Backlinking Archives

A Day in the Life of an Affiliate Marketer

Monday, February 13th, 2012 at 6:36 pm  
Comments (60)

We’ve had a few requests recently from readers who want to know what we do on a daily basis. This is a really good question although a little difficult to answer because we are often working on different projects at any one time. In the past few weeks for instance, we have been looking at ways of making money without having to rely on Google and we don’t mean writing new ebooks, or joint ventures or coaching or anything like that. We mean actually making money from a website related to a particular niche. We want to see if we can get traffic to that website without having to rely on Google and backlinking.

So we have kind of put all of our usual work on the backburner at least for the next few months to see if this will work. If it does, our newsletter list will be the first to know.

This is kind of how we have been working for a while now. We spend a few months on our niche sites and then suddenly we will have an idea for something and that will take all of our attention and we will be off working on that for a few months. We did a bit too much of that last year and it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It wasn’t so much that the projects we were working on didn’t work, only that we didn’t give them a chance as we kept moving from one thing to another. It was back to the bad old days when we were trying to make a living from this business and we kept jumping from one method to another….aargh!

But, fortunately we are good at stepping back and seeing if we are heading in the wrong direction and we are finally back on track. So for now, we are focusing on one website and seeing if we can make money from it without Google intervention.

However, getting back to the whole point of this post, I think those who asked what we do on a daily basis were interested in what we do on a daily or weekly basis in relation to our Amazon sites. Mostly, all we really do is backlinking. We no longer write up new reviews or if we do it is very rarely. The reason we don’t is that we have plenty already up on our sites that we can work with. We’ve mentioned this before on numerous posts on this site but we basically look at reviews that are already getting traffic and/or sales and work on those. We work on them by getting more backlinks to them and editing the content until it is the best review it can be.

So this is how our day generally looks. I don’t know how much detail you might want to see here because some of you may not give a flying fig about when we have breakfast or not or whether we exercise but either way it is all here and you can always skip that sort of stuff and move on to what you think are the important bits if you like. So here it is:

Wake Up!

We both generally wake up sometime before 8am. Wanda is an early bird so will usually be up before me but either way whoever is ready to start work first for the day will send an email to the other to say they are ready. The other will respond to say they are also ready and when that happens I will get in my car to drive over to Wanda’s (she only lives a few streets away so it only takes a minute or two). In other words, we don’t really have a set start time, it’s just when both of us are ready to start work for the day but in general it’s probably around 9am.

Exercise or Meditation

The first thing we do (and this isn’t all that consistent) is exercise or meditate depending on the mood we are in. Sometimes we do neither. At the moment we are working on the PACE program (which is excellent by the way), to get us fit for our next overseas trip. So we have been running up hills and working on the treadmill and using the bike and doing a bit of calisthenics. We sometimes do Qi Gong or we might do a mediation. After the exercise we will make up a Better than Coffee drink mixed with MSM and vitamin C – that keeps the post-exercise aches and pains away.

Breakfast

Next is breakfast. Pretty standard stuff here so skip and move on to the next bit….it’s usually scrambled or poached eggs on toast if you really need to know.

Time to Start Work

By this time, it’s usually about 10am and we are ready to start work. We have an office set up in Wanda’s home so it is kept separate from the rest of the house which is always a good thing. It’s nice to be able to close the door at the end of the working day. We have two computers in there and a white board. That’s about it really. Nothing special.

Answering Emails and Comments

The first thing I normally do is answer emails and also comments on this blog and the Affiliate Reviews HQ site. We get a lot of them and some days it can take a while particularly Monday mornings because we don’t usually answer emails on the weekend and they can build up.

Wanda on the other hand will answer the emails and comments from our niche websites.

Once that is done, we close down our email accounts for the day. If we keep them open, the emails keep pouring in and we are tempted to stop to read and answer them.

What’s Next

At this point, we could be working on a number of different things but we will assume for this blog post that we are working on our Amazon sites and I will use the basic plan that we use when we do this.

We will also assume that we are working on two brand new pages that we have already written reviews for and we have found 3 keywords for each page that we want to rank for. We normally only work on two pages at a time when we are backlinking as the less the better. It’s just so much easier to manage.

