Long Tail Treasure Affiliate E-Course

Affiliate Marketing E-Course

Course Content

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Campaign Outline
Lesson 3 - Product And Keyword Selection
Lesson 4 - Building a Squidoo Lens With Relevance
Lesson 5 - Promoting Your Squidoo Lens
Lesson 6 - Article Marketing
Lesson 7 - Cashing In With Cheap Traffic
Lesson 8 - Blogging for Dollars
Lesson 9 - Mailing List Windfall
Q&A Video/mp3 #1
Q&A Video/mp3 #2

Lesson 5 - Promoting Your Squidoo Lens

Welcome back for another lesson.

It's finally time to talk about promoting your campaign. In our particular scenario the squidoo lens is our landing page so let's see how to drive traffic to it.

I group traffic into 6 categories

Direct - Typing url directly into the browser
Referral - Links from other websites
Search Engine - Links found via search engine
Email - Links from email sent to email list members
Viral - Links in an eBook or other media that can be copied and passed around to others
PPC - Google Adwords and other similar paid advertising

For this particular lesson I'm going to be considering referral traffic and search engine traffic. Other forms of traffic will be introduced in the next couple lessons.

Referral traffic comes from backlinks to your website. The good news, as you've probably guessed from the previous lesson, is that acquiring relevant backlinks that drive search engine rankings will also drive referral traffic. The process is largely one and the same.

I can already hear some objections, and yes there are certainly many exceptions to every rule, but for those marketing via content (articles, blogs, social websites etc.) rather than PPC, they are very often one and the same.

If you expect people to follow a link to your page then the link had better be relevant to them or they won't follow it. So if people from the dog website are not following through to your car dealership website it's because they don't have confidence they'll find what they're looking for.

It turns out this evaluation of relevance we perform when deciding to follow a link isn't just for people. It's the same process Google is trying to mimic with its algorithms when calculating the relevance of your page and determining how much page rank to pass on to your page.

So the point is, in general, as you create backlinks to your site focus on creating backlinks that are meaningful and relevant, as discussed in the previous lesson. This way you're not only building traffic links, but PageRank contributing links to support our search engine positioning.

How To Create Meaningful & Relevant Content?

Focus on helping people find solutions to problems instead of simply tossing them a sales pitch. People grow weary of sales pitches very quickly. If, on the other hand, you create information that helps them solve their problems or find what they're looking for, there's a good chance they will buy from you, or at least follow the link to your landing page. Think about what they want or need, not what you want or need.

Create real value for your leads and there's a much better chance they will turn into customers.

Practically Speaking

Practically speaking we're looking to get backlinks to our landing page on as many relevant high PageRank websites as we can.

How do you pick the right websites to target for backlinks?

There are so many high PageRank sites that you can't get on them all so you still need to narrow down the list of sites to target.

The way I approach this is to start with websites that provide some extra leverage. Though there are many types of leverage to be found, for this discussion I'm specifically talking about these three types of leverage

Syndication Via RSS Feed ? If you have a blog or squidoo lens you can let others syndicate it with an RSS feed. This means your blog posts are available to appear on other websites complete with backlinks creating a path back to your blog or lens. You get traffic and backlinks for Google PageRank. BTW, a Squidoo lens is treated like a big blog post and can be submitted to blog engines.
Social Websites ? these include social communities like Squidoo.com, HubPages.com, Facebook.com etc. and social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com and Del.icio.us
Websites With Top 10 Lists ? EzineArticles.com, Squidoo.com and most other social sites like flickr.com have top lists or most popular lists. We all love top 10 lists ;)

Now even if we only consider these types of sites the number is too big, and it's getting bigger every day as the web moves increasingly towards a web 2.0 model of social networking based content and services. This is good for us as you'll learn.

It turns out that that some sites are just better than others for certain purposes, even if they have the same PageRank. It could be that one site is more relevant to your topic or that it has a lot of members that are in your same headspace. Or it could be that some sites with the same PageRank are not really as close together in the Google Juice providing power as you might think.

Google PageRank

How much more traffic, power, or Google Juice does a page with PageRank 4 have compared to a page with a PageRank of 3?

Maybe you're thinking along these lines ...

It's a 10 point scale and 4 is only 1 point above 3 so it's certainly not double, so maybe 1/2 or more like 1/3 ?

