Do you know what the difference is between a shirt made in the sweatshops of a third world country and a shirt made in the good ol’ U.S.A?

It’s not the quality folks – in fact, over 90% of the time, the same cloth, machinery and processes are being used in both places. Usually, the laborers outside the United States are more skilled than domestic workers.

Now you must be thinking – there has to be something different – after all, those shirts made in sweatshops are a whole lot cheaper. Isn’t that because they are inferior somehow?

In reality…the difference is in our values. Because we automatically equate quality with economic and technological development, products made inside our country seem much more valuable than those made in poorer countries.

In other words – the difference is in our perception and our beliefs, not in quality.

Why is this so important?

This same example applies to info products, albeit in a slightly different way. You see, there’s no set method to package and promote an ebook – some people throw together badly-formatted texts and still make 5 figures in a month, whereas others bust their chops trying to create the perfect book but can’t even buy sales.

The key to selling is not putting your product in front of as many prospects as possible – if that was all that was needed, you could simply setup an AdWords account and forget about it.

The real key to making sales is to position your product so that your prospect is completely convinced that they need this book, otherwise terrible things may happen to them (they could always stay fat, their marriage will dissolve, they could be stuck in a low-paying job for the rest of their lives – worst case scenarios change with your niche).

The product must be valuable in their eyes.

There’s not enough space in today’s lesson to talk about this topic in too much detail, but if you are serious about making a living online then you must remember these 3 points:

3 keys to creating value

One – you must identify a core need of your prospect, and focus your product’s full attention towards satisfying that need.

Two – Don’t hold back in your knowledge. Build up a reputation (through your website, your blog and/or your previous products) of being an expert who is ready to share all his secrets. The more you tell and the more you are willing to share…it will increase the interest level of your prospects dramatically. People have a strong urge for wanting to know more, and if it relates to them personally and can help them improve their lives, they will pay out of their noses for the secrets of an expert.

Third – Two words: social proof. Nothing screams “value!” like acceptance of your expert status by other experts (either in your niche or in related niches). Testimonials in your sales page are the obvious incarnation of social proof, but more sophisticated techniques allow you to enlist the help of experts to sell your e-book.

Believe it or not, but the “packaging” – preparation and presentation – of your info product goes a long way towards creating a strong perception of value in your customers minds. Some of the things that you have to look after are:

• Make sure nothing is missing and that everything is in order.

• Eliminate spelling, factual and grammatical mistakes.

• Actual publishing (from word processor to pdf (or from paper to word processer to pdf)).

These details can seem like a chore but if they are done right you can not only save a lot of time but you can also improve your product’s appeal.

Here’s what you need to look after:

Proof Reading

Get your book proof-read by multiple sources – your friends, your family, even people in your industry. This is the easiest way to get those embarrassing mistakes out of your book without spending too much time or money on it.

E-book Publishing

You have several options when it comes to e-book publishing. I would strongly recommend that you go with PDFs instead of creating special password-protected .exe or .html files. Why? Because you have to make things easy for your customers, not harder. PDFs have become the standard for professionalism in document publishing and most people are very comfortable using them. Work that to your advantage.

If you’re using OpenOffice (free word processing software), you can publish your documents as PDFs in it. Otherwise, use a service like PDF995 to create PDF e-books out of your documents. I personally use a combination of Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat for writing and publishing PDFs, but as both packages can cost a lot (especially if you’re just starting out), OpenOffice is a good free alternative.

Pricing

Generally I don’t include pricing as part of the packaging, but since I will be discussing it in much more detail in the next lesson, here are a few points to remember about pricing:

• Do not assume that you know what the right price is. The right price is set by the market (i.e. your customers) and depends on a variety of factors.

• There are two factors in pricing that you can control – the market itself (whether the target market is affluent / your info-product is about an expensive skill or topic) and the perceived value of your product.

• Keep testing your price, and do not be afraid to push it higher.

• Monitor the progress of your sales, conversion rate and pricing over time. This should not only give you the optimum price range for your product but it will also give you a benchmark price in case you ever want to introduce another info-product in the same niche (or a closely related one).
  

We’re almost out of time today, but I wanted to run this last topic by you as I know many marketers who face this problem – e-books that just won’t sell.

Your first reflex in this situation might be that you are in the wrong market or maybe your product isn’t good. That’s not necessarily true. What I would recommend is that you follow this simple 4-step analysis of your situation and evaluate where you might have gone wrong.

Topic

If you’ve researched your market, this is usually not the problem (or why would you step into a non-profitable niche in the first place?). Try to refine your focus and sharpen your product’s core strengths – that is, clearly define what need your e-book provides an answer to. If there is money to be made here, this will show up in your research (refer to the first two lessons of this topic for more on selecting niches).

E-book content quality

This is where peer-review comes in very handy. Does your e-book lack enough meaty content? Are you selling your readers short? Is your e-book riddled with errors (typos or factual)? Is your language too boring or full of difficult terms?Are you writing like an amazing teacher would teach? Or are you writing like a confused scientist would mumble and grumble?

Sales Copy

How bad is your sales copy, honestly? One of the best ways to test your conversion rate is to setup an AdWords campaign (on a strictly limited budget, of course), drive several hundred visitors to your sales page and see the results. If you’re not achieving a +1% conversion rate, then you need to work on that sales copy a LOT more.

Once again you have two options – if you want to do the rewrite yourself, read up on sales letter writing and make sure you observe the masters – John Carlton, Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy and even the new gurus like Perry Marshall and John Reese. These guys are very, very good at what they do.

If you have the cash, outsource the writing to a copywriter, but make sure you see some samples first. Your sales copy can make or break your online business, and you shouldn’t take it lightly.

Marketing

How effective is your marketing strategy? Are you collaborating with others in your niche (joint ventures), or going on your own? Are you generating any buzz for your product?

The best marketing plans start even before you start writing the book. Building momentum is an important part of launching an e-book, and by giving yourself a headstart you will not only be able to reach more people but you will also learn what works best in your niche by the time you put the book up for sale and really start cranking up the advertising.

To tell you the truth, reviving “failed” ebooks is simply another term for inject value into a product. The four steps mentioned above do exactly that – they pass through each and every component of your info-product strategy (from idea to marketing) and force you to constantly improve your efforts.

That’s all the space we have for today. If you have any questions on the topic “Launching an Infoproduct Business” and especially on today’s lesson (creating value), write to me at infoproduct@seoelite.com.

n the next lesson, I’ll walk you through a series of high-powered techniques that will guarantee you info-product profits (and yes, this will include strategies on how to promote your e-book as well). It will be the last lesson in the infoproduct series, so make sure that you read it next week.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

In today’s lesson, I’m going to present to you my personal system for turning out info-products painlessly (but not effortlessly – nothing worth doing in life is ever effortless, is it?). It’s a series of steps that I’ve developed over the past few years and I have improved it to the point that these days, I can usually put out an info-product within a couple of weeks , from picking a topic to packaging and putting up the e-book for sale online.

Start to finish, idea to reality, in 14 days.

Before you start though, you have to ask yourself some very important questions.

Are you ready to:

• Commit to improving your financial situation?
• Provide a unique and useful solution to other people?
• Create a new stream of income for yourself in just 2 to 3 weeks ?

Notice that I haven’t said anything about being ready to work hard or being ready to dedicate enough time for your writing. Those are byproducts of a bigger decision.