So our plan for the rest of the day might involve one or more of the following tasks:

1. Find 10 potential guest sites – For this task we would each find 10 related sites that we think might be interested in taking an article from us. We would send each of those sites an email and add each site to a spreadsheet in Google Docs. This allows us to keep track of who we have emailed and when.

This might take an hour or two hours or even three depending on the topic in question. We like to find sites related to our product review in some way so it can take time. But we know that it is worth it because we will end up with very high quality backlinks.

2. Respond to positive emails – If we have received an email from a guest site saying they will take an article then we respond to the email telling them that we will start working on their article.

3. Writing guest articles – Once we have a site that is willing to take an article from us then we start writing. Although to be quite honest  nowadays we get someone in Elance to write articles for us but back in the early days we wrote everything ourselves. We’ve written hundreds upon hundreds of articles over time and after a while you get quite good at writing up an article in as little as half an hour.

These guest articles will link back to our 2 product reviews and hence get us backlinks. In each of the reviews we will usually add three links – two to a product review and one to the home page, but sometimes all three to the product review, or 1 to one product review, 1 to a second product review and the third to the home page. In other words, we mix up the links.

4. Writing content for our sites – Again we very rarely write up our own content on our niche sites anymore. So we will generally just spend time in Elance writing up job projects to get 10 articles written at a time. For sites that we are working on we might add one or two articles a week to keep Google happy but we aren’t terribly consistent with this.

5. Commenting on related sites and social networking – We don’t go too crazy with this like we used to but we try and place maybe 5 comments a day or every second day on related blogs. And maybe a bit of social networking and bookmarking. This is really just to diversify our link building efforts – our focus is more on guest blogging than anything else as described in Step 3 above.

Time to Stop Work

At around 3.30 to 4pm we will finish up work for the day. We very rarely go any longer than that unless we have something that we are really enjoying or we have to get done.

So to summarize this might be our plan for the week for the two of us when we are in backlinking mode…

1. Contact 100 sites a week to see if they will accept a guest article.

2. Write up guest articles based on the response you get from step 1.

3. Write one or two informational type articles to add to our site to build up content.

4. Comment on 20 to 30 blogs.

You’ll notice that we don’t allocate time for Facebook, Twitter, reading forums or other peoples blogs. These things are okay if they specifically relate to your business – for example, if you are into Facebook marketing and you make your living this way but if not they should only be a small part of your day. Keep them as a reward at the end of the day after you have already accomplished what you need to do for that day.

We also don’t allocate time for checking stats or our rankings. We used to do this constantly – it’s hard not to when you are starting out – but we really don’t check stats much at all these days. We just get on with the more important things instead of wasting our time worrying about whether we are still ranking for specific keywords or whether our traffic has dropped or not.

What you focus on is what you are going to get in both your daily life and your working life.  So our advice is to stop for just a minute today and see where your primary focus is at least in relation to your online business. Ask yourself the following questions and be truly honest with your responses:

  • Is your day relaxed or do you feel like you have too much on your plate and you don’t know what to do next?
  • Do you feel like you have really accomplished something at the end of the day or do you find that you have spent most of your time reading and contributing to other people’s stuff – forums, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on?
  • Are you focused on just one project or you do you constantly have multiple projects on the go?
  • Are you focused on just one website or are you constantly building more and more websites?

And the final and most important question:

  • Do you truly love what you do online or is it simply a means to make money?

You have to love what you are doing more than the money because if you don’t then you may as well forget it, you are never really going to make it and if you do it is going to be short lived. Sure, there are some parts of the process that you aren’t going to enjoy, like backlinking for instance….it’s not one of our most favorite things, but essentially we really love this business and we love it with a passion.

If you enjoy what you do then the money will follow.

UPDATE: Just because someone asked about the blue toy in our office we’ve added a video of what it does.

The 3 Critical Factors You Need to Know to Make Money Online

Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 8:16 am  
Comments (84)

Do you remember when you were young and your mum or dad (or other significant person in your life at the time) would tell you something extremely wise and life changing but it totally went in one ear and out the other? Today you might think back on it and say, “I wish I’d listened to them; my life would be a whole lot different now”.

