Hi Tomaz,

I just wanted to ask a question regarding affiliate links in a product review site. I’ve started my second site on _______ and have about 50 pages plus 20-30 C2 pages. At this point I do not have any affiliate links or any links to Amazon or any other product sellers.

Of course I would prefer to have 100-200 unique visitors daily before adding any affiliate links, but it seems odd to have reviews without leading the visitor to a purchase site. So when is the most appropriate time to add affiliate links?

Or do you recommend adding links without affiliate coding first? Or should I add Google ads first? That at least gives them a click option.

———————————————————–

Hi R…,

The “it seems odd to have reviews without leading the visitor to a purchase site.” shouldn’t bother you so much.

Visitors come and go and they come again. It’s an endless supply – in fact it keeps growing. More people use internet every day.

So yes, some people will find your site at the beginning and it won’t be of much use to them. So what?

They will find another site. It’s like some people will find a place in the town where a new restaurant is being built – but there are cranes and workers all around.

What should I do? I’ll find another place – for now.

But there is endless supply of people coming into this town and once the restaurant is done, they will keep coming in.

Same with your site. It is still being built and there are just “foundations” and “walls” there.

Build your content and build your links so that you get more traffic. Then you can monetize.

Do affiliate links hurt a new site with almost no incoming links?

I am not 100% sure because I don’t know Google’s algorithm.

I did have one bad experience though when I added Amazon aff. links very early to a site. Here’s how the traffic was going up and how it went up as I continued to build pages and automatically include Amazon aff. links (the last column on the right are unique visitors):

I thought that this was just a Google dance at first so I didn’t do anything. But my average traffic in the next month was 12 daily visitors.

Eventually I removed aff. links and kept building content and an occasional link and the site now gets over 200 daily visitors – which is normal for the amount of pages and links that it has.

In my personal view I think that the site needs to have some authority to be able to withstand linking out often through affiliate links. Especially those which are easily recognizable by Google with an algorithm. (Amazon, Clickbank, …)

On another note, I also think that adding Google Adsense early to the site won’t bring the site down. Again, this is just my feeling based on my experience and some stuff I read.

Another Reason to Delay Monetization

As most of us have found out, there is a strong emotion that affects people when it comes to money – jealousy.

Simply put, people prefer to link to young sites (with poor pagerank and Alexa and simple layouts) if there are no ads and aff. links present. They might be willing to link to a site if it’s just useful content that they are linking to and not a way for another webmaster to make money.

So if you put ads and aff. links to your site immediately, it will be much tougher to get quality links. And the links are hard to get anyway.

The SBI Action Guide suggests adding monetization to your site once it reaches at least 100 daily visitors. But that number is just an indication of how much content + links you have!

It’s an indication that you probably have enough incoming links and authority which can convince Google to keep your site well ranked despite your obvious attempts to make money from those rankings and high traffic.

I personally now do not monetize a site until it has around 400 or 500 daily visitors. (It took me a year with a site to reach that for example.)

That amount of daily visitors suggests enough high quality links and that will on average earn me $400 to $500 per month extra – which is something tangible.

So when should you monetize?

Realize that on average, you will earn around $100 per month from 100 daily visitors. Again, you can earn 3x more and 3x less with 100 daily visitors but in my experience that’s about the average.

If you badly need those $100 per month, monetize with 100 daily visitors. Know that you will now have more problems getting quality links.

Again, there are always exceptions and your site’s design may persuade people to link to you more or your site’s extremely interesting topic may be more “linkable” than a boring product review.

But in general, the earlier you monetize, the harder it is to get links.

When the Game Changes

I found that usually the game changes once my site gets to pagerank 3 or more. Then the link that I offer in return from one of my internal pages is typically a PR2 or a PR1.

That is a good enough value for people to put jealousy in second place because their self-interest is now in the first place.

Most webmasters know that a PR2 in-content link is very valuable to their site and they are willing to return the favor and help you get better rankings and traffic and make more money – but that right now doesn’t matter to them anymore.

They want their better rankings, their traffic and their extra income and your quality link will help them achieve that.

Hi Tomaz,

My name is S….. and I am a former SBI owner who is considering signing up again. I had a travel website that I did not follow through on because I got stuck on and frustrated with the technical aspects of building a website but I am willing to try again and push through the pain so to speak because I want financial independence.

