Internet Secrets Table of Contents Module 1 – Introduction to Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

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Making Money With Internet Marketing Understanding the Basics Where Traffic Comes From How Affiliate Marketing Works Google Adsense As an Affiliate Marketer, All Of Your Traffic is Tracked. Module Recap Markets Vs. Niches Specialty Niches Supply and Demand Evergreen Markets Market: Health Niche: Anti-aging products Seasonal Markets The Typical Buying Process Figuring Out What Your Market Wants Example Of An Affiliate Site and How It Makes Money Module Recap

Module 3 - Keyword Research

4 5 11 13 16 18 24 30 33 35 35 36 36 37 40 42 47 51

Module 4: Affiliate Networks

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Using the Google Keyword Tool Studying The Competition Quality Content Buyer Keywords Module Recap

Networks Open To Everyone Google Adsense Closed/Restricted Networks Exploring The Clickbank Marketplace In More Detail The Next Step: Setting Up a Clickbank Account What About Other Affiliate Networks? Bonus Section: Advanced Market Analysis How To Gather Demographic Information In Conclusion…

Module 5: Getting Your Website Online

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58 62 68 69 75

79 81 84 84 86 88 88 91 94

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Step 1: Register A Domain Name Tips For Choosing Your Domain Name Step 2: Sign Up For Hosting Step 3: Install Wordpress

Module 6: Purchasing Your Domain Name

96 98 99 102

Module 7: Setting Up Hosting

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Module 8: Setting Up Wordpress

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103

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Module 9: Working With Wordpress Module 10: Search Engine Optimization (On-Page)

103 106

SEO Basics How Google Searches Work

Module 11: Search Engine Optimization (Off-Page)

108 108

Module 12: Email Marketing

120 123 124 125 125 126 126 126 127 127 128 129 130

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Glossary Of Internet Marketing Terms

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Anchor Text Submit articles to article directories Upload videos to YouTube (and put links in the description box) Post comments on blogs Post on forums Profile Links Web 2.0 Sites Social Interaction Sites Social Blogging Sites Social Bookmarking Sites Indexing Where To Get Content More Link-Building Tips So How Do You Get People To Join Your List? Signing Up For A Mailing Service Writing Your Own Swipes Deadly Email Marketing Mistake #1: Deadly Email Marketing Mistake #2: Additional List-Building Tips & Tactics

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134 138 140 141 144 145

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Module 1 – Introduction to Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Making Money With Internet Marketing

In this course, Internet Secrets, you’ll discover how to build your own internet marketing business which you can run from anywhere. This will involve setting up a website, which you will use to promote and sell products. If you know very little (or even nothing) about building websites or internet marketing, don’t worry. We’re going to take you by the hand and lead you through this, step by step. When we started out in this business, we had zero “technical knowledge.” (Knowing how to check our email was about the extent of our computer expertise!) We didn’t have a background in sales or marketing. We weren’t experts on any particular topic. And we didn’t have money to spend on starting a business. (In fact, we were pretty much broke!)

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Yet over time, we were able to set up a number of profitable websites in different markets. For us, this was not a quick and easy process. We studied every internet marketing course we could get our hands on. We attended seminars. We formed friendships with top internet marketers and learned their secrets. We spent hundreds of hours working on our websites, and through a lot of trial and error, we eventually hit upon the right “formula.” Internet Secrets is designed to save you massive amounts of time and money, by condensing our knowledge of internet marketing into a straightforward, step-by-step course. It explains the exact steps that we followed, and that thousands of other regular folks are now following, to make money online. Understanding the Basics To get started, we want to explain some of the basic concepts of internet marketing, as well as some of the terminology you’ll need to know. We’ll begin by asking YOU a question: How do the stores and shops in your neighborhood make money? Well, they offer goods and services that people are willing to spend money on. In order for you to make money on the internet, you’re going to set up a website, and then you take that same idea—offering goods or services— and apply it to your website. At this point a concern might pop into your head: “But I don’t have any goods or services to sell.” Well, it doesn’t matter. The beauty of the Internet Secrets method is that you’re going to learn how to make money on the internet without having to create your own product,

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without having to be an “expert” or an “authority” on any topic, and without having to pitch your services and close sales. Now, if you do have a product or a service you’d like to sell on the internet, this method works fantastically well for that. Internet Secrets will allow you to market yourself effectively and attract customers. But it isn’t necessary. You can get up and running with a website and start generating money by learning how to become an affiliate marketer. In a nutshell, an affiliate marketer is a “middle man.” The purpose of your website will be to inform people about a particular topic, and let them know about products out there in the marketplace that they might be interested in purchasing. Every time you are responsible for the sale of one of these products, you get paid a commission by the owner of the product or service. We’ll show you how to quickly and easily do research, so that you can figure out an idea for your site that can be highly profitable. This can be a topic that you aren’t an expert on. It can simply be a topic that you base your website on, in order to make money. Or, if you’re knowledgeable about a certain topic, or have a strong interest in it, you might choose to base your website on that idea, and promote relevant products. Examples: Betsy is into healthy eating and has some favorite recipes she wants to share. Using Internet Secrets, she sets up a website called www.myhealthyeatingrecipes.com. Her website contains recipes, cooking tips, and simple videos she films in her kitchen that show her preparing meals. She also uses her site to display advertisements for recipe books, weight loss programs, and other products that her audience may be interested in.

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Every time a visitor to her website clicks on an advertisement, and buys that product, Betsy receives an instant commission. As her website’s popularity grows, so does her weekly income. Jim lives in Florida, where fishing is his favorite hobby. He uses Internet Secrets to set up a website called www.fishingtipsfromjim.com. His site contains articles he writes about his favorite fishing spots in Florida, as well as “trip reports” from other fishing enthusiasts who contribute to his site. Throughout his website, Jim also gives recommendations for products and services his readers might find interesting—including fishing gear, books on fishing, and fishing vacation packages. Every time one of his visitors clicks on a product or service Jim recommends, and goes and buys it, Jim receives a commission. Eventually, Jim is able to pay for his own fishing vacations around the world with the money he earns from his website. So you see, in both of those examples, the website owner doesn’t have to offer their own product or service. They simply recommend products and services, and earn money as affiliates (i.e. every time Jim is responsible for the sale of a fishing pole or a fishing vacation package, the owner of that company pays Jim a percentage of the sale.) Eventually, Betsy might decide to write her own e-book about healthy recipes, and sell it on her website. Now she can make money with her own product, in addition to the money she makes through affiliate marketing (promoting other people’s products). Jim may want to start offering his services as a fishing guide—charging folks to take them out on his boat and bring them to the hottest fishing spots around Florida. Now he can sell his own services through this website, in addition to the income he generates every day as an affiliate. So you see, you can do both. Or, you can simply make money as an affiliate by promoting other people’s products. Once you understand internet marketing and how to set up and manage a profitable website, it’s up to you which direction you want to take.

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But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First you need to understand the basics behind internet marketing, and why it’s such an incredible alternative to operating a business in the “offline” world. (Not to mention how much better it is than working for a boss!) In the case of a typical offline business (i.e. the stores at your local mall), people drive there, park, and go inside to do some shopping. In the internet marketing world, it’s the same basic idea, except people arrive on your site by clicking on a link, or finding you in the Google search results. The people who visit your website are known as your “traffic.” We want you to remember the word “traffic” because it’s one of the two key elements you need to make money online. The more visitors you get to your website, the more potential customers you have, and the more money you can make. An empty store without any shoppers can’t make money. A website with no traffic can’t make any money, either. And this is why one of your goals as an internet marketer will be to get as much traffic to your website as possible. Now, when people walk into a store and buy an item, they’re taking action—they put something in their shopping cart, and go to the checkout counter and hand over their money. If you own a store, your goal is to do whatever you can to motivate your visitors to take action and spend money. In the online world, it’s the same idea. You want your visitors to take action, too. When this happens, we call it a “conversion.” A conversion does not necessarily mean they’re buying something from you. A visitor can take action in different ways. As long as they’re taking an action that you want them to take, it can be called a conversion.

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For example, let’s say you have a website about dieting tips. You decide to promote a product called “Slimxpress,” so you put one of their banners at the top of your website:

Now, if someone visits your site, clicks on that banner, goes to that product’s website, and buys it, you get paid a commission because you sent the traffic that resulted in a sale. This would be a conversion, since you successfully converted one of your visitors into a buyer. Joining your email list is another action that internet marketers often want their visitors to take. (Setting up an email list and building a list of subscribers is another one of the keys to making money as an internet marketer; later on, we’ll show you exactly how to do this.) For now, let’s look at an example. You’ve probably seen forms that look something like this when you visit certain websites. Basically, it’s a box that invites you to enter your email address in exchange for some type of free gift or information:

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These are known as “opt-in forms” and they come in all shapes and designs. Maybe it’s a form that invites you to enter your email address in exchange for a free quote on car insurance. Or to receive a free “special report” that contains dating tips. Or to get a free video that promises to give you “10 tips for training your dog.” Anytime you see one of these opt-in forms, it’s evident that a fairly savvy internet marketer is in charge of that website. They’re actively trying to build their list of subscribers, so that they can market products to them in the future via email. (If you’ve ever submitted your email address to one of these forms, you probably noticed that from then on, they emailed you on a regular basis…perhaps to an annoying degree!) Anyway, back to what we were saying about getting your visitors to take action. If you have an opt-in form on your website, every time someone comes to your site and submits their email address, that would be a conversion—because this is also an action that you want your visitors to take. Later in this course, we’ll explain banner ads, building your list of subscribers, and all of these other elements in detail. And we’ll show you how to set everything up. For now, we just want you to understand these two core concepts: traffic and conversions. Because when you put these two things together, you make money. The equation is simple: Traffic x Conversions = $$$ • Traffic = People visiting your website • Conversions = Your visitors taking action. The better your website “converts,” the more money winds up in your pockets. You need both of these elements in order to have a profitable website.

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You could get a thousand visitors to your website every day, but if your site is unappealing and boring and doesn’t motivate them to click anything, or buy anything, then it’s not going to convert and all of that traffic will be wasted. On the other hand, you could have a professional-looking website that converts well. You could have great-looking banners. You could have helpful articles and videos. You could be recommending terrific products…but if you’re only getting a tiny trickle of traffic, it doesn’t matter how well your site converts. You won’t make a lot of money, because you aren’t getting enough traffic for you to convert into sales. It would be like owning a restaurant where you serve the best pizza in town, but your restaurant is practically impossible to find and there’s no sign out front. So no one shows up. No visitors = no sales. So when you hear the term “internet marketing,” it simply means offering products and services to people on the internet in exchange for money. The successful internet marketers are the ones who’ve figured out how to get a consistent stream of traffic to their websites, and how to motivate their visitors to take action. Where Traffic Comes From The internet is the biggest marketplace in existence, swarming with hundreds of millions of people. You’ve got potential customers online every day of the year, 24 hours a day. Every second of each minute of each hour of each day, people from all over the planet are online, browsing websites and shopping and buying stuff. The question is, how are you going to tap into this traffic? How do you get websurfers and shoppers to come check out your site and see what you’ve got to offer? There are two main ways to get traffic:

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1 – By getting your website (and the individual pages on your website) ranked in the search engines. (Particularly Google, which is by far the most popular search engine.) In other words, when someone searches on Google for information related to your topic, your site appears towards the top of the search results. People see your site in the results, and click on it. Getting your website “ranked” well in the Google search results will require you to do some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). These are techniques you can use to make your site more “Google friendly” and boost your rankings. Later in this course, we’ll explain SEO in detail and teach you these techniques. 2 – By getting other websites to link to your site. (These are also known as “back links.”) Let’s say golf is one of your passions, so you set up a website where you share golfing tips, discuss your favorite golf courses and golf products, and so on. One day you write an article called “The Top 10 Golf Mistakes You Might Be Making,” and publish it on your site. This article draws some attention from the golfing crowd. People share the link with their friends on Facebook. Other golfing websites mention your article and provide links to it. Now your website is being exposed to a lot of people who normally wouldn’t come across your website. Those links get you traffic! Instead of writing an article for your site, you could record a video and put that video on YouTube. Underneath your video you can put a link to your website. People can click the link and visit your site for more tips. Videos can be an excellent way to get traffic, too. They don’t need to be fancy. You can record a video while you sit in front of your computer. You can record it in your backyard. A simple video that contains some helpful information…or is funny and entertaining…can get you thousands of views on YouTube and a lot of clicks to your site. And it costs you nothing. You’ve probably been sending traffic to lots of websites without realizing it. Have you ever emailed your friends to share a YouTube video with them? Or shared a link to a news story on your Facebook page?

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If someone clicked on that link to watch that YouTube video, or to read that news story, you were generating traffic for those other sites—because when your friends clicked on the links, they were taken to those sites. So anytime you direct someone to a website, you are generating traffic for them. In this course, you’ll learn how to start directing traffic to your own website, so that you benefit from it. Remember, the more traffic you get, the more money you stand to make! Later in Internet Secrets, we’ll explain a variety of other ways for you to drive traffic to your website. How Affiliate Marketing Works With affiliate marketing, you’re promoting products and services offered by other people or companies (otherwise known as “merchants”). As an affiliate, the only thing you need to worry about is sending traffic to the merchants. It’s their job to convert the traffic into customers. Amazon.com popularized this idea back in the 1990s. Amazon has an affiliate program which invites anyone with a website to sign up and promote their products. Let’s say you’ve got a website about gadgets and electronics. If you sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program, Amazon will provide you with ads that you can place on your website. You’ll be given a special affiliate link that you can place in these ads. (We’ll explain later how to set up ads and links, it’s very easy to do.) This link will be unique to you. Every time someone comes to your website, and clicks on that Amazon ad, and buys one of Amazon’s products, you receive a percentage of the sale. Because the customer clicked on your unique link, Amazon can track it, and pay you the commission you earned. The beauty of affiliate marketing is that all you need to do is steer people toward someone else’s product. With Amazon, they process the order, collect the money, and ship the product out to the customer. You don’t need to do anything. You just get paid.

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Hundreds of thousands of websites are now members of Amazon.com’s affiliate program, and it’s one of the reasons behind the company’s tremendous growth. Amazon now offers pretty much every type of product you can imagine—so whether your website is about skin care, electronics, gardening, skiiing, dieting, or virtually anything else, there are related Amazon products which you can advertise on your site to earn commissions from. You can promote Amazon.com products on your site, if you want. We’ll show you how. But we’re also going to tell you about some more profitable ways to “monetize” (make money with) your site, and products you can promote that will earn you more money. Let us give you another example of affiliate marketing. Let’s say you’ve got a website about poodles. You set up a website, and now it’s time to monetize it. So, you’re going to look for products or services on the internet that will pay you a commission for any sales you generate. Here’s an example of a website, officialpoodleguide.com, that uses affiliate marketing to make money: http://www.officialpoodleguide.com/poodle/poodle-obedience-training Notice how the website owner put several banner ads on this page. These banners promote a few different dog-related products. Whenever a visitor comes to this website and clicks on a banner, they get taken to a merchant website that is selling a product. If that visitor makes a purchase, the owner of officialpoodleguide.com—which was responsible for sending the customer—gets paid a commission by the merchant. The amount of the commission depends on the merchant’s affiliate program and how they’ve set it up. There are a few common ways for you to get paid as an affiliate marketer. Some merchants will offer you a choice, so you can decide which way you’d prefer to earn your money.

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• Cost Per Sale (CPS) – If the merchant has a Cost Per Sale affiliate program, it means that you get paid a commission when you send them a visitor who makes a purchase. A sale needs to be made in order for you to get paid. The good news is that in many cases, these types of affiliate programs pay you large commissions—often 50% to 75% of the price of the product. So if the product sells for $50, you would make roughly $25-$35 for every sale you are responsible for. That’s a nice chunk of change. • Cost Per Action (CPA) – When you promote CPA offers, you get paid if the traffic you send performs a specific action on the merchant’s website. This action could be: o o o o o

Signing up for a trial of their service Entering their phone number Entering their email address Taking a survey Downloading some free software or a ringtone for their phone

You may be wondering, why would a merchant be willing to pay you $5 (or more) just for sending them a visitor who fills out a survey or downloads a ringtone? Well, it’s because the merchant knows that on average, they’re going to make a profit from that action. For example, a site that offers free ringtones may require you to enter your email address. The merchant knows that once they have your email address, they can send you emails that offer you related products (for example, discounts on cell phones, or cell phone accessories). Let’s say the merchant has calculated that on average, every email address they collect winds up making them $12 in sales over time. So it makes sense for them to pay affiliates $5 for every visitor they send who enter their email address and download the ringtone. (We’re just making up these numbers for example’s sake, but you get the point.) Generally, with CPA offers, the easier the action is to fulfill, the less the merchant will pay you per action. If the merchant website is asking people to type in their

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email address in exchange for a free gift, that’s a pretty simple action, so the commission you receive may be small ($0.50 per email address). If the merchant website is asking people to sign up for a service that is going to change their credit card every month (for example, an internet dating website that bills you $29.95 every 30 days), then the amount of money they pay their affiliates per action is going to be significantly higher. It’s not uncommon for these types of CPA offers to pay affiliates $50 per action or higher, because the merchant has done the math and figured out that each signup is, on average, worth a lot more than $50 to them. • Cost Per Click (CPC) – With this type of affiliate program, you get paid every time someone comes to your site and clicks on a merchant’s advertisement. You allow them to display their ad on your website, and you get paid each time someone clicks on their ad. Since it’s pretty easy to get these clicks, your commission per click is usually going to be very small—maybe a few pennies. But if you’re getting a lot of traffic to your site, you can get a lot of clicks on your ads and the money can add up quickly. Google Adsense Google’s Adsense network is the world’s largest CPC network. They bring together millions of advertisers and affiliate websites to work together, and make money together. When you surf the internet, you’re seeing Google Adsense ads constantly. Let’s say someone does a Google search on the phrase, “how to burn fat.” This web page comes up towards the top of the search results: http://www.realbuzz.com/articles/top-10-rules-for-fat-burning-exercise-gb-en/ You can see some Google Adsense ads on the right side of that page. This means that every time a visitor clicks on one of these ads, Google pays the owner of this website a small amount of money. Here’s how Google Adsense works:

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Merchants (people who are selling a product or service) set up advertising accounts with Google and create ads that they want to display on websites that are relevant to what they’re selling. Meanwhile, affiliate marketers set up accounts with Google Adsense, because they want to display ads on their website and make money. Let’s say a merchant, who we’ll call Six Pack Stan, is selling an e-book he wrote about how to burn stomach fat and get rock-hard six pack abs. He creates an ad and submits it to Google’s ad program. Google looks through its database of affiliate sites that have signed up for its Adsense program, and figure out the sites that are relevant to that type of ad. Now let’s say you’re an affiliate marketer, and you have a website about weight loss and fat burning tips. You join Google’s Adsense program because you want to be able to display Google ads and make money. Google determines that your site receives the kind of traffic (people interested in burning fat) who would be interested in Six Pack Stan’s product. So, Google begins to automatically display his ad on your site. Your site is one of many websites related to fitness and weight loss that Stan’s ad will be automatically displayed on. By creating that one ad and submitting it to Google, Stan immediately receives exposure to millions of potential customers. Every time someone clicks on one of Stan’s ads, Google charges Stan some money. Every time someone comes to your site and clicks Stan’s ad, Google pays you some money. Signing up for Google’s Adsense program is a fast, easy way for you to start monetizing your site. As for how to sign up for Google Adsense and start running ads on your site, we’ll cover that later. Now let’s explain one other type of affiliate program:

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• Cost Per Impression (CPM) – Every time someone lands on a web page, it’s known as an “impression.” When you sign up for a CPM program, the merchant agrees to pay you a set amount of money for every 1,000 impressions you can deliver to their site. The visitor doesn’t need to buy anything from them. They don’t need to sign up for anything. All they need to do is go there—and you get paid a set amount of money for every 1,000 visitors you send. While this is very simple and straightforward, you’ll need to get large volumes of traffic to your site in order for you to send thousands of people to a CPM offer. So if you’re just starting out with internet marketing, we don’t suggest signing up for CPM offers, but we did want to make you aware of this option. Now here’s one final way to make money with your site as an affiliate… • Selling advertising space or links – You might occasionally receive an email from a merchant or website owner in your market who is interested in placing one of their banners on your site, or a link that will connect your site to theirs. They may be willing to pay you for the right to do so, especially once your site becomes more established and is getting a decent amount of traffic. As an Affiliate Marketer, All Of Your Traffic is Tracked. You might be wondering, “how can I be sure that I’ll be paid for the traffic I send to a merchant, or the sales or signups I’m responsible for?” As we mentioned earlier when we talked about Amazon.com’s affiliate program, whenever you sign up for an affiliate account to promote products, you are given a unique link that contains your ID. Any time someone clicks on that link and goes to the merchant’s site, you are given credit for sending that traffic. It’s all being tracked. You will have a password-protected “affiliate account” that you can log into, to see how much traffic you’ve sent to that merchant, and how much money you’re earning.

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When you set up your affiliate account, you’ll also tell the merchant your Paypal or bank account information so that they can wire payments to you, or send you a check in the mail. Usually, they’ll pay you your commissions once per month. Personally, we like Clickbank.com, which is a huge online marketplace that brings affiliates and merchants together. On Clickbank, you can find tons of products to promote as an affiliate, and you never need to worry about merchants not paying you what you’re owed, because Clickbank takes care of all of the payments. When you send traffic to a website operated by a Clickbank merchant, and someone buys their product, Clickbank processes the transaction. Clickbank takes a small cut as its fee, and splits up the rest of the money between you (the affiliate) and the merchant (the creator of the product). When you are responsible for making a sale, your money shows up in your Clickbank account right away. Once a week, once per month, or whenever you specify, Clickbank will send you a check or make a direct deposit into your bank account. When you promote Clickbank products as an affiliate, you can do so with total confidence that you’ll be paid the correct commission for every sale you are responsible for. Clickbank pays like clockwork. We’ve been with them for years—selling products that we create ourselves, and promoting other Clickbank products as an affiliate. Now, let’s clarify a few things that affiliate marketing is NOT about. Let’s list some of the most common misconceptions about affiliate marketing: • Misconception #1: Affiliate marketing is a scam. Unfortunately, as with many industries in our world, if there’s money to be made, there are scammers that are going to take advantage of the less knowledgeable and prey on the ignorant. But the people who write off affiliate marketing as a scam are simply misinformed, or they were burnt by a scammer in the past and don’t know the truth.

