Gadooney.com

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.

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.

Let’s start off with a quick compare and contrast, looking quickly at two sites, then hopping back here. Just scroll down and view each site as a whole, without getting too bogged in details or clicking links or anything like that.

Patio to Pool

Cisco certification

If you had to make a quick, snap judgment, it’d probably be that the Patio to Pool site looks much better, slicker, and more engaging, while the Cisco site looks kind of crappy and cluttered. And you’d be exactly right, on all accounts, but one of the key reasons is a bit subtle.

I don’t have the design vocabulary to explain it well, but the use of images in the posts on the Patio to Pool site really adds a lot of oomph. Not only does it illuminate and illustrate the topic of each post, but it serves as a visual break, giving your eyes a rest from what would otherwise be a sea of text.

Not so much with the Cisco site, as it’s a bit difficult to focus on things, and the text seems overwhelming. As far as actual word count, the posts on both sites are generally in the same neighborhood, as far as length. But something as simple as inserting images really gives the Patio to Pool site some extra pop, making it look much more inviting and professional looking.

Another subtle bonus from including images in your content is that you can also put them to use for you as far as SEO goes, by using descriptive, targeted alt tags. If you mouse over the images on the Patio to Pool site, you’ll see a title like “Samsonite patio furniture” pop up. Search engines do, to greater and lesser extents, take image alt text into account when ranking pages, so adding images (with targeted alt tags that reinforce the title of the post and the keywords you’re pursuing) can actually give you a boost in search engine results. Usually not a huge one, but every little bit helps.

If you’re building affiliate sites for products, including images is pretty much a no-brainer, if they’re readily available. People love to see the actual products, so including product images will let you kill all sorts of birds with one stones.

Notice, though, the caveat that I added, which was “if they’re readily available”. That’s the only downside to including images, which is that they not only take some work to include in your content, but they’re not always easily found.

Some affiliate programs give you the tools to quickly find and locate images in their catalog (and link them to specific products), while others don’t, forcing you to do the legwork of finding the images that correspond to specific products, etc. Some programs host the images for you while others require you to serve them yourself. It varies pretty widely from program to program, with no real standard.

Like anything, you have to weigh how much time you’re spending in including images, as far as how valuable it might be to your site. In some areas, it’s simply not necessary, and you’ll do fine with very few images, while in others it’s more necessary.

If the affiliate program you’re working with makes it very easy to add images, it’s almost always good to do so, as they really do make your site more atractive. If it’s difficult to add images and doing so adds many hours to creating a site, well, that’s when you have to make a decision, as to whether you’ll likely get more ROI out of having images on pages or on spending your time creating more content.

Kick around in the affiliate world long enough and you’ll hear lots of talk about PageRank. It’s a pretty simple idea but has gotten largely been mangled and obsessed over past the point of recognition or common sense.

When discussing PageRank, what we’re really talking about is Google, and how Google ranks pages in its search results. PageRank is a  part of Google’s search algorithm that automatically determines how pages on similar subjects should be ranked in results. Keep in mind that there are other search engines than Google and while they may incorporate similar factors, when you talk about PageRank you’re really talking just about Google.

It’s easy for search engines to find and index content, and easy to return indexed content when users type in certain terms. Google finds many pages about “widgets” and when you search on “widgets”, bam, Google serves you up the 182,928 pages it’s indexed on the topic of widgets. That’s easy.

The hard part is for Google to determine which of those pages should be listed in the #1 search engine results pages (abbreviated as SERPs). What makes one page on widgets better than another one? How is “better” even defined? With the rise of affiliate marketing, how do you not only accurately rank all the worthwhile pages but also throw out spam pages that are designed solely to make money and are of no use to the average surfer?

The unique way that Google tackled the issue in the past was something called PageRank, which was basically a measure of how many sites linked to your site, and how popular those sites linking to you were. I’m simplifying here, for the sake of brevity, but that’s the basic gist of it. The measure of that popularity (a combination of total links to your site plus how popular the sites themselves were that linked to you) is called PageRank, which is displayed on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

Think of it as a popularity game. If 1,000 websites linked to you, the odds are that your content is pretty damn good. The pages on your site would then get a boost in search results over the pages on another similarly-themed site that only had 3 websites linking to it. Your PageRank would be higher than the site with similar content, so your pages would get a boost over theirs in the search results.

