How to Set up a Profit-Making Affiliate Blog by Digital Recycling

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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:

1. Video - above the fold,
2. Text
3. Embedded PDF
4. Zemanta related links
5. 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...

Related articles

• Notes on Book Publishing
• How to Drive Yourself Sane - Checklist for Self-Publlshing
• How to Develop and Sell Your Own Products Series
• How to Master Affiliate Marketing Series
• How to Promote Your New Book via SEO
• Market Samurai Review - Avoid Failure Rank In Search Engines

Solo Promotion - A critique of "what the pro's do"

The necessity for leverage in online promotion is that everyone starts out by themselves. 

And what prompted this is a new look at Market Samurai's "Professional SEO" article from an application viewpoint. You may want to have this article open in another window (or a separate screen, which is even better) so you can refer to it as we go.

This article makes some sense on the overview, and is why I refer people to it.

However, it doesn't really say much about the individual and their efforts to succeed or scale.
They are actually pointing out that there is a huge market in the middle between the two - since the Professional SEO firms are dealing in major corporations only, while the individual is simply working their own concept over.  And there is a scale of work which separates these two as well - one is dealing in "hundreds" of pieces of content every week, the other a single piece of content weekly.

That isn't very fair to the individual, and they don't tell you how to scale this or how to leverage your work.

Of course, these 30 days are just that - how an individual can leverage their own efforts to earn extra money online. And we've also reviewed how you can ramp your content up to many versions of the same work within a single week - unlike their example of the individual who chose hard ways to do things and later quit these in exhaustion.

Limiting Misconceptions

1. The first one is their emphasis on backlinks. And we've already covered this. You don't use bookmarks and social media to try to get backlinks. You use them to improve the social signal quality of your main and remotely-posted content.

They do cover the point that article directories are a valid way to get backlinks, all white-hat and everything. And this is where they start - pushing their incomplete project of an article publisher. (I'm sure they'll get there, eventually.)

2. And because they don't write this from the view of really getting the whole job done (just from an article marketing viewpoint) they don't really lay out a scheme or plan which the individual can use to scale their production.

So for a long time, this sat in my own mind as an isolated report. Only on finishing up this series and starting that new project did the groundwork they laid start to bear fruit.

How an individuals can scale their promotion

The idea is that the Internet is a great way to leverage all that you do. Market Samurai is a great way to leverage your time required on market research in order to get all the data you need quickly. That one-time purchase should last you years or more - since they support it with updates, and you can also recommend it as an affiliate product.

We've covered in some broad strokes how to simply get this accomplished using a central hub, remote social properties (blogs), and social signals. This type of system can also be scaled, to include other interests - so you are able to promote in several lines. This splits your time up considerably, so it may be that you want to simply start out with concentrating on a single interest and building up content on this.

What the Market Samurai guys cover about Article Directories is correct, provided you spin the content (instead of hiring people to write articles for you on a one-to-one basis) - which is covered in Day 23 - How Article Directories Could Work.

Under that workflow, you simply would take the extra hour to convert that content into a spinnable format, and plug it into Article Demon (another one-time purchase that looks to be supported well so far.)

And that additional hour, plus a submitter like Article Demon, will leverage your one hour into perhaps a hundred or more backlinks on article directories - where everyone wins.

Once your article shows up an AD, you can then bookmark it and then ping your bookmark profile RSS feed - as covered. You may wish to have that article bio spun to give links to your remote blogs instead of your hub - or in addition to it. Just depends on how you created the content for each. But it gives you more options.

As well, many of these AD's give each author an RSS feed, so that could be pinged. As time-consuming as it is, the best results would be probably to use is like a remote blog, and bookmark it/ping RSS. I have no program (yet) which will submit sites to be pinged on a delay - though I'm sure they are out there and will only take looking to find.

Press Releases

Another line of promotion we haven't talked much about is the Free Press Releases. As usual, you want to use those which are effective, and cost nothing. There is simply no good review or explanation of these in The Online Sunshine Plan. Sorry.

Press Releases are not used much, as they are often misunderstood. Mostly, they do not get picked up by news services. And have recently been plagued with spam. Results is that many have been dropped by Google News (if they were ever on it to begin with) and have had to change their operation to restore their credibility. (See http://www.bignews.biz/blog/?p=6 for an exceedingly short list, and some descriptions of why.)

Essentially, these sites are picked up by both regular web searches and also Google News. So they are similar to article directories, but give you additional exposure on a new type of search engine.

However, they are each decidedly different as to how they accept your data. And so have no programs which will submit spun copy (as the Article Directories have only recently begun to have - well, as far as decent ones.)

So there is no real value in getting these only as backlinks. They simply take too much time to implement. You are going to have to spin the content and then also hand-copy/paste it into their particular fields. Some allow internal links within the body copy, some allow images. So it's no walk in the park.

But, like article directories, once you have spun copy, it's simpler to post to several of them, which will mean keyword-rich backlinks on authoritative sites. And - who knows - maybe a reporter will actually read it and call you up (or more likely email) for more information...

In order to find these, the simplest way to test this for yourself is to take a list of "top" or "best" free press release sites and then do a search of Google News to see which ones have pages indexed there. In the search box, type "site:" followed immediately by the domain name (no space between or "http://"). This will show you the top dogs of Google News.

If you cross-compare this with lists of such "best" free press release sites, then you'll get a short list to distribute to.

I spent a couple hours this afternoon (in between interruptions) and culled a short list for you (again, this will change, so isn't final - and I'm sure I missed a few.) And when I was done, I remembered and pulled up an older list I had and cross-compared. (And you'll also see that their Alexa rank has no relation to what Google thinks of them.) Again, these counts change all the time. What was interesting is that the top dogs gained quite a bit on average and the bottom feeders either dropped, or dropped out completely.

URL	Alexa Rank	Pages on Google News
prweb.com	2,469	24,600
prnewswire.com	2,915	23,300
businesswire.com	4,951	12,500
live-pr.com	24,157	9,720
mynewsdesk.com	12,156	7,420
pr.com	8,492	3,770
SBWire.com	16,376	3,180
mediapost.com	4,502	1,150
your-story.org	42,303	688
PRUrgent.Com	17,479	547
betanews.com	5,442	363
PRLeap.com	43,629	314
DirectionsMag.Com	19,834	236
ClickPress.com	12,498	130
free-press-release-center.info	19,260	96
openpr.com	17,098	89
ecommwire.com	29,673	35
MediaSyndicate.Com	446,193	30
NewsWireToday.com	23,797	6

New format? Not so much...

