AffiliateSEO

Internet marketing redefines work and career boundaries.

You can earn your millions whether you’re young or old.

Take it from the expert.

Shawn Collins of http://blog.affiliatetip.com recommends blogs, podcasts, and forums for affiliate marketers.

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click Campaigns, the most important task you should focus on is the very foundation of optimization: keyword research.

The amount of time you devote on keywords list generation and how you conduct it says a lot about what and how you are as an SEO consultant.

It also says a lot about how your SEO campaigns are gonna end up and how stable your campaigns will be.

To make sure you don’t go the way of ’search engine optimizers’ who get the rankings for keyword phrases no one is actually searching for, here are some steps you may want to take note of:

1. Identify your website’s target niche.

What are your products? What are your services?
Which market do you want to capture?
Do you want to focus on a specific geographic location?

2. Identify your resources.

What information do you have on hand? Do you know the products and the services the current buyers prefer for this specific market? Do you know the query strings net surfers usually key in when searching for these products or services?

3. Identify your brand competitors.

Using what little information you have about the strongest brand competitors, do an online search of the products you and most of the consumers are interested in.

4. Identify your site competitors.

Google the keyword phrases you consider relevant to these products and services (based on your research). Take note of the sites that are coming up tops in the SERPs for these particular search strings. Take note how frequent some specific sites are appearing in the search engine ranking pages. We all can learn a thing or two on Search Engine Optimization from these sites.

5. Research, research, research!

Study the top sites. They’re up there for a reason and that reason for sure is, they are doing their search engine optimization campaigns well. Learn from these optimized-site topnotchers.
What are they using? are they using buttons or images? what are the keywords in their alt-tags?
Are they using text? What anchor texts do you see?
When you click on the links, do you land on a relevant page? is navigation difficult or do you immediately see what you are looking for?

6. Read it once, read it twice and yes, you’ll read it again… Content is and will still be king.

Check the content of the popular pages (the pages appearing on top of the search engine rankings).
Is the content interesting? What keyword phrases are predominant in the copy? How often have they been used? List these keywords.

7. Now for the real deal… Research validation.

After shortlisting the prevalent keyword sets, go to digitalpoint.com’s keyword suggestion tool page.

8. Prepare to set your metrics. Keep track of your keyword SERPs.

Type the shortlisted keywords and check how many users are searching for these keywords per day. Tabulate your SEO data.

9. Target highly-relevant, top-searched keywords.

When you already have the needed traffic data, rank the query strings accordingly. Sift thru the pile and determine which keywords drive high-volume traffic everyday, and which amongst those are highly relevant to your target niche.

10. Organize!

Group your final keywords list into categories. You will find out how handy categorizing them earlier would be when you proceed to content, image and landing page optimization. You will also need this for your directory listings and off-page optimization campaigns.

Affiliate Newbies

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, watch this video for tips on how to get started in affiliate marketing.

Shawn Collins discusses what  he would do if he’d start up an affiliate site right now.

SEMPO finally released the results of its first-ever In-House SEO Salary Survey.

I recently published the 2008 edition of the AffStat report, which details the latest statistics in affiliate marketing.

One of the data points that is always asked about is the annual salary information for affiliate managers.

So here you go…

It’s a common question that companies who are considering hiring a search engine optimization company often face – is this something that we can do in-house? More importantly, can we do this in-house and get the same results that an expert search engine optimization company would provide?

As this article will demonstrate, clearly the answer is “yes” to both questions. However, as this article will also demonstrate, getting the types of results that an expert at search engine optimization can provide will cost you – often more than outsourcing.

For the purpose of this article, I’m ignoring the multitudes of companies that decide to dump the job on somebody already in their organization (usually an IT person who already has too much to do) rather than hiring a search engine optimization company. It has been my experience that while some of these people eventually provide decent results, they are the exception. More often than not, the project never leaves the ground, or the effort is halfhearted at best. In a worst case scenario, your internal person may embrace tactics that no expert search engine optimization company would ever use because they can put your site at risk of penalization or outright removal from the engine indexes.

