Amarnath Online

How To Take Advantage Of Your Own Stolen Content

It happens to the best of us.

Like it or not, there are few steps we can take to protect our content from scrapers.

I’ve spent a good amount of time fighting for my content when I find it on other sites. Many of these sites use RSS feeds to steal content. Yeah, there are a few things you can do, but is it really worth all the time and trouble it will cost you?

Here’s what you need to know.

If you post to your blog often, Mr. Googlebot will visit often. Googlebot visits my site at least once every other day. There are times it comes around every day. It loves fresh content!

Having said that, I do have a few blogs that I let slide without making post to them over a several week span. Googlebot slowed visits to these blogs, to a point where it was only visiting every other week or so.

What does this have to do with Scraped content?

You’ve probably heard about Google and the duplicate content penalty…right? Many people will tell you not to worry about stolen content because you published your article first.

Well, that may or MAY NOT be true. If you publish a blog post and it is indexed in Google first, then you generally have nothing to worry about.

However, if you do publish it first and Googlebot doesn’t visit you often and in the meantime your content is scraped and Googlebot visits the scraper site before it visits your site, guess who has the duplicate content then?

How I’m Dealing With Scraped Content

Honestly, I’m not worrying about it much.

What I am doing though is letting the scrapers help me.

What I’ve done with sites that are being scraped but not being visited often by Googlebot is that I’m putting a lot of links in the blog post.

Normally when your content is scraped, it’s being done automatically. The program sucks up all you content on the page including links and sometimes even photo’s. Now when your content is spit out on the scraper sites, there are links in the content pointing back to your site (if you put them in). There are a few scraper programs that strip out links, but from what I’m seeing, most don’t.

And…if you put your affiliate program links in your content, you now have some affiliate links on those sites as well.

But Aren’t All Scraper Sites Low Quality Sites That Don’t Make It Into Google’s Index?

Ahhh…I see you’ve been listening to Google lately. This is what Google would love for you to believe. But it’s not true.

If you Google often, how long has it been since you’ve come across a scraper site that was listed high in the rankings? I found several this morning while searching for some Sports news!

Okay, okay. So all these sites aren’t going to be PR 6 and PR 7’s listed at the top of the SERPS. That’s okay. However you will get a little link love from many of these scraper sites, especially if they’ve been around a while.

I’ve proven this technique with two sites that I knew were getting scraped.

Sure, I’d love it if we didn’t have to deal with these kinds of issues, but we do. So we might as well try and make the best of it when it happens. I don’t know about you, but I’m too busy to spend hours on end hunting down my scraped content and threatning the site owner.

As the old saying goes, shut down 1 scraper site and 10 more takes it place!

How To Write A Sales Letter

The question, “How To Write A Sales Letter”, was one that I received when I asked my readers, “What do you want to know about affiliate marketing“.

I’m not a sales letter writing Guru, but I have wrote my fair share for my online as well as my offline businesses. Here’s the way I go about writing a sales letter.

First off, I gather up other sales letters that speak to me. Yeah, it sounds corny, but I figure if a sales letter can make me buy something, when I know it’s a sales letter, then it’s pretty good. Whenever I come across such a sales letter, I either save it in my bookmarks or print it out and keep it in a file. If it can make a sale to me, then it can make sales to most other people.

Whether you like them or not, those sales letters that are rampant in the Internet Marketing industry sell products over and over. I hear people say they hate those “spammy” looking sales pages, yet it’s some of these same people who buy products from them, myself included. Face the fact, those sales letter type pages sell products or no one would use them.

Another important point to keep in mind when writing a sales letter is to put yourself in your potential customers shoes and ask “What’s In It For Me?” Forget about yourself for a moment. Your sales letter should be all about the benefits the customer will get when buying your product.

The Title of Your Sales Letter Will Make You or Break You

Once you start pouring over those sales letters, read through them all and see which Title really speaks to you. Which one really gets your attention? Which one makes you want to continue reading the rest of the copy? This is probably the one you’ll want to pay attention to.