How these would fit into your promotion system is similar to what you already have:

• Hub
• remote-blogs, slideshare.net, video sites, podcast sites, article directories, press releases
• social bookmarking
• pinging RSS feeds of bookmarks
  

Using these doesn't fit every model. My own instance is moving to writing and publishing short stories. So for every short story, I could author a press release - and by illustrating these stories would be able to create all the rest of the content. However, article directories would probably be best suited for a non-fiction treatment or analysis of what the story meant. So it's 2 additional pieces of content needed for the press releases and article directories. Regular content could be simply spun in order to fit it into article directory posting, but may not be newsworthy.

(Does that 2 additional pieces of content put me over the top? Personally, I don't think it's unmanageable right now.  Getting into the inspired flow, illustrating a short story to bring it to life will be a lot more work. But there is method to this madness as well - all that content can be republished ever again, but that's another story.)

Now note that you can ping the RSS feeds of the article directories and (some) press release sites. And so cut down on your bookmarking work, which is pretty one-on-one in its execution. However, the real effective use of pinging is to do the bookmark feeds. So you may want to get your bookmarking done simply, as the RSS feeds would be cumulative for the bookmarks you do via that feed - once per week should be plenty.

Freebies: I did find some pdf's which cover more the style and use of press releases. "New Rules of PR", and "News Releases". And don't forget the "Article Re-Writer" as a free download (right-click and "save as").

And, as usual: Wishing you Good Luck in Everything You Do.

How to stay on a roll when you get there...

What's next - when you're on a roll?

For those who have faithfully followed this series, I thought to give you an unannounced follow-up.
Most of this series was written in pre-post method, meaning I simply sat down and drove myself to get it out of my head and into a written (digital) form. Wasn't hard, if you can listen to your own inspiration running amok.  (And that's a whole 'nother topic, although I did compile a book about how anyone can release their own genius...)

But as you can see from this blog, I have no short suit in  being able to create new content readily (over-prolific, I call it). Mostly, this is practice, and isn't something I really ever set out to do, but another talent that - when honed - turned out to be sharp.

There is a simple recipe using what we've covered for anyone who finds themselves having more content than outlets: create another outlet stream.

Essentially, a person can have many interests, even though they may only really focus on a few. This where diversity in life makes everything interesting. And the various Internet hosts love it when you dump all sorts of content on them.

That formula:

• On your main hub, set up another category with that other interest (or set up another hub)
• Populate this with some basic content
• Create a new Google+ page and publish these links to it.
• Set up your posterous and remote posting blogs (WP, blog.com, blogger, etc.)
• And set up another twitter account, which posterous can handle for you. You can also autopost to Facebook from here.
• Your onlywire or Synnd work would continue with these new posts.

Quite simple. But it gets all that out of your head...

- - - -

Some examples of content publishing

Hubs

Worstell Farms

Worstell Farms Cinch Diet Plan pages

Thrivelearning System (RobertWorstell.com)

Go Thunk Yourself.com

Google+ pages:

Worstell Farms

Shaklee Cinch Diet Plan

Comparing these 2 sets, you'll see where the cross-posts come in. And its obvious I need to create some more product pages, as I just found Google+ pages and their SEO connection a little over a month ago (just before I started this data dump).

Posterous

Natural Health News and Information

And Now What?

Thrivelearning News and Views

Go Thunk Yourself!

These posterous accounts all autopost to at least 4 other blogs, and usually a twitter account as well. So essentially, for every hub, I (should) have a Google+ page, and a Posterous blog with a mini-net below it. You'll see on WorstellFarms that I created a mini-site just about Cinch which only obliquely links back to the Grass Fed Beef site - but is on the same domain. It's an extension of eating healthy and naturally, so it fits.

Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's bookmarking and so on. And working to find a review from Market Samurai gave me this link about their results in surveying professional SEO companies.

Just a reminder...

Content posting sequence is:

1. Landing/Sales pages are best hosted by your affiliate sponsor's site (unless they do a lousy job, or it's your own product).
2. Review pages go on your main site/hub (and link to the affiliate sponsor)
   
3. Infotainment pages go on the remote blogs (and link to your hub)
4. Bookmark the remote blogs and ping the bookmark profile RSS feeds.

For an example, if you trace out the Cinch Diet Plan pages (goes through "Natural Health News and Information" Posterous site), it will all lead back to Shaklee as an affiliate: http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/

Go Thunk Yourself (and some of Thrivelearning) will trace back to my own bookstore: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/robertworstell

Thrivelearning itself is a montage of affiliate programs and materials. Some are even Amazon astores. And if you search for the slideshare.net sites, you'll see how this material was published as PDF's with backlinks to the hub it came from.

So I just wanted to give you some live examples to check out.

Cheers!

Day 29 - Wrap Up and Review

Well, here we are - the next-to-last post in this series.

Bittersweet and all that.

So we are going to summarize what has been talked about.

Summary - it's all logical

Online promotion follows a few very basic and very simple rules.

The Internet is built and continues to expand based on valuable content and speed. The increasing social use of it has only built and expanded those two principles.

In order to earn income online, in this model, you need to be able to regularly produce fresh content. So the idea is that you've been writing or commenting daily as we've been going along. (And I've set an example of how this can actually be done. Sure I started a couple of days ahead, but if you try this yourself, you'll see how much discipline it takes.)

You need to know your passion and/or purpose in order to succeed at anything. And this can be found by simply narrowing down to what keeps you fascinated, what makes you happy (brings you peace) and/or you could talk about endlessly as long as someone would listen.

Whether its a blog or a site, the point is to have a platform where you can add valuable, original content regularly. This is your base, your Hub.

Most people dread market research because they aren't following their own purpose line and don't have the needed tools. Try Market Samurai, or their free Domain Samurai as a starter.

Sales Funnels are used to provide a valuable channel of products to the lead, customer, and client. They start off small (or free) and eventually wind up at big-ticket items, preferably those which are consumable or subscription-based.

Search Engines, at their bottom line, depend on what words you describe your pages with. Google has a SEO Starter Guide (a free download) which tells you exactly what they are looking for. There are just a few (5) online SEO points to take care of, mainly.

While there are many forms of content Google now provides, it's not all that difficult to create all of them. There are 3 basic types of writing styles required for Internet marketing and promotion to the 3 basic types of Internet users.

I recommend affiliate programs when you are just starting out, as you can learn the ropes without an immediate huge investment. I also give you a list of criteria you can use to evaluate any you find that may align to your core purpose.

