If you have installed Wordpress  and the plugins recommended in my Top 10 Wordpress Plugins article, you ‘ll currently have a blog that looks like the generic Wordpress blog, containing a hello world post, and an about page.

Note: You can click images to enlarge them.

We still have a fair bit of customizing to do, but I want to show you how to add a homepage for your site.  When this is up, it will mean that the search engines can at least get some meaningful content to index, and you can tweak this over the coming weeks as we complete the Wordpress to Affiliate Site customizations in preparation for adding more content.

Before that, I recommend you watch a new video I uploaded giving a brief overview of the Top 10 Wordpress plugins that you have installed, and what they do. 

You can view the video on the Top 10 Wordpress plugins page.

Scroll to the bottom of that page for the video.

OK, back to the homepage.

Login to your Wordpress Dashboard.

Click on the Manage -> Posts menu at the top to open up a list of existing Wordpress posts.

You’ll see a post with the title "Hello World".  This is the post that is seen on your Wordpress blog after initial install, and was put there by Wordpress to get you started.

If you click the title of the post, it will take you to the editing screen where you can edit the post.

If necessary, click the back button on your browser to go back to the Manage Posts screen.

Click the check box at the beginning of this line, and then click the Delete button (above the list of posts on the left).

If you go back to your blogs homepage (you can click the View Site button), you’ll see that the homepage has changed.  It now says "Not Found - Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here."

That’s because you have deleted the only post in your blog.

OK, back in your Wordpress dashboard, click the Manage - Pages menu at the top of the screen.

You’ll see an About page exists.  I recommend you delete that as well at this stage.  We will be recreating all the "support pages" we need later in the tutorials.

You have just deleted the only content your blog had.  We need to add some…

We are going to add a homepage. 

We’ll explore the differences between pages and posts in a later tutorial, but for now, click the Write -> Page (NOT Post).  We want to create a PAGE for the homepage.

Now you are on your own for a bit. This is the page you’ll see (click to enlarge):

Enter a title for the homepage.  This is going to be the title of the visible page (not the title in the meta tags).

Enter in the content of your homepage.  I would recommend just adding text at the moment.  What you are trying to do is setup a homepage that the search engines can index now.

I recommend that you click the Full Screen button in the WYSIWYG editor, so that you have a little more space. 

NOTE: On occasions, when saving information into a post or page, my computer returns with an error as if my network connection had timed out.  This resulted in loss of data on more than one occasion.  I always recommend saving your work as you go, or the alternative is to create your content in a text editor, and then copy and paste it into your Wordpress Dashboard.  There are even some applications that run off-line that can post to your blogs, and if interested, I would recommend you look at the free one by Microsoft called "Windows Live Writer".  Mac users can no doubt find alternatives.

Microsoft Live Writer allows you to format content, add images, select categories for posting, etc, and then publish when you are happy with a click of a button.  Its very cool.  The only downside is that you will need to login to your Wordpress Dashboard to fill in the meta data accepted by the Headspace plugin you installed.

When you are happy with your content, enter 4 or 5 tags in the box provided. 

Think of tags as words that define your content.  If you were to file your content away in a filing system, what categories would you put it under?  These are the types of words to put in the tags.

Scroll down the page a little more, and enter the Headspace Title and Description.  These will be used as the meta tags in your homepage, so take time to get them right.

As you scroll down, you’ll a section called Comments & Pings. 

We’ll look in more detail at these two concepts, but for now, click the little arrow to the left of the "Comments & Pings" section to open it up, and then uncheck "Allow Comments".  We don’t really want comments on the homepage, but that is your choice.  If you do, you can leave it checked.

OK, that’s it for your homepage at the moment.  Scroll back to the top, and look for the "Publish" button.  It’s right next to the Save button that you hopefully used while writing your content.

NOTE: There is also a preview button that opens the page you are working on in a new window.  This is useful to check your content before going live with it. e.g. are images showing up properly?  Are the paragraphs laid out properly, do links work, etc.  

You have just created the page to be used as your homepage, but if you click "View Site", you wont see it there yet.  You will however see a link to it in the right hand sidebar.

To get Wordpress to use this page as your blog homepage, you need to tell it to do so.

Click on the Settings -> Reading menu at the top.

You’ll see the fist item on the page is "Front Page Displays".  This tells Wordpress what you want to display on your homepage.

Click the radio button to enable "A Static Page".  Open up the "Front Page" drop down box, and select your newly created homepage.

Scroll down and click the "Save Changes" button.

Now when viewing your blog homepage, you’ll see the homepage content you just created.

OK, hopefully you have uploaded the top 10 Wordpress Plugins.  The next step is to activate them so that your Wordpress install is “using” them.

Login to your Wordpress Dashboard, and click on the link to the plugins page.

When you get to that page, you should see your plugins listed.

There are two things to notice here.  Each plugin has an “Activate” and “Edit” button.   Click the “Activate” button to activate the plugin.  The page will refresh, and the word “Activate” changes to “Deactivate”.  If you want to turn the plugin off, click the deactivate button.