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Affiliate marketing, as we have explained to you, is not a scam. It’s one of the most legitimate and established business models in the world today. The biggest and most successful online retailers all have affiliate programs— including Ebay.com, Amazon.com and Bestbuy.com. You can sign up with them as an affiliate, promote their products on your website, and earn commissions. • Misconception #2: Affiliate Marketing is a “get rich quick” scheme. Although you can make a lot of money quickly with affiliate marketing (if you follow the right game plan), we’re not talking about a “get rich quick” scheme here. The only way you’re going to be able to achieve lasting success with affiliate marketing is if you put in the time and effort to drive a significant amount of traffic to good offers. For now, this means you must invest the time to learn how this business works, and set up your website accordingly. Later in the Internet Secrets course, we’ll explain how you can scale up your affiliate marketing business (if you choose to do so) while doing very little additional work. One of the secrets is learning how to outsource tasks to workers who live in other countries. You can train workers to ramp up your business and maintain it on your behalf, so that you can literally make money anywhere and at all times of the day—even while you sleep. But if you don’t want to scale up and you’re happy making money with just one simple website, that’s okay, too. • Misconception #3: Affiliate Marketing involves making a product. By definition, affiliate marketing involves the act of selling someone else’s product or service. You do NOT need to create your own product or service. You simply become an affiliate for someone else, and promote their offers. So if someone tells you that affiliate marketing is too difficult because they don’t know how to make a product or service, this is not the case. By

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definition, affiliate marketing involves marketing products that other people spend time and money to create. Now that you can see that affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to get started with making money online, let’s list some of the top reasons to become an affiliate and start placing ads or links on your website: o No need to deal with customers – If customers have questions or complaints about the product, the merchant is supposed to handle it. You send traffic to the merchant’s site and get paid commissions. That’s it. Your job is done. Zero headaches for you. o Unlimited income potential – Being a successful affiliate marketer or internet marketer means there isn’t any ceiling or limit on what you can earn—unlike “regular jobs” where you are paid a set amount of money per hour, or per year. The more time and effort you put into your online business, the more you can earn. And once you’re getting a good amount of traffic to your site, and you understand how to convert that traffic into money, you can put that site on “autopilot.” You can set it aside and let it make money for you while you set up your next website. This business is all about making passive income. Clicks, sales, and money will come in 24/7—even while you sleep, or go on a vacation. o Your location doesn’t matter - Since affiliate marketing is 100% online based, you are not tied down to a specific location. To be in business, all you need is an internet connection and a computer. You’ll be able to fully manage your online affiliate marketing business from anywhere in the world. You could be having a day out with your family, or relaxing on the beach somewhere sipping on a cocktail. You’ll be able to make money from anywhere in the world, because your websites will be doing the work for you. o You’re building an asset - As someone who’s studying Internet Secrets, you’ll be creating websites that provide value and information to your visitors.

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This means that over time, as your traffic grows, your website will become more valuable. As you acquire high rankings in the Google search results, it’s like owning real estate. The more popular and desirable your location is, the more your “land” is worth. (In your case, your website is “virtual real estate.”) So if you have a popular website, and people keep going to your site and the traffic numbers increase, the value of your site increases. It becomes a valuable asset. You may choose to sell your website someday. Take a look at flippa.com and you’ll see how thousands of website owners are able to sell their sites for handsome profits. o It’s recession proof - If you enter markets that are “evergreen” (meaning, they’re aren’t dependent upon a particular season, such as a website that sells Halloween costumes or Christmas tree ornaments), then you can have a recession-proof internet marketing business. Regardless of how the economy might be struggling, people will always be interested in spending money on how to lose weight, how to fix their relationship with their loved one, and other similar topics that never go “out of season” or “out of style.” In fact, during a recession, people are less likely to visit physical retailers to purchase goods and services. They’re more likely to browse the internet to handle their shopping (or solve their problems). o You own your business - When you operate and manage websites, each of your sites can be viewed as an individual business. You can freely buy and sell websites on the internet, and for each successful affiliate marketing website you own, it becomes a small business within itself. This means you don’t have a boss to report to. YOU are the boss and YOU are the one who makes the final decisions. Best of all, YOU get to keep the profits!

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o No need to deal with delivery or payments – As we mentioned earlier, as an affiliate marketer you don’t need to deal directly with customers. That’s the responsibility of the merchant you send traffic to. Dealing with the processing of payments, and the delivery of the product, is also their responsibility. For example, if you send a visitor to Amazon.com and it results in a sale, you don’t need to deal with taking their credit card number and processing the sale. You don’t need to worry about the shipping and handling. Amazon.com handles all that. o It’s low risk - The startup costs with affiliate marketing are extremely low. You set up your own website (or have our Internet Secrets team do it for you), and you’re up and running. This is nothing compared to starting a “real world” business, where you need to worry about hiring (and firing) staff, purchasing inventory, leasing space, and so on. Despite being extremely low risk, the rewards are potentially unlimited, so in our opinion this is one of the best business models in existence! o You’ll generate passive income – Basically, there are two types of income you can generate in this world: “active income” and “passive income.” A standard job pays you active income. You work X number of hours per day, or per week, and get paid X number of dollars. That’s it. The amount of money you take home is directly tied to the amount of time you put in. (Meanwhile, the real money is made by the people higher up on the company ladder.) If you quit your job, or get laid off, that’s the end of your income. With passive income, you can do the work once, and get paid forever! In the internet marketing world, this means you can set up a website, do some SEO and employ some other methods to start generating traffic, and then sit back while the money comes in.

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Once you set up an affiliate marketing website, and your site starts getting traffic and directing it to the merchants you choose to promote, the money and the commissions will start rolling in. Your business will essentially be on “autopilot” (although you can always increase your income by repeating the steps you learn in this course—to get more traffic, promote more products, or set up more websites). The internet never sleeps. When you go to bed in your part of the world, the day is just beginning on the other side of the world. With a “regular business,” you can only make money during business hours. With a website, you can always be in business. You can literally make money while you sleep—or while you go on vacation. You now have an understanding of what internet marketing and affiliate marketing are about. You’re about to enter a whole new world which allows you to make money wherever you are, on autopilot. And you don’t even need to create a product or service. You can simply promote someone else’s! At this point, you’re probably starting to wonder…what will your website be about? What kinds of products will you promote and make money from? We’re going to show you how to figure this out. But before decide on the topic of your website, you’ll need to understand how markets and niches work. We’ll cover this in the next Internet Secrets module. Module Recap Before you dive into the next module, let’s take a moment to recap the key points that you just learned. Making money with internet marketing does not require you to have any special expertise. Being a “computer expert” is not necessary. The fastest way to begin making money online is with affiliate marketing. This means that on your website, you will promote and recommend products and

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services offered by other websites, which are known as merchants. You send them traffic and earn commissions. Two things are required in order for you to be successful: traffic and conversions. You need people coming to your website, and then you need those people to take action (which could mean clicking on one of your ads, buying a product you recommend, or joining your email list). The two main ways to get traffic are: 1 – Getting your website ranked high up in the search engines, particularly Google 2 - Getting links from other sites. (People click on these links, and come visit your site.) There are different kinds of affiliate networks and ways for you to earn money as an affiliate. You might get paid for every click you send to a merchant; for every customer you send to them; or each time you send someone to the merchant and that person performs a specific action, such as giving them their email address or signing up to try out their service. Clickbank.com is an affiliate network we strongly recommend. On Clickbank, you can find products to promote and you’ll be paid your commissions instantly and automatically. And finally, while there are misconceptions about affiliate marketing, the reality is that this is an incredible way to earn passive income without having to come up with your own product or service. Once your site is up and running, your business can essentially run on autopilot and generate commissions for you day and night, every day of the year, no matter where you are. So now let’s proceed to the next module, and reveal some more Internet Secrets.

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Module 2 – Markets and Niches Now that you have an understanding of internet and affiliate marketing, and how it’s possible for you to make money with a website, let’s take a closer look at how markets and niches work. The idea here is to help you to select a topic for your website that will make you money. If you already have an idea for your website, learning about markets and niches may convince you to go with a different idea. Or, you may figure out a different angle to take with your website—an angle that will distinguish you from the competition. Never assume that your website idea is a winner. It always pays to do some research beforehand. You need to be especially aware of a few things:

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• Will there be a large audience of people who are interested in the topic of your website—and are these the kinds of people who will spend money on products? • Are there products related to your topic that you can promote as an affiliate? And will these products pay you good commissions? In this lesson, you’ll learn how to do some research to figure out an idea for your website that can be profitable. Before we jump in, here’s a bit of motivation to get you excited about what you’re about to learn: This is a great time for you to get started with internet marketing! The number of people who buy goods and services online is constantly rising. More and more people are becoming comfortable with making purchases online. In the past, the average consumer might have felt nervous about handing their credit card information over to a website they weren’t familiar with. But this attitude has changed, as buying items online has become a way of life. People love the convenience of being able to shop online—whether it’s on eBay, Amazon, or a website like yours. As a shopper, you don’t have to spend the time to drive to a store. You don’t need to spend money on gas. There’s no need to fight for a parking space, or wait in line at the checkout counter. Online shoppers simply need to find a website that provides them with the products or services that they want. Then, they enter their credit card details (or their Paypal details, which is a very popular way to make purchases online), and wait for their item to be delivered. But we also want to tell you about another type of product which is unique to the online world. You won’t find it in any “regular” store. It’s called a digital information product. These are products that you download straight to your computer, or can access right away on your computer or mobile device. When you buy a digital product,

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as soon as your payment is processed you get the information. There is no shipping, or waiting for a package to arrive in the mail. Ebooks are the most common type of digital information product. You can download an ebook to your computer and read it on your computer screen, or download it to a mobile device, such as a smartphone, an Ipad, or Kindle, and take it with you. Or, a digital information product might consist of some audio files that you can download and listen to. It could also be a series of videos that you can watch on your computer. At this very moment, there are millions of people around the world searching for information online. And there are digital products they can purchase to get the information they are looking for. Many of these searches are conducted by people who need help with a problem, such as: • • • • • • • •

How to lose weight How to fix your marriage How to overcome shyness and meet women How to meet the right man How to cure arthritis How to get rid of acne How to overcome stress/anxiety How to get out of debt

Millions of people facing these problems (and an endless list of other problems) use the internet as a means of finding the answer. In other cases, people are searching for information that will help them improve a certain area of their life, or become more skilled at something. Such as: • • • • •

How to invest in real estate How to “beat” a new video game How to succeed with your Fantasy Football team How to make money in the stock market How to be more attractive to the opposite sex

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• • • • •

How to become more physically fit How to win at poker How to play a musical instrument How to be a better golfer How to learn a foreign language

When you consider the types of products you might want to promote on your website, remember we’re talking about internet MARKETING here. You want to recommend products that appeal to a hungry market—people who will have strong desire to buy. If you read books about marketing you’ll often hear that there are two main motivators that drive human behavior: the desire to avoid pain, and the desire to gain pleasure. “Avoiding pain” can mean getting the solution to a painful, embarrassing or annoying problem. “Gaining pleasure” can mean learning something that will improve the quality of your life. We suggest you promote products that appeal to one of these two main motivations (or to both of them). If your website promotes a product that promises to solve a painful problem, you will have no shortage of hungry buyers. People who are in pain (physical or emotional) need a solution now, and they’re willing to pay for it—even if they come across your website while they’re surfing the internet at three o’clock in the morning! Likewise, if you promote a product that promises to make people’s lives more pleasurable, they’ll be motivated to buy it. For some people, the idea of being the best golfer among all their friends, or toning up their physique so they can show off their body on the beach, is something that will give them great pleasure. Or maybe it’s a different sort of pleasure—such as learning how to grow vegetables in your backyard, or how to speak Italian, or how to catch bigger fish.

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Generally speaking, however, you’ll make more money when you promote products that solve a burning problem. A person surfing the internet might be curious about a product that can make their life more pleasurable in some way—but they say to themselves, “maybe I’ll buy it in the future.” However, if that person has an urgent problem they want the answer to right now, they’re more likely to buy it on the spot. For example, we’ve created a number of digital products (ebooks, mainly) to help people with their relationships. A lot of affiliate marketers promote our products, which are listed on Clickbank.com. One of our ebooks (we’ll call it Product #1) is designed to teach guys how to become better with women—how to carry on interesting conversations, how to be the kind of guy women find attractive, and so on. This product sells quite well. A lot of guys are naturally interested in this type of information. Well, then we put out Product #2—an ebook that is designed to help people “win back” their ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends after getting dumped. This is a topic that is highly emotional. People who’ve just been dumped by someone they love are in a desperate state and need the answer NOW. This product, because it addresses an urgent problem, outsells Product #1 by a wide margin. It “converts” extremely well. Consider the motivations of your potential customers. It’s something for you to consider if your primary goal is to make as much money as possible. Often times, helping people learn more about a hobby is not as compelling as helping them to solve a problem that keeps them awake at night. Markets Vs. Niches Now let’s explain the difference between a market and a niche. A market is a broad overall category. Examples of markets would be:

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• • • • • • •

Health & Fitness Weight loss Fashion Personal Finance Relationships Sports Entertainment

Within each of those markets, there can be many different niches—from slightly less broad, to extremely narrow. Market: Health & Fitness Niches: • • • • • •

Marathon running Bicycling Yoga Strength training Workouts you can do at home Exercise programs to reverse the aging process

Market: Weight Loss Niches: • • • • • • •

How to burn stomach fat and get six-pack abs How to lose weight after having a baby How to lose weight and gain muscle Weight loss tips for people over the age of 50 Weight loss tips for busy moms How to cook delicious, low-calorie meals Supplements (pills, shakes) to help you lose weight

Market: Relationships Niches:

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• • • • • •

Dating tips for single men Dating tips for single women Internet dating tips How to start dating again after a divorce How to have a better sex life with your spouse How to make your ex-boyfriend love you again

Within each market, there are countless different niches. The big advantage of targeting a niche with your website, rather than a larger market, is that you’ll face much less competition. Also, it will make it easier for you to convert your traffic. Remember how earlier, we talked about the importance of getting conversions? Well, the narrower the focus of your website, the greater the chance that your visitors will be interested in exactly what you’re selling. We’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’ve got a website called www.HowToGetYourExBoyfriendBack.com. Since your site is clearly designed to solve a very specific problem, the people who visit your site are probably looking for information on that specific topic. If your site has articles and banner ads that promote a “how to get your ex boyfriend back” product, they’re likely to consider buying that product. These people coming to your site are your target market. On the other hand, if you have a broad website that gives all kinds of relationship advice (for men, women, single people, married people, etc), most of your visitors are going to land on your website, give it a quick glance, and leave—because they won’t feel that your website is going to help with their specific situation. Later on, we’ll talk about how to identify a good market and a good niche for you to target. You can choose a niche that you’re already knowledgeable about (maybe it’s a hobby of yours), or you can select a niche purely because it has the potential to make you a lot of money. Ideally, you will identify a niche that is both. If you have a genuine interest in a topic, and it’s a topic that has a hungry target audience, you’re going to enjoy building up your site. You’ll be more motivated to write articles, maybe shoot

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videos, participate in forums that are about your topic, and so on. If you’re enthusiastic about this topic, you’re less likely to get bored with working on your website and marketing it. Put it this way. You might do your research and determine “How to cure warts” is a problem a lot of people need help with. And, there are wart-curing products out there that you can promote and make money with. But over the coming months, are you going to want to write articles and make videos about “wart cures” to keep adding new content to your site? (For some marketers, the answer is “yes”—the money they’re earning makes it worthwhile!) On the other hand, if you’ve got a strong interest in pets, weight lifting, nutrition, helping people with relationship advice…really, any topic that people will pay money to learn about…you will actually enjoy building up your website over time, and becoming known on the internet as an expert in your field. We’ve got websites that we set up strictly for money-making purposes, promoting products that we don’t find personally interesting. But our most successful websites—the ones that have made lots of money over the years—are the ones that combine our personal interests and passions with products that people want. Specialty Niches Another thing to keep in mind is that people can remain anonymous when they purchase goods and services online. This has resulted in the growth of “specialty niches.” These are niches that don’t have much of a presence in the offline world, but can be extremely profitable for internet marketers. The main defining factor of specialty niches is that they are extremely personal, and quite often embarrassing. Put it this way: the average person would not want to walk into a store and ask a sales clerk for help on these topics. (In many cases, these products don’t even exist in brick-in-mortar stores.) But a person anonymously surfing the internet will jump at the chance to buy an information product that can solve this painful or humiliating problem for them. Some examples of specialty niches are:

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• • • • • • • •

How to talk to women if you’re shy How to get a man to marry you How to resume dating after a divorce How to stop getting yeast infections How to get your ex back How to lose “man boobs” How to cure genital warts How to stop premature ejaculation

These topics are very personal and sensitive. Some people wouldn’t even want to discuss this stuff with their close friends—but they can browse the internet and purchase a product to solve this problem, while protecting their privacy. And of course, another beautiful thing about the internet is that even at four o’clock in the morning, people can purchase an information product and get the answers they need. Websites are open for business 24/7. All of the payments and delivery of information products are handled electronically. There are no “business hours.” We’ll give you an example from one of our “specialty niche” websites: www.ExBackExperts.com. This is the product we mentioned earlier in this module—the one that addresses an “urgent problem” and has been a huge seller for us. ExBackExperts.com sells a digital information product to help people win back the love of their ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend. Everything is downloadable. Customers pay for it, and are then taken to a special webpage where they can immediately download the files. We chose to create a product in this particular niche (how to get your ex back) because we knew there is a demand for this type of information. The people seeking this information are hungry (even desperate!) for a solution, and this problem is universal among men and women. They’re also in a very emotional state of mind when they Google a phrase like “how to get my ex girlfriend to love me again.” (If you’ve ever been dumped by someone you were crazy about, you know the feeling. Wouldn’t you have paid

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some money if you’d come across a website that offered to give you the solution to your heartache, instantly?) Take a look at our sales videos. Our marketing is much more sophisticated than most other products in this niche, which is why we have so many affiliates promoting this product and making piles of money with it. (If you’re interested in setting up a site in this niche, we suggest you promote “Ex Back Experts”—it’s a proven money-maker.) This is just one example, in one niche. The bottom line is, you’re more likely to make sales when you promote products that are emotionally charged. Few people have a sense of urgency or desperation when they go online to learn more about fishing, or gardening, or how to choose the right breed of dog to buy. Those are perfectly good niches to make money in, but just think of how much more urgency is involved when a person is searching for information on how to cure an ailment that’s causing them physical discomfort, or fix their love life, or solve a problem they’re embarrassed to even talk to their friends about. Supply and Demand The supply and demand characteristics of the online world are nearly identical to those of the offline world. Generally speaking, markets can be classified in one of two ways: Evergreen Markets These are markets that always have a big demand for goods and services, anytime of the year, and regardless of how the economy is doing. (During a recession, you might have fewer buyers, but the need for these products will never disappear.) Example of evergreen markets include: Health - There is a significant segment of the population who will always be interested in being healthier, looking and feeling better, and living longer. Regardless of the state of the economy, people will spend disposable income on health-related products. Wealth/finance - This may be the most “bulletproof” market of all. When the economy is bad, there are always people looking for ways to improve their

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financial position or protect what they’ve got. And when the economy is good, there are perhaps even more people wondering how they should invest their money, take advantage of the stock market, etc. Relationships – This is another evergreen market that never goes out of season. People are social creatures by nature. Finding a mate, or someone to love, is a need that is hard-wired into us. Men who struggle to meet women, and women who are trying to find “Mr. Right,” spend millions of dollars on products to help them with these challenges. As we said earlier, we created our ExBackExperts.com website and product because it hits a raw nerve and caters to a burning emotional need that is shared by millions of men and women around the world. If you’re madly in love with someone who walked out of your life, who cares about the state of the economy! You need to get them back, and if you discover a digital information product that promises to give you an easy solution, you’ll probably be willing to pay for it. Interestingly, health, wealth and relationships are the three most common things people ask about when they visit fortune tellers. People are naturally fascinated by these topics, and want to learn more about them. However, these three markets are very broad—so now you’ll want to “drill down” and think about some specific niches within these markets, which could be good topics for a website. Some examples of broad markets, and good niches within those markets, would be: Market: Health Niche: Anti-aging products Market: Wealth Niche: How to get out of debt Market: Relationships Niche: The best Internet Dating sites for meeting your next boyfriend or girlfriend

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Now let’s talk about another type of market: Seasonal Markets These are markets that make money (or most of their money) during certain times of the year. For example, if you were selling bikinis, you’d receive far more orders during the summer months than you would during the winter. If you were selling Halloween costumes, you’d see a big spike in sales during the weeks leading up to Halloween. After Halloween passes, your sales will likely plummet. In our opinion, although there is money to be made in seasonal markets, these aren’t markets you should target right now, because it will probably be harder for you to make consistent money. To help you get started on the right track, we’ve identified a few markets, and specific niches within those markets, which we DO recommend that you consider for your website. Each of these markets is: - Evergreen (you can make money all year long, and demand is permanent) - Recession-proof (the condition of the economy is irrelevant) - Emotionally charged (people who want this information are HUNGRY for it) Here are a few good markets you might want to get started with, along with examples of more specific sub-niches that you can target: Market Weight Loss Fitness Relationships Astrology

Niche Recipes for tasty, low-calorie meals How to get six-pack abs How to win back your ex Using horoscopes to find love

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In our experience, the best customers are the ones who have a problem or an inconvenience that they want to solve NOW. You don’t need to promote products that “solve a problem.” You can promote all kinds of products. As we discussed earlier, Amazon.com has an affiliate program, and they offer pretty much every type of product under the sun—from shoes, to books, to electronics and jewelry. If you want to sign up for an affiliate account with Amazon and show their ads on your site, it’s easy to do. (A word of warning, though: they pay small commissions.) You can also sign up for Google Adsense and put ads on your site that promote Google’s advertisers. This is another way for you to earn cash. But you’ll probably only get paid pennies for each person who clicks on one of the Google ads on your site. If your site is getting TONS of traffic, then those pennies can add up into a lot of money. But if you’re setting up your first website, we’d like to see you earn larger commissions. We’ve found that products that solve painful problems get the best conversions, and often the products that deal with these problems pay you healthy commissions. For example, our website http://www.exbackexperts.com has an affiliate program. It’s an excellent product for you to promote, because: 1 – The product appeals to people who are in a highly emotional state. They’re desperate for help and are willing to pay for it. 2- It appeals to both men and women. (There are separate sales pages, and versions of the product, for men and women.) 3 – The website has an affiliate resource center where you can get your affiliate links, banners, articles, and more. You can view it here: http://exbackexperts.com/affiliates-sign-up 4 – The product pays excellent commissions. Affiliates receive 70% of the price of the product, and the product is attached to upsells and a continuity program.

