Archive for 'August, 2008'

Until recently, I wasn’t aware of the Google Adsense and Ebay Partner Network (EPN) Privacy Policy Requirements for affiliates. This is serious business folks, if you are listing eBay auctions as an affiliate or using Adsense ads within your BANS Build a Niche Store or blog they you are required to have a privacy policy. If you don’t have one, and you are one of the few sites manually reviewed by EPN or Adsense support – your account can be cancelled. That’s right, cancelled, revoked – no more commissions! It’s part of their terms of service (TOS) you signed up for.

Maintainence wise – this sucks if you own a lot of blogs or web sites. Luckily enough, Synclastic has come out with the Privacy Policy WordPress plugin to make things easier for your blog. This will cover Adsense and EPN needs (if you use BayRSS or PHPBayPro to add auctions to blog pages), you’ll have to copy and paste accordingly and manually add the same information to your BANS niche sites.

The plugin is pretty cool, you just enable it and then create a page, and add this comment code to it:

Then, your privacy policy is auto-generated for you, and you don’t have to do a thing!

Here are the options:

You just punch in your name and email, and at the option your page title and slug (permalink) and you’re golden!

If your blog is not WordPress (Movable Type, Blogger, Live Journal, Joomla, etc) – you can just use this handy Privacy Policy Generator by SerpRank.

Affsphere is a new Article Directory (you should belong to)!

If you do article marketing (and you should) – you need to know about the new Article Directory Affsphere.com. This is a new service recently launched by Affiliate Classroom, a widely respected affiliate learning service. While Ezine Articles of course remains the worlds largest (and most trafficed) article directory – Affsphere puts a new twist on an old marketing tradition.

Most article directories have a “give and take” relationship. You “give” them free content, and “take” a few free backlinks in the byline at the end of the article. But at Affsphere, there is more. In fact – there are 8 different ways to make money with Affsphere in all.

1. Banner Ads: You earn credits with acticle submissions, by referring new Affsphere members, and reading articles in the system. Use these credits to purchase banner ad impressions within Affsphere pages. Promote your own site, a Clickbank offer, a niche store, anything!
2. Earn Money with Adsense: You can trade ad credits for Adsense views.
3. Traffic: Like traditional article directories, the backlinks you create within the articles and bios will make you money in your blogs and niche stores.
4. Your Downline: In Affsphere, anyone you refer is in your “downline”, and you can make money on people they refer up to 5 levels deep.
5. Viral Recruiting: Your article pages have your Affsphere affiliate “join” link – so even if you don’t blog about Affsphere, by only submitting articles you can “virally” get people in your “downline”.
6. Affiliate Classroom Commissions: All links on your article pages, or anyone in your downline that signs up for Affiliate Classroom will earn you commissions. You get $10 per month per member. If you get a lot of people in your downline or a lot of article views this has big potential
7. Affiliate Commissions: Affsphere is an “affiliate friendly” directory. Unlike Ezine Articles or other article directories they welcome affiliate links. You can use affiliate link directly in the body of your article or in the resource box at the end! Wow – this completely changes the game of article marketing doesn’t it?
8. Commissions on AffSphere Sales: Anyone who buys courses on AffSphere by clicking on your affiliate links on your pages can earn you $20-$200 in commissions.

I think AffSphere has a lot of potential – it was created with affiliates in mind. I have blogged about the wonders of Article Directory promition and building backlinks – but with AffSphere you can make money in many additional ways, you would be smart to signup today!

Also be sure to read JTPratt’s guide to Article Directory Promotion.

I had been an affiliate of DoubleClick Performics for awhile, and last year they were purchased by google. Now it’s called ConnectCommerce, or the Google Affiliate Program. It’s similar to Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, and the other large affiliate houses. The thing about Google Affiliate program is that because it’s so big – they not only have tons of merchants, but they have some of most well known ones, like Sears, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, and bunches more.

Once you own multiple blogs and sites in various niches you find yourself looking for unique merchants with relevant products you can promote. This usually leads you to sign up for all kinds of programs and affiliate houses to have the most options available at any given time. Believe me, that’s the only reason I belong to every single one of these places. I would love nothing more than to promote only a handful of merchants, but that’s just not realistic. I use Commission Junction for Hostgator and goDaddy, in addition to music product merchants. Google Affiliate is more for my “women’s needs” type merchants (clothing, perfume, etc), LinkShare is for electronics – you get the picture.

I must say that every single one of these affiliate programs has provided ZERO tools to make me more successful, and has done ZILCH to allow me to promote them more. Contacting any one of them through email, support, or their contact form has been time consuming, laborious – and something I even dread. Mainly because I’m never treated like someone that can make them more money – I’m treated like crap (most of the time). If you haven’t had to deal with one of these affiliate houses yet personally – let me tell you about a few of my not so pleasant experiences…

Commission Junction
I had the need to get a data feed from a CJ merchant. I contacted the merchant directly through CJ Support, and 2 days later they emailed back to say that Commission Junction needs to set it up, contact support. I submitted a CJ Support ticket and included all the details for “ftp push”, and 3 days later I got an email back asking for the “login details” to set it up (even though I included them in the initial ticket). I emailed back and 2 days later got an email saying they were “working on it”. About 10 days after that I got email confirmation that the ticket was done, and 24 hours after that I got the first data feed. The data had all kinds of weird characters with accents in it, and I emailed CJ support back about it. 3 days later they emailed back to say that I had to talk to the merchant about this. I emailed the merchant and heard nothing back. After a week I emailed again, and they said they had already replied. They didn’t, so I emailed back again with the concert about the characters in the data, and the merchant program manager said ‘oh -sorry, I gave that to the developer and haven’t heard back yet…’. It’s been 2 more weeks, and I STILL haven’t heard back. I’ve been trying to get a clean working data feed for this one merchant for 6 weeks now I believe?