Once you choose to make your future the most important thing in your mind, you’ll discover that you will automatically work harder and you will always find time to write. It’s just a matter of readjusting your priorities .

Enough “personal development” talk for today. Down to business.

If you can develop an efficient system for doing research, you will not only drastically increase your chances of success, but you will also make sure that you reduce your chances of “giving up”. Once you know that a market for your idea exists, and once you know what they really want, it becomes elementary to put that knowledge into words and to start making money out of it.
Step 1: Find a Topic

The first thing you should do is to write down those topics that you feel you can write confidently about using your own knowledge . For example, I have always been interested in fitness and a healthy lifestyle, so it was natural for me to get started online with an info-product based on the subject.

What do you know?

If you have read my earlier lessons, I have often covered keyword research and how you can judge whether a niche is going to be profitable for you. Once you have identified the niches you can write about yourself, it is time to do your keyword research and find out which niche will be most profitable.

Typically experts might tell you to go after a niche with little competition. That is very good advice, but part of the reason there is good competition on a topic in the first place is because it is a very profitable niche! If your strength is the stock market, don’t be scared away by the competition. In some cases you will find that a market is totally saturated, but in the information business insider tips and knowledge can often get old and outdated.

That is where you can cash in.

Tip – If you’re interested in keyword research, then make sure that you take a look at our brand new Keyword Research software: Keyword Elite.

Step 2: Find the Seven Year Itch

It is not enough to find a topic – you must also find the right angle to it. What is your market’s most important problem? What bugs them the most? What irritates them?

What is their seven year itch ?

If you can position your info-product as a solution to your market’s most pressing need, you have done half your work. A lot of people see their info-products flop because they fail to tap into their niche’s most important problems. Your writing, and your e-book, must have a precise focus .

For example, if you are writing a buyer’s guide on computer notebooks, find out what the common questions and problems are for first-time notebook buyers.

Having such a precise focus also helps you evaluate how big your final product is going to be. There’s no harm in producing
20-30 page reports on specific topics in your niche – provided that they are focused.

Step 3: Prepare your material

Gather everything you think you will need for your e-book in one easily accessible place (like your PC or your workplace). If possible, organize the information a little in sub-topics to help your sort through it better.

If you have to do some research, take the time to make a list of topics you need more information on, then set aside a couple of hours to research and acquire that information. It can be through the Internet or from your local library, but the important thing here is that you have most (if not all) of what you need in your hands when you start writing.

Apart from a few basic skills (such as the ability to write simple English sentences, basic knowledge of word processing software and Internet access for research), you don’t need anything special to start writing. In fact, I’d advise you to keep your writing process as simple and uncluttered as possible. Use extra/new tools only if necessary.

Step 4: Start Writing

Once you’ve completed your research, it is time to start writing. Actually, let me rephrase that…

It is time to stop thinking and start writing.

A lot of time is wasted in procrastinating over a project. Writing a book takes a long time, and when you’re writing to a deadline, it may seem almost impossible.

Stop worrying about it. Stop thinking about it.

Break it down into small, manageable portions , and start writing.

Take action. The rest, if you have built a strong foundation (done your research well) will take care of itself.

Step 5: Don’t Stop

When you write, make sure that you are in a place with no distractions or time constraints. Set aside several hours at a time and commit to working only on your e-book during that time.

Whatever you do, don’t stop writing . If you cannot write one day, use that to motivate you into writing more the next day; the best way to write a long book is to break it down into chunks of 4-5 pages and commit a few hours daily to write them.

Step 6: Revise and edit ruthlessly

You don’t have to send your drafts to a professional editor, but you should at least review and reread your e-book a couple of times to make sure that there are no inconsistencies and that it flows smoothly from chapter to chapter.

Cut out everything that is not needed. Tangential topics are great, but not if they take you too far off-topic.

And absolutely no fluff to increase the page count. The best example on this is Joel Comm, the man behind the most famous AdSense book, AdSense Secrets. His book on Kontera (a contextual advertising system targeted at high-traffic websites) is only 30 pages and yet so chock-full of information that it seems under-priced at $47.

Step 7: Know when to stop

On a different note, don’t obsess over getting your e-book perfect. The key here is that you manage to provide your customers with the information they are looking for in an easily understandable way.

When you feel your e-book does that (it’s always good to get a second opinion though), stop editing and start working on the next phase (packaging and promotion). Your book does not have to be perfect – it just has to be remarkably useful and valuable to the people who need it the most.

I am getting some positive feedback from some of the readers, and it’s encouraging to see how many of you are interested in taking the big step up to info-product publishing. If you have any questions on the topic “Launching an Info-product Business” and especially on today’s lesson, write to me at infoproduct@seoelite.com. I’ll be answering these questions personally for the next few days.

In the next lesson, I’ll talk about how to package and promote your info-product. This information will help you re-launch any “flop” e-books that you’ve written and will also give you the tools necessary to earn a nice passive income off your next e-book.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

Both of these marketing geniuses helped ‘launch’ their online careers through info products.

The info product business model is by far one of the most profitable ways you can build an online business, help others that could greatly use the information you have stored away… and make loads of money in the process. You can use an ebook (electronic book) as just part of a greater online effort (such as promoting a service) or sell it on its own, and still make a hefty profit.

The trick comes in knowing how to write and market the book. You also have to know what to write about. These three things (“what to write”, “how to write”, and “then what”) combine to make life difficult for almost anyone wanting to start their online business by selling an ebook, and the simple fact that people “don’t know what to do” is the single biggest reason why there are so many ebooks being written every week and so few of them becoming profitable.

In the next few lessons, I’m going to get up close and personal with the info product business model and show you exactly how you can launch your very own info product in little to no time at all.

Not because I know how to market online – after all, many other people just like me have built up successful online businesses selling a variety of products, from software to services to even ideas (to an extent, a forum is a business if it can generate revenue for you, but it still remains a place to discuss and share ideas).

No, the reason you should listen to me is because I KNOW exactly what it takes to write a book from scratch. Things are very different if you’re basing the health of your entire online future on the success of your info product. Many people turn down the insanely lucrative idea of writing and selling an info product because they are afraid.

Afraid of not knowing what to write.

Afraid of not knowing how to write a book (especially those people who’re not natural writers (Trust me… I know how that feels).

Afraid of not knowing how to sell the book.

Afraid of not knowing what to do after they’ve created their online business.

I know how it feels. I’ve been through the whole process when I wrote my first ebook back in 2002. I learned through trial and error what the “master” tactics were in shaving days and weeks off your book writing time, and I learned first hand what worked and what didn’t work when it came to marketing my ebook.

It’s what I learned while marketing my first ebook that I built upon and used to create SEO Elite and write the 7 days to massive website traffic course (and still use to write this newsletter).

When it comes to marketing ebooks; I KNOW how to drive massive amounts of traffic to my sites.

So what are we waiting for? Maybe you don’t think that an info product business is right for you.

The first, and most obvious of reasons for creating an info product is the enormous profit margins.

Unlike a service, there are little or no recurring costs for making repeat sales of your ebook. Unlike selling products, there are no inventory costs or product costs to cut into the profits.

An info product, if written for a large and hungry market, is a goldmine because it does not cost anything to replicate. Write once, and keep on selling years later. A mini-site selling your ebook is the essence of passive income – your info product business runs on autopilot, earning you money every day without any effort from your part.

