surely have enough news of the niche to discuss.

Stumble Upon, and other social bookmarking sites. Checking the new articles on a related tag, will show you what other people are writing, and more importantly, what people find interesting on today’s news around the niche.

Youtube videos. Animated images can easily inspire you, and a quick search on your niche can give you lots of ideas.

If your sites are quickly going out of control, or taking up too much of your time, you can outsource the content creation part. You can find writers on:

Elance

Wickedfire

DigitalPoint

There, you will find many people offering writing services, in various qualities and prices. I suggest that you don’t just pick up the cheapest offer. Outsourcing is all about minimizing overhead, and clear communications are worth much more than a percentage of cost. Also, quality articles can bring traffic for months, if not years. One great article is worth much more than 10 crappy ones.

You can also try the ContentSolution service. I never used it so I cannot comment on its usefulness.

Here stops the basic advice, on to more advanced stuff.

This will not be useful to most people, because most people simply do not think that way. My mind can work backwards as well as forwards, and many times I create something from a single phrase or picture. Not many people are good at reverse engineering, and I am one of those few.

My technique is working from the opposite way. What I usually do, is download bundles of something, like photographs or website templates. I browse through them, and when something clicks, I make notes on what article this image could be in, or what kind of website the template could dress. After I finish, I usually have 20 new ideas. Its basically brainstorming, but throw in information overload as well.

Then I categorize the ideas, based on how easy I could make them, how much money it could cost, how viral the idea is, and other factors depending on the subject.

After that, I just pick the best idea, and start shaping it, expanding it. I ask myself basic questions. Why, how? Its not rocket science, anyone can train himself to do that.

For example, the idea for this post came to me as I was staring at a blank Word document. I was brainstorming article ideas, and it came to me that people usually have problems writing content.

Other times, I look at a picture, and build an article around that picture. In case you didn’t notice, I am talking about starting to write an article before even having the subject of the article.

Before I became obsessed with Wordpress, I used to download bundles of Template Monster templates, and browse through all of them. All the templates are beautiful and professional, and I just browsed through them back and forth, jotting down ideas. Ideas for sites came to me, and as I said earlier, I arranged the ideas according to some stats, and started working on them. I have many sites that I created that way, most are mini sites, many more are abandoned or not working anymore. Some are still up. I do the same now with wordpress themes.

Basically I say “Wow, this is a beautiful theme. What kind of site can I make that will use it?”

Someone might ask at this point, shouldn’t you worry about keywords, profitable niches etc when creating a site? My answer is NO. Inspiration is a good thing, and makes you productive. When being inspired, you can do 5 times more work than when you work on projects that have good income potential. The best part is that it does not feel like work. How long has it been since you stayed up all night working passionately? Well, I work like that all the time.

Yes, surely many of those projects will fail. But you will still feel proud about them. And internet marketing has taught me that the most bizarre projects work.

I will sum up the technique here.

Information overload works the same as silent meditation. Instead of clearing your mind from any thoughts, you fill it with sensations. Browsing quickly through a lot of content, and I mean a lot, can get you in a semi-trance like state, which allows your imagination and creativity to pour out.

To get to that point of using this technique, you will need a serious background on internet marketing.

The only way to break the rules, is to know them inside out.

What do I mean by that? When you know how everything works, when your experience allows you to evaluate a keyword or a campaign without checking a keyword tool (and getting close to the actual results), plainly when you become an expert at it, then you can do this technique.

You must not waste thoughts on how to code this, how to do that, is there a plugin for that etc. You must already know all of those things, and just focus on the creation of the idea.

You need to have a variety of tools and techniques already mastered, and just make the idea a reality.

I am sorry, there is no easy way to explain it better. And I know its not for everyone. If it does not work for you, just forget about it.

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by admin

Have you read eli’s seo empire post? If not, you should read it now.

Its what every wannabe affiliate should have read before he even tried putting up his first affiliate link.

Here is my version of the seo empire. I am not trying to copy eli’s post, I am simply trying to show you, how I took eli’s concept and turned it into my creation. (I do tend to turn everything to my own, unique, twisted way). I will not regurgitate everything he says there, so I suggest you read his post as well.

All the information I am sharing here, is simply what I wished someone would tell me when I began affiliate marketing.

First of all, you need a solid foundation, as eli says. A solid foundation means a VPS. It is ok to start off with shared hosting, to lower the starting costs, but you need to make the switch as fast as possible. A 150$ per month cost might sound hefty at first, but you can use that as your starting point. I mean, make your goal to make 150$ per month to pay off the vps cost. It is much easier than you think.

