Recovering From Google Farmer Panda Update

Not sure how I missed this, but the great Vanessa Fox has a fantastic post up on Search Engine Land about what to do if your traffic has gone down since the Google Farmer/Panda Update. It is quite a long post, but she covers it pretty thoroughly. I have had a handful of sites affected by the last update, but am pretty sure what changes I need to make. Not drastic mind you. Pay close attention to the authoritative Content and duplicate content. While not surprising, many sites might fall into the more ads than content category. She also covers how Google recently launched an algorithm update intended to address scraper sites, but I know for a fact that this still needs tweaking on their end. I see scraper sites outranking some original sites everyday. Web spam is always changing and sometimes Google seems to chase their own tail in this department quite often. Anyways, read it slow and absorb it as it is a great post. She really writes great stuff and is worth following.

Affiliate Recruit Wordpress Plugin

I have not quite formulated a plan yet for this free Wordpress plugin I have stumbled upon, but I have a few ideas. The free plugin is called the Affiliate Pro Plus plugin and lets your registered users get credit for new users they recruit by sending people to any url on your wordpress site with ?affid=username appended to the end. This could be for a contest perhaps via Twitter or Facebook and might be a great way to have a traffic promotion. I think you can probably come up with several uses for it. I have not used it yet, but the description claims members can be redirected to any page you want when logging in while admin users will not be redirected. You can also see who has been referred by whom and how many new members have been referred by each user on the user list. Of course this will not be a practical plugin for every site you run, but it is worth bookmarking and playing with should the need ever arise.

Tracking Facebook Likes With Google Analytics

If you use some of the Facebook addons on your site that I have talked about previously and you also use Google Analytics, I have come across a tutorial on how you can track Facebook Likes with GA. This type of analytics I would suggest only on higher volume sites that you know will have traffic and know will get an occasional like. It is not a perfect fit for every site, but I am in the process of implementing it on a small handful of my heavier traffic sites that I blog on quite frequently. It is actually a pretty easy process and just one more way to track traffic and actions. Kudos to David Booth for the short and easy to understand tutorial.

Michelle MacPhearson Blueprint Video

The latest video from Michelle MacPhearson is straight forward. Her blueprint is very similar to what I do myself. She is blessed with the ability to teach and her videos are fantastic. I won't spill the beans of her process, but you will have to opt in to watch here series of videos. Also she will send you a link for a great FREE Rank Decoding Engine software she had built as well. you do not have to buy a thing to get it. I swear. She has a video that explains this for you as well. Nothing earth shattering, but as you will see from the video, Michelle is a great teacher. Her Crowd Mountain and 3o Minute Backlinks programs are top notch.

Blog Link & Traffic Analysis & Popularity Contest Wordpress Plugins

I am on a roll writing content today and have pocketed 20 reviews/articles thus far. I didn't want to interrupt my strong momentum flow going right now, so I will make this short and sweet and defer you to a post by Ann Smarty on Search Engine Journal. Ann takes a closer look at 2 plugins you may not be aware of. The 1st is the Blog Link & Traffic Analysis Plugin, that was even new to me. I think I came across an earlier version of it, but just put it on the busiest site of mine to give it a work out. The 2nd I have used for a while and it is the Popularity Contest Plugin for Wordpress. Don't install these just to install these. Have a purpose for them and use them. You do not HAVE to have them, they are tools, but damn good ones.

OK, back to content writing, I am obn track to write about 40 pieces today. Some days it just flows easy. Today is one of those days. Go write some of your own today. Do it.

Another Solid Reason For Making Use Of Twitter

Like it or not, Twitter is here to stay. Full of spam you say? Absolutely, but so is Google, Yahoo and Bing. Here is a break down of searches done on Twitter compared to other search engines. Now if indeed these numbers are true or close to being true, then as you can see it passes Bing and Yahoo combined. Pretty astounding. I must admit I have used Twitter search a few times myself and found exactly what I was looking for. As I have mentioned in other post, it is very easy to feed your RSS feed into Twitter. It takes only a few seconds to set up and your done. Also using Twitter to network inside niches is priceless. It is a very under done resource. I do not mean blatant spamming either. Those that continue to discount Twitter and how it can be used effectively are missing the boat, but those same people will also tell you it is nothing but spam and just haven't seen it's effectiveness in action. I am glad to say, I have. Hopefully you do as well.

