IMPORTANT –> This is the updated lesson to reflect the upgrades within the new TrafficTravis software. This lesson was originally posted May 24th (WOW 3 months ago already).

There are a few other updates and SUPER COOL surprise in store that all JC subscribers will get for free and will make your keyword reseach MUCH easier! My goal is to have everything out to you by Wednesday.. that means fully updated ebook and new cool tool!

This lesson is a continuation of the previous lesson Keyword Research – Show me the Money… Words that is

Now, that you have a large list of keywords, you will want to filter out the hopeful “Diamonds”… these are the words that are actively being used by advertisers and the tool of choice (in our opinion) is Traffic Travis. We almost passed over this tool because in our opinion the name and logo are cheesy (sorry Mark, but they are). It was a good thing however that we got to know Mark about a year ago and he walked us through this tool and we have been hooked ever since.

We need to make very clear right now, this is not a paid review or a requested review for a favor or anything else like that. As stated in the initial lesson, we will be sharing paid tools that we use and this is one of those tools we use and we personally love. After you finish reading this, you may agree or you may have a tool we do not know about that is just as good and you can use that. Just wanted to make that clear to everyone

How to Dig for Hopeful Diamonds with Traffic Travis:

Step 1 –> Once you have Traffic Travis, open it up select “PPC Analysis”

Step 2 –> Click on the “Add Project” button

Step 3 –> Name your project and select the country location you want Google to use. I recommend you leave it to the United States unless you specifically want to target a different country.

Step 4: Select the “Keywords” tab in the project box and then select “import keywords”. Now paste your keywords from the previous “Keyword Lesson” into the form and click on start.

Step 5: The keywords will now be imported into the main table and you will now want to click on “Start Update” and TrafficTravis will now search Google for each individual phrase and get a list of the sites that are currently advertising with AdWords for that term.

Step 6: TrafficTravis will process each keyword and it is important that you watch the status area and the results. If you notice that suddenly the results change from returning results to now getting all 0’s then Google may have put a temporary block on your IP and this means the have enabled an image verification (captcha) system which prevents Traffic Travis from gathering the data. I recommend you do not have Traffic Travis run more then 1000 words at a time.

To check if Google has implemented a restriction, simply go to google search and try to use the search engine. If you get a image verification to use the search, then you will need to wait until Google removed the restriction or employ the use of a proxy service.

Once the status shows complete you can now go to the next step.

Step 7: Now click on the “Top sites for keywords” tab and then click the “Fetch Sites” button. TrafficTravis will now analye the data from the previous step and display the results you are after.

Step 8: In the results click the “Found” column to sort by highest to lowest. This number represents the total number of keyword that this domain was found advertising. Click on the rows that relate to the market of your niche and it will display the keywords in the right hand “Matching Keywords” box. Click save and name the file “keyword1″.

Repeat this step for the top 5 to 10 results of the most relevant domains to your niche and have the highest returned results and make sure to save each file as a unique name so you do not overwrite each one, so for example the next matching keyword batch save would be “keyword2″.

Step 9: Now take the 5 to 10 files you saved and copy and past the results into one file, so to make one list out of the 5 to 10 individual lists.

Step 10 –> Now go back to TrafficTravis and go to the “Keyword Sorter” in the “ABC Keyword Tools” section. Since there will be duplication in our current list we are going to want to clean it up a bit.

Once you have removed the duplicates you will now have a clean list to work with. Delete any extra stuff that may have been included that you do not want included. Now save this as your good keyword list.

Now we have filtered down our list from a many keywords with many “poor” terms, to a smaller more focused list that contains words you know are directly focused to your topic but also are words you know people are actually paying money to advertise with. This is the start of finding the diamonds… but we are not there yet

Start of Added BONUS Topic –> You better say you love us after this little tip we give you

If you are just starting a new site, this is a great time to find one now, using the keywords you filtered out using Traffic Travis and here is a tip that you are going to LOVE!

This really should be a separate post but we are too lazy right now to do that

–> Get a Domain Name

A very easy and extremely effective way to find a good domain is to use the free “Bulk Register” tool provided by GoDaddy. If you do not have a free Godaddy account, you need to get one now at http://www.godaddy.com

Step 1 –> Log into your Godaddy account and select “Domains” –> “Bulk Register”

Step 2 –> Enter the keywords in the text box provided, select “.com”, enter the “Access Code” and select “GO”. You can select the other extension options if you want.

Step 3 –> Godaddy will now go through your list of keywords and list for you the domains that are available that match your keywords. The results will initially show errors, but scroll down to see which domains are available. You should be able find extremely good domain names to use that will be keyword rich and very targeted to your market.

<– End of Added BONUS Topic (Hope you liked it)

Initial Content Keywords

Now that we have our domain, and our initial filtered list of words, we still have some work to do. To truly find the real “Diamonds” from the hopefuls is we are going to have to use “Affiliate Elite” and run it on a schedule for 2 weeks, we go into detail on this in the next keyword lesson (sorry).

Before we do that however, we want to get keywords for initial site content. We do not want to waste time while waiting for Affiliate Elite, so this is a perfect time to grab 20 or so terms from your list to create your blogs initial content.

Personally our results have proven over and over again that the best results is to not go live with a blog until you have 25 articles or more. We usually target 50 to start with but that is not always possible due to time constraints.

The good thing is we know that with the keyword we currently have that some people are advertising with them, the problem is that Traffic Travis only gives us a snap shot of one day. That means that the words are being advertised with right now but they might NOT be tomorrow because they are no good… which is why we will use “Affiliate Elite” to see if words are used consistently for 14 days.

That said, using some of these words now is better then nothing, at least we can see they are being used by some and the odds are that a lot of the words you select will be good words.

Step 1–> Log back into your AdWords account and go to “Tools” –> “Traffic Estimator” and copy all the keywords into section #1. Then enter 100 in section 2, leave section 3 blank, do not change section 4A and select “All Countries and Territories” in section 4B and select “Continue”

Step 2 –> Google will now display all the keywords and their suggestion of the amount of traffic you can expect for each word. You need to understand that this number represents what Google says you would get with the number one AdWords ad… NOT the number one organic listing, which gets much more traffic then AdWords. Click on the “Estimated Click/Day” so to sort the information from highest traffic to lowest.

Step 3 –> Looking at the list, you are now going to want to select 20 or more keyword phrases. A good rule of thumb is to initially look at the words that are three words in length and have bids between $0.50 and $2.00. The reason is this shows that these words are being advertised on but are not packed full of competitors, which keeps the costs lower. Always start from top to bottom so you can be sure you are getting keywords with some traffic.

IMPORTANT –> Your list might not have any words under $2.00, if that s the case then ignore the cost rule… if there are however, look at those.

Step 4 –> Now you are going to take each keyword phrase and go to google to check out the terms competition. Enter the term in google with the allintitle filter. To do that simply enter the following…

allintitle:”your keyword phrase”

What you are looking for here is the amount of competition this term has and a good indicator of that is the amount of sites in Google that have that keyword phrase in their title. This is not an exact science and there are some who argue that this is not a true picture but from our experience it works and we like to use what we know works (which we recommend you get in the mindset of doing, do not just listen to others but find out what works for yourself). By using the allintitle, we see if a word is overwhelmed with competitors or is easily dominated.

Good guidelines for the “allintitle” results are…

• Less than 15 000 results = Needs to have lots of traffic potential to be worth it. Not recommended for the majority of this content since you will have to focus a lot of link building on this. If you have 2 or 3 that fall in here that is fine but try to have the majority 7000 or less.
• Less than 7000 results = Good – Can be dominated with good optimization and focused link building
• Less than 1000 results = Great – Easily dominated

NOTE –> These are just our guidelines, they are what work for us. Do NOT argue with us if you agree with them or not, they work for us and so there

Step 5 –> Repeat this process until you have a list of at least 20 keyword phrases with OK or better for competition. These are the keywords that we are going to build our blog on initially.

IMPORTANT –> Make sure to only use phrases that make sense grammatically as you will need to be able to create content around these phrases.

Next Keyword Lesson –> Start Up the Diamond Digger

Remember, the problem we have now is that we have words for our content but we do not really know if they are “Profitable”. We have a good guess because we know that as of right now, people are advertising on them but we only know that as of right now they are being used. Yesterday they might not have been and tomorrow they might now be and what we want to know is what keywords are being consistently used for at least 10 to 14 days by the same advertisers. These are the words that we can be sure somebody is making money with and are fantastic words to build content around, especially affiliate based content.

Talk To Us –> Did you Like this Post? If so please let me know, it i good motivation for us to keep this up

Keyword Lesson Series:

1. Lesson 1 – Keyword Research: What are you Basing it On?
2. Lesson 2 – Keyword Research: the Cart before the Cow
3. Lesson 3 – Keyword research: What for may we ask?
4. Lesson 4 – Keyword Research: Show me the Money… Words that is…
5. Lesson 5 – Keyword Research: Diamonds in the Rough
6. Lesson 6 – Keyword Research: Start Up the Diamond Digger
7. Lesson 7 – Keyword Research: Shiny Diamonds Everywhere

Thanks to everyone who was involved in the COWPetition… we have kept our end of the deal and because we won the contest (woohoo!) we have donated all the winnings to WorldVision (an amazing charity) and we feel pretty darn good about it

Click Here to Enlarge

Remember tomorrow is the BIG DAY that we announce the winners of the COWRoast and announce the owners of JohnCow.com, so stay tuned

Well the contest is officially over and yes according to the rules of the game we were victorous.. but that is not what this post is about. Instead we wanted to step back and take a look at the whole thing and talk about a few things.

1. First of all congratulations to Grace Santas for being the winning bidder! We received payment already and the money will be getting donated (we will show the transaction) to WorldVision later this week. We have everything packaged up and as of Monday morning everything will be transferred over to Grace.

2. Garry Conn: Garry is a damn good blogger and one heck of a smart guy. We did not know him from a hole in the ground before this started and he has become a friend and someone we have grown to respect. He is a family man who loves his family and puts them in the place of his life that is most important, which is something we cherish ourselves.

In the COWpetition, Garry did a fantastic job of building a blog with an extremely small budget and used what he had to create a pretty darn good blog… heck we actually bought it (yup.. we paid $850 for it and think it is worth every penny… and we have some good plans for it too) and no Garry did not know we were going to do that

So look for some changes over on that blog over the next little while and make sure to check out Garry’s blog at http://www.garryconn.com

3. Training Provided: Overall the feedback has been fantastic in regards to the material that was provided during those 4 weeks but sadly there were a small few who actually complained. They said it was a farse and that it was not realistic because it was not focused on the newbie. Well first of all read the original outline, the entire purpose was to build a blog using whatever means we had with the end goal selling it for the most amount of money possible. We mentioned upfront that we were going to talk about the tools we used and not try to make up stories of free tools that we do not use just to appease someone. If you say you can not get anything from the material provided we truly feel you are being closed minded and making that decision with out stepping back and looking at the big picture.

4. Rules of the Contest: We wanted to make sure everyone understands this very clear. The rules of the contest were not whose blog made the most money from affiliate sales or adsense, who had the most opt ins or any other metric like that. There was one single goal and that was who sold the blog for the most amount of money on sitepoint. This goal is what directed to build our blog the way we did… if it would have been about affiliate sales we would have done things different.

5. Bidding on Sitepoint: This was actually a huge eye opener and it always amazes me how much speculation and distrust there is in this industry. We are not sure why it always shocks us, since we have been doing this for a long time now, but it does. We received emails, PMs and comments from people saying it was a scam, having the private bidding was shady and more.

It was even funnier when we openly asked if it would be ok to buy our own site and donate the money to the charity and when people said no we listened and kept it how it was originally laid out but after that a few people then mentioned that they think we are doing something shady behind the scenes. If we were going to do that, why would we have first asked permission.