The biggest effort in marketing is in building a list so you can send out sequential emails with an autoresponder. This is as more people use email than surf the Internet. Email is also a personal and captive audience (as long as you keep them interested enough to not opt-out.)

Writing a web page is simple - you write like you talk. It's key that you know the 3 types of writing and post these where they will be accepted.

Social media isn't for backlinks. It's to show the authority and trust your backlinks have. Understand this and avoid the "Google Slap".

Set up your Google profile and a badge on your main site/hub. Share links to your hub on your Google+ profile. Create a Google+ page for each main product or service you offer. Plug in Google Analytics and Webmaster tools to every site and social property you create. The more you connect with Google, the easier it will be to rank well.

You can publish one essay several ways on the Internet so it can show up in several places on page 1 of Google.

A key point is using Slideshare and videos from that same content.

I don't recommend Squidoo or Hubpages, or even article directories, unless you really know how to get your time investment back in leads.

Building mini-nets from free/remote blogs and similar social properties (videos, pdf hosting, podcast hosting) and then bookmarking and pinging those bookmark profile RSS feeds it the simply and effective secret sauce which prompted this series.

It's possible to get Article Directories to work if you effectively spin the content (by hand) and use Article Demon to publish them to several hundred (or more) AD's. It will still take hours initially, but the program takes the mind-numbing repetition out of it.

You need to be using ranktracking and analytics to have definitive understanding of how effective you are - and where you still need to improve.

Network marketing is a logical extension of Affiliate marketing and providing you have a good program with lots of upline support, you can build extensive residual income from downline sales. I list several places to train in this area.

Ebay and Craigslist can be key sources of ready buyers if approached effectively.

The Natural Laws of Marketing are the same which pervade all of Life's activities on this planet. Knowing this can markedly assist your success from here on out - in any field you attempt.

I give you a list of tools and courses for use and reference. (All in addition to the numerous freebies you've received daily...)

- - - -

As I can (I'm pre-loading these and so don't have all the links), I'll come back to give you the daily links to these summary paragraphs.

Good luck with all this.

See you one last time, tomorrow.

Day 28 - List of Tools and Courses

The Grand (In)Complete List of Tools and Courses - to help you earn extra income online.

It's called so, as I am constantly finding more stuff which has great practical value. (It's that Attraction thing at work. Jesus said something like: "As you look, you will find.") And as I find more, I plan to come back and add them.

However, I did want to drop a long list on you of other courses and tools you could use. This is exactly what people say not to do, since the more choices you give, the less chances people will click on anything. So I recommend you bookmark this or save it as a page with links to your hard-drive (where you can find it later..)

Now I already have listed in the sidebar how to find various things like Market Samurai, SBI!, Synnd, MMI, and Magnetic Marketing.

This 30-day blog in itself is probably one of the greatest tools, since what I tell you about creating content and linking into affiliate sites is true for every page here. But this is as I recommend: find valuable products and services, then become an affiliate for them - and link to these in your content.

If you like what I tell you and find it workable (especially the free versions, trial versions, and so forth), then I'm sure that when you decide to invest in the fully working paid versions, you won't mind that I get a split of what you pay for it?

Day 24 - Ranktracking and Analytics - the real bottom line

You can't get anywhere without a goal and some where to figure out where you are.

Same is true for search engine rankings. If you don't track what your progress is, then you won't know what to change in order to improve your rankings.

So we deal with ranktracking and analytics.

Ranktracking Tools

I've done a lot of recommending in The Online Sunshine Plan, and it's mostly around Ranktracker. Originally, this was the only decent tool I could find which would give me keyword data. And I didn't actually use their ranktracking much. Later, as I had to start making my research pay, I got it again and did some regular ranktracking. It is a good ranktracking tool, but has an annual subscription, with another one for "updates". So it was running me about $150 a year. That's nearly as much as I was paying for my autoresponder service.

I quit both as I found replacement programs.

SimplyCast, as you know, is an easier (cheaper) autoresponder for people just starting out.


Market Samurai has now been upgrading their ranktracking part of that program and will allow you a certain amount of keywords to check for free - and they do that checking for you. During the beta, it's 50 keywords, but they intend to drop that to 10 when this is over. But they track the keywords weekly for you - you just have to login to get your updates.

Which is exactly the problem a lot of these ranktracking programs have - you need to run them manually. They hog your bandwidth and are another program to have running on your computer.  Market Samurai you can leave open, or just open once a week when you are checking how you are doing.

Market Samurai is a one-time purchase (less than an annual subscription to Ranktracker) and lets you buy only as much ranktracking as you need. So it makes more sense for someone just starting out.

Analytics

In short, get all you can.

We've covered Google Analytics. And that tool feeds right into Google, so you can write more copy according to what they say you are already ranking for. Your ranktracking above will tell you more, as it's independent of being signed into Google personally. (There are also goals you can set in Google Analytics, and tie in any adsense campaigns, etc. I just haven't really gone there as yet.)

Another set of analytics is your own server, which can be found on your cpanel hosting. This pulls data directly from the server and so is the only really accurate set of data on what keyword they came in with and so on.

But Google tells you what they showed your page as - even if no one clicked through on it.

The trick is to take that list of keywords Google made and run them through your Market/Domain Samurai program to see if any are really commercially worth a hoot.

If you use bit.ly, you can get some analytics from them on who clicked through on various links. As well, good affiliate programs will tell you some of this - so they will back each other up.

AddThis has it's own analytics for people sharing your content.

And you can probably find more. While the server analytics are paid by your own hosting fees, the rest are all free.

An analytics sequence - how to review against your goals.

No, I never got down to this in the book - at least that I could find. There was a blog post once, but Lord knows which one it was on...

So a simple rundown:

• You have your basic keywords and all that market research.
• And you are at least running ranktracking on your main keywords. 
• So you can look up Google Analytics and download what they says you are ranking for.
• Cross-check these for both commercial worth, and to see if these showed up in any of your market research.
• You can also get your analytics off your server to see what you are actually being clicked for - and see if these are worth pursuing.
• And any other analytics (bit.ly, Addthis, etc.) to see what pages are being effective at getting links. 
• From all these, boil down what you are ranking for and compare this against what you want to be ranking for. 
• Then decide against actual income - what affiliate or product sales you had that week, and where they came from - how and what content to produce which would increase your leads, conversions, and sales. 
• (You aren't interested in traffic so much, as buyers.)
• And narrow that to what content you can actually produce that week - which includes posting it to your mini-nets and doing the bookmarking/RSS ping sequence.
• Next week, start from the top. But try to keep to the same overall goal, unless you suddenly become very successful from an unexpected quarter. 

