Transcript continued from the Episode 013 Show notes
The first thing I wanted to talk about tonight and every time we’re doing the podcast now I want to point some things out to you that I see in my Google Reader that I think are really cool.
The first thing I wanted to talk to you about was an article that Jonathan Leger put out, and it was actually back on May 11th, you can find him over at JonathanLeger.com and I’ll have the link in the show notes. We’ve talked about this guy on the show before, he’s a guy that lives just a few miles from me here in the Dallas area, great internet marketer and a really smart software guy.
One of his passions is search engine marketing and he talks about how to rank in Bing in this blog post. A lot you are probably thinking, “Well, I don’t care about Bing, Bing’s not important, I care about Google.” I’m one of those people, that’s kind of the way I think, I never think about Bing. But, Jon writes in his article that with the combination of Bing and Yahoo where they’re sharing results and engine algorithms and so forth some of these guys that research search engine marketing are publishing that Bing is now generating about 30% of all U.S. search engine searches. I don’t think that includes YouTube, it might, I haven’t actually researched it that carefully. It’s a significant two digit percentage of all traffic.
Jon says prior to Bing taking over Yahoo’s search traffic he didn’t care about Bing either, but now that they’ve merged with Yahoo or taken them over it seems to be more important and it might be worth thinking about if they’re truly going to drive 30% of the traffic on search engine terms. So Jon has broken out a couple of things here where he talks about the fact that everybody knows that backlinks are the key to ranking in Google and that’s also true in Bing, but Bing seems to prefer editorial links over all others. Some of the testing that I’ve done in Google and Jon also indicates that Google kind of likes all kinds of links, from directories, articles, blogs, etcetera, blogroll links and so forth as Jon lists in the blog post. But, Bing is more all about discovering what Jon calls editorial links, which links inside of content. So that’s one thing that he observes. So in post links seem to be really important for Bing.
The other thing that he notices in Bing is that he’s able to rank with exact match domain names. So if you’re going for a keyword if you register a domain name with that keyword you have a lot better chance of ranking for that keyword. That’s interesting. I tend to think that’s kind of a transient thing, and by that I mean that I think eventually both Google and Bing will take that out of their algorithm substantially because a lot of internet marketers are aware of this exact match domain name thing and if you look at the kinds of sites that are matching with exact domain names the preponderance of those are really internet marketers trying to collect search engine traffic. So my feeling is that’s eventually going to go away, but it’s certainly true right now both in Google and in Bing, exact match domain names count.
Then he also makes a point about content on Bing. I recommend that you read that article, How to Rank in Bing at JonathanLeger.com. It’s worth your time to think about what your Bing strategy is going to be.
The next thing I wanted to talk to you about, you guys all know that I’m a huge Pat Flynn fan and not too long ago Pat put out I guess it was a podcast episode where he talks about the things that you should do to use YouTube for your blogging and online business. This is an outstanding episode of the Smart Passive Income podcast. Strongly recommend that you go take a look at that.
But, one thing that I want you to note, there’s one thing that I wanted to pick out of this podcast. Like most of his podcasts it’s sort of on the order of an hour long and it is totally worth it, but one thing that he talks about doing is he gives you a sort of well known, but little talked about trick for stealing rankings away from people who have them with videos, and you can do this with other things too. That is to look at the videos and look at the keywords, the tags that are on the video, and use those same tags in your video.
There aren’t that many things that YouTube can use for SEO and one of them is the tags so that turns out to be very important. If you’re making a video about the same topic that they’re making a video about it’s certainly reasonable for you to use similar tags and that will help you rank for the same thing that they’re ranking for.
This is a general idea that you ought to always think about is that if someone is beating you, you ought to spend some time understanding why they’re beating you. If they’re outranking you, you ought to spend some time looking at where their backlinks are coming from and just go try to get the same backlinks and then a little better. That’s really the best way to beat people in the search engine optimization game.
I recommend that you check out Smart Passive Income in general, the blog, but particularly Episode 19. Episode 19 will convince you that you should be creating simple videos for YouTube to help you with your internet business if you’re not already doing that.