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Let’s take a moment to explain these two terms. An upsell is an additional product that the customer is given the option to purchase after they agree to buy the main product. For example, visitors to our site www.ExBackExperts.com are shown a digital information product (an ebook + some bonuses) which they can purchase for around $47. After they complete their purchase, they are then shown another offer: for an additional amount of money ($67), they can buy another product which shows them how to build a happy long-term relationship with their partner once they’ve won them back. This is an upsell. The customer has already made the decision to make a purchase. They’ve demonstrated that they are willing to spend money. So we give them the option to purchase another product, that promises to increase their chances of getting the result they want, or shows them how to get faster results. Affiliates like to promote products which have upsells attached to them, because it increases the amount of commissions they can make. Instead of just being a $47 sale, it can easily turn into a $114 sale ($47 + $67) if the customer chooses to take the upsell, also. And as an affiliate, you earn a big chunk of everything the customer buys. A continuity program is basically a “membership program” that invites customers to agree to pay a recurring fee (a certain amount of money per month). Their monthly payment allows them to access a membership area where they get additional materials every two weeks, or every 30 days. Internet dating websites (which allow you to correspond with other people looking for a mate) are usually continuity programs, requiring their subscribers to pay a fee each month to remain a member. Some of the products you can promote as an affiliate have continuity programs attached to them. The “Ex Back Experts” product has multiple upsells and a continuity program. This gives our customers ongoing access to a membership center which contains additional books, videos and other information.

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So if you decide to enter the “get your ex back” niche, you would follow these steps: 1 – Purchase a domain name (example: www.GetYourExBackSecrets.com) 2 – Set up your website (we’ll show you how to do this shortly) 3 – Sign up for an account at Clickbank.com (the online marketplace where you can find products, such as Ex Back Experts, to promote) 4 – Go to the Ex Back Experts affiliate center and get banners, articles and other content for you to put on your website. The banners and articles will contain links that are coded with your unique affiliate ID. This means that every time someone comes to your site and clicks one of the links, and buys a copy of Ex Back Experts, you will be automatically paid a commission by Clickbank. Don’t worry, we’re going to explain how to do all of this. For now, we want you to understand how the process works, so that you make the right decision about which topic to base your website on. The Typical Buying Process If you’re like most people nowadays who use the internet, if you have an annoying, painful or embarrassing problem, you’ll probably go online to seek a solution, or to hear some opinions from other people who’ve been in your shoes. Even if you aren’t thinking about buying a product, you’ll go online to do some research. And if you are considering buying a product to hopefully solve your problem, you’ll want to inform and educate yourself before shelling out any money. So now, if you find a website that seems legitimate, and gives you some helpful tips, and provides information about a product that has solved this same problem for many other people—and the price for the product seems reasonable—you might give it a try. This is what the buying process looks like for the average consumer who buys a product from a website.

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1 - They need help with something 2 - They go online seeking a solution 3 - They find a credible website that recommends a product that has helped others 4 - They purchase the product If you’re going to use your website to promote products as an affiliate—and this is what we suggest you do, to start making money as soon as possible—you’ll want to keep this buying process in mind. In order to get people to buy products through your website, you must establish some credibility with them. When they view your website, they should get the sense that you know a lot about this topic and you’re sincerely interested in helping them. This way, it means something when you recommend a product. Most people won’t come to your website and immediately click on a banner and go buy one of the products you are promoting. They’ll take some time to check out your site and see the information that you are offering. This is why it’s important for you to have some quality content on your website. You should have some articles and/or videos that are interesting and helpful. The visitors to your site should think to themselves, “Whoever runs this site understands what I need, and has helped other people in my situation.” Later on in this course, we’ll explain how to add content to your website. For now, here’s an example of what we’re talking about: David and Mary have been together for two years, but their relationship started to become rocky over the past few months. Then one night, after yet another argument, Mary told David that she “needed some space.” After a week of being apart, Mary texted David and told him they’d be better off as friends (in other words, she dumped him).

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David is distraught and upset. That night, he jumps on Google and types into the search box “how to work things out with my ex girlfriend.” David comes across a helpful website that explains how to handle a breakup, and the stages of emotions that he will experience. This website has a colorful banner off to the side that recommends a product called Ex Back Experts (http://exbackexperts.com). According to the banner, Ex Back Experts will show him, step-by-step, what he needs to do in order to get Mary back into his arms again. So David clicks on the banner and visits ExBackExperts.com. After watching a sales video that describes the benefits of the product, he goes ahead and purchases the product. As soon as he enters his payment information, he is taken to a web page where he can download the ebook and the other files that are included with the product. The average consumer like David doesn’t have any idea that the original website he visited was an affiliate site, and that by clicking the banner and making a purchase from ExBackExperts.com, he generated a commission for the owner of the website that recommended it. Rather than it being a guy searching for information on how to win back the love of his ex-girlfriend, it could be a guy who is sick and tired of getting his butt kicked on the golf course. He wants to find out how to drive a golf ball like Tiger Woods and impress his buddies the next time he’s on the course. Or it could be “Susan,” who’s been suffering panic attacks and needs to know how to eliminate her anxiety. Or maybe it’s “Jeff,” who wants to know how to pack on some muscle because he’s tired of being scrawny and ignored by women. Like we said, many of the most successful information products are designed to help with an urgent problem.

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Figuring Out What Your Market Wants In the offline business world, companies spend huge amounts of time and money to conduct “market research,” in order to find out what types of products their target audience is looking for, and how strong the demand for a new product will be. In the online world, this information is readily available to you—for free! All you need to do is take a look through these four websites: • • • •

Amazon.com Clickbank.com Google Trends Ebay.com

Amazon.com - This is the biggest online marketplace in existence. Amazon began as an online book retailer, but since then they’ve expanded massively. They now sell virtually any type of product you can imagine, and process hundreds of thousands of transactions per day. This is one of our favorite websites for conducting market research. If you’re considering targeting a certain niche (or want to get some ideas for niches), follow these steps: • See if there is a “For Dummies” guide written on the topic. The folks behind the hugely successful “For Dummies” guides are very smart, and do extensive market research before they spend the time and money to create a new guide. (At the time that we created this course, they had more than 1,800 different titles and over 250 million books in print!) You can “piggyback” off of their research. If there is a “For Dummies” guide written about a niche within a larger market, then you can be assured there is a hungry, sizeable audience for this type of information. So go to Amazon.com, choose a market (the broad category you want to research), and then type it into the search box along with the words “For Dummies.”

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Let’s use dieting as an example. We’ll go to Amazon.com and do a search using the keywords: “dieting for dummies” This search yields a large number of results, and in fact there are a bunch of “For Dummies” guides covering specific areas of dieting: • • • •

Low-Carb Dieting For Dummies The Glycemic Index Diet For Dummies Mediterranean Diet Cookbook For Dummies Low-Calorie Dieting For Dummies

And so on. Any one of these specific niches can be the basis of a profitable website. You’ll stand a much better chance of standing out with a niche website than you will with a general website on “dieting.” • Look for books with a lot of customer reviews – Another big indicator of how “hot” a topic is the number of books that Amazon has on that subject. Look at how many customer reviews there are for these books. If a book has generated a large number of reviews and comments, then clearly this is a topic that people are extremely interested in, and passionate about. Even if some of the reviews are negative, it still means that people took the time to write something. A person bought the book, waited for it to be delivered, read it, logged into Amazon.com, and wrote their thoughts. That takes a considerable amount of effort! We’ve heard that only one in 1,000 Amazon customers bothers to write a review. So if a book has 50 reviews, you can estimate that 50,000 people purchased it. Clickbank.com and CBengine.com - If you’re interested in promoting digital information products, then Clickbank.com is your best bet. We explained earlier how Clickbank.com is an online marketplace with a massive affiliate network, where you can find digital products to promote.

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People who create their own digital products sign up for a Clickbank account and submit their products to the Clickbank Marketplace. As an affiliate marketer, you can join Clickbank as well, to find products in its marketplace to promote. When you sign up with Clickbank, you’ll be asked to choose a unique ID. For example, your ID could be “MARKETER1.” You can then go into the Clickbank marketplace, choose the market and niche you’re interested in promoting, and take a look at the products that are offered. Choose the product you’d like to promote, and Clickbank will give you your unique affiliate link. You can place this link on your website, and anytime a visitor clicks the link, it gets tracked by Clickbank. If that visitor decides to buy the product you are promoting, Clickbank processes the transaction. Clickbank takes a small transaction fee, and splits the rest of the money between you (the affiliate) and the person who created the product. The amount of your commission depends on the price of the product, and the commission percentage that the product creator is offering. All of this information is shown in the Clickbank Marketplace. Most Clickbank products pay a commission of 50% or above, and many Clickbank products sell for upwards of $40. So, these commissions can really add up. If you’re going to promote Clickbank products, we recommend you use CBEngine.com as well. This is a website dedicated to providing detailed information on Clickbank products, to help you decide on the best ones to promote. It’s easier for you to do your research on CBEngine.com because of the simple way in which it displays the information. Let’s say we want to set up an affiliate website in the dating and

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relationships market. We want to find out what the hot products are in that market. So we go to CBEngine.com and use their search engine. We choose these search parameters: • For “Top Category” we select “Self Help” • For “Sub Category” we select “Relationships” • For “Ranked in” we select “Top 15” CBEngine.com then returns a list of the top 15 best-selling products in the Relationships niche:

Looking through the top 15 offers, you’ll find that there are at least seven products that deal with getting your ex back. This means the “how to get your ex back” market is one of the hottest topics in the dating and relationships market, and can be highly profitable for you as an affiliate.

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Once you’re signed up with Clickbank.com, we invite you to visit our affiliate center at http://exbackexperts.com/affiliates-sign-up. We will supply you with great-looking banners, articles and other resources that you can put on your website to start making sales. Now let’s continue with the next way of conducting market research. Google Trends – In the world of stock trading, they say “the trend is your friend” and “ride the trend.” This is also true in the world of internet marketing. If you know what’s hot at the moment, you’ll be able to set up sites that generate lots of sales—because you’ll know what the marketplace is hungry for right now. Check out http://www.google.com/trends and look at the “Hot Searches.” Now, many of these trends won’t have products associated with them that you can promote as an affiliate. (Just because some idiotic reality TV star is “trending” at the moment doesn’t mean there’s a way for you to make money from it.) But this type of market research can provide you with a general idea of what the public is hungry to learn more about at the moment. Then check out the Clickbank marketplace or CBengine.com. There might be a product that ties into that trend, which you can promote and make money with. Example Of An Affiliate Site and How It Makes Money An example of a site that makes affiliate commissions in different ways is http://askthebuilder.com. This site provides helpful content and information for their readers, including high-quality articles and videos. They’ve also got a friendly team of experts who answer questions about “do it yourself” construction projects. When you arrive at askthebuilder.com, the first thing you see is an email capture box which invites you to sign up for their free newsletter:

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This is how internet and affiliate marketers build their lists of subscribers—by offering their visitors something of value (i.e. a free newsletter containing helpful information) in exchange for their email address. Later on in this course, we’ll explain how you can start using email marketing to build your business at a much faster rate. For now, let’s look at the email capture box on AskTheBuilder.com, to give you an idea of why this is so important to have. When a visitor enters their email address into the box, this is called “opting in.” The email capture box is connected to an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a service that you sign up for, that enables you to send emails to people automatically. When a person signs up for the newsletter at askthebuilder.com, their email address gets entered into the autoresponder. The subscriber is now going to automatically receive a sequence of emails which provide helpful tips and other information related to this topic. The subscriber might receive one email every other day from now on, or every three days. Or, they might receive an email whenever askthebuilder.com decides to send out a special announcement.

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In addition to sharing tips and information, these emails can also contain recommendations for products or services that the subscriber might want to buy. Autoresponders are essential for making money online, because they allow you to follow up with your website visitors. The vast majority of your visitors aren’t going to make a purchase right away. The average visitor is going to take a look around, and then leave your site without clicking your banners or buying anything. But if you can capture their email address and get them onto your autoresponder, you can keep in touch with them. It’s been shown that the majority of people need to be told about a product seven times before they go ahead and buy it. Think about that for a moment. On average, you need to tell someone about a product seven times before they decide to give it a try. Your autoresponder is how you get multiple opportunities to tell your subscribers about a product you recommend. So when you set up your autoresponder, you’re going to write a series of at least seven emails that contain helpful tips, and some information about products you recommend. When you recommend products in these emails, you will include your affiliate link for that product. If the reader clicks the link and goes and buys the product, you’ll be paid your commission. Later in this course we’ll talk about email marketing and autoresponders in more detail, and you’ll learn how to get everything set up. Now let’s take a closer look at some of the other ways in which askthebuilder.com is generating revenue. On the right side of their website, there are several different types of advertising. They’ve got: A. another email opt-in box where people can subscribe to the newsletter

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B. a banner that promotes a stain-removing product C. an Adsense advertising block that displays other building-related websites and products

The banner that promotes the stain-removal product is most likely another affiliate offer that askthebuilder.com is promoting. If a visitor clicks on the banner and purchases the product, askthebuilder.com will receive a commission. The Adsense advertising block means askthebuilder.com is a member of Google’s Adsense program and has agreed to display Google ads on their site. Each time one of their visitors clicks on one of those Adsense ads, askthebuilder.com gets paid more commissions. So that’s one example of an affiliate site and how it uses several different methods to generate income. The next time you’re surfing the web, notice the different types of advertisements and signup boxes that websites use. Many of the sites you visit use some type of affiliate marketing to generate income—you just might not have noticed it before. In the next module, we’ll explain how to do keyword research. This is another way to help you figure out a niche for your website that is not too competitive, but still has a lot of potential customers searching for information on that topic.

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But before we move on, let’s review the key points that you learned in this module. Module Recap • A market is a broad overall category—such as “fitness.” • A niche is a specific topic within that category—such as “yoga for women.” By targeting a niche, rather than a large market, you can make your website stand out. Another benefit is that your visitors will be looking for information on a specific topic. You know exactly what they’re interested in. You can then recommend products that are likely to appeal to them. • Never assume that your idea for a website is a winner. It always pays to some research on the market or niche you're thinking about entering. • Clickbank.com is an excellent place to find digital information products to promote on your site. • Digital information products are products that people can purchase online and view on their computers or mobile devices right away. Many of the most successful digital information products help people with a painful or embarrassing problem. Other successful digital information products help people to become better at something, or to improve the quality of their lives. • Keep in mind, the two main motivators that drive human behavior (and compel people to buy products) are the desire to avoid pain, and the desire to gain pleasure. • You may choose to set up a website on a topic that you don’t have any interest in, simply because it's a good niche and there are products in this niche that you can promote and make a lot of money with. But we suggest choosing a topic you at least find somewhat interesting.

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If you have a hobby or personal interest in a good niche (for example, you love playing golf…you enjoy giving your friends dating advice…you love animals…or you know a lot about eating healthy), then you'll probably get more enjoyment out of your website and internet marketing over the long term. It’s easier to stay motivated when you’re having fun—and keeping motivated is one of the keys to growing your income. • When you set up your website (which we'll show you how to do soon), it's important that you provide some quality information for your visitors. You don't want it to look like you slapped your website together quickly just to try to sell stuff. You want to give your visitors the sense that your website is a helpful resource, and that you really understand their situation. If you build some trust with your visitors, it becomes much easier to sell them products that you recommend. OK, let’s proceed to the next module and uncover some more Internet Secrets.

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Module 3 - Keyword Research So now you understand that millions of people use search engines (mainly Google) every day, to find information on topics they want to learn more about—or problems they need to solve. As an affiliate marketer, you will promote products and services to these people, while earning commissions. You get paid when someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase. In the previous module, we explained markets and niches, and gave you some tips for figuring out specific topics (or problems) that might be good for you to target with your website. But before you decide on the subject of your website, there’s an important additional step you must take. This step is called doing “keyword research.” Whenever someone types a phrase into the Google search box to look something up, we refer to that as a “keyword” or “keyword phrase.”

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Understanding what keywords people are using, when they search for information on your topic, is one of the keys to setting up a successful website. This is why keyword research must be done BEFORE you set up your site, or even make a final decision as to what your site will be about. By doing proper keyword research, you can find out: • The actual phrases that people are typing into Google when they’re looking for help or information on a topic. You can then optimize your website so that when people search those phrases, your site appears towards the top of the Google search results. • You can also see the level of competition you’ll be up against. If the Google search results for a keyword are dominated by huge, wellestablished websites, you won’t want to bother trying to target that keyword. Google provides a free tool that will show you how many people worldwide, every month, search for information or help regarding any topic. It’s a very powerful research tool for internet marketers. We’ll show you how to use it in a moment, after we explain a few things. The first thing you need to know is: There are two types of keywords: short tail, and long tail. Short tail keywords are non-specific and consist of 1-3 words. A person doing a Google search on a short tail keyword could be looking for different types of information related to a topic. Short Tail Keyword Examples: Digital camera Weight loss Dating tips Dog training Skin care

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When a person searches a short-tail keyword such as “digital camera,” you really don’t know what’s going through their mind. Why are they searching this phrase? Are they looking to buy a digital camera? If so, what brands would they be most interested in? Are they looking for a cheap camera, or an expensive high-end model? Do they already own a digital camera, and they want tips on taking better pictures? Short-tail keywords are vague. A person who searches the term “weight loss” might be looking for a diet plan. Or, maybe they’re wondering why they’ve been losing weight lately. (Is something wrong with them?) The searcher could be a guy who weighs 500 pounds and desperately needs to lose weight to save his life. Or it could be a bride-to-be who wants to lose a few pounds before her wedding. Likewise, a person who searches “dog training” could be looking for information on training their eight-week-old poodle. Or their 2-year-old German Shepherd. Or they might be interested in setting up a dog training business. So you see, with short tail keywords, you just don’t know what is motivating the search. This is why we recommend you think in terms of long tail keywords. Here are some long tail versions of the keywords we mentioned earlier: Short Tail Vs. Long Tail Keyword Examples: Digital camera / Canon power shot digital camera 6ZX Weight loss / How to lose weight for my wedding

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Dating tips / How to get your ex girlfriend back Dog training / How to train my German Shepherd Skin care / How to cure acne overnight To use the “acne” example, let’s take a closer look at how Google searches work—and how you can use this information with your website. Let’s say Ted has a zit problem that is ruining his quest to find a girlfriend. One Saturday night, as he sits alone at his computer, he surfs over to Google and types “how to get rid of acne” into the search box. Google returns a list of the top results. The web pages that Google shows on the first page of the results are the ones that it feels are the most relevant to Ted’s query (the most likely to provide the information he is looking for). Go ahead and type “how to get rid of acne” into the Google search box, and take a look for yourself.

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(Note: Google results will vary depending on your geographic location. You probably won’t see the exact same results that we do.) On Page One of the results, Google shows you the web pages that it has decided are the most relevant to this keyword. In other words, these are the pages which Google feels are the most likely to give you the information you’re looking for.

The website that comes up #1 in our search is www.wikihow.com. The web page on that site that contains the article is called www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Acne Google feels that this article provides excellent information on this topic. How does Google make this determination? Well, by looking at a bunch of different factors, including: • The age of the website that the page is on (Google “trusts” older websites more than newer ones) • The back links that are pointing to the website and the page (when other sites link to you, Google counts these links as “votes”) • The average length of time that viewers stay on the page (if the article is good, people are going to stick around and read the whole thing. If it’s junk, they’ll leave quickly) • The amount of user interactivity. Are people commenting on the article? Are they “liking” it on Facebook? Sharing it on Twitter? (Again, these are strong indicators of whether the information is high quality) So that’s a basic explanation of how the search results work. Now let’s use the Google Keyword Tool to come up with some good keyword ideas for your site.

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These keywords will be incorporated into the names of the pages on your website, and the articles that you put on your site. In time, you can get these web pages ranked high in the search engine results—so that when people run searches on your keywords, your site appears on the first page of the Google results. Some of these people will click on your site, and visit you. This is how you get traffic from the search engines. And remember: Traffic x Conversions =$$$. Using the Google Keyword Tool Here’s the link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal This tool allows you to find keywords for any searched term in the Google database. It’s not 100% accurate, but it provides a ton of helpful information (and hey, it’s free). There are three types of match types, as you’ll see on the left side of the Google Keyword Tool screen:

Before you run your search, deselect the check mark next to “Broad” and check the box next to [Exact]. To get the most accurate numbers for the keyword you’re interested in, you’ll want to see how many people are searching for that exact keyword.

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Now, run some searches on some keywords that you think people might use when looking for information or help on your topic. Google will then return a list of results, showing you how many Global Monthly Searches that keyword gets, as well as the number of searches generated by many other similar keywords. (Global Monthly Searches means the number of people worldwide who search for that exact phrase on Google each month.) The Google Keyword Tool will also tell you all of the related keywords. There may be dozens (or even hundreds) of similar keywords that get good search numbers.

NOTE: The column in the results called “Competition” is not something you need to worry about. This does not refer to how many websites are competing to rank for the keyword. It has to do with how many websites are targeting that keyword with the ads they are buying on Google’s advertising network. (Still, when a keyword has “High” competition according to the Keyword Tool, it’s a sign that it’s a hot market.) If you’re thinking about promoting products that cure some type of ailment, you might include words in your keyword phrase such as: cure for get rid of treatment for

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natural cure for how to get relief from See what kinds of results the Keyword Tool comes back with. If your website is based on teaching people how to do something (how to play guitar, how to play golf, how to train your dog, etc), you might try including some of these words: how to ways to learn learn to tutorial for lessons for easy way to learn fast way to learn quick way to learn Or, depending on the type of product you want to promote, you might include some of these words: deals on bargains for cheapest price for lowest price As you brainstorm for keywords to research, ask yourself these two questions: • What are the words my target market is likely to be using when they look for this kind of information? • What are the searches that are more likely to lead BUYERS to my website, and not just people seeking general information? Once you figure out the keywords that people in your niche are frequently using to conduct their searches, you will know the kinds of pages you should create on your site in order to get ranked in Google—which leads to more traffic, which leads to you making more money.