For a good, solid, allaround hosting plan see webmasters.com. They offer a cheap shared hosting service which has more options than what you can think of. The only thing I did not manage to install on that package is wordpress mu.

For VPS servers, you can look around the net. What I use is this

Next, you need a service that allows you to register domains, and bulk modify them. I suggest Moniker, its what I use, and I suggest you do too.

For non US affiliates, you should find a registrar that allows you to mass register and mass modify your domain tld as well. For example, I have a lot of .gr domains, and in the beginning I didnt find a registrar with a good interface, and it made it a nightmare switching dns and managing my portfolio.

I dont even need to tell you, you need a paypal account set up, and a credit card, with internet banking preferably. You also need to organize everything, your notes and your passwords, because if you dont, you will be in chaos in no time.

What you need to start with are autogenerated pages. Lots of them. When I say lots, I mean hundreds of thousands. Pick your niche, e.g credit reports, buy a couple of cheap info domains with some relevant keywords, and start generating and uploading.

You can use a lot of tools to generate the pages, a free solution is yacg. What I recommend is rssevolution, a paid alternative. Check out this post, to see how to make the pages easy to manage. You need to make everything with php includes, so you can switch ads and links easily. The structure I use is this:

I have for example credit-report.info. I generate 30-50.000 pages with rssevolution, with a custom template of course to eliminate footprints. I include 4 files from the root domain, advertical.php, adhorizontal.php, wannacookie.php, and linkz.php.

By doing that, I am able to easily change the content of 50.000 pages, simply by changing 4 files. For example, you start off with one domain, about credit. You put up adsense on it (the bids are killer) and some lead offers. You write or buy some articles, and you let it rank. You put up the link inside the scraped pages, and as they get indexed, the links with the anchor you want to rank for get indexed as well.

Then at some point, you make a second site. Instead of starting at zero, you simply go to your linkz.php file, and add the second domain as well. If 5000 out of the pages are indexed, that means 5000 instant backlinks, before you even start developing the site. (hint, go for inline links, google takes into consideration the text close to the link as well, not only the anchor text).

The cookie php is selfexplanatory, just iframe an affiliate link. The only ones that work are ebay and amazon. Even though people say that amazon hunts down cookiestuffers, I have yet to be banned. Their one day cookie will give you not much though. You need to be really lucky about it. A better alternative I have found is ebay, but you will be banned a lot. And I mean a lot…

For the ad phps I suggest you do not use adsense, cause you will get banned easily. Use adbrite, or, better yet, peakclick. You can also mix ppc with affiliate, one ad for ppc, the other for an affiliate banner.

Then come the splogs. You need splogs. Lots of them. They are the best for ranking. They ping, they get backlnks without you doing anything, they get indexed in no time, they give you link juice for your big projects. Splogs are a major part of your foundation for your seo empire. One reason I said earlier to go for VPS, is that splogs will quickly tear your shared hosting to pieces. The bet I have done without bringing down the whole server, (and making the hosting company nag me because the other hosted sites where pissed) is 10 splogs. Trust me, you need more, much more.

Infact, at some point, you should buy bulk info’s (500 or so) and splog them all.

Now, you could build splogs one by one, and at some point, you will be able to set up a new splog in 5 minutes, but its tedious work, and a life saver I have found is blogsolution. It makes managing a huge network of splogs a breeze, and the support is excellent, as well as the fora. Bear in mind though, blogsolution can bring down a dedicated server as well. Something like 100 splogs will be marginal for a normal VPS. An important feature of blogsolution is the easy interface, the cloaking feature, and the fact that it uses its own blogging software, so if you do it smart, you will have no footprints whatsoever. You can even import wp templates, though I havent tried that feature yet.

If you decide to make splogs by hand, you need to scout the net for at least 10 wp templates. Clean them from any footprints, and links at the footer, and start varying the templates among the blogs.

Then use the concept I said earlier, about making everything modular. An easy way to make splogs modular is to make them scrape the normal feed, but also make a master blog, only for link insertion. Set up the splogs to scrape the master blog’s rss feed (its usually www.masterblog.com/feed). That way, you can simply login to your master blog, post links with the anchor text you want, and it will all get scraped by your splogs and indexed. This is very good for putting pages in the index, and indexing parked domains as well.

So, that is all. This is how I built my foundation. Now go and make yours.

Popularity: 25% [?]

written by admin

Today I made some phone calls, selling banner space to my site, to other businesses in the same niche.

And I made a realization: I am selling them, what was already theirs for a good solid 10 years now. 10 years in the internet life is like a millenia. These businesses owned the top 10 results for years, and I showed up out of nowhere, grabbed the top spot, and now I am selling them an overpriced banner slot. Its so shitty I love it.

