Warcraft Affiliates

August 5, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules by MatthewDC

In our last module, we learned how you can use article marketing to garner some serious traffic. Now we are going to focus on a method that I believe should always go hand in hand with your article marketing efforts. That method is Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking revolves around sites like Digg, Reddit, De.lici.ous, and other various sites that allow you to post virtual bookmarks to your website. I am going to try to explain how they work, why they work, and then offer some advice on what you should be doing with them.

How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

We will use Digg as an example since I think they are one of the most often used Social Bookmarking sites. Everyone reading this probably has bookmarks in their firefox or internet explorer that they have saved from all over the internet. These are your favorite sites and ones that you want to go back to constantly for updates and whatever else they might offer. Social Bookmarking sites allow you to do the exact same thing, only the bookmarks are stored on the web where millions of others can find them through a searchable database. Basically what you are doing is adding your website to another search engine that gets TONS of traffic every day. Not only that, but if you are the first one to submit your site, you get to fill out the description box that everyone will see when they visit. Sound nice? Yeah, it is.

Why Do Social Bookmarking Sites Work?

The answer to that is a fairly simple one. They work because the sites are popular with Google. Digg bookmarks get listed in Google very fast and also get ranked fairly high for low competition search terms. The problem is, the listing won’t last long. That is ok however, because the real goal is to use these social bookmarking sites to get your site noticed and indexed in Google faster. Sites like Digg are so successfully not only because they get Google love, but also because of their millions of visitors each day. They are basically offering their own search engine when you get down to it. Your site gets indexed in their system and if someone searches for your key terms, your site might come up. They also have top lists for new sites, popular sites, etc.

So How Should I Use Social Bookmarking with My Sites?

Social Bookmarking is going to become an integral part of your campaigns. Basically every site, every blog, every squidoo lens, and every article you post anywhere on the internet, needs to get bookmarked. It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it the time consumption will go down drastically. You can also find services on the internet that will submit your site for you, or you could outsource and hire someone to do it for you. The key thing to remember is that it is free exposure, free traffic, and a great boost to getting indexed in Google and improving your SEO.

So right now, our steps should look something like this when creating a new site :

1. Make a Squidoo Lens.
2. Social Bookmark the Squidoo Lens.
3. Write 1 Article per day and submit to the top Article Directories with a link to your Squidoo Lens.
4. Once the article gets published, Social Bookmark the Article.

If you are following these steps, you may already be getting some traffic to your lens. The more traffic your lens gets, the higher it will get listed within it’s category in Squidoo. If you can make the top 20 or so, your lens is going to get much more natural exposure from searches within Squidoo and their featured listings. So the goal right now is to drive traffic to your lens with your affiliate link on it, get it bookmarked for a little extra traffic and exposure, then hammer the articles like theres no tomorrow.

Recommended Reading :

• PotPieGirl’s FREE 52 Page Step by Step Squidoo Guide
• Use Bookmarking Demon to automate Social Bookmarking

August 4, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides by MatthewDC

Step 1. Article Marketing

Article Marketing in my mind is the most important part of traffic building. It can get you sustainable, long term traffic, for a very small up front workload. For the basics of what article marketing is, check out my SEO & Article Marketing 101 article. Basically what your going to do is write 500 – 700 word articles based around the keyword of your choosing, post them to various article directories, and then wait and watch the traffic build. A lot of people will try to sell you a “secret formula” to use article marketing to “dominate any niche”. Ignore all of that hype. The one thing you HAVE to understand about article marketing is that it works very well, but it takes a LOT of ACTUAL WORK on your behalf. If you have the money you can outsource, but for the purposes of this training, I am going to keep it as cheap as possible.

The process basically works like this. You always have to start with Keyword Research. You want to find a keyword that meets our criteria to where we think we can get a first page listing on Google. Once your keyword is selected, you really have to focus and make yourself do some manual labor. I try to do at least 1 article per day for at least the first 2 months of any new campaign. It sounds like a lot of work, I know, but that is because it is. We aren’t talking about easy money, or free money here, we are talking about a real business. Real business requires blood, sweat, and tears.