I also keep the crappy sales letters. I try and determine where the ad copy lost me. Was it the title? or the ad copy itself? When you can answer these questions, you’ll have a good understanding of how a sales letter works.

A good title, or header, should grab your customers attention and make them want to read the sales letter. Writing an attention grabbing title takes some work. As with many things, the more you practice it, the better you’ll become.

The 4 Basic Building Blocks of A Sales Letter

When writing a sales letter, there are 4 basic things you must keep in mind and address if you hope to convert readers into buyers.

1. What problem does your product solve?
2. What does your product do?
3. What makes it better than anyone else’s product?
4. Finally, how much will this cost?

Now that you have a good foundation to start with, it’s time to put some meat into your sales letter.

There are an additional 4 things you must convey in order to make your sales letter do its job.

These are:

• Create hope: Its been said that people buy hope. A person with a tooth ache will stop at nothing to get it taken care of. The same is true for someone who needs quick cash for whatever reason. Whatever problem your product or service cures, make sure you show your customer that there is hope when purchasing from you
• Relate to your customer: Talk to your customer as if they were a long lost friend. Become personal with the customer so they feel that you can relate to their problem. People feel secure with someone they can relate with and they buy when they feel secure. Two of the best ways to do this is to tell a personal story and add a photo of yourself to the ad copy.
• It’s all about the FUD: Create FUD in your ad copy. FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, is a time tested technique to get people to buy. It’s been used by both large corporations and small companies alike. It’s in nearly every ad you see in one form or another. It takes practice and experience when using FUD in an ad copy. It must be subtle or you risk turning off the more experienced buyers. This is where those good sales letters you kept will pay off. Pour over them and see how the Copywriter used FUD to sell.
• Ask for the sale: No, wait, DEMAND the sale! When you’re looking over those ad copies you’ve saved, you probably notice that there are several call to actions in the body of the sales letter. Don’t assume that your customer will just get up and order from you. Tell them to do it now! Create a sense or urgency. One good way to do this is by giving them a deadline or give them a bonus if they act now. People hate to lose out on an opportunity! Make sure you tell them why they must act and explain what they’ll be losing if they don’t act NOW!

Learning how to write a sales letter takes a little time. You should also test, test and test more until you get that sales letter that pulls in the customers!

Aggressive Sales Letters Are The Best

The argument against aggressive sales letters has been going on since the first ad copy was written. It’s a proven point, aggressive sales letters sell better than passive sales letters. I don’t like to write aggressive sales letters, but they work.

A long aggressive sales letter will put more money in your pocket than a sales letter that sounds like you’re talking to your Mom. People are lazy by nature and you have to make them act. That’s what writing a good sales letter is all about, making the people you’re reaching out to order from you!

Start looking over those ebook sales letters and begin writing some of your own. Keep at it until you think you have it down. Put the ad copy away for a few days and come back and reread it. Keep making changes until it’s as good as you can get. Send it out and then write another one, send it out and see how it fares against the first. Keep doing this until you see one sales letter converting better than the others. This will be your money maker and you’ll be glad you learned how to write a sales letter!

Is Commenting On Other Blogs A Waste Of A Bloggers Time?

The other day I was reading John Wesley’s “Pick The Brain” blog post on 27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day and 2200 RSS Subscribers. #20 took me by surprise. So much so that I’ve been thinking about it and doing my own research. And I’ve came to the conclusion he may be right.

#20 on this list is “Posting comments on other blogs is overrated“. We’ve always been led to believe that commenting on other blogs will bring us lots of traffic, make us cool and good looking all in one.

After reading John’s post, I started looking through my blog’s stats, courtesy of Google Analytics, to see just how much traffic I get from comments on other blogs.

My findings were somewhat surprising.

I comment quite often on some rather large blogs such as JohnChow.com and Shoemoney, as well as a host of smaller sites. I’m not sure how much traffic these two get in a course of a month, but I’d say it’s in the thousands per day.