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Keyword research can also give you ideas for products to promote. For example, let’s say your site is fitness-related. While doing keyword research, you see that a particular type of health food, or supplement, or piece of exercise equipment is getting a lot of searches. This means it might be a good product for you to promote. We’ll stick with our “acne website” example. It’s not the most pleasant topic, but it’s a good niche for affiliate marketers to make money in. Acne is an embarrassing problem that people are eager to solve as quickly as possible. So we open the Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Note: If you have a Gmail account, sign in before using the Keyword Tool. By doing so, you won’t have to fill out the annoying “Captcha” code every time you run a search. If you don’t have a Gmail account, it’s worth setting one up. It’s free to do, and only takes a couple of minutes. Just go to www.gmail.com. We start by searching the most obvious keyword we can think of: “how to get rid of acne.” This is a long-tail keyword which is specific. When people search this keyword, you know what their intention is. (By the way, make sure to select the tab above the Keyword Tool results that says “Keyword ideas,” not the one that says “Ad group ideas.”) According to the results, the keyword “how to get rid of acne” gets 60,500 Global Monthly Searches. Sounds great, right? That’s a lot of searches! But wait a minute. Before you decide to target the keyword “how to get rid of acne,” you need to realize that when a keyword has a search volume that high (50,000+), it also means you’re going to be facing a lot of competition. There are going to be a lot of other sites fighting to get on (or stay on) the first page of the Google results. With your brand-new site, you’d be facing an uphill battle.

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Unless you put in a lot of work on your website and look at it as a long-term project—frequently adding new articles and doing a lot of Search Engine Optimization—your site will probably end up buried deep in the search results for that keyword, where very few people will ever find it. This is why we suggest you get more specific. While looking at the Google Keyword Tool results for “how to cure acne,” we find that the keyword “how to get rid of acne scars” gets 22,200 monthly searches. This is a good number of searches, and for this term you may be able to rank your site on the first page of Google with some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Another keyword to consider would be “how to get rid of acne fast,” which gets 5,400 searches per month. That’s not a massive number, but it’s a very specific, targeted keyword. The traffic you get from that keyword will consist of people who urgently want to cure their acne (they included the word “fast” in their search). This means they’re likely to buy a product you recommend. So how do you know whether the competition for a keyword will be too tough? Well, you use another free tool. Studying The Competition Here’s how to find out exactly how strong (or weak) your competition for a keyword will be. Go to www.seoquake.com and download their free tool.

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The SEO Quake tool will now appear in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.

Once you activate SEO Quake, it will analyze the sites shown in the Google search results and tell you a number of key statistics about them. These numbers appear in the SEO Quake bar underneath each search result. “PR” stands for Page Rank. Google assigns every website a PR score between 0 and 10. A high Page Rank is a sign that Google trusts that website and believes it is high-quality. Mega-sites such as YouTube and Facebook have a PR9 score. When you first put your site online, it will have a PR score of 0. Over time, as you add content to your site and it acquires back links, your PR score will rise. “L” is the number of back links pointing to the page. “LD” is the total number of back links pointing to the site that the page is on. SEO Quake can also tell you how old the website is, how many Facebook Likes the page has, and other numbers (depending on how to set the tool’s Preferences). When we ran a search for “how to get rid of acne fast,” the top page in the Google results was this:

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So now we’re going to look at the SEO Quake bar under the result, to get an idea of how tough it will be to outrank it for the keyword “how to get rid of acne fast.” The PR score for this web page is 2, which is not impressive. (Sites that are PR 4 and above are difficult to outrank.) The page has zero back links (shown next to the “L”). The overall website, however (www.wikihow.com) has 226,000 back links (shown next to “LD”), which is a gigantic number. The site first went online in 2005 (shown next to “Age”). It’s not what we would call an “old” site, but it’s been around for a number of years, and we know that Google favors older websites. We also notice that the keyword “how to get rid of acne” does not appear in the name of the page (www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Acne-Naturally). So if we set up a page on our site to target this keyword, and we call our page www.ourwebsite.com/how-to-get-rid-of-acne-fast, that’s one way that we could get an edge. Next, we’ll take a closer look at the web page we’ll be competing against. See for yourself: www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Acne-Naturally Nowhere on the page do we see the keyword “how to get rid of acne fast.” If we decide to create a page on our site to target this keyword, we’ll be sure to include it in our article. This will give us another edge. However, we see at the top of the page that it has 73 votes from Pinterest.com users, 42 Facebook Likes, and 11 “Google Plus” votes.

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(Surely you’re familiar with Facebook. Pinterest.com and Google Plus are other “social networking” sites where users share stuff with each other and vote on web pages they like.) These aren’t large numbers, but after doing our analysis, we can see that this page has a pretty big headstart on us—mainly because of Wikihow.com’s total number of backlinks. It’s a big, well-established website. Ranking in the #1 spot for this keyword will be tough. So now we go back to the Google search results and take a closer look at the other results on Page One. How tough are these pages going to be to outrank for “how to get rid of acne fast?” You’ll need to know this so that you don’t waste your time trying to rank on the first page for impossible keywords. And getting on the first page of the Google search results is the key to getting search engine traffic. A study showed that 94% of people conducting searches on Google click on one of the sites on the first page of the results. Only 6% ever bothered to click the “Next” button at the bottom of the page to see the second page of results. And on the first page, it’s the top three results that get the lion’s share of the traffic. In order to get a good amount of search engine traffic, your goal will be to get on the first page of results—and as high up on the first page as possible. So if your analysis shows you that the competition is huge for a certain keyword, forget about it. Go back to the Google Keyword Tool and find a different keyword. Try one that gets less searches. Over time, as you continue to build up your website, you can have dozens of different pages and articles which target different keywords, and rank in the search results for those keywords.

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For example, if your website is called www.easyacnecures.com, you could create pages on your site such as: www.easyacnecures.com/how-to-cure-acne-fast www.easyacnecures.com/best-acne-products www.easyacnecures.com/cure-acne-overnight The pages of your site are designed to target various keywords (“how to cure acne fast,” “best acne products,”’ “cure acne overnight”). Over time, you could add dozens of pages to your website, with each page displaying an article that is based around a different keyword. You’ll use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to “optimize” your pages for those keywords, so that Google gives them higher rankings. Eventually, your website can rank in the search results for many keywords, and your number of visitors will multiply. Anytime a keyword is getting thousands of searches per month, you’re going to be up against a fair amount of competition. In order to start getting decent rankings (and traffic) as soon as possible, we suggest going for lower-competition keywords—and targeting many of them. Remember, we suggest that you get specific with your site—because you’ll face less competition, and the people who visit your site are going to be the right audience for the products you promote. If you set up a site on the subject of “basketball,” you’ll get buried in the search results under many websites that are older and far more established than yours. And Google only has a general idea of what your site is about. But if you decide to set up a site on “basketball tips,” that’s more specific. You could purchase a domain name such as www.playbetterbasketball.com and then add web pages with articles that focus on specific keywords: www.playbetterbasketball.com/basketball-shooting-tips www.playbetterbasketball.com/basketball-tips-and-drills www.playbetterbasketball.com/basketball-moves

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And so on. Now we ought to mention, in the past, we would have told you to use keyword research to come up with the right domain name. If we were going to target the keyword “basketball tips,” we would have tried to buy the domain name www.basketballtips.com. And since that domain name probably wouldn’t be available for us to buy, we would have bought a domain name that at least included the keyword. A domain name such as: www.basketballtipsinsider.com www.basketballtipsexperts.com www.basketballtipsforyou.com The reason is, Google used to place a lot of emphasis on your domain name when ranking you for keywords. If your domain name was an exact match for a keyword, your site would get an automatic boost in the rankings for that keyword. With very little work, you could sometimes rank #1 for that keyword—just because of the name of your site. But Google has done away with this. Which makes sense; just because you were able to buy a good domain name doesn’t mean your site actually gives good information. These days, the name of your domain has very little impact on your Google rankings. (It’s still a factor, but a miniscule one.) Therefore, you don’t need to worry about trying to include a keyword in your domain name. But you DO need to include keywords when you add new web pages, because this is how you tell Google what your pages are about.

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To give another example, let’s say you have a site called www.skincaretipsforwomen.com which promotes a variety of skin care products. One of the products you are promoting is a cream that reduces wrinkles around the eyes. Using the Google Keyword Tool, you see that the keyword “best anti wrinkle eye cream” gets 1,300 searches per month. Then you use SEO Quake to look at the competition for this keyword, and you determine that it shouldn’t be too difficult to get ranked on Page One. So you write an article for your site that is specifically about “the best anti wrinkle eye cream,” and you target that keyword. You title the page: www.skincaretipsforwomen.com/best-anti-wrinkle-eye-cream When Google analyzes your site and its individual pages, to determine where to rank them in its search results, the name of that page tells Google what it’s about. In an earlier module, we explained the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) Naming the pages of your site to include the keywords you want to target is one of the first steps towards getting them ranked well. Quality Content If you browse the sites that show up on Page One of the Google results, you’ll probably see that most of them have some form of advertising, or are selling their own products. But they’re also providing information. It’s doubtful Google would give these sites high rankings if they were only trying to get you to buy something. When you set up your website, you’ll follow the same principle. Sure, you’re going to promote products and make money—but first and foremost, Google should see that you are providing quality information to your visitors. Keep in mind that when it comes to Google’s “organic” search results (the results that don’t include websites that pay for advertising), Google is not in the business of steering people towards products to buy.

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Google is in the business of providing its users with trustworthy search results— results that point people towards websites that give them the information they are looking for. Google is the world’s most trusted and widely-used search engine. They maintain their reputation by being selective about the websites they rank at the top of their results. (This is one of the reasons why www.wikipedia.com ranks #1 for tons of keywords. It contains thousands of pages of pure information, without any advertising at all. Google absolutely LOVES Wikipedia.) If you want to achieve big long-term success with your website, you’ll want to build it up over time and provide your users with good content. When you base this content around good keywords, you’ll get more people finding you in the search results, and coming to your site... More people will enjoy your site, and post comments underneath your articles, and “like” you on Facebook… Other websites will link to you… And Google will see it all, and reward you with higher rankings. Buyer Keywords Buyer keywords are a great way to get specific, and dominate the rankings for keywords that will make you money. One of the tricks to doing keyword research is to “get inside the head” of your target market and think about what they’re actually typing into the Google search box when they’re looking to buy something. A person who searches “how to get bigger muscles” is obviously looking for information on that topic, but would they actually be willing to buy a product? A lot of people are used to getting all the information they want for free on the internet. They’re not buyers.

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But when someone searches a buyer keyword, it means they are actively looking to buy a product or service. Let’s say you set up a website that promotes Apple products (iPhones, iPads, MacBook laptops, etc). You’ve identified a website that sells second-hand (used) Apple products and will pay you a commission for every customer you send to them. So, you sign up to become one of their affiliates. Then, you start doing keyword research to figure out the best way to start ranking your site in the search engines. For you to target short-tail keywords like “iPhones” or “iPads” would be useless. Your site would never get on the first page of Google’s search results for those keywords. The competition is way too steep. And those keywords would be way too vague, anyway. What’s the motivation when someone searches the word “iPhone?” You have no idea. They may be looking for games to play on their iPhone, or tips on how to use their iPhone, etc. Instead, you can target keywords that are specific to people who are looking to buy used Apple products for cheap. You could target keywords such as: Used ipad for sale (1,000 monthly searches) Buy used iphone (1,900 monthly searches) Used iphone 4 (9,900 monthly searches) Used apple laptops (1,300 monthly searches) As long as the competition for these keywords isn’t overwhelming (use SEO Quake to find out), you could then add pages to your website that target these keywords. These can be very profitable keywords, because:

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1 – The competition is not as intense. There are tons of websites that talk about Apple products, but not that many that are dedicated to offering used Apple products for sale. 2 – If you have a page on your site that specifically promotes cheap, used iPads, then anyone who finds your website in the search results is exactly the type of visitor you want. The people who search these phrases aren’t looking for information on the next iPhone that’s coming out next year. They’re not looking for a screen protector for their iPad. They’re not looking for games to play on their Mac laptop. They’re coming to your site specifically because they want to buy a used Apple product. So on your site, you’d want to offer helpful and interesting content. You could write reviews of different Apple products, pointing out their best features. (You don’t need to be an expert on this stuff; just do some research on Google and find out whatever you need to know.) Then, at the end of each review, you include your affiliate link. For example, you could write an article called “Tips On Buying A Used iPhone 5.” In this article, you talk about the features of the iPhone 5 and how it improves upon the previous model. You then mention that you discovered a website that is offering great deals on used iPhone 5s. You place a link at the bottom of the article that says: Click Here For The Best Discounts and Deals On Used iPhone 5s This link will contain your affiliate ID. Every time one of your visitors clicks that link, goes to the used Apple products website, and buys a product, they pay you a commission.

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(Soon, we’re going to show you how to set up articles and links on your site. Everything you’re learning now is important for you to understand BEFORE you go ahead and put your site online.) Typically, anything that involves a specific item, brand, model number or “action word” will be high-converting, and profitable to rank for. Here is a list of words you can use when figuring out keywords to target. These words, when used by a searcher, are an indicator that they’re looking to make a purchase. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Cure Compare Download Now Fast Buy Best Get Purchase Cheap New Bargain Budget Economical Solve Fix Repair Inexpensive Low cost Low priced Review Reduced Compare Scam

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Also, when a model number or name of a product is included in the search phrase, that’s another good indicator that the searcher is interested in making a purchase. Note that the final word on that list, “scam,” is a word that people often include in their searches when they are considering buying something. (They want to find out whether a certain brand or product is a rip-off, or not worth the money.) Let’s say you enjoy photography, and you decide to set up a site that provides reviews of the latest digital cameras. To monetize your site, you have links and banners that promote cameras sold on Amazon.com, as well as other related products (books on digital photography, camera accessories, etc). If Canon releases a new camera called the Powershot SX100, you could write an article called “Is the Canon Powershot SX100 a scam?” Your article can rank in the Google search results for the keyword “Canon Powershot SX100,” and it can also rank for any phrases that include the brand of the camera along with “scam.” In your article, you explain how this camera is NOT a scam, in fact it’s terrific and has lots of cool features—and then you provide a link so that people can go buy the camera at Amazon.com, which pays you commissions. Using the word “scam” can be a sneaky way to get extra traffic. Let’s say someone does a Google search on “Canon Powershot SX100,” and the search results come up. The first couple of results look like they provide general information on the camera. But your site, in the third position, is asking whether the camera is a SCAM. Naturally, people are going to be compelled to click on your site and read your article. They’ll want to find out if the product is a scam, right?

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So when you think about keywords, think about what’s going through the mind of your potential customer when they type their keyword phrase into the Google search box. There is a difference between people who are searching for general information, and those who are specifically looking to SOLVE their problem right now (or buy a product right now). Here’s another example. A person suffering from back pain might type “back pain” into the Google search box. The first page of the Google results will show a bunch of websites that contain information on back pain. These sites are well-established with Google, and you’d be facing a serious uphill battle if you tried to rank for that keyword because it is highly competitive. It’s also vague. A person who searches “back pain” could be trying to find information for any number of reasons. But a much smaller and more specific group will type in the phrase “cure back pain now.” This would be a buyer keyword, because the intention of the searcher is to get a solution to their problem immediately. Suffering from back pain is excruciating; these people need help, and many of them are willing to pay for it right now! When you target a keyword like this, and get your website (or one of your web pages) ranked on the first page of Google for that keyword, you’ll know that the visitors who DO come to your site are extremely interested in an immediate solution. This means they’re likely to pay for a product. Getting ranked for the right keywords is extremely important. We’ve seen novices target the wrong keywords and make ZERO money in affiliate marketing—despite being ranked for many keywords! Their fatal mistake was that they were targeting keywords which did not bring in customers. If you want to start making money quickly, you should go for longer-tail keywords, because chances are there are far fewer websites trying to rank for them.

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And when you use the Google Keyword Tool, don’t get too caught up in how many searches a keyword gets. This is NOT the only indicator of how profitable that keyword will be. You can make more money with low-competition buyer keywords than you would with “vague” keywords that get tons of searches from people wanting general information. And writing reviews of specific products is another way to capture buyer traffic. You can rank for the actual names of the products. Imagine if you had a site called www.thebestdigitalcameras.com, and you had 50 pages with 50 reviews of popular cameras. Each of these pages targets the name and model number of a different camera, and includes the word “buy”: www.thebestdigitalcameras.com/buy-canon-powershot-A2500 www.thebestdigitalcameras.com/buy-kodak-C1530 www.thebestdigitalcameras.com/buy-nikon-S6300 Some of these keywords might get a relatively small number of searches, but if you can rank high in Google for 10, 20, or 50 of these low-competition keywords…and most of the visitors you get are looking to actually BUY a product…well, then you should have no problem making money. So, we suggest you target a mix of keywords: ones that get higher numbers of searches, and ones that get fewer searches but are extremely targeted. Module Recap • Keyword research can mean the difference between setting up a site that gets traffic and makes money, and a site that fails. • Short tail keywords may get tons of searches, but they’re vague. You often won’t know what the intention of the searcher is. Long tail keywords are more specific and targeted, which is why we recommend you focus on them.

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• By including keywords in the titles of your articles and web pages, you make it clear to Google what they’re about—and you’ll rank higher. • Use the Google Keyword Tool to conduct your keyword research: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Tip: If you have a Gmail account, sign in before using the Keyword Tool. By doing so, you won’t have to fill out the annoying “Captcha” code every time you run a search. • Use the free SEO Quake tool to look at your competition. What are their PR scores? How many back links do they have? Etc. If powerful sites are dominating the first page of the search results, it probably isn’t worth targeting that keyword. • Buyer keywords can be the most profitable. Even if the search volume is low, you know the intention of the searchers is to make a purchase.

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Module 4: Affiliate Networks In order to make money as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need to find some good products to promote. So now let’s discuss how to find products that you can promote on your website. The first step is to join an affiliate network. Affiliate networks are websites that bring affiliates and merchants together. Merchants list their products on the network and give the details (price, commission, etc), so that affiliates will hopefully want to promote them. These networks are convenient for you, as an affiliate, because they provide you with a wide range of products to consider. And, the network takes care of paying you your commissions, so you won’t need to chase down merchants to get them to pay you what they owe. When you sign up with an affiliate network and choose the product you want to promote, you’ll be given a unique affiliate link.

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You can then place this link on your website. You can place links in your banners, so that whenever someone clicks a banner and goes and buys a product you recommend, you automatically receive credit for the sale. You can also place these links within your articles. For example, if you’ve got an article on your site called “7 Tips For Burning Belly Fat,” you might put a link at the bottom of your article that says: “Click Here For More Fat Burning Secrets.” When people click that link, they will be taken to the sales page for a product you are promoting. Because that link is coded with your affiliate ID, you will receive a commission every time someone clicks that link and purchases that product. Or, if you send out an email to your subscribers to tell them about a product (later on we’ll talk about how to start building an email list), you can include your affiliate link in the body of the email. We mentioned earlier that we’re the merchants behind a digital information product called “Ex Back Experts” which helps people to reconcile with their ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend. A lot of affiliate marketers are promoting this product right now. We provide our affiliates with banners, articles, graphics, and everything else they need to start promoting it and making money. We also give them their affiliate links. Here are a couple of examples of affiliate marketers who set up websites to promote Ex Back Experts and make money from our product: http://exbackexperts.net/ http://www.myexbackexpertsreview.com/ At the bottom of their articles, they have links or banners which are set up with their affiliate ID. Whenever someone clicks on one of these links, it gets tracked. If the visitor they send to our site (ExBackExperts.com) purchases our product, the affiliate gets paid a 70% commission on the sale!

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On your site, you can promote as many products as you want. For example, you could have a site for women’s fitness tips. If you find 10 different women’s fitness products for you to promote, you can set up 10 different pages on your site to explain these different products and point your visitors towards them. The affiliate network tracks it all. They also process the payments and distribute the money. You shouldn’t ever need to personally contact one of the people whose product you are promoting to ask them for your commission money. The affiliate network handles this. They can send you a check in the mail, pay you via Paypal, or by wire transfer…affiliate networks normally give you a few different options for receiving your payments. Basically, there are three types of affiliate networks that you can sign up with. The first one is… Networks Open To Everyone These affiliate networks usually have a CPS (Cost Per Sale) payment structure. This means you get paid a commission if the traffic that you send to the merchant site converts into a sale. In other words, you don’t get paid for just sending them clicks; you get paid when a click results in a sale. It’s easy to get accepted into these networks. You simply sign up, give them your information (including how you’d like to be paid), and start looking for products to promote. We’ve been extremely successful with an affiliate network called Clickbank. Go here to join Clickbank and get started: http://www.internetsecrets.com/clickbank Clickbank brings together merchants who have created their own products, and affiliates who want to find products to promote. Here are the some of the reasons to join Clickbank:

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Clickbank guarantees your payments. When you send traffic to a Clickbank merchant, and you are responsible for generating a sale, your commission is automatically and instantly deposited into your Clickbank account. You can then receive your payments in the form of paper checks sent to you in the mail, or you can link your Clickbank account to your personal bank account and have it transferred electronically. Clickbank prides itself on never missing payments. You’ll be paid like clockwork. And, you can also view your statistics and see how many visitors you’ve sent to a product’s sales page (which Clickbank refers to as “hops”); how many sales, and how much money you’ve generated; and your EPC (Earnings Per Click). Smart affiliate marketers are especially interested in EPC. This number reflects how much money you make, on average, every time someone clicks on your affiliate link and looks at a product you recommend. As for what constitutes a “good” EPC number, it depends on the type of product you are promoting, how much the product costs, and some other variables—but as a general rule of thumb, $1 EPC is considered strong. Meaning, if you send 100 clicks to a product offer, you’ll make an average of $100. Keeping an eye on your EPC will allow you to determine which products to continue promoting (or stop promoting), and which products you might want to promote even harder. There are tens of thousands of products listed in the Clickbank marketplace for you to promote. No matter what niche you’re in, you’re likely to find Clickbank products that make sense for you to promote on your site. And they’re all digital information products, which means the customer receives immediate access to the product after they complete their purchase. (Most Clickbank products are e-books.) Clickbank offers high payouts. Merchants who list their products in the Clickbank marketplace want to attract as many affiliates as possible, so they tend to offer high commission payouts. You’ll be paid a 50% commission for promoting many Clickbank products. Some offer payouts of 75%!