The other thing to notice is that some plugins may have a note saying there is a new version of the plugin.  This is great, because you can quickly keep plugins up-to-date by clicking on the “upgrade automatically” link. After the upgrade has succeeded (I have never had one yet that didn’t), you will need to click the link back to the plugins page so you can continue activating and upgrading plugins.

Try it if you have any plugins that need upgrading.

Go through each plugin in turn, and activate, followed by upgrading to the latest version.

Once you have activated the plugins, you will need to go in and add some important information into some of them so that they can work properly.

e.g. After activating the Akismet plugin, you will see the following text at the top of the page:

Akismet is almost ready. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work.

Click on the link to “enter your Wordpress.com API key”, and you will be taken to a page that requires you to enter the Wordpress API Key.  On that page is a link to “Get Your Key”.  Follow that link, and get your key.  You can then enter this into your Akismet plugin page, and also select the checkbox that says “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.”

Your blog will now be largely protected from Spam, as Akismet will catch most spam comments and file them away so you never see them.

Once all plugins have been activated, your admin area for your Wordpress blog will look a little different.  For starters, the Lighter Menus plugin will have replaced the awkward menu system with a drop down menu that is much easier and faster to deal with.  You will also have some new menus:

You will see that some of the menu items refer to the plugins that you have activated.

Your next job is to go through the plugin configuration screens and enter any required information into each.  Check the documentation that came with the plugin for more details.

You’ll find new plugins accessible under the “Manage”,  “Design”, “Comments”, “Database”, “Settings” & “Plugins” menus.

I would recommend you have a play around with the menus.  Look at each item in the menus, and fill out any configuration data needed by the plugins.  Most of all, have fun.  This interface is going to be your best friend very soon.

Here is my top 10 Wordpress Plugins.  I do use others, but these are the first ones I install when I setup a new Wordpress site.

1. Google XML Sitemaps - you installed this one last week.

2. TinyMCE Advanced - this plugin enhances the editor in Wordpress (where you write your content), and has a lot of nice features.

3. Lighter Menus - This plugin replaces the cumbersome menu system in Wordpress with nice drop down menus.  This not only looks better, but also speeds up common tasks by making the menus easy to use.

4. All in One Adsense and YPN - There are other plugins that handle Adsense, but this one has a 5 start rating, so should be good.

5. Akismet - helps to filter out spam comments.  This requires some setting up, but we’ll cover that in a later tutorial.

6. AddThis - Social Bookmarking plugin.

• Click on the “Get Your Button” image
• Select Sharing/Bookmarking button from the first drop down list.
• Select the look you like.
• Select “On a blog” from the next drop down list.
• Select Wordpress from the blog type.

You’ll then be taken to a page with further instructions.  Follow the instructions to get your button.

7. Ultimate Google Analytics - this will be used with Google Analytics to track visitors.

8. Wordpress automatic upgrade - this will help you keep your copy of Wordpress up-to-date, which is an important security issue.

9. WP-DBManager - allow you to backup, restore and a whole lot more.

10. HeadSpace2 - Allows you to specify meta tags and page titles, plus a lot more if you need it.

I have recorded a short video showing an overview of what these plguins do:

Adding ever-changing content of any kind to your site is a good thing.

Reasons include:

• Pages that change regularly are seen as fresh by the search engines, which brings the search bots back to your site more frequently, and possibly help your site rank better.
• Visitors will come back if your page content changes often.
• New, current content for your site should be a target of all webmasters.

RSS feeds offer the busy Webmaster a big advantage.

1. RSS Feeds can be set to auto-update on your site without the Webmaster having to do anything.
2. Feeds will bring the LATEST news to your site, giving your visitors the latest information in your niche.

Armed with a free website script called Carp, and an FTP program such as the excellent (and also free) Filezilla, you can add RSS feeds to any site in a matter of minutes.

Download the Filezilla Client software here.

Download Carp Here.

In this example, I’ll show you how to add the RSS feed for my ezSEO Newsletter blog to a website.
Step 1. Download and unzip Carp

Once you have downloaded and unzipped Carp, you will have a folder that contains the following files (note: I have the paid version, so you may see slightly different files in the free version).

Step 2. Uploading the files to your server

Run Filezilla, and setup an account for logging into your domain space.

If you are unsure how to do this, read the Filezilla help file, and contact your web hosting company for the necessary information.

Select & Drag across the carp folder, and the carpsetup.php file from your local folder to your webspace.

Step 3. Install Carp

Once the upload is complete, go to the “carpsetup.php” file on your server using your web browser. Simply type in the full path to the carpsetup.php file on your server.

E.g. http://mydomain.com/ carpsetup.php

For this tutorial, we’ll leave the defaults selected, and then click the continue button.

If the install was successful, you should now find a demo feed being displayed in the web browser:

.. followed by instructions for including the feed on your site:

The last bit of code is the important bit.

Notice that this code is PHP, which means it needs to be inserted on a .php webpage.

Before we go onto that, we first need to delete a couple of files on the server.

