Build a Business Not a Blog by crl826

Building a Business NOT a Blog by: JohnCow.com

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Disclaimer and Copyright Disclaimer: We make no guarantees and take no responsibility what so ever in regards to your earning potential by following the strategies shared in this training material. The purpose of this material is to share the steps we used to build our blog for the "John Cow vs. Garry Conn COWpetition", but that in no way suggests that this strategy will work for you or your business.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Table of Contents

Building a Business NOT a Blog by: JohnCow.com

Table of Contents

Let’s Gets Started –> Putting First Things First:

The Big Picture

Why Are You Doing This?

What Do You Want to Accomplish? What is Your Goal?

Make a Commitment

Get a timer!

Important Reminder - “Work Ethic”

Last but not least - Get Rest

Narrowing Your Focus

Where to Start… How About Selecting a Niche?

We Know the Business… Now What?

So Once We Had Our Market We Needed a Map

Dividing Up the Work

How to Set a Deadline:

Keyword Research

The Cart before the Cow

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com What Are You Looking For? Finding the Right Affiliate Product

35 36

Where to Start?

Finding the Right Product

What about non ClickBank products?

"SHOW ME THE MONEY!” Keywords

Diamonds in the Rough

BONUS Topic on Finding the Perfect Domain Name

Initial Content Keywords

Content Creation Madness

Our Preferred Content Source –> Forums

Test & Track… YES YOU NEED TO!

Start Up the Diamond Digger

Get Your Blog Up

Installing WordPress

Getting Themes

Plugins

Shut off Notifications

Set your Permalinks

Link Bait, Content and Legal Stuff

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Link Bait

How to Make a Link Bait Page:

Start Posting Your Content

Update Your Blog Theme

Updating Your “About Us” Page

Creating a Privacy, Terms of Use and Disclaimer Page

Navigation, Do NOT Forget the Navigation

Call to Action

Create a robots.txt

Initial On-Page Optimization with a Dash of Feedburner and Aweber

SEO Your Index and Link Bait

Use Feedburner and Aweber

Measure Twice Cut Once

Optimize the Opt-in message and “Thank You” page

Checking for Errors (broken links)

Create and Submitting the Google site map

Turn on the Ping

Setting up Analytics

Congratulations… We Are Ready For PROMOTING!!!! Link Bait Promotion

100 101

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com VIRAL Marketing

102

Social Marketing Needs to Start Somewhere

104

Using Press Releases:

106

Do Not Be Afraid!

108

How to Win Friends and Get around Their Pride

110

Follow Up but Be Polite About It

118

Getting Traffic by Leveraging Resources

120

How To You Build Diversity into Your Link Building

120

Keyword Research - Shiny Diamonds Everywhere

124

Filter Out the Good Words

124

Finding the Organic Treasures

126

Organizing Your Keyword in Order of Priority

128

Long Term Maintenance

129

Promotion Plan

129

Watching and Writing

131

Promote those Promotions

132

Recommended Resources

133

Special Thanks

134

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Let’s Gets Started –> Putting First Things First: For those of you that are thinking this is going to be simply a step by step approach to building a blog, you are mistaken… and it is very important that you understand the difference. We really want to make it clear right from the start of this little COWpetition that was set before us, that we are going to be showing you how to start an actual business not just build a blog.

You see there is a gigantic difference between building blogs and building a business. In all honesty anyone can build a blog, there are loads of free services out there that make it completely free to jump online and start writing. This however is not the way to go about truly making money online for the long term.

Our hope is that we will be able to transform your view point on “blogging” and educate you on how to truly achieve solid results. We will show you what the difference between a “Traffic Broker” and a true “Asset Maker” is and why you want to be an “Asset Maker”.

To make this strategy as completely effective as possible you will want to ensure that you do a few things right from the start…

1. Designate Time to do This Everyday: You need to make sure that you take this serious. If you want to succeed then you need to make sure that you treat this as a serious business. You will want to designate a section of time each day and during that time period you shut off all distractions such as the television, telephone, cell phone, instant messenger and your email. This is very important as you want to be as effective as possible, and if you only have one or two hours a day to spend on this then you do not want to have any distractions.

2. Get Organized Right from the Start: You will want to create a folder on your desktop that is designated for this project. Name the folder “JohnCow Cowpetition” or something similar and this folder will contain all the information you collect through out this training. Also it is

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com recommended that you keep a diary or journal of your daily learning’s and goals.

3. Make a Commitment: If there is one thing that frustrates us to no end is when people complain about a system that they do not even try. Please do not waste yours and our time and energy if you are not going to be committed to following the steps outlined in this training. Follow through and then decide if it works for you or not.

4. Make a Plan and Make it YOUR Plan: This is probably the most important point of all. With this training you are going to go through “OUR” training but that does not mean it is the best strategy for everyone and as such you need to tweak each step to suit your needs. From strategies to tools that we recommend, look at them simply as suggestions and if they work for you then great but if they don’t, then use what you find best and make it “Your” strategy.

5. Constantly Ask Yourself this One Question: If you were paying someone to do what you are doing right now, would you feel it was the best return on investment for what you need to have done right now?

We want to make clear that we started out just like the majority of you. Not too long ago we were working a full time job and trying to start a business online. Nothing was handed to us, we worked our behinds off for everything we have and our hope is that the training we provide in this eBook can be put into practice by anyone, whether just starting out or already established.

Last of all, we need to make it very clear that we are going to be referencing some products that we use through out this process. Some of these are free and some of them are not. These are simply our recommendations and if we make a recommendation it will be accompanied by details of how it is used. We apologize if this is an inconvenience to any of you.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

The Big Picture “Give a person a fish; you have fed them for today. Teach a person to fish; and you have fed them for a lifetime.”

Our desire is to have you succeed by following our system. That means that we teach you exactly what you have to do and show you the tools we use to get the job done. What we cannot and will not do however, is the work for you. Creating a successful business online is no different than creating a traditional brick and mortar business… It takes perseverance, money, time and most of all, hard work and a commitment from you.

What we are going to show you throughout this training is not about “Get Rich Quick” schemes. Instead, we stand strong to the concept that you do it right from the beginning and your rewards will be for the long term. You see, most get rich quick systems are based off of ways to “Cheat” the system. We on the other hand, believe in working with the system to achieve incredible results.

To begin, ask yourself a few questions to better understand the reasons for running a business online:

Why Are You Doing This? Before you can start into any part of your new business, you need to ask yourself this one extremely important question:

Why are YOU doing this?

You need to stop right now from wanting to rush into just building a blog. Take a step back for a moment to try and understand the big picture. You have probably heard the saying:

“You can not see the forest for the trees.”

What that means is sometimes you can get so caught up in little details that you miss out on the entire

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com big picture. If you want to truly know where you are going then the best bet is to step back, look at the entire picture and then map out what you want. So asking yourself “Why you are doing this” is one of the first steps in being able to truly understand “where it is you want to go”.

Some examples of “Why” might be:

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to help a current business expand

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to make some extra cash on the side

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to be able to quit your job and work for yourself

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just for fun

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you fill in the blank here

Question to You –> Now it is your turn. What is the number one reason you are doing this?

JohnCow’s Why for the COWpetition –> For us the answer to this question was to Prove Market Authority. We wanted to prove to our readers that we know what we are talking about, it is not about winning (although we had every intention of doing so), it was about social proof. After 30 days we wanted the posts and the blog that we built to speak for them-selves.

What Do You Want to Accomplish? What is Your Goal? You may think this is the same as the first question, but it really is not. Why you are doing something is not the same as what you want to accomplish by doing it. This question takes the first one to a deeper level because it makes you look at it as more than a far off dream but as an attainable goal.

If your answer is “to make some extra cash”, then you probably have a set amount of cash you want to make. Perhaps it is to help pay off a debt or to afford a new vehicle. Whatever the reason, now is the

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com time to figure that out.

Do not shrug this off!

It is so incredibly important and so often overlooked. We guarantee you the people that are very successful online all have answered this question. This comes down to work ethic, you need to take the time to build your solid foundation, and then once that is established, everything else will fall into place.

So How Do You Set a Goal?

Let’s say you make a $40,000 a year salary and want to be able to quit that job to work full time online. The first thing you will need to do then is understand exactly how much you need to live on and then double that (this is the formula we used when we started).

So for our example if you make $40,000 but feel you could live on $35,000 then that would be $70,000. Now that you have a goal of $70,000 as a yearly income, the reason you double it is because you will have to pay taxes, health insurance, employees (even if just outsourcing) and so on. 50% is generous but the last thing you want to do here is short change yourself.

Next you need to figure out exactly how much money that is per day. So take $70,000 and divide it by 365 which equal approximately $192 a day.

So now you need to ask yourself, how are you going to do that? Break that value down to smaller goals. So for example, what it might look like for you is:

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$100 - Affiliate income

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$70 - Adsense / Yahoo Pub / Chitika / Pepperjam

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$30 - Advertising on blog (this is just an example)

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Now it is time to pick a time frame that you are going to achieve that goal. You want to be aggressive here, but you also need to be realistic. If you have never built a blog in your life and to think you are going to achieve that goal in 30 days, is not realistic.

A realistic example might be to create a time frame such as:

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1 Months - Earning enough to pay for itself

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3 Months - Earning $1000 per month

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6 Months - Earning $3000 per month

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1 Year - Earning $5800 per month (Your 1-Year goal)

Once you have your first goal accomplished, then focus on your second and third. Once that final goal is reached make another one and this time go bigger!

Make sure you do not create for yourself an unrealistic goal either! We agree full and well with the concept of aiming high, but one of the biggest reasons many people get discouraged with their progress is they start too high. If you are just starting out, set a goal to what you can live on and then once you achieve that you can then focus more time by being able to do this full-time and you can start to reach for the BIG goals.

If you already have a goal, then congratulations! You are already ahead of the majority.

Something important to note is that you need to stick to your plan and not focus on what every other marketer is telling you. Once you have a plan in place and start to see what is working for you… then simply repeat the process. If a new product or strategy comes out and looks good then figure out how to implement it into your current strategy. If it does not fit then leave it alone! If it does fit and makes something easier to do then great! Keep it and keep moving forward!

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com This is so often the spot that people get hung up on. They have a plan but then Mr. Marketer comes along and says to do it this way instead, so we stop what we are doing and start over again, or even worse, do nothing while we analyze the situation and waste time and money.

Get back to the basics, start with a goal and create yourself a firm foundation first!

Once you have this goal, you will want to print it out and place it somewhere prominent that you will be able to see everyday that you are at your work station. Every morning before you get started, focus on that goal and what you are going to do today to get close to achieving it.

Question to You –> What is your 1month, 3 month, 6 month and 1 year Goal?

John Cow’s Goal –> For us the answer to this question is focused only on a short term goal that in 30 days (because of the COWpetition time line) to have created a blog that when put on the market at sitepoint.com is sold as a complete “Business” solution for the buyer.

Make a Commitment We talked about this already but in our opinion it needs to be repeated again. Writing out why you are doing this and what you want to accomplish is easy. Anyone can take a few minutes and write down a bunch of simple words. What is going to make the difference from making these just a bunch of words to making them an actual goal is that you need to make a commitment to what you wrote down.

As we have said a couple times before, this is going to take hard work on your part and that means that you are going to need to commit time to this every day.

How much time?

That depends on how fast you want to succeed, but we recommend that you spend at least 2 hours a day on this for at least the next 6 months if you want to see any measurable results and in order to do

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com that you are going to have to clear your schedule to allow for 2 hours a day to be spent on this.

That might mean that you have to drop a favorite pastime for awhile or stop watching a favorite television show. Maybe it means that you will have to stay up a little later every night. Whatever it is, you need to decide now and make a commitment that you are going to dedicate that time to growing your business.

The best way to do this is to map out your week ahead of time. This is one of the reasons we love the Franklin Covey day planner systems, because they are based around the principal of putting first things first. That means you need to look at your schedule and plan ahead of time when you are going to accomplish your important tasks.

By looking at your week, you will start to see a lot of opportunities that you could be doing something more productive. Once you identify your areas, you can then plan those times for working on your business.

Get a timer! One of the absolute best things we have ever got ourselves to help improve our time management was an electronic egg timer from Wal-Mart. What you can do is if you know you can work one hour in the morning before work and one hour in the evening when you are usually watching TV, then you set the timer for 1 hour and put it in front of you. Once you press start on the timer then all distractions are off. That means you shut your door, unplug the phone, shut off the cell phone, put in ear plugs (or listen to music if it helps) and do not randomly surf the web! Instead, commit yourself to being effective for that time. If you are having a hard time finding time in your schedule for these 2 hours, the last thing you want to do is waste them.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Important Reminder - “Work Ethic” You see the internet and computers are supposed to make our lives simpler. We can process difficult calculations in milliseconds, create dynamic presentation, find information on just about anything by simply typing in a couple of search terms or talk with people around the world as if they were in the room next door. The problem with this is people often assume that since it makes all these things so much faster and simpler then it should be able to do the same for making money. There has got to be someone out there that has made some program that you simply push a little red button and “POOF” in mere seconds you are generating income.

The answer to that is a resounding… NO!

Yes, there are great programs and material out there, but none of them, I mean absolutely none of them, are a big red button that allows you to sit back and do nothing.

We are sure you have heard of the 80/20 rule. This rule is incredibly universal in its scope because so many things fall into this. For the MMO market I would dare say it is more of a 90 /10 or even 95 / 5rule but for the sake of argument we will use the 80 / 20.

What this means is that 80% of those that buy any software or ebook, will never actually use it to its full potential. That means that 8 out of 10 people will either never even open the software or ebook or they open it up and read through it but give up because it looks like it takes too much work.

Then you have the 20%. This is the small group of people that actually are making a living online, they are the people that realize revenue is only generated through hard work, that no software or ebook is the end all be all of solutions and they actually read through everything and use the solutions how they were designed.

Our hope is by the end of this training to have made you one of the 20% NOT one of the 80%!

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Last but not least - Get Rest Yes, it takes work, yes you are going to have to be a little busier than usual to get your business off the ground but the one thing your body and mind need is rest. We highly recommend that you take off one day a week from all work activity. That does not mean you cannot do work around the house or go fishing, but what it does mean is you completely remove yourself from your job.

This day should be dedicated to getting rest for your body (sleep in and or take an afternoon nap), do what you love (go for a walk, play with your kids outside or go fishing) and just enjoy yourself! More often than not, entrepreneurs who are starting out work themselves into a medication of some sort. They get no rest, no time to unwind and their body starts to react. Stress, depression, obesity are just some of the end results!

Life is your most precious gift, so enjoy it!

Narrowing Your Focus If you have been involved in making money online for more than a couple of years, you will remember that as recent as 2 years ago all that was needed for market research was to find a program that could generate mass amounts of keywords for you. You really did not care too much about anything except getting the biggest list possible.

Today, that is a risky and ineffective way to go. The search engines are getting smarter all the time and their goal is to serve their customers the absolute best search results they can. In order to achieve this, they have hired incredibly talented people to help them design complex algorithms that allow them to automatically filter out good sites from bad sites. They are not 100% perfect at this but they are getting better all the time.

One of the more recent technologies that have been getting a lot of attention is called Latent Semantic

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Indexing (LSI). What this technology (algorithm) does is it tries to imitate the thinking process of a human visitor to do its best to determine if the results of their query are relevant to what the person would be searching for. So when looking at a web page, it would look at the content from a perspective of how a human conversation would take place.

The easiest way to understand it is to think of an example. If you are sitting in your buddy’s garage looking at his new car, do you say…

“Wow, I love red cars. That is a nice red car; I would love to go for a ride in your red car. How much did your red car cost?”

No! Of course not, because that is not natural. Instead the conversation would probably go more like:

“Wow, I love the color red on vehicles. That is a really nice set of wheels; I would love to go for a ride. How much did your car cost?

See how the keyword “red cars” is not even used? That is because most conversations are not so direct or specific. The human language relies on a lot of assumptions and generalities. When you read the second phrase, you understand that there is a red car but you are not beat over the head with the keyword phrase itself.

Now if that was a 500 word article, I am sure you could actually fit the word “red cars” in there, but as the above example shows, you would use other terms as well. Those other terms are terms that are commonly used with the primary term or topic of the conversation, which means they are related.

Another example would be a forum conversation. If you spend any time in forums you will know that when a topic is started, it is not uncommon for it to head in an entirely different (although related) direction. So for example, a topic on “Scuba Diving Goggles” may be started and after a couple posts some one might comment about how they got this great set of diving goggles at a store when they were diving in Fiji. Another person would then refer to that and talk about an experience they had

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com scuba diving in Fiji and some other locations they have visited. Another person might then relate to another location the previous person referenced and how they had a great scuba diving instructor there who recommended a certain type of goggles.

Now, the above example is just that, an example, but this is very much the same as how human conversation is. The mistake many niche bloggers make is they get content that is too focused on a specific keyword and only that keyword. What ends up happening is the content is useless from an enduser standpoint. This strategy has had its time and place, but in the last year alone, many improvements have occurred (especially in Google with LSI) and this strategy is becoming less and less effective.

Content needs to be focused on themes and created like a conversation. You need to not focus in on one single word, but instead focus on the theme for the topic and what conversations occur around that theme. With the use of LSI, (which we believe Google is some what using) Google is better able to determine the relevance of a website by quickly comparing its content to that of existing websites that they consider trustworthy.

So if your web page does not contain the verbiage that is frequently associated with the subject matter of related sites, then the that website will not be considered to be part of that theme or market, which is not good from a long term rankings perspective.

