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Knowing your Niche Market is the First Step to Selling!

May 16, 2008 | 20 Comments

Is your market too flooded with choices? Knowing your Niche market is KeyKnowing your Niche Market is by far, one of the most important steps in avoiding failure with Build a Niche Store or any niche website! Number 3 of the 20 Reasons you will Fail with Build a Niche Store… You Don’t Research your Niche!
image courtesy of: http://www.inflagrantecollecto.info/

In this post, we will look at several of the factors you need to consider when looking into the development of a new niche website. In less than 30 minutes, you will know whether or not a niche is even worth pursuing before you go out and buy that new domain name or get started with hours of development work.

Yesterday, I talked a bit about your Affiliate Website Budget as a whole and determined a few key monthly expenses. Before you ever start working on a site, you need to determine a baseline for profitability, so you have an idea of how much affiliate revenue the site will need to earn, in order to break even.

  1. You will have a fixed monthly expense of $9.95 for Hosting with HostGator for an unlimited number of websites. If this is your first and only, you need to pay the full amount from earnings on this site alone. I will assume for the purpose of this exercise, you will have 10 sites total on this account.
  2. Your domain name will cost at least $7.15 for the first year through GoDaddy
  3. You will need to spend a few dollars on site promotion, $15.00 for directory submissions through a place like SubmitEdge
  4. Your TIME is worth something, for the sake of this post, lets use $20/hour, but we won’t count your initial development time, only the time you need to spend each month for maintenance of the site. The initial development time is sweat equity, required for almost ANYTHING you do to make money! Why am I using $20/hour versus the $50-$100 I spoke about yesterday? When you start any job, you have to start at the bottom and earn your way up the ladder! After you become more efficient doing this, you would quickly see that hourly number rise!

Niche Site Breakeven Point - How Much do I Need to Earn on this Niche Site in Order to Make Money?

Using the figures above as a broad baseline, I can determine that in order for this site to recognize any profit, I need it to earn AT LEAST $348.55 in 12 months! How did I come to that number? 

  1. .95 cents a month for hosting x 12 months = $11.40
  2. $7.15 for 1 year domain registration
  3. $15.00 for Directory submissions every other month for the first year = $90.00
  4. 1 hour a month at $20/hour = $240 for the year. (You can adjust this figure up or down, according to what YOU want to earn hourly)

Breakeven Point: $11.40 (Hosting) + $7.15 (Domain) + $90.00 (Directory Submissions) + $200.00 $240.00 (Your time) = $348.55 / Year
If you chose to purchase a keyword research tool or additional services, you need to add the portion of the cost for this single site into the equation as well.

Niche Site Demand - Do People even need Your Niche Market Site?

This is where you start researching the demand for your niche market! Assume for the sake of this exercise that you are only going to attract a small number of the search visitors for the first year as your site grows, hopefully you can get in front of 2.5% of the total! Of that 2.5%, only a small number are actually going to convert to sales… lets shoot for 10% of the visitors converting to a buyer. If you are using free research tools, this does become a bit harder to measure at this point as Google and several others do not provide raw numbers you could use for figures.

I am not going to do the actual research for this, but instead provide a set of values as an example in the broad market of “iphones”. In order to narrow the market, I use WordTrackerto gather my long tail phrases with little to no competition and find that there are more than 15,000 monthly searches across 100 very specific longtail phrases. That tells me that I could hope to see 375 monthly visitors on average for the first year, with 37 converting sales each month!

  1. 15,000 specific monthly searches X 2.5% = 375 monthly visitors X 10% = 37 conversions.

Niche Market Average Selling Price - Is it even Profitable?

Thus far, we know that we may only see 375 monthly visitors and get only 37 sales from them, now we need to find out what our niche product will produce for an average selling price and determine our cut of the commission from the affiliate sale. For this, I use Terapeak! You can even use their free tools to get this figure, but they only provide 14 days of history… For the sake of this, I used the term iPhone in the search box and the results are:

  1. $129.91 Average Selling Price
  2. 49,000 +/- Monthly Sales Unit Volume

After I know the average selling price and see that there is sufficient sales volume (More than 375 in this case) I head over to an eBay fee calculator to determine what my cut would be.

