Transcript continued from the Episode 046 Show notes
Reviewing Two Affiliate Marketing Courses
Lots of good feedback. I’m really fired up. I’ve been spending a lot of the last week going through Andrew Hansen’s course. I’ve been looking at two courses lately.
As you guys know, I’ve been going through the Micro Site Profits course from the Internet Business Mastery guys. You can read more about that at LateNightIM.com/msp. The target for that course is how to make your very first money online and it focuses on Adsense. It’s taught in a step-by-step way that only Jeremy and Jason can deliver. That’s an excellent course.
Then Andrew has this course coming out on the 19th of February that I’ll be talking about more once it does come out. I’ve gone through every video in that course almost, and it’s also quite amazing. It’s more targeted towards affiliate marketing, picking higher margin and higher revenue items.
Between these two courses I’m pretty excited. I think my goal is to make between 10 and 20 new affiliate sites in 2013. While I probably won’t reveal the exact niches for these sites, my intention is to reveal the progress and statistics for those sites. I’ll talk about site 1, site 2, site 3, and so forth, and probably what niches they’re in so we can talk about what kind of results I get working on 10 to 20 sites part time over the course of the year. I thought that would be fun.
I’d like to end up with an additional 10 affiliate sites in my portfolio by the end of the year that are profitable. Profitable could mean $50 a month, like the Corn Sheller site, or in some cases with Andrew’s course it could mean hundreds of dollars per month depending on which ones you hit.
You can also have cases in all these programs, at least I know I personally have cases from time to time, where the profit on these sites is zero. I’m ready for that and that’s why I want to build more than 10 and end up with 10 profitable ones. That’s one of my goals for 2013 and I’ll be tracking that with you guys and letting you know how the progress goes on that.
If you want to hear some more about what’s going on with Andrew’s course you can check out that launch at LateNightIM.com/fa where there’s a countdown timer. If you’re wondering whether or not you can still make money on the internet, if you’re wondering whether or not affiliate marketing is still working, if you’re wondering about how all these Google things have impacted affiliates ability to make money, I definitely recommend that you read Andrew’s report at LateNightIM.com/fareport. He has a very optimistic and upbeat view of the future.
Appearance on The Awesome Podcast
Shout out to Tim over at The Awesome Podcast. If you guys haven’t checked this podcast out yet, you really should. Specifically episode 8 is fantastic, because it features this guy Mark Mason. Maybe I’m the least awesome of the eight guests, but if you want to know more about me and why I do what I do, definitely recommend that you go over and check out The Awesome Podcast and tell Tim you heard about him from me and leave some comments on the show notes over there on episode eight.
You can find The Awesome Podcast at LateNightIM.com/awesome. Like I said, if you’re interested in hearing a little bit more about what makes me tick, Tim gets into that. I really felt privileged to be on that podcast. It’s a new podcast, but he’s already had some big name guests on there, particular in episode six he had Dan Miller. So I’m in pretty good company over there, it’s really cool and Tim is doing a great job with that.
Listening to Steve Jobs Biography
The last thing I wanted to mention to you before we get into some actual content, which is why you tune into the show, I’ve been spending way too much time learning about Steve Jobs. I don’t know if you’ve read or listened to this giant Steve Jobs biography book that came out a couple years ago.
I was right in the middle of all that excitement when it was going down with the Apple 2. I’m almost 45 years old and my first computer was an Apple2e. In fact, I mowed yards to save up part of the $1,200 and my dad paid the rest. He gave me a goal, I had to save $300 or so and then he paid the rest. I lived on that computer in around 1984 and I’ve been on computers ever since. It was really impactful to my life, because a lot of my engineering career was advantaged by the fact that I had a lot of computer experience.
I definitely recommend that you check that out, particularly the version on Audible. I know you listen to audio because you’re listening to me right now. If you want to check it out on Audible I have a link set up (an affiliate link) at LateNightIM.com/steve. If you use that link it will take you straight to the book and if you sign up for Audible you get your first book free, and you can that massive book on audio for free.
It is a fantastic listen. I’m about two-thirds of the way through it and this is one of those books where sometimes when I get home I sit out in the driveway for a few extra minutes because I am just totally enthralled with this book. Really good stuff.
Thank You Consumer Warrior on iTunes
Last little bit of business. I wanted to say thank you for an iTunes review from Consumer Warrior who says the podcast is helpful to him. Thank you, Consumer Warrior, I really appreciate that.
If you have a mind to do it, I’d love it if you go on over to iTunes and leave a star rating and review. It really helps me grow the show, which I really appreciate. If you need help getting there, you can go to LateNightIM.com/itunes.
Building Links Post-Panda
The very first thing I wanted to talk about was some feedback I’ve been getting about links. I think it was summed up really well from my friend Chuck Brown. I’ve known Chuck for a long time and he asks an excellent question here about link building….