So when you start your market research you need to keep this in mind. We are not looking for those magic individual keywords, we are not doing keyword research but we are doing is Market Research. This will become very clear as we move on.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Where to Start… How About Selecting a Niche? As the saying goes, the first step is always the hardest. This is very true for individuals starting out for the first time with market research. We can hear the cries now:

“Where Do We Begin?”

The question you first need to ask is what type of business are you creating?

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Do you want to create a blog that is something you will personally author and become a known name for?

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Do you want to create lots of small niche specific affiliate focused blogs?

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Do you want an online store front for your current off line business?

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Are you creating blogs to turn around and sell?

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And the list goes on and on

You see, if you can not answer the question of “what you want to do”, then you really can not move to the next step effectively.

Question for You –> What type of business are you creating?

John Cow Answer –> For this contest we created a blog that we wanted to turn around and sell in 30 days. This means we wanted a market that had a potential for lots of traffic, had lots of passionate people, was already a proven market (we did not have time to test new markets), we knew where to find contacts (because we knew the market) and was something we were familiar with so we could ensure that the content was good for the time frame we had.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com might want to start a blog on a specific market that you want to be personally known as an authority for. This does not mean you can not later create small niche sites that promote affiliate products, but what it does mean is that can not be your main focus right now. You want to distinguish the two because it influences the decisions in the next step.

We Know the Business… Now What? As you can see from our breakdown of reasoning, there were limitations to the type of market we could select because of the criteria for our business. We would not want to pick an emerging health niche that we had no interest in or knowledge about because the research and testing would be too time consuming. For us this next step was to brain storm all the markets we…

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Already knew there are markets in

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We had knowledge about

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We knew how to find contacts in

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We saw similar “market related” sites selling at sitepoint.com

The last 2 points were the most important in our opinion. First of all by us understanding the market, we knew exactly where the people were that were influential in that industry. Not that this could not be researched and found but we were very limited on time with the challenge and to create the absolutely best results we needed to purely stick to what works… very little room for exploratory research. The second point was critical because we wanted to know that these types of sites were actually selling… which really is the end result we are after.

So we brainstormed all the possible markets and 4 immediately came up…

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Video Gaming

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Mountain Biking

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Karate / MMA

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Online Business

These are four markets we were knowledgeable in and are some what passionate about. So we then broke down this list and gave points to the specific ones that best met our criteria and we came up with the selection being “Video Gaming”. This market has lots of passionate people, we were knowledgeable about it, knew where contacts were easily found and it appeared to have related sites selling.

So Once We Had Our Market We Needed a Map Now we needed to map out our plan and time frame. We knew the goal, but next we needed to map out how we were going to reach that goal in the needed time frame.

This is where we absolutely LOVE dry erase boards. Since starting full time online we have never been without a dry erase board and the reason is they are perfect for standing up and putting in front of you what you need to accomplish.

Obviously you do not need to go out and buy one… but it is what we use and so we are telling you about it.

The first step was to list all the tasks that needed to be done and we designated them into short term (Urgent Need), long term (Non Urgent but Important) and “Maybe” tasks:

Urgent Tasks: (Need to be done first above everything else)

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Decide on specific niche in the “Video Gaming” market to target

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Initial content decided on using LSI principals

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Domain set up with the blog installed

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Design and graphics started

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“Link Bait” Content ideas agreed upon

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List of sites to contact for joint ventures

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Plugins installed and set up

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Gmail account created

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Feedburner and Aweber account set up

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Get legal documents in place (privacy and so on)

Non Urgent but Important Tasks:

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Niche specific content for blog and promotions research (will explain difference from initial needed content tomorrow) using LSI principals

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Social site accounts set up

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Videos planned for promotions

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Start Contacting potential JV partners

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Start viral marketing engine

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Maintenance plan

Maybe Tasks - these were ideas that came up that could potentially be scope creep and so we would look at as time allows.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com The above is just a general summary of the tasks that are needed to accomplish for our goal, yours very well may be the same. One thing to note is that because our end goal was to sell the new blog, we had to keep that in mind for all services and accounts we created, they would need to be made available with the purchase.

Task For You –> Create a list of all the tasks you know need to get done and put them into three categories

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Urgent & Important

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Non Urgent and Important

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Maybe

Dividing Up the Work Now that we had brainstormed our list of tasks, we need to break them down and put them on a timeline.

Obviously with this COWpetition, we had an unexpected and aggressive time line that needed to fit into our other tasks that could not be ignored. Not having a set deadline however, is not an excuse to not make one. If you want professional results, you need to treat this entire process as a professional and that means prioritizing, planning, setting goals and deadlines!

By not setting deadlines, you run the risk of…

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Scope Creep: Constantly adding new features, strategies and more. This is killer on time frames and budgets and needs to be controlled. You must look at items that are not immediate needs as “maybes” and once all the important things are done and the blog is published and promoted, you can go back and look at implementing these strategies.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Procrastination: Give us an excuse to put it off until tomorrow and we will always put it off until tomorrow. Procrastination is a killer on time management and return on investment and you need to always keep this in check and setting a strict time frame can help. This takes self discipline, especially if the only one you answer to is yourself. This is where finding a “business accountability” partner or group is powerful. Two or more like minded individuals meet and review what’s going on, provide each other with third party feedback and review each others goals and help to enforce accountability. If you suffer with procrastination, then stop here and really think about who you can get to work with you on helping you.

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Analysis Paralysis: With out a deadline you will find yourself spending hours upon hours on tasks that are an absolute waste of time and money. An example is trying to get a plugin to work with your blog that offers nothing but some fun functionality. Frustration and determination kick in and you can get so focused on getting this to work you lose all perspective on time. Before you know it, the day is gone and all you have to show for it is a cool plug-in that still does not work. Set a deadline and use a timer and make sure you are spending time working on tasks that make you money!

How to Set a Deadline: Well the obvious answer is –> when you need it done by!

How about for those that do not have a specific time requirement?

This is when you look at your goals and figure how this fits into with them. If you are just starting out and your first goal was to have your expenses covered in 60 days, then you need to consider the time to build and promote the blog. Then the time it takes for traffic to build up and revenue to start generating.

As a rule of thumb we believe it is wise to not plan any revenue at all to be generated less then 30 days

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com from the completion of the blog. We are NOT saying it is not possible and in fact if you do everything correct, it will happen. What we are saying is for the initial goal it is best to set yourself up so the odds are more in your favor.

This is when we love to go back to the dry erase board. So with the COWpetition, we put the date that was 30 days from the start of the COWpetition at the far right side of the board. Next we divide the board into resource sections. Here is a screen shot of our dry erase board…

(A) 4 sections for this project. Researcher, Content Creator, Designer / Programmer, Promotion

(B) The deadline was set for the date the site must be ready for promotion, which was Friday May 23rd. The goal for this deadline was for the main functionality and initial content to be implemented, the agreed upon “Link Bait” to be implemented and a name capture system put into place.

(D) Each task was divided among the sections and in order or priority, so that jobs that are needed to be done first were done first. For example, the initial research for the targeted niche needed to be decided upon, then initial terms to focus on for content and then the domain name and so on.

Here is the List of Our Initial Urgent Tasks and Basic Conversation about Them…

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com “video game” market is very broad and there are a lot of options to pursue. We need to do initial research to focus in on a niche that we can own. The niche must have…

1. Decent traffic –> This should be pretty obvious (We used Google trends here and compared against terms we knew the traffic for)

2. Low Competition –>Not to be overwhelmed with competition. (Use Google filter allintitle:“keyword phrase”)

3. Revenue Potential –> Must have seen obvious ways that the niche could be monetized, affiliate products, ad sales and so on.

2. Content: Once we had the targeted niche, we needed to get the initial content decided on using LSI principal. The challenge with this content was there was not enough time to truly know if the keywords we selects were going to be profitable however we were limited on time and needed to select words to get started with right away. To accomplish this as effective as possible we…

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Brainstormed topics we wanted to write about

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Went to the top forums to see what the hot conversations were

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Checked out stores to see what hot sellers were

We did more keyword research later, that focuses more on “Money” keywords, but that takes a little time and we needed some initial content for this COWpetition right away.

Domain: There are two ways to look at this, we could get a domain that is keyword rich or get a domain that is “brandable”. To do this we…

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Generate a list of keywords based on what was found from task 2 using the strategy laid out at http://www.johncow.com/keyword-research-show-me-the-money-words-that-is/

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Take those keywords and enter them into TrafficTravis (http://johncow.com/traffictravis) which we will be going into more detail on later.

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Take the results of Traffic Travis and use the GoDaddy (http://www.johncow.com/godaddy) bulk register to find unregistered and keyword rich domains. (We will show this trick later as well)

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Filter through to see if there is anything that fits. If not, then look for variations that can be brandable.

We decided on our domain GamerzReviewz.com because it captured the niche we wanted, was easy to remember and brandable.

4. Install: Blog Installed with selected Theme and Plug-in: This obviously had to wait until we had the domain selected.

5. Design and Graphics: Now that we have a domain, we need to agree on the mood of the blog and what message to tell people as soon as they arrived on the blog. We needed to pick colors and graphics that matched what we felt our target audience would like.

6. “Link Bait” Content Ideas: Needed to brain storm content ideas to get lots of initial linking done and subscribers to our list and it needs to be natural links and authentic subscribers. The “Link bait” must be something that people would want to share with others and help drive traffic to with sites like Stumbleupon and Digg. The options we looked at were…

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Controversial article

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Cool video

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Free give away (ebooks, software etc)

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Contest

For this niche and the time frame we had to come up with the actual content, we needed an idea that was easy to implement and very powerful. The winning idea was to offer what people in this niche need or want… and that was a new gaming system.

7. JV Partners: List of sites to contact for joint ventures: We now needed to brain storm and research all the sites and contacts we have that might be willing to be a sponsor for this contest or mail their list about the contest. We needed to collect emails and phone numbers and we also needed to brain storm an offer that would be a “major win” for the sponsor.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT shy away from this step; it is what took us from working for others, to working for ourselves. Build relationships with others and offer them incredible value for their effort. For example, we would not email someone and ask for sponsorship with out making it very much worthwhile on their end. For our example, we emailed with recommended sponsorship amounts and what they would get in return. We offered promotion on our site but also offered outside promotion such as article submissions. The different levels of sponsorships came with different levels of available promotions.

8. Account Creation: We need to create the basic accounts to be used with this site. Each account must be able to be sold as a package with the blog (since that was our goal). The accounts we needed created were…

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Gmail

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Feedburner

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Aweber

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Facebook

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Digg

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Twitter

There will be more accounts created later but these were the ones we wanted created initially.

9. Legal Docs: Need to be sure we had all are ducks in a row with privacy, terms of use, disclaimers and all that good stuff.

Each of these tasks was divided up with needed time frames to meet our initial deadline.

Keyword Research We have a question for you and we want you to really think about this.

What are the most important metrics that you use when doing keyword research?

1. Traffic

2. Competition

3. KEI

4. ___________ (Fill in the blank)

There are a lot of fantastic tools online today and each one has their good points and bad points… but one thing that 99% of all these tools have in common is they simply give you a calculated guess using their own custom algorithm, that simply tells you how many competitors there are and how much traffic you can expect. Some make up a fancy term to use, such as KEI, but the bottom line is it is simply a traffic and competition ratio.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Now this seems logical doesn’t it?

Of course we want to know the amount of traffic a keyword could expect and hopefully we can find those hidden golden nuggets that have virtually no competition and lots of traffic.

But why is it then, when we find these keywords, research and create good solid content, build back links and work our asses off to dominate the search engines, are we not making any money?

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The traffic is great!

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The rankings are fantastic!

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The content is stellar!

What could be wrong???

This is where keyword research gets tricky and was our biggest discovery in transforming our affiliate marketing business. The discovery was that there is a gigantic difference between “traffic words” and “buyer words”.

You need to understand that just because certain words get a lot of traffic does not mean at all that the people searching with those terms are even remotely interested in purchasing anything.

A good example of this is the “dirt bike” industry. There are loads of traffic to be gained from this market but the demographics of this market tend to be generally teenagers who really can’t afford to be spending a lot of money. Their searches are for interest… because they are fans of the market but few are spenders.

Does this mean there is no money to be made in this market?

Not saying that at all. There may be potential profits from AdSense and other revenue streams but not (in our experience anyway) a lot in the affiliate side of things. Now there are probably some of you out

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com there making a killing in this industry online and if so… good on ya! We are not debating whether a profit can be made but pointing out that depending on the revenue model you are going for; traffic and revenue do not always go hand to hand.

For those of you that have experience in PPC, you see this often. You can have two words that are almost identical yet one converts into sales like crazy and the other does next to nothing.

Why is this?

There are lots of guesses and theories as to why but honestly we don’t know all the reasons. What we do know however is that it is a fact that there are certain words that are more often used by money spenders then just general interest surfers. The challenge however is how to uncover these keywords?

Well there are two ways this can be done.

1. Slow and Painful

Build lots of pages focused on lots of keywords, get lots of back links, record and track everything and wait months to figure out what is working.

2. Fast and Furious

Find out what is working for others and use that information to get your research time reduced to only days instead of months.

Come on now… you can’t be serious cow?!

Oh but we are!

Traditional keyword research is great, there are loads of tools to use and they tell us some fantastic

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com information but the problem is they are only using “traffic” and “competition” to tell you what to focus on.

What about “Sales”, “Revenue”… “PROFITS”?

Would you not rather focus on a keyword that only gets 20 visitors a day but converts 2% then 100 visitors an day that converts 0.01%?

But how now John Cow?

There are no keyword tools that know what kind of profits people are making, they don’t know what words are making sales and what ones are not… do they?

Yes and we are going to prove it to you. We are going to walk you through step by step, the exact process we use to uncover “Killer” keywords that not only have good traffic and little competition, but are also already proven by others to be fantastic money makers.

The Cart before the Cow One of the toughest parts of creating a new blog or some other type of website is knowing what niche to start in and what angle to take in that niche. We can spend countless hours banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what market to start in. We actually become perfectionists before we even know what we are doing!

The process that we are going to walk you through is targeted at building a blog or website that focuses on promoting affiliate products. The reason is, it is our feeling this is by far the easiest and fastest way to get started and you do not have to worry about customer service, technical support, shipping, credit card processing or any other of these business headaches. You simply promote the product or service and get paid a share of any sales that happen… It is beautiful!

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com The challenge with this however is it always comes back to the question… Where do we start?

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Do you research potential markets and then search for affiliate programs that fit?

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Do you find the programs already running and figure out what keywords to use to promote them?

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What type of affiliate programs do you start with?

…and the list can probably go on and on.

The way we look at it is, why reinvent the wheel? We do not want to spend countless hours looking at different markets and then having to try and find appropriate affiliate programs to match up with them. What we recommend is to actually put the “cart” before the “cow”.

START OF COW RANT —>

Please understand that there are many different ways you can do market research. We will probably get some anal retentive person in here arguing about this process but the bottom line is…

Show me the Money!

We have tried many different methods and this process is the one that worked the best for us. This is important to know as well because it all comes down to understanding facts and not theories. If all you do is read and research but never put things into practice, then what are you doing that is tangible?

We strongly believe that you need to make your own plans and strategies, but use what you learn from others and work it into your plans and strategies. Every time you screw up, remember what you did and improve on it… and every time you succeed do the same… remember what you did and improve on it. When you have something that works for you, do not let some theory munger come in and say you shouldn’t do that… YES YOU SHOULD!

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com If it is working for you, then it works!

<– END OF COW RANT

Ok, so why the cart before the cow?

In the 1970’s, the Japanese car manufacturers were the joke of the world. They were tin cans that no one took seriously… but in the 80s this changed and in a HUGE way.

What happened was instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the Japanese realized they needed to change the focus of their energy and instead of trying to invent things, why not instead take what is already working and simply make it better. It was this mindset change that skyrocketed Japan into becoming an automotive giant in the world.

They figured out how to make a better mousetrap and the results were more reliable vehicles that they could make more efficiently and they were even able to charge a premium for it which exploded their profits.

So now let us ask you this.

Do you want to reinvent the wheel and try to uncover new territory or would you rather take what is already working and use that to your advantage?

Both have there pros and cons but the big difference is time commitments and chance of success.

Here is how we see it…

Option #1 –> If you want to break new ground, then great, good luck with that but you are going to need to spend your time finding potential keywords, then figure out what people are looking for with those keywords, then try to find products that people are buying and see if there are affiliate programs available, then hopefully after a while some of your words will be profitable and after a few months you

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com can have a site making some money.

This option can be incredibly profitable, but it takes a lot more work and there is a lot less chance of success.

Option #2 –> Look at what is already making a few people some money, find out what they are doing to make money (spy on them.. bwahahahaha), easily uncover the keywords that people are actually using to buy the products and then offer a better reason to buy through you (your unique selling position).

This option takes the view point of “look at what the customers already are saying they want and give it to them”. After all isn’t it easier to give people what they want instead of convincing them they need something new?

OK, I know, I am not covering the whole big picture with these options, but we feel we are covering the main points and it really comes down to how to best spend your time and effort… always focus on ROI.

Is what you are doing now giving you the best return on investment?

What Are You Looking For? Before we start searching for keywords, we prefer to have a goal in mind and that means that we want to already have the product or service we are going to promote selected. We have been down the path of general market research to uncover a niche (pronounced neesh) and in our opinion it takes way too long and is way too complicated.

Instead we prefer to find a product or service that is already selling or at least starting to sell and then we figure out who is buying it and what words they are using to buy it. Once we know that, then we can figure out how to make a better offer. This does not mean we actually build a competing product

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com (which is a possibility down the road) but instead we figure out a unique selling position (USP) that makes our offer better then the rest so people buy through us. But before we get into that, we need to find a product.

