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CD 1 - The Foundation

Page 2

CD 2 - Market Discovery

Page 5

CD 3 - Keyword Science

Page 41

CD 4 - SEO Dynamics

Page 70

CD 5 - Content Factory

Page 105

CD 6 - Video Marketing

Page 135

CD 7 - Social Strategy

Page 177

CD 8 - AdWords Mastery

Page 236

CD 9 - Advertising Methods

Page 258

CD 10 - Widgets & Software

Page 280

CD 11 - Affiliate Army

Page 317

CD 12 - The Master Plan

Page 370

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CD 1: The Foundation Core Principles John Reese: This entire course is structured around some very valuable core principles, and once you really understand these principles, where they come from as well as how to apply them, not only can you tap into them to generate a lot of traffic, but it goes way beyond that. You can apply them to your marketing to grow your sales, reach more customers, grow your distribution channels and just so much more.

The first principle is competitive research. It's no surprise that most people realize the internet is now the greatest research tool that's ever been invented. We can use it to look at any marketer industry and find out who's selling what, how much they're selling things for, how they're selling things as far as what marketing strategy they use, how much traffic a site gets, where the traffic comes from, who they're partnering with, so on and so forth. It's incredibly valuable.

The next principle is a concept called piggybacking. You've probably heard the old phrase, "Don't reinvent the wheel." Well, that's one of the most valuable concepts in strategies when it comes to having success with your online marketing. We can use competitive research to simply find other people that have put in the hard work, have spent money, and have put in effort to figure out what works and what doesn't. So we're just going to shortcut our way to success and find out what's already working and then just do it too; it's incredibly powerful.

The 80/20 rule - you probably realize what the 80/20 rule is. It essential says in any circumstance, 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts and vice versa.

Twenty percent (20%) of your results will come from the other 80%. When it comes to traffic generation, this is an incredibly true principle; actually, it probably more like 99 to 1. There are thousands upon thousands of ways to generate traffic to a Web site on the internet, but the fact is that there are only a few solid strategies that will generate most of the traffic.

So that's what we're going to go over in this course, scientifically proven strategies that generate a lot of valuable targeted traffic that you can turn into sales for your business.

We're not going to waste our time focusing on these little teeny tiny strategies that will bring in a trickle of traffic. It's just not worth your time if you value your time at more than $0.25 an hour because there's no such thing, really, as free traffic. Any free traffic strategy at least takes someone's time to take advantage of it, and your time is worth money. So one of the principles you're going to see applied throughout this course is the 80/20 rule, and it's a recurrent theme that's incredibly powerful if you know how to take advantage of it.

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The next principle is very simple. Our strategy for you to grow your traffic and your sales is to try and to put into motion several different proven methods that others are proving to work, and then when we get any results at all, when we start seeing any traffic come in at all from different areas that we analyze, the fastest growth to more traffic is to simply improve that area that's working. It's a thousand times easier to generate more traffic by taking something that's already working a little bit to bring in traffic and to improve it rather than try to put a ton of effort into something that's yet to bring in any traffic at all. It sounds easy, but you'd be surprised how many people do it the other way around. They spend so much time trying to bring in a lot of traffic through these different strategies where it's literally all or nothing. They put in a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort and it's either going to bring into them 10,000 new visitors or 0. Well, there's a much easier and faster way to bring in profitable traffic, and I'm going to teach you how to do that.

If you want more traffic, you have to own more of the internet. It's no surprise that the majority of sites in the world that get the most traffic have something in common and that is that they have more pages out there on the internet. In other words, they own a greater percentage of the internet. Since the internet is made up of individual publishers and Web site owners, right now you own a percentage of the internet that's equal to how many pages you have out there on the internet. So it's common sense that indicates that if you want more traffic and if you want a bigger piece of the pie of the internet, you have to have more content pages, you have to own more of the internet. And we're going to go into great detail about this concept and the strategy in this course when we get to the content factory section and in some of the other sections.

Last but not least, a core principle that you really need to keep in mind is to focus on building assets. Anything you do on a regular basis with your marketing, especially when it comes to generating more and more traffic, is that you want to be growing assets, your content. On a week-to-week basis, you want to have more content than you had last week or last month. Ideally, you want to create more products, you want to grow the subscriber numbers to e-mail lists. You want to broaden distribution channels, whether that's with more face book friends or more followers on Twitter or any number of other things you're going to learn in this course. Your test data, when you do try things and you get data as far as what the results were, that's incredibly valuable. You can use that asset to then go from there such as to improve on what's working or to stop doing what's not working, so on and so forth.

And then last but not least, relationships. As you learn throughout this course and you're building relationships with others in your market, other content creators, other freelancers that you can outsource work to, others that can become affiliates or distribution partners, that's an asset. As every week goes by, when you grow any asset at all, you're better off than you were before you reach that new level. And what you'll find is over time as you Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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do all of these things, your traffic grows, your business grows, and you simply just make more money on an ongoing basis when all of these things fall into place.

So these are some core principles I want you to keep in mind, and as you're already thinking, most likely, there are a lot of different ways that you can apply these principles outside of just traffic generation, but they're very, very important and incredibly valuable for you to understand and stay focused on.

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CD 2: Market Discovery Lesson 1: Overview This CD and the concepts that you're going to learn here are very, very important. This is where it all starts, understanding your market, understanding who your customers really are, how to get to your customers, who your competition is, and what's currently just going on on the internet related to your market. So this is all about discovering all the nuances and details about your market that's going to make it possible to drive traffic to your site and then, of course, to grow your business. So there are three core questions we have to answer here: Who is your target customer, where did they go online and then who is your competition?

The who is your target customer question is really about who are they. Are they male?

Are they female? Do they make a certain amount of money? Do they make a lot of money? Do they make over a $100,000.00? Are they located only in Brazil or are they located only in the United States? Do they only speak Japanese? Do they only use a PC computer? And so on and so for. So there's a lot to do with a customer and the demographics that describe that customer, and we're going to get into that in a moment.

But this is the first thing that you need to answer, and you need to answer it as detailed as you can, and that is figuring out who is your target customer. The reason is the more you can discover who your target customer is and all the details about them, it'll be much easier to reach them, and you'll also be able to save money by learning to exclude certain factors that don't have anything to do with them. And I’m going to get more into that in a moment.

And then, of course, where do they go on line? Your target customers are out there on the internet right now, but where are they hanging out? What sites do they go to and where do they spend their time? If you want to divert those people to your site, you're going to have to go and get in front of them and that starts with figuring out where they are.

Now, as far as who's your competition, this is Business 101. It's the same thing on the internet, if you want to succeed in the space, you have to understand who your online competitors are in your market. And, of course, a lot of your offline competitors will soon be coming online; it's only a matter of time if they're not online already, so it's good to know who your offline competition is as well, even if you don't see them online. But for the sake of this course, we're going to focus on who's online right now and what can you find out about those competitors.

So let's start with who is your target customer? All of these questions, by the way, are things that you need to answer. These are action exercises that you're going to need to answer. So who is your target customer? You need to figure out the general

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demographics of your target customer. How much money do you think they make? Do you only sell things to males or females or both? Do most of your customers fall in a certain age range? Now, depending on your business, depending on your market, you may cover a wide range of demographics. In other words, you may sell to people with all different income levels, you may sell to people with different ages, all different age groups, but try to figure out as best you can if there's anything specific about your target customer.

Do your customers have a specific location? Are they all only located in a certain city or is it the entire world? In many cases, it's not just the entire planet, it will be kind of a specific area, whether it's by English speaking only or whether it's North America or whether it's Europe or whether it's certain parts of Asia, you need to figure this out.

What do they want? This is a very important question to understand and figure out how to answer. What is it that your target customer truly wants and desires? However they are involved with your market, it has to do with hopefully them acquiring products and services that will change their lives for the better. So how will their life be better or different if they buy what you had to sell in this market? And what will those things that they buy from you actually do to their lives, how would their lives change? So figure that out, what do they really want and then how are they using your products and services as some kind of a solution maybe to a problem they have or just to change their life or to better their circumstances.

And, of course, that leads into that exact question, what are their key problems? You need to understand what your target customers' key problems are. It's not always about a problem, sometimes it's just a luxury item or there's certain markets where it's just about people just wanting a certain thing for status or something else. It doesn't necessarily mean all products and services are purchased to solve problems, but many of them are.

So you need to examine that about your own business. Do you currently sell products and services that are solutions of some sort? So if you're selling some special neck brace to ease, you know, someone that kind of twisted their neck or has some neck pain, well you're providing a solution that alleviates pain to someone that has a neck problem. If you sell a book or a training course or some kind of information on how to cure back pain then you're providing a solution to those with back pain, so on and so forth. So there are all different types of examples that you could use to illustrate this - that I could be using, I should say, to illustrate this, but you should get the point. So figure that out, what key problems do your customers have and, of course, how can you solve those problems with what it is that you sell?

What do your customers currently buy? And I don't mean on a general level like they all buy toothpaste and toothbrushes because they have teeth and they're humans, they need to brush their teeth, I mean specific to your market. In this course, we're going to be using a recurring general example I've already mentioned about if we had an online store 6

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selling gardening tools, how would we go about marketing it online? And that's going to be a recurring example that I'm going to use throughout all these exercises and throughout this course.

So in our example, let's say we have a store that sells gardening tools. Now, let's say we only sell gardening tools, nothing else, so what else do our target customers buy? Well, they may buy seed and fertilizer, they may buy courses in information in other products teaching them how to be better gardeners, so on and so forth. So it's important to examine what else do our customers buy, even if it's not something they buy from us.

And by the way, in doing all this research, in doing all this analysis, you can find new opportunities for you to expand your business. For example, with our gardening tool store, we may find that a lot of our customers are buying a lot of seed and it's just natural that we add that to our stores and start selling certain types of seed as well, or information products such as how to videos and some other things related to gardening to expand our business. Now, there may be strategic reasons not to do that, but the opportunity and the options are definitely there to at least consider and think about as we learn more and more about our market and learn more about our competitors and what they're currently successfully doing.

And last but not least, when we're trying to figure out who our target customer really is, we need to figure out what can we exclude about them. In other words, what do we know that doesn't apply to them? Do we know that they don't speak Spanish? Do we know that they don't rent an apartment with their gardeners, it's home gardening only, it's only people that are building gardens in their back yard? Are most of our customers living up north where they deal with snow and so we know that they're not someone that doesn’t deal with snow? These are just vague examples, but the more you can figure out about your customer that can be excluded, the easier it will be to advertise to them. When we get into talking about Google AdWords, we can use these exclusions to actually narrow down our focus to save us a lot of money and to increase our sales conversions at the same time; it's very, very powerful. So I want you to start thinking about things that you know for sure about your customer that you can exclude about the information and demographics that makes up your customer.

And then where do they go online? I mentioned this, where do they hang out online, how do we get to them, where are they online? We're not just going to set up a site and just create out of thin air a bunch of traffic for our particular target market. Our target market, your target market is probably already online in many, many places all over the internet, so we need to figure that out. Where did they go? Where are they? Where do they spend their time? And I don't mean just general sites like, you know, using Yahoo mail or reading CNN.com for news, I mean, where do they go online related to your market?

Because if we want to generate that traffic to our site which is targeted towards this

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person then we need to go where they already are and then try to divert them to our site.

That's much easier than trying just to create this traffic and this audience out of thin air.

So you have to answer the question, again these are all action-item exercises that you're going to need to do for your business, do they have online communities in your market?

Are there discussion forums? Are there social communities? What kind of stuff exists for your market where people can congregate and talk about the different things that make up your market. For our gardening example, are there forums and communities out there where people can talk about gardening? Yes, there are, there several, and I'm actually going to show you in this CD how you can find these communities and then how you can take it from there. But that's the question you have to answer, do they have online communities? Because that's where people usually hang out and spend a lot of time talking to like-minded people that are either in the same hobby or facing the same problem that they're trying to solve, so on and so forth.

What blogs do they regularly read? You're going to start seeing there are a lot of common correlations between research I'm going to have you do and then planning and structuring to actually set up your own content production and then search engine optimization. All these other things in communication, they're all going to come together and it's all going to be revolving around a lot of these things that you're going to start seeing in these early stages that you're going to be researching. For example, what blogs do they regularly read?

If you're going to set up a blog and if you're going to be successful generating traffic with that blog, the best way to do it is just like we talked about in the first CD, the foundation.

Piggybacking on other people's success, what other people have already worked hard, spent money on, spent hours of time on, to figure out that works is a much easier shortcut and way to generate traffic, sales and to have success than reinventing the wheel. Much of what you're going to discover in this traffic secrets course is not having you just become a guinea-pig and trying these things that no one's ever tried before. It's exactly the opposite. We're going to shortcut things and just go right to where people are already generating traffic, right to what kind of content people are already creating that's getting traffic and links and all the other benefits that come with that, and going right to other ways that people are marketing online the products and services that you sell so you can simply just do it also. And I don't mean cloning what people are doing or just, you know, copycatting exactly what people are doing or even plagiarizing their content, but using what they're doing successfully and figuring out what's working successfully to then take that and model against it or even differentiate a little bit and actually even make it better is what I recommend, and then you can also generate a lot of traffic like they do and a lot of sales like they do and have success like many of your competitors are having, and that's what this is all about. So in this discovery phase, we're looking and finding things that we're eventually going to be doing in your business, but creating shortcuts to success by finding what's already there in your market and then how you can just do it too.

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So what blogs do they regularly read? Where does your target customer hang out as far as visiting blogs or are there any? Sometimes there aren't any. But what kind of blogs do they read and what are those blogs? You want to create a master list of all the great blogs you can find in your niche that's really going to help you when you get into kind of posting on your own blog as well as participating on other blogs. And we're going to talk more about that, of course, in this course. And I'm going to show you some tools that can help you find blogs so you can answer these questions. All these questions, actually, I'm going to show you how to answer them in a moment.

What articles interest your target market? For a gardening example, are there gardening articles that are out there currently that are an interest to our market? So if we're thinking about creating articles, let's say, to generate traffic and to get out there published on other article directories and to have other people publish them on their own sites to generate traffic for us, what articles, what's in the article or what types of articles do we think our target market, our target customer would be interested in reading and learning about? I'm going to show you how you can figure this out. So, again, a big part of this course isn't about just kind of making stuff up or trying to answer some of these harder questions our own or just guessing, it's all about going and finding out what's already proven or at least appearing to be proven and then starting from there, which is a major, major shortcut.

What videos do they watch? And again, I'm not talking about in a general sense. I'm not talking about do they watch The Office or Lost or, you know, certain movie clips or Saturday Night Live skits, you know, and YouTube or anything. What videos do your target customers watch that's related to your market, and I'm going to show you how we can look and try to figure that out because, again, if you're going to create videos, and we're going to talk all about video marketing in this course, if you're going to be creating video content to try to get free traffic and generate new customers and make a bunch of sales, don't you want to know what other people are already using to be successful in generating traffic and sales in your market? Of course you do. So we need to answer that question, what videos, if any, sometimes there aren't any, but if there are some, what are our target customers already watching and what are the elements of those videos that we should pay attention to?

What e-mail newsletters do our target customers read? Who are they subscribed to?

What kind of information are they receiving? Why are they on those newsletter lists?

Why do they get that information? What types of information is being sent to them in those lists? Again, all of these things come down to the correlation that your target customers are choosing to do these things because they like it or there's some benefit to it.

So if you're finding that your target customers are having discussions on certain communities, certain forums or certain subsets of communities within social networks and we're going to get more into talking about the communities. I'm going to show you some stuff when we get into social strategy later on in this course on another CD when Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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we actually talk about social networking. But on just kind of a Web-based level, so to speak, just discussion forums and like Google groups and some other discussion areas, we need to figure out one, if they're there, and then two, why they're there. Because all this content that's going to get published in all these different places tells you what your market wants, tells you this is what you should be publishing, tells you this is what's currently creating traffic for others, and if we do similar types of writing and publication, we can also expect similar traffic, it's just that simple.

Last but not least, one of the most important questions that you need to answer in your business and constantly be revisiting these questions as well, especially this one, is who is your competition? Who is your competition? It's very, very important. Who are the major players in your market? You may not know who they are or you may only know one or two, but who are the major players? Who are all of them? You know, who are the top 10 most successful businesses in your niche, especially online? Who are they? Who are the major players? So that's a question you need to answer and I'm going to help you answer that on this CD. What do they sell and how? What products and services are they selling to your market and how are they going about it? What's their marketing like? Do they have video demos on their Web site? Do they have, you know, just some basic onepage sales letter types of Web sites? Are they using a catalog type Web site? What kind of follow-up process do they use? Do they try to get people to opt into an e-mail list?

Are they encouraging people to, you know, subscribe to an RSS feed for their blog? What are they all about? How does their little marketing machine online work? How are they successfully selling their products and services to the market that you're in? These are things that you need to investigate, and I'm going to teach you how you to do these things, but these are very, very important questions to answer because if you can answer these questions and know how others are successfully selling, not just trying to sell, but successfully selling products and services in your market, then you can do it to and improve on that and then sell even more.

Who's buying AdWords ads? When you type in keywords in Google, and of course on the next CD, we're going to go into keyword science and into all kinds of keyword stuff, but when you type certain words and phrases in Google, who are the ads that come up in your market for the sponsored ads and sponsored links? Who are those companies and, of course, what do they sell? What do the ads say? Where does it go when you click on the ad and how are they trying to sell to people in your market? This is very, very important for you to keep track of and constantly be observing because this can lead you to new opportunities that you may not have even known about, as well as new methods, new products and services to sell to grow your own business.

And, of course, who has the top rankings? After you learn your keywords and you learn to do proper keyword research that we're going to go over on the next CD and you do kind of your due diligence and you look into your market, into your competition, who ranks like in the top 10 or top 20 for your main keywords? And then, of course, you can 10

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reverse engineer those and figure out why they rank. So if you want to get there, if you want to get anywhere, you find out who's there now, how did they get there, and that's how you formulate a plan to get there as well or even to best them, so to speak, and then to kind of overtake their rankings.

And then who links to your competition? As you're going to learn throughout this course for search engine optimization and just natural traffic linking is very important, that's the way the internet works. People link to good content, they share links, it's just that's the currency of the Web is linking. So who links to your competition? We'll show you how you can figure out who all is linking to different pages and different sites of your competitors, and you can kind of figure out why they linked. If it's a good piece of content that a lot of people link to, analyze that content. What's so great about it? What does it teach? What is the structure of it? What are the secrets of it that I can figure out to why so many people link to it and naturally shared it with others? Because, again, if you can answer that then you already have a head start for you creating your own content in a similar way where you can hopefully expect to get the same reaction, a lot of people linking to it that will send you natural traffic, as well as helping your search engine rankings.

So these are questions that we need to answer in order for you to fully understand your market, who's your target customer, where do they hang out online, and who's your competition. And that's what this CD's all about, helping you answer these critical action steps that you're going to need to answer in order to do an effective job of driving a lot of traffic, as well as making a lot of money online in your specific market.

CD 2 - Lesson 2: Forum Discovery So our first step is just to do some simple searches with Google and see if there are any existing online communities in our market, so we can find out where some of our target customers are just hanging out or spending a lot of their time, as well as talking about things that are related to our market, products and services, new problems, new wants and desires, so on and so forth. In fact, discussion forums and communities where your target customers hang out online and talk about issues related to your market could be some of the best research data that you'll find on the entire internet, it's extremely valuable.

It can help you tweak your marketing so you can do a better job at selling to those people, it can help you come up with product ideas to fulfill or solve a certain problem that they have that maybe no one else is currently solving in the market, or you can also find out about certain products and services that your market is raving about, that they're fans of, you know, certain companies and certain things that those companies do that these people are really, really pleased with, and then they can give you great ideas to improve or tweak your own marketing or the way that you handle customer support or anything else. So

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there's a gold mine of data to be found in discussion forums and by looking at just the conversations that your market is having with other people that are interested in the same types of things related to your market.

So we're here at Google and we're just going to do some simple searches. So the first thing we just kind of want to look for is to see if there are any discussion forums related to our market. So using our gardening example, I'll just do a simple search for - and by the way, I could do a search for gardening forums. In fact, let me do that search first to show you something. So I'll type "Gardening Forum," you could also type "Gardening Discussion Forum," or "Gardening Message Board," those are some just variations of what they call online forums, but I'm going to type in "Gardening Forum" and I’m going to do a Google search. Let's see, up comes "GardenWeb - The Internet's Garden Community," that's probably a really good site for us to go and find some of our target customers and to see what they're talking about and just to kind of get the pulse of the market. "Helpful Gardener Garden Forum," "Garden Forums," "Organic Gardening," as you can see, there are just tons of them, and this is just on the first page. So imagine if we click to the second page of results, there's just more forums and more forums. Now, most markets are like this. Most markets where it's any kind of subject matter that people are passionate about or really interested in or just involved with, they're finding places on line to talk to others that are also interested in the same topic or have the same type of problems, so on and so forth. So forums are usually all over the internet for most markets.

Depending on your niche, you may find a market where there are no discussion forums, where it's something that people aren't really talking about, and that's okay. It doesn't mean that your marketing is going to fail, it doesn't mean that you can't be successful with this course, it just means that you'll be missing that little piece. But for most markets, you're going to find these communities and these discussion forms where your market's hanging out.

As I briefly discussed in the Foundation CD, in the case that you can't find discussion forums or you can't find kind of, you know, many answers to some of these questions that you're going to be doing with some of these exercises that I'm giving you, these action steps, oftentimes it's necessary to broaden your market. You know, with gardening, I kind of briefly talked about before, that gardening is actually a subset of a larger market, which would be kind of home improvement or things related to people that own homes because typically gardens are done by people that own their own home. So if I couldn't find any garden forums then my next searches would be kind of the next step up the ladder, I'd search for kind of home improvement forums and I'd probably find that somewhere within that community there's a subset talking about gardening.

So if you come to do these searches for your market and you don't find communities right away or you're just not finding much, try to go up the ladder, so to speak, into whatever 12

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your market is the subset of. Almost every market is a subset of a bigger market, and you could just move your way up the chain until you find communities related to that larger market and then try to find out if there's a subset for your specific market and if it's big enough and there's enough activity there or value for you to get out of it for you then to go get involved with or use for research data. So you can start by just using kind of the main topic name, like for our gardening tool store, it's just Gardening, so you can take your topic name and then add forum to it like we've done here and just do a Google search and find some good results. So, as you can see, we found a whole bunch of gardening forums and we'd want to make a list of all these.

When it comes to doing proper market discovery and constantly keeping up the - see, one of the things you're going to learn - let me sidebar here real quick. One of the things you're going to learn in this course is that to produce good content, to be actively involved with marketing your business on the internet, to grow your traffic, grow your sales and grow your business, you're going to have a research department. We're really going to get into this when we get into the Content Factory CD, when we really talk about creating content and putting things out there that are driving people to our site and hopefully getting people to share our stuff, which snowballs and drives even more people and then just grows and grows and grows. But we're going to have a research department, that's where it all starts, ideas and concepts and things that we just have in mind that either competitors are doing, we're keeping track of competitors, we keep track of what people are talking about in our market, we keep track of the latest product news and what other companies are doing in our market, so on and so forth, and then we'll fine tune and take things from that research and from those ideas to formulate them into concepts that we should create content around, so on and so forth, and all of that will be evolved and kind of take shape according to what other people are successfully doing with content, and it touches on what I've already talked about. We're going to take the shortcuts to find what's already working in our market, in your market, and then we're going to go from there to either do it just like it so we can kind of get the same results or to even differentiate and do it better and hopefully get better results.

But this example of finding these forums, you want to keep basically a long list of all the forums that you can find. Now, certainly, some of these forums may only have five or six people talking about things, and just like we talked on the foundation CD, the 80/20 rule applies here. You know, there may be thousands and thousands of these forums, but maybe only 20 of them really get much use, and so you can kind of ignore all the others.

On the internet, like I talked about when we went over the foundation and really touched on that 80/20 rule concept, there are so many ways out there to drive traffic, so many methods and tricks and little secrets people have figured out and little sites to get links on and places to advertise and, of course, places to reach your target market, but you have to keep that 80/20 rule in mind. You can spend hours and hours and hours and hours of your time messing with all these little sites, or if you spent 1% of that time sometimes on a larger site, like let's say in this example on one of the largest forums in your market, and Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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you could yield 10 to 20 times the results of what you get out of spending all your time on all those little ones. So make sure you keep that in mind.

But you want to build a list of as many garden forums as you can find, and you'll want to go and kind of visit them and see which ones are busy and how many users they have and then take it from there. For example, this garden web, it's the No. 1 listing for gardening forum, I bet it's a really solid community that a lot of people use because a lot of people are linking to it. So I'm just going to jump over to their site real quick. We can see right here this forums link, this "Garden Forums." Ironically, notice how they have a subset of forums called "Home Forums," which is just that example I used. I had no idea, I've never been to this site, I never - I didn't, of course, know they had this, but just like I had said how gardening is a subset of kind of home-related stuff, home improvement, here it kind of proves my point because they have their forums kind of separated into these things because this is a home and garden type of a site. But if we click on "Garden Forums," it'll take us into their forum or their forum area, and so this tells us the subject areas for this site. Great site. I mean, look, you can look by topic and you can look by name of plant and garden. I mean, who knew there's so much gardening, look at all this.

Well right away, if I had never done any marketing at all in the gardening niche and I'm trying to get us traffic for our gardening tools online store that we're talking about as my example that I'm going to use throughout the course, look at all this phenomenal information that I can find just on this one site. Here are some great keywords already, so I want to copy and paste all these topics. These can make for great keywords when we get into the keyword science, the keyword research on the next CD that's really going to kind of give you the tools that you need specifically to generate traffic from content, the keywords that you use are really going to come into that, following trends and some other things that we're going to get into. But look at this. This is phenomenal data, again piggybacking. This company, for example, has done all the hard work for us. And I imagine this was a lot of trial and error, they had people suggest new types of, you know, new topics and new categories because I image when they first started their site, this site's probably 10 years old, they didn't have all these categories. People kept suggesting them or new things happen in the market, new discoveries, new types of science, and so they created new topics for them. But again, let's not reinvent the wheel, here they've done all the work for us, and I imagine that these topics and this list cover pretty much 90% of the whole world of gardening, if not 100%. And this is why you want to come and do some research in the beginning before you start creating content or setting up pages optimized for the search engines or even advertising and setting up ads in Goggle AdWords or buying media or doing anything to drive traffic to your site.

Even if you have an existing site where you've already done keyword research, maybe you've been on line for years, you already get traffic, you already have sales, you need to revisit this market discovery process that I'm teaching you here because it's incredibly valuable. So many people are already marketing on line, they've been getting traffic for 14

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years, they've been, you know, they have a good business and they've been doing these things, but they're overlooking some of these little things that I'm pointing out right now, and it's the difference in their business kind of growing at a 10% pace each year or tripling or growing by 10 times and being able to dominate their market. So all these things I'm saying, even if you're familiar with some of 'em, just pay close attention. If you know all the stuff or if you know some of these methods then okay, that's fine, but pay close attention because one of these little things that you're not doing could make the difference in bringing in thousands of new customers and potentially millions of dollars.

So let's get back on it. So I just came to visit one site, and you'll want to visit all these different sites that you find when you're doing your research. You want to notice the things about them, what topics they list, what are people talking about, so on and so forth.

I mean, just looking at this, I have a topic list for the next hundred years to write articles about when it comes to gardening. In fact, I'd probably want to specialize and go in a smaller area of some of these topics because there are just so many of them, but you kind of get the picture here - great research data. Here are the main subject areas kind of broken down. If you were going to set up a gardening discussion forum, we're going to talk more about that when we get into some of the social strategy and some of the other things in this course, you may want to set up your own community sites. You may want to set up software that runs your own discussion forums because it's a great way to get people to be creating content for you because as they post and as they say things, those create pages that can get indexed in the search engines. It's not easy to get a forum going, to get it jump started, it's kind of a catch 22, nobody wants to go to a forum where there's no one there talking, it's like they're talking to themselves. But I'll give you a few tricks and mention a few methods that you can use to kind of jump start a forum in your market.

But you'd want to come to other forums that exist and see kind of what their main sections are and what they're talking about and that can give you a head start.

So back to what we were talking about - I didn't mean to get off track there, but that's just some valuable stuff for you. So we'd start with that search, "Gardening Forum." We come down and just go and look at all these different forms that we could find and we'd make a note of them, visit them and just keep what's called a swipe file or kind of a research file of all the information that we can find on the existing communities in our market. But there's another little trick you could use here, you could just type "List of Gardening Forums," and hopefully find someone that's compiled a list of gardening forums and have already done a lot of this research. Again, it's about piggybacking on other people's work. So many people have already done a lot of this other research, a lot of this trial and error with their marketing, and so they can just shortcut it and you can find out right away what works or what doesn't or get the information that you want.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but let's try it.

"List of Gardening Forums," so let's see if someone has actually put a list together that can either give us additional gardening forums that we may not find on our own. You Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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still want to do that other search, but let's just see. So first one, "List of Garden and Bloome compost ingredients," that doesn’t look like a list of actual forums, it just has those terms. "Viewing a List of Forums," this doesn't really look like it either.

Sometimes people call their discussion forum like "forums" plural because some forum sites have little sub-discussion areas, and so they call those "forums" plural, but it's really just one site, one discussion community. So I don't really see anyone that's compiled actually, here's one, and I was cheating because there's one back up here I want to show you as well, but here looks like a list that maybe someone's put together, so let's click this. It may or may not be; it may just be a list of the sub forms in there. So this says "Forum List, Web Garden Forum," let's see if we can get this to load and kind of see what we've got here. So this looks like it was just listing forums of their site, two topics, one reply, currently there's no members and there's one guest online, and guess who's the guest, we are. So this is a dead forum. It doesn't look like - there's no activity at all going on here, this is definitely not one that we want to pay much attention to, so that wasn't a list. So you can keep looking and maybe you'll find someone that put together a list of all the different garden forums, sometimes you won't, but it's worth checking for.

But let's back up here. Notice this Open Directory, "Gardening Forums and Online Communities." They actually have a category in the DMOZ directory, at least they do for gardening, where they list forums and online communities. So let's go there and bingo, jackpot, this is a list of community sites, message boards, forums, this is the mother load, as they say, exactly what we were looking for. And look, here's "Garden Web" that we just visited that has that No. 1 ranking. So this is probably 80/90% of the better forums in this market, and so we would want to copy this page with all these links and then go and visit them individually and see what's there and what we can learn from them.

Another place you want to look for communities, and again, we're going to talk about the social networks and their subcommunities later on in this course on the social strategy disc, but for now just for discussion forums, Google has this thing called Google Groups, and Google Groups, it's kind of a Web discussion, but it can also be an e-mail discussion where people can post to a list serve, which then sends the e-mail out to everyone that's a member of the list, and people could kind of have discussions about e-mail, so it's online and it's in e-mail. But if you go to Google Groups, you can search for - we'll just search for gardening, your topic of your market, and if there are already Google groups with people talking about your market, it'll show up here. So there are some, rec.gardens, some of these are old Usenet forums, if you're familiar with Usenet. It's basically like a global discussion forum network that the internet used to be made up of or part of the internet, and it used to be really popular.

So you can come to Google Groups and you can find links to different discussions and different kind of e-mail communities where they're discussing it through an e-mail list, some of 'em are discussing things through the Web. A lot of those e-mail discussions get posted on the Web, so you can look through archives. You can find all kinds of great 16

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information just like you can in the forums. So you'll want to search not only for forums but also you'll want to search Google Groups; it's a great piece of research data.

So that's it. Those are some quick tricks so you can find discussion forums in your market, and you could just replace those searches with, in this example, "Gardening Message Boards," "Gardening Discussions," and some other words related to forums.

You should find a bunch if you just do "Market Plus Forum," but you'll also want to do "List of Market Forums." You can also do "List of Message Boards" and then the topic, so on and so forth, but do that and you should find a bunch of forums in your market. If you don't, remember, go up a level for whatever market your little market is a subset of and work yourself up the chain until you find out where some communities are where people are at least talking somewhat about your market.

CD 2 - Lesson 3: Blog Scout Let's take a quick look at this site, this is BlogCatalog, and this is a great community site for bloggers. And why this is important for us is they have a great directory where you can find blogs. So if you come up to this top link here, you can click Directory and actually just go and navigate based on category. So if we're looking for gardening blogs let's see, it doesn't look like there is a category for gardening, let's look home and garden, not really one there either. But we could probably click this category - oh, here's a subcategory. There it is, "Gardening." So they have 126 gardening blogs in this directory. Again, some of the blogs are great, they get a lot of traffic, some of them are not. Some of them are brand new, they don't get much traffic at all, and of course, some of these are miscategorized you'll find, sometimes people just put them in the wrong area.

Here's one that's in Turkish or something here. But BlogCatalog is a great site you can just come to, look in their categories, you know, look in their directory, find related blogs when you're doing your market discovery, you're doing your research, you're looking for these other blogs. You know, you could do their blog search, let's see what that'll bring us, so we type "Gardening." It brings up a bunch of other gardening blogs or at least blogs that wrote about gardening. So it's a great site. So this is BlogCatalog and it's a good research tool for you to find blogs in your market.

Now it's time to go and look for some blogs related to our target market to see if we can find some blogs that our target customers are regularly reading or blogs that have to do with our market itself. Again, if you can't find something when you're doing these searches for your market, you may have to go up the next level, like I mentioned before, if your market is a subset of a greater topic or a greater market. And again, you may find that you have to do that and then you may find that, in this example let's say, you find some blogs related to - for a garden example, let's say, about home improvement and things. But you may find that those blogs aren't talking much about gardening, and therefore, they aren't really relevant; that's okay, it happens.

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There are millions and millions of blogs being published on the internet on a regular basis now, and blogging is really just taking off and continuing to grow, so the odds are good that you're going to find some for your market unless your market is really, really obscure, or unless your market has to do with some small B-to-B industry itself or something that's just not talked about very much. If that's the case, you really got to use your noggin and kind of do some diligent research to kind of find what blogs may be related to your market and where your markets hang on talking. It's possible that you won't find any, but I would imagine for 90% plus of target markets in the market that your business may be involved with, you will find several blogs.

This is Technorati. Technorati is basically a blog search engine aggregator type of site.

Google is also an incredible blog search engine. Google's just a great search engine period for any type of content or media. But Technorati specializes in blogs and it's easier to find stuff with Technorati related to blogs or at least it's kind of all kept together and, of course, the results aren't flooded with other unrelated things like non-blogs, I should say, and so when you do a search on Technorati, you're pretty much just finding blogs. And so if we're looking for blogs, this is where we want to start. You can also do searches in Google, for example, you can type "Gardening Blog," "Gardening Blogs," "List of Gardening Blogs," those types of things and find a bunch in Google. But let's start with Technorati when you're doing searches for blogs because Technorati is just a great blog-centric search engine.

Now, when you go to search to find blogs in your market, you've gotta be a little creative.

If I were just to search gardening in their little search box here, it's probably not the best keyword to use to find gardening blogs. It may be, but it may not be. Typically, you want to think about words or phrases, and again, a lot of this is going to make more sense to you after you go through the next CD, Keyword Science. It's kind of a chicken and egg thing here, we're doing one without the other. But once you learn the right keywords for your market and the ones that get the most searches and the ones that are the most relevant to your business and hopefully the ones that convert the best for you when you drive that traffic from them with AdWords and then eventually with search engine optimization, when you figure those things out then you'll know exactly what to come in and look for in these types of search engines. But for now, when you just first start using it and, of course, you can come back after you go through the keyword science process of that CD, but when you first come here, start thinking about things that would be included in a headline or title. In other words, if someone were publishing a blog where they're writing about articles and topics and different things going on in your market, what would be words they might include in titles?

So, for example, with gardening, I'll just think of real quick like planting roses, you know, a lot of people talk about planting roses when they talk about kind of putting together a garden and making their garden nice, a lot of people are into flowers. So if I type in, "Planting Roses," and do a search, we'll come up with any blog titles and posts where 18

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someone was talking about planting roses and then that can typically just lead us right to the related blog. And then I'll show you some little tricks where you can go from there to actually find other blogs. So here come the results, "Carefree Beauty, Shrub Roses," just talking about roses, and you want to read these because sometimes it's not very relevant stuff. But look, here's some videos about planing roses - we're going to get to the videos in just a few lessons here on this CD. And if you go in Technorati, you can find videos like that, so remember this word. I'm mainly going to show you YouTube and doing YouTube research for videos, but just remember that you can come to Technorati and find videos as well. So there's a lot of results here that are related to gardening and are gardening blogs, so we'll want to visit these and see what's going on, see what kind of activity they have, see what they're posting about.

You can come in here and you can find these blogs listed by authority rankings. So for example, if we click on this authority and it comes up and it gives us a thumbnail of the site that it came from - of course, you can hover over any of these little question marks and it'll tell you, of course, what all these little icons are. And some of the sites, these kind of Web 2.0 sites, they have so many little functions and features and voting and all this stuff, it can get a little bit confusing. So if you're ever using these and you just don't understand like this is their logo, but you could've mistaken that to actually mean something, that little kind of "O" there, but if you don't, just click on it, it'll tell you all about what it is. So it says, "What is authority?" So it talks about how they have this kind of algorithmic scoring for how they attach this authority number to blogs. It's based on the number of links, it's based on the activity in the last, I think, six months. It changes all the time. By the time you come here, it may be changed again; they're constantly tweaking this. So the lower the number, the farther it is away from what the best one is in your market or for that particular search, so the lower the number, the better. And of course, you'll find most cases, the lower the number those are the ones, the results that are kind of shown to us first.

But let's go back, you can come here on your own and dig around and look at these authority numbers and try to search by category. It's a little bit harder on here. I'm going to show you another site that makes it easier to search by category, but back to what we're doing. So we do a search, planting roses, what you must know about rose planting, looking at this one, looking at this one. "Home Garden Blog," that's a blog, so we click on that. Let's check it out real fast, if it'll load for us, and what you're going to find is on a lot of blogs they have this thing called a blog roll, which you may already know about.

And by the way, it's kind of a pain, some of these things you have to click twice to actually go to the site. So finally, boom, we're on this site.

So on many blogs, there's this thing called a blog roll where they just freely link to other blogs. This blog apparently doesn't have it. Some blogs do, some blogs don't. But what you can typically find in those blog rolls is they're freely linking to other blogs usually in their own market, and that can lead you to a lot of other blogs in your topic or whatever Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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you're searching for. One of the tricks you use with blogs is to look at the number of comments that are on a blog post, this one looks like it doesn't have any, and that can typically tell you the activity and the following, if you will, for a blog. If you find - and oops, something else I forgot to point out, let me jump back.

You'll notice right here, not all blogs have this, a lot of blogs use FeedBurner to manage their RSS feeds - we're going to talk more about RSS feeds in the course - but they use this little thing and it'll say "Readers" and it shows a number, and that's how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed who, when they use an RSS feed, RSS feed reader, excuse me, they know when - whenever a new post is published, they'll see it in the Reader and they don't actually have to come to the blog. I'll explain this to you more when we get to more about blogging. But if you look at this number, the higher the number, the more traffic they're getting, the more regular readers they have. This blog happens to have nine readers, which isn't very many at all, so they're not getting much traffic. So this probably isn't a blog we need to pay much attention to, except maybe just to notice what kind of content they're writing about to get some ideas, but it's not one we'd probably come when we get to this part of the course to where we would participate on post comments or even approach that blog owner to maybe publish some our content as a guest author.

So if we jump back to the original results from our search - I'll jump over to this one, the High Authority, which should indicate that it has more traffic because that number, as I already mentioned, is based on incoming links. So here are some posts and here are some other blogs that are linked. These aren't necessarily garden blogs, these are just other blogs that they happen to be linked on here, but right here, "Garden Resources," this is linking to some other blogs and some other pages. That's a great way to find other blogs, other sites of interest while we're doing all this research.

So there's no one in the discussion yet on this post, it just happened, so sometimes it takes time. Let's real quickly, though, let's jump back a few months and see if we can find any kind of discussion, there's one person - not a lot. So there's not a lot of activity, it seems, going on in this site. It's a really nice blog, it seems like a lot of people are linked to it, but for whatever reason, maybe just how they have it set up where it's not easy to comment, just maybe people don't know they can comment, because typically there's just a section that says, you know, "Click here for comments," or whatever else. There's a little link here, "Comment," but usually it's a little more inviting than that. So for whatever reason, this blog doesn't get a lot of activity from other readers, but it doesn't mean it doesn't get much traffic. And later on in this CD we're going to talk about how you can actually tell how much traffic it gets and how to figure that out.

But anyways, go to Technorati, do some searches related to your market, related to your keywords, poke around, find blogs - whoops, it's telling us it's not available because it went back to the search page. But anyways, put in some terms, find blogs, visit the blogs, 20

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look for the blog roll that may link to other blogs, that's how you can discover good blogs, look at that little authority ranking that can help you find which ones are getting more activity and links. And basically what you want to do when you do this blog research is you want to compile a list, this is the action step for you. You want to compile a list of blogs in your market, like a hundred of some of the most visited blogs, and when you start getting involved in your market and you start following some of these blogs and reading, the nature of the internet is for blogs to link to other blogs. When you start posting a blog, you'll want to do that. You'll want to site other great content that other blogs are talking about in your industry and, of course, it's just a natural link, it's not an affiliate link, there's no incentive there, it's just you naturally linking to some other good content that you want your blog readers to know about; that's the nature of blogging, so you want to freely link out, it's okay. Don't worry about people leaving and saying, "Oh, they're not gonna come back." You want to do that, and what you'll find is that when you link to other blogs, they'll be more apt to link back to you and send you traffic as well, and so that works out that way.

But poke around, start to find some blogs, start with Technorati, you can also do those same searches in Google, like I said. Find some blogs, start keeping an eye on them, and then also you'll find what other blogs they link to. Before you know it, you'll have your blog universe defined for your market. The most popular blogs and popular visited blogs and most active blogs - remember you can look at the comment numbers, how many people are commenting on the different posts. You know, when you see 10, 15 comments, that's a lot of activity, if you see 100 that's a real busy blog. You know, I think some of the busiest blogs in the world get about 100 to 200 comments and not much more than that. So if you find some, you know, 8 to 10, 15 comments that's a pretty active blog. So make a list of those, and before you know it, you'll define the blog universe and you'll know all the main blogs or, according to the 80/20 rules, the ones getting the most activity for your market.

CD 2 - Lesson 4: Article Examination This is a fantastic resource and a great, great site and service that we're going to talk more about in depth when we get to the Content Factory CD in this course. We talk about publishing articles to get traffic, which is a great way to get traffic and to get targeted traffic that can easily become customers because your content prequalifies them, they're interested in your content, and they can find their way to your site. So, of course, one of the steps in this market discovery, one of the questions I was asking of you that you need to solve as kind of an action step is what kind of articles are available in your market or you think your target customers are reading?

Well, this is EzineArticles, and this is one of the biggest and best, I think it's the best by far, article directories on the entire internet, and it's owned by a good friend of mine, Christopher Knight, and Christopher has been building this site for, I think, over 10 years.

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It's been a long, long time, so it's very, very developed. As you can see up there towards the top, they have over a 100,000 expert authors writing articles and submitting articles to this directory, so there's tremendous content in this directory. And you probably already know about EzineArticles if you've done any kind of internet marketing. If you haven't, come and poke around here, it's an amazing site. You can get your own articles listed for free in this directory, and you can find articles in this directory that you can use.

Now, if you don't know about it, let me give you the brief breakdown about articles.

Pretty much the way it works is all the articles, I think there are millions in this directory, any of the articles that are in this directory, you are free to use on your own site, in your own e-mail auto responders' courses, in special reports, you're free to use it all you want.

Most of the articles contain a footer, a small little area that gives credit to who the author is that wrote it, and almost in every case that little footer will contain links to their Web site, and that's why they're creating the article and giving it up free for people to use on their own sites is because they'll get credit, they'll get that established link that's in that little footer, and hopefully they'll get traffic from letting other people use their content, you know, fair trade. They put in the time and effort to create this great content, you could freely use it on your site and get value out of it, but you just have to keep the links intact to give them credit for who actually wrote the article and obviously linking to their site for people that want to go to their site.

So what you're going to learn when we get to the Content Factory CD, one part of publishing content and getting it out there on the internet, is that you can write articles or hire someone to write articles for you, and you could submit them to this directory. And other people will find them and use them on their sites. They'll add them to their blog, they'll add them to their newsletter, they'll add them to their Web pages because that's, as we talked about, content is what makes up the internet. So most people either need content for their pages and they'll write it themselves, or they need content and they're willing to just use other people's content and give them the credit and they don't mind linking out to them in exchange for using that content, like an article. So that's why articles are important. We're going to get more into that later.

So you can come to EzineArticles, and you can search for articles by topics, you can see all these different categories. And we'll kind of visit home improvement, we may find our little gardening example on under "Home and Family," sometimes you have to poke around, but let's see, you got "Landscaping." I don't really see a specific gardening category here, so rather than guess at what the next closest category is, let's just try doing a search and seeing what articles come up. Now, by me putting in "Gardening," I really need to think like we did in that Technorati example and think of words and phrases that may be in kind of an article title or in the body, gardening should be in the body in there somewhere as well as in the title, so I think that's at least a good place to start. But eventually, you put your thinking cap on and you use some other phrases related to your market like we did with planting roses. So we do a search, and these are all the different 22

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articles or areas of the site that are coming up for that search a lot, we're finding a lot of them in here. So let's click this, "Organic Gardening Secrets." "The Day Lilly is a Delicious Ornamental," so here's an article. It says the word count is 358 words, here's the article itself, and then you'll see here at the end of the article there's a link to a Web site and it's basically if you want more information, click this link and go to the site. So you're free to copy and paste this whole thing as long as you leave that link intact to give the author credit or at least that links to their Web site, and that's it.

But you'll want to come in here and poke around and look at different articles that are in this directory, in this site, that are related to your market, and just create a swipe file, copy and paste them, save them somewhere in a digital files file, you don't need to just print them all out, and just keep them as good examples of content for your market, for articles that people are writing about, so you'll know what people are writing about in relation to your market. And as I mentioned just briefly before already, as you build this research department of your marketing, so to speak, of your company where you take your ideas from to then create content to move to that production and creations stage again, all this stuff, whether you're doing it or whether you hire someone to do it, the more ideas in research you have the better. So you'll want to come in here and find as many articles as you can about your market and then just copy and paste them and store them in some kind of file or some area where you can look through them later in order to - because you'll never run out of ideas to write content. If you need to make a blog post or other articles or a special report or maybe a video series, we're going to get into all that stuff, but you'll never run out of ideas on what to create, that's what holds people back. They're like, "Oh, I don't know what I'm gonna write about. I've already written 50 articles before, I've already written 50 blog posts before, just got writer's block." Well, if you have a great research file and you have good information stored in it that you got from doing research like this, you can just flip through it to get ideas and then move them to the kind of molding production stage and then create content out of that idea of just knowing what someone else wrote about, and so on and so forth.

So come to EzineArticles, it's a great site. We're going to talk more about it when we get to actually publishing content and allowing other people to find our content and syndicate it, which is basically what using this article site will do, letting other people use it and pass around the internet, which gets us links to our site and brings us traffic and everything else that goes with that. So this is EzineArticles.

CD 2 - Lesson 5: Video Search So now let's say we want to find videos that are out there related to our market. Well, we come to the biggest video site on the internet, YouTube. Talk about the 80/20 rule, it's more like the 99.999 to .00001 rule. YouTube far and away serves more videos and has more videos than any other site on the internet. When we get to video marketing in this course, we're going to talk about some of the other sites, some of the larger of the second Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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tier sites. And, of course, you'll find links to a bunch of them in the Resources section that you could use, and we talked about distributing your videos to a bunch of different sites because it can't hurt. But ultimately, YouTube is where the traffic is at. YouTube is where the activity is at. So if there are any videos related to your market that are being published by other people in your market like your competitors, this is the place to find them.

So it's simple. We just go to YouTube, we just do a search like "Gardening" or for similar keywords, and we'll probably find a bunch of videos depending on your market. So obviously, here's a bunch of them, we're already seeing them. And, of course, on YouTube, you can look at Views and you can see how many times it's been watched. So if you just do a search and then glance down the view number, it'll show you what's been popular and what's been watched a lot. Now, there's this interesting kind of Darwinian effect, if you will, on the internet, which is referring to, you know, like the strongest will survive in nature, it's - on the internet, as I've talked about already many times before and I want to drive this point home to you, if you follow the nature of the internet, the natural behavior of the majority of the internet, it unlocks so many things about the popularity and what people are doing and so on and so forth.

For example, sure, one of these videos that has tons and tons of views could've just been someone that spent a lot of money on advertising on a Super Bowl commercial and drove them to this video, the video could totally stink, no one's really interested in it, it doesn't have good value, so on and so forth, that's very possible. But in most cases, these videos and the view numbers are an indication, not always, sometimes that's a correlation to how good that person's marketing is, but a lot of times it is a direct indicator of the interest in that subject matter or how good that video is and the value that the video provided because how a good video is has everything to do with how much it gets passed along, others refer to it on their blogs, others tell others about it, so on and so forth. So scanning down this, 27,000 views is a lot, 76,000, 131,000, although this looks like some kind of prank thing, it's not really what we're looking for, 44,000. So as you can see here, some of these have a lot, some of these have a little, YouTube kind of typically ranks their algorithm, the ones that get watched more as kind of a more relevant result, which is following exactly what I was talking about, it kind of goes with what's natural. Videos that get watched more are probably the ones that are better or have more value for that search or subject matter and Google knows this and that's another reason why the search engines are going to evolve more towards this natural behavior. You know, if someone clicks a result and they immediately bail out because that page stinks, it wasn't what they were looking for, that's a vote, so to speak, towards the fact that it wasn't relevant for what they search for and that's going to effect, I believe, in the future how things are ranked in Google and any other search engine.

So look at the views first, finds one that are related to your market - here's this one with 27,000 views, the one that comes up first, "Container Gardening." You know, I'm not 24

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going to actually let the video play, but this is a great way to do some research and find not only the videos that are getting watched and what's in them but also the comments from other people, what they think about the video, you know, if they love it, if they want to see more of this or that and, of course, you can always go under this "more about the author" who posted that video. This one's called "Recipe Cook," so apparently this isn't just about gardening, it's also about like cooking as well, but you can click this and it'll show all their videos. You can see that they're not all about gardening. In fact, most of them are not.

But you can come to YouTube and do some great research into your competitors, into other people posting videos, and again just like I said, you're going to want to post videos and you're going to learn more about that in this course. If you don't end up doing it that's okay and there are multiple ways to post videos, it doesn't have to be you on camera, and we'll talk about that when we get to video marketing. But if you were going to post videos, and video marketing is just getting huge online, it's only going to get bigger and bigger, you can - there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the video area where you can get a lot of traffic from niche markets, you know, markets that you're doing business in, if you just create some videos, even if they stink, because so many people aren't willing to create videos because it represents work and they're just not willing to do it.

But if you were going to post videos and you were interested in doing that, you'd want to come here first, see what your competitors are doing if there are any, see which ones are getting watched the most and then see the ones that are getting watched the most, what was the content? What was the video? Why are so many people watching it? And then that can give you good ideas to copy and follow suit, just like this piggybacking concept that I've been talking about the whole time. You want to write articles to get traffic, go and do research and find what articles are getting the most attention, you know, on blogs and everywhere else, where the most comments are occurring, what people are talking about, what people are naturally linking to, so on and so forth, and then just do it also but hopefully do it better.

So you can come to YouTube and you can find all kinds of videos for your market just by searching the keywords and the topics, so on and so forth. And when you find one, look at their other videos, it'll lead you to more, it could lead you to them linking to their site, which may be good competitive research for you, you may not have found that company before. And again, all this helps you define your competitive universe. Just like you'll eventually discover all the core blogs that 90% of your, or 80% of your market goes and reads, you'll find the majority of people publishing videos that most of your market is being exposed to or not exposed to and all your competitors, so and so forth. So you need to do this action exercise, come into YouTube, type in your keywords, your topics, find out if you have any competitors that are creating videos.

And again, for example, this lady looks like she's publishing some great videos and some of them, a few, relate to gardening, but this isn't really our competitor. I don't know Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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exactly what they sell; I think it's probably recipe cookbooks or videos and things. So this isn't necessarily competitor, but it is someone creating content in our market and generating traffic from our market, so they're technically a traffic competitor, so I just want to clarify that. Another company doesn't have to exactly sell what we sell or sell what you sell in your business to be a competitor. If they're doing things to generate traffic from the market that you want to generate traffic from, even if they don't sell what you sell, they're still a competitor, they're a traffic competitor, so to speak. You're competing with them to get, you know, the same eyeballs and those same visitors, but they're also someone when they're not selling the same things that you are, someone that you can partner with because you don't compete with each other and so you can share traffic. So use YouTube, find videos related to your market.

CD 2 - Lesson 6: PR Monitor This is something we haven't really talked about too much yet, and this would be press releases. This is PR Web, and they're pretty much the biggest, I think by far, by many, many times, kind of the greatest aggregator of press releases, directory of press releases, press release search engine, whatever you want to call it, on the entire internet. So if you want to keep track of your competitors and your industry and kind of what's going on, it's good to look for press releases. You'll find in many markets a lot of your competitors aren't active putting out press releases, they don’t really care too much about, you know, getting attention from the press and/or they don't know how to. So you'll still want to do a search every so often to look for press releases.

So, for example, I’m going to type in "Gardening" for our gardening example, and we may not find any. I haven't done the search yet, let's see. We're actually - we're finding quite a few. It's no surprise, the gardening market s a pretty big one, it's not too obscure, there's a lot of information in it, there's a lot of products and innovation going on in gardening from chemical processes to equipment, so a lot of bigger companies related to it. A lot of big companies compete in gardening, I mean, Home Depot, Lowes, those types of companies, that's who you're competing with to a degree, even Wal-Mart because they sell gardening products like pots and watering tools and all kinds of things. But so let's click on one of these. So this one's "Garden Sheds, Sale Now On It, Gardening Thoughts." So it's a company in the UK, looking at their URL, and this is just some kind of little press release they put out to announce their sale.

Now, what you'll find is, and you can go to their site and do research on them, and you'll want to do link research on a lot of these companies, and we're going to go over that later on in this CD of how to find who's linking to who, but when you do, a lot of times you'll find that press releases that someone put out are getting a lot of links because most companies, they not only submit their press release to PR Web and to some other press release sites, but they put it on their site itself, like under a little - you've probably seen some companies have a navigation button that just says like "Press" or, you know, for the 26

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media or "Press Releases," you know, something like that. And under that section of the Web site, they have a little index and they list any press releases that they've ever put out.

Well, sometimes you'll find when you're doing your competitive analysis and research that they'll be a lot of links pointing to a press release on someone's site, linked from blogs, linked from just articles, linked from all over the place. And so when that happens, you'll want to look long and hard at that press release and ask yourself why. Why are people naturally interested in linking to this? Why are so many people linking to this?

And, you know, it's probably about some great innovation or it's some amazing sale or something really attention getting or controversial even. And you can use that, again, as a great example of what is getting attention that you would like to get in your business that they achieved through that press release which can then give you what? Ideas for your own press release; it's just that simple.

You're going to do research and find people that are generating traffic and getting activity from certain things that they've tried and tested to figure out, and you're just going to cut right to it and find the ones that worked and then do it also or do it better. You're not going to do a bunch of things, I'm not going to have you do a bunch of things that no one else is doing that's unproven. Why? There's so much more of an immediate return for you to get traffic and sales by just following the leaders and following other people that are already having results and getting success.

Now, see, this kind of thought process that I'm teaching you and this methodology almost goes to the opposite of probably what other people have taught you where they're like, "Okay, the first thing you need to do is, you know, find out the top 10 needs of your market and do this, this, this and this and then try to do this," you know, and then you just pray and hope that a bunch of people will be attracted to those articles or content and end up on your site or, you know, or blog post. There's a much easier way and that's what I'm trying to teach you here.

People have already done the hard work for you, the internet has already spoken, so to speak, as to what they're most interested in in many of these different markets, which ones are getting the most attention, which ones are getting bloggers to link to it, which ones are getting traffic, so on and so forth, or which ones are causing the most discussion in discussion forums, so it's easy. If you just kind of touch on something similar or, again, similar but better, you can also hope to achieve maybe not the same success all the time, but you're much better off and on target to have success than if you did something that no one else did before, no one else wrote about before, and just something that was unproven. Now, this doesn't mean everything you do is only going to be creating things that other people have done before, but most of it is. Don't reinvent the wheel. Write about what people have proven to be interested in because other people wrote about it.

But just, you know, do it a different way and expand upon a subject matter or topic and do it better.

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So keep that in mind, it's a recurring theme that you keep hearing me say and hear me teach you. Do press release research like with PR web and you find some links that are coming to these press releases on other people's site when you go and do some of these link techniques and link research I'm going to teach you how to do, how to find where the links are coming from, if you want to achieve the same thing with a press release then it's got to be about something similar. And again, sometimes it does only benefit the person that's first, so you do have to keep that in mind. Just because you come out with an article or a certain controversial blog post or a certain press release that's already gotten a lot of traffic attention before doesn't always mean it's going to be an instant shortcut to success because sometimes it is a timed thing where just because someone was first, they got all the attention or most of it. But it's still a very good indicator of what you should keep in mind when you create things.

So this is PR Web, great place to search for press releases.

CD 2 - Lesson 7: Competitive Analysis Okay, I've already talked about this a little bit. This is basically just using Google, typing in your keywords and seeing who the competition is based on advertising. So if we type in "Gardening Tools," which is very specific about what we sell, here we see these, you know, it's a sponsored link, so these top three links, those are ads. These side links, these are all Google AdWords ads. People are paying for these ads to appear there and, of course, we're going to go over AdWords in depth when we get to our AdWords Mastery CD, and that's very, very important stuff for you to know. Even if you already use AdWords, you'll probably learn a lot that you didn't know. But so we can see those advertisers. We need to visit those advertisers, we need to see what they're selling, how they're selling it, we need to put together this research file on our competitors that are advertising for our keywords, and we need to keep track of them on an ongoing basis.

Who's still advertising? Who isn't?

You know, there's this great kind of little trick that's from old school direct marketing that basically says if you monitor advertising over a certain period of time, the ads that continue to run are obviously the ones that are making money, and the ones that fall out and disappear are the ones that didn't work out. So the old exercise used to be that if you take any given magazine, so we could go to a book store and get a gardening magazine, and if we were able to go to a library or order back issues and we were able to look at back issues of that magazine, let's say we start with - let's say the current month is June, let's say we go all the way back to January, six months before, and if we start in the January issue and circle all the ads, let's say, that are related to, in this case, gardening tools that we sell, for this example. So we could say, "Okay, here's a competitor doing a gardening tool ad, here's another one, here's another one, here's another one." So let's say we circle 12 competitor ads. Then we look in February and we look for the same ads that were in January and we circle them again. We do this every month. By the time you get 28

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to June, you'll see that some of them have disappeared, and the majority of times, probably 90-something percent likelihood, the ones that disappeared are the ones that didn't make money for the advertiser. Because if you run an ad and it makes money, you're just going to keep running it until it no longer makes money.

This isn't always the case, and I need to point this out, it's a very important point. There are plenty of people that play the everything in one basket kind of law of averages game with their advertising dollars, which is completely stupid and you're going to learn why that's not a very smart thing to do. But there are a lot of people when it comes to AdWords, for example, they just kind of mash all their ads and traffic together and all their keywords, and they're not doing a good enough job tracking them individually, so they don't really know what's profitable and what's actually losing money. And so you may see some of these ads, for example, some of these from this search here that may continue to run, but you gotta be careful because they may not be actually making much money, they may be losing money. But since that advertiser doesn't know AdWords well enough like you will when you finish this course, they just keep running them and losing money because they're adding all their numbers together, and based on their total ad spin, they're making money or breaking even so they keep doing it, so keep that in mind. But in the majority of cases, most marketers online, most companies that are doing business online, especially companies who either have a dedicated employee that manages their ads or - and even small businesses, people are doing it themselves, they're putting a lot of time into it. You may have already generated a lot of traffic from AdWords and so you're managing your own campaigns, you know exactly what I'm talking about, you have experience doing this, and you look for those losers and you get rid of them and you keep the winners and you keep testing and improving.

But keep an eye on the ads, you know, print them out and look over them from week-toweek, month-to-month, and see kinda what ads are coming and going for your main - this is for your main keywords, the ones that you find are the most valuable, like your top 10 keywords that will drive the most traffic volume to your site and the ones you had proven to convert that create the most sales, those are the ones you're most interested in. And if you could get all the traffic from those keywords, those would be the ones you'd want.

And, of course, we're going to get into how you test that and how you figure out which ones convert and all that. But again, 80/20 rule, that's more like 99/1 rule because you're going to find that a very, very small amount of keywords generate the majority of the results and that you could have thousands of other keywords and they won't create as many sales as your main ones. But it doesn't mean you don't take advantage of the long tail, they call it, of the smaller search volume ones because the technology makes it so easy to do those as well, but keep that in mind.

So you want to monitor like the top 10 keywords and keep an eye on the natural rankings of who's just getting these free listings, who gets this free traffic for your keywords, and are they coming and going and who's moving in and moving out? And another trick you Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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can do here, by the way, is you can - when you're searching with Google and you come up with these results, like you probably do right now, you search and you come up with these results, you're seeing, I think, eight AdWords ads on the side, you're seeing however number of - I think it's just 10 results for the results pages. Anyways, you can come under Preferences, see Preferences? And in your Preferences right here, "Number of results display," change this to 100 - you wouldn't want to do this if you had a slow connection, but the odds are good because most people do, you may have a fast connection. So change that to 100 and then save, and now when you do a search, especially for competitive research, I guess you're still - this has been different in the past, it changes sometimes, but you're still seeing only eight AdWords ads, but now look at all the results you're seeing for the organic listings. You can now see 100 per page instead of just 10. So if you were just to print this page out or save it to your desktop, you could get 100 listings in 1 shot rather than going next, next, next. So I just wanted to throw that out there real quick.

It's cool cuz it used to let you do it with AdWords where it would show more than just eight, and it was a great way to spy on the ads, but it looks like they've kind of tightened it up and you have to continue to next page, even the next 100 to see another 8. But anyways, you'll want to just come Google, look at who the AdWords advertisers are again, we're going to talk more about that when we get to the AdWords Mastery CD, and you can also figure out how much people are paying per click. And what you'll want to look into is when you see people paying like really high per click, a high click cost and you can't make it convert, you're just like, "I don't see how people are getting their money out of this." Investigate their site, what do they sell, how do they sell it, you know, how are they able to make it work when you're not? And it can give you ideas, again, to improve your marketing, to expand your business and some of the products, and compete on a higher level. But use Google to do research to find the AdWords listings, as well as the organic listings.

There are a lot of other sites that you can use to do competitive research. In the Info Products Space for Content, I'll jump over there real fast, you probably know of this site or you may have heard of it, ClickBank. You can go to ClickBank.com, you can come to their site, you can go to Promote Products, you can go to their Marketplace, and by category, you can find all of these eBooks and they also do software in here, other digital products, and you can find products being sold to your market. This is a great way to find affiliate products that you can earn commissions from, as well as to see what your competitors are doing to give you ideas to create other products.

So if you're doing gardening, for example, gardening tools, and if you come in here and do research and you find that there is a gardening eBook that sells really well and then you promote it on your site and you make some pretty good money from it and it sells pretty well, the next thought you got to have in mind is, "Maybe I should just create my own and make all the money." You know, it sounds greedy but that's just business. And 30

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so that's something you'll want to think about. I talked about it in the Foundation CD. You'll constantly be wanting to think about how you can subsidize your lead generation cost, subsidize your marketing. So if you can promote other affiliate products in this example, like an eBook, you know, related to your market and make $10.00 or $20.00 per sale, and if you find that you're getting quite a few sales from traffic that you refer and you can do it in the process of generating traffic to get people to kind of see and buy the stuff that you sell, you want to do that. But typically, you start off by promoting things as an affiliate, and if it works, especially if it's a content product or software product, then you really have to ask yourself, "What would it take for me to develop my own product where I make 100% of the sale and not just 50% or 40%. So again, it sounds greedy but it's not, it's just business, that's the nature of business. So ClickBank, you can come in there and see what people may or may not be selling for information products related to your market.

Another one is CJ.com, which is CommissionJunction.com, they're a big affiliate network where they manage affiliate programs for people. You can sign up, create an account for free with them, you can find all kinds of products. Commission Junction has a lot more kind of tangible goods or kind of, you know, eCommerce store goods. ClickBank's all digital, it's mostly eBooks and courses and software, where Commission Junction is like shoes and hammers and, you know, gardening tools, that kind of thing. So for our example, gardening tools, we'd find a better - we'd have a better chance at finding competitors or other products that we could promote from competitors with Commission Junction than we could with ClickBank. But you'll want to look into both, it's a great way to find competitors and competitors that have an affiliate programs. And when we get to the Affiliate Army CD in this course, if you sell your own products and services, you have to have an affiliate program, and we're really going to get into that in this course.

All this stuff that you're learning about how to drive traffic, how to get free traffic from the search engines by optimizing your content and putting content out there, how to buy traffic effectively and turn it into a profit, all these things that you're going to be doing, with your own affiliate program, you can leverage all that stuff that thousands of other people are doing. And so it's a no brainer and we're going really talk more about that. So if you do sell your own unique products and services and you don't have an affiliate program, you're just missing the boat.

But come to CJ.com, you can do some competitive research. Another site that you for sure know about unless you've been living in a cave or the last several years is eBay, eBay's a great research tool to find other, you know, products in your market. You know, we could type "Gardening" - whoops, only if John could learn to spell. So we could do a search for gardening, all categories, and I'm sure we're going to find all kinds of stuff related to gardening and all different kinds of categories. Here's, you know, and some of it's not even relevant. Here's a skirt that was labeled "Garden of Eden," so that's why it's Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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coming up, "Better Homes and Gardens Cookbooks," so some of it is relevant and some of it isn't. But again, you can come in here, you can see what your market's buying, you can monitor it by the bids and which ones are getting activity and the keywords they use.

And there's so much you can do with eBay as a research tool. They track keyword usage, what people are searching for, you can track what's actually selling and for what prices.

They have some great newsletters per category and per section within eBay that are published like every month that show the growing trends, what are the most searched for keywords, what are the most popular items. And you can go in here and you can do that research and it'll give you good ideas for content to create or for products to sell that your market's trending for, so very important stuff. So all these sites could just help you find competitors.

CD 2 - Lesson 8: Traffic Research When you're doing your competitive research and you're really going through this market discovery process, one of the important things that you're always going to want to know is how much traffic does a certain site get. If you find a blog that looks like it's pretty active and may be really popular, you'll want to know how much traffic it gets, or if you see a competitor that's advertising a certain product in, you know, Google AdWords ads and you wonder how big they are, how much traffic volume they get, whether it's from those ads or from anything else, that's just a common thing, how much traffic. It's a common question you're going to have again, "I wonder how much traffic they get?"

Well, let me show you a couple tools. You may already know about this one. This one's been around for a while. It's not incredibly accurate, but it's somewhat accurate, at least to give you a general idea. This is Alexa. This is actually owned by Amazon.com. Now, there's a few different things here and why you want to use Alexa. First of all, over here you see traffic rankings and it say's "Global Top 500." In the Foundation CD, I talked about analyzing the top, you know, hundred sites or whatever we saw on that quick list that I showed you and how you can analyze if you want to emulate the most traffic sites in the world, you need to look at what they're doing and talked about a lot of correlations, most of them have many, many pages of content and so on and so forth. So you can come in here and you can look at the Global Top 500 by category, you could do top 100 by certain countries, so if you're doing business based on country you'll want to do that, and you could do a lot of research for free. Then you can see over there they have premium. You can actually get the list of the top 100,000 sites of the world if you pay for it. It's usually expensive, though, it usually like $5,000.00 or so, but if you have the budget for it and depending on what your business model is, sometimes that's a no brainer. You know, if you have a generic product, let's say, that sells to the masses then, you know, if almost any site could be your partner - you know you see a lot of these, you know, "You've won a free iPod," or things with humor or coupons and things like that, some music and movies, some of these things that are kind of mass market consumer

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appeal, if you're in a business like that, it may help you to invest the money to get a list of the top 25,000 traffic sites or 100,000 most traffic sites in the world and then pay someone to actually start going down the list and approaching them to do deals, to run your ads in their site, for them to become your affiliate and so on and so forth, to partner with you in many of the ways you're going to learn throughout this course. So Alexa can show you how much traffic sites have, but it has all kinds of other stuff, and I'll show you that in the process.

So we could search for gardening and its directory and its database, it can show you these other sites that are found related to gardening. So here's one, let's say, from the UK, "The Total Online Gardening Resource," and it's probably a pretty good site. You can hover over this site info and it shows the domain, and you see real quick, it gives you at a glance traffic rank, 692,000 - the higher the number, the lower the traffic they get. If the number is, you know, 20,000 or lower, like No. 1 would - if it's No. 1 traffic range that's probably Google and so on and so forth, Yahoo then YouTube and the most traffic sites, but if you see a number that's about 20,000 or 30,000 or lower that means it gets pretty good traffic, probably several hundred or even several thousand visitors a day or more.

And so if we just go down this list and let's say we're looking for someone that gets quite a bit of traffic, there's 138,000 - okay, look at this, 600 or 6,762 is their traffic range, of course it's Better Homes and Garden and you'd expect them to do that well. But if we click on their site info, you can find all kinds of stuff about them, what their rank is, if it's up or down, it's a great competitive analysis type of site, free site, this Alexa, so it's a great little tool for you to use. It'll show you some of the sites that link to this site, so this is one of the tools you can use to find links. I'm going to show you some other methods later one. You can click Traffic Details, it'll give you a graph of their activity. You can click this Rank - Rank, to me, shows you kind of more of the view of the traffic, so this is how it ranks amongst other sites. So at one point in December of last year, it got up to about 4,000, so it was ranked about 4,000 in the world or of all the sites they track for traffic, that's really good. And as you can see, their traffic's come down, gone up, and some of this may be seasonal. But you can do this for any site. You can see if their traffic's growing.

So if you do competitive research and you're looking in AdWords and you see an advertiser and he's all over the place or they keep repeating, you come and look at their traffic and if it's kind of on an up-trend like it's growing then you know that company's doing really well, their traffic's growing, you know, they're trending. So you want to figure out, "Well, hey, what are they doing to get so much traffic?"

You know, in fact, let me just side bar here and give you a little bonus tip. If you click this Movers and Shakers link at the top here, this Movers and Shakers link, this is constantly tracking, or at least according to Alexa, it's not always a million percent accurate as the most on-the-move Web sites of the world, but it's pretty close, this is showing you the ones with the most movement, the ones getting the biggest boost in Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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traffic over their averages, so you can see these are the ones that are most on the move.

And these are the opposite, you can see these are the ones that are having the biggest fall in traffic amount.

So a lot of this is trend. This is the one mentioned, a small site on TV and it just, boom, gets a bunch of traffic and it'll end up on this list. But a lot of times you can find on here new viral services and new things someone created for the Web, and it's just growing and growing and growing, and you'll see it on this list. You know, just again as a side bar, but if I were building a company just to try to create different Web sites to try to get a bunch of traffic, you know, for kind of a general market, I would just constantly monitor this and as soon as I saw some that were growing or having good growth, I would clone the same concept. Again, not copy off them, but do something similar because they're proving that it's working and that a lot of internet users are using it and it's growing very fast. So anyways, it's fun to look at that to see who the biggest movers are in traffic. But you can use Alexa to get a pretty good idea in people's traffic. You can do that linking, sites linking in thing to kinda see a list of who's linking, at least according to Alexa, and it's a good competitive analysis tool.

But let's go over to a better one that you may or may not know of. This is Compete.com, and this is a somewhat new company that really only started getting popular several months ago and they're really growing in size. And this company uses some different metrics and things to get data about people's traffic, but they're a lot more accurate. But on the other hand, they don't do as good of a job if it's a low traffic site. Alexa will show more of activity as far as what they think a site's traffic is, you know, even if it only gets 100 visitors a week, whereas Compete, they won't even show it, you know, in their stats if it doesn't get a certain amount of traffic. But for most sites that get a pretty good amount of traffic, which will be your top competitors most likely in any market, you'll be able to find them here with Compete.

So I think BGH was the name of Better Homes and Gardens, if we click this Get Site Analytics, it should just show us - so it says it has very little data, these are rough estimates, but this shows you the uniques per month, so this is roughly 10,000 unique visitors a month, and this shows kind of how their traffic's gone up and down and how it's grown. But the thing about Compete.com is they have some incredibly valuable competitive analysis data, hence the name of their company, Compete, and what they're all about, and you can find all kinds of stuff as far as keywords and seeing how they rank and why they rank, and you can get some results for free, but most of what they sell is for a fee. Now, some of their reports that you can buy are reasonable, so they're not all $100,000.00 or anything like that, you can get it for a few hundred dollars depending on what you want to search for. But it'll show you keywords, so this is showing some of the keywords that's currently driving traffic, how effective they are, and they're giving some other stats.

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But if you come to Compete and you poke around and you look at some of their paid tools, again, depending on your budget, compete is one of the best competitive research tools in the world now. You can get some - like look what it says here, you can get full reports on a competitor and it'll give you tons of keywords, up to 100,000, you can see what their top brand keywords are, you can get just all kinds of stuff. This says you can get reports for less than $2.00, it depends on what you're searching for. But come to Compete.com, poke around for yourself. We'll post some other related links in the Resources section for more stuff, not only about Compete but maybe some of these other competitive research tools that you need to know about. But this is a great tool. This is not just an up and comer, this thing is really becoming one of the best competitive research tools. So if you have the budget for it and you know some of your main competitors, once you figure that out, it could really, really be valuable to come in here and buy some of the reports and really see what your competitors are up to. So that's Compete.com.

CD 2 - Lesson 9: Link Detective So I showed you briefly how you can use Alexa and that sites linked in thing to kind of find some of the links that are coming to a specific competitor site or any one site, but there are some more powerful ways to actually find out what sites are linking to another site. One of the ways, it's old, it's been around for a while, you may know of it, in Google, you can just type link colon and then you can put the Web address or the www first part of an address. So let's use - we'll do Better Homes and Gardens again like we did in the other example. So you want to put in the www if you want to find out people that link to the site using the www, which most people will. And so that's it, you just enter that and then you do a search with having link colon and then the www and the competitor's domain, and it comes up and you see here, 1,670 pages are linking to that domain. And you can come in here and you can investigate and see what pages are linking to this site. And again, you can go and visit these results, you can see how they're linking, why they're linking, are they quoting some of their content like a great blog post, are the quoting a press release that we talked about before, is that what they're linking to, or - and actually, you can get more sophisticated than this. You could actually make this a specific page, which could be their press release page, and find all the links pointing to that specific page.

There are a number of different ways to find links, and we'll put some more information in the Resources section because this is a pretty big, broad topic. There are a lot of different tricks that you can use to do this, but this is the basic one. You just do link colon, name of the domain and you can find in Google. Unfortunately, I believe Google, I'm not sure what their limit is as of today because it changes a lot, I don't think you can go in here and actually see all 1,600, it may or may not show them all. I know at one point they were hiding some of them, and I know sometimes this figure as well isn't accurate, sometimes they don't count certain links depending how they're done for Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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different reasons in their algorithm or for security reasons, and more and more it seems like they're showing less and less. But you can at least come in here and get quite a few and follow quite a few and see, you know, why they link to them and how. You can just visit the page, like we could just visit one of these pages, and there's a couple of different ways you could do this. You could do a View Source with your browser software and then type in that domain and it should show you where in the source code for the html that link exists and then you can find it from there and see where it's being mentioned because sometimes you'll come in here and you'll be looking around, and you won't see where that link even is. And as pages change sometimes, too, it may be taken off the page and Google hasn't updated it yet. You'll find that sometimes, too, where the link doesn't even exist. But typically, you can come in here, you can do that trick with searching the source or you can just use your browser search period and type in the name of the company or something to do with the company, sometimes that'll find the actual name of the link itself. So there's a number of different ways to do that. But that's basically it, just that link colon structure, and it could show you who's linking to a site and then, of course, how many links that they have or at least they're getting credit for according to Google.

Another one is if you come to Yahoo. Yahoo does it a little bit differently. The kind of structure of theirs is link domain colon and then you put in the path to the site, and so they find 346,000. So I imagine a lot of these are in Google's database, but they weren't reporting this many because of whatever reason they're doing with their algorithm, they have reasons for doing all that. But it's a great way to come in here and find all these sites that are linking to that competitor. For example, if this was your competitor and you wanted to research it and see why, you know, if they have a top ranking, links have a lot to do with it. You can see why, they have so many links. But you can go in and investigate how they got their links, why they're getting their links, and it can help you do the same thing.

You'll notice that here, "Show in-links from all pages to the entire site," and you can make it by specific if you just want to go to a specific page of the site to see just what other pages on the internet link to just that page, like, again, if it's the press release section of their site or their about a site or their product site, any landing page any subpart of their site. But this is important, too, so from all pages, show all links, but you can do except from this domain. So if we choose that, it's going to reload, that number went down to 249,000, that means 100,000 of their links being reported were just on their own site from their own domain, like page-to-page them linking and referencing their own pages. So Yahoo is crediting them for 249,000 links coming to their site from pages outside of their site, so that's important because that's really what you're interested in, primarily is what sites are linking from outside to that site.

But you can check the Resources section for more resources and tools for looking into links and doing link and, you know, doing all kinds of link investigation. But that's just a 36

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quick rundown for you of how you do it, it's not that complicated, and it can help you find who's linking to who and figuring out why they're doing it so you can also do it; it's just that simple.

CD 2 - Lesson 10: Google Alerts Let's take a quick look at Google Alerts, you may know about Google Alerts. If you don't, you need to know what it is. It's probably the most valuable competitive research tool in the whole world and it's completely free. It's simple. You can set up these things called Google Alerts within Google with a free little account, you just sign up for an account and then you set it up. And as you cans see here in this Search box, you can put in the terms - you can put in what type of search you want it to do for you. Like if you want it to search videos or blogs or if you just, anything, how often you want it to alert you when it finds something, if you want to just know about it once a week, once a day or as soon as it happens, as soon as Google search engine knows about it and then, of course, you put in your e-mail address, where you want it e-mailed to. So this is incredibly powerful.

For example, if you typed in, for our gardening tool store, if you typed in "Gardening Tools," it would alert you every time a new page that's not currently in their database or maybe it's that and any page that changes, but that happens to include those terms, gardening tools, if they find a new page that would be a new blog post, new article, new video that use those tags or that description, anything that gets added on the internet that Google finds, which Google pretty much indexes the majority of the internet, it'll send you an e-mail alert and say, "Here's what I found related to that search term, and here's the link to it where it's used." Now, if you haven't already figured this out, this is incredibly valuable. You can put in the names of - you can put in your own name, your own company name, your own products and keep up with anytime people talk about you on any blog, on any discussion form anywhere that's indexed by Google. You could do the same thing with your competitors and keep up with what people are saying about them. If there's some kind of trend going on in your market, you know, for this gardening example, a new kind of fertilizer or something else, you can put that in there. Anytime somebody writes about it, you'll find the alert from Google saying, "Here, I just indexed a page from a press release or a new blog post or a new video that references this in the description or tags, that is the name of that fertilizer," in this example.

It's great, it's free, it's just amazing that Google just alerts you like a robot, like a research robot when it finds the things that you want to be notified of; incredibly powerful free service. I have tons of Google alerts that me know about all kinds of things: my name, my company's name, my product, some of my employees' names. Obviously, I do a lot of competitive monitoring with this. I monitor a lot of my competitors' names, their company names, products' names, authors' names, blog names, site names, any technology they have, names of software, you name it. And I like to keep up with what Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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the internet's saying about me or my competitors or about certain things to do with my industry for any business that I'm involved in. And so just check it out, it's google.com/ alerts. It's an amazing, amazing free service.

CD 2 - Lesson 11: Google Trends Let's check out one more great market discovery tool that you can use for free out there on the internet and, of course, you'll find many others in the Resources section related to market discovery that will cover other tools and resources and things that we didn't have a chance to cover on this CD because there are a lot of them. But this is Google Trends and it's free, google.com/trends, and basically you can come here and you can type in keywords and it'll tell you how the trends are as far as for like the search volumes and the activity on the internet with people using their search engine related to the term.

So let's type in "Gardening Tools," and we say "Search Trends." By the way, it's funny to see this "Copyright 2007" down here since we're currently in 2008 while I'm recording this, so that's kind of funny that they haven't even updated their own copyrights. So I did a search for gardening tools, and we see here, here is the search volume, how it's kind of flat or actually even going down since - well, this could be some kind of anomaly that spiked when they first started recording it. So if we go from here, let's say, 2005, it's up and down, up and down, up and down, and it's, ah, it's close to the same peak. So you can see the number of searches being done is about the same, and you can see these ups and downs, like a lot of people search for it and then for this part of the year they don't and then this part they do and then they don't, so notice that. In the beginning of each year, it goes from low to high and then in the middle part of the year it goes down, and then at the end of the year, it peaks. Well, that kind of shows us that people searching for gardening tools, it's kind of seasonal. They're looking more to buy them kind of in springtime and it looks like the fall or at least early winter, which is pretty fascinating.

So this will show you the trends, sometimes you'll see a trend where it's just going up, up, up, which tells you, "Hey, more and more people are searching for," let's say, again, a certain type of gardening tool or a certain type of fertilizer, let's say the example we used before, you could see it's just trending up, up, up, more and more people are searching for it every month, it's getting more and more popular. And when you see that, you need to pay attention to that. That basically tells you, "Hey, I need to create more content for this, I need to do, you know, more advertising around this, I need to pay attention to it because this is what my market is interested in."

Like, let me do a quick example. You may have heard of Pokemon, this little card game slash cartoon slash empire, a Japanese game from, well, from Japan, hence the name Japanese game. But it's a game that started in Japan and you've probably heard of it if you have kids, maybe they collect Pokemon cards and stuffed animals and all the things to do with the video tapes and everything. And we can see that a lot of people searching 38

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for Pokemon through 2005, and then look, it really started to grow through 2006 and then really started to grow in 2007, and then it's kinda like the fad wore off and it's coming down and not as many people are searching it now into this year. Still a lot of people, same level as 2006, but it's come way down. That's a good example of looking at kind of a hot trend or a fad. So some of these spikes you'll see are seasonal, and that should give you indications on what you should or shouldn't be selling maybe or should or shouldn't be writing about at different times, at least the 80/20 rule of putting more effort into something that's something else, if you have a choice. So Google Trends is great, you can get a lot of good data from that.

This will show you kind of where the activity is coming from. You can do it by region, like you can say, "Okay, I just got a license to sell Pokemon in Australia." So since I'm just selling to Australia, that's my target market, I want to see what the trend is for this keyword just in Australia, so it's coming up and we'll see what the trend is. My guess is it's going to be about the same, and it has been, it's about roughly the same. It goes up, up, up, 2007, then it starts to come down a little bit. So this seems to be the hot point of that hobby, that product around the whole world. But you'll find things in certain countries that are more popular at times than other countries and, again, just great competitive research. So check that out, you can just play around with it on your own time for hours, and that's Google Trends. And don't forget to check the Resources site for the CD to find other resources that I didn't have a chance to cover on this CD.

CD 2 - Lesson 12: Review Okay, let's review. We started out by talking about the importance of defining your target customer, how old are they, what are their income levels, are they a certain gender, do they live in a certain location, so on and so forth. And we also talked about the importance of finding things that we can exclude about our customers, things that definitely do not apply to our customers. So down the road when we run advertising, when we set up AdWords campaigns and we spend any money at all to target our customers, we'll know the things that we're not going to pay for, so it'll save us money and also help our results be a lot more targeted, which will help with our sales conversions.

We talked about discovering where our customers hang out. Where do they go online?

Where do they spend a lot of their time? So I showed you how to search for discussion forums and talked about how you can get involved in discussion forums to build relationships in your market, figure out the latest problems, solutions that your market's looking for, keeping up with what they want or currently what your competitors are selling to that market, so on and so forth, so that's very, very important to figure out where they hang out online.

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We talked about the importance of discovering what your target customer reads, what they watch and what they subscribe to, what blogs they regularly visit, what kind of articles they're reading, what kind of videos they're consuming and what kind of newsletters they're subscribing to. All of this is very important to help you formulate and structure your own content of what you hope people read, watch and subscribe to by figuring out what they're already doing out there in your market.

The importance of defining your competition, very, very critical, defining your competition, who are they, who are the market leaders, who's out there actively advertising, what are they selling, how do they sell it, what marketing are they using, what are their prices, so on and so forth, very, very important to define your competition, and we went over several ways to find out who your competition is.

Discover your competition's advertising. I showed you several tricks and things you can do just to simply go and find your competition's ads, what ads they're running, how much they're paying and where they're sending their traffic to and, of course, what marketing they're using behind that advertising.

How to discover your competition's content. I showed you several different ways to find their blogs, their videos, their articles, so on and so forth, so it was very important that you find your competition's content to give you a head start on creating your own content.

And last but not least, finding out who links to your competition. If you want to get links and links are important, and links naturally share traffic as well as boost your SEO rankings, you find out who links to your competition. I showed you several different ways to do that research and find out who links to your competition. So hopefully you took notes or will take notes when you go through the exercise again and doing it on a regular basis to figure out who your competition is getting links from so then you can go and pursue it and try to get those same links.

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CD 3: Keyword Science Lesson 1: Overview Keyword science – keyword research is the key to big traffic. Notice how I’ve underlined, the key, because it’s that important. Now if you’ve already done any marketing at all online, you’re probably very, very familiar with keywords and keyword research. However, I really want you to pay close attention to this entire CD, even if you already have a lot of experience for even years on the internet, because let me tell you, I’ve consulted with a number of different students from a broad range of backgrounds and different experience levels, and even different levels of success and sales from their own line of marketing efforts.

I’ve consulted with even millionaires that are making millions of dollars in sales from the internet that are failing to seize a lot of opportunities they could be because they weren’t doing proper keyword research and they didn’t fully understand keyword science. So even if you’re already doing a lot of business on the internet, and a lot of traffic, you need to pay close attention to this entire CD, because there may be a few little things that you’ve never even heard of before and you can take advantage of. That’s what I hope for you. If you’re new to keyword research and you really don’t know much about it, it’s pretty simple.

Keywords relate to the words and phrases that people type into search engines to find stuff. It’s just that easy, so if a company sells baseball bats, and hopefully someone looking for what they sell will type baseball bats into the search engines, and then what’s related to keywords is what’s called search engine optimization, which we’re going to get to in this course, which is just optimizing pages so they rank well when people search for words and phrases, so hopefully people will find their websites, and then of course do business with them, and give them their money, but keywords make the internet go ‘round. It’s everything to do with content on the internet, and keywords and the power of keywords actually go well beyond search engine optimization, which you’re going to learn.

It has a lot to do with what people search for not only in the search engines, which most people just optimize for, but within people’s sites themselves, and it also has a lot to do with what people are writing about, and how people are finding topics for different industries, and a lot of things that may not even have anything to do with search engines, but how a lot of communication happens from site to site, and a lot of other things that you’re going to learn about throughout this entire course. So keywords are very, very important, and it’s not just about search engines and search engine listings. If you learn proper keyword research, and you really understand the science behind it, and how to

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keep up with it, and how to stay ahead in your market, you can really get a lot of traffic, and you can make a lot of money from it, so this stuff is very, very important.

I will say, however, just on top of everything else that keywords, and keyword research, and everything related to keywords isn’t the only way you’re going to learn how to generate lots and lots of traffic to your site from this entire course, but it is a big part of it, and it’s the foundation of everything, creating content, and optimizing things for the search engines to get that traffic, taking advantage of low hanging fruit where there’s not a lot of competition, as well as going after the more competitive traffic that’s out there, things that are being searched for in Google as well as to properly purchase clicks and advertising with Google AdWords and any of the other pay per click search engines. So there’s just of course a lot of things that fall into place once you learn proper keyword research, so let me just rattle through a few basic things if you are new to keyword research and some of the science behind it, as well as some of the common elements that make up the world of keywords themselves. So if you’re already familiar with keywords, just hang with me. I’m not going to talk very long on this.

I’m just going to run down what things are really, really quickly, and of course, if you’re new, you’re going to pick it up real fast. There’s not a lot to the basics of it, so here we go. If you take the word, gardening, that’s considered a short tail keyword. If you take the words, cheap, used garden tools, that’s considered a long tail keyword.

Now the long tail is this concept that has recently been popularized, and it’s essentially saying that if you look at a chart of all the keywords that are being typed into search engines, on the far left end you’ll have a really high value of common words and phrases, and the fact that they generate a lot of the search volume on the internet. So for example, gardening is getting searched for a lot more in relation to cheap, used garden tools, that’s more words and more specific, and gardening itself, because it contains all the pages and volume related to any of the words and phrases that contain gardening, such as gardening services, gardening supplies, even this other example of cheap, used garden tools. If it said, “Cheap, used gardening tools,” then that would also relate to the volume for just gardening itself, but the long tail is if you were to look at this chart out to the right hand side where the graph, graphing volume, as in number of times things are searched for on the left hand side, and then of course the actual words and phrases on the bottom axis of the chart.

It gets farther and farther out to the right and gets skinnier and skinnier where more and more words are typed fewer and fewer times on the internet, because they’re more specific, and it’s millions and millions – actually, it’s billions of combinations of things people are searching for, but all you need to know about this, even though that may or may not sound confusing, is just the fact that about half the traffic on the internet and the volume from it are short tail keywords, and then the other half is estimated to be long tail keywords of a lot of specific words and phrases.

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Typically, the more specific the phrase, the higher it will convert, because it’s very, very targeted towards exactly what someone is looking for, and on the other side of things, the shorter the term or phrase, even if it’s only one word or two words, typically, depending on the industry of course and depending on the subject matter, it gets a lot more volume and number of searches than of course the longer tail versions, which have more words to them because they’re more specific, but you’re going to learn in this course how to target both of them, and how to do a mix of both, because they’re both very, very valuable.

You don’t just want to go after long tail keywords only and ignore the short tail when there are some common, simple things you can do to actually create content and optimize for the short tail, even single words that are related to your business, even if the competition is really fierce for all the other people out there that are trying to rank high for that, because that’s what you should note. The shorter the tail, so to speak, on the keyword – in other words, if it’s a one word keyword, or if it’s just a two word keyword, you’ll have a lot more people in that industry trying to optimize their pages and trying to get traffic from the search engines, because it has so much more search volume than these little four, five, six, seven, eight word combination keywords that they think, “Well, if I could just put in the time to rank really high for gardening tools, that may get me five hundred visits a day.

Then that’s far better spent than me trying to optimize fifty pages for these other specific little long tail phrases that only get a few visits a day,” and that’s false thinking, because of the competitive factors and because the fact that the long tail stuff says that it converts so much higher.

In many ways, it could be a lot more valuable, but you want to do both, and here’s why you want to do both, because over time you can get really high rankings for the single words and the two word phrases, no matter how competitive your industry. If you are doing the proper things that you are going to learn in this course, and just as time goes by, and as you build a bigger and bigger presence on the internet, and you build more and more assets on the internet with your content, and as you do linking properly and a lot of other things that we’re going to talk about in this course, slowly but surely over time you’re going to rise in the rankings against your competitors for some of the best keywords in the market, and of course it’s very, very possible that in no time at all you could be number one, number two, number three, right there at the very top in those organic listings, where all the traffic that you get from that is free.

The other reason to do it is because by mixing in some of the short tail common words and phrases, what you’ll find is you’ll start getting traffic from long tail keywords that you didn’t specifically optimize your page for.

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For example, you could be optimizing some pages, like you write an article, or you do some blog posts, and we’re going to talk all about this when we get to the content factory CD, but you could optimize your page for just the keyword, garden tools, which is pretty much a short tail keyword. It’s very common, lots of searches, and what you can find, and what you’ll see and start seeing in your analytic reports – I’m actually going to show you, again, a brief example of this. I already showed it to you before when I talked about Google Analytics, but you’ll start seeing that you’re getting traffic from keywords such as cheap, used garden tools, even if you were just optimizing for garden tools, and weren’t even trying to get traffic for cheap, used garden tools, so you’ll end up finding that you get all kinds of traffic from just all kinds of crazy words and phrases that you never thought of, and then of course there’s things you’re going to learn to do with that, such as when some of them really start bringing a lot of traffic and/or start bringing a lot of conversions, bringing you a lot of sales, it’s so easy to make some tweaks and adjustments to tweak what’s already bringing in that extra long tail keyword traffic, to make it bring in even more, and it’s really easy, and you’re going to learn how to do that.

A lot of the search engine stuff, specifically we’re really going to start getting into, coming up here soon in the course with SEO dynamics as well as when we get into the content factory stuff, so I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the SEO stuff just yet, but it needs to be said, because a lot of this goes hand in hand, but that’s it. That’s the short tail and that’s the long tail. It’s simple. A lot of this stuff seems complicated, but really it’s not.

A lot of this scientific marketing type stuff for the internet, when you don’t know it, even search optimization to most people is very, very foreign. They’re like, “Oh gosh, I can never understand that because it seems like a programming language or some kind of engineering secret. It’s not. I’m going to break it down for you. It’s going to be so easy for you.

You’re going to go, “What a joke. I could go out right now and get an SEO consultant if I wanted to, and people could pay me to optimize their pages and rank them in the search engines.” That’s a possibility for you if you wanted to do that after you complete this course. I need to briefly tell you about something, LSI. It stands for Latent Semantic Indexing.

It’s a very, very fancy scientific term, but here’s why it’s important, the keywords and how it relates to search engine traffic and traffic in general that’s related to keywords.

Here’s basically what LSI means. It’s just related words to whatever keyword that you’re using or optimizing for, or it’s just related to a certain keyword, so for example, let’s take gardening. Gardening, gardening tools, gardening supplies, gardening services, all those words are other keywords that are related to gardening because they contain the word, gardening, and that’s not what LSI is. I’m just giving you a brief comparison with something different to make my point.

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So if you go to all these keyword tools that you’re going to learn about on this CD, and you were to type in gardening, let’s say, most of them are going to give you back a long list of keywords that have gardening in it: gardening tools, gardening supplies, gardening consultants, gardening products, gardening, whatever. I’m running out of ideas here.

You get the point, so it’s going to give you a bunch of keywords that have the word, gardening, in it. What LSI is, is its related, themed words, so if you use the example of gardening, LSI words would be landscape, flowers, yard, maybe carrots, seeds.

Its other words that aren’t that word, but are thematically, as they say, related. It’s a similar theme. Now why this is important is because Google uses some very sophistic, super secret, ninja formula, science, engineering whatever, stuff, magic in their master formula to rank pages in their search engine result, and one of the elements of that algorithm that of course nobody knows, otherwise it would just get spammed the death, and the results pages wouldn’t have relevant things when you search for stuff, and that would, of course, stop people from using Google, and they’d be out of business. One of those elements is LSI, so if you know anything about the history of internet marketing, if you have been around the internet for a while, then you probably know that five, six, eight years ago even, you could create a page, and you could put gardening tools in many different places on that page, gardening tools, gardening tools, gardening tools, garden tools, and it wouldn’t matter what the other words were.