I was also not sure how I would effectively monetize a travel website. I contacted SBI but the advisor I spoke to didn’t have concrete suggestions but I checked the results.sitesell.com page per our conversation and contacted the owner of ________.com since that is a travel website about the town of ___ at _____ island and my website would be about the island of ______.

Long story short he doesn’t endorse SBI per say and he doesn’t endorse doing a travel website either. He knows who you are from your postings in the forums and says you are a straight shooter. You guys started at the same time but you are a success and he is not.

I’m trying to figure out what went wrong for him. He did everything right from what I can tell. He followed the Action Guide, has lots of pages, did a video, has 500 unique visitors a day and yet he is not profitable. I find it hard to believe that it is impossible for him to make money with a travel website, especially about ______. He is considering a different topic.

I don’t want to sign up for SBI, do ALL OF THAT WORK only to get nowhere. Can you please weigh in on this.

—————————————————–

Hi S…………..,

I checked the website from your friend. 500 visitors is nice but that earns very little even on max profitable sites. On average, you earn the amount of dollars per month for the amount of visitors you have per day.

So 500 visitors a day -> $500 a month

Of course, this can be 3x less and also 3x more – depending on the market and your monetization skills.

To replace a normal job you probably need over 5000 daily visitors. Of course, you can build 10 sites with 500 daily and that will do it.

Also, if the site gets 500 daily after a few years, then OBVIOUSLY the demand is too low. (or there are just not enough pages and / or not enough links)

Find a niche with greater demand.

It’s very logical to me. Instead of blaming SBI and STAYING a victim, you need to learn from your mistakes and IMPROVE the next time.

The site is profitable it it earns $1 per day. You earn more than you pay for SBI.

To earn enough for a living, you need to go for it and not just try.

Most people try. That’s why most people don’t make it.

They do stuff halfheartedly because they already believe that this won’t work so they are not willing to put the effort into something that won’t work.

So now they don’t put in the effort and prove themselves right – but the reason why stuff doesn’t work is EXACTLY because they didn’t put in the effort and not because internet marketing or SBI philosophy (or many other) doesn’t work.

There is NO way someone can fail IF they put in the work AND learn and improve their skills.

But if you stay hard headed and keep doing the same wrong thing, don’t learn from, don’t ask anyone WHY this doesn’t work (cause maybe your ego is too big and you don’t want to admit mistakes), then yes, you may get 500 visitors per day after 4 years.

The reason why the site you gave as an example doesn’t get more visitors (I did a quick analysis) is because the keywords they chose don’t have enough demand. The site has enough pages but also not many links.

But the main problem is the demand. Imagine how many people want to go to that island that the site is about and how many want to play tennis or buy a vacuum cleaner.

Or how many want to visit that island and how many want to visit New York or Paris. Simply, the niche doesn’t have enough demand.

The SBI Action Guide DOESN’T tell you that with one website you will become financially free if you follow their guidelines.

But it does tell you how to make a profitable site – and earning $500 per month is definitely very nice.

The person who built that site followed the AG but chose the numbers on the low side. The site IS profitable – it definitely doesn’t lose money. In fact, it earns money without any work involved now!

And with 500 daily visitors smart monetization SHOULD earn you around $500 per month – doing nothing!

If that person is disappointed by earning $500 per month doing nothing, then maybe they should go to Haiti (writing this a few days after the earthquake 2010) and see what life can look like.

All you need to do is to learn from your experience, find smarter ways to get content up quicker and make more sites. $500 per month is in my opinion the average of what a typical SBI earns after 2 years.

Again, I am quite sure that that’s because the average person puts in the average effort and doesn’t really commit. Most people don’t think big enough and self-sabotage themselves so that the reality conforms to their beliefs.

It’s not SBI, it’s not Action Guide, it’s not internet marketing – it’s their average thinking, average work habits, average organizational habits and their half-hearted approach that creates average results.

Perhaps one example; I met Mike and his wife from Ireland at the SBI Barcelona conference. They asked me for advice about their site.

I was explaining to them for about an hour all the things they needed to do and they were SHOCKED at the amount of work I suggested. All that?

Earning money online is magical ONCE you establish your site(s). You don’t do anything and the money keeps coming in.

