A couple of days ago Darren over at Problogger highlighted why he didn’t feel good about a specific type of Make Money Blogging training product.

Even though it wasn’t mentioned in Darren’s post, it was quite clear from various references in the post that he was referring to Jack’s latest offering Blog Success.

I am going to turn this on its head a little as I spent a few hours browsing around various B5Media blogs. B5Media is being highlighted as Darren was a founder, and his primary role was training the bloggers, though I am not sure about his current involvement or influence on content strategy.

I understand that they have been going through a lot of mass consolidation of their blogs, and there are tons of redirects from one domain to another, and my taste in content may be different to the general public.

Thus I thought the best way to judge overall content quality would be to use retweets, as recorded by Topsy.com

I am using Topsy as from what I have seen they at least handle internal 301 redirects fairly well, although they don’t seem to do the same for when content gets moved between domains – Tweetmeme doesn’t even handle small changes in permalinks.

Everyjoe.com on Topsy
Blisstree.com on Topsy
Splendidcity.com on Topsy
Bizzia seems to have been recently consolidated into Everyjoe

I also went through a number of their celebrity blogs which haven’t been consolidated, but didn’t see anything that suggested a different emphasis, level of quality or audience engagement.

Only BlissTree seems to have really knocked anything “out of the park” since B5 Media had their site consolidation – wait a moment, that was a post from 2006 on the effect of Coke on the body, and there is another great post on what happens to your body after giving up smoking with 3000+ comments which is also old content.

Even with an army of authors, plus the occasional mention in Darren’s twitter stream the overall public reception of the content is a little bit… muffled.

I am not knocking the strategy or the authors. The authors get paid to write content to specific requirements but ultimately the aim of the current content isn’t to get book deals or speaking engagements, though I do realise some of the B5Media writers are already published authors.

There was no attempt to sell an ebook of “Halloween appetizers” despite Alexa showing it was a recent top search term.

Here is a link to the blog Jack created about Environmental News and dog treats

I have nofollowed the links as I don’t want to have too much of a positive effect on their rankings. To be honest I would have done a bit more work in making things unique, adding a point of view and personality.
I am 50/50 as to whether I would allow the links from my comments though that could be easily fixed by making the sites more personal. When Jack comments with links to the sites, he does do so as himself.

The sites are nothing special, mainly built around niched 3rd party articles, press releases etc sourced through Jack’s custom tools, and using Zemanta in some cases to provide links to 3rd party resources including sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

I personally don’t think it is a worse user experience for a search visitor landing on one of Jack’s niche sites compared to landing on a B5 Media blog, though there would probably be less inclination to subscribe.

Can the content Jack uses rank? Probably depending on search queries, linking etc.

With some long tail queries for snippets appearing on his home page he already outranks the original article author, though that isn’t necessarily the goal.

It is too early days to see the full effects of Jack’s linkbuilding efforts, but both sites have 5-10% of content in primary index.

An alternative goal might be to use lots of this kind of site to help rank other higher quality money sites. To be honest when B5Media had 300+ blogs I always assumed they would eventually move to a more solid revenue model such as eCommerce.

B5Media blogs seem to have 5-10% of their indexed content within Google’s primary index, which can easily be achieved with 100% duplicate content.

Blog Success (on the surface) certainly isn’t the authority blogging model Darren is advocating for Problogger readers, but Jack has taught that model in the past with a fair number of his students achieving success, and also teaches that model as a consultant. I would think some of that also carries across into Blog Success.

(highly targetted display advertising)

Update 14/12/2009

Techcrunch had an interesting piece about quality content on Sunday highlighting a post on Wired that descibes the content creation process on sites run by Demand Media.

I am not suggesting filling up the web with junk content – I have always maintained there are ways to aggregate niched content in ways that add value and create a useful end user experience, even if it might not retain long-term subscribers.

Original Title: Speed Linking Slow Linking

First posted Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55

I don’t like the term speed linking. I like it even less on some blogs that use the “more” tag on a speed linking post, so you don’t even get to click straight through from your feed reader.

I know it helps with traffic numbers, especially if you have a large subscription, but I find it just annoying. Higher traffic that isn’t going to click an advert lowers your CTR.

Another factor to think about is how long people are on your pages. There has been lots of speculation about how long a visitor stays on your site affecting search results. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just doesn’t… yet.

Linking

I write a fair amount about linking… hmm so does Jack Humphreys. Actually Jack writes a lot more than me about linking, and has done for years. In fact, come to mention it, if someone was to ask me to name one person as an expert on linking, Jack would be a good choice.

Jack has just written a great article “Give Links to Gain Authority Status

Jack might even agree with this next part.

Speed Linking = Bad Blogging?

• Unique Relevant Content – Quite frequently, a speed link post doesn’t have much unique content on the page, other than a few links. If you want a page to be unique, and have some value, it needs to have content. One piece of content linking through to another adds value and relevance to both.
• The Fire Exit – Linking through to others is great, but a speed link page is like a Fire Exit. I could understand it if it was an affiliate link… call it a minimalist approach, you don’t write anything to persuade the reader to click through, you just present them with a link and a choice, which pill? We are in a world of tabbed browsers now, but do some justice to the links, even if it is only including a few excerpts and links to related posts.
• Create a reference – If you present a document with lots of useful tips that can’t be totally digested in 30 seconds, there is a higher chance for the post to be bookmarked and saved for reference. That isn’t an excuse for not breaking up your writing with paragraphs, bullets etc.
• Add value – if you write something useful related to someone else’s work, there is a high chance they will link back to you either now or in the future. Are you just a fanboy or do you have a brain and a real opinion?
• Advertising – I mentioned near the start of this article about CTR

  Jack wrote:-

  My advertising rates continue to go up because advertising today is based almost completely on page views. I get new visitor page views, but remember the 37% return visitors? My advertising is affected by that greatly.