  1. Visit this site and insert the average selling price in the opening and closing price boxes.
  2. Remove the PayPal fee checkbox and click on calculate fees.
  3. $11.88 is the total eBay fee for this exercise, of which we get 50% or $5.94 per sale.
  4. $5.94 per sale X 37 Sales = $219.00 Per Month

ACRU or Active Confirmed Registered Users also bring a little money to our earnings! I was in the crowd that thought EVERYONE had an eBay account, again, I was wrong! Up until the EPN changeover, my ACRU per lead ratio was in the 2-3 % range. Meaning that for every 100 people I sent to buy on eBay, 2-3 of them were new accounts. Every ACRU = $25.00

  1. 2% of 37 buyers is roughly 1 new ACRU or $25.00

Niche Website Earnings with eBay Affiliate Program $244.00 per Month

In todays post about Knowing your Niche Market:

  • We have determined that we CAN make money with our new store.
  • Early on, we determined that in order to make this a Profitable Niche Store, we needed to earn at least, $348.55 in the first year.
  • After researching the market with WordTracker, we were able to see that we can expect 37 sales each month based on the search demand of our market.
  • When we multiplied the sales volume with the average selling price and that lonely ACRU, we found that our site would earn approximately $244.00 every month, or a total of $2928.00 for the year!

After figuring all of our numbers, we will see a net profit of $215.00 per month!

Now that we know we can make money… its time to get the domain and get started! Split that profit down the middle and use $105 or so to both promote this site more and start developing new sites!

How do you decide whether or not a Niche Market will be profitable?

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Affiliate Website Budget - Invest to Find Success!

May 15, 2008 | 15 Comments

Budget for Affiliate WebsitesYesterday, I started a new series of posts aimed at the 20 Reasons you will FAIL with Build a Niche Store. Today, I will cover reason #2, setting a Budget for Affiliate Website Marketing! In order to earn money on the Internet, you do NOT have to spend an arm and a leg to get started, but the amount you DO spend will be reflected in your earnings along the way!

I get quite a few questions asking about about which directory submitter software to buy, which keyword research tools to buy etc, the bottom line is that you don’t HAVE to purchase anything except the software, hosting and a domain name, aside from that… the rest is up to your budget and the amount of work you want to do!

Assume for a moment you only have $200 to invest in your affiliate website budget in order to get started with Build a Niche Store for the first month. Where will that money go?

Affiliate Website Budget - Must Spend $114.10
The list below represents what you MUST have in order to get started!

$97.00 is going to cover the Build a Niche Store Software
One of the biggest benefits of this however, is that you can create unlimited affiliate websites for that single cost. You will never need to buy it again and updates (while time consuming) are free for the life of the product!

$7.15 for your first Domain Name at GoDaddy
I use GoDaddy for all of my domain names primarily due to the ease of management and discount codes that are always readily available here! Using OYH3 takes $3 off every .com and .com renewals! Domain names can be registered for any number of years… there are actually benefits to registering longer than just one year (more below) but 1 year is the minimum!

$9.95 each month for HostGator Website Hosting
Now that you have the software and a domain name, you have to have a hosting system, or webhost, in order to make your content available on the Internet. HostGatoroffers some of the most flexible hosting you can find and has a wide basket of free tools like blogs, ecommerce, forums, etc, ready to install on your site!

Affiliate Budget Surplus: $85.90

Since you have a few dollars left over for the first month, where could it be best spent? The items below are not required to get started, but if you do not do research for your site, you may as well fling poo at the wall and wait to see what sticks!

$14.30 To Extend your Domain Registration to 3 Years!
Google actually holds a patent that has a reference to this. On page 2, section [0099] is says:

  • Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.
Keyword Research is Required - There are Paid and Free Keyword Research Tools. The most accurate metrics come from the paid tools. (go figure!) If you were a Mechanic or Chef for a living, you would need to have a set of tools or pans in order to do your job. Internet Marketing is no different… you can struggle along with substandard tools or invest in the tools of professionals. Can you imagine swapping a car engine with only 1 adjustable wrench?
$59/Month or $329 Annually: WordTracker Keyword Research - Since 1997, WT has been a consistent leader in keyword research. I have used WT for several years and find that my results come the quickest with WordTracker. WordTracker also provides a Free Research Tool you can use to test the waters…
Free: Google Adwords Suggestion Tool - If you are going to use ANY free tool, go direct to the reason we are doing this! Google does not provide exact metrics with raw numbers, but the slider charts are a good start if you do nothing else!
$24.95/Month or $197 Annually:  TeraPeak Auction Research - Since we are promoting eBay Auctions, it only makes sense to use their own metrics! There is also a FREE Research tool available through terapeak that provides basic information to get you started! Just go to TeraPeak and click on Free Research on the top menu!

