Deranged Penguin - Affiliate Marketing Done Right

The Niche Blog Workshop, Step Two – Keyword Phrases

September 27, 2009 – 11:08 pm

There’s a musical called “Title of Show” that is about writing a musical. It’s a meta-musical (could it be anything else?) that focuses on the creation of a musical. There’s a great song in it called “Nine People’s Favorite Thing” –

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing

That song didn’t know it, but it was talking about long tail keywords. The development of intelligent search strings that we can leverage is all about becoming nine people’s favorite thing. You want specificity so that your appearance in the search results matches a specific need. You want to directly answer the question posed by a subset of that search audience. If it’s a huge subset, great, but the material point is to be the answer for somebody. If it’s nine people, fine. As the song says,

Those nine people will tell nine people
Then we’ll have eighteen people loving the show
Then eighteen people could grow into
Five-hundred and twenty-five-thousand, six-hundred people
Loving our show

We are building that kind of base for the new niche blog – we want to be hyper relevant to some small sector of the universe, and then grow into a position of prominence. We want the ranking to be organic and real rather than arbitrarily inflated.

Let’s look at a sample search.

This is our competition, at least as far as content goes. Fathers.com has the domain name going for it. Zen Habits is a fantastic blog that pulls lots of views and counts other powerful bloggers among its readership. I didn’t know anything about the Art of Manliness, so I followed the link…and what do you know, the post was guest-written by Zen Habits’ own Leo Babauta. So in effect, Zen Habits has two of the top three. It’s my belief that Leo does things right, and I also think you’re unlikely to unseat anyone on the basis of this keyword. We’re going to need to find some others…
Read More »

By derangedpenguin | Posted in blogging | Tagged Family, Father, Fatherhood, Google search, Keywords, Leo Babauta, Men, Rhetoric, search attention, search audience, search results, search terms, Zen Habits | Comments (0)

The Niche Blog Workshop, Step One – Picking a Niche.

September 24, 2009 – 11:41 pm

So despite asking folks to brainstorm some niche topics, you left it to me to pick one out. The truth is, it was more than I could have expected. We haven’t built trust yet. We’re not there. But I also didn’t want to just focus on Der Pengy. That’s already rolling and it doesn’t conform to the goals of going step by step. Instead, we’re going to focus on a new niche that gets us decent consumer return for keyword strings and useful content hooks for a variety of keyword phrases (clustering, remember?). We’re going to go deep on a couple of different potential affiliate programs with static pages, and we’re going to queue a month’s worth of content. By the end of this month, we’ll have the action plan. By the end of October I hope to provide you with some traffic and monetization results that are better than “nobody came.”

But, first things first: the niche. Because I get to choose (and thank heaven for that) I decided to go with something that means a lot to me. It’s always easier to write when you have some skin in the game, so I’m going to create a content site around fatherhood and raising strong girls. I might stretch into domestic topics that we all know and love from mommy blogs, but I’m more likely to write successfully if I’m talking about men’s interest stuff, male solutions to girl issues, and Reviving Ophelia. Plus, y’know, all the good stuff – vasectomies, turning into a fat sack of guts, and what to do when you’re outnumbered three to one.

There is decent competition for the keywords I’m looking to leverage, but first I’m going to once again leave it open to y’all to determine how we’re going to make adsense work for us within the niche. What products spring to mind? What sort of keyword phrases do we want to focus on? We’re going to have two or three static pages that feature rich content on a particular topic of interest to dads (I’ll give you a hint – one of them will involve feeding the ravenous hordes when mom’s away). We’re going to blog around five or so categories. Those will be the opportunities for adsense and for affiliate links.

What would you do, if you’d found your passion? Use my example or make up your own, and rock those comments!

By derangedpenguin | Posted in advertising, blogging | Tagged AdSense, affiliate marketing, content site, Internet marketing, Keywords, niche blogging, Rhetoric, vasectomies, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)

Sit ‘N’ Go with Acme People Search.