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As an Internet Secrets student, we highly recommend Clickbank as an affiliate network to join right away. Just go here to sign up for a free Clickbank account: http://www.internetsecrets.com/clickbank Here are some other affiliate networks to sign up for, if your site promotes products in the health/beauty market: http://markethealth.com http://moreniche.com And for products to promote in all niches, try these networks: http://offershot.com/ http://paydotcom.com/ http://plimus.com Google Adsense This is another type of affiliate network, and it’s the best-known CPC (Cost Per Click) network out there. When you sign up for a free Google Adsense account, Google will look at your site to determine which kinds of ads would be appropriate for the visitors you’re getting. Then they’ll supply you with a snippet of code for you to place on your site. Google advertisements will now appear on your website. Every time one of your visitors clicks on one of these ads, you get paid a commission. Here’s an example of a web page that has Google Adsense ads: http://www.internetsecrets.com/adsense-example As you can see, on the right side of the page there is a box called “Ads” which shows Google advertisements. The websites shown in these ads pay Google a small fee (perhaps a few cents) for each click they get.

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You can sign up for a free Google Adsense account and have ads displayed on your site, too. You’ll be paid a small fee by Google every time one of your visitors clicks on one of your ads. (Note: You don’t get to choose which Google ads run on your site. Google makes these decisions.) You can sign up here: www.google.com/adsense (You’ll need to have a Gmail account with Google in order to join.) Just bear in mind, in order to make significant money with Adsense, you’ll need to have a large volume of traffic coming to your website, and your ads will need to receive a lot of clicks. So, Google Adsense is an option, but we suggest you stick with promoting products such as the ones found in the Clickbank marketplace. There are many large websites that make a respectable amount of income by running Adsense ads—but they’d probably make a lot more money if they were driving that traffic towards product offers, rather than trying to get visitors to click their Adsense ads. Here’s an example. Let’s say we have a website in the “dating tips for men” niche that gets 1,000 visits a day. If we place Adsense ads on our site, we might receive $0.10 from Google every time one of our visitors clicks one of those ads. Normally, the Click Through Rate (CTR) for a dating website would be around 5%. In other words, with this type of website you can expect 5 out of every 100 visitors to click one of your Adsense ads. 1,000 visitors per day x 0.05 x $0.10 = $5 income per day using Google Adsense. In a month, this would equate to $150.00 ($5 a day x 30 days).

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Not so bad. But now let’s say we’re promoting a dating product—an e-book that we come across in the Clickbank marketplace. The e-book costs $47.00, and the merchant pays a 70% commission to affiliates. We place a banner for the product on our site. This banner contains our affiliate link. Assuming the same 5% CTR, if our site receives 1,000 visits per day our banner will get 50 clicks per day. Now, remember, when you promote a Clickbank product, you don’t get paid for the clicks you send. You get paid when you are responsible for making a sale. So, you’re sending 50 visitors per day to the merchant site that is offering the dating product. Their sales page (where they describe the product and offer it for sale) has a conversion rate of 1%. 1% is the benchmark for a well-designed sales page; anything higher than that is great. This means that for every 100 visitors who land on the sales page, one person makes a purchase. How do you know the conversion rate of a sales page? Well, you don’t. But if you’re promoting products that are top sellers in the Clickbank marketplace, and have a lot of affiliates making money with that product, then it’s safe to assume that they put a lot of effort into creating a sales page that converts decently. So, if you send an average of 50 clicks per day to that product’s sales page, that’s 1,500 clicks per month. If the sales page has a conversion rate of around 1%, this means you can expect to make 15 sales per month. The e-book costs $47, and your commission on each sale is 70%. 15 x $47 x 70% = $493.00 per month going into your pockets! It’s easy to see that promoting a good Clickbank product is far more profitable than placing Google Adsense ads on your site. This is why we strongly encourage you to start off with promoting Clickbank offers.

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In a moment, we’ll explain the Clickbank marketplace in more detail. For now, let’s finish explaining the different types of affiliate networks. Closed/Restricted Networks This final type of affiliate network has a much higher barrier to entry. Affiliates are required to submit an application and wait for approval. The reason for this is because many of the products on these networks offer CPA or CPL commission structures. This means the merchant or product owner will pay affiliates based on how many leads they send to them. They’re not paying out commissions based upon actual profits, but rather on projected earnings. Therefore, they want high-quality traffic, otherwise known as targeted traffic. If your website sends traffic that doesn’t convert for them into sales, they’ll be losing money when they pay you commissions. This is why Closed/Restricted networks will actually look at your website, and want to know some information about it, before they approve your application and admit you into the network. Here are two examples of “closed” CPA networks which you may want to look into: Neverblue HydraNetwork Exploring The Clickbank Marketplace In More Detail As we explained earlier, the Clickbank marketplace is where thousands of product creators (or “merchants”) list their products so that affiliates can find them and promote them. Once you enter the Clickbank marketplace, choose a category and sub-category over on the left side. Then, sort the results by “Gravity.” The gravity score of a product shows you how many affiliates have been promoting this product recently and making sales. A high gravity score is a sign that the product is popular and converts well.

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This means that the merchant who created the product is an experienced internet marketer and knows how to SELL. This makes it a whole lot easier for you, as an affiliate, to make money by sending traffic to their offer. Also check: • Initial $/sale: This is the initial amount of money you will make, on average, each time you make a sale. Some products have “upsells” (additional products the customer is offered after they purchase the initial product). This will bump up the amount of money you make per sale. For example, the front-end product (the main product shown on the sales page) might be a “how to burn off belly fat” ebook that costs $27. The upsell is a $47 ebook that contains healthy recipes for losing belly fat. Some customers will choose to buy both. You get paid a commission on both. NOTE: In many cases, the upsells will not be shown until AFTER the customer enters their payment information. So, you won’t be able to see what the upsells look like, and how they are presented to the customer, unless you actually go through the checkout process yourself. But if the main product sells for, say, $37—and in that product’s marketplace listing, you see that the Initial $/sale is more than $37—then you know that it’s got upsells that bump up the money that their customers spend, on average. When you’re deciding which products to promote, take a look at their sales page. Does it look professional? Is the “sales copy” (the text that explains the product) well-written? Usually it’s pretty evident right off the bat if the merchant selling this product knows what they are doing. But it’s the product’s Marketplace statistics that really tell the story of how successful you can be as an affiliate. Also look at: • Avg %/sale: This is the commission percentage being offered by the product creator. If it’s 70%, this means you receive 70% of the cost of the product for each sale you are responsible for.

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• In the Marketplace description, see if there is a URL for that product’s affiliate resource page. This is a sign that they take their affiliates seriously and want to provide you with the tools you need to make money. These tools may include banners, articles, and emails you can send out to your mailing list. Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of “Video Sales Letters” (VSLs). These are sales pages that are presented in the form of videos. It’s been proven in many different niches that Video Sales Letters out-convert traditional sales pages. If you do see a product with a VSL on its sales page, it’s another good sign that the product owner really has a handle on their marketing, which makes it easier for you to make money as an affiliate. A final note: if the niche you want to promote has a LOT of products listed in the Clickbank marketplace, don’t think that the niche is “too competitive” and will be hard to make money in. Quite the contrary! It means that it’s a proven niche with a huge audience, and as an affiliate, you will have a variety of different products to promote and make money with. The Next Step: Setting Up a Clickbank Account Setting up an account on Clickbank is simple, and free. Follow these steps: Go here: http://www.internetsecrets.com/clickbank At the top of the screen you’ll see a tab called “Sign Up.” On the right, underneath the “Affiliates” header, you have two options to choose from: “I Have An Established Audience” “I Need To Build A Following”

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If you choose the second option, “I Need To Build A Following,” Clickbank is going to offer you some services you may wish to sign up for, including web hosting and an autoresponder. Later in this course we’re going to cover web hosting and autoresponders, so we don’t suggest you sign up for any of these things right now. Finish going through this course first. For now, click through the screens until you see the option to Sign Up Now. Make sure you fill out the requested information in full. Enter a valid email address. Clickbank will send you a confirmation code to that address in order to finalize your registration. The Account Nickname that you decide to use should be easy for you to remember, as it’s going to be the actual username that you use when logging in your account. Quickly review the Client Contract and check the box to confirm that you have read and agree to Clickbank’s terms and conditions. Once you’ve double-checked your details, click the “submit” button at the bottom of the page. Next, you will be brought to a page that says “Signup Not Yet Complete.” Clickbank needs to ensure that they have your correct email address. They will send a confirmation code to the email address you gave them. Complete the process, and your Clickbank account should now be active! Be sure to write down your nickname and password for future use.

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What About Other Affiliate Networks? There are many other affiliate programs out there, and each has its own unique application and approval process. One of the many reasons we recommend Clickbank is that signing up is easy and straightforward, and you can start promoting products immediately, with complete confidence that you’ll be paid. Once you get a feel for affiliate marketing, you may want to explore other affiliate networks to find other products to promote. Bonus Section: Advanced Market Analysis Before you begin promoting products, it’s also important to have an idea of your target audience. What types of people are likely to visit your site and purchase the products you show them?

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Here are some market factors to consider: A. Age - What do you think is the typical age range of the people who would be interested in the products you promote? You really should target an audience that is at least above the age of 18. Most online purchases are conducted through credit card transactions or Paypal accounts. People under the age of 18 generally don’t have these payment options available to them. They’re probably living with their parents and not paying bills, and don’t have disposable income (or credit cards and Paypal accounts) to spend on online products. B. Gender - The gender of your target audience is very important, also. If your website is gender neutral (geared towards men and women), then you’ll want to sell gender neutral products. If your site is targeting women, then only promote products that will be of interest to women. Whether men or women are the more profitable target audience depends on your niche. As you’re starting out with your first affiliate website, we suggest that you target one gender rather than trying to cast a “wide net” and appeal to men and women. For example, a site about “men’s dating advice” is more targeted, and easier to find targeted products for, than a site that is about “dating advice” in general. C. Location – Keep in mind that the Internet is global—and your visitors will be, too. However, the bulk of your buyers will probably come from a handful of first-world countries. Unless you’re going to make a site in a foreign language, then your best traffic (people who are willing and able to buy products) will generally come from: o o o o o o o

USA Canada UK Australia South Africa New Zealand Singapore

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The reason for this is because people living in these countries are more computer savvy. They’ve had access to high-speed internet for a long time. They also have disposable income to spend, and have the ability to make payments over the internet. (And, there are large English-speaking populations in these countries.) Here in the USA, few of us use Western Union to pay for things on a regular basis. Many of us have Paypal accounts. But in many Asian and Spanish-speaking countries, Paypal is not widely used—or not even available. We’ve owned websites that get thousands of visitors per day, but made barely any money because a large majority of the visitors came from countries such as the Philippines, India and Pakistan—where the average internet user doesn’t have the money, or the ability, to make a Paypal or credit card transaction online. D. Prior experience - How much experience your target audience has with the topic of your website is often a strong determining factor as to whether they buy a product. “Newbies” (beginners) are the best audience because they’re easier to satisfy. People who have intermediate or advanced knowledge of the topic might find the information on your website to be too simplistic, and will be more cynical about buying products because they feel they may already know the answers. We suggest that when you add content to your website (articles, videos, etc), slant it towards newbies. They’re more likely to try one of the products you are promoting, and won’t complain that they’ve already “heard it all before.” E. Income level - This factor ties in closely with age. The more money a person makes, the more likely they are to spend money online. We recall speaking with an internet marketer who was frustrated by the fact that his site received an impressive amount of traffic, yet it wasn’t making any money. We took one look at his site and immediately knew the problem: it was dedicated to the children’s cartoon Pokemon! How many children do you know who are able to whip out a credit card and purchase a product? This was an obvious blunder, but do keep in mind that you want to market your site to adults who have money to spend.

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The demographics of your target audience will play a large part in determining how much money you can make from your website. How To Gather Demographic Information Here are two websites you can use to find out the demographics of the audience you are targeting: Quantcast.com Alexa.com Quantcast.com provides free “audience composition” reports. You can look up some of the big websites in your niche and see the demographics of their visitors. You can then use this information as you develop your website and find products to promote. Let’s take a look at an example. Earlier in this course, we referred to a site called Askthebuilder.com that caters to people who enjoy doing home construction projects. Let’s take a look at what Quantcast tells us about this site.

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If we run a Quantcast search on askthebuilder.com, it shows us the graph above. The top half of the screen shows the amount of estimated traffic the site gets. As you can see, it’s getting a large number of visitors a month (111,897). That’s over 3,000 daily visitors on average, which means it’s quite popular. The second half of the page (shown below) displays the US demographics of the visitor to the site. It also breaks down their gender, age range, income level, education level, race, and more.

Clearly, this site is more popular with men than with women. They tend to be over the age of 25, well-educated (and presumably internet savvy), and have a higher-than-average income level. Therefore, this site appeals to a target market that is willing to spend money online. We suggest using another service, Alexa.com, to double-check the demographics and numbers and gather additional information.

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Alexa is the leading provider for website metrics (and it’s free). Just go to Alexa.com and look up a site. You’ll then be shown a screen that displays a lot of interesting information about that site, including: • • • • • •

Whether it mostly receives male or female visitors How much time they spend on the site, on average Their typical education level What country most of the site’s visitors come from What keywords they’re using to find the site in the search engines The other sites that link to their site

Let’s take a look at what Alexa tells us about Askthebuilder.com. If we click on the the “Audience” tab, we are shown the site’s audience demographics.

One of the interesting details this screen provides is that most of the visitors are browsing the site from their homes. This is another good sign, because if they’re

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looking at the site from work or school, they’re probably not buying anything. People generally make online purchases from home. In Conclusion… There’s money to be made in any niche—from selling dating advice e-books, to surfboards, to ringtones for cell phones. But it takes the same amount of time and effort to create a site, regardless of the topic. If your goal is to make money, right now your time is best spent on a website that has the right type of customer base: one that is willing and able to purchase a lot of products. For maximum profitability, identify a niche that has a hungry target audience with the right demographics and money to spend, and build a site around that.

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Module 5: Getting Your Website Online In this Internet Secrets module, we’re going to show you how to get your website online, and set it up. This consists of three steps: 1 – Register a domain name (buy a name for your website) 2 – Sign up with a hosting service (so that your website is viewable to anyone in the world, 24/7) 3 – Install Wordpress on your site (a web publishing platform that allows you to add and manage your content—articles, videos, pictures and so forth). Since the arrival of Wordpress, setting up a website is easy for anyone to do. When we started out in this business, Wordpress did not exist. Building a website was a complex process that required specialized computer programming knowledge. Back in the day, we had to hire programmers to not only build our websites, but to make any changes we wanted to make—such as adding a new article, or even a picture—and they charged us by the hour!

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But with Wordpress, building a website and managing your content isn’t much more complicated than using a word processing program like Microsoft Word. If you want to add a new article to your site, you simply write it and publish it with a single “click.” If you want to add or move around some pictures, or display a video, that’s simple, too. Wordpress also makes it easy to display banner ads, Amazon.com ads, and Google Adsense. We’ll cover this a bit later. For now, let’s get your site up and running. Step 1: Register A Domain Name Setting up your website begins with registering a domain name. This is the name of your site, and its address on the internet. (It’s also known as your “URL.”) Examples of domain names: • InternetSecrets.com • FastWeightLossTips.com • DogTrainingInfo.com You may have noticed that .com isn’t the only “extension” that domain names use. There are domain names that end with .net, .info, .org, .tv, and a variety of others. The reason why you see a lot of sites using different extensions (.net, .biz, etc) is usually because the domain name they wanted was not available with the .com extension. Someone already owned it. So they had to choose a different extension. We say you should always get a .com. If the exact domain name you want isn’t available with that extension, keep looking until you find a .com that will work for your purposes. (We’ll explain how to find and purchase your domain name in a moment.) Why is this important? Because when your domain name ends with .com, your site look more legitimate and “official” than sites with other extensions.

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You’re not a blogger who is writing an online journal just for fun. You’re an internet marketer. You’re selling stuff. Therefore you want people to trust your site and feel comfortable purchasing products that you recommend—and the fact is, some people are a bit suspicious of sites that have “weird” extensions (.biz, .tv, .info, and so on). Here at Internet Secrets, we’re showing you how to build websites that online shoppers will trust and spend money with. So your website needs to look as credible as possible. Note: In the future, you may want to set up a website that represents your company or brand. In this case, it’s especially important to have a .com—because it’s the easiest extension for people to remember. If you tell someone the name of your site, when they go home and try to look it up on the internet they’re going to assume that it ends with .com. If it ends with some other extension, chances are they won’t remember that. But since we’re teaching you in Internet Secrets how to set up an affiliate marketing website to promote other people’s products, you don’t need to worry about “branding” yourself right now. And your domain name doesn’t need to be super easy to remember. We do, however, strongly suggest that you still get a .com extension, because it has a built-in trust factor. To start exploring possible domain names for your site, we suggest you go to www.namecheap.com. Type in some of your ideas for domain names into the search box, and see if those names are available. If the exact name you want is not available with a .com extension, Namecheap will provide a list of suggested names on the right side of the screen. Keep searching until you find a decent name that is available for purchase. Then buy it (this is also known as “registering” it). You now own this domain name. It only costs around $10 per year to hold onto it. Another tool we use for domain name research is http://www.domainsbot.com/. As with Namecheap, just type the phrase that you’re thinking about registering into the search box. Domainsbot.com will tell you if it’s available, and provide a

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list of similar domain names you may want to purchase. Tips For Choosing Your Domain Name As we mentioned earlier, when it comes to choosing the right domain name for your site, in the past we would have advised you to choose a name that contained a keyword you were trying to rank for. (We explained keywords to you in a previous module.) Google used to weigh this rather heavily. If you were trying to rank for the keyword “how to lose weight fast,” and you were able to buy the domain name www.howtoloseweightfast.com, you would have a built-in advantage in the search results. The fact that your domain name was an exact match for that keyword would automatically get you higher rankings than other sites which were targeting the same keyword. However, Google frequently changes the way it evaluates and ranks websites. And it now seems that having a keyword in your domain name makes virtually no difference in your Google rankings. This makes it a lot easier for you to choose a domain name, since you no longer need to worry about trying to find a good “keyword match.” You simply need to choose domain name that meets the following criteria: Make sure it ends with a .com (for the built-in trust factor) Make sure the name of your website gives an idea of what it’s about (example: if your site is about astrology, choose a name like www.yourastrologyguide.com). When people see your site in the search results, the name of your site should make it clear to them what your site is about. Otherwise, they might not bother to click on it. Keep your domain name as short as possible. Google gives preference to shorter domain names, so don’t make it long and clumsy. If the exact name you want isn’t available, try adding a word to the beginning, or to the end. For example, let’s say your site provides tips on becoming a better golfer (and promotes golf-related products). This is a fairly popular market, so obvious domain names like www.golftips.com or www.golfpro.com are not going to be available.

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But you can dig a little deeper, and see if names like these are available: www.yourgolfingguide.com www.progolfingsecrets.com www.easygolftechniques.com www.getbetteratgolfnow.com www.beabettergolfer.com www.easygolftraining.com www.golftrainingtips.com www.golfimprovementsecrets.com If you want, you can include your name in the domain name: www.bobsgolfsecrets.com www.maryteachesgolf.com And so on. We’re just trying to help you come up with some ideas. By adding a word at the beginning of the domain name, or at the end, you can usually find a domain name to suit your purposes that still sounds somewhat catchy. The actual domain name isn’t all that important. You’re not naming your business or your company. You’re simply choosing a name for an affiliate marketing site. If you can get a catchy .com domain name that follows the rules we explained above, great. But don’t spend too much time fretting about it. Pick a name and get started. We have work to do! Step 2: Sign Up For Hosting Now that you’ve got your domain name, you’ll need to sign up with a web hosting service (or a “host” for short). Web hosting refers to a service that makes your website available to your users. In order for anyone on the internet to be able to view your website at any time, you need to make sure your site is running on a computer which is connected to the internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The computer that will be used to host your site is called a server. All of your website files will be kept on this server. Your hosting service will provide this server for you, in exchange for a monthly (or annual) fee.

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This is what a typical server looks like. It’s basically a computer, like the one you might have at home, except these have been configured to host websites. A single server might host the files for hundreds of different websites. (As your business grows and your traffic starts to get significant, you may want to eventually rent your own private server—but this is something to think about down the road.) In addition to hosting your site on one of its servers, a good web hosting company will also provide these features: • Round-the-clock technical support (in case your site encounters any problems) • A control panel you can log into, where you can manage different aspects of your website • The ability to set up email accounts that include the name of your site (i.e. [email protected]) • Traffic statistics, so that you can see how many visitors your site is getting, where they are coming from, and other information (you can view these stats in your control panel) We recommend using a hosting service called HostNine. Their prices are very reasonable ($18.95 per month when you sign up for one year) and they have great 24-hour customer support.

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Sign up here: www.internetsecrets.com/hostnine As your website starts getting more traffic, and you’re earning more money, having a reliable hosting service with good customer support is essential. If your site goes offline for some reason, every minute of downtime could be costing you money. HostNine has always been very fast and helpful in the rare instances when our websites have run into problems. HostNine offers a “reseller package” which we use ourselves. This allows you to set up as many domains as you want, and you can even choose which part of the world you want your server to be based in (US, UK, Netherlands or Asia). HostNine has multiple “datacenters” across different continents. This means you can choose to have your server based in the part of the world where most of your visitors are going to come from. By hosting your site closer to your customers, your site will load faster for them. Once your hosting plan is set up, you’ll be shown a screen that contains your login information. (You’ll receive an email that contains the information as well.) This will allow you to access your website’s control panel (or “cpanel,” for short). The URL for your cpanel will look like this: http://yoursite.com/cpanel This welcome email should also contain your “Domain Name Servers,” which will look something like this: ns1.speedydns.net ns2.speedydns.net Now, log into into your Namecheap account. Go the tab on the upper right side of the screen that says “My Account,” and underneath it, select “Manage My Domains.” 2 – Click on your domain name

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3 – On the left side, click on “Domain Name Server Setup” 4 - Click the circle that says “Specify Custom DNS Servers” and then enter your DNS settings. 5 – Save your changes. It will take up to an hour for the changes to take effect. Once this happens, your domain name will be connected to your hosting service. Whenever someone visits your site, your hosting service will display your site to them. By the way, you don’t need to register your name with Namecheap (there are many other “domain registrars” that provide this service, such as GoDaddy.com), and you don’t need to use HostNine (many other hosting options are out there). These are just the services that we personally use and can vouch for. If any of these instructions are confusing to you, watch the video that comes with this module. You can watch over our shoulder as we walk you through the steps. Step 3: Install Wordpress The arrival of Wordpress was a huge breakthrough for bloggers, internet marketers, and anyone who wanted to set up and develop their own website without having to learn computer programming. With Wordpress, you can quickly and easily set up a website on your own—and if you know how to use Microsoft Word, you basically have the knowledge you need to start posting articles, pictures and videos. It’s really that simple. In the videos that accompany modules 6-9, we’ll give you onscreen demonstrations that walk you through each of the steps.