How Wide Is Your Long Tail Cast Net?

After reading more on numbers included in the Long Live The Long Tail post I did, it prompted some research last night on a few of my sites that do not have high long tail organic searches. Now these sites earn money, rank well and get organic traffic, but they could be getting much more. These sites need a larger long tail net cast around them as they are already seeded very well.

After I get back from Vegas, I have as a priority to research and drill down further on these sites and have a goal to add at the minimum, 10 more pages each to cast a larger long tail net around the sites. These will include more specific brand names, model numbers and LSI related terms that will be woven nicely into content and product listings. It will indeed take some time, but I feel the effort will quadruple the traffic and earnings on most of the sites.

Have a close look at your own sites? How many long tail searches are you getting? Are you thin overall on the amount of words on the site? Could you weave in 5 or even 10 more articles or product pages to better attack other keywords that are closely related? It is amazing how much money we all leave on the table along with how much longer the tail searches are by the surfer. Do not get so caught up in keyword density that you ignore longer phrases that can be woven into an existing site. These long tail searches are usually surfers that take action, which means more money in your pocket.

The Berries Often Taste Better Than The Coconuts

It is a mistake we all make, especially those new to the business of affiliate marketing. Most look at the coconuts way high up in the tree and overlook the berries growing at the base of the tree. How does this relate to affiliate marketing? When most do their keyword or niche research, regardless of the tool you may use, the focus is often put on the results with high numbers. The higher numbers are often one or two keyword phrases, but are not limited to that length as I have seen many three and four keyword phrases that even I know not to attempt to capture.

MOST properly built niche sites these days will have 30 or pages to them. These 30 pages each can be focused on 2-3 sets of keyword phrases. Even if each page was focused around say 2 each per page, that is 60 in total. Now imagine if the exact phrase count for search was 100 each and each of those were very attainable to rank for. That would total out to 6000 exact phrase counts for that site. Now, will it be that perfect? Absolutely not, but you give yourself a much better shot at garnering "buying traffic" by using those longer tailed, less searched for phrases. Mix in the fact that your content by nature SHOULD include LSI type terms that you will garner organic traffic for and you will find that your site is better off as a whole.

So what do you do if you have a multitude of sites you aimed to high with? You can either re-focus those pages around lower volume keyword phrases or you can add more pages to the site that better attack these phrases. Depends really on the direction you want to go. In my case, I usually re-focus the pages, wait for the engines to come back and index them again and build a few backlinks in the mean time. Using this process, I have taken sites that were only earning a few peanuts a month to sites that earn $200.00 or more a month and the volume of traffic has increased. Not only the volume, but the quality. Meaning more repeat visits as well.

Does this mean you can not shoot for the coconuts on some pages? Absolutely not, but when you start picking the berries, you will be amazed how sweet they are and they are easier to get than climbing the coconut tree.

Traffic & Earnings Are The Truest Measuring Sticks

I see a ton of people that get hung up on chasing what the little green Google bar has to say about their site and where they rank for certain keyword phrases. It is easy to use these and other factors as measuring sticks of a site. It is indeed easy to do as we all fall into the trap sooner or later. I judge my own sites by traffic and earnings. It is all that matters in the big picture. My traffic tells me what is working, where the surfer is coming from and where they are going. It tells me what they were looking for and if I had it. Traffic however is worthless if you are not earning from it though. I have sites that do well traffic wise, but the keyword focus and product selection was off. Thus the earnings are flat. I learn from this and re-vamp the sites to better earn from my traffic.

Is page rank important? Not as important as you think. A PR 0 site that is focused properly and full of good chewy content can produce organically on it's own. I have had PR 3 sites that earn less than some PR 1 sites. Now these PR 3 sites are from much earlier days, but once again the traffic was not earning as it could, thus these were re-vamped and are now pulling much better profits.

So do not get caught up in PR and other minor measuring sticks, measure by what matters. The bottom line.