The first file to delete is the carpsetup.php file:

The second file is inside the carp folder, so double-click the carp folder to access its contents.

You need to delete the carpsetupinc.php file.

Step 4. Adding the php code to your site

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t use the .php extension on my webpages, and I don’t want to start switching existing page extensions. I also don’t want to use .php extensions on new pages just so I can include a feed.

Here is how to get around this.

1. Create a php file to hold the carp script code.
Simply create a file and call it something like feed.php. Then paste in the code you were given by the carp install.

2. Save the file and upload it to your server.
Upload the file to your domains “root folder”.

3. Use Server Side Include to include the php file in your web page.
SSI is a really useful tool for webmasters, and one that is well worth learning how to use. For a Linux server, type the following code into your webpage where you want the RSS feed to display:

NOTE: This assumes the page you are inserting this into is in the same folder as the feed.php file.

4. Upload the modified webpage to your server.

5. Modify the .htaccess file.
If you tried looking at your page, you would still not see a feed. You need to tell your server that the pages on your site need to be “parsed” – i.e. checked for server side includes. This is easy. Assuming you are using a Linux server, add the following line to your .htaccess file:


AddHandler server-parsed .html

You can add this line anywhere in the .htaccess file. If you do not have an .htaccess file in the root folder of your site, contact your web hosting company. You should just be able to create one.

6. Load your site.
Now when you go and look at your web page, you’ll see the demo Gecko Tribe feed:

7. Changing the feed.
You probably want to choose a feed that is related to your site. Here, I’ll show you how to add the feed for my own Wordpress blog to your site. The code used in the feed.php file is as follows:

require_once '/xxxx/xxxx/xxx/carp/carp.php';
// Add any desired configuration settings before CarpCacheShow
// using "CarpConf" and other functions

CarpCacheShow(’http://www.geckotribe.com/press/rss/pr.rss’);
?>

You need to change the last line. CarpCacheShow is the command used by carp to identify the feed. The feed currently being used is:

http://www.geckotribe.com/press/rss/pr.rss

Change this to point to the feed you want to display. In this case, the URL of my feed is:

http://ezseonews.com/blog/feed

My new php code is therefore:
require_once '/xxxx/xxxx/xxx/carp/carp.php';
// Add any desired configuration settings before CarpCacheShow
// using "CarpConf" and other functions

CarpCacheShow(’ http://ezseonews.com/blog/feed ‘);
?>

Refreshing my webpage now shows me the ezSEO News feed:

The next step is to modify the carp php file to format, and change the way the feed is displayed. You can read how to do this in the Carp Documentation, but for now, let me just show you what my final php code is for this feed (new additions are in bold). You can copy the exact code yourself, you just need to change the location of the carp.php file in the first line of the php script:

require_once '/xxxx/xxxx/xxx/carp/carp.php';
// Add any desired configuration settings before CarpCacheShow
// using "CarpConf" and other functions
CarpConf('maxitems',3);
CarpConf('ai','

‘);
CarpConf(’iorder’,'link,desc’);
CarpConf(’bidesc’,’‘);
CarpConf(’aidesc’,’‘);
CarpConf(’maxidesc’,145);
CarpConf(’atruncidesc’,'…’);
CarpConf(’descriptiontags’,'b|/b|i|/i’);

CarpConf(’poweredby’,”);

CarpCacheShow(’ http://ezseonews.com/blog/feed ‘);
?>

Here is the display of my final feed:

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

To see how to find other RSS feeds to display, read the Carp documentation.

To see what extras are included in the paid version of Carp, read the documentation that comes with Carp SE.

There is a lot of planning and decision-making involved in starting an affiliate site. It is tempting to take short-cuts because everyone wants to see quick results. However, I cannot emphasize enough the need to take your time.

Follow each stage carefully, and don’t move on to the next until you are 100% happy with the previous step.

Let’s look at an overview of the complete process from start to finish, a kind of summary for the whole of this course.

2.1. Process of building a “FAT” Affiliate site

1. Identify a profitable niche (which includes checking for products that you can promote).
2. Carry out keyword research to find out what people are actually searching for at the search engines.
3. Analyze your keyword research and split your keywords into groups, according to their future use on your site.
4. Sign up with a web host, so that you can get your site on the web. This particular stage is very important since not all web hosts are equal and it is a pain to change over to a new host when you find your current one is not living up to your expectations. To confuse matters further, price is not a good indicator of quality.
5. Buy a domain name, and set up your host ready to upload your pages.
6. Create pages “pre-selling” the products you are promoting. It is important to create quality content that helps your visitors with their buying decisions, as this not only makes your site valuable, it also helps prevent being labelled as a thin affiliate.
7. Add tracking code to your pages, so that you can analyze where your visitors come from, how many, and how they found your pages in the first place.
8. Join affiliate programs that provide products related to your chosen niche. It is often better to have the basic site up an running before trying to sign up for affiliate programs, since many merchants will want to see the site you are going to promote them on.
9. Add affiliate links, and/or Adsense to your pages.
10. If you are selling your own product, create a sales page for the product, sign up with Paypal or another payment processor, and add a Buy button or link to your sales page. Also you need to create an eBook “cover image” for your product, and add this image to the pages of your site so that anyone visiting a page, can see your eBook and click through to the eBook sales page if they are interested in more information.
11. Link your pages together into a site, so that it helps your visitor, the search engines, and your rankings.
12. Upload what you have done so far so that it can be found and indexed by the search engines. Get a link to your site from another site that is already in Google so that the search engines can find your site.
13. Add quality content in the form of articles that are 100% relevant to your niche. These again should be quality articles, which are informative, and provide a genuine “value” to your site. Add these slowly over time, so that your site appears to grow in size naturally.
14. Get links to your site. This can be done in several ways, and not all of them are painful!