You could put just a bunch of gobbledy gook, just a bunch of random words and phrases, but since you had gardening tools in so many different places, and if you put gardening tools in the title, and did some other things, that page could rank high in the search engines because it had so many uses of gardening tools, and it was deemed by that search engine at the time, according to that algorithm, that that was a page that was good for gardening tools. Well, then of course search engines evolved, like they will continue to, and Google of course evolved, and so they said, “Well, just because it has the word that people are searching for on it, even in many places or in certain density, and everything else, doesn’t mean it’s relevant.”

So they added this fancy pants thing called LSI, where they came up with some kind of algorithm where they’re able to take certain related words and phrases, and also look for those on the page, and if those don’t exist, or a certain percentage of those don’t exist, they don’t deem it as relevant, and basically what they figured out is through the use of using this LSI type of science, they’re able to a pretty strong degree determine with a computer if a page of text is legitimate or not or if it’s scrambled stuff, so that’s what LSI is, and in order to get traffic from the search engines, you’re going to need to know how to find these related keywords to any of the main keywords for your business, and I’m going to show you of course tools for finding that, and how to go about doing it, and it’s actually really easy, and it’s fun stuff too, because I’ll show you a neat trick, and I’ll show you some stuff, but that just needs to be explained, LSI. Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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Another quick little acronym to explain before I get to some of the keyword tools for looking for keywords, a couple of different things you’re going to see along with keywords when you’re building reports, and doing this research to find certain keywords that you’re going to want to target to actually get traffic from, you’ll see search volumes, which is just how many times they’re searched for in a month. The word, gardening, it may get searched in Google 100,000 times every month, and so of course, of those 100,000 times, all that traffic has to be divided amongst all the different rankings, and all the different links that people will end up clicking on whenever they search for that keyword, so that’s why volume’s important. That’s why when there’s a keyword with a lot of volume, so many people are after that traffic.

The other value that some of these search engine tools use is a little formula, and it’s called KEI, and it was a concept that was created by an SEO consultant many years ago – his name is Sumantra Roy, and KEI is keyword effectiveness index, and basically what we figured out was if you take the number of searches being done in a given month, and you cross-reference that with the number of results pages that are found in Google currently, or in any search engine, that can give you an idea of how competitive it is to try to get a high ranking for that term. The more pages there are, and of course in correlation with a search volume, creates this number score, and based on that score, it says how much the likelihood is that you’re going to be able to get high rankings and then get some of the traffic, or how unlikely it is. That formula and that score is not exact science.

It’s not one hundred percent accurate. It’s pretty accurate in many cases, especially when it comes to certain long tail things, and we’re going to go over that when we get deep in to the search engine dynamic stuff on the upcoming CD, but for now I just wanted to mention that, so as you see those, as I demonstrate some tools for you, you’ll know what that is and why it is, so here’s what you need to do. You need to use a spreadsheet to build this library of keywords for your internet marketing, and you’re going to need to be constantly updating it every so often, and you want to back it up, and keep it in a safe place, but this spreadsheet is going to be really, really important, and you may even want to have several spreadsheets to break up different groups of keywords, and to track it, but you’re going to want to use a spreadsheet, because it’s one of the easiest ways to manage keywords.

So you can have the keywords in one column, and maybe their search volumes in another, and maybe that KEI score in another, or notes in another that you want to keep, or anything else. There are pretty much three common spreadsheets that you can pick from. You’ve probably heard of Microsoft Excel. If you have a PC, you may have Microsoft Office, which Excel comes with. If you don’t know how to use Excel or any spreadsheet for that matter, take the time to learn how to use a spreadsheet.

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There are some tools out there. We’ll see about linking to them in the resources section for you. I didn’t think of actually doing that, but I’ll try to go and add that for you.

You’re going to need to know how to use a spreadsheet. It’s not really that complicated.

It looks a little complicated at first, but you’re going to need to know how to import data, and how to sort it, and move it around, and all that good stuff, so you’ve probably heard of Excel, maybe even have it, maybe even used it. It’s so great if you have a PC. If you’re on the Mac, you can get iWork from Apple, and in the iWork Suite, there’s a program called Numbers. It’s their version of Excel, does the same thing as Excel, but my favorite spreadsheet is in Google Docs.

If you have a Gmail account at gmail.com – which is their web based mail – if you look at the very top you’ll see in the little links at the very top, there’s a link that says, “Documents.” Well, Google has this really cool, free thing called Google Docs, and it’s a web based document system, and it’s awesome. You can create Word docs in it where it’s a text file, and you can do all kinds of stuff to it, but one of the types of docs they have that you can use in there are spreadsheets. They have limitations, like they only can hold up to 5,000 rows of data, but if that’s the case, then you just create multiple files, and you’d want to do that anyway.

You don’t want to have one master file, even if you ended up with 100,000 keywords, which you can. You can ultimately end up with millions, but we’ll talk about managing that stuff when we get into the search engine type stuff, but Google Docs is great because its web based, and it saves it to their servers. Of course you want to back up and export some of that data whenever you can, but the other cool thing is multiple people can collaborate on a single document, so you can pay three or four people to do market research for you, and do some keyword research, and to be adding keywords to the same document, or they could add them to different documents. Of course then you can get in there and merge them into one document, but it allows multiple people – at your option, you don’t have to – to collaborate, and edit, and work on the same documents, and of course if you go anywhere in the world, and you get access to the web, you can get access to these Google documents.

That’s why they’re really important. I would really suggest that you familiarize yourself with Google Docs and start using it, especially because when we get to the content factory CD, and we start talking about producing good content for you on a regular basis, and some of these other things. A big part of that process, not getting too far ahead here, but a big part of that process is having a research department or folder, so to speak, for your business and your marketing. We are constantly bookmarking things of interest and storing links to interesting blog posts that other people are creating, or interesting white papers and PDF’s, or any other content, any ideas, and so on, and so forth.

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One of the great places to do that is Google Docs, because again, anywhere in the world you get access to the web, boom, log in, make a couple of notes, log out. You can have someone else collaborate on it with you, and it’s just very convenient and its simple, rather than having something sit on one specific computer in your home that the hard drive could crap out and crash, or you could be on vacation, and wanting to get to some of your data. Google Docs: easy. I recommend it.

You’re going to need to use a spreadsheet for this stuff. You’re going to need to use many different keyword tools. Unfortunately not a single tool will do the total job, and one of the advantages you’re going to have if you use more than one keyword tool is that most people only use one keyword tool, and almost every keyword tool out there that I’ve ever used will end up finding keywords that the other ones don’t. It’s just because they use different databases. Some of them have different little magic tricks where they try to combine data, and do different types of searches, and come up with different arrays of keywords, so you’re going to have to use many different keyword tools.

The other thing is you really need to put aside some of your budget towards these keyword tools. Some of them are free, but some of them, the good ones, are subscription based. They range from fifty to a hundred bucks a year to a few hundred dollars a year or more, and of course it all depends on your budget, but the more of these tools that you can afford to use, the better, I’ll promise you, and they’re worth their weight in gold. It’s probably the one thing that you really should invest in no matter what, is getting subscriptions to as many of these tools that I’m going to tell you about, because these keywords is going to be the lifeblood of your traffic, and of course it’s going to hopefully produce a lot of sales for you, and so one sale coming from one keyword in one week could end up paying for some of these subscription services depending on what it is that you sell.

So you want to use many different keyword tools, and I’m just going to give you a quick tour of some of them on this CD, but of course you’re going to want to go back and learn them, and poke around, and just take the time and invest a few minutes to figure them out and how they work, and how to use them, and almost all of them will let you search and build keyword lists, and then export them to a CSV file, which is one of the formats that you can import into a spreadsheet, so you export the CSV, download it, it’s on your hard drive, log into Google Docs for example, open a new spreadsheet or an existing one, go into the little menu and click import, find that CSV file, and then whammo, it gets sucked into your account, and then you see all that data, or you can do it into Excel, or you can do it into Numbers. It works with all of these.

So it’s time to brainstorm. Here’s where keyword research begins. You’ve gotta do some brainstorming about your business. You’ve already done it about your market and everything that we’ve covered in market discovery. Now you really need to specifically start thinking of things.

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Get out a notepad when you’re ready to do this exercise. You don’t have to do it right now. You can come back and watch this CD again, but you’re going to just get out a notepad, and start writing down and brainstorming these ideas and concepts, and then they’re ultimately going to evolve into research points that you’re going to use to put into some of these tools to find more and more keywords for you, so that’s the beauty of it, is if you could just think of the slightest variation of something that could be a keyword, you could fire it into one of these tools or multiple tools, and come up with thousands of other variations and ideas, so a little idea goes a long way in this brainstorming phase, but of course, in the nature of this course, and true to one of the foundational principles of this course, what do we believe in? We believe in piggybacking and not reinventing the wheel.

I’m going to show you some tools that are specifically designed to find your competitors’ keywords and find advertisers’ keywords. What better way than to find people in your industry that are actively paying good money to drive traffic from some of the popular keywords in your market, and then just sucking down and saying, “Thanks,” and borrowing tons and tons of keywords that technology can find that they’re actually using, indicate that they’re using, so I’m going to show you how to do that, but I don’t want you to get lazy and just expect that your competitors – and when you use those tools, your competitors are going to have all these keywords that you’re going to need to use, and you won’t have to do any thinking of your own, because as I said in the beginning, most people, 99.9% of people marketing online right now, I know this without a doubt, don’t do thorough keyword research.

They don’t understand keyword science enough, and so they just do a weak job at actually building a database of keywords, and when that happens, what they’re doing is, and what you don’t want to do is, is just forfeit all these opportunities to make money, to get this easy traffic, and to make these easy sales, so the better you are at keyword research, and again, if you don’t want to do anything in this course such as keyword research, you can have somebody else do it for you or multiple people, and you could pay them, and of course we’ve already talked about that, how to find people to do different things. There are plenty of people who know how to do keyword research, and you can find them at any of those freelance forums, those sites, but you should at least know the basics of all this, so it all starts with brainstorming about your business. The first question we need to answer when you go through the exercise and the action step of brainstorming these keywords initially is what would someone search for to find you, so think of your business, do what they call step on the other side of the counter, become the customer.

Let’s say your customer gets on the web and they’re looking for things in a search engine.

What types of things would they type in, in order to find your business? What types of things are related to your business? Obviously, if you don’t have any pages optimized in Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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the index of search engines, they wouldn’t find you, no matter what they typed in, but hypothetically speaking, what types of things are related to your business, your name, your company’s name, your products’ names, things related to your market and your industry. What are those things?

What words and phrases would describe those things? Think about that long and hard.

What would someone search for to find you? What makes sense? What’s logical?

Also relate it to the problem that maybe you solve for people. What’s related to that problem? What would they be searching for? Stop back pain. Why does my back hurt?

Just think about that.

If you have a solution for back pain, what would people be searching for if they were in agony, in that example, with back pain? How are they searching for things that would relate to you as the solution? What’s related to your competitors? What are their names?

By the way, a legal disclaimer here, I’m not an attorney, not giving you legal advice.

Whatever you do, you’re responsible for on your own. You want to do your own research as far as what different companies allow for buying keywords that have your competitor’s trade names and trademarks in them as well as anything copyrighted, as well as if you optimize your pages for those keywords, what the legal implications are.

Typically in most cases – again, this isn’t legal advice, but in most cases, if you’re just reasonably talking about another company, and legitimately have some real content where you’re not just stuffing a page with a bunch of branded names and copyrights, and clearly you’re just doing it to get traffic, it has no value at all, that’s obviously not okay, but if you’re honestly just talking about – clearly look at, for example, all the people that are talking about the iPhone, clearly that falls under what’s called fair use for copyright law, and plenty of people are certainly making money and getting traffic from people that find their sites when they type in iPhone, but just want to make that quick legal disclaimer, but what’s related to your competitors?

What are their names? What’s the name of the CEO, if there is a CEO, or there’s an expert in the company. What’s the name of that expert that people know? What is their product called? What does it do?

What’s the product name? What are their model numbers? Do they have model numbers or SKU’s? If they do, boy, wouldn’t that be great, to just have a list of a thousand SKU’s if they’re a company that sells all these different products, and when anyone searches for them you come up in some way? Do you think that would probably bring you some sales and related traffic?

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Probably – if they’re looking for your competitor, they might be interested in what you have to sell, so think about that. Think about what’s related to your competitors, what products your customers buy and/or read. On the read side of things, what are the books that are related to your market? Almost every single market has books related to it.

Well, think of all those book titles and write them down, because if you’re in the environmental services industry, and there’s some book called, “How to Clean Up the Earth,” and you sell consulting or services to people that are looking to clean some kind of treatment area, or treat some kind of area if their company owns a bunch of land or something, then you just sell it, and the law’s requiring that the soil is clean and passes these certain tests and everything. How about if you came up when people searched for that book title, because it’s related to your industry and exactly what it is that you do? So book titles are good, magazines, trade journals, as well as what do your customers buy, what products, not necessarily from your competitors, but what products, even from other industries that have parallels to yours?

All this comes back to the market discovery about your customer and knowing who your customers really are, knowing everything about them, and where they hang out, and what they do will give you some of these answers. Here’s one, are there local versions of related things, things that are related to your business? For example, if someone is doing research on the cost of braces for their teeth, and that’s your market, you sell dental insurance, or you sell teeth whitening kits, or something related to teeth, let’s say, local versions of course that do exist would be like Orlando dentists, Chicago dentists, Atlanta dentists, Dallas dentists. Clearly those are keywords that are searched for every single day, and of course you can take the local part of it to other variations, like states, like California dentists.

You could do it with city names. You could do it with state names. You could do it with county names if something’s possibly county related, so if you have a business, anything you do with government, you could take any common word or phrase that’s searched for, anything related to certain counties, and just append all the different county names to that phrase, and you’d have some great keywords that you could optimize for, as well as countries as well. It could be something in another country, or it could be by country name: China something, Canada something, Australia something, and so on and so forth, so think if there are any local versions of items related to your business, and in almost every business, there are at least a few.

This is a big one that’s very, very important. Can anything related to your business, that is, be serialized? This is a concept my good marketing buddy and super marketing genius Frank Kern actually came up with and I remember when he came up with it, because he was visiting me at my home in Orlando, Florida, and we were just sitting around real late, just 3:00 in the morning, goofing off, watching a movie, or TV, or something at my house, and we were just talking about marketing, and he really realized this concept, and Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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how powerful it would be for internet marketing, and essentially what serialization is, which he calls it – it’s just a made-up term – is when you can take a group of something and add it to another concept.

It’s very much like that local version example I gave you. City names are serial groups.

It’s something in series. It’s a group of things like a list of cities, so if you took dentists, and you add it to a group of cities, that would be serializing it, so you’re coming up with all those combinations, but there are many other serial groups, lists, group things that are together in all different kind of markets.

Let me give you some quick examples and how it would apply to marketing. If you sold some information product, some self-published book, eBook, whatever, a course on the secrets for passing admission tests for colleges, well, a serializable – I guess it’s not even a word – opportunity for you for those keywords would be every single college name there is, because if the admission test thing just relates to getting into any college, then you could create Stanford University admission test secrets, University of Maryland admission test secrets, so on and so forth. So you could serialize that one core concept of admission tests and append all the different college names, and there’s probably people obviously searching that stuff all the time, and of course you’d want to do keyword research and find out, but it’s very, very powerful.

So let’s say you had some kind of course or you did something where you’re teaching people how to change their own oil, let’s say. Well, you could serialize that for all the different car types and all the different car models, which is a massive list: how to change your own oil if you have a Honda Accord, how to change your own oil if you have a Nissan 350Z, how to change your own oil if you have a Mercedes C55, so on and so forth. You could just create a ton of keywords by serializing, “Change the oil on your,” and adding that car name. Here’s another example of how this would apply to your business and why this is important of you.

There’s almost serializable things – again, just a made-up word – in almost every industry and every market, so you’ve really got to put your thinking cap on and thing about it, and this is something that can bring really good traffic and good business. That’s very overlooked by most marketers, is this whole serialized concept, but really think about your business. Here’s another example, let’s say you sold movie memorabilia online, some kind of online store. Hopefully you immediately thought of what I was talking about.

You can create pages related to, or include content in some way related to all the different movie titles, but you could also do it with all the different actor names and actress names, and then you can also have the possibilities for all the director names, and producer names, and movie studio names. It just goes on and on, so I hope you can see how

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powerful that is, so think if there’s anything that you can serialize that’s related to your business and to your market. What are some related back door markets?

A back door market is a separate market from yours but that’s related in some way whereas not always, but whereas if someone was doing searches for that market, they’d still be a pretty good candidate to purchase what it is that you sell, or at least some of those people might be good candidates. Obviously your direct keywords that are directly related to what it is that you sell, the more it’s obviously targeted, the higher the conversions will be, and the more money you’re going to get from that, but back door markets are important because they’re often some easy opportunities that other people overlook because they’re so focused on things directly related, and don’t think of things kind of related or parallel to their own markets. Let me give you some examples.

If you sold travel insurance, you could relate that to keywords not only about people searching for travel destinations or for all the different hotels – by the way, talking about serializing, think of all the different hotel names that are out there, and all the different cities in the world, and not only the airlines, and things related to airline tickets, and of course you have museums, and there’s another thing, all the different museum names in the world. There’s so many things, but think about other things that are related to travel, a back door, parallel market that people, obviously if they buy or are interested in it, relates specifically to travel, like luggage. If someone’s doing searches for things related to luggage, the odds are pretty good they’re traveling somewhere, and the odds are pretty good they may be interested in travel insurance.

So do a little bit of thinking about back door markets, and one of the big reasons to think about back door markets is one, I already explained that typically the traffic won’t convert as well, but a lot of times, there are some good opportunities to get some easy traffic, so if it doesn’t take much effort, what do you care? You’ll just take the traffic, which can turn into a customer even short term or in the long term, but you may find that in your business and your market, you may not find a lot of keywords. You may be in a really small niche or a really small market, and you just can’t find a lot of keywords or a lot of keyword volume at least where you’d be able to get much traffic. In this case, you have to go up a notch, like we’ve talked about before, and we’re going to keep talking about, where you go up and you find the next largest subset or next largest set that your market is a subset of, such as gardening being a subset of more or less home improvement or things related to the home.

So if you can’t find a lot of keywords, you’re going to have to go up a notch and find a larger industry or group that your niche is a part of or a child of, like a parent-child relationship. What’s above you, what’s the bigger industry that encompasses you and a bunch of other niche markets, so those can become the back door markets as well, so that’s why you’d want to think of it that way as well. You may have to, and that’s one way that you can find other keywords, and of course they’re not as targeted and they Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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won’t convert as well, but it’s still another opportunity to get traffic, so not only do you want to think of parallel markets, you want to go up for whatever business you have, and consider what that larger umbrella group is for other niches like yours where that would be related to yours, and seek those opportunities as well, and last but not least, it’s vital, notice how I put the word, vital, not important or anything else, because if you look it up in the dictionary, the term vital means requirement for life, I think, where it’s something related to, if you don’t have it, then you die, essentially.

It’s morbid, I know, but it’s that important, vital. Monitor trends in your market. When we get to the content factory stuff, we start talking about research, and we really get into the master plan at the end of this course. We’re talking about things that you need to be doing on a regular basis, and the plan you need to follow.

When all this comes together, part of that is monitoring trends from the blogs that you keep up with, or you pay someone to keep up with as well as other things going on in your industry, so when there’s new news about changes, or stories that are related to your market, or new products coming out, or scandals with companies, or whatever it is that’s related to your market, you need to know what those things are, because industry trends are some of the biggest opportunities to get some easy, freebie, valuable traffic. For example, take the iPhone. When the news about that really started coming out, and it was announced and everything else, there was some marketers I’m sure that rushed to set up pages optimized about the iPhone.

So if anyone searched for iPhone, they’d find their sites, and in the beginning, there probably wasn’t much competition at all, and of course that competition grew over time, but I bet some people made out like bandits, probably got thousands and thousands of visitors that hopefully they were able to monetize and make money from, because they jumped on the trend right away when they knew about it. The other reason why monitoring trends is important is because all of the keyword research tools, they’re not live. They’re not pulling live data. Typically what they’re pulling are search volumes and numbers from a month ago or even 90 days ago, so don’t just think that anything that’s worth anything just shows up in the keyword data and the keyword reports of these services.

They don’t. It takes time, at least a month, sometimes two to three months or more, so if you’re keeping up with trends in your market, I guarantee you, there are searches being done right now related to every single market that are generating a lot of traffic that aren’t yet showing up in keyword reports. So if you just do an effective job of monitoring trends, and that’s all you do, let’s say you forget all the other keywords related to your market, which of course I really don’t want you to do, but let’s just say that all you do is market trends, and when you hear new product names, or you hear about new concepts or services, or just new experts, or just new news, anything related to your market, and you just ran and created some content, and optimized it how you’re going to learn in this 54

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course, and put it up, you could make a ton of money, so you’ll want to do that too.

You’ll want to monitor trends in your market.

CD 3 - Lesson 2: Google Keyword Tool I’m logged into my Google AdWords account to show you the number one keyword tool that you absolutely must pay close, close attention to. Now obviously if you already use Google AdWords, you’re already familiar with this tool, but maybe you don’t know some of the little secrets that it contains or at least the implications of how important some of the data is that it can show you here. Essentially to get here, once you’re logged in, you click on tools at the top. Then you’re going to click on another link that says keyword tool, and it brings you to this page.

Right here you see it says, “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” You have two options: descriptive words or phrases, and I’m going to do that one in just a second.

Let me just type in a keyword like gardening, and it’s going to show us other gardening related keywords, or you can click this website content, and you can put in the URL of your website. If you have an existing website for any page, you can actually put in the URL. You have to put it for each page, and it will go out there, and if you put in your site, for example, it will actually tell you what other keywords and phrases that aren’t even on your website pages that you should use for your keyword research, and of course, for your keyword optimization. It’ll suggest a whole bunch of related keywords and phrases.

The power of this tool is that you can put in any website page, so if you haven’t already figured that out, it’s great to put in some main competitors’ pages, and other pages in your industry, and it’ll come up and tell you a bunch of related keywords. That is incredibly powerful.

Most people don’t think to do that, but under descriptive words or phrases, we’re going to do a quick search here. So I type in gardening, and I’m going to leave this, use synonyms, checked, because that’s going to give us something very, very valuable, and there’s all different ways that you can filter some of your searches, but you can come in here, poke around, and learn some of the nuances on your own, but just click, get keyword ideas, and up’s going to come a bunch of keywords and information related to gardening. Here’s a whole bunch of keywords related to gardening and you’ll notice they all either have gardening actually in it, or their technology takes off the ing and shortens it down to garden, and that’s the keyword.

It contains garden or the full word, gardening, so you’ll notice that every keyword here is either garden or gardening, and it’s pulling all these keywords from its database. The other thing its showing you here is how much competition there currently is in people buying AdWords ads for these keywords individually. It doesn’t really give a number or Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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percentage, but this full bar is tons of competition. Full bar almost is just a little bit less than that, and so on and so forth, so obviously when you get down here and you see empty, it means pretty much no one’s buying ads for that keyword, and obviously in the middle, you can figure out it’s a middle ground there.

Also on this results page, it’s showing you average search volume as well as for a previous month, and it’s following the same little percentage based chart thing here, and typically you don’t need to pay attention to that. If it’s a seasonal type thing, then usually the search volume will change, if it’s some kind of trend, but if you notice, it’s almost the same for most of them. That’s one way to come up with some keywords. You can just put in a phrase and then out comes all these words, and then at the end of course you can be adding them to a list by clicking add, but you can say download all keywords in a text file, a CSV file, and so on, and the CSV file is what I mentioned before.

If you just click this, you’ll download it into your hard drive, and that’s what you upload into your spreadsheet, like Google Docs, or Excel, or Numbers, and that’s how you get this data into that program very easily, but here is the valuable thing about a Google keyword tool. Underneath that first section, now it says, “Additional keywords to consider,” and these got listed because we left the little synonyms thing checked, so this is that LSI thing I was telling you about. These are related theme words, but pay very close attention to what I’m about to tell you, because most people totally miss this and don’t understand the importance of this.

Here is an incredibly valuable group of three words: sorted by relevance, so the top one Google considers the most relevant to whatever that word was you searched for at the top, in our case, gardening, and then it shows the next one, and then the next one, and so on down through this list, getting further and further away from what’s most relevant, although these are still related. They’re just not as related as obviously the ones at the top and so on and so forth. Now why is this important?

This is very important, obviously, because I already told you, Google’s using LSI as part of their algorithm for how they rank web pages, and a big part of the process is it looks on your pages. Let’s say if you were trying to rank high for gardening in this example, it’s going to look on your page for some of these other keywords to see if they exist, and no one knows this for sure, but from some test data I’ve seen as well as from my own research, and it’s obvious in a way, the more relevant your LSI words are to the keyword that you’re optimizing your page for, the better off you are on making that page itself relevant to Google. Google hasn’t come out and said it, I don’t think, a hundred percent.

People have hinted at it, and it’s nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and of course they’re never going to reveal the algorithm or give you too much information anyway, but I think it’s obvious that if you use this at least as some sort of meter of relevance – well, I’ve already seen it. You can’t go wrong in using this as a baseline, and I’m going to show you how to 56

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do that when we get into optimizing our content so it’ll rank high but this is incredibly valuable. They’re telling you what’s relevant.

They’re saying, “Hey, here’s the phrases that you should consider.” They’re doing this when you’re buying AdWords ads, but you can use this data for optimizing your pages for their search engine, but since they’re showing you what’s relevant, you’re going to learn to optimize with these terms, and as I said before by the way – I’ll just stop right here, you want to follow natural patterns of the internet, and you can’t lose. All these Black Hat techniques that spam and are abusive to us, they’re always short lived. I don’t really believe in doing any of that stuff, so what you’re going to learn to do is randomize some of this, just in case you were thinking I’m going to have you just go heavy on maybe the first two, if I’m going to go in for gardening.

No, it’s not going to be that predictable, but we are going to lean heavily towards heavier use of the more relevant terms when we go to optimize for, in this example, gardening, so that’s why the keyword tool of Google is incredibly valuable and incredibly important.

They’re literally telling you what’s also related to the term that you searched for up top, and they’re almost whispering to you if you want to rank high, we’re probably going to be looking for these other terms to see if they exist to base the total relevance of that initial keyword, or at least for it to have a big part of it. The other reason why those LSI words are so important is you’ve probably heard of this Google Slap thing, and we’re going to get to it when we get into AdWords, and that is your landing page needs to have a high quality score in order for Google to, well, first, give you a score, period, but in order for them to give you a price for what you’re going to pay per click, and the – sorry, I didn’t make any sense there going, “So you need a quality score to give you a score.”

So when they score the relevance of your landing page or how good they think the quality is, because it’s part of them trying to deliver a good product to their users and not just have unrelated ads show up, it’s a smart way, because it’s all automated. Their technology is going to look at your landing page that you’re trying to send traffic to.

When you buy an ad, you’re going to send traffic from your ad from Google to your page. Part of the process is they’re going to look to that page to see what quality they think it is using a computer algorithm and the lower the quality, the higher they’re going to make you pay per click.

They’re going to penalize you and on the other side of things, if it’s really relevant, and good quality, and makes a good score, they’re going to reward you and let you pay near the minimums. Well, when we get to AdWords mastery, you’re going to learn how to do that down to the science or very, very close to it, even though Google doesn’t actually tell you exactly what their formula is, and that’s how you can get the lowest cost per click when you buy keywords, and the majority of people advertising in AdWords aren’t able or aren’t currently getting the lowest cost. We’ve seen data that supports that.

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So if you just learn to do that, you’re going to have a leg up on the competition, but that’s why that tool is really important, the part with the synonyms where it shows you those LSI words, because to get a good quality score, you’ll want to use some of those terms on your landing page as well as the main keyword such as gardening, as an example. So this is the Google AdWords keyword tool. This is absolutely a tool that you need to be using, and the great thing about this one is it’s free.

CD 3 - Lesson 3: Using Directories Another great way to find keywords for your business is to use web directories. Yahoo is one of the biggest web directories on the entire internet, so it’s a good place to start, to poke around and get some ideas. They used to have their categories right here at the top of the home page, and they don’t have anymore because they’ve moved more to just having a search field and a search base like Google, but down on the left hand side is where you can get to some of their directory stuff, and you drill your way down, so if you come over here and find something that’s related to your business, as least as close as possible, you want to start there.

So for example, we can start in shopping and then you’ll find most things product based, and then you can shop by category, so we if had something to do, let’s say in the gourmet foods market, and along the principle of piggybacking, letting other people do the work for us, and just not trying to reinvent the wheel, obviously Google spent thousands and thousands of hours and a lot of money to hire people to build a directory for the web, and so part of building the directory for the web is coming up with all these relevant categories, that categories all different types of information for different things, and so you come in here, if we were doing gourmet foods, and we saw all kinds of things on the web with some gourmet food store, here are a bunch of main category names.

It may even contain things that we don’t even sell, but we can get some good keywords, and do some backdoor type things with those keywords, so as you can see, this is where you can get some good data, and of course if you drill into any one of these, you can typically just poke around and see other names, like the names of different coffee names or tea names in this example, different types of herbs, different product names. Here’s a model name for some tea maker, so you can just get all kinds of ideas that your normal keyword research won’t even come up with. So using a web directory is very powerful to be able to come up with core concepts. It’s also a great way to – let me jump over here real quick.

It’s also a great way to find that level above you like we talked about, or parallel levels in the same area, because you’re in a directory. You go up one set of topics and you can find that, so DMOS, same thing. You can come in here, let’s say we sold something, again, we’ll just go with food. I know we’ve been doing gardening, but we’ll just go food real quick, and so here’s a bunch of things.

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If we were doing organic food, not only can we find competitors this way, but you could just scan this real quick and see some different keywords that maybe we didn’t think about. You could copy and paste the URL to this page itself and submit it into that Google suggestion tool, and do the synonyms, and check website content instead of descriptive words and phrases. I showed you where you could tell Google to find things on your own page or other people’s pages, and then this page could create a whole bunch of other ideas and keywords, so it’s almost like an endless flow of keyword concepts and keyword ideas, sousing web directories is just a great way to be able to find parallel markets and find other topics that maybe you didn’t even think about, so you’ll want to use some web directories like this is dmos.org, as well as use Yahoo, and if you have any directory that’s related to your industry, you’ll want to use that as well. It’s a great place to find keywords.

CD 3 - Lesson 4: Meta Tag Spying A great place to find keywords is of course from your competitors, and I’m actually going to show you a tool that will automate this process, but I want to show you the manual method just in case you don’t already know how to do this, because it can be very useful if you come upon a page and you’re just curious about what types of keywords they’re trying to optimize for. Whatever browser you use, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, pretty much all the browsers, if you go to the very top, you’ll find a menu option that says view, and then you’ll find an option that says view source, and when you do that, this is what happens. It comes up with the actual HTML, which is just text, and also on your computer in your menu, you should have some kind of a search feature.

I’m on the Mac and it’s Apple-F that brings this up, and then I can type in meta, which is already there, because I just did this, and it will show us where meta is in the HTML. What we want to look for is meta name equals keywords, and we see that right here, and following that, you see, it says content equals, and then here are a bunch of keywords that this site in particular is trying to optimize this home page for.

You can do that with any page on the web and find what they’re trying to optimize it for, because everybody uses those meta tags, or most people if they know how to do search engine optimization, which isn’t a critical, critical part of search engine optimization anymore, but it’s still something you just want to do anyways, and what I’m going to have you do when we get into creating content pages, and of course optimizing them, but that’s just a way that you can manually take any page and find out if it has meta tag keywords to find what they’re trying to optimize for. Just view the source, so a search for meta, find that meta name equals keywords, and then you’ll see the keywords for that page. It’s just that easy.

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CD 3 - Lesson 5: Compete.com We’ve already briefly talked about compete.com before, and how you can use it just to find out how much traffic a website is getting or a good estimation, but compete.com also has some incredibly powerful competitive research tools that you can use for keyword research and keyword analysis. Now you have to pay for most of their sophisticated reports, but they’re well worth it. They’re actually not that expensive. You can run compete, extensive reports on certain things for two dollars, so you can buy fifty dollars’ worth of credits at a time, and then use up your credits, and then buy more, but it’s really a tool you want to consider using and paying for the reports, because a lot of the data is incredibly valuable.

Let me just show you real quick what it can do, so you come in here, and for example, under site referrals, you can come in here and it says, “Find out which keywords are sending traffic to a specific site,” or you can actually pick an entire category, so the first thing you want to do is see if you can find your specific niche or category for your business in this long list of categories. You may or may not be able to find it. By the way, some of the listings here and subsets of data may actually give you some good keyword examples to use and add to your master list, just like using a web directory, because this is a directory of sorts, and you can see subsets of topics, but that’s the first thing you want to look for, to see if your industry’s in there.

If it is, you’ll want to pay for the full report to get all the data that you can on your industry, but if you can’t, or even if you can, aside from that, you can come in here and you can run reports on specific sites, so you put in the domain. This is actually the site we were just looking at, and I showed you how to manually find their meta keywords, so if we put in that domain name, and we press go here, it’s going to run this report, and it comes up, and it shows us some ridiculous information, incredibly value. It shows us, and a lot of this is estimated, but it’s probably ninety percent accurate, so it is pretty accurate.

It’s showing us what keywords are driving traffic to that site, so the keyword, rain barrel, is currently the most traffic of all the search engine keywords. Of all the pages that domain, that site has optimized, the word, rain barrel, is bringing them the most traffic.

Isn’t that amazing? The next one is compost bins and then you can see the other terms and how they rank as far as the traffic. It gives you a rough estimate of the percentage of their overall traffic that each keyword brings.

They’ve got some other little metrics here about how effective the keywords were, and the engagement, like how long they stayed on the site after someone searched for that keyword, clicked on it, went to their site, and then what they did. They’re somewhat accurate, because I’ve looked at some of my own keywords, and then looked at my own data, but I wouldn’t put too much weight into that. You can use it as some interesting 60

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data. You may find some valuable correlations if you really think about how some of those things might affect your market when you’re analyzing competitors, but overall, I wouldn’t put too much attention to it.

You mainly just want to look at the traffic totals as well as just these keywords. So it’s giving you just all this keyword data, and of course you can view up to, in this case, 151 total keywords and it’s asking me for two more credits, which is a buck fifty or something I think with what I paid, because it’s different prices based on how many credits you want to buy at one time, and the more you buy, of course you get a discount, but you could put any competitor’s domain in here, and it’s going to show you all the traffic they get, or the estimated traffic from all the different keywords, and if the site’s newly indexed, or it’s a newly optimized site, or any other factors, sometimes it won’t have many keywords showing up in here yet, and it takes some time. It takes several months for it to lapse, but that’ll just give you a basic idea of what some of your competitors keywords are, and the different traffic breakdowns of what those keywords are getting.

For example, at the time that I’m recording this, if I put in our main domain, income.com, it doesn’t have enough data, so it only just shows a few small keywords, and of course I have my own data to look at because I could look at my own Google Analytics account and see hundreds, if not thousands of keywords. So again, sometimes you have to come back in time and be patient for it to catch up, because these services use all different kinds of things to collect their data, and sometimes one site may take six months or a year, other sites maybe two months, but come in here and put in your main competitors, and hopefully they’ll have some data on them, and you can find some valuable stuff. The next thing is you come here to keyword destination.

You can type in a keyword and it’s going to show you which websites get most of that traffic. I guess I can’t really go back very easily, but we just looked at that other gardening site. Let’s type in gardening itself, and we want to see who gets the most traffic from the search engine word, gardening, and then who’s second, so let’s click exact match, because we want to know exactly just this word, gardening. If we pick broad match, that would include gardening tools, gardening services, and other things, but just the actual word, gardening, so here it comes real quick with our data.

About.com gets the most, garden.org gets the next, so on and so forth, and you can just go down this list and see who’s getting the most traffic from that one keyword, very valuable data, and the percentage of their share of all the searches. Of all the searches, about.com, those stinkers, they get a fourth of all the traffic to gardening. That’s pretty awesome. Look at this number, average monthly search referrals. This is all the traffic they get from all their pages listed in the search engines.

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They’re getting 36 million visitors a month for free just from their search engine optimization. Now I do have to say this number is not accurate. I have found it to be underreporting, so the real number is probably quite a bit higher than that, and it’s not necessarily the case with all sites of it underreporting, but I think it is, from what I can tell, but either way, it gives you a basic idea. It’s not a hundred percent accurate, but it gives you a basic idea of the traffic some of these sites are getting. You can do it by the keyword and then of course if you look at their total, but look at Yahoo.

130 million visitors a month come from search pages, searched terms I should say, where people click on pages of theirs that are indexed – incredible. Wikipedia, 119 million visits a month. How would you like to have those visits for free, just from your SEO and your ranked pages? MSN, 29 million, but look at sites like GardenWeb. They’re getting a million a month in free visitors.

HGTV, 1.8 million, and again, I bet that number’s a lot higher. Anyway, this is, as you can tell, a really cool service to run some cool reports as well as a very valuable keyword research tool that you need to be using in your arsenal. It’s not that expensive to run reports. You definitely want to do it on your top ten competitors. It’s worth the twenty bucks. See what keywords they’re optimized for, and how much traffic they’re getting, and their market share, as well as maybe put in the top ten of the primary keywords for your market and see who’s getting that traffic, and how it breaks down, and it’s just incredibly valuable.

CD 3 - Lesson 6: SeoDigger Here’s another great tool that you’ll want to consider using for your keyword research.

This is SEO Digger, and this thing’s pretty cool. There’s quite a bit that you can do for free, but it is a paid service that will allow you to do more and get more data, and you’ll want to consider that if it’s in your budget, so check it out. Enter your link or domain in a field below. I have typed in the domain of that same gardening site that we looked at before, so now what I want to do is search for the keywords, and because I already did this, I’m just going to jump forward, and show you the results, and here’s what comes up when I do that search.

It’s showing me all the keywords that it can find in its database, which isn’t necessarily all of them, but all the ones that are in this services database that it’s finding in Google that are ranked for this company, and it sorts them or starts to sort them by the ranking, so check it out. For these first listed keywords, they have the number one ranking, and then for the next few, you could see there’s three second place ones, and then a bunch of thirds, then a bunch of fourths, and some fifths, and so on and so forth on down the line, and you can just go through all these different keywords. The other data gives you about – each keyword is – its estimating traffic based on numbers from Wordtracker, which I’m going to talk to you about in a minute, as well as from the Overture tool, which most 62

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people don’t really use much anymore for keyword research, because it’s not all that great, but a lot of these zeroes, it would seem that they’re estimating zero traffic, but I think the number is so small according to the estimated score of some of these services, so it just doesn’t give any data, but it doesn’t mean it’s not getting any traffic.

How cool is that? You can put in one of your competitors’ domain names and it’ll tell you all the different terms that it’s ranking for in Google as well as their positions. Now this is great because if you find a site that looks weak at search engine optimization, you can come in here and put in their domain, and you may find a bunch of decent keywords that they’re actually ranking high for, and you know they’re not that good at SEO, because after you complete this course, you’re going to be good at it, and so you should be able to overtake them pretty easily in the rankings and start getting some good traffic.

As you can tell, there’s a lot of uses for these types of research services to get keyword ideas, to get competitive data, and just all kinds of other things that you can start to think about as far as how keywords relate to your market, and what they’re doing for this competitor, and what they’re up to, and what they’re thinking about for their marketing.

It’s just very, very powerful, but this is SEO Digger and it’s a must-use tool for sure if you want to do complete keyword research and competitive analysis.

CD 3 - Lesson 7: SpyFu Here’s another great tool to use for keyword research. This is spyfu.com, and this is pretty cool because it can do keyword research data based on the keywords that people are advertising for in Google and their Google AdWords program, so you can see all the different keywords that people are currently buying and trying to get clicks from as well as it’ll estimate what cost per click costs actually are, and some trends for that. That data’s not exactly totally accurate, but at least it’s some okay benchmark data, at least just to get some basic ideas on, so simple. You can enter it and do it by domain or you can do keyword.

Let’s just do keyword, and you click search, and it’s going to come up with a bunch of data on who’s advertising in AdWords. This data isn’t a hundred percent live, so it’s not coming from today. It’s older data, because a lot of its cached because of the heavy searching, but again, it’s still a really good research tool, so it’s showing you the variation of prices of what it would cost per click in Google AdWords to generate traffic if you’re running ads under the keyword of just gardening, so it ranges from 44 cents to a $1.18, depending on the current competition. Again, those numbers aren’t a hundred percent accurate, because I’ve looked, but they’re pretty close, and again you could just use it as a baseline type of number.

It’ll tell you how many results, how many pages there are in Google, roughly how many clicks per day it will bring. That keyword in total brings about 3,000, and what it would Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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cost per day, because it’s estimating there, if you got all the traffic, so I’m up to $3,000.00 a day in cost, again, not a hundred percent accurate, but at least fun to be able to look at and get some ideas from. These are some of the ads that it pulled in Google, and what they say, and who the advertiser is, and the URL, and so that’s what this lists.

Down below it is search results, so it’s showing you the natural search results for that keyword. We’ll show you some categories, so you can get some good ideas for other markets, so you can obviously flip through and view more of the sites that it’s pulling from AdWords, and some more of the data. A lot of it in here, like a lot of the other tools, you have to pay for. That’s how they’re set up.

They give you very, very limited stuff for free, because they want you to obviously pay for their service. Let’s do one more real quick where we’ll type in a domain name. Let’s do HDTV, which we already saw gets tons of traffic from search engines. Let’s see if they’re buying any ads, so clearly they’re buying a lot of ads on AdWords. It’s showing you some of the natural results, keywords that they ranked for, but it’s also showing you what they’re advertising for, and it found 4,000 different keywords that they’re running ads for.

Now this is pretty cool, when you do it by domain. It shows you the top 1,000 competing domains. That’s some good data there that you want to do. It shows you that and then it shows you the top competitors that are advertising for their related keywords. It also shows you the sub-domains that that company’s using, and some of the categories where that content would fall for that company related to this keyword.

This estimates the click costs and the daily ad budget. I guess that is the daily ad budget, so it ranges from ninety bucks to over $1,000.00. I thought that was the click up there.

Oh, here’s the average cost per click. They’re paying between six cents, and 93 cents, and this is the trend change.

Anyway, you can come in here and poke around on your own. There’s a lot of great data in here. You can get a lot of good information, as you can tell, for free. Typically, if you come in here, and you start clicking some of this more stuff, this is what you’re going to see, and they’re going to try to get you subscribed, which is okay, depending on the data, depending on what you’re looking for, and what kind of value you’re getting from just the free searches like this. It might be worth paying, and that’s something you’re going to have to make a decision on, but this is SpyFu. It’s pretty cool.

CD 3 - Lesson 8: WordTracker Let’s take a quick look at Wordtracker. Wordtracker is one of the King Kong tools of keyword research and SEO. Pretty much any serious internet marketer that’s doing any

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kind of keyword research stuff has a subscription to Wordtracker. It’s a great industry tool.

I actually know the owners. They’re good people, and it’s a great product, and again, almost every serious internet marketer I know uses this tool. It’s a must-have, so this is definitely one you’re going to want to fit into your marketing budget. This is their little freebie tool that you can test drive for free before you want to get a full on subscription, and when you get a paid subscription, you get a lot more data including that KEI thing that I was talking about where you can find the score of how competitive it will be to get traffic from certain terms, but let’s just do a quick search just to show you the basics.

Type in your keyword, it allows you to filter out adult related words, do a search, and it shows you other keywords related to gardening, and notice each one of these keywords is a variation, so it has the word gardening in it, and it just shows you all these other great keywords that you want to add to your master keyword list, and then of course at the bottom it says you need to buy Wordtracker if you want to mine 1,000 long tail keywords on this variation of gardening. So as you can see, it ranks it by volume.

So the keyword at the top is the one that gets the most traffic, and then the second one, third, so on and so forth, all the way down ‘til you get farther out on the long tail here, and you find some that just aren’t searched for that much, and of course, as I explained before, the farther long tail you go, the less search volume it is, but of course, a lot of times, it can convert higher, so you may only get one visitor a month from certain keywords, but if that visitor fifty percent of the time buys your product, you’ll be fine with it. That’s much better than having a keyword that brings 1,000 visits and day and one person only buys every five months out of hundreds of thousands of visitors. You get the point.

It’s that simple. Search volume, number of searches, and then it shows you the keywords, and if you click one of the keywords, it will drill down further into that keyword, so this was organic gardening. Click that and now it shows all the variations of organic gardening, all these other long tail variations that have organic gardening, or as you see here, gardening, organic, with it in the other order, and now you can see these volume numbers come down even more because we’re going farther down the long tail, but that’s how you can find more and more keywords.

So if you have a paid subscription to this fantastic service, which you absolutely must have, you can search for thousands upon thousands of keywords related to your market very quickly and very efficiently, and then easily export that data into one of those files that you can import into your spreadsheet, but Wordtracker is a must-have, because you can find that KEI value of how competitive it’s going to be, how hard it’s going to be to generate traffic from certain keywords. You can find a lot of golden opportunities where you can get some decent traffic, and there’s no competition, and you pretty much don’t Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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have to do much SEO at all. Just put up a page that has that title and a few other little things that you’ll learn, and you can start getting traffic, so a very valuable service to subscribe to, so you’ll definitely want to do that.

CD 3 - Lesson 9: Keyword Discovery Let me just quickly show you another tool that’s great. This is Keyword Discovery. A lot of people that have Wordtracker also have this because it can find some different keywords, and it can actually find some different type of data.

It can find misspellings, and it can do some keyword density analysis, and all this other fancy stuff that you may find some good interest in, and so this is another one that you’ll want to consider if you have it in your budget. I would probably suggest that if you could only have one, you go with Wordtracker, but if you can afford it, then also go with this one, which is Keyword Discovery, because Keyword Discovery is fantastic. It’s another great tool that you can find a lot of really good keywords and a lot of other valuable data and also do some decent competitive analysis, or at least industry trends and things based on your market, and get some other goldmine keyword research data, so this is Keyword Discovery.

CD 3 - Lesson 10: WordZe This is Wordze. It’s yet another keyword research tool. The unique thing about this tool is not only can it find you a bunch of keywords and some keywords that other keyword tools may miss, but they have some pretty neat algorithmic formulas that they’ve come up with on their own aside from that KEI index. They’ve got their own little formulas that can help predict how easy it will be to generate traffic from certain keywords, and so it’s definitely worth considering getting a subscription, or at least trying it out for maybe a month to see what you can do with their data, and how it can add some keywords to your total keyword research file, but check them out, take the tour, learn about them when you have some time.

That’s Wordze, just like it looks there at the top, and their site’s wordze.com. You could just go and check it out, but they’re a pretty cool tool that a lot of SEO consultants and experts use along of course with Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, and some of the others, so check this out. This is Wordze.

CD 3 - Lesson 11: Your Analytics This is Google Analytics again. I briefly showed it to you before. It’s incredibly powerful for tracking all your traffic, and it’s an absolute must-use tool, especially because it’s free and it’s so valuable. I just want to show you something real quick

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related to keyword research, and just something that we’re going to revisit when we get to the master plan for sharing something I’m going to have you do on a regular basis, but you can come in here, you can come under content, and then you can come under top landing pages, and then you’ll see your top landing pages, the path they are off of your domain name and on your server, and how many visits came in through those pages, and this is that little ping tool site that I purchased a couple of years ago, and I’ll just use it again because it’s a good example of some strange keywords.

So if we click this top one, that top page, and then we come down here and we click entrance keywords, it’s going to show us the top keywords per page, so we click that, we get a list, we have it show a lot more keywords here. During the date range of the last thirty days, which this is currently set to, we’re seeing all the visitors, the number of visits, and the keyword that brought them to the site and this is incredibly valuable for two primary reasons. One, you can find some great keywords that you never even thought of and then add them to your master keyword file, but two, if you find a keyword for example that you never knew of before and weren’t even trying to optimize for, like let’s say this blog submission site’s one that brought 37 visitors in the past 30 days, again, 37 free visitors.

We can simply go to this page. We know what it is because you can go by specific page and just tweak it a little bit to try to optimize it more for that specific keyword phrase, and in most cases, it’ll be a piece of cake to up this number because we’re not even trying to optimize for it, and it’s getting a little bit of traffic here, and so if we tweak the page a little bit towards that keyword, maybe use it a couple more times somewhere in the body of that page content, and maybe do some other things, of course we don’t want to over optimize for the other keywords that are bringing more traffic than it does, otherwise we’re going to potentially lose that, so it’s a fine balancing act, but it should be a piece of cake just to make some minor changes so it’s more relevant as a page for that term that it already is now, and that number will go up.

That’s just how easy search engine optimization can be if you manage it, and of course that’s all a part of our master plan, and I’m going to have you do that, but that’s just a quick example, and then of course if you did know of this keyword phrase, and you were actively optimizing your pages for it, or this page specifically, well, it works the same way. Now we can see what kind of traffic is coming in, and we can try to do some tweaks and tests, and see if the number goes up or down. Of course, if it goes up, then we leave it alone, or maybe try even more.

If it goes down, then maybe we change it back to what it was. It’s just that simple, so as you can tell, Google Analytics, this free service is an incredible tool for you to use in the process of building your keyword research file and maintaining your activity on a regular basis for the traffic that you generate from keywords. It’s just again, incredibly valuable.

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CD 3 - Lesson 12: Review Let’s review. Keyword research, I stressed how important it was. It’s incredibly important and extremely valuable, and I’m sure you realize that by now. Start by doing a thorough brainstorming session. As you know by now of course, you can see how incredibly easy it is to do powerful keyword research with those tools that are available, but it all starts with just a good, solid brainstorming session about you and your business, and your customers, and the market, and your industry, and everything else that’s related to it.

Start with at least a good baseline to work from, because those tools aren’t mind readers and they can’t do all the work for you, so start with a good brainstorming session to come up with an initial starting point to work from, and think about even involving other people. Ask friends and family to give you a hand, and tell you what ideas they think of.

Of course, two heads are better than one, and some other people may come up with some concepts and ideas that you didn’t even think about, so consider doing that.

Use a spreadsheet to store your keyword files. I like Google Docs, but you can use Excel, or even Numbers, and you’re going to regularly keep this up to date, and it’s important because it’s important to your business. You need to properly manage and store this information, so use a spreadsheet.

Analyze backdoor market opportunities. Consider some of those backdoor possibilities that are described, and how you can go about finding them, and of course, if you start generating traffic from some of those backdoor opportunities, when we get into optimizing pages and creating content, and let’s say you succeed, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem after you go through this whole course, when you start generating traffic, and if there is a situation where you can’t get much of it to convert because it’s not your direct market, don’t forget that it doesn’t make that traffic worthless. Go out there, join some affiliate programs, and promote products directly related to that keyword, and to its traffic, and you can make some money that way, so analyze any potential backdoor market opportunities.

Use multiple keyword tools. We went over this. You want to use as many as possible, and as far as the paid subscription tools, whatever your budget will allow. You definitely need to be using at least a couple of those and it would be a pretty wise investment and money well spent, so make sure that you use multiple keyword tools, because they all get different keywords from different places and different methods, and you can expand your keyword list the most by using multiple tools, and that’s a big mistake 99% of marketers I bet probably make on the internet is that they’re only using one tool, so get that edge by just using more tools.

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Piggyback, this is our core concept that makes all this stuff so powerful and valuable, yet so easy. Piggyback on competitors’ keyword research. Use those tools to dig out the keywords that they’re already driving traffic from. We saw that with the compete.com tool, what they’re advertising with in many places. We saw it with SpyFu, and then of course just the keywords they’re using, period, and their meta tags, and other things that we could see with SEO Digger, and the pages that they’re getting optimized for, or at least that they’re listed for in the Google results that we saw with SEO Digger, so piggyback on what your competitors are doing and take a shortcut.

Always monitor trends in your industry. Keep up with what’s going on and what’s changing, and of course it can introduce you to some new keyword and freebie traffic opportunities where you can get the jump on everyone else that won’t know any of that until they happen to stumble upon it anyway in those keyword tools and even if they do stumble upon it, it may not be for several months, so make sure to monitor trends and keep up with your industry, and last but not least, analyze Google Analytics data to find opportunities.

Find obscure phrases that will bring you traffic that you didn’t even know about, add them to your main keyword file, and/or even if you already knew about them, it’s a great way to see results and then do some tweaking and some minor improvement to try to get even more traffic from something that’s bringing you traffic and proving to work.

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CD 4: SEO Dynamics Lesson 1: Overview SEO Dynamics. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your pages in your website, so it will rank high when people search for things when they use Google or any other search engine. But mainly when we think about SEO, most SEO is done now a days with Google in mind, because Google dominates the search landscape.

It dominates the market share for the number of searches being done, and so you’re better off just kind of optimizing your pages for ranking high in Google and then just letting the magic happen, so to speak, if you happen to rank in any of the other search engines for keywords and phrases that you end up using for your pages.

Now the one thing about SEO itself is, it’s very complicated, it changes on a regular basis, and the most important thing is though, no one knows the magic formula exactly.

Not unless they actually work for Google when it comes to Google’s algorithm, and one of the engineers that work on it. Everyone else has no clue what the real formula is. Now it doesn’t mean that people haven’t figured out a lot of things about how to make pages rank high, and they haven’t figured out some certain tricks and things that actually work, but, nobody really knows and a lot of things people are saying aren’t true, and so there’s a lot of controversy when it comes to the whole SEO world. Because so many people want the benefits that it offers of having a number one ranking and getting a ton of free traffic and sales. And others are battling it out, trying to figure this all out.

So, you need to go into SEO with this in mind. Know that it’s constantly going to change, and know that you’re never going to be able to figure it out completely. And neither is anyone else. So, where does that leave us? It’s very very simple. And on this CD, I’m not going to make it overcomplicated for you. We’re going to talk about using a fundamental strategy in order to get it to work well enough for us to then go from there and move to a secondary stage of improvement to get even more traffic. Rather than trying to do things perfectly in an imperfect world or situation, so to speak, when it’s kind of like trying to hit a moving target. So, SEO is important but it needs a solid strategy. It’s kind of like that 80/20 rule that we’ve constantly been talking about in this course. 20% of the factors will produce 80% of the results in anything. And 80% of the factors on the other side will only produce 20%. Well our focus with SEO is to kind of focus on the 20% of fundamentals that are kind of proven or at least are getting decent results for certain people that, the factors that most people at large have kind of gotten to work. And then we’ll go with whatever results we get from those, and improve things to get better results.

First thing to understand, it’s a core thing is, this LSI thing you’ve probably heard about: Latent semantic indexing. I say here it’s the future, it’s really already present, but it’s becoming more and more prevalent and important when it comes to the whole SEO

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process. What this basically means is, it’s no longer enough to say, “I want to rank high for golf clubs” and that you just have a web page that has golf clubs used in the title, and in the body, and in some links, and images and all these other things, and then you’re just going to rank high for golf clubs. The whole LSI process was done to fight the abuse of people that just stuffed pages with golf clubs, golf clubs, golf clubs, so on and so forth, and it’s kind of a smarter more intelligent way for Google and other search engines to fight abuse. And so what this LSI thing does is use themes related to other words. So, it would just be same to assume that a page that would rank well, or would be relevant, which is what this is all about: serving the most relevant result for people that search for something. A page that would be relevant for golf clubs, would also have some other related words too, whatever theme it belongs to. Like maybe Tiger Woods, or driver, or irons, or putter, other words related to the key word itself. And so what you’re going to learn to do this course, and what you’re going to learn that’s becoming more and more important for SEO, is simply to use other words and phrases throughout the page itself that you’re trying to rank for a certain keyword/phrase for, as well as when it comes to links that are coming to that page or anywhere to your site, that they contain what’s called anchor text, which is what the actual link text says, using these LSI keywords and phrase, and not just the keyword that you’re trying to rank high for. Because that’s where the algorithm currently is in words. Continually moving towards, getting more and more built around that concept around these themes. And so, that’s what we’re going to build our foundation around, is doing that.

SEO, simple. And this CD I’m going to try just to make it simple for you and just get down to the nitty-gritty core elements of it. By the way, in the resources section will constantly keep up with some of the changes and will link to all kinds of other theories and things that people are trying and tricks and things, and so you can always go there and find the latest of what’s going on. But, the CD we’re just sticking with some fundamental things that we know about SEO or at least some people have figured out about it, and then we’re going to take it from there.

But SEO is all about pretty much two things: the content you have on your site, and picking the right key words for your site, and then just links to your site or to your pages.

That’s it, that’s what it all comes down to. How the content is structured on one page, and incoming links from across the internet to that page, or to the site that the page belongs to. That’s it. That’s what SEO all comes down to.

Success for SEO comes down to research. There are a lot of tools that you can use for all different kinds of things related to SEO. Finding who’s linking to competitors, and what makes up their page, and do they have high page rank, and all these other things that do with SEO. So if you go to the resources section, we’ll compile a whole list of tools that you can use to kind of help you in your task to compete in this SEO game against your competitors.

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But there are so many great tools you can use that will just give you a head start, and use that piggybacking process, and I’m going to cover a few concepts in this CD itself, on the CD, but you’ll find even more of those in the resources section.

You’ve probably heard of page rank, it’s kind of part of Google’s magic algorithm where it gives a score to a specific page that’s out there on the internet, whether it’s one of your pages or anyone else’s page. And that score has to do with kind of the value it gives it in the whole kind of, web construct of pages. And the higher the number, I think it pretty much goes from zero up to I think page rank nine is the top, I think maybe Google itself is PR 10 or maybe I got it wrong that Google is PR 9 and then it comes down from there.

But pretty much PR 9 is at the top, then 8,7,6, so on and so forth, anyways. You don’t really need to worry too much about that, but that page rank thing really relates to specific pages, and not necessarily to specific sites, although the home page of a site has a PR number itself. So many people get caught up in PR scores, and that’s why I’m mentioning this. And so certain pages, within a site, can have a higher PR number than the home page, so you can’t always just go by if a site has a high PR number, and you get a link from one of the pages to your site, that it’s kind of carrying that value. Because if it comes from a deeper page on the site, it doesn’t have as high of a PR number, it wouldn’t mean as much as a link coming from the home page, so sorry to have kind of get all crazy with that, but I just wanted to point that out.

But really we’re not going to focus too much on that. PR is important, we talk about link building, we do optimally want to get links from higher PR pages, but just not just higher PR pages, but related pages based on themes. This whole LSI concept: we want to get links from pages that contain similar content, keywords, and LSI keywords to ours.

Otherwise, the link isn’t as important to Google, and it has a lot to do with their whole algorithm.

Page structure and site architecture is half the battle pretty much. How you structure your page, where the keywords go, where the LSI keywords go, and then of course, how your whole site architecture works. How you link from page to page to page. How they link to the home page. And all kinds of other things that go along with that. The domain name that you use, the structure of the URL’s, the structure of the pass for your folders that sites are in, all that kind of good stuff. So, we’re going to talk a lot about that. And then of course, the other side of the equation are those incoming links. What’s in them? So the structure of the links, what keywords they contain, as well as where they come from?

What the quality of that site is that they come from, and how relevant it is to our site.

The bottom line is, our strategy is simple. We’re just going to do a lot of fundamental things, get our stuff out there, and as we get more and more pages out there that are fundamentally sound, we’ll start to get results. And the process is simple. We’re just going to look at what are getting results and then tweak it to get more result. It’s really the 80/20 rule. We’re going to look at what’s bringing in 80% of our free search engine 72

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traffic, and we’re going to focus on that small 20% of our pages and keywords to make it produce even more traffic faster for us, rather then going the other way around and spending so much time on these certain keywords that maybe we’ve targeted, we’re just not having much luck after we’ve actually put in a lot of effort, and we’re trying to rank high.

Obviously you want to target your main performing keywords for your business and your market, and hopefully over time, get higher and higher rankings for the best keyword, for your market, that’s the ultimate goal. But that’s pretty much in almost every market, a long-term process. Because there’s so much competition in almost every industry now, let’s not focus too much on saying, “golf clubs” is the keyword we want to target, and that we’re going to do all these things over and over and over, and spend all our time until we can rank in the top five. Because if you only do that, you’re missing out on potentially tens of thousands of free visitors that can be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars in sales with your business in a much shorter amount of time that it will take for you to get those high rankings for most popular key words.

So our strategy is going to be both. A strategy for you is to target those main keywords that will convert the best for your business. By the way, it’s all about conversion, it does you no good to optimize your pages and your sites specifically for keywords and phrase that bring traffic that don’t convert. Let me restate that: conversion is everything. We don’t want to spend any time at all creating content for or optimizing existing pages, for keywords and phrase that we know don’t convert. So in the master plan, part of our main process will be that the first thing you’re going to do, before anything else, is to, after you do your keyword research, and your market discovery, is to make your way through running some Google ad words campaigns to test keywords, to find the best converting keywords for your businesses that are bringing some results, and then later we move from there to optimizing our pages for those keywords. It’s in that order; it’s not the other way around. Because it does us no good to get hundreds of thousands of visitors, or millions of visitors from keywords in our market that are not going to convert. You’re far better off finding and testing keywords in your market, isolating the ones that convert, and then go from there to try to optimize pages to get some of those keywords and phrase ranked where they’re producing some free traffic for you an ultimately that free conversion.

So, that’s a very important distinction to make, and that’s probably the number one mistake most marketers make online when it comes to search engine optimization: they spend a lot of time targeting all kinds of keywords and phrase, and many of them are ones that don’t even convert, so we have to find out within reason what converts first, before we spend any amount of time optimizing our site.

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CD 4 - Lesson 2: LSI Keywords Okay, I already told you how important the Google ad words, keyword tool is, and how it’s a great way to find keywords and phrases for your business as well as finding those important LSI words according to Google’s relevance, and how they list them, which is why we want to be using this tool. Well, when it comes to search engine optimization, of course, when it comes to putting our whole master plan together, you’re going to see that I use like a little numbering convention for LSI words, and how they relate to when we optimize things for like certain keywords and phrases. So, I use this numbering convention kind of little scheme throughout how the system come together as far as the instructions for you to take action, and so I need to show you how you go and get those values and what they relate too, otherwise you won’t understand it.

So, we’ll come in here and search for a keyword, I’m actually going to, let’s take a break from gardening, I’ll do golf this time, so if we do a search for let’s say golf clubs. So let’s say we’re trying to optimize a page to rank high for the term “golf clubs.” So we come in here and we click get keyword ideas, and these are the different keywords related to the primary keyword. Now, I score these other keywords as keyword 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D. Let me explain that. The main keyword that you’re trying to optimize a page for, the primary keyword, that is keyword 1A or KW1A. It’s not just KW1, it’s KW1A. Well when you look at these other keywords that Google will show you, aside from the main keyword, which is this top one, which is keyword 1A, the next one down is keyword 1B, the next one keyword 1C, keyword 1D, keyword 1E, and so on, you could keep going down to KW1Z if we did all these in order down to Z. Because this is sorted by relevance, other keywords that pretty much have golf clubs in them, or very closely related. So, these are all KW, and then whatever the naming convention, this listing convention is. So if our main keyword we’re targeting is always KW1A, in this list, this is KW1B, this is KW1C, this is KW1D. So, if in the instructions I say, here’s where you may want to use KW1C for page you’re trying to get ranked high, it would be this one, because this is 1A, 1B, 1C, I think you get it.

Now, when it comes to LSI keywords, we come down to these similar keywords sorted by relevance, and this is according to Google’s, this is like LSI’s stuff, according to Google, which is who we want to pay attention to. Now, if you ever see a shorter term, that’s kind of a root term, which in our case, this is what we’re seeing here, just golf, let’s ignore it. Ignore just a single root term, if it’s included in our main keyword that we’re targeting. If this said like, tennis, for some reason, which of course it doesn’t because it’s not relevant, but if it did, then it would be okay even though it’s a short word and it’s a single word. But golf is technically a part of golf clubs; it’s the first word. Or if our keyword was golfing clubs, we still wouldn’t want to use this because the word golf is contained within the words golfing. So we’re going to throw that one out.

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But the next one down, ladies golf club sets, this actually contains golf club, and ideally, since our main keyword was golf club, we don’t want to use an LSI keyword that contains our keyword phrase. Sometimes you can’t avoid it because you’re topic will be so deep and so broad that that’s all there is, in that case it’s okay. Start from the top, you’re going to use the numbering convention, which I’m going to explain to you right now to give them labels, that’s fine. But ideally, skip all the ones that contain the same keyword that we’re trying to work with. And then number them from there.

And so here’s how we would do that. So skipping the main one that’s already in our main keyword golf, we don’t want that. Golf club, we don’t want that, golf set? That’s okay, that’s different from golf club, so if we were just targeting golf, of course, we wouldn’t want this, but if you’re targeting golf, you’re really not going to have many options because everything has golf in it pretty much. But in our case, for golf clubs, let’s stick to the plan. Golf set would be the first one that makes sense, again, we don’t want that one to the keyword, we don’t want this one because it contains golf club, this one is okay, and this becomes LSI 1A. Now, what would be LSI 1B, LSI 1C, LSI 1D? It wouldn’t be these other ones. What that would refer to is, if we did the top search, like we did for golf clubs, and got this full listing related to golf clubs, that’s how we’d find LSI 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, it would be all these sub main terms to the main LSI term. So I’m sorry if that’s a little bit confusing.

But, so here’s how these would be numbered. This would be LSI 1A, we’d ignore this one, it has golf club in it, we ignore this one it has golf club in it, this one has golf bags, it’s okay, this is LSI 2A. This is LSI 3A, LSI 4A, LSI 5A, already pretty much used this, down, here this is the pro, let’s ignore that, so this has golf clubs in it, we ignore this, we’ve kind of used golf set already, ignore that. Components we haven’t that’s LSI, whatever we’re up too, 6A, LSI 7A, and so on and so forth.

So, all of the ones that list in here are LSI a number, and then A, because A is like the top of the root. So these are just what they are. So if we take Pine Meadow Golf, and let’s say this was whatever it was, LSI 3A, because we’re going 1, 2, we’re counting them down according to this list with those numbers. So this is LSI 3A, to get 3B, 3C, 3D, we do the main search at the top, and we would find the, it would show here as the first one, and then whatever is next and the next would our 3B, 3C, 3D, 3E. So from the top, we start by searching for our main keyword, and then we come down for all the process. Let’s see if we can do another quick example to kind of not make it so complicated. Let’s go with, let’s see, let’s go web-hosting services. So let’s say we’re trying, and by the way, very very competitive field, wouldn’t even try to attempt to optimize for this, but let’s say we are, so we’re going to try to optimize a page for web hosting services. That’s our primary keyword, we want to rank high for that, so in our naming scheme, that’s what we know in our little formula that we’re going to use, as KW1A. That’s our primary keyword. So come in here, we do a search, and again, it’s at Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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the top, that’s KW1A, the next one down, KW1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 1F and so on. So these are all KW 1’s. KW1A, KW1B, KW1C. But we want the LSI words for web hosting services that we’re going to use in our formula. And so we come down here, let’s see if, this is a very long list here. So we come down here, and this is challenging because we’re using web hosting services, and ideally web hosting is such the main part of that keyword that ideally we want LSI words that don’t have web hosting in them. And it’s very very hard to do, because that theme is made up so much of that word, as you can see almost every LSI or kind of related synonym to it, just simply has web hosting in it. So, we almost can’t get away from it, so when that’s the case, we just have to use it. So this first one is LSI 1A, this is the top LSI one, according to relevance, this is LSI 2A, LSI 3A. This we can ignore because it’s the root, 4A, 5A, 6A. So this is how they get LSI 1A, it’s the first one that’s shown for other keywords as synonyms in the Google outwards keyword tool. So if this is LSI 1A, in order for us to get 1B, 1C, 1D, we’d have to take this term, come up to the top and search and then go by what shows here, where it would be the top as A, so it would be LSI 1A, 1B, 1C, so that’s how we find the terms using this naming scheme that I use.

So, hopefully you got that, if you didn’t, just watch this again until it sets in, it’s not that complicated. The only complex part is when you’re got to make the decisions to throw out certain ones. Typically doesn’t happen up in here, it happens when you get to the LSI part, the synonym part. Sometimes you just can’t find many other keywords, depending on the industry, and depending on whatever phrase you’re targeting to get completely different words that don’t contain the phrase. If in doubt, err on the side of finding these LSI related keywords that don’t contain any of the words that you’re targeting. That’s really what’s ideal for us. In this web-hosting example, as luck would have it I picked a bad example for you, and it just went that way. Let me do one more quick one, just because this may be a little confusing. If it’s not, just hit the skip button, go to the next lesson.

But, let’s do, I think we do gardening as a root phrase. This could be a much better example, because it will clearly find, well it’s almost forced to find it. So this would be KW1A, if we were trying to rank high for gardening, KW1A, KW1B, KW1C. So, come down here, yeah this is a little bit better, so this is LSI 1A because this is the most relevant LSI theme keyword, this is LSI 2A, now this is a tough decision here, ideally I would skip all these because they contain a big part of gardening, and I would come down to this next one. So this would be LSI 3A, LSI 4A, LSI 5A, 6A, 7A, you get the picture.

So if this is LSI 1A, and our formula calls for a usage of LSI 1D, how do we get that?

Well, we would take LSI 1A, we’d come up to the top, we’d search for that LSI term, that is LSI 1A, we know that it’s going to be at the top, this is LSI 1A, this is 1B, this is 1C, here is how we’d find 1D, it would be this word right here: flowers com. That’s what 76

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would be, I think that’s for people trying to find flowers.com, but that’s what would be our LSI 1D. So that’s how you find those KW numbers as well as the LSI numbers when it comes to using the formula that you’re going to learn, bringing all this together.

So when we’re optimizing a page for two different key words, those actually phrases themselves would be KW1A and KW2A, and any them root term, I mean sub terms off of those would be KW1A, B, C, D, KW2A, B, C, D. And then any LSI words related to either one of those would be LSI 1, 2, 3, in relation to that keyword, and then 1, 2, 3, in relation to the other keyword. Now typically though, they’re going to have the same numbers and stuff when it comes to using two different keywords.

You only want one set of LSI keywords because they relate to both. No reason to go and look them up for both different keywords, so just want to point that out. When we do optimize a page or do anything, we’re never going to look up LSI keywords for two different keyword phrases if we’re trying optimize for two different keyword phrases at the same time. One is enough. And it’s valid unless the two keywords we’re trying rank for the same time are completely unrelated, which we shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

Anyways, watch this again if it got confusing at all until you get it. Sorry if it was confusing, sorry if I was longwinded about it, just want to make sure you got it. That’s how you come up with the little naming conventions that I use in the instructions to bring all this together, and so when you see those LSI 1A’s and B’s and K word 1A’s and B’s, that’s how you come up with them.

CD 4 - Lesson 3: OnPage Factors On-page factors. Ok, so we talked briefly in the overview about how it all breaks down: how are pages are optimized and constructed and, you know, the structure of them, and how words and phrases appear on them, and everything else to do with our pages that we’re creating and then, of course, the other part of the equation is the incoming links to our pages and how that affects the whole formula.

Well there are some key things that we can do, some fundamental proven things that work pretty well for how we structure the content on our individual pages that can help us rank high. So that’s what we’re going to talk about – we talk about on-page factors. It’s stuff on our own pages that we can control, and that we can change, and that we can modify and move around and massage to work with some of these things that people have figured out. So that’s what we’re going to talk about: on-pages factors.

The first and most important factor of everything you do with how your page is structured is your title tag – the title of your web page, that html tag called the title tag. If

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you look at a web browser it’s what shows across the top of the web browser itself when you go to any web page on the internet.

And of all the things people have tried, and all the tests that search engine experts and other people have tested and tweaked and massaged and monitored, the title tag is consistently one of the most important factors for search engine optimization, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be going away, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to, because the title of a web page on the internet really does have a lot to say about what it’s about and what it contains.

So the title tag is the most important thing. That’s what we need to focus on first when it comes to optimizing any of our pages. The title tag itself should be about 65 characters in maximum length – that’s kind of the range most people find that works well – 65 to 70.

So that’s how long it needs to be, and the focus is on the title itself being the most important factor of the page.

Some people say that as long as you have your keyword phrase, that you’re targeting to rank high for, kind of anywhere in the title it’s ok. Well other experts have found that if you have the keyword title to start the tag that you’re better off. So there’s evidence that shows it both ways, but I think more people in the SEO community really lean towards it having more weight if it’s in the beginning, because that’s kind of what’s scanned first when it come to a certain type of process from a computer that’s trying to determine relevance of something.

And there are other supporting factors about sentences and other things where the keywords show up earlier in the sentence, rather than later. So, let’s err on the side of that and – this is pretty much what I use and see from, so that’s what I’m going to recommend you do. Of course, you can test anything you want, and you can try other combinations, but try to isolate your keywords in your titles by having them at the front – so isolate them towards the front.

And so whatever the keyword is that you’re targeting for your title, start with it. And the other great thing is to include your brand name, the name of your site, your company, anything specific to kind of your business and your site, towards the back-end of your title. And a lot of companies use a recurring, kind of scheme of making sure that they’re brand is the same in every single title tag of all their site’s pages, and so it always ends with the company name and how it’s structured. And that’s totally fine and it works very well – at least at the time of this recording – for search engine optimization, and so that’s something that you should do as well. I’ve been doing it, it works fine, so let’s go with what works.

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Here’s kind of an example of what it can look like: ‘gardening tools and supplies’, and then at the end you have your company name, I just made that up: ‘Garden World’ – that may be actually a real company – wasn’t intending to talk about anyone in particular.

But notice the little vertical bar between the keyword area and the brand or the company.

It’s a funny little character but it’s called a pipe, is what they call that. A lot of SEO folks have found that that seems to work really well and it’s a good divider between the keywords and a site name, that somehow the search engine spiders and the process of how Google ranks pages can kind of determine with that pipe that that a separation of ideas or concept.

Don’t ask me how it works, but people have found that it works, so we’re going to go with what works. I’ve used it – it works fine, and so you should use it too, and if things change, then we’ll stay on top of that for you and of course we’ll be covering the changes as all this stuff evolves. Constantly visit the resources section and visit our community for traffic secrets. But use your keyword phrase up front, and then end it with your brand.

The other important thing is you kind of want your title itself to make sense – it’s not just the keyword itself. Like, if we’re isolating here ‘gardening tools’, we don’t just want to put gardening tools, the little pipe | and then Garden World or the name of the site; you kind of want to make it read better, because it’s not just about ranking high in the results pages – it’s about ranking high with a title, which will be a link in the result that is something people will want to click on.

Most people overlook that – they just put all kinds of junk and they try all kinds of stuff to get pages to rank high, but they realize that half the battle isn’t just getting a page to rank high – it’s getting the page high and having the title, that link, appear to be something that people want to click on and then go visit after they do the search.

So you want your titles to make sense. We’ve talked about doing things naturally. You want to write for people, not for the search engines, and so you want that title to make sense. So you do want to use your keyword phrase that you’re targeting, but it’s ok if you use other words along with it to make it kind of make more sense.

There are a lot of different strategies for creating effective titles, and we can link to some of those resources and tips in the resources section, but it’s pretty simple stuff: start with the keyword phrase that you’re targeting, and then make it make sense and look like a description that people will want to click on by adding a few other words, and then of course end with the brand.

The other strategies that I speak of: some people try to combine to main keywords or phrases, of course, that they’re trying to target that page for. So let’s say ‘gardening Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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tools’ as well as ‘landscape supplies’ could be another keyword that we’d to kind of target for our business, to try to landscape for. So we could try to kill two birds with one stone, and try to do it both with this one page.

So we’d use, like, ‘gardening tools and landscape supplies’, and then the little pipe | and then Garden World. And that would be a decent strategy because then on this page, where we put all the other content, we could do a nice mix of ‘gardening tools’ as well as ‘landscape supplies’, throughout the page, and try to have the opportunity for this page to rank high for both of those phrases, and not just one.

There’s a lot of different strategies you can try. You’ll rack your brain over trying to figure out the exact science of it. The best things is, I think: pick one keyword phrase to try to rank high for, and then of course you’re naturally going to mix in other keywords that you’re going to learn – other LSI phrases and other things throughout the page. And so just sort of let fall as it may, that you’re going to find when you start monitoring your results, and then proving whatever happened to rank high. It’s literally like playing the lottery: we’re just going to put a whole bunch of things out there to have the most changes that we can, and then whatever kind of hit, we’re going to go from there and improve it.

But that’s the basics for titles: kind of start with the keyword, include that little pipe |, or some people do the ‘greater-than’ sign or some other kind of dividing character, and then the brand, and then sort of have it the same throughout your whole site. That’s the kind of structure of your title tags. Keyword phrase with some other words and phrases that make it make sense and make it appealing to someone, and then end with the brand.

Keyword density used to be very important. Like, what percentage of your overall text on a page is contained by your keyword phrase – is it 5% of your page, you know all the little characters, if you add them up, what percent (or all the words, if you add them up) makes up how many times you repeat ‘gardening tools’, let’s say. If you repeat ‘gardening tools’ five times and it makes up 10% or 12% of the total words, is that more beneficial than using less. And that used to be part of the algorithm – how many times a phrase repeated and how it related to the density of the page.

But most SEO experts now agree that it’s no longer relevant. In fact, there are many pages out there on the internet that may rank high for ‘gardening tools’ and the page mysteriously doesn’t have it on the page at all! You’re going to find that when you do some of your research. You’re going to find weird things, like, “How can this page be ranking so high for the words ‘gardening tools’ when I don’t see that phrase anywhere on the page!”

Well that’s because there are so many other factors to deal with this Search Engine Optimization stuff. If a lot of the pages that are linking to that page using ‘gardening 80

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tools’ and some other LSI phrases related to ‘gardening tools’, that can make it rank high, even if ‘gardening tools’ doesn’t appear at all. And vice versa: some pages, if they say ‘gardening tools’ on them, but they don’t have any links at all – on the internet – at all come to them, but it’s ‘gardening tools’ (actually it’d have to be ‘gardening tools’ and many other words and phrases, or many other words so it’s kind of a longer-tail keyword) – but it happens to be that it’s something that no one’s other optimized their page for, it could rank No. 1, potentially, and get traffic.

So it works both well: the on-age stuff, the off-page stuff. But keyword density is now considered the most over-rated thing. Don’t worry about it. Just don’t over-optimize your pages. If you want to rank high for ‘gardening tools’, I don’t recommend you use it on a page probably more than three or four times max (most people say one or two). So don’t use it too much – just use it how you would naturally, however that page is structured naturally, talking about whatever content it is. Just let it fall where it may, and go with that. Don’t worry about what percentage of it is the page and all that, because it’s really mattering less and less.

There’s some other tags in the html process of your source. We talked a little bit about this and keyword research – how you can look at your competitors’ meta-tags to find some keywords. When you create your meta-tags – a lot of CMS software, a lot of blog software, we’re going to talk about that, on this CD – a lot of them automatically create some keyword tags and some other software tools out there automatically do it for you.

But if you’re doing it manually, you basically just want to list the keyword phrase that you’re targeting, as well as some kind of related phrases to it, and then, of course LSI keywords with it. Don’t just say ‘gardening tools’, ‘gardening tool supplies’, ‘cheap gardening tools’, ‘discount gardening tools’ – that’s the trap most people fall in and, you know, kind of spam their way in over-optimizing and so, it doesn’t work well. So you just want to mix it up – use ‘gardening tools’ one, and then use LSI-related words: landscape, flowers, supplies, grow vegetables – whatever else there is in that whole theme-world related to ‘gardening tools’.

The meta-description also is another tag, where you want to put in your keyword phrase that you’re targeting. You want to also put in a few LSI keywords, but you want write a little short description about what your page is about. But just make it natural – again let things fall where they may – don’t try to optimize it too much. Use your keyword phrase that you’re targeting once, sprinkle in two or three other LSI words related to your theme, and just write it to sound like what that page is about and you’ll do fine.

I recommend starting at least one sentence of the content on this page that you’re trying to optimize, for a certain keyword phrase, to start with the keyword phrase. Just like we talked about we’re erring on the side of doing that with our titles? One sentence somewhere in the content – it doesn’t have to be the first sentence of your content (and Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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sometimes it’s good not to have it be the first sentence). But somewhere in there, in one of your paragraphs, just start the sentence with your keyword.

You’ll want to use LSI-themed keywords, and I’m going to tell you how to kind of rank those out in a certain way, and how to use them when we get to the master plan – how you decide which ones to use and how you kind of mix it up – I’ll give you some thoughts on that.

But you’ll want to take these themed words, and you want to just mix them, make sure they’re just mixed throughout the content of the page, because that’s kind of naturally how that page would be relevant, like I’ve already explained. So you just want to mix it up. When all else fails with SEO just mix it up and make it random. Just don’t keep repeating the same type of things.

Surround your target phrase, if you can, with LSI keywords. So if you have a sentence, and you say, “This is the place to get some of the best gardening tools in the world”, ideally you want to construct the sentence, you know, at least one sentence where you’re using the keyword phrase, to kind of be bookend, if possible. Some people are finding this is working pretty well.

Bookend it, if possible, with LSI keywords. For example: ‘landscaping’ is an LSI keyword for gardening tools. So if you say: “The key to good landscaping is using the right gardening tools”, even if that’s just your sentence. So at least you’re surrounding it in a way so that it’s in front of it, but it’s part of the same sentence. It’s not like you’re using gardening tools in a sentence by itself without it – it’s not like you’re only using ‘landscaping’ in a sentence by itself without it. You should do those things too. But surround it – so either in the beginning of it, or one the back-end of it, or bookend it: both. So you want to try to surround your targeted phrase in the same sentence with LSI keywords.

There are other tags in html called the “h-tags” – h1, h2, h3. They’re like these headline tags that kind of make larger text. You know for a long time people were saying “You your keyword phrase in an h-1 tag towards the top of the page. That’s fine, that strategy still pretty much works in most cases. And some people say, you know, the next long-tail version of the keyword in the h-2 tag, and then put the next version, longer-out still, in an h-3 tag.

I don’t necessarily see that that works exactly. Again – all else fails, just mix it up. Use your keyword phrase that you’re targeting in an h-1 tag when you can, sometimes in an h-2 tag. Sometimes use an LSI keyword instead in the h-1 tag. You know mix it up.

Like if you’re targeting a page for ‘gardening tools’, let’s say, maybe your h-1 tag will say “Some of the best landscaping tools I recommend”. Something like that, rather than

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just only using ‘gardening tools’ by itself. Mix it up, put some other words with it, just make it natural.

You also may want to, at least one time (again this doesn’t mean 500 times) emphasize your target phrase – your keyword you’re trying to rank high for, with either bold or italic tags, to kind of make it stand out somewhere in your content. Of course, make it make sense, but try to emphasize it somewhere. A lot of people are finding that it works well, to at least just emphasize it once.

Use as much file names as the targeted phrase. If we’re targeting a page for ‘gardening tools’, have an image on the page, and make the file name “gardening_tools.jpg” or “gardening_tools.gif”. However, the important things to keep in mind with file names is, it must be accurate and relevant. Don’t go using an image that isn’t of gardening tools, like, something else, like your photo, and naming it as ‘gardening tools’.

That’s a big no-no because, more and more, Google seems to be doing things where, for example with their image search, where people are finding that they are doing some kind of behavioral things with people not clicking on certain images when they do image searches because it’s kind of a vote for relevancy, and so on and so forth. We’ve talked about some of these things that Google is doing.

So, if all else fails, just make sure the photo, the image, whatever you’re using on your page is what you’re calling it. Of course, try to use one that’s your keyword phrase so you can name it “gardening tools.jpg”.

You’ll want to link out to other trusted sources in your market. We talk constantly about “Follow the nature of the web and you’ll win”. Well, one of the most natural things on the internet are high-quality pages and sites that become these trusted sites, according to Google, that end up ranking high in the result, and value of the trust – a part of the trust – is the fact that trusted sites link to other good resources and pages out there on the internet. That’s the nature of the web: that pages link to other pages.

So you want to link out to other trusted sources in your market. When you do your market discovery and you’re finding the best blogs, when you’re finding the competitors that already rank high for certain keywords, when you’re finding sources of really good news and information, and sites that are trusted in your industry and in your market: those are the sites that you constantly want to be reading and linking to.

Link to their blogs and their blog posts – that’s what will get them to end of linking back to you anyways, when they see you as a trusted source. But you need to be linking out from your pages. Don’t just think about having this link-greed of “Oh, I don’t want to spill link-juice”, as they say, “I don’t want to use up some of my page-rank and send it off to other sites”.

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Actually you do, because that’s just how it works. So on all your pages, at least link out once or twice, maybe even three times, so other sources. When you do it, though, make them trusted sources. When you do it, you can use that keyword that you’re targeting that phrase for, but you really want to mix that up – don’t only just use the phrase by itself – put in some LSI keywords. And of course, when in doubt make that link have natural language. Make it part of a sentence, like a sentence fragment, like ‘Recent Article on Gardening Tools’, not just ‘Gardening Tools’ and a link to somewhere else.

But use keyword phrases that you’re targeting and LSI keywords. Link out from pages that you’re trying to rank high for ‘gardening tools’ with links that say “Here are great reviews of landscape tools”, that’s a good example – landscaping tools. So you want to mix it up so it’s not just outgoing links with just your target phrase.

You always want to be looking to link to your own pages, to pass the link power from page-to-page on your site. When we talk about site architecture, coming up, we’re going to talk about how that’s all structured naturally anyways – how the navigation flows between the pages. But you still want to post to – link to your other pages from different parts of your site. So you want to do it within the theme. When we get to the part about site architecture, and kind of theming out your site into these little area, these little subareas, you’re going to want to be linking kind of between related sub-areas up or down on a ladder. I’ll explain this to you when we get to that part.

But don’t link your pages, necessarily, within the content to other pages on your site, if you have a lot of pages, that aren’t closely, thematically related. So you want to stay within your theme. You’ll understand this when we get to the site architecture part.

But constantly look for an excuse to – one link is usually pretty good, don’t overdo it – but look for excuses to link to your other pages. And when you do it, do from within the content; don’t just put it at the end of an article by itself. Find a way to make it relevant within the conversation, so to speak of the content that you’re publishing – with what you’re talking about.

And, of course, when you’re linking to your other pages, you can use those keyword phrases that other page is structured to rank high for, but also mix it up and include some LSI keywords too. Don’t just use just the keyword phrase itself.

CD 4 - Lesson 4: Buying Domains I’m here at buydomains.com. This is kind of actually one of my secret weapons when it comes to internet marketing. As you know, if you go register domain name for any project, anything you can possibly think of is registered and taken. It’s so hard to come up with a domain name that’s not already taken. So for almost every single project I try to 84

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build and for something new that I come up with, I always just go and buy a domain name from someone that already has a decent one that makes sense for what I want to use. I just know that it’s just going to be so hard for me to come up with something that no one’s ever thought of before and that’s not registered. I mean, there are millions of combinations of words registered, so it’s so hard.

So, it’s easier in most cases, for me, just to buy something that’s decent, rather than settle for something that stinks, that’s got extra words that’s too long, so I like buydomains.com, I’ve bought a lot of domains from them. I bought my original marketingsecrets.com domain from them; I’ve bought a lot of domains from them for a lot of different projects. I bought the blogrush domain here. So I would start by coming in here if you’re looking for a new domain name, for a new site, or any project, and at least see what they have and see what they’re prices are, and see if it fits in with your budget.

There’s some other sites out there for finding domains for sale, will link to some of those in the resources section like sedo, and some of these other ones, and you can go and check those out too, but start here, this is really good.

So, I did a search for gardening tools, let’s say I’m looking for a keyword with gardening, gardening tools in it, for that kind of project, and so as you can see here, and don’t get scared here by these prices, it starts out with these really high prices for some of their better domains, we’re just going to ignore that, I mean of course, unless you saw something you really wanted, I don’t know why income tools actually comes up for my search for gardening tools, I guess it’s just trying to find gardening or tools in any of these domains, rather than both of them per say. But, you can just scroll down and get past all these high prices, and you can continue to more pages, but let’s just down to like the seventh page, so it’ll be some cheaper prices.

But one of the things you’re going to be dealing with is trying to find a good domain name, and it’s really worth it too, if you’re going to build a business around something where you’re hopefully going to do hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, if possibly maybe for you millions of dollars in sales, it’s wroth it to invest in a good domain name that all you’re SEO stuff is going to revolve around, that it’s easy to remember. If you do a pod cast, and you say the name of your domain name, it’s easy for people to spell and type in. There are a lot of advantages to having a good domain name. So many people underestimate that. A lot of people got away from good domain names as company names when the whole dotcom bust crashed. Because back then, everyone was named something.com, pest.com, toys.com, you name it, it was a popular thing, and then everyone got away from it. Well what people don’t understand is, for direct marketing period, it’s the smartest thing to do, to have a great domain name that’s easy to spell, and that can be said through audio where people don’t actually see it written out, and just something that’s easy to remember. It has so many benefits because the domain name is the destination. That’s how people get to the place to do business with you. It’s important to have a good domain, so it’s worth it if you can afford it. It all comes down to, of course Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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you’re budget. If you don’t have the budget now, maybe you’ll have to do things kind of more guerilla style with a cheaper budget, and then maybe when you can afford it, then go and register a domain name. But if you have the budget for it, think about starting with a really good domain name.

Like here’s a great example: gardeningplus.com. If we were doing a gardening site or a gardening business of some sort, that is a great domain name. It’s two words, it has gardening in it, it’s about as short as you’re going to get if it comes to a domain that has gardening in it. There are not many four and three letter words that are actually going to be good along with gardening. So this is a great domain that you can just click and buy it now, this isn’t a bid price or an ask price, you can just buy it for $1,088.00. It’s $1,000.00 of course, it’s a lot of money, but that’s an investment anyways, but that’s something, if you’re going to be spending hundreds of thousands just on add words, you can blow $1,000.00 on an add in US Today, that’s a good investment. So gardeningplus, there we go.

Let’s go to this even further. So you can find really great names for about $1,5000.00.

Any where from $1,000.00 to $2,000.00 you can find some really good names at buydomains, you can find some really good names at buydomains. You can actually find some, they have a little bit cheaper price than that, and sometimes you can find cheaper ones than that.

Let’s see, don’t go for the info’s and stuff, stick with the dotcoms. You can come in here on your own and do some searches. They have an advance search that you can do so you can click up here, advance search, and you can search by, show me the keywords that start with gardening or that end with gardening or that are less than 15 characters, and that only are dotcoms, that don’t have numbers. So you can come in here on your own, and you can do some advance searches for you’re market and keywords you’re thinking about, and really, say I just want to see the ones that you have that fit this exact criteria.

And you wont get such a broad range like I did on this search, but just showing you, if we sold some kind of tools: power tools, gardening tools, whatever, buy tools online, may or may not be, but it’s a lot better than what you’re going to find that’s not yet registered, and for $900.00 that’s not bad. Justgadening.com, how great of a domain is that for a gardening site? To build an authority site about gardening, and to have the hub of the homepage link to some kind of, link to them the online store, as well as to have this whole main site, how great is that domain name for gardening related stuff? It’s fantastic!

For $800.00, well, well worth it.

So, buydomains.com, come in here and look for yourself, and it’s a great resource. They have like almost a million names, 800,000 names available for sale. And some of them are very expensive, $10,000.00, $20,000.00 or more, but the majority of them in here are less than $1,500.00 and you can find some really great domains, and it’s worth just investing the money, buying a solid domain, and just starting with a great brand to build, 86

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something great to build SEO around, and just something great to build a business around. So check out buydomains.com.

CD 4 - Lesson 5: Site Architecture Site architecture. Now this is very important, this is the structure of all your pages, and how they work together and how they are interconnected. This can make or break your SEO effort, so it’s very very important that you pay attention to this, and of course put attention into this when you structure your pages and of course, every add pages.

If you can, you want to make your homepage like a hub, and not necessarily like a store.

This is kind of dilemma for most marketers and kind of playing the whole SEO game.

Because if your site, let’s say, is just an eCommerce store, where you’re selling gardening tools in our example that we keep using, that’s okay. And you can optimize that to rank well in the search engines, and a lot of people do that. However, just to give you my personal preference of a long term strategy, I like to use kind of a hub strategy, where I have one main domain, and that’s going to be pretty much it for my gardening business, because more and more weight is being put into the authority of individual sites. You can certainly build a network of sites and link them together and everything else, but I’m seeing from my own evidence, and a lot of other people are too, that almost looks like a better strategy to put more time and resources into building out one website that goes very very deep with pages and with rankings throughout the site, and making that one site this powerful authority, rather than trying to do it with 10 different sites, and kind of mixing up the rankings and the link values and the PR scores amongst them.

So if all else fails, just go with one domain name and one site, and then just go broad within the one site. Well in order to do this, you kind of want to make the home page a hub that then links out to all the elements of your business. If you happen to have an eCommerce store where you sell gardening tools, that’d be linked to from the homepage.

If you have a great blog with a long of content, and videos, and other things, which of course you should, and that’s what this course is going to encourage you to do, then that kind of links to that area from the homepage. There’s information about you and your company, and your brand, and everything else to do with that kind of linked from the homepage, and so the homepage is kind of this great information source, as well as kind of the guide to everything that goes on in your business: from a content standpoint, to a product standpoint, and how you monetize traffic and actually have build your businesses.

So if you can, make your homepage this hub so that homepage links out to everything else and represent your business at large. The reason for doing this is multi-fold so to speak. The primary thing is that in order to get a lot of incoming links and to get authority and trust, and to kind of build up a lot of kind of just good will on the internet, most people, almost all people are going to end up finding your site typically by going to your Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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home page. When you do a lot of these other things that we’re teaching in this course, like social strategy and all these other things, in your profile and in different places, you’re going to be using the domain name that just goes to your homepage. So that’s where most people will start.

Well you don’t necessarily just want to always send people to your store where you sell your products. You just don’t want to do that. And so in order to get other people to link to you as an authority, even if you have killer content let’s say on a blog that’s in a folder off of your main domain, and your homepage is like your online store, and then you have like gardeningtools.com is let’s say your domain. If people go there, it brings up the store selling gardening tools, then of course, if you have gardeningtools.com/blog, and that’s where people go to see your blog and content about gardening tools, that’s fine but the only problem with that is, for most people that are going to link to and reference that blog, it would make more sense to just keep referencing you as just kind of a general destination whatsoever in linking to your domain name. And so if they go and visit your domain name and see it’s all about sales and conversion, and just you making money, it doesn’t have the same benefit of sharing authority and trust when it comes to content itself. So again, this isn’t an exact science, you can certainly have the homepage be your online store in this example, but I recommend if you can, have your homepage be just a hub to other things that you’re doing, including your store. Because that gives you a lot more flexibility in the long run, it just gives you the opportunity to not only have your store separate and your content kind of separate, but then you can have, you can build in a community or software based things, and other tools for your market. All these things found from the homepage and the hub, so I like the hub strategy of structuring the homepage that way, and then of course, you ultimately want to target your homepage and optimize your homepage for the best keyword in your market that will be the highest converting. Of course we pointed that out, it’s not going to do you any good to target a keyword phrase that doesn’t send traffic that converts. So whatever the best keyword is for volume, getting the most searches out there on the internet, that also converts the best, and will produce sales and send you customers, that’s how we want to structure your homepage. So, the long-term strategy is to eventually get your homepage to rank number one for the best keyword phrase to do with your business, your market, your industry, and what it is that you sell.