Authoritative Sites Sometimes Call For Different Monetization

I have a handful of what I consider high authoritative niche sites. By authoritative I mean, great page rank, Google site links and heavy traffic from both regular readers and organic search results. The thing I have found with these type sites is that not all of them perform well in the new EPN QCP price structure. It is about 50/50 and depends on the niche of course.

The great thing about the high traffic of both regular and organic surfers is that they USUALLY can be defined by a set of demographics. This enables you to not only monetize with niche related affiliate sites, but you also can monetize with non-niche related programs that target certain demographics. Is it a science? Sure! Is it one I have mastered yet? Absolutely not, but I am getting a better feel for it, the more I delve into the sites demographics. The large flux of traffic allows me to test on short time frames to see what works the best. Sometimes it is a pay per click program, sometimes a pay by action program. The good news is there is no shortage of ads to show and test.

If you have high volume authoritative sites that are not performing well with QCP, you do not have to dump it altogether either. You can merely try to better target the organic surfer by in essence making those pages harder for a regular visitor to find, while showing them more ads related to the niche or targeted for their demographics outside of the niche.

Surfer Intent Plays A Much Bigger Role In EPN

Sure kind of an obvious statement the deeper we all get into the new EPN QPC model. Before, we would just target the keyword phrases, try to rank and get our fair share of organic traffic and hope they ate the cookie. Now for straight BANS or primarily monetized EPN models, we need to pay more about the intent of the surfer.

Intent of the surfer is so vast and wide from niche to niche. To put one solid formula or stereo type on a surfer is impossible. For instance, a keyword phrase for "Joe Blow XYZ Review" might produce a surfer that is primarily intent on buying Joe Blow XYZ's. However in another niche "John Rubbles ABC Review" keyword phrase will produce surfers that are mostly tire kickers. If you have been around niche store building a while and have multiple sites, you have surely seen this or something close to the example.

Figuring out surfer intent is hard with any affiliate program, let alone EPN. The only data we can rely on is our server stats and any analytics programs like the Googles. You also have the EPN transaction reports that tell you click times and the items that sold. You really have to marry all of them together to know what keyword phrases or producing the surfers with buying intents. It ain't easy, I will tell you that. Most of my weeks now, I am playing with data. Not that I wasn't before, it is just more important to me now with the new EPN QPC structure. Not only that, it will make me a better marketer.

Lets face it, we all would like 9 out of 10 organic surfers to be intent on buying, that just is not going to happen, but the closer we can get to 9 out of 10, the more success we will have. Even if the magic number is one out of 10. It certainly will vary based on the organic traffic and the intent of the surfer.

If you are looking for a straight answer in this post, I hate to disappoint you. I do not have it, but the answer does lie in your stats or un-attacked keyword phrases and understanding/researching more about the niche. Sure it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but if you never start digging through the hay, you have absolutely no chance at finding the needle. Surfer intent is something we constantly now need to pay attention to. As I mentioned before, it not only will help you with EPN, but will make you a better performer in other affiliate programs as well.

I would be remiss if I did not take time out on September 11th to say thank you to everyone that serves this country in the military and beyond. I will never forget that September day and the sacrifices you fine people make or have made for my country. Thank you!

The Best Traffic Usually Never Comes Through The Front Door

This statement is hard to understand unless you see it in action. Unless you have an established brand or several bookmarking home page surfers, you best traffic will arrive to your site via an interior page from the SERPS or a naturally given backlink from a related or semi related site. We all know the brand meaning. When I buy from Amazon, I go straight to the home page usually and start there unless I have an item bookmarked from a previous session. With niche site building, especially in the early age stages, your organic traffic will be the source of income. Once again, until you see it in action and track it statistically, it may be hard to understand. To better attract solid organic traffic, make sure you are focusing on features, specifications and benefits an item has on your product pages. It is not enough to merely target the product name in long tail. In your content, merely adding color, weight, speed, size and other features that would be closely associated with the item speaks even loader organically. Even in 200-250 words, you can encompass an item that will garner more organic traffic in ways you didn't even initially research or target. Simply drilling down in your product keyword research via Google Keyword Tool or Micro Niche Finder will reveal single words that surfers deem associated.