Considering that you can launch an info product business in as little as 7 days, if you hurry; or 14 days if you’re new to it, that sort of time investment seems way too less for the sort of returns we’re talking about. Let’s say your ebook is priced at $47 and sells about 10 copies a month. In a year, that one book will make you over five thousand dollars. If you sell 20 copies a month, you make eleven thousand dollars.

All from a 7 to 14 day process!

Now add what I will teach you about marketing your book, and you can take that “copies sold” number up to 50 a month (it’s possible to go much higher than that in a market with decent demand, as long as you have a system in place that drives traffic to your site). That’s a cool 28 thousand dollars in your account by the end of the year.

Now copy this system and implement it in a dozen different markets. 12 info products, with each info product earning you somewhere between 20 to 30 thousand dollars a year.

That’s way more money than I care to count right now. The important thing is that this is not something I’m just making up. It is possible, and many very successful internet marketers are doing exactly this right now.

The question is…when will YOU cash in?

Another reason to publish an info product is to supplement an already-running online business.

Suppose that you have a successful niche blog or forum that you’re running, with an established reader base. You can easily write an ebook targeted towards your current market, and leverage your status as an ‘authority’ in the niche to generate publicity and sales for your book.

Similarly, if you run a services business, a published book (even if it is just an ebook) can simultaneously boost your credibility and add to the bottom line for you.

Now, you’re not just making money off your knowledge, but you’re also using it to supplement your business – people who buy your book will trust your opinion and come back to your site. What’s more, your visitors and customers have more of an opportunity to refer others to your site and your book, leading to a cycle of increased profits for you.

The public relations aspect of an info product cannot be ignored. A successful info product instantly establishes you as an expert in your niche, and gives you a credible platform that you can then use to sell your services or other products. Information, and more importantly qualified information coming from an expert, is valued more than ever today.

In a perfect world where you have an unlimited amount of time to create an ebook, it’s possible to create and publish one in as little as 1 week. However, it’s not a perfect world. You, more than likely have a day job, or at the very least, another business to take care of. You can’t just close up shop, ignore the world and do nothing else apart from writing all day long.

A 1 week system works like clockwork for experts and experienced writers, but I think it might be pushing the envelope just a bit for a newcomer to the info product business.

I’d suggest putting at least 14 days into the process, and even then everything has to be timed properly so that you don’t neglect writing your book.

The bottom line, writing your first ebook will take some time and effort. The biggest hurdle you’ll face will be doing the actual “writing” – everything else is part of a system where you just follow instructions (well, almost that simple).

In the next two lessons, I’ll cover the writing process in detail, and show you exactly how you can sidestep those jitters and eliminate that sinking feeling in the stomach you might get when you sit down to write a 50 page ebook.

It’s a simple process, actually. But more on this next time. For now, if you have any specific questions you want answered on this topic (“Launching an info product Business”), let me know at infoproduct@seoelite.com. I’ll be answering these questions personally for the next few days.

Stay tuned for the next lesson as I get more into the meat of creating an info product!

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

Today, I’ll take this review session to the next level by discussing the 20 questions as well as their answers in detail.

So let’s get started…

1. Your website sells Green Widgets – what is the best Title tag for your main page?

a. Get Green Widgets, Buy Green Widgets, Green Widgets, Green Widget.
b. We have Cheap Green Widgets with great prices and selection.
c. Buy Green Widgets | Discount Widgets.
d. Home | Greenwidgets.com

A Title tag must be descriptive, brief and keyword rich. This immediately rules out the first two options for this question, which were either too full of keywords or too long without any targeted keywords. Writing a Title tag is not an exact science – however, keep your keyword terms limited to 2 or 3 in the Title tag, and I always like to separate them with “|”.

2. Your site map has more than 100 links to your pages. Do you:

a. Create a hierarchy of links, and split up the site map into multiple pages.
b. Keep adding new links, no problem.
c. Add a second page to your site map and add new links to that.
d. Stop adding links to your site map completely.

Because search engines are hesitant to give any specific guidelines on how to optimize our websites, any small detail becomes very important. As far as sitemaps are concerned, this is an issue where it pays to listen to the search engines, especially since with large content sites well-designed sitemaps are a sure bet that your site will be quickly indexed.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines clearly state that you should limit your sitemaps to less than 100 links per page, and that it is better to use a hierarchy that signifies the site structure and the importance of these pages. It is good advice to follow, especially when a search engine says that “look, this helps us index your site better”.

3. How many words should you consider writing in a page of pure content (such as an article, a blog post or a product review)?

a. 100-200
b. 500-800
c. 200-400
d. 800+

While there is no set length of pages that works best in search engines (ecommerce stores have little content and still rank high, while many pages ranking high have 1000+ words as a minimum), but if you are going towards publishing quality content (either through blogs or articles), then the 500 to 800 word count is a good range for the following reasons:

• Gives you enough room to discuss one focused topic in detail.
• Forces you to keep it interesting and relevant.
• More content = better contextual advertising – this limit gives you targeted ads for your article quite easily (whereas a small word count may result in generic, site-specific ads).
• Since you cannot cover more than one main idea in such a short range, you must create separate content pages for different ideas – giving you more opportunities to create fresh content (remember to always “drill down” in your content writing and differentiate multiple aspects of the same topic).

4. What is the optimum keyword density you should aim for?

a. 2%-5%.
b. Keep the content normal, but stuff the page with hidden text in alt tags, meta tags and “white-on-white” text to maximize keyword density.
c. As much as possible, while keeping the content human-readable.
d. Forget keyword density – search engines pay very little attention to it any more. Just focus on writing content that people will want to link to.

Keyword density has been abused since before Google came out with their PageRank algorithm in 1998. Keeping that in mind, search engines do not pay much attention to pure keyword density. What they do pay attention to is relevant on-page factors such as page structure, navigation, title tags and advanced topics such as term weight and c-indices. However, all this pales in comparison to the off-page factors (linking strategy), especially in Google. Yahoo seems to give more weight than Google to on-page factors, but even then keyword density is not very high on the list.

5. What should you put inside meta tags?

a. Put your full keyword list in the meta keywords tag, and put your most important keywords in the meta description tag.
b. Ignore the meta tags – search engines don’t use them.
c. Write a short description of your website in the meta description tag, and put your most important keywords in the meta keywords tag.
d. Put your most important keywords in the meta keywords tag and don’t use a meta description tag.

Meta tags, like keyword density, are easily abused and misused. Because of this, search engines are very wary of trusting any information put in them. However since meta tags are essentially describing what the page is about, you should use them to briefly describe each page. Note that sometimes your meta description might be used to describe your site in search engine results, and that any heavy optimization of these tags may trip the spam filters in search engines. Use them, but lightly, and don’t depend on them as they have limited use.

6. For optimization purposes, how should you use images on your site?

a. Use the alt tag to accurately describe the each image, and include descriptive content around each image.
b. Put your most important keyword in an alt tags followed by the word “graphic”.
c. Just use them wherever it is necessary from an aesthetic perspective, without regard for alt tags because they aren’t really that important.
d. Use alt tags to “hide” your full keyword list so you can increase your page’s keyword density.

At the very least, images should contain alt tags with one or two keywords describing that image, and you should try surrounding that image with relevant text. If the image is not used in context (i.e. it is not part of a content page or an article), you should add a couple of lines below the image describing it. In essence, what you would do if you were caring for people whose browsers disabled images and those who wanted some details about the images.