Repeat steps 13 and 14.

That’s it. You may not be following every step (depending on whether you are going to offer your own products), but that list of points are the ones you will follow on the road to a fat affiliate site.

A word of warning, and I cannot stress this enough - You can spend weeks or months going through all these steps and create a large site that is well designed, but unless your content (the stuff you write on the pages) is quality, valuable and genuinely informative, your site will not do well. The most important part of any site is the content, so don’t skip on quality. Make sure that you would be proud to show your content to a Google engineer. If you can’t honestly say you would be happy to do this, don’t publish it on your site. You will be killing any potential your site had to do well.

This video shows how to install a plugin into Wordpress. The plugin installed in this video is a Google XML Sitemap generator, but the principle for installing any plugin is the same, so follow along with this one, and you should be able to install any plugin you want.

Installing a Wordpress Plugin Video:

Any questions or comments, please leave them below as comments.

For those with cPanel hosting, and Fantastico, I have created this video to show you how easy it is to get Wordpress up and running on your domain.  Note though, that I highly recommend you learn how to install Wordpress manually using FTP because you will need to use FTP to install plugins.

FTP is easy….

OK, installing Wordpress by Fantastico video:

As always, leave comments below if you have trouble following this video, or just have questions.

In the “leaked” raters report mentioned earlier, Google goes on to highlight several common spam techniques.  Here they are:

Spam technique 1 - Sneaky redirects

Have you ever clicked on a search result in Google, but the URL you end up at is not the one listed in Google’s results? = SNEAKY REDIRECT.
Similarly, if you click on a link on a website and it takes you to a URL that is not the one referenced by the link = SNEAKY REDIRECT.

Not all redirects are sneaky.  Some are there for good reason and don’t try to deceive your visitors.  Examples of this might include using your .htaccess file to redirect to affiliate links.  This technique is widely used to hide affiliate links from visitors, or make URLs shorter and easier to remember.  I doubt Google would include this as a sneaky redirect.  Another safe type of redirect is a 301 redirect typically used to move a site from one domain to another.

If your redirect is not there to deceive your visitor, then it is probably OK.

Spam technique 2 - 100% Frame

This technique is a form of cloaking.  On clicking a link in Google’s search results, the page you are taken to has the URL of the page you expect, but a frame is used to show the contents of a completely different page.

The result is that Google’s spider indexes and ranks the original page, but the page shown to visitors is a different one.

This is considered spam.

Spam technique 3 - Hidden Text / Hidden Links

Invisible text is easily done.  Create the text or links in the same colour as the background colour.  To the visitor, that text is invisible.  To the search engine spiders that see only the raw HTML, they are there.

Often these can be spotted when you visit a web page by using the keyboard combination CTRL + A.  This selects all text on the page, and hidden text can then be seen as they are highlighted by the browser.

Another form of hiding links is to hyperlink to a page using punctuation.  e.g. linking a “.” to a webpage.  Its not invisible, but it is an attempt to hide a link from the visitor.

Another form of link hiding that I have seen is to have a phrase hyperlinked to several different documents.  To the visitor, the hyperlink looks like a normal link, but move your mouse cursor along the link and you will see the address in the status bar at the bottom of your browser change to reveal different URLs for different parts of the phrase.

Spam technique 4 - Porn on expired domains.

A technique often used by webmasters is to buy old domains with existing PR and backlinks and using that PR to get ranked well for an unrelated topic.

This relates to all niches, not just Porn.

Spam technique 5 - Secondary Search Results / PPC

These are pages set up purely to collect PPC revenue without providing much relevant content of their own.  e.g. Traffic Equalizer sites.  For those still arguing that TE is a good tool (you are in the minority), Google specifically mentions that the pages it wants marked as spam are those that contain search results feeds, and not much else.

Google also mentions sites that have directories setup to include DMOZ listings.  However, it only specifies that these should be penalised if they contain PPC advertising e.g. Adsense.  Those setup without Adsense are obviously providing the visitors with a service and should be ignored (links to relevant sites in your directory is value added for your visitor).

Think about the motives for setting up a directory like this.  Is it for revenue, or for visitors? If the former, Google want it marked as spam.  If it is the latter, you are OK for now.

