This blog has moved from a pagerank 1 to a pagerank of 2. Not bad considering we no longer bother actively going out and looking for links. In fact we don’t promote this blog at all anymore.

In contrast however one of our niche websites in which we actively look for links has moved from a pagerank 4 to a pagerank of 3. It appears that all our other sites have stayed the same.

How has this affected us? Well apart from seeing a difference in the green line on the Google toolbar it has made no difference whatsoever. Traffic hasn’t changed and rankings haven’t changed.

I used to be so caught up in the Google pagerank and would check constantly to see whether a new pagerank had come through. I got so good at it that even now I don’t need to hold my mouse over the green bar - I can tell straight away what the pagerank is by just looking at it. Fortunately I don’t do that anymore.

Old habits die hard however so every now and then I still glance at the little green bar at the top of the screen as I did this morning and noticed a pagerank change.

In my opinion the Google pagerank is really just a rough gauge as to the value of a website - it’s nothing more than that. Don’t get too caught up in it.

Step 1: Upload an Image

First you need to find an image of the particular product. To do this just head over to Amazon and find the product page for that product. At the top left hand corner of every product page in Amazon is an image of the product. You just need to save that image to your computer. It doesn’t matter where you save it as long as you remember where.

Okay, so by now you probably have a blog post written in Wordpress about that product so have that open on your screen. You would be in the edit post section of Wordpress for that. Now you just want to upload the image to that blog post. Hopefully you know how to do this. It will depend on which version of Wordpress you have but there will be an option to upload the image and place it into the blog post itself.

You should now have an image of the product displaying on your blog post but at this point it still doesn’t have a link to Amazon. In other words, if a reader were to click the image it would take them nowhere.

Step 2: Grab the Code

To get the image to click through to Amazon you need to add a bit of code behind the image. To do this you need to head back to Amazon to the product page you were on and click the LINK TO THIS PAGE option on the top menu bar. You need to be logged into your Amazon affiliate account in order to see this.

On this page select the Image Only option. This will display some code in the html box below it. Now you need to pick up some of the code from that html box. We don’t want the entire piece of code. We actually just want everything between the first and second lot of quotes (see underlined in RED in the image to the left). Just copy that code as we will need it for the next step. Make sure you don’t include the quotation marks themselves. We just want everything from http to the next lot of quotation marks.

Step 3: Add the Code

Now head back to your blog post. Click on the product image in your blog post to highlight it and then click the INSERT/EDIT LINK menu option on the blog post menu bar (see image above). You should get a little pop-up that lets you add URLs. Then just paste the code that you grabbed from Amazon into the LINK URL field. Click UPDATE and you are done.

To check that it is working just save your blog post and preview it in a browser and then click on the image. It should take you to that product page on Amazon.

What is a forum?

A forum is a website where like minded people get together to discuss a specific topic. Within the forum a user can post a ‘thread’ which is simply a topic for discussion. There could be hundreds of different threads going at any one time. Once a thread is posted other users can login and leave a response. Each response is added to the thread and hundreds or even thousands of responses can be posted.

To make money on forums you simply register with a forum and start posting your own responses to threads or you can even create your own threads. At the bottom of each response you leave you add one or more affiliate links to a product.

However, you don’t have to add it manually each time you make a post as forums have what’s known as a signature section where you can add your affiliate links. You only have to do this once and then each time you make a post to the forum your affiliate links will show up automatically at the bottom of your response.

The whole point to this is that you are trying to get readers of the forum to click on your affiliate links. The more posts you make, the more times your links will show up and the more likely they will get clicked on by a reader of the forum.

Step 1: Find a product to market

Before you can start making money with forum marketing you need to actually find a product to market. This doesn’t mean that you have to actually go out and purchase stock to sell. Instead you can become an affiliate and promote someone else’s product and make a commission with each person you refer who makes a purchase of that product.

You can find products in a variety of places but our recommendation is to start with Clickbank as it is easy to use and it has a range of very marketable products.

1. Sign up with Clickbank.

Your first step is to sign up with Clickbank. It’s free and once you have registered you will be ready to start choosing products to promote. Clickbank is the biggest online intermediary for digital downloadable products.

You can also find products at:

Commission Junction
Linkshare
ShareaSale

2. Click on Marketplace

At the top of the Clickbank screen is a link called ‘Marketplace’. Click on this link and start searching for products. There are thousands to choose from so you need to be a little bit picky as to what you choose as not all products will sell well.