7. Which style tag is preferred by the W3C for emphasizing important text?

a. <b>
b. <strong>
c. <heavy>
d. <bold>

This is one most people trip out on. The <b> tag is commonly used for style purposes (to make text go bold), and this was inadvertently carried over in SEO circles when people wanted to emphasize certain sections of their content. However, the W3C standards advocate that one must use the <strong> tag to emphasize important words in your content. As for the <b> tag, W3C standards classify it as a styling tag and actually want you to use CSS to style your content, but that’s a separate issue.

So if you’re using <b> tags to emphasize important parts of your content, stop! Use <strong> tags for keywords and key terms, and keep the <b> tag for visual emphasis only.

8. What types of websites are most trusted by search engines (authority sites)?

a. High PR websites.
b. .edu and .gov websites.
c. Low PR websites with lots of backlinks.
d. Medium to High PR websites with lots of backlinks from other high ranking websites.
e. Both b and d

Authority sites are like gold on the Internet – a link from them is better than several links from small, unknown sites. Search engines use different criteria to establish the trustworthiness of a site, but common elements include those websites that are official (reduced chance of spamming and greater chance of accurate information) sites such as .edu and .gov sites (not .org, as this extension has been spammed and abused already) and those websites that receive a large number of links from other high ranking and trusted sites.

Getting links from these sites is tough, but definitely a great investment.

9. Which of these sites will provide the most valuable link?
a. A PR 7 website.
b. A PR 5 site closely related to your niche with strong backlinks from .edu and .gov (trusted) domains.
c. A website with hundreds of pages of duplicate content that is banned in the search engines.
d. A PR 6 website loosely related to your niche but with few ‘trusted’ backlinks.

For a site to be valuable as a backlink, it has to fulfill the following characteristics:

• It must be trusted by the search engines – that is, it must have backlinks of its own from trusted sites.
• It must be closely related to your niche – the closer, the better. So if you’re running a soccer store, a tech site may not be the ideal backlink but a sports site reviewing soccer products is definitely worth going after.
• It should be a clean site – without any penalties.

10. Suppose that you were offered the following 4 choices as a link – which one would be the most valuable?

a. An optimized contextual link (a link as part of a page’s content with proper anchor text) from a closely related PR 5 site’s main page content.
b. A link on the links page of an unrelated PR 7 site – shared with 50 other links (and their two line descriptions).
c. A link on the links page of closely related PR 6 site – shared with 20 other links.
d. A PR 6 link from a directory page with 10 other links only.

The best links are those that are contextual and contain optimized anchor text – such an in-text link to SEO Elite from a blog post of a leading SEO blog (e.g. seomoz or webguerrilla). Note that a similar link from a totally unrelated site such as a real estate portal will not carry the same value.

While directory pages and link pages carry value, these are not as important as contextual links, mainly because contextual links are harder to spam.

11. If you were building links for greenwidgets.com, what would be your strategy in choosing anchor text?

a. Buy high PR links from closely related sites that offer traffic as well as link wealth.
b. Use organic marketing tactics to encourage natural link growth using your site’s content.
c. Submit articles to article directories and link to your site’s inner pages in those articles to build ‘deep’ links.
d. All of the above.

This one was fairly straightforward – when building links, you should pursue opportunities on all fronts. Don’t ignore developing your site’s content and focus all your attention on buying links! Instead, balance your link building efforts and divide equal time for each of these activities.

12. Which of these four is the most important in assessing a link?

a. The anchor text.
b. The PR of the page you’re getting the links from.
c. The number of outgoing links on the link page.
d. The title tag of the link page.

All four factors are important, but apart from anchor text, the other three are also dependent on other factors that may or may not exist in your favor. For example, the PR of the page you’re getting links from is meaningless if the website is in a totally different niche than yours. Similarly, the title tag of the link page may be just [home], but if the link is contextual and if the anchor text is optimized, it’s still a valuable link (where as the reverse – good title tag, bad anchor text – will not be true.

The number of outgoing links is only to be concerned about because it might show the search engine that you are situated on a link list page, which they may or may not penalize the link for. However, a good content page (like on a blog) may contain 30+ outgoing links – yet with optimized anchor text and placed in proper context, the link is suddenly very valuable.

13. How many links should you get for your site in the first 6 months (on average)?

a. 50-70 links a month.
b. 100+ links a month.
c. As many quality links as you can.
d. 25-40 a month.

While the Google Sandbox is not a myth (nor is it as strictly defined as some people might say it is), there are no penalties for building too many links. In fact, the ‘pace’ at which you build your links only becomes suspicious if it is unnatural – for example, if you suddenly get 100+ links to your website in 2 weeks that are from a link network (assuming this link network can be detected by the search engine) and you have made little or no addition to your site content, this would constitute as suspicious, unnatural link building.

On the other hand, if you’re continually adding content and getting deep links (through article submissions as well as through your link building efforts), you may get 300+ links in a week (like seomoz did for its ranking factors list) and the search engine will recognize these as natural – and something viral like this can even propel your site out of the Sandbox.

14. What does PageRank technically measure?

a. The linking power carried by a particular link.
b. How many external, inbound links point to a particular page.
c. The number and quality of the links pointing to a particular page.
d. Your ranking position in the search engines.

PageRank is not link popularity (number of inbound links) or link weight (the linking power carried by a particular page) – in fact, it is a combination of both as well as several different factors.

However, your search engine rankings are not determined exclusively via PageRank – hundreds of other factors, including relevancy of links, anchor text and other off-page and on-page factors come into play as well. PageRank is just a measure, and as a measure its value has been steadily declining – something claimed by Google as well.

15. What does the term “Sandbox” describe in reference to Google’s SERPs?

a. The ranking factors affecting all new websites that are targeting highly competitive keywords before targeting less competitive keywords.
b. Google’s system for penalizing sites exhibiting an overly-optimizing back-link structure.
c. Google’s penalty for building too many links too quickly.
d. Google’s play area for their staff during lunch break.

The Sandbox is a series of filters applied to all new websites as they try to rank for their select search terms on Google. It does not penalize websites for building too many links too quickly (as explained in a previous question), although these filters do affect websites that are seemingly too well-optimised than their niche competitors.

The best path to avoid the Sandbox (or to get out if you’re stuck) is to keep building natural links through your content and focus on your rankings in MSN and Yahoo. If you’re ranking highly in those search engines and are constantly building contextual links, you’ll be able to get out of the Sandbox within an year.

Note: If you start with a keyword phrase that isn’t very competitive and is “less known”, you WILL bypass the “sandbox” and should rank well pretty quickly. Once you build credibility and authority/age, you can start to take on the bigger keywords.

16. What is the best way for websites with very little content (like ecommerce stores) rank highly for competitive product terms?

a. They have a lot of natural links (one-way, contextual) with optimal anchor text from a wide variety of websites.
b. Their pages are stuffed with keywords and “white text”.
c. They use content-generating software to spam the search engines and attain false rankings.
d. They pay a lot of money to get high PR links.

This comes under the whole content vs. links debate: which is more important? Search engines value both, thus the only way to rank well if you have less of one of them is to have more of the other.

In the context of ecommerce stores, they face stiff competition from other stores that buy high PR links to artificially inflate their rankings. The best way to beat them is to go for contextual, one-way links from trusted websites – this is harder and takes more time, but the benefits include first page rankings on SERPs.