Finding the Right Affiliate Product There are different ways this can be done and just today we were asked by a friend of ours, Sheena Brown, how to find good products to sell. We asked her why and she mentioned that she came across a really cool gaming product, called the “Razer Gaming Keyboard”, that has an affiliate program and she was considering trying to sell it.

Our response to her was… “That is the first step... look for products that you yourself would buy.”

This is extremely important because this shows through in your marketing efforts. People tend to be able to smell cow dung from a mile away and you may be able to fool a few people some of the time but you can not fool all the people all the time, so if you try promoting a product that you yourself would have no interest in buying, this often will show in your message.

OK, that is great if you already know a product you want to promote but what if you don’t… where would you find these types of products or services?

In our opinion the easiest place to start is with the main affiliate networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, Link Share and so on. These networks take a lot of the hard work out of the process because they act as the middle man between the sellers and affiliates. They manage the tracking, finances and all that good stuff and make it very easy to search through and find products to sell.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com List of Top Affiliate Networks…

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ClickBank (http://www.johncow.com/clickbank)

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Commission Junction (https://signup.cj.com/member/publisherSignUp.do)

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LinkShare (http://www.linkshare.com)

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Regnow (http://www.regnow.com)

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Shareasale (http://www.shareasale.com)

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Performics (http://www.performics.com)

The other option is, if you know the product you want to sell then you can see what stores have an affiliate program available. To do that simply type in the keyword or product name and include “Affiliate Program” in the search such as…

razer keyboard “affiliate program”

Or, if you know the site that sells the product and you cant see if they have an affiliate program, simply search using the Google site filter such as…

site:www.thedomain.com affiliate

This however does not really solve the problem of helping you find the right product to choose and the reason is if you don’t already have something in mind then where in the world do you even start?

So, we need to back up a little… and for those of you that already think you know what you want to promote, don’t worry about it, we will get back to you momentarily.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Where to Start? If you are just starting out and do not already have a certain market you are involved in, this can actually be a stressful time for you. We can get so riled up over this that we actually give ourselves anxiety. Some of us just grab the first thing that crosses or path or we see some guru promoting and decide that is where to start, only to fail because the competition is so fierce. Others over analyze each product to the point where no product could ever satisfy them.

The best place to be here is in the middle, you want to look for products that are being promoted… but not by every person under the sun and you also need to understand that there is no perfect product out there but you want a product that is not a piece of junk.

The very best place to start for anyone just beginning is with ClickBank. Yes, we know you have probably heard this before and maybe even tried to promote ClickBank products before, but trust us… if you do it right, ClickBank can be a goldmine. The reason we like ClickBank the best for starting out is once you are registered, you can then promote absolutely any product in their database. Unlike other programs, where you still have to apply for certain products and unless you already have a presence online, your chances of getting approved are pretty small.

The downside to ClickBank is it is 100% digital products (ebooks, software, videos and so on) and there are a lot of crap products in there. On the bright side however, there are also many solid products.

Finding the Right Product If you do not already have a ClickBank account, sign up for one now at ClickBank (http://www.johncow.com/clickbank), the process is extremely easy. Once you have signed up, to find products simply go to the ClickBank marketplace at…

http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Once there, the first step is to pick a market that you have somewhat of an interest in or perhaps you already have a site on. Don’t get too hung up on this however, if you really are not interested in anything or have no real care in the world as to what market to start in then just pick a category to start with and work your way down the list.

It is nice to start with a market you are knowledgeable with but this is also a cause for analysis paralysis because we try to find the perfect fit. Over analysis is the enemy, remember that!

Lets for example just pick a random market… we will start with the first category “Business to Business” and the first subcategory “Education”. Keep the settings with “Sortby” at Popularity and the “results per page” to 20.

Now ClickBank will list for you in order of popularity, the most popular products in their database but they also give you some other fantastic information. What we personally like to do is scroll down the page and look at the titles but we also look at the “$sale” number that ClickBank provides. This is the estimated revenue you can expect to make per sale from that product after refunds, charge-backs and ClickBank fees are taken into account.

This number is very important because you want to make sure that the product you are promoting makes at the very least $15 per sale. This is the absolute lowest we will go and the reason is, we want to spend our energy where the money is, so why spend time researching and promoting something that makes you $5 compared to the same effort that can make you $25.

So we scroll down the list and a few products stick out to us right away. The first is the “Instant Forex Profit System“, this pays out over $40 per sale, which is excellent.

The next number we look at is the “%refd”; this tells the amount of sales that are made by affiliates and in our opinion the higher the number the better here because if no affiliates were making any of the sales there would be a cause for concern. This particular product has over 90% of the sales coming

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com from affiliates… which is a good thing.

Now we look at the gravity. This is basically a representation of the amount of affiliates promoting this product. Now it is not a direct 1 to 1 relationship, ClickBank takes things like time since last sale and more into account for the calculation but personally we like it when this number is not too high because it tells us there are not a lot of competitors to fight against. There is no magic number here because there are so many variables that you have to take into account. For example, if the product is brand new then this number would be very low… personally we like between 10 and 50 but we have promoted products lower then that and higher then that… but that is the average we look for.

So for this product the “$sale” is good, the “%ref” is good and the gravity is not too high… this is looking like a potentially good product and now is the time to check out the sales page itself. To do that, click on the “create hoplink” in the directory.

Next, enter your ClickBank ID and click “create”. Now copy the URL they provide and paste it into your browser. This is important because you want to see exactly how the page appears to the end user and you also want to test the links on the page. The first things we look for are…

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A nice clear headline: We want people to get their attention grabbed right away and be sure that it is compelling.

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Clean design and nice graphics: Is the page professional looking or like a mid 90s college student page.

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Social proof (testimonials, screenshots): Prove to me the solution works.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Up to date (no old copyright date or 3 year old screen shots): You will be amazed how many people click off a site just because of an outdated copyright date.

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Clear call to action: Do they do a good job of showing the visitor how to buy the product.

Once we have looked at these elements we then will click on the “buy” link to ensure that our affiliate ID is correctly used. Simply click on the “Buy” link and then scroll down to the bottom of the order page and make sure you see [affiliate = YourAffiliateID]

One thing to watch for as well is an opt-in form. These can be very beneficial to you but make sure you opt in and see what the message is they send you. Some people can be real scumbags and will actually put a different affiliate link in the email message so when you click on it, it overwrites your cookie with theirs and you lose the sale. Make sure they link directly to the page and your affiliate ID still shows up on the bottom of the order form.

IMPORTANT THOUGHT: Should you buy the product before you promote it? In our opinion YES, but not until we are sure this is the right product we want to move forward with. You can also email the product owner and ask for a review copy but we recommend you wait until your blog is up and you can show them the blog the review will be put on. Purchasing or getting a review copy of the product is not a mandatory step for everything you promote but it is wise, as you can then do videos about the product and really explain in details the advantages to the end user.

We personally feel that too much time is spent on over-analyzing products. If the initial data looks good and the sales page looks good then chances are you can make a couple bucks from that product.

What about non ClickBank products? How do we decide if we should move forward with those?

Not all, in fact very few, affiliate programs give you details like ClickBank does. The biggest thing we

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com look at for non ClickBank products is the % commission we can make. If we can not make $15 per sale at the bare minimum, then we don’t bother. Also, we check out the sales page, the same as we do with ClickBank. So with the initial example of the Razer keyboard, we would look at the commission rate and the price of the product and if we could make at least $15 per sale then we would consider looking more into it. If not, then we move on.

Time to Contradict Ourselves –> We would not always not move forward with something if it is less then $15 but we would already have to have a related site set up that we could just write up a promotion for but for full blown market research, it must be $15 or more per sale made.

Once we have the product or service that we want to move forward with, the secret is now to find out how others are making money with it… so it is time to start Digging for keywords!

"SHOW ME THE MONEY!” Keywords In the movie Jerry Maguire, the character Rod Tidwell (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) gets Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) to repeat the phrase “Show Me the Money”. The scene that this took place in was very energetic and fun. The basis of what was happening in the movie was the character played by Cuba Gooding Jr., was making it very clear to Jerry McGuire that he did not care about any of the crap that Jerry was throwing at him… what mattered to him was the money. Don’t fancy talk me, don’t tell me how great it will or could be… SHOW ME THE MONEY!

When we are doing market research, this principal should be front and center. All the fancy numbers and calculations that most of the keyword tools out there tell us are completely meaningless… We want to see the money!

What we mean by that is, before we invest any time or effort into creating a blog, we want to see that people are spending money and more important of all… people are making money in the market that we are targeting. We are not talking about the actual affiliate product here… we already know people

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com are making some money selling that, we are referring to the keywords.

How to Find the “Show Me the Money” Keywords

There are three tools that we absolutely love, when it comes to keyword research and we are going to explain about each one and why we like them. We really wish we could tell you that the only tools you need are free ones but that is just not true, we want to show you exactly how we do this to earn some kick ass affiliate revenue and this is how we do it… with these tools.

As we go through the remaining lessons, we hope you will fully understand why we not only recommend these tools but we use them.

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Google AdWords Toolbox –> In our opinion this is the most powerful tool of them all. If we had to choose only one tool out of them all, we would honestly stick with the free Google tools. The data that Google provides is absolutely incredible and once you understand it, you can uncover beautiful words… and we are going to show you exactly how we do it.

We do recommend that you do not use the publicly accessible tools, but instead create an AdWords account to access the tools from the AdWords control panel. To register for AdWords, you will have to set up a mock AdWords campaign but you can pause it right away and then access all the tools.

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Traffic Travis (http://www.johncow.com/traffictravis) –> We love this tool and we bet that a lot of you (if not most of you) have never heard of this one. A good friend of ours named Mark Ling, who is a very successful internet marketer in the non IM field, created this. Personally we think the name is terrible and the interface is kind of cheesy looking but once you understand what is under the hood of this bad boy, you will absolutely love it and as we get further into the training you will see why.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com part of every affiliate marketers arsenal… in our opinion of course. We absolutely love the spy tool and to be honest with you; it is the only part of this software we really use. Not to downplay the rest of the functionality but this is what helps us identify the winners from the losers.

Other Tools…. there are a lot of other fantastic tools available, such as WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, SpyFu and more. We have used them all and still use some but the above three are our favorites and in our opinion are all that are needed for very effective keyword research and are what we will be sharing with you in the following lessons.

Now before you go out and buy these tools, you may want to follow along and judge for yourself… you may even already own some tools that you can use in place of them.

Let’s Get To It - Enough talk, let’s get our Hoofs Dirty!

Step 1: Log into your account at https://adwords.google.com/select/Login and then select “Tools” and “Keyword Tool”

Step 2: Check the “Website content” box and enter the true URL of the site you are going to promote and select “Get Keyword Ideas”

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Step 3: Google will now list all the keywords that they feel are directly related to that site. They also organize the info into “Groups”. Click on the “Avg Search Volume” to sort in order of highest to lowest.

Step 4: Open a notepad file and copy down the top keyword from each group.

Step 5: Now we are going to look where the discussions are happening. Go to Google.com and now search for…

“Keyword Phrase” Forum

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com …for each of the keywords that you listed from step 4, such as…

This is a very powerful step, because this is where the people in the market actual go and talk. This is where the problems are discussed, the resources are discussed and more.

Step 6: Click on the top forum that shows up and you want to browse through the forum and look for keywords that are not in your list and are not phrase matches to your list words. For example, since the example list has “day trading”, we would not use a word such as “forex day trading” since my keyword already covers that… instead I want to look for words that are completely different. You want to look for words used by experienced members in the forum as well and in discussions that have a lot of responses… that shows interest in the subject.

For example, we found the word “EuroBund Daily Notes”, there is a good discussion on this and it is not something we have on our list… so we added it.

Make sure you do not waste too much time here though… you can get into analysis paralysis here. Just browse around, find popular discussions and look for hot topics and the words being used.

Not every keyword will have a quality forum associated with them, but a lot of them do.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com on page one of the results only. Repeat this for every keyword that you copied down from the previous steps.

NOTE: The reason we are doing this is to focus on keywords from sites that “PAY” for traffic… they are the ones that know which keywords to focus on (did a light come on yet?)

Step 8: Once you have a list of all the URL’s, go back to your AdWords tool and now enter each URL, one at a time into the “Keyword Tool” –> “Website Content”.

Click on the “Add all…” under each group to add all the words to the right side of the screen.

Step 7: Repeat this with every URL that you found from step 7. You will find that there are a few of words that are shared but there are lots more that are new.

By the time you have finished this you will have found a lot of great keywords… but the important thing here is to realize these are not keywords related to just anything… they are keywords related to sites paying to use those words which is powerful because that shows the words are worth something.

Once you have completed this step, export the keywords in text format and save them to your computer.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Diamonds in the Rough Now, that you have a large list of keywords, you will want to filter out the hopeful “Diamonds”… these are the words that are actively being used by advertisers and the tool of choice (in our opinion) is Traffic Travis (http://www.johncow.com/traffictravis). We almost passed over this tool because in our opinion the name and logo are cheesy (sorry Mark, but they are). It was a good thing however that we got to know Mark in early 2007 and he walked us through this tool and we have been hooked ever since.

We need to make very clear right now that this is not a paid review or a requested review for a favor or anything else like that. As stated in the initial lesson, we will be sharing paid tools that we use and this is one of those tools we use and we personally love. After you finish reading this, you may agree or you may have a tool we do not know about that is just as good and you can use that.

How to Dig for Hopeful Diamonds with Traffic Travis:

Step 1 –> Once you have Traffic Travis, open it up select “Competition Ads”

Step 2 –> Select “Keyword Options” and “import from clipboard”. Now paste your keywords from the previous “Keyword Step” into the form and click on start. TrafficTravis will now search Google for each individual phrase and get a list of the sites that are currently advertising with AdWords for that term.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com IMPORTANT: Do NOT enter in a list of more then 1000 keywords or else Google will shut you down. It is recommended that you use a service like findnot.com to prevent Google from identifying your IP and blocking you temporarily. The way to know if you have been blocked is you will not see the numbers increasing in TrafficTravis while it’s running.

Ignore the “Overture Count” this no longer works since Yahoo pulled the plug on this free service.

Step 3 –> Once Traffic Travis has finished, click on “Google Count” and sort by highest to lowest. Under “Domain Name” is the URL’s that are currently advertising for some of the keywords you entered and the number is the amount of keywords that they are advertising on.

You are going to want to select at least 5 of the sites that relate directly to the product you are going to be promoting and for each one right click on the word and select “View Matching keywords” and save the results to your desktop. You are going to repeat this for at least 5 of the top URL’s that relate to your product. If you are not sure, then visit the site to see if it relates.

IMPORTANT: Make sure to save each file as a unique name so you do not overwrite each one. Personally we just name them 1, 2, 3 and so on because we will be combining them into one and then

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com deleting them individual lists soon.

Step 4 –> Now take the 5 files you saved and copy and past the results into one file, so to make one list out of the 5.

Step 5 –> Now go back to TrafficTravis and go to the “Keyword Sorter”. Since there will be duplication in our current list we are going to want to clean it up a bit. Enter your keywords into the “Search Terms” box and click on “Remove Duplicates” and this will now give you a clean list to work with. Delete any extra stuff that may have been included that you do not want included. Now highlight all the keywords (hate it that there is no select all option here) copy them and paste them into a notepad file (.txt) and save this as your good keyword list.

Now we have filtered down our list from a many keywords with many “poor” terms, to a smaller more focused list that contains words you know are directly focused to your topic but also are words you know people are actually paying money to advertise with. This is the start of finding the diamonds… but we are not there yet.

BONUS Topic on Finding the Perfect Domain Name If you are just starting a new site, this is a great time to find one now, using the keywords you filtered out using Traffic Travis and here is a tip that you are going to LOVE!

A very easy and extremely effective way to find a good domain is to use the free “Bulk Register” tool provided by GoDaddy. If you do not have a free GoDaddy account, you need to get one now at http://www.johncow.com/godaddy

Step 1 –> Log into your GoDaddy account and select “Domains” –> “Bulk Register”

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Step 2 –> Enter the keywords in the text box provided, select “.com”, enter the “Access Code” and select “GO”. You can select the other extension options if you want.

Step 3 –> GoDaddy will now go through your list of keywords and list for you the domains that are available that match your keywords. The results will initially show errors, but scroll down to see which domains are available. You should be able find extremely good domain names to use that will be keyword rich and targeted to your market.

Initial Content Keywords Now that we have our domain, and our initial filtered list of words, we still have some work to do. To truly find the real “Diamonds” from the hopefuls we are going to have to use Affiliate Elite (http://www.johncow.com/affiliateelite) and run it on a schedule for 2 weeks, we go into detail on this in the next lesson but before we do that we want to get keywords for our initial site content. We do not want to waste time while waiting for Affiliate Elite, so this is a perfect time to grab 20 or so terms from your list to create our blogs initial content.

Personally our results have proven over and over again that the best results are to not go live with a

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com blog until you have 25 or more posts. We usually target 50 to start with but that is not always possible due to time constraints.

The good thing is we know that with the keywords we currently have, TrafficTravis has shown us that some people are advertising with them. The problem is that TrafficTravis only gives us a snap shot of one day and that means that the words are being advertised with right now but they might NOT be tomorrow because they are no good… which is why we will use “Affiliate Elite” to see if words are used consistently for 14 days. That said, using some of these words now is better then nothing, at least we can see they are being used by some and the odds are that a lot of the words you select will be good words.