Google Affiliate Program
I wanted datafeeds from google affiliate for about 12 merchants, so I submitted a ticket to their support as well. A week went by with no answer. So I emailed them everyday for an entire week (with no answer). Then finally I got an email saying that I asked for “a lot of feeds” to be setup (basically saying I should be patient). Another week goes by. I email again their support and get a response back 2 days later “we have a new ticket system and will respond as soon as we can”. 3 days later with no response I email, again, and again, and again for about 10 days. Finally one day I get email confirmation that they feeds are setup. I login my FTP to check them out, and each and every one is truncated (broken, irrepairable, and useless). Every 2 days google affiliate sends me 12 more broken useless files (a new broken version I guess). I have emailed them 6 times regarding this with to date NO RESPONSE (and still broken feeds). The only worse time I’ve had with google was trying to contact Adsense. I think google is the worst of the worst as far as affiliate programs and support goes.

Pepperjam Network
Pepperjam has been the most responsive to my request, usually within 24-48 hours. But my assigned network manager did quit and they forgot to tell me. Once they fixed that I had a question about THEIR datafeeds, because it’s supposed to be so “easy to subscribe” to them once you login. I subscribed for 10 of their data feeds, and aren’t available for download. I emailed my network manager and she said that it was a technical problem “they were aware of and working on…”. 2 days later I emailed back, “still working on it”. 3 days later, “still working on it”, and the following week “still working on it”. Get the picture here? Great at communications, but poor marks for execution.

I may not be the biggest affiliate around, and I definitely feel that there’s a bunch of favoritism amongst the affiliate houses. If I were earning $5-10K per month in commissions I guarantee that my tickets would recieve top priority and 100X quicker turn-around. That’s just not fair. How do they know how big an affiliate I might be in the next month or year? For one merchant, their slow and unresponsive nature regarding a data feed has completely stifled (and just about killed) the launch of one of my brand new sites. These companies are raking in millions of dollars – don’t they understand that by support affiliates more they are investing in something that can only make them more money over time?

Which brings me to another point…why do services like popshops.com and GoldenCAN, NetShops, and others exist? It’s because affiliate houses themselves still REFUSE to invest any money in tools, scripts, or plugins to help affiliates promote merchants better. WTF?! Why should I have to login and find manually links for programs when the technology exists for them to create a WordPress plugin or some JavaScript to get exactly what I need in a tenth the time? Idiot affiliate house – you can’t see the forest for the trees! It’s like you have an incredible opportunity and you are blowing it! Another faster and more nimble company is going to swoop right in and steal your lunch – the same way that iPod’s invaded the world!

Oh, and by the way….if you’re wondering what all this talk about “data feeds” is – just read these posts:

Create an affiliate store in 5 Minutes from a Data Feed
Monetize Search Results with Datafeeds in WordPress

This post is for owners of BANS or “Build a Niche Store”. If you haven’t purchased it or want to know more – you need to visit this page.

Those of us who are BANS owners received email late last week regarding the re-launch of the BANS web site, sales pages, forum, and the addition of new free templates. These are big changes. I’m glad to see the revamp of the site and sales pages. Everything looks more professional now. I really think a small percentage of potential BANS customers didn’t buy because the previous site and sales pages were a big too much “hype”. They looked a bit like some shafty affilate marketer wanting to push his spammy product down your throat (IMHO).

The 2 additional new things are the forum and templates. First, let me say that I think the new forum looks great. The topics make more sense and everything looks cleaner. Along with the forum comes a new set of rules. I think it’s great that they will no longer tolerate people being degrading, talking down to people, or being disrespectul. However, that’s something nearly impossible unless you have full time moderators reading each and every post (which they do have in place).

The new forum rules also state that you can’t have affiliate links for the sole purpose of promoting yourself. You have to actually have to add some value to BANS and forum visitors. I can see that too. What I don’t understand is the rule about a mandotory moritorium on talking about competing products. Kelvin and Adam don’t want anyone to post a single thing about ANYTHING that competes with Build a Niche Store. Don’t you find this a little weird (and PARANOID!).

First, let me start by saying that I think the new “free BANS templates” available in the forum for download are great! Too bad so many users have paid for templates of similar quality through third party developers for the past few years because the included BANS templates were so bland. These should have been free a looooong time ago.

I guess for me, I think that these new changes are great – but I’m just not as excited as a lot of other people seem to be. Mark the Niche Store Builder is enthralled it seems, and he thinks the “future looks bright” for BANS. I guess I always tend to over-analyze things and go into “what would I do if I owned BANS myself…” mode.