If you schedule your data collection and analysis for Monday, main content on Tues, remote posting, bookmarking, and RSS feed pings for Wedneday, you can then go out into your community and leave valuable comments which contribute to the community the rest of the week - or improve your sales funnel - or write that next newsletter.

This is your part-time schedule, though. After you get home from your day job.

And yes, it's a schedule. You are working about a 60 hour week - 40 at your job and 20 at your passion. But you still run both as a business. Businesses have goals, statistics, to-do lists, marketing plans, and accountability.

Doesn't mean you don't have time with your spouse and family. And I don't mention you taking your weekends for anything. But you do take a serious look at this and do a regular schedule to earn that extra income. Anything less is simply a hobby.

- - - -

I was casting about for freebies and didn't find any appropriate to this. (Like no one actually does this?!?)

There is this page from Market Samurai on how to use their ranktracking and why it's important.

However, I did find this one: "How to Live on 24 Hours A Day."

Cheers!

Day 21 - Mini-nets - the beginning of the end

(Secret Sauce: next-to-last in sub-series)
These next 2 days of material both fit together side-by-each (as some Canadian slang goes). So you'll need to study them together. These two parts are much like  a race car with a nitro boost. While either will push the car forward, both together will make it really take off.

The first point is mini-nets.

I'm now giving you Michael Campbell's "Revenge of the Mini-net". This complements his "Clickin' It Rich" and "Nothing But Net". These three, added together, give you substantial data on how to earn extra income online. And while they were all given away freely on the Internet once, they have since been withdrawn to people's individual archives (like mine.)

I stumbled across these just after or around the time I finished The Online Sunshine Plan and kicked that book over to Lulu.

The overall concept was originally to build smaller sites which all inter-linked with each other and so built up authority and "link-love" between them.

This was essentially premised on the vital necessity of backlinks to improve rankings. And in the days of social media, this hasn't changed, except how you implement it.

There is an interview of Campbell with Howie Schwartz, where the latter's "Conversation Domination" was given as an example of social mini-nets.  Schwartz used several dozen social media profiles to create an interlinked set of different sites. At that time, social profiles themselves would rank. And he then linked those profiles to a landing page which would sell his Halloween costume. The problems with this are that 1) they aren't valuable content per se, and 2) the are labor intensive and had to be farmed out.

The search engines moved on after really valuable content, and it became more of a hobbyist approach for individuals. The overhead was too much to base a business on.

However I did find that other social media, namely free/remote blogs, could be employed to host regular, fresh content and could be updated easily through any program that could access them remotely.

Just recently, I did a review of this and found that while this is not all that well known, it's not a trade secret. A special report which Market Samurai put out said their interview of the "big guns" (those who serviced clients for 10's of thousands yearly) said they would outsource posting to such a network of blogs.

But in reviewing The Challenge, I found that on Module 3, they describe just such an off-page network. (A free sign-up to that Challenge will give you access to all the modules at http://challenge.co/training/) They don't spell out how to do this efficiently, however.

I initially thought this to be a trade secret. Spammers didn't need to know about this, as the would make it quit working. But you also see that I don't particularly spill the beens in this limited release. As well, there are some details you'd have to study this whole series as well as doing some hands-on work to get the same results we've been getting.

The Components

Basically, the list goes like this:

• Your main site or "hub"
• Google+
• Remote blogs
• Slideshare.net (pdf's and powerpoints)
• Videos (optional)
• Archive.org - for podcasts
• Status Update Sites
• Bookmarking Sites

Which are all in addition to your work in social networking you do as part of those communities.

The sequence:

1. Post fresh content to your hub, which is all SEO'd with linking into other pages of your main hub. 
2. Share that link with your circles (public) on Google+
3. Spin this content (edit it slightly) and post to the remote blogs.
4. Create PDF of that original content, or the edited version, and post to Slideshare.
5. (Optional: create podcast, powerpoint, and video - then post these appropriately)
6. Create status updates which alert people to the new content on the remote blogs.
7. Bookmark the remote blogs' new content.
8. Ping the RSS feeds for several of these bookmarks.

The trick is that you could spend a week or more doing this all by hand. But within this system are ways to automate this slightly and make it a one-day, if not a few hours' work.

While there are programs such as Windows Live Writer which will post to your blogs, you can also do this with Posterous.

Status Updates can be done by Posterous, but also by Ping.fm (which is changing since it was bought out) and also Hoot Suite, Twitterfeed, and some others.

Bookmarking we will cover tomorrow, as this needs a great deal more space due to their details. I'll also cover why this sequence is this way, why it works, and the basic theory behind it - although you probably already have an idea why.

But I've already given you more to work with today than you'll be able to get through in a week of hands-on application.

A side note is that once you get into Posterous auto-posting, you'll find there are ways to organize your workflow to make this far easier. But again, to tell you simply how to do this would both be boring and take the fun out of exploring.

So now, with the 3 weeks of preps, I've brought you up to what I've been dying to tell you all. Properly set up, this just works too well. But now isn't the time to give you a long list of testimonials and test cases. At this point, I'll leave you to play with this and make your own observations.

- - - -

I've given you a freebie and assignment in the text above.

Just let me know in comments or by email how you find it to be working.

Day 17 - The Google Gorilla in the Room...

(Secret Sauce - third installment)

We can't continue here without discussing the 900lb. Gorilla in the room - Google.

This particular scene only unfolded for me last month, but is so basic to our SEO efforts that I had to tell you (been "busting to" in fact).

Google has been working on entering the social arena for years. They tried Buzz and Wave and now Google+ - which seems to be a hit (finally). Of course, it's overshadowed by Facebook, for now.

The reason I can say that is that point I've mentioned about Facebook before: it's a walled garden. Unfortunately, that works against it. While I could tell you all the statistics which show it reaches a saturation point in any country and then starts slowly declining, they offset that with it's entry into new countries. And point to ad revenue (which doesn't get new clients for those businesses, so is a ponzi scheme waiting to implode.)

Google+ is simply built on how people share content. So it's a natural fit to Google and users.

But the real deal is that it's now integrated into all Google does - and shortly will even have their analytics built into their Google+ pages. And how you integrate with Google affects what searches you personally get and also who gets your links. So this will help your community to keep track of your content - nice, yes?

There are 2 parts to this:

1. Everything you connect into Google will help your site rank better.
2. Google will teach you how to make better content - so your pages rank better.