Nope. The PageRank scale is actually a logarithmic scale. No one is exactly sure what the logarithm base is because it's buried inside Google secret sauce, but it is definitely logarithmic.

What does this mean? Well if it's log base 10 then each point on the scale is 10 times as large as the one before it. So in this case instead of a 10 point scale it would look more like this

1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
100,000,000
1,000,000,000

So a website with PageRank 4 has significantly more Google Juice than a PageRank 3 site. Now consider that you could have a site that just doesn't quite make the cut for PageRank 4, but it's close, yet just falls at the end of the PageRank 3 scale. Now do you see how two sites with the same PageRank can provide significantly different amounts of power for your backlinks?

Fortunately once you get your head into the online marketing communities like Wealthy Affiliates, or many of the marketing forums and blogs out there you'll discover that news travels fast about which websites Google really likes and which ones generate traffic.

Being connected to the marketing community is just as important as being connected to your niche market that your trying to sell to.

Here's a list of hot websites that at are currently really giving websites a boost so be sure to use them. Of course the list is not exhaustive and does change, but these sites are pretty solid sites that will give your campaign a real kick in the pants

Social Network Websites (Bookmark / Voting Sites)

With these sites the kick you get from Google in terms of your search engine rank is pretty good just by submitting your website, blog post or lens.

But the real power is when people start to Digg it as well, or stumble it, or add it to their del.ico.ous bookmarks. Every time someone does this a link to your submission is added to another page within that persons account. Usually there's a page that shows what links they have, or what they've Dugg in the past. This part of the "social" in social bookmarking.

So as you can see, good content that gets recognized can create a lot of powerful backlinks pretty quickly!

How To Get Your Submission Recognized?

Friend people with these sites. Most of the social networking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, allow you to become friends with people. Trust me when I say you want as many friends as you can get. Make sure they're real though. Don't fall for those 1000,000 friends in 10 minutes deals.

If you make a new submission to a site then your friends will automatically see it in their activity list increasing the chance they will also Digg it or otherwise "vote" for it. Also, many sites like these have a way to send a shout, or instant message, to all your friends which can create a lot of traffic and backlinks quickly.

The key is not to abuse it. If you start spamming people they'll drop you like a rock. But if you simply become part of the community and contribute useful information then people will look forward to hearing from you. And this too will increase your chances for some friendly recognition.

Wondering how to get friends? Simply look for others on the social site and if you find someone who likes the same content as you or who produces content that you like then send them a friend invite, or add them to your fan list. They often will reciprocate. before long you'll have hundreds or even thousands of people in your friend lists at the various sites. And don't forget about all the people they have on their friends lists. This can quickly become a massive network that can help you get the word out about what your doing.

You've got a new friends now so don't abuse them and they will become a valuable part of your network of contacts.
Even if you haven't got a bunch of friends on these sites yet, you can still email your current friends and ask them to Digg or vote for your site or post. All you need is a few votes for your site to get the ball rolling. Think about it, are you more interested in reading a submission with only 1 vote or 8 votes? If 8 people thought it was good then maybe it's worth looking at.
When submitting a webpage, blog post or lens to these sites be sure to think carefully about the title, tags and description. You want it to attract the attention of the right people, people who will actually care to read it.
Lastly, ALWAYS be the first to submit your MOST IMPORTANT pages or posts or whatever you're submitting. Don't give anyone else a chance to submit these ones before you! Why? Because with many social bookmarking sites it's the comment the very first submitter enters that is often displayed as the description of the entry. Everyone after that who votes for it will only be adding a vote and are not able to change the description everyone sees. You do want to be in control of the message you're sending don't you?

Why not submit all of them yourself then? This can be a dangerous tactic because if you submit too often using the same account then people may report you as spamming the submission process. If members of the particular community, say Digg, feel you're spamming the submission process they can report it and have your URL banned so don't over do it. If other people Digg your posts first then they're submitting the post and it's not spam. Make sense? Just remember, if your url is banned then you can't promote your site with this service any longer.

One of the nice things about the fact that these sites get crawled so quickly is that you can get a piece the Google front page in a matter of minutes if your keywords are targeted to a narrow niche.

Remember our front page of Google in 4 minutes picture of our campaign lens for Keyword Elite Scam Challenge?

full image

After only 4 minutes of submitting the newly created lens to Digg the submission was on the first page of Google for our keywords! But note it's the Digg website that's on the front page, not my lens. But the Digg page that's there is a page for my submission with my lens on it. It's not direct, but it's pretty good since it can already start to drive traffic.