Chuck: Hi Mark. It’s Chuck Brown calling with a couple questions for your podcast. You mentioned that you have a virtual assistant who did link building with your Corn Sheller site. I’d be really curious to hear what kinds of links you’re generally having built as your default these days. In other words, what have you seen working for you? And what percentage of anchor text you’re using versus branded links or naked URLs?
Also, I’d like to hear more about authority links. What are they? How do you acquire them? Is this kind of link building something that can be outsourced? I have some sites which I’d like to have maybe one high quality link built for per week to slightly enhance the naturally occurring links. Thanks.
Chuck, thank you. That was kind of a crummy recording over the Google voicemail feedback line, which is notoriously terrible, it has a really low sample rate. Chuck is actually a professional voice over artist and I’m going to be working with Chuck to redo the branding on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast as I continue to try and work out the Mason World references.
There are several things to get into here with regard to link building.
Once upon a time I used to use lots of different kinds of spammy links to get sites to rank, and that was pretty effective. This was a considerable time ago when I was buildings lots of Adsense sites and so forth. You could use article marketing and other kinds of semi-grey hat techniques in order to get links. Things like the One Way Links Network from Jonathan Leger.
I guess it’s pretty well understood and we’ve covered in this episode that that kind of stuff generally doesn’t work. In general, I’m no longer recommending that you target any of these kind of PR0 low quality spammy links directly at your money site. You could get away with that and it was easy, you could get lots of links quickly and it worked for a long time.
My data that I have on the few sites that I built in the last year suggests that in the post-Panda, post-Penguin era that’s just not working very well. What you need are links from reputable sites with high domains. That gets to one of Chuck’s questions, which is, “What is an authority link?”
What I would say is an authority link is a link inside of the context of a post, contextual links are the highest power kind of links that you can get. At least that’s what we believe, that if a reputable source references you in the course of an article, as opposed to a link in the footer or sidebar for example, that’s going to be the most relevant kind of link because they’re basically citing your work and saying, “Hey, if you want to learn more about this, go here.”
So we think those are the most important kinds of links that you can get. The more important the site is, the more authority the site has, the stronger and more important the link is. That can go in two ways. The more authoritative the domain is, the better the link is. The more authoritative the page is, the better the link is.
Now, I think in the former case the domain authority is in general passing through to the page because the domain is linking to the page from various places in the domain. I think that’s the main reason why the domain authority is weighing in here. But in general you need a good page from a good website in a good neighborhood on a related niche, and that’s what an authority link is.
For example, one of the best links that I could get to Late Night IM would be a link from a blog post on Pat Flynn’s blog, Copyblogger, or Yaro Starak’s blog, one of these kind of authoritative blogs. That’s the best way to do it.
There’s really only three ways that I know of to get these kinds of links.
One is you buy them. I have people contact me all the time who say, “If you will write a post and link back to us we’ll pay you.” I just had one of these tickets the other day where somebody said, “We’d really like a link on this page and for your trouble we’ll give you $50.” I don’t do that. I even have a canned response in my help desk where I can hit a button and send back a message that says, “I don’t sell links.” So that’s one way to get them is to buy them.
The second thing you can do is write absolutely fantastic content and get noticed by those people and have them to link to you. Now, this is considerably more difficult, as you might imagine. But you can certainly do that.
Maybe related to that is in some of these cases if you comment on blog posts you will get that do follow link. Recognize in those cases where blogs have do follow links, they’re going to be hundreds of comments and the link juice will be diluted across all those return links, so those aren’t going to be nearly as good as a blog post where the comment links are no follow so the link juice is not leaking out there and it’s coming back to you if you have a link from that page.
You can write killer content and have people recognize you and that certainly happens. Probably the easier way, and it’s been talked about a lot and it has kind of gone out of vogue, is to write an excellent blog post and get the blogger to post that article for you. The more authoritative the blog is, the harder that’s going to be, but you can certainly still do this. Even though people don’t talk about it as much, it’s certainly still a very effective technique.
Those are the ways that I know of to get authority links back to your blogs.
Now, if you’re building 20 sites, like I’m talking about doing over the course of the next 12 months, I’m not going to write guest blog posts in the stop snoring niche or whatever products I end up promoting in this activity. So you have to be able to do something else.
I think the first thing that you have to do is use this strategy that’s been known for a long time to insulate your website from whatever links you’re going to build by creating subsidiary properties that link back to your site. By subsidiary properties I mean taking advantage of making things like Squidoo lenses and WordPress.com blogs and linking them back to your site and then driving some links back into those sites so that they have more authority and that authority will be passed along to your money site.
This is very similar to what is discussed in Pat Flynn’s famous post; The Backlinking Strategy That Actually Works. This is the strategy that most of the big SEO firms are using. You create five or so of these sites with four or five articles on them with good unique content and then you create enormous amounts of backlinks into those sites. Typically those sites can handle big influxes of backlinks because they already have millions of backlinks into them, so the things that you’re doing for this one particular page are not really noticeable in the site’s backlink profile, at least that’s theory, and the link juice gets passed on to your site.
