Gadooney.com

Generating Incoming Links from Social Bookmarking Sites

Yesterday we covered using ezine articles to start building links to your sites once you’re getting some traction getting indexed in search engines, so today we’re going to look at another good way to start building incoming links to your sites, which involves using social bookmarking sites to full effect.

To recap slightly, when I launch new sites I tend to look at the launch as basically a two-stage process. The first part is, for lack of a better term, the throw-content-on-the-wall-and-see-what sticks phase, where I’ll start up a bunch of sites, post lots of content to them, and not worry about much else. I try not to limit myself or overanalyze things. Since it typically takes months for new sites to get listed in search engines, I don’t worry too much about anything other than getting content up. You still need to pick good niches and subjects for sites, which stand a good chance to be profitable for you, and you still need to optimize the structure and layout of your sites, but I don’t usually chase links and traffic in the first stage.

Once I start to get some love from the search engines, then I start to get serious about the second stage, which is building up the links that point to your site. Some people argue that links are important to get your content fully indexed in the first place, which is true, but personally I’ve found it much easier to build incoming links once I have a goodly amount of content up. It also helps me weed out some clunker sites, as far as ideas I try that turn out to be difficult in practice, so by waiting until they either get some search engine traffic on their own, unaided, I avoid wasting time building incoming links to sites that turn out to not be the best idea in practice, as far as getting traffic and making money.

We’ve touched on social bookmarking sites before when discussing traffic sources, but we haven’t really talked about using them to build quality inbound links to your sites. The idea is really simple and doesn’t need much explaining. When a page of yours gets bookmarked at Digg or del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking site, an incoming link to your affiliate site is created. So completely aside from the chance that it might send traffic to your site, each page of yours that is bookmarked on social bookmarking sites create an incoming link to your site.

Not all incoming links are created equal, as some social bookmarking sites are configured to not pass PageRank to your site (this basically means that not all links to your pages on social bookmarking sites help your page get a boost in search engine results), but pretty much any link to your site is a good thing.

So how do we get links to our pages on social bookmarking sites? Well, one obvious way is to write lots of great content that people are inclined to bookmark. For most affiliate sites, though, that’s a bit hard. It’s also kind of a chicken/egg conundrum, as you need lots of traffic for someone to be inclined to bookmark your page somewhere (since a relatively small number of surfers are active social bookmarkers), and most sites don’t have that kind of traffic at the beginning. It’s also difficult as affiliate content can be rather shilly at times, and not exactly the meatiest of content that someone will bookmark. While you can incorporate easy buttons and links on your pages that make it super easy for users to bookmark the page to various sites, no matter how easy you make it you still need traffic.
Instead of just sitting there, hoping and praying that people bookmark your content, you can pursue a more active role, albeit a slightly sneaky one. Register an account at social bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages yourself. Yeah, I know, it kind of undercuts the higher-minded ideals that such sites are based on, but, umm, it works. I’m not saying that everyone should run out and do this or any other slightly sleazy technique I might cover here, I’m just giving you some options.

So you’d basically create accounts at all of the social bookmarking sites, log-in as a user, and bookmark your affiliate pages/sites that you’d like to generate links to. Pretty simple and effective, but it’s also rather time consuming, as you need to create accounts at each site, manage your log-in/passwords at each site, and track which pages you’ve submitted where, etc.

You can extend the above idea one step further, and use automation to generate even more backlinks from social bookmarking sites.  This is verging into black-hat territory, as far as outright manipulation of various systems to artifically boost your pages in search engine results, so be forewarned. One tool to automate the social bookmarking posting process is Bookmarking Demon, which not only automatically creates accounts for you at many different social bookmarking sites, but has the ability to store your login/password information, so that you simply enter the URL and keywords for the page you want to submit, hit go, and the software automatically posts your page to many different sites.