Extending the idea a bit, all links to your site weren’t created equal. Let’s say you have 100 links to your site, but they’re all from other sites that themselves were very popular and had a high PageRank. Your pages would tend to be listed higher than a competing site that also had 100 links to their site, but with all the links coming from less popular sites with low PageRank.

To see the PageRank of your site, download the Google toolbar and configure the options so that PageRank is displayed. Visit a site and in your toolbar you’ll see the site’s PageRank, which is displayed as a green bar that runs horizontally. Hover your mouse over the bar and it’ll show the actual PageRank number in a pop-up box, on the 0-10 scale.

That’s the basic idea of PageRank. It was a good idea and worked well, but, like all things where money can be made, savvy affiliates and SEO firms started gaming the system. An ungodly amount of hours was expending trying to manipulate PageRank, to spread PageRank more effectively thoughout sites so that all pages got a boost, to not leak PageRank to other sites, and on and on and on. For good reason, as boosting your pages in results directly relates to making more money.

PageRank still exists, and it’s still a factor in the ranking of search results, but it’s not as important as it was in the past, as Google is working to incorporate other similar factors into its algorithms, such as TrustRank and other semantic considerations.

Stepping back a bit, the real reason I mention this is to try to prevent you from disappearing down the black hole of spending too much time obsessing over or trying to manipulate PageRank. People waste a ridiculous amount of time debating the pros and cons of things like PageRank, TrustRank, amd REF=NOFOLLOW OR REL=NOFOLLOW, when all they need to do is focus on creating good content.

I know a sound like a broken record, but all you have to do to make money in the affiliate world is focus on writing good, targeted content that people search for. That’s it. Predict their questions and answer them. Pick niches where people have lots of questions and retailers or advertisers are lined up, salivating at the chance to answer their questions. Do that, over and over and over, and you’ll make a boatload of money.

If you get down to the bare bones of PageRank and TrustRank and other factors, they’re really just getting at a very basic truth. They try to identity and reward good content that people are interested in and value enough to link to. That’s it. If lots of people link to something, it’s usually good, interesting, entertaining, whatever. Cool.

That makes your life very easy, as an affiliate. All you have to do is write good stuff, and let the rest work itself out. Sure, you can write crap and compensate for it by all sorts of sneaky stuff to manipulate search results and generate traffic, but that’s not a recipe for long term success, and often more work in the end than simply creating good content.

At a certain point, sure, there’s some value in being savvy to all the latest news about the Google algorithm, and what should be tweaked over here, what could be optimized over there, etc. But in the beginning you’re always better off to simply put your blinders on and concentrate on banging out good content, without worrying about all the extraneous junk that can lead to endless fiddling and wasting of your precious time.

In many ways, there’s no such thing as “bad” traffic to your website. With bandwidth costing next to nothing these days, there’s really no downside to getting lots of surfers on your site who are immediately disinterested in your content and back out or close the browser in 0.02 seconds. It’s not “good” traffic, as you can’t profit from it, but it’s more neutral than “bad”.

The only time traffic goes bad is if you can’t profit from it and you’re spending time and/or money to acquire it. If you’re spending $1 in labor or advertising to attract traffic that makes you $.10, that’s bad traffic, assuming you’re doing everything correctly on your end to optimize your site to generate money.

Remember, your time is valuable and you need to account for it when you’re trying to generate traffic to your site. Just because you’re not spending any money on traditional advertising doesn’t mean that your acquisition costs for traffic are $0.

Let’s look at some of the more common sources of traffic:

• Search engines: This will likely always be both the most common source of traffic to your affiliate site as well as the most cost-effective. Getting search engine traffic is as easy (and hard) as simply writing good content that people are interested in and search for.
• Links from other websites: Pretty straightforward, as we’ve all clicked through a link from one site to another. These links arise in different ways, naturally and artifically, but they involve the same basic mechanism of links between websites. These also include links from leaving comments yourself on blogs and other sites that both allow for comments and display your URL on the comment.
• Social bookmarking sites: These are your Diggs and del.icio.us and other sites where surfers keep lists of bookmarked sites that are shared publicly. Most of the social bookmarking sites keep lists of most popular bookmarks, recently bookmarked sites, etc., and you’ll typically get a burst of traffic (or an avalanche of traffic if you land on Digg’s main page) when surfers bookmark your pages and they show up on the recently added pages.
• Forums:  There are tons of forums out there on tons of topics. You’ll get traffic from these when users post links to your sites and other forum users click through. If you’re a member of forums that allow linked signature lines, you can create a signature line with links to your sites and generate traffic from your own forum posts, as well.
• Word-of-mouth/email: We’ve probably all been told by someone to check out a cool site and typed it in directly into the browser, or have been sent an email with a link to a page on a site somewhere out there on the Internet tubes.
• Paid advertising: This takes various forms but typically is generated by programs like Google Adwords, where you bid on certain keywords related to your site and pay a fee per clickthrough to your site. This would also include buying ads on other sites or even traditional methods such as buying offline advertising.
• Traffic exchange, hubs, and click exchange rings: These are basically links from other sites, but completely artificial, so I’m listing them separately. These just circulate traffic endlessly, for no purpose other than to boost traffic to sites.

