Go to The Keyword Academy and sign up for their Keyword Crash Course.  There is nothing they will email you that will not help you in your online marketing endeavors.

As for me I’ve taken many of their techniques and used them to find keywords that have heavy search volume but not much competition.  I’ve used these keywords to drive more focused traffic to my websites through organic search results and it has been easy.  Using the methods Court and Mark describe I have more than enough keywords to chase after.  I actually have a list of keywords that have heavy search volume and little competition that are just waiting for me to have the time to focus on them.

If you are looking for ways to increase your presence in organic search results, sign up for The Keyword Academy.  No affiliate links here, go do it for your benefit and make some money.  It’s there for the taking!

Anyone can enter to win and it really is a breeze to do.  Check out the Niche Store Site Contest and sign up for the contest!

Anyways I have been enjoying Mark and Court’s Keyword Academy, which I will also post about soon.  I’ve been using their techniques for the last few months and have been very successful with what they teach.  Today I found a long-tail keyword that averages 10,000 searches a month (exact phrase) but has close to zero competition!  I plan on sharing some of the stuff I have learned along with screenshots of increased traffic for my sites thanks to the techniques Mark and Court teach.

See you soon!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is anything wrong with earning money from your posts.  It’s just so obvious that these big blogs are doing that in some posts about the same things at the same times.  I think it’s still worth it to read these blogs though because it helps me stay up on what’s new with my interests.  One blog i don’t exactly enjoy reading but always do is John Chow’s.  John is pretty annoying.  I’m not typically a critical person, but he does go a bit far with the whole “I’m rich, your not” thing.  I still keep up with him though because there are things that are said in his blog’s posts that I can learn from.

Seth’s blog posts are much different from that.  Seth is the originator of the permission marketing theory and he practices it with his posting.  He also does this without showing off his ego.  I’m a bit all over the place with this blog, and don’t really monetize it much, but I hope with the other blogs I am earning money with that I’m earning my visitors “permission” to market to them.

I very seriously hope I never have to do anything this excruciating again.  I had dedicated hosting that I was splitting the cost with someone else but the dude is getting out of his sites.  Which left a pretty hefty cost for yours truly to pony up and I just can’t justify the cost.  So I’m downgrading my hosting service and am now moving like fifty freakin’ websites over to this new hosting plan and it is LAME.

Most of my sites are Build a Niche Store sites, so I’m only transferring the database and theme of each of those.  But quite a few of them are WordPress sites also, and a few of those have a BANS store in a directory.  Messy stuff.  I’m seriously considering getting a server at home and putting it in the basement or something.  My bro is a geek so he could set that stuff up for me real nice and neat, then my only concern would be the cost of a business internet service.  I would want like five IP addresses and they would have to be static IP addresses.  Comcast would want a pretty penny for that but at least everything would be in-house.  That would be awesome-ness.  Check out the cheap CHEAP pc components Tiger direct is offering for some of the latest PC hardware coming out.  No I’m not getting an affiliate commission for that link, it’s just really cheap!

I’m trying to look on the bright side of things with this transfer.  Mark over at The Niche Store Builder recently wrote a few articles about Spring Cleaning for websites.  He talked about WordPress installs, Domain names, and webhosting accounts.  With the transfers I’m making I have to do all those things!  While it is lame it does let me make sure everything I have is everything I need.  The rest can be garbage.

Dynamic search engine results also mean that just because you rank well for a key phrase one day does not mean that you will rank well tomorrow.  You need to put in time for search engine optimization every day for your sites and make sure that your competition hasn’t caught up with you.  As diligent as you were to find your competitors and take over their number one spot in Google, so to are other marketers going after your number one spot.

I recently neglected one of my Build a Niche Store sites that has historically done well for me.  I have ranked in the number one spot in Google for months now with this particular site for it’s keywords and was recently ousted.  Traffic – and more importantly conversions – instantly dropped dramatically.  I got caught up in starting new projects and ignored this sites optimization and now I’m feeling the effects.

Because search engines are so dynamic, it should take just a small amount of work to get back my spot with Google but I also have to make sure I put in the time to keep it there.  Researching the sites that are researching me will help.  Always building solid backlinks to build trust with search engines is also important.  Setting up reminders to go back to sites solely for the purpose of SEO can keep those pesky competitors at bay.

What The Hell is SEO?