In the early days of niche site building, webmasters would merely target one or two phrases and repeat and bold them several times surrounded by fluff text. Now Google expects to see certain related LSI terms or words used in association with the item. Merely stating: "Flux Capacitor Model XYZ" is good and you have the best and cheapest prices on "Flux Capacitor Model XYZ" is garbage and leaving a ton on the table from an organic standpoint. Tell the surfer the size, speed and benefits of using it. You will still be targeting the main phrase, but also will encompass a slew of closely related searches you never dreamed of. Each and every page is a door in, a website all to itself so to speak. Sure it relies on the rest of the website for juice and navigation, but often times it is the only page the surfer sees if done right. Encompass the product and you will see the best traffic come through that door, not the front door.

Great Landing Pages Make Great Filters

One of the biggest overlooked things, especially in the new N1WAY BANS Guide is the the landing page. The landing page can act as a filter to better guide the surfer to EXACTLY where they want to go. Obviously we all want the surfer to come from the SERPS to the exact page of the item they want to buy, but depending on the search they use, that may not always be the case. By building a great landing page such as this one, the surfer now has 3 main choices, 16 choices to other filter landing pages and 2 escape links to other sites with your affiliate code. If you build these landing pages the correct way, you will also increase your chances on product items clicked being exactly what the surfer MIGHT buy and thus scoring better in the new EPN payment structure. I have seen a few sites by readers that try to bypass this page and I think they truly do not understand their usefulness as not only another page that can garner organic traffic, but a page that can filter broad searches that arrive to your site.

How Navigable Is Your Site?

I have been revamping some older sites to make them more navigable mainly for the surfer, but also for the search engines. I am also integrating landing pages on sites that previously did not have them. This is covered a little bit in the new BANS guide, but a great example of a landing page is here.

The page is tailored around Nike Forged Golf Irons and easy for the surfer to get exactly where they are wanting to go with the fewest amount of clicks. Should the surfer be generically looking for non specific Nike Forged Golf Irons and where to land on this page, they now have 3 easy choices to better suit what they are looking for. The navigation on the right sidebar will easily let them switch to another landing page as well by brand. You do not have to link from every page on your site to every page on you site. The surfer and the search engines do not want this. They want a clear and easy navigable path without thinking. By creating an easier navigable site, they have also added 16 additional pages of content, so to speak and created 16 more doors into the site as well. So check your sites navigability and add landing pages where you can. It indeed helps all the way around.

Blog Commenting With Your Twitter URL

We all have done it, we comment on blogs related to our niche and slap our target keyword as the username and our niche URL in the URL spot. Usually it is attached to a 5 word comment, if that. I have found it more useful these days if commenting on a blog post in a related niche to leave my Twitter page username and Twitter profile URL instead along with a meaningful comment. Everyone should have a Twitter page related to whatever niche they are in and hopefully updating with niche related comments or blog post/content pages from your site. When leaving your Twitter username and URL, it is a little less threatening and spammy in nature. Sure you are not getting whatever search engine love there is to get, but aren't we really look for surfers related to our niches? Sometimes we pay too much mind to the search engines and not enough to the goal of getting targeted surfers. Think about this the next time you leave a blog comment.

Have you tried commenting with your Twitter URL?

Getting Niche Related Traffic From Twitter

Using Twitter to drive quality traffic to your niche site is pretty painless and easy to do. While it will not drive a ton of traffic at first, it may down the road the more followers you get.

The first thing you will want to do is to get a Twitter account centered somewhat around your niche name. If comic books is your niche, you may choose a name like comicbookguy or comiccollector. Just make sure it is somewhat related to the niche you are driving traffic to.

Secondly, make sure to add the link to your site in the bio section of your account settings on Twitter.

Third, design an attractive Twitter background and add as much info about your niche and website on the background. Make sure to put your website address in big bold letters on the background as well. If you are graphically challenged, you can user a great program like Customize Twitter to design a very professional background.

Next you will want to hunt down 5 or 6 great blogs or news sources related to your niche. Make sure these sites update regularly and have a RSS feed.

