Gadooney.com

Despite Aaron Wall’s SEO Book getting positive reviews and plugs from just about anybody who is anybody in the world of affiliate marketing and SEO, I’d held off on buying a copy for myself, until earlier this week. Why would I wait so long to give it a whirl, when it’s more than patently clear that it’s a valuable resource? Well, honestly, I’m pretty much a cheap-ass, and $79 is a lot to spend on an e-book, especially when there’s a goodly chance that I already am familiar with a lot of the material.

Having worked my way through most of the 300+ pages of SEO Book, I have to say I’m pretty happy with the purchase. Most of it wasn’t that new to me, having picked up bits and pieces of what’s covered in it over the years, but it’s really well-organized and well-written, and packs a lot of meat into it. If you’re just getting started, it’s a pretty amazing resource and will literally shave years of wasted time off your learning curve.

Probably most importantly, SEO Book is heavy on the solid fundmentals, as far as guiding you through the entire process, as far as how search engines work, how to write good content, how to structure your site, and so on. It’s also very white-hat, relying on solid basic principles to improve the rankings of your sites and pages, instead of dealing with much more dodgy practices that might work today, but won’t a week from now. Yeah, the title is SEO Book, but another alternative, much longer title could be something like “Learn How to Create Solid, Fundamental Content and Websites that Will Rank Well in Search Engines for Years to Come”, as that’s more what the book focuses on, as opposed to the minutiae of things like optimizing your alt-img tags.

You also get some other useful freebies with the book, such as a listing and ranking of various paid and free directories to submit your sites to, and access to other keyword research tools and other good stuff. You also get free access to any updated future editions, which is actually pretty useful for something like this, as Aaron updates it frequently to reflect the rapidly changing world of SEO.

On the down side, it’s in pdf format and it’s 300+ pages, so unless you can print it out at work on the company dime, you’re probably faced with reading it on your computer or printing out sections at a time, which can be a bit of a chore.

All in all, though, SEO Book is definitely worth checking out. $79 ain’t cheap, especially for us tight-asses of the world, but it’s money well spent, and will pay for itself if you’re serious about the affiliate marketing thing and take the advice to heart.

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.

One thing I constantly talk about here is waiting for sites to get fully indexed in search engines, sandbox filters (which prevent your new sites and pages from displaying in search results for a certain period of time), and using good link structure and sitemaps to get all of your content indexed.

Once your sites are up and running, it’s very easy to see how many of your pages have been indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Before I show you how, though, be aware that a page being indexed and it showing up in its proper place in search results are two different beasts. Because of sandbox filters for new sites, your content may very well show up as being indexed, but it’s not yet in the mix of the actual search results, as far as ranking where it should be when the filter is lifted once your site is sufficiently aged.

Let’s start with Google. Run a normal Google search, and type in the following into the search box: site:www.gadooney.com (Type it exactly like that, with no spaces. And type it into the search box, not into the area in your browser where actual URLs appear.)

That will take you to a search results page that shows every page that Google has indexed for gadooney.com. To see your own site, simply replace gadooney.com with your own domain. The total number of pages indexed will likely be greater than actual posts or pages you’ve created, as most search engines index feeds and categories and other extraneous sections of your site as actual pages, especially if you’re using WordPress to manage your content.

To check Yahoo and MSN, repeat the above process exactly, as far as running a search in each search engine using the site:www.yoursite.com syntax.

What do you do with all that data, once you get it? Well, honestly, not too much at the beginning stages, as the value in the site: command at the initial stages is simply to check that the search engines are able to find all of your pages and index it. If they are, then you know that your link structure is working its magic and enabling search engine spiders to find your content. There’s more valuable data in the results from the site: command, but we’ll dig into that in a later post.

One question I’ve gotten a lot is what FTP software I use for moving files back and forth to websites. While using WordPress as a CMS can ease a lot of the FTP load, it can’t completely eliminate it, so you’ll have to get familiar with FTP software at some point in your affiliate/webmaster career.

WS_FTP is probably the most prevalent FTP software, lots of people love it and swear by it, and I’ve used it in the past and been very happy with it. It’s got lots of nice features, bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. WS_FTP is easy enough for beginners to use but it’s also got some nice features for power users, too. The only hitch is that it’s not a free product, and will run you around $60.

I currently use FileZilla, which is a free, open-source FTP program. Very easy to install, and while the interface takes a bit getting used to, it’s worked perfectly for me and I have had no complaints whatsoever. I’ve seen some complaints by power users that it can’t handle more advanced functions that WS_FTP can, but if you’re only occasionally moving files, changing permissions, etc., it can definitely handle that, and it’s hard to beat the price.

Lots of people swear by SmartFTP, which is another popular free FTP program. I haven’t personally used it, so no direct experience with it, but this one gets nods and thumbs up from many folks out on the Internet tubes.

If you can’t tell by now, I’m a big fan of using WordPress for affiliate sites. The price is right (it’s free), it’s a snap to install and use, and it lets you get up and running with affiliate marketing even if you barely know any HTML at all.

WordPress also has a lot of nifty plugins that people have created to make your life easier as an affiliate, too. Below are some of the free plugins that I currently use, all designed to shave off half a minute here, or a couple of minutes there, in the daily routine of working on content for assorted affiliate sites.

Adsense Deluxe: This is a very useful plugin that lets you manage Google Adsense ads throughout your site from the WordPress interface. You create the ads at Adsense but the plugin lets you quickly add them to certain pages but not others, run multiple ads simultaneously, and quickly swap out ad formats on the fly. The real value in this one is that you no longer have to manually go into templates or individual pages to swap out ads, as the plugin centralizes all of that work and lets you manage all of your Adsense ads from one location.

aLinks: This plugin allows you to quickly embed your affiliate links in your content, with a minimum of hassle. You basically tell it that you’d like the phrase “blue widgets” to always link to Widgets.com, with your affiliate link included in the link, so that when you type “blue widget” in WordPress, it automatically converts it to a hyperlink with your affiliate code attached. This seems like a small thing but it will literally save you many hours, as you routinely link to the same sorts of things, and this plugin allows you to do it on the fly.

SlimStats: This is a simple stats package that lets you quickly get website traffic stats on your WordPress dashboard. There are fancy stats plugins out there but this one is a snap to install and is designed to put very little load on your site, while giving you all of the basic stats and functionality that you need.

WP-Amazon: This one essentially pulls the Amazon catalog into the WordPress environment and makes it much easier to add links to specific titles and products in Amazon’s affiliate program.

Amazon Media Manager: Another plugin that speeds the process of adding Amazon products into your site.

If you want to get a rough estimate of what you might make per click for running Adsense ads on certain terms on your site, check out the link below:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Put in the keywords you want to check then go to the pull down menu and select “Cost and add position estimates”. Pull in “100″ in the next box as Max CPC and hit the button.

That’ll generate a full list of estimated CPC amounts for certain positioning in Adwords, which you can use to extrapolate what you’d likely receive for each click for those terms on your pages running Google Adsense. The figures are a little bloated, as they’re an estimate of what it’d cost to be at the top of the ads, so it’s not showing what currently is being paid, just what it’d take you to be on top. Google also takes its cut, so you wouldn’t receive that full amount anyway. And for other reasons I’m not quite sure of, the figures for many keywords seem too high in general.

It’s a decent tool, though, to gauge in general how much you might make running Adsense ads on a site devoted to certain keywords and niches.