Bookmarking Demon is far from cheap, but I’ve been using it for a awhile and it’s been well worth the expense. For a free alternative to simultaneously post pages to multiple social bookmarking sites (although it has many fewer features and functionality), you can try also OnlyWire.

Again, I fully understand that this technique will not be everyone’s cup o’ tea. Like I said, just throwing things out there, and the choice is up to you as far as how aggressively you want to pursue promoting your sites, generating links and traffics, and any other number of affiliate schemings that go on to try to make money online.

Using Ezine Articles to Generate Backlinks

Once your sites have been kicking around for a few months, with good juicy content finally getting indexed in search engines and producing some traffic for you, it’s time to start shifting gears a bit. You still need to continue to crank out content, as that’s the lifeblood of any affiliate site, but you also need to start focusing on getting backlinks to all that great content you’re producing.

I’ve already discussed a few ways to manufacture backlinks to your site (including forum posts and outbound links), but I’ve been saving others that are a little more time consuming initially, but pay off dividends in the long run. Remember, backlinks are basically links from other external sites that point back to your pages.

So, looping back to the title, today we’re going to look at using ezine articles as a way of generating strategic backlinks to your affiliate sites. This is pretty standard fare in the affiliate world and nothing new or groundbreaking, but lots of folks starting out might not know about it, or how it works.

The idea is pretty simple. Write a general article related to the theme of your site and post it at a site like Ezinearticles.com. The sky is pretty much the limit as far as the length and format, and you can browse around on their site to get a general idea of what most articles look like.

You want the article to be informative and reasonably well-written, but don’t try to write an epic masterpiece. Pick something you know and spend 10-15 minutes writing a clear, concise article on it. It’s best to pick a fairly narrow topic, which can be covered quickly and painlessly.

Here’s an example of an article I posted for my Patio to Pool site: How to Build a Concrete Patio.

Decent enough, but no great shakes. So why’d I bother with writing it, creating an account at Ezinearticles.com and submitting it there? Scroll all the way down and you’ll notice there’s a bio section at the bottom, that allows you to include links to your own websites, with anchor text of your choosing.

That’s the real value here, especially when combined with the way that ezine article sites in general work. The model for those sites is that authors and website owners post articles, which can then be freely used by anyone with a website who needs free content to fill it up. So while you basically give up the content that you post there for free, in exchange you potentially get backlinks from any site that takes your article and publishes it on their site, as they have to post the entire text, including the bio section with your anchor text and link to your affiliate site.

That’s the idea, in a nutshell. You’re not really doing it for the potential traffic that might result from people clicking through the bio link, but for the link itself, as Google and other search engines factor in all the links that point to you, as well as the anchor text of the link itself. Since you control all of that (as you get to write the bio and link and anchor text yourself), ezine articles can be a great way of building quality, optimized links that point to your affiliate site.

There are a few things to keep in mind, though. If you’re using pre-existing articles or content from your site as the text of the article you submit, be aware of the fact that it may hurt the ability of that page on your site to rank well in search engine results. Other sites that publish your article might have a higher PageRank, so search engines will boost your content on their site above that same content on your site. So don’t give get lazy and give away the crown jewels, as far as just copying and pasting stuff you’ve already written into article form and submitting it.

You also should consider varying the anchor text you include in your bio, and not always use the same anchor text. You also don’t have to link to your home page, either (as I did in the above example article), as you could link to an inner page, too. So if I wrote an article on “How to Build a Japanese Water Garden”, I could instead use a bio text/link of something like “Check out my patio and pool site for info on Japanese water gardens and more!”

Another thing to keep in mind is that this technique takes time to bear fruit, as you need to get lots of articles out there, and they have to actually be picked up by other website owners looking for content to populate their sites with. Depending on your niche, that may take quite awhile, so this isn’t a slam dunk, immediate way to boost your backlinks, PageRank, and search engine traffic.