Now, the outset is that you need to set up a Google Account, which is fairly simple -  go to https://accounts.google.com and fill out their form. Now a point here is that you don't try to set up several accounts here. It's not like twitter. They cross-check stuff. So one should do you and keep it the same. From all the work I've done with them, that's my short version. Pick one and stick to it.

Google's purpose

Arguably, they have mostly been interested in how people store and retrieve information. Their business plan has been to sell advertising, which has worked. Especially with the tools they offer to "auction" their ads. So they very nearly always sell as the highest rate possible, but that's another story we don't have time to get into.

The great part of Google is that they have been so successful at search, that they have long controlled the greatest part of the market for searches. So if they say they want "such-and-so" every one asks - "how high?" (mixed metaphor).

For better or worse, they have started to become ubiquitous on other platforms as well. Their Chrome browser is now starting to unseat Microsoft's IE as top dog. And this is another way they are working to understand people's usage of the Internet, so they can give better results in their search.

Factually, their biggest problem now is their success, as they have been losing trust - essentially due to the huge amount of data they can access about people. Again, this is an issue that there are solutions for which we don't need to get into.

Our use of this is to leverage their ability to have their fingers in all pies in order to get them to notice our content more easily. The second point it that their feedback on what we do can improve our own rankings. So we use their expansiveness to our advantage.

Analytics

Google Analytics is simple to find. http://www.google.com/analytics/
You sign in with your gmail account (Google Account) and then enter all the various properties that you have. For each one (unless you group them together) you'll get a number which you can drop into other social properties where they ask for such.

A lot of these social sites are supporting Google analytics, which is a good thing. It makes it easier to implement (no cutting and pasting code into your page headers) and this also tells them that your site is available and connects to you.

While we'll go over this later, this is a key point - that you take control of ownership for your content. The better you make this content and the more sites you have out there, it's important that Google knows where it started. By plugging in analytics, you then will enable Google to directly track your site/blog/content and so tell you all sorts of things about how it's working and what you can to to improve it.

Now a caveat - Google Analytics simply isn't as good as your own server. But if you are using free hosting, it's the next best thing (and far better than nothing.) So if you have a Google account, then take the next step of generating a number for it and plugging it in.

Webmaster Tools

Their use of this is fascinating, since they can tell you what people are using to search your site. Again, your own server is better for this in terms of accuracy, but this is what Google thinks your site looks like and so can give you a leg up on what content you should produce next in order to back up what Google is sending your way.

A rule of warning here - it's not the Gospel truth of what are the best keywords you should be using. Remember our lessons on Market Samurai. Not all keywords are valuable. You want to chase those which have commerciality - people click through on ads which others pay good money for. But you can scrape these keywords and run them through Market Samurai (or for free - through Domain Samurai) to find out what is working best for you.

They also tell you here what broken links you have and how you can improve your site for the search engines. Mainly that when they search a site and find broken links, they come back less often. So fixing these ensure they will search your site quickly (like minutes).

Recently (this year sometime) they plugged Webmaster Tools into Analytics which improved both of them. So when you go into Analytics (you'll have to turn on this interconnection, but it's simple) then you can see what keywords are being searched for and what pages people are accessing.

Again, this is included with your Google Account. And some, like Wordpress.com, only take Webmaster Tools. Odd, but at least you'll be able to see the keywords they visit your free Wordpress blog from it's dashboard - which is also handy.

Google+profiles

While this has been a long, slow start and with several mis-steps, now it looks like they have their feet under them.

Google+ profiles are your personal page on Google. And ties all your work on their various platforms together. And it's the best of the profiles out there, since they have learned from Facebook's and other's mistakes. Just review that freebie I gave you yesterday about setting up your social profiles and you'll get the bulk of it. (Pictures, links back to your site, the whole thing.) But they do privacy better (as much as you can on the web...)

I'm not one who cares all that much for burning my time keeping track of other people's posts. (Even Google has this on automatic.) But Google has released this along with some of their other updates, and is probably the first to use a tag (rel=author) which says that the content on that page was created there first. By doing this, they can see where someone else simply copied the content and pasted it onto their site.

So they can then give the best value to the original content. People who copy your stuff (and leave the links intact) will then be sending you authority for being the author. So they boost your site up for those keywords.

The way Google helps you with this is by enabling you to put a badge on your site which lets people "plus-1" your page. But also marks your site as the original.

Google+ pages

I'm continually surprised that there isn't a land-rush for these.

The same thing you do for yourself, you can do for any product. Like affiliate products and such. If you support or recommend a product and have put up pages about that product or service, then create a Google+ page for this and then share the link here for your content (a lot like Facebook or Twitter). But in this case, the links don't disappear, since Google is hosting it on their servers.

Now, if you have a site for that product, then create a badge from that Google page and plop that code down in the sidebar. Voila - you are now the authority for that content as well.

So if you have several sites, you create Google+ pages, share the links, and plop the badge on those different sites. Don't forget to put your link on that page to your site - it goes right under the logo you use. (Nothing like a backlink from Google to make your day, eh?)

Both on their pages and your profile, you can link all your other sites in. Of course, this makes your blogger blog have more seniority, doesn't it? Not bad for free.

- - - -

There's really too much to discuss here. I've touched on the basics we are going to use later in our "secret sauce" sub-series.

The freebie today is called the Google Plus Marketing Landscape - a collection of data from someone who is an online geek from beyond. While you can get it from his site, I've left all his links in and encourage you to visit it just to get a feel of what he knows. (His style of content isn't what I cherish, so I opted out after awhile...)

Your daily assignment is to create a Google Account if you don't have one and play around with their profiles and pages. If you want, you can start linking in your content so others can find it on Google.

Now I don't go into these "circles" things. But I'll leave you to search for them, as there is quite a bit of discussion on them. Hint: pages can't "circle" people. But you can find "shared circles" of just brands and pages to use for your pages to increase their authority. (It's just branding after all...) Active brands will include you're brand in their circles, particularly if you've shared some good content on your G+ page.

Day 15 - Secret Sauce and Social Media

So finally begins the Secret Sauce section. The "secrets" (all readily available if you know where to look) are those which have really quick SEO results and what's driven the creation of this series. This is also where it all gets exciting.

What we are covering today is the last section of The Online Sunshine Plan book, where the social media are explored.

But only partially. So this will start bringing you up to date on practical applications.

Social media is a catch-phrase for sites which people don't much understand. They operate more on word-of-mouth than anything else. And are taken to just mean "popularity contest".