I only list the three services above for good reasons! While I have my own subscriptions to 4 different keyword research tools, WordTracker always provides the most consistent and best results in my opinion! If I only had $60 in my budget for research tools, WordTracker would be choice! If I had NO budget for research, I would use the Google suggestion tool. For the product or Niche Research, TeraPeak is the only choice since their data comes from the exact marketplace we are building our fortunes with!

Monthly Expenses
After the initial investment for the Build a Niche Store software, you will have a monthly expenses.

  • $9.95 Hostgator Hosting
  • $59.00 if you choose to use a tool like WordTracker

See how easy that is? If you chose not to use any research tools, ALL you have to spend is the cost for your hosting account! As you begin expanding your pool of websites, you will incur domain name registration costs, but the level at which you add new sites can be controlled by your own ambitions!

Time is Money - Don’t Waste Either!

Everyone should be able to determine a dollar amount to what they think their time is worth. Personally, I consider my own time worth $50-$100 per hour depending on the project! It may sound like a large amount but when you consider everything it takes to run a business, its not much! (Research self employment tax) The point is… if you are spending 2 hours performing a task that can be purchased for $15.00, why? In the beginning of your adventure into affiliate marketing, you may think it is best to do all of things yourself and in some cases, if you have never done things like directory submissions before, it may be beneficial to at least know how they are done.

The items below are very nice to budget for:

$10-$15 for 100 PR2 or Higher Directory Submissions for each Site.
Yes, they make directory submission software… and it works well! The problem is that it takes quite a bit of time to keep the software up to date, enter the site information into the software, track the submissions etc. I think I used a directory submitter only one or two times, before I realized that paying someone $15.00 to do it for me was quite a bargain! It took 5 minutes to send them the information… and I was done with it! Within a few days I got a nice report with 110 directories that received my submission, all sorted by PR!

$10-$50 for Aged Domains
There are many places on the web to buy domain names people no longer want! For whatever reason, there are 90,000+ domains that expire every day! Some are 1 year old, some are 15 years old… I manage an ecommerce site for a wholesale closeout dealer who had 2 domains for 15 years. They always pointed the unpopular domain name at their primary site and used it for email purposes. When they got a renewal notice, they didn’t take heed to the warning that it was going to expire and let it go! It was picked up on a auction site for $35.00 and was an IMMEDIATE hit for the new owner! If you can find a deal on an aged domain, Buy It!

$20-$50 / Month for High Speed Internet Access
I thought everyone had high speed access and I was wrong! Since the beginning of this blog, I have seen hundreds of emails from dial-up users asking about posting the videos in text format. High Speed access is not required, but looking back at the “time is money” statement, when it takes 3 hours to upload a 5 mb file… you will quickly realize the benefit!

Ongoing Monthly Budget - How to Spend Your Earnings!

Kim will be the first one to tell you that I am a firm believer in reinvesting at least 50% of my gross earnings back into the business during the growth process! If we earn $100, I have already spent $25 and have a plan in place for the other $25!

When I review earnings for a given period of time, I first look to determine my most profitable site and decide what can be done to help it grow even more popular! If I need to get content, I may pay a Ghostwriter to provide custom articles that can be submitted to article directories. If I need more inbound quality links, I look to one of my resources for farming relevant websites and work out a linking strategy. For example if the site earns $150 in a month, I will reinvest the following:

  • $30 on 3-4 custom articles which I provide the topics and target phrases
  • $25 for 25 1-way highly relevant inbound links to 5 different site pages
  • $25 for a new niche website domain name, focusing on the most popular category of the existing site!