But something else to point out before we go further in site architecture is, it’s a constant balance to balance between optimizing a page to rank high and a page to convert high.

Sometimes it’s like a chicken and egg thing, and sometimes it’s almost impossible to have both. You can have a sales letter or some kind of constructive page with copy, or with a nice video or something that does a good job of selling, but if you try to optimize it, you may destroy the conversion elements of the page, and vice versa. You may have a page that ranks really well in the search engines, but it doesn’t convert really well, and so if you go in there and tweak it and add those salesy things to it, it destroys how it ranks.

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So you may find that that’s the challenge, well, the way you kind of combat that and fight against that is to set up some specific landing pages, content pages, that are solely created in a way that they are optimize to rank well, and then they naturally link over to and lead people to another page that structured to sell something. And of course you do the basic fundamentals for optimization on that page that sells something, but you don’t spend too much time and try to really make that something that will rank high. So people are coming to a page that ranks really high, and then leads people over to that conversion destination that will actually produce more sales. Doesn’t mean you can’t have pages that actually sell and make you money that will end up ranking high, but just keep in mind that it’s a tough strategy at times to balance, and when all else fails, separate the two. Try to have some pages, if you have to, that convert well and don’t rank well at all, and get the free traffic coming to pages that link to and funnel people over there.

The other thing to throw out before we move any further, is just know that your rankings will bounce up and down in the search engines, they’ll get indexed at different times, you got to play this as a long term strategy, and just sometimes rankings will settle and really become kind of concrete after about a month, sometimes faster than that. Just keep doing a lot of the fundamental things and it will work, I promise you, you just have to take more of an ongoing long term strategy where month to month we’re going to work on improving your rankings, improving your traffic, making more money, doing things to grow your business, and it will just take care of itself naturally over the long haul. Too many people I see panic when they see, “oh you know yesterday I ranked third for something for page I just created, it was awesome, I got traffic, and now it disappeared.

What did I do wrong?” You didn’t do anything wrong, the search engines, especially Google, the results, they naturally fluctuate, they have multiple data centers and there’s so much to it, but don’t worry about that. There’s so many things not worth wasting your time on it, and putting too much focus in, and a lot of that’s related to SEO’s. Just do the fundamental things, and it’ll take care of itself.

Okay. When it comes to domain names, you may already have a domain name, an existing site, and existing business that you just want to improve, that’s okay. But if you’re going to start from scratch, typically a keyword-based domain is best. Obviously if we want to rank high for gardening tools, and that’s the foundation of our business, then we’d want gardeningtools.com, of course that things taken I’m sure by someone else, but in this example, so you want your keywords in your domain name if you can.

Because when all else is equal, and there’s a tie amongst ranking for something with you and a competitor, it kind of comes down to the domain name. And so, it can benefit you.

It’s not required though; look on the internet, look at your very market for keywords you want to rank high for. There are plenty of people that don’t have the keywords that they rank high for in the domain name. But most people find that it will benefit you if you have the domain, so when you’re starting out, try to put it in there and come up with something that makes sense. Shorter is better when it comes to keywords. When it comes to domains, I’m sorry, shorter is better. So you don’t want some twenty word domain Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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name, because ultimately your domain name is a destination for people to type in manually to come back to you, and the longer you get, the more complicated you get, even if it contains all these keywords and you think it’s going to benefit you, actually it works against you. So, when all else fails, go with a shorter domain name, and don’t use as many parts of your keyword phrases. So, gardeningtoolsworld, or gardeningtoolsplanet, or try to just keep it as short as possible. Still with maybe your main keyword in mind.

And the other thing is, ideally don’t use numbers, don’t use hyphens in your domains, and use a dotcom if you can. Dotcom is still the king domain, I think always will be.

There’s no sign of that letting up, so go with a dotcom, and don’t use numbers of hyphens.

As I just said, avoid hyphens in your domain name. Here’s a little tip, little thing that people are figuring out that has some weight in the algorithm, or at least does right now, Google is doing more and more to try to figure out who’s spamming and who’s abusing their system. One of the things they’re finding is that the age of a domain name registration has a lot to do with the quality or potential for relevance, where a domain registered in 2000, all things created equal, is better than a domain name registered last month. Because if that domain name is older and it’s still around on the internet, it’s probably more legit. Because a lot of spammers go and register a bunch of domains, set up a bunch of junk pages real fast to try to generate traffic, and if it doesn’t work out, or they get banned or what have you, they just throw away those domains, and try their tactics again.

Another thing is as far as the age domain thing goes with how long a domain registration currently shows that the domain is registered for. Along with that throwaway concept of spammers and some black hat techniques, they just register domain name for one year for $6.00 or $7.00 because why pay for more than one year when the odds are that they’re going to get banned and the domain is going to be worthless. Well Google realizes this and so some people are finding, I haven’t seen any for sure results, but it definitely makes sense, and that is that if all else fails, register your domain and make sure your domain is registered for more than one year. It’s cheap anyways; if you’re serious about doing business, register for five years. It’s like $40.00 or something, just go head and register it for the next five years and not have to worry about it.

But the length of the current registration, some people are seeing is going to have an effect on that SEO ranking. Especially I think, people are pulling all this crazy data from Google’s patents, and seeing what they’re patenting and things, and I think that’s a big part of some of the patents, is this how long the domain is registered for, the age of the domain, so I recommend doing it, you cant go wrong with it, it’ll probably work in your favor.

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Use short folder paths when it comes to the architecture of your site. You know, you want to go from your domain name to the next section, which would be in a folder, down from your main domain, it’s best to use kind of short titles. You want to use titles, so this could be like slash gardening tools, and it’s okay to put hyphens and passes, so it could be / gardening-tools. But you wouldn’t want that next folder to be like: slash, gardening tools, landscaping, network. You want to keep it shorter if possible. Shorter paths are better because they’re more natural. Again, it’s all about what’s natural. So a real legitimate site that has tons of pages of content like a yahoo or about.com or any of these other highranking sites, they’re really structuring their network and their subfolders just to kind of manage their site and all the content that they have. Well, it’s silly for them to have these sub domains that are super super long file names that show up on their server, regardless if their optimized for the search engines or at least that they carry all these key words and phrases that they’d like to be optimized for or anyone else. And so they typically, typically a webmaster or engineer structuring layout of a site uses small folder names, because it’s less to type in each time they have to reference that path between pages, and it just doesn’t junk up the computer hard drive itself on the server with these long crazy names. So people are finding that of course, Google realizes is natural, so it matters, so make your shoulder. Make your shoulder; make your folders shorter names if possible.

But of course, try to include some keyword phrases, but just shorter if possible.

Put your keywords in your URL’s and separate them by hyphens. The greatest example of this is when you look at blog URL’s like word press that we’re going to talk about and how they’re naturally optimized for search engine rankings. It naturally takes the title of a blog post and converts it into this structure of words separated by a hyphen, separated by hyphen word hyphen, so on and so forth. So, when you create the URL’s throughout your site, when you set up a page manually, if you don’t do it through a blog, use that structure.

Text navigation is best, if you’re going to have a graphic menu with buttons, which most people have, which is totally okay. If you’re going to have graphic buttons across the top of your site, per say or down the side that link to your other pages, at least use the alt text part of the html text for that button, so you know, it’s like when people hover over it with the mouse, it typically will show what that value is. Put that alt text value for the name of these different areas of your site, of course where you can, you want those to be key words. And so, text navigation is best, and when you structure the different theme areas of your site, you want to have some kind of text navigation: the bottom of your page or maybe at the very very top, real small like you see some people showing that kind of, people call it the bread crumb path, where it says like ‘gardening’ and then it drops down to the next thing with the greater than symbol, then it drops down to the next thing, and the next thing, and show you where in depth you are with the site. Well, you want to have that kind of stuff, and it needs to be text, so find a place to put that in your site. Of course, in the resource section, we’ll put links to all different examples and you can find how other people are doing it. But just keep all these core concepts in mind.

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And here’s an example. You want to kind of structure things so your site goes like gardening, vegetables, carrots. So, on your homepage you’d have the link that says gardening. And if people click that, they then go to a section that’s one click off your homepage but then is about vegetables. And it could right there show articles, or it could show links to the pages or information and/or both, and then somewhere on that page, you’d want people to be one click away from then dropping down to another level, which would be about carrots. And so that’s, you want to build a hierarchy like this, that goes from broad theme to more narrow theme, to really narrow theme. So that’s how you kind of want to structure going deeper into your site.

You’ve probably heard of all the duplicate content fears and worries and everything else, and they’re legitimate. You don’t want to have duplicate content throughout your site.

You don’t want to have the majority of pages keep repeating with like the same paragraph that you have at the bottom of every page, you know and have that paragraph dominate the content, the percentage of content on all your pages. If in doubt, don’t have anything, have less and less repeat throughout all your pages. And don’t reuse your text, like don’t reuse an article in a bunch of places throughout your site. Because Google simply just sees this as a possible abuse tactic, where someone may structure a page and then just make a million copies of it to really try to play that lottery technique where they have these opportunities to hit the algorithm, so they’ll use content that’s slightly optimized differently. So, avoid duplicate content.

Another thing people are finding is don’t use things that sound like you want to trade links with people. Google sees this apparently from what some people hypothesize as a bad site. So you want to avoid possibly things like: having a link or any kind of text on your site that says, ‘add your URL here’ or ‘click here to submit your link’ or ‘click here to trade links with us.’ Stuff like that; you want to avoid that kind of language.

The whole no follow/follow thing can get very very complicated. Links pass value from page to page that they link too, and Google came up with this process called a no follow link, and by default now it’s in a lot of blog software, for example, the comment section, so when people go and spam the comments and put in their URL, those links over to their site, essentially don’t count anymore in the search engine process. Some blogs have turned off the no follow process for their comments, so if you happen to post in there, and you post a link, it does count, and you can link to some of those resources where you can find some of those blogs, and consider using those for link building.

But those no follow tag, is used to tell the search engines not to put any value on where this link goes from this page, so it’s not spilling any of that value of that page onto other pages. And this is a very controversial type of thing on how you use it in your site architecture. And I lean towards this camp, and that is, use the no follow tag on admin related pages, like your content page.

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Your content page is probably linked from every page on your site. Make that link to that content page, and that part of your navigation menu, use the no follow attribute, and of course we’ll link to resources on how to do all this stuff in the resources section if you don’t know how to do that or if you don’t know anything about this. But, put it on your content page, know like your links privacy policy, the copyright page, and content, support, or help, some different things like that, it’s good to add the no follow tag to them, so you’re not spilling value onto those pages. Some people disagree, and say those pages could end up ranking high, but a lot of people agree that it’s better if you just cut those off and worry about losing the value of transferring the link power to the more theme based pages then these kind of admin pages.

Use solid fundamentals, of course. You want to use good grammar and good spelling, and just if all else fails, make your page as professional as you can. Just goes without saying, follow what’s natural, just make it good quality stuff.

You want to create your site so it looks like an authority. Nice graphics, nice layout, not just bombarded with something that looks junky. If you want people to consider your site as an authority, if you want human beings to look at your site as something that’s important, it’s got to look important. And that’s the beginning of the battle and the process of having people link to your site as an authority. People aren’t going to link to your site no matter how good the content is if it looks like crap. So, that’s actually a part of SEO, which isn’t directly related to the optimization of it itself, but make it look good, and it will benefit you for getting links and having people more likely to reference you as an authority.

Don’t overload your pages with advertising. Don’t junk it up and put all this crap in your pages. Because one, it looks like garbage, and the human element is bad for looking at your pages as an authority, but there’s also things related to how Google may value your page. Because they’re able to do all kinds of crazy things in their algorithm, like they may find that a lot of junky pages are using some kind of spammy affiliate network service to make money from their pages, and so they could easily put something in their algorithm that just says all pages that you find that contain the code that loads this add, devalue it. And so you got to be careful with the advertising. So if all else fails, don’t add too much advertising to your page.

This is another thing that’s debated. Google has some guidelines, and people go by different things: have a maximum of 50 links on a single page linking to other places if possible. And always err on the side of less links, the fewer links you can have, I think the better. So don’t try to make 50 links, have four or five if you can, but as a maximum, 50 links. Some people say if you have a site that has 10,000 pages or 50,000 pages or a lot of pages, then you can get away with having a couple hundred links, but all else fails,

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err on the side of fewer and fewer links. I think the fewer links that you have the better it’s going to work for you.

A lot of people believe in this theory, which I kind of go by, which seems to make good sense: have any page in your site, unless of course you have a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages where this won’t work as well, but three clicks max, coming from the homepage to get to any page, anywhere in your site. If you have to click through navigation more than three clicks, you’ve kind of buried that page too low, and you need to kind of bump it up in the hierarchy somewhere from your homepage.

On your homepage and in your main nav that repeats throughout your site, you can come up with ten core main categories for your site, write those down, kind of into themes, we’ll go over more of this in the master plan, but break, if we take gardening as our main focus, we do gardening tools, landscaping, flowers, vegetables, seeds, we come up with like the ten biggest top tier categories, and then everything else that we publish in content or do on our site falls underneath those categories, and then may even fall one level further, but that’s it. Three clicks max from the homepage.

Use lowercase for everything and full paths, so all of your file names: lowercase. All your folder names: lowercase. Any use of your domain name or how you’re linking to it: lowercase. You know all of the URL names, lowercase. Don’t use capitals anywhere. All lowercase text, when it comes to anything to do with paths and links, and using the structure of what references a page or a file on a server, so always use lower. When I say use full paths, that’s the absolute path, like it works in html if you’re on a specific page, and you create a link that just says go to the destination of /more golf clubs.html. That could be what’s defined as the path on a link.

Let’s say you have a link that says more golf clubs, and in the html for that, it could just say the destination is “/moregolfclubs.html.” And if that was actually a page, moregolfclubs.html on your server, that would work. That link would, you could click it and you’d go to that page, but you don’t want to do that. Every link that you use as well as every time you reference a file, like an image or anything else, use a full path to it: http://domainname.com/folder/folder/whatever.html. So whatever the path is to get to that image, or to get to the page you’re linking too, always use the full path.

CD 4 - Lesson 6: SiteMap Creator An important part of site architecture is having a site map. A site map is a file essentially that’s like the blue print for your whole site. In this file, it contains all the links to all the pages throughout your site, as well as how they link to each other, like the structure and architecture of your whole site. It’s literally the blueprint for your whole site. It’s very important to have a site map, and it’s typically off the same path, where it’s like domain name.com/sitemap.xml, because a lot of these are xml files, they structurally are. The 94

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search engine spiders love them. Certainly, you can not use a site map and still do well with search engine optimization, because the Google bot will find it’s way to your home page, and then it’ll work it’s way to all your other pages. However, most search engines and most of their little bots and stuff, including Google, prefer the site maps, because it can really direct the flow of the spider and how it indexes things and it can really help things get indexed fasters, as well as just simply better, because it’s a better way for it to find your pages than trying to have it jump through the different links on your page where some of them are going out, some of them are going deeper, so on and so forth.

So it’s very very simple. This is probably the most popular site map related tool online: xml-sitemaps.com. Basically what you do is, after you build the core of your site, you get things kind of structured with the hierarchy that you’re going to use for categories and all the other decision that you’re going to be making, and you get some of your core pages set up, you literally come in here, you put in your URL for your site, the domain name, the root like to your homepage, and this thing will go out there are crawl all over your site, and it’ll go through all your different links. It will do all that stuff, and it will create this site map for you that you then put on your server. Typically you just put on your server at domain.com/sitemap.xml. And the search engines, a lot of them by default know where to find it through that path, and that’s it. And so you definitely want to be using the site map, this service to create that site map, because that really helps with helping spiders find your stuff.

There are other tools out there for site maps, we’ll try to link to some of those in the resources section. Google has something and there’s some other ones, and you can actually submit a site map to Google, there’s a lot of different things you can do with the site map to make it easier for searches to find you, but it all starts with creating the core site architecture that you’re going to start with, then using a tool like this to build the site map. Then, going from there. So even it says there’s four steps to get it done: URL, you press start, you wait for it to be crawled, then it’s going to create the file for you, you’ll download the site map and you’ll put it in a certain directory for your site, and then you can go to your Google webmaster account, and you can add the URL to your site map to tell Google, ‘here’s my sitemap where your spider can go and index my site.’ And it’s recommended that you do that, where you do submit it to Google to tell them here’s the sitemap for my site.

But sitemaps are very important. It helps the search engine spiders find all the different pages on your site. And there are a lot of other tips too, by the way, that we didn’t get a chance to cover, just because most people already know them, but if you don’t, there’s some core things about site and page architecture, like java script and flash, that things in those, the search engine bots can’t read, so you don’t want to optimize with anything in those. We’ll link to some other tips, little nuances like that if you’re interested in those.

But just the foundational stuff, just do what you’re learning and it’ll work for you.

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CD 4 - Lesson 7: Link Building Link building. We talked about how important it is. Half of the equation, incoming links.

So link building is very very important. It’s such a major part of the formula that you just can’t ignore it. And a lot of times if you’re going to err on the side of doing something not so perfect or so right, links will save you, so if your page isn’t optimized as best it possibly could be for how it’s structured, you can get away with having a higher ranking if you have more links or better links actually coming to that page or coming to an area within your site that links to that page, so where it gets ranked high, and you can have it rank higher, again through the link building process than through the optimization process on the page more than vice versa. As I mentioned some pages can rank high for phrases that aren’t really being used or optimized for where there’s not much competition, just by how the page is structured, with no links at all. But what happens more than that is, or are the pages that rank high that don’t contain any specific keywords, but have links coming to them that contain the keywords or related keywords, and that’s why it ranks high. So linking is very very important.

Very very important warning though: you don’t want to get incoming links too fast. So if you’re setting up a new site, and you’re trying to optimize it, don’t just go out there and get hundreds of hundreds of links in the first week. Ideally the rule of thumb is don’t get more than one link a day, at least for the first couple of months, and then maybe you can pick up the pace with two a day, and the next month three a day. But it’s slow and steady wins the race. If you get too many incoming links too fast, you run the risk of Google flagging you as somebody that’s kind of abusing the system. So, just don’t get links too fast, just take it naturally. Set up your site, structure it well, get some pages out there, publish your blog, get some links and some good web directories, we’re going to have tons of, there’s tons of link resources in the resources section as well as we’ll constantly be updating it for you. Start there with some of the best ones, we’ll talk about some of that in the master plan, but ultimately, just don’t get them too fast when you’re first starting out. If you’ve already got a site that’s been around for awhile and has a lot of incoming links, then you can just use some of these other link building strategies and resources to kind of get more and more, as much as you can within reason. But just don’t, don’t go pay some company to get you 10,000 links and have them get you 10,000 links in all these crazy pages within a week, or it’s the kiss of death, it’s going to flag your site.

As I mentioned, a starting point for most SEO optimization, for most of this process, for most SEO consultants and experts, they agree is to start with good web directories. And some of them you have to pay for inclusion, other ones are free, my advice is, it of course all depends on your budget, if you don’t have a large budget, then I wouldn’t even do any of the paid ones, but if you have a decent budget, I would just do both. So, start with getting listed in some of the better directories, and then of course, start with getting included in some of the ones that are paid. So start by doing those like one a day. Pick out

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the best one, then go to the next one and so forth, and of course we’ll have a huge list of those in the resources section.

You know reciprocal linking of trading links with people, you link to me I link to you, use to work really well. Now it’s just totally devalued, it doesn’t really work all that much anymore, but it still works. But, the best way people find that it works is with content. If you’re going to exchange links with somebody, someone you know, you become friends with them, they say hey let’s exchange links, a couple ways to do it that most people have found: try not to exchange the links from the same page. Like they link to you on the homepage, you link to them on your homepage. Maybe somewhere deeper on their site they link to your homepage, or they link to a deeper site, a deeper page on your site and vice versa. So don’t just have it the same page links to you that links back to that same page. But the other thing is, if you’re going to exchange links, it’s better to do it within content, with content. Get them to put an article on their site, that within that content, not just at the very end, but somewhere within the text is a link to your site, and that’s a lot more valuable and is doing a lot better for people than it is if you just have a link that’s just sitting there by itself at the very bottom of the page that links to you. So put it within content, if you’re going to be doing that. Of course anywhere you get a link from, anywhere on the internet, if it can be within content than sitting by itself, it’s a lot more valuable.

Always keep in mind; a quality link is better than a thousand weak links. A quality link is better than a thousand weak links. It’s not just about total link popularity, it use to be. It’s not so much anymore. You still ultimately want to get a lot of links over time, and just get them from all over the place, and you’d love to have the whole world linking to you, but when push comes to shove, you’ll rank higher if you just get fewer high quality links, and of course, if it’s done within content or done with the proper keywords and phrases, or LSI phrases, than the results you’d get if you had just tons and tons of links from little junky sites that don’t have much value in Google’s eyes.

Anchor text, what the words are in the link itself needs to be a broad combination of terms. The biggest kiss of death now, it use to work, but not anymore, is if you just had a hundred incoming links to your site that only said gardening tools. You could rank high for gardening tools, that’s how it use to work, and it was easy. No longer the case. You want to, I would say, you want to use the actual keyword phrase that you’re targeting no more than 10% of the incoming links that you have. So 10% of the time, maybe the link just does say gardening tools or discount gardening tools. All the rest you want it to be other words along with the phrase, so its kind of a longer tale version of that keyword, as well as LSI phrases. You really just want to mix it up, and when we get into kind of ranking out your different LSI phrases, which we’ll kind of talk to you more in the master plan after you get things to convert, you figure out what kind of you want to target, you’re going to have some to pick from, so as you build these links you just want to mix it up.

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It’s very important that the link comes from not only a relevant theme page, but the words that are around it. That’s why it’s better if it comes from within content. But first and foremost, it really does need to come from a page that is related to your page. Don’t do a reciprocal link exchange with a site that sells cat sweaters if you have a gardening site.

That’s not going to do you any good, even if you do use some kind of an article or something else, because the other pages that link to that page can tell Google if the content on that page, even though it is structured to have LSI words and keywords, if it’s kind of makes sense that they’re linking within.

So Google’s process and where it’s going is incredibly intelligent. It’s going to, you may be able to fake it and get by in the short term, but we’re all about a long-term strategy so that everything I’m having you do for your business is building equity in your marketing.

It’s building this asset for every little thing you do is going to have this long-term value, so everything that you spend your time on or invest your money in will hopefully return value to you forever.

So, let’s stay away from these short lived thing and trying to beat the system, so make sure when you’re getting incoming links where maybe you’re buying them from or where you’re getting them from, you got to be careful buying links, Google cracks down on that too now. So it’s just constantly this juggling act. But where you get them from needs to be from a site that has the pages that are truly related to whatever your site is about.

And of course, you want to work on kind of a, this isn’t an exact science, I just say this is a rule of thumb because most people, they only focus on the homepage, but fact of the matter is, this math is probably better off to even go less than this the homepage. But just as a rule of thumb for you, just to keep for you to at least keep in mind, so you’re not just building your links to the homepage. The very least, do half to your homepage, but then the other half of links that you’re getting coming to your site, have them point to sub pages in your site, what they call deep linking, they go farther down into your site. And of course, the more relevant they are, if you’re getting linked from an article or blog post that’s within a specific category like carrots, let’s say in this gardening world, you don’t want them to link to your homepage, if at all possible, have that carrot page link to your carrot page, and that’s more powerful ultimately.

But you do want both, because you need those incoming links coming to your homepage, because although this page rank thing of Google as everyone’s figuring out or trying to figure out, is on a page by page basis, and just because a homepage has a high page rank, doesn’t mean everything else in that site has that high value. Google does seem to have some kind of scoring process for scoring like an entire domain name and thinking of something site wide. And a lot of that does have to do with links that do go to the homepage, so there are benefits of that. So, but split it up about 50/50 when you go and

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do link building. Maybe half to your homepage, but everything else, just deep linking throughout your site.

CD 4 - Lesson 8: Press Releases A great way to get some incoming links to your site is by submitting a press release to sites, like PR web. Putting out a press release, and having the press release contain links to your site and to some of your pages with specific links. You can put full on anchor text links within the content, and it’s a great way to get press releases distributed in different PR directories around the web, especially a lot of sites will pick up your press release and republish it, and so that link is getting kind of spawned out there on different places on the net, and it’s counting towards your site because it’s coming off of whatever site used that press release. So, not going to go too much into press releases, we’ll link to some of the resources. There’s a science to writing a good press release, and how you structure everything else, and again, link to plenty of those resources in the resources section for you, but you’ll want to consider using press releases. You’ve got to do it properly though, you don’t just submit a press release for the sake of submitting one, there’s kind of you have to structure a certain way and have a reason for doing it, but almost of course every business has reasons to be using press releases, and almost every business has a bunch of different things that make for a good press release. So, consider submitting press releases, and we’ll of course link to more resources to help you learn how to properly do it, and why to do it, and how to do it, and how to get the most benefit from it. Especially when it comes to building links, but it’s a very kind of underrated method for building links to your site, and that’s submitting press releases.

CD 4 - Lesson 9: Competitive Research Okay we’ve already talked about many times now, the importance of doing competitive research to find things that you can piggyback off of, and just short cut your success. I want to just quickly share with you two core things you can use for SEO research, for SEO competitive research. Of course we’ll link to plenty of other tools, there’s a ton of them out there on checking PR for different sites and all kinds of rank monitoring tools, there’s just a bunch of different stuff available, and of course we’ll link to all of that stuff for you.

But there are a couple things I want to show you real quick that you can do in Google that are very powerful and almost, these are kind of the two core things that a lot of SEO people use to kind of investigate competition for any keyword. It’s all in anchor: and then the keyword. Actually I need to put a space here. So you type “allinanchor:” with no spaces between any of this, of course you can space out the keywords, and then you do a search. And what this is bringing up for these results, two million pages here, these are all the pages that have links coming to them where in that link, it contains the term

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gardening tools or whatever you search with that little scheme there, that little parameter.

So it can help you see how much competition there is for certain keywords in the sense of seeing how many links are out there that contain the main keyword. As we’ve already gone over, a big part of the process is not necessarily the exact keyword phrase, but LSI keywords. However, most people at the root of their efforts, use the main keyword they want to rank for in the anchor text when they’re getting links and things, and so that’s how you can use this to find the competition. So, allinanchor is one of them, the other one is allintitle, so you type allintitle, no spaces, colon, no space in the keyword, you do a search, now it shows you how many pages on the internet, 155,000 in this case, have gardening tools as part of the title to the page. Another great way to kind of get a gauge on not only the competition, but you can use this to find link patterns and other people in your market to maybe exchange content with, or to do deals with, or just to spy on period.

But those are the two main ones that people use for SEO research. Allinanchor to see how many links are pointing to pages that contain those keywords, and then allintitle: how many pages that contain the keywords themselves. So, use those two types of searches to do competitive research, and it’ll really benefit you.

CD 4 - Lesson 10: Using A CMS When it comes to search engine optimization and doing a really effective job, and of course creating a lot of content so and they both go hand in hand. One of the most valuable things you can use in your business is what’s known as a CMS, or content management system. Now there are a bunch of them out there, it’s essentially a piece of software that manages the process of adding new pages to your site, and of course changing anything about the look, and it’s basically an easy way to publish things on the internet, so you can crank out content, and you’re not worrying about making each page from scratch. You know every time you want to add a new page of content to your site, only just a few five, six, seven years ago, you almost kind of had to do everything by hand, well now there are some great tools out there that can manage the whole process for you. And when it comes to search engine optimization, not only will it handle the whole process for you, but there are plug ins and other little tweaks and configurations that can be done to these pieces of software, where they’re already optimized for 95% of the search engine optimization process.

So, one of the best ones is word press. You’ve probably heard of word press if you’ve been around the internet for very long, it’s a blogging platform, maybe you use word press, but word press is incredibly valuable. It’s free software, you can come to wordpress.org and download it, you may need some help installing it if you don’t know how to do that with a server. But once you get word press installed in your server, there are a bunch of plug ins that you can use, and of course we’re going to link to all those in the resources section, that are specially made to make word press work really well for SEO benefits. And there’s a lot of different tweaks and things you can do to work press, and of course we’ll link to all that stuff in the resources section, and once you get it kind 100

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of set up, then you don’t have to mess with 90% of some of these things. When you write a blog post, you’re title will automatically appear in the blog post title itself will appear in the title tag, and kind of proper structure with adding the little pipe and your site name on the end. Let’s say you can set that up in advance, so every time you just write a blog post title, you don’t have to worry about also adding your, the little pipe and the name of your site. Of course you wouldn’t want that on a blog post title anyways, so when you write a blog post title and the page gets published, that title tag automatically is the title of your blog post, and then has the little pipe thing, or the little greater than, however you want to set it up, and then your brand. So, you can do little things like that that are going to automate a lot of these things that you’re learning to do for search engine optimization.

So, I mean it’s just night and day using something like this rather than doing it by hand, and you can just get so much more done. And this just naturally links between categories, you can set up that hierarchy within word press that we talked about, where you have gardening and then going down to vegetables, and going down to carrots. You can do all that within word press, so it’s just very very powerful. So I highly recommend using word press, and of course we’ll link to the different resources and plug ins and how to tune word press for SEO. But check this out real quick, this is a great site: earlytorise.com. Great company, great content, they publish all kinds of stuff dealing with health and wealth, and lifestyle and things. But I just wanted to show you their website, so as you can see, you know, their website doesn’t, it’s not a typical blog type website. They’ve got products, so this is kind of like a hub site: it links to products, it links to articles and other things, but guess what?

This is managed, I’m 99% sure at least I looked into it and it looked like it was, but and someone told me it was, to confirm it, but I’m pretty sure it is, this is managed with word press. You can do exactly this in word press. And so this doesn’t look like a typically blog, or kind of CMS type of website, and that’s important. It looks professional, but yet it has the SEO benefits that things are nested in the way things are structured throughout the pages of the site, that they link to other pages, and this is just some kind of sales where they have set up on one of their pages. But they’re managing the majority of this through word press. So, when they post their newsletters, now you can see this kind of looks more blog like. They have experts; all these are great keyword links that create the search engine optimization. The nested categories that we talked about, you can do this in word press, so you definitely want to consider using word press as the management system just for all the stuff that you put out there on the internet, including for your homepage and how you do everything. So, word press is powerful, we’ll of course link to where you can get it and the other resources in the resources section for this CD.

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CD 4 - Lesson 11: Google Analytics Real quickly, just want to revisit this, already talked to you about Google analytics and how incredibly powerful it is and why you have to be using it to manage all of your traffic. But one of the things you’re going to be doing in the master plan, and managing your SEO efforts is simply managing the results from your SEO efforts and that’s when you come in here, you can go under traffic sources, and this can manage multiple sites if you have multiple sites, but for your main domain, or just working with one site in this process, this traffic secret system for getting the traffic from the search engines, we’re going to be having you come in here on a regular basis, you’re going to be coming under traffic sources, you come under keywords, you look at the keywords that are brining traffic for your site, of course you can change this page structure so you can see more.

But what we’re just going to keep an eye on is which ones are brining us the most traffic, you can see of course which page within your site the traffic is going to, in here with Google analytics, as I mentioned, we’ll link to some other resources for learning Google analytics, because it’s very complicated and we could do 100 hours on Google analytics alone, but just so you know, this is, you’re going to learn to come in here and you’re going to find the results so you can say, ‘oh, someone searched for blog submission and it brought us 61 visitors.’ So we go to the page that this is driving the traffic from, or the traffic’s coming to it, so whatever that page and however it’s optimized, that ones’ brining us traffic for this keyword, then we’re going look to be tweaking that to possibly up this number, because it’s already working, so we could just do some minor things to make it work better.

So just wanted to show you this real fast again, because it’s going to be covered in the master plan and I wanted you to know just again how it relates to search engine optimization. So we’re going to use analytics to track all our results, we’re going to come in here and see what keywords are working, and then we’re going to tweak them to work better. And that’s what our core strategy for you is going to be all about. Throwing a bunch of stuff out there, waiting to see what hits, when stuff hits, we tweak it and fine tune it and make it work better, while at the same time, continuing on a long term strategy to get you higher rankings for the best keywords in your market that you do want, as well as any others that you’re really targeting.

But, anything that works at all, any traffic we get at all, within reason, even if it’s not maybe some of the highest converting stuff. Remember I talked about only the converting stuff matters? Well in some cases, it’s not optimal, but it is brining us maybe some newsletters subscribers, maybe not buyers at first, and it does have some kind of value to us, maybe we can monetize it with affiliate programs or advertising or something else, it still has some value, and so if it only takes two seconds to make a title a little bit better on a page that let’s say this blog submission page is getting us some good traffic, but blog submission isn’t even the title, so if we just tweak that one page to have blog submission in the title somehow, and if that can triple that traffic, we would want to do that. So, just 102

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wanted to show you Google analytics again real fast, and how I’m going to be referring to it in our master plan, because it’s really important.

CD 4 - Lesson 12: Review Okay, lets review. The magic algorithm changes regularly, we talked about this. No one’s ever going to figure out exactly what the Google formula is. And even if somehow they did, in a week, in a month, in a few days, it’s probably going to change then they don’t know what it is. This is the very reason why not to spend too much of your time trying to master search engine optimization. It’s one thing if that’s only going to be your job, and you’re going to build a business around it. If you’re in any other business, take my word for it, don’t waste your time. It just takes too many hours of your time to try and figure it out and stay on top of it, and it changes so much, just look to other experts, other authority sources on the subject matter, and of course, you know we’ll do our best to keep all those things up in the resources section, as well as link to other solid authorities out there that are constantly figuring other things out. Of course we want to listen to everyone we can on the subject matter, because it’s so broad.

And that’s the other thing you have to realize is, no matter how smart you are, or how many hours you’re going to put in anything, you’re never going to master any certain topic. You’re never going to know it all, so you got to look to other people. So, obviously what I’m teaching you in all these different things I’m teaching you, I’ve learned from some different sources, and of course will link to those in the resources section of course and give credit to those where I’ve learned some things from. As well as I’ve learned some things kind of just accidentally. But just know that you just keep a broad mind, and don’t spend too much time trying to ace this thing, because it’s a moving target.

It’s all about incoming links and proper keywords. This is what we talked about. How the page is structured, using the right keywords, having it theme related, it’s got to be within themes, it’s got to link within themes it’s got to make sense, it’s got to be relevant, or it’s bad. And so you want to get those incoming links from relevant good places, and you need to be using pages with good relevant content.

See how this is all working together? We talk about publishing a lot of content, we talk about publishing really good content, things that humans will really want to read and really want to link too, it all works together.

Title tag, most important thing. Start with your keyword, also put your brand in there, separate, use that little pipe thing or like a great than symbol, and that’s the biggest start of the entire SEO process.

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keywords and certain titles. Use these research tools to keep up with the rankings in your market, to give you some ideas, to piggyback. That concept of piggybacking that we keep repeating again, and again, and again. Very valuable stuff. But use these research tools, and of course we’ll link to a bunch of them in the resources section.

Site architecture is critical. The way your page is linked to each other, the way you structure your URL’s, your domain name, everything to do with all that is important, so you want to make sure and set up that foundation correctly.

Use the steady growth link building strategy, don’t just jump out of the gate and get a million links right away, or you can get penalized and it can take you forever to get back into Google’s results, and some people never get back in. Slow and steady wins the race for building a long-term strategy. Doesn’t mean we cant get short term traffic right away that we can make a bunch of money with, but long term slow steady link building strategy is the best.

Consider using word press as the CMS platform, it has so many advantages, so many plug ins, so many ways to optimize it. You really want to think about that. It’s just a fantastic piece of software, so that’s why I showed it to you, that’s why I talked about it.

So, unless you’ve already got a site on it’s way and it’s already complicated and it’s too hard to change, think about starting off as a foundation of word press, because it does more than just kind of make your blog, it can just make an entire site.

Last but not least, the concept in process is just simply monitoring our analytics and improve what’s working. Talked about this now more than once, and it’s because it’s important, and that’s the process and we get into kind of the step by step of what you’re going to be doing on a regular basis in the master plan. That’s a big part of it. We’re simply observing hey what’s working, out of all the stuff we’re throwing against the wall, and let’s go in that direction to tweak it to make more improvement, to get more traffic.

Because that’s the fastest way to get more traffic, just simply improve what’s getting some traffic rather than spending a lot of time on things that aren’t working at all. And so that’s the main concept of what we always want to keep in mind.

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CD 5: Content Factory Lesson 1: Overview Content Factory. This is the most important CD in this course next to the Master Plan.

You need to pay close attention and even take notes along the way. This is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. This CD is about doing things in a certain way and to a certain quality level that are going to make the difference in you generating a little traffic or a ton of traffic. So pay close attention.

We’ve already talked about how important it is to be publishing great content on a regular basis, all the benefits that has. And so in this CD we’re going to really talk about how to go about doing that, how to plan for it, where to get ideas from, how to schedule content, and all the other things that go along with that. Let’s play the SEO lottery. I love using this analogy because I think it’s so accurate.

You know, hitting on that algorithm of Google’s which is just a mystery no matter how many experts spend tons and tons of time trying to crack the code and figure it out. Not only does no one know the exact formula, but it changes so often, even if someone starts figuring it out, tomorrow it can be completely different. So we want to take a lottery mentality.

If we’re trying to win a lottery our odds go up if we have more tickets. The more tickets and number of possibilities and combinations that we have in our hand, the more likely we are to have a better chance to win and hit on that exact number that ends up winning a lottery so to speak, and there’s the analogy.

That’s the only reason you want to put out a lot of content and if all those pages are optimized correctly like we’ve already talked about with this search engine dynamic stuff, then we stand a really good chance to rake for all kinds of obscure words and phrases, thousands of them.

Things that we aren’t even targeting specifically with certain pages that we’ll be able to generate high quality traffic from and make money from, and of course improve those to generate more traffic and all the other benefits which come from that that we’ve already talked about so we’ve got to be prepared to play this SEO lottery and the way we do that is by building and putting in motion a content factory and that’s what this CD is all about.

You need to manage your factory like a TV show. So many people have problems with “I don’t know how many times I should post on my blog.” Or “I don’t know what I should write about.” You know “How should I link things together?” Or “Where should I distribute my content?”

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They don’t have a management process in place. And I’m going to give you a basic model that works for other industries for you to use to generate content for your business on the internet. That model is for you to think like a producer for a TV show. Let me give you an example.

When Oprah Winfrey does a show and they come to the end of the show and the cameras go off, she turns to the staff and says “Hey, great show everybody. Great job. Great work.” She doesn’t then turn to somebody after she says that and go “Hey, what do you think we should talk about on tomorrow’s show?”

No, it doesn’t work like that. In fact they’ve produced shows many, many weeks, if not months in advance and so they’re working with a buffer of a pretty long time frame. And that’s what you’ll learn to do in building your content factory. You’ll learn to kind of compartmentalize different parts of the flow in the process from doing research and building a swipe file of other interesting content and other posts you find in your market, to generating ideas from some of your research to come up with the next concepts for what you’re going to create content about and moving that in to other phases towards producing the content and syndicating and getting it out there.

We’re going to cover all of that. But you need to manage your factory just like you would a TV show. It’s not that hard. Create link bait to get links and traffic. You probably know by now what link bait is. We’ve talked about that a little bit. Link bait is certain pieces of content that are specifically created to hopefully attract a lot of links because as we already know, links are very valuable to the SEO process and the links themselves can actually send us direct traffic from those links coming from where the link is at.

So we’re going to talk about that because it’s very important that some of the content we’re putting out on a regular basis is structured like this link bait so it’s kind of most likely to get incoming links from other people in our industry, and we’re going to talk all about some little secret ways and techniques that you can do that. And it’s actually pretty simple and you’ll be surprised I think if you don’t know some of these methods.

We’re going to talk about using a crash course as your foundation. Again, we’ve talked about the importance of putting out really good quality content. You have to give before you receive in most cases and it’s happening more and more on the internet. The buy cycle, the sale cycle is taking longer. People aren’t going to sites and just buying right away at the rates that they used to.

There’s now more of a relationship courting period. People like to do more research and learn about companies and it’s just the natural process, just like it doesn’t work really well to blatantly advertise on the social media sites. You need good content to really set a first impression with people and make them want to get more from your company to consume more information as well as to do business with you.

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So we’re going to talk about creating a crash course that will solve all of these different issues. We’re going to talk about content launchers. You’re probably like “What in the world is a content launch?” You’ve probably heard of product launches but we’re going to talk about content launches and how you can create specific campaigns and orchestrate these little campaigns to create a special piece of content that you orchestrate a process to just blast it out for maximum effect all over the internet site, the social sites, and many other places to get a really big return of links and traffic and benefit from it.

So it’s important. We’re going to talk about how you can go about doing that. There are many formats and many types of content. You know, blog posts are some of the most common. There’s also podcasts, recorded audio and video, articles, basically four to 600 word piece of content, and e-mail content as well. You have an e-mail list; you’re going to mail things out to the subscribers on your list. What’s that content going to be?

We’re going to talk about all these things, lots to cover when it comes to content. And the beauty of content is a lot of it can be repurposed. Let me repeat that. The beauty of content is that a lot of it can be repurposed, so it can be reused. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you record an audio podcast. It’s a half hour just talking off the cuff about lots of things to do with your industry and your market and your business. You can take that audio file and use it to generate traffic. You can get it listed in the iTunes directory and other podcast directories. You can have people subscribing to your podcast. Of course they’re only going to do that if it’s good. That’s why the foundation has to be good content.

But you can have that recording and any other recordings that you make for this podcast transcribed into text and now you can use that text throughout your site as a blog post, as an article in other places, and now you kind of get a two for one benefit of just creating the podcast one time. You record the podcast; you get the podcast value, but now you can have it transcribed very easily and you get the text value of being able to use that for search engine optimization.

So it’s very, very powerful. And last but not least, you need to build a team of content producers. You don’t have to create content all by yourself, in fact you don’t have to create at all if you don’t want to. You can write checks to people that will cost effectively create content for you at relatively cheap prices.

There are some out there that will write 400 to 600 word solid articles on many different subject matters for five to $7.00 a piece. So you don’t have to hire someone on staff for three or four or $5,000.00 a month. You don’t have to break the bank to get people to write content for you. It’s not like $100.00 an article or anything.

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So you want to consider building a team of content producers because you only have so much time and you’ll want to be hiring people to create content for you and do research for you anyways just so you can have more content than you’re able to create on your own. So it’s going to be important to build a team of content producers for your content factory.

CD 5 - Lesson 2: Crash Course A crash course. I also refer to this sometimes as your calling card, or kind of your signature piece; you’ll understand why. But essentially you need a crash course for your visitors. A crash course is basically kind of a concise piece of solid content about your market, about your business, about something important to your prospects in the market that they can get a lot of value from.

For example, in our gardening example that we have been using throughout this course, a great crash course would be you know, kind of like, a beginners guide to successful gardening or you know some kind of step-by-step quick start guide to you know, gardening, mastery, something along those lines where it’s kind of an A to Z kind of summary piece of content that teaches something, typically like a how-to like how to do something.

Because how-to pretty much has the most value of all the different content types. So, you want to have this thing, I call it a crash course at times just because it’s kind just takes anyone that’s even you know, a complete beginner for things related to you and your business and what it is that you sell, and it can bring them up to speed really, really quickly, and kind of make them medium or even an advanced type of prospect with a lot of knowledge about the things that you sell, products and services.

So this crash course does multiple things. The first thing is it establishes the first impression in the relationship between you and visitors. So it’s got to be fantastic. This crash course you know, piece of content really needs to be just incredible value. Almost like a paid product. There are many different kind of formats for – and I’m going to talk about those in just a minute. But it doesn’t have to be you know a hundred pages or anything but you want to make it a pretty good size so you have plenty of room or space to teach a lot, and to really give a lot of value.

So, you’re going to want to create this signature piece of content that many people will read and consume and the first touch, so to speak, with you and your business. It could be in the form of a PDF report. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit. It could be a video, or it could be you know an article or a series of articles.

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I typically recommend PDFs because they rank pretty well on the search engines and PDFs themselves have this kind of higher perceived value because people can download them and keep them on their hard drives, or put them on you know, pass between machines and it’s kind of portable. I think it’s called the portable document format, if I’m not mistaken.

So, PDFs have way more value than articles. You know, between PDF and video it’s kind of you know, it’s debatable depending on who the prospect is and what they are looking for. But the PDF has a higher perceived value. They could save it to their hard drive and the search engines can index them so it has all these different benefits.

You want to start by compiling a FAQ for your niche, a FAQ for your market, your industry. FAQ is frequently asked questions. So, do some research in your market and find out what the most frequently asked questions are when it comes to your market. You can do this by visiting discussion forums and looking at blogs in your market and if you just poke around for long enough you’ll start to figure all these things out.

You can figure this out by the content that other bloggers in that niche have bloged about; you know what they’re kind of writing about, what they post about, how-to things, or they’re posting about, you know solutions. Or a lot of them do kind of a Q and A type of a format and I want to talk about that to in a second. So do some research and figure out what the frequently asked questions are for your market. And most of that is what you want to try to compile into your crash course.

So if kind of a new person comes to your site and they are new to that market and they have tons of questions, you know, “Should I use fertilizer or not on my garden? If so, what kind should I use? You know, what kind of tools should I use to till the soil and how often should I water the garden if it doesn’t rain?” You know all these common questions.

“Can I grow corn in Florida?” So on and so forth. That may not be a common one but you just want to do your research and find the most common questions and use that as a foundation for creating this crash course for creating this, you know, kind of little how-to guide related to your market, like you know. So an example case related to gardening and the frequently asked questions are some of the best things to answer and build your crash course around because it’s just what the market is thinking and what they want to know.

You’ll want to use the crash course as a bribe to get people to join your e-mail list. You can simply do this by having a little optin e-mail form on your blog over like in the far right column and you can have a little graphical representation made that represents the crash course, like a little kind of virtual cover and you can just have it above and you can put some copy that basically just says you know, opt in now and get free access or instant access to the gardeners crash course or the two day you know, super course to the biggest carrots in town, or whatever you get the point.

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You want to use a decent copy. Give the crash course a unique title and promise to give it to people if they opt-in. Now you can certainly give it away in other areas in the site if you wanted to, but ideally you want to try to get the most value from it and typically that will come from offering it as what’s called an “Ethical Bribe” to get people to opt-in to your list.

I already mentioned this, the crash course needs to be rock solid content. If there’s ever going to be good content that you create, let me repeat that. If there’s ever going to be good content that you create you want it to be for this crash course, because again this is going to set the first impression. If it’s just awesome stuff it’s really going to affect your prospects that read it and consume it. That’s going to make all the difference in the world for the rate at which they buy your product and service or click on links on your site that may make you money or come back and visit on a regular basis. So, it needs to be absolutely rock solid.

One of my dearest friends, very, very close friend of mine, great internet marketer Jimmy D. Brown, he once said this phrase that I’ll never forget and he was talking about how to create effective content for your marketing. And he calls it – and you’ve probably heard this before because so many people have kind of copied it or you know, kind of regurgitating it but he’s the one that came up with it.

Useful but incomplete. And you kind of want to take this stance or strategy with all the content that you create within reason; and the crash course is no exception. So you want it to be rock solid, great, great content; but towards the end of it you kind of want to leave it open ended where there are some other things that they will need to you know, learn about and research to really be able to take the gardening you know, process or whatever the situation is to that highest level.

And then of cores towards the end in this, you know, kind of, incomplete part lead them to other content of lead them to your products that actually are solution to kind of what ever the need is to complete the thing. So you can link to your products, don’t be to aggressive about it but you can certainly do that then and you could also use it to drive people reading it like to your blog or to your new videos you’ve published or to pod cast that you regularly publish.

You can use it to just, you know, lead someone down a path to take the next logical step and sometimes to a page where your products and services are for sale; and sometimes it’s not; but useful, but incomplete.

I just mentioned this, you want to lead visitors to other content or products so as they’re reading the content and they really enjoy it, don’t lose that opportunity to tell them about more content you have or to lead them to products that you sell.

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At the end of this report or this course, if you’re going to do a video, or if it’s going to be in articles, at the end you want to give them multiple ways to stay up to date and to stay in touch with you. If you didn’t use this crash course report as a bribe to get people to opt in then you’ll definitely want to list the URL where they can go and opt-in to your list.

But you’ll also want to promote your Twitter accounts saying “Hey follow me on Twitter and keep up with some of my latest ramblings about gardening.”

You know make it fun, add some personality to it. You could also tell them to, you know, become your friend on Facebook and put that in some terms of why they’re on your site.

“Join me on Facebook where I publish videos about gardening and you know, put my episodes of my weekly pod cast.” Whatever, you get the point. But give them multiple ways to stay in touch with you which can allow you to continue to communicate with that person rather than if they leave and they never come back.

CD 5 - Lesson 3: Producer Method Work like a TV show producer. I gave you that Oprah Winfrey show analogy. They don’t create shows from day to day. They pre-plan and produce shows weeks if not months in advance. And that’s what you need to do as well with your little content factory that we’re teaching you how to create. We’re putting great regular content out there across the internet.

So the big challenge for everyone is how do I manage a content factory? Let’s face it.

Most people realize that if you put a lot of content out there on the internet and on a regular basis you’re really going to benefit from it. Content is that valuable asset, one of the valuable marketing assets in your business and everything you do on the internet.

So managing that process of how to produce it is the biggest question that most people have because they don’t understand all the little things that go along with putting out that content on a regular basis and to keep it coming, keep producing that result. Here’s how you manage it and here’s how it works.

This is actually a simplified version. We’re going to get in to more details about this in the Master Plan CD. But here’s the basics of it. It’s this producer flow. It starts with scheduling. You kind of look at when the next available spot is to put out your next blog post or to put out new articles or to put out videos, and then you manage your time and kind of your production schedule and what your availability is in the beginning before you start creating more content and before you start publishing the content and putting it out there.

You surely don’t want to put out tons and tons of content all on the same day and then not have much content for a few weeks so you kind of want to space it out and pre-plan,

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almost pre-schedule it. And if you do that you’ll get far ahead and create a buffer where you can even have two, three, four, five months or more of content already created for the blog, for article directories, podcasts, everything that you’re doing and then you can go on vacation and you can take time off and you can do all those things because it’s all being done, being planned in advance and you don’t have to be there in front of the computer day to day, week to week to keep up with something like this.

Of course you can hire someone to manage the whole thing for you as well as to do anything else in this course like we’ve already talked about now. So that’s also a consideration. But here’s the flow. It starts with that scheduling process, then pretty much there’s a research department.

You need to constantly be keeping what they call a “swipe file” where you’re just taking copies of your competitors, marketing materials or blog posts, everything they’re doing, swipe a copy of it and just copy it in a folder somewhere and just keep it kind of in an archive related to your competitors. So you’re going to compile as much research as you can find.

All the different blog posts that you find in your market, take some notes about them, what those posts are about. Even when you start to see spikes in comments analyze what’s being published in your market, what’s getting the most attention, and what people are finding valuable and store those notes and ideas in the research folder or kind of department.

You can use Google Docs for this. Google Docs works really well so you can constantly be surfing the internet from anywhere in the world and you may find a really good blog post for your market. You can just copy and paste that URL right in to kind of your research archive, Google Docs area if you have it set up in Google Docs as kind of just documents that you’re just going to edit from anywhere and add information to.

But you want to keep this research file, it’s very important. You’re constantly going to be compiling research. When you think of concepts that you’d maybe like to write about, write it down and file it away.

The next stage is the idea of development where you take a concept or idea and you kind of create the structure for what it’s going to be. If it’s an article then you’re kind of creating the flow of the article. If it’s a podcast you’re kind of creating all of the elements of what that podcast will actually contain. Does it contain an interview in the second half? You talking about something for 10 minutes in the beginning, all that is figured out in the idea development pre-planning stage.

Then it moves in to the content creation, when the content is actually made. Whether you hire someone to do writing or you do writing yourself, this is where that happens. Where

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videos are made, audio podcasts are recorded, things are written, it happens there. The next stage is to release the content.

You’re going to be releasing all your major content in one form or another on your blog.

We’ve already talked about the blog structure benefits to SEO and for SEO and it’s just a natural fit that you’re going to be releasing all of your different types of content in one form or another through the blog itself. So you get to that part of the flow where you release the content and you put it out there.

Now releasing it will be scheduled. You’ll look in to the future in advance and you’ll see when you have an availability for putting out a new blog post and then when that day comes and that time is appropriate you actually publish the blog post. Then it moves in to a syndication phase. This is where if you’re using widgets that syndicate all your blog posts on Facebook or on many other sites, when you publish to the blog it automatically gets syndicated towards many parts of the internet which is very, very powerful.

So that’s kind of the syndication phase that it goes through as soon as you release it. It gets distributed to all these little points all over the internet. Then the last major phase is promotion where you’re kind of actively promoting the content. You’re telling your list about it or telling people about it, just doing anything to drive links and attention to it so people go and check it out.

This is very, very important. To run your content factory the foundation of it will be key words because you want to be creating content that’s optimized for the search engines that can generate traffic for you. That’s what this is all about. That’s the purpose of this.

We need to keep an updated list of key words that you want to target. We already talked about how you need to test your key words first, you need to look and see what will convert for your business and really do your market research.

But once you’ve figured out these things and you get the AdWords process of actually testing them to see what the conversion is, when you find these main key words, five, 10, 20 words that have proven to bring you positive results, sales, opt-ins, some type of conversion, you want to have those key words in a document somewhere.

Google Docs is fine, but some kind of list. And so as you’re producing content for your site out on your blog and through these other formats; you want to be looking to this list to see what you haven’t created yet and to be able to apply that to the next piece of content so it’s optimized for that next key word.

Now you want to mix it up where not all of your posts for example are totally optimized for the search engines. It can just be you just writing off the cuff, talking about something, not trying to optimize it. That’s natural and it’s something you want to think

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about. Like you don’t want every single blog post you write to start with “Gardening Tools”.

So you’ve got to mix it up, really change it up, and of course when you compile this list of the five, 10, 15, 20 really kind of valuable key words for your market that convert the best, you’re also going to need to do the LSI research that we just talked about in the SEO CD where you’re finding all the little sub roots of the LSI words and keeping the list of all those together in this master list because you’re going to be pulling from those as well when you create new pieces of content.

I already said this; almost all content pretty much needs to be released on your blog. If you publish articles which we’re going to talk about, you publish it on your blog first and then submit it to a bunch of different article directories. If you create a video and you’re going to upload to all the different video sites embed it in to your own site on your own blog. Create a special PDF report, put a link to it on the blog or actually just publish it on the blog.

So there are a lot of different things you can do to release your content no matter what format on your blog, but you always want to think first and foremost, how can I promote this or how can I mention this and use this on the blog because it’s very important. You need to post your blog as often as possible. Now in the past I’m not exactly one to be preaching and giving this advice.

If you’ve ever been reading my Income.com blog for very long, or my old marketing secrets blog, you know I go through times where I post quite often every day or so and then there’d be silence for two months and then I’d sporadically pick up posting again.

That’s because I had so many other projects going on, so many other things that were taking up my attention that I didn’t have time to post on a regular basis. But you really need to do so because it really, really hurts you.

I recognize now looking back, seeing some data and seeing some of my stats that it kind of hurt me many, many times when I took so long to post again. So as a minimum you need to post once a week to the blog that you set up for your business whether it’s just some basic news about your industry or some personal things that are going around the office where you work or whatever the case is, you need to post at least once a week.

Beyond once a week it kind of just gets to the point where people are like “Oh, this blog is outdated. They haven’t posted in three weeks. No reason to ever come back.” So you want to post as often as possible within reason with probably a max of three or four posts a day.

You want to pre-schedule as well as have standby content. I talked about this a little bit.

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they can fill it in and use that content. It’s a lot better and more valuable to be able to fill in content for something that’s going to be missed rather than missing it.

In other words, if you’re not going to be able to post a blog this Friday and you’re just like “Ah well, people will have waited two weeks between the latest post based on when I’m going to get back.” That’s not really a good option. So by having some standby content pre-made you have something to immediately publish and fill in the gap and not have to worry about people kind of getting bugged by coming a week later and not seeing anything new.

But you’ve got to manage everything like a TV show. That’s the most important thing.

And if you do so all of this will become very, very easy. And of course on the master plan we’re going to go in to a lot more detail about all the little steps you’re going to take with this process and it will hopefully end up becoming very, very clear for you what the simple plan is you have to do on a regular basis. It’s not real complicated, it just has many steps to it and there are many little intricate details on why it works and how.

So you’re going to learn all of those. And of course, hire others to create content, but you optimize it. If you go to a lot of these different freelance sites, and we’re going to talk about some of those, and hire content writers, but you only want to hire someone to write – this is a big mistake marketers make. They hire someone to write it and they say “Hey, do you know search engine optimization? I want you to optimize this article for me.

Don’t worry about that. Tell them if they ask that you don’t want any SEO benefits at all.

You just want a solid article. Because when you get the article back you’re going to optimize it. It won’t take that long.

You change the article title up a little bit to go towards those title related things for the algorithm as far as making sure your key words are in the title and separating the brand or the business name from the title, so on and so forth.

But you optimize it. You add the LSI keywords throughout the text and paragraphs as well as the main key words throughout the different paragraphs and you just take control.

And if you optimize it, it will definitely come out a lot better once you’ve learned all these things and you know what to do than having others do it that claim that they know SEO. So that’s very, very important.

CD 5 - Lesson 4: Link Bait Creating link bait. This is very, very important and very, very valuable to you in your business and everything you’re doing with this course. By now, you know that you want to get incoming links to your site. It has all those SEO ranking benefits, as well as just the natural traffic you can get from people clicking that link from one site and coming to yours.

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Link bait is content that’s structured to hopefully get a bunch of people to link to it. So it’s content that’s created specifically to attract links. Seems kinda sinister, but it’s just part of the process. It doesn’t mean that this content is going to be worthless and it’s just aimed at attracting links. It’s almost the opposite. Typically, most link bait has incredible value, and that’s why people will naturally link to it, because it is a good resource, and people want to share good resources with their readers.

There are quite a few different types of link bait that you can create. Some of the more popular ones from doing analysis online, when someone creates like a beginner’s guide to like an article series or something, or even like a PDF, like a crash course, like we talked about, or a quick start guide to whatever. So someone puts in a lot of work to become the definitive guide for a certain industry, like for gardening, like here’s the beginner’s guide to growing carrots if you live in the South.

Once that’s created and if someone put enough time into it and it’s valuable enough, others aren’t really going to waste their time making it, too. They’ll just link to yours.

So that’s one element of link bait and why it’s great to create really good content that others will want to link to.

Other types of link bait that are very popular and get a lot of links are resource lists or lists of tips. Just like I show this example, “58 Ways to Lose Weight.” It could be like “159 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.” “24 Ways to Save on Your Taxes This Year.” Numbered lists get a lot of attention, and it’s an old kind of copywriting secret that numbers and some kind of specific amount that’s just not rounded off with a bunch of zeroes gets more attention and pulls the reader into the copy more than not using it or using like 10,000, with the zeroes, rather than 10,248, and so on.

So numbered lists work really well. The more work you put into it and the nicer the list, and, typically, the bigger the list, the more people are just going to link to it, rather than create their own list.

That’s really what this is about. When you do resources and guides and things, it’s really about creating things so other people won’t do it. Like you just make it so good and so long that other people aren’t going to take the time to do it. They would just rather link to you.

Interview multiple experts. This is a great, great concept to get traffic to your website, to get links, and just to get recognized. You can seek out some of the top experts in your market and do like a group interview on the phone or you could ask them questions via email and they answer them and email them back, and then you compile them all together. There are a number of different ways to interview experts and to conduct these

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interviews. So you can do it in person. They could just be texting and typing, again, or it could be something they prerecord. There’s a lot of different ways to do it.

But what you want to do here – and this is very, very critical – you want to find those trusted sites in your industry, like we already talked about, the ones that you’ll be wanting to occasionally link out to, and you’ll want to find some of the most influential people in your industry that reach tons of other people, way more people than you reach.

When you isolate and find those people, those are the ones you want to target for doing interviews. Because most people, if they participate in anything, they’ll kinda feel obligated to link to it. So once you put up that interview or the interview series with multiple experts, you’ll want to send a nice email to the person, and you want to say to them, “Hey, just to let you know, I just published our interview. Go check it out. And I want to thank you again for spending the time with me to do such a great interview,” so on and so forth.

Well, most people will just happen to write a blog post and say, “I recently did an interview with such-and-such. You can check it out here.” And they’ll link to it. So when you appeal to the egos of some of the more influential bloggers in your market, it’s a great way to get them to do interviews.

One of the kinda little models I like to use is – I call it “the greatest minds of...”. You could apply this to anything. The greatest minds of karate. The greatest minds of scrapbooking. And imagine someone emailing you – let’s say you were into, I don’t know, cross-stitch, that hobby.

What if you got an email from somebody and they said, “Hi, I’m such-and-such. I currently run a seminar in the cross-stitch industry, and I’m doing a series on the greatest minds of cross-stitch. It’ll be an interview series, and I’m isolating five of the ten crossstitch experts that I could find for my research, and you were one of them.” Well, that really appeals to that person’s ego, and so the odds are really high that once the interview is put online, that person’s going to link to it, because it made them feel great and all the other psychological benefits that went with it.

So think of that model, great minds of whatever. Car racing, if that’s what your market is. Great minds of magic tricks. Doesn’t sound very good, but you get the point. You can use that greatest minds of and name that your interview series, or something similar, and it can work really well.

Surveys and polls. Another good way to get link bait is if you run a special survey about something, some kind of controversial event or something that gets a lot of attention.

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more likely to link to you, because it’s too much work for them to go out there and drive a bunch of people to a poll just to get the same results. So typically, they’ll link to you and say, “I just saw some great stats today. Here are the latest stats on lounge chair use,” or whatever. Doesn’t matter. But think about creating surveys and polls for your market.

Awards and recognition, another one that appeals to ego, if you created some kind of just awards for whatever reason, and you put up the list of winners on your site and, of course, emailed the person, like Nicholas Cage or whoever, and say, “You’re getting an award for Best Celebrity Blog.”

Anytime you do those things, you’re going to be really likely to have that person link to you, because they’re going to be feeling good about it. They’re going to be just using – in some case, whether it’s a TV or an Xbox. It doesn’t matter what the product is involved with whatever you’re writing about or anything.

The point is that people like to be recognized and they like to be given awards. So if you give those out, you’ll probably get other people to link back to you, where they can use it as reinforcement, telling their own people, “Hey, I recently was voted the number-one celebrity blog on the web by such-and-such, such-and-such.” That link will be a link to the poll, so people can see it for themselves. So think of different types of awards and recognition that you can appeal to people’s egos, and you’ll most likely get a bunch of links.

Free widgets, tools, and web services. A number of people have used this model and have done very well with it. Typically, it’s in the tools kind of area, which is also – it’s also a web service of sorts. But it’s where people create resources that other people can benefit from. Maybe it’s some kind of like mortgage calculator that’s on a web page. Or maybe it’s some kind of golf handicapping, golf score tracking service that’s free. It can be any number of things.

But you really need to start thinking about, “What kind of widgets, tools, or web services could I use in my business that people would get a benefit from and would be willing to use?” Because that’s very, very important. It can be extremely valuable.

So think about those widgets, tools, and web services, because when you publish those, and if other people find them and they like them tons of people will start linking to it, sometimes thousands. And that’s exactly what you want. That needs to be your strategy, how to create a free little tool that will appeal to the most people on Facebook, for example, and that they’ll really get a lot of good value out of, and then everyone will recommend me and link to me, so that’s what you need to be thinking about.

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want, and then emulate them. Figure out what they did and then just basically do what they do or do what they did, and you’ll shortcut the path to success. You don’t want to clone someone or rip off copyrights or anything like that, but get a good idea of what type of link bait worked for them and what the post was about and everything else to do with it. Again, then just go from there.

CD 5 - Lesson 5: Article Marketing Article marketing, incredibly valuable and a great traffic generation concept. If you don’t do anything else in this course but create articles and submit them to the article directories, you can generate a good amount of traffic and make some sales just from those efforts. But, of course, I want you to do everything we’re building here, creating this kind of well-oiled, virile marketing machine, how all this stuff’s going to come together in the master plan, and for you to do all the different things, and not just article marketing.

But article marketing is incredibly valuable. It’s great for building back links and traffic.

We want those incoming links. We know they’re valuable. Well, a lot of these article directory sites, the links that they’ll actually have coming back to your site that will be within your article are do-follow links that count towards SEO. They’re not the nofollow links. So that’s very, very important and very valuable at the same time.

And, of course, since articles are such targeted pieces of content, and if the title is written well, really says what it’s about, a lot of people can end up browsing the article directories and then clicking on your link, reading your article, and being one click away from then ending up on your site. So it’s very, very important.

You’ll want to optimize your articles based on the high KEI value for easy traffic. The KEI value is what you’ll see when you do keyword research with Wordtracker. I’ve briefly mentioned it before. It’s this formula that cross-references the number of searches being done on a keyword in a given month and how many competing pages there currently are for that keyword. Based on that cross-reference, you can end up kind of getting a good idea of which keywords that you could target will be the easiest to rank high and to start generating traffic from.

So KEI can be very valuable. It’s not 100 percent accurate, but it can be accurate for many, many keywords, and I’d say it’s probably about 70 percent accurate. Definitely well worth using, and that’s this formula that an old SEO consultant named Sumantra Roy came up with years ago and many, many people use it and apply it and have really good results.

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rare occasion. But you only want to be creating those types of articles and optimize for those types of keywords about half the time. The other half, you want to kinda stick to the main game plan of putting out content for these main – converting the best keywords in your market. So you want to do 50/50.

Make your article titles – just basically use the same SEO rules. Lead with the keyword.

Do all the same fundamental things, where it’s readable by humans, where people will want to click on it. So you’re creating the title so that it’s compelling. That’s the point here. Make it something people will want to click on and check out. But just follow the same SEO stuff, and it works the same way.

I mentioned this, how-to information makes the best articles. It pretty much makes the best content. That’s what people want, the how-to. Just tell me how to do X so I can get Y as the end result. So think about creating these tutorials and how-to articles. So when you create an article for your gardening business, per se, that article’s going to contain some “Here’s how to transplant a smaller plant into your garden without hurting its roots.” Whatever. But it’s how-to information that’s very critical.

So always try to think of what how-to information can I create in this next piece of content, whether it’s articles or blogs or videos or anything, because that kind of trumps everything else. Use that useful, but incomplete, Jimmy D. Brown concept. Use it with articles. You especially want to be using it with articles, because those are really going to be published outside of your site.

And so you’ve gotta try your hardest to get people to come to your site. So create a really good article, but kinda leave it not quite complete, and then you want to lead people to clicking on the link or links to your site that you’re allowed to put in this resource box at the bottom of the article itself.

Again, piggybacking, go to EzineArticles.com – probably the best article directory online right now – and do research into some of the most popular articles. You can clearly see how they’re structured. It’s not that hard. It kinda opens with some kind of introductory kind of statement or the kind of introduction of a certain problem, and then it flows into kind of more about the situation, as well as flowing into then the solution and kind of completing the loop, as they say.

But just look at the successful articles on Ezine Articles. You can see it by views. That should be a pretty good indicator for what you need to emulate and kind of model your own articles after.

You don’t want to sell the link to the crash course and to these other pages that are deeper on your site. I mean, I’m sorry. You don’t want to sell with the link that you’re going to get in the footer of your articles. I’m sorry. I got totally confused there for a minute. So 120

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you don’t want to link to products and services in the resource area at the bottom of your articles where you’re allowed to use links. You’ll want to link to your crash course.

So if you create an article that’s kinda the prequel to your crash course, you can say, “To learn all about how to transplant vegetables from one garden to another, see our five-day super course to go from zero to carrot hero in no time flat.” And then that’s the link you want to use in the resource box.

Of course, same anchor text rules apply for search engine optimization. Use the next group of keywords that you’re going to use, mix up those incoming links with the LSI words, and structure that link where it would be natural and not totally forced.

Then, of course, the other thing you’ll want to do with some of your articles is to deep link into your site. When that article’s really relevant to some other information that’s on your site, link to that page, wherever it may be, deep into your site architecture. Those deep links really count towards SEO and really help all the other pages rank well by having this incoming link value go deep into your site, and then get passed around to the other sites, and then all the benefit that happens from that.

So link to either your crash course or a deep link page on your site, but not your products and services. That’s the biggest mistake most people make writing articles. They promote like their online store with their little footer. Big mistake. Just give them more information. They’re already consuming it. Go and give it to them.

Another thing you could do is a hybrid format. Create a text article and say, “For more on this subject matter, we’ve published amazing step-by-step videos to deal with transplanting your carrot from a pot into the garden,” or whatever the subject matter is.

So do a hybrid step-up from one type of content into another format. And that’s a nice logical step of value. Go from a little text article into a full-blown video that you can go watch right now. As you can imagine, that can get some really good response.

I mentioned this, use ezine articles and do competitive research. Look and see what other articles are getting viewed a lot and how they’re structured and what they say. It’s pretty much common sense.

I’ve said it before, release on your blog first. You want to be putting out everything on your blog first, and then going and submit it to other sites. You typically want to wait about a day or two before you go and submit it elsewhere, to make sure Google has come and indexed it, and it knows that it was listed on your site first, kind of as the original author of that content.

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that little research box, they can swap out your link to wherever it was going on your site to their affiliate link that promotes the things that you sell.

Again, that’s not as effective as linking to a deep linked – a deep page in your site structure or linking to the crash course, but you’ll still sell some and you can still get some conversions. Because you’ll want to test. You may end up getting a lot in your specific market. Things could be different for you. But in most cases, you want to just link to other content.

Well, in the case of the affiliates, just let them change the URL to link to product pages.

You could set up your affiliate software where they can link to content, and that visitor gets cookied, so if they go anywhere on the site or end up buying anything later, then the commission is still going to be paid, but those are decisions that you’re going to have to make.

But that’s great to give affiliates articles that they can use and put great content right on their site that’s basically acting like a sales vehicle, because if anyone clicks a link and buys, that’s how they’re going to get paid. So release on your blog first. Wait at least two days or so. And also think about letting your affiliates brand your articles, so they can pass them out all over the Internet, and they benefit and, of course, you benefit, as well.

CD 5 - Lesson 6: Creating Podcasts We’ve already talked a little bit about podcasts, and it’s an incredible opportunity for you to create a podcast and generate some good traffic from it. You can get your podcast listed for free in the iTunes directory, so imagine, millions of people that have iPods and that have iTunes on their computers, PCs and Macs both, they can search the little “Podcast” menu button and they can go into the podcast directory and find your podcast and subscribe to it, and find you when they probably never would’ve had a chance to stumble upon your content or any of your posts anywhere, or anything else, in some cases.

So you could reach far more people than you ever could kind of without that avenue. So it’s very, very powerful. I know many, many people that have had really good results with podcasts, where they’re getting anywhere from ten to a couple hundred new subscribers and listeners and, ultimately, visitors every single day, just by getting some podcasts out there.

And the more podcast episodes you publish, the larger footprint you have. It’s just kinda like the more content you create with blog posts or articles, the more episodes you get out there, the more things there are for people to find of you in the iTunes directory, as well as all the other podcast directories that are out there. There’s a bunch.

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Now, to create an effective podcast, you’re going to have to know a little bit about how to set up audio properly and use a good microphone and how to set up RSS feeds and some other things, and you’ll find links to all that information and all the tips that you need to do all that stuff in the resources section for this CD. But doing a podcast can be fun and, like we already talked about, you can kinda get that double value out of it, where you can transcribe it into text, and now you have a great piece of text that you can optimize for the search engines and use to hopefully get some rankings and get some traffic. So you get double value out of it. You create this multimedia piece. That’s this audio recording in this example of an audio podcast. That can go out there to all the different podcast directories and people can stumble upon it, as well as recommend it to others. And then you get that other component to it, the text component that you can use to try to rank high, just like you would any other text.

So you really need to consider publishing a podcast, if there’s enough information, at least in your market, that would kind of work well with a podcast, where – some kinda episodic show where you do it – ideally, you’d want to do it once a week, whether the show’s five minutes or 35 minutes. You just do one little recording each week, and then you use the software and services that are linked to in the resources section to publish your latest podcast episode, and then it just gets pushed out to all the different RSS channels and all the different people subscribing through iTunes. There’s all kinds of neat tools out there to track how many people are consuming each episode and how many people are checking out your listings, and some really neat traffic and marketing implications.

But podcasts are really cool. You should look into it. They’re growing in popularity, but at the same time, not a lot of people are publishing podcasts because it represents a certain amount of work, and most people just don’t want to put in the work that it takes to properly record some kind of show and, of course, prepare for what the show’s going to be about and all those things.

So you definitely want to look into doing that, and that would just simply be publishing like an audio podcast. Go to the resources section when you get a chance and look at the resources there for it, and you’ll find everything you want to know about it. But it’s definitely a great opportunity to consider.

CD 5 - Lesson 7: Email Content Let’s talk about some tips for creating great email list content, the email that you’re going to send out to your list. Emails that you send to your list kinda need a more personal feel than just kind of a third party, “Here’s an announcement that we just put up a new blog post.” It needs to be one-to-one communication, which is what email is, so it’s you Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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talking to one other person, even if a million different people are getting the message.

That’s how it needs to be structured. So it needs to have a personal feel to it.

Don’t send the same things that you posted on Twitter, on your blog, or elsewhere also in your email. If anything’s going to be different, it needs to be email content that you send to your list. You can make some of your blog posts and Facebook actions and Twitter content and things like that the same across many different little platforms, but email needs to be different. Don’t just use the same copy and pasted message that you posted elsewhere. Always send your list a unique email message that has value for them. But make sure to maintain that personal feel.

Track the traffic from links in your emails, if possible. If you’re promoting something in a specific email, you’ll want to set up tracking links that will let you track that traffic.

You can do this through Google Analytics and you can also do it through most affiliate program software, if you have an affiliate program. Of course, there are ways to just do a custom version of this, where you could have someone probably for $100.00 create your own little traffic tracking script, and you can do it that way.

But you want to track the traffic from links in your emails. You need to use compelling subject lines. Open rates on emails – basically, how many emails are getting actually opened and looked at, not just showing up in the inbox – those rates are falling. It’s harder and harder to get people’s attention and get them to open emails. Most people just get so many emails now. That’s why. So you need to use compelling subject lines. Put mysterious things in there, shocking lines, things to kind of evoke controversy. Just all the things you can think of that fall under the realm of getting attention, because you’re going to need to get attention to get someone to open your emails.

Set up an auto-responder. We’ll link to auto-responder services and resources, just like anything else we mention on this CD and any other CD. Set up an auto-responder to auto-deliver content. Auto-responders make great tools for Internet marketers because you can load up a bunch of content in advance. It’s almost like an automated content factory.

And you can have it just kind of drip out these messages on any schedule you specify. So you could have ten emails that go out once per day for ten days the moment somebody opts into the list. They get that first one, then tomorrow they get the second, so on and so forth. Very flexible. You can do all kinds of stuff with it, and it’s a great way to deliver some really good content.

You kinda want to keep your messages to your email list about 75 percent content and 25 percent pitch, where you’re actually selling something or endorsing a product. Now, as time goes by and you build a stronger relationship with your list, you can lower the content number and raise the pitch number.

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But in the beginning, keep pitching and real hard marketing to a bare minimum. You want people to fall in love with you and your content and become fans of yours and really just want to consume everything you’ll create or write about. In order to get there, you’ve gotta go low on the marketing side of it, at least for the first month or so, to really prove your worth that you have a lot of great stuff free to share with them they can benefit from. So keep the pitching and the hard promotions trying to drive the people to your site at a minimum, at least in the beginning.

Use your email and your email list for most important announcements first. Email is the absolute most powerful communications tool when it comes to marketing and using it to recycle and drive traffic to any website. It’s probably always going to be the case because email is kinda the lowest common denominator of communications, networks, and tools on the Internet, and I don’t see email going away anytime soon. Because of that, people put more value into emails they receive, they check email more times a day, so on and so forth.

So to kinda hammer home the concept of treating your list really well and being really personal with them, you’ll want to make any special announcements of new content released, new products, new partnerships, whatever, by email first to your list. They’ll appreciate it. They’ll appreciate seeing the news before it’s posted on CNN or elsewhere.

But use email for the most important announcements first. I would just say almost all announcements, but in many cases, you don’t want to send out an email to a bunch of people just to say what you’d say in a Twitter link and a nice blog post that you liked. So you gotta use your own judgment. But for important announcements, you’ll want to use it first before anything else.

Give summaries and links to all your other activity. Give summaries and links to all your other activity. So when you’re publishing like an email newsletter or sending out emails to your list, like if you send out an email digest once a week, kind of updating people what happened in the previous week, put little paragraphs, little enticing summaries in a link to that article that you’re talking about. And, of course, in these emails that you send out, you can link to other things that you’re up to, your other sites and products.

You may also want to create like a signature file that gets repeated in every email that you send out that kinda says, “Follow me on Twitter” and has your Twitter URL or the URL to become your friend on Facebook or any other service that you want to share with someone on your list that you want to kinda participate in, so have you. That’s how you do it.

So you could do a lot with email content. Just keep it to solid content and you’ll win.

You’ll get tons of fans and anytime you actually do go to promote something or sell something, it’ll just sell like gangbusters.

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So that’s a quick rundown of what kind of email content you need to be creating and kind of what the quality structure is for what the content even is, such as if it’s content or sales message, so on and so forth. So hopefully you can take those tips and create more effective emails that you send out to your list.

CD 5 - Lesson 8: Special Reports So we’ve talked about how you need this crash course, like, document that’s really kickbutt, super valuable piece of content. And I recommended that you make it in PDF format because it just has higher perceived value because it can be downloaded and there are other benefits to is at well. As you can see here, this is a PDF, this is the Rebirth of Internet Marketing, a PDF special report that I put out over a year and half ago. And I was just talking about trends that I saw coming for the internet. And things about content, and things about sales letters, and copy, and video, and a lot of different things, and a lot of them are starting to come true. And it was just, you know, little report that I put together, but as you can see, you know, this type of style and formatting is great. It’s like looking at a digital magazine. Kind of so much more value than just, you know, article text or even the format of blog posts, it just looks better and it’s just more, it has more importance.

So you’ll definitely want to think about creating a PDF for that crash course, but also creating other PDFs, other special reports, you know, or white papers, and giving those away. Because they’re just a great way to have people link to it. When I put this out tons of people linked to it, you know, recommending other people go and read this and I wouldn’t have gotten has many links if it was just a blog post that I had made, even with the same information, although it’d be a really long blog post. And so here I talk about how content is Kong, how it’s just really dominate and not even king, it’s above that. But anyways, so this thing got lots of links and it probably wouldn’t have if it was just a normal blog post, because it has higher perceived value, like I said, as this downloadable, like, digital magazine thing. It just looks better, feels better, it just seems to be more valuable.

So you definitely want to be creating PDFs and special reports for your market.

Definitely for the crash course if you can. And when you go to the Resources Section there are links to a lot of different places that you’ll be able to distribute PDFs like Scribd and some - some social document places that you can get some traffic from and some value from. But you’ll definitely want to be creating PDFs and special records. They are great marketing tools to use content in a way to - to get those links and the traffic and to build the relationship with people so you can really increase the rate at which you sell people the products and services that you sell.

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CD 5 - Lesson 9: Content Launches Content Launches. Now this is incredibly powerful. You may have heard of product launches before which are orchestrated campaigns where a lot of marketing is done on like a specific day to kind of get the mass shock and awe effect of having all these promotions land at the same time for releasing a product to the market. Well a content launch is very similar. It’s orchestrating a campaign to have content get the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, when it gets released and published for the first time.

Now there are a lot of kind of nuances to doing this and doing it right and that’s what I want to talk to you about and teach you, because you don’t just do a content launch with every piece of content you have. There are only certain types of content that it will work for anyways, and there are a lot of little kind of nitty gritty details that you need to make sure that you kind of use, otherwise things won’t be, you know, quite as effective for you.

But why do content launches? Well, it’s simple, it’s to get a lot more traffic and a lot more exposure and hopefully a lot more links so it’s a lot like taking link bait and putting together this kind of master marketing plan to really get a lot of people to see it and vote on it, and bookmark it and to do a lot of these different things on the internet. So it can get mass traction and get mass links.

So I just said it’s a coordinated, high exposure release of content. That’s what it is. You pick a specific date, and you do certain things to get a bunch of things in motion that are going to give it the most exposure when it releases.

The content needs to be fantastic and very link worthy. It needs to be high quality content and it needs to be good link bait. It needs to have really good value, be something that, you know, a lot of people see value in and would want to recommend to their own blog readers if they have their own blog. So it needs to be very link worthy, otherwise you don’t want to use it for a content launch, because it kind of defeats the purpose.

So it needs to be really, really good. Like if you come up with a concept for something that you thinks going to make some really good link bait and - now but the way this is kind of outside the scope of interviews, you kind of don’t want to use interview style link bait content for this stuff, but, you know, kind of numbered lists are really good examples, like 147 Ways to Get People To Garden More in Their Backyard, you know, whatever, those lists type of - of link bait formats.

So when you come up with a really good one that you think has a lot of potential, you did your research, you see other ones have worked, you kind of have maybe a unique twist on it, you want to save that one to do a content launch with it. Now you typically don’t want to do more than one content launch process a month. Sometimes maybe every two Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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months, because you really want to save things and so you can get the maximum effect from it, you don’t want to saturate things because if you’re trying to do content launches all the time it’s just not going to work.

So a lot like a product launch you use anticipation to preannounce what’s coming. You can tell your list, “Hey, I’m working on some really great content. I really think you’re going to like it and it’s going to be awesome and a lot of people are going to want to know about it.” So you’re already planting the seeds that people are going be thrilled with it and really like it and even want to tell a lot of people about it. So you use the anticipation process. Have friends and customers on standby ready to help. Tap into some other marketing friends that you know, you know, some other people you’ve met through the Income.com community, and tell them, “Hey, I’m orchestrating a content launch. I would really like your help in, you know, digging my post when I make it with social bookmarking it, with maybe even if you don’t mind, linking to is from a blog post that you make on that day, and I want to orchestrate this so everybody does all of those things on the same day at the same time.” Because that’s what’s going to create this massive content launch. It’s going to get the most attention on all these bookmarking sites and these social news sites and from other bloggers and it’s just going to kind of explode, but you got to coordinate it properly, so get friends and customers on standby that will be ready to help you, you know, on that given day. And sometimes you can kind of ethically bribe them and say, I’ll give you, you know, such and such special report or video that I’ve made if you help - help me out and help promote this content.

Like I just said, you’ll want to use the social news sites and you want to have people vote on the same day. Ideally you want release the content in the morning, and you’ll want to have it done on either a Tuesday or a Wednesday, those are the highest traffic days on the internet. So you’ll want to release it on a Tuesday or Wednesday and you want to have people that are going help you vote on it, vote it up on the same day and as soon as possible. So release it in the morning, and have some folks immediately go and bookmark it and vote on it right away.

Again, you want to get other bloggers to post about this content release. You know, get some of them to kind of be on standby and to help you out, you know, that goes along with the asset, the important marketing asset, some things we talked about in the very beginning of all this, about, you know, the foundation of this, the asset of having relationships with other people in your market that have distribution to reach people in your market. Like other bloggers in your market. You know, they are kind of technically your competitor of sorts because they’re writing about, you know, the same type of content and you’re kind of fighting for some of the same viewers, but not really, because you can share them and people like to read multiple blogs and so on and so forth, it’s obvious.

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So if you build friendships and relationship it’s so easy to say, “Hey, I’m doing a little content launch where I want to, you know, release this great piece of, you know, link bait,” and you can even let them read it ahead of time make sure they like it so they - they know what they’re getting into, and then get them to agree to announce it on their blog, you know, like the morning when you release it, and of course you’ll want to return the favour to them and help link or vote up something of theirs. You know that’s how all this kind of social stuff works from a marketing standpoint, it’s cooperation amongst other marketers. And you know that’s one of the reasons why I created Income.com as a company and one of the missions was to help bring other marketers together to really help people leverage the marketing assets that they have in their business, because you can only go so far on your own, and if you have relationships with others that are building traffic, creating content, doing these other things, it’s just a multiplied effect if you can tap into that.

Use the social bookmarking sites upon release. You know, use the same kind of ratio that you’re going to learn, you know, and what percentage you should be bookmarking things because you don’t only bookmark, you know, your site and only your things and nothing else.

So you want to encourage others to Twitter about the release as well. Where they’re going to announce it to their Twitter followers, just like you’ll announce it to all of yours, you know, call in favors, get them to release it and do this coordinated mass announcement all on that same day a Tuesday or a Wednesday and just, you know, get it out there, hit it hard and just have the biggest impact. And when you do all these things together and really going to detail the fine steps to this in the Master Plan for you and that you’ll - you’re probably already seeing in the handouts for this course on how to do this, but when you do all the fine details you have the best chance of getting noticed, having the kind of success beget more success, so to speak, where the rich get richer almost, momentum builds more momentum, that’s how the internet naturally works. So when things get voted up on the social news sites they’ll snowball and get more and more votes and can get more and more traction.

So you want to do content launches about once a month or once every two months with a really great piece of link worthy content. Coordinate things like this and you can get great results for getting a whole bunch of attention, links, traffic and incoming links.

CD 5 - Lesson 10: Live Events Another type of content that you can create and you should consider creating is like a live event. Like a web-based kind of class that you hold online where you share your screen and show things on your computer, or you go to certain websites and show them off, or you just talk about certain topics and show some kind like a presentation with little bullet points and so on and so forth, or photos or anything else you want to share.

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And this is GoToMeeting, you can hold a bunch of online meetings. It’s pretty inexpensive, it’s only like $99 a month and you can have a bunch of people like in an online classroom, and you can share your screen and do presentations like I just talked about and do some of these other things. And you can record it and then have the recording available for others to watch at anytime.

So that’s a great piece of content that you can create is that recording and then of course you can have that transcribed, the audio transcribed into a text file to get the benefits of search engine rankings for that, as well as just having yet another piece of content, it’s like two assets for the price of one working for you to try to get you traffic. So you’ll want to think about doing some meetings like GoToMeeting type stuff, where it’s like an online webinar.

You’ll also want to think about doing like conference calls just on a normal telephone conference call line because whether you interview an expert or something like that, that works really well. And you can have that call transcribed and then use the audio recording as a great piece of valuable content that you’ll use and distribute in your marketing. As well as the transcript, just like in the webinars case, that you can transcribe the audio and use that separately for search engine optimization and the other benefits.

Something else you may want to consider that’s getting very popular is doing like live video shows, like UStream.TV is one of them. There’s some other ones out there, where you can create a free account, it’s amazing, it’s totally free, you just log in, you have a webcam, and you can kind of run your own live little TV show, or you could have people live viewing whatever it is that you’re showing on your camera and what you’re talking about.

And there are ways to record that video so then you could have that recording to use again and again and again, as well as, just like the webinar or a conference call, you could have it transcribe into text, that audio that is, and end up using that text as a separate blog post or separate entry somewhere, separate article and optimize it to get some traffic in the search engines.

So consider different types of live events that you can record and then leverage the recordings as well as the transcripts.

CD 5 - Lesson 11: Hiring Writers So to really get your content factory reaching full speeds you’re going to need to hire some people to do research and to create some of the content that you’re going to be putting out there on the internet. You just can’t do it all yourself. This is guru.com, this 130

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is one of many places that you can find people to do writing and research on almost any topic there is, so regardless of what market you’re in, even if it’s some really kind of niched industry that not many people know about, or it’s very scientific, most of these people are plenty capable of doing some basic research and then creating some pretty decent content, you’d be surprised. You know, not in every case, I’m sure there’s certain types of markets where it’s, you know, some kind of medical thing or it’s surgery or something way too complicated for someone and they can’t just get up to speed in a couple of days by reading some trade journals and magazines and books, and so they obviously won’t be able to create content for you. But in most other general kind of markets or kind of regular consumer markets there are plenty of people that can do a good job of doing research, finding out what’s hot, what needs to be written about, and then they can create content for you.

And so guru.com is a great place to find some of those people. As you can see coming here, you can click on writing, editing and translation and it will bring up a bunch of profiles of workers in the system or companies that represent workers that are part of the guru.com system, that do writing. You know, need compelling content that sells, stop here, you know. It’s all these people do, or it’s their main focus is creating great content.

And so since that’s what you need, you know, this is where you need to go, these are the type of people that you need to be looking for and building relationships with and using.

And when you’re outsourcing to content writers or programmers or any type of outsource situation, you kinda want to do the human split test. You want to kinda give one person a very small project in the beginning and give another person a somewhat small project in the beginning. Even maybe give ‘em the same project, of course they don’t know each other, they don’t communicate, and then look at their results, and whoever did the best job, you know, in this example of creating the best content, like a great blog post or a great article or great article series, whatever the case is, you can look at their work and make a determination on who’s better and then give that person a lot more work So in the beginning you want to kind of test people out and give them a small project to do like maybe just one article, or one blog post, before you kind of commission them to create, you know 50 page special PDF reports for you, without trying them out. So you want to try them out first, but that’s how you do it. Read some of the reviews, give them some test projects and see how they do. And you’ll find there are plenty of talented, smart hardworking folks that would just love for you to pay them, you know, $10, $15 an article or even less in many cases, as well as a small price to create blog posts and reports and other things. And you eventually kind of, just want to bring them into your team and be giving them, you know, a steady flow of content for them to be creating for you and of course it’s all going to come down to your budget and what you can afford, but once you get to the point where you can afford to reinvest and hire people to make content, you want to tap into that. It’s a great investment and it can really pay off.

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But guru.com is one of these places you can come to find writers, you can also find them on rentacoder and elance and odesk, and a lot of these other freelance sites that you can find links to in the Resources Section. But start by doing a little poking around, doing a little research in these sites, and then find someone that looks like they may be able to do a good job of writing for your market, and try ‘em out. And once you find someone that’s really good and does really great work, especially if they’re cheap, you want to lock ‘em up. If you can afford it, you want to bring ‘em on board and give ‘em so much work essentially that they’re not going to be doing too much work for others anymore because you’re able to support most of the income they want to make, and so you’re not going to get to the point where you can’t use them when you want to because they’re busy on other projects. So that’s something eventually you’re going to, you know, come upon with good talented people, because talented people are found and they’re in high demand and so if you find one, you know, try to negotiate and lock up some kind of, you know, monthly salary deal, or some kind of, you know, more locked in type of a situation and you can end up having some of these people work for you for many, many years to come, I have. I’ve had relationships with people that did freelance work like this for me for, you know, eight years and they just did tremendous work week after week after week, and it just creates tremendous returns that they’re just pumping out all this fantastic content. And it’s just getting, you know, distributed through the factory, through the machine, through all these different peer points that I’m teaching you to do, and all these different, you know, methods, and some of ‘em didn’t even exist when I - when I started outsourcing some of this stuff, but doing many of these things that did, as well as adding them as they - they, you know, came about and were proven to work, and it’s just yields fantastic results.

So you’re going to need to eventually at some point if you really want to get the maximum traffic from your net marketing, hire people to write content for you. And so you can find a bunch of resources for that in the Resources Section.

CD 5 - Lesson 12: Review Let’s do a quick review. By now you realize content is not just king, like most people say, but content is Kong. It’s the single most important factor in internet marketing success for driving a lot of traffic to your site. Putting out great content on a regular basis and using the proper methods to have it syndicated and promoted and you can set yourself up to have the best chance at generating a lot of traffic from your market.

And great content of course creates many benefits. Those valuable incoming links for SEO, the traffic that comes from those links, and also what the great content will do to prospects that find your stuff and they’re thinking of, “Wow, this stuff is so great that’s free, I can only imagine how great the quality of their products are that they actually sell.” So it has many, many different benefits and there’s a reason for doing it.

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You want to start by creating that crash course, kind of that A to Z or some kind of little condensed course about your market, about something to do with your market, you know, how to is - is the best type of information for that. And of course give this away as a bribe to get people to opt into your list. At the end of this, kind of special report you want to lead people to some more content or to your products as solutions for things that you’re talking about. That’s one of the most powerful things you can do is actually teach people how to do something step by step and then for one of the steps they need to actually have a tool or a product or something to complete the step, and that being the thing that you sell. So it’s like you’re giving someone the recipe and ingredients list to cook a dish but you actually sell some of the important ingredients themselves, and so to make the dish they’re going to need to buy the ingredients. So - so kind of keep that in mind.

But you want to make the crash course fantastic content to have that, “Wow, if their free stuff is so good, their paid products must be fantastic.” So it’s very important that you do that properly.

You want to manage your content production like a TV show, schedule it in advance, have a research kind of file, be pulling for the research file to develop ideas, then you actually create the content, have the content scheduled for future release, then you’ll release it. It will get syndicated and then of course you can promote it.

You’ll also want to keep tabs on a keyword list for keywords that you’d like to optimize pages for and go look to that list first before you got to create your next bit of content so you can kind of work in some of those keywords and go from that standpoint, rather than just creating the content first and then trying to force in keywords.

You want to create that link bait to attract links and traffic, that, you know, link worthy type of content that others would naturally just want to link to so you can get the value from those links.

You want to do these content launches to get maximum value out of this whole process.

Once a month, or once every two months, or even you know, less often than that, you just don’t want to do ‘em too often, like every week or every two weeks, where you’re hitting people up asking for these favors, but create that really good piece of link bait and orchestrate a big content launch to get all these things moving at the same time to get that maximum effect.

You want to use many formats for your content, not just blog posts, you want to be creating those articles and putting them on your blog as well as submitting them to the article directories. You want to be creating podcasts which is an incredible opportunity and of course you can get the kind of double value out of it where you could record an Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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audio podcast, have it transcribed, and then use that text for something. You can do live events like web classes and webinars or conference calls on a phone system and so forth.

And you can also do, you know, these special white papers or PDF reports and you can distribute those through social, you know, document sites like Scribd and some other ones that you can find links to in the Resources Section, as well as a lot of other sites and resources that you’ll find where you can submit a lot of these different types of content to where you can get links like from certain types of podcast directories and some of these other things that we’ve kind of vaguely covered before. But you want to create content in many different formats.

And of course you want to hire and grow your content team in order to grow your traffic.

You can only create so much content yourself. You want to tap into other people and have them doing it for you, researching and creating content for you on a regular basis.