Writing the Articles

When you write your article, make sure that your keyword is in the title and somewhere in the first paragraph. After that, I don’t care how many more times it shows up. You will hear tons of experts tell you that you should have X amount of keywords or Y percent density. Forget all of that. Make sure it’s in the beginning of the article and then don’t worry about it. Just write an article that people will want to read and that will entice people to check out your other articles. This is how you build real, lasting traffic.

Let me get this off my chest before we move on. A lot of people will tell you to do re-writes of your articles rather than write completely new articles every time. To just change some paragraphs around or a few words so that ezinearticles will accept it as a new article. Whether you want to do this or not is up to you, but I refuse to use this tactic. Let me explain why. I am trying to build a legitimate business. One that people trust, will come back to again, and believe is worth their time. If they start re-reading the same article, do you think they are going to trust you? It’s ok to write 2 articles on the same topic, as long as they take a new angle, or address some new aspect, but please don’t just move some paragraphs around. Yes that will work and get you in Ezine. Yes that will probably get you decent traffic. But honestly, it tarnishes your name and we want to build a brand with legs. Ok, now that I feel better, we can move on.

This isn’t going to be a workshop on how to write great articles. I might cover that in a later article or module, but for now, we are going to focus on the traffic generation part and the process we will use. Once your article is written, you need to do 2 things. First you need to make a squidoo lens that contains the article itself, along with an affiliate link to a product of your choosing, as well as a link back to your main squidoo lens (that’s the one we made in module 6). Once that is set up, you need to submit the article to article directories. I have a list of the Top Article Directories here on the site you can use to start out. This can also be outsourced but since your just starting, I recommend doing it yourself.

The Resource Box

The key to building traffic from these articles is by properly utilizing the resource box. The resource box is where most sites will allow you to post your links back to your site. We will use EzineArticles as an example because they are the largest and most well known article directory. EzineArticles will allow you to post 2 links in the resource box of your article. We want to use these 2 links for specific purposes. First we want to make a link that reads something like this “For the original article, visit Your Keyword Title Here”. In this link, Your Keyword Title Here would link back to your new squidoo lens of the same name. This will be the one that you just made containing your article. For the second link, we are going to link back to our main lens (the one from module 6), with something like this, “For more articles like this one, visit Main Site Keyword Title”. That is all their is to it!

Most of the sites will take up to a week to list your article, so the traffic is going to take a while to show up. Be patient and you will see a steady increase once the articles start going live. Like I said previously, I try to do an article a day for almost 2 months when I first start out with a new site. I might miss a day here or there, but the important part is getting those articles out there. Give it a shot and see what you can come up with.

Our next module is Module 7.2 – Traffic Generation with Social Bookmarking

in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules, PPC by MatthewDC

If you’ve read all of the modules up to this point, congratulations. You are already on your way to starting your own affiliate marketing business. You understand the basics of affiliate marketing, you should have a clickbank account, and you even set up your first squidoo lens. The only problem now is, noone is looking at it. But don’t worry, we are going to cover all of the basic traffic methods I use, right here in module 7 and it’s sub-modules!

Traffic generation is a funny business. Much like all areas of affiliate marketing, everyone has their own take on what you should and should not be doing to build traffic. The methods I am going to share with you are all methods I have personally used and found to work for me. If you do them aggressively, you WILL get traffic to your site as well as increase your Google Pagerank and backlinks at the same time. All of these things will help you get to your ultimate goal, whether it be $1000 a month or $500 a day.

Due to the importance of this topic and the number of methods you can use, I am going to break this module down into sub-modules as follows:

• 7.1 : Traffic Generation with Article Marketing
• 7.2 : Social Bookmarking
• 7.3 : Forum Participation
• 7.4 : Pay Per Click (PPC)
• 7.5 : Outsourcing Everything

All of these methods go hand in hand to create a complete traffic building system. One method alone probably won’t be enough to get you serious visitors to your site. That being said, combining article marketing with social bookmarking is a very powerful traffic building system. If you have the right keywords, you can make some serious sales after about a month. So go check  out the sub-modules, learn everything you can, and then get to work writing your articles. Your almost ready to start cashing those checks!

