Associate Programs Newsletter #366

Super affiliate Dan Ho says that one thing many affiliates get wrong is keyword research - or keyterm research as he calls it.

He makes his affiliate living by concentrating on "mini-themes" or niches within niches...

I asked him to write an article explaining this concept.
      
Also, lots of other good stuff.

CONTENTS:

1. Ramp up your sales by selecting the right keyterms
2. Cashing in on an obsession
3. Top list of old-time Internet marketers
4. 8 reasons why Craig is an RSS addict
5. How to reduce your PPC bid costs
6. Good, easy way to do a valuable survey
7. Want to comment?
8. Thought for today: Promise me

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1. Ramp up your sales by selecting the right keyterms
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By Dan Ho
 
By the time you finish reading this short article, you'll have a better understanding of how to ratchet up your sales by selecting good keyterms.
 
If you've been involved in Internet marketing for any length of time, you've heard countless times how important keyterms are. Even though most people I talk to seem to know in theory about their importance, I've still discovered that many people aren't proficient at doing keyterm research and made poor choices.
 
If they've already built many pages based on poor keyterms, this adversely affects their traffic and/or their sales and they've wasted a tremendous amount of time.
 
Back in 2004, I was interviewed for an ebook called Niche Site Confessions. My contribution to that book primarily consisted of keyterm selection.
 
Since that ebook is no longer being sold, I'm going to give you a tip that people had to pay for back then. I called it "mini-themes" and here's what it means.
 
I noticed that a lot of people were missing out on capturing a lot of potential traffic and sales because they wouldn't take a subject, even if it was a very small one, and break it down into even smaller topics.
 
Let's take myself as an example. I like to promote niches in the health market. One of the niches I promote is nutritional supplements.
 
Because I would scope out the competition, I noticed that a lot of website owners would do this: they would create an individual page on specific supplements or ingredients that appear in supplement products.
 
For example, a popular supplement is coenzyme Q10. A typical website that sold this supplement would do one page on coenzyme Q10, talking about its benefits, its side effects, its role in the body, and so on.
 
Because it's not efficient to optimize a single page for a great many keyterms, these website owners left a lot of traffic and sales on the table.
 
My suggestion when it comes to mini-themes is to break a small topic like coenzyme Q10 down into numerous smaller topics. For example, rather than create one page on coenzyme Q10 which covers everything, build multiple pages on it, doing each page separately for one or two keyterms.
 
Unlike what others did, I would optimize a page just on the benefits of coenzyme Q10. I'd build another page on the side effects of coenzyme Q10, and so on.
 
By doing this, I stood a better chance of getting ranked highly in the search engines for those keywords as opposed to someone who covered all of the same material on only one page and, therefore, could not efficiently optimize their page for all of the good keyterms people would type in to research that supplement.
 
Now, do you think this strategy of mini-themes (themes within a theme) had an impact on my sales? The answer: a huge one!
 
Not much has changed with my thinking on this strategy in the last three to four years, but more recently an idea came along that augmented and confirmed my keyword philosophy.
 
This idea was spurred on by an interview that Ken Evoy, founder of Site Build It!, did with Chris Anderson, author of the widely acclaimed book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More".
 
In the interview, Ken makes a statement to Chris, concerning his daughter's popular site on Anguilla:

"Anguilla. Take that niche site. It is found by 8,000 search terms at Google. The top 20 keywords account for 25-30% of its traffic, but the remaining 7,980 account for all the rest."
 
Ken goes on to say, "Those searchers are highly niched, therefore highly interested and targeted visitors."
 
After making these revealing statements, which my own evidence has borne out over the years, Ken asks Chris a bit later: "...is this keyword distribution in fact what you refer to when you talk about the mini-tails - the tails within a tail?" to which Chris replies, "You nailed it. Yes, that's exactly right."
 
Now, what I found interesting was the "tails within a tail" comment, which, in my view of things, was similar to my strategy of mini-themes, or "themes within a theme".
 
However, the long tail philosophy for keywords is not just a rehash of what I was saying; there are nuances.
 
My strategy had one basic aim: to rank higher in the engines for a broader range of targeted keyterms on a specific subject due to higher relevancy, leading to increased sales.
 
The long tail of keyterms, however, implies more of a notion of effectively mining the various niches within a niche.
 
Let's use another example.

If someone is looking for a fish oil product to improve their health, they may begin their research by typing in the keyword "fish oil". After looking at some results, they may not find what they are looking for, or they read some of the pages that appear in the search results and become educated on the subject. As they become more educated, they start refining their searches with longer phrases, that is, more specific, keywords.

Eventually, they may be convinced from their research that they need to be taking a "pharmaceutical grade fish oil supplement" or a "molecularly distilled fish oil supplement". These are two examples coming from the top of my head.
 
Now, if you really think about it, these technically aren't really "themes within a theme"; they are more akin to "niches within a niche". That is, fish oil may be a niche product in the supplement market, but a "molecularly distilled fish oil supplement" is a niche within that niche.
 
The beauty of targeting keyterms like this is twofold.
 
First, if you happen to be selling a product that meets these criteria, you are going to have a much higher conversion rate because the person typing in these phrases is looking for something very particular, is probably more educated on the subject, and, all in all, further along the buying cycle.
 