Now, I am thinking of doing the same in other business niches. I am gonna forget about affiliate offers, the regular high volume niches etc for a while. These businesses cannot sell from affiliate networks, but they are paying big cash to show up on buyers monitors.

The key here, is experience. Weigh the niche, build it proper, spam the shit out of it. Link build it, make sure it gets to the top spot when google lifts the filters, and simply own the first place before google even indexes you.

A little tip is: Try to market to the businesses who already buy banners and adwords, but who don’t know shit about seo.

Quoting Sun Tzu, The Art of War:

A battle is won before the swords unsheath.  

Popularity: 29% [?]

written by admin

Making adult sites, is one of the easiest ways to make money online. Not easy to make a lot of money, easy to start making a little money.

And one of the easiest ways to make adult sites, are scraper blogs with adult content.

Most of the adult affiliate networks are kind enough to provide you with an RSS feed, complete will luscious women, calls to action, images, keywords, and all that is updated daily.

So, why not capitalize on that?

• All you need is an adult domain, any keyword rich domain with adult keywords will do. Put in, sluts, fuck, tits, whatever.
• Then, you need to signup with AdultFriendFinder, and DatingGold.
• Set up a blog at your new domain, and as always put on analytics, akismet and wp-o-matic.
• Do the permalinks and the expanded pinglist hack.
• Go to your DatingGold login, and from the promotional tools, choose the wordpress templates.
• Download the template, and upload it to your WP installation.
• Set up wp-o-matic to scrape daily from both AFF and DatingGold. DatingGold might need you to ask for the RSS feeds to be activated first.

And you are done! Throw some links to help, and social bookmarking (make sure you tag it as adult).

Make sure everything works correctly, and forget about it! Go work on your other projects, or make more of those ssplogs (sex spam blogs. My word)

Every one of those ssplogs will make 2-3$ per day, once it ranks.

Popularity: 24% [?]

written by admin

A year ago, after a lot of research, I decided to go for a very competitive niche.

(I will not say what that niche is, but smart people will find out anyway)

The niche is a standard business avenue, unlike the classic affiliate marketing world.

The keyphrases I went for were 2, a main and a secondary one.

The main keyphrase had 80.000 results in Google, hardly a competetive number for other niches like poker or credit.

The secondary keyphrase had 220.000 results in Google, a better match.

Obviously, the secondary had more searches than the primary, so why did I choose it the other way around?

Well, the answer was that while the secondary had more searches (and competition), it was a wider interpretation of the business, whereas the primary is spot on the theme. Also, in the primary, the other sites where actually my competitors, where in the secondary, it was them and lots of relevant businesses, but not actually the competition. I hope that made sense.

Then, I researched many of the competitive sites, and I laughed a lot while doing so. The 90% of them was horrible, and the remaining 10% was too basic, and most of that 10% had seo from 1995.

Examining the top 20, and their backlinks, I saw something ugly. These guys had stuffed keywords in metatags, backlinks from every relevant directory out there, DMOZ links, Yahoo directory links, PR6 links from irrelevant sites that had not been updated since 1996 (yes, I am serious). The top 15 where on-site seo’d to shit, with almost every page indexed, in both yahoo and msn.

And the cherry on top was the domain age. Every domain was from 1997-2001 tops, and every site has been in the index with closely the same content ever since its registration.

Not a good landscape to dive into. Actually, for the past 3 months, the only thing keeping me from outranking them is domain age, and their backlinks age.

Right now, I am close to Google spot 26, and the site keeps on ranking as Google lifts the filters from my links. How did I do that? Simple:

• Pure content. Many of the competitive sites where the classic brochure sites, saying a bit about the company, some pics, prices, and a few more pages. I found that they lacked in content, so I beat the shit out of my content part, and stuffed everything in. They have 200-2.000 pages, I put up 50.000.
• Links. All their links where reciprocal (which worked in the old days, but now it nullifies the “vote” from one page to another). I put on one way links. Also, I put the directory on a different domain, so any reciprocals became 3-way-links.
• Spam links. All their seo was white hat, and borderline gray hat. Don the black hat my friends, and your opposition is in deep trouble.
• Dullness. Their sites, except a few, are dull, dull, DULL. Put some web 2.0 thingies up there, and your are good to go.
• Sex. Or lack thereof. Let me say this softly: YOU CANNOT SELL ANYTHING WITHOUT SEX. I put on pictures of babes. They are going the family route. I win, they lose.
• Static sites VS pinging blogs. You know who wins.
• Adsense. Come on! Adsense on a business site? He has got a nice: “This site a scam? Find out here” ad that steals a third of his traffic. Amateurs…
• Communication. If you dont communicate with your customers, you lose. Put in blogs, skype, email addresses everywhere, phone numbers, contact forms, forum, comment, etc.
• Imagination. They lack imagination. I dont. Create anything you can think of that can give you a competitive advantage. Find what they dont have, and put it up first.

