Here’s a big secret about Google search. Most who use it are information seekers. They want to know something. They are browsing for free information. But as a marketer I want to sell something, get an ad click, or at least get a name. But the typical info seeker does not want to give anything in return for what they get. So keep this fact in mind before you go spending dime one on anything related to search.

Here’s another problem with Google search. Every seven to twelve months Google rewrites their search algorithms. They say it is to give the user a better search experience but often this is not the end result. I’ve read many comments recently that Google searches are getting less and less relevant. I’ve experienced the same.

There are almost countless how-to courses out there telling you how to research a niche, buy a domain name for it, develop the content, etc. All of them are aimed at pleasing Google search and somehow getting ranked on the first page for money making keywords. Before you believe any of this stuff, it is yesterday’s news. What worked when the course was written is out the window the next time Google updates the algorithm.

The latest Google wrinkle is that displaying any advertising above the fold might penalize a site’s placement in search. This is so patently at odds with Google’s advice for their own product, Adsense, as to be laughable. Adsense publishers are given a heatmap of ideal Adsense placements, and I have to tell you that the most profitable placements for Adsense are all above the fold. So on one hand Big G wants us to place our Adsense ads where they might actually be seen and generate clicks, yet on the other hand they are going to bury our sites if we do put them there.

 Most niche sites depend on Adsense, Amazon, Clickbank, Commission Junction, and other ad sources to survive. Niche marketers who rely on these type of income sources and Google for traffic are in for a rough ride.

Here’s some small irony. Google has an affiliate network. I’ll bet you may not have known this.  They have some pretty well known names, like Cabelas’s. I wonder how they will justify this affiliate marketing love/hate relationship with their publishers and advertisers? So is Google now going to say, “Here, be an affiliate for this great company. But on your website, don’t put any links for them above the fold, where they might actually generate business.”

The takeaway from this is that don’t make something you can’t control the cornerstone of your online business. Don’t get caught up in the futility of trying to please Google. They change the rules all the time. Niche marketing works if you have your own, in demand product in the niche. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that niche websites are the way to instant riches. Google doesn’t like them any more.

1. Instant affiliate payments
2. Instant sales notification
3. Global cookies for each vendor
4. Instant tracking of sales and statistics

Let’s look at the details of each of these points. First, JVZoo has overcome the problem of rotating payments to fulfill affiliate payments and just simply credits the affiliate with their proper share at the time of sale. Besides giving the affiliate their share instantly, the vendor is always the product owner, so refunds and customer service issues don’t fall to the affiliate.

Next, affiliates are notified directly of their sales. I can vouch for this feature as I recently promoed a JVZoo vendor’s product and was immediately paid my share on the sale. Love those Paypal payment notices.

Third, the global cookie means that you get paid for other product sales from the same vendor. In JVZoo’s words “By sending a buyer to one of our vendors you are automatically cookied to any other product that vendor may have in our market place.”

And last but not least tracking of your sales and statistics is instant. Just login and it is up to the minute. Again, in JVZoo‘s words, “You will be able to see detailed reports of how many visitors and clicks you have received, how many sales you have made, your conversion percentage and also the EPC (earnings per click) for each individual campaign.”

There are many other reasons which a thorough exploration of the JVZoo site will reveal. Until now I have not recommended any affiliate network in the 5 Star cateegory here. Almost everyone knows the shortcomings of Clickbank. What Clickbank has going for it is the vast amount of product. The downside is the fee structure, whether you are an affiliate or vendor.

JVZoo fixes most of what is wrong with Clickbank. The site owners are innovative and know what Affiliate Marketers and Vendors need. You won’t be able to find an offer for everything you might want to feature, but if it is there the prospect of instant payments is very appealing. And the fee structure beats Clickbank by a mile. JVZoo is highly recommended and joins my list of 5 Star No Brainers.

The version of Micronichefinder that I’m using, 5.6.44, has a new interface compared to older versions. I may have skipped over installing a few new versions but I am one of those people who is loathe to upgrade unless I am having issues with the software.  At first the newness of the interface threw me as I was too used to the old interface, but after a search or two using it became second nature.

WitIn no time flat I had checked out a couple of niches I was thinking about building sites for, found the most profitable keywords to target, and even found some domains that had great keyword phrases in them. I also found out that one of my ideas sounded good but was lacking easily rankable keywords. So that idea will just go to the round file and I’ll work on those I found that look better.

Sometimes I think that this software is pegeon-holed a bit too much as it works fine for non-micro niches too. You have to adjust your thinking somewhat but all the info you need for the bigger broader niches can be analyzed with this tool as well.

