How to Market Online: Tips and Secrets Reviewed: How to Set up a Profit-Making Affiliate Blog by Digital Recycling

Q: You may have wondered about that old blog - do I shut it down, or use it somehow? A: Recycle - always.

(photocredit: Matt McGee)

The answer with old blogs is NEVER, EVER DELETE THEM (sorry about that shouting...) The older the blog is, the better the authority it's granted, even if it's sat inactive for awhile. Putting a little time into them now can get them earning some extra income for you from here on out - even if it takes a little more than an afternoon's investment.

Note: I'm only giving you some distilled practical theory here - this isn't a lesson in SEO. This works and I wanted to share it with you.

While there are details to this, I'm going to give you the short-hand list. We are going to use a Blogger blog, essentially because with recent changes they've made, this is able to take advantage of its being part of the Google+ family to give you better rankings.

Realizing we are both busy and have things to do, here we go:

1. Re-activate the Blogger blog if its been "deleted" but still there. (Note: ensure you are the real owner and no one can come back and change passwords on you. Change your Google+ security settings to point only to your contact points. Or, better, "move" the blog by changing the admins.)

2. Ensure the Google+ account for this blogger blog is very active and many people have it in their circles. (Otherwise, transfer the blog to your own active Google+ account.) Make sure your blog autoposts from your Google+ account, and uses G+ comments for the blog posts.

3. While you are working on your popularity, get the product ready. I currently prefer ebooks made from PLR or Public Domain books, but you can also use any decent affiliate product. (See "How to Master Affiliate Marketing" for some inexpensive books on this, or "How to Develop and Sell Your Own Products.")

4. Dig out Market Samurai and do your market research to find what the buying keywords are that have lower competition.

5. Create a CNAME for your blogger blog from a domain you own, so that the keyword is used as a subdomain - this is where you break it away from the blogspot domain.

6. Take your PLR ebooks which match and extract content to match the keywords - re-write them completely, but you only need about 500 words.

7. Again with Market Samurai, find videos which match the keywords, as well as ping-back links. (If you have the time it would be far preferable to create your own videos, like recording those 500 words matched to a powerpoint.)

8. Create the framework for these 5 or so pages (matching the number of decent keywords you find, and the amount of PLR you can draw from) - so you have keyword-rich links for the posts themselves.

9. Using Open/LibreOffice, create PDF's from the PLR and post these to several of the best doc-sharing sites. Ensure they each link back to one of the blog posts you just created.

10. Now, ensuring you have all-possible on-page SEO going (descriptions, etc.) - build your page so that it has:

Video - above the fold,
Text
Embedded PDF
Zemanta related links
Related sites from your Market Samurai research.

And you use Zemanta plug-in to help you with text links and labels, etc.

11. As your posts go live, you'll be autoposting them to Google+

12. Somewhere along the line, you've turned that PLR into at least one ebook and published these to iTunes and B&N (via Lulu), as well as Kobo and Google Plus. (See "Just Publish" for the details on these.) Create a sidebar html text box which either sells the ebook directly, or sends them to a landing page where you can get their email and they can download it for free from the thankyou page. (If you're using an affiliate product, then that's the landing page they go to.)

13. Now all you have to do is visit and post a new short post every month or so in order to keep it rising in the standings. The other thing to do is to run a Synnd campaign on those original posts, or at least the blog address, in order to improve the social signals - which will raise it's rankings as well.

- - - -

Obviously, if you would just find and take profitable areas with products - or create money-making ebooks in those areas and distribute these via the main distributors (Amazon and Smashwords don't like PLR or PD, so it's just those 5 above) - then you can duplicate this as much as you want. Every single book you create should link to it's own blog.

My own example of this is at http://goodfundraingideas.worstelldesign.com - where I've done just the above with an old (deleted) blog I found access to. The ebook is called, "How to Raise Money for Charity - A Review and Guide to Good Fundraising Ideas."

The details can be pretty-well fleshed out if you follow the links. And if I ever get caught up, this might make a nice little ebook on its own...