Internet & Affiliate Marketing News

If you want to get ahead of everyone else in the web 2.0 online game then watch this video from Gary Vaynerchuk below. It’s absolutely amazing and so true. The dude is right on the money.

You can also check out his blog at http://garyvaynerchuk.com/

The part where he says “The Gate Keepers Are No Longer In Control” is something you really want to pay close attention to. The internet changed everything, and millionaires are being made every single day. You don’t need any media attention, managers, or some huge start up capital. You can build your brand from home using a blog and a camera. The big corporations don’t even know what hit them yet. They don’t control shit anymore.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you watch the entire video TWICE and check out Gary’s blog. I bookmarked it

Take care!

OK, today I am going to show you guys how to easily install a fully optimized SEO Wordpress blog. It’s very easy and you don’t have to buy anything. All you have to do is download some plugins and install them on your Wordpress installation.

So let’s start from the beginning.

Step #1 – Install your Wordpress blog

Go to the download page and get the latest version of Wordpress. If you want your blog to be the main site then don’t install it in a “blog” folder. Just upload all the files to your main public_html folder and run the installation.

Step #2 – Once the blog is installed you want to edit your permalink structure. When you login to your wordpress blog go to settings and choose the “Permalinks” tab. If you have just installed your blog I recommend that you choose the “Custom Structure” option and set it so it’s only “/%postname%/”. Make sure that your host allows the rewrite rules in your htaccess file.

The reason for setting the permalinks this way is so your post pages look like this: www.yourdomain.com/post-name

This is the ultimate url structure you want on your site to get higher rankings.

Step #3 – Let’s Download The Weapons Of Mass Destruction – Installing Plugins

Ok, when you install your blog it has some things that needs to be changed like the titles of all your posts and pages. Wordpress ads your blog name to all posts pages at the beginning of the title so you want that to be removed. Also you want to add description and keyword meta tags to all your blog pages. You are going to need an xml sitemap plus better linking infrastructure across all your post pages.

Here are the main plugins that you should get started with:

Google Sitemaps Plugin – Great plugin that is a must-have. It will automatically generate xml sitemap for your blog and ping Google everytime you update your blog with new post. You can download it here.

HeadSpace2 – Very cool pluing that will allow you to control all the meta tags like custom titles, tags, description of your pages etc. I highly recommend you have it on your blog. Get it here

Related Entries Plugin – This plugin is also a must-have if you want to increase the activity of the Googlebot on your site. It will help Google index all your post pages but also pass page rank across your pages and help them rank better. You can download from this site

SEO Title Tag – This plugin also allows you to control titles of your blog posts. If you already installed HeadSpace2 then you might not need this one, but I have it on my blog. You can get that one here

Social Bookmarks Plugin – Let your visitors get traffic for you with this plugin plus build links for free. You should always have some kind of bookmark plugin on your blog and I like this one so go ahead and download it now.

OK so that’s basically it. Install all those plugins on your blog and set up your permalinks right. Also make sure you set your blog to ping these sites after you make a post:


http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/


You should be set now. Start posting some new content regularly and concentrate on building links to your new blog.

Next thing you want to do is get a new theme for your blog, and do some more customization. You want to make things visible for your readers like the feed subscribe button and bookmark links.

So that’s basically it. That should get your started and if you keep up with new content and link building you should start receiving traffic within couple of weeks.

I decided to get into the ringtones! I am already running some profitable CPA offers but kinda always stayed away from ringtones.  I thought there was too much competition in it, but finally decided to give it a try and see how it goes. I am going to drive traffic strictly from Adwords and nothing else.

I have put together a specific plan of attack. I am already working on some landing pages and getting some keyword research done. This is going to be an exciting ride

I will report back with my results and let you know if the campaign was profitable or not. I have looked at many ringtone CPA offers. The one I am thinking about testing out is at AzoogleAds.

By the way, just to let you know I am not going to bid on “ringtones” keywords. I am trying to think outside of the box with this one so wish me luck.

Inlinks.com has launched and it’s the new form of paid links. The concept is simple. You can purchase inline links from their network of bloggers that will be displayed within the content of their posts.

This actually created some controversy because obviously this service violates Google TOS. The problem is that Google will probably have no way of detecting those paid links, which is going to benefit the advertisers since the link juice will pass to their site.

