To be successful in affiliate marketing, you have to find a product that many people want. Not only that, you have to find one that they are likely to purchase over the Internet. Sure, a few people will buy a car or boat online, but not many. There are some products that people want to see, touch and evaluate in person before buying. You can’t do that online! Find a popular product that you believe in and then see if they have an affiliate program and find out the terms.

Start by making a list of the things you like and are passionate about. It has always been said that you can sell something you believe in. That’s true. It’s also true that it’s very hard to sell something you know nothing about or have no experience in. This is why it’s critical in finding something that you enjoy or are passionate about.

Both Yahoo and Google have sections where you can go and look to see what the most searched terms are for the previous week, month or year. This will tell you what people are searching for online. Google also has a section called “Hot Trends” that is updated throughout the day to show you the most searched for terms. This can be a huge benefit if you follow it over time.

The other section in Google you want to do research in is Google Trends. This tool will tell you how well the product you’re interested in has been searched for in the past. Google trends is a free tool and one you should not overlook. You want to see the line on the grapch either fairly steady across the graph or rising. A downward line on the graph tells you that interest in the product is tapering off.

The section you want to look for in Yahoo is Yahoo Buzz. This section tracks the most searched for terms of the previoius week or month. It will also tell you whether or not your term is on the rise or tapering off. Personally, I prefer Google Trends for seeing if the product is on fire or cooling off. To find it, go to buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com. Play around with it a while to really find the best niche products that are hot.

Another excellent place to find hot selling products is ebay. Ebay has a section that will show you the most popular selling products. This can also give you ideas on what to sell on ebay and on the Internet as well. The section you want to look for is called Ebay Pulse. You can also drill down to find which specfic prodcuts are hot. For example, iPods are always hot on Ebay. But which color? Use Ebay Pulse to find which color or which model is hot.

Finding a hot selling product is not hard. You just have to know where to look in order to find them. Picking an affiliate product just because it has a high payout is a sure fire way to fail. Pick something you know about and then research it to see if there is a demand for it. This way you’ll have the confidence to stay the course until you see the fruits of your labor pay off.

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Yeah, for some of you BANS owners, it’s been a pretty tough last few months.

I’m knocking on wood here. If you remember right from my initial Build A Niche Store Review, my goal was to build 100 BANS sites. Now I’m thanking my lucky stars that I have AMADD (Affiliate Marketing Attention Deficit Disorder) and only made it to 30 sites before I lost focus and went off doing something else. So far none of my sites have been touched by either Google or eBay. I’ll give you my theories on why that is on down the page.

A Few Theories Why Google Is De-Indexing BANS sites.

I’ve been following a lot of the chatter on forums about this subject as well as receiving a lot of email. This is what I’ve figured out to this point. No one has 100% concrete proof why Google is de-indexing BANS sites. There are a few theories floating around.

1. The BANS program was being used by a lot of spammers. Many of these guys/gals were throwing up huge numbers of BANS sites on .info domains. They never bothered to change anything with the programs, their only concern was to get as many BANS sites up as they could, as cheaply as they could. This left a huge footprint for Google to follow.
2. Most of these same people never bothered to put any content on their sites. They were simply ebay sites with ebay auctions on them. This would be what Google calls a “thin affiliate” site. And we know what Google does with thin affiliate sites.
3. In order for Google to get all the spammy BANS sites, it had to take some legitimate sites along with them. It’s the shotgun approach. Use a huge pattern to make sure you get all of them. Try and limit the casualties but go forward knowing some innocent victims will be in the pattern.

My Theory On Why Google Hasn’t De-Indexed All BANS Sites

Even as far back as when I bought the Build A Niche Store program, there was talk about Google finding the footprint of all the standard BANS templates and possibly penalizing them. It seems this bird has come home to roost. From the start, here is what I did to try and make my BANS sites unique from all the other cookie cutter BANS sites.

• I changed up the CSS a little bit on every site. I made sections like the header and content fields larger and smaller.
• I changed the colors on every site.
• I changed the size of the headers on every site and used graphic headers.
• I DID NOT go out and start sending hundreds of backlinks to my sites. I built them up over time using blog carnivals, article submissions, reciprocal linking and adding one way permanent links.
• I added content to nearly every page plus I used a lot of graphics.
• I never put eBay auctions on my main page. I put content on the index page to make it look as much like a informative content site as I could. Just look at how many BANS sites have nothing more than auctions on their front page.
• On many of the domains that hosted my BANS sites, I added blogs, article directories and forums to many. (mostly just blogs that supported the main domain)
• I never put more than 2 BANS sites on one hosting account plus I paid extra for all sites to have a dedicated IP’s. I’ve read stories of people hosting all their BANS sites with one hosting company. Wow, I can’t fathom that idea. I’m just too paranoid I suppose.
• I only used dot com domains. Of course, these last two items is what I do for nearly all of my affiliate sites, not just for BANS. I want to make it as hard as possible for Google or any other search engine to spy on my websites.