As Mark pointed out in his post, BANS has rapidly gone from 1,500 users to over 10,000 in the last year. On the one hand you can say that it’s been difficult for Adam and Kelvin to keep up with that kind of growth. On the other hand, as an affiliate marketer you think – do Adam and Kelvin even realize the potential (opportunities) they have?

Most online (and traditional) marketers only dream of having a product that they sold 10,000 times and having an immediate customer base.

From the BANS Marketing Perspective -

• You have a product that you sell ONE TIME and offer FREE lifetime upgrades and support for that can be installed on an UNLIMITED amount of domains. Is this a sound business model? Look – you just inherited 10,000 customers who paid one time and will never pay again!
• You have 10,000 customers that have a “base model” product. To enhance it they have to hack the code themselves, or pay a third party developer for themes, add-ons, headers, enhancements, etc.
• You have 10,000 customers that are to some degree “affiliate marketers”. Helping them with other affiliate marketing needs beyond sales and installation of a single script product would foster company growth.

The emails announcing these changes seemed a bit narrow minded, talking about everything being for the good “of furthering BANS as a product” and being an eBay affiliate. I think this misses the boat a bit. First of all – there is much more to being a successful eBay affiliate than creating a niche store with BANS software. I can make money as an eBay affiliate using WordPress plugins like BayRSS, or by using eBay’s own widgets available within EPN. I can even build eBay pages or entire affiliate sites using freely available open source software. It also seems as if they think you can’t be as successful as an eBay affiliate within setting up BANS stores.

It would seem that it would be smarter to capitalize and on the trademark “Build a Niche Store”. The term “niche store” is used by online marketers to describe setting up nearly any type of affiliate site in a specific topic. So are “niche site” and “niche blog”. I can create a niche site using a wide variety of services like goldenCAN, PopShops, Shopping.com, Chitika, Affilistore, NetShops, and a hundred others.

Adam and Kelvin don’t want you to talk about anything that’s “competition to BANS” in their member forum, so you couldn’t mention any of those other products or services there. Doesn’t that seem strange? The members forum is PRIVATE. People that haven’t already purchased BANS can’t see it, so talking about competing products (amongst existing customers) isn’t going to dissuade anyone from buying it. And if someone mentions something that causes a forum member to look into AND BUY a competiting product – WHO CARES! They already bought BANS (because they’re a forum member) AND BANS has nothing further to sell!! Get wise guys, acting this way is a bit like putting your head in the sand.

Things that would make BANS a “must-have” product and driving force for affiliate marketers

Consider this my “BANS wish list” and an open letter to both Adam and Kelvin…

Changes I would make if I were in charge of BANS

• An update adding BANS features now available in the current eBay API, like the ability to “Find Popular Searches” and “Find Reviews and Guides”
• Addition of a BANS API allowing developers to officially write BANS plugins and add-ons
• Online Marketplace for official plugins and add-ons to be sold, in addition to premium themes
• Creation of free integration plugins so BANS could be used in conjunction with open source software such as WordPress, Mambo, Drupal, Joomla, Noah’s Classifieds, MediaWiki, Aardvark’s TopSites, etc.
• Addition of a Certified Consultants directory so you can pay for BANS expertise for setup, enhancements, or custom add-ons and themes
• An expansion of the “Build a Niche Store” brand, creating products for sale to create niche stores as an amazon affiliate, or using datafeeds, or tying into other API’s – like Shopping.com, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo Search, or numerous other ones

Again…this is merely me thinking, “if BANS could be everything I wanted – what would that be…?” Hopefully in the future we will see great things, and who knows – if we’re lucky maybe they will listen to just one of my suggestions! Are you a BANS owner? What do you think?

I thought I’d post a quick comment to let you know that if you’re just reading my blog, or subscribed to my feed – you’re missing out!

There’s another part of this site (that’s gaining momentum) – and that the JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes Forum! I don’t always have time to post everything on the blog, and I kind of reserve that for longer in-depth articles. You could always follow JTPratt on Twitter, but I don’t always post their either.

When I have something short and sweet to say – I often put it in the forum.

Here’s what you missed out on today:

• How I use Ping.fm to build links
• How to build links the easy way
• What’s Coming in WordPress 2.7
• BANS re-launching next wek
• New Directory to add your Blog too

You should definitely check out the forum! The forum home, and each and every topic has it’s own RSS feed if want to get specific notifications for certain subjects.

You may be wondering how I installed a forum in my WordPress blog. If that’s the case, maybe you haven’t checked out my series 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days, because you must have missed WordPress Hack #16: Adding a Forum to WordPress!

Today you’ll learn how to perform keyword research while I review Trellian “Keyword Discovery” tool. There are many free and paid ways to do “keyword research” online, and Trellian’s service is one of the major paid services available.

This is the third installment in the new series How to Build Income Online.

I won’t go on and on as much as I did yesterday about why Keyword Research is so important – but it’s worth stating again…

There are 3 main reasons to do “Keyword Research”:

• Which keywords are best to use?
• How much traffic do they get?
• How much competition do I have?

There was a comment left on the initial post in this series this morning basically saying – “will you get traffic just by posting everyday, I didn’t get much at first, but now that I do keyword research it’s increased dramatically…”. Of course! The first post was just to get people used to the fact that you have to post all the time and build income “post by post”. Through each and every post in this series you should get better and more experienced on how to expertly craft those posts into search magnets that draw traffic to your site. That’s the goal because traffic = $$, but merely posting is the beginning.