When you find a niche that works… invest in it! The bottom line in your affiliate website budget is that it will cost you at least:

  • $114.10 to get started with Build a Niche Store
  • $60 each month to equip yourself with the tools to succeed
  • 35-75% of your monthly earnings, to reinvest back into your business.

What else do YOU plan for in your affiliate website budget?

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20 Reasons You Will Fail with Build a Niche Store

May 14, 2008 | 16 Comments

I’m always asked… How can I Succeed with Build a Niche Store? Over the past months, I have devoted many posts to ways you can find success with BANS, so I thought I would write this post explaining the 20 Reasons You Will Fail with BANS!

I will follow up with a new post every day, explaining how to overcome every one of these reasons! It may be a good time to Subscribe to my feed for email updates!

  1. You think Affiliate Marketing will help you Get Rich Quick!
    Face it, there are no Get Rich Quick schemes… everything takes time!
    Read more about Growing DollaGreens!
  2. You Expect StockBroker Earnings on a ShoeString Budget!
    You cannot build a business with no budget! While building an affiliate empire with BANS is not expensive, it cannot be done for free!
    Read More about: Affiliate Website Budget
  3. You Don’t Research Your Niche!
    Everything starts with Research! Just like every other aspect of a business, you have to do some basic research. Read More about: Knowing your Niche Market
  4. You Don’t Focus on Your Niche!
    Just as bad as not researching your niche, straying from your niche market can be just as bad! Why confuse your visitors with information or Ads unrelated to your target buyers?
    Read More about: Feeding your Target Visitors
  5. Your Spend Too Much Time on a Niche Paying Pennies versus Dollars!
    If you can toss up a $10/sale site (0.25 cents commission) in a market with little to know competition, do it! Don’t however devote countless hours to the site expecting stellar earnings!
    Read More about: Finding the Right Niche Market (coming soon)
  6. You have Too Much Content on your Sales Pages!
    If you have a sales page on your BANS site with more than 150 “Related” words above the listings, put that junk on a content page! Just because you have the ability to add content to sales pages does not mean you have to do overdo it!
    Read more about: Building a BANS Site that Sells! (coming soon)
  7. You have Too Little Content on Your Site!
    If you install Build a Niche Store and don’t spend time adding targeted information based content, you might as well pull the arm of a slot machine!
    Read More about: Adding Relevant Content to your Niche Site & Niche Store Writer Review | Dealing with BANS Duplicate Content
  8. Your Site Looks like an Advertisement!
    Do you have more banners and ads than you do product listings?
    Read More about: Don’t bite the Affiliate Program that Feeds you! (coming soon)
  9. You Have Too FEW or Too MANY Categories on your Site!
    Unless your site is about USB Humping Dogs- you wont survive with 1 sales category! Likewise, having 750 pages in your sitemap is only good if they are all about your niche market!
    Read More about: Keeping your Site Niche Focused! (coming soon)
  10. You Don’t Make Changes to EVERY PAGE of Your Site!
    Simple… If your site has 100 identical pages to another site, both lose!
    Read More about: Make your Affiliate Site Stand out from the Crowd! (coming soon)
  11. You Don’t Promote Your Site, Even Just a Little!
    Would you Build a physical store in the middle of North Dakota, 500 miles from ANYONE, without at least advertising that it exists? If you don’t promote your site just a little, why bother building it?
    Read More about: A Poor Link Strategy is better than None at All!
  12. You Don’t Check Your Site Logs!
    Links bring spiders… Spiders and Content bring visitors… Do you know is if any of the above are coming at all? Using Site Logs to Generate MORE Traffic!
    Read More about: Understanding site logs for an Affiliate Website
  13. You Check Your Stats TOO Often!
    How many times each day do you login to and check stats/earnings? Unless you ran a special promotion of some type, once a day is almost TOO MUCH! Besides, seeing that you earned $100 in a 3 days is alot more promising and encouraging than earning $3 at 8am, $2 at 10am, $6 at 9pm…. repeat every day!
    Read more about: Eliminating Distractions so you can get Work Done!
  14. You Think this is Too Hard for Someone with no Programming Experience!
    If you can read this post - you can Build a Niche Store and start earning money! You didn’t know how to ride a bike until you tried and even then, you needed training wheels and fell off a few times!
    Read More about: Affiliate Marketing made Easy, Even a Caveman can do it!
  15. You Give Up Too Soon!
    This should have been #1, #4 and several others in the list of reasons you will fail! If you have not followed your plan for at least 6-12 months, you won’t know if it would have worked or not! Heck, it takes 9 months for a baby to come into the world… you MUST have staying power!
    Read More about: 12 Months to Financial Independence with Affiliate Websites
  16. Your Site loads Too Slowly!
    Count the “Mississippi’s” as your site loads. If you get to “5 Mississippi” you are losing more than just visitors, search engine spiders don’t like you either!
    Read More about: Ways to make your BANS Affiliate Site Load faster!
  17. Your Target Keywords and Phrases are Too Generic!
    Are you targeting common one-word terms like “phone” or “car”? If so, grab a ticket, get in line and come back in 15 years! Oh yeah, keep working on your site the entire time… and you may get in the top 100 before you come back!
    Read More about:Longtail keyphrases for Affiliate Websites
  18. You Don’t Have a Plan
    Would you build a house with no blueprint? How about assembling that new christmas gift monster truck for your 3 year old? Without a plan, you are just wasting your time! Even a simple plan can help you succeed!
    Read More about: Simple Plans for Affiliate Websites
  19. You Don’t Follow Your Plan, or are unwilling to change it!
    Following a set of guidelines assures you that everything needed to succeed is done at every step of the way! You can’t put on the roof until the walls are built! Just as important, if your not willing to flex a bit, every house is going to look exactly the same!!
    Read more about: Affiliate Marketing changes every Day - Do You?
  20. You Don’t Even use Build a Niche Store!
    If you are not using Build a Niche Store to launch and grow affiliate websites, why? Why wouldn’t you want to use one of the easiest and most effective ebay Affiliate Software programs on the market? With more than 27,000 eBay categories and an unlimited amount of Niche Markets within each category, What are you Waiting for?