BUT…

Before that happens, the work involved in getting the site up is no different than any offline job and there’s no magic. There need to be hours of hours of work and there needs to be an intelligent choice of niche and keywords.

It’s VERY unlikely that you’ll earn thousands of dollars with your first site – as it is very unlikely that you’ll earn fortunes with your first restaurant that you set up or any other offline business.

80% of business fail in the first 5 years. And that’s the offline world statistics.

Is now a normal business to blame or the people?

So if many people fail with online business or SBI for that matter is it SBI or people? You know my answer.

I look to provide additional (hopefully smart and logical and simple) information on my blog to help people become smarter doing their online businesses.

The system works incredibly well, but you need to become very good at it. And the way to become really good at anything is to keep doing it and keep improving.

If you’re building your site in the same way this year that you did last year, you have not improved.

How can I make this better and more efficient is the key question that has to be in your mind day after day.

That’s how you become better at anything what you do and eventually become above average in anything you do.

If you want above average earnings, you need to become above average in doing this online business.

I really don’t think you need above average IQ, but you need above average commitment and put in above average effort.

The search Adsense shows up only on Google search page results, like here:

The other way of Adsense is the one you’re interested in, because you want to insert it into your CONTENT. This Adsense shows on other websites – and the internet is full of it as you know.

Here’s an example of CONTENT Adsense ads (I wonder how long will Google allow the Wisegeek to keep images near ads. They also use some other tactics to trick people into clicks on these pages below…):

If you want to know how much you’ll get paid from Google from putting ads on your site, you cannot find out that with any tools. BUT…

You can get some ideas by checking out your previous sites and perhaps sharing your stats here so that we have more numbers to rely on.

Here’s what you need to do:

1.    Calculate the average CPC (cost per click in your niche) based on the Adwords tool

•    Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool and enter your main seed word or site concept keyword – I’ll use tennis as an example

•    Sort by Global Monthly Search Volume and leave the Match Type to Broad, then take the top 20 keywords’ Estimated Avg. CPC and calculate the average (add all the numbers and divide them by 20 – double check that you really added 20 numbers)

•    Write down the number – in this hyptothetical case it would be 1,52.

2.    Calculate the average CPC based on the data from your Adsense account:

•    Login to your Adsense account and check the stats for previous month. Then choose the right channel (if you have more websites) and divide your earnings in that channel by the number of clicks. You’ll get a number which represents the average payout per click in your niche.

•    You cannot disclose this number (and any other) according to Google’s privacy policy BUT you don’t need to.

3.    Calculate the ratio of the Content Adsense and Search Adsense in your niche

•    You need to divide the Content Adsense number you got in the Step 2 by the number you got in Step 1. In my case: x / 1,52 (which I don’t have since I don’t use adsense on my tennis site . But for example, let’s say the x is 0.20.)

•    The ratio is 0.20 / 1,52 = 0,13. Which means that I get 13% payout on Content sites compared to the numbers I can see in Adwords stats.

I use Adsense on just 2 websites now. The ratio for site #1 is 14% and the ratio for #2 website is 9%.

I can see from my stats that when I research a niche and the Adwords CPC shows for example $3 on average per click, I can assume I will get around 10% of that – which is around 30 cents per click.

If I assume 5% CTR and that I get double pageviews on the number of visitors, then if I get 100 visitors to my site, I will get 200 impressions, with 5% CTR that’s 10 clicks, each click is on average 30 cents so I might earn around $3 per day with 100 visitors per day. Or $30 with 1000 daily visitors…

Please share your ratio for your niche (I suggest you don’t put your website in the comment link this time…) so that we can get a better idea on what Adsense pays on content sites…

The key section was this one:

We recommend selling your foreign language product as a completely separate product from the English version. ClickBank allows publishers to specify the language of their product when they submit their product for approval. When you do this, customers will automatically be sent to a ClickBank order form in the appropriate language. We also send out Spanish, German, and French receipts, as well as other notifications.

I also checked the Interned World Stats and came across this graph:

While SBI doesn’t currently support Chinese characters (but I hear that it will!), I decided to translate my tennis videos into Spanish – as there is obviously a huge number of people searching the net in Spanish language.

It’s a one time investment and the reward – earnings – keep coming in. I found a Spanish translator on getafreelancer.com, and he translated the sales letter and the videos for $450. He was also kind enough to add the subtitles to my videos too.

