Day 1 is finished and it was a full day!

It was kinda cool to meet some of the internet marketing Rockstars I see in all the videos.  The likes of Ed Dale, Paul Culligan, Mike Filsaime, Leslie Rhodie, Dan Theis, Dan Raine, Lynn Terry and a bunch of others.

So what was my big takeaway from today?

During what they call a “Hot Seat” a panel of some of the smartest internet guys in the world look at a bunch of sites and tell you what they think you should do to make it better (sometimes in a “guy meeting you in a dark alley sorta way) but still good.

Every website they looked at they started off by asking the room what they thought the point of the site was.   And most of the time we had no idea.

So what is the jist of every page of your site?  What do you want the reader to do?  And as was said over and over again….One Page, One Job.  Meaning every page should have only one job!  Opt in? Sale? Etc….

So…thinking about my new Search Engine Optimization Company I asked myself, what is the one thing I want to happen when people visit my site?

I want them to sign up for what I call a “Free SEO Snapshot”

The only problem is that if a business owner were to visit my site.  They have no clue what the heck a “SEO” or a anything like that is.

So I need to ask myself what is it that a “SEO Snapshot” does for a business owner?  And have the opt in copy & video be about that.

I will keep you posted with what happens.

Many Blessings!

RK Castillo

Check out my video that talks about my business building system. Master these 5 things and you can grow any business anywhere!

So here’s the business building blueprint:

Leads

X

Conversion Rate

=

Customers

X

Number of Transactions

X

Average Dollar Sale Price

=

Total Revenue

X

Margins

=

Profits

Use this step by step system to start & build any business anywhere.

A buddy of mine was interested in starting a home based business in the “Fitness Bootcamp Niche” So I told him I’d check it out and let him know what I thought.

Watch this video:

If you Want to Learn How To Run Your Own Profitable Fitness Bootcamp Click Here!

Step 1: Google Suggest

So I started out in Google and looked at Google Suggest (the thing that pops up and tells you different keywords and how many sites are competing for that Keyword.

Step 2: Commercial Viability

Then you look and see if there’s any PPC Advertising (The sponsored links on the right hand side and possibly the top) If there are, it is usually a commercially viable market. That’s just a fancy way of saying people will spend money in this market.

Step 3: Find Long-Tail Keywords

Next scroll to the bottom of the page on Google and look at the “related keywords.” This will help you drill down and find more long-tail keywords and possibly buyer keywords. For this niche….Fitness Bootcamp is vague. What do they want to know about fitness bootcamp? Do they want to start one? Find one? Etc…. Long tail keywords add those action phrases.

Step 4: Traffic Stats & Action Keywords

Then we used the Google Keyword Tool at:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type in the keywords you found when you looked at “related keywords”. You’re also gonna want to add you main keyword “fitness bootcamp” and some action phrases. Something like “fitness bootcamp how” or “fitness bootcamp start”

Step 5: Check for Competition

Go back to Google and type in one of the action keywords you found using Google’s Keyword Tool. In the video I typed in “Fitness Boot Camp Workout” The purpose now is to look at your competitors and what they’re doing. So I clicked the number one spot on the first page of Google to see what they were doing.

This guy is selling his product for $109. So you can see that the competition isn’t giving away free information in this market (at least this guy) You’d want to do this for at least the top 5 positions for this keyword, if not the top 10.

Step 6: Find Affiliate Products for Keyword

I noticed that he has a thing for affiliates at the bottom. So I went to www.ClickBank.com to see if there were any affiliate products we could sell to this market.

Affiliate products are other people’s products that you market for them and if the people you send to their sales page buy you get a commission off of that product.

You can also check www.CBEngine.com for affiliate products on clickbank. Sometimes clickbank’s marketplace is hard to navigate through and find products. So this is just another place to find some products to market as a clickbank affiliate.

Step 7: Check Stats for Competition

Then go to Yahoo Site Explorer at: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites and type in the url of the number one site in google for this keyword. Look how many pages this website has and look how many links to this website there is.

To take the number one spot for this keyword you will have to do more than this website. Get more quality link backs, etc….

Now do this for at least the Top 5 sites in Google to see what the competition will be like to get on the front page of Google on this site.

Step 8: Decide is this is something you want to go into

Now assess if this market is something you’d like to spend your time, money & resources to market to.