I had some announcement last time that basically one of the things that I was going to start doing on this podcast was start focusing more and more on affiliate marketing. I believe for part-time internet marketers this is really the right way to get started and is a really good strategy if you’re only going to be able to work on your business a few hours a week, five to 10 hours a week, affiliate marketing is really attractive because you don’t have the added burden of product creation and all the other things that go along with say information marketing or some of these other strategies that you can use online. But, it’s not exclusive of that, you can certainly focus on affiliate marketing and then when your time allows you can add information products in the mix.
One thing I say about affiliate marketing is I actually recommend something that’s a little bit different than what the “follow the money” gurus say. A lot of these guys say you really need to focus on affiliate marketing offers and internet business models that can give you the biggest return on investment. I certainly believe that it’s true, you need to focus on something for affiliate marketing that can actually pay you, this is very important. If you’re really selling straw for stuffing straw pillows and the commissions are a penny, it really doesn’t matter how good you are at that you’re not going to make any money.
But, the other thing that I think is really important, particularly for part time internet business people is that you focus on something, some aspect of the business that you’re passionate about, because internet business is really difficult and it can be really difficult. There will be times when you’re just not highly motivated to do anything. I’ll tell you this is something that I’ve been dealing with a little bit since the birth of my fourth child. That’s right, count them one, two, three, four.
So when the fourth child came along I’m getting older, I’m over 40 now, and the fourth and I think final, I think we finally figured out what’s causing this childbirth thing and we’ve figured out a way to stop it. That’s maybe a different podcast, but I think we’re done with babies. But, this beautiful baby girl came and it was late nights in the middle of the night when I normally would be doing blogging or podcasting I had her and was feeding her and I just really kind of lost all my momentum. But, I’m passionate about internet business, so I’m not willing to give that up. While it’s been hard for me to create all the content that I want to create over this short period of time that’s just a season in my life. Internet business is something I care about a great deal, so it’s ever forward and I’m going to do my best to pick up momentum.
This is something that you can really sense if you deal with a guy like Cliff Ravenscraft who is obviously passionate not only about podcasting, but about the seven or eight of the other topics that he podcasts about. That’s not to say that he’s not strategic, he’s actually incredibly strategic in the way that he does business and he picks things that he cares about strategically. I’m sure he cares about many things, he doesn’t podcast about everything that he cares about, but some of the stuff that he really cares about is also strategic.
It’s that overlap of passion and strategy that you can really use to leverage and get your internet business to the next level. If you make it all about chasing the best pay-per-click offer or selling Elvis bobble heads even though you’ve never listened to an Elvis record in your life just because the commission on Elvis bobble heads is good, you can certainly make money doing that. But, it will end up just being another job. One of the great opportunities with internet business, I think, is that you can talk about and do things that you really care about.
So in order to kind of follow up on that in the next episode I’ve actually already interviewed, my next interviewee is an expert in the area of following your passion. This guy’s name is Henri, you are absolutely going to love that. We’ll have an interview with him, I don’t quite have it prepped yet so I can’t include it here, but in the next episode which is coming in two weeks or less we’ll be having our interview with Henri and we’ll talk all about passion and why passion is important in your internet business.
It’s really funny because I got feedback on this last episode where I started talking about passion and I got this unsubscribe from Aweber, and every unsubscriber that leaves comments I read them, and this comment said, “Follow your passion, where else did I hear that? Kind of everywhere. Please be original, although I know it’s not easy to say something else than doing something you love and work hard and smart. Success with your biz, bye.”
So this guy, I love the name, it gives you an opportunity to say what your name is and he doesn’t say what his name is, he leaves the name Free Adsense something or another. So this is a guy who is obviously into following the money – and good for him. Maybe he’s passionate about money and maybe he’s passionate about free ways to get Adsense profits or whatever. I’ve been down that road. If he’s good at that and he loves it, I think that’s great. But, just because something is original doesn’t mean that it’s right.
Sometimes you’ve just got to say what you think and what is right. What I think is right is that your internet business ought to make the internet a better place. That’s something that I stole from Nicole Dean. You ought to try to help people profitably in your internet business. That’s something I stole from Bob the Teacher. And I really think you ought to care about, be passionate about the thing that you’re working on because that’s the thing that’s going to keep you going whenever things get a little difficult.
So I thought I’d share that feedback with you and kind of give you some idea of where I’m headed with this kind of affiliate marketing thing in the future.