Now, I’m not saying if you do these things that Google will not index your site. These are the things I did to every BANS site I had. I did these things from day one and as I said above, knock on wood, my sites haven’t been touched. In fact, many are still climbing the SERPS.

Is the Build A Niche Store Still Worth Buying?

I’ve had a few emails asking that question. Honestly, I’d say yes it is. But only if you intend to build sites that have a lot of content and you make them unique. If you’re plan is to buy it and throw up a bunch of BANS sites without adding any value to them, I think you’d be wasting your money. Google is on to you.

Alternatives to The Build A Niche Store program

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week or so, you know I’m impressed with the PHPBay plugin for WordPress. As I stated in my post Advanced Build A Niche Store Strategies, I’ve been using PHPBayand WordPress to make blogs and stores with eBay auctions. It seems every week that my PHPBay/WordPress stores outproduce my Build A Niche Store sites. Hey, it’s no secret that Google is crazy in love with WordPress blogs. Why not take advantage of that? Plus, to be honest, a WordPress blog and PHPBay combination site just looks much better than 99% of the BANS sites out there, mine included. (hey, maybe Google hates ugly sites?)

Whatever the real reason that Google is de-indexing or penalizing BANS sites, owners using this program need to proceed with caution. If you continue to make sites with BANS, then do everything in your power to make them unique and stand away from the crowd.

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Every blog or website you build should have a Privacy Policy and a Terms and Conditions or a Terms of Usage page.

Why?

Because not only is it good netiquette but it will also help you out with ranking in many of the Search engines. Yahoo and MSN are sticklers for a Privacy Policy and Terms page. I thought I had already put those pages up here, but apparently I overlooked them.

It’s been my experience that new blogs and websites will be indexed quicker and have a better chance of moving up the SERPS if they have both a Privacy Policy and Terms page. Especially when dealing with Yahoo and MSN.

If you run a PPC campaign, then a Privacy Policy and Terms page will give you a better quality score with Google. I ran experiments last year with a PPC campaign. I compared landing pages and sites with Privacy Policies and Terms pages against those without these pages. I was able to get better quality scores, and keep them, with the websites that had a Privacy Policy and Terms page versus those without.

They don’t have to be elaborate. In fact you can copy mine or you can go to Google and search for “Privacy Policy Example” and get all that you need.

If your blog or website doesn’t have these, now is the time to add them!

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It’s no secret that both Microsoft and Yahoo have been lagging way behind Google in the last several years. To make matter worse, both companies have been buying up smaller companiesin an attempt to give theirself an edge over Google, but to no avail.

It was nearly a year ago that I predicted that Microsoft would have to buy a major search engine company to stay competitive with Google. Looks like Mr. Gates was listening! (now share the wealth brother!)

Microsoft’s Buyout Details

Last year, Microsoft sent out feelers to Yahoo about a possible takeover. Yahoo’s board told Microsoft that they felt like the time was not “right” for a deal. Which probably means the Yahoo board wanted more time to figure out how to make more money off of Mr. Gates.

Now a year has past and Microsoft is standing at Yahoo’s door with the Armored car out front…actually that would be more like a Armored train!

Microsoft is offering to offer Yahoo shareholders $31 per share, which is an increase over what Yahoo share’s are currently going for.

Will the Merger Really Help Either Company?

Microsoft is looking at saving at least a Billion dollars by merging the two companies.

Personally, I don’t see that both companies combined can take on Google unless their development teams start getting creative. Google is where it’s at today because they offered innovative and creative products and services to Internet users while Microsoft and Yahoo have been offering the same old thing in a different wrapper.

Yahoo has been a little more successful against Google than Microsoft in the PPC arena, but both still come up short. Most of us who use PPC simply get better results and reach more user through Adwords than we do with Yahoo or MSN.

Only time will tell whether or not Yahoo accepts this offer. They’ve recently laid off over a 1000 employees so they are certainly feeling the heat. Microsoft may be just what Yahoo needs to keep its head above the water.

However, unless both start coming out with some innovative products and services, this takeover may be just the thing that drowns both companies (as far as search and Internet services are concerned). It will be a long hard climb to the top for a merged Microsoft/Yahoo and when they get there, they’ll have to deal with King G and he’s not going to give up easy.

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He emailed his site to me to take a look at it for him. It only took a second looking at the source to realize this guy had hired the wrong person to do SEO on their website. A quick look at his site with my Firefox SEO extension showed no backlinks.