Add these RSS feeds to post automatically to your Twitter account using Twitter Feed. Here is a great tutorial on how to use Twitter Feed. If you have a blog as well, make sure to add your feed as well.

Make sure to check your followers daily and follow back any users that follow you. Over time, you will pick up quite a few followers related to your niche. You will also be driving some traffic to other sites in your niche, but you can use this to your advantage and contact the other sites and try to work out a link trade between you and the other sites.

After you build up some followers, you can also mix in some affiliate link offers into your Tweets two or three times a day.

This is a painless, yet effective way to build up quality surfers without spending a ton of time other than the initial setup. Give it a try, you might be surprised how good it works.

There Is More To Niche Traffic Than Just Google

Google is the king of search engines, but that is like saying the sky is blue. We already know it to be fact and do not need daily reminders of it. However most niche site builders are TOO reliant on Google and can have huge swings in traffic with every algorithm shift. Google should be the by product of hard work and a bonus, but it is not the only source of traffic out there. Using social sites like Facebook, Linkden and various others, can get you just as much in touch with your target market as Google can.

If you were to put your house on the market, would you be 100% reliant on Google? Not yet, but perhaps one day Google will play a bigger role in that, but as of right now you or your realtor would promote your home through various other means. The same should go for your niche sites. Where does your target buyer surf or hangout related to your niche? Can you market to them through articles or advertise on forums related to the niche? Open up your mind and get in touch with your target buyer. Not every buyer finds useful websites to buy from through Google. It is not the end all, do all as a source for traffic.

Some Friday Links To Read

Came across some good reading today, so I thought I would dedicate a post to it. First is a post from Website Magazine entitled Men vs. Women: Website Optimization Usability Study. Basically it is a quick look at the surfing habit differences between the sexes.

Next is A Guide To Qualifying Link Prospects For Relevance, Value & Potentiality by Search Engine Land. The post also features a neat little Link Building Worksheet as well. Very worth the read.

Lastly is a Newbie Guide written by Nicky Cakes. some good stuff on landing pages and setting up t.racking

Convert Your Foreign Traffic With Geo BANS

If you are a BANS user, you might want to pay close attention. Whatever country you are in, you are likely getting some form of foreign traffic. Depending on what niche you are in, you might get more in one niche versus the other. If you have a US store for example, you are likely only showing US eBay ads and if you get a UK surfer, odds are you will not be converting them via EPN. BANS user Tao has a great fix for this problem and it is called GEO BANS. In just a few easy steps, you can have your BANS store Geo target ads from different eBay platforms for whatever country your surfer hails from. This will give you a greater chance at converting the foreign surfer. Tao has addressed all 248 possible countries that can be detected and assigned them all to their nearest eBay country listings. For the price of a couple of pizzas, this mod will pay for itself in no time flat.

I have personally tried this out myself and notice a difference in more earnings, all from foreign surfers I was missing converting before. I have seen the benefits first hand on geo targeting my traffic and i think you will as well.

Here is a PDF on the complete rundown of GEO BANS. Tell Tao I sent you when you order.

More Questions About The Free Traffic System

I have been getting quite a few emails regarding the Free Traffic System I have been promoting as of late and wanted to clarify a few things for those interested in using it.

First, I suggest when you use it, you use it to first up the rankings of one of your articles on EzineArticles or GoArticles site. This will let you see how it works without putting your own sites at risk. Once you see the power of it and how it works, you can go forward from there.

Second, you need a great article of 450 words or more to submit. I would use a different article than the one you are driving traffic to, but along the same lines or topic. If you can not write your own original content, use Need An Article.

Third, learn to use the article spinner properly and spin it good. Use at least 3 variations of words or phrases for each item you spin. The better the spin, the better for everyone involved. I hate spinning articles, but their spinner is easy to use and a good one. Spin the title as well as body of the text. This is very important.

Fourth, rotate out your anchor text links, do not use just one. Settle on three keywords or phrases related to the article you are trying to rank for.

Fifth, Is it free? Yes, very free.

Sixth, If you never use it on your own sites that is fine, you can make a living out of ranking your ezine article on page 1 of Google and funneling traffic off of them to your niche sites.

If I haven't clarified this enough, just continue to shoot me an email or comment here.