So, we’re on Keyword Research Day #2 and I’m going to show you how to use the Keyword Discovery tool. There are two version to this tool – one is free and one is paid. You need to register for a free account to use the free one (no credit card required here).

Click the banner above to get a Free Trial account at Keyword Discovery for keyword research so you can follow along (*again – no credit card required).

Keyword Discovery has some unique options for keyword research. In addition they claim to have 36 billion unique search terms where WordTracker has 300 million. They also have keyword data in other languages, like Spanish, Dutch, and Polish. Their paid service is more per month than WordTracker, but has more features – like a keyword density tool so you can harvest the keywords competitors use on their web sites. Let’s get started…

Starting a search for keywords is easy. The first thing you notice are the numerous options that are available. You can search the “global premium database” for keywords, but you can also search various countries and markets. Also note that the bottom you can search eBay, news and shopping databases – and not pictured, the last two are specifically Google or Yahoo data. You can also choose thesaurus, including plurals, phrase match, historical, and more right off the bat. Keyword Discovery seems to have all the options baked into one easy to use interface, whereas with WordTracker yesterday – you can see they have theirs spread over various screens and tools. There are also options here to the right for “spell” (misspelling search), “related”, and “fuzzy”. I’m going to do a search for “hard drive” just like yesterday.

The numbers seem be higher and I seem to have some clearer options with Keyword Discovery vs. WordTracker. I have keywords I expected like laptop hard drive and external hard drive (second on the list today), but I also got unexpected results like “dell c 600 hard drive” and “500gb external hard drive”. I want to dig deeper in these results if I can.

In the images above I clicked on the chart icon to the right of “dell c 600 hard drive” – and look at the results. It shows that the dell c 600 hard drive phrase has really only been searched for in the last month. Is it a trend that will continue? Who knows, but I’m more interested in keywords that always get traffic. I want to dig deeper on the keyword “external hard drive”.

The graphic above is the results I get after clicking on the chart “trends” icon beside the “external hard drive” result. It looks like searches for this are increasing, which they should be as external hard drives are getting bigger, and cheaper every month.

Now, I clicked on the “market share” button at the bottom and now I see how the search traffic is split for “external hard drive” across google and Yahoo! Looks like the traffic from Ask and MSN for that keyword phrase are almost non-existant. One more thing I can do is actually click on the term “external hard drive” to get related keyword phrases that include that phrase:

This is great, because I can see if related terms get as much traffic and if I should consider them as well. It also gives me hundreds of ideas for future posts and articles. So far we’ve just looked at raw traffic information (a bit more in depth that with WordTracker). At the bottom of the keyword search results are additional options.

These icons are options, the trash can is “delete from project”, the chart is “analyze results”, the next one is “export results”, the binoculars are “search and replace”, and the last icon is “search DNS”. I’m going to “analyze results”.

Now we get some competitive analysis information like we did yesterday in WordTracker. In this chart we get KEI information (see yesterday’s lesson for explanation), but it doesn’t appear for all results. It appears the ones you see KEI for are ones somebody else recently ran, and now it’s cached. If you want KEI for certains ones you have to check the box to the left and click the “analyze” button at the bottom of the page.

I clicked all the missing results and clicked “analyze” to load them all in the graphic above. Now I have the data I need. The only thing you don’t see on this screen is an extra column that was too big for me to include to the right “predicted daily”. I think out of this list if I was going to start up a brand new site based on this info my keywords would be “external hard drive”. I know the KEI is very low and there’s a lot of competition, but there are so many options for categories, sub-pages, articles, and posts. In the column you can’t see “external hard drive” gets 480 searches per day – that sounds pretty good to me. Especially since most people searching for that term are definitely shopping.

Now I’m going to do some other types of searches using the keyword phrase I picked “external hard drive”. Next I do a spelling search on this keyword phrase:

It looks like at least 3 variations of that phrase are getting some sigificant searches every month. If I use those in posts and artices I should attract additional traffic.

Next I do a “related” results check for “external hard drive”, and while not the most significant – I do get a list of related terms that might be good in my site.

Now, I’m going to do something that I’ve only seen (so far) in the Keyword Discovery tool. I’m going to take the phrase “external hard drive” and use the “search DNS” option. What what this does:

This search takes your keyword phrase, in this case “external hard drive”, and lookes for domain name options and tells you if they’re available or not. It tells you if they are available, registered, or for sale. I think that’s an awesome time saver!

There are several competitors tools within Keyword Discovery. The first is the “X-Ref” tool. Basically it does a keyword search like the first one we did, and then if you give it one URL it will figure out how many keywords in your results match keywords on that page. It can only do this for one web page at a time. So – I would have to do a google search for “external hard drive”, and then punch in one of the top URL’s to cross reference. The first results I got was for the PCMag Reviews and Price Comparison page for “hard drives”. That didn’t seem to work for some reason – so I did it for the second result at “newegg.com”.

This is a very telling graph, because I did it on the #2 results for “external hard drive” – and they have 28 matches for the phrase “external hard drive”, and only 1 for “external hard drive case”. They don’t have any other keywords – and you can’t see it here but they only have “external hard drive” appearing once in keyword and once in meta description. None of the other phrases rank at all.

