Sweden Thanks Me
How to Choose an SEO
Getting the High Ground with Domains
Most aspects of SEO work on “equal” ground.
No matter how exclusive and high quality a backlink is, your competitor can always get a backlink of equal value.
No matter how relevant an article is, your competitor can always write an article of similar keyword relevance.
Almost every aspect of SEO can be duplicated by your opposition.
So when you find an aspect of SEO that is entirely unbalanced – and effective enough that it can tip the scales against the sites of multi-million dollar companies – it’s worth knowing how to use this aspect to your advantage.
A picture’s worth a thousand words.
Open up Market Samurai and look at the SEO Competition matrix for “Credit Cards”.
You’ll see 10 results that look a lot like this:
Notice anything strange?
It might be something that you’ve seen in your own niche. You might even notice it practically every time you do a Google search.
These 10 results reveal important story about one of Google’s great biases.
Let’s start looking at the 2nd result, and continue through the results immediately below it.
Visa, MasterCard, American Express – all huge names, synonymous with the term “credit cards”.
In terms of search engine relevance – these sites (synonymous with the term “credit cards” itself) are some of the most relevant credit card sites online.
Below those, there are some credit card comparison services, and smaller credit card providers such as Discover Card, Citi and Chase – the sort of “mix” of sites that you’d typically expect to find on a search engine results page… All relevant sites, but with lower levels of authority and relevance.
But the first result…
Here’s where things get interesting…
The first result on the page is www.creditcards.com
It sits ahead of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express – all multi-billion dollar companies with marketing budgets that could buy a small country…
Their names are synonymous with the words “credit cards”…
They have plenty of high PageRank links, including links from some of the largest and most reputable sites online…
And 100,000’s more links than their smaller rival…
…And yet they’ve been beaten to the punch – they’ve met a real David versus Goliath scenario with this “creditcards.com”.
This story repeats itself…
It’s something you can see in practically any keyword niche you analyze.
Smaller sites with keyword-optimized domains are seeing their SEO efforts magnified over time – giving them an unfair advantage that allows them to outrank competitors who boast more links, better content, higher PageRanks and more.
Let’s look deeper into the SEO analysis to see it in action…
Here are the off-page results again from Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module.
www.creditcards.com has lowest PageRank (PR) of all domains on the first page of results, and fewer Backlinks to the Page (BLP) and Backlinks to the Domain (BLD) than most of its competitors.
Its domain age is roughly on par with most of the domains there (some are higher, some are lower).
But it has one clear feature almost exclusively absent from the competition – it has the keyword “credit cards” in the domain name.
This demonstrates just how valuable it can be to get a good keyword-optimized domain.
Good domain names make SEO a whole lot easier.
They leverage or magnify your SEO efforts – so that each link you build, or article you create, counts more heavily towards your rankings – so you can put in less work than your competitors and still get the same (or better) effect.
This gives you a strong advantage over your opponents.
Think about the value of getting better results, with less time and effort.
Could it mean you have more time on your hands to devote to improving your site in other ways? Could it mean you get more visitors? Could it mean more sales? Could it mean bigger profits?
These opportunities to leverage your results in SEO are rare.
Using keyword optimized domains is one of the few “jiu-jitsu” SEO techniques that still remain effective, allowing you to use the search engines’ heavy bias towards keyword optimized domains to your advantage.
So what should you do now?
4 Action Points for Using Domains Effectively
- Use Keyword Domains for SEO – Obviously if you’re setting up a new site, and you aim to invest in SEO to attract visitors, get a keyword optimized domain.
- Consider Moving to a Keyword Domain – If you’ve just set up a site, and it’s still in its early phase, consider moving to a keyword optimized domain. If you have an older site, the decision might not be so clear-cut though, because moving to a new domain name usually means starting afresh in the eyes of the search engines.
- Keep Your Competitors Out – Check for, and get, any high-value keyword domains in your market. Remember: no matter how successful you come to be you can always be unseated by a competitor bearing a keyword.com domain – so even if you don’t use the domains immediately yourself, protect yourself and keep potential competitors out of your niche by holding onto dangerous domains yourself.
