0toCash

It’s almost “money season” online and that means Google has to start tweaking the ranking algorithms again. This one potentially could have a huge impact on affiliate marketers this holiday season but right now it is too early to tell.

And the “advantage” of something like this rolling out now – in Aug/Sep – is that surfers will get used to it and perhaps some “banner” blindness will set in.

What the heck am I talking about? This:

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site (source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/showing-more-results-from-domain.html)

To be fair, Google is reacting to Microsoft’s Bing search engine here and has been testing this new multi-listing for a while…

And it looks all innocent when you’re searching for information about the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. But what about when you’re looking for an HP printer or a Dyson vacuum?

You can click on the image and see that above the fold, only Google shopping and hp.com URLs are being displayed.

What about Amazon.com? Or your niche website selling HP printers? Pushed down in the results.

Now, there are multiple forms of this listing display and I’ve tried to show both examples.

With the AMNH case you had AMNH.org sites taking up the SERPs *and* you had a directory listing at the main AMNH.org result.

All this takes up valuable screen real estate and despite all the social and web 2.0 properties out there, most users hate to scroll if they aren’t really engaged in the content above the fold.

We can craft all sorts of evil conspiracy theories about Google doing this to drive up Adwords revenue but that doesn’t really help.

What you need to do is start monitoring the SERPs for your sites and for related brand/product affiliate sites. The Google May Day update had an effect on search results for long tail keywords and this modification is addressing the shortest tail brand-category type pages.

The best information will come from watching your traffic deltas in cases where Google is now favoring a brand name website.

If you were ranking for brand-category type keywords like (‘dyson vacuum cleaners’) before you want to take special note of shifts in the rankings and how this is impacting your long tail traffic to things like your page on the Dyson DC 25 Ball Vacuum Cleaner.

If you see dramatic changes then it’s time to consider more advanced SEO techniques like third level push and variants to get more juice to the interior product pages and perhaps give up on the category.

This is a grossly simplified piece of advice – the bottom line is that you’ll have to revisit your internal linking and your link building and (re)focus on what you can reliably rank for given Google’s changes.

As Cosmo says in Fairly Odd Parents… “good times… good times…”

Note: I’ve been busy lately creating a new version of the 0toCash blog and finishing up a series of reports (free) on “money models” for subscribers. So here I am tweaking and changing my local copy of the site here and I come across a bunch of “draft” posts… Posts that I wrote and didn’t edit, or didn’t finish or just never pressed the “publish” button. Below is one of them. And it’s about my favorite marketing time of the year – New Year’s.  Enjoy…

Good affiliate marketers rejoice come Labor Day (that’s the first Monday in September for you folks not in the US)… why?

It’s the start of the holiday season. That beautiful time of the year when people open their wallets a bit wider than normal and buy all sorts of stuff online and off.

Brick and mortar stores look forward to “Black Friday” and of late e-ecommerce vendors count the days until Cyber Monday. Both of these are great days to cash in on your efforts as an affiliate marketer but they pale in comparision to another day…

New Year’s.

I couldn’t say this any better than smaxor did last year…

There are two things that make the New Year a fantastic time for affiliate marketing

1. All the brand advertisers that were buying and bidding up prices leave the market place. So reps for ad companies actually want to talk with us again and have time for us affiliates.
2. New years resolutions. It’s a new year everyone wants to stop what they’re doing and start doing something better.

If you doubt that New Year’s resolutions are prime hunting ground for niche affiliate marketing, get this.

(source: http://www.oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/affiliate-marketing/explosive-formula-for-affiliate-marketing-in-the-new-year/)

Here’s the US Government’s list of top New Year’s Resolutions. Complete with links to (mostly) public domain content you can use and refer to:

• Drink Less Alcohol
• Get a Better Education
• Get a Better Job
• Get Fit
• Health-e-Cards for Holidays and New Year
• Lose Weight
• Manage Debt
• Quit Smoking Now
• Reduce Stress at Work
• Reduce Stress Overall
• Save Money
• Take a Trip
• Volunteer to Help Others

Look familiar?
Pretty much this is a who’s who list of information product niches…
and their interest peaks around January 1.

Imagine that…

Russell Brunson bought out Frank Kern and Ed Dale’s original Underachiever Formula website and product and is relaunching the thing tonight.

Now, if you weren’t around back in 2004 and 2005… it was ‘da bomb (or something like that). Basically you had two big camps in the IM world: the Adsense folks and the niche marketing information product folks. Frank and Ed were the spiritual leaders of the infoproduct crowd and dubbed their method the “Underachiever Method.”