If you are new to all of this, the best thing to do is to find a product that you are interested in. This will make it easier for you when you start leaving forum posts as at least you will have some knowledge of the topic. For instance, if you play the guitar then type in ‘guitar’ into the Clickbank search and see what products come up.

Now the absolute best thing you can do is actually buy the product yourself so you know that it is a quality product. That of course isn’t always practical so look for products that have a high gravity. What this actually means is that a lot of affiliates are promoting it which gives us an indication that it sells well.

Step 2: Find Related Forums

Once you have a product, you need to find forums that relate to your product. For instance, if you chose a dog training ebook then you need to look for forums relating to dogs, animals or pets. To do this head on over to Google search and type in variations of product keywords with the word ‘forum’. For example:

- ‘dog forum’
- ‘puppy forum’
- ‘animal forum’
- ‘pet forum’

This should provide you with a list of related forums that you can start adding comments to. Ensure that each forum is fairly active as your posts will be wasted. To do this just check the number of posts left and check the dates added. If the dates are within the past few days then you know that the forum is fairly active.

What to look for:

• Read the forum rules first before signing up.
• Ensure they allow signatures in your posts and allow affiliate links
• Ensure they are active

Step 3: Sign up for each forum

Now you need to register with each related forum. Just look for a place on the forum page called ‘Register’ or something similar.

Step 4: Start leaving posts

Before you start adding affiliate links it is important that you read the rules of the forum. You should also spend some time just reading through the forum to see what sorts of discussions are going on and what questions are being asked.

To do this, click on a thread that interests you and read what the person has to say. You will probably find responses under that initial thread so read each of those as well as it will give you an idea of what sorts of things are spoken about.

If you have something to contribute then look for a button or link that allows you to respond. It will be say something like ‘Respond to this thread’ or ‘Reply’ or ‘Add a response’. Just click on that and you will be presented with a box where you can type in your response. Once you have done that just click on the button or link that allows you to post to the forum. It will say something like ‘Save’ or ‘Post’ or ‘Submit’ or something similar.

Don’t be shy about making posts. You have to start somewhere so just provide your thoughts and then move onto the next thread. Add four or five responses to get the hang of it.

Important

1. Never spam the forum. In other words don’t write your posts just to promote your product. You will be thrown out of the forum quick smart if you do this. You don’t want to even mention the product you are promoting in your responses. This is done via your signature which we will come to next.

2. Never leave short answers like ‘nice post’ or ‘great idea’. This is not contributing to the forum in any way and again you will probably be thrown out. Leave good quality responses that provide value to the forum.

Step 5: Add your signature

Most forums have a signature section which allows you to add some text and a link or two below each of your forum posts. Some forums require you to add a certain amount of posts before you can add a signature. This may well be worth the effort if the forum is very active.

To add a signature look for the CPanel or CP or user admin area of the forum. You have to be logged in to access this section. Once in this area you may need to click around on the menu bar to see where the signature section is hidden. It is not always obvious.

Once you have found it you will need to add the Clickbank hoplink to this section. To get your Clickbank hoplink you just click on the “create hoplink” link under the product your are going to promote and then type in your Clickbank nickname. You would have created this when you registered with Clickbank.

BUT you don’t just want to add the link to the signature section as that would be really boring and nobody would click on it. You need to find something that will entice the person to click so start thinking of a catchy phrase or sentence that you can use to incorporate with your affiliate link. For instance if you are promoting a dog ebook then you might use one of the following:

- Proven methods to stop your dog from barking. Click here to see how.
- In just five minutes you can teach your dog to sit. Click here to see how.
- My dog was a biter. Click here to see how I fixed it.

Now you don’t want to lie here and make up stories so ensure that what you say in your signature is accurate.

Now you just need to combine your text with your Clickbank hoplink. Forums usually use a type of code called BBCode which uses a system of tags, There are a number of tags we can use but for our affiliate link we want to use the [url] tag.

So lets just say we have our text that we want to use which is: “Proven methods to stop your dog from barking. Click here to see how” and we also have our Clickbank hoplink which is http://www.myclickbanknickname.dogtrainingebook.com.