Pros about the fitness bootcamp market:

• There is money in it…
• A couple clickbank products so you don’t have to create a product
• One of those products pays pretty well

Cons about the fitness bootcamp market:

• Fitness Bootcamp is a vague phrase. To find out what they want in this market you have to create long-tail keywords like “Fitness Boot Camp Workouts”
• When you do the long tail you see that you only get like 30 searches a month. Which tells me that this isn’t a very hot market…could be one day but it isn’t really happening right now

So those are the steps that I go through to see if a market is viable or not….

If you have any more questions write a comment below and I will do my best to answer it…

Perry Belcher just put up a great post teaching how he does market research and beats his competition:

These are the 4 things he says to do:

1. Discover your competitions strengths and weaknesses.

2. Borrow research from Amazon

3. Kick their ass with style

4. Make it easier for customers to buy

To read Perry Belcher explain step by step how he does these 4 things Click Here

Found a great video today by a guy named Paul Colligan.  Check it out now…

Leave a comment below and let me know what you thought!

Found a great article today on using RSS Submissions to get better rankings in the search engines.

It comes from:

http://internetmarketingformommies.com/are-you-using-rss-submission-in-your-internet-marketing-strategy

Here it is:

Building links is the most important thing you can do to help boost your niche sites up in the search engine ranking. I know you have heard me say this before, but I’m gonna say it again and again and AGAIN, until it sinks in.

I know it takes some doing, because it took me a while to really GET it too.

Today I want to talk about the power of RSS submission, and provide you with a little proof and an exciting little moment I got to have today.

RSS submission ~ What is it?

Just about every page on the internet has an RSS feed. If it doesn’t you can probably make one for it. I’m talking about all the places you go to build links, blogger blogs, squidoo, knol, vox, even myspace blogs have an rss feed.

You can take each and every one of these feeds, and your money site feed, of course, and submit it to directories. These RSS directories are similar to article directories. People can go to them to search for information or sites related to what they want to know about.

The are a few cool things about RSS directories though.

1. Each time you update your blog, lens or site your RSS listing updates as well.

2. Your titles become the link back to the post in your RSS feed.  If you use your keywords in your titles (as you KNOW you should be) you have created a perfect anchor text link back to your site.

3. Not only are these directories great for building links but they also rank in search engines as well.

Submitting to RSS directories is one of those monotenous tasks we as internet marketers have to do. Yeah, it’s not fun and in fact, it can be pretty mind numbing, but it works. So take the time and do it.

Where can you find these RSS directories to submit to? I created a list of my own after going through a huge list of RSS directories. A lot of them don’t work anymore, so you will have to go through and make your own list. You can also google RSS directories or something similar and come up with even more.

Once you have a list the quickest and easiest way I have found to get through this process is to create a bookmark folder on your computer. Bookmark all the sites in one folder. You can then click the “open all in tabs” and they will all open at once, you can just click through and add your rss feed to each site. Close the ones you do as you go through. It takes me less than 10 minutes to get this done.

** If this explanation seems like greek or you just don’t get it I have outlined the whole process in a FREE ebook. I use bookmarking sites for the example, but the process is the same, just use the RSS submission sites instead of the bookmarking sites. **

I knew this process worked for getting backlinks because I’ve had a lot of sites do much better in the rankings after going through this process. It wasn’t until today that I had some fun proof that they will rank in the search results as well. I work on a new site each week. This week I am working on a Rival Slow Cooker and Crock Pot Recipes site.  I did the RSS submission on Tuesday ~ yes the day before yesterday, and this is what I found today.

You can see the actual listing here.

So I would say YES, it is definitely worth submitting your RSS feeds to RSS directories. I love the feeling of having 4 out of the top 10 sites pointing to MY sites. That’s what it’s all about.

Go ahead, put “add to RSS directories” in your internet marketing strategy, I swear it will help you out. (I have it in day 2 of my promotion schedule.) If you don’t have a plan to market your sites, check out this awesome website marketing strategy ~ it’s pretty much exactly what I do.  If you follow these steps you will see an increase in traffic. And we all know what more traffic equals. More MONEY!! and that’s what it’s all about, right?

Use this strategy and let me know how it helps you grow your search engine rankings!

One of the best ways to drive traffic fast to your website is to utilize Pay Per Click Marketing, also know as PPC.