The on-page SEO (or lack of) was horrible  plus his Copywriting was not optimized either. It was no wonder this site didn’t rank. This site was in a small niche and it shouldn’t have been that hard to rank well, especially over a year’s time.

If you have questions about your SEO expert, here are 7 signs that you’ve hired the wrong SEO expert or company.

1. Your Real Estate Agent website ranks #1 for Viagra in your City.
2.  There are no backlinks pointing to your website, but you find that your website has 367 outgoing links to Gambling and Porn sites.
3. When you pull up your SEO’s website, it says “This Account Has Been Suspended.”
4. Your think “BlackHat SEO” is the name of your SEO Company.
5. Your SEO expert’s idea of on-page optimization includes typing your keywords across the top of your index page, over and over and over.
6. More than 95% of people with Guestbooks on their websites know your URL.
7. Matt Cutt’s knows your URL by heart.

Okay, so that was a little tongue in cheek list, but there are a lot of people/companies out there who will take your money and do little to get your website ranked. There are also those who can actually damage your website. Buyer Beware when hiring an SEO Expert or SEO Company. Here’s a post about questions you should ask your potential SEO company.

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Many of the blogs that I visited had removed the MyBlogLog widget. So then I logged into MyBlogLog account and noticed that there were fewer subscribers to some of the communities and my own community had shrunk.

In fact, when I looked at the top 10 A-list bloggers, I noticed only 1 had the MyBlogLog widget on their site.

What Has Caused the Exodus of MyBlogLog Subscribers?

So I started doing a little research into why this was happening.

I read old reviews about the acquisition of MyBlogLog by Yahoo and really found nothing.

Now I knew that some bloggers have had a problem with MyBlogLog from the beginning when it was reported that their widget was reading and possibly recording traffic to the blogs that used their widget. It was even reported that this widget would read and log clicks to Adsense. Needless to say, this didn’t set well with a lot of people.

Even with those reports though, many bloggers were adding the MyBlogLog widget to their blogs in huge numbers.

It wasn’t until I started reading post on other blogs about Yahoo requiring a MyYahoo account to login to MyBlogLog that I started seeing a lot of discontent. Obviously many MyBlogLog users refused to make the changeover and decided to leave rather than be forced to open a Yahoo account.

Why would Yahoo make this move?  Surely they knew it would drive away subscribers?

Life After The Yahoo Acquisition

Personally, I don’t like the move either. I have multiple MyBlogAccounts and Yahoo accounts. When I go blog browsing, I have one MyBlogLog account I use. However, sometimes another profile will pop up on the blogs MyBlogLog widget. This doesn’t set well with me.

I’m not sure what Yahoo’s plan is for MyBlogLog is. From where I’m standing, it doesn’t look like a good fit for Yahoo. I believe their move of requiring a Yahoo account to login proves this.

So what’s in store for MyBlogLog? I don’t know honestly. I don’t use MyBlogLog as much as I did previously. It also seems to have become very spammy.

I’ll continue to show the widget in the short term, but I’m wanting to see some advantages of using it.

What experiences have you had with MyBlogLog? Do you still use the widget? Share your experiences with the rest of us by dropping a comment.

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Optimize Your Links with the “Title” Attribute

I covered Anchor text in my post Overlooked Steps To Boost Traffic and Rankings, but it’s important enough to go over here again. 

This is how most links look if you look at the source code of a website.

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com” mce_href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>www.yoursite.com</a>

That’s okay, but by adding Anchor text and a Title, you can change that little link into a Superstar.

Here’s how to structure your link.

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com” mce_href=”http://www.yoursite.com” title=”your keyword here“>Your Keyword</a>

Notice the “Title” at the end of the URL? You should always have a descriptive keyword between the quote marks. Also, instead of using www.yoursite.com, use Anchor Text instead. Anchor text will be a keyword, preferably one you want to rank for.

For example, if you had a Dog Grooming business in Akron, one of your keyword phrases would be “Dog Grooming Akron.” Your Anchor text and “title” attribute would then read “dog grooming Akron.”

This will help you rank much higher in Google than not performing these extra steps. It may just shoot you right past your competitors!

 How To Optimize Your Images for Higher Rankings and More Traffic

Another area where Webmaster and Blog owners fail to take advantage of on page optimization is with their images.

Believe it or not, some people actually browse the Internet with Images turned off. The pages load faster and most of the time the ads won’t show up either.

There are two reasons to optimize your Images.

1. Higher SERP rankings
2. Google Image Search

Using keywords in the “alt” attribute for an image will help you rank higher in the SERPS. It also describes the image to someone who has the images disabled in their browser.

Another benefit of labeling your images in the “alt” attribute is that they’ll show up in Google’s image search.