Now we want the reader to be able to click on the words ‘Click here’ in our piece of text so we need to add a link to those words. To create the code for this we do the following:

[url=http://www.myclickbanknickname.dogtrainingebook.com]Click here[/url]

We then add our text around this as follows:

Proven methods to stop your dog from barking. [url=http://www.wspc25.dogtrainingebook.com]Click here[/url] to see how.

This will display as follows:

Proven methods to stop your dog from barking. Click here to see how.

Once you have done this then save your changes and click the Preview link if the forum has one so you can see if your link works. If they don’t have a preview link then the only way to check is to create a post in the forum and see if your signature shows up correctly at the end of your post.

Now What?

Just start leaving as many forum posts as you can on as many forums as you can. But always keep in mind that you need to provide value to the forum by writing good quality responses. You are better off in the long run providing quality rather than quantity as other readers are more likely to click on your link if you have something of value to say.

Good Luck!!

These all involved a good amount of extra effort which although we are both hard workers and were prepared for it, we just didn’t have the time to do this sort of work in a big way as we were already adding content to one of our niche blogs which was taking up a bit of time on its own.

We needed something simpler that wouldn’t require much time to implement.

We then thought about the websites we already have. We have a number of niche affiliate sites and some are making more money than others but we have a few that are making hardly anything at all - maybe a few dollars each a month. Some of these websites have not been touched at all in more than a year which probably explains why they haven’t been bringing in much income. So we decided that it was about time we got them making a bit more money.

Our main income from these few sites is from Adsense ads so we sat down and looked at the stats of each of these sites to find the pages getting the most traffic. We decided we would work on any page that was getting more than 500 hits in a month. We took each of these pages and looked at the Adsense ads currently on the page and found that most were small and easily missed.

So this was an obvious change we needed to make. We increased the size of the Google ad and moved it to a more prominent spot and we did this with each page on our list. We also changed the link color to ‘click me blue’.

Lastly we created URL channels in Google Adsense for each of these pages. This was from a suggestion of James Martell at one of our Bootcamp sessions. We should have been doing this from the start as it is a brilliant way to track where your Google Adsense clicks are coming from and it is really easy to do. Once you have added your Google ad to a page you then grab the URL of that page and then add it as a URL channel in your Google Adsense channel area.

The benefit of this, apart from the fact that you can see where the clicks are coming from, is that if you find that a page gets a good amount of money for each click then you can work on generating more traffic to that page.

Our analysis for this has only just started as we only made the changes a couple of days ago but we can already see an increase in clicks which equates to an increase in income.

Over the coming months we will start testing the Google ads on each of these pages and change the link color and ad position to see which works best and we will keep doing this on an ongoing basis.

The next step was to look at the affiliate websites where we are currently making most of our money. These sites are less focused on Google Adsense and more focused on product commissions. Some of these websites are ranking really well in Google and getting lots of highly targeted traffic. We started with our top website and analyzed each page to see what could be improved upon.

The work here involved moving products to above the fold and creating more prominent links or ‘buy now’ buttons. For those that don’t know ‘above the fold’ refers to any part of a website showing in a browser that a person can see before having to scroll down.

We also reworked the review pages for this site which are what really gets our visitors to buy.

We then started to create SIDs for each and evey affiliate link on our site through any product links we have in CJ. This is something we are still working on as there are a lot of links on the site but what this will tell us is exactly what links are generating sales and from what page on our site they are coming from.

When we get a bit of extra time we will also be making use of Google Website Optimizer. This free Google service allows anyone with a website to test and optimize multiple versions of pages on their website.

This whole exercise has taught us the importance of testing which is something we really haven’t delved into in a big way before.

At this stage I don’t think it is working for all accounts. When I log in using one email account and search I don’t see the new features but logging in with another seems to work.

As you can see from the image, next to each search result are three new icons. A promote icon (which is the one with the up arrow); a remove icon (the one with the cross) and a comment icon.

Clicking the Promote icon moves the site in question to the top of the search results.

Clicking the Remove icon removes it from your search results. If for some reason you want to get the deleted one back, you can do so by scrolling down to the bottom of the search results screen and click the ADD A RESULT link. Of course, you will need to know the URL of the site you removed as from what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a way of seeing the sites that you have deleted. You can also add any other site using this option.

You can also add comments for each search result which is a handy little feature.