So please let us lay this out for you…

i. We did private bidding because some people do not like to bid open… we do not know why but that is their own concern. We did not buy our own site, did not have someone we know buy or get someone to buy it… why the heck would we risk ruining our reputation for a single website. The lady that bought the site is someone we have never met or heard of and purchased it on her own will… we asked for a name and picture to be put on this site and she said no to the picture (which is no issue) but her name is Grace Santos and here was the conversation we had over sitepoint PM…

Click Here to Enlarge

ii. We had an individual out right call us shady in the comments of sitepoint and our response to the was “LOL whatever”

The purpose of that response was that if they are going to outright label us as scamming (which is what shady really means) then we are not going to even bother responding. A PM that would allow us to explain would have been more appropriate and then we get a PM from them saying we were unprofessional. Well talk about being a hypocrite… they call our actions shady because someone outbid them and then say we are in the wrong… people need to look in the mirror.

We believe in giving everyone respect but plain and simply do not be an ass and assume things and make comments and expect us to be appreciative of it. Maybe next time, take the time to ask us personally and keep the accusations until you are educated.

6. The Prizes: We are very thankful to all our sponsors who donated prizes and we also want to apologize to a few of the winners. We failed to mention a turn around time and did a poor job of updating some of you on this. The majority of the prizes were delivered right away because they were digital but a few were physical products and take time to get processed. We PROMISE all prizes will be delivered

7. So would we do it again? Absolutely yes… we of course would do a few thing different but being through this once opened our eyes to a few things and we loved it.

Last of All THANK YOU! We truly mean that… THANK YOU TO ALL OUT LOYAL READERS… There are so many of you that have emailed and commented on how the cowpetition was a great learning experiance for you and all we can say is THANKS!

So overall what was your opinion of the whole thing, good or bad… but we prefer the good

Congratulations to all the WINNERS!!!

>>Click Here to Watch Video of Draw<<

1. Winner – Lisa of http://audiblemarketing.com : A FREE copy of David Cavanagh 52 Week “Getting Started On The Internet” Program – includes 52 weeks of live conference calls, 1 on 1 coaching and membership site. Also includes 4 day live workshop in Pattaya Beach Thailand ($9,997 Value)
2. Winner – Mike of http://www.daddyworkathome.com : A FREE copy of Ultimate A-to-Z Information Marketing Brain-in-a-Box from Yanik Silver ($3,000 Value
3. Winner – Doug of http://twitter.com/itsroadkill : A FREE copy of Dominiche (Ed Dale & StomperNet) — The Art Of Buying & Selling Websites(Electronic version) — ($1,500 value)
4. Winner – Dulcenegosyante of http://www.dulcenegosyante.com : A FREE copy of the StomperNet Home Study Course – 15 DVDs ($1,997 value)
5. Winner – Kelli-Want to know my thoughts? of http://onlymythoughts.com : A FREE copy of Ryan Deiss’ Wholesale Traffic System ($1,997 value)
6. Winner – konstantin.alexiev : A FREE copy of Eben Pagan’s Altitude Home Study Course ($2,497 value)
7. Winner – Dennis Batey : A FREE copy of Jeff Mulligan’s QuickieProfits, one year membership ($359 value)
8. Winner – Sergio L. Garza M. : A FREE copy of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula 2.0 ($1,997 value)
9. Winner – Gold Medal of http://www.yourdesignhere.com : A FREE copy of Frank Kern’s Mass Control ($2,497 value)
10. Winner – Luke Jernejcic : A FREE copy of Jeff Johnson’s Underground Training Lab, 60-day membership ($997+ value)
11. Winner – Michael of http://parosparadise.blogspot.com/ : A FREE one year subscription to TrafficKahuna ($997 Value)
12. Winner – Buzzoodle : A FREE copy of the Full Blogging Mastermind Audio Series from Yaro Starak with over 10 hours of up to date blog training ($397 Value)
13. Winner – Dude World Order of http://www.dudeworldorder.com : A FREE copy of Web 2.0 Marketing Tips from Miguel Alvarez, author of Marketing Factor ($135 Value)
14. Winner – John Motson of http://www.dnxpert.com : A FREE copie of OIOPubliser ($37 Value)
15. Winner – John Rivera : A FREE copy of OIOPubliser ($37 Value)
16. Winner – http://www.powerteamnetwork.com : A FREE Copy of Affiliate Elite Enterprise Edition ($550+ value)
17. Winner – ParisRia of http://theblogtrends.blogspot.com : A FREE Copy of TrafficTravis ($97 Value)
18. Winner – Michael of http://parosparadise.blogspot.com : A FREE 1 Year Membership at PLR Pro ($1164 Value)
19. Winner – Chris of http://twitter.com/ChrisCoger : A FREE Copy of Easy Member Pro Unlimited ($297 Value)
20. Winner – Sergio L. Garza M. : A FREE Copy of Video Post Robot ($197 Value)
21. Winner – Laura : A FREE Copy of ContentComposer ($297 Value)
22. Winner – Gold Medal of http://www.yourdesignhere.com : A FREE Copy of SEOCodeBreaker ($97 Value)
23. Winner – Info Product of http://www.informationproductideas.com : $100 DealDotCom Bucks at DealDotCom.com ($100 Value)

All the winners will be getting emailed tonight with what we need from them.

IMPORTANT –> We will NOT get the prizes delivered until early next week

Thanks to all the sponsors!

PS –> We are starting a cool new contest next week where we will be giving away a brand spanking NEW iPhone!

Oh and thanks to http://www.mathgoodies.com/calculators/random_no_custom.html for the use of their number generator that we used to select the winners.

We have officially closed the contest, shut off the comments and are NOT taking any more entries into the COWpetition. This afternoon we will be going through and organizing all the tickets and then doing the draws for the prizes, so stay tuned.

We also would like to let you know that the contest blog GamerzReviewz.com, is officially up for sale at sitepoint.com and we would like to shout out a HUGE thank you to Matthew at SitePoint for sponsoring this.

We have put together a pretty amazing package with this blog and who ever gets it is going to be getting a lot… PLUS if our blog sells for more then Garry’s then we are donating 100% of our winnings to WorldVision.org

You can also track Garry’s sitepoint auction at http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/3871

It is so hard to believe that it has been a month now since the start of this COWpetition and we have to admit that we are a little sad about it. We have fell in love with our COWpetition blog GamerzReviewz and tomorrow it is going up for sale

As for the COWpetition itself, we have had a blast and we hope you have enjoyed the posts. We will be closing the doors to the contest and shutting off the comments on the contest page at 12 noon eastern tomorrow (June 18th) and so if you still want to earn some extra tickets, now is your chance!

Once we close the doors on the contest, we are going to count up all the names and tickets and then we are going to be holding the draw for the prizes.

If you do not have a comment indicating what you have done for the contest, make sure to do that now. Remember all comments with links go into moderation, so do not fear that we did not get the message.

We want to also assure you that even though this contest is over, we still have a LOT of awesome things planned for you at Johncow. We already have a super contest scheduled for next week and then another great one starting in mid July…. and another one already scheduled after that too. So if you are interested in running a contest with us, you better let us know soon because we are already booked up until August.

As for the training posts, we still do have a couple posts to finish and we have a keyword post to finish as well. We are then going to put those posts into a PDF ebook and make it available to everyone on the mailing list.

We promise that the quality of content will continue to be as good (if not better) as you have been used to over the past 10 weeks and we even have a sweet tool we are creating for you (and its free) to help you with one of the research strategies we have taught.

We would love to hear your feedback on the whole COWpetition, including the posts, strategies, the blogs, what you loved, what you hated (you better have not hated anything ) and so on. Please comment below and let us know.

Last of all, we just noticed this morning that a couple advertising spots have opened up and one of them is designated for a prize winner of a contest from a few days ago so if you want the other one, you better grab it now

Have a great and productive day!

Now that the initial JV Partners have been contacted it was time to focus on getting some link building and traffic generation done. We are big fans of leveraging the power of Web 2.0 communities but it is never wise to put all your eggs in one basket… you want your links to be diversified as much as possible. This is a challenge that a lot of people seem to run into because they find a strategy that works (whether it be a paid or free one) and they only do that. This is fine when just starting out and you are getting a few links but as your site grows you are going to need to incorporate a lot more strategies.

You see, as your site grows, if all the links pointing back to it are from the same sources, well then you will only get to a certain level and then plateau. Google pays attention to things like the source IP of the links and domains and all that good stuff and as the amount of links grow, it makes perfect sense that this becomes a bigger factor. If you only have say 50 links to your site and you used one method to get that… big deal, Google will not waste its time trying to figure out if all your links are natural are self made. If on the other hand your site now has 2000+ links, well then this starts to become a little more important and if 100% of those links are coming from just a few IPs and domains, well then things start to look a little suspicious.

How To You Build Diversity Into Your Link Building

This is certainly not an easy task to do by traditional methods. By building a high quality link bait page and using sites like Digg and Stumble-upon are very effective, but they are not really guaranteed and only getting a single Digg or Stumble is not anything to get excited about. There are also the strategies of submitting good content to article directories, contacting webmaster for links, creating good content that people just want to link to, submitting more press releases, submitting to link directories, commenting on blogs, submitting guest posts to blogs and so on and so on. These are all solid strategies but the challenge with them is the time frame in which they are effective.

Then there are paid tools that promise to make link building a breeze but the challenge with these tools are they tend to focus on only one strategy, some employ very risky strategies and if not properly used can get you into trouble with the search engines. A lot of these tools also use other peoples resources and do not ask permission, they focus on quantity and do not take into account quality. The other challenge is you are usually left to you own make to tool work.

OK Cow, So What Are We To Do Then?

The best solution is to do a mixture of everything… which of course is the obvious answer. You need to ensure you incorporate strategies that are solid and proven to work but it is also foolish to not take advantage of some of the great tools out there that make this work much easier. This is no different then using tools to make your research or site building easier… this is exactly what tools like TrafficTravis, AffiliateElite and even WordPress do, they make it easier to accomplish tasks. Each one of these tools, if used proper, can help you to achieve some pretty cool things, but if misused can cause a lot of frustration.

One of the most effective strategies we use is the concept of “Promoting Your Promotions”. This is something that 90% of the market fails to even consider doing and it is a huge opportunity. Say for example you leave a quality comment on someones blog that uses “dofollow” and they have no other comments. Well chances are this page more then likely will not be spidered from Google for a while, since it is not a popular page.

So, why not help it out and make it a little more popular by promoting it?

Think about it, you have taken the time to help add value to the blog by leaving a quality comment and your hope is that you get a link back out of it. Why not do a little promotion to that page and get the spiders back to that page right away and make your link count. Yes you are helping the owner of the blog but by helping them, you are also helping yourself.

Another example is EzineArticles.com, which is a powerful site that Google seems to absolutely love. If you do your research and create a good quality article, there is a good chance that the article will show up in Google, usually within about 48 hours. This however, is not guaranteed… there are thousands of articles added to this site everyday and not all of them rank well right away, or if they do they are down on page 3 or 4…which really is not all that helpful for getting traffic. It is great for the back link but you want to get traffic too. So what we do is make sure we also promote our article on EzineArticles, to give the page more authority which then helps boast it in the eyes of Google and gives it a higher ranking.

Our Tool of Choice

The problem with promoting your promotions, is it can start to be a fair bit of work. There are some simple strategies for accomplishing this, such as creating a Tumblr.com account and then linking to the page and then pinging your tumblr blog. This is effective but does not really pack a huge punch. This is one of the reasons that our tool of choice is so powerful. The tool we are referring to is one that we have a vested interest in and love using it. The tool is TrafficKahuna and what we love the most about this service is it is not just one service, it is made up of different tools for different strategies. They have a large network of blogs, they have a three way link exchange, an article exchange, video submission, an amazing co-op tool plus some solid Web2 training.

There have been some different rumors flying around about this tool and most of them are from people making assumptions that have never used the tools. For example there was a person claiming that all they did was publish the rss feed from one post onto dozens of different blogs… well that is not true. The system uses xmlrpc and publishes no more then 2 of the exact same articles on any 2 blogs. There was another claiming that they did not have as many blogs as they claimed… well that again is not true. What they do is rotate in and out some of the blogs to ensure they are not overused and they also make it so your posts only go to specific niche related blogs and the blogs are owned by members and are high quality blogs that are not simply link farms. These blogs must pass some strict criteria and no two blogs look the same.