Our next module is Module 8 : Scaling Your Campaigns

August 3, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, PPC by MatthewDC

Keyword Research is so important that I couldn’t really figure out how to fit it into the modules. In most cases it will be the very first thing you do when starting a campaign or a new site. The problem is, in doing our training, we are starting from scratch and keyword research is much too advanced a topic for a beginning Affiliate Marketer. That being said, I felt like we needed to cover how to properly research keywords to use for naming your sites, article writing and marketing, and link building. Somewhere along the line I will implement a keyword module, but for now, this supplement will have to do.

I have seen countless affiliate marketers take on the subject of keyword research and it seems like every single one of us has our own unique spin on things. One thing everyone has in common however, is where we all start. Everyone you meet that does keyword research, starts with Googles keyword tool. So let’s go ahead and open up the keyword tool and take it for a spin. You should see a box that says enter a keyword or phrase. This is where we are going to type in the general idea of what we want our campaign to be about. Since this site specifically revolves around World of Warcraft, we are going to use that. I personally like selling leveling guides, so I am going to narrow down my search even more.

This is one area where I am going to be somewhat different than other marketers. When I do a keyword search, I already have my specific term that I want, so I am going to uncheck the box to use synonyms. I am going to type in leveling guide and click get keyword ideas. So your screen should look something like this when you are ready to submit.

Once you hit “Get Keyword Ideas”, you will get a series of results. We want to sort this list by clicking on “Global Monthly Search Volume”. This will rank the terms by the number of searches on average each month. By looking at these results we can see the average Cost Per Click (CPC) for the specific term, the search volume, and the competition for each phrase. I am not too overly concerned with the competition meter at this point because it is only showing the PPC competition levels, and we are going to be aiming for organic traffic, or traffic from search rankings.

Basically what we are looking for are keywords with a search volume of anywhere from 300 to about 10,000. This range should hopefully give us some terms that we can rank competitively for without having to do too much link building and article marketing. Once I find a term that I like, I am going to take that term and put it into Google. When I do this, I am going to put quotations “” around the term. This is going to give me a more accurate idea of the competition level for that term. Ultimately when I do this, I want to see 10,000 results or less. There are times however when I would accept a higher number.

For instance, if I see an ezinearticles.com listing, or a squidoo, hubpages, or other article site on the first page, that tells me that the competition is fairly limited. I can build a site of my own and do a couple weeks of article work and more than likely make the first page. I usually keep going through this process until I find anywhere from 10-25 keywords to use for my article marketing campaigns. So let’s recap what we are looking for.

• Global Monthly Search of 300 to 8000
• Search results of Less Than 10,000 with “Quotations”
• EzineArticles or Squidoo listed on the 1st page
• Keywords that seem relevant to our overall site topic

That’s really all there is to it. You will hear all kinds of different theories and practices from various internet marketers, but if your terms meet those criteria, you can probably make the first page of Google. The number of search results will determine how hard it will be and how much work you will need to put in to get that ranking, but even with search results upwards of 30,000, you can still get to the top over time, you just have to be resolved in doing so.

August 2, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, World of Warcraft by MatthewDC

Search engine optimization is the key to getting targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is important because you want the traffic coming to your site to be interested and ready for the content you are going to provide them. If your new to the Affiliate Marketing business, search engine optimization is the practice of trying to get your website ranked as highly as possible in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and now Bing. We do this by using a process we call Article Marketing.

Article Marketing is the #1 method of building targeted traffic to your website. It builds backlinks to your site, it generates traffic from article directores, and it can even get your content distributed to other sites, which in turn builds more links and targeted traffic. The concept is fairly simple and can be broken down into 3 step process.

Step 1. Write an interesting article.

This sounds like common sense but a lot of people are confused on exactly what an article should consist of. Many of you may have read in various places on the internet that you need a certain keyword density, or that your keyword needs to appear in particular parts of your article. I don’t hold to these myths. When writing an article for distribution, have the keyword in your title (which it should be because that is what the article is going to be about), and then focus on writing a good quality article that someone might actually want to read.

