Ethical Internet Marketer – Make More Money Online… Ethically!

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product or service that is relative to his affiliate marketing business topic?

The first thing this affiliate does is usually to place a logo for the product on his website and send out a marketing email to his list recommending the product or service he discovered. If this average affiliate marketer has at least some motivation, he will make his email as good as he can.

It will address each member of his list by name and there will be bullet points listing the advantages provided with ownership of the product or service. Then he will sit back, cross his fingers and toes, and hope to make a few sales. Well, that IS a plan but it isn’t a very good one.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a new product, he does pretty much the same thing. He notifies his list of the upcoming launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and then he sends out the marketing email at the launch.

He will make a few sales…very few. Of course, he won’t be working very hard either and maybe he is very happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place.

Average! Why would anybody want to settle for average anything? Doesn’t ‘average’ mean ‘common or ordinary…nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to keep reading.

What puts one affiliate marketer above the average affiliate marketer? The answer is uniqueness.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better than just average, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques that will set you above just an average affiliate marketer.

Average affiliate marketers just don’t grasp the idea that in order to sell tons of products, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from them rather than buying the same product from someone else.

Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonus incentives but they will be pretty ordinary and things that are really not of much value or even unrelated to the product that is being promoted.

The really GOOD affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives which are BETTER than anything that is being offered by any other marketer and are directly related to the product that is being promoted. The really GOOD affiliate marketer will give his customers a very good reason to buy from him.

Actually, the whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just plain old common sense. If you can buy 2 ears of corn from vendor A for 20 cents or 2 ears of corn from vendor B for 20 cents and vendor B throws in some butter to go on the corn free of charge, which vendor are you going to buy from?

Affiliate marketing is the very same thing.

You have to offer bonuses and you have to offer better bonuses than those that other affiliate marketers are offering.

For example: Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing that you’re an affiliate for. It’s a very good book that has been written by an Email Marketing Guru. It is selling for $100 and your commission is going to be $50 per sale that you make. There is an elaborate live launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.

How can you get an edge here? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to offer something that your competitors are not offering. You could have set up a free teleseminar that will take place within a few days of the launch for those who buy from you or you could offer a free 30 minute downloadable audio tape that further explains certain points in the E-Book.

The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your competitors. The product will always be the same…but the bonuses that are being offered is where you can get the edge.

Tip: Never underestimate the power of ‘free’. Everybody loves getting something for nothing or getting something extra. They especially love getting something that others are not getting. And that brings me to another, finer point of offering bonus incentives.

If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch, you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more exclusive and thus more desirable.

This is tricky.

You don’t want to make customers mad but you do want to make those who get the added bonuses feel like they have gotten something others have not gotten. You might phrase your offer to say that the first 200 people who buy the product from you will be allowed to join the teleseminar live and others will receive a transcript of the teleseminar. Like I said, this is tricky but it can be done.

The bottom line is just this: If you want to be a better than average affiliate marketer you are going to have to offer more and better bonus incentives than your competitors are offering. All affiliate marketers for any product are all trying to sell to the same basic customer base and that base is not unlimited.

In order to get an edge and rise above what is common, ordinary and average you will need to get really creative with the incentive bonuses that you offer with your affiliate product or service.

There have been lots of discussions going on whether it’s still smart to be using duplicate content on your web pages. In this article, I want to give you my opinion about it and what I’ve personally noticed with regards to the use of PLR content or free reprint articles on my own websites and on my clients’ websites.

First of all, let’s have a look back 3-4 years ago. Back then, you could simply slap up a website which was scraping content from other sites or even from the search engine results pages (e.g. Traffic Equalizer as the one software which started it all) and you had a site that attracted a lot of visitors automatically because you had “optimized” content. Some people made a lot of money from these tactics (5 figures monthly) and they were building dozens of such sites on a daily basis.

Nowaways, these tactics are seen as “search engine spam” or “black hat tactics”. There is a time for everything and if people were making decent money with it then it fulfilled its purpose – at least for the developers of those scripts and the ones who were using it (yes, I had used it as well in the beginning…). But the search engines wised up and were taking measures to detect that kind of content.

The next step the “lazy” marketers were taking was the creation of automatic content sites. There were (and still are) tons of scripts out there which will allow you to fetch articles from article directories and from RSS feeds directly and create a whole website with this content. You simply enter a keyword (or multiple keywords) and with a few clicks of your mouse, you had a whole website. After some time, the search engines found out about it and in most cases your rankings and your Google Pagerank was gone overnight – and so was the income!