  Maybe he needed to make this a little clearer. Repeat traffic and repeat views for the same advertising message is more valuable, because consumers need to see an advert multiple times before it even registers as something interesting, or something they might be looking to buy.

Here is an example of a speed linking type post on Jacks site.

Now first off, Jack publishes full feeds – I am not forced to visit his site to use the links. Thus the links are there to be useful, and not to create supplemental traffic that won’t help CTR.
He does include some comments about why they might be useful to me. I would actually prefer him to write a little more, or to interweave the speed links with references to his own writing on similar subjects.

Back Scratching

Speed Linking can be good for back scratching – links are better if they are surrounded with lots of related keywords, not just for the person you link to, but quite possibly also for yourself.

(highly targetted display advertising)

Whilst he employs 80 people, he also has a team of 200+ website creation, content development, link building and social media specialists to call upon (native English speakers).

If you can avoid doing all the work yourself, either with automation or outsourcing it is more scalable.

Keyword Titan

Just over a week ago, Todd Hogan the founder of Keyword Titan approached me to see if I would be interested in taking a look at their new Keyword research automation tools.

Trust me, I have spent thousands on various keyword research tools in the past, some of them even still get updated by the authors despite changes in the way data can be pulled from the search engines, many of the services are still in business and even booming, and in many ways I am quite happy with what I already have available.

That being said, time is one of my most valuable commodities (though I tend to not use the resource to it’s full potential)

Another problem is grouping

It is fairly easy to group keywords if you are generating them from various root keywords.

{specialty} {profession} {location}

Annulment Attorney in Los Angeles

It is far harder, or at least more time consuming on researched keyword lists.

Keyword Titan Ultimate Challenge

I was already starting to prepare a monetization list to offer as an opt-in bonus, as a companion to Howie’s 36 Niche report. I knew he was covering keyword research in his training, along with monetization, but I wanted to help accelerate the success of anyone taking part in his competition, and continuing that into the future.

If you help people achieve results, good things happen.

The amount of time involved to research 36 niches, highlight 100s of core topics to focus on, and drill down into traffic data, grouping etc using conventional tools would have been astronomic.

2 hours per niche wouldn’t be unreasonable for a shoddy job x 36 niches = 72 hours

2 weeks work, maybe one if you are a machine

It would be less if all you were doing is generating the keywords using some kind of spinning technique, but you would still have to identify the root keyword lists, and then think about negative keywords, grouping etc.

So I challenged Todd to create me 36 keyword lists that I could give away, highlighting the best opportunities for competition and traffic, suitable for both SEO techniques and PPC.

Due to timezones, national holidays in the US, long weekends and various discussions on objectives etc, from start to finish it has taken 8 days to prepare these lists.

I asked Todd how much time it took to prepare all 36 keyword lists.

I couldn’t even contemplate that with any of the tools I own, or have seen. The closest were products like Keyword Bible, but on a broad topic such as Howie provided an initial cross referenced search would have been grinding away on my PC for 30 minutes or more, without any thought to whether the keywords were
actually useful, grouping etc.

These days such poorly defined keyword lists for Google PPC would be a liability.

36 “Opportunity” Keyword Lists Free

What we have prepared are what I would term “core opportunity” keyword sets, the kind ideal for small niche sites, social media promotion tactics etc.

These lists were prepared in exactly the same way as the demonstration video on the Keyword Titan website.

Each list is approximately 150 keywords highlighting the cream for traffic and commercial intent.

1 Complete List for Acne Niche

One complete keyword list for Acne, a $15 value yours free

Acne Keyword Research list is provided free of charge on http://nicheexposed.com

You can also get another free list covering the auto industry just for signing up for a free Keyword Titan account

Full Lists For Other Niche’s

Keyword Titan has 2 primary monetization models

The first is a monthly subscription which is ideal for power users. During discussions with Todd I discovered that their primary target market is specialist SEO & PPC agencies working with lots of clients, or large corporate account holder, not smaller internet marketers.

I believe however there is a huge untapped market (for Todd) within the internet marketing field, especially power users leveraging outsourcing or mass site generation.

From a single complete list, or even from the condensed lists we are providing for free, it would be easy to create 50 or more websites, or a few larger authority sites.

Thus for many a subscription would be overkill, and they should concentrate on owning one niche at a time.

The second monetization model is pre-built and custom lists purchased individually. The pre-built lists are a very affordable $15, and $30 for a custom list based on your own selection of primary keywords.

I believe all of the pre-built lists are available free to people who purchase a monthly subscription.

The 36 Niches Are Now Available as Pre-built lists

Other niches are also available as prebuilt lists

All the sample lists are now available for immediate access, including the complete keyword research list for Acne.

Get them here (Free)

Http://nicheexposed.com

Who is Keyword Titan ideal for?