Passion is indeed critical, but it is true that in addition to passion you’ve got to have something really great to sell if you’re an affiliate marketer and you’ve got to know how to sell it. So passion will get you started and it will keep you going, but you’ve also got to have the right techniques. I have a good friend who has been doing affiliate marketing for over five years now, Andrew Hanson, I’ve had him on the show before. Andrew is working on a product right now that’s pretty cool and it’s for guys like me and you who are trying to be successful at affiliate marketing, basically it summarizes everything that Andrew knows.
I’m not really here to pitch the product, but I called Andrew and I said, “Hey, you’re doing this product and I want you to come on my show and give us one thing for free out of the product, give us one great tip or neat idea out of the product for my listeners. If you’re interested in looking at the product you can go to MasonWorld.com/ua. It is a fantastic product, but what I really want you to hear is this amazing free tip that Andrew gives us absolutely at no cost. Let me go ahead and take you to that call now….
Mark: I’m very excited to be on the phone with Andrew Hanson. Andrew and I have known each other for a long time, we’ve been down in the trenches a lot doing affiliate marketing and Andrew keeps confusing me changing time zones. Andrew, how are you? Andrew: I’m really good. How are you? Mark: I’m doing great. So you’ve escaped from down under and now you’re hanging out with the queen. That’s my understanding, is that right? Andrew: Something like that, yes. It’s been a roundabout journey, but I left Australia like three years ago now. I think the times I’ve spoken to you I’ve been in various places. The first year we lived in Canada for a little bit, we were in Toronto and Montreal. Then the year after that we moved to Mexico and spent a year down there just in the sun sipping cocktails and all that good stuff. And now we’ve moved to the UK. So that’s the time conversion problem that we’re having, so it’s not your fault. Mark: And for the late night internet marketer guy, that’s me, six hour time difference, which is what I get from Dallas to London, puts me either right in the middle of dinner with my kids or has you asleep in the middle of the night. So if you hear some screaming children in the background, don’t panic, they’ll be okay. We’re going to try and make it through this the best we can. Andrew: I’m ready. Mark: Awesome. I know you’ve actually been a little bit hard to get a hold of because you’ve been working so hard on a course. I’m not really trying to go crazy and promote the course on the podcast, you know that’s not what the podcast is about, but I know that I got a review copy – thank you very much. I don’t know if I got through quite all of them, but 60something videos, I think it was maybe 63 videos. Andrew: Right. Mark: And I was really surprised as long as I’ve been doing this how many things were in. You know how long I’ve been talking about affiliate marketing just with you. I was really surprised how many things are in that course that I had not heard of before or that I was not doing, it’s quite shocking actually. Can you talk a little bit about kind of these tips and tricks and stuff that you’ve got jam packed in there? I’m going to ask you to pick one and give it away for free here in a minute, so be thinking about that. Andrew: Sure. Firstly, I want to say thank you, because that’s probably the best compliment I could receive to have someone like yourself who is obviously so experienced and has done so well with affiliate marketing to say that they’ve genuinely gotten new stuff out of the course and found it valuable. Thank you for that. The way I’ve described it writing certain material is that it’s a system that you might know with some tweaks and some changes to strategy that you might not know. I mean, the concept of building affiliate mini sites has been around for al ong time, as you well know. Mark: Right. I’ve built over 100 or something like that. Andrew: Right, people have been doing well for awhile. But, as we also know, the game is always changing, particularly this year maybe more so than at any time since I’ve been doing this. Things like the algorithm updates that have happened in the past six months. Making affiliate mini sites today and profiting from that business model is not the same as it was five years ago, it’s not even really the same in many ways as it was 12 months ago. So what this course is it’s really how to profit from that model in 2011 with as much new stuff and up to date stuff as I could possibly squeeze in. I think if you’ve been reading my emails like you have, you probably know that’s kind of all that we’ve been doing over here on our little team for the last six to eight months. I obviously haven’t been putting out any new products, we’ve just been hitting our affiliate systems really hard, working on our SEO, building new systems for link building and for our content creation, and bringing new staff members to kind of scale up everything we’ve been doing. While we’ve been focusing on it so hard we just came across so many new things ourselves that we noticed were working that were improving our rankings or improving the conversion rates on our affiliate sites, or finding us new affiliate offers that no one else knew about. We realized that we just had to share it, there was just too much information there. So that’s a broad overview of the course. I can go into a little more detail broadly before we discuss one topic if you’d like, but I’ll