Late December and Early January Search Industry blogs were a wash with their predictions for 2012. Visiting all the usual blogs, and it soon became apparent that most of the industry experts had either been paying the same fortune tellers, in which case they might want see if they can get a refund, or that everyone had unanimously decided to rehash what they say every year but just mention Google+ a bit more.

Predicting what’s going to be major in search for 2012, is a bit like predicting that the weather in Sante Fe will be sunny tomorrow, it’s pretty much a given and nothing groundbreaking is actually being predicted. All the same kinds of things are re-emphasised: quality, relevant and unique content (offsite and onsite), social media is becoming a larger signal influencer, freshness of content matters etc etc.

I’m reading an interesting book at the moment – Everthing is Obvious (Once you know the answer) which deals with this subject and as humans in all areas of life love making predictions which are often flawed from the very beginning. The only predictions we can make with a probability of a certain amount of accuracy are the ones that aren’t really saying a lot. Also when making predictions, we often neglect relevancy and what will be relevant in the future when our predictions may come into force. No one could have predicted that Google would rise to become a multi-billion dollar industry when an offer for a few million was made to its founders: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or that Facebook would dominated our lives and become the largest and most successful social network out there.

So whilst predicting the major trends for 2012, and what’s going to be important for webmasters, perhaps we should be admitting that our predictions are based on a probability of a certain outcome. Hence, becoming a good guessing game, but nothing we can be sure of. What do you think?

2012 Search Predictions – Revelations or Just Rehashing The Same Old? is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

With just one month to go before Christmas Day,  it’s soon become that time for many online marketers to dig out that winning Seasonal ad copy, or start bidding on those lucrative ‘Black Friday’ keywords. As with anything, careful competitor analysis and planning well ahead, will stand you in good stead and go some way to ensure that your holiday campaigns are profitable.

In this post, I’m going to give you some tips for running a profitable Paid Search campaign in your chosen niche, by following some tried and tested methods for ensuring your CPAs are as low as they should be, and your conversion rates soar during times of economic uncertainty:

1. Careful Keyword Research. By now most Internet Marketers are aware how valuable keyword research is to running a successful SEM or SEO campaign. But many choose not to invest much time in this crucial aspect, and end up paying high prices for keywords that don’t end up converting. So when carrying out keyword research it’s essential to a.) devote enough time to it b.) use more that one tool to get an aggregated search volume (bear in mind Google Adwords tool traffic estimator will be largely inaccurate for seasonality keywords as the data will be largely skewed to just a few months of the year)

2. Check out the competition. As equally important as careful keyword research, is competitor analysis. Try running a few searches on your main keywords and see what the competitors are using in their ad copies – what are their main highlight points (is it delivery time, discount offer highlighted or something else), what’s their call to action and are they directing searches to an appropriate landing page?

3. Target the undecided and consider your audience.  When running your paid search campaigns you want to target people who haven’t made up their minds yet. Therefore, bidding on general keywords such as ‘personalised gifts’ might be an idea if the CPC are favourable. You should also make sure before crafting your ad copy you have considered your audience – what kind of language is appropriate, what will get their attention and come up with a catchy call to action to finish off.

4. Try something new. The content network can be a very lucrative and profitable network, especially around the holiday season time. However, just like anything it requires carefully strategical implementation, a lot of monitoring, analysis and tweaking to make sure it’s as profitable as possible. Keep an eye on your daily budget and adjust accordingly, and always check if your ads are on the right kind of websites that will be targeting your audience. Check for no impressions and no clicks on a regular basis, every 1 – 2 weeks.

5. Quality Control. Make sure your ads aren’t appearing for any keywords that could damage your brand image or keywords that you don’t want your ads to be associated with. Adding negative keywords on the adgroup and campaign level will ensure that your ads aren’t showing for the wrong kinds of keywords.

Sticking to the basics, but also trying something new and different will go a long way to ensuring your holiday campaign is a successful one!

Making The Most From Holiday Campaigns is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

There was some major news this week from Google that have started making moves towards encrypting search results in an effort to perhaps dampen some of the bad PR they’ve had in recent times from collecting data via unsecured networks in Google owned street cars. However, this move which so far has just been implemented in Google.com, with some reports that it hasn’t been fully rolled out yet, has generated a malestorm  of controversy amongst SEOs and digital marketing professionals.

Many are arguing that this move makes it virtually impossible for Webmasters and SEOs to carry out their work effectively, as essential data will now be blocked out from Analytics making it a lot more difficult, if near impossible, to make improvements to optimise landing pages if they can’t see which keywords are referring their traffic to said pages. That being said, it’s worth pointing out this juncture that this data will still be available for Paid Search advertisers on Google Adwords. This has prompted many to speculate that this could be a move by Google just to push more people to spend money with their paid search advertising channels and thereby spend less time on their SEO efforts (which doesn’t bring any direct revenue for Google). Also it’s worth stating that this move has only been announced for Google.com and no mention of it will be rolled out to other locales.