Better is to think of them as a modernized "good old boy network". The word Network is key here. It's who you know and who you follow (trust) and who follows (trusts) you.

These sites mainly survive by selling advertising, which is mostly ignored by their users. However, there are enough click-through's in general to support those businesses who are addicted enough to buying advertising that they won't really check their bottom line. (It's a government-sponsored activity, BTW - tax credits for spending in this area abound.)

And those social media which can't get people to click-through on advertising ultimately implode due to lack of support.

Many of the older social media sites have moved to a different model, or were bought up by a larger corporation as a loss-leader (or like Google's Blogger and YouTube, are used to aggregate information about viewer habits - so they can sell more advertising)

The (False) Legends of Backlinking

Why social media is important these days is that Google is monitoring social media in order to see what people consider is valuable. So they can deliver the most appropriate content in their searches.

Spammers follow Google, and have jumped into social media to get their product in the top rankings. (Since the top five get about 85% of the clicks.)

And so the game continues, as Google then changes values for these. Search Engine Whack-a-Mole.

Most SEO guru's out there don't really get social media. They will tell you what you need to do is to get a lot of high-quality backlinks to your site. And they're stuck on this concept to the point where there have been some major "Google slaps" (devaluations) where some foolhardy entrepreneurs have cobbled together sets of "older" domains and addresses which they then allow people to link back to under the guise of "social media" - which is so apparently worthless that Google catches on to their game, then overnight devalues all the rankings based on those artificial creations. (Hope they invested their fast profits in real estate..)

We've covered this before. Google follows the people it services. If you are consistently producing fresh, high-quality content that is useful and considered valuable - then Google will reward you with high-rankings.

If you are after high-rankings just so you can get click-through's to your site and hopefully convert that traffic to sales - Google is going to sooner or later send your pages down to plus-100 rankings, if not outright eliminate you from their rankings completely.

Social media isn't for backlinks, although these sometimes happen. However, Google and others use it for analyzing whether other people think your content is any good - to determine its relative value compared to other material out there.

Social media means Community

And that is the basic approach which starts making sense of this scene.

We've covered community. It's what creates business models. People have a need or want and someone recognizes this, and creates a solution which people are willing to exchange something valuable for. And until someone does, there will be all this talk and whining and so on about the problem area.

This has given rise to forums, wiki's, blogs, and social networking sites like Facebook and anything that has "groups" in it.

Another need is to be able to share what you are doing, pictures of your kids and pets, and really stupid moves and all sorts of things. And this is served by Facebook and a few other sites, where you can find all about the details of their dog's diet (both ends - TMI) and who said what to whom. This is the old backyard gossip fence or neighborhood barbecue, converted to Internet versions.

The general advice I've encountered on this (and I wasted enough time in these social media sites to generally prove their consensus as workable...) - is that you pick only 2 or 3 good communities to do all your interacting with. This is where you keep your ear to the ground to find out what you need to know in order to deliver what people consider valuable. There are as many communities out there as there are scratches to itch. And more are splitting off and joining with each other every day. So you find our niche and you'll find a community there (or one will form around you pretty quick.)

And corporations have found that when they have people who simply park on Twitter and their Facebook page to deal with upsets their customers have, they can turn bad PR scenes over faulty products or service situations into a "hero riding out of the dawn to save the day" scene.

All this fiction about corporate "branding" is just that. And is why Facebook and most social media never convert in terms of "Return on Investment". Businesses already have communities around their product - they just have to join in on the conversation which they are already part of.  But buying ads in these areas is really just paying for someone to run an online service for them to help the community.

When General Motors and others pull their ads because they don't see any return in terms of improved customer consumption - they simply don't get it. Ford has a single person who is engaged all the time in just taking the pulse of various communities which Ford services with their products. Name is Scott Monty. Great guy. Look him up and follow him. He's figured this stuff out, even if Ford still hasn't. But they are closer than the other car manufacturers internationally (IMHO.) But that discussion takes us away from where we want to keep focused on...

3 types of social media

• Bookmarking
• Status Updates
• Networking

Others may disagree, saying that social media can also be categorized by type of content and how its shared. True enough.

Our focus has come in through creative content and SEO in order to figure out how to earn extra income online. So through that tunnel-vision, we can see that all these other forms of content are just that - and we can publish our vision and inspiration a thousand different ways through the Internet. But it won't change the fact that the top five spots on Google will always get the lion's share of clicks. Even the fact that Google is now tracking and presenting more than a half-dozen different ways people can produce and share their content.

And while I can (and will) continue with more of this explanation, it next goes into how to apply it.

So we'll leave you today with more freebies so you can start figuring this out on your own, testing what I say above (and as always) before/if you adopt it for your own use.

(These freebies are also your assignment today - yes, it's way more reading than you even had to do in college. But that's the way it is on this site - a data dump.)

1. This online course from SiteBuildIt! is ostensibly about writing, but says a lot about what we are talking about here. Cherry-pick it and then come back to study it thoroughly. NetwritingMasters.pdf

2. Brian Solis has been writing about the online world for years, with a few bestselling books. This is a simple article of his: Redefining the Echo Chamber.

3. As much as I recommend Marketing Samurai, there is also the fact that they deal in a great deal of education, even if its around their own product for examples. Market Samurai BlackBook.pdf

- - - -

OK, now I've pushed you over the edge. Absorb what you can. It might or might not get easier in the next few days. Because I only want to do this once, and get it as right as I can - since my next project takes me into territory which I won't have any reason to come back and refine this. So I trust you to help me make sure we build this bridge correctly so that not only you, but all you help can make this transition simply and safely as well.

Until tomorrow...

Day 06 - Sales, Funnels, and Human Nature

Today we are reviewing Section IV of An Online Sunshine Plan.

It's titled "Your Sales Funnel", but you might as well call it human nature.

And an additional ebook you should be familiar with is "Get Your Self Scam Free". 

Because what we are doing with sales is using the built-in foibles which pretty much all humankind has already programmed in. And "Scam Free" was written after I got very interested in how I was duped into a scam. Interestingly, that research allowed me to get out from under and help several others get their own money back as well. (Even though I told these scammers exactly what I was doing - they wouldn't believe it until it cost them far more...)

You simply take the data in that book and reverse it to find out how something like 99.99997% of this population works.

And of course, I was introduced to this by studying how to write "sales pages".

This data in OSP starts about page 187. And you'll see how Cialdini and Maslow were used in "Scam Free". Too simple, though.