As far as places to submit your articles to, in addition to Ezinearticles.com there are tons and tons of similar article submission sites. You can find lists by running Google searches on “ezine articles” as well as hitting some of the below links, which I’ve used at various times in the past (I haven’t combed through the full list below in awhile so some of these may no longer be active):

www.findbusinessarticles.com
www.addme.com
www.allthewebsites.org
www.amazines.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articlebin.com
www.articlecentral.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
www.article-directory.net
www.article-emporium.com
www.articlefinders.com
www.articlesfactory.com
www.articlessource.com
www.articlesumbissions.com
www.articlewarehouse.com
www.articleworld.net
www.authorconnection.com
www.awebhostingprovider.com
www.businesstoolchest.com
http://www.buzzle.com/
www.commonconnections.com
www.connectionteam.com
www.constant-content.com
www.easyarticles.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.family-content.com
www.fresh-articles.com
www.freezinesite.com
http://www.goarticles.com/
www.ideamarketers.com
www.isnare.com
www.marketingpitbull.com
www.searchwarp.com
www.uniterra.com
www.womens-netnews.com

It takes awhile to initially register for each site as an author (I’d recommend storing all that stuff in an Excel file as far as author ID and password for each site, to speed up logging in and posting to each site in the future), but it’s time well-spent, as you want to get your articles out to as many sites as possible.

Still Alive…I Swear

Sorry for the lights going a bit dark in these parts of late, but real life has been kicking me in the butt of late, and I’ve had more important stuff to wrestle with than all of my silly web schemery detailed here.

On the bright side, things have settled down and the time off was good for me, as far as recharging the batteries a bit. I’ve got some new content in the works here, as well as a few site reviews and other stuff to roll out over the next few days.

Tricking Yourself into Being More Productive

Dabble in the affiliate marketing world for very long and you’ll realize that the ability to juggle is definitely very, very valuable. For all of those of us with a day job (not to mention a spouse, family, or life in general), there’s only so much time in the day and only so many things one person can do.

If you take a generalist approach and have many affiliate sites up and running, prioritizing and working efficiently gets even harder, as you’re always facing a mountain of work, always neglecting whatever site you’re not currently working on. No matter how motivated you may be, sometimes the mountain overwhelms you, and the end result is that you do absolutely nothing, saying any number of variations of a phrase like “Ugh, too much, not today.”

I’ve been doing this stuff for years and years and that last one still bites me in the ass. I can preach all day about the value of writing something, anything, each and every day, but I still come up empty occasionally, usually at the worst time, as far as having many, many things that need doing.

One thing that helps me get out of that rut is kind of bass-ackwards, but it works. Lists tend to paralyze me, and while a routine is good (when your workload is manageable and everything is clicking along), sometimes that routine itself becomes an excuse not to get work done.

If you tend to get work done early in the morning but, due to feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of stuff to do, put off doing work that morning, odds are you aren’t going to carve out time later in the day. Ditto if you work later in the evening, as delaying doing anything has a tendency to result in later saying “Hey, look, now it’s bedtime, I’ll work on that affiliate crap tomorrow.”

So how do I get out of that nasty feedback loop when I find myself stuck in it? As backwards as it sounds, I try not to obsess on what needs to be done and surprise myself by suddenly sitting down and cranking out some content, just doing the first thing that comes to my mind.

My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I’ll be in the middle of yardwork and stop, come in, and write for 15 minutes or so. Or putting away laundry, when I suddenly disappear and bang on the keyboard for awhile. Or watching television.

It’s not that I’m some mad scientist and suddenly inspired, but more that I’m tricking myself into just doing work, without the whole internal monologue that normally accompanies it, as far as telling myself I need to get work done, making up elaborate reasons why I don’t want or need to, promising myself I’ll do twice as much tomorrow to catch up, yada yada yada.

Once you have a number of affiliate sites up, the nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to bang out content here and there, as you’re typically talking about fairly short, concise pages. I keep a list of potentially profitable keywords for all my sites geared towards search engine traffic so it’s simply a matter of sitting down, pulling up a list, and writing a couple of pages.