The old form of paid links doesn’t have the same effect as it used to according to Aaron Wall. He makes a very valid point about paid links that are displayed in the footer or sidebar.  Everyone knows that most of the time those links are paid and the advertiser is trying to get higher search engine rankings.

Anyway, should you use this service to get top search engine positions? In my opinion NO. It’s just to easy to get one-way links these days. Article marketing and press release work wonders, seriously try it. Also, you should create link baits and get people to bookmark them through social sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. If done right your site would get a lot of attention and probably hundreds of natural backlnks.

I also found an interesting post on Shoemoney’s blog regarding the InLinks service, which you might want to take a look at.

So how would I use this service? Well, I would probably set up a new niche site just for that and see if I can rank it for some profitable keywords. I wouldn’t use it on my existing sites that are already ranking well. It’s just not worth the risk.

Everyone knows that Adwords can be very profitable if used the right way. It’s an awesome traffic generation tool that works instantly. You can literally set up a campaign within minutes and start testing conversions of your offers and see which keywords work and which don’t produce the results you want.

I know it sounds easy but in fact there is a lot more things involved than just setting up a campaign and hoping for good ROI.

Anyway, I have been doing some testing lately and it’s working out pretty well for me with the CPA networks. By the way I see much better conversions from a CPA offer than from a Clickbank product, so you might want to keep that in mind.

I am going to give you the exact strategy I have been using to profit from CPA offers. It works almost every time I use it. So here is what I do:

I am a member of about 6 CPA networks. I am always on the look out for great offers that pay per lead. The conversions on those are insanely high. I find something that pays per lead or where they only need to pay like $1 or $2 to sign up. I also make sure that the payout is around $15-$20.

Next, I make sure there are lots of searches within that niche and plenty advertisers. You do want to enter a market that is competitive!

Once I find an offer I want to promote then I fire up my Dreamweaver and start creating the landing page. I usually try to make the landing page look almost the same as the actual landing page of the offer I am promoting. I basically presell it and have a masked link to the offer.

Then I use my little cool script PPC Profit Booster to create landing pages for each keyword I want to bid on. I usually go for local targeting. I set up my pages so it’s like this keyword1-illinois.html, keyword2-indiana.html, and so on for each state.

Once I have the pages ready and uploaded to my site I create a sitemap for them and additional pages like privacy policy, terms page, contact us page, and that’s it. Now I go to Adwords and create the campaign. I set up a different Adgroup for each state with with only about 3-4 keywords in each Adgroup. This tactic allows me to get great quality score with no problem at all.

My ads go live and traffic starts rolling in I always monitor my spending and stats so the campaign is profitable. Once I see that it’s doing well I basically go and find another offer and repeat the process.

Of course sometimes I use a squeeze page before I send them to the offer, but this strategy helped me set up some profitable income streams that now run on complete autopilot…lol…ye it’s possible!

So there you have it. You could easily use this technique alone to start profiting massive cash with CPA offers. Just get out there and do it.

Ok, so I just went to Warrior Forum earlier today to check out some WSOs. When I entered the forum the admin made everyone look at a post by Eric Louviere for his Six Figure Apprentice program. Of course I read it and checked out the offer. It was priced at $20 for Warriors only and I know Eric knows his stuff so I went ahead joined his site to see what I can learn from him. Even though I do pretty well with my own niche sites and promotions I am always on the look out for things that will help me sell more stuff.

Anyway, after I joined I was able to download this 72 page report and watch first 3 videos of the Week 1. He also gives you an option to upgrade to the full course for $197 which I think is awesome, but not sure if I have the time to get engaged in it at this point as I am very busy with my own projects etc. In fact I am already doing pretty well with CPA networks and that’s what mainly this course covers.

Anyhow, the message I wanted to get accross here is that you should run and get it if you are a Warrior Forum member.  Eric reveals some very very powerful stuff that could change your current situation literally within days. I am talking from experience because I went through what he describes in his course. You see, people get so distracted and have no focus so they never make any money. It’s a fact! I have been there and done that. I would bounce around from one thing to another and never really had any success until I realized that I needed to focus on one and one thing only to become the best at it.

So the course is about making money with CPA offers and Eric reveals the exact system that he uses to generate cash while building a list. I know it works because I use it too in some of my marketing campaigns. If you want to learn about CPA networks and how you could make this big jump ahead of everyone else then go ahead and sign up asap.