Sales pages are just one style of writing, though. In a couple of days, I'll go over the others and how they differ - so stay tuned.

Sales Funnels

Whoever thought this term up should probably be shot. It's not all that accurate. (See page 184 as to why.)

But the general concept is that you have not just a single product to offer your new customers. Regular income is built on having a string of products which anyone can buy, so they continue to give you valuables in exchange for their trust in your on-going valuable offers.

And (though I'll go over this point in a few days in more detail) you should be investing in product lines which are consumables, or have regular service payments. All this other stuff about "income on autopilot" is a bunch of hooey. You want to deliver value and continue delivering value. You want leads to turn into clients and so your cost-per-lead drops considerably, since you don't have to spend a great deal in finding new customers in order to make your extra income goals.

The article on "Adding Value" (page 193-200) is quite interesting from this view.

You'll see from what you've covered before this, that I've changed some views on things. However, the base of this is still straight.

Mostly, this is pretty pat stuff when you review it from the data above.  So I'll leave you to this study.

I do recommend you check out the free or one-time payment for Market Samurai. Their ability search for affiliate programs is quite good. And you can tell what would be a good match and value you can deliver that supports your purpose - or simply more Internet Marketing Sleaze.

Another entertaining set of sales pages and an opt-in email series is found with "Magnetic Sponsoring". It's really worth the study. And for only about $30, you can get into their affiliate scene, where you get even more info on how their system works from an insider's view.

- - - -

Freebie today is another ebook by Michel Campbell - "Nothing but 'Net". I think you'll find his style refreshingly honest, plus you get some insider history of the early Internet. And some good ideas on how to build your own business these days.

Assignment is as above - check out some various products and services you might be interested in offering. And sign up for some newsletters so  you can study their sales funnel. (Just put your credit card well out of reach - like in another room or with someone you trust.)

Tomorrow, we'll be covering Search Engines - their supposed care and feeding...

Day 05 - Insider's Guide to Marketing Research

Good marketing research pays off well.

Now we are in the thick of it.

We are still on section III of An Online Sunshine Plan - Market Research (pg 115-154, sans Articles).

As a note: review the three main essays on this in that book -

• Where to look for your keyword research - Part I - Basics (pg 141)
• Where to look for your keyword research - Part 2 - The Real World (pg 144)
• Where's the money? I'm from Missouri - show  me. (pg 146)

These cover a very distilled research cycle and how to go about it. (Hint: Get a 3-hole punch and some binders to hold it all.)

Marketing Definition - Revisited

As covered on that first page of Section III - "Marketing" is simply finding and building markets. A "market" is anywhere people exchanges goods and services. Anywhere.

This, of course, plays right into our hands, as we are interested in earning extra income by leveraging our online investments (time, money - but mostly time.)

Market research is NOT: "Look for a niche, find a niche product, promote that product, get the sale/get the commission." That is just one step shy of a scam. Impersonal, and non-rewarding personally. It will simply tire you out.

The other reason (besides having endless content inspiration you can tap) is to work out your purpose/bliss first is so that you can stay involved and interested in what you are doing. Money has to go somewhere - your wealth has to be for a reason. (And that's not good enough  to be able to "buy stuff and show it off.")  There is no reason you can't enjoy every single moment of every single day and also be richly rewarded for your efforts. It's not work, it's a passion you are following.

Market research, you may recall from yesterday, is figuring out

• Who
• wants What
• Where and 
• for How Much.

Who - is market demographics.
What - is product selection.
Where - is product production and delivery.
How Much - is pricing.

In all of these, as covered in the book, you want to look for a viable scene which matches what you are most interested in doing to provide real value to those who find you.

Demographics can be simply found by looking at Quantcast.com or MSN adCenter Labs

Product selection can be studied by looking up Ebay, Amazon, Clickbank, About.com, etc. (see pg 148).

As we are dealing with affiliate products, you can see that they will take care of delivery and guarantees. Some sites, like Clickbank, will also show a quality score - which is the rate of returns for that product.

Note: Frankly, I don't recommend settling for Clickbank or Commission Junction or Amazon when you do adopt an affiliate product. Reasons - mostly in how they treat their affiliates. Clickbank has a nasty habit of taking back commissions if you don't meat their minimum every month, bit by bit. Commission Junction will simply dump your membership after 6 months with no sales. Amazon - unless you are pushing big-ticket items (not books) gives you only tiny payments.

But these three tell you what type of products people are buying and what to look for (and look out for).

In a later post, I'm going to give you a fuller breakdown later on what makes a good affiliate product, along with my own recommendations of a handful which have tested out over years. Right now we are looking through our Market Research to find a community which is viable and you can give value to.

An article you should review is on page 177 of An Online Sunshine Plan. Charles Heflin is quoted where he gives more steps to study the community in order to best serve it. His steps: Observe, Gather, Reward, Engage, Seek - and you are already doing these in life, so his article simply enables you to apply this to your online income production.

Paid Tool

Again, I go to Market Samurai to get a lot of this homework done faster.

Unfortunately, their "Samurai Dojo" doesn't go into much detail here about the tools in their product. 

There is one lesson, which tells you the "commerciality" of a keyword phrase.

But consider this screenshot:

(click to enlarge)

This is their "monetization" page. "Be Healthy" came up as a keyword, so searching in Amazon found a nifty little set of products you can promote. Note that if you sold the Cuisinart Griddler, you'd get a tidy sum (take about 4-8% of that price).

If your passion was cooking, then this would be a nice review page to do with an affiliate payment for every sale.  However, the much cheaper coffee filters are in much higher demand - and would require much more research to get that figured out.

They also allow you to search from  ClickBank, Commission Junction, and PayDotCom.

Again: you start out with your own best interests at heart - your purpose/bliss - and find what community already exists which you can serve, find out their keywords, find out what they are like, find the products they are buying.

Once you settle on that community, then you can go to the next phase - which is figuring out how to tell them what they want to hear - which is not politics (although they undoubtedly got it from marketing) - it's so you can help them improve their lives by offering and delivering true value.

- - - -

Here's an ebook which really builds on what we covered today: "Clickin' It Rich" by Michael Campbell. He used to sell it, then gave it away, and now it's hard to find as he's only dealing directly with a select group of clients.

He'll take you quite beyond what we deal with here and starts to give you an inkling of what is needed to make extra income online. Whole picture stuff.

Assignment today: catch up on your reading above.

And it would be smart to go ahead and get your binders, yellowpads, and 3-hole punch to start collecting and organizing all this data for your niche.