In one months time, I’d received less than 30 visits from these two sites combined! Many of the other blogs accounted for a few visitors each. Total for the month from all blog comments, less than 50 visitors.

Wow, I think John is on to something!

The Real Value of Commenting On Other Blogs

Comments on blogs were never meant to be used to share PR link love or drive hordes of traffic to your site. However many “guru’s” will tell you that you must do this in order to build traffic.

The real value in commenting on other blogs is that you’re building a relationship not only with the blog owner, but with the readers of that blog as well. Whether or not they visit your site is not as important as them getting to know you.

I enjoy commenting on other peeps blogs. I enjoy the different views many other bloggers have and it’s interesting to see the response some bloggers get to their latest post.

So if you’re only commenting on other blogs in hopes that massive traffic is coming your way, you may be in for a let down. Post comments if you have something to add to the discussion, otherwise your time driving traffic to your site can be better spent elsewhere.

Is Adsense Still A Good Choice To Monetize Blogs?

For many new bloggers, they invision having a custom made blog theme all decked out with the latest colors and graphics with the coolest plugins and a RSS subscriber base numbering in the 5 digits. Many also imagine raking in thousands of dollars per month by monetizing a blog with Adsense.

These illusions are quickly shattered when they see their Adsense accounts with .05 and .20 cents per click and a CTR of 1%. It doesn’t take the newbie blogger long to realize that their dream of living of off Adsense income isn’t a reality.

Is Adsense Still a Good Choice For Monetizing Blogs?

The quick and easy answer is Yes and No. In order for Adsense to be a viable option to monetize a blog, you need large amounts of traffic. And not any old traffic will work!

Many bloggers love to talk about Social Media and they spend a good amount of time writing articles and submitting them to the popular Social Networks like Digg and StumbleUpon in order to bring the masses of Social Networkers to their site. While this may increase traffic to a blog, it rarely translates into clicks on their Adsense ads.

Why Social Traffic Isn’t Good For Adsense

If you’re one of these bloggers who’s chasing traffic from Social sites and still wondering why your Adsense account is empty, listen up, I’m fixing to let you in on a little secret.

Social traffic doesn’t convert for squat. Of course, you already knew that didn’t you!

Why?

Because people who use the Social networks are pretty ‘Net savvy and they don’t click ads. They read blogs more for entertainment purposes than they do for the informational value. Sure, they may read a post about whether or not Adsense is still a good choice for monetizing blogs, but if there’s an Ad block on how to monetize a blog with Adsense next to the post, they aren’t likely to click on it.

Another reason Adsense is a poor choice for Social blogs is because the Click Through Rate (CTR) will be in the dumps. This will cause your Adsense ads to be Smart Priced.

This is how it works. Google Adsense works of off the principle that a targeted Internet searcher is more valuable to the advertisers than a browser just clicking around the Internet.

So when your Social Network browser comes to your site, Google does not consider this a targeted user. If the advertiser is paying $2 per click, and a Social Network user comes to your Social blog about making money on the Internet and actually does click on a Adsense ad, you’ll receive a lower per click price than if that user had went to Google and typed in “how to make money online” and came to your blog and clicked an Adsense ad about ‘how to make money online’. Google considers this targeted traffic and will pay you the most for this type of Internet users.

Why Organic Traffic Pays Off With Adsense

Stop and think about this one for a minute. When an Internet user is searching for some knowledge, they want it and they want it yesterday! Many of us will not stop searching the Internet until we find the useful information we need. We’ll click on this or that, we’re frantic searchers and we need that information!

Let’s say you’re bills are piling up because gas is at $4 a gallon and food prices are skyrocketing. You need some debt relief. So you go on over to Google and type in ‘debt relief’. You then click on the first result that promises you quick and painless debt relief. After you browse the site for a few minutes, you realize this site can not answer your questions and you’ll have to go elsewhere. There’s an Adsense ad block to the upper left with an add about instant debt relief. Hmmm, that’s just what you need right now, instant debt relief.