• SEO & PPC agencies (time is money)

• Large corporate SEO & PPC managers – potentially less specialized skills and less time to manage 1000s of keywords

• Mega sites dealing with multiple verticals

• Mass automation niche marketers who would like some of what they throw against the wall to actually stick

• Niche Marketers looking to dominate single vertical markets (the single reports)

• Anyone who values their time

I haven’t played with the interface extensively, but the results speak for themselves.

Thanks to Todd for offering to help with these keyword lists

Google today have launched Google Health that is supposedly for US use, but I was able to log straight in, and add the ailment I suffer from. I am not worried about the privacy aspects.

The information provided is pretty basic as you would probably expect in a country famous for medical lawsuits.

One useful aspect of Google Health did catch my eye.

So if I was to recreate a niche site related to Chondromalacia Patella, those would be reasonable top level pages to build topic silos from, or sister sites such as back pain.

It goes without saying that Google have reliable information on this, and those keyword serches in the sidebar are about to get more traffic.

A.D.A.M. creates health content for consumers that is physician-reviewed by experts in their field.

Being the top related search terms, they would also be some of the best terms to use for Adwords landing pages, if they are allowed in your geographical area.

Search Engine Land has lots of screenshots of Google Health and Google Blogscoped has good coverage.

I thought I would take a few minutes to do a little very simple keyword research using free tools to find some viable niches to write about.

For this exercise the easiest tool to use is the Google Trends mashup created by the Wordtracker guys for the 30 Day Challenge.

What this allows you to do is first of all get search numbers from Wordtracker, and then compare the search terms with Google trends which provides real data on search volume.

Often the numbers provided by Wordtracker leave a lot to be desired, because they are easily manipulated by very few real searchers, but they do provide an excellent starting point to highlight niches.

Hubpages Is An Authority Site

It is important to realise that Hubpages is already an authority site, thus it is possible to target slightly more competitive terms than you normally might be able to when building you own niche websites, and still get results fairly quickly.

I have spotted a number of decent niches just using the keyword “film” but you should also use the thesaurus offered to provide more ideas.

Remember that whilst the keyword is film, that could mean movies, but could easily also be window film, camera film, etc.

You are also able to go off at a tangent, so a biography of Doris Day might be appropriate (if enough people search for it) – actually Doris Day might be more suitable for a full niche site so you can cover more terms to get more traffic volume.

Certainly “movie” is a better term than film based upon search volume.

False Search Volume

Be really careful to check the trends

As an example “Upcoming Will Smith Movies” based upon Wordtracker shows a search volume over 1000, but Google trends data soon squashes that happy feeling, because whilst there is almost no competition for the term, there is no search volume either.

Easy Niches

I am not giving you the keyword, but it was a product based search listed under movies.

I also checked using allintitle:”key word” and it has less than 600 competitors on Google

In fact that niche is easy enough it could certainly be gaining search traffic within a month on a fresh domain, let alone on a Hubpage.

It is also traditionally when new life is brought into the world, so it is an ideal time to clean up some niche websites and turn some ideas into revenue streams and to experiment a little.

I am frequently asked by email all kinds of beginners questions

• How to choose a niche?
• How to go about keyword research?
• How to promote niche websites?

I am going to steal some quotes from Franck

Taking about John Reese and Blogrush

1. Release crap (improve later, but start making money with your crap)
2. Test everything (Jay Abraham’s style)

These advice makes me a lot of money, and it was actually my starting point online. I made my first affiliate commission ever with a “crappy crap” forex website.

About what he learned from the Get Altitude CDs

I learned 3 important words from Eben Pagan. When you know these 3 words you will say like “Hmm, is this extraordinary?”. (I said this when I heard Eben tell this).

But I guarantee that it’s important for your business and it produce tremendous results…

Here are these three words… Speed of implementation.

I also have a number of tools I want to test out so this will also involve some rapid learning along with the rapid development and content generation.

These Are Going To Be Rough

That doesn’t mean junk

Diamonds start off in an uncut state that isn’t very dazzling, and many have imperfections that make them only good for industrial use.

In our case we might end up with 31 sites that just pull in a few dollars per month, but most of them will be very low maintenance.

Some of the sites exist and will be revamped, so have existed in the past, and others will be born fresh

Tools

A lot of the tools I have are no longer sold, and a few were quite expensive.

Most of the sites I am going to work on this month will be using free and affordable tools, but if you want me to include one of your products, make sure I have a copy to play with as early as possible.

Product Placement and Niches

If you want to suggest broad niches to have a play around with, or a specific product to promote let me know

I am going to try to have all the sites “worth being in the index” and I certainly won’t be breaking any laws.

Hmm… guidelines… we’ll see ;)

At its core, my first impression of SocialRank niche websites was that it was little more than a WordPress splog scraping my content based upon keywords used and giving some kind of relevant or irrelevant ranking based upon some internal algorithm.

It is still my content appearing on a 3rd party site, in the same way as one of the millions of kubrik themed sites that just grab keyword based feeds from Technorati.

As I have said in the past, I license my content as GPL, so am quite happy for people to repurpose it, and hopefully if they provide a link a little traffic finds it’s way back to my site.