Once you can afford it and have it in your budget that needs to be something that you’re just paying towards every month and it’s just happening like clockwork because the investment that you make in that content is literally like buying Google AdWords ads, it’s an advertising cost of sorts. You’re paying X amount and hopefully you’re getting Y amount in return as far as the traffic that you’re going to get.

But the most valuable thing about content is it’s truly an asset. You create like this equity in your marketing, every little piece of content that you create. Every new piece of content you create you’re better off, before you had it, because now you have more content. And a lot of this content can generate traffic for many, many years to come. So it’s not just like if you shut off your AdWords campaigns and the traffic starts coming stops coming that is, it’s totally different. So creating this content is an investment in your business that can pay off for many, many years to come and can generate potentially thousands, and in some businesses hundreds of thousands or millions in sells, depending on their marketing and what kind of content they’ve got out there. But you need to hire and grow that content team to be able to effectively create enough content, because otherwise you just don’t have enough hours in the day.

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CD 6: Video Marketing Lesson 1: Overview Video marketing. We just finished an entire CD about building that content factory in your business, and going over how incredibly important it is for you to be creating great content on a regular basis and putting it out there on the Internet to generate leads and traffic for your business; and how over time, you're only going to benefit more and more by the larger amounts of content that you own and that you have that make up part of the Internet.

Well, we didn't get a chance to go too much into videos and video marketing, and video content. It's yet another type of content. You've got text, you've got audio and you have video. And video, when it comes to content and especially entertainment as a format trumps all the others.

And, it's no surprise now that there are faster connections on the Internet, and the Internet is evolving so that we're seeing more and more video used online. More and more video content is put online, more and more video content is consumed online, and now, the trickle down effect of more and more businesses using video in their marketing, and it's only going to grow in popularity. So as you can imagine, video marketing has a very bright future ahead of it. As connections get faster, as the technology and the hardware, and the software makes it cheaper and easier for people to create great video content, we're going to see more and more of it.

Well, unless you've been living in a cave, of course, for the last few years, you know about the growth of YouTube and the popularity of YouTube. You probably know about Google's universal search results, where they're now putting these videos in the search results, and how we're going to be seeing more and more of that as more videos are created that have higher relevancy than their text counterparts. We're going to see more videos shown in those search results.

So, video is definitely the present and the future for the Internet, for marketing, and it definitely is for traffic generation. Now, there are a lot of different ways that you can use videos in your marketing. You can use it on the conversion side, in the sales process, in the relationshipbuilding side, and so on and so forth. But, since this course is about generating traffic, we're going to be focusing on creating videos and using videos to generate traffic.

There are a number of different types of videos that you can create and that people are creating: a commentary type of video where someone's just looking into a webcam and talking about a certain topic; there's people doing product reviews or site reviews and those types of things; the 'fly on the wall' here's something about my life that I'd like to Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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share with you type of videos. And, this is what marketers are using, not just people specifically creating videos, and how it's being used for marketing and how you can use this stuff for marketing. So, a lot of it's personal stuff where someone will say, hey, I'm sitting at home, I just want to show you my new office, and they give you the little video tour of their office and it's really great, and so on and so forth.

But, to generate traffic, we really need to have a solid strategy because not all video types that I just mentioned work well to generate traffic. And, when we say generate traffic, the ultimate goal is to get traffic to our website, and that's why we're doing all this. It's not necessarily to get video views over on the YouTube site or any other video hosting site.

The goal is to get traffic to our website, and then, of course, to hopefully get some of those visitors to join some of our communication channels that we're really going to go over when we get into social strategy: as far as allowing us to have permission to send an email at anytime; and allowing us to be able to push our blog content through RSS feeds; allowing us to communicate with them on a social network that we're friends with them on, such as Facebook or MySpace; or any of these other ones, and allowing us to maybe send them Twitter messages that they're seeing because they're following us, so on and so forth; and of course, to get them to our site and get them to look at our stuff and hopefully buy from us or do something that makes us money.

So, the goal is to get traffic. Well, if that's the strategy to get the traffic to our site, then we need to have a good strategy to do that. And, one of the things you need to really keep in mind is that not all videos and video types, like the ones I mentioned as examples, are ideal for generating traffic. If you think about what's the best kind of video that if someone stumbled upon it out there on the Internet that would make them want to go to someone's website, what would that be? Would it be just somebody giving their opinion about something?

Maybe. But in most cases, unless they're really controversial or really over the top, passionate about a subject matter, or really, really knowledgeable about something, where we wanted to hear more of their opinion, it would just get drowned in the noise of all the other stuff that's on the Internet: people doing similar things, giving comments and giving different types of reviews about things, or giving commentary.

So, if you really think about it and if we really analyze it, the type of content that would most likely get people to be interested in us and wanting to consume more information from us would be some kind of beneficial howto information. We've already covered this a little in the content factory process of creating those articles and special reports and blog posts, and the other types of content, but we have to really think about that as well for using videos to generate traffic.

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a little bit broader scope of content that we put out there on the Internet to try to generate traffic from. But, it's typically the same type of focus, like we've already talked about.

The howto value type of stuff is what prospects will appreciate the most, and what they'll want more of.

So with that being said, your focus on creating videos and using them to generate traffic really needs to be around howto information, if at all possible for your market, teaching someone how to do something. And then, of course, you could highlight your product in the video as the solution, or you can use what I've already mentioned, my friend, Jimmy D. Brown's great, great philosophy and strategy of 'useful but incomplete'. If you can create some kind of tutorial type of teaching content that's really good, but it's just not complete that can drive them to your site to get more information, or to get that solution.

And, that's what we need to do, that's the ultimate strategy here. So, this CD is going to talk a lot about that.

It's not going to talk a lot about doing the 'share my life' relationshipbuilding types of videos that you can and should be making in your marketing. Those types of things serve their purpose to improve a relationship with prospects and a lot of other things, but we're really going to get into that in social strategy. But for now, we're going to focus on generating as much traffic as we can from the use of video.

So, there are many places to distribute video and we're going to talk about those on this CD, and in this group of lessons. We also have to consider the 80/20 rule or in this case the 99/1 rule when it come to traffic from videos themselves. And that is because YouTube is by far the dominant video player in that market. They are the dominant site for video and video traffic.

I think it was something like 20 or 30% or 18%, it is a very high number, the last statistic I saw, about the percentage of video on the entire Internet that is watched from YouTube.

It is like 18 or 20%, I think is what it is of the entire Internet, which is just mind boggling, that is just a lot of attention and views that are being done through that site or through the hosting of videos on that site in the case of videos being embedded on other pages through YouTube. But we've got to keep that in mind.

So a lot of what I am going to be showing you on the CD and talking about optimization for tweaking your titles and descriptions and how to set up things, so people find them in the search engines as well as when they search YouTube itself. A lot of what I am going to be showing you as examples is going to be on YouTube because that is where you need to focus most of your efforts.

However, we are going to get into some of these other places. In the resources section for the CD, you will find tons of other video sites that you can distribute your videos to. And there are some tools and services out there that can automate the distribution of your Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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videos to those other services. And you know, I am always under the impression or at least under, I should say, I am always under the kind of attitude or approach that if it doesn't take a lot of your time or expense, then why not distribute content or do things that can put it in many many places even if some of these other places get very very few views or little traffic at all. It doesn't cost you anything to do it and somebody may stumble upon it one day and that could become a valuable customer.

So again, if it doesn't take much time, there is not much more to the process than what you are already kind of doing. As a workflow for what you are doing for your marketing, why not do it as well. So we are going to talk about those other places and some of those can bring you some pretty decent traffic. Some of them won't bring you much traffic at all, but again if you can automate the process of submitting your videos to all these other services pretty easily, it is worth just doing if you can do it with the technology and there is technology available to do that.

So there are many places to distribute video. It is not just about YouTube and if you get serious about creating solid content, which you should. And if you see a need, see one of your action exercise is really going to be to brainstorm different types of videos that make sense for your market. And since most markets can deal with news announcements, some types of howto information, and any type of information, period, just like we covered and went over just creating general content for new market, then there will be some similar opportunities for video. But you may find that there are some fantastic opportunities for video. In fact where if you could create video content for certain things that you want to create and get out there to create that footprint to drive traffic to your site, then it would work better than articles or some other kind of descriptive text.

In other words if you are involved in a market that is very visual, let's say like a hobby market or some type of market where you are selling solutions or at least the ingredients to a solution that helps people build things, let's say. And you can create videos showing people how to build things, that is clearly more valuable to a prospect than just kind of reading an article about how to build something. So you need to brainstorm that. It is going to be one of your action steps for your marketing process and the part of the whole master plan, which you are going to learn in the very last CD of this course.

You need to brainstorm that and think about, is there anything very visual that has to do with my market and my prospects that they would love to see certain videos on X or how to do X and so no I didn't say tripleX, of course porn is very popular online but how to do a certain thing, like how to build something or to learn about something, so think about that, what would make for some great ideal videos for my market if there are any.

Video quality does matter. One of the fallacies of marketing with video and what a lot of people kind of have been saying or like to say is that: oh it doesn't really matter what your video looks like, it is the content that people are just interested in. It is the 138

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information. Well, while this is true, I agree and I disagree. Of course the content, of course the ultimate message is what really matters to the prospect, but it is a lot like graphics.

You know eight to 10 years ago, you could put up an ugly website that had some ugly graphics and you could still do really well with ugly marketing. You have probably heard other marketers even talk about this before, how ugly sites can still make money and how they work just as well. Well the Internet is evolving, people are getting more and more accustomed to nicelooking design, really good looking interfaces and graphics.

Just look at Apple as a company. They spend a lot of time on their design, that is why they are successful, their product design. Their stuff just looks cool and it is just appealing to the eye. If you have ever used a Mac itself or you have one, you know, the reason why they are doing so well and putting a hurting on Microsoft is because their icons and their interfaces and everything is just great on the eyes and it is just pleasant to look at.

Well, this bodes well in all areas of marketing that have to do with good design. That is the same type of correlation, that will work well if you have good design for anything. So having professional good quality design on a website can establish a good first impression, can put a prospect in a certain mindset and a certain mood to make them more receptive to doing business with you than if you had amateurishlooking website design or something that just didn't look very good and attractive.

It is true. Things are more attractive, have more success when it comes to design and graphics and marketing and everything else. I mean there is a reason when companies do commercials and product placement and everything else, they use attractive spokespeople, attractive models and not a bunch of funny looking ugly people, it is because it is just how it is, human psychology and how attractiveness affects us.

Well video quality is the same way, that is the point I am trying to get to. Good looking video, more in the professional quality level, doesn't have to be some huge multimillion dollar production or anything with crazy graphics and all kinds of things, but the better it looks, the more professional it looks, the better it is going to be for you. So why not try your best to make some high quality looking video.

And in the resources section you are going to find at least all kinds of software and recommended hardware and other things for you to create good looking video from. Most of the webcams, especially ones built into laptops, like if you have a Mac book, the camera is in there. They got to the point now where they are so good, the quality is pretty good now to create decent video with them. So it is possible to create some decent looking video with just that builtin webcam in the computer or even some $100 webcams that you can just buy like CompUSA or any other one of these computer stores and Best Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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Buy, things like that, or order them online.

But there is a difference with $500 video camera that you can buy and the quality difference that it will make. And you will also find some resources in the resources section for this CD about tricks for creating goodlooking YouTube videos for example.

As you notice, when you use YouTube, sometimes you can see really bad quality videos where it is all pixelated and it is not very clear.

And then you will see real sharp high quality strong images, not HD, but pretty good looking video. And there is a trick to actually getting that high quality look out of a YouTube video because YouTube videos are converted when you upload them. And so it could be the same video, but it is just treated a little bit differently before it is uploaded to YouTube and it comes out looking better.

So when I say quality of the video, I don't necessarily mean the resolution, like the sharpness, like it is high definition or anything. I kind of do and that does have kind of a reference to it but really when I am saying high quality video, I mean what is on the video, you know what is the setup, what are the people seeing, is it just someone sitting there at their desk like on a webcam with a bookshelf behind them just talking about some things or is it someone that is doing kind of a virtual set type thing that actually doesn't look very good because you can tell it is fake.

A lot of times that looks simply just kind of crappy and it is kind of a turnoff. It is like ooh, that doesn't look very good. Or is it someone that is using good lighting? Good lighting is the key to good video. It is just like photography and that is really what video is, it is just 30 frames of 30 still images together every second that makes moving pictures and what makes video in film. And so it is no surprise that to get good video images, you need good lighting just like if you know anything about photography, the key to good photos is good light.

And so there are little light kits you can buy for few hundred dollars and a few tricks you can do, again we have links in the resources section for you. But just putting up better lighting even if it is used sitting there in front of the computer with the camera on you and your bookshelf behind you, if you have good lighting, you can make that look 10 times better than someone else that is doing it that has bad lighting in their office where they are shooting that video.

So video quality matters and there are some very low cost tools you can see that you will find links in the resources section, to add some little title bars and things like that, like when you start talking and you know, you can have your name come up on, what they call lower third, which you see on the news when some one is interviewed and their names comes up on a little lower strip. You can do little things like that, add music and do some other things, kind of fade in music at the beginning, fade out music at the end, to 140

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really just add to the video production quality of it.

And if you do this, it just makes you seem more professional and it just really will do a lot for your company image and ultimately to generate more traffic, which is what our goal is here. All things considered equal, the same content message against the same content message, the better looking more professional video will have a greater response and outperform that lower quality video practically every single time. So keep that in mind that quality does matter.

The other benefit of video is you can put in the time and create a video of some sort and then have it transcribed where someone listens to the audio and of course you can do this with audio too, someone listens to video audio and transcribes into the exact text of what is said on the video. And then you can use that, you would probably want to edit it up a little bit and change it up, so it doesn't read just like somebody was saying it. And you can use that as a blog post many times or as an article or in other places online where you are going to use content.

So it kind of has a double use. Video is the video itself and what is on the video transcribed can become text that you can also use to generate traffic. So video is very very important and very very valuable. And in this CD, we are going to talk about a bunch of different ways that you need to be thinking about. And when we get to the master plan in the last CD, you are going to see how this will come together with some specific step by step actions that you will need to be taking if you are creating video and of course I want you to be creating video to generate traffic.

So if you are not creating video yet or you are scared of video, either you don't want to appear on video, let me just address that real quick. If you don't want to appear on video, you don't have to. There are a few different ways and I will show you some of those examples where you can have videos that don't have any one on them. It is just like a PowerPoint presentation, almost like this, like you are watching now. This is technically video and you are seeing something and you are listening at the same time, yet this presentation itself doesn't have any one on camera.

It is a type of video and so you can create little PowerPoint types of like old poor man's video when you use Camtasia and PowerPoint or like I show you in PowerPoint if you are using the Mac and you create basically a video of you giving a presentation and showing slides, pictures, just text boards like this and talking over it. And that can certainly be used on YouTube and different sites to generate traffic.

So if for some reason you don't want to appear on video, you are just camera shy or you just don't want to or you just want your privacy or whatever, it is OK. There are several videos you can make and get lots of traffic with different formats where no one is on camera like I just described or the other option is you can always hire someone. You can Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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always pay someone part time or $100 per video or $50 per video. You can hire someone locally just to come and read a script. An attractive woman works really well, not to sound sexist or anything, but many companies have found that having an attractive woman in their videos works really well in response and in viewership.

And it is obvious with all the geeks online, especially if we do something online like attractive woman, and so that is something to consider or of course you can hire a wellspoken man that can do a good job of reading your transcript as well, just like a woman can and use them. So look at the resources section, you will find a lot of different resources for making videos, software or hardware setups. There is light, cameras, all that good stuff. And some suggestions for you for different types of videos and hiring people and all that kind of good stuff. So video marking is very powerful and we are going to talk all about in this CD, how do you use it to generate traffic because that is what this is all about.

The last thing I want you to think about is that you don't want to always use free hosting.

You don't want to always use free hosting. And why is that? Well, it is simple and let me just say so many marketers are doing this wrong. A lot of people are using video online to generate traffic and for the marketing, they put everything on YouTube, they put every single thing on YouTube. If they just turn the camera on the show, their daughter's picture that she drew at school, just to kind of share some of their lives which is good stuff to do to be transparent and to just let people know more about you the person, sometimes that is really good for relationship building. We have already been talking about that a bit.

But they will put that on YouTube. And so that falls into the same account with some of the good howto videos and some of the other information. And it can actually work against you if your strategy is to generate traffic to your site. So someone is using YouTube and they find one of your great howto videos, which this CD is all about getting you to create, that can get people to go over to your site to learn more or to see what you have to offer etcetera etcetera.

And oftentimes what people do and we will explain this as we get more into YouTube and these other sites is, when someone likes a video, the natural thing is, oh I wonder what other videos this person has. And so they are looking at your other videos. Well if you are putting this personal type stuff on there that is not your best material on the same account with YouTube, it is easily found and it will say, oh it is this and they will play it.

And a lot of times, those personal things can actually work against you in generating traffic because the prospect isn't ready for that step in the process of building the relationship. They don't know you. They don't know anything about your company or very little and so showing them your daughter and showing your home office, they don't even know what's in it for them for them to listen to you yet.

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So that is one reason not to put a lot of these other videos at least on the same account on YouTube, but the other reason for not using YouTube to host everything is the fact that when you embed the videos in your own pages, if you do that, you know how YouTube works, so you should that anyone can click the video and it loads the same page with the video on YouTube itself; that is how YouTube got big from that viral nature of people embedding the videos on other web pages.

They are always able to click the video and most people do just out of curiosity and it opens up YouTube where they can then find other YouTube videos and then also get distracted and away from your video and end up watching other things. That is not what you want when you are trying to bring someone into your marketing process and really communicate to them and fight for their attention. You don't want to distract them with all these other funny videos and these other videos. It is like channel surfing on TV. If you take away the remote and force someone to sit there and watch your TV program, it is going to be a lot more effective than if they can just flip through the channel and just leave and decide, oh I may come back later and watch that.

So you have to have that mentality when you are hosting videos, like for example with YouTube. I would personally in almost every case would never host a video on YouTube and then show it on one of my own controlled web pages by embedding the code from YouTube. Now there are some exceptions to this rule. If there are some some circumstances like on a blog or some other things where if you do testing and you find that if you embed the video, you get more people to watch it, then that is an exception that you want to consider making, because number of views and we are going to talk about this more in the CD the number of views is part of the algorithm on YouTube for which videos get ranked higher when people search for things or search by category.

So if you could embed the video and get more views, then that is something you would want to consider but in almost case, if you are talking about a video, if you are determined to have people watch that video on YouTube to get those views up, then you can put a still shot for example of that video on a page and when they click it, it goes over to YouTube and they can watch it or you can use a link, a text link that just goes over to the video. It is a fine line. If you are putting out some content that you are just using to kind of bait some traffic from YouTube, using it as like a traffic generation magnet of sorts, then you need to weigh the pros and cons, but the cons are simple.

If you are putting out some free video content, some great content that you want to share with your audience, like on your blog for example, you really don't want people to be able to click on it and end up on YouTube and leaving your blog and getting away from one of your message here in the middle of. Just like for example, someone is on your sales page and you are using videos for testimonials or in the sales process, you don't want people to be able to click on those and end up on YouTube and get away from your sales message, you are just going to really hurt your sales conversion.

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So again, there is a time and place for using free hosted videos on some of these services and there is a time and place for hosting it yourself where you control what the player looks like, you control the fact that where if people click on the video where they end up going and you are just in control.

And I am going to talk about some resources for that on the CD, like Amazon's great S3 service, which we currently use at Income.com for a lot of our video use and you should consider doing it too, a lot of marketers are also doing it where it is pretty inexpensive.

You still have to pay for the bandwidth, but it is like $0.18 for every gigabyte transfer.

And of course if you have a video that is a 100 megabytes, then you can have 10 full views of that to make up a gigabyte and if you do the math, the cost to you is like less than two pennies, two cents for every person that views the video.

Now, sure, if you have thousands of people viewing it, you'd much rather have that free and not have to pay for it. But if you are going to have thousands of people viewing it, it is worth controlling it. If you don't want people for example to leave like that sales page or anything else, there is far more stake than the small pennies that it is going to take just for you to pay for serving it.

So, just wanted to throw that out there in this opening presentation to get you in the mindset about video marketing for traffic generation and just for conversion to making money. You don't always want to use free hosting and it is a big mistake a lot of marketers make. Lot of marketers just use YouTube for everything, and they just think, "Well that is the just the way I should do it," without regard to strategy.

And that is typically the difference between very successful players in the market and so so successful players. And that is a good strategy. And what I am trying to teach you and share with you throughout this entire course in the Methodology Traffic Secrets 2.0 here is what I believe is a solid strategy. I am strategist, that is just the way I am, I believe I am very blessed, I have been born with that gift, a strategic mind. And so I am all about strategy, that is how I think of connecting the dots and how things work together, what makes for the best use of things, what is the most effective and so forth.

And this applies to video in many ways. Free hosting is a big one, so you don't want to host everything on YouTube. There are always reasons for you to host videos yourself like through Amazon service which I will go over with you or you can use some of these other providers that are linked in the resources section.

So if you don't want people leaving your site, you don't want to be using the free hosting.

If you are going to try to get traffic from something, then you want to use all these different free video services that we are going to go over. So let's get ready to talk all about how to use videos for traffic generation.

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CD 6 - Lesson 2: Video Types OK, let's start by talking about different types of videos. I kind of briefly talked about that in the first overview presentation for this CD, but I just want to show you some examples real quick. Just so you know what I'm talking about, so you have no doubts about it whatsoever.

I'm on YouTube. We're going to be doing a lot of YouTube work here on this CD obviously, because it's kind of like the 800 pound gorilla of the market that gets most of the activity, and this what you should really focus on most that we've already talked about. It's kind of the 8020 rule on steroids, which is what I like to call the 99 in one rule.

Really, this thing is going to create most of your results.

I did a search for "Internet Marketing" because there's a lot of Internet marketing videos.

When it comes to marketers putting videos on YouTube, it's dominated by that niche usually first in any kind of resource or tool, then spills over into the subniches, and then becomes mainstream where every market industry seems to be doing it.

If we do a search for "Internet Marketing" you can see that there's 26,900 videos that come up as results. There are lots of Internet marketing videos because there are a lot of marketers using YouTube. One thing I want to point out about video marketing is and even though you see 26, 900 videos here the other thing you need to keep in mind is that videos take more work, or least represent more work, than some text does.

You know in many cases it's easier to hire out someone to pay someone to write an article than it is to make a video. Especially if someone's going to be on video. And producing the video in a professional way and making it look good, even adding music and those things, it takes more work.

Well anytime and this is a great rule of thumb anytime there's a marketing technique that takes more work, you stand to kind of oneup so many competitors in your market that aren't willing to put in the work to do it. So, creating videos and getting into making videos is very important for you, and I really want you to do it because there's so many competitors regardless of what niche or industry that you're in that isn't going to do it.

They're just not going to go through the trouble of getting a camera, learning how to set it up, learning how to set up a little bit of good lighting, and maybe even some post production editing to add fade in music and fade out music at the end.

By the way, there's tools in the Resource Section that will make that stuff simple and pretty inexpensive. Some of them are expensive you could spend a lot of money on some real advanced protools, but there are some that are relatively inexpensive. But most

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people aren't going to go through the trouble of looking into doing that and to mess with that, so you have that advantage over all those other marketers that aren't willing to do it.

I just wanted to point that out.

But if we scroll down here and look at some of the videos, these are just still shots. This is what we'd call a talking head video. It's somebody who is clearly sitting in front of a web cam, and he's just talking about whatever it is that's the topic of this video. Perfectly acceptable, very good, very popular, easy to do.

This looks like some kind of screen capture video, like a Camtasia or an I Show You type of video. This looks like another one, which is just kind of spiced up with some kind of an angle there so it's not just another straight shot of the screen. This is more of a professionally produced video, you can just tell from the screen shot.

Here you've got the title on the screen, "Lower Thirds" it says what company they're from or who they are. This is like a professional interview; this is something like you'd see on a news channel or cable channel. So that's some high quality looking video.

If you compare that no offense to either one of these people, I don't know whose videos these are and I'm not trying to criticize anyone here of course. For all I know, this top one makes a million times more dollar return than the lower one. But just a quick example, look at the look of this video, and then look at the look of this video.

Even though this talking head video is great looking just with the backdrop and the nice little light accent there, that's a really nice talking head web cam type video better than most as we'll see here. But look at it in comparison to this video and you can see just a different level of professionalism and quality.

Now in not every case will the more slickly produced looking video outperform the lower budget video. So I don't want to say that, but in most cases nicer looking video gets a better first impression, gets more attention. That's what you're fighting for here, is people's attention. To get more attention ultimately can yield in most cases better results.

Here it looks like another screen cap video. Or there's another type of video you can make out of just still images or photos, it's like a slideshow. You could show one, then have another photo show, and that makes a video. Just different photos in a slideshow type of arrangement perfectly acceptable. With someone doing a voiceover and talking, a kind of narration.

Or even I've seen some videos that don't have anyone talking; they just have text that pops up on the screen to illustrate whatever point they want to illustrate with no voice whatsoever. There are a lot of different ways to create video. As far as effective video, I think a combination of everything can make a really good video.

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But if there is something that you can demonstrate on the screen, by all means Camtasia or I Show You is great. If anything to do with your business has to do with the computer and doing something especially on the Internet, then screen capture video is perfect.

As you can see, this course is perfect for screen capture video like you're watching right now because I'm demonstrating and showing you things that relate to what I want you to do. So it's the perfect marriage. Other markets aren't going to have that, but in most markets you can find that type of opportunity.

For example, let's say you sell to the real estate market. Like real estate marketing services, or anything to do with real estate. And you want to create some videos and screen capture video, like showing movement on the screen. It would be a lot easier than setting up a little set, a little production where you're on camera, other people are on camera, and you could do it quick and easy and dirty and just get it up online.

There are a lot of different things that you could do with real estate. You could show something on Google Maps to show where a certain house is located. You could show different still photos of shots from let's say, a house that's for sale that you're trying to sell or get people interested in. You could use Google Earth, the satellite view and zip around to different areas. You just have to get creative with it and you can figure some different things out.

Anyways, as you can see there's a talking head video here, someone sitting in their room obviously a bedroom, sitting on the edge of their bed. It's very popular, the web cam talking head view. Nothing wrong with it, totally acceptable, it can work really well. This looks like video of it's actually a good friend of mine, Michael Forton, you may know of.

This is taken from some kind of a workshop or seminar, you can tell.

This one seems just to be I don't know if that's a web cam video or if they just set up a camera that they're talking into. This is kind of the poor man's video that I talk about, which seems to be some kind of a PowerPoint presentation that's recorded with screen capture software, most likely. It's kind of like the first presentation you pretty much see on each CD, the overview, or at least the presentation part with the bullets and everything.

It's the same thing. You can teach very effectively with it. You're just giving a presentation and you're talking over it while you give the presentation. You can make complete videos that way, for any different market, to teach any different type of information or talk about anything.

So these are the different types of videos that you can make. You can do the web cam

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talking head video. Here's someone clearly sitting at a table where there would actually be a camera most likely, unless they it could be a camera built into their laptop and it's just far away.

But this is more of what I would consider like a set. Like a live action set type of a video, where the person is kind of immersed in some kind of an area and talking, so you can see the things around them, in front of them. They're kind of like on a little miniature stage, like a little set. And this is just maybe someone in their workshop or kitchen or bedroom, behind a table.

But you can see how that has a different feel than just the talking head video. And a lot of times a little scene like that has more implied or just the look to it, to most people, is more professional. Because it's weird, it seems like the videos that stand out and look like they took more work to put together in many cases, not every case, are the ones that seem like they're higher production, because more work was put into it. Go figure.

But clearly that looks like more work was put into it than someone just sitting there and turning on their computer. And since so many people are just sitting there in front of their computer and put the camera on them and talk, this one, where someone's sitting at a desk or at a set, really stands out. It's different.

A big part of marketing, to be successful, to stand out against all the noise and to get that attention that you so desperately want for your business, is to be different, is to differentiate. I've been talking a lot in this course about the power of piggybacking and letting other people do the work for you, and then just kind of joining in and doing it as well to kind of share in some kind of the same success.

But ultimately what you really want to do is, use what they've shown you and what they've proven to work or what appears to work well. And then do it beyond that.

Differentiate so you now stand apart from them, but using the head start that they gave you. That will really, in most cases, produce the best results.

But you can see here, there's a lot of different types of videos at least, that you can kind of tell just from some of these freezeframe, still images. Clearly some kind of a screen capture. This looks like an interview. That could be from a seminar. That's my friend Steven Pierce, clearly him on stage at a seminar. This is from some kind of gettogether, someone in the back of the room filming. This is from a seminar, someone on stage.

This looks like somebody in front of their computer with quite a fancy backdrop there.

Quite a large painting or something. This is something almost like on TV, like some kind of stage playlooking thing. A talking head video again; a screen capture. This looks like some kind of a still image. Someone using illustrations, which is a lot like using photos.

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talking head, my buddy Ed Dale.

There's a lot of different ways to create videos. Search "Internet marketing" and just look at some of the different ones to get some ideas, regardless, even if you're in Internet marketing. But if you're in a different industry, a different market, selling to that industry.

Just do a search for "Internet marketing" and you'll see a broad range of videos that people are marketing with.

There are a lot of different types, but for the content itself, you want to keep it geared towards howto. You want to deliver some type of beneficial value to the people watching it. And stay away from the "fly on the wall" type stuff, which has it's purpose in your marketing, but isn't going to be the best strategic move to get traffic and get people over to your site.

So you want to just give, give, give good value. And also on YouTube, don't waste your time doing promotions. When you do a search for "Internet marketing," come in here on your own time actually I'm going to make that one of your action exercises. I want you to do a search on "Internet marketing" and do some research on what other marketers are doing.

And you'll notice how many people are creating videos just to promote some kind of product that they're trying to sell. They think someone's going to come along and find that video and learn about that products and then just go buy it. Now that certainly can happen and it does happen. But I think, dollar for dollar spent, minute for minute of your time invested, if you're going to create videos to put on YouTube to generate traffic and to actually make you money, you need do it in a twostep process.

It's like the old twostep direct marketing model. When people put a classified ad or even a small display as in a magazine or newspaper, they don't try to sell the product directly from the ad. They just get people interested to ask for more information, and then that more information sells the thing that the company sells.

Same type of outlook here using YouTube. You want the content piece to be something that's got a lot of value, teaches them something, but still maybe has that useful but incomplete model that I've talked to you that I've learned from Judy Brown, that's so important, and I'm going to talk to you more about when I get into talking about how to optimize for listings and things later on throughout this CD. But how you should be structuring that content and what it should actually be needs to be in mind of, "I just want to get someone to go to my website for more information, to learn about me." Which they can then end up tying into, like I've briefly discussed, these communication avenues with the joinin email list or something else that will let you follow up with them. As well as, they may just order the first time they come to your site.

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But if you're using a video that's trying to sell a product itself right there on YouTube, ehh, you're not going to get as much of a result as you would if you used it just to kind of get people interested and kind of presell them almost on you as an expert, or your company on it's products. And then get them to go to your site.

So keep that in mind. And again, a lot of these videos that you're going to see here that are actually promos selling something, and many times it's not that people are making a bad strategic decision of trying to use YouTube to get traffic to that thing to sell that thing, a lot of times it's because of what we already talked about, of using YouTube to host videos. And every video someone makes for their marketing, they just use YouTube for it.

And so that's why they also show up on YouTube, these promos and things that maybe people only wanted to show on their blog, where they had already given some other information and where it made sense, and not just using it on YouTube to try to get people to see it where it would actually be effective.

So I'm not saying it can't be effective, but you're going to have to have a lot of traffic and a lot of numbers to make it effective. And if you spend the same amount of time, I believe, if you go for the contentdriven howtwo type stuff, really good information, then ultimately that's going to pay higher dividends for you as far as the traffic it generates and the money it generates than a promo will.

CD 6 - Lesson 3: Trend Watch We are going to head back to YouTube in just a minute, but I want to show you a site that is a decent resource to use, just for research. If you go to Technorati.com/pop/YouTube, you'll get to this section. We have already been over Technorati as a blog search engine, and we have talked about the piggybank concept a million times now. Well, this is just some good general research for you.

This is showing the latest, most popular videos that are out there on blogs that are attracting a lot of links. So, in reverse engineering that, if you want to put videos on your blogs, let's say, that can get a lot of attention and get a lot of links, that can also have a benefit on YouTube and everything else with getting traffic, why not look and see what are the most popular videos throughout blogs that are getting linked to right now? And that is what this will show you, is a lot of videos that are being put on different blogs that are attracting links.

Now you may be thinking, well why don't I just look at popular videos on YouTube and that will just tell me what the people are spreading on the Internet and talking about.

Because it is not always true. Ones that actually get put on blogs and linked to, they are of a different breed than the general most popular videos on YouTube itself.

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Some of the same videos get mixed between the two like very viral things, but a lot of times more newsworthy, more content things, like you're seeing somebody's stills. These are clearly interviews or excerpts from news specials where people are talking about politics or something else, and that is why it is getting linked to.

There are other funny humorous things, other music videos, other things that clearly still get linked to on blogs and end up in this list, but you will end up finding a lot more relevant blogrelated types of content, you know, things that make more sense for a blog to post than just the general most popular viewed humor or entertainment types of things that you will find on YouTube that I am going to show you in a second.

So just a resource for you to check out, for you to do a little bit of research, just to kind of like get a pulse of what is kind of popular in video land that is being used on blogs and that people are talking about and linking to, because a lot of times you can get some good ideas from it for creating your own videos.

So let me jump back to YouTube. And on YouTube, there are so many different sections.

You can come in here and poke around yourself and figure out all the general sections, like the "featured videos." And the feature stuff typically happens when a video gets a certain amount of views in a certain period of time. And then you can end up on the most popular page and you can end up with some of the most views, like you go to most popular and you can see some of the most popular videos right now.

You can see the most viewed. I guess the most popular ones that people are adding to favorites and we are going to get into all those little nuances, but you can come in here and see what has the most views for today, for all time. You know if you go to all time, again unless you have been living in a cave and you don't really use the Internet that much, you have probably actually been exposed to several of these videos that you see on this page, because these are the most viewed videos in the history of YouTube and probably the history of the Internet since most of the stuff is going through YouTube now.

This Evolution of Dance one is actually pretty good if you have never seen it. But it has been viewed 87 million times. Isn't that incredible? And I really hope that guy is doing well making a bunch of money from that exposure. I think he is some kind of a comedian if I am not mistaken. But wouldn't you like to have the number one watched video of all time by views on YouTube or in the world? That would be some great bragging rights.

But there are a lot of different videos here that get a lot of views and you can go through them and you can kind of see what the general consensus is, of what kind of things people like. And now, most of the stuff has nothing to do with your business and your markets. You're not really going to be able to use it. There are tweaks that you can do, though, on content you create for your market.

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Controversial things can get a lot of attention a lot of times a lot of views but you've got to be careful with that. You don't want to be controversial just for the sake of being controversial, or be negative or put someone down or accuse one of your competitors of something nasty. And again, I am not an attorney, this isn't legal advice, you got to be careful of all that kind of stuff, so you don't get sued.

But if you can talk about a controversial topic in your industry, and of course, I recommend not putting other people down in the process. There is just no reason to do that, and you can do so without naming names or putting down competitors. And if the topic itself can get a lot of interest and activity, that can bode well for you.

When we break down the nuances of all these little elements of YouTube's system like the comments and favorting and ratings and all this stuff, then you will see how that type of activity and getting people to talk about something can really benefit you, like comments is a part of the algorithm and it also helps with the views if there's a lively discussion going on, and when a lot of people are talking about something, it can drive more views of the video. It all kind of works together.

We're going to talk more about that, but most of this generally real popular stuff is just consumer entertainment, or some kind of comedy or humor that gets most of the views.

That kind of research you'll find a lot of those may not be relevant for your business and your market, but you still want to do research.

It's still an Action Step for you to keep up with what people are watching, because it can give you ideas. You could put your own little funny video for your market based on some kind of mainstream thing that's going on, and it could do really well.

Let me see if it's still listed, I'll show you a great example of this. Yes, here it is. This is great, and actually it was done by more than one person. You may have seen in the last year or so this blonde headed guy who had a sheet behind him. He was crying and telling people to leave Britney Spears alone, and just going on, and on, and on. It was kind of a pathetic video, but it got millions and millions of views. It made its way on David Letterman and Jay Leno, and just the whole world was talking about it. It was on news programs. It was just incredibly viral and it went everywhere.

So a couple customers that I know that are in the Internet marketing industry created spoofs on that video. Instead of doing "Leave Britney Spears Alone" they did their version of "Leave John Reese Alone" and both of these are really, really funny. You can come in here and watch them yourself. I just crack up at what they both did; they're both very creative.

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activity just for a little goofy YouTube video that they made. I'm sure it helped drive newsletter subscriptions and traffic to their Website, and some other things. Both of these guys I know very well and they're very smart marketers. And they used it to promote their stuff as well as just to give good, funny content to their audience.

That's just an example of if you keep up with mainstream news, and what's going on, and what's popular sometimes there are opportunities to do some kind of parodies and things related to it that will work with your market. A lot of the great old school direct marketing teachers talk about keeping an eye on the National Inquirer, read newspaper headlines, and keep up with what's going on in the world because a lot of times you can use those things in your marketing to get better response in the things that you do. So those are just a couple tools to find out.

I can see I misspelled my last name, but those videos still came up. Those are some concepts for you to think about, and for you to use as an Action Step to kind of look and see what's popular, think about mainstream ideas that are popular that maybe you could use in some way in your marketing, or just see what's popular period out on blogs and everything else to get some ideas for your industry.

And again piggyback. If you can do something that's similar, that will be effective for your market that other people have already done successfully you stand a good chance of being successful too. One more thing I want to point out since we're talking about all this stuff. Views for the sake of views, just like traffic for the sake of traffic. All traffic on the Internet is not created equal; you should know that by now, and just getting traffic for the sake of traffic isn't going to do you any good.

I'm going to talk more about this when we get into the Social Strategies stuff, but I've had some certain experiments, and some certain things end up getting a lot of traffic. Over 200,000 unique visitors from some of these social sites, for example. Like one blog post I made with something that was kind of humorous I'll talk more about it again on the Social Strategy CD but it got Dugg, and it got over 200,000 visitors that came to check it out. But what's ironic is that those 200,000 visitors which, if you paid ten cents a piece would cost you $20,000 in advertising produced very little money for me. I tracked it like I do with everything, and it produced very little result at all.

It didn't produce much at all, and that's because the traffic even though it was something that I did that got a lot of traffic that traffic wasn't targeted. It wasn't interested in my business, and therefore it didn't convert. It wasn't monetizable into much of anything, and so you want to keep that in mind.

If you see things on here that could get a lot of traffic, that you could create that would be mainstream, doesn't mean that it's going to do your business any good. It's got to stay targeted. It's got to be related in some way. If you're going to do one of these parodies or Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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something, you have to twist it and find a way to relate it to your market and ultimately what's in it for your customer. So keep that in mind.

CD 6 - Lesson 4: Competitive Analysis We've briefly covered this already, but doing research on videos in your market is a great way to find out who's getting traffic, what types of videos your market's watching and showing interest in which could give you that piggy back edge of giving you a head start but you can also use YouTube to do some other investigative work.

Let me show you what I mean. If I type in 'gardening tips' here, it gives me all these suggestions when it pops up. And let's sort them by view count so we can see the most viewed. It's a music video of course, so that's not relevant.

This is kind of a music related one too with a band, so I don't want to go to that one. Let's look at this one: "How to Grow Bonsai Trees, Free Lessons." So this is obviously probably a high quality.

By the way, Expert Village is a great site for you to try to submit videos to. They actually I think they're paying people to add howto videos if they're good enough quality, but you can certainly go there and use it for great research to find some high quality videos in your niche in your market to get some good ideas, to see what they're showing and what they're teaching. But that's a really good resource.

We will of course link to tons of video resources in the Resources section. Go over there right now and see those. But I actually forgot about telling you about that one, Expert Village is a new up and comer and it's a great one.

We're looking at this individual page for this actual video, we can see it's got 65, 000 views. And if you're doing research which, that's why I've come here this is an action step for you to do some video research. You're going to be doing this on a regular basis; its part of your Master Plan, which you're going to learn at the very end of this course.

You're going to want to come in here and research what's going on in your market, to keep up with the videos that are being uploaded, and which ones are getting watched. But here's one of the areas of research that you want to do.

See this right here? Statistics and Data, this is just fantastic. I'm so glad that YouTube does this. For marketers that know how to use this data it's just incredibly valuable.

Here's a great little trick that most people don't know. You can come in here, and you can actually see where a lot of the traffic is coming from for this video, and you can see what other sites are linking to this video.

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You can see right here, 687 clicks, and the top referrer pretty much for this video. It's been viewed 65, 000 times, well 687 of those views came from or least clicks that came over here came from this URL. If we go there real quick, it looks like some kind of Spanish I think, or Portuguese type site.

But look, they've embedded that person's videos that I'm looking at on YouTube, and so they're generating traffic and views for this person's video.

If you were doing something, let's say, in this market that related to Bonsai trees, and you wanted to get someone to display your videos, and to link to your videos I mean, who knows, this could actually be the creator of these videos, but it may not be don't you think this would be a great person to approach to also show your videos or link to your videos? Yes, it would be.

It's very important to realize and you're going to hear me mention this again especially when we get to building the Affiliate Army and building a successful affiliate program, if that's an opportunity for you in your business, if you sell your own products. If we get to that CD you're going to hear this again, because it's very relevant to that.

Anything you do in marketing that you're trying to get someone to do, it's so much easier hundreds of times easier to get someone to do what you want if they're already doing it.

For example, if someone is already hosting videos and linking to videos to other people in your market they are more likely to be receptive to actually host yours and do it as well. Obviously they know they benefits, they're already doing it for a reason, and so they're more likely to do yours too.

The reason why I think of the affiliate thing is because I know from hard experience of doing it the wrong way. I used to spend so much time trying to educate people about what my affiliate program was, when I had it in different markets. Such as I had some info products in a baby related market one time in this example I'm giving you.

Because that's not an Internet market or a make money market most people don't even know what affiliate marketing is I had to spend all this time explaining how an affiliate program worked, explaining why they wanted to become my affiliate, explaining what the benefits were, and I didn't get very good response.

Ultimately what I learned about recruiting affiliates in this example which I go over again on the Affiliate Army CD, you'll learn all about it is the fact that it's so much easier to find an already active affiliate and get them to become your affiliate, than it is to take someone that's not already an affiliate and educate them.

The reason why I bring that up, if you follow this valuable data to these people that are Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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hosting these videos and linking to these videos, they're going to be a hundred times more responsive to do yours as well, than someone who's never hosted a video. Like not showing one right in their page, not linking to it.

Again, the same principal applies to so many things like links I've said this before in the past if you want to get someone to link to you and you want to share links with someone, it's so much easier to find someone that's already sharing links with other people.

When you do that link research and you see who's linking to who in your market, and if you want to try to swap links with somebody, it's going to be so much easier to swap links with somebody that's already swapping links with others because they know the benefits of it and they're already doing it than it is to convince someone that's never swapped links with someone to do it.

Keep that in mind, same thing applies in so many different ways. A lot of these strategies I'm teaching you are just foundational, smart, common strategies that work again and again, and apply in so many different ways. It's like the piggy backing concept, it's like the 8020 rule, and it's just like so many of these things can be applied in so many different ways. Doing more than is expected of you, over delivering.

Think about these core concepts and how you could apply them to other areas because they work in marketing, and they're proven. So when you're looking at this data let's get back to it, don't mean to ramble too much here like sometimes I do, I apologize for that here's who's sending traffic.

Let's click on this one. Let's go over. It's some kind of other foreign language site, so maybe that video wasn't even in English, I'm not sure. For whatever reason this site is hosting this video and they're related to bonsai trees and the hobby, it appears.

I can't read the other words on their site but I can recognize bonsai. If you also had bonsai videos, and if these people didn't create this so they're not just about hosting their own, they are doing other people's they'd be a great person to contact to host your video and which would create a link to your video.

We're talking just a moment about optimization and how to optimize these videos, and how to get traffic, and how to get a normal search engine results from some of your videos. Where your video listings will show up in the search engine results, which will drive traffic to the videos and then hopefully if you've done it correctly which you're learning on this CD how to then get people over to your site.

Statistics and Data, just go to that tab, hop over to some of these other sites. Do another one real quick here; waiting for it to load, apparently it doesn't want to. Let's try a different one. And here's someone that's hosting the video. I'm not sure why these are 156

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foreign; I didn't pay any attention to this video.

No, I can hear the audio, it sure sounds English but I'm not sure what that's all about.

Maybe that's some kind of sneaky tactic that person's using, where they've hijacked foreign blogs, I don't know if that's the case. I don't know, but it's kind of peculiar that that's the only place those videos are listed, or that's where most of the traffic's coming from.

But that's what you want to do, you want to do some research and you want to go to that Statistics and Data tab right here, to find out where a lot of the traffic is coming from. But what's linking to this video is a great links for your videos.

We'll talk about it when it comes to the Search Engine Dynamics and how things work, those incoming links, remember? It's a big part of the process, has great value. And so it does as well, with YouTube videos and how they're ranked, as well as how they show up on just the normal Google results. Incoming links has a lot to do with that.

If you want to get those links go to people that are already linking to and hosting videos from your competitors in the same market. If your stuff is good they'll probably do it as well. So do your research, it's very, very valuable.

CD 6 - Lesson 5: VEO OK, now let's talk about how to optimize your YouTube videos so they rank well when people search for things on YouTube; as well as, hopefully, they'll rank in the Google search results themselves, where you see those little thumbnails of little videos that are pulled from YouTube.

And of course, later on in this CD, I'm going to talk to you about several other free video hosting services that you should be using and submitting your videos to, and you can follow some of these same guidelines for optimizing your videos for those sites, as well as some of these things I'm going to tell you that can allow those listings to rank well in the Google search results. They just won't show that thumbnail and won't be defined as a video, but it'll show up like a normal search result will show up, so people can be just one click away from finding your video and watching it on those other sites.

So I found this great example when I was searching for gardeningrelated things to use as an example for you, to talk about optimization. And this person does a lot of things really, really well. There's one thing I don't care about that they do. And I don't know this person, I don't mean to criticize them, but it's just my opinion and I'm going to point that out. But basically, what you'll notice in this optimization process for videos, it's very, very much like what we've already gone over for normal search engine optimization for just your normal content pages and blogs, and all those other things we've already talked

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about at this point.

So, the first thing you notice is every video has a title, and that's what someone's going to click on, along with the thumbnail that goes along with each video that shows up as they're ranked in the results when people search for things.

Creating the right title goes just like everything else. You want to start the title with your keyword phrase if you can. You want to try to slip in as many main keywords as you can so it still makes sense. You also want to write the title so it's benefitdriven and so it's appealing to a human being that would want to click on it. And that's pretty much it. Just like normal search engine optimization.

The description, same thing. Use it to use some keywords, slip in some LSIrelated theme keywords. And that's the only critique I have for pretty much this entry here by this person. It's kind of keyword stuffed. Too spammy for my taste. I'd rather prefer one written for a human being and written in language that makes this video more descriptive and really makes it read as something somebody would want to go and check out.

But one of the things that they did here that I really, really like and I was going to suggest to you because I've used it before is they registered a separate domain name, and they used a domain name that was related to videos related to their topic. And it's great.

Because if someone is watching your videos, they're interested in videos, they're interested in the subject matter, the odds are good that they'd want to watch other videos.

And having a domain here and you can put the URL in the description like this and it can become clickable having this domain that sounds like it's for more tips or more information about the subject matter and other videos, is ideal, because if people are already watching videos, they're more inclined to watch more videos. And so that link looks really intriguing. Like, "Oh, I wonder what other gardening videos they may have on their site." And people will be more likely to click on it and check it out, rather than if that just says, "Gardening Tool Store," "Brought to you by the Gardening Tool Stor," or something.

So, our main strategy here is to get traffic to our website, right? Hopefully, they'll come to the website and may buy something from us immediately, or at least they'll join one of our lists or one of our communication points so we can keep in touch with them and build the relationship as well as drive them back to the site.

Well, if that's the core strategy, then we want to use whatever URL possible and whatever methods possible that will increase the rate at which people click and end up visiting the site. This is one way to do it. Creating a separate URL, something that's very specific, that's related to your topic and has video or videos in it somehow. I think that's a great way to increase the clicks on the URL that you put in your description.

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You also can put in tags. And we've already covered tags. Same rules apply. Don't just use the same keyword over and over and over with some kind of variation. Use the main keywords once or twice and then use some of those other themed keywords. And just don't overdo it. Maybe use six to nine tags max and that's it. So, don't go crazy and use too many tags.

The other optimization thing isn't so much about how to get it to rank high, but how to get more traffic from YouTube. And that's, just like this, using that watermark URL right over the video. So if anyone steals your video, it's on there, and they'll just be driving your traffic however they promote and use that video.

And that's what this person did pretty well. This is one of those poor man's videos that I've explained, a Camtasia or a PowerPoint type of presentation.

And then the last things you really want to do with some of your videos like this on You Tube is put a call to action at the end. Ask them to go visit a site. Attach something to the video. Say, "YouTube only allows a maximum length video of 10 minutes, and I have more tips for you that go way beyond 10 minutes, so if you want those, you need to go over and watch suchandsuch video on my website." And even say what your website is.

And tell people to go to the website, give them the call to action.

Tell them to go to the site to get something. Give away a free gift or some free special report or some free mini course or something. But mention it and promote it in your video, and encourage them to go over to your site to get it. And it's just yet another way to get people off of YouTube, from watching your videos, onto your site, which is our core goal and strategy here.

The other things that's very important to get videos to rank well is just like any other search engine optimization on the Internet, and that's the offpage stuff, which is links.

Getting those incoming links.

We've already talked about doing video research and checking out the statistics and data tab, and finding other related or competing videos in our market. And going and looking and seeing who's linking to them and then using that information to maybe get the same people to link to your videos or host your videos on their pages, to then benefit from the incoming links and the value that creates.

But the other thing you're going to want to do is link to your videos using anchor text containing your keywords, just like we've done for our other search engine optimization efforts. And that's how you're going to get higher rankings on YouTube, as well as to get your YouTube videos to show up on the Google search results.

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It's a combination of views and all these other things that are related on the site, including favoriting and rating and all these things that we're going to cover. But all of these things work together to rank videos high on Google itself and on YouTube. So to get them to rank highly, all these things work together.

But links are very important. Any linking that you can do to your YouTube videos, and using linked text that contains keywords and phrases that you want to link for, the better.

So the more incoming links, the higher you can help your videos rank on YouTube itself, as well as on Google.

And the same things goes for these other video hosting sites I'm going to tell you about.

When you put videos on those sites, you want to do it all the same way. Similar type of title with the keywords leading if you can. Don't overdo the tags. Make the description natural. If you can, just use the same domain. If you did go and get one that has videos in it or video in it, that's related, just like this example here that this person's done that's really smart.

Do the same types of things. The one thing you really want to mix up, though, are the exact titles. Don't just submit your videos to 10 different free video hosting sites and use the same video title. Mix it up, change it up. We've kind of talked about his already with normal content and articles and everything else, blog posts and so on and so forth.

But mix it up. Use some different titles. Even if it's the same video. Because they're on different sites, use some different titles. And in your anchor text, of course, that goes without saying, you want to mix that up with all the different links you may link to your videos. Make sure to use different anchor text. Don't just use the actual title of the video as the link. Mix it up so it's not all the same.

Remember, it's about following the natural path of what the Internet would naturally do on its own, if someone wasn't trying to game search engines to rank high. What the nature of Internet activity would be. And so people link to videos using different words and phrases and not always just that video title. So keep that in mind.

That's pretty much it. The only other thing is to pick a category that best suits, of course, your video and the niche that it's for. That's it. Follow the same rules that you do for normal search engine optimization. Do some of the community things that I'm getting ready to tell you about here soon in an upcoming lesson.

That's actually the next lesson, I'm going to explain some of that to you, as well as a few other things that you're going to learn throughout the rest of this CD. So you're going to do all these things together in order to get your videos to rank well. And you're going to understand all these actual individual steps and when to do them and all that stuff when it comes to the master plan, the last CD of this course, it's all going to come together.

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So, sorry if it's kind of all over the place, and I'm telling you to do things here and things there. So, there's a lot of action steps for you to do. And, you just follow a lot of the common SEO stuff and it works as well for videos. And, you just kind of get it all working together in a process, you wash, rinse, repeat. And you get results and you just continue to do that.

But the most important thing is, of course, to get a watermark on your videos if you can.

And to get a call to action actually at the end of the video, where you're talking to the person watching the video and you tell them to go to the site for some specific reason.

And they have to have a reason or an incentive to do it.

A great way to do it is a free bonus or a gift or something. Tell the person, "Hey, I want to run a special promotion here on YouTube and thank all my viewers that have watched my videos that I've taken the time to put up. If you go to my site right now at suchandsuchsuchandsuch, you can get a free gift that I set up. It's a free sevenday mini course teaching you how to do X, " related to the topic.

So, there's a lot of different things that you can get creative and do to give away or to create incentive to get someone to go watch. You can use intrigue, you can say, "Hey, if you enjoyed this video, I've got an even better video; but because it's over 10 minutes long" you can use this as a great reason why "because it's over 10 minutes long, YouTube won't host it because they have a 10minute limit. And so go to my site right now at freegardeningtipsvideos.com� or whatever the name of your domain is "and watch that video."

That's a great way to get people to leave YouTube and go and look for that video on your site. So, those are just some ideas for you, and what you need to be doing to optimize your videos themselves so they'll rank high on the video sites as well as off the video sites in search engine results.

CD 6 - Lesson 6: Community Factors YouTube has a lot of community and social features that attribute to the ranking algorithm of how videos rank when they're searched for by keywords on YouTube itself as well as in Google's universal search thing, they call it, where they'll show videos in the actual search engine results pages.

It's pretty much just a few things here. Ratings, where people can rate a video from 15, five being best and one being worst. What they think of the video. People can "favorite" the video, where if they have an account on YouTube they can click it as a favorite and then they can always go into their area of their account to look at their favorited videos.

It's like doing a bookmark on a browser, so they can remember what videos they liked and always be one click away from watching them again.

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And then, of course, we have comments, which people can comment on videos. And all these things attribute to the algorithm for how things rank. The more activity a video has, the better the ratings for a quality type of a score. But then the more people that have favorited it and the more comments that it gets seem to contribute directly to that algorithm.

And so you want all those things. How do you get those things? It's simple. In your normal means of communication with your audience, and your distribution which we're really going to get into when we talk about social strategy and email marketing and how to get the word out and keep driving people back to your site and communicate with them about, "Hey, I've got new content for you to check out. Hey, here's a special I'm running on my products."

Whatever it is you communicate with them on a regular basis with, you can simply use that and ask people: one, use it to announce like a new video you put on YouTube, but secondly you use it to just say, "Hey, help me out. Give it a high rating if you like it; add it as a favorite and post a comment on it. I really appreciate it."

And that's it. That'll get you the views. That'll get you the ratings. That'll get you favorites and that'll get you comments. Of course, I mentioned before, the number of views has a lot to do with the algorithm, too. But that's it.

The one thing I forgot to mention about optimizing your videos is this thumbnail that you see when people do a search. If somebody searches for gardening, these videos that show up, not only does the title have a lot to do if somebody's going to click or not, and the description, but a lot of times and probably more than anything because it's visual and videos are visual the still shot that shows that represents the entry here in the results pages is going to have a lot to do with the rate at which people click.

This frame is typically pulled from the direct middle of your video. That's how YouTube is working right now; it may change in the future. But it's pulled from the exact middle frame of your video. So if you have a 10minute video, right at the 5minute mark, or 5:01, you're going to have a frame in that area that's pulled.

So try to make it as compelling as possible. People typically can pull high response than just like still images or still life. If you're going to do a poor man's video like I call it, where you're just going to do like a PowerPoint presentation or even some kind of screen capture thing, put some type of compelling, interesting photo just up for a few seconds.

Work it into the video somehow, Have it show directly in the middle of your video so that becomes the thumbnail image that people see when your video is shown, when people look at your other videos, when they see them in the results.

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That little thumbnail for each video is shown all over YouTube in many different ways on your profile, channel page, and so on and so forth.

The other thing I want to mention is, when you create an account on YouTube it is best, I believe, if you set your account type as "guru". There's "director" and "comedian" and "musician". There are all these types of labels. But use "guru" because that relates to an expert or someone giving information.

That's pretty much what you're going to be using YouTube for, to try to get traffic. You're going to be giving out that good content as an expert related to your products and services or related to your business, to try to drive traffic. So you'll want to do that too.

CD 6 - Lesson 7: Video Responses OK, I'm back here at the "Evolution of Dance" video, the most popular video of all time on YouTube, 87 million views. And I want to show you an interesting little trick or method that not many people even know about when it comes to YouTube.

Right here under the video in this kind of community section where the comments are, and the favorites and the ratings and all that good stuff, notice this: "video responses".

YouTube allows people to host a video response to other videos. It's like someone can give commentary, like say, "Hey, this video's awesome. This is what I think." Or, "This video stinks." Or anything else they want to say. Or they can post related videos to it; just to post is as a response.

Now last check, of course these things change all the time, but in the settings there's a way to set it so people can't post video responses to your videos. But most of them enable it and have it so anyone can post a video response.

Well, as you can imagine, it's a great way to hijack some of the traffic, or at least divert it to your videos and your profile by finding popular videos and posting a response. Of course, you want the response to be relevant. You wouldn't post your gardening video related response to this video. It's not going to do very well, and it's probably going to get you reported and get you in trouble with YouTube. So you want to things naturally, remember. That's the common theme here.

But check this out. Here's some little video with kind of a little hand talking, and it's talking about that dance video and what he thought about it. Look at the rating: horrible.

People hate this thing. But look at the views: 238,000 views. And I can guarantee you all those views probably came just from posting the response.

It wasn't from some great marketing and search engine optimization. It wasn't from the viral affect of people going, "This is the greatest thing ever," and passing it around. The

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rating is low, and you can tell people don't care to show this to other people, because they don't like it. Or the average person doesn't like it, based on those ratings.

A few people posting their comments, but not that many, it's a fraction of one percent. So it's clearly evidence that posting a response can get you traffic. Well, the way you'll want to use this is not really to piggyback on some of the most popular videos, which are just kind of humorous or music videos, and probably don't... If they apply to your market, then by all means do it. But if they don't, you don't want to do that.

What you can do is find ones in your market and post decent responses to them, to divert some traffic to you. Again, it's natural and it's legitimate.

So you'll want to study your responses and see which ones are getting more of traffic.

Again, let other people show you what's working and then kind of figure out how to do it as well. But typically just a talking head video of you talking to a web cam and saying what you thought about a video, and them maybe adding a couple of comments, like adding some other value to the video.

And then even making reference to say, "Hey, check out some of my videos where I show how to grow tomatoes. This is a great video that I just watched on growing carrots." Like if you're posting a response to a carrot video. You can say, "I've got some in my account that I've posted about growing tomatoes. If you're interested in growing tomatoes, go check mine out."

"One thing that people want to keep in mind that's important, that this video mentions, is about fertilizer. I've found that using the wrong fertilizer can hurt the growth." You get the point. Post something that makes sense.

But that's another strategy that you can use on YouTube to divert traffic over to your videos, is by posting video responses.

CD 6 - Lesson 8: Video Distribution Video isn't only about YouTube. There are tons of other sites out on the Internet that you'll want to use to generate traffic to your site. Of course, first generating traffic to your videos themselves, getting views on those videos, and then being able to divert those viewers, or at least some of them, over to your website, which is our goal here of generating traffic using video marketing.

Here's just a quick list of some videorelated sites, just to show you what's on this directory site, and I'll link to this directory site in the resources section of this CD. As well as you'll find a list in the resources section of the video sites that we recommend that you submit all your videos to, following along with all of the video optimization tips that I just shared with you for properly creating titles and descriptions and all that good stuff, 164

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and some of the other methods for watermarking videos and putting calls to action.

Just like I talked about for YouTube, you do the same types of things for some of these other services. And if you can link to these videos, you'll also increase your Google search results, and in other search engines where listings on these sites will actually show up.

Again, they won't show the thumbnail. It won't be a video you can actually play right there in the results, like some of the Google Video and YouTube stuff works. But it'll be just like a normal listing, people can click it and then they'll come to your video page on one of these sites.

But as you can see, there's a ton of them. They get added all the time. It's constantly changing, so if you regularly visit the resources section, we'll try to keep those up to date, and we'll keep adding them as we keep discovering them, as other customers keep discovering them. We'll just keep building a network of sites that you can submit your videos to.

And I talked about it before, it's kind of like that 99torun rule where you're going to get going to get probably 99% of your video traction and traffic that comes from your efforts on YouTube, 1% from the rest. Maybe more like 90/10, but Google definitely dominates.

But it can't hurt you to get your videos out there on all these other video sites.

Again, even if you can get one visitor from it, especially if you can automate submission with some tools that are out there, which we've linked to in the resources section for you.

They can automate the process. So why not just list it there as well.

The point is, as you can see, it's a huge list. And it's going to be growing every single year probably, with new ones. And there's lots of different places where you can submit your videos. And a lot of different places, of course, all of those have the potential for getting ranked, like in Google. Because most of these sites, almost all of them actually, get indexed by Google, and their video entries get indexed by Google. So, yet another reason to do it.

CD 6 - Lesson 9: Social Bookmarking On the next CD in our series, Social Strategy, we're really going to get into talking about all these Web 2.0 sites and services and social networks and all these different things that you can do and get involved with to help drive traffic to your site, to help you communicate with more prospects, and meet new people and find new customers, and all the things that go along with it.

But one of the other benefits of getting involved with those types of sites and services is that it can actually help us with our SEO efforts. And I just want to show you something really quickly. We're going to really get more into depth on this service and some other on Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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the next CD. This is del.icio.us. That's what's it's called. The URL is actually http://del.icio.us. So it's a little complicated, but it's called del.icio.us, that's what it's called. And this is a social bookmarking service, if you don't know what that is. Social bookmarking is where you can set up an account and you can submit things to your account or basically bookmark things in your account. But other people can see the bookmarks and sites that you've found and you think are interesting and that you've collected.

And you can tag the with keywords, describe them in different ways, do all this kind of stuff. And other people can share them and look at your bookmarks and so on and so forth. Well, the search engines really like these bookmarking sites. You can come in here and you can put a link to any of your content pages out there on the Internet and it can help your search rankings. Of course if you don't abuse it and you do it properly.

But the reason that I bring it up right now is, you're going to want to use these social bookmarking sites to bookmark all of your videos. So when add something to YouTube, you're also going to want to come into your bookmarking accounts on these services and you're going to book mark the URLs that go directly to your videos.

That's going to help that incoming link score. It's going to help them rank higher, and it can also send just traffic directly from people browsing these social bookmarking sites and then finding yours and finding their way over to your videos.

So we're really going to get more into that strategy in the next CD, but I just wanted to briefly show it to you because there are a lot of these social bookmarking sites, and there are ways to automate the submissions so it really doesn't take too much of your time. And that's one of the things I'm going to be having you do to increase the SEO parts of your video optimization, to bring in incoming links.

We're going to do that as well, like I briefly mentioned before, for your blog posts and some of the other things that you're going to be doing. We're going to be tying all this stuff together, and when we get to the master plan, the last CD of the course, when everything comes together all the details and the schedule of when to do things and what your main options are to think about, and really how to manage this stuff and put all into practice. That's when you'll really understand it.

And you'll understand it more, of course, on the next CD, Social Strategy, when I explain all this and why we do it and how we do it. But this is social bookmarking, and you'll do this to your videos as well, and it'll allow people to find them this way as well as help your rankings, which will ultimately help the traffic that we get from the videos that you get posted on all these different sites.

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CD 6 - Lesson 10: Podcast Directories What are the things you're really going to want to consider to get the maximum traffic from creating videos, and from creating good content on the Internet is to set up and publish a video podcast. It's not for everybody. It takes a little bit more work than a lot of the other methods, but it can really, really pay off if you do it properly.

A podcast if you don't know is pretty much an episodic series of content. It pretty much started with audio podcasts where people are producing their own radio show. Maybe they come out with a new show once a week. It has an RSS feed just like a blog does, but it's the feed for the podcast.

Anyone that subscribed to it with a program like iTunes or any other program that can listen to audio podcasts or in the case of video podcasts, can watch a video podcast automatically gets pushed that latest episode whenever it gets published.

But if you're going to do a video podcast which is just like the audio podcast, which you could also do, by the way. If you don't want to do a video podcast you could do just a little radio thing it's got to be really good content. And it's episodic, again, where you'll come out with multiple episodes.

It's kind of got to work together from episode to episode. Whether you interview an expert in your market every week and you call it "Interviews with Gardening Masters" or something like that, or it's some different howto things each week.

But just taking random videos you're making for YouTube like little PowerPoint presentations or little web cam things that's not really going to fly very well. You're not going to get many people to become regular consumers regular watchers, people that consume your content of your podcast or video podcasts.

Again, it takes a little bit more work to do it properly, but if there's a lot of content for you to share in your market and you enjoy teaching that content again, you could hire someone to do this, in this example if you like doing it, think about doing a podcast.

It has all the benefits of publishing video on other sites. You can still take your podcast episodes and put them all on YouTube, just like you do any of these other videos that you're going to be doing. But the cool thing with creating a podcasts of good quality and you get a following for it, there are all kinds of other traffic benefits.

This is videopodcasts.tv and it's a video podcast directory. You can come in here and look around. Try to find some related podcasts to your market; you can look at their little directory listing that's right down here. Go in by category and try to find some similar to your market. Download them, listen to them, watch them, and get some ideas. Then try to

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do something just like it yourself.

A lot of podcasts if they're actually produced well, you can actually justify selling advertising to sponsors and having them pay you to put their commercials in your podcasts. Or you can do it, of course, without that and just focus on the content and getting a following, then in each podcast driving people to your site. It's a little like having your own radio or TV show. There's a lot that you can do with it.

Here's another huge benefit if you put in the time and you publish a podcast you can get it listed within the iTunes directory. Now we'll link in the Resources Section for this CD how you go about finding the information to get listed in iTunes. There's a large Frequently Asked Questions document that Apple's published that answers all the different questions on how to go about doing it, what the format needs to be, and all that good stuff.

You pretty much submit it and then they review it. It takes one to two weeks, they review your submission, and they look at the content. Somebody listens to it or watches it and they make a determination if they think its good enough for their directory.

If you go to iTunes right now and you click on podcasts, and you search the podcast directory not all of it is the greatest stuff you've ever heard before. Some of it's great but some of it's just OK. The bar is not that high to get accepted, but if you get accepted you can get a lot of extra traffic from the millions and millions of people that use iTunes to go to the iTunes store to buy music or to download TV shows and movies.

Apple is just on an unbelievable path of growth right now with everything that they're doing with the iPhone, with video iPods, and with Apple TV. All these things are coming together into one massive network system for downloading, for buying, for watching, for sharing media. Being in iTunes could potentially be a great lead generation source for you.

I know some people that have their podcasts just audio podcasts so far listed in the iTunes directory, and they just get a steady flow of leads all the time. People that subscribe to their podcasts, people that they end up driving to their Website and selling to and making them customers. It's just a great free source for traffic if you're going to put in the time to create some really good content, episodic content like doing your own little show.

Video podcasts, I think are really going to start taking off. There aren't that many of them yet, which can really give you an advantage for getting noticed and getting viewership. If you come into this directory and you poke around you'll find some, but they're kind of few and far between. There aren't that many people doing it right now.

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Again, we talked about it briefly before anything that takes more work you're going to have less and less people doing. Putting out a pretty good podcast video or audio takes quite a bit of work. It's not a tremendous amount of work, but it's a little bit more work than just creating just some quickie howto videos and things. It's got to make a bit more sense, be a little more thought out and planned. You're literally like running your own little talk show, radio show, or TV show, and that stuff takes real planning.

It goes along with the Content Factory process that we talked about of going from idea and research into the planning phase, the production, the scheduling, distribution, and all that stuff. You would do the same thing for your podcast. Plan out all your little shows, just like Oprah does. You'd plan out all your little shows, then produce them, and push them through your podcast feed. We'll link to all the resources you need to do that for this CD of course in the Resources Section.

Think about doing it, because if you can get into iTunes of course, and you get listed in all these other directories, there's a bunch of podcast directories that we'll link to it can be a great source of free traffic. The rate of traffic that you're going to get from it is really going to have to do with how good your content is. Where have you ever heard that one before?

Obviously it goes with the same theme that we're talking about, creating really good content. If you do put in the time and create great content for podcasts you can get thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of subscribers to your podcast. Some even have I think over a million. When you get to that level you can just write your own checks. It's just a great way to generate a lot of leads and a lot of sales.

Look into podcasts, consider it, and I know for a fact that it can be a great traffic generation strategy. It's just something you need to consider if you're going to be creating content anyways.

CD 6 - Lesson 11: Amazon S3 I told you why you don't want to host all your videos on the free services already. If you do any kind of video for any type of conversion part of your marketing, on your sales letter, whether it's a testimonial or whether it's just an opening description of something that you sell, or it's a thank you video after people order.

When you're doing any of that stuff, you don't want to be hosting them on YouTube, because when you embed them on your pages people will just be one click away from clicking that video and then having YouTube come up. You don't want people to leave the sales process your site.

And there are many other areas where you want to use video, where you don't want

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people to leave like that, which I've kind of already gone over.

Well this is Amazon S3, this page that I'm at. And if you have an Amazon.com account, you can do a search for "web services" and you can just add web services to your main Amazon.com account. If you don't, then just create an Amazon.com account, then search for "Amazon web services" and add the ability to have web services on your normal account, which is how it works.

Amazon has this thing called S3, or Simple Storage Service is what that stands for. And it's great. You basically upload a file to that service, and it then distributes that file to different data centers that it has. And when any one goes to actually use that file for example if it's a video file, then you'll just have code that put on that web page and the video will load right on your web page as if that video's hosted on the web server that you have that's serving that actual page.

But it's not. That video is being served through Amazon's servers, but people don't realize that. The beauty of it is, it's very kind of load balanced to where, even if you had a million people hammer on your website, that video is still going to load with no problems at all. Because Amazon has so much bandwidth, and the way they distribute that file to different data centers and the way they do, I've never heard of anybody that's had a lot of problems where they hosted a video with this S3 service and it wouldn't load because of too much traffic.

Sure Amazon has the occasional hiccups, but it's a great way to have your videos load. If you do a product launch and you don't want it to slow down your servers because video files are big and when you get a lot of people requesting it, it can really bog down your servers.

So you'll notice a lot of these Internet marketers that are doing these massive product launches where hundreds of thousands of people come to their site within the same 10minute period, when they have videos a lot of them are not using Amazon S3.

We've been using at our company a while now. I was one of the pioneer users, one of the original groups of testers and users when this came out, as well as one we were one of the private beta testers for a service called EC2. When they had a closed group of beta testers, we were able to use that.

So Amazon’s doing all this really neat stuff with this Web Services division of their company. They're kind of trying to become a utility company on the Internet for computing power itself, server programming ability. Or just programming power, just like processing power, I should say.

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documents. As well as doing database storage and different functionality for webbased services. They're just trying to become this utility company of the Net. And so there are pros and cons for using them for different types of things, but they work great for video hosting. Their prices may change, but right now it's about 18 cent for every gigabyte transferred, and you only pay for what you use. There's no minimum monthly fee, there's no contract. It's great, just pay as you go. So if you only use 36 cents worth of bandwidth for videos you've served, you get billed for 36 cents that month. It's great.

So for 18 cents a gig, it's a nobrainer. That's very, very competitive, and in many cases a lot cheaper than what normal hosting providers will charge you for bandwidth. And the fact that the video file is handled in such a way that it's on Amazon's massive networks; you don't have to worry about it slowing down your regular web server. It's just all the reason to do it.

So we'll link to, of course, this service in the resources section of this CD, as well as some other tools you can use with this service to make it easy to upload your files and some other things to allow you to actually use this service as easily as possible. And then you just copy and paste the code right into your pages and you're serving video from S3 and you're not serving it from YouTube where people can click and leave your site.

So there are a lot of advantages to being able to keep people on your site, which of course I already explained. Especially in any kind of sales process, you don't want people leaving or being able to leave. And so that's why you'd want to use Amazon S3.

And also, it's just more professional when you're serving video for a lot of different things and you're marketing, and you're not using You Tube. YouTube just looks really amateurish. It's just looks like you weren't willing to pay to actually serve the video yourself. And of course YouTube's quality isn't the greatest.

When you use S3, Amazon's service, you can also serve different sizes of videos. It's not just the small YouTube size. You can do sort of the widescreen HD format that's really nice looking. You can serve the larger kind of camtasia tutorial type videos that you've probably seen, kind of a larger square.

So there's a lot of functionality you can use with this Amazon service. It's easy to use. It's relatively inexpensive. It's pretty darn reliable and fast, and highly recommended for any of the video stuff you're going to do where you wouldn't want to host it on one of these free services, like I've already explained.

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CD 6 - Lesson 12: Review Let's review. We talked about how powerful video marketing is now and will be in the future. So, there is no better time to really get involved with it than right now.

To generate traffic, you need to focus on creating howto videos that you are going to put on all these video sites like YouTube and these other sites.

Stay away from all the other cutesy types of videos that a lot of people create just to show off their dogs and their kids and other things. You can certainly do that and you can certainly put them on YouTube if you want, but if you do that, just get a separate account.

For generating traffic, a core strategy here, we want to just have meaty highquality content videos that someone would really be impressed with and have the need to want to consume more great video content just like it, so then we could of course drive them to our site, drive them to our other videos and then eventually sell to them, build a relationship with them and do business with them.

So, we need to keep our focus kind of on the howto side if we can or just the solution side if that works with your business and you can figure out what to create in that format that kind of falls in the realm of howto or a tutorial or just some important information. An expert interview can work just as well as a howto video, but it high quality video that has really good content, that is the key here, because that is going to set the first impression to get people to want more stuff from you and that is what this is all about, plain and simple.

You want it just to be so good or as good as possible that people say, what else does this person have and then of course giving them the opportunity to click over to your site and to get more. So, you got to keep that strategy in mind.

Take the time to produce good quality video. You are going to find links in the resources section for the CD on equipment and software and some tips and some other things, but you want to take the time to produce good quality videos, how to edit and produce them if you want to add some little special effects, some minor transitions. Again, it is a lot easier than you may think, if you think it sounds too complicated.

A lot of the software that is available today automates that process pretty much, makes it easy to edit videos and add this little special effects to them at least on a basic level. And to add music, to add kind of a fading up intro and a fading down kind of exit, a little track, you can do that. Of course, learn how to properly light something to shoot it with video, how to kind of set up lights if you are going to be shooting like just for the webcam even, you sitting at your desk, how to get better quality video that way.

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And so, you just want to put in the time to produce good quality videos and to learn how to properly compress them and how to prepare them when you upload them to YouTube and these other sites, so they look really good even on those sites. Again, you will find links to those tutorials and how to do all that stuff in the resources section for the CD, but it is important that you get involved and learn how to make good videos.

It is fun. It can be a lot of fun and it is not as complicated nor is it is expensive as many people think it is. The prices are really coming down on being able to create high quality video. And it is also getting easier and easier to deal with some of the software that is out there now. So, produce good videos.

Of course, you want to analyze other videos in your market, our core piggybanking concept throughout this course, find what others are doing and having successes with and do it too and hopefully you will also have success. So, you want to be analyzing other videos that are in your market to find videos that are getting traffic, to find videos that are getting high ratings, to find videos that people are commenting on, to find videos that are getting people's attention, to find videos that people are linking to, so on and so forth.

To achieve all the things that you want, find others that are doing it first, and then emulate their successes, that is the whole process, don't just clone them and copy them exactly, but use them as a guideline, as a template, to have them have helped you figure out what is working and then just do it too and hopefully do it better and differentiate yourself.

Properly optimize your videos for high rankings, a lot like we already discussed for the search engine optimization elements of our content pages on our site, on our blogs, et cetera, et cetera. Put your keywords first in your title tag, but make your title tag descriptive and benefit driven, so when someone reads it, they will want to click on it. It is just as important. That is half the battle as we have discussed. It is not just about getting to rank high, it is getting someone to click on it and people do read it and make a determination after they read it if they want to click or not.

And if it is just stuff with a bunch of keywords and it doesn't actually make sense if you read it as a sentence, a lot of people ignore those, they just think it is spam and they go on to the next one. And so, you got to properly create your title, you want to use proper tags, you want to use the keywords that you hope to rank for, but you also want to use those LSI terms, those semantic terms that are also in the same theme, but don't share the same actual words. But, you don't want to overdo your tags, six to nine is a pretty good range, but I like to keep it under 10.

You see some pages we have already talked about, you will see it with some videos. We are trying to use like 30 different tags and it is just spamming and obviously it is going to be stomped up by the different search engines and the different video sites just because Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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they are not going to put up with that even if they do right now, so just do things naturally. You wouldn't really naturally want to do that, so you certainly don't do it when you optimize.

And then, put that URL right there in the description, especially on YouTube and any of these other sites that allow you to do it, maybe, register a new domain name to include the word video or videos in that domain name to kind of make it descriptive and to allude to other videos on that subject matter.

Think about putting a little watermark in your videos showing the URL at all times, where people can just be curious and go over and visit the site. And of course, use the call to action. Offer a free bonus, a free gift, a longer video that is a good little trick there to use YouTube's limitation of only a 10minute video as a good reason of why you need to tell someone to go to your site to watch a certain video because you couldn't put in on YouTube for them. Because a lot of people may say, well if you have other videos we need to watch, why don't you just put them on YouTube, why aren't they listed under your account, I don't get that what kind of a sneakiness are you trying to pull here. But, it is a great thing.

So, you can just say, 'Hey thanks for viewing my videos here on YouTube, and if you are really interested in gardening, you definitely will want to go to my website, freegardeningvideos.com and I have some other great tutorials on there that are even more extensive than the one you just watched, and they are a lot longer than the one you just watched. And the reason why I can't put them on YouTube is because YouTube only allows videos with a maximum of 10minute length.'

So, optimize your listings, your titles, your descriptions, all that stuff and then just use good sound marketing, I should say, for getting people to go to your site through that URL and the description, but also giving them the call to action, the video itself.

To benefit from the community features, like I explained, on YouTube like the ratings and the comments and views themselves and getting people to favorite a video, just ask for help. Use your distribution you are really going to learn about in the next CD of social strategy. Reach out to your audience, the people that you have the ability to put a message in front of and say, 'Hey, you know, I got this new video put in YouTube, hey help me out.' Vote it up, add a comment, make it as a favorite on your account, whatever you want, just ask.

It is the same thing when we start talking about the social kind of new sites and the social bookmarking sites. Those things all benefit the more users actually dig something, vote thumbs up on something, bookmark something within one of the social bookmarking services and so on. So, the way to really get momentum and get the best results from those services is to work with a group of people that can help you out. And so just ask 174

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people and you will be surprised.

Most people really are willing to help, and especially if you are putting out good content, you are treating your customers and you market really well, even if people have never bought from you before, if they are just prospects, just subscriber to a newsletter or something. If you are constantly giving them good content, you are treating them well and there is a great reason for them to stay in touch with you and to be involved with you and to let you market to them in the first place and communicate with them, they will be more than happy to help with anything you ask. You will be surprised.

And then, link to your videos to improve the rankings. We talked about this. Just like the off page factors of normal SEO, the video stuff works the same way. To get your video listings on all these different video sites, to rank high on those sites specifically as well as in Google, you are going to need to link into those videos from your blog and from other pages that you have. And include anchor text in the links themselves that is related to what you want to rank for.

And again mix it up, create random linked text and random titles and random descriptions. Now, when I say random, I don't mean just jumbled letters random; I just mean mix it up and make them different. You can submit a video to three different sites and use all the same stuff, but don't do that to 20 different video sites. Do it in groups of three, maybe, where you are going to change the title a little bit, change the description a little bit and then you will submit that to three different video sites. And then, you do a different version to three more and so on and so forth. But, mix it up, don't just leave it the same. That is not natural and it will work against you with rankings and getting traffic, but link to your videos.

Another concept that you can use, another strategy you can consider is with articles you can actually put a link in an article that you put out there in the article directories like we have already talked about and have the link within the article or within your byline box at the bottom linked to one of your videos. Some people have done that with some successes.

And it is a great transition to take someone like we have already talked about from an article to a video and sometimes you can do that and take them directly to YouTube and kind of get double value out of it. You are getting them to your video like you wanted to in the first place, and so you are giving them more content which builds the relationship with the prospect and the value in their minds and how they are going to really want to buy from you more or consume other information from you at a lot higher rate, because they have already been pleased with that article.

And it can also help that video rank higher because here you are getting a valuable incoming link to the video, but you need to weigh the pros and cons because sometimes Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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that is not the case, you get more value if you link from the article actually to a specific site that has calls to action on it and other things depending on your marketing like we have already discussed. But, it is just another strategy you may want to think about is linking from articles or other content you put out there or guest blog posts or anything like that to your videos that are on YouTube or anywhere else.

And last but not the least, don't host all your videos with a free video host. Look into Amazon S3 hosting for videos so many marketers are using it now, it is just a great cheap way to host your own videos and not use one of the free services where people can be one click from leaving your website. We have already discussed all the different ways and benefits of why you wouldn't want to always use a free video host such as during your marketing process, on your sales letter, for testimonial video or any kind of just video you have made to try to help sell your product on a sales type page, you don't want people to be able to click once and end up on YouTube, which is what happens if you host on YouTube and embed that video there with their code.

So, use another host such as Amazon, where you control the video itself, the size, the player, the functionality of people click or whatever you want to happen. There is a neat stuff you can do Flash, if you hire someone that knows how to program Flash, which of course you can just follow what we have gone over in the course for finding out programmers, which you will learn more about on the widgets in software CD. But, in general, we are talking about for finding freelancers and just like to find freelancers to do research and write content for you, you can find them to program things and do design, and of course Flash is one of those things.

And so, you can create a player that loads a big clickable button at the end, right there where the video was, that takes them from wherever you put that video to a certain page, to order a product or preview a product the sky is the limit and the flexibility is yours if you are hosting your own video and you are in control. So, don't host all your videos with a free video host, use a paid service for some of them where it makes the most sense strategically like Amazon S3.

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CD 7: Social Strategy Lesson 1: Overview Social Strategy. By now you realize it. Web 2.0, social networks; everything is about the social web now. Social media has kind of changed the entire internet and has just changed everything. And when it comes to marketing and generating traffic for your site, of course, and also sales and new customers and everything that goes with it, in order to be completely effective with everything you do with your business online, you have to effectively incorporate some kind of social media strategy.

So that's what this CD is all about. How do we take advantage of social media to drive traffic, to drive sales, to build our brands, to build and strengthen bonds and relationships with customers, and ultimately just to make more money in our business because that's what the goal is. So how do we do it? How do we tap into all of these Web 2.0 things properly? And which ones are worth using, and which ones are a waste of time?

The one thing you'll notice, the consistency and the congruency of the methodology behind this course and behind what I teach and behind what I'm going to have you do, any time I ever tell you to take action on something, is the fact that I'm all about just doing what works and doing what's worth the time.

When you hear of free traffic generation methods, free traffic or free advertising, nothing is really free. I'm sure you realize that by now. Everything has a cost associated with it.

It may not be you have to use a credit card to buy something, but it takes your time. And, of course, your time is one of the most limited resources that you have; and therefore there is a cost.

So there are a million and one ways to try to drive traffic and sales from social media, but the majority of them aren't worth your time unless you value your time at less than probably $1.00 an hour. So what I'm going to talk to you about and suggest to you and build in to the methodology of this course and build into the master plan that we'll get to at the very end to have you do on a regular basis is from my own testing results as well as the results of students, colleagues and people I mastermind with and taking all the data and results.

And then just using a sound strategy to get ultimately what we want to get, and that's traffic and that's sales for something that makes a lot of sense, something that's efficient and is a good return on investment in time or with money that we spend.

Obviously, social media marketing is growing very fast. The whole thing is growing.

Every time you look online there's a new social network or new social news or

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bookmarking site or some new Web 2.0 service. It's just evolving, and it will continue to evolve.

The good news is you can keep up with the resources section, and as new sites are created, new services are launched, and of course, new techniques are discovered even for some of the existing services. That's where you'll find some of the latest methods and techniques that you can tap into and that you know you can go and use because they work. So you'll want to keep up with that over time. The weeks, months and years to come you'll want to keep up with that because it is changing quickly, and it's going to continue to evolve.

The most important thing that you have to understand, if I could kind of get any point through to you for this entire course, it's what I'm about to you, at least in how it relates to social media. So please pay very close attention to what I'm about to teach you. When it comes to social media marketing, 99 percent – or maybe even more than that – maybe 99 point something percent of marketers are using it wrong. They're using it incorrectly.

Social media is not for advertising your products and services and websites. Let me repeat that. Social media is not for advertising our products, services and website. If you try to use it as an advertising tool you will fail. You also will potentially damage your brand and your reputation.

So you must be thinking then, you're, like, "Well, I don't get it. If it's not for advertising my products and services, why would I want to use it?" Well, here's what social media really is and the purpose for it and how to use it effectively to generate traffic sales and business for you, which is the same goal of advertising your products and services.

Social media is for building your brand, building relationships with people, allowing other people to discover you and your business and your products and services; to syndicate content that you publish on the internet, which then of course could drive people to the pages on your website that sell things. But really to strengthen and grow a bond with potential prospects in your niche market, and then make them more likely to buy from you. It's also used for publishing the content itself that you'll be creating.

And so it's many different things. It's primarily a syndication and also a communications channel. Let me explain what I mean by that. Syndication is the process of you creating some kind of content or some kind of information and having it distributed, republished, reprinted, however you want to describe it, all across different points all over the internet.

So, for example, if you make a blog post on your blog and you have a Facebook account, and you have a plug-in set up or a Facebook app set up to syndicate your blog post, whenever you make a blog post on your blog, it automatically also gets made or at least a snippet of it in your Facebook profile. I'm going to actually show you how all this 178

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happens and how it all works. That's syndication. That's the process of releasing content in one place but having it automatically, or with a little bit of work, then distributed, shown and published in different areas around the internet.

I mean, we've talked about it tons and tons of time now how valuable content is to generate traffic and sales on the internet and how content makes up the internet. And so it's incredibly powerful for you to have all these different syndication points. So any content that you create you get this multiplied effect of value when it's published across the internet in different ways, through different channels in different syndication points.

It's almost like having a cable TV network of sorts. Like you're publishing a show, and it's getting distributed through all these different regional cable networks. And people maybe are even using these kinds of Apple TV, Slingbox, Netflix Box; I think there's one called Roku. All these different devices now that can take content from TiVo, DVRs, cable networks, vice-versa, and allow people to watch them online and vice-versa, online distributed content that can be watched on the TV. All of that is converging together, so syndication points are very powerful. It's like having that cable TV network or that multiple distribution network. You publish content, and you're going to get value from it. You're going to get traffic from it, hopefully sales from it, hopefully indexed in the search engines, hopefully shared by others because it's good.

And that's what the core focus of this is, is to create good content because if you do that you will naturally win on the internet. But then also people linking to it, and of course all the benefits that come from that, traffic coming through the links as well as the SEO benefits, which then can get you rankings, which then can you get you traffic and so on and so forth. It's just a snowball process.

But social media is best used to syndicate your content as well as to communicate with an audience and to communicate through distribution channels to get information and messages and some kind of communication in front of other people. But in doing so, in doing things to reach out to a group of people on, let's say, Facebook or another social network or through some other type of social site, in doing so it's not so much that you're just sending out a message to tell them something to promote and advertising something that you sell.

Because the way social media works it's literally like people coming over to your house to have dinner and sitting around a dinner table. If you invite people to come over and have dinner and as soon as they start eating you start pitching Amway, or you start trying to sell them Tupperware, or you start trying to tell them how you started a new paper route and you're looking for affiliates for it, or you're looking for other people to expand on your paper route, and you'll share the profits, that's just impolite.

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And here's the kicker. It's not just that it's rude, and it's going to upset those people, and they may never come over to have dinner again. Here's the most important part. It's not effective. It's not going to work. It may work 1 out of 1,000 times, but the damage you do in using that model and trying to do that that way it's just not worth it.

So going into social media and using social media and understanding that, it's a syndication and communications tool, to have other points to syndicate and automatically replicate your content you're creating as well as to communicate with little herds and social groups of people to alert them that you've created some new content or there's some breaking news you want them to know or something about yourself. That's really the basis and the foundation for good social media marketing and use.

So many marketers that are using it are just trying to throw up links to their site. It's funny. Like, they think just because they advertise on it people will end up finding their site, and it's just going to be worth doing. Well, it's not. So you have to realize that millions and millions of people are using social networks and these social services, and they're not business owners and marketers.

The majority of people that make up social networks and these social media sites and services, the bookmarking services, the social news services, all the stuff we're going to cover in this CD, guess what? Those aren't business owners. Those are just people of society, people of sub-niches and groups and little subcultures that are sharing, voting on and talking about information and content that's on the internet. So if you try to use it to pitch your stuff you will fail. Let me repeat that. If you try to use social media to pitch your products and services you will fail.

But ironically it doesn't mean you can't use it to get a ton of traffic and make a bunch of sales. You just have to understand how to do it properly, and that's what this CD is all about. So make no mistake about it. The people that are directly trying to advertise and promote their products and services are going to fail. They're just not going to do well.

There's like one minor exception to the few people that are actually having some success selling, using these tools, and it's just this incestuous cycle of if you want to learn how to make money on Facebook, I'll show you how I did it: here's my course. Well, the only way they made the money on Facebook is by selling something related to teach other people how to make money on Facebook. And because most the people connected to that person also want to make money on Facebook, they're willing to go visit the site and buy the thing because it's related to the thing itself, which is just this incestuous cycle.

But outside of that, for most people that you're going to encounter on many of these services that say, hey, I know the secrets of – I'm making on this. I did $20,000.00 here or $10,000.00 there, the majority of what's being sold is simple this cycle of information 180

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about the same thing to get people that want to make money for the same thing. But ultimately those techniques do not work if it's to actually sell something unrelated to the medium.

So don't try, even if you're thinking of ideas of kind of selling some kind of tutorial on how to use Myspace or something else and then use Myspace to do it, I wouldn't even waste your time because long term it's a short-lived strategy. You may make a few sales, but ultimately, it's going to do more harm than good.

The proper way really to go about it is just to deliver killer content for free through social media to reach your market to then break through social circles of other people that will be exposed to it. And then their friends will be exposed to it, and then the people they tell can be exposed to it either directly or indirectly, either actually through kind of word of mouth or the fact that they're interacting with your content online in these social media networks. Then their friends see it and then get exposed to it too even if they didn't want to or even if that person originally didn't intend to. And you're going to see how all this starts coming together.

But it's mainly to be used for just putting out really good content. So any business owner or marketer who doesn't have content to share is doomed to fail, and that's the foundation of this course. You can get all the traffic and sales you want if you're willing to create good content for your market, which can translate then into traffic and sales. So be smart about it and use it properly, and it can actually be a goldmine for you and your business.

There are several different segments of social media. We've got social networks like Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and Hi5 and Orkut and some of these other ones that you've heard of before, LinkedIn. There's all different types of social networks. Then the other type of social media that's kind of out there is content sharing. It's where people on the internet are sharing websites, funny videos, funny pictures or just interesting pictures and videos and all types of content and good blog posts and all that good stuff. They're finding it and discovering it for themselves, and then they're sharing it with others.

And some of the sites that have the process of sharing you get into voting and that kind of thing, which is like the Digg community or Reddit or Mixx or Propeller, Yahoo! Buzz, some of these other things that we're going to go over in the CD. So it's about networking with other people socially, likeminded people having discussions, so on and so forth, and sharing content, even the social networks. And then the content sharing sites themselves which is literally about, "Hey, look what I found on the internet. This is really cool. Check it out," which is the social bookmarking sites as well as the social news sites.

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syndicating content that's published elsewhere on a blog but also to create new content or to publish content for the first time. A good example of this would be like Flickr.

Flickr is a very, very popular, massively popular photo-sharing site. It's kind of like a social network built in where people can comment on each other's photos and favorite each other and communicate with each other and build groups of people they follow and photos that they follow and photographers that they follow, I should say. But really it's a place to publish your photos, and that may be the only place that you publish them. You put them online; you upload them to your Flickr account. You don't do it like on your normal website, so it's not just syndicating it through Flickr. You're actually using Flickr.

So that's a good example of actually publishing directly with one of the social services, social content services in this case. And of course most of those then have abilities to syndicate elsewhere. Flickr's a great example. There's, like, a Flickr plug-in that's, say, for Facebook. Once you set it up, any time you upload a photo on Flickr it automatically gets shown inside your Facebook account. You can put that on your blog, so it automatically shows little pictures that you've uploaded most recently. As you do to Flickr it'll show right there on your blog or anywhere else. So all of these things kind of work together, but that's pretty much how it breaks down.

You can complicate social media and Web 2.0 and all this other stuff any way you want, and it can get very detailed, and there's all these kind of unique Web 2.0 services, but when it all comes down to it, it comes down to those three main areas. Social networks for meeting likeminded people or keeping in touch with friends and family, telling people about cool content you've seen as well as casting your vote and opinion on it, and then there's the publishing side of actually using these things to publish content.

The piggyback method that we've talked about as a foundational principle of how to shortcut your way to success generating traffic or sales also applies to social media. I mean, it applies to everything, but it applies to social media. Let me give you some quick examples.

Let's say you want to get a lot of friends on Facebook or any of these other social networks and you don't know how to go about it or you just want to do some competitive research or you just want to kind of look and see what other people are doing. Well, it goes to kind of give you a head start or at least implies that if you examine those that have a lot of friends and see what they're doing you'll just figure out how you can get a lot of friends. It's really just that sample. Go and look at who's having the success or getting the volume that you want to get, and just see what they're doing, and then you can do it to.

When it comes to social news sites, like Digg, or example, and you'd love to get on the front page of Digg and get 100,000 visitors or whatever and get a bunch of traffic and 182

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then the links that can come from that when other people find it on Digg and start linking to you, you'd love to do that, right? Well, if you're going to do that, go look at Digg and see what the top-voted sites are. Look at it historically by all time. Look at the all-time most dug posts.

What are they about? What are the titles to those pieces of content? How are those titles intriguing, or how does it strike interest in people? What do the masses on that site look to be interested in because they voted that up? And why did they do it? Was it just some late-breaking news? Was it some controversial thing? Was it some amazing resource, a list of 50 killer web tools for X topic? What was it?

So if you just examine what's popular and what gets a lot of votes that's a shortcut to emulate to possibly have similar success. So don't just try to create something completely new and think you're going to create this amazing new concept that no one's every done to try to get a lot of Diggs. Just look at what's already gotten a lot of Diggs and then try to find a way to make it apply to your business and what you're doing.