Unfortunately, this is how most of us function when it comes to making money online. We want all the answers but we aren’t always prepared to take them on when we hear them. I know that in the early days, we learned the ins and outs of making money online from James Martell but did we really listen to what he had to say?…no not really. We took what we wanted from it all and played around with the sites and added content and tweaked the themes but when it came down to it, we didn’t really follow what he had to say. Why?…well looking back on it now it was mostly because we just weren’t patient enough and not being patient enough results in a cascade of problems. Believe me we kick ourselves now because had we followed James’ method right from the beginning we would have succeeded a lot sooner than we did.

When you aren’t patient enough you get to a point where you don’t quite believe in the process. And if you don’t believe in the process, you are either going to stop putting it into practice or you will start to tweak it a little putting your own spin on it until eventually it becomes nothing like the original method.

So for us, instead of writing long detailed posts, which is what James recommended, we went ahead and wrote hundreds of poor quality short unhelpful articles. And instead of focusing on just one website, which is again what James recommended, we kept building more and more sites. And instead of backlinking we spent time tweaking the sites. As a result, it took us a lot longer to get anywhere.

This is what happens to a good majority of people. We still get emails today from people who have purchased our Amazonian Profit Plan who have obviously not really taken it all in. For instance, we recommend working on only 5 product reviews at any one time. But instead we get emails from people saying they have added 20 or 30 reviews to their site and wonder why they aren’t making any money. They wonder if adding more will help. Of course it won’t because if none of the first 5 are making any money then why will adding another lot of reviews make any difference?

I know I am rambling on a bit here but what I am trying to get at is that in order to make a good income online you have to first of all be patient and second of all follow through on the process. It’s almost like baking a loaf of bread. If you follow the recipe exactly you get a better loaf. If you start tweaking by adding a bit more flour or a bit more yeast you might still get a decent loaf but if you start experimenting by omitting or changing some of the ingredients then it is pot luck as to whether it is going to turn out or not. You might get there eventually if you experiment enough but it will take you a lot longer than if you just stuck to the recipe.

There are plenty of recipes for making money online but in terms of affiliate marketing and the product review concept there are 3 critical ingredients you need to follow in order to succeed:

  • Choose a quality products
  • Write quality reviews
  • Get quality backlinks

Notice the one word that keeps repeating itself?…that word is QUALITY but most people making money online do everything but provide quality. It’s always more about QUANTITY for most people and it was for us also – hence why we built website after website. Fortunately we stopped at around 20 or so but a lot of people just keep going.

I know we have spoken many times about ‘Quality vs Quantity’ on this site but it’s something that needs to be repeated constantly because a lot of people just don’t get it. You really have to make quality your main focus and now more than ever because it is the direction that Google is taking. Google want to have quality sites ranking in their search engine. They don’t want to see poor quality spammy sites in the top 10 for any of their search results.

Even if we put Google aside for a minute, then it is still obvious that quality is important. It’s important because when anyone comes to your site they are doing so because they want answers. If you have a product review site they want you to tell them why they should buy the product. They don’t want to see a site full of ads, pop-ups and a short unhelpful review.

If you don’t focus on quality then you will really struggle with making money online. You have to make quality your number one priority if you want to succeed.

Let’s take a look in more detail:

1. Choose a Quality Product

When most people build websites they immediately start thinking about what niche they should pick. This is a big mistake in our opinion. There is this concept that some niches are better than others but nothing could be further from the truth. It has nothing to do with the niche because in reality every niche has both good products AND bad products.

People think that the secret to our success are the niches we have chosen so they go searching for our sites and try to replicate it all. But it has nothing to do with the niches because we make money from all sorts of niches. There isn’t one niche that does better than any other because it’s not about the niches…it’s about the quality products we have chosen within those niches.

Your readers don’t want to buy poor quality items. They want the best they can get for their money and your job is to find the best quality products and write about them. It’s simple really but a lot people don’t want to take the extra effort it requires to do that sort of research. They want to make money online but they don’t want to work for it.

2. Write Quality Reviews

Once you have chosen a quality product you then need to write a quality review. This is really a critical factor if you want your reviews to convert. It’s not just about getting your readers to the merchant and letting the merchant do the rest. Believe us when we say that because we thought the same thing. We wrote 300 word reviews for a long time thinking that the shorter the review the better as the reader would simply click over to Amazon for more info. Most didn’t stay on the page long enough to do that. They immediately saw the short review and clicked the back button. Those who stayed and clicked through to Amazon didn’t buy. Why?…because we gave them no reason to buy.