I found a great article that gives an overview of PPC Marketing.  Here’s a small snippet of the article:

Pay per click marketing can be very effective for getting the word out about your blog. This is especially true if you have affiliate programs you promote there. Many bloggers know what pay-per-click is, of course, but they don’t have a full understanding of the various elements of it.

Following is a brief overview of pay-per-click, and three key factors that go into making up a successful pay-per-click ad.

To read the rest of the article click this link:

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2009/03/16/blog-marketing-an-overview-of-pay-per-click/

Jeff Johnson just put his step by step traffic plan up on his blog.

If you don’t know who Jeff Johnson is he’s one of those guys in the internet marketing world that everyone looks to for advice.

He goes after highly competitive markets and time in and time out will get ranked in the top 10 of Google for whatever keyword he is trying to get ranked for.

Please do yourself a huge favor and go check out Jeff’s traffic plan now….by clicking this link:

Jeff Johnson’s Step by Step Traffic Getting Plan

Found another great article on how to start as an affiliate marketer.  Check it out:

There has been a surge of new Affiliate Marketers as of late due to the current state of the economy. Many are trying to supplement there incomes by working online. You may be finding yourself in this new environment, wondering how to get started. It is very important to get an affiliate marketing education and you should enroll in some sort of online class or membership site to fill this need.

That being said, is it possible to make some bank while you are learning? Well as a mater of fact it is. This article will address the how to affiliate marketing for newbies. Making some money while you are gaining affiliate marketing skills.

There is a simple and effective technique that when implemented can pay for your
course(s) and put a little in the bank. The beauty of this is you need practically no skills, no website, and no money, well almost none.

Most affiliate marketing courses will charge you a monthly membership. At first that might seem to be a negative thing, but in all reality it is positive and can be turned in your favor. I belong to two of these membership sites. One cost $40 each month and the other cost $97 each month. I may seem insane to you but I really like these numbers, and here is the reason why.

Both offer an affiliate program. I am not talking about the course or schooling itself but rather their referral program. Both will give you 50% commissions for anyone you can get to sign up to the program. You will be showing a profit on the third referral! Your education becomes free at this point and your are now in the black, making some bank.

This is not some MLM scam. No one is left holding the bag with a ton of useless products. You are encouraging others to take advantage of the very schooling that is teaching you to make money online. Your referrals will be thanking you for tipping them off to this valuable information. This is no joke, I get thank you emails each day from referrals.

Back to the how to affiliate marketing for newbies. Any merchant worth his or her salt spends thousands of dollars on their advertising program. This means that since these courses offer an affiliate marketing program for their members, they have spent thousands of dollars on development and testing to get their sales pages (the ones you will be using) to be high converting power houses.

All you have to do is send traffic to their sales page and they do all the rest of the work and give you 50% of the revenue! By the way this is a monthly stream of income. Contrary to popular belief you will NOT need a landing page to pre-sell your customers. You will be sending them straight to the high converting power house of a sales page your merchant spent the money to develop. 100% of your referrals will be reaching the merchants high converting sales page. None will be getting lost at some pre-sell landing page you spent hours to make and money to host.

Here is more how to affiliate marketing (for newbies). You need to register a domain name. If you shop around this can be done for less than $10 for the year. Only register the domain, do not purchase hosting or anything else. Make sure of two things when considering a domain. It should be easy to remember and it needs to be a .com, not a .info or .tv or .net or any other confusing extension. Make the domain blend able with your product you are promoting. For example, if promoting AffiliateClass101.com, register and appropriate domain like MyAffiliateClass101.com or GetAffiliateClass101.com

Once you have your domain then forward it to you affiliate link. This is a free service just like when you move and you have your mail forwarded. Your referral will be sent directly to your merchant’s high converting sales page!

Now you can spend your valuable time on your education and implementing the skills learned to send traffic to your new domain. You will be wasting no time trying to learn to build landing pages, setting up and paying for hosting accounts, testing and retesting conversion rates or any of the other obligations that come with having your own web site.

I have affectionately named this how to affiliate marketing technique the Newbie Jump Start for it simplicity and ease of use. I’m no Einstein and this technique is not an original idea. This and many other skills, the how to affiliate marketing, I have learned by enrolling in several great affiliate marketing courses. A sort of investment in myself. I would encourage you to do likely.

I found a great article by Anton James at http://www.isnare.com/?aid=353302&ca=Marketing

In it he talks about the pros & cons of using Pay Per Click in your affiliate marketing campaign.

