WHY BACKLINK?

It’s now very well accepted that getting backlinks, that is, links from other websites, to your website is not only a great way, but also a very necessary way to gain rankings in the search-engines. To do this, you need to promote your website. There are many ways to do this, like article marketing, Pay Per Click marketing, email marketing, press-releases and so on.

However, there are backlinks and there are backlinks. You see, not all links are created equal. The search-engines don’t rank all links the same, and not even all backlinks are rated the same.

For example, getting a link to your site that has anchor-text associated with it saying “click here” is one of the very worst links you can have. It’s probably better not having a link at all if you can only get this type of link.

It’s much better to have anchor-text that includes the name of your website, or at least text referring to something relevant to your sites content.

LINK TO WHERE THOUGH?

But of at least equal importance is WHERE the links point. Most people typically have the links pointing directly to their home page (also called the ‘index’ page). This is okay, however the search-engines seem to like seeing links to VARIOUS pages within your site. They see this as being a much more realistic picture of how other websites would link to you.

In effect the search-engines are asking “are these websites linking to something especially relevant to that particular page in this other website, or are these links simply articles or press-releases that have been pumped-out to fool us?”.

It’s a bit like Deep-Sea fishing. Rather than casting your line into a river and letting your line sit on the surface, you make sure the float allows the line to drop WAY down deep into the water. That’s pretty much how you want to view your links. Direct them DEEP into your website.

HOW DOES THIS HELP?

Not only is this good for getting higher search-engine rankings, you’ll also see improved retention from your readers and website visitors.

Why? Well, it’s quite simple really. When somebody reads something that you have written on somebody else’s website and they LIKE what they read, they will likely click the link and be taken to the same post or article within your website. So, they immediately feel comfortable reading what they’ve already been reading.

The graphics on your site will be new to them, and they may not LIKE them at all, but they are already comfortable on the site; they KNOW this is the site maintained by the person who wrote that great article on the other person’s website.

Now that they are on your site, they already know some of your work, so they’ll feel more inclined to read some of your other work, whether that is your blog-posts or your articles.

THE END RESULT

So, the more natural the balance of links into your website the better for the search-engines (and therefore your rankings) and the more you can get people directly to the page where the SAME article or post is within your site, the better it is for the reader.

Always remember what you are trying to achieve. You want rankings from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Ask so that you can be more easily found from a search-engine, but you really want PEOPLE to like what you provide in your website. If they like your site, they will get to like YOU, and if they like you, they will BUY from you.

Luke.

There really are some “must have” tools as an online marketer and Sparky from Alexa is one of them.

WHAT DOES SPARKY DO?

It was originally called the Alexa Toolbar, so you may have already heard of it, but here is a list of it’s features.

• Related Links
• Traffic Trend
• Reach Meter
• Traffic Rank
• Enhanced Search
  

RELATED LINKS

This allows you to quickly see sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.  So, if it’s YOUR site, you can see other similar sites quickly and easily.

TRAFFIC TREND

As the name implies, this feature monitors your a sites activity (whichever site you are on at the time) over a period of four month so you can see if the site is becoming more or less popular.

REACH METER

This tool allows you to see how far around the world your site (or any other website) is being viewed around the world.

TRAFFIC RANK

This let’s you quickly see how a website is ranking in Alexa.  The lower the number the better as your aiming to be #1…….unlikely of course, but something to aim for!

ENHANCED SEARCH

This feature of Sparky shows the Alexa Rank next to results on Google, MSN, Ask, Yahoo etc.

You efforts to make money online can be greatly improved if you can monitor your success.  After all, if you don’t know where you are, how can you know where to steer?

Using Sparky along with other free tools such as Google’s Webmaster Analysis tools can really help you find your way around the increasingly difficult maze that is the World Wide Web.

You can get Sparky FREE here.

Luke.

When I first wrote about TubeMogul the company had only been around for a few months. Well, they’ve now added a great new feature called InPlay.

INPLAY

InPlay is something like the equivalent of Google’s Analytics system, but instead of analyzing visitors to your website, InPlay analyzes views of your uploaded videos…………and a whole lot more.  Here’s a list of it’s features:

• Advertising
• Audience
• Player Tracking
• Region Tracking
• Syndication Tracking
• Per Stream Quality
• Viewer Attention
• Viewed Minutes

Here’s a quick rundown of each feature:

ADVERTISING

Compares different types of advertising types and measure its effect on your viewer’s experience.

AUDIENCE

This feature tracks when and where people view your video.

PLAYER TRACKING

Compares multiple video players making changes so that you can determine what is and is not successful.

REGION TRACKING

This will show you how to track your viewed minutes by regions of the world.  It allows you to make changes to your videos to target a particular part of the world.  You biggest viewship might be in Japan, but how would you make changes if you didn’t know this?