In short I still give MicroNicheFinder my highest 5 Star No Brainer rating. James has definitely kept this software updated and fresh. That alone is something unusual in the land of sell and forget Internet Marketers. James Jones definitely stands above the crowd, providing support and upgrades that few software suppliers in this market can match.

Want to know what it is? Drumroll…….

It’s often called by the acronym WIIFM or “What’s In It For Me?” Simply put it breaks down to:

What do you- as a consumer- actually care about? Read on, because it may not be what you are thinking.

Your wants, needs and desires will typically fall into one or more of the following categories:

• Better health
• More comfort or security
• More money
• Greater success
• More leisure time
• More popularity
• More recognition
• Greater charisma
• Greater beauty
• Instant gratification
• Attraction to pleasure
• Avoidance of pain

Your article may be great in your own mind, but though you may have your reader’s attention, you need to hammer the advantages, comfort, happiness, and instant gratification and other WIIFM emotional benefits your reader will enjoy.

Don’t forget the headline is the most important part. Make a promise or ask a question and then make sure you follow up on what you have implied in your article headline.

Writing good articles and advertising copy is nothing more or less than knowing who your buyers are, recognizing what they want, and then telling them how your product will fulfill each of those wants.

The steps:

• Visualize your prospect
• Recognize their wants
• Satisfy those wants

Remember this tip because it’s one of the most important keys to article writing that makes you money. Put another way, it’s not about you, it’s all about THEM!

If you still don’t know how article marketing can generate endless residual targeted traffic to your sites, now is a good time for you to do a bit of research and find out for yourself how effective this method can be.

Click here for the Underground Secret EzineArticles Manifesto

All the best for your article marketing and writing success,

Lowell

One thing you can do is cloak your affiliate link so it is hard for others to figure out what the hoplink is. But there is still usually a problem. The hoplink usually still shows in the browser address bar. So what you need is the next step: cloaking and masking.

You can buy programs that do this. But if you promote less than seven or eight Clickbank products on a regular basis why not just buy a domain name for each of them? Or at least consider doing this for your bestselling products. Why?

If you click on this link for Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon, you will have to look twice to even know you have been redirected. I’m using my domain registrar’s domain control panel redirect function for my affiliate link. And I’m also cloaking/masking the browser’s address bar to show my domain name, which is so similar to his no one will notice. This is also done right in the domain registrar control panel. GoDaddy and Namecheap both offer this at no extra charge.

In addition, if you are careful with your domain name you will get type-in traffic. From the domain name above I’ve made many sales from type-in traffic. Word transpositions are better than mis-spellings here as mis-spellings are a red flag for some.

One other benefit of this domain name redirect and cloaking method is that if you promote affiliate merchants at places like ezinearticles.com, you know that they will only allow a root url in the body text of an article. So now you have one. And another benefit is that when your articles are used on other websites, if your resource box is “conveniently” chopped off, your affiliate link is still in the body of the article.

This is best used for long running established merchants you know will be around in a year or two and you also know will keep their product updated. The product above was off the market for over a year. Even so, Ewen rebirthed it this year and there I was, the old hoplink still worked and I was earning commissions in no time because I had this in place.

Oh yeah, I said this was quick. I can’t predict how long it will take you to buy a domain name, but after you do this changing to redirect and cloak is almost instant.

So there you go, an almost foolproof way to preserve your affiliate commissions at Clickbank. And other places too.
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So what is the simplest thing you can do that really matters?

Register an exact match .com or .net or .org domain name. Some people say hyphens are ok but my recent experience tells me no. How do I know this works? Because I have recently (in the last two months) gotten brand new sites ranked right away, on the first page of Google, for meaningful keywords that actually bring traffic and sales.

Now of course the exact match keywords have to also be the exact match for your home page topic. But you can add related articles as new pages. And if the keywords for those are properly selected, you may rank for them, although probably not as fast.

What didn’t work as well was adding a word to the front or back of the keywords, changing the word order, or hyphens. I can tell you this because I tried all these when my keywords were not available as one of the big three top level domains. Those domains have not done so well in Google as the exact keyword matches.

But interestingly enough, they do pretty well because they are full of long tail keywords that generate traffic. All these sites are monetized with Adsense, Amazon, or both, depending on how they test out and what the topic is. And some of my sites that aren’t ranked so well for the main keyword actually bring in more money than the ones that do rank. Ahh the magic of the long tail.

They all have one thing in common in that they are WordPress blogs. Which brings me to the other thing I make sure to do. Make sure your blog post and page titles are the keywords you are targeting. And make sure the blog post and page titles have the H1 tag. Some say this doesn’t matter but my limited research says it does, at least for brand new sites.