Now a word of warning, this tool can be used to flood the internet with crap but that is another point we love about this tool, as they have strict moderation and are not afraid to kick people out that abuse the tools.

One of the coolest things for using this tool is when wanting to give your link bait pages a little extra boost. Their co-op tool is made up of thousands of members that work together on a point system. So you login and there are jobs available to perform, you do them and gain credits and you can then turn around and submit your job. So for example, when you create a link bait page, you can submit your digg page and ask members to digg your page. By getting those few initial diggs, this helps to boast the page up and get noticed and then the natural process take over (remember the concept of pulling the kite string). Another cool strategy with this tool is when you create a Squidoo.com lens for example, you use the blogging tool they have to get some back links to the Squidoo lens, then you request a few people to vote on the lens and you skyrocket that lens. One last thing is you watch you track backs, and when people start talking about your site and linking to it, you then do a little promotion to their site. You see the power in that is, if you can get their page ranking well in Google, then that is more traffic for you. Do not be happy with just one listing in Google… why not dominate them all!

You see the secret is leveraging these resources to work with each other instead of against each other. If someone is linking to you and is on page 2 of the search engines, do not look at that as competition in the results, look at it like it is your page and what do you need to do to get that page into the top 5 of Google. This is where tools like TrafficKahuna come in and are extremely powerful.

Disclaimer –> Like any tool, this is not the end all be all of tools, you want to make sure you are diversified but as your business grows and you have resources to invest then tools like this are a huge help. Like every tool, there are those that love it and those that dont… the best thing to do is try different things and see what works for you and then figure out how to improve upon that.

We promised to share all the tools and strategies that we use and this is one of them but please remember NEVER put all your eggs in one basket and what ever methods you use make sure quality is ALWAYS front and center.

In tomorrows post we are going to talk about some of the extra tings we did with our COWpetition blog GamerzRevewz.com

PS –> Do not worry that once this contest is done, that the quality of posts are going to shrink… we have lots and lots planned, so do not worry!

Hope you found this post useful!

First of all we want to wish all you fathers out there a very happy Father’s Day!

It is hard to believe that there are only 3 more days of this COWpetition… our Video Game Reviews blog will be going up for sale on the 18th and we will also be organizing all the contest winners. If you have not registered yet, do not worry as you still have time to do it right now. Visit our COWpetition page for more details.

In yesterdays post we talked about how we approached potential JV Partners for promoting our new blog, today we want to talk about the importance of following up with them. Now please remember, this post is to explain how we did this with our COWpetition blog and that means there was a strict time frame of only 30 days involved, so we had to improvise on a few things.

One of the rules in sales is that it takes seven communications to make a sale, so that means that a sales person, on average, needs to communicate with a potential customer seven times before they finally buy from them. Now what this refers to is with cold calling, obviously if someone is in search for a product or service already and is looking for it, then it is much quicker to close a sale. When you are contacting potential JV Partners, you need to look at it like cold calling for a sale. You are trying to convince someone, who more than likely has never even heard of you before, that it is worthwhile for them to partner up with you.

Now to communicate with someone seven times is very effective but for us to do this in such a short time frame is not very wise. Being too aggressive can work against you and you will be considered a spammer. Another important point is to never threat anything. What we mean by that is say for example you requested a link exchange from someone (this is just an easy example, please do not argue whether link exchanges work ), the most effective method is to post their link on your site first and then ask them to reciprocate. Well if after a week they do not reciprocate, do NOT email them and say that if they do not respond in 48 hours you will take the link down. OK, we confess, this example is a real life one and about 5 years ago we were guilty of trying it. All we can say is we got hammered by angry webmasters that used a lot of colourful language and the theme was that if we were requesting a favour from them then threatening was not a good move… we saw the error of our ways and 100% agree.

For the contacts that we had phone numbers for, our second contact with them was using the phone. When calling, often times you will get an automated voice system. You want to leave a message and you want to make sure that you sound as professional as possible. Do not stutter and just try to wing the conversation, make sure you have a script that you are following and rehearse it a few times. No one is going to follow up with you if the message sounds like a nervous person. You also need to make sure you make reference to the email you sent and the date and time you sent it, this way if the email was overlooked, you will spark an interest for them to go back and look at it.

It is urgent that you be fully confident in what it is you want from the person you are trying to contact, the more confident you are, the more assured that they will be in partnering with you. The most effective results for us seem to be simply introducing ourselves and mentioning that we were just following up on an email that we sent earlier and wanted to know if they had any questions.

For those that we did not have a phone number, we simply emailed them a friendly reminder. The way we formatted the reminder was that we know they are more than likely very busy and we wanted to follow up to ensure they received the email and to answer any questions they might have. We also included the original message with the follow up message.

In most situations the routine we follow is that we try to mail on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only. Some say Sundays work well but we have not found that. We also follow up to the original message about 24 hours later. After that we would tend to follow up about once a week and after the seventh try if we have not received a response we stop contacting them. This time however, due to our time constraint, we only followed up a third time and that was it and this was one week from the original date of contact.

Remember, be polite, be respectful, plan out what you are going to say, rehearse it and be professional!

Well there are only two more posts left in this COWpetition and tomorrow we are going to talk about the powerful tool we used that we talked about a few days ago and then on Tuesday we are going to wrap up by talking about some odds and ends with the video game blog. We sure hope you have been enjoying the posts and we are making a promise to you that we have lots of cool things planned for this summer so make sure to subscribe to our list and stay up to date on everythign going on.

A couple days ago we posted about the idea of “brown nosing” to get friends (JV Partners) and today we want to expand on that by providing you a real life scenario of what we truly meant by that and how we were able to gain some wicked exposure for our COWPetition blog GamerzReviewz.

First of all, we want to clarify something, we used the term “brown nosing” because of the shock value and we see it worked… which is cool but you will see today that the messages we sent people is not really that type of message BUT it depends on who is interpreting it. The BIGGEST thing we want to emphasize here however is the point that you do NOT want to be fake… it comes down to being respectful. What we mean is being fake is transparent and will eventually come back to bite you, however being respectful and sticking to facts is solid and will not turn around to bite you.

An example of this is an argument we got into with a friend at a wedding. We married sisters and my friend accused us of being fake because our wives ornery grandfather likes us much more then him. The basis of his argument was that we always acted pleasant and happy to see him even though he was often not a pleasant person to be around and is very set in his ways. My friend looked at this as being fake because he feels he should not have to act different for anyone and if he does not like someone then it is how he is going to act.

The way we looked at it however was…

• 1. We love our wife and this is her grandfather and she loves him very much
• 2. He is 89 years old and is very set in his ways
• 3. Who benefits from being rude and confrontational with him?

You see we look at it as to how can we make this a WIN/WIN and by digging our heels in the ground and being confrontational with him is only a win for one person (our selfish pride) but is a lose for everyone else. So instead, by us having to give a little more by being patient and overlooking certain things we make our wife happy which makes us much more happy

Now we need to stress one point, this respect only goes so far. Being respectful does not entail letting people walk all over you and take advantage of you. We get into debates with him and he knows where we stand on things however we are respectful to him.

Now lets carry this over into business examples. When you are looking at making WIN/WIN partnerships with people, ask yourself how can you get the most benefit out of this partnership. You need to look past appeasing your inner selfish pride and look at what is good for your business not just right now but for the long term as well. So often we get caught up in the here and now and fail to see how this will affect us in the future.

Our belief (and we have proven this in our own business) is that by going the extra mile for someone now helps to ensure a solid relationship in the future. For example with a new site that has little traffic and search engine influence, to approach someone and ask for a link trade or to be mentioned on their blog is not really a fair trade. This person has worked hard to be able to get to where they are and in our opinion to simply expect them to link to you or mention you because you link back is actually a little disrespectful in our opinion… especially if the person has never heard of you before.

Now one can argue that it is more effective to try and build a relationship first with the person and we 100% agree with this to a point. Examples are being solid contributors to their blog, providing constructive feedback about their products and things like that. The challenge we had here however was that we only had 30 days with this COWpetition to get as much exposure as we could with our blog and building relationships like that take time.

So what we did was first of all we made a list of all potential JV Partners that we could think of and we divided that list up into what type of partner they might be, which were….

• 1. Mailing List Partners: These are sites that have targeted mailing lists and might mail for us about our site
• 2. Content Partners: These are sites that might allow us to add content about our site
• 3. Banner Partners: These are sites that would put our banner on their site

Our main focus was to be on number one (mailing list) as that is the quickest way to get exposure.

Once we had our list we then had to research the most effective way to contact them. Some where friends but most were complete strangers. Contacting people we already had relationships with was easy, these were people that we have made contact with over the years in the IM world that we knew had a presence in this market. You see we have sites and mailing lists in dozens of niches and so do our friends and it is wise to know this. By having a close network of friends and knowing what markets they are in is very helpful when you have an interest in a similar market. Since we already had a relationship with these people, it was much easier to just send an email, get on skype or call them up and ask for the favor.

Now it is important to understand that we also made it clear that it was not just a one sided approach and we made it very clear as to how we would make it worth their while… the cool thing is since we already had proven our value as a friend to them, most simply did it as a friend.

Now, contacting the strangers on the other hand is the hard part. As stated above, we have had no time to build a trustworthy relationships with these people and so we needed to be able to ensure that our request stood above the crowd as something that was truly worth their consideration and this is were some might look at it is “brown nosing”.

The first step was to ensure we had the best possible contact method for them. Most was email but some had phone numbers available and we also looked for the name. Using the persons name in the communication is very important. Once we had the contact info we needed to create a personalized communication for each one. A huge mistake a lot of people make is by using just one template and simply replacing the name and url of the site… this is what is called being fake. Instead you need to look at their situation and see how it is you can add value to what they already have. If someone has a forum that already has loads of backlinks and traffic, by offering a link back to them is pretty much useless but perhaps offering to make a major mention of them as a sponsor with a link in a paid press release that you are sending out might be more enticing. For others we noticed that they had a good size list but were not showing up for certain main terms in the search engines and so we figured we could offer some targeted link building on certain terms. We looked at each site and tried to figure out the best value we could offer.

Next we needed to make sure we communicated in a professional way. By sending emails from a gmail or hotmail account is usually not a great idea for first impressions, so we made sure to create personalized email accounts using the domain of the blog. Next we made a basic template that only covered certain things, such as describing who we were. It is important that you try as best as possible to sound professional, so if you have a company name, then use that in the email.

Next we created very personalized messages for each site, that focused on what we saw of value in them and how we were willing to go above and beyond to work with them to make this a true win / win.

Here is an example outline that is very similar to what we actually used. We modified it slightly and PLEASE do NOT just copy and replace this message below, make sure you make your own custom messages and use your own voice with own introduction, make your message stand out from the crowd.

Start of Email –>

Dear (Insert Name Here),

My name is (Your Name Here) and I am the Marketing Manager of (Company Name Here), and we are looking for some powerful partners to align with in a new endeavor we are partaking and you immediately came to mind. (Their Name here), I have known of your site (url here) for a while and I absolutely love how (enter something you really like about their site or service and do NOT be fake, this is were you build them up).

(This section is now where you explain what you are doing, we mentioned that we are building a Video Game Review blog that was part of a contest on a popular blog, that we were giving away a free gaming console and what we had planned for marketing with the site, we also gave them the URL and explained all the plans for the blog.)

We have a host of diverse and experienced skill sets that are going to make this endeavor a success, including:
(In point form mention things you could offer. Even if you are the only one doing this or if you have a few out-sourcers then mention what you have to offer in services, you do not need to mention you are doing everything yourself but do not lie and say you have an office full of staff if you do not and make sure to make it sound as professional as possible. For us since we have in house staff we used that to our advantage and mention all that we had to offer )

(This section is to now explain how we envisioned them working with us. We explained what we thought was great about what they could bring to the table, we let them know we respected what they have done so far and how we would be willing to go above and beyond to work with them and we explained in detail exactly what we would be willing to do in return. You need to made it clear what you will do for them, set it up to make it a no brainer for them. It is important that you do NOT expect them to see the benefit of a partnership right away, even though you do, you need convince them of it by going above and beyond.)