If you checked in on the search term "Keyword Elite Scam" over the 4 day period after it was submitted you'd have noticed that the Digg listing in Google bounced around a bit and then dropped out of site. Even though you don't see it, it's still contributing a fair amount to your PageRank. The idea though, is to use this as a quick way to get out there while you build backlinks with more permanency.

Blog Promotion (RSS Syndication)

Blogging is great for generating traffic, but it only works if you have something useful to say. Make a blog about your product and then research it so you can offer up some info every other day that will pertain to your product or service. There will be more on how to effectively use your blog to drive traffic in a later blog lesson.

The important thing to note is that through RSS your blog content can be syndicated around the web. This means your blog posts can be republished, complete with links, on other websites. This is great way to create traffic and backlinks.

The services listed above help to promote you blog so others around the web know there's been an update. For instance, pingoat.com will ping a number of blog directories and search engines letting them know you have new content. It's quick and well worth the effort.

Twitter is a little different and is considered a micro blog tool. You can see an example of it on the top of the Long Tail Treasure blog. It's like text messaging meets blogging. Real-time blogging.

At the very least, be sure to Pingoat.com your blog posts or your lens every time you make a change to it. (and remember, you're making a small change to your lens every 1-2 days right?)

Sites With Top 10 Lists

Want more traffic? Become popular! Everyone loves to check the top lists on new sites. If you're at the top then it's automatically perceived that you know what you're doing.

There's a couple strong psychological principles at work here. One is the authority figure perception that if you're at the top you're good, better or even the best. The other principle is the conformity principle. If everyone else thinks your page or article is really good because many people viewed it then even before they read the article they're already biased in the right direction because they want to see what others see.

Popular opinion rules most people lives so become popular! Make sure you promote sites that have top lists based on the number of page views. At least promote them until your post or article makes the top list.

Here's a very powerful example from my $7,000 campaign.

I wrote 9 articles in total and submitted them to EzineArticles.com. Those 9 article generated over 2,500 click throughs in under 60 days!

How did I do that? Leverage!

For each article I created a short 2 paragraph summary post on my blog. At the end of each post I had a link to my EzineArticle article page that said "Read Full Article". Now my blog readers were going to ezine and my ezine article was getting credit for an article view. (more on this in a later blog traffic lesson)

To speed things up a bit I used a little 2nd Tier PPC traffic to help boost the page views at EzineArticles. I used money I had made from a previous sale so it wasn't out of pocket money. You can read a bit more about how I use 2nd Tier PPC traffic in this blog post titled When Does A Second Tier PPC Search Engine Make Sense?

You don't need to do this if you don't want to spend any money. It just means it may take a little longer to hit the top viewed list on EzineAritcles. But you get the idea I'm sure. Simply promote your articles a bit and send them some traffic. I'll show you how to do this with your blog soon.

Once they reach the top viewed list you can generally stop directing traffic there and redirect it to your landing page where there's a better chance it will make a direct sale. At this point it's much easier to stay on the top viewed list because of all the extra traffic you get for being there in the first place. Sweet!

On EzineArticles the top viewed is a pretty sweet place to be. If you're in the top 15 viewed for your article category then your article link will appear at the bottom of EVERY article in this category. You WILL get traffic, provided your article is decent. The top list will only get them to read, but your article itself must get them to click through!

Keep in mind that many sites work like this, not just EzineArticles. Consider Squidoo with its top rank system. Having a high lens rank means you're on the top of the category lists when people browse. Also, whenever someone does a search in Squidoo that contains one of your lens labels your lens will be part of the search results. Guess how the search results are sorted? Yep, by lens rank!

For my $7,000 campaign I was getting about 70 extra lens views a day from people stumbling across my lens within the squidoo community because it's lens rank put it on the top of all the lists lists and searches.

Other Sites

USFReeads.com

USFreeAds.com is more of an article directory than a typical classified ad service. When you place an ad it can be pretty flexible and allow for a full article with pics if you want. The nice thing is there isn't really too much moderation and no review by USFreeAds. This doesn't mean abuse it, it means that your ad gets posted very quickly.