Here is the link to the WF thread where you can get more info and sign up. I highly recommend it, and no I am NOT making any money by telling you about this. I just thought you should take advantage of it. It’s by far better than any ebook on Clickbank you can find right now.

If you are a webmaster and own many websites like I do then you probably want to know the best SEO techniques to get your site ranked and get more traffic. Well, there are 2 routes with SEO and that’s blackhat and whitehat SEO. Which one you are going to choose is totally up to you, but I want to give you some insights to help you make the right decision. So let’s talk about blackhat SEO first…

Blackhat SEO

What does it really mean? Blackhat SEO means that you are bending the rules to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. Usually those techniques violate Google’s webmaster guidelines and if discovered by Google or other search engines then you will get banned and deindexed from the search results. I guess that’s the basic idea of blackhat seo.

Here are a few techniques that are considered blackhat:

1. Doorway Pages (Cloaking) – It’s a tactic to trick the search engines that you have lots of content pages on your site. Those pages are used to redirect the visitors (search engine user) to another page or so called money page where you are trying to sell or promote something.

Here is how cloaking works

The basic concept is that you have a script running on your server that generates those cloaked pages automatically. When the search engine spider or Googlebot visits the site it’s being presented with pages that have lots of relevant content and optimized for varies keyword phrases. When those pages get indexed in Google they will usually obtain good rankings and start driving traffic to your site. When the visitor clicks on the link from the organic search results he/she doesn’t see the original page that Googlebot has seen. The cloaking script automatically detects that it’s a real person and redirects them to totally different page or your money page.

I have to warn you though. If someone discovers this activity on your site then you can say bye bye to that domain name. It will usually get banned within days once the cover is blown.

Some cloakers got smart and register so called throw-away domain names for cloaking purposes only. This means they keep indexing those cloaked sites and redirect visitors to a whole different domain name, so if the site where the cloaker is installed gets banned their money site is safe, but that’s not always true either.

So basically you need to create cloaking sites faster than they are being banned so you can keep constant flow of targeted traffic to your website or landing page.

2. Buying Links – This in fact is a big problem for Google and other search engines. The reason for that is because it’s ALMOST undetectable. The concept here is simple. If you want top search engine rankings then you need lots of backlinks to your website. If your niche is highly competitive then you need basically thousands of them. Some niches like for example financial, mortgage, credit report, insurance are insanely competitive, and it would require some long term content development and link building campaign. If you have the budget you can buy links from other authority sites which is against Google’s terms of service. If this was allowed then any company with a lot of money could dominate the search engine rankings by simply buying links from other high PR and authority sites. Google has managed to keep up with this by integrating some changes to their algorithm, but the problem still exists on massive scale because in reality you would need a real human editor to visit every site to see if you are buying links or if you are gaining them in the natural way.

3. Keyword Manipulation – This tactic used to work about 7-8 years ago and now is being used to trick Adwords for higher quality score more than SEO. The basic idea is to insert keywords on your site and hide it by making them very small and not readable to human eye or just changing the color of the text font to white on the white background. Google has pretty much crushed this. Their spider can easily detect this on your page so I wouldn’t recommend this at all.

4. Cross-linking – This has been going on for years and still is quite effective if you don’t get caught The idea is to create many niche sites on different IP addresses and link them all to get higher rankings. It’s against Google terms of service to link to your own sites within the same niche. This is why Google has become a domain name registrar and now has access to WHOIS information so they can see which domain names you own. So if you are using this technique you better mask your WHOIS data.

5. Scraping Content – Scraping other sites for content is actually becoming more and more popular. Most of the people that use it try to monetize those sites using Adsense. The idea is that you have a script installed on your server that automatically pulls content from other sites and creates pages on your website. This falls into the duplicate content category, but it looks like Google really doesn’t care much about this anymore. The sites with scraped content usually get filtered out off the search results, but somehow they still get indexed and manage to pull some traffic. So if you use this on massive scale you could actually see some great results as far some affiliate income.

6. Hijacking – This one is actually pretty evil and you wouldn’t want this to happen to you, but here is how it works. The hijacker goes and creates a 302 redirect on some established site which gets indexed in the serps while the original site gets deindexed. So basically if some company has an affiliate program and you want to monetize on their traffic from search enignes without doing any work you would go and create this kind of redirect and your page would appear in place of the original domain name. Of course you would redirect through your own affiliate link. This is one bad technique that should not be used ever.