What do you do?

Click the Adsense ad promising instant debt relief or hit the back button a half dozen times to get back to the Google SERPS page?

Yeah, me too. I’ll hit the Adsense link every time if it will lead me to what I’m looking for.

And you know what?

The Webmaster or blog owner gets the maximum payout for your click because you found his site by searching for the term ‘debt relief’.

If I had gone to his site looking for ‘Ways To Make Money Online”and then clicked the same ad, chances are good he would not have received the maximum payout for that click. That’s why you’ll see some of your Adsense ads paying out .20 cents for one click and the next it gives you $2. It’s all about how the Internet user got to your site.

So What Type Of Blogs Are Best For Adsense?

It’s not really what type of blog is best for Adsense, the question should be “What type of traffic is best for Adsense?”

And that question is an easy one to answer. It’s organic search traffic. Plain and simple.

Now having said that, you’ll see that many of the so called Social media blogs do not rank well for anything of value.

Ever see John Chow or some of the other popular social bloggers rank in the top 10 for terms like “how to make money with Adsense?”No, you don’t. That’s one of the biggest reasons you don’t see Adsense on their sites. They can’t bring in the organic search traffic they need to convert browsers into ad clickers and their social traffic sure as hell won’t click the ads. So they end up with a crappy CTR and get Smart Priced. The few clicks they do get, Adsense pays out a few cents here and there. Then the Social bloggers will proclaim to the masses about how Adsense doesn’t work any longer!

Adsense Can Be a Steady Income Producer For Blogs and Websites That Pull In Organic Traffic

This is the real secret to Adsense and how to make it pay the most for every click. If you have a blog or website that ranks well for a number of keywords and your pages are optimized to bring in targeted search traffic, you’ll do well with Adsense.

Your blog doesn’t have to be a custom made Wordpress blog nor does it have to be fancy. In fact, you can start with one of these Adsense optimized themes. It does have to be SEO optimized with lots of backlinks to rank well for your keywords.

Forget about the Social traffic and getting your post Dugg and Stumbled. Sure, it’s nice to see all that traffic, but why bother when you know it’s not going to convert plus it’s going to ruin your CTR. And to top it off, it will get you Smart Priced with Google Adsense.

Go after the money. And in this case, the money is in ranking well for your keywords and driving crowds of targeted organic search traffic to your blog or website.

Your blog or website should cover one subject, such as ‘debt relief’. Don’t try to make a blog or website cover everything under the sun. Each page of your website should have an article or post covering one keyword.

For example, if you had a blog over the main keyword of ‘debt relief’, then you’d probably want your interior pages targeting keywords such as ‘bankruptcy’, ‘debt consolidation’, ‘how to pay off your bills early’ or ‘debt consolidation loans’.

While you’re at it, make sure your blog or website is optimized for Adsense. Don’t cover every page in Adsense ads. The top paying ad block is normally a 350 block at the top. You might also want a Tower block in the sidebar, but that’s where I’d stop.

In the past, I put those little Adsense link blocks on my sites, but have always done poorly with them. I’d rather someone click on one of the Adsense ads in the body so I’ll make more money per click. That’s why I’ve started putting only two Adsense ads on my content sites. More ads normally dilute your per click payout.

To wrap this up, if you want to make money with Adsense, forget about those cool social blogs, go with a keyword targeted blog or website. SEO optimize it, build backlinks to make it rank well for your chosen keywords and then sit back and watch the Adsense money roll in. You can still monetize a blog with AdSense, you just have to go about it wisely.

Make Money Online Without A Website

There are many ways to make money online without a website. This is just one technique that I stumbled on. You see, I’m never content with the same old-same old. I “experiment” (and I use that word loosely) with different ways to make money. Some of them turn out disastrous while others prove to be nice surprises.