Over the next 2-3 weeks, I will be running all 20 of these reasons in their own posts! Don’t Fail with Build a Niche Store when you don’t have to!

Mark

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eBay Partner Network Kicking Affiliates in the Face!

May 14, 2008 | 20 Comments

eBay EPN Kick in the FaceHow much time have YOU lost since the April 1st changeover from CJ to the new eBay EPN affiliate program? I guess a better question would be: How Much Money has the EPN COST You?

Image courtesy of: www.yamakai.org

We are now 6 weeks into the new eBay Partner Network and there is no question on my end that something is very wrong! Like many others, I want to give this new program time to work out any bumps and issues that eBay may not have planned on, but the general consensus on the EPN forum is that the new program is not tracking correctly. My own site performance metrics tell me the same story…

Do you think it is only BANS sites affected by the change… think again! After only 30 minutes of reading over at the forum, you will soon see that this is affecting everyone from Build a Niche Store users to long time affiliates with active sites several years old!

I read one post where a user showed historical data from CJ where one of his sites earned an average of 15-20 ACRU’s every day for the past 16 months, since April 1st, his click volume has remained constant, yet his ACRU’s have declined to less than 1-2 a day! eBays answer… “Nothing is Wrong”(Kick in the Face!) This is the one area that eBay really needs to improve… the communication to its so called “Partners” in the affiliate program is non-existent! Aside from the canned, point and click answer’s you get when asking them a question, they have no communication plan to address the concerns of the affiliates. This alone will cause people to leave for greener pastures… I mean, if something is wrong, at least address the issue and let us know you are working on it! If nothing is wrong, provide an explanation for the differences we are all seeing in our metrics! Ignoring the forum posts is just another kick…

In my own case, I have one specific site that steadily earns and I could always count on 2-4 ACRU’s from this site every week! The site has earned more than $400 every month since last October and I was very excited about the new EPN swap, so I could grab that extra 5% at the end of April! Since switching… the opposite has occurred.