However, if it is rolled out to other countries (and looks like the UK is getting this too) this could be one of the worst decisions ever made and proof that Google is not only hypocritical (no doubt Google targeted inline ads in Gmail will still continue) but also confirmation that Google has become the Voldemort of Silicon Valley. So I guess we have to make the most of the data we have available to us today and implement those postponed changes a bit sooner than we had initially planned, as tomorrow the data we’re so reliant on could easily be gone. Or just cough up the money and spend with Adwords as a last resort…

On a final note, it’s interesting to see some analysis from people in comparing the search strings of an SSL encrypted search with a normal search. The key is that the ‘q’ string with an SSL encypted search will not present any keyword and be blanked out, whereas in a normal search ‘q=keyword’. Perhaps the answer is to now look a bit closer to Bing and spend some more time getting more familiar with their analytics and tools for SEO.

Has Google Gone All Voldemort on Our Asses? The SSL Debaucle is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

About a month ago, some web masters on this forum were speculating that there has been yet another google panda update 2. However, Google were quick to respond that there hasn’t been another update. But, people still continued to post on the Webmaster help forum that they’ve experienced similar experiences. It’s most likely another issue or issues at play, if Google have come out and said that they’ve made update. But, it does show that many Webmasters’ are still confounded by the Panda update and it’s several updates since it was first announced of at the beginning of the year.  So I thought I’d quickly address some of the main things you should be looking at to rectify any inflicted pain if you are confident that your website has been hit by the Panda bashing earlier on in the year.

Let’s start of by looking what Panda was all about, and what kinds of sites fell foul of this latest algorithm change. Panda 1.0, as it’s been termed by many in the industry but at the time was coined by Danny Sullivan as the Farmer update, anyway it happened around February 24th and it’s main purpose was to stop content scrapping sites – i.e. sites that just nick other peoples content and post it on their sites. It was bad news for a lot of sites who had been relying on this strategy to fill their sites up with content get some nice linkage to their site, and hit a lot of big names in a variety of sectors: travel, tech and finance etc. Some were quicker than others to clean up their act and get their rankings restored,  such as PocketLink. It wasn’t until several updates to the update ensued that it impressed upon people that this algorithm change wasn’t going to be corrected by Google and it meant business.

What directives has Panda updates given Webmasters?

Webmasters have known for a while that content is King in the eyes of Google, however what transpired from the Panda update, is that low-quality content i.e. content that offers little to no value to your readers/visitors isn’t. Furthermore, if that content happens to be borrowed from another source and copy and pasted, well that’s just not going to fly with the big G anymore. It also prompted Webmasters’ going back to Google’s official Webmaster guidelines and swatting up again on the do’s and donut’s, so also going back to the basics re: ethical white hat link building, site architecture and accessibility, duplicate content etc…It also prompted their web masters to make concerted efforts to make their site a “high-quality” one. Here lies one of the fundamental points and aims of the Panda update, Google is trying to reduce and eliminate the number of “low-quality” sites and clean up its search results.

Therefore, when producing any kind of content for its visitors, Webmasters’ should spend some time on it asking themselves what value is this bringing to visitors (am I merely rehashing content, or am I putting a new spin on it by adding in my own research and data). Any content that you can produce and publish that can spur on interest, commenting and perhaps even debate and backs it up with research data is certainly worthy of a “high quality” label.

So my advice for anyone that was hit by Google Panda, or sees that something is amiss in their rankings to re-read up on Google’s Webmaster guidelines and correct any behaviours in their site’s SEO related history than might correlate to their drop in rankings.

Has there been another Google Panda Update? More information on Google Panda is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

It can be very problematic for bloggers (new and old) to create content that appeals to the masses, my advice is don’t TRY to. Firstly start off by looking at your existing audience and who already engages with the content on the website. Simple data analysis from your tracking software tools can help you with this – find out what your most popular content is, what keywords are getting the most visits, are people visiting your site through longer keyword terms or perhaps your branded and 1 or 2 tailed keywords are generating the most traffic. You don’t have to spend hours upon hours on this, but rather than let the data sit there and go to waste, some time spent understanding what these numbers mean and getting an action plan together means you’re no longer taking stabs in the dark when it comes to new content production.

So “Mr. Marketing Expert” what are my tips for creating content, that people will actually want to read?