For example, let’s go back to your Dog Grooming business in Akron. Let’s say you have a picture of a Beagle on the front page.

Here’s how the link structure normally looks.

<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/beagle.jpg” mce_src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/beagle.jpg”>

And here’s how it will look after you Optimize it with the “alt” attribute.

<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/beagle.jpg” mce_src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/beagle.jpg” alt=”dog grooming akron”>

Now, if you were a Kennel selling Beagles, your “alt” would be “Beagles”. Be just as descriptive with the “alt” attribute as you were with the “title” attribute!

This way, if someone goes to Google and types in “dog grooming akron” and then hits the “Image” button at the top, it’s likely the picture of that adorable Beagle will show up. When they click on that adorable little Beagle picture, it will shoot them to your site.

See how simple that works?

Now go and optimize your links and images for higher rankings!

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Smart pricing as Google calls it, was allegedly an attempt to increase “value” for advertisers. From what I can tell, no one can tell exactly how “Smart Pricing” works. From the discussions on many of the forums lately, Adsense revenues are falling further and further for site owners.

Yesterday I was reviewing my Adsense revenue, which by the way is down across all my sites, and notice there was one ad that received 10 clicks. I got 26 cents for those 10 clicks. Not 26 cents per click, 26 cents for all those clicks! That comes out to a whopping 2.6 cents per click for that ad!

As far as I can tell, and many other website owners as well, Smart Pricing is an excuse for Google to keep more of your money.

Adsense Alternatives To Help Boost Your Website or Blog Earnings

Here’s quick rundown of some alternatives for replacing Adsense on your site.

• AdBrite - AdBrite advertises that it serves 727 million impressions to 33,534 sites. The income is a 75/25 split in the site owners favor.
• Advertising.Com – They have a wide range of advertisers to choose from. They have CPA and CPC programs with a net 15 payout.
• AzoogleAds- Azoogle has many companies to choose from with many different ways you can apply those ads. This is a popular Affiliate Network for credit card offers, debt relief, car loans and insurance offers.
• BidClix- This is a model where advertisers bid for the highest placement. BidClix advertise that they serve over 30 million ads a day for their advertisers. They pay every 15 days.
• Bidvertiser- Bidvertiser serves up ads that look like Adsense ads (as does many of these other companies).  They also will pay your through PayPal, which I like!
• Burst!- Burst has over 4200 specialty content websites currently on over 400 channels. Some of their recent advertisers include John Deere, Weight Watchers, Vonage and State Farm just to name a few.
• Chitika – Let’s face it, they have the best looking contextual ads on the Web. But a wise publisher will do their research before joining up. Read the Internet Marketing forums and ask questions.
• Claxon- Claxon pays on the 15th and the 30 or 31st of every month. At one time Claxon payed 85% of the gross. I’m not sure if that’s still the case since they were bought by Human Ingenuity International. You’ll have to contact them or join their program.
• IntelliTxt- Another inline text contextual advertiser. They advertise that they serve over 250 million user-initiated video ads per month.
• Kontera- Kontera offers inline text ads. Personally, I’d do more research on them before joining. They advertise that they’ll get back to you within 5 business days of submitting your application, but it took them over 2 weeks to get back to me the fist time and they denied 5 of my sites. Oh yeah, the denial email was a form letter that said they denied my claim because my “site” was offline (remember, I submitted 5, not 1). Ummm…yeah. So I recently submitted them under Joel Comm’s link and its been nearly 3 weeks and I haven’t heard a peep. They don’t seem to be real big on answering emails or applications!
• Miva- They offer pay-per-click ads (resembles Adsense ads) along with inline-pay-per-click ads.
• MSN Adcenter- Another Adsense type contextual program from the good people at MSN.
• TribalFusion- TribalFusion says it serves up 19 Billion impression…yes, that’s Billions as in starts with a “B” plus some of the highest payouts on the Web. They pay 55% of ad revenue with a $50 minimum. You’ll have to wait 45 days for you money though.
• ValueClick - They pay by the 25th of each month for the previous months clicks. They also pay by PayPal.
• YPN- This is Yahoo’s version of Adsense. Trustworthy and their ad blocks resemble Adsense.

Okay, there you go. 15 alternatives to Adsense. Sure, there are other advertisers who you can sign up with, but these 15 seem to be the big players in the industry.

 Many site owners have got complacent and have failed to test other Contextual Advertising Programs. (myself included) I’m sure we’re leaving money on the table. It’s time we all put Adsense aside and tried out some of these other networks.

Also, you need to know that I’m only an affiliate for a few of these companies and I’m certainly not an expert on any one of them. I’ve provided the link to their sites so you can do your own research to find your Adsense alternative!

If you’ve tried any of these networks, let me know how they worked for you!

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