While it’s kind of dumb, tricking myself into working usually gets me over whatever hump of malaise I’m stuck on, and back into my normal routine of slowly and steadily generating content on a variety of sites.

February Wrap-Up

Wait, is it March already? Jebus. February just sort of slipped away from me. Buh bye, February.

I have to admit that I don’t look forward to these detailed monthly recaps, especially as they get a little more cumbersome as I keep adding sites. It seemed a good idea initially, as far as a proof-of-concept that silly monkeys like ourselves can make money online, but I wonder about the execution, as I end up making broad swipes at it without lots of detailed stats.

Something to ponder, and I may look into a better stats tool that can pull and parse data from all my sites and report it in one central location. I can sort of do that via stats packages on the dedicated server, but it’s a fairly blunt instrument and a bit hard to pull out data solely from my affiliate sites, as there are additional non-affiliate sites on the server.

In very broad brush strokes, I didn’t get as much content out in February as I’d hoped to. Real life sucked up a lot of my time and I got a little more bogged down in a few experimental projects than I’d planned on. I also launched a few more new sites, which always eat up a decent amount of time, as far as fiddling with layouts, getting the initial content up, and all that jazz.

Traffic continues to climb, though, pretty much across all the sites, and the last week or so has been pretty encouraging on the Google front, as the first wave of sites I launched are finally picking up some decent organic search traffic. I’ve also been pretty pleased with the two “meatier” sites I’ve launched recently (Vroomchatter and FlipThyHouse), as they’re both pretty quickly picking up traffic and an audience, and have decent legs for the long-run, as opposed to some of the shillier stuff I do with niche sites devoted solely to certain keywords.

As far as monthly income, here are the raw numbers:

Google Adsense: $94.02
Text-Link-Ads: $43.00
ReviewMe: $100.00
Commission Junction: $105.87
Direct advertising buys: $200.00
Partnerlogic (poker affiliate program): $361.48

Total income: $904.37

That’s down from ~$1,100 in January and, again, skews heavily towards my poker blog. It’s kind of dumb to piss and moan about makingnearly a grand from silly typings on websites, but it’s a little disappointing that I haven’t been able to move the Adsense needle faster.  Granted, a lot of that is due to the sites just now making their way into search engine results, so there’s that to keep in mind. Probably 90% of the work I’ve done thus far is geared towards Adsense traffic, which will hopefully bear fruit later down the road.

Plans for March are pretty much the same old boring routine, as far as getting lots of content into the hopper, fleshing out and optimizing exsiting sites, yada yada yada.

Putting Your .htaccess File to Work For You

A .htaccess file is a simple little file that sits on the root level of your site and can do all sorts of nifty things for you. It’s kind of a freak in the world of HTML, as your site can function just fine without one, so it’s not exactly necessary, but it can also do heavy, important lifting for you, if you use it correctly.

Here’s the official definition of a .htaccess file from Apache, as well as when and when not to use one. One key thing to keep in mind is that the below is for Unix/Linux servers with Apache set up. That’s by far the most common setup for hosting accounts these days, so if you’re not sure what you’re running, odds are that you’re good to go.

For our purposes, we’re not going to worry so much about the permissioning side of .htaccess files, as far as protecting directories, etc. We’re just going to focus on ways to use the .htaccess file to make sure that our content gets indexed correctly, that error pages are handled efficiently, and that we keep spam comments down to a minimum.

First we have to create a .htaccess file. One thing to keep in mind is that it’s a different type of file than others, as far as it’s name and format. It’s not short for anything and there’s nothing extra tacked onto the file name. It truly is .htaccess, nothing more, nothing less.

The easiest way to create one is to open up Notepad and create and save a file that’s called .htaccess.txt. (The .txt part is necessary and unavoidable but we’ll remove it later after uploading the file via FTP to the root of our website.)