leave it up to you. Mark: I think the point I wanted to get out, and this is one of the things I really love about the way you do things, this is the result of you really doing affiliate marketing. You’re a real affiliate marketer, you and your business partner, and your fiancée, and the assistants that you have on your team, you have sites that you really make money from. You’re the real deal. Andrew: Yes, I guess I am in as much as you can be I suppose. In a way I’m a bit of a nerd for it, this is kind of my life, just traveling and sitting on the computer all day doing this stuff. So, yes. I like to think or at least I’m proud of the fact that that comes through in my material. Probably the same as you, I just don’t understand certain people who can just release courses on this stuff every two weeks. I just think, “What’s in it? What could you be putting in it that you didn’t put in it last week?” Mark: That you could have possibly tested, I mean how could you possibly test stuff before telling people about it and being releasing courses at that rate, right? Andrew: Exactly. That’s kind of the big joke that most of those people aren’t really. Mark: It looks like I lost you a little bit there. Are you still with me? Andrew: Sorry. Are you still there? Mark: I think we had a little internet connection thing, but I’ve got you back now. Andrew: I saw that come up. It seems okay for now. Mark: Okay. I got all of that, so now while we’ve got a hot connection, because you know there’s a whole big ocean between us at the moment, I want my free tip for my listeners. I’m looking for something that you think is valuable that you probably included in the course, but that not everybody has heard of. Maybe something that isn’t common knowledge that you’d like to share, kind of let the cat out of the bag a little bit, something unique that my listeners can walk away with today. Andrew: Sure. When you first asked me that there was a few different things that came to mind that I could thought I could possibly do and in that moment there was one thing that really stood out, so that’s the one that I’ll tell you. The reason I tell you this one, and this one is to do with niche research specifically and finding affiliate offers. The reason that my mind goes to that first is that that is really when all is said and done I still believe to this day that finding affiliate offers and locating the right niches and the right keywords is where success happens as an affiliate marketer – as a search affiliate marketer anyway. When you have the perfect niche, when you have the perfect affiliate offer that has low competition, that’s going to convert really well, that has volume, that’s in a market where you can bring a significant amount of traffic to it, just finding that offer is half the battle. After that everything else is easy. When you’ve got that perfect affiliate offer it’s easy to drive traffic to because the keywords aren’t competitive, it’s easy to create content for, it’s easy to sell to people because the offer page is so good it converts so high and it’s easy for people to purchase. All of those things. The affiliate offer is really the key. So I’m going to give you a tip for finding these affiliate offers that are like this. Mark: That sounds absolutely perfect. That’s exactly the kind of thing that we’re looking for because if you don’t have something that is good to sell and possible to sell, you can’t make any money. Andrew: That’s exactly right, and it’s proven to be true time and time again. Not just for me, but for other people as well. So the tip is this. There’s these couple of services that I’ve fallen in love with that aggregate affiliate offers from many different affiliate networks. Someone has made a script that has inputted accounts at let’s say 50 different affiliate networks that list affiliate offers, and they’ve made them all searchable from a single database. The thing is that a lot of these affiliate networks aren’t ones that you know about, so it’s not like Amazon and Commission Junction and Clickbank, although they are in there. It’s all these affiliate offers in all these networks that if you didn’t use one of these services you would probably never know about and never come across. However, in a amongst them are all these kind of hidden gems that if you know how to search these tools right, if you know how to manipulate this little interface that they have you can come up with all kind of affiliate offers from there that are very low in competition, very high in converting, have killer payouts, and that you can make a stack of money on. This one, I’ve talked about one in the past more commonly, but more recently I’ve kind of come to really like another one as well. The URL you can go to that now, it’s called Odigger.com. Mark: I have to interrupt you. I had never heard of Odigger when I saw this in your video. I stopped the video and I went over there. I was totally blown away by that. So everybody listening to this needs to go check Odigger. I was really surprised. Andrew: For sure. It is such a cool tool. I can’t remember the number, but it aggregates the offers from a huge number of affiliate networks and there’s always more coming in every day, so every time you go back and use this tool there’s new information in there, it’s frequently being updated. So the specific technique, just if I were to tell you the name of that tool on its own and let you go nuts and just search for affiliate offers through it that alone could change your affiliate income, that could allow you to create your next profitable mini site. But, I’ll tell you