It was based on buying Adwords traffic (“never pay more than $0.05 a click…” was an infamous rule) using a bazillion keywords and driving traffic to a flycatcher page. The “flycatcher” was a simple survey that asked the visitor their most pressing question about whatever niche you were in.

This did two essential things:

1. PROVED beyond a shadow of a doubt that you could drive traffic to your landing page
2. TOLD YOU EXACTLY what the market wanted in an information product in that niche

You didn’t actually create the ebook/audio/video until AFTER you had enough feedback from your market.

So what did you do next? Simple – take the burning questions your market told you about, get an information product built, slap up a sales page to replace the flycatcher, and start selling.

Traffic was cheap back then and being into lots of tiny niches was the fashion. Ed even made a big splash when he sold 39 of his niche sites for something like $4 million.

Now, the Undies concept – which begat the original 30 Day Challenge, the Ultra Underachievers coaching program, and skads of offshoots and variants – is evergreen. Information products are a GREAT business to be in. Always has and always will be. People always have a problem to solve and a “how to” book, ebook, video, or audio will always find an audience with good marketing.

The Undies approach on the other hand has gone through massive revisions over the years thanks to the 30 Day Challenge and other programs.

But if you want to see what everyone was talking about back in the day (at least half of the IM world) – here’s a link to an old Underachiever’s Newsletter.

I have no idea what Russell’s going to do with Undies in 2010 but you should head over to http://UnderachieverFormula.com if you’re interested in a little bit of IM history and what’ll probably be a good product launch.

Keith “protein shakes” Baxter just published a really nice blog post about new twitter marketing software that actually works.

By “works” I mean that it gives you TARGETED traffic to your landing page of choice and helps create the right kind of social ‘buzz’ in a non-spammy and scummy way.

I know… an automated Twitter app that isn’t spammy. Who would have thunk it?

The best thing is that Keith tells a great story about how he learned about the software, gives you a personal case study of how it worked for him in something like 17 nanoseconds and THEN outlines 5 ways you can monetize using this.

Oh, and he also gives you an EXAMPLE of one of this affiliate review sites focusing on a particular brand of protein shake called Shakeology (you can see how he’s set up his site here: Shakeology Review Site).

OK, so for spit nothing you get:

1. great blog post that you can model
2. info on what looks to be ‘freakin great non-spammy Twitter marketing software
3. an actual case study complete with traffic and the site!

Ummm… what are you doing here? Go to Keith’s Affiliate Radio site now and read the post

Back in the day Corey Rudl did a bunch of testing and proclaimed that on average it took 7 “touches” before most people would buy from you online.

And there in lies the birth of the famed “7 Day e-course”

The 7 day course model was THE model new internet marketers were
taught…

And most people thought it was as simple as loading up the autoresponder with your course chopped into 7 pieces and your link in each message.

There are a couple of problems:

• this isn’t 1999
• 7 is not really a magic number

Online commerce was brand new in 1999. It was a bit harder to make a sale – especially for infoproducts. These days things are different – ebooks are outselling harcovers over at Amazon.com and people are very comfortable with buying online.

So how many times do you need to touch someone?

read more…

The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation…

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

If I had a broad brush I could paint the internet marketing world – and the entire marketing world in general – in two colors:

1. transactional marketing
2. relationship – or engagement – marketing

With transactional marketing there is no “lifetime value of the customer” – there is no list building, follow up, or focus on getting anything other than the sale (or the Adsense click).

A lot of people get drawn to affiliate marketing because of the transactional model – no customer service, no need to communicate with anybody. Just put up some pages and wait for the money to come in. Adsense is the same way. Hell, the entire Adsense model is based on this arbitrage approach.

What’s important here is that this is an immediate gratification approach to marketing.

And that’s ok. It is what it is.

When someone comes to your site you need them to do one of three things:

1. buy
2. bookmark
3. leave

Now, the BBL model applies to most any type of direct marketing but here the “buy” is really “B-U-Y”. It’s not just take an action like download a free report or subscribe to a list, etc. And that makes all the difference…

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Engagement marketing is different.

read more…

Ryan Deiss launches Perpetual Traffic Formula today and you can expect the promotions to be HUGE… There’s a sportcar and a whole host of sweet gifts on the line for the affiliates that can bring home the bacon.

