If you’re a blogger or an info marketer, I guess you might be like I was when I first started out, figuring that keyword tools were redundant, because you would go ahead and optimize your site for “internet marketing” or “make money online”. While you can try that, you’d get much more leverage from a tool that my friend, Howie Schwartz has recently developed and launched.

If you’re not familiar with Howie, you’re not alone. Till recently, he was a blackhat SEO turned Web2.0 specialist developing products and training together with the likes of Dr Mike Woo-Ming and Keith Baxter.

Gamers might be especially pleased to find out that Howie was executive producer of the first Grand Theft Auto game.

Since his move into Internet marketing, he’s developed a couple of custom tools which his technical team uses to develop his niche sites.

I had a chance to see how he’s dominated the SERPs (search engine results pages) with multiple sites all pointing towards his central site.

Part of this strategy involves his inhouse tools, one of which he’s recently commercialized as Keyword Secret.

While there’re a multitude of keyword tools in the market, what differentiates Keyword Secrets is that it’s an application built on top of the Google API (application programming interface) so the data is focused on Google’s results (ie no dilution by the inclusion of tier-2 or secondary data sources).

The key USP for me is Keyword Secret’s “Power Niche” feature. The power niche does a real time analysis of Google SERPs for a given keyword/keyphrase and generates a keyword list based on the live results.

The bottomline? The keyword lists you get are datamined or analyzed and scraped from Google’s results.

Although you may not be guaranteed top position on the SERPs, you will (more…)

• Keyword Research
• 3 Comments

Mark asked “I have been reading your blog for awhile, and everything I have seen you do has revolved around blogging and free traffic. Have you had success with this program, and/or with PPC in general recently? I am just a bit surprised to see you promoting this offer since I haven’t read about you doing things with PPC before.”

Here’s my response to this Monday Question:



Monday Question - PPC Vs Blogging And Free Traffic - The best bloopers are a click away


While blogging and free traffic continue to generate 90-95% of the traffic (with SEO traffic making up the balance), like any business owner, I’m looking at ways to grow my business and increase sales and profits.

PPC is certainly a good prospect, which is why I’m promoting PPC Classroom. It comes from 2 credible Internet marketers, Jeremy Palmer and Anik Singal, and I’ve had a chance to take a look at the product. The next phase is (more…)

• Internet Marketing
• 2 Comments

I’ve been tagged by Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director Robyn Martin (and soon to be Mrs Kris Jones) in the latest incarnation of the “8 things about me” meme. Instead of telling you more things beyond what’s already in my bio, I’d like to focus on 8 things I’ve learned about affiliate marketing.

Here are the tag rules:

Here are the tag rules:

• Each player must post these rules first.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write about their eight facts on their blog.
• At the end of your blog post, choose eight people to get tagged, list their names, and link to them.
• Don’t forget to contact them telling them they’re tagged. Also, point them to your blog post so they know what to do.

Here’re the my 8 “facts”:

1. Payouts don’t tell the entire story. If an offer doesn’t convert, even at $150 a lead, it doesn’t do you any good.
2. The Affiliate marketing big guns are using PPC (PayPerClick) traffic to drive traffic in great volume to their sites. Check out Gauder Chaudry’s PayPerClickFormula and blogs from PPC Super Affiliates like Shoemoney, Amit Mehta, Kris Jones and Geordie Carswell, Andrew Johnson, Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Tip and Aojon’s Affiliate Marketing Blog among others if you want to gain the competitive edge.
3. Knowledge is going to be your biggest weapon and who you know is going to be a big part of it. I like visiting and more importantly, contributing to forums like the WickedFire Affiliate Marketing and 5Star Affiliate Marketing Forum. Once I get a number of projects off the ground, I plan to get more involved in ABestWeb. If you haven’t listened to ABestWeb founder Haiko De Poel’s “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts on WebmasterRadio from back in 2004 and 2005, you’re missing out.
4. Join a quality CPA network. Do your homework, check network reputations with other super affiliates. Make sure you have a great affiliate manager supporting you. Besides giving you marketing tips, they can help bump your commissions once you start generating quality leads. I like Copeac (Danielle Iovino), AzoogleAds (Erin Hughes) and MaxBounty (Jessica Dagg). [If you join as part of my affiliate network through my links. Drop me an email and I’ll help you get started].
5. Internet Marketing is more about “Marketing” than merely the “Internet”/tech side of things. You need to be able to establish rapport, build relationships with merchants, affiliate networks and fellow affiliates. If you’re a prima donna, you get relegated to the “has beens” once your numbers drop. Build bridges, create connections to key players in your market. Do whatever you said you’d promise to do. [Many marketers fail on this point…]
6. Constantly add value in whatever you do. If you’re looking for the quick fix, or a shortcut to bumping your affiliate revenue, you can probably game one of the sites out there and get a blip on your commissions for the month, but it’s not likely to be long term. Focus on building a long term business and it’ll continue bringing you income even when you’re not tending to it (which was the original intent of starting a business, wasn’t it?)

Ok, I better add 2 personal “bits” to (more…)

• internet memes
• 9 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.

In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]

The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)

But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?

It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.

Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?

Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.

 Master Marketer Seth Godin

If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:

“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.

Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.

You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.

As Seth skillfully illustrates:

Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.

So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need (more…)

• Squidoo
• 2 Comments