Especially, if you had been using nothing else than content which got published from an RSS feed automatically which was one of the latest trends and had been done in combination with WordPress or with scripts which then created an archive of these published RSS news on your server. Your site could survive longer if you had been using a completely unique and modified website template for it. If you were using a website template that had been provided by the developer of such a scraper/RSS script, then you had to be prepared to lose your site fairly quickly.

A different way of building sites quickly was by using a desktop software (or online versions for that matter) which created a complete site from PLR articles you had sitting on your harddrive. As long as it was still working with the search engines, I had done it as well – after all, it’s much quicker than to build something from scratch.

But what I’ve been noticing in the last few weeks and months from observing the rankings of dozens of those kind of sites was that these kind of sites were not getting great rankings anymore.

Personally, I’ve noticed a recent trend with my websites that completely new sites which have nothing but duplicate content on them are getting a greyed out Google toolbar (you need to have the Google toolbar installed to see this).

Meaning, they were penalized.

In the past, I had only seen this kind of penalty with scraper sites but Google has extended this to new, non-unique sites as well. At least, when you’re starting out with a new site, you should be adding unique content on a regular basis now. Once I had replaced the non-unique content with unique articles, the greyed out toolbar was gone and it was white instead. That means that with the next Google update, the site will be getting a Google Pagerank.

So what is the next logical step in this “cat and mouse game”…?

The next step can only be to provide Google with what it really wants: Great and unique content. Yes, I know, it might be hard to build a site completely from scratch and write unique content for it. I would prefer some kind of automation, too…. But in the end, you’ll be getting rewarded with more visitors from the search engines and better rankings in general and you’ll have more loyal visitors if they see that you’re providing unique content on your site.

Instead of giving your website visitors the quickest “exit” from your site by publishing rehashed and sometimes even very badly written PLR content and wanting them to click on your Adsense- or other PPC ads, you’ll attract visitors who’ll be staying on your site for much longer and who will be using your site as one of the first points of interest whenever they want to get new content on the same subject.

You can make use of this behaviour by offering them a free report or ebook and getting them on a mailing list. This way, you’ll be able to direct them to your website every time you have some new content and you’ll be able to make long term profits from your site by adding the proper monetization to it – not just from Adsense or affiliate programs.

You might also be able to get direct advertisers who want to advertise with you. This can mean easy monthly profits. A lot of sites which are getting many visitors are charging $200 and more for placing a simple banner on their site. In this case, you’ll be building a real business instead of relying on the latest “fad”.

I know this goes against most of what most others are preaching, that you need volume to build your VRE empire… One thing doesn’t exclude the other, though. While you, yourself might only be able to build very few sites using this tactic, you should be using the profits from these sites to start outsourcing as much as you can to get more sites up and running. Instead of adding new pages to these new sites yourself, you simply find someone to do it for you.

You go to sites like Elance.com or Scriptlance.com and you post a project that you’re looking for a reliable writer who’ll be posting new content to your site on a regular basis. The easiest way to get this done is by using a WordPress blog. Pay this person per unique post (e.g. $2-3) and you’re looking at monthly costs which will be quite low for these regular updates (the posts don’t have to have the length of full blown articles – often 200-300 words are enough).

This is what I am personally doing now in combination with silo-structuring and LSI, I’m mainly doing Web 2.0 promotions and article marketing. With regards to my search engine rankings and visitors I must say that this has been the best step I’ve taken in a long time. There has hardly been something before that had such a dramatic impact on my rankings… and if you want to attract more visitors to your own sites then I suggest you start doing the same!

Good Morning, Detlev…

I found out a long time ago that what you are talking about in your email {“What are you waiting for…”}, what that link you included is really dealing with… at least I hope it is. It’s called “Fear of Success”. In a nutshell, it comes from your family, that you don’t have permission to grow or succeed past their level, the families place or station in life. We get programmed all our childhood to accept our place, station, in life, you are told over and over for years things like “We, our family, have always been {insert some job or trade, etc. here”}.

You could call it the “blue collar”, or “lower working class curse”. I heard it all my life, that we were workers. My Dad really only gave me one piece of advice that he had gotten when he was young “get a job and show up every day”. The idea he said was that if you showed up every morning you would work all day and that would get you a paycheck on Friday.

Sadly, too many people are programmed to only expect a typical paycheck on Friday for their whole life. They think they will never be allowed to climb up the ladder… That those places are for others and we aren’t like them. And it’s a terrible thing to live with and even harder to break out of. And the only way out is to get permission to exceed the traditional family limitations.