one more thing about how to actually manipulate that for some really cool results. Before I tell you the technique there’s a little theory that’s important to understand, and that’s this. We know that there’s new affiliate offers coming out all the time, so new companies have new products that they list or that they open affiliate programs for on the internet all the time. And affiliate offers, many of them, not all, many of them have a lifespan. Just like products in any business they have a lifecycle and they’re hot for a period of time, which varies, at the beginning of their life up until the middle of their life, and then eventually they decline and new products take their place in the market. So there’s this time to promote affiliate offers in the early months of their life when there’s the most money being made. The most money is being made in that time because they have the best position in the market, because they’re new and they’ve just been released and they’re a little bit exciting or different. But, it’s also the most profitable time to promote them because in those early stages is when the smallest number of other affiliates are also promoting them. So you’re promoting stuff that’s new and has low competition, which in the search engines is a seriously big deal because it’s just common knowledge that if you’re promoting something that is really competitive where there’s 100 other affiliates who are also trying to optimize for the same keywords you are, trying to claim the same little spots in the market as you are, it’s so much more difficult. Mark: Timing is everything in affiliate marketing, just like any other business. Andrew: No doubt, absolutely. So what you can do, the technique is that you can manipulate Odigger to find new affiliate offers. The way that you do it, and there’s a couple of ways, but it all comes down to what you search, so what you can do is you can go to Odigger.com and instead of typing in a keyword like weight loss or typing an affiliate offer like the name of some weight loss product, you type in 2011, the year 2011. What you’re going to find there, what will be returned in that search is all the affiliate offers that have been released in 2011, or at least all the affiliate offers released in 2011 that actually list 2011 in the title of the offer, which a lot of them. So the name of a lot of the offers is like “slimfast new diet 2011,” or something like that. The ones that have just been released this year often advertise the fact that they have because it’s more attractive to new affiliates. So by searching 2011 you’ll come across all these offers that have just been released this year. Amongst them are some absolute goldmines because they’ve just been released, they’re not competitive yet, they still have fantastic payouts, they usually – not even usually, let’s say sometimes they have existing brands that were being sold offline and now they’ve started to be sold online because of this affiliate program being launched. So there is just a haven of opportunity there. And you’ll notice as well that because the data is being aggregated from so many affiliate networks there’s so many of them, it’s not like you’re going to run out of these opportunities or telling you guys about them is going to cram all these affiliates onto them. There’s a lot of them, so there’s an unlimited supply of them, and again more of them are coming on all the time. So you could run the same search next week and you’ll probably come across some different ones. That is probably the best tip I can give you in this short period of time. The opportunity there is just phenomenal. Mark: I was hoping you would pick that one, because I was totally blown away. I was surprised when I did that, I was shocked at how many offers there were that had 2011 in there and it was stuff I had never heard of, it was little search engine competition, but lots of traffic for people searching for those products. I guess a lot of that is because those companies are marketing those products other ways, on television and things like that, and people are sitting down at their computer and searching for information about this stuff. Andrew: Absolutely, Mark. Not only that, but because the companies are already advertising for them and because maybe the person who has come to Google has seen the product already on TV or something like that, they’re also presold, which we’ve talked about before, where they don’t just know about the product but they kind of want it. They’re thinking about wanting it or thinking about buying it. So that’s how you achieve really high conversion rates as well, because you don’t have to do a lot to sell those kind of people. A lot of the time they’re already sold. Mark: Well, Andrew, I can’t thank you enough. I know my listeners are going to appreciate that. I know you are incredibly super busy and I want to let you get back to the business of getting the course out. I’m going to give everybody on the show a link to the course. Of course, you know I believe in the things that you do, I’m going to have a special bonus for people who buy your course through my link if they choose to do that. If not, that’s cool. I just wanted to make sure that I got a little something extra out of you today and I really appreciate it very much. Andrew: Thank you for having me on. This is cool. If you’re listening, I hope you get to try out that technique. If you get to grab our course that’s even better. Mark: Okay, Andrew. Thank you so much and say hello to the queen for me if you see her. Andrew: Will do, my friend. Mark: Thank you very much. Bye.