There are many other black hat SEO techniques like link spamming, building link farms and more.

Black Hat SEO is not for everyone. It usually delivers fast and quick results but it’s not a long term business model that will continue to grow. You need to constantly tweak and put up new sites to keep the momentum going. I have done some black hat seo in the past when I first started, and I know what kind of risk is involved. I was constantly under stress and hoping that my sites will survive another day

I switched from black hat to white hat SEO and I like it much better. Some people never make the switch and stay underground…lol

Anyway, let’s take a look at White Hat SEO and what it’s all about.

WhiteHat SEO

Whitehat SEO delivers slower results but much more stable and steady income. The idea is to provide high quality content that gets noticed. If you put out great content it will accomplish 3 things – get higher rankings and gain authority plus get natural links back to your site.

The problem why so many people struggle with Whitehat SEO is because it takes a lot of work at the beginning without and results at all. For the first month or 2 you will be creating content without getting too much traffic or generating any substantial income. Most people quit because of that and then try black hat stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you try to build a stable business and only use White Hat SEO. You will not have to worry about getting banned or losing your site. Once you get to the point where you are making decent money from it then it will be much much easier than any black hat technique. In fact you can make more money with doing a legitimate business than trying to trick the search engines.

Hope this post helped you understand the whole concept better, so you can decide for yourself which way you are going to choose.

Feel free to post your comments below with your opinion.

Ok, I already know that some people are going to call me an idiot or that I have no idea what I am talking about, but I am just going to say it…Cash Gifting is illegal in my opinion and I hope you won’t get scammed like many others did.

So what is Cash Gifting? Well, it’s basically a pyramid scheme where you give cash “gifts”…lol…to other participants in order to join the program. Let’s face it you are joining because you expect to make money from it. Please don’t tell me that you are just giving some stranger money for nothing because that’s basically bullshit.

Cash Gifting used to be an offline scam where people would meet and exchange cash. Many of those groups got arrested and went to jail. Now cash gifting entered the online market, so it’s basically still illegal because there is no difference. Anyway, the only reason why FTC is not doing anything yet is because it would be too hard to track people down. They are all over the country sending each other money through UPS and Fedex.

Here is what really bothers me. You see, some of those cash gifting participants called IRS and recorded the message asking them if it’s illegal and got an answer that it was fine…lol..I imagine that the phone operator didn’t really know much about it and was caught of guard with that question.

Another thing about this whole cash gifting is that people are posting videos all over the web showing how much money they made using those programs. I am sure you have seen some of them showing envelopes with cash. If you didn’t then go to YouTube and search for “cash gifting”. You will find hundreds of them.

Now if you ask any of those people that are in cash gifting business about the legality of it, they are going to say that it’s perfectly legal. They are going to show you some recorded messages with IRS or some other BS to get you into the program. They also make you sign this little piece of paper stating that you don’t expect anything in return and that you are basically just giving them money..lol

I called a lawyer here in my local town and he said that the little paper would NOT hold in court by the way, so keep that mind.

Anyhow, the law says that you can give up to $12,000 tax free to someone. This is mistaken by those in the cash gifting programs because they are using it to make money. The whole purpose of someone joining a cash gifting program is to earn money and not lose it by giving away cash. Come on people, wake up!

Here is some more stuff from MLM Watch Dog that I think you should read too.

Here is how most of the Cash Gifting programs operate online. Usually it’s a 1 up where you pass up your first “gift”   to your sponsor. Then after that you keep all the gifts and those need to pass up their first to you too. So with that said, you can see that you will need to promote it all over the web and get people to the program. At the end there is always someone that doesn’t make money so they lost in this whole deal. As you can see you need to constantly get new suckers into cash gifting programs otherwise you won’t make money and that’s why you would join one anyway.

I say that cash gifting programs are illegal and it’s just a matter of time before the authorities catch up with them. I highly recommend that you stay away from them and save your money. There are a lot better ways to make money online than cash gifting.

Feel free to post your comments below, but I have to warn you that I won’t approve any comments with profanity.

If you are like me staying up to date with the latest internet marketing launches then you probably have heard about the new Clickbank Inner Circle that is supposed to hit the marketplace on December 3rd.