EDIT: I got asked what I mean by keyphrase.

When you say keyphrase instead of keywords, you mean like a long english sentence that has the keyword in it? can you give some examples?

A keyphrase is a phrase that contains a few keywords you want to rank for. Something like the longtail, but not exactly. An example : “Glowleaf affiliate marketing blog, out of the box thinking for making money online”

You spoke in the last post about beating the competition with, among others, pure content.
They put 2000 pages, you put up 50,000. How did you put those up? I mean it must be generated, but then the content quality isn’t there so much? Or did I miss something?

About content, you can autogenerate pages, interlink them, and put up links. Check this out:
http://www.cashquests.com/google-pag…eat-the-system

Also, eli at blue hat seo says that internal linking to the upper pages push up rankings as well. I could not find the article on a quick glance. You should read his whole blog anyway!

So, I just combined the two ideas.

Once you put up those pages, all you have to do is try and index them. Then your ranks will go up. Also, always monetize the autogenerated pages with ppc (not adsense, try adbrite, or better yet, peakclick).

What I have been wondering about is how to facilitate the most time consuming part of the work: content.

Could you tell me more about generating those pages. I mean generated pages that are, i guess, good enough in terms of english to get people to go on them and click on ads.

I heard of some generators using dictionaries, but it’s most for bots, not so much for humans.

I like rssevolution. You have to buy it, but you can use a demo for a few days to see what it does. A free alternative is yacg.

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Popularity: 27% [?]

written by admin

I recently browsed through all the ebooks I have read about SEO 2 years ago. Looking back, I laugh at them now, but they sure did teach me a lot.

My experience has showed me that SEO has changed a lot, and for a reason.

Google cannot rely on the information the webuilder gives, simply because the webuilder can manipulate that information.

Meta tags are a thing of the past. So is alt text in images. So are h2, h3 tags.

Here is my SEO summary:

• You need your main keyphrase, and a secondary key phrase.
• Put that phrase in the title tag, the h1 tag, and in the first 20 words of your content.
• Make variations of your keyphrase, and make sure all incoming links you control have it as anchor text.
• All engines you use must have url rewrite for seo purposes, “?” in urls kill rankings.
• You need to get into DMOZ, at least for your big projects.
• Have internal links with anchor text, not “Home” and “Click Here”.
• Your domain must be brandable, but buy keyword rich domains also and point them to your site.
• Your incoming links need not only anchor text, but surrounding relevant text as well, like this:

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Popularity: 17% [?]

written by admin

Here is a way to create backlinks:

Browse Youtube and find high PR videos relevant to your site. Copy the embed code, and embed it!

Like this:

This will create a backlink on youtube, at the statistics & data tab beneath each video. Like this one
This is an easy way to get indexed fast, and give some linkjuice, as the link is no follow. I believe that no follow simply reduces the linkjuice significantly, but does not nullify it.

Popularity: 20% [?]

written by admin

A huge mistake all starting affiliates make, is to leave their installations to default settings. Take wordpress for example.

I have seen many splogs, with the default, kubric I think is its name, template. That is a huuuge footprint, one very easy to track and ban.

When you are trying to cheat the engines, dont hang up a label that says “SPAM”.

• You need to change the template, and also vary the templates you use among installations. Pick 10 light templates you like, remove all the links to the designers and similar stuff.
• Edit the silly “just another wordpress blog”.
• Remove the link to wordpress.org, as well as the “powered by wordpress”.

All these are footprints, that engines can easily use to disqualify any link juice you might have had.

Other engines, have other footprints. Find those too. And remove them.

Popularity: 23% [?]

written by admin

A great trick to generate content for your wordpress blog, is to use the plugin Global Translator

The installation is very simple, just follow the readme file instructions.

This plugin creates a set of buttons on your WP template, that automatically translates your site through Babelfish translation.

The trick is to go to the plugin options, and activate the caching option. By creating a writable (chmod 777) “cache” folder in the plugin folder, you allow it to keep the translated pages there.

The spiders will crawl your site, and index the translated pages as well. On average, you should expect to have 10 times more content than your original, full with relative keywords, and with no duplicate content penalty.

Popularity: 7% [?]

written by admin