I think this is great for the user but how will this affect SEO? This remains to be seen, but providing good quality content is going to be even more important as who is going to promote your blog or website if it is just a spammy piece of work?

Google emphasizes that this won’t affect other people’s search results but you would have to think that this is a great way for them to see what is popular and what isn’t and at some stage they may incorporate it into their search algorithm.

My outdoor fireplace is an outdoor fireplace of remarkable design. My outdoor fireplace means I can entertain outside in winter as an outdoor fireplace keeps the outdoor area cozy.
 
… a more acceptable way would be to write:
 
My outdoor fireplace allows me to entertain my friends and family, all year round. The remarkable design ensures that the smoke is positioned away from the entertainment area.

Write naturally and the keywords will fall into place without any effort on your part.

Just an update for those who missed my first post on this, we have taken one of our niche blogs and increased our blog posting frequency to see how it would affect traffic and sales. We are currently posting 50 posts a week to that blog. This usually means a blog post goes up every 3 or 4 hours.

We don’t seem to have too much of a problem getting this many posts up. The more we do, the better we get at it and the easier and quicker we can churn them out. We generally spend a couple of days gettng as many done as possible and post them to Wordpress with a future date and time. This means that they go up automatically over the week.

The Results

As of this week, traffic is starting to increase dramatically. This could be due to the fact that the holiday season is fast approaching but at the same time last year we didn’t see this much of a traffic increase. It is also the most traffic we have ever had to that blog.

Sales are also increasing but not as much as I would have expected. We are definitely making more on that particular niche blog than we have ever made but I would have expected more at this point.

With this in mind, we have started to focus a little more on click through rates, conversion rates, merchant performance and the basic structure of that website. Our current click through rate for that website is around 5% which is pathetic really when we have other sites getting as much as a 60% CTR. There is so much more room for improvement here.

So the first thing we are doing is completely overhauling the site. We have found a new template that allows us to better promote products and is more appealing to the viewer and are structuring it in a way that is more likely to get the reader to click through to the merchant.

This should be ready to be published within the next couple of weeks so it will be interesting to see if it makes a difference.

#1 Article Distribution

There are two ways to do this:

1. Submit articles to article directories. This isn’t entirely effective as Google no longer ranks them highly except for a few notable exceptions like Ezine Articles for example. Even then, what we have found is that when our articles have been picked up by other webmasters to use on their own websites, in general they were of low value or Adsense-only sites with little value in the eyes of Google.

Plus there is the problem of duplicate content. Google doesn’t like it and will only disregard multiple pages with the exact same content. It is still worth submitting to a site like Ezinearticles.com however as you can often get some good traffic from them.

2. Submit articles to websites. Instead of article directories, we submit our articles to other websites. This can take some work but the value of the link is in our opinion a hundred times better than submitting to an article directory as you get to pick and choose which websites you want to submit your article to.

So this is what we do.

Firstly, we gather together a list of websites that meet the following criteria:

• Must be on topic - in other words if the page on your website that you want to rank for is about dog beds then you would start looking for sites related to dogs and pets.
• Must have a pagerank of at least 3 or 4 on their homepage and a pagerank of at least 2 or 3 on their article pages. In other words, if your article is going to go to this site, you want to get some pagerank from it and if their articles are already getting a pagerank of at least a 2 or 3 then you know that your article will most likely get a similar pagerank once Google finds it.
• Avoid merchant websites and big companies. They most likely have their own writers and if they don’t then your request to add an article probably has to go through a committee first before anyone is likely to approve it
• Look for a site that already has articles on their site - they obvious already see the value in articles and would most likely love another article written specifically for them.

Once you have a list of potential websites then email each of them to see if they would like an article for their website or blog. Ensure that you let them know that the article will be free and unique to their website. You will also need to let them know that you will be adding a couple of links in the article back to your website.

Don’t submit the same article twice. I have already discussed the problems of duplicate content in Google so once you have submitted an article to a website file the article away and don’t use it again.

#2 Blog Comments

Find blogs or blog posts that are on topic and add a comment. Adding comments to blogs works in three ways. Firstly, it is a way of making friends with those who have blogs in the same niche as you. It creates relationships and you may eventually be able to set up a business arrangment that benefits both sites.

