This video is over 60 minutes long so it may take a minute or two to load.

When you watch it, you’ll discover:

1. Why I think blackhat SEO sucks.
2. How to ‘bulletproof’ your high rankings so you can keep getting high volumes of targeted traffic from the search engines for years (in some cases maybe even a decade).
3. Details on a 13-page website that I sold for $25,000.

…And more.

So if you want to take a peak at some of my SEO strategies, watch this video.

And if you’d like more information on my course, you can get that here:

Click Here To Learn More About The InlineSEO System

Just letting you know that I’ve finally released the InlineSEO System.

If you’re interested in learning how to get top rankings, you can check it out here.

I’m very proud of this product and think it will really help business owners and webmasters who want to master SEO and gain more free traffic.

One thing I want to point out is that I will not be doing an official launch like you’ve seen 100 times before if you’re on several internet marketing mailing lists.

I don’t have a problem with big launches by any means, but I do feel this product will stand on its own.  So I’m not going out and recruiting a ton of affiliates before launch date, setting a limit on the quantity and then pulling it down once I launch it.

I’m just going to release it, work hard on marketing it over time, and make it a success.

I actually sell a training course this way (one that doesn’t deal with internet marketing at all) and it does just fine by my standards.

I’m hoping this SEO training course will continue to sell month after month just because of the quality of the course and not due to marketing tactics like scarcity and offering big commissions. 

I do want to point out that the product is a physical product so it is on the expensive side.  But I didn’t feel I could do it justice with online videos (which would have been cheaper and less hassle for me) as it’s about 8 hours worth of video.  There’s also an Action Plan that goes along with it that I wanted to be able to provide in printed format. 

Here’s a photo of the course if you want to take a look:

The course is set up so that you watch about an hour’s worth of video, then you get to work; following worksheets that walk you through SEO and progressing on your site.

I use the “W” word often because I think it’s a joke for anyone to say that you’re going to build a business (online or offline) without it.  So yes, it takes work, but once you get your site set-up with high rankings and can convert that traffic into a profit, you can pretty much walk away from it. 

And that’s really what this course is about.

I’ve maintained high rankings and loads of traffic to my earliest sites for nearly a decade now so I know my system works.  I continue building new online businesses with the same SEO principles in mind and they continue to dominate the search engine results. 

I started building a site in October of last year so I could exactly follow what I do as I created this system for you.  So it’s what this entire InlineSEO System is based on.  And it’s getting about 60,000 unique visitors a month now … all from high rankings. 

And that’s with incredibly limited time spent on my part because I’ve been wrapped up in so many other things.  So if you want to learn how to get traffic to your sites, this course is going to show you exactly how to do that. Again, you can check it out the InlineSEO System by clicking here.

If you’ve watched the site, you know I haven’t been around much lately.  So I’d like to share with you why that’s been…

I decided there’s a real lack of information on SEO as far as something people can take, digest and then follow along in order to get top rankings for their sites.  So I decided to put together an SEO training course based on my year’s of SEO experience. 

I actually built a site before I got started so that I was absolutely, 100% sure I didn’t leave any of the steps out.  And although it’s taken me a long while to get this course together, I think it will be very worthwhile to webmasters and small business owners.

It’s turned out to be a lot longer than I expected; with about 8 hours of training videos, an Action Plan with worksheets, 6 modules and much more.  Since it’s so big, and really the point behind it is to fill out the Action Plan while you watch the videos (so that you start seeing an increase in your rankings instead of just reading how to do it), I’ve decided to have it turned into a physical product.  So next week, I’ll be sending it out to Cindy at Disk.com (my fulfillment company). 

Here’s a screenshot of what the CD-Rom menus will look like:

I’ve put a lot of work into this product and really think it’ll be a great help for people who want to learn how to get top rankings.

Anyway, I’m really excited about it!  And I just wanted to let you know why I’ve taken the long break and that I will definitely start posting again. 

All the best…

Lisa

If you’ve been following the posts I put out right before the holidays, you’ve seen the Affiliate Marketing Blueprint.  The first 5 modules that I’ve posted all deal with assessing a niche.  My philosophy is that you want to waste as little time as possible figuring out which markets you can make a profit from. 

The problem is that it takes time to set up a website, an autoresponder, craft a sales letter or landing page, and put together affiliate links/banners/images, or even worse, create your own product.  If you’re not careful, you can easily waste a month on just these activities before you make any money from any given market.  It’s also possible to do all this work only to find out that you’re not ever going to make any real money from the effort you put in.

So the assessment phase of the blueprint is really important.  I put it together and use it to make sure that all the work I do will pay off.  It saves time and money.  If you don’t use this blueprint, or come up with some other way to assess markets before you spend time and money on them, you’ll likely end up burning yourself out and may give up.

If you’ve read the modules, you’ll see that I like to start with PPC campaigns, specifically Adwords.  I think it’s the fastest and easiest way to figure out which keywords directly match up with the product you’re trying to sell.  I like SEO and that’s my main method for getting large volumes of traffic, but it still takes some time, especially compared with the speed of using PPC.  You can set-up a campaign in about an hour or so with PPCS and start getting traffic immediately.  Even if you’re good at SEO and have a plan in place, you’ll be lucky to get a high volume page one ranking in several weeks.  So what I do is use PPC to find out the keywords related to my target market that will PAY me before I try to rank for anything.  Then after I figure out what keywords I’m making money from, I target those through SEO.  I know a lot of people don’t like to pay for traffic, but this is a great way to avoid wasting your time.  And time is something we’re all limited by.