Whilst, I don’t profess to be an Über authority on this subject, I do have some experience and some tried and tested ways of writing different kinds of content in the internet marketing field, from Ebooks through to Press Releases and content for SMEs and larger corporations’ web properties and of course trying to update this blog and others as often I can. The first task is to make sure you have a catchy headline. As humans we’re very fickle creatures sometimes, and let’s face it there’s a lot of content on the web nowadays to detract our attention. Ensuring you have a snappy headline/title encouraging people to read on, means half the battle is already over.

The next step is to ensure your article is well researched, so before you even start hitting the keyboard, do some reading up on your chosen topic and make sure to have notepad on had and extract the information you think your readers will like and find useful. Make sure you credit all sources, in most cases these days when writing a blog article or post it involves a trackback to the original article and an anchor text link with one of their keyphrases from the titlebar, to return the favour.

The last and probably most important tip I have to offer, is to make sure your content is unique and relevant. You’re not adding anything new by recycling and rehashing old topics and just putting a few links in there. The best content and stickiest is stuff that actually puts things to the test, refutes them or challenges commonly held perceptions and backs it up with the authors own research and findings. Whilst, this may not appeal to the average blogger who perhaps doesn’t have much time to get this heavily involved with their posts and to sustain this on a regular basis, there’s always the option of getting a professional writer or blogger to perhaps write guest posts or articles (indeed this can be a great way to get more exposure to your blog).

You can also capitalize on trending topics  - Google Trends or trending topics on Twitter perhaps, and try and produce some link baiting articles. But often these are very short-lived strategies and you can bet your bottom dollar, that lots of people are doing the same. I wouldn’t recommend this as a long-term strategy in content production.

If you’ve got any interesting methods and ideas for producing sticky content, please let me know by commenting.

Creating Stellar Sticky Content – Tips For Content Writing is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

Whilst not a new topic, quite far from it, with many early blogging evangelists declaring some years back that blogging was dead due to the rise of Social Media where interactions are taking place in real-time, and messages can me more targeted to certain audiences/groups and individuals. Back in 2008, Jason Calacani declared that blogging had become far too impersonal and lacks intimacy and “retired” from blogging (his blog posts nowadays mostly consist of hipstamatic photos). Many bloggers since have followed suit, complaining that everyone and their dog are now blogging clogging up webspace with their offloading of thoughts and opinions.

Whilst I agree on some points, that the very notion of blogging has to a certain extent become diluted and it’s becoming harder not only to get noticed amongst the myriad of other bloggers in your industry but it’s also becoming harder to manage blogs and update them with new content – especially with most peoples’ attention faced towards that prevalent of buzz words: Social Media, I still firmly believe that blogging still has its place despite most people choosing to do most of their online interaction and communication on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus etc. After all to abandon all blogging activity and let all that content, vested time and money, and effectively pour it down the drain seems rather counter-intuitive. Especially if your blog is getting a substantial amount of traffic and generating a sideline or even main income.

People still are actively seek out new blogs of interest to them, and in certainly more traditional and slow adpoting industries when it comes to technology people are just at this late stage in the game ‘catching on’ – as this guardian article elaborates. There’s very much a resurgence as well in certain industries, and blogs can still be used for citations and enhancing your learning about certain subjects and topics from professional experts within their respective fields. It’s just that now it’s probably much harder to get your blog noticed than it was before due to competition, but all that means is rethinking your PR and marketing strategies. It has become a game of marketing your blog to your target demographics better. This is why it’s essential to do not just what your competition is doing, but to go one step further and do a bit of clever thinking and strategizing -achieved through some careful data analysis and implementing changes as a result. Blogging is still alive and kicking.

Does Blogging Have Any Relevance Today is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

If you’ve just started out in affiliate marketing, or perhaps been promoting products for some time, you’ll know how hard it can be to drive those first few sales or increase your monthly recurring revenues. More and more visitors are becoming savvy to affiliate links and how they appear when they hover over the link, once they see any sign of an affiliate link they may run a mile – even though you the product you’re promoting could actually help them be it in an online or offline capacity. Of course, it’s important not to deceive or try and trick your visitors (I try to be as transparent as I can on this blog and indicate my affiliate links so it give the visitor the option of whether or not they want to click).

That being said, there are a range of WordPress Plugins, free and premium, that can help you improve your affiliate endeavours and hopefully boost your monthly income as a result. Using these Plugins will help you organise, track and monitor and most importantly change/tweak accordingly to ensure your programs become more and more profitable.

Top 5 Affiliate Marketing WordPress Plugins:

#1 Pretty Link – A great free plugin for cloaking/redirecting your links with inbuilt stats features.  Simply copy and paste your affiliate link and choose your output vanity link. Probably one of the most simply affiliate plugins to use, it even has a tutorial video if you get stuck on how to get going with it. In short, a very useful plugin to have in your arsenal and will certainly ensure that there’s no swiping of your affiliate links from other affiliates and tidies up your outbound links nicely. Also with Pretty Link Pro you get some added cool features such as the Tweet Buttons and Social Buttons that you can add to posts and pages.