Step 1–> Log back into your AdWords account and go to “Tools” –> “Traffic Estimator” and copy all the keywords into section #1. Then enter 100 in section 2, leave section 3 blank, do not change section 4A and select “All Countries and Territories” in section 4B and select “Continue”

Step 2 –> Google will now display all the keywords and their suggestion of the amount of traffic you can expect for each word. You need to understand that this number represents what Google says you

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com would get with the number one AdWords ad… NOT the number one organic listing, which gets much more traffic then AdWords. Click on the “Estimated Click/Day” so to sort the information from highest traffic to lowest.

Step 3 –> Looking at the list, you are now going to want to select 20 or more keyword phrases. A good rule of thumb is to initially look at the words that are three words in length and have bids between $0.50 and $2.00. The reason is this shows that these words are being advertised on but are not packed full of competitors, which keeps the costs lower. Always start from top to bottom so you can be sure you are getting keywords with some traffic.

IMPORTANT: Your list might not have any words under $2.00, if that s the case then ignore the cost rule.

Step 4 –> Now you are going to take each keyword phrase and go to Google to check out the terms competition. Enter the term in Google with the allintitle filter. To do that simply enter the following…

allintitle:”your keyword phrase”

What you are looking for here is the amount of competition this term has and a good indicator of that is the amount of sites in Google that have that keyword phrase in their title. This is not an exact science and there are some who argue that this is not a true picture but from our experience it works and we like to use what we know works (which we recommend you get in the mindset of doing, do not just listen to others but find out what works for you). By using the allintitle we see if a word is overwhelmed with competitors or is easily dominated.

Good guidelines for the “allintitle” results are…

•

Less than 15 000 results = Needs to have lots of traffic potential to be worth it. Not recommended for the majority of this content since you will have to focus a lot of link building on this. If you have 2 or 3 that fall in here those are fine but try to have the majority 7000 or

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com less.

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Less than 7000 results = Good - Can be dominated with good optimization and focused link building.

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Less than 1000 results = Great - Easily dominated

NOTE: These are just our guidelines; they are what work for us. Do NOT argue with us if you agree with them or not, they work for us and so there.

Step 5 –> Repeat this process until you have a list of at least 20 keyword phrases with OK or better for competition. These are the keywords that we are going to build our blog on initially.

IMPORTANT: Make sure to only use phrases that make sense grammatically as you will need to be able to create content around these phrases.

The problem we have now is that we have words for our content but we do not really know if they are “Profitable”. We have a good guess because we know that as of right now, people are advertising on them but we only know that as of right now they are being used. Yesterday they might not have been and tomorrow they might now be and what we want to know is what keywords are being consistently used for at least 10 to 14 days by the same advertisers. These are the words that we can be sure somebody is making money with and are fantastic words to build content around, especially affiliate based content.

Content Creation Madness There are now two directions we can go…

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1. Dig for long tail terms first and then start on content

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

2. Start the content going and then come back for long tail terms

We would usually start with option 1 and then once that was initiated we would move into the second task, but once again this particular time we are time restricted and need to get content started ASAP. The first step was to identify the topics we would be covering. We have the initial words we know we need to focus on but the challenge now is to get good quality content as fast as possible. There are two options we have…

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Outsource: Get others to write for us

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Write it ourselves

As mentioned before, one of the criteria for selecting this niche was to have a market we know and because of that we are able to write a lot of the content and it is content we are passionate about and so it is easy to write. If we would have selected a niche that we had no interest in, then the process would have been painful. We would have needed to research and then figure out how to rewrite into our own words and YUCK… no thanks… not when in a rush!

So we listed all the topics and highlighted the ones we could write about. Then we grouped together the remaining content to be outsourced.

The options for outsourcing are many, there are sites like scriptlance.com, rentacoder.com, elance.com, mechanicaturk.com (an Amazon service) and more but personally we do not recommend starting with them because a lot of the writers at those places are trained on mass keyword writing and the content is usually very poor quality. This strategy is very effective for creating sites that are just AdSense focused or if you personally have time to edit and rewrite every article they send. With our time constraint this was NOT the best option for us.

Our Preferred Content Source –> Forums

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Forums are in our opinion one of the absolute best research tools available online. You get instant access to real life conversations from those that are in the market. You can find what the problems are, what the current solutions are (if there are any) and who are the experts of choice. What is wonderful about forums is they are often occupied by people who are passionate about that topic and just love to talk about it.

Step 1 –> Create a job description and put it on your blog. On this page explain what the content would be for and how it must be created and also put the payment options and an email address.

This is very important because when you are getting back to potential writers you can direct them to this page instead of always retyping the information. An example of our job posting was similar to…

Start of Example –>

Need detailed reviews written for the following popular games for the specific gaming system…

PS3:

> Keyword Phrase 1 Here

> Keyword Phrase 2 Here

Wii: > Keyword Phrase 1 Here > Keyword Phrase 2 Here

PC: > Keyword Phrase 1 Here > Keyword Phrase 2 Here

Xbox 360:

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com > Keyword Phrase 1 Here > Keyword Phrase 2 Here

Reviews must be…

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In English

•

Not focused on making sure the keyword is repeated, instead just write about the topic

•

Have correct spelling and grammar

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Be 400+ words in length minimum

•

Contain non copyright protected screen shots from the game

•

Reference good resources for getting cool cheats for the game

•

Mention news worthy info about the game as well (if there are any)… like updates that are coming, new versions release dates and so on.

•

Must be 100% unique and written by you and the copyright of the work will transfer to us

•

Written from an experienced player of the game.

If you only have experience with certain games that are not on the above list and you want to write only about those individual games, contact us and we can work that out.

We are only interested in top quality content and authors are paid after content is reviewed.

Once paid the author transfers 100% ownership of the content to the owners of GamerzReviewz.com

If content is good there will be regular content from you needed.

This line is where you would put how much you would pay or other options that are available

If interested please contact us at email@yourdomain.com

<– End of Example

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Step 2 –> You want to find and list the top forums in your market and to do this simply go to google.com and yahoo.com and search using…

“keyword phrase in quotes” forum

Step 3 –> Visit each these forums and bookmark the ones that have a lot of recent activity and topics that directly relate to your market. Make sure there are not only a lot of initial threads started but a lot of replies in the threads as well.

Step 4 –> With your list of forums, go back and find out who the top posters are and send them a private message. It is very important that you take your time here and craft up a very professional message to send them and initially do not mention anything about finances; just ask if they would be interested in writing for your blog.

You will find that occasionally you will discover someone who just loves to write and as long as they can have their name and a link with the content, they will write for free. Now do not get all excited here… very few do this but a few of you will get lucky here.

One challenge you may also come across is people that do not feel qualified to write about a topic. They might be very vocal in the forum environment but to suddenly have their name attached to content outside the forum is intimidating. With these types of people you need to let know that they do not have to have their names associated with the content.

After the initial reply, most will ask for a price and this is the time when you give them a link to your job page.

IMPORTANT: Make sure to SPELL CHECK… nothing spells unprofessional like poorly spelled communications.

Step 5 –> If you do not find writers from the above step or want more then it is now time to post job requests in the forums directly. Some of your requests will get deleted so do not get worried about ©Copyright 2008 JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com that because some forums are very strict on what can and what can not be posted in them. For your job request make sure to put a link to your job posting and if you are not allowed to post you can PM a regular contributor and ask if they would for a few bucks through PayPal (where there is a will, there is always a way) .

Step 6 –> Post a job on Craiglist.com. Craigslist is an extremely popular classified ad site that gets LOADS of traffic. Every major city in North America is covered and a few international ones as well. Each city has its own dedicated sub categories and a lot of them of 100% free to post jobs on.

WARNING–> They are VERY strict and VERY cautious about spammers, so do NOT be surprised if your first couple get deleted. Keep tweaking the ad and resubmitting it and look at what others have put in their ads and try to copy their formats. There are some cities, like New York and LA, that cost money to use but there are many like Toronto that are free and get a lot of traffic. The one thing to note here is that you must be willing to pay for the content when you advertise with Craigslist, but you will find good writers that are passionate about the topic.

Test & Track… YES YOU NEED TO! This is no time to get lazy and do not think that you are one of the lucky ones that do not need to do this, what you want to do is get a lot of different writers, writing for you at first and then filter out the best ones. If for example, you need 50 articles, then get 10 different authors to write a couple each and then filter out who wrote the best for your needs and then get them to write the rest. Out of the initial few you will get a few that are flaky, not good writers or do not ever finish.

By using this strategy you can get a good amount of content done in a very short time… and it is VERY good content PLUS for the few that do flake out you do not have to worry that you are getting nothing done.

Now that we have the initial content creation started our next step is to get the long tail research

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com started (this is easy to do and get set up, but takes 2 weeks to get the results) and once this is done it is time to install the blog, fix up the theme and install the plugins.

Start Up the Diamond Digger We took our focus off of the keyword research for a little while to focus on getting the initial content for the blog and now that the content is in the process of getting created, it is time to go back and start up the “Diamond Digger” to find the keywords that we are going to want to focus on for making lots of Money!

The tool of choice for us is Brad Callen’s Affiliate Elite (http://www.johncow.com/affiliateelite), it is a very cool little tool that has lots of great features but our hoof’s down favorite is the AdWords Campaign spy tool. The reason this is so powerful is it will track for you which keywords are being advertised on consistently by the same people and the power in that is if the same advertiser is spending money on the same term for 2 weeks straight, there are only two things going on. Either they are making a profit or they are an idiot… and in our experience 90% of the time, when the advertiser has an ad showing for 14 days, the ad is profitable.

Disclaimer: This strategy does not work for 100% of the markets out there. Occasionally you may come across a market that does not have a lot of words being advertised on with PPC. This does not mean the market can not be profitable, but you will want to make sure and snoop around at the competition and see how they are monetizing their sites. When there are a lot of PPC ads that is usually a good sign that there are an abundance of affiliate opportunities available.

Let’s Get Started…

Affiliate Elite is not free software but we are not going to lie to you and say that we do this with free tools just to please a few readers. This is the tool we use for this job, this is the tool we used for the

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com COWpetition and this is the tool we recommend you use if you can afford it.

Step 1 –> Open Affiliate Elite and select the project type “Analyze AdWords Competition”

Step 2 –> Click on “Add Campaign”

Step 3 –> Enter a campaign title, leave Google selected and leave the “number of times to run each keyword” at 1 and then click OK

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Step 4 –> Click on “Add Keywords” and paste in your list of keywords and click OK.

Step 5 –> Now click on the “Scheduler”

Select “Daily” and then “Next”

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Select to “Run the Check” Daily and click next and then select when you want to run it and then click “Finish”

Step 6 –> Now click on “Options” and then change the “Use SE Courtesy” to “15 to 20″. This is important so that you do not get your IP blocked from Google. This process will run in the background and you want to have it have it run slow and steady to ensure you get all the results.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Step 7 –> Now click on “Run Now” and run the initial process.

Step 8 –> Now click on the close X in the top right corner…

…and since you have the scheduler running, Affiliate Elite will stay active in your task bar.

To reopen Affiliate Elite, just double click on the icon in the bottom corner of your screen.

Step 9 –> Now you are going to let Affiliate Elite run for 14 days straight and at the end of the 14 days you will know exactly what words are “Diamonds”.

Remember the reason we use this strategy is because we want to try and eliminate as much of the guess work out of the market research as possible. By finding out what the competition is using and making money with in PPC, we can then take those results and transfer them to SEO. Next week we will walk you through what to do with the words from Affiliate Elite.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Get Your Blog Up We always hear about how we need to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to dominate the search engines but for the last couple years the term VEO has surfaced which says to focus on the visitor and not the search engines.

Which one is right?

In our opinion, they both are. You see with the new evolving dynamics of the web, things have changed. No longer are you just focused on trying to get traffic from Google but now you have hundreds and sites to also take advantage of that can send you equal and often times more traffic then Google. Because of this if you end up on focusing on just one aspect of your site optimization then you are missing out on the entire potential.

Our recommendation is you first set up your site for the human visitor and then once that is done, optimize it for the search engines. This is no different then focusing on your content, you want the reader to be satisfied and then you can tweak it to make the search engine bots happy too. In our experience trying to first optimize for the search engines and then for the human visitor is a more difficult task.

The process that we go through for this and the one that we followed for the GamerzReviewz blog is…

•

Install your blog, theme, and plugins

•

Create a “Link Bait” page and Opt In with site navigation emphasis on the “Opt In” and “Link Bait” for both the search engines and the visitors and update the graphics and color of blog to match theme

•

Manually test all links and ensure all navigation is pointing exactly where we want it to, install a robots.txt file and then submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools to verify the blog is clear

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com of errors

•

Start contacting JV partners and start your initial promotions

The great thing is while the keywords are running in Affiliate Elite, we can get all this other important work done and when they are ready we can already be getting loads of traffic thanks to our Link bait page and viral incentives.

Installing WordPress There are two “main” ways to install a WordPress blog. The first is to manually download the files from…

http://wordpress.org/download/

The second is to use a free installation script, called Fantastico, which is standard with many hosting accounts. If you do not have a hosting account, we recommend you check out BlueHost, which is a very reliable hosting provider that comes with Fantastico. You can learn more about them at…

http://www.johncow.com/bluehost

If you do already have a hosting account and it does not come with “Fantastico” or something similar, then the manual installation is relatively easy to perform and WordPress provides a detailed guide at…

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

…to help you with the installation. Yes we realize there are more ways to do this and there are new tools for this popping up all the time, but for the sake of simplicity these are the two we are referring to.

For this lesson we are going to walk you through the steps to install WordPress using the “Fantastico”

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com service, which is what we did for the COWpetition.

Step 1: Log into your hosting account control panel and locate the “Fantastico” icon.

Step 2: Once inside the “Fantastico” control panel, you will see on the left hand side, a list of different PHP scripts that you can install on your server. Click on the “WordPress” link.

Step 3: On the right side of the screen you will now see a summary of current WordPress installations on your server. If you have not installed WordPress already, under “Current Installations:” it will simply say “None”. Click on the link that says “New Installation”

Step 4: Now you will have the WordPress set up form on the right hand side of the screen. If you have installed your domain as a subdomain or addon domain, then make sure you select the correct domain location in the drop down box. If you are installing the blog in the root directory of your domain, you will leave the “Install in Directory” blank. Enter an administrator user name and password and your email account password.

The email account password can be anything you want as you will not use it anyway and the rest of the fields will all be updated later on. Now click on “Install WordPress” and then on the next screen click the “Finish Installation” button. On the final installation page, you can also enter your email address to have all the installation information (user name, password, and more) sent to your email address.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Congratulations, you have successfully installed WordPress!

Getting Themes When you first install WordPress on your domain, it will have the default template. Personally I recommend you do not use the default template, as it is in my opinion, very boring, and there are loads of nicer free templates available.

Step 1: Log into your WordPress admin panel at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Step 2: Click on the “Design Tab

Step 3: This is your “Template” management area and WordPress makes it extremely easy to update your templates with just a few clicks of the mouse. To find some great templates, you are going to want to scroll down on the “Design” page and click on the link called “WordPress Theme Directory”. Make sure to right click and open in a new window so you do not leave your admin area.

Step 4: You will now find a directory of thousands of free WordPress Themes (templates) that you can use on your blog. We recommend that your first choice in the sorting options, on the left side of the page, the “Widget Ready” option, as this will make modifying your blog a lot easier later on. Now select a theme that you like and do not worry if you are not sure, you can easily change the theme later if you wish.

The sorting options are not guaranteed and so a word of warning is to install the theme and check that tit is widget compatible before you do any image changes or anything like that.

Note: Widgets are a feature in WordPress that allows you to easily drag and drop different features into your blogs sidebar.

Step 5: Once you have the theme that you like, click on the “Download” link and save it to your

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com desktop. You will want to unzip the file and save the folder to your computer.

Step 6: Now open your favorite FTP software to upload your theme to the correct folder. If you do not own FTP software, download the free open source solution called FileZilla, which can be downloaded from http://filezilla-project.org/

Step 7: Locate the folder on your server called “themes”. To find it, go to your root folder where your index page would be and click on “wp-content” –> “themes”

Now upload the entire contents (folder and all) to the themes folder.

Step 8: Go back to your WordPress admin area now and if you are still in the “Design” area, refresh your page. You will now see the downloaded template included. To install the template, simply click on the template picture and it will automatically get installed. You can now right click on the “View Site” button and open in a new window, to see how the new template looks on your blog.

Plugins Plugins are basically scripts that can be easily added on to your WordPress installation to add extra functionality and since WordPress is an open source project (all the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use with a few restrictions) there are literally thousands of programmers constantly creating improvements and new plugins for WordPress.

The problem with plugins however, is WordPress is always evolving and with new improvements, often some plugins stop working with the latest version of WordPress. Thankfully however, there are always new plugins being created and 95% of them are all free.

The majority of plugins are more for fun functionality, meaning they are more just “cool to have” type of features. There are a few plugins however that in our opinion are very important to use and help from both an end user and an optimization point of view. These plugins are not the only plugins to use

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com and if there are others you like then feel free to use them. We also make no guarantees that the next time WordPress updates, that any of these will continue to work.

To find plugins, click on the “Plugins” tab…

…and then scroll down to the bottom the page and right click on “WordPress Plugin Directory” and open in a new window. This site has thousands of plugins to choose from and provides some important information. The most important thing to look at when looking at plugins, is the compatibility, you want to ensure that the plugins work with the version of WordPress you are using. To check this, simply click on the plugin title in the directory, then on the Plugin Details page, check the “Requires WordPress Version:”

To find out the version of WordPress you are using, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page in your WordPress admin area and it will mention it.