Setting up a new sales letter was a little bit complicated because SBI doesn’t have special characters like ñ, but as you can see you can use special HTML code to display such characters. Here’s the code for this letter in HTML: ñ

All in all it took me about 10 hours to set up the new sales letter, set up a new product in Clickbank and upload the new videos to my hosting.

The videos de tenis page soon started to rank well in Google since I gave it a few good links from both of my tennis sites and also exchanged a few links where I asked other webmasters to link to my Spanish sales letter.

You can see the traffic and the keywords for which is being found below.

There are also many affiliates on Clickbank that are promoting this page and sending lots of traffic to it. It’s now my third most visited page:

The earnings are not that great though; based on a few emails from Spanish speaking visitors, they worry more about online credit card abuse than English speaking visitors – therefore fewer buy.

But still, they visit my site, maybe subscribe to my newsletter and maybe recommend the site to their friends.

Here are the earnings this year:

I earned around $1500 in the first 6 months so it looks like I’ll get to around $3000 per year. That’s a pretty good extra income considering that it cost me $450 and 10 hours of work.

I am quite sure that once SBI allows Chinese characters, I will translate my videos in Chinese too. Reaching an extra billion people is definitely worth it…

So… Have you translated your products yet?

It usually takes me around 5 to 6 months before I get 200 daily visitors. I need to add at least 50 pages of content – probably around 70 to 100 – and I need to get quality links to my site.

But look at these stats:

As you can see, that traffic is rising very fast; at the start of May the site just started receiving a few visitors and a few weeks later it was already getting over 200 daily visitors.

And that’s not all; I’ve only published 9 articles by that time on that site!

What’s the secret?

Buying a high pagerank domain or a website which already has many quality incoming links!

I knew for quite some time that there is a huge market of domain names which are being sold and bought all the time but I never knew how to make the best of this system.

I then watched Chad Kimball’s video on buying dying domains and realized that it’s not such a big deal. I didn’t exactly follow his system but instead, I checked the DigitalPoint forums where there are domains and websites sold all the time. (you can even sign up for the RSS feed for Domains subtopic…)

I first bought a PR3 domain for small money to get me started. I then learned how to transfer a domain from  someone else to me – I had to open a godaddy account and start a new hosting account.

I then learned how to host that domain on godaddy, installed wordpress on it (automatic one click install with godaddy’s tools) and started a blog! I used some old, not very well written articles on that blog and it started getting some traffic and the pagerank remained.

It’s possible if you buy a dropped domain or a domain that hasn’t had content for some time that Google will remove the pagerank once it figures out that the domain is now a new website…

I then became braver   and spent some time looking for a PR4 or PR5 domain. There are many offers, but you need to check whether that website has had some pages indexed in the past with archive.org and if there are really quality links coming to it. Check Chad’s video I mentioned above…

Here’s what I did next:

1.    I found a domain that had PR5 incoming links from Yahoo directory and some other sites which seemed quite good. I could see from Yahoo and incoming links what this site used to be about. Yahoo had a description and incoming links had some anchor text.

2.    I then checked whether these keywords (based on which the site was created before) had good PPC in Adsense and also whether they had good demand in WT. The exact keywords didn’t have good PPC, but tightly related had. (Adwords suggests synonyms…)

3.    I then did the basic keyword research, decided on a niche with good demand and not too much competition and requested articles from my writers.

4.    Then I installed wordpress on that domain and started adding articles. Since the articles were optimized for certain keywords, the site had PR5 and the incoming links were tightly related to my theme, it started to rank immediately for these keywords!

5.    I’ve now created an author account on wordpress so that my writer can publish the articles herself! I now only check the site here and there, do some minor corrections with tags or categories and all the rest is done. The pagerank is already there, the articles are written AND published for me so all I do is watch the traffic and earnings. The earnings are not spectacular, but I am testing some Chitika and Adsense and other stuff to see what works best here.

I’ve recently started another SBI site from scratch but I think it will be my last one. Getting a PR5 domain where all you need is to publish articles is really worth the money and time which would have to be spent on getting those darn links.

Not only that, I now own 2 PR5 and one PR3 websites from which I can link to my other sites and which enable me to exchange quality links with others.