My company often works with firms after they have used non-expert internal talent to optimize their website, and most of the time we are actually doing more work because much of what has been done is ineffective or dangerous. We have to take everything apart and put it all back together, often while making requests to the search engines to have penalties lifted.

The real goal of this article, however, is to assume that a business has decided to embark on a search engine optimization campaign, and that it is also committed to using a proven expert in search engine optimization. The choice then is simple - does the business hire an experienced resource to work in-house or should it instead go with an outsourced search engine optimization company?

A recent study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, published in the January 2008 edition of DM News (”Healthy SEM Salaries Rule: SEMPO Survey”), points out that experience in search engine marketing carries a high price tag. For instance, if you were looking to hire someone with more than five years of experience in search engine marketing, you could expect to pay between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. For somebody with experience but not five or more years, you can expect to pay anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 per year.

If nothing else, these real world figures should convince discerning companies that expert search engine optimization and marketing is not something that you should dump off on an existing employee without any experience in the field. The free market has determined that expert search engine optimization and marketing is worth at least $60,000 per year for a full time position, and up to $200,000 per year.

On the other hand, most reputable search agencies have many more than five years of collective experience in the search engine marketing industry. In addition, a high percentage of these agencies offer SEO services that cost considerably less than $60,000 per year, to say nothing of $200,000 per year. It should also be noted that this figure neglects to include any of the additional costs associated with hiring – benefits, training, and so on. In addition, an expert search engine optimization company will have a broad range of sites from which to draw knowledge, while your in-house expert will likely only have one, or a handful at best.

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Wakefield, MA, January 10, 2008 – In-house search engine marketers (SEMs) are receiving healthy salaries in line with their experience levels but if you want a salary in the mid-to-high $100s to the $200K range you are usually going to have to invest five to seven years to get there – a traditional dynamic in which experience brings greater compensation. The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), www.sempo.org, today announced this and other top line findings from its first-ever survey of in-house SEM job salary compensation.

One of the key findings is that roughly one third of in-house search engine marketers are managing monthly budgets in excess of $200,000. “We anticipated a lower ceiling of monthly spend closer to the $100,000 range so we were pleasantly surprised,” says Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee and Lead SEO Program Manager with Microsoft. “The $200K monthly spend is a healthy barometer of the search marketing industry and it syncs up with SEMPO’s current trend projections that SEM spending will double by 2011, to more than $18 billion.”

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Let’s start with the basics: an SEO’s guide to internet marketing, brand positioning and domain name buying.

1. Product
What products or services are you trying to sell? Is there a need for this product or service? What are the customers interested in when they check out similar products or services? What isyour competitive advantage.

In internet marketing, one easy and surefire way of getting this information right away is to go for a tried and tested keyword suggestion tool . I use digitalpoint’s keyword suggestion tool to check the daily traffic for the top keyword searches in Google (WordTracker) and in Yahoo (Overture).

E.g.

What products or services are you trying to sell?

Computers.
Search the keyword ‘computers’ using digitalpoint keyword suggestion tool (or your preferred keyword research tool). What do you see?

The top keyword search results for the keyword computers :

computer , computer notebook , computer training, computer sale, computer desktop, computer software, computer service, computer dell, computer repair, computer store, computer support, computer electronics, computer desk , computer game , apple computer
Do you sell these brands? These computer add-ons? Do you offer these computer services? Do you want to be seen as one of the major competitor sites selling these general products, brand and services?
If you do then do the mix-and-match game. Mix relevant keywords and match them with an available tld.