If you view the source for your blog you may find that there is either an h2 tag or no tag at all for your post and page titles. Make sure that you have a theme that uses h1 tags for post and page titles. If not it is easy to modify, but be aware you will have to modify your main_index, your page, and your single post php files in the “Appearance” editor.

The second part is a given. A good theme will already be set up that way. Your theme may not be but it is a simple matter to change it as outlined above. If you are doing html pages then it is simple to use the correct tag for your article keyword title.

But back to the first thing, my biggest challenge to find keyword matching domain names was all the back and forth from my research to my favorite domain name search tool. But just last week there was an upgrade to my favorite keyword tool, Micronichefinder.

Micronichefinder now has a built in top level domain search. So all I have to do while doing my research is click on an icon in the same row as my keyword phrase and it tells me whether or not that particular keyword phrase is available as a top level domain. Very cool.

Now don’t forget, the other part of SEO, off page, ie backlinks, is more important than the on-page stuff. But start out with the on page done this way and then you will have an on page advantage that will serve you well when those off page backlinks start coming.

So forget all the “get on Google page one” product hype. These are two easy on page things you can do to get a website ranked quickly.

Until just recently, making videos has been a tedious techie thing. You needed an expensive program like Camtasia to get anything that looked good. And there is quite a learning curve with Camtasia.

But here is a site, Screenr, where you can make short screen capture videos for free. There is a 5 minute limit for your video. Need more time? Just chop your presentation up into 5 minute blocks. Most people have a short attention span, so that may actually be a good thing.

And before we get any farther into this, there are also free video makers at Screen Toaster, Animoto, and Jing. But I’ve had audio problems at Jing. Screen Toaster makes a file only in mov format, and Animoto’s free offer is a front end for a $249 product. So my vote is for Screenr. It is also the easiest to use.

At Screenr, you don’t need anything but a microphone and speakers on your computer. This free service has a default set up for you to automatically post videos to Twitter. You do need an active account at Twitter, as that is what Screenr uses for your login info.

But here’s the key to using Screenr to make your own videos. You don’t have to post them to Twitter. When the video is done being rendered, Screenr will give you the option to NOT publish to Twitter. Then you can save your video and – this is important – download it immediately.

For embedding purposes your video is saved with a direct Screenr url and you are also given an embed code. But to be safe download it so you have a copy secured. Screenr saves your video in mp4 format, so it should play easily in any up to date video player.

Here’s a video I did for this post. It’s not the greatest but I hadn’t gotten past my first cup of coffee so go easy on me.

This is embedded here with the code tags in the html view of the WordPress editor. I did have to change the player width and height in the embed code to not slop over the post container. Another cool thing is that a high def bigger screen render is also available, which opens up full screen.

And Screenr also gives you a direct url to your video. For instance the one above is http://screenr.com/X2B

Screenr is absolutely a No Brainer for making short videos. Just remember to keep it short and simple to get the most out of this free online video maker.
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But, as with anything like this, here’s the big problem. Any money making keyword only has room for so many people before the saturation point is hit. And in case you didn’t know this, an advertiser who has an ad that Google knows converts well will pay less per position than an unproven one. So heaven forbid your ad doesn’t convert well, because you will end up paying a bundle for a low position.

Now I am admittedly flying somewhat blind on this, as I don’t know what the keyword Chris X is showing you and how many people are competing for it now. And honestly I don’t even care. Because if you do the math on almost any situation like this you find that it doesn’t take very many more campaigns for a keyword to destroy profitability for all involved, except maybe for the guy who got in there first and now has the proven track record. Ironically, the way Google does things, he’s the one who pays the least per click for the highest position.

Some parallels to this entire “too many people in anything destroy profitability” are the resell rights products that people price so low they are devalued, even though some of them are excellent. For example yesterday I saw a high quality copywriting course being peddled for a tad more than 7 bucks with private label rights. It has sold for $97 end user. So go figure that.

Another example is that back in my eBay days I had almost a ton of hard to find service manuals I bought from a repair shop that went out of business. I sold thousands of dollars worth of the original manuals, one at a time. But other eBay sellers bought them from me and photocopied them, and put them up for sale at a fraction of what my originals sold for. For a while I still made money on the ones that were too involved to copy (hundreds of pages and many 3 foot long fold-out diagrams,) but I blew the rest of them out and moved on to something else.

So if you are looking to find riches by knowing one secret Adwords keyword, or even a bunch of them, that are no longer a secret, it ain’t gonna happen. Of course you can learn from the process involved and apply it to a different keyword, a different niche, and mess around in Adwords until it gets profitable.