If the plugin is compatible, then click the download button and save the file to your computer. You will then want to unzip the contents of the zip file. Now open your FTP software and navigate to “wpcontent” –> “plugins”

Simply upload the unzipped plugins file to the plugins folder. Now go the plugins page in your admin area and you will see the list of uploaded plugins. Plugins that are NOT activated will be white and once

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com activated will turn green. To activate a plugin, simply click the “Activate” link.

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Akismet (http://akismet.com/) This comes standard with WordPress and is in my opinion the most stable of all “Spam Filter” plugins. The only draw back to this plugin is you need to have a WordPress API but these are very easy to get. Simply register at http://www.wordpress.com and then you will receive an email with your API key in it. Then you activate the plugin and click on “Akismet Configuration” and then enter the API key in the provided field.

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All In One SEO Pack (http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) WordPress out of the box is not optimized well from a search engine perspective. This plugin helps with improving how each post and page is optimized and also helps to prevent your blog from showing duplicate content.

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Google XML Sitemaps (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/) Google site maps are fantastic ways to help improve the complete indexing of your blog. This ensures that all posts and pages are properly linked to for Google (and the other search engines) to find. You can also block certain pages from being found, ping the search engines when your sitemap is updated and best of all the sitemap will automatically update every time the blog updates.

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Related Posts (http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries) This plugin helps to provide better related internal linking on your blog. Once activated, this plugin will find which posts are similar to each other and interlink them. This is good for both the search engines and human visitors.

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Sociable (http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/sociable/) This plugin will automatically add links to your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so that your posts can be easily added to them.

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Brian’s Threaded Comments (http://meidell.dk/archives/2004/09/04/nested-comments/) This plugin will automatically organize your page comments in a more structured pattern so replies ©Copyright 2008 JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com can be made directly to specific comments.

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Enforce www. Preference (http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/) This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URLs.

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Homepage Excerpts (http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/) This plugin gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

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Subscribe Remind (http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/) This plugin will automatically place text and a link at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

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WWSGD (http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do) Treat new visitors different then new visitors

•

Feed Footer (http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/) This plugin allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed.

•

OIO Publisher Plugin (http://www.johncow.com/oiopublisher) This plugin is very affordable at just $37 and is by far the best we have come across for easily managing displaying paid advertising on your blog.

Do not be concerned with modifying the settings for these plugins yet. You will do this later on once we add content.

Shut off Notifications

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Once you have installed your plugins, you are now going to turn off the default notification function. This is a powerful feature with WordPress that notifies different blog directories when a new update has occurred at your blog. The problem is you do not want to be notifying anyone about your blog until you have some content.

To shut this feature off, click on…

“Settings” –> “Writing”

…and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called “Update Services”. Delete the URL that is in the form field and click “save changes”

Now go to…

“Settings” –> “XML Sitemap”

…and un-check all the “Update notifications”

•

Notify Google about updates of your Blog

•

Notify MSN Live Search about updates of your Blog

•

Notify Ask.com about updates of your Blog

•

Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog

Set your Permalinks One of the other draw backs of WordPress is that it’s default with very non user friendly file names. On the good side however, they make it very easy to customize this and make it very user friendly. So instead of having a URL that looks like this…

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

…you can have something like…

http://www.yourblog.com/categoryname/keyword-phrase-here

To set this click on…

“Settings” –> “Permalinks”

…and click on the “Custom Structure” radio button. Now in the field provided you can set how you want the file system to display. There are dozens of combinations that you can create and the available tokens can be found by clicking the link called “number of tags are available”

Once you have the permalinks set, click the “Save Changes”. WordPress should update this automatically but it may require you to modify your .htaccess file. WordPress will provide you with the exact steps you need to do this. Congratulations, your blog is set up!

Link Bait, Content and Legal Stuff Now that our blog is installed with the proper theme and plugins, we need to start putting everything in order.

With a new blog, a huge mistake that a lot of marketers make is they focus all their initial energy entirely on the index page. This is where they target the majority of their links and optimization, which is not an effective viral launch strategy and we can prove that by pointing you to sites like ©Copyright 2008 JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com.

How many Diggs or stumbles are actually linking to the index page of a blog?

VERY FEW!

Link Bait With a brand new blog your focus, in our opinion, should be on creating what is referred to as a “Link Bait” page. When we first create our blog, it is our usual strategy to have it completely non-monetized and focusing all its attention initially on the “Link Bait” page for the first 30 days. We usually do not monetize the blog initially as we have proven to our selves that it increases link building effectiveness (people are more willing to link to a new site that offers just good info rather then to one that is hammered with ads).

Another reason we use this strategy is a blog is usually not starting to earn revenue for the first few weeks because the traffic is not really at a point to where it is worth while and in our opinion it is better to sacrifice a few dollars in potential ad revenue to get more back links.

The other reason for not monetizing is we want to finish analyzing the keywords with Affiliate Elite to understand what our focus keywords for making money need to be and then we want to start creating the content focused on monetization (affiliate stuff).

With GamerzReviewz.com we did not follow this strategy of not monetizing the blog due to the fact that we only have 30 days and we do not have time to come in later and start testing different things but it is highly recommended that you do not monetize your site during the initial launch phase.

So with the Link Bait page, the focus is to provide something that is very attractive to others and entices them to not only link to that page but also share it with others. So many times we have seen people submit a generic article or the homepage to sites like Digg and then they cry that the system

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com does not work. Well no kidding it does not work when you are submitting useless information that is not exciting to the readers. Who would ever Digg a PLR (private label right) article or something some outsourced help in India wrote that can’t speak a word of English but qualifies as an Elance.com writer.

You need to understand that with the evolving internet and Web 2.0 (actually some are even saying Web 3.0 now) the real power is in using solid Link Bait content with the social sites. The best way we can describe this is it is like pulling the string on a kite to try to get it into the air, when you pull hard on the string the kite jumps up into the air… but then what?

This is when the wind MUST take over and lift the kite into the clouds or else it crashes back down to the ground.

When you submit content to social outlets, if the content is garbage, then the initial boast you give it will be all that it has, and once the initial promotion stops, the content will drop like rock. On the other hand however, if your content is worthwhile, then others will grab onto it and your link growth will explode.

How to Make a Link Bait Page: A Link Bait page can really be anything you want. It can be…

•

an article

•

a song

•

an image

•

a video

•

a contest

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

software

•

or anything else you can think of

The idea however is it must be something worth while so people will want to link to it and share it with others. A great article that gives some good detail on creating a “Link Bait” page is at…

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/linkbait-beginners-guide/

For our site we needed something that we knew would cause a lot of buzz and offer a lot of value to the potential buyer of this blog in the long run. Back links of course are very valuable but have a mailing list is much more valuable and so we needed something that could accomplish both goals and therefore we decided on a contest that would require contestants to provide us with both emails and links. We wanted to ensure that we targeted people that were in the gaming market and offered something we know that the majority of them would love to win and so we offered a new gaming system.

The problem is when you have a contest, often people do not want to share about it because they want to win and the more they share then the less chance they have to win the prize. To counter this we made it so there was a worth while incentive to not only opt in to the mailing list but also share about the contest with others.

You can check out our “Link Bait” contest page at…

http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/contests/win-a-ps3-xbox360-or-wii-with-gamerzreviewz/

One last point on “Link Bait”, make the page easy to read and come alive. Put some images in it if you can, make sure to bold certain points and even blockquote a really important point or two. It is also important that you keep the paragraphs to no more then 3 sentences each… this makes the content easier to read.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Start Posting Your Content Now it is time to start adding some of your content. The purpose of this content is to just give some food to the search engines while your site is getting started. We are not going to promote the site yet, we are just wanting to add the content... we still have to fix up the navigation. Also if you just had one page (your link bait), it is not much for the search engines to bother with and also your readers will be pretty turned off, because you will not appear much of an authority on the topic. You want to appear as some what of an established site.

Once you have your initial content (at the bare minimum start with at least 15 unique posts) you will add them as individual posts to your blog. Make sure to organize the posts into categories and rename the default category to something that relates to your site.

Update Your Blog Theme This is very important because it helps to make your blog recognizable for the niche you are pursuing. Often people just use a WordPress free theme and leave the images that are included and so you may have a city scene for the top banner on a blog about “Back Pain”… not really a good idea. The first step (if your blog has a header image) is to update this header image… which is very easy to do.

Step 1 - Mouse over the image and right click your mouse. The image more then likely will be a background image, so select “View Background Image”

Step 2 - Now right click on the image and save to your computer. You will also want to note where the image is located because you are going to upload to that same location on your server. An example of the location is…

http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/images/header.jpg

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Step 3 - Edit the header image, keeping the original size and include some images that relate to your topic.

Step 4 - Upload the image to over write the original.

Now it is time to start setting your blog up to get ready to go live.

Updating Your “About Us” Page The “About Us” page is an often ignored and under used page that really is something that helps build a lot of credibility with your site. This is especially true when it comes to trying to sell to people because you need to ensure you create a sense of trust with the readers by either explaining your qualifications or by relating to them.

There are two ways we go about creating an “About Us” page…

•

Talk about the Person: If you are interested in building yourself as an authoritative person in this field then this is a perfect place to create a resume of sorts. Explain why you created this blog, what the blog is for, why you are an authoritative source for information in this niche and maybe a little bit of personal info like where you are from and also add a picture of yourself.

•

Talk about the Site: If you are not interested in personally being known as the author of the blog (branding your name) then instead of talking about the person behind it you can focus on the blog directly. We still recommend you include an image on the page. For this type of page you will want to stick to the facts of the blog only, what it is created for, where they should go on it, what they can expect from it and why it is a resource they should use.

How to Create the “About Us” Page…

Step 1 –> Click on “Manage” and then “Pages”

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com You do not need to create a new page here since WordPress automatically created the about page right off the start.

Step 2 –> Click on the page titled “About Us”

Editing a page is no different than a post, the only thing is you do not assign a category.

Step 3 –> Once you have created the page, you will want to shut the comments “OFF”. Simply scroll down to the “Comments & Pings” and un-check the boxes and then select “Save” button.

Creating a Privacy, Terms of Use and Disclaimer Page We think that often people look at the Internet as a “personal” item and that our blogs are our own private things that we can safely share with others. The sad thing however is this is 100% not true and there are thousands of rouge lawyers out there just waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce of some poor unsuspecting victim.

The best way to protect yourself from this is first and foremost, seek legal counsel on anything you are not sure of. Next you will want to make sure you use content that you have legal rights to use, meaning you created it and have the permission to use it… this includes images, videos and articles.

You also want to ensure you have the proper legal documents on your blog such as a “Privacy Policy”, “Terms of Use” and “Disclaimer”. These are extremely important because they clearly lay out the who, what, when, why and how that surrounds your site so you can be protected.

There are a lot of sources you can use to create these pages that are both free and paid. Do not just copy and paste something from another site but make sure to get a custom one for your business and we personally recommend the “Internet Law Compliance System” which does cost money but it covers you from A to Z. To create these pages, you will simply create pages in your blog.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Step 1 –> Go to “Write” and then “Page”

Step 2 –> Create the individual page and then make sure (like the about us page) you shut off the comments and pings.

Step 3 –> Click “Publish”

Navigation, Do NOT Forget the Navigation There are two main areas of focus that every blog needs to pay attention to…

•

People –> Human visitors need to know exactly where to go and how to get there

•

Bots –> The search engines bots need to no where to go and not go

The easiest way to do this… in our opinion, is to first create the site navigation, then once it is all done you go back and move it around to sort what goes where. To do this, you need to clearly understand what pages are important to get them ranked in the search engines and what pages are important for people but not for the search engines, for example…

•

Non Money Pages (privacy, disclaimer and contact us): These types of pages are very important to have for legal reasons and also to help provide assurance to the readers but they do not need to rank in the search engines, they are simply on your site for anyone needing that info but having them rank in the search engines is pointless.

•

Money Pages (sales pages and other monetized pages): These are the pages that you want people to visit; you want people to find in the search engines and are what you make your money from.

Because of the difference between money and non money pages, you want to ensure that all the “link love” that your site has, is focused as much as possible on the pages you make money on. This ©Copyright 2008 JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com does not mean, removing links but instead just moving them and using the infamous rel=“nofollow”.

What this allows you to do is keep links visible to the human readers but for the most part ignored by the search engines (mainly Google) and vice versa.

Step 1 –> The first thing you want to do is to put the links to the disclaimer, terms of use, privacy and contact down to the bottom of the page, out of the way and remove any of these from the top and or side of the page. These are not pages that make you money, so you do not need them front and center but you do want them to be visible to someone looking for them. By moving these to the bottom of the page and adding nofollow to them, you are able to keep everyone happy.

Step 2 –> Put a “Home” link in the top nav or sidebar with a “nofollow” tag. You are going to have to modify the actual template html to do this. This is important because you want a “Home” link for people to be able to clearly see how to get to the home page but you do NOT want the search engines using the word home as the keyword anchor text for your home page… unless of course you are Home Depot.

To do this what we recommend is you “view source” of the blogs index page and then copy the html that is being used for your sites navigation. Then go into the template source code and modify the php scripting. So for example, the source code for blog navigation in the header.php by default will look something like…

<li class=”about”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

…and when the source code is viewed from the live blog, it would look like…

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com <ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

So what we do is delete the source code html in the header.php (if the nav is in the header) and replace it will the html but add the nofollow where we want it to be, so it would look like…

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Hopefully we did not lose you there.

Step 3 –> Put a static link to your “link bait” page (do not use the nofollow for this link) beside your “Home” link in your navigation. So with the above example, the code in the header.php would now look like…

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/linkbaitpage”>Link Bait Keyword Text Here</a></li>

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com <li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Call to Action There are two things you need to do for your readers… the first is provide useful content… the second is direction.

This is really where the rubber hits the road in terms of a quality blog (in our opinion) and a “MFA” (made for AdSense) site. What we mean by that is, if you have a garbage site, that has no link bait, uses cheap writers or only unedited PLR, then chances are you’re not going to earn any loyal followers. People want quality… they want answers and they want help. If you can provide that, then you will gain trust, they will want to come back and you will be able to earn revenue.

To do this most effectively, you want to keep those loyal people updated by opting in to your autoresponder / RSS feed PLUS you want to make sure you are directing them to the most important area of your site at that time… that would be the link bait for the initial site. To do this there are two things you can do…

•

Use the plugin Subscribe Remind (http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscriberemind/): By using this plugin you give a pre defined message but the message is easy to see and is made to appear with every post.

•

Create a custom message at the end of each post: Creating a custom call to action in or at the end of every post gets the readers attention when they are already interested in what you are saying. This is the perfect time to mention to them that they can learn even more or get even better results by signing up or visit your link bait page. Have the message directly relate to the content… if one post is about “fat burning products” on a blog more specifically about

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com exercise, then having a generic “Learn more about exercise” is not good… but having something like…

Click Here to learn about not only the latest Fat Burning Products but also discover fun and easy exercises, healthy eating tips and more by now

Personally, we recommend using both, as this is the most effective because it covers all areas.

When ever linking to the Link Bait or RSS feed, especially when using a call to action with a term like “Click Here”, you should add the nofollow tag to the link. We do not recommend using a keyword as the link, a call to action phrase is much more powerful and effective.

Create a robots.txt The robots.txt file is a file on your site that is meant to give instructions as to where search engine spiders may and may not go. This is not a wall but a permission system, which means that you can not force “bad” bots to listen to it. Bad bots are the bots that go all over your site but do not offer you any value at all.

The powerful reason for the robots.txt file is that it is listened to by the majority of all search engines and it helps to ensure that your site gets spidered and indexed properly. That means the pages you want to be found, can be found and the pages you want hidden will remain hidden.

We do not want to go into a long lesson on this, as there are loads of resources available on the topic that can be explained much better then we can explain them. What we will share with you however is that you want to use one and you want to upload it to the root directory on your server, located in the same place as your index page.

You can see the robot.txt we use at http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/robots.txt (hopefully this has not

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com been changed by the new owners of that blog)

Initial On-Page Optimization with a Dash of Feedburner and Aweber We have our content ready, the internal linking set up and our robots.txt file set up. There are just a few more things to take care of and then we can start up the initial promotion engine. These are…

1. SEO Your Index and Link Bait

2. Set up the opt-in form with Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com) and Aweber (http://www.johncow.com/aweber)

NOTE: During this time we have actually initiated some of the work in the promotional side of things, but for the sake of keeping things organized in these posts we are laying it out in this order. In the next post we start getting into the promotional side of things.

SEO Your Index and Link Bait We are almost ready to go live with our blog but first we need to make sure that it is properly optimized for the search engines. To do this we will use the WordPress plugin called “All In One SEO”.

Step 1: Activate the plugin if not already activated.

Step 2: Go to “Settings” and then “All in One SEO”

Step 3: Enter in a…

•

Home Title

•

Home Description

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Home Keywords.

These may change after you look at the Affiliate Elite results but you still want something in there for now.

IMPORTANT: The title of the page is like the headline of a classified ad, this is what Google uses in the main title of the listing and if your title is not formatted properly and compelling then your click through rate is going to be terrible. We have seen many people with great rankings and not great traffic due to this reason. Make a more compelling “ad” then everyone else… you want to get the attention of the person looking at the results in Google.

Google often uses the “meta description” as the description in their search result listing so make sure you explain in the description why the reader needs to visit your site. If you say you are the best at something then explain why in the description.

For the keywords just put four keyword phrases about your blog, do NOT worry about this too much as Google basically ignores them and they do very little in the other search engines as well. For the title do not use more the 10 words, for the description keep it to less then 20 and the keywords just put four or five phrases.