If you want to take your internet marketing business to a new level, I strongly recommend you learn how to find buy domains or even websites with quality links and high pagerank which you then »refurbish« and use your SEO knowledge to transform them into passive income ATMs.

Here’s some good info too:

If you’re interested in buying an old domain or a website, get in touch with Faisal from whom I already bought 2 domains. His email is easysign (at) yahoo.com .

I’m not talking blatant cut and paste but the more subtle grey areas. Suppose I wanted to do a vacuum review site (I don’t, just an example) then a review of SuperDuper123 will be very similar as its major plusses and minuses are the same, the keywords will be the same etc.

Is it all down to voice etc. or have I missed something? I would hate to reverse a site then be accused of cheating or am I’m being over cautious?

—————————————————————————–

To keep things very simple, my answer would be: use different words.

If you use different words, or in other words , create unique content, then no one can rightfully accuse you of cheating.

Of course, don’t copy the HTML of the template – that would be copying too. (Unless the template is a free template or can be bought and is sold to many customers!)

If you choose the same keywords, that’s not copying, that’s keyword research. If you’ve learned SEO from the same source, then it’s very likely that you will choose most of the same keywords in a niche and build the site structure in the same way.

All cars have 4 wheels and all houses have 4 walls. (I am exaggerating to make my point…)

A website on vacuum cleaner reviews following sound SEO will definitely have almost the same structure as my site.

The real worry here is then copying the content. Don’t do it.

If you write original content, then you are not copying anyone. The key here is that you are legally safe.

The next question is whether you can handle the emotions when someone accuses you of copying their site, but they are not legally right. (And cannot win a legal case against you.)

Can you handle that or are you afraid even of that confrontation?

How about people emailing you and telling you that your site sucks, that it’s just made to earn money through advertising and that the English of your articles is terrible?

If you cannot handle that, then don’t start a website.

There are all sorts of misguided people (I tried to find a really mild word to describe them. ) and sooner or later someone is going to send you a message and you’re going to suffer because of someone’s opinion.

If you KNOW that you are doing the right thing, then you’ll be able to sleep well. But if you KNOW that you are taking shortcuts, then your conscience will start bugging you.

I protect myself legally by getting real unique content and from my conscience (and not really from someone else’s OPINION) by doing things right so when a misguided person sends me a criticizing email, I know they’re wrong.

I can forget about that in a minute and live a calm and happy life.

This might be a stupid question, but do you think that making a living online is sustainable? In other words, do you see yourself making a living online 15 years from now doing the same thing?

A: You’re welcome and thanks for a very interesting question. I’ve considered and contemplated on this before – whether online business will work in 15 years or more.

Here are some of my conclusions:

1.    Having a job, especially now, is not safe. There were around 600,000 people laid off in USA in December – if I am not mistaken. So I don’t see a normal job sustainable in the long term. Even CEOs get fired. (I hope more bankers get fired soon…)

2.    The only thing certain in this universe is change. Everything changes and you have to change with the time to keep up and prosper. The Internet (for most people) is around 10 years old or even less. And see all the changes; Yahoo, Google, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, … Maybe in 10 years there will be Shmooglehoo and we’ll just have to adapt.

3.    The Internet is definitely here to stay and in will just get faster and more interactive. People will still use the Internet in large extent to find information online and they will definitely search with keywords for quite some time. Large content sites with lots of text will do well for a very long time. There would have to be some extraordinary evolution and revolution in digital world to change that. Check my Interview with Ken Evoy on the future of the Internet for more ideas…

4.    The first future that I see is that search engines will read audio from videos (and audio files) and index those too. Meaning, if your site has embedded videos, Google will know whether the videos on your pages are relevant or not and will rank your pages accordingly. But if you really want to have a high quality site, then video is surely even now present on some of your pages.

5.    The online business is scalable while a job is not. If you have one full time job, you cannot have another full time job. But if you have one mature website, you can easily start working on another. I see stats from 2 sites that were not updated (one added a few C2 pages) in 1 year, I just exchanged a few not very valuable links. The traffic of the first one increased by 20% and the traffic of the second one by 25%. So did the earnings… Meaning; no work on the sites for 1 year still earned money and gave me enough time to start new sites or improve existing ones.

6.    The real key is not really in what kind of business you are but whether your knowledge (or product) is valuable. Do you know something that other people need? Can you offer products that other people need? I believe the knowledge is more important and more valuable. Online business allows you to share this knowledge with the whole world and be rewarded for that – of course many times more than if you share this knowledge with just a few people.