 #2 Ninja Affiliate. Although it’s not a completely automated system i.e. click one button and it does everything for you, and if you’re looking for a plugin to do absolutely everything for you , and shine your shoes at the same time, this is probably not the plugin you want. Saying, that it’s pretty much spot on, on what you would come to expect for a paid for plugin. It covers the basics: link cloaking/redirection (preventing other affiliates from malicious intent and manipulating your affiliate links), easy link management, use no-follow links, sort into groups, but by far the best thing about this plugin is that it can automatically turn the keywords in your post or page into affiliate links – thus saving you time in having to search out appropriate products to promote. Basically, with this plugin you guaranteed that no thieving ba$tard steals your links, and their support is certainly worth the modest price tag.

#3 Ad Injection. A good free plugin to rotate your banner ads. You can include several banner ads of various sizes and choose the rotation of these ads that are served, a good way to ensure even coverage of your promoted products/services. Also it works with any caching plugin that you might have installed, so installing it won’t won’t reset or upset your data collection. Furthermore, you can choose to exclude showing the ads in certain places in your posts/pages.

#4 WP Marketer. Again another good free affiliate marketing plugin. Like the above plugin it features the inbuilt function of turning your keywords into affiliate links and also placing a limit on those keywords so you don’t over do it, but it also includes image conversion. The user has the ability to mask their links right from the when you start to write your posts in the Dashboard or when editing existing pages/posts.

#5 Affiliate Royale. A brand new release from the same people that bought us Pretty Link (I’m a big fan of this and ninja affiliate). With a different focus and target audience to all other featured plugins so far, this is solely for people wanting to set up an affiliate program. It offers a great and intuitive way for you to monitor your affiliates’ performance through charts and empirical data. Also allowing an easy system for maintaining your brand with your own banners and links and aid you to keep growing your traffic and revenue streams. To get this premium plugin click here

One last tip: You may or may not be aware of a quick way of installing new plugins, rather than go to the plugin page and download to upload, you can simply go to plugins —> add new –> search for the plugin you’re looking for and then click on the ‘install now’ link all done through your WP interface Much quicker and easier than downloading the zip file and uploading it again.

Top 5 Affiliate Marketing WordPress Plugins is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on reviews and forums that present some harsh criticism of the big G. Whilst, I’m not aiming this post to be a Mr. Fan boy post – isn’t Google great, how I wish I could dress in head to toe in Google apparel etc. I do feel that a lot of the time people are too quick to make (wild) accusations without fully delving into the facts and absolute reasons. As the phrase goes ‘correlation does not imply causation’. Anyway to give you an idea of what I’d recommend reading this and this, and I’m sure you could find a lot more on Webmaster World and the like.

I find it funny that are people out there who feel that googol(Google) have nothing better to do that act with malicious intent, randomly choosing sites or tweaking their algorithms to take out specific sites they don’t like (vary rarely will Google engineers employ manual algorithmic tweaks) and make sure they never appear in the SERPs ever again. Hmm…Maybe it’s because your site didn’t adhere to Google’s very own Webmaster guidelines, maybe it’s because you decided to buy masses of paid for links, or use some automated software to create spammy links.   Despite the wealth of information around that says don’t do this, there’s still plenty of people who wanna get some quick traffic and will break the rules. Many in fact manage to stay under the radar, if they’re clever, and might mix white hat with some black hat strategies and sit riskily on that grey border.

So if you do find that one of your sites has gone from 400 visitors a day to 0. First of all don’t take it personally and automatically assume it’s because Google has decided to take a vendetta out against your site. It may be that your site hasn’t even been penalised, but there could be a server issue, or a malicious attack on your site. Explore all possibilities before reaching out for help. And if you do believe you’ve picked up a penalty go through the appropriate channels, seek advice from the support forums before submitting just one reinclusion request and make sure all problems have been rectified before doing so. Always be polite and courteous, after all these people are giving up their time for free (on the forums) to help you out. At the end of the day being proactive is far better that whining on forums and review sites.

“Google Penalties” – Time To Stop Feeling Victimised is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

I just wrote a new post on mainly Internet marketing forums and whether it’s valuable or not following the advice of other Internet Marketers. You can read the full article here.

How much should I listen to other Internet Marketers? is a post from: Online Niche Marketing

I’ve been putting together a series of tutorial videos to help you with the first and fundamental stage of identifying a successful niche area for internet marketing. Here’s the first video where I cover some free research tools. In the next tutorial I’ll go over how to use some of the more sought after paid for research tools. Please leave your comments below, and any suggestions for future video coverage areas.

Killer Keyword Research – First Tutorial Video is a post from: Online Niche Marketing