Second, as Ken Evoy mentions, if a great deal of your traffic is coming from a wide range of niche keyterms and not just 10 to 20 bigger ones, you are more hedged against fluctuations in Google. While some of your pages may fall, others will rise.
 
If you are dependent on a vast majority of your traffic from a small number of keyterms, one bad shift from the search engines can lead to a drastic drop in traffic and sales.
 
For all these reasons, in my affiliate training service I am employing both of these philosophies - mini-themes and long tails - when I do the keyword research for my subscribers on the products we are promoting.
 
But even if you aren't a subscriber to my service, you can take what you've just learned and start getting more targeted traffic and making a lot more sales if you take the time to think of how it applies to what you're selling and implement it.

 * Affiliate training by Dan Ho
 
Dan Ho recently launched new affiliate training in which he'll make it as easy as possible for you to succeed.
 
Dan will: Pick an affiliate product for you to promote (a good one that produces residual income); do the keyword research; provide tips via his email newsletter; provide training via weekly teleconferences; and answer questions and help you on a private members' forum - no extra charge. As an optional extra, he'll even build your website for you, if you want him to.
 
I don't think anyone anywhere is offering to do so much for affiliates to make sure they succeed.
 
You can sign up here...
 
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/training

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2. Cashing in on an obsession
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One way to make a living as an affiliate is to identify a hot trend or an obsession and write about it. Here's an excellent example.

Celebrity Baby Blog - http://www.Celebrity-Babies.com cashes in on the obsession millions of people have with celebrities.

It posts photos of celebrities and their babies, tells fans what the babies are wearing, and provides links to stores where the products can be bought.

Does this sound boring to you? Read on and weep when you see the numbers involved...

The blog's founder, 32-year-old Danielle Friedland, a former Avon Products executive assistant, says she launched the blog in 2004 as a lark, after becoming bored with a blog on knitting.

Some lark. Celebrity Baby Blog now gets 10 million page views a month, according to the Wall Street Journal. Last year it earned $500,000 in advertising from big companies including Verizon, McDonald's and General Motors.

The blog's advertising rates sound like something out of the days before the 2001 dot-com crash. They vary from $7 to $35 CPM (per 1,000 impressions). You can see the details here:
http://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/plan.php?site=cbb

Judging by advertisers' testimonials, they're getting their money's worth.

Could YOU have success like that with a blog?

Maybe. Maybe not. If you're going to try, you need to learn from experts, people like Anik Singal and Rosalind Gardner, who run Blog Classroom, a blog training program showing you the quickest, easiest way to get started online.

If you've never set up a blog, you'll be surprised how easy it is. A WordPress blog is also wonderfully easy to use. The first time I tried one, I was VERY pleasantly surprised.

In their 100+ video training program, Anik and Rosalind will show you everything - how to set up a blog very quickly, how to maintain it in only a few minutes a day, how to get traffic within minutes of posting your first post, which WordPress plugins you use, eight different ways to monetize it, and so on.

Blogs are HOT, there's no escaping it.

However, out of all the millions upon millions of blogs, most earn pitifully little.

A very small minority of bloggers have figured out how to make them work extremely well. So if you want to go this route, don't go alone. Learn from experts.

Their expert training isn't cheap, so you'll need to be strongly committed to making this work.

Check out the details here...
 
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/blog-class

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3. Top list of old-time Internet marketers
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This will bring back memories for those of you who have been online for years...

Neil Shearing has written a list of the "old-time" Internet marketers who have had the most influence on his Internet marketing career.

http://www.neilshearing.com/2008/05/07/my-top-ten-list-of-influential-old-time-internet-marketers/

TIP: As well as being interesting and encouraging feedback, blog posts like this can produce very useful backlinks, if they encourage owners of well established, popular sites to link to you.

I was honored to be mentioned.

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4. 8 reasons why Craig is an RSS addict
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One of our Burleigh Heads team members, Craig Cahill, is addicted to RSS. If you don't use RSS much, you may be surprised by some of the benefits he's discovered...

8 reasons to RSS

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5. How to reduce your PPC bid costs
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This is the first of a five-part series by our PPC expert Reena Shohet providing simple tips on how to boost your Google AdWords Quality Score. In this series you'll learn what factors impact your Quality Score and how to reduce your minimum bid costs to generate more profit.

Quality Score may be more complex than you think...

Quality Score - Best Friend or Worst Enemy?

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6. Good, easy way to do a valuable survey
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Do you want to do a survey to get valuable data on what your website visitors really want?

Craig has been testing SurveyGizmo. Here's his verdict...

SurveyGizmo review

(You can take part in the quick survey Craig set up and see SurveyGizmo in action.)

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7. Want to comment?
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Do you want to comment on this newsletter...

You can always do this when you read one of these newsletters.

It's easy. Go to http://www.AssociatePrograms.com

You'll see the latest newsletter featured on the main page.

Scroll to the bottom of the newsletter, click on "Submit Comment" and add your comment.

(Comments are moderated. I'm in Queensland, Australia, and may be sleeping when your comments are posted. So if you don't see your comments appear immediately, that's probably the reason.)

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8. Thought for today: Promise me
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"Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." (Christopher Robin to Pooh) - A. A. Milne.

All the best

Allan Gardyne