SYNDICATION TRACKING

This feature allows you to monitor viewer behaviour OUTSIDE of your website.

PER STREAM QUALITY

As it’s name suggests, this allows you to track the quality of your viewed videos.

VIEWER ATTENTION

This is for monitoring the average time that people watch your videos.  If people are generally watching only 10 seconds of a 5 minute video………..you NEED to make changes to it or remove it entirely.

VIEWED MINUTES

Last but not least, this feature allows you to know exactly how many minutes ALL of your videos have been viewed, allowing you to know if you are generally poplular………….or otherwise.

InPlay is a paid service, but for what you get in return, I for one think that it’s great value.

It may pay you huge dividends in determining how to create better videos to market your website.

Go and check it out for yourself!

Luke.

Once you’ve realized that the way to start making passive income from the Internet, one of the first things you need to do is to find your niche market. Finding a niche market may be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack (not ANOTHER cliche!), but when you do find a market that doesn’t yet have too many competitors, you’ve found a diamond-mine, and this is what Internet marketing is all about.

Now finding a niche-market may take some time.  There are MILLIONS of niche markets LITERALLY MILLIONS, but you don’t want a market that serves red-headed Mongolian soccer-fans who only like playing on Tuesday in the rain.  That market would be too small.  Neither do you want to find a market that caters to people who want to meet someone of the opposite sex………..that’s not even a niche!  No, you need to find a market that’s somewhere in between.  You need to find a group of people that is large enough to support an income for you, but that is also small enough not to have found too much interest from other marketers already.

How can you do this?  Well, you ca try Google’s free keyword tool or even WordTracker version of this. They’re both good enough to find a niche market.  Using these you can begin to find SUB-CATEGORIES for areas that YOU are interested in.  After all, if you’re not interested in red-headed Mongolian soccer-players, you MIGHT be interested in soccer.

There’s also a great piece of free software available at Good Keywords.

So, you can start doing searches using one of these great FREE tools, just don’t look at the top results which will already be covered by other marketers.  Look further down the lists and find RELATED areas.  Then, use THESE KEYWORDS to type into the search-boxes again and see what results you get.  Take your time doing this, as it might mean the difference between success and failure for your project.

If you make the sensible decision to spend a good amount of time RESEARCHING, it will pay you huge dividends later on.

Luke.

Pay Per Click ads need to be as near perfect as possible.  How do you do this?  Well, there’s no scientific formula for doing this, but here are some ideas.  Look at several other (dozens of other) people’s ads and decide which ones make YOU want to click on them. Write yours in a similar way to these.   Write using words that make people afraid of missing out on something (”everybody is doing this!”).  Make sure that punctuation helps to make your words make sense.

Once written, leave the ad and don’t look at it again until the day after.  See if it STILL looks good and makes you want to click it.

DON’T MAKE SPELLING ERRORS!  There’s no need for ANY spelling errors with so few words and all the spell-checking software and dictionary.com online.  Also, make your hyperlink easy to read: don’t write www.lukehawthorne.com, rather write www.LukeHawthorne.com, capitalizing each word or name.

Ensure that you get the readers attention.  You are competing against other ads offering similar products.  That the whole idea of Adwords advertising; only ads that are RELEVANT to the search will be shown on the result-page.  The ad is there for no other reason than to MAKE THEM CLICK it.  It isn’t meant to sell them anything so don’t try.  You just want them to click it, so make them CURIOUS about what they might see IF they click.

Place the keywords you’ve chosen in your headline, then again in the second line, but if you have to choose, keep them in the headline and don’t worry about the second line.

The last line of your ad is also very important of course, and you should try and think like this “if I could only write ONE line, how could I make that one line get them to click?”……….then write each line with this same thought in mind.  Let the reader know that clicking YOUR link rather than the others on the page is really the only choice to make.  Let them know what the BENEFITS are if they DO click on your ad.  So, rather than say “Golf Clubs for sale”, say “85% off Golf Clubs”.  The benefit to the reader is a cost-saving.  Which would YOU rather click?

Don’t use words that have more than one meaning.  It may be cute and clever, but it won’t get you any clicks.  And don’t be deceptive. If you say “85% off Golf Clubs” and you don’t offer anything of the kind, you’ll just end up paying for thousands of clicks and have no sales to pay for them!

SPLIT-TEST your ads!  Make sure that you try different ads pointing to the same website and MONITOR which ads get you the most clicks. When you split-test, make sure that you ONLY change ONE thing in each ad.  If you don’t do this, you won’t know what is making the difference in the click-through rate.

PPC campaigns take time to get right, but once you DO get them right, they will pay you back for a very long time to come!

Luke.