2. Competitors
Based on your market research, which sites are appearing strongest on the SERPs? They are your site competitors. Study these sites and learn why they are ahead of the SEO race. There are a lot of SEO tools online which can help you get a heads-up on how your competitors are doing.
a.The first thing I’ll recommend though is for you to get hold of good old firefox (the SEO plug-ins are simply awesome!). You’ll find out later how handy firefox’s SEO plug-ins are when you proceed with your search engine optimization tasks.
if you don’t have it yet.

b. Download Niche Watch.
Enter your target keyword and the website of the strongest brand competitor for your market niche.
Study the competitors who rank high on SERPs. What’s the domain name? What are the subdomains? What are the keywords that are appearing repeatedly on their sites ? What’s the marketing slant? What products or aspect and features of the products are they focusing on? What’s their competitive advantage?
c. Download SEOQuake. The page stats it will give you on your site competitors’ rankings and performance will help you come-up with a well-researched competitor analysis.
d. Download SEObook. Discover why over 50,000 webmasters use SEO for firefox and ramp up your internet marketing campaigns.
3. Branding
Choosing a domain name is somewhat similar to conceptualizing a brand name.Your goal is to make your product or service known and for it to be remembered. You want the brand to evoke interest and loyalty. You don’t just just design your campaigns for new clients, you want repeat orders, repeat customers.
Customers… Your target market… You create your brand for them.
In Search Engine Optimization, the same premise holds true.
You choose a domain name designed to draw your customers in.
But that doesn’t end there. You don’t decide on a domain name with just your customers in mind. You optimize not only for people but for search engine bots, the search engine spiders - the creepy crawlers of the internet world.
4. Strategy
Who is it really that you want to please first, the bots or your target consumers? (Remember if the search engine bots don’t like you, you would be invisible in the SERPs). What stage are you in your marketing cycle? Do you prioritize returning customers or do you pay a premium to get a hundred new ones? Do you believe that name recall’s the end-all and be-all or do you bank on employing good old marketing techniques to get you to the top?
Decide on how you want to be seen: is it by being endorsed or by showing up tops on the search engine list? Is it by having a short, catchy name or is it by having a looooong keyword-rich domain name lording it over the search engines? (If you can still find a top-searched keyword or short keyword phrase highly-relevant to your market, by all means buy it! That’ll be a snatch right there! )
5. ROI
Return on investment. Conversion. Bottom line. Ultimately, this is what most e-commerce sites’ end-goal is. So, how do you plan to earn your dollars? How much do you want to earn in how long a time frame? What online earning potentials do you see for your site? How do you plan to monetize your site (aside from selling your products or services)? Will you be setting up google adsense or selling affiliate products or will you be focusing on your products or services alone as your major income stream?
If you plan to earn from google adsense and affiliate products and and are really keen on earning profits at a short turn-around time, then by all means buy computerelectronicstore.xxx. It wouldn’t do so much for branding purposes since it’s a kilometer long and quite generic but well, you want the bots to see those keywords, right?
If you plan to stay for the long haul and want both customer and search engine-bot respect, get your pen or notepad ready, you’re on for a tedious and tiring research but then again, who’s complaining? You’ll find it fruitful when you earn your big bucks, i tell you.
And speaking about fruits…
Apple used to be one.
Err, it still is…
Or is it?
Ask Steve Jobs.
Or better yet, ask Google. You’ll see his answer right  on top of the first page.

Go. Google it.
Or should I say, do a search on the internet by typing it?
Na-ah. Just.. Google it.
Google.
A word formerly unbeknownst but now the most powerful.
Short.
Catchy.
… and so i go on and on…. and on… and….
The point is, the name is only as important as the effort you’ll devote in optimizing your site. And you start it by choosing the best domain.
… and we go back to my first statement. Run-around, round-about… and so the circle goes.
Addendum: Online, you’ll be spending a lot of time sifting thru articles, researching, lurking, meandering… sifting again, researching… Most of the times it will seemingly be a waste of time (more so if you’re reading my articles, har-de-har) unless - UNLESS - you go right up and try it out and optimize.
Yeah, OPTIMIZE? o-p-t-i-m-i-z-e?
That’s what you came here for, remember? You wanna know how you can get a good domain name?
So, what are you still doing?
Go ahead and buy your domain name now.
Here’s one tip so you’ll forgive me from taking your time. The cheapest Domain Name I’ve found so far.