Check it out

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you may or may not have heard of direct linking. Put simply, it is a method where you send pay per click traffic directly from your PPC ad to the merchant’s web site. It is one of the fastest ways to ramp up an affiliate business as you are not concerned with constructing your own websites or landing pages.

Direct Linking is a bit of an enigma, there is a great deal of mis-information regarding the practical use of it as a strategy. Furthermore, there is the perception in some circles that it is frowned upon by the major search networks. This isn’t entirely true, but Google in particular has made direct linking practices more restrictive than they used to be.

If you’re looking for a bit of insight into this marketing angle, read on. I’ll give a brief example of how it works and then provide some pros and cons.

The Basics:
You construct your ad with the following elements:

* Headline (Contains destination URL)

* 2 Lines of Ad Copy (where you are selling the product/service to the customer)

* Display URL

The Headline is generic text related to your ad but also contains the destination URL as an embedded link. This URL could be one of a number of formats. For simplicity, it’s usually a special link that includes the page address where the customer will end up, combined with your affiliate information. They sometimes look something like this:

http://affiliate_info.merchant_info.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=keyword

This is so the merchant can track where the customer was referred from, and pay a commission if there is a sale. Destination URLs can be quite lengthy as they usually contain a lot of information. The limit in most search engines is usually 1024 characters. There are other options like masked domains and cloaked links, but to explain them is beyond the scope of this article.

The display URL must be the primary domain where the customer will ultimately end up. For example, if you are direct linking to the page

www.awesomeshoes.com/nike

your display URL must be

www.awesomeshoes.com

or even

www.awesomshoes.com/nike

The latter is acceptable as you can show sub domains.

Be mindful of character limits with display URLs in search network ads.

Pros of Direct linking:

1. Speed

The most obvious advantage of directly linking your ads to the merchant site is that you don’t have to construct any kind of website or landing page. You can literally have a campaign up and running in a matter of hours.

2. Build Credibility

If you link to a Merchant that has at least some kind of business presence on the web, the customer will see the display URL and will automatically associate your ad with the Merchant. It goes a long way to overcoming the confidence gap customers will feel towards an unknown new business.

3. Great Training

Direct Linking is great for testing Merchant offers to see if they are profitable BEFORE you invest too much capital into your campaign. Pay Per click marketing involves a learning curve, and direct linking lets you get your hands dirty and learn the ropes before you commit to a site of your own.

4. Most Direct Path for the Customer

This is especially important when you are trying to sell retail or brand names online. In many instances people know exactly what they want, and they don’t want to jump through too many hoops to get to it. If the customer has to click through too many pages to get to the point where they can purchase the item, they may give up, go back to the search page and click on your competitor’s ad.

5. Landing Page Quality Score

Quality score is a complex beast, but put simply, the search engines penalize or reward you for how relevant the landing page is, in relation to your ad and keywords. If you are landing on an established business’s web page and providing your ad is well constructed, your quality score should be healthy.

Cons of Direct linking:

1. Not all merchants allow direct linking

Some merchants don’t allow their affiliates to run direct linking campaigns to their web pages. They feel it offers value that is marginal and creates unnecessary competition. Some Merchants on the other hand love it, as it brings in extra business. Always check your Merchants terms of service. And remember that the Merchant can change their policies anytime they like. Not good if you have a mega successful direct linking campaign you suddenly have to suspend.

2. Competition for keywords and display URLs

This is probably the greatest challenge facing affiliates who direct link. As there may be many affiliates using the single merchant display URL, competition for high converting keywords may be an issue. When you are new, you may get pushed out by affiliates with more bidding power and better quality score due to a solid account history. This is also known as the “one URL” rule. For Example, if there are 10 affiliates bidding on the keyword “ringtones” and all are direct linking to the single merchant, only 1 of those affiliates ads will show up. This will depend on who has the best quality score and highest bid price.

3. You get more control with your own site.

With your own site and landing page, you get the chance to pre-sell to the customer. There are many examples of affiliate sites which take on a “review” format where you can evaluate various products and recommend the best. Many people are looking for review sites to get a third party opinion before they buy.

To quickly summarize. If you are new to affiliate marketing or would like to test a new niche, consider direct linking as a fast strategy where you can try things out before over committing yourself. If you are more experienced and you know that you are in a profitable niche, your own site and landing page will be a great long term investment.

Hope you found this helpful