What the hell is SEO and how do I use it?  O.k. I understand it stands for Search Engine Optimization.  But what it means seems different anywhere I go on the web.  Webmasters get bombarded everywhere they go with what they need to do to their sites to get them to rank well with search engines and it is very confusing for newcomers (like myself.)  WIth a few of my sites, I have managed to rank well for keywords that bring in a steady amount of traffic and I’ve decided that I need to do more with organic search results if I want to make more money.  The basic thing I have learned when visiting sites that promise to help boost my rankings are:

1. They all want money.
2. Most of them are full of it.
3. Search Engines hate the things they do.

The problem with looking at SEO this way is that it’s made me avoid looking for information about it.  I hate researching SEO because of all the nonsense I have to deal with or sift through.  This is bad for me because I don’t want to do any kind of advertising campaigns for my Build a Niche Store sites.  I want to get traffic through organic search results.  And the only way to get decent rankings in search engines is by knowing a good amount of optimization techniques!  See my problem here?

I have found a few good places for learning SEO without having to deal with rubbish, like SEO Book.  I think one thing I need to stay away from is places that promise automated ways of boosting my sites rankings because that is the exact thing that Google and other search engines punish.

So what the hell is SEO exactly?  I’m still not sure exactly how to answer that.  But I am much more commited to learning more after seeing myself how powerful ranking well for my targeted keywords can be.

With that said, some of the things involved with getting a BANS website ranked well with the search engines are not very easy to do.  The main thing I hate doing is submitting to directories.  This is a very effective way of getting some anchor text out there that links back to your stores.  But it can be very lame.

Recently I purchased a package from Submitedge to get a domain name ranked faster after I had to transfer a store to a new domain name.  I used a link from Dave’s blog to get there, as my way of thanking him for his BANS Blog.  I’ve done manual submissions with directories before and it’s very time consuming with the reward coming from that work sometimes months away.  I decided to try SubmitEdge and I don’t know if I can get myself to do directory submitting manually again.  Using SubmitEdges’ system is not cheap but I would have to say it’s very worth the one-time fee to get a website out there and ranking in search engines for the terms I chose.

The other option is, of course, submitting to directories yourself which is free and still a very effective marketing technique.

I have a difficult time being to transparent when writing posts concerning affiliate marketing because there is always the risk that a fellow affiliate marketer will copy my work.  For example, in earlier posts I’ve written about my problem with the LEGO group concerning one of my domain names.  I went out of my way in that post to make sure I didn’t mention the actual domain name in question for a few reasons.  I hate it the idea that other affiliate marketers can copy my work.  When you consider the path that someone would take in getting to my blog you realize that a high percentage of my visitors are going to be affiliate marketers and, more specifically, BANS affiliate marketers.  A visitor is going to get to my blog either from a search engine or through a link from a fellow affiliate marketers blog.  It’s a good chance that these visitors are looking for ideas for BANS sites.

Now I’ve got to say that I would love to give my two cents to help anyone with a project.  It would be very cool if each visitor that came to my blog went away learning something they didn’t know about affiliate marketing, the Build a Niche Store system or anything else I may write about.  If that is the goal of writing in this blog than it would be smart to be transparent with everything I write about and give readers as many ideas as I can.  But I don’t want anyone copying my work.  It sucks putting in the work to research a niche, finding the best keywords to promote, designing a website, and creating unique content only to have some loser affiliate marketer copier copy my work.

I’ve read a few different instances where affiliate marketing bloggers have had their work copied.  One famous instance of this is Shoemoney reavealing how he was making it big with affiliate ringtones.  He basically laid out step for step how to make a ton of money with affiliate ringtones and everyone copied him.  He recently did a post called the seven deadly sins for trying to make money online where he touches on not revealing exactly how your making a killing online.

I just read Marks post over at his blog, the Niche Store Builder, where he discusses how easy it is to impress MSN.  He mentions in his post that he would not reveal the website in question or his earnings.  This is a fairly common theme for internet marketers because many people can be envious of ones success and put effort into, not only copying their work, but doing what they can to sabatoge their work also.

I think we as bloggers have to draw a line with how transparent we are with our affiliate marketing projects and do our best to be as descriptive as possible while avoiding malicious visitors.  I am interested in networking and helping out as much as I can so feel free to send an email if there is something I write about here that you would like me to touch on a bit more.  But I won’t do your work for you.

BANS Landing Pages

I’ve made changes to a few of my Build a Niche Store (BANS) sites recently after noticing them drop in search engine rankings.  These BANS sites were of the thin variety.  That is, they had little original content and the front pages were the out-of-the-box versions with little unique content and with eBay items.

I planned on changing these stores drastically, but for the most part all I have done so far is take away all eBay items from the front page.  I turned the front page of each BANS site  into landing pages. 

These landing pages are almost a site map.  I’ve noticed that the site map page of the out-of-the-box BANS install is about the only page the does well with Google and it’s the only page that doesn’t have eBay items!  It is also basically a landing page.  It takes a visitor to wherever they want to go in your site.

Google makes it obvious that it considers unique content important.  I changed those BANS site front pages two weeks ago and since then two of the BANS sites are ranking on Google front page again for good keywords.  They are getting traffic again and converting.  I’m going to do this for all of my sites and you should to.