The Affiliate Lair

Hey everyone,

I moved the Single Action Page Blog Theme and videos to the “Wordpress” tab. This way the videos won’t try to load every time you login. This should make the site load faster for you. Be sure to mouse over the tabs up top to make the sub tabs appear. All of the new videos are under the sub tabs.

It also appears that the site was down for a few hours this morning. I’m not sure what caused this problem. But everything seems to be working again. If I keep having trouble, I may end up switching hosts…hopefully there won’t be any further problems.

If you have any trouble with the site (site is down, can’t see videos, sub tabs not working, etc) please let me know by either leaving a comment or emailing me at chrishubbard1@gmail.com. If there are still bugs in the site, I want to get them worked out asap.

Thanks,

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

I just added 3 Niche Research videos and 3 Wordpress SEO Optimization videos. You can find them under the tabs “Research” and “Wordpress” above.

From here on out, I will be adding all new videos to pages and they will be located under tabs in the header of the site…this way you can leave comments. For some reason, comments on posts refuse to work and support has not gotten back to me.

I hope you find these videos useful. I will be adding a few more niche research videos. I know niche research isn’t the most exciting topic but I’m spending a good amount of time covering it because I think it’s such a critical part of the process. From there we will move into product selection and finding affiliate programs to promote.

More videos will be added very soon.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

I have already begun creating some niche research videos and they will be up here soon (look for them on the weekend). One thing that I’ve realized through my conversations with several people who purchased ABB through my link is that I have marketers of all different levels in terms of skill and experience. This presented me with a challenge…do I cover the basics and risk upsetting those who are more advanced…or do I cover the advanced stuff and risk confusing those who are new?

I came to the conclusion that I should really try to cover everything. The most important thing to me is that I deliver videos that will give everyone a process to follow to get affiliate campaigns launched. And obviously that process will be based on what X teaches in the Affiliate Black Book. In this game, the more offers you put out there, the more money you will make…and having a core process that you can follow over and over again is key to getting alot of campaigns up and running.

So what I’ve decided to start off with is a case study. I will film myself researching a niche, locating and analyzing products to sell, researching keywords, setting up my blog/landing pages, and then setting up my PPC campaigns.

In the videos that I’ve done so far, I have laid out how I personally do things. But as I’m going through the process, I may stop along the way to explain what I’m doing and why. For example, I just made a video where I am researching the ClickBank marketplace. During the video, I stopped to explain what the numbers under each product mean and why I look at them. So I explained how to tell the commission rate, how much you will make per sale, what gravity means, etc.

For many, this will be very basic and honestly it may bore you. But I know there are others that will find it beneficial as they are just getting started and have not setup any campaigns in the past. So I ask you more experienced marketers out there to just bare with me as i go through some fundamentals and basics. I will get to the advanced stuff. I just want to make the videos as detailed as possible so they help everyone.

By the end of this case study, it is my sincere hope that everyone who watches these videos will be able to duplicate the process – regardless of their experience level.

On another note, it has been brought to my attention that the comments are not working as they should. It seems that you can leave comments on the “pages” such as the “About” page…but the comments for the posts are not working. I thought I had screwed up the settings at first but I checked them and they are correct.

So it is my belief that the problem is being caused by the membership site plugin I’m using. I am going back and forth with support trying to get this fixed. As of this writing, support could not figure out what was causing the problem so they referred it to a programmer. I am awaiting the response from the programmer. I really want to get the comments working so that I can get feedback and answer questions as we go through the case study.

I will get this worked out somehow so that we can have the open discussion that I promised.

OK, I think that’s it. I will put my first few videos up this weekend. I’ll shoot out an email as soon as they are up.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

This weekend I will get started on the first Affiliate Black Book case study. I am going to choose a niche, pick several products and build out a review site using the strategies laid out in ABB.

This is going to be a great step by step case study. I’m looking forward to doing it. I will load up the videos as soon as I make them.