September 23, 2009 – 10:33 pm

The standard term for single table poker tournaments online is “sit ‘n’ go.” It’s exactly what it sounds like – eight to ten people pay an entry fee, sit down with the same number of chips, and duke it out until there’s only one person left. Usually three places are paid – everyone else walks away with nothing. Third place does a little bit better than a refund. First place is usually something like 2.5 times the entry fee. The entry fee can be $1.25 or it can be $225, or even more.

Whole systems have been set up where the entire point is to treat ever increasing entry fees as a ladder of sorts, so that first you win a small one, then you enter a tournament with a slightly higher entry fee, and if you place you re-enter at that level. When and if you win, you move up another notch, and so on. I don’t know how sustainable that system is, but the point is that you risk a small amount, then you risk a little more, and so on. You progress slowly.

There’s a way to do this with Acme People Search. The first step, signing up to get your own personal search engine, is free. (Mine is PeeplSeek.com.) During that sign-up step, you have to confirm your contact information and then you are instructed to sign up for three different affiliate programs – ClickBank, HD Publishing, and MyLife. That’s fine, those are free as well. Now you have a search engine and your affiliate links show up roughly once every three times someone visits the page (35% of the time). They don’t necessarily have to even search – they can click on one of the text links below the search box to view various products that are related to public records searching, background checks, and other things related to people search (remember, the goal in any niche web effort is to provide a cluster of opportunities for the end user to find what they need). If you work hard and drive traffic to your search engine through free methods like article marketing, you can develop a decent little income stream. You’re only getting paid one third of the time, but on the other hand, you haven’t paid a dime for the opportunity.

Step two in the system helps you monetize the site even further by adding AdSense to the mix – and bumping your affiliate advertising display rate to 65% – but to do that you have to choose a hosting provider and get your search engine installed on your own domain name. Now we’re talking some money – you’ll pay HostGator $8.00 a month for a “Baby Gator” plan to host your search engine, or else you’ll pay GDI $10.00 a month for hosting and an additional income opportunity. So, we’ve reached the point where you are obliged to pay. I understand that there are some people who do not want to go there immediately. That’s okay. Let’s take a ladder approach –

HostGator for a year is $96, and GDI for a year is $120. But, just like the affiliate programs in step one, the HostGator affiliate program is free to join, and pays $50 per signup minimum. If you drive more sales, you’ll make a higher commission per sale. So, go get yourself a HostGator affiliate ID. Spend time with their sales materials, and learn how to drive traffic to HostGator. If you make two sales, you’ve paid for a year of hosting on the Baby Gator plan. If you make three, you can go for GDI. Make four, and you very nearly cover the cost of both. Now you have a hosting plan for two different websites (this is how Der Pengy was born). All of this assumes, of course, that you rely on free advertising methods. That’s fine – it may take longer but right now you are getting your feet wet. And you’re risking nothing by trying.

So now we come to step three – $29.95 per month paid to Acme to lock in a 100% display rate for your affiliate links on your site, get the “high volume” commission rate for any HostGator signup, and also receive some help from Tissa building a strong downline with GDI. This is a big step – you need $360 per year to cover the costs. But here’s the thing: by now you should know whether you can make that or not. You will have seen the kind of success you can have with the affiliate programs. You will know a lot more about how your search engine converts on sales of other products, and you will be able to make a decision about whether you take it to the next level. It’s hard to think of it right out of the gate, but if you think of it as just another step up the ladder, it becomes much simpler.

You can spend a year at step one or you can spend five minutes there. The same is true of all the steps. I should mention that there are free trials for steps two and three, and also that if you commit to being a teacher and source of support in the world famous Acme People Search Forums, you have the opportunity to have all of the program fees paid back to you every month. So in the time it takes you to learn how to earn, you might already be a valued member of a learning community – so much so that you will get the entire system for free.

Take the smallest step to success right away, then lean on the experience and knowledge of the forum community and Tissa himself. Pretty soon you’ll be “all in” and loving it.