Many new affiliate marketers fall into this scheme and buy pre-written articles and content and think they are going to make millions. The sad truth is, they are not even going to make $5. The reason why they are not going to make money is because that same article or content has been sold numerous times over and over again. There may be over a thousand copies of that article or content online even before you get your site up.

Why this is bad?

Google and other search engines rank your site on how unique your content is. They will punish the site owner who uses other peoples work, especially when there are thousands of copies already online. By then the search engines will just skip over you and your site will not be ranked and possibly considered as spam.

Take for example Sue, she came to me one day saying she bought a special package that was going to be on sale for today only and limited to 500 copies sold. We talked for a bit more and I told her to upload the info and send me over her site url. I then entered her site url into CopyScape and you wouldn’t be surprised to see she had 3,293 identical matches to her website content! The sad part was that she spent $12.95 for it. Even though this wasn’t much, I have heard of people spending $300 for an all access pass to thousands of articles….which most likely have already been put online millions of times.

How you can prevent this

If you happen to have already purchased pre-written content then I suggest you run your site through CopyScape. This will check your website against duplicate content and show you how many other websites have the same content as you. Don’t be surprised if you have more than one hundred matches.

To prevent this, don’t buy pre-written content. The best content for your site is written by you and is unique online. The time you invest into your content and articles the better your results will be.

Its back again, Google Adwords has sent out more coupon codes to entice users to spend more money on advertising. I received about 5 post card size cards from Google and Hostgator with different amounts of value per Google Adwords promo code. So make sure you check your mail today (snail mail, not email). My values ranged from $25-$75. I had a few sites with hostgator awhile back, but I have seen Google partner up with other companies on this before. I am posting a few codes over at Search Engine Promos for free for the taking. Here are some pictures of what to look for: (Click Photos to Enlarge)

The following is a list of 31 ways which i use to get all my websites ranking at the top. All these work, believe me.

All OFF PAGE SEO

1. Contact site owners, give them relevant articles in exchange for links. (When you contact the site owners, do not ask them, hey do you want an article for your site but I’ve my link in it, he will just say no. say it like “hey, i have some really good articles that might interest you and your readers, I’ve also included my url but feel free to remove it if you don’t like the article” 90% of time the link is left in the article if its good.

2. Insert articles in article directories with relevant links back to site. track these articles and when other websites pick them up offer them more articles free in exchange for links, works like a charm. (you should also cross link all your articles to pass juice, it also doesn’t look as spammy and gives more credibility.

3. Contact site owners for link exchange (Think outside the box here)e.g type in your main keyword in google, go to the 3-4th page, these sites usualy have a good PR and are willing to exchange links than page 1 results. check the link page is recently cached and has less than 50 links, check for nofollow.

4. Contact site owners and ask them would they be willing to convert a keyword on their existing article to point back to your site in exchange for articles (articles with your links)

5. copy all of your competitors back links (use seo elite for this, get lots of different IP addresses

6. Use Isnare article distribution. (be carefully using this, make sure you have quality backlinks first and only use once a week, twice at the most)

7. Back link solutions

8. article underground

9. paid per post reviews

10. Directory submissions (especially paid ones, but only who pass PR juice)

11. Social bookmarking (from different IPs)

12.PR Pumpers site creation on different IP addresses. (build 20 mini niche sites, each site should focus on 1 or2 keywords of your money site, build links to these sites and PR, pass the PR to your money site, link out to your competitors once or twice so it looks natural)

13.Post internal URLs to deep linking directories

14.All the top article directories

15.Link baiting (quizzes, Buzz, lists, Humor etc)

16.Write something very con traversal and post on your site (this 1 method made me about €11,000 in 1 month for 1 article!)

17.sponsoring sites

18.Press releases, (The right way )

19.Yahoo answers/questions

20.Google groups, ask questions leave answers, iie links

21.Video Creation

22.Twitter ( I LOVE IT, A DREAM COME THROUGH IF YOU KNOW HOW TO USE)

23.Wiki site submissions

24.Facebook and myspace (Top Method)

25.Proper paid links

26.RSS feeds submissions

27.Track backs

28.web 2.0 marketing, (My Way!!!!)

29.Squidoo & hubpage creation

30.multi blogs creation

31.submit a good story to digg that has a link back to another article on your site

Lately many of my affiliate diet sites having seen a big decrease in conversions and traffic and this is do to Google knocking me down on the search engine listings. I am not sure why Google is punishing affiliate diet sites but I am not the only one, I have heard from a few other affiliates who are having the same problem. Is the diet offer niche over? Hopefully not.