To ‘give someone a reason to buy’ means telling them why the product is going to benefit them in some way and/or why it is the best available compared to other similar products. If they have the benefits in their head, by the time they reach Amazon they are more likely to buy.

But it’s not just about slapping a few benefits on the page and hey presto you will make sales. It takes more than that. It means thoroughly researching the product until you know it inside and out because in most cases you won’t actually own the product. This means spending time on Amazon reading customer reviews and searching the manufacturers site for detailed information about the product and scouring the net for what others have to say about it.

It also means writing long detailed reviews that are around 1000 words or more. Our longest review now sits on our Affiliate Reviews HQ site and is over 4000 words long and we could have written much more. Remember that the person reading your review doesn’t have the product in front of them so they will want to know everything they can before buying. Don’t be afraid to add even the smallest of details.

The only way you are ever going to write really good quality reviews is to forget about the search engines because if you think about what the search engines want to see in the review then you are thinking about the money first and your readers second. So instead of worrying about the search engines, worry about your readers and what they would like to see in the review. If you do that you will always end up with well written helpful reviews.

3. Get Quality Backlinks

The final step in the process is getting quality traffic. This is where most people fail. They can often choose quality products and write quality reviews but the traffic part eludes them. The reason for that is that they are not patient enough. They start out all keen and send out some guest articles and maybe write a press release and do a bit of social networking/bookmarking and leave a few blog comments but because they don’t see anything happen straight away they lose focus. Their interest starts to wane and before they know it they are building another website because ‘the next website will be the one that makes it’ or so they think.

Or worse yet, they might pay someone $20 to get 1000 backlinks to their site. It just doesn’t work. We know this from experience, because like almost everyone else we too have tried this method in the past. You need QUALITY backlinks if you want to rank well in Google or any of the search engines for that matter, and the best quality backlinks you can get come from guest blogging. Yes, it takes time but it works. You can choose to continue to ignore backlinking or get someone else to add hundreds of spammy backlinks to your site or you can do it the right way and only focus on quality backlinks.

Just keep in mind that one good quality backlink is often better than thousands of poor quality ones.

The Final Ingredient

So what is the final ingredient? The final ingredient is you and whether you are patient enough to stick with the plan. Just remember that:

  • If you have chosen quality products then they will sell.
  • If you have written a quality review then it will convert.

All you need is the traffic but it can take a year before you really start to see some real action with backlinking. Are you prepared to stick at it for that long? You really have to answer that question because if you aren’t prepared for that then this isn’t the business for you and you will only find yourself in what we call the Affiliate Marketers Cycle of Doom. Sure you might have success in a month or two – lots of people have – but if it doesn’t happen in a month or two are you willing to keep at it until you do or will you just be off to build yet another website?

The Most Powerful Backlinking Method There Is

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 at 8:00 am  
Comments (134)

We’ve been at this business for quite a number of years now and over that time we have tried just about every backlinking method known to man. We’ve tried authority site backlink packets, article directory submissions, reciprocal linking, 3 way links, blog commenting, link wheels, blog networks, forum posting, social bookmarking and networking, press releases and that’s just for starters.

We even paid an SEO company back in the early days to do the SEO and backlinking for us. That was a big mistake… it didn’t take long before we realized that we knew more than they did and they cost what felt like a fortune at the time.

I think our goal with all of this has always been to try to find an easy way to get backlinks but I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no easy way. If you want strong powerful backlinks then you have to work for it. And notice I said ‘strong powerful backlinks’. Anyone can get a ton of backlinks to their website – I could email someone now and they could get me thousands of links in the next 24 hours but you can only imagine what sort of links they would be.

The distinguishing factor here is quality not quantity. One good quality backlink has more value than hundreds or even thousands of poor quality backlinks.

That’s not to say that all of those backlinking methods I’ve listed above are worthless. On the contrary, a good mix of backlinks is important so it helps to include a range of different techniques. However, what we have found is that out of all the backlinking methods we have tried one stands head and shoulders ahead of the rest. The backlinking method I am referring to is guest blogging or guest articles (or PAD if you are a James Martell student).

Guest blogging simply involves giving free articles to website owners in exchange for links back to your website.