There is however one thing I absolutely detest

Don’t Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content

If you site contains no original content, if you are not entering the “blogging conversation”, I don’t want you to spam the hell out of me with trackbacks and pingbacks.
I sent an email to SocialRank to switch off the pinging, the pinging continued with my email box full of ping notifications. All I received in response to my email was an invite to their beta.

Would you join the beta of a company effectively hiting you with trackback/pingback spam?

I don’t see them anymore, I have told Spam Karma to blacklist them just like any of the other splogs.

On the other hand I read today an interview Ben did with SocialRank.

This seems similar to the Quechup debacle at the beginning of last month where an over enthusiastic viral referral system effectively destroyed the social network before it gained any traction. The first page of results in Google only mention negative things about Quechup – I assume they rebranded.

I never accepted an invite to Quechup, but I assume within the terms and conditions somewhere they gave some notification that when you provide your friend’s details, they would automatically send email invites. Thus the emails probably weren’t spam, and looking back through the few emails I received, were not to my knowledge in any way illegal, with a clear opt-out option, company details, a nice link through to a company privacy policy etc. In fact iDate who own Quechup issued a press release 2 weeks ago explaining the changes made to the feature to stop people making mistakes when inviting people.

I think the problem comes with people so used to how Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented these in my opinion quite dangerous address book sharing features, they assume every site works the same way, even if the other site actually had a similar but different feature well before LinkedIn and Facebook. The iDate press release mentions having this feature since 2005.

With SocialRank it is different. They are the ones filling my email box with pingback after pingback proclaiming that they scraped my content.

I don’t regard them as a stinking splog, they are still linking back to the original source with a followable link, but currently they are more annoying than Quechup invites just 1 month ago.

I know that an article covering the importance of good anchor text or choosing a niche would help a lot of people, but I would much prefer to just link through to other people I respect who have written about the subject as well, or in many cases better than I would do myself.

I have discussed in the past that I don’t write speed linking articles, and for some reason, despite how many hundreds or even 1000s of bloggers use speedlinking in their titles, or even have whole categories for such roundup link posts, I still rank highly for the term in Google.

Scott Jangro seems to be going through a similar dilemma to what I go through on an almost daily basis – stick to your self defined niche, or respond to the signals given to you by your traffic stats.

Vanessa Fox has saved me a whole load of time testing out lots of ways to aggregate profiles on social networks.

Whilst Diggers tend to bury security warnings as spam, they are never-the-less extremely important, well unless you want Aaron to break into your WordPress account in under 5 minutes. Upgrade Now

If you have a couple of hours to spend on your education, John Reese really knows a lot about increasing your income online, so I can’t think of anyone better to interview Shoemoney. There is a lot to be learnt, think of what it would be like to eavesdrop on a conversation between 2 top earners at a bar during a large convention.

That blog post I think is a landmark for affiliate marketing in more ways than one, as John Reese included a disclosure at the bottom for the affiliate links.

Who knows, maybe he wrote it after coming back from lunch with Ted Murphy of PayPerPost.

It is true, in John’s email newsletters he always declares affiliate links, in fact he highlights them, often asks you to clear your cookies before clicking through, and offers massive bonuses for using his links, but this is something different, and because John is so influential in affiliate marketing, I think this might might cause a lots of changes.

I even grabbed a screenshot

As it is memorial Weekend in the US, here are some charity links.

First of all Mark at Bloglyne is raising money to fight premature birth, what is on offer is a great deal.

Secondly Stephen Pierce has set a goal to feed over 1,000,000 million children
within 72 HOURS. Lots of free useful stuff on the site even if you don’t make a donation

“When You Download This Free Success Report We Will Donate A Plate Of Food To A Starving Child On Your Behalf. It’s That Simple. No Strings Attached.”

Tags: charity, disclosure, linking, niche marketing, payperpost, SEO Blog, social networking, WordPress Security
]]> http://andybeard.eu/787/letting-other-people-write-the-linkbait.html/feed 7 http://andybeard.eu/749/watering-the-plants-digging-holes-housekeeping.html http://andybeard.eu/749/watering-the-plants-digging-holes-housekeeping.html#comments Mon, 21 May 2007 19:04:05 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/05/watering-the-plants-digging-holes-housekeeping.html Offline situations can have quite a devastating effect on your blogging, and whilst a lot of my niche sites run on autopilot, that is a lot more difficult for this site.
If I was going to be travelling for some time it would be possible to hand over the reigns to a possible guest author, or to publish some content with a forward timestamp, but because this blog is intended to be a community site, where I interact with my audience, if there is going to be a short delay in my publishing schedule, I tend to take the less complicated route… so be it.

Read more on Watering The Plants, Digging Holes & Housekeeping…

Tags: blogging tips, niche marketing, outsourcing, tools
]]> Offline situations can have quite a devastating effect on your blogging, and whilst a lot of my niche sites run on autopilot, that is a lot more difficult for this site.
If I was going to be travelling for some time it would be possible to hand over the reigns to a possible guest author, or to publish some content with a forward timestamp, but because this blog is intended to be a community site, where I interact with my audience, if there is going to be a short delay in my publishing schedule, I tend to take the less complicated route… so be it.

I have been extremely busy offline for the last week, and whilst I have lots of material prepared, I opted not to publish it, because I knew I wouldn’t have time to respond to any questions. I did have enough time to continue responding to comments both here and elsewhere, and to see what was happening in the blogging and internet marketing world.