This tells me (like I said), I have a pretty good chance at ranking for some of those other keyword phrases on specific posts and pages with different terms that include our main keyword phrase.

The last competitor search I’m going to do is the “keyword density” search. I used “www.newegg.com” since they are top competition for all hard drive related searches. This graph shows us the top 10 keywords they rank use on their homepage and where they appear (title, keywords, description, link, and heading). If I did some more google searches I could find where they rank for these phrases – but this is good info as it shows how they get their rankings and where they place their keywords. Once I get my site up I can compare my URL with theirs to see how I’m doing.

The only other thing I should show you is the “industry keywords” tool in Keyword Discovery. Let’s say I start with “computers”, and on the next screen click “hardware”, then “storage”, and then “hard drives”.

In this tool I can drill down through industry categories to get as close to my keyword phrase as I can (in this case “hard drive”). What I get is a list of “industry terms” for hard drives that I otherwise may not know – AND I get their search traffic. In this graph I see that Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital are the top 3 industry terms (and manufacturers), and combined get more than 9,100 searchs per month. That’s more than our main keyword phrase “external hard drive”. With this information – if we use those 3 terms throughout our new site we can get 75% per more traffic per month.

As you can see in today’s post, keyword research isn’t easy – but the data you retrieve may last a very long time. With just a small amount of data you can amass hundreds of keywords giving your fertilizer for posts and articles, keywords, descriptions, titles, products, and more. There are, as I said, many competitors online vying for your money to sell you online keyword research tools. WordTracker and Trellian’s Keyword Discovery are the largest I know of. If you come across “Wordze” – that’s just Wordtracker in disguise, it’s the same data with a different front end. There are several niche tools for keyword research but none I’ve found as broad as these two.

If you’re going to start a site, blog, niche store, or build an online business keyword research will give you the data you need to be more informed about traffic and the competition – and in the end be more profitable. You can’t build a business on little or no research. Tomorrow I’ll cover free keyword research tools – and you can weigh how they work versus paying a monthly fee for a service like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery.

Do you understand that “keyword search” is the foundation of your online business? In my “WordTracker Review” I will show you how to get started and what tools you can try for free – and why they are important to building income online…

This is the second installment in the new series How to Build Income Online.

My first post in this series was structured purposely to get you thinking about writing about things you know about. This is helpful on many different levels. Writing about things you are experienced in helps you to come up with new ideas, it helps keep you focused, it keeps you interested – and it makes it easier when it comes time to research.

Let me give you an example. If your niche is knives and swords, and you collect knives and swords (and have for years) – you will already know the names, the brands, the types, some history, the merchants, the ins and outs of buying, how to store, how to sell, and more. You probably have an automatic years worth of articles and posts in your head. But let’s say instead that your niche is air purifiers. You have to research the brands and models, reasons to buy, health benefits, prices, merchants, aftermarket, and more.

My advice to you will always be to write about what you know, because you will always make more money at it. It will also make it easier to perform keyword research. Now that you understand that you can build income one post at a time you have to do some research around the best ways to approach it.

There are 3 main reasons to do “Keyword Research”:

• Which keywords are best to use?
• How much traffic do they get?
• How much competition do I have?

“Keyword Research” may be the most important thing you ever do if you want to build a business online. It’s probably the most overlooked, most mis-understood, underestimated part of the process. If you wonder why there are a select few individuals making a killing online (compared to the hundreds of thousands trying) – ask yourself what kind of research you’ve done to ensure a solid foundation.

It’s not only the online world that does this. I can drive up and down main street in my town and see all kinds of small businesses that closed within the first 18 months. I’ll bet money that 95% (or more) did absolutely no market research whatsoever before opening. They didn’t know their target customer, the local traffic, the local economy, or anything about how to attract, cater to, retain, and build an increasing customer base. I’ve only seen one local small business (out of maybe 20) do exceedingly well, so well in fact they are expanding within the first 2 years of business.

I know the family that owns that business – and they have money. They also own a construction business. The combination of the two made their business uber-successful for two reasons. Before they opened they had money to do two things. One was consult with experts within that industry about the market. The second was they used the family construction business to gut and renovate the business inside and out for next to nothing.

I’ve explained this to get you to understand that you’re not going to start a business online with no money at all and be successful overnight. You have to invest both time (and a little) money to get started. Let’s face it, you’re not an expert in this field – or you’d already be successful, wouldn’t you? I run across people all the time who refuse to pay any money for research tools, because they don’t understand the value of it. It’s an investment. A good online research tool gives you information you can’t get on your own, and you can use that information to make key decisions about your online business.

You are lucky, because in the brick and mortar world – if you make bad business decisions you business can close, like all those I drive by every day. Online if you aren’t successful yet, so what? The only things you’re out is your time and web hosting fees and yearly domain renewal. Hosting is cheap, it’s nothing like leasing a building. You have no payroll, you’re probably the only employee, and there are no bills besides hosting. So basically – every day’s a new day for you. You could languish online unsuccessfully for years before figuring out what it takes to build online income.