(This section is to now close the conversation and add urgency to it. It was important for us to not put excessive pressure on them but they needed to know that there was a time frame involved here. For us this was very short and so we needed to be a little more aggressive but if you do not have an immediate short term then save this for a follow up message.)

Thanks (Enter Their Name Here), for taking the time to consider our proposal. My team and I are standing by to make this a very worthwhile partnership. I am also open to any ideas you might have in regards to this proposal.

I look forward to working with you,

Kindest Regards,

Name Here
Your Company Name and Position
Phone Number
Email Address

<– End of example email

IMPORTANT –> Do not contact any potential partners until you have something worthwhile to show them. Make sure your blog or service is ready to go, nothing says “Delete Me” more then a partner request from someone who only has a vague idea about something. If it is just a plan then make sure you have a written out plan with details you could send them… so often we have been asked to talk to someone who sounds like it might be a good idea only to find out they have no idea, just a hunch. Make sure you have something concrete for the potential partner to grab onto.

Well this is the end of another super long post

Hope you enjoyed it and tomorrows post is going to be much shorter and we are going to talk about following up with potential partners after the initial message is sent.

We are going to let you in on a little secret here… this was a huge part of how we were able to get some pretty influential contacts when we initially started in our online business.

You have to be a brown noser!

Now, you do not need to take this to the extreme but before you puff your chest out and say that you will never swoop to that level, let us explain what we mean.

Pride is a terrible thing because it is something that causes us to do some of the stupidest things. Let me give you an example. A couple weeks ago my office landlord called and asked for us to sign our new lease and pay June’s rent… well we told them that we have asked for our back door to be fixed for 2 months now and we are not doing anything until it is fixed. Well the door got fixed and the next day the landlord called and said that with holding rent was very unprofessional and not the way to get things done (which was proven otherwise but we will let that go). Then they started making up things like it took 2 months to get parts (which was a complete joke) and that if we did not pay right away they would come and change the locks.

Well we knew first hand that all the guy did to fix the door was replace the hinges and home depot carries them, plus he welded part of the door frame and added weather stripping. We had asked over and over to get this fixed and we were ignored until we refused to pay rent and then magically it happened. Well the attitude on the phone caused my pride to want to puff out… this person was lying and threatening and we are not going to stand for that… in fact we almost told them to come change the locks because we were moving the office. Well instead of that we took a couple deep breaths and simply said that we will have the rent for them in one hour and for them to have a nice day.

Why did we do that?

Well there are 7 people in this office and desks and computers and we worked out a good deal on rent since we remodeled the office… so would moving to prove a point and satisfy our pride be worth it?

Absolutely not but we can tell you one thing, our pride really made it hard to come to that conclusion.

What Does That Have to Do with Contacting JV Partners?

Every week we get many requests to partner with someone… it might simply be a link, a review or involvement in a project and 99% of these requests are simply deleted!

Why?

Because they are not truly WIN/WIN partnerships. For example, when someone asks us for a link trade and the site they will link from has barely any subscribers and low traffic… how is this a true WIN/WIN? Think about it… is this not really only a win for the person who has the site with low traffic and subscribers?

So how can you get around this?

Simply, you go for the pride… you satisfy the persons desire to be right (even if it is only in their own mind). This might sound conceded but it is just the way it is. Now take that same request we had above and tweak it to instead of saying a fair link trade, what if you said something like…

“We are such fans of your blog and we know that a link trade is not really a equal fair trade and if you are interested and since we are such a big fan of your blog, we would be more then happy to write a great review of your blog, submit an article that is a review of your blog to EzineArticles.com plus put a link in exchange for just a link from you”

Look at what we did there… we tried to satisfy the ego of the person by saying how much we love and respect them and that we know we are not equal but would be willing to go that extra mile just to be able to get a little of what they have.

So often we think of a WIN/WIN as an equal effort trade… but that is not what a true WIN/WIN is. For both parties to win, then both parties must get an equal value benefit. This is even more important for new blogs because you have absolutely no proof of results you can give them, so you need to get creative here.

What things could you offer above just a link back…

• Detailed post review
• You will write content for their blog
• You will do blog commenting for them with a link to their site
• Submit articles to major directories like ezine articles
• Create a quality squidoo lens about their site

…and the list can keep going. The thing is if you really feel that they could help your blog get off the ground, you NEED to make them feel important, you NEED to make sure your communication with them stands out from the crowd and you NEED to make it worth their while.

You need to understand that people who think that they are more influential then you in the market are going to have a certain level of pride about it. With that pride comes a barrier that you need to get over and that is where the “brown noser” comment comes in. You need to get over your pride that it is beneath you to do this and you need to suck up to the person, make them feel special and appease their pride so that they almost feel like they are being generous and gracious. This may sound silly but PLEASE consider it and try it… we promise you that the results will speak for themselves. With a few of these winning partnerships you will soon be able to start offering equal trade exchanges with people because you have the results to back it up.

Now a little word of warning, do not go overboard on this either, you do not want to sound like a creep or stalker but you need to sound like a fan.

In tomorrows post we are going to show you some of the exact emails we sent people and highlights from the phone calls we left with people and what the results of this were.

Hope this post was worth while!

In our last post (What Do You Digg Your Heels in On) we posed a couple questions in regards to an incident with an elderly lady at Home Depot and the response has been pretty good. Obviously with the two questions we had there are no wrong answers because it is all up to interpretation of the situation and each view point was surely a valid one.

For us, the important issue that we saw to be taken from this was something that relates to fear and ignorance and is something that stops a lot of us in our tracks from getting in on things before it is too late and prevents us from going from good results to exceptional results

An example of this within the MMO (Make MOOney Online) business is the “Tag & Ping” strategy that was introduced a couple years ago. We recall a few people bashing it and saying it was short term and was not going to last long. We knew of people predicting 3 months of life and that was it. These people looked at it like the previous strategy of “Blog & Ping” and immediately categorized it as the same and labeled it without even understanding anything about it. Well here we are 2 years later and this strategy has given birth to some amazing marketing strategies and in itself is still very effective, of course there have been tweaks and changes.

Why did people dig their heels in and fight it?

Maybe they did not trust the person they heard it from, maybe they were burnt before by a previous strategy and did not trust this one or maybe the process sounded too complicated and they were afraid to try it. We could keep going with reasons but the bottom line was something got stuck in their head and made them resistent to it without even having a clue what the process was about.

The end result?

It was not the end of the world but it was a missed opportunity. Some still stay away from it calling it black hat and yet others are still afraid of it. Anything to do with the word “Web 2.0″ and they curl up in a ball and shiver.

Get to the Point Cow!

If you want to grow your business, if you want to be a leader in this industry… you can NOT live on rumors, assumptions and fear. Look at the comments in this blog alone, things like…

• “those products are a scam”
• “that strategy does not work”
• “those techniques dont work or they would not be selling them”

That is nothing but FEAR and or IGNORANCE speaking. We can guarantee that 90% of the people that leave those comments, have never tried the product or strategy they are bashing and are not making a dime in profit online… they have either been burnt once, bought something and made assumptions about it right away and never bothered to follow through on it or they heard from someone that these products or strategies are junk.

Often we hear of people who refer to posts at places like digitalpoint or the warrior forum, and these posts they refer to are a complete joke… someone, who has no business talking about the subject because they do not even have a successful business online, starts mouthing off about something and because they have 1000+ posts, they are immediately thought of as an authority. Sorry but no they are not… if they had a successful online business they would not have time to waste in places like that.

Now do not get me wrong, there are a lot of people we respect in those forums but very and we do mean very few. Unless you can see for yourself the results that person has, do NOT listen to them.

One of the things we talk about around here is “theory”… we absolutely despise marketers who thrive on theory. It amazes us that even students of ours who pay us for help, totally ignore the advice we are giving them because they say that is not what so and so says. It is completely insane… they have not even bothered to try what we are showing them and yet they dig their heels in the ground and refuse to listen because of a theory from someone that they think is an authority and something that person has said has made them afraid.

The only way we were able to grow ourselves a successful business was by trying new “scary” things… by stepping out of our comfort zone and most important of all, by not letting theory distract us but actually following through on things and seeing for ourselves what works and what does not work. We will never and we mean never, tell someone that something does not work unless we have tried it and know first hand.

OK, so is this really about the elderly lady at Home Depot?

Not entirely… it is actually a mixture of things, the lady at Home Depot just kind of put it all together for us and really made us look at this. Some of the comments as of late have been biting at us a tiny bit and then a few days ago a comment about not buying that FaceBook and web 2 marketing actually works and then the Home Depot incident… it all came together.

WOW… this was only going to be a short intro into todays lesson but it just kept going and going… sorry about that.

So how in the world can this tie into the Video Games Reviews blog that we built for the COWpetition and “Getting the Word Out”?

It comes down to this…

We Are Not Afraid of:

• Trying Something New
• Stepping Out of Our Comfort Zone
• Being Told No
  

The story of Colonol Saunders of KFC is very inspiring. As an old man, he went to hundreds and hundreds of restaurants, trying to get them to buy into his idea… 99.9% of them said no… but all it took was the one that said YES!

With your business are you making ignorant assumptions, are you missing opportunities because you are intimidated by something, are you afraid to try something new?

If you want your blog or business to grow you need to drop your assumptions right now and step out of your comfort zone. If you want to get the word out then you need to be like Colonol Saunders and start knocking on peoples doors… and do NOT be afraid that they will say no. This is where the rubber truly hits the road for those that want to build a business and those that are just doing it for a hobbie.

With GamerzReviewz.com we listed every single blog, forum and website we could think of and or find that had an influence on the market. We then contacted many of them directly by email and phone to request a partnership. Some requests were for links, some where for advertisements in emails and some were for sponsorship of prizes. The point is however, that if we really wanted to get people talking about our blog, then we could not rely soley on general sites… we NEEDED to go right to where the people where that we were targeting.

The end result… 95% of the people said no or did not respond at all… but 5% said yes and the cool thing was that out of that 5% we got HUGE and we do mean HUGE exposure.

So what did we say to these people?

Sorry but this post is way too long already… come back tomorrow and we will tell you and explain the results. Then after that we are going to get into some really cool Web 2.0 strategies using a really powerful tool that has gotten us some “sick” results. This is a paid tool but we said we were going to be sharing everything we used and so we are going to talk about it. This tool in fact was a major influence in a large chunk of our taffic and we will be showing you where the traffic is coming from and how this tool helped.

Hope you enjoyed this post (ramble) and look forward to your comments.

IMPORTANT –> Before we go too far in this post we need to stress that please do not think that a contest is the only way to go. A contest is great but look at the most talked about items on sites like Digg.com, there are very few contests and in fact at this moment chances are none of the stories have anything to do with a contest. The reason we are saying this is because often times when we are training people, they simply duplicate the exact steps we are doing and this is a HUGE mistake. You need to look at the market you are in and make a plan but MOST important of all is to make it YOUR plan. You need to look at your market and go where they are talking and find out what they are talking about.

In the previous post we talked about getting the criteria of the contest on our link bait page ready, now it is time to start dropping seeds about the contest in different areas. This is where we start tapping into various different “Web 2.0″ communities and getting involved with like minded people. This part of the job is where we see a lot of people really drop the ball, they get lazy and do a half ass job and only see a tiny fraction of the results they should. You see each of these communities we are about to get involved in are very picky and do not take kindly to internet marketers trying to spam them to death. That means that you need to become an authentic part of their community before you can tapping into them or you need to find someone that is and get them to help you out. If you just join the community and then post a link directly to your blog and tell everyone to check out this great site, you will be completely ignored.