You know, the same thing goes with social bookmarking sites. When you read about or hear from others where they got a lot of traffic from social bookmarking, they've got a lot of incoming links, they've got a little people to visit, a lot of people to share it. What were the correlations that made that happen? What was that piece of content about? If it was a blog post what did they write about? What did people say in the comments? How did it get bookmarked first? Who bookmarked it, did they or did or other people or did they invite their list to do it?

So if you want to have success with any of this stuff, tons of friends, tons of traffic and links from bookmarking sites, tons of people passing around something or voting something you've created and getting high exposure on these news sites, for example, just look at the ones that already have been successful and do it too. It's just that simple. So don't forget that piggybacking applies to all the social media stuff.

Last but not least for this overview, this is incredibly valuable for you to understand, and I only know this from scientific proof and data from using these tools and working with these tools as well as looking at the proven data and results from others that have done the same. There is a communications hierarchy for response and results and ultimately to get traffic that you need to understand.

The top dog in the food chain is e-mail, and what I mean by that is e-mail marketing.

Like having an opt-in list where people give you their permission to e-mail them. So with all things created equal, if you create a new blog post and you wanted to drive people to it, e-mailing a list that you have will create the greatest response and the most traffic.

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And the other thing about this hierarchy for response, if you fully examine it, it's kind of common sense. It has to do with the value and the attention that's committed to it for people that use these different types of communications element. For example, e-mail is checked more and is more important to internet uses than anything else. We live and die, so to speak, with e-mail as our main communication source. Most of us check e-mail multiple times a day. That's how our friends and family typically contact us directly or a customer has a question or a potential partner contacts us.

That's it. That's kind of the lowest common denominator of communication on the entire internet is e-mail. And it's just a regular part of our lives, and it always will be most likely. And so it's no surprise or it should be no surprise to you that e-mail gets the best response. That when you send out announcements about something you just posted or something you're doing or whatever, you'll get the most traffic from doing it with e-mail.

Now, by now you should probably be seeing something in this little hierarchy, or maybe you're not. Notice how RSS is farther down on the list. When you think of RSS you probably think of blogs and blogging, and you're probably thinking, well, why do most bloggers just really on RSS for people to subscribe to a feed, to subscribe to their blog.

How come most of them don't do e-mail, like don't try to build an e-mail list or don't have some kind of e-mail component for notifying people that they have a new blog post?

Well, they don't realize it but they're making a huge mistake. Now, RSS is important, and I'm going to get to that and explain why, but it doesn't trump e-mail. E-mail trumps everything. And so most bloggers on the internet, even the most popular blogs in the world, are just making a monumental error by not putting more focus into building e-mail subscriptions for their blog readers and focusing on RSS because RSS isn't as important to people. It doesn't get the same attention to people as e-mail.

So it's just an important point I want to point out to you. And the reason why most bloggers don't know this is because they're not good marketers. I hate to say that, but many of them just don't know the nuances of internet marketing because they haven't been involved in other projects and other businesses when RSS wasn't even a part of the equation. And so most people just got blog software.

And of course I don't mean to put down anyone. There's a lot of bloggers that are very, very successful, and they're doing great, and they do great work, so I don't mean to demean them in any way. But blog software, when it was created for blogging, wasn't created by marketers. It was just created by software engineers that saw a need to build a platform content management, and then it was created. And RSS was this amazing technology, and it has some great uses, and you will definitely want to use it. I'm not saying not to.

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But in the process, e-mail was incredibly overlooked because of the fact that they just had no experience with e-mail marketing. They don't realize how great the response is. So I'm going to tell you right now what you're going to start to see more and more as a trend is more and more bloggers focusing on building e-mail subscriptions where people can get post by e-mail or updates by e-mail and not so much RSS. They'll promote both, but you're going to start to see more and more focus on e-mail.

And, of course, if you have a blog, if you're doing anything where this is all going to tie together, you're going to want to have an e-mail form on your blog or on other pages all connected to everything you do. Your main focus is going to be to get people to opt-in to an e-mail list. That has the most value. That will be the most valuable asset that you'll build over time. It can grow virally on its own.

But ultimately, it represents the absolute most powerful and effective way to get traffic to go to your website, and ultimately, to get people to buy your products and services and/or for you to monetize the traffic when they come to the site if you make money in other ways like affiliate programs or through advertising or AdSense or anything else. So make no mistake, e-mail is the No. 1 king when it comes to driving people back to a site, and everything you need to do needs to have e-mail strategy in mind. We're going to talk more about that in this CD a little bit. But keep that in mind.

Next on this hierarchy for response under e-mail, so it's not as good as e-mail but it's kind of next in line, is Twitter. Twitter is relatively new at the time of this recording. It's just over a year old, but I'm already seeing some tremendous response from it, and I've only been using it for a few months now. It's getting very, very popular. And this could change, by the way. That's why you want to keep up with the resources sections for this course because these things can change quickly. But I think that this hierarchy is going to be pretty solid for a while, maybe for many, many years. Something new may came out and may kind of break its way into this hierarchy, but at least for a while I think this is going to be very, very solid.

Twitter, if you don't know what Twitter is we're going to go over that and kind of some techniques for that, is a micro-blogging platform. It's made where you can send a text message from a phone or from the web itself and make little posts that are a maximum 140 characters, so it's a very, very short post. And then foundation of Twitter is based on the question of "What are you doing?" So it's you basically saying what you're currently doing, and then that gets posted and other people can see it.

Why this is important and why it has become valuable and why people use it and put their attention into it is a very common and yet powerful part of human psychology. And what it comes down to, the best way to describe it is kind of the fly-on-the-wall syndrome. We all, as human beings, would love to be a fly on the wall and hear things or see things that maybe we shouldn't see or at least that we normally wouldn't have access Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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to. That's why naturally humans are voyeurs. They like to people-watch or look and see what's going on here and just observe. It's just in our nature.

And Twitter allows people to kind of do that because it's not so much only content that's being published in Twitter. It's pretty much just people kind of just saying what they're up to and maybe where they're going or if they're a taxicab somewhere. I was recently in Las Vegas, and I was just caught in this horrible traffic jam, and I just made a little quick post. I said, "I'm currently entrapped in taxi hell." And it was funny as I got a bunch of replies and stuff.

And so people like keeping up with people they're interested in and what their real lives are about, where they're at, what they're doing, and that's just the phenomenon behind Twitter.

But what's great about Twitter also is that people are using it to link to other things on the internet. While they're going about their normal day and they're reading a certain blog post they like a lot, they could say, "Currently reading such and such. This is great," and then they link to it, and then others can click on the link, of course, and go check it out, and they appreciate it. And then of course if they have a blog, let's say, and if they make a blog post it's a great way for them to Twitter and say, "I just put up a new blog post. If you're interested go check it out."

So Twitter is becoming this important little communications medium. Some people get into little personal conversations and can chat with each other, and there's a way to do it privately so most people don't see it. But a lot of the chatting that goes on is public, so people see other discussions and things.

And it's very viral. When one person posts to someone – I'm going to show you all this and how this works – but when it happens, other people can be exposed to something related to someone else, even if they're not following them, as its called, or their friend.

And then they can always be one click away from checking that person out and what they're Twittering about and talking about and decide if they want to follow that person so they can start keeping up with all their little message in their main timeline. Again, I'm going to show you this, especially if you've never seen it.

But it's very, very important people are spending more time on Twitter. They're using it for these micro-communication points, whether it's sharing about what they're up to personally or sharing things they're finding on the internet that other people should find interesting or posting about things that they're up to, their latest blog post, their latest product specials and so forth.

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went on sale or something, it'd be okay to mention it and link to it, but it needs to be a very, very low percentage of your overall communication. Like 1 out of 100 little Twitter posts should really be promotional in nature.

You always have to remember this, by the way, when it comes to all of this social media, communication, everything. It always comes back to one thing and always should come back to one principle. What's in it for them? People, if they follow you on their Twitter, it's not just for their health. They're not just doing it for kicks. They're doing it because they're interested in seeing what you're going to have to say.

Well, if all you have to say is just a lot of personal kind of blabbering about, like, "I'm currently making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I'm currently taking my dog for a walk." None of it has to do with your business and kind of while they're connected to you socially because ideally you're going to use it for some kind of marketing purposes for you. That's why you're going to use it to generate traffic. You can use it for personal reasons too, but you want to be using this tool for marketing. That's what this is all about and to generate traffic and sales and grow your business.

Well, if someone's following you because they're in your target market and that's how you reach them and that's what the goal is, well, what's in it for them to follow you? If you're in the gardening industry and they're following you, and you're linking to the latest gardening news releases that you find on some other industry sites or blog sites that you like or post, well, that's why they're following you. That's the core reason.

And so if you're just posting about personal stuff, although because of the fly-on-the-wall concept, people like to keep up with the personal stuff, they like that element of transparency where they feel closer to you and it's a stronger bond socially because they're giving you their attention to even see what you're saying at all, the real driving force is the value. What's in it for them? And that has to relate to what your business does and what you can do for them as far as the communication goes.

And so that's why all this stuff does relate to not selling but giving and giving free content and giving free value related to your industry. And so you always want to keep that in mind when you're Twittering. It's easy, and I fall in the same trap. Sometimes I just get into personal stuff. I start jabbering away about how much I love the latest iPhone or Mac computer or some gadget or I just saw a great movie or something.

And I have to stop myself even because, obviously, I'm not perfect, and I make mistakes all the time as well. And I have to think, "Hey, hey, hold up there, John. This isn't really why people are following you and willing to listen to and be exposed to your messages where it's adding to the noise of everything else that they have going on. Really why they're doing it is because, in my case, of internet marketing strategies, techniques and

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business information. So I have to keep that in mind and balance it with making sure to Twitter about that stuff, so keep that in mind.

Down the little hierarchy then we have RSS where people can subscribe to your blog.

They can have an RSS reader where they have a piece of software any time any of the blogs they're subscribed to, they just push a button and say I want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Any time the blogs are updated, the next time they open that software that manages all these little RSS subscriptions, they're going to see the latest blog post, so it's pushed to them.

So you can think of it just like magazine subscriptions. You go to your mailbox and the latest issues show up when they show up. Same thing. They use a piece of software to digitally manage all these different digital content channels, and whenever they're updated, the next time they look in that management software for all their channels, they'll see the latest entry that got pushed out down the channel.

So almost all blogs use this, and it's great because a lot of people like to read blogs with an RSS reader and not actually on the blog themselves because sometimes it's easier, and they can consume more information with these RSS readers. But RSS can also syndicate content. People can take an RSS feed. They can attach it to a webpage, and they can set it up where your blog posts are automatically getting copied onto one of their webpages.

And then, of course, that's just more exposure for you, and that, of course, happens all over the internet.

And it's something you can do as well. If you need good content you can find RSS feeds and companies that are giving you permission to do this, which most do. And you could set it up so that every time they post it'll automatically update one of your webpages. It's a great way to get free content for some of your pages is by using RSS feeds and channels. And we'll link to more resources on all of this, of course, in the resources section, so check there and stay up to date with that.

And then last but not least down the food chain is Facebook and communicating through Facebook as far as getting a message out there or having your blog post syndicated or anything else syndicated through Facebook and through some of the communication you have in Facebook, and then how it can drive traffic to your website.

So this hierarchy that I'm laying out for you is all based on my data as well as data I've gotten from others, and it's pretty consistent. So when you spend equal time doing things, all things considered, this is how it falls in line for what will generate the most response. And again it's kind of common sense, and I really don't mean to just keep babbling and rambling on about this. I want you to understand this in case there are other tools or in case your business kind of goes along better with some other tool or some other service or some other network so you can understand it.

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Notice the hierarchy is in level of attentive importance. E-mail's first because we check I the most, and it's the most important to us. Twitter is becoming kind of the next best right now for response because people are using it more and more, and they're looking to it a lot, and it's important to them because they're using it to kind of message people and communicate with people. So it's a way they keep in touch with people as well as their own followers in their own market, so it has that value.

RSS, well, a lot of people use it to read blogs and keep up with different types of content.

As it's pushed out on the internet it gets pushed to them. Not a lot of people necessarily open that every single day or every three hours to see, "Oh, what's the latest thing that's been pushed to me?" They open it and read it whenever they feel like it.

Well, Facebook, even though there's a lot of daily usage of it for some people, they're using it all the time, logging in all the time, they're not always all their friends' different profiles where their friends are making updates. They're not always going and encountering all these other areas where their friends or people in their social network are actually communicating and adding information, and we're going to go over Facebook in detail, and there's some different things that you can do, but that's why.

So when you do the things on Facebook that's why it doesn't generate as much response as those other three tools. It's still great to use when you need to use it. That's why it's in this course, but it's just not as effective, and you need to understand that.

One thing to point out about Facebook is that you absolutely don't want to use – and this is really going to go against what some marketers are doing, but I really believe it – you don't want to use the kind of private messaging function of it. You don't on any social service. E-mail is the only exception. You don't want to use it to send messages to people about their stuff.

Like, if you make a blog post or, of course, the big no-no, if you're coming out with some product that you're trying to drive people to the site to launch something or whatever you don't want to mass send messages to all your Facebook friends even if you have a fan page thing set up, and we're going to go over that too. You really kind of don't want to just blast everybody with an e-mail telling them about it.

You can get away with it with some of the fan product-based stuff, kind of. I still don't recommend it, but I definitely don't recommend doing it to your friends. Like my friends on Facebook, people do it to me all the time, and they don't realize that they're very close to me, and I do it to some people, I end up blocking them and kicking them off my list, and I don't want to hear any more from them because it's like spamming.

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It's abusive. It takes our time to go into that private message box and look at them, and the last thing we want to see are ads. We don't want to see ads. It's just like in our email. Unless we've opted into a specific newsletter list, unless we're really wanting to hear from somebody, we don't want to see those messages.

So the other thing you're going to notice about this CD is that I don't talk at all about Myspace and Myspace marketing. Now, why is that? Well, it's because it doesn't work, that's why. Any of these things I'm telling you about are things that work, and that's why I'm having you do them. The other things that I'm not really encouraging you to do either don't work at all or don't work enough where I think it's worth your time or it's some other negative benefit which may hurt your business.

The thing about Myspace is this. It's huge. It's very popular. It arguably has a lot more Facebook, but it's a different type of site and service. Now, is it possible to generate traffic and sales and activity from Myspace? Yes, it is. Absolutely. There are many people that use Myspace to generate traffic to their websites. There are quite a few people that have made some good money marketing on Myspace. I'm not disputing that.

I'm not arguing with that.

Here's the problem. Myspace, in order to be effective for using as a traffic generation source or method, it can only work if it appeals to a certain market. The majority of Myspace is used by a lot of younger demographics, like kids or teenagers or some college students. And as people get older and older on the spectrum of age, the activity is lower and lower and lower.

Facebook is a little different. Facebook, although it started for college students, has really blossomed into kind of a social network for every one of all ages. And it's more professional, you'll notice. I mean, that's why it's booming in popularity and really making the run for Myspace as the top social network is because it's just better in so many ways. It doesn't look like Times Square blinking and clacking and stuff like Myspace pages do with the auto-play music and so many of those pages that just look so unprofessional. It looks like marketing in the mid '90s when people just had flashing stuff all over their pages, and they didn't know how to market.

Well, Myspace has just gotten polluted. There have been tools created to auto-add friends and to do all of these different things just to spam it and abuse it. And so it's almost worthless for marketing. If you're dealing with something in the entertainment industry, humor, kind of independent film stuff maybe or definitely music and those types of things, Myspace then can be effective for you.

But if you're in any other niche or any other industry I suggest don't even waste your time. Don't even mess with setting up a profile. If you already have one that's fine, but

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don't put much effort into really getting people to friend you on Myspace and all that because, in my own experience, it's worthless. It's just not worth the time.

Facebook, on the other hand, I find, at least right now, has some pretty good usage to it as far as marketing and response. It has some pretty good effectiveness. Will it last? It's only a matter of time. It may get abused to the point where it becomes rendered useless as well. We'll see.

So, of course, keep up with the resources section in the course, the community element of Traffic Secrets to communicate with other Traffic Secrets owners like you. And so you can keep up with what's going on with that and anything else of course.

But we'll see. But right now it's solid. I think you should definitely build a Facebook network and use it for marketing like we're going to talk about on this CD.

CD 7 - Lesson 2: Email Marketing Okay. So in the overview presentation you saw me talk about the importance and the power of response for e-mail and how e-mail trumps everything else. So in everything you do you need to find a way to incorporate the ability for people to opt-in and give you permission to e-mail them in the future. So to get them to opt-in to join an e-mail list.

Now, how do you do that? What's the most effective way to do that? Well, it's simple.

Give them what's called an ethical bribe. You offer them something of value. And this is a very important point I want to make. If you ever want to get someone to do anything you need to give them an incentive, and it will increase the rate of response.

Here's how else you can apply that same principle to social media and social networking.

Let's say you want to get more friends on Facebook. Well, one of the ways to do it would be to incentivize your prospects or your visitors or anyone that comes in contact with your marketing where you'll want to be telling them, "Hey, become my friend. Send me a request on Facebook." Add an incentive to it. Say add me on Facebook, and I'll send you my free fill in the blank. Free special report on X; free audio recording; free little mini video series. Whatever.

And then, of course, that piece of content that you create to give away as the incentive is some kind of great content related to your business. It can be kind of like the crashcourse element that we covered in Content Factory, that kind of information staple that's on your site. You can make it a continuation of the crash course, like it's a part two. And in order for people to get the second part they need to opt-in for it to get private access to it.

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So there's a number of different models that you can use there. And, of course, we'll put links in the resource section over time to different methods for doing this and for different resources to manage it, of course. You need, like, an auto-responder account or some kind of contact management/opt-in e-mail management service to be able to build subscriptions and then be able to send those people e-mails. Of course, we'll link to some recommended resources in the resources section for this CD on different services that you can use to actually handle the behind-the-scenes technical part of building and managing an e-mail list.

But for marketing purposes, how do you go about it? Well, this is a blog that belongs to a good friend of mine and a really good marketer, Alex Mandossian. And as you can see here with this kind of animated that's all blinking and going crazy, this is his little promo to try to get people to join an e-mail list. So he's really going all out here, and he's using some kind of animation that could really get attention. And he's got that little headline there, you know. "Claim your five secrets to making change now." And then it says, "Enter your e-mail below to claim your free audio e-book." And then so they just fill out that form, and then they get their free audio e-book.

And, of course, that's how he's putting people on an e-mail list. That's why it's up front and center. That's why it has so much focus on it on his blog because he's a smart marketer. And that's what he wants above all else is to get people on an e-mail list.

Now, you don't have to build an animated type of display. You don't have to even have a promo like this on your blog or on any of your pages that are this size. You can get away with it being a little bit smaller. But there needs to be a reason. Just saying, "Join the email list to keep up to date with my posts," that's not enough to get a high number of people to opt-in and to join.

So what you'll want to do is give away – and this is the easiest and cheapest way to do it.

Give away some kind of great content for free as the incentive to kind of bribe them to reward them for the action if they do what it is that you wanted to do, which would be opt-in here. And if you do that and you give away some kind of bonus or some kind of piece of information, it's great to have a little virtual cover like this made that kind of represents the thing, it gives it more perceived value.

So you'll certainly want to use some kind of benefit-driven headline that talks about why they should get that free content, what it's going to do for them, and of course, that would need to relate to your business because that's the target market that's going to be seeing it.

But if you put a little virtual image of what the little report is, you could just have one made, it kind of gives it a good feel that they're getting something. It's not just electrons they're downloading, even if it's just a digital download.

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So you can see Alex is using that here, and of course, this animation is getting all kinds of attention because he really wants people to see that. You don't have to use animation like this. You can try it. You'll want to test it. But that's just how you do it. You just put in a little opt-in form. You give someone incentive for joining the list, some kind of value, some kind of content, and then they have the form for them to join where they can get that content thing instantly, and that's it. That's all there is to it. That's as easy as it gets for building that opt-in list and getting people to opt-in.

You will probably also want to build a separate landing page on your site that just promotes your opt-in process, your form where it's basically kind of a full-page version of what this little box and offer would be where you could put more information about that thing that you're giving away. You could show testimonials from other people that joined and got the free thing and what they think of the free thing, and so on and so forth.

And just make that a natural landing page.

So anywhere else on your site you can link to, "Hey, get my free special audio report," or whatever else on such and such. And then they click that link, and then they go over to this full page that really kind of sells that opt-in, even though it's free, to get people to join the e-mail list. It's that easy. That's how you do it. And again, we'll link to some other resources, some other examples for you to look at. But that's what you want to do.

You want to focus on getting people to join an e-mail list because that's an incredibly valuable asset for you to be able to reach out and communicate with people.

And what's great is with e-mail marketing, when you build a relationship with people, and you give them good content, and you tell them about your blog post, you can actually get away with, and it's been done for years. It's almost expected to do advertising and promotions when you send out e-mails. You don't want to do it every time you send out an e-mail, but every four or five messages of sending good content.

Remember, what's in it for them? Why are they going to be staying on that e-mail list in the first place? It's to get good content and benefit from things related to your industry.

So it's not just about them signing up to have you blast the with advertising, but you can get away with doing advertising and just all the marketing that goes along with e-mail marketing when you build an e-mail list.

Because this is really Web 1.0 stuff, although it's still a part of the social media spectrum of being able to communicate with people through e-mail, it's kind of the exception of what I told you about. You don't want to sell and promote so much your products and services on the social media networks and bookmarking sites and all the other services.

But in e-mail it's actually okay, and you can get away with it because it's a different type of medium.

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But that's how you go about it. That's all you have to do is create something like that and get people to join an e-mail list, and then you'll have that ability to follow up with them.

CD 7 - Lesson 3: Blog Participation If you're going to generate a lot of traffic, and ultimately a lot of sales for your business, using social media, you have to get involved and participate in social media. And one of the easiest ways to participate in kind of social types of sites, services and processes would be to get involved with other blogs in your niche. We've already talked about this a little bit, and hopefully you know because of the research things that I already covered how you can go about finding the popular blogs in your niche.

But once you find them you want to get involved with them. You want to join the discussion. You want to participate with them, and it can help redirect some of that targeted blog traffic to your blog that's in the same market, which is a natural fit for anyone reading that blog.

So for example, here's a great blog, this is Mashable. This is a really good Web 2.0 social media type blog. That's what they cover is just all different kinds of social media services, so it's a great blog. I recommend you check it out.

But let's look at a recent post about the iPhone, a very popular post. And there's a lot of discussion down here where you can see the comments. So people are just commenting, making different comments about what they think. And when you comment you can make your name a link by putting a URL in the form when you create your comment, submit your comment. So as you can see here, this person, this is a link. So if you click their name it'll take you probably to their blog or to their website, in this case. But that's how it works.

Now, this link doesn't count on most blogs towards the SEO process because they're nofollow links, which we've talked about. But it's still a way to promote your site, your blog, so people can be one click away from coming over to your site, so it still has good value.

So if you put useful content in your comments, if you have something good to say in the discussion, don't just spam it, then people will say, "Oh, that's an interesting outlook," or, "That person seems to have some experience in this market. I wonder what their site is."

And they will click and go over on your site. It's a great way to get people to find you and your blog, and then they become regular readers of your blog. They'll join your email list. They'll subscribe to RSS feeds, so on and so forth.

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traffic. It's also a good way to just kind of network with that blog owner. So if you're regularly contributing to their blog, and you want to use your name and everything and not just some cryptic username so they'll recognize you.

And then, of course, what you naturally want to be doing when you make blog posts, which we've talked about a little bit, is link out to other posts because those other authors are going to see that incoming traffic and the incoming link when they look at their analytics, so they're going to be grateful for that and more likely to return the favor. So if you're linking to them, and you occasionally post comments on their blog, they're going to be a lot more likely to return the favor, and that's why you want to do it.

But something else that's very important here, and this text format is a little bit off just because of the narrow browser I have to use here just to do the capture for you. That's why you kind of see that stuff jumbled together, but just pay no attention to that. This section above comments that you'll typically see says trackbacks. Most blogs have this enabled.

A trackback is basically where you make a blog post on your blog almost in response to this blog post. And so the trackback kind of links back over here and connects the two.

And it's all done automatically through blog software like WordPress. And, of course, in our resources section you'll find links to all that good stuff about which services and software that you should use for your blog, and we've already talked about that a little bit such as using WordPress and so on.

But in the process of using that software there's a thing called trackbacks, and you can do these where it ends up in this area, and it's like a link that goes over to your blog post where it'll show this is the title of the blog post. So talk about targeting marketing, if anyone's reading this post, and they're interested in it, whatever it is, and they come down and look at the comments, and they pass by these trackbacks or these hopefully wellwritten titles are descriptive of continuing the conversation about this same subject, that is about as targeted as you get.

And that's why these links, these trackback links get quite a bit of click activity, and so that's one of the best ways to kind of divert and borrow, so to speak, traffic from other blogs is to do a trackback. And what you'll find is on many blogs on many different markets no one ever does any trackbacks. You'll only typically see trackbacks being done on geeky blogs or internet news and things. That's typically because most of the bloggers that even know what trackbacks are kind of more on the technical side.

So if you're in the gardening market or you're in the triathlon market or the cross-stitch quilting market, there's probably not a lot of trackbacks going on in your market on related blogs in that niche. And so if you do one it's really going to stand out because

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you'll probably be the only one a lot of different times. So that's why all the reason you want to do it.

If you visit the resource section we'll have some links there that go to tutorials on exactly how to walk through the step-by-step process of doing a trackback. It's not too complicated. Depending on which software you're using it'll be different. That's why it's not easy for me to create a one-size-fits-all tutorial here within the CD. But visit the resources section. We'll link to some other trackback resources to show you how to do this, but it's not hard. It's not hard at all. Most blogging software does it.

But that's what you get. It creates this link above the comments that contains the headline that you wrote in your response posted on your blog. So it could be very, very powerful for driving traffic. So you'll want to participate in blogs, which we've already talked about, and you'll want to get involved.

CD 7 - Lesson 4: Using Twitter Okay. So this is Twitter that you've heard me talk about before. And if you've never seen it, this is basically what it looks like. It looks a little complicated, but really it's not.

Once you get used to it it's simple.

Okay. What you're looking at is the view from my account when I'm logged in on the web, and yours will be different. Obviously you won't have an Income.com logo like this little color scheme like this. It's just how I have customized my own account to look this way, which is pretty cool. You can customize the look and feel of your account. And then when people actually view your profile to look at your information, they'll be exposed to the customization.

So anyone that comes to my profile on the Twitter system throughout their network, they see this view that you're seeing, at least the color scheme with the logo and everything.

Now, it's too bad I can't make this logo clickable. That'd be pretty cool. People could just click that and end up on the site. Or putting hotspots here for anything else I wanted to promote. Currently you can't do that, or at least I haven't figured out how to do it. I imagine maybe eventually there'll be a way to do that, but right now you can't.

But it's pretty cool at least just for branding to put maybe your company logo or your name or something if you're going to be using Twitter, which I highly, highly recommend that you get used to using Twitter on a regular basis.

Now, you can, of course, come in here on your own, and you should, and poke around and follow their help documents and kind of figure out all of the individual features. I'm not going to go into all of the individual features here. I'm just going to cover some core ones and help you how to use it for marketing.

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But if you come in here, basically this is kind of like my homepage, per se, for Twitter.

So what I'm seeing here in this view is like the timeline of the most recent Twitter posts from people that I follow. And the top one is the most recent one. And I imagine if I refresh here it's probably going to move down, and we'll see some new ones. Sure enough, the one that was just at the top is down here now.

So there's a lot of activity; a lot of people making posts all the time. Of course, you can come to the bottom of this and click older and find your way going back through some of the older ones and keep going and see kind of a history in case, obviously, you can't be monitoring this 24 hours a day.

But this is kind of my personal timeline for my account for the people I'm following. So is this the big foundation of Twitter. What you see on your account when you're logged in like this and you're just kind of looking and seeing the activity that's going on, the posts that you get that you'll see here, someone's picture and whatever they're saying, is based on who you're following. And you can follow anyone in the system. Once you look at someone's profile or you're exposed to something someone posted in the system you'll be able to follow them. I'm going to show you that in a minute.

Once you're following them you'll always see every post they make show up in your timeline. Of course, if you're not seeing it as soon as it's made you can go back in the history, and it'll be there in the order in which it was posted. But it'll start adding it to your account. So, like me, once you start following a lot of people, this currently shows my followers, 2,282, and then this shows the number that I'm following personally, which is what's showing up here. That's the difference. Sorry if I confused you.

So who you're following is what shows up here when they make little posts, so I'm currently following 2,200 people. And followers, this is how many people are following me. So when I make a little post, if I write in this little box up here, my entry like this will show up in their kind of little timeline here, just like theirs do on mine.

And of course you can send a direct message to someone. It's like a little mailbox. It's kind of a pain in the neck. I wouldn't recommend doing it much. Just e-mail someone if you have their e-mail address because it's kind of a pain to go in there and reply from there. If you can't say it publicly, and if it needs to be a private message, I don't suggest using the direct message functionality. Same thing with Facebook and these other sites.

It's usually better to use e-mail. Facebook might be a minor exception sometimes.

So as you can see I've got 176 private messages that people have sent me, and I get a lot of direct contact from people. It's almost impossible, in most cases, for me to reply to everyone just because in this case, in this system it's very, very hard to reply fast. So I don't recommend that you direct message people.

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Updates are my updates. I've made 408 little post entries in their system so far. And of course I can click this archive right here, and it's going to show me the kind of history of all the little posts that I've made. I notice the site's running kind of slow. It's trying to load right now. That's because Twitter's going through some growing pains, and they've had some downtime.

But this shows all the posts I've made, and the date it was made, the time it was made.

And so if someone's following me and they see one of these entries, someone could always, like, click my photo or my name, and then they come to my profile page showing my last post. Here's a post I made five hours ago because I got up early this morning to come in here and actually record what you're listening to and watching right now.

So it can show me information about the person, so this is your profile. You can set this information. So here I've got a link that jumps right over to Income.com, so that could help me drive traffic from Twitter. You'll want to do that. You can put other links in here to your other sites. Don't go crazy and spam a ton of URLs in here, but you can put more than one.

So any time someone is checking out your profile, which happens a lot, Twitter is very viral. Because as people follow you, and people make comments about you, which I'll show you in a moment, other people will get exposed to you that aren't following you, and then they may be curious and they click your name. And if they like what you have to say then they'll start following you.

Remember I talked about you have to constantly think about what's in it for them. Yes. People are following you on Twitter and interested in your Twitter post just for the sake of being a fly on the wall, what's going on in your life. But for business ultimately and for good marketing they're there for value because hopefully you'll be posting links to other stories you found on the web to deal with your market or that you've just made a blog post or something that may be of interest to them.

So keep that in mind. You've got to balance that out of posting good value and then just posting the personal stuff. So I mean a lot of people are just using this for personal reasons to keep in touch with their friends. That's what most people are doing on Twitter.

But the people using it for marketing where they're really communicating with customers and prospects of their business, you don't want to post as much personal stuff as you do to links to good resources and stuff related to your market. You just have to balance it, a little bit of both.

But that's all this is. And so if we go back, which I'm back to kind of my main view where you saw those tabs where my main timeline is, and then it says archive I just

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clicked on. If you click everyone it's going to show you a timeline like this for everyone on Twitter, the millions of people and what the most recent posts are.

And so, as you can imagine, you refresh and anyone you've seen is scrolled way off the page because thousands of them are happening all the time. Not really a big reason to ever monitor it that much. Obviously every time you post yours will show up there if anyone's ever looking at that right after you posted, but it's just something you really don't need to worry about. So that's archives.

So now the other cool thing is this replies tab. So when you click that, and it'll load in just a second here, it's going to show all the people that made a Twitter post that was kind of addressed to your attention. It's public though, so it's not a private message, so all these entries here are people kind of talking to me or about me to get my attention. So these are considered replies because they put the at symbol in it.

So here's how Twitter works. When you make a post, like here it is, "What are you doing?" So you could type something in here about I'm currently whatever, and then you update. And then your little entry will get paid on all the people's little homepages like this that are following you, and it'll go in your archive as well so people can always see it at any time.

Well, part of the format of Twitter is if you ever want to get someone's attention or you're ever referring to someone, like, if you're saying, "I'm currently on such and such's blog.

This is a great post," the etiquette is any time you kind of reference another Twitter user you want to mention them in your Twitter post, and the way you do it is with the at symbol.

So, for example, if I knew someone or was doing something related to somebody, let's say, and their name was Bob Jones, and that was actually their Twitter username, I'd say, like, "Hey, I'm currently checking out the latest blog post by" – and then I'd go @Bob Jones. And so when I post that, everyone that's following me will see that I said that, and the @Bob Jones turns into a link just like this John Reese link is. So anyone could click that and go check out Bob Jones' profile and see what they're posting and try to follow them if they would like to follow them.

So that's what the etiquette is. That's why you see the username of the person. This is, of course, the photo that goes with it, and you click that, either one, and go to their profile and see their latest Twitter posts or any of these at names in the post themselves go to that person. So that's kind of the etiquette. You always want to mention someone you're talking about.

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name in some way, either someone's trying to get their attention, like, these people are all asking me a question. They saw that I posted, "I'm up early to prepare for a long day in the recording studio," and so several people are asking me the question, "What are you recording? Do you have a recording studio at home, or do you go somewhere to record?"

It looks like he's trying to John. He had a misspelling here.

So you can see that these are all in the last whatever. This is the history of it, and I can flip through here, and of course, only I can see this. But these are people that are making entries and trying to get my attention. And sometimes it's not necessarily to my attention; it's referencing someone. You can see here, this is Brian Clark, a very popular blogger. I made a comment to him where I said, "Hey, such and such post that you made is bouncing between No. 1 and 2 on our Traffic Jam site," and I was just letting him know that.

And I just totally goofed up and realized it wasn't for him. I meant to say it and send it to this other guy, Darren, and that's his username. So he corrected me. He was, like, "Uh, that's Darren," and then put in his Twitter name and said, "Not me," and put a smiley face."

So what's cool is he made this comment, and a lot of times you'll see this line, "In reply to." So when people are making entries you'll see, like, "In reply to," sometimes. And if you click that it will show you the original Twitter post that someone is then making a reply to. So you can kind of follow the conversation so you're not just totally lost.

And so I had made this post, and I had directed it to that guy's attention. I said, "Hey, your 'How to be an interesting blogger post has been bouncing between No. 1 and No. 2 most the day on Traffic Jam," which is one of our sites. And then he replied and said, "Oh, that's not my post. That's this other guy." And, of course, I then wrote back and said, "I'm an idiot. Sorry about that."

So you use the at thing anyway to get people's attention or to make reference to someone.

Like he was talking about this guy Darren, and that's Darren's username. And so it's just etiquette that he just put it in there. And Darren would actually see this entry as well under his replies. It doesn't necessarily have to be the first person. Anyone that has their name in here will see it under their replies tab up here.

So if someone writes something that you want to reply to you can click this little curved arrow here to reply to that person. And again, this is all public so everyone can see this.

Or you can click the star if you want to favorite a certain entry, and then it'll be listed under your favorites, so later you can come and see all the ones that you favorited, all the individual entries. So if somebody makes a good entry where they're linking to some kind of really good resource you may want to favorite it, and it's like bookmarking it, and you come back and see it later. And other people can see your favorites too.

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So if I want to reply to this person who says, "Hey, what are you recording today?" because they saw my little update there, I'd click this and immediately it puts in at and their username for me. So then I just type my message, and I'll update it. Everyone will see this message because it's in the public timeline, but this person will actually see it also not only in the public timeline if they happen to be loading it while mine is still in the screen, but also it'll show up under their replies. And that's why it's kind of separate, which is good so you can always see who is trying to get your attention.

So I click reply, and then I can make an entry. And then if anyone actually sees that entry it'll say in reply to, and it'll say their name, and they can click it. And they could see that this was the original question that someone asked me, so they can kind of follow the conversation.

But the other etiquette is when you kind of talk to other people publicly about things, you kind of want to make it descriptive about what the original question was so it's not just vague answers, so people are just, like, "What are they talking about?" Since it's public, the etiquette is kind of try and include as much as you can about the original question, for example, if someone asks you a question.

So, like, I'm reply to this person, and they said, "What are you recording?" I could say, "I am currently recording some footage for Traffic Secrets 2.0, and this is being posted live, so now you're famous." So I'll post that, and then they'll actually get that message.

But if I jump back to recent, which is my main timeline of all my followers, my posts show up as well, so there's what I just posted. And all the people that are following me, all these 2,200 people, they're all going to see this if they load their timeline any time soon or if they're online right now. So they see that I responded to that person, and then they can click this and see what the original message was to me and kind of follow the conversation that way too.

So I mean that's pretty much it. So what are you doing? You could make a little entry.

You could say, "Hey, I'm currently looking at this." Now, the system was really kind of originally designed for mobile phones, so you can Twitter and send an SMS message from your mobile phone to a certain number; I think it's like a five or six-code ID that's in the SMS system for it relates to Twitter. And so if you make that post from your phone it'll automatically add an entry like this to the entire system, just as I used this form here to make the post and said this, I could have done that from my phone.

That's how powerful Twitter is. You can be anywhere, and you can say, "Hey, I'm currently stuck at the airport," and everyone will see it just like they see this message. So it's very, very powerful. And, of course, you can get updates on your phone. When anyone that you're following posts a message it can show up on your phone. I've disabled Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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it though. That's why I have web-only on the device updates, and you can go in the settings and set some more detailed settings because otherwise my phone would be going crazy with text messages all the time with all the activity I have.

One thing I didn't show you here is if I click on that person's name, the woman that asked me that original question, she's obviously following me now. And we'll see here in just a second. Again, Twitter is going through some growing pains, so it's kind of slow to load.

So this is the person, this is their profile. Here's a link to their website, some information about them. It says who they're following and their followers, and so you can click and see who other people are following, which is pretty neat.

And this is the timeline; the order with top is the latest of this person's Twitter posts. So you can see people are mentioning blog posts and blog URLs. But notice this; it says follow under the name. I'm currently not following this person. They found me somehow and are following me. So I'd like to follow them back, so I click the follow button there. And in just a moment, it should happen in a second, but Twitter is very, very slow. Unfortunately they've had a lot of downtime recently where they go down and they come back up.

So now it updated. It says, "You're now following Cocoa Craft." So now anytime she makes a post at all it'll show in my main timeline area. And this, of course, if I ever visit someone I am following then this lets me know, "Hey, you're following them." And you can go into your followers' list and stop following people or even block people if you want. So, again, you can come in here and find out your own settings.

But look, this is her kind of homepage and her layout that she made. She's made it blue.

So you can make it whatever you want, and you can kind of brand yourself. But that's the gist of it. It's not that complicated. And how you want to use it for your marketing is post URLs to interesting things you're finding on the net related to your market. If you make a blog post or add some good content post the URL to it. That's great. People like to keep up with your blog posts.

Some of the biggest bloggers in their world don't post a lot of personal stuff at all. And it's fine; people don't care. All they're using this for is every time they make a blog post they just post a Twitter entry. It just says "new blog post," and then they just put the URL. So I'm following several different blogs that way just to keep up with it. As soon as they post I like to go over and read it, so that's another way that Twitter's important.

So there are going to be a lot of strategies for Twitter. Keep up with the resources section for this CD in particular, and we'll keep that up to date. I'm sure in our community a lot of people will be talking about things they've tried and things that are working.

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One more comment to mention. When you post from a phone, when you post a URL of some sort, they use this Tiny URL dot com system. You can actually see one of the URLs here. And it will auto convert a long URL into a shorter one. That's because you're limited by 140 characters for each post, so it automatically does that.

Now, if you're going to be posting from the web like this – and by the way, there are multiple Twitter clients and other services that use this API that Twitter has that's basically kind of like a gateway to their programming where you can create your own applications and pull Twitter data and allow people to post to Twitter from, like, other sites and services and other software.

So there are other clients out there, and a lot of times you'll see them. Like it says TwitBin here. A lot of people use Twirl. Right here, "Posted from Twurl." So this person didn't post this with their phone. They didn't post this with this web-based site logged in on Twitter itself. They're using some other software that they have on their computer called Twurl that's very popular.

So people are kind of advancing what Twitter has done and making their own ways to communicate with Twitter, and we'll link to some of those in the resources section for you to check them out. And some of them have some advantages that you may be able to look into.

But if you go to post a long URL in here, like this woman's blog post, you're going to have to shorten it up to get it to work with Twitter. One of the things I like to use is a resource called SnipURL.com. You can create a free account, and then you can copy and paste a long URL, and then it'll give you a shorter version. Then you copy and paste that into Twitter.

And the cool thing about that service is it will track the number of clicks on that URL, so you can log in to your account and actually get a good feel for how many clicks came from you posting that. And, of course, you can keep tabs on the activity that you're getting when you post certain things. And use that information to help mold your strategy to get even more people to your blogs, your blog posts, anything else you share with Twitter.

So that's just an overview of Twitter. You should set up an account. Start using it. Start following people and get involved with it. And over time, as you see my account, you'll notice my follower's number will really start to grow. I've actually never really actively marketed my account much. I mentioned it once before to my list and that's it, and I could do some kind of marketing campaign where I offered to give someone some sort of incentive, like a special video series or report or something if they added me on Twitter.

Like I already mentioned if you want to get people to do things for you, if you incentivize them they're more likely to do it. So I'll probably be doing that in the future.

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I've kind of been holding off waiting for Twitter to kind of become more stable and get their technical problems ironed out. But once they do I'm really going to go crazy and push this hard because I believe that Twitter is going to be a very, very valuable way to drive traffic to your sorts and to announce that you've put up new content and all those other things I've already talked about.

So I think that it's going to hold its position in that response hierarchy that I showed you, where it's only going to be under e-mail, where aside from e-mail marketing Twitter is going to trump everything else as far as keeping in touch with people, announcing things.

And when I show you Facebook in our next lesson, you'll see how my Twitter post and activity automatically gets syndicated to Facebook. So any time I make one of these entries, any one that happens to be checking out my account, my profile pages on Facebook, will also see my latest post.

So keep in mind that I just posted this where I answered her, and I told her that I'm currently recording some footage. And I'm going to show you that in the next lesson how we're going to see that right on Facebook. So this is Twitter.

CD 7 - Lesson 5: Facebook Strategies It's time to talk about Facebook, which is pretty much the granddaddy of them all when it comes to the social media, social networking sites. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the one that brings you the most traffic. It depends on your industry, depends on your business, depends how you use it. But bottom line, you need a Facebook account.

You need to be using it because it works.

When I evaluate marketing strategies and techniques, I just look at the data. I look at the results. Is it bringing traffic, and is the traffic converting and making money, and does it overshadow or outweigh the time it would take to, actually, make use of it. And in my scientific evidence and experience and evaluation, the answer is yes, by far. And I've also gotten the same thing from other people that are using it as well.

Now, it could change over time, and it may get to kind of spammy, and bloated, and some other things, and it may stop working as well. I doubt it. I think they're going to you know, keep a pretty good handle on the importance of the site and how it works, and keep a lot of things intact, which make it a really good site. Of course, it gives it those advantages over MySpace, and why it's exploded and gotten so popular.

Facebook itself has hundreds of features and settings, and there's all kinds of stuff to Facebook itself. A tutorial on how to use Facebook would take hours upon hours upon hours. And so that's going to go beyond the scope of this course, and I'm not going to show you every little bell and whistle of what Facebook does. You can come to 204

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Facebook yourself. They have some tutorial information. There's some good help information. You can use that to learn how to use Facebook itself and all the different features and functionality.

But I'm going to focus on – and you need to do that anyways to familiarize yourself with it, if you're not already. But I'm going to focus on the marketing tactics and unique strategies that you could use right now, today, with Facebook to help generate traffic to your sites or your blog or to your content. That's really going to be our main focus, to build relationships with people, find JV partners or to find affiliates for your affiliate program or new programs that you could become an affiliate of, other bloggers to share content with, share links with, to build your brand. I mean that's important.

A lot of people like to ignore branding when it comes to Internet marketing because it's primarily a direct marketing medium where it's all about just, like, placing an ad, or doing something to promote something, and then tracking what the results were, and then how much money that created, which is essentially the nature of direct marketing. And because the Internet is so designed and formulated to just be so great for direct marketing, so many people miss some other elements of just traditional business and marketing.

And branding's very, very important.

I used to not believe this until I actually saw it working and saw it for myself how valuable it was, and then I really got it. And so by networking on sites like Facebook and getting your name out there and really branding yourself as an expert as well as your company, your company name, you just build equity in it, and it can really make it just so much easier for you to sell to people even if someone has never done business with you or even visited your site.

If they see you and others have ever mentioned you or talked about you, or they saw you talked about on another site or another blog post or what have you, or on Twitter or anywhere, people are going to be almost precondition to put more value in you or whatever it is you have to say, and then, ultimately, whatever it is that you have to sell.

So branding's very powerful. Facebook does a great job of that.

Again, I talked about the importance, the absolute importance of not pitching and advertising, and just directly just trying to sell stuff through Facebook and these other sites, but it's particularly important and accurate about Facebook because it's not a medium is kind of set up well for advertising. And if you do that, well 1), if you take activities like posting ads and links in different places of Facebook, and just trying to ask anybody and everybody to be your friend, and doing some kind of aggressive marketing types of things, Facebook will ban you.

So you gotta tread carefully but there are a lot of ways I'm going to teach you that you can use it to generate traffic and, ultimately, to get money from using Facebook. So what Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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you're looking at here, this view, is what's called the profile view. There's two main views that you're going to be concerned with and I'm going to explain those to you. This is the profile view. If anyone wants to come and check out John Reese's profile on Facebook at any time, this is the view they see. This is my profile.

So you can see, it has a picture of myself, and when I'm posting on other sites, or other profiles as you say, within Facebook, or doing little things where it shows anything to do with me, that's when it could show my photo, like as someone's friend like you're seeing these people. You know some people with the question marks haven’t uploaded photos yet. But these people, obviously, that's their little avatar that represents them.

And so mine is this, but it would be smaller, obviously, when someone sees it like in that friend view. So at the top, you can see my name and it has a status of what I'm currently up to or the last time I updated my status. And then it says, of course, some information about me, where I'm located, my gender, relationship status, what I'm looking for with the site. And there's more things you can list here or you can do less. You can list none of this if you want. It's up to you.

A lot of options and a lot of flexibility on Facebook for the amount of information you share, as well as what you don’t want to share, how you want to control your friends, how you want to group them for security. Lots at Facebook, so you'll need to kind of familiarize yourself with it. But then, this is called a mini-feed here. This kind of keeps up with any actions that I take in the Facebook world, so if I update my blog and pull in a blog post, it's going to show here, like right here. John recently updated his blog.

If I ad someone who's a new friend, John and Kim Castle are now friends like it shows it.

Shows all my activity and what I'm up to. I wrote a new note. It shows it, links to it and talks about it. So this little min-feed just kind of shows what I've been up to with my account. So if you go to anyone's profile, you see kind of this letter stream of what they’ve been up to. You can click to see all, and you can see even more farther back than what this currently shows, so that's what you see there.

Over here's links to photos of me. It's either photos I've uploaded or photos that other people have uploaded and tagged with my name. That's very important, tagging things on Facebook with other users' names, and we'll get back to that. This says view my friends. This shows the number of friends that I have. Others can look at my whole friends list. You'll notice it says 5,000 too big, but nice even number.

The reason why that is, is Facebook currently, at the time of this recording, has a limit of 5,000 friends. You can't have more than 5,000 friends on your account, unfortunately.

I'm waiting for them to up the limit so I can, of course, add more of my customers. I imagine I could get that up to probably 100,000 friends over time. But I can't, so I'm stuck on 5,000 and so I just have to deal with it.

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Every now and then, somebody may kill their Facebook account or unattach themselves to me. And so it frees up a spot. And then I can go in, and I'll show you in a minute how I have a queue of people waiting for me to add then, and then I can add them as friends.

But for now, they just have to wait. And unfortunately, it's the way it's set up. It's kind of rude, like, 'cause I can't easily communicate with all those people that are waiting without sending individual messages, one at a time and it's kind of a pain in the neck, so I don't do it.

So for all they know I don’t like them and I'm not accepting their request to be my friend, which, again, kind of stinks. But I some of them realize that I've hit that limit 'cause I've announced it to my list and they know. Here's my friends area. Again, it'll show some photos randomly of different friends and then you can click to see it all.

Here's Twitter. Now, I lied to you just a second ago when I made that post replying to that lady when I said hey, I'm currently recording traffic secrets footage. It's live, now you're famous. Remember I said that's going to show in Facebook. Unfortunately, right now Twitter's having a few issues and the little plug-in application here for Twitter, it's not updating right now. There's some kind of problem going on with it connecting to the servers.

I imagine later on today or tomorrow it'll start updating again, but, typically, it updates relatively quickly from the time you post at Twitter to the time it'll show here. So if anyone comes to this profile, they can see my latest Twitter post. And this is the one I made right before I replied to that lady. So it says up early to prepare for a long day in the studio and shows the time and the date that I posted it, which was earlier today. And so, you can see it syndicates my Twitter activity also here on Facebook.

And there are scripts and things out there, and we'll link to them in the resources section where you can actually add this Twitter box to any web page you have in the world that you control. So anytime you post at Twitter, it shows up in a box right there on that page.

A lot of people put it on their blog. A lot of people put it on their other sites. So how awesome is that? You post anything to Twitter about what you're doing, or a link or anything else, what you're reading. And that gets updated on many different points, however many you set up all over the Internet.

So that's pretty awesome just to have that syndication power like I've been talking about, which, of course, you can do the same for your blog. So you can have your blog post syndicated in many, many different places. So it's just the more you get your stuff out there, the more people can stumble upon it, find it, like it, and then hopefully share it with others, link to it, submit it to different sites. It just grows like a snowball.

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When you put out a lot of good content, man, it just goes everywhere on the Internet.

And that's what I'm trying to get you to do. That's what the methodology behind this course is all about, to get you doing that. Become that content factory and be pumping out great stuff and you're just going to dominate your niche online. You can't help but do that because that's what's going to drive the traffic is content, regardless of what you sell.

So it's cool.

You can add this Twitter plug-in; it can automatically show whenever you make a Twitter post. There is a sitting in the notes function of Facebook. You can make a note about anything and your profile will update with it that you’ve made this note about anything you want to talk about, ever. And then other people that are your friends and are connected to you can comment on it, and other people can see their comments and stuff.

And we'll get back to that in a minute.

But there's a way you can set up in your notes that you can pull automatically from your RSS feed, which all the blog software platforms automatically have. RSS feed is built into them, so you just go there and you take your RSS address – and by the way, I recommend using FeedBurner.com to manage your RSS feed for your blog or for anything else. So if you go to FeedBurner.com, it makes it a lot easier to – and you can track stats or how many subscribers, all kinds of good stuff.

But once you do that, you take your RSS address; you add it into the notes section to add your blog and then every time you make a blog post, wham, automatically added into your notes. So if we jump in here real fast, we can see that these are the latest blog posts that I've made. And it's real cool because the really neat thing about it is it keeps all links intact. So when I'm mentioning things, my other sites, my other products for sale, you are getting advertising to the things that you sell when you use Facebook and these other social media sites.

I didn't want to imply that you're never going to be advertising your things for sale. You are, you're going to be getting links and promotion all over. It's just done through the veil of content because that's really what people want more than just you pitching you stuff for sale. So clearly, TrafficJam.com is a site my company owns. This is an ad for it. I'm talking about it. It essentially becomes an ad or promo for it 'cause people can click right here and go to it.

And so you can see, these are some of my blog posts, the last few that I've posted. And it's just putting it right here into FaceBook, which is great. And what's really neat is if you use photos or images in your blog post like I use this one in a blog post, it pulls it right into FaceBook. So if you start using a lot of photos and images like we talked about to create great content, you should almost always try to put some kind of images 'cause it's more compelling.

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This is another reason to use images in your blog post because they can be shown across FaceBook. And as you'll see, images, and photos and everything else get the most attention and will get you the most activity and, ultimately, the most traffic. So you'll want to use – that's another reason to use images and photos. When I say images, whether it's clipart or something, an illustration or just a photograph of something in your blog post.

But that's how it works with the notes so you'll want to do that. You just go into notes over here where you're managing all the different components of your profile. So you can move things around. You can take things off. You can move them around in order.

So I could say I want my Twitter updates to show down here and I want the notes to show above it. Now, everyone that loads this page, that's the order they see it.

I put Twitter higher up because that's more important to me and I want people to see it there. You can't move friends. It's stable. You can't move the mini-feed. But everything below here you can move around and add different things. Some people you'll see their profile's kind of junky. There are all kinds of blinking stuff and funny little games and things, but to each their own, whatever they want to do. So this is just general information, great place to advertise your website.

Again, you can put as little or as much information as you want. You know this is kind of the final wall thing and it's a relationship building. People want to know about me. So you know there's a place when you setup your FaceBook account, you can put some of your favorite movies and it automatically links to some of them and more information about them. It works like tags. Favorite TV shows, what you like to do. And it just says about me and you can put whatever you want. So I put a lengthy bio about myself, just in case anyone finds me on here through one of their friends that doesn't really know much about me, and then I connect with them and they're able to read this.

They can get to know me better. A lot of people go wow; you know I didn't know that about you. And some of this stuff I'd actually never gone into detail before so even just my regular customers didn't know this. So it's just yet another way to build a bond and strengthen a relationship with people. And so, of course, look; link to my main website here. Link it to the blog here. You could put lots of links in here and promote your other sites. Just don't overdo it and make it look kind of crappy and spammy. It's all about balance. So that's a profile.

Under here, I actually have another blog. I'm kind of double dipping here a little bit. I'm actually testing something right now. But I'm using another application that will pull my blog post automatically into this page. And I like this one a little better because, unlike the notes, it shows more of the blog post than just the first one and the first few lines and then only the titles of the others, like you see. It only shows three items. Actually I

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forgot. It's not really showing much of a description at all. It just shows the headline links.

So this is pulling in the actual part of the story. Actually let me check something real quick if I make it in the wider area. It's pretty cool how you can just drag and drop things. Let's see if it adjusts the format here. Okay, so I was wrong. It's because of which column you put it in. If you put it in your smaller column, it will only show the titles. If you put it in the larger column, it'll at least give you a paragraph description of the first one.

But that's not as good as this blog. Whoops, I want it below Twitter. It's not as good as this blog app that I have installed 'cause this shows that for a bunch of recent posts. It lets me set how many I want to show and I currently have it set on five. And it pulls in images from the post. Look how great that is, how much attention that gets. People are like, oh, what's that, and they’ll click here and go read the blog post. So pros and cons to both doing it the notes way – I'll explain all that in a minute how it can be used as a strategy 'cause that's very important.

So down here I have a Flickr plug-in. Anytime I add photos to Flickr, they can be automatically added to here. It's just like Twitter. It syndicates the photos. These are some photos of my home that I recently shared that people got a lot out of. You know transparency's a big thing. It's becoming more and more important, and it's great for branding and for marketing and for getting to know people. It's no longer as effective to be anonymous, to just be hiding behind a company name and logo, and expecting people to give you their money and do business with you.

The social web and everything that's happening with our culture and with the Internet and where all this is going is making people more accessible. And people are expected to be more accessible. That's why you need to be using FaceBook. Many of your customers are going to come to expect to be able to communicate and socialize with you, and get to know more about you as an individual as well as more about your company. And so the more of this that you can do, share photos, talk about your pets, whatever. People like that, like, they like to get to know the person behind the brands. Not just about here's what my company can do for you and these are greater products. It's more about real people. So that's a Flickr plug-in you can add and so it will add photos.

But I'm going to show you and explain to you why you also want to be uploading photos directly to your FaceBook account. And like I mentioned a minute ago, photos get the most attention. As you can see here, that's really attention getting. And for marketing it's really so, and I'm going to explain that in just a moment. So below here is what's called your wall. People can make posts to it and you can reply and post on their wall. But everyone that visits the profile sees this. And so it's just a way for people to find out

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about you, participating in other people's walls. And somebody can click on that name and go over to their profile. So that's the profile page.

Somebody views the John Reese profile here on Facebook and this is what they see.

Links to see what kind of friends I have. See, it's reloaded now. It's showing different friends, and that kind of just keeps happening at random. And there's some plug-ins.

There's like a top-friends thing where you can show your most popular friends or who you're calling your favorites and other things. But there's all kinds of Facebook applications that can add functionality to FaceBook itself.

And in the Widgets and Software CD towards the end of this course, I actually talk about how you could look into actually creating a FaceBook application for your business if it makes sense, to generate traffic 'cause some of those things can become very viral with a lot of people using your application. Like this Twitter thing here, this is an application that was installed to add more functionality to my profile page and there are other ones as well. So people can give you little gifts and things, which is kind of fun.

And there's all kinds of stuff that goes on FaceBook. Some of it's kind of junky that I don’t like with a lot of the different applications that have been made for Facebook.

Little games you can buy your friends, and you can say how hot you think somebody is.

A lot of it's just kind of noise and it's not good for business and it's just kind of a distraction more than anything. It's not that it's like this bad thing that could take away from business, but it's just a distraction. And you'll notice some people's profile pages are just like Times Square with blinking, all kinds of stuff.

And to me it's too much like what killed Facebook for what I think – for using it for business. It just looks unprofessional. So you gotta be careful about that. But this is a profile page. Everyone has one. And you come in here and you can see all these things about someone, what they’ve been up to, who they're connected with, if they’ve posted to their blog or anything like that if they have it set up. And you do want to do that. You want to set up your blog to pull in blog posts into your notes section. You want to consider – and I'll to try to link to some and suggest some.

I'm using this one called Flog Blog. Who knows, you know by the time maybe you're watching this I maybe have dumped it and I'm using something else 'cause I do a lot of testing. But this one is better for pulling in blog posts and showing them off, I find, than the notes one. So I'm going to keep it for now and just kind of, not cheat, but kind of double publish the same information here. So this is one part of two main parts of the Facebook. This is the profile, shows everything about an individual person.

Now this that I'm going to show you next, is the other part of Facebook. This is your homepage. So when you log into Facebook, this is typically where it takes you. And this tells you and updates you with the activity of your network, of the people you're Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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connected with as well as things tied to your account. On the right-hand side here, you see request activity for your account. You can see I have 479 people that have requested me to add them as my friend. And, of course, I can't yet because I hit that 5,000 limit.

But that's what that's for. If I click this it'll go and show me all those friends. All these other requests are these little applications that different people are asking you installing things and a lot of it you just have to ignore it. But that's kind of a status activity area here of what's been going on with your account. Invitations, these are people inviting me to joint different events that they're coordinating online for meetings and things like that and that's what you see there.

These pokes, this is kind of weird. This is part of FaceBook culture. You can poke someone and it'll show up and say somebody poked you. It's just kind of a fun way just to say hey, nudge, nudge, you know I was thinking of you and just pokes you. It's kind of a weird thing that doesn’t really do anything so I don’t recommend you paying attention to it. Or at least I don’t. A status update, you can update, of course, your status like I already showed you on the profile page. And when other people view this page to show the activity of what's – the profile is what's going on with you.

The homepage is what's going on with everyone you're connected to in your network. So my stuff is showing in this area as well because this is for my whole network. So you see my status stuff here. But it's also showing the status of other people that are in my network. So if I click this see all, I can see all the latest status changes. It's in the order of what was changed most recently. So it shows – and, of course, everything is one click away from going to that person's profile and seeing their profile page.

So this just shows all these people who updated their status and what they're up to. And you can put URLs in your status. That's a good marketing strategy. When you say, hey, I just posted a blog post, you can link to it. And people see it if they look at their page and look in the status area. Or if they're looking on your profile and they see in the mini-feed it's one of the entries. Hey, you changed your status to this or that person added this. So editing your status is a great way to put in links to things you're reading, to your own content pages you just put on line.

And people will find it and then can end up going there. So and, of course, you know good etiquette is you want to link to other people's content as well and mention those in your URL. Like this person, great example. Currently browsing and he puts a mass control URL from one of my closest friends, Frank Kern, who you may know of, a good marketer. So he says I'm currently browsing this page and I'm listening to Frank Kern and Filsaime is Mike Filsaime, another good marketer, another good friend of mine. So that's a great example of using social media well.

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It's not just about promoting your own stuff. This person's just telling the rest of their connections and anyone that comes into contact with him. Hey, here's what I'm up to.

I'm checking out this site. It's great. You should check it out too. Not affiliate link, that's just one of the pages. It has an I.D. on the end, but just 'cause it's like Entry 35. So it's just freely sharing some good stuff, which is the nature of social networking. So someone's promoting a FaceBook group they just created. A lot of different ways that you can use that status and it ends up showing up in that status area of the home area for each person's account.

So it's events. This would show any of the events that people in my network are setting up. And by date tons of – you know these are the people that set them up. This is whatever the event is. You know online meetings and teleseminars and even real world workshops, people make notes in events for. It's just like calendaring kind of so this is keeping up with what people's activities are. Some of it's online, some of it's offline.

FaceBook's really powerful, a lot of neat things you can do with it. So you can get involved with events and do things.

And as you interact with events and sign up for events and do different things, that will show up on other people's homepages. And I'm going to get to all that in just a moment so I don't want to jump too far ahead. So this just shows all kinds of information about my connections, the friends that I'm connected to. So as you can see photos really stand out. Anytime someone adds photos to their album it shows up here and I see that person's name. And it gives me an opportunity to be one click away from going to their profile or from clicking to check out these photos.

This is the event that was set up. So you can create an event name and you can tag your photos and all that kind of stuff. And it's all connected here in FaceBook and it all serves a purpose. So it'll tell you who's joined what group, who's changed their status. This person just entered that they’ve entered into a relationship. So just this kind of the pulse of what's going on with your group, and you can adjust the preferences to show you more or less of certain types of things. Like say, show me more updates of photos or show me less, so on and so forth.

But here's the power of FaceBook. It's very, very viral. As you can imagine, there are some interactions that happen between users that expose them to other users outside of just the two users that are connected. So this homepage here, as they call it, that is my news feed of my 5,000 friends and whatever they're doing. That's what shows up on this page. Anytime they do major moves, it's showing up here. So when you're doing things with your FaceBook account, other people are going to be notified. Every time you upload a photo, all of your friends are going to see a mini shot of that photo and see links to go check out that photo or that new album.

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That's very powerful just to – you know 'cause every time somebody logs into Facebook this is the page they're exposed to. So if you add photos and you're constantly adding photos to your Facebook album, not just to Flickr, but to your Facebook album, you're constantly going to be in the eye of or exposed to all your normal friends that you're connected to. Now, don't overdo it. I see some people here that clearly know of that technique and are abusing it.

I'm not going to name names, but there's a woman in particular that I'm connected to right now with my 5,000 friends. I'm actually debating whether or not to remove her because it gets annoying. And it's like she posts a new photo of herself – or if you join a group and post photos to a group, that will also show the photo in this news feed on all your friends' accounts. And so it was literally every single day I was logging in, there are her photos again that she added to some other group. And she joined, like, hundreds of groups. It just becomes spammy.

Like after a while you're just like, okay, you're getting some good exposure, but enough is enough. You're going overboard with this. So be careful about using some of these techniques or you can abuse it and upset people and, again, hurt your reputation. It won't be effective, especially if people block you, then it has no effect. So when you do things within Facebook it gets updated on other people's news feeds.

So upload a photo, it'll show it. Upload a video, it'll show the thumbnail and let people click to watch a video. Adding videos is a great way to reach a lot of people. I haven’t started doing it too much yet because I've only really started using FaceBook heavily in the last few months. I actually had consulted with someone else that was using it for the real estate market and I never really used it for myself. So I didn’t get too involved in it.

And we had a different strategy and were using kind of some different techniques at the time anyways.

But now that I've been using it a lot lately, I see all the things. And as it evolves – you'll want to check the resources section and keep up with that as we learn new techniques 'cause this stuff is going to evolve on a weekly basis. There'll be new techniques all the time for generating traffic and for marketing purposes on sites like this. So things change all the time. But I notice if you add a photo, it gets a lot of traction 'cause it shows on this page for all your friends. If you add a video, same thing.

And so it's the same thing when you join groups, which I'll show you in a minute, which are kind of sub-social networks. And you participate in those and enter into discussions.

So like anytime you make a comment or you're posting on someone's wall or you're doing all these different things, all that gets updated in different places. And a lot of that happens on these news feeds so it shows on the home page of all your friends. So adding media, photos and videos ends up getting thumbnails on here and getting a lot of attention

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to drive people back to your profile and, of course, exposing yet again to anything that you're up to.

But the other thing that's really powerful about this is when you comment on things. If someone comments on one of your photos or someone comments on one of your notes, here's the powerful thing about that. In most cases, it's different for some of the uses of it. But for most cases of the commenting, not only does it show up on, like, your feed of activity of showing what's going on, just the general activity that's in your little network and, also, showing what you're doing, but it'll expose the fact that someone commented on something of yours to their entire network because they’ll see it in that, like, feed area of the profile.

And so if you have someone that has 500 or 1,000 or even 5,000 friends as well that ever interacts with things on your profile page and your things within Facebook, it updates in their activity list and exposes – you know if they had 1,000 friends, all 1,000 friends that then go to profile will see it/ And for example see that Ann Smith made a comment on a photo or made a comment on a note of John Reese's. And so people will be like, oh, who's John Reese. Why is my friend, Ann Smith, commenting on that. So they’ll click over and if there's any kind of related interest in that topic or whatever it is, they may ask to become friends.

And so that’s the viral nature of Facebook. It gets scary at some points of how viral. You can get your name, and your photos and anything you're doing out there across Facebook and build a huge following. So just getting involved you know, posting notes, pulling in your blog post, commenting on other people's walls, on their photos, on their notes, in the discussions and groups, all that stuff, just gets your name all over the place.

A few things about etiquette: When you ask someone to be your friend, there's an area there where you can add an additional note. You always should add a note so when they see your request they also see the note. Let me show you that real quick. I'll just to jump to my friend request page and you'll see some of my requests. Actually, I'm going to stop this 'cause now that I think about it it's kind of a privacy thing. Maybe some people are – 'cause you're sending someone like a little private message with the request and sometimes it's personal.

And I don't want to actually expose someone's personal message to me. Now that I think about it, it's just not a good idea. But when you send a friend a request, you can send a note with it if you want, or not at all, and you always should. Just say hey, it'd be great to connect with you and you to become my friend because – and say why. So if you're joining groups I'm going to show you what those are. Or if you're interacting with people and they're not your friend yet and you want to add them as your friend on Facebook, tell them why.

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Say hey, I see you're also in such-and-such group. I thought we could connect as friends, and so on, and so forth. So just put a reason. So when you go to groups – and, again, you can poke around here on your own and figure things out about all the different functionality. But if you go to groups, type in a subject, like, for your market. So I'll do gardening and just push enter there. It's kind of weird how they don't have a submit button. I think it's bad design they need to fix 'cause if you click on this thing it actually starts a group if you want to start one.

So these are all different groups for our gardening example. All different – it's like Ning, kind of like little sub networks that you'll see when we get to Ning and talk about Ning, the groups within Facebook as the main social network. So this one, Organic Gardening 101, has 2,600 members and these little updates about what's going on. How many new members it probably has it since you last checked it or last were exposed to it. So if we visit it, it's very much like an individual, like a group has a profile page too just like an individual. A group can have its own photos. It can have its own videos. It can have its own events. It can have its own blog. It can have its own information.

The difference in – one of the differences in groups, it can have a discussion board. So people can post and talk about different things. So here are all the different topics and different people talking about things. And people can, of course, become a member of it.

So you attach yourself to a group. And so it's like you're now part of a mini sub-network.

And then, of course, the group has its own wall you can comment on, just like a person's profile page. This looks like sort of spam here. So you’ve gotta be careful. You don't want to post – you really don't want to ever plug your sites when you post on Facebook.

Like if you make a comment, you get in a discussion, you don’t want to post your site.

If you make a comment to something where you recently wrote a blog post, you can say hey, great post. I recently just wrote something about this very subject, and then put in your link. That's okay, but don't just say hey, great post and then all of a sudden, it's a URL to your online store. That's just kind of – that’s spamming. That’s not how you take advantage of this stuff.

But anyway, so groups are like friend profile pages, but for a group of people. And so when you post a photo to this group, it's going to show across all your normal friends.

Not that group related, all your normal friends' homepages of what are going on with your friends. It'll say – you know if I posted a picture of this, it would say John just posted this photo and it'll show the thumbnail to the Organic Gardening 101 group.

So as you interact with groups, you reach more and more people virally with what you're doing because as you post things to groups the other members start being exposed to it as well, even if they're not your friend. So it's just there's a lot of viral implications to Facebook. There's a lot to it. The best thing for you to do is just to get your feet wet if 216

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you haven’t already used it. Poke around a little bit with it and you'll just see for yourself how it works.

It's not that complicated and you'll start to learn some of these little methods and tricks for getting your name out there more and more, and building up your own friends and everything else. Now, one more thing I want to show you is on Facebook you can set up kind of like a secondary account called a fan page. And you can do this for any of your products, for you personally, and for anything you want to do like business related. And so I set up a fan page.

Now, the fan pages aren’t limited to the number of fans so this is like a group. People can be associated with it. They don't have to request it like being a friend. You don't have to get permission and have someone say okay, I'll accept you as a friend. Anyone can become a fan of this page and they're instantly a fan. And so it has its pros and cons.

And the reason why I set up pretty much is because I couldn’t take anymore than the 5,000 friends and so I wanted some spillover. It kind of acts as double duty.

I can, of course, post different things about pulling my blog post, syndicate my other things from here on the fan page itself. But the only downfall I'm finding is the fan pages that you're allowed to – actually encouraged to use for business, by the way, aren’t really as effective as the true friend connection. That friend connection is more powerful.

When you do things, people are seeing more things about you and you can get your things exposed to their friends.

The fan page has limitations in that regard and it's also – it's more work to keep up both, to be adding things to your regular profile main account as well as being social and keeping up with the fan page thing. And frankly, to be honest, I find it kind of silly that I have a fan page. Like I'm just a normal person and it's just kind of lame in my mind, like hey, be my fans. I mean it's not like I'm a rock star or something.

So for business it's kind of weird. I mean that's just my personal thing. Some people like it. I think people understand that the fan page is – it's not just people idolizing someone like Mick Jagger or something and it does have its purpose for business. But it doesn’t have the functionality that the main account has.

And so if Facebook would lift the 5,000 friend limit, I'll probably delete this maybe or just really not do much with it, and then put my main focus in just the friend account, my main social account because, again, that reaches far and wide and has greater implications, virally, and it's just there's more stuff you can do with it and have a better relationship with the folks that are connected to you than the relationship I can have with fans, like on this type of thing.

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So that's pretty much Facebook in a nutshell. The kind of core strategies that you want to use is you want to connect the notes section, go into notes here. You want to connect your blog to your notes. So down here on the right side, you can do edit import settings and it'll ask you to put in your feed. This is the current RSS feed that I have for OurIncome.com blog. So that's this. That's why it's pulling in the blog posts to the profile page automatically under that notes section.

Now, the downfall of this is apparently how it appears to be set up is that you can't import multiple blogs if you have more than one blog. And that's a downfall. You could do it with the – I think, with that other blog application I'm currently testing. Or I guess you could always just go find a different blog application. And they're not going to know which blog you're kind of putting in there. But that's notes. So you can see it pulls friends' notes as well.

But that's how you pull in your blog posts, so they're shown right here. And you can add other notes, just about anything, like I just added this today reminding people hey, Twitter's really blowing up. Make sure to go join Twitter now and also, to follow me. So I link to my Twitter thing. So you see I'm promoting. I'm actively marketing, but I'm not plugging something for sale. I'm just saying hey, connect with me over here. And that's just the way you do it, that's the etiquette.

One of the sneaky tricks you can kind of do with notes is if you add a comment to your own note. See when I add this note as far as I checked last, it doesn’t update on all my friends' homepages saying John created a note where – I'm sorry, where other peoples' friends will be exposed to it, like in their mini-feed and everything. But I believe if you add a comment to your own entry, it will be exposed to not only all of your friends, but also their friends as well through some of their feeds if I'm not mistaken.

This stuff changes all the time. But it can be very powerful to comment on your own, but do it sparingly, of course, and don't be spamming and abusive. But you can invite people.

Hey, I just posted a note, comment on it and tell me what you think. And every time someone comments on it, all their friends will definitely get exposed to their activity and they’ll say, Susan Smith recently commented on this note from John Reese. And that, again, can drive people over to it and to you.

So that's first and foremost. You want to pull in your blog post to your notes. If you have Twitter, which I hope you'll set up and start using, you can use the Twitter application.

The way you get to that is you come under applications here. You click – what do you click here? Oh, you click edit and it'll allow you to search for applications and then you can just type Twitter and you'll find the Twitter one. And then just look at the different settings and you click install. And it'll have you put in your username and password for your log in for Twitter and then it'll do it's thing.

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And you can come on here, and push things around in whatever kind of order you want. I think you should put Twitter on top and then have your syndicated notes under it over here on the left. And then, right hand side, profile. I'm using this Flog Blog. I would use it for now, unless you see me not doing it or see it updated in the resources section or posted in our community of something better. But I like this, even though I'm kind of double dipping.

Again, showing my blog posts or the notes, or at least links to them, and it's showing over here. I like this. I like people being able to scan this. It's like a mini version of my blog.

You may want to think about setting up a Flickr account. If you upload photos, you'll also want to upload into Facebook. I haven’t had a chance to do that, but if I do that, add these photos as well, manually, it's going to so up across all the different homepage feeds of everyone's friend, you know network activity that’s connected to me. And they’ll see that. It's just more advertising, and it promotes my stuff and my profile and it drives people over here.

So, of course, this is my wall and people just making comments about different things, and saying different comments. And I can reply and post back. You just want to get involved you know. You don't have to spend a lot of time on this stuff. But just spend a half hour a week just to come in here and make some comments, post some comments, post some notes. I guess I said comments twice there, but post notes, do some different things, participate and then just go about your week. Even spend five minutes a day, even ten minutes a day, but just get involved.

Post on people's walls, add comments to notes, create notes, join groups, post photos to groups. Just as you do things, everyone else will notice because it updates these little news feeds, and you'll just reach more and more people. And if you're doing good things with value, remember what's in it for them. It's not just for their health. They want to see you just always posting pictures of your cat. It's gotta be about your business and why people would be interested in connecting with you in the first place.

So if you post good content, good value, you're posting links of things you're checking out and looking at, it's just going to come back to you tenfold and really benefit you and your business. So that's a crash course on Facebook, of course. Check the resources section as well as the private protected area in our community for you for this course that you have a license to. And I'm sure people will be talking about other things they’ve tried in Facebook and new things, and you'll be able to keep up with that as well. So that's Facebook for you.

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CD 7 - Lesson 6: Ning Niches Let’s take a quick look at Ning. Essentially what Ning is, is it’s a social network platform, or service or whatever you want to call it, for people to set up a social network and talk to other people. So, it’s like FaceBook. So, FaceBook is a social network that people can join. They create an account. And then they can request to be friends with other people and connect those relationships to their account and keep up with the communications between other people.

But the thing that’s different about Ning is, Ning is essentially kind of a social network service where anyone can create their own social network. So it’s not just like one big social network for everyone, like FaceBook or MySpace, it’s for building kind of mini social networks, and it’s specific by interest or by topic, etc.

So, gardeners, for example, could create their own gardening social network. And there can be multiple gardening social networks. And then when you join that network, you’re talking about all things gardening with that group of people. So, it’s very, very powerful.

It’s like you have your own little mini FaceBook, where everything, the communication, the posts, everything, only has to do with the topic. So, although there are groups within FaceBook and there are other things within FaceBook where people can communicate and collaborate on specific topics, this is a little bit different because it’s a miniature social network only about that topic.

So the great thing about Ning is, is you can find a lot of different social networks for thousands of different markets and niches. And it’s a great place to not only collaborate but just to meet and build relationships with other people in a similar interest or topic. So again, for our gardening example, if you’re interested in gardening, you’d want to join some different gardening networks and just start networking with people that way. And then, of course, telling them about your blogs and when you publish content—and not pitching them, like we’ve talked about.

But if you come to the top, you’ll see, I actually have already typed it in, there’s a search field where you can search their different social networks. So if you type in “gardening,” like I’m going to do in this example, it quickly searches and comes up and shows all these different gardening social networks that people set up. There’s tons of them. And so you can do a little bit of research and see which ones have the most members, hopefully, because that’s kind of where you’re going to reach the most people, and then take part in some of the busier ones.

Of course, there’s a link here, it’s on the Home Page, as well as the other pages, where you can see the most popular social networks on Ning, this kind of goes along with the piggybacking philosophy. So you can do some research here and see where most of the people are at, and get involved in those if makes sense for your business.

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But this is Ning. It’s basically like FaceBook but a bunch of mini FaceBooks based on topic. And so, as you can imagine that’s very, very targeted and very, very valuable to be able to come in here and network with specific people that are a member of a little community passionate about a specific topic and that topic only. So, you’ll want to check out Ning and see if there’s any social networks within their system in your market. And get on there and make friends and start communicating with people there and using it for your marketing.

CD 7 - Lesson 7: Social News Another type of site in the whole realm of social media are social news sites. A social news site is where there’s a bunch of members of the news community for that site, just a bunch of users, and the way it works is simple. People submit interesting images, videos, blog posts, anything that’s out there on the Internet, and other members of the community vote on it, whether it’s good or whether it stinks. And if it’s good, it gets a bunch of votes. And depending on how many votes that it gets, will determine how much exposure it gets on the site.

So, this is Digg. You’ve probably heard of it, Digg.com. And Digg is one of the biggest social news sites on the entire Internet. And you’ve probably seen these little yellow buttons on people’s blog posts and on pages that say Digg This. Well that’s when it does.

When someone Diggs it, it gives it one vote, one Digg they call it, on Digg itself, and then it goes into the system where other people can Digg it as well—and if it gets enough, it kind of moves up the ranks of different sub-pages of the site. And then, of course, if it gets a lot of Diggs it can make it to this Home Page of currently the most popular, or most Dugg, posts out there on the Internet.

And if you get on the Home Page of Digg, you can get a ton of traffic. I had an entry that I put on my blog. It was actually kind of just a funny entry and that’s probably why it did so well on Digg. Because you’ve got to understand, if you’re in a niche market, like gardening or something, or marketing, or whatever your market is, Digg is primarily for kind of general news.

It kind of leans toward the techie side, kind of the geek community is most of the people that are doing most of the voting on Digg. So if it’s related to videogames or some kind of technology but even politics—you’re probably noticing here there’s a lot of political stories—and so it’s kind of mainstream news, kind of leaning to the side of geeky-ness.

But again, piggybacking. If you want to get traffic from Digg, you want to get a lot of Diggs on Digg, come and look and see what the most popular sites are, and you’ll see for yourself what their community really likes.

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But I made a post on my blog once. I have a large saltwater aquarium in my home. It’s like 1,000 gallons. And when it gets cleaned, a guy actually gets into the tank with a mask on, and basically goes swimming. He gets in there. And it was funny. One day the guy was over cleaning. And I thought it just looks so funny, and so I took a photo of him submerged in the tank. It almost looked fake or looked like it was a mermaid or something. It was funny. And I just posted it on my blog just on a whim. And one of my blog readers Dugg it and submitted it to Digg. And then other people saw it and they Dugg it as well. And it ended up making it to the front page of Digg. And ultimately, when all was said and done, it sent over 200,000 people to that blog post—200,000 people.

So, on the plus side there was a ton of people that came to my blog that I didn’t have to pay for; it all happened automatically because someone added it to Digg. The downside was those 200,000 visitors really weren’t worth much. I would’ve rather had 1,000 targeted visitors from people interested in whatever my subject matter was about, than just general humor traffic that came to that post. Because, of course, I track everything.

And I tracked the results of that traffic, and it was almost worthless. Just people jumped over to look at the photo. And then they probably just laughed and they just left. They didn’t read my blog. They weren’t interested in what my content was about.

And so getting Dugg for the traffic can be a bit overrated. It depends on your market, though. If you’re doing something in videogames or something like that, it could work out well for you. So, you got to keep that in mind in these social news sites. They can be powerful, they can bring you a lot of traffic, but ultimately it comes down to what your subject is if it’s going to actually bring you any value.

However, the positive side, for sure, of getting up there in the ranks on these social news sites where you get noticed, just like that aquarium funny picture, is that you end up getting a lot of other sites on the Internet linking to you. So on top of what Digg brought me in traffic, a lot of other sites monitor Digg for content and for interesting news. And so, I had hundreds of other sites linking to that blog post to share that funny picture.

So, it got me a lot of incoming links. And so, as we already talked, it has SEO value, and so that helped kind of the page rank value for that page. And it can also affect my site, as we’ve already talked about, as that link can pass page rank and other link value to my other internal pages. And so, that had benefits of getting those other incoming links, as a part of the process.

But overall I would say that I wouldn’t spend too much time and effort in this quest to try to get on Digg’s Home Page, or on any of these other sites, only because the traffic, and again it depends on what you sell, but mostly because the traffic isn’t going to be very targeted. It’ll be very low quality. And it’s not easy to get on the Home Page of Digg and to get tons of traffic.

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But on a lower level, like just to get quit a few Diggs and at least to get on some of the sub-pages of Digg, because Digg does have kind of certain categories, you can kind of get some targeted traffic if you fall into some of their main categories that you can see there at the top, science and gaming and lifestyle and entertainment, sports, etc. So you can still get some okay traffic from there and some good incoming links which will be valuable. And the way you do it is simple.

It’s kind of bad etiquette to submit your own posts and pages to these social news sites.

So the way you do it is simply reach out to your distribution points, through your e-mail list, through Twitter, through FaceBook, through these other things, and just ask people, “Hey, will you Digg this post?” And, of course, you don’t want to do that for every single blog post you make, or people are just going to get numb to you always asking for Diggs. But I would save it for when you create a really good, meaty, high-quality post that has a lot of value.

You’ll get to those posts where you put in a lot time to make it, and it’s really good and you’re getting good feedback. Then reach out to everybody. So, you may want to do that once a month or something. So then you reach out to every peer point, communication point, that you have at your disposal and ask people, “Hey, really help me out, please.

This is getting a lot of great attention. Please Digg this,” if you’re on Digg, or please Buzz It Up, as they say, on Yahoo Buzz, and so on and so forth on the other sites.

So, let me show me real quick some other ones. Of course, we’ll link to a ton of these in the Resources section. And any tips that start to formulate for some of these sites, of course, you’ll be kept up-to-date with that and you can stay in touch with that.

This is Yahoo Buzz. This is relatively new at the time of this recording. And this is becoming more and more like a Digg. It’s slightly different. So, people add these little Buzz Up videos to buzz up or buzz down. It’s just like Digg. It’s just a way to vote. It’s good or it’s bad. And they rank these entries based on how many votes they’re getting— very, very similar. And this, if you get on Yahoo Buzz Home Page, you can get a ton of traffic because Yahoo has a ton of traffic. And apparently, a lot of people are using this Buzz site.

This is another one. It’s called Newsvine—very similar. People can submit news posts.

It’s a little bit different format, a little different style, but the same thing. You create an account and then you have the ability to submit things and vote on things.

Here’s yet another one. It’s called Propeller. Very much like Digg. It’s run by AOL. It used to be a bigger part of Netscape, now it’s kind of standing on its own. Same type of thing, people can vote it or sink it. So, it’s just voting it up or down.

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But these are great research tools to come in and find what the latest news is. To do some research on headlines because you can get some good ideas on the type of headlines that are getting the most attention because they’re getting views and votes. So, you can come and check these out on your own. Again, we’ll link to a bunch of them in the Resources section, and you can check it out.

But so, that’s social news sites. And the way that you kind of get benefit from social news sites is to just ask your distribution points. When you mastermind with friends what you should do, and you just start getting to know other people, like through the Income.com community itself, especially other marketers, you’ll kind of network with people and you’ll kind of share the vote love, so to speak. Ask them to Digg you, you’ll Digg them. If they’ll Digg you obviously, they should only do it and you should only do it if that person likes the actual content. You don’t just Digg it for the sake of Digging it or that can really hurt your reputation on those communities. So, you never want to spam or anything, of course.

And you want to take advantage of that by networking with people. But again, limiting your campaigns to vote things up to when you really post something that’s good. So obviously you’re not asking all the time for people to vote you up, as well as you’re just not spamming their system. Because if they see that you’re trying to submit a lot, that’s why you shouldn’t even submit your own story. Let other people do it. They have these algorithms in place to stop spammers. So if you’re submitting and voting and you’re trying to you think you’re going to be sneaky.

The other reason why is that you’re not going to find these, what they call, black hat techniques in this course, or what I teach people to do, is because they’re short-lived.

These companies aren’t stupid. They’re just no dumb. So it’s like if you think that you’re going to create a bunch of different accounts and fake vote on your stuff to kind of get up there, you’re sorely mistaken. They have a lot of security features and detection things in their code that will snuff you out and just eliminate your ability to ever participate again, to try to block your IP or to cookie you and do things. So it’s just no worth it. It’s not going to be worth it.

And so, some people advocate setting up multiple accounts on some of these different social sites. Sometimes it can be okay. I’m really kind of – I go, again, with what’s more natural on the Internet. Using these sites and doing it naturally, would you have multiple accounts? No, you’d only have one.

And so, in our next section when we start talking about social bookmarking sites, I’ll talk more about the frequency of which you’re bookmarking things. It’s okay to bookmark your own entries, but it needs to be at a low volume level in relation to other things you bookmark. Otherwise, it’s not natural that you’d be using that site and just bookmarking the same site domains. So, even though they don’t know those are yours, again, these 224

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algorithms aren’t stupid. They can figure it out. And everything on the Internet that gets traffic and attention is always abused by spammers and marketers trying to get traffic from it and trying to make money from it. So almost all these, well they all do, not even almost, they all have measures in place to stop spam. And it’s just not worth it.

But these are social news sites. Again, check the Resources section; you’ll find more news about this. You primarily want to add it to your overall strategy, when you have something really, really good that you think is worthy, and you’ve done your homework, of getting a lot of attention.

CD 7 - Lesson 8: Social Bookmarking We just talked about social news sites, where people submit links to content videos or photos. And people vote on them and then they get ranked. Next, we’re going to talk about social bookmarking sites.

It’s kind of similar but there’s not really a lot of voting going on in most of them. It’s just you can set up an account, you can bookmark some interesting things that you find on the Internet, and other people can look at what you’re bookmarking. And then it’s searchable. And people can find yours. And then they can look at all the ones that you’ve linked to in your account. They can find other people that link to similar things and their interests. It’s just a great way to discover things on the Net that you’ve never found for yourself because the Internet’s so big. So, that’s kind of the science or the reason behind social bookmarking sites.

This is a list of like the Top 30 social news/bookmarking sites on the Web. And, of course, we’ll look to this in the Resources section. You can see them for yourself, as well as other sites that aren’t in this list that are below the, this is just the Top 30 for activity, below that.

But Digg, we already talked about. Social News. Technorati is a blog search engine but you can submit, of course, your blog posts and things. And it becomes almost like a kind of social-bookmarking-type site. Delicious, we’ve talked about. It is the biggest, true social bookmarking site. Propeller’s a news site. We’re going to talk about StumbleUpon in the next lesson. Reddit’s a social news site.

So, you can look at this list yourself. Some of them down here are true social bookmarking sites, where people are just bookmarking things and sharing them and you can search. Now, the one important thing you need to think about for social bookmarking is – well, there’s two things actually.

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a service, there’s some free ones, and then you kind of connect it to all your different bookmarking accounts that you have. You put in all your contact information for those.

And then you post a bookmark one time to that service and it’ll post to all of the other bookmarking sites that you have accounts with. So, it’s pretty cool and it’s pretty convenient, and you’ll want to be using that.

But the rule of thumb, I really want you to think of, is a ten-to-one ratio, or 10 percent.

It’s okay to bookmark your own stuff, links to your own posts, links to your own articles, links to your own pages with video, whatever. I mean technically it’s okay to link to some of your sales pages too, although I would stick to just content; you’re always safe if you do that with these social sites.

But what you want to do is you want to not only post your own site URLs for your blog posts and good content, but you only want to do it about 10 percent of the time. So that means for every one time you post, you want to post nine or ten non-owned sites and URLs. So I guess it’s more of a nine-to-one ratio. For every nine times you post other people’s stuff, then you can post one of your own.

So it’s roughly 10 percent or so, give or take, of what the kind of breakdown needs to be.

Because if you’re just posting bookmarks for your own blog posts you’re going to get account disabled. All these sites, again, they track spam and abuse. And again, that’s not natural. Somebody wouldn’t join one of these sites to be bookmarking cool stuff they’ve found and only bookmark stuff from the same company or same blogger. They don’t do that, they bookmark stuff from all over the Web. So keep it to about nine-to-one, ten-to-one, and you should be okay. And you don’t have to and get and set up multiple accounts and try to trick the system like some people do.

Not that there’s necessarily anything unethical about that, per se. I think it’s just better just to do things with one account, avoid the spam-y nature of trying to look like you’re trying to get away with something.

And just do so by being natural, and, in this case, bookmarking a lot of other things that aren’t unrelated to you but are in your market, as well as bookmarking your own stuff.

But just keep that ratio there of about 10 percent. Your stuff will make up only about 10 percent. Not half, not more than that. So, keep that in mind.

The other important thing about these services is that most of them, especially Delicious, the biggest one, allows you to tag your entries. And that’s when you’ll want to call upon, of course, everything we went over in the search engine optimization stuff about tagging and especially when we were talking about creating content. And you’ll want to tag those post, especially your own posts that you make, your own entries for your own stuff, with tags that you’re kind of targeting for your business—some of the cool ones that convert well, and then some of the LSI ones that are thematically related to those.

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And then, of course, what you want to do is when you have really good stuff, reach out to other people that you can reach through all these other methods we’ve already talked about, e-mail, Twitter, through your blog, through FaceBook, and ask that people bookmark your posts. So not just Digg It or something but also bookmark it with Delicious and these other social bookmark services.

And, of course, mastermind, meet people in the Income.com community, and build a group of friends that you can be social bookmarking each other’s stuff. But just remember: keep the balance. Just like your stuff should only be about ten-to-one, nineto-one ratio, same rule of thumb goes for your friends. Don’t make one post for you and the other nine for one friend off the same domain. Really mix it up and randomize it, and basically make it natural so it doesn’t look like there’s any rhyme or reason to it, like it’s totally random, and it’ll work out well for you.

So, that’s just a quick overview of social bookmarking. You’ll find links in the Resources to a bunch of bookmarking sites that you’ll want to be linking to. Because, by the way, I’ve already mentioned it, let me mention it again, the beauty in doing that is that it’s a great source of incoming links. Which we’ve already talked about, I’m just going to reinforce the point.

For search engine optimization purposes, it’s a great way to get incoming links that add the value to your rankings through these social bookmarking sites. Because many of them give you a true link, not a no-follow link, so it does count in Google towards your Google algorithm score for how things will rank.

So that’s another reason why you want to use these social bookmarking sites, not just hoping that someone in that community stumbles upon your submissions and goes to your site, or they’re doing a search and find one of your submissions, those things as well, but the good byproduct is, is that you’re actually getting some valuable Google accredited links by using these services.

And, of course, that’s why you want to use a tool also to make it easy to just sign up. You post once and it posts to all the different sites for you, so you don’t have to constantly be making all these different posts to all these different sites.

If you use that ratio, that I told you to use, nine-to-one or ten-to-one, then you can away with posting pretty much the same thing all the time to all the different bookmarking services because you’re not just spamming off one domain. Occasionally, you may want to mix it up and submit some different stuff to the different accounts that you have so every account doesn’t look exactly the same.

But overall, it shouldn’t be too bad, even if you do keep it the same because they’re Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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totally unrelated companies and unrelated sites. And it’s not like they’re kind of working together to see patterns because a lot of people are posting the same ones with those tools to all their accounts at the same time.

But that’s social bookmarking.

CD 7 - Lesson 9: StumbleUpon Let’s take a look at StumbleUpon. Now this is a very, very interesting kind of social media news/bookmarking service. It’s very, very popular and it’s capable of sending a lot of traffic to your site.

And you’ll just sign up for an account. And you install like this little toolbar that allows you to kind of click the Stumble button, as it’s called, and it will load a random site that it thinks you might be interested in. And then if you like it, you can kind of vote it up or down with the toolbar. And then it just all happens from the toolbar, so you don’t go to a Web site to submit necessarily, like a site. You can. You can do that as well but most of the activity control in the StumbleUpon community is using their little toolbar, which makes them unique.

And so, they’re big. They’ve got, as you can see right here, 5.2 million people that are registered for their service. I don’t how many are active, but quite a bit. I get quite a bit of traffic from StumbleUpon, just from people who like my blog posts or things I put out on the Net and they Stumble them through one of the sharing tools—which I’ll show you in a just few upcoming lessons.

Like Share This, it’s called, where people can share something they’re viewing that’s yours, like such a blog post. That’s the best example. They can add it to Digg. They can do all – they can submit it to all these different places by clicking this one convenient little thing that goes to all those, and StumbleUpon is one of them. And a lot of people ask people, “Well hey, Stumble me. Submit me to StumbleUpon.”

So, you can create an account. You can surf around, Stumble things, vote for things.

Same kind of thing, you got to keep the ratio down. In fact, I would almost avoid Stumbling your own stuff at all, unless it’s maybe 1 out of 30 or 40 times, because StumbleUpon is a little more sophisticated than those other social bookmarking sites.

Because they drive so much traffic, they’re susceptible to a lot more abuse and spam, and I think they have a lot better security to keep people from abusing their system.

So, if all else fails like that, it’s just better to ask other people to Stumble or vote on something for you. You don’t even need to do it yourself, which, in most cases, you don’t want to because then there’s no tie to your account at all. So just ask others to do it, like we’ve already talked about now several times, and you’re better off if you do that.

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But you can get some decent traffic from StumbleUpon. It’s not the highest quality traffic. For me in my results, it was better than Digg traffic. It was kind of somewhere in the middle. It was okay. And, of course, if it’s free, it’s not a bad tradeoff. I mean again, it does take your time to get involved or to ask people to use their time to Stumble you and to vote for you, but sometimes the gains can be good. You can submit things and the way it’s done on the system it’s kind of categorized, so it is a little bit more targeted.

And when we get to the Advertising Methods CD, we’re going to talk about different options that you have for advertising. And one of them is StumbleUpon. They sell traffic for like $0.05, where they send people to your site. And I tested it out. I’ll cover that a little bit, but it’s another way that you can use StumbleUpon. When you create an account, you can become an advertiser and buy traffic. And there’s some different considerations for that, and I’ll cover those when we get to that upcoming CD in this course.