So you’ve created the empty file. The first step is to set up how you want your site to handle pages that are accessed and produce an error. Instead of users seeing an unhelpful 404 error page if they try to access a file that no longer exists, you can use the .htaccess file to automatically redirect them somehwhere else, usually your home page.

Here’s a sample bit of code that you’d insert into your .htaccess file to handle error pages:

ErrorDocument 400 /index.html
ErrorDocument 401 /index.html
ErrorDocument 403 /indexhtml
ErrorDocument 404 /index.html
ErrorDocument 500 /index.html

What does that do? Anytime a user on your site encounters an error (400 and 404 errors are the most likely culprit), instead of seeing a stock error page, they’re instead automatically redirected to your home page, which in this example is located at index.html. If your home page was located at index.php, you’d insert that instead.

If you’d rather create a custom error page (such as one that said  ”This page no longer exists, but you can find great information about Wombats on the site here, as well as here.), then you could change index.html in the above example to the name of the custom error page, something like error.html.

You can also use your .htaccess file to ensure that search engines spider and index the preferred version of your domain name. This gets into the world of SEO and PageRank, but the short version is that search engines see gadooney.com and www.gadooney.com as two separate sites. While users can type either and get to your content fine, you prefer to have search engines to simply pick one and just use it, to give you maximum traction in search engine results.

Making that happen is pretty simple, as you just have to enter the following code into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourSite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.YourSite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously you need to replace the “YourSite” with your actual site information. Google also lets you set your preferred domain via their Webmaster Tools interface, which has some other useful goodies as well.

If you’ve changed the location of a file or an entire site, you can also use the Rewrite command to point to the new location, with something like the following (replacing the directory info and html file locations with the specific info for your site and files):

Redirect /OldDir/old.html http://www.site.com/NewDir/new.html

For those using WordPress who get hammered with spam, you can use the .htaccess file to cut a lot of that out at the source, by adding the following to your .htaccess file (with credit to JohnChow.com for pointing out this in a recent post):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*johnchow.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://www.thetechzone.com/$ [R=301,L]

Again, replace the details with those for your own site. All the above code really does is to make sure that a person leaving a comment has a referral, which should always be the case with legitimate comments. Spam comments often don’t have a referral, so disallowing anyone without a referral from commenting impacts only spam comments.

You can pick and choose from the options above, and include the code you’d like to use in your .htaccess file. Once you’re ready to roll, save it. At this point, it’s still a .htaccess.txt file. Upload it to your server via FTP and put it in the root level of your site. Be sure to upload it in ASCII mode, not binary.

Once it’s uploaded, you’ll need to change the name of the file. Change the name to it’s true name, which is “.htaccess”. Don’t out a period after it, don’t put in quotes, don’t add an extension, simply type in “.htaccess” as the new file name.

You may also need to CHMOD the .htaccess file to 644. Do a Google search on “.htaccess chmod 644″ if you need instructions for that, as this is getting long enough as is.

Hopefully that should give you a basic introduction to some uses for the .htaccess file. Poke around some on your own, though, as it can do a lot more than what’s touched on above, and is a pretty powerful little file that’s often overlooked.

Do Excerpted Links in Blogs Prevent Search Engines from Spidering Your Content?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: If you use an excerpted link (or any “Click for the rest of the entry” type of link to keep the post on the home page shorter and more concise), you’re not really affecting the ability of search engines to find and index the content in the post, assuming you’re using a typical blog structure.

Most blogs are set up so that a certain number of recent posts are featured on the home page, in addition to every post having a permanent home in the archive. Since the permanent home contains the full text of the post, search engines almost always find and index the content there, so you really don’t have to worry about using excerpted links, and the content they may “hide” on posts on the home page.

One consideration, though, is that your home page is typically spidered much more frequently and content there usually ranks higher in search engines, so if you’re targeting more “newsy” niches (i.e. posting blow by blow updates of the Britney saga or American Idol results), you’d probably want the full text of each post to appear on the home page. If your content is more timeless, using excerpted links is pretty much a non-issue, and one that neither helps nor hinders you.