If you plan to use your own profile then another point to consider is the markets you are in. Often people tend to build blogs on different niches and this can pose a problem, imagine going to a site like FaceBook and seeing “John Cow” owner of JohnCow.com , GamerzReviewz.com and FrillyScrapBooking.com. You would look at this and probably have a few questions and if you were looking for something in the scrapbooking market then you would probably have some doubts that the person in the profile was who you were wanting guidance from in this market. Now, if we created a Facebook profile for our wife and had her name tied to the Scrapbooking site, that would be better. Oh and let me apologize right now to any of you guys out there reading this that are passionate scrapbookers, we are sure your frilly scrapbooks would make even my gramma envious… don’t let us discourage your manly passion (hey we actually kept a straight face while writing that).

OK, so now we needed to start listing the communities we were already a part of and remember one of the reasons we picked this market was because it was something we were familiar with and because of that we had profiles already established in some of these communities that matched up nicely with our new blog. So we listed the communities we were already a part of and then listed the communities that we were not part of and then needed to figure out how to tap into them. This actually turned out to be MUCH easier then you would think because of the strategy we used for getting writers… since the authors are real gamers, we simply requested their help.

NOTE –> If you do not already have established accounts in these communities, take your time and build them. Add real pictures and do not leave blanks, the first hint of a spammer is an unfinished profile.

IMPORTANT –> Do NOT add your own posts to these communities as recommendations. What we mean is it is fine to put your blog in your profile but do not digg your own pages. There are loads of people on Digg that will report this the moment they see it, they hate this kind of activity. What you can do however is ask people to digg the article for you. Now this might sound a little hypocritical that you can not post your own page but you can “ask” someone else to do it for you, but that is just the way it is. This was easily accomplished by simply asking the authors to digg the page and hopefully once the seed was planted, it was healthy enough to grow on its own after that.

Some of the communities we used were…

• Facebook
• MyBlogLog
• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Mixx
• Bumpzee

Now we used more then this but we are not listing them and that is because we want you to think for yourself. Go to Google and find sites like these but that are targeted directly to your market.

Using Press Releases:

Press Releases in our opinion are one of the most effective paid promotion tools available. This of course is 100% dependant on the quality of the content and of course the value of the story. You could have a fantastic press release but if the story it references is boring then it is a complete waste of time. The service we use is PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com) and we only use it when we have something of value to tell our market about. If you have a brand new blog, a press release is a great way to get the news out and like the example of GamerzReviewz, having a contest to celebrate the grand opening helped to make the news that much more exciting.

The draw back of using PRWeb is they are pretty expensive but the exposure of linking that you get is HUGE. Your press release gets distributed to major high authority sites and the credibility of your blog in the eyes of Google absolutely skyrockets.

A lot of marketers talk about using the Yahoo Directory (which costs $299) but in our opinion that is something to do once your blog has proven itself. We never pay to get added to the Yahoo directory until we see that it is turning a profit and if you only have so much to spend then use a press release. Now, this does not mean we do not recommend Yahoo Directory, in fact we highly recommend it but once again not until your blog has started generating revenue. The yahoo directory will give a great deal of added credibility and exposure to your blog.

With PRWeb the more you pay, the more exposure you get and also in order to be able to use keyword anchor text in your release you have to pay for one of the premium packages. This is very powerful, as you are getting keyword anchor text to your blog from extremely high authority sites.

In our next post we are going to continue on about announcing our contest in different areas of the web and then after that we will get into our joint venture process.

Hope you enjoyed this post and please post below any comments or questions you have about this post.

PS –> Over the next few months we are going to be sharing how we use different web 2.0 sites but there is no way we are able to go into detail in these posts on that, as each site would a full post and how to use Facebook is a series by itself.

There are two phases to the promotion rollout for our new Video Game Reviews blog, which are…

• Link Bait Promotion
• Index Promotion

We usually have four phases which also include…

• Money Promotion
• Maintenance Promotion

…the difference is we are going to be selling this blog very soon and as such we do not have the time to layout the entire process. The initial “Link Bait” promotion is to get the site to take off as fast as it can by using a viral element that takes full advantage of social web communities. Then once that is initiated we then move into a focused campaign on promoting the index page. These are what we will walk you through over the next few days.

The “Money Promotion” is when we start to really monetize the blog with affiliate reviews of different products and or services and focus the promotion on those pages. The last phase is the “Maintenance Promotion” where we rotate through promoting both the index page and other “deep link” pages of our blog. We believe it is important to focus on a 50/50 split of gaining links to both your index page and other deep linked pages on your blog. Our goal is to try and maintain a minimum link growth of one new one way link a day (average 30 a month). This is very easy to achieve if you create solid content, people will link to it naturally and that can leave you to focus your promotion on your “Money Pages”.

Now before a few of you comment below or email us requesting that we also share about “Money” and “Maintenance” promotions, do not worry about it, we have every intention of sharing this as well… but not right away, so you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you are notified

Link Bait Promotion

The reason we put so much attention on creating a quality “Link Bait” page is because it is so vitally important that your link growth be as viral as possible. We mentioned this a few posts back but think it is essential to repeat it. Promoting your blog is like pulling the string on a kite you are trying to launch into the sky, when you first pull on it, the kite shoots off into the air but if there is nothing (no wind) to carry it up high then the kite simply drops back down to the ground like a rock. So often we see people putting loads of effort into promoting something that is plain and simply a piece of crap. If you are not going to take the time to do this right, then your results are going to be poor. Do not just promote a keyword optimized article written by some guy with a name you can not pronounce that can barely speak a word of English and is only focused on making sure your keyword phrase is at 6%.

We do not want to get into detail on the “Link Bait” page as we have talked about that enough in prior posts but we hope that you can see clearly that quality is vitally important.

With our blog GamerzReviewz, our link bait page is focused on a contest and we now have three tasks we need to focus on. The first is to put together a viral system that will encourage readers to share our contest and link to use. The second is to start placing news of the contest in different areas that will start to get the ball rolling. The third is to find joint venture partners that would be willing to promote our contest to a targeted list of video gamers.

Part 1 –> VIRAL Marketing

Viral marketing is the process of creating an initiative that when done correct will have the consumers in your market spread the word. There is nothing more powerful in marketing then having the consumers recommending you to others. The challenge here is that it is not an easy system because what you might think is great, is not a shared view with others…. especially if you are entering a market you are not really familiar with. We felt that offering a free video game console was pretty much a no brainer for a video game market but we needed to set it up so that people would be encouraged to spread the word. The challenge with a contest is the more people that enter, the less your chances to win are, so we needed to create a very worthwhile incentive to get as many people as possible to do more then just the bare minimum.

We tested a few different options here and it is important that you test different options. For example we at first put an option for people to post in video game forums but this was not effective because it broke the rules of most of the forums and the posts were looked at as spam and were deleted. We had some apprehension about this strategy from the start, but it is always wise to test things in different markets… some times they work in one and not in another. Since we were watching this very close, we were able to pull this very quickly when we saw it was not effective and the last thing we wanted was to be labeled a spammer in the communities that we were targeting.

We brainstormed many different options and prioritized them in order of what we felt were the best. We did not want to add every option at once as this can cause a lot of confusion by giving too many options and also makes it harder to track. The one common element that we needed to focus on however was that for people to enter into the contest, they had to perform an action that added value to the blog, such as becoming a subscriber to the blog or providing a one way link.

IMPORTANT –> Do NOT just copy what works on one blog and think it will work for yours. Each market is so very different and one of your options might be something that barely anyone in your market is even capable of doing. Look at where a lot of actions are taking place for your market and figure out how to tap into it. For example the social community PlugIM.com is a fairly powerful tool to use but it is only focused in the IM (internet marketing) market and therefore having one of the criteria to be using this community when your market is focused on a completely unrelated market would be a huge waste.

Once we had our list of criteria we then needed to explain it as effectively as possible which means in as little words as possible. Remember you are dealing with a media that allows for great impatience because if your reader is encouraged to click away, they will. That might even mean hitting the back button in their browser which means you lose them. Once we had the criteria worded correctly we posted it and we also made sure to set a couple reminders in place for those that take the initial step of registering. Once registered the people are brought to a “Thank You” page and we needed to make sure that this page reminded them about how they could get even more chances to win. We also added a thanks for registering email into the system, so once subscribed they were reminded there as well.

The next step, which we will post about tomorrow, is to start getting the word out the the right people to get this viral process kicked off.

Hope you enjoyed this post and remember to subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date on the COWpetition and make sure to subscribe via email to enter into our HUGE $27000+ In Prizes Contest.

Almost 4 weeks ago, some comments were made about the marketing ability of John Cow… and it got us snorting mad.

We understand that controversy is great for bringing attention to bloggers and so we understood that Garry wanted to get attention by making claims about us but we just could not sit there and do nothing. So as you all know, the COWpetition was created to put an end to the smack talk once and for all.

Over the past two weeks we have brought you through the process of how we built a brand new blog and starting on Friday we are going to be sharing with you everything we are doing to promote our blog. So we thought this would be a perfect time to share with you the results so far, so you can see first hand that the methods we are about to teach you are not theory but honest to goodness solid FACTS!

Result #1:

JohnCow –> We received many comments and emails about how we should not have targeted such a competitive market, we of course laughed at those comments because we knew damn well what we were doing and the proof in that is the fact that we are on page one in Google for our main term “Video Game Review” and “Video Game Reviews” for the GamerzReviewz blog

Garry Conn –> Sorry Garry, but we look in the top 100 results for your blog for the term of your index page and you are no where to be found?

Disclaimer: We wanted to see what the traffic ratio was in comparison for this because maybe Garry’s term was a lot better. Well, this actually caused us to laugh. Here is the Google trends to show you the traffic potential and pay close attention to the fact that Google estimates Garry’s submitted blog traffic to be not even high enough to record any trends for it… Ouch!

Result #2:

John Cow –> Link Bait page traffic: we have been preaching the power of a link bait page for helping explode and maintain traffic growth. First of all “Click Here” to check out the 90++ terms we are getting search engine traffic from to our Gamerz Reviewz link bait page alone.

Garry Conn –> Well we assume that the page he has called “Free Debt Consolidation Books” is it because the focus seems to be on that, but sorry we could not find it in Google anywhere?

Results #3:

John Cow –> Getting initial traffic is great but what about consistent traffic growth… well Gamerz Reviewz (according to Alexa) has been on a steady increase from the get go…. look at the graph below.

Garry Conn –> Well looks like you had a good start there Garry (not as good as ours of course) but damn you kind of nose dived there didn’t you? Well maybe it was because you focused on getting traffic to it from the make online online community instead of the market it was actually in. We could be wrong though.

Summary –> GamersReviewz is dominating in all the areas it has initially been targeted on (and we have just started). Garry Conn’s site on the other hand, well you be the judge.

Want to learn first hand how we are doing this? Want to see the exact step by step process? Then subscribe via email (the form is in the sidebar) our list and you also get to be involved in our free CowCasts!

The old saying “Measure Twice Cut Once” is an important one to remember, especially at this phase of your blog creation. Having a blog that is now 95% ready to go live is often a time that a we start to get impatient and want to focus on the promotions to start earning money. This is a HUGE mistake because we suddenly put more items on our plate and get distracted from finishing off important items that seem insignificant but are critical to your blogs initial success.

There is certainly a good balance here as well as there are also those that are never satisfied with what they have and therefore get stuck in analysis paralysis and just sit on thier blog never moving forward with it, never feeling like it is ready. Your blog does not need to have perfect graphics and the exact correct colors, there are what we refer to as “Deal Breakers” which are the items that are critical and then there are the other tasks that are not critical but “Nice to Haves”.

The remaining items to finish before we start to go heavy with the promotions are to…

• Optimize the optin message and “Thank You” page
• Checking for errors (broken links)
• Create and submitting the Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)
• Turn on ping

Part 1 –> Optimize the Opt-in message and “Thank You” page

How often do you go to a blog and see a message like “Subscribe to our RSS feed”?

Do you really think that is effective?