So the question becomes which of those are good, which are bad, and what should you be doing to try to get more of the good traffic while avoiding the bad traffic?

Like anything, it all depends on your site and the nature of the traffic, but in general the best traffic for affiliate sites is search engine traffic. You can control it to some extent by writing good, focused content, so the traffic you get is usually pre-sold and inclined to click on links that make you money. They’re after what you’re advertising, which is why they landed on your site, so it’s a much easier sell.

All search engine traffic isn’t good, though, as you’ll inevitable get ranked for weird terms that really have nothing to do with what your site is about. This happens and really isn’t something you can do much about, other than to write focused content. It’s neutral traffic, for the most part, unless you’re wasting too much time on creating the unfocused content that’s attracting it.

If it’s just surfers landing on your site from stray words in your focused content, that’s fine, but it starts to become bad traffic if you’re investing too much time slapping up any old content for the sake of getting hits.

Traffic from other websites that link to you is generally good traffic, but it’s hard to get. You can’t make someone link to you, so you can’t scale this one up as quickly as you can with search engine traffic. It’s usually good traffic because sites that link to another tend to share similar themes, so a surfer that was interested in the original site is likely inclined to be interested when they click through a link and land on your site.

While you can’t control who links to you, you can encourage it by linking to them yourself and clicking through that link on a regular basis. Webmasters are obsessed with stats and watch like a hawk to see if anyone is linking to them. If they see consistent traffic coming from your site, they’ll usually link back to you, out of professional courtesy. Linking to similarly themed sites can also help you in search engine rankings as long as you do it in moderation and don’t have a ginormous number of links going out from your site.

Comment link traffic can also be good, if you do it in moderation. If you spam comments just trying to get a boost from all the links back, you’ll get crap traffic and possibly punished in some search engines. If you judiciously leave comments on blogs of a simmilar nature to your site, though, this can be a good source of traffic. 

Traffic from social bookmarking sites looks nice but it’s often hard to monetize. Digg can bring your site to its knees if you’re on a shared server and the general consensus is that it’s hard to make money from the traffic, as people on those sites are generally fairly savvy and not as inclined as a grandmother from Wisconsin to click on an Adsense link.

Like anything, though, this can be good traffic, especially if you’re smart enough to optimize your pages specifically for the social bookmarking sites sending you traffic. It becomes bad traffic if you spend too much time trying to game the system, obsessing on getting certain pages bookmarked and not spending enough time simply cranking out good, focused content.

Forum traffic is generally decent traffic, as it’s often on a similar theme and of interest to the surfer clicking through. It’s usually slightly better if it comes organically from some unaffiliated party on a forum saying “Hey, check out this cool site” and linking to you, as opposed to generated yourself from putting links in your signature line and posting a lot on forums.

If you’re spending a lot of time posting solely for the purpose of getting forum traffic, you’re probably wasting time and would be better off writing more good content for your site.

Word of mouth traffic is good but extremely hard to get. All you can do to get it is to have a kick-ass site or one that entertains people in some sort of unique fashion. Think of the things that prompt you to recommend sites to other people, as far as examples of what you have to do to get this kind of traffic.

Paid advertising is a mixed bag. If you’re experienced and know what you’re doing, it can trump all the other traffic sources in value, as you’re attracting surfers that already have their credit card half way out of their wallet. But it can get pricey quickly and optimizing your site for paid traffic is difficult and not for the faint of heart.

Because of the expense, paid traffic can also be the absolute worst for you, as unlike all the others listed above, it’s not free. You’re paying good money for it so it’s disastrously bad traffic if you pay that money and see no return.