- Just Wait For What’s Up Next… – Over the next week, we’re going to drill deeper and deeper into how to find, select and utilize domains effectively for SEO, and look at some of the advanced techniques that professional domainers use to secure dynamite domains, and outrank established high-PageRank competitors like they were taking candy from babies.
Written by Brent Hodgson.
How to increase sales in a recession
Many people in businesses want to know how to increase sales in recession. You can use the recession to your advantage, by advertising sales for your business. You can pitch that it is because of the recession, and that you understand that many people are going through hard times right now. You want to help them by lowering costs for a certain period of time, so they can still buy your product or service, even if they are having a financial crisis. This will entice more people to buy from you.
Do New Years resolutions suck?
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that deciding upon some new resolutions at the start of the year is usually a rather silly and pointless exercise. Doesn’t it just set you up for disappointment?
After all, it’s a well-known fact that most people don’t stick to their resolutions for more than a day or two or a couple of weeks at most.
Besides, what makes January 1st such an important day that it alone should mark the new beginning for not only the change of year but also changes in one’s life?
Sure. I suppose it can be a good thing from a symbolic perspective, but isn’t starting fresh and making new beginnings – well…isn’t that what mornings are for? And we each get 365 of those per year! Shouldn’t we be resolving to “______” every single day?
Share your thoughts.
Will Smith’s Wisdom
“I hate being scared to do something.”
One of my favorite quotes from this video compilation. What’s your favorite quote?
Post it in the comments box below.
Increase Your Sales with CPA Marketing
CPA Marketing has become more popular lately with the high profile launches of several high-ticket “how to” info products around the CPA space. It’s proven to be a rapid and powerful way to increase your sales in many different businesses. But be careful, it can be risky!
What Is CPA Marketing?
CPA, which stands for Cost per Action, is basically a form of affiliate advertisement that is used by almost all companies throughout the world in order to generate leads for their products. This marketing is done by affiliates who work through their own websites in order to send traffic to the advertiser’s website for the product of the company. CPA deals with specific forms of marketing which involve pay per click and pay per lead ads.
CPA Marketing – The Reason behind Its Sudden Hype
Most of us are aware of affiliate marketing, which is a form of virtual advertisement on the Internet with the help of which companies all over the world sell their products to consumers from any part of the globe. However, have you ever heard of CPA marketing? Well, CPA stands for Cost per Action.
The basic idea of a CPA marketing plan is to gain useful information from potential consumers and convert them into profitable leads for future sales generation. This information can be of various kinds: telephone number, residential address, email address, social security number, credit or debit card number, etc.
Depending on the importance of the information marketers in a CPA network get paid. Yes, all you need to do is have potential customers who come to your website submit crucial information about themselves so that the company that you are working for can use it in future for affiliate marketing. Sometimes the pay for a single bite of such information can be only 70 cents. At other times it can be as high as $50!
A great example of a CPA Campaign running right now is the Ab Circle Pro promoted by Jennifer Nicole Lee. What makes this CPA Campaign particularly powerful is that it is also currently running on as a TV Infomercial, therefore, it’s already something that a lot of people are somewhat familiar with.
The best thing about CPA Marketing is that you get paid even if you don’t manage to sell the product that your company is making. Basically if the individual, who visits your website clicks on an advertisement, downloads a newsletter, signs up for a regular subscription or simply goes ahead and buys the product, you get paid in commission.
However, if you want to be taken seriously as a CPA marketer by CPA networks then you need to have a website of your own. Companies will want to see if you are fully equipped with apparatus that you will require to promote their products. If you don’t have a website of your own, create one immediately. If you are not sure about creating one on your own, hire a professional to do the job for you.
Once you have your own website you need to embed the HTML codes and links of the various products of the companies that you want to market through CPA networks, on to your website. You can ask the website designer who made your website to do this job for you as well if you don’t want to do it yourself.