The inspiration for this method came one day when I asked myself “Self, I wonder what would happen if I created a product page from a big Merchant with one item on it and threw a bunch of relevant anchor text links at it?” To which myself replied “Well Don, I don’t know. Let’s try it and see what happens.” (Yeah, I have these little chats with myself all the time.)

In order to make this technique work, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, you’ll need two basic things.

1. An affiliate account with a merchant that allows you create single product pages. The merchant must be an authority site such as Amazon.
2. A method to generate a good number of relevant links to your page with anchor text. You can use TNX, LinkVana, BacklinkSolutions or any number of other link networks out there. Article marketing is also a great way to generate the needed backlinks if you can mass produce some articles.

What we’re going to do here is use the Merchants authority site against itself to make our single product page outrank the main authority site’s page. Kinda underhanded but hey, all’s fair in love and affiliate marketing!

What you need to do is choose a product from your Merchant that is fairly new. This will reduce competition and increase your chances of getting the top SERPS rankings fairly quickly.

Let’s say you had created a single product page for the MacBook Air when it first came out. You would then take your single product page on the MacBook Air and create targeted backlinks to it.

It’s important that you do not use the same anchor text over and over. Change it up. Your keywords for anchor text would be something like.

• MacBook Air
• MacBook Air Review
• MacBook Air Reviews
• Buy MacBook Air
• MacBook Air vs IBM ThinkPad
• Apple MacBook Air

This way, you can still use the Merchants authority to rank well and avoid tipping Google off to what you’re doing. If you only use one or two targeted anchor text, Google could flag this as Googlebombing. That wouldn’t be good.

Another advantage to using a Merchant that has an authority site is that you can build a large amount of links to your product page without waking Google up. If you were to build massive amounts of links to a new site about the MacBook Air, they’d probably slam you pretty hard. It’s not natural to gain tons of new links to new sites and Google has this figured out now. However, Google is used to seeing a huge amounts of links going to these authority sites so you don’t alert them when you send all your targeted anchor links to your product page.

As I said earlier. This technique doesn’t always work 100% of the time, but it works pretty damn often for me. The trick is too be on the watch for new products coming down the pipe and be capable of producing quality one-way backlinks to your page.

In the future, I’ll try and post more articles on how to make money online without a website since I know a some of you are just starting out and do not have websites.

Make Your Blog User Friendly

It’s taken me a while to implement formatting of my articles on this blog. But since I’ve really been trying, my readership has grown as has my page views.

I’m still amazed at the bloggers who have a huge lump of text in thier post. I’ve even seen the whole post be one giant 600 word block. Even I couldn’t read through it all without wishing it would end.

Formatting your blog and making it user friendly includes using paragraphs and sectioning. Remember, most blog readers are skimmers. They’ll skim right over most of your text.

Who Wants $10?

Don’t believe me? When I did the post about sponsored links in WordPress Themes, I buried a challenge in the post. The challenge was that I would pay someone $10 if they could tell me how many embedded links are in a WordPress default install.

Although that page was linked-to pretty heavy and I received a good amount of traffic to it, few guessed at the right number. Most I believe skimmed right over it and never saw the challenge. So from now on, I’ll be leaving little challenges like that in my post, just to see who’s paying attention! By the way, the challenge in that article is over, no one guessed the right number, keep reading to find the next challenge buried in an upcoming article.

How To Format Your Blog for Reader Loyalty and Ease of Use

Here’s how to ad some formatting to your blog to make it more user friendly.

• Use bullet points for list (like this one) – Bullet points tend to break the text up and make list easier to read
• Use the <H3> tag for section headers – I believe the H3 tag is underused by many bloggers. Instead of using the <b> tag for section heading, use the <H3> and make your post easier to read and increase your SEO. Some search engines like Yahoo and MSN thrive with on page optimization.
• Bold Keywords – If I click on a site and see many of my keywords, I tend to stay around the site longer reading relevant information. If I click on the same site and see a huge blog of text, I don’t bother. So do many other people. Use the <b> tag to bold keywords in your article.
• Use the <em> tag – The <em> tag is the same as the <i> Italics tag. Use italics to make quotes or your powerful thoughts jump out on the page. Italics pull peoples attention span out of “skim” mode. More so than the <b> tag if you ask me.
• Keep paragraphs short – I’m bad about this, but I’m getting better! Don’t go on and on forever. Keep the sentences focused and on point…yeah…I’m guilty of this one also

It doesn’t take long to break some paragraphs up into sections, use some bulleted list and bold some keywords. This will make your blog “Skimable” and will make many of your readers happy!