17. Which of these will NOT get your site penalized in Google?

a. Thousands of automatically-generated pages built only for the search engines.
b. Building quality links at a steady pace.
c. Scraping (stealing) content from other websites.
d. Getting links from websites that Google considers to be from a ‘bad’ link neighborhood.

Using content-generating software that creates pages only for search engines is a common spam tactic, and search engines have, in the past couple of years, rapidly caught on to this approach and will penalize it severely. Similarly, stealing content from other sites is not that hard to detect (they measure the similarity of content and match it with which page was indexed first).

Links from a website that is already penalized by Google can get your website penalized – this is not a guarantee, but if your website is getting several links from banned sites AND there is any spam-like activity on your website (like stuffing keywords into your meta keywords tag, or overoptimised title tags), then you may get penalized as well.

18. Which of these five methods will NOT give you an accurate estimate of the search demand in a niche?

a. Overture search term figures
b. WordTracker.com numbers
c. Nichebot.com
d. Statcounter.com

Overture and WordTracker report numbers based on an analysis of a subset of search engine data. Nichebot provides data from the above two services, while Statcounter is used to monitor site traffic.

19. When designing the site structure of a website, which of the following statements is NOT a good idea?

a. Make a site map that points to each page on the site.
b. Attempt to make all pages accessible from the home page by at most 3 clicks.
c. Link all of your inner pages to all of your other websites.
d. Create a category structure that goes from broad to narrow.

Site-wide links should be reserved for the important internal pages of your own website (such as the home page, the contact page and main category pages). This way, you will be transferring maximum link weight back to the key pages of your website so that they can rank higher. BY linking all pages on 1 of your websites, to your other website, the search engines will quickly see that you are trying to manipulate their results and will more than likely penalize you accordingly.

20. Which is the best method of getting traffic to your site?

a. Pay-per-click ads.
b. Pay for high PR links so that you get a PR yourself, which will help boost your own search engine rankings.
c. Submit your website to search engines and popular directories, and focus on creating content.
d. Create quality content that people in your niche would want to link to, and then promote that content through article syndication, blogs and forums.
e. All of the above.

Traffic building methods, like link building, should never be restricted to one form of traffic (because when that dries up, you’ll be caught with your proverbial pants down). If you sell products, then PPC ads are a great tool for driving targeted traffic. On the other hand, paying for “traffic” links on related websites will do wonders as well. In addition, search engine traffic procured through link building and creating quality content will assure that you have a steady stream of free traffic to rely upon.

I hope that you have gained something from the SEO quiz as well as the discussion in this lesson. Remember, the only way to succeed at SEO is to APPLY what you learn – if you’re not doing that, you had better get started.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

One thing to remember in any learning process is that unless you apply what you’ve picked up on a daily basis, you’re not going to benefit from your investment. It doesn’t matter how expensive or valuable that advice is; even simple, common sense tips are rendered meaningless by a lack of application.

To help you recap what you’ve learned so far, I’ve prepared a short quiz (20 questions) on the most important SEO topics. I hope that at the end of it, you will be able to better evaluate your current SEO efforts, and should be able to pinpoint the areas where you need to improve.

The quiz is divided into 3 sections (On-page optimization, link building and general SEO), and is geared towards the basics – so hopefully you should all be doing pretty well in it.

The answers are at the end, but please don’t peek :

Let’s get started.

On-Page Optimization

1. Your website sells Green Widgets – what is the best Title tag for your main page?

2. Your site map has more than 100 links to your pages. Do you:

3. How many words should you consider writing in a page of pure content (such as an article, a blog post or a product review)?

4. What is the optimum keyword density you should aim for?

5. What should you put inside meta tags?

6. How should you use images on your site?

7. Which style tag is preferred by the W3C for emphasizing important text?

Link Building

8. What types of websites are most trusted by search engines (authority sites)?

9. Which of these sites will provide the most valuable link?

10. Suppose that you were offered the following 4 choices as a link – which one would be the most valuable?

11. If you were building links for greenwidgets.com, what would be your strategy in choosing anchor text?

12. Which of these four is the most important in assessing a link?

13. How many links should you get for your site in the first 6 months (on average)?

General SEO

14. What does PageRank technically measure?

15. What does the term “Sandbox” describe in reference to Google’s SERPs?

16. What is the best way for websites with very little content (like ecommerce stores) rank highly for competitive product terms?

17. Which of these will NOT get your site penalized in Google?

18. Which of these five methods will not give you an accurate estimate of the search demand in a niche?

19. When designing the site structure of a website, which of the following statements is NOT a good idea?

20. Which is the best method of getting traffic to your site?

Ok, now that you’ve answered all the 20 questions, compare your answers to the answer sheet below. This was a fairly basic quiz, so if you get less than 10 right, you should seriously consider reviewing the material in this newsletter. However, if you got more than 15 right, congratulations – you’ve got the basics right. Make sure that you apply these principles to your websites as well, otherwise you wont see good rankings.

Stay tuned for the next lesson where I’ll be going through the answers for each of the questions above in more detail. It’s critical that, at a bare minimum, you can fully grasp all the questions above. So look for my email in the next few days.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

In the SEO Elite newsletter I’ve often mentioned the benefits of article marketing, but with Google’s recent updates to its ranking algorithms, the topic merits a fresh look. With everyone even remotely interested in achieving decent search engine rankings turning to article marketing, it is critical for your website’s success that you fully understand what traditional article marketing is about and how you can benefit from it. Note that as search engines become smarter with reciprocal links, article marketing – especially the sort of marketing that guarantees good results – will require some expert knowledge.

In the rest of this lesson, I’ll show you:

• How traditional article marketing works
• Why it will not work in the long run and
• The right way to do article marketing

In addition, I have a surprise for you at the end of this issue (but wait, read the lesson first, what you’ll learn here is priceless).

Traditional article marketing works something like this:

You write (or pay someone to write it) a 600-word article, take out a list of 100-200 article directories, and submit your article to all of them (or you could hire someone to do that as well). In a week or so, your article is accepted and published by the article directories, not to mention thousands of websites who pick up articles from these directories.

Then, after a week or two of submitting the article, search engines pick it up and suddenly see hundreds, if not thousands, of new links to your site. Even if these are low-quality links in some cases (there are very few highly reputed article directories, and most of them are not themed), your rankings benefits thanks to the sheer number of links you’ve built.

Over a period of time, after several article submissions, you notice an improvement in your search engine rankings at the next algorithm update. Yes, those links have made all the difference, and now your site is starting to get higher search engine placement.

By the looks of it, article marketing has everything search engines ask for – quality content, contextual links and even one-way links (as opposed to reciprocal links, which are less valuable).

However, to draw a parallel, just blindly submitting articles to hundreds of directories is like shooting in the dark – you’re essentially banking on getting tons of non-themed links in the hope that they will be enough to improve your rankings (you may get lucky now and then and have some big website in your niche pick up your article and run it).

Important: The reason I say that many of these article links are non-themed is because the search engines not only look at the page your link is located on, BUT also look at the “website” your link is located on. All of these article directories are probably not related to your website in theme.

If you are serious about your rankings, you’ll have to get your hands dirty and chase down the right links yourself (only at the beginning of course – as your site’s popularity increases, your articles will generate their own links and you will get requests from other websites requesting your permission to reprint your articles).

The case for adopting a personal approach to article marketing becomes air-tight if you consider the following:

• Search engines are clamping down harder on duplicate content , using the “date of discovery” (when the SE spider first finds the content) and other factors to find out which article is original and which are “copies”.