Step 4: Do NOT check the “Use categories for META Keywords” but DO check…

•

Use noindex for Categories:

•

Use noindex for Archives:

•

Use noindex for Tag Archives:

Checking these for exclusion is very useful for avoiding duplicate content. Also check the “Autogenerate Descriptions” this will autogenerate the description if there’s no excerpt for the post.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Step 5: Go to your Link Bait post and scroll down to the “All in One SEO Pack” form area.

You want to now create a custom…

•

Title

•

Description

•

Keywords

…for this page.

Step 6: Now you want to go to your post text and click on the HTML tab

Step 7: Where ever you have an image in the content look for the alt= and you will want to enter text into the alt tag. I recommend you put the main keyword phrase in one of them (ONLY ONE) and then in any other images, simply put what the image is a picture of. This is important from a professional standpoint and is just one of the “MANY” things Google looks at.

Step 8: Last of all go through the post and bold the main keyword phrase once and then Click

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com “SAVE”

Use Feedburner and Aweber We are going to be brutally honest here and tell you exactly how it is. We do not organize contests, spend hours writing content and work our tails off on this blog because we are such nice people. The fact is this is part of a business and our strategy is that by providing excellent value to you and working with you to help you succeed, we will gain your trust so you will opt in to our mailing list which in turn increases our readership and advertising value and hopefully you will also eventually purchase something with us or through us. You NEED to keep this in mind for you business, you have mouths to feed, bills to pay and you need to generate revenue to pay for those things.

Why do we tell you this?

Because we see so many bloggers out there that have no clue and they are going in circles, barely making a penny and they can not figure out why. Not only do they have no idea why they are doing this (we talked about this a while ago) but they also have done absolutely nothing to actually build a business and assets.

Let me ask you this…. What would happen to your current business if Google decided to deindex your blog?

If you have not taken the time to build an asset for your business then the answer you probably have is a pretty colorful one that we will not bother repeating.

So what is an asset? An asset is basically something that you own and has a value and one of the best assets an online business can have (in our opinion) is a subscriber base. With a solid base of subscribers, even if Google totally de-indexed your blog, you would not be lost at sea, you would still have a revenue stream and your business could still grow.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Of course there is more to having a list of subscribers then that but hopefully you are getting the picture here.

With a blog one of the easiest ways to gain subscribers is through the blogs RSS feed. This is very effective for staying in touch with your readers however it has its limitations but using a service like FeedBurner.com is an excellent way to overcome those limitations. They allow you to optimize and advertise and even offer a mail option where subscribers can subscribe via email. The problem with the Feedburner option by itself however is you do not really own the asset, instead you are left at the mercy of Feedburner.

The Solution –> The solution to this issue is using the mailing list service Aweber with Feedburner.

We do not want to NOT offer a RSS subscription option for those that prefer to use a RSS reader and we of course want to be able to publicize our RSS readership size for monetization purposes but at the same time we want to grow an asset that we own and can have total control over. This is where Aweber is very powerful because it works beautifully with Feedburner to get the best of both worlds! You can also mail your list personalized messages, gifts to increase trust and the occasional offer (which is what this is all about). A word of caution however, if you are mailing a promotion… make darn sure you truly believe it is something your readers would be interested in and is something you believe is worth while for them. Do NOT send them crap or you will lose their trust!

NOTE: We know of no other mailing list service that works with Feedburner like Aweber does for being able to get the full benefits of Feedburner tracking.

Step 1: Go to http://www.feedburner.com/ and create a free account

Step 2: Submit your RSS feed and then click the “Activate Feed” button.

Step 3: Click the “Next” button and then on the next page check the…

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com “I want more! Have Feedburner Stats PRO also track:” (This is now free)

NOTE: There is an option here to optimize the links fro tracking purposes versus search engine optimizing… personally we like to leave it at default to get the most accurate tracking but the choice is up to you.

Step 4: Click the “Optimize” tab and then click on “SmartFeed” in the side bar and activate this.

Step 5: Click the “Ping Shot” in the side bar and click all the available service and then add 5 more from the drop down box and then click “Activate”. We do this instead of pinging from our blog.

Step 6: This step is only for those who do NOT have an Aweber account. Click on the “Email Subscriptions” in the side bar and click “Activate”. You will then take the supplied html code and enter it into a “Text” widget for your sidebar of your blog. Make sure to have it as close to the top of the sidebar as possible.

Step 7: If you have an Aweber account, you will not want to complete step 6 but instead log into your Aweber (http://www.johncow.com/aweber) account and click on “Create and Manage Lists”

Step 8: Click the green “Create List” button and fill in the following but make sure to click the save button in each section that you fill:

•

List Name

•

Uncheck “Multiple Unsubscribe”

•

Company Name (use name of blog)

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Website URL

•

Email Address (this is what your subscribers will see)

•

Name

•

Check the From/Reply

Step 11: Click the “Messages” tab and “Blog Broadcast” sub menu and then the green “Create Blog Broadcast” button.

Step 12: Enter the following information…

•

RSS Feed URL: Put your Feedburner RSS feed URL in here

•

Send Preferences: Send immediately and check Send Automatically

•

Click the green “Load Templates” (Just use the basic template)

•

In the “Plain Text Message” delete the lines…

{!rss_channel_title} {!rss_channel_description} {!rss_channel_link}

…and replace them with something like…

Hey {!firstname_fix}, Here is the latest update from Website Name Here…

(Obviously use something in your own voice)

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com It should look like this…

Repeat the same step for the HTML message and so it looks like…

Click the green save button.

Step 13: Go to “List Settings”, then the sub menu “Web Form” and click the green “Create Web form” button.

Step 14: Fill in the following information…

•

Form Name

•

Check “In line”

•

Create a “Thank You” page on your blog and put the URL to the Thank You page in the field (DO

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com not use the Aweber default).

•

Put that same URL in the “Already Subscribed Page” field. (This is what we do initially but later on we change this but we will talk about that later)

•

Click “Next” and add the “Name” option to the form and then mouse over the Name field in the preview box and click on the blue box with a pencil in it. In the drop down now select “Yes” for required.

•

Click Save.

Step 15: Click on the Get HTML link and copy the HTML not the JavaScript.

Step 16: Log into your blog admin area and go to the “Design” and then “Widgets”. Click the “Add” beside the “Text” option to add a text widget and then click “edit” on the new added widget. Enter the HTML for the opt-in and click “change” and then “Save Changes”

Step 17: Drag the widget to the top of the widgets and again click “Save Changes”

Step 18: Go to your blog index page and view the opt-in box to make sure it is properly formatted to work with your blog. We will talk about formatting the opt-in message and thank you page in the next post.

Step 19: Go the Plugins page and activate the plugin “Feedburner Feedsmith” and then go to “Settings” and then “Feedburner”

Step 20: In the #2 box, enter your Feedburner RSS feed URL, leave the #3 empty and then click save. Your RSS feed will now auto redirect to the Feedburner one.

In the next post we are going to talk about…

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com •

Optimizing your opt-in message and “Thank You” page

•

Creating and submitting your Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)

•

Checking for errors

Measure Twice Cut Once The old saying “Measure Twice Cut Once” is an important one to remember, especially at this phase of your blog creation. Having a blog that is now 95% ready to go live is often a time that we start to get impatient and want to focus on the promotions to start earning money. This is a HUGE mistake because we suddenly put more items on our plate and get distracted from finishing off important items that seem insignificant but are critical to your blogs initial success.

There is certainly a good balance here as well as there are also those that are never satisfied with what they have and therefore get stuck in analysis paralysis and just sit on their blog never moving forward with it, never feeling like it is ready. Your blog does not need to have perfect graphics and the exact correct colors, there is what we refer to as “Deal Breakers” which are the items that are critical and then there are the other tasks that are not critical but “Nice to Haves”.

The remaining items to finish before we start to go heavy with the promotions are to…

•

Optimize the opt-in message and “Thank You” page

•

Checking for errors (broken links)

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Create and submitting the Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)

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Turn on ping

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Optimize the Opt-in message and “Thank You” page How often do you go to a blog and see a message like “Subscribe to our RSS feed”?

Do you really think that is effective?

We can guarantee that the majority of you agree it is not yet the majority of you do that very thing. This is one of the factors of your site that is so important and yet our impatience or even laziness can cause us to just skim over it and go on to other things. Earlier we reference creating a call to action that was placed at the end of your posts to entice the reader to take a desired action on your blog. This exact same thing needs to take place with getting readers to opt in to your list.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and answer the question “what is in it for me”. People do not subscribe to RSS feeds for the sake a seeing the word subscribe, the do not submit an email just to see what happens. Never assume that offering free advice is something people will appreciate but instead give your readers what they want by providing a solution to a problem. Whether your blog is about health, automobiles, racing or make money… there is a problem your readers have and that is why they are on your blog at that moment. It is your responsibility to understand what it is and provide a solution to them with a high perceived value.

Once you know the problem, you now have to tell them how to solve the problem by opting in to your list or subscribing to your RSS feed. With the GamerzReviewz.com blog that we built, the problem that we focused on was video gamers not having all the latest gaming consoles so they could play all the coolest games and so we offered them a simple way to have a chance to win one. There were a few different ideas we had for opt in headlines, we thought of mentioning how they could make their friends jealous by showing off their new system, they could finally stop being the butt of the jokes and actually have a system like everyone else or we could just tell them they can win one and let their own reason surface. We opted for the last one and made it very obvious to see when they went to the blog what the benefit of opting in was.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Once we had the opt-in message ready we now need to figure out how to best use the thank you landing page. This is an extremely valuable piece of virtual real estate and so often we see a thank you page that simply says “Thanks for opting in”. This is where you want to be sure that you give your reader direct instructions on what you want them to do next and it might be giving them an up-sell to a product or like with the GamerzReviewz blog we used this to instruct them how to get more chances to win which were by performing actions that promoted GamerzReviewz. This is the critical need to the blog, to get the word out, and so it is the main focus.

Checking for Errors (broken links) Before we create our sitemap we want to make sure that all links are working and there are no broken ones. Having broken links can cause errors and the search engines will not be able to properly access areas of your site but you will also give readers the impression of an unfinished, unprofessional site. This is very easy to check with the free tool http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Create and Submitting the Google site map Now that all the pages on your blog are ready to go, and all the links are checked and accurate, you want to make sure that the search engines are able to easily access all of them. The most effective way is to accomplish this is to create a search engine (mainly Google) specific sitemap and with WordPress this is extremely easy to do with the help of the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap that all the major search engines can read and is very easy to use.

Step 1: Go to the Plugins area and activate the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin.

Step 2: Open a blank notepad file and select save as and save the blank file as “sitemap.xml” and then repeat this step and save a new one as “sitemap.xml.gz”

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com permissions on them to six.six.six which is read & write access.

Step 4: Go to “Settings” –> “XML-Sitemap” and on the top of that page in the “Status” area, click on the link that says to build sitemap manually.

Step 5: You sitemap should now be ready and now scroll down and make sure the option “Build the sitemap in a background process (You don’t have to wait when you save a post)” is checked and if you have any extra pages on your blog, such as an opt in thank you page, then you are going to want to put the id# of that page in the “Exclude the following posts or pages:”.

To get the ID #, go to “Manage” –> “Posts” and then mouse over the title of the post and you will see “&post=#”, the # is the post ID.

Step 6: Now go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and if you do not already have an account with them, create one and then submit your sitemap. This is very important because the information that Google provides after a few days is very powerful and so do NOT just rely on the “ping” feature with this plugin. We promise that in a few days when we show you the data Google provides, you will be thankful you did this.

Turn on the Ping Now it is time to turn on the auto pinging feature in your blog but since we are having Feedburner doing the pinging for us, we only need to ping Feedburner and let them do the rest. The benefit of this is the back end issues that ping the services can cause with your blog and by only pinging Feedburner you eliminate all these issues.

To do this go to Settings –> Writing and scroll down to the “Update Services” area and enter http://ping.feedburner.com and click “Save Changes”.

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com

Setting up Analytics Before starting to promote our blog, we wanted to ensure we had some type of third party analytics service in place that would provide detailed information on exactly where traffic was coming from, what pages it was going to and even where it was leaving from.

There are a lot of services out there, some paid and some free, but it our opinion we have not seen a reason to use them that justifies their cost over the free options that are available. This is of course purely just our own personal opinion and if you are currently using a different service and are happy with the results they provide to you; then please continue to use them.

The free service that we recommend using is Google Analytics. This used to be a paid service that Google bought out a few years ago and has since made it completely free PLUS they have added numerous improvements.

The main drawback to using Google Analytics is that it is owned by Google and some people are not comfortable with Google having the inside picture of everything that is going on with their blog. Our feeling is unless you are participating in risky black hat strategies; then using Analytics should not be a cause of concern.

If you are just dead set against using Google’s service then a second good free alternative that provides some fantastic data is “WordPress Stats” which uses the WordPress API. You may also use this service in conjunction with Google Analytics.

Setting up Analytics on your blog is extremely easy and is just a matter of copying and pasting a few lines of code into the footer of your blog. There is a plugin that you can use that will make this even easier for you to do (which is the method we recommend because it is so easy). The plugin is…

http://www.semiologic.com/software/marketing/google-analytics/

Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com …and the instructions are very easy to follow along.

Congratulations… We Are Ready For PROMOTING!!!! There are two phases to the promotion rollout for our new Video Game Reviews blog, which are…

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Link Bait Promotion

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Index Promotion

We usually have four phases which also include…

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Money Promotion

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Maintenance Promotion

…the difference is we are going to be selling this blog very soon and as such we do not have the time to layout the entire process. The initial “Link Bait” promotion is to get the site to take off as fast as it can by using a viral element that takes full advantage of social web communities. Then once that is initiated we then move into a focused campaign on promoting the index page. These are what we will walk you through over the next few days.

The “Money Promotion” is when we start to really monetize the blog with affiliate reviews of different products and or services and focus the promotion on those pages. The last phase is the “Maintenance Promotion” where we rotate through promoting both the index page and other “deep link” pages of our blog. We believe it is important to focus on a 50/50 split of gaining links to both your index page and other deep linked pages on your blog. Our goal is to try and maintain a minimum link growth of one new one way link a day (average 30 a month). This is very easy to achieve if you create solid content, people will link to it naturally and that can leave you to focus your promotion on your “Money Pages”.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com and “Maintenance” promotions, do not worry about it, we have every intention of sharing this as well… but not right away, so you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you are notified.

Link Bait Promotion The reason we put so much attention on creating a quality “Link Bait” page is because it is so vitally important that your link growth be as viral as possible. We mentioned this a few posts back but think it is essential to repeat it. Promoting your blog is like pulling the string on a kite you are trying to launch into the sky, when you first pull on it, the kite shoots off into the air but if there is nothing (no wind) to carry it up high then the kite simply drops back down to the ground like a rock. So often we see people putting loads of effort into promoting something that is plain and simply a piece of crap. If you are not going to take the time to do this right, then your results are going to be poor. Do not just promote a keyword optimized article written by some guy with a name you can not pronounce that can barely speak a word of English and is only focused on making sure your keyword phrase is at 6%.

We do not want to get into detail on the “Link Bait” page as we have talked about that enough in prior posts but we hope that you can see clearly that quality is vitally important.

With our blog GamerzReviewz, our link bait page is focused on a contest and we now have three tasks we need to focus on.

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The first is to put together a viral system that will encourage readers to share our contest and link to use.

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The second is to start placing news of the contest in different areas that will start to get the ball rolling.

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The third is to find joint venture partners that would be willing to promote our contest to a targeted list of video gamers.

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VIRAL Marketing Viral marketing is the process of creating an initiative that when done correct will have the consumers in your market spread the word. There is nothing more powerful in marketing then having the consumers recommending you to others. The challenge here is that it is not an easy system because what you might think is great, is not a shared view with others…. especially if you are entering a market you are not really familiar with. We felt that offering a free video game console was pretty much a no brainer for a video game market but we needed to set it up so that people would be encouraged to spread the word. The challenge with a contest is the more people that enter, the less your chances to win are, so we needed to create a very worthwhile incentive to get as many people as possible to do more then just the bare minimum.

We tested a few different options here and it is important that you test different options. For example we at first put an option for people to post in video game forums but this was not effective because it broke the rules of most of the forums and the posts were looked at as spam and were deleted. We had some apprehension about this strategy from the start, but it is always wise to test things in different markets… some times they work in one and not in another. Since we were watching this very close, we were able to pull this very quickly when we saw it was not effective and the last thing we wanted was to be labeled a spammer in the communities that we were targeting.

We brainstormed many different options and prioritized them in order of what we felt were the best. We did not want to add every option at once as this can cause a lot of confusion by giving too many options and also makes it harder to track. The one common element that we needed to focus on however was that for people to enter into the contest, they had to perform an action that added value to the blog, such as becoming a subscriber to the blog or providing a one way link.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT just copy what works on one blog and think it will work for yours. Each market is so very different and one of your options might be something that barely anyone in your market is even capable of doing. Look at where a lot of actions are taking place for your market and figure ©Copyright 2008 JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com out how to tap into it. For example the social community PlugIM.com is a fairly powerful tool to use but it is only focused in the IM (internet marketing) market and therefore having one of the criteria to be using this community when your market is focused on a completely unrelated market would be a huge waste.

Once we had our list of criteria we then needed to explain it as effectively as possible which means in as little words as possible. Remember you are dealing with a media that allows for great impatience because if your reader is encouraged to click away, they will. That might even mean hitting the back button in their browser which means you lose them.

Once we had the criteria worded correctly we posted it and we also made sure to set a couple reminders in place for those that take the initial step of registering. Once registered, the people are brought to a “Thank You” page and we needed to make sure that this page reminded them about how they could get even more chances to win. We also added a “thanks for registering” email into the system, so once subscribed they were reminded again.