Cost per Action marketing is more profitable than affiliate marketing in the sense that in case of the latter, an affiliate only gets paid in case of a sale. In case of CPA marketing, one gets paid as long as he or she can derive some sort of activity from the consumer. Generation of leads is what companies look for from a CPA marketer.
Once you have come across a profitable line of advertising among them any CPA networks out there you can build on your leads by also indulging in affiliate marketing of the same products. You can invest in your website by submitting articles to article directories to spread awareness of the existence of your website. Using Google Adsense is also a good option to do the same.
Depending on your Return on Investment (ROI) you can invest in your CPA network as much as you like. The idea is to make more and more individuals visit your website so that you can generate better leads.
If CPA Marketing excites you and is something that you could see yourself getting involved with, I recommend the The CPA Affiliate Marketing Business System to help you get started. All the essentials to getting your own CPA Business off the ground are included in this course.
CPA Offers or Affiliate Marketing- Which one to Choose?
CPA offers and affiliate offers are pretty difference in actuality, though they might not look very different. Take note of these differences so that you could choose the form you would prefer.
Affiliate networking is about a company or affiliate network providing you with a particular link that is unique enough. Thus this link is to be employed to drive traffic to the web pages where the company’s offer is highlighted. Once this link is followed up to make a purchase, a commission is earned by the marketer.
CPA offers are often employed similarly. But the difference lies in the fact that the advertising charges are counted for a CPA offer every time a potential customer actually completes a certain action. The actual sale need not be made for the commission to be earned. These actions range from, submitting a zip entry to providing email ids, to even signing up for a trial or something.
Once the marketer has started promoting a particular offer, he/she gets a code that is really not very different from an affiliate code. This allows the company to note that it is from a particular marketer that the sales initiative or promotional initiative was launched. The idea is also to feed the company with as much traffic as you can to increase chances of a purchase.
CPA networking often makes conversions a lot simpler. It is always easier to get a customer to provide info or visit the website of a company that might be totally alien to them than making a purchase of 100$ from the same company. Add to this they might just be getting a free sample of they do complete this action. Thus a conversion is a lot easier to make with CPA marketing.
A CPA offer allows you to make money continuously as it is not limited to making commissions only on making sales. There are far greater opportunities of making money by way of CPA marketing.
Learn more about CPA Marketing with The CPA Affiliate Marketing Business System. All the basics to getting your own CPA Business started.
Google Local Business Center
Google claims now that 82% of people looking for local information begin their search online. Read more
Get All The Silver You Can as Fast as You Can!
A little over a year ago, before the recession hit, I became convinced that investing in Silver would be a much wiser move than leaving cash in any Bank. (We all know what happened to Banks).
I’ve made a lot of dumb decisions in my years, but this definitely was NOT one of them. (Insert gratuitous self-back-patting here). I had done a ton of research and knew that the economic “crash” was going to hit in September. By then I was well on my way. With only a tiny investment per month I’ve already managed to acquire a nice little nest egg. (See picture below).
It’s really easy to do and I can show you how you can do it too!
But I’m getting ahead of myself…I’d like to show you something first.
I just discovered some new information in an article that I’d like to pass on to you…
The US mint has diverted all its resources to stamping Silver Eagles and has run out of blanks again.
Click here to see the full report from MineWeb.com website.
(Here’s an excerpt from it)
“Meanwhile, silver producers have found themselves equally frustrated by the inability of the U.S. Mint to meet the demand for silver coins. Production of the American Eagle Silver Proof and Uncirculated Coins has also been temporarily suspended because of unprecedented demand for the American Eagle Silver Bullion Coins.
The product catalog states, “Currently, all available silver bullion blanks are being allocated to the American Eagle Silver Bullion Coin Program, as the United States Mint is required by Public Law 99-61 to produce these coins ‘in quantities sufficient to meet public demand.’”
Thus far this year, silver bullion coin sales total 14,899,500 compared to last year’s total sales of 19,583,500.