I hope you enjoyed that free tip. Andrew is good people, I really have enjoyed knowing him over the years. That’s one of the great things about this business is that you get to meet people. That tip is really cool. Go ahead and go on over to Odigger and check that out. If you do happen to want to know more about Andrew and his course you can go to MasonWorld.com/ua and check it out. It’s a pretty cool course, I’ve been through it and I recommend it. But, there’s a free report there that you might find interesting as well, I recommend that too. Check it out if you’re interested. If not, that’s groovy, enjoy the free tip.
All right. I was little worried about this whole number 13 thing. It turns out that 13 is indeed a bad luck numbers in some countries, particularly in the U.S., episode 13 had me a little concerned.
There’s actually a recognized phobia that real physicians recognize and it’s something like Triskaidekaphobia or something like that, which is a term they’ve been using in the psychology industry since the turn of the century.
Actually, Friday the 13th has been considered an unlucky day since the 1800’s. Nobody really knows exactly why, but it’s likely that it has something to do with the Crusades when the Pope sent people out to capture the Knights Templar, I sound like a Dan Brown novel now, they sent people out on Friday the 13th to kill other people.
Another theory around the unlucky number 13 goes back to Christ when there were 13 people around The Last Supper table, Christ and the 12 apostles making another theory why 13 might be an unlucky number.
And then another theory is that monks didn’t like it, because when there are 13 full moons that makes calendaring very difficult and apparently monks were in charge of calendaring prior to Google Calendar.
Anyway, there’s lots of reasons why 13 might be unlucky, but I think we’re cool here and I think we’re going to survive the 13th episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
The last thing I wanted to talk about on today’s podcast is just a motivational topic. I try and I’m going to get back to this as well, ever Monday to try and talk about a motivational topic, because I think one of the critical things about internet marketing late at night and part-time trying to build an internet business over time is consistency and being able to get back to it every day. I often tell people you should do a little something on your internet business every day. My experience is sometimes we get so lost in the details of what we’re trying to accomplish that we forget why we’re doing what we’re doing and what our motivation is. This goes back to this topic of passion.
So I wrote a blog post, I think it might sound a little silly to you at first, but I think everyone should essentially have a personal slogan that has to do with why they are doing their internet business or what they are trying to accomplish.
The thing that I told you earlier or the one that I borrowed from Nicole Dean on occasion, making the internet a better place, the one that I stole from Bob the Teacher about helping people profitably, those are great kinds of slogans. They can also be more specific to what you’re trying to do. For example, a lot of times I tell people that I’m trying to do affiliate marketing, talk about affiliate marketing, and teach affiliate marketing. That’s one kind of slogan or kind of idea that I have about what I’m trying to do.
I encourage you to take the time to think about what it is that you’re really trying to accomplish and boil that down into a personal slogan. I’ll tell you something else that’s really funny. I have a MasonWorld.com coffee mug, actually it says Mason World Enterprises, LLC, which is the LLC that I operate under, and I drink coffee out of that coffee mug almost every morning just as a way to kind of remind myself that, “Hey, today I need to find a little time to work on this internet business because that’s really what I’m excited about and what I want to be doing as far as business things are concerned.”
So I encourage you to create yourself a personal slogan and print it on a t-shirt and wear it around or sleep in it or something. You’ll be surprised at the kind of results that you can get from simple things like that.
That’s what I wanted to cover. I hope you’re happy to have me back, I am certainly glad to be back. I wanted to take a minute to thank people who have taken the time to leave a review in iTunes. Thousands of people download this podcast and one of the things that really helps this podcast rank in iTunes so that people can find me is those reviews, particularly if they’re positive. But, if you’ve got the time and motivation to pop into iTunes and leave me a review I would really appreciate it, it’s very helpful and it kind of helps me get the word out.
I hope that you’re having a great time with your internet business. I’ll be back in a week or two with Henri and some excellent content on passion in internet business. Until then I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day. Thanks.