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Social Marketing Needs to Start Somewhere IMPORTANT: Before we go too far in this post we need to stress that please do not think that a contest is the only way to go. A contest is great but look at the most talked about items on sites like Digg.com, there are very few contests and in fact at this moment chances are none of the stories have anything to do with a contest. The reason we are saying this is because often times when we are training people, they simply duplicate the exact steps we are doing and this is a HUGE mistake. You need to look at the market you are in and make a plan but MOST important of all is to make it YOUR plan. You need to look at your market and go where they are talking and find out what they are talking about.

In the previous post we talked about getting the criteria of the contest on our link bait page ready, now it is time to start dropping seeds about the contest in different areas. This is where we start tapping into various different “Web 2.0″ communities and getting involved with like minded people. This part of the job is where we see a lot of people really drop the ball, they get lazy and do a half ass job and only see a tiny fraction of the results they should. You see each of these communities we are about to get involved in are very picky and do not take kindly to internet marketers trying to spam them to death. That means that you need to become an authentic part of their community before you can tap into them or you need to find someone that is and get them to help you out. If you just join the community and then post a link directly to your blog and tell everyone to check out this great site, you will be completely ignored.

If you plan to use your own profile then another point to consider is the markets you are in. Often people tend to build blogs on different niches and this can pose a problem, imagine going to a site like Facebook and seeing “John Cow” owner of JohnCow.com, GamerzReviewz.com and FrillyScrapBooking.com.

You would look at this and probably have a few questions and if you were looking for something in the

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com scrapbooking market then you would probably have some doubts that the person in the profile was who you were wanting guidance from in this market. Now, if we created a Facebook profile for our wife and had her name tied to the Scrapbooking site… that would be better.

Oh and let me apologize right now to any of you guys out there reading this that are passionate scrapbooker’s, we are sure your frilly scrapbooks would make even my Gramma envious… don’t let us discourage your manly passion (hey we actually kept a straight face while writing that).

OK, so now we needed to start listing the communities we were already a part of and remember one of the reasons we picked this market was because it was something we were familiar with and because of that we had profiles already established in some of these communities that matched up nicely with our new blog. So we listed the communities we were already a part of and then listed the communities that we were not part of and then needed to figure out how to tap into them. This actually turned out to be MUCH easier then you would think because of the strategy we used for getting writers… since the authors are real gamers, we simply requested their help.

NOTE: If you do not already have established accounts in these communities, take your time and build them. Add real pictures and do not leave blanks, the first hint of a spammer is an unfinished profile.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT add your own posts to these communities as recommendations. What we mean is it is fine to put your blog in your profile but do not Digg your own pages. There are loads of people on Digg that will report this the moment they see it, they hate this kind of activity. What you can do however is ask people to Digg the article for you. Now this might sound a little hypocritical that you can not post your own page but you can “ask” someone else to do it for you, but that is just the way it is. This was easily accomplished by simply asking the authors to Digg the page and hopefully once the seed was planted, it was healthy enough to grow on its own after that.

Some of the communities we used were…

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Facebook

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Digg

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Stumbleupon

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Mixx

Now we used more then this but we are not listing them and that is because we want you to think for yourself. Go to Google and find sites like these but that are targeted directly to your market.

Using Press Releases: Press Releases in our opinion are one of the most effective paid promotion tools available. This of course is 100% dependant on the quality of the content and of course the value of the story. You could have a fantastic press release but if the story it references is boring then it is a complete waste of time. The service we use is PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com) and we only use it when we have something of value to tell our market about. If you have a brand new blog, a press release is a great way to get the news out and like the example of GamerzReviewz, having a contest to celebrate the grand opening helped to make the news that much more exciting.

The draw back of using PRWeb is they are pretty expensive but the exposure of linking that you get is HUGE. Your press release gets distributed to major high authority sites and the credibility of your blog in the eyes of Google absolutely skyrockets.

A lot of marketers talk about using the Yahoo Directory (which costs $299) but in our opinion that is something to do once your blog has proven itself. We never pay to get added to the Yahoo directory until we see that it is turning a profit and if you only have so much to spend then use a press release. Now, this does not mean we do not recommend Yahoo Directory, in fact we highly recommend it but once again not until your blog has started generating revenue. The yahoo directory will give a great

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com deal of added credibility and exposure to your blog.

With PRWeb the more you pay, the more exposure you get and also in order to be able to use keyword anchor text in your release you have to pay for one of the premium packages. This is very powerful, as you are getting keyword anchor text to your blog from extremely high authority sites.

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Do Not Be Afraid! Many of you may recall a couple years ago when the “Tag & Ping” strategy was introduced. We recall a few people bashing it and saying it was short term and was not going to last, we knew of people predicting 3 months of life and that was it. These people looked at it like the previous strategy of “Blog & Ping” and immediately categorized it as the same and labeled it without even understanding anything about it. Well here we are 2 years later and this strategy has given birth to some amazing marketing strategies and in itself is still very effective, of course there have been tweaks and changes.

Why did people dig their heels in and fight it?

Maybe they did not trust the person they heard it from, maybe they were burnt before by a previous strategy and did not trust this one or maybe the process sounded too complicated and they were afraid to try it. We could keep going with reasons but the bottom line was something got stuck in their head and made them resistant to it… AFRAID OF IT… without even having a clue what the process was about.

The End Result…

It was not the end of the world but it was a missed opportunity. Some still stay away from it calling it black hat and yet others are still afraid of it. It seems anything to do with the word “Web 2.0″ and they curl up in a ball and shiver. If you want to grow your business, if you want to be a leader in this industry… you can NOT live on rumors, assumptions and most of all FEAR.

Often we hear of people who refer to posts at places like the Digitalpoint or Warrior forum, and these posts they refer to are a complete joke… someone, who has no business talking about the subject because they do not even have a successful business online, starts mouthing off about something and because they have 1000+ posts, they are immediately thought of as an authority. Sorry but no they are not… if they had a successful online business they would not have time to waste in places like that.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Now do not get me wrong, there are a lot of people we respect in those forums but very and we do mean very few. Unless you can see for yourself the results that person has, do NOT listen to them.

One of the things we talk about a lot is “theory”… we absolutely despise marketers who thrive on theory. It amazes us that even students of ours who pay us for help, totally ignore the advice we are giving them because they say that is not what so and so says. It is completely insane… they have not even bothered to try what we are showing them and yet they dig their heels in the ground and refuse to listen because of a theory from someone that they think is an authority and something that person has said has made them afraid.

The only way we were able to grow ourselves a successful business was by trying new “scary” things… by stepping out of our comfort zone and most important of all, by not letting theory distract us but actually following through on things and seeing for ourselves what works and what does not work. We will never and we mean never, tell someone that something does not work unless we have tried it and know first hand.

So how in the world can this tie into the Video Games Reviews blog that we built for the COWpetition and “Getting the Word Out”?

It comes down to this…

We Are Not Afraid of:

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Trying Something New

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Stepping Out of Our Comfort Zone

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Being Told No

The story of Colonel Saunders of KFC is very inspiring. As an older man, he went to hundreds and hundreds of restaurants, trying to get them to buy into his idea… 99.9% of them said no… but all it took

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com was the one that said YES!

With your business are you making ignorant assumptions, are you missing opportunities because you are intimidated by something, are you afraid to try something new?

If you want your blog or business to grow you need to drop your assumptions right now and step out of your comfort zone. If you want to get the word out then you need to be like Colonel Saunders and start knocking on peoples doors… and do NOT be afraid that they will say no. This is where the rubber truly hits the road for those that want to build a business and those that are just doing it for a hobby.

With GamerzReviewz.com we listed every single blog, forum and website we could think of and or find that had an influence on the market. We then contacted many of them directly by email and phone to request a partnership. Some requests were for links, some where for advertisements in emails and some were for sponsorship of prizes. The point is however, that if we really wanted to get people talking about our blog, then we could not rely solely on general sites… we NEEDED to go right to where the people where that we were targeting.

The end result… 95% of the people said no or did not respond at all… but 5% said yes and the cool thing was that out of that 5% we got HUGE and we do mean HUGE exposure.

So what did we say to these people?

How to Win Friends and Get around Their Pride We are going to let you in on a little secret here… this was a huge part of how we were able to get some pretty influential contacts when we initially started in our online business.

You have to be able to appease people’s pride!

Now, you do not need to take this to the extreme but before you puff your chest out and say that you

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com will never swoop to that level, let us explain what we mean.

Every week we get many requests to partner with someone… it might simply be a link, a review or involvement in a project and 99% of these requests are simply deleted!

Why?

They are not truly WIN/WIN partnerships. For example, when someone asks us for a link trade and the site they will link from has barely any subscribers and low traffic… how is this true WIN/WIN? Think about it… is this not really only a win for the person who has the site with low traffic and subscribers?

So how can you get around this?

Simply, you go for the pride… you satisfy the persons desire to be right (even if it is only in their own mind). This might sound conceded but it is just the way it is. You want to satisfy the ego of the person.

So often we think of a WIN/WIN as an equal effort trade… but that is not what a true WIN/WIN is. For both parties to win, then both parties must get an equal value benefit. This is even more important for new blogs because you have absolutely no proof of results you can give them, so you need to get creative here.

What things could you offer above just a link back…

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Detailed post review

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You will write content for their blog

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You will do blog commenting for them with a link to their site

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Submit articles to major directories like EzineArticles.com

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Create a quality Squidoo.com lens about their site

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com …and the list can keep going. The thing is if you really feel that they could help your blog get off the ground, you NEED to make them feel important, you NEED to make sure your communication with them stands out from the crowd and you NEED to make it worth their while.

You need to understand that people who think that they are more influential then you in the market are often going to have a certain level of pride about it. With that pride there is a barrier that you need to get over. You need to get over your pride that it is beneath you to do this and you need make them feel special and appease their pride. With a few of these winning partnerships you will soon be able to start offering equal trade exchanges with people because you have the results to back it up.

Now a little word of warning, do not go overboard on this either, you do not want to sound like a creep or stalker but you need to sound like a person who respects what they have accomplished so far, follows their advice and is some what of a fan.

The BIGGEST thing we want to emphasize here is the point that you do NOT want to be fake… it comes down to being respectful. Being fake is transparent and will eventually come back to bite you but being respectful and sticking to facts is solid and will not turn around to bite you.

An example of this is an argument we got into with a friend at a wedding. We married sisters and my friend accused us of being fake because our wives ornery grandfather likes us much more then him. The basis of his argument was that we always acted pleasant and happy to see him even though he was often not a pleasant person to be around and is very set in his ways. My friend looked at this as being fake because he feels he should not have to act different for anyone and if he does not like someone then it is how he is going to act.

The way we looked at it however was…

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We love our wife and this is her grandfather and she loves him very much.

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He is 89 years old and is very set in his ways.

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Who benefits from being rude and confrontational with him?

You see we look at it as to how can we make this a WIN/WIN and by digging our heels in the ground and being confrontational with him is only a win for one person (our selfish pride) but is a lose for everyone else. So instead, by us having to give a little more by being patient and overlooking certain things we make our wife happy which makes us much happier.

Now we need to stress one point, this respect only goes so far. Being respectful does not entail letting people walk all over you and take advantage of you. We get into debates with our wife’s grandfather and he knows where we stand on things however we are respectful to him.

Now let’s carry this over into business examples. When you are looking at making WIN/WIN partnerships with people, ask yourself how you can get the most benefit out of this partnership. You need to look past appeasing your inner selfish pride and look at what is good for your business not just right now but for the long term as well. So often we get caught up in the here and now and fail to see how this will affect us in the future.

Our belief (and we have proven this in our own business) is that by going the extra mile for someone now helps to ensure a solid relationship in the future. For example with a new site that has little traffic and search engine influence, to approach someone and ask for a link trade or to be mentioned on their blog is not really a fair trade. This person has worked hard to be able to get to where they are and in our opinion to simply expect them to link to you or mention you because you link back is actually a little disrespectful in our opinion… especially if the person has never heard of you before.

Now one can argue that it is more effective to try and build a relationship first with the person and we 100% agree with this to a point. Examples are being solid contributors to their blog, providing constructive feedback about their products and things like that. The challenge we had here however was that we only had 30 days with this COWpetition to get as much exposure as we could with our blog and building relationships like that take time.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com So what we did was first of all we made a list of all potential JV Partners that we could think of and we divided that list up into what type of partner they might be, which were…

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Mailing List Partners: These are sites that have targeted mailing lists and might mail for us about our site

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Content Partners: These are sites that might allow us to add content about our site

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Banner Partners: These are sites that would put our banner on their site

Our main focus was to be on number one (mailing list) as that is the quickest way to get exposure.

Once we had our list we then had to research the most effective way to contact them. Some where friends but most were complete strangers. Contacting people we already had relationships with was easy, these were people that we have made contact with over the years in the IM world that we knew had a presence in this market. You see we have sites and mailing lists in dozens of niches and so do our friends and it is wise to know this. By having a close network of friends and knowing what markets they are in is very helpful when you have an interest in a similar market. Since we already had a relationship with these people, it was much easier to just send an email, get on Skype or call them up and ask for the favor.

Now it is important to understand that we also made it clear that it was not just a one sided approach and we made it very clear as to how we would make it worth their while… the cool thing is since we already had proven our value as a friend to them, most simply did it as a friend.

Now, contacting the strangers on the other hand is the hard part. As stated above, we have had no time to build trustworthy relationships with these people and so we needed to be able to ensure that our request stood above the crowd as something that was truly worth their consideration and this is were some might look at it as beneath them.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com but some had phone numbers available and we also looked for the name. Using the persons name in the communication is very important. Once we had the contact info we needed to create a personalized communication for each one.

A huge mistake a lot of people make is by using just one template and simply replacing the name and URL of the site… this is what is called being fake. Instead you need to look at their situation and see how it is you can add value to what they already have. If someone has a forum that already has loads of back links and traffic, by offering a link back to them is pretty much useless but perhaps offering to make a major mention of them as a sponsor with a link in a paid press release that you are sending out might be more enticing. For others we noticed that they had a good size list but were not showing up for certain main terms in the search engines and so we figured we could offer some targeted link building on certain terms. We looked at each site and tried to figure out the best value we could offer.

Next we needed to make sure we communicated in a professional way. By sending emails from a gmail or hotmail account is usually not a great idea for first impressions, so we made sure to create personalized email accounts using the domain of the blog. Next we made a basic template that only covered certain things, such as describing who we were. It is important that you try as best as possible to sound professional, so if you have a company name, then use that in the email.

Next we created very personalized messages for each site that focused on what we saw of value in them and how we were willing to go above and beyond to work with them to make this a true win / win.

Here is an example outline that is very similar to what we actually used. We modified it slightly and PLEASE do NOT just copy and replace this message below, make sure you make your own custom messages and use your own voice with own introduction, make your message stand out from the crowd.

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Dear (Insert Name Here),

My name is (Your Name Here) and I am the Marketing Manager of (Company Name Here), and we are looking for some powerful partners to align with in a new endeavor we are partaking and you immediately came to mind. (Their Name here), I have known of your site (url here) for a while and I absolutely love how (enter something you really like about their site or service and do NOT be fake, this is were you build them up).

(This section is now where you explain what you are doing, we mentioned that we are building a Video Game Review blog that was part of a contest on a popular blog, that we were giving away a free gaming console and what we had planned for marketing with the site, we also gave them the URL and explained all the plans for the blog.)

We have a host of diverse and experienced skill sets that are going to make this endeavor a success, including:

(In point-form mention things you could offer. Even if you are the only one doing this or if you have a few outsourcers then mention what you have to offer in services, you do not need to mention you are doing everything yourself but do not lie and say you have an office full of staff if you do not and make sure to make it sound as professional as possible. For us since we have in house staff we used that to our advantage and mention all that we had to offer)

(This section is to now explain how we envisioned them working with us. We explained what we thought was great about what they could bring to the table, we let them know we respected what they have done so far and how we would be willing to go above and beyond to work with them and we explained in detail exactly what we would be willing to do in return. You need to make it clear what you will do for them, set it up to make it a no brainer for them. It is important that you do NOT expect them to see the benefit of a partnership right away, even though you do, you need convince them of it by going above ©Copyright 2008 JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

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(This section is to now close the conversation and add urgency to it. It was important for us to not put excessive pressure on them but they needed to know that there was a time frame involved here. For us this was very short and so we needed to be a little more aggressive but if you do not have an immediate short term then save this for a follow up message.)

Thanks (Enter Their Name Here), for taking the time to consider our proposal. My team and I are standing by to make this a very worthwhile partnership. I am also open to any ideas you might have in regards to this proposal.

I look forward to working with you,

Kindest Regards,

Name Here Your Company Name and Position Phone Number Email Address

<– End of example email

IMPORTANT: Do not contact any potential partners until you have something worthwhile to show them. Make sure your blog or service is ready to go, nothing says “Delete Me” more then a partner request from someone who only has a vague idea about something. If it is just a plan then make sure you have a written out plan with details you could send them… so often we have been asked to talk to someone who sounds like it might be a good idea only to find out they have no idea, just a hunch. Make sure you have something concrete for the potential partner to grab onto.

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Follow Up but Be Polite About It Now please remember, this post is to explain how we did this with our COWpetition blog and that means there was a strict time frame of only 30 days involved, so we had to improvise on a few things.

One of the rules in sales is that it takes seven communications to make a sale, so that means that a sales person, on average, needs to communicate with a potential customer seven times before they finally buy from them. Now what this refers to is with cold calling, obviously if someone is in search for a product or service already and is looking for it, then it is much quicker to close a sale. When you are contacting potential JV Partners, you need to look at it like cold calling for a sale. You are trying to convince someone, who more than likely has never even heard of you before, that it is worthwhile for them to partner up with you.