USFreeAds.com currently has a PageRank of 5 and often gets indexed several times a day. The basic free service is a little limited in terms of the extra tools you get to make your ads and the use of pictures, but you still get the powerful backlink to your website.

If you happen to be promoting business opportunities, work from home opportunities or make money products then you may want to look at the upgrade since it will automatically list your classified in the Bizz-Wizz.com classified as well. Bizz-Wizz.com is a classified service that caters to these kinds of ads.

Keyword Elite Scam Campaign Makes 1st Page

Just to give you an idea what a USFReeads.com can do. Earlier in this lesson I showed you a screen shot of the Google results for our keyword "Keyword Elite Scam". It showed a reference to our site by way of a Digg link. I also noted that the listing bounced around a lot and then fell off the charts a few days later.

I created a USFreeAd with our keyword in it and within 10 hours it was showing up on the Google front page, along with our squidoo page too. You can see the USFreeAd here and below is the Google screen shot.

Now here's the most interesting thing to note about this. Two days after posting this USFreeAd titled "Keyword Elite Scam Challenge" it seems our Squidoo.com lens is now planted in second spot for our keyword search on Google. Also note that the USFreeAd itself doesn't appear, but you can be sure it's contributing PageRank to our Squidoo lens. This is one of the reasons our lens is positioned where it is now. Have a look

BTW, if our USFreeAd wasn't created with the same keyword choice as our Squidoo lens it's quite possible our lens wouldn't be where it is right now in Google. If you're wondering why then please reread the lesson on Relevance.

Also, recall that I said USFreeAds that are business or money related opportunities get free listings in Biz-Wizz.com if you have the premium USFreeAd account? You can see the add on Bizz-Wizz here. And it didn't cost anything extra over an above the USFreeAd premium account membership.

Google Front Page in A Week

So there you have it. We have front page direct listings for our campaign lens (landing page) and it took about a week for it to settle into a decent position!

Don't expect to walk away and have it stay there for long if you don't cultivate it. You need to start propping it up a bit more with additional backlinks using all the methods I've mentioned in this lesson.

Also, writing articles and blog posts to support the lens is very important. Start with articles on EzineArticles.com. Then, once you have a few articles, you can start a blog and post summaries of the articles with links to the actual EzineArticles. You'll already have a blog posts done for every article you write!

I'll be talking more about article directories and blogs and how to integrate them in lessons coming up soon.

The Most Important Part

If there is one key element underlying this lesson it's the social network websites. If you've been avoiding them because you think they're all about MySpace and FaceBook then please have a closer look. There are social networks (often associated with Web 2.0) of all different flavors attracting all different crowds for many different reasons.

Humans are social. It doesn't matter if it's in the real world or online, we want to interact, we create communities, we gather around ideas and common interests.

If that last paragraph set off any bells then pat yourself on the back you've just learned how to find a hungry niche!

We create communities and gather around ideas and common interests so get involved in the social networks and you'll find niches left and right just ready to pay off!

Where The Heck Are We?

So where are we now in relation to the campaign diagram? We're just into the section where we start writing articles for Article Directories. In fact, since I group USFreeAds in with articles you could say we've already started submitting articles.

What's next?

In the next lesson I'll be talking about article writing and some of the key elements you need to consider if you want your article to perform for you. Remember, your article isn't just there for creating backlinks, it generates some of the best traffic you can get!

Someone who just spent 5 minutes reading your article and STILL wants to click through your link is a MUCH better prospect than someone who spent 4 seconds typing in a Google search. Not to mention that the article has already primed them for your landing page. What more could you ask for in a prospect?!

Additional Resources

Wealthy Affiliate members - be sure to take advantage of the forum section of the Wealthy Affiliate University. There are literally a few thousand active members exhanging ideas on affiliate marketing. You'll have no trouble finding experienced marketers ready and willing to answer your questions. In fact, the forum is so active and with the depth of knowledge that's already there in the existing threads, is quite likely most of the questions you have are already answered! Like any social network website you'll learn far faster if you get in there and interact so go to the forum and search it just like you would a search engine.

Long Tail Treasure Blog - The blog for this course is where you'll find some of the latest strategies and techniques I'm using. It's also where I'll be addressing common questions I receive from course members.

One of the best ways to keep up to date with what's going on at the Long Tail Treasure is to subscribe to the RSS blog feed for this course

Get RSS Feed

Sincerely,
Todd Ariss