If you focus on writing quality content about the topic of your choosing, then everything else will work itself out. There is no magic percentage or number of times you should use your keyword. There is no magic formula to creating articles that will make you sales. Simply write articles that you yourself would want to read and you will be well on your way to building traffic.

Step 2. Market the Articles.

Now that you have your article written, you need to get it out there. We do this by submitting our article to various article submission sites. If you are having trouble finding sites to submit your article, just do a Google search for article submission, you should find plenty of results. One thing to remember when submitting the article is to read all of the policies for the particular site you are going to use. Every site is different in regards to how many links they will allow, if any, as well as what kinds of topics they will accept. Most sites will allow links only in the resource block.

It is important that your resource block be used properly in order to make article marketing successful. As I said previously, most sites will allow two links within the resource or author bio box. These two links should be very specific. You want one link to lead back to the main page of your website and the other to lead back to the original source of the article your posting, in other words, the specific URL for that article on your website. This will build you the most consistent and targeted traffic in the long run.

Step 3. Utilize the Traffic

This step isn’t really a part of the article marketing process, but it is important to note. It seems like article marketing is becoming more popular and many people are utilizing it to build traffic, but I am amazed at how many people improperly utilize the traffic they are building. You still need a quality landing page for the traffic you are building. If they read your article, enjoy the content, and visit your site, but the site is a one column black and white mess of words with thirty affiliate links and banners thrown everywhere, that user is going to jump immediately to the back button on their browser. In other words, build a legitimate site, with valuable content so that you can build trust and maybe even capture an email address. This is the best way to utilize the traffic from article marketing.

To sum it all up, article marketing is an easy process. The only catch is that it is time consuming and requires that you be diligent and focused. I can gurantee you however, that if you follow through with this method, it WILL build you targeted traffic that converts. It has worked wonders for countless of my campaigns.

If you think it is too much work and would like an easier solution, you can outsource the creation and marketing of articles. The following are website I recommend you check out :

• SubmitEdge
• Elance
• Mass Article Control (Awesome Software)

August 1, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules, Squidoo, World of Warcraft by MatthewDC

In the last module, we covered the importance of of having a site and the difference between Landing Pages and what I am calling “Mini-sites”. In this module, we will discuss the process of getting your first website published to the web. We are going to start with a simple landing page using Squidoo to set it up.

Squidoo is a very popular site in the internet marketing world. They allow you to create one page websites, post any content you would like (for the most part), and they also allow you to put whatever links you would like. They also allow you to do it all for FREE. Sounds good right? This module is going to walk you through setting up your first Squidoo site (what they call a “Lens”). We like Squidoo because it allows you to get your affiliate link on the web for free so that you can start building traffic and we also like Squidoo because Google likes Squidoo.

I originally had a whole article written about how to set up a squidoo lens. It was very basic and only covered a few simple steps and really didn’t go in depth into squidoo. I wasn’t happy with the level of training that it offered so I went on a hunt to find a better, more developed squidoo training guide.

That is when I found PotPieGirls FREE 52 Page Squidoo Training Guide. This thing is awesome. It’s step by step with full color screenshots for every single step. I don’t have permission to give it to you but if you head over to her site and sign up for her mailing list, she will email you the PDF. I cannot stress enough how much you need to read this guide. So get it, read it, and then move on to the next module.

Our next module is Module 7 : How to Build Traffic to Your Website

Recommended Reading :

• Get a FREE 52 page illustrated, step by step squidoo guide from potpiegirl. did I mention it’s FREE?
• If you are looking for more in depth lens making tactics and tips, Squidoo has a lens for that.

July 25, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Guides, PPC by MatthewDC

Pay Per Click advertising is a very popular method used by many experienced affiliate marketers. While it can be a very successful technique, it can also be overly expensive when not done properly. Today I will try to explain to you the basics of Pay Per Click, but I would highly suggest you try to get more in depth on the topic prior to beginning your first campaign.