7.    The Internet will change but not in its key function – allowing people to search for information. You may have to change HOW you provide that information (text, video, audio, video conferencing, …) in order to benefit the most from the current state of internet, advertising and selling options. But if you have valuable knowledge, then you have nothing to fear. And remember, on the Internet, even knowledge of how to tie a tie is very valuable and can be very profitable.

8.    And finally, don’t put all the eggs in the same basket. People who invested heavily in stocks feel the pain now. (Luckily for me, I didn’t have enough money to buy stocks before. ) I am not a financial expert, but having some money in the bank, some in stocks, some in real estate and some invested in websites will definitely allow you stay afloat in any kind of recession. (Which by the way I don’t feel at all with my online business. Traffic is growing and so are earnings.)

Your thoughts?

The factors that enabled a successful website to get lots of free search engine traffic and earn lots of money are almost completely transparent – you can see exactly what it takes to build your own website that works.

This article will show you how to analyze successful websites, learn from them and apply this knowledge to your online business.

Step 1: Find successful websites

How do you know which websites get a lot of traffic and earn good money?

a) Sitesell.com lists their most successful websites, and you can study the top 5 from each category on this page. These sites definitely get a lot of traffic.

b) Find sites with an Alexa ranking below 100,000. While Alexa doesn’t tell you exactly how many visitors a particular site receives, in my experience all sites with a ranking below 100,000 have very good traffic. Install Search Status if you use Firefox for a quick glance at the Alexa ranking.

c) Look for success stories. Google has their Adsense success stories page, and if these sites earn a lot of money, they definitely get a lot of traffic. You can also learn where to position Adsense ads since these sites all get very good CTR and eCPM.

Step 2: How many pages of content does the site have?

If you want to build your own website that gets a lot of traffic, let’s say over 1,000 hits per day, then how many pages do you need?

Go to Google.com and type: site:www.example.com.

Here are the top sites from 5 categories from the Sitesell.com results page, and the number of pages they each contain:

a) windows-vista-update.com, 2760 pages

b) topsexywomen.com, 1390 pages

c) debtsteps.com, 175 pages

d) cookingnook.com, 424 pages

e) 4×4offroads.com, 818 pages

Your first reaction might be: “How am I going to write so many web pages?”

The first thing to be clear on is that you won’t do it in 2 months, but if you write 3 pages each week, then your site will have over 150 pages in just one year.

Second, lots of pages can be written by your visitors through the clever use of Content 2.0 which SBI sites provide, or by getting comments on your blog which add to the length and word count of the page.

Step 3: How many incoming links do the websites have?

Quality, relevant links are the MOST IMPORTANT ranking factor in Google, slightly less so than in Yahoo and MSN. You can build your own website with 1,000 pages of great content, but without the right links your content will not exist in the search engine index.

You MUST get links to your site in order to rank well. So, how can you see how many links you have, and from where do these links come from?

Go to Yahoo.com and type: link:www.example.com

To see only external links (which are the key links), select Show Inlinks: Except from this domain and to Entire Site. (You’ll do that on the next page that comes up after you type in your query in the Yahoo search field.)

Let’s check the links of those 5 SBI sites we analyzed before:

a) windows-vista-update.com, 3999 links

b) topsexywomen.com, 4288 links

c) debtsteps.com, 1469 links

d) cookingnook.com, 1519 links

e) 4×4offroads.com, 4996 links

Yahoo Explorer also lists the websites and pages from which there are incoming links so that you can see the quality, page rank, Alexa and the relevance of each link that points to the website you’re analyzing.

Note that Yahoo Explorer also shows the number of pages indexed for the website that you are analyzing; you can compare it to the number of pages indexed in Google. This is explained in Step 2 (above).

Step 4: For which keywords are the site’s pages optimized?

Just building a website with good content and getting quality links is not enough to get traffic unless you have a massively popular website.

You need to target specific keywords which are searched often in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, and gradually work you way up in the search engine results page (SERP).

So, how can you determine which keyword a certain page is optimized for?