Now to communicate with someone seven times is very effective but for us to do this in such a short time frame is not very wise. Being too aggressive can work against you and you will be considered a spammer.

Another important point is to never threat anything. What we mean by that is say for example you requested a link exchange from someone (this is just an easy example, please do not argue whether link exchanges work), the most effective method is to post their link on your site first and then ask them to reciprocate. Well if after a week they do not reciprocate, do NOT email them and say that if they do not respond in 48 hours you will take the link down. OK, we confess, this example is a real life one and about 5 years ago we were guilty of trying it. All we can say is we got hammered by angry webmasters that used a lot of colorful language and the theme was that if we were requesting a favor from them then threatening was not a good move… we saw the error of our ways and 100% agree.

For the contacts that we had phone numbers for, our second contact with them was using the phone. When calling, often times you will get an automated voice system. You want to leave a message and you want to make sure that you sound as professional as possible. Do not stutter and just try to wing

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com the conversation, make sure you have a script that you are following and rehearse it a few times. No one is going to follow up with you if the message sounds like a nervous person. You also need to make sure you make reference to the email you sent and the date and time you sent it, this way if the email was overlooked, you will spark an interest for them to go back and look at it.

It is urgent that you be fully confident in what it is you want from the person you are trying to contact, the more confident you are, the more assured that they will be in partnering with you. The most effective results for us seem to be simply introducing ourselves and mentioning that we were just following up on an email that we sent earlier and wanted to know if they had any questions.

For those that we did not have a phone number, we simply emailed them a friendly reminder. The way we formatted the reminder was that we knew they were more than likely very busy and we wanted to follow up to ensure they received the email and to answer any questions they might have. We also included the original message with the follow up message.

In most situations the routine we follow is that we try to mail on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only. Some say Sundays work well but we have not found that. We also follow up to the original message about 24 hours later. After that we would tend to follow up about once a week and after the seventh try if we have not received a response we stop contacting them. This time however, due to our time constraint, we only followed up a third time and that was it and this was one week from the original date of contact.

Remember, be polite, be respectful, plan out what you are going to say, rehearse it and be professional!

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Getting Traffic by Leveraging Resources Now that the initial JV Partners have been contacted it was time to focus on getting some link building and traffic generation done. We are big fans of leveraging the power of Web 2.0 communities but it is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket… you want your links to be diversified as much as possible. This is a challenge that a lot of people seem to run into because they find a strategy that works (whether it be a paid or free one) and they only do that. This is fine when just starting out and you are getting a few links but as your site grows you are going to need to incorporate a lot more strategies.

You see, as your site grows, if all the links pointing back to it are from the same sources, well then you will only get to a certain level and then plateau. Google pays attention to things like the source IP of the links and domains and all that good stuff and as the amount of links grow, it makes perfect sense that this becomes a bigger factor. If you only have say 50 links to your site and you used one method to get that… big deal, Google will not waste its time trying to figure out if all your links are natural are self made. If on the other hand your site now has 2000+ links, well then this starts to become a little more important and if 100% of those links are coming from just a few IPs and domains, well then things start to look a little suspicious.

How To You Build Diversity into Your Link Building This is certainly not an easy task to do by traditional methods. By building a high quality link bait page and using sites like Digg and Stumble-upon are very effective, but they are not really guaranteed and only getting a single Digg or Stumble is not anything to get excited about. There are also the strategies of submitting good content to article directories, contacting webmaster for links, creating good content that people just want to link to, submitting more press releases, submitting to link directories, commenting on blogs, and submitting guest posts to blogs and so on and so on. These are all solid

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com strategies but the challenge with them is the time frame in which they are effective.

Then there are paid tools that promise to make link building a breeze but the challenge with these tools are they tend to focus on only one strategy, some employ very risky strategies and if not properly used can get you into trouble with the search engines. A lot of these tools also use other people’s resources and do not ask permission, they focus on quantity and do not take into account quality. The other challenge is you are usually left to you own to make the tool work.

The best solution is to do a mixture of everything… which of course is the obvious answer. You need to ensure you incorporate strategies that are solid and proven to work but it is also foolish to not take advantage of some of the great tools out there that make this work much easier. This is no different then using tools to make your research or site building easier… this is exactly what tools like TrafficTravis, AffiliateElite and even WordPress do, they make it easier to accomplish tasks. Each one of these tools, if used proper, can help you to achieve some pretty cool things, but if misused can cause a lot of frustration.

One of the most effective strategies we use is the concept of “Promoting Your Promotions”. This is something that 90% of the market fails to even consider doing and it is a huge opportunity. Say for example you leave a quality comment on a blog that does NOT use “nofollow” and they have no other comments. Well chances are this page will not be spidered from Google for a while, since it is not a popular page.

So, why not help it out and make it a little more popular by promoting it?

Think about it, you have taken the time to help add value to the blog by leaving a quality comment and your hope is that you get a link back out of it. Why not do a little promotion to that page and get the spiders back to that page right away and make your link count. Yes you are helping the owner of the blog but by helping them, you are also helping yourself.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com you do your research and create a good quality article, there is a good chance that the article will show up in Google, usually within about 48 hours. This however, is not guaranteed… there are thousands of articles added to this site everyday and not all of them rank well right away, or if they do they are down on page 3 or 4…which really is not all that helpful for getting traffic. It is great for the back link but you want to get traffic too, so what we do is make sure we also promote our article on EzineArticles.com, to give the page more authority which then helps boast it in the eyes of Google and gives it a higher ranking.

Our Tool of Choice

The problem with promoting your promotions is it can start to be a fair bit of work. There are some simple strategies for accomplishing this, such as creating a Tumblr.com account and then linking to the page and then ping your Tumblr blog, which is effective but does not really pack a huge punch. This is one of the reasons that our tool of choice is so powerful. The tool we are referring to is one that we have a vested interest in and love using.

The tool is TrafficKahuna (http://www.johncow.com/traffickahuna) and what we love the most about this service is it is not just one service; it is made up of different tools for different strategies. They have a large network of blogs; they have a three way link exchange, an article exchange, video submission, an amazing co-op tool plus some solid Web2.0 training.

There have been some different rumors flying around about this tool and most of them are from people making assumptions that have never used the tools. For example there was a person claiming that all they did was publish the RSS feed from one post onto dozens of different blogs… well that is not true. The system uses XMLRPC and publishes no more then 2 of the exact same articles on any 2 blogs.

There was another claiming that they did not have as many blogs as they claimed… well that again is not true. What they do is rotate in and out some of the blogs to ensure they are not overused and they also make it so your posts only go to specific niche related blogs and the blogs are owned by members

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com and are high quality blogs that are not simply link farms. These blogs must pass some strict criteria and no two blogs look the same. They also have strict moderation and are not afraid to kick people out that abuse the tools.

One of the coolest things for using this tool is when wanting to give your link bait pages a little extra boost. Their co-op tool is made up of thousands of members that work together on a point system. So you login and there are jobs available to perform, you do them and gain credits and you can then turn around and submit your job. So for example, when you create a link bait page, you can submit your Digg page and ask members to Digg your page. By getting those few initial Diggs, this helps to boast the page up and get noticed and then the natural process takes over (remember the concept of pulling the kite string).

Another cool strategy with this tool is when you create a Squidoo.com lens for example, you use the blogging tool they have to get some back links to the Squidoo lens, then you request a few people to vote on the lens and you skyrocket that lens. One last thing is you watch you track backs, and when people start talking about your site and linking to it, you then do a little promotion to their site. You see the power in that is, if you can get their page ranking well in Google, then that is more traffic for you. Do not be happy with just one listing in Google… why not dominate them all!

You see the secret is leveraging these resources to work with each other instead of against each other. If someone is linking to you and is on page 2 of the search engines, do not look at that as competition in the results, look at it like it is your page and what do you need to do to get that page into the top 5 of Google. This is where tools like TrafficKahuna come in and are extremely powerful.

Disclaimer –> Like any tool, this is not the end all be all of tools, you want to make sure you are diversified but as your business grows and you have resources to invest then tools like this are a huge help. Like every tool, there are those that love it and those that don’t… the best thing to do is try different things and see what works for you and then figure out how to improve upon that.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com We promised to share all the tools and strategies that we use and this is one of them but please remember NEVER put all your eggs in one basket and what ever methods you use make sure quality is ALWAYS front and center.

Keyword Research - Shiny Diamonds Everywhere Now that the initial work is completed and AffiliateElite (http://www.johncow.com/affiliateelite) has run for 14 days, we are ready to get our good “Money” keywords. Once we have these words we are then going to need to decide which words we are going to focus on for affiliate presales content and which ones will be for regular content posts.

Note: We did not have time to actually fully follow this strategy with the GamerzReviewz blog, however we feel that it is extremely important to include in this eBook because it is important for creating effective content.

Filter Out the Good Words Step 1: Open AffiliateElite and select “Analyze AdWords Competition” and click “OK”

Step 2: Select the campaign from the drop down menu that you want to get the keywords from.

Step 3: Click the “Report” tab.

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com Step 4: In the “Report” section, right click in the table and select the “Expand All”

Step 5: Click the “TD Ratio” twice to sort from highest to lowest of percentage found.

Step 6: Click the “Export” button and then save as an Excel CSV file.

Step 7: The export CSV now needs to be edited to see the best keywords. To do this delete all the columns except “Keywords”, “Total Days Found” and “Total Days Found (%)”

Step 8: Now highlight the three columns and click in the menu “Data” –> “Sort” and then sort by “Total Days Found” and “Total Days Found (%)”

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Step 9: Now you can delete all the keywords that were not found at least 85% of the time. Now copy those keywords and save them in a notepad file (.txt)

You now have a list of keywords that you know have a very good chance of being profitable because they are keywords that advertisers have consistently been spending money on. The challenge now is to figure out which of these words are good from an organic search engine stand point.

This is where we use the Traffic Estimator tool from your Google AdWords account.

Finding the Organic Treasures Step 1: Log into your AdWords account, go to the “tools” section and then “Traffic Estimator”

Step 2: Enter the keywords from the .txt file you created from AffiliateElite and (1) enter them into the top box 1, (2) Enter a Max CPC of 100 and (3) select “all countries and territories” and add. Now click on “Continue”

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Step 3: Google will now give you details of each of the keywords. It is important to remember that this data is related to Google AdWords and that means that the traffic estimates are lower then what you might expect from organic search engine listings.

Now you are going to click on the link “Estimated Clicks / Day” and this will sort the data from highest traffic to lowest.

Step 4: Next you are going to start searching for the best words to use for content on your blog. Do NOT use single word phrases; you will have better chances with larger phrases such as three word phrases because these tend to have lower competition. Start at the top of your list and work your way down and what you are going to do is take the keyword phrase and enter it into Google search using the allintitle search command…

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You are going to want to find the keywords that have decent traffic and low competition and as a general rule if the allintitle results are…

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Less than 10 000 results = OK

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Less than 5000 results = Good

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Less than 1000 results = Great

Organizing Your Keyword in Order of Priority With your list of keywords, you now want to figure out which ones are going to be designated to your presales pages and which ones will be best for regular post content.

For your presales content you want to select the words that…

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Have the best traffic potential: Your presales pages will be linked to from every page on your blog and therefore will be easier to rank for in the search engines. These are the pages you want to focus high traffic potential to.

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Are directly related to the product or service you are promoting: Do not select a keyword just based on traffic, the word also needs to relate directly to the product or service. For example if your best keyword is “Red Race Cars” and if the product or service is about “Blue Race Cars”, that might confuse the visitor.

Note: You need to balance this with competition as well. For example if you have a word that has a traffic potential of 100 visitors a day and a competition of 8000 versus one that gets 90 visitors and has a competition of 3000… we would take the little bit less traffic phrase since it will be easier to rank for.

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Long Term Maintenance In the beginning of this eBook we talked about the 80/20 rule and Long Term Maintenance is truly one of the strategies that falls into the 20%. Over and over again we see people who spend lots or time and resources into building a blog, promoting it and then just walking away from it. Then these same people complain a few months later because their blog has gone nowhere. The other trap people fall into is they try to follow some long term maintenance but they do it wrong and spend countless hours turning their wheels but never going anywhere.

Long term maintenance is not just about making sure you continue to add content and do promotions, it is about testing and tracking the results, making sure you are creating the “right” content and doing the “right” promotions.

Promotion Plan When promoting your blog, the best way to ensure that you cover the important areas first, is by drawing out a plan of attack. The easiest way to do this is by first focusing on the pages that are most important to you such as your link bait, index and affiliate pre sales pages. An example of a plan might be…

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Link Bait

•

Index

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Presales & Index

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Deep Link & Index

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Link Bait & Index

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com How this would be laid out is that each time we do a promotional push on the blog we would have a specific focus. The first batch (as already talked about in this training) is to focus on the link bait page. Once the link bait page is promoted, then we would do a focused promotion on just the index page. An important point to remember here is that for the first 30 days we ONLY use one variation of the keyword phrase we are targeting for that page. So with the GamerzReviewz blog the term “Video Game Reviews” was the main term and that was the only keyword anchor text variation we used for the first 30 days of promoting that page. After 30 days we would then start to rotate in other variations of that term but NOT until after the 30 days. This is important to ensure that Google gets a clear picture as to what that page is about.

You will need to make sure that after 30 days, you do start to use variations or else it can actually start to work against you. The reason is Google will start to get suspicious if after 2 months and out of 1000’s of links, there is only 1 keyword phrase being used for the anchor text… this will start to smell of spam.

After the index page was promoted we would then turn our focus to a presales affiliate page (post promoting an affiliate product) plus the index page. You want to ensure you keep close to a 40% to 60% split with links going to the index page.

Once the presales page was promoted we would then look at our analytics and look for a term that is sending decent traffic to our blog and we would try to find those terms that we are on page 2 or 3 for in Google. If on page 2 or 3, Google is sending us some traffic then it only stands to reason that if we could improve our rankings for that term to page 1, we would get excellent traffic. To do this we simply check out what terms are sending us traffic; then look in the Google results as to where we are appearing and what page it is pointing to. Then we would focus that batch of promotions on promoting with that specific keyword to get that result onto page 1.

Then the next batch might be focused on another link bait page we have. We recommend you create a

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Building a Business NOT a Blog by JohnCow.com new link bait page every 3 or 4 months to keep a solid viral link building strategy going.

We recommend that you lay out a 3 month promotion strategy for your site.

Watching and Writing Similar to your promotion strategy you want to also have a content strategy in place. You do not want to just recycle keywords you are currently using and you also do not want to just rely on keyword tools. Your blog combined with analytics is now an extremely powerful keyword research tool and you really need to use it.

A great strategy is to once a month look back at the previous month’s stats and look at what keywords have been used to find your site and what pages are they pointing to. Often times some pretty good keywords will be sending traffic to posts that are not really targeted to that topic. These are perfect keywords to use to create new content for your blog and by focusing the content on those specific phrases you stand a better chance of getting even better rankings for those terms.

Another strategy is a variation on the previous one and instead of creating new content; you instead tweak the old content. So if you are ranking pretty good for a high traffic term but the focus on the content was actually a different but related term that gets less traffic… then you need to weight your options. You need to decide if you want to create a new post that targets your higher traffic term or do you modify the current content to better focus on the better term and then create a new post focused on the lesser term?

This is an area where you really want to brainstorm some different ideas as to how you can use the data provided by your analytics to really boast your traffic and you want to schedule time to focus on this strategy at least once a month.

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Promote those Promotions We already talked about this strategy but it is so vital that we feel it is important to talk about again. With your analytics you now also have information on where traffic to your site is coming from. By watching this you can then look to see for ways to help increase the referrals these sites are sending you. So for example if you noticed that you are getting traffic from a link on site www.abc.com, you can then check the site out and see what it is about. You can then do some promotion for that page and send more traffic to that page, which would mean even more traffic for you.

Another strategy is to watch your targeted Google results and check out the competition. If you are ranked for a term, look at the other results and see how you can use them. Occasionally you will find one of the results might be someone talking about your site or just linking to you… in which case you can promote their page and help them to send you more traffic. Some may be a blog that you can leave a comment on and so leave a very informative comment on their blog. Make sure to look at each specific instance and really think about ways you can use it to your advantage.

Thanks for following along and we hope that you have found this eBook to be helpful for you. Please remember to check back with http://www.johncow.com for even more tips to help you “Make Money Online”

~The End

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Recommended Resources

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Affiliate Elite – http://www.johncow.com/affiliateelite

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Aweber – http://www.johncow.com/aweber

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ClickBank - http://www.johncow.com/clickbank

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Feedburner – http://www.feedburner.com

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Free Broken Link Checker - http://validator.w3.org/checklink

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GoDaddy - http://www.johncow.com/godaddy

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Google AdWords Tools – http://www.johncow.com/adwords

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Google Webmaster Tools - http://www.google.com/webmasters/

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OIO Publisher – http://www.johncow.com/oiopublisher

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PR Web - http://www.johncow.com/prweb

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Recommended Hosting - http://www.johncow.com/bluehost

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Traffic Travis – http://www.johncow.com/traffictravis

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TrafficKahuna - http://www.johncow.com/traffickahuna

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WordPress – http://www.wordpress.com

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Special Thanks We would like to take a moment and thank Garry Conn over at http://www.GarryConn.com for providing the spark that initiated the COWpetition. We would most of all like to thank our loyal readers who were a huge help by providing encouragement and feedback PLUS are the main reason this was created. Without the readers http://www.JohnCow.com would be nothing and this eBook would never have been!

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