Outsourcing

Whilst I don’t outsource work on this blog, I do use out-sourcing for other projects online, and heavily use outsourcing offline. The offline outsourcing is actually setup extremely well, though many might look on it as being a little lazy.

Watering The Plants

In Poland they have a saying roughly translated, “Build a house, plant a tree, conceive a son”. Trees obviously have other benefits, such as looking nice, hiding ugly features, sheltering you from the breeze, and giving some privacy.

So for my new house it was decided that we should get some trees planted as soon as possible around the borders. We should have done it a few years ago when we first purchased the land, but small trees have this bad habit of walking off on the back of someone else’s lorry if left unattended and we had other priorities.

Planting trees in my new (future) garden isn’t a one man job.

So we had a team of 6 guys plus a small tractor with trailer, and planted ~300 trees in 5 hours.

At the time we thought the ground was moist enough and plenty of rain had been forecast, but the weather let us down.

Early last week I ended up spending a whole day watering the 300 trees – I couldn’t arrange anyone to do it at short notice, plus every now and then it is good for me to get out of the house, plus I was able to oversee other things going on.

The Water Feature

We always planned to have some kind of water feature in the garden, partially because of the “ambiance”, and partially through necessity – our land has a gradual slope, and water collects at the bottom even though it is well drained.

The initial plans were quite modest until my father-in-law got a little carried away.

By the time the excavator finished the hole is over 2 metres deep in places, a nice figure of 8 with a pedestal in the smaller section approximately 2 metres across that is the basis for some kind of waterfall feature.

The Pool

We decided that whilst we had the heavy machinery available it was time to also dig the pool, and a couple of days later the concrete bed was laid.

That is a view from one of the guest bedrooms. The pool isn’t huge 12m x 5m x 1.5m deep but as I tend not to leave the house too much, it will prove a useful convenience to keep fit.

Roof & Plumbing

If that wasn’t enough, we have roof tiles now being laid, and the whole plumbing and heating installation being finalized.

The guys who are doing the roof also built most of the house, and there is a specialist team of 3 guys doing the plumbing and heating installation.

This Is All About Niche Marketing & Blogging

Some jobs you can do yourself, even gain significant pleasure doing them, but at the end of the day using efficient tools, and sometimes outsourcing specific tasks is necessary.

You can’t afford to do them yourself

I am probably capable of “mucking in with the lads” on the building site, in fact my current 100 year old cottage I spent 3 months full time, with one hired hand renovating, but that isn’t an economic use of my time. Last week was quite exceptional, I have probably spent only 2 weeks so far on the land since we started actually building the house.

In many ways I am probably as far removed from the building of my house as Bill Gates is from the development of Microsoft products.

Me >> My Wife >> My Father-In-Law >> Building Site Manager / Building Firm Owner / Plumbing Contractors / Suppliers >> Manual Labour

I have met most of the people involved, but I don’t handle the day-to-day issues, and when I do it is primarily in consultation with my wife. She actually did her own out-sourcing deal – she runs her father’s manufacturing & wholesale business, and he takes care of the building work (he doesn’t get his hands dirty), and spends time with his friends in “business development” meetings.

We are being “thrifty” with our spending, but that is a much better option than attempting to do everything ourselves.

It is however important to know how to do the tasks you assign to others, or to judge the quality of the work. If I hadn’t spent so much time working on my cottage, I couldn’t possibly spend so little time on the current building work. In the same way, if I didn’t know how to build a website, I wouldn’t be happy outsourcing it.
I also know enough about programming to review code, test it effectively, and release products that work.

Don’t try to do everything yourself

Tags: blogging tips, niche marketing, outsourcing, tools
]]> http://andybeard.eu/749/watering-the-plants-digging-holes-housekeeping.html/feed 2 http://andybeard.eu/598/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html http://andybeard.eu/598/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:55:27 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html Stampede Secrets 2.0 is unlike any internet marketing report or ebook I have read…

If spending $97 on an ebook is a major financial commitment, don’t read any further

Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…

Read more on In Depth Review | Traffic Strategy | Stampede Secrets 2.0 – Social Media Marketing From A Unique Perspective?…

Tags: marketing, niche marketing, niche websites, rss, RSS Sharing, smm, smo, social bookmarking, Social Bookmarks, social marketing, Social Media, social network, social networking, social networks, Social News, social proof, Social Tagging, stampede secrets, syndication, tagging, tags, tracking, traffic, traffic strategy, vre, web 2.0, web metrics, Website Promotion, website traffic
]]> Stampede Secrets 2.0 is unlike any internet marketing report or ebook I have read…

If spending $97 on an ebook is a major financial commitment, don’t read any further

Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…

• There is no hype in the sales letter
• There is no hype in the ebook
• There is no hype in this review

Another Web 2.0 Social Media Ebook?

After you read the sales letter that is probably the impression you will have, and in fact you will still have that impression shortly after you start reading the ebook.

Here are some interesting facts for you

Pages 56 (+bonus guide on video, crib sheets and tables)

Subject	# of times
Mentions of Digg in the content	1
Mentions of linkbait	0
Mentions of “effect” (such as Digg effect)	0
Netscape	0
Reddit	0
Positive mentions of Del.icio.us	1

In fact those few references that were included were mainly in facts and figures like usage data.

So What is this Ebook Talking About?