While gold and silver producers have repeatedly gone to government officials to get them to authorize an increase in the number of refineries which can produce the blanks and the facilities that can mint the coins, industry sources say they feel they have been stonewalled by mint officials who refuse to budge.
Among the U.S. manufacturers of blanks is Sunshine Minting in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Stern-Leach of Attleboro, Massachusetts. Nearly all U.S. Mint gold coins are manufactured at West Point, New York at a remote site on military academy grounds.
U.S. Mint spokesman Michael White told Mineweb refiners are running 24-hours a day, seven days a week trying to meet demand for blanks.”
Get all the silver you can as fast as you can. Silver investors will be the wealthiest members of society when this meltdown continues.
And consider promoting an instant online silver business that pays you silver.
To get silver quickly, I highly recommend Silver Snowball.
I’ve been getting shipments every month for over a year now and it’s my new savings account.
I LOVE IT!!!
Click the picture of me here to see how you can start your OWN Silver Savings Account.
http://www.silversnowball.com/351/
Are SEO Companies Just Con Artists?
Of course not!
That’s just a catchy title to make you read this.
But I do think that some SEO companies are. I’ll tell you why…
Here’s what I discovered yesterday about one of them which still has me hot under the collar.
A colleague of mine is working with a client who contracted one of these “BIG SEO COMPANIES” to optimize his site and supposedly drive tons a new targeted traffic to it.
I took a look at the proposal, which was a bloody 35 pages long, only to realize that it was a giant sales letter in disguise. The “proposal” proposed very little for the client but certainly did talk a lot about how great the Company was. For the novice, non-technical person, it’s rather confusing and misleading as it cites all kinds of examples of high searched keywords in his niche with super high clicks, implying that he was going to get this kind of traffic. Of course, that’s not what they were promising, but it certainly could have been easily misconstrued to mean that.
Reason being, very little “proposing” was actually being done. Only about 5 pages of the document had anything to do with the client. The rest was just boilerplate bullshit. (Hey, this is my blog and I can swear if I want to.)
Most of the work they proposed to do for him could be done in a single day, if not less. It certainly doesn’t require the 12 month payment commitment and a $25,000 price tag.
Yes! $25k for this, and that’s the entry level package. The middle package, which doesn’t include much more, is $35K and the top level package is $76K. Hard to friggin’ believe.
Now I’d show you this comparison chart, but it is copyrighted and confidential, so I don’t want to get myself into hot water over it, but suffice it to say, this is the lamest list of SEO services I’ve ever seen.
Don’t get me wrong…good SEO/SEM work is not cheap. It’s labor intensive and can bring a huge return for the client. But there’s got to be some serious meat in the work they do to warrant that kind of fee.
What shocks me more than anything about their service is what is NOT listed on the things that they do for that money. Even at the $76K level, the foundational stuff that I do in my practice isn’t even included, such as Web 2.0 properties, Social Bookmarking, RSS Feeds, Video creation and Submission, Pinging, and PAD Submissions, just to list a few. I do dozens of things each month for each keyword, so the list can get pretty long.
The reason I even found out about this is because after having contracted them several months ago, the client has yet to see any evidence of any work being done. He’s still not ranking anywhere on Google and no new traffic is coming in from any of the “supposed” new sources.
Bottom line: this guy got hosed! Big time. He’s locked into a 12 month payment plan, paid $5K+ as a down payment and won’t see any ROI from this.
Worse yet, his current website sucks and this SEO Company didn’t even address that issue and offer to fix is up for him FIRST. They just put in a couple of metatags and said that was all it needed. What good does it do to drive a bunch of traffic to a website that’s broken?
So I’m still really pissed about this.
But on the other hand, it’s encouraging to know that people are buying these kinds of services. In their defense, SEO/SEM can be very complicated and if you’re not familiar with all the jargon, it’s just human nature to believe the folks who are part of the big company. So, there’s a ton of business out there, but hopefully the majority of it will go to companies that really can deliver results and make their customers overjoyed by their work.