Traffic from traffic exchanges, click exchanges, and hubs is just useless. Don’t waste your time with it.

One of the most difficult things about getting started with affiliate marketing is that the sledding is very slow and rough at first. If you’re completely starting from scratch (and not simply adding links to an existing site you have with traffic), you’ll very likely go months without any visible fruits from your labors. And even when the first fruits do appear, they are usually very, very tiny and far from ripe.

There are several reasons for that, but the most prominent is that it simply takes time for your site to be fully indexed in search engines, especially with Google. It’s frustrating, but it’s just the way things go. Most search engines are moving towards using a sandbox filter, first pioneered by Google, that takes into account how old your site is when indexing and ranking your pages. All that means is that there is usually a waiting period where you new site is treated differently and not fully indexed, even if it would normally rank highly for certain terms. When your site has been around for awhile, you get the green light and are indexed fully. In some ways this sucks, but in others it’s a good thing, as it’s purpose is to protect you in the long run from people spamming content on sites, automatically generating millions of pages overnight on new, throwaway domains and endlessly repeating the process.

This is one reason I recommend immediately jumping in and getting the ball rolling, even if your site isn’t polished and completely done. Get the main pages up, even if you know you will tweak the content, design, and layout later. It’s very natural to want your first baby to be perfect and beautiful when you reveal it to the outside world, but the reality is that no one is going to be looking at the beginning anyway, so it really doesn’t matter what it looks like.

If you stretch a bit, you can turn the waiting game to your advantage. Instead of getting impatient and expecting immediate results, try to see it as a savings or IRA account. Each page you create has the potential to earn you money for years. While you may not see any returns from that work in the short term, it will eventually kick in, and it will continue to work for you, long after you’ve created it.

Here’s a dirty little secret. In this day and age, if you’re starting a website for affiliate purposes the domain name you pick is nearly meaningless. Yes, in some very rare cases you can do much research and unearth a peach of a domain name, but it’s almost always wasted time.

A “perfect” domain name would be one that has your key topic in it (or, in affiliate marketing parlance, your “targeted keyword”), as well as one that gets type-in traffic and is memorable. So let’s say you wanted to promote affiliate programs for cigars, and somehow, in a magical world, no one had registered cigar.com. That’s a perfect domain name for you, as it has your targeted keyword plus people simply type in “cigar.com” into a search engine if they’re looking for a cigar but have no idea who sells them online, just like horny monkeys type in “sex.com” for the same reason.

So that’s the theory of the perfect domain name. Now let’s bust it to pieces.

Search engines continue to move away from attaching any value to terms in your actual domain name (such as ranking you higher on search terms for “widgets” if your domain name is “justgreatwidgets.com”), because even a retarded chimp can game that system.

People like to pretend that understanding the inner workings of search engines are some secret, alchemical art, but in many cases it’s common sense. If you rank pages higher if they have the keyword in their domain and suddenly see an onslaught of domains and pages like “http://www.widgets-buy-online-great-super-widget.com/widgets.html”, well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that you should move the other direction, and stop rewarding spammy pages like that.

(Sure, argue with me all you want that Google still gives you a boost if your domain name has your targeted keyword in it, but I’ll bet you a box of doughnuts that over time that will steadily dwindle to nothing, if it isn’t already there.)

As far as great type-in domains and/or memorable ones, well, this one is obvious, as they’re pretty much all taken. The only ones not taken are too obscure to do you any good. Sure, midgetgoatsex.com is still available, but what in the world are you going to do with that? Umm, forget I asked.

People waste far too much time when getting started with affiliate sites searching for that perfect domain name. The reality, too, is that you’ll crank out mnay sites over your affiliate career, and it’s often better to launch new ones as stand-alone domains. If you’re about to start a new site and are struggling for a domain name, don’t sweat it. Just pick something. It matters very, very little.

Gadooney.com is a good example of the above. When faced with possibilities like “makemoneyfromaffiliatemarketing.com” or something equally silly, I couldn’t help but throw up in my mouth a little. So I picked a random nickname for a coworker that developed from Jebus only knows what dumb inside joke we were riffing on at the time. Within ten minutes from the decision to launch this site I had the domain registered, added to my hosting account, and was up and running.

Don’t get bogged down on choosing the “right” domain name. There is no “right” domain name. Grab something and get to work.