If you are going to be successful online, today could be that day for you. I’m not saying that you have to spend money on research tools to be successful online, but it helps, it’s quicker, it’s better information, and it’s money well spent. Unlike other blogs that “hype” you into buying crap you may or may not need through their affiliate links I will present to you your options and tell you exactly how I use them and what has worked for me. You will be able to “try before you buy” (and I encourage you to). Yes, the links on this page are affilate links (where applicable) – and if you do sign up I do make a small commission. It’s not my intent to “trick” you into buying something so I can profit, I want you to learn from my mistakes – and if you choose to signup my commission is a small form of payment for giving you these free tutorials online.

Now that I’ve gone through a long-winded discussion about WHY to do keyword research, let’s check out some tools. There are tons of companies vying for your business when it comes to online research, but there are only currently two contenders that I consider to be the biggest.

The first is WordTracker. I consider Wordtracker to be #1 in keyword research because of the sheer amount of data they have. If you click the banner above – you can signup up for free 7 day trial. You have to give them a credit card number, but they have made it VERY easy to cancel before your 7 days are up.

The screen above is what you see the first time you login your free trial Wordtracker account. I’ve circled the link to cancel your trial at any time before the 7 days is up and you get billed for the first month. So, you have nothing to worry about if you just want to check out Wordtracker for a week and then cancel without purchasing at all.

In the top right of the green section is the “keyword researcher”. If I want to quickly get some basic keyword information or ideas this is a great place to go. I’m going to try looking up they keywords “wireless hard drive” because that’s a post I was thinking about earlier this week.

As you can see the number of people searching specifically for “wireless hard drive” are only 2 per month. Related keywords are about the same. I’m going to try to give this search more “seed” keywords.

Now we’re getting some real results. I have some great information to write a post with. The keywords “hard drive” are searched 438 times per month. So are specific keyword phrases, like “external hard drive (407)”, “notebook hard drive (304)”, and “laptop hard drive (105)”. I focus on these three things because they are physical products I can promote as an affiliate through eBay, Commission Junction, or Amazon easily. What I could do is do further research on these words to find the most popular makers and models, but the searches are so low I probably don’t need to. This keyword search gave me other good information to go on that makes great fertilizer for post. People are searching for “hard drive data recovery (205)”, “format hard drive (134)”, and “hard drive recovery (199)”. I could also write a tutorial post about hard drive data recovery. Then I could promote hard drive products or data recovery software or services. I could write 4 posts, one about formatting drives, one about data recovery, one about laptop hard drives, and one about external drives…all from this one bit of keyword research.

This is great info, but lets dig deeper. Click on the middle “evaluate” tab…

You next have the choice of which search engine evaluation data to use. I’m going to choose google, Yahoo!, and MSN…

Once I click the “evaluate” button I get some telling information that I never would have gotten from a “free” keyword research tool.

This screen takes the results we just saw and breaks them down against the search competition (per search engine) and assigns a “KEI score” for each one. What is KEI? KEI is an acronym for “Keyword Effectiveness Index”. It’s a ranking system that weighs how popular a keyword is with the competition it has on the Internet. Supposedly the higher the score, the more profitable the keywords will be (because you have less competition). I wouldn’t say that there is no merit to this score, but there are people who will dig through keyword results simply to find keyword phrases that have a KEI of 500+ thinking they are choosing highly profitable keywords. This is especially popular among people with “niche stores”.

My advice to you is this…do not spend all day searching for high KEI keywords, but be cognisant of keywords that aren’t worth pursuing. Look at the results above. The phrase “hard drive” has KEI of zero – and for good reason. The term is so generic and broad that there are millions of competitors for it in every search engine. But look at how dramatically it falls for notebook hard drive, format hard drive, laptop hard drive, etc. There may be competition, but you CAN succeed with a blog post, mini site, or niche site in those areas.

I’ve shown you how I do quick searches, which can be done for anything from a blog post, to a niche site idea, a title, description, good keywords to use in blog comments or when link building, or in article marketing. All these things I’ll cover more in depth later in the series. If you’re using WordTracker for the first time and trying to get ideas for starting an entire online business, blog, or niche store – then go back to “home” in your WordTracker trial and do a “full search” (bottom right).

In full search mode you just have to give a single keyword phrase you want to research. In this example I used “hard drive” again to see what I would get.

Although I couldn’t show them all here, I got a list of suggested keywords a mile long. I went through and picked out all the ones I thought were relevant. The good thing about this list is – once again, I have a plethora of ideas now. The list showed things I already had like hard drive, internal and external, but it also had acronyms like ATA, IDE, SATA, SCSI, HDD and more. These are things once again that I already knew since I am very knowledgable in hard drives, but may have not thought about as keywords. And if this search were for something I knew nothing about like “central air conditioning” or something like that – this list would be littered with industry terms and words that I otherwise would have no way of finding out. There is something to be said for experience – remember?

This list also has manufacturers names in it like Seagate, Western digital, and terms like data recovery, partition, and backup. It also had terms I would not have thought of, like people searching for specific sizes of hard drives like “10GB” and “1TB”. It also had online sites listed like “newegg.com” – leading me to believe that the name of a web site might be a popular search term by itself. So I chose all the words I thought were relevant and clicked to go to “step 3″.