We can guarantee that the majority of you agree it is not yet the majority of you do that very thing. This is one of the factors of your site that is so important and yet our impatience or even laziness cause us to just skim over it and go on to other things. In the previous COWpetition post we reference creating a call to action that was placed at the end of your posts to entice the reader to take a desired action on your blog. This exact same thing needs to take place with getting readers to opt in to your list.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and answer the question “what is in it for me”. People do not subscribe to RSS feeds for the sake a seeing the word subscribe, the do not submit an email just to see what happens. Never assume that offering free advice is something people will appreciate but instead give your readers what they want by providing a solution to a problem. Whether your blog is about health, automobiles, racing or make money.. there is a problem your readers have and that is why they are on your blog at that moment. It is your responsibility to understand what it is and provide a solution to them with a high percieved value.

Once you know the problem, you now have to tell them how to solve the problem by opting in to your list or subscribing to your rss feed. With the Video Game Reviews blog that we built, the problem that we focusd on was video gamers not having all the latest gaming consoles so they could play all the coolest games and so we offered them a simple way to have a chance to win one. There were a few different ideas we had for opt in headlines, we thought of mentioning how they could make thier friends jealous by showing off ther new system, they could finally stop being the butt of the jokes and actually have a system like everyone else or we could just tell them they can win one and let thier own reason surface. We opted for the last one and made it very obvious to see when they went to the blog what the benefit of opting in was.

Once we had the opt in message ready we now need to figure out how to best use the thank you landing page. This a an extremely valuable piece of virtual real estate and so often we see a thank you page that simply says “Thanks for opting in”. This is where you want to be sure that you give your reader direct instructions on what you want them to do next and it might be giving them an upsell to a product or like with the GamerzReviewz blog we used this to instruct them how to get more chances to win which were by performing actions that promoted GamerzReviewz. This is the critical need to the blog, to get the word out, and so it is the main focus.

Part 2 –>Checking for errors (broken links)

Before we create our sitemap we want to make sure that all links are working and there are no broken ones. Having broken links can cause errors and the search engines will not only not be able to properly access areas of your site but you will give readers the impression of an unfinished, unprofessional site. This is very easy to check with the free tool http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Part 3 –> Create and submitting the Google site map

Now that all the pages on your blog are ready to go, and all the links are checked and acurate, you want to make sure that the search engines are able to easily access all of them. The most effective way is to accomplish this is to create a search engine (mainly Google) specific sitemap and with WordPress this is extremely easy to do with the help of the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap that all the major search engines can read and is very easy to use.

Step 1: Go to the Plugins area and activate the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin.

Step 2: Open a blank notepad file and select save as and save the blank file as “sitemap.xml” and then repeat this step and save a new one as “sitemap.xml.gz”

Step 3: Upload these two new files to the same directory as your robots.txt file and change the permissions on them to six.six.six which is read & write access.

Step 4: Go to “Settings” –> “XML-Sitemap” and on the top of that page in the “Status” area, click on the link that says to build sitemap manually.

Step 5: You sitemap should now be ready and now scroll down and make sure the option “Build the sitemap in a background process (You don’t have to wait when you save a post)” is checked and if you have any extra pages on your blog, such as an opt in thank you page, then you are going to want to put the id# of that page in the “Exclude the following posts or pages:”.

To get the ID #, go to “Manage” –> “Posts” and then mouse over the title of the post and you will see “&post=#”, the # is the post ID.

Step 6: Now go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and if you do not already have an account with them, create one and then submit your sitemap. This is very important because the information that Google provides after a few days is very powerful and so do NOT just rely on the “ping” feature with this plugin. We promise that in a few days when we show you the data Google provides, you will be thankful you did this.

Part 4 –> Turn on the Ping

Now it is time to turn on the auto pinging feature in your blog but since we are having FeedBurner doing the pinging for us, we only need to ping FeedBurner and let them do the rest. The benefit of this is the back end issues that pinging the services can cause with your blog and by only pining feedburner you eliminate all these issues.

To do this simply go to Settings –> Writing and scroll down to the “Update Services”  area and enter http://ping.feedburner.com and click “Save Changes”.

Congratulations… We Are Ready For PROMOTING!!!!

Hope this post helped… let us now your questions and comments.

OK, we are at the start of week 3 and so it is time for the 2nd COWcast and time to open up the Q&A

The feedback on the first COWCast was great (if you attended and want to leave some feedback about it, that would be fantastic… you have to be opted in via email to our list to access it) but before we schedule our second one this week, we want to open it up to any questions and or clarifications in regards to the last  weeks posts.

Here are the links to the posts as a refresher for you

• Initial On Page Optimization with a Dash of FeedBurner and Aweber
• Navigation Do Not Forget the Navigation
• Get Your Blog Up
• Keyword Research Start Up the Diamond Digger
  
• Content Creation Madness

Please post your questions and clarifications down below

We have our content ready, the internal linking set up and our robots.txt file set up. There are just a few more things to take care of and then we can start up the initial promotion engine. These are…

• 1. SEO Your Index and Link Bait
• 2. Set up the optin form with FeedBurner and Aweber

Note –> During this time we have actually initiated some of the work in the promotional side of things, but for the sake of keeping things organized in these posts we are laying it out in this order. In the next post we start getting into the promotional side of things.

Part 1 –> SEO Your Index and Link Bait

We are almost ready to go live with our blog but first we need to make sure that it is properly optimized for the search engines. To do this we will use the WordPress plugin called “All In One SEO”.

Step 1: Activate the plugin if not already activated.

Step 2: Go to “Settings” and then “All in One SEO”

Step 3: Enter in a…

• Home Title
• Home Description
• Home Keywords.

These may change after you look at the Affiliate Elite results but you still want something in there for now.

IMPORTANT –> The title of the page is like the headline of a classified ad, this is what Google uses in the main title of the listing and if your title is not formatted properly and compelling then your click through rate is going to be terrible. We have seen many people with great rankings and not great traffic due to this reason. Make a more compelling “ad” then everyone else… you want to get the attention of the person looking at the results in Google.

Google often uses the meta description as the description in the listing as well so explain the title, so if you say you are the best at something then explain why in the description.

For the keywords just put four keyword phrases about your blog, do NOT worry about this too much as Google basically ignores them and they do very little in the other search engines as well.

For the title do not use more the 10 words, for the description keep it under 20 and the keywords just put four or five phrases.

Step 4: Do NOT check the “Use categories for META Keywords” but DO check…

• Use noindex for Categories:
• Use noindex for Archives:
• Use noindex for Tag Archives:

Checking these for exclusion is very useful for avoiding duplicate content.

Also check the “Autogenerate Descriptions” this will autogenerate the description if there’s no excerpt for the post.

Step 5: Go to your Link Bait post and scroll down to the “All in One SEO Pack” form area.

You want to now create a custom…

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

…for this page.

Step 6: Now you want to go to your post text and click on the HTML tab

Step 7: Where ever you have an image in the content look for the alt=”" and you will want to enter text into the alt tag. I recommend you put the main keyword phrase in one of them (ONLY ONE) and then in any other images, simply put what the image is a picture of. This is important from a professional standpoint and is just one of the “MANY” things Google looks at.

Step 8: Last of all go through the post and bold the main keyword phrase once and then Click “SAVE”

Part 2 –> Use FeedBurner and Aweber

We are going to be brutally honest here and tell you exactly how it is. We do not organize contests, spend hours writing content and work our tails off on this blog because we are such nice people. The fact is this is part of a business and our strategy is that by providing excellent value to you and working with you to help you succeed, we will gain your trust so you will opt in to our mailing list which in turn increases our readership and advertising value and hopefully you will also eventually purchase something with us or through us. You NEED to keep this in mind for you business, you have mouths to feed, bills to pay and you need to generate revenue to pay for those things.

Why do we tell you this?

Because we see so many bloggers out there that have no clue and they are going in circles, barely making a penny and they can not figure out why. Not only do they have no idea why they are doing this (we talked about this a while ago) but they also have done absolutely nothing to actually build a business and assets.

Let me ask you this…. What would happen to your current business if Google decided to de-index your blog?

If you have not taken the time to build an asset for your business then the answer you probably have is a pretty colorful one that we will not bother repeating.

So what is an asset? An asset is basically something that you own and has a value and one of the best assets an online business can have (in our opinion) is a subscriber base. With a solid base of subscribers, even if Google totally de-indexed your blog, you would not be lost at sea, you would still have a revenue stream and your business could still grow.

Of course there is more to having a list of subscribers then that but hopefully you are getting the picture here.

With a blog one of the easiest ways to gain subscribers is through the blogs RSS feed. This is very effective for staying in touch with your readers however it has its limitations but using a service like FeedBurner.com is an excellent way to overcome those limitations. They allow you to optimize and advertise and even offer a mail option where subscribers can subscribe via email. The problem with the FeedBurner option by itself however is you do not really own the asset, instead you are left at the mercy of FeedBurner.

The Solution –> The solution to this issue is using the mailing list service Aweber with FeedBurner.

We do not want to NOT offer a RSS subscription option for those that prefer to use a RSS reader and we of course want to be able to publicize our RSS readership size for monetization purposes but at the same time we want to grow an asset that we own and can have total control over. This is where Aweber is very powerful because it works beautifully with FeedBurner to get the best of both worlds! You can also mail your list personalized messages, gifts to increase trust and the occasional offer (which is what this is all about). A word of caution however, if you are mailing a promotion… make darn sure you truly believe it is something your readers would be interested in and is something you believe is worth while for them. Do NOT send them crap or you will lose their trust!

Note –> We know of no other mailing list service that works with FeedBurner like Aweber does for being able to get the full benefits of FeedBurner tracking.

Step 1: Go to http://www.feedburner.com/ and create a free account

Step 2: Submit your RSS feed and then click the “Activate Feed” button.

Step 3: Click the “Next” button and then on the next page check the…

“I want more! Have FeedBurner Stats PRO also track:” (This is now free)

NOTE –> There is an option here to optimize the links fro tracking purposes versus search engine optimizing… personally we like to leave it at default to get the most accurate tracking but the choice is up to you.

Step 4: Click the “Optimize” tab and then click on “SmartFeed” in the side bar and activate this.

Step 5: Click the “Ping Shot” in the side bar and click all the available service and then add 5 more from the drop down box and then click “Activate”. We do this instead of pinging from our blog.

Step 6: This step is only for those who do NOT have an Aweber account. Click on the “Email Subscriptions” in the side bar and click “Activate”. You will then take the supplied html code and enter it into a “Text” widget for your sidebar of your blog. Make sure to have it as close to the top of the sidebar as possible.

Step 7: If you have an Aweber account, you will not want to complete step 6 but instead log into your Aweber account and click on “Create and Manage Lists”

Step 8: Click the green “Create List” button and fill in the following but make sure to click the save button in each section that you fill:

• List Name
• Uncheck “Multiple Unsubscribe”
• Company Name (use name of blog)
• Website URL
• Email Address (this is what your subscribers will see)
• Name
• Check the From/Reply

Step 11: Click the “Messages” tab and “Blog Broadcast” sub menu and then the green “Create Blog Broadcast” button.

Step 12: Enter the following information…

• RSS Feed URL: Put your FeedBurner RSS feed URL in here
• Send Preferences: Send immediately and check Send Automatically
• Click the green “Load Templates” (Just use the basic template)
• In the “Plain Text Message” delete the lines…{!rss_channel_title}
  {!rss_channel_description}
  {!rss_channel_link}

  …and replace them with something like…

  Hey {!firstname_fix},
  Here is the latest update from Website Name Here…

  (Obviously use something in your own voice)

  It should look like this…

  

  Repeat the same step for the HTML message and so it looks like…

  

  Click the green save button.

Step 13: Go to “List Settings”, then the sub menu “Web Form” and click the green “Create Web form” button.

Step 14: Fill in the following information…

• Form Name
• Check “In line”
• Create a “Thank You” page on your blog and put the URL to the Thank You page in the field (DO not use the Aweber default).
• Put that same URL in the “Already Subscribed Page” field. (This is what we do initially but later on we change this but we will talk about that later)
• Click Next and add the “Name” option to the form and then mouse over the Name field in the preview box and click on the blue box with a pencil in it. In the drop down now select “Yes” for required.
• Click Save.

Step 15: Click on the Get HTML link and copy the HTML not the JavaScript.