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Module 6: Purchasing Your Domain Name Module 7: Setting Up Hosting Module 8: Setting Up Wordpress Module 9: Working With Wordpress Watch the videos that accompany these modules. Some things are better demonstrated onscreen, and this is the case with purchasing your domain name, getting your site online, and installing and using Wordpress. It will be much easier for you to follow along if we actually SHOW you how to do it. The videos for these modules (6-9) are designed to walk you through each step. Here’s a short summary of what you will learn in the videos: We’ll give you pointers on purchasing a good domain name for your website. You will always want to choose a .com extension for your site, and if the exact name you want is unavailable, you can play around with different combinations of words until you find a name you like. You will then need to sign up with a hosting service (or “host”) in order to get your site online and display it to the world 24/7.

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For hosting, we recommend that you sign up with Host Nine for a reseller account. Click here to sign up: http://www.internetsecrets.com/hostnine Once you’re logged into your hosting account, you will need to set up a new account for your new domain name. Once you do this, Host Nine will show you a screen containing the logins for your website’s control panel, along with your Domain Name Servers (or “DNS”) settings. DNS settings typically look something like this: ns1.speedydns.net ns2.speedydns.net Log into the website where you purchased your domain name (we recommend using Namecheap to buy domain names), and find the tab that shows you the Domain Name Server information. Copy and paste the settings provided by your host into the first two boxes, as shown below.

It should take an hour or so for the DNS settings to take effect. Once they do, your domain name will be connected to your hosting service, and your site will be online. Now you need to install Wordpress on your site.

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To install Wordpress, you need to go into your website’s control panel. This is how you would find the login screen for your control panel: yourwebsite.com/cpanel (Your login details were shown to you, and probably emailed to you as well, when you set up the account for your new domain on your hosting account.) So you log in, and then find the icon for installing Wordpress. With many hosting services (such as Host Nine), you’ll find it in the Softaculous Apps section. If you are using a different hosting service, the button may be called Fantastico.

From this point, the videos will explain how to work with Wordpress and add content (articles, videos, banners, etc) to your site. We’ll also show you several plugins (free tools) for you to install on your site, to give it additional functions.

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Module 10: Search Engine Optimization (On-Page) Before we jump into this lesson, first a quick recap. In the beginning of this course, we explained the formula for making money with a website: Traffic x Conversions = $$$ You need traffic and conversions in order to be profitable. Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. You can have a beautifully designed website offering the best deals on terrific products, but if no one is finding your site, you’ve got no one to sell to! There are many methods of driving traffic to your website, but essentially, they all fall under one of two categories: • Free traffic • Paid traffic

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Paying for traffic usually means purchasing ads. For example, you can sign up with Google to advertise in their search engine listings. The screenshot below shows the Google results if we do a search for the keyword “how to play guitar.” The first two results, above the YouTube video, are ads. You can just barely tell, because the background for this “advertising block” is a subtle shade of yellow (and, above the ads it says “Ads related to how to play guitar.”) The owners of those two websites are Google advertisers. Every time someone clicks on those links, Google charges them some money.

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This form of advertising is known as PPC, or “Pay Per Click.” The more competitive the keyword is, the more money Google will charge per click. But learning how to run a profitable Google ad campaign is a complicated subject, and if you don’t know how to do it correctly, you can lose a lot of money quickly. So in this module, we’re going to focus on getting free traffic by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO Basics The term SEO encapsulates everything you do to improve your web site’s rankings in the search engines. If your site is about learning how to play the guitar, and you are promoting guitarrelated products, you’ll want to rank as high as possible for keywords such as: How to play the guitar Learn to play guitar Play guitar lessons Learn guitar fast And so on. You’ll use the Google Keyword Tool to come up with keywords to target, as we explained in a previous module. The more keywords you achieve good rankings for, the more people are going to find your site in the search results, and the more free traffic you will get. How Google Searches Work In a moment, we’re going to give you some SEO strategies that you can start using to improve your rankings and traffic. Before we get into that, let’s take a moment to review how Google works. When people use Google to search for information, Google’s job is to show them the websites that are most likely to give them the information they’re looking for. Google analyzes every website on the internet to determine what it’s about, and the quality of the information it provides. Google will review your site, too, soon after it goes online.

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In case you’re wondering how this “analysis” is done, Google does not have a thousand worker drones sitting in cubicles whose job is to manually review each individual website. The review process is handled by Google’s algorithm, which is a highly sophisticated computer program that is designed to quickly scan each site and evaluate it based on a set of factors. Google then ranks every website in its search results, depending on how relevant a website is to the different phrases that are typed in when people search for information on that topic. (Note: Google doesn’t only evaluate your website when it first appears on the internet. It reviews every site on a regular basis, particularly when you add new articles, videos, etc.) Let’s say Bob and Mary are planning a trip to Las Vegas. They need to book a hotel, so Mary sits down at her computer and types in the phrase “Las Vegas hotel discounts.” Google will show, on its first page of results, the websites that it feels provide the best information on this topic. Google has determined that these websites give a lot of good, relevant information on discounted hotel rooms in Las Vegas. If you want to climb onto the first page of Google for that keyword, and grab a chunk of this traffic, you’ll need to “optimize” your website to make it as Googlefriendly as possible for that keyword. Now, ranking for the keyword “Las Vegas hotel discounts” would be extremely difficult. There are Google advertisers claiming the top spots on the first page, and many of the other sites on Page One are massive travel websites (vegas.com, hotels.com, agoda.com, expedia.com) that have high PR scores and tons of back links. We talked about how to study your competition in a previous module, but with a keyword like this, you don’t need to do any deep analysis. You simply need to look at the websites on Page One to know that it’s incredibly competitive. But by doing some SEO, you should be able to rank well for lower-competition keywords.

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There are two forms of SEO that you can do: 1. On-Page SEO 2. Off-Page SEO. On-page SEO includes all of the things you do on your website (such as including keywords in the titles of your articles) to make it more search-engine friendly. Off-page SEO includes all of the things you do away from your website (such as getting back links from other sites) to make it more search-engine friendly. Let’s begin with on-page SEO. This is where your SEO efforts should begin. The main goal of on-page SEO is to help the search engines understand what your website is about. When the search engines crawl your site to determine how it should rank, they’re looking for certain signals. When you understand what they’re looking for, you can show them these signals. Here are our seven keys to good on-page SEO: #1 Have good content. Your “content” consists of everything on your site that your viewers can look at and interact with—your articles, images, videos, comments sections, etc. How do we define “good content?” Here are some rules to follow: Your content should always appear on your site first. If you copy articles from other sites, the search engines will ignore them (or they may even penalize your rankings for being a copycat). Basing one of your articles on an article from another site is okay, but only if you rewrite it extensively. Your content should be useful. Everything you put on your site should offer some type of value for your visitors—whether it’s to teach them something, help them solve a problem, or entertain them. Don’t put content on your site just for the sake of adding something new.

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Long articles get more respect from the search engines than short ones, which means your articles should be at least 700 words long. And if you’re providing tips or information, it pays to do some research beforehand, so that your articles are worth reading. A well-researched, helpful article is going to stay in the search engines forever— and if it gets a good ranking, that one article might bring you many thousands of visitors. It’s worth spending the time to make each of your new articles lengthy and as useful as possible. If you create a new post that features a video, or an image, add some text to the post as well. Underneath the video or image, write some text to explain or describe it. The more content you can include in each of your posts, the more good stuff you are “feeding” the search engines. If you publish a new article, you can include a video along with it. Just find a relevant video on YouTube and display it with your article. Include images, too, to make your posts look more robust. Your content should be updated frequently. The frequency with which you add new content depends to some degree on the topic of your site. If your site is about celebrities, sports, news, etc., then you will probably have to post multiple times per day to keep your content relevant and up-to-date. But if you’re running a typical affiliate marketing website, there isn’t “breaking news” that you’ll need to report three times per day. We suggest publishing something daily if you can, or at least 2-3 times per week. Take a look at your competitors, too—the other websites in your niche who are beating you in the rankings. How often do you see them publishing new content? If it’s been months since they updated their site, you may be able to overtake them if you consistently publish fresh, useful content. Also, by publishing frequently, you give an incentive for your readers to come back and visit you. Most affiliate marketers are lazy—they slap together a website, publish a few articles, and call it a day.

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But if you continue to publish good new content, you can build a loyal following. Your readers will “like” you on Facebook, and share your links on Twitter and other social media sites. Other websites will link to you. This boosts your rankings further. Perhaps most importantly, when your readers come to think of you as an “authority” on your topic—if they enjoy reading your articles, and trust you to provide great information—they’ll be much more likely to buy products that you recommend. Here’s the next element of good on-page SEO: #2 Optimize your content and format it properly. In order to fully understand what your pages are about, the search engines will look at elements including the titles of your pages, your page descriptions, and their formatting. First, when you create a new post, be sure to write a title that contains the keyword you are trying to rank for. Examples (keywords are in bold): • • • •

7 Easy Ways To Cure Arthritis Fast My Funny Story About Training A Labrador Puppy A “Weird” Tip For You To Get A Flat Belly 3 Mistakes People Make When Buying Florida Real Estate

We like to use numbers in our titles quite often (“7 Ways,” “3 Mistakes,” etc) because it compels people to read—it really sounds like you’re about to learn something specific and useful. The “description” of your post will be seen by searchers when your site appears in the search results. When you look at the search results, each website that comes up has a description underneath. A well-written description will motivate the searcher to click on your site, rather than on one of the other search results.

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Your descriptions shouldn’t be longer than a couple of sentence. Make sure the descriptions for every one of your pages is unique. In addition to being included in your title, your keyword should appear: • In your Meta Tags • In the first 50 words of your article (within one of the first few sentences) • One or two more times in the body of your article NOTE: Google will penalize you if it sees that you are repeating your keyword too many times in an article. You never want your articles to look like you’re trying to rank for a keyword. Now let’s explain what we mean when we say your articles should be “properly formatted.” Your posts have headlines (

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) which “break up” the article into sections and make your information look well-organized. (We explained how to use tags in the module on adding content to your site.) Your text should be easy to read. Don’t use strange or exotic fonts for your text. Basic fonts like Arial work just fine. Also, don’t make your text too small. It should be at least 12 pt in size. When your articles are easy to read and nicely formatted, your users are more likely to stick around. We found that by increasing the size of the font on one of our sites—from 12 pt to 14 pt—we were able to significantly boost the average amount of time our users spent on our site. This, in turn, helped our rankings. Your text is split up into short paragraphs. Paragraphs shouldn’t run longer than 4-5 lines. Having short, concise paragraphs will present your information in a clearer manner that is easier for the reader to digest—and easier for the search engines to evaluate. Another note on formatting: it’s good to include images, but the problem with many images is that their file size is large. The larger their file size, the slower your page will load.

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Use this free tool to “compress” your images before posting them on your site. The images will look the same after you use the tool, they’ll just be smaller in file size: http://www.internetsecrets.com/smaller-images Use the “alt” tag to tell the search engines what each of your images is about. And name each image file to include a descriptive phrase or keyword. (Instead of uploading an image called “picture3.jpg,” you’d want to rename the image “how to play guitar.jpg” if your site is about learning to play the guitar. The next image you upload could be named “learn rock guitar.jpg,” or “man playing electric guitar.jpg,” and so on.) #3 Have Internal Links. You should have links within your articles that point to other articles on your site. The mega-site Wikipedia.com is the ultimate example of good internal linking. Look up the actor “Brad Pitt” on Wikipedia, and you’ll see that there are links to other pages within the same site that are about each of his movies, his co-stars, and so on. You can zoom in on the image below, or click here to see Brad Pitt’s Wikipedia entry.

With your site, follow the same idea. Whenever you publish a new article, find ways to create internal links to other articles within your site. This will be easier to do as your site grows.

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(Don’t overdo it; a few internal links per article is fine.) When search engines such as Google crawl through your pages, whenever they see a link they will follow that link and look at the page it leads to. If you’ve got lots of internal links within your site, it shows the search engines that your site has depth. You are providing LOTS of information related to your topic. Also, internal links increase the amount of time that your users spend on your site. Google watches these numbers closely. and takes it into consideration when they rank you. If your average visitor comes to your site, and winds up spending 12 minutes on your site because they read an article, and then click on internal links and read a couple more articles, and then stick around for a few extra minutes to write a comment on one of your articles… That’s a powerful sign that your site offers great content. On the other hand, if your average visitor arrives on your site, doesn’t see anything interesting, and goes back to the search results within 20 seconds, that shows Google that your site does NOT deserve good rankings. Internal links give your readers a reason to “click around” and look at different pages of your site. When you create internal links, don’t use obvious keywords as your anchor text. Follow the Wikipedia model. Make it look natural. Over time, you want your site to seem like a miniature “encyclopedia” of information, where people interested in your topic can spend an hour reading through various articles, watching videos, etc. And the whole time, you’ll be exposing them to products that you are promoting as an affiliate. #4 Load Fast. The speed at which your website loads for your users is another important factor in your Google rankings. Google is on a mission to make the

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web faster, and it doesn’t like websites that load slowly. So speed is now a ranking factor. Use this free tool to check how fast your website loads: tools.pingdom.com It will give you a score (from zero to 100) and show you the elements of your website that are slowing down its load time. Look at the “size” column after you run your analysis; you may have some files, such as images, that you can shrink down or remove to make your site load faster. #5 Use Google+ and Google Authorship. Google+ is basically a new type of “social network” (similar to Facebook, in a sense) that ties together all of the Google services we already use. On Facebook, you add “friends.” On Google+, you add people to your “Circles.” You can organize your Circles depending on how you know them: Friends, Family, Business, College Buddies, etc. When a Google+ user gives one of your posts a “Plus,” Google weighs it more heavily than getting a “like” from Facebook. Google+ has a lot of interesting features and we expect it to become even more important to your rankings as time goes on. Start familiarizing yourself with it. Here is an excellent resource for learning more about it: http://www.internetsecrets.com/google-plus You can sign up for a Google+ account here: https://plus.google.com You should also start using Google Authorship. Google has traditionally given higher rankings to websites that it considers to be the “authority sites” in a particular niche.

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Now, Google has taken it a step further by giving “authority” to individual writers. Websites are given a Page Rank; writers can now get an Author Rank. You can establish authority by linking your Google+ profile to the content you publish. When your content appears in the Google search results, your name, image and a link to your Google+ profile will be seen alongside it. If you publish content that is well-received, and readers are sharing your articles with their friends, giving them Google+ votes, Facebook likes, and so forth, your authority will grow. This, in turn, gives your website more authority in the eyes of Google. You can learn more about it and sign up here: https://plus.google.com/authorship #6 Have outgoing links to authority sites. Another on-page SEO factor that is often neglected is linking out to other trusted sites or web pages on your topic. Think about this: the Internet is made up of sites linking to one another. If you don't have any links pointing to other sites, you’re not contributing to the overall online community. Just make sure your outgoing links are pointing to good, reputable sites (for example, YouTube and Wikipedia), because you will get penalized if you link to bad, low-quality sites. If you write an article about “how to train German Shepherds,” you could link the words “German Shepherd” to the Wikipedia page about German Shepherds. Or, you could link those words to a YouTube video about German Shepherds. This shows Google that you’re trying to be a good resource on this topic— beyond providing an article about German Shepherds, you’re also helping to point your readers towards additional information. And here’s our final key to doing on-page SEO: #7 Encourage user engagement. Besides trying to get Google+ users to like your stuff, you want all of your users to “engage” with your site as much as possible. You want users to leave comments under your articles, and to share

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your content and vote for it on social sites such as Twitter, Digg and Stumbleupon. These are all signs to Google that users are enjoying your content. In the previous module on setting up your site with Wordpress, we told you to install a plugin that allows your users to give you these different types of likes and votes. At the end of the day, your level of user engagement comes down to the quality of your content. If your content is extremely useful, funny, interesting, or provocative, you’re naturally going to get more comments, shares, likes, and so on. So there you have it: the basics of on-page SEO. Next, we’ll cover off-page SEO.

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Module 11: Search Engine Optimization (Off-Page) So now you understand on-page SEO: the elements of your site that you must optimize in order to win respect in the search engines. Once your on-page SEO is handled, you can begin your off-page SEO campaign. This is achieved through building back links on other websites, that point to your site. In order to achieve good rankings and maintain them, you’ve got to combine solid on-page SEO with an off-page SEO campaign. So why is it so important to get these back links? To put it simply, Google’s search results are one big popularity contest. Back links are like “votes.” Generally speaking, the more votes (or back links) a site gets from other sites, the higher its rankings will be. But in the world of SEO, not all votes, or back links, are equal.

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The most powerful back links—the ones that can seriously elevate your rankings—come from sites that: Have authority (they have a high PR score and many back links of their own) 2. Have relevancy (their topic is similar to yours) 1.

Whenever a site links to your site, they pass along a certain amount of ranking power, or “link juice,” to you. If the site linking to you has authority and relevancy, you’ll get a nice amount of juice from them. Anchor Text When you place back links on other sites to point to your site, anchor text is an important factor. As we explained earlier, anchor text = the words that represent your link onscreen. If you’re trying to rank a page on your site for the keyword “how to get your ex boyfriend back,” you’ll want to build some links to your site that use the keyword as their anchor text. If I submit an article to an article directory and include a link at the bottom, it might look like this: I hope you enjoyed this article. Visit my website for more tips on how to get your ex boyfriend back. Or, let’s say I find a blog about relationship advice, and it has a comments section. I post a comment underneath one of the articles and include a link to my site. It looks like this: I enjoyed reading your blog, especially your advice on getting over a breakup. In my case, I’m trying to figure out how to work things out with my boyfriend, Dan. Do you have any tips on how to get your ex boyfriend back? My keyword, “how to get your ex boyfriend back,” is the anchor text that I use for my links.

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The actual HTML code would look like this: how to get your ex boyfriend back Google sees my anchor text, and assumes that the page it links to is a source of information on “how to get your ex boyfriend back.” Therefore, Google should give my web page a better ranking for that keyword. The more links I build with that anchor text, the better my rankings will become for that keyword over time. But you should not use the exact same anchor text over and over again for all of your links. This makes it obvious to Google that you’re trying to rank for that keyword. It looks unnatural. As a rule of thumb, only around 20% (one out of five) of your anchor text links should be a match for your keyword. Main Keyword (use for roughly 20% of your anchor text): how to get your ex boyfriend back Variations (use for roughly 20% of your anchor text): getting your ex boyfriend back how you can get your boyfriend back get your boyfriend back get back with your boyfriend get back with my ex For the remaining 60% of your anchor text, use: • Your URL Examples: Want to learn how to get your ex boyfriend back the easy way? Watch this:

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http://exbackexperts.com/ForWomenVideo1.html Here’s a site I found that has a ton of information on diets: http://www.whatsthatdiet.com • Or, use words unrelated to your keyword Examples: Click here to learn a proven strategy for getting your ex boyfriend back. This is my favorite website for learning how to fix your relationship. Check out this site is you want no-nonsense tips on how to build muscle the easy way. And so forth. By mixing up your anchor text, your links appear more “real” in the eyes of Google—as if real people are linking to your site in a natural way. Think of it this way: people share links with each other all the time. You probably share links with your friends. And when people share links—whether by posting it in a blog comment, in a forum, or posting it on their Facebook wall—they don’t use a keyword as the anchor text. They simply post the link, right? You want Google to think that your links are being shared by random people because they like your website. You don’t want it to be obvious that you are the one doing SEO and building links to boost your search engine rankings. There are endless places on the internet where you can build links that point back to your website, so really, your off-page SEO efforts can go on forever. It just depends on how much time and effort you’re willing to spend to boost your site to the ranking you want. The more competitive the keyword is, the more effort (and good back links) this will require. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most popular ways to get back links. Keep

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in mind, using these methods will get you traffic, too, when people click on your links and come to your site. Submit articles to article directories Here is a short list of some of the most popular “article directories,” which are sites that contain thousands of informational articles organized by category (health, self-help, relationships, etc). To start submitting to an article directory, just register for a free account. Each directory has its own rules about back links. Some will allow you to place one back link within your articles; some allow more than one. Whenever you create back links, follow the anchor text rules that we explained earlier. • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Ezine Articles GoArticles ArticleSnatch Article Dashboard iSnare Buzzle Articles Base Article Alley Article Click Article City Amazines SearchWarp Easy Articles

(To find more article directories, do some Google research. Try Googling “best article directories.”) Go here for some more suggestions: http://www.internetsecrets.com/article-directories

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Upload videos to YouTube (and put links in the description box) YouTube is absolutely massive, and it’s a great way to get links and traffic. It also happens to be the #2 search engine, behind Google! Nowadays, many people who search for information online skip Google and search for information on YouTube instead. (They’d rather watch a video than read an article.) Therefore, YouTube should definitely factor into your SEO efforts. Not only can you get back links from YouTube—you can also get heaps of traffic when people view your videos, and click the links in your description box that lead them to your site. Create short videos on your topic (3-5 minutes long is fine), and upload them to your YouTube account. You will be asked to write a description for each video, which will appear underneath it. This description can simply consist of a few sentences, or you can make it the length of a full article. Sprinkle some keywords in there, the same way you would when posting content to your site. You’ll also be asked to supply “tags”—words and phrases which describe your video. When people use the YouTube search box, your video will come up in the results when their search matches one of your tags—so create a whole bunch! You want as many YouTube users as possible to come across your videos. You can get a list of keyword ideas from the Google Keyword Tool, and then create a “tag” for each of these keywords. Each of your YouTube video descriptions can contain two clickable links to your site. You can’t use anchor text, so just type out your URL. (Want to learn more yoga tips? Get my free course here: http://www.yogatipsforwomen.com) And, each video you upload should be “tagged” with a list of keywords, so that lots of YouTube searchers come across your video.