Depending on the choices you made in step 2, you may have to weed out some of the not-so-relevant ones here in step 3. As you can see, with my keyword combination choices for “hard” and “drive”, I got bad phrases like Hard Riddles, hard core, Fakes Hard Jennifer Aniston, and more. The cool thing is that at this point, you have two options at the bottom of the page. You can email these results to yourself for safekeeping, but like before – option 2 is to get “competition results”. You choices for competition here are even more in depth.

In addition to google, yahoo, and MSN, you can also search AlltheWeb, Ask, and Altavista. You can even search competition for the Yahoo! directory and Open Directory. But, for this step you can only choose 2 sources for competitor data at once. I’ll just do google, and Yahoo! for this search.

First we see the results from Yahoo! It says Yahoo! gets 19% of all search engine traffic. Despite the KEI numbers, laptop harddrive and notebook hard drive are search for 600+ times per month in Yahoo! But now we have a couple new things to consider – jump drives, flash drives, etc. As a matter of fact, Flash USB Drive Review (#1 result) has decent KEI and gets 163 searches per month. That may not seem like much, but those are targeted customers looking for a review before they buy a specific product.

Next we have the google results for the full search, and it says google gets 68% of all search results – which is more than 3 times Yahoo! The results are nearly identical except with higher search counts. Look at the #1 result – the KEI for “Flash USB Drive Review” is very high – and this gives us a very good picture of what to expect.

So, based on the two kinds of Wordtracker searches I just showed you – look at all the competitive data and analysis you can do in a relatively short period of time. You can view traffic, competition, and get and unbelievable amount of suggestions for keywords, topics, makes, models, manufacturers, industry terms, and more.

Is this all you can do with WordTracker? By no means…you can setup “projects” to save results for campaigns you’re working on over time. You can look at both long and short term reports for the top 1,000 keywords in the world. I didn’t even go over the “Keyword Universe” tool that suggest terms using lateral search and a Thesaurus. You also get free access to “Wordtracker Academy” where you can find free articles, tips, tricks, and case studies to get even more ideas from.

I have written hundreds of successful blog posts based on keywords I got from WordTracker. I have re-written blog posts and made them profitable using keywords from WordTracker. I have even changed the title name and catch phrase of entire blogs dramatically increasing my traffic using keyword I got from WordTracker. I have purchased in the past their daily, monthly, and 6 month subscriptions and each has paid for itself. I recommend you try the free seven day trial and use it for yourself. You have nothing to lose and can easily cancel before you are billed as I previously showed you.

The second major keyword research tool online is “Trellian’s Keyword Discovery” which also has a free trial – and we’ll cover that tomorrow in Day 2 of Keyword Research.

Anyone can make money online – but money doesn’t grow on trees. You can plant your own seeds online though, and over time they will grow a sustainable stream of income. Here are 5 steps you can use to plant those seeds for maximum growth.

This is the first installment in the new series How to Build Income Online.

I want to talk to you about a way that anyone can start building income online. Anyone. If you can search google – you can do this. The world of “making money online” can be simply overwhelming and you can get caught up trying to learn too many things when I firmly believe you should concentrate on the basics in the beginning and learn everything else as you go. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you may have been earning money online for quite some time. Think of this post as the one you never read before you “figured it out”. Think of it as the one to point people to who ask you how to make money online. Being the beginning of the “building income online” series – I have to talk to all those just starting out…

Step #1: Write About What You Know

I’m assuming already that if you’re reading this post on this site you already have a blog. The most important advice I can give anyone trying to earn money on the web is to stick to writing about what you know. Don’t try and write about things that cost a lot of money just because you think you’ll make more money. Until you get some experience under your belt managing, monetizing, and marketing a blog – just stick to what you know for at least 6 – 10 months. You will learn more about blogging as you go, but by sticking to things you have lots of experience in and are passionate about you will let your expertise carry you along the way.

I read a forum post the other day where the poster said “a sale is the number one action per page – period”. I don’t think that kind of mentality will help you in the long run, mainly because the average person is turned off by being “sold” and marketed to every second – they even become blind to it after awhile. The number one action per page should be giving people relevant information each and every time they visit your blog or web site. Part of that might be a sale – but people aren’t always shopping are they? You goal is to reach visitors that like the topics you write about that will return on a regular basis.

In marketing terms this is what they call “branding”. You should just see it as a way to make friends online. You’re not looking to become the next Bob Villa, but if your trade is carpentry – people that visit your blog over time will come to know you as the guy that can help build cool projects, and has an affinity for beer and football. It doesn’t matter who you are – anyone can do this, Grandpa can write about the differences between the 50′s and today and gardening and Mom can write about how to plan meals and a budget for a household of 5 while working in the office.

I could teach you all kinds of things about “online marketing”, but you don’t need any of that to get started or to be successful. Write a list of things you know how to do well, and if somebody were in front of you right now you could teach them. That’s what you can blog about – and you should write in a style that is conversational. Write as if you were talking to a person right in front of you. Over time write about things that you like as if you had a penpal and were trying to get to know them. By doing these things you will be creating truly “original content”.

Some of the best examples of blogs that started out this way are Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, and EZ DIY Electricity.