• Search engines are getting better at evaluating “ themed ” links – links from industry-related websites, with a greater emphasis on niche sites dealing with one or two themes rather than general purpose sites dealing with a large set of themes (like article directories).

• Search engines already consider anchor text as vulnerable to spam, so if hundreds of links pointing to your site suddenly pop up (with the EXACT same anchor text), this would be a “red-flag” event.

In other words, while article submissions are excellent tools for gaining traffic and rankings, search engines are catching up to the fact that spammers may use “blind” submissions in order to artificially boost their link popularity, and are looking to implement filters that can catch spammers. This will not happen immediately and maybe not even in the next year, but as the search engine wars (between Google, Yahoo and the rest) heat up, search engines will get stricter in terms of what they allow to rank highly in their search results.

Note that when I say search engines, I’m really talking about Google (which current serves 40-50 percent of all search engine traffic). However, as article spam increases, the other search engines are bound to implement changes that will catch it as well.

If you want maximum results for your article marketing, you would be best served by adopting the following tactics:

• Target the top article directories and go for a few quality links instead of hundreds of low-quality links. In other words, hit the top article directories (I’ve listed a few later on in this lesson) and devote the rest of your time on the next couple of steps.
  
• Find themed article directories / content sites that are related to the niche that your article addresses. For example, if you write about CSS, you would be looking for directories and websites that accept content on website development and more directly, website programming.
  
• Use articles as link building tools – find high-ranking sites related to yours and instead of simply asking for links, pitch your article to them as an offer to their readers. If your article is engaging, fresh and unique, most websites will gladly publish it on their websites (or at least give you a reference link), leading to increased traffic as well as link popularity.

There are a few more things that you can do to make sure you came out ahead of the search engines’ spam filters:

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

Ideally, you shouldn’t publish articles that you submit on your own website – this “may” help you avoid the duplicate content penalty a bit. On the other hand, this does not address the concern that carbon copies of your article will suddenly pop up in hundreds of places on the Internet. To deal with this, you can use one or more of the following techniques:

• Post the article on your website, and wait for it to be indexed by the major search engines before you submit it to the article directories.
• Post the full article on your website and submit “ half ” of it to the article directories (works best if you have a 1000 words+ article).
• Have your writer create a second, different version of the article. Then, you can submit that version to the directories while keeping the original on your site.

Deep Linking

Instead of just putting links to your main site page, link to a few inner pages of your site from within the article text. Of course, the inner pages must be relevant to the article topic. This will help spread the link popularity you receive throughout the site. Deep links are one of the ways search engines use to evaluate the value of links.

Themed Links

Use different articles for different purposes. For example, you could have one article promoting your main website, another promoting your new book (and linking to the order page), and yet another article linking to your newsletter signup page. The key is to remember that articles also mean traffic, and along with deep links, getting traffic to the key money-making areas of your site is very important.

Find Quality Article Sites

There are very few article directories (like Ezine Articles ) that have a stellar reputation within the search engines. Directories like Go Articles and ISnare are popular precisely because they themselves have managed to rank highly within the search engines.

The top ranked directories will not only get you the most link wealth but also the most traffic. However, don’t be satisfied with just hitting the general purpose article sites – make sure that you find sites within your niche that accept articles exclusively to the topic – if you can get links from within your own topical link neighbourhood, they will be worth much more than the links you get from the big article directories.

And now, for the surprise I mentioned earlier.

Very soon, I’ll be launching a new service that will allow you to crank out QUALITY Adsense style websites in only a few minutes. There are 2 major hindrances for Adsense website publishers. They are:

1. Lack of unique, quality content.
2. Lack of links to get the pages indexed quickly.

Lack of unique, quality content

What most adsense publishers do is visit article directories such as those mentioned above. They then grab 20-30 articles related to their website topic. They add the articles to their site and hope to see the search engine traffic pour in. Does it? 99.9% of the time is doesn’t.

The reason is because you’re serving up duplicate content that the Search Engines already know about.

So, how can you get around this? Easy… Create your own unique content based on the keywords you’re targeting. Up until now, this could be an extremely time intensive process. Can you imagine writing 30, 550+ word articles? Sheesh, I don’t even want to think about that. You can figure it would take you about 60 minutes to write 1 “quality” article. If you were to write 30 articles, that’s 30 hours of work! Almost an entire week’s work… Makes me sick just thinking about that

Anyway, if you’re anything like me and many other internet marketers, we know the key to massive success is paying others to do thing you don’t want to do yourself, in order to free up your time (which is the most important asset you have) to promote your website.

This is where my new service comes in. We will write ALL of the articles for you, for an insanely cheap amount per article. Because my staff is so large, we’re able to do this so cheaply, which benefits everyone Plus, everything is organized into your very own administration panel where you simply enter whatever topics you want us to write about. Click “submit” and BAM, we’re immediately writing your article and will have it to you within 24 hours. The sky’s really the limit.

Alright, I won’t give you a URL for the site just yet, but look for an email in the coming weeks. You’re going to love what you see.

Lack of links to get the pages indexed quickly

This is another very common problem, but can be solved extremely easily. In order to get your pages indexed, you simply need links. The more links pointing to your website, the faster you will get indexed, period.

How can you get easy, fast links to your site? Go to LinkMetro.com and either sign up for a free account and manually exchange links with over 20,000 other websites listed in very tightly themed categories OR upgrade to an Advanced membership where you can get links even quicker and easier.

Whatever you decide. Go to LinkMetro.com and start getting links and I can guarantee that your pages will get indexed MUCH quicker than had you not done so.

Well, that wraps up this lesson on the importance of article marketing. I hope that this lesson has taught you some new strategies for using articles as effective marketing tools for your online business and I will speak with you soon!

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

Not all strategies are created equal. For example, implementing Tip #1 might not increase your bottom line by much if your newsletter doesn’t integrate the tips very well. On the other hand, if your current crop of subscribers were acquired from those cheap holiday mega-giveaways, you might be surprised to learn how much an effect Tip #4 can have on the profits generated through your newsletter.

You might already know a few tips from this list – that’s good, because now you know you’re on the right track.

In essence, these are the specific aspects of your newsletter strategy that you should “check” regularly to see if you’re doing them (and doing them right). And make sure you monitor your own results to find out what works and doesn’t work – you are bound to learn something every time you send out an issue (assuming that you’re continuously plugging away and testing things).

Below are my Top 10 practices and tactics that I’ve picked up over the years:

1 – Readers Come First

People care less about you and more about themselves. In each issue, review each section with the specific criteria of usefulness to the reader. If it’s not at least a 3 out of 5, either ditch it or push it to the end of the issue. In fact, you might try to structure your newsletter by sticking in what you think is most useful to the reader at the top, and working downwards from that.

2 – What Have I Done for You Lately?

Depending on how frequent your newsletter issues are, you will need one new “big thing” to keep the publication fresh. Whether its in the form of a new service, a tool or a free ebook / report, make sure to provide something valuable (on a large scale) to your subscribers periodically (say every year, or every 6 months).

You could even put the offering on a new website, and thus generate rapid publicity (and free links) to your site as a result of such a promotion.

On a side note, be on the lookout for several new tools and services that I’ll be announcing – a keyword tool (Keyword Elite) and an article writing service are just two of them. Stay tuned. I’m very excited to show you guys!