Spam technique 6 - Thin Affiliate Doorway pages

To cut through this section and give you a summary, Google considers affiliate pages that don’t provide useful content to the visitor as spam.  e.g. a page setup purely for ushering visitors to an affiliate program is considered spam, if that page does not provide the visitor with useful information or a useful service.

Pages that add value, and are useful to the visitors even if the affiliate links were removed are OK.

What this means is that you need to provide interesting, unique content on your pages.  Create a page that will really interest your visitor, and then affiliate links are OK.

Again, ask yourself this question.

“If I removed all advertising from this page, would it be useful and/or interesting to a visitor?”

If yes, your page is safe.  If not, it would be marked as spam by a rater.

The report continues with the same sort of guidelines, but nothing new.

To Summarize this report:  To keep your affiliate sites safe:

1. Create every single page for the visitor.
2. Give the visitor a useful service.

For Example

• Review something, then provide an affiliate link.  That is fine.
• Do surveys on the site and provide the survey results, and your affiliate links are probably fine.
• Create a page that compares prices from different sources and your page is fine.
• Create a page that reviews different merchants, and helps your visitor make the correct buying decision and you are fine.
• Create unique, relevant and interesting/entertaining content on your site, and the affiliate links will be fine.
• Don’t use any technique that is only there for the search engine spider.

For your affiliate site to be safe, create a site that provides “a service” to your visitors.

Google say:

“Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of the website”

and

“Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?”

Is this last point an indication that you should have pages without affiliate links on them?

In my opinion, probably 99% of affiliate sites being built today are “thin”, and won’t do well in Google.

If a thin site gets spotted, it gets penalised.

OK, so how can you make sure your site is not labelled as thin?

This Course is intended to guide you towards building profitable affiliate sites that offer the visitor good value, and won’t be penalised by Google.

In all of your site building activity, “provide something no other site does.”

For example

Think about an affiliate site on Scrapbooking.  There is a range of products you could sell from Amazon or other stationery merchants, but you do run the risk of becoming a thin affiliate, unless you help your visitor in some way, or provide your visitor with something valuable or different that no other site does.

Well, what if you had your own eBook on scrapbooking?  You could put links to it from every page of your site in one of the margins.  You could also promote and sell a range of scrapbooking products from different merchants.  In this way, not only are you providing something unique (your own eBook on the subject), you are also helping your visitors find sources of materials for their hobby.

Incidentally, one of the very first eProducts given to Nicheology members was an eBook on Scrapbooking (in fact, I believe that product is still available for new members).

Nicheology is a membership site that gives its members two eBooks a month that they can edit and call their own.  The site is capped, so new members often have to go on waiting lists to join.  If you are interested, you can join the waiting list at the Nicheology site.

The way this works is that you take the Scrapbooking “Product in the Rough” (as Nicheology calls it), edit it, and compile it into your own eBook.  This can be sold via Paypal, Clickbank or Paydotcom (Clickbank and Paydotcom make it easy for you to get affiliates of your own to sell your book for you).

Your site has just avoided being labelled as thin (assuming you put a little effort into the building of your site and add some quality content).

NOTE: The best format for an eBook is Adobe’s PDF format.  It can be read on PCs and Macs, and avoids the potential virus threats that EXE eBooks can harbour.

The simplest method of compiling an eBook is to use a tool like Docuprinter LT from Neevia.  This tool installs on your computer and allows you to Print to PDF format from your word processor.  E.g. I write my Reports in Microsoft Word, then print them, selecting the Neevia Plugin as my printer.  It creates a flawless PDF document, with contents entries linked to the appropriate section of the document.

I use Docuprinter LT for all eBooks and reports, and it is simple, reliable, and does not have problems with hyperlinks that so many free tools do.  All you do is create your document in your Word Processor, and save it as a PDF.

Above I wrote in brackets ” assuming you put a little effort into the building of your site and add some quality content”.

What does this mean, and how can you avoid potential problems?

Follow this course, and by the end, you will have a site that you would be proud to show a Google representative, or one of their spam-busting, thin affiliate tell-tale raters.

Back in 2004, John Evans released an eBook called Success Alert.  This eBook was a series of interviews with successful Internet marketers who shared their strategies and techniques. The one interview that stuck out to me was a certain Colin McDougall (VEO Report).  Back then, he was making 250k a year from affiliate programs. 

This year, John released Success Alert Volume 2, and I have a discount coupon code for my subscribers. 

First, let me give you a quick review of the eBook.

The thing I like about Success Alert volume 2 (and Success Alert Volume 1) is that the people interviewed in this book are not “gurus”.  These people are making between 60k and 80 million a year, and prefer to remain anonymous and under the radar.  What’s more, in volume 2, John had another criteria for picking his interviewees.  They must make most of their 1ncome outside the “Internet Marketing” niche.

Success Alert volume 2 interview 9 Internet entrepreneurs, each using different Internet business models, so that you get a wide range of experiences to draw on for inspiration and valuable tips.

If nothing else, this volume, like the last, provides fantastic motivation for anyone who feels like jacking it all in.