Chris

Chris Affiliate Black Book Videos

I have found that Wordpress blogs help quite a bit with getting good to great quality scores within your Adwords campaigns. But let’s face it; they’re not the end all, be all when it comes to quality score. The real key is twofold:

1. Give Google what they want – follow Google’s guidelines when you build your pages and they will love your site

2. Implement some basic SEO

OK, this is going to be a long guide but it should end your quality score woes for good. Doing all of this will take some time but it will be worth it. Just follow these steps in order whenever you setup a new campaign (this is for Google’s “search network”..not the content network)

1. Domain name – if possible, have you main keyword in your domain name.

2. Do not use a private domain name..most domains are public by default so you usually don’t have to worry about this.

3. Do not cloak your pages or use iframes – Google hates this and it will kill your quality score

4. Meta tags – Put your main keyword in the “title” tag of your page. Also be sure to write a compelling call to action for your “description” tag. Make sure your description tag also has your keywords in it.

5. Use an h1 tag for your page’s headline and again make sure some variation of your main keyword is in the headline

6. Put images on the page that are relevant to your message. Name these images using keywords that are relevant to the image….any other images that are NOT relevant to your message, name them numbers. This can sound confusing so let me get into an example:

If you are promoting a dating product and you have a picture of a couple out on a date, you might name that image: “firstdate.jpg”…that shows Google that this image is relevant to the keywords that you are advertising for. But if you have an image that is a company logo, you should name that image “1.jpg” instead of “logo.jpg”. Here’s why: if you have only 2 images on the page and one is named “logo.jpg” and the other is named “firstdate.jpg” then Google sees that 50% of your images are relevant….but if you instead name the logo “1.jpg”, Google will ignore it and only see the “firstdate.jpg” picture, making your images 100% relevant…

Also, do not use an “alt tag” on the images that you have named with numbers.

Note: NEVER name non relevant images with keywords to try to fool Google. Naming guarantee images, add to cart images, company logos, etc with keywords is a surefire way to get a Poor quality score with Google.

7. Include a ” Contact Us” and “Privacy Policy” link on your page. I also like to include a “Terms of Service” link for good measure. Google’s TOS requires this so be sure you do it. Make sure these links go to pages that have the proper info on them. These links must also be regular links that Google can spider so no javascript.

8. Make sure your “Contact Us” page has a name, address, phone number and email address. Google’s TOS requires full contact info on the page. Do not use a form as Google’s spiders cannot read forms.

9. Be sure that your written content is relevant to the keywords you are advertising for. I know this is obvious but so many people make this mistake. If you are promoting on the keyword “dating in los angeles” you need to make sure your content is focused around this term. I like to have this exact term in my page at least 2 or 3 times if possible. You can also use variations of the term like “find a date in los angeles”

10. Only use original content – No PLR or copied content on your landing pages. If it’s not original content, you will get penalized by Google. If using PLR content, be sure to rewrite it so that it is original.

11. Create some inbound links to your page before you start your Adwords campaign. If you are promoting multiple pages on the same site, you can usually get away with just having some incoming links to the homepage…but linking to internal pages is not a bad idea either. I will get into this in another post about links…(for now just use digg.com, a blog, setup a wordpress.com blog and post with links back, etc)

12. Make sure Google has spidered your site before running ads. Do a google search like this “site:yourdomain.com”…so for this site I’d type this into Google “site:affiliatelair.com”…this will show you if Google has indexed your pages or not. If they have, then it’s safe to go ahead and fire up your Adwords campaign.

13. Include audio or video on your page. This can be as simple as embedding a YouTube video. It’s not absolutely necessary but Google likes to see video and audio content on your pages.

14. Build your site out to at least 5 pages. These pages need to be keyword rich pages focused around your topic. Link the pages together as well so that no page is left out on it’s own without a link into it.

15. Once your page is complete, ask yourself: if I was searching for this term and landed on this page, would I be happy with what I find? This is very important because Google is all about providing quality search results. If you can honestly answer “yes” then you are on the right track. Google also measures how long searchers stay on your site (yet another reason to include a video or audio on the page)

I will do another post on opt in pages. Despite what you may hear, you CAN use opt in pages with Adwords as Google specifies that you can use Adwords for “lead generation”….you just have to do it the right way. I will get into that in depth in a later post.

Chris PPC