Turn Affiliate Datafeeds Into $ Dollars $

I get emails all the time asking me how to take advantage of affiliate datafeeds that are put out by merchants. To be honest, how I use the datafeeds depends on my website and the merchant. I will tell you that I use a wide variety of programs and services when I use datafeeds. I’m just not comfortable with one program or service, probably due to all the different niches I’m in.

What Are Affiliate Datafeeds?

Affiliate Datafeeds are files that merchants provide that contain all of the products that they carry, or just the products they wish to put online. Typically these files come in a MS Excel format so that they are easier to work with.

Some stores, like BettyMills, have datafeeds with over 50,000 products. This means that once you get your datafeeds online, your affiliate store will be populated with over 50,000 items from Betty Mills.

A good place to find Merchants who have datafeeds is ShareASale.Com. Not all merchants have datafeeds, but you’ll find many on ShareASale that do. Simply sign up for their Affiliate Program and download the datafeeds.

Not All Datafeeds Are Created Equal

Sadly, not all merchants produce the same quality of datafeeds. A nice feature about the merchants on ShareASale is that you can preview the datafeed before downloading. The preview will give you a few examples of what the datafeed will look like. You’ll see some that have very lame or minimal descriptions. That’s okay if it’s a merchant you really like and you’ll take time rewriting the descriptions. The description is where the money is in datafeeds. More on that later.

Programs and Services That Turn Affiliate Datafeeds Into Web Pages

As some of you may recall, I did a review of Goldencan some time ago. It’s a simple service where you can put entire stores from different merchants on your websites. Just make sure you’re signed up with the merchants before getting the code for those stores!

Another program I used and reviewed here is PopShops. Generally Popshops works the same way as Goldencan but not really…if you can follow that! With PopShops you get the choice of using either JavaScript, PHP or HTML to insert products from datafeeds into your website. Unlike Goldencan, PopShops charges money for their service (except the basic level which gives you minimum products) . The prices are very reasonable for what you get. You can start with the free package and later on, if you want more products, you can choose which package suits your needs.

Goldencan on the other hand is free to use. However, with some merchants Goldencan will take the 4th click as part of the “fee” for their service. Having said that, there are plenty of other merchants on Goldencan that pay their own way so that all clicks are yours. If giving every 4th click to Goldencan is going to be a problem, you need to check the Goldencan website before you decide on a merchant and see which merchants pay their own way and which ones will cost you every 4th click.

Another service that I’ve used briefly was DataFeedFile.com. I used them briefly on several Affiliate sites. This was a couple years ago and one problem I was having would be dead pages. By this I mean you’d click on a page that DataFeedFile produced and there would be no product, just a statement saying the file didn’t exist. I hate to think about how much that cost me. To be perfectly honest, the best I remember, all dead pages came from Performics, so take that with a grain of salt. It could have been Performics problem, I don’t know. I just know that I do not use either one as of now.

The programs above work well for most affiliate marketers. Having said that, with these type of programs I feel that you loose some control over the products offered. I like to tweak my datafeeds. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that you need to tweak your datafeeds to get the most money out of them so they will convert well. You don’t have that luxury with the above services, at least not that I’ve seen. But remember, they are easy for the novice to use, so there is a trade off. Control vs Ease of Use.