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Post comments on blogs Go to Google.com and run a search on this phrase (put your keyword between the first set of quotes): “your keyword” + “leave a comment” Google will show you a list of blogs which will allow you to post a comment. Some will allow you to include a link in your comment. Here, the key is to leave a thoughtful comment that shows that you actually read the article you are commenting on. This makes it much more likely that the blog owner will approve your comment. Here’s another site you can use to find different types of sites and blogs that allow you to make comments (and slip in a back link): http://dropmylink.com/

Just type your keyword into the search box and choose a category of site from the drop-down menu. Google will show you a list of results. Check out these sites and see if you can post a comment with a link. Post on forums If you can find any forums (message boards) on your topic, sign up and join. Some forums will allow you to include a link in your posts. Others will let you put a link in your “signature” that gets placed beneath your comments. Every time this guy posts a comment on this forum for internet marketers (www.warriorforum.com), his signature contains a link pointing to a service he is promoting:

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Profile Links Many websites that have their own internet “communities” (think Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or forums on a topic) will ask you to create a Profile page when you join. On this Profile page, you can enter your personal details. In many cases, they’ll ask you for the name of your website or URL, if you have one. This presents an opportunity for you to get a back link. Always look out for opportunities to slip in a back link! Web 2.0 Sites The term “Web 2.0” can cover a lot of different types of sites, but we’ll keep our definition simple: these are sites that aim to build online communities where members can interact with each other—by exchanging messages, sharing content, commenting on each other’s posts, etc. There is a strong social element to these sites, which is why they’re often called “social networking” or “social media” sites. Facebook would be the current king of the “social” sites. On Facebook, millions of links are being passed around every day. These sites present opportunities for you to get back links. Again, these links not only get you link juice—they can also direct a lot of traffic your way. We’ll break them down into two categories: “social interaction” sites (where the emphasis is on people communicating and interacting with each other), and “social blogging” sites (where lots of members are writing articles and blogging about topics). Social Interaction Sites

• Facebook • Twitter • Google+ • Pinterest

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• Instagram • Myspace • YouTube Social Blogging Sites

• Tumblr • Blogger • Hubpages • Squidoo • Weebly • Quizilla There is a third category of sites we want to mention: Social Bookmarking sites. With these sites, once you sign up to join, you’re able to click a button to “bookmark” web pages that you want to share with your fellow members. A bookmark is a vote, basically. The more bookmarks a piece of content gets, the more prominently it gets featured on the bookmarking site. You can join these sites for free, and submit links to your own site to get back links—and traffic. But don’t only submit your link. Write a sentence or two to describe what you’re sharing, and then give the link. This makes it look like you’re legitimately sharing some content—not just trying to get a link. Example of submitting to a bookmarking site: Hey, I found this blog post that has some pretty amazing advice about losing belly fat: http://www.loseyourbellyfatblog.com Social Bookmarking Sites

• Digg • Reddit • Stumbleupon

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Indexing Whenever a new web page gets put online, Google will likely find it and “index” it (include it in its database of billions of web pages). When a big authority website adds a new page, Google will index that page quickly because it knows that site is contributing valuable content to the internet. These sites get priority. For example, when www.huffingtonpost.com puts a news story online, that page may get indexed almost immediately. Once the site is indexed, Google can determine where (and how) it should rank in its search engine results. In your case, you need to make sure that Google discovers all of your back links and indexes them. These back links you’re building won’t do you any good if Google is not aware of them. The way you make sure Google notices your back links is to build links that point to your links. If you really want your SEO efforts to be effective, you should build back links to the articles you submit to article directories, and your YouTube videos. (When you upload a video to YouTube, it winds up on its own page, with its own URL. You can build links to this page). All of these pages need back links. First, so that they get indexed as quickly as possible. And second, you want all of these new pages you’re creating—in the article directories, on Web 2.0 sites, and on YouTube—to rank in Google. If your site is about dog training, and you’ve got a bunch of YouTube videos and posts on Tumblr.com and Blogger.com that are ranking for all kinds of dogrelated terms, a lot of people are going to become aware of your website. All of your videos and posts have links that take people to your website. So you see, by building links to your links—which we call second-tier links—

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you get more visibility in the search engines. For example, let’s say you submit an article to an article directory. This article contains links pointing to your site. Then, you build some links that point to your article. These would be second-tier links. Your second-tier links don’t have to be super-high quality. Their main purpose would be to make sure Google finds your article and indexes it. You can build these links on your own. Bookmarking sites, like Digg or Stumbleupon, are a good way to quickly create second-tier links. You could also use your Twitter account to send out a Tweet that contains a link to your article. This would count as a second-tier link, because that link will be posted on Twitter. Or, you can have lots of these links created for you, by hiring someone at Fiverr.com. Just go to Fiverr and do a search for “back links.” You’ll find lots of people who will use various types of automatic software to quickly create back links for you. (Never point these low-quality links directly at your main site. Mass link-building services like the ones you find on Fiverr should only be used with your secondtier links.) Where To Get Content As you can probably tell by now, an effective SEO campaign requires a lot of writing. You need articles not only for your own site, but to submit to other sites, such as article directories and social blogging sites. All of these articles need to be original. So we suggest outsourcing as much of this work as possible to writers. You’ll find lots of writers on Fiverr.com. You can start with a small budget—say, $20 per week. You can probably get 5-6 decent articles written for this much money if you shop around a bit.

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We like The Content Authority, where we get bulk numbers of articles written for cheap. On this site, you don’t have any direct communication with the writers. You submit your work order (including the keywords you want to base your articles on) and Content Authority assigns your articles to their pool of writers. Another great site to start using is Odesk.com. On this site, you can contact writers individually and work out deals with them. If you assign a writer a large number of articles (i.e. a batch of 50), you can negotiate a cheap price. You can use some of these articles as content for your site, and use the rest for your SEO campaign. For starters, set a goal of building100 back links to your main site. Build two or three links per day. Devote an hour or so each day to SEO, and you should start seeing results. More Link-Building Tips • Be aware of the number of links on the page giving you the backlink. If the page giving you a link has tons of links pointing to other sites, then the “link juice” you receive is greatly diminished. This is because the search engines do not like "link farms" (pages that are set up solely to link to other pages, and provide no real content). The fewer links that are on the page linking to you, the more selective that site appears to be, and therefore your link will count for more. • Try to get back links for ALL of the pages on your website. This is one of the biggest mistakes people make with SEO: they only make links to their home page. It’s crucial to have links pointing to every page of your site that you want to rank in the search engines. If you submit an article to an article directory and they allow you to include two links, you could build link #1 to your home page (www.yourwebsite.com), and build link #2 to another page (www.yourwebsite.com/newarticle). Well-respected authority sites with lots of great content don’t only have links pointing at their home page. Every one of their articles and blog posts

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probably has links pointing to it. (These links are also known as “deep links.”) You want your site to appear the same way to Google. • Try to make your link profile look as natural as possible. Your overall collection of back links—every link out there on the internet pointing to your site—is known as your “link profile.” It shouldn’t be too obvious to Google that you’re trying to rank for a keyword. This is why it’s important to vary your anchor text. • Another way to make your link profile seem more natural is to link out to authority sites sometimes. For example, if you submit an article to Ezine.com, or post an article on Hubpages.com, you can point one of your links at your own site, and point another link at an authority site such as Wikipedia or YouTube. This can help disguise the fact that you’re doing SEO. It would seem to Google that you’re just trying to be helpful to your readers, and showing them other resources to check out. Likewise, when you use a bookmarking site like Digg to bookmark your articles, don’t only bookmark your own stuff. Mix it up. Bookmark a few news stories, YouTube videos, etc., and then build a link to one of your own pages. This makes your bookmarking account look more real. Got it? Okay then, let’s continue with more Internet Secrets.

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Module 12: Email Marketing

Email marketing is an essential component of internet marketing. This means capturing the email addresses of people who visit your site, and putting them on your mailing list. One of the worst mistakes made by inexperienced affiliate marketers is that they don’t collect email addresses—or they don’t collect them aggressively enough. These marketers are leaving huge amounts of money on the table! Money they COULD be scooping into their own pockets. Let me explain how this works, and why neglecting to collect email addresses severely limits the amount of money you can make. Say a Google searcher named Bob comes across your site in the search results, and visits your site.

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He reads one of your articles, clicks on one of your affiliate links, and gets taken to a merchant website to see the sales page for their product. If Bob buys the product, you get paid a commission. But chances are, Bob won’t be making a purchase today. (Remember, even the really good sales pages only convert at around 1%,) You’ll probably never see Bob again. He won’t ever be coming back to YOUR site. But now let’s say the merchant is a smart internet marketer. He’s going to try to collect Bob’s email address, whether he makes a purchase today or not. The merchant site has an opt-in box (a box where people can type in their email address) that appears as soon as Bob arrives on the site, or a box that pops up to route people to a squeeze page (a page specifically designed to collect email addresses). The merchant offers a “free gift” to Bob in exchange for his email address. The merchant can give out this free gift all day long, and it costs him virtually nothing; it’s simply a PDF document, or a short video that contains some tips. Bob simply has to type in his email address, and then he receives a link in his email inbox—that lets him download the PDF, or watch the video. The merchant might have a hundred (or three hundred!) visitors a day typing in their email addresses and receiving their free gift. The merchant is “building a list.” He is amassing a large database of email addresses, of people who are interested in his topic. So now, the merchant has the ability to maintain contact with all of these people. He can email them every couple of days with helpful tips, along with recommendations to buy his product or other products he might be promoting as an affiliate.

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(A lot of merchants who are selling their own products make money with affiliate marketing, too. Once you’ve got a big list of subscribers, you want to sell as much stuff as possible to them!) As an affiliate marketer, you will make far more money in the long term if you start building a list of your own subscribers. So How Do You Get People To Join Your List? As far as how you set up an opt-in box, and actually add email addresses to your database (y’know, the technical stuff)… I’ll explain that to you in a moment. First I want you to understand the core strategies behind “list building.” You want to motivate people to subscribe to your mailing list voluntarily. You’re not tricking anyone. You’re not “stealing” anyone’s email address. You’re not spamming anyone. That’s not what this is about. You get people to subscribe to your list by offering them something of value for free. Think of it as a “bribe”: in exchange for joining your mailing list, you will give them free information, or free help with their problem. The free gift you use as your “bribe” can be a short ebook (a PDF document, it only needs to be 10-15 pages long); a video; or an audio recording in which you share some tips on your topic, or explain the “7 myths” or “10 mistakes” that might be holding them back from getting the results they desire. You can now email your subscribers on a regular basis to stay in touch with them. You’ll share more tips with them, perhaps share stories from your own experience, and also let them know about products you recommend.

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Your emails will contain your affiliate links, so that if one of your subscribers wants to check out a product you recommend, they can click the link, go to the merchant’s website, and buy it. You, of course, will earn a commission each time you are responsible for sending the merchant a customer. Emails you send to your list to promote a product are known as “email swipes.” It might look like this:

Hey, I hope you’re doing well. I just wanted to tell you about an amazing new video that I just watched from a weight loss expert I really admire, Dr James Anderson. In this video, he reveals a very surprising (but powerful) tip for a flatter belly in just 7 to 10 days. I watched it, learned some incredible information, and I figured you might find it very helpful, too. Click here to watch this quick video: http://jennifer7.flatbellytips.hop.clickbank.net Talk to you soon, Jennifer P.S. Be sure to watch this video today, it might not be online for long: http://jennifer7.flatbellytips.hop.clickbank.net

In that example, an affiliate marketer named Jennifer is encouraging her subscribers to check out the sales video for a weight loss product. Jennifer includes her affiliate link in the email twice. It’s an affiliate link for a Clickbank product she is recommending (“jennifer7” is her Clickbank ID, as you can see in the links).

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Many merchants (especially on Clickbank) have affiliate centers where you can go to get pre-written email swipes, along with banners, articles and other resources. Let us show you the affiliate center for our “Ex Back Experts” product, which we told you about earlier in this course. (This is a digital information product that customers download immediately, which shows them how to win back the love of their ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend): http://affiliates.exbackexperts.com/ As you can see, on the right side we have lots of resources that our affiliates can use to promote our product. They simply need to type their Clickbank ID into a box, and their affiliate links will be instantly generated for them. We suggest that when you’re exploring the Clickbank marketplace and looking for products to promote, you choose products that have affiliate centers. Usually, the URL for the affiliate center will be shown in the description for the product. A good affiliate center—one that provides you with banners, email swipes, articles, and other resources—is a strong sign that the merchant who created the product is an experienced internet marketer. And this means their sales page has probably been thoroughly tested and tweaked so that it converts well. When you promote products like Ex Back Experts that have affiliate centers, you won’t need to write the email swipes yourself when you want to promote the product. The merchant provides you with the swipes. You just plug in your name at the end of the swipe, and make sure your links are correct. Then you send the email out to your subscribers, and hopefully the sales will start rolling in. Bear in mind, you’re relying on the merchant’s sales page to convert the traffic you send them into sales.

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If the merchant has a nice-looking sales video which explains the benefits of the product in a compelling way, then a short swipe will suffice. You simply want to get your subscribers to click on one your links and go watch the video. The video has been designed to “close” the sale. In other cases, you may be promoting a product that has a simple sales page that provides limited information. Here, you might want to take the time to write a longer swipe that explains the benefits of the product, and gets your subscribers excited about it. This is known as “pre-selling.” You’re explaining to your subscribers why this is an offer they should check out. Or, you’re relating to them about how hard, painful, or frustrating it is when you DON’T know the solution to the problem they are facing. But if you’re promoting a Clickbank product that is one of the top sellers in its niche (such as Ex Back Experts), you can probably rest assured that it has an affiliate center with email swipes, and a well-designed sales page that does all of the “selling” for you. The idea of pre-selling, however, can always be used in the articles you publish on your website. You can give your readers an informative article, and then, towards the bottom of the article, you talk about how you used to have THIS SAME PROBLEM until you discovered a solution that worked for you. Then you mention the name of the product you are recommending…talk about its benefits…and provide your affiliate link, so that you can send your readers over to that product’s sales page. The idea is, you’re “warming up” your readers and getting them excited about the product, before you send them over to the product’s sales page. (If you want to study the product you are promoting so that you can really explain and vouch for its details and benefits, just email the merchant who created the product. Usually, they’re happy to provide affiliates with free copies.)

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Signing Up For A Mailing Service You’ll need to sign up for a mailing service in order to start collecting email addresses and building your database of subscribers. The mailing service that we recommend is called Aweber. Go here to sign up: www.internetsecrets.com/aweber This is the preferred mailing service for internet marketers. You’ll pay a fixed amount of money every month for their service, and the amount you pay depends on the size of your list. A good mailing service like Aweber provides several crucial benefits: • Every time someone enters their email address into your opt-in box, their address is automatically stored in your Aweber account. • Any time you want, you can send out an email to your entire mailing list (we call this sending out a “blast.”) You can send out a blast immediately, or schedule it to be sent out on the day (and at the exact time of day) you specify. • Aweber also allows you to set up an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a sequence of pre-written emails that get sent out on a schedule that you set up. When someone subscribes to your mailing list, you can arrange your autoresponder so that from now on, they will receive an email every other day, or once a week, or every 10 days—the frequency is up to you. (We don’t suggest emailing your subscribers more than once every couple of days, since you don’t want to annoy them.) You write the emails in advance, load them into your autoresponder, and every new subscriber will receive this sequence of emails.

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• Reputable mailing services like Aweber guarantee good “deliverability.” This means that the emails you send out will likely land in your subscriber’s inboxes. Email providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) have “spam filters” which are designed to block incoming emails that might contain junk you never asked for. When you have a list of subscribers, your email blasts can trigger the spam filters—even if you’re sending out legitimate information to people who joined your list. Top mailing services like Aweber are always keeping an eye on the spam filters to make sure that your emails get delivered and don’t get flagged as “spam.” There are free mailing services out there, but we don’t recommend you use them. One of the reasons is that their deliverability is poor. (What good is a mailing list if the emails you send your subscribers get blocked, or end up buried in their spam folders?) • Finally, Aweber provides you with detailed statistics. You can see how many of your subscribers are opening your emails (this is known as your open rate). And, you can see how many people clicked on one of your links to go check out the product you recommended. (This is known as your clickthrough rate.) Open rates are a very important statistic. If your subscribers aren’t opening your emails, then obviously they can’t click on your links and go buy a product. So you always want to strive for the highest open rates possible. Once you begin with your email marketing efforts, keep an eye on your open rates—and continually try to improve them.

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Writing Your Own Swipes As I said earlier, with some products like Ex Back Experts, you can simply go to the merchant’s affiliate center and get your pre-written swipes. There is very little work involved on your end—you simply copy and paste the swipes into your autoresponder, or blast them out to your subscribers. (Just make sure your correct affiliate links are in there!) But in order to set up a solid autoresponder sequence that stretches out over several weeks—or even better, several months—you’re going to need to write some of your own swipes, too. The goal is to write a sequence of swipes that your subscribers will want to read. You don’t want them to only read the first message in your sequence and then unsubscribe. You want them to read message #2, message #10, message #20, and so on. The more “contact” you have with your subscribers, the more opportunities you have to sell them products. TIP: You might want to structure your autoresponder sequence as a 10-day or 30-day “e-course.” You state on your opt-in form that they can get this course for free by signing up, and you mention some of the specific topics your course covers. Then, you write your swipes so that each of them contains a lesson. Example: “Welcome back to our 10-day e-course on burning belly fat. In the previous lesson, I told you about 10 foods that you must avoid in order to get the flat midsection you’ve always wanted. In today’s lesson, we’re going to cover three exercises that have been proven to burn belly fat.” Then, you can end the email by saying something like: “Be sure to look out for the next email you receive from me, because we’re going to cover another extremely important topic. I’m going to tell you about some ‘super foods’ that will not only boost your metabolism and help you to burn fat— they’ll also make you look and feel younger, stronger and more energetic.”

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“P.S. If you haven’t seen this video yet, be sure to give it a look. In it, a top fitness guru reveals a little-known (but extremely effective) method for toning your midsection:” (And then, you insert your affiliate link. This link leads to the sales page for the product you are promoting.) Two factors are going to determine how many of your subscribers open and read your emails. Most affiliate marketers do a poor job with these two factors, which is why I call these The Two Deadly Mistakes Of Email Marketing. Deadly Email Marketing Mistake #1: Writing bad subject lines. When you open your own email account and see that you have some new messages, you’ll glance at who the email came from, and the subject line of the email, right? Even if you don’t know the person who sent you the email, the subject line alone might compel you to open the email and take a look...or, to delete it. For example, if you received an email from VIAGRAXXX and the subject line said, “Hey buy this now!!!!”, you would probably hit the delete button, because it looks spammy. But if you received an email from “Michael Stern” and the subject line said, “I need to speak with you, important” you might open it and give it a look. And if you received an email from Michael Stern with the subject line, “IRS Audit – Contact Us Immediately,” I’m pretty sure you’d open it! So you see, the subject line can mean the difference between your messages getting ignored (or instantly deleted), and having your emails being read. Your subscribers need to at least OPEN your emails, in order for them to read your messages and consider buying a product that you recommend.

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Now, we’re not suggesting that you use misleading subject lines to scare or trick your subscribers into opening your emails. But you can certainly get creative with your subject lines, and push some “psychological triggers.” Remember the two “motivators” that drive human behavior, that we talked about in an earlier module in this course: the desire to avoid pain, and the desire to gain pleasure. This applies to the email blasts you send out, as well as the emails loaded into your autoresponder. Sometimes we use subject lines that sound like we have a “secret” to share, which triggers the desire to GAIN something. Examples: • • • • •

You’re not going to believe this… I probably shouldn’t be telling you this I need to tell you this real quick… I still can’t believe this worked Can you keep a secret?

When the subscriber opens your email, you want the content of the email message to be consistent with the subject line. If they feel like you “tricked” them into opening the email, they may ignore your emails in the future. But it’s usually pretty easy to make an attention-grabbing subject line consistent with the message you deliver in the email. You just need to be a bit creative. For example, if the subject line is “can you keep a secret?”, in the body of the email you can talk about an amazing product which you are going to recommend to them, but you don’t want TOO many people learning this secret because it will create more competition...

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Or, your email can say that if you buy this product, it’s going to make your friends jealous (and possibly angry) because they’ll be absolutely BLOWN AWAY by how fast YOU get results... Or you can explain how you “shouldn’t be telling them this” because this information is SO powerful that you don’t want it falling into the wrong hands, or being used by people who aren’t ready for it. With the subject line “I can’t believe I’m telling you this” you can tell an embarrassing story from your own experience...how you used to suffer from the same problem that your subscribers are having… But THEN you discovered a product that solves this problem (and you give them your affiliate link to click on…) Use a compelling subject line, and then back it up with a well-crafted email that ties your message to the subject line. Another effective type of subject line promises to give your subscriber specific information or specific benefits. I’ll give you a few examples. Some of these subject lines will trigger the desire to avoid pain. Others will trigger the desire to gain pleasure, or a positive result. Examples: • • • •

The 7 deadly mistakes you’re making with your diet The 6 reasons why your diet is making you FATTER 3 weird secrets about training your puppy 10 amazing opening lines you can use to talk to women

If your open rate for an autoresponder message or email blast is extremely low (under 3%), you might try a different subject line. If your click-through rate is high (over 5%), meaning lots of your subscribers are reading your emails and clicking on your links—but you don’t make any sales— then it’s a sign that either A) the email message probably should have done a better job of “pre-selling” them on the product, or B) the product you are promoting doesn’t convert well.

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Good internet marketers pay attention to these numbers, and re-adjust their strategies accordingly. Deadly Email Marketing Mistake #2: This mistake (which I’ve seen LOTS of affiliate marketers make) is not building rapport with your subscribers. When you have “rapport” with your email list, it means your subscribers like you. They trust you. They get the sense that you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. You’ve been where they are right now. You understand their problem, or the goal they’re trying to achieve. You’re not some random “sales person” who keeps beating them over the head with products you want them to buy. You’re a person who really “gets” this topic that they’re interested in—and you’re interested in teaching and helping them. Sure, you’re going to recommend products for them to buy (so that you get paid your commissions)... But your recommendations won’t carry any weight unless your subscribers TRUST you and feel they can RELATE to you. So when you set up your mailing service and your autoresponder sequence, you should write your emails so that your subscribers view you as a real person. You don’t need to use your real name. You can use an alias (or a “pen name.”) There’s nothing wrong with doing this to protect your privacy. What IS important is that your subscribers feel that you’re an actual person who’s been in their shoes, and you’re on a mission to help them with their situation.