But StumbleUpon, it’s another one to consider. If you check your logs and your Google Analytics, you’ll find, over time, if you’re putting out good content, you’ll get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, just naturally. I’ve said it and it’s been the foundation for this course, if you put out good content on the Internet, if you put out great content, you can’t lose. You will be found. So, of course, you do all these little social things that you’re learning in this course just to advance that ability and explode that ability to be found, by syndicating your stuff in more places and allowing people more ways to stumble upon it, to find it.

And I don’t mean stumble upon it as a pun to this site. It’s just that’s why it’s a great name that they use for this because that’s how it is in the Internet: you stumble upon things, you find them almost by accident. And that’s how it’s going to be for our content.

And trust me. If you follow this course, your traffic can just only grow. It’s almost impossible for it not to because it’s just a fundamentally sound strategy that drives the entire Internet.

So again, you’ll start to see some StumbleUpon stuff. You may already see it in your Google Analytics if you’re already using it. And you’re wondering “Where this coming from? What’s this Stumble Upon thing?” Well, now you know. It’s this community where people using the toolbar to find things, as well as submit things, and then other people see it through the community and vote on it. And that’s how, a lot of times, you get a ton of traffic from StumbleUpon.

So, those are the considerations. Ask other people to Stumble your – and remember, save it for the good stuff. Don’t worry about the other stuff. The normal posts that you make, maybe they aren’t your best, they’ll get some stumbling anyways naturally, or

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bookmarked naturally, or people sharing them naturally. So, you’ll get traffic from them regardless.

But when you go to really do a push to get the most bang for the buck out of you creating some great content, that’s when you want to really call upon your friends. Call upon people you mastermind with. Call upon people that you kind of talk to and socialize with in the Income.com community itself. And then reach out to your distribution points of Twitter and, of course, e-mail and RSS and all these avenues that you have, to get to people. And say, “Hey, do me a favor. I’m real proud of this post. I think it’s great value for people that you’ll find.”

And, of course, in doing so and telling people to vote, it’s going to drive more people to read it for themselves as well, even if they didn’t the first time you announced it. So, it kind of has a double purpose there. But just save it for when you have good stuff. And then ask people to vote you up and everything else. And they will. And that’s what will bring you more traffic, not you trying to scam the system and you kind of being sneaky and voting on your own stuff. You don’ t need to. Just ask other others to do it.

But that’s how StumbleUpon works. And it’s definitely something to incorporate into your marketing. And you’ll see it, of course, mentioned in the Master Plan, at the very end, when we tie everything together. But that’s StumbleUpon.

CD 7 - Lesson 10: LinkedIn Let me quickly show you LinkedIn. This is a pretty interesting kind of social network type of a site. It’s pretty much – think if it almost like just a big directory for professionals and businesspeople. And it’s a way for them to kind of connect to each other, kind of as a social network, but also for just contact information, as well as for job recommendations, to get endorsements from each other as far as someone’s work. So, in case someone looks in here for – because this is – what a lot of people use LinkedIn for is to find people to hire, in many cases. And so, they’ll look and see if people have worked with that person and the recommendations.

So that’s one of the big uses that people use it for, but it’s used in marketing just for networking. Like true business networking. To find likeminded people or other people in maybe your industry that you can just build a relationship with. This isn’t FaceBook.

This is something completely different. It’s more serious and people use it to really make more like business connections, to be able to do joint ventures and business deals together.

So you got to be real careful how you use this for marketing because it’s definitely more on the professional side of it, and not – it’s not a social, social as FaceBook and some of these other sites are, so there’s not a lot of communication going on in this site between 230

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users. It’s just the functionality how a user can be connected to other users that can be connected to other users. And then people can find each other virally through those methods.

And I mean you can ask your connections questions. And they can interact. And other people can see that on the network, and so on and so forth. But it’s mainly a professional network. I’ve met a few people there. I’ve probably ended up getting some new customers from LinkedIn. Not a lot but enough to make it just worth having a presence on the site. And I believe it’s going to grow over time with entrepreneurs and business owners. It’s already big anyway, but I mean I think it’s just going to keep growing. And so, it’s worth it just to kind of put up a page and a profile and an account, and use it and reach out to your contacts and at least ask them to join you.

But this is just like what you see. I’m logged into my account. But this is like the profile of you, of what other people see too. So, you can just see that I’m currently CEO of Income.com. I pretty much just have 90 connections on here right now. I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to build this up. I’m just kind of doing the bare minimum, I guess. But I do meet people through here and use it. I just don’t use it a lot. But it’s just one of those things that’s kind of set up once and just kind of let it go on its own. You don’t really need to market it. People will find you through it.

So, it’s just kind of like a basic profile. And so there’s a link here to my Web site, that my company thing goes to Web site, so people can find me, whether they’re looking at someone else’s connections and they see me and learn about me and just get curious and end up going to my site from it. That’s one way that it can drive you traffic.

But these are my connections. So this is my network on here, so these are all the people that I’m connected to. And it’s pretty cool because it’ll show you shared connections that you share with other people. So it’s like it’ll show you that, “Hey, you’re connected to this person, and so are all these people as well.” And then they recommend other people that you should get to know. And again, it’s like a – it’s just a relation – it’s a true relationship social network.

It’s kind of really what social networking is really supposed to be. Not where you can have all these friends on an account, like in FaceBook, that are really strangers that you don’t really know and don’t really have much of a relationship with, just kind of minor interest. Where this is more about really making, I mean, new friends but really new business contacts and professional contacts. And like in a lot of trade shows for different industries, a lot of people will say, “Hey, here’s my card.” And on their card typically, and they’ll even say it. They’ll say, “Hey, connect to me on LinkedIn. Connect me to your account so we can keep in touch.” It’s like a Rolodex of business contacts.

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But that’s LinkedIn. You can come in here and see all the little features of private messaging people and how you can post questions or ask for people to recommend someone for a certain job or task or project. And you can come in here and kind of look on your own at all the features—that kind of goes beyond the scope of me bringing it up in the first place to use for marketing.

But I would recommend setting up an account in LinkedIn. I think it’s something all serious business owners should have. And I think you’ll find that just for the few minutes it is, it’s free, just set it up and let it run on its own, that it’s well worth some of the connections and people that you’ll meet that will find you through it. Because a lot of people use LinkedIn to search for people if they don’t know their e-mail address or want a way to contact them. So, it’s kind of like a White Pages/Yellow Pages type of thing, as well.

But that’s LinkedIn. Definitely worth setting up an account and using it.

CD 7 - Lesson 11: ShareThis One of the best ways to get the most out of social media is to make all the things that you do, your marketing, your communications, everything as a part of this whole process that you’re learning, easy for others to also participate in social media with how it relates to your stuff. And one of the best ways to do that is with this free little button service thing that you can get, called ShareThis. It’s at ShareThis.com. It’s a great concept someone came up with, totally free.

Primarily it’s used as a plug-in for most blogging platforms, so it works with almost every type of blogging software that’s out there. But it’ll work independently and pretty much on any Webpage and with any service. It’s actually cool. If you set up as a plug-in for, let’s say, your blog, every time you post a new post it’ll be attached to the bottom of each post. And if you pull your blog posts into FaceBook, like with a blog application like I showed you or with that notes process, it’ll also pull in some of these sharing links and add them at the bottom of the post, so people can share easily, directly from within FaceBook. It’s very, very cool, very powerful, so check this out.

It basically puts this little button and this link wherever it’s used and it says ShareThis.

And so this will show up at the end of every blog post you make automatically, once you set it up. And so, when people click it—a lot of people know that it’s there and what it does. So, when people click it, it comes up and it says ShareThis with one of these services. So, it lists all the major social media, social news, social bookmarking sites, social networks, and so people can just be one click away from sharing it wherever they’d like to share it.

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So as you naturally submit things to Delicious, remember that nine-to-one or ten-to-one ratio, or you Stumble things yourself, or you add things to Digg yourself, or you do anything, to kind of make it natural, where you’re Digging and voting and submitting and bookmarking other people’s content out there on the Internet, this is an easy way to do it.

Just look for this little ShareThis button, click it, and then fire it off to one of these.

Most of these services, once you’re logged in once, it’ll keep the cookie active so you don’t have to keep logging in. So it’s literally, just open this, click one of these, and then it gets done. Sometimes it’s multiple steps, like if you have to log in or go another step in the process, but it’s pretty convenient. And so you’ll want to have this on your blog post pages and within everything you do.

And it’s just free. It’s easy. It works. People are using it. I’ve seen good results from it.

So, you’ll just want to add it. I mean it only takes up a little bit of space. It’s worth using it, even along with other stuff. If you have a main Digg This button showing up at the bottom of your blog posts or a Stumble icon or anything else, you can also have this ShareThis which will also do the same thing or be another click away from people, let’s say, adding it to Digg. But you can add both. Who cares? It doesn’t hurt to add both.

And sometimes it’s even better because it’ll give people more than one opportunity, let’s say, to Digg it, in that case, if they click ShareThis or if they actually just click the Digg This little yellow icon button thing there that shows the number of live Diggs.

So, ShareThis it’s great, ShareThis.com. Sign up. Get it. Get the right one that you need for your blogging platform, depending on what you use or for however else you would like to use it, and start using it. It’s just a no-brainer to help other people share your stuff all over the Internet with any of these services, which has all the benefit that we’ve already been talking about.

CD 7 - Lesson 12: Review Let’s review. By now, you should realize how important and valuable social media marketing is. It’s here to stay. It’s only going to grow. It’s not going anywhere. It’s a part of culture now. It’s going to become a regular part of business and a regular part of marketing, so you need to embrace it. If you don’t, you’re going to be left behind and you’re leaving a lot of traffic and a lot of money on the table when it comes to marketing your business on the Internet.

So, you just got to do it. You just have to find some time. Again, any of this stuff you can actually hire someone to do. So, you can hire someone to submit to the bookmarking sites or to vote on stories on Digg or anything else. Other things, not just your own types of content or your own pages or anything else you’re doing out there, but that other factor of to keep it natural. You just say, “Hey, surf around with this 20 minutes a day and just

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bookmark some sites that you like that are related to our industry.” So again, it’s either you or someone else but it still needs to be done. Social media marketing is powerful.

To grow your traffic and sales, you do it by not selling. Don’t pitch. Don’t promote your stuff directly. You can put the URLs in your bios, of course, and let people find it themselves. So, it’s not like you’re not going to link to the stuff that you have for sale and your pages that sell things, but just don’t actively plug it. Don’t just keep putting your URL out there or using things as an excuse to pitch your URL or e-mailing people’s directly to inbox going, “Hey, I thought you might be interested in this whatever,” and give your URL. You just don’t sell. Don’t sell and you’ll make money, as weird as that is. If you don’t sell, then you will make money because you have to do it without selling.

Then remember the hierarchy of response. E-mail’s the king and probably always will be, then Twitter, then RSS, then FaceBook. You want to ask others to vote, submit, Digg, bookmark you, so on and so forth, and save it for when you have something really good.

Save it when you have some really good content that you think a lot of people will like and that the effect of getting it out there to a lot of people will have even more people share it. That’s when you want to put a little campaign together to just do the shock and awe, so to speak, just to get it everywhere. That’s when you ask for the favors and get people to Digg it, vote it, submit it, so on and so forth. So don’t do that all the time, or you won’t get the help that you want.

And get involved and use the services yourself. I just talked about this. You just got to use the stuff. You just got to use it yourself. Spend a few minutes a week, a few minutes in the morning, whatever, whenever it makes sense to do it. But you got to get involved and do it yourself and use these services, or, again, pay someone to do it, if you’re going to get benefit out of them. You can’t just expect to drop in on them whenever you want to advertise something.

And if you set things up to syndicate your content, syndicate your blog posts, syndicate your Twitters and other things, that’s kind of doing the work for you. You just post to the blog and post to Twitter, and it’s going to be updating in many places. So, it’s not like I go to FaceBook every day and say what I’m up to or add some information. I’ll go a few weeks without doing much because when I post on my blog, the blog is updating automatically. So, it is staying fresh. New things are happening on FaceBook because it’s syndicating these other things, and with Twitter as well.

Remember that 10 percent rule for keeping it natural. If you really want it to work and not get banned, you have to emulate the nature of the Internet itself. We’ve talked about this principle many, many times in this course. So you only want to be bookmarking things and voting on things or submitting things, if you’re going to do it, I suggest you don’t submit to those big news sites yourself, like I already mentioned. The bookmarking service is okay. But if you have to do it on any of those, for every time you do yours 234

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there needs to be nine or ten for others, unrelated to your domain and unrelated to your business. I mean related in the sense that it’s the same market but not connected. And so just keep that in mind, and I think you’ll have good results from it.

And syndicate your content as wide as possible. Take advantage of all the syndication points that you can locate, putting your blogs on FaceBook or on any of the other social networks. If you go to the Resources section, you’re going to find links to other social networks. There’s not time to cover them all, there’s so many. But you can set up some of the same things. So, where you’re auto syndicating your activity on those whenever you do it, blog posts, Twitters, so and so forth, Flickr photos uploaded, so on and so forth.

So, take advantage of syndicating your content in as many areas as possible.

And always remember to ask yourself that question: What’s in it for them? Never lose sight of that and you’ll succeed. Remember why people are connected to you, why people want to know what you’re up to, why people want to listen to you. It’s because of the value that you apparently represent in the first place and the benefit they’ll get from it.

Sure, some people just want friends for the sake of friends because of the human element and human interaction of it. And they may truly become your just social friend. But ultimately this is about business. And you’re using these tools for business, so it needs to be congruent. And so people that are going to show interest in you did so because of the relation to your business and the market that they’re in or found you through, based on all these targeted traffic methods which is the foundation of how this is all working and how they’re finding you. And so, you have to remember what’s in it for them.

It’s okay to share personal stuff; people love that. It’s okay to say you’re sitting in the movie theater waiting for some movie to start. Again, people love that. It’s okay to show photos from vacations. Again, people love that. It’s okay to give your opinion on Britney Spears, that’s fine. But balance it out.

Share URLs of blog posts you’re currently reading. Share sites and services and resources that you’ve found that you like, link to them that are related to your industry.

And link to your own good content when you put it out there to share it with people. But just keep in mind what’s in it for them, and you stand to succeed at 100 times better rate than most marketers that are just thinking of, “How can I use this to generate traffic and make some money?” So keep that in mind: What’s in it for them?

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CD 8: Adwords Mastery Lesson 1: Overview AdWords Mastery. By now you should realize how incredibly important that Google AdWords is for your business, regardless of what market you’re in. If you’re only going to do one thing in this entire course, then I want you to at least just master Google AdWords, because Google AdWords alone can greatly increase the amount of visitors you get to your website, can greatly increase the amount of customers that you start pulling in, and of course can greatly increase the amount of money that you make in your business.

When it comes to marketing, when it comes to using the internet to grow our businesses, when it comes to finding new prospects and finding new customers to sell things to, it’s all about target marketing. Well it doesn’t get any more targeted than being able to put an ad, or being able to put any kind of communication in front of someone that’s searching – now, that’s actively searching, not just searching and looking for things, but is actively searching for exactly what it is that we sell. So that’s incredibly powerful, and that’s the value in this search marketing thing, of being able have our ads displayed when an internet user searches Google for a keyword or phrase.

So if you’re going to do anything, master Google AdWords, and you can greatly increase the amount of money you make in your business. Of course, I want you to do everything that I’m teaching you in this course, but if you have to be lazy, and if you’re going to be lazy at all, than at least just master this AdWords parts, because it’s incredibly important, and it can really change your business overnight.

The thing you have to realize, though, is that, in order to maximize the profit that you make from AdWords, it takes work. Now the beauty of anything in marketing, and anything in business that takes work, is that the advantage for you is there are so many other competitors, there are so many other marketers out there, that aren’t willing to do the work that it takes to get the next level of success. So, in essence, the work something takes, the easier it is to make money from it, because you lose more and more people along the way that aren’t going to be willing to do the work.

Well, Google AdWords is no exception. It’s not that difficult, but it takes work. In order to make the most money possible, which you’re going to learn how to do, from Google AdWords, you have to become an avid tester; you have to be willing to carefully test and track all of your results. You’re going to be testing different types of ad copy for your ads themselves, you’re going to be testing key words, to see what kind of results those individual keywords produce, and you’re going to be using a wide range of features that Google offers you within the AdWords system, that you can really take advantage of to

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maximize the amount of money that you make from advertising within their whole world AdWords.

So just know that it’s going to take some work, but just like anything else in this course, you can hire someone else to do the work for you, if you don’t want to spend the time, but you should at least learn to do it yourself in the beginning, because that’s going to become very important – for you to at least know how it affects your business.

The more relevant, the greater your profits. This is kind of a little mantra that you need to realize when it comes to Google AdWords. Their job is to serve the most relevant results in their result pages when someone does a search with their search engine, and that goes along with ads as well. So the Google AdWords ads that are shown along the sides of their organic, kind of natural listings, those ads that show up, they need to be relevant as well.

So the more relevant you can make your ads within the AdWords systems, the more it benefits you, the higher your click-rate will be on your ads themselves (which lowers the cost that you pay-per-click), as well as the more relevant your landing page that you’re sending traffic too, the more Google will reward you (and allow you to pay less, as well as give you better positioning). So there are so many different benefits that go with maximizing the relevancy of everything you do along the way with Google AdWords. So keep that in mind.

In essence, it comes down to this: using the right keywords with the right ad and the right landing page. Now, in the past, we as internet markers would just set up campaigns for thousands of keywords, pretty much use the same ad, and drive them all to the same website for the same landing page – that same page that they end up on.

Well all of that has changed – you can’t do that anymore when it comes to Google AdWords when it comes to driving traffic and making money from advertising within Google’s search engine. Now it’s all changed, and it’s on a much, much smaller, more detailed level.

So now it comes down to creating small ad groups, with tightly-related keywords, serving a specific ad only for those keywords, and then sending any traffic from that small group of keywords to a specific landing page designed especially for those keywords. Yes, it takes a little bit of work to do all these things, but when we do all these things properly, we can get the maximum traffic, we can get the lowest cost for that traffic, and then we can get the highest conversion, so we can make the most money. So it all works together.

Now the one thing most people don’t realize is Google actually wants you to make more money. They want you to get the maximum traffic at the lowest price, and they want you to make the maximum amount of profit that you can from advertising in their system.

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For all the different reasons: for having you advertise with them long-term, to increase the competition for all the different people that will be bidding on those keywords, and everything else that goes along with it. But they want you to win.

So first and foremost, if you’re not familiar with AdWords, or even if you are, you need to go into the Google AdWords system, set up the account, look at their tutorials, read all their ‘Help’ docs, look at everything that they’re telling you to do in their system.

There’s a wealth of knowledge that they’re giving you, to essentially tell you how to succeed with their system. So many markers don’t take the time to go in and learn and to consume the information that Google is actually giving them. So that’s first and foremost – that’s homework, kind of project #1 for you: go in and really familiarize yourself with Google AdWords and all the help information and all the tips that they’re giving you, because that’s critical for you to maximize the success that you’ll have from their system.

This is very important: you need to treat every keyword and keyword phrase that you’ll find through your market search that you’ll find through your keyword research that you’re going to use to advertise your business; you need to treat it just like it’s its own little individual business. Almost like it’s a vending machine, like your business owns a vending machine route of snack machines, let’s say, and you’re going to put thousands of them all over the country or all over the city that you live in. Well you’re going to track the results from each individual machine by its location, by the prices that – the things that are for sale in that machine, what they go for – and by tracking all that you’re going to treat each machine like it’s its own little business, which you would if you were in the vending machine business. Well that’s how you need to think of each keyword.

Every keyword is essentially different. The psychology that goes in with the overall math - that kind of balances out with the statistics involved with all the people that search for a specific keyword – the behavior and the results that come from each individual keyword will be completely different from other keywords. So they’re all going to have unique results, as far as how high they convert in sales, if they don’t get any sales at all, if they get a lot of clicks, if they don’t get many clicks. So every keyword is different, and every keyword needs to be treated like its own business, because you’ll find a few keywords for your business and your market that will produce the bulk of the profits for you.

It’s kind of like that 80/20 Rule on steroids: you may find that some keywords create 90something-% of the actual dollars that you produce and sales from advertising with Google. So always keep that in mind that each keyword needs to be treated like its own business. That’s very, very important.

You’re going to want to use exact phrase matching. When I started teaching some of my Google AdWords techniques in the first version of the Traffic Secrets course, and in a workshop I did, with some other information that I was sharing (over four years ago, now), I was very, very adamant about getting people to use exactly phrase match. In 238

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other words, you’re going to just have ads show up – you just want ads to appear in Google only when someone types in a specific phrase, and only that specific phrase.

Now when I was telling people that the bulk of your focus needs to be on this, so many other AdWords teachers and other people that were experts with Google AdWords, a lot of them kind of laughed at me, almost, or were kind of – almost like saying that I was giving bad advice to people by telling people to go exact match, that you could do a broad match, like you could put in, like, ‘gardening tools’, and then your ad would show up for every variation that has gardening tools in it. Well it’s kind of funny that now, after a few years, everyone’s on the exact match bandwagon. And if you really think about it, as far as why that reason is, you’ll come down to the essence of what AdWords is about now, about that specific keyword or small group of keywords that are related, the right ad for just those keywords, and the right landing page, it has to be specific and exact.

Now in the master plan and in the documents and how-to information for this overall course there are going to be times when you want to do broad match to discover some new keywords. But ultimately you’re going to be taking your keywords and moving them into exact match groups and campaigns to maximize the amount of traffic, to maximize the amount of money that you make from Google AdWords.

So when all else fails, use exact match; only have an ad show when someone types in an exact keyword phrase, with no other words, with nothing else with it, not in a different order, the exact phrase, like ‘discount gardening tools’. Only when someone types in exactly that, because, as I already mentioned, due to the psychology, and just the way it is, when people type in certain keyword phrases, they have a different mindset when they type in a similar keyword phrase with one word added to it, for example, and so on and so forth. So we’ve got to use exact match.

Something else that I need to just throw out here, which is kind of another argument of sorts in the AdWords and has been for a very long time: a lot of people like to teach that Google AdWords’ success really just comes down to generating the maximum amount of traffic for the cheapest cost - so pretty much the focus being on price-per-click. So if you could use the minimum bids and still get a good amount of traffic, that that’s always the way to go when using AdWords.

Well this thinking is completely false. It’s not about how much money you pay-per-click; it’s about how much profit a specific campaign makes you. Because – I’ll give you an example: let’s see – we’ll keep using this little ‘gardening tools’ example that we’ve been using. Let’s say that you could get the number one position in the Google AdWords placement, so your ad shows up first in the paid listings, when someone searches for ‘gardening tools’. If you’re willing to pay $1.00 per click, and because you are willing to pay $1.00 per click you are going to get the bulk of the traffic by being in that No. 1 Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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position, let’s say it’s 1,000 clicks a day. Now you could get traffic and have your ad run when someone searches for ‘gardening tools’ by only paying $.05 per click, but because of the competition for that traffic you may only get five or ten visitors a day.

Now, with all things created equal, if that traffic of being in the No. 1 position, or being in the No. 100th positions where your ad will show up, if all that traffic converts the same – let’s say it takes one out of 100 visitors before one person will buy a gardening tool from a gardening tool store – if all that’s created equal, then the conversion value is equal whether we pay $1.00 per click, or whether we pay $.05 per click. The traffic we produce converts just the same. And so, most people’s thinking is, “Well, I definitely only want to pay $.05 because it will be more profitable”. While that’s true, there’s something very important that’s being missed: the important thing that’s being missed is the premium that it’s worth paying to get the volume. Although you can get traffic for less if you bid less, by bidding a lot more (if you can still make the equation work to produce profit) it’s worth it to pay to get the heavy volume, because at $.05 per click maybe you’ll make one sale a day, and, Ok, it’s going to make a little more profit, but if you pay $1.00 a click, maybe you’ll make 100 sales a day, with less profit per click because of the cost, but you’ll net profit will be more.

So don’t think about lowest cost possible – think about most profit possible on a day-today basis. So I hope I didn’t confuse you there too much, but so many people get away from the fact that it’s really about the net total that you make per day, when it’s all said and done, not about how profitable traffic is on a lower-volume basis by paying the least per-click and maximizing profits. You’re willing to make less profit per-click if you can get more sales and pay for the volume, so keep that in mind.

The other thing to keep in mind is, just as a rule of thumb: as Google suggests certain bid costs, bid prices to start your campaigns at, pretty much just go with 50% of whatever they suggest. If they say the suggested click-bid for you for this campaign is $0.75, then just take about a half that and put that in as your start amount. Don’t go too low – you don’t have to go maximum price: start out with about 50% of the price they give you.

The other thing to keep in mind is you’re going to have to carefully track all your campaigns down to the keyword level, and you’re going to have to track your conversions. Now the way you can do this is simple; we’ve been talking about Google AdWords – I’m sorry Google Analytics – the free traffic service for tracking where your traffic is coming from. So you’ll want to have a Google Analytics account, and you’ll want to combine that with their conversion tools, where you can put a little piece of code on, like the thank-you pages for an opt-in form, or the thank-you page when someone actually orders one of your products, and you’ll want to be tracking conversions for each of your keyword campaigns.

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So the way you’ll do that is simply by using analytics and their conversation tools, and of course the resources section will put a link to all of this stuff to where you can find tutorials and how to actually set all that up. But you’ll want to make sure that you do that, because it’s very important in the AdWords process that in order to constantly test – to run split tests between ads to see which ad will perform better, where you can lower your costs and maximize your profit, as well as to see which ones are converting the most.

Now when you’re running tests to try to find out which one of your keywords is actually going to convert the best, a lot of times it’s not efficient to only track conversations based on sale. Maybe you sell something, where it takes a lot of visitors before a sale is made.

And if that’s the case, and you’re trying to figure out which groups of you keywords, which types of keywords are going to create conversions, there’s a little secret that you can use – now it’s not always 100% scientific, but I find that it is, the majority of the time, and instead of basing the conversion process on people that order, you can base it on ‘opt-ins’. I find that the majority – this isn’t always the case, but most of the time it has been for me: if users are going to convert into an opt-in, such as to subscribe for more information if it’s related to that keyword, of course, and to what it is that you do, users that will opt-in and convert are much more likely to end up converting than eventually to become buyers. If users aren’t willing to opt-in for more information or for a report related to the business or the solution, then they’re probably not going to convert, or they’ll convert at a much lower level.

So when you’re tracking and testing campaigns to see which ones will convert more than others, oftentimes you can use opt-ins as a conversion metric, to determine which keywords are more valuable – if doing it by making orders and sales doesn’t work out for you, in other words if it’s taking too much traffic to figure that out. So you can substitute an opt-in process for something for sale to get a gauge on the quality of traffic that’s coming from certain keywords.

And last but not least, you need to know upfront here in this overview there basically are three networks within Google’s AdWords’ system: Google itself, which is kind of the default – people searching Google – your ad’s going to get displayed; the other one is just called Search – it’s pretty much their search partner. So if someone searches on Ask.com, or some of these other search engines, your ad will show up there as well.

Now you can turn that on and off, we’re going to talk more about that, but you need to realize these three components are separate, and all traffic is not created equal: it’s different. So a lot of the things that you’re going to see in this CD, and that you’re going to be told for this course, is really tracking things down to this granular level of what’s different and what’s unique – to find out how to maximize the traffic and maximize your profit.

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So the big, kind of top-down three of how it all starts, is these types of networks: Google, their search partners, and then what’s their content network, where people are running AdSense ads on their pages – where they can sign up as a publisher in Google’s program, they can get some code and put it on their pages, and when someone goes to one of their pages it loads these ads from Google’s system. Well those are content network ads. And of course, any testing that we do in the system we’re going to want to separate these.

Now, you can separate the Google search stuff from the content network, but you can’t separate Google from their search partners. However, you can create a campaign for a certain keyword only with Google, and then create a similar campaign that’s Google plus the search networks, and kind of get some kind of metrics to go by from that level. But think about this as three different search networks, or three different areas where this traffic is coming from and it will all be valued differently.

CD 8 - Lesson 2: Competitive Research During so much of this course we’ve come back to again and again this principle of piggy-backing: letting others put in the hard work, letting others make the investment, letting others put in the effort to figure things out, and then letting us just open our eyes and look and see what people are doing and kind of getting a shortcut to success so we don’t have to do all those things ourselves.

Well Google AdWords is no exception. You can come to Google, simply type in the keyword phrase for one of your keywords, and just look at the AdWords ads. Look at how the ads are structured. Look at what the headlines say. Look at how the formatting is. Look at what they’re putting in their ads. Look at what the ads say, period. Look at the URLs and kind of how they’re structured. Just look at your competitors for your keyword phrases and you can figure out what makes an effective ad, and what makes an ad that people are clicking on for a specific keyword.

That’s where you want to start. Look what your competitors are doing, print out several pages of the Google AdWords ads, and then try to formulate your own ads by using theirs as a template or a starting point. And, of course, you can click on their ads and see what kind of landing pages you end up going to and how their structured. And, of course, they know how Google AdWords system works, they know that to lower their costs they need a good landing page, so check everything out that they’re doing.

Of course, some people are probably making mistakes and paying too much money, but if you do enough research and enough monitoring of your competitors, you’ll find people that are doing it right and have kind of figured it out, and then you can just take it from there and go one step further for yourself.

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But you need to be monitoring your competitors’ AdWords ads on a regular basis if you’re going to make the maximum amount of money from each keyword, and treat each keyword like its own little business, you’ve got to protect its turf, so to speak, and see who’s out there actively advertising when people type in that keyword or phrase. And the way you do that is simply by monitoring your competitors.

See how the ads change over time: print them out once a week, once a month, keep tabs on who’s coming in that’s brand new that’s buying that traffic, who’s been around for a long time, and just take it from there. But let them shortcut your success by showing you what kind of ads are working, which ones are formatted properly, which ones are written in the way that they’re getting the most attention and probably the most sales, and then just take it from there. But you want to be regularly monitoring your competitors in order to make the most money possible from Google AdWords.

CD 8 - Lesson 3: Writing Effective Ads Writing effective ads, now this can make or break your success with the Google AdWords system. The first thing you need to think about when you're creating your ads is what are they thinking? In other words, the person that's typing in the keyword phrase that your ad is going to show for, try to get in their head, what are they thinking when they're searching for that phrase? You know, what's their situation, what problem are they looking for a solution to or just what are they thinking about? What are all the different things that that person is thinking about? So spend some time doing some brainstorming, that's a good action step for you when you go to creat your ads. Think about all the different factors that they may be thinking about which led them to do that search and then, of course, what's going to be going through their minds, what their thought process is when maybe they're evaluating different ads or looking at the search results, what do you think they're looking for, you know, what do they hope to find, and then hopefully you can craft your ad to speak directly to them.

The key with Goggle AdWords ads is to make every word count. You know, you've got your headline, that top line that becomes clickable, then you've got the body, those two lines in the body and then, of course, an additional line, which most people completely overlook, which is the URL where you can kind of share the Web site address. You need to make every single word count on all four of those lines, it's very, very important.

One trick that you could use to get more attention to get your ads noticed more, because that's a big part of it, first you've got to get attention, then you've got to get people interested in your ad and then you got to get them to click, and all those things work together to raise your click-through rate, which will lower your cost within Google system with how it works. So one of these things you can do is you should capitalize the first letter of each word. Don't capitalize all the letters in a word, you're not allowed to do that, but you can capitalize the first letter in each word. So if you say, "gardening Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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tools for you," you know, if that's a sentence, the G in gardening is capitalized, the T in tools, the F in for, the Y in you, you get the picture. So capitalize the first letter in each word, and of course, you can do a split test with, you know, different capitalization, without capitalizing the first letter, but in most cases, I'll just save you the time, it'll almost always perform better if you capitalize the first letter of each word.

Include the keyword as much as possible. This is kind of common sense, but you just need to know it. So in your title, if someone's searching gardening tools, include gardening tools in that headline. Obviously, if someone's searching for a five- or sixword phrase, a long tail phrase that you're trying to run ad for, you can't include all those words in your ad, in your headline or in any other part of the ad, but just get to the core of the keyword phrase. So anything to do with gardening tools, use gardening tools as much as you can, not only in the clickable headline but also in the body and then, of course, also in the URL. All of these things lead to better click-through rate and better conversion.

Use the URL space wisely, this is that bottom line. You don't need to include the www, it's not a requirement, so get rid of it because it's taking up space. But you'll want to use a domain name ideally that contains the keywords that you're trying to target with the ad, as well as after you show the domain name and you can do a forward slash and then show like the name of the page, whether it's a folder or it's a .html page, you can pretty much leave off the .html because it's just going to take up space. But do forward slash and then like the name of a folder, and have that either have to do with the call to action, you know, like say, "Free Report," or "Special Deal," or "Get Discount," or something along those lines, or use it to put more of the keyword phrase in that extension part of the URL. But most people don't take full advantage of the URL space, they just put like their domain name there and that's it. Well, that's a big part of the ad that's going to get noticed, so you've got to make it work.

Use special characters and numbers. I started teaching this several years ago and it still works to this day. Typically, if you can turn your headline into a question or use a question somewhere in the body of the ad, it can improve attention and it can improve response. So it increases the amount of attention that it gets because that little question mark kind of stands out. So, you know, if the headline is like, "Need Gardening Tools?" those types of things, try to think of different questions. You know, anytime you can put in a dollar sign, a dollar sign kind of stands out, or an ampersand, you know, like the 'n sign that you'd use between two different words. Of course, you've got to be careful, you can't just use special characters for the sake of using special characters, Google won't allow it, but anywhere you can legitimately use them, use them because it'll make your ad stand out against all the other competing ads. And anytime you can use numbers or specifics within the ad, like say, you know, "Thirty-Two Garden Tools for You," or something along those lines where you're using a specific number, that can get attention and it can increase the importance of the ad, it can look more specific and really look 244

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more like the specific solution to people than it just will be if it's generic. So specifics are better, and when it comes to making every word count, it needs to be concise, but don't make it concise and generic, try to make it specific and sometimes you can do that by using numbers.

Use negative qualifiers if you need to. A negative qualifier is like putting the price in an ad, you know, like if you're advertising gardening tools or a specific type of gardening tool and then in the ad itself you could say, you know, "Only $97.00." Well, when people see that, if they're not willing to spend $97.00, they're probably not going to click on the ad. It doesn't always work, but it is one way to cut down on kind of worthless clicks.

Now, the deal with negative qualifiers, you know, if you put like, "For Women Only," or, you know, "For First Time Home Buyers Only," those are all types of negative qualifiers where you're putting things in the ad that will limit the audience that's looking at the ad.

But something I need to point out is that with Google AdWords, you're battling the process of trying to get the maximum click-through rate for your ad that will lower your click cost that Google makes you pay, as well as maximizing your conversion. So if you use negative qualifiers, it's going to lower click-through rate because it's going to weed out certain people that actually read the ad and notice they don't qualify and it's not for them. So you're going to have to balance that. If you're getting tons and tons of clicks from a specific keyword, you're getting the lowest possible price for it, you're getting some decent conversions but you just feel like a lot of the clicks are wasted then try to put in a negative qualifier and test it and see if it will at least, you know, raise your conversion. It's going to lower your click-through rate, but see if it keeps your clickthrough rate at a high enough level that will qualify you to get the lowest prices in Google's system.

And of course, you want to include a call to action or a specific result in the ad where you're saying, you know, "Take Advantage of the Discount," or "Get the Free Report," you know, "Order Now, Get the Super-Duper Gardening Hoe," whatever it is that you're talking about in the ad, you know, "Get it Today," you want to reference something in the ad that refers to something that's predictable, something that's going to happen when they click the ad. Either they're going to take advantage of a special or some kind of giveaway, and, by the way, don't promote a giveaway if it's not truly a giveaway, that's against Google's rules and they'll kind of suspend your ads if they find that you're kind of almost like false advertising there, not telling the truth, where you say, "Free such and such," and then they go there and there's all these things they have to qualify to get the free product, so you gotta be truthful in your advertising. But try to include some kind of specific result, something they're gonna get, something that's gonna happen when they go to the site, and it can really increase the rate at which people click, as well as increase the rate at which people convert.

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CD 8 - Lesson 4: Keyword Domains Now I already talked about buydomains.com when we were in the search optimization and content-factoring part of this whole process. Talking about how it’s worth it to invest in a quality domain name that’s related to your market that can help you with search engine optimization, just conversion overall.

Well you’ll also want to consider actually investing in a good domain name when it comes to maximizing the money you make from Google AdWords. Most people don’t even think of this, and don’t even realize this. The URL can make a big difference when it comes to Google AdWords ads. The website address that shows up on the bottom line of the ad itself can make a difference in click-through rate, and of course ultimately in conversion.

Well if you’re going to treat each keyword phrase as a separate business, which you should, and when you start finding that certain keywords in your market – in your industry – can actually generate a lot of traffic and a lot of sales. From one keyword phrase there are companies out there generating $100,000.00 a month from a single keyword phrase, because of either traffic it gets and/or just how much sales it produces because it’s so targeted.

Well depending on your business, of course, and your budget, of course, and a lot of other factors, you may want to consider buying a really good domain name that has the keywords in it, for keywords that generate a lot of income. So, for example, ‘gardening tools’ (sticking with that basic example) – if we found that that keyword phrase was really, really valuable for our gardening business, and could make a lot of sales, then we’d want to think about getting a domain name specific for that keyword phrase, if we weren’t already using one.

So if we were just using, like, Gardening World.com, let’s say, as our main company site, we may want to actually get a domain name that has ‘gardening tools’ in it specifically.

For example, here’s “Gardening Tools Now.com”. We may find that that actually would convert higher than just saying, like, “Gardening World / Tools”, or something. And I have seen this, in my own scientific tests, proved to be true that sometimes if you have a keyword-related domain (where the keywords are in the domain itself) you can get a higher click-rate, and ultimately more traffic and sales, than if you use one that doesn’t have the keyword phrases in it – if it’s just some kind of brand.

So it’s something you want to think about. Of course it all depends on your industry and your market, but if there are specific keywords that can generate a lot of traffic and a lot of sales, it may be worth it for you to invest in getting a really good domain name related to that keyword phrase, if it can increase your results. So consider that, and then, of course, you’ll want to test that.

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CD 8 - Lesson 5: Landing Pages Great landing pages. Ok, in order to get the lowest cost possible per-click, and for the traffic that we generate from Google AdWords, we’re going to need to send traffic from our ads to a great landing page. (Great, of course, according to Google and however they qualify it or quantify it or score it). Now the good news is, Google will pretty much tell you what it takes to make a great landing page, and of course we’ll link to that information in the resources section for this CD. There are a lot of things that kind of make up their mysterious formula for how their system rates, whether a landing page is good or not. And that’s what you need to understand, and how to kind of optimize your landing pages, to get them to score really well with Google according to these things that they won’t tell you.

You need to use good SEO basics. The title page to your landing page – you should start it with your keyword phrase. You should also use meta-tags like we’ve already gone over for Search Engine Optimization such as for meta-keywords, and an accurate metadescription. Also if you put images on your landing page (and you should wherever possible), name the images as the file name that contains the keyword phrase. All of these things work together to help create what Google sees as a high-quality landing page.

You need to have outgoing links to other pages within your site, as well as to what I call the Admin pages, like ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, ‘Privacy Policy’, and so on. You need to have all those on your landing page. One of the best places to put it is just in the footer, like in a little footer menu. But you need to have outgoing links.

You need to have original content on your landing page. Don’t just put one or two sentences and try to sell someone from just that small amount of content. Use a couple paragraphs, if possible, or more, of original content that’s talking about whatever it is that you’re promoting with this landing page. Of course, you want to include uses of your keyword phrase that you’re creating this add for in the first place within AdWords, as well as the LSI keywords that you’ve learned how to do in the whole search engine optimization process.

Your landing page should only focus on a specific keyword, or a small, tightly-related group of keywords. If you’re going to set up Google AdWords ads for ‘gardening tools’, don’t also send traffic from ads for, let’s say, ‘buying fertilizer’. Not only create separate ads, but don’t send that traffic to the same landing page, because it’s not going to score as well.

So if it’s about discount gardening tools, that landing page needs to be only about discount gardening tools, and be optimized for that specifically. Again, as we talked Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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about, it’s going to take more work, but if you put in the work, you’re going to get lower cost for your traffic, as well as higher converting traffic.

So you’re landing page needs to be created to only focus on a specific keyword. If you haven’t realized it by now, you’re going to be setting up a lot of different landing pages for all these different campaigns, and there are different ways to do that and make it easy to kind of repeat a basic template, and then fill in the blanks. And of course we’ll link to some of those resources in the Resources section, and you can handle that anyways if you just use the CMS system like WordPress, but you’re going to need separate landing pages, one for either each keyword, or each tightly-niched group of keywords that are really related to each other.

If you’re going to do an opt-in form to try to get people to opt-in to an e-mail list, put the form lower on the page, rather than higher on the page. When Google sees opt-in forms, like, front-and-center, like right towards the top of the page (because they can see it in the code in the html) they don’t like it. Tests have shown that this will score a landing page pretty low. So if all else fails in your testing, move the opt-in form lower on the page if you can, without affecting your conversions and your goals too much, and that should help with the scoring for that individual page.

And last, but not least, you just simply want to improve the quality score of your landing page until you can get it to be great, if possible. When you can make it great, you’ll get the lowest cost-per-click possible within the AdWords systems, and that will maximize, of course, your traffic according to your budget, and ultimately the amount of money that you make. So constantly improve your landing page until you can get it to be great.

And now again, since we’re treating every keyword like a separate business, when you find the keyword groups and phrases that do generate traffic that converts, it’s going to be worth it to put in the time to make the best landing page you can for that specific keyword for us to maximize the amount of traffic, and the amount of money that we make from it.

So just don’t get kind of down about “Oh I don’t want to put all this work to create all these different landing pages”, our focus is going to be on the highest-converting keywords, and at least making those maximize the profits we generate, as far as the traffic that we generate from that keyword. So we constantly want to improve our landing pages for our highest-converting keywords, until we can get them to become great.

CD 8 - Lesson 6: Quality Scores By now we’ve already gone over how to use the keyword within Google AdWords to find keywords. I showed you how to use it to find LSI keywords and other suggested keyword phrases. But when you come in here under “How would you like to generate 248

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keyword ideas”, that top one is “By descriptive words or phrases”, that’s what we use to find the LSI keywords, and the other related keywords. But notice the next one down, which we briefly talked about before: “Website Content”. If you have that selected, and you enter the URL of your landing page, it will come up and give you a bunch of suggested keywords related to the landing page.

Well until you see it show you, as a suggestion, the keyword phrase that you’re targeting for your AdWords ad, you’re probably not going to get a high-quality score. So you want to tweak that landing page until you get it to show up as one of the keyword ideas – that’s how you know you’re on your way to getting a high-quality landing page.

The other place to keep track of, of course, the quality score itself, is to go within a campaign, then go within the ad group, and then when you’re looking at the data for the ad group (by the way, this is a little campaign that my father’s running for a business that he has. My dad’s an engineer and he has invented several different putter designs for golf, and so he sells his own putter that he created. So these are some of the keywords that he uses) this “Customize Columns” link here – you can click this, and it’s a dropdown, and in here it’ll say “Show Quality Score”. Right now it says “High-quality score” because we’re already showing it right here. But by default you’ll have to click “Show quality score” and then you’ll click “Done”, and then you’ll start to see it like this. And so it will show you the value of your quality score itself (or what your quality score is, I should say), and then it will typically say what your minimum bid can be.

So you want to get this to show “Great” as the quality score for all your different keyword entries, and of course, the majority of this has to do with your landing page quality. So work on improving your landing page, until you can get this quality score to show for “Great”. You can’t always do it for every single keyword, but do your best, and if you can you’ll get the lowest cost-per-click for those keywords.

CD 8 - Lesson 7: Google Search In the Overview for this CD, I talked about there were basically three networks within AdWords’ systems: Google Search, their search partners, and then the content network.

Now any time you run a campaign or test a keyword, you want to be doing it separately in each of these.

And here’s how it works: when you set up your campaign it will ask you questions, but you could always come in to “Edit campaign settings” and you’ll see this right here: “Networks – Show my ads On”. Google searches the top one, and that’s where you want to start all tests. Only have this one checked, so your ads are only showing up when someone searches within Google itself, and your ads will show up next to the normal organic results.

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Then the next one is “Search network”. You can set up a separate campaign for those keywords and have “Search network” checked, and so now your ads are showing on Google itself, and the search network. Now unfortunately you can’t only show the search network and not Google, but you can still set up a separate campaign and try to gauge it to see if it’s even worth it.

Now most of the traffic that you’re going to receive, and the best results that you’ll receive, will come from Google search, not from their search network. The search network is typically lower-quality traffic. So it’s not going to convert as well. You’ll still want to test it for your campaign, and all your little campaigns. But just know going in that traditionally Google search, by itself, will be the highest converting traffic that you can get.

But with any campaign that you do – any test that you do, you’ll always want to start with only having “Google search” checked, because that’s very, very important. So many people have everything checked, and just say, “I just want max traffic”, and the beauty of the Google AdWords system is that you can test and manage campaigns by using all these specific settings, and separate campaigns by different setting groups, so your results aren’t getting all kind of mashed together, and confused or lost, because you’ll find that specific settings, when they’re on or when they’re off, will produce profitable traffic.

And then you’ll see the other side of that: where specific setting, on or off, will lose you money.

So the beauty of the AdWords system of being in that much control allows you to control your traffic and, more importantly, you profit. So always keep that in mind: that you need to be testing individual campaigns by all these separate settings, and it all starts with the Google Search setting set by itself.

CD 8 - Lesson 8: Content Network We just talked about how important it is that you use the Google Search network separately for campaigns, than from their search network partners, and of course from their content network. But the Content Network part of Google AdWords is incredibly valuable, and you may find that it’s a hidden gem that produces more traffic, and more sales for your business, than Google Search.

Most people don’t realize that. A little people teaching Google AdWords will say, “Oh, turn off Google Content Network and don’t use it”. Well that’s kind of crazy because in many markets Content Network works really well – you just have to know how to do it.

So after you’ve exhausted the testing process for using your main keywords and finding which ones convert, in the Google search process, you want to move and run separate tests just for those keywords within the Content Network. So, when you edit your setting 250

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you can do this – it will ask you those questions that you’ll answer when you go to set up a new campaign, but when you come under your Edit Campaign settings you’ll see it again – you’ll see again this Networks – “Show my ads” on. You’ll just want this one checked right here (whoops) – Content Network. You’ll have that set, and that’s where your ads will show up kind of as AdSense ads on people’s websites that are in their AdSense program.

Now it says “Let me set separate prices for content clicks”. You don’t really need to worry about this because you’re not going to be running it along with Google Search. If you’re running it together you can set different bids, but you really don’t need to worry about it, because you’re going to set up a campaign that’s just on the Content Network.

Now the power in running ads on the Content Network is that you can actually track your traffic, and your conversions, by individual website within the Content Network. There are some paid services – we’ll link to those in the Resources section – as well as some good data that Google will give you themselves that you can use to figure out which individual sites in the Content Network are sending you profitable, and which ones aren’t.

And then Google allows you to actually exclude certain sites that you don’t want your ads to show up on when you promote, or when you use, the Content Network (when you promote your ads across the Content Network). So, in your testing, and in part of the master plan for you using AdWords that you’re going to discover, is that you’re going to test the Content Network for your main keywords that produce sales for your business (of course, you’ll discover those first through just doing them and testing them with Google Search). But then when you’re testing Content Network, you’ll kind of ferret out, if you will, and find all the individual partner sites within the Content Network that are sending profitable traffic, and then you’re going to hone in and only run ads on those and exclude all the other ones.

It’s incredibly powerful. Then, of course, as a bonus tip, you can go to those sites individually and try to buy advertising directly from those sites outside of Google AdWords. In many cases, because they’re only getting a small share of the click-costs within the AdSense process, you can pay them more than they’re getting from Google, and get traffic from them for less than you’d pay through Google.

So, there’s just a number of things that you can do once you figure out which sites are profitable, and one of the best strategies is to just go to them directly, and try to advertise on their site. So if you find a site on the Content Network that’s sending you tons of traffic and tons of sales, you’ll want to try to go to them directly and do an ad deal directly with them outside of Google, because it will save you money, it will make that website owner more money, and you’ll make more profit as a result.

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And that’s also another opportunity to maybe look at buying someone’s website – if you find that they’re sending a lot of sales this way through this Content Network. So it opens up that possibility as well. But even beyond just buying someone’s site, just go to them directly and try to buy the ads directly, and you can typically save quite a bit on the ad costs you’d pay through Google, rather than direct to that site.

So it’s incredibly for you to run ads separately through the Content Network.

CD 8 - Lesson 9: Language & Location And if that’s not enough there are even more-powerful control features within AdWords.

We can have your ads show only to a specific language audience. So you can see right here (this is all under the campaigns settings again): “Target Audience – Languages”. So you could say, “I only want my ad to show for people who speak German, or at least they’re coming from an area that’s known to speak German”. This can be incredibly powerful, depending, of course, on your business and what markets that you sell to.

So you can actually set up specific campaigns for the same keywords for a specific language. So you can have two separate campaigns: one for English speakers, one for German speakers. And then, of course, you could target it all the way down to landing page and everything else for that specific target audience: incredibly powerful!

And something else that it’s incredibly powerful is the “Location” feature of AdWords. If you’re trying to market any kind of regional business, that maybe it’s a local store or local business of any kind, or if it has to do with a certain state, or a certain country, then you’ll want to use the location target. And you’ll want to use it anyways, depending on your business, so you’re not running your ad to everyone in the world.

I recommend starting with the U.S., the UK, Australia, and even just that, to start with, and then expanding throughout Europe for English-speaking companies selling English and services related to English speakers. So I recommend starting with that, rather than the whole world. But it’s incredibly powerful what you can control here within the “Locations” setting for Google AdWords. You can actually come into here, and you can set it by zip code, by country, by city, by state – there’s just so much that you can control within Google AdWords.

And you’ll want to take advantage of this control, if you’re going to maximize the amount of profits that you make from using AdWords, because you’re going to find that you may get traffic from, let’s say, people in Mexico, but it never converts. Or you may get traffic from people in the United States that never converts, compared to Canada.

You’ve got to keep an eye on your analytics – you know exactly where your sales and your profits are coming from. You may actually find (and this is a good example for this) 252

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that you can’t turn a profit on the traffic that you generate from people that live in the United States, but that same ad run only to people in Canada creates a profit. Now that’s kind of a vague example, but that kind of stuff happens for certain keywords.

So you want to have location control, and really keep an eye on where your sales, and where your traffic, is coming from at all times, because there are mathematically, statistically, things that you can exclude to maximize profits – and one of them is location.

So you can exclude traffic coming from certain countries, and maximize the amount of profit that you make from buying that traffic. So you’ll want to test by location, as well as by language, that I’ve already pointed out.

CD 8 - Lesson 10: Dayparting By now you’re probably realizing how incredibly powerful the AdWords system is, and how much control it gives you over all these individual settings and factors and demographics and locations and languages, and different types of networks where the ads run, of course. By having that control you can really hone-in on where the profitable traffic comes from, and where the losing traffic comes from, so you can avoid buying the losers, and keep paying for the profitable traffic. It’s just that simple.

Well there’s yet another incredibly powerful feature within AdWords, and it’s called Ad Scheduling, and people also call this Day Parting. Essentially what it is, is under the Campaign settings for any ad group, any campaign that you create, you can click on Ad Scheduling and, by default, your ads are just going to run at all times, all throughout the day. It’s going to take your budget and traffic volumes, and it’s just going to divvy it up amongst all the different times in the day.

So you’re not just getting all your traffic at 4:00 AM, and then your budget’s used up for the day, and then it won’t run your ad again until after midnight the next day. It kind of averages it out, and breaks it up amongst the whole day. Well you can actually come into Ad Scheduling and set the specific timeframes of each day, even based on your time zone (or any other time zone), from when you want your ad to appear.

Now why this is incredibly important is, just what I pointed out about the location stuff: you’ll find that certain country traffic doesn’t convert. It’s not going to make you a profit; it’s not going to make you money. So you’re going to want to exclude your ads from showing in those countries, like in Mexico, or in Canada, or the U.S. – whatever the case is.

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Well here’s what else you’re going to find: you’re going to find that the majority of your sales that come from specific keywords happen at certain times of the day, based on whatever time zone – your own or any other time zone.

Because of that, you’re going to want to take advantage of Ad Scheduling in this process of Day Parting. You’re going to want to have your ads show only during the most profitable times. What you may find is that certain keyword profit, as a whole, isn’t profitable. But if you narrow down when those ads show to only the most profitable times, you may find that you may make it profitable. So you’ll want to come in to this Ad Scheduling part and only schedule your ads to run at certain times.

I find for many different campaigns that I run, for many different types of keywords and different types of business, that when it comes to a U.S.-based business, and of course it’s kind of an English-based business, that traffic that comes from the late hours at night, or the early morning hours, isn’t of the same quality as traffic from the rest of the day.

I find that traffic, after about 11:00 PM Eastern Time, all the way up to 7:00 AM, Eastern Time, is lower-quality traffic and doesn’t convert into sales, as much as traffic that comes during all those other timeframes. So for many of the campaigns I work with, I shut off the ads and don’t have them run at all during those late-night or early-morning hours.

Now this isn’t always the case and you’ll want to be testing this for all your different keyword groups and, of course, all your different keywords. I talked about how you have to look at each individual keyword as a separate business – like that little vending machine. And in order to do that – in order to maximize the money that you make from it – you really need to look at the data from where sales are coming from, and when they happen, and consider scheduling your ads to show only during certain periods of time.

Now you may find that you make sales early in the morning and late at night, and it’s kind of balanced out throughout the day and so that’s Ok. Leave your ads alone and let them run 24 hours a day, which is the default. Don’t have it not show your ads, or don’t have it show your ads only in specific times and not in others. Just have it always show different timeframes.

But if you’re getting most of your orders at only certain parts of the day, you might want to shut off the add from showing in those other parts, and maximize the profits that you make from that ad, and from that keyword.

CD 8 - Lesson 11: Negative Keywords One last thing I want to point out within the Google AdWords system is their setting for “Negative Keywords”.

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Now I’ve already told you that I’ve already told you that the majority of the campaigns that I want you to set up and test are going to be for exact keyword matching. In other words, exact match when someone types in ‘discount gardening tools’, so your ad will only show up when someone types in those three words – not if they type in ‘cheap discount gardening tools’, or anything else, but just that specific phrase in that exact order.

However, when you need to run a campaign that covers a broader groups of keywords, to kind of save you some time and really, hopefully, to ferret out the profitable keywords that you would then move into its own campaign, to do exact match, if you’re going to need to do a broad match like that – to do able to get the most traffic and find some of these individual keyword phrases – you’re going to need to know that you need to use “negative keywords”.

Under the Campaign settings for all the different ad groups that you set up within Google AdWords you’ll find something that says “Add Negative Keywords”. And when you click that you come to a page like this, you can pick the actual campaign, whatever you call it, especially if you call it by a certain keyword, and you can enter in this box “Negative keywords”. Negative keywords are simply words, that if someone types in, the ad doesn’t show for it.

So if you’re running a broad-match campaign say, for example, ‘gardening tools’, you’re going to have that ad show up when someone types in ‘gardening tools’ along with any other text, so if they type ‘cheap gardening tools’ or ‘gardening tools for you’ or any combination of keyword phrase with ‘gardening tools’ in it, the ad would show, in this case, for a broad match.

But you can add in certain keywords, so if someone does type them in, it doesn’t show.

For example, the word “free” is a common negative keyword that people use. So if someone types in ‘free gardening tools’, obviously you don’t want your ad to show because you just sell gardening tools.

So you could put in “free” as your negative keyword and your ad would never show if someone used the word “free” along with any other words that would make up your keyword phrase, and so your ad wouldn’t show for them. A lot of people put in sexrelated too, like “nude” or “naked”, or just the word “sex”, so if someone is using some kind of porn phrase (and unfortunately there are a lot of them being searched all the time, with all kind of strange search strings out there), their ads won’t show as well.

So you could just a little brainstorming and a little homework yourself in your own market, and probably figure out some of these negative keywords to use if it relates to something that you know for sure people in your market look for that has nothing to do

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with your product or service, you’ll want to add that into the negative keywords so your ad doesn’t show and you don’t waste that money. So on and so forth.

But if you have to do a broad-match campaign to try to cover the most area possible, to figure out some of these more profitable individual keywords, then make sure you use the right negative keywords, so you don’t waste having your ads shown to certain keywords and phrases that will be a part of that broad match.

CD 8 - Lesson 12: Review Ok, let’s review. By now you must realize that you have to carefully track and test by each keyword. Treat each keyword like its own individual basis, and if it can’t be done by each specific keyword, then use ad groups of tightly-related keyword phrases. But carefully track, test, tweak it and prove by each keyword or tightly-related group of phrases, because all the different keyword phrases that are searched for related to your business are going to create a wide-range of conversions, a wide-range of prospects and customers, and all the traffic is totally different, and it’s going to convert completely different. So that’s the only way that you can maximize it, is by treating it separately.

To get a great click-through rate, you have got to have a great ad. Start by monitoring your competition to get ideas, and then just simply test: set up new ads, have them rotate, when you have some ads that create higher CTRs and, of course, hopefully maintain the same type of conversion, then you’ll want to start running those ads, and no longer run the original ad. So you constantly want to be testing to get higher and higher clickthrough rates.

Great landing page is critical – it’s a big part of the process for how much Google will charge you per-click, and you want to get that quality score up to “Great”. And you simply do it by using the search engine optimization basics that we have already gone over, as well as all the other things that are related to creating a great landing page.

Google Search, their search partners, and the Content Network within their system, are not created equal. You need to test it separately as much as you can. You can’t separate search partners from Google Search itself, but you can do a separate campaign where you do only Google Search, and then another campaign with Google Search combined with the search partners. And, of course, you can run the Content Network completely separate, find out which sites are generating the profitable traffic, exclude the ones that aren’t, and of course, it’s a good strategy to try to go those sites directly to buy advertising directly from them.

Day Parting can be the difference between success and failure for certain keywords. Find out which parts of the day your conversions are coming from, and if it’s consistent with a certain type of day, don’t run the ad for the other parts.

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Carefully test by location and language. Just like the Day Parting part can be the difference between success and failure, you want to test it and keep tabs on the areas that your conversions are coming from, and then stop showing your ads to the areas that consistently don’t perform.

Monitor those competing ads to improve your success. Keep an eye on your competition at all times to get new ideas, to see how they’ve improved their click-through rates, and hopefully their conversions, and then just again, piggyback on the hard work they’re doing for you.

And last, but not least, you always just want to be testing and trying to improve your results. Do make the most money from AdWords; it takes management on a week-toweek basis. If you don’t want to put in the time to do it, train someone and pay them to do it for you. But you need to manage AdWords on a regular basis. You can’t just set it and forget it, and let it go, because 1) Google is constantly making changes to their system and their prices and how things are scored, and 2) the competition for your keywords in your market will constantly change. You’ll get people that drop out and you’ll have less advertisers sometimes, but more often than that over time you’ll get more and more people competing for the same traffic.

So always be testing and always try to improve, and you’ll be able to maximize the amount of money that you make for the keywords in your market.

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CD 9: Advertising Methods Lesson 1: Overview Advertising methods. Okay, we’ve already gone over Google AdWords and by now you realize how powerful Google AdWords is and how much traffic and sales it could bring your business. Most companies online that are buying traffic and paying for advertising online are only using Google AdWords and some of them are doing millions of dollars in sales in annual sales from just advertising with Google AdWords.

But there are a lot of other advertising methods you can use to drive traffic to your site and some of it’s paid where you have to pay for it and some of it’s free where you get the advertising for free. Now there are a lot of little kinds of methods and sites and tricks and services that can be used to generate free website traffic as well as little areas to buy website traffic. They aren’t going to be covered in this course, at least not on the CDs, so this is the resources section for the advertising method CD here and we’ll keep building links and reviews and comments about a lot of these other little techniques that of course we didn’t have time to fit in to the course because there’s just so many of them.

So go there and you’ll already see some and we’ll continue to add them as other people discover them. But there are a lot of little classified sites and all kinds of little freebie advertising forums and things of that nature that are out there but we’ve got to go back to the very, very beginning where we started with all this and the foundation of talking about the 80-20 rule and those kind of concepts.

The thing you have to keep in mind with all these little tricks is, and it’s one of the biggest mistakes I see internet marketers make. They get so distracted by all these little methods that people are talking about that are working for driving traffic and they go and spend hours of their time trying to get it to work and sometimes it even does work and they’re generating a few visitors here and there.

But they don’t realize if they calculated the return for those visitors in direct correlation to how much time it took them to create, you know, to actually produce that traffic, they don’t realize that they’re essentially trading their time for 25 cents an hour or some really low cost. So the key methods that are taught on the course and I’m going over on these CDs are the ones that will account for 99% of your results and be the most profitable.

And although there are some others that you may want to tweak and test as they may work better for your market than for other markets, I just want you to keep in mind that if you just do everything that’s being taught on these CDs, that’s plenty for building a multimillion dollar revenue business and so don’t spend too much time on some of these other little methods although we’ll compile some links for them.

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So when it comes to other advertising methods there are many methods available online that we’re going to go over in this CD, and the key to it is you have to track all your traffic sources separately. Just like you’re going to be tracking all your key word traffic separately, you’ve got to track all traffic sources separately otherwise you won’t know what’s making money and what’s losing money. So it just goes without saying.

But as far as where you can drive traffic from and what traffic you should be buying, the answer’s always the same, wherever you can buy it profitably. Of course it doesn’t take too much of your time to manage. That’s the other kind of category out there, like I already referred to some of these free methods and other services that are available out there.

So track everything separately and just be on the lookout to find new advertising avenues that you can test and hopefully turn a profit with and then you can just keep advertising with them on a regular basis. Of course you’re going to want to be monitoring all this activity on a regular basis anytime you’re buying traffic. But there are many methods; you just have to track them separately.

Pay per click search engines, there’s a ton outside of Google AdWords. They don’t all work exactly like Google AdWords but they’re all very similar. They use a similar model of you bid on different key words that you want your ads to show up for and based on the demand at any given time is how much that key word is going to cost per click.

Same thing as AdWords. You want to track these individually, you want to do kind of an exact match kind of situation where it’s just as someone types in that exact key word in that exact order and that’s it. Well, there are a lot of pay per click searches. You’ll find a list of them in the resources section. The big ones, like Yahoo has a pay per click program, MSN has their own, I believe Ask.com still has one. Last time I tested it a couple years ago it didn’t produce much results so I haven’t tested it again but they may have improved it or have some new program on a pay per click sponsor basis that is.

But there are hundreds of other pay per click search engines. The only problem is again 80 20 years olds, more like 99-1 rule, most of those pay per click searches don’t get enough traffic to even make it worth it. But the top four or five or six or so you’ll want to test at least with your main key words that are converting well and producing cash for you that you’ve proven to work after testing in AdWords first.

So some of your best key words that you’ve tested in AdWords, even ones that you can’t afford to keep running in AdWords because they’re too expensive, the ones that produce the biggest results, test those first in these other search engines because it won’t take you that much time. So test those and these other pay per click search engines.

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Buy media. There’s actually more media traffic. When you say media it’s just traffic period, like people going to a website or visiting a news site or a blog or anything on the internet. There’s more actual traffic on the internet, page views and visits happening than there are searches being done in the search engines, and you can buy that traffic in a number of ways.

I’m sure you’ve noticed every site you go to, all the majors, you’re seeing different sized banner ads and some of them are kind of video with the sound off, you can turn them on and play, all different kinds of buttons and little sponsor pieces of content, all kinds of ads that you see all over the internet. Well most of those fall within this whole buying media thing and different types of media. Banner ads and skyscraper ads are called these kind of long-narrow vertical ads. They come in different formats.

So they come in different pricing formats as well. So CPM is kind of the golden standard of internet advertising. It stands for cost per thousand, and it’s not CPT which you’d say “I thought you said it was CPM.” It is CPM but it’s an old printing industry term. I think the M is Latin or something. So that’s why they use that. But anyways, cost per thousand.

So what it means is if you’re buying banner ads at the top of a website or a network of websites that if the CPM price is $5.00 that means you’re going to be paying $5.00 per every 1,000 times that that banner ad is displayed to visitors.

And sometimes it’s unique visitors so they’ll cookie it or set it up in a way where it doesn’t count unless it’s unique visitors, but you’ll have to check on that any time you’re going to buy this type of advertising. So it’s paying a price per impression, the number of times the ad shows. It has nothing to do with how many people click. So you’re paying just for how many times it shows.

Now you can find some good CPM deals through some of the larger networks that I’ll go over on this CD, of course listed in the resources section. Sometimes you can find CPMs for 75 cents or a dollar, what they call run-of-network where it’s kind of targeted and it’s across all their different sites that they manage advertising for. And sometimes you can get some good deals but it’s a trade-off there.

By going cheaper you kind of give up targeting and as we’ve already covered and kind of hammered home during this whole course, the more targeted the traffic is of course the higher it converts and the higher it’s worth. So it’s a trade-off. You might get higher CPM but it may not convert as much. So CPM rates that are five times higher that convert 10 times higher are a better deal than if it’s cheaper so keep that in mind.

CPC, cost per click, just like pay per click and AdWords. Some people will sell you banner ad impressions across a whole bunch of sites and you’re only paying each time someone’s clicking on your banner ad. The other one that’s getting more and more popular is CPA or cost per acquisition.

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Basically this is lead generation, like getting someone to fill out a form for more information, listing their name and their address and their zip code and their telephone number. You know, it changes as far as what the form requirements are and how much the leads cost. Leads can be anywhere from 50 cents to $100.00 or more depending on the industry. But you want to look in to CPA and I’ll talk about some CPA networks on this CD and of course link to them in the resource section.

But the CPA thing is kind of interesting because it’s kind of becoming a popular way to generate affiliate commissions because you can become a publisher in most of these CPA networks and be on the other side of the process where you’re hosting these forms and these ads to try to get people to fill them out, then the network pays you for each lead you generate because they’re selling it to someone else.

So they may pay you $3.00 every time someone fills out a certain form and then they may be selling it to the advertiser for $6.00. The whole thing about the CPA networks is you want to learn how to play both sides of the game as I call it. You want to be a buyer as well as someone who makes money by running the ads. That will give you a lot of leverage if you test that way because then as you drive traffic from other places you can subsidize that traffic by making the money by running some of these forms and or you will be able to buy some of that form generated, lead generation traffic by working with that company as an affiliate and sometimes you get better prices.

But play both sides in a lot of these situations if you have traffic you can get paid for running the ads. Of course the other side is where we’re talking about buying the traffic.

But those are the three main models and when you do deals with some of these big networks that I’m going to talk about, the thing you need to keep in mind is everything’s negotiable.

Always try to get it for less, try to get them to give you a really, really low deal, a lot lower than what they’re quoting you, and say you want to test out the traffic, you want to test out the media buy, then if it’s profitable for you then you will roll out and spend more money with them. And most of them will be willing to work with you, so it’s worth paying a lower rate and they’ll give you a lower rate to hopefully prove themselves that the traffic is good so you’ll then buy 10 times as much or more and even buy it on a regular basis.

So the whole reason behind buying media especially is having the ability to scale. If you have a business that’s working really well, making good money on the internet, and all you need is just more traffic to make more money, when you get to that point of course that’s after the whole creating and publishing content on a regular basis, you’re still going to do that and of course finding all the profitable ways in Google AdWords to be generating traffic and sales.

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After you do all that then this is kind of moving in to another phase of rolling up, rolling out, and scaling. I shouldn’t say rolling up, but rolling out and scaling to generate more and more traffic and the way you can do that is by buying media. You can buy right now a billion impressions of your ad if you had the money and the budget to do that. So a lot of it’s targeted now. You can pick the demographics.

We talked about knowing your market. If you know those things and who your customers are that will be easy to do. So there’s all kinds of things you can do from zip codes, gender, and so that’s the other reason to know your market. But when you do these deals you’ll always want to try and negotiate.

Sometimes you’ll get hybrid deals. If they’re only willing to give you CPM based stuff you can get them to throw in some CPC traffic as well and in some cases you can get them to actually run content of yours that runs kind of like an ads – it’s kind of like what they call an advertorial and embed your links in it so you’ll get some good link value as well for search engine purposes.

But there’s all kinds of options for you when you work with those companies, you just have to build a relationship with one of the reps of one of these ad networks and hopefully work something out to where it can become profitable and you can just turn on the tap and flood your site with more and more traffic and more and more and more profitable sales as you get it to work.

Blog sponsors, sponsorships and reviews, there are a lot of different ways to advertise on targeted blogs now which is very, very valuable. You can not only sponsor them by having ads displayed on the blog but you can do a paid review where you can have bloggers review your site or your products and have them write like a review as one of the posts on their blog.

So there’s a lot of different options available today for blog advertising. I’m going to go over some of those. E-mail sponsorships and buying subscribers. You can advertise in email newsletters. In fact the first thing you need to think about for your industry in the niche that your business is in is what magazines are there in my industry? And then try to find that magazine’s website.

In most cases offline magazines that you find being published at the newsstand, they usually have some kind of online list because they understand direct marketing. That’s how their whole business is built. So they typically have an online mailing list or online version of the magazine or newsletter and almost always these magazine companies sell sponsorships.

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We can have your ad go out in e-mails to sometimes millions of people. So that’s definitely an option. Buying subscribers, there’s a process called co-registration where you can pay to have a little form put on someone else’s subscription form where they can easily check the box and you’ll have a description for whatever your e-mail subscription is giving them and if they like it they’ll check the box and then that person is agreeing to subscribe to your list as well.

A lot of co-registration doesn’t convert. Some of it’s very low quality. There are some spam issues of course where some people may think it’s spam if they don’t remember where they joined, but there are some legitimate uses for co-registration depending on your market especially if you’re in kind of a large market or a kind of mass market. You definitely want to investigate co-registration because there are a lot of ways to make a lot of money with it.

Video ads, they’re going to be the next big wave. We’ve talked about video marketing several times now. Video is just where everything is going and there are a number of place where you can start buying video ads and video ads kind of come in a couple different variations. Pretty much they’re called pre-roll and post-roll, so pre-roll and postroll.

Pre-roll are ads that show on the front before a video starts. I’m sure you’ve gone to CNN and watched a video or somewhere else and watched a video like TMZ or something and you see that you have to sit through an ad for 15 seconds or something. That’s a pre-roll ad. Post-roll is an ad that would play after a video is done. As you can imagine the postrolls don’t get watched as much because once they see the ads they turn them off and the pre-roll ads can’t be turned off so video ads are the next big wave. You’ll want to consider testing some video ads depending on your market, depending on what kind of availability you can find for video advertising.

Now the most underrated method for advertising, for basically writing a check and getting a bunch of new sales and traffic is by buying sites. I’ve already showed you some of the statistics from that little Pingoat site that I purchased that’s getting about 2,000 visitors a day and building hundreds of opt-ins to a list everyday, and that was done by buying the site.

Someone else built it, they’ve got the traffic coming to it, they put in the hard work. I just wrote a check and now I own it and get all the benefit from it forever or until I sell it to someone else. I’ve bought several sites and it’s a solid strategy that most people don’t realize. Some people are buying websites kind of got caught up in a flip it mode where it’s almost like real estate. They’re just buying it to try and resell it.

But you should really look to buying sites just to generate traffic. Here’s what I want you to keep in mind. The majority of the people on the internet, 90 something percent aren’t

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going to know this internet marketing stuff and these traffic strategies that you’re learning on this course.

This is way over their heads. This is way beyond what they know. And because of that they don’t know how to maximize what they have so they’re not making anywhere near as much money as they could from that site that they have in many cases, not always, but in many cases that’s what the situation is.

Well this is a great opportunity for you to move in and try to do a purchase of their website, then of course you can improve the site and add your skills and abilities and what you’ve learned on how to make sites better, how to make them more optimized for search engines, how to do all these other things, how to put an e-mail list form on it, how to do all these things you’re learning to do, and easily make your money back on this site forever and then sell it for profit or just keep it as a traffic generation avenue for you.

But buying sites is very, very important and is a very valuable strategy that any market has to consider. I once had a joke with some friends at a seminar. I said “You know, we should” or actually they were saying “We should have a contest to see which one of us can be the first to rank #1.” And they said “We’ll kind of live blog it or put a diary online of all the steps, who’s where and who’s making the most progress.” We said “We’ll just turn this big contest in to a publicity stunt.”

And I immediately said – they weren’t talking to me, they were actually kind of talking next to me but they were friends of mine. I said “Hey, can I play?” I said “I’d like to play in your contest.” And they said “Oh yeah, sure.” I said “I just wanted you to know that I’ll win.” And they were like “Ha, ha, we heard you’re good and stuff, but we want to try.” I was like “No, you don’t understand. I’d win.” I said “In fact, I can get the #1 ranking in potentially 20 minutes.” They were like “No, no, that’s impossible.” And I said “All I’ll do is look up any key word I want, see who’s #1, pick up the telephone, call that website owner and make him an offer to buy the website and now I’ve got the #1 ranking.”

So I just tell that funny little story to give you that analogy and that example that if you want a #1 ranking from some key words that you’ve proven to be really valuable, like if you’re finding certain key words are producing thousands of dollars in sales for you and are just really valuable on a per visitor basis, you want to analyze who’s ranked for those key words and what they sell and try to figure out if they’re maybe not doing a good job and maybe not making anywhere near as much as you are and then you can move in and make them an offer or try to negotiate and see what they want for the site, buy it, and then you’d have this site that can just generate leads for you almost forever. You’ll have some maintenance to do in most cases to keep up the ranking but you’re just so far ahead of the game. So that’s an underrated method.

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CD 9 - Lesson 2: Other PPCSEs I’m here at payperclicksearchengines.com. It’s like a directory for all the different pay per click search engines that are out there on the internet. So this is kind of their main list here. You’ll see it starts with Google AdWords which of course we’ve already talked about in depth. Here’s Yahoo’s and here’s some other ones. MIVA, Enhanced Interactive, ABC Search, Goclick, all the ones you’ve probably never heard of. Again, these smaller ones don’t get a lot of traffic.

Of course Yahoo gets a lot and Microsoft and their ad center gets a lot. By the way, the CD doesn’t have room for me to go in to detailed tutorials about how to use MSN Ad Center as well as Yahoo’s system. They actually have some really good tutorials right on their site. Once you kind of know how to master AdWords you kind of know everything for the other ones. They won’t have as many bells and whistles as AdWords or as many powerful features.

But it’s pretty much the same rules apply for how to create your titles and the body and what URLs to use and just everything else that goes along with that. And so of course if somebody has some real questions about that we can create a supplemental tutorial, but right now we don’t have time to do that only because Microsoft and Yahoo have done a good job creating their own tutorials to show people and teach people how to use other systems.

But anyways this is a list of tons of other pay-per-click search engines and on this site payperclicksearchengines.com, I’ve actually been using it for years. They’ve been around for a while, you’ll find some niche directories, you’ll find some UK only based directories, all kinds of sites in here. But again you’ve got to remember most of them are not worth your time, don’t get much traffic. I would just only test the top 10 for your five best paying key words, the ones that convert the best for you and that’s it. Go from there.

You’ll find fast enough that it’s probably not worth you even to continue to try to buy that traffic but it is worth testing because some of them you can get some converting traffic and sometimes you get a little bit of volume so you can set it up once and just let it auto bill you according to whatever budget you set and then you can just be generating that traffic. So check it out, payperclicksearchengines.com.

CD 9 - Lesson 3: Buying Media So when you get to the point where you want to buy media like video ads and banner ads and buttons and all different types of ad formats, all across the internet on a lot of high traffic sites, wherever you want advertised, you’ve got to use an ad network or traffic broker if you will. Basically there’s a bunch of huge companies set up where they

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managed the available ad space that website publishers typically in this case, really high traffic publishers like the CNNs or the ESPNs, but they work with some smaller sites too.

But essentially these companies, they are managing that space and they’re selling it through their own sales channels and of course it takes them kind of a cut in order to manage it all for those sites. But the sites benefit because they don’t have to mess with selling the ad, trying to get people to advertise. They just let companies like this, companies like Double Click manage it for them.

Double Click is one of the largest ad networks in the entire internet. They’ve been around forever, and Google recently bought them for like 3 million or something. Obviously Google wanted them because it’s a very important part of the kind of online advertising landscape and now that Google has them they really have a dominant monopoly when it comes to selling advertising on the internet.

Well Double Click is the company you want to come to if you wanted to test some ads across different high traffic sites and of course if you wanted to eventually write a check for 50 million dollars a month you could do that with Double Click to buy that kind of traffic. They have billions of impressions available to run ads across the internet. Most of these ad networks are going to have minimum buys, sometimes it’s as low as 2,500, sometimes a thousand, sometimes as high as 10,000.

It all depends on the situation. All depends on who you’re using and how far they’re going to make it for you and whatever services they provide. But in order to use these companies you’ve really got to be on the ball. These companies employee some pretty aggressive sales people and their job is to get as much money out of you as possible.

So just when you get to the point of testing some of this stuff, when you’ve gone as far as you can with everything else which is still going to be a lot of work, it’s going to take you very far just doing that other stuff, when you pass that and now you want to scale some more to get more traffic and raise your sales, this is where you go next. This is where the big boys go to grow their business beyond AdWords and SEO and a lot of other things.

They buy media; they buy ads across the internet. So just be careful when you negotiate and talk to some of these sales people because they get paid typically by whatever prices they can get you to agree to.

So the higher the price that you’ll go for, the more money that they make. So don’t be afraid to really lowball them and again, give a low price and say you need to run a test for $2,000.00 or something if you have it in your ad budget if they’ll do it for that, then if it converts and you like it, you say “Hey, it worked out pretty well, what have you.” Then just say you want to buy more and you could say “Well, why can’t you just sell me 100 times more at the same price? Give me volume discount.”

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So there’s ways to do it. But Double Click is one of them. Another one is Casale Media, another big company that is just kind of an ad agency. They represent all these other sites and if you’re a publisher with a lot of traffic you can come here and they’ll represent you and sell your ad space. Advertising.com, yet another one. You can come in here and learn all about all the different programs they have for advertising.

AzoogleAds. This is another interesting one worth a test. They do a lot of affiliate driven activity and you can play both sides of the game with them as well where you can make money promoting their stuff as well as an affiliate, or buying the traffic as an advertiser.

But buying media and really going big on the internet is very, very powerful. But you have to keep your conversions in line and in front of you. You have to track everything carefully otherwise you can waste a lot of money.

So be very, very careful. And if you start buying a bunch of traffic and it starts converting and you tell the company “Hey, I want more of this.” you’ve got to track every step of the way, trying to get site by site tracking somehow because you’ll find that you may say hey, the last campaign netted you 5,000 profit so you want to do another campaign 10 times its size.

Well you may find that the sites that they then put your ad to because you kind of have already maxed out your previous site don’t convert as well. Same thing with Ad Sense and NetContent. You’ve got to track every specific thing as to where the traffic is coming from because it will convert differently.

But when you’re ready to really scale big, especially if you have a mass market type of product like weight loss or fitness or something to do with computers or stock trading, saving money on your taxes, kind of these things that appeal to a broad range of people, you may be a good candidate to use media to try to really roll out and raise your traffic levels and build your business. But again, always comes back to testing and if you use any of these you want to do a small test as possible because the test is going to be an indicator of what’s going to happen if you start buying more traffic and getting the same result.

CD 9 - Lesson 4: CPA Networks CPA, cost per acquisition, or some people just call it cost per action, is another pricing model for buying traffic on the internet. This is HydraNetwork, they are one of the larger CPA networks out there and you can play both sides as I mentioned with CPA types of programs, especially where you can be an affiliate and you can make some money from your traffic and monetize some of your traffic or you can buy the traffic.

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Typically what CPA is, is true lead generation where you’re having somebody fill out a form for more information about something and then the advertiser gets all that data so they can then contact that person by phone, by e-mail. There are all different forms of lead generation and how much information you can get. Some of them will only have email address and name, some of them will have 10 different things. But that’s just CPA and you can come in here and of course when you have time and poke around and see what programs they have an how they work.

And we’ll link to some other CPA networks. But this is the main one that’s pretty big and getting pretty popular. It’s just yet another avenue for you to consider testing to generate leads for your business and you may find that it’s not very good and it doesn’t convert, or you may find the opposite that it converts really well and typically this type of company can really roll out and scale your lead generation where they can bring you a lot of traffic.

So consider that and consider promoting as well as testing advertiser CPA types of advertising.

CD 9 - Lesson 5: Blog Advertising I already talked about the general ad networks that are out there for doing media buys.

Well there are specific ad networks just for blogs. So all they do is just represent blogs and sell their ad space for them. This is Federated Media. This is kind of one of the largest ones in the blogosphere as they call it amongst blogs, and they manage and sell advertising on some of the largest and most trafficked blogs in the entire internet.

So if you want to test ads, buying media and testing that media that is, on targeted blogs, if you have something that’s related to blogs or if you find that a lot of blog related traffic for your business converts really well, these are the people that you want to see and see what they can offer you and see what their costs are and how much you can test them to see if you can get some of that traffic to convert.

But all the main blogs you’ve probably ever heard of, they’re very popular out there on the internet. Most of them have their advertising managed by federated media. Some use other networks, some sell themselves, but typically a lot of the biggest blogs are using Federated Media. So you’ll want to check them out. Of course we’ll link to them and all the other sites for the resources section for this CD. That’s how you can buy ads on blogs and the highest traffic blogs. So you’ll want to consider that. Taking our audio course we’ve already used the different purposes in this course but you can buy ads on Technorati and you can do it by category so if you had some kind of entertainment related business, you can have ads running just like this one over here, kind of flash animated ad in this category. You can see the sponsor links here.

Another ad down here.

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Typically they have all kind of advertising options, different sizes, different types of placement. But Technorati gets a lot of traffic and it’s a place to consider again when you’re looking for places to test to generate your profitable traffic. So that’s Technorati, and then one more I want to show you. This is IZEA and they have a number of different blog related advertising services.

If you’ve heard about them you probably know the old name they used to go by which is PayPerPost. They kind of invented this model of paying bloggers different prices, typically $5.00 to make a post on their blog so it’s just like a regular post which is a promo for you and your product. They still work that way, so you can go in there in to their site and log in and you can pay and have thousands of bloggers post about you and advertise your product or service or anything that you want.

Typically you can get it done pretty inexpensively, $5.00 per post; sometimes it’s 10 or more. But you can get some inexpensive ones and you can get targeting with more money. So they’re faced with the same situation that you will be when you buy media or traffic anywhere. You pay more for targeting; you pay less for just kind of general impressions and availability. That’s IZEA and you can just come and check them out and see all the different advertising options that they have and of course the other thing you want to consider if there’s a certain blog that’s in your industry and your market that’s getting a lot of traffic, you can approach them directly.

You have to understand that. Selling ads directly to someone is almost always much more profitable, sometimes even twice as much. So sometimes blog owners or site owners are much more willing to negotiate on price then some of these ad networks might be because they’re working on a cut that they have to protect whereas the person who owns the site, all the money is theirs so whatever deal you make with them. So don’t rule out emailing someone just directly and saying “Hey, I would like to advertise on your blog.

What do you charge?” And then take it from there. Just another advertising option for you.

CD 9 - Lesson 6: Email Advertising This is Opt-Intelligence. They’re one of the larger co-registration kind of providers on the internet. There are several of them out there and if we find links to them we’ll put them in the sources section for you. But this is one of the biggest. You may want to start with them, run some tests with them.

Now again, just upfront, a lot of co-registration services where they put a little check box or a form out there on a page somewhere in the internet that somebody is subscribing to some kind of news letter or stock alerts or something else and they check the check box or they do something else where it says “I also want to advertise” I’m sorry “I also want Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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to subscribe to this list” which would happen to be yours, so you’re advertised on that form while they’re in the process of subscribing to something else, sounds a little complicated.

That’s how it works. But a lot of those leads aren’t very targeted and don’t convert well just because the process that’s used to get them where they’re kind of already opting in for something else, so depending on how closely matched your list offer is compared to the page that it’s running on will have everything to do with how well it may or may not convert.

So let’s say you’re in the golf industry and you can find a site that has a massive newsletter for golf enthusiasts and they have an opt-in page and they’re constantly getting thousands of new subscribers everyday and you can pay to have a little thing put on there where people will agree or not agree to also join your list that’s related to golf. So if it’s golf related and that specific it might be worth testing and it can turn out to be very, very profitable.

I know some people have made a small fortune with co-registration because they’re able to build a list of millions of people very, very quickly and as we’ve already talked about, having a list is very valuable. But it’s just another thing that you can test and it’s kind of more mass-market. See, a lot of these mass media, reach a lot of traffic, get to a lot of people type things, they’re going to be more successful for kind of the larger mass consumer markets like weight loss, business opportunities, Forex trading, other health information or fitness, self defense, things of that nature where it’s kind of more the infomercials you see on TV. Any infomercials you see on TV, those are the types of products and services that will work better in most cases, not all, but in most cases with these kind of mass numbers. But sometimes you can get it very, very targeted. So it’s at least worth perusing and seeing what they can do for you and maybe giving you a test and hopefully it will become a new profitable traffic source for you that you can generate traffic in on an ongoing basis.

You’ll find links to some other ones in there as well as some other e-mail sponsorship opportunities for some potential e-mail related advertising that you might want to consider doing for your business.

CD 9 - Lesson 7: Shopping Engines If you sell actual products, the products that you ship that aren’t information products that are like toys or golf clubs or sports equipment, anything of that nature, you need to pay close attention to this. This is Google Product Search. It’s like Google.com/product and it’s a free directory database that you can submit your products to and tag them and

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describe them and use key words and have them show up when people search this Google Product Search directory that’s really growing.

So putting gardening tools here, age old example, and you can see these results that come up over here, these are different entries that different companies submitted to this product database and it’s completely free. So it’s definitely worth submitting all your products if you have an ecommerce store and you sell real products like this. Get them listed in here because not only is it free and they’ll show up when people search, you know, in this product directory, but depending on the relevance of the item as Google of course sees fit, some of these product search listings show up in the main results pages.

You’ve probably seen some little tiny video thumbnails where videos are showing up in the results. Well some product entries in this database are also being displayed by Google in those main results. And so you have the potential to get a pretty decent ranking if you can get one of your products to hit on their little algorithm and end up showing on the main page. So if you sell any kind of products, you just definitely want to come over here, Google.com/products, and submit your product.

Come down to product information for sellers and it will tell you how to do it. Of course this is another good tool you can use for competitive research and get ideas and look at different categories and search for different types of products and check competitors prices and all the different types of things you can do with competitive research. See what they’re selling, how much, what the marketing is, so on, so forth. This is Google Product Search, definitely worth submitting all your products to if you sell actual products.

CD 9 - Lesson 8: Classifieds Another type of advertising definitely worth testing for you are classified sites and most of them are free. This is Craigslist which you probably know about which is like the king of all classified sites, it’s the top 50 most visited websites in the world, and you can get a lot of traffic and generate sales from this site. The thing about Craigslist is the rules are constantly changing and they don’t really like marketers too much.

So as far as using their system for driving traffic to web pages, they don’t really like it too much. It can still happen, they allow it to happen in certain ways if you do it right. But you should just know that most of the listings in here are kind of localized type things, someone selling a couch or typically what you’d see in the classified section of a newspaper. That’s kind of how this was created and emulated after.

If you have a local business of some kind that you want to drive traffic to, this is a gold mine for you because you can generate a lot of traffic from Craigslist. If you do anything with real estate, this is a gold mine. When you talk about serializing different things, this

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is a great place to promote real estate related products because you can do it by all the different locations. So it can be like Florida foreclosure information or North Carolina foreclosure, so on and so forth.

But it’s a little tricky and you have to be careful how you do it. Check the resources section for some links and tips about actually taking advantage of Craigslist. Because their rules seem to change so fast, I didn’t want to put it on the CD because it would probably be outdated by the time – between the time I record and the time you’re actually viewing this.

But definitely look in to Craigslist. It has some good potential to generate some free traffic but again, strict rules, not favorable to sending traffic to a site and you just got to be smart in how you do it. But there have been some people who have made thousands and thousands of dollars from the free traffic they generate from Craigslist. You definitely want to consider it.

Here is a Craigslist clone essentially by eBay. This is EGG, I think it’s a horrible name, hard to spell. Look at this thing right here, look at it. You almost have to squint your eyes to figure out what those letters are. I don’t know who came up with that. But same thing.

It’s localized. Probably good for some localized type things or for maybe some serialized things by location like real estate and other things like that. You’ve got to follow their rules.

These things aren’t really set up to drive traffic to a website. Doesn’t mean you can’t kind of circumvent the system and make it work where you’re promoting one thing and then people kind of get redirected. But you always want to go by the rules so read the rules and see what you can make of it. But it’s definitely worth testing if you have anything that is capable of working in classified sites. Last but not least this is another popular one called usfreeads.com. A lot of people use this site. A lot of people get some decent traffic from placing classified listings in this site, so this is definitely one you may want to consider putting a couple of listings and testing to see if it’s worth your time.

If it is keep doing it. Every so often create a new ad or update the ad to keep it fresh and hopefully you’ll get some good traffic from it. But those are classified sites. There are some other ones on the internet. I’ll link to those for you and it’s kind of when you get done with everything else, then you come to classified sites and test those as well.

CD 9 - Lesson 9: Buying Web Sites I told you how one of the most underrated methods for trying to buy traffic for your site is buying a site with existing traffic. It’s kind of a form of advertising. It’s an investment in your business to generate traffic. Well this is Site Point, sitepoint.com. They’ve got a

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marketplace and it’s one of the most popular kind of websites for sale types of areas online where people sell websites.

This is actually where I found the little ping site that I used as an example that gets a couple thousand visitors a day. And you can come in here and it’s constantly being updated with new sites for sale so you want to watch it at different times and depending on your market you may or may not find anything. But depending on your market you may find a lot of good opportunities.

But as you can see here look, this is a four and a half year old computer site that generates 4,000 visitors a day and it currently makes $1,400.00 in revenue a month so this is a site that’s making money. So even if you don’t improve it at all it’s still generating some good revenue. So as you can see they have a minimum bid of $5,000.00, they’re changing their format.

This is a buy it now price, $25,000.00. Yeah it is, they changed it since last time I was here. So $25,000.00 you can click right now and buy it and not try to bid for it and potentially be beat by someone else. In my case when I bought the little ping tool site it was $30,000.00 and I did all the math on kind of what it had and everything else and this just seems too cheap. So I took the risk and I bought it.

After I did my due diligence – key words there. You really want to do your due diligence and research these sites for sale and make sure people are telling the truth about the stats, how many links they have, you know by now how to do a lot of those things. Kind of a look and see how much traffic the site gets with Compete and Alexa, you know how to search those back links with different tricks with Google or Yahoo or MSN. So you can do a lot of your own kind of looking and digging yourself to verify some of these statistics or close enough to it. So you really want to be careful obviously before you spend $25,000.00 if you’re going to buy a site that expensive. But I click buy it now and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and it turns out right after I bought it someone had offered the previous owner even more money and so the guy I bought it from was a real nice ethical guy and he said “Hey, if you want to just flip it and make a quick profit, this other guy wants to buy the site. I was like “No, I think I’ll keep it.”

But you can come in here; you can see a description about the site. You can click the thing and go visit the site. It tells about revenue details, where it’s getting its money from.

They almost always show stat charts or links to their counters or their analytics accounts so you can verify it. But there you go.

If you have some kind of computer or tech site and you had the budget for it you might want to consider it. 4,000 visitors a day, it’s hard to say how many of those are unique. So Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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from today to the next day, how many of those people are repeat people. But it’s probably at least 300, 400, maybe 500 unique people very single day.

So if you were in the computer industry, market, selling things related to computers and cheapest traffic you could get within reason from Ad works was 50 cents a click, and this site was getting 500 visitors a day that were unique, that would be a $250.00 dollar a day ad cost. You can do the math on that, $7,000.00, whatever it comes out to be, $7,500.00.

So the site technically generates $7,500.00 worth of traffic if it converted about the same and if it’s $25,000.00 that just goes to show that in roughly four months that would be – it would pay for itself and you would be getting all that other traffic essentially for free forever as long as the traffic kept coming in.

And of course it generates revenue too so it’s also going to return your money even faster than that. But that’s if it had 500 unique visitors that converted about the same as the 50 cent traffic. It typically won’t because users on Google are actively searching for something so they’ll convert at a much higher rate than people that just passively click ads or come upon something on a site that they’re checking out. But still as you can see with that quick example of the math there are great deals to be had buying sites.

Of course there is a whole business you could run just by buying them and improving the marketing and then selling them. That happens all the time. But this is Site Point, a marketplace. You can come in here. It’s a great area for finding sites for sale, businesses for sale. Here’s a gift basket site, niche site. A lot of neat sites you can find in here. One on modeling, one on break dancing. And all different ranges. You can see from 80,000 to 1,500. Of course some of those are starting bids, not what you would get it for.

But you can get some sites inexpensively. Another place to look for sites is on eBay although they’re usually not that good, they’re kind of just template sites that don’t get any traffic and they’re trying to pass it off as like a turnkey business in a box. Most of it is crap. I’d stay away from that type of stuff. But we’ll link the resources section to some other places online. But this Site Point is one of the best ones out there and I highly recommend you look in to it and check it out.

But aside from that always keep in mind that there are great deals to be had and great websites to buy where they are not actively advertising a site for sale. So you can send them an unsolicited offer. You’re like “I really like your site. What would it take for you to sell it to me? Would you be interested in parting with it?”

Almost everybody has a price and of course if they start off high or whatever they start off with, you can always negotiate it and a lot of times you can still create creative financing deals so to speak where even if you’re buying some awesome site that had tons of traffic and it was clear. Let’s say you had tracked the Ad Sense, ContentNetwork,

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AdWords ads, and you saw you were converting all this traffic from this site so you tried to buy that one site because it was so valuable to your business.

Let’s say the only way you could buy it is you’d have to pay $250,000.00. That’s what they wanted and that’s what it was worth because they had #1 rankings and just thousands upon thousands of visitors everyday. Well, a lot of owners of different things, I’ve done this with domain names as well, will do like creative financing type deals so it’s better for cash flow for you and of course for them it gets the deal done because most people aren’t just going to pay $250,000.00 all in one shot and have that in their budget, so you can get away with paying $20,000.00 upfront and then paying payments for like three years or something.

There are a lot of different ways to do it. So if your budget can’t afford to buy a $5,000.00 site if they’re selling it for 5,000, there are ways sometimes to get a payment structure set up. It’s done all the time. It’s done in real estate; it’s done in buying and selling normal businesses. It can easily be done buying websites. But come in here, look around, you can find some good opportunities and you should always consider or think about hey, what kind of sites in my market can I buy that I have the budget for and hopefully make it happen.

CD 9 - Lesson 10: Video Advertising I already told you that video advertising is really going to be the wave of the future, or at least it looks like it will be. It’s kind of too soon to tell how well it’s going to convert and you know, how well people are going to start adopting video ads, but all the indications are there because the growth of just video marketing itself that just video advertising and being able to buy it on different sites is definitely going to be the future.