A few lucky ones learn that they can give themselves that needed permission, but it is a great struggle to develop that simple ability. The tragic fact of life is the great multitudes won’t, simply can’t for the above reasons. But then it wouldn’t be such a great society without them, without anyone to do the work that needs to be done. For they are, in fact, the fountain of wealth the few at the top live off of by taking a bit of what each produces for themselves. A few cents isn’t much by itself, but if one is taking a few cents from hundreds, or thousands, or millions it adds up nicely to a huge amount of wealth. And that is what the super rich do, have always done…

I’ll share with you the real secret Napoleon Hill discovered, what he alluded to in every chapter but never actually named outright… everything else he wrote is just supporting methods. And every self-help, how to do it, get rich, book, program, or system since then only takes a part or three of what he wrote in “Think and Grow Rich” and simply expounds on it a bit more, none of those have ever offered anything new, it’s something I had written on my wall years before I read his book, a “what to do with the great idea your mind gave you, or the desire you get for something”.

Just do IT.. NOW!

“Now” is the keyword, thinking about won’t get anything done If you can give yourself permission and then just do it NOW you will succeed. His thirteen basic principles are simply tools to help you get it done faster. And that’s why 99% of the people that buy all the books and systems and all the rest never ever use them, they simply don’t have permission to do it, to go forth farther and succeed.

Someone loaned me their copy of “The Secret” last week and from what I read it boils down to about the same thing, their slant is kinda like self hypnosis to give yourself permission to get what you want, to be able to accept it when it shows up. And again it’s you that must do it, what ever that is which is required to go get the thing you want. Like they teach in school for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, that is because the universe demands balance.

You can share this if you want, even look deeper into it so you can share a deeper understanding of what it is and how to learn to give permission and then do it NOW. And if it makes you a new bundle of money maybe you’ll share back what you think it was worth…

Keep up the good work,

Jon

Maybe, you’ve seen the videos already which I am about to show you but if not, then please pay close attention to them because they can add more profits to your bottom line:

==> www.quickanswers.info/TrafficSecrets2

Yes, the videos are from THE John Reese who was the first well known Internet marketer to hit the 1 Mio. Dollars in 1 day mark. The product he sold was “Traffic Secrets”.

That was way back in 2004…

Without traffic, all of your webdesign, salesletter creation or graphics become completely worthless. Traffic equals customers and it is the lifeblood of any online business.

Many of the techniques John was teaching in V. 1 have become outdated…

Well, little did most people know that John has been quietly testing hundreds of ALL-NEW traffic methods and strategies to take that original course to another level. He wanted to take advantage of all the new and powerful opportunities of Social Media, Video Marketing, Content Syndication, and much, much more.

“Traffic Secrets 2.0” includes all the latest strategies – especially with regards to Web 2.0:

==> www.quickanswers.info/TrafficSecrets2

Video 1 gives you 10 tips on how to get solid data for your niche market and competition research. And you can get another 2 videos by joining his announcement list.

Make no mistake: The techniques he teaches are solid and tested. John never releases a product that hasn’t been extensively tested and Traffic Secrets will be no different.

Many of the techniques in Traffic Secrets 2.0 are exactly what I am doing every day to get traffic to my own sites and to my clients’ sites and therefore, I know for sure that they work.

And in the videos, he’s actually revealing how the package looks like, what’s included and he’ll mention the price which is much different from the original Traffic Secrets 1 (revealed in video no. 3).

Should you decide that you want to get this product, then please watch out for my email on Tuesday. I’ll be making a very special bonus available if you get your copy through my link…!

==> www.quickanswers.info/TrafficSecrets2

I haven’t been promoting many of the big launches in the past – I have become VERY selective in what to promote…

But with his course, I can be 100% sure that you’re getting top quality which will help you to increase your profits by being able to attract more traffic to your websites.

I still have the original Traffic Secrets course from John in my bookshelf and that’s why I know that he’ll even top the quality of Version 1.

Moreover, in one of the videos, he mentioned that ALL FUTURE UPDATES to Traffic Secrets will be completely free!

What more can I say? Watch the videos before he’s taking them down after the pre-launch ends (on Tuesday):

==> www.quickanswers.info/TrafficSecrets2

Have a great Day!

To Your Success,

Detlev Reimer

P.S.: I wouldn’t be doing you a favour by completely ignoring this launch…

P.P.S.: This has also been sent to my list by email.

In part 1 of this series, I mentioned how important it is to use LSI when writing articles and content for your website.