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has been made famous by search companies like Google or Yahoo. It allows you to place your ads on various participating sites, and pay a fee based on the number of times your particular ad is clicked. Google Adwords is the most well known and trusted of the PPC engines in use today. Website owners allow the ads to be placed on their site in exchange for a portion of the fee collected by Google when someone clicks the ad. Google handles all of the processing and money exchanges and you get to place your ad on highly visited sites without having to broker a deal yourself.

What Are Keywords?

Pay Per Click engines like Google Adwords work in several different ways, but the most common is by what we call Keywords. A keyword is a term that is associated with your site, that you would like to use to trigger your ad. For example; you run a World of Warcraft Leveling Guide site, and you know that people will be searching on Google for the phrase “WoW Leveling”. “WoW Leveling” would be considered your keyword. Keywords are the foundation of a PPC campaign and will determine when and where your advertisements will surface. To find out what keywords your competitors are using and lighten your workload, you can use sites like Keyword Spy (my favorite).

Setting Up a Campaign

When creating a PPC advertising campaign, there are several parts to the campaign that you must design. Each step is an intricate process and requires research in order to keep your costs down. The first step is to research keywords and find the terms that you would like to use to trigger your ad. Once you have your terms selected, you can most on to creating the actual advertisement. Google and Yahoo allow for text ads, video ads, and banner ads. The most common type is the simple text ad. You have probably seen these types of ads down the right side of Google when you do a search.

Text Ads require three lines of text and are your chance to sell the product. You need to make the ad enticing and with very limited space. There are entire ebooks on the subject of creating PPC ads and how to write the best copy, we will not go in depth as this is a basic introduction to PPC. However just keep in mind that even professionals are constantly testing multiple ads and everyone at some point or another will write a dud.

Once you have your keywords and ads fleshed out, you simply need to make a bid on the keyword. The bid will determine how you rank within the results for any specific keyword. If 100 people are bidding on the keyword “WoW Leveling”, and you bid less than they do, your ad will not show. The actual algorithm is somewhat more complicated than that, but bid price plays a large factor in how you place on Google.

The Google Quality Score

The other major factor that goes into how your ads rank on Google is the Google Quality Score. Google assigns a score to your landing page based on an unknown series of criteria. The quality of your ad (having the keyword in the title) and the content of your landing page seem to be the most important. The higher your quality score, the less you will pay per click to advertise on Google. Again, whole books have been written on optimizing Google quality score, so we won’t delve any deeper onto the subject.

What to take away

PPC Advertising can be a great way to gain traffic to your sites. However, it is not wise for a new affiliate marketer to rush in head first. If you use the wrong keywords, create horrible ads, or bid too much for your advertising, you can spend a lot of money in a very short period of time. Read up on the subject, look into how to select your keywords and write proper ads, as well as how to increase your Google quality score before you get started. If you do the research, you will be able to use Google Adwords to bolster your affiliate marketing business and make a substantial income doing it. To get more in depth training on Google Adwords, check out Perry Marshall’s Google Adwords Course.

in Affiliate Marketing, Free Training, Guides, Modules by MatthewDC

Making sales is what it is all about. Without sales, theres no money, and without money, what’s the point? So let’s talk about how we can go about making affiliate sales and start making some money. There are several business models you can use in this industry. Some of which are free and some of which will cost you money. How much money depends on how much you are willing to spend. There are a LOT of options so we will start with one of the cheapest.

in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides by MatthewDC

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make money on the Internet? Maybe you have been scammed by various get rich quick schemes, or paid survey sites. The truth is, there are only two viable money making business models that the average Joe can use to make money on the Internet. One is to create your own product to sell and the other is Affiliate Marketing. Today, I am going to explain to you what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and why it works.

in Affiliate Marketing, Guides, World of Warcraft by MatthewDC

As the market expands and new guides are released, this list will continue to grow. Check back often more the most up to date listing.

Leveling Guides

• Zygor Guides – Top Seller! Also my personal favorite..
• Brian Kopp
• Dugi’s Ultimate – Also Rocks
• Team iDemise