Nose, Meet Grindstone… Grindstone, Nose…

Much craziness abounding of late, especially ramping up with possible real estate investments getting rolling, and the markets taking a dump yesterday didn’t exactly easy my stress levels any.

On the affiliate front, I’ve been keeping my head down, cranking out pages on existing sites, and launching a few trial, experimental sites that are soaking up lots of time. I’m finally getting some Google love to the first batch of new sites I’ve been detailing here (including this site), which is nice to finally see.

I’ve also been more active in monitoring other affiliate-oriented sites and blogs, something I’d let fall a bit to the wayside in the last year or so. It’s definitely hard to sort through the clutter, as there’s a massive amount of crap out there, but you definitely find more than a few nuggets of gold if you’re patient and keep an eye on stuff.

To that end, here’s some links to useful blogs/sites that deal with affiliate marketing and/or general webmaster/SEO topics:

• ShoeMoney
• Problogger.net
• Matt Cutts
• JohnChow.com
• Net Business Blog
• Blue Hat SEO
• Dave Turnbull
• TylerCruz.com
• Web Publishing Blog

Weekly Recap

Man, can I get a do-over for February? Or at least have the month back, as I’m not sure exactly where it went, but it’s largely gone-gone-gone, with seemingly little to show for it.

Or, you know, lots to show for it, depending. One thing I forget at times is that I’m essentially starting over with all my affiliate work, after all of my casino and poker related sites came crashing down in the wake of recent US legislation whacking that industry mightily. I fall into the trap of viewing everything through that lens, as far as rushing, pell-mell, to try to make up the money I was previously making, and viewing anything less as a failure.

Which is pretty damn dumb, especially when I spend so much time here preaching patience, acknowledging the fact that it takes much time for your efforts to bear fruit, as far as getting indexed in search engines, acquiring customers, and building traffic. Beating myself up for not instantly achieving beaucoup traffic and riches is, umm, not very realistic or helpful.

At the same time, there is a balance, as far as pushing yourself to constantly get pages and sites out there. Especially if you’re blessed/cursed with a day job and are doing the affiliate stuff on the side. The difficulty is in find a balance, and giving yourself credit for all the things you did accomplish, instead of focusing on what didn’t get done.

In that light, while I cranked out very few pages of content this week, much work was done on Pokahblog.com and Oddsnark.com, as far as getting them ready to open up to a beta test experiment of sorts. I’ve been playing around the idea of being able to offer a community, group blog on assorted topics that’s open to any author, but one that still offers them a chance to potentially make money via Adsense and affiliate programs.

As the owner/admin, I’d basically make the site go, optimize and promote it, provide a way for authors to make money, and give them an easy way to post content. Which is a fairly compelling idea in many ways, as it solves the primary problem for me (getting content onto optimized sites) and for bloggers (having multiple outlets for the content, including commercials ones designed to make them the most money possible). It’s also a potentially nice outlet for people wanting to dip their toes into the affiliate waters but who aren’t quite committed to signing up for a hosting account and setting up a website themselves.

So those are in beta testing now, as I just opened them up a few days ago. Still some kinks to work out but I’ll be curious to see how the experiment turns out. The key, methinks, is going to be whether or not the sites can achieve a certain critical mass, as far as building up enough traffic that authors can see a tangible return for their work. I think it’d be a pretty compelling pitch if someone could jump in, post a lot, and make $50-$100 month from their content, but it’s going to take a lot of traffic to make that a possibility, and a lot of patience from early beta testers.

As far as my personal stuff, I continued to pick away at assorted sites. Still not getting much love from search engines but that’s par for the course at this stage. I’ve got a few new schemings up my sleeve, which I’ll likely detail here soon. Plan for the rest of the month is to bang out some content in assorted places, but, as always, who knows if that’ll end up being the case.