Then those incoming links that are coming into the Squidoo lens and the WordPress.com pages, you drive social media bookmarketing and other things to those links so that they get indexed by Google. This is the generation of thousands of links. This is the kind of thing that SEnuke tries to do, but the problem that I have with SEnuke is that in general the kind of content that I am able to find the time to create running SEnuke myself is basically spamming the internet with a bunch of junk and I really don’t like that.
Kind of a compromise position on this is there are some SEO firms that are hiring native English speaking U.S. college graduates to write spun content and create these giant link wheels for you at some reasonable cost. They’re using their own software that is similar to SEnuke, but they’re getting better control over the content. I’m experimenting with one of these now and there are a couple of them that I like. I’m not quite ready to talk about exactly who they are yet, because I haven’t decided whether or not they’re doing a good job. I actually just ordered some articles to be pointed at the Corn Sheller site to see what kind of work these guys are turning out.
Chuck, I think the answer to your question with regard to what to do about building links is right now I’m not building a lot of links because I don’t feel like I have an option that I feel great about. I’m experimenting with some higher end link building services. I’ve put all my low end stuff on hold. The One Way Links product from Jon Leger is currently being rebuilt. All the other low level linking stuff that I was doing is kind of on hold. I’m not doing much article marketing right now. I’m just not doing a lot of link building.
I’m going to have to figure something out. Andrew definitely has some recommendations in his course about how to go do this on autopilot. I’ll be testing that stuff out as I build these sites. So I promise to get back to you on more stuff.
In general, I don’t have my VA in the Philippines build links too much. She is very busy with lots of website admin kind of stuff. She’s very talented and very capable of doing that kind of work, but I don’t have her do that. I usually outsource that to SEO firms that have the automation that allows them to do that cost effectively. I think for link building automation is absolutely critical.
So that’s an answer to that question regarding VAs and so forth. I haven’t had my current VA do much link building, but I’ve tried some of that in the past and I think that’s a pretty difficult way to go. I think it’s more cost effective to hire a reputable SEO firm to do that kind of link building. That’s my thinking on that.
On the links that I am building the other question Chuck asked was what percentage of links anchor text am I mixing for my keywords. Much lower than you might think is the answer. Andrew’s results indicate that it takes very few keyword links to rank for keywords right now because of the Penguin algorithm updates.
Google can’t have it both ways, if they want to penalize people for being over-optimized that means things that are optimized less than what’s being penalized, by definition, have to be the sites that rank high. So it turns out that one of the side effects of this is that it doesn’t take a lot of keyword matching anchor text to rank. So I’m trying to keep my matching keyword anchors well under 20%.
I am using LSI and sometimes just natural language keywords in the mix. The LSI stuff would be stuff that’s related, essentially synonyms for the keywords that I’m trying to rank for. That’s kind of obvious, but the thing that’s not so obvious and the way that I think about is if I were a blogger I might use words like “click here” and “look at this cool stuff” mixed into my anchor text if I were writing real posts. So I mix a lot of that stuff in that just simply doesn’t have the keywords in it at all. I’m also mixing in the bare naked URL at a rate not to exceed 20%. That’s the keyword mix that I’m using right now.
That’s what I have for you right now, Chuck. I promise that when I have some up to date, recent experience with these couple of professional SEO houses that I’m looking at right now, I will definitely get back to you with that and we can talk a little bit more about exactly what’s working then.
Late Night Internet Marketing Meetup
The last thing I wanted to mention before my throat explodes and I actually die here on the podcast is that I’m going to do another Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Meetup somewhere here in Allen,Texas. Right now I’m thinking sometime in March. I started a little thread about this on the Facebook fan page over at LateNightIM.com/facebook. If you’re interested in attending, let me know. Probably what I’ll do next week is I’ll have a Facebook event created where you guys can go and anyone who wants to come can join us.
The idea is I’m going to go sit in a pub and if people show up we’ll talk about internet marketing, and if people don’t show up I’ll drink beer. Actually, I’m going to drink beer either way, so I’ll watch basketball. Last time we had a really good turnout, I suspect that will be the case again. I already have a couple of RSVPs. If you’re listening to the podcast and you’re interested in a meetup in the evening in Allen, Texas in the month of March 2013, give me a shoutout over on the Facebook page and we’ll go from there.
(RSVP to the meetup event on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/events/131789043664084/)
Thank you for listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast…
Thank you very much. I have a real treat for you next week and I want to tell you about that. I have gotten several requests for information about plugins and what plugins are recommended for WordPress and how to decide what a good plugin is. You know who you are if you’ve requested this, and thank you because that’s awesome feedback.
Next week I will have Dustin Hartzler on here. Dustin is a WordPress guru; he’s a WordPress programmer, he consults on WordPress, and he knows a lot about plugins. He goes through not only his list of must-have plugins, he talks a little bit about a few of his favorites that are beyond the must-have list, and he talks about the criteria he uses when he’s trying to pick a plugin from a bunch of plugins that all do the same thing. That’s all good stuff and we’ll talk about that next week.
Until next week. See you later.