So I just want to share this site real quick. This is Spot Exchange, and of course the link to it from the resources section for this CD along with some others. But this is a site just like advertising.com or Double Click or some of these other media companies, but they just specialize in video ads. And so you can come here and you can upload a little video ad, and you can pick all different types of sites to publish that ad and of course they sell the advertising with a lot of different models, CPN, CPC, all different types of structures that they can use, and everything’s open for negotiation and just like everything I’ve already said with all the others and it works. Same things applies here.

But this was just pretty neat to at least look at and poke around with and consider testing it if you have anything that could be advertised well with video; something visual, something that needs to be demonstrated, whatever the case may be. This is the place you’d want to come to think about testing some you know, some different ads and such.

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So, the other networks like Double Click and the other ones, they getting into video ads too so this isn’t the only place to you know, buy video ads, but this is a unique company that’s doing some interesting things that’s unique to video advertising and so it’s definitely a company that you at least want to take a look at and see if some of their unique solutions are something you’d be willing to test that may work for you business.

So, that’s Spot Exchange, you can check that out.

CD 9 - Lesson 11: Radio Ads And last but not least I just want to show you what the power house Google is doing and how they are evolving. This is the section on their site where of course we’ll link to it from the resources section where you can buy video ads just like Spot Exchange that we just talked about. Different formats, little different set up, but they’re going to be getting heavily into providing video ads for advertisers, course you probably know they own You Tube, so they get tons and tons of video traffic everyday, and so when you buy ads you can test and have them showing on some You Tube videos. They are offering that right now.

So, they are offering some video ads and some of those opportunities, but here’s what’s crazy, Google now has this set up where you can buy advertising from them not only with AdWords, not only with video, not only with image ads, then you can buy audio ads and you can actually have your ads broadcast on radio stations. So, this is just yet another possibility for advertising your business and depending on your business, depending on you know, how your kind of ramping things up and what market you’re in, radio advertising might work really well for your business and so it’s definitely something that you might want to consider.

And it’s really cool that Google is really just kind of encompassing all media and all advertising avenues, and they even have things that can help you make your audio ad, and they show examples of good radio ads and how they’re created and you – how the script goes and the flow and everything. I’ll tell you Google is pretty impressive with what they’re just doing with advertising as the foundation of their company. And also impressive in just the resources and the information they provide to help you make that advertising as effective as possible. Most other ad related companies, they don’t care.

They just want to say they’re advertising and most people that buy advertising with companies don’t make any money and are never coming back to buy again and most ad companies know this so they don’t waste their time with it. Well Google’s different.

Google’s actually trying to help people optimize their campaigns, trying to help people make as much money as possible because they know then they’ll buy more and they’ll make more money. And it’s common sense. Too bad most advertising companies don’t do that but, they’re just missing the boat. But, I’ll link to this in the resources section of

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course and this is radio ads and just another type of ad that you want to consider testing to drive traffic to your site. Who knows? You may find it’s a gold mine.

CD 9 - Lesson 12: Review Let’s review. By now you realize there are many ways to scale your traffic. The key word is scale, because you always want to start small, carefully track the traffic, make sure it’s profitable, then slowly but surely turn that faucet and turn up the flow of traffic. But you have to manage it every step of the way, because certain campaigns even with the same network, supposedly one the same site could be very profitable at one traffic level and could lose a lot of money at another. So you have to manage it every step of the way.

The other pay per click searches like I talked about are worth testing. Take your three, four or five highest converting key words for your business, and test them out on some of these other search engines, these other pay per click search engines you know, programs that they have for advertising. Test them, do it by exact key word, track per key word and per that actual search engine, so you know exactly what’s coming in from that individual ad, and then take it from there. If it’s not converting or creating enough traffic to even make it worth your time, just ditch it. Don’t even waste anymore time or even think about it. However, if you test and it’s bringing a steady flow of sales, even if it’s just a little bit, then you’d want to roll things out like you do with AdWords, and expand your key words and you campaigns, and try to generate more and more traffic and sales.

Media buys. You can get millions and millions of visitors if you can afford to, of course, buy a lot of media. Always carefully negotiate the price; it’s always negotiable, do hybrid deals if they’re only offering CPM. Try to get them to give you some CPC maybe. There have been a lot of deals done where you can get them to throw in putting an article on that main site they’re going to be advertising, or if it’s a combination they’re of, in a certain you know, kind of market you can get them to kind of put one of your articles permanently on their site network. There’s anything’s open for negotiation and you can work all kinds of creative deals.

Piggy back at working ads; we didn’t talk too much about this but we’ve talked about the past. If you know, want to run some banner ads for your specific market, go into commission junction, and look at the banner ads for your market for some of your competitors and their affiliate programs and see which ones are working best and start testing some similar elements that they used, that according to stats and commission junctions, show that those are the best performing ads, and take it from there.

It’s that same piggy back principle we have been talking about. It applies to everything and creating it or applying it to creatives which are fancy – it’s a fancy advertising industry term for ads you know, what the ad actually looks like. Applying it to creatives

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works just as well as it does applying the concept to anything. So go find ads that you know work really well by for example looking in those stats and commission junctions and then take it from there, and you’ll short cut you know, the road to having a successful ad yourself.

CPA, cost per acquisition. You can generate lots of leads but you want to play both sides.

You want to be an affiliate and make money from sending leads to them, as well as testing generating leads. You can bounce the two sometimes and actually really subsidize the cost to be generating leads from the advertising side, if you can combine the CPA forms and things with other offers and products, not just by itself, but with other things.

So, always try to play both sides.

Many opportunities for blog advertisements. We’ve talked about Federated Media is kind of the big ad network for just general media banners, different types of ads, styles and formats. You can always go to blogs directly of course, and see how much they charge to run an ad. We talked about IZEA, and the paper post types of blog sponsorships that you can do. We’ll link to some other ones in the resources section like Review Me where people can review your products and services for a set fee.

So there are a lot of different opportunities Technorati, there different things related to blogs and you want to really look into that because blogs are very responsive in most markets and they’re very, very targeted, and that’s why they are responsive. So, think about advertising on some blogs.

Shopping engines; we talked about Google product search as the main one. There’s some other smaller ones we’ll link to in the resources section. And of course, classified sites such as CraigsList, and that Key GG thing, or what ever it’s called, and US Free Ads. There are different classified sites that are out there that are definitely worth testing. At least just to spend a few minutes just to set up and ad and see what it will do, you just never know.

But definitely get listed in the Google product search if you sell actual products. From everything that I’m hearing and starting to see happen from it, it’s a no brainier. So here were getting good traffic from the main results when people just search Google period as well as a lot more people are using that product search directory, that database engine to find deals and things. And it’s a great way to get traffic, targeted traffic, people searching for exactly what you sell. The example like gardening tools, like a shed. Video ads are growing in popularity, definitely worth testing if you have something video might work for.

And of course buying existing websites is a solid strategy whether you see them listed on market place type listing like Site Point, or some of the other websites for sale, websites that we’ll have listed there in the resources section for you. Or, you’re just contacting a 278

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site owner just out of the blue and saying “Hey would you be interested in selling your site?”

No matter what method you use, buying existing websites that have existing traffic, or someone’s already put in all the work to create a bunch of content they’ve got indexed you know, they have an affiliate program, what ever they are doing in this constant traffic it’s well worth considering buying and just taking over that traffic. It’s not like buying an ad that when you stop paying for the ad, the traffic shuts off. It’s an investment that could potentially pay dividends for years, and years, and years to come.

And there are other advantages by the way to buying existing websites. Many of them are getting a lot of traffic because they have high search engine rankings, and so they already have a lot of as they say, link juice you know. They probably had high paid rank. But they have a lot of links coming into them, and you can really leverage that link power to link to your other sites and pages that you want to get ranked high of course. You want to make sure it’s thematically related as we’ve already talked about is so important, and not some unrelated site.

And of course, you want to use content and put the links within content but it’s another reason to buy solid existing sites that are getting a lot of traffic, especially if they have some good search engines listings already. So that’s definitely a strategy you’ll want to look into, and that’s one of the most underrated I think. It could be expensive but, ultimately, if your business can make it work, it can be very, very profitable.

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CD 10: Widgets & Software Lesson 1: Overview Widgets and software. Most people don't realize that software is one of the most powerful traffic generation methods on the entire internet. We've already been talking about content. Content, content, content. And it's critical for any business to be using a lot of good quality content to generate a lot of traffic to any website and to bring in new customers and prospects for any business that's trying to market online.

But what we haven't covered too much up until now is software and it's important to know all the possibilities when it comes to using software to generate traffic because software is responsible for generating billions and billions and billions of visitors to all kinds of sites all over the internet. If you look at the top 500 or so websites, by traffic, in the entire world, we kind of already went over the fact that a lot of them have in common that they have many, many pages of content and that they have good content.

But what we didn't go over in detail was the fact that the ones that don't have all that content typically have something else and that's they utilize software to generate their traffic and to generate the exposure for whatever it is they do online. Great example of this are the social networks, Facebook, My Space, Bivo, a lot of these sites that we've already been talking about during this entire course. Those sites are all basically software. They're web services. They're web-based applications but they're software.

There's a lot of other software out there that has been responsible for generating billions and billions of hits, page views and user signups such as communications tools like Skype, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and all those other programs like that that help users communicate with each other on the internet. Those are software. Some of them are web-based, some of them are apps you actually download and install into your computer.

But there are many other types of software as well that can drive traffic to a website or just to get people to come and use it. If you've seen Stumble Upon, which we've already been talking about, their whole service is toolbar based where you install a toolbar and then you can surf around the internet, vote on sites that you like, so on and so forth, through the toolbar and it kind of tracks where you go and which sites you're voting on.

Well, that toolbar is very viral and they have things built into it where it could bring in your friends and other people and that's what helps their service grow. You may have heard of the Alexa toolbar that many people had installed at one time and still do.

Google's toolbar is probably one of the most popular ones where you can search right from the toolbar in a little bit of search space on the side. Many browsers now actually come with this installed.

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We've got the world of widgets which are now these little pieces of software that you can actually put on a webpage and the software runs in a little spot within the webpage but that software may be powered by some other computer out there on the internet. A great example of this widget is like Twitter. By the way, Twitter is another piece of software on the internet that's generating lots and lots of traffic and that's what runs that business. It's a software program. It's a communications tool that's mostly web-based and that's how that's reaching millions and millions of people.

But there's a widget for Twitter that you can put on a webpage and so, when you actually make Twitter posts and Twitter entries, if you have the little Twitter widget, let's say, on the side of your blog, it'll automatically show the latest Twitter post that you've made right there on your blog. So if someone's visiting your blog, they can see in this little box what your latest Twitter post was. They also have widgets for, like, Flickr, the photo hosting service so, if you post photos to your Flickr account, they can show up in a certain area in your blog.

Like, it'll say, like, the latest photos added to Flickr. So those are widgets and there are all kinds of other widgets. We've actually developed one called BlogRush that you've heard about and that's just pulling content from other blogs to be shown on someone else's blog. So one blog can load this little box and it'll actually show links to headlines from other blogs all over the internet, as we've already talked about.

So widgets, that's another type of software and, in a moment, I'm going to go over several other types of software that you probably haven't even thought about but the point is there's all kinds of software that can be created that can help you generate traffic to your business, bring in new prospects, bring in new customers and can help you grow your sales. There are just a number of different opportunities for you to think about and for you to try to kind of come up with a good plan to actually create some software that would be great for your market.

And, in thinking about that, you need to realize that almost every niche has this opportunity. So kind of one of the action steps that you need to take is to kind of do your homework and do a little bit of research and start thinking about what types of software, applications or web services or widgets or anything else that we're going to talk about on this CD, which ones might apply to your market. What can think about that your market might be able to use?

Almost every niche could use some type of software, whether it's some kind of updated news widget or updated information widget that's related to content, news, and announcements for that market or if you sell a certain type of solution and, in your market or at least for your customers, they're making some kind of progress, there's a need or at least an opportunity to create some kind of software that would be kind of a Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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progress tracker of sorts.

For example, if you were in the health and fitness market and you're teaching people how to put on muscle mass or to lose weight, I guess weight loss is probably the easiest example, so let's say you're just mainly selling information or selling products and supplements related to weight loss. Well, you could provide this free weight loss tracking service to your customers or to anyone where they could create an account and they could log in and it could be just like an online diary where they could record their latest comments, you know, about what they've been eating and how it's been going and how they feel and also put in how much they weigh on any given date that they're making that entry and the simple type of pieces, you know, software web service could simply track their progress so they could look at it over time and maybe this little service would just draw a nice little line graph or chart showing the progress that they're making based on the data that they're entering.

This is a very basic example but this could be applied to almost any market where a business is involved with some type of progress, you know, whether it's weight loss, whether it's making money, whether it's reducing someone's debt so they're tracking how much debt they have left, it could just be any number of things. So, you know, it could be gardening as well, like, we've been using this gardening example. It could be, you know, how many full tomatoes you've grown this season or, you know, how big your garden's getting, so on and so forth but that's just a quick example.

So anything where progress is being made, there's almost an opportunity to create some kind of web-based tracking service to either sell or even just give. Most of what we're talking about here with web traffic generation is just creating things that people will just use for free that can drive us traffic and bring us leads as a part of us giving that away.

But there's also, of course, always the opportunity to sell access to such software or web service and, you know, you want to think about that as well but, for the most part, we're just talking about doing this for free to generate traffic.

So that's what you need to think about in your business. After you poke around and learn about all these different types of software in the examples I'm going to give you on this CD, you need to kind of look around the internet, check some of them out and start thinking about what could I do specifically for my market? In a lot of markets, another great example is any kind of media hosting, for example, like photos, photo albums. If you're doing something, let's say, in the dog market, whether it's, you know, dog sweaters or dog beds or dog training or anything of that sort, you could create some kind of free photo album service to host photos of your customer's dogs or to do something in the parenting niche or something for children.

It could be, you know, posting photos of your kids. If you're in the hobby market and it's, you know, designing and building model rockets, it could be some kind of photo hosting 282

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service/community where people can show off what they've built and, you know, and brag about and comment on the other photos that your other users are posting on your service. And, of course, in the gardening niche, you could have people just post photos of their gardens and also post photos of kind of how to processes that they're doing.

In other words, when they're going to plant some new seeds, maybe someone's going to take five photos of the entire process showing them digging the hole, putting in the seeds, you know, putting the topsoil back over it, watering it, adding fertilizer. So, as you can realize, there are just a number of different opportunities for you and so many different ideas that you can run with to create some kind of software so start thinking about and keeping an open mind about different ideas that you can do for your business because they're all over the place.

The great thing about software as a traffic generation tool is that it can be designed to be incredibly viral. Most of the very, very popular internet services on the internet, in the top 500, that are software-based, are typically incredibly viral. Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Skype, all these things have that in common. They're viral. And many of those things involve people's friends and that's how they become viral because they all have the here, invite your friends to come use this service with you element into the software itself and that's what helps it grow.

Many of them became huge, even multi-billion dollar companies with almost not using any advertising at all. They just rely upon the viral nature of the service and that pretty much does all the marketing for them. You know, Facebook, I don't think, spent a lot of money on advertising. They just got a core group of users using the service and then they opened it up to more and more users and then those users told their friends and so on and so forth. So you'll want to keep that in mind, too.

You always want to be thinking, how can I make this viral? How can I give people an incentive to tell their friends about this? Is it I'll develop this software, this service, so it's better off if they have their friends involved with them? Because that's what all the communications types of tools do, you know? Twitter is better if you have your friends on Twitter. Facebook is better if you have your friends there with you, you know?

Skype is better if you actually have someone that you can call and talk to, you know, it's making phone calls over the internet for free. Obviously, you know, Skype is probably one of the best examples of a viral piece of software service used for the internet ever. I think it grew faster than any other product ever put on the entire internet and it's kind of obvious, if you think about it, why that happened.

It's not because they had a huge marketing budget, it's because the entire service worked around people bringing in other people to the service for them because the way it works is, you download the software, you install it on your computer and then you make phone Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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calls for free using, like, a headset and a microphone through your computer and your internet access but, in order to talk to people, like, to have friends to talk to for free or family members to talk to for free using it, they have to have the software installed, also.

So, as you can imagine, that's how it grew virally.

Somebody would learn about it, they'd install it and then they'd tell a bunch of people they knew that they wanted to talk to for free on it about the software and that's how it grew. But think about how you can make yours viral because almost everything can be made viral. Any of these widgets that show up on other people's sites that pull data from your server or from your service if you ever do something widget-based, you know, can have a little link on there that says, you know, click here to add this for free to your site.

You know, that's certainly what we did with Blog Rush. We had that enabled into our widget where, at the very bottom, it says click here to add your blog post for free and so, every time that widget loads, every time someone sees it, they're also exposed to, essentially, a little advertisement for the widget itself and that's why, of course, we get tons of new users every single day and it just grows and grows and grows. So think about how you can design any software thing that you may create for your business and for your market to be viral. And, of course, you may think of some great ideas or some great concepts that don't have to do specifically with your market.

We've talked about before in this course how to go one set up from your market, you know, using the example of, if you're in the gardening niche and that's your business selling gardening tools but, if you can't get penetration into the market to reach the full market, then you may have to go up to see what the market is above it which would be, like, home improvement, you know, above that would just be lifestyle in general.

But if you're working on these ideas and you want to create software and you find yourself where you have to go up a level, you may start stumbling into some really good opportunities to create maybe some even just mass market services like Facebook and, you know, these Twitter apps and these other things and who knows? You may end up getting rich from it but the point is to try to think about this, at least to how it applies to your market. The other additional opportunity is you may create something for your market that really may take off and go crazy and then you can apply it to other markets, license it to others to use or open it up and just launch it for other markets.

There's just a lot you can do with it but think about how you might be able to make yours viral and, again, think about how people can get their friends involved to use it to where the service is better if their friends are in it. If you can get that one done for your project, if you can solve that problem, you're set up to make it a home run but think about how to make it viral. The great thing about widgets and software and creating this stuff to generate traffic is that the costs, not always but most of the time, can be very inexpensive.

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I mean, you have to have it hosted on a server somewhere or you at least have to have a server for people to download the software from if it's going to be some kind of a downloadable application but having software developed is a lot cheaper than most people realize. You can have simple scripts made that'll be for simple web services for a few hundred dollars. You know, you can have some pretty advanced software applications that someone would download and install on their actual computer that would do something for even $2,000.

And, depending on the scale of what you're trying to do and how many servers it may need or how just vast the concept is, you know, if you're trying to build a Facebook or a Twitter or you're trying to do something really, really extreme and complex, you know, then you're going to get into thousands and thousands of dollars but, still, some of that stuff can even be developed for $5,000 or $10,000 so it's not like you have to spend a $1 million, you know, to create some kind of service.

I doubt any of the services that you see online today that are just massive, there was more, you know, where they spent more than probably $20,000 initially to develop the beta version of the service. Obviously, it's different if someone hired a, you know, a whole bunch of people and they had venture capital and they brought in all these engineers to design a beta application of some sort so that's a different situation. But, in most cases, when it's one person with an idea and they outsource to a software developer to create something, they're not really spending a lot of money to create the first version of their idea just to see if it will fly and you don't have to, either.

And, because the costs are pretty inexpensive, not only for development but also for maintenance, unless you develop some kind of You Tube service where you're dealing with video files, hosting people's video files for free which is going to really eat up bandwidth, then that's going to have a high cost. In most cases, because the costs are pretty inexpensive, when it's broken down into the cost per visitor that it's going to cost to bring traffic to your website, it's one hell of a bargain, basically. It's going to come down to fractions of a cent if your software does anything and becomes viral at all, you can end up generating hundreds if not thousands of leads to your business for less than a penny apiece when it all breaks down to how much you spent to have the thing developed. So keep that in mind.

It's actually very inexpensive and another reason you want to think about doing this.

Now, there are many types of software. I've already mentioned a few of these but here are a few others that you may or may not know of. Toolbars, I mentioned Stumble Upon has that toolbar, Google has one. You can have your own toolbar if you want. We're going to talk about that on the CD. You can have a toolbar for cat owners and there's a lot of this type of stuff out there on the internet and, you know, it's not being used by millions and millions of people, it may only be used by hundreds or thousands of people but that can still bring a lot of traffic to your site and give a lot of value to your prospects Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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and your people.

Widgets. We've talked about widgets, little software apps that can be added to a webpage, you know, that run from another server where the data's being pulled or the activity's being pulled from somewhere else. Social networking applications. If you've used Facebook now, you know, or My Space, you're seeing a lot of these social networking applications. Facebook, we've talked about, has their own platform. You can develop or pay someone to develop an application that runs on Facebook. I'm sure you've seen all these little Facebook apps that are on there and we've talked about some of them already. Web services. We've talked about this.

Web services is kind of just a general term for anything that's web-based but that would be things like Twitter, Facebook, My Space, those are technically web services but also what I already kind of talked about, like a weight loss tracker where someone gets a free account and they go and they log in with a user name and password and then that thing does something and it's web-based. It's not software they download and put on their computer. That's a web service.

Badges. These are little things that people have given out, like, little badges or awards that people put on their site. Some of them can have some kind of functionality where they'll show, like, hits. Like a great example is the kind of feed burner number of RSS subscribers, a little badge, people put that on their site, shows how many current subscribers they have and it's kind of a live number that pulls from feed burner site but another type of badge is also, like, an award. There have been many sites out there that give these little awards, these little kind of, you have, you know, the best design award for a dog site and they give those out and, of course, those awards typically carry HTML that links to the site that shows all the different awards and a lot of people don't care.

They'll put these little awards on their site and they're proud of them but what usually happens with those types of things, it's kind of sneaky, I think the first person that ever started this idea was a genius because it's obvious that who benefits the most from those little awards are the person that created the award in the first place because most of the awards link back to the site that gave out the awards. And, as they just give out more and more rewards, people have them running on their pages at all times, they put them on there and forget about them and those awards typically link to the main award site and that just brings that site tons and tons of traffic. So there's the opportunity for you to do things like that and we'll talk about that on the CD. Mobile applications. These are becoming more and more popular and they'll become more and more powerful as traffic generating tools in the very short term. The iPhone, you know, already has its own platform and its own SDK for developing applications specific for the iPhone. You know, Google's working on this thing call Android, which is applications for mobile phones. So we're going to see a lot more mobile apps. You got 286

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another type of software that can have to do with bringing people to your websites.

Mashups. Mashups are essentially when you can use these little APIs which are these little plug and play gateways that tap into other existing software services to use their data and data from other services to kind of mash them all up, you could almost think of, like, making a salad, pouring all these items in a bowl and mixing it all up, and making some new type of software. You've probably seen it with Twitter a little bit and Facebook and some others where people tap into, like, an API and they pull data and they create, like, a new version of Twitter, you know?

We've seen this with kind of desktop apps like Twirl and some of these other things and, by the way, there'll be links to all kinds of examples to all of these in the resources section so just go and visit there and you'll see all kinds of examples to that and we'll keep adding them and updating them and, if you know of any that we haven't listed, feel free to submit them and we'll add them. But Mashups are getting popular because it's an easy way to create kind of a new resource or software tool by just using other people's web services and software tools. You're not even creating anything unique, so to speak, where you're doing sophisticated coding from scratch. You're just tapping into all the coding and all the communities of other services and you're making your own unique little thing and I'll show you some examples in a moment.

Shareware. Downloadable software. This is typically what people think about when they think of software. You either think of shareware, obviously, or you think of software you buy at the computer store like Microsoft office or anything you install on your computer.

But shareware has been around for, gosh, 20 or 30 years and it's essentially a software program that's downloaded and installed on a computer. It's given away and shared with others, that's why they call it shareware, and then they just ask for, like, a donation if you like the software. But you can create shareware that's not for sale, it's just a program that you have someone create for you and you just give it away, someone installs it on their computer and then, of course, it serves some purpose running on the computer and it doesn't ask for a donation or anything and you can create this type of program and it can help generate traffic to your website a number of different ways.

The software application itself can contain links that go right to different websites that you have or different areas of your websites. You can force a free registration on anyone that wants to use the software where it's free but they just need to register for the software and, of course, this is a way to build, like, an opt in to get a prospect. So imagine just creating some kind of really cool, like, you know, weight loss tracker like we talked about that was web-based.

You could also do one that's shareware and make it really, really nice, really nice interface, good graphics, has different charts and things, but it actually runs on someone else's computer and, for this example, actually, that makes a lot of sense because maybe Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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someone's kind of shy and they don't want to-- or they just want their privacy and they don't want to be putting in their weight every day on some web-based service where someone can see how much they weigh so they'd feel better about it if it was just software on their own computer that no one else had access to that information and they could just track it on their own computer.

So that's just a great example for something that would probably make a lot more sense as a downloadable program. But then, of course, for them to use it, they have to initially register it, like a little popup screen can come up on the software and they can just put in their information and kind of opt in to your registration list and now, as people are giving this shareware program away, and we'll talk about a few ways on how to get it distributed, as people give it away, it's getting passed all over the world and, every time somebody gets it from someone and goes to put it on their computer, they have to register it with you. Very, very powerful.

There have been many types of shareware programs like this that have been given away all over the world that have ended up generating millions of dollars in paid business for related services and paid software for a lot of different companies. Many software companies, a lot of smaller, independent software companies, not like the Apples and Microsofts of the world but some of the smaller ones, have built successful companies off the foundation of giving away free software like this and having it just passed around all over the world. So something else for you to think about.

And there are several other types of software and we're going to talk about all those but software is an amazing world and it can really bring your business a lot of traffic. In my own businesses, in several different markets, ranging from people selling all kinds of stuff on eBay, everything you can think of, to helping people get more advertising for a website or for exchanging content on a blog to all kinds of stuff, we have been very involved, I have, for, gosh, 15 years plus now creating all kinds of software programs for the internet. I created one of the first auto responder services in 1994. I created a free image hosting service for eBay users starting around 1997. It was called myitem.com and it's no longer in business now because eBay pretty much hosts images for free right in their service but, back when they started, people had to host their photos somewhere else and so I had the idea of building this little web-based service to host their photos and paid, like, $300 to have it made and people would put the code in their ad, their listing and it would load the photo from our server and have a link that said, click here to get free image hosting for your ad or for your photos and it just grew virally. As more people used it, more people saw the exposure to the service, got exposure to the service, and it just grew and grew and grew and that service probably made me a few million dollars ultimately. It's just the power of software.

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constantly think of ways that you can add software to your business. Again, I can't stress how powerful it is and how beneficial it can be because a lot of these things you can just create, set up and they just run on their own. You, of course, want to maintain it but you want to just keep that in mind, that it's not something that you're going to have to keep recreating all the time.

You can get benefit from it for years and years and years and we have with some of our little software projects. They got put online and almost forgotten about and they still generate traffic to this day. Something else I want to mention here, it's very, very powerful, is when you create these software programs that are going to get passed around or used as a service or anything that has anything viral in it at all, even just with a tell a friend function or anything, the power is having distribution and that's something you keep hearing about throughout this course.

You know, we've kind of talked briefly about using these communication tools like Twitter in your email list and RSS feeds and all this other stuff through social networks to get a message out to your circles of distribution. You know, when you post new content, you have a new product coming out and all these things. Well, no matter how big or how small that distribution is, you have a major advantage of having any distribution at all when you go to launch one of these web services or one of these web-based applications because you jump start it with your current audience.

Now, if you're starting from zero and you have no reach at all yet, no email list, no friends on Facebook, you know, no one following you on Twitter, no distribution, then it's going to be a lot harder but once you get up to pace and you start getting any at all, a few hundred here, a few hundred there and you have an ability to reach people, you can leverage that to get more traffic. That's the beauty of traffic. You can use traffic to get more traffic to get more traffic. It's just a snowball effect. So keep that in mind.

You can launch any of these services just reaching out through your existing customers and your existing audience and have it jump started and it'll grow a lot faster than it would if you started with one or two people. So I just want you to keep that in mind.

Let's talk, now, about a few tips for software development. This is important stuff. It all starts with specifications or a spec sheet, as it's called. When you want to have someone create software for you, and we're going to talk all about how to find software developers and all that good stuff, but when you want someone to create software for you, it all starts with the specs, the specifications sheet. It's basically kind of an instruction manual, an instruction sheet, it's not really a manual, it's just kind of a description of what you want someone to create for you.

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people for that because this is just something you learn with experience. I have over ten years involved with software development and so I've finally figured this out. It took me many years to get this right. But here's what you need to keep in mind. The more details that you can give a programmer about what it is that you want, one, the faster they're going to get it done and they're pretty much paid by time, typically by the hour, so it's going to be a lot cheaper for you but, two, the quality of the work.

The more you have to make the programmer guess what you want, the longer a time it's going to take because they have to come back and keep asking you for clarification or, if they just kind of make their own decisions, it may not be what you want. Things may have to be reprogrammed later. It's just, it can create a huge hassle or it can just-- I know people that have created software projects, like a web service, that took 12 months, a full year to have developed and, ultimately, when I looked into the project and saw what was going on, it was literally something that could have been done in six weeks but they started out by not giving the programmer the right amount of clarification and details in the beginning to let that person really know what it is that they wanted them to build for them.

So here's a few things to keep in mind when you want something made. You want to detail as best as possible every little function, feature and process of the thing you want to have made. I mean, get down to every little detail. Like, I want someone to be able to go to a web page, click a button that says "register", then I want them to give me their name, their email address, and pick a password and then I want that application to email them an email that they have to click a link to confirm that they want to set up the account.

And then, when they do that, they'll get another email that welcomes them to the service and it says this, this, and this. Then it will create an account in the database or somewhere within this web service. Then they'll be asked to answer five questions to set up their account. So you need to be specific and then the next best thing you can do, aside from that, is to create a prototype. When you're dealing with any kind of software, it has some kind of an interface, what it looks like, what the user will see when they use it.

So sketch it out, create some ugly little sketches in Photoshop or have someone else do it or, if you want to take it a step further, have all the web design and the design of the software itself, you can find someone on any of these freelance types of sites, some of the ones I'm going to discuss on the CD for finding programmers, you can also find designers there, so when you find a good designer, think about having them design what the software is going to look like. Every single page of the web service, every single area of the user interface, you know, what the widget looks like and even a dummy version of it as if it were working and live.

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know, it's just, they're just still images. They're not working web pages or working pieces of software. If you do that, you'll save yourself so much time as well as the programmer.

You just give them the designs and the specs, you still have to give him specs about what it all does but that will be a major, major shortcut in your costs as well as in your time.

So it all starts with the specs. The more you can detail for them, the better. Test programmers with smaller projects first.

When you're looking for programmers to outsource things to, it's best if you can just come up with some smaller job to give them just to see how they are, how fast they are, how their work ethic is, how the communication works with them, and, of course, the quality of their work. If you have this idea for the next Facebook or Twitter or some kind of major application that you really think could be incredibly valuable, the last thing you want to do is hire someone that you've never worked with before to code this super project. So test programmers out with smaller projects first. Work with multiple programmers. This is very important. Even if you find someone that's fantastic, like, the best programmer ever, you still want to have working relationships with some other programmers that work in the same type of programming languages.

For the internet, if you're going to do a web service of any kind, the majority of webbased services are developed with what's called LAMP, which stands for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. Linux is one of the most popular web servers that's used on the internet, one of the most popular, I guess, operating systems that run servers on the internet and then Apache is the web server. MySQL is the most common database and PHP is the most common scripting language to work on those services. Most programmers doing web-based stuff will do it in that, in those technologies. Others will do it in Java, others will do dot.net so there's a broad range of things but the point is, find multiple programmers that work in the same technology that your web service works in or that your, you know, shareware downloadable installable application works in and always have backup.

God forbid your main programmer gets, you know, sick and goes in the hospital or gets killed in a car accident or anything else and then they're the only one that worked on it and you don't have a relationship with someone and, meanwhile, your website or your software service is down and you're just sitting there and your users are getting upset because they were using it every day and you had thousands of people using it. I mean, so you need to have backup programmers.

And, of course, one of the other important things I forgot to mention here, at least on a little bullet here in this presentation is that you always want to get detailed documentation on anything you have someone created. Get detailed documentation. In other words, where the code is documented.

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the moving parts and the code that they created and how it all works so any other reasonable programmer can pick up the documentation and immediately know how the application works then go in and fix problems or make modifications, changes or additions without just spending weeks and weeks and weeks just trying to figure out code as if it's like in Chinese. So having documentation is very, very important. Of course, any programmer worth their salt will create and include documentation for you but work with multiple programmers, even if you're not going to have much work for some of them. It's always good to have a working relationship, a friendship even with other programmers that you can call on in case of an emergency or in case you just have some work that you need done right away.

And, of course, test, test, test your software before you actually put it out there, otherwise, you're going to run into all kinds of problems. The worst thing that could happen to you is that you have a great, great idea that people love. They start using it like crazy and telling their friends and then it just crashes because of a common thing that you could have fixed if you would have done thorough testing. Believe me, we've had that problem many times with a lot of things that we've developed. We've learned our lesson and you can't always cut off potential problems because, a lot of times, if things get very popular, you had no way to test on those levels with thousands of people but, typically, you can find a lot of bugs and problems if you just do thorough testing.

Get some friends to test it out, you know, give you their feedback on it before you kind of open it up to the public but always test before you put it out there. Don't just rush it to market just to get it out there for the sake of getting it out there. Of course, request feedback from people using your software or service. They're the ones that will tell you what will make it better and, of course, now, you can't always go and change it and add all the features that everyone possibly asks for.

You know, one of the best and most successful software companies on the internet is a company that created the Base Camp software. I will put links to that company in the resources section. This company is very, very smart. Most of their web-based services, and they're subscription based, that's their business model, to actually sell them, what they do is they kind of create services that are just basic and simple to use that don't have a lot of features, that don't confuse people and it's just easy to use. They know that their services can be better and more powerful but the success of what they have created is in its simplicity. It's a lot like Twitter. You know, a lot of people say, you know, Twitter could have all these other features and do all this other crazy stuff and it would be better.

Well, not necessarily better. What makes it popular is just because it's so simple. It's easy to use. It's basic and it's just-- it only has a few features and that's it. It's simple.

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going to have to balance but listen to your users. Last but not least, when you find an all star, try to hire them full-time.

When you're using different software developers and you can find some great software developers, you know, for $5 or $10 an hour in other countries, like if you're in the U.S. and other countries around the world, for a lot less than you could find someone in the United States and they'll do just as good of a job and sometimes even better. But, when you find somebody that's just awesome, you know, someone that does great work, they work fast, you enjoy working with them, they seem to have a good attitude, you just like working with them, they make progress quickly, they're a real asset to your business, see about hiring them full-time.

Many programmers can be hired full-time for $1,500 to $2,500 a month. So for, you know, $1,500 a month, you could have someone working for you full-time where they essentially kind of agree to be working 40 hours a week for you for that set rate. And it's great because then you kind of lock them up and, by giving them that steady work, they don't have to go out there and fight for all these other freelance jobs and they can just, one, they're going to feel better about their lives because they know the steady money is coming in and that's a lot better than having, you know, great months and then not getting paid for six months at a time because they don't have any work and it'll be better for you because you'll have someone great that's locked up and, if you had an idea and you went back to someone that's great that you used before, well, they may be busy with other projects and can't do your work for many, many months.

So when you find a great person that you're outsourcing to, and this goes for outsourcing in general, whether it's research or writing or anything else that you'd outsource on a project basis, if you find someone that's just incredibly fantastic and especially if they have a pretty inexpensive rate, something that's very cost-effective for you and if you can afford it in your business, your business gets to that point of growth, try to lock them up full-time because it'll really, really pay dividends. So always keep that in mind. If you find an all star type of freelancer, try to find a way to hire them full-time.

CD 10 - Lesson 2: Competitive Analysis So we talked about this before for just looking at some of the top high traffic websites in the world. And so I’m looking here at the global top 500 list here on Alexa, which we’ve, kind of, already talked about. And before we talked about it, we were talking about content. Which of the sites, kind of, had the most content on the Internet or had the most traffic, because of the best content or the most content, as in millions and millions of pages. But if we, also, look at this list, we’ll find a lot of software driven sites; MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, this Orkut. A lot of these are getting so much traffic because of some type of software. So you can, of course, come in here and look on your own and see that so many of them are driven by software, probably, 30 percent, maybe. A lot of them have Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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to do with hosting photos and other types of media, like this Image Shack, here, is a big one. You’ve probably heard of Photo Bucket and, of course, Flicker. There’s a bunch of them out there that have to do with letting people upload all different types of media files.

But software is very, very powerful and it can drive a lot of traffic, which we’ve been talking about.

So if you just come here, and you look at some of the global top traffic lists, you’ll get some ideas. And a lot of times, you can take similar ideas and then, just adapt them to your own market. You know, for example, you see YouTube on this list, and you may think, “Well, I could create a video hosting site for my, you know, gardening niche. And just try to build a gardening only video site.” And that actually may work. Now, I’ll just say this, though. Video hosting services have struggled to find a way to turn a profit.

Because video files are so big and those bandwidth costs can just be so expensive. So you’ve got to be careful with that. But that’s just a quick example. For some of these other ones that are, you know, kind of, social networks, you may think, “Well, I could create a social network just for gardening.” And there are a number of different ways to do that if that’s what you want to do. But just looking at these top lists of the highest traffic sites and keeping up with it is a great way for you to get some good ideas to, maybe, create a niche version of that type of service or tool for your own market. So you can use Alexa and just look at their, kind of, top 500 list. The other thing we talked about before was the movers and shakers list. You can monitor this list on just a regular basis.

Just come in here and look and see which of these sites, you know, is, kind of, growing in popularity. And a lot of what you’ll find is software driven, or at least, user generated content that works with some kind of software back end. Like, for example, this one here, blog of humorous images, this might be some sort of blog that someone set up where other people can submit images. So all the work is being done automatically. It’s not really someone writing a bunch of content. The users are just uploading photos.

Another one with just a bunch of, you know, collection of interesting images.

Ning is a social network service that will let people create their own niche social networks. It’s, kind of, like I was just talking about, where you can create your own gardening social network, like a MySpace or something. Well, Ning lets you do that for free. And there are pros and cons, of course, to using their service, rather than, maybe, doing it on your own. But you can see them rising in the movers and shakers list this week, because of their traffic. Or, at least, the difference in traffic that maybe they had last week to this week. So they’re going up the charts here. But look at this mover and shakers list and keep track of that. And you can, kind of, get some ideas. The bottom line is to use Alexa and, also, Compete.com, which we’ve talked about, to look into some of the traffic data for some of the competitors in your industry that are using software and web services. Just because they have some kind of software based thing doesn’t mean it’s working.

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numbers they’re getting to even see if it’s worthwhile for you to, kind of, do something similarly or to actually make something that’s better. So it all starts with doing the traffic research and finding out, not just, you know, what’s hot and what’s popular by monitoring these types of lists, like the movers and shakers and the top 500. But, also, when doing your research in your own market, which is very critical that’s an exercise, you know, an action step that you need to take. Look at your own market and see what’s going on in relation to software. And then, go and investigate, you know, those services and those types of software tools and see if any of them are getting a lot of traffic. Or if there traffic has been growing steadily that’s typically a good indication that something’s having a viral effect. When it just has a steady, you know, uptake of growth, where each month is bigger than the previous month, and it’s just going up, up, up. So do your traffic research and do your due diligence when you analyze your market for the software that currently exists. And for what’s going in your market before, maybe, you try and run with one of your own software ideas.

CD 10 - Lesson 3: Toolbar Marketing One of the types of software applications that you want to consider creating to help you generate traffic to your business is a tool bar. If you don’t know what a toolbar is, it’s basically a thin little strip that’s under the address bar and the common button areas of the web browser. And they make toolbars for Firefox, internet explorer. I don’t think they’re making full on toolbars for Safari on the Mac yet, but I imagine they will in a matter of time. But toolbars-- it’s kind of like what you see here. These are examples of toolbars.

You’ll see one of these little strips installed up towards the top of the browser under the normal browser buttons like back and forward and refresh and all that stuff. And they have all kind of functions built in. You may even have a toolbar installed on your browser right now. Typically a lot of browsers right now come with kind of Google’s toolbars.

You’ll see kind of a search box down here at the end in this area which searches Google and you’ll have some other ones for bookmarks and favorites and some other things. But these are toolbars. They add increased functionality to the web browser. And they can do all kinds of stuff now like play streaming content, manage RSS feeds for like blogs and news. Of course they can have one button access to any website in the entire internet just kind of having some favorites or bookmarks right there with specific icons. They can search Google, but also any other site on the internet if they’re set up that way. They’re very, very powerful. They’re pretty cool. There’s some pretty neat ones out there and a lot of different uses for toolbars. The toolbars we’re looking at here were developed with this company called conduit.com and they kind of have some kind of a platform already created for quickly making toolbars for people that want to make them and brand them to give away to their own audience. So you may want to consider using this service depending on your service, depending on your market, just to create a quick and easy branded toolbar rather than have a programmer go and create one for you completely Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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from scratch.

They’ve kind of got everything already figured out when it comes to the toolbar world and, as you can see, these are examples they show in their site of all these different companies that they’ve worked with like Major League Baseball and Bravenet and all these different companies, tech crunch, discovery. So they’ve helped people create a branded toolbar that they can just give away and of course they’re kind of customizable to do anything that the person wants to do with the actual toolbar. Set it up with specific buttons that go to certain content on their site. So the first thing you have think about is does the toolbar make sense for our business. In some markets it’s really not going to. If you put out a lot of content and you have a pretty big following of people in your industry, in your market, and you have a market that’s pretty rabid about your content, then you may want to consider creating a toolbar.

If your business is some kind of services business that’s created for an industry, you know, let’s say you deal with lawyers and you’re all about helping lawyers find better resources online or find clients online or whatever the situation is with this quick example, then maybe you want to create a toolbar that’s kind of to help lawyers. It will have built in all these kind of search mechanisms and buttons to help them easily find all kinds of things on the internet that that industry commonly uses, like searching different law reference sites and so on and so forth. But at least give it some thought and see what kind of opportunities may exit for your business in your market in your industry to have a toolbar like this. And you’d be surprised how many applications there are for toolbars again with content, just with bookmarks, with search capability. And so it’s something for you to think about and at least test. I’m not sure how much this company actually charges. The claim is you can create your free toolbar. I guess it’s some kind of partnership. You can create a toolbar for free and just give it away and I imagine somewhere in the links will be for some of their sponsors or something.

And that’s what’s cool about this process is, once people install these toolbars, in some of these drop down areas there will be permanent bookmarks for certain services and, of course, you can put affiliate links in those services and you can do all kinds of other things. So I imagine that’s what this company does is maybe they’re getting paid per click if they have Travelocity or some travel company for example stored in kind of the bookmarks listing on some of these toolbars. And however many people go over to Travelocity or some other travel site from that permanent link that’s in the toolbar or at least from the link that maybe starts out in the toolbar because some of 'em may be customizable where you can delete it if you don’t want it anymore. But at least if it stays in there and if anyone every visits that link, then maybe this company has some kind of partnership deal. I’m not sure what it is, but it would make sense where they’re getting paid ten cents, twenty cents a visit or that comes through any of these toolbars that their system creates. So it’s pretty neat. You can just come to their site conduit.com, look around just to get some toolbar ideas, and then figure out what it is that they actually do.

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I’m sure their model’s changing all the time.

But what it is they actually do where they’re making money from this. So then you have to weigh kind of the options. If you do want to make a toolbar for your market and decide, well, they have some links in here for some advertisers, things that I don’t want in here and my users don’t want. Therefore, I think I’d be better off just hiring a programmer to create from scratch a totally custom toolbar setup for me to give away to my customers and then I control all the links and don’t have to give any exposure to this company’s stuff. Or you may just decide, “You know what? This is free. I can get it going right away. I can have it set up where people can be linking to my content.” I mean, isn’t this cool how they have right here where you can listen to some kind of an interview or audio right here in the toolbar? I think that’s really, really cool stuff. And, of course, the RSS feeds you can pull down and they can see your latest blog post all that stuff right from the toolbar without them having to go to your site.

So, it’s too bad that everyone on the entire internet isn’t using the same web browser where there could be one toolbar that works with all of them because then this toolbar stuff would really be something to put a lot of resources and effort in I think. Because it’s sort of fragmented where some of these toolbars will only work with Firefox or will only work with Internet Explorer and a lot of them won’t work on the Mac, you kind of have to jockey and juggle multiple versions and things. It can still be made to work, but none the less your market may be ideal to create one of these toolbars and so it’s something that you’ll want to think about doing, at least testing. Again, if this company will let you quickly create one for free and then just start giving it away. And if you’re thinking about doing it, why not just try it and just to see what the penetration will be of the toolbars.

See how many people may install it. If you start getting a lot of people that say, “Oh, this is the greatest thing ever. We love it, but maybe we don’t like certain ads that are in it.”

Well, then maybe you want to then pursue having your own custom toolbar made.

And you can post listings on any of the kind of freelance sites we’re gonna go over on the CD and you can find programmers that are perfectly capable of making toolbars. It’s not like just this company is the only one that knows how to make them and can get 'em to work. There are plenty of people that know how to do it. But that’s toolbars for you.

Stumble upon has one built in that kind of runs their service that helps people not only stumble sites as they call it through their service, but also that’s used for voting. There are a lot of other services that are out there on the internet that have kind of a toolbar based service. So there are just a lot of ways to use a toolbar. So put your thinking cap on and try to think of what kind of opportunities could there be for you and your business in your market to have a group of users out there with your toolbar.

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CD 10 - Lesson 4: Widgets Widgets are another type of software that can generate traffic to a website. And they're getting very, very popular. And I have to make a correction. Before, I pretty much said that widgets are these little software programs or applications that run on a web page where they're being actually powered by some other site that's not the site that's actually showing the widget. And that's somewhat true. But widgets are also little kind of mini apps like that that can actually run on a computer itself. So it's kind of not a full blown application that, you know, you'd run like Photoshop or something else on your computer.

But it's kind of like a miniature application that's kind of in many cases or most cases it's kind of always running like on your desktop, like it's always just showing you the live weather or the latest stock quotes so on and so forth. So just to correct what I said earlier, it's not only web-based stuff, but how most people think of widgets and using widgets for the Internet, it is web-based where it's pulling data from somewhere on the Internet and then publishing that data to a little frame or a little box or little area on web pages all over the Internet. One of the great places to come to get ideas for widgets, to see what's already out there and just kind of see what's popular and to see what's being made and what people are using is Yahoo!

Widgets. It's at widgets.yahoo.com. It's essentially a large directory of widgets. Now, most of these widgets are software widgets to be installed on a computer. But you can come in here and you can see the top rated widgets by downloads and by ratings and votes. And you can get all kinds of ideas for your own widgets. So you can click on any one of the icons next to the name, like this one, DayPlanner, and it gives you a little screenshot of what the widget will look like. So what it looks like on your computer. So it's like some little built-in, mini calendar planning tool that someone created is this one.

And so, pretty much all of these are free or most of them are. Some of them have a fee, but a lot of these are free-- just free widgets people are making and giving away. But there are some pretty creative things that people have created when it comes to widgets and these little mini programs, you know, all kinds of stuff. Like here's this countdown timer. It's just exactly what it is, a countdown timer.

So you can set it to any time you want and then it will ring an alarm when it hits zero, so all kinds of little utilities and funky little programs. And then you'll find that there's a lot of stuff related to content as well, like managing RSS feeds, like when someone posts a new blog post where you're subscribed to the RSS field. It'll pop up an alert on your desktop or with your web browser telling you hey, there's a new post that was just made to this feed that you're subscribed to. I see a lot of games, all kinds of communications tools, like little chat tools and all kinds of stuff. But like utilities, you can find for monitoring all kinds of things on your computer. So you can just come in here on your

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own and look around and find all kinds of things. Some of them are for web-based applications. A lot of them are for the computer. But you can at least get some good ideas and figure out how to adapt some of those ideas maybe to your own market and to your business and your own industry and then come up with your own. And then hopefully, people can use it and in some way it can drive traffic either to your site or it could be some kind of syndication tool where when you publish content, it can get delivered through this tool, through this widget and directly to your users, like to their computer desk tops or to their web pages where they're hosting and serving. I guess not hosting but serving your little widget on their pages so other people will be exposed to the content that you publish that gets syndicated like inside the little frame of the widget itself. But if you come to Yahoo! Widgets, you can poke around.

You can go to this section called "Create Widgets" under this "Tools & Reference" area.

It'll tell you everything you want to know about widget developing and how they're made or how most of them are made anyways and just give you a basic idea about the world of widgets. There's community forums for developers. And even if you have some programming experience and/or, you know, have an interest maybe in wanting to learn how to program so you can actually kind of make your own widget, because they have a lot of how-to's and lots of tutorials in here where you actually learn exactly how to make your own widget. I don't recommend it. I think if you want to generate more traffic to your business and make more money and make more sales, sell to more customers which is probably why you invested in this course, your time is better off spent marketing and managing strategy within your business than it is doing programming and HTML, a lot of the technical stuff that you can just pay someone a pretty, you know, reasonable rate of pay to just handle it for you, so you don't have to do it. So sure, you could come in here and read all the tutorials and learn actually how to become some kind of ninja widget maker, but again, I just don’t recommend it.

If you're just totally sold on doing it and it's just something you think will be a lot of fun and you just want to do it, well, then go ahead and do it. But when it comes to business decisions, I think you're better off if you just pay someone to do for you, especially if someone's got all the experience and you don't have to waste time with trial and error.

And then just, again, give them specs for what they want and then have them just make this widget or this little piece of software that you wanted to make. And that's it. So that's Yahoo! Widgets. Another company I briefly mentioned before was Slide. I just want to show you them real quick. This entire company is run off basically widgets that they have created for Facebook and MySpace and for people just to use on any web page on the Internet. If you saw some of their apps, you would recognize them. One of their most popular ones is a slideshow application where you could put it on any web page. You see it pretty much on MySpace pages mostly. And it's where photos are kind of slowly

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scrolling to one side and you see a bunch of photos. And then you can click on a photo and you could actually see a bigger version of just that photo.

Most of what you see when you see that kind of little thing that looks like, a little slideshow, is from this company. They made it popular. I mean they're reaching something like 120 million people a month or something with their little widgets all over the Internet. So this company is just solely focused on widgets and building little apps that run on other web pages. So they're not creating web services. You know, they're not creating any specific service that people are logging in and using like Facebook. They're creating little mini services or widgets that run on top of other services. So you can come to Slide and get a few ideas of what they're doing. They're doing a lot of just general consumer things, you know, scripts and widgets that anyone can use. Again, a lot of it's related to photos and image hosting, which we've kind of briefly talked about already. But you may find some ideas that you could adapt to your market.

I already mentioned it before. Image hosting or video hosting is something you may want to consider. Just like I talked about the example of if you had a gardening site, like the example we've been using and you wanted to create free photo albums where people could post pictures of their garden as well as little how-to photos for some kind of process to where they did something in their garden, then you may get some ideas for how to make it look and what people like based on what this company is doing because they're very popular and you should just definitely check them out. It's-- I've been keeping up this company. It's very neat, what they're doing. And the founder of this company was one of the founders of Paypal. So they obviously know a thing or two about building a successful Internet company. So they're kind of leading the way with widgets. So you want to check them out too just to kind of see what they're up to. But that's basically the widget world in a nutshell. It's not real complicated. It's just these little mini software apps that either run on a web page or they run like on the desktop.

And there's a number of ways that you can create widgets that your customer base can use that can let them stay in touch with you or let them keep up with content that you're publishing or any number of things that can drive them back to your site as well as strengthen your brand through the software tool and just a number of other uses that could be done with these widgets. So look into it, start thinking about what you could do maybe with widgets. Get some ideas from what other people are doing successfully and then try some stuff out. You may just find that a little widget you create may end up bringing you thousands upon thousands of free visitors. And they could be great cash paying customers for the next 10, 20 years and beyond. And it could turn out to be the most profitable thing you ever did, more profitable than buying AdWords clicks or buying banner ads or buying radio commercials or anything else. So you just never know

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what you try.

That's why you want to try a little bit of everything and then use that 80/20 rule. When you find things that are working more than others, you push harder on those. You put more resources into those and then you just kind of squeeze it for all it's worth. So that's the world of widgets.

CD 10 - Lesson 5: Facebook Apps Social networking applications are, kind of, a software type that’s really gaining in popularity. We just talked about Slide, briefly, when it came to widgets and applications that can be used on other sites. And they, also, have Facebook apps, so that’s a big part of their applications, as well. Facebook has a specific platform for developing little software apps and, kind of, widgets that run within the Facebook world. And other social networking sites have it, as well. After Facebook announced they were going to have their own little app platform, MySpace has since developed one for their site. And some other sites are developing them, as well.

So one of the things you can do is you can come to Facebook.com/apps A-P-P-S. And you can just look around and see some of the popular applications that are being used and developed for social networks. If you come up here, and you click “Most Active Users,” this little tab here, this is ranking the top apps on Facebook from top to bottom of the most users, the most activity here. So you can see this Fun Wall one made by that company, Slide, that I had briefly talked about when I talked about widgets. They have 2.4 million daily active users that are using this little application. It’s incredible. And just like it says, over 5 billion videos and more are exchanged on this little Fun Wall app.

If you’ve used Facebook, at all, you’ve probably seen this Top Friends type thing, where people can have a little area where they say, “Top Friends,” where they have, like, a little Top 20 friends, or however many top friends they want to put in there. That’s separate from their main friends list. It’s, kind of, like, the old Top 8, or I guess it’s expanded now to more than that on MySpace. But where you can, kind of, create a little section for you best friends out of all the friends that you have or all the connections that you have. But you’ve probably seen that if you’ve used Facebook, at all.

Again, it was developed by that company, Slide. And then, there’s just a bunch of other ones. These little games and all these little weird things that you see on Facebook. Some of them can become really annoying. It’s a lot of noise. You know, when you’re getting a lot of these application requests to install them and everything else. And some of them are pretty stupid, I think, but some of them are, kind of, you know-- some of them that are Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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corny get a lot of people using them, and they get passed around. And, you know, some of them stick, some of them don’t. Some of them, you like personally, some of them you won’t. I guess, we all have our own preferences. But you can come here to this Facebook.com/apps, their apps directory, and get a good idea of what’s popular and what’s getting a lot of activity on their platform. And when it comes to these social networking applications, Facebook’s, pretty much, the king for social networking applications. I imagine, you know, MySpace will try to catch up here pretty soon.

As they’re, kind of, trying to play catch up when it comes to creating applications that run on the social network. And then, eventually, I imagine there’ll be some kind of common, you know, API or common set of features and functions that a developer could use to create one application that’ll run across all the different social networks. Or, at least, I think, that’s what developers are hoping for. But anything you find in here that, you know, interests you or you think you could modify or do something similar for, specifically, that is for your market or your industry. You can find freelancers, just like you do on any of the sites, and we’ll end up talking about on one of the later lessons on this CD. And many of those programmers know how to make these types of Facebook apps, as well, or for any of the other social networks. So even though it’s, kind of, a different platform and it’s, kind of, a different type of programming, pretty much, most programmers can do anything. And so it’s all very similar stuff. So just come in here and look around. You can come in here and look and see how things are classified. So here’s a bunch of different business applications, or at least, business related, or make money related, probably. And you can just, kind of, come in here and get some ideas. And you can see how many active users they have. That’s a pretty good indication of if they’re sticking or not, so to speak, if they’re popular. Of course, you know, somebody could’ve just added today, and it may have 300. And that’s actually really, really good. But I know some marketers that are dabbling in this area that are creating some Facebook applications to try to get more exposure to a specific market.

And it’s definitely something for you to look into for your business and for your market and your industry. Because, as more and more people start using these social networks on a regular basis and making them a part of their lives and a part of their daily communication. These applications can become very, very valuable and very, very important. So come to this Facebook applications directory. It’s the best place to start to get a good look at some social networking applications. And hopefully, you can find some good opportunities and good ideas, doing the research to see which ones are popular. And then, finding a way to, kind of, differentiate and improve on or make it different or make it apply to your own business. And then, try to have it made and get it out there. You know, obviously, you want to, kind of, build up a Facebook distribution of friends, first, to get some people to, kind of, install it and give it a try first. Just to get the

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word out there. And hopefully, it’ll grow virally and then, it’ll take off. And hopefully, you can get a lot of new customers from it that end up finding out about you through that little application. So check that out.

CD 10 - Lesson 6: Shareware This is download.com and it’s one of the biggest directories on the entire internet for shareware and different types of software. So when it comes to software they actually install on your computer like a full blown application that would run on a Macintosh or on a PC or some kind of LINUX software, but a full blown software application, you know, you think of like a full on game or like a Photoshop or Microsoft Office or Word, any of those types of things. Those would be like a full blown software application. Well, if you can think of some full software application that would benefit your market and your business, and there are all kinds of opportunities out there, almost everyone could probably think of one, but if you think of one, see it as an opportunity, and want to go in that direction, you’ll want to get it distributed through download.com. Millions of people use this site all the time and search for different types of software. People rate them, you can categorize them. You can tag 'em with keywords. Basically it’s a search engine, but for software.

So you can come in here and just poke around with download.com and look at all the different categories and get some ideas about things, just looking real quick under, I’m using a Mac right now, so that’s why it’s showing me Mac software and that’s why it says Mac up here in the search box by default. It’s just because it’s looking at my browser details and it knows what kind of computer I’m on. But if we just look here under home and education real quick, under Mac software and you can do this on PC software or under anything else. And see we go to Kids and Parenting. We can find all kinds of software for that market related to kids and parenting. So if you were selling something in that market, you know, here’s some ideas for you to see what other people are doing in that market. And again, the common theme of this course, one of them anyways, is about piggybacking.

Let other people do the hard work for you. let other people kind of go out there and be the guinea pigs and you can just kind of take a shortcut for what they’ve proven to work or not. So, as you can see here, total downloads, you should be able to sort by total downloads. Okay, we have. So we’ve sorted by total downloads for this category of kids and parenting. And now we see what the top software is. Then number one rated software as well as downloaded software as of right now in this category is a program to help kids learn their ABCs. So you can see the market has spoken so to speak and this is what they want the most or that’s getting the most interest or at least the software’s done Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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the best job at. And that’s helping kids to learn their ABCs. Now, this should tell you something incredibly valuable right now.

Software and services in any format, you know, they kind of go by the same thing.

What’s the benefit for the user? What’s in it for them? So check this out. I just did this quick research. We’ve just looked into this category and we now see, okay, helping your kids learn their ABCs is the most popular thing here, right? Well, does it mean that if you’re doing business in this market and you want to try to do some software related things to get some traffic, that you need to go out and create a full blown Macintosh App or PC app that’s about helping kids learn their ABCs. What about creating a widget of some kind that’s related to helping kids learn their ABCs. Or what about some kind of little web based service that helps kids learn their ABCs. The odds are good that it’s probably going to have a good chance of success because this software that does something similar is already successful. Do you see the correlation there?

So when you find things that are having success, it doesn’t mean you have to do it in the exact same format to hopefully have success as well. You can do it in other formats. And a lot of times you can have more success by doing it in other formats where the original idea isn’t being done. So it’s a great example. It’s a learn ABCs type software product that’s very popular for the Mac and someone could probably just create a Widget or some kind of web based free service doing the same thing and I bet get tons of traffic eventually over time and there may be something out there already. I haven’t even researched this, so someone may already be doing this. But if they’re not, the potential is certainly there for someone to create a web based learning or ABCs type of free little service for kids and they can put some animated cartoons and animals and noises and things like to make it fun for kids.

And maybe you could have a tell-a-friend or share my results with grandma or something like that. So when the kids are, you know, their parents log them in and create the account and they’re kind of learning their ABCs, maybe they’re tested and they get scores and things on how well they do or maybe even they hook up a microphone and record them saying their ABCs. But who knows? There could be an element there where they could invite a grandparent or someone else to come to the site and look and see, you know, what their progress is and even make comments like, “Way to go, Joey. We’re really proud of you.” Just brainstorming here with you just for a second, but look at what’s working and go from there to make it better. It’s that common theme throughout this course. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You don’t need to. Let other people do the work for you. So let’s look at another one.

Let’s go to genealogy. Let’s sort by a total download. And the top one is some kind of

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family tree organizer. They’re probably all going to be that way actually, now that I think about it because it’s pretty much what genealogy is, is tracking your kind of family tree.

But obviously this piece of software has something that the other ones don’t. I’m not sure what that is. Maybe it looks better. Maybe it’s easier. You probably have to read some reviews to find out. But clearly a lot of people are downloading that piece of software. And no surprise to me, just because I know some of the things that are out there on the internet and some of the things that are popular, there’s a site called geni.com, GE-N-I dot com. And I think ancestry.com is another one. They’re just massively popular with millions and millions of visitors. And great examples of software driven sites and services that are getting traffic.

So anyways, you can come in here, look around. Health/nutrition, let’s look at this real quick; one last one. Let’s go to total downloads. Hey, that’s funny. That first one said perfect diet tracker was that kind of little example I just made up when I had been talking about trackers. But here you can find different types of programs here. Diet sleuth tracks calories and nutritional value. Kind of fitness tracker, but just tremendous, tremendous information and research data you can find just from looking around in something like this download.com directory. Looking at the ones that are getting the most activity indicating some sort of level of success and then just using that as kind of a jumpstart for you to have success doing something similar. So that piggybacking thing is very, very powerful. So, let me just show you one last quick thing while I’m here at download.com.

You can come in here, poke around, do your own searches. Obviously you can search by key word.

You can search by some other things. You can look at it by category. But when you create something and you want to get it on here, come down here at the bottom. See this “submit software”? It’ll say, “Welcome to upload.com.” Brilliant that they own download.com and upload.com. And they’ve all kinds of service offerings that they do.

You know, you can do a paper download type thing where you pay according to the number of times the program’s downloaded. It’ll give it more exposure to help you get more downloads. They have all kinds of listing packages, I can jump over there real quick, just to get your stuff listed. They have a bunch that’s just free. So it’s not like you have to pay to have your products listed on here, but some of what they offer in their premium service for $99 a month may be something you want to look into and test where they have some more kind of advanced marketing packages or I guess marketing avenues for you in some cases where you get higher exposure on searches and they’ll have other options like linking directly to the download page rather than making someone go through multiple steps. All kinds of things that they offer. Very, very smart. Very, very smart business.

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But that’s just what you want to do. You want to click that link submit software and then read all the different options they have. If you’re going to get into doing anything software related, and that’s it. It’ll take care of you and you can help market and sell even. If you wanted to sell software product directly through what seenit’s doing with their download.com site and of course this upload.com site. So check it out.

CD 10 - Lesson 7: Badges & Awards I briefly mentioned badges and awards as kind of a little software of type of service that you can use to get traffic. A great example of a company that's doing this, if you go to bloggerschoiceawards.com, it's a company that created a process for people to vote on their favorite blogs, by all these different categories. You could see all these different types of blogs, and you could see the live votes per category, like best blog overall, best celebrity blog, best health blog, so on and so forth. And the cool thing is, when somebody wins an award, the service, the site, this company, they give out a little kind of badge that looks like their logo, so somebody can put it on their blog. It's like bragging rights.

People are proud of it. It's just like if anyone ever won a trophy, like a kid won a trophy in little league or soccer, or some adult won it in a bowling league, they proudly display that trophy on their bookshelf in the family room, or wherever they have it in their house, in their office, on their bookshelf, or on their desk even. People like recognition. It's just part of human psychology.

So these different types of little awards, people like, and they like to put them on their website. This has been happening for over ten years on the internet. There have been all kinds of this type of concept. This is kind of the first one, or the way it at least works for blogs, and it's pretty neat the way they've developed this. Essentially, when someone wins a category, they put the little badge graphic on their blog that said, "This blog was voted best celebrity blog, that won a bloggers' choice award," or whatever. And typically, that little badge then links back to this site where people vote. So there's some other ones I think, if I'm not mistaken, where if they're just nominated in a category, they have another badge they can put on their site, where it says, "Hey, click here and vote for me for best sports blog." And so that little badge links to the voting page, in this case, that category. So it's very, very smart.

You can come take a look at this and get some ideas on what people are doing with these little badges, where they're giving out little special images, where people can put them on their sites. Of course, those pretty much usually link back to kind of a main site. And not only is this a great idea, this isn't just some kind of a scam or some real sneaky tactic. It's great for the users, because they get good value out of it, and people like the recognition.

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set up some awards thing that's just kind of a scam, where people aren't really being recognized for any given purpose. Some people have actually done that on the internet, and people realize that everyone that submitted their website to a certain directory was given this people's choice or popularity award. And so people were putting the badge on their site because they felt good about it, until they realized that every single site that submitted to this web directory was given the same award. So you don’t want to do that.

But this bloggers' choice awards, they've done a great job of this, of creating a neat system that's legitimate, that people actually want to win. It's actually something that's worth winning, because it can help bring credibility to their blog, and they can become more successful because of it. But in turn, it also brings this site more traffic, and of course, the company more traffic, that runs the site. But check it out. This is a great example of badges and awards, which is kind of a minor version of software. There's some scripting that runs. It's not like a little widget, or full-blown program, because someone's just putting an image on their site, but it is a little software service that runs the whole voting process and how it all works. But check it out, it's pretty neat.

CD 10 - Lesson 8: Web Services When you say web services, that's really a broad description. It's kind of any software based thing that's running on the web. That could be Facebook. That's a web service.

Twitter, that's a web service. EBay, that's a web service. So a web service is just something web based, but obviously it's something you want to think about for your business. What kind of web services could you set up for your users to use or take part in, because there's just so many different things that you could do, the opportunities and the possibilities are limitless. But what I want to share real quick is just a couple of quick resources that you may want to think about.

One of the things that you really want to think about is setting up a community site for your market. And if you have enough users in your market and especially if you already have some kind of distribution where you can get to quite a few users, then you can jumpstart a forum, jumpstart a community, just like a forum or like a little social network.

It's going to be harder if you don't already get much traffic or have many people on an email list, or have many people yet, at least, that you have connected as friends on social networks, or followers on Twitter. But once you do, you'll want to think about setting up a community of some sort. It's a great way to let your customers and your prospects kind of talk to each other. And again, not every market is going to be one that suited for having a community, if you're selling something that's like, how to solve back pain.

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probably just going to buy it from you once, and hopefully have back pain no more, and there's nothing more to talk about related to back pain ever again. And so having a community for previous people with back pain doesn't make sense. But in other markets, where people are passionate about the topic and the subject matter, such as any hobby, or anything that someone spends quite a bit of their time on, usually that's a pretty good example of something that would make a good community site. So this is V Bulletin. It's software. I think that's the number one discussion forum software on the internet, or at least it's in the top two or three. I think it's number one though, because I think it's the most widely used one. It's definitely one of the top. But basically, you can buy the software. It's pretty inexpensive, a couple hundred bucks. You could put it on a server and it's ready to go. It is incredibly powerful. You can customize the colors and how it looks, and what the forum names are. And people can instant message each other and can upload photos and it manages photo albums. It's really great.

We briefly talked about a big part of content, or what you could do for content, is user generated content, where your users, your audience, is creating pages for you in some way. And that grows your total footprint, your total ownership, so to speak, of the internet, because you're creating more and more and more pages. And so, if you have a forum, and you can actually get a forum that can sustain itself-- that's the hard part, is get it going with enough people talking.

Like I mentioned before, it's kind of a catch 22. People aren't going to go there and participate if there's no one there to participate with. And so, how do you get it started?

Well, you have to kind of steamroll it, just get a bunch of people to come in at once, and just really get the activity going to get it to take off. But if you can do that, and your market will support a forum in a community, and once it gets going, it could really be great for generating traffic for your site. Because the pages from discussion forum can really build up. They can get indexed by the search engines, and then those just could be other ways that people can find you to end up coming to your site, and hopefully buying from you. So you want to consider-- that's an action step for you to take. Can my business, can my market support a community site, either a social network or some kind of a discussion forum? Will that work for my market? Now in many markets, you'll find there are already community sites, there are already popular discussion forums and you may or may not be able to compete with those.

You can almost always have some sort of success competing. If your market currently has, if you know of, a few big discussion forums in your market, it doesn't mean that you can't also set up one. But sometimes, it's hard to compete when there are some really big forums in your market that have already reached critical mass. And so some people that know of them are like, "Well, why would I waste so much time on your little forum,

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when everybody's already over there talking?" So it can be a little challenging.

However, if you can pull it off and you can make it work, a forum can be a great way of generating traffic to your site, from people telling other people about your forum, as well as your forum getting indexed in the search engines, like I already mentioned. So just check out V Bulletin and look at the features. It's a tremendous piece of software for a pretty low price.

Another piece of software I just want to mention while we're talking about web services and different possibilities is this one, that that's PHP Fox. And if you've ever wanted to have your own social network, like your own MySpace, or your own Facebook, this will let you do it. I think it's like $200 or $300. You install it on your own site, and then you can tweak it and customize it any way you want, and wham! You basically have your own social network for whatever you want, and you own it. You make all the money from-you're not going to have sponsored ads running on it from some other service that you're using or anything like that. You can put ads on if you want, and you make all the money.

You can do anything you want with it. It's yours. So I just want to mention that. That's PHP Fox. You can go to their site, phpfox.com, and if you thought about having your own social network, or you just want to dabble in it, I recommend this software. A lot of other people are starting to use this software and I've seen some pretty good reviews from it, so you may want to try it out.

So when you think of web services, of course, sky's the limit. It's anything you could dream of in your mind that's database driven, probably, that has to do with information on a web page, of people viewing information, manipulating information, entering information, viewing information, charting, graphing information. Again, anything you could think of. But when it comes to some community things, like having a discussion forum or social network, or chat rooms, which are some of the most popular web services, you may want to consider some of these just off the shelf, ready to go, site in a box type thing, where you could just be up and running, and you don't have to spend months of waiting for a programmer to develop it.

Again, it's all about the marketing. It's not about becoming a software developer per se.

So sometimes the faster you can get up and running, to do just as good of a job, or at least close to it, to start generating traffic, will give you more of a return than if you're trying to perfect something and do something that's totally yours from the ground up. So that's just a consideration to make when you deal with some kind of software project. Is there something out there that exists now, that I could just buy and start using? Is there an advantage to that, or will I benefit at least in the short term, rather than trying to create something on my own, completely from scratch?

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So that's something I want you to keep in mind when you start thinking about the software, because there's a lot of things that are already made, like these types of tools, like PHP Fox or V Bulletin, where you don't have to just put in months of programming development time and expense to, for example, create-- to have your own forum, when you could just buy forum software that's being run successfully by thousands of other websites, all over the internet. And then you could just do it too, by paying $199 or whatever their price is. So something for you to keep in mind.

CD 10 - Lesson 9: Mashups Mash ups, yet another type of software that you can create to generate traffic to your website for your business. This is webmashup.com. You should just come here. Poke around. Look. They have a directory of different mashup APIs. The API is like the little coding gateway to some other existing piece of software that you can tap into to then use that service or that piece of software to add it to another piece of software, or another service, or to ten others, or to your own, to kind of make them work together, which is why they call it a mash up, to make something new.

So if you come and click on Mashup APIs, it’ll show you kind of all the different APIs, at least that they have listed here. So let’s say if we go to Shopping, you’ll see there’s one that works with Yahoo shopping. Their web service is API. It taps into their database that tracks millions of products from thousands of different merchants, and you can create your own applications from that API, so it’s like a shopping search engine, if you will.

So you can create your own shopping search engine using Yahoo’s data and all the things that they have going on with that piece of software, that web based service. And you can combine that with all kinds, with your own unique functions, bells and whistles that you think of to maybe expand upon it or to customize it for your own market maybe, or whatever.

So a lot of common mashups that are being done on the internet involve like Google maps. A lot of people have done some neat things with Google maps, because Google maps is such a great little web service, and they have an API for it to be able to do things with it. So, for example, here’s a common mashup example. You could take this API from this Yahoo shopping service, and you could combine it with the API from Google maps, and when people search for anything in the shopping engine, let’s say they search for shoes, when they see merchants come up, they could click on the merchant and it could automatically show where in the U.S., or where in the world, that merchant is located. It could put like a little pushpin on the map using kind of the Google maps technology to map out the address to that merchant if, of course, Yahoo’s data contain that. That’s just a quick example for mashup.

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But come in here and poke around and look. So all these APIs can be used to create an application, so if you’re looking to pull data from somewhere, you can pull it from some of these different databases that have a lot of data that allow you to use their API, and make your own type of project for the web, your own mashup. So a lot of people have done this, and some of them have made millions and millions of dollars doing it as a separate business, creating these shopping search engines where they’re pulling data from other companies, where they’re not even doing the work to compile the data. They’re just freely pulling the data and making their own type of search engine out of it by adding other things to it, and then getting a lot of people to come and visit it and becoming popular, and then selling ads on those pages.

Now, with most of these APIs, if they serve some kind of data, like Yahoo’s shopping thing, it includes links to Yahoo and all kinds of other things that makes it worth doing for Yahoo. It’s not like they’re just going to hand you their whole business, where you can just clone their search engine and they’re not going to get anything out of it. So it serves their ads and some other things, but what do you care? What does anyone else even care if you can make some neat things with it, and then you can monetize it in other ways, like have other ads on that page where the listings show, or to have users sign up to a list, or any number of things that you could think of.

So come to the site, webmashup.com. Poke around a little bit. Your mind will go crazy with all the things you can do, because this is basically software exponential. It’s taking existing services and just kind of multiplying them together to make other things, so just the opportunities are limitless. You can just go in any number of directions and create just anything you could think of with all this stuff. So check this out.

CD 10 - Lesson 10: Mobile Applications Mobile applications are yet another type of software that you'll want to think about when creating something to drive traffic to your site. Now again, not every market, not every industry will it make sense to have some kind of mobile application or this type of software. But nonetheless, it's something to at least consider and brainstorm and think about when it comes to creating some kind of software that can help your business and your marketing.

The iPhone obviously from Apple is getting very, very popular They have their own apps store now. They have their own SDK toolkit that developers can use to create applications that will run on the iPhone. So if you're going to do any kind of mobile application development, you definitely want to consider creating something for the Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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iPhone, as well as maybe for others. You'll find links in the resources section to Google's Android platform, and to some of the other ones that are out there.

But mobile applications, it's kind of a growing area. More and more people are accessing the internet from their cell phones. People over in Asia now are accessing the internet and doing internet based things, 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more than most of us currently are in the United States, and even in parts of Europe. So they're way ahead of us, and I would imagine that over time, people in the US and in North America, and in Europe, will start to catch up to what Asia's doing with their cell phone use and the internet. So mobile applications, maybe something you want to think about to develop for your business. All kinds of opportunities there.

Just do some searches for some different applications. We'll put some links up to the apps store for the iPhone, as well as to links to other applications on other mobile platforms. And hopefully, they'll give you some good ideas, and you can do some research and see what's popular, and maybe kind of get a head start towards what maybe you'll want to create that could have some success. And that can hopefully drive traffic and give you some business through that application.

CD 10 - Lesson 11: Finding Programmers The most important thing when it comes to all this software related stuff is simply finding someone that can make it for you. Now in the resources section for this CD you’ll find links to tons of places online where you can find freelance programmers that can do software development for you. But I wanted to quickly show you a site that you may not know about. It’s really getting more and more popular every single month, and it’s growing as far as in size as to how many programmers are using it, and how many jobs are getting posted, and that’s oDesk. You can find it at oDesk.com. It’s a lot like an Elance, or RentACoder, or ScriptLance, but the unique thing about oDesk is that they’re certifying their developers. They have to take tests, kind of showing what they know.

And then according to how they score on these tests, it goes along with their profiles and what you see along with their system. So you can come to oDesk.

As you come up here towards the top, you can see and click “Find Providers.” So we’ll click “Find Providers.” Works a lot like these other freelancer sites. And there ya go!

It’s just a long list of developers, the type of development they do, what they charge, $20an-hour, $23-an-hour, $18-an-hour. How many hours of work they’ve recorded within this system that they’ve gotten paid for. You can look at test scores, the number of tests they’ve passed, so on and so forth. And when you come in here and you look for programmers to work with, you can look right here under this directory for different types 312

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of jobs that you want to have done.

So here’s desktop application, client server applications, pretty much like a web service, some web-based type of thing. You know, if you want to have a game made, certain kind of utility, some kind of software plug-in, a mobile application, so on and so forth. So you can find for widgets and website-based types of things. You can find all that in the directory for specialists that may have experience or handle that sort of job. You can also go up under this tab called “Find Jobs,” and that would pretty much be a viewer or programmer looking for a job, but what’s great about this is that you can look at other people’s software listings that they’ve posted where they want people to do the programming for them, and get an idea of what people are doing. It’s a great way to kind of spy on what other people are having made, and kind of what else is going on in this whole little software development world.

You can also get a good idea of how people are creating specs, and kind of how they’re handling it as far as having something made. So like if someone wants to have a YouTube program, we’ll do something similar to YouTube. So you can find just all kinds of fascinating ideas in here just by looking at what other people are wanting to hire someone to have made. So let’s jump in here real quick, and let’s look at mobile applications, for example. And let’s see, let’s try to find an interesting one real quick. So let’s look at this one. “iPhone Application with Location-Based Features.” So it shows when they posted the listing. Shows what their estimated budget is, and apparently they’ve already had several people inquire about it. It’s showing kind of what people say it would cost. The person posting the job listing can put in how many hours that the programmers have to have already worked through this site in order to be considered.

And of course, what their feedback score has to at least be. So it gives the person wanting software, a lot of control over kind of quality, or putting some assurances that the only people that can bid-- reach whatever criteria they specify. So these are some of the candidates, some of the programmers that have said that they can make this for them.

And oftentimes they’ll leave comments and you can see what kind of prices they’re saying that it will cost, or that they’ll do it for. But anyway check out oDesk.com, you can just spend hours looking around on this site at all the different jobs that are being placed, as well as looking at the programmers and what they can do, and looking in their portfolios and seeing what they’ve created. But this is a great place to come if you want to have software created for any idea that you come up with that this CD may spawn for you that you may think about doing for your business. You know, you may go and do some research and say, “Ooh, I see someone doing that that’s getting a lot of traffic. We should do something similar for...,” you know, kind of niche-i-fy it, so to speak. Like take a mainstream application, make it for our own market, like a gardening version of

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that, so to speak. And then have it made. And the place you’d want to come is a site like oDesk or Elance or some of the other ones that’re listed in the “Resources” section. But this is where it all begins.

To have something made, you’ve gotta find a software developer to make it, and again, keep in mind that you want to kind of build relationships with more than one developer in case of an emergency, or just in case one of them can’t be reached, or something happens, god forbid, to somebody, and you have a service that a lot of people are using, and you need someone to get in there and do it, because you can’t. So that’s important, but check out oDesk.com, great site. They’re doing some really great things, and I highly recommend it.

CD 10 - Lesson 12: Review Okay, let’s review. By now you realize, or should realize how much traffic that software can generate. It can generate tons and tons of traffic, and it’s responsible for billions and billions and billions of visits all across the internet. It’s very, very powerful. So you need to examine your market and look for opportunities. The way to do this is simple.

Examine your market or existing industry, and find where software already exists. Find where web services already exist, where toolbars exist, where widgets already exist. Find what’s already in your market. See what’s already successful, what’s already popular, what people already like, what people are already using.

And then going back to the theme, one of the foundational themes of this course, or piggybacking on other people’s hard work. Find ones that’re already successful, and then take it from there as far as doing something similar or doing something a little bit better.

But examine your market and be looking for those opportunities. We’ve talked about many different software types on this CD, so you have a lot of different things to choose from to go forth with some idea for software to generate traffic for you. Toolbars and widgets and web services and social networking, applications and mobile apps and mashups and shareware.

We’ve talked about all these different types of software. Now you just have to kind of pick and choose your opportunities and just run with something. Sometimes maybe you can actually choose something that could made faster, like a small widget or a small script that you could then have developed into a full-blown web service if the smaller version becomes successful or kind of starts showing some promise. So always keep that in mind, too. Don’t just put all your eggs into the basket of creating this massive software application that’s gonna take months and months and months to actually have made to see if anything will happen from it.

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Always think about doing it in stages, and maybe doing kind of a small test version with not as many features, or maybe nowhere near as complete, but just to see what the interest would be. We talked about how it all starts in the specifications phase. The more details that you give a programmer, the better. It’ll cost you less, it’ll get done faster, and you’ll end up with higher quality work.

So detail every function, feature, click movement, everything of what you want someone to create, as well as possibly handing them a prototype with what it looks like, even if it’s not the final design, but show them what each individual area or page will look like, or widget screen will look like, or anything that you want it to do, and the more you can detail the better the result is going to be. Very, very key.

Work with multiple programmers. You don’t want to work with just one person, no matter how good they are, even if they’re the best programmer in the world, because if something happens to them, where they can’t get to their email, or they can’t be reached for a few days or even a few weeks, you just never know what could happen. So if you’re working with multiple programmers, or at least have a working relationship with them, so you have someone that you could get in touch with and pay them to do some work for you-- you know if you needed it in an emergency situation, that’s very critical, because you never know when you may have some kind of situation where you’re not going to be able to reach the main programmer and you need to get someone else in there.

Consider hiring those all-stars fulltime. Talked about this several times, now, and it’s very, very important. When you find these freelance workers that do fantastic work for you, see about finding the place in your budget to be able to hire them fulltime to make them a full part of your team.

And last, but not least, use your existing distribution to jumpstart you. With any software project you do, especially anything that’s viral in nature, you want to reach out to your existing distribution to jumpstart you. You can also reach out to your existing distribution, and your existing audience and find beta testers.

So, for example, before you go live with something, you could reach out to, you know, your email list, or people that’re reading your blog, or people that follow you on Twitter-anywhere you reach people-- Facebook, My Space-- anywhere, and communicate with them and tap into that group of people, and say, “Hey, I’m looking for some people to test this software project that we’re working on.

You know, the first 50 people that go and sign up here, or join this list over here,” or

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however you want to set it up, we’ll get free accounts to be able to test with us, and you can offer them some kind of bonus, report or something, you know, to thank them for their help. Or a lot of people just do it for the sake of kind of being on the inside and getting to test something and use something that’s not public yet.

And so, and a lot of people will just be glad to do it, because if you give good content, you know, cut them one of the main foundations of this whole course, and you treat them well, and you’re constantly giving them value, they’ll be glad to help you with anything you ask them to do, just in return, just because you’ve been good to them, and now they want to be good to you.

But use your existing distribution to help you get testers, help get feedback, to help mold the kind of evolution and the creation, the modification, of whatever software thing that you’re gonna make. And also use that existing distribution to jumpstart it with traffic.

Traffic begets more traffic if used properly.

We’ve been talking a lot about that in this course. So use your distribution to start using your service, to invite friends, and then to just be using this service to affect other people, such as if they put the widget on their site, more people are gonna see it. Every time someone goes to their site, so on and so forth. So very, very powerful.

Make sure to use all these things, or most of these things that you can when you get software developed, and then when you market the software, and hopefully you can start getting a lot of traffic from any of these software projects that you decide to go into.

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CD 11: Affiliate Army Lesson 1: Overview Affiliate Army. Okay, by now we’ve gone over a ton of strategies for you to generate traffic for your business. If you don’t already see how this is going to start bringing you a lot of traffic to your business in the short term and in the long-term, you probably need to go back and start this course all over.

But here’s what’s incredibly powerful. I’m about to tell you about a concept or process that can take all of these traffic methods and strategies that you’ve learned and multiply it by a thousand because having your own affiliate program, if you sell your own unique products and services, can literally exponentially grow your traffic.

Why is that? Because it’s essentially letting others generate traffic for you. So when you take search engine optimization and creating a lot of great content, putting up videos on the internet, interacting in all different social networks and social bookmarking sites and social news sites, paying for advertising in AdWords, buying media and buying ads all over the internet.

When you take all these different things together, how would you like having someone do all of those things for you where they do all the work, they spend all the time and they spend all the money and you just get traffic and you don’t pay anything until they send you a sale.

It’s like saying you’ll agree to give them five dollars after they bring you ten dollars first.

It’s a no-brainer of course. You’d take that as many times as you could get it. Well, that’s what having an affiliate program is all about. An affiliate program is one of the strongest strategies on the entire internet for generating traffic.

It’s no surprise that it helped build companies like e-Bay and PayPal and Amazon and many of these other massive companies on the internet because you take all the different strategies that you can use for driving traffic and you let other people do all of those things and then send you traffic. It’s incredibly powerful.

So, the first action step for you is to think about can I incorporate and use an affiliate program for my business? If you have your own unique products and services, then the answer is yes and it should be yes.

If you’re currently an affiliate marketer where you’re just making money by promoting other people’s products and services or if you just generate content sites and you’re

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making money just based on advertising that supports the traffic that you generate, then you won’t be able to have an affiliate program.

If that is the case where you can’t have an affiliate program, you’ll want to think long and hard about expanding your business model so you can have your own unique products and services where you can have an affiliate program because again, it’s one of the best ways to generate traffic on the internet because others are doing the work for you.

It’s at no risk to you and what you’ll find is through a good affiliate program, once you get it up and running – I’m going to teach you how to do that, the traffic becomes very, very consistent and it can just virally grow month after month after month. It’s just a phenomenal way to generate traffic and sales for your business.

This is the top traffic strategy for many businesses on the entire internet. I have personally generated millions upon millions of dollars through several different businesses online that I’ve been involved with using an effective affiliate program, having others drive traffic to my site for me.

Now of course I employ all the other traffic strategies that I’ve told you about during this course so far and of course you should, too. You should also do all these things or as many of these things as you can, but don’t ignore the power of having your own affiliate program. It’s just incredibly valuable.

So understand that this is the top, very number one strategy that many companies are using online to generate their sales. So, that alone is something for you to strongly consider about doing it yourself.

And if you already have an affiliate program, but maybe your business isn’t kind of where you want it to be yet, then you need to pay close attention to some of the nuances that I’m going to explain as far as the strategy behind developing a powerful affiliate program because just knowing how to have an affiliate program and kind of knowing the nuts and bolts and the basics of how it works isn’t enough. It’s not the difference between having an affiliate program and having an incredibly successful affiliate program.

So you’re going to have to know these little things because only someone with a lot of experience of how to do it on a large level and have a lot of success with a very, very big affiliate program will actually know what to tell you.

For several years I had affiliate programs that were doing okay for me, but I didn’t have the experience yet to know what made the difference. So now that I do I really want to share those little things with you because it’s the little things that can really make things

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grow by a factor of five, ten or 100 when it comes to generating more traffic and more sales. So pay close attention.

The great thing about having an affiliate program and having other people promote your products and services for you, you can’t stop the traffic if you wanted to. It’ll just keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. What a great problem to have. So, again, very, very powerful.

And you need to know that affiliate marketing drives the internet. If there was no affiliate marketing, the internet would be probably only ten percent of what it is today because almost every site that you see online in one way or another benefits from affiliate marketing.

Now, certainly there are some sites out there where people are just publishing content and just writing about a certain topic or a certain industry and they’re just doing it because they want to and that’s all and well good.

But the majority of commerce online is driven in some way by affiliate marketing.

You’ve probably heard of Ad Sense, which is Google’s program where they allow people to basically distribute Google AdWords ads within their own pages and get paid per click and share in the advertising money that’s spent by those advertisers.

That really changed the game a few years ago when that came out. It allowed publishers a way to instantly start making money from their sites that were going to be advertising supported without them actually having to go out and sell those ads to somebody.

But affiliate marketing is everywhere. You just don’t realize it. So it’s really something that revolutionized business. It changed the game of business. The whole concept of pay per performance type of marketing where a company doesn’t have to pay the marketing or advertising cost until after the sale is generated by some process. It is just a game changer. It’s completely different.

It takes all the risk away from the advertiser and puts all the reward on the other end of the fence so to speak for whoever’s going to actually do the lead generation and then bring in the sales.

So it’s driving the internet and it’s yet another reason why you need to have your own affiliate program today and growing week after week, month after month and into the future if you’re really serious about building a thriving business online and generating lots and lots of traffic.

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So again, if you’re not currently making money in your business model by selling your own unique products and services, you need to figure out a way to do that because most large businesses have their own products and services that they sell.

So again, there’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money from just generating traffic and making money from advertising or from being an affiliate yourself. But if you really want to make a lot of money and a lot of revenue in your business you need to have your own products and services.

A successful affiliate program becomes a powerful viral marketing machine. The beauty of it is is once you learn how to get a solid affiliate program off the ground, as affiliates promote it and send traffic to it, it attracts more affiliates that aren’t yet promoting your affiliate program, but may be promoting other affiliate programs.

They learn about it. They sign up. They become an affiliate and then they start sending you traffic. Then some of their traffic happens to be affiliate traffic that are people poking around and they end up finding your affiliate program through that person’s efforts and it’s just kind of a snowball type of growing process.

Viral marketing – we’ve talked about it many, many times in this course. It’s incredibly valuable on the internet. It allows things just to spread on their own without any additional cost and it’s definitely something you want to tap into in every way possible.

For the affiliate it’s all about how much. It’s all about the money. Let’s not kid ourselves. So if you want to have a successful affiliate program, the more you can pay, the higher the commission, the more money you can share of the sale, the more successful your program will be period. It’s all about the math.

So if you were to give 100 percent of the sale away to the affiliate you’d be far more successful than you would be if you could only give away 50 percent of the sale. And likewise, if you can give away 30 percent of the sale you’ll be far more successful than if you only give away ten percent of the sale. That’s just the way it is.

Affiliates are fickle. They go from program to program. They’re just trying to find a way to make the most money possible for their efforts for the time they spend and for the money they invest in buying ads and buying traffic and putting in hours of time to do search engine optimization and to create great content themselves.

So don’t kid yourself. If you want to have a successful affiliate program and you’re not willing to pay out a pretty nice commission. I most cases of digital products such as software or information products of any kind, 50 percent commission is about the standard when that product pretty much has a zero cost of goods.

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In other words, it doesn’t really cost anything to sell ten online video based memberships compared to 100 for a company let’s say that’s doing some kind of online video training.

Let’s say they have an online training course that teaches people how to speak Spanish.

Because there’s no real additional cost unless they have individual coaches that spend time with each customer and, of course, they have labor cost. But if it’s a digital product, it’s pretty much the norm that the kind of base commission around the internet is 50 percent. That if it’s $100 product, an affiliate will get $50 for every sale that they refer from traffic they generate to that program.

So it’s really all about how much. So if you’re selling some kind of physical product, some kind of widget, some kind of thing that’s actually manufactured and made, then of course the amount that you’re going to be able to pay out is a lot less unless you actually sell something that has a high, high profit margin.

But make sure that it’s far greater than just five or ten percent because that’s not enough to get affiliates’ attention. You really need to be able to pay enough to make it worth people’s trouble and to also be able to prove with the conversions and everything else that it’s actually going to be worth their time. So the more you can pay, the better.

Now many online marketers are really taking things to a different level with their affiliate programs where a lot of them are starting to give away 100 percent or all the profit on the initial sale that an affiliate makes because they then expect to make their money on the back end or when that customer buys the second time or goes and buys other products and services from the company. So, that’s a very generous model to use. Just give away everything to the affiliate on the first sale and make everything on the back end.

Another model that’s getting more and more popular is what’s known as lifetime commissions where an affiliate program will say listen, if you send us a lead and someone buys something from us, we’ll hard code that person.

If they ever buy from us today or in six years from now, you’re going to get an affiliate on any of their activity because the thinking is that company wouldn’t have ever had that customer if it wasn’t for the affiliate.

So what do they care if they pay a commission down the road. Half of the money, if they’re paying a 50 percent commission, is possibly half of what they never would have had. So half of $200 in five years from now is better than zero or 100 percent I should say of nothing.

So that’s becoming popular and affiliates like that. They like sending traffic one time and knowing that potentially some of that traffic can pay them commissions again and again and again down the road. So this is something that you really need to think about.

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Think about how generous can I get away with being and not of course jeopardize my business model because the more generous you can be, the more success that you’re going to have in your affiliate program. The more people are going to get behind you and work hard to drive you traffic. It’s just that simple.

He who pays the most, or I should say she, he or she, who pays the most on the internet in any market, any industry is going to end up commanding the most attention from the affiliate base that’s going to drive traffic for that industry and that market.

Of course there’s a small side bar to that statement and that has to do also with how well it converts because if you pay 90 percent commission, but it takes 10,000 visitors to get one sale of ten dollars, you’re not going to survive very well.

And just a quick point to throw out as an aside note here, one of the tips that you also need to keep in mind is don’t make your affiliates be your guinea pigs for your marketing. You need to drive some targeted traffic with AdWords yourself. You need to tweak your landing pages.

You need to tweak your web site and your process and make sure it’s doing a good job at selling your products and services to your market through that targeted traffic, like you’ve already learned in this course, before you go and expect an affiliate to go out and do the work to promote your program because if you don’t tweak your process first and you send affiliates out there to generate traffic for you and it’s not converting, you’re done.

That affiliate’s never going to work hard to generate your traffic again, even if you improve things later and get it selling well later, they’ve already tried. They may have spent $500 in AdWords traffic and sent it to your site and nothing happened. They lost $500. They’re never coming back.

They’re probably going to tell other affiliate friends that they knew and then they’re going to stay away from your program. So it’s very, very important that you don’t make your affiliates the guinea pigs for your affiliate program.

You need the right affiliate program software. There are several kind of off the shelf programs that you can buy and install on your own server. There are some hosted solutions where you can just pay a service to run it for you.

Of course there’s always the option to kind of create your own custom software if you have a programmer or have access to programmers and you just want to kind of make your own unique thing from scratch. In most cases that’s not really necessary because

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there are so many solutions out there and you can just use one of those solid solutions and just get up and running.

So there’s a lot of different affiliate program software and services that are out there. Too many to go into of course on this CD-ROM. You can go to the Resources section for this CD and we’ll have links to all kinds of different programs and some reviews and some notes that you’ll find over there in the Resources section, as well as we’ll try to keep it up to date as more of these get added to the market for you.

But go to the Resources section right now and you’ll already find links to a bunch of programs for you to consider or software and services to consider to run your affiliate program.

But having the right affiliate program software is key and they’re not all created equal.

Some of them just croak and die when you start sending a lot of traffic. Other ones are really good. Other ones don’t effectively track the activity and that’s very important. If you’re not accurately tracking the traffic and giving credit to the affiliate for the traffic they generate, your program’s doomed and people are going to stop promoting you.

There are essentially two ways to pay an affiliate because now you’re thinking okay, if someone starts sending me a lot of traffic, they’re going to start working hard to send me sales. How do I compensate them? How do I pay them? We’ve already agreed on the commission.

I’ve got an affiliate program software service that’s managing my program and keeping track of all the statistics and how many sales they’ve generated and the refunds and all that good stuff. How do I go about paying them?

Well, you pretty much have two options. Obviously there are other options than these.

You could do direct deposit. You could use ATM kind of debit cards. I’ve seen some companies do that, but there are essentially two main ways to pay affiliates.