3 – Quality Source of Subscribers

It’s absolutely critical to the success of your email newsletter to figure out where your new subscribers will come from. Many subscribers to SEO Elite come from the thousands of inbound links to its home page, many more still arrive from the search engines and others are acquired through syndicated articles across a network of reputed sites.

4 – Keep It Simple, Very Simple

That goes for layout, sentence structure, copy style and editorial guidelines. Readers in this medium need to “get it” fast. If you try to get them overly involved with complex schemes or hard-to-understand copy, you’ll lose them. It’s like radio, in a way. It’s very easy to lose someone’s attention in radio because there are no visuals. Online is a lean-in, rush-to-read-it medium. People lean forward into their computer monitors, usually with a very specific intention. Serve that intention or something very close to that intention – with speed.

If you’re building your online presence through podcasts (audio blogging) and/or vidcasts (video blogging), this advice applies in spades. Make everything easily accessible, and allow for a link to a page that helps out first-timers or people who are having any trouble.

5 – Pick Your Email Service Provider Carefully

Read their white papers on email marketing and take it for a trial spin before committing resources. See which businesses similar to yours use a similar service – call them up and see what they have to say about that service. In short, do your homework before you leap.

You don’t want to be caught in a situation where you build up your list through one service provider before realizing that there’s another email service that offers better terms, is more scalable and generally more suited to your needs.

6 – Show Your Face

I’m guilty of not following this advice on the SEO Elite newsletter. However, understand that the Internet is (still) a pretty spooky place. Showing your face, rather than some slick graphic, is a good bet. People like to know there’s a human at the other end of the line.

7 – Put the Subscriber First

Even if your email newsletter is complimentary, first serve the subscriber as though he/she was paying for your product. If you don’t, your readership will sense you have other agendas and lose their loyalty. Give your readers everything you have, and don’t hold anything back. It’s important you give MUCH more than you receive… so give them every ounce that you have in you.

8 – Make Your Newsletter Indispensable

If your newsletter becomes a must-read, other sites will point to you, which will increase your standing in search engine results and bring you even more traffic and subscribers… but you must first be such a solid resource that other sites can justify pointing to you as that industry’s “go-to” resource.

9 – Subject Headers Rule

No matter who is in the “From” field, you know you need a compelling subject header. Keep it short, sweet and direct. No hyperbole or overly “sales-like” material. I’ve seen the very same solo email campaign draw 20% better response rates (and more) using a different subject header. BTW, I notice my subscribers love “How To” subject headers. It makes sense. After all, people who read an SEO newsletter are always interested in knowing how to do things or how to do things better. Never, and I repeat, never use the subject line: “Article 107 of 182″ or something along those lines. Use something intriuging. Nobody cares if this is Article 107, or whatever the case may be. The purpose of the subject line is to get people to open the email.

10 – Never allow others to pay you to advertise in your newsletter

Every once in a great while, it’s ok to do a little advertising in your newsletter, but if you decide to do this, it had better be either for your own product OR for a product that you are a direct affiliate of. Wasting your 1 mailing containing an advertisement for something, on someone else’s ad is a big no-no. You could earn far more money AND chances are you could be telling your subscribers about a much more helpful product if it’s one you picked out yourself.

Make sure that you review your publishing strategy and find out if you’re not implementing any one or more of these tips – they could make a significant difference to your bottom line. All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

Last time, I started off with saying that people shy away from email marketing because they don’t know how to do it. Almost as bad is the lack of an effective plan. In fact, there are so many questions to ask in email marketing before you send out even one issue of your newsletter because of what’s at stake – thousands of dollars in profits, your company’s reputation, customer confidence – that its no surprise to see big companies spending a lot of money just to get email marketing right.

So…what does an email marketing plan consist of?

• A strong content base.

• A newsletter template.

• A strategy for acquiring subscribers.

• A publishing schedule.

• An advertising plan.

Let’s look at each individually.

If you want to gain and maintain subscribers, you must have something valuable to offer. Usually that comes in the form of expert knowledge, unless your business is in providing the latest news about a particular subject, in which case your newsletter can write itself (although if you don’t include any original content, you’ll lose subscribers fast).Email marketing is most successful if you make the commitment to give something valuable to the subscriber first. Everything I’ve said so far about building trust applies here in spades. Make sure you offer something unique and useful to your readers.

A major debate in email marketing is the question of frequency – how often should you send out your newsletter? Daily? Weekly? Once a month?

The truth is, there’s no set formula for this. Instead, the answer lies in your business plan – what you want to achieve from your email marketing, and what sort of relationship you expect to build with your readers. If your newsletter is a “how-to” resource (like this one), you may consider weekly mailings (or twice a week, if possible). The problem then becomes content generation – do you have enough new topics to cover in your next newsletter, and can you write two newsletters in a week?

My advice would be not to settle for anything more frequent than a weekly newsletter, and depending on your business model, you might even want to opt for a biweekly or monthly newsletter. On the other hand, some marketers totally ignore such guidelines and publish irregularly , whenever they please (or whenever they have something useful to say). If you’re undecided, you might want to try that approach until you can figure out what’s best for your particular list.

Most email marketers prefer to include the whole newsletter within the email. This however raises a whole set of problems – email deliverability becomes a major issue, as long emails (especially ones that talk about making money) trip spam filters on most email networks. Another problem is how your newsletter is displayed – if you have an HTML formatted newsletter, it might break up or display incorrectly. Worse still is the case with images – many email providers (including GMail) don’t display images by default. Such issues can seriously downgrade the visual impact of your newsletter.

And of course, bandwidth becomes an issue if you have a medium to large list. Sending a 100k image-laden, html formatted 1000+ words newsletter to 20,000 is, despite being an exaggerated example, stupid. Third party list management tools can often charge you for high bandwidth, and you don’t want to incur unnecessary costs.

The alternative strategy is to use the emails as a short reminder to the subscriber that a new issue has been posted, and then to post the issue online on your website. This allows you to create a visually appealing, aesthetic newsletter template and by directing subscribers to your website, you’ve already confirmed that they are interested in what you have to say – the click-through rate immediately becomes an important metric for you to gauge how successful your marketing is.

No matter which approach you take, keep your template simple and professional – the focus remains on the content, not on the design.

To make your newsletter worth your time (and for it to help you make money), you need to build your list . Usually this amounts to a flurry of activity and a mad rush for a lot of subscribers when you start off your newsletter, and then it tapers off into a steady stream of new signups.

What’s important is to have a definite plan in place for getting subscribers (in other words, traffic to that landing page). It usually means that you’ll be spending some money, unless you happen to partner with other sites in your niche and syndicate your content, or you manage to achieve top search engine rankings (which you SHOULD be doing by now, if you’ve followed this newsletter).

If you need to spend money on building your list, consider this – each subscriber has a specific value attached to him/her. This value can be calculated like this:

• The amount of money a subscriber (on average) spends on buying your products during the time he’s on your list.

• The average amount of revenue you get through newsletter advertising per subscriber.

Add those two numbers up (remember, these are averages), and you’ve got the monetary value of each new subscriber. This calculation gives you a ceiling amount you can afford to spend per subscriber .

To illustrate, here’s an example – if you earn $15,000 from a list of 3,000 people by promoting just one product in the last three months, then your subscriber value is $5 (15,000/3,000). Of course, this number is for a confirmed subscriber, so if you were running an AdWords campaign with a hypothetical 5% conversion rate on your landing page (good landing pages usually have a conversion rate of over 10%, although it depends on the relevancy of the traffic as well), you can spend at most 25 cents per click – not a bad amount.