CJ Stats, March 2008 for One Auto Based Site:(AWStats showed 4045 Visitors / 20,175 PageViews)

  • 5246 Clicks
  • 29 Sales
  • 11 ACRU’s
  • $466.63 Total Earnings ($191.63 not counting ACRU)
  • $11.24 EPC

EPN Stats, April 2008, Same Site: (AWStats showed 4403 Visitors / 29,334 PageViews)

  • 6130 Clicks (16% increase)
  • 122 Bids
  • 34 Winning Bids (17% increase)
  • 0 ACRU’s
  • $193.68 total earnings (1% increase)
  • $5.69 EPC

After seeing these metrics, I am not giving up on the EPN and neither should you! The difference in the two stats above is strictly on the ACRU side and in the month of May, the site HAS registered one new ACRU so far. Not what I have historically seen, but still a move in the right direction, and worth the time to let run for a few more months before making any drastic changes! I am trending for more bids and clicks on the same site which is in line with the traffic seen in the logs.

So, how do you know if EPN is working right for you?

  1. Look at your Site Traffic: Has it increased, decreased or remained the same? Check your AWStats to make sure!
  2. Count your Clicks: Same question… are they relatively the same or have you seen a noticeable change one way or another?
  3. ACRU’s - Look through your historical CJ data and check to see if there was a sudden drop when you switched to EPN.

If the first two of these measurable stats have moved in the same direction, up or down, it is nothing to do with the EPN changeover! If traffic was down, chances are that earnings will be down as well! The same holds true for the clicks… fewer clicks = fewer bids = less affiliate commission!

The third metric concerning ACRU conversions is one I do not have the answer to! Just like everyone else who has seen the issue of ACRU’s not being recorded… I too, have received the canned email response and a big old eBay Affiliate Kick in the Face!

I think I already know the answer… but how have your eBay Affiliate sites been performing?

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SEO for Affiliate Websites - Don’t Get Links from a Cemetary!

May 13, 2008 | 11 Comments

A few days ago, Jeremy published a post over at Shoemoney titled: SEO Has no Future. As you can imagine, every time he posts about SEO… the comments tend to carry on for several days during a sometimes heated debate, this was definitely no exception! The problem with his post is that what he talks about has very little to do with actual SEO and more to do with search engine marketing, or SEM.

SEO itself is considered as EVERYTHING you do to help your site rank better in search engines. From your initial research to layout of your content and ultimately, developing a link strategy to gain more pagerank, everything you do on the site to attract visitors from search engines is considered SEO. By saying that SEO has no Future (great linkbait title) as he does in his post, it would be too easy for someone to think they can just put up content, get some social bookmarking love and succeed. I hate to say it… but it’s wrong!

Looking at every aspect of SEO and in our case, how it can affect an Affiliate Website, there was one very valid point in his article… Search Engine Marketing, or SEM is likely going to be the first to die! If you have been following along this blog for a while, you probably noticed that I rarely talk about getting links from places like USFreeAds or other types of “Get links Quick” places. I think I posted one article about getting 10,000 links in one day as part of a test on one of my own sites and that is about it, aside from directory listings for BANS sites. The main reason I avoid these types of posts is that the practice of building links, just to have links, is a huge waste of timeand will likely become a non-issue in search rankings at some point! I cannot count the hours and days I have spent on inbound linking for various websites… only to have the links discounted in the longrun! At the time, I was getting links from pages designed for links to other websites which became known as link farms… today, you might as well call them link Cemeteries!

Google may not have a great way to do it yet, but you can bet that at some point, they will have fine tuned the algorithm to completely discount reciprocal or even one way links, that were created for the sole purpose of attracting search engines and increasing pagerank! In the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it even says so:

Don’t participate in link schemesdesigned to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

I suggest everyone actually spend an hour or so reading through ALL of the Webmaster Guidelines, paying close attention to the sections on link schemes and affiliate websites. EVERYTHING you wanted to know about succeeding with a BANS site is listed in these guidelines… Some of the more notable guidelines that DIRECTLY affect BANS:

  • Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
  • Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
  • Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
  • Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
  • Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
  • Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
  • If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
  • It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest. In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Overall, SEO from a technical standpoint will ALWAYS be needed on every website and every page you create! SEM, or marketing of that website for inbound links on the other hand… has always been a waste of time!

The bottom line of ANY link building strategy… no-cost directory listings are GOOD! Directories actually have a purpose in that they help organize the Internet like a phonebook.

If you DO go out link farming, get those links from RELEVANT websites with existing pagerank and authority. If you are going to a site for the sole purpose of an inbound link, you are wasting your time! Don’t get links from a Cemetery!

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