I hope you’ll give the information I’ve put together in the assessment part of the blueprint a try.  And I’ve set up this post to address any questions you may have on any of the information I’ve covered so far.  I’ll do my best to answer your questions in the comments section below.

Now you have your generic domain name, your landing page as I outlined in the previous “Landing Page Intelligence” module, your keywords and the affiliate program you’re going to promote.

All that’s left is to put it altogether by firing up your Adwords campaign. Google has a wizard that makes creating campaigns, ad groups, adding keywords, creating copy, and setting up bid prices pretty easy. So I’ve just listed out the main points here…

Create a new campaign just for this test niche. You might just call it “Dog Training”.

Create the ad groups by theme, Dog Training, Puppy Training, Train Dog, etc… Remember that you must focus in tightly. For this example, we’ve decided to go with ‘dog training’ instead of ‘housebreaking’ or ‘dog obedience’. We’ll save the themes we don’t use now for later.

Within each ad group go ahead and copy and paste the keywords from your theme lists.

Next, start on the ad copy for each theme as you set it up. I really don’t get very fancy with the copy for my test run. The main thing is to put the ad group theme words in the copy at least twice (once in the headline and at least once in the body copy). Part of the reason I had you organize the keywords this way is that ALL the keywords in a single ad group have the same copy. Anytime a surfer searches for the words in your ad group, the words show up as bold.

So by having a central theme for each ad group and using those words in your ads, the searcher will always see at least some of the words he or she used for the search bolded in your ad. This will increase your click-thru’s significantly.

Depending on the niche, sometimes I’ll make it clear that surfers are going to a review site. Other times I’ll talk about the problem and solution. Just be sure to include the theme words in the copy. If you want, write 2 ads and split test them against each other. Make it clear one is a review and the other is a problem and solution. Most of the time, the problem and solution ad will out-pull the review ad, but not always.

Problem and Solution Ad

Review Ad

Set your bid prices pretty low, especially if you are new at this and don’t want to go broke. I know I don’t want to give Google any more money than I have to, so I still set my bid prices pretty low to start (15 to 35 cents a click unless I know it’s a hyper-competitive market like ‘web hosting’ and I’ve decided to go for it anyway).

Set your daily budget pretty low, like $5 to $10 a day. Set an end date for the campaign just in case you forget to stop it. 5 to 10 days is usually enough for analyzing whether this set-up is worth pursuing.

Within your campaign, make sure you have only English speaking countries selected and disable the content network. I would also set the budget to accelerated (to show the ads as quickly as possible) and you’ll want the ads to rotate as evenly as possible (especially if you set-up 2 ads to run against one another). All this can be found under “Edit Campaign Settings” just in case you missed it during set-up.

You are now live!

Watch your campaign for a few days. You should expect to spend about $50 to get any worthwhile results. You will need about 200 clicks to begin making any judgments at all.

Now I realize some of you reading this are going to throw a fit that you have to spend some money to get into a business. All I have to say is ‘are you kidding me?’ Compared to the cost to enter most businesses, this is peanuts. Don’t go crazy with your ad spend, but $50 to test out a niche is not a whole lot of cash. For many niches, you can get a pretty good idea with even less.

That’s really about all I need to figure out if I want to pursue a niche or not. Top affiliates I’ve spoken with agree that number is plenty in most cases (just don’t pick something like ‘web hosting’ which has a minimum bid of about $10 to get to the top of the rankings).

Analyze your results. Did any of the keywords result in sales? Hopefully you had some.

If not, pause the campaign and see if your landing page is the problem. If you think it might be, you may want to re-work it and try again. We’re shooting for credible here. If the fonts are all over the place and the copy is hard to read, you’re not looking very credible. You also want compelling. This can often be accomplished by talking about the problems your prospects are having, how you had them once too, but you found the solution in the product you’re recommending.

If you really put in some effort on the landing page, have done your keyword research homework and still have not made any sales, you may want to examine your keyword themes and try a different subset (for example, since we started with dog training, you might want to try housebreaking this time). Give it another go.

If you really are not getting any sales at this point, you should scrap the whole experiment and move onto your next niche. Seriously. If you can’t make any sales with about 200 or so clicks set up the way I showed you for a tight theme (and you’ve even tried it twice now), you might not have a good market to match. It happens.

Note that I’m not talking about making a profit; I’m talking about making any sales at all … period.

If you made a few sales with the quick set up I’ve outlined above, you’ve probably found a niche worth going after. If you broke even (spent $50 and made $50) you definitely found something with potential and should pursue it further. If you actually made money, you are onto something scorching and should be super excited to put in more work.

If you didn’t find a winner this time then go back to the beginning and try again. Don’t be too upset because next time all you need to do is select a niche, an affiliate program, some keywords, and put together a landing page on your generic site. So you’re at least starting with more than you did the first time. You should also have more experience writing copy for the landing page and setting up Adwords campaigns. So you are learning. Do not take this experience as a failure at all.

While I know you can definitely earn money with these techniques, they do take a little practice.

Expect that you won’t find a winner every time and just get back to the drawing board.

When you find a winner here’s where the momentum should kick in. Stop testing niches for right now and get going.  You’ve now completed the ‘Assessment’ phase of the program.  Now you need to learn how to increase your profits.  I call this next phase, ‘Level I’… and the first module within it will show you how to “Slap Google Back”.  But we’ll get to that later.