Step #2: Add Relevant Content and Resources

The Internet is literally clogged with information. The key to turn a one-time visitor into a repeat visitor is to surprise them with a little “cache” of information. Give them more than they expected and a reason to remember you as a resource. Let’s say I’m writing a post about my new digital camera. First I’ll write about how I decided it was the best purchase for me. I may link to or quote reviews I read at other web sites and include a product picture. If YouTube has a video demo of the camera, I’ll include that. Sometimes what you’re writing about isn’t a product at all – maybe it’s TV show or a physical place. Use online resources to complement your post.

The most used resources of mine are usually YouTube and Wikipedia. These are followed close behind by Google Blog Search and Google Image Search. More importantly, most of my posts are peppered with links to others sites where people can read about either where I got the idea or what others think about that topic. Do not be afraid to link to or quote competitors (big or small), and good blog has lots of outgoing links. Your visitors will return, and other blogs will begin to link back to you (and even read your blog).

One of my best examples on how to do this is my post a few months back: Asus EEE PC Review.

Step #3: Monetize Every Post with Something Relevant

Think of every post as a seed that you plant in a garden. Over time you expect it to sprout into a plant and bear fruit. Some seeds will never spout, others will grow slowly, and some will even shoot up higher than all the rest beyond your wildest expectations. Every time you write a post you have the ability before and after the content (and sometimes within it) to complement it with a relevant and tasteful ad. I’ll give you three easy ways to plant seeds.

Adsense Ads: The easiest way to monetize a blog post is with adsense, because google can intuitively read your content and place highly targeted ads on your blog. If you have an ad block above every post you will eventually build pennies per day into $1-$5 per day in passive income. A well written blog with 4-5 new posts every week can easily make monthly income with fewer than 100 visitors per day.

eBay Auctions: Nearly anything is for sale on eBay and nearly everyone has used it at one time or another. Why not add a few live relevant eBay auctions to your post? You can make really good money promoting eBay auctions – I’ll give you a link at the end of this post to find how to signup and also how to add auctions to blog posts.

A good example (that has paid me well) for monetizing relevant content is my post on: Network Storage

Other Merchants:

Two of the largest affiliate programs in the world are Commission Junction and Amazon. Amazon sells nearly everything, and you can promote any product they sell. Through Commission Junction you can promote thousands of merchants from goDaddy to H&R Block. Use one or both of these affiliate programs you could add nearly any product at the end of a blog post, and earn a commission for sales through it.

Most of these programs require a working web site or blog with at least some minimal content on it in order to approve your application, so note that beore you apply. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up through these links:
Google Adsense
eBay Parter Network
Commission Junction
Amazon Associates

There are other affiliates you should sign up for (later). For now – these are the largest and most well known ones, get signed up now if you already aren’t.

Step #4: Lather, Rinse, and Repeat Posting

I cannot stress enough the importance of persistence. It is my greatest weakness – not being diligent enough. Remember in high school your economics teacher who told you if you saved $5 per week for 20 years it would (with interest) turn into $1 million dollars? I don’t know a single person that managed to do that. I can guarantee you that if you post 4-5 quality posts per week on a blog, add some relevant resources, and monetize with relevant products – within 6 months you will be making monthly income. I’m not going to lie and say “you will be a millionaire” – you won’t. But you should be earning at that point some kind of monthly check. With 4-5 posts per week at the 6 month point you should have about 100+ posts on your blog.

If you wrote in the conversational style that I told you to – about topics you know best, you will have attracted some good stable organic search engine traffic – in fact you should at that point have about 100+ regular readers and/or subscribers to your RSS feed. Even if you did nothing at all beyond what I said in this post you should be getting some kind of small monthly check of some kind.

Step #5: Learn As You Go

I said if you did nothing more than this post you would make money. Sheer persistence in posting will earn you money by default. But if you only spend about 5-6 hours per week learning more about online marketing you could be making say $1,000 per month (like me) instead of say $100. You will get better over time and eventually (if you stick with it) be able to earn enough per month to work permanently for yourself. Just remember, only a select few of you will get this far.

Think about it like school. If you could attach a dollar amount to education and be guaranteed a certain salary dependant on how much time you put into your education – would you have gone farther? What if high school was worth $25,000 per year, a 4 year college degree was $50,000, a Master’s degree was $100,000, and a doctorate was worth $250,000 per year (for the rest of your life)? Which level would you strive for? Would you stop before reaching the top?

Nothing comes for free, and working online is no different. There is no magic software to make you into a millionaire overnight, and a hundred shiny ebooks won’t make you into a “guru”. The only guarantee I can give you is that you more you learn, the more you’ll make. Always remember, if it sounds too good to be true – it probably is. Be sure to read blogs and take advice from online mentors who seem honest and transparent, revealing their online struggles as they go to help you pave you own way to building a sustainable monthly income.

Who Am I?

My name is John Pratt and you’re reading my blog is JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes. If you want to “learn as you go” as I stated in the last point – my blog has hundreds of posts that can help you with the details of building online income through blogging. The home page is a great place to start, but if you were interested in knowing more about placing eBay auctions in your blog posts – you might want to visit my post on WordPress eBay Plugin BayRSS for now.

Be sure to follow the Build Income Online Series for detailed posts about what types of web sites you can build, which affiliate programs to promote, and how to get traffic to them to build monthly pay checks!