PayPal has this awesome thing called Mass Pay and you can just go into PayPal. Once you’re logged in if you look at the very bottom of – look at their footer menu. You’ll see a link that says Mass Pay, or you should anyways unless they’ve changed it since the last time I looked, but it should be there.

It’s called Mass Pay. It’s fantastic. That’s how we’ve been paying our affiliates for years.

It’s so easy. All we do is generate a text file that our affiliate program software outputs.

The text file just basically has the e-mail address of the affiliate, which is their PayPal address. We assign some unique ID to that affiliate just so we can track it internally.

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Then in this file it also shows the amount in U.S. dollars since that’s how our program runs that this affiliate is to be paid for whatever current sales period we’re paying for.

Then typically it just has a little line in there that says keep up the great work. You can add other little memo notes and all those tings that they’ll see in their PayPal account.

But you basically take this text file and that could be created automatically from affiliate program software. You go to Mass Pay. It says Upload Your Mass Pay File. So you find it on your hard drive. You click it. You press go. Whamo! PayPal automatically pays either ten or 10,000 affiliates in one shot based on that one text file. It’s very, very powerful.

You don’t have to stuff envelopes and mail checks to 1,000 different affiliates and go through all that. You just upload the text file, press go and of course, you have to have money in your PayPal account to pay all those people, but you have that in there first and then it just takes care of it. Everyone gets paid electronically. A lot of people prefer it and it’s right there in their PayPal account. So that’s one way.

That’s primarily how we pay. You’ll always have people that have problems with PayPal or they can’t get a PayPal account. They’re in a certain country where they can’t accept PayPal or they just don’t use PayPal ‘cause they had problems with it and then you’ll actually need to mail a physical check to those people and you can kind of make arrangements with those affiliates on an individual basis. But that’s pretty much it.

Some people actually mail checks every single month to their affiliates. They print them out and they mail them. A lot of people like mailing the checks because usually in the envelope with the check they put some kind of promo for the affiliate program where they’re announcing a contest or some other types of information to really encourage that affiliate to sell more. So, that’s an opportunity you don’t really get if you pay via PayPal. It’s kind of a marketing opportunity.

But you’re going to have to weigh the pros and cons. There are actually services out there that’ll handle mailing – printing and mailing checks for you. That may be another option for you. Again, you’ll find links to those types of services and those options in the Resources section for the CD. But it’s just something for you to think about. How you’re going to pay your affiliates.

The other thing to think about is how often. Once a month is typically what most affiliate programs pay. Some affiliate programs pay quarterly, which is horrible. Affiliates hate that. It’s all about cash flow for affiliates. If affiliates are going to go out there and spend a lot of money in AdWords promoting your site, they need to get paid back as soon as possible for any results to pay for the clicks and of course their ad costs that they’ve invested in promoting your product. So the faster you can pay the better.

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As affiliate programs evolve I think we’re going to start seeing almost weekly payments in most programs, most of the popular programs. Right now it’s pretty much once a month, but I think more and more we’re going to start seeing the rate of pay increase to really make affiliates happy. So that’s a consideration. Something you’re going to have to figure out for your program, but minimum pay once a month.

Typically what we’ve done we pay on about the 15th of each month and when we pay on the 15th of the month it will be for the previous month’s 30 days or 31 days of sales. So it gives us two weeks there since a sales period ends to actually audit things and make sure everything’s in line before it’s actually paid out there on the 15th for that previous 30 days that came before the beginning of that month that it’s paid in.

Consider using an affiliate network. I’m going to show you a few here on this CD. Some people don’t want to run their own affiliate program. Some people would rather tap into an affiliate network, like Commission Junction or doing digital products on ClickBank.

There are pros and cons to both.

When you use an affiliate network you get the benefit of their marketing and their built in affiliate base. It can kind of keep you from having to go out there and try to find affiliates for yourself. However the down side is it’s usually expensive.

They either take and/or an expensive up front free, plus a transaction percentage of all your sales. Sometimes it’s so expensive it’s not really worth it. Some companies will take 20 percent of the volume that’s created for your affiliate program.

So when you make that decision to be real generous to your affiliate partners and you end up paying a lot, if you pay that plus 20 percent, you’re almost losing money or you’re left with nothing. So it’s definitely something to consider.

Sometimes it’s smart to do it first just to be able to build some affiliate relationships with other affiliates. Then you can decide hey, our contract’s up or whatever agreement was with the affiliates network’s up. Now we’re going to go do it on our own.

Since you already have the relationship with those affiliates, you can just say hey, come with us. We’re doing our own independent program. A lot of companies have done that.

They use an affiliate network to try to get a bunch of affiliates and then they go out on their own where they’re making all the money without paying a transaction percentage.

Of course you’re going to have to read the terms of service and the legalese of these different affiliate networks to make sure you’re able to do that and that there’s no conflict of interest of course for like stealing affiliates and they’re not getting compensated for things.

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But most of them have some kind of agreement that’s for a certain period of time where they don’t control you or your affiliate activity forever. So you can leave and then have people follow you and come with you without continuing to pay those transaction fees.

But we’ll talk about a few of those affiliate networks.

Of course the other advantage to using an affiliate network is they pay the affiliates, they handle all the refunds, they handle the payments and the processing. So it can save you a lot of headaches and a lot of the work, but on the other side of things again, it’s very, very expensive. So that’s something you’re going to have to think about.

One tier versus two tier. This is a huge question mark that most people have when it comes to running their own affiliate program. If you don’t know what this is, let me tell you what this is real quick.

A two tier affiliate program and it started years ago. I think my old friend who unfortunately has passed away now, a couple years ago, two, three years ago now, Corey Rudl, he was kind of a pioneer in the affiliate marketing space for the internet marketing industry. I think he was one of the first who had like a two tier affiliate program.

What that meant was you get your special links as an affiliate. That if you sent traffic through those links you’d get credit for any sales that you referred. And so obviously that’s how an affiliate program works.

But the kicker was, of a two tier program, that if another affiliate followed one of your links, ended up signing up for the affiliate program themselves and then started generating traffic, you’d get like a small percentage of any of the sales that they drove to the affiliate program. So you’d get these overrides.

It’s almost like a bonus that if your traffic sent any other affiliates that became affiliates that then started sending traffic, you may get five percent commission on anything that they generate.

So for a lot of people this was a great incentive. They’re like wow, it’d be great if I ended up referring hundreds of other affiliates to this company that ended up generating all this traffic and I could make this small percentage of all these other people where I’m not even doing any of the work and it could just go on for years and years and years.

So it was very exciting, at least the possibilities of that two tier program and how much money that it could make for people. And there was also the incentive and it still is in most of these two tier programs where you could have a straight link for just promoting the affiliate program and not the products of the company.

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So you could say hey, are you looking for a great opportunity to make money as an affiliate marketer. I recommend this affiliate program. Their products convert really well. Go sign up as an affiliate and start sending them traffic. And that’s another way of course if they use that link that you’d get credit for them kind of under you. It’s almost like a multi-level type thing on a second tier.

One tier is just a straight up affiliate program. An affiliate signs up. They get credit for the traffic that they send and of course they get paid on the sales that they’ve referred through that traffic and that’s it. If somebody else signs up as an affiliate that came through their link, their traffic, they don’t get any credit for it. There’s no additional bonus or anything else.

A lot of people, especially in kind of like the make money type markets and the internet marketing types of markets to marketers and business people, a lot of those programs are running two tier programs. There are some mainstream kind of e-commerce programs; selling shoes, handbags and things like that that also do two tier as well.

But it’s really popular kind of in the make money thing because they think if they’re promoting a make money product those people are likely to be affiliates, too, and that’s the way two tier works.

But here’s the bottom line. I’m going to give it to you straight. As someone that’s run successful affiliate programs now for several years and my companies have generated millions and millions of dollars through our affiliate programs. We have a lot of experience. We’ve done two tier programs and we’ve seen all the data. We’ve done some one tier stuff. We’ve seen all the data.

Here’s what my opinion is and it’s also the opinion of a lot of super affiliates, the ones that drive most of the activity and we’re going to talk about that in a minute, talk about the 80/20 rule.

It’s actually more like 99 to one that’s what you’ll find with affiliate programs that even if you have 5,000 affiliates you’re going to find that only 50 are driving most of your sales.

That most people will sign up as an affiliate and never send you any sales or very, very little traffic. But we’ll get to that in just a moment.

The bottom line is two tier, I honestly believe now in this evolution, this day that we’re at in e-commerce is totally over rated and it’s almost just not worth doing for a couple different reasons. One, I think and from a lot of different legal opinions that I’ve read – again, I’m not a lawyer. This isn’t legal advice.

But the two tier type of structure is borderline kind of network marketing and there could be some potential legal issues with running such a program. For us, just to give you an Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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example, for all the things that we’re doing at Income.com and of course anything I consult with anyone on or anything else that we ever get involved with or any company that I ever start that has an affiliate program outside of Income.com will only have a one tier program.

Again, it’s for two reasons. One is because of the potential legal problems, but two, most super affiliates aren’t really interested in two tier programs. They would rather be paid a higher commission on the sales they generate than the bonus and promise of oh, if they happen to refer someone else that they’re going to get paid on that activity because they know very, very few other affiliates actually drive any sales.

And again, when you pay out that second tier bonus, that has to come from somewhere.

So if you’re selling products let’s say that are $100, and if you were able to pay a 50 percent commission – you may not be, but if you were normally if you were able to pay a 50 percent commission to the affiliate that refers the sale, if you’re going to do a two tier program where you’re going to pay another ten percent on any of the two tier sales, you may now have to only pay 40 percent to the referring affiliate; ten percent on that second tier to make up the 50 percent. Otherwise then it’s going to break into you paying out 60 percent and you’re only going to net 40 percent.

So, the affiliate, most of the active affiliates, the ones that actually make much money and generate much activity, they would rather just have the higher commission. They’re like I could care less about two tier. Just give me more money per sale. So that’s what we’re seeing a lot in the affiliate marketing industry. Less and less affiliates give a hoot about a second tier.

So, when you weigh the possible legal implications and you weigh what affiliates really want that drives activity and them getting paid more, I believe one tier’s the way to go.

Again, this is just my opinion. You can do your own due diligence and make your own decision, but I think one tier is the way to go for those reasons I’ve just specified.

Another tip is you’ve got to protect your program against fraud. More and more a lot of affiliate programs are kind of evolving where they don’t just let affiliates sign up and get going. For years, many programs, and a lot of them still do today, allow someone to sign up as an affiliate. The system immediately gives them their affiliate link and right now if it’s three o’clock in the morning they could run out and start driving traffic to the affiliate link and start making money.

There’s pros and cons to doing this. The negative part of it is is there’s a lot of fraud that goes on in affiliate marketing. We’ve been hit by it many times. It just happens. You just have to protect yourself against it.

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One of the ways to protect yourself against fraud and a lot of affiliate programs are starting to do this, a lot of the larger affiliate programs, the more serious ones is to review all the affiliate requests. When someone wants to become an affiliate you kind of make them fill out even a questionnaire to qualify themselves like saying why should we make you an affiliate. What are your qualifications? Just because hey, I think I can send you some traffic, that’s not good enough.

So you may want to think about that. Reviewing all your affiliate requests before you set someone up with an affiliate account. If it’s a super affiliate that can send a lot of traffic, they’re not going to care because most of the programs that they’ve promoted where they make the most money they had to go through the same process. So it’s not a big deal.

Because fraudsters would just love – they love everything that’s automated. They can sign up. They can send a bunch of fake sales from different proxy servers and different hacks on the internet. Use a bunch of stolen credit cards. Hopefully get those commissions and get paid before the company realizes it’s fraud and before all those charge backs come in. They got their commissions. They’ve high tailed it out of there and they don’t care what happens after. So you’ve got to be very careful.

Check fraud happens a lot. Talked with several companies that have had – they send out a $500 commission check or a $50 commission check and somebody fraudulently turns that check into a $50,000 check. So, I mean there’s crazy stuff that’s going on in the world of fraud. So you have to be careful of that.

Another way to protect against fraud is to limit the countries that you take affiliates from.

You’ll find some resource links in the Resources section about different countries that we recommend and what other people are finding. Again, it sucks to kind of discriminate against certain countries, but the fact of the matter remains that a lot of fraud is coming from specific countries and it’s almost not worth it for you to try to accept any affiliates from those countries if you can just cut off all the potential problems in advance.

There’s always exceptions, of course, where you can have people apply and if they can prove to you that they’re a legitimate affiliate, if they have references or they have a legitimate site, like an authority site that’s been around for years and you can see that they’re legitimate, then you can make an exception regardless of what country they’re in.

But you’ve got to be thinking of ways to protect your program against fraud and you have to make sure to really express to your affiliates that they can’t spam or abuse the internet in any way. They can’t use black cat methods or they can ruin your reputation. They could actually get you involved in lawsuits, which has happened.

Unfortunately some friends of mine, really good internet marketers have run really solid companies. They do it by the book and everything else and they run a really nice Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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business, treat customers really well, honor all refunds, make their customers really happy and they’ve gotten caught up in lawsuits because of some knucklehead affiliate that signed up and started doing fraudulent things with spamming and all kinds of things.

Somebody sued them and then of course sued, in this case, the friend of mine that owned the company of the products they promoted because it was all involved together. That’s just the way lawsuits work. So you’ve got to be really careful and make sure you set the rules properly for your affiliate program and you’ll find some information in the Resources section on how to do that.

The kiss of death for affiliate programs or JVs. You may have heard the term JV. It means joint venture. It’s very much like an affiliate program, even if it’s just some kind of set up with one person where you give them a link and they promote a product or service or project that you’re doing. They send traffic and you’re going to kind of share the wealth of whatever comes in from it. You’re going to give him some commissions.

Joint ventures, affiliate program marketing, whatever you want to call it, it’s kind of all the same thing. But the kiss of death in doing any of these deals is not paying people on time. If you want to kill your own affiliate program or you want to kill any kind of business relationship that’s going to work hard to send you traffic, the way to do it is not to pay them on time.

So if you owe someone $500 in commissions and you pay them a week late or two weeks late or you just think oh, I’ll pay them next month, you’re done. You’re done, you’re done, you’re done. Stick a fork in you. You’re done. You can’t do that with an affiliate program.

The number one rule in doing business online, like with joint ventures and working with other people and doing any kind of affiliate program marketing where people are promoting your products and services is to pay them quickly and pay them on time. It’s just like you in any other element of business. If you’re doing business with someone and they’re paying you late money they owe you, you’re probably not going to want doing business with them.

Don’t make the mistake that many, many other affiliate programs have made. They’ve kind of gotten arrogant or they’ve had an ego about it and they’re like oh, we’ll pay our affiliates when we want to. We have such a great product and such a great pro – I’ve seen this with huge companies. They think their arrogance of just oh, well these affiliates can’t sell these great handbags anywhere else ‘cause we’re the only ones that make them.

Well, guess what? Those affiliates as soon as they get paid, they’re never going to promote your stuff again regardless if you have a unique product and they made good

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money from it. Just because they need to count on that money. They have bills to pay.

They have advertising expense to pay so pay on time.

I mentioned this a minute ago. The 80/20 rule becomes the 99/1 rule in running an affiliate program and making money from other people promoting your products and services. It’s probably more than that. It’s probably like 99.999 to .00001.

You’ll find that a very, very small percentage of your affiliates are actually driving most of your activity. There aren’t many affiliates out there in the world in any industry that are generating lots and lots of traffic.

So of course you can take the long tail view. You could have hundreds of thousands affiliates and if they each send one or two visitors a week it’s all going to add up and you can generate a lot of sales.

You can make some good sales from a volume aspect and you will just by having a lot of affiliates, but most of your sales are going to come from a few hard core, solid performing super affiliates as they call them that are able to generate a lot of traffic and a lot of sales for you.

So those are the people you need to cater to, recruit and of course build relationships with because they’re going to drive most of the results and activity in your affiliate program.

You’ve got to do all the work for your affiliates. You need a training center that you have to set up. Give people all kinds of ads to use. Videos they can use, banners they can use, pre-written e-mails they can use, everything that they can just copy and paste and make it easy to promote you. Don’t make them do any work.

If they want to do additional work like a lot of super affiliates will, they’ll go and create their own custom ads and things. Well, they still have that option. But give people canned ads and do all the work for them. Train them, show them how to promote your product and communicate.

Show them what’s working with other affiliates, but do all the work for them. Help them sell you and your products and they’ll sell more of you and your products, of your business of whatever it sells. So you need to do all the work for them. The more work you do for them, the more results you’ll see.

You’ve got to keep your program fresh. Come out with new product offers, new specials, new seasonal types of promotions. Stay in contact with your affiliates. It’s a good idea to have like an affiliate blog for your program that only your affiliates can see where they can keep up with the blog of what’s going on with the program, some new things that you’re trying, some new creatives, some new ads, some new things that are working.

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Keep it fresh. Stay in contact with them and keep new deals and keep new things in front of them and you’ll keep the activity high. I myself made this mistake many times where I just get in a lazy mode of kind of set it and forget it. You set up the affiliate program.

You create some things for affiliates to use. The sales and traffic start coming in and even starts going a little bit and then you just forget it and just say well, it’s already doing all the work; let it run.

Well, that can work, but if you really want the best results possible, you have to keep it updated. You have to keep communicating and you have to stay kind of in the forefront of the minds of your affiliates if you really want to keep them to keep pushing you hard ‘cause a lot of affiliates will promote something one time, lose interest and go and try something else. Affiliates – the thing you need to remember about affiliates is that they’re extremely fickle.

So it’s very important that you keep it fresh and you always keep things in front of them, even if they’re not currently promoting your program, keep reminding them of the opportunity. Keep making it easy for them.

Say hey, maybe you haven’t promoted us recently. Here’s a cut and paste promo that’s paying off really well for other affiliates. Here’s all you’ve got to do is copy and paste it and fire it off to a list if you have it or put it on your blog or use it here or there. Or here are some AdWords ads that are working well for other affiliates. And just communicate and keep it fresh and you’ll see better and better results.

Running contests can increase activity. I’m going to show you a funny example of a contest that a friend of mine ran recently for their affiliate program. You see some of the prizes. The thing about contests, again, the main focus for affiliates is – the main focus for them is it’s all about the money, right. They’re doing it to make money.

That’s totally true, but you’d be surprised that little prizes and gifts can really get people more excited about increasing their activity because one, they know if they increase their activity they’re going to make more money anyways, which again, that’s what affiliates care about. How much? What’s in it for me? How much am I going to get paid?

But contests can actually be fun for affiliates and whether they’re winning a video camera or a Mac Book Air laptop or iPods or – even if it’s something that’s not that expensive, like a $50 gift certificate to the Outback Steakhouse or something like that.

Even though a lot of super affiliates can afford to just buy those things for themselves, there’s something about the psychology in getting free stuff that you’re not actually putting out money for. Even though they’re putting in the work and they’re basically earning it anyways, it’s just a different thing.

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You’d be surprised. I have seen multi-millionaires where their time is worth thousands of dollars an hour, put in a lot of time just for the chance to win like a $200 iPod that they could walk down to their local Apple store if they have one or go to Apple’s web site and order it.

They could buy 100 of them if they wanted to. But they’ll fight it out because – well, a lot of marketers, a lot of affiliates in all different markets, regardless of what niche, a lot of them are competitive anyways. It’s a fun thing to try to make more money. Seeing those numbers grow is like a scoreboard so it’s almost like a game.

But contests can be very powerful in getting people to get off their butts and get them to push some new traffic to your site. So we’re going to talk about that in a little bit.

Quietly promote your program on your site. Don’t push it in front of all your customers.

When people come to your site, don’t have it screaming at them, hey, join our affiliate program, become our affiliate because you’re alienating the affiliates that are doing the work for you and they’re sending you traffic.

They don’t want you to pitch your affiliate program to other people that come to the site that they’ve sent there where they may join the affiliate program and sometimes they end up buying from their own link and removing the commission from that original affiliate.

It’s just kind of rude and it’s just kind of a bad code of conduct to use.

So the way you do it is simple. Just quietly promote your program on your site. Most companies with even very, very valuable affiliate programs just kind of quietly put the link Affiliate Program.

It will usually just say Affiliate Program in the footer menu of their navigation. Not as a top main link, but just somewhere in the footer because super affiliates and really active affiliates know that that’s where you find information about an affiliate program or partner program if a company has one.

So affiliates will find you. They’ll know to look there and they’ll end up discovering it and they’ll end up finding your program on their own. You’ll get new affiliates that way if you’re not directly recruiting them.

So do it quietly with a small link at the bottom of your page and that’s it. Don’t put it throughout your copy or anywhere on your site and you won’t upset your affiliates and of course, they’ll promote you harder knowing that you’re not going to try to be stealing their commissions by getting other people to sign up as an affiliate and buy when they sent them there in the first place.

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You must sell your affiliate program. Even though it’s free. Even though it’s an opportunity to make money. You have to sell it. We’ve been talking about this.

Everything about marketing is what’s in it for them. We kind of talk that a little bit when it comes to social strategy and having someone as your friend on Facebook or follow you on Twitter or reading your blog or doing anything where you’re in touch with them, you’re using up their time. Attention is a valuable thing and it’s getting more and more valuable as more people are fighting for people’s attention in this world.

Well, when it comes to an affiliate program you have to sell it, you have to market it to get people to sign up to it. So I’m going to show you some information about that, an example of that, about selling your affiliate program. As some of your affiliates have success, you want to get testimonials from them if you can. Make a case study of their success story and then promote them to get other people to join the affiliate program. It’s very, very important and it’s very, very powerful.

Some of the biggest affiliate programs in the world that’s how they work. I think when eBay really kicked off their affiliate program and they had some affiliates earning over – I think their top affiliate at one point got a check for like over a million dollars for one month of activity. That’s huge. A million dollars for one month of activity. Their top affiliate did.

So when they broke that news our top affiliate – I think they came out and said their top 20 affiliates were making at least 100,000 a month, which is crazy. That’s a lot of money.

So when they were saying “Our top affiliate earned over a million dollars in the last month of activity.” It really opened the eyes of other affiliates all over the internet. Like wow, I really need to start promoting their program because clearly a lot of people are getting paid from it.

So keep that in mind. You have to sell your program. When you start getting somebody that has good results when they’re making good money, see if you can get their permission to promote it. Typically most affiliates will let you do that. One, they like the respect and recognition that they’re doing well and they don’t mind. Sometimes for competitive reasons they won’t want people to know.

You kind of have to negotiate that on an individual basis and see if someone will let you do it. Usually they will because they’re just glad to return the favor since they’re making so much money from your program.

If you want to find affiliates. This is a big thing. Well how do I get affiliates? How do I find affiliates? We’re going to talk about several methods of course throughout the CD and these lessons that you’re about to go through, but you’ve got to find affiliates.

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You’ve got to become active and you’ve got to go out there. You can analyze competition. You can monitor advertising, all these things that you’re already going to be doing anyways through the curriculum and methodology of this course of what I’m having you do for all the other reasons and other strategies from creating content and keeping up with your market.

But you can do those things to find affiliates and we’re going to talk more about that because you’ve got to actively look for affiliates and of course go through the process of building a relationship and recruiting them and getting them to promote your program if you really want to have a successful affiliate program.

Here’s a big secret I shared – gosh, several years ago when I started doing some marketing teaching online and just sharing some of the success I was having in my own business before I really became kind of a well known teacher in the internet marketing industry.

I was seeing that a lot of people were struggling with doing joint ventures and doing affiliate program marketing and everything else and so I taught this concept. Its been very, very powerful to so many people. So if you’ve never heard me talk about this before, I hope you really pay attention to it. Here’s one of the biggest secrets to getting other people to sell your stuff and send you a bunch of traffic.

So many people that start out with a new affiliate program, like you maybe. If you don’t have an affiliate program yet or maybe you have one that’s just never gone anywhere. So many people get frustrated and they’re like gosh, I don’t have 1,000 affiliates like such and such does in my market or I don’t have 10,000 people linking to my gardening tool store and so I’m not getting all that traffic. It’s hard for me to compete with my competitors.

Well, listen, when it comes to anything that we’re talking about in this course, everything starts from zero. The most successful people on the internet – let’s say that have done email marketing start with zero subscribers. You get one. You get two. Then you get 50.

Then you get 100. People that have had RSS subscribers to their blogs, they start with zero. They have to get one before they can get a million.

Well, getting affiliates is no different. You’re going to start with no affiliates and you’re going to have to work your way up to getting your first one, then the first five, then the first ten and so on and so forth.

Well, here’s the secret to doing successful joint ventures and getting people to be your affiliate and really getting the ball rolling. One of the biggest secrets is all you have to do is one. Just focus on one. Once you prove that your marketing works – again, don’t

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make people your guinea pig. Drive targeted traffic. Prove that your site converts. Then use that data.

You can just say hey, look, I drove 2,000 visitors to our site and here’s what it produces in sales and if I give you 50 percent, here’s what you could reasonably expect. You’re not promising them, but here’s what you could reasonable expect if you sent the same amount of traffic. So giving that data.

Well, use that data and just to get one person, convince them to promote your product or service, to do an e-mail to their e-zine opt in newsletter list or to put a post on their blog or anything else. Then as soon as you get one person that has any success at all. Like you get one person that plugs your stuff, they make $500. Now what you want to do is you want to use those results. Of course you want to get their permission and you deal with all that.

But now it’s so much easier to go and get other people to promote your product ‘cause it’s a much easier sell. You start by selling and convincing people by using that data that you got on your own, but once you have someone else that has successfully promoted your program and done a joint venture with you and gotten results at all, like three or $400, now it’s a no-brainer to go to other people and say, “Look, such and such over here put a little post on their blog. They made $400. I think you could probably do about the same, hopefully. Maybe even better. Why don’t you try it.”

That’s such an easier thing to sell and to convince people to do than you saying well, no one’s ever promoted my program before, but you should just go ahead and promote it.

Here’s something to keep in mind. I’ve taught this before. It’s incredibly powerful.

Think about this. Anywhere in your marketing where someone is about to make a decision of any kind that you want them to make, to opt in to an e-mail list, to join and get an RSS subscription to a feed of any kind, to follow you on Twitter, to become a Facebook friend, to do anything, to buy from you.

When someone is about to do any action that you want them to take, one of the most powerful things in marketing is for them to hear from or be exposed to someone else that’s already made that same decision.

That’s why the power of the testimonial or the success story is so incredibly powerful when it comes to marketing psychology. So, you want to get people to become your affiliate?

One of the greatest things would be to have like a video on a page that you could show people or that you could send them to that would be an affiliate talking about how much

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money they made by being a part of your program. There it is. That trumps everything else.

They could say hey, I’ve been an affiliate of this program and here’s my check. I made $32,000 by sending some AdWords traffic and I love this affiliate program. Very powerful.

It’s not enough sometimes for you to say how great you are or how well things will work on your end. It’s so much more powerful and easier to sell something if other people that have already made the same decision someone’s about to make or thinking about making can actually speak for you. So always keep that in mind.

So again, do one successful joint venture, let their voice sell it to other people. Leverage that to get a second joint venture or a second affiliate promoting you. Use their results.

Now you’ve got a guy that’s made $350. You’ve got a woman over here that’s made $200 from promoting your product.

Now it’s going to be that much easier to get a third person. Then when you get someone that makes more money, you leverage that to get a fourth person and so on and so forth.

So leverage any results that you have at all that’s successful to get more results. That’s very, very powerful. It’s a very, very true marketing concept. I want you to keep that in mind. So leverage successful deals to get other deals.

Great affiliate programs get discovered period. If you have a solid affiliate program that pays well, that converts well, you’re going to get discovered because as affiliates are out there actively promoting you, other affiliates and smart marketers, just like you’re becoming from this course when you’re learning how to monitor the competition and keep up with your market, they poke around. They look at things.

They figure things out. They’re thinking of the piggyback philosophy as well. Hey, wonder what this person is doing. I wonder if they can give me a shortcut and show me where the money’s flowing so I can get in front of it, too.

They’re going to find you. When they see ads that are being run by some of your affiliates, they’re going to find you. Affiliates themselves are going to find you when they’re doing research in that market.

They’re going to find out about your affiliate program and that’s how they can end up finding you, finding that little affiliate program link at the bottom of your page ‘cause they already know where to look for it. Getting to an area that sells your affiliate program that we’re going to get into on this CD. Talking about how to convince people to sign up for your program and then you’re all set.

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They join, they promote, other people see their ads and then they find out about it. So great affiliate programs can’t be kept a secret on the internet. They just can’t be. The more they’re promoted, the more it begets so to speak more activity and affiliates. So if you create a great affiliate program like I’m going to teach you on this CD, you do all the right things, people will find you. You will be discovered even without actively going out there at first.

At first you want to actively go out there and you want to seek out affiliates, but kind of once it’s going a lot of their work will bring you new people. Of course you’ll always want to spend some of your time actively recruiting new affiliates yourself and/or paying someone to do that. We’re going to talk about that a little bit. But great affiliate programs get discovered.

You’ve got to monitor your market if you want to find affiliates. I’m going to show you how to do this. I’ve kind of already talked about this a little bit just a second ago, but look around your market. We talk about this piggyback philosophy throughout this course. Let others do the hard work for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Go monitor your market. Look at the AdWords ads for your main keywords. You’re going to find that some of those ads are being run by affiliates for affiliate programs being run by your competitors. Bingo.

You want to find active affiliates that can send you a lot of traffic that are willing to spend money in advertising and do the work, just look and open your eyes and do a little bit of research, like I’m going to teach you to do and you’re going to find where a lot of the activity is being driven from and so you can contact them, build a relationship and then you can make them your affiliate, too.

And last but not least if you want to have maximum success you’re going to need to hire an affiliate manager. I’ll put some links to some resources in the Resources section for doing this for you and I’ll keep adding to it as more and more information is written about hiring affiliate managers. It’s kind of a new concept right now, but it’s becoming more and more and more popular, but ultimately you need to have someone manage your affiliate program on a full-time basis.

When I say hire somebody, I don’t mean you have to pay them $100,000 a year with benefits and they have to be in your same city. You could outsource to somebody, maybe in another country to work part time to kind of do some things.

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everything that needs to be done on a regular basis and how to kind of grow depending on what level you’re at and where you go next.

But ultimately you want to hire someone to manage your affiliate program itself because it can be one of the best ways and it can be one of the sections of your marketing that can generate the most traffic and business for you. Obviously it needs to be managed. It needs to be kept fresh.

The communication needs to be with the affiliates. They need to be paid on time. There needs to be someone there to build new relationships, whether it’s going to industry conferences to find new affiliates or to get on the phone and start kind of making friendships and relationships with people in your industry and your market. It’s great to have an affiliate manager.

So again, in the beginning depending on your budget you can do it yourself. You can be the affiliate manager. You can do that role yourself, but ultimately you want to hire someone to kind of take that off your hands and be managing that at least on a part time basis initially and then on a full-time basis.

How do you compensate affiliate managers? There’s all kinds of ways to do it. You can pay them a good salary. You can pay them an override percentage of the sales they help generate and manage. There’s just a number of ways that you can do that. We’ll put some information in the Resources section ‘cause again there’s a lot of stuff that we covered on that for you to think about doing that.

But those are some tips for the affiliate program and as we go through lessons in this CD I’m going to show you how to do a bunch of different things where you can be successful with an affiliate program and again, it’s a top traffic strategy for a lot of different companies for a reason. It’s incredibly valuable and incredibly powerful. If you want to have a lot of traffic, maximum traffic for your site and your business online, you need an affiliate program if you’re selling your own products and services period. You need an affiliate program.

CD 11 - Lesson 2: Commission Junction I’m logged into Commission Junction, which is at cj.com. Just those two letters: cj.com.

Now Commission Junction is one of the largest affiliate networks in the world and they actually manage affiliate programs for a lot of different companies, some very, very large companies, some billion dollars companies, as well as some very, very small companies.

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affiliate network, you can pay Commission Junction to manage the entire program for you. To pay your affiliates, to manage all the tracking and all that stuff and just to do everything for you.

Now, the last time we checked – I’ve never actually run an affiliate program through them. I know other people that have. It’s not cheap. It’s several thousand dollars I believe still to have it kind of set up as like a set up fee.

Then there, of course, is an ongoing percentage that you have to pay them of all the revenue activity that’s generated through your affiliate program that they manage, but they will handle a lot for you and depending on your business model, it may or may not make a lot of sense to actually use them, but they’re definitely someone that you want to look into and consider.

But regardless of if you’re thinking about or will have them run your affiliate program, they’re great for you just to use as an affiliate, the other side of the equation, to find programs for you to promote.

You can sign up for an account for free as an affiliate and then you can find programs in your market to promote as an affiliate where you can make money if people travel down those links that you put up anywhere in your marketing process and if someone buys or takes an action that they pay for.

It’s not always about getting paid a commission when someone buys something you can get paid. If someone just goes and signs up for a free form or does some kind of lead generation. So all different kinds of ways to make money from affiliate marketing.

As I’ve explained throughout this course, it’s just the smart thing for you to do to find different ways to subsidize and get value from any of your advertising, any of your marketing, any of your traffic generation.

Sometimes that comes down to getting paid when your traffic, your audience goes and buys products form other people, other companies out there on the internet in your market, your industry, which it’s going to happen anyways. So my philosophy is you might as well find ways to get paid for it.

So, you definitely want to look at being an active affiliate yourself. All smart internet marketers or almost all affiliate marketers themselves regardless of their business model.

You can make millions, of course, selling products and services to a specific market on the internet.

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Even businesses that do also make money by partnering with complementary companies in their industry that aren’t selling competing products and services and so of course they can share traffic. It’s a great strategy that we’ve already talked about several times.

But Commission Junction you can create a free account. You can come in here and you can find all different kinds of affiliate products free to promote where you can get paid.

So you can use Commission Junction and their affiliate directory here for multiple purposes.

One, you can find it to find affiliate programs in your industry for you to promote and make money from, but two, you can use it for competitive analysis. So for you to find affiliates in your market that are active that you want to recruit and get to become active for you where they’re actively sending you traffic and buying AdWords campaigns and buying advertising and spending their time doing search engine optimization and all the things that you’ve learned throughout this course, having them do all that for you if you want them to do that. Well, you have to find them and one of the ways is you can use this for competitive research.

But on one side of things of just you looking for programs to promote to make money from to subsidize your own traffic, come in here and look around. They cover a lot of different markets. So regardless of what your business is you should be able to find a program in here or multiple programs that relate to what it is that you do.

Again, if you can’t step up a level like we’ve talked about before, find the next highest thing up, promote that to try to subsidize some of your traffic and then hope to get some of your traffic from that higher level to actually convert into customers for your more niche market.

But for our gardening tools example that we’ve been using throughout this course, we come in here. Here’s their main subset, Home and Garden. It’s above of course kind of the top level Home Improvement we’ve talked about would be the step up from just specific gardening stuff. So we can hopefully find some things in here. So, if we go venture into here it shows all the things related to that kind of home and garden general market.

So this is listing all the different programs. It’s just an invaluable resource to come in here in Commission Junction. Again, you create a free account, validate your e-mail and you’re in this thing getting access in a matter of just a few minutes. So, it’s just definitely something you need to come as an action step regardless of what your business is just to use it for just doing some research.

And if you don’t have a business at all for some reason let’s say, or you want to start a new business, this is a great place to come to use the piggybacking method to see where a

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lot of money’s already being spent in specific markets that can give you ideas. So it’s a great, great research tool.

Let’s jump back to that kind of category listing. This is showing all the programs from the main category Home and Garden. Let’s go to actually the individual one called Garden.

Now we’re just looking at gardening things. So here it’s showing the advertiser name and you can click a few links to actually see the different links for the different affiliate programs; the different, I guess, areas of their affiliate program. They have different ads they’ve pre-written for the affiliate to use.

This is three month EPC, seven day EPC. This is kind of earnings per click. They’re kind of tracking and showing you how much the affiliates earn on average per click that they send to each of these affiliate programs.

So this one apparently pays on average $190 for every click that’s sent through one of these affiliate links. Now that’s really, really high. I found in the past by doing a lot of work with Commission Junction affiliate programs and doing a lot of different things that some of this data isn’t accurate. Of course your mileage may vary when it comes to almost anything.

Same thing goes with affiliate programs. Just take it with a grain of salt. It’s a good rule of thumb kind of just to go as a baseline to test things out, try maybe some of these higher paying, higher reported programs first, but don’t take it as gospel because you may find one that’s lower down that’ll produce a lot more for the traffic that you send. Again it may be more complementary to your business.

A lot of other factors involved, but at least gives you some ideas. So that’s what the EPC is. What the average click is worth that the affiliates are sending through those affiliate links. Again, that number is generated from a lot of different factors. They could presell.

When it comes to making money in the affiliate market, the more you can pre-sell – in other words the more you can recommend and review and talk about an affiliate product before they actually go to that end site to actually buy that product or learn more about it, the higher the conversion will be; rather than if you just say this is a great book and you have a link and someone goes and reads about a book.

They didn’t even know what the title was going to be. That conversion would be lower than if you say hey, I just read a great book. It’s called 101 Ways to Build an Awesome Garden. It’s only $18. I highly recommend it. You can read it in a matter of three days.

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about the book. That second description will convert a lot higher. So there’s a science with affiliate marketing and to getting it to sell.

So, again, some could be using it; some could be not that can be affecting these numbers.

But you look in here as far as network earnings, as far as kind of the volume that’s been generated from the different categories, which programs are getting the most activity.

This says how much it pays; ten dollars a lead. So if you just send them a lead even if they don’t buy, they probably have to opt in to some kind of form or ask for more information, you can get ten dollars a piece.

These other ones are percentages off a sale. If you send someone to – this example is Michigan Bulb Company. They must sell bulbs and seed and things for gardening. You get 15 percent of anything that someone spends that goes to a link that you refer traffic.

So you can see, if you had a gardening tools business like we’ve been talking about is the base example for this course, look at all these great programs that you could use in your e-mail marketing, throughout your blog, whether it’s a side ad or whether you mention them in a blog post.

Of course you want to fully investigate these companies. You never want to just recommend anything blindly. You want to do your due diligence, review it, make sure they treat your customers well and it is a good product before you to recommend it otherwise it can hurt your reputation.

But once you do all that, which is just kind of common sense stuff, once you do all that look at all these ways for you to generate money from your traffic if you had traffic in this market.

So if you’re able to generate a return through all these different ways from your own traffic, you could be one, there are plenty of people that have a business just by being an affiliate marketer without selling their own products and services and you can see how.

You can set up content sites. You can do search engine authorization.

You can pay with AdWords and drive people and pay with other advertising methods, all the things that you’re learning in this course, drive a bunch of traffic and then monetize it by just promoting other people’s products and not ever sell anything.

But in the case of this CD, it’s about you having an affiliate program, you getting people to sell your stuff. You can use Commission Junction to find other programs that are in your market. One for you to use as an affiliate, but two, to do research and to see what they pay their affiliates, which ones are popular. What kind of ads do they use. Like let’s look at some of these top ones.

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Let’s look at -- you click View Links and you can see the different ads that they’re giving their affiliates to use. Click on some of these. Sometimes they’ll come up to full size.

Like this is a large banner here. This isn’t just – so that’s the actual size of it. But that’s the ad they’re giving affiliates to use and there’s data that shows how each ad performs.

You can see how this banner, this size, this animation is actually performing the best so far for their affiliates and then which ones are also performing and then all these different options you can see all these different ads.

Again, let’s go back to it. Piggybacking and the power of not being an inventor and not reinventing the wheel. If you’re in the gardening market and if you were selling similar products to the market and you want to know what kind of ads need to be made to give to your affiliates, here you go. Look at an existing affiliate program that’s already working and already succeeding and then just do it similarly.

You know you’d want to give your affiliates an ad that’s about this size and maybe have it animated like they do. You don’t want to copy it off them and have the same exact pictures and stuff, but look at their copy.

Look what they’re saying. Look what the offer is and you can just see why it’s working and you can see why it’s getting attention and then you can just do it, too. It’s the most powerful thing that you can do in marketing on the internet. Do some research. Find people having positive working results and do it, too, or do it better or do it similarly.

Don’t reinvest the wheel. There’s no reason to.

All this stuff that you see here for example, for this company and these ads, they have spent probably hundreds of thousands or more on creating and testing these ads and getting people to try them and getting the ones that would actually convert.

So rather than you happen to be a guinea pig and just try things, you can come and do some common research, look at these different programs, look at the ads that they’re giving to their affiliates to use and you can pinpoint exactly what’s working and what they’ve already figured out. The different sizes, the different types of animation, the different types of copy and you can use it, too.

By the way, the copy that you see here, for example in this gardening niche if you had a gardening site and if you were selling similar things like whatever this company sells, plants and things, look at their copy. Gardeners looking for quality plants, wholesale pricing, free gifts with every order. For three peacock orchid bulbs with any order.

Look at some of this copy.

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have the highest value you know that whatever these words say are resonating really well with people in that market.

So, there are some great kind of gimme, freebie, valuable data for you if you’re going to create ads this size for example. If you were going to actually pay to have them shown on the internet. We already covered with buying media and buying banner ads. Look at banner ads that are already working like for these people affiliates and use those. We talked about that a little bit already, but you’re going to create AdWords ads.

Here’s another place to find really good quality ad copy. We’ve already talked about this, but I’m just reinforcing it. Let other people do the work for you. They already have.

We’re 15 years into e-commerce and development of the worldwide web. Almost everything’s been tried.

You can always try and test new little ideas and get crazy in your market, but why do it in the beginning until you’re just doing so much money that you can then spend some time or pay someone to try some different crazy outside the box things. Go with what already works and make money, too. That’s the recurring theme I’ve been giving you throughout this course. I want to keep drilling it into your head. It’s very important.

Anyway, come to Commission Junction, create a free account and you can find all kinds of great products that you can promote as affiliate to monetize your own traffic and to make money from your own traffic, to get it to break even or even to turn a profit on your affiliate offers. Then all the money you spend generating traffic and all the money that’s generated from your own products and services if you sell them, it’s just bonus.

It’s free money because the traffic’s already been paid for from these affiliate offers. But come in here and do some research to figure out what’s working for giving affiliates ads and things and for what their offers are and then just do it as well for your affiliate program. It’s incredibly powerful and it’s easy to do.

CD 11 - Lesson 3: ClickBank Analysis This is ClickBank.com. You’ve heard me talk about it before. You probably already know about ClickBank. Most people with any kind of exposure to internet marketing know full well about ClickBank, but let me just go over it real quickly with you, especially if you don’t know what ClickBank is, but even if you do, maybe there’s some things about ClickBank that you don’t know that can really help you.

Now when it comes to running your own successful affiliate program, ClickBank is another alternative as an affiliate network to manage your program for you. They’ll even collect the payments. You don’t even have to take your own credit cards or payments or anything or even deal with refunds. They do everything for you.

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All you do is send traffic to your store. If anything sells and if it’s done through an affiliate, they handle everything and then just send you a check for your share of the money.

Pros and cons – the pro is that they handle everything for you and that it’s easy and they have a built in affiliate network. So they already have tons of affiliates and so if you get ranked in their marketplace especially, if you have any kind of success, the affiliates will really find you.

I’m going to show you the marketplace, which you may have seen, but I’m going to show it to you for anyone that hasn’t seen it as well as point out some things about it. But it’s very powerful to have a built in collection of affiliates ready to test and promote your offer and that’s what ClickBank can offer.

ClickBank’s a great company. I’m a big fan of ClickBank. They’ve been around for years on the internet. They’re doing really good stuff and it’s no surprise that they’re very successful.

The con is it’s expensive. You’re paying a percentage of your sales and if you were running your affiliate program yourself and making all the money by you just paying your own affiliates and by you having software that runs it for you, you could potentially make a lot more money depending on the size of your affiliate program. So you have to weigh the pros and cons.

You’ll have to come in here. Their fees change on a regular basis. So you’ll have to come in here and look at their latest fees, figure out if it’s worth it.

Now ClickBank is only for digital products. If it’s an information, like an e-book you wrote. So if our gardening business had a How to be Successful in Gardening, How to Go from Total Newbie to Green Thumb in Less Than Seven Days and Have a Beautiful Garden for Less than $200, if that was some kind of a book course we put together we wanted to sell for 30, $40, ClickBank would be a possibility to think about selling it through to have a built in affiliate program where other gardening people could find it and promote it and just let ClickBank do all the work.

But again it gets pretty expensive. I think they take a few dollars per transaction as just a transaction fee, plus the percentage and it can end up being ten, 15, 20 percent or more of the total purchase price of the product. Most people don’t realize that, even when they see a percentage of seven, eight percent. They’re like oh, seven, eight percent’s not bad.

But then there’s like a dollar transaction fee.

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percent. It’s 17 percent of every sale because that dollar is on top of the seven percent and that would be an additional ten percent of the total price.

So you’ve got to carefully look at the math before you make any business decisions, which is common sense of course.

So ClickBank if you do digital products, downloadable software, any kind of downloadable information product, any kind of downloadable thing, ClickBank is one you definitely want to consider.

But it’s also great if you go up here at the top, you click Marketplace and you’ll see where you can shop or look at any of the programs that are in their network in their system. They don’t have as many categories. I’ve kind of gone over ClickBank already before, but I’m going to show it to you again because I’m doing this CD by CD. Sometimes I forget that I’ve already shown some of this on the other CD’s.

But because I’m trying to keep it in context. We’re talking about your running an affiliate program. And thinking of that you can come to their marketplace, look at affiliate programs and do competitive research. One, see if you can find an earmark, just like we talked about with Commission Junction in order to see what else is successfully selling so you can think about adapting your own business. Or finding products that you can promote as an affiliate to make money from.

But the thing about ClickBank in the marketplace is you can come in here and you look yourself. It’s changing all the time. You can come in here. You can read their frequently asked questions. You can learn about it, but they have all different kinds of neat metrics that you can rank their programs by; dollar per sale, how many have the most affiliates promoting it, which ones are selling the most copies. Some really good competitive research data. You can just come in on your own and poke around and look for it.

But again, it’s a great place to find products for you to sell to make money from. It’s also something to consider to sell your own products. Maybe even just short term as a test.

Again, you want to read their terms of service. You want to look at all the legalese of their agreements and make sure that if you ever do plan to remove your affiliate program and do it on your own later that we’ve already talked about, that you could do that with no problems with them.

But come to their site, poke around, see what’s for sale. Some of the products are low quality. A lot of it’s kind of hype-ish, make money-ish kind of things. It’s not always kind of niched by different shoe store. That type of tangible product; gardening or home improvement or auto parts and things because it’s digital. It’s a lot of information. A lot of information’s about make money that you find on the internet.

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But none the less it’s a good place to come in and just do some competitive research.

Check it out. That’s ClickBank.com. Go to their marketplace. See what’s successfully selling in the market and use the piggyback process to find a way to do it as well, to do it better, so on and so forth.

Again, I’m never talking about cloning people or ripping people off or copying their stuff, but we’re just talking about using it to give us a head start. So come in here, find out what’s selling the best in certain markets. See what the copy is to get ideas for your own copy writing, for your own AdWords copy, for your own classified ads copy, for your own banner ad copy, for your own offers and again save yourself a lot of time and effort by just using what other people have already proven to work.

CD 11 - Lesson 4: Affiliate Monitoring Now when you’re looking for affiliates, when you’re trying to find affiliates in your market that can also sell your stuff and send you traffic, you’ve just got to look for the activity. One of the most active places, which you’ve already covered in this course, is Google AdWords.

So many people are driving billions and billions of dollars and billions and billions of visitors through Google’s search engine market system of AdWords. That’s a great place to find active affiliates because active super affiliates buy AdWords traffic and do all these other things that you’ve learned about in this course to send traffic to affiliate programs.

So the natural thing is well, if you want to find some of the most active affiliates that will go out and buy traffic for an affiliate program, you want to look in Google and monitor AdWords advertising.

So it’s simple. It all starts – you just come into Google and you’ll do some research like you’ve already been taught to do in this course to look at some of your main keywords.

But in this case the primary thing you’re going to be doing is looking at the AdWords ads, these sponsored ads across the top, these other ads down the side.

Now Google has some different rules. They change from time to time about promoting affiliate programs in their system for AdWords. At one point it was like only one affiliate ad could show up at a time. So if you’re going to be sending traffic directly to the affiliate program site, like directly to their domain, you had to clarify it in the ad with a little AFF that would signify that you were kind of an affiliate program promoter, as an affiliate marketer and that you weren’t the actual merchant itself.

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for that little AFF that you’ll usually see in many markets. Doesn’t look like we’re seeing many here. That signifies an affiliate marketer.

But smart affiliates actually register their own domains and set up their own web sites so the traffic goes to them first to a landing page and then they send it off to several different affiliate programs. So in that regard they don’t really have to put that little AFF thing or signify that they’re an affiliate in their ads. It’s kind of gray area. I think they’re supposed to depending on their model, but they get away with not doing it.

So you just have to do your research and your due diligence in your market and regularly monitor these ads. You have to go and visit them. You have to go to these sites and look at these sites and see what’s being sold and see if it’s just kind of a review site where they’re reviewing affiliate programs, where they’re not actually selling it, but they send you off somewhere else. And that’s how you find the affiliate. Smart, super affiliates own their own domains, send their traffic through their own domains in most cases, not always, but in most cases.

So you’re going to have to kind of poke around and do your homework to find them, but just do it by putting in your main keywords that get the most volume and that are the most targeted to convert for your market and see who’s buying ads. Not only do you find your competitors. You’ll find super affiliates of your competitors and that’s how you’ll find them.

Then you’ll need to go and contact them. I recommend the phone if you can. Call people on the phone or try to get through to someone on the phone and build a relationship with them that way. You can send them an e-mail, but don’t send them just a form letter email that you’ve written that says, hi, I notice you’re advertising; I wonder if you could da, da, da, da.

The best thing to do when you build a relationship with a super affiliate is to visit their site. If they have a blog, read their blog. Get involved with their business and know what they’re doing so when you contact them you can reference something they’re doing.

Like say hey, I really enjoy your blog at such and such domain; I liked your post about this. So they know that you’re just not sending them a form letter that’s informal otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere.

It used to work. You could just blast a bunch of people with a form letter and a lot of them would respond. Doesn’t really work anymore and you can see why. It’s just kind of rude. So, it’s worth it to build relationships on a singular level one at a time when one affiliate could send you $10,000 in business every single month forever. So as you can see it’s worth it to – sometimes it can be a lot more than that.

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In eBay’s case they had a million dollar month affiliate. How would you like to have that affiliate promoting your stuff? But even if it’s just they’re going to send 500 a month.

That’s worth it for you to take the time to try to get to know people. That’s how you’re going to do a lot of business on the internet anyways and share traffic and be successful is to build relationships with people.

We’ve already been talking about this, but I want to say it again. Build relationships and friendships with people and that’s how you get rich online. Look to really help other people. They’ll look to help you in return. Everybody wins. It’s easy.

But monitor the AdWords ads and you can find the active affiliates.

CD 11 - Lesson 5: Spying Techniques Okay, I’m back at Commission Junction and I’m logged in and I want to show you another little trick, little method to find affiliates in your market. Again, it’s piggybacking. If you want to get affiliates in your market, go to active affiliates.

Let me point this out. It’s a million times easier and more effective to find an existing, active affiliate to become your affiliate and to promote you and to send you traffic and sales. It’s a million times easier to do that than it is to educate someone on what an affiliate program is and why they should promote you.

Let me repeat that. It’s a million times easier just to find someone that’s already doing what you want someone to do for you rather than taking someone that’s not already active doing that and convincing them why they need to become your affiliate and how your affiliate program works and that they can just sign up and get a link. So keep that in mind.

Again, it’s a lot to do with the piggyback phenomenon that I keep talking about. That concept about not reinventing the wheel, but if you want results think of the results you want.

Find kind of little factors that are already creating those results and tap into them. So that would be going to find active affiliates and just pointing them your way to promote your program, too, rather than convincing somebody and educating them what an affiliate program is in the first place.

Okay. So I’m in Commission Junction. I’m looking at this DirectGardening.com, which looks like a great company. They’ve got their affiliate program. Looks successful. It’s set up in Commission Junction. Commission Junction’s the affiliate network that’s running it. We’ve already been in here so you can find some of the ads that they’re giving their affiliates to use and all the different stuff.

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So obviously their web site is DirectGardening.com. You can see that right there. That’s the name of their site. So we’ve already kind of talked about this concept before when it comes to finding sites and specifically finding who’s linking to them, right.

We talked about this for our search engine optimization kind of analytic research, our competitive analysis to find out who’s linking to who and where it’s coming from because if we want to get links from people, it kind of goes with what I just said about the affiliates, right.

If you want to exchange links with people let’s say. This is a great example and this is why this concept and this philosophy is so powerful when it comes to your marketing. If you want to exchange links with people you’ll have 100 times more of a possible success rate by going to and approaching someone that’s already exchanging links with other people to get them to exchange them with you, too, than to go to someone that’s never exchanged links with somebody and to convince them why they need to exchange links with you. Make sense?

Just like the affiliate thing. Rather than educate someone about what an affiliate program is and to convince them to participate, you find someone that’s already doing what is you want them to do just to get them to do it with you, okay.

Now we already showed that you can use this link colon trick with Google. We already showed you you can do the link domain colon method in Yahoo and of course in the Resources section there’s other methods that you could use to find who’s linking to who and there’s other links to other tools there.

Also, there’s good tools out there for finding affiliates. Some software programs people have written and sell and some services. They come and go. Because things change so much sometimes they stop working, but if you check the Resources site, as I’m recording this there’s some there that work now, that work okay, but just check for the latest ones and you can try them out for yourself or see what’s currently available for kind of using software to automate some of this for finding affiliates for you.

But we’ve used that link trick to see who links to different sites. It’s another way to find affiliates. So links aren’t just about search engine optimization link partners or getting links from different places.

Affiliates are a way to creating common links to your site that can also help with search engine optimization, but of course that are sending you traffic. So we saw that Direct Gardening company. I think that’s what they were called. Let me jump back here real quick. Yeah, DirectGardening.com was the name of that company that’s running their affiliate program in Commission Junction.

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So if we do link colon – actually let’s do the whole thing out. Let’s do www dot – we should find some people linking to their domain with www. So there’s only nine here, but the odds are these are probably other affiliates for them. Let’s take off the www.

Three W’s there. It seems to be finding the same ones.

So in this case, eh, it didn’t work so well. Doesn’t seem like too many affiliates are using the direct domain and actually it makes sense why and I already knew this, but I wanted to at least do this test first. So one way to find out who’s linking to a site outside of the search engine part of finding the incoming links is when those links are also when you’re trying to find who’s linking, but they happen to be affiliates.

Now when people are running their own affiliate program with their own software, like our company does for example, we’re using our own domain name. Everything comes through our domain.

By the way that’s the other benefit of running your own program and using your own software or using your own schema, if you will, of your own domain. You can get that search engine benefit of the links when people are linking to you because they’re using your domains. That they’re not just using a redirect. Some good affiliates use a redirect, send it through their own domain, but a lot of them will use your domain and your links that you give them.

Well, all those companies using Commission Junction are doing so through Commission Junction’s tracking domains and that’s why we’re not seeing tons and tons of pages here when we search for link colon in this domain name. This doesn’t mean that these are the only nine pages on the internet that link to this company as an affiliate, but if they were running their own affiliate program, it would show most of their affiliates that are using their domain. So that’s one way to find them.

There’s actually another more sophisticated way to find affiliates for programs through Commission Junction. I’m not really going to get too much into it. I may eventually write up a little article for you and put it in the Resources section to give you tips on how to do it.

It’s more sophisticated where you’re actually looking for the more extended URL that goes through the Commission Junction network and it carries some code along with it, some ID numbers that are specific to each of the different affiliate programs and there’s a way to search that out to actually find the different affiliates programs, like to find this company’s affiliate program.

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domains and URL’s. You’ve probably seen them. They usually look like – I believe it’s like KRSKV.net or something along those lines is one of the domains they use. You’ll see that all over the internet.

But if we go back there – but that’s one way to find affiliates if someone’s running their own software, which many companies are is to do that link colon trick where you can find where all the links are.

Of course, Google won’t let you actually see all of them, but the ones they will see you can go and find out who those affiliates are. You can do the same analysis on traffic.

Find out who’s getting the most traffic and then you can pretty much probably figure out who their best affiliates are by kind of cross processing that process of finding who links and how much traffic they get.

But if you come in here and by the way, actually I can’t do it yet because each program you have to join and be accepted and then they’ll actually give you the html. But when you join, you get accepted you can look at the html. It’s going to show you that domain that goes through Commission Junction.

It’ll show you the ID codes and that’s what you’d try to search for to find people using that exact data that’s found in some URL’s. I’ll put something in the Resource section now that I’m thinking about it. I hadn’t done that yet and I’ll put something in there on kind of how to track that for you.

But that’s one technique for finding affiliates is just to do who’s searching for the domain.

I mean who’s linking to that domain name. And when you know an affiliate URL has a certain scheme to it, like maybe it’s domain name.com/affiliate/ whatever, there are ways to search for that specific string and to find all the links, even if they have things attached to it by using some of those techniques.

So that’s just another method to find affiliates is just use those link methods of who’s linking to who and Google and Yahoo and the other search engines.

CD 11 - Lesson 6: Text String Trick I’m back at Commission Junction once again. I’m logged in. I’m looking at this same company that we looked at before, this Direct Gardening.

Now I want to show you another way to find affiliates. It’s kind of a nasty little trick actually that not many people know of. It works really, really well. See, a lot of times to kind of be a detective and a sleuth and to find things on the internet, you’ve just kind of got to put your thinking cap on and think of some unique ways to find things out and discover the information that you’re really looking for.

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So if we’re looking let’s say for affiliates that are promoting this company let’s say and we want to find them so we can hopefully recruit them to promote our stuff because that’s the goal here. We’re thinking okay, how do we find those links.

Well, we can try to do the link technique which I just talked about where you can find out who’s linking to who. Then if they’re doing it through Commission Junction’s kind of longer link, sometimes you can’t find those very well. You can find some of them.

But we’re thinking what are some other ways to find affiliates that are promoting things?

Well, here’s kind of a sneaky way to find it and I kind of came to this concept through like reverse engineering. A lot of affiliates are using text ads, text links where they just – they say something about the affiliate program and then they link to it.

So almost all affiliates programs give – and you should, too, give their affiliates text link ads to use. Just pre-written text for them to use copy and paste and a blog on the bottom of a page and the little link kind of listing wherever on their sites to promote the affiliate program.

Well, watch this. If we click Text Link, for example, this one program. You can do this with any program in your market and find stuff. Here’s a description of the text link.

Just DirectGardening.com, quality plants at great prices. Then that will turn into a link and link to the site. Actually it’s longer. It’s offers quality plants at great prices, come see what we mean.

So, a lot of their affiliates are probably just copying and pasting this and using it in different areas just as a text link where it doesn’t look like an ad, which a lot of people discovered on the internet the less something looks like an ad the more attention it gets because people have learned to kind of tune out banner ads and flashing ads and they don’t always perform as well as they used to because people are getting just pounded with advertising. So text in many cases works a lot better. That’s why Ad Sense, of course, and AdWords works really, really well.

But this is the text ad they’re giving people. So watch this. Okay. Well, I’m going to just copy and paste this. I’m going to jump back over to Google. I’m going to search for this text string. Or it’s just part of the ad. You could use the whole thing or just part of it and I’m going to put it within quotes. So I only want to see pages that are in Google’s index that have this exact phrase just like this.

So of course you can do this with any text string. So if we do a search we come up with 3,750 results with that exact string. And look. DirectGardening.com quality plants at great prices, DirectGardening.com quality plants at great prices. In almost every case we’re finding here – here’s one that’s not. See, they just happened to use that in a 354

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sentence. (unintelligible) means that we provide quality plants at great prices. So that wasn’t one.

But all of these you know are and of course we could have put that in there, the domain name as well. But often times people will change it a little bit or tweak it. Maybe they don’t want to mention the domain because they don’t want people just going over there bypassing their affiliate links so they’ll only use the text part of it and just make it a link to the site.

So, you’ve got to put your thinking cap on. Search for different parts of text string. So if you can find text ads for any program, you can find who’s running the text ‘cause that’s what gets indexed in search engines, unlike images and what the images actually say.

They’re not easy to find.

If certain people are naming their banners Affiliate Banner One and that’s actually in the html they give people to use and because affiliates are lazy they just copy and paste to make the banner appear. You can use an image search and find those as well, but text string searching is much more powerful.

So just look at all these affiliates we’re finding just by searching for the text string. And because of how Google actually works, we can probably find a lot more affiliates doing text string search than doing that who’s linking to who search because Google doesn’t always let you see all the incoming links.

That’s how they protect their algorithm actually is they stop you from finding where all the links are coming from so you can’t totally reverse engineer the algorithm and figure out how someone’s ranking high.

But with text strings they want you to be able to find all the different text strings in their search engine because that’s what they’re for is to help you find the information you’re looking for and with their own syntax of being able to put things in quote so it’ll be shown in exactly the same order and exactly like how you format it there, that’s very, very powerful.

So you can poke around affiliate programs. You can take their text ads, search for their strings or parts of their strings within quotes and whoops. You can find the majority of their affiliates that are indexed in Google. It’s a very, very valuable trick and a valuable concept.

And if you didn’t know it, that one concept alone is worth way more than what you paid for this course. So make sure to make a note of it and make sure to regularly be using this trick to find affiliate programs in your market.

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CD 11 - Lesson 7: Affiliate Directories There are a lot of affiliate program directories out there on the internet. If you go to the Resources section you’ll find links to a ton of them. It’s a great place to come to do competitive research, to see the other programs that are in your market, to find programs to promote as an affiliate to make money like we already talked about, how you can do that with Commission Junction but also just to find competing programs.

There’s a lot of programs that don’t use like Commission Junction or ClickBank. They’re running their own software, which you may or may not want to do and when that’s the case you can’t find them through those networks because they’re not a part of those systems. So affiliate directories are another place to find those affiliate programs.

So, this is AffiliateScout.com. This is one of many affiliate program directories. It’s a pretty good one. You can come in here. And our example Home and Garden. You can click on the category. Shows 493 programs in that group, 67 in garden specifically. You can just come in here and you can read about all the different affiliate programs.

Then you click web site and then go over and visit the programs. See what they’re all about. See what they’re selling. See how much they’re charging for their products. See what their business model is. Reverse engineer all – just see how they do business, what products they sell and of course how much they pay their affiliates.

If you’re going to set up an affiliate program you need to look at what your competitors are paying out to see if you can compete or not. If you’re thinking about paying 20 percent, you don’t know if you’re going to get away with it or not. You see all your competitors are paying 40 percent; you may need to rethink it. If you find all your competitors are paying five percent, then you may even think about paying a little bit less and making more money or you may think about hey, I’m just going to pay more and really command the attention of affiliates.

So, affiliate directories. Another great place to find affiliate programs and another benefit of affiliate program directories is a place to promote your affiliate program. So you want to actually take an action step. If you have an existing affiliate program or if you’re going to start one, one of your action steps is to go and get listed in all the different affiliate directories.

Some of them don’t get much traffic at all, but it’s worth just a few seconds to go and get listed. By getting listed some of them you get that link benefit. Some of them aren’t using the no-follow tag. So your link actually is credited in the search engine process.

So it’s a great way to get links.

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Not all super affiliates use these affiliate directories to find programs, but some of them do. Some of them may be business owners like you doing exactly what I’m telling you to do. Look at other programs in your market, not only for research, but to find opportunities to promote and other ways to make money from your traffic, to monetize your traffic, to subsidize your lead generation costs.

So people can find you through the directory if you’re listed. So they can come in here and find you and again it only takes one affiliate that maybe that super affiliate’s going to drive 10,000 or 20,000 a month in business to totally change your business and really change your numbers. So you might as well be listed in every place possible where some affiliates at all go and look for programs.

So go in the Resources section. It’s an action step you need to take. Get listed in all the affiliate directories. Not only for the link possibilities and just the raw traffic possibilities, but for affiliates to find you.

But again affiliate directories are a great place for you to do competitive research to not only find other programs, do all these other methods to see who their affiliates are, to find affiliates for you, but again to find affiliate programs for you to promote.

CD 11 - Lesson 8: Running Contests Contests. In the opening presentation for this CD I talked about how you want to think about running contests to keep your program fresh and to kind of spur some activity amongst your affiliates.

Contests are great because as I already explained, even though affiliates have the money and they can afford to just go out and buy some of these little things if they wanted to own these prizes, it’s different when especially when it’s something you can’t really justify spending your own money on, but if you win it, it’s fun and you’re glad that you have it and other times it’s just fun to compete because marketers of all kinds are competitive and it’s like a game.

Well, when you run a contest you want to have a lot of prizes because one, many of your affiliates are going to know that they’re not your best affiliate. They don’t have millions and millions of visitors that they’re sending, unless they are your best affiliate.

So a lot of people get discouraged and say, “Well, I’m not even going to try to compete for these prizes. I’m not even going to try to do a mailing to my newsletter list again or to make a blog post or to even buy AdWords ads because I know I can’t win the contest because I know I’m nowhere near one of their top affiliates.”

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So, because of that so you don’t alienate kind of and leave people out, you want to have a lot of prizes to give a lot of people the opportunity in order to win something. A lot of affiliate program contests do some fun things where it’s like hey, if you make one sale at all you get at least this minimal prize. So everyone’s a winner so to speak that generates any sales at all.

Let me show you something real quick about contests. This is great. This was a contest that one of my good friends, Ryan Deiss, great marketer, good guy. You may have heard of him. Been marketing online for a while. Very, very successful in a lot of different businesses. This is the contest he ran recently to kind of get some activity for an affiliate program that he was running. Let me just show you some of these things. You’ll laugh, but it’s fun stuff.

His promotion was very, very successful; very, very successful. So the number one price he gave a Segue, one of those little scooters. Kind of one of those cool, funny, geeky things that you may think oh, that’s kind of cool, but you’d probably never buy for yourself. They’re very expensive. I think they’re a couple thousand dollars. So that was like the first place prize for this contest.

Whoever sold the most during this period of time for the contest. I think Ryan actually did something very creative as well is he let the prize winners, based on their placement, actually pick what prize they wanted.

So if someone won first place and they didn’t want the top prize, they could actually pick from any of the other prizes and then that prize would be gone and the next place person would have the rest to choose from.

So, gave away a scooter. Second place was a nice HD camcorder. Third place was a Mac Book Air, which right now is very, very popular as give aways for affiliate prizes.

Everybody loves the Mac Book Air. A lot of people already have a laptop so it’s very hard to justify buying another laptop just ‘cause it’s thinner and kind of cooler and sexier when they already have invested in a 2,000 or $3,000 laptop. It’s hard to justify going and spending another two grand on another laptop when you don’t really need it.

But I have one. I love it. It’s great for traveling. So it’s a very popular product right now to give away for affiliate contests. Who wouldn’t want a free Mac Book Air. Then a nice digital camera. Then it’s funny some of these prizes. Ryan was real creative and got smart and did some kind of just fun novelty things that people would kind of want, but never buy for themselves. It would just kind of make it fun.

So he gave away a Blend-Tech blender. You may have seen the kind of viral videos on WillItBlend.com that they put on YouTube where this guy blends crazy stuff. He’s blended a Rubrics cube. He’s blended an iPhone. He blends all kinds of stuff.

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This is cool. Look at this little cooler scooter thing. It’s like a little electric scooter that has a cooler under the seat where you can keep beer or soda or whatever. So, this was one of the prizes that he gave away, which was really funny. A lot of people were fighting over this. They really wanted this. So that’s kind of funny.

Gave away a Nintendo Wii with the sports bundle. It came with a bunch of games. The Rock Band game. Again, a lot of affiliates can easily go out and buy these things, but maybe they just can’t justify to their husband or wife spending two or $300 on a video game when maybe that money should go towards the kids’ college fund or a new TV or groceries or something else that makes more sense, clothes, whatever.

But they’re not spending the money. They’re getting it for free because they won it as a prize. So, that’s why prizes and contests are fun for affiliates and it works really well. A Dyson vacuum cleaner was prize number eight. The little Amazon Kendall. Little remote control helicopter. Remote control boat. Some kind of – I don’t even know what this is – five foot erection. Some kind of thing that boosts up your height. I’m sure Ryan did that just to be funny. Any way to just get people’s attention. Like what is that, but it’s some kind of booster architecture thing.

Of course Ryan’s a very, very good guy, very clean guy. So that’s not meant to be some crude thing. I want to point that out. He’s not like that. A little headset, the jawbone thing. If you haven’t seen that it’s very popular where you can actually be in the car with the window down talking and it reduces the sound so even someone on the other end magically so, doesn’t really hear all that noise from the road. Actually great invention; great product.

One of those little like stretching, sit up inversion machines. A little robot. As you can see, Ryan got very creative with this stuff. This is why his contest did very, very well.

You may want to just copy and do some of these same items because it worked really well. A little herb garden. Gave away iPods, iPods touches, little iPod Nanos. Look, prize number 20, a set of steak knives. You remember the old joke from Glen Gary Glen Ross and he actually linked to the movie, which is great.

So Ryan, he’s following the rules of running a good affiliate contest. He’s making it fun.

He’s making it competitive. That’s what you need. You need to spice things up. Most people are bored when they’re going through the same things all the time, even if they’re making a lot of money. So sometimes adding a little spice to the process can work really well and in Ryan’s case it really did.

So this is great. What if I’m not in the top 20. He says, “Don’t worry. We’re not leaving anybody out. If you make one sale you’re going to get the ultimate tool of all tools. It’s not just a spork. It’s a titanium metal spork.” Ya’ know, part spoon, part fork. “So Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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everyone’s going to get this shipped to them if they make one sale.” So of course it’s a funny thing. It’s for fun, but a lot of people are proud. They’re like, hey, I got my metal spork that I won in the contest.

So think about running contests at different times for your affiliate program to kind of get the affiliates in gear, get them sending more traffic. Get them something to look forward to, something to compete in, something to make fun. You may want to do a contest once every two or three months or whatever makes sense. It’s just something to do to get affiliates active sometimes when activity can get stagnate.

Affiliate contests can really bring in a lot of sales. I mean we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes over a million dollars in new business just from running this contest. Of course if you add up the value of all these prizes based on the amount of money that came in as a result, it’s a no-brainer because it’s just a small fraction of what the increase in sales created by running the contest.

So think about different contests that you can run for your affiliates and think about what your affiliates might want and do some fun stuff.

CD 11 - Lesson 9: Program Marketing I mentioned it to you before in the opening presentation for the CD. You have to sell your affiliate program. So it’s not enough just to link to the page quietly from the footer that I’ve already told you about at the bottom of your web site.

But you need to have a page that talks about your affiliate program, about the commissions, why it’s so good, why people should sign up as an affiliate to promote your affiliate program. You have to sell it to get people to sign up. What’s in it for them?

Really it’s not just about they know that if it’s an affiliate program they’re going to make money, you’ve got to talk up the commission. Remember if it’s about how much am I going to make, you need to put that up front.

But also reinforce some common things about when you pay, how fast you pay, what they need to do, that you’re going to do all the work for them, all these things I’ve talked about you need to do, just restate it so people know that. They’re not just going to assume things and all affiliate programs are the same because they’re not. All affiliate programs are actually different.

This is – just to show you real quickly – this is an affiliate program page for a good friend of mine, Steven Pierce, great marketer you probably heard of. One of his businesses is in the trading market and selling like stock investing, kind of stock trading, day trading types of systems and training courses. This is just a quick example.

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This is the affiliate program page to get people to sign up and become an affiliate for one of his products. This page is selling the affiliate program. It has a little headline. In only three and a half minutes you can start cashing in on the market trading craze even without a web site.

So it’s saying even if you’re not already in this business, even if you don’t have a web site, you can run ads, promote our program, send traffic to it and it’ll do the selling for you and you can make money that way.

So it states here you can earn 51 percent commission on every sale you make. It’s very generous. It’s going to get people’s attention. He’s using ClickBank for this ‘cause it’s a downloadable product and of course he says, “If you don’t have a ClickBank account, you can just sign up for free and boom you’re off and running.” ‘Cause that’s who’s running it. He’s using an affiliate network in this case for this product.

Then he just talks about some facts about the program. You don’t have to do much selling. Just send traffic to the site and the site does all the selling for you. You don’t even have to have a web site. You can just send traffic direct from ads. Thirty seconds you can get started with a quick start and a plan he gives you. Gives you sample ads and promos to use. The marketing system’s all set up. It works. Bullet proof tracking. It’s important. Affiliates want to know that things are going to be tracked.

Then he mentions partnering with the company’s been online since 1998. So for ten years. All these things just reinforce to the affiliate that’s looking at this that might be interested that hey, this is a program that you want to get involved with and try. That’s the hardest part. Overcoming the resistance just to get people to sign up and try to promote your affiliate program.

So that’s why you need a page to sell it to then just say hey, sign up and get started. Of course he reinforces that there’s no tolerance for spam and everything else. Now the only thing that could make this page better would be to actually use some testimonials like I mentioned. Use some case studies from other affiliates and show a video from them or a quote from them saying how yes, I’m an active affiliate; I’ve done really well in this program; you should do it, too. So on and so forth. That’s very, very powerful.

Obviously this is just one page of hundreds that Steven has and all these different projects he’s working with. I know some of his other projects that are bigger actually do that. So I’m not criticizing him by any means.

But you can do that as well by adding it to a page like this with a testimonial or success stories from your other affiliates ‘cause remember that’s going to be very powerful when someone’s about to make any decision, especially someone that’s thinking about Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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becoming your affiliate is I wonder how other affiliates are doing that are promoting this.

I don’t want to be the only one that’s going to try this and then fail at it or maybe since I’ve never heard about this before I don’t know if it even works.

So if they’re able to see quotes and testimonials and success stories, again, you’re going to have to work with your affiliates to get their permission and hopefully they’ll actually be kind enough to give you testimonial, which most of them will. They won’t mind, especially you can put a link to their web site under the testimonials saying what their side is and a lot of times they’ll be glad to do that just for the return link. They’ll be more than happy to kind of help give you a testimonial or say something positive about your company of course if they have had a positive experience But that’s it. You need to sell your program by having a page that talks about the benefits. What’s in it for them. So you want to list how much does the program pay.

The percentage and all is great, but if you’re selling something for five bucks and you’re paying even 100 percent where it’s a five dollar commission, it’s not very attractive.

So the amount of commission gets people’s attention as well as the commission percentage. The commission percentage says how fair you’re being, but also the amount of commission is really what’s in it for them and what’s going to kind of get their attention.

But so is the conversion information. So if you can share hey, this site converts five percent of everyone that visits, the average value of people you send, you’re going to get 70 cent return on average for each visitor you send you can expect to make 75 cents or $2.50 or four dollars. Anything you can say to kind of sell your program, the better.

So remember, you have to sell your affiliate program. So you’ll want to have an information page that’s set up that your link in that footer of your menu where I told you you need to quietly promote your program.

Well it needs to lead to a page like this that gives information about your program that tells what all the benefits are. You can even state some of your rules just so people know again that they can’t spam or do black cat techniques or anything like that to abuse the internet and so on and so forth.

But you have to sell your program. What’s in it for them. Really get across the benefits so it’s a no-brainer. You can even put a video here. I’ve done that myself. I’ve seen others do that where you just put a little video that just says, hey, thanks for your interest in our affiliate program. Here’s what it’s all about and why you should become an affiliate today.

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Video marketing, like we’ve already talked about in this course a lot is really the future.

So if you had a video here that also – you want to have text as well to support it for people that don’t want to sit through a video or maybe their audio’s not working on their computer or maybe they’re in the office and cant’ listen to audio or it’ll disrupt people.

So you want to have supporting text, too.

But hey, why not have a video of you saying, hi, I’m such and such, founder of the company; these are our products. We have a great affiliate program. We have a lot of affiliates making X. It’s quick to sign up. So on and so forth. And use the video to actually sell the program.

CD 11 - Lesson 10: Training Videos You’ve already heard me mention this tool, this piece of software. I just want to mention it again. This is Camtasia Studio. It’s about 300 bucks. Great piece of software. A lot of internet marketers use it. It’s especially made for the PC. If you’re on a Mac there’s a program called I Show U and U is just the letter U. So it’s I Show and then the letter U. There’s another one called Screen Flow. Check the Resources section. We’ll link to a bunch of other tools that are like this.

But basically what it is once again, it is a screen capture utility where you can navigate let’s say anything on your computer, like showing off web sites. Just like what I’m doing here. Like you see me showing off this web site in a video. This was created using – this was actually captured using I Show U for example. As is much of this course. Things that I’m demonstrating to you on screen.

But you can do it with Camtasia as well, especially if you’re PC based. I’m Mac based for most of what we do. That’s why I’m using I Show U. But you’ll want to have a tool like this. It’s well worth the investment and when it comes to running your own affiliate program, how you’ll want to use this tool is to like train our affiliates.

You can give them – if you have some kind of affiliate software set up where you have a training center where all your tools are, create a tutorial and walk people through the process of getting their links, how to copy and paste them, how to put them onto their pages, where to get the different ads from, how to keep up with the latest news.

Even though it’s kind of common sense you think all people just figure it out. It doesn’t hurt to have videos that just show people how to do everything just in case someone can’t find something or just in case they want to have the reinforcement of you showing them how to do something.

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Talked about, again, I already talked about it in this course before, Camtasia and using it to make videos and doing that kind of stuff for video marketing. But you can use it for training. To train our affiliates. To show them what you want them to do and just to make it easier for them and also to cut out any potential mistakes for those people that just want to see like a step-by-step process because any place or potential for a problem is the opportunity for someone not to add a link to you or not to promote your product.

Could be something so simple where they just didn’t see a button to actually go and get a tracking link or they didn’t understand how they could look at their stats to see what the activity is because a report that showed their sales was hidden in a menu. They didn’t know where it was.

That could be the difference in again, like a $10,000 a month – someone that’s spending that much sales a month in actively promoting you or not because they couldn’t figure out how to see the reporting to see the results to even keep messing with promoting your products. So these are great tools to have not only for video marketing, but also for training. So great investment for you to make to get one of these software programs to show people the way around as far as like how to get involved and get started with your affiliate program and how to manage their stats and how to be an effective and successful affiliate.

CD 11 - Lesson 11: Affiliate Videos I just talked about Camtasia for the PC. This is the other one, I Show U, that I’m actually recording this with. Just to bring that up real quick. Doesn’t really matter because it didn’t really need to show you a web site for this chapter per se for this last lesson.

But I just wanted to mention something. The future of affiliate marketing I believe is really going to be just like most marketing online, it’s going to be video related. We’re coming to a point where it’s easy to brand videos.

For example, in Camtasia, when you produce a final Camtasia video after you make it like if you show a tutorial of something, there is a section where there is an end of video action. You can set that to what’s called Jump URL. Then you can put in a URL. So it basically says when this video is done playing what should it do. That’s the end action.

So you could just say stop. You could say loop and play again from the beginning.

Or one of the features in Camtasia, which is great is called Jump URL. And you can do that with almost any of these screen capture programs. If it doesn’t have it built in you can get someone that knows flash and you can modify the code so it does what you want it to do, but basically what it will do is when the video’s done playing it will jump to a URL. 364

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Well, you can create videos like flash videos, whether it’s what we already talked about, like a talking head video where it’s someone on video talking or whether it’s a screen capture video of something being shown on a screen. When it’s done playing it can jump to a URL that could be an affiliate URL. So, for your top affiliates you may want to go in and set up these types of videos and have them auto-redirecting to the URL that’s theirs that tracks their sales and then give them those videos and say hey, here’s some videos we just released. You can embed them ‘cause that’s popular.

You see these YouTube videos embedded on people’s blogs and on people’s web pages so they don’t actually have to go to YouTube to see it. It plays right in the page.

But this is the future and this is really what we’re going to start seeing a lot of in the affiliate marketing space. We’re already starting to see a little bit of it. We’re going to see a lot of it. So you’ll give someone some code, one of your affiliates. They’ll paste it and embed it right in let’s say within their blog. The video will show on their sites.

So somebody doesn’t have to leave to see it and after it plays it’ll open a new window or redirect that same window to come to your site, which the video was about, but it will have gone through the affiliate URL so if anyone buys after ending up on your site, that affiliate gets credit.

So start thinking about ways that you can use video with your affiliates to promote your affiliate program. You can go to any one of those outsources freelancer sites that we’ve already talked about, the Rent a coders, e-lance, o-desk, Guru.com.

That kind of stuff to find programmers that can create some kind of little custom video tool for you if you need it for kind of branding videos so when they get done playing they’ll go to an affiliate link and you can put in kind of your top affiliates links or you could have a script made where every affiliate could log in if you’re running your own program or if you have tools for your own affiliates, like you should.

And they could just say click to make the video and the script will automatically take a video that you’ve uploaded and add their affiliate URL to it and then say here’s the file to download to use or to put on your site.

You can pay someone to pay a script like that. We’re going to see more and more of that type of stuff included in affiliate program software. But start thinking about that.

Start thinking about the possibilities to give videos for your affiliates to use and I guarantee you within just a few short years that’s going to be all over the internet and so Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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many companies and affiliate programs will not only just be giving banner ads and text links and all those things we’ve already talked about, but will be giving videos for their affiliates to use that will be tracked.

Even like someone – you can code it so if someone clicks on the video – you know how you’ve seen embedded video that’s from YouTube on a web page and if someone clicks it, it also goes to YouTube. That’s how they virally got so big.

Well, you can code it so if anyone clicks on the video as well, it follows the affiliate link and opens like your store, like again your gardening tool store if it’s like a gardening video. That’s the affiliate program for our gardening example.

And/or it could also – you could make it not jump at the end of playing or you could. It’s your option or maybe you want to give the affiliate the option so it’s coded that way to do that as well.

So very, very powerful. So just think into the future or the present or the near future of doing some affiliate video type stuff because that’s going to become very valuable, just like all the other video types of marketing that we’ve talked about in this course.

And if you check the Resources section we’ll keep that updated with any developments along this way. Software tools, services that will create these things or any information to help you do this as well, as well as any kind of case studies that we find where other people are doing it successfully. So think about that. Video marketing for your affiliates.

CD 11 - Lesson 12: Review Okay. Let’s review. Take the time to properly set up your program. You’re going to have to do your due diligence, your research and some careful consideration to decide where you’re going to host your affiliate program. Are you going to use one of the affiliate networks like we talked about like ClickBank, Commission Junction or any of the other ones that are out there and available or are you going to do it yourself?

If you’re going to host it yourself or use a service to run it for you, such as from a software service, then you need to properly look into and research that service or the software tool that you’re going to go and put on your server. Do other people say that it has problems when it reaches a certain high level of traffic or is it rock solid.

So, properly setting up your program in advance is very, very important. Having the proper legal documents in place for an affiliate agreement and we’ll link to all these resources again in the Resources section. But you need to have all these things in line to set up your program.

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If you follow the action steps for this CD and for this overall course, you’ll find all the steps that you actually need to take to set up a proper affiliate program. So we’re going to go over that again, but just as a quick review, you’ve got to set up properly when you set up your program for the first time. You don’t want to have to redo your program and potentially lose out on one of the affiliates that’ll never come back.

So take the time and be patient in making some decisions at least in the beginning and they could pay dividends in the long run.

You’ll want to fully test your marketing before you accept affiliates. Don’t let them be the guinea pig for your marketing. Buy targeted traffic with AdWords that you now know how to do. Prove that your marketing will convert and sell before you even think about having other people start putting in the work and the effort and spending the money to drive traffic to you.

The worst thing you can do or one of the worst things you can do is to have affiliates start paying for advertising or putting in the work to set up search engine optimization and to create content to promote you. Then the traffic doesn’t convert. That relationship is not going to go very well and it’s not going to last. So test your marketing first and prove your marketing first. Get it working well. Then roll out and explode your traffic through an effective affiliate program.

Always remember it’s about the money for the affiliates. Nothing else really matters. It’s not about how cool the tools are that you have to use ultimately or even how cool the contest prizes are or how easy it is. Even though you need all those things, it’s about the money. It’s about that commission you pay.

So the big question you need to ask yourself is what’s the most I can give away and get away with. Give till it hurts I say. Be as generous as you can and it will come back to you ten fold. So really push the pencil, do your accounting properly and figure out your business model and what it can afford to pay and try to pay as much as you possibly can.

The more you pay and reward your partners, the more results it will end up producing for you and your business.

Again, do all the work and make it easy for affiliates. Do everything for them. Give them all the ads to use. Give them any kind of text to use or banner ads or things, articles they can put in their email follow up series or guest posts they can put on their blog.

Anything. Do it for them. Make it easy. Copy and paste. Simple one, two, three and again the super affiliates that may not want to use your canned ads or the things that you give them, that’s fine. They’ll then go and put in the time to make their own, but at least they have the option. So do all the work for your affiliates and make it easy for them to start sending you traffic.

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Keep your program fresh to keep it responsive. Run a JV blog. Give them news regularly. Run different specials. Do occasional contests. Do some different things. Put out some new tools for them to use. Keep in contact with your affiliates and keep the program fresh if you want to keep it responsive and get the most traffic coming in.

Again one of the ways to do this is to eventually hire an affiliate manager that’s going to stay on top of it and work your affiliate program. Keep up with the affiliates. Keep communicating with the affiliates on a regular basis to give them anything they need.

That’s very important to be very, very receptive and have good communication open with your affiliates so in case they have any problems or they need anything from you, you’re there to give it to them in an instant. They’re your partner now. They’re a big part of your business. You need to support them and eventually you need to have somebody running that affiliate program full-time.

So keep the program fresh to keep it working and keep the activity going.

And then find your affiliates by using competitive analysis. I showed you a few different tricks searching for who’s linking to who. Examining the affiliate directories and the affiliates networks to find programs in your market. Going and doing AdWords research.

Going and looking and seeing who’s buying the traffic for that market for those programs. Going and seeing who’s promoting it and that’s how you can find the affiliates. Find them already active for competitors and for other programs and then go and get them to promote you program, too.

Then, of course, keeping up with it on a regular basis. Constantly do your competitive analysis. Constantly find new partners, new changes, new opportunities, new ideas, so on and so forth. And that’ll really give you a shortcut and the quick road to maximum success rather than just trying to figure it out on your own, rather than you being the guinea pig of sorts and rather than you trying to reinvent the wheel. Use effective ongoing competitive analysis and let others do all the hard work for you.

Last but not least, invest the time to build relationships with your affiliates. These aren’t robots. These aren’t computers. These are people that will be sending you traffic and sending you money. Take the time to build relationships with them.

See about meeting with some of them at industry conferences. If some of them go to seminars or trade shows or events in our industry. Build relationships. Take them out to dinner. Build friendships. Send them occasional gifts. That’s totally unadvertised, unannounced.

If an affiliate sent you $20,000 in business in the last year when you’re sending out your tax forms and everything else that you need to be doing and again we’ll list all these 368

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things in the resources section, but when you do those – when someone is producing those results for you send them an iPod every now and then or send them a big screen TV or send them stuff.

Make them know that they’re appreciated for the business they’re sending you and you’ll be surprised how far that goes. They’ll be thrilled ‘cause most affiliate programs don’t do anything for their affiliates and they just say, “Here’s your check. This is what you’re getting.”

Go above and beyond. Just as my father always taught me always do more than is expected of you and you can’t lose. So put in the time to actually build relationships and even friendships with some of your affiliates.

You can set up a relationship that will pay dividends for years and years and years, as well as you can build a great relationship with somebody else, another business owner, a marketer in your industry that can lead to all kinds of opportunities, whether it’s just master minding and sharing great test data or marketing types of results or just anything that can really benefit you in your business.

New opportunities. They can introduce you to other affiliates they know or other potential partners. It just never hurts to have great relationships with people in your industry and it can just make your business explode over time by being able to leverage the relationships you have with other people in your market.

That’s what running a successful affiliate program at its core is about anyways is working with other people in your market where they’re doing essentially all the work for you; although you’re also going to be doing work on your own to promote your business, but you can leverage a lot of their efforts as they also promote your business. That’s why you absolutely need to have an affiliate program.

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CD 12: The Master Plan Your Master Plan Now it's time to bring everything together to create your master plan of action. In order for you to start generating a lot of traffic as soon as possible, you're going to need to follow several step-by-step instructions that are included in the blueprint handouts that came with this course, and you're going to need to follow those blueprints in a specific order.

The first blueprint you need to follow the instructions on is the Mission Control blueprint.

This blueprint will give you step-by-step instructions for setting up all the tools and accounts that you're going to need to carry out all the strategies in this course, so it kind of sets up the foundation for everything.

The next blueprint to follow is the Market Spy blueprint. This will help you do exhaustive competitive research. It will help you generate that core base of keywords that you're going to need to market your business with, as well as to discover all the different players in your market, the products that are being sold, the people creating content in your market, and everything else you need to know to take advantage of everything in this course.

The next blueprint to follow after the Market Spy blueprint is the Opportunity Analyzer.

You're going to need to answer several important questions when it comes to your business and your market, such as are there opportunities for you to set up an affiliate program? Are there opportunities for you to create Widgets, toolbars or other types of software? Are there opportunities for you to monetize some of your traffic generation by promoting related affiliate programs? There's a lot to it, so you want to go through the Opportunity Analyzer blueprint.

After that then you want to carry out the AdWords Attack blueprint. You'll learn to start with a base of keywords, set up proper AdWords campaigns and roll through a sequence to find out if keywords convert as well as how to improve them to maximize the traffic, to lower the cost per click, and hopefully maximize the amount of money you make from that traffic and then to scale it from there with more keywords, more traffic and more sales. You'll need to carefully follow that blueprint and the cycle that it takes you through to where you create new campaigns, discover if they're profitable or not and then roll it out from there.

It's important that we're starting with the AdWords Attack blueprint before we get into creating any new content at all because throughout the AdWords Attack process, we're going to discover the best keywords in our market that will convert and create the most

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profits for us, and those key words will be the foundation of what we create content with.

As was already mentioned several times in this course, we don't want to waste our time creating a lot of content, doing a lot of SEO, and doing many other things related to keywords that aren't proven to generate sales and ultimately profit for us. So that's why we start with the AdWords process before we get into creating content.

The next blueprint to go through after the AdWords Attack blueprint is the Content Factory blueprint, is to get your content factory in motion and to start creating content that's optimized for the search engines, as well as structure to help you get other people to link to you, as well as to get other people to share that content and everything that goes into that entire process. After that, you want to carry out the Social Director blueprint, how to tap into social media, to expand on this entire concept in strategy, to reach more prospects, to reach more people with your content, to reach more people you can generate sales and profit from, and to grow your distribution channels, as well as to syndicate your content, so that's very, very important.

And then last but not least, after you follow the instructions on all of those blueprints, you want to carry out the Advertising Expansion blueprint. Once we've discovered what keywords make us money, what activities make us money, now we want to reinvest in the business and test and scale advertising everywhere we possibly can on the internet that will generate a profit. So that's why the Advertising Expansion blueprint is incredibly important. Once we figure out what things will work and once we figure out what types of traffic will generate income for us then we want all of that traffic that we can get, even if we have to pay for it, as long as it will produce a profit.

Maintenance The traffic generation power of this entire course actually goes beyond just following the steps of those blueprints. Now, certainly, if you want to generate more traffic, you can just wash, rinse, repeat the steps on some of the blueprints to generate more traffic, that will work, but if you really want to maximize the amount of traffic you get from this entire process, there's some ongoing maintenance that you need to do.

The first thing is just to monitor Goggle Analytics. We've talked about this before, just see what's working, where traffic is coming from, and then isolate that concept and make a tweak to it or improve it and just make it create more traffic. If a keyword is generating some good free traffic from the organic listings, that's an opportunity to either one, create more content, optimize around that keyword phrase, or two, to simply go to the page that's having that success and to improve upon it to generate more traffic.

Improve your results through testing. You constantly want to be testing and rotating different ad copy for AdWords, test different types of posts on your blog, test different types of giveaways to ethically bribe people to opt into an e-mail list or to follow you on Traffic Secrets 2.0 - Training Guide

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Facebook or to follow you on Twitter or whatever the case may be, but try testing things.

Of course, you don't want to spend too much time or too much effort in doing it, but there's some small little tweaks you can make just to see how things may work better that can generate a lot of traffic for you.

Hire content creators. By now you realize how valuable content is and owning more of the interne, that whole process for generating more traffic. Well, you can only create so much content yourself. In order to really grow your traffic when it comes to that, you're going to have to hire other people to create content for you. So reinvest in your business when your budget will allow it and hire content creators.

Scale your advertising, that's the heart of the Advertising Expansion blueprint, and it's very, very important. When you discover the different type so traffic that will turn into a profit for you, will generate revenue and income in your business, you simply want more of that traffic. Well, in order to scale that and really get a lot of traffic and sales, the best place is to simply scale your advertising. So you constantly want to be on the lookout for new places to advertise where you can start generating a new source of leads and many times you'll find new opportunities, you'll test those opportunities, they'll prove to be profitable, and then you can just let it run every single month and that'll just bring in xwave of sales every month, another $1,000.00, another $10,000.00, it can really vary greatly, but it can produce a lot of consistent ongoing traffic. Of course, we always want to test everything down to that individual traffic campaign level to make sure that it is profitable, but once you're doing that, you constantly want to stay on the lookout for new ways to scale your advertising.

Acquire assets but also continue creating them. We talked about the power of buying a Web site where someone's put in all the hard work for us and we can just basically write a check and buy a site and hopefully it won't take too much ongoing maintenance to keep that site going like, you know, if it's a blog it's going to take someone to keep making the blog post and a lot of times we can find sites that offer tools or a lot of preexisting content that already gets a lot of traffic. Well, we can just buy that site and then get all that traffic. But you also want to focus on creating your own assets. We've talked about this as a foundational principle, you know, work to build your e-mail list subscribers, create new products if you can, create more and more content, build relationships, get more test data and all the things that go with that. So you want to keep doing all these things on an ongoing basis.

Listen to your customers and prospects. It goes beyond just research about the customers that belong to one of your competitors and seeing what they're talking about. Your really need to listen to your own customers and prospects. What are they posting in the Comments section on your blog? What kind of feedback are they giving you about their needs or just their comments and feedback on a specific product or anything you're doing? Listen to your own customers and prospects, and you'll find a wealth of 372

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opportunity to do things that can generate more traffic or to do things that your customers and prospects will want to share with others, or to simply create things that will generate more revenue for you. Listen carefully to your customers and prospects.

And last but not least, on an ongoing basis interact with the Traffic Secrets community.

The Traffic Secrets community, as you will quickly find out, is going to develop into more and more of a valuable thing for you to take full advantage of. Many people sell access to membership sites and communities like this that are inferior to the value you can get from the traffic secrets community, and you get access to this community for free, so you need to take advantage of it. Get involved, share some of your results, you know, network and mastermind with other marketers. You can find some great partners, you'll find other people may be doing business trying to reach your market, you can find ways to work together to help both of you make more money. But interact with the community, become a regular part of the community, and it's only going to help you generate more traffic and more business by staying in touch with others that are doing what you are trying to do, even if it's in a different market. So make sure to interact with the Traffic Secrets community.

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