Step 16: Log into your blog admin area and go to the “Design” and then “Widgets”. Click the “Add” beside the “Text” option to add a text widget and then click “edit” on the new added widget. Enter the HTML for the optin and click “change” and then “Save Changes”

Step 17: Drag the widget to the top of the widgets and again click “Save Changes”

Step 18: Go to your blog index page and view the optin box to make sure it is properly formatted to work with your blog. We will talk about formatting the optin message and thank you page in the next post.

Step 19: Go the Plugins page and activate the plugin “FeedBurner Feedsmith” and then go to “Settings” and then “FeedBurner”

Step 20: In the #2 box, enter your FeedBurner RSS feed URL, leave the #3 empty and then click save. Your RSS feed will now auto redirect to the FeedBurner one.

In the next post we are going to talk about…

• Optimizing your optin message and “Thank You” page
• Creating and submitting your Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)
• Checking for errors

Hope you found this a helpful post! Do not forget to register for our HUGE contest if you have not done so already (Click Here to do that now) and as always give us some feedback, questions and comments about this post

There are two main areas of focus that every blog needs to pay attention to…

• People –> Human visitors need to know exactly where to go and how to get there
• Bots –> The search engines bots need to no where to go and not go

The easiest way to do this… in our opinion, is to first create the site navigation, then once it is all done you go back and move it around to sort what goes where. To do this, you need to clearly understand what pages are important to get them ranked in the search engines and what pages are important for people but not for the search engines. For example…

• Non Money Pages (privacy, disclaimer and contact us): These types of pages are very important to have for legal reasons and also to help provide assurance to the readers but they do not need to rank in the search engines, they are simply on your site for anyone needing that info but having them rank in the search engines is pointless.
• Money Pages (sales pages and other monetized pages): These are the pages that you want people to visit, you want people to find in the search engines and are what you make your money from.

Because of the difference between money and non money pages, you want to ensure that all the “link love” that your site has, is focused as much as possible on the pages you make money on. This does not mean, removing links but instead just moving them and using the infamous rel=”nofollow”.

What this allows you to do is keep links visible to the human readers but for the most part ignored by the search engines (mainly Google) and vice versa.

Step 1 –> The first thing you want to do is to put the links to the disclaimer, terms of use, privacy and contact down to the bottom of the page, out of the way and remove any of these from the top and or side of the page. These are not pages that make you money, so you do not need them front and center but you do want them to be visible to someone looking for them. By moving these to the bottom of the page and adding nofollow to them, you are able to keep everyone happy

Step 2 –> Put a “Home” link in the top nav or sidebar with a “nofollow” tag. You are going to have to modify the actual template html to do this. This is important because you want a “Home” link for people to be able to clearly see how to get to the home page but you do NOT want the search engines using the word home as the keyword anchor text for your home page… unless of course you are Home Depot

To do this what we recommend is you “view source” of the blogs index page and then copy the html that is being used for your sites navigation. Then go into the template source code and modify the php scripting. So for example, the source code for a blogs navigation in the header.php by default will look something like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

and when the source code is viewed from the live blog, it would look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

So what we do is delete the source code html in the header.php (if the nav is in the header) and replace it will the html but add the nofollow where we want it to be, so it would look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Hopefully we did not lose you there

Step 3 –> Put a static link to your “link bait” page (do not use the nofollow for this link) beside your “Home” link in your navigation. So with the above example, the code in the header.php would now look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=http://www.yourdomain.com/ rel=”nofollow”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/linkbaitpage”>Link Bait Keyword Text Here</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Part 2 – Call to Action

There are two things you need to do for your readers… the first is provide useful content… the second is direction.

This is really where the rubber hits the road in terms of a quality blog (in our opinion) and a “MFA” (made for AdSense) site. What we mean by that is, if you have a garbage site, that has no link bait, uses cheap writers or only unedited PLR, then chances are you’re not going to earn any loyal followers. People want quality… they want answers and they want help. If you can provide that, then you will gain trust, they will want to come back and you will be able to earn revenue.

To do this most effectively, you want to keep those loyal people updated by opting in to your auto-responder / RSS feed PLUS you want to make sure you are directing them to the most important area of your site at that time… that would be the link bait for the initial site. To do this there are two things you can do…

• Use the plugin Subscribe Remind (http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/):
  By using this plugin you give a pre defined message but the message is easy to see and is made to appear with every post.
• Create a custom message at the end of each post: Creating a custom call to action in or at the end of every post gets the readers attention when they are already interested in what you are saying. This is the perfect time to mention to them that they can learn even more or get even better results by signing up or visit your link bait page. Have the message directly relate to the content… if one post is about “fat burning products” on a blog more specifically about exercise, then having a generic “Learn more about exercise” is not good… but having something like…
  Click Here to learn about not only the latest Fat Burning Products but also discover fun and easy exercises, healthy eating tips and more by now

Personally, we recommend using both, this is the most effective because it covers all areas.

When ever linking to the Link Bait or RSS feed, especially when using a call to action with a term like “Click Here”, you should add the nofollow tag to the link. We do not recommend using a keyword as the link, a call to action phrase is much more powerful and effective.

Part 3 – Create a robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file on your site that is meant to give instructions as to where search engine spiders may and may not go. This is not a wall but a permission system, which means that you can not force “bad” bots to listen to it. Bad bots are the bots that go all over your site but do not offer you any value at all.

The powerful reason for the robots.txt file is that it is listened to by the majority of all search engines and it helps to ensure that your site gets spidered and indexed properly. That means the pages you want to be found, can be found and the pages you want hidden will remain hidden.

We do not want to go into a long lesson on this, as there are loads of resources available on the topic that can be explained much better then we can explain them. What we will share with you however is that you want to use one and you want to upload it to the root directory on your server, located in the same place as your index page.

You can see the robot.txt we use at http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/robots.txt

Hope this post helps, hope you opted in to get more great tips and a chance to win some cool prizes and we hope you leave a comment about this post

Now that our blog is installed with the proper theme and plug ins, we need to start putting everything in order.

With a new blog, a huge mistake that a lot of marketers make is they focus all their initial energy entirely on the index page, this is where they target the majority of their links and optimization. This is not an effective viral launch strategy and we can prove that by pointing you to sites like digg.com and stumbleupon… how many diggs or stumbles are actually linking to the index page of a blog… VERY FEW!

Part 1: Link Bait

With a brand new blog, your focus, in our opinion, should be on creating what is referred to as a “Link Bait” page. When we first create our blog, it is our usual strategy to have it completely non monetized and focusing all its attention initially on the “Link Bait” page for the first 30 days. We usually do not monetize the blog initially as we have proven to our selves that it increases link building effectiveness (people are more willing to link to a new site that offers just good info rather then to one that is hammered with ads). Another reason we use this strategy is a blog is usually not starting to earn revenue for the first few weeks because the traffic is not really at a point to where it is worth while and in our opinion it is better to sacrifice a few dollars in potential ad revenue to get more back links.

The other reason for not monetizing is we want to finish analyzing the keywords with Affiliate Elite to understand what our focus keywords for making money need to be and then we want to start creating the content focused on monetization (affiliate stuff).

With GamerzReviewz we did not follow this strategy of not monetizing the blog due to the fact that we only have 30 days and we do not have time to come in later and start testing different things (you will notice the ad placements have already changed a few times as we are testing them) but it is highly recommended that you do not monetize your site during the initial launch phase.

So with the Link Bait page, the focus is to provide something that is very attractive to others and entices them to not only link to that page but also share it with others. So many times we have seen people submit a generic article or the homepage to sites like digg and then they cry that the system does not work. Well no kidding it does not work when you are submitting useless information that is not exciting to the readers. Who would ever digg a PLR (private label right) article or something some outsourced help in India wrote that cant speak a word of English but qualifies as a Elance.com writer.

Image via Wikipedia

You need to understand that with the evolving internet and Web 2.0 (actually some are even saying Web 3.0 now ) the real power is in using solid Link Bait content with the social sites. The best way we can describe this is it is like pulling the string on a kite to try to get it into the air, when you pull hard on the string the kite jumps up into the air… but then what?

This is when the wind MUST take over and lift the kite into the clouds or else it crashes back down to the ground.

When you submit content to social outlets, if the content is garbage, then the initial boast you give it will be all that it has, and once the initial promotion stops, the content will drop like rock. On the other hand however, if your content is worthwhile, then others will grab onto it and your link growth will explode.

How to Make a Link Bait Page:

A Link Bait page can really be anything you want. It can be…

• an article
• a song
• an image
• a video
• a contest
• software
• or anything else you can think of.

The idea however is it must be something worth while so people will want to link to it and share it with others.

A great article that gives some good detail on creating a “Link Bait” page, is at…

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/linkbait-beginners-guide/

For our site we needed something that we knew would cause a lot of buzz and offer a lot of value to the potential buyer of this blog in the long run. Back links of course are very valuable but have a mailing list is much more valuable and so we needed something that could accomplish both goals and therefore we decided on a contest that would require contestants to provide us with both emails and links. We wanted to ensure that we targeted people that were in the gaming market and offered something we know that the majority of them would love to win and so we offered a new gaming system. The problem is when you have a contest, often people do not want to share about it because they want to win and the more they share the less chances they have to win. To counter this we made it so there was a worth while incentive to not only opt in to the mailing list but also share about the contest with others.

You can check out our “Link Bait” contest page at…

http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/contests/win-a-ps3-xbox360-or-wii-with-gamerzreviewz/

One last point on “Link Bait”… make the page easy to read and come alive. Put some images in it if you can, make sure to bold certain points and even blockquote a really important point or two. It is also important that you keep the paragraphs to no more then 3 sentences each… this makes the content easier to read.

Part 2: Start Posting Your Content

Now it is time to start adding some of your content. The purpose of this content is to just give some food to the search engines while your site is getting started. We are not going to promote the site yet, we are just wanting to add the content.. we still have to fix up the navigation. Also if you just had one page (your link bait), it is not much for the search engines to bother with and also your readers will be pretty turned off, because you will not appear much of an authority on the topic. You want to appear as some what of an established site

In the previous post we talked about creating content and so we are not going to go into any more details on it here.

Once you have your initial content (at the bare minimum start with at least 15 unique posts), you will add them as individual posts to your blog. Make sure to organize the posts into categories and rename the default category to something that relates to your site.

Part 3 – Update Your Blog Theme

This is very important because it helps to make your blog recognizable for the niche you are pursuing. Often people just use a WordPress free theme and leave the images that are included and so you may have a city scene for the top banner on a blog about “Back Pain”.. not really a good idea.

The first step (if your blog has a header image) is to update this header image… which is very easy to do.

Step 1 - Mouse over the image and right click your mouse. The image more then likely will be a background image, so select “View Background Image”

Step 2 - Now right click on the image and save to your computer. You will also want to note where the image is located because you are going to upload to that same location on your server. An example of the location is…

http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/images/header.jpg

Step 3 - Edit the header image, keeping the original size and include some images that relate to your topic.

Step 4 - Upload the image to over write the original.

Now it is time to start setting your blog up to get ready to go live.

Part 4 – Updating Your “About Us” Page

The “About Us” page is an often ignored and under used page that really is something that helps build a lot of credibility with your site. This is especially true when it comes to trying to sell to people because you need to ensure you create a sense of trust with the readers by either explaining your qualifications or by relating to them.

There are two ways we go about creating an “About Us” page…

• Talk about the Person: If you are interested in building yourself as an authoritative person in this field then this is a perfect place to create a resume of sorts. Explain why you created this blog, what the blog is for, why you are an authoritative source for information in this niche and maybe a little bit of personal info like where you are from and also add a picture of yourself.
• Talk about the Site: If you are not interested in personally being known as the author of the blog (branding your name) then instead of talking about the person behind it you can focus on the blog directly. We still recommend you include an image on the page. For this type of page you will want to stick to the facts of the blog only, what it is created for, where they should go on it, what they can expect from it and why it is a resource they should use.

How to Create the “About Us” Page…

Step 1 –> Click on “Manage” and then “Pages”

You do not need to create a new page here since WordPress automatically created the about page right off the start.