Now, I only have a couple of things to say. If you’re on my email list you probably already read this (so apologies)…

PTF may not be for you.

Seriously. This isn’t some reverse psychology “bad news” thing. I am being 100%  straight up with you.

Here’s a quick video I did (2:25) talking about PTF and what might actually be better options for you right now.

http://0toCash.com/ptf-launch

p.s. Don’t get me wrong. I love Ryan’s courses. Wholesale Traffic Formula was brilliant for instance. But bottom line – you may not be ready for Perpetual Traffic Formula.

How many do you have?

If you’ve been doing any kind of search engine optimization you know hoe important links are.

And not just any kind of links – quality links.

Sure, you can get by for a while – 6 to 10 weeks usually – with profile links and pligg submissions direct to your money page. But it doesn’t last long.

Authority Codes is a new free report that gives you a list of high quality authority sites to get backlinks from.

Here’s the deal. Download the report and shoot us a ticket at  http://0toCash.com/support and I’ll give you a private report from my personal spreadsheet with at least 39 additional authority sites that you can post links on. I say at least because I am not sure how many of the 1,724 sites I want to give up.

So I’m bribing you to read a free report. What kind of world are we in?

Seriously – read the authority codes report. Send me a support ticket. Score more high quality authority linking sites.

Pardon my french. But you really need to read this email Peter just sent out to his list. There are three things I want you to get from it:

1. the email structure itself. It’s a GREAT presell and attention getter.
2. you HAVE to watch the Vishen presentation that Yanik put up. That’s the first link Peter gives you.
3. TAKE SOME ACTION and look at the posts and structure of Vishen’s site. That’s the second link.

Really look at the posts in Google Reader. DECONSTRUCT his business.

Seriously. This is one of the most powerful videos and exercises you can do. Full stop.

Hey – it’s Peter,

When I wrote Nanobloggers last year, I did it with the intent to help create better personal businesses for people. The model obviously works, I’m living proof of that and so are the many people who REALLY put NB to work.

The NB concept is easy – but it requires work. Every solid, long term business requires work. I don’t deal in one-hit-wonders and neither should you.

I find it quite amusing to see that some NB buyers have pimped out Facebook profiles where they yap all effin’ day long with their 2,000 or more “friends” …
but when I visit the Nanoblog they build 5 months ago, I see nothing but virtual tumbleweeds and hear nothing but the sound of crickets.

When I ask them why that is – they say that they didn’t “get” Nanobloggers, that it’s too difficult for them.

NOTE: Click on the link below to keep reading. I have some killer commentary that’ll help your business apply this very notion after Peter’s email finishes up.

read more…

Before I get started let me make one thing clear…

I am a HUGE Lance Armstrong fan. Yeah, I know all about Lance being an egotistical, hard ass athlete. Find me someone that dominates a sport (or a business) like he’s had that isn’t a dick sometimes. ‘Comes with the territory.

Anyway, this post isn’t about Lance or the Livestrong foundation. It’s about Livestrong the website.

The Livestrong site is owned and operated by Demand Media. Demand Media owns eHow and a bunch of other web properties and has a goal of publishing 1 million content pieces a month. YES – 1 million. Gulp!

The thing is, Livestrong is the kind of “portal 2.0″ site I’ve been writing about publically and privately for a while now. Sites like Livestrong and RightHealth are huge portal directories with a lot of aggregated content and very little “original” content. And the stuff that is original is pretty light.

That’s the polite way of saying near useless.

The thing is, these portal sites have been kicking Google ass. They rank for thousands of terms and basically let you acquire authority that you can use to link out to your other money properties AND they make you bank. Serious bank with Adsense and image ads. This is SEO arbitrage as its best.

Now, as the web goes – let’s face it, this is garbage content. I’m not judging. I am being honest. In the great words of Jeremy Palmer: “Demand Media is to content as BP is to Oil Rigs”

Well, the glory days of “portal 2.0″ are closing on us. Google’s declared war on these portals and recently announced an algorithm change specifically to address these kind of sites.

I have a nice portfolio of content islands that use this portal strategy and it’s time to start watching and migrating. The hammer won’t fall all at once — it never does (usually). But it’s coming.

Don’t cry for me Argentina… the truth is I’ve never left you. Watch, learn, and adapt. 3.0 or 2.1 are right around the corner.

CREDITS: inspiration for this post (and some tears along the way as you could see it coming) comes from Aaron Wall’s excellent SEOBook blog and his post here –> http://www.seobook.com/the-spammer-lifestyle