Let these 9 entrepreneurs inspire you the same way Colin mcDougall did me in volume 1.

Each interview is very in-depth, and finishes with a summary of the main important points you can take away from the interview and apply to your own business.

You will get a look at 9 real businesses, and see exactly what level of work and commitment it takes to run a successful online business. 

While I cannot tell you who the entrepreneurs are, or show you their websites (this information is given in the book), what I can do is highlight a few of the interesting things I found in the interviews in the book.

Entrepreneur #1 -  his website gets 15,000 to 20,000 visitors a day, yet he says SEO for traffic generation is not crucial.  I think you would be surprised at what he thinks is the most important factor for generating traffic.

Entrepreneur #2 - tells you which search engine converts the best for his site.  This is particularly interesting since most people optimize for, and worry about, Google rankings.  This guy also says that he has never gone all-out trying to get links to his site.  How does he get incoming links?  The same way I do of course ;O)

Entrepreneur #3 - During the interview, he describes his target “customer” with such clarity and certainty.  He says he could go to any city, and point out the houses where his target customer lives.  That is very important information when you begin writing a sales letter. This guy knows what he is doing.  No wonder he makes annual sales of 400k.

Entrepreneur #4 - does what a lot of other businesses don’t do very well - put the customer first.  It sounds simple, but read why this business requires a good rapport with customers or it could very well fail. 

Entrepreneur #5 - this business sells around $6 million worth of toys a year, but his target market are not school kids?  What’s going on there?  I would suggest that this is the key to his success.

Entrepreneur #6 - (Note: this is Interview 7 on the Success Alert sales page, but interview 6 in my copy of the book).  This guy provides some excellent advice to anyone starting out.  He highlights the biggest mistake newbies make, and in my opinion, he is spot on.

Entrepreneur #7 - (#6 on the sales page). This guy tells you why he began by giving away his “product”.

Entrepreneur #8 - Explains why growing his business is not about increasing the number of visitors to his website.

Entrepreneur #9 - It’s interesting that this business was started up because the entrepreneurs son came to him and suggested they start an Internet business.  It now has annual sales in excess of $25 million.

I have just given you a small flavour of Success Alert volume 2.  I think it is a cracking book, full of advise, tips and motivational stories.  As I said earlier, I asked John for a coupon code for my subscribers, and he agreed to knock $20 off the pr1ce. 

To get the d1scount:

1. Go to the sales page:

http://ezseonews.com/sa2

2. Click the order button
3. Scroll down the page.  On the right, underneath the order total, you’ll see a coupon code box.  Enter the following into the coupon box:

SA2AW

4. Click the Apply button.
5. The total will refresh, with your $20 discount.
6. Fill in your details, and submit your 0rder.

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I have.

Some have called it a hoax, others have seen it as the end of affiliate marketing, but if you actually read this report, you will hopefully see what I see:

(a) Affiliate sites are here to stay
(b) If you do things right, you will end up with less competition from other affiliate marketers (since so many will ignore this report and continue to churn out thin sites created with little or no focus on the visitor).

This report was apparently given out to people chosen to work for “Google’s spam department” as “Raters” - maybe they should be called ratters ;o).

That’s right, Google apparently has hired people around the world to do web searches, look at the results in Google, and identify those sites that Google should penalize for Spam.

With Google doing such weird stuff lately, and some affiliate sites disappearing without trace, things are starting to make sense.

This “leaked” report details what the raters should look out for, what to label as spam, and what not to label as spam.  I am sure that you agree, whether this document is real or not, it is certainly something we should all look at carefully.

Below, I have highlighted the main points of the report.  I hope to show you exactly what you need to do to stay on the right side of these “Raters” and of course Google itself.

Before we begin, I just want to say that I don’t think any of this is new.  I think that what Google is trying to achieve here is what they have always tried to achieve - relevant results without spam.  I think that Google’s filters only go so far, and Google realise this.  There is nothing as reliable as a human for determining quality, so hiring people to search out spam was the next logical step forward.

OK, let’s look the main points.

(a)    the first thing Google instructs its raters to do is read and learn the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

You can read the full guidelines here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Let’s have a quick look and see what Google have to say about what makes a site good.

Summary of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Under the section Design and Content Guidelines, there are some useful tips on how you link the pages of your site together.

GOOGLE: “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.”

This should make sense.  If a page has no links to it, the search engines cannot find it.  In addition, links pointing to pages help that page rank well (because of the influence of link text).

GOOGLE: “Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.”

A sitemap is there to help users, but the search engines use them to find new pages.  When you add a new page to your site, add a link on the sitemap, and the search engines will find it.  If you want the spiders coming back to your sitemap frequently, consider adding an RSS feed to your sitemap.  Last week I mentioned some software that makes adding a feed to your site very simple, so there is no excuse for not using the technology available to you.

GOOGLE: “Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.”

Here we have a reference to content.  Quality content is the way forward.  Page generators that create 1000s of pages with no unique content are struggling to survive.