This basically means that you’ll have to use words which are related to the overall theme of your website. So if you’re writing about how to improve your tennis game, it would be better to mention words and names like e.g. “raquet (racket)”, “slice”, “return”, “break”, “Roger Federer” and “tennis court”, too. Moreover, you should be using synonyms rather than repeating your main keywords again and again. You can’t simply just stuff your main keywords into your articles and expect to get great search engine rankings.

But it’s not all about the keywords themselves. Often, you’ll find websites which have a linking structure that is bound to “bleed” a sub-theme into several other sub-themes. This can destroy the effectivity of your overall SEO efforts.

Most Websites Have A Poor Linking Structure

What do I mean by that…?

Well, it means that the majority of sites is using a linking structure in which each page of the website can be accessed from ANY of the subpages on your website. This might be a good thing for your website visitors but with regards to SEO, it can mean the difference between getting found and ranked well and not getting anywhere near the Top 1000 of the search engine results pages for your chosen keywords.

Linking from every page to all the other pages dilutes your organizational theme of your website, thus making it very difficult for your main keywords to rank organically in the major search engines. In this regard, you’ll often find that you have great rankings for some general keywords (which are probably not even related to your topic) and that you have bad rankings for your specific keyword terms.

This usually happens when you’re utilizing a poor page to page linking strategy…

Theme Density On Single Pages Is Not Enough

Theme density is how many related words appear in connection with the subject of a web page that is determined to be relevant by the search engines. Google’s latest LSI algorithm is able to catch spammy content and thus it will lower it in the ranks. The days of Keyword Density Analysis are over. Now it’s all about theme density.

Having LSI keywords appear on a single web page is not sufficient, though. Theme density needs to be incorporated into your entire website. This means that your whole site structure needs to reflect your overall theme and not just your individual pages. The best way to ensure that this is being put into practice is by structuring your website into what is called “silo structures”.

The Solution: Create Your Websites Using “Silos”

When you’re using LSI on your website in combination with a silo structure, you will automatically enhance both the theme of individual pages within the silo and the silo itself. Each silo is a sub-theme of your main niche topic and should be completely separated from your other sub-themes.

It’s very important that the silos will never link to an individual sub-page of one of your other silos. But the last article page (or product page) within a silo can link to the index page of the next silo.

The graphic below will make this clearer (see below for a silo structured website on Electronics):

The index page links to several sub-themes, the silos, but it doesn’t link to pages within the actual silos. The index page of a silo has one or more links to sub-silos (which are silo index pages again). From the last index page, you have only links related to product pages/article pages which are related to the current sub-theme. And each article is linking to the next one.

The last product page in each silo links to the next silo index page until there are no more silos left. The only other link you could put onto these internal pages would be a link to the homepage itself to make navigation for your visitors a little easier. The second main silo (digital cameras – in blue) would be built in the same way and would not have links to the other main silos.

Using these techniques when structuring your website and by using LSI on your content pages, you are set to beat up to 90% of competitors in your chosen niche (presupposed you’re getting at least some backlinks to your site)!

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SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY SUBSCRIBERS:

I’m about to offer a service which will be putting these SEO principles into practice for you so you don’t have to….

Before offering something like that, I need to know how many people would be interested in this. Let me tell you that SEO companies who are actually applying these principles charge A LOT of money ($697+) for creating these kind of websites!

My offer would be that I create a website for you with up to 25 pages in total at an unbeatable price of just $197/site incl. 1 year of free hosting (my subscribers only – others will soon have to pay at least $397 for it). You can supply me with your content which you want to have used for the site or you can choose 1 of hundreds of private label article packs (with at least 25 articles to fill the site) that you’ll be able to choose from starting tomorrow.

If you’re interested in this, then please go to my helpdesk and let me know that you’re interested and which topic you’d like to have a site on. ( Use “I am interested in your silo-structured websites” as your subject line for the ticket.)

I will only offer this service if there’s enough interest in it – so the more helpdesk tickets there are, the more likely it is that you can get a site. The number of spots will be very limited as this is eating up a lot of my time. There won’t be more than 12 sites built!

Please also tell me in your helpdesk ticket if you want me to do the basic promotion as well so I can plan how much outsourcing will be needed! The basic package price will probably be in the $147 region but I have not decided on that, yet…

The sites will be built using XSite Pro 2 which is simply the perfect tool for creating websites based on LSI and Silo principles! Silo structured websites don’t need a lot of promotion to get great search engine rankings but the more you are doing, the better the rankings, of course. (I’ll also offer a basic package for the promotion of these websites which includes directory submissions and social bookmarking)

Sites will be built on a first come, first serve basis…