A program that I use that will give you complete control over your data feed is Webmerge. I guess that I would say that my biggest complaint with Webmerge is the lack of good video tutorials on how to set it up and get started. Webmerge can be a bear to learn, but once you do, oh boy, you have a lot of control at your finger tips. Webmerge does link to some third party tutorials written by other websites, but so far I haven’t found any good video tutorials. I think novices would eat this program up if they realized how much control they get to keep using a product like Webmerge.

With Webmerge, the program creates static HTML page for every product in your datafeed. It will also create static HTML navigation pages. Once you have imported your Datafeed into Webmerge and then went through the paces to export your finished HTML pages, all you have to do is upload them to your server.

Just over a month ago I came across a script that took data feeds and created dynamic web pages with each product. This script created a whole store from datafeeds. You can even have multiple datafeeds running under one store. This is great if you want a comparison shopping site.

The program I discovered was AffiliStore 2.0. This script makes it easy to import merchant datafeeds and turn them into working real time stores. You really need to go and look at their sample sites to get an idea of how powerful this script is.

I call this script BANS sites on Steroids because this script will build stores for you that have thousands of pages!

One word of caution though. In the AffiliStore forums, I saw quite a few people complaining about their sites slowing down or misbehaving when they exceeded 10,000 products. So if you have a store with 30, 40 or over 50,000 products, you may want to try it out with a smaller datafeed. On the two sites I used to build with datafeeds, one has just over 8500 products and the other has just over 6000 products and I’ve had no problem out of either one. So far in my experiments, it looks like this script will be damn good in targeting and conquering niches.

One of the best things about AffiliStore is that it’s free! Yeah, freakin’ free! That makes it better than BANS any day!

A Word About Affiliate Data feeds

I saved this for last because many of you, especially the new people, need to know this. I see a majority of you failing to do this and you’re leaving money on the table.

There are many so called “guru’s” out there that will claim datafeeds at unique content for your website.

I’m calling bullshit on that one peeps!

If you can download a datafeed from your merchant, then so can all 2000 of the other Affiliates that have signed up for their affiliate program.

Then what happens when say… 5% of those affiliates, including you, publish those raw datafeeds? Yep…duplicate content and then you run the risk of being labeled a “thin affiliate site” by Google. Something you’ll always be fighting against.

The way you turn that datafeed into dollars is that you open the datafeed in MS Excel and pull up the descriptions. Once you’ve opened your affiliate datafeed, you’ll go through those product records and modify the descriptions to be SEO friendly and informative.

This will get you higher in the Search Engines. The higher you are in the search engines, the higher the traffic. The more traffic you have coming in, the more bank you take home!

I can’t stress how important it is for you to spend time customizing and seo optimizing these product descriptions. It’s not uncommon for me to spend a few days tweaking my data feeds. This is where your payday is at!

I’m also currently experimenting with a Affiliate datafeed Wordpress Plugin. The jury is still out, but just as soon as I feel comfortable writing a review of this Plugin, I’ll let you know.

Okay, this should be plenty of information to get you set up and going with affiliate datafeeds. This is the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing. Now go forward and build your affiliate empire!

When Is a Blog Post Too Long?

The subject of how long a blog post should or should not be has been hashed out many, many times on the Internet.

Yesterday, after getting my Internet service back, I finished a blog post for one of my other blogs which I had started last week. The blog post turned out to be nearly 2500 words long. Wow, that is my all time long-winded blog post!

An instant after I hit ‘Publish’, the thought came to me that I should have cut that post up into smaller sections and did a mini-series. That is, I should have used short 300 to 600 word blog post over a period of days to get my message across rather than one huge blog post.

To Break Up a Blog Post or Not…That Is The Question

I personally do not have a problem with the length of blog post as long as they stay focused on the subject. I don’t care if they are 200 words long or 2000 words long. The important thing to me as a blog reader is that the post gives me the information I want and I just as soon have that information in one large chunk, not strung out over a few days.

I understand why some bloggers use a mini-series type post. They can micro-cover one subject over several days. If the subject you’ll be posting about has many points or differing angles, you might consider breaking it up over several post rather than one long one.