Your subscriber value can rocket upwards if you use backend sales and market more than one product to your list. Advertising within your newsletter also counts for a lot, and should be able to give you enough “cushion” to allow you to spend money to get subscribers AND turn in a tidy profit.

If you’re running a newsletter, I strongly recommended that you run some from of advertisements in them (your OWN advertising of some sort). As long as what you display is relevant to your readers’ interests, you are bound to profit from the exercise.

Also, make sure you map out how frequently you send out purely promotional offers to your list (assuming you take that route). Hitting a list with too many offers too quickly can backfire on you – on the other hand, you can and should send multiple mailings about the same product to ensure a maximum response rate from your list. It’s a tricky balance, but as long as you make sure you focus on providing value first, you’ll do fine.

As I’ve been saying all along, email marketing is serious business with amazing marketing possibilities. Create a specific email template and then map out your email marketing strategies before you start.

That’s all for today. In the next lesson, I’ll wrap up the email marketing series with a set of email marketing strategies that the top gurus will charge you hundreds of dollars for – stay tuned.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com

It’s not bad strategy – although “poor strategy” is a major factor in ruining any profit-potential a website, product or idea might have.

And no, it’s not a lack of leads – building your list is surprisingly easy once you know the right way to go about doing it.

The biggest mistake people make is this:

They assume that email marketing should be left to experts, and don’t bother learning anything about it!

Folks, I’m not joking about this. There are tons and tons of websites out there with perfectly profitable business plans who are missing out on pure gold by ignoring their email marketing campaigns. And no, sending out monthly newsletters about so and so updates on the site does NOT constitute as email marketing.

Email marketing is a process of generating business through maintaining a list of email contacts – people who “sign-up” to your list for one reason or the other (usually to gain access to information or some other resource). A properly run campaign involves at least the following:

• Building a positive, responsive relationship with your list.

• Providing your list with a reason to trust you and your advice (give quality information first, ask for their money later).

• Promoting targeted , useful products to your list (related (directly or indirectly) to the “reason” they signed up for your list.

You’ll see from that list of points that simply mailing promotional offers to a bunch of email addresses does not qualify as email marketing. No. That is spam.

Don’t be like most people on the Internet. If you’re operating in a niche online, you’re almost guaranteed to be sitting on a small gold mine. Profit from it by all means possible, and make the effort to set up your own email marketing campaign.

To setup your email marketing campaign, you need the following:

• A reliable autoresponder.

• A lead capture form / landing page.

• Means to bring traffic to that landing page.

• A set of pre-written messages for your list.

• An email marketing plan.

If that sounds like too much, don’t worry about it. All five points are explained in full detail below.

The Autoresponder

An autoresponder is the most powerful tool in your email marketing arsenal. Essentially, it not only automates list management (including subscription and unsubscribe requests), but it can also automate the process of sending emails to your list. You can load a set of emails / messages to your list in your autoresponder, and the script will automatically send the emails out at the dates you specify.

The two autoresponders I would recommend are AWeber and GetResponse. Both are reasonably priced and have excellent features. I personally use Aweber myself, although if you want to test autoresponders and see how they work I would suggest that you sign up for the free version of GetResponse and experiment there first.

Setting up an autoresponder is fairly simple. Both AWeber and GetResponse have a straightforward sign up procedure, and once you’re in, they provide detailed tutorials to help you set up your list management process. You can find GetResponse’s tutorial here:

http://www.getresponse.com/ModStatic/JumpStart

Pre-written messages

List management is really simple with autoresponders. You can preload your account with template responses for any of the following occasions:

• When someone signs up through a lead capture form.

• When someone confirms their subscription to your list.

• When someone unsubscribes from your list.

• When someone sends an email to your autoresponder email address (you can configure this message to tell the sender that you will respond within a certain time, or redirect them to a different email address).

In addition, you can write up several emails in advance (in case you want to send messages to your subscribers at specific dates in the future) and load them in your autoresponder. Then, just specify the dates you want each message to be sent on, and your work is done . The autoresponder takes care of everything else.

Pre-loading messages into your autoresponder is a great way to schedule an informational email course, or if you want to send several promotional emails for the same product.

Most autoresponders (including AWeber and GetResponse) offer templates for generic messages (such as the list above), making your job a lot simpler. All you really need is to customize these templates if necessary, and then upload your own messages.

Once you’ve set up your autoresponder, it’s time to build your list. For this, you need to do two things:

• Set up a landing page through which people can sign up on your list.

• Drive traffic (hint: targeted traffic – people who are likely to be interested in hearing what you have to say i.e. people interested in your niche) to that landing page.

Let’s look at these individually.

Landing Page

A lot of people simply use a “sign up for our newsletter” type of box on their main pages and expect people to come barging in. That’s not how it works. For people to sign up for your list, they have to be interested in what you have to say. This means that first you have to educate your potential subscribers to what they have to gain by handing over their email addresses to you.

Set up a separate page on your website – a “ landing page ”. On this page, you would include a description of your newsletter as well as the key benefits to your subscribers for signing up to the newsletter (a free report on plus weekly updates, or regular dating tips, or whatever your niche is). The key here is to convince the reader that if they are interested in your field, it’s in their benefit to sign for your newsletter because it is THE place to get the best information about that field.

And of course, provide a simple form for the visitors to fill in and sign up to your newsletter.

Drive Traffic

By now, you’re all set to build your list and crank out the sales pitches through your autoresponder. But first, you need to drive traffic (read real people) to your landing page so that they can sign up to your list. Here’s a quick discussion of a few tactics you can use:

• Write and submit articles in a niche article directory . Make sure you include your resource box at the end of the article, with some text describing your email course and a link going back to your landing page. This is fairly elementary, but its still surprising how few people end up taking advantage of this technique.Make sure that you focus on the top content-rich sites in your niche when you are submitting these articles.

• If you expect to profit significantly from your subscribers (in the next lesson I’ll tell you how you can calculate the lifetime value of your subscriber), you can afford to spend some money on building your list. Use Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing to drive targeted traffic to your landing page. The key here is to bid on very specific two-word and three-word phrases, so that not only your traffic is targeted, but that you can get these clicks for cheap.Make sure that you’re not paying too high a price for each click (1 visitor), otherwise the process might backfire on you.

• Simple as it sounds, make sure to promote your newsletter on your website . Don’t just settle for a link on every page – include some text and actually explain in a few words what the newsletter offers (kind of like a PPC ad).

• Offer a freebie – this could either be a free tool or access to a section of your website (where you keep the good content) or even a downloadable report. This is by far the most common hook marketers use to build their list.

• If you have a sales pitch on your website, make sure that your “free” newsletter features prominently in it. It will provide readers with a risk-free alternative to test you and find out if you can really deliver on any claims you make in the sales pitch. In addition, many people don’t buy immediately – they tend to evaluate the pros and cons and deliberate over buying decisions (especially costly buying decisions) quite a lot. By offering them an option to sign up to your newsletter, you secure an inside track to the “buy or not” debate in their minds and are in a position to win their trust and earn their money.

That’s it for today. This quick overview will help you quickly setup your own email marketing campaign. Make sure that you test it first and run your autoresponder through its paces to understand how everything works before jumping into the deep end and driving traffic to your landing page.

In the next lesson, I’ll discuss how you can setup your email marketing plan for maximum success and give you some killer advanced email marketing strategies.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com