Subject	# of times
References to Business	31
Community	9
Research	44
Content	56
Feedback	8
Amazon	7
Ebay	7
YouTube	7
43 Things	20
Traffic	170

Traffic Secrets

Whilst many people don’t appreciate the value of ebooks, claiming that the information is out there if you look for it, or join and participate in various forums, that isn’t strictly true.
We live in an age of information overload. Quite often different ideas and new ideas take a long time to rise to the surface, or never make it, not because the ideas are not valuable, or supported by hard evidence.

I often see “specialists” in SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing) claim that their methods and expensive services can work in virtually any market place.
I am not going to dispute those claims, but that very statement tends to drown out other methods that could be equally effective for traffic generation that might be equally, or potentially more suitable for certain markets.

Traffic Strategy

The fundamental value from this ebook is that it challenges you to examine your social media marketing strategy, and optimize it for best effect.
This is nothing to do with writing better headlines, or coercing top users at Digg, Reddit or Netscape to add you as a friend and to plug your content.

Whilst Laura’s intention was to target the ebook to beginners in social media marketing, in many ways consultants in social media marketing should read it because it will place a new perspective on information and strategies you think you already know.

Professional Writing

Laura has written a lot of ebooks as a ghost writer, and this isn’t her first outing in publishing an ebook in her own name. This ebook oozes quality production with footnotes on almost every page and links to resources that back up the data and strategies she proposes.

The professional tone may also be one of its shortcomings – The Stampede Secret isn’t a light refreshing read, or suitable for people who prefer information in short 400 word chunks.

To get the most benefit you really will have to read through the ebook a couple of times taking notes – in some ways it reminds me of some of the more serious marketing reports you might receive from Marketing Sherpa.

Recommended Audience

Ideal

You are already making money, and probably think you know everything there is about SMM. You might even skim read the ebook once and think there is nothing new, but if you take the time to sit down and read it slowly a couple of times, you will pick up a new perspective.

• Marketing consultants
• Blogging consultants
• Business owners in niche markets
• Owners of Virtual Real Estate in Niche markets including blogging networks
• VCs and Angel Investors
• Researchers
• Journalists

Possible

Beginners who have tried SMM for their niche websites and blogs with little success, and who have money to invest to accelerate their learning process.

Don’t Buy It

This isn’t an ebook showing you the secret route to success and instant wealth. This isn’t something you should spend your last meal ticket on for that one chance of financial independence.

If the price of the ebook is more than you would spend on a night out, think again.

It will probably take you 3 hours to read this ebook unless you have been studying various fast reading techniques – if 3 hours of your time is worth less than $97, this ebook probably isn’t ideal.

You Can Find This Information Elsewhere

I honestly haven’t gone searching for all this information elsewhere, but I am sure somewhere among the millions of pages of content that are created on the internet every day, you would find at least 90% of this information. The value is in the way it is collated and presented.

Just as an example some of what is discussed in the ebook you could find on my blog, and potentially in more depth, especially in regards to things like tagging. Laura even quoted from one of my articles and linked through, highlighting that people should read the article, and the valuable discussion afterwards.

Unique Information

Analysis of one of Laura’s niche sites in a very competitive market (Acne Treatment) with real proof of traffic numbers from Quantcast – not just screenshots.
This isn’t a high traffic site, it is very much a simple niche website, running on WordPress that anyone could create and generate some income – I wouldn’t expect Laura to expose her most profitable sites.

Discussion of traffic strategy – some social media consultants charge $5000 per day to help you formulate a social media marketing action plan. Most of the consultants concentrate on the search engine optimization benefits, and not how to participate in social networks to find real customers.

How to Write an Ebook – whilst this isn’t one of the lessons taught, the production quality and style is something to learn from.

I am going to finish off with a few select quotes from the ebook that don’t give too much away, but at the same time highlight how much different the overall perspective of the information is.

If anything is going to hold you back in being a fore-runner in the new web, the need to measure and record every click or movement to and on your site would be the culprit. The internet is changing at such a rapid rate that controlling and metering every change you make has the potential to stall your success.

Uptight control and playing it safe is seldom the stance of a pioneer. It is the pioneer who wins in profits, fame and visitor traffic – not the followers and whiners. I am not guaranteeing success by any means, nor am I advising you to risk your life savings on some promising new start up, but I am saying that the occasional ‘play your cards or go home’ attitude is one of the keys to success.

Web 2.0 is a very creative, innovative and fluid environment. Most Web 2.0 sites cannot be put in a box and measured in any consistent and reliable fashion – they are simply too young. There is a level of intuition at launch, an element of change and growth throughout the life of the web property, and yet another level of intuition used for assessment when determining a reasonable sale value.

Conclusion

No hype, no bonus, though if I do see enough interest and sales I might write up a supplement to the ebook going into some of the topics in more depth, especially on the benefits of tagging.
I would probably make that available free to all Laura’s customers.
I may even go into some of the topics that Laura has missed – Web 2.0 grows at an alarming rate, and there is a limit to how fast you can research strategies enough to be able to offer conclusive proof.

Disclaimers are unheard of in most ebooks, but Laura takes this to a new professional level, this is just part of it.

Information within this report may be speculation and are therefore within the meaning of the securities litigation reform act of 1995 and contain verbiage such as ‘expected’, ‘anticipated’, ‘estimated’, projected’, ‘believed’ or variations of those.