Anyway, the CB Inner Circle is created by Chris Freville who is one of the top marketers on Clickbank. He has mastered the JV secrets and how to create highly profitable Clickbank products that sell.

Chris sent me the product for review and I took the time to evaluate everything before I decided to promote it. After reading all the content and going through some of the modules of the Clickbank Inner Circle I have to admit that it’s good stuff. I have actually learned a few new marketing tactics and I thought I knew them all..lol

Anyhow, If you want to know more about the CB Inner Circle and the bonus I am offering if you buy from my link the check out my Clickbank Inner Circle review page. I am going to post more info there as we get close to the launch so I suggest you to keep coming back for more info and updates.

I feel like this is a great product for those who want to get ahead in the Clickbank marketing game. I hope you get a copy for yourself because it’s going to put you on the right track and help you make more money with Clickbank.

OK, here is the link to my review page…

http://www.affhelper.com/clickbank-inner-circle/

Today I purchased a new product from James Schramko called Double Digit CTR. The product came with a 61-page manual, 9 videos, and an MP3 file recording. I went through the videos first to quickly check out what his techniques are all about. Keep in mind that I have bought all kinds of PPC guides before and know most of the tactics used by affiliates already, so I wasn’t expecting much. I thought if I could learn maybe 2 new techniques I could possibly squeeze more profits from my own campaigns.

So let’s review the content of the videos…

Video #1 – Intro

In this video James covers basic information about his course and what you are going to discover by going through all his 9 videos. He makes a very valid point in this video that gives you a better understanding what pay per click marketing is all about. He also lists some of the most common mistakes people make while setting up Google Adwords campaigns.

Video #2 – Keyword Research

I actually learned something new from this video. He does go over some of the main tactics like spying on your competition first and using the Google Keyword Tool, but he also talks about building your own keyword lists using specific phrases that people use when searching for something online. I can see how I could build lists of long tail keywords within minutes using this technique. He also provides a link to his free tool that will help you do that with a click of a button.

Video #3 – The Strategy

This is basically the main core of the entire system. I like how James goes exactly step by step to show you how to set up Adwords campaigns and what settings must be changed inside your account to make the campaign successful. He has a valid point that Google’s default settings are wrong and will make you spend tons of cash without any results or sales. He also talks about adgroup creation and how you should properly structure your Adwords campaigns. This in fact is crucial part of the system and if you don’t follow this outline you’ll most likely end up wasting tons of money on untargeted clicks that won’t make you any money. James also reveals some of the stuff you should never do within your Adwords account. The video goes further into country targeting and how to pick your timing. There are some more tips that he revealed in this video but I won’t post it here because that would be not fair to James.

Video #4 – Landing Pages

This part of the course is something every affiliate marketer should learn. I have discovered some pretty cool tactics that I will be implementing shortly in my own campaigns. James shows you how to create very effective landing page that will deliver conversions. Some of the stuff he covers were totally new to me. I have learned what needs to be included on your landing pages and where exactly place your links for maximum results.

Video #5 – Writing Your Adwords Ads

James goes over some very powerful copyrighting techniques and how to properly use exclamation marks to instantly boost your click-through rates. He actually gives you the exact phrases you shoud use when writing adwords ads, which is cool. He teaches how to use negative keywords and the right url structure of your destination urls.

Video #6 – Example Campaign

In this video you will see how James sets up campaign from start to finish, which is very valuable information. I have bought so many different PPC manuals that never included this part of the course.

Video #7 – Case Study

Here James Schramko shows you his techniques in action and what kind of results you can expect if you follow the course step by step. His campaign pulled thousands of dollars in sales in one day, and produced some hefty affiliate commissions.

Video #8 – Advanced Tactics

After watching this video I realized why so many people fail with Adwords. James really knows his stuff. He reveals how you need to maintain your Adwords campaigns and how to constantly tweak them for higher conversion rates. This is a step that many affiliats skip, which is a deadly mistake that will send your wallet to the cleaners.

Video #9 – The Next Steo

This video explains how to expand your reach by going into content networks, developing your own tools, and basically making more money from your campaigns.

So what is my overall rating of this course on a scale from 1-10? I give it a 9. What I think was missing is how James picks products to promote for his own campaigns, and more about the content network. The course itself is well worth the money and if you are an Adwords advertiser then this is one of those products you should have in your collection.

You can pick it up by clicking here…