Of course another advantage of breaking a long post up is that you’ll have several post on the same subject. This may help you in search engine rankings, especially if every article is SEO optimized and linked to the other related post.

So When Is a Blog Post Too Long?

When the blogger starts to wonder from the main point and fails to remain focused. A blog post should be a focused article aimed at one singe idea or subject. If you get off track and start talking about something else totally different in the post, it’s time to back up and end it. You can always put up another post dealing with the different subject and link back to any previous post to prove your point.

Long blog post can also run the risk of losing your readers interest. Now, having said that, if you’re a captivating writer you may be able to keep your readers interest from the first word to the last. It depends on you.

Here are Some Pro’s and Con’s of Long Blog Post

Pro’s

• You’re able to give the reader all the information in one chunk
• Your post should be focused and SEO optimized which will help you in the rankings.
• If it’s truly a pillar article, it’s more likely to get back links

Con’s

• Run the risk of losing your readers interest
• The keyword density of the page is diluted
• It’s harder to keep a long blog post focused on the subject your writing about

Only you as the blogger know your readers and what they like/dislike. If you’re the type of blogger who dishes out short, lazer beam focused 300 word post, then hitting them with a 2000 word post may send them over the edge. You need to be aware of the Pro’s and Con’s of long blog post and know when to break it up!

1. Social bookmarking : There are many social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us,digg,technorati etc. where you can add any site’s url as a bookmark.

This url can be your own blog’s url. This will definitely increase your blog traffic.

2. Submit to search engines : submit your blog url to popular search engines like google, yahoo!, msn(now called ‘live’), ask.com.

Google : http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

3. Post at forums : There are many forums present online. Start posting at these forums on some appropriate topic which is related to your blog and never forget to add your blog’s link along with your message.

4. Submit articles to article directories : Submitting articles to the article directories is a very nice way of increasing traffic for your blog. If you need some more information on how submitting articles helps in bringing traffic Read this.

List of article directories where you can submit articles.

5. Leave comments on other blogs: whenever you visit a blog, make it your habit to leave comments on their articles and add your blog’s address to that comment. Try to comment on those blogs and sites which have got high search engine rankings. And keep this thing in mind that don’t spam. Your comment should make some sense so that readers will get good impression for your blog and hence the will definitely visit your blog.

6. Submit your blog to blog directories: there are many blog directories where you can submit your blog and will surely help you to increase your blog traffic.

• Technorati.com
• Topblogging.com
• Blogtoplist.com
• Fuelmyblog.com
• Mybloggingarea.com

7. Pay per click advertisements: google adwords is service through which you can advertise your blog. But this service charges you money for that. I would advice you to use this service only if you want to sell your products.

What is search engine optimization and how does it increase traffic for your site? Internet users usually go to search engines like Google or Yahoo to find the sites that they visit. Chances are that your site, new as it may be, would already be listed in these search engines’ databases. However, even if you appear in the search results page of Google and Yahoo, without search engine optimization, your site could be buried in page ten of the results page. That makes it unlikely for visitors to easily find your web site, even if your site is what they are searching for. The sites on page one of the results page are the sites that employ search engine optimization techniques.

A simple search engine optimization strategy involves the use of popular keywords or keyphrases. Sites like Wordtracker or Google adwords can show the keywords that are often entered on search engines. By making sure that these keywords appear often on your sites’ pages or on pages linked to your site, you increase the frequency that your site is displayed on the results page, as well as improve the ranking for your site.

Another search engine optimization strategy often employed is link farming. This involves a group of web sites linking to each other’s pages. Since search engines often rank sites with lots of other sites linking to them quite highly. Having as many sites as possible linking to your own site is a good way for search engine optimization.

Article marketing is another useful search engine optimization technique that you could use. If you can write interesting articles and post these online with a link to your site, then the search engines would count all these links from all these articles and thus, give you higher rankings. Using the article marketing search engine optimization technique along with extensive keyword use will also further increase the visits your site gets since more people could find these articles using search engines