Most websites follow this SEO (search engine optimization) principle; they include the main keyword for which they want to optimize a certain page:

a) in the title

b) in the description

c) in the keywords meta tag

d) in the first sentence of the page

e) occasionally throughout the page

f) In links pointing to this page, and where the main keyword is used in the anchor text (i.e., link text)

How can you determine the meta tags of each page?

Right-click on the page you want to analyze and select “View Page Source”.

Let’s examine Thrandur’s page of 4×4 Trucks. At the top of the page, you’ll see meta data for the title, description and keywords.

The first keyword in the keywords meta field is 4×4 trucks, and it’s the keyword for which Thrandur optimized the page.

4×4 trucks is a keyword that is in much demand.

… and Thrandur ranks well in Google (at positions #11 and #12 in the Google search rankings at the moment of writing this article) which means he gets a nice amount of traffic for this keyword and its long tail keywords.

(A quick suggestion for Thrandur: optimize your homepage for the “4×4 Trucks” keyword by using it in the title! Also, if you point a few links to your homepage with this keyword – even internal ones will do –you’ll surely get higher rankings in Google for the 4×4 trucks searches.)

You can also run a quick WT query to see the main keywords from the 4×4 site concept:

Then, you can check which of those keywords Thrandur used, whether he chose to use them as T2 (main pages) or T3 (articles), and what other keywords he optimized his site for.

For example, one page is about Off Road Wheels which is, of course, very relevant to the 4×4 topic. This page ranks as #6 in Google at the moment of writing of this article.

How did Thrandur come up with this keyword?

http://www.kwbrowse.com/4×4.html

Kwbrowse lists the relevant keywords to your main keyword, and you’ll see that “off road” is one of them.

In this fashion, you can reverse engineer what the person who built the site did to come up with the keywords that his site ranks high for.

Step 5: How to build your own website that looks great? Learn from others…

The “View Page Source” shows you the HTML of the page, and you can learn some very useful tricks. You can learn how to position pictures, videos, advertisements and so on.

Here’s an example: if you want to add a picture to your page and wrap the text around it, you will need some space between them so that it looks nice.

If you just add the picture with the <table … HTML tag, there won’t be any space between the picture and the text.

See, for example, how the picture on the right is too close to this text?

If I want to have some space between the text on the left and the picture on the right, I have to use a HTML trick to achieve that.

There are a few ways to do this and I used a simple table with an align tag in the example on the right to get some space between the picture and the text here.

Right-click on this page, select ‘View Page Source’ and see how I did this.

This is just one example of how you can learn from others, since websites are so transparent on the World Wide Web.

One important word of advice though: DO NOT COPY from other people. They’ve invested time, money and energy into their businesses, and you need to respect that and their copyright.

I suggest that you LEARN from their success, ADAPT to your needs and eventually build your own website that works!

This is the basis of Ken Evoy’s ‘Site Build It’ program, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of high traffic websites based on this model.

On the other hand, you have the bloggers. They stick to their model of running a blog, which is actually a website from the perspective of both search engines and most visitors. Blogs are typically updated more often than websites and are more time-oriented – meaning they write about something that is happening right now in their industry or field of interest.

I have found that using both, a large content website and a blog, is a great combination and others have also recommended this approach.

Using examples from my main tennis site and tennis blog, we will now look at seven reasons why you need to have a website AND a blog. (I suggest you open both sites in tabs and then come back to check my advice)

1. Links to your main site from your blog. Links are the key to higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting quality, relevant links with the anchor text of your choosing is not easy. Your blog allows you to create a link from any page of your blog to any page of your site using your chosen anchor text.

Examples:

a)    I can link from the homepage of my pagerank 4 blog to the main Tier2 pages of my main site and thus add a lot of link power to these T2 pages. This of course helps immensely with respective T2 page rankings in SERPs. Check the links in the sidebar pointing to Tennis Tips, Tennis Instruction, and other T2 pages.

b)    I can also link from individual posts to other pages of my main site using a variety of anchor texts to boost my sites rankings with keyword variations and more pagerank: Knee bend and racquet drop when serving

2. Quality 3- or 4-way link exchanges. A blog with a good pagerank gives me the power to negotiate very good link exchanges. The visible pagerank is still the main concern for many webmasters when you negotiate a link exchange.