I have actually been chucking a few emails backwards and forwards to Laura over the last couple of days, and I thought I would include one small excerpt.

You know you really rock! You don’t even ‘know’ me and you’ve given me so
much of your time. It’s a dying art in our world.

I am not going to include my exact reply, because it mentioned names of people that if internet marketers were actively using LinkedIn, would certainly appear between myself and Laura as shared contacts, and over the last 2 years I have certainly dropped by her blog a number of times.

This comment also shows the benefit of “paying it forward” and the value of providing information for free to eventually reach your goals.

There are quite a few expert marketers who normally charge their clients a great deal of money who I correspond with on a regular basis, simply because they have gained value from what I have offered for free.

One of the bonuses that Laura provides is some very specific email support – she states that she will answer 2 emails from her customers, and highlights the importance formulating those questions to receive maximum benefit. She is not going to exclude pleas for help, and win / win relationships can develop to extend the level of help provided.

I have always been happy to answer emails regarding the products I review both before someone makes a buying decision and afterwards, or you can just ask here in the comments.

I gained a great deal of value from Stampede Secrets. I might not realise that value immediately because I already employ many of the strategies and techniques discussed, and it is hard to quantify the effect any changes might have on my income.
Reading the ebook has certainly helped me highlight the action I should be taking to revitalise some of the niche websites I have had for a long time and hardly ever modify, because each is bringing in a small trickle of income.
Laura has helped me realise that it is possible to employ a few extra traffic strategies for these niche websites that could turn the flow of traffic into a gushing fountain.

Disclaimer:- I am one of the few people who received a free review copy of this ebook, possibly because I offered to take a look before publishing, that Laura reads my blog, and because she quoted me in the ebook. To be honest I might not have purchased the ebook just based upon the sales page. That is the value of affiliate marketing in pre-selling, or explaining the benefits of a product in an ethical manner

Tags: marketing, niche marketing, niche websites, rss, RSS Sharing, smm, smo, social bookmarking, Social Bookmarks, social marketing, Social Media, social network, social networking, social networks, Social News, social proof, Social Tagging, stampede secrets, syndication, tagging, tags, tracking, traffic, traffic strategy, vre, web 2.0, web metrics, Website Promotion, website traffic
]]> http://andybeard.eu/598/in-depth-review-traffic-strategy-stampede-secrets-20-social-media-marketing-from-a-unique-perspective.html/feed 9 http://andybeard.eu/504/auctionads-partially-solves-two-international-affiliate-problems.html http://andybeard.eu/504/auctionads-partially-solves-two-international-affiliate-problems.html#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:21:18 +0000 Andy Beard http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/auctionads-partially-solves-two-international-affiliate-problems.html

Shoemoney Media and Mediawhiz (The parent company of Text Link Ads and ReviewMe) have released an innovative new monetization model, based upon Ebay Auctions – AuctionAds.com

Mainstream media will no doubt not even think let alone write about the 2 core advantages of this system for a large segment of the affiliate marketplace.

Read more on AuctionAds Review – AuctionAds Partially Solves Two International Affiliate Problems…

Tags: affiliate, Affiliate Marketing, auctionads, blog monetization, blogging, cashflow, Ebay, ebay affiliate program, international affiliates, Make Money, mediawhiz, monetization, niche marketing, niche website, shoemoney, tags, utw
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Shoemoney Media and Mediawhiz (The parent company of Text Link Ads and ReviewMe) have released an innovative new monetization model, based upon Ebay Auctions – AuctionAds.com

Mainstream media will no doubt not even think let alone write about the 2 core advantages of this system for a large segment of the affiliate marketplace.

1. International – Even affiliates in the UK were unable to join the Ebay affiliate program in the US
2. Payment – Payment is made by Paypal rather than check, with a $10 threshold

International Affiliates

If you are an affiliate based in the US, almost all affiliate marketing doors are open. If you live anywhere else, or if your company is registered somewhere else, you ultimately always hit barriers for your participation.

Ebay International Affiliate Barriers

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay (US) Affiliates FAQ

The Ebay affiliate program is managed by Commission Junction, who provide an international affiliate management system.
Unfortunately Ebay has chosen to separate their affiliate program by territory, at least for some.
Affiliates based in the US can join the affiliate program of other counties, affiliates outside the US cannot join the US program… one day the European Union might decide that is not free trade.

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay UK Affiliate FAQ:-

It is not Commission Junctions fault, they provide an international platform, although it is confusing for affiliates to identify which affiliate programs they are entitled to join.

International Payment

With Paypal being offered there are several advantages

• Low $10 payment threshold
• No excessive charges for processing international checks
• No delays in cashflow (though it is not specified how quickly AuctionAds will pay)

This might not be a universal advantage for all affiliates, because Commission Junction do offer direct bank transfers in a number of territories. A lot will depend on how AuctionAds calculate when a payment is due.
If their system allows for them to make payments faster than Commission Junction, that is a significant advantage.

There is no need to sign up for our affiliate program because our affiliate program is built right into the ads you display! If a user clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” that is displayed and signs up for our service you earn a bonus 2% of all revenue generated by that user for the 6 months.