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Many internet marketers say “the money is in the list.” In reality, the money is in the list if you treat your list well. This means taking the time to set up an autoresponder sequence that helps and teaches people, rather than just constantly hammering them with sales pitches. The most successful marketers we know give away lots of helpful information for free. When you do this, your subscribers begin to look at you as an authority and they trust your recommendations. You’re much more likely to buy a product that a friend recommends to you, over a product that a stranger recommends, right? Come across in your emails as a friend who is on their side, understands what they need, and has solutions. When you follow this principle, you can make a lot of money even with a small mailing list. A small but responsive mailing list is much more valuable than a huge list filled with subscribers who rarely even bother to open the emails you send them, because they know you’re only trying to get them to buy stuff. TIP: Create a new email account and join the mailings lists for some of the top Clickbank products, particularly products in your niche. Read the emails that they send you. If they send you some type of free gift for signing up—it might be an e-course, or a short ebook in PDF format—review it and see how you might model your own free gift after it. See for yourself how the super-successful internet marketers are crafting their emails, and running their lists. Additional List-Building Tips & Tactics You don’t need to ask for the subscriber’s first name AND email address. Some marketers ask for both, because when you have their first names, you can turn on a setting in your autoresponder that allows you to insert their first names into the emails you send. The message can begin with “Hi, (first name)…” We’ve found that people are slightly less likely to sign up for a list when they are asked to enter their first name. They may have concerns about giving up this

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personal information, especially if they’re looking for a solution to an embarrassing personal problem. So just ask for their email address. It’s all you really need. On this same note, you’ll get a higher signup rate if you address your visitors’ privacy concerns. On your opt-in form, tell them that you respect their privacy, and that you will not spam them or share their information with anyone else. Also mention that they can unsubscribe any time they want to. (Your autoresponder messages will automatically contain a link at the very bottom that allows people to unsubscribe if they wish to.) Design a “squeeze page.” When you use the Optimize Press theme for Wordpress, you’ll be able to quickly and easily set up nice-looking squeeze pages which can be very effective for collecting email addresses. You can direct some of your traffic to your squeeze page, to get more signups. For example, when you submit articles to article directories, or videos to YouTube, you can point your links to your squeeze page to get people to join your list. And finally, provide as much value as possible. The more helpful free stuff you give to your list, the more they will appreciate you—and the more likely they will be to buy products you recommend. For example, you can record a short video and put it on your website. The video simply shows you in your backyard, or sitting in your living room, giving a helpful “tip of the day” that pertains to your niche. In one of your autoresponder emails, you can say, “Hey, I just put together a short video for you about ____, I think you’ll really enjoy it.” And then you provide a link so that your subscribers can go watch it. Instead of a video, it could be an article you publish on your website. You can also ask them to “like” your video or article with their Facebook account if they enjoy the material; this way, your video or article will be seen by their Facebook friends, which gets you more exposure and traffic.

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Try to mix it up a bit and keep things interesting. Occasionally giving your subscribers videos to watch, or small free gifts (such as short special reports that they can download), will make them look forward to receiving your emails and seeing what you’ve got in store for them. Remember, with an autoresponder, you only need to set it up once. It might take a while for you to write the emails in your autoresponder sequence and come up with free gifts and bonuses to give away to your subscribers, but this is time well spent! And over time, it’s a good idea to keep refining your sequence and adding more good stuff as you come up with it. There’s no limit on the number of messages you can add to your autoresponder. We have mailings lists which send our subscribers a message every two or three days, for over a hundred days. It’s not uncommon for a subscriber to buy a product from us two or three months after signing up for our list! A strong autoresponder sequence, and a mailing list that grows every day, is one of the keys to making money on autopilot.

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Module 13: Internet Secrets Conclusion We’ve reached the end of this journey. You now have an exact roadmap for you to follow to create your own website and start generating income with it. You understand the steps, and the strategies, that are necessary. Your personal journey towards internet marketing success begins now. A few important notes before we wrap this up… If you can spare a modest weekly budget to devote to your website, you can achieve results faster (and save yourself a lot of the “grunt work”). For example, on Fiverr.com, you can pay just five dollars for all kinds of different services. For example, you can: • Pay writers to write articles for your site • Hire someone to create videos (send them a script, have them record it, and then upload the videos to YouTube)

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• Pay people to quickly create lots of back links for you (just keep in mind, these types of back links shouldn’t point directly at your website—they should give “juice” to the first-tier links that point to your website) • Create graphics for your website, such as a logo that you place up top in the “header” area of your site www.TheContentAuthority.com is another service we recommend, for having batches of articles written. www.TextBroker.com is another option for fresh, unique written content. (With these services, you don’t speak with the writer directly; you pay for an article of a certain length, give them the topic, and they assign one of their writers to handle it.) If you want to find a writer you can work with personally, look on www.Odesk.com. Here, you can hire writers who are willing to write large batches of articles for cheap, according to your exact specifications. Having a skilled writer on your team, who works quickly and inexpensively, is a valuable asset. You could have your writer send you a batch of 25 articles, and you can publish 2-3 articles per week for the next couple of months. If you don’t have the budget right now to pay for services, you can handle the work yourself. This is what we did when we started out. But as you start generating income, we highly recommend you allocate some money to paying for services—especially article writing—so that you can grow your business faster. Now let’s recap some of the key points you learned in this course, and give you some final tips: • Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest and most profitable ways to make money online. You don’t need to create a product or offer a service. You simply tell people about products and services they might want, and earn commissions for the clicks, leads or customers you are responsible for.

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• Don’t assume that a website idea will be successful. Do the research first. Explore the niche. Find out how many people are searching for the type of information you want to provide. Take a look at your competition in the search results. Research your target demographics. And see if there are products or services you can promote in this niche, that will pay you healthy commissions. (The Clickbank marketplace is a great place to start looking.) • Then, build a website using Wordpress that provides value to your visitors. Look at it this way: when people find your site in the search results and visit you, are they going to appreciate your content? Are you giving them a reason to bookmark your site and return in the future? Are your articles or videos interesting enough that some people will want to share your content with their friends? The answer to these questions should be “yes.” • Aim to establish yourself as an authority on your topic by publishing helpful, well-researched content. Participating in forums on your topic is also a great way to get your name, or the name of your website, out there. Speaking of forums, we suggest you sign up for a free account at www.warriorforum.com. This is our favorite internet marketing forum. At any given hour of the day or night, there are thousands of internet marketers of all experience levels on this forum, exchanging tips and sharing their strategies for success. You can educate yourself about all areas of internet marketing by reading through the threads, and you can ask questions which other members can answer.

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It’s a “newbie-friendly” site, meaning that many Warrior Forum members are new to internet marketing—so there’s no need to be shy about asking your fellow warriors for help or advice. Also, the Warriors For Hire section of the site (located in the Warrior Special Offers Forum) is a great place to find workers for all types of assignments—from article writing, to running SEO campaigns for you. • Unless you pay someone to handle it for you, spend some time each day on SEO, acquiring back links and optimizing your content so that you achieve good rankings in the search engines. This can get you a constant stream of free traffic. • Set up an email opt-in form and start building a mailing list ASAP. This way, you can stay in contact with your visitors. A subscriber on your list might not buy a product through your site today—but they may buy that product a month from now, or even three months from now, when you remind them about it. • Take the time to set up an autoresponder sequence that does more than just tell your subscribers about products they can buy. You want your subscribers to look forward to opening the emails they receive from you, because they see you as a “friend” who understands their situation— the problem they’re trying solve, or the goal they’re trying to achieve. When you build rapport with your subscribers, they’re more likely to trust your recommendations. And finally…and most importantly… stick with it. It’s going to take time to build up your website with lots of quality content, and for the search engines to start rewarding you with high rankings. Building your mailing list takes time, too. But it can all pay off massively. This can be your roadmap to unlimited passive income—to generating money on autopilot like no other type of business in existence.

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Once all of the pieces are in place, and you’re consistently adding interesting new content…and your list of subscribers and your traffic are growing every day… This is when you can begin to experience the freedom that internet marketers around the world, of all ages and backgrounds, are now enjoying. Not only financial freedom, but the freedom to work for yourself, wherever and whenever you choose to. You’ll probably encounter doubters along the way, as we did—people who simply can’t wrap their heads around the concept of making passive income (possibly lifechanging amounts of passive income) with a website that you create yourself. This is because people fear what they can’t understand. The average person has been conditioned to believe that you must have a “job”— and put in X number of hours per week working for someone else—in order to earn a living. They can’t imagine themselves as entrepreneurs. And they certainly can’t fathom having a passive income stream that generates money 24/7 and pumps money into their bank account even while they’re on vacation…or sleeping! Never let the doubters distract you from your mission. Let them remain on the hamster wheel, working for a paycheck, but never really getting anywhere. You now understand that there is an alternative… A way to chart your own course and shape your destiny, by staking out your own small piece of the internet and helping people to solve their challenges or achieve their dreams. Everything you’ve learned in this course is real. The methods are proven. Now you just need to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

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Remember, this knowledge means nothing unless you TAKE ACTION. So get to it! We wish you all the best.

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Glossary Of Internet Marketing Terms

Above the Fold: The portion of a web page that you see onscreen when you arrive on a website, without scrolling down. Ads that are “above the fold” get more clicks, since visitors see them immediately. This is why these types of ads are more expensive to purchase. But when you’re setting up your website, you don’t want to have too many ads above the fold, as Google doesn’t like this. They want your visitors to be greeted with good content, rather than being bombarded with ads. One of the reasons why Google penalizes websites and give them poor search engine rankings is because they have too many ads above the fold. Adsense: The Google advertising program where website owners (or “publishers”) can sign up to be paid for agreeing to display advertising sold by Google on their website. Publishers who sign up with Adsense can choose the places on their website where they want Adsense ads to be shown. Google gives the publisher a small piece of code, and the publisher will place that code at each location within their website where they wish to show ads. Google allows each site to display Adsense ads in up to three locations.

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AdWords: Also known as Google AdWords, this advertising network allows Internet marketers to bid for position within the sponsored (i.e. paid) search results. Google AdWords provides Internet marketers an alternative to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). With Google AdWords, Internet marketers can start promoting their sites in the search engine results immediately. Internet marketers will bid an amount they're willing to pay per ad impression (meaning, every time their ad appears in the results), or every time one of their ads is clicked. Google determines the ranking, or order, of sponsored search advertisements based on the bid amount and the CTR (Click Through Rate). Google gives better positions to the ads that get the most clicks. Affiliate Marketing: This means using your website to promote a product or service that is being offered on another website (known as the “merchant”). You are paid a commission each time you sell one of the merchant’s products, or each time you send a visitor who performs a specific action that the merchant wants them to take (i.e. signing up for their newsletter, filling out a survey, downloading a ringtone, etc). Algorithm: Google (and other search engines) use an algorithm to determine how to rank websites. Basically, it’s a sophisticated mathematical formula that figures out how relevant each website is to certain keywords. If a Google user does a search for the words “how to lose weight,” the search results will show the websites that the Google algorithm has determined to be the most relevant and useful. Google is constantly changing and attempting to refine its algorithm (how the algorithm actually works is a closely-guarded secret), which is why the search engine results often fluctuate. Analytics: Sometimes referred to as “web analytics,” these are tools that webmasters can use to look at their website statistics: including the number of visits, where those visitors come from, what content they’re looking at, how much time they spend on the site, and so on. Google offers a free set of tools called Google Analytics which will provide you with all of this information about your website, and much more. Anchor Text: Anchor text is the clickable part of a hyperlink. For example, if there is a link that says Internet Secrets which leads to http://www.internetsecrets.com, the words “Internet Secrets” would be the anchor text.

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Autoresponder: You can sign up for a mailing service such as Aweber.com, 1shoppingcart.com, or InfusionSoft.com in order to collect email addresses from your website visitors or customers and put them on your “mailing list.” You can then write messages and load them into your autoresponder, which means that your messages will be automatically sent to the people on your list whenever you want them to be sent. For example, you could write five messages for your autoresponder and set it to send out one message every other day for the next ten days. Autoresponders enable you to stay in contact with your subscribers or customers, to give them additional information or to promote offers to them. They’re an essential part of any successful internet marketing business. Backlinks: The links to a website that originate from other websites. Backlinks are very important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), because Google sees each link as a “vote.” But all back links are not equal. A backlink from a trusted, established website in your niche is far more powerful (in the eyes of Google) than a backlink from a brand-new website on a topic that is different from yours. Below the Fold: The portion of a web page that is viewable in the Internet browser window only after scrolling down. Ads below the fold perform worse than those above the fold, which is why they’re cheaper to purchase. BlackHat SEO: This refers to unethical tactics used to improve a website's postion in the search engine rankings. If you want to know what types of links Google likes and dislikes (or considers to be unethical), read the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Basically, whenever you build links on websites for the purpose of boosting your site up in the rankings. Also, there are different types of automated software you can use for BlackHat SEO, which build thousands of backlinks to your site quickly. As Google and its algorithm have become more sophisticated, BlackHat SEO tactics are less likely to work these days—and whereas before, Google would ignore these suspicious links pointing to your site, now they’ll penalize you for them. This makes BlackHat SEO a risky way to try to promote your website. Blog: Short for “Web Log,” Blogs are a popular way for Internet users to post information organized around an area of interest. Blog sites such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com provide a free platform and tools that

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allow you to publish your own blog without having any technical expertise. Most blogs also allow readers to post comments and share their favorite blog posts on Facebook and other places. Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a website who view only one page before leaving the site and returning to the search results. This is a key metric for website owners to look at when they’re studying their traffic, since a high bounce rate is a sign to Google that their site is not providing useful, relevant information on the topics that users are searching for. Google also watches your site’s bounce rate, and will penalize you for a high bounce rate and reward you for a low bounce rate (this reward comes in the form of higher search engine rankings). Browser: The software on your computer that you use to navigate to and view websites. Examples of browsers include Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The following video is a good overview of what a browser is and what it is not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BrXPcaRlBq o Click-Through: The act of clicking on an online ad and visiting the page that it routes to. The goal of every online ad (or banner ad) is to get the highest click-through rate possible. Advertisers who purchase ad space on a CPC (Cost per Click) or PPC (Pay per Click) basis are charged a fee each time their ad is clicked. Commission: When an affiliate sends traffic to a merchant site, and it results in a sale, the merchant pays the affiliate a commission. Commissions can be a one-time payment (for example, 50% of the price of the product), or it can be a recurring payment. Some products charge the customer on a monthly basis—for example, an internet dating site that charges $30 per month to be a member. Affiliates like to promote products that have recurring billing. With a $30 per month internet dating site that pays 50% commissions, the affiliate can get paid $15 per month for every customer they get to sign up. Continuity Program: This is basically a “membership program” that invites people to sign up and pay a recurring fee (usually a certain amount of money per month). Dating websites (which allow you to correspond with other people looking for a mate) are usually continuity programs, requiring their subscribers to pay a fee each month. Some of the products you can

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promote as an affiliate have continuity programs attached to them. For example, the product we sell at ExBackExperts.com has an optional continuity program. In addition to purchasing the main product (an ebook), customers can elect to pay $39.97 per month for access to a membership center which contains additional books, videos and information. Affiliate marketers like promoting continuity programs (and products which include continuity programs) because they can earn commissions on an ongoing basis. Cookie: A cookie is a file sent by a website that is “invisibly” saved on a user’s web browser to record their activities. If you’ve ever returned to a website to log in, and the website already has your username and password filled out, it’s because their cookie is stored on your browser and it allows them to fetch your details. Cookies are very important for affiliate marketing. Let’s say you have a banner on your website to promote a fitness product. A visitor comes to your site, click on that banner, and goes to the fitness website, but they leave without making a purchase. However, if that same visitor returns to the fitness website a week later and then makes a purchase, you (the affiliate) will still receive credit for the sale, because a cookie was stored on their browser. The fitness site knows that you were originally responsible for sending that customer to them, and so they pay you. Content: Content refers to all of the information on your website: the text, pictures, videos and everything else. In order to achieve and maintain good rankings in the search engines, it’s important for website owners to put new content on their sites on a regular basis. Google likes to see sites that are active and have visitors interacting with them (i.e posting comments, sharing them on Facebook, etc.) Google does not like to see sites that haven’t been updated in months. Conversions: This is the percentage of your visitors who take an action you want them to take. If you’re selling your own product, you would achieve a conversion each time a visitor buys your product. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you might define conversions differently: for example, each time someone comes to your site, clicks on one of your banner ads, and purchases a product from a merchant you are promoting. A conversion could also mean signing up for your mailing list. It all depends on the particular goal of your website or web page. Smart internet marketers are always testing and looking for new ways to improve their conversions.

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CPA: Stands for Cost per Action. In this Internet advertising model, the advertiser pays the affiliate each time the affiliate sends them a visitor who performs a certain action. This action could be signing up for the advertiser’s newsletter; filling out a survey; or downloading a free piece of software. CPC: This is a mode of advertising that means Cost per Click. The advertiser pays a certain amount of money each time their ad is clicked on the affiliate’s website. Therefore, in order for the advertiser be profitable, they have to make sure that their offer converts. If they’re paying lots of money for clicks but not making sales, they’re losing money. CPM: Cost per thousand impressions. In this advertising model, the advertiser pays a flat fee for every 1,000 times that their ad is displayed. Double Opt-in: If you have a mailing list or newsletter on your website for people to subscribe to, this is the “safer” way to build your mailing list. Double Opt-In means that when a visitor enters their email address (or first name and email address) into your signup form, they are automatically sent an email which asks them to confirm their subscription. They will need to click a confirmation link in the email in order to join your mailing list. This means they’ll need to perform an extra step, and many people will ignore the confirmation email and not get on your list—however, you’ll know that the people who do confirm really do want to receive emails from you. This means you’ll get less spam complaints, and your mailing list won’t contain a ton of phony email addresses. (If you choose to set up your autoresponder with single opt-in, it means they get put on your list as soon as they give you their email address. No confirmation email is sent.) Domain Names: The name of a website address that you see in your browser, following the http:// or “https://”. Every domain name must be unique. When you type a domain name into your browser, the Internet will convert it into an IP address and connect it to the site so that you can access its content. eCommerce: This refers to all business conducted over the Internet, usually involving the online promotion and sale of good and services. Products can be either physical goods or digital products that can be purchased and downloaded immediately.

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Googlebot: This is a software program created by Google, often referred to as a "spider," that is designed to continually discover new websites and web pages. When you set up a new website, or add a new page to an existing site, it won’t take long for the Googlebot to “crawl” it and figure out where to place it in the search engine results. Google Analytics: A valuable free tool offered by Google that enables web site owners to track their statistics—including how many visitors are coming to their site, how long they’re staying, which pages they’re looking at, etc. Keyword: A word entered into a search engine for the purpose of finding related web content. Keyword Optimization: This is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactic for improving a web page’s ranking in the search engines for a particular keyword. For example, if you have a page on your website that is about “how to train your poodle,” and your goal is to achieve a high ranking for that keyword, you could optimize the page by putting the phrase “how to train your poodle” in the headline of your article and also placing it several times within the body of your article. When you “optimize” your site for a keyword, it means you’re targeting it and specifically trying to rank for it. Long Tail Keyword Phrases: This refers to keyword phrases that are comprised of at least four words. “Long tail” keywords are often easier to rank for because there isn’t as much competition. For example, you will find it extremely difficult to get on the first page of the Google search results for a phrase like “lose weight.” (There are thousands of well-established websites competing for that same keyword.) You’ll find it easier to have success if you target a keyword phrase such as “how to lose weight if you are over 40,” or “losing weight after you have a baby.” Off Page SEO: This refers to optimization strategies that take place away from your website, such as building links on other sites that point back to your own. On Page SEO: This refers to optimization strategies that take place on your site, such as using keywords in your article titles, and in the body of your articles, to try to rank better for certain words or phrases.

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Opt-in: The act of a subscriber signing up for your mailing list or newsletter. This means they are requesting to be sent information via emails and providing you official, legal permission to do so. Opt-out: The action a subscriber takes when they request to be removed from an email list. The Federal CAN-SPAM Act states that it is illegal to continue sending emails to a subscriber who has elected to opt-out of your mailing list. This is why when you receive emails from an internet marketer’s autoresponder, you’ll usually see an “unsubscribe” option at the bottom of each email. Page Rank: Google assigns every website and web page on the internet a Page Rank (PR) score of 0-10, with 10 representing the most trusted and important sites and pages. Brand-new websites start off with a Page Rank of 0 and can rise by acquiring links from other sites. When doing SEO, one of the goals is to obtain links from sites that have high Page Rank. When this happens, the high-PR site will pass along “juice” to the site it is linking to, and it may help to raise the site’s rankings in the Google search engine. To put it another way, we say in the Internet Secrets course that the internet is like a popularity contest: the more sites that link to your site, the more “votes” you are getting. A “vote” from a high-PR site (5 and above) is worth hundreds or even thousands of votes from sites with low PR scores. Therefore, links on high-PR sites are very desirable. PPC: Stands for Pay Per Click. This is a form of advertising that website owners can pay for, to give their site more exposure. When an advertiser launches a PPC campaign, their ad will be shown on the websites that participate in that ad network. The advertiser will be charged a set amount of money each time someone clicks on one of their ads. This is the standard pricing model when you advertise in the Google search results. SEO: Stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the practice of using tools and techniques to raise the position of a website in the search results for a particular keyword or key phrase SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. When a user searches for a keyword or key phrase in a search engine, the SERP listings appear, showing the names of web pages, descriptions of them, and the links to them. of links to web pages returned by a search engine query. The goal of SEO is to improve a website’s standings in the SERPs.

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Traffic: Visitors to a website that can be measured and tracked are often referred to as traffic. Traffic can come from the search engine results (otherwise known as organic or natural search results); from ads; from links on other websites; and from many other sources. Traffic is the lifeblood of any internet marketing business. Upsell: This is an additional product that a customer is given the option to purchase, after they agree to purchase the main product. Let’s say a website sells a product on “how to win back the love of your ex-boyfriend.” The customer clicks the “Buy Now” button to order it. Then, before the customer is taken to the checkout page, they are shown a page that makes them another offer: for an additional $67, they can also get a program that will teach them how to build a happy long-term relationship. Affiliate marketers like to promote products that have strong upsells, because it increases the amount of commissions they can make. URL: Stands for Universal Resource Locator. This is the unique address of any resource on the Internet including web pages, videos, audio clips and images. Whenever you visit a web page on the internet, its URL is displayed in your browser. Visit: The act of one Internet user going to a single Internet website. A “Unique Visit” is when someone visits a website for the first time. Web Hosting: These are services that make your website available to your users. You need to have “hosting” in order for your website to be displayed online. A good web host will ensure that your site is online at all times. They’ll also provide you with the ability to set up multiple email addresses ([email protected]) and offer 24/7 customer support. Wordpress: Wordpress is the CMS (Content Management System) that we recommend you use to set up and run your website. The beauty of Wordpress is that you don’t need to have any technical expertise to use it. With a few clicks, you can set up a website and then begin adding content. There are also a huge number of free Wordpress “plug-ins” which you can add to your website to perform various functions (such as adding a button so that people can “Like” you on Facebook).

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