Secondly, it can bring traffic into your site - albeit not very much but each person into your site is yet another potential customer. To get more traffic ensure that you are at the top of the comment list. You can use a free program called Comment Sniper to alert you when a new post has been posted on a particular blog.

Thirdly, you can get valuable inbound links to your site, but there is a trick to it. You need to find blogs that don’t have a nofollow tag. This can be hard work if you do it manually so you can use a dofollow search engine or you can use a piece of software called Fast Blog Finder.

#3 Social Networking/Bookmarking

Submitting to social bookmarking and networking sites is an easy way to get links to your site. There are social networking and bookmarking sites that don’t use the nofollow tag so you may be able to get some link juice from them. These include:

• Blinklist.com
• Mister-wong.com
• Backflip.com
• Bibsonomy.org
• Linkagogo.com
• Jumptags.com
• Furl.net
• Diigo.com
• Rawsugar.com
• Myjeeves.ask.com

#4 Directories

Google really doesn’t value directories much these days so don’t go crazy adding your site to them. Stick with the best of the best. Again it all comes down to quality not quantity. If you can, find directories that are specifically on topic. If you have a craft site for instance then add your site to a craft directory.

#5 Develop Good Quality Content

We’ve already mentioned that content is a good way of bringing in links but it is perhaps the most important. If you develop good quality content then other webmasters will naturally link to you.

What Not to Do

• if you have multiple websites then don’t link between them. Google doesn’t like it and could ban your site completely from their search engine.
• Don’t add your link to just anywhere. Stay focused and look for quality links. You are better off spending a day looking for one very focused pagerank 5 page to add your link to than adding your link to 20 pagerank 1 sites who are all off topic.

You can read the original post here - Blog Posting Frequency - Does it Increase Traffic?.

So far we have stuck to the plan and uploaded 10 posts a day - actually to be more accurate it is probably somewhere between 8-10 posts a day.

Has it increased traffic?

Yes it has but only up to a point. It seems to have remained fairly static despite us adding more and more content. It is definitely an increase on the previous months traffic but it is not progressively increasing which is what I thought it would do.

Has it increased sales?

At this point, not really. It’s a difficult one to analyze however as with the stock market crisis and people getting concerned about spending their money it may be resulting in fewer sales. At this stage, sales have neither increased or decreased.

What’s next?

We are going to continue with this experiment as it has only really been a couple of weeks. I’d like to give it a couple of months at least to see the full impact….if any.

Article Marketing is the process of writing articles and submitting them to article directories. In each article you add links to a product or service that you want to promote. When a reader of your article clicks on the link they are taken to the merchants website. If they buy something from that website then you get a commission.

It’s a simple process and doesn’t require any outlay of money. It does however require that you have some sort of writing skill but you don’t need to be a professional author by any means. If you have written an essay or report in school then you can write an article suitable for the internet.

How Does it Work?

The first step is to choose a product to promote. You don’t have to actually buy stock yourself. Instead you promote someone elses product. The best place for this is Clickbank. This site acts as the middleman between you and the merchant. The products in Clickbank are mostly digitable downloadable products like eBooks and memberships.

Once you have chosen a product in Clickbank you can then write an article based on that product. For instance, if you have chosen an ebook to promote on improving your golf swing then your article might be titled - “3 Tips for Improving Your Golf Swing”.

Once you have written the article, which by the way only has to be about 300-500 words, then you add a byline at the end of the article and in that byline you add your affiliate link. You get the affiliate link (or hoplink) from Clickbank once you have registered with them. The affiliate link is just a piece of code that links to the merchants website.

Once you have that all in place you submit the article to an article directory like Ezine Articles, Goarticles, Squidoo or Hubpages. Bear in mind that Ezine Articles no longer allows affiliate links so you may need to create a landing page using Blogger or Wordpress.

Now the trick with all of this is that you need to choose keywords to use in your article that are not very competitive. In other words, you want to be able to rank on the first page of Google for your article. This is where you need to do a bit of research using one of the free keyword tools like Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Research Tool.

For our golfing example for instance we would head on over to Wordtracker and type in the keywords ‘golf swing’. From the list that is displayed we would then take each keyword and type it into Google using quotes eg. “golf swing tips”. If any of those keywords show less than 5000 competing websites then I would consider this a good keyword and I would base my article around that keyword.

If you really want to get serious about article marketing or similar techniques then we suggest learning from the best at Wealthy Affiliate University.