You will get paid the first of every month via Paypal. We feature a 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Ebay With TradeDoubler

I noticed that the affiliate program for Ebay.pl is actually handled via TradeDoubler – I don’t currently publish any sites in Polish, but that might be something I will look into for some of my future publishing – maybe their Ebay interface is more “International Friendly”.
I do know that the payment threshold quoted was 150 zloty – $50 USD which is far higher than the $10 Threshold offered by AuctionAds.

If TradeDoubler doesn’t provide global Geo-targetting, it would only be suitable for non-English language sites, at least compared to AuctionAds.

Other Advantages of Auction Ads

What is the advantage over CJ/eBay direct affiliation?

Easy implementation and the leverage of AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and our ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own affiliate relationship.

I have niche websites which receive 90% US traffic, but I have never been able to offer Ebay as an alternative sales channel. Whilst I have been able to use Chitika adverts, and have included affiliate links through mainly Linkshare, Ebay quite often was offering much better deals for the products my visitors wanted to buy.

Being able to offer the best deals and make money from doing so is always the best option for affiliates.

Live AuctionAds Examples

So here are some example “live” adverts – no screenhots you will have to click through if reading this in an RSS Reader.

Keyword: Blogging

Keyword: Internet Marketing

Keyword: Gardening and “Mole trap”

Feature Suggestions

• Keyword Targetting – very much like Chitika, a very specific product related keyword seems to be the best option currently. I am not actually sure it would be an advantage to offer contextual or based on several keywords. I did try comma delimited keywords and they didn’t seem to work. Maybe category + keyword would be a good alternative.
• Remove Ads By AuctionAds – if you wanted to place 3 half-banners vertically because that suited your layout, the AuctionAds link in each of them would be inappropriate. Alternatively provide multiple image alignment options – also allow the colour to be changed
• RSS Feeds – I would love to be able to use an RSS feed of the adverts, that I could then use to style in whatever way I choose.
• Direct Affiliate Link – Please provide a direct affiliate link – I missed the link in the interface which is under Account Home.
• Pay Per Click – It would be great if AuctionAds in some way to provide a bridge for international affiliates to advertise Ebay products in the US market via PPC
• auctionads_ad_client – for the tin-foil hat brigade, there needs to be a way of generating multiple values for every niche website. Maybe you can do a deal with Google Yahoo and MSN so these don’t appear in search results, but that isn’t total anonymity.
• Campaigns – Ability to create a campaign on the fly, or at least while you are creating code – this is possible using the wizard, but it seems you have 3 seperate processes currently, and it should be possible to have just one.
• Presets – the ability to save a preset for colour selection, and maybe retain a complete history of ads already created for different campaigns.
• Live Results – Currently the number of results are displayed using Ajax, it would be good to be able to preview them
• Hide Campaign ID – The ability to have none human readable campaign identification (this seems to have been added while I was writing) – I would love to be able to assign my own (as above, campaigns on-the-fly)

Take A Look For Yourself

I strongly encourage you to take a look at AuctionAds for yourself. If you are an international affiliate, it is in my opinion the best option for the Ebay affiliate program, other than features such as PPC and various RSS and API integration. If that can be added to the mix at a later date, AuctionAds as a conduit for Ebay is going to be huge.

Where is the link? At the bottom of the example ads or just click here.

Further Discussion

Actually very few sites so far have picked this up, so I will add links as I see them

Techcrunch seems to be first with the news – they are thinking about giving it a test run on their more product related sites. The advantage AuctionAds for them is that it is Geo-targetted – AuctionAds handle the backend merging of multiple affiliate programs.

Linda at 5 Star Affiliates so far has what she admits to being a short writeup, but she has spotted that sometimes the auction items are expired. She has also managed to hack an affiliate referral ID, which I will have to take a look at doing as well.

Update on AuctionAds

Darren emphasised that AuctionAds is very much a network that will work best with product focused sites. He says he has also had a chance to have a look at the backend – I am not sure that is behind the scenes of what a normal publisher sees, but Mediawhiz normally put together fairly solid services, and I am sure Shoemoney’s team have the security under control.

John Chow also did an in-depth review of of AuctionAds explaining how the payment system works for normal Ebay affiliates in great depth, and also how he intends to use the adverts on his product reviews sites.

Ajay has knocked together some code for making AuctionAds to a certain extent “contextual”, either using UTW or SimpleTags Data.
I don’t think this approach is ideal currently, because I have had a chance to exchange emails with Ddn and currently the widget uses keywords supplied randomly rather than in priority order, unlike Chitika which uses a priority scale. This is something that will be fixed in the near future.

This is important, take for instance this example (though unlikely a good example for Ebay content)

wordpress theme, wordpress, blogging

If these were used randomly, you would probably end up with more adverts which used the keyword blogging, and you might end up with Britney Spears T-shirts or other celebrity stuff. The adverts are often being optimised based on which adverts will finish soon.

If they are taken in priority order then this is ideal, and you could use

barcode number, camera model, camera manufacturer, camera type, photography

For many blogs, using a mixture of custom fields and categories might prove better for targetting, because they can be listed in a specific order. UTW allows tags to be displayed in popularity order, so maybe that could be reversed to achieve almost the same thing.

Tags: affiliate, Affiliate Marketing, auctionads, blog monetization, blogging, cashflow, Ebay, ebay affiliate program, international affiliates, Make Money, mediawhiz, monetization, niche marketing, niche website, shoemoney, tags, utw
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