GOOGLE: “Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”

An invitation to use primary and secondary keywords.

GOOGLE: “Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.”

An indication here how highly Google ranks keywords, especially in text links.  For a well-optimized site, I do not recommend using fancy image navigation buttons built with JavaScript.  Good old-fashioned text links will help your site get indexed better, and rank higher.

GOOGLE: “Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate. ”

Reading between the lines - don’t stuff keywords.  Write these tags naturally and with ALT tags, make sure they reflect the image (since these tags are used by blind visitors).   The title tag is very important, so do use your primary keyword in the title.  However, be careful with ALT tags.  Keyword stuffing is likely to result in a penalty.

GOOGLE: “Check for broken links and correct HTML.”

Do you have any broken links in your site?  These can cause problems.  Additionally, you should verify your HTML using a service like HTML Validator.  They actually have a free version.

http://www.htmlvalidator.com/

Invalid HTML could be affecting your rankings.

In the Technical Guidelines, there are a few good tips as well:

GOOGLE: “Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID’s, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site. ”

Speaks for itself really.  A lot of new webmasters like to load their pages with fancy animations, scripts and eye-candy.  Avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

Here is an interesting point:

GOOGLE: “Once your site is online, submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. ”

Many marketers including myself never submit sites at this URL.  My advice here is to add a link from a page already in Google, and let Google find the site for itself.  I don’t think I have submitted a page at this URL for over 2 years, and my new sites get found within days, using this linking technique.

GOOGLE: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!. ”

Since directories are highly valued by Google, try to get your site listed in them.  These directories will provide a quick route to getting indexed, as well as provide valuable PR and link reputation for your site.  The way Google probably sees directories listings is that if the site is there, it is quality (since places like DMoz are edited by humans).

If you don’t read all of the Google guidelines, you should at least print out the Quality Guidelines - Basic principles section.

GOOGLE: “Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

Here is a clear warning to webmasters.  Don’t use tricks, and don’t over-optimize your pages.

As I always say “if it makes you nervous, don’t do it”.

Google themselves say something very similar here:

GOOGLE: “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Another bomb-shell for many:

GOOGLE: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighbourhoods” on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

This is a clear indication that Google does not like reciprocal links.  In addition, there is a warning there that linking to a penalised site can cause your own site to get penalised.  A site that is carefully controlling their linking, will be able to spot bad sites, and avoid penalties.  A site that links to all and sundry wont, and are therefore likely to get into trouble.

GOOGLE: “Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.”

This guideline warns against software that automatically checks rankings or other automated tasks.  If you are using a rank checker, make sure that software uses the Google API key (which Google introduced to help developers create Google-friendly software) which can then check Google safely.  This API Key limits the number of automated queries the software can do, and keeps you within safe “Google limits”.

The Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations sections should act as your checklist of things not to do.  Here is the list:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Keeping within Google’s guidelines is so important if you want your site listed.  I highly recommend you print out the entire set of guidelines and read them again and again until you are familiar with them.

OK, back to the Google raters.

Google have told their raters to pay particular attention to:

(b) “The distinction between pages designed for human viewers and those set up for search engine robots”

and

(c) “The specific enumerated manipulative techniques for which sites may be ‘punished’ by Google”

You can see a lot of pages in Google’s index that have been setup purely for search engine robots, or pages that are designed to do nothing more than increase your rankings of other pages.

These are typically pages that hold no interest to human visitors, and are merely there to either manipulate your own rankings, or make revenue from Adsense (or affiliate programs).

Techniques here might include “hidden text”, keyword stuffing, pages containing search engine results (like TE pages), pages that only contain RSS feeds and little else, cloaked pages and doorway pages.

If your page is not interesting for a visitor, and is only setup to get Adsense clicks, or boost rankings of other pages, then these are the pages Google considers spam.

Do this test:

Remove all income generating code from a page (Adsense, affiliate links etc).

Then ask yourself this:

“Is this page still of value to a human visitor?”

If you truthfully answer yes, then you are OK.  If you answer no, then that page would be considered spam by a rater.  Later in this course, we look at a more comprehensive checklist to see whether your pages are thin or not.

OK, so what’s all this about thin affiliates?

In a “leaked” document reportedly coming from Google, the big G gave guidelines to human spam-busters on how to classify affiliate sites as thin or not.

A “thin affiliate” is basically one that creates pages with the sole intention of ranking well and directing traffic to an affiliated merchant site, without adding anything unique to the World Wide Web.

It seems that the algorithms at Google HQ are no longer the only ranking factors involved in where your pages end up in the search results.  Now, human beings are scouring the Internet looking for sites to penalise.

Here is the report:

http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc

(If you get asked for a username and password, just cancel twice, and the document should show up).

Advantages of Wordpress in no particular order:

1. Online access using your web browser means you can add content from any computer, anywhere in the world.

2. “WYSIWYG” editor. This stands for “What You See Is What You Get”. In other words, you can create your content in the editor, and see how it is going to look as you create it. Format headers, add images, and see it right there in the editor.