Example:

Check the sidebar of my tennis blog again and you’ll see that I link to the ‘Fuzzy Yellow Balls’ website in my Tennis Blogs section. I am giving them a pagerank 4 homepage link and, in return, the ‘Fuzzy Balls’ site links to my ‘TennisMindGame’ site from their homepage.

I also provide them with a testimonial so that my link is not in the footer or somewhere else where it could be mistaken for a bought link and the Fuzzy Balls site could be penalized for that, which would make the link to my main site worthless.

3. Reciprocal links with other blogs for higher pagerank and traffic. Bloggers are typically very aware of the distinction between a blog and website and don’t want to “mess” with websites. They are much happier to have a “peer”, a fellow blogger, ask them for a link exchange and will be much more willing to agree.

Example:

Head back to the Tennis Blogs section in the sidebar of my blog and check the tennis blogs I link to. Then see if those blogs also link back! This helps me to increase the pagerank of my blog, which I can then direct to my main site to increase its SERPs.

4. The blog allows you to answer questions and create more interesting content. Your main website should be based on keyword research in your niche area. That means that most pages on your site are optimized for certain keywords that visitors frequently use on search engines such as Google.

Typical keywords in my tennis niche are tennis tips, how to play tennis, tennis lessons, tennis instruction, mental tennis, and so on.

Once you get some traffic to your main site, you’ll also start receiving questions through your contact form. Answering these questions almost never results in a keyword-focused page, although it is beneficial to the visitor(s), since it solves a problem.

Example:

Check the posts in the Tennis Parents category. Almost all of these posts are questions and answers and are, hopefully, useful to parents of tennis kids.

5. A blog is very quickly indexed by Google and you can get short bursts of traffic when you optimize a post about a current event. Google knows that most blogs write about current events so it indexes accordingly and pushes them higher in SERPs when they are optimized for the right words.

Example:

I wrote a post about Rafael Nadal beating Federer in the Wimbledon final. As a result; I got over 800 visitors in one day. This was because many people were searching for information about Rafael Nadal and Google placed my post in the top 5 SERP for a few days.

6. Blogs can be listed in Blog directories and sites that list top blogs. This again helps to increase the link popularity. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to get those links with a typical static content site.

Example:

My tennis blog is listed in alltop.com or, more specifically, on this pagerank 5 tennis related page: http://tennis.alltop.com/

7. Blogs allows users to post comments. This adds interest and interaction to the users site visit. Of course, they also build additional content related to the main topic of the post. Once a person has commented on a blog, it is very likely that they will return and check other visitor’s opinions and, eventually, become a regular reader and commenter.

Example:

Check the comments on this interesting post about Sampras vs. Federer…

Before you rush off to start your new blog, here are a few additional words of advice.

It will take some time to build good link popularity. Your blog won’t rank anywhere at first, so you’ll be writing many posts and getting about seven visitors per day. Also, ensure that you have enough interesting content to enable you to update your blog at least once a week.

If you feel that you have content that doesn’t really fit into your keyword-focused static site, and you have some extra time to hunt blog links, then consider starting a blog.

The website/ blog combo will give you an edge in your niche market and will help you to become an even greater authority on your chosen topic.

While I kept the main Chitika ads on my site, I saw that the Chitika Linx was not earning well.

So I tested the Amazon Context Links affiliate program. Since I use SBI Includes on my site I can change the javascript code for all pages of my site with only one upload so I simply replaced the Linx code with the Amazon Context Links javascript code.

I selected the option where Amazon automatically links to their products if it detects the name of the product in the text and I chose 3 links per page.

After a few days I saw that the orders started to come in. I used to earn from Amazon around $200 to $300 per month with a few links that I manually included in my pages.

But now I would get days like this:

So last month (July 2008) was the first month that I left Amazon Context links appear on my site and here’s the result:

As you can see I got 8915 clicks, 194 orders (2,18% conversion) and I earned more than $800. My total from Amazon in July was $1010.

A very cool thing about Amazon affiliate program is that when people land on Amazon, they know where they are. They have probably ordered something in the past, they trust the system and they often order many other items besides what you are promoting.

There are more than 50% of orders in my case, when people ordered other items than I linked to from my site. This is also very useful since the more items people order the higher overall commission you get.

Here’s the Amazon referral-fee rates chart:

The Amazon Context Links program works really well for me and it’s very easy to install if you use Includes files. All you need is one upload and the Amazon affiliate program takes care of the rest.