Simple right? Too simple for some it seems or perhaps they really don’t see the value in this method. We received an email some time back from someone saying that they had read where someone had posted on a forum that although our Amazonian Profit Plan was great the backlinking section was ‘weak’.  I could only laugh at that because this method of backlinking is about the strongest there is.

It may seem ‘weak’ to some because of it’s simplicity and because there are no tricks involved in it to manipulate the search engines. And it is because of this many don’t see the value in it.

They also don’t even want to try it because they know it involves work. Most people simply want to press a button and hey presto they have hundreds of backlinks. In an ideal world that would be great but so far I am yet to see any automated backlinking system that results in hundreds of GOOD QUALITY backlinks.

Even those blogging networks haven’t been much of a success. We’ve tried most of them and some are better than others of course but ultimately your links end up on blogs that have been manufactured simply to add links. What this generally means is that the content on those blogs is average to say the least and they aren’t updated very often. You will also find that your links are mixed with other often undesirable links so you are associating with a bad neighborhood so to speak. We keep trying these networks and will probably continue to try them but as yet we haven’t really found any that have been up to par.

Another thing to consider here is that Google is starting to focus on quality even more so particularly with their latest update. I can only imagine that more is coming from Google in the future so we need to be ever vigilant that we not only provide quality content but we also have quality backlinks from quality sites.

This is an industry where just about everyone is looking for a quick fix and when I say ‘everyone’ we include ourselves in that bunch. Even though we have worked hard to get where we are, we are still constantly looking for things to make it easier. But then again maybe it’s a good thing that it isn’t that easy to make money online. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and the market would be flooded.

It’s a case of survival of the fittest – only the strongest survive in this business and usually that means those that don’t give up and keep at it despite the work. You only have to look at JamestheJusts success story to see that.

What I am getting at is that if you want to really succeed with all of this you have to be prepared to do the work and you have to be prepared to stick at it for the long haul. That means even if you haven’t made a cent in the first three months, you keep going. And even if you have only made a few dollars by the end of the first year, you keep going, And even if, like us, after 5 years you still aren’t making a full time income, you keep going.

Doing the work means that you have to stop looking for the easy way out. You have to focus and focus big time and you have to stop looking for excuses. Getting traffic is often the biggest hurdle for most and excuses abound as to why they haven’t started to focus in on that area. Even for those who have started backlinking it is often a case of spending a few hours on it and then forgetting about it for another few weeks or maybe forgetting it altogether because it is just too time consuming or too difficult, or family commitments are getting in the way or it’s boring or whatever. Boring just doesn’t cut it – if you have an excuse for not working on building traffic then you have to get past it because it really is your biggest obstacle to making money online. This was one of our biggest obstacles – for us it was all about building websites and adding content but not real much happened when it came to backlinking.

Traffic is critical to your success and to get traffic you have to work for it.

So, How does guest blogging work?

If you have a system of getting traffic that works for you then by all means use it. We just know what works for us and guest blogging works.

The first step involved with guest blogging is finding sites to submit articles to. The best sites are those within your niche. Bear in mind, when contacting sites in your niche they may consider you as their competition and may not want to add a competitors article to their site. This often has to do with what you are promoting. If you have a specific product site then it can be a little more difficult – for example, if your site is about Apple iPhones and you contact another site also promoting Apple iPhones they will probably ignore your email. On the other hand if your site is about dogs then often it is often easier to contact other dog site owners as in general these sorts of sites are not as product orientated and they see you as more of a kindred spirit rather than as a competitor.

To get around this, you simply approach sites that aren’t in the same niche but are kind of related in some way. For instance, with the iPhone example, I might contact young bloggers who talk about fashion, music and similar topics.

You want a list of sites that have a decent pagerank – we usually go with 3 and up. You can start with technorati.com to find blogs or simply use the Google search.

Once you’ve found these sites you simply send them an email asking if they would like to take a free article from you in exchange for 2 to 3 links in the article back to your website. You let them know that the article is unique and will be on a topic related to their site.

If you get a response back from them you simply write up your article (or get someone to do it for you using Elance for example) and send it to them ensuring that you have placed links to your website within the article.

As you can imagine this method of backlinking can be time consuming. It’s not the quick and easy automated type of backlinking that everyone is after. But you also have to remember that the quality of links is very strong because you are picking sites that are already favored by Google.