3. Automatic updates of menus and pages as you add new content. One of the “pains” associated with traditional web editors is that you need to add new pages to menus, sitemaps, etc

4. Huge following for Wordpress, and therefore a lot of support.

5. Plugins make Wordpress extendable. Adding new features is as easy as uploading some files, and activating the plugin.

6. It’s fr.ee

7. Lot’s of fr.ee themes to change the look and feel of your site quickly, and effortlessly.

8. WordPress adheres to W3C standards for XHTML and CSS.

9. WordPress has a built-in trackback or pingback feature.

10. Frequent updates.

11. Easy to install.

12. Easy to update existing “pages”, or add new ones.

13. Comments can be posted by site visitors, naturally growing your content.

If you are a seasoned Wordpress user, I am sure you can come up with even more benefits. Please feel free to add them as comments to this post. No need to register to leave a comment.

For those of you that are new to Wordpress, hopefully you can see that this platform has a lot going for it.

There are a number of different things to look out for when you sign up for an affiliate program. Not all affiliate programs look out for their affiliates because to them you are nothing more than a faceless source of free traffic. Some of the way this is done are obvious, but others are less so. Here we expose certain techniques that you should look out for when deciding upon an affiliate program to promote.

1. Link to affiliate program

Popular amongst Clickbank affiliate programs, links to Join Affiliate Program or Make Money web pages are the quickest way for you to lose your commission after sending a visitor to a product page. A lot of visitors will simply sign up themselves and buy through their own link. They get a discount, the merchant makes his percentage, you get nothing.

2. Toll Free Numbers on the sales page

Toll free numbers on sales pages are a great thing for the merchant because the visitor has an extra way to part with their cash quickly and easily. However, most merchants (not all) don’t have anything in place to track phone orders to the referring affiliate. Because of this, you don’t get the commission you deserve from your referral.

3. Demo versions of software

If the merchant provides a demo version of their software product which can be bought after a trial period, does the affiliate get commission. In some cases yes, in others no. The best situation would be if the merchant provided you with your own demo version with affiliate link embedded, so that you could offer the demo from your own site. Then when the visitor buys throught he software, you get your rightful commission.

4. Affiliate banners on the merchants own sales page

This one is an annoying source of affiliate leakage. Some merchants have taken to joining affiliate programs themselves so that if the visitors you refer to them don’t buy their own products, they (the merchant) can make commissions themselves for the affiliate programs they are promoting. This way the merchant makes money on your referral - you make nothing.

When we look at affiliate programs to include in this directory, they must pass stringent criteria. These are designed to protect your affiliate commissions and make sure that you get paid for sales generated from your referral link.

These 4 criteria are essential to get listed in this directory:

1. No link to the merchant’s affiliate program on the sales page.

2. If a toll-free number is located on the sales page, there must be a way of tracking phone orders to the referring affiliate.

3. If there are demo versions of the product, there must be tracking in place to make sure that sales are assigned to the correct affiliate.

4. No Affiliate banners on the merchants own sales page, or other links that can take your referral off the merchant site without making a commission.

In addition, we will be looking at ways in which the merchants goes above and beyond to ensure affiliates are well looked after. This can include things like:

1. Using special scripts like Adrian Ling’s Easy Click Mate to prevent affiliates from merely substituting their own affiliate ID in a link on your page.

2. Providing marketing material - banners, promotional materials etc.

3. Having a two-tiered affiliate program structure - i.e. you make money on your referrals, but also on referrals of your referrals.

4. Recurring commissions on your referrals (more typical with some membership sites or web hosting companies that give you a commission every month for the lifetime of the customer you referred)

Are you tired of losing affiliate commissions because a merchant doesn’t do enough to protect your cookie?

How many times have you seen affiliate sales pages that have a prominent link to their affiliate sign-up page? This is a regular occurrence especially amongst Clickbank affiliate programs. Have you ever wondered why these programs don’t have great conversion rates (for you!).

Well, they may very well convert much better than you think. If you send a visitor to Merchant X’s sales page via your affiliate link (thereby setting your cookie on that visitors machine), but the visitor sees a link to join the Merchant X’s affiliate program on the sales page, a large number of visitors will simply sign up for the affiliate program themselves and buy through their own link instead.

The outcome of this is you are sending your hard won visitors to a site that makes you little or no money. What about the merchant? Well he or she is fine. They make the sale anyway and don’t really care which affiliate gets the commission as long as they make the sale. You keep sending Merchant X free traffic and lining his or her pocket, while you wonder why you don’t make any commissions.

Here is the scenario:

1. You do your keyword research
2. You build your sites
3. You pay for your hosting
4. You get good rankings
5. You send your traffic to merchant X
6. Merchant X makes it easy for the visitor to steal your commission
7. Merchant makes his or her percentage so is happy
8. Visitor buys at a discount so is happy

You make NOTHING and are very unhappy

The above situation is just one way that your commission is being leaked by merchants that really don’t care enough about YOU. There are other ways that we discuss on our affiliate commission leakage page.