(Also - catch up on your comments below. It's key to be writing something every day as part of learning the discipline of creating content.)

Day 04 - Why is Market Research Dreaded?

You'd think that something so fascinating would have people lining up to start it.

With the right tools, I can stay on the trail of discovery for hours and even days.

But missing adequate tools, it becomes arduous - with results that are sketchy at best.

Before we get into todays' content, let me say that this is based on Section III of The Online Sunshine Plan - which is a hint to review this as part of your studies today. (But just as there is a lot in this section, we are also not going to attempt to cover this subject in a single day's lesson.)

Let's see how we've gotten here:

• To make extra income online, you have to provide something valuable to exchange with someone else. 
• You need to promote solutions to people's problems. 
• And you have to give good content so people can trust your solution and ask for more information (become "leads").

There are 3 myths that I mention in this section of that book:

1.  "Markets are impersonal." Truth is that they are very personal and the more interaction you have with your prospective buyers, the better will be your sales and income.
2. "Customers and Consumers." There are no customers (literally means people of habit) or consumers (people who use things up.) There are really only clients - people who you service for as long as they need your help.
3. "Competition." Also doesn't exist in actuality. There are levels of creativity - and if you don't have enough income, you can become more creative in finding valuable solutions to offer. Nature is abundant. Only people create "competitors" so they can have a game to play, figuring that they need opponents.

I continue (pg 117 by now) to logically define marketing as an extension of the Golden Rule. The subject is summarized by the statement that you have to give in order to receive.

So what, then, is marketing research? 

A nutshell definition: Finding who has problems and how they talk about it so you can provide solutions in a way they can easily understand.

In that statement, you see that we are working to find out:

Who are the potential buyers.
What they are looking for.
What phrases they used to describe it.
Where they are using these phrases to find it.

Those phrases are known as "keyword phrases" or "keywords".  They define what people are looking for. 

Now, how to find these keyword phrases has free tools and paid tools. And the ones I recommend in the book aren't (now) the ones I use. KeywordResearchPro quit working when they had a major Google Algorithm change. RankTracker has an annual payment (plus add-on's which also cost you), and is mostly good for tracking your site ranking. Otherwise, the tools they offer are based on older Internet traffic theories, which have either changed or been superceded in the last 2 years.

(I favor buying a tool once, and ensuring that the company who offers it supports continued development. Continuing subscriptions need to be really worth it. (Other than my Internet provider and site hosting, I have just one service I pay for. Food, clothing, and housing and cel phone are different - we're talking about our online business activities...)

Free tools to find keywords. 

Mostly, these come from Google. Almost everything else online either uses Google as a backend, or has been bought up and now doesn't work. Not that Google has a monopoly, but rather that they are far more effective.

1st Google tool: Adwords Keyword Tool
(Go ahead and open that up in another window so you can look at it. ) This was designed around people looking for keywords to use in their advertising. But it's far more versatile than that. Enter a search term and you'll see lots of columns of data. And you can export these to a spreadsheet (CSV) and play around with the data offline.

Key columns to notice: 
Global Monthly Searches - how many searches are done for a given term. Doesn't mean people - it means how many times this phrase is looked for. If there aren't very many, then it's probably not an easy phrase to earn income with.
Approximate CPC - tells whether other people consider it worth running an ad for. If you have .05 or less, it's basically not. (You can set the filters at the top and eliminate those where no one is running ads for them.) If people are paying money to run ads, they figure that they can get that money back with sales. Means you can make income here.
Local Search Trends - shows whether its a fad, has seasonal issues, or is a regularly searched phrase. Lack of any trends usually means the volume of searches is too low to register.

The next free tool you'll need is to simply look up those top words in Google search. Unfortunately, this is a one-by-one approach. The good part of this is that you can find out who the top-linked sites are. Plug all this data into a spreadsheet and you'll have a lot of your market research right there.

What you want to find out is what Google says are how many sites exist with that keyword phrase in them - in some type or kind of combination. Remember that while others refer to this as "competition", you can also use this number to see the probability of how many sites are actually search engine optimized. (Rough rule of thumb - less than 1%. So just knock off 2 zero's to start with.)

However, it gets even wilder - those Charles Heflin links I gave you in the book (page  128) will show you how you are really only having to be interested in the first 2 or 3 pages, since the rest aren't even using your exact phrase.

Meaning that if you optimize your page well, you will pretty easily rank at the top for that phrase (well, we have some additional tools - both free and paid - which can cement your top standings.)

The thing to worry about is the SEO'd pages. And in the book, I have you Web1Marketing had a tool to check "all in title", "all in anchor" and "exact phrase", which would give you a good indicator if those pages were optimized. Unfortunately, this page now produces no results for Google. (Meaning the algorithm was changed - or that page was blocked by Google.) But you can do these searches on your own. Check out Google Guide (http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html) and find the operators you can prefix your searches with.

You can string these operators together with "AND" in between, but be warned that Google will shut you down after just a few searches like this. (Spammers have been there, done that ahead of you.)

All told, it's possible to do this for free, but time consuming and frustrating. You may need to wait hours between a few searches (and I have, many times.)

A word on Wordtracker. Their free tool isn't worth it, and their paid tool costs too much for what you get from it - because it is again, a subscription. IMHO. Tried it, didn't get the results I needed.

Paid Tools. 

And I finally found a replacement. (Told you I was doing this for hours and days at a time...) It's a one-time purchase and they keep improving it. It's called Market Samurai. (And it has a free intro version you can try out...) They've signed up for various professional-level/corporate API's to keep their tool running. Those API's are prohibitive for an individual or small start-up.

They have substantial pages on Keyword Research, which I recommend to you as part of the homework assignment today. Because they explain things with videos and also provide a transcript - doing this so well, that it's ridiculous for me to try to reinvent this wheel. (And did I say their training is free?!?)

Even though they discuss their tool through out, the simple points they present are very basic.

Introduction to Keyword Research
The Golden Rules of finding remunerative keywords

Now, skip to the next lesson we need - which concerns how to find pages which are already SEO'd and which are ranking for some reason with no real SEO (yes, these do exist - and I'll mention some probable reasons in later lessons)

Discovering SEO'd pages existing for your keyword

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And that's more than enough for today. This will get you started on the basics. We have some more work to do on our keywords, and our market research. But that's another day.

Do let me know what comments and questions you have. Either post them below, or send me an email.

Today's freebie: A Millionaire's Secret

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Coming up tomorrow is more about how to discover who needs your help and how to help them find your solution...