Finding Profitable Affiliate Niches

We’re going to loop back today to a tool I’ve mentioned before, the Google Adwords Estimator tool, but we’re going to use it in a slightly different way than before.

Previously I’d recommended using it to prioritize the content that you create for your site, starting with the terms that had the highest CPC estimate, as those would in theory pay you the most as an affiliate for Adsense clicks on those terms on your site. Since time is at a premium, that’s a good way to work smarter and maximize the bang for your content-creation efforts.

The Adwords Estimator tool, though, can do some other neat stuff, too. If you’re taking the generalist, shotgun affiliate approach (i.e. trying lots of smaller niche sites and seeing what sticks), you sometimes encounter a bit of an odd conundrum. You’re ready and willing to bang out a site but you don’t have anything planned, as far as areas you’d like to target.

While that sounds dumb, it’s not uncommon, especially if you build lots of mini-sites that are 10 pages or less. You can usually brainstorm and come up with a decent niche after some cogitating, but a quick shortcut is to use the Google Adwords Estimator tool to do the brainstorming for you.

To get started, pull up the tool here. Click on the big tab titled “Site-Related Keywords”. which is right next to “Keyword Variations” which is the default tab that’s selected when you land on the page.

Next you’ll be prompted to enter a URL. Enter http://en.wikipedia.org into the URL field. Then be sure to check the box beneath it, which says “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”

In the dropdown menu below that, select “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” and then below that, enter “100″ into the “Max CPC” field. When all that is done, click the “Get Keywords” button.

You’ll get a big honking list of keywords and CPC estimates, so click on the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column to sort them with the highest at the top.

So what just happened? We basically just used a dynamic, constantly changing source of data (Wikipedia) to do the brainstorming work for us, as far as finding potentially profitable niches to build an affiliate site around.

If you scan down the results, some results should leap out at you, with surprisingly high estimated CPCs. Because the home page of Wikipedia is dynamic, with random content pushed to it throughout the day, your results will be different, but when I did it the following jumped out at me:

martial arts billing: $11.07

martial arts software: $10.91

What you’re looking for isn’t necessarily the highest CPC estimate, but more a sweet spot, as far as a term that pays well (I consider anything over $5.00 as paying well), is reasonably obscure with little competition (I just ignore generic ones like “Bally fitness” even if it pays very well, as it’s too competitive), and has a decent amount of search volume (if only 2 searches are done on the term per month, it does you little good to build a site for it, even if the CPC estimate is high).

The Estimator tool has options in the pulldown menu to view the same terms for search volume trends and other data, so you can get a broad idea there as far as how often the terms are searched for. For much closer to exact data, many affiliates use WordTracker, although it’s pretty pricey so you might hold off on that until you’re making the big bucks.

Determining overall competition for terms simply takes some experience, but plugging the term into Google and running a search is the basic way to go about it. See how many total results there are and check out the top listings to get a gauge of much competition there is, how high the PageRank of the sites with the top results are, how well-optimized the pages in the top spots are, etc.

Using the “martial arts billing” and “martial arts software” above, poking around shows that those are actually fairly competitive terms, as far as existing pages targeting them, so building a site around them isn’t a slam-dunk proposition. So you shouldn’t necessarily expect to mine gold each time you run through the process above. it’s not some magic formula for riches, just a nice way to mine for potentially profitable niches that you might never have thought of otherwise.

You can also put any URL you’d like into the tool to analyze for keywords, so play around with it, trying things like http://news.google.com and http://buzz.yahoo.com. You can also focus on inner pages in Wikipedia like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_arts if you find a promising looking term and want to delve deeper.

Another nice feature is to run your own affiliate sites through it, as it will pull up your own targeted keywords and related keywords and give you estimated CPCs for them, hopefully confirming that you’re on the right track and targeting profitable niches, as well as potentially new fodder for pages to create.