Step 2 –> Click on the page titled “About Us”

Editing a page is no different than a post, the only thing is you do not assign a category.

Step 3 –> Once you have created the page, you will want to shut the comments “OFF”. Simply scroll down to the “Comments & Pings” and un-check the boxes and then select “Save” button.

Part 5 – Creating a Privacy, Terms of Use and Disclaimer Page

We think that often people look at the Internet as a “personal” item and that our blogs are our own private things that we can safely share with others. The sad thing however is this is 100% not true and there are thousands of rouge lawyers out there just waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce of some poor unsuspecting victim.

The best way to protect yourself from this is first and foremost, seek legal counsel on anything you are not sure of. Next you will want to make sure you use content that you have legal rights to use, meaning you created it and have the permission to use it… this includes images, videos and articles.

You also want to ensure you have the proper legal documents on your blog such as a “Privacy Policy”, “Terms of Use” and “Disclaimer”. These are extremely important because they clearly lay out the who, what, when, why and how that surrounds your site so you can be protected.

There are a lot of sources you can use to create these pages that are both free and paid. Do not just copy and paste something from another site, make sure to get a custom one for your business and we personally recommend the “Internet Lay Compliance System” which does cost money but it covers you from A to Z.

To create these pages, you will simply create pages in your blog.

Step 1 –> Go to “Write” and then “Page”

Step 2 –> Create the individual page and then make sure (like the about us page) you shut off the comments and pings.

step 3 –> Click “Publish”

OK, we think this is enough for this post… we actually have loads more but we will break this into another post in which we talk about navigation, call to action and the robots.txt

Hope you found this post useful and as always please give us your feedback, comments or questions

We always hear about how we need to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to dominate the search engines but for the last couple years the term VEO has surfaced which says to focus on the visitor and not the search engines.

Which one is right?

In our opinion, they both are and we made reference to this is an early post in this cowpetition.

You see with the new evolving dynamics of the web, things have changed. No longer are you just focused on trying to get traffic from Google but now you have hundreds and sites to also take advantage of that can send you equal and often times more traffic then Google. Because of this if you end up on focusing on just one aspect of your site optimization then you are missing out on the entire potential.

Our recommendation is you first set up your site for the human visitor and then once that is done, optimize it for the search engines. This is no different then focusing on your content, you want the reader to be satisfied and then you can tweak it to make the search engine bots happy too. In our experience trying to first optimize for the search engines and then for the human visitor is a more difficult task.

The process that we go through for this and the one that we followed for the GamerzReviewz blog is…

1. Install your blog, theme, and plugins
2. Create a “Link Bait” page and Opt In with site navigation emphasis on the “Opt In” and “Link Bait” for both the search engines and the visitors and update the graphics and color of blog to match theme
3. Manually test all links and ensure all navigation is pointing exactly where we want it to, install a robots.txt file and then submit your sitemap to Google webmaser tools to verify the blog is clear of errors
4. Start contacting JV partners and start your initial promotions

The great thing is while the keywords from the previous lesson are running in Affiliate Elite, we can get all this other important work done and when they are ready we can already be getting loads of traffic thanks to our Link bait page and viral incentives.

In todays post we are going to focus on point 1 and then in the next post it will focus on 2 & 3 and then after that 4 (or so that is the plan right now).

The following may seem basic to you but we are sharing it anyway and so pay attention

Part 1 –> Installing WordPress:

There are two “main” ways to install a Wordpress blog. The first is to manually download the files from…

http://wordpress.org/download/

The second is to use a free installation script, called Fantastico,that is standard with many hosting accounts. If your hosting account does not come with “Fantastico” or something similar, then the manual install is relatively easy to perform and WordPress provides a detailed guide at…

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

…to help you through the installation.

Yes we realize there are more ways to do this and there are new tools for this popping up all the time, but for the sake of simplicity these are the two we are referring to.

For this post we are going to walk you through the steps to install WordPress using the “Fantastico” service, which is what we did.

Step 1: Log into your hosting account control panel and locate the “fantastic”icon.

Step 2: Once inside the “fantastico” control panel, you will see on the left hand side, a list of different php scripts that you can install on your server. Click on the “WordPress” link.

Step 3: On the right side of the screen you will now see a summary of current WordPress installations on your server. If you have not installed WordPress already, under “Current Installations:” it will simply say “None”. Click on the link that says “New Installation”

Step 4: Now you will have the WordPress set up form on the right hand side of the screen. If you have installed your domain as a subdomain or addon domain, then make sure you select the correct domain location in the drop down box. If you are installing the blog in the root directory of your domain, you will leave the “Install in Directory” blank. Enter an administrator user name and password and your email account password.

The email account password can be anything you want as you will not use it anyway and the rest of the fields will all be updated later on. Now click on “Install WordPress” and then on the next screen click the “Finish Installation” button. On the final installation page, you can also enter your email address to have all the installation information (user name, password, and more) sent to your email address.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed WordPress!

Part 2 –> Getting themes and what to look for and what to customize

When you first install WordPress on your domain, it will have the default template. Personally I recommend you do not use the default template, as it is in my opinion, very boring, and there are loads of nicer free templates available.

We used out own custom theme that you can learn more about at http://www.johncow.us/milkit/

If however you want to use one of the free templates available from WordPress then…

Step 1: Log into your WordPress admin panel at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Step 2: Click on the “Design Tab

Step 3: This is your “Template” management area and WordPress makes it extremely easy to update your templates with just a few clicks of the mouse. To find some great templates, you are going to want to scroll down on the “Design” page and click on the link called “WordPress Theme Directory”. Make sure to right click and open in a new window so you do not leave your admin area.

Step 4: You will now find a directory of thousands of free WordPress”Themes” (templates) that you can use on your blog. We recommend that your first choice in the sorting options, on the left side of the page, the “Widget Ready” option, as this will make modifying your blog a lot easier later on. Now select a theme that you like and do not worry if you are not sure, you can easily change the theme later if you wish.

The sorting options are not guaranteed and so a word of warning is to install the theme and check that tit is widget compatible before you do any image changes or anything like that.

Note: Widgets are a feature in WordPress that allows you to easily drag and drop different features into your blogs sidebar.

Step 5: Once you have the theme that you like, click on the “Download” link and save it to your desktop. You will want to unzip the file and save the folder to your computer.

Step 6: Now open your favorite FTP software to upload your theme to the correct folder. If you do not own a FTP software, download the free open source solution called FileZill, which can be downloaded from http://filezilla-project.org/

Step 7: Locate the folder on your server called “themes”. To find it, go to your root folder where your index page would be and click on “wp-content” –> “themes”

Now upload the entire contents (folder and all) to the themes folder.

Step 8: Go back to your WordPress admin area now and if you are still in the “Design” area, refresh your page. You will now see the downloaded template included. To install the template, simply click on the template picture and it will automatically get installed.

You can now right click on the “View Site” button and open in a new window, to see how the new template looks on your blog.

Part 3 –> Plugins… what they are and which ones to use

Plugins are basically scripts that can be easily added on to your WordPress installation to add extra functionality and since WordPress is an open source project (all the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use with a few restrictions) there are literally thousands of programmers constantly creating improvements and new plugins for WordPress.

The problem with plugins however, is WordPress is always evolving and with new improvements, often some plugins stop working with the latest version of WordPress. Thankfully however, there are always new plugins being created and 95% of them are all free.

The majority of plugins are more for fun functionality, meaning they are more just “cool to have” type of features. There are a few plugins however that in our opinion are very important to use and help from both an end user and an optimization point of view. These plugins are not the only plugins to use and if there are others you like then feel free to use them. We also make no guarantees that the next time WordPress updates, that any of these will continue to work.

To find plugins, click on the “Plugins” tab…

…and then scroll down to the bottom the page and right click on “WordPress Plugin Directory” and open in a new window. This site has thousands of plugins to choose from and provides some important information. The most important thing to look at when looking at plugins, is the compatibility, you want to ensure that the plugins work with the version of WordPress you are using. To check this, simply click on the plugin title in the directory, then on the Plugin Details page, check the “Requires WordPress Version:”

To find out the version of WordPress you are using, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page in the your WordPress admin area and it will mention it.

If the plugin is compatible, then click the download button and save the file to your computer. You will then want to unzip the contents of the zip file. Now open your FTP software and navigate to “wp-content” –> “plugins”

Simply upload the the unzipped plugins file to the plugins folder. Now go the plugins page in your admin area and you will see the list of uploaded plugins. Plugins that are NOT activated will be white and once activated will turn green. To activate a plugin, simply click the “Activate” link.

Akismet–>
(http://akismet.com/) This comes standard with WordPress and is in my opinion the most stable of all “Spam Filter” plugins. The only draw back to this plugin is you need to have a WordPress API but these are very easy to get. Simply register at http://www.wordpress.com and then you will receive an email with your API key in it. Then you activate the plugin and click on “Akismet Configuration” and then enter the API key in the provided field.

All In One SEO Pack –>
(http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) WordPress out of the box is not optimized well from a search engine perspective. This plugin helps with improving how each post and page is optimized and also helps to prevent your blog from showing duplicate content.

Google XML Sitemaps –>
(http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/) Google site maps are fantastic ways to help improve the complete indexing of your blog. This ensures that all posts and pages are properly linked to for Google (and the other search engines) to find. You can also block certain pages from being found, ping the search engines when your sitemap is updated and best of all the sitemap will automatically update every time the blog updates.

Related Posts –>
(http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries) This plugin helps to provide better related internal linking on your blog. Once activated, this plugin will find which posts are similar to each other and interlink them. This is good for both the search engines and human visitors.

Sociable –>
(http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/sociable/) This plugin will automatically add links to your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so that your posts can be easily added to them.

Brian’s Threaded Comments –>
(http://meidell.dk/archives/2004/09/04/nested-comments/) This plugin will automatically organize your page commentsin a more structured pattern so replies can be made directly to specific comments.

Enforce www. Preference –>
(http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/) This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.

Homepage Excerpts –>
(http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/) This plugin gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Subscribe Remind –>
(http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/) This plugin will automatically place text and a link at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WWSGD –>
(http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do) Treat new visitors different then new visitors

Feed Footer –>
(http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/) This plugin allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed.

OIO Publisher Plugin –>
(http://www.johncow.com/oiopublisher) This plugin is very affordable at just $37 and is by far the best we have come across for easily managing displaying paid advertising on your blog.

Do not be concerned with modifying the settings for these plugins yet. You will do this later on once we add content.

Part 4 –> Shut off Notifications

Once you have installed your plugins, you are now going to turn off the default notification function. This is a powerful feature with Wordpress that notifies different blog directories when a new update has occurred at your blog. The problem is you do not want to be notifying anyone about your blog until you have some content.

To shut this feature off, click on…

“Settings” –> “Writing”

…and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called “Update Services”. Delete the url that is in the form field and click “save changes”

Now go to…

“Settings” –> “XML Sitemap”

…and un-check all the “Update notifications”

• Notify Google about updates of your Blog
• Notify MSN Live Search about updates of your Blog
• Notify Ask.com about updates of your Blog
• Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog

Part 5 –> Set your Permalinks

One of the other draw backs of WordPress is that it comes default with very non user friendly file names. On the good side however, they make it very easy to customize this and make it very user friendly. So instead of having a url that looks like this…

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

…you can have something like…

http://www.yourblog.com/categoryname/keyword-phrase-here

To set this click on…

“Settings” –> “Permalinks”

…and click on the “Custom Structure” radio button. Now in the field provided you can set how you want the file system to display. There are dozens of combinations that you can create and the available tokens can be found by clicking the link called “number of tags are available”

Once you have the permalinks set, click the “Save Changes”. Wordpress should update this automatically but it may require you to modify your .htaccess file. Wordpress will provide you with the exact steps you need to do this.

Congratulations, your blog is set up!

In the next post we focus on getting our “Link Bait” set up and optimizing the blog around it from a visitor and search engine perspective.

We hope this was helpful and we will talk to you all tomorrow

Please provide your feedback!