Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue has an innovative strategy to get one of his sites ranked within the top results on Google for the highly competitive term “Bingo” and affiliate marketers can take a lesson or two or three from Keiron’s case study.

In “Easy method of gaining quality backlinks and building a database of users” Keiron has bypassed the traditional strategy of asking webmasters for backlinks or a link exchange, in favor of a premium giveaway.

The pens costing 20 pence (or about $0.41) each are a viral and guerilla method to gain a backlink.

He’s also engaged in using press releases to distribute his message/content and some viral marketing on forums has occured.

As the marketing is done partially offline (through the delivery of the pens), you’ll get the link love from a backlink, compared to a 2-way link.

At this point, some readers might be thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”

A key reason is many Internet Marketers are overly focused on:

1. Technology: Trying to signup for some automated bookmarking/viral software that’s just been released.
2. Following the advice of a guru who’s had a successful campaign (Note: once something has been done successfully once, it’s difficult to repeat it verbatim with the same level of success. Those familiar with Economics will know it as the law of diminishing utility).

Likewise, “value creation” is a buzzword in corporate circles, but to get more out of it requires people to do more than sit in a circle on Friday afternoons, chomping on doughnuts, sipping cappucinos, talking about improving work processes, but never doing anything about it.

I used to conduct entrepreneurship training focused on business building skills in the Singapore schools. It was particularly frustrating to sit in on meetings where it’d take 2 weeks to figure out who’d be a project manager and who’d form the team.

Then they’d be offer to conduct “research” for a couple of weeks and finally decided that there were too many obstacles, so they needed to find some other project (or niche in Internet Marketing speak).

They’d then bang into some other challenges in the midst of their “research” and give that up too.

Which kind of reminds me of what many new Internet Marketers do.

They start out with AdSense publishing, then maybe make a switch to eBay auctions. Then they decide it doesn’t work, and before you know it, they’d made a full circle of adsense publishing, affiliate marketing, product creation, online auctions, PPC arbitrage, CPA marketing, and somehow come to the conclusion that “nothing works”.

Is it due to the “Honeymoon effect“?

Maybe.

And it feels like old ground is being covered, like (more…)

• Internet Marketing
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