But like the stock market, Adwords is an expensive place for a newbie to find himself. If you don’t know what you are doing you may end up maxing out your credit card with little or nothing to show for it.

All due respect to Chris X, if you want to really learn Adwords and avoid financial disaster at the same time, Perry Marshall is your man. To understand what makes any Adwords campaign work, you’ll need a thorough understanding of the ins and outs of Adwords.

Get Perry’s course first. That’s my big warning to Adwords newbies.

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In the past I had Adsense units here on Marketing No Brainers, but removed them because of dismal click through percentages. Last week I switched the theme to a clean three column theme, Prosense Gray, that was actually designed to display Adsense ads. I used it not because of the Adsense but because I liked the theme otherwise.

But I wasn’t aware of all the ways Adsense displays were built into the Prosense theme, and by the time I got around to making the theme play the way I wanted,  I had a good week’s worth of Adsense data for this site. And the results were still dismal. So today I went through the theme and got rid of all the Adsense.

I’ll break down the reasons and compare it to sites I do well with Adsense. First, I think that Adsense is a lot like any other offer, a 1% clickthrough rate is about average. This is based on several years of tracking.

Second: at 1% you would have to have a lot of traffic or very high paying clicks. And my sites that do well with Adsense are tightly focused sites outside of the Internet Marketing area.

For example, looking in my Adsense account reports for this month I have a hobby site that does around 4%, and a personal finance site that does around 5%. There are some product oriented sites that average 1.5% or so, and I am not sure if Adsense is the best way to go with some or all of them, but I am still optimizing them. These sites do pretty well with Amazon as-is, so I may move more in that direction with them.

But this site, Marketing No Brainers, had a less than half percent click rate, which is as I said before, dismal. Internet marketing people know that those Adsense units are ads, and are probably the most conditioned of all people not to click on them.

So my conclusion remains that if you want to monetize an Internet Marketing site, don’t use Adsense. With Adsense, you are stuck with what Google considers relevant in their Ad inventory. I had everything from email marketing (ok) ads displaying to car dealer ads (not ok.)

On Marketing No Brainers , most outbound links have always been to my own products or to affiliate products that I’ve vetted and that I know deliver quality for my reader’s dollar. I’ve tried to avoid looking like all the blog banner farms out there with the themes that are designed to just show ads. I try to keep the content value high.

That has always worked well for my readers, and hence for me. With my short journey back into Adsense with this site last week, I’ve found that Adsense and Internet Marketing content still aren’t a good revenue mix. For whatever reason it seemed to cheapen the reader’s experience while at the same time just taking up space.

I know there is probably someone out there doing well with it, but for now I’ll stick to my guns: Adsense and Internet Marketing sites are not a good mix.

http://b4a.net/to/seosupercharged <<===

SEO traffic is the highest quality free traffic you can get. And I don’t know about you but I want all the free traffic I can get. But there are so many myths and misconceptions flying around about SEO.

Most everyone tells you how to optimize your site for the search engines. But if you analyze the pages that turn up in most searches, you’ll find that most of them aren’t even optimized for SEO.

Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize your site. Because optimizing your web pages for SEO is one way you can actually compete against all the thousand pound gorillas in your niche.

http://b4a.net/to/seosupercharged <<===

The thing those gorilla sites have that you don’t is backlinks. They have hundreds or thousands of them. How many do you have? And backlinks are the thing most seo reports gloss over.

But this report shows you an actionable system you can use to start building backlinks immediately. And even better, Sean shows you how to automate the backlink building process.

Honestly none of the stuff here costs anything to do.

http://b4a.net/to/seosupercharged <<===

Oh you could spend money on a few optional tools to speed up the process, but it isn’t necessary.

I’ve read a bunch of stuff on SEO and tried just about everything. And if I was to write an SEO report, it would be an exercise in futility, because most of what I do is in this.

Sean’s system is about 85% of what I do for SEO. What he sort of leaves out is article submitting for SEO.  The big secret to that is you can write about anything because you aren’t using the link to promote your site, you are using it for a backlink for better SEO ranking for your main or secondary keywords.

Most of the time for that I just submit articles to ezinearticles and goarticles. I put resource box links with pertinent keywords in the anchors to sites and internal pages I want to get a high PR link to. For that all that you need to learn is how to link from your resource box.

So if you get this, which I recommend you do, you can just forget all the other crap you have read about SEO, since this actually works. Add that little bit I told you about article submission and you’re covered about as well as you can be.

And the beauty of it is that you can forget all about the SEO myths, because you will be dealing with SEO reality instead.