Many offers like Acai Berry, Wu-Yi tea, and other similar diet offers are really taking the hit. It is getting to the point that a bidding war is going on that by the end of the day you profit margin is less than 10%.

Starting a new forum is very time consuming as well as a difficult task. The biggest problem is not creating and setting up your forum but getting people to register and be active in the forum. I get asked all the time on how to build a successful forum. The most important thing is to make sure you already have a good flow of traffic. Already having a website established with lots of users visiting your website and then adding a forum will be much easier then starting a forum from scratch. Here are some tips that should help you get your forum moving along.

Hire people to post in your forum

There are a lot of companies out there that you can pay for so many posts. Do some research online and make sure they have good reviews and feedback.

Some services that offer paid forum posting

• http://www.forumpost.org/
• http://www.paidforumposting.com/v4/
• http://www.forumbooster.net/
• http://www.forumadvantage.com/
• http://www.postingdirect.com/

Offer Contest

Having a contest to help build your forum is an easy and cheap way to get people to register and participate in your forum. You could offer people who join your forum and post 10 quality posts (Not short “thank you” posts will count) an entry into a drawing to win an ipod or something related to your forum.

You can then post your contest on other similar forums or other websites to bring in traffic.

Offer Incentive

Similar to having a contest, you can offer new forum members points or rewards for posting so many times. There are a lot of forum addons that offer reward points that can be cashed in for rewards and prizes.

Ad Revenue Sharing

Offer to share your ad space with forum users who meet a certain criteria. When users sign up they can enter there google adsense ID and when they post messages in your forum a banner can rotate with the users ads. OR you can offer a rev share (percentage) of the click to your members.

These are just a few ideas to help promote your new forum. Check back soon as I will be adding new ideas later.

The days of being able to bid for search engine ad placements for spots 1,2,3,4,ect. are over. I miss the days when they showed you who was first and what bid it would take to be #1. You could bid for the spots. Now its just 1.1, 1.9,..blah blah they just try to bleed you out to be #1 by paying way more per click then normal.

It used to be like this:

Then all you had to do was raise you bid to $1.99 and you would be in the first spot. It was fun, simple, and easy.

Which do you prefer Google or Yahoo for search marketing? I like yahoo because in my experience the keyword bids have been cheaper. Its just been so tough lately trying to knock out the spam, crap sites that just click on ads to make money. I have tried Microsoft AdCenter but had problems with them in the past (When they where in beta stage) and lost a lot of money. But thats another story found here.

To begin, I have to say that Search Engines are just like another area in this business (Link lists, TGPs, Pic Post, etc.), whatever area you choose, you have to learn as much as you can about it and then keep trying until you master it. So if you are completely new to Search Engines and don’t know nothing about the way they work, I recommend you to go to Search Engine Watch and read every article explaining how Search Engines work. But after reading about Search Engines you may be a little insecure about what are the right keywords to use.

To find all the related keywords to your main keyword, go to Google and do a search. You will get a list of all the keywords related to the word or words you wrote. At the results page you will see that the number on the left sorts the terms returned from higher to lower. Those are the number of times a search for that specific keyword was done on Google Search. Now you have a list of terms related to your main keyword, so how can you choose the best ones for you? If you are a newbie to Search Engines, you should try to stay away from the top terms and go down to the less searched terms, why? Because those top terms are searched a lot of times and you will find a lot of competition (real good competition) if you try to create pages with good ranking for them.

As a newbie to Search Engines you need to feel like you are having success in what you are doing or you may get disappointed and give up.

If you go for the less searched keywords you have more chances to get good rankings, very good rankings and your confidence will grow up and you will stay working with SEs.

Another tip is that you should select the keywords with at least three words in it because is easier to get good rankings with larger phrases than with short phrases, for example, to get a good ranking for one word: “affiliate” takes a lot of experience while getting good rankings for “mastering affiliate marketing” is much easier. It is true that larger terms get fewer searches but we are trying to balance some hits with good rankings while you build confidence in what you are doing.

The last tip is: it is easier if you go with less general terms. I mean, going for “affiliate” related terms is going to take more hard work than going for “unmastered affiliate” related terms. If you search in Yahoo for “affiliate” you will find 150,000 results while a search for “unmastered affiliate” returns about 12,500 results. The less competition you will have, the easier for you.

Source: Web O is an author over at WebOverDrive.com